Quotulatiousness

October 2, 2012

The Baby Boomers are turning into the New Victorians

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:20

As usual, Gregg Easterbrook manages to squeeze in lots of non-football items into his weekly NFL column:

The entertaining aspect of the fizzled Newt Gingrich presidential campaign was that Gingrich still blames the 1960s for everything. The 1960s were half a century ago. In the year 2012, blaming the 1960s makes about as much sense as someone during the 1960s blaming events on the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet.

Since Gingrich put the 1960s into play, note that during that decade the mainstream media advocated what was then called “free love,” and looked down with scorn upon those who backed traditional views of marriage and lovemaking. Yet today when people engage in free love, graying Boomers who run the MSM get all squeamish.

Here, The New York Times treats as shocking that an unmarried yoga instructor had “a penchant for women” and liked “partying and fun.” Man likes women — arrest him! The unmarried instructor faces “accusations of sexual impropriety,” which means “yoga’s enlightened façade” is tainted by “scandal.” And the scandal is what? That unmarried adults are having consensual sex. This “penchant” must be stopped — it can lead to fun.

Worse, yoga can “promote sexual arousal” by causing “emotional closeness” that leads to “increased blood flow” which makes “pelvic regions more sensitive,” resulting in “debauchery.” Who wrote this, Queen Victoria?

All news organizations, including ESPN, sometimes publish ill-thought-through articles. What’s compelling about this one is the sociological change reflected. When they were young, the Baby Boomers who now run big news organizations extolled free love and mocked the older generation’s conventional expectations about sexuality. Now that the Boomers have aged and are not getting any themselves, they evince shock that younger people are fooling around.

Why (some) business experience is valuable for politicians

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Megan McArdle writes about the worsening problem of government officials who have never spent any time in the business world, but have huge power over the business environment:

Of course, we’ve had many good presidents with no business experience. But Obama’s whole administration tends to be light on people from outside the academia — NGO — government triangle. It’s something that’s increasingly true of Washington in general — and, I think, increasingly problematic.

[. . .]

The increasingly mandarin elite, hygienically removed from the grubby business of scrounging for customers, frequently seems to have no idea at all what goes on in companies. Stop grinning, Republicans; I mean you too. Yes, too many liberals seem to believe that all infelicitous market outcomes can be cured by appointing a commission composed of really top-notch academics — during the debate over health care reform, the words “peer reviewed study” were invoked by supporters with no less touching a faith than an Italian grandmother performing a rosary for the salvation of the godless Communists. On the other hand, here comes the GOP claiming that entrepreneurship can be started or stopped with small changes in marginal tax rates, as if one were turning on and off a light. This is no less of a technocratic fallacy, even if, as with many technocratic fallacies, there is a grain of sound theory buried somewhere under that towering mountain of unwarranted assumptions.

The result is that companies usually get treated as a rather simple variable in a model rather than the complex organizations they are. For example, you see people reasoning from corporate behavior to efficacy: if fast food companies spend a lot of money on advertising, then said advertising must make kids eat more fast food; if hiring managers demand a college degree for positions that didn’t used to require one, there must be a good business reason. “They wouldn’t do it,” says the argument, “if it didn’t work.”

If you’ve actually worked at a company, this is a ludicrous statement. Companies do stuff that doesn’t work all the time, and it can take decades to unwind even the stupidest expenditures and rules. More importantly, when they do have good reasons, they are often not the reasons that outsiders think. The elite projects their own concerns onto the company, instead of asking the company what it’s worried about.

[. . .]

The flip side of this is the people who think that companies don’t do anything at all that couldn’t be done better by government or academia … except sit back and rake the money in. This is particularly prevalent in discussions of health care, but it frequently pops up elsewhere. My favorite in this genre is Jerry Avorn, the professor of pharmacoeconomics who told Ezra Klein that we didn’t really need drug companies because now academics with good drug prospects could simply go straight to the capital markets and raise money to fund their own projects.

This is simply breathtakingly wrong. For one thing, venture capitalists want an exit strategy before they will put money in, and in biotech, exit is often a sale to a big pharmaceutical firm; no Big Pharma, no VC funds. And second, few newly hatched biotech firms have the complementary capacities to bring a drug to market by themselves. Forget the sales force; I’m talking about the expertise to get the thing through the FDA approval process and produce it in massive quantities. How do they acquire those capacities? They partner with Big Pharma, or license to them.

Making a case to abolish the patent system

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick summarizes a recent study of the benefits and drawbacks of the current patent system:

Over at The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann has a great article covering the latest paper from economists Michele Boldrin and David Levine […], which argues why it might make sense to abolish the patent system entirely, even while admitting that patents may have some benefits in some cases. You can read the full paper here (pdf) where it makes “the case against patents.” While this may sound similar to Boldrin and Levine’s earlier works, this one goes further, and is definitely worth the read. In effect, they argue that not only do patents rarely help innovation, but, even worse, the existence of patents (even where they help) will only lead to the system being expanded to where they do more harm than good:

    The initial eruption of small and large innovations leading to the creation of a new industry — from chemicals to cars, from radio and TV to personal computers and investment banking — is seldom, if ever, born out of patent protection and is, instead, the fruits of highly competitive-cooperative environments. It is only after the initial stages of explosive innovation and rampant growth end that mature industries turn toward the legal protection of patents, usually because their internal grow potential diminishes and the industry structure become concentrated.

    A closer look at the historical and international evidence suggests that while weak patent systems may mildly increase innovation with limited side-effects, strong patent systems retard innovation with many negative side-effects. Both theoretically and empirically, the political economy of government operated patent systems indicates that weak legislation will generally evolve into a strong protection and that the political demand for stronger patent protection comes from old and stagnant industries and firms, not from new and innovative ones. Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely through strong constitutional measures and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent-seeking, to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it.

Warship spending then and now

Filed under: History, Military, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:39

An article at Strategy Page looks at the much-higher cost of modern weapons systems and compares a few modern items to their historical predecessors. An eye-opening example is the comparison of a battleship to a modern US Navy destroyer:

A new U.S. destroyer design, the DDG-1000, displaces 14,000 tons, is 193.5 meters (600 feet) long and 25.5 meters (79 feet) wide. A crew of 150 sailors operates a variety of weapons, including two 155mm guns, two 40mm automatic cannon for close in defense, 80 Vertical Launch Tubes (containing either anti-ship, cruise or anti-aircraft missiles), six torpedo tubes, a helicopter and three helicopter UAVs. The DDG-1000 was to cost $2 billion each, but it has been cut back to just three ships, which drives the cost up to $6 billion each.

A century ago, a Mississippi class battleship displaced 14,400 tons, was 123.2 meters (382 feet) long and 24.8 meters (77 feet) wide. Adjusted for inflation, it cost $150 million. A crew of 800 operated a variety of weapons, including four 12 inch (300mm), eight 8 inch (200mm), eight 7 inch (177mm), twelve 3 inch (76mm), twelve 47mm and four 37mm guns, plus four 7.62mm machine-guns. There were also four torpedo tubes. The Mississippi had a top speed of 31 kilometers an hour, versus 54 for DDG-1000. But the Mississippi had one thing DDG-1000 lacked, armor. Along the side there was a belt of 226mm (9 inch) armor and the main turrets had 300mm (12 inch) thick armor. The Mississippi had radio, but the DDG-1000 has radio, GPS, sonar, radar and electronic warfare equipment.

Each of the three DDG-1000’s being built cost 40 times more than the two Mississippi class battleships. Is the DDG-1000 40 times more effective? The DDG-1000 would make quick work of the Mississippi, spotting the slower battleship by radar or helicopter, and dispatching her with a few missiles. The Mississippi’s 12 inch guns had a maximum range of 18 kilometers, versus 130 kilometers for the Harpoon anti-ship missile. There has always been some debate if modern anti-ship missiles could really take down a battleship, what with all that armor and plenty of sailors for damage control work. The USS Mississippi ended its career in the Greek navy, and was sunk by German aircraft in 1941. Many battleships have been sunk, usually by bombs and torpedoes delivered by aircraft.

Although the last two American World War II era battleships were only sold off six years ago, battleship advocates keep coming with ways to revive these massive (45,000 ton) armored ships. The boldest proposals had most of the World War II era mechanical equipment and replaced with gas turbine engines and modern generators and electronics. This would reduce crew size from 2,700 to 600. But what really killed the battleship was the smart bomb, especially the GPS guided ones. The 16 inch battleship guns could not match this accuracy, unless a GPS guided shell were developed (a major cost). What really killed the battleship was massive innovation.

The DDG-1000 is still “pre” whatever the next dominant type of warship will be. But it’s ironic that a hundred years later, the descendent of the 14,000 ton Mississippi is a 14,000 ton surface ship that has more firepower, a longer reach and the ability to see targets hundreds of kilometers away, and is called a destroyer. And what kind of destroyers escorted the Mississippi? They were ships of under a thousand tons displacement, with crews of about a hundred sailors. Armed with a few 3 inch guns and some torpedoes, no one at the time expected them to evolve into a 14,000 ton warship.


USS Mississippi (BB-23), from the Wikipedia entry


Artist’s conception of the DDG-1000 class lead ship USS Zumwalt. Full-size image at Defence Industry Daily.

Eric Hobsbawm is about to be beatified as “the most celebrated British historian of the 20th century”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

Michael Burleigh on the recently deceased — and totally unrepentant Communist — Eric Hobsbawm:

I can almost hear the wave of mourning that is about to fix Hobsbawm in the public consciousness as “the most celebrated British historian of the 20th century”. You have to understand the British Left, which is still near hegemonic in the humanities and social science departments in our universities, to grasp why those of a more liberal conservative persuasion will disagree.

First there is the tendency to worship at the feet of foreign gurus, a failing George Orwell (or as Hobsbawm had it, the “upper-class Englishman Eric Blair”) attributed to Britain’s alienated intellectuals taking “their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow”. This led them to give credibility to such evanescent charlatans as Michel Foucault, the chief exponent of “knowledge as power”, and the Palestinian activist and literary critic Edward Said.

[. . .]

Throughout, there was a dogmatic refusal to accept that the Bolshevik Revolution had been a murderous failure. Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR — not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward — might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.

Everything Hobsbawm wrote deceitfully downplayed the grim role of the Communists in Spain in the Thirties or the forcible nature of the coups the Soviets carried out in Eastern Europe after 1945. Such a cosmopolitan thinker had ironically become imprisoned within a deeply provincial ideological ghetto, knowing or caring nothing for the brave Czechs or Poles who resisted Stalin’s stooges, while being manifestly nonplussed by the democratic transformations of Central Europe since 1989-90. That the secret police — the Sword and Shield of the Revolution — would end up running Vladimir Putin’s FSB-mafia state was literally inexplicable to him.

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