There's a terrible syndrome associated with brain injury and many diseases of neurodegeneration: involuntary spontaneous weeping and laughing, unassociated with any underlying feeling.
Creepy no? Well, guess what turns out to be an effective treatment for this effect? A combination of Robitussin and an antiarrhythmic*! Does this not make you feel confident about our understanding of the human brain? Thanks, Science!
*OK, this is an exaggeration. The antiarrythmic is just there to block the metabolism of the dextromethorphan. More info here.
[Ben A.: 11/1/10 21:02]
Ben A, thanks for that timely takedown of Democrat propaganda. They can use as much smoke, mirrors, and dry-erase ink as they want, but they'll never trick us into voting against what we know so deeply -- cutting taxes on the rich (and, let us emphasize, on the pool of potential buyers of Manhattan real estate) is the key to a strong economy.
Off to Australia tonight. We had to be careful about which day we chose to leave on. I didn't want to cross the international date-line in such a way as to cause me to miss my own birthday.
[Ben H.: 10/31/10 14:47]
Possibly True Factoid
According to this Joel Kotkin article, New York City has half of the entire U.S. count of mass-transit users. Outside New York City, there are now more telecommuters than mass transit users. Maybe some of that bridge toll money should go to subsidizing our broadband!
[Ben H.: 10/31/10 14:46]
After this plot, I'm sure to face more inconvenience. I order all my toner online from Dar-Al-Cartridge, the Yemeni printer superstore. Good luck on my packages getting delivered now!
[Ben H.: 10/29/10 22:16]
Exactly -- intentionally walking Hamilton to pitch to Vladimiro Guerrero! I have to believe that Guerrero must have felt disrespected by Girardi's decision and that this sense of having been slighted surely helped motivate him.
[Ben H.: 10/24/10 13:39]
Intentional Walks
The Sainted Bill James once ran a simulation with a better-than 1921 Babe Ruth on a terrible team (#5 batter: Gino Cimoli). James then then simulated 2000 seasons: 1000 in which opponents always intentionally walked the Babe, 1000 where they never did. The team with walkin' Babe averaged 667 runs vs. 601 for swing-away Babe (Ruth averaged .385 and 61 HRs in the simulation).* Adding base runners and removing outs has effects that powerful, even with Babe Ruth.
Let's just say that Gino Cimoli is no Vlad Guerrero!
The last week for us has been a crazy amalgam of Park Avenue luxury and wilderness camp-out. We are renovation refugees, as I've mentioned. Typically that means one either imposes on friends/relatives or pays exorbitant NYC short-term housing rates. We decided to do about three weeks of each, but in between we've scheduled three weeks somewhere else: in Dao's sister's empty apartment on Park Avenue. When I say Park Avenue I mean Park Avenue, not "Park Avenue and 123rd Street" or something. And when I say empty, I mean empty except for an Aero-bed -- they have moved to Chicago with all their stuff, but haven't yet closed a sale of this apartment. The result is a very strange experience. You get off the subway and walk home and enter the lobby, and you're sort of slinking in shamefully because you walked in from the sidewalk rather than from a chauffeured black car. (Compare Rastignac in Le Pere Goriot, mortified to be walking, in his own boots, through the portes cochères of his social betters.) You take the dark wood elevator to your floor, sitting on the leather bench or not, at your discretion. Then you open the apartment door and see a wide expanse of bare hardware floor. You can cook something for dinner in your one metal pot over the flame of the Thermador stove, and eat it, with a plastic fork, in one of the folding chairs you brought over. You can read for a while because there's no television or WiFi network. And then you go to sleep on the Aero-bed. But wear a sweater because the radiators stay inexplicably cold until 6:30 A.M. and you have only a thin blanket. And hang up your food sack so the bears don't get it!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 10/23/10 12:36]
My former boss used to say, as a sort of investing motto, "Don't result it." The quality of decisions made ex-ante does not always manifest itself in the ex-post result. At the risk of sounding like I might be "resulting it": what the hell was Joe Girardi doing intentionally walking Josh Hamilton three times last night? Ok, the results were not helped by Hughes actually succeeding at uncorking a wild pitch on an intentional walk (quite an accomplishment), but still...
[Ben H.: 10/23/10 10:26]
Crackpot Physics News
Having not enough time to pursue the details of my Bergsonian Dynamics theory has induced me to think instead about its overall structure -- or the overall structure it would have if the math worked out, which is, as ever, unlikely. But who knows?
Recall its basic premise, which is that each point in spacetime ought to be identified with the totality of mathematical possibilities there (formally, a model of the standard set theory axioms). A point is "later than" another just if it has more possibilities (sets). Each point's totality is "constructed" in a precise sense by the collection of points in its past, which means causality holds. My chief goal, never quite realized, has been to show that a structure like this, meeting certain desirable axioms, must have a structure vaguely like the spacetime we observe.
Now I'd never thought seriously about how quantum mechanics would fit into this scheme. The proof-outline I keep working on depends on certain "generic curves" that bend around in unforeseeable ways, curves that could naturally be identified with world-lines of particles. This has sort of a quantum-mechanical flavor, but I never really thought this through.
I've started noodling about a question I had pushed aside before. Assume the Bergsonian axioms are consistent, and consider any point in a structure obeying them (and "looking like" spacetime). Its past light cone will be a substructure that also obeys the axioms. The proof-outline I've been working on depends on a way of mapping the points into a coordinate system. The question that I've been noodling about is this: is only one such coordinate mapping possible? The short answer is "no" because of relativistic invariance: the underlying structure shouldn't change if your coordinates reflect a frame of reference moving at any velocity. What occurs to me is that a transformation from one alternative past to another, in the quantum sense, could also be one under which the underlying spacetime remains the same. For example, you shoot off an electron. A second later you're in a quantum state in which the electron could be here, or there. In the standard way of thinking, the two "superposed" states are fundamentally different. One will turn out to obtain, and the other will be, in some difficult-to-explain way, thrown away. If my new idea holds water, the two states will not be distinct structures, but two different ways of seeing the same structure. A measurement event, AKA a collapse of the superposed state onto one or the other, will simply be a point at which one of the two ways of seeing the evolving structure no longer works.
Probably you could splice out the Bergsonian Dynamics from this idea, and just try to run with the idea that you can always get from one alternative history to another via a transformation that leaves some "fundamental structure" of your spacetime invariant. This strikes me as a powerful idea and it would stun me if people smarter than me hadn't spent lots of time on it already. But Bergsonian Dynamics gives a clear answer to what the invariant fundamental structure is: spacetime points considered as totalities of mathematical possibilities. Particles and their world-lines would not be fundamental. Assuming, of course, that any of this works out mathematically.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 10/20/10 20:13]
Malefactors of Great Weatlh
Come on, Ben A! When the Comp Lit or Media Studies department of the UT comes up with as unequivocal an advance in their field as Mack Brown did in his with the modern Spread Offense, then maybe we can talk about misaligned payscales!
[Ben H.: 10/20/10 11:02]
Austin hosted the Texas Book Festival at the Capitol this weekend. As you wind up to toss out an easy coastal crack making light of the inappositeness of a book fair in a purportedly illiterate state, I'll note that the event attracted quite a throng. I attended a couple of interesting panels, though their content is not what I want to share. Rather, I was struck by the difference between post-discussion questioners* here and those I am accustomed to in NYC. One of the panels I attended consisted of three biographers of Gilded Age business tycoons. Now, in NYC, for sure the first questioner would have been a hyperventilating 50-year old in a rumpled tweed jacket, barely disguising in the form of a question his breathless little speech; something sputtering to an end with, "and so, don't you think that a Marxist perspective better explains the evolution of Vanderbilt's empire?" Here, on the other hand, the first questioner was a stone-faced middle-aged fellow with close-cropped hair and an engineer's square, unfashionable glasses, who before he made any pretense of asking a question, felt the need to remind one of the panelists (a distinguished professor of American History at UT) that "America is not a democracy, it never was designed to be one. It's a republic." And they say Glenn Beck isn't an educator!
I did appreciate that the organizers, in order that I shouldn't feel completely at sea, did import one woman with a "Send Rove To Jail" poster to stand outside the book-signing tent.
*By coincidence, the New Yorker had an apt cartoon this week. A moderator on a stage addresses an audience. "We will now open the floor to slightly shorter speeches disguised as questions."
[Ben H.: 10/18/10 17:03]
Save Frustum
From the New York Times:
"The Tea Partiers who rail against frustums seem happy to forget the thousands of good union green jobs that frustum construction and maintenance provide. What's more, it is evident that the elimination of government support of frustums would hit the poor and minorities hardest."
[Ben H.: 10/18/10 16:42]
Free Advice For The Tea Party
Really the only thing stopping the Tea Party steamroller now is its embarrassing failure to say how it will achieve its signature goal, shrinking the government. Everybody knows "We will cut waste, fraud, and abuse" means "We will cut nothing." My advice is inspired by that famous staffer of the W Bush White House who bragged about creating their own reality. I recommend this speech:
Folks, I'm going to give you some straight talk today, not going to mince words. The Department of Rammed-Earth Frustums is waste of resources that our country cannot afford. I want you to look at this pie chart here; fully twenty-two percent of the federal budget today is going to rammed-earth frustums! Now let me be clear. When I see a truncated cylinder of hallowed American soil rising up from the fields, it stirs something patriotic in me, it really does. But when I'm flying to and from Washington DC and I look down and see mile after mile, row after row of these things out to the horizon -- and this isn't to take anything away from all the hard-working Americans who put them there -- I've got to wonder, is this the best use of our resources? And I have to answer, now that the Cold War rationale for rammed-earth frustums has disappeared, no. No, we cannot afford this waste of taxpayer money.
[Updated: I have learned that "rammed-earth" is a more common term for packed-earth.]
How did it go, Ben H? Game one was enough to prompt a lynch mob even among friendly Scandanavians.
I should note that only Ron Washington's coke-addled bullpen management stands between the Yankees and a 0-2 hole...
[Ben A.: 10/16/10 20:01]
If Psychotherapy Were a Drug, It Would Be Removed From the Market; Volume CVII
As if being trapped thousands of fee below the Earth weren't enough, the Chilean miners were afflicted with psychologists.
The mental-health experts overground used a system of ‘prizes and punishments’ to try to control the men’s behaviour - for their own good, of course. So when the men assented to hour-long phone calls with the mental-health team, as they did when they were first found to be alive 17 days after getting trapped, they were rewarded with prizes such as access to TV shows. But when they refused to talk to the psychologists, as they started to do in mid-September when their health and body weight were improving as a result of sent-down food and they insisted that ‘we are well’, the psychology team would deprive them of luxuries. As one on-site doctor put it: ‘We have to say, “OK, you don’t want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music - because we administer these things.”’
Several black SUVs are parked on my street and beffy dudes with earpieces are lurking about. Our neighbor a few doors down apparently is a childhood friend of Laura Bush. She's in town for some book promotion and is staying with her fiiend. I'm not sure how welcome she'll feel, what with every other house sporting a Bill White For Governor lawn sign...
[Ben H.: 10/15/10 16:21]
Divided Loyalties
I'll get to test how deep Texas hospitality really runs this week. I intend to watch the ALCS, which will require a trip to a bar or restaurant, and I intend to root for the Yankees!
[Ben H.: 10/14/10 19:52]
To assuage our guilt about staying for weeks on end at friends' apartments while our own gets renovated, we've been cooking them good dinners. Tonight's is the best so far: steak Henri IV, i.e., with artichoke hearts filled with Bearnaise sauce. Ben H, I remember we tried making this for you once, and although the steak was better that time, the Bearnaise sauce didn't quite take. This time the Bearnaise sauce is transcendental but our friends are stuck in traffic, an hour an counting, north of the city. I know the sauce is going to separate by the time they get back.
Seriously, I was never sure whether I ought to be for or against that tunnel. I mean, was it really in my interest, as a high-tax-paying New Yorker, to make it easier and more convenient for people to arb the city by working there but moving (and moving their tax residency) to Joisey? Did I really want more Joiseyites crowding on to our already maxed-out subways? On the other hand, if a new tunnel expanded the city's access to a hinterland of cheaply-housed helots available for cleaning, serving, and nannying, maybe it would be to New Yorkers' advantage?
Speaking of maxed-out and subways in the same sentence... it is heartening to see that the MTA is doing its part in the fight against deflation!
[Ben H.: 10/8/10 10:21]
Yes, we are growing less awesome. We've recently discussed East Coast transportation infrastructure. Some people are trying to improve the situation here. The Republicans thwart them. Oh well, I've hedged myself against accelerating third-worldization by purchasing a home in Manhattan, the ultimate gated community. As the gates get higher, my property values should rise. Good times!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 10/8/10 08:18]
"O’Brien used to claim that his blood group was Johnny Walker"
A reporter will always lose by alleging Jewish control of the media.
Proof:
Either it is or is not the case that Jews control the media.
If Jews control the media, they will fire an employee who makes an allegation of Jewish media control.
If Jews do not control the media, the reporter will be fired for making a false allegation with overtones of racism.
[Ben H.: 10/2/10 17:52]
Latest Foreclosure Scandal: Less Than Meets The Eye
Now, let me preface my comment by saying that there have been instances where loan servicers attempted to foreclose without having requisite proof of mortgage or with other blatant gaps in the documentary record. I haven't seen any cases where the target of foreclosure was, in fact, current on the mortgage or didn't have a mortgage at all, but even so, summary judgment ought to be reserved for those cases where there aren't outstanding questions of fact, and services ought not attempt to avail themselves if their files don't bear it out.
The latest press-touted scandal relates to so-called "robo-signers." Loan servicers (mostly banks) designate one or a small number of officers to sign affidavits in support of actions for summary judgment for foreclosure, attesting to the facts of the case. As it turns out, some of those officers have signed enormous volumes of petitions. The press breathlessly asserts that these signers could not have personal knowledge of all of these cases. The implied correlary is that the cases have not received a proper vetting and homeowners are therefore getting screwed. Well, hold on just a minute. My experience with document-signing on Wall Street (admittedly in a slightly different area) would suggest that the claim doesn't support the correlary.
Financial institutions only grant signing authority stingily. For example, I remember that nearly every derivatives trade confirm our firm received from Citibank was signed by the same VP. I think he probably signed for every interest rate derivative. Clearly, he could not have deep personal knowledge of the facts of each one. However, behind that act of signing is an extensive institutional process for verifying and cross-checking all the terms of contract. By the time Mr. Robo-Pen gets it, it is very unlikely to have any problems. Mr. Robo-Pen may well spot-check some fraction of the confirms crossing his desk, or even can each for unusual terms that might bear further investigation, but he could almost certainly blithely sign away without corrupting the process. On our own side, we had a similar system. All confirms/contracts were signed by the CFO. The volume far exceeded his ability to examine each one. But every trade-related confirm/contract had to be read and checked first by the operations department, second by the middle-office, third by the trader, fourth by the business-unit manager and fifth by the legal department. These hands represent people reporting to three different areas and different senior managers. It's a very robust process, the strength of which does not depend on the guy who puts pen to paper at the end and whose reliability is not vitiated by the signer's handling a lot of volume.
In our case as in the case of loan servicers, the signer really makes an affirmation on behalf of the institution, which is as it should be. He is saying that the institution has appropriate knowledge of the case and affirms the facts as stated to obtain. Again, that's as it should be. And, surely were it to come to light that the institution were filing foreclosure cases with bad facts or incomplete documentation, the authorities would not come after Mr. Robo-Pen alone, but rather the institution. If the press really wants a legitimate scandal, identifying Robo-Pen users only constitutes the first step. The press will need to find a meaningful number of Robo-Pen signed cases where documents were seriously out of order. So far, I haven't seen evidence of that.
[Ben H.: 10/2/10 13:14]
Ikea in TX
I didn't notice the use of helot temp-labor at the IKEA just outside of town (in Round Rock, actually), but it was interesting to note that all the signs were in both English and Spanish. The Ford-ite jump of production workers to customers has occurred here, happily.
[Ben H.: 10/2/10 12:54]
Paramus, NJ
If you factor out the crowds and the long trek to get there -- and tonight we did factor them out, by going late in the day to a store we happen to be staying close to -- Ikea is swell. I dig the sunny, breezy, youthful, can-do, egalitarian, poverty-free Swedish vibe of the stores. What a buzz-kill then to see, over meatballs with lingonberry sauce, a tired old Hispanic man wiping the tables, wearing a blue T-shirt that says on the back, "Labor Ready 1-800-24-LABOR."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/30/10 22:42]
Cambridge, MA
Setting: Deb and I are walking to the subway, and we notice a fleet of tow trucks out jacking up cars.
Deb: What is going on?
Me: It's street cleaning. They shifted the day and then put up a bunch of signs"
Deb: "That's ridiculous! Street cleaning schedules are a day a month. People plan for that. You can't just put up a bunch of signs and tow everybody's cars!"
Tow Truck Driver, Overhearing Us: "Oh yes we can! College town, and apparently nobody can read..."
[Ben A.: 9/29/10 15:43]
I deliberately chose to live near a university. For the cultural life. For the youth and vigor. For the gunplay. These kids with their fads. The Post Office (as if it didn't have enough problems) is in danger of losing its status as the eponym for mass shooting. Pretty soon, we're going to talk about "going academic." On a side note, Colton Tooley is a fine name for a violent lunatic. Not quite Lemrick Nelson, but not so far below it, either.
[Ben H.: 9/28/10 19:22]
Let me tell you about this class. The first thing one must consider is that it's in the Kennedy School. Therefore, enrollment consists almost entirely of former NGO workers who don't want to think very hard about the premises of children's rights and whether or not there can even be such a thing, but instead want to tell stories about the time when they worked in Sad Third World Nation and witnessed Horrible Scenes of Human Degradation and this inspired them to want Bring Justice to All the Oppressed Peoples of the World. The way to do this apparently is to make a list of as many nice things as possible (education, comprehensive health care, wealth, freedom of expression, protection and autonomy in the most desirable proportions, freedom from all coercion and feelings of unhappiness, puppies, rainbows, sunshine), call these things "human rights," or, where "human" seems to be too exacting, "children's rights" since people are more willing to give stuff to children, then mail this list to all the Sad Third World Nations, and check back every few years to lament how few of these demands have been fulfilled.
Great post for Ezra Klein there. Commenters seemed very impressed too. It occurred to me you might look into that new job opening at the White House.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/22/10 21:54]
A while back our two-year old thought it would be funny to call construction cranes "Germanies," as in, "Look daddy, a Germany!" I still have no idea why. Yesterday when we were walking down the street and she said, "Look daddy, Africa!", I expected something similar. "Uh, where is Africa?" I asked. "Up there, that cloud!" And I'll be damned, there was a cloud that looked just like Africa! (Less delightful was when we got to the store and she said, while standing right in front of the rather overweight clerk, "Daddy, that woman has a big tummy!")
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/21/10 12:33]
Since Iris has a toy Babar but no Babar books, I'm considering telling her that this elephant is really Melchior Vuvuzela, personal friend of Jacques Chirac and President For Life of Caoutchouca, currently exiled to his hôtel particulier in the sixteenth arrondissement, and then build some stories around that.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/16/10 22:55]
Maybe His Plan Is To Balance The Budget By Selling Metaphors
Mr. Paladino dismissed concerns that the Republican Party would be rocked by his nomination, saying he had already fielded a congratulatory call from the party’s state chairman, Edward Cox. “We’re on the same page,” Mr. Paladino said. “He’s getting on the bus with us and we’re all going to the dance together.”
I record the following not because anyone should care but because a year from now I'll wonder why I find myself rejecting someone's suggestion to go to this place Dovetail -- a relatively new restaurant on the UWS -- for dinner, and it will help to have this to refer to. Dovetail is not bad. It's good. At its price point, in this neighborhood, you should go to Ouest or Cesca instead. (Or just stop fucking around and go to Jean-Georges.) The chef's philosophy seems oddly untimely. We had his (or her? I didn't check which celebrity cook was backstage) vegetarian/vegetable-focused tasting menu. That idea should be a winner, especially in late summer, when all you have to do is get some just-picked tomatoes from your farm and put them on a plate. And then fresh local corn, fresh local basil, fresh everything else. These days you unconsciously assume a good restaurant will push the local/fresh/rustic/comfort angle. And you're a little shocked when they don't. Almost all the dishes we got at Dovetail tried to impress us with complex ingredient combinations. Trout roe in a cold pea soup? The roe didn't add much, peas are out of season, and the soup just made me recall the smoother and richer version from Jean-Georges. Fig slices and a mayonnaise-like sauce on chanterelles? Really? Do chanterelles need that? The paella with duck hearts was pretty good -- I'm a sucker for duck hearts -- but with all the other ingredients thrown in it just underlined the out-of-control syncretism. Our parental lifestyle lets us dine out maybe three or four evenings a year. I'd prefer not to spend any of them at NYC's version of Springfield's "The Gilded Lily."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/6/10 22:50]
While We Waste Time, The Forces Of Darkness Gather Allies
I made it out of Brooklyn and sold my place just in time to avoid this mess! Phew!
And in related news, the Onion files a report that I had been long expecting.
Shteyngart Short
I've probably mentioned it before, but when I moved back to New York in the mid-90s, one of the few high school friends I spent time lived in a big old house in Victorian Flatbush. Shteyngart (pre-fame) was one of her roommates. I remember him as a very funny guy -- more funny in person, in my opinion -- and more like the video than in his books.
[Ben H.: 9/4/10 10:41]
I See You Your Dryer And Raise You a Washer
Crunchy jeans? You want crunchy jeanns? In a WSJ lifestyle article this week, a senior style guru at Levi Strauss & Co asserts that he only washes his jeans once every six months! Take that, China!
[Ben H.: 9/4/10 10:25]
Are The Chinese Just Intrinsically Smarter Than Us?
Yes! When we lived in Europe we had no dryer and had to get used to wearing crunchy jeans the day after laundry day. But we also realized that our clothes were not being abraded into oblivion on a weekly basis. Ever cleaned the lint trap? Dude, that's your clothes you're tossing in the trash! Here is a real conspircary: the dryer-manufacturer/clothes-manufacturer complex, that forces Americans to buy clothes twice as often as should be necessary.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/3/10 18:52]
The Bryant and Diamond-Dybvig model? Who takes that seriously anymore? Someone needs to go to Minneapolis and kick the hell out of the place.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/2/10 13:28]
Descent Into The Abyss
Rolnick: What was Paul Krugman’s opinion about those Princeton macro seminar presentations that advocated modern macro?
Sargent: He did not attend the macro seminar at Princeton when I was there.
I appreciate your corrections to my Croesus Shrugged theory. Rereading the post, I see that I didn't make clear what I was really trying to express, which is that belief in a theory about socio-economic behavior is a fascinating and complex thing when believers are themselves actors in the society or economy about which the theory is stated. I also misused metonymy -- the post may makes some sense if you take "George W Bush's high-income tax cuts" to be metonymic for "legislation paid for by wealthy interests for their own enrichment." (Extension of all the income tax cuts has become a sort of Carthago delenda est of the WSJ and I have permitted that to swell my estimate of its importance.) And it makes more sense if "loose monetary policy" is a metonym for "loose monetary and fiscal policy." Finally, my use of words like "conspiracy" and "plutocrats" in an effort to make the post more pungent made it seem like I wanted to scold the rich for deviousness, which I didn't. My point was that many moneyed interest groups (I have to be vague here since Ben H points out that Democrats get money from such groups too, although I read that Wall Street donations have swung back to the GOP in a big way) are acting (or could be seen to be acting -- I'll be mealy-mouthed here) in a way whose effect is similar to conspiracy, but without any actual collusion -- shared belief in an apparently objective economic theory can act a lot like collusion when this belief affects how people act -- I want to be clearer here but the kid is demanding to see pictures of llamas on the computer --
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/1/10 07:21]
No Shuttering Envisioned!
I just go through cycles of thinking that the blog should transform itself into something better, and this wave feels stronger than others. The really frustrating thing is that the name "bandarlog" is so brilliant and applies so perfectly to the blog's present form -- "[The Bandarlog] boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/31/10 20:59]
I, too, wish the business community had so much ideological cohesion! First point: big business is not the engine of job creation in the US. (Plus, Doug, you are clearly well-informed enough to have read how some important sectors of big business, especially Wall Street, have in the last few years skewed their donations heavily toward the Democrats!) Small business is too small and fragmented to hatch any conspiracies. It isn't hiring not so much because of questions about whether personal income tax rates will be 35% or 39.6% (higher tax rates don't help, but I doubt make a huge difference to hiring), but rather general regulatory uncertainty and (circular) uncertainty about the economic outlook. The regulatory uncertainty is not to be sniffed at. Your average small businessman knows his business but isn't some sort of legal wizard. He probably can't exactly figure what the new health insurance law will mean for his labor costs and regulatory burden; the new 1099 requirement probably has him spooked; and a proliferation of microsectoral regulation introduces FUD to a lot of different industries. Finally, what Krugman may be missing (or, more likely, glossing over) is that we have reached a point many EM countries have sad familiarity with -- the point of "fiscal dominance." The right thing to do, if our economy were populated by agents without foresight, would be to continue a loose fiscal policy (and Krugman really wants loose fiscal policy more than monetary policy, Doug). However, economic agents are seized with worry about the sovereign's credit (and local government credit, too). The positive economic impulse of fiscal loosening is fully or more than fully offset by the negative confidence shock and effect on price-of-risk of further descent into perceived insolvency.
Monetary loosening does very little because nobody creditworthy wants to borrow. Stimulus tends to leak overseas. Ordinarily this could have some positive effect through USD weakening. Unfortunately, much of the world still insists on keeping their currencies from appreciating against the USD, so the US doesn't get the benefit of depreciation. Ultimately, all this currency intervention leads to inflation and credit bubbles overseas (we are starting to see this), which may raise import prices in the US and give the US "real" depreciation, but this could take a while.
In my EM experience, anticipation is always worse than the event. I think the US would be better off with a cathartic one-time big drop in housing prices, wages (as long as public-sector wages were along for the ride), and Social Security benefits, plus micro-sector structural reform/deregulation. Get it overwith, make what everybody suspects real, tangible, and quantifiable, rather than having it as a looming, frightening, uncertain threat. Expectations of rising wages and prices could return, solvency would be restored (and frankly, if higher taxes -- preferable through reduced deductions and loopholes, i.e. similar progressive rates, lower regressive deductions were part of the package, I think the confidence boost of the rest of it would more than offset the effect of higher tax pressure) and the economy could get moving again.
[Ben H.: 8/31/10 10:06]
Natural Endowments vs National Character
Argentina boasts perhaps the world's best environment for raising cattle. Yet, the world's largest beef processor announces it is pretty much throwing in the towel on doing business in Argentina. Nestor and Christina Kirchner's constant meddling in the cattle market, sudden export bans, imposition and cancelation of various taxes, subsidies, price caps, has made it impossible for cattlemen to run their businesses. The Argentine cattle herd has shrunk to the point that JBS doesn't have reliable, affordable supply, even if Argentine rules made it possible to export production freely. Unpredictable regulatory regimes destroy confidence and deter investment much more than mere high taxes (I'd love to pay the quoted income tax rates in Argentina, they're quite a bit lower than here; but I'd much rather be a businessman here!)
[Ben H.: 8/31/10 17:00]
Literary Outrage
And maybe the protagonist could see evil behavior and move aggressively to combat it instead of being paralyzed by doubt and ineffectual. Daring!
The Lurkers Speak
Doug, your suggestion of shuttering the bandarlog has already evoked howls of protest! Don't close up shop on account of my absenteeism!
[Ben A.: 8/31/10 16:29]
If Only!
Scott Adams once wrote that he devoutly hoped a shadowy conspiracy of wealthy malefactors was controlling the world, because if events are governed the wishes of the average man on the street we are all totally screwed. In this vein, I tend to doubt that anything as piddly as the Bush tax cuts are influencing policy decisions of Our Plutocratic Overlords. Generations of high-end tax planning work have likely blunted the effect of anything so pedestrian as the income tax.
Even the type of 'indirect' conspiracy described by Doug below seems improbable. Joe CEO wins if his stock performs. He has much more to gain from a good quarter than from the electoral ousting of the party (allegedly) committed to economic populism. And indeed, the observed pattern of donations supports a more standard model: donations represent a) efforts to secure influence from the winners, b) expressions of political and cultural affinity.
That said, If a down economy can create divided government, I regard that as a fabulous outcome.
[Ben A.: 8/31/10 09:22]
Formal Innovation in Fiction
The most formally daring move a literary novelist could attempt these days would be to write a temporally linear, heavily plotted book, featuring a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.
[Ben H.: 8/31/10 15:15]
Croesus Shrugged
If this blog had a separate column for macroeconomic musings by people who have no training in the field, this post would belong there. In lieu of training, I use what I hope is a nuanced sense of the zeitgeist and of American sociology to make predictions. For that reason, my predictions are worthless to the extent that places other than America are involved. And they may be worthless for other reasons; take the pretty steady macroeconomic outlook I've had for six or eight months. It has seemed to me -- and it still does -- that the available policy choices are to print money and slowly recover with mild inflation, or else slip into a very long recession. (I suppose anyone who reads Krugman's column enough eventually believes this.) And then I observe that today's Americans, whose essentially hedonistic nature makes them ill-suited to self-laceration of the "We repent of our indebtedness!" variety, will grope their way to the first choice. It is only in the last couple of weeks that I've felt the possibility that the second way will come to pass. My thinking here centers on what I call the "Croesus Shrugged" effect. The rich people who sit on corporate boards and executive teams are, by and large, fans of the George W. Bush tax policies that have been helping them become cartoonishly ultra-rich. They repeat, or cause to be repeated through their press organs (WSJ etc.) and PACs, the canard that our high unemployment is due to worries that the Bush tax cuts will expire: unless businesses can be sure of a long-term low-tax environment, it would not be in their interest to hire people. I say "canard" because they manage in a convoluted way to keep this from being an outright falsehood. If all business leaders simultaneously act as if they believe that they shouldn't hire people without tax relief, then that belief comes true: any company that bucks the trend finds itself producing more stuff than is warranted by the anemic demand that results from everyone else's refusal to hire. Conditions are thus good for a "spontaneous conspiracy" to emerge. Business leaders act as a nefarious cartel increasing unemployment, but they don't need a smoky room, or indeed any communication at all, to act that way, since each individually recognizes (if only subconsciously) what he stands to gain from holding the economy hostage, and recognizes (if only subconsciously) that his peers recognize this too. (A similar spontaneous conspiracy to advance falsehoods was at the root of the Iraq war.) Now, what do the erstwhile GOP plutocrats want? To be present plutocrats, naturally, so they would be happy if the economy stagnated until the next opportunity to retake the executive and legislative branches comes around. They could count on their populist stooges to repeat the chorus that liberalism is wrecking the economy, and bring them back to power. At which point they would bring back the Bush tax cuts and pass economy-boosting measures similar to the ones they are currently blocking. And they (or their peers on the corporate boards, if you care to make a distinction) would hail these steps as reasons to start hiring again. And they would thereby demonstrate a causal relation between low taxes on the rich and economic recovery. The takeaway: be short 2011 and 2012; be long 2013.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/30/10 23:12]
James Wood has a well-written review in the latest New Yorker of a French novel called "03". But get this:
Nothing happens in “03.” The narrator has his thoughts, and then the book ends: boy and girl are still at the bus stop, as they were at the start. “03” has the afternoon listlessness of adolescence. It is a risky and ambitious book ...
One idea for using the two-column format would be to put "left brain" posts on the left, and "right brain" posts on the right, except I can never remember which is which. Right brain is analytic, right?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/29/10 22:50]
Put The Lime In The Coconut And Call Me In The Morning
This is Gombrecht masquerading as Ben A -- hey ben, replace this text with something edifying and entertaining. I tried posting in left and right columns as myself and it broke my program. Maybe this isn't such a great idea after all ...
[Ben A.: 8/29/10 22:33]
Glenn Beck March
I had a couple of biting one-liners about this march -- I assure you, those old codgers wouldn't know what hit 'em! -- but then I realized that I can't dismiss it as the sadly familiar dance of dupery, because I really don't understand what all those people were doing there, and I think that by learning why, I could learn something I didn't know about contemporary America. Of course, if the march had been explicitly political, it would have been the same old dance of dupery. Apparently it was more of a religious revival. The best thing to do would be to go to the source, but as of this writing Beck's server seems overwhelmed, and the only thing that I see is the top of the page, with advertisements for three distinct products that Beck shills for.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/29/10 22:49]
Technology Catches Up With The Bandarlog
However tiresome my posts may be, they always appear in this nifty, artisanally-coded, non-Wordpress design. Did you know we're only using about 1% of the potential niftiness of the design? You did if you read us at the very beginning. My initial design idea for this blog was to have two threads side by side, left and right, with all of a given author's posts topologically connected. It was a neat problem and I think I pretty much solved it. But the browsers of 2002 did a poor job of rendering my intricate table structure; they would add lots and lots of whitespace so that the design basically looked broken. What kept me from re-coding the site later on using a different HTML approach was that, in practice, even when the design rendered well, it was hard to tell what was going on -- hard to tell which order you were supposed to read the posts in, hard to find visual cues about which posts were supposed to respond to which others.
It seems to me now as I look back at that initial page with Chrome 5.0.375 on a Macintosh that the design now renders pretty well (little extraneous whitespace). It also seems to me that this blog isn't going to perdure in its current form much longer. Maybe as a sort of last hurrah, we can play around with the left/right blog posts, as we mull over what might replace the current form of the bandarlog.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/29/10 13:00]
