Sausage Hurts

You know you're an applied microeconomist when the first thought you have after reading this article about how sausage increases the risk of cancer by 20% is, "Hmm. Could I use the Atkins Diet as an instrument for sausage consumption?"

I told an editor of an economics journal over dinner a few weeks ago that I was really sick of the emphasis that is placed on exogeneity in applied micro studies. It's not simply that I can't find as good of instruments as the ones used in the best journals. Rather, it's that my wife doesn't know what an instrument is or why it is important. So instead of spending my life answering interesting questions about policy and society, I come home and say, "Hey honey, you'll never guess what cool instrument I thought of today." She hates it when I do that.

Mile High Tower

Saudi Prince wants to build the above building, which will be a mile high. That's pretty high. And expensive - around $2.5 billion. I'm guessing this is all that $100 a barrel oil money being well spent. If oil prices really are at peak levels, then it's going to be the city of the future. But if oil prices were to start falling, that mile high building is going to look like the desert giving us its middle finger.

Chris Blattman's Secret Confession

Chris Blattman shares his story.

I'm reminded that, as an undergraduate student, I was deeply influenced by a book by E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. Schumacher was a British statistician and an influential socialist and economic thinker during the 1970s. He is best known for his plea for a human-scale and decentralized approach to economic development. The subtitle of his book tells it all: Economics as if People Really Mattered.

According to Schumacher, the most powerful actions we can take as individuals are small and personal ones. Help a disadvantaged youth through school. Start a village library. Plant trees. Until being reminded by Johnson's story, I hadn't given the book much thought in almost ten years. I aim to pick it up again when I get home.

It's ironic I should come back to Schumacher after all of these years. In my first attempt to apply to economic graduate programs, I made the (fatal) mistake of devoting my personal statement to Jane Jacobs and E.F. Schumacher--a radical urban planner, and a socialist.

Needless to say, I was roundly rejected from PhDs.

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (4 stars out of 4 stars)

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession is a documentary (2004) about a legendary pay cable television channel in Los Angeles from the early 1970s until the end of the 1980s. It also has to have one of the lamest Wikipedia entries ever made. One sentence that reads

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004) is a documentary about Los Angeles pay cable channel Z Channel that accompanied the DVD release of uncut version of Heaven's Gate.

So whoever wrote this entry could only commend that it was a DVD that was released with the uncut version of Heaven's Gate. Here's a few more sentences. It's a documentary about one untold piece of movie lore in which a brilliant, though psychotic, programmer named Jerry Harvey educated the Los Angeles area about good movies. Men like Jerry Harvey, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Ebert are, I'm convinced, the ones who are actually trying to help the rest of us see why movies are important by showing us these movies. Harvey ultimately murdered his wife and then committed suicide in what appeared to be the result of his own inability to manage his deep mental illness. Despite this tragedy, he did incredible work at Z Channel. To just name a few things:

1. He brought attention to films that had been completely butchered by studios during the editing stage. For instance, it was Harvey that ended up playing the full four hour version of Once Upon a Time in American, which is arguably one of the greatest films made of that decade. Directed by Sergio Leone and starring Robert De Niro, James Wood and a young, beautiful Elizabeth McGovern, it's a movie that played poorly in a test viewing which resulted in the studio gutting it down to two hours, making the film what I can only imagine is completely unwatchable. Harvey played it on Z Channel, and managed to bring the movie to the public's attention. One critic wrote it was the worst movie of the year when she saw the 2 hour cut, and when she saw the 4 cut later, wrote that it was in the top ten films of that decade. He did similar things for such movies as Heaven's Gate, too. In other words, Jerry Harvey invented the "director's cut."

2. James Wood gives Harvey all the credit for bringing the public's attention to the Oliver Stone film, Salvador. Woods, in the documentary, notes that the movie had no budget and no money to promote the film. It showed in February, and disappeared very quickly soon afterwards. Harvey saw the movie, and contacted Woods telling him that he would play it in December on the channel. He put the movie on the cover of Z Channel's preview guide (which appears to have been, itself, a fantastic monthly zine with excellent reviews) in December during which the Bel Air festival circuit was playing the movies that would later be nominated for Academy Awards. In the end, Harvey's actions got the movie tons of exposure, which Woods credits for getting him an Oscar nomination for Best Actress as well as a Screenwriting nomination for the writers.

3. Harvey brought about the use of letterboxing films, wherein the entire film in its original dimensions would be shown on television (which has a different dimension that traditionally required cropping films). This is of course now the standard way of distributing movies to television.

There are many more such stories as these, but what it appears is that Harvey was someone who understood good movies, and was passionate and adept at getting those movies to market for people who simply couldn't have themselves found the movies. This is the work of a kind of match maker when you think about it. He knew where the good movies were - in the popular films and the obscure films, he knew where they were and because of his obsessive work for Z Channel, he managed to educate many people growing up in Los Angeles, like Tarantino who was an early subscriber, about good movies. That the last chapter of his life, the bookend if you will, involves him murdering his wife and then executing himself makes the entire story all the more horrific.

Mr. T says Treat Your Mother Right

Reason #4001 for Wikipedia's bad assness? It's Mr. T entry. I leave you with this little ditty by the T man himself.

1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act

I am constantly learning something new about legislation aimed to curb drug abuse, which is both exciting and frustrating since I always feel like, "Shouldn't I already know this?" Today I learned about the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This was the act that, among other things, created a mandatory minimum of five years for simple possession of more than five grams of crack cocaine. Simple possession of any amount of other drug, including powder cocaine, remained a misdemeanor with a 15-day sentence required only for a second offense. It also introduced many of the mandatory minimum sentences that still exist today. If you look at the above graph from the BJS, you can eyeball what appears to happen immediately following the implementation of the act. THis is interesting, because until now, I was just taking it for granted that the increase in drug arrests that you observe from 1986 to 1990 was caused by the crack epidemic, and the violence and burglaries that originated out of it. That may be true, but it may also be an exogenous increase in imprisonment triggered by the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and if it is, then maybe one could use that Act to help identify the effect of the war on drugs on some outcome. Like mating markets equilibria or family structure, or even crime itself (if, for instance, Miron's theory about enforcement of drug prohibition causing crime).

Update: Correction. The 5-year mandatory minimum for 5 grams of crack possession was implemented in 1988 with the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The 1986 legislation established the bulk of drug-related mandatory minimums, but that specific one came in two years later. But, it does appear to have caused a swelling of prison populations, doesn't it? Which is why Levitt's idea to use overcrowding litigation as a way of identifying the effect of a single prisoner's crime production seems so obvious and ingenious. I can imagine that following 1986's Act, the prison populations simply couldn't keep up with the increased demand for prison space and thus started to exceed their capacity.

10 million?

The Superficial reports that Angelina Jolie may get as much as, wait for it, $10 million for pictures of her next baby. Wow. Interesting incentives. Used to be professional women couldn't work, because it disrupted their career, but $10 million is more than Jolie makes for a movie if I had to guess. No wonder she's cranking em out.

Petreaus Recommends Slowing Withdrawal

General Petreaus has recommended slowing down the scaling down of troops in Iraq in order to better assess if the region can handle the reduction in security. I'm glad to hear this. I've been concerned that the one successful thing so far in this war, the surge, seems to be the thing being called into question because of the timing of the election. Only time will tell.

Correlation or Causality?

New study from Melbourne psychologists finds that women who are depressed have more sex. The article seems to imply that the relationship is causal - that the depression triggers the need for sex. For instance, see this:

""When people are depressed they feel more insecure about their relationships and concerned that their partner may not care about them or find them valuable," Dr Allen said.

"Having sex helps them feel that closeness and security."

That's a completely credible theory. I can easily see how it would work. Sexual intimacy has the potential to solve a lot of loneliness problems. Heck, even in the Christian religion, you see this expressed in the first pages of Genesis when God says to the solitary Adam, "It is not good for man to be alone" and thus makes him a partner with whom he enjoys, among other things, a sexual relationship. Interestingly, even in the perfect world, it is not enough to simply be in communion with a loving God - man still needs a partner.

But, putting aside the credibility of the theory, it sounds like all the team really has uncovered is a correlation between depressed women and sex. How do they know that the causality runs in the direction of depression causing demand for sex? The article opens up with these two paragraphs:

A survey of Melbourne women presented at an international mental health conference has concluded that females who suffer from mild to moderate depression have a third more sexual activity than those who are not.

They also had more sexually liberated attitudes, a bigger variety of sexual experiences and, if single, were more likely to partake in casual sex, Dr Sabura Allen, a clinical psychologist at Monash University, said.

I wonder if the team considered the possibility that it was the engaging in promiscuity that was causing the depression, and not the other way around. Or perhaps there are feedback effects - that loneliness triggers demand for sex which, under certain conditions, can increase the loneliness and lead to a somewhat compulsive appetite for sexual partners. Point is, finding a correlation between two variables is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for proving causality. Psychology has had a major influence on economics, particularly with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work, but if nowhere else, I think empirical psychology could stand to be influenced dramatically by our emphasis on the problems of endogeneity.

The Wire Was Right

From Gelman's blog

""In Baltimore, where over the last twenty years Times Mirror and the Tribune Company have combined to reduce the newsroom by forty percent, all of the above stories pretty much happened. A mayor was elected governor while his police commanders made aggravated assaults and robberies disappear.

"... It would not have been easy for a veteran police reporter to pull all the police reports in the Southwestern District and find out just how robberies fell so dramatically, to track each individual report through staff review and find out how many were unfounded and for what reason, or to develop a stationhouse source who could tell you about how many reports went unwritten on the major's orders, or even further -- to talk to people in that district who tried to report armed robberies and instead found themselves threatened with warrant checks or accused of drug involvement or otherwise intimidated into dropping the matter."

This Made Me Laugh

From Andrew Gelman's blog.

Writing about four-leaf clovers, Steven Levitt says, "I’ve been looking my whole life and never found one." This reminds me that when I was a kid, my sister Susie and I used to find them in the backyard all the time. We'd also occasionally find siamese dandelions (one stalk, two heads) that we'd put on our older sister's bed to freak her out. Much later, Susie told me that our land was on some sort of former waste dump and so we (along with the clovers and dandelions) were probably being poisoned.

The New York version of this story: several years ago I was standing on the subway platform, and I offhandedly said to my companion, Hey, let's look for rats. We looked, and, indeed, there was a rat. I mean, I knew that there were rats in the subway--I've occasionally even seen them on the platform--but I didn't know they could be summoned at will in this way.

Gelman has to be one of the most down to earth statistician types I've ever read. Actually, James Hamilton is another. When you read Hamilton's Time Series Econometrics book, it's unbelievably dense and painful. Then when you read his blog, you're like "Goodness, is this the same person?" Gelman, though, is more like Ken Binmore, a game theorist. Binmore's book is actually approachable, because he writes so well, and brings it down to the mere mortals. Gelman's book and blog do the same thing. We clumsy social scientists who are intellectually challenged appreciate it much.

Sex Ratio Trends

One family I know of is very concerned about excess c-sections. I have only followed their reasoning from a distance, but I've always wanted to follow it more. In light of their worries about the negative implications of rising c-sections, I thought this was interesting. A very interesting new article entitled "The rise and fall of excess male infant mortality" finds the following:

"The male disadvantage in infant mortality underwent a surprising rise and fall in the 20th century. Our analysis of 15 developed countries shows that, as infant mortality declined over two centuries, the excess male mortality increased from 10% in 1751 to >30% by approximately 1970. Remarkably, since 1970, the male disadvantage in most countries fell back to lower levels. The worsening male disadvantage from 1751 until 1970 may be due to differential changes in cause-specific infant mortality by sex. Declines in infant mortality from infections and the shift of deaths to perinatal conditions favored females. The reduction in male excess infant mortality after 1970 can be attributed to improved obstetric practices and neonatal care. The additional male infants who survived because of better conditions were more likely to be premature or have low birth weight, which could have implications for their health in later life. This analysis provides evidence of marked changes in the sex ratio of mortality at an age when behavioral differences should be minimal."

Here's one quote from the article:

"In the last several decades, medical-technical advances, such as the increased use of Cesarean deliver y (C-section) and the spread of neonat al intensive care units (NICUs), have further lowered infant mortality, particularly among small and premature babies, which would disproportionately benefit males."

Sex ratios at birth tend to be skewed. On the one hand, there's a slightly higher probability of a male birth, making it not entirely a coin flip. But, on the other hand, the male child has a lower survival rate than the female, meaning that in developing countries or areas with poor access to neonatal healthcare, you'll see higher infant mortality but which selects on males more often, which offsets the slightly higher chances of a male birth. C-sections and other neonatal technological advances in healthcare appear to have benefited the male survival chances, and caused sex ratios to change.

LAT Apologies to Combs

The LA Times has apologized to Puff Daddy, saying that the documents used in the recent story alleging Combs as responsible for a shooting of Tupac had been doctored by a prisoner.

Links

South Park episodes soon coming for free download. I only want one, though.

The people love her.

Reading and Thinking

I'm in a coffeeshop in a little town two hours south of where I live, and I'm eating an everything bagel toasted with cream cheese. It's the first bagel I've eaten since July of 2007, when I left grad school. That town had the best everything bagels I'd ever had, and it spoiled me on them. I would only shop at coffeeshops that sold the bagels made by the local bagel shop, owned by an old Jewish family, not out of loyalty so much as addiction. When I interviewed with my university in February of 2007, I asked them all the usual questions about tenure requirements and teaching loads, but at the end I also asked, "So, where can I get a decent bagel in this town?" I was disappointed when they told me I couldn't, and while I never told my wife this, if I found another university offer that was nearly equal in various ways, that they had a decent bagel shop in town would've been the clear deal breaker for me. So here I am in a coffeeshop, early morning, working on my talk that I'm giving at noon, eating an everything bagel toasted with cream cheese and a large coffee. It's nice. Of course, the bagel probably came from Costco's, but you do what you can with what you have.

NPR reports on the painful stereotype of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles. Caption says, "Every bad Asian stereotype rolled into one." The actor who played him is still haunted by the role that became a fixture in the popular imagination, for good or bad. It is a funny character and movie, without question. It's strange how much damage humor can do, though.

More on the Economy

Another excellent survey of the current economic situation from the NYT. This one gets into more of the details surrounding the derivative markets and the credit default swaps. It's not esoteric, since it's written with the goal of helping the reader understand it, but you get the sense that these financial instruments are still not well understood. I disagreed with the last sentence of the article, though. Just because it's too complicated to understand in 10-15 minutes doesn't mean it's a useless product.

Tim Keller at Google

Star Wars: Force Unleashed Game Makes Me Want Xbox 360

If you go here, you can watch the new teaser trailer for the new Star Wars video game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It's receiving a lot of hype to say the least (see here). It even got a review in Vanity Fair, for goodness sake, making it their first video game article ever. Since we're basically Star Wars fanatics in this house, I told my six-year-old son that the only way we can get this game is if he saves all his money and buys an Xbox 360. I feel a little guilty for telling him that, since basically if he bought an Xbox 360 (he's six!), I will have tricked him into buying me an Xbox 360. Nonetheless, this game looks awesome.

Gunga la Gunga

I once read that he ad-libbed this whole scene. If true, then it's at least on the same level as Obama having written his own speech the other night. Pure genius!

What I'm Reading on Wikipedia

The Wendell Berry entry, the Mary Oliver entry (which is way too short), the Sharon Olds entry and the Chris Pureka entry.

What a treasure wikipedia is. All these wonderful articles on everything in the world.

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

"I'll be honest, when that black guy said he would 'stop at nothing' to get change, it kind of scared me," local mechanic Phil Nighbert said. "Just leave me alone."

"Hip Hop Saved My Life" - Lupe Fiasco

In the Valley of Elah (4 stars out of 4 stars)

In the Valley of Elah is Paul Haggis's first movie since his Oscar-winning Crash. It stars Tommy Lee Jones as a former military man (Military Police) whose son, who has been serving in Iraq, has gone AWOL. Jones then embarks on a personal mission to find his son. The movie also stars Charlize Theron in a dazzling role which highlights, not her glamorous beauty, but her great skills as an actress and chameleon. In supporting roles, James Franco, Josh Brolin and and Jason Patric (who is showing his age) also star.

I gave the film 4 stars out of 4 stars, not unlike someone else whose opinion on movies I revere. The movie is on one level a mystery and on another a profound political statement about the war in Iraq, as well as potentially a general statement about the brutality of war in general. We are confronted with soldiers returning from the war more wounded than anyone here can possible understand. Whether this war is somehow worse, in that regard, than any other war is another matter, but Haggis seems to suggest that at least he believes so. For one, we're given stories about the AWOL soldier's tour in the Bosnian conflict, which did not seem to leave the kinds of scars on him that the current war has left. And of course we're given Tommy Lee Jones' character himself, who may be somewhat naive about just how bad things are over there, despite himself having served in the military.

To say more is to spoil the film, as this is a movie that if you learned more of the plot, you would be robbed of certain viewing experiences that occur in the first 40 minutes of the film. But I strongly recommend you see it.

Passion of the Christ Caused Crime?

Interesting sentence I just found in Dahl and DellaVigna's fascinating paper "Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?"

"Figure 1d also plots the top-10 weekend for the audience of strongly violent and mildly violent movies. Interestingly, not only dose the figure offers no indication of a positive relationship between violent movies and crime, but it offers some indication of a negative relationship. For
both mildly violent and strongly violent movies, 7 out of the top 10 weekends have below average (that is, negative) residuals for log(assaults). It is interesting to note that one of the positive residuals for the strongly violent movies is for the movie ”Passion of the Christ.”

Interestingly, at the time, I do remember hearing reports of hate crimes, but I dismissed them. I wonder if someone shouldn't look into this more closely, though. Maybe with an event study? I'm not sure if they follow up on this in the paper or not, as this is really just one of the early raw correlations. But that's a provocative little finding, to say the least, even for an early stage correlation. (Full disclosure, I loved that movie).

Paper Encyclopedias are Disappearing

Paper encyclopedias are becoming an endangered species. We were talking about them the other day at my house over dinner with friends. We all had one. My parents spent who-knows-how-much on a set, as did my wife's parents, and my friends' parents. I remember leafing through them when they would arrive. The paper pages were thick and glossy, and the edges of our World Book series were plated with gold. At least, that's what I believed. My favorite part when the new volume arrived was to crackle the pages, as they came to us slightly stuck together. I'd then breathe in deeply the fumes from the new book. Last, I'd actually read something - usually about planets, or maybe an animal.

But that's all coming to an end. Encyclopedia Brittanica has laid off most of its 1000 door-to-door salesmen and Brockhaus is posting all 200,000 of their scholarly articles on line, hoping to churn a small profit from ad revenue. These are dinosaur models of information storage, production and distribution, but that doesn't mean we can't love them and miss them. The market system is a brutal system of coordination, providing incentives to engage in welfare-enhancing activities from which society benefits, but during which obsolete ways of life are scratched out like some stupid little scab that only reminds us of something we used to do. Joseph Schumpeter had a great name for it - "creative destruction." The paper encyclopedia is, sadly, one of the more recent casualties in that creative process.

Nevertheless, my children will not know what they missed. They will only know that if you go to Wikipedia, you can get lost in a world of hyperlinked articles on anything and everything. The consumer surplus generated by the Internet is huge - astronomical even. But we can still admit to ourselves that we miss some of the old things, even if we're ultimately able to believe what's replaced them is better. Or even if we can't.

Puff Daddy? Say it Ain't So

Not that I care if it was, but the LA Times is reporting that Puff Daddy had something to do with Tupac Shakur's shooting and mugging outside a studio. Not the shooting that ultimately ended his life, but an earlier one. It involved disrespect and Tupac's "insolent attitude." A gangster named Redmond, it is reported, arranged for three assailants to assault Tupac as he was arriving to a recording studio, where Combs, Redmond and others from Bad Boy Records were waiting. When he arrived, Tupac was immediately mugged and shot four times. The story says he then stumbled up to the 10th floor, accused Redmond of orchestrating the whole thing, sat down on a couch (bleeding all over the place), rolled a joint, and called his girlfriend who called his mom. The next day he went to prison for gang-raping a female fan, and from prison he would repeatedly accuse Bad Boy of the assault. Read the whole thing - it's fascinating. Combs and others have denied the story vehemently.

Wikipedia Opines on the Current Situation

I continually surprise myself. Instead of going to wikipedia first, I inevitably go to it last. Yet I know from experience that it's really only valuable in the first steps of learning something new. And it's especially valuable if you can't see the forest for the trees and just need someone to break it down in layman's terms. I heartily recommend, therefore, "Subprime Mortgage Crisis" and "United States Housing Bubble". Reading them - and I have to think this is a mixture of being an economist, teaching principles of macro (but being a microeconomist by trade), and trying to sell a house (on the market for approximately 10 months and counting) - at times I really felt like I could puke. Like when I read this:

"Greenspan warned of "large double digit declines" in home values "larger than most people expect." Problems for home owners with good credit surfaced in mid-2007, causing the U.S.'s largest mortgage lender Countrywide Financial to warn that a recovery in the housing sector is not expected to occur at least until 2009 because home prices are falling “almost like never before, with the exception of the Great Depression."

Now, I love gossip as much as the next person, and so of course I know that this is just talk right now. So much of forecasting is guess work. But the whispers are that Lehman Brothers are next.

Bear Stearn, RIP

Here's what I just read about Bear Stearns

"Bear Stearns was founded as an equity trading house in 1923 by Joseph Bear, Robert Stearns, and Harold Mayer with $500,000 in capital.[4] The firm survived the stock market crash of 1929 without laying off any employees and by 1933 opened its first branch office in Chicago. In 1955, the firm opened its first international office in Amsterdam. In 1985, Bear Stearns became a publicly traded company."

And like that, it ends.

Greenspan's two cents

And with the declining dollar, those two cents are worth even less! Bum-dum-dum. Seriously folks, I'll be at the Holiday Inn all next week.

No seriously, this is a good article by Greenspan. I'm going to print out a million of them and give them to my students tomorrow. We start, more or less, the "shortrun of the economy" tomorrow and it's high time they start getting this now. Better from me than some kid on the street, you know what I'm saying? I was interested in a lot of things, but the perils of models that are "too simple" was especially valuable I thought.

"The essential problem is that our models – both risk models and econometric models – as complex as they have become, are still too simple to capture the full array of governing variables that drive global economic reality. A model, of necessity, is an abstraction from the full detail of the real world. In line with the time-honoured observation that diversification lowers risk, computers crunched reams of historical data in quest of negative correlations between prices of tradeable assets; correlations that could help insulate investment portfolios from the broad swings in an economy. When such asset prices, rather than offsetting each other’s movements, fell in unison on and following August 9 last year, huge losses across virtually all risk-asset classes ensued.

The most credible explanation of why risk management based on state-of-the-art statistical models can perform so poorly is that the underlying data used to estimate a model’s structure are drawn generally from both periods of euphoria and periods of fear, that is, from regimes with importantly different dynamics.

Cheaters!

Even the advances of technology aren't enough to eliminate the problems of cheating.

All may not be as it seems, however. One stunning blonde named Samantha believed she had been recruited in just that way by an elite agency of same calibre as the Emperor's Club.

She was even asked to fill out income tax forms and fax them to the future "employer", with the promise that an initial $4,500 cheque would be forthcoming after she spent a weekend in Atlantic City with her first client.

Assured by such formalities, she kept the date. When no cheque subsequently arrived, Samantha called the agency to complain, only to find that the telephone number used to retain her services was a throwaway mobile, and the fax number that of a Wall Street print shop. A cheeky New York finance man had duped her into bedding him.

Update: Actually, this is really a great example of how things work in the illicit markets where you can't rely on courts and law enforcement to enforce property rights and contracts. This is why you might expect, in fact, a prostitute to join a pimp who can use violence to enforce contracts. Violence, in the absence of legal mechanisms to enforce property rights and contracts, is the only recourse available in illicit markets, and one reason why drug prohibition is associated with increased violence among sellers.

Help, My Daughter Made me a Socialist

Okay, that's a lame title for a blogpost, but heck if it doesn't describe this fascinating new paper by Ebonya Washington entitled "Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers". Check out the abstract

"Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson's propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence."

Having two daughters myself (babies at this point), I'm not surprised. I wonder what effect boys have, though? Opposition to military drafts?

The Jane Austen Book Club (3.5 out of 4 stars)

The wife and I watched The Jane Austen Book Club last night. She gave it a 2.75 out of 4 stars, and I gave it a 3.5 out of 4 stars, which maybe calls into question the claim that it's a typical "chick flick." Or maybe it calls into question my masculinity. Or maybe it just means I have bad taste in movies. Whatever it means, the standard predictions did not apply, because my wife wasn't nuts about it and I was. My wife has also read all of Jane Austen, and I have read none. Nevertheless, I thought it was charming and insightful, though hardly perfect. If When Harry Met Sally is the gold standard for the romantic comedy, then at best The Jane Austen Book Club gets 3.5 out of 4 stars.

The Jane Austen Book Club (JABC for short) is a story about six people (five women and one man) with diverse backgrounds and tastes who decide to start a book club devoted to the reading of Jane Austen's six novels. As the movie progresses, we learn that their lives are starting to look an awful lot like the books they're reading. In the end, people find love and happiness. And I suppose that it is because the formula of the romantic-comedy is so strictly followed in this movie that it led many people to call it a standard, formulaic chick-flick.

But, I thought it was actually very interesting for a different reason, and for a reason unrelated to the romantic-comedy genre. The movie is primarily a story about how stories (and specifically literature), when at the center of our individual lives and at the center of our communal lives, can change us. The six form a book club, and by reading Jane Austen, go in one second from talking about the characters and the plot of the books to the characters and the plot in their own lives. In one scene, a man estranged from his wife is discussing privately a scene from Persuasion and then immediately goes to confessing his own struggles and failures in his marriage. It's almost as if we are to believe that stories provide windows through which we understand our own lives. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas wrotemore or less that narratives provide us with the tools we need to navigate our ethical lives, and nowhere have I seen that better explained and displayed than in this movie, oddly enough.

The movie also has the humility to acknowledge the treasure in stories in the unlikeliest of places. One of the main characters, the sole male member of the club, loves science fiction. He grew up in a household of women, and when he was 10, his father invited him into his study (no girls allowed) and let his son his read his first science fiction magazine. Over time, the science fiction stories would give him safe refuge from his older sisters and the challenges in his life. When he meets Jocelyn, the older woman, unmarriaged champion dog breeder, he immediately begins to pursue her, and he even believes that they would swap favorite authors. He'd read her favorite novels (Jane Austen), and she'd read his favorite science fiction novels (Ursula K. Le Guin is his favorite). He ultimately ends up reading all her favorites; she always has an excuse not to read his. But the excuse is that she doesn't like science fiction, despite having never read any. In the end, when she finally does get around to reading the books he gave her, she learned how wonderful the books were, and at the same time, seems to realize how wrong she had been about him from the start.

It's good to find a movie that takes the power of stories as seriously as this one does. Not too long ago, I had so fully come to believe in the power of stories, and their centrality to our real lives, that I decided that the Church was really meant to be like a book club. We get together and tell one another the stories of the Bible, because telling and hearing the stories changes us. It makes sense of our own lives. It gives us the tools we need to navigate our social existence. It makes us wake up to the stories. There is something to the book club. I was constantly reminded of myself when the French teacher tried to monopolize the interpretation of the book club or dictate what the story meant. Once my wife threw a copy of James Joyce's Dubliners at me because of our differing interpretations of a story, and I always knew it was not because we disagreed, but because I was a jerk. Living in community - you don't know what's going to happen, and you definitely can't control it. Living among a storied people is the same way. The stories, when read faithfully, earnestly and honestly by faithful, earnest and honest people will let loose a wind that can turn over your whole life. This movie was an attempt to tell a more profound story in the packaging of a simple romantic-comedy formula, and I thought it did a good job. It was an ambitious movie, in that sense, and it manages to both be a good romantic-comedy and a good philosophical tract at the same time. Not easy, as you can imagine.

Political Correctness and the Pastorate

J brings to light a good point, which I hadn't considered..

"That your pastor should be politically correct in order to qualify you for public office is laughable if for no other reason than the fact than being described as a "politically correct pastor" should disqualify you from the pastorate. I don't agree with much of what Mr. Wright has said, nor with much of his theology for that matter, but I whole heartedly applaud the fact that having spent thirty years as a minister has resulted in a life and message that is out of step with the political and cultural mainstream - anything else would be hypocrisy."

Feldstein Concerned

Former NBER President, Martin Feldstein, is very concerned about the problems in the US economy. I, for one, am absolutely pukey over it, but every now and then, you talk to another economist and s/he tells you it's nothing, it'll blow over, etc. But I am more than a little worried that this one will hurt.

Soulmate Film Trailer

The Strangers

This looks freaking scary. It's allegedly based on true events, but I cannot find any reference to those true events on the websites or Wikipedia. Please post if you know.



What's really exciting for me, after having watched this trailer, is how utterly terrified this is going to make me in my real life where I already am paralyzed by low probability events.

Diamond-Water Paradox

Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed that price was determined by input prices, mainly that of labor, from where we get Marx's "labor theory of value" and ultimately his notion of capitalist exploitation. But in time, economists would come to believe that price was also affected by subjective valuations of goods and services by consumers, and not merely by producer costs. These people, now called the "marginalists," argued that people had a willingness to pay for goods and services, and that goods and services had both a total value, but also importantly, and importance at the margin. This distinciton was useful because it helped us better understand why water, which had such a tremendously high value to anyone, was so cheap, yet diamonds, which were not as useful, were so expensive. Water's marginal benefits were much lower, because of declining marginal benefits associated with water consumption. That is, once you had satisifed your thirst, the next unit of water did not have all that much marginal benefit to anyone, and that this helped determine ultimately the price.

In light of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, it's fun to re-read Dwight Lee's old FEE article, "Marriages, Mistresses and Marginalism" which frames the decision to take on a mistress as a kind of water-diamond paradox sort of problem.

Charlie!

Harvard Tenures Roland Fryer

I just learned from a credible source that young Roland Fryer had already gotten tenure at Harvard. Damn! Dude wasn't there a couple of years and he already got tenured. I don't even know how long he's been there, technically on the economics faculty, since for two of the years he was at Harvard Society of Fellows. But even if it was three, he's already tenured.

Foster Care Kills

If you are on the margin of remaining in your home with your family and being removed and placed in foster care, then foster care will cause the following outcomes: increase the likelihood of child teenage pregnancy, lower your earnings, lower your schooling attainment, and increase the likelihood of engaging in criminal activity. So finds two new papers by Joseph Doyle, an economist in the business school at MIT. The two papers are here (AER 2007) and here (R&R and JPE). His identification (we're economists, so of course, we have to talk about his identification) is pretty cool. He uses as source of identification not simply placements in foster care, but the assignment of case workers to the child's case. Specifically, some of the case workers have very high removal rates and some have very low removal rates, and the idea is that there is something about the ones with the very high removal rates (call them the "hard asses" if you will) that causes a child to go to foster care, independent of their family situation. That is, if the easy case worker had gotten that case, the child wouldn't have gone to foster care, but because the hard ass did, the child did. Instrumenting for foster care placement with the type of case worker, Doyle finds worsened outcomes in the child using a dataset from Illinois that basically only University of Chicago graduates or faculty members can touch (Doyle did his PhD at Chicago). Very cool. Check out his entire research agenda here. Lots of cool papers there.

ISFP?

Interesting. I now scored ISFP on the Myers-Briggs test. Historically, I've tended to score INFP - intuitive, instead of sensing. Although this time, I scored a 1 on sensing, which I think basically means I can go either way. Here's another description of the ISFP personality

The Portait of the Composer (ISFP)

Besides being concrete in speech and utilitarian in getting what they want, the Composer Artisans are accomodating and attentive in their social roles. Composers are just as reluctant to direct others' behavior as are Performers, though they appear even more so, since they are more attentive.

While all the Artisans are artistic in nature, Composers (perhaps ten per cent of the population) seem to excel in the "fine arts," having not only a natural grace of movement, but also an innate sense what fits and what doesn't fit in artistic compositions. Of course, composing must not be thought of as only writing music, but as bringing into harmonious form any aspect of the world of the five senses, and so when an especially gifted painter, sculptor, choreographer, film maker, songwriter, chef, decorator, or fashion designer shows up, he or she is likely to be an Composer.

Composers, like the other Artisans, have a special talent for "tactical" variation, and such talent differs radically from that possessed by Idealists, Rationals, and Guardians (who have their own unique and inherent abilities). As the word "tactical" implies, Artisans keep closely in "touch" with the physical world, their senses keenly tuned to reality. But, while the Crafter is attuned to the tool and its uses, the Composer is attuned to sensory variation in color, line, texture, aroma, flavor, tone-seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing in harmony. This extreme concreteness and sensuality seems to come naturally to the Composers, as if embedded "in the warp and woof" of their make.

Bob Dylan, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Cher, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mel Brooks, Steven Spielberg, and Neil Simon are examples of a Composer Artisans.

It's hard to take the test repeatedly. I felt anchored to certain answers, because I knew they weighted me towards one type or another. So, for instance, I've sensed a slight blossoming of the extroverted side of me, which I get from my mom's side, over the last five years. But it's nonetheless hard to answer the "how are you at parties?" questions any differently. And, I think I actually am still more interested in staying home with the family than being in social situations, so maybe it's not so much that I'm actually more extroverted, as I am just more comfortable in my skin than I used to be. Either way, the point still remains, I think it's hard to take the test multiple times and answer it truthfully. Maybe if you took different types of tests, not just the Myers-Briggs, though. But then, they don't all map onto one another. The Big 5 has 5 dimensions, whereas Myers-Briggs has only 4, for instance.

Burbs Entry Very Impressive

Whoever wrote The Burbs entry on Wikipedia really put together quite an article. Compare it with any of the other wiki film entries and I think you'll agree. Nice to know someone out there cares enough about this really funny movie.

Smooth Walrus

More on STD Findings

A colleague sent me the New York Times article explaining more of the study, and something caught my eye. The article says the data is from the CDC National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). You can read about that data here. The data uses a sampling method of households that would make all inference from the sample representative of the population sampled. Approximately 7000 people are in the survey, which in its most recent manifestation, has been conducted annually since 1999. Here the journalist writes:

The centers conducts the annual study, which asks a representative sample of the household population a wide range of health questions. The analysis was based on information collected in the 2003-4 survey.

Extrapolating from the findings, Dr. Forhan said 3.2 million teenage women were infected with at least one of the four diseases.

The 838 participants in the study were chosen at random with standard statistical techniques. Of the women asked, 96 percent agreed to submit vaginal swabs for testing.

The findings and specific treatment recommendations were available to the participants calling a password-protected telephone line. Three reminders were sent to participants who did not call.

Of that 7000, 838 apparently were randomly picked to participate in the STD section. Of the 838, around 804-805 agreed. So very high response rate. We can therefore conclude, as best as I can tell, that the sample estimation is statistically accurate, given some margin of error.

I wonder if what is going on here is that some of the infections studied are asymptomatic. For instance, chlamydia produces symptoms that often go unnoticed, and therefore the STD can be undetected for long periods of time. The population the researchers study, though, are sexually active groups - 15-19 year olders, for instance. I want to say that the median age for female sexual debut is 15.5 years, but don't quote me on that. I think it's between 15-16, at least, and is slightly older for White females. So, these adolescents are mostly sexually active. If there is an asymptomatic STD in the population of sexually active, non-married groups of females, then it would seem like it could grow into the high rates of prevalence observed by these researchers. The window of time when a person is infected with a sexually transmitted infection and sexually active is critical, which is why you want to get infected people treated as soon as possible (particularly ones who are high risk, like commercial sex workers. They have so many partners, that their one exposure can can growth rates to exponentially increase).

But, with this demographic, if the STDs have been in the population for years, then growth can happen easily because the STDs are relatively undetected. HPV and chlamydia both low detectability. I bet so do the others. So what this is saying, if I had to venture a guess, is that this is a true externality problem. They are not well-informed about their own health status, and thus neither is their partner. Plus, their adolescents, and adolescents take too many risks anyway, including having unprotected intercourse.

Here, incidentally, is the source of the study. This is not, importantly, based on surveillance data, but as with the chlamydia study, is based on a nutritional study which was randomized. Here's the description of the data:

Genital herpes prevalence data come from the New York City Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is modeled after the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The survey was conducted in 2004 among a representative sample of New York City adults 20 or older. Of the 1,999 people enrolled in the survey, 1,784 were tested for HSV-2.

New STD Findings

From a new CDC sponsored study

CDC study released today estimates that one in four (26 percent) young women between the ages of 14 and 19 in the United States – or 3.2 million teenage girls – is infected with at least one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus, and trichomoniasis).

Led by CDC’s Sara Forhan, M.D., M.P.H., the study also finds that African-American teenage girls were most severely affected. Nearly half of the young African-American women (48 percent) were infected with an STD, compared to 20 percent of young white women.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine

Ed Burns, David Simon and other writers from The Wire comment on the connection between their show and America's so-called "war on drugs":

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Wish me luck. In a few weeks, I'll be giving two talks on the costs of drug prohibition to undergraduates both at my university and a neighboring one.

Gmail Beta

Two questions.

1. For how much longer will Google's gmail be beta?

Which leads in quite nicely to my second question.

2. WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH GMAIL! Is it breaking all the time for anyone else but me? It's crashing on me all the time - easily 4-5 times a day. And don't even get me started on its lack of compatibility with Safari. I'm losing my mind because I cannot get it to load up.

Update: I think it's primarily a Safari thing, because I just loaded up Camino and it came right up - while in the background Safari was still struggling to get it to load.

Ledger's Assets

Heath Ledger's assets were listed at $145,000 recently. Didn't he make millions per movie? I wonder, then, how it got spent down to that level? I would love to eavesdrop on Hollywood types explaining the cash flows of actors and actresses. I know there are a lot of hidden expenses, too, but at the same time, it seems like you're getting huge windfalls all the time.

Unsafe, very basic things

This shows up in the affadavit:

"Later, the agent told "Kristen" that the client would "ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe -- you know -- I mean that ... very basic things. ... 'Kristen' responded: 'I have a way of dealing with that. ... I'd be like, listen dude, you really want the sex?' ... You know what I mean.'"

Apparently, this is a reference to his desire to have unprotected sex with the prostitute. I thought it must be some reference to things like S&M, bondage, things of that nature, but apparently it's probably just a reference to wanting to have sex without a condom. I'd be surprised if they didn't have an ala carte option for sex without a condom. It's essentially the compensating differential equal to the risk of STD infection (probably low in this case, given the selectivity of the clientele) and the expectation of a pregnancy outcome (probably higher). I would expect this to always be an issue for brothels, and that they'd have these higher-priced options available for their clients for their consideration.

Last Spitzer post

A guy who works for a group called Sexual Recovery Institute just made a great point. He said that if he sees one more politician confess publicly to sexual misconduct at a press conference with his wife beside him, done basically in order to appear publicly contrite to salvage their political career, he will go crazy. The wife is so hurt in the clip being replayed. Why is she there? If all he's gonna do is apologize vaguely to her and to the public, why does she have to be there? I think this guy's point is very good. The real tragedy in this is that wife and the daughters.

Beautiful Abandoned Russian Homes

These recently discovered Russian homes made my heart skip a beat. Apparently, they were hidden deep in Russian forests, and so have been more or less preserved, despite being abandoned a while back. I don't know the story. These photos of the stairs were crazy, though.

LRC on Spitzer

The guys at Lew Rockwell are taking Spitzer to task. This is all news to me. Goes to show what living in a media closet in which the only access to news is the Internet (which means, if Perez Hilton doesn't cover it, I'm late to learn). Here's an interesting post from Karen de Coster, representing the extreme libertarian position on Spitzer's situation, you might say.

Everyone is right about Spitzer, of course, and I single out Bill's insightful comments about "derivative crimes." In addition, the seizure of private text messages and emails is especially disturbing to me. However, this ruthless slimebucket - Spitzer - has only become a victim of the totalitarian system that he worked so hard to enable and grow. This bastard doesn't deserve a single tear (let alone a libertarian defense), and in fact, it'll be justice when he faces the same kind of politically-ambitious totalitarian torment that he has administered to numerous individuals, entrepreneurs, and successful businesses. He has destroyed umpteen lives and business ventures in order to fulfill his ambition to ascend to the ranks of the dictatorial, ruling elite. May he join Nifong in the nether world of payback and ruination.

George Fox

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is all over the television because of a federal wiretap that caught him using the services of a high priced prostitution ring. He used the name "George Fox" as his pseudonym when meeting with the prostitute. Here's who that was:

George Fox (July 1624 – January 13, 1691) was an English Dissenter who is commonly considered the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers. Living in a time of great social upheaval, he rebelled against the religious and political consensus by proposing an unusual and uncompromising approach to the Christian faith. His journal is known even among non-Quakers for its vivid account of his personal journey.

Everyone is debating whether Spitzer should resign, and whether he should face criminal charges. I am just wondering what happened, and why it happened.

Update: The Smoking Gun is great for this.

Update Deux: Anderson Cooper has some interesting things that he's talking about. Why prostitution solicitation, and not an affair? I was wondering the same thing. It seems like prostitution solicitation among a politician or businessman might simply be evidence of loneliness and workaholism. Workaholism makes relationships difficult to maintain, including an affair. It also creates a wedge against one's wife, and therefore creating loneliness. Commercial sex workers provide a service that is contractual and well-suited to the demands of a workaholic. They work around his hours, can meet his needs on demand, and there are no responsibilities after the affair occurs. Spitzer appears to have had at least more than one encounter with a worker named "Chrissie" because I saw earlier that he had a credit of $500 with the prostitution ring, which implies a previous encounter. (I'm not sure how you get credit with a prostitution ring. Maybe he had a coupon?). So he builds attachments, but they're essentially completely one-sided.

Update Trois: Okay, the George Fox is not the Quaker, but apparently one of Spitzer's biggest campaign contributor! It was definitely more interesting when he was pretending to be the Quaker, though. My mind could get around the possible connection, but I still thought it was kind of cool.

Blinded by Science (ists)

Apparently, Obama has thrown Austan Goolsbee, awesome economist formerly known as "Obama's top economic adviser to the wolves. Obama says, "Austen who?" Well, that hurts. I actually was considering Mr. Obama for a second there, on the sheer merits of Austen Goolsbee alone, which is I know stupid because since when do politicians do what economists say, right? Didn't Mr. Nixon have some damn good economists on his staff when he erected those brilliant price and wage controls? The median voter theorem says politicians listen to the freaking 50th percentile voter, who most definitely is nowhere as educated as the median economist, let alone Mr. Goolsbee. Politics as usual. You tell one Canadian newspaper that the Messianic presidential candidate who sounds like a freaking protectionist intent on halting all trade with Canada and Mexico, that he's just saying that stuff because of politics, and poof. You're gone.

Guitar Hero III Maniac!

This is so hypnotic. The kid is an animal.

African Slave Trades

From Nathan Nunn's newly published article, "The Long-term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades," in a new Quarterly Journal of Economics 2008.

"The slave trades also contributed to political instability by causing the corruption of previously established legal structures. In many cases, it became common to obtain slaves by falsely accusing others of witchcraft or other crimes (Lovejoy 2000; Northrup 1978; Koelle 1854). Klein (2001) writes that 'communities began enslaving their own. Judicial penalties that formerly had taken the form of beatings, payment of compensation or exile, for example, were now converted to enslavement.' Often, leaders themselves supported or even instigated this abuse of the judicial system (Mahadi 1992; Klein 2001; Hawthorne 1999,2003). To protect themselves and their community from being raided, leaders often chose to pay slaves as tribute, which were often obtained through the judicial system. Hawthorne (1999,2003) provides detailed studies of this process among the Cassanga of modern day Guinea Bissau. The chief of the Cassanga used the `red water ordeal' to procure slaves and their possessions. Those accused of a crime were forced to drink a poisonous red liquid. If they vomited, then they were judged to be guilty. If they did not vomit, they were deemed not guilty. However, for those that did not vomit, this usually brought death by poisoning. Their possesions were then seized and their family members were sold into slavery."

Lost Time Travel Theory

Interesting theory about Lost, thanks to J.

Rendition (5 stars out of 5 stars)

Last night, my wife and I watched the 2007 film, Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Omar Metwally, and Peter Sarsgaard. I consider this one of my favorite movies from 2007. The movie is two intertwined stories about an assassination attempt on an African government official and a subsequent torture/interrogation of a suspect, with a second parallel story about the official's daughter and the boy that she is in love with. The movie is ultimately a genius critique of torture as a method of extracting information, as well as a story about the very high human costs of torturing the wrong man.

First, a suicide bomber detonates himself in a crowded town square in a failed assassination attempt of an important government official (we never quite learn who he is or what he does, only that he works with the CIA and the American government in the war on terror). Gyllenhaal witnesses the attack. He and a colleague from the CIA are in a car, stuck in traffic, when the bomb goes off. His colleague is hit by shrapnel and dies in Gyllenhaal's lap. Because of the thinness of the CIA's resources in the region, Gyllenhaal is immediately promoted to oversee the interrogation of a person of interest. It his first torture, in other words.

The main person of interest is an Egyptian-born American (non-citizen) chemical engineer who is in South Africa, Capetown for a conference at the time of the attack. He is flying back home to his pregnant wife, played by Witherspoon, and his 6-year-old son. Upon landing in Washington, DC, local police and officials "detain" him. Or maybe detainment isn't the right word. "Kidnapped" seems like a more accurate description of what happens, because when he lands, uniformed police officers escort him to a stairwell, and hand him off to masked men who throw a black bag over his head and whisk him away. While being briefly interviewed by a CIA agent, we learn two sets of facts about the engineer. First, there is circumstantial evidence linking him to the attack. He is Egyptian, and the attacks were orchestrated by an Egyptian Islamic terrorist cell. He is a chemical engineer who worked with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms six years earlier on a project related to bomb-making, and thus possesses knowledge of explosives. And the most damning, he has five telephone calls to his cell phone from an Egyptian person who is a known terrorist. The other set of facts we learn is that he claims to have no knowledge of the cell phone calls, and denies that he is working with terrorists. The head of the CIA believes there further interrogation is warranted, since one American CIA agent was killed in the attack. Using a legal loophole that had expanded since 9/11, the CIA sends the engineer back to Africa for "interrogation" under a policy called "extreme rendition." Since torture is illegal in the United States, the CIA relies on other countries to do it for them.

A second distinct storyline, but related in an unknown way, involves the African government official's daughter, who is Muslim and in love with a Muslim radical. To discuss how this story fits into the other would give away some of the more interesting things about this movie, so I won't. But I can say that the liaison is in appropriate, not only because her father is working with the American government to deal with local terrorist cell groups in the region, but also because her father has already arranged for her to marry another man. This girl's story gives us insight is an important story, because through it we learn about the motivations of a young radical, and serves to illustrate some of the unintended consequences of torture.

The film is not generically a critique of the war on terror. We are shown racial Islamic terrorists who are indiscriminate in their attacks, willing to murder women and children in their campaigns of intimidation and shaming via suicide attacks. We are given a backdrop of 9/11 which serves to convey that terrorist cells in faraway places eventually make their way to American shores, thus making it in America's best interest to address the groups at the source of their growth and birth. The film is very focused in its criticism: its objection is to the morality and efficiency of torture as a tool used in combatting terrorism. The engineer is flown back to Africa where the government official targeted in the assassination attempts to extract information from him about the attack using various techniques such as water-boarding, electrocution and solitary confinement. This movie does an excellent job of laying out carefully the key issues involved with that calculation - that torture likely has a high false positive rate (ie, we will end up torturing a high number of innocent people) and the information we get is questionable in value (ie, there is a high noise to signal ratio because innocent people will say anything they think we want to hear). The movie focuses, in other words, on the costs of torture, and forces us to modify our understanding of torture's efficacy.

As I said starting out, this was one of the best political thrillers I'd seen in a long time. It's far better than Michael Clayton, for instance. It's far better than any of the other political thrillers that came out in 2007, if I had to guess. The movie is well-written, well-acted, well-conceived and well-executed, and uses innovative narrative techniques to illustrate political theories about the negative feedback effects associated with torture (ie, that it breeds terrorism). I give it five stars out of five stars. This film came under the radar in 2007. Boxofficemojo.com shows that it opened Friday, October 9th, 2007 to 2,250 theaters, which is a moderate opening. Definitely not a blockbuster opening, but for a political thriller with incisive commentary about torture and the war on terror, relatively large. It average $600-700 a screen the first weekend, which then dropped significantly to $300-400 the second and third weekends. It ended its domestic run with around $9 million and then disappeared. For some reason, the film never found its audience. Maybe because that category - political thriller/war on terror commentary - was crowded last winter. For instance, Lion for Lambs, which also starred Meryl Streep along with Robert Redford and Tom Cruise, opened roughly around the same time that Rendition ended, and would also only go onto make $15 million (despite a $35 million production budget). Charlie Wilson's War opened in December with an all-star cast: Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts starring, and Aaron Sorkin writing. This movie did the best, by far, of the three with domestic revenues equalling $66.5 million (with a production budget of $75 million). This would turn out to be one of Tom Hanks lowest earning films ever. Then of course there was Michael Clayton which opened on October 5th, 2007, one week before Rendition. Clayton, starring Clooney, is also a political thriller, though it's more generally one from the lawyer genre and more focused on corporate corruption and environmental degradation than it is on American foreign policy. Nevertheless, this movie also opened against Rendition and likely sucked some of the wind out of its sails too. Clayton has as of this date earned around $50 million, and received some Oscar buzz as well. But given that it had Clooney in it, this is again one of his lower earning films as of late.

I mention the other films to try and make sense of why this film went under the radar like it did. All the political films showed up during the Oscar season, and all of them were low revenue earners and most did not break even (did any break even?) with the domestic run earnings.

The Host (2.5 out of 5 stars)

The Host is a Korean tale about a monster that terrorizes a community, and thus fits with the Asian monster movie genre. An American scientist orders his Korean employee to dispose of at least 50 bottles of formaldahyde into the river Han. The toxic chemicals end up creating a mutated amphibious fish creature that is roughly the size of a large bus that goes on a killing spree one nice afternoon eating dozens of picknickers. In the process, the youngest member of a family is stolen away by the monster. The rest of the movie is about this family attempting to get her back.

The movie seems to be more than just a monster movie. The Americans have created, through their irresponsibility, a monster enemy that terrorizes Korea. But, to make matters worse, the American government then declares that the monster is the carrier of a deadly virus, and order various biochemical agents dropped on it, as well as quarantine everyone who had been in close proximity to the monster. We eventually learn the Americans have made this part up, and that there is no virus. The critique seems to be that America has created its own enemies, and now rather than fight that enemy head on, uses the existence of the enemy to create a phantom enemy through propaganda. You could probably read the Iraq war into this, if you tried, or the Axis of evil powers that included North Korea. It seems to be a more generic idea, though, so it doesn't quite fit just one American situation, as much as it seems to describe a pattern of American foreign and domestic policy, that includes environmental pollution.

But the movie is mainly a monster movie, and as a monster movie, it has its pluses and minuses. The monster is shown running along the river, in broad daylight, towards a crowd of people, knocking them aside and eating them as he runs. That was fairly terrible in its own way. And the few times we see the monster, it is interesting. But most of the movie is devoted to the family, their agony, their mission to rescue the youngest daughter/niece/granddaughter, and how the mission transforms them from selfish, bumbling misfits, to courageous heroes. So why didn't I like the movie? I didn't like the movie because it seemed too slow in places where it should've picked up the pace, and I never found the story of the monster all that exciting to begin with. The political commentary was interesting, and original, and fit with the Asian monster movie tradition of using the monster as a metaphor for global fear (Godzilla, for instance is traditionally believed to be a collective response to Japanese worries and concerns about nuclear power and Hiroshima). But I nonetheless found myself bored 1/3 to 1/2 the time. Maybe under different circumstances, I would've liked it, but my first viewing, I found it boring.