More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well

Saturday, November 8th, 2003

The Hoover Institute, a conservative thinktank, publishes a number of books, including More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well — which they adverstise with these controversial excerpts:

Women in the Military. “At Parris Island, it was discovered that 45 percent of female Marines were unable to throw a hand grenade far enough to avoid blowing themselves up. If I were in a foxhole with a woman about to toss a hand grenade, I’d consider her the enemy.”

Racial and Gender Quotas. “The only reason the elite haven’t mandated quotas for women, Japanese, and other underrepresented groups in the NBA and the NFL is because the folly and costs of their cosmic justice vision would be exposed.”

Affirmative Action. “Too many blacks receive twelve years of fraudulent primary and secondary education that cannot be overcome by four years of college. Unfortunately, liberals and civil rights organizations add to that disaster by giving unquestioned support to a corrupt education establishment that produces the fraud.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act. “In some quarters, the ADA is taken to stand for ‘Attorney’s Dream Answered.’ And who pays? You and I, through higher prices or less convenience.”

The Minimum Wage. “Low wages are more a result of people being underproductive than being underpaid. They simply do not have the skills to produce and do things their fellow man highly values. The minimum wage law is evil legislation and deserving of repeal altogether.”

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Medical Student Epithet Makes Patients Wary

Friday, November 7th, 2003

The power of euphemism, from Medical Student Epithet Makes Patients Wary:

Patients reluctant to have a medical student sit in on their consultation are less worried if the student is introduced as a ‘trainee’ instead, a doctor wrote on Friday in Britain’s leading medical journal.

Patients are much more willing to accept the presence of a ‘trainee doctor’ or even a ‘student doctor’ than a ‘medical student,’ Hany George El-Sayeh wrote in the British Medical Journal.

He said patients feared they would be seen by a scruffy, disinterested youth who might later report their intimacies in the bar.

Describing a student as a trainee doctor would also heighten the youngster’s esteem, he added. But trainees themselves ought to counter stereotypes by making a greater effort to appear interested, smart and punctual, he said.

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Foreign Belly Dancers Fight Ban in Egypt

Friday, November 7th, 2003

I’m a bit confused about how Muslim nation can have a strong, proud tradition of belly dancing. Anyway, the Egyptians don’t seem to like foreign competition. Foreign Belly Dancers Fight Ban in Egypt:

Foreign belly dancers are appealing to the Egyptian courts to overturn a decree that stops them working in the country they consider the home of the dance, a performer and her lawyer said Thursday.

Mohamed Ibrahim, a lawyer representing two dancers, Australian Caroline Evanoff and a Russian known as Nour, said Manpower and Employment Minister Ahmed el-Amawi issued the decree preventing foreign belly dancers from working in Egypt.
[...]
Tickets fetch 200 Egyptian pounds ($35.52) for performances by top dancers in Cairo’s luxury hotels, where the mixed-sex audiences often throw generous tips onto the dance floor.

Some dancers perform in cheaper, smoke-filled bars, frequented almost entirely by men, venues which some say give a bad reputation to an art form that requires years of training to perfect.

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Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex

Friday, November 7th, 2003

Singapore never ceases to amaze me. Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex:

A Singaporean police sergeant has been jailed for two years for having oral sex in a country where prostitution is legal but oral sex is not, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Straits Times reported that the 27-year-old police coast guard sergeant landed in court after a 16-year-old reported to the police that she had performed oral sex on the man.

She was above the age of consent and agreed to perform the act, but oral sex is against the law in the city-state, the paper said.

‘The act by itself is an offence. It is not a question of consent or no consent. Even between consenting people, it is an offence,’ criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan told the paper.

The maximum punishment for the offence is life imprisonment.

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‘Hitler’s Mountain Home’ from Homes and Gardens November 1938 – p 193

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

Wow. The Guardian Unlimited has reprinted Hitler’s Mountain Home from Homes and Gardens November 1938 – p 193.

It turns out that one of the Guardian‘s editors had stumbled across the magazine article, as he describes in At home with the Führer:

My discovery was an article headlined ‘Hitler’s Mountain Home’ – a breathless, three-page Hello!-style tour around Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps. In it, the author, the improbably named Ignatius Phayre, tells us that ‘it is over 12 years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border’. It was originally little more than a shed, but he was able to develop it ‘as his famous book Mein Kampf became a bestseller of astonishing power’.

The great dictator, it seems, was quite the interiors wizard: “The colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect… [Hitler] has a passion about cut flowers in his home.”

And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he “delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur… ”

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Moral Hazard and Protective Gear

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

It turns out that people take greater risks when they’re protected against the consequences:

My interest is in pointing out that the seatbelt phenomenon for which Sam Peltzman is known here — that mandatory seatbelt laws can and do, at the margin, induce less careful driving than in the absence of such laws — is not just restricted to seatbelt laws. (Heck, have ya seen the way Volvo drivers drive?)

Take my favorite example, from my favorite sport: hockey. When I was a wee lassie and we had season tix to the Penguins, the players soared around the ice with their locks flowing (this was the mid-70s, after all), and there were fights, and people got injured.

Then the NHL implemented a mandatory helmet rule for all entering players; existing players were grandfathered out of having to comply. Both my casual empiricism and statistics on penalty minutes and the increase in incidence of particular penalties (especially high sticking) suggest that the Peltzman effect was in full force: mandatory helmets seem, at the margin, to have contributed to an increase in violence in hockey, particularly the nasty, cheap crap that gives hockey such a bad name.

What this moral hazard problem has provoked in the NHL is not a reconsideration of the wisdom of mandatory helmet rules, far from it. It has led to two decades of inveighing against fighting, roughing, high sticking, checking from behind, all of the behaviors that increased after the helmet rule.

Similarly, American football players tackle their opponents much more violently than rugby players can afford to, and gloved boxers hit harder than bareknuckle fighters.

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Coolie?

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

After reading Upwardly mobile phone jockey… or ‘cyber-coolie’?, I decided to look up “coolie”; it was one of those words I more-or-less knew, but didn’t know the origin of. Merriam-Webster OnLine defines it as follows:

Main Entry: coo·lie
Pronunciation: \?kü-l?\
Function: noun
Etymology: Hindi & Urdu qul?
Date: 1638
: an unskilled laborer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages

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Beyond face values

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

Beyond face values reviews Portraits: A History — and shares some amusing art history:

For example, until the 19th century the only permissible way an artist could paint a naked female portrait was for the sitter to pretend to be a goddess. Even Rubens’s blatant celebration of the sexiness of his young second wife was rendered respectable by deriving her pose from an ancient statue of Venus. Diane de Poitiers, posing starkers as the virgin goddess Diana, must be the cheekiest. She was both widowed and the mistress of Henry II at the time.

It was Goya who broke the convention with his Naked Maja, “the first purely profane, life-sized female nude in Western art”. The picture was commissioned by a Spanish politician for his secret erotic collection, only gossip identifying the subject as the Duchess of Alba — a slur which so rankled with her family that 150 years later, in 1945, the duke had his ancestor’s remains exhumed, unfortunately to no conclusive proof.

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Upwardly mobile phone jockey… or ‘cyber-coolie’?

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

Upwardly mobile phone jockey… or ‘cyber-coolie’? describes India’s success in taking over the call-center business:

In India, which has been most successful in stealing call-centre business from the rich countries, companies teach their operators to understand American accents and imitate them. They watch American movies together, and those who can easily comprehend Sylvester Stallone’s dialogue are said to be approaching perfection. Some companies try to create an American ambience by putting little American flags on the desks and providing pizza.

India now has more than 160,000 call-centre workers and expects to have a million by 2008. Raman Roy, who runs a company called Wipro Spectramind, imagines India becoming ‘the back office of the world.’ He had 200 employees three years ago and now has 5,100. They take catalogue orders, book hotel and airline reservations, do some telemarketing, and then move up to computer help desks, insurance claims processing, various forms of accounting, and payroll management.

This is where it gets interesting though:

Not everyone finds this system admirable. Last year, a reporter for the Times of India mentioned to Roy that there are those who think these workers operate at the lowest end of the value chain. Roy replied that you can do a low-end job and then maybe move to a better job. “Without the low end, you cannot proceed to the high end.”

This controversy recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that “These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age.” In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while “it isn’t much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill” (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it’s the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. I love that line.

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Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading draws an intriguing connection between the famous psychological intrument and astrology:

Introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the test bears a charming resemblance to a party game. A person is shown ten inkblots and asked to tell what each resembles. Like swirling images in a crystal ball, the ambiguous blots tell a different story to every person who gazes upon them. There are butterflies and bats, diaphanous dresses and bow ties, monkeys, monsters, and mountain-climbing bears. When scored and interpreted by an expert, people’s responses to the blots are said to provide a full and penetrating portrait of their personalities.

The scientific evidence for the Rorschach has always been feeble.

How did the Rorschach test become so popular then? Because Rorschach “wizards” were able to make uncannily accurate “blind readings” of patients from just their test responses. Only these amazing Rorschach readings were no more accurate than a good palm reading:

In the late 1940s, psychologist Bertram Forer published an eye-opening study that he called a “demonstration of gullibility” (Forer 1949). After administering a questionnaire to his introductory psychology class, he prepared personality sketches. For example: “Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.”

Forer asked the students to rate their own sketches for accuracy. The students gave an average rating of “very good.” More than 40 percent said that their sketch provided a perfect fit to their personality.

The results seemed to show that Forer’s personality questionnaire possessed a high degree of validity. However, there was a diabolical catch: Forer had given all the students the same personality sketch, which he manufactured using horoscopes from an astrology book. The students had gullibly accepted this boiler-plate personality description as if it applied to them uniquely as individuals.

Although the statements borrowed from the astrology book were seemingly precise, they applied to almost all people. Following the eminent researcher Paul Meehl, psychologists now call such personality statements “Barnum statements,” after the great showman P.T. Barnum who said, “A circus should have a little something for everybody” (he’s also credited with, “There’s a sucker born every minute”).

As Forer had discovered, people tend to seriously overestimate the degree to which Barnum statements fit them uniquely. For example, students in one study who were given Barnum statements disguised as test results responded with glowing praise: “On the nose! Very good”; “Applies to me individually, as there are too many facets which fit me too well to be a generalization.”

Interestingly, many “psychics” believe in their own powers — and most Rorschach “wizards” probably believed in theirs.

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Falling on Deaf Ears

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

Falling on Deaf Ears asks, how reliable are ear-witnesses? Not very:

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed in Trenton, N.J., in April 1936, for kidnapping and murdering the young son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. The most dramatic moment in Hauptmann’s closely watched trial came when Lindbergh identified Hauptmann’s voice as that of his son’s kidnapper. “The minute Lindbergh pointed his finger at Hauptmann, the trial was over,” said Hauptmann’s lawyer after the conviction. “Jesus Christ himself said he was convinced this was the man who killed his son. Who was anybody to doubt him or deny him justice?”

Lindbergh had heard the voice of his son’s kidnapper three years earlier. Still hoping to get the child back alive, Lindbergh had accompanied Dr. John Condon to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx to deliver ransom money. Condon handed off $50,000 in marked gold certificates, while Lindbergh waited nearly 100 yards away in a car. Out of the darkness came the words, “Hey, doctor! Over here, over here.”

Twenty-nine months after the encounter in the cemetery, in September 1934, Lindbergh told a Bronx grand jury that “it would be very difficult to sit here and say that I could pick a man by that voice.” Undeterred, the district attorney asked Lindbergh later that day: “Would you like to see the man who kidnapped your son?” The next morning, while Lindbergh sat in the back of the D.A.’s office among a group of detectives, Hauptmann was brought in and asked to repeat the words, “Hey, doctor. Here, doctor, over here.” Lindbergh told the prosecutor that he recognized the voice as that of the kidnapper, and he testified under oath at the trial that Hauptmann was the man he had heard in the cemetery.
[...]
One year after Hauptmann’s execution, Frances McGehee, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, had students listen to a person read a 56-word passage from behind a screen. The students were then tested at various times to see whether they could pick the reader out from a group of five voices. They did so with 83 percent accuracy the next day. Three weeks later, however, their success rate had declined dramatically to 51 percent. Five months later they were down to a dismal 13 percent accuracy rate — well below chance.

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Chick Lit Keeps on Clicking

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

Chick Lit Keeps on Clicking succinctly enumerates “chick lit” genre conventions:

Like all genres, chick lit has its conventions. Its protagonists tend to be attractive women in their 20s or 30s; they’re educated, self-aware and quick with a snarky retort or a wise aside; they live in New York, San Francisco or London; they work in publishing, advertising, media or entertainment; they lament their single status; their families appear every few chapters, Greek chorus-style, to shake their heads in synchronized dismay; in the end, a Cinderella ending makes everything right. Chick lit is marketed like the candy it is. The books are wrapped in brightly coloured covers with girly typography, often treated as a point-of-sale impulse purchase. Titles are often child’s book simple, like See Jane Date or Run Catch Kiss.

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Vigor of Life

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

The Journal of Manly Arts (I still love that name) provides an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt’s autobiography, Vigor of Life, that describes how “having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home,” he couldn’t hold his own with the other boys, so he took up boxing (at age 14). From there, he kept up a fairly active lifestyle:

I did a good deal of boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attained to the first rank in either, even at my own weight. Once, in the big contests in the Gym, I got either into the finals or semi-finals, I forgot which; but aside from this the chief part I played was to act as trial horse for some friend or classmate who did have a chance of distinguishing himself in the championship contests.

When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form. I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew older. I dropped the wrestling earliest. When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week. Incidentally I may mention that his presence caused me a difficulty with the Comptroller, who refused to audit a bill I put in for a wrestling-mat, explaining that I could have a billiard-table, billiards being recognized as a proper Gubernatorial amusement, but that a wrestling-mat symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted. The middleweight champion was of course so much better than I was that he could not only take care of himself but of me too and see that I was not hurt — for wrestling is a much more violent amusement than boxing. But after a couple of months he had to go away, and he left as a substitute a good-humored, stalwart professional oarsman. The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling. He could not even take care of himself, not to speak of me. By the end of our second afternoon one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my short ribs badly damaged, and my left shoulder-blade so nearly shoved out of place that it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought we would “vote the war a failure” and abandon wrestling. After that I took up boxing again. While President I used to box with some of the aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood. After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.

When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling.

I enjoyed these comments on boxing:

Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the Young Men’s Christian Association. I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.

Naturally, I’m most interested in Roosevelt’s jiu-jitsu training. Here’s what he had to say in a letter dated February 24, 1905:

I still box with Grant, who has now become the champion middleweight wrestler of the United States. Yesterday afternoon we had Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that it is difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita was perfectly content to be on his back. Inside of a minute Yamashita had choked Grant, and inside of two minutes more he got an elbow hold on him that would have enabled him to break his arm; so that there is no question but that he could have put Grant out. So far this made it evident that the jiu jitsu man could handle the ordinary wrestler. But Grant, in the actual wrestling and throwing was about as good as the Japanese, and he was so much stronger that he evidently hurt and wore out the Japanese. With a little practice in the art I am sure that one of our big wrestlers or boxers, simply because of his greatly superior strength, would be able to kill any of those Japanese, who though very good men for their inches and pounds are altogether too small to hold their own against big, powerful, quick men who are as well trained.

Posted in Fitness, Martial Arts, Policy | No Comments »

Where To Get Rich

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

From Where To Get Rich:

What do these towns have in common: Albuquerque, Austin, Bentonville, Dayton, Denver, Omaha, Racine and Tacoma? They are the birthplaces of firms that created 17 of the top 25 personal fortunes in this year’s FORBES 400 list.
[...]
There is a funny American myth that you have to go to big places such as New York or California to make your fame and fortune. Maybe fame. But fortune, as this year’s FORBES 400 shows, is more often found off the beaten track.

Best place to make a future FORBES 400 fortune? Start with this proposition: The most valuable natural resource in the 21st century is brains. Smart people tend to be mobile. Watch where they go! Because where they go, robust economic activity will follow.

If you agree, then put your chips on cities that: a) attract smart people; and b) are low-cost enough to incubate a business so it won’t need much outside capital, which is dilutive to wealth building. In other words, look for cities with these attributes:

  • Universities
  • Stellar K-12 education
  • Capital for experimentation
  • Capital for business risk
  • Low taxes and light regulations
  • Love of creative mess
  • Inclusive optimism
  • Respect for the risk taker

Posted in Business | No Comments »

A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down

Wednesday, November 5th, 2003

In A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down David Brooks paints an ugly picture:

Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein’s government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children.

Try to put yourself in the mind of the killer, or of the guy with the plastic bag. You are part of Saddam’s vast apparatus of rape squads, torture teams and mass-grave fillers. Every time you walk down the street, people tremble in fear. Everything else in society is arbitrary, but you are absolute. When you kill, your craving for power and significance is sated. You are infused with the joy of domination.

These are the people we are still fighting in Iraq.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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