Dueling for Dollars

According to Edward Lazear, managers are Dueling for Dollars:

There's a good reason corporate CEOs are paid those enormous salaries, and it has little to do with their current performance. According to Stanford Business School economist Edward Lazear, six- or seven-figure compensation packages aren't a reward for today's work — it's a payoff for the long hours put in when the boss was aspiring to the top job. And it isn't motivating the CEO anymore — it's motivating the managers who are vying for the top job. 'The CEO gets to enjoy the money,' Lazear says, 'but it's making everybody else work harder.'

Making Unemployment Insurance Work

I've often wondered why unemployment benefits weren't in the form of a loan. Edward Lazear suggests just that in Making Unemployment Insurance Work:

The main purpose of unemployment insurance is to cushion temporary, unanticipated spells of unemployment. It is not intended to support system those who are chronically out of work or those in industries with relatively high wages and high expected unemployment, like construction.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to eliminate the abuses of unemployment benefits without also eliminating the insurance aspect. [...] To reform the system so that it would provide needed insurance and reward firms and workers who stay off the unemployment rolls, the current subsidy program should become more of a loan program. Under this system, workers would receive benefits during spells of unemployment but would repay a portion of the benefits after returning to work. Firms whose workers stayed off the rolls would pay less; workers who did not draw down benefits would receive more take-home pay.

Man Versus Mine

In Man Versus Mine, Robert Bryce notes how little insurgency has changed over the years:

Nearly a century ago, while serving as a British liaison officer to the Arab tribes during World War I, T. E. Lawrence developed many of the techniques of modern insurgent warfare. Lawrence's fluency in Arabic and profound understanding of Arab culture helped him invigorate the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918. His savvy military tactics helped ensure its success against the Turks.

In his memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Lawrence revealed his most effective tactic: 'Mines were the best weapon yet discovered to make the regular working of their trains costly and uncertain for our Turkish enemy.' If not for Lawrence's pioneering use of precisely placed explosives, the Arab Revolt might well have failed.

In Iraq the insurgents are using similar weapons against U.S. forces. Today they are called IEDs — for 'improvised explosive devices' — rather than mines, and the insurgents are targeting automobiles rather than trains. But the effect is just as devastating.

The number of mines being used in Iraq, and the share of casualties for which they are responsible, dwarf anything ever before seen by the American military. During World War II three percent of U.S. combat deaths were caused by mines or booby traps. In Korea that figure was four percent. By 1967, during the Vietnam War, it was nine percent, and the Pentagon began experimenting with armored boots. From June to November of 2005, IEDs were responsible for 65 percent of American combat deaths and roughly half of all nonfatal injuries.

Early Retirement

Philip Greenspun, who retired in 2001, at the age of 37, offers his thoughts on Early Retirement:

Ask a wage slave what he'd like to accomplish. Chances are the response will be something like "I'd start every day at the gym and work out for two hours until I was as buff as Brad Pitt. Then I'd practice the piano for three hours. I'd become fluent in Mandarin so that I could be prepared to understand the largest transformation of our time. I'd really learn how to handle a polo pony. I'd learn to fly a helicopter. I'd finish the screenplay that I've been writing and direct a production of it in HDTV."
[...]
Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated.

FDA Shows Interest in 18th Century Presbyterian Minister

The Presbyterian minister at the heart of FDA Shows Interest in 18th Century Presbyterian Minister is Thomas Bayes, the creator of Bayesian statistics:

The frequentist approach, familiar to anyone who follows the news of clinical trials, measures the likelihood of an observed result having occurred by chance. That 'just by accident' possibility is the null hypothesis, and is usually realized in clinical studies by giving a placebo to some of the trial participants for comparison. Results are expressed as a 'P value', with (for example) a P of 0.01 meaning that if the trial were repeated over and over, only one per cent of those studies would show an equivalent result (or better) for the placebo as compared to the drug treatment.

Bayesian statistics, though, don't address the likelihood that your observed results might have come out by random chance, but rather give you a likelihood of whether your initial hypothesis is true. (Ironically, that's what many lay people think that's what the standard approach does). That likelihood is compared to some initial hypothesis, which doesn't have to be the just-by-accident null one. In fact, you can start with more than one hypothesis and compare things as you go along. One consequence of that setup is that Bayesian trial designs allow you to use the data that comes in to modify the trial while it's still going on. That's basically forbidden under the standard statistical approach, where the design and end points of the study have to be decided up front.

What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Profiling

Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece Troublemakers, examines "what pit bulls can teach us about profiling":

There is no shortage of more stable generalizations about dangerous dogs, though. A 1991 study in Denver, for example, compared a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with a history of biting people with a random sample of a hundred and seventy-eight dogs with no history of biting. The breeds were scattered: German shepherds, Akitas, and Chow Chows were among those most heavily represented. (There were no pit bulls among the biting dogs in the study, because Denver banned pit bulls in 1989.) But a number of other, more stable factors stand out. The biters were 6.2 times as likely to be male than female, and 2.6 times as likely to be intact than neutered. The Denver study also found that biters were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained. “About twenty per cent of the dogs involved in fatalities were chained at the time, and had a history of long-term chaining,” Lockwood said. “Now, are they chained because they are aggressive or aggressive because they are chained? It’s a bit of both. These are animals that have not had an opportunity to become socialized to people. They don’t necessarily even know that children are small human beings. They tend to see them as prey.”

In many cases, vicious dogs are hungry or in need of medical attention. Often, the dogs had a history of aggressive incidents, and, overwhelmingly, dog-bite victims were children (particularly small boys) who were physically vulnerable to attack and may also have unwittingly done things to provoke the dog, like teasing it, or bothering it while it was eating. The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd — which looks as if it would rip your throat out — and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.

19th-Century Ju Jitsu

I'm not sure why the uploader added a hip-hop soundtrack to this 19th-Century Ju Jitsu footage, but it's always interesting to watch English gentlemen demonstrate martial arts.

Tact Filters

Jeff Bigler explains Tact Filters:

All people have a 'tact filter', which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most 'normal people' have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!'

'Nerds,' on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, 'They're just saying those mean things because they're jealous. They don't really mean it.'

When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one's feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one's feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.

Edward Lazear

Tyler Cowen has a good round-up of links to articles about Edward Lazear, who has just been nominated to head Bush's Council of Economic Advisors.

Libertarian Orphans

From David Boaz's Libertarian Orphans:

The Gallup Poll's annual survey on government found that 27% of Americans are conservative; 24% are liberal, up sharply because the poll was taken after Katrina, which boosted support for the proposition that 'government should do more to solve our country's problems.' Gallup also found — this year as in others — that 20% are neither liberal nor conservative but libertarian, opposing the use of government either to 'promote traditional values' or to 'do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.' Another 20% are 'populist' (supporting government action in both areas), with 10% undefined. Libertarian support, spread across demographic groups, is strongest among well-educated voters.
[...]
With big-government conservatives spending money like Imelda Marcos in a shoe store, and big-government liberals supporting the Patriot Act, even pro-government populists are represented in D.C. It's the libertarian voters who are orphans.

Stephen Colbert on Dungeons & Dragons

The Onion's AV Club interviews Stephen Colbert — and asks some unusual questions:

AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?
SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981 — four years.
AVC: What's the appeal?
SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.

Edit: I hear he's "up to [his] baldric in plus-one scimitars."

Recommended Reading For New Entrepreneurs

Recommended Reading For New Entrepreneurs from Tim Faley, the managing director of the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor:

Crossing the Chasm
By Geoffery A. Moore

e-Boys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work
By Randall E. Stross

Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Business Goals
By Thomas L. Harrison with Mary H. Frakes

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas L. Friedman

Innovation and Entrepreneurship
By Peter F. Drucker

The Art of the Start: Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
By Guy Kawasaki

Early Debtors Faced Jail at Own Expense Until All Was Repaid

If you think a small-business loan is risky, look at how it used to be. From Early Debtors Faced Jail at Own Expense Until All Was Repaid:

One piece of baggage America's first settlers carried with them from England was the belief that not repaying one's debts was a moral failure. As in England, the colonists' penalty for such wickedness was often prison.

The theory behind jailing debtors was that the threat of incarceration might persuade them to reveal hidden assets. Or their families might take pity and pay their ransom. But if the debtor was truly penniless, he could be sentenced to what amounted to life in prison. Unlike murderers, rapists and thieves, the debtors were also responsible for paying their own upkeep, thus putting them even further into debt.

As a 16th-century English judge declared, 'If a debtor can't feed and clothe himself, let him die, in the name of God, if he will and impute the cause of it to his own fault, for his presumption and ill behavior brought him to that imprisonment.'

Health Care Crisis? How About a Recreation Crisis?

John Merline asks, Health Care Crisis? How About a Recreation Crisis?:

Over the past 20 years, spending on recreation, health clubs, even lawyers, has climbed at about the same rate as health care. Yet nobody talks about a national health club crisis, or the need to reform the nation’s recreation industry.

My Kind of Economist

Tim Worstall declares William Easterly My Kind of Economist for making comments like this:

It doesn’t help the poverty trap story that 11 out of the 28 poorest countries in 1985 had NOT been in the poorest fifth back in 1950. They had gotten into poverty by declining from above, rather than being stuck in it from below, while others escaped. If the identity of who is in the poverty trap keeps changing, it must not be much of a trap.

Stuck on 1968

I must admit to getting a bit of a chuckle out of Arnold Kling's opening salvo in Stuck on 1968:

Most people who were liberals in 1968 still are. Liberals. In 1968.

Kling notes that "the Conventional Wisdom among well-educated liberals in 1968 included the following":

• Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism.
• The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century.
• Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities.
• Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty.
• What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries.
• Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting.

Further, "he degree of confidence in these beliefs was so strong that liberals in 1968 came to the overriding conclusion that":

• Anyone who is not a liberal must be incorrigibly stupid

Of course, "since 1968, we have seen":

• a mass exodus from Communist Vietnam (the boat people)
• a large exodus from Cuba (the Mariel boat lift)
• the collapse of Soviet Communism, revealing that the system did much broader and deeper damage than most people realized
• an unmistakably large gap between North Korea and South Korea in terms of material well-being and personal freedom

Kling was a young liberal in 1968. He's not now. Young. Or liberal.

How Wal-Mart Is Like Academia

James Joyner explains How Wal-Mart Is Like Academia:

Because the academic market is so tight, universities have adopted virtually the same attitude toward aspiring professors as Wal-Mart does to prospective stockers. They demand heavy teaching loads, substantial committee work, a rigorous pace of professional publication — and offer rather paltry salaries. And that's for people who have, on average, twenty-two or more years of schooling.

Not only is there intense competition for jobs— a nationwide search and the willingness to move, usually at one’s own expense, to whatever school will hire you is a must — but schools increasingly hire part-timers (called “adjuncts” in the business) who work for peanuts and no benefits rather than full-time professors.

Now, obviously, those who succeed at getting tenure-track teaching jobs make more money and have better benefits than those who land jobs as retail store cashiers. But, then, the latter don’t give up a decade of earnings while pursuing degrees in higher education.

The Hamas Win Brings Clarity

Max Borders shares his unusual perspective on Palestinian democracy in The Hamas Win Brings Clarity:

In fact, it will now be easier politically for Israel to do what it must to protect itself. Now that Hamas is “legitimate,” Israel can simply defend itself against Palestine instead of a murky Palestinian faction — and such would be justified even under international law. Israel is no longer dealing with a terror group hiding behind an enfeebled Fatah.

They’re dealing with a government that has been elected upon an existing right of self-determination — even if it determines itself to be a terror state. And real states (elected by a real majority) may legitimately get their clocks cleaned if they commit acts of war against other states. This may be the clarity the region needed. In the short term, it may mean all out war. In the long term, it may bring some finality to things in a place that has seen only a series of wars and intifadas anyway.

The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds

What didn't Feynman do? From The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds:

Hwang's claims are far from the first fabrications in science. Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman made pertinent remarks on supposedly newly-found Maya documents that were publicized in the 1970s. They were quickly found to be fakes. Feynman had earlier translated (for fun, naturally) a section of a Maya astronomical almanac from the authentic Dresden Codex in which mathematical symbols denoted regularities of the sightings of the planet Venus. When the finding of a new Maya codex was announced, Feynman quickly saw it as a forgery. The arcane calculations for Venus were repeated from the Dresden Codex, and merely copied in a different style, that of the authentic Madrid Codex.

In other words, the forgery wasn’t very clever. “Out of the hundred thousand books originally made [by Mayans],” notes Feynman, “we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other [very few] fragments. It was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing original in it.”

Even More Boy Trouble!

In Even More Boy Trouble! Steve Burton describes his experience trying to teach science and math in a pubic school:

Nor did it take me long to figure out why boys are falling behind girls all across the country. Because it is boys, far more than girls, who need strict discipline and who go straight to hell without it. Raising and teaching boys is a lot more like taming wild horses than it is like nurturing wounded birds — but we are locked in a feminist cultural moment that sees education as, precisely, 'nurturance.'
[...]
Anybody who really knows anything about boys knows that if they see one of their own constantly challenging the supposed authorities and getting away with it, he will quickly become a hero to them — the alpha male, the leader of the pack. And I saw this happen again and again. Budding thugs and clowns who, at one time, would have been quickly and permanently expelled and out looking for dead-end jobs, became instead the most popular kids in the school, lording it over the campus social scene with all the hauteur of grand duchesses — and serving as models for their peers.

For the girls, gazing on admiringly, this sort of thing is only a misfortune. But for the boys, caught up in the struggle, it's a calamity.

The Trouble With Boys

Peg Tyre looks at The Trouble With Boys:

By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent.

Would You Take the Bird in the Hand, or a 75% Chance at the Two in the Bush?

Would You Take the Bird in the Hand, or a 75% Chance at the Two in the Bush? looks at people's very different tastes for risk and what the research shows:

This short problem-solving test, [Professor Frederick] found, predicts a lot:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
2. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

The test measures not just the ability to solve math problems but the willingness to reflect on and check your answers. (Scores have a 0.44 correlation with math SAT scores, where 1.00 would be exact.) The questions all have intuitive answers — wrong ones.

"Getting the math problems right predicts nothing about most tastes," but it does predict a taste for risk and a patience for bigger, later payoffs.

A Degree of Respect for Online MBAs

Firms are starting to show A Degree of Respect for Online MBAs:

Enrollments at online MBA programs are soaring — to about 125,000 students from virtually zero 10 years ago — even as applications to traditional business schools have dropped. And while online programs might not grant access to powerful alumni networks or the most prestigious consultancies and investment banks, respect for the degrees has increased to the point where, for some, getting one makes good career sense. 'Our perception is that an online education from a reputable college or university is as valuable as the degree offered on-ground,' says Alan Fisher, manager of corporate extended education at Intel, which pays for employees to earn MBAs through various Web-based programs. 'We don't differentiate between the two.'

Maverick Hunter's 'Human Beings As Prey' Plan Not As Challenging As Expected

Maverick Hunter's 'Human Beings As Prey' Plan Not As Challenging As Expected.

I suppose it's not so amusing if you haven't read Connell's The Most Dangerous Game.

I’m Proud to Be a Coal Miner’s Grandson

In I’m Proud to Be a Coal Miner’s Grandson, Iain Murray makes the case that coal mining isn't that dangerous:

To hear Senators Byrd and Rockefeller speak, one would think that the coal mining industry in this country is one of the major sources of death in the US. They might be surprised to hear that, while 28 miners died in accidents on the job in 2004, so did 27 top executives.

The Art of Bootstrapping

Guy Kawasaki opens The Art of Bootstrapping with this dire assessment:

Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.

That's why "the key to success is bootstrapping":

The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps.

He recommends forecasting from the bottom up:

Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: “There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to use install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.” The bottom-up forecast goes like this: “We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.

The Day His World Stood Still

The Day His World Stood Still tells "The Strange Story of H.M.":

When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made 'H.M.' the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.

Henry grew up outside of Hartford, Connecticut, and was by all accounts an amiable young man with above average intelligence. He liked to go ice skating and to listen to mystery shows on the radio, which he enjoyed because he could often deduce the villain ahead of the program detective. Then on his sixteenth birthday, Henry had his first grand mal seizure during a celebratory trip to the city with his parents. After that point, the paralyzing seizures arrived with increasing frequency, until by the summer of 1953, he was experiencing as many as eleven episodes per week. He was unable to hold a steady job, and his prospects for independent living seemed dim. There were not many effective treatments available for epilepsy in 1953, so it was with a mixture of hope and trepidation that Henry's family turned to Dr. William Scoville and his experimental surgery.

When heroin was legal

BBC News Magazine looks at When heroin was legal:

"The Case for Heroin" — so ran the headline for the Times leader column of Tuesday, 14 June 1955.

In the course of a short, lucid article the newspaper which had long been the mouthpiece of Establishment Britain set out its argument in favour of heroin.

In the context of all that has happened since, from heroin's link with violent crime to the transfer of HIV among users who share needles, as well as countless other social ills, such an article today would seem unthinkable in all but the most libertarian of newspapers.

But in mid-1950s Britain, the spectre of drug addiction was a long way from the top of the public's concerns.

In fact, as the Times editorial states, in 1955 there were only 317 addicts to "manufactured" drugs in the whole of Britain, of which just 15% were dependent on heroin. That's a national total of 47.5 heroin addicts. History, regrettably, does not record the precise circumstances of the half-addict.

By contrast, in the US, where heroin was outlawed in 1925, it was said to be a "major social problem".

The Roman Way, Part I

Friedrich von Blowhard opens his The Roman Way, Part I with a quote from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — which I immediately recognized, since I'd just read it a few weeks earlier:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

Of course, Friedrich brings it up in order to disagree. He sees the Romans as too militaristic:

Compared to the Senatorial class in Rome, the Spartans were a group of gentle pacifists quietly minding their own business. For Roman aristocrats, warfare was business and conquest was their ‘business model.’

Of course, sometimes unparalleled militarism leads to a Pax Romana. I enjoyed this comment by MQ:

At some level war was the "business model" for the elite in almost all powerful pre-capitalist states (which is a major reason why capitalism is such an epochal improvement from previous systems). The Romans were just particularly good and particularly vicious. Golden age Athens certainly had colonialism and the resulting tribute as a major source of wealth, and the roots of Greek democracy in many ways lay in war — citizen soldiers demanded participation.
[...]
I think you're presenting a somewhat one-sided picture of the Roman achievement though. The empire seems to have generated wealth more effectively than states for many hundreds of years before its rise or after its fall. Part of this was due to economies of scale in trading (including the creation of the world's largest free trade zone up until that time) and agriculture. But part was due to the amazing level of Roman skill in civil engineering and administration. By pretty much all of the indirect measures of wealth and market development we are able to use — population, city size, number of cities, road networks, division of labor, financial institutions, etc. — Rome was wealthier than Europe in the late middle ages and some argue even in the early modern period. (Look at Peter Temin's work for the argument that Rome was as wealthy as 17th century Europe; I'm don't think I buy it but he has lots of good and interesting arguments). The Romans were brutal, destructive, creative, and constructive all at the same time, and looking at just one side will lead you to caricature them.

The mountain man and the surgeon

The mountain man and the surgeon offers up "reflections on relative poverty in North America and Africa":

When Americans hear the words “poor” and “white”, they think of someone like Mr Banks. He has half a dozen cars in varying states of disrepair parked outside his trailer, car-parts everywhere and a pile of crushed Pepsi cans below his porch.

He “draws” $521 a month in supplemental security income (a form of cash assistance for the elderly, poor and disabled). [...] Mr Banks also complains that he cannot draw food stamps. In order to qualify, he would have to sell his truck, which he cannot bear to part with. Mr Banks would probably be surprised to hear that, thousands of miles away in central Africa, there lives a prominent surgeon whose monthly income is roughly the same as his. Mbwebwe Kabamba is the head of the emergency department at the main public hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After 28 years as a doctor, his salary is only $250 a month, but by operating on private patients after hours, he ekes it out to $600 or $700.

Given the lower cost of living in Congo, one might guess that Dr Kabamba is better off than Mr Banks. But the doctor has to support an extended family of 12, whereas Mr Banks's ex-wife and three sons claim public assistance. Indeed, the reason Mr Banks split up from his wife, he says, is because they can draw more benefits separately. She still lives in the trailer next door.

In more detail:

“Poverty” describes two quite different phenomena: utter penury, of the sort experienced by the billion or so souls who subsist on $1 a day or less; and the situation of people in rich countries who are less well off than their compatriots.

For the first group, finding enough to eat is a daily struggle, and a $2-a-day job hand-washing mineral ore in a river is a lucky break. Shortly before meeting Dr Kabamba, your correspondent interviewed a group of Congolese ore-washers who were delighted to have found such lucrative work.

European countries tend to use relative measures of poverty. A household with an income less than 50% or 60% of the national median counts as poor. This has the perverse result that if the country gets richer, the poverty rate can still rise, as long as incomes at the top and in the middle rise faster than those at the bottom.

America, more sensibly, uses an absolute standard. The “poverty threshold”, created in the mid-1960s, was based on an estimate of how much an adequate diet might cost, multiplied by three. This figure is adjusted for inflation each year, but is otherwise unchanged. So the fact that, according to the Census Bureau, the share of Americans in poverty rose between 1974 and 2004, from 11.2% to 12.7%, ought to be a cause for shame.

But it is not, because American poverty statistics are misleading. For one thing, the poor rarely stay that way. In 1996-99, only 2% of Americans were poor every month over the full four-year period. And life appears, by most measures, to have improved. Poor people today live longer, spend longer in education and are more likely to have jobs. Fewer live in substandard houses, more have cars, fridges, boomboxes and other necessities that were luxuries a couple of generations ago.

How, then, to account for the apparent rise in poverty? It is partly a matter of definition. Some non-cash benefits, such as food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid, are excluded from the calculation. And the raw data must be wrong. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, notes that while reported annual income for the poorest fifth of households in 2003 was $8,201, their reported expenditure was $18,492. Nobody can explain this vast discrepancy.

All one can say is that whereas the poor in Kinshasa complain about the price of bread, the poor in Kentucky complain about the price of motor insurance. Fair enough—they need to drive to work.

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons was originally published in Look magazine.

The Ph.D. Glut Revisited

From Gary North's The Ph.D. Glut Revisited:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Also, if ego were marketable, all Ph.D. graduates would get tenure.

Why does any Ph.D. student at any but the top graduate schools believe that he will get tenure at any university? The odds are so far against him, and have been for a generation, than he ought to realize that he is about to waste his most precious resource – time – on a long-shot. Investing five or more years beyond the B.A. degree, except in a field where industry hires people with advanced degrees, is economic stupidity that boggles the imagination. Yet at least 200,000 graduate students are doing this at any time. Of the 46,000 who earned a Ph.D. in 2003, at least 50% got to ABD status and quit. Probably more than half of the others quit before they got to ABD status.

At $20,000 or more per year in tuition and living expenses, plus the $35,000 not earned in the job market, trying to earn a Ph.D. is a losing proposition.

The Global Id

John Lanchester describes Google as "wired straight into The Global Id," because it "in effect has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes." That direct line is worth a lot of money — more than IBM:

Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world — with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

About Google's founders:

Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely academic environment in which both Page and Brin were raised. Page was born in Michigan, Brin in Russia, but apart from that their backgrounds were eerily alike: ethnically but not religiously Jewish, educated in Montessori schools, their fathers both university professors of science (computer science at Michigan and maths at Maryland, respectively), their mothers both also super-numerate (database consultancy and Nasa — it must be fun to say ‘my mum works at Nasa’). Brin was 16 when he began taking classes at the University of Maryland, and 19 when he graduated. He went to Stanford to begin work on his PhD. Page, who had done his first degree at the University of Michigan, came there a year later to have a look at the computer science PhD programme. On a Stanford orientation day in 1995, looking round San Francisco, Page began arguing with the tour guide, a second-year comp. sci. PhD student whose opinionated obnoxiousness so closely resembled his own. You have seen enough buddy movies to know what happened next.

The Passion of C.S. Lewis

As The Passion of C.S. Lewis points out, The Chronicles of Narnia aren't allegory — at least not by a strict definition:

C.S. Lewis, however, always claimed that The Chronicles of Narnia were not allegorical. 'You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books 'represents' something in the world,' he wrote to a group of schoolchildren. 'Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress but I'm not writing that way.'

David’s Friend Goliath

In David’s Friend Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum explains that most of the world realizes that America is a benevolent hegemon:

Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain once observed, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true of America’s role in the world. The United States is the subject of endless commentary, most of it negative, some of it poisonously hostile. Statements by foreign leaders, street demonstrations in national capitals, and much-publicized opinion polls all seem to bespeak a worldwide conviction that the United States misuses its enormous power in ways that threaten the stability of the international system. That is hardly surprising. No one loves Goliath. What is surprising is the world’s failure to respond to the United States as it did to the Goliaths of the past.

Sovereign states as powerful as the United States, and as dangerous as its critics declare it to be, were historically subject to a check on their power. Other countries banded together to block them. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany during the two world wars, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War all inspired countervailing coalitions that ultimately defeated them. Yet no such anti-American alignment has formed or shows any sign of forming today. Widespread complaints about the United States’ international role are met with an absence of concrete, effective measures to challenge, change, or restrict it.

The gap between what the world says about American power and what it fails to do about it is the single most striking feature of 21st-century international relations. The explanation for this gap is twofold. First, the charges most frequently leveled at America are false. The United States does not endanger other countries, nor does it invariably act without regard to the interests and wishes of others. Second, far from menacing the rest of the world, the United States plays a uniquely positive global role. The governments of most other countries understand that, although they have powerful reasons not to say so explicitly.

'Way Forward' Requires Culture Shift at Ford

A harsh lesson in leadership from 'Way Forward' Requires Culture Shift at Ford:

At a meeting in early October at Ford Motor Co.'s big design-center showroom here, an employee asked Mark Fields, then fresh in his job as head of the company's North and South American auto operations, if workers should be worried about their pensions.

'Yes, yes, you should,' Mr. Fields says he replied. 'That's a great motivator.'

For Ford workers, the idea that the family-controlled company, still commonly called 'Ford's' by longtime employees, might not pay promised pensions is a shocking concept. 'I decided this was a chance to get people moving; to get away from the 'this too shall pass' mindset we've had,' Mr. Fields says.

Executive Envy

Executive Envy explains what happened last time Congress reacted to "exorbitant, outrageous, immoral, offensive" CEO compensation — it made things worse:

That's exactly what happened the last time Congress waded into this thicket of envy, capping the tax deductibility of salaries at $1 million in 1993. Corporate boards — which hire and set the pay of CEOs — naturally reacted by finding other ways to compensate their most important employees.

A favorite route was with stock options, which during the dot-com and stock-market bubble of the late 1990s rewarded even many lousy CEOs as if they were Jack Welch. But instead of giving Congress its share of the blame for this unintended consequence of populist opportunism, the financial press finds it easier to keep shouting 'greed.'

A recommendation:

No doubt some executives earn more than their performance deserves, but that ought to be an issue for shareholders. And the best way to give shareholders influence over managers and their pay is to restore the market for corporate control -- that is, remove the legal and other impediments to takeovers.

The CEOs and boards most likely to pad their own pay despite lousy performance are those who know their jobs aren't at risk. Yet the poison pills, staggered boards and other anti-takeover tools that have proliferated in recent decades don't receive the same political outrage. If certain media moralists want to oust bad CEOs, they should call for a repeal of the Williams Act, which requires that investors disclose any large share accumulation to the broader public. This has the effect of preventing quiet accumulations and making takeovers less profitable and more difficult.

The Socratic Method

Rick Garlikov provides "a transcript of a teaching experiment, using The Socratic Method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school":

There were 22 students in the class. I was told ahead of time by two different teachers (not the classroom teacher) that only a couple of students would be able to understand and follow what I would be presenting. When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at all.

What was he trying to teach?

The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions.

Read the transcript.

Capital Offense

John Rutledge feels that letting the 2003 tax cuts expire would be a Capital Offense:

America is not competing for jobs with China. We are competing for capital. Double taxing dividend and capital gains income drives capital to China, where it earns higher after-tax returns. When that happens, American workers are left behind with falling productivity and uncompetitive companies.

Screening the Latest Bestseller

Screening the Latest Bestseller describes the new Sony e-book reader:

The screen uses E Ink technology developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It consists of 480,000 tiny 'microcapsules,' each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When current is applied to electrodes underneath these capsules, they turn black or white, depending on the polarity of the current.

The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There's no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be 'refreshed' 60 times per second or more).

The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color — between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony.

Sony will sell e-books through its own iTunes-like store, but it has also said that its Reader "will be able to display content from RSS feeds and from PDF files."

Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV?

Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV? points to one of the few examples of a do-it-yourself digital movie making it:

Roger Ingraham, the film's director, dropped out of high school, wrote a script and, at age 19, shot Moonshine using several dozen volunteer actors and crew. Total price: $9,200, including the cost of a Panasonic camera, a PowerBook G4 and website hosting.

An agent from the William Morris Agency saw a trailer for Moonshine while surfing the net, and helped usher the film into Sundance.

Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks

Wow. Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks:

A parasite that causes rats to sacrifice themselves to cats may also change human behavior, making women more outgoing and warmhearted, and men more jealous and suspicious. The Toxoplasma bacteria is shed in cat feces, which are eaten by rats; infected rats become fearless in the presence of cats, which makes them easier to catch, which, in turn spreads the disease to new cats.

Carl Zimmer has a few more examples that ended up in his Parasite Rex:

The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Disney's Expedition Everest

Disney is one-upping its own Matterhorn ride with a new Expedition Everest ride at their Animal Kingdom — which celebrates animals, both real and imagined, like the Yeti. Boing Boing links to some amazing photos of the Nepalese theming.

Collegecuteness.com findings correlate with shirt slogan

Two University of Chicago students — male students — decided “in true U of C fashion," to "get statistics” supporting the famous U of C t-shirt slogan that “the squirrels are cuter than the girls.”

From Collegecuteness.com findings correlate with shirt slogan:

To evaluate the claim that Chicago girls are less attractive than others, he and Scimeca turned to the internet. They chose 10 colleges located across the country, from small, liberal arts schools to massive Big 10 universities. Capitalizing on the popularity of TheFacebook.com, they randomly selected 35 female students from each school’s freshmen class and took the picture from their profile.

With these pictures in hand, they used another popular website to measure the girls’ looks. Each photo was posted on HotOrNot.com, where leering strangers can rank subjects on a scale ranging from 10 (hot) to 1 (not). After receiving 300 votes, each of the 350 total pictures was removed and the average score for each girl calculated.

James Bond car sells for $1.9 million

James Bond car sells for $1.9 million:

A Swiss businessman won the keys to James Bond's silver 1965 Aston Martin DB5 coupe on Friday with a $1.9 million bid at an annual classic car auction in Arizona.

Marriage builds wealth more than being single?

From Marriage builds wealth more than being single?:

The study used data from surveys taken over a 15-year period involving 9,055 Americans who were between 21 and 28 years old in 1985.

Those respondents who remained single had a steady, but slow growth in wealth, from less than $2,000 at the start of the surveys up to an average of about $11,000 after 15 years.

However, those who married and stayed that way showed a sharp increase in wealth accumulation after marriage, growing to an average $43,000 by the 10th year of marriage or by about 16 percent a year.

For people who married and then divorced, there was a slow build-up of wealth during the early years of marriage and then a steady decline about four years prior to divorce.

'Many of these people may have separated before the divorce became official, which would help explain why wealth starts falling so early,' Zagorsky said. 'Divorce is often a long and messy process, and you can see this in the four-year decline in wealth.'

The study also cast doubt on a common assumption that divorce is much harder financially on women than on men. In fact, it showed that women suffered financially only slightly more than men.

Should we fear the proposed Iranian oil bourse?

I came across the same story "that Iran will construct an 'oil bourse' with oil priced in terms of Euros instead of dollars" as Tyler Cowen, and I dismissed its claims that such a system would "swiftly destroy the financial system underpinning the American Empire" for the same reasons:

As a first-order approximation, it doesn't much matter whether Iran prices its oil in terms of dollars, Euros, or some other currency. At the beginning of each day, investors (including the OPEC nations) are holding their preferred bundle of currency positions. You might need to hold or receive Euros for a moment to make a transaction, but moving from the dollar to the Euro, or vice versa, can be done easily.

Currency markets are some of the most liquid markets in the world.

Myth: Schools don't have enough money

John Stoseel argues that it is a myth that schools don't have enough money:

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Doctors claim suspended animation success

From Doctors claim suspended animation success:

A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Hasan Alam, has tested the technique about 200 times on pigs, with a 90 per cent success rate.

First he anaesthetises the animal, then cuts a major vein and artery in its abdomen to simulate multiple gunshots to a person's chest and abdomen.
As the pig rapidly loses about half its blood and enters a state of shock, Dr Alam drains its blood and stores it before pumping chilled organ preservation fluid into its system.

The animal's body temperature falls to about 10C until it is in a state of 'profound hypothermia' and has no pulse and no electrical activity in its brain.

But after the blood stored earlier is warmed and pumped back into the pig's body its heart starts beating again and it comes back to life.

'It is still pretty awe-inspiring,' Dr Alam said. 'Once the heart starts beating and the blood starts pumping, voila, you've got another animal that's come back from the other side.

'Technically, I think we can do it in humans.'

He now wants automatic consent to use the technique on all patients brought to his hospital who have lost blood and would probably die with only standard care.

Notes on the Denial of Perspective

From Notes on the Denial of Perspective:

Felice Varini paints (lines, concentric circles, triangles) on things (tunnels, castles, groovy interiors). A seemingly random smattering of elements that, viewed from a specific point in space, coalesce into a tangible planar element.

Falling back to earth, alone

Falling back to earth, alone describes an unbelievable skydive:

In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.

He then jumped.

Kittinger free-fell for over twenty miles — at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.
[...]
Luckily, there's a film.

First Computer Bug

The First Computer Bug was literally a "moth found trapped between points at Relay #70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University," back in 1945:

The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".

How best to fight off a shark

How best to fight off a shark:

Bernie Williams, a 46-year-old Australian scuba-diver, fought off repeated attacks by an 11ft (3.5m) shark by hitting it on the nose with his speargun.

As is most often the case, he didn't see the shark coming until it bit him.

Mr Williams said: 'It just came out from my left hand side... chomped on my arm and took me for a ride for about two metres.

'I stabbed it on the nose with a speargun, but it was just like hitting a lump of steel. It didn't slow down in the slightest.'

The shark retreated before making another attack on Mr Williams, giving him just enough time to hide in a crevice near the ocean floor until his diving buddies came to the rescue.