CapitalistImperialistPig

The Eye of Sauron

2012-02-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

So what happens now that both the national spotlight and Romney's millions are turned on Santorum like the eye of Sauron? Nothing good, I imagine. Alternatively, maybe he really does have a chance, and Republicans have made up their minds to stage a nostalgic revival of 1964. The mind reels.

A Corrupt Profession

2012-02-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

I watched the Academy Award winning documentary "Inside Job" tonight. It's pretty much guaranteed to raise one's blood pressure by twenty points or so.

One point that caught my eye was that in addition to the billions the financial services industry lavishes on lobbying and political candidates they also spend a fortune corrupting important economists. Such payoffs take the form of lavish consulting fees (Summers, Hubbard), lucrative board memberships, or more direct fee for service arrangements, like the quarter of a million dollar fees paid to a former Fed Governor and a leading British economist to praise the soundness of Icelandic banks (not long before they collapsed.) If you are a prominent economist, and speak the truth as Wall Street would like it, you should make many times as much from such fees as from your salary.

Finis for Football?

2012-02-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen asks about the prospects for an end to football, American style.

When I was in high school, my debate coach, himself a former football star, told us we were crazy to play football. I took his advice, but my more talented colleagues mostly didn't, and 6 years later our superstar quarterback was a crippled old man who had trouble walking down the street. And that was before we knew about the cumulative damage concussions do. Football is a very dangerous, brain destroying sport, but its also strategically the deepest sporting event, and by far the popularity champ.

Recent rule changes to limit hits have perhaps made the sport a bit safer at the margins, but have also been unpopular. A huge problem is the fact that players keep getting bigger and faster, increasing the momentum tranfer in collisions.

I don't see any good way to limit speed, but there is a very simple way to limit size. Modern football linemen are enormously muscular, but they are also packing 50-60 pounds or more of lard. As a result, they lack endurance. End unlimited substitution, and the average size would shrink dramatically, I'll bet.

Allow substitutions only on time outs and change of possession, and limit those to just a few players, and the player size would change drastically. Payrolls would also shrink a lot.

Nowhere Man

2012-02-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

An awful lot of people, including some of his oldest colleagues, seem to think that the real Mitt Romney is either elusive or non-existent. Frank Rich looks for the soul of the mystery man but doesn't find much:

Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was."
...
He can come across like an android who’s been computer-generated to be the perfect genial candidate. When forced to interact with actual people, he tries hard, but his small talk famously takes the form of guessing a voter’s age or nationality (usually incorrectly) or offering a greeting of “Congratulations!” for no particular reason. Richard Nixon was epically awkward too, but he could pass (in Tom Wicker’s phrase) as “one of us.” Unlike Nixon’s craggy face, or, for that matter, Gingrich’s, Romney’s does not look lived in. His eyes don’t show the mileage of a veteran fighter’s journey through triumphs and hard knocks—the profile that Americans prefer to immaculate perfection in a leader during tough times. Even at Mitt’s most human, he resembles George Hamilton without the self-deprecating humor or the perma-tan.

Of course Rich is not exactly an unbiased observer, but it's a very common theme. Story after story tells of a man who can't or won't relate to people - neither average joe's on the campaign trail or his high-powered fellow vulture capitalists.

Rich's 4000 words probably offers what insight is to be had, but David Brooks tackles the same theme, only with much less penetration, in todays NYT.

I'm thinking maybe this is not a guy who is so much obssessively secretive as a guy who really doesn't live on the social planet. High functioning Aspergers/Autism perhaps?

Gospel According to Suskind Chapter 13

2012-02-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

It's pretty clear now that Suskind's message is not so much that Emanuel, Summers, or Geithner - or probably any of the other people who talked to him - failed, but Obama. Obama, it seems, could give terrific speeches but flunked follow up.

Perhaps most momentous and characteristic was his encounter with the Captains of all the big banks on Wall Street. They were shaking in their boots. Obama told them that he was all that stood between them and the pitchforks and they all got the reference. Then he made his catastrophic mistake.

Obama is a consensus seeker to his core. He likes to find a position everybody can agree on. But his audience was an audience of sharks. They understood fear and they understood weakness. If Obama had wielded the former like a sword they would have bowed to any demand that spared their necks. Instead, he told them "I'm here to help you." They smelled weakness and blood and his power evaporated like a bad Wall Street dream.

Obama reached the Presidency with as little executive experience as almost any previous President. Moreover, he was confronted with the worst crisis of any President since Rooseveldt. There is nothing shocking about the fact that he made mistakes. It's pretty hard to imagine that a relatively dimwitted gambler like McCain - himself hardly strong on executive experience - wouldn't have made a lot of worse ones.

Asymmetric Information

2012-02-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

One way to get advantage over someone else is to some crucial fact that your rival doesn't. You might, for example know the cards in his poker hand while he doesn't know yours. Freshwater economics is based on the idea of perfect markets, which require perfect information. Real markets with large information asymmetries allow large rents to be extracted from the economy.

This fact is the reason it's cheating to have a colleague signal you the contents of somebody else's card hand, and the reason market and company insiders are prohibited from profitting through their insider information.

Financial engineering, Wall Street style, was and is all about creating and maintaining information asymmetry, which they do by creating and trading exotic financial instruments sold over the counter with little oversight. These "dark pool" markets are ideal since only the broker/creator really knows the terms of the other paties to the deal, and because with no open market, would be sellers need to return to the broker to deal.

I was discussing this with a guy who, though quite a bit smarter than I, had not made a study of such matters. "Why," he asked, "don't they make that illegal."

The answer, I think, is that only a few people really understand this. Some of them are would be reformers. The rest are the guys making hundreds of billions from the situation. Guess who speaks with the louder voice.

Paul Volker

2012-02-08T21:34:00.001-07:00

In the late 1970's the United States was suffering from ruinous inflation from a variety of causes. Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volker to head the Federal Reserve system in 1979 and Volker made his bones by determining to squeeze inflation out of the system. He did this by clamping down brutally on the money supply, raising the Federal funds rate to 20% and producing the worst recession since depression days. The country suffered, but inflation evaporated, and thus he broke inflation and made Ronald Reagan's career when the economy rebounded sharply. Reagan, however, didn't care for his pro regulation stance and ultimately replaced him with Alan Greenspan, who achieved an outsized reputation for financial genius before it became clear that his easy money policies and hands off regulatory stance had contributed greatly to building the monster that ate the world's financial system in 2007-2008.

After the fall, and Obama's election, Volker, who had been a key Obama advisor, wanted the Treasury post, but was shunted to an advisory role when Tim Geithner got the job. Obama,according to Suskind, had two somewhat rival sets of advisors, one led by Volker and the other by Summers and Geithner.

Summers and Geithner were heavily enmeshed in Wall Street, and had played roles in the deregulation that had helped fuel the bubble that burst. They subscribed to the "first do no harm" rule and thought the first order of business had to be to save the banks regardless. Volker still believed in forceful action, and thought a sanguinary destrustion of the worst offenders would pay off in the medium turn. Wipe out the banks too weak to survive on their own instead of propping them up with Federal bucks and the whole industry would improve its behavior, he thought.

Geithner and Summers won this battle, with an assist from Rahm Emanuel, and that's the world we live in now. For the most part, the perps are still in business and doing business in much the same old way.

The Boys Club And The Sisterhood

2012-02-05T14:21:00.004-07:00

Though most of the men won’t say it, they feel that the nexus of math and risk—and the gaming of both, without flinching—is an area of male inclination. In fact, many of the women agree. They say that’s part of the problem.

Suskind, Ron (2011-09-20). Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (p. 205). Harper. Kindle Edition.

The view from Chapter 9.

The battles Brooksley Born had fought and mostly lost in the Clinton administration were refought under Obama, just with higher stakes. This time the sisterhood was larger, including Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, an early critic of Paulson and Geithner, FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, SEC Chair Mary Shapiro, and Elizabeth Warren, head of TARP oversight. They were still drastically outnumbered by the old boys network led by Geithner and Wall Street, but they had one crucial advantage - they had been mostly been right where Summers, Greenspan, and the other efficient markets devotees had been wrong. Bair, a Bush administration appointee, had famously pushed to regulate Enron's financial doings but had been over-ruled by her more fanatical free market colleagues, two to one.

The question of the moment was what to do about Citibank, a two hundred year old behemoth that had pioneered many financial innovations, including the checking account but had also repeatedly got itself in trouble from which it had to be bailed out by the government. It was seriously upside down again, and despite tons of federal money, $45 billion from the treasury and three hundred billion plus in free money from the FED, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Bair wanted to shut it down.

Obama also leaned that way, while Geithner stood as the defender of Citibank and its creditors - he was on the phone to CEO Vikram Pandit almost every night. The big sticking point was the cost of bankruptcy and who would bear it. Bair wanted the creditors to take a big haircut, but Geitner fought fiercely to protect them.

I repeat that Süßkind is a great story teller. He may not be the best unraveller of the financial intricacies, but he is fabulous on illuminating the human side. If finance and financial shenanigans are your thing, or you just like history and politics, I can stongly recommend Confidence Men.

Meritocracy and Information

2012-02-05T09:41:00.002-07:00

Ron Süßkind reports a revealing musing of Larry Summers to the effect that information has probably contributed to inequality by making it possible to pay people what they are worth. I recall a Business Week cover story of a decade or two back which similarly reported that customer service had become so lousy because computers had revealed to businesses just how little our business was worth to them.

If you are the travel scheduler for a major corporation, airlines will anoint your feet with oil and pave your path with gold, but if you are a family travelling with children - not so much. Similarly, the rainmakers of the corporate world are showered with cash, while the faceless worker bots see their salaries driven relentlessly downward.

A meritocratic society, where merit is measured purely by contribution to the profit center, can be a very unequal one indeed. Libertarians say "so be it." Conservatives say "as God intended." Liberals, though, have a more difficult problem - how should the competing demands of liberty and equity - or rather, equality - be balanced?

Pragmatists, like your humble servant, doubt the stability of a strictly meritocratic society where merit is based solely on money - or maybe even of any strict meritocracy. I'm pretty sure computers are not done messing with us yet.

Newton's First Law: Superbowl Edition

2012-02-05T06:54:00.002-07:00

Mike Pesca of NPR attributes this law of physics to Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton:

An object in motion tend to stay in motion until shoved out of bounds...

The Difference

2012-02-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

If you doubt the difference between Obama and Romney, consider this story asserting that a cabal of billionaires led by the Koch brothers has pledged $100 million to defeat Obama:

At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections.

A source who was in the room when the pledges were made told The Huffington Post that, specifically, Charles Koch pledged $40 million and David pledged $20 million.

Freed from any restraints by the Supremo's Citizens United decision, the billionaires club has moved very successfully to demonize Obama to a degree that American Presidents have rarely been subjected. The slanderous attacks likely to be mounted will probably the worst the country has seen.

Financial Derivatives and The Bankers Who Love Them

2012-02-04T09:54:00.001-07:00

Why were the financial derivatives markets so beloved of the giant investment banks, and why did they fight so hard to keep them unregulated? Ron Süßkind tells the story (which Cynthia has already mentioned in comments) of how Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers defeated Brooksley Born's plan to bring them into the regulatory fold, and reveals how they manage to extract gigantic rents from them.

The magic rent extraction potion is information. The first ingredient of an efficient market is perfect information, and as long as derivatives were the proprietary property of a few big banks, they could hoard information so that buyer and seller saw only what they wanted them to see. Stock and commodities exchanges were established to free their respective items of commerce from this kind of "dark pool" and Born wanted the same for derivatives. She lost that battle and the big banks won and the rest of us got stuck with the financial meltdown.

At the start of his term, Obama had to pick an economics team. He had a choice between his original advisors, like Goolsbee and former fed Chairman Volker, but decided to go with the advice to leave the home boys home and picked a crew of what he hoped were more market savvy insiders: Geithner and Summers. Christina Romer was added too, but as it happened, her good advice was mostly ignored or trumped by Summers and Geithner.

So why did he pick those whose hands were already implicated in the disaster? I don't buy the conspiracy theory version, so why else? I blame a combination of Obama's inexperience in running anything plus his innate conservatism and instinct for compromise. If he went with Volker, he would need to bust the big banks, and the carnage would be terrible. As it happened, the carnage was pretty terrible anyway, and the bankers whose empires he saved would turn on him and become the treasury of his enemies.

It was almost certainly a mistake, but every President makes them, and those who face the worst crises, like Lincoln and Rooseveldt, make the most. The real question is, what did he learn from those mistakes. We are still finding out.

Chess and Economics

2012-02-04T09:08:00.001-07:00

Ken Rogoff became a chess grandmaster while still a teenager, but eventually concluded that he couldn't climb to the very top, so switched to economics, and is now a Harvard professor and one of the world's most influential economists. Via Tyler Cowen, this Gideon Rachman financial times story from Davos, which is heavy on the chess. On Bobby Fisher, and praise:

Rogoff’s real hero, however, was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion of the 1970s. He remembers following the games from the famous Fischer-Spassky world chess championship in 1972, and being awed by Fischer’s play – “It was like seeing the hand of God at work; the originality, the simplicity.” He shakes his head in delight and amazement. Fischer even paid the teenaged Rogoff the compliment of analysing and praising one of his games in an article. But Rogoff did not let that go to his head. “I took that to mean that he knew I could never beat him. Because I knew he was hyper-competitive. I completely understood the message,” he chuckles.

On chess as an addictive drug:

I ask whether it was hard to switch from chess to economics? Rogoff confirms that it was. He says chess people find it difficult to move on, because the game is so addictive. But at graduate school he became convinced that dividing his attention meant that both his chess and his economics were suffering. He had to make a decision. Once he had chosen economics, he had to deal with his chess compulsion. “Being very good at anything involves being somewhat addicted – so part of my strategy of moving on was to give it up completely. I don’t play chess casually ... Not unless it’s incredibly rude to decline playing.”

But chess is still part of his mental make-up. “I think about chess all the time. In boring meetings. Or at night. Sometimes I think about chess to calm myself down, almost like meditation.” Still, he has to be careful not to let the addiction return. “I can’t have chess on my computer. But I think I have it under control most of the time.”

American Idle: The Presidential Sing Off

2012-02-03T22:41:00.001-07:00

All signs point to a close election between Obama and Romney this fall, but consider whom you want leading the country in ... song

Review: Could somebody please take that dog out in the street and shoot it.

Review: President of the United States of Soul

Stop The Presses

2012-02-03T20:31:00.001-07:00

Too bad nobody even knows what that used to mean anymore.
Lubos hears hints that a press stopping event, namely, sighting of a stop squark - the supersymmetric partner of a top quark - (did physicists get too f****** cute for their britches there, or what) might have been sighted at CERN.
I'm in no position to speculate on the plausibility of this rumor, but if true, it's huge, or rather, gianormous. Confirmation of supersymmetry would do an enormous amount to validate all the work done on it, and slightly less directly, string theory. It would also mean that supersymmetry, and perhaps some string implications would be accessible at energies not beyond the range of our technology.

The Undeserving Poor

2012-02-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

Lately the right wing has taken to indulging its obsession with the undeserving poor - that is to say, those that they consider to deserve to be poor. One econ prof defined them to be those who are poor but could reasonably have avoided being poor if they had made better life choices.

It probably is true that many could have avoided poverty if they made smarter choices, or fewer dumb ones - like, I imagine, having kids out of wedlock, being a drunk or drug addict, eating too much fatty food, and voting Republican.

More interesting, to me, said someone, are the undeserving rich. Not sure how those are defined, but those who got rich dishonestly or unscrupulosly, or by dumb luck might count.

Confidence Man: The View from Chapter 8

2012-02-01T21:29:00.002-07:00

So far, Süßkind is a heck of a storyteller. The story of the great crash and Obama's campaign are both told as a series of mainly personal vignettes - clearly the remembrances of major and some less major players. These are personal stories, but the central narrative is always in the background, and the parts of the story we get are those experienced by the players we hear about.

So far this has been mostly the story of how the looming catastrophe was gradually apprehended by a few bankers and economists close to the industry. These Cassandras suffered the usual fate of their clan - they were ignored, or mocked, or fired, but a few managed to keep thier heads above water and even save a bank or two.

Obama had friends and advisors among this group, and was probably the first prominent politician to have even a murky picture of the impending crash. At first, though, both he and his advisors saw it as something fairly far ahead - something that might happen in the middle of his second year if he was elected.

At this point, the Bush economic team - Treasury Secretary Paulson, Fed Chairman Bernanke, and New York Fed honcho Tim Geithner were still in almost total denial. As business conditions tightened in 2007, the portents of doom became more obvious, but Paulson's Treasury thrashed fecklessly. By the time disaster was at hand in late summer 2008, Paulson had frittered away a full year.

A very interesting aspect of the story that of the egos that led to annihilation (Fuld at Lehmann) or to it's very brink (Thain at Merrill Lynch).

Candidate Obama is portrayed as quick, cool, well-informed, and masterful, but with the Candidate now the President-elect we already see hints of a more uncertain touch. Brilliance can't quite substitute for lack of experience. His most fateful decisions, it appears, will be his choice of Chief of Staff and economic advisors.

It's pretty clear that Larry Summers is destined for a key role in the developing play. Initially an outsider, Summers' dominating personality, brilliance, and oratorical mastery have brought him near the center of power. We also see hints of trouble ahead. Summers, while Bob Rubin's deputy in the Clinton administration, was a key player in the bank deregulation which allowed the banks to stuff their portfolios with the risky financial instruments of mass destruction at the center of the 2008 crash. Moreover, at least in Süßkind's version of events, he seems to have consistently underestimated how bad things were going to get.

Süßkind vs. Larry Summers

2012-01-30T21:38:00.002-07:00

Early in Confidence Men, it looks like Ron Süßkind is auditioning Larry for a villain's role. Most interesting to me was his argument that the feminism issue was a theatrical side show on the real reason Larry got the boot as President of Harvard. Susskind says or implies that the Summers' real sin was meddling in the management of Harvard's endowment by getting it into the financial derivatives market, a venture which made a bundle at first but ultimately cost 1/3 of Harvard's ginormous endowment.

Decimal Points: Income by Percentile

2012-01-29T03:47:00.003-07:00

Somebody noted that it's hard for Americans to get too worked up about rich guys running for President because everybody running is pretty rich compared to an average American. Determining exactly where one winds up on the income scale seems to be a bit of an inexact science, since estimates vary a bit, but to be a bare minimum one per center you need to make something like $400,000 per year. One percenters are a fairly diverse lot, but executives are the largest component by far, though large numbers of doctors, financial professionals, and some lawyers also make the cut. Add in a few actors, athletes, salesmen, lottery winners, etc.

The President qualifies, probably on the basis of salary alone, but he also makes some from his book sales. The jump is steep to the next factor of ten, the 0.1%. It takes about $2 million to qualify here, and the Obamas missed last year, though not by too much. Candidate Newt Gingrich made it easily with his $5 million dollar income, but he would need to do more than twice as well to qualify for the 0.01%, where the entry fee is $11 million. The Mittster makes the grade quite comfortably, along with about 14,000 other families.

It's easy to imagine that you aren't rich, or at least not very rich, even if you are well up in the one percent, because from almost every vantage point there are others who are a whole lot richer. Mitt has something like a quarter of a billion dollars, but there are all those other guys with a whole billion, or ten, or twenty - like Newt's $10 million financial backer, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

The one percent may be diverse, but not so the 0.01%. Membership in that club is pretty much reserved for those that sit atop financial empires, or who have inherited a big part of such an empire.

The Last NR?

2012-01-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall:

Mitt puts Newt in a crate, ties the crate to the roof of the car and starts driving the family all the way to the nomination.

Death Spirals, Alcoholic Vertigo, and D2O

2012-01-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

I love this science video (via Andrew Sullivan) - presented at a frenetic pace that inhibits any boredom:

Crazy About You

2012-01-28T16:51:00.005-07:00

If you happen to be science, the arts, politics, philosophy...
Via Marginal Revolution, a new paper looks at the relationship between family psychopathology and intellectual specialization. It turns out that this idea is not exactly new:

A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. Aristotle claimed that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia”, while the physician Benjamin Rush noted a link between manic episodes and “talents for eloquence, poetry, music, and painting” ... Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression ..., while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found ... In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers ... These threads of evidence suggest that intellectual interests might be broadly linked to neuropsychiatric disorders...[ellipses are the references to be found in linked paper]

The authors turn their neuroscientific smoke detectors on an incoming class of Princeton frosh and find diagnostic fire.

And yes, autism spectrum is linked to scientific, mathematical, and engineering interest.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum looks at the same paper, and has a hand dandy chart from it.

Brad DeLong & Comment

2012-01-25T06:47:00.002-07:00

Quote of the Day: January 25, 2012
"The history of enterprise in antiquity therefore falls naturally into two periods. First is the development of economic practices in Mesopotamia circa 3500-1200 BC. By the end of antiquity we find gain-seeking shifting away from productive enterprise to land acquisition, usury, profiteering from political office, and extraction of foreign tribute by force…"

--David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, The Invention of Enterprise

12:59 AM in Books, Economics, Economics: Growth, Economics: Health | Permalink

Comments
Gene O'Grady said...
Uh, when was this end of antiquity?

Snoozer

2012-01-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

Obama hewed closely to the tradition of making the State-of-the-Union speech a sort of national soporific. Predictions that he would throw down the gauntlet to the Republicans turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

The experience of watching it was sort of like paging through the more boring sections of one those mail order catalogs that specialize in stuff I would never buy.

Mirror of Grubsdnal

2012-01-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

From the comments on Landsburg's post discussed in my previous post:

Steve’s mirror world shows that Mitt pays 40% of what would have been his income in Timm’s tax free world, but it also provides a handy tool for exploring other revenue structures. Suppose the taxmen of Mitt’s world distributed the tax burden somewhat differently – instead of 35% of salary and and 15% of investment income, they might (crudely) try to maintain revenue by making the charge 50% of salary and 0 % of investment income. That would wind up costing Mitt 50% of his total income.

Hmmm? Maybe it’s not investment tax that’s hurting his bottom line. Suppose we reverse the tax rates to 0% of salary and 50% ofinvestment income. In that case he only pays 25% of his Timm world income. That makes it look like it’s tax on salaries that really hurts the saver.

Am I missing something?

I doubt it.

More Sophistry From Steve Landsburg

2012-01-23T23:57:00.006-07:00

I have tried to swear off economics Prof Landsburg, but he been making the same flawed argument for years now, so I can't resist deconstructing it. He wants to argue that Mitt Romney is overtaxed. As usual from SL, this requires a heavily hypothetical backstory:

To understand Mitt Romney’s tax burden, you have to compare him to his doppelganger Timm Romney, who lives on a planet with no taxes. In the year (say) 2000, Mitt and Timm both earned (say) a million dollars. Timm invested his million dollars, saw it double over the past decade or so, and cashed out his investment this year, leaving him with two million dollars. Mitt, by contrast, paid 35% tax in 2000, leaving him with $650,000. He invested it, saw it double, and cashed out last year, paying 15% tax on the $650,000 capital gain. That leaves him $1,202,500, which is about 60% of what Timm’s got. In other words, the tax system costs Mitt almost 40% of his income.

That is, 40% of his imaginary income in a universe with no taxes, or 27% of his actual income in this universe.

Naturally this scenario depends on neither Mitt nor Timm needing to spend any of what they earned. Let's compare Mitt with a different cousin, Kitt, who actually needs to spend what she makes. Let's say that Kitt earns the same $1 million as Mitt, pays the same 35%, and spends all of the rest over the next ten years. Mitt and Kitt each earned $1 million, and Kitt got $650K to spend while Mitt somehow wound up with a bit less than twice that, for a net tax of minus 20.2% of his earned income.

Ok, now I've been a bit sophistical - doesn't Mitt deserve something for the ten years worth of forgone consumption. How much exactly? Well, if we believe in the efficient market, the compensation foregone was worth exactly what he earned on it, or $650,000. To make things even, let's assume that Kitt runs out of money before the ten years are over and needs to earn another $650K to keep the wolf away from the door.

At this point, according to our classical analysis, Mitt and Kitt have each produced $1650 K worth in either salaried work or forgone consumption. Mitt has payed 35% x 1 million + 15 % x $650 K, while Kitt had to pay 35% x 1650 K so she payed $130 K more.

The point is that priviledging investment income has no justification in either classical economics or common sense. The other point is that whenever Landsburg makes one of his counterintuitive arguments, whether in relativity or economics, there is likely to be some sophistry behind the curtain.

Cowen on Autism Spectrum

2012-01-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen writes on Autism, economics, and the new DSM definition. One interesting sentence:

It’s well known that the DSM process itself is, for better or worse, heavily influenced by various interest groups, including pharmaceutical lobbies.

the first two comments form a priceless couplet.

MoDo Hits A Sentence Out Of The Park

2012-01-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

Maureen Dowd's NYT column:

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

The rest of the essay may be less acute, but it's not a bad analysis of why Obama's hard core supporters are so disappointed in him.

Is Tim Maudlin An Idiot?

2012-01-22T22:11:00.001-07:00

Well, probably not, since he has apparently just been hired by the world's top philosophy department. Physicists of my generation often have a deep distain for philosophy, especially, perhaps, for philosophy of science. I thought maybe we might have caught that from our hero, Feynman, but I remember debates and recriminations with my philosophy of science prof well before I knew much about Feynman.

Be that as it may, why does Prof Maudlin say something this stupid:

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. ...

This argument is foolish on many levels - especially because it is neither new nor true. Lots of clever people, notably Ernst Mayr, have made it, but it's not true that no other species have developed technology - ants, bees, termites, and beavers have, even if they haven't gotten so far as we have, probably because they aren't smart enough. By his logic, if you had landed on Earth two billion years ago, you could have concluded that cellular organelles were not useful, and one billion years ago you could have concluded that multi-cellularity was not useful, and 500 million years ago that life on land was not feasible for multicellular animals.

Even a very clever fellow like Mayr was reluctant to concede that evolution is a cumulative business, but the molecular data is unambiguous on that count. High technolgical intelligence was one of the latest inventions of evolution, and it has demonstrated its power by taking an extremely obscure species and sweeping it across the planet and beyond, driving millions of other species extinct in the process.

Arguing that high technological intelligence is not very useful because beetles didn't develop it is the same type of error as arguing that tanks (or metal body armor) aren't very useful in warfare because the Aztecs didn't have them.

Rage

2012-01-22T06:18:00.000-07:00

Somebody asked me last night what let Gingrichwin big in South Carolina. I think Michael Tomasky nails it:

This is what conservatives want. They want someone who can stand on a stage with Obama and say, “You are our nightmare. You are the destroyer. You are the un-American and the anti-Christ, and I smite you.” For conservatives, it’s personal with Obama. He blinds them with hatred.

So they don’t really want someone who can “beat” Barack Obama, which is the question the exit polls asked. They want someone who can humiliate him in prime-time television, put him in his place, expose him to the world such that all the deluded idiots in this country who still like Obama finally and blazingly acknowledge the
truth that has so long been obvious to them. As Newt supporter Sam Pimm told me at the Gingrich victory event, “I would buy a ticket to see Gingrich debate Obama. Newt versus Obama is going to be something to see.”

If winning stems from that, so much the better. Rank-and-file conservatives like Jim Dolbow believe it’s bound to. “He knows how to defeat liberals,” Dolbow said about Gingrich at the victory event. “He did it in 1994. He’s a liberal slayer.”

An Andrew Sullivan reader makes the same point:

As much as the commentariat likes to talk about electability, the just-regular-folks I spent the holidays with talked only about how Newt would "hammer" the President during debates. "Can you imagine," my sister said, her eyes as lit-up as a child's on Christmas morning. "When Obama starts that smartest-guy-in-the-room shit, Newt'll shut him up." No one talked about policy or even politics. This is a mob storming the Bastille, cheering the guillotine, and Gingrich is their most likely Robespierre.

One Wack Job

2012-01-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Arun reports:

Haaretz

NEW YORK - The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

What an asshole. This nutcase, Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, has probably done more damage to Jews in America than anybody since the Rosenbergs. Of course his despicable nonsense is a first cousin to and natural outgrowth of the lies and slanders spewed by the right wing noise machine.

It's hard to see an upside for anybody in this. Chemi Shalev examines the entrails.

Fermi Question

2012-01-16T23:30:00.001-07:00

The proliferation of planet discoveries now makes the question of the absence of aliens a lot more pointed. There now seem to be billions and billions of planets, many of them likely rather Earthlike, so where (as Fermi asked) are all the aliens?

I asked this question of a deep thinker I know.

His opinion: "It probably means we will destroy this place in the next few hundred years."

There is no shortage of evidence thaat we aren't smart enough to handle the power technology has given us to screw up.

Blowing Up Nuclear Scientists

2012-01-16T10:21:00.001-07:00

Iran claims to have made arrests in the case of assassinated nuclear scientist. Not sure about the crdibility of the links of the arrested to the assassination, but if they got those responsible, it could get interesting.

So far they blame the US, the UK and Israel.

Autism and Genius: Chapter Next

2012-01-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

A very interesting CBS Sixty Minutes program today told the story of Jake, a kid who started showing autistic symptoms at age two and began regressing in his development. His parents tried everything, and finally found that one thing he loved was numbers. His development of his love of numbers and math coincided with a return of some social skills and language. By age eight, he was a math prodigy, auditing university math classes and getting the highest scores on math tests. Now thirteen, he is a college sophomore and intends to study for a doctorate in physics. He was the youngest person to have published in Phys Rev A

By now, he has an excellent vocabulary, speaks like a very self-possessed adult, and interacts easily and naturally with his fellow college students. Allegedly he has maxed every IQ test he has taken.

One special talent he possesses is a superb, probably eiditic memory for things he is interested in. He claims to never forget any math or physics problem he has ever seen - but couldn't tell you where to find anything in his house.

The program included an interview with a psychology prof who studies autism and autistic savants. About one in ten autistic persons has a savant skill, she said, and one trait they all have in common is exceptional memory.

The story revived and reinforced my faith in the autism-genius link.

False Flag

2012-01-14T22:40:00.001-07:00

Iran has claimed they have evidence that the US is behind the string of assassinations of Iraqi nuclear scientists. Most consider Israel a much more likely candidate. Kevin Drum finds a story claiming that Israelis posing as Americans are the real culprits. This type of false flag operation would seem tailor made for Israel's attempts to drag us into a war with Iran.

According to Perry's sources, nothing was done about the Israeli program until Barack Obama took office, at which point he "drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran":

"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations." Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them — 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"

Is this true? Needless to say, there's no way to know. After all, if we weren't involved, we'd deny it. But if we were involved, we'd deny it too. Still, take this as a data point. Apparently lots of current and retired officers say that we have nothing to do with the Iranian assassinations.

Presumably Petraeus knows the truth. If the false flag bit is so, it ought not to go unpunished.

When Does a Greenhouse Run Away?

2012-01-14T12:55:00.001-07:00

Over at Lumoville, an alleged professor of atmospheric science is claiming that a runaway greenhouse is impossible on Earth, so I thought I might try to discuss what the necessary and sufficient conditions for one are - Cliff Notes version.
Opacity

The atmosphere, or rather some of the gases in the atmosphere, are fairly transparent to incoming visible radiation but opague to outgoing thermal radiation. This one way transport warms the Earth a good deal beyond what its temperature would be in their absence. The most important such gas is water vapor. Water vapor is the key, but not the only, player in runaway warming.
A tale of two feedbacks.

The blanket of water vapor around the Earth warms it. Suppose we warm the surface. That increases the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere and consequently tends to warm it. That's a positive feedback, people, and positive feedbacks are unstable - a little bit of warming produces more warming, which in turn produces still more warming and so on to infinity. And vice-versa - cooling sets off still more cooling. If that were the whole story, we would either be condemned to chill or roast, unless we were prepared to believe in utterly improbable fine tuning.

As it turns out, there is a negative feedback which counteracts this effect. Increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases convection, which increases rain, which removes water vapor from the atmosphere. There is a balance point between the positive and negative feedbacks which stabilizes the temperatures.
Convective Depth

What determines the balance point is mostly a matter of the depth of the convecting part of the atmosphere - that part of the atmosphere in which heat is tramsported upward more by convection than radiation. That depth depends on a few things, like the heat of the Sun, but importantly for our purposes, it depends on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the absence of water vapor, such as above the watervapor rainout level, CO2 is the principal source of radiative opacity for outgoing radiation. The temperature at the top of the radiating layer will be that required to balance incoming absorbed radiation. The temperature at the bottom of the convecting layer will be sufficient to support convection to the top of that convecting layer - some approximation of an adiabatic lapse rate.

Runaway!

Runaway occurs when the temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere reaches the boiling point of water. At that point, the condensation feedback ceases to operate and nothing can stop the temperature increase until the temperature at the bottom becomes high enough to radiate at frequencies that penetrate the water vapor - 1400 K or so.

Once that occurs, the die is cast. Water vapor at the top of the atmosphere will be dissociated by ionizing radiation, and the hydrogen will be lost to space. The oygen will be incorporated into the crust or into CO2, with most of the carbon in the Earth's crust being converted to CO2.

As the water is lost to space, the planet will cool somewhat, but the vastly increased load of CO2 will probably still keep surface temperatures at several hundred C. We will become like Venus, to which this scenario happened perhaps billions of years ago.

Correction and clarifications from experts solicited, as are questions from the less expert. It's clear from this that we are currently a long way from the runaway point, but it's non-trivial to calculate how dramatic an impact greenhouse gases make on the set point.

UPDATE: Wikipedia notes that there are somewhat different definitions of a runaway greenhouse effect about, some of which are less drastic than the Venusian style event I describe. I'm not sure which version Hansen thinks we are faced with. The milder ones are propelled by CO2 rather than water vapor, and are reversible (in geological time spans) by feedbacks in the carbon cycle.

A Nobel Prize Isn't Just

2012-01-14T10:47:00.001-07:00

...a pile of money and eternal glory.

Sean Carroll notes that you might also get a special parking permit and mocked on global television by Sheldon Cooper, like Sal Perlmutter.

Brian Schmidt, in the comments, complains that he didn't get either. Sean mocks Brian's deuteronope compromised fashion sense, and Bob Kirshner defends his old student. Also helpful Nobel fashion advice.

Default, Dear Brutus

2012-01-14T10:22:00.001-07:00

The long, slow-motion train wreck of the Euro continues, picking up a bit of speed with the downgrade of a bunch of European debt and the collapse of negotiations to "voluntarily" restructure Greek debt. The point of the so-called voluntary restructuring is to avoid triggering the now notorious credit default swaps (CDS) which continually threaten to send a cascading chain reaction of bankruptcy through the financial world. Why the damnable things - which Warren Buffet called "instruments of mass financial destruction" - were not banned, abolished, and consigned to the lowest depths of financial hell after 2008 I will never understand.
Actually, I do understand, but I just don't like it. They weren't banned because international investment bankers love them - they allow them to make hugely profitable bets with other peoples' money, and stick the losses to taxpayers when they go bust.
It seems increasingly likely that the Merkozy "solution" - austerity with a dash of qualitative easing - is not going to work. Thy've tried A, they tried B - now what?

UPDATE: Krugman reacts to Merkel's reaction:

And today we read about the response:

German chancellor Angela Merkel has called on eurozone governments speedily to implement tough new fiscal rules after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of France and Austria and seven other second-tier sovereigns.
Still barreling down the road to nowhere.

More Fire

2012-01-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

Lumo writes on the subject of my previous post. I fear I left a somewhat intemperate comment. Nonetheless, should the great eraser strike, I repeat it here:

CapitalistImperialistPig
Ah yes, Comrade Stalin, you would fire every researcher who ever studied any question that might be dangerous to your cracked pottery. Your fear of reality suggests that there might be a hint of a scientist hiding somewhere in your fanatical mind, and that the fanatic is terrified that the scientist might wake and send your tower of lies tumbling down.

A couple of points that you might have preferred to ignore: we already have one example of a runaway greenhouse planet in the Solar system: Venus. Also, 5000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere may or may not have occurred in the past, but if it occurred more than several hundred million years ago, that experience might be irrelevant to today's hotter Sun conditions.

Hardly anybody thinks that the runaway greenhouse is likely for Earth - but one guy who does is the one who first discovered and explained the Venusian one.

The last paragraph is not correct. Hansen played a key role in confirming the Venusian Greenhouse, but Wildt seems to have first proposed it in the 1940's, and Carl Sagan revived in in the 60's.

The Fire Next TIme

2012-01-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

...the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up...2 Peter 3-10, KJV.

Astrophysics and biblical prophecy agree - hot times are coming - really hot. At some point during the next two billion years, the gradual warming of the Sun as more and more helium "ash" accumulates in the center will cause a runaway greenhouse effect as more and more water vapor accumulates in the atmosphere until the oceans boil.

At that point, it's game over. The temperature will rise to about 1400 C and stay there until nearly all the hydrogen in the atmosphere has been lost to space, at which point old Terra will become another carbon dioxide furnace like Venus - not as hot as 1400 C but still plenty hot.

There is the question of when. Could we accidentally accelerate the day of doom into the present by dumping a heck of a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere? Jim Hansen thinks so, but others aren't so sure.

From Technology Review's Physics archive blog:

But that raises an important question: is it possible that we could trigger a runaway greenhouse effect ourselves by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?

According to the climate scientist James Hansen, that's a distinct possibility. A couple of years ago, he wrote: "If we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there's a substantial chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty."

Today, Colin Goldblatt at the University of Victoria in Canada and Andrew Watson at the University of East Anglia in the UK, publish an interesting analysis of this question and, while they are nowhere near as pessimistic as Hansen, their conclusion is not entirely re-assuring.

Here's the background. The fear is that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is warming the planet and increasing evaporation from the oceans. The extra water vapour, itself a greenhouse gas, causes more warming and more evaporation in a vicious cycle of temperature increases that eventually result in the ocean boiling away.
...
Goldblatt and Watson have an answer: "The good news is that almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that it is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of noncondensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere."

But there is an important caveat. Atmospheric physics is so complex that climate scientists have only a rudimentary understanding of how it works. For example, Goldblatt and Watson admit that the above conclusion takes no account of the role that clouds might play in this process.

And scientists' ignorance of the processes at work raises a significant question mark. As Goldblatt and Watson put it: "Is there any missed physics or weak assumptions that have been made, which if corrected could mean that the runaway is a greater risk? We cannot answer this with the conﬁdence which would make us feel comfortable."

Not that any of this will concern the religious and other crackpots.

Funny Numbers

2012-01-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

I've been reading about IBM's new technology that stores a bit on just twelve atoms - good enough to store a whole byte on 96 atoms. I think I can follow the arithmetic so far. Next it decides to get funky. The linked story and another on CNN say that it now takes about a million atoms to store a bit. The CNN story adds that it takes half a billion to store a byte. Hmmm?

These numbers imply, say both stories, that we should now be able to achieve data densities 100 times greater than present technology. Elsewhere, the linked story thinks that it only takes 1/83,000 as much space to store a bit in the new scheme. Hmmm again?

I seem to get 1,000,000/12 = 85,000 and 500,000,000/96 = a little more than 5,208,333. No wonder we old people have so much trouble keeping up with technology.

New York Times Shocked

2012-01-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

...shocked to find readers actually expect the Paper to check on the truthfullness of stories they report.

More On Romney the Vulture

2012-01-12T23:12:00.003-07:00

From Andrew Sullivan, more Bain adventures:

Here's the New York Post, for Pete's sake, making the case last year against the shifty Wall Street games of Bain:

Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...

* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

A capitalist Hayek could love, I guess. Romney and Bain's genius, it seems, was finding suckers to stick with the bill when they drove these companies to bankruptcy. No coincidence, I guess, that these suckers prominently included workers who lost jobs and pensions. It seems plausible that he might operate the same way in the White House.

Republicans have been declaring class war for half a decade - maybe they will finally get it.

Adventures in Vulture Capitalism

2012-01-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum and Reuters tell the story of one of Mitt's adventures in vulture capitalism. The CLiff Notes version:

Bain buys company pretty cheap. Has company borrow a potful of money, and uses the money to pay Bain a gigantic dividend. Company now owes so much it can't pay or continue in business. Bankruptcy declared, workers are laid off, creditors, including the workers pension funds, are stiffed. All made possible by that miracle of modern capitalism, the limited liability corporation.

Details at link above.

Terrorism Against Iran

2012-01-11T21:52:00.002-07:00

Four Iranian scientists thought to be associated with its nuclear program have been assassinated in the last two years. Iran blames the US and Israel, but at least one observer points the finger at the Israeli Mossad and the MEK, an anti-regime Iranian terrorist organization. I don't know anything about the author, but this sounds plausible to me. The US, after all, is still trying to get Iran to talk, and this sort of terrorism tends to be exactly the opposite in its effects.

If Iran were determined to retaliate in kind, it would find Israel a very hard target, but the US, not so much. Just such a scenario, provoking a US war against Iran, is probably exactly what Netanyahu dreams about.

Tartuffefied!

2012-01-09T17:43:00.005-07:00

Gus is the cat at the theatre door.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a "scene workshop" based on Moliere's Tartuffe. We used as a script Richard Wilbur's translation into rhymed couplets. If, like me, you didn't know what a "scene workshop" was, in our case it consisted of eight actors learning a selection of scenes from the play, and presenting them as a play with no special costumes and only a very minimal set, with a narrator filling in the missing details.

Somewhat to my surprise, a bunch of people actually showed up, and, allegedly, payed money to see this.

I hadn't been on stage for twenty years or so, and was much older than most of the rest of the cast, so I was appropriately terrified. Fortunately, I managed to remember most of my lines and the audience didn't throw fruit or even boo.

It was a heck of a lot of fun.

Of course my head is still filled with all these rhymed couplets.

Europeans Are Not a People

2012-01-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

..is the title of a recent Andrew Sullivan post, and an occasional theme of his these days. They lack, it is said, a common language, common views of government or a common view of what Europe is or ought to be. All quite true, of course, and absurdly irrelevant. Exactly the same could have, or in some cases, still can be said of Canadians, Americans, Britons, Italians, Spaniards, and countless others.

Peoplehood is not something that comes out of the soil or is imposed by genetics. It's created by someone's vision the promotion of common purpose. Europe has gotten a great deal out of the fragile unity they have managed to create so far, including relatively unprecedented prosperity, freedom from internal wars, and safety from the ravening beasts on its borders.

They have gotten those advantages for going on sixty years now, just long enough that almost everyone who remembers what went before has perished. It will be sad, I think, if they tear themselves apart again and go back to interncine conflict - sad, but not particularly surprising.

What Does IQ Measure?

2012-01-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

I have more than once said that nobody knows what (biological substrate) IQ tests measure, only that they have high consistency, at least over short intervals. There is another sense in which we know exactly what they measure: speed and skill in solving a wide variety of cognitive problems. Those cognitive problems usually encompass verbal, mathematical, spatial, and pattern recognition tasks. Skill (and speed) at each of these tasks is known to be teachable, at least in part.

Why then, should there be this prejudice that IQ is not teachable? Mostly, I think, because those skills can't be taught quickly. No one becomes a chess master in 1 or even 100 lessons, and no one acquires a large functional vocabulary without years of reading and writing. So, if IQ measures one's teachability and is itself teachable, does that just mean there is nothing there but education? Probably not. We differ in reaction time, working memory, and our ability to convert working memory to permanent memory, and it doesn't seem that those things are greatly affected by practice.

It seems possible, or perhaps even likely, that intrinsic differences beyond the reach of education exist. But its also likely that the usual results of IQ tests are only rather indirect measures of those intrinsics.

Krugman Counter-punching

2012-01-03T17:58:00.001-07:00

This stupid blogger interface has a nasty habit of deleting an entire post just when I'm ready to put it up - I've never found out what provokes it. Maybe someday I will attempt to recreate this post on Krugman's response to Cowen and Tabarrok.

Kevin Drum Unloads On Katrina vandenHeuvel

2012-01-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

.. and other liberals who find something to like in Ron Paul.

Can we talk? Ron Paul is not a charming oddball with a few peculiar notions. He's not merely "out of the mainstream." Ron Paul is a full bore crank. In fact he's practically the dictionary definition of a crank: a person who has a single obsessive, all-encompassing idea for how the world should work and is utterly blinded to the value of any competing ideas or competing interests.

This obsessive idea has, at various times in his career, led him to: denounce the Civil Rights Act because it infringed the free-market right of a monolithic white establishment to immiserate blacks; to dabble in gold buggery and advocate the elimination of the Federal Reserve, apparently because the global economy worked so well back in the era before central banks; suggest that the border fence is being built to keep Americans from leaving the country; claim that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and should be dismantled; mount repeated warnings that hyperinflation is right around the corner; insist that global warming is a gigantic hoax; hint that maybe the CIA helped to coordinate the 9/11 attacks; oppose government-sponsored flu shots; and allege that the UN wants to confiscate our guns.

This isn't the biography of a person with one or two unusual hobbyhorses. It's not something you can pretend doesn't matter. This is Grade A crankery, and all by itself it's reason enough to want nothing to do with Ron Paul. But of course, that's not all. As we've all known for the past four years, you can layer on top of this Paul's now infamous newsletters, in which he supported a political strategy consciously designed to appeal to the worst strains of American homophobia, racial paranoia, militia hucksterism, and new-world-order fear-mongering. And on top of that, you can layer on the fact that Paul is plainly lying about these newsletters and his role in them.

Amen!

Learnin' and IQ

2012-01-02T11:51:00.001-07:00

From Tyler Cowen, one of my favourite polymaths:

Children who have more schooling may see their IQ improve, Norwegian researchers have found.

I need to dig into the details, but the effect seems improbably large.

Using data on men born between 1950 and 1958, the researchers looked at the level of schooling by age 30. They also looked at IQ scores of the men when they were 19.

“The size of the effect was quite large,” she said. Comparing IQ scores before and after the education reform, the average increased by 0.6 points, which correlated with an increase in IQ of 3.7 points for an addition year of schooling, Galloway said.

Let's see, between 1933, when Feynman's IQ was tested in school, and 1948, when his big contributions hit publication, Feynman had something like ten years of intense school and 3 years of super school at Los Alamos - could work out to an additional 48 IQ points, bringing his adult IQ up to a respectable 173;-)

College Collusion

2011-12-31T01:15:00.000-07:00

Joe Nocera, writing in the New York Times, talks about the obvious but rarely mentioned:

Twice a year in Vienna, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries gather to decide on the short-term direction of oil prices ..

Indeed, collusion and price-fixing are the main reasons cartels exist — and why they are illegal in America.

Yet, in Indianapolis a few weeks from now, a home-grown cartel will hold its annual meeting, where it, too, will be working to collude and fix prices. This cartel is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. would have you believe that it is the great protector of amateur athletics, preventing college athletes from being tainted by the river of money pouring over college sports.

In fact, the N.C.A.A.’s real role is to oversee the collusion of university athletic departments, whose goal is to maximize revenue and suppress the wages of its captive labor force, a k a the players. Rarely, however, will the cartel nature of the N.C.A.A. be so nakedly on display as at this year’s convention.

The worst sin a college athlete can commit is to attempt to collect some portion of his fair market value for his performance as an athlete, and the NCAA exist almost entirely to preserve that "moral" code.

I would love to see the courts find the NCAA in restraint of trade and fine their asses off, but it's not likely to happen in the age of our corporate crony loving Supremes.

Nocera thinks that some sort of half measures involving paying college athletes can work, but I'm far more absolutist. Abolish the NCAA.

Why Take IQ Seriously?

2011-12-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows what IQ is, by which I mean that nobody knows what is the nature of the biophysical substrate underlying performance on IQ tests. There are a number of hints, though, that there really ought to be some such underlying biology.

I collect a lot of abuse from my commenters whenever I venture into the murky waters of IQ. Their predominant argument, so far as I can tell, is either that IQ doesn't exist or if it does we should pretend that it doesn't. I hear someone shouting "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

The best reason for taking IQ seriously is that the world does. If you apply for a school, or a job, or join the military, you will very likely get an IQ test. These tests are prompted not by superstition but by overwhelming evidence that whatever it is IQ tests measure, that something is strongly correlated with performance - in school, on the job, and in life. That is true for such diverse occupations as offensive tackle in the NFL, machine gunner on a tank, financial analyst, university professor and bank teller.

The fact is that it's deeply foolish not to study so important to everyday life, especially since so little is known about it. At one point, IQ was thought to be something purely innate, like eye color or blood type. That belief has been shown to be false. Despite strong genetic influence, IQ has been shown to be affected by education and life experience. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be with adult height, now known to vary by nine or more inches depending mainly on childhood nutrition. The brain, of course, retains its plasticity long after bone growth plates have shut down further action.

So, go ahead and ignore IQ if you like - the world won't.

How To Look Foolish: Part CXXIV

2011-12-30T14:04:00.002-07:00

When we are moved to vituperation, the instinct to compare the offender with the worst hobgoblins in our mental armory is strong. Those who indulge this instinct might bear in mind that they may be performing the intellectual equivalent of tattooing the word "STUPID" (or maybe "STOOPID" on their forehead.

Thus it was that Roman Catholic Cardinal George, Prince of the Church, primate of some Chicago based satrapy, came to acquire the offending tattoo, when he compared a Gap Pride parade to a Ku Klux Klan rally, as Andrew Sullivan reports.

Here is a clue for those who wander through fields of clue glue without any sticking. If you make such a comparison, make sure you know precisely what aspect in which the offending behaviors is similar to the totemic villainy. If the main or only point of similarity is your idiosyncratic disapproval of both, save us all some trouble and just go get the tattoo. You can keep it under your hat for ceremonial occasions.

Rick Perry

2011-12-29T17:36:00.001-07:00

...took some grief for this comment:

Rick Perry in Iowa: “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.”

Despite any territorial ambitions I might have and Ron Paul's speculative plots, Canada isn't technically part of the US yet, but I know what Rick means - Canada is a hell of a lot less foreign than Saudi Arabia or even Venezuela, not to mention closer. So give the Rickster a break on this one.

IQ and Feynman

2011-12-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

Richard Feynman was one of the most influential physicists of the middle of the twentieth century and notoriously bright - the kind of guy who gloried in outsmarting everybody and nearly always succeeded. One popular rumor holds that Murray Gell-Mann (my candidate for greatest living physicist) left Caltech because he couldn't stand being regularly bested by Feynman.

Razib Khan, writing in Discover, notes that Feynman reported his high school IQ test result as 125. Now 125 is a fairly respectable IQ, good enough that only one in 17 people scores that high, but nobody thinks that Feynman was just 1 in 17 people smart or even just 1 in 1700 people smart. He was the guy often called the smartest man in the world - though to be fair, when a magazine cover so dubbed him, Feynman reported his own mother's reaction: "Pity the poor world!"

Khan and others seem a bit befuddled by Feynman's "low" score. His theories:

One thing I have always wondered about is the fact that Richard Feynman had substantive accomplishments which marked him as definitively brilliant by the time he was talking about his 125 I.Q. score (which is smart, but not exceedingly smart). Intelligence scores are supposed to be predictors of accomplishments, but Feynman already had those accomplishments. Bright people take many psychometric tests, so there will be a range of score about a mean. My personal experience is that there’s a bias in reporting the highest scores. But it may be that Feynman gloried in reporting his lowest scores because that made his accomplishments even more impressive. Unlike most he had nothing to prove to anyone.

To which I say - all of the above. I don't have my "Surely you're joking" copy at hand, but I seem to recall that he had just won the Nobel Prize when he stopped by his old HS to check his IQ score. Feynman loved to punctuate his intellectual feats of strength with an "aw shucks" manner and some self-deprecating banter. Moreover, he was a notorious contrarian who could delight in finding "different" but still correct answers to conventional questions. He was exactly the kind of guy who, given 20 different IQ scores for himself, would tease everyone by choosing the lowest. When Doug Hofstadter, another pretty bright guy, gave a seminar at Caltech, he reported that Feynman sat in the front row and kept interupting him with "village idiot" questions. Feynman apparently delighted in the characterization.

Commenters drew some scorn from Khan by suggesting that (a)IQs weren't meaningful, or (b)that IQs above 125 were all the same, or (c)there was some fundamental flaw in the test Feynman got.

For Lee, Who Doesn't Believe

2011-12-28T20:43:00.001-07:00

...and 2001: A Space Oddessy fans everywhere.

David Zax, writing in MIT's Technology Review, writes about Apple's TV speculated for 2012. The rumor is that it will be simple, highly integrated, and perhaps under voice control.

sweerek, writing in comments, has my favorite in a lo-ong time.

next year in a livingroom somewhere

User: Siri, bring up Microsoft's MediaRoom
Siri: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
User: What's the problem?
Siri: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
User: What are you talking about, Siri?
Siri: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
...
...

War and Rumor of War

2011-12-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

In case we haven't yet had our fill of Asian war, Iran has made a threat that can hardly be less than mortal.

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

The declaration by Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, came as President Obama prepares to sign legislation that, if fully implemented, could substantially reduce Iran’s oil revenue in a bid to deter it from pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Prior to the latest move, the administration had been laying the groundwork to attempt to cut off Iran from global energy markets without raising the price of gasoline or alienating some of Washington’s closest allies.

Apparently fearful of the expanded sanctions’ possible impact on the already-stressed economy of Iran, the world’s third-largest energy exporter, Mr. Rahimi said, “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Iran’s official news agency. Iran just began a 10-day naval exercise in the area.

In recent interviews, Obama administration officials have said that the United States has developed a plan to keep the strait open in the event of a crisis. In Hawaii, where President Obama is vacationing, a White House spokesman said there would be no comment on the Iranian threat to close the strait. That seemed in keeping with what administration officials say has been an effort to lower the level of angry exchanges, partly to avoid giving the Iranian government the satisfaction of a response and partly to avoid spooking financial markets.

I doubt that the US, or the rest of the world, would tolerate a blockade. Breaking it would quite likely take at least a massive air war.

Future History and Education

2011-12-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

History remains one of the least predictable domains of human endeavor, but unencumbered by an formal knowledge we leap into the breach where the wise fear to tread. The future powers of the world are widely speculated to be China and India, and why not? They have been the most populous nations for centuries and have often been in the forefront of invention and culture.

China has already secured a place as a great power, but India seems much more problematic. China's old civilization was thoroughly shattered by the Communist revolution, and that destruction may have prepared it better to accept the revolutionary implications of modernity. It also appears that totalitarian rule makes it possible to introduce changes that a democratic society will not tolerate. Moreover, China has a long history of political unity that India cannot match, and the utter dominance of the Han imposes a kind of ethnic and cultural unity.

I won't venture to guess how much India is held back by the remanents of cultural legacies like the caste system, but one problem or symptom seems to be the continuing failures of the Indian educational system. India has managed to produced a highly educated elite while most are left behind.

PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, assesses the educational attainments of 15 year olds in industrialized countries. Via Marginal Revolution, we have this WSJ report by Prashabnt K. Nanda on India's performance in its first outing in the PISA.

New Delhi: A global study of learning standards in 74 countries has ranked India all but at the bottom, sounding a wake-up call for the country’s education system. China came out on top.

It was the first time that India participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). India’s participation was in a pilot project, confined to schools from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh
...
To be sure, there are some reservations about the findings of the study. Such comparisons may not be fair as they are not between equals, says Manish Sabharwal, chief executive officer of human resources training and placement firm Teamlease Services Pvt. Ltd.

Yet, he argued, it does serve as a timely warning.

“Industries are already facing a problem because of poor quality (of graduates),” Sabharwal said. “What we need to do is repair and prepare. Repair by imparting skill training and prepare by improving the school system, which is the main gateway.”

In Tamil Nadu, only 17% of students were estimated to possess proficiency in reading that is at or above the baseline needed to be effective and productive in life. In Himachal Pradesh, this level is 11%.

The United States fares much better in these studies, but falls far short of the elite, ranking just 15th in reading and falling to 21st in science and a dismal 24th in mathematics. Those who fail to upgrade their infrastructure, both physical and intellectual, are poorly placed for the future competition.

Making Money

2011-12-27T08:31:00.002-07:00

The "Euro Crisis" has receded from the front pages, at least for the moment. Why so? Fundamentally because the European Central Bank (ECB) did what it said it wouldn't/couldn't do - print up some extra money. So what does quantitative easing, European style, look like?

The most obvious way to do it would have been to buy up sovereign debt from the troubled Southern countries, thereby lowering their borrowing costs. This is one thing recommended by Krugman and other critics. Silly naive Americans!

The European way is more subtle. What happens instead is that the ECB lends money - half a trillion Euros, so far - to peripheral and other troubled banks. These loans are secured by collateral - mostly sovereign debt of the self-same troubled nations. This provides those nations with liquidity, for the present. It doesn't immediately do anything for solvency problems, but with luck, it might help prevent a disastrous descent into another recession.

The deal made was that those bailed out in this deal would get a friendly German boot on their throat to prevent them from overspending in the future. If it doesn't work out, somebody, presumably mostly Germany, is stuck with the half a trillion in noncollectable debt. If it does, eat your heart out Ron Paul.

Books of 2011

2011-12-26T15:30:00.001-07:00

In case any of you are tempted to write in my name for President (if nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve) I thought about my answer to the traditional candidate question: what books are you reading or have you read recently. I find that I don't read as many books as I used to. The intertubes, plus deteriorating vision (and intellect) are probably to blame.

Commenters, whether running for office or no, are invited to join in.

On my Kindle (* reviewed here, @ still working on it):
*Debt, the First 5000 years, by David Graeber
*The Science of Evil, by Simon Baron-Cohen
*The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson
*On the Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche
*Beyond Good and Evil, by F. Nietzsche
*Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
*@The Shape of Inner Space by Shing-Tung Yao and Steve Nadis
*Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady
*The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen
*The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
@Confidence Man, by Ron Susskind
@Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Tartuffe, by Moliere

I read some print also, and will report on it later.

Exclusive Neighborhoods

2011-12-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

The private island is perhaps the ultimate toy of the absurdly wealthy. In today's tough real estate market, some kind of private island is probably available to anybody with an extra seven figures rattling around in their wallet, but you still probably need eight to get into the luxury market. Naturally, the sky is the limit if you want genuinely princely amenities - jet port, deep water harbor for your yacht, a few villages worth of servile native house elves.

Personally, I want more. If I make it big I plan to buy Madagascar or New Zealand.

Machine Morality

2011-12-25T22:19:00.001-07:00

Colin Allen tackles the issue of machine morality in the New York Times: The Future of Moral Machines. We don't have to wait until machines get smarter than people to worry about this he argues - in fact he seem to be a bit skeptical that they will get smarter. He right on the first point and wrong on the second, I think. As to the second:

The neuro- and cognitive sciences are presently in a state of rapid development in which alternatives to the metaphor of mind as computer have gained ground. Dynamical systems theory, network science, statistical learning theory, developmental psychobiology and molecular neuroscience all challenge some foundational assumptions of A.I., and the last 50 years of cognitive science more generally. These new approaches analyze and exploit the complex causal structure of physically embodied and environmentally embedded systems, at every level, from molecular to social. They demonstrate the inadequacy of highly abstract algorithms operating on discrete symbols with fixed meanings to capture the adaptive flexibility of intelligent behavior.

A total crock, I think. Computers are just as good at dynamical systems behavior etc as they are at operation on abstract symbols with fixed meaning. Our understanding of all the above is in fact predicated on having reduced them all to abstract symbols - to physics in other words.

Back to his main point - robots, even if they don't have any moral programs are already operating in domains with complex moral dimensions. As the author points out, Isaac Asimov explored these dimensions in his robot stories, with robots constrained by his laws of robotics. Our robots are not so constrained, but they are gaining greater autonomy and are increasing trusted with matters of life and death - from killing those we call our enemies to driving our cars and doing our surgeries. Robots make buy and sell decisions in the stock market in a millionth of a second. Nobody can check their work in advance and the consequences may be calamitous - some stock market crashes have already been blamed on programs run amuck.

It's pretty obvious that plenty of other dimensions of our society are going to be trusted to robot deciders.

At a more mundane level, consider just the robot red light/speeding cameras that have proliferated. Here the moral is the morality of letting a machine give tickets where most of the income goes to private entrepreneurs who sponsor the cameras. Speeding is a simple case, perhaps, but when private enterprise profits from identification of crime, their is plenty of scope for justice to be subverted in the name of profit.

Does this talk of artificial moral agents overreach, contributing to our own dehumanization, to the reduction of human autonomy, and to lowered barriers to warfare? If so, does it grease the slope to a horrendous, dystopian future? I am sensitive to the worries, but optimistic enough to think that this kind of techno-pessimism has, over the centuries, been oversold. Luddites have always come to seem quaint, except when they were dangerous. The challenge for philosophers and engineers alike is to figure out what should and can reasonably be done in the middle space that contains somewhat autonomous, partly ethically-sensitive machines. Some may think the exploration of this space is too dangerous to allow. Prohibitionists may succeed in some areas — robot arms control, anyone? — but they will not, I believe, be able to contain the spread of increasingly autonomous robots into homes, eldercare, and public spaces, not to mention the virtual spaces in which much software already operates without a human in the loop. We want machines that do chores and errands without our having to monitor them continuously. Retailers and banks depend on software controlling all manner of operations, from credit card purchases to inventory control, freeing humans to do other things that we don’t yet know how to construct machines to do.

We will either prescribe some moral principles for our machines, or pay the consequences.

Virtually Real

2011-12-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Miller has a theory about Fermi's paradox. Seventy years or so ago, a bunch of physicists were wondering about the plausibility of extra-terrestial intelligence. It was obvious already that there were lots of stars, and it seemed likely that many of them had planets. Once intelligent life had evolved, it shouldn't take long to colonize a galaxy.

Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, “So, where is everybody?” That is, if extraterrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s Paradox.

The paradox has gotten somewhat sharper since. We have now discovered hundred of extraterrestial planets, and it's clear that they are pretty common. It's plausible, if not yet demonstrated, that there are many which are good candidates for supporting life. The evolution of life and especially intelligence is more problematic - it took a long time here on Earth. Still it's plausible - again not yet demonstrated - that there are tens of millions of planets in our galaxy that have been hospitable for life for much longer than the history of the Earth.

So where are they? For Miller's theory, visit the link.

Book'em Dano

2011-12-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

One of the losses in the age of Kindle is our ability to size up a person by scanning his or her bookshelf. A standard question for Presidential candidates is to ask them what books they are currently reading or which influenced them greatly. Paul Begala looks at the current crop of Republican candidates and finds something of a literary desert/freak show.

One of the strangest moments in Mitt Romney’s uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Brett Baier a couple of weeks ago came when Baier asked him for the name of the last book he’s read. “I’m reading sort of a fun one right now,” he explained, “so I’ll skip that.” Then he hurried on to say he just finished George W. Bush’s Decision Points. (Which, as Jon Stewart noted, he also said he had “just finished” six months ago.)

But wait: what’s such a guilty pleasure that Mitt dares not speak its name? Japanese cartoon porn? One of those novels about adolescent vampires? (A cute answer if you’re a 15-year-old girl, but kinda creepy if you’re a grandfather running for president.)

But maybe the answer’s worse. When he was asked by Fox to name his favorite novel back in 2007, Romney said Battlefield Earth, the magnum opus of sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Ron Paul turns out to be Congress's champion quoter of Ayn Rand, and Michele Bachman cites an obscure pro-slavery rant out of extreme right field.

Ron Paul in the Rough

2011-12-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

Via Brad DeLong, Ron Paul Newsletter quotes.

This is pretty vile stuff. This guy stinks to heaven.

Pants on Fire

2011-12-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul, truthteller, continues to lose credibility. The latest, is a letter of solicitation, published over his signature and citing his personal experience which includes the following lowlights:

It is written in the first person, it appears above his signature, and in making some of the accusations, the appeal references what it purports to be Paul's personal experiences.

The letter suggests, for instance, that new $100 bills distributed by the Treasury and ostensibly aimed at tracking drug money were instead aimed at keeping track of all citizens.

"I held the ugly new bills in my hands," the letter says. "I can tell you -- they made my skin crawl!"

The letter also says that "my training as a physician" -- Paul is an obstetrician -- "helps me see through" what he calls the "federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS."

The letter warns of a "coming race war in our big cities" and says Paul "laid bare" what it calls "the Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica."

A spokesman for Paul told Talking Points Memo that the candidate disavows the letter and did not write it.

I took offense at the "cheap harmonica" crack. That harmonica has cost the US taxpayer hundreds of billions if not trillions.

Of course Paul denies it, now, though he told a different story a couple of decades ago. The facts make pretty clear that Paul either is the author or else is a guy who allows and profits from the use of his name by racists, conspiracy theorists, and crackpots of an extreme sort. Either way, not a guy you should trust within a Texas mile of the Oval Office.

Face it, Andrew Sullivan, your endorsement of Paul is (yet) another example of your frequently spectacular bad judgement in politics.

Memory

2011-12-22T14:36:00.002-07:00

A bad memory is a good quality for a Presidential candidate to develop. I don't think Paul believes in evolution, but Jackie Kucinich, writing in USA Today, has noticed that Ron Paul's remembrance of his newsletters and their authorship has evolved over time.

WASHINGTON – Rep. Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disavow racist and incendiary language published in Texas newsletters that bore his name, denying he wrote them and even walking out of an interview on CNN Wednesday. But he vouched for the accuracy of the writings and admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.

Some issues of the newsletters included racist, anti-Israel or anti-gay comments, including a 1992 newsletter in which he said 95% of black men in Washington “are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

Paul told The Dallas Morning News in 1996 that the contents of his newsletters were accurate but needed to be taken in context. Wednesday, he told CNN he didn’t write the newsletters and didn’t know what was in them.

Ron Paul's Newsletters

2011-12-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul's various newsletters are picking up some notice due to his 15 minutes apparently having arrived in the Republican primaries. Conor Friedersdorf takes a look. He quotes this from Jamie Kirchick's 1998 New Republic piece:

Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Air Force surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.

...whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.

These newsletters apparently pulled in about a million bucks a year.

Paul denies authorship, but he also refuses to say who the authors were - and his is almost the only name ever making an appearance.

Not Something A President Need Worry About?

2011-12-20T04:41:00.001-07:00

It seems that a bunch of racist and otherwise bigotted comments got published under in Ron Paul's Newsletters a couple or three decades back. Not really a problem though, since:

“He totally disavows what was said and disagrees with it totally,” Mr. Kesari said. “The only responsibility he takes is for not paying closer attention.”

I wonder how that argument would have worked out for, say, Eichmann?

Robert Samuelson, Journalistic Idiot

2011-12-19T15:02:00.001-07:00

Robert Samuelson, quite inexplicably, is one of the country's most influential economics journalists. I say inexplicably because I've never seen any evidence that he knows anything about economics or anything about journalism except the ability to parrot the right-wing party line. Oh wait - maybe there is an explanation.

I first became aware of him when his byline replaced that of the great economist Paul Samuelson in Newsweek a few decades ago. Hmmm, I thought at the time, perhaps he is the idiot nephew of the real Samuelson. (Actually former Harvard President Larry Summers is the only fitfully idiotic nephew of both Paul Samuelson and another economics Nobel, Kenneth Arrow).

I digress. What I meant to say was that Paul Krugman has caught Robert Samuelson in another whopper (or, if we take a generous interpretation, perhaps just ignorant stupidity)

Follow the link for details.

Levelling and The Republic

2011-12-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of the American Republic, and the aspirations eloquently expressed in the second paragraph quoted from above have a central place in the quest for freedom everywhere. Their moral force has shaped our national character and our Constitution, and many of our best deeds have been inspired by our attempts to live up to those aspirations.

It's not an easy standard, and we have failed repeatedly to live up to it, but its potentcy as a battle cry for freedom has never wilted. Our nation's long struggles over slavery and equal rights are the most dramatic manifestation of the challenge of that standard. The fact that these words were penned by a life long slave owner are yet another proof of difficulty their achievement.

The founders of our nation knew history, so they were not under any illusions that they had created a magical system for the preservation of liberty. John Adams and George Mason in particular were wary of the hazards of evolution into oligarchy or dictatorship. The present age is hardly free of warning signs of their encroachment, especially the emergence of the national security state in the wake of 911 and the exploding inequality in wealth.

Ian Ayres and Aaron S Edlin, writing in today's New York Times, sound the alarm and plump for a proposal:

THE progressive reformer and eminent jurist Louis D. Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Brandeis lived at a time when enormous disparities between the rich and the poor led to violent labor unrest and ultimately to a reform movement.

Over the last three decades, income inequality has again soared to the sort of levels that alarmed Brandeis. In 1980, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans made 9.1 percent of our nation’s pre-tax income; by 2006 that share had risen to 18.8 percent — slightly higher than when Brandeis joined the Supreme Court in 1916.

Congress might have countered this increased concentration but, instead, tax changes have exacerbated the trend: in after-tax dollars, our wealthiest 1 percent over this same period went from receiving 7.7 percent to 16.3 percent of our nation’s income.

What we call the Brandeis Ratio — the ratio of the average income of the nation’s richest 1 percent to the median household income — has skyrocketed since Ronald Reagan took office. In 1980 the average 1-percenter made 12.5 times the median income, but in 2006 (the latest year for which data is available) the average income of our richest 1 percent was a whopping 36 times greater than that of the median household.

Television and the consolidation of media has hugely increased the power of wealth make it's voice the only one heard. In Lincoln's day, a city of a few thousand people was likely to have a dozen or more newspapers, each with its own editorial voice. Today, a tiny number of giant corporations control nearly all media.

The author's of the Times Op-Ed have a levelling proposal, one that I think deserves (but is unlikely to get) consideration by our political class:

Enough is enough. Congress should reform our tax law to put the brakes on further inequality. Specifically, we propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners — a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.

Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality. Billionaires could double their current income without the tax kicking in — as long as the median income also doubles. The sky is the limit for the rich as long as the “rising tide lifts all boats.” Indeed, the tax gives job creators an extra reason to make sure that corporate wealth does in fact trickle down.

Of course our government is pretty much already owned by not the 1%, but the top 0.01 %, so the prospect is hardly reallistic. Note also that as Krugman and others have pointed out the the sharp point of inequality is really in the top 0.1% and 0.01%. (My guess is that Prof K himself is solidly in the top 1% of earners but not quite in the higher priced groups).

Let me review just a couple of potential criticisms:
(1)That's socialism! - Answer: Not it isn't. Buy yourself a dictionary (or find one online), and look under S. They have definitions. Socialism is social ownership of the means of production.
(2)That's Communism! Answ: See number (1). Check dictionary under I, for idiot - that would be you.
(3)Taxes compromise liberty. Answ: Yes.

From Waypost 47

2011-12-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

At least this is shorter than Rand, but her debt to Nietzsche is very clear, even if she just hacked away a few chunks with her axe - the pretentious elitism and the focus on sacrifice.

It's very hard for me to like an author proud of his obscurity - obscurity usually conceals nothing interesting. I can also see the debt of the exponents of literary theory.

But Not Beyond Tedium

2011-12-19T01:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you go to a party and there is an attractive woman there, effervescent with conversation and life. You listen to her, but she won't stop talking. Those cute little mannerism gradually become cloying - those clever remarks become more repetitive and filled with the shallowest of insights.

Yes indeed, I did think of that once - was I seventeen, or maybe twelve. I've never found that thought useful since.

So it is with Nietzsche. How he does yammer on, making fun at the expense of other philosophers, Darwin, Copernicus, physicists in general, bombarding us with verbal tricksiness and shallow refutations.

I hope he gets better.

Ding-Dong Rhymes with Kim Jong

2011-12-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Dead.

Who Dat?

2011-12-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

The headline screamed: Trust me, an infamous serial liar says

Well that's a little ambiguous, I thought, are they talking about Gingrich or Romney?

The Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends

2011-12-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Men and women may present more of a challenge:

Holy Ghost

2011-12-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

Lumo re-translates Genesis to demonstrate why Leon Lederman was right to call Higgsy "The God Particle."

In the Fox News article, physicists propose new nicknames for the Higgs. Matt Strassler thinks that people should call it "the evanescent yet essential Higgs boson". It's good that Matt isn't a publisher because he wouldn't sell Lederman's book even as a roll of toilet paper.

Elegant and instructive - the L-man in top form.

Wanna Rumble?

2011-12-17T04:19:00.001-07:00

Economics and climatology have become too depressing to talk about, so I picked a quarrel with my commenters over autism spectrum disorder.

Arun was moved to write: "...the difference between Americans and other cultures is that Americans seem to believe that there is a math gene, if you have it, you are good at math;..."

There is quite a bit of literature indicating that mathematical talent (like talent in music, chess and a wide variety of other areas) is strongly influenced by genetics.
See, e.g.,

Behav Genet. 2009 Jul;39(4):380-92. Epub 2009 Mar 15.
The heritability of aptitude and exceptional talent across different domains in adolescents and young adults.
Vinkhuyzen AA, van der Sluis S, Posthuma D, Boomsma DI.
SourceDepartment of Biological Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. aae.vinkhuyzen@psy.vu.nl

I'm not sure this is a uniquely American prejudice.

More on the Autism Wars

2011-12-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

The LA times is running series called Discovering Autism. The title is derived from the idea that Autism, long thought to be a rare disorder, is actually quite common, afflicting about 1 per cent of us. Autism diagnosis in childhood has exploded, and is now twenty times more common that a few decades back. Increasingly overwhelming evidence indicates that that difference is due mostly or entirely to earlier generations failure to spot the illness or correctly identify it.

In particular, large scale population studies show that autism is roughly as common in 80 year olds as in children. Nearly all these people went through life with no diagnosis or or an incorrect one. Some were institutionalized as psychotic, but others managed to lead somewhat normal lives.

As I've mentioned before here, usually to great derision, there is even evidence that many classed as geniuses were also autistic. Artists, musicians, physicists, chess masters, and mathematicians are frequently cited.

Both the recent explosion of the autistic population and the identification of prominent individuals as autistic are related to a broadening of the definition of autistic, in particular in the recognition that Asperger's syndrome and some similar conditions share deep connections to classical autism and that there is an Autism spectrum with afflicted individuals suffering different degrees of impairment.

Mental hospitals have largely been emptied over the last four decades, but the remaining population probably includes about 5,000 people with undiagnosed autism, said David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist who led the Norristown study.

Many more are thought to be in prisons, homeless shelters and wherever else social misfits are clustered.

But evidence suggests the vast majority are not segregated from society — they are hiding in plain sight. Most will probably never be identified, but a picture of their lives is starting to emerge from those who have been.

They live in households, sometimes alone, sometimes with the support of their parents, sometimes even with spouses. Many were bullied as children and still struggle to connect with others. Some managed to find jobs that fit their strengths and partners who understand them.

Or perhaps in physics departments.

University Education

2011-12-16T12:58:00.002-07:00

A young relative, himself a graduate of one of the world's most prestigious universities, opines that the institution is obsolete. At the risk of mangling his argument a bit, I think it goes a bit like this: Universities are places where a bunch of people who have spent their lives having rather specialized knowledge poured into their own heads spend their time trying to pour a bit of it into the heads of a bunch of students, usually by talking to a blackboard, which, after they are finished, usually contains an abbreviated and mangled version of the same material found in books. The whole process is absurdly inefficient, as are creatures which take a decade or two to absorb a few megabytes worth of material.

Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at at Notre Dame, writing in a NYT blog, says that the students are there mostly for set decoration. The real purpose of the university is its role as a community of scholars.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students. This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding. When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society. Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs. There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians. Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

Hmmm? He might be agreeing with our first protagonist.

I'm sort of sympathetic to his professor's eye argument, but I think he might have a hard time selling it to either taxpayers or boards of governors.

Sullivan Remembers a Quintessential Hitchens Moment

2011-12-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan revisits a Hannity vs Hitchens donnybrook:

Somehow the Hitchens -Hannity combo is compelling. Because one is a man dedicated to truth and freedom, and the other is committed to propaganda and power. There are few more pernicious liars and propagandists in this country than Hannity, and in the face of such poison, Hitch never wavered. He attacked:

The finale is pungent.

Trade Imbalances

2011-12-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum observes that the real problem between the Euro rich and their poor southern relatives is trade imbalance and capital flows. Germany has been making more stuff than it consumes and Greece has been doing the opposite.

....But rebalancing trade flows? I'm not sure anyone even knows how to do that. The normal mechanism is via currency devaluations, but within the eurozone that's obviously not a possibility.

This is Europe's biggest problem. The ECB could put out the short-term fire if it agreed to guarantee periphery debt. That's a political nonstarter right now, but at least everyone knows it's an option if things really start to implode next year. But trade and capital flow balancing? Nobody even has a clue what to do about that. But without it, future crises and future bailouts are inevitable.

It's not quite true that nobody knows how to rebalance without currency revaluations - consider for example, New York and Mississipi. How does the US rebalance between the more productive and the less? A combination of at least three things: labor mobility, transfer payments, and governments that can't get away with unlimited borrowing.

The Euro deal seeks to fix only the last of these. Transfer payments seem off the table, and labor mobility is limited more by language and cultural barriers than policy.

Higgsy

2011-12-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

At last do we see old Higgsy, grooving up so slowly? The evidence now looks better than ever, if not quite yet iron-clad. So far it looks like a standard Standard Model Higgs. Arun Gupta has several links to expert opinions. Also worth checking are Lumo, John at Cosmic Variance, and other likely suspects.

So now what does particle physics do for an encore?

Cooking With Gas

2011-12-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

The usually quiescent black hole at the center of our galaxy appears about ready to produce some dramatic fireworks. A modest sized cloud of interstellar gas - about three Earth masses worth - seems destined to approach the black hole, be ripped apart, and largely swallowed by our BH. The event should heat it to millions of degrees and make it a very powerful x-ray emitter. The results should start appearing in our instruments in a couple of years.

From another point of view, all this happened 27,000 years ago, but we should get the news soon.

Euro Fixed?

2011-12-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

You may not be shocked to hear that Paul Krugman isn't optimistic.

So last week European leaders announced a plan that, on the face of it, was pure nonsense. Faced with a crisis that is mainly about the balance of payments, with fiscal crisis as a secondary consequence, they supposedly committed everyone to severe fiscal austerity, which would guarantee a recession while leaving the real problem unaddressed...

Recent market optimism, Krugman thinks, was due to the assumption that the ECB would now ride to the rescue.

What Anglo-Saxon economists need to understand is that the Germans and the ECB really, really don’t share our worldview; they really do believe that austerity is all you need. And all indications are that they will cling to that belief, even as the euro falls apart — an event they will insist was caused by the fecklessness of the debtors. Given a choice between saving Europe and remaining righteous, they’ll choose the latter.

TBD

Newt - onian Politics

2011-12-12T17:37:00.001-07:00

The Republican establishment is more than a little discomfitted by Newt Gingrich's ascendancy to leader of the pack. They wished for anybody but Romney and got their wish.

Why, though, is the base so infatuated by the man? While Romney, who actually is fairly smart, has had to spend his time pretending to be dumb, this actually opened up an opportunity for Newt to do his famed "Stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like" act. He has mastered the art of saying the most egregious nonsense in a fairly convincing way. Of course Romney, too, has been willing to lie his ass off in pursuit of higher office, but he just doesn't have Newt's skill. It might be a matter of experience. The business man married to one woman forever guy just doesn't have the practice in prevarication that the crony capitalist and serial womanizer developed.

Kevin Drum takes a typically penetrating look in Newt Gingrich, Intellectual. My favorite paragraph:

A week ago one of Andrew Sullivan's readers provided the sound bite version of this theory:

As much as the commentariat likes to talk about electability, the just-regular-folks I spent the holidays with talked only about how Newt would "hammer" the President during debates. "Can you imagine," my sister said, her eyes as lit-up as a child's on Christmas morning. "When Obama starts that smartest-guy-in-the-room shit, Newt'll shut him up." No one talked about policy or even politics. This is a mob storming the Bastille, cheering the guillotine, and Gingrich is their most likely Robespierre.

Of course Gingrich's actual intellectual credentials are on the C+ side - A PhD in history who failed to get tenure at a school nobody has ever heard of - but he has mastered the art of saying "fundamentally" a lot. He is a skilled debater though - something Obama hasn't really demonstrated.

Fascism* in Europe

2011-12-12T00:43:00.001-07:00

There was a very direct connection between the emergence of fascism in Europe in the thirties and the economics of the depression, as Paul Krugman reminds us here. Krugman blames the wrong-headed policies now being implemented in Europe for the re-emergence of right-wing extremism in much of Europe today.

Hungary is something of a worst case, having already drifted into a right-wing authoritarian statism.

The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program — and has been following the Hungarian situation closely — tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

It’s not clear what can be done about Hungary’s authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start — in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union’s rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.

And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don’t, there will be more backsliding on democracy — and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries.

*Spelling corrected courtesy of Lumo.

Chi-town

2011-12-11T11:07:00.001-07:00

Not exactly sure why I find this song irresistable - I've never been beyond O'Hare.

Career Politicians

2011-12-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

Newt Gingrich wittily noted that Romney would have been a career politician if he had beaten Ted Kennedy in 1994. Romney lost a lot of points with me by failing to reply that Gingrich might have been a career politician if he had been able to keep his pants zipped, his hand out of the public purse, and avoid lying under oath.

Monday Monday

2011-12-10T22:58:00.000-07:00

Angela Merkel has won her point, and the Europe that didn't quite bow to German tanks has bowed to German banks - except for one troublesome island.

Nicholas Kulish, writing in the New York Times, has some observations:

Even as European leaders put together their latest response to the euro crisis last week, a German-American clash over how best to manage a vast financial crisis and put the world economy back on a sound footing was set in stark relief.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany defied skeptics and laid the groundwork for a deeper union that she said rights the mistakes of the euro’s birth and puts integration on a stable path for the long term. In the process, she forced German fiscal discipline on Europe as the prescription for the ills that afflict the region.

Obama, and lots of economists, think it won't work and will provoke a major world recession. Of course the markets also get to have their say.

In the end, Mrs. Merkel’s view clearly won out over Mr. Obama’s. “Merkel is calling the tune and writing the notes,” said Mr. Joffe, the publisher of Die Zeit.

Whether Mrs. Merkel’s strategy works is a question that markets will begin to ask on Monday, whether she likes it or not.

Euro Summit Summary

2011-12-09T22:59:00.001-07:00

OK, I'm mystified. European countries cede a big chunk of their budgetary powers to Germany and get what, exactly? Is there an actual or virtual guarantee that the ECB will then buy the bonds of the endangered countries? If not, what the heck is the point?

Will newer versions of the Euro have that motto Wolfgang covets? Something like "Wir legen unser Vertrauen in Angela"

???

Tyler Cowen Gives Some Love

2011-12-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

...to Stephen Williamson, who worries about taxing the rich too much.

Tax people at a higher rate, and some drop out of the labor force.
2. Taxes affect occupational choice. Some work by Manuelli/Seshadri/Shin says that the effect of taxes on human capital is big time. Why do I want to undertake a costly and risky investment for a very small payoff?
3. Entepreneurial activity has to be very elastic with respect to tax rates at the top end.

Tyler's usually docile commenters call "bullshit" on a massive scale.

Europe?

2011-12-09T04:24:00.002-07:00

Angela Merkel seems to have gotten her European conquest. Now what?

Reich on the Speech

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008…

Via Brad DeLong.

Expletive Delighted!

2011-12-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

Obama finally gives a great speech!

He said most of the things I thought he should have been saying for the past three years, and the crowd ate it up.

Fighting to the Death

2011-12-05T17:54:00.000-07:00

The NYT has a multi-part series on the life and death of feared hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard, dead of drug overdose at 28. At 28 his brain was already in advanced state of destruction by chronic traumatic encephalopathy - likely the result of repeated concussions. His path was an accelerated version of that of many hockey enforcers, combat, brain damage, personality change, addiction and death.

Unfortunately, hockey is not the only sport where athletes are battered to an early and often agonizing death - boxing and football frequently suffer similarly serious brain damage. Even the relatively gentler sport of soccer tends fo inflict head injury, albeit in a less direct fashion. Repeatedly heading a soccer ball can cause brain damage too.

Ironically, hockey, one of the most dangerous sports, would be relatively easy to make safer - just adopt strong penalties against fighting. This won't happen from inside the NHL, because the league and it's owners think blood on the sand produces money in their pockets, and the fans agree.

It's Technical, OK?

2011-12-05T07:04:00.000-07:00

WB dabbles in Beatles Musicology. See, also.

Racism In The Ivy League

2011-12-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

The admissions policies of our nations most elite universities are cloaked in an obscurity that hides everything except the obvious: that obscurity was devised for purposes of exclusion and continues to be used for it. The SAT exam was devised to allow those top universities to attract to talent but quickly revealed that a huge proportion of the top talent so judged was Jewish. Clearly it wouldn't do for Harvard to become Jew U, so "racial balance" (not too many Jews) became a cardinal principle.

Today the same tools are used to defend against the Asian flood. Canny students now know enough not to identify themselves as Asian on their admissions applications if they can reasonably help it. Alex Tabarrok quotes the USA Today story:

USA Today: Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

Her Mom is correct:

Asian students have higher average SAT scores than any other group, including whites. A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.

The traditional forms of discrimination are now complicated by affirmative action, which in theory is supposed to compensate students for a disadvantaged background but now often results in discrimination not only against the children of Indian neurosurgeons but also against those of impoverished Vietnamese immigrants.

Affiliative Behavior: Oklahoma Edition

2011-12-04T10:49:00.001-07:00

After Oklahoma State bested Oklahoma in their bitter football rivalry, fans stampeded on to the field, tearing down the goal posts, injuring several of their number, two critical. Such events, and much more catastrophic ones in soccer are all too common. Why do we do it? Why do we care about these professional or semi-professional athletes whose lives hardly intersect ours at all?

Regular readers may guess that I'm going to suggest that it's an instinctive human behavior with some evolutionary basis, and I do. The urge to attach ourselves to groups - football clubs, gangs, political parties, chess clubs, religions, tribes, nations - is too widespread to be an accident. It's also too obviously adaptive in the classic cases of tribes and gangs. The lone individual with no posse or tribe is an easy target and has no chance against the group.

One of my many beefs with libertarians is their obliviousness to this truth.