Arthur Godfrey, Marshall McLuhan and the educational topic of the day

There's a great quote from Arthur Godfrey which, unfortunately I'll have to paraphrase from memory. Godfrey, who was, by some standards, the most successful broadcaster ever, said his informal, intimate style came from the realization that radio personalities in the early Thirties talked as though they were addressing a roomful of people but most of the people who were actually listening to the radio (rather than talking to each other) were by themselves.

Godfrey was perhaps the first major broadcaster to think about broadcast media in the modern medium-is-the-message sense. This understanding extended to television as well. In the late Forties and early Fifties, Godfrey was the dominant personality of that medium as well.

Of course, in 1931, all recorded and broadcast media were fairly new. Now we've had about a century to think most of this through. Even Understanding Media is almost fifty years old. We have fully internalized the idea that different media are... different. No one but the hopelessly naive would suggest that what works in a play would work in a movie or that what works in a movie would work on TV or that what works on TV would work on the internet.

Except in education. Pick up the New York Times and you'll find not one but two Op-ed columnists whose writings about MOOCs aren't just pre-McLuhan, they're pre-Godfrey, and Friedman and Brooks are no worse than most people covering the topic.

We have decades of experience in educational media and distance learning. If we build on that we have the opportunity to revolutionize education. If we ignore it, all we're likely to do is enrich hucksters and waste students' time.

Just two more on journalistic tribalism and I'll change the subject

I was planning to give the topic a break for a while after these harsh (though I hope justified) posts on Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, but these two recent stories (both via TPM) are simply too apt to leave out of a discussion of the increasingly unhealthy culture and social dynamics of journalism.

The first involves a topic hit briefly in the second post, Michael Kelly's handling of the Stephen Glass scandal, discussed here by Tom Scocca as part of a larger piece on Kelly and Iraq.

Remembering Kelly in 2004, the editor of his posthumous collected works, Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about the mystery of “the two Michaels”—the subtle reporter and the hectoring columnist. There were more like three Kellys: the loving and loyal personal Kelly; the impish, incisive, and sometimes courageous observer; and the nasty, often petty polemicist, who wrote things for effect that he knew were untrue. But they blended into each other, and not to his benefit.

It was Kelly’s notion of collegial devotion that led him to brutally defend his New Republic protege Stephen Glass, past the bitter end, refusing to concede to Buzz Bissinger that a smear Glass had written about the healthy-eating activist Michael Jacobson, in a story admitted to have been fabricated, was inaccurate.

When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote—as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment.

So he shared with Sullivan, who had originally hired Glass, the distinction of an active role in two of the worst failures of journalism in a generation. Perhaps, like Sullivan, he would have changed his position on Iraq, had he lived to see our military might losing control, the easy liberation collapsing into hell, Saddam’s torture prisons reopening with American torturers. What might he have written, if he’d had the chance to engage with the terrible truths of this past decade? What might a hundred thousand other people have done, if they’d lived too?

The notion of loyalty comes up a lot when people remember Kelly. It's a word with highly positive connotations but a somewhat spotty record. You'll hear it used to describe people sticking with down and out friends but also to explain why clean cops cover up for dirty ones. As a general rule, when loyalty means always siding with the insider in an inter-group conflict, it's a bad and potentially dangerous thing.

If you look at this in terms of the interests of subjects, journalists and readers, Kelly's loyalty expressed itself almost solely as putting journalists' interest above those of  their subjects and readers. Both in the Glass affair and in his own writings, Kelly placed a low value on seeing a subject treated fairly or a reader informed truthfully. Despite this, even after the Glass scandal, Kelly remained a tremendously well respected member of the journalistic establishment.

The second involves a favorite Kelly target, Al Gore and the ultimate DC insider, Bob Woodward:

He also told an unflattering, but amusing story about sitting next to former Vice President Al Gore at a dinner, saying being with him was “taxing,” and added, “To be really honest, it’s unpleasant.”

Woodward said Gore pressed him on why the journalist didn’t go after Bush, who beat Gore in the 2000 presidential election, over the war in Iraq.

Gore was a former reporter before becoming a politician, and “he thinks he invented [reporting] also,” Woodward joked in reference to an often misquoted statement that the ex-vice president claimed he invented the Internet.

I don't want to dig through the whole sordid history again but here's a quick recap. Al Gore was strongly disliked by much of the DC press (most notably by the highly influential Kelly). Probably not coincidentally, the coverage of Gore's campaign was marked by the creation and propagation of various misquotes and factual errors.

What's interesting here is Woodward's ability to tune out more than a decade of revelations about the 2000 election. When faced with professional criticism, he responds by dismissing the critic with a widely debunked claim that originated from a string of professional lapses by his immediate colleagues.

These are all signs of a profession in trouble.

An anecdote on standardized testing

From Yahoo:

High school junior, Kyron Birdine of Arlington, Texas was suspended for tweeting a photo of his one sentence essay answer on the STAAR exam. As reported by WFAA News 8, Birdine used his iPad to snap a shot of his answer, "I have the TAKS test to study for, not this unneeded craziness." He filled out the rest of the page with the word “YOLO” ("You only live once") and a happy face emoticon. The tweet was sent to the Arlington Independent School District (ISD) and the Texas Education Agency as a protest against the new STAAR test. About the test Birdine said, "It wasn't for a grade. Colleges don't see it. It didn’t help, it didn't benefit my personal life at all."

The STAAR, State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, standardized test is a new testing program which is used by the state to evaluate educational outcomes for those entering the ninth grade in the 2011-2012 school year. Those students entering the ninth grade before that school year, like Birdine, are being issued the test to help perfect future versions of the exam. In Birdine’s case, the STAAR test does not impact graduation, instead he will be graduating under the TAKS, Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, testing standards.

A few quick points

1. Standardized tests take a great deal of valuable time away from everyone involved in the educational process -- students, teachers and administrators. That doesn't mean that these tests aren't worth the trouble but it does mean there are costs to consider;

2. Standardized test data measure a combination of factors including focus and motivation. The difference between a high scoring class and a low scoring class often has less to do with what the students learned and more to do with the teacher's ability to convince students who have no real incentive to do well not to ABCD their way through the test. When students approach these tests the way Birdine did, it can be extraordinarily difficult to glean useful information from them;

3. Birdine was not punished for a "breach of security" as administrators claimed; he was punished for making a legitimate protest. He knows it; they know it; everybody knows it. I have had mostly good experiences with principals and superintendents but there are certainly administrators out there who are inclined to use their power to silence critics and to advance their own interests over those of their students (and remember, some of these top positions pay damned good money). Though seldom put in so many words, one of the central tenets of movement reformers is the belief that administrators should be given more power. I'd argue some administrators are already abusing the power they have.

More on journalistic tribalism

Having brought up the charge in a previous post, I should probably take a minute to spell out exactly what I'm talking about. I'm using a very broad reading of the term 'tribalism' (perhaps so broad I should say something like 'tribalism and other social psych phenomena'). The traits I'm thinking of include:

1. Us/them mentality;

2. Excessive reliance on in-group social norms;

3. Deferring to and preserving hierarchies;

and as a consequence

4,   A tendency to use different standards to judge interactions based on the relative positions of the parties.

There is inevitably going to be a degree of subjectivity when deciding who goes where in the hierarchy, but I think it's fairly safe to say that Maureen Dowd and (till his death) Michael Kelly were in the innermost circle with writers like David Brooks and most prominent, established Washington and, to a lesser degree, New York journalists fairly close.

In this tribal model, it makes perfect sense that Politico would view Chris Hughes' (outsider) request for a small change in the copy of Timothy Noah (insider) as a major affront. It also explains Politico's attacks on Nate Silver (outsider) when his work started making established pundits (insiders) look bad.

The press corps's treatment of Al Gore in 2000 is another case in point. Following the lead of Dowd and Kelly and reinforced by a general dislike of the candidate, the group quickly established social norms that justified violating the most basic standards of accuracy and fairness.

The poster child for this kind of journalistic tribalism is Jack Shafer, or at least he was a few years ago when I was first experimenting with blogging. One of my main topics was the press's inability to face up to its problems and Shafer was the gift that kept on giving (I haven't read him much since). That blog is gone now but I still have my notes so here are some highlights.

Shafer was openly disdainful of readers and generally dismissive of their interests which is an extraordinary starting point for a journalism critic. Consider this passage from the aptly named "Why I Don't Trust Readers"

I'm all for higher standards, but I draw the line when journalists start getting more complaints about less serious professional lapses. Serious: Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking. Not serious: campaign donations in the low three-figures for reporters distant from that beat; appearance of conflict of interest; a point of view; friendships with the rich and powerful.

First, notice the first item on the list. Plagiarism is certainly a serious offense, but the other serious offenses are the sort of things that can destroy people's lives, conceal crimes and enable corruption. Even more interesting is what didn't make the list: unintentional distortion due to laziness or bias; patterns of minor errors; isolated cases of serious errors due to negligence; selective reporting (as long as it doesn't rise to the level of distortion); failure to dig into important aspects of a story; cozy relationships with subjects as long as it doesn't involve the quid pro quo of a bribe.

What's important here was the victimology. In plagiarism, the primary victim is a fellow journalist. In all of these other cases, the primary victim is either the subject or the reader. Shafer was a tribalist and his main objective was almost always the defense of his tribe and its hierarchy.

There's a remarkable inverse correlation between the rank of Shafer's subjects and the harshness with which he treats them.  This is particularly apparent when different subjects of the same article have different positions. Shafer provided an excellent example when he wrote a post complaining about liberals writing books that actually called conservatives liars in the titles.

The books were Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,  Joe Conason's Big Lies and David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush. Of these three, Conason was something of a pariah (Shafer dismissed him as a Clinton apologist) and Franken was clearly a journalistic outsider. Corn, on the other hand, was very much an insider in the Washington press corp (Shafer even described him as a friend in the post).

Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that Shafer finds a way to shield Corn from much of the blast.

This criticism applies more to Franken and Conason than it does Corn—you can't expect a book about Bush's lies to also be about Clinton's lies. And Corn acknowledges in his intro that Bush isn't the first White House liar and that Clinton lied, too. 

Of course, you could easily make a similar but more persuasive argument in Franken's behalf. Lies was largely focused on the relationship between the GOP and conservative media and since the book was published in 2003 when there was no Air America and MSNBC was just starting to experiment with liberal programming, there was no way to provide similar examples on the left.  Just to be clear, I'm not making that argument; I'm only saying that it's just as viable as the one makes for Corn.

For an even more dramatic bit of paired data, consider two obituaries Shafer wrote, separated by only a few months. The first was for Walter Annenberg, best known as a philanthropist and founder of TV Guide. The second was for Michael Kelly, journalist and former editor of the New Republic. Once again there's a clear hierarchical distance between the subjects: Annenberg, though decades earlier a power in publishing and to his death a major force in philanthropy, was not a journalistic insider; Kelly, on the other hand was about as inside as you can get.

As you've probably guessed by now, Shafer's approach to these two obituaries differs sharply. Though they don't fully capture the difference, the epitaphs give a good indication of the respective tones:

Michael Kelly: "Husband. Father. Journalist"

Walter Annenberg: "Billionaire Son of Mobster, Enemy of Journalism, and Nixon Toady Exits for Hell—Forced To Leave Picassos and van Goghs at Metropolitan Museum."

The contrast is sharpest when Shafer addresses journalistic scandals and cozy relationships with controversial right wing politicians, areas where there are definite parallels between the two men. Shafer actually explains away the New Republic/Glass scandal as an instance of Kelly being too loyal for his own good.

Shafer often judges figures on the periphery of the journalistic establishment based on a much higher standard than "Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking." For someone like Larry King, a few disputable errors and minor discrepancies (such as changing the date of an incident from 1972 to 1971 when retelling an anecdote) merit an entire column. (It's worth noting that this column ran in the middle of 2009, a period when the coverage of politics, the economy and the European crisis were raising all sorts of journalistic questions, questions that didn't get a lot of space in Shafer's column. This raises the issue of trivialism in media criticism -- see On the Media for a myriad of examples -- but that's a topic for another thread.)

If marginal figures committing minor offenses are treated harshly by Shafer, what happens when someone at the top of the hierarchy does something that Shafer normally considers a serious offense like plagiarism? We got an answer to that one when Maureen Dowd was caught lifting a passage from Josh Marshall.

Here's her explanation in Bloggasm:

“i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”

And here Shafer explains why it's not so bad:

1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)

2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).

3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.

4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."

5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.

6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.

And here was my response at the time:

1. 'Responded.' Not to be confused with 'confessed,' 'owned up,' 'took responsibility,' or any phrase that uses a form of the word 'plagiarism.'
2. "[A] little soft"?
3. Yeah, near verbatim quotes make it through convoluted processes all the time.
4. "[M]y friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." -- What exactly would an excuse look like?
5. No, she just implied it wasn't plagiarism. That definitely gives her the moral high ground.
6. What a trooper.

(I apologize for the tone. I was in a snarky phase, but I'm trying to play nicer these days.)

I've spent a lot of time on Shafer because he's a good example,  I was familiar with his work and, as a media critic, he has an important role in journalism's self-correction process, but he's is not an isolated case, nor is he the worst of bunch (particularly not since the rise of Politico).

The point of all this is that journalism has a problem with tribalism and other social dynamics. These things are affecting objectivity, credibility and quality. What's worse, journalists seem to have so internalized the underlying mindset to such a degree that most of them don't even realize what's going on.

Always read the fine print.

As a follow-up to the More on Libertarian priorities post, here are the actual factors that played into the freedom index:

Fiscal Policy (35.3%)

 The fiscal policy dimension consists of the following categories: Tax Burden (28.6%), Government Employment (2.8%), Government Spending (1.9%), Government Debt (1.2%), and Fiscal Decentralization (0.9%).

Regulatory Policy (32.0%)

 The regulatory policy dimension consists of the following categories: Freedom from Tort Abuse (11.5%), Property Right Protection (7.6%), Health Insurance Freedom (5.4%), Labor Market Freedom (3.8%), Occupational Licensing Freedom (1.7%), Miscellaneous Regulatory Freedom (1.3%), and Cable and Telecom Freedom (0.8%).

Personal Freedom (32.7%)

 Personal freedom dimension consists of the following categories: Victimless Crime Freedom (9.8%), Gun Control Freedom (6.6%), Tobacco Freedom (4.1%), Alcohol Freedom (2.8%), Marriage Freedom (2.1%), Marijuana and Salvia Freedom (2.1%), Gambling Freedom (2.0%), Education Policy (1.9%), Civil Liberties (0.6%), Travel Freedom (0.5%), Asset Forfeiture Freedom (0.1%), and Campaign Finance Freedom (0.02%).

So the single largest component of the Freedom index is "Tax Burden" (28.6%) followed by "Freedom from Tort Abuse" (11.5%).  Yet I had always assumed that the Libertarian alternative to government regulation was to allow lawsuits to proceed?  What other mechanism do they have for solving disputes that are resistant to amicable resolution? 

Meanwhile, "Assest Forfeiture Freedom" (at 0.1%) suddenly looks like the way to finance the freest possible government as you cna be awful on this scale and still do pretty well as Tax Burden is 286 times as important.  One can go on and ask about things like "Freedom from discrimination" but the real acid test is what are the most important parts of the index.  The largest category is Fiscal Policy and it is dominated by less government spending.  That may actually be a libertarian goal (under theories like the Night Watchman State) but that seems to conflate political preferences with actual empirical measures of freedom. 

More on libertarian priorities

I recently had a post where I wondered about what Libertarians in the United States focused their attention on.  It seems I am not alone. Consider these examples:

Personally, I do think freedom is important so fortunately we can salvage the concept from the wreckage of Mercatus. Some of the problem here arise from arbitrary weighting of different categories in order to simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism's strong alliance with social conservatism. Consequently, a gay man's freedom to marry the love of his life is given some weight in the rankings but less than his right to purchase a gun with minimal hassle. A woman's right to terminate a pregnancy or a doctor's right to offer a pregnant woman treatment she considers appropriate are given zero weight. You might think at first that abortion rights are given zero weight for metaphysical reasons rather than reasons of cultural politics, but it turns out that permissive homeschooling laws are given weight as a factor in freedom. Children, in other words, are considered fully autonomous agents whose rights the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents from birth until conception at which point they lose autonomy until graduation from high school.

.  I think he meant from conception until birth, above.  And also consider his later examples:

Nor is there any coherent treatment of the question your "freedom" to trample all over my legitimate interests. New Hampshire, for example, ranks number one in "travel freedom" in part because New Hampshire has lax laws about your right to engage in the dangerous practice of driving while talking on a cell phone. Obviously states attempt to curb unsafe driving in part out of paternalistic interests, but also because safe drivers have a strong interest in not seeing our property or our persons destroyed by unsafe driving. One possible reply is that instead of prophylactic rules about safe driving practices we could let people drive how they want and address claims of harm ex post. But "freedom from tort abuse"—i.e, making it difficult for the victims of the reckless behavior of others to secure financial compensation—is considered a dimension of freedom. What's more, while Mercatus does consider the right to buy cheap beer to be an important dimension of freedom and also considers the right to dangerously talk on your phone while driving a car, they don't consider the right to drive while drunk to be an important dimension of freedom. Presumably because that would be considered beyond the pale politically.

Part of the problem here is that freedom is a very broad concept and different people can have very different weighting functions on what they see as being the key freedoms.  It is also a factor in economic opportunity -- without the ability to feed and clothe oneself, it is rather academic how much the locals enforce no cell phone use while driving. 

But this is precisely what I was talking about. The idea that Texas is less free because of municipal debt is odd.  People can be less free because they have mortgages but we normally consider the freedom to enter long term contracts to be a good thing. 

Now it may be that I do not have the whole picture.  But I look at the free states and I wonder exactly how these rankings reflect the actual experiences of the residents. 

This guy REALLY doesn't like MOOCs

The guy in question is Jonathan Rees. He's a history professor at Colorado State and his blog, More or Less Bunk (which I recently came across by way of Lawyers, Guns and Money), seems to be all MOOC, all of the time. I don't agree with all of his points, but he does make some good ones and given the embarrassingly low thought-to-hype ratio we normally encounter on the subject, posts like “My MOOC is a pale imitation of the class I teach on campus.” provide some badly needed balance.

Weekend blogging -- 61 seconds from the world's most prolific film composer

If the whip cracks don't give it away, you're not watching enough movies.




* At least among major players, I dare you to find an IMDB page to compare to this one.

A few brief thoughts on Timothy Noah's reaction to the firing of Timothy Noah

I didn't really have any strong feeling about the firing of Timothy Noah, but when I came across this Politico excerpt in Talking Points Memo, it seemed rather odd to me.

“Once, shortly after he bought it, he said he liked a piece I'd written advocating an energy tax,” Noah wrote. “Another time, after I wrote a piece about Jim DeMint's departure from the Senate headlined 'Requiem For A Wingnut,' he emailed me to say ... wait, I've got it here: ‘I have little esteem for Jim DeMint, but I also want us to make a rule of not name-calling in headlines. We have strong opinions, but name-calling so outrightly undermines the seriousness of what we are trying to do here.’”

“I quietly changed the headline to the somewhat clumsy, ‘Farewell, Filibusteringest Senator’ and quietly worried whether the magazine's new owner (who around that time also told an audience at the Kennedy School that he'd like to co-brand a chain of cafes called the New Republic) might be a young man with more money than sense,” he said.

And, he added, “my firing is an additional data point.”

I've read this over a few times and it still seems a bit strange. A publisher told a writer to tone down a title. There was nothing particularly special about the title and the the publisher gave a reasonably sounding explanation for why he wanted the change. This bothered the writer enough to cause him to worry about the publisher's competence and to later use it as the basis of a very public criticism.

I realize that Noah may be understandably angry, but even factoring that in there seems to be a weird disconnect here, as if, when he tells me that a publisher changed one of his titles, he expects me to conclude that there's something wrong with the publisher. It's not immediately clear to me that the publisher was wrong, either about this particular title or about the policy of avoiding taking shots in a title, but even if the publisher were clearly wrong, it would still strike me as part of the normal friction of putting out a magazine.

I also get the feeling that Mackenzie Weinger, the author of the Politico piece, had the same reaction as Noah, especially given the snark about the New Republic cafes. (two quick points: first, speakers at events like this are expected to toss out big, interesting, out-of-the-box ideas like co-branding seemingly unrelated businesses; second, weird co-branding ideas are common. By the standards of the field and in the context of the speech, this suggestion wasn't particularly outrageous.)

What makes this more interesting than just than just another case of an ex-employee griping about a former boss is the way it supplies what Noah might call an additional data point for some ongoing concerns about the state of journalism, the idea that the profession has a problem with arrogance and tribalism.

To the tribalism point, this is the second time in recent memory when Politico's Media column has uncritically taken the side of Washington journalistic insiders (such as Noah) against outsider (such as Hughes). It was the Media column where Dylan Byers went after Nate Silver because, to be blunt, he was making the the DC journalism insiders look bad and, more to the point, expendable.

And having journalism critics who uncritically take the side of other journalists is not a good thing.

Do the connotations of "property" influence the "intellectual property" debate?

Tim Taylor has a great post on the history of the term "intellectual property" and the way wording may be shaping our thinking. (via Thoma)

Mark Lemley offers a more detailed unpacking of the concept of "intellectual property" in a 2005 article he wrote for the Texas Law Review called "Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding" Lemley writes: ""My worry is that the rhetoric of property has a clear meaning in the minds of courts, lawyers and commentators as “things that are owned by persons,” and that fixed meaning will make all too tempting to fall into the trap of treating intellectual property just like “other” forms of property. Further, it is all too common to assume that because something is property, only private and not public rights are implicated. Given the fundamental differences in the economics of real property and intellectual property, the use of the property label is simply too likely to mislead."

As Lemley emphasizes, intellectual property is better thought of as a kind of subsidy to encourage innovation--although the subsidy is paid in the form of higher prices by consumers rather than as tax collected from consumers and then spent by the government. A firm with a patent is able to charge more to consumers, because of the lack of competition, and thus earn higher profits. There is reasonably broad agreement among economists that it makes sense for society to subsidize innovation in certain ways, because innovators have a hard time capturing the social benefits they provide in terms of greater economic growth and a higher standard of living, so without some subsidy to innovation, it may well be underprovided.

But even if you buy that argument, there is room for considerable discussion of the most appropriate ways to subsidize innovation. How long should a patent be? Should the length or type of patent protection differ by industry? How fiercely or broadly should it be enforced by courts? In what ways might U.S. patent law be adapted based on experiences and practices in other major innovating nations like Japan or Germany? What is the role of direct government subsidies for innovation in the form of government-sponsored research and development? What about the role of indirect government subsidies for innovation in the form of tax breaks for firms that do research and development, or in the form of support for science, technology, and engineering education? Should trade secret protection be stronger, and patent protection be weaker, or vice versa?

These are all legitimate questions about the specific form and size of the subsidy that we provide to innovation. None of the questions about "intellectual property" can be answered yelling "it's my property."

You could go further and argue that copyrights and patents actually restrict property rights. since they limit what people can make and sell. This aspect has caused some notable libertarians to voice concerns about the seemingly inexorable expansion of these government-granted monopolies.

Some similar issues are raised by the different meanings of the term "rational." "Rational" means something very specific when used in the context of economics. All sorts of behavior we would normally consider rational is irrational in the economics sense. Unfortunately, some economists have used the negative connotation we associate with "irrationality" in its general usage to argue against decisions that are irrational only in the strict technical sense..

Some people just insist on being tied to their possessions

Joseph appears to have had somewhat mixed feelings about this New York Times piece by Graham Hill, a multi-millionaire preaching the freedom of not getting tied down by your possessions. Joseph wondered how this philosophy might work for people on the other end of the spectrum

Assuming things haven't changed greatly since 2003, you can probably get a pretty good idea from this LA Times story from Carla Rivera about a service that provided storage bins for the homeless:

At 7:45 on a recent morning, the nondescript building looked as busy as a checkroom at an airport or train station, with a line of people hauling backpacks, duffle bags and grocery carts.

Chris Thorn, 47, was sorting through a brown leather satchel on rollers, pulling out thick sweaters and other winter clothing to store in anticipation of warmer weather.

Thorn said she has been homeless for a year and has been staying at the Midnight Mission, where there is limited space for belongings.

"It's especially important to have someplace to store clothes for when you get a job," said Thorn, who says she occasionally does painting and construction work.

Nearby, Ruby Simmons, 61, struggled to maneuver a grocery cart overflowing with blankets, sofa pillows, purses, comforters, books, toiletries, an umbrella and a knob-ended, sturdy stick that she said is useful for walking or protection.

Even after filling a bin, Simmons had a cart full of blankets, clothing and her westerns and mystery novels to keep with her.

Simmons was nonplused when asked what she considered the most important of her belongings, some of which she has had since moving from Missouri more than 30 years ago.

"I got the pillows from a minister who was giving stuff away. You'd hate to lose any of it," said Simmons, who has been homeless off and on for years and was recently living on the street. She said she hopes that, in another year, when she reaches retirement age, Social Security will provide enough for a hotel room or apartment.

Graham Hill

I have some aspirations to be a bit of a minimalist.  But I was struck by the New York Times piece by Graham Hill.  In it, a multi-millionaire talks about how he was able to live a life of freedom wandering around the globe and how possessions were a chain.  The correct response to this piece is to ask how it would have worked out if he had decided that his cash assets were also a fetter. 

Based on anecdotal evidence from talking to homeless people, I suspect it would not have been fantastic.  Consider this episode:

But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.

I followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.
 

Travel is an extremely expensive luxury.  With a decent career I still have to work to scrape up the money to visit my very geographically dispersed family and friends.  I think few people without financial assets would be able to simply pick up and live in a succession of expensive, world-class cities.  Again, my homeless person surveys are strictly anecdotal, but beautiful women or dashingly handsome men as companions seem absent from their accounts of living rough. 

As for being poor, it made a huge difference for my freedom in the periods of my life that I had the cash to compensate for mistakes or broken things.  It's much less of a sacrifice to live in a studio apartment if you can rent a suite at a local hotel whenever it gets claustrophobic. 

It is fine to be able to make the decision to have few possessions.  It is completely different to not have a choice in the matter. 

Recommended Reading

See here for a discussion on a recent paper on health inequality.

 The best sentence in the blog post? 

Cynics may spot the benefit of such an approach for those at the top of the income distribution…

Intellectual Property

Mark Thoma points us towards a potentially really important finding:

By linking a number of different datasets that had not previously been used by researchers, Williams was able to measure when genes were sequenced, which genes were held by Celera's intellectual property, and what subsequent investments were made in scientific research and product development on each gene. Williams' conclusion points to a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development for those genes held by Celera's intellectual property.
 

As we have long discussed on this blog, the justification for intellectual property is to encourage and promote innovation.  There has long been a concern that the innovation would have happened with or without the patent (software patents are a good example of this phenomenon) but a general consensus that the profits from patents increase innovation (due to the rewards generated by a successful innovation).  However, if the granting of a patent were shown to decrease innovation then the argument for granting them would be weakened.

If granting a patent reduces future innovation and the patented innovations would have occurred with or without the patent then the patent process becomes pure rent seeking.  It's clear that these two conditions do not universally hold (i.e. medication discovery as currently constructed is too expensive without a clear path to future profits).  But the possibility that this could be true for same areas of technology is a sobering thought indeed. 

New advice column

Emily Oster has an advice column.  Read here.

It contains an excellent explanation of opportunity cost with respect to child rearing.