The Devil's Candy -- movie bombs and college budgets

The recent discussion of higher education costs got me thinking about other spiraling budgets and about one of my favorite case studies on the subject, Julie Salamon's excellent, The Devil's Candy, an account of the making of the movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Salamon, already a well established journalist, was given almost unprecedented access to the production. I say 'almost' because there is one other similar book, Picture, by Lillian Ross of the New Yorker, which describes John Huston's filming of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. Huston's film has grown in critical stature over the years, but it was a notorious commercial flop, which should, perhaps, have been a warning to Brian DePalma and the other people behind Bonfire.

Of course, Hollywood is a world of its own, but there are some general lessons in The Devil's Candy. One is that enterprises have a right size and if you try to scale past that size, things can go very wrong. As DePalma (who deserves serious points for forthrightness) put it:

"The initial concept of it was incorrect. If you're going to do The Bonfire of the Vanities, you would have to make it a lot darker and more cynical, but because it was such an expensive movie we tried to humanize the Sherman McCoy character – a very unlikeable character, much like the character in The Magnificent Ambersons. We could have done that if we'd been making a low-budget movie, but this was a studio movie with Tom Hanks in it. We made a couple of choices that in retrospect were wrong. I think John Lithgow would have been a better choice for Sherman McCoy, because he would have got the blue-blood arrogance of the character."

Another lesson is that, viewed individually, each of the disastrous decisions seemed completely reasonable. There's something almost Escher-like about the process: each decision seems to be a move up toward a better and more profitable film but the downward momentum simply accelerates, ending with a critically reviled movie that lost tens of millions of dollars. I suspect that survivors of similar fiascos in other fields would tell much the same story.

Finally there's the way that the failure to control costs in one area limits the ability (or willingness) to control it in other areas. You might that excessive spending on a cast would encourage producers to look for ways to spend less on something like catering, but the opposite often seems to happen when you have this kind of budget spiral. It's a delusional cousin of dynamic scoring: people internalize the idea that anything that might directly or indirectly improve box office performance will pay for itself, no matter how expensive it may be. Pretty soon you're bleeding money everywhere.

Ddulite Investors

[for a definition of ddulite click here]

I started out in the banking industry. My company used to broadly recruit from other banks so we had plenty of chances to compare stories about strategies that different banks used and this particular one stood out to me as an interesting way of handling investor complaints.

The bank in question was in the middle of a very good run, making a flood of money from its credit card line, but investors kept complaining that the bank was making all that money the wrong way. This was the height of the Internet boom but the bank was booking all of these profitable accounts through old-fashioned direct mail. If it wanted to maximize its stock price, the bank needed to start booking accounts online.

The trouble was that (at least at the time) issuing credit cards over the Internet was a horrible idea. The problem was fraud. With direct mail, the marketer decides who to contact and has various ways to check that a customer's card is in fact going to that customer. With a website, it was the potential customers who initiated contact and a stunning number of those potential customers were identity thieves.

The Internet was an excellent tool for account management, but the big institutional investors were adamant; they wanted to see the bank booking accounts online. Faced with the choice between unhappy investors and a disastrous business move, the company came up with a truly ingenious solution: they added a feature that let people who received a pre-approved credit card card offer fill out the application online.

Just to be absolutely clear, this service was limited to people who had been solicited by the bank and based on the response rates, the people who went online were basically the same people who would have applied anyway. From a net acquisitions standpoint, it had little or no impact.

From an investor relations standpoint, however, it accomplished a great deal. Everyone who filled out one of those applications and was approved* was counted as an online acquisition. Suddenly the bank was using this metric to bill itself as one of the leading Internet providers. This satisfied the investors (who had no idea how cosmetic the change was) and allowed the bank to continue to follow its highly profitable business plan (which was actually a great deal more sophisticated than the marketing techniques of many highly-touted Internet companies).

*'pre-approved' actually means 'almost pre-approved.

Nightmare Travel week approaching

There may be light blogging for the next 10 days or so.

California has good universities!

From the Academic rankings of world universities:

1. Harvard University (private)

2. Stanford University (private)

3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (private)

4. University of California, Berkeley (public)

5. University of Cambridge (British)

6. California Institute of Technology (private)

7. Princeton University (private)

8. Columbia University (private)

9. University of Chicago (private)

10. University of Oxford (British)

11. Yale University (private)

12. University of California, Los Angeles (public)

13. Cornell University (private)

14. University of Pennsylvania (private)

15. University of California, San Diego (public)

16. University of Washington (public)

17. University of California, San Francisco (public)

18. The Johns Hopkins University (private)

19. University of Wisconsin - Madison (public)

20. University College London (British)

Some interesting patterns immediately jump out.  Of the top 20 schools,  17 are American, which is pretty impressive given the share of the world population held by the United States.  Of the 17 American schools, six of them are public (which is amazing given how many resources the private schools have).  Of the public schools, 4 of them are in California.

So why are we discussing the need to privatize California higher education, which combines extremely high quality with relatively low tuition?  I mean seriously, is there no other public university system in the nation that we can focus on?  Or is it merely that reformers want to destroy the example of well done public education?

The whole argument strikes me as insane.

Not sure Dean Dad caught the gist

Via Joseph, Dean Dad has the following reaction to recent comments by President Obama:

President Obama has put higher education “on notice” that if we keep raising tuition, we’ll get our public funding cut.

To which I say, huh?

We’ve had our public funding cut already. Since 2008, an uninterrupted series of cuts has been the direct cause of severe tuition increases for public higher ed. If you want to stop the tuition increases, the first thing to do is to require the states to restore and then maintain realistic funding levels. (When referring to a point in time, the usual term is a “maintenance of effort” requirement. Otherwise, it can be set as a “grant in aid.”) When the states have cut back, colleges have turned to the Feds through the indirect means of raising tuition, much of which is funded by Federal financial aid.

The post doesn't include a link but I assume he's referring to this (emphasis added):

Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury – it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

I don't often find myself defending the President's education policies (too many movement reformers have his ear), but I think he did a good job hitting the main points here and Dean Dad could have done a better job reflecting that.

I think we need to understand college cost structures better

This post (in the midst of a long, long single page blog) was very interesting:

College Costs and Quality? I rather suspect that my experience as a university professor is pretty typical, although certainly there are much more dramatic. Over the past 15 years my real (inflation adjusted - just using the CPI) salary has fallen16.5%, 831/2 cents on the dollar, not counting various costs the universities have shifted to the faculty (and not accounting for the fact, which nobody seems to when considering the situation of seniors in our society, that as one ages medical costs are an increasing proportion of expenditures, and they have been rising sharply). The "special" equipment I need is a decent laptop computer, the provision to our department members of which has enabled them to reduce secretarial support. The courses I used to teach as seminars are now in amphitheaters, and, while the substantial advances in IT (when the equipment works) have certainly improved that teaching environment, it is still most certainly not comparable to the learning in the interaction, and professor attention to individual students, of the seminar format. Moreover, tests are inadequate measures of learning, and abysmal measures of creativity, yet evaluating and commenting on papers and projects in classes of this amphitheater size is simply physically impossible, and beyond the capabilities of teaching assistants, in my field anyway. Indeed, I suspect over emphasis on exams (and standardized tests) may actually stunt creativity (assignments here for psychologists and cognitive scientists). 

 I think that there is a real need to understand why costs of college are escalating.  It seems to be a complex problem and I have begun to suspect that simple explanations are likely to be inadequate.  Some of the issues seem to be related to new services (e.g. information technology, increased reporting mandates, student services).  But it is remarkable that salaries for the most expensive workers can drop at the same time as costs are rapidly rising.

Some of this is likely due to loss of state funding.  But private schools have also grown more expensive with time and this cannot be solely attributed to changes in funding.

I would love to see a time series of university budgets, in real dollars, to try and understand this issue better.

I was surprised by the lack of comments on this

Dean Dad:

President Obama has put higher education “on notice” that if we keep raising tuition, we’ll get our public funding cut.

To which I say, huh?

We’ve had our public funding cut already. Since 2008, an uninterrupted series of cuts has been the direct cause of severe tuition increases for public higher ed. If you want to stop the tuition increases, the first thing to do is to require the states to restore and then maintain realistic funding levels. (When referring to a point in time, the usual term is a “maintenance of effort” requirement. Otherwise, it can be set as a “grant in aid.”) When the states have cut back, colleges have turned to the Feds through the indirect means of raising tuition, much of which is funded by Federal financial aid.

I think we really need to make a distinction between public and private education here.  Public schools, like in California, have had huge funding cuts that led to large percentage increases in tuition.  But, in absolute terms, the increases are small compared to the amount of tuition charged at private schools (like Stanford, which is in the same state).

In public education the finding cuts are causally connected to cost increases.  But I am not sure the University of California is really the problem in terms of unsustainable educational costs.  True, universities are expensive and I have been amazed at the cost increases.  But serious cuts in state support needs to be part of the overall picture to really understand what is going on.  Education (especially affordable education) is a public good and should be treated as such.

Gaming

Mark has a sideline as a professional game designer and I am an avid follower of role-playing games.  So while we rarely do gaming posts, I decided to put a good RPG post collecting blog into the blogroll.

Enjoy.

I am confused about carried interest

Does anybody have a good reason for the carried interest tax exemption?  It seems to entirely benefit a group that already has very large incomes and doesn't really seem to be in the same class as investment capital that was risked in the marketplace.  Paul Krugman notes how much benefit a retired investment adviser can reap from this exemption:

 First, $13 million of the total was carried interest, which gets taxed like capital gains but is really just commissions that receive special treatment for no good reason. No profits taxes were paid on that income; right there, a minimally defensible tax code would have levied $2.6 million more in taxes on Romney.

I am completely agnostic as to the identity of the person in question -- it would be just as concerning if Barack Obama had millions in carried interest in his tax forms.  The real question is how this exemption (which is commissions) can stimulate economic growth.  I understand the argument for preferential treatment of capital gains.  I even understand how capital gains can end up making moving between houses expensive for no really good reason.  So I comprehend how this can be a matter of academic debate.

But can anyone explain why commissions should get preferential tax treatment?

Admittedly an extreme case

One of my biggest objections to the wildly popular contrarian school of journalism is the way that, rather than following a line of reasoning to an unexpected conclusion, many writers obviously start out with an absurdly counter-intuitive position then try to come up with a list of reasons to justify it.

You know the sort of thing I'm talking about, stories with titles like:

Newt Gingrich's three marriages mean he might make a strong president -- really

Student Loans and Emergencies

From the Incidental Economist's comment section:

As a resident manager of David’s House , a beautiful private nonprofit home away from home for families of sick children at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital , like a Ronald McDonald House, one of the saddest and most frustrating things I saw was student loan collectors that would not work with parents who had run out of forbearance time to reduce or temporarily waive student loan payments despite their medical emergencies. Even the federal government will operate this way when a student loan goes into collections. Will not work with the debtor at all. We had collection agencies tracking down parents at our facility because, of course, parents who were living there temporarily needed to make the phone number known instead of keeping it confidential. The student loan crisis: another problem that you economists should address.

The decision to make student loans immune to bankruptcy is going to be a problem in the long run, at least so long as the totals become so high.  I meet a surprising number of students with > $100,000 in debt.  It's one thing to allow large debt to occur as part of developing human capital.  But the punishment meted out to people when their lives go wrong seems way disproportionate to the decision to borrow.  This is even more true when you look at the employment rate among Americans without a college degree.

It makes education into a high stakes gamble (at for those who are not already wealthy) instead of a public good that we provide to improve human capital.

Tax Reform

I am normally not the biggest fan of Greg Mankiw as I am concerned that his anti-tax stance reduces the focus on how we can use a strong taxation system to build a strong economy.  But this post is one that I found myself agreeing with more than I disagreed with.  In particular, note:

Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work. The incentives they face when deciding how much to drive would more closely match the true social costs and benefits.

And this:

Consider the deduction for mortgage interest . . . Subsidies to homeowners are, in effect, penalties on renters — after all, someone has to pick up the tab. But there is nothing wrong with renting. And once one acknowledges that renters are poorer, on average, than homeowners, the mortgage interest deduction becomes even harder to justify.

These are the sorts of places that tax reform might make a significant difference in building a better system.  It is true that tax reform in these areas would be politically unpopular.  But, in the long run, it might make for a much better and more transparent tax system.

Why I believe in safety nets

Megan McArdle argues:

Who among the parents fighting so hard to get their kids into a good school is going to volunteer to have their kid give up the slot in the upper middle class? People are willing to accept a certain amount of slippage, but only as long as it comes with added job security (government) or special fulfillment (the ministry, the arts)--and even in the latter cases, Mom and Dad will often be strenuously arguing against following your calling. But how many doctors and lawyers would simply glumly accept it if you told them that sorry, junior's going to be an intermittently employed long-haul trucker, and your darling daughter is going to work the supermarket checkout, because all the more lucrative and interesting slots went to smarter and more talented people?

The lack of a safety net makes falling in social status a serious problem.  When basic medical care is linked to being a productive member of the middle class, people are willing to make enormous sacrifices to protect themselves from falling in social class.  If we mitigate the problems and torments of extreme poverty then maybe it won't be seen as terrible to have people shift around in social class.

Now it is true that my focus is on absolute levels of deprivation.  But if the you can be poor with dignity and have basic needs met then maybe that will make us a little more willing to address inequality in general.

Copyrights and patents are intrusive government regulations

They are monopolies that restrict the rights of businesses to make and sell certain products. What's more, they're built around non-rival goods with origins that are often difficult to trace (since virtually all 'creative' works are derived from other earlier ones).

This doesn't mean intellectual property laws are bad. They aren't. Society could not function well without them. What this does mean is that these laws have a cost. They distort markets, raise prices, divert resources from productive areas to legal departments and inhibit creative destruction and the founding of new businesses. We have to balance these costs against the social benefits of encouraging creation and dissemination.

Recently, though, we've lost sight of that need for balance, in no small part because those costs are born by consumers and small companies that lack the wherewithal for PR and lobbying. In the area of copyrights (patents are a subject for another day), we've allowed ludicrous extensions, let lawyers grab works from the public domain, retroactively granted copyrights to works whose creators have been dead for decades, and tried to greatly restrict the concept of fair use.

It's important to remember that the very notion of owning an idea is a useful absurdity. Ideas are intangible and indistinct with no real demarcation from other ideas. It is tremendously useful for a society to encourage creativity and give creators a protected period to disseminate their works, but if we start thinking of protecting intellectual property as an end to itself, all we have left is the absurdity.

Works moved out of the public domain?

Seriously?

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a federal law that restored copyright protection to works that had entered the public domain. By a 6-to-2 vote, the justices rejected arguments based on the First Amendment and the Constitution’s copyright clause, saying that the public domain was not “a category of constitutional significance” and that copyright protections might be expanded even if they did not create incentives for new works to be created. The case, Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545, considered a 1994 law enacted to carry out an international convention. The law applied mainly to works first published abroad from 1923 to 1989 that had earlier not been eligible for copyright protection under American law, including films by Alfred Hitchcock, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso.

 How exactly does this act to promote the creation of new works?  Any possible incentive to the creaters is long past.  Notice that this period ends in 1989 -- how many people would have created more works jsut in case they could get copyright protective in a foreign market 23 years later? 

I am not against intellectual property rights (rather the converse) but I question is need for such long term protection for pieces that are decades old.  At some point the public domain is the right place for these older works, as it gives them a chance to be rediscovered by people looking for inexpensive content.  That is probably a better legacy for the creators than any minimal stream of royalties could be at this late date.