Posted by Marc Hodak on May 25, 2008 under Movie reviews | Comments are off for this article
Too late for the epidural.
Like most romantic comedies, Knocked Up is basically about placing mismatched elements A and B in a crucible, throwing in a catalyst, and watching the crazy reaction as they become a bonded pair. In this case element A, Allison Scott, played by the stunning Katherine Heigl, is a girl that pretty much has it all together; she’s a junior producer on E! network who just got a promotion. Element B, Ben Stone, played by the lumpy Seth Rogan, is as his last name implies someone who would rather wake up to some good weed, and without much of a planning horizon beyond that.
I’ve never seen Heigl before on TV or in film. Now, I could watch her all day long. I hear she plays a doctor on TV. In this film she plays a patient looking for a decent Ob-Gyn. But this film is really about what she’s looking for in the man who impregnated her. Decency is a given. Ben is immediately taken with Allison–who wouldn’t be–and quickly owns up to his responsibility. Allison is a decent person, too, so it’s not like he has to take the good with the bad on that count.
The “baby on the way” is, of course, the catalyst in this crucible. The pregnancy establishes the timetable for this relationship as well as the pace of this movie. The birth itself happens at such a pace that the doctor must tell Allison that there is no time for the epidural. That’s how comedy works–we laugh at the pain of the characters. The acting and writing was uniformly good–a perfect Apatow blend of goofy and grounded.
I think that romantic comedy endings are scarce in real life because people are too impatient to let a relationship grow, or tend to succumb to the destructive fantasy of “the one for me.” I’ve always believed that two strangers stranded on an island would figure out how to make it work happily ever after…or there would soon enough be only one left. But no two people are on an island. We’re inundated with choices and friends and relatives and all the rest of civilization telling us “you can do better.” And lots of unhappy relationships.
I read that Heigl got banged up a little about comments about this films “sexism.” I’m sure the public reaction was overly politicized and highly unfair. She clearly liked making this film, and did a fabulous job. One of the things I have liked about Apatow films have been their apolitical nature, which is often misinterpreted as “politically incorrect.” Politically incorrect is what a Mel Brooks did. Everyone else is just a pretender.
The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act, among other things, reduces taxes on lawyers with an offsetting increase in taxes on investment managers and corporations. If that doesn’t sound like the kind of bill a Republican would vote for, think again:
Republican Congressman David Hobson supported the bill with the following justification:
“Probably the responsible vote is ‘no,’ but how do you explain that in a media that’s frantic over gasoline prices? Frankly, this has nothing to do with gasoline prices, but you can’t explain it, and it taxes the rich guys,” Hobson said.
As it turns out, most of this bill was aimed at extending tax breaks to a myriad of industries. Would he be inclined to support those? Well, let’s just toggle over to his list of biggest campaign donors to see who we meet. Hey, there’s PMA Group, one of the largest industry lobbyists on K Street pushing those production incentives for renewable fuels. Hi PMA! Then we meet Forest City Enterprises, a major beneficiary of R&D tax credits. Hi FCE! So, you see, Hobson wasn’t compromising his supposed principles, he was just showing gratitude to his biggest supporters.
Then, we meet Pioneer PAC. Hi Pioneer! Wait, whose Pioneer?
As Ted Kennedy begins his battle with cancer, we’re treated with a story about how his work in the Senate may be paying off in the form of his treatment choices:
“It’s really hard to think of anyone who’s helped biomedical research in this country or the National Institutes of Health more than he has, and hopefully he’ll get some benefit from how he’s helped others,” said Dr. Patrick Wen, clinical director of the Center for Neuro-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Personally, I would consider it somewhat vindictive to wish upon Ted Kennedy the fruits of his health care policies. The good news is that Kennedy, like nearly all sufferers, will have no idea which of dozens or hundreds of treatments for his condition don’t exist today because of the costs of regulations that Kennedy supported over the last several decades (see below the fold).
I also hope that Dr. Wen is much better at connecting the dots in his research than he is between his last statement and this one:
Economics comes into play, as well. Simply put, the market for brain cancer drugs pales, compared with that for other malignancies, with only 9,000 people a year in the United States diagnosed with the kind of cancer that has beset Kennedy.
“Because the numbers are relatively small,” Wen said, “the incentive to develop drugs for brain tumors is less than for breast cancer or prostate cancer.”
Posted by Marc Hodak on under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article
Lou Pearlman was given an unusual sentence for defrauding investors of $300 million. He was nominally sentenced to 25 years in prison. However, the judge offered to reduce his sentence by one month for every $1 million Pearlman was able to return to his victims.
I’m not sure what the legal implications of such an offer might be, but the incentive issues are compelling. The first-order incentives are pretty clear: Pearlman has a strong incentive to return most, but not all of the money. Why not all? Because of economic laws, which are not subject to negotiation.
Pearlman is currently 53, so a 25 year sentence pretty much takes up most of his remaining life expectancy. I would bet that if he could buy his way out of that sentence in an all-or-nothing transaction, he would do so at any price. But most economic decisions are at the margin, and this one is one of them. As the sentence gets reduced, the marginal value of each month in prison is likely to go down. For instance, he may well decide that six months in prison is worth $6 million. I probably would. This remains true even if he’s resource constrained. For instance, if he only has enough to buy his way out of 15 years, he might still decide that the 121st month is worth an extra million, especially if he’s able to realize some returns on that million during the 10 years and a month he’d spend in the slammer.
The second-order incentives are a little more problematic. Regardless of whether Pearlman is resource-constrained or not, he’s simply paying for his crime at cost. If I defraud someone of a million, I shouldn’t be given the option of giving back that million and calling it even; there should be some extra penalty, either in cash or prison time (except that I personally don’t believe in swelling our prisons with non-violent offenders).
Also, is a million per month the right price? Or does the routine fraudster get a lower rate? Maybe it’s $100,000 per month for an executive? Or $10,000 per month for Guido? (Hey, I’m just sayin’.) More importantly, how much are prosecutor’s going to be selling freedom for? Government agents, like economic agents, will go with what the traffic will bear. So the question won’t be, “What is the appropriate price of freedom in this case?” It will be, “How much you got?”
Posted by Marc Hodak on under Economics | Comments are off for this article
Buffet says he likes Obama. Icahn says he doesn’t trust him on the economics.
“I personally think he would be a terrible president,” Icahn said, arguing that Obama would probably go on a “huge spending spree” that “the country can’t afford right now.”
It’s always difficult to comment on political opinions about economics because politics is so opposed to economics. Economics is about decision-making at the margin, where trade-offs are easy to discern, and decisions about trade-offs are easy to evaluate. Politics is about bundling decisions with the express purpose of making such trade-offs impossible. You don’t want that extra tax dollar to fund the war rather than children’s health care? Tough. Your taxes pay for the bundle, and you don’t have any choice about the bundle or about paying for it.
So, the economic bundle that goes with Republicans versus Democrats is too unwieldy to provide any clear comparison between the two. For example, Icahn presumably would have felt more comfortable about Bush than he does about Obama on economics (so would I), yet Bush oversaw a huge spending spree that this government couldn’t afford. That’s not damning to either Bush or Icahn; the spending spree is a built-in fact of life for any president given the powerful incentives toward irresponsibility that drive Congress.
On the other hand, if Buffet is so sanguine about the higher taxes and the capabilities of his Democratic buddies promising to bring them on, then he has a choice at the margin about that. So, why isn’t he giving any of his surplus wealth to the government instead of to a place like the Gates Foundation? Another billionaire offers a good answer to that.
Posted by Marc Hodak on May 21, 2008 under Self-promotion | Comments are off for this article
I was explaining to my Russian audience why their oligarchs deserved their billions, when someone decided to launch a pointed comment…
I hear they found something that looked like a controller in the bag of an attendee representing the AFL-CIO. Or maybe one of those Towers Perrin hecklers.
Posted by Marc Hodak on May 20, 2008 under Scandal | Comments are off for this article
It’s becoming increasingly clear that this was the approach taken by Texas CPS in the FLDS raid that took over 460 children away from their mothers. What reason was there for this?
Joseph and Lori Jessop…said they didn’t know where the state had sent their 4-year-old daughter and 2 1/2 -year-old son, but as a nursing mother Lori Jessop has been allowed to care for her infant son, who is in a foster care facility in San Antonio, during the day.
Joseph Jessop is 27, and Lori Jessop is 25, according to court documents. They’re not in a plural marriage and lived in a single-family unit at the Yearning For Zion Ranch.
So, why are their children still stripped from them? Why they still forbidden to return to their home under the threat of not being able to see their kids at all?
Update: A Texas court of appeals has spanked CPS, and restored a sense of semblance to this travesty.
The debate between scientists and theologians continues. Actually, the link mostly recounts the surprisingly diverse opinions about God held by scientists. Here are the most common answers to the question: Does science make belief in God obsolete?
— Science has failed to find natural evidence of God. Natural evidence is all there is. No God. Case closed.
— Slightly softer is this line of reasoning: Science erases the “need” for God as an explanation of our experiences, and God either doesn’t exist or is at best a hypothesis (to the agnostic).
— And then there’s the view expressed in the title of University of Hawaii physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger’s new book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis — How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist.”
Then, we get into the more tortuous explanations attempting to reconcile science and religious belief. These are variations on common fallacies about science:
1. Science hasn’t proved that God doesn’t exist, so He might.
Weak. One can’t prove a negative assertion. Resting one’s case on the lack of proof negates reason. In fact, most serious theologians have long since given up on reason as a basis for God; they stipulate that it’s purely a matter of faith.
2. We can redefine “God” as the ‘wonders of science’–viola, no contradiction.
Super weak. I can define my shoe as your watermelon. It doesn’t make my shoe any more appetizing.
3. Biggest reach of all: “It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning … that makes science and religion look like competitors today.” The implication is that they don’t have to be, i.e., it’s just semantics.
Weaker than the gravitational field around a King James Bible. Science is not about meaning. It’s about relating X to Y. That relationship doesn’t mean anything, until someone invents that meaning, which is separate from the theories, hypotheses, tests, and conclusions that comprise the scientific process.
Inventing meaning is practically all we humans do, besides maybe grow food and make toys. Religionists must consider that science can be meaning-free. The debate is ultimately between a belief in meaning and an acceptance of meaninglessness.
In a way, the fallacy of science as a different kind of meaning is the most difficult to dispel in a debate about God. People who believe in God cannot imagine that anyone truly can’t. People who don’t believe in God cannot fathom that anyone really can. That’s the unconquerable divide.
I will finish by paraphrasing a believer who is also a skeptic: I am not one of those people who believes that God is involved in the world. On the contrary. Observe the world around us. Observe the world through history. Does it look like God’s involved?
ABC News answers the question: How divergent can a headline be from the content of a story? When it comes to CEOs, the headline and story apparently don’t have to have anything more than the flimsiest connection. Here’s a recent headline and lede (and accompanying ‘fat-cat’ photo):
Hard-Charging CEO Rakes in Millions
Blankenship Earned More Than $23 Million in 2007
The CEO of the country’s fourth largest coal company raked in more than $23 million in 2007.
And here is the last paragraph:
Blankenship receives the lavish perks that many CEOs are accustomed to, such as the use of the Massey corporate jet, which cost the company and its shareholders more than $180,000 in 2007.
So, this story is clearly about how much money a CEO made, right?
Well, the entire rest of the story, completely sandwiched between the first and last paragraphs, was about this CEO funding a lavish trip and election campaign for a state supreme court justice. The actual lede, buried two-thirds of the way into this story is this:
Fellow justice Larry Starcher told ABCNews.com he believes Blankenship has effectively bought himself a seat on the Supreme Court of West Virginia.
Apparently, the media, and presumably their readers, are more concerned with the raw amount that a CEO legally earns than about a possible corrupt relationship between that CEO and a state court judge.
Should CEOs make a lot when their workers wages are rising only modestly, if at all?
Let’s say that you’re CEO of an electronics company. You have always gotten those electrical components from a domestic supplier that is a government-protected monopoly. One day, you cleverly figure out how to sidestep that monopoly by sourcing from abroad. Your company saves a lot of money, and profits go up. The shareholders would like to reward, not punish this behavior. That’s how markets work.
Now, as certain compensation critics would have it, you have injured the earnings of the domestic producer. Your pay should be proportionately lower, to reflect their reduced earnings. Make sense? I didn’t think so. But if you replace “government-protected monopoly supplier of materials” with “government-protected monopoly supplier of labor,” then you arrive at the same illogical endpoint; the wages of managers linked with the cost of inputs. That, of course, is a recipe for bleeding the firm with a managerial bias toward uncompetitively high labor costs.
Insisting on a linkage between CEO pay and the wages of their employees is what I’m calling the Wage Link fallacy. It’s based on a primciple that is central to communism: An Individual’s wages should be unconnected to their productivity. Most purveyors of the Wage Link Fallacy, besides outright communists, are unions and their fellow-traveling politicians, most recently including EU officials from yesterday’s FT.
Excessive pay awards for company executives came under fire yesterday from the European Union’s senior economic policymakers, who condemned them as “scandalous” at a time when ordinary employees are under pressure to accept modest wage deals.
Notice how pay is prejudged as “excessive” against the standard of wages of “ordinary employees.”
Those pressing the Wage Link Fallacy invariably are pushing for government to trump the verdict of the market in assigning a small portion of productivity gains to those who create them. They wish, instead, to punish the managers who create those gains, the domestic consumers who benefit from them, and the employees outside of the unions’ sphere of influence who help make them possible.
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