tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10841447033515480822024-03-19T00:01:30.262-05:00AndrocassA discussion of today from a place of truth (or as close as I can get)Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.comBlogger755125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-44802963230397705742018-07-14T19:53:00.000-05:002018-07-14T19:53:05.028-05:00Is this mike on? Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3...What, Androcass, are you back?<br />
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Probably not, but I thought I'd put up a post just to remind the world that I'm still here. Let the indifference begin.Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-3271490979692745892010-03-06T17:26:00.003-06:002010-03-06T17:27:53.508-06:00A few more...<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">observations about the Winter Olympics, in particular NBC's coverage of it, before the whole thing retreats from our memories.<br /><br />° Most of my most ardent feelings come from figure skating, because that's the winter sport I've followed the most closely. My brother and I used to watch it with our mother, and now I watch with my wife. When I <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2010/02/there-is-in-olympics.html">refer</a> to the broadcast team of Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic as a "train wreck," I do so based on some decades of watching figure skating.<br /><br />I don't have the same points of reference for other winter sports. I really enjoy the biathlon because of its juxtaposition of cross-country skiing (a sport which, as a marathon runner, I can relate to) and shooting (which I can't relate to at all). To me it's like running as hard as I can for 15 minutes, then stopping to thread five needles as fast as possible, then running some more. (I also have to admit to a fondness for sports that are abstracted out of real things. One can see where the biathlon simulates something a soldier might have to do. Similarly, I have a great affection for modern pentathlon. Until figure skaters can shoot lasers out of their sequins, it's difficult to find the real activity there.)<br /><br />But I don't "get" biathlon well enough to determine whether NBC's Chad Salmela is doing a good job. There's no obvious screeching about the mundane, no crying, and a reasonable amount of information (most of it about ski wax), so I'd guess he's doing OK. But I'm not really sure.<br /><br />With skating, however, I know enough to know that we're being poorly served by the current analysts. Bezic and Hamilton offer almost nothing in the way of insight; it's just their emotions spilling out the airwaves, and I'm honestly not very interested in how they feel about things. As I <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2010/02/there-is-in-olympics.html">wrote before</a>, I want either information to help me understand the event better, or a sense of what it is to be there experiencing it for myself. I get neither from the screaming and the crying and the rampant self-indulgence.<br /><br />The saddest thing is that NBC has better people on staff. Tom Hammond, a generally competent play-by-play guy in many sports, sinks to the level of his co-commentators. He could easily be replaced by Andrea Joyce (who's done a fine understated job hosting the Grand Prix events televised on NBC's <a href="http://www.universalsports.com/">Universal Sports</a>) or Terry Gannon (who did figure skating for 14 years on ABC, understands the sport, and knows a lot of the players).<br /><br />The Universal Sports coverage has been illuminating, as we have heard Joyce working with a few different color commentators, each of whom has surpassed Bezic or Hamilton. I only caught Michael Weiss once, but he, while unpolished, did a nice job and shows real potential. Paul Wylie gives a nice analytical look at what's going on. And Peter Carruthers, Joyce's most frequent partner, has become quite good. (Just a few years ago, he wasn't particularly good at all, talking way too much about a skater's "lack of concentration," but he's rounded into someone who can emphasize the important aspects of a routine without hyperbole or <a href="http://tv.gawker.com/5481409/figure-skating-makes-scott-hamilton-orgasm?skyline=true&s=i">Hamilton-esque screaming</a>.) Any of them would be better choices than Bezic/Hamilton.<br /><br />º A lot has been made about the new skating scoring system. Very simply, they replaced a system in which each judge gave a mark for technical execution and another for artistry, with a system in which each element (jump, spin, step sequence) gets a value, then is judged as +3 to -3, and includes five presentation areas for which scores are given a 0 to 10 ranking. There are various weights given, the numbers are added together, and the score rolls out. (A more detailed treatment can be found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISU_Judging_System">here</a>.)<br /><br />[A word about the usual description of the system. It's often termed "mathematically complex." It's not. The system is based on multiplication and addition, and any reasonably smart 4th-grader could handle its complexity. What's complex is how the numbers are arrived at, and the motivation behind the calculations.]<br /><br />What's odd is that they took a system which was faulted for a lack of accountability and transparency and replaced it with a system that has almost none of either. The scores that are used are not identified by judge, and the numbers they put down seem arbitrary.<br /><br />The system does, however, replace two numbers per judge with a whole lot of numbers per judge, and demonstrates what I like to call the "false certainty of more data." Anyone who has seen a work performance evaluation system in which there are weights and measurements and defined criteria, all of which are used to come up with one number that reflects an employee's performance for the year, knows what I'm talking about. Each skater ends up with a whole bunch of numbers to look at, but that specificity doesn't imply greater accuracy. Any judge can still show systematic bias; instead of being clear ("The Russian judge only gave 5.2?"), that bias is buried under a mass of GOEs and base values and factors, but it can still easily be there.<br /><br />º There was a lot made about the "world record" performance of Kim Yu-Na in winning the ladies' gold medal. Unfortunately, the code of points changes each year, the required elements change, and so forth. World records, national records, personal bests, all are meaningless within a system that revamps its rules each year. It's as if high jump records were kept, but the length of an inch changed each year. The records would be irrelevant, just as they are today in figure skating.<br /><br />º Also in figure skating - there were some comments on the under-rotation of jumps, especially when it turned out that US hopeful Rachael Flatt had been marked down twice in her long program for failure to complete her triple flip. Bezic and Hamilton were indignant, arguing that the judges were "tough" on Flatt (indignation which seemed to come mostly from their inability to see it).<br /><br />Here's the rule: if, upon slow-motion review, it is decided that the skater was more than a quarter-turn away from completing a revolution, the skater gets credit for the next smaller jump (a triple loop becomes a double loop, for example). The points are correspondingly less, so the skater will not score as high.<br /><br />This debate is ludicrous. My feeling is that there shouldn't even be a quarter-turn leeway. If you complete three revolutions (not 2-3/4), you've done a triple. Anything less, it's a double. It's the only way figure skating can be considered a sport, not a dance on ice. There's no "almost" clause in any other real sport.<br /><br />º Listening to NBC's coverage, one would think there was a new nation called "North America." Especially as the first week full of United States success gave way to a second week dominated by Canadian gold, there seemed to be a push to appropriate Canada's victories as, somehow, ours. This was particularly true in the ice dancing final, as a lot was made of the "first gold medal in ice dance earned by a North American team."<br /><br />It may be noteworthy that Russia lost what was once a lock for a gold medal (only two exceptions, 1984 and 2002, versus 7 golds for various incarnations of Russia), but it isn't clear that "North America" has finally found the magic. The gold and silver medal-winning teams were coached by skaters who came up in the Soviet system, so it's not as if we've found some kind of capitalist magic. It hardly constituted a "Miracle on Ice."<br /><br />And it isn't clear at all that, NBC notwithstanding, we in the 50 states should take a huge amount of pride in the victories of a non-entity called "North America."<br /><br />º In general, I think that many of the problems NBC has in covering the Games is their omnipresent hope of finding a transcendent moment. We're supposed to believe that these athletes come to the Olympics and do the impossible (and NBC's there to capture it for us). Michael Phelps wins 8 gold medals in swimming and, despite the essentially repetitive nature of what he's doing, is instantly touted as the <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2008/08/phelps-greatest.html">greatest Olympian of all time</a>. Usain Bolt sets sprinting world records - because he happens to do it at the Olympics, he's an instant immortal.<br /><br />In most cases, however, success comes as a result of long hours of mastering skills. Evan Lysacek wins an Olympic gold not by transcending human performance, but by strategically simplifying his program (by omitting an attempt at a quad jump) and executing it in a way he has hundreds of times before. You can respect his ability to perform under the exaggerated pressure of an Olympics, but you can't argue that he's doing something unprecedented. The same is true of pretty much every sport. Biathlon is impressive, but success is the result of untold hours of hard training and genetic fortune, not in willing one's self to ski faster and shoot better simply because it's the Olympics.<br /><br />This is where commentators get themselves into trouble. Scott Hamilton (yes, him again) is fond of talking about "muscle memory," in which a skater does something almost automatically because they've trained the move again and again in practice. But, if that's true, then what accounts for Scotty's ecstasy at the landing of a "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOOOOE! Ohhhhhhh!" combination? These athletes do that every day, it just isn't that amazing.<br /><br />Which brings us to Joannie Rochette (whose case I've already <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2010/02/there-is-in-olympics.html">commented on</a>). Her mother passed away two days before Joannie was to start competing, and NBC treated it like the most remarkable thing possible. How can she possibly skate? How can she go out there?<br /><br />Here's how. She's done these routines many times. She's jumping and spinning using her "muscle memory," so her performance does not depend on being in the right frame of mind. If anything, her two routines constituted seven minutes in which she didn't have to think about her mother. It's NBC which needs to portray her performances as impossible.<br /><br />I don't mean to minimize Joannie's pain. I lost my mother a few years ago; while we had an oft-contentious relationship, the pain I felt was still real. And now Joannie has to go through that, and, despite its being something most of us have to deal with eventually, I wish she didn't.<br /><br />But we shouldn't ignore the context. Had she dropped out of the Olympics, no one would have blamed her, but NBC would at best have treated it as a footnote and moved on. Joannie would not have received thousands of texts and messages of support, she would not have become the icon of the Olympic spirit (and, of course, not been overscored in her long program). I'd suggest we take a moment and consider the kind of coverage an Estonian biathlete would have received in the same circumstance: pretty much none.<br /><br />NBC has decided that the Olympic Games needs these kinds of over-arching narratives, these personal dramas writ large, and, as long as they arise in certain sports and from certain countries (how much attention did Petra Majdic receive for winning a bronze in the cross-country sprint immediately after falling and breaking four ribs and puncturing a lung?), they'll get the full focus of the network. And maybe they're right, maybe they do need the Tonya-Nancy kind of stuff to sustain interest as they grub for ratings.<br /><br />But, occasionally, I find it kind of wretched, that we can't just be left to appreciate the effort and the training and the performance, that everything has to be augmented by heaping servings of bathos. Because it's a pretty fine line between admiring the pluck of a Joannie Rochette and shamelessly using her heartbreak to pull in the Nielsens.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=19b39902-2d00-86fb-87fb-d34fd21e561e" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-41377279953389138702010-03-04T19:34:00.002-06:002010-03-04T19:34:50.399-06:00NBC's lost weekend<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I have commented before on what a big fan of the Olympics I am (I'm sure I wrote a few posts about it in August of 2008). The Winter Games are no exception, and I watch pretty much every minute that I can. That watching is, of course, all on the big network, as I don't have cable TV, but one certainly gets one's fill from the flagship.<br /><br />And the coverage was pretty much what we've come to expect. I'll probably have a post or two over the next few days about specific quibbles, but there really were no surprises. The pre-selected stars (Vonn! Ohno! White! Lysacek!) were given far more than their share of attention, and the network left some time to accommodate the stories that actually grew out of the events (Mancuso! Miller! That big bobsled guy!). Naturally, these were all Americans, as someone needs to be really special in a marquee sport to be noticed if they aren't from the 50 states (Kim Yuna! Joannie Rochette! Alexandre Bilodeau!). [Note: it really helps if they are from or train in Canada.]<br /><br />This is all pretty standard stuff. What I don't understand is the series of odd decisions NBC made in their final weekend coverage. I could chalk some of it up to having to give 3 hours to a hockey game that they had not anticipated (do we really think they would have given most of Sunday afternoon to the Czech Republic vs. Finland?).<br /><br />The problems actually started Thursday night in the coverage of the ladies' figure skating final. This is one of the major events of the Games, there's a massive amount of hype, and NBC gave it surprisingly short shrift. They showed a total of 9 programs, and, other than the final group of six, made curious choices as to who they showed. We "got" to see Tugba Karademir, who finished last (I wonder why NBC finds her so compelling, as they featured her four years ago), Cheltzie Lee, who finished 20th (and we saw her short program as well), and Elene Gedevanshvili, who finished 14th. Why they picked these three is beyond me.<br /><br />[By the way, who finished 4th in the free skate? Laura Lepisto of Finland, who jumped from 10th after the short to 6th overall. As far as I can tell, she was never mentioned once, and was omitted from the graphic showing the final scores - we saw 1 through 5, then 7th.]<br /><br />On Saturday night, NBC showed six programs in the figure skating exhibition gala. I personally don't care too much for that, but I would think it a big draw for the audience, and NBC kind of threw it away. Of course, if you had cable, you could have risen at 5:30 AM (Central Time) on Sunday and watched it on MSNBC, but I still don't grasp the rationale.<br /><br />Then, Sunday afternoon, they showed almost every minute of the Men's 50K cross-country race. I like endurance athletics; had I grown up in a place with recreational skiing, I'd probably be out there myself. But watching it was not all that interesting; NBC could have cut it by about half, had a perfectly exciting event to show, and left time for other things.<br /><br />Finally, there was the bizarre decision to cut abruptly from the Closing Ceremonies to Jerry Seinfeld's new show. There was almost no warning before Bob Costas told us to come back in an hour. As I get older, I find the Closing Ceremonies to be less interesting - I mean, Nickelback? Avril Lavigne? - it's like watching video of a party to which I wasn't invited. Nevertheless, it seemed like an odd choice to move so quickly from one to the other.<br /><br />What a shame NBC had to end that way.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=a6554d77-7d43-8a5d-b336-05232f2d14e3" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-87244969824407890652010-03-02T14:06:00.002-06:002010-03-02T14:06:48.371-06:00Followup on health care<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I know that all my readers have been breathlessly anticipating my second post on the myths of health care (the first was <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-great-myths-of-health-care-part-1.html">here</a>). I stated there that the most ardent pro-health care advocates are making, amongst the very true things they're stating, a couple of arguments that seem quite questionable.<br /><br />The first one was the idea that, no matter how flawed the legislation, it will inexorably be made better over time. I find the evidence for that rather sketchy.<br /><br />My second installment is coming along one of these days, but the urgency seems undercut by the near-total lack of movement on this effort. It would appear that the coming mid-term elections will doom us to the status quo. For completeness' sake, however, I will get around to Part 2 at some point.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9a007275-5d72-8a79-87bf-510ab2eacc10" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-3112044737026226102010-02-24T18:40:00.003-06:002010-03-02T13:13:52.171-06:00There is an "I" in Olympics<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><blockquote><big>“What a gift she's given us.” - Sandra Bezic, NBC, 2/23/2010 </big><br /></blockquote><br />Joannie Rochette's story is truly sad. She comes to Vancouver as a potential medalist in the ladies' figure skating event, in an Olympics held in her home country. And her mother arrives to see her skate, then passes away before the competition begins. The juxtaposition of what should be the greatest moment in this athlete's life with one of the greatest personal tragedies one can endure makes for an almost unbearable poignancy.<br /><br />Rochette chooses to skate, and, in last night's short program, skates very well and ends up scoring enough points to put her in third place at this point.<br /><br />As she comes off the ice, Sandra Bezic, one of NBC's skating experts, utters the quote above. I'm willing to cut her some slack, in that stupid things can be said in the excitement of the moment, but later, during the post-competition wrap-up, she essentially repeats herself.<br /><br />I could spend some time unpacking this quote, but, if you can't see the fatuousness of it, no amount of explaining is going to help. To suggest that Rochette skated for us, rather than for herself, or her father (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/24/AR2010022403640.html">misidentified by NBC</a>, corrected only far after they had milked the pathos out of it), or for the memory of the mother who had supported her through her quest for a dream, strikes me as amazingly inappropriate.<br /><br />But I'm not surprised.<br /><br />_________________________________________________________<br /><br />There are, I think, two schools of thought as to how sports commentary should work. There are those who believe that the role of the analyst is to, well, analyze and explain and teach. The audience should gain insight into how these accomplishments are done, into what distinctions are made by judges, into what separates mediocre from good from excellent. The analyst, who was a practitioner or teacher or both (Bezic herself was an excellent pairs skater with her brother, then became a top choreographer), can lead us through even unfamiliar sports and, while not necessarily deluging us with minutiae, lead us into a greater understanding and appreciation of these feats.<br /><br />I'm reminded of the great <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_DeRogatis">Al DeRogatis</a>, who called football for NBC in the '60s and '70s. He had been a fine player, and, in the booth, broke down football in great technical detail, allowing the viewer to understand some of the intricacies of the game. One could learn a lot from DeRogatis. But after 1975, he was out, because the new breed of broadcaster had come.<br /><br />The other kind of commentator is the one who attempts to create excitement, who tries to convey a picture of what it feels like to be there. He or she might sprinkle in the occasional technical term to prove their <i>bona fides</i>, but that's mere seasoning in the stew of emotion that they're trying to cook up. (In football, they might mention a Cover 2 defense, but they'll never take the time, or risk viewer boredom, by actually explaining what that is.)<br /><br />There are some who can play both roles. John Madden, particularly in his early days as a broadcaster, could convey with a kind of verbal shorthand what the game felt like ("Boom"), but also provide some real insight broken into 15 to 20-second chunks.<br /><br />But that's all gravy, especially in something like the Olympics where we thrill to events to which we'll pay absolutely no attention until 3 years and 50 weeks from now when the next Winter Games come along. I'm certain that NBC is making a concerted effort to provide us with 99% feel, 1% information, and that's the way they're going to do it (and perhaps they have research to indicate that they get higher ratings when they handle it that way).<br /><br />The problem is, of course, that facts can get in the way of the narrative excitement. Snowboardcross and skicross are the two newest additions to the Winter Olympics, and they can be exciting in the final rounds when four athletes are on the course at the same time, jostling for position.<br /><br />However, qualifying for these sports is really, really boring. A course that presents numerous challenges when two competitors are an elbow shove away from each other seems to be of little interest when only one person is going down. But, in NBC terms, these sports are NEW! EXCITING! THRILL RIDES! So we're not told that the men have 33 skicrossers competing for, yes, 32 positions. The women, 35 for 32. The announcers were careful to stay away from mentioning that nothing much is at stake.<br />_________________________________________________________<br /><br />So we end up with powerful incentives to "go surface," to hype and emotionalize everything instead of explaining. NBC hires nominal experts, then has them ignore their expertise in favor of creating a word picture of the experience.<br /><br />But what happens when they hire people who can't do that, who have impressive resumes but no ability to convey the ambiance of the competition?<br /><br />We know what happens - we the viewers are subjected to the train wreck that is the team of Sandra Bezic and Scott Hamilton. Hamilton, a man I think very highly of for his personal story and his charitable work, is possibly the worst "analyst" working for any major sports network. Bezic is better only because she shuts up more often (with execrable lapses like the quote above).<br /><br />The problem, I think, is that they don't the narrative gifts to deliver to us a sense of what it's like to be there. Instead, they substitute their own feelings. So we don't get, "Triple lutz, triple toe loop, well done with a small turnout on the landing." We get Hamilton's "TRIPLE LUTZ...TRIPLE TOE...OH, HE FOUGHT FOR IT, BUT HE GOT IT!!!" And that's actually a high point in content for our Scotty.<br /><br />Everything is filtered through the prism of their emotions. To some, it might seem more vivid, but it far more often comes off as information-free blather that appeals neither to our brains (because there's no content) nor to our hearts (because we really don't care how Sandra and Scott feel about things).<br /><br />One might have thought this reached its peak in the 2002 Olympics, when Bezic told us she was "ashamed for our sport" when her favored fellow Canadian pairs team was, in her opinion, underscored. National jingoism aside, this was the apotheosis of her self-importance, as scandal, duplicate gold medals, and a new judging system followed. It's hard to avoid feeling that Bezic began to overestimate her impact after this, leading her to think that she really was a major mover and shaker in figure skating.<br /><br />So we end up with the most subjective look possible, one which asks us to think more about the announcers than about the event. And we get fatuous quotes like the one from Bezic, which tells us nothing except that she feels that Joannie Rochette skated for the good of Sandra Bezic. And the "we" just makes it worse, as this hack "analyst" attempts to include us in this most inappropriate feeling possible.<br /><br />NBC really needs to take a look at this team and see if there isn't some talent somewhere that could do a halfway-competent job.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5975f56a-8147-88d5-b09f-68afc3ec6dd8" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-80146931162861242792010-02-06T17:05:00.002-06:002010-02-06T17:08:51.765-06:00The two great myths of health care - part 1<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I'm returning from my self-imposed exile because I'm finally fed up with the rhetoric surrounding the endless and, almost certainly, failed bid to create a health care plan that will actually help Americans at a reasonable cost. Having read endless amounts of prose on the two sides over the past year, I don't need to articulate the very real concerns that the right has over these proposed plans (of course, 95% of everything they've said is garbage - death panels? - but worrying about future costs is perfectly reasonable), because they seem to be carrying the day.<br /><br />No, I have a problem with the left, particularly that segment of the left which says, "We're not getting everything we wanted at the beginning, but it's still a good start; let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good." I'm with them up to a point. I think something should be done, and the bills that are on the table represent some progress toward treating health care, to some level, as a right of citizenship rather than just another consumer good.<br /><br />But it is profoundly unhelpful to advance arguments that are wildly speculative and questionable as justification for passing such major legislation. And, as I've had the opportunity to read and ponder much of the rhetoric, I've identified two such arguments that are seen as "proof" that we must move ahead with what's on the table. In this post I'll take up the first: the idea that whatever is passed will inevitably be improved in the near term, so we better get the ball rolling.<br /><br />Any number of bloggers and pundits have taken up this idea, this utopian vision of "It must get better, so let's get started." Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, et al seem honestly to believe that flawed legislation will inevitably be followed by better legislation <i>ad infinitum</i>, that somewhere in the future we will end up with a near-perfect system in which everyone gets what they deserve and no one has any problems. This viewpoint is exemplified by a <a href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/our-dysfunctional-left">Kevin Drum post</a> from today:<br /><blockquote>In 20 years this bill will be entirely forgotten except as the first step toward broad national healthcare. The excise tax, the public option, the subsidy levels, the exchange — all forgotten because they will have been steadily replaced by an entirely different infrastructure. It's true that some of that infrastructure will be path dependent on the details of the current bill, but most will simply evolve as a result of technology and public demand. By 2030 arguments over the public option will seem as antiquated as rants against the tin trust.<br /></blockquote>Wow, that sounds great. But do these folks have any evidence to offer along this route to perfection? Well, they love to cite both Medicare and Social Security, which started out in limited ways, requiring years of pressure and legislation to achieve their current status.<br /><br />And I will admit that these programs, each of which were thought wanting in their original creation, have been refined over the years and become closer to their original intent. And national health care kind of looks like those programs, so it is natural (if somewhat pat) to believe that the arc of development will be the same.<br /><br />However, the rationalist must then look more broadly, across all government programs, and must ask: "Has that been the fate of all large-scale government programs? Do they inevitably start out small and limited, and grow to something wonderful over time?"<br /><br />The answer must, alas, be no. I'm sure there were people who felt that our periodic stabs at creating better schools would eventually lead to, yes, better schools. And some of those people have been waiting for three generations to see those schools improve, and they're still waiting. The war on poverty was going to stamp out the injustices that prevent people from achieving their dreams, and it is a war as yet unwon.<br /><br />There is very little evidence that there is political tide which inevitably makes bad or flawed legislation into good policy; there are numerous examples on both sides of that ledger. I'd like to see those who are willing to settle for whatever Washington may eventually pass to concede that it may not ever get a whole lot better than what we start with. If there are flaws in National Health Care 2010, they may well still be there in 2030 (and 2050...), and we had better be prepared to live with that. [The other myth later...]<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-41480016627157674172009-12-14T16:02:00.002-06:002009-12-14T16:02:21.776-06:00Notes on being away<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Not blogging for two months has its pros and cons, but there are two I'll mention briefly.<br /><br />1) I've started to get comment spam, odd since there's been very little activity here, and I'm planning to clean it out. If you happen to be a spammer who's reading this (as if), don't bother to send it. My readership is not all that big, and it's pretty much non-existent from Japan, so it's really not worth it.<br /><br />2) Back in July I wrote a <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2009/07/of-cool.html">post</a> that was kind of a throwaway, about a radio commercial that had really bugged me (does "keeper of cool" resonate with anyone?). Why, I can't imagine, but my post continues to show up first (out of 433,000 hits) in a Google search for that phrase, and, as a result, it has become my most popular post by a wide margin, attracting (so far) 39 comments. I confess that I don't understand that at all.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=99b38f33-61fe-8fa3-a6c7-a06e75311c2c" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-11535335302402569082009-12-14T15:49:00.002-06:002009-12-14T15:49:29.820-06:00Wait - what??<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">As you can see, it's been more than two months since I've blogged, and what's funny is that I really haven't missed it all that much. That said, it may be time to get out and drop a few insights on the world; also, I owe you, my readers, some promised posts (such as my guide to going Rim-River-Rim in the Grand Canyon in one day, NPS advice notwithstanding).<br /><br />In my dedication to remaining logical and centrist, I'm finding plenty to criticize in the current scheme. Since I ripped conservatives pretty consistently in the runup and aftermath of the Obama election, you might think that I'd be in hog heaven right now. But I'm not, not that I expected much else (I'm actually pretty amused at the liberals who thought the system would change overnight, ignoring that Obama is a successful product of that very system, and apparently believes that tweaks are preferable to revolution).<br /><br />But what really amuses me on either side of the political dichotomy is the raging inconsistency that people demonstrate. Let's just take one example from last month. Ezra Klein is a young man who writes for the Washington Post, and has taken a special interest in health care. A lot of what he writes is insightful and informative, and I recommend following him.<br /><br />However, he can fall plague to the seduction of utopia. A favorite staple of people who want to advance some controversial notion is to let the states experiment with alternatives, at which point we can pick the best one for the country as a whole. This argument ignores differing situations - does the Massachusetts health care program, and we'll stipulate that it's been a success, really apply to Hawaii, Texas, and North Dakota? I can't say, but neither can anyone else.<br /><br />But here's <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/fun_with_federalizing.html">Klein on November 17</a>:<br /><blockquote>Medicaid should be federalized, but so too should <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/03/nationalize_the_schools.html">a lot more of school spending</a>, along the line Matthew Miller has argued for. And these would both be good policies even outside of the context of state budgeting, as leaving school funding to local communities is a recipe for wild inequality and inconsistent standards, while leaving Medicaid eligibility to the states has left America with 51 different Medicaid programs with 51 different eligibility schemes and very little coherence.<br /></blockquote>I'm sorry, but why hasn't one really good Medicaid idea come to dominate others? You can't argue that the states can be used as laboratories for policy alternatives if real-world examples are hard to come by. I suspect we're seeing path dependence and special interests as impediments to change, and that's why I'm always mightily suspicious when anyone's pet theory is advanced as a candidate for dispersion. It's very possible that some new method of education, no matter how successful, will <u>not</u> be adopted wholesale by lesser-performing school districts. In the end, it will all come down to some kind of central coercion, and I don't have the sense that the United States is all that happy with that idea.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=885ef52b-2799-80af-b459-6435b22a7c2c" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-77175883736041084662009-10-04T07:20:00.000-05:002009-10-04T07:20:00.421-05:00A blogging loss, at least for now<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there has been a change in a blog I have mentioned often and have highlighted to the right, <a href="http://www.dwaffler.com/blog/">Decidedly</a>. The main author, Greg Glockner, has left the company from which the blog emerges (he talks about his decision in a post <a href="http://www.dwaffler.com/blog/index.php?id=8889129387888234346">here</a>). and we shall be losing his insight on issues of decision-making. The blog continues with posts by Carol A. Burch, whom I have quoted from time to time, and I'll go on following it, but we'll miss Greg and hope he finds another outlet for his writing soon.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=b1d3101d-fff9-8626-9811-21e272a45c58" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-36710316961377857152009-10-02T19:10:00.002-05:002009-10-02T19:11:49.607-05:00First the Cubs, now the Olympics<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I'm going to admit upfront that I love the Olympics. The idea of athletes from all countries and all sports getting together and competing is easily over-sentimentalized, I know, and the problems of the world don't go away for 17 days every four years, but it still represents an ideal that is good and noble. Maybe it's become cluttered with commercialization and politics and greed and all the other human sins, but there remains a purity behind the intent that I appreciate and admire.<br /><br />Perhaps that's why I, while leaning toward wanting the Games in my home city of Chicago, retained some very real ambivalence about the whole thing. The politics of Chicago and Illinois is so corrupt, so subject to cronyism and cheating, that I feared, I suppose, that the Olympics would be tainted by the sweetheart deals, the opportunities of resource diversion to cronies of Mayor Daley, the ram-it-through mentality that would make the actual people of Chicago an afterthought.<br /><br />Yet...it still would have been really cool to see the Olympics come to Chicago, to be here for this oft-wonderful city to be highlighted on the world stage. Perhaps Bob Costas could do his show overlooking Daley Plaza with a big picture of Da Mare over his shoulder (having set the precedent of honoring local dictators by allowing us to spend 17 days appreciating the lovely mass murderer Chairman Mao).<br /><br />Alas, it is not to be. Chicago got blown away in the first round of a competition that everyone in the city figured was in the bag. The media coverage was laughable, of course, including Olympics "experts" who, before the vote, confidently told us all the reasons Chicago was the front-runner, then did a 180 after the vote and confidently told us about the many flaws in the plan.<br /><br />[To offer a minority-in-Chicago opinion: The voting results tell me that Chicago had no chance. Had we squeaked by Tokyo in the first round, I doubt things would have gotten any better. One has to suppose that the Asian bloc would have gone to Chicago instead of Rio, and I know no reason to think that would have been a lock.]<br /><br />But here's the most important flaw, in my eyes. Chicago is simply not perceived as a world-class city by, well, anyone who doesn't live in Chicago. I wish it were true, certainly, because I love a lot of things about this town, but it simply isn't, and all the boosterism in the world isn't going to change that.<br /><br />Look at a <i>Chicago Tribune</i> <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/chi-0927edit1sep27,0,2182522.story">editorial</a> from this past Monday:<br /><blockquote>No, Chicago doesn't <em class="i">need</em> the Olympics. This is already a world-class city. Has been for decades. During its rich history, Chicago has scrapped its path to world-class stature in manufacturing, finance, retail, professional sports, academia -- on it goes. An Olympiad would be wonderful, but certainly isn't essential.<br /></blockquote>The paper cites five areas in which Chicago is world-class.<br /><br />Manufacturing - largely gone to cheaper places in the country and out, and most of the headquarters of those companies have left for greener pastures.<br /><br />Finance - guess the largest bank headquartered in Chicago. Go ahead, I'll wait. That's right, it's the Northern Trust, an institution that exists primarily to manage the assets of rich people. It has no place in the nation's top banks.<br /><br />Retail - we need only look at the replacement of Marshall Field's with Macy's, but we can also walk down Michigan Avenue and see all the national chains to understand that retailing is no longer a primary industry.<br /><br />Professional sports - even if we grant that field an influence it doesn't have, it's hard to make a case that we're any better at that than other world cities.<br /><br />Academia - the tendency to overrate Northwestern, which comes from looking around newsrooms and seeing all the Northwestern grads, is irritating enough. When one looks at the deplorable condition of the once-proud economics faculty of the U of Chicago, one gets a sense that perhaps all is not rosy on the local quads.<br /><br />The "on it goes" might include financial markets, but the Board of Trade and its ilk are rapidly moving to T1 and T3 lines coming in from all over the world, so they aren't the source of employment they once were. It might include tourism and conventions, but a lot of that business is being lost to cities with more to offer in the way of entertainment and food (it seems clear that any industry with a strong Asian presence is going to put their conventions in Seattle, San Francisco, or Vegas; Europe, New York or Orlando).<br /><br />What Chicago has not done is establish any particular presence in anything with a future, in technology or bioengineering or alternative energy. That we aren't Detroit stems mainly from bigger size and greater diversity of industry, but it's not difficult to see us following that path eventually.<br /><br />And Mayor Daley knows this, which is why he pushes tourism and splashy parks and big events, because those are the only ways he can think of to extract money from other places to prop up an obviously unsupportable infrastructure.<br /><br />I hate to write this, hate to believe it, but it's hard for me to see a great future for Chicago. Getting the Olympics might have delayed the day of reckoning, but it wouldn't have changed the fundamentals. Not getting them, I don't know what's going to happen. But, at some point, the boosters and hucksters are going to have to realize that a very different Chicago is coming down the pike, and we're better off planning for that than we are trying to hit the big home run to "put us back on the map."<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=7b0b630b-226e-8310-a44e-7ecafbc2e6bc" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-80610128354464912272009-09-15T11:34:00.002-05:002009-09-15T11:34:49.085-05:00Back from the Southwest<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Blogging (and responding to comments) has been even more sparse the past few weeks, as you may have noticed. I was away, picking up on more of the things that I missed from having a travel-averse mother. I finally made my first journey to both the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, about which I'll probably have more to say in the coming days (of course, I said that about last year's trip to Utah, too, and you're still waiting for that).<br /><br />I'll just enliven things with one comment: It is possible, no matter what the Park Service says, to hike from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River and back in one day, though I am not minimizing it as a challenge. But the wife and I did it, it was not unbelievably difficult, and I'll write more about that for those who care at some point. Anyway, ho hum, I'm back to the quotidian, and none too thrilled about it.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=9fc2c915-e5e1-8621-8fb8-f3a7bf028fb8" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-46010314577704057322009-08-26T10:19:00.001-05:002009-08-26T10:21:01.865-05:00They shoot, they score<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">CBO (Congressional Budget Office) scoring has become the hottest thing lately. CBO assessment of a health care plan, for example, is seen as definitive (at least until the results differ from what is desired, at which point the spin comes in - but the numbers themselves are rarely questioned).<br /><br />So, and it seems to be a question day on the old blog, why can't the magic of CBO scoring be extended to a breakdown of costs and benefits by population segment? Why can't we put the wisdom of these analytic solons to the test of figuring out, for example, what a health care bill will really cost for different people, or anticipating how the market will change in response to passage of any of the myriad of bills we have?<br /><br />The answer is probably that these matters are too difficult to forecast, that too many different things can happen. But can't that same argument be extended to the areas the CBO is willing to consider? Aren't all of their numbers, all of their revenue and deficit calculations, fraught with uncertainty? Perhaps we all need to take everything we're hearing with huge heaps of salt.<br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=cef89d16-e34c-8d79-95a4-3c593c964f18" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-41951869880225708132009-08-26T10:13:00.002-05:002009-08-26T10:20:35.371-05:00Software vs. finance<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I've worked in software for quite a few years now, and I know that there are few more complex things that humans have created. To describe to anyone who hasn't worked in the field just how complicated an order entry system, for example, can be is almost impossible. You not only have thousands of lines of code, written by people of varying skill levels and experience responding to different requirements, but you also have interactions with the operating system, third-party software, external data stores, and so forth. Any moderately interesting application is orders more complex than the majority of the non-computer world.<br /><br />So my question for the day is this:<br /><br /><b>Why do we need finance people to stay in place to unwind the crisis, when we let completely inexperienced people take over our software?</b><br /><br />We're seeing our bankers making the big bucks again, and they were all kept in place through government bailouts. No matter what they had done to destabilize the world financial system, they were needed because "only they could understand these complicated financial instruments."<br /><br />Now I have a master's in finance from a prominent school (FWIW), so I have some understanding of financial products, the misdirection, the assignment of risk (that theoretically reduces that risk, ha, ha), and I can tell you that there is no financial product, no matter how layered in legal jargon, that compares to a useful computer program in difficulty.<br /><br />So, and I ask this in sincerity, why do we need to prop up the kings of Wall Street, restore them to their place in the universe, while every day we move some piece of software to an offshored company full of folks with meager training and experience? Why are we so comfortable taking applications away from the people who built them, giving them over to people who don't understand the business, the industry, the requirements of users?<br /><br />Several answers present themselves, and at least one of them is right, but I still find it incongruous and unfortunate.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5425fd5f-c151-8ac1-b4f8-64ee5657bfc0" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-70305458040284533022009-08-26T09:57:00.002-05:002009-08-26T09:58:04.444-05:00The final end to Camelot?<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Ted Kennedy has, as pretty much everyone knows by now, passed away, and there is no end to the tributes for the great "liberal lion." A typical one <a href="http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/08/ted-kennedy.html">comes from Robert Reich</a>:<br /><blockquote>America has had a few precious individuals who are both passionate about social justice and also understand deep in their bones its practical meaning. And we have had a few who possess great political shrewdness and can make the clunky machinery of democratic governance actually work. But I have known but one person who combined all these traits and abilities. His passing is an inestimable loss.<br /><br />Most Americans will never know how many things Ted Kennedy did to make their lives better, how many things he prevented that would have hurt them, and how tenaciously he fought on their behalf. In 1969, for example, he introduced a bill in the Senate calling for universal health insurance, and then, for the next forty years, pushed and prodded colleagues and presidents to get on with it. If and when we ever achieve that goal it will be in no small measure due to the dedication and perseverance of this one remarkable man. We owe it to him and his memory to do it soon and do it well.<br /></blockquote>I don't really have a lot to say about Ted Kennedy in particular. The whole Kennedy family mystique has always eluded me; I never found them as good-looking or effective or impressive as the common wisdom would tell us, but they seemed to fill some niche in America that people desired. We're starting to see some dispassionate looks at the legacy of JFK, finally, and it would appear that, whatever his potential may have been, the reality was somewhat more disappointing. RFK was a master of rhetoric, but he didn't really accomplish much either.<br /><br />But Teddy, he's the one who rolled up his sleeves and did the work and stood as a beacon of hope. And that may all be true, at least to some people.<br /><br />My point, actually, is about the expectations we have for people in politics and how different they are from those in any other walk of life. Look at the Reich quote above; we're supposed to commend Kennedy for fighting for universal health insurance for 40 years, for fighting the good fight.<br /><br />But, bottom line, he didn't get it done. He spent 40 years under Democratic and Republican presidents, within Democratic and Republican Congresses, and it hasn't happened. He was undoubtedly sincere about wanting it to happen, he introduced bills and talked up the issue and cared about the people who needed it, I'm sure, but, in the end, we don't have it.<br /><br />I can't think of another field of endeavor in which results are so severed from perception. If you worked in a company and spent 40 years never quite getting your product out the door - well, you wouldn't work in that company for 40 years. On the other hand, if you happened to be in a division that got lucky, you'd be lucky too. But it would all come down to what you had been perceived as accomplishing, not to the effort you had made, no matter how noble.<br /><br />That's not true in politics. You can truck through 40 years, making speeches and showing you care, and, when you pass on, you'll be hailed as a success despite a lack of provable results. Whatever symbolic role Ted Kennedy filled (and symbols do matter, so I am not trying to deny the power of that), the reality is that very little of his effort in health care (and other issues) came to fruition. That doesn't mean he shouldn't be admired for trying; it does mean we should try to temper our awe, just a bit.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=b2601c4b-d38c-8064-9f5c-aeaca5fbe091" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-69442927153573945732009-07-29T14:09:00.002-05:002009-07-29T14:10:28.214-05:00A shameless bid for Google attention<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The Illinois Lottery is running a couple of commercials for their second chance lottery game, one of those things where people can win by saving their losing tickets. One of those commercials has a funny line, though I'm ignoring the fairly obvious implication that girls with accents are easy (leading the lottery-playing character to get a creepy smile on his face). One of the Vegas dancers is trotting down the street and says, "I'm a dancer. I can dance." The actress gives a good reading of the line.<br /><br />I mention this only because I want to see what Google does with this post. Only one result currently comes up in a search with <"i'm a dancer i can dance" lottery>; this post should make two.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=41f02317-9700-8ebe-872d-9ff7c3a58d46" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-60966742773082423502009-07-27T11:13:00.009-05:002009-07-27T11:22:53.968-05:00Another tragic death<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The word "legendary" finally died today. It had been on life support for some time, but it took the <i>Chicago Tribune</i> to <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-cohen-obitjul27,0,6688377.story">push it over the edge</a>:<br /><p style="line-height: 2em;"><blockquote><h1>Alexis Cohen, legendary 'American Idol' contestant, killed in hit-and-run in New Jersey</h1><h2>Legendary for her cursing rant against Simon Cowell</h2></blockquote></p><br />I acknowledge that this is a tragedy for her family and friends, and I'm not trying to make light of her death.<br /><br />But when a headline writer for a major metropolitan newspaper destroys the meaning of a word in some lame bid to draw attention to one of the more minor stories of the year, it is not wrong to wonder just how low our standards will go.<br /><br /><div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=5a3a2279-7b61-86ae-8e00-3f40dc97b989" alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" /></div></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-4979160894648206722009-07-15T14:33:00.002-05:002009-07-15T14:37:00.677-05:00"Keeper of cool"<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Sometimes I'll go to the Web to see if something is bothering others the way it bugs me; in effect, I'm pathetically looking for support in my dissatisfaction. I don't know if other people do that, but I rather suspect they do. I would think there were Google searches for "michael jackson too much coverage" from people who were attempting to discover that others felt that the "news" outlets were focusing overly much on a less-than-that-important story (I suspect that, had Jackson passed away during fall premiere season that the number of hours devoted to it would have been far less).<br /><br />Anyway, I've been irritated for some time by the radio commercials for Cisco's WebEx product. It's a teleconferencing product, and the campaign has featured at least two spots starring a businessman who uses WebEx to enhance his ability to do presentations and hold internal meetings. The facts behind the campaign aren't bad; I'm a big believer that teleconferencing is going to become ever more important, that at some point it will curtail the rosy forecasts of ever-increasing business air travel (even if fact is lagging the enthusiastic projections of those who sell these systems).<br /><br />What I don't like is the narrator - I've taken a visceral dislike to this guy. In the first spot, he talks about how he can appear all over the world making presentations, yet still be available for tonight's date with "the <u>very</u> lovely Rachel," and I just find something smug and smarmy about the way he delivers the phrase.<br /><br />The newer ad demonstrates how this guy can pull his creative team together to implement some idea he had (perhaps on a date with tvlR, I don't know). His idea bounces from his head to various other cities, and the other members testify as to their contributions, and our main guy comes back to tell how his great idea was instantly translated into reality because of WebEx. (This is a pretty rosy picture of innovation, but it is an ad, I suppose.)<br /><br />In this case, it's not Rachel's boyfriend who bugs me as much as "Logan in Cambridge," who proclaims himself, "I'm kind of the keeper of cool." And he's more smug than the Rachel guy, and it all just rubs me the wrong way.<br /><br />So this morning I get on the Web to see if anyone else is as bugged by these ads as I am, and the answer is, apparently not. But here's the funny thing: There seems to be one transcript of this commercial that has been replicated numerous times, so it propagates the same funny errors. (Oddly, the transcripts aren't exactly the same, so is it using some kind of voice recognition software?)<br /><br />First, we have "so I gathered my eighteen to meet online using WebEx," which is not what he says at all; it's "gathered my A team." Then comes Cool Boy, and his segment is transcribed as, "Logan in Cambridge Canada keeper of cool." As I've already pointed out, it's "I'm kind of the," not "Canada."<br /><br />So I've gone from being nettled at an ad that just sticks in me to being perturbed by an Internet mystery: why these strange renditions, and why are they spreading (and another, why isn't anyone else bugged by these ads, but maybe I'm just going to have to accept that it's my own pathology being measured here)?<br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-58926904140732352452009-07-14T11:31:00.002-05:002009-07-14T11:32:08.151-05:00Bubble machine<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Occasionally I will take requests on the blog (actually, I'd love to get more), suggestions on something to write about, and I'm happy to put something together if I can think of something to say. A reader/friend asked me to write something about Matt Taibbi's <i>Rolling Stone</i> article titled <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print#">The Great American Bubble Machine</a>. In it, Taibbi lays the blame for our financial meltdown on investment bank Goldman Sachs:<br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-size:+1;">T</span>he first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.</p><p>Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.</p></blockquote> Reaction has been severe. Of course, Goldman Sachs has responded with outrage, but many other commentators have leapt to the barricades, accusing Taibbi of overreach and sloppiness. One who has attracted a lot of attention with her "takedown" is <i>The Atlantic</i>'s Megan McArdle, and I'll swing back to her in a moment.<br /><br />But, you ask, what of my take on the original article? Ah, yes, but there's a problem: <i>Rolling Stone</i> has, in their infinite old-media wisdom, not published the whole thing online; the link I provided above is a series of excerpts interspersed with videos of Taibbi. So it's hard for me to provide any cogent analysis of the article without running out to the store and picking up a copy of the mag, and I'm not going to do that. (Kevin Drum fell into the trap, reviewing the article without realizing he was looking at bits and pieces. Once he got on track, he read the whole thing, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/taibbis-bubble-machine">concluding</a> that, "It's a very good takedown of the modern financial industry and well worth reading." Drum also provides a link to a site that purportedly offers the whole article, but that's not working for me.)<br /><br />I am left, then, trying to review an article based on excerpts, and that's not fair to the piece. I will not try to claim total objectivity anyway, as I am a fan of Taibbi's writing. His reviews of the Tom Friedman <i>oeuvre</i> are canonical, but I <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2009/01/kick-him-while-he-up.html">already praised</a> those enough. He is a passionate writer, one who, perhaps, sometimes allows his passions to get in the way of precision.<br /><br />But that's who he is, and to take the other side, to argue that his vehement eloquence is disqualifying is to refuse to engage with his points. And that is a far greater sin. Witness the quote in a <a href="http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1908562,00.html?iid=tsmodule">TIME piece</a> from a former journalist, "For the record, I don't think any article that contains the line 'vampire squid sucking the face of humanity' [Taibbi's opening description of Goldman] is real journalism." That quote is vacuous and completely unenlightening. (Taibbi himself responds to <i>TIME</i>'s piece <a href="http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/07/on-the-everyone-was-doing-it-excuse/">here</a>.)<br /><br />Here's Taibbi's position in an somewhat unfair nutshell: Goldman Sachs has been at the center of every negative investing trend over the last several decades, and their involvement in questionable financial instruments and oil speculation directly led to the current world financial crisis. Furthermore, their connections to people in high places ensures that they will be allowed to profit mightily no matter what happens in the global economy.<br /><br />And that doesn't really seem too wrong. I sense maybe a little too much conspiracy in Taibbi's article, a bit too much willingness to credit Goldman with prescient malevolence. In my experience, there is rarely a decision arc in even the most powerful companies; rather, there is a culture which approaches problems in consistent ways, thus leading to similar results. Once that culture is seen as successful, it becomes widely adopted and the influence is magnified.<br /><br />One thinks of, in the business consulting realm, the influence of McKinsey. McKinsey is not responsible for some of the worst management trends of the past 30 years, but they do tell their well-paying clients what they want to hear. Once the concepts (things like dehumanization and offshoring, anything in which customers can reap gains without paying the full costs) get the official McKinsey imprimatur, they become consecrated as holy writ, and McKinsey appears to be at the cutting edge of modern management techniques. I believe something similar happens with Goldman Sachs, that whatever they do quickly pervades the industry, giving the appearance of a conspiracy where none exists.<br /><br />Which brings me to Megan McArdle. I find this self-styled libertarian to be maddeningly inconsistent, capable of penning some clear-eyed pieces that cut through cant (as in <a href="http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/retraining_isnt_the_answer_1.php">this post</a> about retraining, where she couples her own experience with conventional wisdom and finds reasons to question the "wisdom"), but too often falling into a mush of disorganization. One could pin that on the blog format, but she is a major force in the blogging world and I expect more from her.<br /><br />At any rate, <a href="http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_taibbi_gets_his_sarah_pal.php">her criticism</a> of Taibbi has received quite a bit of attention, probably because she begins:<br /><blockquote>What I think, sadly, is that Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites. <br /></blockquote>(Sarah Palin analogies are always attention grabbers.) Her argument is that Taibbi misemphasizes the importance of the things that Goldman did, that they did do those bad things but they're old news and other people did stuff that was worse, so why pick on Goldman?<br /><br />She then takes her U of Chicago MBA (a degree she shares with this writer) and rolls right off the tracks:<br /><blockquote>But in fact, everyone was aware that CDO's were repackaging crap mortgages--that was the point. The idea was pure portfolio theory, broadly agreed upon by everyone involved. Everyone knew a lot of the mortgages might go bad, either by defaulting or prepaying. (This is a risk for bankers, who don't like the idea that if interest rates drop, their 7% mortgage might suddenly turn into a pile of non-interest-bearing cash which can only be invested at 5%.) But if you pool the risk, only some of the bonds will go bad, while others pay off. The result is a less risky, less volatile investment than any individual junk mortgage bond. And it would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for <strike>those crazy kids</strike> a collapse in the housing market of a scale not seen since the Great Depression.<br /></blockquote>This betrays a misunderstanding of portfolio theory, in that the risk of the pooled security is less only if there is minimal correlation among the component securities. Diversification works only when the underlying elements are different in nature; when they all stem from the same source, for example, residential mortgages, any downturn in the overall housing market will destroy the value of the pooled security, which is, of course, exactly what happened. There is no magic that allows anyone to take D-level garbage that is all of the same type and turn it into AAA by clever dividing and recombining. That's absolutely basic.<br /><br />McArdle then hedges her own bets by agreeing with Taibbi's basic point:<br /><blockquote>Wall Street is an arrogant beast that more than held up its half of the devil's bargain which drove us into our current ugly straits. Bankers who thought they were geniuses were deceived by models that assumed away the possibility of a second great depression. They made a terrifying amount of money doing it. And now that the taxpayers have bailed them out at considerable expense, we don't even get a goddamn fruit basket. Instead they merrily go along paying themselves gigantic bonuses for the singular feat of not driving our economy entirely back to the stone age. I think some populist rage is more than warranted.<br /></blockquote>She simply disagrees with the way Taibbi chose to illustrate these problems, claiming that he didn't ask the right questions and, therefore, profoundly misunderstands the true nature of the problem. So we should be mad at Goldman, but we should also be mad at others too, and we can't know exactly who we should be mad at for what, and so forth into its own brand of incoherence.<br /><br />McArdle got some pushback for her piece, especially for her assertion that, "financial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system." So she wrote another long <a href="http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/villains_of_the_piece.php">blog post</a> about that, defending herself with this analogy:<br /><blockquote>A woman gets into her car, and waves at her husband, who is crossing in front of the car. Pressing the pedal to the ground, she puts it into gear . . . and steams forward at full speed, crushing him against the wall of the garage.<br /><br />Is she a villain? It rather depends, doesn't it?<br /><br />Scenario #1: she's angry because she found out he had an affair, and decided to kill him "by accident" for the insurance. Scenario #2: she thought she was stepping on the brake, and stepped on the gas instead. The former is a crime, the latter a tragedy. But you can't divine which simply by knowing that something terrible happened....Villainy involves people who know, or should have known, that what they were doing was likely to lead to the awful results.<p>I mean, you can quibble and say "You should have known that that was the gas pedal", and indeed you should have, but if, for whatever reason, your senses deluded you, you're not a villain. No, even if you were thinking about the presentation you had due at work--or how angry you were at your husband for having a fling with his secreatary--rather than concentrating on your driving.</p>When something is common enough, I think it definitionally isn't villanous. It may be a practice that should be fixed--we should all be more careful when starting our cars, I'm sure.</blockquote>This is a bad analogy, so let's try to fix it. Let's say the woman may or may not know how to drive. Her husband asks her if she knows which is the brake pedal. She confidently answers yes, then steps on the gas and kills him.<br /><br />Alternatively, she chooses to flip a coin as to which pedal to step on.<br /><br />Is she a "villain" in either of those scenarios? I don't know, but she is certainly criminally negligent, and we do have societal punishments for that kind of recklessness.<br /><br />And this is closer to what we've seen from our financial corporations. They took unconscionable risks, actions that could bring down a world financial system, then pled, "No one could have known," when it all went south. Their perverse incentive policies made gambling with OPM (other people's money) acceptable, even necessary. This is not their senses deluding them, this is arrogant heedlessness and, whatever the merits of Taibbi's contention that a great deal of it was due to deliberate manipulation on the part of Goldman Sachs, can't be wished away by McArdle's limp argument.<br /><br />Then, unsurprisingly, McArdle yet again hedges her bets, telling us that she actually doesn't like Goldman Sachs at all:<br /><blockquote>I have no reason to love Goldman Sachs, and I don't. I didn't like them when I was interviewing for investment banking internships in business school (worst interviews by far were sponsored by Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns). I dislike the way their alums, and indeed, their current employees, have permeated our politics and our financial regulatory system like some sort of insidious fungus. I have been repelled by Jon Corzine ever since he spoke at my business school graduation ceremony, where he jovially described how he had cheated his way into a diploma by getting his girlfriend to do his final project for him. He seemed to think this was funny.<br /></blockquote>She goes on in this vein for a while, but ultimately defends the bankers by claiming that they were stupid, but so was everybody else, and that doesn't equate to villainy, and that no change to history would have allowed us to avert the financial crisis (?!?):<br /><blockquote>But I think the case needs to be a leetle bit tighter than the fact that bankers make stupid decisions, bankers get paid a lot, and we just had a financial crisis. I'd like to see someone make the case that they did things that were actively, knowingly, illegal and morally turpitudinous, rather than simply totally moronic. Because with the total moron thing, they had an awful lot of company.<br /></blockquote>Of course, that's actually just the case that Taibbi is making (perhaps it is not as airtight as we would like, but it's a start). When money is entrusted to people who are reckless with it, that's wrong - I suppose we can debate the word "villainy" at some length. But the hands-off, "no one is more wrong than anyone else" attitude is profoundly unhelpful, no matter how much the principal actors in this piece would like it to become the prevailing approach.<br /><br />[Update: I have come across <a href="http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3159732&pagenumber=1">a site</a> on which the whole Taibbi piece has been posted. I don't believe a complete reading changes anything I've already written, but I'll ponder it some more and come back if I have any additional comments to make.]<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-88827110854135439752009-07-13T13:12:00.002-05:002009-07-13T13:13:33.384-05:00Used to put the paycheck in the bank, now we get it there<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Kevin Leicht is guest-blogging at Credit Slips this week, and he starts off with <a href="http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2009/07/is-borrowing-a-substitute-for-getting-paid.html">an excellent post</a> that discusses the way in which our economy has moved from one in which people consumed based on what they were paid, lowering their risk over time, to one in which consumption is based on debt. He concludes:<br /><blockquote><p>More importantly, Henry Ford’s original idea (that workers should be treated well in part because they spend money as a consumer outside the office door) was discarded as a quaint old-fashioned notion. “Let the other guy treat people well, I can’t afford it” seemed to be the individual response of employers around the country and, for a long time anyway, Wall Street loved it. In the business section of the newspaper major downsizing on the front page was accompanied by major jumps in stock prices on the back page.</p><p>Over the long term this exposed a classic public goods problem – <em>U.S. consumer purchasing power is something everyone has an interest in but no one has any concrete incentive to contribute to themselves</em>. There are so many alternatives to paying people a decent wage that virtually any alternative is more acceptable than paying people more money or even paying people what they’re worth.</p><p>Is this sustainable?? It is difficult to see how. After all, if someone told you that we were going to base the largest developed economy in the world on (a) treating the mass of employees badly, (b) producing many products and services that are consumed offshore and then (c) loaning these same employees money to buy the basic goods and services to keep the entire economy afloat, I would say that someone just walked off a postbellum Southern plantation to sell us on the virtues of sharecropping(!) . </p><p>The current economic downturn gives us an opportunity to think hard about this entire I-borrow-because-I-can’t-get-a-decent-wage system. Simply restoring the ability of banks to loan money is not enough. Instead, the actual real earnings-based purchasing power of the American consumer must be restored. This is a much tougher task. Loaning people money is not a perfect substitute for paying them, but it is the easy way out. It produces real differences in political and economic power that can’t be ignored. It also isn’t economically sustainable. </p></blockquote> Nothing to add, except to point out that we have structural problems which will prevent the recovery, when it comes, from being a return to what it was before. Robert Reich sees this, in <a href="http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/07/when-will-recovery-begin-never.html">a post</a> from last week:<br /><blockquote><p>My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.</p>The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.<br /></blockquote> There are those of us who have been arguing this for some time, that the rules and the landscape have changed, and we had better start preparing ourselves for reduced opportunity and circumstances. We could do that through intelligent planning, through a recognition that the old rules don't apply any more, but I'm pretty sure we won't do that.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-28661964734075326122009-07-10T20:26:00.002-05:002009-07-10T20:27:11.851-05:00Gettin' all renegade-y<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">A lot of people have already commented on TIME's <a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1909442,00.html">cover story</a> on Sarah Palin, and I'm certainly not going to go through the whole thing - it's all I could do to read it. It's a curious piece, one almost obsessed with creating an image of Palin as quintessentially Alaskan, and thus foreign to normal understanding. There is some talk of her negatives, but that all seems to get washed away in a tide of admiration, forced, I suppose, by the attempt to explain her appeal. But there is, along with a Web sidebar titled "See the fashion looks of Sarah Palin," which probably never accompanied a TIME story about Eisenhower, this:<br /><blockquote><p>Whether that is true or not, Palin's unconventional step speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence. </p><p>If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it.</p></blockquote> This is simply claptrap, not illuminating at all. That we should believe that Palin stepped away from the governorship because of her "ingrained frontier skepticism" of her own authority is almost insulting. It suggests that she doesn't trust herself to run something, and, while I think a little self-doubt is a good thing, this is not exactly the quality we look for in a president.<br /><br />We still trust credentials a lot, as we don't ask our barber to take a little off the top and fill a bicuspid while he's at it. We might be starting to understand that credentials don't guarantee wisdom, but I don't think that credentialism is on the wane at all. If anything, it's become more prevalent as we tell our kids that the only road to success leads through college.<br /><br />What's interesting is the title used on the cover of the print edition: The Renegade. I believe we're supposed to admire Palin for taking "the road less traveled." And this seems strangely reminiscent of another politician, one who bucked the system, voted his conscience, a press-deemed "maverick."<br /><br />And as I <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2008/08/original-maverick.html">wrote about</a> John McCain close to a year ago:<br /><blockquote>Is it possible that John McCain, the original maverick, thinks that "maverick" implies random, unexplainable decisions, rather than adhering to a set of principles that are sometimes at odds with a party's orthodoxy? Because I think the people think that McCain is the latter, and I'm beginning to suspect that McCain is the former.<br /></blockquote>As entertaining as the press may find randomness, it seems a very poor quality to seek out in our leaders. A little unpredictability may be admirable; running amok rarely is.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-24720715176403990532009-07-10T17:23:00.002-05:002009-07-10T17:23:49.073-05:00Hello? Is anyone there?<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Greg Glockner, at the Dwaffler Decidedly blog, tells <a href="http://www.dwaffler.com//blog/index.php?id=4515953809779575096">A tale of two outsourcings</a>. The first is actually a counter-outsourcing story, as Boeing plans to buy one of their key suppliers for the "revolutionary" 787 airplane, running directly counter to their master strategy of strewing bits of manufacturing across the world and assembling the results in magically short time. This hasn't gone at all well, as I <a href="http://androcass.blogspot.com/2008/01/we-make-money-by-leaving-tough-stuff-to.html">wrote about</a> a year and a half ago:<br /><blockquote>This, of course, is the logical consequence of modern-day management thinking. You out-manage your risk by transferring it to others, relying on contract compliance to take the place of responsibility. You conceptualize or ideate, not even descending to the point of high-level design, rather shifting that to the "experts" who know better than you what you need.<br /><br />But you can't take a contract and glue it into a working airplane. Perhaps Boeing will get some money back, eventually, through negotiation or lawsuit. Will they ever make up the deficit to Airbus in market or mind share? I doubt it.<br /></blockquote>Apparently the newest solution is to bring the suppliers into the company, so the mystical world of contract compliance will give way to the old-fangled solution of actually managing something.<br /><br />Greg's second example comes from the world of telecommunications: Sprint is going to outsource their network operations to Ericsson:<br /><blockquote><b>So what will be left of Sprint?</b> They don't manufacture the equipment. They won't operate the network. <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135357/Big_Sprint_Ericsson_managed_services_deal_called_a_boost_to_both">According to Matt Hamblen of Computerworld</a>, "Ericsson will manage day-to-day operations of the Sprint CDMA, iDen and wired networks, while Sprint retains control and customer care under the deal."<br /><br />Customer care? Excuse me while I laugh. Someone I know endured atrocious customer experiences from Sprint. It took <em>months</em> of letters - the old-fashioned, paper kind - to resolve a simple billing issue. <b>Customer service is <em>not</em> a strength of the mobile phone industry</b>.<br /><br />Oh, and isn't customer care just another job that will be outsourced someday?</blockquote><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3386314594359704613-4515953809779575096?l=dwaffler.blogspot.com" width="1" height="1" /></div>The answer to the last question is, of course, yes. Which will leave Sprint with control and...nothing else.<br /><br />I may well have mentioned this before (my great ideas get lost in the swirling mists of time), but I think we're approaching the logical consequence of this thinking. Eventually, there will be a Fortune 500 company that will have about 12 employees. There will be a CEO, a few people who stay up all night to talk to the various suppliers around the world, and some flunkies who will make lunch and airplane reservations for the CEO. That'll be it.<br /><br />The value of the company will not come from any value-added work they'll be providing, because there won't be any. The company won't make anything, won't sell anything, won't ship anything. It will simply be a holding company for a collection of brands, with all the work done by others as cheaply as possible. The CEO will negotiate contracts (at the highest level), check with the lawyers to ensure contracts are being complied with, give presentations to analysts, and do as much media as possible to "build the brand."<br /><br />At that point, maybe we'll all finally understand that it is not a function of American business to employ Americans, and we'll stop accepting some pretty weak arguments that we have to do more for these companies. Then, corporate welfare will stop, lobbyists will have less influence on politics, and we'll be able to work for the welfare of the people.<br /><br />Ha, ha, I made myself laugh.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-21837943346019987602009-07-04T23:10:00.002-05:002009-07-04T23:10:56.268-05:00An entertainer in the Capitol? No way<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><span style="font-family:sans-serif;">Republicans seem to be upset that former Saturday Night Live writer and occasional performer Al Franken has finally been certified as the winner of a Senate seat from Minnesota. </span>He "stole the election," he's "unqualified," and so forth.<br /><br />What could they ever think of a president who had appeared in movies like:<br /><ul><li>Cowboy from Brooklyn</li><li>Girls on Probation</li><li>Naughty but Nice</li><li>Alice in Movieland</li><li>Juke Girl</li><li>The Rear Gunner</li><li>Stallion Road</li><li>She's Working Her Way Through College</li></ul>I mean, come on, do we want some porn actor in Washington, in the seat of power?<br /><br />Of course, these are all movies from the <i>oeuvre</i> of Republican saint Ronald Reagan. Maybe Stuart Smalley isn't looking quite as bad now.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-85712330583768686442009-07-03T22:28:00.002-05:002009-07-03T22:29:17.783-05:00Palin was different<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Ezra Klein, in the wake of Sarah Palin's surprise resignation, <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/sarah_palin_in_charts.html">quotes</a> some <a href="http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/04/a_tantalizing_graph_featuring.html">research</a> by a Penn graduate student that indicates that Palin had an unprecedented effect on the presidential race, completely out of line with that of any other candidate for the second spot:<br /><blockquote>Judgment on her was incontestably important. The correspondence between dynamics in her ratings and dynamics in McCain vote intentions is astonishingly exact. Her marginal impact in vote-intention estimation models dwarfs that for any Vice-Presidential we are aware of, certainly for her predecessors in 2000 and 2004. And the range traversed by her favorability ratings is truly impressive. But why? We are unaware of any theory that opens the door to serious impact from the bottom half of the ticket.<br /></blockquote>I don't think this is particularly surprising at all. Most veep candidates come from a pretty narrow range of candidates, the experienced governor/senator/representative community. They usually have some kind of track record, might have been contenders for the presidency themselves, and are genially competent (Dan Quayle notwithstanding).<br /><br />This does not describe Sarah Palin at all. She was and is a woman of modest accomplishments, an appalling lack of qualification for a presidency that she very well might have had to assume, and an ideologue whose beliefs were entirely out of step with the mood of the nation.<br /><br />In other words, we don't need a theory to wrap around the Palin effect, we need to look at Palin herself - and that's just what the nation did, and they decided that they didn't want her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and McCain was reckless in picking her. If there's anything to be learned here, it is that the "bold" pick will be taken negatively if it represents an unacceptable amount of risk. We might conclude that Oprah is unlikely to be tabbed any time soon.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-1987807053297261062009-06-17T20:16:00.001-05:002009-06-17T20:18:20.433-05:00Post-nation nation<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://www.dwaffler.com//blog/index.php?id=8854658219076765799">Carol A. Burch at Decidedly</a> (a week old; I'm still working on my new blogging schedule):<br /><blockquote> Success of one's people in those countries [Russia and Asia] is honored, appreciated and focused upon by each individual far more than in the United States, where emphasis is on the individual and individual achievement.<br /><div><br /></div><div>We can see the effect of individual vs. collective consciousness as we look at the shifts in centers of economic and political power in the world today.</div><div><br /></div><div>Corporations and individuals in the U.S., as is their right in a free society, made decisions that inured to their individual benefit. Production and manufacturing (and the economic and political strengths that are associated with those endeavors) went elsewhere. Certainly, the image of a collective exodus of almost the entire manufacturing base from the nation was probably not part of each individual decision. Yet, cumulatively, over time, this happened. This is the effect of the lack of a collective consciousness. Now, with diminished economic health and clout to influence the world's direction, we, as a country, are less formidable, and are viewed primarily as a voracious consumer society.<br /><br />Economic strength now centers in the countries that took on the manufacturing. Of note is the fact that these countries operate culturally with a high level of collective consciousness,with a collectively understood and embraced long-term vision of a future in which they will continue to dominate. It is unlikely that the mistakes we made will be repeated there.</div></blockquote>Very true. We derided the old Five-Year-Plans of the Soviet Union and China, confusing execution with concept. Then we saw India and China actually plan for the future, focusing resources on growth fields like engineering and computer science. (Keep in mind this didn't constitute a huge risk, these were already well-established as fields of the future by the time these countries got around to supporting them.)<br /><br />At the same time, the U.S. decided that <i>laissez faire</i> worked so well for economics that it could be applied to anything that even had the slightest economic component. <i>CSI</i> is a hit TV show, of course we'll see students flock to forensics programs despite the reality that budgets will never go up as much as enrollment did. I wonder what all those budding Gil Grissoms are doing now.<br /><br />One thing that interests me is how this idea was sold to the American people, not that they needed much convincing. There were two large ideas, I think, with which we deluded ourselves that "collective consciousness" was something that could be transcended.<br /><br />The first was what I call the "lottery mentality," with an added shot of altruism. If we allow everyone to pursue their own aims, each person will maximize their potential, get rich, and then be able to do more for the collective than they ever could just going out and living their lives. What lottery winner fails to say that he'll do more for his church, or for his children, or for his community? We created a virtue out of going out and scrabbling for whatever bucks were there, because, sometime in the future, more will be created for the larger group.<br /><br />Much of this, of course, was simply mindless claptrap. A lottery is a massive tax and redistribution scheme, but it's hard to see how society profits from it. Much of business works the same way - some aspects of what is done is truly innovative, and betters the lot of humanity, but a great deal more is a way to take money from someone and give it to someone else. [I'm not talking here about the normal business of business, in which customers pay less for something than it's worth to them, but some of the less publicized activities, such as lobbyist-induced tax breaks and offshoring, things for which we never quite figure out the true cost.]<br /><br />The second "big idea" was one that didn't require us to give up our sense of the collective good, but to expand it. This was what I refer to as the "post-nation" concept, the idea that we uniquely had a responsibility to the world, that even if some of our practices were negative in effect to the U.S., that they benefited the world far more.<br /><br />We see this in some of the commentary the past few days about Iran, from those thinkers who believe we "must" get involved. That we would undoubtedly pay a price in lives and money to install a president who doesn't have all that much power who might be little better than the one they have is of little consequence; we must interfere because that's what America does.<br /><br />We also see it in discussions of offshoring in which we blow by the very real negative effects on American workers and move to wondrous tales of how our work is helping the downtrodden of China and India. Whatever we used to call national interest gets subsumed to a utopian ideal of effortless foreign aid.<br /><br />I guess my point is that the United States has never really lost its sense of the collective unconsciousness, we've just allowed it to be perverted from the straightforward sense of nation that we used to have to some pretty indirect, even strange, concepts. It's not that we've lost sight of the greater good, just that we've allowed it to be twisted into ideas that are so obscure that the true costs and benefits have been lost.<br /><br />Perhaps these new ideas are, ultimately, better for the world as a whole and we should pursue them, but I don't believe the case is so clear-cut that we shouldn't at least be discussing them. And I'm sure it's just coincidence that they are pushed most ardently by the folks who have the most to gain from their acceptance.<br /><br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1084144703351548082.post-46125241786026358942009-06-11T14:08:00.002-05:002009-06-11T15:09:42.383-05:00Ups and downs<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><span style="font-family:sans-serif;">Sullivan <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/bear-rising.html">points out</a> that poor Paul Krugman </span>can't seem to make up his mind as to whether the economy is getting better or worse:<br /><blockquote>Is it just me, or has the economic news started to darken again?<br /></blockquote>Sullivan then prints a rejoinder from Free Exchange:<br /><blockquote>The first and most obvious point to make is that news can surprise on the downside while still trending toward improvement if expectations have improved more rapidly than the data.<br /></blockquote>Which doesn't entirely eliminate the other possibility, that the second and, at least to me, equally obvious point to make is that news can surprise on the upside while still trending toward decline if irrational hope has improved more rapidly than the data.<br /></div>Eric Easterberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11535369798458596223noreply@blogger.com0