What do these two things have in common?

Standard and Poor's defense against misleading ratings:

S&P said in its request to dismiss the case that the government can’t base its fraud claims on S&P’s assertions that its ratings were independent, objective and free of conflicts of interest because U.S. courts have found that such vague and generalized statements are the kind of “puffery” that a reasonable investor wouldn’t rely on.

So lying about the results of your financial analysis (for profit) and misleading people who rely on information is okay?  Do these people not know that accurate information is an absolute requirement for markets to work and that ends up being a classic principal agent problem? 

And then consider this case:

It was also the beginning of the end.  The Journal at first identified her as just an analyst for the Institute for the Study of War. In other op-eds, O‘Bagy herself had disclosed the dual association, but for the Journal, at the insistence of Kim Kagan, the Institute’s head, she says, she did not. Kagan disputes this account. Critics were quick to point out the Journal’s omission of O’Bagy’s task force work, charging that she was lobbying the same politicians she was meant to be briefing. O’Bagy and the task force both say she was never involved in the group’s lobbying activities. But that first opening led others to look more closely. Within days, it was revealed that Dr. O’Bagy didn’t have a PhD.

I think that these are both parts of the objectivist ideals that have penetrated American society.  It has replaced ideas like "it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game" with an ideal of winning as being a sign of moral worth. 

Objectivism definitely has a "do what you want element".  Consider:

Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.

It is not that there is no value in this approach, but one can easily imagine how this can lead to people running roughshod over others in the climb up the slippery pole of success.  I think that this is worth giving a lot of consideration to. 

What is the role of truth, self-discipline, and good conduct in the modern world? 

Weekend blogging -- checking a couple off the list

If there's a film lover's equivalent to David Lodge's literary parlor game humiliation (where you list the most famous/important books you haven't read), I'd be one hell of a competitor. This weekend, though, I plan to knock off a couple of longstanding items from my to-see list.



If you want to catch this first one, hurry. Free viewing expires in a couple of days.




I also need to see Diabolique as background for a post I plan to do one of these days on the odd critical rise of Vertigo, but more on that later.

There is a long history of this type of bad judgement in literature

It dates back to Ivanhoe, who clearly picked the wrong girl -- the less interesting and compatible partner.  It looks like the Marvel version of Thor has the same problem.  Curiously, the mythical Thor actually picked Sif so maybe he will change his mind eventually?

Twitter's 140 -- the fast and the freshest

In response to my previous piece about Twitter, Joseph suggested that the 140 character limit forces writers to terse. I'm not so sure. I think the more common response has been a tendency toward annoying abbreviations, elliptical writing, and small subjects.

This did, however, get me thinking about the possibility of other reasons for the character limit, and I was forced to admit there are a few.

For starters, there's speed. The short length encourages writers to wrap up their thoughts and get them out the door. I am sure there are those out there who labor over each tweet as if composing a haiku, but for most of us very little time elapses between when a thought hits and when the tweet button is hit.

That speed leads to a number of other traits which are desirable for the platform. It more or less guarantees a healthy flow of traffic. You can find a rapidly flowing stream of tweets on almost any subject imaginable.

Compared with blogs, the brevity of tweets can make exchanges feel more like conversations than debates. This gives Twitter a distinct and inviting feel.

Perhaps most importantly, that speed also allows Twitter to be the most up-to-date of news media. When it comes to getting detailed, real time information during a big, complicated crisis, Twitter is exceptionally good, in large part because the users are constrained to produce short, fast bursts of information.

I still think that the Harrison Bergeron effect – setting up an artificially equal playing field for mobile and nonmobile users – is the most important aspect in the success of Twitter, But there's certainly more to the story.

Driving versus walking

We are late to this party but consider:

When it comes to energy use and greenhouse gases emitted, appearances can be grossly deceiving. Granted, people who drive everywhere are energy users and polluters. But walkers also use fossil fuels through the food they eat to replace the calories burned while walking. Of course, driving can be more polluting under some circumstances, such as when large SUVs are the preferred vehicles or when drivers insist on doing wheelies at every stoplight. Bicycling the distance can also be less polluting than driving. Dunn-Rankin sums up the central, largely counterintuitive, point of this commentary: "Driving a small [or moderate-size] car and not having to replace burned calories saves more energy (and greenhouse gases) than walking when the extra calories expended are replaced."

Tim Stuhldreher jumps on the biggest issues:

First, if you’re going to look at the entire food chain to determine the energy cost of human walking, it’s only fair to do the same thing for the car. That means you have to factor in the energy costs of producing it. It’s not clear how much that adds, but it’s significant: Estimates range from 10 percent to 100 percent and everywhere in between. I’m not going to speculate on the exact number, but if it’s 50 percent to 100 percent, then we’ve just put walking right back on par with driving, mile for mile.
 

Second, Dunn-Rankin’s result depends on the use of a high-mpg car, around 40 miles per gallon. If you drive a pickup truck or an SUV, your mileage is worse, and you have to adjust the figures accordingly.

 Third, doing this calculation on a per-mile basis ignores the obvious and important point that people typically drive much farther than they walk. No one buys a car to go half a mile here, a quarter-mile there. Moreover, land use patterns change as cars become more prevalent in society – you get less density and more suburban sprawl. To see the real impact of driving vs. walking, you have to take that into account.

I think the last point is the most salient.  The argument also has other issues -- like if we used bicycles instead of cars for the commute then the bikes would be a lot safer and people would be a lot more physically fit.  It may be implausible to walk twenty miles to work but I have met people who actually do it by bike.  Heck, it is also possible that people would lose weight, become more efficient as a result, and actually generate less emissions themselves. 

Furthermore, this assumes that the same fossil fuel use would remain in agriculture while being removed from personal use.  And that more efficient ways of agricultural transport could not be found (or that we couldn't alter our diet by season).  

It's a point mostly of interest to see how far people will accept the counter-intuitive as true, just because it is so at odds with conventional wisdom.  Sometimes the conventional wisdom exists for a reason. 

Service Contracts

From the local Mad Biologist:

Yes, there are people who will give away their information at the drop of a hat for a ten percent-off coupon. But many of us have no choice in the matter. When you sign the terms of agreement for an internet provider, credit card company, or many other businesses, you are offered a take-it-or-leave-it contract. No negotiation is possible. And these contracts are often for nearly-essential services. Sure, you don’t need a credit card, an internet connection, or an email account, but it’s hard to function in 21st century America without these things.

These are often de facto monopolies (e.g., cable companies), or else you are offered a very limited number of options that really don’t differ that much (e.g., wireless providers). In a common law sense (and the last thirty years of neoliberal and conservative jurisprudence have essentially annihilated the notion of common law), a contract that you can’t negotiate for a service you basically can’t do without isn’t really a contract, it’s extortion. Worse, this unequal (one might use the word servile) relationship is often sanctioned by the government.

 This is a bit strident, but basically correct.  Boilerplate contract that cannot be easily negotiated in individual cases is a nice legal defense but rather misses the point of agreements.  The imbalance in market power is really the problem and the services have become increasingly essential.  Try not having a credit card, a bank account, telephone, or internet access.  People due survive in these circumstances, but the level of cost to avoiding these contracts is high. 

Now when the contract is reasonable that is one thing.  But isn't the idea of a universal reasonable standard of interaction seen elsewhere?  Or was I dreaming during the "government regulations" phase of my education? 

Free TV blogging -- subtle signs of a tipping point

It may not look it, but I think this might be kind of a big deal.

As (very patient) regular readers know, I've been following the over-the-air television story for a long time, partly because I'm a satisfied user but mainly because there's a push to shut down the medium and I believe that the loss of OTA television would reduce media diversity and acerbate the effects of income inequality.

There's been a definite progression in coverage since the conversion to digital in 2008. Other than a few pieces specifically on the conversion (such as this very good story from the LA Times and this not-so-good one from the NYT), there was almost no mention of the new medium for the first year or so.

Then came the comment stage: articles about relevant subjects like cable problems and cord-cutting would make no mention of OTA options but the comment sections were full of readers saying "what about rabbit ears?"

The CBS/Time Warner dispute prompted another stage marked by a considerable increase in coverage. With the largest markets in the country losing cable access to the number one network, reporters more or less had to discuss other options for viewing television. The resulting stories were of somewhat uneven quality, but they did start addressing over-the-air as a viable option.

Now we have what might turn out to be the fourth stage in the coverage. Here's a passage from a recent post by Brad Reed of the tech site BGR complaining about Comcast's service:

Now, I know there are solutions to this. I plan on installing a digital antenna and unplugging the Comcast cable all together so I can once again watch football in HD. But it’s appalling to me that Comcast has sent me a product that the company has billed as an “upgrade” that has actually downgraded the quality of my service dramatically. What’s more, Comcast is telling me I’ll need to pay an extra $10 a month to access channels that are free to access over the air.

The worst part about all this is that I’ll have little choice but to continue paying Comcast for a television service that I’ll never use simply because the company’s glorious bundling plans make it cheaper for me to have TV and Internet than just Internet alone. And it’s not like I can switch providers since Comcast has a regional monopoly in my area.

I do have one small quibble with this story – there is no such thing as a digital television antenna – but on the whole this is the kind of story we've been waiting for: A writer for a tech savvy site who knows what is available over the air and who understands the value of having an option to a cable monopoly. This was almost impossible to find a couple of years ago.

One of the points I've been hoping/meaning to get across (as a blogger, I've always had a poor conception-to-expression ratio) is that competition is only meaningful if customers know their options.   That knowledge is not automatic. It has to be derived from personal experience, word-of-mouth, journalism/media coverage or marketing.

When you have a new product (and digital OTA is a new product, as or more distinct from analog OTA than cable was from that same medium thirty-five years ago), customers are particularly dependent on coverage and marketing to tell them they have another option. Unfortunately, most companies with major marketing budgets had a vested interest in the failure of the free TV model while the media had no interest in the story for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that companies like Weigel Broadcasting didn't have top dollar PR firms writing the journalists' stories for them.

As a result, there was a real danger that the new medium was going to be chopped up and sold for parts before the slow dissemination of information through direct experience and word of mouth could reach critical mass. For a time, I thought it was the likely outcome. Now, I think the odds for OTA are looking pretty good. The technology has always been more than competitive. Now that journalists and tech writers are including antennas in their discussions of television, that technological edge can start making a difference.

Fewer time zones

I am a west coaster who works with a lot of east coasters.  So this is absolutely correct:

You can see all of these brain regions firing up as he gets excited and calls for a Panel Of Important Experts to figure this out.  It’s especially cute that he  thinks that people on the East Coast would keep schedules that differ from the West Coast by only 1 hour.  Um, no.  Their schedules would be about 3 hours off from ours no matter what the clocks might read. But Kleiman and a few other technocratic folks are so enamored of this.  I feel like we’re getting real-time text output from an fMRI study on them.  I kind of want to bring Kleiman and an fMRI to a pedagogy workshop, just to see if the results correlate with his response to merging time zones.

It's a remarkably bad idea.  The annual time change has some bad properties.  The idea that people in the US really don't care if daylight is associated with work and school is a bit less likely . . .

That this would end up with anything but different standard work hours seems relatively unlikely.

Harrison Bergeron and the forced equality of Twitter

I've been experimenting with Twitter recently and giving a lot of thought to how it can compliment blogging, longer form writing and other projects. It's an interesting platform, almost a medium to itself,  with lots of interesting features, but if you limited me to one defining aspect, it  would clearly be the 140 character limit. Both the style and content of tweets have clearly evolved around those constraints.

And because my mind is prone to odd turns, that got me to thinking about the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. story "Harrison Bergeron." In case you're not familiar with the story, here's the premise:

It is the year 2081. Because of Amendments to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is smarter, better-looking, stronger, or faster than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced. The government forces citizens to wear "handicaps" (a mask if they are too handsome or beautiful, earphones with deafening radio signals to make intelligent people unable to concentrate and form thoughts, and heavy weights to slow down those who are too strong or fast).

How does that relate to Twitter? Consider the case of the following two writers:

The first sits at home in a comfortable chair, using an ergonomic keyboard, with three large high-definition monitors and a high-speed Internet connection;

The second is standing in line at a convenience store with one arm filled with groceries, trying to type out a message with one thumb.

If these two writers are allowed to compete on equal terms, the first will soon dominate the platform. Here's where the Harrison Bergeron effect comes into play. Twitter creates an equal playing field not by improving the productivity of the mobile user but my handicapping the user who would normally be dominant.

Of course, the hundred and forty character limit is also a handicap for the mobile user, but it is a much smaller handicap. In most cases the guy tweeting on a phone would probably not go that much over 140 characters anyway.

Twitter's character limit is not driven by a misplaced sense of fairness. There have been big practical benefits from this approach. By coming up with a mobile-friendly platform, Twitter has come to dominate the social and much of the news side of what is perhaps the fastest growing and most lucrative market in 21st-century communication. Those thumb-typers brought a lot to the table.

So, just to be clear, there is no disrespect intended here but it is interesting to note that the fantastic success of Twitter can be largely attributed to a largely arbitrary restriction imposed on its users.

New Train regulations

One of the strange things about the United States is the barriers to innovation in terms of updating infrastructure.  Europe has very nice and efficient fast trains.  So wasn't it a shock to learn it has been a major policy change (a decade in the making) to allow them to be used in the United States?

I mean we are talking European trains here.  Not exactly known for their glaring safety issues and constant corner cutting.  [yes, I know that there are train accidents.  There are also car accidents. Looking at relative rates isn't going to make the European trains look like a silly option]

Something to keep in mind

This point came up in an article on what makes a good criticism of economics:

And sorry economists, this sign also works the other way.  There have been some great economic analyses of other fields, but if you’re reading an economic critique of another academic field – “if only they were more statistically rigorous like us” – there’s a good chance it’s breaching the equivalent 18 signs for that field.

The 18 signs come from Chris Auld. 

I actually think that this piece is really important.  Just like economists do not like outsiders wandering into economics and making sweeping statements about how the field has issues, other fields aren't thrilled when economists do it. 

Now there are some borderline cases: health economists often know a lot about epidemiology, for example.  But then they also, most of the time, tend to be cautious.  I've worked with enough health economists now that I certainly realize the dangers of boldly striding into their field. 

The most polarizing figure, for a long time, was Emily Oster.  But she is really smart and her health related work has become really first rate at this point (any field can occasionally welcome a smart and careful self-taught pundit).  In fact, recently she has been on the side of the weight of the data with her pregnancy book (which I expected to loathe given the pre-publication advertising).  This isn't to say she got everything right, but that I am now convinced she has taken the time to understand the field and make important contributions.

Weekend blogging -- Kael and the importance of context

Pauline Kael had a rare knack for pointing out things that you never realized had always bothered you, like the way so many analysts of pop culture get things so badly wrong because the lack adequate context and detachment and because they're completely oblivious of these limitations.

I was working on a post on the dangers of writing a serious socio/political essay from a fanboy perspective and I was reminded of the next to last paragraph of the following excerpt from Raising Kane. After I went back and reread it, I decided I needed (had an excuse) to print the whole passage:

In later years, Welles, a brilliant talker, was to give many interviews, and as his power in the studios diminished, his role in past movies grew larger. Sometimes it seems that his only power is over the interviewers who believe him. He is a masterful subject. The new generation of film historians have their own version of “Look, no hands”: they tape-record interviews. Young interviewers, particularly, don’t bother to check the statements of their subjects—they seem to regard that as outside their province—and thus leave the impression that the self-aggrandizing stories they record are history. And so, as the years go on, if one trusts what appears in print, Welles wrote not only Kane but just about everything halfway good in any picture he ever acted in, and in interviews he’s beginning to have directed anything good in them, too. Directors are now the most interviewed group of people since the stars in the forties, and they have told the same stories so many times that not only they believe them, whether they’re true or false, but everybody is beginning to.

        This worship of the director is cyclical—Welles or Fellini is probably adored no more than von Stroheim or von Sternberg or De Mille was in his heyday—but such worship generally doesn’t help in sorting out what went into the making of good pictures and bad pictures. The directors try to please the interviewers by telling them the anecdotes that have got a good response before. The anecdotes are sometimes charming and superficial, like the famous one—now taken for motion-picture history—about how Howard Hawks supposedly discovered that The Front Page would be better if a girl played the reporter Hildy, and thus transformed the play into His Girl Friday in 1940. (“I was going to prove to somebody that The Front Page had the finest modern dialogue that had been written, and I asked a girl to read Hildy’s part and I read the editor, and I stopped and I said, ‘Hell, it’s better between a girl and a man than between two men.’”) Now, a charming story is not nothing. Still, this is nothing but a charming and superficial story. His Girl Friday turned out joyously, but if such an accident did cause Hawks to see how easy it was to alter the play, he still must have done it rather cynically, in order to make it conform to the box-office patterns then current. By the mid-thirties—after the surprise success of It Happened One Night—the new independent, wisecracking girl was very popular, especially in a whole cycle of newspaper pictures with rival girl and boy reporters. Newspaper pictures were now “romantic comedies,” and, just as the movies about lady fliers were almost all based on Amelia Earhart, the criminal-mouthpiece movies on William Fallon, and the gossip-column movies on Walter Winchell, the movies about girl reporters were almost all based on the most highly publicized girl reporter—Hearst’s Adela Rogers St. Johns. Everybody had already been stealing from and unofficially adapting The Front Page in the “wacky” romantic newspaper comedies, and one of these rewrites, Wedding Present, in 1936 (by Adela Rogers St. Johns’s then son-in-law Paul Gallico), had tough editor (Cary Grant) and smart girl reporter (Joan Bennet) with square fiancé (Conrad Nagel). This was the mold that The Front Page was then squeezed into to become His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy (already a favorite square from The Awful Truth) in the same roles, and Rosalind Russell was so obviously playing Adela Rogers St. Johns that she was dressed in an imitation of the St. Johns girl-reporter striped suit.

        Some things that students now, seeing films out of the context of the cycles they were part of, may take to be brilliant inventions were fairly standard; in fact, the public at the time was so familiar with the conventions of the popular comedies that the clichés were frequently spoofed within the pictures. But today, because of the problems peculiar to writing the history of modern mass-art forms, and because of the jumbled circumstances in which movies survive, with knowledge of them acquired in haphazard fashion from television, and from screenings here and there, film enthusiasts find it simpler to explain movies in terms of the genius-artist-director, the schoolbook hero—the man who did it all. Those who admire Citizen Kane, which is constructed to present different perspectives on a man’s life, seem naïvely willing to accept Welles’s view of its making; namely, that it was his sole creation.

        Howard Hawks must wonder what the admiration of the young is worth when he learns from them that he invented overlapping dialogue in His Girl Friday, since it means that they have never bothered to look at the text of the original Hecht and MacArthur play. Welles, too, has been said to have invented overlapping dialogue, and just about everything else in Kane. But unearned praise is insulting, and a burden; Welles sometimes says, “I drag my myth around with me.” His true achievements are heavy enough to weigh him down. Welles is a great figure in motion-picture history: he directed what is almost universally acclaimed as the greatest American film of the sound era; he might have become the greatest all-around American director of that era; and in his inability to realize all his artistic potentialities he is the greatest symbolic figure in American film history since Griffith.

Sidenote: this was also something of a swipe at the writing of  Peter Bogdanovich. Perhaps not coincidentally,  Bogdanovich has since engaged in a decades-long effort to discredit Kael and this essay. See here and here for examples.

Billionaires in Sweden?

Matt Yglesias has a "must read" article on why does Sweden, home of cuddly socialism, have so many billionaires.  In some ways the cuddly socialism makes it possible to have a much more vicious market economy.  Putting people out of work in the name of efficiency is far less resisted if there are assurances that they will still end up with food, shelter, and health care.

But there is another argument that I want to focus on.

This reality cuts against a recent critique of the Nordic social model from Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Thierry Verdier that was popular in right-of-center circles. The authors contrasted American-style cutthroat capitalism with Nordic-style cuddly capitalism as two social systems that are compatible with high levels of GDP per capita. The cuddly Nordic system might be better for human welfare, they said, but the American system is better for the world. Their reasoning was that high levels of inequality create financial incentives for innovation; cuddlier nations don’t have those incentives. The authors test this rather schematic model empirically by showing that the U.S. files more patents per capita than any of the egalitarian Nordic countries.

Now followers of this blog will know that we consider the patents-innovation link to be nonsense.  It is as much a matter of the legal structure of the country in question as it is a marker for innovation (and excessive patents create more opportunities for lawsuits, which rarely improve corporate performance). 

But the real tricky piece is calling the American system "better for the world".  I grow tired of argument, offered without exceedingly strong proof, that current business practice just happens to be all about altruism.  After all, the current system also happens to be shifting a lot of wealth into a fairly narrow social class.  Is that also all about altruism?  Or, like Sweden, is it about having a tournament system of business rewards? 

The real question is about the counter-factual.  Would a cuddly form of capitalism really result in less innovation overall? 

Now it is possible that Sweden (and other Nordic countries) have unique advantages that may not be replicated elsewhere.  But let's engage that argument directly, rather than resort to appeals to "we suffer for the sake of everyone" type red herrings. 

Moral underpinnings of income

John Sides brings up something that has long puzzled me:

But, unlike with programs that do provide direct subsidies, most Americans do not think of tax credits as government benefits.  Mettler’s data shows that 60 percent of people who claim the mortgage interest deduction say they “have not used a government social program.”  The same is true for those who claim tax credits for child and dependent care or the Earned Income Tax Credit, or who pay into a 529 savings program for their children’s education.

Reducing income is equivalent to increasing expenses from a balance line point of view.  It is true that there is a difference if one presumes that salaries and income streams are a morally just allocation of resources.  But that is a very strong assumption that has a number of key issues involved.  Is robbing a bank a morally just sources of income?  What about managing a pension fund in a way that maximizes fee revenue?  Or writing a hit song in a market with limited media outlets?

When you look closely, a lot of sources of income depend partially on a socially agreed upon framework where laws decide what is or is not a just income.  So the distribution of resources is no more morally just than the laws themselves.  And one rapidly runs into a odd problems if (changeable) laws reflect underlying moral worth.

Now I tend to be pragmatic.  Rewarding hard work and the exercise of talent is a really important social goal.  So it is good that there is a distribution of income, insofar as it encourages the socially desirable outcome of more resources and a better world for all involved.  Things like a stable currency and a court system are needed for a modern society to function.

So the mortgage tax deduction is a government program, as clearly as being mailed a check by the government. It's just a difference in how the accounting is done.

Beware of shifting standards -- more fun with the Netflix narrative

This is another example of the Netflix narrative and press release journalism, but I probably would have flagged this even without those connections simply because it nicely illustrates one of the classic warning signs to look for in stories about numbers.

Here's the headline I saw on a Netflix via a Yahoo link.

Netflix tops 40 million customers total, more paid US subscribers than HBO

Do you notice anything funny? Check out the first part "40 million customers total" and compare it to "more paid US subscribers." Why shift from total to US mid-headline?

Maybe following the link will clear things up:

Netflix's results for the third quarter have arrived and one of its most important numbers, the total amount of US subscribers (not including trial accounts), has reached 29.93 million, more than HBO's last count of 28.7 million. Last year at this time it had notched 25.1 million US customers, and including trial subscribers it passed HBO's US customer base back in April. Internationally it's up to 9.19 million subscribers and is anticipating that it will add more than three million customers total in the next quarter. New original series Orange is the New Black has been a hit and while Netflix still isn't releasing viewing numbers, it says the show will end the year "as our most watched original series ever." Yes, bigger than House of Cards.

I'm a bit confused as to how that 'tops' 40 million (29.93 + 9.19 > 40?), but that's not relevant to this conversation, nor is the fact that, since we have no idea how many people watched House of Cards (Netflix is notoriously closed-mouthed on the subject), knowing that Orange beat it doesn't tell us that much.

What is relevant here is that this is very much a Netflix = HBO2.0 story and that it uses both the worldwide total for Netflix and the small US advantage over HBO to make its case. That leads to the obvious question, how does Netflix compare to HBO worldwide?

Thanks to Wikipedia, we know the answer is "not that well."

HBO also broadcasts in at least 151 countries covering approximately 114 million subscribers worldwide.

Of course, all of the usual caveats apply -- Netflix is a good service. NFLX may still be a bargain at $350 a share. -- but when it comes to the coverage, we still don't have a fact-based narratives.(though we do sometimes have narrative-based facts).