Damn you, Paul Krugman!

I'd been planning a post drawing an analogy between the way certain academics forced the data to fit their models and the efforts made in the dying days of the Ptolemaic system. I guess the bloom is off that one.

Nobel Prize winners who work on Saturday are just showing off.

You can, if you’re desperate, try to explain this away by saying that there was some fundamental structural change in the early 1970s, but at that point you’re deep into epicycle territory. And there’s more — for example, Ireland went abruptly from having a stable real exchange rate against the UK to having a stable rate against Germany when it joined the European exchange rate mechanism, etc..

[Emphasis added.]

Employment in the US

Speaking of interesting graphs, the one posted by Matt Yglesias is rather interesting. January 2010 to January 2011 seems to have resulted in the creation of approximately 1 million private sector jobs coupled with the loss of 250 thousand public sector jobs. We can discuss whether this was an appropriate response to the budget realities of 2010 (it's an open question) but it is pretty clear that we are not trying any sort of classic Keynesian response to our current economic woes.

Education and Poverty

One of the most difficult things in looking at education is that it is very hard to establish causal directions. Are bad teachers creating poor educational outcomes or are places with poor educational outcomes so difficult to teach in that the good teachers leave. It's an important question when you consider possible interventions.

This was very clear in these posts by Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Livengood on education and poverty. There is an impressive inverse association between poverty and educational test scores. It's pretty clear that there could be a common cause (i.e. a confounder) or that the direction of the causal association could go in either direction.

However, the policy decisions are very different depending on the causal relations involved. If poor schooling is a cause of poverty then it makes sense to focus massive efforts on educational reform. But if poor educational outcomes are caused by poverty then this suggests a completely different approach. And, of course, finding a confounder is also a key point.

Now, this assumes that all parties are acting in good faith. If there was an interest in keeping outcomes poor in MS and CA (to pick two low performing states) then educational reforms that worsened outcomes might make sense. This would be a good strategy if one wanted to continue to use "poor educational outcomes" as a talking point as reforms take decades to really take effect.

Finally, one has to worry that real issues (poor educational outcomes) might be used to implement ideological views (i.e. a dislike of unions) when such reforms might be orthogonal to the issues at hand. This wastes the effort of reform without addressing the underlying issues.

Now, none of this is to accuse any group of bad faith. But it is important to realize that there are multiple viable hypotheses as to the causes of poor educational outcomes. The state that I am the most interested in is California; they seem to have very poor outcomes for a large state with a diverse (and often knowledge-based) economy. If that is a reflection of resources expended then maybe we need to focus on counter-intuitive approaches (like raising taxes to improve educational funding) if we really want to make a difference.

It's important to keep up standards

Going full circle in pop culture hell

As someone who knows way too much about pop culture, this New York Times story about the new Spider-Man musical caught my eye, particularly this passage:

Media celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Beck and the hosts of “Morning Joe” have all raved about the musical, especially Mr. Beck, who said in an interview on Friday that he had seen it four times.

Mr. Beck has framed its appeal on his radio broadcast as a face-off between regular Americans and cultural snobs (i.e., liberals). In the interview, however, he was more fanboy than fire breather, rattling off plot points and design elements with the practiced eye of a Sardi’s regular.

“The story line is right on the money for today, which is to be your better self, that you can spiral into darkness or — ” here he quoted one of the show’s anthemic songs — “you can rise above,” said Mr. Beck, who estimated that he sees a dozen shows a year. “In fact, I just wrote an e-mail to Julie” — Ms. Taymor — “about how much I loved the new ending.

Though it's probably just a coincidence, Mr. Beck had quite a bit in common with Spider-Man's co-creator, Steve Ditko, at least when it comes to politics. Ditko was a devoted objectivist and was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand, particularly The Fountainhead and its persecuted hero. You could catch some glimpse of this in the Marvel comic, but it wasn't until Ditko left the company in the late Sixties that he was able to fully express his philosophy in a series of comics that really have to be seen to be believed.

So for fans of Steve Ditko, students of objectivism and those of you with a morbid sense of curiosity, enjoy.

Soon to be relevant quote

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Kung Fu Monkey via Prof. Krugman.

EDIT (by Joseph): The original source is Raj Patel's "The value of nothing"

While on the subject of checkers...

I had meant to include a link to this very nice list of checkers variants.

Weekend Gaming -- Behold the humble checker

Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen.

Edgar Allan Poe -- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Poe's opinion on this matter is more common than you might expect. It's not unusual to hear masters of both chess and checkers (draughts) to admit that they prefer the latter. So why does chess get all the respect? Why do you never see a criminal mastermind or a Bond villain playing in a checkers tournament?

Part of the problem is that we learn the game as children so we tend to think of it as a children's game. We focus on how simple the rules are and miss how much complexity and subtlety you can get out of those rules.

Chess derives most of its complexity through differentiated pieces; with checkers the complexity comes from the interaction between pieces. The result is a series of elegant graph problems where the viable paths change with each move of your opponent. To draw an analogy with chess, imagine if moving your knight could allow your opponent's bishop to move like a rook. Add to that the potential for traps and manipulation that come with forced capture and you have one of the most remarkable games of all time.

There have been any number of checkers variants.* You could even argue that all checkers games are variants since, unlike chess, there is no single, internationally recognized version. Here are some of the best and best-known.



Spanish Checkers

Considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the national variants. It is distinguished from the American version by a queen's (analogous to a king) ability to jump long. This makes a queen powerful but, since captures are mandatory, easier to capture.






Dama (Turkish Checkers)

Also known as Greek checkers. In this variant, pieces move vertically and horizontally instead of diagonally. Among other things this doubles the playing field.



Lasca

This variant was invented by the second World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker. It's worth noting that Lasker (who is considered one of the best chess players of all time) would look to checkers when designing his own game.

In Lasca, captured pieces are added to the bottom of columns controlled by whichever player has the top piece. Since jumping only captures the piece on top of the column, players have to take into account not only position but also height and position.

You can get a detailed write-up by following the link or you can see Lasker's original patent application here. He comes off as rather immodest, but he was the world's best chess player and a close friend of Einstein so I guess we can let him slide.


Misère checkers

This one you probably know as suicide or give-away checkers. The object is either to lose all your pieces or have them blocked so that you can't move.



Endless Checkers (or whatever the damned thing is called)

I'm certain I've read about this somewhere though I can't seem to find any record of it. Here, when a piece reaches the last it can move to an appropriate space on the first row (think of a board wrapped around a cylinder). There are no kings in endless checkers.


I have a feeling I'm missing something. Any suggestions?

* Including one I'm particularly fond of, but that's a topic for another post.

Maybe it's a system for redistributing wealth to statistical consultants

Hot on the heels of this, Nick Rowe has a post up at WCI discussing the ways that certain popular revenue gathering plans increase inequality and the reasons why people don't seem to mind.

If you hurry, you can read it before I do

I don't normally link to things I haven't gotten around to reading yet but between Michael Lewis's record of sharp insights and fine prose and Felix Salmon's glowing recommendation ("tour de force"), I feel confident that this take on Ireland's crisis will be well worth reading.

Free TV vs. Hotel Cable

I've written quite a bit about over-the-air (OTA) digital television. It's an impressive advance in a major consumer technology and I'm a satisfied customer, but the most interesting aspect of the OTA story might be the coverage that it doesn't get. It took the New York Times months to produce a single (factually challenged) story on the subject though bloggers like Rajiv Sethi had long been on the case.

The absence of coverage fell in line with a couple of suspicions I've long held about the current state of journalism. First, journalists tend to view the world almost exclusively through an upper-middle class perspective (which, given the pay many of these journalists make, is really strange). Second, journalists have grown more passive, more likely to wait for someone (usually someone with a vested interest) to tell them what to say.

Though they might not be talking about it, media companies have taken notice. Both the Tribune Company and MGM have quietly moved into the field with AntennaTV and ThisTV, while the cable companies have been issuing carefully worded statements about how they are not worried about the recent drop in subscribers.

I'm pretty sure they are worried, and and a recent encounter with hotel cable explains why.

For some reason, hotels seldom splurge when it comes to cable (other than the mandatory HBO). This could be because rigorous cost-benefit has shown that all those extra channels don't pay for themselves or it could be because it's an easy item to cut and corporate politics tends to reward short term savings. Either way, you're looking at the most basic of basic cable.

As I was settling in for the evening during a recent trip, I turned on the TV and surfed through the channels. The best thing I could find, honest to God, was Spy Hard on TBS. To add insult to injury, the signal had been severely compressed so the picture was strangely blotchy.

It struck me that I would have been much better off had the hotel simply put an antenna on top of the TV. Being in a major metropolitan area I would have gotten more channels including multiple choices from PBS (I get ten in LA) and at least one OTA superstation like ThisTV or AntennaTV. The programming on these two runs the gamut from from awful (Benny Hill) to good (Philadelphia, La Cage aux Folles) to great (Lean's Great Expectations). ThisTV in particular has been bringing its A-game (It's currently showing Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. All about Eve is coming up tomorrow).

Cable is largely based on a commitment/upsale business model. You get customers to sign a contract for the economy package then bump them up into progressively more expensive options. This creates a hard (contractual) and soft commitment (you often find yourself hooked on one or more of the shows in the higher tier).

This model worked extremely well for over thirty years but now viewers in much (if not most) of the country have an alternative to basic cable that offers more channels with better programs in higher quality with no commitment for free. All that's required is an appropriate antenna. When we add other elements (Redbox, Netflix, online video, even the DVD section of your local library) the picture becomes more complex but not in a way that improves the situation for the cable companies.

How do you use an upsale approach when your cheap option isn't as good as the free one? I don't see brand-building as a viable solution; the relevant brands here are the shows and networks, not the providers. That leaves two choices: improve basic cable; or hope that the lobbyists for the cellular industry manage to shut down OTA television and grab the bandwidth before consumers realize what's happening.

I would probably have gone with the first choice, but the cable companies may know something the rest of us don't.

The lesson of Cassandra -- sometimes it's no fun being right

Mark Thoma has taken Paul Krugman's one-day hiatus from his column as an opportunity to pull from the archives an extraordinary piece by Krugman from back in the late Nineties. I limited myself to one paragraph but the whole thing merits a careful reading when you get the chance. You'll find that in 1998, Krugman was saying most of the same things he'd be saying in 2011:

I don't know what provoked [Robert] Samuelson's outburst. But if one of our most well informed economic journalists has come to disdain macroeconomics, this may be because he has been listening to economists themselves. Over the past 30 years, macroeconomics--and especially that part of macroeconomics that concerns itself with recessions and depressions, in which the economy as a whole is less than the sum of its parts--has fallen steadily into disfavor within the economics profession. As late as the mid-1970s, many textbooks still followed the lead of Paul (no relation to Robert) Samuelson's classic 1948 Economics, beginning with the macroeconomics of booms and slumps and turning to microeconomics only in their second half. Nowadays, however, every textbook (yes, even the one I'm writing) relegates macro to the second half. Even within the macroeconomics half, more and more books (like the much-hyped new text by Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw) dwell on "safe" issues like growth and inflation as long as possible, introducing the question of recessions and what to do about them almost as a footnote.

People who ought not to be interesting but are

Most famous people aren't as interesting as you expect them to be -- I suppose that's inevitable -- but quite a few of the nearly famous are more interesting than they ought to be. Now, thanks to Nick Paumgarten (via Chait) we can add the actor who plays "The World's Most Interesting Man" to the list:

Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do. A montage of highlights from the real life of Jonathan Goldsmith might include (had there been cameras present) footage of him rescuing a stranded climber on Mt. Whitney, saving a drowning girl in Malibu, sailing the high seas with his friend Fernando Lamas (the inspiration for his Interesting persona and, according to Goldsmith, “the greatest swordsman who ever lived in Hollywood”), and starting a successful network marketing business (“I was a hustler, a very good hustler”), which, for a while, anyway, enabled him to flee Hollywood for an estate in the Sierras. Among the outtakes might be glimpses of his stint as a waterless-car-wash entrepreneur. “I love the old philosophers,” he said. “I have a large library. I am not a die-hard sports fan. I love to cut wood.”

...

Goldsmith had on a black polo sweater, a black sports coat, bluejeans, and black tasselled loafers. He had a black-diamond earring that Barbara had given him. They drank Chianti, and Goldsmith told the story of his life and career. The Most Interesting Man in the World, it turns out, is a Jewish guy from the Bronx. His mother was a Conover model, his father a track coach at James Monroe High School. Postcollegiate dissolution (and a session with the famed psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham) led him into an acting class at the Living Theatre and, eventually, into competition with the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. (Goldsmith recalls a contentious exchange with Hoffman: “I jumped up and said, ‘Dustin, the reason you don’t like me is because I’m gonna make it and you’re not.’ ”) Goldsmith eventually made it—out to Los Angeles, anyway—and embarked on a career as a “that guy,” very often the that guy who gets killed, on television shows such as “Bonanza,” “Mannix,” “Gunsmoke,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “The Rockford Files,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “CHiPs,” “Dynasty,” “T. J. Hooker,” “Knots Landing,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “MacGyver,” and “Dallas,” to name a few. He had an equally peripatetic career off the lot, the particulars of which he’s saving for a book. He divulged one old surefire tactic: knowing that Warren Beatty kept a penthouse suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Goldsmith used to wait in the lobby for the young women who’d been summoned there, and he’d intercept them, saying, “Warren sent me down. I’m terribly sorry, but he had to cancel the meeting.”

But even taking into account his ability to snag one-night-stands from Warren Beatty (that, my friends, shows an inventive mind), Goldsmith still isn't as unexpectedly interesting as James Lipton.

That's right, that James Lipton, the guy who does the fawning interviews of vapid celebrities. Probably the last person in the world you'd pick to be trapped in an elevator with, but Lipton is one of those rare people who gets more interesting when he talks about himself. His biography starts with playing the Lone Ranger's nephew (which would make him the Green Hornet's father, by the way), ends with him named dean emeritus of the Actor's Studio Drama School and includes a interlude as a French pimp (though Lipton disputes the use of the term since he worked for the prostitutes rather than the other way around). You can hear Lipton's charming account here.

But you should still skip Inside the Actor's Studio.

Outsourced blogging

I've been meaning to post something on the Collegiate Learning Assessment exam (which seems to be the main data source for the new book Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa). In the meantime, Dean Dad has a good post on the subject.

There has never been a greater time-wasting innovation than Wikipedia

Case in point: the details of the third voyage of Willem Barentsz are completely useless knowledge but the story is (if you'll pardon the adjective) undeniably cool.

And you thought statisticians were just good for counting cards

We're also handy if you have a handful of scratchers.

From Wired (via Felix Salmon):

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

For example the ticket below has one winning row. If you're having trouble spotting it the article has a step-by-step solution.



To make things even more interesting, there's evidence that Srivastava may not be the only one to have spotted the pattern.

"What is the worst case scenario here?"

If you're in a hurry, skip to 6:30...





Does this mean I'll have to retract all of these posts?

"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao..."

This is probably a question for Andrew Gelman but this post by Jonathan Chait (previously mentioned by Joseph) raises some interesting points:

A Frum Forum writer notes an interesting trend: People who find their parents are watching Fox News and losing their minds. To wit:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day – especially Glenn Beck’s program.

Used to be I would call my mom and get updated on news from the neighborhood, her garden, the grandchildren, hometown gossip, and so forth. I’ve always been interested in politics, but never had the occasion to talk about them with her. She just doesn’t care.

Or didn’t. I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but she began peppering our conversation with red-hot remarks about President Obama. I would try to engage her, but unless I shared her particular judgment, and her outrage, she apparently thought that I was a dupe or a RINO. Finally I asked my father privately why Mom, who as far as I know never before had a political thought, was so worked up about Obama all the time.

“She’s been like that ever since she started watching Glenn Beck,” Dad said.

A few months later, she roped him into watching Beck, which had the same effect. Even though we’re all conservatives, I found myself having to steer our phone conversations away from politics and current events. It wasn’t that I disagreed with their opinions – though I often did – but rather that I found the vehemence with which they expressed those opinions to be so off-putting.

To add some heft to this anecdotal take, Fox News has the oldest audience of any news network -- the average Fox News viewer is 65 years old!

Assuming something even vaguely like a normal distribution, this means that a significant number of Fox viewers (and presumably Tea Partiers) were high school and college students in the Sixties and early Seventies. In other words, it appears that the generation that gave us the most annoying right-wing movement in recent memory also gave us the most annoying left-wing movement.

My question for Dr. Gelman is: how much overlap was there? What portion of the students who went around quoting the Little Red Book are now seniors quoting Glenn Beck?

Is geography destiny? -- walkability

[following up on this post and this one]

In comments, Joseph pointed out that, while I had argued that the stereotypes about LA (and by implication, other cities) were exaggerated, I hadn't addressed the larger question of location affecting lifestyle.

Does choice of city have a big impact on lifestyle? Certainly, but it may not be the impact you expect. Before I got to LA, I thought it would be something like Atlanta, a dense center of urban culture and activity surrounded by miles of faceless ring cities, but LA doesn't really have a center. What you normally think of as urban activity (screenings, plays, concerts, speakers, art shows, dining, night spots and places to hang out, etc.) is spread out over the four thousand plus square miles of LA county.

This leads to an odd paradox: LA is one of the most and least walkable cities you'll find. The city is filled with great neighborhoods where you can live or work without a car. You can walk or pedal anywhere you need to go. If, however, you want to experience more than a tiny portion of the social and cultural life of the city you have to have access to a car and accept the fact that a significant part of your life will be spent on the freeways.

Another Education Post

Dana Goldstein:

The fact is that where such programs exist, they are oversubscribed--parents don't seem to mind sending their kids out-of-district (sometimes just a 5 minute drive away) into a town where they do not enjoy political representation when the result is a better education.

I think this direction is non-controversial. However, this scenario assumes one of two things:

1) There are more students in the district which is accepting students. As the United States funds a lot of education out of local property taxes, this may create less resources per student in the destination district (and ways to try and balance this out are quite tricky)

2) Some students need to be sent the other way. If the perception is that going the other way leads to a lower quality education (even if untrue in fact) then that could be an issue.

In the second case, I suspect that the lack of representation will be a much bigger issue (as it makes it hard for parents to engage the new district to try and remedy issues that are seen as concerns).

LA, NYC and other imaginary places

from Penelope Trunk (via Joseph):

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

I've been living in LA for a few years now and I have a pretty good read on the town. I can show you the trendiest parts of Silver Lake, the funkiest parts of Venice and the toughest parts of Watts. I can take you to the best taco stand in East LA and get you a milk tea with or without boba at four in the morning. I can introduce you to such diverse characters as rocket scientists, a mystic knight of Oingo Boingo, and Frenchy from the original run of Grease on Broadway.

Like I said, I've got a pretty good read on this town and I can tell you that the LA that you hear about doesn't exist. What does exist are little slivers where you can find passable facsimiles of the LA of an Aaron Spelling show, where you can see toned and tanned people who look like what you thought people in LA looked like.

What LA gives people like Trunk is a fantasy, a chance to convince themselves that life is like a TV show and they belong in the cast, but the only way to maintain that fantasy is to tune out or simply avoid almost all of Los Angeles, and that's a shame because it's a helluva town.

If you turn on the dome light, the whole thing explodes

There has been a lot of talk from the right recently (Megan McArdle is on the case) on the potential problems electric cars can have with cold weather. Most of the commenters seem to have rolled the Volt in with this group which seems strange for a plug-in hybrid. The comment that really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph from the Washington Post's Charles Lane:

The exact loss of power these cars would suffer is a matter of debate, partly because no one has much real-world experience to draw on.* But there would be some loss. Running the heater to stay warm, or the car radio to stay informed, would drain the battery further.

Nerd that I am, the idea of significantly draining a hybrid's battery by running the radio reminded of the Simpsons' episode where a truck was so delicately balanced on the edge of a cliff that Homer was able to shift it back on the road by tuning the radio. I suppose it's possible but I wouldn't call it likely.



* Actually we do have real world experience thanks to the good people at Consumer Reports who tested the car under just these conditions and found the EV range dropped to the low end of what GM claims but the mileage running in standard hybrid mode remained remarkably good. This information is also available on Wikipedia.

Is geography destiny?

From the comments in Megan McArdle:

It is totally unsurprising that ground zero for the locavore and electric car movements is northern California, where you can find anything you want, from cacti to chunks of glacial ice, within a couple of hundred miles. And where the climate is such that electric cars don't face battery-killing subzero nights, don't need to run big heater loads during winter driving, and don't require big air conditioner loads half the year.

and from Penelope Trunk:

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

The panic about New York was unnecessary, though. After ten years of living in NYC, when I imagined leaving, I thought I could never leave because the cultural opportunities are so amazing. The expertise people have in NYC is so vast and varied and I thought I’d never get that anywhere else.

When I left NYC I didn’t care about looking perfect everywhere I went. I didn’t care about the kind of car I drove. I was a New Yorker.

I have been thinking about this issue after visiting Northern California for the first time last week. Like Seattle, it seems to be an exceedingly pleasant place to live and seemed to be very walkable. But it lacks the freezing winters of the mid-west and the stifling summers of the south-east. Maybe it is just easier to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle there?

So I wonder just how important geography really is determining lifestyle? I am not sure but maybe the answer is that it is a lot more important than I might have previously thought.

Depressing thought of the day

From Jon Chait:

Basically, the optimal number of Fox News-like propaganda outlets is zero. But I suspect the next most optimal number is two, not one.

I worry not so much that this statement is wrong but that it is correct and that there will be a push to a local optima.

Just when you thought it was gone for good -- more thriller blogging

I had previously complained about the ads for James Patterson's books using the word 'unputdownable.' I would not have thought they could get worse, but they have.

The latest has Patterson say directly to the camera "New York has never had a great detective hero until Michael Bennett in Tick Tock."

This is a strange comment for a couple of reasons. First, New York has had its share of memorable fictional detectives from Nero Wolfe and Mike Hammer to Bernie Rhodenbarr and Matthew Scudder. The last two are the creations of Lawrence Block, whom Stephen King named the only writer who come close to replacing John D. MacDonald (a quote that still embarrasses Block). Block, who is still putting out books in his seventies, has received wide critical acclaim, particularly for his pitch-black Scudder novels and is one of those writers other writers tend to single out for praise.

Which, in a way, brings us to the second odd point: Patterson's suggestion that he's the man to fill in the gap. Patterson is not one of those writers other writers tend to praise while critics have mostly ranged from the brutal to the Lincolnesque.*

Perhaps Patterson is using this ad as a chance to slap down some of his critics (including Block's admirer, Stephen King).

Or of course this could just be a way of selling more books.





* "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

Blog-snark as a high art

As only a Brit can do it.

Raising tuition

I have quite a bit to say about this post from Richard Posner but no time to say it at the moment. I'll try to get back to this but in the meantime feel free to start without me.

In any event, there is no case at all from an overall social standpoint for subsidizing students who would pay full college tuition, without the inducement of a subsidy; the subsidy does not induce students to obtain a college education who otherwise would not because they could not afford to; it is a windfall to their families. Private colleges recognize this. They charge very high tuition (though not high enough to cover all their costs—but they have other sources of funds, such as alumni donations), but grant scholarships or loans to students whose families can’t afford the tuition. Charging low tuition to everyone, as public colleges do for residents of the state in which the college or university is located), does not make economic sense; it merely as I said provides windfalls to families willing and able to pay the full tuition. As Becker points out, this results in regressive redistribution of income, because families that can pay full tuition are wealthier than the average taxpayer, who pays for the costs of public colleges that tuition doesn’t cover.

Brad DeLong needs to watch more TCM

If he did, the next time he saw a story about Microsoft's online losses he would realize they were simply following this time-honored business model (relevant quote at the end of the clip, but watch the whole thing).

Paul Krugman has no shame

No honorable man would use this title, even if the topic is core inflation. Even Shakespeare would have said this one goes too far.

Student Loans

I came across this article by following one of the commentators in the discussion section on Andrew Gelman's blog (it was the same discussion that Mark was recommending). Protoscholar is discussing financing graduate school and makes a very good point:

The last option, to be avoided if at all possible, is student loans. The U.S. government makes it incredibly easy to take out student loans to pay for school, but these things will haunt you for decades to come. Remember that they are not GIVING you money, they are LOANING it to you. You have to pay it back someday. If a starting assistant professor makes $50,000, it isn’t worthwhile to get the degree and graduate with twice that in loans.

Remember; loans cannot be gotten rid of with bankruptcy and have the potential to ruin your credit, your chance of buying a home, your ability to rent a place and a lot more. Figure out the cost/benefit of taking out loans. What is your starting salary likely to be? Are you stuck working for a university or can you go into private industry for a few years and make a pile of money that can be used to pay the loans off? Is your field notoriously underpaid? Think about these things before accepting the loans or plan on slaving to pay them off for a long, long time to come.

I wish more students would think about issues like this. Even with assistantships and so forth, it is difficult to complete graduate school without acquiring some debt (as life can bring up all sorts of surprises that cost money). Plus, it can be hard to live like a hermit for many years, especially if the school you are going to is in a large city (with the consequent expenses).

But I see a lot of graduate students finish with a surprising amount of debt; even if the degree is very marketable this can be a dangerous way to start life off.

The curious case of Dr. Glaeser

Edward L. Glaeser is smart guy. Despite being in his mid-forties, Glaeser has already made a number of important contributions to economics. He has been a fixture in the Boston Globe and has recently joined the lie-up of the New York Times' Economix blog (slogan: "explaining the science of everyday life."). All of which makes this recent column on population shifts all the more inexplicable.

The article is classic "ice cream causes murder" analysis. In order to get the desired conclusion, you have to ignore numerous confounding factors and discard a number of alternative hypotheses that better explain the data and even then you have to be selective with your metrics and graphs (or at least the labeling) to maintain even the appearance of credibility.

Joseph has already discussed this at some length but just to review, percent change can be tricky to work with, particularly when dealing with state populations which can vary by well over an order of magnitude. Add to this the matter of population density -- certainly a concern when talking about home prices but notably absent from Prof. Glaeser's post.

Let's take Glaeser's comparison of California and Texas. If we look at percent population change as he does, Texas does much better but Texas has more land and fewer people. If we look at absolute change, the results are much closer and if we take density into account with something like change by area, California may actually come out ahead. (Glaeser's use of California is also interesting in other unintended ways, but more on that later.)

If you look at this table from Wikipedia, the role of population density becomes harder to ignore and Glaeser's case becomes harder to buy. Consider these two paragraphs:

"More generally, population isn’t moving to high-income areas. The four fastest-growth states were Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho (in order of growth), all of which have earnings below the national average.

"Our richest states, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, grew by 4.9, 4.5 and 3.1 percent, respectively, far below the national average. People are not following the money."

Could available land be playing a role here? Probably. Nevada, Utah and Idaho are among the ten least densely populated states in the union. Arizona is is in the next ten. By comparison, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts make up three of four most densely populated.

Glaeser's response to this point (in a related post) doesn't really help his case:

"Why is housing supply so generous in Georgia and Texas? It isn’t land. Harris County, Tex., which surrounds Houston, has a higher population density than Westchester County, N.Y."

To people with even a passing familiarity with these two areas, the fact that Harris County is more dense than Westchester County is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that someone would say that Harris 'surrounds Houston.' For most purposes, Harris IS Greater Houston. The city does include two other counties but Harris contains all but a fraction of the metropolitan area's population.

In other words, the county that includes Houston is more dense than a suburb of New York.

But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Glaeser's prime example:

"My interpretation of Red State growth is that Republican states have grown more quickly because building is easier in those states, primarily because of housing regulations. Republican states are less prone to restrict construction than places like California and Massachusetts, and as a result, high-quality housing is much cheaper.

"There is a strange irony in this: more conservative places do a much better job in providing affordable housing for ordinary Americans than progressive states that are believed to care about affordable housing.

"Progressive states, of course, have other objectives beyond affordable housing, and some involve blocking building. California environmentalists have been fighting construction for more than 40 years, and regulations in Massachusetts are barely less intrusive."

According to Glaeser's hypothesis, California should be scraping the bottom, particularly given that, as mentioned before, the metric being used tends to understate the growth of highly populous states. And keep in mind that he previously used Oklahoma as one of his examples of Red State growth. Oklahoma's growth rate was 8.7%. California's was 10%. That puts California slightly above the national average. (You'll notice that, unlike the other states discussed, California's actual growth rate does not appear in the article, nor is it labeled in any of the graphs.) California also beat a number of McCain states in the region of Oklahoma and, being a good ol' Arkansas boy myself, I can tell you that if a lack of building codes and environmental regulations were driving immigration, the whole area would be packed.

[To get a good picture of what's going on here, take a few minutes to look at this helpful interactive map. Pay close attention to the red states in the center of the country like Missouri.]

Population density alone does a good job explaining population shift patterns (considerably better than Glaeser's hypothesis). Add in the growth of the Hispanic population (something any competent demographic analysis should include) and it does an excellent job. And when you lay on top of that the expected impact of Katrina (how much of Texas' growth was diverted from the anemic Louisiana?) and the Nevada real estate bubble, the map we see looks almost exactly like the map we would expect.

If you don't want to use population density and the growth of the Hispanic population, how about the graying of America? Traditional retirement migration patterns look a lot like what we're seeing here and I'll bet we can come up with a few more explanations that outperform Glaeser's hypothesis.

George Polya once observed* that, when given a theory, scientists and mathematicians tended to look for cases that contradicted the theory while almost everyone else looked for cases that confirmed it (others had made similar points before he did, but I'm a Polya fan). Glaeser's approach here falls into the 'everybody else' category. He went looking for confirmation and he found it, but his theory maintains the appearance of validity only as long no one looks for contradictory evidence.

Perhaps Economix needs a new slogan.



*Quoting from memory so I may have to revise this later.

When bad things happen to good technologies

Roger Ebert has a follow-up to the letter he published from Walter Murch on the various reasons why 3D remains a bad idea (previously discussed here). This time the subject is Maxivision48, a technology that, according to Ebert, "produced a picture four times as good as conventional film."

It's an interesting counterpoint, an innovation that has been getting great reviews from independent experts for a dozen years but can't seem to get any attention from the industry despite what seems to be a sound business case.

Better late than never...

Via Andrew Gelman, here's an excellent post that made many of the same points that we've been making about lottery-based analyses here at OE (and beat us to the punch by several months).

Mini-colloquium: Homework

One of the cool things about about Andrew Gelman's blog is the quality of discussions you'll see in his comment section. The observations are almost always well-informed and the tone strikes a nice balance between spirited and civil.

Prof. Gelman's recent post on homework (which responded to this post we did earlier on OE) prompted one of these excellent discussions. Joseph has already built a post around one particularly interesting comment, but all of them are worth reading.

Hotel pricing enigma

(that may not be that enigmatic)

Has anyone else noticed that the higher the price of the hotel, the more likely it is to charge for internet access? I do quite a bit of travelling on my own decidedly thin dime so I usually stay in one of the bargain chains but occasionally I find myself in a nice, corporate-booked hotel. Free internet is almost universal in the cheap places but it's likely to run you $10 a night in a place with valet parking and a fitness center.

I assume this is another case of prices being driven by expense accounts, but does anyone else have an alternative explanation?

Educational Lotteries

Hoisted from the comments on Andrew Gelman's web site, Steve Sailor claims:

In my one experience with a charter school lottery, the charter school made it quite difficult to enter the lottery; and to find out if your kid was selected, you had to go there and ask them. And, it appeared, it wasn't a random lottery at all. My son was known to the founders of the school as a star student, so when I showed up and nervously asked if his name had been picked, I was told, Don't worry about it, of course he's in.

This is a very good point. There have been some very good comments on the use of charter school lotteries as a gold standard. I think there are persuasive reasons to be concerned, even if the lotteries are fair. However, it would be in the self interest of charter schools to accept a few "star students" outright rather than lave their selection to chance. Insofar as this happens at all, we would no longer have randomization (and thus would be unable to use these lotteries to estimate causal effects, even if the other concerns were not present).

So it seems increasingly hard to treatment there lotteries as a valid instrumental variable.

Weekend Gaming -- The Blue and the Gray

[If you missed it, check out last week's game as well.]

The famous game designer,* Sid Sackson, had over eighteen thousand games in his personal collection so making his short list was quite an accomplishment, particularly for a game that almost nobody has ever heard of.

On this alone, the Blue and the Gray would be worth a look, but the game also has a number of other points to recommend it: it only takes about three minutes to learn (you can find a complete set of rules here); it is, as far as I know, unique; it raises a number of interesting and unusual strategic questions; and for the educators out there, its Turn-of-the-Century** origins provide some opportunities for teaching across the curriculum. My only major complaint is that it requires a dedicated board, but making your own shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

The object of the game is to be the first to get your general to the center by moving along the designated path while using your soldiers to block your opponent's progress. Since soldiers can capture each other, the game has two offensive options (capturing and advancing) compared to one defensive option (blocking). (Something I learned from developing my own game was the more the designer can shift the focus to offense, the better and faster the game will play.)

I don't know of any attempt to do a serious analysis of the Blue and the Gray. Might be fun to look into. If someone out there finds anything interesting, make sure to let us know.


* Yes, I did just use the phrase, 'famous game designer.'

** I'm going off memory here about the age of the game. You should probably double check before building a lesson plan around this. (see update)

UPDATE:

Via the good people at the University of Maryland, here's the original patent from 1903.

A new post by James Kwak, an old rant by me

James Kwak has an excellent post on rational maximizing, but while the whole thing is worth reading, this passage jumped out at me:

I say this is interesting because, on the one hand, I accept the random walk studies (and I personally believe I have no ability to predict where any security price is going tomorrow), but on the other hand I think that any idea that markets have fundamental levels is flawed. For example, housing prices are still falling. Some people try to predict how far they will fall by looking at the Case-Shiller Index and figuring out where the long-term trend line will be. But how do you look at a chart and figure out what the right value is? What if there has been something different about the market over the last one hundred years from the market today? It’s really a fool’s errand.

Kwak's objection reminded me of a similar problem I had with the book, "Lifecyle Investing," by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, one that finally made my head explode:

No one can possibly know what's going on here! We can get some smart people making good guesses about long term stock performance, but these guesses are based on data from a century's worth of secular upheavals. A list that includes the Great Depression, two world wars, a post-war reconstruction, the cold war, China becoming a major player, boomers entering the market, boomers leaving the market and huge changes in regulation, technology and business practices.

What's happening now never happened before. What happened before never happened before. What happened before what happened before never happened before. We have no precedents. People are recommending forty-year investment strategies using models based on data from markets that haven't gone twenty years without a major secular change.

I have great respect for economists, but, more so than any other field I can think of, they are shooting at moving targets and sometimes I get a bit nervous about their aim.

One more exchange on Mankiw's assumptions

More from the ongoing debate.

Here's David (pulled from a longer comment):

I think where we disagree (assuming that we do disagree) is on where the burden of proof should lie. As an economist, and based on my reading of the theoretical and empirical literatures, the burden is on the individual who claims there are important plateaus and such. This requires showing empirically that they exist, and not in a general sense, but on the relevant margin of choice for those individuals. My general sense is that most economists would agree with this placing of the burden of proof, and your suggestion of the consensus of various economists is consistent with my impression as well. In other words, to assume that there are important plateaus on the margin requires empirical justification, and substantial justification because its very difficult to understand labor markets if we deviate generally even moderately from this productivity/wages relationship. So while you agree that “…if pundits' arguments are sufficiently robust or their assumptions are obviously true, they can do what Mankiw does.” I’d say that the consensus to me amongst economists supports the arguments and broader type of assumptions that I discussed previously. I suppose that’s an empirical question, for which I have not yet looked for data.

David,

It's easy to get lost in the weeds here, so I'll try to get a few specific points out of the way then address the bigger issue of of the way we treat assumptions in the economic debate.

First, when it comes to robustness, it is sufficient to show that deviating from an assumption would cause the model to fail. There is no need to show that a particular deviation (such as the possible plateaus I suggested) occurs, only that if it occurs problems will follow. The world is full of perfectly good models that are not robust. As long as the real world lines up closely enough with the model's assumptions, the lack of robustness is not an issue.

Robustness is, however, an issue when we go out of the range of data, and, given these unique times, every policy proposal goes outside our range of data. At this point the burden falls on the proposer to be explicit with assumptions and make some kind of case that they are being met.

We also need to be carefully to distinguish between individual and aggregate relationships. We know that raises and promotions occur at discrete points and bonuses are frequently capped. That means, for many workers, the relationship between wages and productivity can't be linear. It is, however, possible that when aggregated that relationship is linear (or at least close enough for our purposes). The problem here is that proposals that assume individual level linearity can sound a lot like proposal that assumes aggregate linearity. Once again, we need more caution and clarity than we've been seeing.

All of which lead to the main point: much of the economic debate (particularly Greg Mankiw's corner of it) has been based on arguments that aren't all that robust and assumptions that aren't immediately self-evident. Many of these arguments reach conclusions that are difficult to reconcile with the historical record (such as Mankiw's prediction that a return to Clinton era taxes would have dire effects on the nation). Under these circumstances, assumptions should not be left implicit and they certainly should not be depicted as broad and obvious when they are highly specialized and non-intuitive (Freakonomics being the best known example with Levitt's go-to "people respond to incentives." formulation).

In other words, in this situation, I'd probably argue that the burden of proof is on Mankiw; I'd certainly insist the burden of clarity is.

Evaluating the evaluations

Busy morning so I don't have time to do more than provide some links and the abstract for this paper on the effectiveness of college teachers.

In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standard-ized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow-on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow-on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.

Here's the ungated version via Tyler Cowen. May not be quite the same as the published one.

Here's Andrew Gelman's reaction.

Repost -- Fitness Landscapes, Ozark Style

[I'm working on a long post that uses fitness landscapes, so I thought I'd rerun some previous posts to get the conversation going.]

I grew up with a mountain in my backyard... literally. It wasn't that big (here in California we'd call it a hill) but back in the Ozarks it was a legitimate mountain and we owned about ten acres of it. Not the most usable of land but a lovely sight.

That Ozark terrain is also a great example of a fitness landscape because, depending on which side you look at, it illustrates the two serious challenges for optimization algorithms. Think about a mountainous area at least partially carved out by streams and rivers. Now remove all of the rocks, water and vegetation drop a blindfolded man somewhere in the middle, lost but equipped with a walking stick and a cell phone that can get a signal if he can get to a point with a clear line of sight to a cell tower.

With the use of his walking stick, the man has a reach of about six feet so he feels around in a circle, finds the highest point, takes two paces that direction then repeats the process (in other words, performs a gradient search). He quickly reaches a high point. That's the good news; the bad news is that he hasn't reached one of the five or six peaks that rise above the terrain. Instead, he has found the top of one of the countless hills and small mountains in the area.

Realizing the futility of repeating this process, the man remembers that an engineer friend (who was more accustomed to thinking in terms of landscape minima) suggested that if they became separated he should go to the lowest point in the area so the friend would know where to look for him. The man follows his friend's advice only to run into the opposite problem. This time his process is likely to lead to his desired destination (if he crosses the bed of a stream or a creek he's pretty much set) but it's going to be a long trip (waterways have a tendency to meander).

And there you have the two great curses of the gradient searcher, numerous small local optima and long, circuitous paths. This particular combination -- multiple maxima and a single minimum associated with indirect search paths -- is typical of fluvial geomorphology and isn't something you'd generally expect to see in other areas, but the general problems of local optima and slow convergence show up all the time.

There are, fortunately, a few things we can do that might make the situation better (not what you'd call realistic things but we aren't exactly going for verisimilitude here). We could tilt the landscape a little or slightly bend or stretch or twist it, maybe add some ridges to some patches to give it that stylish corduroy look. (in other words, we could perturb the landscape.)

Hopefully, these changes shouldn't have much effect on the size and position of the of the major optima,* but they could have a big effect on the search behavior, changing the likelihood of ending up on a particular optima and the average time to optimize. That's the reason we perturb landscapes; we're hoping for something that will give us a better optima in a reasonable time. Of course, we have no way of knowing if our bending and twisting will make things better (it could just as easily make them worse), but if we do get good results from our search of the new landscape, we should get similar results from the corresponding point on the old landscape.

In the next post in the series, I'll try to make the jump from mountain climbing to planning randomized trials.

* I showed this post to an engineer who strongly suggested I add two caveats here. First, we are working under the assumption that the major optima are large relative to the changes produced by the perturbation. Second our interest in each optima is based on its size, not whether it is global. Going back to our original example, let's say that the largest peak on our original landscape was 1,005 feet tall and the second largest was 1,000 feet even but after perturbation their heights were reversed. If we were interested in finding the global max, this would be be a big deal, but to us the difference between the two landscapes is trivial.

These assumptions will be easier to justify when start applying these concepts in the next post in the series. For now, though, just be warned that these are big assumptions that can't be made that often.

They may be anecdotal...

...but as recent events drive the mental health debate, cases like this take on an added significance.

"Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed."

According to Roger Ebert (who should know), Walter Murch is "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema" and, according to Murch, 3-D movies are still a bad technology.

Here's his main objection (from an open letter to Ebert):

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution* has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focused and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now "opened up" so that your lines of sight are almost -- almost -- parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the "CPU" of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.

Murch also makes important points about the editing and aesthetics of 3-D cinema, none of which are likely to make you rush out and invest your money in the technology, but that's just what the film industry has been doing.

As far as I can tell, it's been over seventy years since a customer-facing innovation (Technicolor) has revolutionized the cinema industry (distinguished here from home entertainment where the story has been entirely different). There have been customer-facing innovations but they've failed to catch on (Cinerama, color-based 3-D, Sensurround -- Imax has managed to stick around, but with less than 500 theaters after about four decades, it hasn't really been a game changer).

The innovations that actually had a major impact on the industry have been primarily focused on making films faster and quicker to make and easier to market (multiplexes, 'opening big,' digital production, post-production and projection, even CGI).

And yet studio executives continue to dream of the next Vitaphone.






*I'm not sure about the 600 million years -- how far back does stereoscopic vision go?

What's French for spam?

A few days ago, Seyward Darby posted a good piece of analysis on publishing teacher scores. Having been critical of Darby's previous writing on the subject, I entitled my response "Credit where credit is due." This morning I found the following comment complete with hyperlink:

Creadit - Vous cherchez crédit, credit d'impot, banque et bancaire [redacted] est une entreprise de courtage offrant les meilleures solutions pour pret relais et Credit en ligne au meilleur prix.

Or (according to Google Translate):

Cread - Looking for credit, tax credit, bank and banking [redacted] is a brokerage firm offering the best solutions for bridging loan and Credit online at the best price.

This should have been an easy catch for the spam filter. Was this just a random slip-up or does language make a difference?

I could not agree more

From Matt Yglesias:

Opioid addiction is bad, and it’s perfectly reasonable for policymakers to try to minimize its incidence. But short of dying, experiencing chronic pain is one of the worst things that can happen to someone. The correct ordering of priorities is to try to make sure that nobody suffering from treatable chronic pain goes untreated, and then try to minimize addiction risks within that framework. The view that people suffering pain should get relief subject to the binding constraint that we need to fight addiction has a nice Puritan logic to it, but it doesn’t make any real sense.

I have been enjoying Matt's comments on pain medication. The ability to relieve pain is one of the miracles of modern medicine and one that should not be squandered. There are always going to be limitations to any system but it is odd that we don't focus on those in need of pain relief first and abuse second.

After all, we don't ban driving just because some driver's are reckless or irresponsible.

Health care and economies of scale

As mentioned before, I always like to be cautious when drawing conclusions from different countries, cultures and hemispheres. With that caveat out of the way, this Marketplace story about an Indian health insurance program is definitely interesting and possibly important as well.

Shetty and his team of 40 cardiac surgeons at Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital are used to conversations like this one. They perform many more operations each year than comparable U.S. hospitals.

Shetty: This is a thousand-bed heart hospital. We do about 33 to 35 heart surgeries a day.

About a third of all of the patients at Shetty's hospital are farmers from rural villages. They're here because they have something called Yeshaswini insurance. It doesn't cover routine doctors visits for, say, a cough or a cold, but the insurance does cover all surgical procedures. The farmer pays approximately three cents a month; the government puts in one and a half cents and farmers cooperatives operate the program. Shetty believes there's strength in numbers.

For another story of medical developments coming from unlikely places, check out this story on battlefield medicine (this time from NPR).

Brewsterian astrophysics and Frazzian mathematics

Hey, it's a Sunday.

Damned, pinko entrepreneurs

Whether in business, education, or any other field, what works there might not work here. With that caveat in mind, take a look at "In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism" by Max Chafkin in Inc. magazine (or, if you're in a hurry, you can go to Felix Salmon's pithy analysis of the article and get much of the meat without the local color).

Here's the keystone of the piece:

Norway is also full of entrepreneurs like Wiggo Dalmo. Rates of start-up creation here are among the highest in the developed world, and Norway has more entrepreneurs per capita than the United States, according to the latest report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a Boston-based research consortium. A 2010 study released by the U.S. Small Business Administration reported a similar result: Although America remains near the top of the world in terms of entrepreneurial aspirations -- that is, the percentage of people who want to start new things—in terms of actual start-up activity, our country has fallen behind not just Norway but also Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland.

I tend to be distrustful of international comparisons, but, as I've mentioned before, if you're going to do it, Canada is probably where to start. "Demographically, economically, culturally and historically, Canada would seem to be the obvious country to look to when trying to determine the effectiveness of potential U.S. policies..." Having our northern neighbor on the list makes me more inclined to give its obvious implications some weight and those implications conflict with a lot of what we've been told about business-friendly policies.

According to much of the conventional economic wisdom, we should be leaving all of these countries behind in terms of entrepreneurs and new businesses. Their progressive taxes and extensive social safety nets should leave people with little incentive to work hard while their restrictive regulations (in Norway "firing an employee for cause typically takes months, and employers generally end up paying at least three months’ severance.") should make running a nimble and efficient business virtually impossible, but what should happen clearly isn't.

It would be interesting to see Greg Mankiw's explanation for this.

Kind and literate OE readers

Can someone out there help me find the name of a story. It's from the late Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. In it a banker tells of a colleague who was ruined because he became obsessed with chess. I won't spoil the payoff but it's very funny and incredibly timely.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

Note to Gelman -- first fill its mouth with salt, then light candles, then decapitate

Andrew Gelman is once again going after the voting-is-irrational zombie (disinterred this time by the Freakonomics team). Gelman shows, using estimates that if anything err on the conservative side, that the possibility of influencing an election, though small, can still easily be associated with a reasonable expected value.

This particular zombie has been shambling through the dark corridors of pop econ books and columns for years now (Gelman himself has been monster hunting since at least 2005), but every time the creature seems truly dead and buried, along comes someone like Landsburg or Levitt, someone who's smart enough and mathematically literate enough to know better, but who just can't resist digging up the grave.