New hire

AOL has hired a Google executive as their new CEO. What I find interesting about this is that, when AOL wants to improve their Internet advertising, they go out and get a chief executive who has experience doing that very thing. I'm sure they're going to pay him a lot; if he can keep AOL going, he'll be worth it.

But if, say, Microsoft wants to improve their search business, they don't go to Google and attract away some of their top technical minds. Instead, they whine about how they're not allowed to bring in top talent from overseas, the best and the brightest, the magical folks who will elevate them into the stratosphere. They push for visas, they threaten to offshore massive numbers of jobs, when they could go out and pay for the top existing people.

Why are the rules different in these two situations, I wonder?

Outsourcing (again?)

As regular readers know, I rarely waste any of my bon mots. If I write a comment of any length, it will probably show up in a subsequent blog post, and, as it has been, so is it here.

My post yesterday, More on outsourcing, attracted some comments in spite of the fact that it was basically a weak spin-off of an excellent Carrie post (which itself has received some deserved attention, having been featured in the most recent Job Destruction Newsletter and in a post at VDARE.com, which termed it "superb"; they also featured Yours Truly in a post - I must confess to slightly mixed feelings here, as VDARE has occasionally gone over the top in their opposition to immigration, and has a strange affinity for Michelle Malkin, the low-rent Ann Coulter).

One good comment came from Red Oak, and I take the liberty of reprinting it in full:

Poking around that blog [U of Michigan professor Bob Kennedy's book- and offshoring-promoting blog, The Services Shift] is fascinating. It's an excellent illustration of the thesis that our globo-class really is a pack of denatured sociopaths. It is now an unquestioned axiom to these people that the nations and peoples of the earth have no purpose beyond contributing to the "competitiveness" of multinational corporations. I don't mean "sociopath" hyperbolically either, but technically. There is no human value - no culture, no bonds, no shared heritage, no social meaning, outside the "ego", as it were, of corporations.

But what I find interesting is this: we know that this sociopathy is not shared by the businessmen, academics, and politicians of the nations who benefit from the mass offshoring and "H1-B-ing" of America's wealth and jobs. They strike me as normal human beings, looking out for the interests of their own, though they're happy to mouth the globo-crap to the eager Western whores selling out their own nations, who probably think they're "one of them", all playing the big globo-game together. For example, one of the links at Kennedy's blog went here, to an article that is pretty much the standard b.s. about the horrors job "protectionism", with an added bit of interest from our friends the sociopath immigration lawyers, warning that "[w]hile some populist sentiment may call for employers to lay off H-IB visa-holders before U.S. workers, experts say such plans are not only shortsighted, but discriminatory. Facing liability for nationality bias is only one problem with the concept." Got that? They're getting all geared up to invoke (or rather, invent) some "global law" to litigate against preserving American jobs in America during a deep recession that may turn into a depression. Behold this bizarro world Magna Carta: the laws of a nation do not exist to protect the interests of its citizens, the laws of a nation exist to promote and protect the interests of foreigners and multinational corporations from the self-seeking of a nation's citizens.

Now this is disturbing, and infuriating, but, at this stage of the game, hardly surprising. But as I noted to myself that these alleged globo-laws against "nationality discrimination" would be wielded only against Americans - the Chinese or Indians would have the good sense and sane patriotic sentiments to laugh them off and tell any protester to stuff it - a question just occurred to me: I wonder what the foreign beneficiaries of visas and offshoring think of the likes of Mr. Kennedy and his ilk (like those helpful native immigration lawyers who are devoted to screwing their countrymen - unless the Americans are the co-ethnics of foreigners they're helping and just engaging in standard ethnic nepotism). Nobody, after all, has any admiration or respect for sell-outs and traitors, not even the people who are using them. Do they just consider them useful chumps, or do they actively despise them? I'm just curious, because I think holding such types in contempt is a pretty basic and pre-rational human reaction.

I didn't try to respond to everything, there's a lot packed in that comment, but I did write:

Thanks for the comments. I wonder if you've ever had occasion to check out Bakan's book, The Corporation. Bakan. a professor at the University of BC, lays out an interesting case that the very structure of a corporation makes it pathological in nature, that it is inherently incapable (if acting "properly") of promoting the common good. The book was written in 2004, and now seems prescient in detailing the implications of the legal construct.

What this thesis makes me think is that most individual people within corporations are not sociopaths (though I have run across a few), but people who are conditioned by their surroundings into taking positions that turn out sociopathic. Obviously, they are gullible, believing the likes of "statesman" Bill Gates as they trash the reputations of US workers, but that's natural of those who thrive in hierarchical institutions. If you can convince yourself that the greater good is being served by moving thousands of jobs overseas, it's easy to overlook the concomitant harm.

As to your point about a nation's laws, it does seem as if we, perhaps out of a sense of guilt about our good fortune (much of which came out of the hard work and sacrifice of our forefathers and -mothers), are the prime movers in a kind of implicit global law. We have to educate the world's youth and employ the world's workers, because we have so darn much. The protectionism of others is understandable, because they have so little; we, on the other hand, have an obligation to look out for everybody else. That we may need to change the rules in response to new conditions is not a popular idea at all.

Your last point, about the way we're regarded by the folks who are profiting the most from our giveaways, is an interesting one. Perhaps, after years of our giving foreign aid and education and citizenship to large numbers of immigrants, they've just come to expect that we'll keep the giveaways coming.

---

A quick word on another comment. I'm not sure what exactly to what this comment was responding, but it stated:

Work visas stop offshoring of high-skill jobs? Work visas stop the offshoring of high-skill INDUSTRIES.

One hears this a lot (and it probably deserves a lengthy post of its own) but this sentiment doesn't fully hold up. Essentially, what this implies is that these high-skill jobs are going to foreigners no matter what we do about it, but we're better off if they at least do them in this country.

This seems plausible, the taxes stay here, and we presume that ancillary companies and suppliers are better off. I honestly don't think we can balance that yet against the technology leakage when those job-holders return home, and the loss of capacity to perform that work by Americans. I don't think, long-term, that we will retain those industries anyway in the wake of a recession and the idle workers of Asia. There's a kind of neutron bomb idea here, that we can retain industries without them actually employing people, and that's somehow a good thing. Again, I don't think we've really begun to understand this yet, but it's difficult to see this as an absolute good for Americans, no matter how it turns out.

It's it's, unless it's its

If you're one of the many who have trouble distinguishing between "it's" and "its," which I'll grant is confusing in that two rules are confused ([contractions with is take an 's] [possessives take an 's]), I have a helpful suggestion for you.

Rather than trying to figure it out, just use the same one all the time. This is the principle of the old brain-teaser, which is more correct, the clock that loses a minute every day, or the clock that doesn't work at all? (The second, of course, as it is right twice a day.)

Many writers seem to get "it's" and "its" wrong; apparently they completely misunderstand the right rule. So pick one, and you'll only be wrong 50% of the time. You're welcome (or is that your welcome?).

More on outsourcing

I don't have a lot new to contribute on this topic, largely because I don't do the tough work Citizen Carrie does in digging out the news and trends about the movement of jobs overseas and the accompanying smokescreen in the press. Her most recent post, Ross School of Outsourcing, is long but more than worthwhile to read. (This explains why she didn't post for five days, I'm thinking.)

The motivation for her post is a deconstruction of a Detroit News commentary by Robert (Bob) Kennedy, and Carrie does a fine job of going through it (and how she stomachs yet another variation on the offshoring is good, visas are better, American workers are unqualified and lousy, I can't imagine). Kennedy is a University of Michigan professor, something that apparently doesn't require the examination of multiple sides of an issue, especially as he is also the executive director of the William Davidson Institute. This is one of those ostensibly "non-profit, independent, research and educational institute[s]" that has been financed by an "international manufacturer of glass products."

It's not impossible that the WDI began as a place of legitimate inquiry, but it's oh-so-easy to look at who's writing the checks, an international manufacturer that employs a lot of overseas workers, and conclude that the development of a belief that offshoring is socially positive is a good career move. (Whether a public university should accept money to promote the beliefs of the donor under the aegis of the institution is a big issue, one for another day.)

I'm not going to even try to rehash Carrie's post, it's so dense (in a good way) that I couldn't do it justice, but I will follow one of her links, the one to Bob's blog. Actually, the blog isn't totally Bob's, there's another contributor named Lou LaFrate. He is not a staff member at WDI, he's a Director of Business Development in the automotive field. I don't know what company Lou works for, but I have my suspicions.

Anyway, this blog essentially exists as a promotional mechanism for Bob's new book. (To show you the incestuous nature of these matters, at least three of the nine Amazon reviews, which are all 5-star!!, are written by WDI staff - in other words, they work for Bob. Lou's got another, and a few are hard to tell.) You can find it on your own.

As Carrie says:

In an odd way, his site will make an excellent resource for anti-offshoring bloggers who might be looking for something to write about. Kennedy probably has the finest collection of links around that talk about the great benefits of offshoring, outsourcing, and how the loss of millions of manufacturing and higher-level service jobs in the U.S. will ultimately lead to greater prosperity for all.

And that's certainly true. Just catch this item (posted by Lou):

A story in the LA Times reported that employment in the region surrounding San Jose dropped 1.3% late last year. The key reason cited is the lack of "enough skilled workers needed to drive the next decade's innovation". This specific issue is addressed as one of the 5 key drivers of globalization in chapter two of Bob's book.

They captured the essence of the story correctly, then used it to frighten us with the news that students at the Indian School of Business "have chosen to opt for domestic offers over international offers." (The story is simplistic if it thinks the key reason for lower employment in a severe recession is a lack of skilled workers.) The whole blog is like this, that offshoring is not just inevitable (which may be true), but is desirable as well. If it were just another advocacy blog (like, quite often, my own), that would be fine. There's definitely a point of view, as the current political trend is described as:

more and more defensive posturing by politicians introducing “buy American” provisions in legislations, restricting H-1B visas, etc.

That this might not be "defensive posturing," but a principle that American money should go to support Americans, is not something Bob and Lou want to get into.

What is disturbing is that a university and its faculty are supposed to be seekers of the truth. They're supposed to look at all sides of the issue and try to find reality in it.

Bob, on the other hand, has made up his mind and is willing to cherry-pick facts to support his bought-and-paid-for notions. He's done well jumping on the offshoring wave, and he's going to ride it as long and hard as he can.

And mroe power to him. He can advocate offshoring while ignoring every argument that someone might present which points out possible deleterious long-term effects, and it will have no effect on his tenure, his large private consulting business to overseas and multinational corporations, his book sales.

It may just take the maturation of distance learning technology, in which his job is given to one of those Indian School of Business graduates who's staying home, to get Bob to question some of his assumptions. We can only hope.

Adjectives

I've studied a few languages with varying degrees of success, I've taken courses in linguistics, so I've had the opportunity to think about how languages do things. At that, I am continually surprised by the complexities of English. When you really think about all the things we just naturally say and understand, and, more importantly, the things we recognize as "wrong," it's a marvel we learn the language at all.

John McIntyre has had a couple of posts up lately about rules, and, in one he wrote just a short time ago ("This is not a rule"), he points out something I hadn't really thought about before:

One example is the pattern or sequence of adjectives. When a string of adjectives precedes a noun, they follow this pattern:

article, opinion, size, age, shape, color, nationality or ethnicity, religion, material, purpose or qualifier.

You can talk or write about the old gray Presbyterian stone church without giving trouble to your audience, but a reference to the Presbyterian gray stone old church will be a problem. I suppose that you could call the sequence of adjectives a rule rather than a pattern or structure, but it is not anything that has to be taught to a native speaker.

Pretty interesting, and perhaps this is one reason I never quite got this down in French (except to replicate what we do in English, which I'm guessing, Mrs. Wright, was wrong some of the time).

OK, we're saved

I'm going to give President Obama some credit for taking on a whole bunch of challenges. A lot of people, particularly the talking heads on the Sunday talk shows, believe he's taking on too much, that he should focus like a laser on the economy and let everything else slide.

Here's what I believe: Obama sees where the country is and thinks pretty much everything has to change, that to do one thing without the other is doomed to failure. We can't fix the banking system without getting our whole financial system on firm footing, and we can't do that while Americans fear the crippling effects on having insufficient health care. And we have to stop spending so much on health care. We can't continue our dependency on other countries for energy, we have to bring that home, and, in so doing, we'll create new jobs. And so on, and so forth.

I certainly don't buy into every detail of these things, and I think the effects will be far less than forecast. There is an enduring optimism that people who have made the system work for them tend to have, and that's lovely; for those of us who have been buffeted about a little more, who have not had a meteoric rise to the Presidency, things do not look as rosy.

But I applaud the attempt to look at the nation as a holistic system, one that has to improve in several areas at once. If Obama took the standard approach of serializing these problems, the one that Congress seems to prefer, he would need five terms to accomplish everything.

There would also be inequities in this approach brought on by exigency. If we throw money at the banking system for 18 months to save it, bankers are going to receive all the perceived benefits of these actions. However, if we're improving health care at the same time, then everyone's getting something.

So, fine, let's take on education as well. I believe that Obama is captive to conventional wisdom on the subject, but any effort would be welcome, right? Let's see. He gave a major address on education to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce this morning, and let's take a look at it.

He begins with a nice riff that talks about balancing the short-term with the long-term (along the lines I talked about above):

In the short term, that means jump-starting job creation and restarting lending, and restoring confidence in our markets and our financial system. But it also means taking steps that not only advance our recovery, but lay the foundation for lasting, shared prosperity.

I know there's some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time. And they forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad and passed the Homestead Act and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of civil war. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn't have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war; he had to do both. President Kennedy didn't have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don't have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

America will not remain true to its highest ideals -- and America's place as a global economic leader will be put at risk -- unless we not only bring down the crushing cost of health care and transform the way we use energy, but also if we do -- if we don't do a far better job than we've been doing of educating our sons and daughters; unless we give them the knowledge and skills they need in this new and changing world.

There's the obligatory mention of how the GI Bill...investments in math and science...the wonders of Google..."economic progress and educational achievement have always gone hand in hand."

But then we run off the rails:

The source of America's prosperity has never been merely how ably we accumulate wealth, but how well we educate our people. This has never been more true than it is today. In a 21st-century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there's an Internet connection, where a child born in Dallas is now competing with a child in New Delhi, where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know -- education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it's a prerequisite for success.

This paragraph is more of the nonsense we've heard for years. The "what you do," "what you know" distinction is ludicrous, especially if you're in the market for a job and running up against the hirers who say that you need "exactly" the qualifications in the job description. When people start to pay for "what you know" rather than for job titles, we'll have something.

Worse, of course, is the perpetuation of the idea that the Dallas child is falling behind his Indian counterpart because of his remarkable stupidity and the incompetence of his teachers. How many more times do I (and many, though not enough, other commentators) have to stress that the jobs are lost not because of the awesome intellectual power of Dajit or Li-Xun, but because of the discrepancy in compensation. I know why Bill Gates pushes this idiocy, but I want to think better of Obama.

On he goes:

So let there be no doubt: The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens -- and my fellow Americans, we have everything we need to be that nation. We have the best universities, the most renowned scholars. We have innovative principals and passionate teachers and gifted students, and we have parents whose only priority is their child's education. We have a legacy of excellence, and an unwavering belief that our children should climb higher than we did.

But there is doubt. We have the "most renowned scholars," most of whom use whatever clout they've earned to stay as far away from the undergraduate classroom as possible. We have universities that get far more excited about March Madness than graduation rates for those athletes. And we have tuition rates that are skyrocketing even as opportunities for our young people are narrowing.

It's that most American of ideas, that with the right education, a child of any race, any faith, any station, can overcome whatever barriers stand in their way and fulfill their God-given potential.

This is a wonderful sentiment, really it is, but it conflicts with what we're actually seeing. This expression of the American Dream has run headlong into the other expression, that people should be free to exploit whatever resources they can in order to enrich themselves. If that means we treat the workforce as replacable drags on personal fortunes, so be it. If that means we use cheap foreign workers to line our own pockets, that's the American Dream for a whole lot of executives.

The next part of Obama's speech is very good, as he talks about "the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline." That's all true, especially in Washington, which has managed to create No Child Left Behind, a set-it-and-forget-it system that brought laissez-faire thinking to education. And no one should be able to argue with:

The time for holding us -- holding ourselves accountable is here. What's required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It's time to expect more from our students. It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. It's time to demand results from government at every level.

Of course, he follows that with:

It's time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world. It's time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career.

Again, until every American child is given the ability to live on $10,000 a year, this "out-compete" business is just an excuse. No one knows a way to make American children five or so times as productive as foreign children, so the numbers will never add up. Furthermore, we don't actually know what constitutes a "complete and competitive education" in our current situation.

Obama then moves into the five "pillars" of his program. The first is more support for early education. As someone who grew up pretty far right, this kind of program always strikes me as a but heavy-handed, asking government to intrude into the lives of people.

But then I think of teenagers having babies, the lack of reliable day care, the research that indicates that children learn an incredible amount before the age of 5, and I get a little more sympathetic to these efforts. There are still problems: if we can't find top quality teachers for the grades we have, where will we get the ones who are capable of teaching 3-year-olds?

The second pillar is to "spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments." Here's the thing, and I should probably put this at the end, but no one ever accused my posts of being organized.

Our schools should be better, not because of some vaguely-defined objectives about "competitiveness" or "economic decline," because we still haven't defined the way the one translates into the other - the forces that are creating economic decline have surprisingly little to do with education. No, they should be better in the way that anything we take on should be better. If we're going to spend billions on education, we simply should take enough pride in ourselves to do it more effectively. If other nations are really doing a better job of teaching their kids, that's just wrong.

Obama wants "tougher, clearer standards," and that's fine. Of course, he's calling on states to make that happen, which is somewhat contradictory. If we're to have one set of standards for the nation, they'll have to come from one place...and that place will be Washington. Politics will determine if that's going to happen.

This part, however:

I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.

irks me, because there is no real proof that we can teach those things effectively. If we can't even teach bubble-filling, how do we teach creativity? We don't know, so it will be back to the same experimentation that has been the hallmark of American education for decades - the same decades that have demonstrated our decline.

The third pillar is probably the most problematic. It's the need for:

recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers.

Need I point out, again, that the probability of creating 3,000,000 great teachers is highly unlikely. I commend Obama for putting money into local government so we don't see layoffs in our schools, because fewer teachers can't be the answer. And urging young people to go into education is never a bad thing (other than the philosophical dilemma, do we really want our best and brightest to teach instead of do?).

And here we come to the magic, that marvelous word "accountability," which automatically makes the weak strong. The usual stuff here from the President, mentoring, merit pay, guidance, support.

But the carrot doesn't come without the stick. We're going to get those bad teachers out of the classroom, drum them right out.

[Then there's this:

I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children's teachers and the schools where they teach.

If only Mr. Obama had the same standards for bankers and auto executives....]

I'm sure I've said this before, but there's a level of unreality here. We really don't know how to evaluate teachers, to distinguish great from good from OK from salvageable from irredeemable. If you're an administrator in a marginal school district, there's a huge incentive to keep the bodies you have. You don't know where the next crop is coming from, and you sure don't know they'll be any better, so you tend to inflate the grades so at least you aren't showing the newbies where the cafeteria is.

The fourth pillar is, of course, "promoting innovation and excellence in America's schools." How do we do this? Charter schools, accountability, blah, blah, blah.

There's an inconsistency here. We're going to couple accountability with autonomy; add those to higher standards imposed from outside, and you have oxymoronic thinking. We can't let charter schools, for which the evidence of effectiveness is actually pretty thin, go off and do their own things at the same time we make them more accountable. It makes no sense at all, we have to choose one or the other.

The longer school year, the talk of individual responsibility, I'm certainly all for that, but Obama is trying to use his popularity to change behavior. Good luck with that. Of course kids shouldn't drop out, but the tie between these policies and the high rate in some places is tenuous at best.

Pillar five is "a quality higher education." Simplifying forms and raising Pell Grants are good things, but drops in the bucket. Something that will get attention is Obama's exhortation for each American to "commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training,
with the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in
the world by the year 2020."

This is fine, I suppose, but even Obama says:

By 2016, four out of every 10 new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training.

I don't really see how these things go together. 60% of new jobs will not require this training, so why are we putting every student on the track of more education? Yes, Obama includes technical training along with college, but the emphasis is clearly on colleges and universities.

Interestingly enough, government will be the solution through programs and funding. I'm not seeing the place where we ask business to step up and do anything, even if they are the ones profiting.

So, unfortunately, there is very little new here. There is no recognition that job loss comes from anything other than our incompetence vis-à-vis other countries, that we need to create alternate tracks for students who won't master the world economy, that we have any idea of matching supply to demand.

No, it's the usual ideas supporting the concept that all education is good, more is better, and we should move heaven and earth to get it. There was nothing about the disconnect between the people who already did that and are finding themselves passed by, and the promise to our nation's children that this is likely to increase. Sadly, this speech is the standard, let's do all this good stuff and magic will happen. I'd like to see some more creative thinking than that.

But will the Right scurry away from it?

Sullivan makes a lot of sense in The Center Moves Left?, in which he explains how the Obama administration is responding to actual events, not attempting to recreate France or form a socialist republic:

If your goal is to keep a polity in one piece during an economic crisis, raising some taxes on those who have had a relatively low-tax couple of decades, is again pragmatically defensible. If I thought Obama's goal was to redistribute for the sake of it, I'd be appalled. But that isn't what he's said and it isn't what he believes. Ditto cap-and-trade. I don't think it's the best way to tackle climate change, but I do see it as a legitimate, practical response to climate change - not some expansion of government for its own sake. It's also a real, if flawed, attempt to wean us off oil after a decade in which we learned the hard way what oil-fueled fanaticism can do to us. Again: this is about reacting to changes in the world. It seems to me to be within the conservative mindset to adjust to practical necessity and a changing world.

Once again, we have the curious attempt of Andrew Sullivan to reserve the "conservative" label for the things he believes, despite any evidence that modern American conservatism is anything like that.  I admire the effort, but I think Sullivan's going to have to change his moniker, because the Palin/Jindal Republican Party ain't a gonna.

But his point is spot on: we have massive problems like the economy, climate change, and health care, and the Republicans have been given every opportunity to do something about them, and they haven't made an iota of progress.

Now the Democrats are having their turn, and, while I don't buy into every last piece of it, I sure know what doesn't work.  So let's be cautious, see what happens, and try to respond a lot more quickly than we've seen in this last torpid 28 years.

I want to dislike him

I want to dislike Justin Timberlake, really I do.  The whole Mickey Mouse Club, boy group thing seems like a career path calculated to make him famous and rich.  To see him as a male version of his erstwhile girlfriend, the insufferable Britney Spears, is almost too easy.

Yet, he is putting together a pretty decent career.  His music has continued to grow and develop since the 'N Sync days.  I don't know what portion of this is due to Timberlake, and what to producers and songwriters, but he's doing some reasonably complex stuff.  He even almost redeemed Madonna's 4 Minutes (but only almost).

His public persona has become appealing as well, despite certain missteps at, say, a particular Super Bowl halftime show.  He has a real chance to become one of the go-to hosts for Saturday Night Live, in the same company as Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  I can't hear Beyonce's Single Ladies without picturing the SNL skit where Timberlake appeared as a backup dancer.

Jimmy Fallon's late-night debut last Monday, that meltdown disaster, was almost saved by Timberlake.  Supposedly, he volunteered to fill in and do an extra number at the Grammys when Chris Brown was, ahem, indisposed.

JT seems like a good guy with some talent; maybe his biggest talent is seeming likable, but I remain to have it proven to me that he's actually a jerk.

David Foster Wallace

I apologize to whomever pointed me to this.  I followed a link to this New Yorker story so I could read it later.  Now I have, and want to point my readers to it, but I can not give a proper hat tip.  Nevertheless, if you want to ruminate on creativity, depression, and the frustration of reaching for something that you can never quite find, read the piece on the life and death of writer David Foster Wallace.  D.T. Max has produced a heartbreaking story about a genius who remained forever restless.

Same place, different road

I was thinking a bit more about my previous post, More from the dreaded France, and another thought occurred to me.  My point there was that the current Republican idea of threatening Americans with the specter of turning into France was likely to be ineffective, and betrayed a lack of knowledge as to what the American Dream is all about.  It's not about the chaotic marketplace, it's about the fruits of coming through that chaos.  To claim that Obama wishes the U.S. to become France West is a false claim with a false conclusion.

An underlying theme to all this whining from the Right is that Obama wants to redistribute income, take from the deserving rich and give to the great unwashed; you know, the same marvelous theory that has given us flat median income and a major, not-since-the-Depression crisis.  The Republican idea has been that each earns according to their talents and adaptability, and any deviation from that is inherently unfair.  So we see proposals like a flat tax, which is seen as "fair" by its proponents.  If you can't make it in our system, the argument goes, it's your own fault, and no one should be expected to pick up your slack.  No redistribution, that's socialism, and we can't have that.

So let's take a scenario that's all too common today.  On the one hand, you have a worker who's been at a company for 20 years.  She's done everything she's ever been asked, has worked unpaid overtime when it was needed to get a task done, works well with others.  Her effort has been instrumental in getting the company to a place of profitability and respect in the industry.  She has received steady raises over the years, slightly higher than the rate of inflation, so she is making about twice in real terms what she was making when she started.  Of course, she is more than twice as valuable, so the company has actually come out ahead, but it's a tradeoff with which she's comfortable; she has a life in the community, her kids like their schools, her husband has a job at which he's happy.

The company decides to hire a new CEO.  He's a slick guy, the right degrees from the right schools, moved from company to company on the fast track upwards, shook the right hands.  He never really developed any expertise other than an ability to be decisive in meetings, and he's either been lucky enough that those decisions have been right, or he's gotten out before the wrong ones brought him down.  His fabulous education came from schools which, public or private, have been supported by taxpayers, and he's played the corporate welfare game quite successfully.

CEO Guy comes in and wants to make a splash right away, demonstrate to the board that he's a bold visionary, not afraid to make the tough decisions.  Increasing revenues by creating new products or selling more of the old ones is hard; that usually takes a while and requires some knowledge of the company and its industry.  It's way easier to look at some department profit statements and slash a couple, saving all those salaries.  Or, as he did in the previous company, he can outsource or offshore some "non-core" functions.

Either way, the hard worker loses her job.  She hasn't done anything wrong, she never has, she's just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Depending on the economy, her field, her formal credentials, she may be able to get another position without too much trouble.  On the other hand, she may not, and her family may be forced into a series of tough decisions.

And the money that was saved by giving her the heave-ho?  Some of it went to shareholders, but not all of it.  Some of it went to consumers, but there's ample evidence that prices are lowered a lot less than the actual savings would imply.  Ah, but CEO Guy's contract calls for him to get "variable compensation" based on profits, and he's brought those up, oh yes he has.

So we most certainly have income redistribution here.  But this is Republican-approved redistribution, the kind where one employee of a company gets to make decisions that move dollars into his own pocket.  This is perfectly fine, not that evil kind where the elected representatives of the people decide a progressive tax rate will take somewhat more from those who have to set up programs to help people who have not.

What's the difference?  In the first case, it's all private, it comes from decisions made by one person who has been granted near-life-and-death power over the affairs of another, without any consent of the second person.  In the second case, the people speaking through their official government have made the decision that the nation's interest will be better served if there is somewhat more equality.

In each case, whether you're on the Right or the Left, you support some form of resource redistribution.  Personally, I'm not totally sold on either.  The first seems wrong; it seems to be that, after 20 years, that employee has more "ownership" of her job than a two-month severance check would imply.  The second can easily be overdone; I lived through the Carter years, where it seemed we could solve every problem by moving money around the economy (and led directly to the backlash of the "Reagan revolution" and the Greed Decade of the 1980s).

So, yet again, I urge taking a middle ground, leaving most money in the hands of those who make it, while never forgetting that a nation with millions living in poverty is not a strong nation, no matter how many billions the people at the top have.  Does the current bundle of Obama programs go too far?  I don't know yet, but I'm guessing that, since the president has said that over 90% of the money will pass into private hands, the people at the top will fare just fine - no tag days for Bill Gates, I would wager.

More from the dreaded France

This idea, that Barack Obama is turning the United States into France (quel horreur!), is apparently not just from the fevered mind of Republican operative Mike Murphy (as I wrote about on Monday).  Kevin Drum writes about a New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen, who at least does some fleshing out as to why he thinks we're going the way of our Gallic neighbors across the sea.

Apparently, in France the government is seen "as all-embracing solution rather than problem," and:

there’s more than a touch of France in the bash-the-rich righteousness with which the new president cast his plans as “a threat to the status quo in Washington.”

This piece goes on, and gives us a glimpse of what Obama's opposition is thinking.  There's the warning against nationalization, which France tried, then rejected about 25 years ago (so the nationalizations were the scary France, and the reversals were, quoi?, the non-France?).

But we get the crux of the argument a little lower down.  "French savoir-faire" offers great pleasures, but in no way matches the joyously chaotic American ambition.  We offer "the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons."  And then comes this pronouncement:

Churn is the American way. Companies are born, rise, fall and die. Others come along to replace them. The country’s remarkable capacity for innovation, for reinvention, is tied to its acceptance of failure. Or always has been. Without failure, the culture of risk fades. Without risk, creativity withers. Save the zombies and you sabotage the vital.

If America loses sight of these truths, it will cease to be itself.

I'm still not sure why, other than force of habit, the Republicans use France as their model for static, non-innovative, stifling cultures.  But let's move past that.  (Actually, let's not.  Is France, with their restless immigrant population and 80% nuclear power, really the slow ponderous culture Cohen purports it to be?  Seems not.)

One of the major aspects of the American experience has been the conflict between limitless chaos and organized civilization.  We worship the frontier, the men on their horses riding hither and yon, but that's always in support of the town, the stagecoach, the new schoolmarm.  We may need a certain amount of "creative destruction" in order to remain vital, but once we slip past a certain boundary, we have anarchy.

And our current situation has some measure of that, some degree of having left rules behind and thrusting the most vulnerable out into the wilderness.  While the CEOs, who are supposed to be bold visionaries and risk-takers, the John Waynes of the modern-day frontier, protect themselves in their gated communities with their golden parachutes, the walls of the fort are coming down and the average American is getting scalped.

When hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans are being thrown out of their jobs every month, we have moved from "creative destruction" to, simply, destruction.

What Cohen misses is that the glorious "boundlessness" he writes about is not the end, it's the means.  We accept the chaos to get beyond it, because accepting it seems to be the best way to give the greatest number of people a respite from it.

The apotheosis of Cohen's America would be one in which all that we have is thrown into a big drum every year, then reapportioned out to whomever was most deserving.  You could never count on having achieved anything, as it might be taken away from you at any moment.  Is that really the American Dream?

Of course not.  We can argue back and forth as to whether AIG or Chrysler or Citigroup should be propped up or allowed to die, but we shouldn't argue that we want the whole system to die.  Vague warnings about France, which at the very least understands that a safety net is needed for the most vulnerable, doesn't advance the discussion of the specifics.  The contention of Cohen and Murphy that there are two poles, and classic America stands at one, and France at the other, simply doesn't hold up.  It's a subtle matter of degree, and righting the American ship is not the same as setting it on fire.  Republicans need to figure that out, and soon, or they truly will become irrelevant.

How do you travel?

I'm not very good at coming up with the winning analogy.  Every so often, I'll think of one, and I'll run it past the wife, and she's very good at poking holes in it, showing me where it's more misleading than helpful, so I tend to drop it (oh, occasionally they'll find their way into the blog anyway).

I haven't had a chance to test this one, so I'll put it out there; she can comment on the blog if she has something to say.

Anyway, it seems to me there are essentially two camps regarding the economic downturn and how we might get out of it.  To analogize: our economy's on a long trip, and your belief about the resolution of the current situation depends on whether you think we're traveling in a plane or a car.

For about the last 30 years, we've been heading the wrong way, toward the wrong destination.  Let's say we started in Cincinnati, and we were on our way to Florida.  Actually, where we need to be going is Maine, but some actors and fearmongers convinced us we needed to be off to the sunny Southeast.  Florida, in this analogy, is the land of infinite opportunity represented by allowing people to do anything they want to do, conduct massive experiments with the economy with the tacit support of the people's representatives.

So we went down through Kentucky and Tennessee and so forth, and only now have we begun to realize that there are major hurricanes at our destination and we don't want to go there at all.  We're supposed to be in Maine, which features a certain discipline and austerity, but it has the sense of teamwork and community that we need.

But how do we get there from where we are?  It depends on whether we're flying or driving.  If we're flying, we simply turn about 90° to the left; we'll be delayed, obviously, but it's clear that if we just sit tight, we'll get to our destination without incident.

But, if we're driving, it's a lot more difficult to see our path from our current vantage point in the Smokies.  We can't simply turn left.  If we try, we'll tear apart the car and not get there at all.  So we need to reroute, get out the atlas and find the best way.  We'll make some wrong turns, because our maps are not all that good.  There will probably be some damage to the car along the way.

We want to believe we're flying, but putting our arms out the window and flapping isn't going to lift the car one inch.

The magic multiplier

I've written several times lately about what I call the magic multiplier, the oft-mentioned figure that will turn the government spending of the various stimulus packages into great positive effects on our GDP.  The more responsible economists point out that this measurement of the results of fiscal policy applies only when there is slack capacity in the economy, that is, when people and plants are idle.  They could all be working, except, for some reason, they are not, so government as the employer of last resort puts them to work.

I have been somewhat dismissive of this multiplier, which has been pegged at about 1.40.  In other words, every dollar of government spending will translate into an injection of $1.40 into our economy.  Having done some economic modeling myself, I'm pretty aware of its limitations; it's a field that's still in infancy, no matter how powerful the computers we throw at it.

Since studies of fiscal stimulus rely on previous conditions similar to the ones in which we find ourselves now, and our situation now is widely acknowledged to be one-of-a-kind, unprecedented as to its causes and effects, it's difficult to see how even the best model can be more than indicative.  The results aren't treated that way, of course, not when there's a political point to be made.  So it's now pretty much taken as common wisdom that the money we throw around the economy will be returned to us with a nice bonus thrown in.

There are many reasons, if we can pull our eyes away from the equations for a moment, to suspect that the multiplier may be overstated.  Even if the models were perfect in capturing what happened in the past (that is, they could predict the already-known "future of the past"), conditions are radically different than they have been before.  Do they take into account the possibility that, as an example, GM could invest some of their bailout money, $1,000,000,000, in Brazil?  [H/t to the Job Destruction Newsletter.]

Do people really believe that the new energy economy is going to be confined to this country?  Or all the new development in health care technology?  Or will we see leakage to the increasingly aggressive offshoring companies (see Carrie's Nation for some thoughts on this)?

All that said, I still guardedly believe we have to move ahead with our current path.  I just want us to temper our expectations, take 1.40 with a grain of salt, and remain vigilant as to what we're actually spending our money on.  We can all react with horror to the likes of "Buy American" provisions, but it really isn't all that surprising that people want some protection for their trillions of dollars.

I try not to get too technical in this blog; I have some training in economics, and could draw the occasional graph or put a few equations here.  But there are people who do that sort of thing better, the likes of Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma, so I leave the heavy lifting to them.

However, if you want to get a little heavier into the development of these multipliers, there's an excellent item by Mark Thoma from about a month ago ("The Great Multiplier Debate").  In it, he presents a lengthy excerpt from Menzie Chinn on the three basic models used to develop these multipliers.

Thoma then gives us five excellent paragraphs on why these models are flawed.  Essentially, current economic practice focuses on growth and monetary policy:

Nobody, or hardly anybody, was asking questions about the use of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy. Hence very few models were built to look at this issue.

No one has thought for some time that fiscal policy, that is, government spending, was ever going to be the tool by which we "fixed" the economy:

Thus, the need for stabilization policy, fiscal policy in particular, was believed to be greatly diminished. The fact that fiscal policy might be needed in a deep recession because monetary policy would be rendered ineffective was discounted and ignored because the the belief was that a deep recession couldn't occur, the economy was too robust and flexible for that.

Monetary policy could handle any problem that arose, so cutting edge economists simply didn't develop tools for discussing our current situation.  The only models we have to explore the now are fairly old-fashioned, and subject to the distortions of unrealistic assumptions:

The next approaches to macro modeling and estimation, the micro-founded models and the VAR models, came into being as the fiscal policy question was falling by the wayside (most VAR models do not even include government spending and taxes). Thus, as you may have noticed, there isn't much in the way of evidence from these models that we can rely upon (and that's not even considering the fact that we have very little data from recessionary episodes to inform us on these issues). The models will be built - I guarantee you they are being built presently - but for now we have what we have.

As is all so typical, the more you know about economics, the less you rely on it for simple answers.  There's a lot of insight in the field, but predicting, especially in a new kind of environment, just isn't there, and we need to understand that, and level our expectations accordingly.

The other Thanksgiving Day

Today's the day we thank the 20th Amendment to the Constitution:

1. The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

Otherwise, we would have had until today to watch George W. Bush and his minions flail away at governing the nation.

Magic from Brooks, and responses

As another illustration of the kind of journalistic thinking I talked about in my last post, see Brad DeLong for a couple of deconstructions of the newest David Brooks effort.  It's a typical example of Brooks Big-Think that devolves into incoherence, and Joe Klein and Ed Kilgore do a nice job of laying it bare.

The Wall Street...Huh???

I have expressed concerns about the eventual effectiveness of the current programs that have been approved and will be; I think, for various reasons, the measures will be less effective than the rosy picture that is painted by Democrats. The infrastructure part of the stimulus package should be called the CCEA (Connected Contractor Enrichment Act), at least in Illinois. New energy, even if we can provide proper incentives and safeguards, is unlikely to lead to a new wealthy middle class, no matter how many times Obama says so. More education always seems attractive, but only if it matches up with the actual needs of the job market - I see little evidence that the stimulus money is going to fields that will keep our university labs full. Leakage to other countries is a real risk, especially when those other countries are leaving the saving of the world to us.

We need to keep our expectations realistic, not just accept the economist-generated estimate of 1.40 for the magic government spending multiplier, recognize that we could stoke up the economy well past the time that recovery is afoot and end up with troubles in the other direction. And, yes, we have to take moral hazard into account as we formulate programs (a comment on an earlier post on this topic, which I didn't fully understand, seemed to misunderstand my position - to clarify, we need to recognize the reality of moral hazard; it shouldn't forestall action, it should force us to create proposals with some care).

All of this is not meant to suggest that we should do nothing and wait for the market to come to the rescue. People are hurting, people who have not been particularly well-served by untrammeled free market orthodoxy. We're beginning to recognize the limitations of that approach, that there are public objectives of a modern society that are not fulfilled by laissez-faire.

Well, most of us are, but not the bible for investors, the Wall Street Journal. I'll grant that their audience is not the public at large, but that's no excuse for specious reasoning that ignores reality. But that's exactly what we find in an editorial today, The Obama Economy. I'll go through this is some detail.

It begins:

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

The drop in the market is, to be sure, troubling, but this is written in a misleading way. We're asked to believe that the market was roaring back in the days before Obama took over, until the world started getting a look at his policies. What is ignored is that most analysts believed the market was coming back because investors were pleased that Bush was leaving. Even taken as it is, the text is poor, because the January 2 peak was the highest since all the way back on November 5, which really wasn't the time of the "autumn panic."

The use of the term "become clear" is completely unsupported, and the implication in the second paragraph is by no means perfectly logical. It's hard to see how giving money to failed companies is "punishing business," unless we mean "punishing CEOs," which may well be a concern to WSJ readers.

Then we come across this graph, a fine example of using graphics to obscure reality:

Look at how this has been carefully chosen to make the Obama months look like the problem. The huge losses incurred by the DJIA in the months before the election are ignored. The 4500 point loss that preceded this point is blown by; after all, only partisans could blame Bush for any of this:

The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it's also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length -- and average job loss -- of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up -- unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.

Again, reasoning based on assumptions, not facts. We have no idea whether the "excess" (in what, the writer doesn't say) has really been "worked off." That this recession is close to the average length of previous recessions ignores the fact that this is very likely a worse-than-usual downturn.

By the way, note the term "job loss" in the above paragraph. It's the only time that employment will be mentioned.

There's some more stuff, not worth quoting, as to how the economy is in pretty good shape (oil prices are low, liquidity is busting out all over, housing prices are close to the bottom). Supposedly, things have been quietly getting better over the past couple of months, except for those nettlesome Obama policies.

I should probably quote a lot more of this thing, but it's discouraging. Oh, OK, maybe a bit more:

What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama's ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.

We're getting to the gist of this now. It takes a little interpretation, but the "improving incentives to work or invest" essentially means "drop corporate tax rates." "Repair and recovery" means we should just give money to corporations and let them work things out. But even this understanding doesn't help us with all this "reasoning":

Perhaps the imminent Treasury "stress tests" will clear the decks, but until they do the banks are all living in fear of becoming the next AIG. All of this squanders public money that could better go toward burning down bank debt.

What does this even mean? I guess banks are afraid they might be taken over by the government, but some of them have already been given money that exceeds their current market capitalization. I can only believe the WSJ supports no-strings contributions to our well-managed financial institutions.

Surprise! They're not fond of the budget either:

The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they're no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade.

If health care organizations had found ways to extend coverage and rein in costs, the public wouldn't be demanding change. If they had used some of their massive profits to modernize, making medicine safer, we would be fine with them.

If private lenders were making loans, they would still be in the game. I guess every student is supposed to drop out for a few years while the market sorts it out, then come back to school and go into permanent hock as their bargained-down salaries fail to cover the repayment of those loans.

If energy companies had taken the lead on new energy, if they had devoted their record profits to paying the full costs of their operations, there would be no pressure for carbon taxes or cap and trade.

Of course, we have to get in one political barb:

They seem preoccupied with going to the barricades against Republicans who wield little power, or picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh, as if this is the kind of economic leadership Americans want.

It's really hard to see the Obama White House as the obstructionists in the current situation. As I said above, I'm not fully on board with every single thing, but the Republicans have offered nothing but roadblocks and unpleasantness - they're an embarrassment.

What The Wall Street Journal wants, clearly, is a retreat to the glorious days when business leaders called the shots, got whatever they wanted. What that is is a modified free market in which the vast majority of Americans are caught up in creative destruction, while the executives soak up all the marvelous riches that are generated.

But the market is not perfect, it does not inevitably create humane or just outcomes (even Adam Smith didn't believe that). If the current administration ends up going a bit too far in that direction, well, Republicans and Big Business have only themselves to blame. Had they ever put the public's interest ahead of their own, there would be a lot more sympathy for them now that they're on the skids.

Funny item

At the risk of getting too quote-remote, I offer the following from Adrian Furnham (in the Henry Hitchings work The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, as cited by John McIntyre):

It has been said that journalists first used the word “guru” to describe management theorists because they could not spell the word “charlatan.”

Perhaps this is a little too mean to journalists (but not to management "gurus"; hey, where is that cheese, anyway?).

Speaking of the Sunday shows

I just wrote about yesterday's Meet The Press, but I have a more general question. Why are political operatives and pollsters so often invited on these shows to talk about policy?

George Stephanopoulos had Karl Rove and Stan Greenberg on his This Week panel yesterday. Everyone knows Rove as the architect of Bush's two presidential victories; Greenberg is less widely known, but is a Democratic pollster. If George had these gentlemen on to talk about campaign strategies and their effects on the populace, that would be worthwhile, but there's no campaign now. So Rove and Greenberg are talking about the pros and cons of Obama's economic policies.

And I don't care what they think, because they're process guys, not content guys. The Peter Orszag (new director of the OMB) interview may not have been exciting (or particularly illuminating), but at least he's in the thick of the reality.

I can understand why Rove and Greenberg would want to expand their portfolios, but I can't understand why, with all the newsmakers that float around Washington on a Sunday morning, ABC would put these chaps on.

France scares me

Well, not me, but apparently Republican operative Mike Murphy thinks we all are. In his appearance yesterday on Meet The Press, he invoked France four times (by my count) as the economic model toward which we're heading under the Obama economic plan.

If we need any better example of how tired the rhetoric of the Republican party is right now, this is it. I understood, but thought ridiculous, the anger toward the French in the wake of our rush to attack Iraq. Their reluctance at that time to join our quest wasn't exactly unique, but they seemed to receive the bulk of the enmity. In retrospect, of course, the French seem to have been the prudent ones.

The Republicans cranked up the France business again during the 2004 presidential campaign, accusing John Kerry of (gasp!) speaking French. How effective that particular idea was I don't know, but it hardly seems all that significant now.

Yet Murphy raises the specter of France as the horror which must be avoided, and I don't get it at all. France may have a higher level of government spending than we do, but so do lots of countries. They're hurting in the current global financial troubles, but many countries are doing worse. If Murphy wants to terrify us into rejecting the president's initiatives, he should warn that we'll become Iceland or Zimbabwe, not France.

And this guy is still an important voice in the Republican party...I don't get it.

Traffic you can use

I don't like to get too pet peeve-y, at least not too often, so I haven't written before about traffic reports. I don't quite get why they're so important (at least they are in Chicago), because there are rarely good alternatives. My suburb was once a farm community, so it was pretty self-contained except for the train line to Chicago (used mainly to ship furniture). The major businesses were those that were needed internally, like commercial stores and the hospital and the schools.

As a result, there are simply not a lot of direct roads here from the big city. There is Ogden Avenue, a busy stop-and-go roadway that travels through several commercial districts and is ill-suited for actual travel. And there is I-88, part of the Interstate Highway System.

So, if you're coming to or from Chicago, and there's a problem on 88, well, too bad, that's still going to be the best game in town. They'd have to pretty much close the highway for an hour to make taking anything else worth the delay.

Therefore, traffic reports are largely irrelevant to anyone living in my area, and the same is true for a lot of the other suburbs around Chicago. Yet, traffic reporting seems to become more important all the time, and I've learned to live with it.

However...

I heard a traffic report on our local news radio station the other day introduced with, "Getting you home safe and sound...." That sounds good, and I'm sure it's the kind of thing that sounds warm and audience-friendly, but it's such nonsense. If you want to get people home safe and sound, you should put them on the most crowded roads you can find. You're way safer driving at 5 mph than speeding along at 75. The objective of the report is to get you home fast, not safe. That illusion, that it's helping you do that, is the source of its attraction, but it's pretty weak.

Well, I've read over the preceding, and it sounds a bit more curmudgeonly than I like to think I am, but heck, let's put it up anyway.