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http://www.econtalk.org/jacob-vigdor-on-the-seattle-minimum-wage/

Stress about money can be a useful driver to get off your fat backside and go get a job.

Stress about unemployment can be a harmful driver of keeping your fragile backside in a toxic job in which you deliver far less value to yourself/family/industry/society (and consume more medical support) than if your career was managed proactively with less fear.

But many just inherently love the genre of pointy stick incentive porn, especially when when discussing a group of presumptively characterized as even more fat and lazy than yours truly.

Psychology 101: That's how we generally deal with our own self-loathing: by projecting it onto a group even less deserving. Go into any prison. You'll never find anyone tougher on crime than the white collar criminal who defrauded little old ladies into destitution seething with vanity twenty paces farther up the corridor from the filthy puke who stalked underage girls.

These small trials are just the tip of the iceberg.

Check out Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong (2017) about how Hong Kong established a unique cultural heritage of low-taxation social safety nets.

This took a very smart man twenty years to accomplish (circa 1950 to 1970). He had scored several firsts back in the homeland in Latin and Greek, and thoroughly believed that excess government spending drained venture capital away from projects that drive the long-term growth rate.

But then when the private sector borked things over (far too many people were dying in preventable housing fires) he waded into the mess and established a government program in low-cost housing that didn't kill people for no good reason.

I was watching Erik Weinstein the other day, explaining the IDW (which began as an in-joke BTW). He sensibly explained that no intelligent person believes in completely open borders; and conversely, that no intelligent person believes in completely closed borders (these being memes that society's elite institutions—operating on both the left and right—above the MSM layer, use to keep the masses uselessly preoccupied with ridiculously polarized bun fights).

A complex world always has two sides.

UBI is not a panacea, but it could turn out as well as Hong Kong, depending on how we move forward.

Throughout his time in government, Cowperthwaite refused to compile and distribute official data for economic output. For most of his tenure as Financial Secretary, he simply batted away requests for the data. When Milton Friedman visited Hong Kong in the early 1960s, he asked Cowperthwaite why there was such limited information on national income.

The text continues, quoting from Milton Friedman:

Cowperthwaite explained that he had resisted requests from civil servants to provide such data because he was convinced that once the data was published there would be pressure to use them for government intervention in the economy.

Neil Monnery on Hong Kong and the Architect of Prosperity — 8 October 2018

He was very clear in his own mind about what the second order impact was of collecting the data. And so he said, "Well, I simply won't collect it. It doesn't affect anything. We will have the same policy whether it's a thousand dollars higher or lower. So it won't affect what we do as government, so therefore there's no point collecting it."

Of course, once he'd gone, his successor gave way a little bit on that and started collecting the data, and that's what we end up with today.

It's a fascinating point, and I think he was probably proved right, actually.

Of course, leaving people to burn to death in substandard housing does indeed motivate them to get off their fat asses and move up in the class structu

Yes, real estate isn't a liquid asset, but over time, it's almost always an investment that significantly increases in value.

Historical norms should be taken with a grain of salt. Additionally, certain gambling games always go up, until the black swan comes along and multiplies by zero.

How many 2008s can the average person soak up in one lifetime?

Russ Roberts interviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb on rationality, risk, and skin in the game — 5 March 2008

I find Taleb to be more aggressive than necessary, and I quickly get to the point of "haven't you belaboured this enough, already?" and then I get onto the Internet, and I think "well, maybe not too belaboured in the larger context".

I tend to regard "almost always" as a dead giveaway that someone is sweeping survival risk under the handy carpet of historical norms.

There's even a worse theorem here. It's pretty much a law of human nature that if you can convince a large enough group of people to onboard some substantial exposure exclusively because it "almost always" goes well, market insiders will be quick to engineer a shocking reversal on that long-standing historical trend.

Big Finance can engineer almost any outcome these days, it just needs to be big enough to justify a systemic assault (with enough sheep on the wrong side). This kind of engineering at scale doesn't come cheap, so it tends to be carefully paced (also spacing out due to the undue-regulation minimization sheep-shear spacing theorem).

Gone are the days where it's safe to make major investments facing backwards in time.

There recently was an interesting podcast from Econtalk discussing the idea of a real estate tax based on self-assessment. The owner of a property would list a price at which they would be willing to sell, and they are required to sell if a buyer offers that price. This price would be the tax assessment value. If Apple values their headquarters at $200, they would pay taxes based on that $200 amount. But another party is free to come along and purchase the property for $200. If someone undervalues a property in order to reduce their tax burden, it may be purchased from them.

There are a number of practical issues addressed in the podcast. It would be disruptive to have one's house perpetually "on the market". Is anyone allowed to come walk through your house to take a tour as a prospective buyer? What are the implications for acquiring large rights-of-way for, say, a railroad? If Railroad A owns a stretch of land measuring 1,000 miles by 20 feet, could Competitor B purchase a random segment of this line, measuring 20 feet by 20 feet, and then block the activity of Railroad A by prohibiting trains from passing over its land? Would this require the Railroad A to value every "unit" of land it owns at an exorbitant price, and thus pay exorbitant taxes, to avoid disruption by spurious purchases? Would Railroad A be allowed to aggregate the entire line into a single "unit" of land, allowing them to undervalue the property (Competitor B would have to put up the money to purchase the entire line)?

In South Korea, for example, 30% of jobs are in manufacturing, compared with 22% in Canada.

So superficial it makes my head explode, and stupid, too.

Employment by industry

All industries (2017): 18,416.4 (thousands)
Goods producing services: 3,875.9

That's 21.0% of jobs in Canada in the "goods producing services" sector as of freshly updated statistics for 2017.

This sector further breaks down:
* agriculture
* forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, oil and gas
* utilities
* construction
* manufacturing

Actual manufacturing: 1,724.8

That's less than 10%.

Right, Canada hasn't manage to integrate "social tasks" into driving those oversized, bitumen dump-trucks up in Fort Mac. To a first order, I'm guessing that 60% of this entire correlation could be explained by Canada being (geographically) just a tiny bit bigger than Korea, with correspondingly more jobs anchored behind a steering wheel (all of which would be categorized as "at risk").

True manufacturing sectors that remain in Canada and the United States are generally the hardest manufacturing jobs to automate, and with the largest value add.

Here's just one in depth discussion of the matter:

Adam Davidson on Manufacturing — 2012

Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about manufacturing. Based on an article Davidson wrote for The Atlantic, the conversation looks at the past, present, and future of manufacturing.

Davidson visited an after-market auto parts factory in Greenville, South Carolina and talked with employees there as well as with executives at corporate headquarters.

What is the future of factory work in America? Why are some manufacturing jobs in America while others are in China or elsewhere?

The conversation looks at these questions as well as how well or poorly the U.S. education system prepares students for the world of work.

Snippet:

Russ: Which is surprising. Because I think what is surprising, at least to a novice like me, we have in the back of our mind this idea that all these factories are so mechanized, there's so much robotic help--a robot, that's as smart, as precise, as careful, as repeatable, replicable as you'd want. So, why is it that there are--how can there be a quality difference between what a factory stamps out here versus there?

Guest: That was one of the big lessons that I learned. As the machinery that a factory uses gets more and more expensive, sophisticated, it requires more and more human intelligence to operate it. It doesn't require more people. It requires a lot fewer people. But the people that these new machines require often have to have far more skill and be able to think through problems with much greater sophistication.

Many of these jobs could be further whittled away, but mostly by re-automation. And this gets way harder with each iteration (and with less immediate ROI from the scant number of workers displaced).

———

Half the time Russ drives me nuts, because I'm not a neoliberal at heart, but I take my anti-neoliberalism seriously, because it deserves an informed critique (this requires endless hours wading into murky waters you don't really like, but that's simply the cost of not being an idiot). True neoliberals don't find it as painful as I do to be generally well informed; their posture is primarily to dismantle, and there's simply no end of things that suck and on the surface appear to justify hasty extermination, with only the selfish hand (powered by whose industry, exactly?) to fill and close the gaping wound. (Hard not to love the perpetual-motion-machine immune system of the invisible hand when it

As a general proposition among neoliberals who have poured clarified butter over Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations while pushing Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments off to the broccoli side of the ideological plate, corporations only care about the betterment of society insofar as it also helps their bottom line.

As a general proposition, women only give sex for money.

Money: the abstract quantity which motivates an animal to engage in any pro-social behaviour whatsoever.

Even Adam Smith thought that definition was total baloney.

———

Anthony Gill on Tipping — November 2017

Russ Roberts: I don't want to miss our conversation about tipping in places you never expect to come back to.

Why is it that people tip in restaurants they'll never come back to, cabs they'll never be in again?

And of course many people listening to this would say, 'Only an economist would think this is a puzzle'. But, go ahead.

Anthony Gill: Yeah, it seems like such a horrible thing. But I think only an economist who hasn't read Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments would think that a problem.

Apparently, man invented the corporation so that we could shed our best impulses, once and for all.

Every other human assembly is judged the caliber of people involved; but corporations run true to blood type: green. Only, and always.

———

One of the great things about Spock was his clarity of categorical perception, without constantly being filtered through some half-misremembered Vulcan blowhard.

I would have also enjoyed hall-monitor Spock, who constantly upbraided McCoy by responding "yes, but so-and-so also said X in another book".

And then McCoy would reply "damn your green eyes".

John discusses his recent book, Words on the Move, in the following podcast: John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language — August 2017

There are words like "behoove" that are in trouble. You do hear it every once in a while. "Ruthless" is a word, but "ruth", which used to be a word, isn't. So, that kind of thing, that words catch on and other words die out—I was aware of that. But, your book just opened my eyes in an incredible way. Especially, since I have to confess, I'm a bit of a language snob.

So, too, can 'crypto' be dismembered.

The podcast wasn't my favourite episode. It was a bit too strawman for me, perhaps because I already know this material fairly well.

We just finished watching an older Coen film, A Serious Man. For a quantum physicist who can infallibly fill chalkboards with bra–ket notation without hardly blinking, he sure does gape like a clueless fish when he discovers his wife is capable of forming alternate plans.

Words are like wives. Just when you think you've got it all sorted out ... change happens.

I want to base my entire political and social system on it's the occasional pang of conscience from a member of the ruling elite.

Did you first check whether it's a historical truth that much of human enlightenment has depended upon this exact thing? Because if you didn't, you might be throwing the only successful system we've ever had out the window with the bath water.

Show me the political system that hasn't depended upon this, and presently works better than the current environment of anti-bipartisan American politics.

David Zetland on Water

Zetland: But let me put a bright light on a couple of things.

I'll just give one example that was positive, and that was kind of the difference that an individual makes; and that was when a new general manager was appointed to the Phnom Penh Water Authority in Cambodia. And Cambodia is not only one of the poorest countries in the world but also one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And this guy basically said, 'I'm going to have a professional system.' And he insisted on getting paid for the water.

So, the army had not paid its bill for years. It was a very big customer. The manager went to collect the bill and the guy put a gun to his head and said, 'The army doesn't pay.' And the guy said, 'I'm a good Buddhist; do what you have to.' And then the guy rolled, and he paid. And that payment set an example for other customers.

So they started collecting money. They started firing staff that were incompetent or corrupt; and they started rewarding staff who were competent. And not only did they expand that system to the slums in Phnom Penh, but they also lowered the price of water, especially to the people who were under-served. Because they were buying water off of trucks at 10 times the official price, but they had no official service. And when they got connected to the official system, the poorest people of Phnom Penh suddenly saw their quality improve and their price drop. And that was—it's widely cited as a success. And it's based on, essentially, a guy doing the right thing.

Russ: Which is hard to rely on, unfortunately. But it's glorious when it happens.

Glorious visions of human affairs lacking intellectual rigour are also hard to rely on.

My own standard of rigour includes honesty. Superficially ridiculous is not enough. One also has to prove there's actually something with less blemished skin that has ever worked. (Diogenes was a wimp. He should have spent his pointless existence searching for an honest libertarian.)

Libertarians basically believe that linear superposition applies to giant systems. If for any x, with enough cleverness, one can make a market to good social and economic effect, then for any 7000 different {x}s, you can instigate all these independent markets to good social and economic effect at the same time with correspondingly large benefits.

Perhaps, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.

This is funny, because in software, we can barely manage to compose three desiderata (quality/scope/budget), on a good day.

Markets sure look good set against the backdrop of social equity accumulated by other means over hundreds of years (the British enlightenment took place on the backs of exceptional individuals whose existence one wouldn't wish to have to rely upon).

What other idea, postulated for the highest reach of human complexity, circulates on the founding metaphor of frictionless composability?

That any experienced software person bites on this for a millisecond seriously blows my mind.

Canice Prendergast on How Prices Can Improve a Food Fight (and Help the Poor)

Here's a guy who designed a market clean sheet and actually got it right. Glorious when it happens, I'm totally with you on that point.

I want to base my entire political and social system on it's the occasional pang of conscience from a member of the ruling elite.

Did you first check whether it's a historical truth that much of human enlightenment has depended upon this exact thing? Because if you didn't, you might be throwing the only successful system we've ever had out the window with the bath water.

Show me the political system that hasn't depended upon this, and presently works better than the current environment of anti-bipartisan American politics.

David Zetland on Water

Zetland: But let me put a bright light on a couple of things.

I'll just give one example that was positive, and that was kind of the difference that an individual makes; and that was when a new general manager was appointed to the Phnom Penh Water Authority in Cambodia. And Cambodia is not only one of the poorest countries in the world but also one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And this guy basically said, 'I'm going to have a professional system.' And he insisted on getting paid for the water.

So, the army had not paid its bill for years. It was a very big customer. The manager went to collect the bill and the guy put a gun to his head and said, 'The army doesn't pay.' And the guy said, 'I'm a good Buddhist; do what you have to.' And then the guy rolled, and he paid. And that payment set an example for other customers.

So they started collecting money. They started firing staff that were incompetent or corrupt; and they started rewarding staff who were competent. And not only did they expand that system to the slums in Phnom Penh, but they also lowered the price of water, especially to the people who were under-served. Because they were buying water off of trucks at 10 times the official price, but they had no official service. And when they got connected to the official system, the poorest people of Phnom Penh suddenly saw their quality improve and their price drop. And that was—it's widely cited as a success. And it's based on, essentially, a guy doing the right thing.

Russ: Which is hard to rely on, unfortunately. But it's glorious when it happens.

Glorious visions of human affairs lacking intellectual rigour are also hard to rely on.

My own standard of rigour includes honesty. Superficially ridiculous is not enough. One also has to prove there's actually something with less blemished skin that has ever worked. (Diogenes was a wimp. He should have spent his pointless existence searching for an honest libertarian.)

Libertarians basically believe that linear superposition applies to giant systems. If for any x, with enough cleverness, one can make a market to good social and economic effect, then for any 7000 different {x}s, you can instigate all these independent markets to good social and economic effect at the same time with correspondingly large benefits.

Perhaps, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.

This is funny, because in software, we can barely manage to compose three desiderata (quality/scope/budget), on a good day.

Markets sure look good set against the backdrop of social equity accumulated by other means over hundreds of years (the British enlightenment took place on the backs of exceptional individuals whose existence one wouldn't wish to have to rely upon).

What other idea, postulated for the highest reach of human complexity, circulates on the founding metaphor of frictionless composability?

That any experienced software person bites on this for a millisecond seriously blows my mind.

Canice Prendergast on How Prices Can Improve a Food Fight (and Help the Poor)

Here's a guy who designed a market clean sheet and actually got it right. Glorious when it happens, I'm totally with you on that point.

The problem with Kevin Kelly is that he tickles the part of your brain that wants more Richard Feynman, and then this.

This thesis is not new.

Kelly on the Future, Productivity, and the Quality of Life — January 2013

Guest: The basis of my non-worry comes from the fact that I think the idea of universal computation is a myth. And by universal computation is the belief that starting with the mathematical idea called Turing-Church hypothesis, which says any computation is equivalent to any other computation. The full version of that is: Any computation is equivalent to any other computation given infinite time and space.

From my original notes:

There was good stuff, but he also went on irritating rambles I wouldn't wish to consume again. ... The weirdest one is where he challenges universal computation as applying only when infinite in time and infinite in space.

Kelly seems not to comprehend the challenge involved in proving near-equivalency of computational systems (over any ingenious metric) in the finite case. You'd be walking straight uphill in the general direction of Chaitin's constant.

Although there are infinitely many halting probabilities, it is common to use the letter omega to refer to them as if there were only one.

Is lumping omega actually a real problem?

Kelly seems pretty sure that omega comes in flavours marsupial and mammal ("substrates").

Feynman had a supreme knack of not screwing this stuff up, even when he was skirting a field he really didn't know much about. He had such a strong sense of when his own feet were on solid ground, and was extremely clever is turning the discussion to where his solid footing generally carried the day.

Kevin Kelly not so much.

No one has yet mentioned my favorite podcast, econtalk:
http://econtalk.org/
It's an hour a week and while it can get a bit wonky it's almost always really interesting. I highly recommend the episode on the life of a potato chip:
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

-alan

No one has yet mentioned my favorite podcast, econtalk:
http://econtalk.org/
It's an hour a week and while it can get a bit wonky it's almost always really interesting. I highly recommend the episode on the life of a potato chip:
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

-alan

Yes, nice equation you got there: doing exactly what you've been told to do makes you a hero.

Interesting how a culture of inhibited personal judgement—once people spy greener grass on the other side—turns out not to be a selling feature. Let me ask you a question: This "does not compute" head-in-sand response of yours, how's that working for you inside the giant, black Faraday cage?

I've never been able to comprehend how many people look at history, and the first thing they wish to do is abstract out all human capacity to do the right thing just because.

You also see this with many free market fundamentalists.

David Zetland on Water

But let me put a bright light on a couple of things. I'll just give one example that was positive, and that was kind of the difference that an individual makes; and that was when a new general manager was appointed to the Phnom Pehn Water Authority in Cambodia. And Cambodia is not only one of the poorest countries in the world but also one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And this guy basically said, 'I'm going to have a professional system.' And he insisted on getting paid for the water. So, the army had not paid its bill for years. It was a very big customer. The manager went to collect the bill and the guy put a gun to his head and said, 'The army doesn't pay.' And the guy said, 'I'm a good Buddhist; do what you have to.' And then the guy rolled, and he paid. And that payment set an example for other customers. So they started collecting money. They started firing staff that were incompetent or corrupt; and they started rewarding staff who were competent. And not only did they expand that system to the slums in Phnom Pehn, but they also lowered the price of water, especially to the people who were under-served. Because they were buying water off of trucks at 10 times the official price, but they had no official service. And when they got connected to the official system, the poorest people of Phnom Pehn suddenly saw their quality improve and their price drop. And that was—it's widely cited as a success. And it's based on, essentially, a guy doing the right thing.

Russ Roberts:

Which is hard to rely on, unfortunately. But it's glorious when it happens.

Oh, Russ, you're such a wet blanket.

The problem here is that it's definitely not glorious once you abstract out all capacity for one guy to do the right thing (not dependable, who needs it?). Because system. Because mission. Because hero culture.

Has there ever been a system where it never transpired that, at some point, a healthy institutional outcome was achieved only because some individual did the right thing?

Nice to have, or essential to have?

Important question. Deserves an important answer. Unfortunately, Russ is too wrapped up in his ideological lazy filter to do the math.

Supposedly, the best way to get a Nobel in Economics is to pick a topic that "isn't economics" or is obvious or is obviously false, or otherwise is a dumb idea.

The only example that comes to mind at the moment is behavioral economics, but this tendency has popped up more than once in the podcasts at http://econtalk.org/ .

If you want to go looking for other examples there, its probably best to skip the podcasts about the economics of pirates, and the manufacturing of potato chips, and of car parts. (Probably.)

Bollocks on their predication rate. Real forecasters report skill. By contrast, actual progress on predicting the North Atlantic Oscillation, perhaps an achievable goal, would be huge.

Both of these issues are covered in Judith Curry on Climate Change, a podcast from 2013 which, as it happens, I consumed yesterday.

Concerning the rush to embarrass themselves by reporting their weather prediction rate, it's because of the taxonomic land grab.

Host: I wonder how you feel about how your particular field has changed as you've grown up in it and been out for 25 years. ... Do you feel that we are making progress in the scientific world on this particular topic? Or are we in trouble?

Guest: I think we're in big trouble. When I left graduate school, nobody called themselves a climate scientist. They were an atmospheric dynamicist or a geochemist or a physical oceanographer or things like that. And we were all focused on increasing fundamental understanding. And that was the focus. It was the breakthrough in understanding, changing the way people think, was what mattered. And somebody who published too many papers was probably looked at with suspicion--they are doing the quick and easy stuff; they are not really digging in. It was potentially superficial.

The other thing that was looked down upon, say in the 1980s, was doing something that was too applied, working to deal with regional problems or something like that. That was viewed as soft core; it was what the people did who couldn't really make fundamental contributions to understanding, so they moved on to some of these applied topics, which were useful in some way to regional decision-makers.

I would say in 2000--it was a gradual transition, but I think circa 2000 there was a switch to people finding it beneficial to self-label them as a climate scientist. There was a lot of money, research dollars in this area; there was a lot of influence to be had, in terms of sitting on panels and boards and committees and being interviewed by journalists and being invited to testify in front of Congress. And so the value and the influence of the scientist sort of switched into that dimension where your measure of influence was not so much how you increased our fundamental understanding of how the oceans worked, but it was really to what boards and committees you sat on, your press, and your influence in policy, being invited to testify in front of Congress, and whatever. So I've seen that switch.

The problem is, the concern that I have for the health of our field, is that there's still a lot of fundamental things that we don't understand. The climate models aren't good enough. We need to go back to basics, increase our understanding about the non-linear dynamics of all these ocean oscillations and complexity of the system and things like that.

There are a lot of fundamental things that are getting short shrift, that the sex appeal in our field right now and a lot of funding is to do what I call mock 'climate model taxonomy', where people are analyzing the output of climate models and finding something interesting, alarming, or using them to infer that we won't be able to grow grapes in California in 2100 or something like this. This is the stuff that gets published in Nature and Science and PNAS. People get a press release.

Note that the word "useful" as I chose to hear it, is entirely confined to the domain of career advancement and the writing of committee-room position papers.

Two things about Russ.

One is that he doesn't connect as much as he should. He's (since) done other podcasts which talk about how the regional nature of congressional representation makes politics in America intensely regional. This is

General wisdom is that you DON'T go for any counteroffer

General wisdom among people who have never heard of auction theory is that you DON'T go for any counteroffer ...

People who have heard of auction theory know that general wisdom in this area is overrated. It's a very thorny sub-discipline of game theory. Just for example, the stable marriage problem is widely studied because the best form of loyalty is when no defection transaction has a mutually positive incentive.

Ideologically, the invisible hand supposedly functions as the great purveyor of stable marriage: to the highest bidder thou shalt go. All this stuff about employees hiding their market preferences and market value from their current employer is the opposite of what a free market economy supposedly delivers (or, to put it another way, all of this exists under the "sand in the Vaseline" column of the invisible hand).

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha on LinkedIn and The Alliance

At least this discussion recognizes that in the big picture, the present labour-market etiquette of skulking around is a big steaming pile of crap, and there ought to be a better way. Loyalty in the workforce is the modern equivalent of mind games in the bedroom. You don't hear nearly so much about mind games in the bedroom since divorce became far less stigmatized.

For the record, I would tell firm B, "look, make me an offer, if I like your offer I'll ask my present employer if they wish to beat it by some significant amount (a figure that shall not be less than $5000 annually) and only if they beat you by that margin, will I accept the counteroffer. (I'm assuming trust can be established, and we aren't analyzing my capacity to lie like a bastard.) By doing this you've heavily loaded the dice toward the benefit of firm B is resolving near-ties in best-offer-received. This should offer them sufficient protection that you're not just playing them to win some other chess game on a different chess board.

Obviously, it's a lot more complex, because there's an entire Dilbert Space of opportunities to lie and defect.

Theorem: in any society, a maximum of one individual can operate effectively without extending any trust at all.

Corollary: under the rubric of professionalism, the vast majority of participants in meaningful economy extend trust in more directions that you can count on any given work day.

Definition: EQ = the ability to navigate life's challenges with a less oppressive coefficient of paranoia.

That about sums it up.

On the other hand, biomass has been increasing, arable footprint is likely to shrink, people are better fed and live better, no shortage of wilderness.
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

This is one of my favourite EconTalk episodes of all time.

The guest talks about the "ethical drift" resulting from the imposition of an impossible burden. (My favourite EconTalk episodes are usually the ones where Russ is surprised to discover that the world works as well as it does. In this one, he's shocked by the military's willingness to engage in self-criticism.)

Leonard Wong on Honesty and Ethics in the Military

This one is not unbearably polemic for a general audience, and it's tremendously apropos.

The planning behind the NT kernel certainly dwarfed the care behind the accretion of Linux.

So too did the planning behind Nupedia dwarf the planning behind Wikipedia. One perseverated while the other iterated. Here's an entire EconTalk devoted to the common mental mistakes people make when talking about the best ways to plan and make decisions.

Phil Rosenzweig on Leadership, Decisions, and Behavioral Economics

I liked the following passage, in which I learned that even the best surgeons iterate.

Atul Gawande talks a lot about how a surgeon needs a coach because surgery, as important as it is, it's a discrete event that takes a certain amount of time but at the end of which you usually have a fairly clear feedback of how well you did. You can then take that feedback onboard and try again.

Linus is forthright that his strategy has always been to prefer taking feedback on board over out-front planning. In feedback-rich environments, this can often be an optimal strategy.

You're talking about property as if it's a black and white thing. It's not, and never has been. What we now understand as "property" is the end result of a complex social negotiation that's been ongoing now for many millennia, which has always featured strange winners and losers, and devils in the details.

One can't live in the world and not notice this.

Woe to you if you discover that "your" back yard is contaminated with someone else's "ancestral" DNA.

If "your" antenna radiates energy through "my" radio circuitry, am I allowed to do what I wish with my radio's behaviour?

Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property

I once saw Prince making some ridiculous argument about the protection of music, with no idea at all that the people who come up with the fancy clothing he wears are afforded nothing at all like what he presumes:

Johanna Blakley from That was from Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property:

The main protection fashion designers have is over their trademark: their logo, their name.

Source is protected; that's why you hear about raids on pirates, who have made copies of Louis Vuitton bags, Canal St. in New York, Santee Alley in Los Angeles.

Have control of their name; have copyright protection of all the two-dimensional designs that go into the production of a garment.

Textile design with a certain pattern—automatically qualify for copyright protection of that design.

What they don't own are any of the three-dimensional designs they end up creating. The stuff you see prancing out on a runway are actually up for grabs. Anybody can copy any aspects of any of those designs and get into no trouble with the law.

Those designs are not particularly utilitarian—a word that comes up a lot in this industry—utilitarian stuff tends not to be protected legally.

Something has to be considered a work of art in order to be considered for copyright protection. The courts decided long ago that they did not want any fashion designers owning such utilitarian designs as shirts, blouses, pants, belts, lapels. Don't want somebody owning a monopoly—basically what a copyright gives you.

If I'm at the runway in Milan and I see a design I like and I'm a medium-to-high end retailer, versions of those non-utilitarian clothes get translated into garments that are worn by everyday people, correct?

Yes, and the courts would say that any fashion design, no matter how non-utilitarian it may seem, does not qualify for copyright protection.

The only way it would qualify is if there were some detachable piece from that outfit. The rare example would be like a belt-buckle—a sculptural item that you could remove and hang on the wall and regard as a piece of art.

[I put what sounded like Russ into italics, which on that transcript is anyone's guess.]

Next we get into the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. Under no moral theory of copyright, as originally conceived, do retroactive term extensions make any moral sense whatsoever. Basically one group of assholes paid off another group of assholes (who were actually supposed to represent the interests of their constituents, but that's another matter).

The motivated citizen tries to take property seriously, and then it degenerates all over again into Boss Hogg and Rosco vs the Downloaders of Hazzard Country.

So now you know why your two cents worth of Morality 101 sometimes falls on deaf ears.

You're talking about property as if it's a black and white thing. It's not, and never has been. What we now understand as "property" is the end result of a complex social negotiation that's been ongoing now for many millennia, which has always featured strange winners and losers, and devils in the details.

One can't live in the world and not notice this.

Woe to you if you discover that "your" back yard is contaminated with someone else's "ancestral" DNA.

If "your" antenna radiates energy through "my" radio circuitry, am I allowed to do what I wish with my radio's behaviour?

Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property

I once saw Prince making some ridiculous argument about the protection of music, with no idea at all that the people who come up with the fancy clothing he wears are afforded nothing at all like what he presumes:

Johanna Blakley from That was from Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property:

The main protection fashion designers have is over their trademark: their logo, their name.

Source is protected; that's why you hear about raids on pirates, who have made copies of Louis Vuitton bags, Canal St. in New York, Santee Alley in Los Angeles.

Have control of their name; have copyright protection of all the two-dimensional designs that go into the production of a garment.

Textile design with a certain pattern—automatically qualify for copyright protection of that design.

What they don't own are any of the three-dimensional designs they end up creating. The stuff you see prancing out on a runway are actually up for grabs. Anybody can copy any aspects of any of those designs and get into no trouble with the law.

Those designs are not particularly utilitarian—a word that comes up a lot in this industry—utilitarian stuff tends not to be protected legally.

Something has to be considered a work of art in order to be considered for copyright protection. The courts decided long ago that they did not want any fashion designers owning such utilitarian designs as shirts, blouses, pants, belts, lapels. Don't want somebody owning a monopoly—basically what a copyright gives you.

If I'm at the runway in Milan and I see a design I like and I'm a medium-to-high end retailer, versions of those non-utilitarian clothes get translated into garments that are worn by everyday people, correct?

Yes, and the courts would say that any fashion design, no matter how non-utilitarian it may seem, does not qualify for copyright protection.

The only way it would qualify is if there were some detachable piece from that outfit. The rare example would be like a belt-buckle—a sculptural item that you could remove and hang on the wall and regard as a piece of art.

[I put what sounded like Russ into italics, which on that transcript is anyone's guess.]

Next we get into the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. Under no moral theory of copyright, as originally conceived, do retroactive term extensions make any moral sense whatsoever. Basically one group of assholes paid off another group of assholes (who were actually supposed to represent the interests of their constituents, but that's another matter).

The motivated citizen tries to take property seriously, and then it degenerates all over again into Boss Hogg and Rosco vs the Downloaders of Hazzard Country.

So now you know why your two cents worth of Morality 101 sometimes falls on deaf ears.

The market works. When permitted to. What a surprise. (To some.)

For those that think "gouging" is awful, I recommend the EconTalk podcast on the subject. http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

I was thinking I might read this book. Then I looked up the authors (you left out National Post columnist Andrew Coyne). I still might read this book, though a freshly Windexed critical lens.

I only had to read a few of his pieces on supply management (which I know something about) to discover that Coyne has a few things clear in his head.

Basically, he's a class act with the framing effect.

I won't bore people with the gospel according to Daniel Kahneman. Instead we'll ignore the eminent literature and just cut to the chase.

Here's how it works in practice. You start talking about "the consumer" (embedded in hot-button phrases such as "if politician X really cared about the consumer"—magic tricks always work best with a flourish of misdirection) and everyone automatically puts on their "good consumer" face, which for carnivores, is bringing home the bacon at the best possible price. Seriously, no-one wants to be left off Santa Claus's "good consumer" list. So it's immediately clear that Canadian consumers want American prices, right?

How about we start the conversation differently?

Who here kicks their dog? Who here would use an electric cattle prod to cut another $0.02 of the price of sirloin steak? This time the reaction is a little different—no-one wants to make Santa's permanent record under "cruelty to animals".

So where's the conflict? The conflict here is that these are the same fucking people.

Call them a consumer, they want a low price. Mention the dog beater down the street, then they give a shit about animal welfare, even if it hits them in the pocket book (to a degree).

The Canadian system is pretty much the worst system for achieving the lowest possible price. The American system is pretty much the worst system for achieving animal welfare and certain other controls over the quality of the food supply. (Mention listeria or ebola and you'll quickly discover that all the same people want to make yet a third Santa Claus list—just so long as we're on whatever list Santa is presently examining, it's all good).

The American system isn't even a "free" market by how the average person images any kind of "free" thing anywhere actually works.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Chickens

Before anyone dumps me on their mental list of the short moment, I found the following equally interesting:

Greg Page on Food, Agriculture, and Cargill

It's a complex world out there. Even Harper deserves a critic with two eyes.

An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.

Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase

Yeah. I mean, there should be, just purely from an economic perspective you should see evidence of this. So we started looking. And surprisingly enough, as I speak here today, in 2013, we have more bees in America than we did in 2007, before Colony Collapse Disorder was observed and named. There is virtually no effect--there has probably been some effect on the price of pollination services, but it's not dramatic. And it's probably only for almonds, the only early-season crop that is pollinated. Not for the other crops pollinated the rest of the year. And this is surprising, given all the discussions of CCD and honeybee health.

We've found there's been no effect of Colony Collapse Disorder on the prices of queens.

H1-B is NOT immigration.

H1-B is the primary way by which tech immigrants come into the country. It wasn't intended that way originally, but that's how it has worked out, and it's how the legal framework is set up. That's no accident either because it's the way it works in most other countries too: temporary work permit, then permanent residency, then citizenship.

I'm guessing they will seem a lot less valuable to employers here if they have a green card such that they can change jobs without risk of being deported.

Transferring between employers is easy for H1-B workers; the old employer doesn't need to approve and doesn't even find out. So, employers have no special hold over H1-B workers. The only thing that makes H1-B transfers difficult is the government red tape and quotas that surround them.

But beyond just IT, I'm pretty sure most Americans would find increase in income to match the last 30 years of inflation would be a real help. It would also stimulate the economy and boost profits of a lot of companies.

Americans are actually doing quite a bit better now than 30 years ago. There has been some stagnation, mostly under Obama, whose economic policies turned out to be a complete failure, measured against his own predictions and promises.

Of course, we'd be doing a lot better still with more immigration, lower taxes, and less regulation.

It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

Simply not true, unless you believe that non-terrible code requires God himself to reach down and personally touch type.

I heard a bit of CBC episode recently, where a breathing consultant by the name of James Chambers argues that humans are terrible at breathing, and that with proper training (this takes about a year), we're almost competent (and then flowers bloom everywhere in an orchestral swell).

Breathe In, Breathe Out

One thing I will say is that a programmer is only as good as the API he or she programs against. In the spirit of Bill Maher, I hereby announce a New Rule: Garbage under, garbage above.

Most of the programmers with legendary reputations for writing correct systems have worked at (or fairly close to) the bare metal (or some POSIX-ratified virtual bare metal with extra starch).

Humans actually suck at just about everything. Programming is not especially special (modulo rampant innumeracy). All the greats in any discipline recognize and work within their personal limitations.

It's not constructive to become so bitter that you give up, or delegate the hard work to a tool that can only take you so far (perhaps less far than you wish to go).

Just the other day I listened to this Econtalk episode from six months back: Joshua Angrist on Econometrics and Causation

For the entire episode, Russ Roberts is trying to play the same pessimism card, effectively implying that humans suck at everything.

Joshua Angrist is having none of it. He directly refutes the posture of excessive pessimism time and again. It's a joy to hear Russ taking one on the chin for a change.

Now we just need an enterprising academic to self-subscribe to a personal mission to save us all from ourselves to come along and wrap up the whole of econometrics into a protective cocoon inside of which many of the basic errors simply can not be made.

Brave new world? Or cult of pessimism?

In my corner of the world, hard-baked optimists don't write unthinking rants anchored on assertions prefaced with "statement of fact". Wits on dial tone predicts no good thing.

The problem is that California's water policy is badly flawed.

Charging below-market prices is a very bad idea. Charging below-cost prices is a very very bad idea.

After listening to this podcast, I've concluded it's worse than I had thought. http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

Ugh. All your base R belong to us.

Avec optional appositional phrase:

means that Uber can, and is, on its way to becoming a Big Data company

Sans optional appositional phrase:

means that Uber can on its way to becoming a Big Data company

With proper parallelism:

means that Uber can become, and is on its way to becoming, a Big Data company

With more visual help to pair the distal commas:

means that Uber can become—and is on its way to becoming—a Big Data company

As it happens, I listened to an EconTalk episode last night dating back to July 2014, which is mainly about Uber.

Michael Munger on the Sharing Economy

This happens to be the audience-favourite EconTalk episode from 2014.

I've never been as much of a Mike Munger fan as many listeners of the show, but I actually thought this episode was well done. It's about 59m30s longer than what fits in an SMS message, so that makes it fairly clear that this episode is not preaching to the Uber choir. It's for those of us north of 30, whose lives are so dismal we sit around and listen to other people converse about how old and dismal we've all become.

Last week's EconTalk was on water and it discusses the current usage, production structure and the resulting shortages in California. http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

I remember listening to an EconTalk podcast about when this was tried somewhere in Latin America. There was a bustling trade in fake license plates so you could swap them out and the number of cars people owned spiked up. In the end it was not very effective.

Obviously,the Paris experiment might have a different outcome but I suspect the Parisians will find ways to drive on the prohibited days. Uber/Lyft/Sidecar have to be giggling in glee. (I can't remember, did Paris ban ride sharing?)

As was stated in a podcast -- http://www.econtalk.org/archiv... -- failure to finish doesn't mean much.

If you can get what you came for after a few hours, or after doing 90% of the course, why bother to go on? You got value from it.

And if you quit after a quick look, is that a bug or a feature? Do people always attend every university they visit? Does people ever drop a class when they realize after a session or two that it isn't going to work for them?

There may not be a "right" metaphor for this, but if there is, it's probably not related to academia.

A MOOC is more like a library book than a college class. You're not obligated to complete what you start, and it's silly to suggest that not completing it is some kind of "failure".

Isn't Sesame Street the original, and most successful, MOOC?

For another point of view ...

This week, Russ Roberts chatted with former Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller about the present and future of online education.
http://www.econtalk.org/archiv...

After I buggered with the classic restorer and other bits, it's not killing me.

The underlying problem seems to be that the UX people pretend to represent a consensus, but we seem to constantly get a consensus of platforms, rather than a consensus of users.

This is far from a great interview, but the basic idea deserves some thought: Searls on the Intention Economy

The only way out of this mess is to create a marketplace of pull. When we have the capacity to advertise for what we really want in how our UX behaves, only then it will be fully revealed that there's no master ring to bind them all.

Claudia Caswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Addison DeWitt: Because that's what they are

So then, why do all desktop UX updates since the adhesive iPad resemble psoriatic haemorrhoids?

Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Anyone ...

As American cities grew, people found it very easy and affordable to move 10, 15, or 20 miles away from the city center, and do the same thing.

Your whole argument hinges on this point, but you undermine it later by confessing that infrastructure to serve these low population densities is very expensive.

How could this be?

Public policy. Implicit subsidies. Reaping what you don't sow.

One example of this is how the civic center soon finds it difficult to finance their police services. Yet everyone in suburbia benefits from the law and order in the downtown as maintained 9-5, without actually paying their fair share of the cost.

During the baby boom, the middle class got what the middle class wanted. For the politicians it was buy now, pay later. Benefits delivered immediately, true costs deferred.

Glaeser on Cities

... the big idea was a vast, vertically integrated factory. And that's a great recipe for short run productivity, but a really bad recipe for long run reinvention. And a bad recipe for urban areas more generally, because once you've got a River Rouge plant, once you've got this mass vertically integrated factory, it doesn't need the city; it doesn't give to the city. It's very, very productive but you could move it outside the city, as indeed Ford did when he moved his plant from the central city of Detroit to River Rouge. And then of course once you are at this stage of the technology of an industry, you can move those plants to wherever it is that cost minimization dictates you should go. And that's of course exactly what happens. Jobs first suburbanized, then moved to lower cost areas. The work of Tom Holmes at the U. of Minnesota shows how remarkable the difference is in state policies towards unions, labor, how powerful those policies were in explaining industrial growth after 1947. And of course it globalizes. It leaves cities altogether. And that's exactly what happened in automobiles. In some sense--and what was left was relatively little, because it's a sort of inversion[?] of the natural resource curse, because it was precisely because Detroit had these incredibly productive machines that they squeezed out all other sources of invention--rather than having lots of small entrepreneurs you had middle managers for General Motors (GM) and Ford. And those guys were not going to be particularly adept at figuring out some new industry and new activity when the automobile production moved elsewhere or declined. And that's at least how I think about this--that successful cities today are marked by small firms, smart people, and connections to the outside world. And that was what Detroit was about in 1890 but it's not what Detroit was about in 1970. And I think that sowed the seeds of decline.

There's the invisible hand for you, hard at word squandering tax-payer dollars, only at first it all seems so tremendously win-win.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html

It's both. On the topic of "natural talent", there's been a lot of DNA studies on athletic performance. There's actually a lot of genes involved. Some genes give you extra red-blood cells. Other genes cause your body to respond to training (i.e. if you train for 10 weeks, you'll get better gains in athletic performance than someone who trains for 10 weeks but has worse genes). In the case of athleticism, it's not just about interest and putting your time in. I don't know if "math skill" is similar, but it's at least worth pointing out that we don't know certain things about what makes a top performer. We shouldn't jump to conclusions about it all being about "interest" and "putting the time in".

A recent podcast on the interplay between genetic and athletics: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.html
An NPR interview with the same author: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/05/209160709/talent-or-skill-honing-in-on-the-elusive-sports-gene

The idea behind insurance is that it is a personal choice to have it or not.

Where the fuck did you get that? That's actually the founding idea and sole power source behind libertarianism: that all good things come from choice alone.

Insurance is about entering into social compact where individual risks are borne by the group. The Canadian health care system is an insurance system, even though I've never personally received a choice in whether to participate. Insurance actually works best when it casts a wide net, despite the exceedingly awkward conversation about where benefits end, for the diseases where medical science offers us the most heroic, astrobuck interventions. Not facing these adult questions doesn't make a system better, it just makes the system easier to stomach, living life with your head in the sand.

If you're not even conversant on Rawl's original position, it's going to be hard to draw you into meaningful debate. Rules that everyone would agree to before the first card is dealt will be portrayed as selectively punitive if introduced after people take a boo at their hole cards. Fly in the ointment: we all have hole cards already dealt.

Why did Europeans not adopt American notions of freedom and government long before America embarked on the great experiment? Because they reached a gridlock of vested interests, each pursuing their own glorious choices.

Now America has an advanced case of gridlock syndrome. The better path for all concerned is no longer an option. Democracy in the first place is all about facing the risk that your own choices will overruled by the choices of others, should they happen to outnumber you, or the electoral lines were cleverly gerrymandered, or the options presented/not presented have been engineered by the deepest pockets.

No matter how you slice it, choice is a social construct. Do you really think a libertarian paradise is immune to the vested interests of shadowy elites?

If I thought choice worked the way you think choice works, I'd be libertarian too. Choice is a superhero, but not a faultless superhero. Choice simply can not fix all problems. The fly in the ointment is biological interconnection.

The form of choice that must be most zealously guarded is that surrounding self-actualization. I'm sitting here at a keyboard, connected to the internet, in a country which guarantees free speech in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and generally enforces those laws with laudable diligence. If I fail to self-actualize, I'm sure as hell not blaming it on the Canadian health care system.

We're in a medical reality right now where large numbers of people take drugs such as Lipitor, where few benefit from doing so. This is fundamentally socialist. These drugs are explicitly designed to behave like this, by profit maximizing private interests. It's awfully darn hard to make a billion dollars a year selling a drug costing $500,000 for a course of treatment with 100% guarantee of permanent cure. Many of your prospective patients don't have $500,000 at hand, and even if they did, it means their children don't go to college.

That reality will change over time. Topol on the Creative Destruction of Medicine is a great overview of this. The day will come to circle the wagons around the American health care delivery model yet again. But you fear waiting for that day, don't you, because you know how damn important it is to the outcome of the debate that hole cards have already been dealt. People will then cling to the the Obamacare system using exactly the same arguments you are using to prevent its inception. And I'll still be here upbraiding those idiots, too, so long as my fingers obey my command.

Many of the Obamacare opponents are so prostate before the god of gridlock, that they conceive of Obamacare as terminal station. It's not a good terminal station. I agree. So let's kill gridlock and live like sensible humans.

Those studies are a joke, listen and learn:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/07/scott_atlas_on.html
You are probably unwilling to listen since it contradicts your world view and fervently held system of beliefs. You should continue to close yourself off and only read evidence that supports what you already believe, it makes it easier to be dismissive and to denigrate people you disagree with.

I think you touched on the counterargument (that has been very well made): while state money is loose, bank money (the overwhelming majority of the economy) is very tight. Because banks are still recapitalizing, the money supply is very tight. I'm not a fan of CATO or Hanke, but I still have to credit him for making the case on this. He also did a good EconTalk podcast about hyperinflation where he explains this in detail.

I'm not prepared to say whether or not the fed fucked up yet. I think we're going to have to leave that one to the history books and just agree that we don't really have sufficient understanding of all the what-ifs at this time. My gut says they stopped things from getting far worse, but that these policies are simultaneously slowing a recovery and setting a path for a new bubble.

completely ignores the fact that many people ...

Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.

Let's see, here.

the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).

Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).

Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).

completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).

(Welcome to online education, pal.)

But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.

The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.

I picked up a few of these tidbits from EconTalk, among other sources.
Hanushek on Teachers
Ravitch on Education
Paul Tough on How Children Succeed
Kling on Education and the Internet

Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.

After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)

Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.

I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string

completely ignores the fact that many people ...

Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.

Let's see, here.

the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).

Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).

Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).

completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).

(Welcome to online education, pal.)

But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.

The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.

I picked up a few of these tidbits from EconTalk, among other sources.
Hanushek on Teachers
Ravitch on Education
Paul Tough on How Children Succeed
Kling on Education and the Internet

Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.

After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)

Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.

I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string

completely ignores the fact that many people ...

Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.

Let's see, here.

the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).

Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).

Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).

completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).

(Welcome to online education, pal.)

But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.

The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.

I picked up a few of these tidbits from EconTalk, among other sources.
Hanushek on Teachers
Ravitch on Education
Paul Tough on How Children Succeed
Kling on Education and the Internet

Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.

After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)

Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.

I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string

completely ignores the fact that many people ...

Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.

Let's see, here.

the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).

Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).

Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).

completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).

(Welcome to online education, pal.)

But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.

The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.

I picked up a few of these tidbits from EconTalk, among other sources.
Hanushek on Teachers
Ravitch on Education
Paul Tough on How Children Succeed
Kling on Education and the Internet

Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.

After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)

Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.

I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string

Whatever you do, please don't attribute this to actual "capitalism" or "the free market." When people talk about deregulation as a horror, realize this is the kind of horror that the deregulators seek to undo -- complacent vendors with a cozy layer of protection against new entrants.

Also, consider how much like these state franchise laws resemble gerrymandering district agreements -- both rely on passing in secret -- or at least in relative obscurity, in a process that regular folks rationally stay away from -- agreements to use the force of law to keep things tidy, stable, and predictable (and profitable, for those who've done the manipulating), rather than dynamic, risky, interesting, innovative, and other nice adjectives.

The laws that give special privileges to state-sanctioned franchise owners are bad, even if they have some small silver linings, whether the franchise is for transportation, banking, legal services, auto sales, gambling, or Dixie cups. Not that their history in the auto industry isn't interesting -- this podcast is enlightening on that topic: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/06/munger_on_franc.html

Re: the ice shortage, etc, if you don't already know of it, IMO the most amusing account of this is from the always illuminating Mike Munger :)

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/01/munger_on_price_1.html

Now that the Federal Reserve is doing perpetual quantitative easing (they aren't even using terms like QE-2 any more) it is even harder to say what will end up happening with all of that extra money.

No, they're using QE3 now.

The point is that there is no historical comparison to suggest what might happen... other than to look at the Weimar Republic in Germany. That isn't exactly comforting if you are claiming that a substantial increase in inflation won't be happening.

It's getting late so I won't attempt details, but I'd argue the fundamentals are different. Although we have fairly loose policies on state money, we have drastically tightened policy on bank money in recapitalization efforts. The result: not much inflation. State money is only a small portion (IIRC, 15%).

I think the housing-based economy is ridiculous, and that we're setting ourselves up for a few really big crashes... but I don't think QE will be responsible for them. Or that it's likely to lead to hyperinflation. I believe they will be able to ease QE before things get out of hand, and that the US is more than capable of increasing revenues to match current spending. It would be politically unpopular, but they should be able to operate without hyper-inflating.

I can't believe I'm going to refer someone to a conversation between a guy from CATO and another at Hoover, but for a good discussion and explanation of the subject you should check out Steve Hanke's 10/29/12 EconTalk. Hanke is an expert in hyperinflation and definitely worth a listen/read.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/nosek_on_truth.html

Listen. Learn. Positive, sensational results get published. Negative results only get published if they contradict a well known study/result/notion. Of course there are exceptions, as always.

The framework is discussed a bit on this EconTalk podcast: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/nosek_on_truth.html

Absolutely well said. Also I might add, 100% health insurance coverage does not mean better (or 100%) healthcare goods and services. Also, one last point to add...the U.S. still has, by far, the best and most innovative healthcare system (and coverage) in the world. I suggest anyone interested to listen to this podcast, look at the links, and do some reading here: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/07/scott_atlas_on.html

The WHO report ranking the world's healthcare systems has been proven time and again to be a ridiculous, and very unbiased set of conclusions from their "scientific studies."

Actually, the opposite is really true. Studies have shown that women are generally better at one on one relationships and not typically as good at dealing with large groups and their dynamics. Men thrive more in the tribal, large group environments which is a large reason women typically don't do as well in the business world. Note the liberal uses of the word "typical". Here's a good podcast with references: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/11/baumeister_on_g.html