November 30, 2011
Reason.tv: California vs. The Feds on medical marijuana
Is “innovation” today’s buzzword equivalent of “excellence”
Stephen Gordon thinks that the term “innovation” is well on the way to being just another way of saying “corporate handout”:
The theory of economic growth includes roles for such well-defined concepts as investment, human capital, research and development, productivity, and technical progress. I don’t know where innovation fits into this. My guess would have been that innovation is another name for R&D, but apparently there’s an ineffable distinction between innovation and R&D.
There are well-known policy instruments at the government’s disposal for increasing investment in human and physical capital and for increasing R&D activities. (Their relative effectiveness is another question.) But so far, the only proposals I’ve seen for an innovation policy consist of programs in which governments give money to deserving firms. This is problematic on a couple fronts.
Firstly, there are already many — too many — ‘economic development’ programs whose purpose is to channel public money to companies that enjoy the favour of the government. It’s hard to believe we need more of them.
Vikings place four more players on injured reserve
Cullen Loeffler was expected to be placed on the injured reserve list, after sustaining a second injury in Sunday’s game that can take up to six weeks to heal. His replacement was signed by the Vikings yesterday. The other players going to the IR list were less anticipated:
The downward spiral continues at Winter Park.
If it seemed things couldn’t get much worse for the Vikings, who are off to a 2-9 start and threatening to become the worst team in franchise history, they’ll now enter the final month with four key contributors lost for the season.
On Tuesday, a quartet of starters — receiver Michael Jenkins, long snapper Cullen Loeffler and safeties Husain Abdullah and Tyrell Johnson — were all placed on injured reserve, another major gut punch to a team that is sinking fast.
To fill the holes, the Vikings re-signed receiver Stephen Burton to the active roster and also agreed to terms with long-snapper Matt Katula and safeties Jarrad Page and Andrew Sendejo.
The loss of Jenkins registers as the most surprising news. The eight-year receiver, who had 38 catches for 466 yards and three touchdowns this season, suffered a knee injury at some point during Sunday’s 24-14 loss in Atlanta.
In other news, you can tell when your team is just playing out the string when both the fanbase and the professionals start talking about draft prospects with five games left in the regular season.
November 29, 2011
Comparing the Tea Party and Occupy movements
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.
Stephen Gordon: Governments should favour consumers over producers
In his latest post at the Globe & Mail‘s Economy Lab, Stephen Gordon points out that governments get the entire prosperity thing wrong:
The next time a political party vows to defend the interests of the producers in a certain industry, you should ask why it isn’t choosing to defend the interests of consumers instead. Because the contribution of an industry to the public good is not its ability to provide large incomes to those who work there; it is its ability to produce things that people want to buy.
Business groups may give lip-service to the benefits of competitive markets, but their heart isn’t in it; they know that their real interests are best served by providing reduced output at high prices. And that’s exactly what we get whenever governments set policy in order to benefit producers: see, for example, our dairy industry.
The motives of producers who call for special treatment in the name of consumer protection are equally suspect. Producers are not in business for their health, and they definitely are not in it for your health. So when producers call for regulations in the name of protecting consumers, you can generally assume that the real and intended effect is to exclude potential competitors: see, for example, our dairy industry.
Megan McArdle: Barney Frank will be missed
Yeah, read that title again. She’s not kidding at all:
Guess which Democrat now becomes the ranking member on the financial services committee? That’s right, none other than our favorite batty aunt, Maxine Waters. The woman who, during a major hearing with the cameras on her, asked the heads of Goldman Sachs and State Street bizarre questions about how they set the limits on their consumer credit cards*. She asked Ken Lewis, the head of Bank of America, a question about “offshore loss mitigation caps” (a term of which I — and also, clearly, Ken Lewis — had never heard) that was so bizarre — and garbled — that he was flummoxed into silence; he sat there squirming like a third grader being picked on by the teacher.
When he finally got the courage to ask what she meant, it became clear that Maxine Waters had no idea what she meant; I assume she’d either taken hasty and incomplete notes when her staffers briefed her about what to ask, or had flubbed reading the question, and couldn’t bring herself to admit on C-SPAN that she hadn’t really bothered preparing for the hearing to the extent, of, say, familiarizing herself with the institutions whose heads she was grilling, or actually bothering to understand the questions she was going to ask. It was kind of hilarious, until you realized that this was her job, and that she voted on critical financial regulatory questions.
Nor is this an isolated pattern; every time I see Maxine Waters at a hearing I know that the questions are going to be bizarre, and that Congresswoman Waters will make them even stranger with garbled readings and off-topic follow-ups.
* If I actually have to tell you this, these financial institutions do not really deal with consumers, much less their credit cards. I’m not picking on you — you have an excuse. You’re not a member of the financial services committee.
European democracy is now “the preserve of right-wing populism”
Frank Furedi on the urge to omit democracy from European government:
Over the past month, it has become clear that the European Union doesn’t simply suffer from a democratic deficit; rather, it has decided that in the current climate of crisis and uncertainty, the institutions of government must be insulated and protected from public pressure. In Brussels, and among an influential coterie of European opinion-makers, the idea that ordinary people have the capacity to self-govern is dismissed as at best a naive prejudice, and at worst a marker for right-wing populism.
As we shall see, this desire to renounce the politics of representation is by no means confined to EU technocrats. To no one’s surprise, many businesspeople and bankers also prefer the new unelected governments of Greece and Italy to regimes that are accountable to their electorates. And such elitist disdain for nations’ democratic representative institutions is also shared by sections of the left and the intelligentsia, too. So in his contribution on the crisis of democracy, Jürgen Habermas, the leading leftist German philosopher, writes off national electorates as ‘the preserve of right-wing populism’ and condemns them as ‘the caricature of national macrosubjects shutting themselves off from each other’.
Indeed, it isn’t the old-fashioned conservative detractors of the multitude who are at the forefront of the current cultural turn against democratic will-formation — no, it is liberal advocates of expert-driven technocratic rule who are now the most explicit denouncers of democracy. The current political attack on the principles of representative democracy is founded on three propositions. First it is claimed that the people cannot be trusted to support policies that are necessary for the preservation and improvement of society. Secondly, it is suggested that there is an important trade-off to be made between democracy and efficiency, and that in a time of crisis the latter must prevail over the former. And finally, anti-democratic ideologues believe that governments, especially democratic governments, have lost the capacity to deal with the key problems facing societies in today’s globalised world.
NFL week 12 results
Ugh. After a great start on Thursday, Sunday was grim (against the spread, anyway). I’m dropping like a stone in the AoSHQ pool, down to 30th spot after this weekend.
Thursday’s games: 3-0 (2-1 against the spread)
√ Green Bay 27 @Detroit 15
√ @Dallas 20 Miami 19
√ @Baltimore 16 San Francisco 6
Sunday’s games:
∅ @Atlanta 24 Minnesota 14
√ @Cincinnati 23 Cleveland 20
∅ @Tennessee 23Tampa Bay 17
√ Carolina 27 @Indianapolis 19
∅ @St. Louis 20 Arizona 23
√ @New York (NYJ) 28 Buffalo 24
√ Houston 20 @Jacksonville 13
∅ @Oakland 25 Chicago 20
∅ @Seattle 17 Washington 23
√ @Philadelphia 20 New England 38
∅ @San Diego 13 Denver 16
√ Pittsburgh 13 @Kansas City 9
√ @New Orleans 49 New York (NYG) 24
Sunday’s games: 7-6 (3-10 against the spread)
Season to date 106-70
Oh, the jarmanity!
The Reg reports a terrible traffic accident in Yorkshire:
A flood of yeast extract has blocked the M1 motorway in South Yorkshire after a truck containing the Marmite ingredient crashed and spilled its load.
The road is still closed this morning, according to the latest traffic information, as cleanup workers scoop 23.2 tonnes of the gloopy brown stuff off the road surface.
[. . .]
The dumped yeast extract was described as “waste” by the BBC, so is highly unlikely to now end up in Marmite jars.
Left uncleaned, the vitamin-rich syrup, packed with denatured yeast cells, could cause a minor biohazard as it is highly nutritious to bacteria cultures.
November 28, 2011
“Newt may be a poor fit for the role of ‘anti-Romney,’ but … he knows how to play the Washington Game”
Gene Healy isn’t a fan of Newt Gingrich as the GOP nominee:
Has it really come to this? Newt Gingrich as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney? That’s what many in the punditocracy have proclaimed as the former speaker of the House has surged recently in the polls.
Yet a look at his record reveals that Newt is hardly the “anti-Mitt” — he’s Mitt Romney with more baggage and bolder hand gestures.
Every Gingrich profile proclaims that he’s a dazzling “ideas man,” a “one-man think tank.” It seems that, if you clamor long enough about “big ideas,” people become convinced you actually have them.
But most of Gingrich’s policy ideas over the last decade have been tepidly conventional and consistent with the Big Government, Beltway Consensus.
Gingrich’s campaign nearly imploded this summer when he dismissed Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., Medicare reform plan as “right-wing social engineering.” But that gaffe was a window into Gingrich’s irresponsible approach toward entitlements.
In 2003, Gingrich stumped hard for President George W. Bush’s prescription drug bill, which has added about $17 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. “Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill,” Newt urged.
And in his 2008 book Real Change, he endorsed an individual mandate for health insurance.
In the same way that we now know that “Santorum” is also the name of an obscure US politician, we are reminded that, back in the 1990s, “Gingrich” wasn’t just the word for the dog turd you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.
Who won the War of 1812?
According to an American historian quoted in the National Post, Canada won:
In a relatively rare admission for an American scholar, a leading U.S. historian who authored a provocative new tome about North American military conflicts states bluntly that Canada won the War of 1812.
Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot Cohen, a senior adviser to former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, writes in his just-published book Conquered Into Liberty that, “ultimately, Canada and Canadians won the War of 1812.”
And Cohen acknowledges that, “Americans at the time, and, by and large, since, did not see matters that way.”
The book also echoes a key message trumpeted by the federal Conservative government in recent weeks as it unveiled ambitious plans to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 over the next three years: that the successful fight by British, English- and French-Canadian and First Nations allies to resist would-be American conquerors — at battles such as Queenston Heights in Upper Canada and Chateauguay in Lower Canada — set the stage for the creation of a unified and independent Canada a half-century later.
“If the conquest of (Canada) had not been an American objective when the war began, it surely had become such shortly after it opened,” Cohen argues in the book. “Not only did the colony remain intact: It had acquired heroes, British and French, and a narrative of plucky defense against foreign invasion, that helped carry it to nationhood.”
Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories
This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:
So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)
1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.
Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).
So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …
2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.
Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.
That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.
The real reason the German bond auction failed
Tyler Cowen explains:
If Germany and a few other, smaller AAA countries were to guarantee or monetize the debts of Italy, Spain, and possibly France and Belgium, never mind Greece and Portugal, Germany would not be AAA itself. The German median voter has very little interest in guaranteeing the above-mentioned debts. If German yields are flipping upwards, it is, in my view, because investors now see the whole euro deal as unraveling and don’t want to deal with the complexities and flak. A big chunk of the German auction didn’t sell at all. You don’t have to think that Germany is ripe to default to see that markets are warning Germany not to take on the whole burden.
The only remaining question, if Germany isn’t willing to take on the entire burden of European debt, is when will the whole edifice come crashing down and who’ll manage not to be crushed by falling debris.
Megan McArdle reviews some recent scolding books on thrift
Megan McArdle admits right up front that she recently splurged on a very spendy kitchen appliance, so you know she does not number herself among the community of scolds on the topic of thrift:
For decades, Americans have wallowed in credit, shunned savings and delighted in debt. In 1982, the personal savings rate was 10.9% of disposable income, by 2005 it had fallen to just 1.5%. It has since rebounded, but remains a measly 5%.
All this profligacy supports a rather vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism. Authors as varied as the economist Robert H. Frank (1999’s “Luxury Fever”) and the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (2007’s “Consumed”) have ganged up on what they see as the particularly unequal and excessive American spending habits. Unsurprisingly considering their abhorrence of waste, they are avid recyclers; the same arguments, behavioral economics studies and anecdotes appear time and time again. Access to credit makes consumers overspend. Materialistic people are anxious and unhappy. The conspicuous-consumption arms race is unwinnable. Down with status competition! Down with long work weeks, grueling commutes and McMansions! Up with family time, reading and walkable neighborhoods! The effect is rather like strolling down the main tourist strip in a beach town: Each merchant rushes out of his shop, gesticulating wildly and showing you exactly the same thing that you saw at all the previous stores.
The latest person to open up shop on this boardwalk is Baylor marketing professor James A. Roberts. “Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy” runs mostly true to form, its main innovation being to add financial self-help advice to the usual lectures. The book includes not only exhortations but actual instructions—how to make a budget, get out of debt and save for retirement.
It’s a thorough survey of both academic research on consumerism and basic finance advice. Still, I first ran into an argument I hadn’t seen before somewhere around page 200 — that the perfect surfaces of modern products hasten the replacement cycle because they show wear so badly — and well before then Mr. Roberts had fallen into some of the terrible habits of the genre. Though less openly contemptuous of the spendthrift masses than many of his fellow scolds, he still exudes that particular sanctimonious anti-materialism so often found among modestly remunerated professors and journalists.
Here are some of the things that upset him and that “document our preoccupation with status consumption”: Lucky Jeans, bling, Hummers, iPhones, 52-inch plasma televisions, purebred lapdogs, McMansions, expensive rims for your tires, couture, Gulfstream jets and Abercrombie & Fitch. This is a fairly accurate list of the aspirational consumption patterns of a class of folks that my Upper West Side neighbors used to refer to as “these people,” usually while discussing their voting habits or taste in talk radio. As with most such books, considerably less space is devoted to the extravagant excesses of European travel, arts-enrichment programs or collecting first editions.
