Monday, March 21, 2022

Someone saw Double Indemnity and thought "what a great concept for a life insurance ad"


Sure, we've all thought it, but we didn't expect them to just come out and say it.




There's a long and very mixed history for edgy advertising. If done with a light touch it can be effective. Secret Weapon, until recently the company behind Jack in the Box's long running campaigns, was a master of hitting just the right balance.




Really edgy ad campaigns are often built around the theory that name recognition, particularly for a new company, is necessary and initially sufficient and the best way to achieve that is with an ad that gets everybody talking. Apple's "1984" was only tangentially related to the Macintosh PC, and yet it often routinely lands on lists of the best television commercials.

Of course, "1984" was in one sense highly traditional. It associated the product with positive things: freedom, self-expression, empowerment. What happens when a campaign focuses on nothing but making an impression?

We have at least one prominent example that debuted during the 1999 Superbowl. Anybody remember Outpost.com?




At least in this case, things didn't work out that well.


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Friday, March 18, 2022

Weekend Web3 notes

First, Ben McKenzie gives an excellent interview on crypto from the very heart of the trendiness beast. 




Next is a conversation with a software and dev ops engineer named Geoffrey Huntley who has "stolen" all the NFTs available through the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. It's all part of a satirical art project to educate people about what NFTs are and, more importantly, are not. Coffeezilla is a YouTuber who specializes in uncovering get-rich-quick gurus who make up much of the advertising on the platform (including on his own channel because that's how the algorithm works).





The innate absurdity of stealing NFTs was also the subject of this Colbert sketch.






We'll let John Wick have the last word.



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Thursday, March 17, 2022

Two alternatives to daylight saving time, one of which is just silly

First, from XKCD:



I come from a nocturnal family, so we had a strong preference for falling back over springing forward. My father insisted that after losing that hour, he never felt right till he got it back. If anything, I feel the same only stronger.

We currently have a system that's pretty good in the fall but which sucks in the spring, which raises the question, why not just keep the good part? If we gain an hour twice a month, we'll get twenty-four 49 hour weekends, we'll all be well-rested and at the end of the year, we'll be back where we started.

Who's with me? 


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Wednesday, March 16, 2022

"The ultimate distillation of the golden age of fraud"

If you're new to Web3 and the hype economy in general (a phrase I apparently no longer have exclusive rights to) this New Republic overview by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman is a good place to start.

In the golden age of fraud, grift sits comfortably alongside the general sense of unreality permeating the American economy. JPEGs sell for millions of dollars and are denominated as a new asset class, despite the many practical and philosophical problems accompanying them. Ephemeral meme stocks and dog-themed crypto tokens outperform deep-pocketed companies that actually, you know, make things. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, owes his fortune to a state-subsidized electric car company that produces far fewer vehicles than his competitors but is worth more than almost all of them put together. (Although it must be said that Musk’s rivals often aren’t much better: Volkswagen, the number-two car company in the world by revenue, cooked the books for years by rigging emission-detection software.)

...

The cryptocurrency industry may be the ultimate distillation of the golden age of fraud. Like Uber, it’s benefited from vast sums of cheap investment capital and pliant public officials easily charmed by new technologies. But whereas Uber provides a clear service, albeit at the expense of underpaid gig workers, the use cases for crypto remain uncertain, even as it drapes itself in utopian rhetoric about financial revolution. Wild volatility, a lack of payments infrastructure, rampant scams, and technical complexity make crypto an unappealing choice to be a real currency or store of value. And its environmental impact and Ponzi-like economics—new investors are required to buy out the old—mean that it may actually be a negative-sum game.

In a hype economy built on froth, virality, misinformation, and celebrity endorsements, crypto has no apparent utility besides being a source of risky speculation. As economists from both the left (Krugman, Roubini) and right (Hanke) have pointed out, crypto has no inherent value except what another person might pay for it. In economics, this is referred to as the “greater fool” theory. At its base, crypto is private money (an outdated notion from the nineteenth century) that largely runs on rails purposefully set up to be outside the banking system and away from those pesky government authorities with their annoying focus on transparency and the rule of law. Its value is a collective hallucination, dependent on constant salesmanship and, in some cases, deception and market manipulation.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Tuesday Tweets

I'm amazed/appalled at how little attention these stories are generating. It's almost as if the interest of journalists is inversely proportionate to the level of extremism.






Musk: unhinged tweeting at... 12:48 AM... 1:31 AM... 4:09 AM...





You know you're a true believer when you brag about how easy it is to repo your car.









You'll be surprised to learn that people who shop at the Beverly Center aren't all that price sensitive.




Of course that's what you'd expect from liberals like Boehlert and the... uh... Wall Street Journal.



Accusations that a political party is in the pocket of a foreign power have historically been the go-to examples of a witch hunt, but in this remake of the Crucible, the case against the witches is actually pretty convincing.














Marshall makes THE essential point about Putin's show of weakness in Ukraine.
More here.










Misc.










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Monday, March 14, 2022

Twelve years ago at the blog -- did not expect to run across Trump

He's only tangentially related to the topic of the post, but his appearance does give this a slightly unnerving quality you want in a Monday post.  

The actual topic of the following is brands and how to value them. A couple of the references have aged badly (does anyone even remember John Edwards?). On the whole though, I think it holds up. Apple is still Apple. Clorox is still Clorox. And Trump still has unconvincing hair. 

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Comparing Apples and Really Bad Toupees

DISCLAIMER: Though I have worked in some related areas like product launches, I have never done an analysis of brand value. What follows are a few thoughts about branding without any claim of special expertise or insight. If I've gotten something wrong here I would appreciate any notes or corrections.

Joseph's post reminded me of this article in the Wall Street Journal about the dispute between Donald Trump and Carl Icahn over the value of the Trump brand. Trump, not surprisingly, favors the high end:
In court Thursday, Mr. Trump boasted that his brand was recently valued by an outside appraiser at $3 billion.

In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that financial troubles had tarnished his casino brand. He also dismissed Mr. Icahn's claims that the Trump gaming brand was damaged, pointing to a recent filing in which Mr. Icahn made clear that he wants to assume the license to the brand. "Every building in Atlantic City is in trouble. OK? This isn't unique to Trump," he said. "Everybody wants the brand, including Carl. It's the hottest brand in the country."
While Icahn's estimate is a bit lower:
Mr. Icahn, however, believes his group also would have the right to use the Trump name under an existing licensing deal, but says the success of the casinos don't hinge on that. The main disadvantage to losing the name, he says, would be the $15 million to $20 million cost of changing the casinos' signs.
So we can probably put the value of the Trump brand somewhere in the following range:

-15,000,000 < TRUMP < 3,000,000,000

(the second inequality should be less than or equal to -- not sure how to do it on this text editor)

Neither party here is what you'd call trustworthy and both are clearly pulling the numbers they want out of appropriate places but they are able to make these claims with straight faces partly because of the nature of the problem.

Assigning a value to a brand can be a tricky thing. Let's reduce this to pretty much the simplest possible case and talk about the price differential between your product and a similar house brand. If you make Clorox, we're in pretty good shape. There may be some subtle difference in the quality between your product and, say, the Target store brand but it's probably safe to ignore it and ascribe the extra dollar consumers pay for your product to the effect.

But what about a product like Apple Computers? There's clearly a brand effect at work but in order to measure the price differential we have to decide what products to compare them to. If we simply look at specs the brand effect is huge but Apple users would be quick to argue that they were also paying for high quality, stylish design and friendly interfaces. People certainly pay more for Macs, Ipods, Iphones, and the rest, but how much of that extra money is for features and how much is for brand?

(full disclosure: I use a PC with a dual Vista/Ubuntu operating system. I do my programming [Python, Octave] and analysis [R] in Ubuntu and keep Vista for compatibility issues. I'm very happy with my system. If an Apple user would like equal time we'd be glad to oblige)

I suspect that more products are closer to the Apple end of this spectrum than the Clorox end but even with things like bleach, all we have is a snapshot of a single product. To useful we need to estimate the long term value of the brand. Is it a Zima (assuming Zima was briefly a valuable brand) or is it a Kellogg's Corn Flakes? And we would generally want a brand that could include multiple brands. How do we measure the impact of a brand on products we haven't launched yet? (This last point is particularly relevant for Apple.)

The short answer is you take smart people, give them some precedents and some guidelines then let them make lots of educated guesses and hope they aren't gaming the system to tell you what you want to hear.

It is an extraordinarily easy system to game even with guidelines. In the case of Trump's casinos we have three resorts, each with its own brand that interacts in an unknown and unknowable way with the Trump brand. If you removed Trump's name from these buildings, how would it affect the number of people who visit or the amount they spend?

If we were talking about Holiday Inn or even Harrah's, we could do a pretty good job estimating the effect of changing the name over the door. We would still have to make some assumptions but we would have data to back them up. With Trump, all we would have is assumption-based assumptions. If you take these assumptions about the economy, trends in gambling and luxury spending, the role of Trump's brand and where it's headed, and you give each one of them a small, reasonable, completely defensible nudge in the right direction, it is easy to change your estimates by one or two orders of magnitude.

We also have an unusual, possibly even unique, range of data problem. Many companies have tried to build a brand on a public persona, sometimes quite successfully. Normally a sharp business analyst would be in a good position to estimate the value of one of these brands and answer questions like "if Wayne Gretsky were to remove his name from this winter resort, what impact would it have?"

The trouble with Trump is that almost no one likes him, at least according to his Q score. Most persona-based brands are built upon people who were at some point well-liked and Q score is one of the standard metrics analysts use when looking at those brands. Until we get some start-ups involving John Edwards and Tiger Woods, Mr. Trump may well be outside of the range of our data.
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Friday, March 11, 2022

I'm not recommending this SNL clip because it's funny. In a sense, I'm recommending it because it's not.

Yes, I know. Complaining that Saturday Night Live isn't funny anymore has been a cliche for longer than most of the cast members have been alive, but that's not really where I'm going with this. For one thing, it's not a question of anymore. The show never was consistently amusing or even interesting. That was never the point.

For a few years back in the 70s, Saturday Night Live did hit a very sweet spot, being on the intersection of the conceptual comedy movement of people like Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman on one side and the rise of the Second City school of sketch comedy on the other. It also benefitted from an early association with talents like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Buck Henry.

Lorne Michaels’ initial idea was to rip off National Lampoon's stage and radio shows keeping much of the cast and many of the writers. The material was toned down for television (including adding the Muppets to the original line-up), but it was clearly an unlicensed Lampoon TV show. That initial concept burned itself out fairly quickly and was definitely showing its age even before the 1980 reboot, which more or less introduced the current incarnation of the show.

SNL has been an institution for most of its run, and as a rule, intentionally funny institutions are rare. It's true that lots of incredibly talented people have worked for there, both in front of and behind the camera (Michaels has a good eye) and they do hit paydirt now and then, but that's not really what the show's about. 

Almost since its inception, people watched SNL so they could talk about what other people were talking about, and since at least second or third season, the producers have built the show around this. In addition to catchphrases and recurring characters who often didn't need to recur, this has led to increasing reliance on topical sketches that check off familiar figures and events, where the laughs come less from the jokes and more from the sense of recognition.

Sketches like this.



This follows a very old tradition. Don jr. rubbing his nose and looking for a bathroom with a mirrored countertop is the 2022 version of the famously drunk character walking out with an ice pack on his head. 

We've talked before about how bad art can often be more useful than great art.  Someone like Shakespeare will see things that their contemporaries miss which pretty much by definition makes she or he unrepresentative.

This sketch by comparison is the exact opposite, bad but representative of its moment. Some talented performers manage a few real laughs, but on the whole, it's just a bunch of walk-ons close-captioned for the comically impaired. The jokes are simply characters saying out loud obvious things about themselves: 

Fox News has been pushing Russian propaganda about Ukraine and is now desperately trying to backpedal since the position has become toxic;

Tucker Carlson is a smug, preppie racist;

Trump is a babbling idiot;

Fox viewers are old;

And so on.

There's no real imagination here, just a checklist of people and incidents associated with conservative media and the war in Ukraine, but it is that very lack of imagination that makes this useful. The writers made a list of things that they believed their audience would recognize and agree with. They seem to have been successful. The cold open without anything to recommend it other than the topic has gotten buzz, write-ups and over three million views on YouTube.

There is, of course, the bigger question of to what extent we can generalize from the SNL audience to the wider population, but that's a conversation that requires a different set of tools. 

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Thursday, March 10, 2022

Not merely a villain but also a fool

Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow on how (and how not to) break up tech giants like Google and the walking anti-trust violation formerly known as Facebook. The opening passage fits nicely with our long-running tech messiah thread.

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalomanical supervillains.

From time to time, we even manage to portray one of these people in a way that hews most closely to reality: ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or I, whose success comes down to a combination of luck and a willingness to set aside consideration of the needs of others. It’s easy to find such people atop our increasingly steep economic pyramid, but it’s very hard to find any who’ll admit it. There is nothing a successful person hates more than being reminded that “meritocracy” is a self-serving myth, a circular logic that says, “The system puts the best people in charge, and I am in charge, therefore I am the best.”

But while the powerful remain blissfully insulated from the bursting of the meritocratic delusion, public sentiment is increasingly turning against the ultra-wealthy, and in the most interesting way possible. Today, the commercial tyrant isn’t merely seen as a villain, but also as a fool – someone whose greatness is due to an accident of history and a vacancy of mor­als, not the result of a powerful genius gone awry.

It’s a distinction with a difference. If Facebook is Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is a once-in-a-millennium genius who did what no other could, then our best hope is to somehow gentle the Zuck, bring him into public service, like a caged ET that govern­ment scientists either bribe or torment into working on behalf of the human race. That’s the constitutional monarchy model, the model where we continue to acknowledge the divine right of kings, but bind them to the material plane by draping the king in golden chains of office whose ends are held by an aristocracy that keeps the monarch from getting too frisky.

But if Facebook is Facebook because Zuck got lucky, if he just combined cheap capital with regulatory tolerance for buying out the competition and building a legally impregnable walled garden around his users, then we don’t need Zuck or Facebook. There’s plenty more where he came from, and all we need to do is withdraw the privileges that regulatory forbearance granted him. That’s the republic model, where we get rid of the king and govern ourselves.

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Wednesday, March 9, 2022

"Love Me, I'm a Liberal"

A couple of threads converged to remind me of this. First, I've been thinking about the relationships between the young revolutionaries of the sixties and the insurrectionists of today (and, given the typical age of Fox viewers, wondering how much of an overlap there is).

Second, the war in Ukraine and the various Russian scandals that came before it have highlighted longstanding rifts between liberals and the anti-anti-Trump left. This is part of a tradition that goes back to the split over war with Germany in the late thirties and the tankies of the fifties and sixties. 

Phil Ochs' "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" is one of the best and wittiest examples of sixties radical disgust with those just to the right. You can find complete annotated lyrics here, though the song is better listened to than read.




Excerpts:

Intro
In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic. 

...

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad that the Commies were thrown out
Of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
And I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
As long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal


Ah, the people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
Now, I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crane?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

...

Sure, once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
Ah, but I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal


That last verse would prove to be prescient. Ochs' generation turned out to be far less committed to these causes than their parents were. He never saw his radical peers become reactionaries. He killed himself in 1976.

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Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Five years ago at the blog -- the Watergate debt



Monday, March 13, 2017

The Washington Press Corps and the "Watergate debt"

I don't want to exaggerate the magnitude of this, but I have come around to the notion that one of the factors, albeit perhaps a small one, that helps explain the bizarre behavior of mainstream journalists toward Republican scandal over the past quarter century is the sense that the press corps owes one to the GOP after Watergate.

The scandal was the one instance in American history where a president was forced to resign and investigative journalism was arguably the main driver. The press aggressively pursued the story and the coverage was, at the very least, sometimes colored by the personal dislike that many journalists felt toward Nixon.

As the years passed and the former president (deservedly or not) managed to rehabilitate some of his reputation, the idea seemed to take root in the press corps that they needed to balance the scales. The idea was nurtured by the Republicans and conservative media but I don't believe it was planted by them. Like its sister belief, the biased liberal media theory, it was an idea born of and trapped in the 70s.

The Iran Contra scandal was both symptom and aggravating factor.  There were hesitation marks all over the reporting, and while some of these can be attributed to the extraordinary popularity and charisma of Ronald Reagan, the timidity of the press is still notable. Nonetheless, despite the relatively gentle handling, it was still another case of journalists pursuing a Republican scandal.

By comparison, the election of Bill Clinton seemed to represent an almost perfect opportunity to balance things out. Not only was Clinton a Democrat, he also was an outsider (which threatened the livelihood of veteran reporters whose status rested on their DC Rolodexes) and a Southern boy from the wrong side of the tracks (which played on deep-seated regional and, more importantly, class prejudices).

I was in or around Arkansas through the 90s and I remember a constant sense of amazement. Perhaps it was just my naivety, but I was completely unprepared for how low supposedly respectable journalists were willing to go once they'd committed to a narrative, even if it meant crawling in bed with the remnants of the state's  segregationist movement (I still remember my revulsion seeing the Washington press corps elevate Jim Johnson to elder statesman).

I've argued before that the bad journalism that took root during Whitewater was a contributing factor and possibly necessary condition for the Bush presidency, the build-up to Iraq, and a general undermining of democracy that culminated with the election of Donald Trump. It would be ironicc if misplaced guilt over great journalism helped contribute to the decline of the profession.

For related oints, check out thee following from Charles Pierce and Frontline.
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Monday, March 7, 2022

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.





Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 


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Friday, March 4, 2022

Horrible Children

I've been thinking a lot about infantilism and the alt-right, particularly the possibility that being immersed in that world might cause or at least contribute to the strange, childish behavior we've been seeing. It's a thesis one is reluctant to bring up for a number of reasons: it's dismissive and needlessly insulting; it frees one from the need to address other positions or understand where they come from; it seldom leads anywhere productive. 

Sometimes, though, a possibility becomes so unavoidable that ignoring it becomes an act of dishonesty.  We have grown men throwing literal tantrums over wearing a mask. We have Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like spoiled twelve-year-olds at the State of the Union. We have Donald Trump.



This is not normal. The outbursts. The pouting. The contrariness. The substitution of "own the libs" attention getting devices for a political view.

And, yes, we can find examples in both parties, but in no way can this be considered symmetrical.
 
Bob Chipman has been thinking along related lines. Chipman is, as previously mentioned, one of our best critics/cultural commentators. Here he uses JoJo Rabbit as a stepping off point to explore the strangely childish quality of the Nazis. He even takes the connection between infantilism and Nazism further by bringing in a comparison to certain extreme reactionary segments of fan boy culture.
 




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Thursday, March 3, 2022

Two and a half threads worth your time (including a great Big Con reference)

Twitter has loads of issue and a potential for abuse arguably second only to Faceb-- sorry, Meta, but unlike whatever the hell it's called, Twitter (if used properly and that's a big if) can be one of the best places online for finding interesting and unexpected conversations with smart people. You have to be selective and pay close attention to who is recommending, speaking and replying, but if you stick with the informed and trustworthy, you can come across fascinating threads on topics like tire maintenance and the fate of nations. 



It turns out that for those invading certain parts of Ukraine in early spring, this is a big deal.


At this point another tire expert pops up with an equally fascinating divergent thread.


Remember what I said about paying attention to who's replying? Noah Smith falls in the trustworthy category.  



Some of these threads read like first drafts of blog posts. The choppiness can be distracting, but it can also have a staccato quality where each point lands distinctly and has a chance to stand on its own.

I've been talking about Twitter vs. blogs and other platforms, but the relationships are symbiotic. 

And I love the way Doctorow connects this to the classic book the Big Con.

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Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog

 Friday, March 2, 2012

Bleeding heart Randians

Once again, Joseph has left it to me to play bad cop on the McArdle beat.

As you can see from the previous post, Megan McArdle has a piece up at the Atlantic complaining about the lack of sympathy for the wealthy when they find themselves in financial trouble.
Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that's perfectly affordable on the income they've been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don't feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them.

I keep getting the feeling that McArdle's default approach to complexity is to look at one dimension at a time until she finds a view she likes.

In this case the complexity lies in the way we see financial hardship. We generally react to news of other people's money troubles with a combination of sympathy and disapproval (read Charles Murray for an example of the latter). The level of sympathy is largely determined by where the fall leaves the victim while the level of disapproval depends on how avoidable the crisis seems to be. Both these factors tend to make us react somewhat more harshly to financial problems of the well-to-do.

And in the cases in question here, the avoidability level is up there. The Bloomberg story that McArdle was talking about concerned highly paid executives who are facing hardships because of smaller-than-expected bonuses. This is a very different situation than a drop in salary. Even for the very well paid a completely unexpected reduction in salary can cause problems. The possibility of a smaller bonus should always be expected.

These were financially literate professionals who failed to take into account the potential variability of their income stream and as a result made reckless decisions then failed to own up. This isn't to say that some of these families aren't facing painful disruptions. Of course we feel sympathy for them, particularly the children, but the adults in these situations got there because of bad decisions and now they have to take responsibility for their actions.

At least that's what McArdle used to believe.
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Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Gentrification and Chinatown





Roy Choi is one of the culinary stars of the 21st Century. You'd be hard pressed to find a chef who has done more to change the way people think about dining, particularly here in LA, but Choi himself has mixed feelings about the impact he had had. Trendy restaurants bring real benefits to a neighborhood, but these often come at a cost.

In this episode of Choi's Broken Bread.
Roy’s Chinatown restaurant Chego opened in 2013, which soon became the poster child for gentrification in the area. Roy explores what he would have done differently as he retraces his steps through some of the neighborhood’s beloved establishments like Hop Woo and Phoenix Bakery. He also meets newcomers to the neighborhood Pearl River Deli and Endorffeine.

While journalists discussing the housing crisis are contractually obliged to cite San Francisco, places like Chinatown go largely unnoticed which is the opposite of what would happen in any rational discussion. For reasons discussed before and certain to be brought up again, SF is one of the worst major cities in California to develop from an urban planning standpoint. Chinatown, on the other hand, is ideally situated.

Chinatown also provides a much more representative and sympathetic picture of the concerns over gentrification. Like Boyle Heights, Chinatown has already paid a disproportionate share of the price for LA's development. 
The first Chinatown, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets (now Cesar Chavez Avenue), was established in 1880. Reaching its heyday from 1890 to 1910, Chinatown grew to approximately fifteen streets and alleys containing some two hundred buildings. It boasted a Chinese Opera theater, three temples, a newspaper and a telephone exchange. But laws prohibiting most Chinese from citizenship and property ownership, as well as legislation curtailing immigration, inhibited future growth.

From the early 1910s, Chinatown began to decline. Symptoms of a corrupt Los Angeles discolored the public's view of Chinatown; gambling houses, opium dens and a fierce tong warfare severely reduced business in the area. As tenants and lessees rather than outright owners, the residents of Old Chinatown were threatened with impending redevelopment, and as a result the owners neglected upkeep of their buildings.[3] Eventually, the entire area was sold and then resold, as entrepreneurs and developers fought over the area. After thirty years of decay, a Supreme Court ruling approved condemnation of the area to allow for construction of a major rail terminal, Union Station. Residents were evicted to make room for Union Station without a plan for the relocation of the Chinatown community.

Chinatown was gradually demolished, leaving many businesses without a place to do business and forcing some to close. A remnant of Old Chinatown persisted into the early 1950s, situated between Union Station and the Old Plaza. Several businesses and a Buddhist temple lined Ferguson Alley, a narrow one-block street running between the Plaza and Alameda. The most notable of the surviving buildings was the old Lugo Adobe, having been built in 1838 by the prominent Californio family. Some decades later, the Lugo Adobe became the original home of Loyola Marymount University, and later, it was rented to Chinese-Americans who ran shops on the ground floor and a lodging house upstairs. Christine Sterling, who had brought to fruition the Olvera Street and China City projects, argued that remaining buildings of Old Chinatown were an eyesore and advocated successfully for the razing of all the remaining structures between the Plaza and Union Station.

We need more housing and places like Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Watts are well-suited for development and densification. At the same time, residents of these neighborhoods have legitimate concerns. Framing the debate and a conflict between noble YIMBYs and villainous NIMBYs is not productive and it is enormously unfair. 
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