I sure hope that fifty million people won't continue to go without health insurance and many of them die prematurely or have to declare bankruptcy because you didn't understand the basic principle of insurance.
JUSTICE ALITO: But isn't that really a
2 small part of what the mandate is doing? You can
3 correct me if these figures are wrong, but it appears to
4 me that the CBO has estimated that the average premium
5 for a single insurance policy in the non-group market
6 would be roughly $5,800 in -- in 2016.
7 Respondents -- the economists who have
8 supported the Respondents estimate that a young, healthy
9 individual targeted by the mandate on average consumes
10 about $854 in health services each year. So the mandate
11 is forcing these people to provide a huge subsidy to the
12 insurance companies for other purposes that the Act
13 wishes to serve, but isn't -- if those figures are
14 right, isn't it the case that what this mandate is
15 really doing is not requiring the people who are subject
16 to it to pay for the services that they are going to
17 consume? It is requiring them to subsidize services
18 that will be received by somebody else.
19 GENERAL VERRILLI: No, I think that -- I do
20 think that's what the Respondents argue. It's just not
21 right. I think it -- it really gets to a fundamental
22 problem with their argument.
23 JUSTICE GINSBURG: If you're going to have
24 insurance, that's how insurance works.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Citizens Untied
One of the concerns about the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" ruling is that big money will monopolize the public dialog. After all, if money is speech, then those who have more money have more speech. Which in turn means that speech isn't really free, after all.
That aside, the presumed outcome would be that establishment candidates will steamroll over anyone independent enough to not have unlimited resources behind them. Which conventionally gives the advantage to Republicans, since they're the party of the rich.
But it turns out that you don't have to be part of the Establishment to be rich. This year's Republican primary isn't really Mitt Romney against Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul - it's really Mitt Romney against Foster Freiss and Sheldon Adelman, in which a couple of rich, independent fanatics can bankroll the process of pulling the Republican Party to pieces along its fault lines of libertarian freedoms, religious moralism, nationalist xenophobia, and commercial pragmatism. Instead of locking in a sustainable Republican advantage, "Citizens United" may end up being its Achilles Heel.
That aside, the presumed outcome would be that establishment candidates will steamroll over anyone independent enough to not have unlimited resources behind them. Which conventionally gives the advantage to Republicans, since they're the party of the rich.
But it turns out that you don't have to be part of the Establishment to be rich. This year's Republican primary isn't really Mitt Romney against Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul - it's really Mitt Romney against Foster Freiss and Sheldon Adelman, in which a couple of rich, independent fanatics can bankroll the process of pulling the Republican Party to pieces along its fault lines of libertarian freedoms, religious moralism, nationalist xenophobia, and commercial pragmatism. Instead of locking in a sustainable Republican advantage, "Citizens United" may end up being its Achilles Heel.
Stand Your Ground
If Florida's "stand your ground" law had worked as intended, Trayvon Martin would have shot George Zimmerman.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Forget 9/11
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was last weekend, and it was full of exhortations to remember the event, as if merely remembering it were a patriotic act. Apparently, taking care of the first responders and volunteers who cleaned up afterward isn't so patriotic, as demonstrated by the ongoing refusal to pay for those victims' cancers, just in case one of those illnesses wasn't actually caused by the event and taxpayers get saddled with someone's medical expenses unjustly.
To illustrate our reverence for the event, if not for the victims, pieces of the World Trade Center are being shipped to build memorials around the country just so we never forget. Which makes me wonder - why is it so important to remember it? If you were a terrorist, what would be more rewarding than to have your victims build monuments to remember your deeds? Wouldn't a more effective, and probably healthy, response be to take care of the victims who still live, remember those who died, and forget the rest?
To illustrate our reverence for the event, if not for the victims, pieces of the World Trade Center are being shipped to build memorials around the country just so we never forget. Which makes me wonder - why is it so important to remember it? If you were a terrorist, what would be more rewarding than to have your victims build monuments to remember your deeds? Wouldn't a more effective, and probably healthy, response be to take care of the victims who still live, remember those who died, and forget the rest?
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
401Kasino
When I started putting money into a 401K plan, the conventional formula assumed that a conservative investment mix would deliver about 8% per year.
Ha!
This was back when real estate values were expected to never retreat, the stock market was presumed an almost sure bet, and bonds were suggested as a kind of seasoning to the recipe, basically a head-nod to the faint possibility of risk, a demonstration of being a responsible investor rather than a speculator pinning one's star to the flighty fancies of the stock market.
According to US News, the average 401K account balance is now back to about where it was in 2007, before the latest financial unpleasantness. That's about $70,000, up about $20 K from the low in 2008. Of course, only a few people had the foresight to bet against the housing bubble and subprime mortgage gold rush. The breadth and depth of the bailouts required to keep the world's economy afloat are pretty strong evidence that most investors failed to see the end coming.
Efficient market theories assume that the price of an asset always reflects the perfect balance of valuations by informed investors acting out of rational self interest. Market behaviorists have recently shown that most investors don't qualify as perfectly rational or informed, and this is certainly even more true among the amateurs who make up the bulk of 401K owners. Since most actively managed funds fail to beat the market, even the experts get it wrong more often than right.
Recently, Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles at the University of Chicago demonstrated that poker is a game of skill rather than strictly one of chance. They showed that high performing poker players continue to perform well from year to year, while mutual fund managers' successes and failures are random.
It's ironic that online poker is outlawed in the US because it's considered to be gambling, while investments in mutual funds are a mandatory part of retirement planning.
Ha!
This was back when real estate values were expected to never retreat, the stock market was presumed an almost sure bet, and bonds were suggested as a kind of seasoning to the recipe, basically a head-nod to the faint possibility of risk, a demonstration of being a responsible investor rather than a speculator pinning one's star to the flighty fancies of the stock market.
According to US News, the average 401K account balance is now back to about where it was in 2007, before the latest financial unpleasantness. That's about $70,000, up about $20 K from the low in 2008. Of course, only a few people had the foresight to bet against the housing bubble and subprime mortgage gold rush. The breadth and depth of the bailouts required to keep the world's economy afloat are pretty strong evidence that most investors failed to see the end coming.
Efficient market theories assume that the price of an asset always reflects the perfect balance of valuations by informed investors acting out of rational self interest. Market behaviorists have recently shown that most investors don't qualify as perfectly rational or informed, and this is certainly even more true among the amateurs who make up the bulk of 401K owners. Since most actively managed funds fail to beat the market, even the experts get it wrong more often than right.
Recently, Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles at the University of Chicago demonstrated that poker is a game of skill rather than strictly one of chance. They showed that high performing poker players continue to perform well from year to year, while mutual fund managers' successes and failures are random.
It's ironic that online poker is outlawed in the US because it's considered to be gambling, while investments in mutual funds are a mandatory part of retirement planning.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Irony
Sarah Palin, speaking at a celebration of Ronald Reagan at the Reagan Ranch Center, proclaimed that the US was on the "road to ruin" because of mounting debt. Being the astute student of history that Sarah is, I'm sure she was fully aware of the irony.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Persecution Complex
"I want my life back." - BP CEO Tony Hale, complaining about the inconvenient effects of the Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed eleven people, on his own life.
"...journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." - Sarah Palin, confusing criticism of right wing confrontational rhetoric with persecution of her personally.
"...I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other." - Don Schmierer, one of the American evangelicals who visited Uganda in 2009 to urge passage of legislation condemning homosexuality there, complaining that he had received over 600 messages of "hate" mail related to his visit. His complaint was voiced in reaction to the beating death of David Kato, one of the leading gay rights activists in Uganda.
"...journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." - Sarah Palin, confusing criticism of right wing confrontational rhetoric with persecution of her personally.
"...I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other." - Don Schmierer, one of the American evangelicals who visited Uganda in 2009 to urge passage of legislation condemning homosexuality there, complaining that he had received over 600 messages of "hate" mail related to his visit. His complaint was voiced in reaction to the beating death of David Kato, one of the leading gay rights activists in Uganda.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Industrial Policy, Again
In the official Republican response to tonight's State of the Union address, Representative Paul Ryan stated, "Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won't work now."
Actually, the microprocessor and the internet are two technologies that developed specifically because of government sponsorship. In the early 1960s, the US military bought large numbers of nascent microprocessors at prices designed to stimulate further development of the technology, in effect creating an artificial market to prop up the technology until it got a foothold in the broader commercial market. Without that assistance, the US wouldn't have become the center of microprocessor manufacturing that we became: no Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Apple... and the personal computer revolution would have come later and, probably, somewhere else. The PC revolution created countless jobs and became a new infrastructure-level productivity enhancer that increased US competitiveness and, I think, pulled us out of the early '80s recession.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is famously responsible for the development of the internet in the 1970s, which blossomed 20 years later and created another infrastructure-level increase in productivity and competitiveness. Again, I think that technology pulled us out of the recession in the early 1990s.
Today, there's no similar technology emerging from the labs, ready to conquer the world and make us all more productive, create millions of new jobs, etc. If Ronald Reagan hadn't pulled the plug on government-sponsored technology programs, particularly in environmental technologies, we might have such a new technology ready to create jobs and maintain our competitiveness. Lacking such a technology, we're left to compete with few advantages in a world full of lower cost producers, some of whom also have more natural resources. Republican demonizing of industrial policy has basically disarmed us economically.
Actually, the microprocessor and the internet are two technologies that developed specifically because of government sponsorship. In the early 1960s, the US military bought large numbers of nascent microprocessors at prices designed to stimulate further development of the technology, in effect creating an artificial market to prop up the technology until it got a foothold in the broader commercial market. Without that assistance, the US wouldn't have become the center of microprocessor manufacturing that we became: no Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Apple... and the personal computer revolution would have come later and, probably, somewhere else. The PC revolution created countless jobs and became a new infrastructure-level productivity enhancer that increased US competitiveness and, I think, pulled us out of the early '80s recession.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is famously responsible for the development of the internet in the 1970s, which blossomed 20 years later and created another infrastructure-level increase in productivity and competitiveness. Again, I think that technology pulled us out of the recession in the early 1990s.
Today, there's no similar technology emerging from the labs, ready to conquer the world and make us all more productive, create millions of new jobs, etc. If Ronald Reagan hadn't pulled the plug on government-sponsored technology programs, particularly in environmental technologies, we might have such a new technology ready to create jobs and maintain our competitiveness. Lacking such a technology, we're left to compete with few advantages in a world full of lower cost producers, some of whom also have more natural resources. Republican demonizing of industrial policy has basically disarmed us economically.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Missing the Points
The current national dialog about and coverage of the recent shootings in Tucson has left out some points that I think are important. In no particular order:
1. The controversy over gun control ignores the fact that when guns are readily available, they're readily available to mentally ill people too. A short list of victims besides those in Tucson includes Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady, John Lennon, students at Virginia Tech and Columbine, and Darrell Abbott, one of the best and most underrated (in my view) electric guitar players in the world.
2. Many are expressing hope that the shootings in Tucson will wake people up to the destructive, hyperbolic rhetoric that poisons our political process. But we had a far worse incident, the terrorist attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 people and was directly precipitated by right wing rhetoric about "jack booted government thugs" from J. Gordon Liddy and other talk radio hosts. If that didn't do it, this won't either, particularly since the connection between rhetoric and action is far more tenuous in Tucson than it was in the Oklahoma City incident. Then, as now, those same right wing commentators are slinking away from the scene of the crime with their hands open saying, "It wasn't me." But in the case of Tucson, that's probably accurate, and soon we'll be back to business as usual, if we're not already.
3. Articles and commentary about the Tucson shootings and the toxic, hyperbolic rhetoric in our political discussion usually claim that such rhetoric comes from both sides, that the left is as guilty of inciting violence as the right is. Why doesn't anyone challenge this bromide? Throughout the Clinton and Obama administrations, right wing commentators have made claims of tyranny, socialism, and even murder (completely ignoring that both administrations were moderate by almost any objective measure). These commentators included the religious, political, and thought leaders of the Republican party: Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin. When did any of the Democratic equivalents of these people ever say anything equivalent about a Republican politician? When did Nancy Pelosi call Bush a Fascist and compare him to Hitler? When did Harry Reid ever mention "second amendment remedies" in reference to a political opponent? When did Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington, or Bill Maher ever urge violent revolution against the Republican administration? And when did a Democratic member of Congress ever call the President a liar during a State of the Union address? The false equivalence of rhetoric between the left and right shouldn't go unchallenged.
4. Speaking of the right wing vendetta against Obama and the lies that Fox News and others like it continue to manufacture, why doesn't anyone remind all these so-called Christians that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits bearing false witness against your neighbor? Is it because all these so-called Christians don't actually, um, know what the Ten Commandments actually are?
5. In all the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in reference to criticism of her own level of rhetoric and her use of gun sights to target swing districts, no one seemed to notice that she recast legitimate criticism of rhetoric that incites violence against liberals as itself a kind of hate speech against conservatives. How can THAT go unchallenged?
6. Speaking of Palin, her video response to that criticism continued the conservative tradition of casting themselves as victims. In fact, several conservative commentators have claimed that they, in fact, were the true victims of this event, because people are starting to (albeit timidly) criticize them. Hasn't anyone noticed a pattern here? Christians are continually persecuted in this country (even though they're by far the majority, every US president has been a practicing Christian, and they control the political agendas at every level of government). Furthermore, the anti-abortion crusade is the equivalent of the equal rights movement, and the taxes that pay for our roads and public services are tyrannical impositions of an oppressive government. How much longer can the dominant US political movement of modern times continue to claim the advantages of oppression and persecution?
1. The controversy over gun control ignores the fact that when guns are readily available, they're readily available to mentally ill people too. A short list of victims besides those in Tucson includes Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady, John Lennon, students at Virginia Tech and Columbine, and Darrell Abbott, one of the best and most underrated (in my view) electric guitar players in the world.
2. Many are expressing hope that the shootings in Tucson will wake people up to the destructive, hyperbolic rhetoric that poisons our political process. But we had a far worse incident, the terrorist attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that killed 168 people and was directly precipitated by right wing rhetoric about "jack booted government thugs" from J. Gordon Liddy and other talk radio hosts. If that didn't do it, this won't either, particularly since the connection between rhetoric and action is far more tenuous in Tucson than it was in the Oklahoma City incident. Then, as now, those same right wing commentators are slinking away from the scene of the crime with their hands open saying, "It wasn't me." But in the case of Tucson, that's probably accurate, and soon we'll be back to business as usual, if we're not already.
3. Articles and commentary about the Tucson shootings and the toxic, hyperbolic rhetoric in our political discussion usually claim that such rhetoric comes from both sides, that the left is as guilty of inciting violence as the right is. Why doesn't anyone challenge this bromide? Throughout the Clinton and Obama administrations, right wing commentators have made claims of tyranny, socialism, and even murder (completely ignoring that both administrations were moderate by almost any objective measure). These commentators included the religious, political, and thought leaders of the Republican party: Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin. When did any of the Democratic equivalents of these people ever say anything equivalent about a Republican politician? When did Nancy Pelosi call Bush a Fascist and compare him to Hitler? When did Harry Reid ever mention "second amendment remedies" in reference to a political opponent? When did Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington, or Bill Maher ever urge violent revolution against the Republican administration? And when did a Democratic member of Congress ever call the President a liar during a State of the Union address? The false equivalence of rhetoric between the left and right shouldn't go unchallenged.
4. Speaking of the right wing vendetta against Obama and the lies that Fox News and others like it continue to manufacture, why doesn't anyone remind all these so-called Christians that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits bearing false witness against your neighbor? Is it because all these so-called Christians don't actually, um, know what the Ten Commandments actually are?
5. In all the controversy over Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in reference to criticism of her own level of rhetoric and her use of gun sights to target swing districts, no one seemed to notice that she recast legitimate criticism of rhetoric that incites violence against liberals as itself a kind of hate speech against conservatives. How can THAT go unchallenged?
6. Speaking of Palin, her video response to that criticism continued the conservative tradition of casting themselves as victims. In fact, several conservative commentators have claimed that they, in fact, were the true victims of this event, because people are starting to (albeit timidly) criticize them. Hasn't anyone noticed a pattern here? Christians are continually persecuted in this country (even though they're by far the majority, every US president has been a practicing Christian, and they control the political agendas at every level of government). Furthermore, the anti-abortion crusade is the equivalent of the equal rights movement, and the taxes that pay for our roads and public services are tyrannical impositions of an oppressive government. How much longer can the dominant US political movement of modern times continue to claim the advantages of oppression and persecution?
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
What's Wrong With America....
...is that the people who are obsessed with the news should listen to some music, and the people who just listen to music should pay some attention to the news.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Christians Behaving Badly
I'm usually not very interested in celebrity news, but Mel Gibson's recent rantings made me wonder about something. Let me illustrate:
- My wife had her rental car damaged in a parking lot in Minnesota by the wife of a professor of religious studies at a Lutheran college there. When the car rental company demanded compensation for the damage from my wife, she referred them to the woman who caused it. She and her husband initially denied they were responsible, then avoided phone calls from both the company and from my wife until my wife finally threatened them with legal action.
- A former neighbor sold a house on our street with a septic system that was on the verge of failing. The symptoms were clear but the former neighbor failed to disclose the problem, leaving the new owners with an unexpected $20,000 bill. The former neighbors claim to be devout Christians.
- Need I mention Catholic priests?
You would think that people who publicly proclaim their faith would feel some responsibility to live up to the values of that faith, but in some cases it seems the opposite is true. Why is that? Do some Christians feel that, because they're essentially good and moral people, anything unethical they do is OK because they're still good people underneath? Or does the weekly trek to church relieve them of their sins so they can pile more on during the week? Does bad behavior in the secular world not count for much in the spiritual world?
Some right wing Christians, including my mom, seem to think that all morality stems from religion, so atheists can't be trusted because they lack a moral foundation. Like many things, I think this notion is supported more by faith than by evidence.
- My wife had her rental car damaged in a parking lot in Minnesota by the wife of a professor of religious studies at a Lutheran college there. When the car rental company demanded compensation for the damage from my wife, she referred them to the woman who caused it. She and her husband initially denied they were responsible, then avoided phone calls from both the company and from my wife until my wife finally threatened them with legal action.
- A former neighbor sold a house on our street with a septic system that was on the verge of failing. The symptoms were clear but the former neighbor failed to disclose the problem, leaving the new owners with an unexpected $20,000 bill. The former neighbors claim to be devout Christians.
- Need I mention Catholic priests?
You would think that people who publicly proclaim their faith would feel some responsibility to live up to the values of that faith, but in some cases it seems the opposite is true. Why is that? Do some Christians feel that, because they're essentially good and moral people, anything unethical they do is OK because they're still good people underneath? Or does the weekly trek to church relieve them of their sins so they can pile more on during the week? Does bad behavior in the secular world not count for much in the spiritual world?
Some right wing Christians, including my mom, seem to think that all morality stems from religion, so atheists can't be trusted because they lack a moral foundation. Like many things, I think this notion is supported more by faith than by evidence.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Dear Facebook:
I recently got an email from a Facebook member who I must know from somewhere, with a bunch of recommendations from you of other people I might know. I was curious about how you knew so many people I've encountered in my life, particularly since there wasn't much in common between them: some personal and some business, some here and some from my previous home... I wondered how you knew. IP addresses? Mining public data bases?
So I did a quick Google search and found several hundred posts on numerous forums from Facebook members who were wondering the same thing: how do you know? How do you dredge up someone that a person met in a bar ten years ago and offer them as a friend recommendation? Or an ex-husband, or a stalker? How do you offer a forty year old guy as a potential friend for a sixteen year old girl?
But here's the thing, Facebook: I'm not on you. I'm not a Facebook member, and I have no interest in becoming one. So while your own members find this, let's generously call it "prescience", somewhat creepy, getting a bunch of eerily accurate recommendations from you without having first opted in to your social network asylum is almost scary.
Based on my quick search, I suspect that what you're doing is suckering new members into uploading their address books so you can mine them for new customers. So let's say that Jay and Nancy both have my email address. As some point, then, I get an invitation email from you suggesting Jay and Nancy as potential friends. It may not matter to you that Jay is a psychotic sociopath who claims to be "electrosensitive", rants about radiation from cell phone towers, and has my email address because I once attended a community meeting about cell coverage. Or that Nancy is a consulting client who likes to keep her professional and personal relationships as separate as possible, and co-mingling them may put my professional relationship with her at risk. As far as you're concerned, if someone has my email address, that person is likely to be a potential friend.
Facebook, this is one of those cases where you can have too much of a good thing. When your marketing efforts start reaching past the fruitful fields of friendship into the murky swamp of indeterminate and potentially damaging connections, it suggests that your business model has run out of steam, that growth is at an end, that your valuation has probably passed its peak. Probably should have gone public a couple of years ago.
Sincerely yours,
You-know-who
So I did a quick Google search and found several hundred posts on numerous forums from Facebook members who were wondering the same thing: how do you know? How do you dredge up someone that a person met in a bar ten years ago and offer them as a friend recommendation? Or an ex-husband, or a stalker? How do you offer a forty year old guy as a potential friend for a sixteen year old girl?
But here's the thing, Facebook: I'm not on you. I'm not a Facebook member, and I have no interest in becoming one. So while your own members find this, let's generously call it "prescience", somewhat creepy, getting a bunch of eerily accurate recommendations from you without having first opted in to your social network asylum is almost scary.
Based on my quick search, I suspect that what you're doing is suckering new members into uploading their address books so you can mine them for new customers. So let's say that Jay and Nancy both have my email address. As some point, then, I get an invitation email from you suggesting Jay and Nancy as potential friends. It may not matter to you that Jay is a psychotic sociopath who claims to be "electrosensitive", rants about radiation from cell phone towers, and has my email address because I once attended a community meeting about cell coverage. Or that Nancy is a consulting client who likes to keep her professional and personal relationships as separate as possible, and co-mingling them may put my professional relationship with her at risk. As far as you're concerned, if someone has my email address, that person is likely to be a potential friend.
Facebook, this is one of those cases where you can have too much of a good thing. When your marketing efforts start reaching past the fruitful fields of friendship into the murky swamp of indeterminate and potentially damaging connections, it suggests that your business model has run out of steam, that growth is at an end, that your valuation has probably passed its peak. Probably should have gone public a couple of years ago.
Sincerely yours,
You-know-who
Sunday, July 4, 2010
How Ronald Reagan Killed America
The June 14/20 issue of Bloomberg Business Week has a summary of why several prominent economists and analysts who have been bearish through the past few decades (in some cases) are still bearish now. At the end is one exception: James Grant, publisher of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer". The article states: "'We observed this in the recessions of 1991 and 2001, which were meek and mild, and so were the corresponding recoveries.' The deep recession of the early 1980s, on the other hand, led to a spectacular recovery. Based on that, Grant believes the rebound from this recession will be job-rich and strong, a position he has stuck to for nine months now."
My intent here is not to pick on Grant, but rather to use this as an opportunity to point out that a lot of economic analysis seems to want to treat the economy like the weather: a complex system that is hard to predict, but that does exhibit historical patterns because it's self directed. This may be true of weather, which has relatively few inputs. But economies are not self-contained forces of nature, but rather complex systems that are tightly coupled to many influences: demographics, technology, politics, and so forth.
So let's take the "spectacular recovery" that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Many people would like to credit Ronald Reagan with that recovery. The analysis quoted above would like to treat it evidence that the deeper the recession, the stronger the rebound. But what else happened in the mid-1980s?
One thing that happened was the personal computer revolution, which kicked off a wave of infrastructure-level capital investment and yielded tremendous operating benefits in almost every industry that continue today. Surely that had something to do with this recovery? And perhaps the subsequent emergence of the internet, another infrastructure-level transition that required, again, tremendous investment as everyone from corporations to grandmothers built web sites, had something to do with the recovery in the 1990s?
I don't think it's merely coincidence that these massive technology advances and infrastructure-level transitions happened at about the same time these recoveries did. So I have to ask, what infrastructure-level technology is on the cusp of maturity today that will lead to a wave of investment and operating benefits over the next ten years?
Frankly, I can't think of one. And without one, I don't think we're going to see a recovery like we did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Where should we be looking for such an opportunity? Well, the government cultivated the nascent semiconductor industry in the 1960s that led to the computing revolution of the 1980s and beyond. The government cultivated the internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we started reaping the benefits twenty years later. So to find the maturing technology that will pull us out of the current recession, we should look to the 1980s.
One class of technologies that would fit the bill and was just getting off the ground at that time was renewable energy. At least, it was until Reagan killed government investment in renewable energy programs. Renewable energy is, like computing and the internet, and the national highway system, electrification, water, communications, and railroads before, an infrastructure-level technology that would require massive current investment and reap massive future rewards. Had Reagan not halted government investment in such technologies, we would probably now be on the verge of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar. We might be burning our garbage for energy rather than burying it in landfills. We might not be intimately entangled in the Mideast and a target of terrorism. We might not have a uncontrollable oil well dumping untold amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Instead, all of these are happening, and we have no long term strategy for solving these problems. For the foreseeable future, we'll be dependent on a finite and dwindling resource that pollutes our air and water, and that's largely controlled by entities who may not have our best interests at heart. As the world's biggest consumer of oil, we have the most to lose when it gets expensive and rare.
But perhaps more important than all of this is that, without another maturing infrastructure-level technology waiting in the wings to fuel the next wave of economic growth, we may not have a next wave for a long, long time. Without such a wave, there's nothing to stimulate growth except more borrowing. Without such a wave, there's no mechanism for organic job growth. And the one person most responsible for putting us in this position is Ronald Reagan. I predict that in thirty years or so, it will be widely recognized that he was the one who killed America.
My intent here is not to pick on Grant, but rather to use this as an opportunity to point out that a lot of economic analysis seems to want to treat the economy like the weather: a complex system that is hard to predict, but that does exhibit historical patterns because it's self directed. This may be true of weather, which has relatively few inputs. But economies are not self-contained forces of nature, but rather complex systems that are tightly coupled to many influences: demographics, technology, politics, and so forth.
So let's take the "spectacular recovery" that followed the recession of the early 1980s. Many people would like to credit Ronald Reagan with that recovery. The analysis quoted above would like to treat it evidence that the deeper the recession, the stronger the rebound. But what else happened in the mid-1980s?
One thing that happened was the personal computer revolution, which kicked off a wave of infrastructure-level capital investment and yielded tremendous operating benefits in almost every industry that continue today. Surely that had something to do with this recovery? And perhaps the subsequent emergence of the internet, another infrastructure-level transition that required, again, tremendous investment as everyone from corporations to grandmothers built web sites, had something to do with the recovery in the 1990s?
I don't think it's merely coincidence that these massive technology advances and infrastructure-level transitions happened at about the same time these recoveries did. So I have to ask, what infrastructure-level technology is on the cusp of maturity today that will lead to a wave of investment and operating benefits over the next ten years?
Frankly, I can't think of one. And without one, I don't think we're going to see a recovery like we did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Where should we be looking for such an opportunity? Well, the government cultivated the nascent semiconductor industry in the 1960s that led to the computing revolution of the 1980s and beyond. The government cultivated the internet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we started reaping the benefits twenty years later. So to find the maturing technology that will pull us out of the current recession, we should look to the 1980s.
One class of technologies that would fit the bill and was just getting off the ground at that time was renewable energy. At least, it was until Reagan killed government investment in renewable energy programs. Renewable energy is, like computing and the internet, and the national highway system, electrification, water, communications, and railroads before, an infrastructure-level technology that would require massive current investment and reap massive future rewards. Had Reagan not halted government investment in such technologies, we would probably now be on the verge of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar. We might be burning our garbage for energy rather than burying it in landfills. We might not be intimately entangled in the Mideast and a target of terrorism. We might not have a uncontrollable oil well dumping untold amounts of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
Instead, all of these are happening, and we have no long term strategy for solving these problems. For the foreseeable future, we'll be dependent on a finite and dwindling resource that pollutes our air and water, and that's largely controlled by entities who may not have our best interests at heart. As the world's biggest consumer of oil, we have the most to lose when it gets expensive and rare.
But perhaps more important than all of this is that, without another maturing infrastructure-level technology waiting in the wings to fuel the next wave of economic growth, we may not have a next wave for a long, long time. Without such a wave, there's nothing to stimulate growth except more borrowing. Without such a wave, there's no mechanism for organic job growth. And the one person most responsible for putting us in this position is Ronald Reagan. I predict that in thirty years or so, it will be widely recognized that he was the one who killed America.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Microsoft, innovation, and Competitiveness
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are famous for not letting members of their families use Apple products. Since taking over the reigns at Microsoft, Ballmer's stance seems to be that guts and determination will beat innovation, even though he claims the mantel of innovation every chance he gets. In the press, Apple is held up as the paragon of innovation, and Microsoft is tagged as the follower who's always a step or two behind. This has certainly been true in operating systems, where Vista and now Windows 7 have basically been clones of the concurrent version of OS X.
The thing is, Microsoft had a nice, fast, light, and highly functional smartphone OS, Windows CE, ten years ago. Third party developers could write applications for that platform and sell them in something like an app store (like Handango). And Bill Gates has been stating for almost that same amount of time that tablet PCs would be the future of computing. Despite its reputation for innovation, Apple is merely refining product categories that Microsoft has been developing for years.
Despite the advantages of an eight year market lead (at the time of iPhone 1.0), a huge installed base, and a clear and accurate vision of the future, Microsoft failed to capitalize, and is now an also-ran in mobile devices (see here and here). Microsoft could have, and should have, owned this space. Why didn't they?
Despite Ballmer's public displays of determination and competitiveness, the bottom line is that Microsoft failed to compete. After winning the browser war with Netscape, they stopped advancing IE until Firefox matured into a viable threat. After developing the smartphone market, they sat on that platform while Apple and Google developed more modern mobile OSs. Perhaps Microsoft's problem is that they declared victory in a competition that never really ends. And perhaps the lesson from that, one that Apple certainly embodies, is that you never sit on a lead.
The thing is, Microsoft had a nice, fast, light, and highly functional smartphone OS, Windows CE, ten years ago. Third party developers could write applications for that platform and sell them in something like an app store (like Handango). And Bill Gates has been stating for almost that same amount of time that tablet PCs would be the future of computing. Despite its reputation for innovation, Apple is merely refining product categories that Microsoft has been developing for years.
Despite the advantages of an eight year market lead (at the time of iPhone 1.0), a huge installed base, and a clear and accurate vision of the future, Microsoft failed to capitalize, and is now an also-ran in mobile devices (see here and here). Microsoft could have, and should have, owned this space. Why didn't they?
Despite Ballmer's public displays of determination and competitiveness, the bottom line is that Microsoft failed to compete. After winning the browser war with Netscape, they stopped advancing IE until Firefox matured into a viable threat. After developing the smartphone market, they sat on that platform while Apple and Google developed more modern mobile OSs. Perhaps Microsoft's problem is that they declared victory in a competition that never really ends. And perhaps the lesson from that, one that Apple certainly embodies, is that you never sit on a lead.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Might Makes Right
Living in a mostly rural area, we frequently see (and sometimes hear) nature at work, as larger and stronger wildlife (eagles, hawks, coyotes) prey on the smaller and weaker. Thank God that civilization has enabled us to substitute the force of ideas for the force of, well, force.
Or has it?
The New York Times recently ran a piece ("Jon Stewart's Punching Bag, Fox News") describing how the Daily Show is fact checking Fox News and calling them out for hypocrisy, inciting violence, and other offenses. The Times piece was a cautious treatment of the subject, recognizing that Fox doesn't always get its facts straight but not acknowledging the deliberate distortion, misrepresentation, and manipulation of their audience that characterize their programming.
This brought to mind the hand-wringing that went on after Scott Brown won the Senate seat in Massachusetts that had been held by Teddy Kennedy. Drama aside, the general conclusion was that the Democrats were toast because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority - they had been reduced to merely holding the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. Hence, they would be completely ineffective going forward.
The consternation (or glee, depending on which side you're on) was due to a simultaneous high degree of faith in the solidity of Republicans and their willingness to do whatever they had to to advance their agenda (or at least hold back the Democrats) and a complete lack of faith in the Democrats' ability to stand up to the Republicans. Apparently, 41 well organized Republicans outnumber 59 poorly organized Democrats.
Or is it really their relative levels of organization that matters?
Back to the Times article. I wondered why the Times wouldn't go the extra step of pointing out how emphatically correct Jon Stewart is in his criticisms of Fox News. I wondered why congressional Democrats are accurately perceived as being so cautious. And why the Obama administration has been equally cautious in reversing Bush administration policies, abolishing Don't Ask Don't Tell, and aggressively pursuing a progressive agenda.
I suspect that I know the answer. Republicans have guns.
Seriously, when did a liberal every blow up a Federal building? When did a liberal kill a doctor out of a sense of moral and religious self-righteousness? When Bush was in office and trying to take the county back to the Dark Ages, did liberals go off into the woods, form militias, and threaten armed rebellion? Did liberals ever tell a Republican president that he was lying during a State of the Union address? Have liberals ever showed up to rallies for a Republican president carrying guns? And have liberals ever incited violence against elected officials for passing legislation they disagreed with?
People often call Democrats "pussies" for not standing up to Republican bullies. I'd prefer to characterize them as civilized. While liberals try to advance their causes within the frameworks of law, Republicans are resorting to force and the threat of it. And in inciting this behavior, Fox News is the chief obstacle to civilized, law-abiding debate in this country. In this sense, they violate everything that America supposedly stands for.
So why is it that a Comedy Central comedian hosting a fake news show is the only public figure in the country to take them on?
Or has it?
The New York Times recently ran a piece ("Jon Stewart's Punching Bag, Fox News") describing how the Daily Show is fact checking Fox News and calling them out for hypocrisy, inciting violence, and other offenses. The Times piece was a cautious treatment of the subject, recognizing that Fox doesn't always get its facts straight but not acknowledging the deliberate distortion, misrepresentation, and manipulation of their audience that characterize their programming.
This brought to mind the hand-wringing that went on after Scott Brown won the Senate seat in Massachusetts that had been held by Teddy Kennedy. Drama aside, the general conclusion was that the Democrats were toast because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority - they had been reduced to merely holding the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. Hence, they would be completely ineffective going forward.
The consternation (or glee, depending on which side you're on) was due to a simultaneous high degree of faith in the solidity of Republicans and their willingness to do whatever they had to to advance their agenda (or at least hold back the Democrats) and a complete lack of faith in the Democrats' ability to stand up to the Republicans. Apparently, 41 well organized Republicans outnumber 59 poorly organized Democrats.
Or is it really their relative levels of organization that matters?
Back to the Times article. I wondered why the Times wouldn't go the extra step of pointing out how emphatically correct Jon Stewart is in his criticisms of Fox News. I wondered why congressional Democrats are accurately perceived as being so cautious. And why the Obama administration has been equally cautious in reversing Bush administration policies, abolishing Don't Ask Don't Tell, and aggressively pursuing a progressive agenda.
I suspect that I know the answer. Republicans have guns.
Seriously, when did a liberal every blow up a Federal building? When did a liberal kill a doctor out of a sense of moral and religious self-righteousness? When Bush was in office and trying to take the county back to the Dark Ages, did liberals go off into the woods, form militias, and threaten armed rebellion? Did liberals ever tell a Republican president that he was lying during a State of the Union address? Have liberals ever showed up to rallies for a Republican president carrying guns? And have liberals ever incited violence against elected officials for passing legislation they disagreed with?
People often call Democrats "pussies" for not standing up to Republican bullies. I'd prefer to characterize them as civilized. While liberals try to advance their causes within the frameworks of law, Republicans are resorting to force and the threat of it. And in inciting this behavior, Fox News is the chief obstacle to civilized, law-abiding debate in this country. In this sense, they violate everything that America supposedly stands for.
So why is it that a Comedy Central comedian hosting a fake news show is the only public figure in the country to take them on?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Ironies Abound
I have a new theory about why the Republicans have been so successful over the past ten years - or more. Consider the recent health reform legislation: the very people who will most benefit from it (lower income working people) are the ones who most vociferously opposed it. A recent New York Times article profiled Tea Party activists and found that many had joined the movement after losing their jobs. And that many were living on government subsidies - the very ones that they protest against so adamantly. Perhaps the most revealing part of the article, though, was its account of why some of the members joined - that it gave them a sense of belonging, of purpose, and recognition that they didn't get anywhere else.
I think the Republican party has been doing this for a long time, now. Its focus on churches and Christian "values" is really an appeal to that segment of the population who belong to churches because they need the community and direction that those churches provide (see Matt Taibi's description of an evangelical community in his book The Great Derangement). Perhaps the conservative movement is really composed, largely, of people who need the direction, purpose, and sense of belonging that membership in an evangelical congregation or the Tea Party provides. The reward structures offered by those communities outweigh facts, apparently, and make it possible for people to demonstrate, and vote, against their own economic interests. Apparently without thinking about it much.
This suggests that the essential problem with liberals is that they're too, well, satisfied with their lives - they don't need that kind of external support and reward structure, so there's no liberal equivalent of the evangelical church network or Tea Party movement. And the problem with the Democratic party is that it hasn't leveraged similar reward structures, so it has nothing to offer that segment of the population who are searching for meaning from those kinds of structures. Apparently, there are enough Americans who need that kind of support to make Fox News, the Tea Party, and the right wing overall successful. Perhaps the number of Americans who fall into that camp is a measure of our overall well-being as a country.
In addition to the obvious irony that these people are trying to prevent the very progress that will provide them more economic security, the final irony is that all these people, searching for community, do so in the name of individual rights and liberties. Their message is libertarian but their behavior is collective. It's difficult to imagine a political movement that could possibly be more intellectually inconsistent.
I think the Republican party has been doing this for a long time, now. Its focus on churches and Christian "values" is really an appeal to that segment of the population who belong to churches because they need the community and direction that those churches provide (see Matt Taibi's description of an evangelical community in his book The Great Derangement). Perhaps the conservative movement is really composed, largely, of people who need the direction, purpose, and sense of belonging that membership in an evangelical congregation or the Tea Party provides. The reward structures offered by those communities outweigh facts, apparently, and make it possible for people to demonstrate, and vote, against their own economic interests. Apparently without thinking about it much.
This suggests that the essential problem with liberals is that they're too, well, satisfied with their lives - they don't need that kind of external support and reward structure, so there's no liberal equivalent of the evangelical church network or Tea Party movement. And the problem with the Democratic party is that it hasn't leveraged similar reward structures, so it has nothing to offer that segment of the population who are searching for meaning from those kinds of structures. Apparently, there are enough Americans who need that kind of support to make Fox News, the Tea Party, and the right wing overall successful. Perhaps the number of Americans who fall into that camp is a measure of our overall well-being as a country.
In addition to the obvious irony that these people are trying to prevent the very progress that will provide them more economic security, the final irony is that all these people, searching for community, do so in the name of individual rights and liberties. Their message is libertarian but their behavior is collective. It's difficult to imagine a political movement that could possibly be more intellectually inconsistent.
Monday, February 22, 2010
A Few Thoughts After the Death of a Pet
Our beloved dog died last November. We had about a week with him after the initial diagnosis, during which time he took Prednisone and perked up to the point where he had a few moments of near-normalcy during his last days. We were grateful for the time we had to tell him how much we loved him and mentally say goodbye to him many times before doing it for real. Afterward, I wondered about a few things. It's taken me a while to put them down here.
One of the things we struggled with afterward was what to say about it. It didn't seem right to say that he "died", because he didn't, really - he was euthanized. It was an active process rather than a passive one, done on our terms rather than on nature's. The closest I could come to something that reflected how I felt about it was, "We had to say goodbye to our dog." Because the alternatives just didn't seem to fit.
One alternative was, "We put our dog down." This struck me as too harsh for the kind of relationship we had with him. We made him stay "down" when we punished him; making him stay down was an act of dominance. But euthanizing him had nothing to do with punishing him and nothing to do with dominance. Instead, giving him a relatively painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and before uncontrollable pain set in, was specifically an act of respect. This made me wonder if you would talk about "putting your dog down" if you respected him or her, and whether I was strange to respect our dog. I was certainly proud of the fact that he, a Welsh Corgi with short, stubby legs, could leave the ground, twist in the air, and catch a Frisbee in flight. That, while many Corgis become overweight, he was mostly muscle, stayed within his ideal weight most of his life, and played recklessly into his twelfth year. That he was so patient with us and so gentle with others, and so undemanding. And that he connected so well, making direct eye contact in a way that seems rare in dogs.
Another was, "We had to put him to sleep." More respectful of the dog, maybe, but less respectful of the event. This was not an event to minimize, and this phrasing seemed to do just that. Our dog couldn't avoid what happened to him - why should our language attempt to do so?
I'm not sure I ever found the right words, but that might have been appropriate, because there was little that was, ultimately, right about losing him. He, our relationship with him, and the process of losing him were too complex for a simple description to do justice to, and in the end I stopped trying. But that was okay, because most people had been through a similar event, and most understood even without the right words.
Which brings me to the next thought, that how people reacted to the event or to the news became, for me, almost a test of character. I found myself being disappointed by people who I thought were closer or better friends when they failed to express the right amount of sorrow, and being surprised by the comfort and support that came from unexpected sources, people who hadn't been that close lately for one reason or another. When I've been in that situation, hearing of bad news and being in a position to react, I've often failed to speak or reach out, believing that nothing I could say could adequately respect the situation, that an inadequate attempt would be worse than no attempt at all, and that silence was more respectful than platitudes. Now I know I was wrong, and I hope I'll handle those kinds of situations better in the future. Sincerity and sensitivity matter more than eloquence.
My final thought comes from sitting in the vet's office during that final week, knowing that it wasn't his last day yet, but that that day was pretty close. A neighbor, an evangelical Christian, happened to be there with his dog, and he asked what we were in for. We gave him the story, and he blithely assured us that he'd put down four dogs in his time and we'd be fine. On a personal level, his general affect and mode of operation is friendly, loud, relentlessly upbeat, and more broadcast than receive, so I don't blame him for his relative insensitivity. What I do blame him for, though, is the notion that we can give our pets a painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and on our terms rather than waiting for the biological crisis of natural death, but we can't do the same for ourselves or for the human members of our families.
One of the things we struggled with afterward was what to say about it. It didn't seem right to say that he "died", because he didn't, really - he was euthanized. It was an active process rather than a passive one, done on our terms rather than on nature's. The closest I could come to something that reflected how I felt about it was, "We had to say goodbye to our dog." Because the alternatives just didn't seem to fit.
One alternative was, "We put our dog down." This struck me as too harsh for the kind of relationship we had with him. We made him stay "down" when we punished him; making him stay down was an act of dominance. But euthanizing him had nothing to do with punishing him and nothing to do with dominance. Instead, giving him a relatively painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and before uncontrollable pain set in, was specifically an act of respect. This made me wonder if you would talk about "putting your dog down" if you respected him or her, and whether I was strange to respect our dog. I was certainly proud of the fact that he, a Welsh Corgi with short, stubby legs, could leave the ground, twist in the air, and catch a Frisbee in flight. That, while many Corgis become overweight, he was mostly muscle, stayed within his ideal weight most of his life, and played recklessly into his twelfth year. That he was so patient with us and so gentle with others, and so undemanding. And that he connected so well, making direct eye contact in a way that seems rare in dogs.
Another was, "We had to put him to sleep." More respectful of the dog, maybe, but less respectful of the event. This was not an event to minimize, and this phrasing seemed to do just that. Our dog couldn't avoid what happened to him - why should our language attempt to do so?
I'm not sure I ever found the right words, but that might have been appropriate, because there was little that was, ultimately, right about losing him. He, our relationship with him, and the process of losing him were too complex for a simple description to do justice to, and in the end I stopped trying. But that was okay, because most people had been through a similar event, and most understood even without the right words.
Which brings me to the next thought, that how people reacted to the event or to the news became, for me, almost a test of character. I found myself being disappointed by people who I thought were closer or better friends when they failed to express the right amount of sorrow, and being surprised by the comfort and support that came from unexpected sources, people who hadn't been that close lately for one reason or another. When I've been in that situation, hearing of bad news and being in a position to react, I've often failed to speak or reach out, believing that nothing I could say could adequately respect the situation, that an inadequate attempt would be worse than no attempt at all, and that silence was more respectful than platitudes. Now I know I was wrong, and I hope I'll handle those kinds of situations better in the future. Sincerity and sensitivity matter more than eloquence.
My final thought comes from sitting in the vet's office during that final week, knowing that it wasn't his last day yet, but that that day was pretty close. A neighbor, an evangelical Christian, happened to be there with his dog, and he asked what we were in for. We gave him the story, and he blithely assured us that he'd put down four dogs in his time and we'd be fine. On a personal level, his general affect and mode of operation is friendly, loud, relentlessly upbeat, and more broadcast than receive, so I don't blame him for his relative insensitivity. What I do blame him for, though, is the notion that we can give our pets a painless, dignified death, with minimal anxiety and on our terms rather than waiting for the biological crisis of natural death, but we can't do the same for ourselves or for the human members of our families.
Monday, January 18, 2010
If Late Night Talk Shows Were Desserts
| Show | Dessert | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The Daily Show | Tiramisu | Complex, stimulating, ultimately satisfying |
| The Colbert Report | Chocolate Mousse | Simple, smooth, deceptively rich |
| Letterman | Plum pudding | Mostly conventional, but with a hint of danger when soaked in brandy and lit on fire |
| Conan O'Brien | Licorice ice cream | Intriguing, different, out of the mainstream, not sure if good or not |
| Leno | Lime Jello with whipped cream | Almost offensively inoffensive |
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