From an interview with Tom Schaller of FiveThirtyEight:
“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we conserved our resources. We spent half what the RGA spent,” said Daschle. “It was the right call because neither race would have been helped by more spending.” He said the DGA spent $4 million in VA to the RGA’s $5M, and about $3.5 million in New Jersey to the RGA’s $7 million.
You don’t hear politicos say that more campaign money would have been useless very often.
From The Virtues and Vices of Equilibrium and the Future of Financial Economics, Geanakoplos and Farmer 08, SSRN:
Equilibrium theory focuses on individual actions and individual choices. By contrast Marx emphasized class struggles, without asking whether each individual in a class would have the incentive to carry on the struggle. Similarly Keynesian macroeconomics often posited reduced form relationships, such as the positive correlation between unemployment and inflation (called the Phillips curve), without deriving them from individual actions. Equilibrium theory is an agent based approach which does not admit any variables except those that can be explained in terms of individual choices.
From A History of Fortification: From 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1700 by Sidney Toy, page 23:
The principles of attack and repulse by means of mines dug beneath the walls of fortresses had reached a high state of development by the end of the sixth century B.C. At the siege of Barca in Libya, about 510 B.C., the Persians excavated underground tunnels that reached to the walls. Among the Barcaeans there was a skilled worker in brass who took a brazen shield and, carrying it round within the wall, applied it here and there at places where he thought the workings might be. Where there were no mines the shield was silent, but at places near mining operations the shield made a vibrating sound. By countermining at these points the Barcaeans broke into the enemy’s works and slew the men they found there.
Someone found this blog with the search query “Steve Strogatz is gay”. A curious thing to be searching for; Strogatz is a well-known mathematician specializing in nonlinear dynamical systems and chaos theory, among others. Why you’d care if he’s gay is quite beyond me, but I guess someone does. Presumably they got this post.
From Hayek:
When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike. There are many values of the conservative which appeal to me more than those of the socialists; yet for a liberal the importance he personally attaches to specific goals is no sufficient justification for forcing others to serve them. I have little doubt that some of my conservative friends will be shocked by what they will regard as “concessions” to modern views that I have made in Part III of this book. But, though I may dislike some of the measures concerned as much as they do and might vote against them, I know of no general principles to which I could appeal to persuade those of a different view that those measures are not permissible in the general kind of society which we both desire. To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.
Earlier I argued that the order resetting executive compensation for the companies accepting bailout money from the US government would not impede the ability of the companies to retain their top executives because it was a predictable outcome once the companies made the decision to seek help and that any executives that would have left because of the order should have already left. Turns out that part of the story is correct. From the Washington Post today:
Even before the Obama administration formally tightened executive compensation at bailed-out companies, the prospect of pay cuts had led some top employees to depart.
But Thursday, he ruled only on slightly more than three quarters of the pay packages that were to be under his purview. The balance reflected executives who have left since he began his work in June or will be gone by the end of the year.
Many executives were driven away by the uncertainty of working for companies closely overseen by Washington, opting instead for firms not under the microscope, including competitors that have already returned the bailout funds to the government, according to executives and supervisors at the companies.
The Obama Administration made big news today by announcing that the 25 highest compensated executives at the 7 biggest recipients of funds (Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, GM, Chrysler, and the financing arms of GM and Chrysler) will see markedly reduced compensation this coming year. The blogosphere is of course up in arms about this; lots of libertarians and conservatives think that this is a horrendously bad decision, and that this will cause executives to flee these companies. I think differently. Here are a couple reasons:
1. Expectations: executives at these companies had to know this was coming once they asked for bailout money. Government money makes business decisions at these companies a political affair and it was unreasonable for executives to not make the calculation that politics would work in their favor. That is to say, the mass exodus everyone is predicting should have happened months ago. That an exodus has not happened is telling. Perhaps it is also true that these executives have nowhere to go; would you hire a GM executive with a resume detailing their role in running their companies to the ground?
2. More expectations: I bet executives at these companies look at the endgame. Ultimately either these companies will unwind their operations or will return to profitability. In 2-5 years it will have been better for executives at companies that expect to return to profitability to have stayed with the company than to have left and tried to find work elsewhere. At some point these companies will unwind themselves from the government lifeline and have freer reign to reset compensation schemes at which point loyal executives should expect to see themselves handsomely compensated.
3. Some of next year’s compensation for these executives will be in the form of stock options, not cash, in what looks like an effort to have executives invested in their company’s performance. An attempt to solve the principal-agent problem? Likely.
4. And finally, it seems to me that part of the message that the Administration is sending is that these executives are expendable. If we can find smart people like Geithner to run big, important organizations like the Treasury Dept. for a salary that’s just under 200K, then it seems obvious that we can find qualified, motivated people to replace executives who do choose to leave. There are a lot of smart people in the world and these executives don’t have a monopoly on the qualities that make good executives. In fact, it’s probably true that some of them just don’t, since it was under their watch that these companies asked for a bailout.
So is the Administration’s decision to cut executive compensation a big deal? I don’t think so. My argument boils down to two claims: first, that there will be no executive flight (it would have already happened), and second, that even if there is executive flight, it doesn’t matter because these people are replaceable.
It feels silly to respond to an article this bad from an author who doesn’t seem to have the ability to think coherently, but Eric Hobbs (VP of the Mizzou College Republicans) has a column titled “Liberals Make me Laugh” in the Maneater this week. I can’t address the entirety of the article as there are far too many warrantless arguments made without little to no attempt at spinning a coherent narrative, but I will note that the first half of the article barely contains a single identifiable argument. My best attempt at a translation is that Hobbs makes something like the following claim: It is patently laughable that the Senate Finance Committee vote on health care legislation this past Tuesday was a vote on concepts to be included in a bill to be finished later, as opposed to a bill that had actually been written. Or alternatively, that Senate committees shouldn’t vote on concepts to be included in legislation and should instead limit their decision making to only formally submitted bills. This seems like an impossible standard to hold committee grunt-work too; the purpose and nature of Congressional committees is that they are where legislation gets fleshed out and compromises made. Cutting out that process seems to me to be unwarranted.
But the arguments that Republicans like Hobbs are making seem to me to miss the point; first, they miss an important argument the left makes, and second, they are never couched in any kind of intellectual modesty so that any engagement becomes a confrontation. As for myself, I’m hesitant to come to big picture conclusions about a public option or even the entire thrust of the Democrat push for insurance reform but there is a fundamentally attractive premise at the heart of the liberal desire for universal healthcare. It is that our national policies, both foreign and domestic, often are co-opted by moneyed interests skilled at navigating the halls of power, and that conservative leadership particularly are never identified with the desire to evaluate costs and benefits in a way that speaks beyond the cultures of money and power. Alternatively I could state that the left is far more inclusive in the demands it is willing to be responsive to than the right. I am particularly fond of citing the statistic from the 2008 Republican National Convention that 1.5% of delegates were black, or discussing the participation of women in the Republican party. The left is willing to ask why we’re willing to make a tradeoff like the decision to go fight a second war in Iraq when the money could be spent with a much more clear return providing healthcare to those who desire it and can’t afford it; the right, as far as I know, rarely crosses this conceptual bridge, eliding the debate with statements about the invincibility of markets and tenuous claims about freedom and national security. The conservative movement ends up crippled by a paucity of ideas and an unwillingness to engage in civil debate.
There is a caveat; the inclusive nature of the Democrat project does not mean that policy is not influenced by moneyed interests, or that populist demands do not get co-opted by the system, or that they are even smart demands to begin with. The attraction of the Democrat project is its inclusivity and that, I think, is a starting point lost on a GOP that insultingly layers its new website with pictures of token minorities.
Note that I’m careful to not assign moral standing to particular ideological stances or real-world actors; I think corruption is an inevitable part of politics, and it is clear that Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans. But it seems to me that there is inherently more competition in the market for Democrat ideas than there is in the market for Republican ideas; part of the reason is the exclusionary nature of GOP participation and part of it is that the GOP meta-narrative is one that is fundamentally anti-intellectual; as a result, the GOP has lost its intellectual moorings (and most importantly, its intellectuals).
I love good food and I love searching for good food. In that vein, I leave you this gem from Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon, page 26:
…There is one almost infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars on a cafe.
No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.
One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.
Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.
Three calendars: Can’t miss the farm-boy breakfasts.
Four calendars: Try the ho-made pie too.
Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.
One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I’ve never seen a secen-calendar place. But old-time travelers– road men in a day when cars had running boards and lunchroom windows said AIR COOLED in blue letters with icicles dripping from the tops — those travelers have told me the golden legends of seven-calendar cafes.
And no, I won’t apologize to people who think this is an inappropriate subject to blog about. And yes, this is (theoretically) safe for work (no pics). But there is a book on Amazon titled How to Live with a Huge Penis: Advice, Meditations, and Wisdom for Men Who Have Too Much by Jacob and Owens. An excerpt:
When a young Samuel Clemens was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, his shipmates used to joke that his penis would reach a depth of “mark twain” (12 feet) if he threw it overboard. The name stuck, though most of his readers never had a clue to its origins. In Twain’s masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, scholars believe that Huck’s friend Jim (the runaway slave) represents the imprisonment Twain felt because of his huge penis.
The conflation of the narratives of slavery and Reconstruction as a priapic metaphor strike me as extremely funny satire, especially since the authors extend the subsuming conceit of the penis narrative throughout the entire book.
