NYT correction watch: Did Dickens meet Dostoevsky? -- Opinions still differ

About six months ago, University of California Berkeley Prof. Eric Naiman revealed that much of the literary world, including the New York Times, had been taken in by massive hoax.(you can read my take here but you should read Naiman's piece first. It's exceptionally good). When scholars first started raising questions about the hoaxster's claim, which appeared in the NYT, that Dickens met Dostoevsky, the paper published a weaselly update:

Correction: October 29, 2011

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about “Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist” by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and “Charles Dickens” by Claire Tomalin, recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin’s book in which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter and whether the meeting ever occurred.  

The "some scholars" line badly understated the case but it was at least technically accurate at the time. Now, though, we know that all of the primary sources for this anecdote came from a serial fantasist writing under a string of assumed identities and we've known this since last April (the story even made Slate). That would seem to be plenty of time for the NYT to update their correction so I googled "Dickens Dostoevsky" and Michiko Kakutani (the writer in question). Here's what I saw:

Correction: October 29, 2011

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about “Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist” by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and “Charles Dickens” by Claire Tomalin, recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin’s book in which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter and whether the meeting ever occurred.  

Maybe they'll get around to fixing it next year.

Medical Innovation is expensive

Megan McArdle has some strong opinions on how high drug prices have managed to help drive medical innovation:

Drug development is essentially a giant international collective-action problem. The U.S. has kept it from being a total disaster because we don’t have good centralized control of our insurance market, and our political system is pretty disorganized and easy to lobby. If that changes -- and maybe we just changed it! -- we’ll knock down the prices of drugs to near the marginal cost using government fiat, and I expect that innovation in this sector will grind to a halt. Stuff will still be coming out of academic labs, but no one is going to take those promising targets and turn them into actual drugs.

and

There are some promising alternatives. The main two that have been suggested are prizes and having the U.S. government get into the business of developing actual drugs, rather than just funding basic research. I’m in favor of trying both of these approaches. But so far, prizes have not proved themselves as ways to fund what is essentially commercial product development -- at least, not at the same level that patents do. Nor has the government. As we’ve just seen from the government’s attempt to develop a Travelocity-like site for health insurance, there are reasons to think that government might not be very good at that sort of thing. I don’t mean to slur the government -- governments absolutely have developed drugs in the past. But these are not the majority, and government processes often make it hard to do things that companies do easily.

Now I don't want to knock pharmaceutical companies.  A lot of good work is done by these companies.  On the other hand, medical costs in the United States are really, really high.  And the National Institutes of Health has proven itself as a really effective model of targeted and efficient medical research.  Now it is true that the cost of doing this would not be trivial.  Randomized controlled trials are extremely expensive and crucial to ensuring that only safe medications reach the open market. 

So this would be expensive.  But I am unclear as to whether it would be more expensive than the current model of drug development.  And these subsidies could go to many of the same companies that develop drugs now.  I think that this conversation would be much better informed with some actual calculations as to cost/benefit.  This is a bit outside of my expertise, but I see it as a key step to really advancing the conversation. 

Did Andrew Gelman catch me doing something I've complained about other people doing?

Maybe. In reply to this post where I suggested that Motley Fool's Netflix Emmy coverage was an example of the following:

One of Motley Fool's favorite strategies is to pick a hot company like Netflix or Disney and relentlessly talk it up. Unlike the traditional pump-and-dump, the goal isn't to drive up that individual stock (it's hard to move a Disney); instead what's being pumped is the idea that you're losing money by not being in. This frame of mind makes readers receptive to buying MF's investment books and $199 newsletters even though, based on their columns, they have little to offer other than conventional wisdom and questionable analysis. 

 Gelman offered an alternate suggestion:

But I wonder if there’s something else going on. I don’t read The Motley Fool—actually, I’ve never looked at it before, but I did click on it just now when preparing this post—but I do subscribe to the New York Times. The Motley Fool’s motto is “to educate, amuse & enrich.” The Times is not enriching me, but I do read it to be educated and amused. I wonder whether the Fool’s pushing of Netflix is part of the educate-and-amuse bit. Okay, the story is not very amusing and apparently not educational at all—but, from the reader’s perspective, what the Fool is providing with the Netflix story is an ongoing saga, a mini-soap-opera.

The best analogy might be the newspaper coverage of a sports team. Yeah, the Tigers are gonna go all the way this year, check out their new pitching staff, etc. These kinds of stories have their own internal logic and they can be pegged to local news. Thus, the Emmys can be spun as evidence for a pre-existing story where Netflix is a hero, just as the local newspaper can spin a hot streak by the third baseman as good news for the home team.

I generally get annoyed with people who read hidden meaning into a story element when there's an obvious narrative or commercial reason for including that element. My go-to example is critics who read puritanical agendas into teen-slasher films, ignoring the facts that:

Exploitation film-makers are constantly looking for a way to incorporate sex and nudity or "the suggestion thereof" into scripts;

They are also looking for ways to scare the audience and for directors of limited talent, one of the easiest methods for making an audience jump is to spring the monster out when the victims have been lulled into a false sense of security;

In order to stretch this kind of story out to feature length, it helps if you can find an excuse to have one or two character at a time slip away from the group.

Under these constraints (and generally assuming none-too-gifted screenwriters composing as fast as they can type), it would be surprising not to see the sex-then-death plot device showing up in cheap horror films.

So am I guilty of the same kind of over-reading with Motley Fool and Netflix? Maybe a little but there are a couple of caveats that need to be thrown in.

First of all, a good sales pitch is generally a good story but it has to be a special kind of story, one that ends with the customer in just the right frame of mind. Unless I'm missing a revenue stream here, these MF posts exist solely to drive people, directly or indirectly, to purchasing an MF publication. They have to be entertaining enough to hold the readers' interest but, unlike a movie or a TV show or a magazine article, they have to do more than just entertain; they have to sell. Given that constraint, you can't analyze the story without analyzing the pitch.

Second, are stories of glamorous successes  a good way of giving investment advice? I recall Peter Lynch saying that he preferred unglamorous companies that other investors were likely to overlook (if memory serves, he specifically said that the corniness of the name "Moe" in the Pep Boys logo made him much more eager to buy the stock). Given that the vast majority of us have no business picking stocks, is it responsible to sell the amateur investor on buying the superstars corporations that everybody's talking about?

The importance of measurement

Exactly how you measure a parameter is both important and difficult:

Well, one of the reasons some Americans feel they’re being taxed to death is that if you add up our taxes, which are low compared to other modern countries, and then you add in private expenditures for things the tax system pays for in other countries — a lot of our health care costs, higher education costs, admissions and fees and tickets and licenses for a lot of things — lo and behold, we end up being a relatively high-tax country. But it depends on how you analyze the data.

And let me give you one killer figure: We spend so much money on our health care in this country — or as I prefer to think of it, sick care in this country — that for every dollar that the other 33 modern economies spend for universal coverage, we spend $2.64. And this is done using something called “purchasing parity dollars,” so they’re truly comparable. So we spend $2.64 per person and still have almost 50 million people with no coverage and 30 million with limited coverage, and these other countries spend far less with universal coverage.

This is definitely a different perspective than I have had on this issue before.  In a way I have been trapped in the paradigm of public versus private provision (and so a small public sector seems to suggest a low tax country to me).  But a basket of goods and services can be difficult to break into such pieces. 

An excellent example of this problem is the extraordinary costs of health care in the United States.  Finding ways to properly tackle the problem of medical expenses is difficult, frustrating, and has some really nasty trade-offs. Trying to solve it is important. 

But in the meantime, pushing economic growth for the lower and middle classes is a good second best way to proceed forward while we seek solutions to these fundamental issues.   

Deficits and Climate Change

Larry Summers makes the link and it is not the one you might expect; instead he is looking at the innate uncertainty in policy projections:

These figures lie well within any reasonable confidence interval for deficit forecasts. The most recent comprehensive CBO evaluation found that, leaving aside any errors due to policy changes, the expected error in projections out only five years is 3.5 per cent of GDP. Put another way, given the magnitude of forecast uncertainties there is a chance of close to 40 per cent that with no new policy actions the ratio of debt-to-GDP will decline over 25 or 75 years.

Of course, debt problems could also be much worse than is now forecast.

But in most areas policy makers avoid taking strong actions unless there is statistically compelling evidence to support them. Few would favor action to curb greenhouse gas emissions without evidence establishing that substantial climate change is overwhelmingly likely. Yet it is conventional wisdom that urgent action must be taken to cut the deficit, even as prevailing short-run deficit forecasts suggest no problems and long-run forecasts are within margins of error.

When the variance in the projection models are explicitly discussed, it makes the whole matter seem more prosaic.  After all, if we were frequentists we would reject the hypothesis of an increase in debt to GDP deficit at 10 years as not statistically significant (versus the null hypothesis that this change = 0). 

Much of this uncertainty is on the growth side of the equation, which may actually be the easiest policy lever to move in the short term.  It seems to me, as a student of history, that it is rarely the case that a country has been ruined by a burst of prosperity, growth, and development of human capital.

But the second part of Dr. Summers' argument is really the best -- Climate change is at least as likely as an increase in the debt to GDP ratio in the next 75 years.  I think the balance is much higher and the possible side effects of climate change are pretty dire for some really key places in America (think Miami).  Yet it is not the flashpoint for this discussion and that, I believe, is what gives the game away. 

Whatever people are fighting about, it is not the long term state of the debt.  Sure, it would be nice to reduce it but obvious tactics (raising taxes) are completely off of the table and there is a constant return to trying to cut specific government programs.  This has all of the hallmarks of a policy duel and not a real worry about the long term future.

But one way or the other, the discussion has been way too focused on the point estimates of the statistical models and not the confidence intervals.  Epidemiologists have already learned, to their regret, how dangerous that can be. 

P.S. And no, I am not suggesting a p-value based approach either, but rather measures of certainty that are explainable in ordinary language and make clear that these are projections, so that the level of sacrifice to improve the point estimate can be properly evaluated. 

A mean looking kid walking by a row of glass houses with a big ol' bag of rocks

TPM has a short but fascinating revelation

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Thursday that a public editor at the New York Times considers liberal columnist Paul Krugman's work to be an ongoing "nightmare."

During a segment on "Morning Joe," conservative historian Niall Ferguson joined Scarborough to pile on Krugman. Ferguson said that Krugman lacks "humility, honesty and civility."

"And there's no accountability," Ferguson said. "No one seems to edit that blog at the New York Times. And it's time that somebody called him out. People are afraid of him. I'm not."

Scarborough then recalled a conversation he had with a Times editor following his televised debate with Krugman earlier this year.

"I actually won't tell you which public editor it was but one of the public editors of the New York Times told me off the record after my debate that their biggest nightmare was his column every week," Scarborough said.

Assuming that Scarborough is on the level (and putting aside Ferguson's self-awareness issues), this would seem to echo the New York Times' reaction to Nate Silver. In both cases, the supposedly liberal staff seemed to take an instant dislike to highly respected liberal writer/researchers who appear to have brought in a large number of traditional and digital subscribers. What's going on?

As regulars have probably guessed, I see this as another result of an increasingly dysfunctional culture of journalism, specifically the way that journalists react to having someone on the inside who ignores the implicit code of conduct.

This is not a left/right matter -- it cuts across pretty much all of the media establishment -- but conservatives have tended to make better tactical use of the rules we're talking about, for instance, using pox-on-both-their-houses conventions to provide cover for unpopular positions. As a result, there are more obvious targets on the right but that's a fairly trivial factor.

Silver and Krugman prompted such a strong reaction not because they were too liberal (despite seeing the world through an overwhelmingly upper class perspective, the NYT cannot be considered a right-wing paper); but because they were insiders who refused to follow the rules of the culture, and who therefore threatened that culture.

Over the past two decades, journalists have fashioned a remarkably self-serving code of conduct: de- emphasizing factual accuracy; embracing a lazy herd mentality with talk of narratives and memes; avoiding tough confrontations through false equivalencies; and passing the buck on keeping their audience informed.

When Nate Silver pointed out both that the data didn't support many of the popular narratives and that the journalists pushing those narratives were contributing nothing, he threatened reputations, business models and the underlying culture of the institutions. The fact that he was right was beside the point; he was ignoring the conventions of the journalistic establishment and there is no greater bastion of that establishment than the New York Times. By the same token, when Krugman points out that "centrist" pundits have a huge personal and professional interest in pushing the "Paul Ryan, serious policy guy" narrative, he was expressing a fact that was widely known but which was not supposed to be said aloud.

The paper has never been exactly friendly to blunt, independent writers with satirical tendencies as Molly Ivins discovered way back in the Seventies, but things have only gotten worse since then. Almost everybody lives in glass houses now and Paul Krugman does not look like someone you'd trust with a rock in that situation.

Weekend blogging -- "nudity or the suggestion thereof"

Eventually this is going to tie back in with a recent Andrew Gelman post at the Monkey Cage and possibly with a post I need to write one of these days on the business lessons of Roger Corman, legendary maker of exploitation pictures (often but incorrectly identified as 'B-movies'*). In the meantime, I think this anecdote can probably stand on its own.

When Martin Scorsese first met Corman, he expected to meet the maniacal, seat-of-the-pants yahoo type that the stories might suggest. "Instead," Scorsese recalls, "I found him a very courteous and gentlemanly guy, but a very stern and tough customer who was quite polite as he explained these outrageous tactics of exploitation in cold, calm terms. . . . 'Martin, (Corman told him,) it's important that every fifteen pages there should be a touch of nudity or the suggestion thereof. Like a shoulder or leg exposed. It keeps the interest.' "

* B's are films made to fill out the second half of a double feature and, as Corman himself likes to point out, that format had fallen out of favor well before he started making films.

Ecomonies and Pharmacoepidemiology: today's link.

Beat the Press points out just how much health care costs are driving the United States fiscal situation:

But suppose we humor our friends at the Post. If our per person costs were the same as Canada's, or 53.1 percent of U.S. costs ($4,521.6/$8507.6) , then we would be looking at primary budget surpluses of more 2.0 percent of GDP over the next decade. These rise to more 3 percent of GDP in the 2040s and would eventually exceed 4 percent of GDP ($640 billion a year in today's economy).

If our per person health care costs were the same as in the U.K. then we would be spending just 40.0 percent as much on health care ($3,405.5/$8507.6). In this case our primary budget surplus would be over 3 percent of GDP for the next 15 years, rising to over 4 percent of GDP in the 2040s and eventually exceeding 6 percent of GDP by the end of the forecast period ($960 billion in today's economy).

I think that this rather dramatically illustrates that there are a lot of ways to meet the challenges of the long term budget deficit.  It's not that we can become Canada or the UK tomorrow, but that this difference in costs (with the attendant lack of access) is not ideal.  If we do decide that it is worth it to put this focus on medical costs then it makes sense to realize that taxes are needed.  In isolation, most taxes hurt somebody.  In isolation, most government programs benefit somebody.  The trick is to find a way to balance these two elements.

It is very much like pharmacoepidemiology.  Our focus on the adverse effects of medication use can often blind us to the real benefits of appropriately prescribed and used medications.  But balancing the two pieces is not at all trivial, so it can be too easy to just weigh one side of the equation. 

What does a position entail?

I am big fan of thinking through an argument from start to finish as well as assessing the implications of the argument.  Matt Yglesias did a good job with this approach with this post:

After all, the assumption that economic growth will continue undergirds conventional wisdom about economic policy in a really profound way—namely it's the key reason to limit political interest in redistribution of economic resources. There are a lot of metaphors about rising tides lifting all boats and baking a bigger pie instead of arguing about how to divide up a small one, and they're all pointing to the same issue—distributional issues matter, but in the long-term, economic growth matters much much more. Average living standards in the West are much higher in 2013 than they were in 1863 not because we abandoned capitalism and workers seized control of the factories, but because society as a whole is much more prosperous than it was 150 years ago.

It is an absolutely correct argument -- if there is no longer any potential for growth than pro-growth wealth distributions are kind of pointless and it becomes cruel to allow for high concentrations of wealth.  Now it is a different argument to claim that wealth concentration is required to encourage growth, but then the absence of growth should be a huge problem for low-tax/high-growth crowd.  Appeals to the long run get less compelling when the long run never actually arrives . . .

An interesting point on redistribution

Chris Dillow:

Now, libertarians might object that such redistributions are the effect of meddlesome government. In their ideal polity, we'd simply have secure property rights and no redistribution. I'm not sure. In a minimal state, we'd still have technical change. And this itself creates de facto rights. For example, in the 19th century mid-west, the invention of barbed wire (pdf) allowed land-owners to enclose large areas, thus strengthening their property rights. In the 21st century, file-sharing gives young people the idea that they have a right to free music. Faced with such technical change, even a libertarian state would have to choose how to allocate new rights - for example, the right to shared files versus the right to protect one's intellectual property. However it chooses, there's redistribution.

I say this to endorse Frances' claim; governments don't "defend" property rights but create them.

I think that there is a real sense that this point is very useful -- property is entirely a social construct.  There is no sense, in the state of nature, where a given piece of land is owned by a specific individual.  A system of property rights has many great features but the choice of what can be owned is, itself, rather important as are the socially acceptable steps that can be taken to defend these rights.

In practice going back to first principles on these types of rights can be very difficult and is likely to be somewhat misleading.  However, it is always worth noting that the outcomes that we currently have are because of system of values interested to maximize aggregate welfare and not some sort of natural entitlement. 

Solar: a continuing update

Brad Delong points us towards a great chart of the cost of solar energy.  The key quote:

The price of solar photovoltaic cells has dropped 99% in the past quarter century. So in an increasing number of markets around the country, solar is at or very close to grid parity.

In particular, the article focuses on a Colorado discovery that solar is looking competitive with natural gas fired plants.  And, in the United States, the heavy use of air conditioning likely means that peak sun and peak energy demand will line up reasonably well.

There remain technical challenges, but this is a very encouraging place to be. 

The obvious and the obviously obvious

This quote (cited by Andrew Gelman via a badly chosen URL), "The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time." got me to thinking about what we mean when we say "obvious" or, more precisely, the different things that different people mean when they use the word in different contexts.

The obvi-... er, first example that comes to mind is this anecdote I first encountered in The World of Mathematics."

A famous math professor was giving a lecture during which he said "it is obvious that..." and then he paused at length in thought, and then excused himself from the lecture temporarily. Upon his return some fifteen minutes later he said "Yes, it is obvious that...." and continued the lecture.

A slightly different form of this anecdote was cited by Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes in their essay on mathematical folklore, unfortunately, it seems fairly obv-... make that, fairly clear to me that they missed the point of the joke:

This metajoke says a lot about mathematicians. First, they are often very quick thinkers, able to reach conclusions far faster than others. Second, they can see the humor in some jokes but are easily bored by the routine or familiar. Third, they often dismiss results that are obvious to themselves as “trivial”, even though the results may not be trivial to others. The following joke vividly illustrates this penchant.

A mathematics professor was lecturing to a class of students. As he wrote something on the board, he said to the class “Of course, this is immediately obvious.” Upon seeing the blank stares of the students, he turned back to contemplate what he had just written. He began to pace back and forth, deep in thought. After about 10 minutes, just as the silence was beginning to become uncomfortable, he brightened, turned to the class and said, “Yes, it IS obvious.”

The problem with this interpretation is that the students' confusion is not only not a central feature of the joke; it's not even a standard element (note that it doesn't appear at all in the previous version).

The joke here isn't that what's obvious to a mathematician may not be obvious to mere mortals. Instead, it's the far more interesting point that mathematicians and their ilk (and if you're reading this...) often use the words like "obvious" in a way that, though relatively precise, is very different from the way normal people use them. In common usage, being obvious is itself obvious. Normal people sometimes wonder if something that seems obvious is really true but they never spend time wondering if something that is true is really obvious.

At the risk of speculating on the motives of the apocryphal (and keeping in mind that I haven't taken a pure math class in more than a decade), I'd say that 'obvious' in this context means 'does not require a lemma.' You will hear mathematicians use the word in this sense, even though the question of whether or not a proof is complete is often far from obvious inn the traditional sense.

You could make a similar point about the way economists use 'rational' but that's a topic for another post.

Weekend blogging -- TV spies and war games

I came across a Youtube channel dedicated to the late Sixties/early Seventies show Callan. In case you're not familiar with it, the show was basically British television's answer to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the other anti-Bonds of the period. It was also the role that brought Edward Woodward to prominence thanks to an extraordinary portrayal of a man eaten away with self loathing.

Callan lives a drab life and genuinely hates his work and most of the people he works with. The only consistent source of pleasure in his life is his collection of Napoleonic war game miniatures. Occasionally, stories revolved around actual gaming, like the episode, "Act of Kindness" from the third season.

Which is a pretty good excuse to post it as part of our ongoing gaming thread.

Other people get their allusions from classical literature; I use old Superbowl ads.

Like a lot of people, I've always looked at Grover Norquist as both dangerous and untrustwworthy. Certainly the last peerson I'd expect to balk at extremism, but recent events have made what were fairly fine distinctions plain. In the case of Norquist, this interview reminds us that even the hitchhiker with an axe draws the line at the one with the chainsaw.

Electronic currency

It seems like Bitcoin is experiencing a bit of a set-back.  It is probably not that surprising that such a strong challenge to fiat currency has been met by federal investigators.  The more high profile the challenge, the easier it would have been to meet it.  It is the stuff that isn't advertising on Wall Street that might slip under the radar.