Saturday Afternoon in LA

I'm typing this sitting under the umbrellas at Irv's Burgers, a Fifties era hamburger stand in West Hollywood. It's a notoriously friendly neighborhood place and it reminds me of something that first struck me when I moved to LA from Atlanta: for all its trendiness, LA has a distinctly old fashioned attitude toward dining. In most of the country, if you drive down the street looking for a quick bite to eat, you will see the same places serving the same food.

It's true that national chains are eating away at local dining, but the independents and local chains like Tommy's and Zankou's still dominate much of the town. Part of the reason is certainly the loyalty these spots inspire. Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold once refused to say whether he preferred Apple Pan or Pie N' Burger because he didn't want to deal with the letters from the patrons of the spot he didn't pick.

I was having a cheeseburger at Apple Pan last week and I got into a conversation with the man sitting next to me. He had been coming there weekly for over fifty years, only slightly longer than the counterman had been there.

There are plenty of regulars here at Irv's, walking in and picking up old conversations through the pick-up window with the family that owns the place. There's a comfortable, small town vibe here that you can find in most of LA.  That's not something most of the world associates with LA, but the locals know. 

Marissa Mayer: Outlier

There has been a lot of talk about Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo!  A lot of the interest seemed to be in the fact that she was six months pregnant when appointed and not just that she is the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company right now.  In particular, so close to the Anne-Marie Slaughter discussion about "women having it all", people wondered if she was a good example of women having it all or not.

But Ms. Mayer, you I admire greatly, has nothing to contribute to the debate except (perhaps) to act as an existence proof.  She is a 37 year old worth 300 million dollars.  I think it is fair to say that she is not going to  be unable to provide extensive child care services as well as working.  Might a bracing schedule interfere with breast feeding?  Yes, but many children are bottle fed (I am one) and did fine.  Might it interfere with seeing everything about your children?  Yes, but only in the same way that rules out a serious quest for enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery as well.  In life there are always some degree of trade-offs between activities -- none of us can do everything.

But most importantly, her career track and resources add nothing to the debate about work life balance for young women in the United States.  The normal barriers to career success are things like access to childcare and needing to balance housework.  Or with being a single mother and needing to do it all on your own.  The wealth to hire a team of housekeepers and childcare providers makes most of this far less concerning.

It is like worrying if Warren Buffet has health insurance or not.  It is pretty clear that not being insured would not be a serious barrier to Warren Buffet getting and and all treatment that he desires.  After all, he has the resources to overcome these issues.

So I think the real narrative is "lack of resources".  That being said, it turns out I am a fairly big Marissa Meyer fan and I hope that she is an amazing success in her new role.  I do think she is a good example as a businesswomen and engineer about how to climb the corporate ladder and become highly successful.

"The corporate equivalent of ketosis"

An excellent post by Felix Salmon on the mishandling of the USPS:

To put it another way: the Post Office is broken, in large part thanks to unhelpful meddling by Congress. And it won’t get fixed unless and until Congress gets out of the way and stops forcing it into the corporate equivalent of ketosis, essentially consuming its own flesh in order to survive.

AHRQ Questions

The Incidental Economist is writing about a House Bill to remove AHRQ as an agency and to remove economic research from the National Institutes of Health. 
I am of decidedly mixed feelings. I can definitely see how the focus in the NIH should be on the science. Single, focused mandates can improve the ability of an agency to perform a critical task.

But that, if anything, is why AHRQ is critical. If we want to remove economic research from the NIH (to improve focus and metrics) then it would make a second agency, with the appropriate mandate, even more important. This is very similar to the FDA, which focuses on safety, needing a partner organization that is considering cost.

So that rather inclines me towards the view that I like the improved NIH focus but see pairing it with the elimination of AHRQ as being a very questionable decision.

NOTE: the preceding was entirely personal opinion. It does not represent any institution that I have been affiliated with or will be affiliated with. I have received funding from AHRQ.

Quote of the Day

Via Twitter

davidfrum @davidfrum 15 Jul One of the many evils of the employer-based healthcare system is that it makes unemployment an almost total personal catastrophe ...

It is true that if we wanted labor market mobility then we would face this issue head on. Lot's of other financial services (bank account, auto insurance) don't depend on employers.  The one bright side of plans like the 401(k) is that they also decouple the dependence of former employees on the health of the employer's pension plan.  Why can't we do the sdame thing for health insurance? 

I dream of distant verdant fields

And as I walk toward those fields, I realize that I'm looking at millions of terracotta figurines of small animals, cartoon characters and busts of the President, all with grass growing out of their heads.

Spies like us

I've been seeing how many calories I can log on the exercise machines at the gym (I realize those numbers may not accurately measure what I'm burning but they make a good motivational metric). To keep myself distracted I've been digging up all the files I can for my cheap media player, including a number from the wonderful Internet Archive.

One of the shows on the playlist was Ziv Television's I Led Three Lives. I had never actually seen the show but I had heard about it and knew the basic premise -- a fictionalized account of a man who infiltrated the communist party for the FBI. It was a well done show (Ziv always knew how to get the most out of a limited budget and often hired some interesting talent like Harlan Ellison and Gene Roddenberry), but what stood out was just how much a product of its time the show was and how difficult it would be to imagine the '53-'56 show ten years later.

We often talk about the Sixties as being the height of the Cold War but that certainly isn't the picture you get from pop culture. Light entertainment like Man from UNCLE and Hogan's Heroes as well as message films like the Russians are Coming featured sympathetic Russian communists. More serious fiction like the Harry Palmer and Matt Helm books (no, really) and most of all the novels of John LeCarre depicted counter-intelligence agents as morally compromised as their counterparts. Even the Bond films never used the Russians as primary villains.

The difference in attitudes is particularly sharp when the Bond movies are compared to the corresponding novels of a decade earlier. Other than the Blofeld arc at the end of the series (which also happened to be the Sixties books), the villains in Fleming's books were Russians and they were every bit as despicable (and somewhat more cartoonish) than the fifth columnists in I Led  Three Lives.

Of course it was possible to find evil Russian communists and (thanks to Stan Lee*) even rhe occasional fifth columnist, but the public mood had clearly changed. I would guess this was primarily a reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis but I'm open to other suggestions.



*On a related note, Lee's famous break with the comics code was prompted by a request from the Nixon administration'

(From Wiki)

An early 1970s Spider-Man story led to the revision of the Comics Code. Previously, the Code forbade the depiction of the use of illegal drugs, even negatively. However, in 1970, the Nixon administration's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked Stan Lee to publish an anti-drug message in one of Marvel's top-selling titles.^[1]:239 Lee chose the top-selling The Amazing Spider-Man; issues #96–98 (May–July 1971) feature a story arcdepicting the negative effects of drug use. In the story, Peter Parker's friend Harry Osborn becomes addicted to pills. When Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn, Harry's father), Spider-Man defeats the Green Goblin, by revealing Harry's drug addiction. While the story had a clear anti-drug message, the Comics Code Authority refused to issue its seal of approval. Marvel nevertheless published the three issues without the Comics Code Authority's approval or seal. The issues sold so well that the industry's self-censorship was undercut and the Code was subsequently revised.^[1]:239 

[Also posted at Mippyville TV]

Schadenfreude alert

Marketplace approaches this as a story about the importance of timing the sale of a company. I think there may be a bigger point here about the actual value of some of these companies:

When Digg launched in 2004, it was a startup darling. It let users post links to their favorite news and websites. Then their friends could vote the link up-or-down. In its heyday, the site had 14 million visitors -- and a line of offers. Google reportedly put $200 million on the table in 2008. But no deal was ever done. So that $500,000 selling price has got to hurt. But could Digg have known?

Ezra Klein makes a point that should be obvious but apparently isn't

Yesterday's Washington Post had an excellent piece by Klein yesterday, Here's the money shot:

Actually, I got something wrong there. I said “almost nothing.” But that 1.459 percent doesn’t account for inflation. And so when you do account for inflation, it’s not “almost nothing.” It’s “less than nothing.” Here are the latest “real yield curves” for Treasurys, which is to say, the yields after adjusting for inflation:


They’re negative. Negative! The market will literally pay us a small premium to take their money and keep it safe for them for five, seven or 10 years. We could use that money to rebuild our roads and water filtration systems. We could use that money to cut taxes for any business that adds to its payrolls. We could use that to hire back the 600,000 state and local workers we’ve laid off in the last few years. 

Or, as Larry Summers has written, we could simply accelerate payments we know we’ll need to make anyway. We could move up maintenance projects, replace our military equipment or buy space we’re currently leasing. All of that would leave the government in a better fiscal position going forward, not to mention help the economy. 

The fact that we’re not doing any of this isn’t just a lost opportunity. It’s financial mismanagement on an epic scale.

As noted before, Paul Krugman and company spend a great deal of time arguing that financially  governments are not like households or businesses. It's a valid point, but the economists making it often lose sight of the fact that, in this context, it's also a moot one. In this situation, a government, a family or a business, if responsibly managed, would take advantage of these better-than-free funds for investment and maintenance.

There is no context in which our current course makes sense.

An immunity to cognitive dissonance now seems to be the sole requirement for a journalism position

First consider this from Politico (via Chait)

"The Obama complaint claims we erred in saying Mitt Romney gave up active management of Bain Capital in early 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympics, insisting we were then wrong in saying Romney was not responsible for shipping U.S. jobs overseas," FactCheck's Brooks Jackson and Robert Farley wrote in a response to the Obama campaign, which had complained about an earlier article by the authors.

"In fact, if the Obama campaign were correct, Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999."

This would seem to be a convincing argument. Romney is too smart and too much of a professional to casually misrepresent himself on a federal filing. The only trouble is that, according to recent reports, at least some of those forms seem to tell a different story.

Romney said he left any managerial role at Bain Capital behind in February 1999, delegating all voting shares of stock to 26 managing directors and leaving day-to-day operations to focus on running the Olympics. But subsequent SEC filings list him as “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.” A 2001 SEC filing first reported by TPM lists his “principal occupation” as “Managing Director of Bain Capital, Inc.” and theBoston Globe reviewed additional filings containing similar claims.

I don't know enough about the law to say where the line is here but I'm pretty sure that there are legal connotations to these terms and that listing yourself as chairman, CEO, president and managing director of a firm you have no managerial role in has got to put you in a legally gray area. I doubt that's a risk Romney would take. 


Which takes us back to Factcheck which reacted as follows:

"We see little new in the Globe piece. So far, nobody has shown that Romney was actually managing Bain — even part-time — during his time at the Olympics, or that he was anything but a passive, absentee owner during that time, as both Romney and Bain have long said," Brooks Jackson, a co-author of the FactCheck piece, told POLITICO today.

Are 83% of Medical Doctors considering leaving medicine?

Aaron Carroll rightly argues that any such claim is silly:

Let’s get past even that. Let’s just take the top line result. Does it pass the smell test? Do you really believe that 83% of doctors are considering quitting because of the ACA? Do you really believe that only 17% of docs are NOT considering quitting? Really? Anecdotally, I’ve heard of no physicians whatsoever who are quitting; I work with a lot of docs. But let’simagine my experience is abnormal. Remember that about 20% of physicians make an earning placing them in the top 1% of the country. Medicine, above any other profession, is more likely to earn you that much. This survey would have you believe that more than 80% of us are willing to throw all that away, just because of the ACA.

Notice that this implies that medical doctors would have to be complete and utter morons in order to do this.  And over ACA?  Now, I could imagine a scenario in which medicine was becoming less attractive as a career path and some doctors might have decided they would have been better off as MBAs, for example -- ignoring whether they could have been a successful MBA even if they had wanted to.

Heck, would not the MA experiment have shown these kinds of effects if 83% of MDs were honestly considering leaving? 

Why can't we have a press corp that would make fun of such an unlikely claim? 

Stock Market Bubbles and the Near Miss Effect

This American Life had another remarkable episode a few weeks ago on blackjack (which I just got around to). As usual, there's lots of good stuff here, but two parts in particular caught my eye. The first was this work from two researchers at Southern Illinois University, Reza Habib and Mark Dixon (the second will have to wait for an upcoming post):

Sarah Koenig
In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers-- 11 addicted, or what they called pathological gamblers, and 11 non-pathological gamblers-- as all these people watch near misses on slot machine displays. 

 The results surprised them. Because while both addicted and non-addicted gamblers said the near misses felt more like wins, their brains said something different. Here's Reza Habib. 

Reza Habib
What you see in the non-pathological gamblers is that the regions that are activated for losses, those same regions tend to be also activated for near misses. And so the brain, at least, processes these near misses in the same way that it processes losses in the non-pathological gamblers. In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses.

And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem which are involved in reward and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers, their brains, at least, are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.

Mark Dixon
This is Mark again. And one of the effects of this, or the implications of these data, are that a pathological gambler going into the casino who's actually losing, his brain is firing like he's winning. Disturbing, isn't it.

Sarah Koenig
Yeah. It's crazy.

Mark Dixon
Oh, it's way crazy. And so you are experiencing those same sensations as a win when you're not winning.

This got me thinking about bubbles. Even in normal times, traders experience constant near-misses; they get in a bit too late or stay in a bit too long or buy a dud only to watch its nearest competitor shoot through the roof. In bubbles those near miss moments easily increase by an order of magnitude. Every time a trader talks to a friend or picks up the Wall Street Journal, he or she hears about an almost-purchased stock doubling in value.

I wonder how much of the curious behavior of markets in bubbles is driven by those traders whose brains are scoring near misses as wins? I'm sure someone's looking at this from the neuroscience side. It might also be worth factoring in when doing agent-based simulations of the market.

"The mind reels with sarcastic replies"*

Today is International Media Ethics Day.



* A quote from the great Charles Schultz

The part where the vet sees the closet should break your heart

Two incredibly touching and (for what they imply) troubling stories from NPR, one about veterans and one about families with small children. Two groups that receive ever-increasing lip service and steadily diminishing support.

"I give up a little bit of my world each day"

NPR is running an extraordinary series on the return of a disease we thought we had beaten:

The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 was supposed to sharply cut exposure to coal mine dust. The act set a standard for coal dust exposure (2 milligrams per cubic meter of air), which was as little as 1/4 of the concentrations miners breathed at the time.

The act's passage followed a 23-day unauthorized and rowdy strike in which 40,000 West Virginia coal miners demanded government efforts to prevent the disease and to compensate victims.

By the end of the year, tough dust exposure limits were in place. Miners were offered free diagnostic chest X-rays every five years, and federal compensation became available. The X-rays showed 4 in 10 miners tested had black lung. The disease killed 1,800 miners in a single year. But diagnoses soon plunged more than 90 percent, according to NIOSH data.

"They anticipated that no one would develop progressive massive fibrosis," says 84-year-old Donald Rasmussen, a pulmonologist in Beckley, W.Va., who says he's tested 40,000 coal miners in the last 50 years.

"In 1969, I publicly proclaimed that the disease would go away before we learned all about it," he adds. "And I was dead wrong."

Rasmussen first started charting an increase in serious black lung cases about 15 years ago.

"We began to see the appearance of younger miners who had worked in the mines only since the dust suppression following the '69 act that were showing up with complicated pneumoconiosis or progressive massive fibrosis," he says.

Since 1970, NIOSH epidemiologists documented test results for 43 percent of the nation's coal miners. In 1995, the tests began to indicate more and more black long, rapid disease progression and the unexpected occurrence among relatively young miners.

"From the patterns and from the severity, from the prevalence of the disease, this must be a situation in which the dust in many, many mines is simply not adequately controlled," says Edward Petsonk, a pulmonologist at West Virginia University and a consultant for NIOSH. "There's nothing else that could possibly cause this."

And its human toll:

"Now it feels like I've got a heavy wet sack on each lung," McCowan says, between long, deep breaths. "Breathing has become a conscious effort. ... It seems like I give up a little bit of my world each day, that it gets smaller and smaller." 

Simple tasks become enormous challenges — "a Mount Everest every day," he calls it — including holding his 2-year-old grandson.

"I say, 'Little buddy, I got to put you down for a few minutes,'" McCowan says with a deep sigh. "And he's learned to run a little bit. He'll say, 'Run, paw-paw, run.' He wants me to chase him. And I can't."