Various Provocations

Linkism

2011-07-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

“Sometimes state flags…”

Scientists insert artificial human livers into mice.

How China’s new rich are stimulating the trade in illegal elephant ivory. Also, how China’s bad debts are cause for concern. Discovering the mysteries of the Chinese consumer.

Microsoft’s patent shakedown.

Australia is proposing a radical carbon emissions plan.

We’re about to experience one of the harshest droughts in decades, since a little old thing called the Dust Bowl. But remember: climate change isn’t real, climate change isn’t real, all that weird weather stuff that you didn’t notice before is just random chance, climate change isn’t real LA LA LA. IT'S NOT HOT OUT.

When the Mainstream is easy to shun

2011-07-11T21:15:00.001-07:00

Julian Sanchez writes this, of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pretty excellent New York Times essay on the ease of acquiring knowledge about your obscure tastes in music:

Developing non-mainstream tastes in almost anything used to be pretty hard.

The driver for this is a good thing, but I’m not sure this particular effect is. If you had non-mainstream tastes back in the day, it was a sign you were honestly committed to those beliefs as evidenced by all that effort you put into it. Maybe you became a bit close-minded as a defensive mechanism (otherwise all that work was wasted), but overall you were an interested person, and interested people are more likely to be interesting and do interesting things.

There are a large number of people these days who seem weird for weird’s sake, and I don’t find this particularly interesting.

War on Salt

2011-07-11T18:48:00.001-07:00

So there’s this:

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greatertheir risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

This should make Mayor Bloomberg look ridiculous, who personally led the anti-salt crusade from the front, loudly. To hear the rest of the Scientific American article tell it, the evidence linking salt intake to hypertension has always been flimsy, which should make everyone have a good think and particularly the technocrats: what other common nutritional advice is based on similarly flimsy evidence? What are we doing to study this?

I was always suspicious of the salt-cutting initiative because it seemed much too easy and too obvious. People are capable of surpassingly dumb omissions, but this seems a bit too much.

Linkism

2011-07-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

Developed-world deleveraging will take an awfully long time.

How to reduce the costs of universities.

China appears to be getting a big appetite for corn.

Shelia Bair’s exit interview in the NYT Magazine supposedly is excellent; haven’t yet read it.

NYT writers’ fiction recommendations. Some are strange (Jaws), some are a bit surprising (if you had to guess one Gabriel Garcia Marquez book that would be recommended, it’d be the sublime One Hundred Years of Solitude or the slightly-less-sublime Love in the Time of Cholera, but no—it is “Strange Pilgrims,” which I have never even heard of.)

40 people die in Mexico at the hands of drug gangs.

Looks like Pakistan v. the U.S. government is escalating, particularly over this dead-journalist contretemps.

When theories go wrong: automatic enrollment in 401(k)s decrease saving.

What summer camp inflation tells us about education.

Congratulations, But Sarcasm

2011-07-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

So a few days ago, this headline was blared:

Now, 3,000 hits is quite the feat and deserves congratulations. Nevertheless, the aggression with which we're being told to respect Derek Jeter is more than a bit patronizing, as if we can't be trusted to respect Derek Jeter on his own. I mean, "RESPECT DEREK JETER" is right up there with these sentences:

"It's time to respect Michael Jordan."
"It's time to respect the troops."
"It's time to respect our firefighters."
"It's time to respect our police officers."
"It's time to respect our new alien overlords."

There is no one on the You Ess of Ehh that has not been informed about the necessity of respecting Derek Jeter, and I doubt there's anyone who doesn't have at least a smidgen, a soupcon, a mite of respect for Derek Jeter. So why are we being informed, over and over, that we must respect Derek Jeter? Don't we have at least a bit of intelligence?*

* the RESPECT DEREK JETER campaign is eerily similar to the RESPECT KOBE BRYANT campaign, in that you sense sportswriters are a beleaguered group searching for human beings who fit the archetype from which they can propagandize endlessly from, as they were endlessly propagandized by their sportswriters in the forms of the same archetypes. (And what's a sportswriter but the truest believer, anyway?) So they have to force people into their archetypes and ignore flaws: i.e. that Bryant and Jeter, while both very good players and among the best players to play their games, are nowhere near as good as sportswriters' limited yet creatively exaggerating imagination would have them be.

Hmmm...

2011-07-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

Questions are being asked, whether this is the time that Rupert Murdoch will finally get it. I'm skeptical, though when I see this picture:

I think late Marlon Brando in Godfather. Astute readers (or, really, anyone) will recall that this look features right before Don Corleone dies.

Linkism

2011-07-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

Some commercially valuable fish are going to be on endangered species list.

What happens if the U.S. breaks the debt ceiling.

Scientific knowledge and democracy—what happens when people don’t have scientific knowledge.

What’s drug resistance worth to governments?:

For every death from AIDS, the US federal research establishment awards approximately $69,000 in grant funds. And for every death from MRSA, it awards $570…. the research budget at the National Institutes of Health has been rising, from $13.1 billion in 1998 to $28.7 billion in 2008; within that, so has the research budget at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), from $1.4 billion to $4.6 billion over that same decade. They wondered how much of that research funding was going to this resistance problem that health authorities nationally and globally have pronounced a crisis. MRSA, let’s remember, kills an estimated 19,000 Americans a year: more than HIV, and more than pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, H. influenzae and group A Streptococcus combined.

MRSA, remember, is a big, big deal—it’s the nasty antibiotic-resistant disease that we should be looking out for.

China’s cities’ debt overloads.

Why illegal immigration from Mexico is less appealing (Mexicans are better off).

Using satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks.

The final space shuttle liftoff—what it’s like in the astronaut’s words.

A interview with Bill James on crime.

Chicago by boat: A timelapse journey from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Theorizing

2011-07-07T20:35:00.001-07:00

The theory that health information technology will contribute to further disparities in health care outcomes remains an interesting one; I’m just not sure we’ll realize the results any time soon. The NYT has an interesting story with a less-interesting anecdote in the middle. Naturally, I’ll focus on the less-interesting anecdote (the story is about genomics and cancer; a Duke lab announced too-good-to-be-true results that turned out to be just that, with fraud discovered…here’s the less-sensational anecdote):

The Duke case came right after two other claims that gave medical researchers pause. Like the Duke case, they used complex analyses to detect patterns of genes or cell proteins. But these were tests that were supposed to find ovarian cancer in patients’ blood. One, OvaSure, was developed by a Yale scientist, Dr. Gil G. Mor, licensed by the university and sold to patients before it was found to be useless.

The other, OvaCheck, was developed by a company, Correlogic, with contributions from scientists from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration. Major commercial labs licensed it and were about to start using it before two statisticians from M. D. Anderson discovered and publicized its faults.

I realize this is not precisely what the theorizers have in mind when they talk about widening inequality, but it does show that health tests are generally less accurate than you’d think.

Bowdlerization

2011-07-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert, in talking about The Great Gatsby, copies its opening paragraphs:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament."-- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

You can’t be perfect, but you can get asymptotic to it. I can’t really think of much I’d change, and I bet if I tried I’d remove a comma and then, upon further revision, put the comma right back where I removed it. So there’s that.

This comes in the context of Ebert discussing a bowdlerized version of the novel, which may be either intended for schoolchildren or learners of English as a second language; it’s almost immaterial, isn’t it? The simplified version uses a word base of about “1,600 basic words,” and proves once and for all that it’s not the words that are important, it’s the way they’re used.

Look at the words used in the excerpt above: very few, if any, are obscure and you might hear any on any day. No, the magic is that they’re arranged in a certain way and in that certain way they happen to combine and do something special.

Other than that very basic demonstration, bowdlerization is pretty offensive (if that’s what this is).

Linkism

2011-07-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Parties, nominations, Bachmann and trust.

South African government v. journalists.

What actors tarnished their Oscars most in 2011?

The tennis triangle—the three dead kings.

Interesting: the Netherlands are a net agricultural exporter.

Nice slideshow of the High Line.

The space shuttle’s Southern California legacy.

Nate Silver casts skepticism on the NBA’s poverty claims (the NBA protests.)

Comedy-wise

2011-07-05T17:50:00.001-07:00

The release of the top conservative books here is a funny one. I’m not talking about regular-version funny, like Witness (because of the enduring relevance of fighting the Communist moles in our society), as there’s one book that really distinguishes itself in terms of weirdness: J.S. Mill’s On Liberty

Which is written by a guy so ahead of his time, liberalness-wise, that some of the stuff he did might still be controversial. Funny choice, good for the comedy.

Ah....

2011-07-05T15:30:00.001-07:00

Well then:

What is it about consumer protection that Republican lawmakers don't like? Is it that they want to see their constituents fleeced and flimflammed by businesses? Is it that they don't care?
…
Whatever the reason, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee has approved a spending bill that not only slashes the budget of the Consumer Product Safety Commission but also cuts off all funding for a recently launched database of product-safety complaints.

To be fair, I suspect much of it has to do with the cut-everything-and-cut-it-now attitude currently prevailing through Washington. $3 million may be utterly insignificant, but sometimes you have to show your constituents you care. (Otherwise, why would the open government initiatives be in danger despite a similar low cost?)

I mean, this seems like something everyone can get behind: liberals, for obvious reasons. But free marketeers too; after all, we’re told by free market people like Hayek that the market works best when it has information to make its decisions, and surely information about product safety is the kind of information the market would value. Or not. Who knows?

It’s actions like this that make Republicans look less like brave soldiers for conservatism and instead like brave mercenaries for corporate interests.

Linkism

2011-07-04T19:54:00.000-07:00

Brazil risks a bust after its boom cycle.

A global race to match American drones.

On Thailand’s new Prime Minister and her family.

Indian call centers and British call centers are now equally costly.

Looks like the PRI is back in Mexico.

On how “smart irrigation” might save water. (The description of how they figure out what the weather is at any given place sounds like a huge technical feat.)

More Hispanics are identifying themselves as Amerindian.

The New Yorker on Facebook’s COO and women in Silicon Valley. Very interesting read.

Lastly, this photo gallery on tennis’s men’s number one players has to be seen for Ilie Nastase.

Another Cliche I Hate

2011-07-04T18:43:00.001-07:00

OK, so a cliché I hate: “Let the players decide the game,” in reference to some controversial, important referee’s decision. That argument attempts to move from the back-and-forth of arguments about fact (“He was out of bounds!” “No, he wasn’t!”) to an abstract argument that sounds good. Yes, we do want players to decide the game primarily.

But of course, a referee making a decision for one team or player and deciding the game thusly is the equivalent of a referee not making a decision for the other team or player and hence deciding a game. The referee always decides the game by his or her particular version of the rules. The game is meaningless without the rules.

In practice, people are rarely consistent about this: if you’ve ever said, “Let the players decide the game,” you should applaud many or most potentially game-deciding non-decisions or missed calls. Yet most fans I know will not be so understanding in that event (as well they should.) Fine, so people are hypocrites—that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the overarching argument. Except we know better: if we could count on noncalls being made in inflection points, most players would resort to egregious cheating. That’s letting the players decide the game, I suppose, but it completely removes any artistry from the game and often means we’ll be watching a scrum rather than, say, a beautifully-arced jump shot over an outstretched hand to clinch a game. What’s better?

New Standards of Turpitude

2011-07-04T12:09:00.003-07:00

For those of us who haven’t been following, the Rupert Murdoch empire broke through yet another standard of evil today with fresh revelations in the News of the World phone hacking case. Essentially, the tabloid would hack into the phone messages of various people and use the information gained thereby for various tabloid purposes. Well, that’s what was known before. Now we know they hack into the phones of grieving victims and interfere with police investigations:

The News of the World illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance, an investigation by the Guardian has established.

Here’s the chain of events: the tabloid hacked into Dowler’s phone to listen to the messages left after her abduction. The problem was that so many people were calling her phone and leaving messages that the mailbox would fill up, denying space for later people to leave messages. So the tabloid deleted the old messages. That’s a problem because the family believed it was Dowler deleting the messages (raising hope that she was still alive), and the police would’ve been interested to listen:

According to one senior source familiar with the Surrey police investigation: "It can happen with abduction murders that the perpetrator will leave messages, asking the missing person to get in touch, as part of their efforts at concealment. We need those messages as evidence. Anybody who destroys that evidence is seriously interfering with the course of a police investigation."

Now, is Rupert Murdoch personally an evil man? It’s hard to say. But it’s easy to say, when looking at the businesses he controls, that his results are nothing to be proud of: you could excuse Fox for being a partisan outlet when this is merely an American tradition; but then again you’d also have to blame Fox for the continuing derangement of the Republican Party. There’s really no excuse available for this phone-hacking business. So it seems to me that, if you were to value the net impact of Rupert Murdoch’s business activities, you’d value it at a net negative, probably a large one. So Murdoch might not be evil, but he’s done a lot of wrong.

This seems to be an increasingly prevalent standard for businessmen these days. Most bankers around the time of the financial crisis were not personally evil, I believe. At the same time they’ve caused millions of people unnecessary suffering and have permanently stunted the growth of this country. In a complex society, where our actions often have consequences far away from our persons, this often happens. The key is to align actions and consequences closely. Culturally, if you have an ethic of greed and personal-orientation, things like pursuing the next story or getting the big bonus assume an outsized importance relative to the far-off person who may or may not get hurt down the road. In terms of accountability, it’s striking how often these people get away with it: according to the Guardian story the police seem to have known the tabloid was hacking mobile phones (though not that they were deleting messages), and let them get along with it. These types of moral compromises only embolden a self-oriented ethic, and end up creating bigger dilemmas for everyone to deal with.

Linkism

2011-07-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

On Greece—James Surowiecki on tax dodging; on the wider effects to the Euro; on how Greek government debt will be like a CDO.

Decent story on ACOs.

Chinese corruption and official support of certain charities has apparently sparked Chinese distrust of philanthropy. Also: ominous signs in Chinese debt for local governments.

Big banks are preemptively reducing loan sizes…while other people can’t get a modification.

Some interesting stuff on data overload.

Didn’t realize the loopholes in Prop 13:

Even if an owner sells his entire interest in a piece of commercial real estate, the property is not reassessed if no single entity acquires more than a half-ownership stake. It is easy for corporations to structure deals to avoid a tax increase.

Apparently they’re lobbying to get that changed. Personally, wouldn’t mind the entire thing being abolished, along with the entire proposition system.

Congestion pricing—not coming to an American city near you.

Things We Now Know

2011-07-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

I’m probably late to the funeral, but still, this has to be a bad sign:

Who is that, you ask. Excellent question, hypothetical person I’ve created for rhetorical purposes. It’s newly-declared Republican Presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter. This makes the second year in a row an older white gentleman has run for the Republican nomination while also fancying himself a guitarist. Now, odds are, he is not very good and does not have very good taste. Nevertheless, this is the perfect opportunity to remind ourselves that rock and the guitar specifically are very much uncool now. If it’s safe enough for a Republican nominee to touch, it’s not edgy and not cool.

Now, deep down, we always knew this. We knew that when we noticed the kid playing the acoustic guitar in high school, singing some nonsense song in a falsetto voice. Nevertheless, now we really know and have no excuse. It’s time to officially deny the genre, or at least come up with some controversial figures.

Wimbledon Final

2011-07-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

Djokovic out-Nadaled Nadal. His ability to cover all parts of the court might even surpass Nadal's peak (which was a few years ago.)

Djokovic remains a strange, grass-eating human being, and his father's fashion sense is still wonderfully bad.

ESPN put it best by headlining it "New World Order."

Fin.

ADDITIONALLY: Apparently ESPN will get the exclusive rights to Wimbledon next year. Good. NBC manifestly does not get sports and does not show them live. Therefore they don't deserve it.

Linkism

2011-07-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

Can Silicon Valley culture be transplanted in San Francisco?

A dispatch from the Guardian on the mess with the Dodgers.

An interesting column in Slate about Michele Bachmann, paternalism and evangelism (How can Bachmann run for President and promise to be subservient to her husband?)

Michael Lewis reviewing Mark Twain’s autobiography. (Self-recommending.)

What would a post-Chavez Venezuela look like?

What does the developing world need, regulation-wise?

World Bank opening up its data.

Angry Birds and great stagnation.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Partial

2011-07-02T22:11:00.001-07:00

Nick Kristof has an excellent point:

If you look at my coverage of Africa, I’ve spent far more time in Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Niger — some of the most forlorn countries on the continent — than in bustling dynamos like Botswana or Ghana. The upshot is that I fear we sometimes create a public perception of Africa as a basket case, in a way that discourages tourism and business investment. If that’s the case, then our efforts to help Africa only hurt it.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the basic problem with eastern Congo is that it’s undercovered rather than overcovered: this is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has had far fewer column inches than any other major conflict. Likewise, the 1 million kids a year who die of pneumonia, overwhelmingly in Africa, deserve more coverage, not less. Same with maternal mortality, malaria, fistula, hunger and so on.

I’m proud that my coverage on some African challenges feels as if it has helped spotlight the challenges and led to lives saved. So what do we do to call attention to problems without exaggerating them in the public mind?

I don’t think there’s any easy answer to this conundrum…

I’m not sure of some of his specific points—anecdotally from the media, business investment does not exactly seem to be a problem for Africa (most of the investment seems to be in commodity extraction, which is not exactly winning the future but probably preferable to some of the alternatives)—but the overall point is sound: listening to the media tell it (rarely and loudly), Africa is in terrible shape. Yet when viewed from the statistical perspective, Africa looks to be in much better shape than ever before.

Charles Kenny makes the point at length here, but in general signs look good—life expectancy up, child mortality down, GDP per capita. If it weren’t for the AIDS crisis, Africa would be in better shape still. Obviously there’s a long distance between where Africa is and where we’d like it to be, but life is still much better than before and we haven’t quite heard that enough.

This is part of the psychology of the media. Quiet successes, occurring over the course of decades, are hard for journalists to pick up upon and explain. It’s difficult for historians to explain, even long after the fact, so it’s hard to be too harsh on journalists. The problem comes when we allow our partial regard of reality to become the entire thing.

Savings Glut

2011-07-02T19:10:00.000-07:00

Chart from Krugman, then commentary:

And:

Before the crisis, businesses were net borrowers, and to the extent that they preferred to rely on internal finance, anything that increased their profits might have led to at least some extra investment. Now, however, businesses are by and large taking in more in profits than they want to invest in expanding their businesses, so they’re lending out the excess, parking it in various securities. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that taxing their corporate jets would reduce investment, or that giving them a tax holiday on repatriated funds would increase investment.

So I suspect the problem here is from a corporate perspective, there’s nothing much to invest in (say, The Great Stagnation thesis): they’re uncertain of future returns, and can maintain a certain level of productivity with minimal staffs, and that’s fine for them. The key here would be for the government to find a way to kick it up into a higher equilibrium.

(I suspect most of this money that businesses are loaning out is finding its way to Brazil, China, India, et. al., which is why they have such high inflation rates despite—in Brazil’s case, at least—having such high interest rates. Well, because of, actually.)

Linkism

2011-07-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

Are we close to usable food allergy therapies?

What’s up with Mikhail Prokhorov’s officially-approved new opposition party in Russia?

Prison terms for crack cocaine offenses reduced. Well done.

State slogans ranked and saluted.

African GDP growth, in graph form.

Hackers attacked Arizona state police again.

Cisco’s ambitions to create several new smart cities (with the forthcoming New Songdo near Seoul being a demonstration piece). Very interesting.

The collision of creativity and cash at Pixar.

“Microsleep” to improve smartphone battery life.

How the definition of “Santorum” will reveal what kind of search engine Google is.

Off-the-shelf organs: too hard for science?

So why are they so angry again?

2011-07-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

The article linked to a few days ago arguing that Germans were very angry is worth thinking about, but ultimately has to be clarified a bit. Here’s the basic thesis:

Germany's western flank has become the greatest exporter in the Western world, second only to China and far ahead of the United States. The container ports along the Rhine are working day and night to deliver record orders of German products to southern and western Europe, the U.S. and especially to China. Shops are busy. Home sales are rocking. Unemployment hasn't been so low since the eighties. In terms of growth, profits and productivity, the current German economic boom has surpassed even the “wonder years” of the 1950s. These are, by several measures, the most successful people in the world.

Yet it is very hard to find anyone here who is happy about this state of affairs. Unlike the great Rhineland industrial booms of the 1950s and 1970s, this one is provoking Germans to turn against their government, against Europe, against technology and growth, against outsiders. It is an inward-looking, self-questioning moment in a country that the rest of Europe very badly needs to be involved in affairs outside its borders.

OK, so there are a few ways to resolve this paradox: either Germans aren’t as successful as they really are, or they are ungrateful twits. Not knowing enough Germans, I decline to speculate on the latter (though all the Germans I’ve met have been fun, worthwhile people, so….). I think it’s the former.

Let’s take the opportunity to demarcate two distinct entities: Germany is doing great; the Germans may not be. While recent times have seen a great boom in the official, top-line statistics, it’s generally ignored—in the telling of the German story—that German wages have actually declined over the previous decade, by 4% in real terms. This may seem strange, as German unemployment is quite low and its productivity fairly high. These are conditions that should, in isolation, demand wage hikes rather than stagnancy in nominal terms. If your wages had declined over the previous decade, despite making more and better stuff than ever before, while everyone told you how super awesome you were…you might get angry! So ze Germans are angry.

Now, as most countries do when they get collectively angry, they are getting angry at the wrong people—typically it’s the immigrants and other minority groups that receive the venting—but when the facts justify anger, it shouldn’t be particularly surprising when people decide to get angry.

For those who aren’t inclined to get angry because of other people’s misfortune, it nevertheless raises some uncomfortable questions: that is, the Germans are a productive people who are employed, and yet they cannot get wage raises. What more could you really ask from them? It implies disturbing things about the economy that this is true, though I’m unsure what the exact implications are besides something’s gone wrong.

Things We Don't Know

2011-07-01T15:06:00.001-07:00

An interesting article in Scientific American about prescription drugs and elderly people makes the case that we’re doing it wrong. After noting that most clinical drug trials don’t have very big samples of old people (and goes so far to say “guidance on practice are not science based [sic].”), the author writes:

A recent study of elderly ICU survivors found that 85 percent were discharged with 1 or more potentially inappropriate medicines, with more than 50 percent in that group discharged with medications deemed more harmful than beneficial (Morandi et al, 2011). The authors press for more attention to appropriateness reviews, with the rationale for starting each therapy in the ICU, and discussion of when it can be stopped.

Brian Strom, MD, professor of public health and pharmacology, University of Pennsylvania, describes the issues this way: "The problem is Congress and our research agencies. They fund so little work on the pharmacology of the aged and other demographic subgroups, and their risk of drug interactions. And, there is phenomenally small, and shrinking by 60% (down to $5.1 million/year), amount of money being spent supporting the Centers for Education and Research and Therapeutics, who are charged with doing studies that industry would not fund, and with changing prescribing to be more rational."

The more you read about health care, the more you’re struck by the amount of stuff we don’t know at all about health care—the lack of knowledge is accentuated by the realization that much of the stuff we think we know is actually unknown, possibly right but possibly wrong. (There are problems with large numbers of studies—see this article on biomarkers for one example—and then there’s the excerpted article above.)

My personal hunch—given facts like the above—is that more substantive, thorough studies will show health care to be much in terms of quantity, with much of the surplus detracting from people’s health.

Linkism

2011-06-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

What happened to Thailand in its slide from democracy to political near-chaos.

Predicting the effects of extreme climate change.

Hospice care has been hyped as delivering better care (in terms of satisfaction) for a cheaper price, and that’s led to an increase in the numbers of terminal patients using it. Has widespread fraud accompanied it?

Patents out of control—Apple edition.

When democracy and inequality collide (South Africa edition.)

Is the NBA really losing money? Accounting magic and the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets, including this factoid I didn’t know:

The RDA dates back to 1959, and was maybe Bill Veeck's biggest hustle in a long lifetime of hustles. Veeck argued to the IRS that professional athletes, once they've been paid for, "waste away" like livestock. Therefore a sports team's roster, like a farmer's cattle or an office copy machine or a new Volvo, is a depreciable asset.

The underlying logic is specious at best. As Fort points out, a team's roster at any given moment isn't actually depreciating. While some players are fading with age, others are developing and improving. But the Nets don't have to pay more taxes when a player becomes more valuable. And in any case, the cost of depreciation is borne by the athletes themselves, when they pass their primes and lose their personal earning power.

Nevertheless, the IRS not only agreed with Veeck but allowed any owner claiming the write-off to deduct roster expenses twice — first under "player salaries," in the case of the Nets' documents, and then under "loss on players' contracts" — and an enormous tax shelter sprang up within the balance sheets of franchises everywhere. This can't be emphasized enough: Every year, taxpayers hand the plutocrats who own sports franchises a fat pile of money for no other reason than that one of those plutocrats, many years ago, convinced the IRS that his franchise is basically a herd of cattle. Fort calls it "special-interest legislation." "It's not illegal," he says. "It's just weird."

The magic of the judiciary and wiretaps:

A total of 3,194 intercept applications by federal and state courts were authorized in 2010, with 1,207 applications by federal authorities authorized and 1,987 applications by 25 states authorized. One application was denied. Installed intercepts totaled 2,311.

So who’s watching the watchmen, again? (not the judiciary, apparently.)

Magical Realism

2011-06-30T21:22:00.001-07:00

There’s a novel solution to solving the debt limit crisis proposed in this TNR article: ignore it, by executive fiat. There are even some decent legal arguments for the idea, including the idea that no one would have standing to contest the decision. Then there’s this:

Garrett Epps, a legal journalist and professor at University of Baltimore School of Law, has made an even broader argument in a pair of articles for The Atlantic’s website. In an interview, Epps told me that there was a strong argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional because it exceeds the legislative branch’s power of the purse. The argument goes like this: Because Congress already appropriated the funds in question, it is the executive branch’s duty to enact those appropriations. The debt ceiling, then, is legislative “double-counting,” because the executive branch is obligated to spend the money Congress appropriates, without having to go back and ask again for permission.

Of course, you can figure out a reasonable-sounding legal argument for anything, and said reasonable-sounding legal argument will get accepted or not based on the interests in the judge in question, so the real question isn’t whether “ignoring it” would work legally, it’s whether it would be a good idea.

I’m not too sure about that. Aside from the practical questions of how much uncertainty would be created in the short term, there’s the question of whether or not we want the solution to every thorny legislative problem to be “Magical President Time.” This ends up leading to dangerous thoughts for just about everyone, from the President (who thinks s/he can do whatever s/he wants) to citizens (who wonder why, if the President can do whatever s/he wants, hasn’t the President solved all of life’s problems?). Magical realism regarding the Presidency is a dangerous line of thought and should be discouraged whenever possible. On the other hand, a second recession would be disastrous and would forever shatter confidence in the government. So that’s bad too.

(And, yes, it can happen: a far less radical conservative caucus sunk the TARP deal temporarily. I’m quite sure they’d be willing to risk economic armageddon.)

The Partisans and TV

2011-06-30T15:00:00.001-07:00

The Guardian semi-seriously reviews an American book claiming American TV is too left-wing and then asks the same question of British TV. Not being a devotee of British TV, I couldn’t rightly say whether they’re correct in their diagnosis, but I think the question of American TV is a bit more interesting to consider.

It’s hard to take the question too seriously as partisans are always too likely to consider the entire world to be accosting his team specifically despite all logic and with perfect malice—if it’s not the textbooks that are too right wing, it’s the movies that are communistic. These claims should only occasionally be taken seriously. It’s especially hard to take these claims seriously in the case of art—which TV sometimes aspires to and more rarely achieves—because art is complex and complex things tend not to have neat messages.

I think of The Wire first. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is famously left-wing; it’s pretty obvious if you read further into his background. That’s fine. Furthermore, The Wire is highly didactic and political. You’d therefore expect it to be a pretty left-wing TV show, except I’m not sure how much it is. It’s a great and complex TV show and has a lot of stuff going on that undercuts any political message.

(For one, the left-wing stereotype is that left wingers are confident about the ability of government to get things done and resolve the world for the better. It’s hard for a viewer of the show to leave with much inspiration about that life—the message about governmental effectiveness at the end of it is so much fatalism: things suck, the system makes it suck, the system actively resists any attempts to end the suckage and through bad incentives will typically end, therefore things will always suck in all probability. This is not the typical liberal message, put it that way.)

This will not do for the partisans, but it’s true.

Linkism

2011-06-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein has an interesting twist on the “explosion of health inequality” theory—from abortions.

A funny article on NBA Draft fashions.

Pharmaceutical companies are decreasing their R&D investments.

Will gathering solar power in space and transmitting it terrestrially be valuable?

Judicial humor in opinions from the bench (one of these is actually funny).

Chinese migrants—a generational gap.

Very interesting development—insurers are buying hospitals. If done well, could be a boon.

Why are procedural shows so popular here and abroad?

How the FDA impedes medical innovaton—essay and blog post.

What 4chan teaches us about internet culture.

Withdrawal

2011-06-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

The LA Times has a wonderfully in-depth article on the perils of privatization in Indiana—some services have apparently become markedly less effective, and there are accusations of privatized companies going to friendly operators:

Key players involved in the process had ties to Affiliated Computer Services, the company that benefited the most from the deal. Mitch Roob — a Daniels appointee who ran the state's Family and Social Services Administration when it awarded the contract — was a former ACS vice president. As the state began the project, Roob occasionally sought advice from former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a political ally of Daniels and fellow privatization advocate who also had been an ACS vice president.

The libertarian critique of many regulatory agencies and government in general is that it becomes captured by the interests they’re supposed to regulating; the solution, in their eyes, is typically for the government to withdraw. This might work in a blank slate situation, wherein the government has the choice whether or not to enter some new field; but in a situation like this, the act of withdrawing can often serve the entrenched interests it’s supposed to hurt. This shouldn’t be surprising; entrenched interests always find a way to get the first bite of the apple. But it is something to think about when someone extols the virtues of withdrawing (rather than withdrawn) government.

Linkism

2011-06-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

Today in bubble predictions—Brazil! A BBC article observes that some neighborhoods in Rio are experiencing an 80% rise in housing prices. Said BBC article neglects to mention the phrase “credit card debt” or even “debt” in general, which makes the case all the more convincing.

Ezra Klein makes the case for coming health care inequality.

More on the insurance industry, climate change, and “hundred year” disasters.

New drugs fighting prostate cancer prolong life on average by a few months and cost $500,000 a year for the privilege.

Nick Paumgarten of the New Yorker on online dating.

We did it! We eliminated rinderpest! (why it’s so hard to eliminate diseases: not the vaccines, the getting people to take them.)

Why is Germany so angry?

Are useful are biomarkers tests? Perhaps not at all much.

In Practice...

2011-06-28T19:30:00.001-07:00

Would you like to learn new, possibly disturbing information?:

When heart attack victims are taken to hospitals that aren’t equipped to perform lifesaving procedures to open blocked arteries, standard medical guidelines recommend they be transferred to another hospital within 30 minutes. Yet only one in 10 patients is transferred in that time, a new study has found.

I had one thought, then I dismissed it for wrongness. The thought I had was that this sounds like awfully good information to share with everyone, right? That’s nice in theory, but then again—how does this help in practice? (Imagine the conversation with the EMT: “Oh, let’s go to Presbyterian—they transfer their patients according to—” [slumps over])

In this measure, as with so many, it’s hard to figure out how the accountability of the market figures for the individual consumer. Narrowly, this suggests the problems with radical transparency in actually changing health care in this country, but more broadly it suggests problems with accountability in general. If consumers aren’t to discipline hospitals that employ such faulty procedures, who are? Insurers and hospitals are locked in a constant battle and it’s hard to see the insurers being able to insist on and win demands to such forms of care. The key mover here is probably going to have to be the government through Medicare…

(Incidentally, on the information front: the problem isn’t that it doesn’t exist, it’s that it is available in incomprehensible form. Let’s take this LA Times article on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation database: it says consumers might be able to make decisions about their local hospitals or physicians based on quality metrics. Unfortunately, it’s basically an aggregator of other people’s quality metrics, with no intent to make it usable—either design-wise (i.e. how presentable it is), or in terms of scoring which metrics are reliable descriptions of reality and which aren’t. Just because you have a lot of information does not mean it’s particularly likely to be useful for you.)

More Direct Democracy In Practice

2011-06-28T16:44:00.001-07:00

William Saletan does not phrase it as such, but he gives an excellent additional reason to oppose direct democracy in his article about why many states might find it hard to pass gay marriage approval bills. Even though gay marriage is more popular than ever, the shift in popular opinion might not help pass bills:

That can't happen in California, Virginia, or the other 27 states where constitutional amendments forbid gay marriage…The question now is whether the new majority will get its way. To undo the constitutional amendments of the past decade, supporters of gay marriage will have to pass ballot measures in those states. In Nevada, they'll have to do it twice. Passing ballot measures is hard. People tend to vote against them out of suspicion and fear, particularly when you're messing with the constitution.

As our experience with the U.S. Congress in the early Obama years can confirm, people have a terrible status quo bias. So it’s a bad idea to make people’s whims one year binding upon the settled discussions of a few years later. Nevertheless, this is what twenty-nine states have done and the gay people of those states will find it much more difficult than necessary to enjoy the right to marriage that they always deserved in the first place.

Besides the obstacles posed by previous years’ bloat, there’s the thought that people’s human rights shouldn’t be up to a popular vote. Nor should technical issues. And yet, glancing at the ballot every year, these two types of questions predominate year after year. It’s a sign that direct democracy in practice is not a good thing and we should end it.

Linkism

2011-06-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

In medicine, new isn’t always improved (in metal-on-metal joint implants).

Well then—Chinese food safety edition:

In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.

Also—China’s uneven urbanization (600 million Chinese still live in rural areas.) Also, how the Chinese are manufacturing part of the new Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

The Coen bros. next movie will concern the Greenwich Village folk scene.

What happened to the African tennis player?

Once upon a time in Bombay (a slideshow).

The world’s most important boring man—the head of the ECB.

A pair of tick-tocks on the gay marriage bill in New York.

Who is impressed by a British accent?

It's the Incentives, Stupid

2011-06-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic has a wonderful article on HHS open-data guy Todd Park, who is being set up to try to do with health care data what NOAA did with weather data and the government did with GPS data—release the data it’s gathered into the innovation wilds and see if useful, productive services can be extracted. Coming as it does after the closure of Google Health, it’s good to hear more will be done with health information, which does seem to have some promise.

But the note to recall comes from the middle of the article, which includes this cautionary note:

Park first got a taste for the massive blockades hindering payment reform when he and his partner launched Athenahealth. Before it became a software company, Athenahealth was focused on maternity care. The team wanted to scale a model where instead of assigning a doctor to a pregnant mother, you also assign her a midwife, a nutritionist and a case manager. Though the upfront costs are slightly higher, studies found that this type of care radically reduces the chances of costly complications with the mother, which drives down costs overall by as much as 20 percent. So representatives of Athenahealth approached the major health insurance companies and proposed a new payment model: Instead of paying for professional services, the insurers would pay a global fee for all care -- hospital care, physician care, lab care -- so that if Athenahealth could keep the mother healthy, lower the rate of complications and therefore lower costs, it would be able to more than cover the cost of the additional upfront preventive care, benefit financially and in the process drive down the total amount of money the insurers had to pay out. A win-win for all. "The insurers said, 'Look, we completely agree with your math,'" Park said. "'We agree with the five-year study that shows this model will work, but we can't rewire our systems to pay you differently from everyone else. We have to keep paying you on a per-service basis, even though we completely believe that this lowers cost for higher value.' And that was my first fundamental lesson regarding the principles of how you pay for health care dictates how health care gets delivered. Because this model can't scale, can't become widespread, if it's not supported by the payment system."

Basically, Park wanted to do ACOs for maternity care, and don’t doubt it’d be a highly wonderful model for just about everyone involved. But it couldn’t work because of the structural issues—i.e. the incentives. All of the cool innovation stuff and new inventions sound great and might be successful, but the odds of it mattering are low unless the incentives are worked out and are sufficiently widespread across the health care system.

New Kinds of Labor

2011-06-26T22:01:00.001-07:00

The Times has an article on young people taking multiple part-time jobs in order to fill the days, and concludes with this thought:

Still, is job-juggling really sustainable, particularly when the next stage of life hits and there may be a mortgage and children?

Ms. McCarty doesn’t think so. She is looking for an end to her 80-hour weeks and meager paychecks. “I don’t want to be 30 and working a bunch of small jobs so I can pay my bills,” she said.

No one wants to be working eighty-hour weeks, but why should mortgage and a children be a huge impediment to a life of multiple part-time jobs? I suppose the reason is stability and rootedness, but are we just too rooted these days? The institution of the thirty-year mortgage looks particularly odd these days; I’m sure there are a number of older people just paying off their thirty-year mortgage in Detroit right now who were looking forward to a much easier life, financially speaking, only to find it’s not quite what they wanted to be.

This may be an interesting case of culture versus economics; economically the idea of a series of part-time jobs looks intriguing—with the increasing substitutions of computers and machines for labor, actual people become less important and so part-time jobs becomes a possible economic solution. One could imagine this being appealing for many reasons too—you get to try out a bunch of different stuff and generate a variety of experiences; perhaps you’d become more entrepreneurial as you acquire a variety of experiences. Culturally, though, society is still geared against dilettante career-hopping: the thirty-year mortgage, as mentioned; perhaps marriage expectations; and career prestige is still tilted towards the people who focus over the people who hop around. So will money change our expectations or will our expectations change where the money goes?

Linkism

2011-06-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

A very good review of David Foster Wallace’s fiction.

India: is it a poor country or a rich one?

The white elephants of Spain.

How the mortgage industry lies with statistics.

Texas Rangers hitter to wear contacts to change his eye color (to red) during day games so he can hit better.

Patent overhaul bill passes.

Germany’s two capitals (and their past and future)

Can North Africa light up Europe with solar power?

Missed Opportunity by Google

2011-06-25T00:23:00.001-07:00

In disappointing news, apparently Google has closed Google Health, saying that it hasn’t been as disruptive as it could’ve been. In an interesting unintentional commentary on Peter Orszag’s claim that new health care information technology will disproportionately benefit the rich, apparently one of their problems was that only the affluent were using the personal health records provided by Google Health.

That’s a shame, because some form of electronic medical records is clearly necessary for moving to a more innovative, cheaper and more effective health care system. And while Google has a reputation for disruption, I’m not quite sure they were thinking disruptively enough when it came to their product: they were trying to interface with health care providers’ electronic medical records when they should have been trying to replace them entirely. In terms of creating a more functional, popular product, that’s not a big ask—not only are they too-rarely used, but the actual design of the things generally stinks (have you seen yours, if you have one? Chances are it looks like a mid-90s Windows RPG, interface-wise.) So, too bad.

How To Tell When Your Song Is Too Popular

2011-06-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

When it starts getting played in contexts that are a totally inappropriate match for the circumstances. Classic examples include when "Who Let The Dogs Out?" started getting played at every sporting event (because what we all want to hear when watching sports is a song about inappropriate party farting) and the entire Black Eyed Peas catalog at any event ever (except, perhaps, a bonfire of BEP CDs). The other circumstance, for completeness's sake, in which you can tell your song is overplayed is "Hey Ya!", which was simply played far too much. (These songs become good after a rest--"Hey Ya!" is just as excellent now as when it began; "Who Let The Dogs Out?" is bad.) Our latest example:

We were recently played this song throughout the NBA Draft, and for an event ostensibly about the happiness of new beginnings and the future, it's odd to play a song about a bitter breakup containing the line "WE COULD'VE HAD IT AWWWLLLLLLLLLLL!" This sounds like the sort of thing you hear after the disastrous post-career bankruptcy, not the promising beginning.

In other words, totally inappropriate. The question is will "Rolling in the Deep" become "Who Let The Dogs Out?" or "Hey Ya!" While "Rolling in the Deep" is not as good as "Hey Ya!", I expect it to be more like that song--it is, in fact, a pretty solid song. But overplayed.

Linkism

2011-06-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

A look at what legalizing marijuana might do to Mexican cartels’ revenues.

The rise and fall of Myspace.

How high-speed rail will alter China.

Pharmaceutical industry going for even more intimate ties with academia.

You really do have to read Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant” (and then the editor’s story).

Dirk Nowitzki in Deutschland.

Zlatan Imbrahimovic: the winningest loser in all of sports.

More Explanation Needed

2011-06-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

So there's a fun enough article in the Times about a movie theater chain that takes a tough ol' Texas line against texters and assorted miscreants by kicking them out. Good for them, though I'd endorse a bit more rough Texan justice and support hanging without appeal. Nevertheless, the Times includes this one anecdote that demands additional context and explanation:

During a screening of “Shutter Island” at a multiplex in Lancaster, Calif., last year, for example, after a man asked another audience member to stop talking on her cellphone — politely, according to witnesses — her boyfriend attacked him with a meat thermometer, landing the victim in the hospital in a coma and the assailant in prison with a conviction for attempted murder.

Why does the boyfriend have a meat thermometer? (Why not a more effective weapon? What was his thought process when he decided to acquire a meat thermometer in preference to actual weapons ["Well, I could get this knife, but I'd better use this meat thermometer?"]?) How can a single meat thermometer put someone in a coma? More explanation is needed here, surely.

Regulatory Accountability

2011-06-23T22:17:00.001-07:00

The New Yorker has a well-reported piece from George Packer on the Raj Rajaratnam insider-trading case. Most of the details we already know, but Packer makes an excellent point late:

…nearly three years after the financial crisis, Wall Street still relies on reckless practices to create wealth. An investment banker recently described the meltdown, with some chagrin, as “a speed bump.” The S.E.C. remains so starved of resources that its budget this year falls short of Raj Rajaratnam’s net worth at the time of his arrest. The agency lacks the technology to keep track of the enormous volume and lightning speed of algorithmic trades, like the ones that caused last May’s “flash crash” of the stock market. The market has become more of an exclusive gambling club for the very rich than a level playing field open to the ordinary investor.

As for the larger financial system, in Washington, D.C., implementation of the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law has been slowed, if not yet sabotaged, by lobbying on the part of the big banks and a general ebbing of will among politicians. Neil Barofsky, the former inspector general of TARP, said, “Is Tim Geithner going to have the political will to take on the size and interconnectivity of the largest banks? Nothing in his previous career suggests he would.” Barofsky went on, “It is a remarkable failure of our system that we’ve not addressed the fundamental problems that brought us into the financial crisis. And it is cynical or naïve to imagine it won’t happen again.”

The Rajaratnam case, like the Bernie Madoff case, is an example of people falling in love with stories. Thematically, the Rajaratnam case and the Madoff case and the financial crisis seem very closely related; you could have a hell of a time presenting the similarities and complexities in an English time. The actual causation is harder though: Rajaratnam and Madoff are unimportant in comparison to the financial crisis, and what fed them was completely different—housing (and a nonperforming economy) vs. inattentive rich people vs. fraudulent stock practices. Similar but separate, in truth.

Nevertheless it is important to prosecute those wrongdoers that you can, if only to give the general impression that it’s all under control. Though of course it isn’t: the people who created all of these toxic products are unrepentant and wealthy. It’s odd the special lack of accountability that bankers seem to enjoy. In England, you have blatant cases of banks aiding money laundering (read the story for several laughable examples), and I don’t doubt that similar occurs in the U.S. Anything to gain a bit of extra working capital, hm? Meanwhile the big regulatory news is that the FTC is continuing its antitrust investigation of Google. I appreciate the regulatory proactivity, but I wonder if they might, perchance, examine the parts of the economy that are actually fucked up as opposed to the ones that might, maybe, become fucked up.

Overload

2011-06-22T15:24:00.000-07:00

Peter Orszag worries that new health care technology will promote inequality; that the well-off will be able to afford the newer stuff and the not-so-well-off won’t be. He wisely chooses to focus on the gap in available information—the new brand of health care technologies collect much more information, record much more information, and thereby make much more information available for patients and doctors to act upon. This seems plausible enough on first glance, and it might actually turn out to be true. But I think there are solid reasons for skepticism: I’m not sure such technology would work, and if it does work I see few reasons why it wouldn’t be widespread.

Let’s take the latter critique first. It’s a commonplace that Moore’s Law delivers more computing power at a lower price every year; that’s often mistakenly extended to other, inapplicable fields—not all problems are computing problems, believe it or not—but this is not such an instance. Orszag’s entire case rests on the availability of information, but we know that more information is available at a cheaper price than ever before and I see no reason that this wouldn’t continue.

The more interesting point is one Orszag only hints at but doesn’t get at further, and ties into my idea that I’m not sure such technology would work. I’m using “work” in an unconventional way here—instead of its actual technical use “working,” I mean its social function “working.” The electric car works technically but may not work socially. Same thing for the type of information technology Orszag envisions—I’m not sure it will work socially unless the superstructure of the health care system is changed.

More information isn’t necessarily better. Technocrats like Orszag are very comfortable with integrating data into their lives—with knowing the context and nuance to the thing; they are comfortable with the fact that data is just another language and as such has difficulties—and so they mistakenly extend their mental model to everyone. But we know that most people don’t necessarily work that way. They did a study of calorie counts on restaurant menus in New York City a while back and found that it actually caused customers to order more calories. This, I should note, is for a fairly intuitive statistical measure. There are more obscure and hence more ignorable statistics out there for people to misunderstand.

And if human nature is one thing, how are we to interact with doctors who might be able to explain such subtleties? These days the American doctor is a harried individual packing her day full of appointments and consultations, with nary a moment for explanation. It certainly doesn’t pay at the moment to be so patient about your relationships; medicine is all about volume. And with the amount of information Orszag anticipates, volume is the enemy and context the ally—you can’t boil things down to a specific, headline number.

That’s the social stuff. I’m not even sure that the technical benefits are all that large. Most of the scans they give these days aren’t particularly useful; if you give the same doctor the same scan on two different occasions he will often give you two different diagnoses. This is to say nothing of the various state-of-the-art joint replacements that work no better than their ancestors, or the pharmaceuticals with little clinical benefit but much marketing muscle. Technologically, a lot of the new stuff is not particularly huge.

All this is a way of saying that like many prophecies it sounds good but the reality is far more muddled.

Linkism

2011-06-22T00:58:00.000-07:00

$100 million high school sits unused in mint(ish) condition in California: it’s cheaper not to use than to use.

Boston Review has a nice forum on experimental economics.

Mexican gang has moved into Guatemala.

Don’t look to courts for social change (historically, they’re conservative).

The long autumn of Roger Federer.

On the future of water.

Stop mining coal and oil and start mining heat?

The economic benefits of cutting haze from coal power plants.

Pakistan, emigration, and the ISI.

Corruption

2011-06-21T22:20:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has a pretty good article on corrupt boss Jack Warner. Warner, for those of us who are unfamiliar, is one of those political bosses in poorer countries who extracts his take from just about everything—Warner’s big thing (besides running the government of Trinidad & Tobago) is soccer: he was an executive committee member of FIFA, the President of CONCACAF (otherwise known to normal people as “North America”), and so on. This gave him quite a few opportunities to extract kickbacks, appoint buddies, steer business, etc., which of course he availed himself of mightily.

That’s not good for soccer in general, of course, but I’m not so sure it’s quite as bad in general as it’s made out to be (politically, at least). I read an interesting argument in a book whose title I forget but probably still own that posited that political corruption is actually not all that bad: it’s not as if the money from bribes et. al. disappears. Instead, it’s reinvested. If corrupt official X does a sound job reinvesting the cash, then the economy prospers even though some businessmen might have lighter wallets than otherwise. It’s possible to carry this argument out too long, but it’s worth thinking about. Certainly countries like Japan didn’t exactly lack for corruption during their upward growth phase, and China, India and Brazil are often spectacularly corrupt.

So in many ways I’m not surprised to see plaudits like this:

“He has a reputation as a doer, helping the dispossessed,” said Rita Pemberton, who is the head of the history department at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad. “He has made the front pages of the newspapers, helping this one and that one — people whose houses were falling or dilapidated — and adopting children, the kinds of things that win you support at the ground level.”

If you take a lot of money, you’d better be providing services. In politics, that’s being personally accountable. To cite another book—I read the memoirs Plunkitt of Tammany Hall for a history class, and what’s striking is the level of intimacy and responsiveness politicians had to have in order to keep the wheels of the machine grinding. I’m not sure it can be precisely measured, but the responsiveness seemed much greater than people have these days in the U.S.

I’m quite certain in the long run corruption needs to be cured, but I’m not sure it’s a right-this-moment problem for many developing countries.

The Moment

2011-06-21T14:19:00.001-07:00

New York profiles Rick Perry, and it’s striking how much right-wing ideas become ever more right-wing. For example:

In his book Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington, he contends that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments—which allow for the Feds to collect income taxes and for the direct election of U.S. senators, respectively—are both big mistakes. To many tea-¬partyers, in fact, these positions might look more like badges of honor than marks of shame.

And:

He maintains that the key to job growth nationally is a radical form of federalism that would allow every state to compete with ruthless abandon for corporate investment—to compete, in other words, to out-Texas Texas. To many critics, this sounds like a recipe for an abysmal race to the bottom; they point out that the state, in addition to creating jobs, is also one of the most polluted in the country, has the highest percentage of residents without health insurance, and ranks 43rd in high-school graduation.

Is there a liberal politician out there with comparably extreme views? Perhaps Bernie Sanders, who’s a socialist after all, and perhaps Dennis Kucinich too. But these guys aren’t treated seriously at all and their ideas less so. More to the point, their ideas are typically somewhat new and fresh; Perry’s ideas are old reflexes and dispositions pretending to be new motions. These ideas were discarded for a reason—they’re utterly crazy—and so it’s distressing to see them brought back for any purpose other than mocking the past.

Perry’s ideas about the Constitution probably need no rebuttal, but his second idea is probably stranger: for someone to be an avid free-marketeer, it’s odd to embrace what is essentially zero-sum competition in regulatory matters. States will only get job growth in this manner insofar as they steal jobs from other states or countries, and generally the types of jobs that get generated aren’t exactly the win-the-future type that we want. (Well, mostly—but then again I doubt Rick Perry has it in his mind to deregulate licensing and in particular medical licensing.)

So if Perry is getting this type of play, it’s a sign that the ever-more-right-wing moment will expend longer and deeper.

Ah, What's The Point Here?

2011-06-20T14:01:00.001-07:00

Sasha Frere-Jones has a funny essay on the women of pop, comparing Beyonce and Lady Gaga, but he commits an error in his description of Gaga:

Lady Gaga, by contrast, is all distance and transgressiveness. She shows up in our lives, but only as close as her commercials for Google allow. (She’s the only pop star big enough to negotiate with Google.) Gaga has her own way of being family-friendly, which makes the idea of Sasha Fierce seem like a halting crayon sketch. At the after-party for the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, two weeks ago, having been presented with the Fashion Icon Award, Gaga danced with her father, Joe Germanotta, in a bodysuit that was only a millimetre or two away from being transparent. Even when Dad’s in the room, Gaga has no interest in playing to the middle. Her body-distorting outfits and avid embrace of the gay community don’t scare many: “Born This Way,” released on May 23rd, sold 1.1 million units in its first week, the most since 50 Cent’s “The Massacre,” in 2005. But in the second week the album’s sales were down drastically, by eighty-four per cent, placing her next to Adele, who was sticking close to the same chart position she has maintained in the seventeen weeks since the release of her record.

The familiar question—how trangressive are you really if you’re also very popular—applies with particular force to Lady Gaga. For me, it’s hard to escape the impression that she is actually very boring, both in persona and musically.

Her music generally sounds recycled from the eighties or seventies with stale synthesizers, etc., and it’s not as if the lyrics are particularly interesting or novel. But then again I doubt the Lady Gaga phenomenon is about the music: it’s about the persona. Gaga’s persona is a comfortable trangressiveness for the mainstream to embrace: few people are ready to admit to anti-gay prejudice or indeed prejudice of any sort and therefore Gaga’s anti-prejudice stance is not particularly bold. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing that Gaga believes these particular things, it’s just that you should forgive me for being uninterested when someone proclaims she wants to be bold and produces actions few people actually disagree with. The other plank of her calculated outrageousness is her fashions, but does that matter? Like, at all? Isn’t that the stuff of slideshows and instant impressions and just-as-instant forgetting? If your brand is based on transgress, at least transgress an interesting norm or two.

So—what, exactly, is the point of Lady Gaga again?

Linkism

2011-06-20T01:43:00.000-07:00

Bank exposure to Greece, parsed.

The real show of London’s upcoming Olympics—the urban renewal project.

The Guardian has a great article on Central Americans migrating across Mexico to the U.S. and the hazards they face. I recommend the film Sin Nombre if you’re interested in the cinematic treatment.

New York Times writers name their favorite nonfiction books (that Robert Caro’s “The Path To Power” is mentioned and not his “The Power Broker” is a very odd omission—really, they both ought to be on there.)

What the country needs—5% inflation?

Obama administration to stop giving out health care law waivers.

The story of the Stanley Cup.

NBA Draft 2011

2011-06-19T23:37:00.001-07:00

With the NBA draft coming up, it’s a decent time to take stock of the league. The initial image of the draft—that it’s bottom-heavy (and “heavy” is a relative term here)—seems to be the correct one so far. That’s a serious problem to have: NBA scouts are generally correct about the generalities when it comes to the NBA Draft. If they say there aren’t any superstars, then the probabilities are there aren’t any to be had. That’s a problem—the NBA, now as ever, is a superstar league, as the Mavericks, Heat, Thunder and Bulls prove.

It should be a rather better draft if you want to fill in some holes—which should be a boon for the Bulls, who need that one good shooting guard to get that much better (Tyler Honeycutt! Honeycutt!). That’s a bad thing for the bad teams in the league in two ways: one, the players aren’t likely to be very good for them; two, a fill-in-the-holes player is only going to be useful to you if you know what your holes actually are.

Circumstance basically determines whether or not your draft strategy is any good, and since superstars are the only way to win, you need to get lucky. With all the discussion about the structure of the league and the strategies needed to beat it, you need to get lucky.

(If I were the Cavs, I’d think about drafting Derrick Williams over Kyrie Irving with that first pick. Williams has a chance to be a distinctive player, someone few teams have the players to match up with. Maybe that’s wishful thinking. For the Bulls, I want Honeycutt and perhaps a foreign player to stash overseas.)

Culture

2011-06-19T23:10:00.001-07:00

Slate has an interesting article about the enduring appeal of traditional medicine relative to modern medicine:

Traditional medicine has an enduring draw; consequently, it is a struggle to convince patients to stick with modern treatment. Standing in a breezy exterior hallway in Moshi's Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center near the Child Centered Family Care Clinic where he spends his days, pediatrician Dr. Rahim Damji told me that for weeks this spring, the crowds that typically throng the outpatient HIV clinic at the hospital had thinned out. Many patients stopped taking their anti-retroviral medication after making the trek several hours away to visit a new traditional healer in Loliondo, Ambilikile Mwasapile, known simply as Babu. A retired Lutheran minister, Babu began to gain fame around East Africa last fall because of a herbal concoction—called mugariga—that he claims is a miracle cure for HIV and four other major ailments, including diabetes, hypertension, and epilepsy. Lines of SUVs and minibuses crawled along, stretching for miles as people—often very ill—tried to reach him. Some avoided the line by flying in on helicopters. Babu's visitors included government officials such as Tanzania's deputy minister for Water and Irrigation….

Dr. Maya Maxym, an American pediatrician at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center with thePediatric AIDS Corps, explained Babu's draw: "People here have a very deep faith, and God is very present, real, and tangible in their lives," she said. "So, the combination of religiosity and magical thinking creates a perfect niche for someone like Babu to come in and give people hope that their suffering can be taken away by a miracle." People are willing to shell out two months' salary to "go and drink a cup of hope." The impact on HIV clinics around the area was noticeable. "People were coming here less and less. But now they've learned that these herbal medications are not working and are coming back to the hospital," Damji said. "We have had to change some medication because of resistance."

This should spur some skepticism among observers that all that’s needed to combat disease, particularly HIV, is piles of money for vaccines. Certainly widespread use of vaccines is an excellent way to combat disease, and certainly plenty of money is needed to purchase those vaccines. That’s not, however, a sufficient condition. Culture is pretty complex and powerful, and it takes more than cash to twist it to your purposes.

Ah, Unsurprising

2011-06-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an excellent article on double scanning: when a patient is given a CT scan...then given another in the same day. If you've been paying attention to this blog, you know that the value of one of these scans is somewhat ambiguous, so it may come as no surprise that getting two in the same day is not a good idea--from a cost perspective, or, of course, a health one (one CT scan = 350 chest X-rays, so, uh...a lot of radiation there). Basically many of the trends you've heard about the health care system are present in the article. It's a question of incentives, first (hospitals get to bill twice); a question of culture and geography, second. (Geographically--and this isn't a surprise--Massachusetts scores best in not giving patients double scans; Oklahoma scores worst.) Culturally:

The Medicare agency believes hospitals can and should do more to change physician behavior. “Hospitals will say, ‘Wait, we don’t order tests, why are you measuring us?’ ” said Dr. Michael Rapp, who directs the Quality Measurement and Health Assessment Group for the federal agency. But, he added, “Hospitals certainly have the ability to put in policies and to monitor what’s happening.”

Correct. It's not exactly a significant source of revenue for hospitals, so the culture of throwing-the-entire-arsenal at the problem tends to reign.

And, of course, like many health care problems, reducing the amount of care here actually means better care and better health for the patient, insofar as receiving unnecessary blasts of radiation tends to injure one's health.

Bridesmaids, Awkwardness, and the Hollywood Ending

2011-06-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

You should watch Bridesmaids: it’s a very good comedy. It also becomes more interesting as you think about it. The first impression is that it is a number of SNL skits linked together by a common, overarching plot (Kristen Wiig trying to get pulled over by a cop is hysterical), but there’s something more about it.

The film is concerned mostly with the comedy of awkwardness, which is well-trodden territory by now. Like most awkwardness comedy it talks about the perils and attraction of self-sabotage. There’s a funny little bit in which Kristen Wiig and her archenemy spar over how much people change, with each of them dancing around a point they’ve already decided on (Wiig is in the people-don’t-change camp, which is self-serving for her character in many ways: she’d prefer people don’t change because her friend, the one who’s getting married, is being pulled between Wiig and her archenemy, and if she doesn’t change she’s still Wiig’s friend. And she prefers that people don’t change because she doesn’t want to change herself—she is a cynical, self-sabotaging kind of a gal.). And of course people-don’t-change is the fundamental message of most of the comedy of awkwardness stuff--all those times you’ve embarrassed yourself, it seems to say, because you didn’t know the right thing to say, because you read someone else wrong, that’s always you and you’ll never get over that. And you know better and can’t change it. Isn’t that uncomfortably funny?

Wiig ends up embarrassing herself, driving away her friends and destroying her romantic prospects in a finely-tuned instinct for self-destruction (she can never quite resist the temptation to act out. There’s a perceptive line when the bride-to-be shouts at Wiig that instead of acting cynically publicly, she should “talk behind her back like everyone else.” The comedy of awkwardness usually relies on people not quite getting the rules, or refusing to play by them. In something like The Office, Michael Scott doesn’t get the rules [and everyone else is beaten by them]; in this film Wiig perfectly well understands what the rules are but can’t bring herself to play by them—they’ve let her down.) This is about par for the course for the comedy-of-awkwardness genre, which raises the question of “What next?”

This is always a tricky question for a writer but might be particularly tricky in this instance. Audiences like being happy and like seeing their characters change. It sounds sappy. But this is more often true than you’d think; back in writing classes the question would always be asked: how are the characters changing? It’s a perfectly sensible question to ask—if the characters are always the same, why should we focus on this particular time as opposed to any other? But the message of the comedy-of-awkwardness is typically that you can’t change, however much you might like to. This creates difficulty, which requires a lot of artfulness to solve.

I don’t think Bridesmaids solves the problem at all. It has a happy ending—the girl(s) get(s) the guy(s)—and does it well enough that you genuinely feel good afterwards. But it’s a bit dissatisfying for me, at least—I intellectualize movies as I’m watching them, and I couldn’t quite escape the feeling, even at the depths of Wiig’s character’s troubles, that she’d be solving them in Hollywood fashion. Which, of course, she did, in dramatically less screen time than it took for her to get into them in the first place. The punchline essentially defied the premise.

Linkism

2011-06-18T01:23:00.000-07:00

Why policy-minded academics should blog.

An interview with David Foster Wallace back in Sept. 2006.

FT has a detailed analysis of the Iranian political conflict.

Can we afford the military budget?

Brazil is arming against pirates on the Amazon.

Cancer death rates falling.

Are we reaching Turkey’s economic moment?

Today in budget battles: slash budgets for school lunches, keep subsidies for big agribusiness.

Universal pre-school: a necessary idea.

Question Time

2011-06-17T13:14:00.001-07:00

A meandering, long essay about the history of corporations from 1600-2100 contains this insight about the East India Company:

At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire. Massive flows of gold and silver from Europe to Asia via the Silk and Spice routes had been a given in world trade for several thousand years. Asia simply had far more to sell than it wanted to buy. Until the EIC came along…

Basically the EIC had to sell Asia drugs in order to balance out trade flows.

Viewed with this information, the current trade deficit with the U.S./E.U. to Asia doesn’t look like a temporary aberration but more a part of a historical pattern whereby the West wants more stuff than the East than the East wants from the West. Is this overgeneralizing? I’m not entirely sure. But why is it the equilibrium seems to feature such an exchange of money for goods?

Also: if it is true the pattern is woven in rather than an ebbs-and-flows deal, what does that say about classical economics? Can you have a one-sided free trade regime (probably not: eventually you need to hit an equilibrium in which the balance of trade is even, and therefore some countries practicing mercantilism while others practice openness will inevitably fail, one imagines.)

Afghanistan Crisis

2011-06-17T12:41:00.001-07:00

So, uh, this:

The Afghan government will struggle to pay its bills "within a month" after the International Monetary Fund rejected proposals for resolving theKabul Bank scandal, western officials have warned.

The IMF rejected the proposals because:

. Firstly, an agreement that Afghan taxes, not foreign aid, will repay the $820m taken out of central bank reserves last year to prop up the bank. Second, they want serious criminal investigations against managers and shareholders, many of whom enjoy high level political support, who illegally borrowed huge sums of interest-free cash from the bank.

Is there any foreign military intervention of the U.S.’s that’s looking good these days? I’m struggling to think of an example. Turns out, it’s hard to bomb a society to rubble and then, while accelerating a process that took hundreds of years everywhere else, build a functioning society in its place in a reasonable time frame. Who could’ve guessed?

Linkism

2011-06-17T01:38:00.000-07:00

Charging up the world’s market for vaccines.

A new method of treating burns (spray-on skin)?

A conservative case for Medicare rationing (i.e. IPAB)

An interesting-looking bill meant to deal with antibiotics.

Can anyone stop the British tabloids from acting up?

Obama administration argues Libya war legal.

Death, drugs and corruption in Colombia.

Tragically Trivial

2011-06-17T00:33:00.001-07:00

So the WSJ has the obligatory “what’s next for Anthony Weiner” article, in which the familiar ideas that “Americans like a comeback story” and “Americans are quick to forgive” blah blah blah are trotted out. The weird thing about the story, however, is the finger-wagging tone of it, where separate people suggest that Weiner has “a few screws loose” or that he ought to do “penance” and that he needs to show “remorse.”

All this is a goofy manifestation of a puritanical type of mindset (or, at least, assuming that one exists), because, really: who did Anthony Weiner hurt, exactly? His wife, perhaps (who hasn’t made her feelings clear one way or the other, but one assumes…) The people? As far as we know it was consensual.

What evidence is there that Weiner has screws loose? Has there been any suggestion that his actual job performance was poor? Has there been any suggestion previous to now that he was an unstable or otherwise damaged personality? As far as we can tell, the answers are no.

Basically, Weiner did a dumb thing in that other people were bound to get all wound up in a tizzy over something very silly and ultimately personal, but other than that—do what you gotta do there, champ. It’s weird to see these quotes, which are basically the same quotes you’d see after any disgraced politician story, except that it’s no ordinary disgraced politician story: it is tragically trivial.

Checking In

2011-06-16T16:40:00.001-07:00

Foreign Policy has an article about how Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq is consolidating power and rapidly becoming the sort of controlling leader we allegedly invaded to prevent:

With these security gains, Iraq's primary challenge has now shifted. Terrorist violence is still an enormous and regular threat, of course: Roadside bombs target U.S. and Iraqi security forces; insurgents sabotage essential infrastructure; assassins murder government officials with silenced pistols; and suicide attackers carry out coordinated operations designed to rack up the highest body count possible. But as horrible as terrorist violence is, the ICG has observed that "it will take a change in the country's political dynamics in order for [insurgent] attacks to have any significant effect" on the stability of the state. The existential threat to Iraq no longer comes from isolated attacks, but from the risks of political combustion.

Maliki's growing power may now pose such a risk. Despite his security gains, he has not normalized command and control of the military. In fact, he now functions not only as commander in chief but also as the acting head of the Defense and Interior ministries, which run the Army and the police, respectively. Not only is Maliki effectively a commanding general, but he is also the chief administrator of the country's security forces. In 2009, in light of this worrying trend, the Guardiancharacterized Maliki's rule as authoritarian; Maliki responded by suing the British newspaper for nearly a million dollars and seeking to close its Baghdad bureau.

The rest of the article has the usual disturbing signs—terrorizing journalists, marginalizing the opposition, etc.—and they’re pretty disturbing. It’s worth noting, whenever news comes out like this, that the exact purpose of the initial invasion and the subsequent surge was to create a better politics for Iraq. They are better, clearly so: but are they so much better that we can say the price we paid for it was worth it? I’m going to say no.

Feel Good Policies

2011-06-16T15:55:00.001-07:00

Via Marginal Revolution, this is a good line on banning those wasteful incandescent light bulbs:

If they’re really interested in environmental quality, policy makers shouldn’t care how households get to that total. They should just raise the price of electricity, through taxes or higher rates, to discourage using it.

Instead, the law raises the price of light bulbs, but not the price of using them. In fact, its supporters loudly proclaim that the new bulbs will cost less to use. If true, the savings could encourage people to keep the lights on longer.

This makes perfect sense and I agree. Banning a particular type of light bulbs won’t have a big effect. But I suspect that’s the precise reason they’ve been banned. There’s an anxiety about global warming—the typical have cake/eat it too one. We’d like to do global warming, but don’t want to make any substantial sacrifices to avert it. Banning a particular type of light bulbs is an easy sacrifice to make, and while I’m sure we all realize the action won’t stop global warming, it allows us to pretend otherwise. Same with all of the rest of those lifestyle modification green policies—yes, your canvas bag at the grocery store is not going to save all of the trees in the forest—but it makes us feel good.

Linkism

2011-06-16T00:22:00.000-07:00

American retail chain stores are trying again in Europe.

Russia’s VIP car policy causing citizen rage:

[The] migalka -- a blue VIP car siren that, when turned on, allows the driver to circumvent all traffic laws -- … With that blue light flashing, a driver can cut through traffic like an ambulance, and everyone else must scatter. (Although some VIPs don't even botherissuing that warning.)

China’s big health problem—lead poisoning:

The few published studies point to a huge problem. One 2001 research paper called lead poisoning one of the most common pediatric health problems in China. A 2006 review of existing data suggested that one-third of Chinese children suffer from elevated blood lead levels.

An easy way to make poor people’s lives better in developing countries—get them eyeglasses.

Coen brothers preview movie they’re working on. Hmm…

What happens after the [business] one-hit wonder?

An oral history of Dirk Nowitzki. And: playing against Dirk Nowitzki as a minor-league basketball player in Germany.

On slums and free markets.

Belgium has gone a year without an official government.

The non-existent invisible hand.

In favor of more corporate raiders?

No Wai!!

2011-06-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

Totally unsurprising:

Almost three months into the campaign of air strikes, Britain and its Nato allies no longer believe bombing alone will end the conflict in Libya, well-placed government officials have told the Guardian.

Instead, they are pinning their hopes on the defection of Muammar Gaddafi's closest aides, or the Libyan leader's agreement to flee the country.

"No one is envisaging a military victory," said one senior official who echoed Tuesday's warnings by Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, head of the navy, that the bombing cannot continue much beyond the summer.

Of course, announcing your strategy is "We'll give up if you don't" is an excellent way to ensure you give up.

What, exactly, was the point of all this again? When was the last time bombing someone exclusively actually won a war? Don't you need to have boots on the ground in order to actually control a given piece of territory (which you would need to do in an instance like this)? What happens once we give up--haven't we just pissed off Gaddhafi for no gain whatsoever?

Thinking things through--still our greatest weakness, apparently.

Let's Get Regulatory

2011-06-15T22:18:00.001-07:00

Here’s a pretty good article assessing the details of the Obama administration’s regulatory policy. To summarize quickly: the regulations aren’t being handed down, and the promised deregulations are mostly benefiting businesses. To wit:

"All signs are that they are imposing additional constraints on themselves in the one area where they have the most freedom to operate," Weissman adds. "The result is we're going to have less protection for health and safety for consumers and workers, the environment is going to be more poisoned, people are going to be less economically secure -- all because of a reluctance to offend the big money interests that dominate Washington politics."

This is all well and good and I mostly agree with the critique—it does suck that the administration is afraid of offending business interests, and thereby forgoes regulation or neuters it. However, I think regulation and deregulation is more complex than the simple spectrum set up in our politics from low regulation/big business love ----- heavy regulation/big business hate. There are many regulations out there that businesses specifically advocate for as a way of shutting out new entrants or otherwise punishing competitors (e.g. copyright law, occupational licensing, etc.), or regulations that just hurt everyone’s welfare (e.g. immigration restriction), not just big business. The regulatory state is to complex to be simplified.

Pakistan Arrests

2011-06-14T22:33:00.001-07:00

Today in encouraging news:

Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led tothe death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.

Pakistan—can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Well, you can live without them, but only if you’re willing to contemplate big changes in the American foreign policy status quo, which apparently no one is quite ready to do. And to be fair, the doomsday scenario in Pakistan—militants with their finger on the atomic bomb trigger eying India (with its finger on its atomic bomb trigger) with suspicion—does sound appropriately bad. But if some imagined worst-case scenario is bad, is it worth tolerating an increasingly uncomfortable reality? If it weren’t for the fact that we’re already involved with Pakistan, would we be involved with Pakistan? This seems unclear.

Accountability

2011-06-14T21:32:00.001-07:00

Let’s do the accountability game:

One man shot another guy in the face.
One man slept with a prostitute.
One man was found with tens of thousands of dollars frozen in his freezer.
One guy likes to send pictures of himself to people who want to see pictures of him.

Only one is under serious pressure to resign!

Now, you can’t call this a party thing—there’s one Democrat (“Dollar Bill” Jefferson) and two Republicans. And you can’t call it a sex thing only (I mean, Vitter slept with a prostitute). So what explains the derision for Weiner and the survival for Mssrs. Cheney, Vitter, and Jefferson (well, the latter survived the elites and was finally ousted by the voters…three years after it became clear Jefferson was absurdly corrupt)? I’m not sure there’s a perfect answer, but if I had to guess, the titillation here is that Weiner had the misfortune to be into a modern form of sex. If Weiner slept with a secretary, probably no big deal—because sleeping with the secretary is an ordinary kind of a sin. At least part of the derision behind the Weiner thing is that a large proportion of people believe it’s utterly asinine to be sending pictures of your private parts over the internet (though it’s difficult to tell what proportion of the aforementioned large proportion enjoy looking at pictures of private parts on the internet). But that just explains the “titillation” part—it’s a leap to resignation, isn’t it? Maybe it’s because they believe Weiner is such an idiot to be indulging this that there’s no way he can be effective. Of course, we have a pretty good idea whether or not Weiner is an effective representative, seeing as he’s been a representative for a few years now. His record is his record.

But that’s accountability in the U.S.

Mavs Win

2011-06-12T19:53:00.001-07:00

The Mavericks did it. On one hand, this might cause glee for many fans and hope for others. I’d only recommend the first feeling if the event in itself is pleasurable and not grounds for the second—i.e. I wouldn’t necessarily expect your team to benefit from the example.

After all, if the Heat wins, what kind of example must that set to general managers? How can you imitate the Heat, exactly? “Go get two of the top five players in the NBA”—there’s some great advice there. The Mavericks seem more attainable; as a Bulls fan, you can see some of the same things in the Bulls—except the Mavericks are older, more wizened, and Dirk is awesome. (Can Rose become as good as Dirk? Plausible, right?)

If you’re not a Bulls fan (or a Thunder fan), it’s hard to take much hope from the result in terms of aspiring to the Mavericks’ example. This Mavericks team was built through a willingness to spend cash at a galactic level, and the willingness to trade for and waste money on many useless players until the right combination clicked. That’s fine, but it’s not a sustainable strategy.

Still, good for the Mavs and good for Dirk Nowitzki.

Studies in Legislative Torpor

2011-06-12T10:37:00.001-07:00

Government at its finest:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is threatening to use the power of his position to alter key elements of No Child Left Behind if Congress doesn't renew and upgrade the education law before the next school year begins.

Mr. Duncan is promising to waive specific requirements of the law in exchange for states agreeing to adopt other efforts he has championed, such as linking teacher evaluations to student achievement, expanding charter schools and overhauling the lowest-performing schools. Effectively, he's warning Congress that if it doesn't overhaul the nine-year-old law, he'll bypass lawmakers to get his way.

I don’t blame Duncan—NCLB is a very flawed law, and Congress has shown little desire to get things done (the article quotes Tom Harkin as saying there’s “bipartisan” support and a Republican House member as desirous of passing reforms in a piecemeal fashion, which are great sentiments, but still.) For these big reform bills, it’s fair to expect six months to a year to take in the best of times—health care reform and financial reform each took about that year, but with unified Democratic control over each branch of government—and if that best-case scenario holds, we’re looking at passing the bill by the end of the year. But that’s optimistic; any error or delay pushes the schedule into 2012, which is an election year, which means the entire political system gets even stupider than it currently is. And if that occurs, you might find education shunted aside entirely, which is an unacceptable result.

This wouldn’t be an issue if Congress were able to do the slightest thing competently, but it is an increasingly incapable institution, so this necessitates the executive branch to actually execute some plans of action. That’s a bad course of option for many reasons—the lack of accountability, the lack of public debate—but it’s preferable to nothing being done, which is what would happen if we left governance to Congress.

Linkism

2011-06-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

Does China’s gaokao college-examination test serve its youth poorly?

Should the government encourage monopolies and other big businesses?:

The heretical truth is that rapid economic growth and unionization may sometimes require markets that are deliberately made less competitive by regulation. Monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations are more likely to invest in breakthrough innovation than firms struggling to break even in highly competitive markets. And cartelized industries are far friendlier to organized labor than ultra-competitive markets. If progressives really want to promote technology-driven growth and a union-based middle class, then they need to reconsider the lessons of the New Deal’s successful experiment in utility capitalism.

(And an interesting pair of replies.)

Are wildfires getting worse?

Can we deliberately make ourselves smarter?

IBM doing some interesting work with a new graphene circuit.

Did “IP eat TFP”?

The dilemma of India’s poor state, West Bengal.

Why The Internet Isn't Like The Rest Of The World:

2011-06-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

It's still new. Here's Groupon's founder about the seeming obviousness of the idea of social media + coupons:

"In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas. So yes, it is simple." He laughs. "It's ridiculously, enormously simple. It's still a gold rush. Any hick can show up and find a nugget."

This may explain part of the whole great stagnation thesis: the rest of the economy has been conquered by specialists, and specialists require a vast process of knowledge and credentialism to undergo the alchemy from generalists to specialist. That's not necessarily bad--scientists, say, need a lot of knowledge in order to get to a position in which they can actually find out about something new--but it does mean that gathering new knowledge will be a more tedious process. (Whereas, in the past, important math and science ideas could be discovered by gifted amateurs: Benjamin Franklin and Leibniz poured the foundation for much of math and science and for them math and science was kind of a hobby. The only realm where you see someone's hobby turning into vast cash these days tends to be the internet. Perhaps the lesson is that hobbies are more likely to create large sources of wealth than one's job.)

Theory Confirmed!

2011-06-11T11:14:00.001-07:00

Jane Jacobs’s theory was that properly-designed cities should, all else being equal, have less crime per capita than suburbs—because there are always people around with eyes open, there isn’t as much room for a criminal to hide. Criminals thrive without scrutiny, is the basic theory.

That basic theory seems to be confirmed a little bit by New York’s wonderful High Line park, which has had not a single major crime reported. This almost sounds implausible or ridiculous—no one has gotten into a fight or something?—but I suppose it’s true. I have no special reason to disbelieve. There are some structural reasons inherent to the High Line that make criminality difficult (e.g.: if you’re a pickpocket, what’s your escape route? Jumping off?), but I think it comes down to the eyes theory. As one quotation puts it:

“Empty parks are dangerous,” said Joshua David, one of the founders of Friends of the High Line. “Busy parks are much less so. You’re virtually never alone on the High Line.”

Linkism

2011-06-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

Looking at lists to trace history (and confirming the “Industrious Revolution.”)

Would massive investment from Google crowd out private investment?

Are universities suppressing innovation?

More vaccines for poor could save 6.4 million lives.

After its hugely successful bike-sharing program, Paris is launching an electric car-sharing program.

LeBron James’s Jordan problem: his story isn’t as good.

Banks lose on swipe feeds.

The price of Manhattan (or: why Manhattan should get denser?)

Wanted: more Wimbledons?

Tracking talent flows in Silicon Valley.

Financial transparency not very transparent.

Iceland is crowdsourcing its new constitution.

Is This Not The Most Unfair Song?

2011-06-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

Isn't it unfair to judge a particular American woman based on America's foreign policy? Isn't that desperately silly? (And they say rap likes to demean people...) (But they've both got nice beats.)

Muckraker

2011-06-10T17:26:00.001-07:00

Pivoting off of the piece on an Indian city called Gurgaon in India, which grew from barely nothing to seemingly-thriving hub for big companies, Kevin Drum and Alex Tabarrok react. It’s Tabarrok’s reaction that’s worth thinking about and responding to. He talks about the original developer who started building there and says:

Had the original developer been responsible for both the oases and the desert it could have built the power plants, the roads and other infrastructure and made locating in Gurgaon even more desirable than it is now. It is true that a city requires public goods which local governments often do not provide. Charter cities try to get around this problem by importing wholesale a new, higher quality government. An alternative is to avoid government all together and privatize enough to make the entire city what is in effect a hotel on a grand scale.

But what to do now? The governments involved are inefficient and often corrupt. We can hope that they will get better in response to the well-educated populace and the incoming corporations but even today, the solution is not simply to hope for better government but to expand on what is working well. The firms that operate the private oases are “small cities,” the solution is to make these cities larger.

Connect enough office parks, factories, and apartments, for example, and it will make sense for a private firm to build an efficient electric plant rather than have smaller firms use inefficient and polluting diesel as is the case now.

I’m not quite sure Gurgaon in practice or Gurgaon in theory quite fulfills the libertarian vision ascribed to it. There’s a throwaway line in the article that hasn’t gotten the necessary attention:

The water supply is vastly inadequate, leaving private companies, developers and residents dependent on borewells that are draining the underground aquifer. Local activists say the water table is falling as much as 10 feet every year.

There’s just not enough water. This is a manageable problem if there’s only one or a few Gurgaons, but it is not in any way a scalable solution. The world is already running low on water as it is without the determinedly voracious appetites of mature capitalism factoring on a worldwide scale. The theoretical or actual Gurgaon would have more voracious appetites still. Obviously water is underpriced in all scenarios and therefore I suppose a monopolistic business controlling all of the water might be an adequate solution but I find monolithic business to be equal to monolithic government on the list of evils to avoid.

The article overall is reminiscent of the situation in the United States circa 1900 or so, and in that case rather than leave the country to governments, or hope for a better government, citizens organized and built a much better government for themselves. They had in many cases decidedly mixed results and bequeathed us with some permanent mistakes but overall figured out a system that worked pretty well for a pretty long time. Tabarrok later describes the problems arising from private provision of public goods as “second-order” problems of monopoly, but that’s only a way of evading that at a certain point you need an active, competent government.

Linkism

2011-06-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

U.S. falling behind in green business:

Of the three largest operators of wind farms doing business in the United States, only one, NextEra, is American. Iberdrola is Spanish and Horizon Wind Energy is a subsidiary of Energias de Portugal. Among manufacturers making components for the industry, just one American company, General Electric, is in the top 10. The others include Suzlon (India), Vestas (Denmark), Goldwind (China) and Enercon (Germany).

Egypt’s economy is stopped.

Should personalized medicine be used for trials?

The changing nature of “confidence” in the Obama administration economic policy.

One way capitalism can make health care worse and more expensive.

More on Watson and health care.

Looking back on IBM’s history (The Economist)

Looking at antibiotics and farm animals (and the Danish example of going entirely off of antibiotics for farm animals).

Unsurprises

2011-06-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

This is unsurprising:

[Merritt Hawkins]’s annual report on recruiting incentives finds that 74% of the jobs they recruited for in the year ending March 31 featured a performance bonus. Of those that offered such a bonus, in 90% of the cases it was linked to “fee-for-service style volume.”

Meantime, fewer than 7% of the jobs offering bonuses rewarded physicians for meeting quality or cost goals. “Volume/production remains the standard,” the report says, despite the fact that “health reform encourages the use [of] quality or cost-based compensation metrics.”

This is, of course, the type of incentive we'd like to see go away in a better health care world.

One thing I think would be interesting to learn from this report are the geographic concentrations and to what extent doctors with such incentives are concentrated in high-cost areas. The "duh" result is yes, but always nice to see that confirmed.

Pump You Up

2011-06-09T11:06:00.001-07:00

Via True Hoop we learn that one of the union proposals to NBA owners is extra draft picks to struggling teams. As Abbott points out, that’s a pretty goofy proposal:

…More good draft picks would be a way for the worst GMs and owners to compete without getting any better at their jobs. This is like performance-enhancing drugs for the worst front offices in the league.

As fans, we root for the great competitors, right? Those who do best at their jobs? I'd argue the league ought to encourage teams similarly. If the Clippers didn't have Blake Griffin walking through that door, as a reward for losing, wouldn't Donald Sterling have to do some soul-searching about how he runs his team, and maybe come up with a more competitive approach?

This is correct. It’s even more striking when you realize the number of teams that have been more-or-less generationally mismanaged—the Clippers, the Knicks, the Hawks, and the Warriors are probably overall the worst, though other teams flit in and out. (Strikingly, the number of highly mismanaged teams in big important markets is higher. Correlation or causation?) Obviously bailing them out with draft picks is an artificial way of increasing parity, the chop-the-best-down rather than build-them-up strategy, and it’s probably not best for the NBA in the long run—the most compelling teams (to me) have a vision and an organizing hand behind them; the pumped-up, doped teams that will emerge from this infusion of draft picks will be good but probably not organized.

At any rate, this is a funny little comment about the way the world works. I bet, of the 30 NBA owners, approximately 25 or even higher like to talk tough about capitalism most of the time but are utterly unconcerned with being whiny little socialists when it comes to their sports teams.

Linkism

2011-06-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

On Indian private dynamism versus public dysfunction:

In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.

Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.

It goes on. Fascinating read.

Russia declares “total war on drugs” and promises to treat drug dealers like “serial killers.” This will work out well for everyone, I’m sure.

A strange shortage in cancer drugs in the U.S.

Does the world need a new Marx more than a new Gladwell?

California will almost certainly miss the deadline to release prisoners from its overcrowded prisons.

How empty malls empty out the cities that rely on them.

Emerging market convergence in industrial production, but not overall productivity.

EPA targeting dirtiest coal plants for mercury.

The HBO Actor Recycling Program:

From the moment Aidan Gillen made his debut on Game of Thrones as kingdom treasurer Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish, viewers had reasons to be suspicious. Sure, he swore fealty to our man Ned Stark and spoke modestly ("We are the lords of the small matters here") of his own role in the Grand Guignol political drama that is Westeros, a cesspool of backstabbing — and front-stabbing — that would make Lyndon Johnson weep like John Boehner. Baelish's mouth promised loyal assistance, but there was a glint in his eye, a weaselly vibe about him we just couldn't shake. Was it the flowing robes (call it Obi-Wan chic)? The disturbing tendency to deliver soliloquies while stage-managing live sex shows? Or the fact that Littlefinger — Littlefinger! — harbored a lifelong crush on Ned's wife? No, it was something else that left us unsurprised when Baelish's deception was revealed with a dagger held to Ned's throat: recognition. The last time we saw Aiden Gillen had also been on a Sunday night on HBO, when he was also playing a morally slippery politico who had trouble keeping his littlefinger in his pants and the truth in his words: Tommy Carcetti, the ambitious, duplicitous would-be Mayor of Baltimore from The Wire.

The article posits that it keeps on casting the same actors in the same types of roles and imprisons them forever. That said—spoiler alerts abound!—there are quite a few differences between Carcetti and Baelish. Carcetti is charismatic, but flops between idealistic and Machiavellian throughout the series. He’s also not personally a jerk. Baelish is pretty much always a jerk and always Machiavellian.

Realpolitik

2011-06-08T19:37:00.001-07:00

Ah, the Middle East:

The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power.

To my knowledge the military actions in Yemen have never been debated in Congress, nor by the public. Yet here we are, bombing in a country whose leader is apparently not too popular and whose people want an alternative form of government.

This presents certain problems for the government—yeah, there’s the realpolitik argument that all that matters is the U.S.’s interests, end of story, but there’s a certain point at which realpolitik isn’t realpolitik. We’re reaching it, and a big rethink of American foreign policy is needed.

Linkism

2011-06-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

Great Britain bans the sequel to the Human Centipede. Amazing you can ban a film in this day and age.

Mexican drug lords with DIY tanks.

The science behind basketball and jazz.

Closing the revolving door behind hospital readmissions. Also, soaring health costs and medical devices.

Interestingly, Glenn Beck is starting up his own internet TV channel, for which he will charge a fee.

Sports Illustrated profiles little-known cult favorite Andrew Luck.

The High Line park as economic dynamo for New York City.

An excellent article on the rentier class and its reaction to recessions (tight money and squeezing the debtors), with a multitude of reactions.

Brain calisthenics for abstract ideas—how rapid-fire presentation of facts might aid learning.

Using smartphone data to map transit and transportation.

Thinkable

2011-06-07T21:28:00.001-07:00

Watching the Finals Game 3, I couldn’t help thinking peripheral thoughts: like, just how good is Mark Jackson going to be as coach, anyway? The game was of a high quality, and while the series is tied the Heat have overall looked more authoritative, so I see little reason to deviate from my prediction that the Heat will win in six.

So back to the coaching thing. Jackson plays the hype man to van Gundy’s strategy man in the three-man booth (though van Gundy has, as the three-man booth thing goes on, increasingly tended to Jackson’s level), and tends to speak mostly excitedly in clichés while offering below-average-to-average strategic commentary. This does not sound like a guy ready to outwit the NBA (though, then again, many NBA head coaches don’t sound like they’re ready to outwit the NBA, and are prepared to act like it too.)

It’s kind of interesting that no one has protested or finds the hire very interesting at all, but here we are. This is the kind of situation that doesn’t seem to work out well, and we know it, and yet it is acceptable to appoint him. This is a strange kind of conventional wisdom that allows a front office to make this kind of hire, and makes it thinkable, despite the evidence and the feeling that it is not a very good idea at all. People, particularly those in power, are surprisingly constrained by what is thinkable and what isn’t thinkable, and it’s kind of weird that hiring a prominent European head coach directly to a head coaching position in the NBA (like Ettore Messina, who’ll be an assistant coach for the Lakers) is unthinkable whereas hiring an inexperienced guy who doesn’t seem particularly sharp on air is totally thinkable. But such are the strange ways of power.

Texas Education

2011-06-07T13:30:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has a highly detailed article on a Turkish social movement (a bunch of Islamic moderates) operating a chain of charter schools in Texas. It purports to be an investigative piece, but it’s hard to say how much there is there—it accuses the chain of not living up to the spirit of H-1B visas for special talents (they like to bring in Turk teachers even though they have no apparent special skills), and of relying on Turkish contractors, builders, etc. Honestly this does seem pretty minor, and I do think a bit of xenophobia motivated the article—if these were a bunch of tough-talking Texans I bet there isn’t a big to-do. Nevertheless it is somewhat interesting that a social movement could decide to influence American education en masse and might be something to think about when debating charter schools.

However, it’s this little detail that I thought was worth dragging out:

The Texas Education Agency has a total of nine people overseeing more than 500 charter school campuses. “They don’t have the capacity at the state level to do the job,” said Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Even so, the state’s education commissioner, Robert Scott, last year took the unusual step of granting Harmony permission to open new schools outside the normal approval process.

Nine people for 500 school campuses? Ah, Texas, you sure know how to do your government lazy. If you’re not going to trust your government big, you might as well not trust your government small either. Many advocates of various small government or market-oriented solutions to problems don’t realize this, or don’t sufficiently account for this in their thinking, but markets are fragile entities that need the authorities present at various times for various reasons. The market isn’t a clean model; it’s a chaotic, turbulent sea. Given the problems Texas has had with, for example, high-stakes test cheating, it might behoove them to keep and retain experienced regulators.

The Default

2011-06-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

The grim power of the default option—from an article describing Pandora’s possible success:

Though AM/FM radio’s popularity is waning, listeners still tune in for more than two hours a day, according to Bridge Ratings. By contrast, based on Pandora’s figures, its users log in on average for considerably less time. That could take some shine off Pandora’s ability to aim ads more precisely.

I’m not sure how good the radio ratings are; as far as I know they still rely on handwritten journals to compile their ratings, which are a comically bad system for precisely measuring what people are doing when. But still, if you think about it the numbers aren’t totally implausible: Americans spend a lot of time driving. What is distressing about the statistics is the attraction to the default option—people listen to radio because it’s there. On the list of “media with the dumbest people associated with it”, radio is only a step above comment threads, and that may be because money buys the relatively sane. But still—have you listened to the radio during prime commuting hours? The people are more-or-less universally dumb, talking about inanities, and doing fifth-grader pranks. Do people actually listen to this stuff? I was under the impression people listened to the radio for, you know, the music.

Linkism

2011-06-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

James Surowiecki makes an interesting point in discussing Elizabeth Warren:

For all the talk of the financial industry’s power, its performance over the past decade has actually been dismal. Countless lenders have gone out of business, and many of those still standing saw their stock price decimated after they loaned immense amounts of money to people who couldn’t repay it. The banks thought they were taking advantage of uninformed consumers, but they ended up playing themselves. In a more transparent credit market, almost everyone would have been better off.

An analysis of Iran’s internal battle.

The Times on Spain’s frustrated youth.

Why the “epidemic” of mental illness (and are antidepressants all that effective)?

Is there a cash cure to the AIDS epidemic? South Africa thinks…maybe!

On climate change:

When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster.

Why American taxpayers are subsidizing Brazilian cotton growers.

A “paramilitary-style” patrol in a Detroit neighborhood.

Jellyfish: more complex than you think.

Pie: Unamerican?

Waving goodbye to Google.

The baddest lawyer in New Jersey (a crazy, crazy story from New York.)

Roger Federer as Ozymandias (Watch the Throne)

2011-06-06T19:46:00.000-07:00

Roger Federer briefly turned into a rapper or at least the conventional notion of a sports superstar after he finished off his victory against Novak Djokovic on Friday—he swaggered right towards the net, wagged his finger at Djokovic and yet out a barbaric yawp. “Watch the Throne”—to borrow the title of that upcoming Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration. Or, perhaps—“don’t call it a comeback.” (Mirka said knock you out?) Whatever. Just as surely as Eminem murdered Jay on his own stuff, so Rafael Nadal left no doubt that the triumvirate of tennis is reduced to its usual hierarchy: Nadal on top, Federer in the middle, Djokovic third.

Interestingly, or perhaps typically, the order can be dictated by mental toughness and confidence. Federer, as evidenced by the wagging at the end, was utterly confident he still had the goods over Djokovic—who was, strangely, reduced into his old crabby, peevish personality in the French; he oftentimes complained over crowd noise and recoiled against slights. Djokovic is a guy who apparently only feels comfortable with the adulation of the Serbs; he has managed to piss off the French and the Americans, and it’s a good bet if both the French and the Americans find you unsavory, you are, in fact, unsavory. So Federer enjoyed superior mental toughness, and the backing of the French crowd, who probably like him because for all the French Revolution stuff the French still secretly yearn for someone who acts like the ideal aristocrat, until he faced Nadal, who has all the mental toughness of the Terminator. Nadal is so mentally tough mental toughness doesn’t even enter into it—he’s effaced his entire off-court personality into an implacable wall—and Federer feels a special weakness in the face of that implacability, and so he loses.

For a man who not just loses to his greatest rival but is routinely humiliated by him in important matches, the media is surprisingly admiring of him. Joe Posnanski thinks it’s because Nadal is better than his imagination, and Nick Sywak argues that it’s because Federer is artistry and tennis fans want artistry to win:

The truth, I suspect, is that we keep saying Federer is the best ever because we need it to be so. We need to believe in the triumph of the beautiful, that the grace he embodies isn't merely incidental to his success. Because tennis, even as it appears forever on the verge of degenerating into mere athleticism (cf. the joyless gruntfest that has been the women's game of the past half decade or so), can never quite escape its subtle relationship to art — to sculpture, say, even to dance. (Attending a tennis match is even a little bit like going to the opera, what with the hushed deportment.) Nadal's two-handed backhand, so powerful that Federer once said it was like facing someone with two forehands, could never be called beautiful. But the majestic sweep of Federer's increasingly anachronistic one-hander, so ruthlessly victimized by Nadal's tsunamilike topspin, has the drama of a grand gesture. In this dialectic tennis resembles soccer, where greatness can be achieved via mere winning (Manchester United) but immortality is reserved for those who win the beautiful game beautifully (Barcelona).

This seems plausible enough. There was once a time where it was Federer who intimidated. Like Barcelona does now, his style seemed to embrace the game so comprehensively that no one had an answer and no one particularly wanted to find out whether there was one (did you remember the Wimbledon match where Federer’s opponent sat with him during breaks, practically giddy that Federer had deigned to grace him with his presence?), and so they were intimidated. Then Nadal came along. But it’d be a mistake to reduce Nadal to brute force; or, rather, it would be a mistake to underestimate the awesomeness of brute force. Federer’s beauty is easy to get: he takes chaos and brings it into order; sees the statue inside the block of marble, etc. Nadal is harder to get; Nadal is a force of nature—volcanoes erupting, buffalo stampeding, big cats leaping, etc. Nadal takes chaos and tries to harness it just a bit. Federer is wow while Nadal is holy shit. Both are awfully cool in their own way, and it’s a mistake to only appreciate one aesthetic form. The ultimate message of Nadal over Federer is that, in the end, the raw power of nature gets you—either you blow up immediately and apocalyptically, or, by the end, after the weight of centuries, you crumble. Ozymandias, king of kings, is somewhere, mere dust in the desert.

Rulemaking

2011-06-06T17:15:00.001-07:00

A couple of articles to update us on financial regulation—first, Geithner declares “no race to the bottom” on the rules; second, there’s the more worrying notion that the financial rules are being distorted and delayed by lobbying:

So far, 28 of the financial overhaul rule-making deadlines have been missed, according to Davis Polk, a law firm that is tracking the rules. Of the 385 new rules to be written, the law firm says, regulators have completed only 24 requirements; they were supposed to have taken 41 such actions by now.

“There’s an attempt to kill this through delay,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former official at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is in charge of writing batches of the rules. “The difference between eight or nine months and 24 months could be cataclysmic here.”

Later in the article we’re treated to the spectacle of lawyers arguing it will take two years to rewrite all of their derivatives contracts, which sounds goofy but I’m sure is simply a tactic to extend the old lawless state for as long as possible so the looting can continue.

This should in no way be surprising: we’ve been seeing the same process unfold for health care. But it’s disturbing in more ways than one: it was a slog to get the laws written in the first place, and the hope was that progressives could get some momentum from that. That presumption might undermine future success, in actuality. Anti-government people might neuter the laws and the rule-making process and then use that success as an argument that regulation can never get the job done, as backwards as that seems. That’s not to mention the missed gains from failing to get the job done, particularly in health care.

Pawn of the system

2011-06-06T15:20:00.001-07:00

Peter Diamond took to the New York Times op-ed page to complain about his now-defunct bid to become a Federal Reserve governor:

LAST October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be?

The easy answer is to point to shortcomings in our confirmation process and to partisan polarization in Washington. The more troubling answer, though, points to a fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy.

This is one instance in which the easy answer is, in fact, the correct one: the Republican Senators would’ve rejected Milton Friedman himself had the Obama administration nominated him. It may be more comforting to Mr. Diamond that he was rejected as a consequence of his beliefs—which at least feels personal rather than being a pawn of the system that the alternative posits—but Mr. Diamond is a pawn of the system. Sorry.

(This is a convenient time to remind you that the Constitutional system of confirmations has become obsolete in our partisan-inflected times.)

Linkism

2011-06-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

How unstable will the Middle East’s new democracies be?

The importance of the European outbreak of E coli strain’s resistance to antibiotics.

Should the U.S. embrace regulatory outsourcing?

New Jersey: scrapped rail investment and built a mall instead.

American teachers do more work for less pay than their international peers (infographic).

Smartphones killing the PC?

Banks might need more capital as a consequence of the Fed’s new financial regulation rules.

Video game console dominance is eroding.

An interesting discussion of decoding the genomes of cancer (and its possible efficacy in fighting cancer).

The death of the American dream.

The Era of Cheap

2011-06-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a very good article on how the pace of agricultural yields are declining and how they might further decline in the future due to the ill effects of climate change, but there’s one line in particular that stood out to me:

Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may be over. “Our mindset was surpluses,” said Dan Glickman, a former United States secretary of agriculture. “That has just changed overnight.”

You hear the phrase “era of cheap _____ may be over” so often—Google suggests “oil”, “capital”, “food”, “Chinese products”, “airfare”, etc.—that it’s striking no one has quite put it all together yet: the number of people is increasing and their wealth is increasing faster, meaning a proportionately larger increase in demand for stuff. Meanwhile, the amount of stuff—the amount of energy available to the world—is basically constant; it’s the ability to be more productive per unit of energy that increases wealth. Nevertheless there are constraints and we are running into them. This leaves us to either figure out some huge breakthrough in productivity per unit of energy, or in total energy available, or the end of an era of a lot of cheap stuff.

(And remember those stagnating wages? They really stink if all the cheap stuff is gone.)

Ah, Optimism

2011-06-05T13:35:00.001-07:00

Everyone is quite certain HIV/AIDS is quite beatable, for logical reasons, though I’m not quite sure about this. Here’s The Economist’s take:

Not enough people—some 6.6m of the 16m who would most quickly benefit—are getting the drugs. And the pills are not a cure. Stop taking them, and the virus bounces back. But it is a huge step forward from ten years ago.

It concludes that it is a question of money:

Such a programme would take years and also cost a lot of money. About $16 billion a year is spent on AIDS in poor and middle-income countries. Half is generated locally and half is foreign aid. A report in this week’s Lancet suggests a carefully crafted mixture of approaches that does not involve treating all those without symptoms would bring great benefit for not much more than this—a peak of $22 billion in 2015, and a fall thereafter. Moreover, most of the extra spending would be offset by savings on the treatment of those who would have been infected, but were not—some 12m people, if the boffins have done their sums right. At $500 per person per year, the benefits would far outweigh the costs in purely economic terms; though donors will need to compare the gain from spending more on knocking out AIDS against other worthy causes, such as eliminating malaria.

It’s somewhat surprising to see The Economist so blithe about the exigencies of execution here—typically the classical liberal/libertarian line here is to be skeptical of the efficacy of these types of big programs with grand interventions (they’re hard to execute the vision, they’re rife with unintended consequences, etc.). Here the problems are pretty obvious—it’s hard to get people to take drugs that consistently.

That’s a comment on everyone, by the by—ask a doctor, and the doctor will tell you it’s hard to get patients to do the right thing (by the doctor). This is one of the reasons we have an incipient antibiotics problem. But it’s also especially difficult to get people in developing countries to take drugs consistently, as the work of Esther Duflo shows. So aid to beat AIDS might have a positive effect, but I wouldn’t expect it to beat AIDS by any stretch of the imagination. We still haven’t beaten polio, and that’s something we have a vaccine for. Probably best to tone down the triumphalism a bit.

Linkism

2011-06-04T22:17:00.000-07:00

More cultural autonomy for Kurds in Turkey.

A multitasking car battery.

How many poor does India have, really? Also, India’s new forced school integration law for the poor.

China’s nostalgia for the just-past.

What happens to Egypt when the Nile runs dry?

Japanese corporations’ misguided acquisition strategies.

How effectively does Groupon leverage its size?

Health Care Brittleness

2011-06-04T15:48:00.001-07:00

Two stories—one on researchers finding a new kind of antibiotically-resistant MRSA (which is a nasty disease that tends to strike patients in hospital) and the other on that big E. coli outbreak in Europe (which is also resistant to antibiotics)—are worth following for what they say about our health system these days.

For one, it’s about globalization—researchers are worried about this new gene in MRSA because it’s at 1% of the population, because of its ability to multiply, propagate, and spread. (They found it in farm animals, which perhaps indicates its ability to spread easily from humans to animals back to humans again).

For two, it’s about our poor use of antibiotics, which we overuse like the rest of our health care interventions, which makes the subsequent problem all the worse.

We have a health care system for which most of the individual moves are rational but the final result isn’t. That’s poor incentives at work.

Linkism

2011-06-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

DoJ putting itself to good work and investigating some patent troll possibilities from the Nortel sales.

Huawei and its invisible, strange executives.

Water in China: the end of the Yangtze in Shanghai and assorted problems; and the drought consuming China and the impractical solution worse than the problem etc.

Australia: the new California? And is it suffering from economic complacency?

Regulation by investigation.

The craziness of doing business in Argentina.

Charter schools, integration and the middle class; also, a response and dwelling on KIPP schools.

Does cutting mental health increase the prison population?

Time to start fretting about carbon again.

Ah, Scandal

2011-06-03T19:26:00.001-07:00

The media is a continually surprising beast: it will obsess over stories that are utterly trivial, that everyone—including the people writing the stories—thinks are trivial, and it will obsess over it in the manner of a lovelorn teen, i.e. for days and days; and then it will ignore stories which are outrageous. Nothing breaking there, you might say: the media loves the salacious and hates the substantive. Except sometimes the salacious, the scandals are ignored too.

Consider the recently officially confirmed news that the Knicks were firing Donnie Walsh and (unofficially but all but certainly) replacing him with Isaiah Thomas. This is the easiest column-filler in all of sports, and yet there have been few. The most I’ve seen are a few resigned tweets. This is not the outrage we’re looking for: the Knicks are rehiring one of the worst GMs of all time in all sports, ever. It might be going too far to suggest Isaiah Thomas is one of the worst executives of anything ever, but I’m not sure how far past too far this suggestion is.

There must be a fascinating personality at the helm of the New York Knicks, to have resolved after spectacular failure to repeat the experiment with the exact same personality, and there is—James Dolan (and New York Magazine did a profile of him). Fascinating personalities, while they make for good stories, are not necessarily the best way to conduct business, which naturally raises the question why such a willfully, repeatedly incompetent owner is allowed to impose himself on the team for year after year, failure after same old failure.

This isn’t just Dolan, by the by—it’s Donald Sterling, it’s the owners of the Cincinnati Bengals, it’s so many teams at so many times. It’s something of a mockery of the notion of private sector efficiency and accountability, but then again the rich are different than you and I.

Still, it’s incredible just how different.

Intractable Problems watch: health care

2011-06-03T14:24:00.001-07:00

Health care reform is composed of several experiments each with their little conjectures. One of the favorite conjectures of liberal health care reformers was that insuring the uninsured would push the uninsured to primary care physicians and dentists early in the process, catching problems early, and stopping them from ever getting to the emergency department. That would have two good effects: obviously, cost-wise, would keep those nasty ER bills out of the system; second, it would relieve the pressure from an overburdened ER system, which might just mean better care for the people who really needed it.

Massachusetts was one of the first parts of the country to try health care, and an interesting study was just published from thereabouts:

Total visits increased from about 425,000 in the first nine months of 2006 to 442,000 over the same period in 2008 -- a four-percent rise.

When the researchers focused in on the visits that should have been most affected by reform -- visits they classified as "low severity" in people previously uninsured or underinsured -- they found a slight dip of 2.6 percent, from 186,000 visits in 2006 to 182,000 in 2008.

By definition, most people with "low severity" visits could have been treated by a primary care doctor.

The authors note in Annals of Emergency Medicine that even with insurance, some people may have trouble accessing primary care -- for example, if they work during the day and can only get medical help at night or on the weekend. Also, primary care doctors are in limited supply, and people may have trouble booking appointments, Smulowitz added.

"Access to health care is dependent on really more than switching you over to being insured," he said.

So like many intractable problems this turns out to be a problem with multiple deep roots. Massachusetts dealt with part of the problem and received a correspondingly low return (though I’d be interested to see a comparison here of how many emergency room visits they’d be expecting in a baseline scenario). The next stage is figuring out how to make more PCPs available to patients—primary care physicians being, of course, in shortage.

One proposal in the New England Journal of Medicine is to make more low-cost clinics available, particularly by combining them with academic centers. That sounds like a good idea. Also: more nurse-led clinics (and a corresponding regulatory lowering of rules that constrain the ability of nurses to practice independently or near-autonomously). Also: more importation of foreign doctors. Also: more medical schools. Lots of different tools needed.

Linkism

2011-06-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

Hollywood vs. the Internet and restrictive IP laws.

Couple of pieces on Nigeria: one on Goodluck Jonathan’s journey (and Presidential priorities); the other on its economic potential.

Asia’s new growth model; how real is China’s growth; China’s non-bank credit bubble. Also: China’s trash-to-energy landfills.

Ahmadinejad is in trouble: been accused of breaking the law in managing Iran’s oil by conservatives in Iran’s parliament; also, there’s some trouble over the killing of an activist.

Are secondary stock markets for pre-IPO companies the next new opportunity for fraud or abuse?

Africa surveys its science: they’re doing less of it.

More on the virulent E. Coli strain in Germany, presumably from Spanish cucumbers. (It’s antibiotically resistant, which is very worrying.)

Should we embrace competitive bidding in Medicare?

India’s food troubles:

“No one cares about the sell-by dates of bread,” one man commented. “What happens when the bread gets old in the village stalls? They fry it in oil and sell it as bread pakora instead.” In the 600,000 villages and towns in non-metropolitan India, I learned, none of the teeming hundreds of millions of residents cared about the mechanized processes and international standards of hygiene that would allow India to join the industrialized nations in their eating habits.

Perhaps that is because those hundreds of millions have more fundamental concerns when it comes to food. The enthusiasm for expiration dates at the Summit must seem peculiar to the poor in a country where 43 percent of children under the age of five are malnourished. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 28 percent; it’s 7 percent in China, to which India is so often compared. The Indian government’s own data show that 800 million Indians live on about twenty rupees (about $0.50) a day. Half of those are farmers who produce food that they, for the most part, cannot afford to eat thanks to the demands of speculators and affluent urban consumers.

Privilege

2011-06-01T19:01:00.001-07:00

Every four years, someone publishes a column advocating an end to the Iowa/New Hampshire duopoly at the beginning of the primary season for all of the usual reasons—the people of those states aren’t particularly reflective of the U.S. as a whole, etc. etc.—and typically it’s debated halfheartedly before it’s dropped. It’s the political column equivalent of complaining about people who don’t return calls or people who don’t cover their mouths before sneezing or whatever: true but deeply boring.

In this case it’s deeply boring, because, well: when’s the last time someone has willingly voted him-/herself out of power? It’s been quite a long while, has it not? Officially Iowa/New Hampshire have no power to guarantee themselves at the front of the line, so I suppose Republicans and Democrats could just decide to move the calendar around, but from their perspective is it really worth all the fuss? No, probably not.

The more insidious privilege at the heart of American government is the Senate, of course.

The management of strangeness

2011-06-01T18:56:00.000-07:00

The unfortunate part about writing a novel that’s supposed to be about an askew, weird version of the real world is maintaining the feeling. Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me is as good an example as any: a novel about a fading model getting into a car crash and having to have her face completely reconstructed, it deals with the weird as consistently as any novel I’ve read in a while. Through the first half it detaches the reader to read, the occurrences and particularly the coincidences and memories, of a world that’s not quite right.

The central mysterious character is alternately called “Z” or “Michael West,” and he spends most of the novel trying to fit in: he’s constantly watching TV in order to pick up the inflections and words, and generally occupying the space just outside the center of characters’ attention while voraciously trying to figure out how to fit into a particular world he dislikes. (Meanwhile he’s being investigated by a private detective and the model for various reasons, though he successfully stays a few steps ahead of them throughout the novel.)

The trouble with sustaining a mystery, or even just a feeling of weirdness and abnormality is that you want things to seem just a little bit off: not so crazy so as to seem there are no rules whatsoever, but enough so that it’s unsettling. The trouble is that if you ever explain what the rules really are, it all becomes normal and not unsettling at all. Z turns out to be a would-be terrorist (he gives up that ambition), which is kind of a distressingly usual narrative solution to the problem. Blah; too normal. (The novel, in of itself, is a great set up with a typical punchline—one of those postmodern critiques of image and consumerism and what-have-you. The model becomes a reality TV star of a sort. Ultimately the novel isn’t Egan’s best, but it’s not bad. Would recommend A Visit From The Goon Squad or The Keep well above Look At Me, ultimately.)

Explanations tend to murder stories of this sort. Another favorite example of this is A History of Violence, which features Viggo Mortensen as a small-town badass who beats up a bunch of thugs and gets national attention for it—only to attract the wrong sort of attention, i.e. someone from his past who insists he knows Mortensen very well (and his history of violence, natch) despite Mortensen’s insistent protests to the contrary. As it turns out Mortensen was lying and he did know the guy; in fact, Mortensen used to be a gangster (in Philadelphia, no less—the only detail of the story that’s surprising or original.) What was an interesting story turns into just another gangster story—it moves from the unusual to the ordinary. You can do the other way around (for an example that didn’t quite work out in practice, though the principle is fine: American Gangster is a gangster story about black people), but you can’t pique people’s expectations only to resolve them in a typical way.

Linkism

2011-05-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

WSJ declares war on hypertension (and that we’re winning too).

Esquire profiles John Lasseter, whose company—it’s called Pixar—you might know well.

What Netflix and Amazon might be able to tell us about fighting poverty.

Ancient Roman ship may have had fish tank.

First quantum computer sold?

The intolerable choices of the Eurozone.

Fascinating reading about the changes coming to the air fleet of the Department of Defense (doubling the number of drones).

How other countries teach the teachers.

Islands for sale!: in Greece and Scotland.

Driverless cars and American decline.

Ariel Levy of New Yorker crushes a profile of Silvio Berluconi.

GOP Governors and the exchanges. Also:

Health Care Fatalism

2011-05-31T21:44:00.001-07:00

The New Republic has posted an article that argues for fatalism in American health care—rather than fighting an unwinnable war against disease (like, say, a war against drugs or terrorism), the health care system should become more modest about what it can achieve:

In 1959, the great biologist René Dubos wrote a book called Mirage of Health, in which he pointed out that “complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream remembered from imaginings of a Garden of Eden.” But, in the intervening decades, his admonition has largely been ignored by both doctors and society as a whole. For nearly a century, but especially since the end of World War II, the medical profession has been waging an unrelenting war against disease—most notably cancer, heart disease, and stroke. The ongoing campaign has led to a steady and rarely questioned increase in the disease-research budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It has also led to a sea change in the way Americans think about medicine in their own lives: We now view all diseases as things to be conquered. Underlying these changes have been several assumptions: that medical advances are essentially unlimited; that none of the major lethal diseases is in theory incurable; and that progress is economically affordable if well managed.

But what if all this turns out not to be true? What if there are no imminent, much less foreseeable cures to some of the most common and most lethal diseases? What if, in individual cases, not all diseases should be fought? What if we are refusing to confront the painful likelihood that our biological nature is not nearly as resilient or open to endless improvement as we have long believed?

The argumentation and examples used are very tight, so I’ll refrain from excerpting deeper in the piece at all—it just wouldn’t be fair to the writers. The general idea is familiar to people who’ve read a fair bit about health care—that the American health care system is drastically inefficient—but the conclusion is not (essentially, that we should surrender to fate and make our accommodations.)

This kind of attitude makes some sense in some occasions. Cancer, for example, is an area you have to wonder about the appropriateness of the heavy artillery brought against it: we have complex, expensive drugs that are used to prolong life often for a matter of weeks, which are often unpleasantly spent in a hospital bed, drugged and insensate. Atul Gawande has argued convincingly for the virtues of hospice care in instances such as these.

Overall, however, I take a radical approach. Some reformers (including the authors) would be happy with restricting the growth of health care to the growth of GDP; I actively believe in cuts: that is, we should be able to spend less in real terms and realize more in gains than we are at the current moment. Part of this is an incentive problem—that is, incentivizing doctors to provide good care rather than high-volume care. But part of this is, interestingly, a technology problem. As the authors note, technology is a funny thing in health care: like the health care system in general, it delivers results of uncertain value for a very high price. But it’s possible to imagine breakthroughs that would be more like computer-industry breakthroughs—things like artificial organs (as they note, the cost of dialysis is highly expensive, without getting into the quality of life issues) are an excellent example. And that’s the sort of thing that requires research dollars and developmental effort—it requires, in essence, the sort of sacrifice and dead-end straining that the authors seem to be critical of in the article. And that is a truly interesting problem. I’ll break my little rule earlier and excerpt something:

Vannevar Bush, ascientific advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously said that science is an “endless frontier.” He was right then and that is still true now. But scientific progress to extend that frontier is not an endlessly affordable venture. Health care, like the exploration of outer space, will always be open to progress, but we understand that putting humans on Mars is not at present economically sensible. We have settled for a space station and the Hubble telescope. We must now comparably scale down our ambitions for medicine, setting new priorities in light of the obstacles we have encountered.

But of course science research and the allocated dollars don’t quite work the way that Mars does. Uncertainty is the relevant factor: we often discover things we weren’t thinking we’d discover (say, penicillin), or discover things after a long, seemingly-futile effort. If we were to give up now, we’d be accepting what we have for a long time. Is that acceptable? I don’t think so. On the other hand, the endless fealty to the newest intervention available gives you the cancer drug that gives you three more weeks of life. Maybe someday, if we cure a significant type of cancer, we look back on one of those horribly expensive, ineffective cures as a prerequisite for that total cure, but maybe we don’t. We just don’t know. I do think that there is a lot of waste and expense in the system—particularly administrative costs—that can be wrung out. Maybe that’s a good way of bypassing both sides of a difficult debate.

Budget Cutting

2011-05-31T15:05:00.001-07:00

Ah, deficit reduction:

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed the state legislature’s appropriations for the Kansas Arts Commission, enforcing an executive order he signed in February eliminating the commission—and all five commission members’ jobs. Brownback plans to replace the commission with a private foundation, but his actions, taken over the legislature’s objections, make Kansas the only state without an arts agency. As the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies noted, that $689,000 targeted in the veto was a whopping 0.005 percent of the state’s budget, and it’s not as if it’s trading off with other programs. The budget the legislature approved would have created a $50 million budget surplus next year before Brownback’s additional cuts.

This is a very obvious example of a common mindset of deficit hawks, which is that they’re often more interested in cutting stuff they don’t like than deficits per se. That’s fine, obviously—there’s a bunch of stuff in budgets at all levels of government that I’d like to cut irrespective of its budgetary impact—but you’d hope deficit hawks would be more forthright about their goals, aspirations and desires in this.

(The other easy example is the budget-cutting debate in Washington: a balanced budget-cutting debate would target the Department of Defense, the tax code, farm subsidies, etc., etc. rather than the single-minded focus on Medicare that we see today.)

Linkism

2011-05-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

Can managed care save Medicaid?

Wonderful: the Facebook comments of people who take The Onion articles seriously.

The early history of HIV/AIDS. (what a remarkable picture at the top of the article, too.)

Are physicians moving left politically (as a consequence of selling their practices and becoming hospital employees)?

Examining skyrocketing executive pay.

More on the possibilities of driverless cars.

China’s food inflation culprits.

Russia’s nanotechnology plans.

The writers of Groupon.

Can Spain stand the shock to its economy from the European cucumber crisis?

Take The Ball And Go Home

2011-05-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

It’s good when the right people are angry:

The administration plans to establish “Medicare spending per beneficiary” as a new measure of hospital performance, just like the mortality rate for heart attack patients and the infection rate for surgery patients.

Hospitals could be held accountable not only for the cost of the care they provide, but also for the cost of services performed by doctors and other health care providers in the 90 days after a Medicare patient leaves the hospital.

This plan has drawn fire from hospitals, which say they have little control over services provided after a patient’s discharge — and, in many cases, do not even know about them.

Well, uh, why not find out?

The article goes on to cite a pretty archetypal example of an older woman getting hip replacement surgery and later developing an infection and having to be readmitted to the hospital. A certain amount of this is probably inevitable, but on the other hand shoddy practices are fairly rampant in hospitals nationwide. That’s what hospitals have control over, what they’ll have to cut down on if these penalties have any force, and what might eventually deliver better, cheaper care. (Unfortunately, the Times article contrasts efficiency vs. quality of care, which is such a tired and false dichotomy I’m very tired of seeing in print: I mean, are they thinking about their own example? Stipulate that, on average, better care could prevent readmissions. That means that higher quality care would lead to lower costs for the system, fairly directly. Everyone wins—well, except the hospitals. Which is why the article quotes so many angry hospital people. Which is a good thing—they should be angry.)

I did, however, find it interesting which hospital people were angry and which were not. The pacific hospital person hails from an Iowa association of hospitals. Now I’m not positively sure in this instance, but the Upper Midwest—particularly Minnesota—has a great reputation for lower cost, higher-quality care as a consequence of their medical culture, and so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Iowa scores highly on the administration’s rubric and might therefore expect to see some monetary gains from the scheme.

But for all the winners there will be losers, and all of the losers will squeal, at least at first. Making sure the losers don’t change the rules of the game to turn themselves into winners is a critical political duty for the Obama administration bureaucrats. Good luck.