January 30, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:So I saw this on Mark Kleiman's blog, alleging that Shrub is now dying his hair even though he made fun of Gore doing the same thing. Which would be pretty damn silly.
Well, my first thought was "He's dying his hair gray?" Because I'd just watched him on the State of the Union, and I recalled it as pretty, y'know, gray. Not any color that comes in a bottle, as far as I know. The picture in the first link looks pretty damning. But then there are these:
They all seem to indicate that his hair is indeed gray, although of course I picked the ones that looked grayest. Lest you think I have too much time on my hands, I point out that these are from the first page of photos you get when you search on State of the Union.
Pictures are valuable, but not invaluable -- it's very hard to compare colors, for example, as anyone who's ever shopped from a catalog knows. So I think it's probably a bit of silliness caused by a trick of the light. The author appears to take it very seriously, as do the commenters -- they were discussing emailing Frank Bruni last I checked. Left and right: you have taken leave of your senses when you are trying to interest journalists, or the reading public, in the question of the president's dye job. And that's all I have to say on the matter; you'll all have to decide for yourselves whether our president is the kind of shameless hussy who dyes his hair.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. . .
Couldn't resist this item from Reason Express, partly because I enjoy all the email I get when I defend Microsoft, and partly because the SCO servers I've worked with are, hands down, the worst pieces of equipment I've ever seen:
It was inevitable that that the raucous glee with which anti-Microsoft techies cheered on the Justice Department's antitrust pursuit of the software giant would come back to haunt them. But who knew the karmic payback would be so literal?
Former anti-Microsoft bulldog David Boies has now been retained to put the screws to the Linux/Unix community. One branch of the Unix world -- SCO Group -- has Boies tracking down supposed violations of its proprietary versions of the business operation system.
It hasn't taken very long for professionals in the field to note that SCO's products haven't been very successful and that the legal route is a poor substitute for actually building something people want.
This, of course, is exactly the kind of thing which could be said -- and was, by some -- of Netscape, Sun, IBM, and the whole crew running to the feds over Microsoft's supposed violations. The point, then as now, is that bigfoot law is a tremendously clumsy thing to use to address the fluid market dynamics
of the software industry.
For those who invited Boies into the techie boutique while he was at Justice, the sound you hear now is a large, masculine bovine trampling all your fine porcelain.
From the desk of Jane Galt:This fact sheet says hydrogen's not explosive. But I seem to recall long explanations from people who ought to know that in an accident, hydrogen tanks would explode & kill the occupants of the vehicles: that safe storage was one of the key problems facing the engineers of hydrogen cars. Can my engineering/chemist people comment?
From the desk of Jane Galt:So Salon's got this new advertising plan: if you click through an ad, thus reassuring the advertiser you're actually eyeballing the thing, you can access Salon Premium.
Who's their first advertiser? Mercedes-Benz.
Huh? I mean, given my current employment situation, I'm not in their demographic. Nor, I suspect, are most of the other people who use it. If you're too cheap to pay $30 for Salon Premium, what are the odds you can afford an E-Class?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Josh Marshall, no apologist for the Bush Administration, has an absolutely stunning interview with Ken Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Everyone, for or against, should go read it.
January 29, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Standing ovation
Chris Caldwell has a great bit on the Democratic applause problem:
Whether they're subtle or ham-handed, applause lines demand snap judgments from congressmen of the nonpresidential party, who must navigate between the Scylla of l�se-pr�sident and the Charybdis of treason to the party. Under Clinton, the Republican rule was: When in doubt, clap. Under Bush, the Democratic rule is: When in doubt, don't. The Republicans method looks better on TV. Democrats, by just sitting on their asses, implied disagreement with some pretty popular proposals:"... end the practice of partial birth abortion." (Subliminal message glum-faced Democrats gave voters: But we love partial-birth abortion.)
"... field a defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles." (Who wants to be protected against missile attacks, anyway?)
Come to think of it, the Republican clap-for-everything rule was hard-learned wisdom. It was Gingrich, if I rightly recall, who alerted GOPers that the phrase "affordable health care" was not an occasion for rolled eyes and sniggering.
From the desk of Jane Galt:So what does Jane think of the State of the Union?
Well, long-time readers will know that I think micro-initiatives are the death of civic society by a thousand cuts. On the other hand, if you must have micro-initiatives, these weren't all that bad. AIDS in Africa? Yeah, that's nice. Rebuild Afghanistan? I'm on board. Faith-based initiatives? I doubt they'll work, but it doesn't get my knickers in a twist about the separation of church and state, either.
Prescription drug plans -- AAAAACK! But we already knew that was coming.
On the other side, I will withold public comment on the merits, but dang, he sure do talk purty. Clinton didn't make a memorable speech I can think of, after "It's the economy stupid" (well, I guess "I did not have sex with that woman" and "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" were memorable, but not in any way Democrats or Republicans would care to dwell on). He put it all over through personality. Bush isn't much of a public speaker, and he's awful off the cuff -- but he puts it right in the groove when it counts, and he's not afraid to hire speech makers who will take a couple rhetorical risks now and again.
The Dems did not cover themselves in glory. Between sitting when they should have stood, standing when they should have sat, and getting a guy who reminds everyone of their nice-but-ineffective eighth grade social studies teacher to deliver the response, they made a hash out of it. On the other hand, I guess politically they're between a rock and a hard place. Nonetheless, I think "Pick a direction and go in it" is a better political strategy than "flail wildly". The president outflanked 'em again -- every time I think he's dropping the ball, it turns out he's just biding his time. Whether or not you like the guy, you have to admire his political instincts: completely different from Clinton's, but at least as effective, if not more so.
They've got nothing to take to the public in 2004. And you could see on their faces that they knew it. Nancy Pelosi tried to pull it out with some faux-snotty-disbelief head shaking, but it just went to show that since Clinton, the party's political instincts have completely atrophied. She's no longer just the representative of a district whose residents are certain to be shaking their heads along with her, telling everyone else in the room what a perfidious liar the president is. She's now part of the national face of the party, expected to appeal to people outside of California's reflexive liberals. Those people have seen the same look on their teenager's face when the subject of, say, taking out the garbage comes up, and they don't find it endearing.
John Edwards and Joe Lieberman had the sense to look thoughtful, even when Edwards took it on the chin with that trial lawyers remark, and Lieberman even congratulated the President after the speech. The rest of the Democratic presidential hopefuls looked like sore losers at the awards banquet. And yes, Hillary, you didn't need to be much of a lip reader to see you whispering "[expletive deleted]" in Joe Lieberman's ear.
Overall, it was a pretty good speech. Not FDR-level good, but good. And if the Democrats are smart, they'll start trying to pull themselves together instead of, as I expect they will, whining about Bush.
January 27, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Incentives Matter
Very nice piece on New York's absurb rent control laws from William Tucker.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Ampersand has a very interesting post on the "Absent Fat Person" -- the way that movies and TV use fat suits to make thin actors fat. He argues that they do this in order to keep us from being made uncomfortable by laughing at a real fat person, which would be mean, not funny.
I think he's right about that, although I think he gives it too much importance. Fat kids have been made fun of from time immemorial -- was it Chaucer, or one of his contemporaries, who has the long series about the fat priest? Most people associate extreme overweight with extreme forms of the same behaviors as those that make the rest of us gain weight -- eating too much and not moving. Whether that's fair or not, as long as self-control is prized, there will be a stigma attached to the external evidence of its absence.
From the desk of Jane Galt:One of the nice things about being me is that I get all these mass political emails. I just got one from the Democrats headlined "What do YOU think the State of the Union is?".
I'm so glad to be able to help out my Democratic friends. Personally, I think your party should have told you about it sooner, certainly before they spring a pop-quiz on you. But I suppose that's an internal manner you'll have to deal with. Anyway, here's the answer:
The State of the Union is an address, given by American presidents per the Constitution, at Article II, Section 3. Woodrow Wilson instituted the modern practice of delivering it to congress in person. It takes place in late January. In this address, the president lays out the major issues and achievements of the nation for the past twelve months, and outlines any plans he may have for addressing major areas of concern.
Now when you get the quiz, you'll at least have the first answer in your pocket. No, don't thank me. I'm a giver.
From the desk of Jane Galt:You know, I like Mark Kleiman's blog a lot, but sometimes he just revolts me.
January 26, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Kevin Drum offers a first-hand account of Schumpeter's creative destruction.
He also asks a question I happen to know the answer to:
Yesterday Amazon reported fourth quarter results: revenues of $1.4 billion — up from last year — and a tiny profit of $3 million — down from last year. And of course there was also the usual "pro forma" malarky: we would have earned $75 million if we didn't have to, you know, follow normal accounting rules and all.This has gotten ridiculous. Amazon is the biggest and most successful of the Internet retailers, and yet they can't show more than a microscopic profit at an annual run rate of nearly $6 billion. If you can't manage a profit at that level, when can you?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the amortization of a large capital asset base over a low-margin highly competitive business, and the crushing high interest debt they took on back when network effects were going to enable everyone to make money without working. Back in 2001, my more skeptical professors, and me, were pretty doubtful that they would ever manage to turn a profit. That they have done so for two quarters running in a potentially deflationary recession is actually, in my humble opinion, kind of impressive.
While we're talking about items on CalPundit's page, he comments on the dismissal of the fast food lawsuit, which I've been meaning to comment on, because as you may or may not be aware, I wrote an article predicting such lawsuites way back in May. He points out, correctly, that it was dismissed as the majority of frivolous suits. That is not, however, necessarily a reason to sit back in satisfaction that the threat has passed.
The anti-tobacco suits used to be just such frivolous suits. The immunity of tobacco from lawsuits was black letter law -- a number of textbooks and important cases cited it specifically as being immune from suit.
What changed? Well, class actions came along and verdicts began to get a whole lot bigger. That made companies prone to settle even bad lawsuits, because even though the odds were small of getting a bad verdict, the result of doing so wwould be catastrophic -- just ask Dow Corning.
Judges also got more reluctant to fulfill that gatekeeper function, throwing out suits. There is more tendency now to let the jury decide, even when the jury lacks the legal or scientific background to make an informed decision. That allowed tobacco lawsuits to be brought, even though historically they had been thrown out.
The advent of class actions had another effect: it allowed small groups of people to amass truly massive sums of money. White shoe lawfirms make a lot of money, but their income is limited by the fact that their business model isn't really scalable -- their income is limited by the number of hours they can bill in a year. Trial lawyers who win a class action lawsuit, on the other hand, can end up with a payoff that equates to an effective rate of thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars an hour. The only other professionals I can think of off hand who are compensated like that are investment bankers. That money becomes a war chest to pursue the next suit, which is how asbestos money funded breast implants and tobacco suits and will now, if the soil looks fertile, be poured into the pursuit of fast food lawsuits. It will fund studies by "nonpartisan consumer groups", pay for PR firms, and most importantly, be poured into campaigns to elect sympathetic legislators to change the law, as they did in many states to make the tobacco suits possible. Campaign funds will also go to the kind of judges who like to "let the jury decide". If you notice the jurisdictions where bumper verdicts get handed out in any sort of civil suit, from personal injury, to medical malpractice to class actions, they tend to share a couple of characteristics: a large number of unemployed people to staff the jury pools, and elected judges.
So the fact that one suit has been dismissed does not mean that they all will be. John Banzhaf, the law professor who drove the tobacco lawsuits and has made the fast food industry his next target, has announced that he wants to file suit elsewhere. You can bet he'll find a more sympathetic forum, like Madison County, where the judges won't be so quick to dismiss his arguments.
Anyway, I could go on forever, but it would probably be more practical for you to just go read Kevin's excellent blog.
January 24, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Compared to What?
Agencies predict human disaster in Iraq
The real question is: Would the majority of these poor folks be better off if there is no military action against Iraq?
This is very reminiscent of pre-Afghanistan predictions, and not entirely consistent with the ongoing complaints about sanctions.
Sometimes all your options suck.
January 23, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Holy Smokes, Ice on Manhattan's waterways! I haven't seen that in a long time.
Note to tabloids and others: Draw ridiculous inferences about global climate change.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Fahrverboten
I've been looking at replacements for the Dreckmobile. I drive almost 20,000 miles a year, so I like a comfortable car with a good sound system and a low noise floor. And I want it to last 100,000 miles without turning into a shivering, creaking disaster.
Several of my prior cars have been of German make. I have never owned a French car, and can't think of a reason why I should, purely on the merits of the product. German cars, however, are often attractive and fun to drive, although not as reliable as the Japanese competition.*
Now I'm considering ruling out German makes as well.
"Consultation" with NATO allies always meant permission, and permission was never forthcoming. It's funny that the Germans and French lecture the U.S. about the wisdom of heeding them and keeping them happy. They're willing to tolerate all sort of misbehavior by others without repercussion, so why do they think we might worry about consequences of our decision on Iraq? (Well, they might accuse us of being "inappropriate" or call someone a [expletive deleted])
My actions are, of course, inconsequential (and Germans are virtually certain not to listen to a person named "Dreck"). However, if public sentiment here were to move heavily against Germany it would certainly be economically devastating for Europe. France and Germany's actions could provoke a backlash in a way that Japan never did. People will grasp these events much more firmly than previous boycott justifications such as dumping, cheap labor or Europe's ridiculous phobia about genetically engineered crops.
Furthermore, if it's shown and publicized that France and Germany have been selling weapons-related equipment to Iraq, as Steven Den Beste speculates, I expect many Americans to react viscerally.
Cessation of trade wouldn't be good for us either, but perhaps it would constitute the magical "sacrifice" everyone's been looking for.
* One thing the Germans can't do is ergonomics. Thousands of tiny cryptic (and beautifully machined) buttons stashed all over the cockpit make selecting a radio station more like adjusting a polygraph. Try to hit the blinker and reset your cruise control. Design by Committee.
January 22, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Another correspondant forwards this article and asks whether there's anything to it. Apparently, some are arguing that executives at companies whose stock pays dividends are less likely to dump their stock.
Well, it makes intuitive sense, largely because executives with large stock holdings in dividend-paying company stock are less likely to need to dump their stock. Non-dividend paying stocks enrich their holders through appreciation in the stock price -- the perfectly innocent executive who merely wants some cash to buy a house, or diversify his portfolio, has to sell company stock to get it.
It would also, I think, reduce the incentive to dump, because it's harder for the executive to generate a big run up in the stock price; dividend-paying stocks are generally less volatile for a number of reasons.
But it's hardly definitive proof. For one thing, you have to remember that dividend-paying stocks are very different kinds of companies, from non-payers. And for another, a company in trouble may have stopped paying dividends before the executives dumped. Nonetheless, an interesting read.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Tax Cheats?
One of Asymmetrical Information's moles forwards this item from Businessweek:
A sure-to-be-contentious issue in the Jan. 28 confirmation hearings for Treasury Secretary nominee John Snow: His company, railroad giant CSX, didn't pay any federal income taxes for two of the years when he sat at the controls.CSX took deductions on depreciation of capital investments relating to its acquisition of Conrail and didn't pay taxes in 1998 and 2001, says spokesman Adam Hollingsworth. Indeed, Uncle Sam refunded CSX more than $50 million in each of those years.
While this is not unusual for capital-intensive companies, some lawmakers feel it's unseemly for a Cabinet official. Watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice director Robert McIntyre says it makes Snow a "corporate freeloader." CSX counters that it paid taxes 9 out of the 11 years that Snow was the chairman.
The issue may spark fireworks, but it's unlikely to derail the nomination. Insiders say that Snow has been charming members of the Senate Finance Committee behind the scenes. "While we're not taking anything for granted, we've not been made aware of any serious concerns with his confirmation," reports Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols.
As my correspondant says:
Note the Al Gore-like, "some lawmakers feel..." followed by a quote from...a liberal lobbying group! . . .
To paraphrase Roman Weil's quote on WorldCom, "This is stuff we do in the [seventh] week [of intro accounting]!" My wife (who did corporate taxes for six years at Deloitte and Touche) read the article and concluded that CTJ is advocating CSX ignore the tax code. To put it another way, if Bush nominated a homeless man for Treasury Secretary, CTJ would be all over him for not paying income taxes.
This is a very silly article, and especially in Businessweek, which is generally a very sharp publication.
I'm willing to bet that CSX didn't just take depreciation allowances in the years it didn't pay any taxes, but in the years it did. I'm willing to bet it took them every year. Depreciation, for those of you who have always wondered, is how companies with capital assets expense the wear and tear on those assets. The basic idea of financial statements is that they should fairly and accurately represent the value of the company, to the extent that such a thing can be fairly and accurately represented in this imperfect world. Now, every year, capital assets generally become less valuable. Buildings are one year closer to being condemned or torn down to make way for a Multiplex. Computers are one year closer to not being able to run the next version of whatever OS they're on. Machinery is one year closer to breaking down from accumulated wear and tear. The financial statements should show this loss of value. That's what depreciation is: the loss of asset value over the course of the year.
Now, since it's a little hard to get the accountants to go down and calculate exactly how rundown your buildings are, how obsolete your computers have become, or how much wear and tear your machinery has experienced, assets are depreciated on a depreciation schedule: each type of asset basically has a table telling you what percentage of its value it loses each year. Thus computers are depreciated on something like a 3-year schedule, while machinery and equipment can depreciate over 20 or 40 years.
Thus, we can be fairly sure that CSX, whose assets are composed of highly depreciable physical plant like rails and cars, took substantial depreciation every year.
But how did they get money back, I hear you cry!
How did you get money back from the government last year, even though you'd lost your job and weren't going to pay any tax this year? You crook, you.
The answer is, you'd overpaid your previous year's taxes.
In the case of CSX it's more complicated. They probably used an NOL carry -- a Net Operating Loss credit.
A company's taxes are based on a snapshot -- roughly, the net cash position of the company over 12 months. But such a snapshot can be wildly inaccurate. Say they get a big contract with a juicy cash payment in December. They have to pay taxes on that. Now say that contract runs for the next year and goes over budget and costs them a bundle. You've taxed them on a profit they didn't really make. That's not only unfair -- it could push them out of business. Not what the government wants, no matter what the fellows at the local Chamber of Commerce lunch say after they've gotten into the Molson.
So companies can apply this year's Net Operating Losses -- the losses that they took on their regular business operations (not their financing activities, such as loans or stock sales; or their capital investment, like buying the railcars they exploit to get those juicy depreciation allowances) against earnings in other years. These losses can, if memory serves, be carried forward as many as three years, or back as many as one. This helps to smooth the tax picture, so that companies are in the long run paying taxes on the money they actually earned, rather than the distorted picture one might get from the calendar year.
At this juncture, I've undoubtedly got more than a few readers wearing a sarcastic expression and saying "If it's such a good idea for companies, how come I can't do it?"
Well, because if you have a couple of bad years, the government will make sure you have a roof over your head and something to eat. It doesn't do the same for the companies it puts out of business -- or so we lightheartedly hope.
And saying that it's "unseemly for a cabinet official" not to have paid taxes in a year when his company didn't make any profits. . . well, I thought the folks who write for Businessweek were supposed to know something about, y'know, business.
You know, Businessweek, it occurs to me . . . I know something about business. And I'm available. For very reasonable rates.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Scott Rosenberg wonders if the deflation we may be facing is due to cheap Chinese production.
Umm. No.
That's good deflation -- deflation produced by the higher productivity of comparitive advantage. In other words, it actually costs less, in total resources, to make something in China than in the US; therefore, prices fall. We've had that sort of deflation in all sorts of industries forever, and it doesn't cause the kind of deflation that economists worry about. The computer industry is the best example of this, but there are many, many others. Moreover, we've been importing from China, and before that Japan, for decades -- no deflation. Finally, trade is a relatively small part of the US economy.
The kind of deflation that economists worry about is the kind that is caused by a mismatch between the supply of money and the demand for it. Specifically, people want to hold more money and spend less, so you need more money in circulation. The problem is that, like hyperinflation, deflationary expectations can actually create more deflation -- people expect prices to fall, and therefore they want to hold onto their money longer. Manufacturers have to cut prices to sell their goods, which confirms the expectations and makes people hold their money longer. . .
Just create more money, you say? Would that it were so easy. The primary vehicle for money creation in the US is not the printing press, but the banks, which create money by extending credit. (I'm simplifying like hell here; if someone thinks I've simplified too far, feel free to email and let me know.) Part of severe deflation is usually that the banks don't want to create credit, because continued deflation makes it less like that people will be able to repay. At the same time, even if they wanted to create credit, people don't want to borrow, because deflation means they will have to repay their loans in dollars that would buy more tomorrow than they will today -- you'd need a hell of a lucrative opportunity to borrow in cheap dollars in order to repay with more expensive ones.
If the deflation is severe, banks will stop lending entirely, because the real interest rate gets unhinged from lending risk. The real interest rate is the rate of interest adjusted for inflation: if inflation is 2%, and you're paying 5% on your house, the real interest rate is 3%, while the nominal rate is 5%. Now, if the inflation rate is -3%, a real interest rate of 3% means that the bank would just give you the money, and you'd pay them back when you get around to it. But why would they do that? You might default -- whereas if they stick the money in their vaults, perfectly safe, they'll get the same return without the risk. So as nominal interest rates approach zero, banks have no incentive to lend at all. (This is very rare.) That's the supply side problem. The demand side problem is that if the banks charge a rate above what would otherwise be the market-clearing real interest rate in order to adjust for risk, people will find the loans too expensive and decline to borrow. The mechanism for generating money starts to break down. So just when you want the banks to be lending like crazy to stimulate demand, they lose their incentive to do so.
No one's really figured out how to end deflation, except have World War II, which doesn't seem very practical. Japan's tried Keynsian stimulus -- it failed. It's tried any manner of schemes to stimulate demand -- no go. Possibly some of the solutions that haven't been tried would work, but since the reason they haven't been tried is that they're politically untenable, that's not very helpful.
So no, we don't want deflation. Unless you're the sort of person who was so moved by your grandparents' tales of how desperately poor -- but cheerful and plucky! -- they were in the Great Depression that you'd like to give it a try yourself. But if we do get it, you can't blame it on trade.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Cat. Bag. Out.
Attention, fellow members of the VRWC: Wil Wilkinson has betrayed us!:
The Kochs, Coors', Scaifes, and a few other plutocrats gather secretly in the immense inner sanctum (mounted heads of endangered species dot the redwood paneled walls) of their undetectable mountain escape (each attended, naturally, by his own eight year old, third world, hunchbacked, spiritually broken, manservant) and outline a unified strategy for political domination. They put the word out (through special encrypted satellite telephones) to their Machiavellian savant operatives, who forthwith erect institutions in Washington. These institutions hire raving ideologues whose task it is to create carefully crafted propaganda cleverly disguised as "research," which they then feed to their allies in the media (who slyly camouflage themselves by propagating a myth--through the devious use of "studies" and "polls"--that the media is overwhelmingly Democrat), who then disseminate this misinformation to the minds of Americans everywhere, thereby creating "conventional wisdom", false consciousness, and Republican majorities.
From the desk of Jane Galt:I'm about to get shot, but. . .
Harold Pinter's latest is not a bad poem. The intellect it betrays is, of course, shallow and nasty and trapped in an adolescent attachment to utopian power-fantasies, but the poem itself is not bad; better than much of Pinter's work.
It's not all that good, either, mind you. For one thing, it goes from not-so-cryptic Crusade imagery, tied into "Praise America's God", to an extended singing metaphor without a direct reference to hymns. It hurts the poem. A one-line reference would both round out the poem, and make it immediately comprehensible in the way that a poem needs to be to be great. Mind you, the best poems are layered and textured -- but the surface of a poem must immediately strike you and grip the mind, or else the layers never work their way into your heart. The lack of an obvious transition loses the momentum he builds up with his striking introduction, and he never gets it back. The sharp contrasts he tries to draw don't make the emotional impact he's trying for because you've just spend three seconds out of the poem, wondering how we got from a to b, before your brain said "Oh, right, hymns" and moved on.
Most of his images are, alas, thoroughly recycled, but his writing is terse and workmanlike. I've read a great deal many worse poems.
I suspect that Pinter couldn't wait to get this out there. He will regret it; the poem betrays the hurry. It will last longer as a political curiosity than as a poem, which is always regrettable. Of course, if he waited much longer, and America invades Iraq and comes back with pictures of tortured baby Kurds from the Saddaam archives, the poem might not go over so well. As we learned in business school, often time-to-market trumps quality.
And doesn't that really tell you all you need to know about the effect his politics are having on Pinter's poetic legacy?
From the desk of Jane Galt:CalPundit has a nice little tribute to Virginia Heinlein, Robert Heinlein's wife and the inspiration for many of the women in his books. If you're a Heinlein baby like me, this means something to you. Otherwise. . . well, later I'll be posting about taxes.
January 21, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Historical Allusion Missed By Gunman
UPDATE: Good God! What is happening to this peaceful university town?
Some news of Suburban "Packs not Herds" in The Princeton Packet (article not on-line). An article describes an unusual carjacking in Princeton yesterday, right on the corner of the University campus:
Rosemary O'Connell, 61, of New York City parked her gray 1992 Mercury Topaz sedan on Nassau Street outside CVS...While Ms. O'Connell sat in her unlocked car applying the makeup at 12:30PM, a man in his 30s entered the car and calmly told her to stay in the car, Lt. Reading said.
The woman, fearing the man had a weapon, jumped out of the car while he was still talking to her...
...Several pedestrians and motorists tried to prevent the man's escape in the car, but to no avail, Lt. Reading said.
An off-duty Trenton fire-fighter jumped in front of the vehicle but was knocked out of the way...
...R. William Potter, an attorney, was heading back to his Nassau Street Office when he heard the victim screaming for help. He ran alongside the car up to Vandeventer Avenue, trying to flag it down...
..A dump truck tried to cut off the fleeing car, but the driver maneuvered around the truck.
OK, so they're a suburban pack. They made the old college try and failed, but good for them for trying!
This hardly matches the best Princeton crime story of all time, in which an elderly historian stands up to a gun-wielding bank robber:
Princeton had an armed bank robbery in 1999 - right where yesterday's carjacking took place. One of the burglars jumped into the car of a well-known local man, Lucius Wilmerding -
News articles reported that the remaining robber fled with another hostage and met up with an accomplice in the parking lot behind the bank. Racing from the scene, the two crashed their car into a stone wall about one mile north of Nassau Street and one block from where Lucius was escorting his friend to the car. The two robbers separated on foot, leaving their hostage in the wrecked car.Brandishing a machine pistol, one of the robbers encountered Lucius at his friend's home. When the gunman burst into the rear seat of Lucius's car, Noelle Veitch astutely jumped out of the car's front seat, ran back into her home, and called the police. The gunman climbed into the front seat of the car and ordered Wilmerding to drive back up Witherspoon Street as fast as possible--at over 70 m.p.h. Lucius, angered by his assailant's rudeness, hit the brakes, whereupon the gunman stamped on the accelerator and threatened to kill him.
Wilmerding, an eminent historian, responded by quoting Admiral Dewey at Manila Bay: "You may fire when ready, Gridley." This historical allusion fortunately was missed by the gunman, who pistol-whipped Lucius across the face and threw him out of the car near Forer's Drug Store, located close to the Princeton Medical Center.
Lucius received a black eye from the pistol-whipping and a concussion when his head struck the pavement. He was hospitalized for three days, with a minor skull fracture and abrasions on his arm. Curiously, his assailant also threw Lucius's cane out of the car. Now, Lucius says he feels "pretty much back to normal, bothered only by occasional bouts of double vision." In December he made a trip to England to meet with some wartime friends.
Don't you love it?!
Sorry 2nd amendment devotees, no stories of armed citizens (in NJ? get serious).
One thing about this story doesn't seem right - a '92 Mercury Topaz? If you've been to Princeton, you'd know its chockablock with new Beamers, Mercedes and other expensive rides. What gives?
The last carjacking in Princeton seems to have been in 1999.
From the desk of Jane Galt:That would explain a lot. . .
If it's true, we may have found the reason behind Scott Ritter's abrupt 1998 about-face on the subject of Iraq's WMD: he was arrested for soliciting underaged girls (14 and 16). Weevil was wondering about blackmail way back when, and this would certainly be blackmail material. The charges have been dropped and the records sealed, suggesting something very odd indeed is going on here.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Lott Vindicated?
Julian Sanchez writes that someone has come forward to report having participated in the Lott survey. James Lindgren has interviewed him/her and found him/her credible; even Tim Lambert says this means the survey was probably done. I'd like to see another person come forward -- there are always wing-nuts out there -- but overall, I find it fairly convincing.
Disappointing for the gun control side, which was undoubtedly hoping the gun rights side would get it's own private Bellesiles. I think the gun rights side can be proud of its reaction -- with a few exceptions, rather than demonizing those who asked the questions, they were quick to call for investigation of the charges, and make it clear that if answers were inadequate, such behavior would not be tolerated. I think it makes a nice contrast to the Affaire Bellesiles for those of us who want the gun rights movement to win on the merits.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:More on Medical Malpractice
Debate raged in an earlier post about the causes of the crisis in medical malpractice insurance.
Here's more fuel for the fire.
Did Investments Affect Medical Malpractice Premiums? answers that question with a definitive "No." It also provides color on other potential causes under discussion:
For premiums to have kept up with medical inflation for the period 1975 to 2001, they would have to increase by 41%. For premiums to have kept up with the increases in paid losses since 1975, they would have to increase by 325%. For the industry’s average loss ratio to drop back to its 27-year average, premiums would need to rise by 59%. For the loss ratio to drop to its nadir during that period, premiums would have to increase by 368%.Yup. Underwriting losses would seem to be the problem.
January 20, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Very interesting article in Slate on the battle between directors and bowdlerizers. Looks like Mrs. Grundy has the law on her side.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Okay, techies, two questions:
Can anyone think of anything useful to do with an old IBM Thinkpad with 4-8MB of RAM and a 60-100MB hard drive? Other than making a pretty paperweight, I mean.
Will someone please tell me why, even though I copied the code for my hit counters into my template, they don't, y'know, count hits?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Pushing Up Daisies?
The group MoveOn has purchased airtime in 13 cities to run an updated version o the infamous "Daisy Ad" that Lyndon Johnson ran against Goldwater in 1964. The new version isn't getting good reviews:
What an absolutely hideous commercial! If one insists on featuring a child in a spot, I would think that one would first and foremost insist upon a child who could act. And who did not have -- as this child appears to have -- a curious facial rash. I won't even address the $7 spent on wardrobe. Let's move straight to the graphic, powerful scenes of war. Here, juxtaposed with the shots of the sweet, innocent "little girl," this war footage is supposed to fill us with terror. "If a bomb like that explodes here … that precious little girl could die!" Instead, these scenes of destruction and firepower have the opposite, thrilling effect. The poor quality of the video footage reminds us that it's been a long time since we've had a really good war. The media coverage would be spectacular, thanks to today's sophisticated digital video cameras. A new war would be great TV. Yeah, motherfucker, BRING IT ON! All the while, a voiceover drones on, hypothesizing. "Maybe‚ … maybe‚ … maybe …" By the third "Maybe" one has simply stopped listening and is instead looking at the explosions and wondering what sort of graphic design elements CNN will create when the war finally does happen. Will they include an explosion-orange color in their new War on Iraq graphics? Or is this color considered proprietary to "Connie Chung Tonight"?Alas, the greatest crime this ad commits is that it does not respect its viewer's intelligence. It uses a cheap scare tactic, an easy, manipulative play for sympathy. And it does this with production values that are far below the industry standard. I believe it is the moral responsibility of the creatives who conceived of this commercial to kill themselves. And take the little girl with them.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Tax divide
Arnold Kling has a succinct summary of the battle between left and right over tax cuts:
In Paul Krugman's model, government spending is given, and tax cuts increase deficits.
It's O.K. to run a deficit during a recession, as long as the deficit is clearly temporary. But both the numbers and the administration's search for excuses tell us that there's nothing temporary about the red ink. On the contrary, we'll probably be on a deficit bender until the baby boomers retire — and then it will get much worse.
History suggests that Washington spends whatever it receives in taxes plus as much more as it can get away with.
Virginia Postrel pointed out that this story and this sidebar in USA Today seem to confirm Friedman's model, at least for state and local governments.
State governments are struggling to pay for expensive programs that were approved or expanded during the economic surge of the late 1990s. Although the economy began to cool in 2000, state and local spending has continued to grow, increasing by an annual rate of 4.2% in the first nine months of 2002.
Discussion Question. How would economists prefer to determine the level of government spending and taxation?
Needless to say, I agree with Uncle Miltie.
January 19, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Fully Moved In
I finally moved all my posts from the old site over here. Unfortunately, I made enough dumb mistakes that it has taken several hours of editing and rebuilding. I haven't assigned categories to everything, but I will take care of it in time.
You will notice this blog just aged by about two months.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Counterprotest Chic
Tee-hee! I had so much fun watching the protesters on television and remembering my days back at the Socialist Union that I decided to make myself some counterprotest gear:
Update InstaPundit asks where you get a t-shirt. Why, right at the cool CafePress store!
From the desk of Jane Galt:Fellow Travelers
I've seen a number of people say that it doesn't matter that A.N.S.W.E.R. organized the anti-war marches -- they may be quasi-marxist apologists for Stalin using the anti-war rallies to advance a hard-left statist agenda, but why should we let that stop us from marching in a good cause?
Come again? Would you go to a fundraiser for abandoned puppies organized by the Klan? Please do not bother trying to convince me; of course you wouldn't. You'd donate money to a shelter, or adopt a puppy, but no matter how good the cause was, you wouldn't stand up to be counted alongside the guys in sheets.
When you go to a rally whose principal speakers are Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, et. al., your presence gives them power. It makes them the spokesmen for however many people showed up on the mall, power they can trade on to get a hearing in the press and on the Hill. It doesn't matter how much you protest that they don't speak for you -- they do, now. You let them. That's why all those Nader groups try so hard to get you to pay a nominal membership fee, sign their postcards and petitions, and put your name on their rosters -- because it allows them to go to your congresscritters and say "All these people support me. Give me what I want." That power generally extends far beyond the original issue that made you sign; you might have been in favor of reauthorizing the Clean Water Act, but six months later, your name, along with thousands of others, will be lobbying for single-payer health care.
Now, if you don't have a problem with A.N.S.W.E.R., or with the fact that your presence helps them advance their agenda (not to mention funding them, since they charge groups a cover to set up a table), then that's fine. But if you don't like the group, or what they stand for, then you have to ask yourself whether attending the rally is worth handing them more power. Protesting is a fundamentally political act. It doesn't matter what your private intentions were; what matters is the public effect. And the public effect was just to tell the government and the public that you support A.N.S.W.E.R. and all the people you weren't listening to on the podium. I've been to a lot of those rallies, and I know how hard it is to hear those speakers -- but if I ever go to one again, I'll be right up front, listening to what I'm telling the world.
Update Hmm, lots of angry emails.
To those who said, as predicted "They don't speak for me", well, who were you trying to speak to? Undoubtedly the press and the government are aware that there were non-A.N.S.W.E.R.-type folks at the rally. But given who organized it, they're going to be taken as the fringe. That 50,000, or 100,000, or 8 zillion, or whatever the game of internet telephone is now placing the number of attendees at, is going to be interpreted as support for the hard-left anti-war movement, which is both the core and the public face of the movement -- and if you want to tell me it isn't, ask yourself how come A.N.S.W.E.R. seems to be the only group organizing sizeable rallies? I'm sorry, but the calculus of an activist group is that, if your body is there, the powers that be will treat you as a supporter of said group, whether you are or not. Just like if you saw a bunch of people walking down the street behind the Klan in support of your local children's hospital, the assumption would be that all those folks were not merely public-spirited citizens concerned about quality pediatric care in their community, but also, racist jerks who support cross burning in spirit if not in person.
I did not say you "should sit down and not rock the boat". I didn't say you shouldn't protest. I questioned whether this protest was the right one to attend, given that it funded and empowered an organization that supports every revolting left-wing maniac regime in the world, just as long as it isn't the US. Marching with a really foul political organization is not the same thing as a priest and a rabbi carrying a banner together at a civil rights rally, despite several writers who appeared to think that supporting A.N.S.W.E.R. was the same thing as marching with the World Council of Churches. There are some differences that shouldn't be papered over if you have any choice -- and I think people should ask themselves whether attending this rally was important enough to give power and money to A.N.S.W.E.R. That's a question only an individual can decide. But I think it's serious enough to deserve to be asked.
Update II Tacitus phrased it a little more pungently than I did.
January 17, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Things that make you go "hmmm.."
Today's New York Times carries an article entitled "Inspectors Find Empty Warheads in an Iraqi Depot", featuring photos of physicist Faleh Hassan carrying documents out of his house in a corrugated box labeled "deionized water".
A corrugated box can come from anywhere, I suppose. They may even use deionized water for drinking in Iraq (although I doubt it). But Deionized water is a staple in chemistry labs where it is used to dilute or dissolve other chemicals. Faleh Hassan is a Physicist.
UPDATE: commenters have helpfully pointed out that DI water has uses for physics as well.
MAJOR UPDATE: This is bigger:
On the same morning that a team of inspectors had found the 12 artillery shells, another team of nuclear weapons experts had paid a surprise visit to the homes of two of Saddam's leading nuclear physicists who worked for Iraq's top secret for the Ministry of Military Industrialisation (MMI)...(via Eugene Volokh)...Once inside they found what one Western official has described as a "highly significant" batch of documents which, on closer inspection, revealed that Saddam's scientists were continuing development work on producing an Iraqi nuclear weapon.
From the desk of Jane Galt:What Are the Rich Getting Away With This Time?
What, my correspondants ask, is to keep evil rich people from taking advantage of the new dividend taxation scheme by forming corporations and taking all their income as untaxed dividends? Or setting up similar deals for managers? The subtext seems to be, "Bet you thought you could slip one by us regular folks, hmmm?" Well, you know me, Jeremiad Jane, Shill for the Military-Industrial Complex. I'm sure I'm going to disappoint the readers who thought they'd caught me pulling a fast one, but the answer, my dears, is "the tax code".
Before I explain myself further, I'd like to try to convince you of a proposition that is basically non-controversial in economics: that it doesn't matter whether you tax the employer or the employee; the employee still pays the tax.
Think of it this way: your boss has some amount of money he is willing to pay for your services. Any more than that, and he'll find someone else, or another way to accomplish the tasks he was willing to pay you for. Say that amount is $50K per year.
Now say that the government slaps a 10% tax on wages, payable by the employer. Say further that you are a crack negotiator who has extracted the maximum $50,000 he is willing to pay in salary bargaining. Does your boss go down to the money tree on the back lawn and pick another $5,000 to pay you with? Of course not. He fires you and hires someone cheaper. Or gets a machine to do the job. I had a nice email from a guy at a company making restaurant equipment a while back, saying that he could always tell when a state had raised its payroll taxes or its minimum wage -- there was a huge spike in purchases of labor-saving equipment from that state.
Salary negotiations basically go like this: your company has a maximum they will pay. You have a minimum you will accept. You settle on an amount somewhere in this range; exactly where depends on how good a negotiator you are.
Now add taxes into the equation. Say your boss is willing to pay a total of $50,000, and you're willing to accept a minimum of $40,000. Now, let's add a payroll tax of 10% into the picture. What does that mean? It means that the maximum you will actually get paid is $45,454. If you demand more than that, they will not hire you, because it will push their expense over $50,000.
Now let's imagine it's not a payroll tax, but an income tax of 10%. You'll get slightly less at the maximum: $45,000, rather than $45,454. But the difference is not large compared to the $4500 you lose to the tax. The effect of both taxes is to cap your after-tax salary around $4500 -- even though one tax is nominally imposed on the employer.
And that, my friend, is why companies can't just use the new dividend tax to make salaries to top managers tax free. When you look at a salary, you can't just look at the benefit to the employee; you also have to look at the cost to the corporation. And in this case, there's a big cost to paying salary in dividends instead of wages: salaries are tax deductible, but dividends are not.
Let's imagine again that the corporation is willing to pay a manager $50,000 net of taxes, and the manager is willing to take $40,000 net of taxes. Now, let's examine what happens under the two alternatives. We will assume, for the purposes of the excercise, that the manager is a real sharpie and squeezes every last dime out of his company.
Regular salary:
The company is willing to pay up to $76,923. Why? By paying that amount, the company saves $76,923 X 35% on its taxes: $26,923. That leaves them an after-tax cost of $50,000. Assuming an income tax burden of 20% (yes, this is NOT like real life), that leaves our manager a comfortable after-tax income of $61,538.
Salary paid as dividends:
Now, assume the company wants to pay the manager a nice tax free salary using some dodge to pay his salary as dividends. How much are they willing to pay? $50,000. Why? Because dividends aren't deductible. He gets it tax-free -- but he's worse off than under the regular salary scheme. Note that a dodge to get the employee his salary tax-free only really works when the employee's average income tax rate is higher than the corporate income tax. But that happens only at very, very high levels of taxation, and also, with the new phase-outs there won't be anyone in the country paying a higher rate than the corporate tax. So no one is going to pull that particular dodge.
The same goes double for rich people. Why would you dump your assets into a corporation for the pleasure of paying a 35% bite off every dollar if your marginal rate was lower than that?
There are corporate forms in which the company does not pay the corporate income tax, such as the partnership, the REIT, and the S-Corporation. However, those entities also do not benefit from deductible dividends. So while I'm sure that people would set up an entity to dodge their tax burdern if they could (and in fact, they do so all the time -- what do you think tax lawyers do all day?), this law is not going to help them accomplish their goal. It is going to shift capital distributions from stock repurchases, which were popular in an era of tax-advantaged capital gains, but it is not going to make it so they get to mint money without paying off Uncle Sam.
Next question?
From the desk of Jane Galt:A lawyer on the law
Medpundit posts a letter from a lawyer with some harsh words for the law:
The law in america is a 12th century construct with overlay of high middle ages guild thinking and a religious gloss over it. Lawyers can best be thought of as "free companies" ie mercenary knights of the 12-14th centuries. It believes in trial by combat(the adversarial process), the duty to zealously defend the client, no duty of the attorney to tell the truth(they are not under oath), a referee who can reverse any decision if it does not feel right ( equity taking the role of the archbishop), protection of the professionals
(lawyers and judges) from the rules imposed on the rest of society(the serfs or us), and a refusal to acceed to control from outside the caste (the supreme court is always right, especially when its wrong). I often contended that the legal cannons are an almost perfect definition of evil, ie no
responsibilty for any of your actions no matter how reprehensible(I was only following orders). The legal process has not yet come to grips with the enlightnment or scientific revolutions. Most legal process is indistinguishable from the process of the middle ages. A telling point on legal ethics is that all law reviews check each footnote in a legal article because of how commonly lawyers lie about facts. Anglo-american law holds that the highest right anyone has is the right to sue anyone else for anything. That actually trumps everything else. The judges view law written by the legislature as suggestions, after all only the judges can say what it really means. A bad legislative law can be reversed, reversing a bad supreme court is almost impossible.
That's gotta sting.
From the desk of Jane Galt:More on the TV show
I'm hearing a fair number of comments along the lines of "Wow! She's not jaw-droppingly hideous the way she said she was!" I don't recall ever really mentioning my appearance. . . how did I convey the impression that I was 300 pounds and covered with warts? Of course, I suppose it's better to set up low expectations than to disappoint.
From the desk of Jane Galt:I just had to share this testimonial with you:
Hello.I just had to e-mail you and tell you how your "Jane Galt"
merchandise made me a hero to my wife.I bought a fleecy top and a "Who is Jane Galt" apron for her as
gifts and she was thrilled to get them. She wore the top all day the
next day (it's COLD in Winnipeg) and has put the apron in the place of
honour in our new kitchen. Great stuff!!! Love the "Jane Galt"
business, too.
Get your hot Jane Galt merchandise today!!! Fleeces for winter, baseball hats for summer, and for that special someone -- the Who Is Jane Galt baby-doll T! All proceeds go directly to me for my drinking fund.
(I offered to share, but Mindles has a real job, so he can't take any money. So that $0.35 is all mine! mine! mine!)
From the desk of Jane Galt:There is a rising tide of ugly prejudice in this nation. We were warned. . . we saw the signs. . . but we did not heed. Now it is becoming clear that vegetarians face the oppression and violence that have plagued so many minority groups in the Land of the White Male Carnivore.
First they kill us for food.
Now Andrew Olmsted brings us another tale of horrifying anti-vegetarian prejudice.
When will the madness end, my brothers? We must band together now and take a stand against the rage of the opressor before we find it is too late. . .
From the desk of Jane Galt:More than a couple of people have indicated that they saw the segment on PBS and they want to start their own blog. How do they get started, they ask?
Well, if you don't have your own domain and host, you can start off by going to Blogger. Blogger is free software that will let you get started posting entries. They also have a free site, Blogspot, where you can host your blog. Don't worry about going to Blogspot; Blogger will let you set up a site there as part of starting the blog.
If you're a more advanced user with your own site, I use Movable Type to make this blog. It's also free to download, although you are encouraged to tip. It's a more complicated setup, so unless you're Unix/Web proficient, I recommend starting with Blogger to see if you like Blogging.
If you want a spot to host a Movable Type blog, I can recommend my provider, Cornerhost.
If you want a domain, Register.com will help you find one. It's more expensive than other services, but the service and features are better, and it's only $100 for two years.
You'll want to play with your template -- add links and features. This HTML Guide will help.
You'll also want to publicize your blog, after you've got some content -- I had some advice on that, way back when.
After you've publicized it, you'll want hit counters to track your stats. I use GoStats and Bravenet, both of which are free.
January 16, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Well, I just saw myself on television. Conclusion: I have very large teeth. And, apparently, a lisp. This may be why my career as a spokesmodel never took off. On the other hand, I feel confident saying that I was the best looking woman on the segment.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Microsoft just announced a dividend and a stock split. Since Microsoft has been accumulating cash for some time, this is big news. Looks like the dividend tax cut may be working already.
From the desk of Jane Galt:When Branding Goes Mad
So NARAL is re-branding itself from the National Abortion Rights Action League to NARAL Pro-Choice America. Presumably, they will ultimately drop the NARAL part and go with Pro-Choice America, or PCA, for their full name. This Salon article calls the move brilliant.
This is why marketing people need to get out more. Someone buy this man a ticket to reality. Brand is very, very important, but there are limits, my mad little friend. If you package up radioactive garbage and try to sell it to people for their children to ingest, no matter how great your branding is, they aren't going to buy it.
You can switch the language from "abortion" to "choice" all you want, but people know what the euphemism means -- the Victorians didn't eliminate sex by calling it "family duties" either. People are for or against abortion on the merits, not the brand.
Language is very, very important, of course. The pro-choice movement succeeds, to the extent it does, by essentially editing the fetus out of the argument. One could argue that the pro-life movement succeeds by editing out what happens to the fetus after it's born.
I think that's why I've noticed that when I dare to post on abortion, I get a large number of pro-choicers policing the language -- most recently, when I described use of the morning-after pill as inducing an abortion. Abortifacient is, in fact, the medical term for that pill, which prevents conception by preventing the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. I shouldn't use that word, I was told. Why not, if it's a medical term? Because it's "loaded". Well, abortion is what we're arguing about. I am not going to pretty it up by discussing "choice"; if you think that women should be allowed to abort their babies, then you have to argue that.
I've no doubt there are pro-lifers out looking to police me into calling it "baby-killing" instead of abortion, but so far, they haven't had the courage to write.
So language is important. But it's not like people don't know what a group like NARAL does; they advocate for an absolute right to abort your babies/fetuses right up to the time they're born. Changing the name of the group isn't going to change people's minds about the activity the group stands for. Are they that stupid? Or is this less a branding move to win new converts, than preventing current members from being constantly reminded what it is they're actually fighting for?
UPDATE: Thank you, language police, I was not trying to imply that advocating for the pro-choice side is the same thing as packaging up radioactive garbage and trying to sell it to children. I used the latter as an extreme example to illustrate that there are some things you just can't brand. I then went on to attempt to argue that abortion is one of them, albeit not in the same category as packaging up radioactive garbage and trying to sell it to children. I apologize to anyone who was confused.
UPDATE II: My, the police are out in force tonight. Pro-choicers, I am told, are not "for abortion"; they are for choice. Fine. You may rephrase that sentence: "People are either for or against the right to have an abortion on the merits" or "the right to choose to have an abortion" on the merits, or however else you like, as long as you do not try to remove the word "abortion". We are not discussing the choice of what career to pursue or whether to hang a valence on the livingroom drapes.
UPDATE III: Let me make it clear that I know that there are people with deeply reasoned belief in the right to abortion. I myself am unenthusiastically in favor of keeping it legal, although not of the execrable Roe decision. I don't try to argue the topic itself, because ultimately it comes down to a value judgement of what is more important: the baby's right to be born, or the woman's right not to have to use her body to succor a child against her will. There is no logical argument that is going to persuade someone who has chosen one side that they are wrong, because it is simply a different weighting of two competing rights. My disdain is for the euphemism. If what you are advocating is so distasteful to you or others that it will not stand the cold light of plain words, you should rethink your advocacy.
From the desk of Jane Galt:John Lott Update
We have at least some corroboration of John Lott's story: Julian Sanchez has talked to people who remember John Lott's hard drive crashing, and work that had to be scrapped because of the data loss. But I'd still like to hear from some students.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Advertising, Marketing, and SG&A: or, how consumer groups lie with statistics
A number of you have asked how I could possibly claim that Pharma only spends 1% of revenue on advertising, when y'all have seen numbers from consumer groups that run 30%. Well, I got that number from an industry group, but they provided backup. (I can't find the link now, sad to say)
One should, of course, qualify that number, since in position papers like these, things are rarely what they seem. The advertising they are discussing is consumer advertising, not advertising to doctors, which is a very large expense. They backed it up with numbers on overall industry revenue and numbers from some advertising group on pharmaceutical advertising revenue. However, the percentage spent on advertising expensive drugs will be much, much higher than that. It's just that, although they're popular, expensive drugs do not actually make up the majority of industry revenue.
But although I certainly wouldn't have put it past the industry group to portray themselves in the best possible light, I know the consumer groups are lying. Or rather, stretching the truth into new and interesting shapes. The number they are calling "advertising" is actually a number on the balance sheet known to accounting professionals as SG&A: selling, general, and administrative expense.
SG&A is a basket term. It includes everything that happens outside of a factory (things that happen inside a factory are COGS: cost of goods sold) or a lab (things that happen in a lab are R&D: research and development).
So how do they get there from here? Thus: first one consumer group writes a report in which they render that SG&A expense as "Marketing" to make their point a little more punchy. Now, a large component of SG&A is marketing. But it is not the only thing. If you've ever worked in the headquarters of a corporation, think of all the departments. Accounting. IT. Payroll. HR. Mailroom. Reproduction. Marketing. Corporate Finance. Sales. Those are all part of SG&A.
Somewhat counterintuitively, to the accounting layman, Sales is not part of Marketing. Marketing is the department that figures out who your consumers are and how you should sell things to them, and what you should sell; the sales department actually goes and browbeats the customer into buying the stuff. Nonetheless, one consumer group decides that it's all pretty much marketing, and then writes a report called something like "Pharmaceutical Companies: Raping the American Family for Fun and Profit", which cites the SG&A figure as the company's "marketing expenditure".
Now, advertising certainly isn't the same thing as marketing. It's a component of marketing, but only a small one. There's also professional advertising in places like the JAMA, which no one really objects to (there wouldn't be any JAMA without that kind of advertising); there's product market research and sales materials to be written and junkets for physicians. Much of this stuff may also be objectionable to many, although one should keep in mind that if the pharmaceutical firms stop paying for physicians dinners and vacations, their patients may have to start, so it's not necessarily a net savings. All of which is irrelevent, because the important part is that it is not advertising.
Nonetheless, another consumer group takes that report and writes one of their own: "Pharmaceutical Companies: Satanic Spawn Who Dream only of Murdering Our Children and Selling Their Broken Little Bodies for Mulch". This report cites that "marketing" number as "advertising expenditure". Thus we get the claim that pharmaceutical companies spend 30% of their revenues on advertising, when the real number is much, much lower than that. And thus the belief common among advocates for a single payer health care system that we can force companies to lop of 30% of the price of a drug without touching R&D.
This is wrong in two ways, of course: the number is too big, to start with, and more importantly, it misunderstands the way that companies make decisions. Consumer groups are thinking of pharmaceutical expenditures as budget items -- expenses to be cut. But you have to think of R&D and marketing expenses as an investment. Every budget season, the company allocates its funds by deciding which investment will be more profitable. The assumption is that if you institute price controls, companies will give up marketing to focus on R&D. But the reverse is likely to be the case. R&D is very, very, risky, and very long term. Marketing is perhaps risky, but very short term, and so much less investment is required overall. If you cut the potential profit on a product in half or more, a risky project like R&D has to have a stratospheric potential return to ever get funded. Marketing dollars, on the other hand, are likely to have a much bigger return, because when prices are controlled, the only way to make money is through volume -- meaning advertising becomes crucial to maintaining profitability. Who advertises more: Qualcomm, with its fat margins and high R&D expense, or Proctor and Gamble, with skinny little margins and tiny research expenditure?
So anyway, that is how I arrived at my number, and how they arrived at theirs. You may dispute my number -- but only, please, with good numbers of your own, not with some PIRG screed, 'kay?
January 15, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Media Matriculates
I was not aware my co-blogger obtained a Ph.D. in Economics!
January 14, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Another Reason Not to Go to the Gym
One doesn't even want to imagine the incident that gave rise to this change in policy:
Physical, which operates nine gyms in the former British colony, recently posted signs in its Hong Kong facilities forbidding the use of mobile phones in locker rooms.Whodathunkit. Having a picture of yourself toweling down your own naked body at the health club isn't "good for your privacy.""It's just some areas that are restricted for mobile phones," said Physical spokeswoman Miran Chan.
"Some of these phones can be used as cameras. If someone uses a phone this way and takes a photo and puts it on the Internet, it's not very good for our members and their privacy."
It seems bit indirect, though. Are cameras banned?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Jim Henley has an update on the John Lott story based on an email that was sent to some bloggers who wrote on the issue, though not -- sniff -- myself. Some of the explanations strike me as potentially mitigating, such as offering the name of a faculty member with whom he discussed the questions, and other witnesses who can corroborate that he lost his hard drive in 1997; others are plausible but have no way to confirm. (He says it was only two Chicago students who organized other friends to do the survey. I'm slightly skeptical -- Chicago students have friends? At other schools? Plus it's awfully convenient. But if it's true, God help the man, because there's a good chance an email or an ad won't find them.)
I think he's toast. After Bellesiles, the gun-control folks are out for blood. Unless he finds those students, he'll never work in academia again.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Those heartless drug companies
Derek Lowe has a post on GlaxoSmithKline, which has just told Canadian pharmacies that if they don't stop selling to the US, Glaxo will stop selling to them.
No doubt we'll hear the usual parade of consumer advocates complaining that those heartless pharmas are putting profits before people. Snore.
Let's look at what this really tells us: first, that Canadians must be buying their drugs very close to marginal cost. If Glaxo is serious -- and I've no reason to think that they aren't -- then a loss of a small portion of the US market is more serious to them than the loss of the entire Canadian market. In other words, yes, my sweet, we are subsidizing the rest of the world's pharmaceutical R&D, because of the unbeatable combination of single-payer buyer power and the government's ability to break the patent if they don't like the price.
(NOTE: in Canada, many drugs are paid for privately, but there are price controls and other regulatory schemes, plus the government's complete hostility to private health care providers. My assertion stands.)
That also tells us that if we got single payer here, prices worldwide would have to go up, or R&D would collapse -- industries that sell at marginal-cost pricing do not have big research budgets. Yes, my single-payer-loving friends, so would the 1% of industry revenues that gets spent on advertising, plus whatever boondoggles they give the doctors. I'm more worried about the 20% R&D spending, thanks. If Canadians and Europeans were smart, they'd stop snotting about our health care system and start rushing to assure us that it's -- "just awful -- nothing you'd ever want to try for yourself".
Derek Lowe cuts loose on the Pharmas for not making the economic argument, and instead pulling out a lame basket of excuses about safety, like those wily Canadian pharmacists have been thinning out the Lipitor with talcum powder.
This argument is a disgrace. I can't imagine that these pharmaceuticals are in any worse shape than what's on the shelves here. No, the real problem is that PhRMA doesn't want to make the economic argument above - the real one - because they're afraid they might lose the battle. (So they've such lame positions that losing the battle is even more likely.) I really don't think that my industry's leaders understand how idiotic the "unsafe Canadian drugs" line sounds. It makes me grit my teeth, and I'm about as sympathetic a listener as you can find. We're in danger of sounding as out-of-it as the recording industry: like a joke, in other words. The last thing we need.
He's right. The problem is, if the pharmas made the real argument, they would lose. First of all, because there are any number of consumer groups out their with quasi-marxist agendas and no understanding of accounting or economics who will give people talking points memos just plausible enough for them to pick the argument they like -- I can have all the prescription drugs I want at low cost, and research will be just fine! Consider this talking point from the Manitoba Pharmacists Association that made its way unquestioned into the article above:
The Manitoba pharmacy group estimates about one million U.S. residents, mostly senior citizens, obtain drugs they otherwise could not afford through Canadian online mail-order pharmacies.
Okay, one million is the number of people who order drugs from Canada. Those are not all people ordering drugs they can't afford. Can't afford is when, after you pay for rent or mortgage, taxes, food, and enough clothing to cover your body, you do not have sufficient cash to pay for your drugs. I'm willing to bet that many or most of those seniors have greens fees, grandchildren's birthday presents, travel expenses, meals out, and assorted other things that could be scaled back sufficiently to cover their drugs if they wanted to. They don't want to pay a lot of money for their drugs; it pinches. They have to give up other things they enjoy. But that is not the same thing as being unable to afford drugs, which is when, no matter how frugal you are, you could not possibly scrape together the money. Seniors are by far the richest segment of our society; they also know how to stretch a dollar. It strikes me as vanishingly unlikely that most of the seniors ordering from Canada actually could not pay for their drugs any other way.
And second of all, Democrats need an issue, and Greedy Corporations Bleed Seniors Dry seems to fit the bill just fine. So the Pharmas make lame arguments and lose anyway. But at least they give it the old college try.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why does one bother to point out bias in the New York Times, many readers have asked. Mickey Kaus sums it up nicely:
How many of the New York Times' journalistic problems would be solved if the paper just replaced the slogan in the upper-left hand corner of its front page ("All the News That's Fit to Print") with the phrase:"A Crusading Liberal Newspaper"
I'd guess those four words would neutralize about 80 percent of the animus against Times editor Howell Raines. What's deeply annoying about Raines and his henchperson Gerald Boyd isn't their liberalism, or their bias, but their insistent pretense that what they are doing isn't liberal or biased but just straightforward objective newspapering the way the Times has always done it. ("Call it journalism.") They're selling their product dishonestly, sneakily trying to trade on the credibility earned in an earlier, different time. The truth would set them free. There's nothing wrong with being a crusading liberal newspaper, after all.
But today the Times seems to be heading in the opposite direction, taking steps to shore up the lie, to reinforce the false impression of objectivity, by -- according to the description in Editor and Publisher -- banning reporters from
contributing to campaigns; or taking part in "public causes or movements." This includes wearing campaign buttons, marching in support or opposition of causes ....
Will this fool anyone? That would seem to be the idea. As Michael Kinsley has noted, such rules ban only the appearance of bias, not the actuality of bias. NYT Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse marched in a big pro-Roe, pro-choice demonstration a few years back. Does anybody think she's changed her mind since? Will they think she's changed her mind if she now refrains from marching? (Or will the Times, in keeping with the spirit of its new rules, transfer Greenhouse from the Supreme Court beat because she's already blown her cover?) ....
I think that liberals feel quite complacent about the New York Times right now, just as they were about the presidency as long as Bill Clinton was in it -- when people you like are in power, it seems to be the natural order of the universe. However, I think they, and Sulzberger and Raines, believe that the paper's status as the Paper of Record is too enshrined to be changed by slanting their coverage -- and I think they're wrong. Not everyone who subscribes to the New York Times does so because they are part of the choir Raines et. al. are preaching to. Those readers won't stay with the paper if they come to feel that the news coverage is going to give short shrift to the side of the story the reporter disagrees with -- not just in always-misreported issues like gun control, but on a wide range of social and policy issues. Like most heirs, I think Punch regards his fortune as inexhaustible, a fact of nature -- and he's rapidly spending down the reputational capital his forebears built up. He wouldn't be the first heir to tank a seemingly unstoppable company.
There is nothing wrong with being a great liberal paper. But Raines & Co. don't want you to read their coverage thinking "this is a great liberal paper". . . they want you to read their coverage thinking "this is objective news coverage". They want to use your belief that their coverage is objective (or as nearly so as it is possible to get in this world of fallible humans) to sell their political beliefs. Now, having lived on the West Side my whole life, I can vouchsafe that it is possible that they believe their slant is the objective point of view, which just goes to show the danger of being surrounded only by people who agree with you. But in the case of a major newspaper, it behooves one to get out and research the market once in a while. Their subscriber base is growing. But can it continue to do so if the paper keeps moving well to the left of the electorate? Eventually, the paper risks being simply out of touch on the major issues of the day. I find the Village Voice a fascinating read -- but I'm not looking to it for policy coverage, or to take the pulse of the nation.
Are all papers biased? Sure. Most reporters are liberal; all reporters have an audience to please. But there's a difference between the Washington Post, where the editors try to keep an even keel because their audience is, after all, half Republican; and the New York Times, where the editorial direction seems at times to be actively in favor of slanted coverage. And I think that the more the New York Times moves to the left, the more they erode their reputation, and leave the office of "Paper of Record" up for grabs. It is their perfect right to do so. I comment on it only because, first, aggressively editorial news coverage annoys me (yes, my dears, I also switch the channel when O'Reilly comes on); and second, there is always an element of schadenfreude in watching someone make a really gargantuan mistake.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Steven Den Beste says that Mac is losing market share among the high end users, as the difference in speed is making it impossible for even long-time Mac afficionadoes to keep using their Mac. If he's right -- and the numbers seem to back him up -- the company is in big, big trouble. Big trouble. BIG TROUBLE.
Before the Mac folks start sending me hate mail, let me point out that I'm simply not in their demographic. I installed NT servers for years before I went to B-School, and now that I'm unemployed, it's one of the few ways I make money. I run my own servers, which won't work on Virtual PC. I am not afraid of my system crashing, though my Dell's been running for five years without a single problem and is only now beginning to run out of steam, with a full-up hard drive, a dying fan, and a creaky bus. I don't find the Mac interface intuitive; I find it an enormous pain in the ass, because I already know where everything is on a PC, and the Mac insists on doing things for me that I want to do for myself (and XP has followed it in that direction. Arggh.) I've also had a very bad experience with Macs -- I'm more than willing to stipulate that it's possibly a six sigma event, but I've had an inordinately high number of catastrophic failures on the Macs I've worked with, given how low that latter number was.
But users seem to love their Macs, and find them intuitive and incredible, and want to keep them, and I think that's fine. I think that the more fanatic comments about PCs generally reveal that the last PC they worked on for any length of time was running 3.1, but that's fine too. The Mac is a great piece of equipment, with an ease of use made possible only by integrated manufacture of parts and software. And the downside is, as Den Beste points out, higher cost of production (because the production function and cost curves of hardware and software manufacture are radically different, meaning you can't drive prices down the way PC's do), and the risk that a component bottleneck will hose you. Which is what has happened. Apple is hostage to Motorola for chips, and Motorola isn't making a new generation chip, meaning that Apple has to wait over a year for IBM's 970 series. That's why PC's are pulling away so rapidly from Macs -- all their components are being improved, while Apple is pretty much mired in the fact that no matter how much you improve the other components, the processor's still running at 1 Ghz. It is possible that small variations in chip speed can be overcome by software or components, but by the time the chip is twice as fast -- and the memory is three times as fast, and the bus. . . at the high end, the differences will become very apparent.
Speed makes the least difference at the low end -- though even I've noticed how big a difference there is between browsing on my lowly PII-400 and the new 2.6 Ghz machines I'm installing. (Many components contribute to this, not just the chipset.) That's where Mac is winning customers, with its glamorous cases and, I guess, intuitive software.
But the company can't live on those customers. Not and remain the company it is.
Apple is the high cost producer in the consumer computer market. Even with fabulous design, competing solely for the most price sensitive segment of the market is not a long-term winning strategy -- one bad move could kill you. More importantly, the rule of thumb in computer hardware is that the high-end segment subsidizes the R&D for the low end guys, who get the technology initially designed for the power users only after something bigger and better has come along. The premium price charged for the power machines is what covers most of the cost of R&D.
That R&D produces all the software that Mac afficionadoes rave about. If the power users defect, it's going to severely erode their ability to continuing to produce all the stuff that makes Mac users love Mac. As Den Beste points out, everyone steals software features, including Apple. The advantage to having a Mac is that you get them first. If Apple gets pushed out of the high end market -- and the likelihood is that their 970 machines will be both slower than the top PC's and exorbitantly priced -- their business model becomes, I think, unsustainable. Their software makes them a very good computer for the low-end user -- but the low end user won't support the cost of developing the software.
Consider that if the high-end user exits, the low-end users have to support more of the R&D costs, simply because there are now fewer users over which to spread it. Add to that the fact that the power users supported higher margins, and you're talking about a substantial jump in the price of an iMac or iBook. They're already, last time I looked, about 30% higher than the equivalent Dell. Users are supporting this, mainly the most fashion-conscious and least price-sensitive part of the market. But even those folks won't support a price that's double what you pay for a PC. And Apple won't try to charge it to them. They'll slow down development. Meanwhile, their competitors will steal whatever they've already developed and further erode their competitive advantages.
Of course, I think the company's doomed anyway, because Steve Jobs can't live forever, and while he's a genius at design, he's lousy at building a company that can get along without him. But what do I know? I'm one of those PC wackos.
January 13, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Orson Scott Card has a very interesting take on North Korea. It's obvious that he read a lot of military history to write the Ender series.
When an American pundit or politician criticizes President Bush for being a hypocrite or a bully because he’s using diplomacy with North Korea and the threat of war with Iraq, it tells us one of two things.Either the critic is hopelessly ignorant about geopolitical and diplomatic realities … or the critic knows that President Bush cannot respond to his criticism, and therefore the critic can make political profit at the expense of American foreign policy.
In other words, those who make this particular accusation against the president are either squirrels or snakes: either chattering stupidly or poisonously biting the president while he’s trying to protect us and our friends from a serious danger.
I prefer to think that these critics simply haven’t thought things through. And I’m happy to point out that few of those who have made this particular accusation are responsible officeholders.
You don’t throw rocks at the guy who’s trying to tame the tiger.
And what about me? Haven’t I just made all those private negotiations public?
Of course not. The Chinese don’t care what I say. I don’t speak for the government. I don’t have any contacts in the White House or the State Department.
I’m just a guy who knows how to read a map.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Stimulating Discussion
Kevin Drum complains that the Bush tax stimulus plan is only going to be stimulative for two years before causing a contraction in 2005.
But of course it is. If you believe in stimulus, all stimulus plans are eventually contractionary.
That is, unless they remove some sort of distortion in the economy -- like, just to pick an example out of nowhere, the differential treatment of capital gains and dividend income -- the basic idea of a stimulus plan is to borrow prosperity from the future.
Stimulus plans do not grow the economy. Everyone from Paul Krugman rightward generally agrees that the only way to grow the economy is either to increase the labor or capital input, or increase productivity. Except in rare cases such as the Keynsian Liquidity Trap, all you are doing is altering the shape of variation around the trendline. If your stimulus actually works, you will thus get more growth now at the expense of less growth later. In other words, contraction.
Neither stimulus plan currently proposed is going to increase capital inputs. Neither is going to increase productivity, except to the extent that a change in dividend taxation forces companies to disgorge cash they shouldn't be keeping. It's possible that the tax cuts might increase the labor input -- but this is the dreaded Supply Sider argument, which I don't think Kevin is fixing to endorse. (In fact, his whole argument sounds curious, given that he is an ardent supporter of the party that has been trumpeting the "temporary" stimulus of its tax cut.) That leaves us with expansion now, at the expense of contraction later. Or, in other words, TANSTAAFL.
January 12, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Happy New Year Indeed
Between physical therapy for my shoulder and an amazing rush of stuff at work, I haven't had time even to check my email.
Up until now, and now I wish I had not. Here's a trans-atlantic sniff from my British friend Ted:
Dear (Dreck),
Happy New Year to you and yours. No, I'm not on the Julian calendar. It is just that until now, I had nothing much to say.
But a day or two ago, I was made to think by a BBC correspondent in Washington saying, when asked what Americans made of British reservations about an attack on Iraq, replied that they thought nothing at all because they did not know about them. He went on to say that there is very little coverage of foreign news, as indeed we have found on our travels in the US. In 1980, we were once in a motel in South Dakota and found on the TV a news programme. It was all South Dakotan news but a modest little notice appeared saying "Foreign News". It had only one item, a train derailment in Kentucky. A bit extreme no doubt but Kentucky is about 1000 miles away. I came back convinced that there were only two American foreign policies, either isolationism or a crusade.
This made me think that in at least one respect, the Pax Americana is different from the Pax Romana and Pax Britannica. The latter two were all quite small places and were obliged to take account of what was going on elsewhere. The sheer size of the USA makes it entirely understandable that most Americans are not only ignorant about but also indifferent to the rest of the world . I hope to get the Bobbitt (the other Bobbitt I hasten to add) from the library soon.
Meanwhile, the Israelis are still digging themselves deeper into the hole they are in although they do show some slight signs of realizing it.
Yours
Ted
My current draft reply reads:
Good lord, you were saving it up and that’s what you came up with?BY ALL MEANS, do keep assuming that all Americans are ignorant bumpkins if it is convenient for you. I’m sure every coal miner in the North of England is well versed in our constitution. Don’t let the fact that we’re actually FROM all over the world get in the way of your convenient stereotypes.
I suppose I should forgive you this view if the column discussed here is representative of the attitude and competency of the British press you are reading. Are you even aware that foreign correspondents, particularly condescending Brits, insist on judging us by inspecting our equivalent of Page 3 in your tabloids? Seek and ye shall find. I believe our correspondence began when I reminded you of the behavior of English soccer fans while the world was watching. Shall we judge you by that?
At any rate, how wonderful is it that you find our ignorance "understandable". I'm sure that the citizens who give more than $2.6 Billion in private foreign aid annually (more than the official aid budget of most countries, seven times as much as the U.K.'s private aid and two-thirds of the U.K's official aid budget) will be pleased to know that you do not hold them fully accountable for their "indifference".
And the Israeli situation is entirely due to that infernal Jewish 'digging'. Indeed, having reacted less violently to terrorists on their doorstep than any other regime in history (including, notably, their neighbors such as even Jordan), why can't they come out of their 'hole' and be wiped off the face of the earth like gentlemen?
How nice it must be to assume that one knows is all that needs to be known, and that justice must reside with the cause that is least troublesome – or at least the one that assuages one’s post-colonial guilt most effectively.
Happy New Year to you as well. I hope it brings better than this.
Jump ball, folks. I have to go stretch (and put the damn red meat back in the fridge). I'll decide whether to send it in the A.M.
UPDATE: Not sent yet (see comments). Here's another take on private foreign aid that suggests ours is ten times higher than the figures cited above:
International giving by U.S. foundations totals $1.5 billion per year, according to the latest figures. Even this shortchanges the "mega-donors" such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, because its biggest outlays came after the latest figures were tabulated [see here - Ed.].Corporate philanthropy has also become a significant part of the total. Once disallowed by U.S. courts, charitable giving by U.S. businesses now comes to at least $2.8 billion annually. And cooperation between corporations and foundations has become common: When Merck gave $50 million for an HIV/AIDS program in Botswana, it was matched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This doesn't begin to touch the work of America's NGOs, whose missions help the needy around the world. Groups like Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children give a whopping $6.6 billion in grants, goods and volunteers. Religious overseas ministries contribute $3.4 billion, including health care, literacy training, relief and development. Even the $1.3 billion U.S. colleges give in scholarships to foreign students is more than Australia, Belgium, Norway, or Switzerland gave in total foreign assistance in 2000.
There's another way that the U.S. contributes as well, one that speaks volumes about this country's real gift to the world. As Mexican President Vicente Fox says, the "real heroes" are immigrants who send money to families back home. Personal remittances from the U.S. to developing countries came to $18 billion in 2000 and provide, in Mexico for example, the third largest source of foreign exchange. U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin, who sends money to her aunt in Mexico, calls remittances "one of the most important transactions between our two countries."
Population (or GDP)-adjust that!
From the desk of Jane Galt:Oh. My. God.
Listen to Gray Davis' idea of fostering economic growth:
Gov. Gray Davis criticized President Bush's economic plan Tuesday because he said it lacks the short-term job creation and stimulus measures needed to immediately turn around the U.S. economy.Davis applauded the extension of unemployment benefits and middle class tax-cuts in Bush's $674 billion package, but stressed it would fail to cut the jobless rolls this year. Bush should invest money in public projects like roads and Amtrak instead of relying on the private sector for job growth, Davis recommended.
Would that be mortgaged all its capital assets to pay operating expenses Amtrak? Needs to periodically panic the Federal government into providing subsidies to cover the trains that run mostly empty through the hinterlands Amtrak? Gray Davis thinks that running more trains with no one on them is going to give the economy a boost? I don't think we really need to ask ourselves why the California budget is in its current shape.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Times Watching
Stuart Buck has a nice piece on the New York Times' pro-choice news slant.
From the desk of Jane Galt:I find it interesting that no one's talking about how much trouble the Democrats find themselves in going into the 2004 election. The ban on soft money is hurting them far worse than the Republicans -- the Republican fundraising base is a lot of small donors, while the Democratic base is a devoted cadre of very high net worth people who can afford to donate very large sumes to the party.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that, for all their talk about the Republicans being the party of the rich, it is the Democrats who are really dependant on that top 1% they keep yelling about? So why do they support policies allegedly designed to soak that top 1%?
My experience of politics rejects the theses that those 1% are too stupid to recognize their own interests, or that they are too altruistic to seek them -- just witness the drive by those alleged liberals in Hollywood to keep the proles off their beachfront. That would seem to indicate that the policies advocated by the Democrats are not, in fact, hurting the interests of the 1% -- or at least the large portion of the 1% that represents their donor base. Thoughts?
January 11, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:The New Republic this week has an article (not yet online), claiming that the .50 caliber sniper rifle is capable of taking down an airliner as it takes off or lands.
I am sure that this is theoretically true, but Eli Lehrer makes it sound as if anyone wtih sufficient target shooting ability could set up "over a mile away", aim his rifle, and bring down a plane with ease. This sounds extremely unlikely to me, considering how many .50 caliber machine gun bullets it used to take to bring down smaller, frailer propeller planes. Aviation and gun experts: how likely is it that someone outside a major airport could get a line of site on the runway unnoticed and with any reliability hit the fuel tank or the pilot of a plane moving fast enough to have hit takeoff speed? He blames, predictably, the NRA for endangering us, but the danger seems awfully remote to me. Can anyone comment?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Bellesiles Again?
It looks like John Lott, the author of
More Guns, Less Crime, may also have fabricated data.
It's not quite on the scale of the Bellesiles fabrication: it looks like he made a stupid remark about having done a survey in order to deflect criticism of his using a Gary Kleck number indicating that 98% of gun uses do not involve a shooting; Kleck's number included shots that missed, or were warning shots, but Lott and others said it applied to merely "brandishing" the weapon. The distinction is a fine one, and doesn't overturn Lott's major or minor theses (unlike Bellesiles fabrications). Nonetheless, his story sounds fishy to me: he did a survey without funding, kept no records, and can't remember the name of a single student surveyor? If he can't substantiate, he should be slammed for it, and right quick. Fabricating data is fabricating data, even if the data only replicates data that's known to be good.
Of course, the left will jump on it and say it's just as bad as Bellesiles. I've no doubt that many will have some interesting reason why it's actually worse. That's silly. Bellesiles made up data and egregious mis-cites were his entire book, and the data were the central reason he got the various awards and prestige; Lott's assertion is a stronger version of another study that was itself pretty strong, and the distinction is fairly trivial. It's also a relatively minor contribution to his overall thesis. Nonetheless, scholars cannot tolerate other scholars who make up data. If it's true, embarassing as it is, the gun-rights folks can make this even more embarassing for the gun-control folks -- by showing that they, unlike the gun control people, do not succor and protect people who make up data to support their case. Just as every time the Republicans punish leaders who are guilty of wrongdoing, it hurts the Clinton Democrats on the stump, gun-rights people can wring victory out of defeat by refusing to countenance unethical activity in their ranks.
January 10, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Lose! Weight! Fast!
More diet advice from CalPundit.
The Jane Galt diet plan is similarly simple: cut the sweets back to once a week (and that includes cakes masquerading as muffins and cookies pretending to be granola/energy bars), and have some green vegetable matter at every meal. Eat the greens first. Stop eating as soon as your stomach feels full, which will probably be well before you stop being hungry. And if you really want to turbocharge it, why, give up meat, of course. But don't go on some stupid diet, because you'll just gain it all back, and more besides. The most important diet advice ever is this: don't go on any diet plan that you can't live with for the rest of your life.
On the other hand, as one of my friends once said, I hit the Pick 6 in the genetic lottery on that front. I've been overweight once in my life since adolescence, and that was when I was at the WTC site eating sugar absolutely non-stop. The weight came off as soon as I cut out the sugar. So what the hell do I know?
January 9, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Dividend or bust
So what do I think of the dividend tax cut?
I'm kinda in favor of it. I think the later "fixes" to retained earnings add unnecessary complexity, but I don't think it's a show stopper. And I like the idea that companies will have incentive to disgorge their retained earnings rather than find something stupid to do with them. I agree with Mindles that an even better fix would be to work on the corporate side -- or best of all, eliminate the corporate income tax -- but politically, this is probably the best you can get.
And I think that, although this is one of those policy areas where it is possible to have in-depth arguments in which there are good technical points on both sides -- the Democrats are getting a tad hysterical, particularly ones who ought to know better. While I am in favor of holding down both taxes and government spending, broadly I agree with the propositions that government spending is the important factor to watch, not how it's financed; and that at the current levels of taxation and borrowing, increases in either are likely to have an effect too trivial to be measured in aggregate. So I didn't get hysterical about Clinton's tax increases, even though I've no doubt that they discouraged some folks from working more; and I think it's ludicrous to be going on about these current tax cuts as if they were the End of Civilization, when any effect on interest rates is likely to be microscopic. I think deficits are bad because we should limit our spending to what we, ourselves, are willing to pay for, but I don't buy the voodoo effect. Especially since many of the people yelling about it were curiously silent when the Clinton administration announced they weren't going to close the deficit until Clinton was safely out of office. Rising tax receipts from capital gains, and a modest Republican-led decrease in spending closed the deficit; it certainly wasn't the brilliant planning of Bob Rubin, whose projections never came close to the speed at which the deficit closed. Or, as numerous people have said, including the much maligned Glenn Hubbard: growth causes surpluses, not the other way around. I'm firmly in that camp and it will take some pretty powerful data -- data my liberal finance-oriented friends who worked for the Clinton administration have, up until now, been unable to provide -- to move me out of it.
Similarly, I think the Democratic plan is excruciatingly dumb on its own logic -- "temporary" stimulus is theoretically, and apparently empirically, unlikely to work. But if they want to offer a payroll tax holiday, well, anything that takes money from the government's a pretty good plan in my book.
I don't think either will be very stimulative, but then I haven't seen any evidence that any stimulus actually works outside of Keynsian macro textbooks, so I don't care. I think it's a good idea to end the bias towards debt and capital appreciation over dividends. And there I stand.
From the desk of Jane Galt:This seems like an entirely salutory step to me: the SEC has said that if you are a corporate lawyer who is aware that your clients are committing a material breach of the securities law, and the board won't stop, you have to step down and inform the SEC that you're quitting for "professional considerations".
The lawyers, of course, are unhappy.
The proposal, which arose from last year's wave of corporate scandals, has elicited a chorus of criticism from law firms, bar associations and corporate lawyers, who contend that it would severely damage the attorney-client relationship. "It paints a target on your client," says Lawrence J. Fox, a Philadelphia securities litigator who has represented lawyers accused of wrongdoing.
Excatly, my friend, and that's what we want when your client is committing securities fraud.
On the other hand, I'm sure the lawyers have a lot of reasons this is a bad idea. Dave? Stuart? Pej? Professor? Professors?
From the desk of Jane Galt:The PETA folks warned me that Big Meat would soon be rounding up vegetarians and killing us. But I didn't believe it. . . until now.
January 8, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Boss' Plan is My Plan
I agree with the commenters on my earlier post that the administration's proposed rules on marking up shareholder basis are going to be a complex nightmare. Every broker and money manager will have to spend millions on record-keeping systems to keep track of basis at the lot level (what? We don't have a field for this!). As far as time spent on tax returns, well, this is a tax-preparer full employment act.
Pamela Olson (Assistant Treasury Secretary for Tax Policy) is quoted describing the plan in the WSJ article I linked. Poor Pamela - she has been a champion of tax simplification...up until now. This is her on December 18, 2002 speaking at the Tax Executives Institute (as printed in the New York Sun but not available on the web):
This is surely not a tax system anyone would set out to create, but it is the system that has evolved over time. Let's face it. We have reached the point where our tax system is held together by chewing gum and chicken wire........The following are the goals we (the administration) will strive to achieve:
- A system that is simple and easy to understand, with reasonable filing and record-keeping requirements, and non-intrusive tax administration.
- A system that is efficient and minimizes interference in economic decisions.
- A system that supports the international competitiveness of U.S. business and workers.
- A system that is fiscally sound, raising the revenues necessary for government operations.
- A system that is stable enough to avoid the constant tinkering of years past.
- A system that is understood to be fair, treating similarly situated taxpayers alike and equitably distributing tax burdens.
Well, the administration's formulation of dividend tax relief doesn't really achieve many of these goals. But, Pamela, you had me at (1)...
UPDATE: One of the reason's I am harping on complexity actually does go to the potential stimulus of the administration's bill. It seems to me that one of the necessary condition's to the Permanent Income Hypothesis, the premise on which we claim marginal rate relief stimulates investment, is that consumers and investors actually should be able to project easily their permanent increase in income. Anything that makes tax relief less transparent or certain will dilute the effect.
Another interesting comment in the prior post pointed out the potential generational differences in experienced relief. People who receive dividends as a meaningful part of their income tend to be older. Is the administration softening them up for social security reform?
I think policy has taken a back seat to politics. While this may be necessary to passage of any tax relief, it's a shame. Incidentally, David Frum, editorializing in the New York Sun yesterday, agrees:
..delivering the benefit to individuals rather than corporations makes reform look less like the elimination of an injustifiable disparity between two methods of finance and more like a juicy freebie for one class of the population, people who happen to own stock.
Burton Malkiel also weighs in today endorsing the policy:
My guess is that eliminating the double taxation of dividends would lead to a powerful rally in stock prices and would do much to lift the penumbra of uncertainty that has bedeviled both consumers and corporate managers. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where dividends are taxed at both the corporate and the individual level. Treating debt and equity in an equivalent fashion will eliminate a major distortion in the tax code.
In the longer run, the effect on corporations and the economy will be unambiguously beneficial.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Via Dave Tepper: Clinton may be nominated to head Oxford.
Seems like the kind of day job we'd like him to have. Very Jeffersonian. Although one could wish it was an American university. And one hopes it doesn't have the effect we've seen in so many Americans abroad, where some unknown substance in the water causes their mouth to completely disconnect from their brain, assuming a British accent (even when in countries other than England -- strange) and Euro-Lefty opinions.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Hmmm. . . there's this post screaming that Republicans are looting strong Democratic states to pay off Republican states. But then I look and it looks to me like the distribution is good old fashioned tax-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor and what's the objection the Democrats have to this, exactly?
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:More Details on Dividend Taxation
Oops. major clarification to the dividend tax relief:
But the plan also is structured to give shareholders a potential tax break on profits even when a company retains or reinvests them in the business, Treasury officials said.Here's how that part of the plan works: For every $1 a company retains as earnings instead of paying it out as dividends, a shareholder would be allowed to exclude $1 per share from his taxable gain at the time the share is resold.
The purpose of the plan, Treasury officials said, is to prevent the pendulum from shifting too far in favor of dividends, and forcing companies to pay out dividends when they would prefer to reinvest the money.
"What we're trying to do is get rid of the bias against dividends," said Assistant Treasury Secretary Pam Olson. But at the same time, administration officials "don't want to create a bias" that pressures companies to pay dividends when they shouldn't.
Treasury officials said the change for retained earnings actually reduces the cost of the dividend plan as a whole, estimated at $364 billion over 10 years, by about $40 billion. It does so by eliminating some incentives companies would have had to game the new system, Ms. Olson said.
It'll be a while before the market sorts this out. This would seem to result in a heavier taxation of stocks that have multiple-expansion potential compared to others.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Whatever you think of Andrew Sullivan, his Salon column has perfectly captured something I've been trying to say for a while:
Reading Joan Didion's recent essay-cum-speech in the New York Review of Books is an enlightening exercise. It's enlightening not because it persuades. There is no argument in it, no prescription for American foreign policy now, no alternative proposed for countering the murderous terrorism that has already killed thousands of Americans. In this, Didion perfectly represents a certain type of decay in thinking on the intellectual left. Their argument about where we should go from here is essentially, "We shouldn't be here in the first place."
Pointing out past errors is useful, but beyond a certain point, it ceases to be so. The Left is at this point. Yes, shouldn't have given the Muhajadin money. Supporting Iraq in Iran, well, we were wearing our bad idea jeans. But what should we do now? If you want to complain about the situation, it behooves you to say how we should make it better. And if you think it's intractable, it behooves you to say that you don't know how to fix it any more than the folks you're criticizing. If all you've got to peddle is "no", go sell it somewhere else. We're full up here.
From the desk of Jane Galt:High Stakes Tests: Yea or nay?
Kimberly Swygert weighs in.
I'm in favor of tests in the sense that I believe in the proposition that if you don't measure something, it's awfully hard to manage or make policy for it. Perhaps the way the tests are set up is problematic, but I don't know how we can fix schools if we don't have a meaningful measure by which to compare their performance longitudanally and latitudinally. Moreover, I've looked at some of the high school exit exams, and they're pitiful. If the kids can't pass 'em, there's something horrendously wrong with our educational system, and the tests are measuring that just fine.
No doubt they encourage cheating. But so does any measure of performance, full stop. That doesn't negate the need for performance measures.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Via Mark Kleiman: lashon hara. We'd all be better off if we didn't engage in it. But then what the hell would we talk about?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Whither North Korea
Absolutely outstanding post on the complex quagmire of North Korea from Daniel Drezner.
January 7, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Ask and Ye Shall Receive
Scroll down the comment thread in this post for some "Jane" pictures.
Not quite the Hologram you were hoping for, I know.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why's it so expensive?
From Medrants, a comprehensive answer to those who demand to know why medical costs are rising:
Better, more costly technology
Better, most costly medicationsIncreased health care labor costs
Defensive medicine (see the next rant)
Our societal demand for the 'best' health care - regardless of price - for all (although society often demands the most costly even when it is not the best)
Reimbursement which pays well for procedures and diagnostic tests, but poorly for office visits and thinking
There are valid arguments in favor of single payer health care, though I find them ultimately uncompelling. But if you have some fantasy that single payer will make health care cheap, especially absent other reforms, think again.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Sidney Smith asks an interesting question: how come paying Americans to stop reproducing is horrifying, but paying foreigners to do so is just good family planning policy?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Is Fat Fine?
I've had a couple of emails asking me what I think about this piece in TNR arguing that being overweight, but not morbidly obese, is perfectly healthy. Well, when a lawyer tells me that he's been reviewing the medical literature, I get a little suspicious, since people who become lawyers are generally not known for their strengths in either science or math, the two tools needed for satisfactory review. And indeed his review is most unsatisfactory. He tells us that studies showing higher mortality and poorer health outcomes associated with obesity are funded by the diet industry, which is interesting but doesn't tell us whether the studies are right or wrong, especially since his definition of "diet industry" seems to include every company not actually a restaurant, and since we don't know what definition of "funding" he's using -- endowed chair, or rent-a-doc? More importantly, he offers only the sketchiest explanation of how he decides which studies to believe and which ones to discard, so that ultimately the criteria seem to be "this one agrees with my thesis, and those bad ones don't." Hardly a unique sin in journalism, but I'm not quite ready to join the pork parade because of it. Especially when there are large studies like this showing an average loss of life span of 3 years for the non-obese overweight.
That doesn't mean he's wrong, of course, but I think I'll check the evidence myself before I say more.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Diet Redux (Teehee!)
Jim Henley has been posting some enjoyable follow-ups on the diet question. He also emailed me to tell me that I implied that Jim Henley had written that obesity guidelines are written by diet companies. He did not write that; one of his readers did. I meant to tell you but I forgot. Now you know.
Incidentally, Jim, I like to link the name. It helps people find it when they google themselves.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Dividend Taxation
Just some preliminary thoughts on dividend tax relief.
I'm sure there are political reasons behind the administration's chosen construction of relief from double taxation of dividends, but I agree with Martin Mayer that the tax relief should come at the corporate level, not the individual. Why?
Most Americans who invest in the stock market don't currently pay taxes on dividend income. Their savings are in retirement plans like 401(k)'s, and dividends paid to these funds are not taxed. A law that made dividends tax-free would do nothing to put money in the pockets of people with all their stock in retirement plans.
Hard data on actual direct stockholding comes from the Federal Reserve Consumer Finance Survey. The 1998 survey suggested 48% of the population owned stocks, but only 15% owned stocks (and 12.3% mutual funds) directly in taxable accounts. Furthermore, the vast majority of the value of held stock remained in the top income cohorts. For readers interested, the 2001 data are due out in February 2003. In the meantime, The Investment Company Institute has their own 2002 study.
If the point is to boost the stock market, excluding the dominant tax-exempt institutions from dividend tax relief doesn't make a lot of sense, and corporations won't be able to report higher earnings from a dividend exclusion. However, boosting the stock market is not necessarily an effective stimulus. The Federal Reserve, at least, has found the wealth effect smaller than originally feared. (Of course, it could be asymmetrical...)
Apparently, a large part of the intended stimulus is an effective marginal rate cut for the top tax bracket (more accurately those owning stocks directly, but the two groups are essentially the same). Critics are correct in pointing this out.
I believe marginal rate cuts help the economy in the long run, but do not constitute a particularly effective short-term stimulus for consumption or investment. I'm also disappointed, but certainly not surprised, that double taxation will continue mostly without relief.
While good for the wealthy, the administration's plan does not appear to have been designed for corporations. Companies get neither a dividend deduction, nor hopes of a market boost to get rid of that pesky pension under-funding.
January 6, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Well, now those who have been wondering about Instapundit's assertions that I'm a "babe" can see for themselves.
Memo: I am not usually as rambling and incoherent as I sound. I think.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Et Tu, Bill?
Apparently favored blogosphere whipping children Dowd and Krugman are not the only regular contributors mailing it in to the NYT Op-Ed pages these days. Distinctly Dowd-ish.
January 5, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Jim Henley has a post arguing that obesity studies are funded by the diet industry, and thus flawed.
There are undoubtedly problems with the measurements, but they aren't all flawed one way. Height-weight tables put my ideal weight around 175, at which point I could probably audition for a role as one of those East German shotputters.
Also, the studies aren't all funded by the diet industry; a lot of them are funded by the CDC, NIH, or other agencies. And the data I saw is pretty clear: the lowest mortality is associated with a BMI of 19-21. 2nd lowest is 21-24. 25+ starts carrying health risks, and 30+ has associations with severe health outcomes.
I remember watching a documentary on a Japanese country in business school and being subtly puzzled by the feeling of something wrong -- something I couldn't put my finger on. Then I realized -- no one in the picture was fat. Not the managers, not the old guys. Everyone was slender. Undoubtedly, they fell within the BMI guidelines. Equally undoubtedly, most Americans would be horrified by the caloric intake of the typical Japanese -- little meat, very little sugar, not even that many refined starches. My experience is that people who classify low BMI's as impossible are really classifying the eating habits that get you there as outside the bounds of reason.
[And yet there is an alternative -- a healthful, enjoyable vegetarian diet! Unless you have cheese at every meal, you'll drop that weight in no time. Promise.]
Don't get me wrong -- I wouldn't live on the Japanese diet if you paid me. For starters, I hate seaweed. But it isn't some sort of impossible dream, either. Not doing so is a choice, not fate.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Blogs just made the mainstream -- I just saw Michael Barone mention Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, and Instapundit on the McLaughlin Group.
January 4, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:I think it's time to lay off Bob Rubin. Calling Treasury to see whether they could lean on Moody's to forestall a downgrade of Enron's debt was a spectacularly bad idea. Certainly, it rubs a little of the shine off the halo Democrats have built around him; Rubin the white knight turns out to like to pressure the government in his own interest, just like everyone else. On the other hand, consider the everyone else - Rubin's sin was, in comparison, a minor pecadillo. What he did was not illegal, nor even really unethical. He called Treasury to argue that the pubic would be better served by keeping Enron's debt rating up. This was not true. But interest groups of which we are all fond say things that are not true every day, most of them much more egregious than this one. In fact, you can probably recall a recent incident in which you tried to, say, convince your spouse that the family would really be better off at a golf resort than going to boring old Disneyland -- the kids'll love it! And unlike you, when Fisher pointed out that it was a bad idea, Rubin agreed and hung up.
So I propose a deal: if Democrats will stop alleging that Bob Rubin is a superhuman exemplar of all that is right in government, Republicans can stop reminding us that he's just a regular guy after all. Except really smart and rich, I mean.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:How to make something out of nothing
While slumming on Common Dreams, I found this example of how misleading punditry memes get started. Here's Norman Solomon giving "awards" a la Andrew Sullivan:
"KICKING OUT HISTORY" AWARD -- Multiple winnersDozens of esteemed journalists and major media outlets qualified for this prize by reporting that the Iraqi government had ejected U.N. weapons inspectors four years ago. Actually, the inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 under orders from UNSCOM head Richard Butler just before the blitz of U.S. bombing dubbed "Operation Desert Fox."
With notable disregard for historical facts, many reporters at leading news organizations flatly asserted that Saddam Hussein had "expelled" or "kicked out" the U.N. inspectors. Among the purveyors of that misinformation were Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio (Aug. 3), John Diamond of USA Today (Aug. 8), John McWethy of "ABC World News Tonight" (Aug. 12), John King of CNN (Aug. 18), John L. Lumpkin of the Associated Press (Sept. 7), Randall Pinkston of "CBS Evening News" (Nov. 9), Betsy Pisik of the Washington Times (Nov. 14) and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (Nov. 17).
Some outlets were repeat winners, as when USA Today claimed in a Sept. 4 editorial that "Saddam expelled U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998." Other prominent newspapers also made the false information a centerpiece of the positions that they espoused. The New York Times declared in an Aug. 3 editorial: "America's goal should be to ensure that Iraq is disarmed of all unconventional weapons. ... To thwart this goal, Baghdad expelled United Nations arms inspectors four years ago." On the very next day, the Washington Post editorialized: "Since 1998, when U.N. inspectors were expelled, Iraq has almost certainly been working to build more chemical and biological weapons."
Joshua Micah Marshall has already responded to this bit of semantics.
While being essentially confined to one's hotel doesn't place you outside the territory of Iraq, it certainly does constitute "kicking out inspectors". Answer a simple question - were there any "inspectors", in a functional sense, at that point? No. Of course, Solomon also neglects to reveal that the bombing that caused Butler to pull the team out was executed precisely for Saddam's refusal to cooperate with inspectors.
To elevate this repeated poor word choice to one of the "foulest media achievements of 2002", reveals just how little ammo Solomon has to convince us that he is the lone moral truth-teller. It is Solomon who deserves a "P.U.-litzer" for perverting the truth.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:All Together Now
All together now folks - the potential war with Iraq is not about oil. (via Stuart Buck)
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Mentioned, not Used
I believe Winston Churchill described the method for making a properly dry martini: mix gin and ice; glance quickly at a bottle of dry vermouth; pour.*.
Substitute Bush-bashing for Gin, Social Science theory for Vermouth, (and quick for "dry") and you've got Paul Krugman's easy column cocktail.
I agree with Donald Luskin that Krugman's latest is a horrible non-sequitur. It follows an old pattern of grandly making allusion to an impressive academic theory (to reinforce his economic credentials as relevant to political punditry, one supposes), followed by vitriolic criticism of the Bush administration with barely any connection to the column's high falutin' beginnings. As Luskin points out, he is also quite selective with his description of Ellsberg's theory.
Krugman's point appears to be that the Bush administration is all empty threats and no reward. But he conveniently ignores two very relevant facts in order to make the tired "attacking Iraq not North Korea" argument:
- It is widely believed, certainly by the administration, that North Korea already has nukes, and
- The prior administration was all carrot and no stick whatsoever, which is why (1) has come to pass
It's very easy to tell someone they are playing the game wrong while misunderstanding or misrepresenting the cards in their hand.
What would Krugman do? Allow North Korea to sell their (non-)compliance with nuclear agreements yet again? Accept North Korea's money for old rope strategy forever? This will simply put us back in this identical situation in a few years when North Korea once again finds itself too strapped to feed its soldiers and fuel its tanks.
* I have heard it differently from the linked recipe
UPDATE: Hoystory has more on this same column, and guess who swept the titles in Lying in Ponds?. Also, tons of spirited discussion in the comments, in which my command of Latin and logic are questioned, and the entertaining question of 'why does Krugman provoke such ire' is flogged within an inch of its life (is it 'Jane's addiction'?). I'm sticking to the 'Ann Coulter of the Left' explanation, except not as funny or attractive. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan (who just won't drop the 'former Enron consultant' prefix) provides fodder for the Krugman-detractors with an interview quotation.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Has anyone else noticed that Salon's content is getting extremely thin? I know it's the holiday, but I've been watching the decline for months. . . sections only have one column each, and anything you want to read is premium - and there's not even much in the latter category. Does this spell doom?
January 3, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Abridged Two Towers
The Abridged Two Towers is very funny:
'Read it all', to coin a phrase.
HELM'S DEEPLEGOLAS: This is going to be most unpleasant. Hundreds of people will die.
ARAGORN: Thank you, Captain Obvious.
LEGOLAS: You're just jealous because I'm pretty.
ARAGORN: You're just jealous because I'm going to be king.
LEGOLAS: You can bite my ass....
----
ROHIRRIM GUARD: Sire, there are some really femmy people at the gate. They have bows.
ARAGORN: Those are Elves. Let them in.
ROHIRRIM GUARD: Oh! Elves! Wow, I didn't expect that.
PEOPLE WHO READ THE BOOK: Neither did I...
From the desk of Jane Galt:Racism or Racialism?
Eve Tushnet has a long, thoughtful series on race and lingering racism. In one part, she discusses the disturbing study that showed that applicants with black names were disproportionately not called back for interviews. Are there alternate explanations to racism?
Well, possibly. One of those explanations might lie with EOE lawsuits, although not quite the way that one would think. It's usually alleged that employers are afraid that new minority employees might sue for discrimination. But even if they weren't afraid of this, employers might discriminate against "black" names in choosing resumes, because of the incentive system of current discrimination legislation.
It is well known that well intentioned punitive measures can have side effects that oppose the goals they aim to achieve. When draconian penalties are set for crimes like cheating, teachers are reluctant to turn offenders in; when we enact "3 strikes" laws, we give criminals incentives to kill their victims to keep from being identified. The structure of anti-discrimination legislation suggests that this could be another one of those situations. When an employer is sued for hiring bias, the standard procedure is to look at the pool of applicants for positions and see whether the percentage of blacks hired is identical to the percentage of blacks in the applicant pool.
But it is not necessarily the case that employers that hire a smaller percentage of blacks than the percentage in the pool is a racist employer discriminating against blacks. It is a common fallacy among the inummerate to believe that small populations mirror the distribution of larger populations. For example, say there are 1 cancers for every thousand people. It does not follow that my building, which has about a thousand people in it, will have one and only one cancer. The belief that it should follow is what drove the Long Island Cancer Cluster scare; if there were three cases of a rare brain cancer in one town, it couldn't be a fluke -- it had to be Evil Chemical Companies, or Greedy Power Barons, or what have you. But you are surrounded by clusters -- people named Fred, folks who enjoy obscure bluegrass musicians, people with the same birthday. There's nothing nefarious in this; just ordinary statistical dynamics. Notice that people living near power lines did not look for abnormally low incidence of certain diseases, which they could undoubtedly have found just as easily.
But I digress. The point is that the laws of statistics and probability tell us that even in a marketplace pristinely free of racism, some employers will end up hiring more blacks than they would on strict percentages of the applicant pool, while some will end up hiring fewer. Yet the lawyers will not seek out the companies with more minorities to determine what the distribution looks like; rather, they will descend on those who happen to be on the tail end of the distribution, and seek to punish them. The worse the punishment for doing so -- and some of the verdicts have been quite large -- the more incentive even a non-racist employer has to cleanse the applicant pool of minorities before he can be held legally accountable for a failure to hire them. If the percentage of blacks in the applicant pool is low enough, variance even at the tail end of the distribution will be statistical noise for all but the very largest companies. Since resumes do not contain information about race -- but do contain markers for race -- it is easily conceivable that an employer might use those markers to winnow down the percentage of blacks in the pool to a more manageable level.
That is not, of course, to suggest that racism is not the cause -- only that it might not be. Further testing would be required.
One should also note that the study displayed a very wide variance between even very "black" names, with some names getting called back almost as much as "white" names, and other names doing very poorly. This suggests, at minimum, that further studies are necessary to replicate the results, since there's no reason I can think of to believe that "Latoya" is somehow less identifiably black than "Aisha".
Tushnet also asks of the "strong" theory of unintended results (that employers are afraid to hire blacks because they are afraid that they will sue), why this is any more logical than employers being afraid to hire whites because they're afraid they'll racially discriminate? Well, couple of reasons: first of all, racial discrimination isn't limited to whites, as anyone who's worked with a workforce where minority group has traditionally controlled certain positions can tell you. (The nastiest comments I've ever heard about blacks came from the Puerto Rican mail room at one of my jobs, who felt threatened by the blacks over in Repro.) And second of all, assuming that there is any chance at all of frivolous lawsuits, the decision will be biased towards getting rid of blacks. Assume that whites have a propensity of 1 in 5 to discriminate, and blacks have a propensity of 1 in 1000 to unsubstantiated discrimination lawsuits. (THIS IS JUST A MATHEMATICAL CONSTRUCT NOT A COMMENT ON ANYTHING IN THE REAL WORLD NOR ARE THESE NUMBERS MEANT TO BE REPRESENTATIVE). Unless it were possible to staff your entire organization with blacks at no loss of productivity, you would be biased towards hiring whites, since getting rid of the blacks gets rid of both problems, while getting rid of the whites does not rid you of frivolous lawsuits.
Overall, I'd say that while there might be lingering racism in hiring, I haven't seen it. And I'd like some further studies before I'm ready to throw the American Experiment out the window -- especially when the problem might not be racism, but the unintended consequences of laws intended to address it.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Blair's (not that one) Predictions
How did I miss Tim Blair's New years Predictions? Robert Fisk figures prominently, as do a variety of "symbols of the hatred and fury of this filthy war". Michael Moore in France! Don't miss it.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Going to Hell in a Shopping Cart
I've always been tickled by arguments that reveal the political spectrum as a wrinkly circle, rather than a line. I picked out this column as a perfect example of the phenomenon and showed it to my wife, remarking that I might blog on it."Isn't that kind of easy?" she said, wrinkling her nose and handing it back between two fingers.
"What's wrong with easy? Why not a little barrel-Fisking on a cold winter night? Isn't this scolding boil crying out for a ride in the Tuschmobile and an application of Preparation F(isk)?"
Our Quality of Life Peaked in 1974. It's All Downhill Now
We will pay the price for believing the world has infinite resources
by George Monbiot
It turns out many of the self-styled "progressives" catalogued on Common Dreams are reactionaries. George Monbiot, in particular, stands athwart progress whining "NOOoooo, you're doing it all wrong!"
Or, as one of my childhood friends used to say, "pretend I won, OK?"
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.I guess if you really are travelling backwards it would look like things are getting worse (But to answer his question, here are a quick 25 factual "bases" for the belief they have improved, and here's an alternate take on pollution).
As for "taking into account such factors as..", anyone can use a customized "quality of life" index with subjective components to support their beliefs. Mine would substract points for the number of column-inches by George Monbiot, Robert Jensen, Tom Turnipseed, Molly Ivins and Bernie Sanders . Hmmm. Things are getting much worse! My Idiotarian Verbiage Index suggests the world really is going to hell in a hempbasket.
The reason should not be hard to grasp.
Not when you're busy wringing your hands, furrowing your brow and attempting to change human nature (while not chewing gum).
Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion. This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken.It's Voldenomics, the science that dare not speak its name!
It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.So let me see, you tell people they were better off in the age of disco and Watergate, that there was more pollution before catalytic converters, when much of the world was burning coal (and dung) as its primary energy sources and tires vaporized in 10,000 miles, telling people that this time we really will run out of all the things we need even though it didn't turn out to be true when you said it in 1974. People call you a cranky prig lunatic for that?
Where the Hell do they get off! Well, there's no accounting for the common folk.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.Capitalism only requires that human ingenuity be infinite. Capitalism deals quite ably with "finity". In fact, last I checked, capitalism was about the most efficient way to allocate resources and avoid authoritarian power. The marketplace assigns higher prices to things that are becoming scarce and profit-seekers (translation for Idiotarians: money-hungy amoral spendthrifts) develop substitutes.
I'm not a proselytizer for Christianity, but Monbiot's inadequate understanding of capitalism still seems to exceed his understanding of Christian salvation.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.A brief interlude to sing about the Laws of Thermodynamics:
Heat is work and work's a curseA Pfennig is currency, not a natural resource. Paper and electronic money are, for all practical purposes, infinite. Gold is not, but we took care of that a long time ago. GDP is measured in money, not consumption of natural resources. Since 1974 most of our growth has come from burgeoning trade in non-polluting services and intellectual property. But since Monbiot is living backwards, like Merlin, he sees it the other way around.
And all the heat in the universe
Is gonna cool down,
'Cos it can't increase
Then there'll be no more work
And there'll be perfect peace
Really?
Yeah, that's entropy, Man.
And all because of the second law of thermodynamics which lays down:
That you can't pass heat from a cooler to a hotter
Try it if you like but you'd far better not-a
'Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a rule-a
'Cos the hotter body's heat will pass to the cooler
-Flanders & Swann
Does anybody even understand the lunacy put forth in this paragraph? The power of compound interest makes our debt to natural resources unpayable? Or was it that lack of natural resources to understand debt is compounded by the lack of interest in lucid analogy? Something like that.
....One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity.....Funny, I thought it was infinity that was hard to understand.
is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labor and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future."Capitalism has moved its frontier.." Oops, you were almost on to something there, George.
Damn, even after the apex of the human condition that was 1974, that colonial past keeps mucking up our future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints.and that industry's profits are equal to those of the industry built upon the denial of progress.
Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.Help, the Limited,and Newell Rubbermaid are taking over the world! Short the knickers sector!
Or is it that people's jobs and livelihoods depend on consumer spending? Nah. Who needs all those empty retail and distribution jobs anyway. Oh, by the way, G., you can have my Victoria's Secret catalogue when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery. Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."Wow - Monbiot's correspondents are more hateful than mine. And that's saying something. Still - population control belongs exclusively to his side of the political ledger.
And how does this compare on the "unmediated savagery"-meter to what Monbiot's wishes: provoking the implosion of consumer spending and negative interest rates (see Leitaer below) so we can have double-digit unemployment and shove the billion or so people who have been able to raise their living standards in India and China (largely on the strength of Exports to the developed world) back to their desparate 1974 living standards?
I'd say its a draw. Monbiot's program is population control by another name - he doesn't want to get his hands dirty with forced sterilization, but he's willing to let starvation and disease wipe out all those resource consumers instead. When it comes to suffering (as opposed to anything else), Monbiot is willing to let a severely weakened market sort it out.
Besides, taking your most insane reader correspondence and generalizing it to the unwashed masses - that's just a cheap rhetorical trick to be outraged*. Imagine how you could portray society using James Lileks and Steven Den Beste's hate mail!
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.Somewhere in there is a retraction for parroting all that Worldwatch "population bomb" doomsaying. Did you hear it? Now its farm animals! Once again, despite Monbiot's averred affection for the little guy and dislike for technology, it's the vast numbers living hand to mouth in an agrarian fashion that get the shaft on the Monbiot plan. After all, all that dung-burning is pollution, right? Let them go without milk, fire OR the progressive community's bete noir, "'Untrammelled' Economic Growth."
....[snip...]It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.Call up Lietaer's book on Amazon and you'll see that "people who bought this book also bought books by John Pilger and George Soros". Sigh. Amazing how many suppressed utterers of the "the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken" get published on dead trees, isn't it? Do you suppose they would be "taxed out of existence" as well?
I'm not even sure how to evaluate the effects of paying someone to take money off your hands (negative interest rates). I do know the Lietaer has predicted some sort of disaster with the world's currencies, and it seems like negative interest rates might just do the trick. In addition, it would trigger an enormous (relative) boom in exploration and development of natural resources. Somehow, I don't think this is what Monbiot has in mind.
Monbiot's assertion here is that growth is finite because resources are finite. Growth in GDP is not identically constrained by natural resources (although it does require either population or productivity growth). GDP is measured in dollars, which are not resource constrained. Monbiot takes no notice of the fact that less and less of the world's trade is in natural resources. similarly, his debt analogy is a loser because debt can be monetized (in fact, that's what lietaer seems to be recommending).
Strangely, the best sense I can make out of this paragraph is that Monbiot wants to make the economy more resource-dependent by making currency worthless and bringing on an era of rampant inflation. This would seem to be at odds with his general concern for natural resources (not to mention people's desire to work and earn a living), but I don't think he's thought it through that far. It fits his hatred of money, and that's enough.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. (emphasis mine- Ed.)It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.One of the faults of the "progressive screed", typified here, is that they typically call for nothing other than the overthrow of those in power and a general sea-change in people's attitudes. Even if we accepted their "factual" assertions, just how are they going to make all of humanity play according to all their unpleasant, quality-of-life-decreasing rules?
(repeat)Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad.How sick are you of this deluded, prudish, finger-wagging snobbery? Doesn't that just sum up the "progressive" philosophy? Unwittingly, Monbiot has revealed the puritan reactionary disguised in the "progressive" left. It's the progressive hair shirt - there MUST be a downside to these so-called "improvements" in the quality of life because, dammit, they happened without our permission! You're not playing by our rules! If consumers like it, if its an "exciting present" it must be bad for you. If we don't like it, it's clearly immoral.
Beware the apocalypse, the sky is falling, Gaia will sit in judgment and declare us unfit to pursue our dreams. And, by George, her standards will be... Monbidiotarian.
* sort of like fisking a monbiot column, I guess...
It appears that I missed Samizdata and Layman's Logic having fun with this one. Sorry Guys!
From the desk of Jane Galt:How the West was Begun
by Jared Diamond
Like the Elusive Quest for Growth, this book ultimately asks the question of why some nations are better off than others. But while Easterly focuses on the economic structures that prevent or enhance prosperity, Diamond goes further back, to the dawn of agriculture, to ask how some countries ended up with Starbucks and MP3 players, while others stayed in the stone age.
The result is fascinating. Ultimately, he traces it back to how hospitable the local culture was to agriculture, but along the way he takes you on a tour of plant and animal life, geography, and even geology to explain why, no matter how smart they were, Papua New Guineans were never going to break out of the Stone Age, because natural constraints on their agriculture or technology prevented them from concentrating sufficient population densities to do so. If you haven't got a local food crop that can be domesticated into a high-yielding staple, you'll remain a hunter gatherer unless you are lucky enough to encounter someone from another region who can share theirs with you. If you haven't any domestic animals to help you till the land, your productivity will be strictly limited. And if there is no iron or copper on your island, you are not going to develop metal tools.
I have two main problems with the book. The first is that there is an element of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc, to his logic. While it makes intuitive sense to say that if local plants and animals are poor candidates for domestication, local humans will not thrive, Diamond's assertion that the local candidates are more convincing for island-nations than large regions like the United States, where the reasoning is largely: the locals did not successfully domesticate high-yielding staples or animals, therefore there were none that could have been domesticated. He constructs a fairly convincing model of what makes a successful candidate for plant domestication, but as he himself points out, these conditions are sufficient but not necessary: teosinte, the ancestor of corn, is such a poor candidate that the debate is still raging over how the hell we got from ears the size of a thumbnail to the crop that build the Americas. The argument is even weaker with animals. In some cases the ancestor is extinct; in others, such as wild boars, they do not fit the criteria he has set up. It seems to me that there is a stronger element of luck to all this than Diamond is willing to allow.
Which is probably because of my other main beef with the book: Diamond spends a great deal of time telling us that it's simply not true that primitive societies remained primitive because they are genetically inferior. I am sure he is correct, but he's rather strenuous about it considering that this argument is not seriously advanced by anyone I've ever met, and hasn't been for the last fifty years or so. It's a lot of space to take up refuting an argument no one is making. And I think it leads him to overstate the case, which is extremely strong -- but which would be even better if he allowed for the possiblity that some people simply got lucky -- or conversely, that some people just didn't figure it out before the western ships got there. We are all dependent on genius and luck; to admit it is not to imply that those who didn't have them are somehow deficient.
Nonetheless, it's a must read for anyone who wants to know how domestic civilization arose. I highly recommend it.
January 2, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Chilling question from Charles Murtaugh:
If the superinfection problem is real, it means that unsafe sex (here or abroad, gay or straight -- but see my previous post for qualifications) could rapidly spread drug-resistant virus through a population on antiretrovirals. The result is that broader access to antiretrovirals in Africa could produce a breeding ground for drug-resistant HIV. How will this affect the international AIDS advocacy dynamic, if First Worlders start to see Third World antiretroviral drug access as a threat to their own public health?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Okay, I don't want to see one more commentator stating or implying that the reason other states act badly is that we're not setting a good example. Kim Jong Il is starving millions of his own people, despite the sterling example we're setting in that department. He would want nukes even if we didn't have them because he wants to be able to destroy the other kids in the sandbox if they won't give him their toys. We are not parents, and we are not rearing the dictators of the 3rd world. And even if we were, based on their current behavior, it would not be a good idea to negotiate with them -- it would be time to take them out to the woodshed.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Flag of Honor
I just bought one of these on the street. I am simply touched to see the WTC victims I knew written into the stripes of the flag.
From the desk of Jane Galt:The fine art of making excuses seems to be on the decline, to judge from Stuart Buck's description of Susan MacDougal's reason for refusing to testify:
Well, if there has ever been a more implausible explanation for a refusal to testify, I haven't heard it. Her explanation amounts to saying that she was willing to actually go to jail for refusing to testify, so that she could avoid the mere chance that if she told the truth, no one would believe her and she might someday end up being prosecuted for perjury, and despite her having told the truth, the prosecution would be able to prove her a liar beyond a reasonable doubt, and then, alas, she would end up . . . going to jail, which is where she was anyhow.
January 1, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Doctors on Strike....
...in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
There is a downside to huge medical malpractice awards.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:With buddies like these...
Just what I need! A a bursting, vapid Fembot to read me my news.
Can you imagine one of these reading you USS Clueless?
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Ouch
I apologize for disappearing. Here's the deal- I have acute tendonitis in my shoulder. A few days ago I couldn't even raise my arm above waist level. Needless to say, this has not been conducive to blogging. In fact, my computer habits (work and blog) may have caused the problem. I've been sore for a month, and one short day of skiing laid me low.
So I took some time away. But I was watching, and here are some random observations....
Did you know that some people are giving their loved ones plastic surgery as a Christmas present?Yeah, and it has something to do with President Bush, apparently.
Amazing, the things you learn when you read the paper.
I did go out to see Gangs of New York. This is a flamboyantly bloody film, as described in the New Yorker -
obvious, and grisly, with an emphasis on knives and blood that borders on the fetishistic. Scorsese shot "Gangs" in Rome's Cinecittà, and the picture has some of the depressive feverishness of "Fellini Satyricon," which was also shot there—the jeering spectators mounted in multitiered sets, the furtive life of the crime-ridden metropolis, with its hapless poverty, its barbaric entertainments, its obscure and unredeemed suffering.
In the moments when I was able to block out Lenny DiCaprio's hideous performance I thought of the precious illusions about man's past or "natural" state that cultural conservatives and certain leftists seem to maintain, i.e., the rural life is better, rapid development reduces our naturally prosperous standard of living, etc.. So, I wondered, was the violent, hateful moral wasteland depicted in this film an accurate depiction of life for the poor in the 19th century?
No, says Kevin Baker in the New York Times, it was worse:
Certainly "Gangs of New York" should not be mistaken for the historical record; it is based on Herbert Asbury's book of the same name, a scarcely accurate collection of gangland anecdotes gathered in the 1920's. But if anything, Mr. Scorsese has for the most part spared us the more sordid details of the reality. In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.Many people seem to be surprised and unsettled by this aspect of the American past. But the truth is that antebellum New York, particularly in its poorer wards, often was literally swimming in filth and blood. The city's sewers were so stuffed with butchers' offal that they overflowed with it even in the lightest rains; it wasn't uncommon to see little boys sailing paper boats on pools of blood in the gutters. Pigs ran loose on the streets, as Mr. Scorsese faithfully shows, and rat-baiting was indeed a popular spectator sport, an entertainment in which betting gentlemen wagered on how long it would take a trained terrier to kill 100 rats.
Between 1788 and 1870 there were numerous riots, many of them with a morbidly comic tinge to them, as their names imply — the Doctors Riot, the Flour Riot, the Actors Riot, the Orange Riots. These disturbances broke out at the drop of a hat, often sparked by something as minor as a misunderstanding. (The Doctors Riot started because of a rumor that medical students were secretly dissecting the corpses of the poor and ended with a mob ransacking the house of someone named Sir John, whose name was mistaken for Surgeon.) These outbreaks were usually put down only after extensive bloodshed.
After all the grief Anna Quindlen took about claiming to "understand" a woman (Andrea Yates) who drowned her kids, I'm surprised she even went near Madelyne Toogood -
Yet there’s a weird sort of cognitive dissonance between that attenuated consciousness of childhood safety and the Zeitgeist of our dangerous age. Perhaps it was reflected in the behavior of Madelyne Toogood, the mother caught on tape walloping her 4-year-old daughter as though child abuse were an aerobic exercise. The video eye watched as the woman hit the child, and hit her, and hit her again. Then she put her in the child safety seat in the car, and hit her some more.
A twisted metaphor for a time in which we keep our children away from gory movies and then have to keep them inside so they will not be picked off with a semi-automatic weapon.
I thought also of my oldest child when he was about six. Sometimes, as we arrived at the playground, he would point way across the park to a group of older kids playing and laughing and oblivious to our presence. "Dad," he'd say, lip quivering, "those kids are being mean to me." Silent, long distance taunting, apparently.
North Korea's recent statements about imminent U.S. attack plans reminded me of that.
Also, being accused of "internationalizing" our conflict with North Korea. That is rich.
Today I heard Clinton National security Council Staffer Charles Kupchan declare that the Bush Administration is focused "like a laser" on Al Qaeda and Iraq. Funny, I thought Iraq was distracting us from Al Qaeda.
I am almost done with Smart Mobs. I'm not sure Howard Rheingold and I define "Commons" similarly. Also, he spends a lot of time describing the incredible means for communication people will have in the future without offering much of a suggestion of what we will do with it. Teenagers checking each other's location every ten seconds is not an earth shattering social trend. Will ubiquitous access to information and communication change our actual beliefs and behavior?
Finally, for all you SUV-snobs out there (no I don't have one, and my wife is a card-carrying SUV-hater) - do you know why people buy Suburbans, Yukons and Navigators? Very simple - child seats, bucket seats and airbags. You can't wedge one of your kids between Mom and Dad in the front seat of the Country Squire anymore, and minivans have no room inside for luggage when the seats are full. Take my word on that last one. You try strapping duffle bags to a roof rack with only your left arm.