Drunk History Starring Jack Black (vol. 2)

Drunk History Starring Michael Cera (vol. 1)

Home Prices Falling

Looks like the house prices are readjusting. See here.

"Sales of new homes fell last year by 26 percent, the steepest drop since records began in 1963, the Commerce Department said on Monday."

There's a silver lining in all this - prices could not be dropping. I'll take market clearing over a surplus of housing stock all day long.

Maternal Employment and Child Cognitive Development

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is an ideal dataset for studying the allocation of time. For those of us interested in child and family health outcomes, it offers one of the few windows into time allocation that may help us better understand plausible mechanisms linked to health and educational outcomes. If quality time is a valuable input that with significant health and human capital implications for children, particularly in these early formative years, then the ATUS gives us a chance to explore for those links.

The ever-interesting John Cawley has a new paper using the ATUS that explores for whether maternal employment pushes down child cognitive development via reduced time inputs invested in children. Here's the paper and here's the abstract

Recent research has found that maternal employment is associated with worse child performance on tests of cognitive ability. This paper explores mechanisms for that correlation. We estimate models of instrumental variables using a unique dataset, the American Time Use Survey, that measure the effect of maternal employment on the mother's allocation of time to activities related to child cognitive development. We find that employed women spend significantly less time reading to their children, helping with homework, and in educational activities in general. We find no evidence that these decreases in time are offset by increases in time by husbands and partners. These findings offer plausible mechanisms for the association of maternal employment with child cognitive development.

The actual results are pretty interesting. The authors find conditional on spending some time in the various activities they study, working is associated with mothers spending 5 fewer minutes reading to their kids, 6 fewer minutes helping with homework, 17 fewer minutes on other educational activities, 18 fewer minutes playing with their kids, 8 fewer minutes supervising their kids, and 139 fewer minutes spend with the children overall (p. 11).

Nolan Remembers Heath Ledger

Christopher Nolan, director of the successful Batman Begins film and upcoming The Dark Knight offers his memories of Heath as an actor. The small touches of what Heath did on set appear to have left an impression on Nolan. He writes:

"One time he and another actor were shooting a complex scene. We had two days to shoot it, and at the end of the first day, they'd really found something and Heath was worried that he might not have it if we stopped. He wanted to carry on and finish. It's tough to ask the crew to work late when we all know there's plenty of time to finish the next day. But everyone seemed to understand that Heath had something special and that we had to capture it before it disappeared. Months later, I learned that as Heath left the set that night, he quietly thanked each crew member for working late. Quietly. Not trying to make a point, just grateful for the chance to create that they'd given him."

The small things - the throway gestures made when no one is looking - say a lot about who we are, our character. It is good to read this about Heath. Albeit insignificant, it suggests that he was a decent man with kindness who cared for others - for his audience, his director, and the men and women on his set. He is sorely missed by many who knew him and only knew him through his wonderful stories.

Love and Sex With Robots

This is both funny and kind of intriguing. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to embed this clip (so how did Gizmodo do it?), so you have to click through to see this three minute interview by Steven Colbert with David Levy, author of the new book, Love and Sex With Robots. Apparently, the book is about what the title suggests - that in the not-too-distant future, robots will function as substitutes for human beings (specifically as romantic partners). Which is another way of saying, Levy thinks there is a segment of the population who, at the margin, would consider matching sexually or relationally with a robot if the price of matching with a human were to increase. He mentions who he has in mind - people in bad relationships or people who are alone. Both groups face a higher price for having sex or relating with humans (whether it's their spouse, their partner or they don't have anyone), and therefore might be willing to substitute towards sex with the robots.

If I had to guess, that margin currently is the "avid consumer of pornography" and the "prostitute consumer." He argues that the substitutability is along the dimensions of love and sex, but it's really not difficult to imagine that if this market were to exist, it would probably be mainly along the latter dimension of sex and not love. I think we are a long way from convincing Artificial Intelligence in even basic things, let alone something as complex as human emotion. So, Sex With Robots is the part I'd bet on. If robots are substitutes for sex, then they are mainly affecting the threat position of males who now can privately have sex with a robot. Probably, the ethics of this are unclear to us now, but one can imagine that on the continuum of infidelity, this is somewhere between watching pornography and paying for a prostitute, but not quite either one either. So, maybe some people in marriages would consider sex with a robot, because the costs of doing so are lower than visiting a prostitute (no risk of STD, for instance). But, I bet for most people, since there already are several substitutes for sex with one's partner or spouse, this won't have that big of an effect on their threat position and thus not move anyone out of the monogamous pairings.

On the other hand, it might move people out of the market for a prostitute, if the price was right. I'm guessing sex with robots is a pretty pricey exchange, though - the marginal costs of each encounter are not trivial, I'm guessing, but the fixed costs of each machine are huge. So do the people who currently have sex with prostitutes have the income to afford such a machine? I doubt it. So we're back to wondering just who this market would exist for. Because, if a man is wealthy enough to be able to purchase one of these machines, then I suspect he could've had a real-life person at such prices. I've seen a study that shows a man who is several deviations below what is considered handsome on average has to make several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year more than the average male to be coupled with an attractive woman (also measured as a woman a certain number of SD above the mean). So, if we're talking about such men who are unattractive and can afford a sex machine, then can't they afford a real life woman too? Certainly for those men, such women are preferred - unless I really don't know anything about the male species, I'm going to say that's a no brainer.

So I see the real challenge in this as the fixed costs of producing such robots, which will ultimately limit the market because the people who need them won't be able to afford them, and the people who can afford them probably don't need them. It's an interesting thought experiment to say the least.

Star Trek Trailer

New teaser trailer for the JJ Abrams prequel. I am not a Star Trek fan. But, I bet this does for Star Trek what the new James Bond did for James Bond. Which is to say, actually make it a watchable franchise (at least for me).

Sex is a Substitute for School?

That's what Daniel Rees and Joe Sabia find anyway. From the abstract

"A number of studies have shown that teenagers who abstain from sex are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their sexually active peers. However, it is unclear whether this association represents a causal relationship or can be explained by unmeasured heterogeneity. This study employs a variety of econometric techniques to distinguish between these hypotheses using data on females from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our results provide evidence that delaying first intercourse leads to an increased likelihood of graduating high school. The avoidance of teen pregnancies can explain approximately one third of this effect. Controlling for teen pregnancies, psychological/emotional factors, and academicestimated effect by more than 50 percent.

This quote from the first page helps explain a possible reason for this finding. “When greater energy and interest are invested in sexual activity, the drive for academic performance is likely to diminish.” (Rector and Johnson 2005, p. 20). In other words, maybe it's a substitution effect caused by a simple reallocation of time? When you're spending all that time trying to get laid, what else would you have done? After all, it's not easy to have sex in high school - it requires significant planning, woo'ing, money, etc. And that time is all coming from somewhere. Maybe it is coming from your schooling.

Update: They focus just on females, not males. Secondly, they find that waiting til age 18 to have sex has a large reduction in the probability of dropping out, and that is mainly because abstinence prevents pregnancy, and teen pregnancy is one of the most significant reasons for dropping out for a girl. Not quite the story I had in mind, but I guess it's interesting. Actually, it's kind of less interesting than before. I like my time allocation story much better.

GPSTS at Google

Unfortunately, this cannot be embedded otherwise I would. Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS) founders Charlie Nelson (Professor of Law at Harvard Law School) and Andrew Woods (Harvard Law student) were invited to Google recently to present the case for poker. GPSTS is currently an organization on many university campuses, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. I'm currently in the process of establishing one here at my school (fingers crossed).

Click here for the 52 minute video.

Conspicuous Consumption

Ray Fisman reports on the new Charles, Hurst and Roussanov conspicuous consumption and racial differences in "bling" expenditure paper. There are a handful of people working on this extremely important topic, and hopefully we'll see much more work on this in the immediate future.

The paper points out nicely what makes the economist different from the other social sciences. Whereas other social scientists appeal (at least the bad ones [don't hit me!]) will appeal to culture as a cause or personal taste, the economist says those are non-explanations and instead urges one another to look for different prices and income constraints. This is from Becker and Stigler's classic De Gustibus Non Est Disputadum paradigm. Assume preferences are constant and the same, for purely methodological purposes (forget whether it's really true, in other words), and push neoclassical economics til it breaks. Or as Fisman nicely puts it:

In general, the poorest people in any group are forced to opt out of the conspicuous consumption arms race—if you can't afford the signal, even by stretching your finances, you can't play the game. I, a humble economics professor, don't try to compete in a wealth-signaling game with the Wall Street traders whom I see on the streets of Manhattan. But this still leaves us with the question of why a black person would spend so much more in trying to signal wealth than a white person. The Cosby explanation—that there is simply a culture of consumption among black Americans—doesn't quite cut it for economists. We prefer to account for differences in behavior by looking to see if there are differing incentives.

Harvey Dent is Two-Face

Word on the street is the Two-Face is the character to watch in the upcoming Nolan sequel. That's exciting. Thanks to several writers and arcs throughout the 1980s, Two-Face became a very troubled, complex, and tragic person. He is in many ways a kind of Bizarro Bruce Wayne, only instead of carrying his scars internally, he carries them externally on his face. You get the sense often that there's a bit of randomness in each person's decisions to pursue their vocations as villain and hero - that had only 1 or 2 things been different, they'd be on different sides. That's because it's as much madness as it is committment and idealism that makes Batman do the things he does. And that's why Frank Miller tended to hint at the similarities in stories like Batman: Year One, in which he shows us Dent meeting with Batman secretly in his office before his face was scarred. They understand one another, and were at one point comrades who needed and helped the other to achieve their stated goal of justice at any cost. It's time that someone told Two-Face's story, and I'm grateful it's Nolan.

CT Discusses Iraq Numbers

I'm going to go without links on this because I'm lazy, but in October 2004 (roughly), a statistical study of the number of "excess deaths" (a term of art that, I'm learning, may actually explain some of the discrepancy) that had occurred in Iraq because of the invasion appeared in the British health journal, Lancet. Note, this was literally weeks before the US presidential election, and the journal's editor stated that he rushed this to print because of the findings would/should/could have an impact on American voters preferences over Kerry and Bush. The Lancet article (now called "Lancet 1" or L1, to distinguish it from another study done two years later, itself called L2) found excess deaths were 650,000 since the invasion. To give you a sense of the magnitude, the only other data available about mortality was something called the Iraqi Body Count and it estimated casualties at around 40,000. So, big difference. When that study was published in Lancet, the proverbial shit hit the fan, at least on economics and policy blogs, like Crooked Timber and Deltoid, not to mention ones right of center, which basically immediately dismissed the numbers as too high. You could see what appeared to be people choosing sides, too, based entirely on their prior beliefs about the relative justice of the war. If you favored the war, you thought the numbers were too high, and that something was horribly wrong with the survey's methodology - you thought something was terribly wrong with the methodology, even if you knew nothing whatsoever about survey methodology or statistics, mind you. But, if you opposed the war, you were absolutely convinced the study was right. If you favored the war, but weren't convinced the study was flawed, you couldn't make sense at all because so many different arguments about methodology were argued, and I am not methodologian (is that a word? It is now).

This week, another study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It used different data, and different survey instruments, and a different sampling strategy. Which is better is totally beyond my area of expertise, but the point is, they find the number of "violent deaths" (note the difference) from 2003 to 2006 was 150,000. Again, the proverbial fecal matter is being slung so hard at the fan, that it's passing through the blades and hitting the wall on the other side. You can read the article here. You can read some blogging opinions here, here, here, here, and here. If you really want to get that feeling - you know the one where you want to stab yourself in the eyes with pencils - then feel free to wade through the hundreds of comments left in each of those blogs. You know the phrase "more heat than light"? The L1, L2 and now the new IHIS study (what it's being called) have tended to generate a blazing furnace of heat, and very little understanding about what we actually know about Iraq mortality because of the invasion.

So, I thought it was worth pointing you to this post at CT as a good place to take a break, and hear some comparisons made between the two studies. At the very least, I'm not wanting to stab myself in the eyes when I read it, and that's a big plus considering. I do take issue, though, with this point he makes:

I’d add that to have been sceptical of Lancet 1 (when it was the high number) but not to have a word of criticism for this study (now that it isn’t the high number) goes really badly for the old credibility.

Not sure what to say here, except that this seems a bit extreme. I found the initial L1 study impossible to fathom. I wasn't saying it was wrong, I just couldn't understand how the Iraqi Body Count could have that level of an undercounting bias. It's not that I don't believe IBC could undercount, but this was an order of magnitude to qualify as fraud. And maybe it was fraud on the part of whoever collected the IBC data, but the point is, not knowing anything else, the number just seemed inflated. Call it having priors. Plus, the paper was hurried through peer review for what seemed like political purposes - that is, to influence the 2004 election. That's just plain weird, and very hard to understand as someone trying to be objective. So you take a number that feels too big, a methodology you don't understand, and the appearance of political bias, and you see the intense disagreements, and to say the least, you just don't yet feel like you can call those numbers fact. Then this paper comes out in a very credible health journal - arguably one of the most selective health journals - and does not appear to be pushed through peer review. It finds a lower number, and uses also a methodology that would seem appropriate. Why should I be so incredulous towards it, exactly?

HIV Life-cycle Discoveries

Saw this today:

In what is being hailed as a major step in the fight against HIV/AIDS, U.S. researchers have identified 273 proteins that are key to reproduction of the virus that causes AIDS. As we hear from VOA science correspondent Art Chimes, that gives scientists many potential new targets for drugs to disrupt the sophisticated lifecycle of the virus.

Ebert Reviews

Interestingly, Ebert ranked There Will Be Blood as one of the top 10 movies of 2007, yet he only gave the movie 3.5 out of 4 stars. So you might be thinking, "Well, maybe he gave so few 4 stars this year because he was sick," but I doubt that that is it. There were several 4 star films that didn't make his top 10 list, so what's up? This is actually one of things about Ebert that I really appreciate. Individual rankings usually are given grades relative to the demands of the ambition of the filmmaker, and the ideal effects of the story genre itself. So, it's possible for a fairly mindless film to get 4 stars, even if the net effect of the story to be relatively small compared to a 3.5 star film which, while not perfect compared to the potential of the story itself, still swamps the 4 star film in terms of nt effect. That is at least how I rationalize what appears to be violations of basic transitivity that should probably dominate any kind of ordinal ranking of films.

Secondly, Millions (A Lottery Story) looks and sounds interesting. It's a documentary about the first people to win the New York Lotto powerball. They split the winnings a dozen ways, giving each of them $5 million. Several of the winners, now in their 70s, spent every penny of it. Others saved every penny of it. I look forward to catching it when it comes out on DVD (if I can remember).

The Wire Season 5

Over at Freakonomics, ethnographer and sociologist, Sudhir Venkatesh, recounts his experiences from watching episode 1 of season 5's The Wire, with several retired drug dealers whom he has gotten to know through his own field work. Their predictions and interpretations are interesting - I didn't suspect any of the things that these men did, and if their predictions come true, I'll be very impressed. We watched episode 1 last night. It is available for free download off of iTunes, amazingly. It was very good, and at several points, I was reminded of what a fantastic show this is. How many bodies has Chris put in the ground? Yet he was so polite to the woman in the courthouse. That's a small touch, but very effective and showing the kind of person he is. I am heartbroken to see McNulty deteriorating and destroying the good thing he has going, though. Honestly, I'd have preferred he not even be in this season, despite how much I love him, because I would've known he was settling down with a good woman were he not present.

Economic Development Reduces Terrorism

So says Gary Becker. He writes:

Terrorist groups rely on populations that are sympathetic to their cause to hide and protect their members. They also recruit disaffected youth in significant numbers who are willing to commit suicide to destroy enemies. Just as economic progress greatly affects family structure and the amount of freedom available, it also sharply reduces the willingness of people to hide or otherwise protect terrorists because they have more to lose if they are caught. Although leaders of terrorist organizations usually come from more educated classes, these organizations rely on numerous foot soldiers to do a lot of the dirty work. They are generally recruited from younger and less educated groups. It becomes much harder to recruit many of these soldiers when good jobs are available, especially if these recruits are asked to commit suicide.

This seems to contradict Alan Krueger's findings, though. I've only skimmed that book and a separate piece he wrote on the relationship between poverty and terrorism, but I think the overall gist is that he finds little correlation between a country's poverty and stage of development and the incidence of terrorism. But, I nonetheless think Becker is correct that as a country grows, and its people become wealthier, the costs of terrorism mostly fall. We're talking about an income range, though, which may not be entirely convex.

Hypothesis: Boxing is More Dangerous With Padded Gloves

I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to persuade several people over the Christmas break that boxing is actually more dangerous because of the mandatory padded gloves boxers wear. It's all simple economics: how the role of incentives, and specifically how making a person safer may inadvertently put others at greater risk, affects behavior. Chalk this one up to another instance of the Peltzman Effect.

My theory is simple. Take two objects made from human bone and slam them against one another. Half the time, object A will break; half the time, object B will break. Now, take object A and change its shape into a dome. The geometry of a dome makes object A stronger and less likely to break when struck against object B, despite both A and B being made from the same hard substance (i.e., bone). Now, when B strikes A, B will break more often than A. This is the situation I suspect a person finds himself in when fighting bare-fisted. Head and face strikes are "expensive," in relative terms, because the person striking will more likely break his fist if he strikes his opponent's face or head. As such, he must do so rarely, and when he does so, he must use techniques that will minimize the likelihood of a broken fist. But on average, because his hands are unprotected, he cannot repeatedly strike the face or head without expecting to break his hand.

And this is a problem, because one of the ways a person can defeat his opponent is if he can cause a concussion in the opponent, which will happen if he strikes the face or head hard enough to jostle and bruise the brain. But, the force has to be very high. As such, he must be sparing in those strikes, because while they have a very high return, they also have a very high risk factor too. If he fails to cause the concussion before he breaks his fist, then his opponent will have the kind of advantage that will almost certainly guarantee he will be severely injured and ultimately lose the fight.

In comes padding for the hands (i.e., boxing gloves). Why do we pad the gloves? You might think it is to protect the opponent's head, but I suspect what it ultimately does is protect the striker's hands from the risk of fracture from a head-shot. Now, object A when hit with object B has the higher probability of breaking/concussion, because object B is padded enough to minimize that risk of fracture. But, what is the behavioral impact? By reducing the "price" of a head-shot (ie, lower risk, holding return constant), the boxer will strategically target the head and face more often with his punches. That is, padding the gloves results in more strikes to the head because of reduced risk of fracture of the striker's hand, and ultimately will lead to more concussions than would exist in a bare-fisted fight. This is of course a "longrun" result. When played out by two rational boxers, boxing gloves puts both boxers at more risk of longterm neurological damage.

This is at least my theory.

Pulp Fiction

What a great evening it was when me and a friend from high school, unsuspecting and all, stepped foot into a nearly empty Malco theater in Memphis, TN in 1994 to watch this thing of beauty. Personally, I consider this movie like a billboard marking a new age of really great storytelling in the United States.

How to Win a Fight

At first, I thought this essay was going to be stupid. Then I read it and realized there's actually some fighting theory upon which it is built. And I didn't know, for whatever reason (call it, "never been in a fight") I had no idea such theory even existed. This is a useful essay.

Bridges!

My wife says this is her favorite bridge in the entire world. (More here).

More Recession Woes

It just keeps ticking up.

Sex Ratios, Prostitution and Monkey Sex

A fascinating new study coming out in Animal Behavior suggests that male monkeys pay for sex, specifically with services performed, and that as the sex ratio moves in favor of the males (ie, more females to males), the males spend less time grooming their partner. Less cuddling and no money spent on movie and a dinner? Interestingly, this is in its own way a paper I'm trying to get published. Maybe I should send it to Animal Behavior.

Terminator

Warning. This post is nonlinear.

Terminator 1/2 is ranked #13 out of 25 top Sci-fi of all time by some authoritative governing body (okay, Entertainment Weekly, whatever). I haven't gotten to 1-12, so I can't say whether this is is fair or unfair, but I will say I remember vividly being dropped off at the theater with two 9th grade friends by my mom, not even knowing what this movie was about, what the reviews were saying, and having only the barest memory of Terminator 1. And when we emerged from the dark screen, it was like we were emerging from our baptism into a new world. That's how great of a film experience it was. The action set pieces, the special effects, the characterization, the Guns and Roses soundtrack (a band I hated with a fiery passion, but worshipped for the two-odd hours of the film). It was a work of genius.

Update. Lost is #11. Okay, I can buy that. Also over-the-top feelings when I watched the pilot a few years ago, and really ever episode since. I like where this is going.

Update Deux. Okay, you had me at hello. The Matrix at number one? Yes there is a Santa Claus, Virginia. Although, where is Twin Peaks in this list? Did I miss it?

Update Troi. This is such a great list. Evidence? V, #25. Galaxy Quest, #24. I've forever felt like this is one of the most under-appreciated movies ever. Quantum Leap, #22. Star Wars: Clone Wars, #20. Sigh. If only any of the prequels had been half as good as this cartoon spanning 2003-2005, maybe the world would be a much better place than it is. I don't think a single other Star Wars movie is even on this list, and yet Clone Wars made it! That says volumes about how great this show is. And my current favorite, lovefest - Heroes at #18. I won't bore you with odes to this wonderful show (I even loved season 2, so shoot me. But it's like a love letter sent to me from Zucker at NBC. Gush. Eternal Sunshine of the Heartless Mind, #17! Wow. This is the best list ever made.

Movie Violence

I like this study on movie violence. When a violent movie comes out, crime drops while the movie is playing, and remains down into the mid-week. This may be causal - it is at least correlative. A causal explanation might be that violent movies incapacitates violent people, much like prisons incapacitate violent offenders. Now we just need a study like this that looks at video game violence. When really violent video games are released, do we spikes in measures in juvenile delinquency? I suspect we do not.

Colbert vs. Freeman

Opt Out Mortgages

Behavioral economics has much to offer the world. One thing I've become convinced by is their emphasis on default positions. Michael Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explain how this isnight could be expanded creatively to mortgages. One of the problems in the subprime mortgage crisis appears to be people were taking out mortgages they really did not understand and which lenders did not clearly explain. In other words, the problem was one of asymetric information, leading many (like Krugman this morning) to argue that there was predatory pricing and just plain stupidity going on with the advent of various financial innovations (which Krugman said will one day become a curse word, after all the damage is done). The authors present a good case for making standard 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages with solid underwriting the default mortgage a person takes out, which then requires careful explanation by lenders to get a borrower onto something else. If people are myopic, then the costs of learning the details of their mortgage (which in my experience are substantial. The sheer intimidation factor alone is enough to make many people just try to get it all over with as soon as possible) necessary to making a rational choice about which package is best given one's risk preferences, etc., will ultimately lead a person to becoming rationally ignorant of the asset they've just invested in. This at least puts the default into something relatively safer, which is probably a better outcome for both many consumers and the macroeconomy as a whole.

Recession 2008

I'm at the AEA in New Orleans, where I just returned from a session on the subprime mortgage crisis with panelists Bob Schiller, Paul Krugman, Larry White and one other person who I didn't recognize. Three out of four were incredibly pessimistic, and since I have a house on the market (after 9 months, it still hasn't sold), I started to get incredibly discouraged and decided to leave during the Q&A. I looked at the futures on 2008 recession at intrade, and for the first time that I'd seen recently, looks like a 2008 recession is collectively believed to be more likely than not.

One interesting slide that Schiller showed was a 100-year series of real housing price index, which he and Chip Case had constructed using a bunch of different housing prices since 1890. The growth in housing prices was unreal. It's a somewhat volatile price series anyway, but since the late 1990s, housing prices were on an upward climb resembling the start of a roller coaster mountain, and then began to fall. How far they fall is anyone's guess. Priced to market, they appear to need to collectively fall 30% according to one or two of the panelists. But that's heterogenous across the country. Some cities, like Houston and Atlanta, appear to have escaped this bubble, in terms of their asset prices, but some places like San Diego may be over-valued by as much as 50%. I wonder if my house is not moving because it was a first-time home (950 sq feet), and the combinatin of consumer uncertainty and the drying up of credit for marginally higher risk consumers has dried up demand for houses on my block of predominantly African-American owned and rented homes.

On the recession front, Schiller showed another interesting time series that will be interesting to watch - the unemployment rate for the last 80-100 years. The most recent data showed unemployment rates grow from 4.7% to 5.0% in a single month. Five percent is not large, but a growth of three-tenths of a point in a single month is large by historical standards. Schiller claimed that we've never seen growth that much not be followed by a recession. Which may explain intrade future's pricing the event at more like 55% as opposed to last week's 40-45%.

Update: Jim Hamilton also offers some excellent analysis from this week's economic numbers. He shows the unemployment rate spike, plus some other indicators suggesting a slowdown is coming.

Ode to Roger Ebert

I know, I'm a broken record. On this blog, I write about 5, maybe 6 topics. Economics, sex, drugs, movies, and Roger Ebert. But I have so few heroes anymore - I've moved through them viciously, using them up when I'm desperate and spitting them out when I realize they can't fix me. But Father Roger is a different man unto himself. First, let's just be very clear about this - no one has done more to educate Americans about what makes good film than Roger Ebert. You might say that MFK Fisher is the Roger Ebert of the food essay. He's a giant. Some loved Pauline Kael, some love Anthony Lane or AO Scott. They're fine - they have their moments, and I too love to read them at times. But Ebert is different - he is a force, a power. He is like the ghost of Christmas past. He transforms the most banal person's dead heart into something living again, because he has this unusual combination of gifts. Even to have one of these is a blessing, but to have them all is just plain strange.

He is, first of all, incredibly sympathetic to people. You get the sense that were he not famous, he could be your friend (as it is, though, his opportunity costs are always very high, so don't expect him to be your friend anymore) because he'd be the one person who really understood you, and saw that you weren't crazy, weird or ugly. Or rather, that you were, but that those things weren't actually bad things, and that you were more than just the sum of those characteristics. He does this towards movies and their directors, as well as to those stories' characters. He gives every movie, every director, and maybe the most important of all, every genre, a fair shake, the benefit of the doubt, which in my mind is a necessary, and maybe even a sufficient condition for being a decent person in this world. To withhold judgement on people, to be patient with them, to even go so far as to let people tell you their story and the way they see the world. It's almost Christian, I daresay. I love Ebert for this. And it's why I am so pleased that when I say he is the world's greatest ambassador of film, I say it knowing he is spreading this kind of good will in the process.

Secondly, he is ridiculous with a pen and paper. It's just stupid, really. These little essays he writes, each week - sometimes as many as 5 essays about a movie per freaking week - are incredibly well-written. They are full of original insights into film, film genre, acting, directing, story-telling, story structure, and film history. He understoods all of it, but more than that, he communicates it very clearly, efficiently and well. His essays are well-written - they are at times funny, infuriating, but always reasoned with the force of a penetrating logic and the appropriate amount of evidence.

When a person is sympathetic and communicates as well as this person does, that person is automatically great, no matter what they do. So, to Roger Ebert, continue in your vigiliance, fighting your cancer, getting healthy, as we and the saints pray for you daily.

Top Ten Movies

Ebert's list of top 10 2007 movies was very helpful this Christmas vacation. I can now offer my own opinion on each of the ones of his I saw.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

N/A

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

N/A>

Into the Wild

N/A

Juno

I give this one 3.75 out of 4 stars. The only reason I don't give it 4 stars is that like man other reviewers, I think it was over-written in the first act, more or less. I had trouble really believing Juno, and her peeps, spoke that way so effortlessly. Had that part been toned down a bit - taking out every other clever, wry comment, for instance - I think the entire movie would've worked perfectly. Because when we got into Act 2, I started crying and didn't stop crying until the movie ended. I thought the soundtrack was breathtaking, and I absolutely loved Michael Cera in it. I actually liked him better than Ellen Page, but whatever, they were both fantastic. It went from being a movie "about" teen pregnancy, to a movie about friendship, maturity, love, and the challenges of parenting and marriage. Or rather, it wasn't really "about" those things as much as those were the setpieces in a really endearing story.

Knocked Up

4 out of 4 stars, no question. I'm proud of Ebert for putting that on his top ten list, because I remember him not putting 40-Year-Old Virgin on the top ten list, even though I thought it also was one of the best films of the year. I like this genre, personally, in which I put movies like American Pie, and 40-Year-Old Virgin. Vulgarity and humanity mashed together like play-dough. What's not to like? Knocked Up was a very sweet film, and the ensemble in it just absolutely love each other and bring out the best in each other, which I imagine ain't easy. Some of the best acting was by some of the secondary character actors, I thought - like the really tall guy who kept hitting on Katherine Heigl's sister in the film. I thought he brought a lot to each scene, and it was funny to see his shameless flirting. I doubt Rogen and Apatow have many more of these up their sleeves, but together they managed to make some fantastic films, of which Knocked Up is a classic.

Michael Clayton

My wife and I watched this last night in our hotel room. I give this one 3.75 out of 4 stars, too. To say it is one of the best legal thrillers ever made, which is I seem to remember one of the ways Ebert described it, is true and not true at the same time. It's definitely a thriller, and since the characters are lawyers, I guess you could call it technically a "legal thriller." But legal thrillers really are more about the courtroom - The Verdict or A Few Good Men or even Jagged Edge, for instance. This is more in the vein of The Firm than those other films, because this one uses lawyers as both heroes and villains, and sets the large, corporation that is covering up a major pollution problem with a fertilizer that causes cancer in farmers (particularly small farms in cold regions). But, it's not like The Firm because The Firm had more of a traditional MacGuffin kind of thing going on, whereas Michael Clayton requires the viewer to keep track of very specific, and at times, complicated, details regarding a firm's plot to cover up the damages created by their product. So, my 1/4 of a decimal point off is partly due to confused expectations - or rather, from probably having too narrow of a view of the genre in the first place, and from relying so much on Father Robert's descriptions in shaping my expectations. But all in all, it was incredibly tense and well done. The main villain in the film is consistently haunted by her vocation and what she must do for the company, even if it means murder, and she always seems like she is about to throw up. That's kind of how I felt the entire time - extremely tense, like something bad was about to happen. But even when that bad thing does happen, I already knew it was going to happen, because it's one of the first scenes (the story is told in a non-linear fashion), so why was I so nervous and anxious? I have no idea, but I was. Terribly even. I also thought it was interesting that so much attention was given to details that, in other movies, is often glossed over more quickly. Like, for instance, what's at stake for the law firms. Or, the weightiness of a deposition gone bad. Or, the moral culpability of the individual employee in a corrupt law firm, when she decides to go very far in covering up evidence that would destroy the company. Or even the difficulty in hiring an assassin, or how difficult it is to assassinate someone. All of it is treated surprisingly realistically, which I guess I didn't realize what that meant before. All in all, though, I loved it and especially loved George Clooney in it. He's a phenomenal actor, I think. He was much better with his facial expressions and a more minimalist acting than I'd seen him do before.

No Country for Old Men

Already reviewed. But, absolutely brilliant. Probably the best of the bunch, if you ask me. Of the films I've seen, I think it's Best Picture for 2007, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor assuming the psychopath is nominated for that (which he definitely should be).

Ratatouille

What a great movie. Brad Bird's great. Great storyteller, full of compassion, insight, intelligence. I love him. I did not love this as much as The Incredibles, because I didn't always feel like it worked as well. But, I also love superheroes more than food, so I can't dismiss the idea that that is the reason. Still, I did love it.

The Savages

N/A

There Will Be Blood

N/A.

Science of Dreams

Dreams draw upon the last week's material moreso than the childhood. That's not a refutation of Freud's theory of dreams, since he explicitly stated that the material used by the id to communicate via dreams was the most recent experiences in the sleeper's life. But, he may have over-emphasized the early childhood years. I still like the model of the id/ego/superego. It seems to me he was on to something with that.