Posted by Marc Hodak on August 15, 2007 under Unintended consequences | 
One of Rutger’s nappy headed hos has filed a lawsuit against Imus.
“This is a lawsuit in order to restore the good name and reputation of my client, Kia Vaughn,” said her attorney, Richard Ancowitz, exclusively to the ABC News Law & Justice Unit.
“Don Imus referred to my client as an unchaste woman. That was and is a lie.”
In my book, this places Richard Ancowitz way high on the list to win the prize for biggest Damn Instigator of Community Kaka.
His suit will have some shred of credibility if he can summon one, just one, witness who heard Imus’s remarks and concluded, “Oh, the Rutgers women’s basketball team must consist primarily of prostitutes.” Of course, anyone who would testify such a thing should be easy to impeach as a witness on the grounds that some people are truly too stupid to be allowed to speak in public.
Vaughn’s lawyer said that some of the money from any damages awarded in the lawsuit “would be used to create a scholarship program to study the effects of bigoted and misogynistic speech on society.” I would like to use my winnings from this frivolous suit to study the chilling effect on speech of giving some government agent the right to determine which comments might be construed as bigoted or misogynistic, and what penalties one might suffer for actually having a sense of humor, even if in poor taste.
I would also like to study the incentives of trial lawyers who can talk an otherwise sympathetic college student-athlete into launching a suit guaranteed to bring ridicule and questions about her sanity before the public. Didn’t your lawyer tell you, Ms.Vaughn, that most people, including Imus listeners, already love you and respect you for your talent and grace, and that this suit can only reduce the public’s regard for you on every count?
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 13, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
CNN reports that U.S. life expectancy lags behind other countries’. This sounds like an article about a scientific health study, but it isn’t. When one starts to read it, one quickly sees that this is a puff piece devoted to a particular policy perspective riding a thin surface of statistics.
The article starts with this paragon of objectivity:
“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation sounds like a research organization. They claim to aspire to that image. From their web-site:
“The Institute will focus its competencies to pursue research, education, and evaluation across different topical areas.”
“The Institute strives to be the lighthouse standard for high-quality information on health that is valid, comparable, comprehensible, and freely available in the public domain.”
Yet their web site does not provide a single study, not even the Census Bureau study (poorly) cited in the CNN article in which Dr. Murray is extensively quoted. The Institute describes its areas of work, yet provides not one example of said work. The Institute “stands by the principle that information should be freely available to all who wish to use it,” but provides no information at all. This doesn’t look like a research foundation with much of a track record, but it’s apparently good enough for CNN.
Given the way Dr. Murray is spouting off about policy, I doubt that his institute will contribute anything useful to the discourse on health care. For example, the highest life expectancies are to be found in places like Japan, Singapore, and the tiny countries of Andorra and San Marino. For anyone with a decent grasp of geography and demographics, these countries stand out as having relatively homogenous populations. Is it possible that demographic differences in diverse countries might have a material impact on aggregate results? A credible researcher would ask and answer that question before you could even raise it–certainly before speculating about policy differences at the root of aggregate results.
So, let’s do what Dr. Murray wouldn’t, and tease out a couple of facts. First, the article notes that blacks live shorter lives than whites*. The average U.S. longevity is, according to this article, 77.9 years, and the longevity of blacks is 73.3 years. From other sources, one would know that similar disparities exists between Hispanics and Native Americans, making up 15 percent of the population, versus the average American. Taking apart just these demographic pieces, what remains is an average longevity for mostly Asians and Whites that would easily place the U.S. in league with Japan and most of Western Europe.
So, I would like to see a report on how Americans fare by demographic type versus their cousins in ancestral lands. We know, for instance, that African Americans live far longer than Africans in Africa, even those nations not ravaged by AIDS. Mexican Americans almost certainly live longer than Mexicans in Mexico. Do French Americans live longer than the French in France? I”m not sure, but several of my French relatives in need of specialized care have come to the U.S. for treatments. That’s at once telling, and a potential source of muddying the comparison. How about Japanese-Americans or German-Americans versus their native counterparts? Is it possible that the American cousins of Asians and Europeans actually live longer? If so, would all the people clamoring for socialized medicine in the U.S. begin clamoring for market-based health care in the rest of the World? None of us may live long enough to see that.
* see parenthetical comments below the fold
Read more of this article »
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 12, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
On my way home from a little camping trip with my sons, we stopped for gas. At the cashier’s window was a sign, no doubt created by the good State of New York, warning that buying cigarettes for minors could get you into trouble. The tag line was:
Its not just wrong, it’s illegal
This bothered me. I would be fine with either half of this message, i.e., that buying cigarettes for minors would subject one to either a moral or a legal sanctions. I don’t have a problem with laws against selling cigarettes to minors, as long as they’re enforced in a reasonable fashion. (Unlike New York, which is a little crazy when it comes to trying to enforce such bans.)
What struck me about this sign was the implied hierarchy of authority. It appears to say that ‘illegal’ should outweigh ‘immoral.’ Try this in the context of a more extreme message: Killing someone is not just wrong; hey buddy, it could get you jail time!
Maybe it’s because I believe that we should only have laws against activities that everyone unequivocally finds morally wrong that I feel that law should be the afterthought to moral repulse. To have enforcement rely with more weight on illegality than immorality says, to me, either:
A) Those of us subject to the laws but not making them are morally stunted compared to those making the laws (the “moral superiority” theory of law making)
B) Those making the law don’t really believe or care so much about its moral weight (the “power trip” theory of law making)
A corollary to the second theory is (C) that the immorality of the law is inherently unclear to the broad citizenry, which for me raises the question if there should be a law about such a thing. (I don’t believe this would apply to a ban on cigarettes sold to minors.)
Which theory do you think best explains such a sign? (Or, feel free to suggest another.)
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 7, 2007 under Collectivist instinct |
A former KGB officer suggests that international lack of regard for our president is merely a reflection of our own disrespect for him. He recollects for us a youthful impression:
My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While “America” was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war — if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.
So, his remedy is to stop bashing our own presidents. We should summon just enough propaganda to squelch public disdain about our leader in order to strengthen other’s perceptions about him.
Aside from the principled and consequentialist qualms I’d have about the level of propaganda that would be needed to make Americans feel good about someone like Bush (or any recent president, not to pick on W), I wonder about the value of doing so. Clearly, it helps to achieve “national” objectives for everyone to be behind a leader proposing them. But are national objectives all they’re cracked up to be?
I’m also skeptical about the psychology of former-Soviets, even those of good will towards America. I have had many friends from the former Soviet Union. They have been uniformly smart people, some of them quite brilliant, but nearly all of them possessing a peculiar blind spot with regards to propaganda and the associated freedom of the press. I know that to them, my “knee-jerk” defense of an unfettered press, even one prone to printing lies, seemed equally peculiar. So, when I expressed my doubt about the long-run efficacy of propaganda, I would use my Russian friends themselves as Exhibit A: you won’t find a more cynical people on earth than Russians, and I don’t think it’s genetic. Furthermore, no amount of propaganda got the Russians to forget about the Beatles or blue jeans. Decades of hero worship nurtured by propaganda did not prevent Lenin’s statue from toppling all over the communist world, including in cities named after him. In the long run, I don’t think W’s image can be resurrected with fawning press coverage. If anything, presidents like Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan get far better press treatment today than they got in their own day.
The most disturbing thing about this Russian’s nostalgic recollection, however, is his grown-up expression of a child’s most collectivist impulse–hero worship. Our press already possesses the most annoying tendency to credit collective effort to a single individual, even as it subtly undermines the value of the individual in nearly every other way. They aggrandize individuals because their readers relate to individuals, not ephemeral forces. We buy celebrities, not concepts. The press certainly has an interest in selling us the notion that W’s daily schedule is newsworthy, or that it matters why Brad broke up with Angelina. Even if idolatry is good business in catering to human nature, though, I really don’t see the virtue of supporting it as a matter of public policy.
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 3, 2007 under Patterns without intention |
Every accident, such as the horrific collapse of the highway bridge in Minneapolis, brings on six, predictable steps:
1) Shock – People react to devastation in a visceral way. For a fair percentage of people, the instant response is “OMG,” “Wow,” or even “Cool.” It may take several beats, minutes, or hours before even those of us who exhibit a great deal of empathy in our personal and professional lives finally arrive at a genuine sense of dread about the matter. Just before that moment sets in is where local news is at its best, satisfying what is at this point an insatiable curiosity.
2) Grief – First from those directly affected, then from the rest of us witnessing them, in widening circles. Here, the news process rapidly goes downhill, chasing the “human story” in the form of cameras and mikes in the faces of the distraught, preferably as they are dragged from the river. It’s not the media display of individual grief that is so unwholesome as much as the competition to display it sooner, oftener, and more graphically as the media swarm descends on the situation.
3) Political outrage – They can’t help it. Politicians trade on outrage. Unlike the media coverage of grief, which only gets unseemly when it balloons into a competition of pain, political outrage is unseemly at the outset. Then, the competition begins. That escalating outrage is conveniently directed at the most politically vulnerable link in the chain of causation (or foreigners). Not to underestimate the depth of outrage a politician is capable of mustering, politicians can express it toward several politically vulnerable groups, opponents, and each other all at once. They’re that good.
4) Blame – Any situation where people get hurt on a large scale, no matter how accidental, sooner or later generates a widespread sense that “someone” is at fault. In the case of engineering failure, there is almost never a single reason. Given how few bridges collapse in this country, the most likely cause is a whole chain of improbable decisions and events that, absent any other intervention, would be unlikely to recur in several decades. But the politicians will lead the hunt, with the media close behind, instinctively homing in one of several links in that chain as “the” cause.
5) The Memo – In the witch hunt that follows, eventually proof will show up that someone, somewhere, wrote a memo predicting that this would happen. Sort of. It will rarely be a definitive prediction, such as “Structural defect A will lead this bridge to fail in the next six-to-twelve months if we don’t do anything.” It will be a more general prediction like, “Deficiency A across our system of bridges may, if untreated, eventually lead to severe problems, or even catastrophic results.” This memo will, of course, be indistinguishable from thousands of similar memos that predict disasters of indeterminate timing and consequence all over the nation all the time. But as far as the blame hunters are concerned, here is the smoking gun. Every can see the smoke with the perfect clarity of hindsight bias.
6) Prosecution – The person who ignored “the memo” becomes a useful scapegoat. And his boss. And their co-conspirators. The eventual trial is, of course, just another part of the show that this whole disaster becomes, the crescendo of blame and outrage, a chance for the people to march from the countryside with their torches through the public square…oh, wait, wrong century.
Not.
You’d like to think that a disaster, unfortunate as it is, can be used as a learning opportunity. If we never have an engineering failure, then things clearly have been over-engineered. After a failure, if the process is done right, everyone has the incentive to contribute information related to the chain of events so that resources can be focused on the weakest link.
Blame and outrage destroys that process. It forces everyone associated with the accident to hide the very information most closely related to the weakest link. At its worst, when bad judgment criminalized, the only people benefiting are those doing the punishing. The rest of society bears the cost of overreaction.
Anyway, that’s the prediction here about how this accident will evolve into tragedy.
Posted by Marc Hodak on August 1, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs |
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission had $3 billion to spend on improved voting processes. They released a report detailing the amount of spending so far by each state. This is a pretty straightforward report dutifully produced by an bureaucracy whose name certainly evokes the “we’re here to help” joke. However, I think it’s very interesting how the news outlets picked it up.
The Wall Street Journal noted that that “just 60% of the $3 billion” had been spent. “Just” sounds like “not enough.” The AP, in a story picked up by the New York times and others, sported the headline, “Some States Slow to Spend Voting Aid.” There is no mistaking the connotation of being “slow.” This article‘s headline said that the states were “behind.” Who wants to be behind on something?
But is it bad that the states have not yet spent 100 percent of these funds allocated to them? The press is clearly implying that these underspending states may not be living up to their responsibility to provide secure voting, possibly forcing us to relive the Florida 2000 debacle. But is that what is really happening? Or might it, perhaps, be a sign that some states are less deliberate or more spendthrift than others? Or that some states are merely more bureaucratic and indecisive?
Or, is it possible that the federal government somehow, perhaps, misallocated $3 billion of funds to the states?
Read more of this article »
Posted by Marc Hodak on July 30, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs |
That was the headline of a WSJ article today. It begins with the story of Invitrogen Corp. having spent $2.5 million and 10,000 man hours on SOX requirements.
Officials at the Carlsbad, Calif., biotechnology company think the costs are excessive. But they say Sarbanes-Oxley helped to spur other changes that made Invitrogen a better-run business.
So, this is an article about the benefits of a policy whose costs exceeded its benefits. This made me think of other policies that could spur similar articles:
* The government requires all restaurant food to be tested for bacteria before being served to customers. “Incidences of Food Poisoning Reduced”
* The government lowers highway speed limits to 40 mph. “Fewer Deaths on Our Nation’s Highways”**
* The government mandates blender blades be diamond-tipped. “Smoother Smoothies for Everyone!”
If positive, absolute benefits were the primary criteria by which laws should be passed, we’d end up with nominally more benefits, but with significantly less of the things that we could have had if our resources had been allocated elsewhere. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately, newspapers can’t write compelling stories about the things we don’t have as a result of resources that were not devoted to them.
Congress, of course, counts on invisible opportunity costs staying that way. That’s why they didn’t simply mandate that companies put the proposed SOX rules up to a shareholder vote. They had neither the good will nor the good sense to do that. Letting people decide what to do, letting them weigh their interests for themselves, is not what lawmakers do.
** (HT: Larry Ribstein)
Posted by Marc Hodak on July 29, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs |
The Daily Dish picks up on a new study from Democracy Corps that purports to find a collapse of support for the GOP among young people.
Money quote:
Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day. The range of the issue disagreements range from the most prominent issues of the day (Iraq, immigration) to burning social issues (gay marriage, abortion) to fundamental ideological disagreements over the size and scope of government. This leaves both potential Democratic nominees with substantial leads over Rudy Giuliani, but importantly, both Democrats still have room to grow their support among younger voters. The current problems with the Republican brand are not fully reflected in young people’s preferences for President.
Notwithstanding the source (an ultra-liberal think tank), any approximation of this result can only be characterized as pathological incompetence on the part of the GOP. W had the perfect issue to turn this younger generation against the Democrats–Social Security, or, as I like to call it, the wholesale plundering of our youth by today’s older voters. He blew it.
I’m sure this generation now coming of age will one day look back on the growth of government in the first couple of decades this century (especially if we get the kind of president that Democracy Corps wants), and wonder how their parents/grandparents who professed to care about them so much could have stiffed them so badly.
(HT: ProfessorBainbridge.com)
Posted by Marc Hodak on July 25, 2007 under Regulation without regulators |
MySpace recently booted about 29,000 sexual predators from its site. Nobody asked them to do it. They just figured that it was good business to keep their young customers from getting, you know, raped. On the one hand, one could read that as a positive indicator that a private company has every incentive to police its space and keep it safe for its intended users. On the other hand, one can read that as the perfect excuse for government involvement in the Internet.
“The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace – 29,000 and counting – screams for action,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.
In North Carolina, Attorney General Roy Cooper wants a state law that would require children to obtain parental permission before creating profiles on sites such as MySpace, and require the site to check parents’ identity.
I guess that making MySpace the North Carolina AG’s deputy nanny can allow him to pretend to care more about my kids than I do. (I read the news, too, Roy.) I guess, too, that the action by MySpace doesn’t count as “action” as defined by the Connecticut AG. Politicians live by the premise that there is no regulation until the government does it, and voters will tend to believe them. Especially when it comes to protecting the children.
Posted by Marc Hodak on July 24, 2007 under Unintended consequences |
Earning guidance is a controversial practice on Wall Street. Companies don’t like it because they’re concerned that investors place too much emphasis on one little number–current earnings–instead of focusing on the long string of future earnings that everyone knows should guide valuation. Managers are also a little concerned about the liability associated with “misleading” investors about earnings, i.e., falling short, even if for reasons beyond anyone’s control. Wall Street has the same concerns as management, plus the sense that certain managers may be pushing the accounting envelope a little far, or making short-term decisions to manage their earnings. Governance mavens don’t like the idea of one party trying to manage the other’s expectations. They would rather that companies simply became more transparent without the games.
So, if everyone is wary about earnings guidance, why is it so common? Over a third of the S&P 500 and perhaps a larger percentage of investors play this game. This game becomes more easily understood if one sees Wall Street as an animal that needs a certain amount of variety in its diet. Information from companies is a type of nutrient for the capital markets, and we are seeing the effects of nutrient deficiency in the feeding frenzy that surrounds earnings announcements. Companies try to mitigate this frenzy by offering earnings guidance, even though they don’t necessarily benefit from doing so.
Earnings guidance has been around in some form for a long time, but it really became a focal point for the investment community after the introduction of Reg FD. The intent of Reg FD was to create a “level playing field” for corporate disclosure. The main effect, however, has been to severely constrain the flow of information between companies and outsiders. Companies are justifiably afraid to disclose information in something other than the prescribed manner, and the market has suffered from the effects of reduced disclosure.
Read more of this article »
