The General Grant quote I was looking for earlier

I've got a post coming up on price discrimination and the role information plays in the process. One of the things that came to mind was this anecdote from the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which describes his experiences as an eight-year-old horse trader and illustrates what happens when the seller knows too much.

As he told the story, there was a Mr. Ralston living within a few miles of the village, who owned a colt which I very much wanted. My father had offered twenty dollars for it, but Ralston wanted twenty-five. I was so anxious to have the colt, that after the owner left, I begged to be allowed to take him at the price demanded. My father yielded, but said twenty dollars was all the horse was worth, and told me to offer that price; if it was not accepted I was to offer twenty-two and a half, and if that would not get him, to give the twenty-five. I at once mounted a horse and went for the colt. When I got to Mr. Ralston's house, I said to him: "Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won't take that, I am to offer twenty-two and a half, and if you won't take that, to give you twenty-five." It would not require a Connecticut man to guess the price finally agreed upon. This story is nearly true.

D&D Monsters

This list is a pretty representative list of the most unique and popular Dungeons and Dragons monsters.  I am a little surprised none of the creepy monsters made the list (green slime, ear seekers, rot grubs) but these are the ones you'd see in the novels. 

Not sure that Bacharach shouldn't have split this into to two but both halves are worth reading anyway

Via Thoreau, Jacob Bacharach has has an excellent albeit somewhat disjointed post that hits on a few of our ongoing threads. It starts out as a beautifully cynical insider's view of MBA programs then jumps (a bit abruptly) to a blistering take down of Joel Klein's efforts, working with the Rupert Murdoch family of companies, to sell tablet computers to school districts.

Here's a taste:

And in any case, when you look at the sales pitch, you see the same old clichés about the workplace of tomorrow peddled as the great social inflection point whose crisis-borne arrival necessitates the adoption of these critical tools that just happen to cost $199 a pop. The simple fact of that traditional dollar-short-of-an-even-hundred commercial pricing model ought to tip you that something may be slightly crooked here, the transformative promise more marketing than prophecy. “Robin Britt, the Personalized Learning Environment Facilitator (PLEF)”—no, really—leaps Ballmer-like to the front of the room and engages in a little future-is-nowism for the crowd:

I've been meaning to write about the tablets-in-the-classroom movement for awhile, particularly since the recent blow-up in here in LA. It represents one of the most notable of the many cases where ddulites and movement reformers intersect with predictably disastrous results.

For the record, disadvantaged students would much better off if we gave them laptops running Ubuntu rather than the latest tablet. It's worth noting that the latest snag in L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy's iPad initiative came because no one thought to budget money for keyboards. (Deasy isn't really a think-things-through kinda guy. Unfortunately, he's in a think-things-through kinda job.)

General Grant on the U.S.-Mexican War

I came across this in the course of researching a post on another topic. I don't want to imply  an analogy between Syria or even Afghanistan or Iraq -- these are very different situations -- but it's still worth that in what we generally think of as a jingoistic age, you could find a range of nuanced views.

From The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory. 

It's worth noting that Grant's friend and publisher, Mark Twain, was also a vocal critic of imperialism.

Fiscal responsibility

As we get further into the debt conversation, I think this is worth remembering:

People have largely forgotten about this, but back in the 1999–2001 era instead of complaining about the deficit being too high conservatives were obsessed with the need to prevent the national debt from getting too low. The reason was that they feared that there might not be enough "on-budget" debt for the Social Security Trust Fund to buy, which would lead the Social Security Trust Fund to act like the Canada Pension Plan and start investing in equity and other financial vehicles. This, according to Alan Greenspan and others, would rapidly put us on the road to serfdom.

But as sovereign wealth funds are spreading from Persian Gulf petrodictatorships to oil-free dictatorships (Singapore) and oil-rich democracies (Norway) and now even America's friendly next door neighbor Canada, I think it's time to rethink this opinion.

And also this:

But the larger point here, surely, is that Rehn has let the mask slip. It’s not about fiscal responsibility; it never was. It was always about using hyperbole about the dangers of debt to dismantle the welfare state. How dare the French take the alleged worries about the deficit literally, while declining to remake their society along neoliberal lines? 

In a sense I think we should be mad at the Austerity advocates for hopelessly confusing the debt issue.  Debt is bad but increased taxation is always worse seems to be the argument.  But by trying to confuse the issues they are merging two very different propositions.  High taxation can be bad but the evidence for this is much weaker than for government financial crisis due to debt loads. 

But it becomes impossible to talk about the debt without getting drawn into the quagmire of the appropriate level of taxes.  But it is notable that the argument against running a surplus appears to be bogus (the disaster of paying off the debt seems to not be a disaster elsewhere).  The level of taxes in the United States is low relative to other first world countries -- that makes it hard to argue that small tax increases would immediately lead to disaster. 

This is making me want to be almost dismissive of the deficit.  Not because the debt wouldn't be lower in my ideal world, but because all of the action is about the size and scope of government (and a strange argument about whether government should be intrusive at the federal or state level).  These are interesting arguments, to be sure, but they are only distantly related to the question of fiscal responsibility.

Weekend blogging -- "Zatoichi and the Chess Expert"

Not chess as we think of it (though it does qualify as a first cousin).

Still how can I not post a link to a film where a blind master swordsman meets up with a mysterious chess-playing samurai (and one of the best of the series to boot).

Dilbert

This Dilbert comic strip shows that Scott Adams still has it.

But how often is the cost-benefit equation for work and reward really put this cleanly?

Still more Motley Foolishness

In the pursuit of a couple of threads about the business of media, I find myself frequently clicking on links to Motley Fool posts and almost always regretting it. Here's how I summed up my reaction earlier:

MF specializes in overexcited, often under-informed posts usually focusing on hot topics that have strong emotional associations of success or (more rarely) failure. All of which is designed to get readers anxious and eager enough to shell out $199 a piece for various newsletters.

One part of that formula is the BIG HEADLINE!/small story. The pattern here is to start with a wildly overstated headline then scale back to a much more modest actual claim in the article. On top of that, even the modest claim is weakly supported only by very optimistic arguments.

Recent examples:

This Marvel Movie Has "Winner" Written All Over It
(about the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy)

and

Why Disney's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Could Be Bigger Than "The Avengers"

If you read the first, you go from Guardians having winner written all over it to it being "an interesting mix of characters that under the guidance of director James Gunn could result in a potent Marvel movie." In this context, I'd read "winner" to be above average for a film in the larger Avengers franchise or at least a 300 million dollar box office. From there we go the the more modest and far more vague 'potent.'

Left out is the fact that the director, while promising, has only directed two features, Slither and Super, neither of which appear to have broken even. Add to that the fact that introducing large numbers of unfamiliar characters is problematic, and that one of these characters is named Rocket Raccoon (a joke that wasn't good even when the reference was fresh).

Likewise, after claiming that the new Shield television show could be bigger than the Avengers, the article never actually argues for anything more than it possibly being a successful show that's good for the network. Once again, even that fairly limited claim is not well supported. No reason is given why the show should be more successful than something like Young Indiana Jones (another TV spin-off of a hit franchise) or that, if it is successful, that success will be somehow more important to ABC than the success of a Castle or a Dancing with the Stars. It should also be noted that while Joss Whedon has been the creative force behind many critically acclaimed TV show, he has never, to my knowledge, been involved with an actual hit. (And no, having a long run on the CW does not count).

Just to be clear, I have every reason to believe that these shows will be entertaining and have a reasonable shot at success. The people at Marvel have a good track record and have shown themselves to be smart about playing a long game.

What I am saying is that Motley Fool has not presented any arguments to show one way or another that these projects will be successful enough to move the stock. What MF is doing is trying to create a emotional state such that you will be eager to start playing the market and you will subscribe to one or more of their newsletters. As far as I've been able to tell, that's pretty much all they try to do.

I have two problems with that approach. First, they appear to be selling a product of little value. Second, and this is the kicker, they are encouraging people to engage in what is for most of us a highly risky behavior.

I have no way of knowing whether or not Guardians of the Galaxy will break box office records or if Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D will be the top rated show next year. If they are hits, I couldn't tell you whether or not that success has already been anticipated by the market and priced in to the stock. These analysts might be right about Disney stock or they might be wrong. Given the arguments we've seen so far I have no reason to guess one way or the other. However, given the cost and risk involved, I would be reluctant to make an investment based on one of these guys' monthly newsletters.

Charter Schools and Hedge Funds

A Wall Street trader draws an interesting analogy:

Survivorship bias
In statistics, this is a textbook case of what is known technically as “survivorship bias”—otherwise known as “ignoring data that makes you look bad.” This statistical fallacy opens up enormous opportunities for people with flexible ethics and an entrepreneurial bent. It is a mainstay of the hedge fund industry, for instance.  Hedge fund indices routinely appear to outperform simple, non-fee generating investment strategies like index funds by neglecting to include funds that closed down, and take funds out of the index whenever they stop reporting performance (hint: no fund fails to report good performance!).

R u hot or not?
Some funds, which shall remain nameless on the advice of counsel, improve quite a bit on these crude methods. They recruit new traders continuously, and give them a bit of capital. After a few months, the ones that make money are trumpeted to investors as the next hot thing, while the ones that don’t are quietly fired and never mentioned again. In this business model, what the traders actually do is irrelevant, as long as they are cheap and willing to sign leonine contracts. In fact, buying monkeys and letting them flip coins to predict market direction would work even better, though this might make the game a bit too obvious.

Repeat as necessary
The parallels to the emerging charter school paradigm are obvious. You start a lot of charters. Some do better than public schools, some do worse, but overall they underperform. You shut down the bad ones. Now repeat the analysis with the non-terrible ones. Improvement!  Except that the students unfortunate enough to attend these terrible school don’t just disappear (we hope – let’s not give charter schools any ideas!). However, they do disappear from the CREDO study, and that seems to be good enough for the charter sector and its advocates to proclaim this a success story.

I haven't seriously dug into the CREDO data so I can't vouch for the rest of the trader's analysis but it looks reasonable and it reinforces a point I've been making for a while: there are a lot systemic factors which favor charter schools and which furthermore tend to bias the data in these schools' favor. In other words, given the conditions charters operate under, we would expect them to outperform public schools even if they were pedagogically identical due to factors like selection, volunteer and placebo effects and even if the schools were performing identically, we would expect the charters to look better due to factors like attrition and survivorship. Add to this some non-trivial cases of data cooking and you can see where this leads.

Even with these factors, charter school performance has been tepid, at best. I don't see that as an argument for abandoning the experiment, but it does mean that the standard the-more-charters-the-better narrative is no longer viable and movement reformers like Arne Duncan have got to mark to market if they expect to be taken seriously.

Weekend blogging -- sometimes the least conventional covers turn out to be the most faithful

The standard approach to "You Rascal You" would be a band dressed Thirties-style in white tuxedos against an Art Deco background fronted by a vocalist with a mock-menacing bass voice but a cheerful demeanor, figuratively (and perhaps literally) winking at the audience to let them know it's all in good fun.

Played straight, without the winking, the effect is very different.

If you have to ask, you should use the door marked "Morlock"

From Business Insider:

An NYC High Rise Is Putting In Separate Entrances For Rich And Poor Renters

A luxury high-rise apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side is set to have a so-called “poor door” — a separate entrance for low-income residents receiving subsidized housing.

The 33-story building — 40 Riverside Boulevard – being developed by Extell Development Company will have 219 condominiums selling for more than $1 million each.

But by including 55 affordable housing units on the first few floors renting at a starting price of $845 a month, the developer could get a tax break, according to the West Side Rag.

With this disparity between the million-dollar condos for purchase versus the units for rent at a phenomenally low price for Manhattan, the developer decided to design the building with separate entrances for those who own condos and those who rent at a price below market value. As one might expect, this “rich door,” “poor door” situation doesn’t sit well with some.

Excellent Point Alert

Via Thoreau, we have a comment on Dean Dad's latest post:

I graduated three decades ago with an engineering degree, and in spite of all the talk about the shortage of technical skills, less than 20% of my graduating class got jobs in their field.

I thought then, and I still think now, that "skill shortage" is management-speak for "shortage of skilled people willing to work for what we want to pay them". I also note that the rhetoric about needing to pay enough to attract good people stops as soon as you get below upper management level…

 Thoreau goes further:

Hiring cheap workers on the lower rungs is always, always justified as necessary for the business to survive, as it paying exorbitant salaries to failed managers.

There really is a disconnect here.  It is not necessarily that senior management salaries are wrong.  it is more that it is odd that senior salaries are going up at the same time as other salaries plummet.  Given the cost of managers, they would seem to be the best candidates to outsource -- all things being equal. 

But we have a mystical faith that strong leaders are necessary for a business to prosper but that we can get cheap on the lower levels.  However, there are some organizations (say militaries) with very objective success metrics where the officers are often seen as less important than the non-commissioned officers (Britain would be an example of this).  The NCOs provide the low level guidance required to ensure excellence. 

Are we sure corporations are different? 

This is a really big deal

From Yglesias

Most low-income Americans aren’t poor at all by global standards, so evidence from successful anti-poverty programs in the developing world are difficult to apply to domestic poverty. That’s why it’s so telling and fascinating that a study on the cognitive downsides of poverty would find identical results in New Jersey and Tamil Nadu. Much work on domestic poverty rightly emphasizes the idea of skills and “human capital” needed to navigate a complicated modern economy. This naturally leads to a focus on education, whether in the guise of various school-reform crusades or the push to bring high-quality, affordable preschool to more households. But adults need help, too, and the perception that poor adults—as opposed to presumably innocent children—are irresponsible often leads to reluctance to treat adults as adults who are capable of deciding for themselves how best to use financial resources.

This paternalistic notion that we should be relatively stingy with help, and make sure to attach it to complicated eligibility requirements and tests, may itself be contributing to the problem of poverty. At home or abroad, the strain of constantly worrying about money is a substantial barrier to the smart decision-making that people in tough circumstances need to succeed. One of the best ways to help the poor help themselves, in other words, is to simply make them less poor.

The causal ordering here is really important.  We see this dilemma with other variables that are difficult to randomize.  So, for example, it isn't 100% clear if lack of exercise contributes to obesity or if being heavy makes one less likely to exercise.  It can make a big difference in public policy if the causal arrow reverses direction (or if there is a positive feedback loop that goes between the two variables).

In this case, there seems to be evidence that making a stingier and more complex welfare state increases the long run poverty via decreased decision making due to financial stress.  If this is borne out in other context then it totally changes the optimal policy responses to poverty. 

I didn't realize that it was OK to overstate numbers by an order of magnitude if it made for an interesting conversation

I'm going to try to get back to this and connect it with some other threads. For now though, consider it one more data point in the ongoing story of the challenges faced by people who try to correct falsehoods once they've made their way into the mainstream.

From Marketplace:

Could it possibly be true that watching videos on my smartphone uses as much electricity as two refrigerators?

“This is an example of a claim that sounds interesting, but really has no basis in fact,” says Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University.

Koomey has devoted years of his professional career to fighting this refrigerator analogy. It first came up more than a decade ago, by the same author, then making the claim that a Palm Pilot used the same electricity as a fridge.

Koomey says fighting it again now is pretty frustrating, “I’d rather not have to spend time rehashing this stuff.” But, the claim is back. So Koomey is back; figuring out just how much electricity goes into making and using my smartphone.

By his calculation, it’s about 60 kilowatt-hours.

Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of the phone-equals-refrigerator claim, estimates it’s closer to 700 kilowatt-hours.

Mills is author of a report called The Cloud Begins with Coal, sponsored by the mining and coal industries. He says he wants to get people thinking about how much electricity these devices use. And he doesn’t think the controversy around the refrigerator analogy distracts people from his bigger point.

“The debate makes it an interesting conversation, like we’re having,” says Mills.

He stands by his calculations and his main assertion: “It is accurate: it uses a lot of electricity. Now if someone were to say, it’s not equal to a refrigerator or equals half a refrigerator or a tenth of a refrigerator, that’s still a big number.”

Epidemiology example in tech

This post is a great example of epidemiological reasoning:

When people compare the stability of Linux and Windows, they may be biased a couple ways. First, Linux is more often deployed on servers and Windows more often on desktops. So they may unintentionally be comparing Linux servers to Windows desktops. Second, they may be thinking that Linux users’ computers are more stable than Windows users’ computers, which is probably true. Linux users typically know more about computers than Windows users. They are more able to avoid problems and more able to fix them when they occur.

You see central issues in epidemiology of trying to form comparable comparison groups and trying to disentangle environmental factors.  The higher knowledge base for the Linux users is directly comparable to the healthy user effect (more informed individuals are more likely to use preventative therapies).  The differences between server versus desktop is a great example of differences in the population.  If drinkers are also more likely to smoke, sleep less, and so forth then you may well see more problems unrelated to the exposure itself. 

Epidemiology is everywhere.