Swords and Wizardry Appreciation Day: Wow

I was amazed by the number and quality of Google+ responses to the Swords and Wizardry Appreciation Day.  It is pretty amazing the actual depth that this segment of the OSR actually has. 

One thing that really stood out is how easy it is to houserule S&W.  It is not just that they have the rules available in editable text format but that the rules themselves are very robust to tinkering.  This was one feature of more modern RPGs that I found difficult -- if you changed the assumptions of the game designers then the system showed problems.

The classic example is magic items in a D&D 3.X/Pathfinder world.  It is well known that the system presumes a certain level of magical gear for the players.  It also assumes that it is easy to make magical items.  Without these features, characters may well not operate as expected (the Monk 1/Druid X is much more formidable, for example). 

But with S&W, the alteration of a single rule rarely has repercussions across the system.  Sure, you can break it if you try to.  But the game plays well with many tweaks -- some of which are actually discussed in the rulebook (ideas like giving +1 to hit to two weapon fighters, or no memorized  wizard spells above level 6 but rituals instead).   This allows for a lot of freedom for groups to tinker and try to find the optimal balance. 

Swords and Wizardry Appreciation day

I was always surprised to be a Swords and Wizardry fan.  In a lot of ways I was a bigger fan of the original basic and expert (B/X) D&D books released after the first run of Dungeons and Dragons (and contemporaneous with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons). 

But the adventures sucked me in: both Grimmsgate and MCMLXII caught the sense of wonder of the early adventures and the lack of systematic approaches to everything that came latter.  Modern descendants of the original D&D (both the Wizards of the Coast and Paizo versions, both high quality products) lacked the sense of wonder that can from not fully understanding the world.  When everyone knows what an Ogre is and can do then there are few surprises left. 

The latest addition, in terms of rules, is Swords and Wizardry complete, which manages to have all of the key elements of the rules in 131 pages or so.  Sure some of the elements are not described in great detail (especially the spells) but that is a virtue.  I do think it was a mistake to include the spells above levels 5 or 6 . . . but the designer even admits to this in a sidebar.

Overall it was a refreshing vision of the game in an earlier era and one that I quite liked.  It was well timed to come out with the re-release of TSR D&D (both as premium reprints and as PDF files).  I have quibbles (no elf Druid despite an illustration to the contrary) but I think the vision and the production quality make up for these issues.  It is true that the system will work best for those who already understand D&D, but that really was how the hobby came to be (with the rule books often being somewhat inscrutable). 

Overall, I have really enjoyed this game system and I hope that Frog God Games continues to do high quality products like these ones (especially the modules). 

Tonight only -- free teleseminar on getting rich by writing for television

OK, not really, but a friend sent me this and I thought I'd pass it on because:

1. It sounded interesting;

2. It ties in (albeit weakly) with some recent discussions of distance learning;

3. Ken Levine (MASH, Cheers, Frasier) is one of the best bloggers on the subject of television and the business of writing.

Sorry about the late notice.

Tonight at 9 PM Eastern/ 6 PM Pacific I’ll be holding another FREE teleseminar. The topic is writing partners and my partner, David Isaacs will be joining me. We’ll answer all your questions. If you’re interested in participating and not already on the alert list here’s where you go to sign up. You must sign up by noon PDT. Did I mention it's FREE?

From unsupported hypothesis to conventional wisdom

I don't want to pick on Andrew Delblanco, who turned in an unusually well-balanced piece on MOOCs in a recent issue of the New Republic, but this passage bothered me quite a bit:

But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.” “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”

(for more along similar lines)

I'm not an economist, I haven't gone through Baumol and Bowen's research, and my college teaching experience is more than a decade out of date, so I'm certainly missing some salient points here, but if the hypothesis is true, I'd expect to see the following:

1. There should be a shortage of teachers

2. The percentage increase in wages for teaching should be greater than the percentage increase in overall tuition.

3. The share of tuition going to instructional costs should increase substantially relative to costs such as administration.

Rather than seeing all of these, it's not immediately obvious that we're seeing any. College teaching jobs are not easy to get, non-instructional costs seem to be more than holding their own and if you look at people who are paid solely to teach, their wages are increasing more slowly than tuition.

We have to be careful about treating informal observations as data, but with that caveat in mind, there are lots of reasons to question and not much evidence to support the hypothesis that a lack of technology-driven productivity gains by instructors are causing the sharp growth in tuition. Nonetheless, the idea has gone from interesting but unlikely theory to generally accepted fact.

Here's where I blame it all on Steven Levitt.

OK, not really, but this is an example of a journalistic fad that owes a lot to Freakonomics: propping up an argument with a semi-relevant economic allusion. This isn't the same as analyzing a problem using economic concepts (for example, trying to explain health care inflation as a principal agent problem). Instead, what we have here is the idea that explaining the concept is the same as arguing that it applies.

It is, of course, possible that cost disease really is driving the growth of tuition. This is an enormously complicated problem and complicated problems often look very different when examined in detail. Viewed from a distance, though, the idea that a lack of instructional productivity gains are driving the growth simply doesn't jibe with what we're seeing.

Lesson for Epidemiology

I am amazed that Mark was not all over this statistical modeling issue.  Matthew Yglesias posts the response from the authors here. 

A couple of quick thoughts.  First, no matter what you think of the authors of the original paper, I am inclined to applaud them for sharing both the source data and the statistical code used to analyze it.  It opened to them a comprehensive methodological critique but that could not have happened if they had not shared the source data and code.  The next result, from a scientific point of view, is a huge win (and I think this outweighs any actual errors, presuming that they were not intentional). 

Second, the whole issue of association versus causality is one that we should think more about.  It can be easy to slip in the fallacy of equivocation: asserting associational thinking when a study is attacked but interpreting it in a very causal manner in a policy discussion.  We have this problem all of the time.  We state associations like "people who eat red meat have a higher rate of disease" but then turn that into a recommendation of "eat less red meat". 

Now clearly one has to make an actual decision at some point and, in a lot of cases, the guidance can cause no harm.  But there are complex cases where this could matter a lot.  Consider the inverse association between smoking and Parkinson's disease.  Imagine (based on no data -- just a though experiment) that we extended this association to show slower progression in patients who continued to smoke.  That might make one think that cigarette smoking might be recommended to Parkinson's disease patients.  But if we are wrong (and the association is confounded or acting as a marker for some other trait) we will increase the rates of lung cancer and serious heart disease for no therapeutic benefit. 

Sometimes a randomized trial is an option.  But when it is not (as many exposures, like height or air quality, are hard to randomize) then there is a very delicate decision-making process.  It is very instructive and important to watch how other fields of study deal with these types of issues. 

Edit: It seems everyone has been looking at this question.  Some additional very good takes (over and above the Mark Thoma, Matt Yglesias and Mike Konczal linked above) include:

Andrew Gelman
Noah Smith
Paul Krugman
Tyler Cowen
Jonathan Chait

I continue to hope Mark Palko can be convinced to weigh in as well. 

Simply amazing tale of corporate governence

This was just amazing:

At Iris International, a medical diagnostics company based in Chatsworth, Calif., shareholders rejected all nine directors in May 2011. In keeping with the company’s policy, they submitted their resignations. And then they voted not to accept them. The nine stayed on the board. (The company was acquired in late 2012 by the Danaher Corporation.)

Assuming that this is a factually correct version of events and does not omit a key detail of some kind (always a risk when a story seems this outrageous), this is a remarkable separation of the owners of the company from their own board of directors.  In theory, could any board-member be replaced under these circumstances?  

A defense of the envelope method

Emily Oster has a provocative piece in Slate arguing against the envelope method of budgeting.  The crux of the argument appears to be:

The principle in question here is that “money is fungible.” In reality, all dollars are the same. There is no such thing as a gas dollar, a grocery dollar, a “fun” dollar. The Ramseys of the world argue you should just apportion them into the envelopes depending on what you think you might spend. But doing it this way is not actually the best way to dole out your money; you are not optimizing. Your money is just not working as hard as it should.

The system works great, as long as nothing ever changes. But the minute that some price changes, you’re in trouble. Here’s an extreme example. Imagine you drive to work, and your “gas money” envelope contains enough money to get you to work for the month, and maybe a little cushion. But then gas gets more expensive. You may first react by switching to a worse grade—say, from premium to regular (research shows many people do this). But if gas prices go up even more you simply will run out of money in the gas envelope. And then you won’t be able to get to work. Strictly following the envelope system here would be much, much worse than “cheating”: It’s certainly bad for your household budget if you miss work.

This presumes that the envelope system is static and the allocation of money in the envelopes never changes as prices change.  In other words that you do your budget once and never alter it.  It is clear that the strong form of this argument is actually a straw man -- would anybody let themselves be evicted because their rent went up but they could not bear to alter the values on the envelopes?  In general, this system will fail int he face of massive price and income volatility, but then nothing works well when you cannot plan for future income and expenses.

In my experience, the actual reason for the envelope system is one of two cases:

1. It reduces the complexity of managing a detailed household budget
2. You are really so poor that you have no ability to reallocate money

In my youth, I knew a lot of poor people (less so now, which is not necessarily a change for the better) and, in fact, was very poor for a time.  When your budget is tight enough it may really be the case that you cannot overspend on gas for the car without being unable to pay rent and/or eat and/or pay the electric bill.  People at this level of poverty do not necessarily have credit cards..

One of the features of being middle class is having flexibility.  Consider the plane ticket example that Dr. Oster presents: that makes total sense if you could (in theory) allow a credit card to increase.  But if the cost of the item would bring your bank account below zero and you don't have credit (or it has ruinous terms, like a payday loan or a 30% credit card) then you simply can't spend the money at all.

In practice this lack of flexibility can be very tough.  There are a lot of items that, bought in bulk, are cheap.  But bulk items are hard to transport on the bus (especially if it is crowded) and cost more (and you often cannot borrow against the future).  There are a surprising number of costs to being very poor (as opposed to being very frugal).

So, yes, it is possible for the envelope system to be too inflexible and that is not ideal.  But it is very, very useful when you have $110 after rent and utilities to make the rest of the month work.

Risk Aversion

What is the average interest rate these days?  According to one source it is puny:

Throughout the entire industry, however, the national average bank interest rate for savings accounts is only .21 percent

So why might be it rational to overpay your taxes by a small amount?  Consider this comment from Megan McArdle:

A tax refund is not free money you get from the government. It’s free money you gave to the government—by overpaying your taxes all year. You think the interest rate on your savings account is paltry? At least it's not zero, which is the amount Uncle Sam pays you for your yearlong interest free loan. (If you underpay the government, on the other hand, they charge you not only interest, but also penalties.)

On one hand her advice is completely sensible.  It makes a lot of sense to reduce a very large tax refund.  On the other hand, you need to save a lot of money for the 0.21% interest in that savings account to outweigh the interest and penalties.  Since even interest is 3% (15 times the savings rate), I think it makes sense to aim for a small refund rather than to make errors on both sides of the distribution (since underpaying is much more expensive than the lost revenue from overpaying).  This logic may not hold if interest rates and/or inflation pick up in the future. 

Did Dickens meet Dostoevsky? -- Opinions differ

Ross MacDonald books often start with a family that seems perfect except for one element out of place (like an angry, disturbed child) but when the hero starts to tug on that one thread the entire illusion falls apart.

University of California Berkeley Prof. Eric Naiman has come close to the scholarly equivalent of a Ross MacDonald novel in his recent essay in the Times literary supplement (via LGM). He finds one thread out of place, in this case an unlikely meeting between two famous novelists.By tugging on that thread Naiman uncovers a hoax of truly incredible scale and complexity. (Literally incredible at first. I Googled a half dozen of Naiman's facts before I decided he wasn't the one playing games.)

You really need to read the whole thing for yourself but one section near the beginning was particularly relevant to some of our recent discussions.

Late in 2011, Michiko Kakutani opened her New York Times review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens with “a remarkable account” she had found in its pages. In London for a few days in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky had dropped in on Dickens’s editorial offices and found the writer in an expansive mood. In a letter written by Dostoevsky to an old friend sixteen years later, the writer of so many great confession scenes depicted Dickens baring his creative soul:

“All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”

I have been teaching courses on Dostoevsky for over two decades, but I had never come across any mention of this encounter. Although Dostoevsky is known to have visited London for a week in 1862, neither his published letters nor any of the numerous biographies contain any hint of such a meeting. Dostoevsky would have been a virtual unknown to Dickens. It isn’t clear why Dickens would have opened up to his Russian colleague in this manner, and even if he had wanted to, in what language would the two men have conversed? (It could only have been French, which should lead one to wonder about the eloquence of a remembered remark filtered through two foreign tongues.) Moreover, Dostoevsky was a prickly, often rude interlocutor. He and Turgenev hated each other. He never even met Tolstoy. Would he have sought Dickens out? Would he then have been silent about the encounter for so many years, when it would have provided such wonderful fodder for his polemical journalism?

Several American professors of Russian literature wrote to the New York Times in protest, and eventually a half-hearted online retraction was made, informing readers that the authenticity of the encounter had been called into question, but in the meantime a second review of Tomalin’s biography had appeared in the Times, citing the same passage. Now it was the novelist David Gates gushing that he would trade a pile of Dickens biographies for footage of that tête-à-tête. While agreeing with Tomalin’s characterization of this quotation as “Dickens’s most profound statement about his inner life”, he found its content less astonishing than she: “it’s only amazing because it’s the image-conscious Dickens himself coming out and saying what anybody familiar with his work and his life has always intuited”.

Shortly thereafter, the Times website appended to the online version of Gates’s review the same cautionary note that had already been attached to Kakutani’s. But on January 15, 2012, the paper’s “Sunday Observer” section published yet a third article on Dickens that quoted from Dostoevsky’s letter. (The same online disclaimer was soon appended to this piece as well.) The newspaper’s collective unconscious was unable to give the story up. It demands retelling, and by now Dickens and Dostoevsky can be found meeting all over the web. Their conversation appeals to our fancy while, as Gates realized, comforting us with a reaffirmation of what we already know. Moreover, this reassuring familiarity applies not only to Dickens, but also to Dostoevsky. The man who asks “Only two?” is a writer who already knows what Mikhail Bakhtin would eventually write about him, who is presciently aware of his late-twentieth-century canonization as the inventor of literary polyphony.

I wondered if Naiman was being overly harsh when he called the retraction 'half-hearted.' He wasn't:

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.

I know I've been harping on this but there's a big and important issue with modern journalism's indifference to getting the facts right. The difficulty involved in checking a story has decreased by orders of magnitude and yet, even at our best papers, Twenty-first Century reporting is often less accurate than Twentieth Century work. Part of the problem is he belief that you're in the clear when you publish something that obviously wrong if you later add a weaselly some-people-disagree disclaimer at the bottom.

But enough scolding. Go read the Naiman piece. You will not find anything else like it.

Coding boot camp

Interesting story both from an educational and labor-economics standpoint. More to come on this one.

From the AP:

Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.   

“It’s the best decision I’ve made in my life,” said Shimizu, 24, who worked in marketing and public relations after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. “I was really worried about getting a job, and it just happened like that.” Dev Bootcamp, which calls itself an “apprenticeship on steroids,” is one of a new breed of computer-programming school that’s proliferating in San Francisco and other U.S. tech hubs. These “hacker boot camps” promise to teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, with starting salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, often within days or weeks of graduation.

“We’re focused on extreme employability,” said Shereef Bishay, who co-founded Dev Bootcamp 15 months ago. “Every single skill you learn here you’ll apply on your first day on the job.”

These intensive training programs are not cheap — charging $10,000 to $15,000 for programs running nine to 12 weeks — and they’re highly selective, typically only admitting 10 to 20 percent of applicants. And they’re called boot camps for a reason. Students can expect to work 80 to 100 hours a week, mostly writing code in teams under the guidance of experienced software developers. “It’s quite grueling. They push you very hard,” said Eno Compton, 31, who finished Dev Bootcamp in late March. Compton is finishing his doctorate in Japanese literature at Princeton University, but decided he wants to be a software engineer instead of a professor.

Weekend blogging -- Geoffrey Lewis

It's always cool to discover unexpected talents in familiar figures, like the actor you've seen playing a hundred "blank-faced hicks" who turns out to know more about dialect than perhaps anyone in Hollywood.

Along similar lines, I'd always liked Geoffrey Lewis's amiable sidekicks, but it turns out he was just as well known in acting circles as an Oscar nominated monologuist.

The even more indefensible Michelle Rhee

USA Today's Greg Toppo drives what should be the final nail into the coffin of Michelle Rhee's reputation (via Esquire's Charles Pierce):

District of Columbia Public Schools officials have long maintained that a 2011 test-cheating scandal that generated two government probes was limited to one elementary school. But a newly uncovered confidential memo warns as far back as January 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in 70 schools "implicated in possible testing infractions."

The 2009 memo was written by an outside analyst, Fay "Sandy" Sanford, who had been invited by then-chancellor Michelle Rhee to examine students' irregular math and reading score gains. It was sent to Rhee's top deputy for accountability.

The memo notes that nearly all of the teachers at one Washington elementary school had students whose test papers showed high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures and asks, "Could a separate person have been responsible?"

It recommends that DCPS contact its legal department "as soon as you think it advisable" and ask them to determine "what possible actions can be taken against identified offenders."

DCPS officials have said they take all cheating allegations seriously, but it's not immediately clear how they responded to Sanford's warnings. Only one educator lost his job because of cheating, according to DCPS. Meanwhile, Rhee fired more than 600 teachers for low test scores — 241 of them in one day in 2010.

...

In a statement, Rhee said she didn't recall getting Sanford's memo: "As chancellor I received countless reports, memoranda and presentations. I don't recall receiving a report by Sandy Sanford regarding erasure data from the (DC Comprehensive Assessment System), but I'm pleased, as has been previously reported, that both inspectors general (DOE and DCPS) reviewed the memo and confirmed my belief that there was no widespread cheating."

If any of this seems surprising, you either haven't been following Rhee's career or... Well, that 'or' is a bit complicated. Rhee has always done things that seemed questionable (abuse of power, suspect claims, relentless self-promotion) but these disturbing points were largely omitted from coverage that often verged on hagiography. It was only after giving her full support to the country's most reactionary governors that her reputation started to fade.

Even with that a surprising number of otherwise intelligent journalists who have covered Rhee for years still manage to deny the undeniable.

S&W appreciation day

A message from the makers of Swords and Wizardry in celebration of S&W appreciation day (April 17th):

We would like to ask you each to announce to all your readers that we will be offering a 1 day only 25% off Swords & Wizardry sale. The coupon and information is optional to post on your blog of course: Frog God Games (http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/) and d20pfsrd.com Store will be offering a 25% off Swords & Wizardry products.  We will be sending out a coupon code before the event.

No member of this blog is affiliated with this company nor do we have any financial interest.  But if you were planning to check this this system anyway, it is not a bad time. 

Note that a lot of the game system material can be downloaded for free, in a handy word document for house rules development.

When I say my to-blog list is ever-growing...

Good ones from Dean Dad and Adam Kotsko.

Felix Salmon is one of those rare business journalists who actually understands business.

Ebert was an odd Paulette.

WSJ is waaaaay behind the LA Weekly. (and when you can't keep up with those guys you really need to think about a career change).

"Fox threatens to become cable channel amid Aereo dispute" -- lots to say on this one.

An interesting story (via The Story) about a reporter who visited the markers the census department uses to commemorate the spot of the population centroid. I wonder what the centroids of population subgroups (demographic, economic, political) look like and how they've shifted over the years.

Another case of economists seeing a paradox when the rest of us don't?

Climate change comes with bumpy rides.

And finally, the film Paul Krugman doesn't want you to see.

Free TV blogging -- suspicion confirmed

This was an AV club day. A musician friend needed some help digitizing various videos in various formats so we picked up an adapter at Fry's (after being told by four different salespeople that they didn't have it) and spent the rest of the afternoon cannibalizing cables and rearranging equipment. (Worked great, by the way.)

The adapter came with a very small antenna that allowed you to watch broadcast television on your PC (I tried it my laptop and got almost 100 channels). After we'd captured the video clips he needed, we decided to hook up the antenna to his new big screen TV and check out the results. There was a dedicated connection for over the air so you could switch back and forth two versions of the same network feed, one coming over the antenna, the other coming through the Time Warner digital cable box.

I had expected the picture quality to be indistinguishable but we both immediately noticed the difference. The broadcast signal, picked up through a small, cheap antenna that basically came as a extra with a hybrid TV stick, was clearly better than the picture Time Warner charged hundreds of dollars a year for.

This anecdote would be a good stepping-off point if you wanted to address some big questions like media consolidation, bundling (both of services and content), the hard lot of orphan technologies or the wretched state consumer reporting. For now though, I'm just going to leave it as an experiment for our viewers at home: if you have a television set made in the last five years and a set of rabbit ears made in the last fifty, plug the antenna coaxial into the jack marked AIR and see what you get. It takes very little time and it might end up saving you a few hundred dollars a year.

I'll be coming back to this...

From John Hechinger:

From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10 times faster than they added tenured faculty.

Stupid, horrible people are not interesting; intelligent, decent people doing stupid, horrible things are.

Some recent activity here at Stat Views has got me thinking about a fairly obvious distinction that still somehow has a way of getting lost

Most bloggers (myself included) spend a lot of time singling out someone for the idiotic or offensive. These posts are fun and the targets often have it coming but there are two things to remember (and God knows this applies to me as much as anyone):

1. It's not that difficult to find an idiot or jerk if you're really looking;

2. There is nothing particularly notable about an idiot acting stupid or a jerk acting obnoxious.

What's interesting and potentially important is when someone who's not at idiot acts like one (analogous arguments hold for jerks and scoundrels for the rest of this post). This isn't just a case of hating the sin and not the sinner; it's more a question of causal reasoning. When a stupid person does something stupid it requires no explanation but when an intelligent person does something stupid (or better yet, engages in a pattern of stupidity), it suggests that something happened to cause a deviation from the expected. That deviation begs a cause.

For example in the 2000 election coverage, the journalistic lapses mentioned previously are interesting because the journalists involved were both professional and highly respected and had risen to the top of a very competitive profession. If a group of high school reporters had propagated errors in a school election and had biased their coverage because of social cliques and because one candidate had given them small gifts and compliments that would not be of any real interest.

What made this interesting and, to use an often misused phrase, significant was the fact that given the initial assumptions we would normally make about these respected and experienced journalists, what we saw was extremely unlikely. So unlikely it demanded an explanation

In this case various social psych phenomena did fit what we observed. Authority figures within the journalistic click were strongly opposed to Gore. Reciprocation meant that Bush's special treatment of the press corps would be returned. Bush's likability relative to Gore meant that he was likely to receive preferential treatment. Social norming meant that these behaviors would be internalized and repeated

Just to spell things out, what's interesting here is the way that one hypothesis (the Washington press corps was professional and impartial) fit the data badly while another (social dynamics were influencing journalists) fit the data well.

Sometimes what's interesting is neither the person or the act but the reaction to it. For example there was nothing that out of the ordinary about Timothy Noah complaining about the boss who fired him, there was however something strange about the way Politico reacted to Noah's complaint

By the same token there's nothing particularly interesting about a high school student writing a sarcastic essay about the schools that rejected her application. What is interesting is the way that essay illustrates an anticipated reaction among people of a certain social class to changes in the way students are admitted to prestigious schools.

It's easy for the reader (and too often the writer) to lose sight of what's going on. If they rise above the look-at-the-moron humor, posts about stupidity generally need to be a kind of significance test. Start with the assumption that "complete idiots are rare" and seldom make it through demanding selection processes, then, if you are faced with extreme stupidity, ask yourself how likely it is that someone that dim would have reached his or her position. At a p value of around 0.01, it's time to start looking for alternative explanations.

[note: I tried something new with this post, dictating the first draft to my I-phone. I found if I spoke very slowly and enunciated every syllable, the results were acceptable though I did get a couple of odd errors like cherlist for journalist (and, yes, 'cherlist' is a new one on me). I believe I caught all of the Siri-isms but if you see a complete non sequitur, it was probably supposed to be something else.]

Why I remain skeptical about fully private health care

Austin Frakt:

But the problem here is far worse than that. A shockingly large proportion of hospitals could not even report a price when asked. That’s not true of very many other industries. Typically, when someone is ready to buy, someone else is prepared to offer a quote. Not being able to produce one is a very unusual market feature.
 

So not only do you have the problems of trying to comparison shop when the seller has an incentive to make the price hard to find.  You actually have to take a leap of faith and hope that the final price is reasonable -- a gamble that it is hard to imagine doing with other goods and services of the same price point as a hip replacement (the example Frakt was talking about above).

Would you drive a car off the lot in hopes that it was cheaper than expected? 

And how do you apply market pressure when you can't actually use competition to select prices? 

The ever growing to-blog list

Something on the optimal partitioning of time based on this from Neal Stephenson and John D. Cook.

Mental Floss lists sometimes look a bit too good to be true but this list of scientific accidents would be a nice starting place for a post on the importance of open-ended research.

It's just possible that video gamers are over-represented in online polls.

The final chapter the JCP saga? We've already covered this as a fitness landscape problem, now we can talk about the dubious record of the great man theory of business management.

A whole thread on this excellent piece by E.O. Wilson on how much math a scientist really needs and this follow-up by Paul Krugman on the role of intuition.

Swords and Wizardry

Long term readers may know that I am interested in Table top RPGs and Mark is actually a published game designer (Kruzno).  It has been a while since I did a gaming post but there is a fun movement afoot to honor a small publisher that has been putting out some high quality books.

Erik Tenkar, of Tenkar's Tavern blog seems to be the nexus of an appreciation day that has been gathering steam.  So if you want to see something different, drop by and say hi. 

Cohort effects

Kevin Drum has a nice piece about recent increases in social security disability. 
His main hypothesis should be quite familiar to epidemiologists: that the increase is benefits is largely driven by cohort effects (due to the aging of a large demographic bulge in the United States population). Given how closely current payouts match 1996 projections, that isn't an unreasonable stance.

There are some small upticks recently, but these could be due to marginal workers in the face of a lengthy recession. Workers who would normally be border-line might prefer to work (given that working has a very positive halo on self-image in American culture) but lose their jobs due to the general economic downturn.

Is this a problem?

Well, only if you have a plan to employ 57-year olds with degenerative disk disease, or similar mobility restricting conditions. Otherwise, what really is the point of targeting this group at this time?

Obesity, genes and environment

Via Thomas Lumley:

In fact, just about the only completely uncontroversial fact about the increase in obesity is that it is entirely due to environmental changes of some sort. There’s disagreement on precisely which environmental changes, and on the likely public health impact, but not on the general principle. The reason is very simple: the genes of this generation’s children came from their parents, with almost no changes. There simply hasn’t been enough time for genetic differences to contribute.
 

This is absolutely correct.  Now it is possible that some genes make particular individuals more susceptible to particular environment insults.  But then it is unclear what the "cause" of the epidemic is: the susceptibility or the actual exposure.  In infectious diseases we are quite clear that some people are immune to some infectious diseases.  But if a particular individual becomes sick with a disease, it makes a lot more sense to blame the pathogen and not the genetic vulnerability of the person.

So when we see such a huge change in the prevalence of a chronic disease (like obesity) it makes a lot more sense to ask what is the underlying exposure.  In the same sense, I am unimpressed with arguments from things like self-discipline.  It is more probable that the current generation is more dissolute than the preceding one, but it seems unlikely that you are uniquely dissolute from a historical perspective. 

Quote(s) of the day

[See update]

High school senior Suzy Lee Weiss has a piece in the Wall Street Journal (Gawker does a good job summarizing. If you're a true glutton for punishment, you can follow their link to the original). The tone is jokey in an unconvincing way (mock bitterness coming off as all too real). The primary targets are people who have it easy because they're, you know, different (girls who wear headscarves, for instance). Those who do charitable work also get a good going over.

It was, however, this bit that really caught my eye.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself!

Putting aside the apparent confusion over necessary and sufficient conditions, what's striking is item four on the list, buried between athletics and lesbian mothers. The humor in this piece is not subtle. I'm pretty that Weiss really does feel that a lack of academic achievement shouldn't count against her (yes, I realize that there are serious people who argue that we should use things other than test scores to assess a student, but Weiss spends the rest of the essay mocking most of these alternate measures).

...

I was going to stop there -- that's why there's a '(s)' in the title -- but as I was giving Weiss' op-ed one more read-through to make sure I wasn't being too harsh, I came across this:

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. "Assistant Director of Mail Services." "Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics." I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

While on the subject of family connections, here's an interesting coincidence: this ordinary high school student who gets an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal happens to be the sister of a former Wall Street Journal features editor.

What are the odds?

UPDATE: Via a comment at Monkey Cage, this San Francisco Chronicle story puts Weiss' SATs at a respectable 2120. Not "killer" but high enough to make a Harvard application worth a shot. She was also a Senate page from a politically well connected family which makes the gopher comment a bit odd as well.

Still, for the record, Weiss was a strong candidate. I can understand her disappointment.

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.   

Libertarianism

Chris Dillow is strident:

Instead, I suspect what we see with her and with Ukip - and, one could argue, with some who support press regulation whilst favouring social liberalism in other contexts - is asymmetric libertarianism. People want freedom for themselves whilst seeking to deny it to others; this is why some Ukippers can claim to be libertarian whilst opposing immigration and gay marriage. This debased and egocentric form of libertarianism is more popular than the real thing.

But I think he might be on to something.  I have long wondered why Libertarians focus on certain positions (e.g. taxation) and not others (e.g. prisons).  I am not saying all Libertarians focus on taxes and no Libertarian is worried about the criminal justice system.  That would be a straw man version of the argument.

It is more that the attention to these issues seems to be rather selective.  Not all of them: I can find individuals with consistent positions on the hot button issues like drugs, criminal offense, personal freedoms and so forth.  But the focus on, for example, lowering taxes seems much stronger than the focus on reducing the prison population.  Or at least that is one outsiders view.

Weekend movie blogging -- meta spoilers

I was starting to write a post about an old but nicely done 70s movie of the week (Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Lloyd Bridges all doing good work but -- God help me -- it's Robert Reed who knocks it out of the park in his big scene). I was specifically interested in the odd way the writer handled the big reveal, having characters start to speculate about it in the middle of the film.

I started to contrast it with a Henry Fonda film that ends with a with a masterfully executed blindside twist but I realized that simply by saying ____ has a great surprise ending I could spoil the film. You might not guess the ending but knowing something was coming could keep you from buying into the story. When the rug was pulled out you'd already have one foot off of it.

Likewise, an Ira Levin novel I was also going to use as an example derives much of it effectiveness from the skillful way the writer slips something very big past you without putting you on your guard, If I tell you Levin pulls a fantastic narrative trick in ____, there's a much better chance that he won't pull it off.

The idea that simply telling someone that there's a spoiler can be a spoiler reminded me of a class of puzzles where before you can solve the puzzle you have to know if you have enough information to solve the puzzle. These are discussed at length by Raymond Smullyan in What Is the Name of This Book. I'll try to dig up my copy and update the post with some examples.