Rounding half a billion

TDK hit $500 million domestically some time this weekend, becoming only the second movie in history to do so. Not bad. It's already at $919 million internationally, too. Man, this sucker has made Christopher Nolan so happy.

Damn Wikipedia is Fast

Is Wikipedia more accurate than prediction markets, polls, blogs and news? Good grief. Thursday at 5pm, people were already updating the Palin page! Prediction markets had whatshiface governor whose name starts with a P (Tim something) and Mitt Romney at 50% apiece! I heard Palin's contract was still trading at single digit numbers at 2am, but wikipedia was already starting to get a lot of traffic to its Palin page late afternoon on Thursday. That is amazing.

Tactically Smart, Strategically Not? The Jury's Still Out

That's the way zeropundit frames the Palin choice. On the one hand, as I've been thinking, it's tactically the right choice in terms of the pure race itself. On the other hand - and I think everyone probably agrees here - she's not ready to take the office of President on Day One. She has no foreign policy experience or defense experience, for instance.

But, neither does Obama, and I found myself recently for the first really realizing that. If we say Palin isn't qualified to lead, then we need to better understand why that same logic doesn't apply to Obama, who has no executive experience. Fabius Maximus does a side-by-side, impartial comparison of Obama and Palin. Here's Palin's short political resume:

Part-time Wasilla City Council: 1992 - 1996
Part-time Wasilla Mayor: 1996 - 2002 (2000 population 5,470)
Part-time Member, Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: 19 February 2003 to 23 January 2004
Alaska Governor: 4 December 2006 to present (21 months).

Here's Obama's equally short list.

IL Senate: 1 January 1997 - 4 November 2004
US Senate: 4 January 2005 - present (44 months)

He notes that half of Obama's time was spent campaigning (approximately). Most of what Obama has over her is his education and his intelligence. His academic pedigree is superb, and he taught at Chicago for 12 years, making me suspect his grasp of policy could be good. But he himself has no experience working with a diversity of interest groups, or the myriad of other things that is required of management. For the government, too, we know that intelligence and education are poor predictors of competency in public administration (See Posner and Becker's old posts for this). So do we necessarily weight his education positively, negatively or neutrally?

Point is, a lot of people's confidence in Obama has to do with his charisma, not his experience in executive office. Palin's had some, but nowhere near enough if we believe there are returns to experience. But, then, that takes us back to Obama, who is also a spring chicken. It's interesting what McCain's choice is doing. It's inevitable that the selection highlights Obama's inexperience. That is of course going to be a hard case to make by McCain's team, because who wants to at this point talk about that, but how can McCain not take it up defensively if Obama brings it up? Maybe it's for that reason Obama's now distancing himself from his earlier remarks made about Palin as inexperienced, saying that it wasn't him who said it, but his staff, and they don't represent him. Maybe no one wants to talk about experience anymore. Because, if you take experience out of this altogether, as one person said it the other day (I think in a comment on MR), Obama beats Palin and McCain hands down.

Pilan Bio

Man, this guy lays the love down genuinely and thickly. You can see, reading it, why she has an 80% approval rating in Alaska. I take back what I said about "ties to big oil." The exact opposite. This guy said he kicked big oil in the nuts. (Note, this line really pissed me off though, and always does: "Change means not having to push "1" for English, damnit.")

Whatever comes of 2008, I think what McCain has done is at the very worst accelerated Sarah Palin's political career. Come 2012 or 2016, we may be seeing her again.

No Way This'll Work

The more I think about the Palin choice, the less I'm convinced it's going to work. She's so conservative, she's like a caricature of the Republican party. Member of the NRA, ties to "big oil" (I think; I'm going off stuff I heard), pro-life, evangelical Christian, tax cutting libertarian, wants creationism taught in the public schools. That's just the stuff off the top of my head. How could a registered female Democrat who is also an ardent supporter of Hilary Clinton possibly choose McCain simply because his VP is a woman? It's not like those supporters were indifferent to the issues; Hilary embodied a bundle of issues, not just a chromosome. Easily, the next President could pick a judge for the SCOTUS, even 2-3 depending on if it's Obama or McCain, and if a woman voted for McCain to spite Obama, even though she is a registered Democrat and presumably prochoice, she could very well be affecting abortion policy. If Obama is President, then most likely he'll just be replacing the liberal judges who are so old, unless Kennedy retires (who is the swing vote). But if McCain wins, the SCOTUS composition could change dramatically, assuming he was willing to appoint some conservative judge to the court who could also make it past the Senate (which is highly unlikely). Still, point being, I just can't see a voter doing that. I think when the dust settles, Palin is going to push a lot of these Hilary supporters over into Obama's arms.

Update: Instapundit quotes Doc Searls who says the same thing: ""Struck me as pretty smart, though maybe a little too smart for McCain’s own good. . . . Also FWIW, I know a lot of Hillary partisans, and if anything the Palin selection helps them rationalize voting for Obama." I feel really the same about it. It seems like a crucially smart decision, and kind of reveals something about McCain's judgment (to me, good judgment) that maybe we didn't know, but no way is it going to work. I suspect he's handed Obama the Presidency the more I think about it.

Coen Brothers Bio

The NYT has an interesting biographical piece about the Coen Brothers this morning, in response to their new movie, Burn After Reading.

How to Judge these things

MoLT wonders how good of a decision this was for McCain, given that Pilan clearly is not ready to be President. Until McCain picked Pilan, I really hadn't given thought to experience at all. Obama has four years of experience in national politics, but has spent the last 18 months campaigning. Nevertheless, he feels competent - he exudes it almost. But, while Pilan immediately does not seem incompetent (like Obama, she's a freshman when it comes to holding a major office as governor), I share MoLT's general discomfort.

I suppose there is a point where you need to judge these things by some other metric than just whether they make sense strategically, but I guess I keep going back to the issue in my mind that politics is all public choice. It's all rational decision-making by political actors. McCain cannot implement the policies he ultimately believes are critical to America's prosperity and safety if he is not President. And inTrade has had him losing this race before he even was the Republican candidate. Futures for a Democratic win has been at 60% - an electoral landslide - since late 2007. If you are in a position where the stakes are high, but you are behind, the "right choice" is to gamble big. You need that variance to help you.

So, I hear what people are saying, and I am sympathetic, but I hold firm to the belief that this is exactly the way the system requires that political actors behave, if they are in fact rational at all (and I hope they are). It's hard for me to judge his choices as irresponsible or reckless when they seem dictated by the near impossible race he's in.

Are you experienced?

Ash Blog Durbatuluk (wow, that's a mouthful) has some really interesting analysis about the whole "inexperience" arguments that will have to be navigated by both sides thanks to Palin. It's true that Obama's team is going to have a hard time making the inexperience argument against Palin, since it highlights his own inexperience. But, now McCain's side is having the same problem. Selecting Palin harms his ability to make that argument. Yet he still chose her - undoubtedly his strategists realized the challenges it would create on that front.

What I suspect is the case is that Obama's inexperience doesn't even seem material to a lot of people. This race is run on the recession, the ending of the war, and on Obama's celebrity-like attraction. He has the appearance of John F. Kennedy, who was equally inexperienced but remembered as one of the great ones. So probably, pushing the inexperience argument may have had limited traction for McCain's group in the first place. In these swing states, like Virginia, it's also probably not going to be pure charm that will make all that much difference either. The recession matters there more than most places (this contraction is heterogeneous across states) and the middle class tax cuts is going to feel particularly good.

Will it Blend?

From today's NYT:

Ms. Palin said she supported Alaska’s decision to amend its Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But she used her first veto as governor to block a bill that would have prohibited the state from granting health benefits to same-sex partners of public employees. Ms. Palin said she vetoed the bill because it was unconstitutional, but raised the possibility of amending the state Constitution so the ban could pass muster.

“I don’t think a Hillary person would ever move to her, based on the issues,” said Jean Craciun, a strategic research and planning consultant in Alaska who has done political polling for Democrats and Republicans. “I don’t think before today I would have ever heard someone call her a feminist.”

That's kind of how I've been thinking, too. I understand the wedge strategy being played here, but I just have a hard time imagining registered, left-of-center, female Democrats who fought hard for Hilary to now roll over, and just out of petty spite, vote for McCain because he's got someone with a pretty face as his runningmate. She's extremely conservative. Take a poll of every registered Republican in the country, in or out of office, and she's going to be in the 90th percentile of that distribution. But, having said that, there's no denying her political, guttural appeal. She's got a lot of the same kind of thing that Obama has.

“She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her,” said Andrew Halcro, a Republican turned independent, who along with Tony Knowles, a Democrat, ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006. “Tony and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.’ ”

“You know,” said Mr. Halcro, invoking the Democratic presidential nominee, “that’s kind of like Obama.”

But, given that at this point, inTrade puts McCain at such a longshot (he's had 40% on his contract, and Obama 60%, the entire time. I think Palin pushed Obama's down from 62 to 60%, but that's speculative, as there's a lot of tiny variation around 60 that I've seen for a while on that contract). So, if you're a longshot, then the right choice is the risky choice, the gamble. The safe choices are predictably not enough to help him with key states and demographics, and right now, even with Palin's liabilities (like her inexperience), this sounds right. I just suspect it won't be enough.

Who is Obama?

I really like the McCain/Palin ticket, and may actually vote, and if vote, vote for them! But I still, deep down, really like Obama. I'm just hoping that we can just be friends. But, when I read that he's actually "a minimalist empiricist who believes in market-based approaches for pursuing progressive ends. In short, Obama is...Cass Sunstein," - well, I sort of want to be more than just friends, if you know what I mean. Nudge-nudge.

Donnie Wasn't Real?

Rolling Stone interviews Steve Buscemi about The Big Lebowski and Buscemi lets this little gem out.

I don't know how big this is but there's this new theory that Donny is just a figment of Walter's imagination. Like he's an old army buddy that had died or something. It almost works. There's the "your phone is ringin', Dude" "thanks, Donny?" [exchange]. But that's the only acknowledgement that the Dude makes of Donny. If you watch those scenes, it's like Donny would come in, Walter gets so upset and it's like the Dude never hears it.

Very interesting. I need to rewatch it and keep this theory in mind. If you can delete that one scene, does the theory really work at all?

Weird Fluctuations at inTrade

Man, the contracts on Romney and Tim Pawlenty are swinging wildly over at inTrade. Romney was just down to 30%, and is now back up to 46, whereas Tim Pawlenty is at 50. Looks like a toss-up between these two men.

Update: As of 8:35am CST, Romney is trading at around 10(%), Pawlentey at 3(%), and Lieberman at 8(%). The dark horse candidate from Alaska, Sarah Palin is now trading at a whopping 52(%). A female runningmate has obvious appeal, given all that I've been hearing about Hilary's people upset towards Obama.

Update deux: I wonder if this was a last-minute switch in response to seeing how Obama's speech went over. The media has been abuzz with a lot of excitement over last night's speech. Those on the right end of the spectrum are predictably non-chalant about it, but I've been hearing far more excitement from centrist right to left pundits. I'm listening to it now. But, if it's as much of a bounce as people are saying, then I can see the appeal of Palin who seems very strategic. This will be an interesting race, if so.

Gender Discrimination Paper

Another interesting new paper from the NBER Working Paper series (easily the only economic website I'd take with me if I was stranded on a desert island). The title of the paper is Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias? by Lori A. Beaman, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, Petia Topalova. Here's the abstract

We exploit random assignment of gender quotas across Indian village councils to investigate whether having a female chief councillor affects public opinion towards female leaders. Villagers who have never been required to have a female leader prefer male leaders and perceive hypothetical female leaders as less effective than their male counterparts, when stated performance is identical. Exposure to a female leader does not alter villagers' taste preference for male leaders. However, it weakens stereotypes about gender roles in the public and domestic spheres and eliminates the negative bias in how female leaders' effectiveness is perceived among male villagers. Female villagers exhibit less prior bias, but are also less likely to know about or participate in local politics; as a result, their attitudes are largely unaffected. Consistent with our experimental findings, villagers rate their women leaders as less effective when exposed to them for the first, but not second, time. These changes in attitude are electorally meaningful: after 10 years of the quota policy, women are more likely to stand for and win free seats in villages that have been continuously required to have a female chief councillor.

We can poop on random assignment and identification fetishes all we want, but when they're used on important questions, it feels like I've learned something.

The Plight of Mixed Race Adolescents

That is the title of a new NBER working paper from Fryer, Kah, Levitt and Spenkuch. Here's the abstract:

Over the past 40 years the fraction of mixed race black-white births has increased nearly nine-fold. There is little empirical evidence on how these children fare relative to their single-race counterparts. This paper describes basic facts about the plight of mixed race individuals during their adolescence and early adulthood. As one might expect, on a host of background and achievement characteristics, mixed race adolescents fall in between whites and blacks. When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. We argue that these behavioral patterns are most consistent with the "marginal man" hypothesis, which we formalize as a two-sector Roy model. Mixed race adolescents -- not having a natural peer group -- need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted. All other models we considered can explain neither why mixed race adolescents are outliers on risky behaviors nor why these behaviors are not strongly influenced by the racial composition at their school.

Yay to the Weak Dollar

The depreciating dollar comes to the rescue. Second quarter GDP grew at 3.3%, largely driven by increased exports. Bernanke will be remembered well for all this I bet.

500 million

I guess it'll probably round 500 million this time next week, assuming it keeps bringing in a million a day and 5 million over the weekend. Maybe it'll settle at around 510-515? It's definitely not going to get close to beating that juggernaut, though. Titanic had 30 million dollar weekends for 9 weeks in a row, and then double digit weekends for 10 more after that. Batman, in comparison, shows the more standard distribution for a blockbuster - giant opening weekend ($150 million) following by a long tail. Titanic's mass is in the early days, too, but it it sustains huge weekend draw for much longer than Batman did. Batman, in other words, looks more like a modern blockbuster, and Titanic looks like nothing we've ever seen before, and maybe nothing we'll ever see again.

Drakmar: A Vassal's Journey

A documentary about a young freshman in high school whose passion is for medieval fantasy. The trailer hints at the role that Drakmar's father, who appears to have left his mother and the boys, has had in causing Drakmar serious pain. High school is not a good time to be into medieval fantasy, as you may have guessed. Hattip to The Superfial Writer. Here's the movie's website.

Note to Self

This page is a link to a homeowner who built a 40'x10' bocce ball court in his yard. Most American courts are 60'x10', and since I can probably only squeeze a 40'x10' in, I should look at this closely.

Kindle Zeit-Lust

Argh! More Kindle desire swelling up within me. Kottke points us to this attractive promotional at Amazon whereby if you get the Amazon visa card, you get the Kindle at $100 off the retail price, bringing the price to the still too expensive price of $259! No fair - I still want one!

New Blog

What to Expect when you're Aborting is a blog of a 23-year-old blogger who allegedly just learned she was pregnant days ago. I say "allegedly" only because you never know anymore, but other sources say it's legitimate. Assuming it is, she is going to have an abortion (she's maybe 6 weeks along at this point, it sounds like), and is documenting it. I'll be following it for the next few months religiously, I'm pretty sure. Lots of Juno references, too. I will be interested to read of a chronicling of this event, as I've never read of it personally. I know very little about abortions, from the perspective of mothers and outside the political rhetoric.

Haircut 2.0

I need a haircut right now. Usually I go to Supercuts, and most of the time, I hate it. I just can't figure out how to explain what to do. I want to say "cut my hair short, sort of the way it looks right after you get a decent haircut" but that doesn't work. Which means, I probably could do much worse than to let a bunch of strangers cut my hair than to keep going ignorantly to Supercuts, like this guy did.

Glad to be an American

Seriously, compared to Britain, an American child's childhood is most likely to be practically idyllic compared to that nightmare. Or so says a recent UNICEF report.

"Never Doubt the Magic of Software, Chewbacca!"

This is new to me. So funny.

NYT Magazine on Obama

A very nice piece in next week's NYT magazine (hattip to tyler) on Obama's economic way of thinking. I really liked the label that Cass Sunstein gave him.

Sunstein, now on the faculty at Harvard, has a name for this approach: “I like to think of him as a ‘University of Chicago’ Democrat.”

It’s a useful label. Today’s Democratic consensus has moved the party to the left, and on issues like inequality and climate change, Obama appears willing to be even more aggressive than many fellow Democrats. From this standpoint, he’s a true liberal. Yet he also says he believes that there are significant parts of Reaganism worth preserving. So his policies often involve setting up a government program to address a market failure but then trying to harness the power of the market within that program. This, at times, makes him look like a conservative Democrat.

Those two paragraphs are, in a nutshell, exactly how I describe myself. I've never voted Democrat, but could if it were a University of Chicago Democrat.

In-Ground Trampoline

We are making an offer on a house in a minute, and so I thought I'd post a link to an interesting blog I found last night. Or rather, to an interesting entry on that blog: Inground Trampoline Design parts 1 and 2. This took him 6 man-days to make, which is about 6 more than anything I've ever done before. But I got kind of excited when he posted his calculations using the law of cosines, and so I'm sort of intrigued. It's an in-ground trampoline, as you can see in this picture, and it does two things. One, it's much prettier to me than having a big old trampoline in the yard, which I think are kind of eyesores (no offense). But, two, it reduces nearly all the risk of your kid getting killed on it by placing it in the ground. Heck, even your 1-year-old could walk on this thing.



I'm also going to build a bocce ball court in this yard, assuming we get it. If we can get both, then my wife and I could play bocce ball at one part of the yard, while my kids bounce on the trampoline at the other end of the yard.

Should the Minimum Drinking Age Be Lowered?

Lots of articles coming out this week because of the release of a report of sorts urging for a lowering of the mandatory drinking age from 21 to 18. It was signed by around 100 college presidents, who believe that doing so would reduce binge drinking on college campuses. You can read the the Amethyst Initiative's statement yourself here.

I'm fairly skeptical that reducing the drinking age would do anything to reduce binge drinking, to be honest. In his 2007 book, Paying the Tab: the Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control, Duke economist Philip Cook who spent part of his career studying alcohol control policies writes the following.

"Some of the strongest evidence we have on the effects of alcohol-control measures arises from the `laboratory' of the states. The Twenty-first Amendment ensures that each state establishes its own alcohol-control policy. ... The quasi-experimental method has been used most prominently and persuasively in the case of the minimum drinking age. As of 1970, most states had adopted twenty-one as the minimum age for legal purchase of any sort of alcoholic beverage ... by 1988, every state had established twenty-one as the minimum age. The frequent changes in law generated a great deal of evidence on the consequences of the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA). ... The most important potential effect of these changes was with respect to traffic fatalities involving youthful drivers. A decrease in the MLDA from twenty-one to eighteen could logically increase traffic fatalities by increasing the amount of drinking that was coupled with driving. ... States that lowered their MLDA experienced an increase in youthful highway fatalities relative to states that did not.

The entire book is a good one to read for those interested in the Amethyst Initiative's statement, but it's particularly relevant for this debate because it summarizes all of the research done on MLDA. In essence, the evidence that we have suggests the following: a reduction in MLDA from 21 to 18 would likely increase traffic fatalities, and possibly other risky behaviors associated with alcohol like risky sex. Chesson, Harrison and Kassler found that MLDA was negatively correlated with syphilis and gonorrhea incidence among youth, and more recently, Angela Fertig and Tara Watson find evidence linking MLDA to poor child health outcomes. Lower minimum age drinking laws were associated with higher incidence of low birth-weight babies, premature births, and unplanned pregnancies.

As Cook shows in his book, there has been a mountain of studies done on this, and the overwhelming conclusions from them suggests that lowering the MLDA from 21 to 18 would have significant social costs. Something we libertarian-sorts are reluctant to face, I think, is that alcohol and illicit drugs have externalities. They are associated with more driving fatalities, for instance, as well as bad outcomes for babies. In other words, the full costs of drinking are not absorbed by the drinker - they "spill over" (lol!) onto others not involved in that calculus. Alcohol control should be focused, imo, on greater restrictions, not fewer, making the Amethyst Initiative's statement a troubling one.

Kite Surfing in a Tropical Storm is a Bad Idea, Seriously

This fellow will almost certainly win the Darwin Award for 2008, if he's fortunate enough to have survived the ordeal. (Although I think the award can be given posthumously, in which case, it's his to lose). He harnessed himself into a wind-kite during tropical storm Fay, and basically accelerated to no-telling how fast in about 2 seconds, appearing to slam head first into a building. He's now in critical condition. As the article reads, when there is a emergency storm warning, use common sense. And if common sense tells you to harnass yourself into a wind-kite during it, then ignore your common sense entirely.

What are the Odds that UFOs are Aliens?

Robin Hanson, using some Bayseian updating, says it's around 5%. Of course, he's right, if not on that magnitude, then at least on the analysis of the kind of extreme certainty displayed by many people (including me, probably) about things they cannot know with such certainty.

Courtroom Heart-Attack

Psyche! Seriously, how embarassing for this guy defending himself to fake his own heart-attack, and then get totally dissed by the judge who doesn't believe it for a second. I remember trying to trick MoLT once twenty years ago that I had knocked myself unconscious in a ditch on my bike. He also didn't believe it for a second.

de Vany article

Arthur de Vany is interviewed in the Times, and it's interesting. It focuses mostly on his theories about dieting, which I didn't realize were so thoroughly worked out. de Vany is professor emeritus of economics at one of the University of Californias (Irvine I think). I think he had an illustrious career as a kind of economist-statistician. A lot of what I read by him was heavily statistical, but not econometrics so much. It felt like someone doing truly original applied statistical work to something in economics, but using whatever instrument he had created to show it basically described the most important general pattern in that industry. I know of him from his excellent book Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. After reading that book in grad school, I wanted to study the film industry so bad. It was a real revelation. But I stuck with prisons and gonorrhea instead. Anyway, de Vany's thoughts on dieting come from his more general theories about evolutionary fitness, and it's really interesting stuff. It sounds like he, like many others, sees a low-carb diet as the way to go. (ht to mr)

VP Picks

Lots of rumors that Obama has already picked his VP candidate, so I decided to check inTrade for some clues. This was at 20-25 either yesterday or the day before, and is now officially a coin flip. No one else even comes close, so whatever is going on here, traders are interpreting the buzz as purely going to Biden. It'll be interesting to see if that is the case, if for no other reason that to test inTrade's predictive powers.

Best Deleted Scene Ever

Youtube title is "Best Deleted Scene Ever." At first, I was skeptical, but after watching it, I'm pretty sure it's true. If only because usually scenes are deleted because they don't work for whatever reason, and this scene works for every reason. I wonder how it got cut out?

Zach Galifianakis interviews Michael Cera

Slow Motion Bullets

Very beautiful. The ending is pretty powerful, I thought. Of course, I also now just want to go shoot things and take pictures of it, so how effective is this campaign exactly? I guess so long as I just shoot milk glasses and eggs, then very effective.

Bottle Rocket

The latest in the Criterion Collection will be Wes Anderson's first movie, Bottle Rocket. FWIW, Bottle Rocket's my personal favorite of them all. I actually prefer all of his movies in reverse order of release. Bottle Rocket is one of the sweetest movies on friendship that I've ever seen, though. It's for movies like that one, in fact, that I tend to tell anyone who'll listen that we live in the Golden Age of film. (I overuse that phrase, as you can tell. We also live in the Golden Age of Television). (ht to kottke)

On a different note, is anyone else sort of surprised that none of Tarantino's films have received the Criterion treatment? Weird.

Pacino/De Niro Looks Right as Rain

Roseanne Barr is, um, an interesting person

Roseanne Barr had some interesting things to say about Jon Voigt, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on her blog. Here's a small quotation.

jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a crap about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more.

What to say? I'll just quote the very funny much funnier Superficial Writer instead of offering anything original myself.

Wow. Somebody's going through the change. Did she just attack Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for providing a home to poor underprivileged children? Yeah, these two are clearly diabolical. I bet next they'll build a hospital for AIDS victims. God, what a pair of assholes. If only some heroic comedian that everyone assumed was dead would lambaste them on her blog.

More Pooping on the MFI

A professor in the Chicago anthropology department writes into the Chronicle complaining about the Milton Friedman Institute. He brings up Pinochet. For those who don't know, my understanding of the story is that Chicago had some kind of exchange program with a Chilean university. About 25 economists ultimately graduated from this Chicago program and ended up advising in the Pinochet regime, which was a brutal, right-wing military regime. Friedman delivered a dozen or so lectures down there, and advised on macroeconomic policy, including but not limited to a plan to eradicate their hyperinflation problem. For this, Friedman's legacy is linked to Pinochet's regime in the minds of leftist academics.

What a difficult balance it is to give economic policy. Presumably, had no one provided that administration with reasonable policy, then the lives of Chileans would've undoubtedly been worse. The author of the above Chronicle piece seems to have a difficult time believing that counterfactual. The fact of the matter is that authors like this one oppose something like the MFI on purely ideological grounds. They are almost always Marxist in philosophical orientation and so are genetically inclined to hate Millton Friedman because of his general endorsement of market liberalization and his general suspicion of government intervention. Nevermind that nearly all economists agree with him, or that his ideas have more or less won the war of ideas even in monetary policy (see this Ann Schwartz reply to Paul Krugman in a recent Journal of Monetary Economics for how Friedman's positions and theories withstood the tests of science and time).

BSG Addiction

My Battlestar Galactica addiction is nearing its completion, because last night we finished watching season 3's season finale, and are therefore nearing the end of season 4.0 as well. I found an even sweller site that streams uninterrupted BSG show online, with the added bonus that the screen isn't crowded with Asian advertisements. Just a SciFi icon in the lower right corner.

When I saw the season 3 season finale, I just couldn't believe the revelations. I dreamt about them, and when my cat woke me up to feed him at 2 in the morning, I popped out of bed thinking about them. I woke up this morning thinking about them - I just cannot wrap my head around it. Those clever fracking cylons! So say we all!

Correlation and Causality Entry #3

From a classic Esquire piece on breast size and feminism, we get another example of how we shouldn't make causal inference based on mere correlations.

Gregory: I have a friend who recently had breast reconstruction after having undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer. She was upset because, for the time being, she was not allowed to get the silicone implant and had to stick with the saline. As it turns out, she is very pleased with the saline. But this gave rise to an interesting point. Another friend pointed out that in politically conservative, repressive times, big breasts on women become very popular, and in liberal, freewheeling times, small breasts become popular.

Clarke: What age are we entering into now?

Gregory: Well, clearly we are in a repressive age.

Clarke: So there are going to be larger breasts.

Gregory: Yes, based on my friend's theory. For example, the fifties were a very repressive age, and we had Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield. The twenties were a very wild age, and small breasts were popular. You see, his theory is that in a repressive age, people feel the need for nurturing. That's why big breasts become popular.

Clarke: Yes.

Gregory: Now, my theory is that my friend is confusing cause and effect. Rather than political thought determining breast size, it's the other way around.

Clarke: You mean breast size determines political thought?

Gregory: Yeah. Big breasts are popular, people look around, they say, "Oh, there's lots of big breasts -- they're very big, they're scary, somebody might get their eye put out. I'm going to vote for Buchanan."

Clarke: Yeah.

Gregory: It's not that "Political times are repressive, ergo we like big breasts" but that "There are a lot of big breasts around, ergo we get scared and we get conservative." And, conversely, like in the sixties you had people like Penelope Tree and Twiggy, and people looked around and said, "Oh, there's lots of small breasts around -- it's okay, it's safe. I'm going to join a commune and take drugs."

Did Phelps Win His 7th Medal?

This is a pretty poorly argued argument, but this picture speaks a thousand words. The one problem with the other photo I posted last week is that it just shows them touching the wall, not a shot of Cavic touching a split second before Phelps. But this MSNBC screenshot shows Cavic touching ahead of Phelps.

What's the Most Dangerous Sport?

I wouldn't have said roller skating, but after watching this, I know it is the case. I couldn't even count how many ways this guy could've died in the video. To whet your curiosity, imagine a man in some kind of metal suit that is covered head to toe in roller skates - roller skates on his feet, legs, hands belly, everywhere. Next, put that man on a winding highway in the Swiss Alps. I've no idea how fast he is going, but it looks pretty dang fast, and I cannot believe he is actually making those hairpin turns. He's a transformer, and watching it almost made me cry on many different levels.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Update: At 4:13, the guy passes a pair on a motorcycle who appear to be going a typical speed on a road of this kind, so I'm going to guess he's going around 60-65, at least. It's not clear how he brakes, but the way he makes turns looks like it takes some getting used to. I could imagine that the same people who do BASE jumping doing this. He's literally like a rocket for no telling how long.

Kids Re-Enacting the Trailer for Dark Knight?

Priceless.

Phelps vs. Cavic Photo Finish

So close! Phelps must've rocketed those arms forward to beat Cavic to the wall.

The Station Wagon

Jay Leno writes a nice article about an old Dodge station wagon, and in the process reminds me why I love my Volvo 850 Turbo wagon so much.

Are You a Boy or a Girl?

There are easier ways to answer that question than to go to this site, but it's nice to get some confirmation from other, somewhat novel, methods. Looks like I am in fact a boy. In fact, based on my browsing history, the likelihood that I'm a male is 89%. Interestingly, that I look at perez so often probably pulled that estimate down, but that I check digg constantly pushed it up a bunch.

Summer of Tears is Teen Wolf

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile. NSFW due to bad words!

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Greatest Architects

David Galenson has a new article on architects and their life cycle entitled "The Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century: Goals, Methods, and Life Cycles". Here's the abstract.

A survey of textbooks reveals that Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of the twentieth century, followed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The same evidence shows that the greatest architects alive today are Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano. Scholars have long been aware of the differing approaches of architects who have embraced geometry and those who have been inspired by nature, but they have never compared the life cycles of these two groups. The present study demonstrates that, as in other arts, conceptual architects have made their greatest innovations early in their careers, whereas experimental architects have done their most important work late in their lives. Remarkably, the experimentalists Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry designed their greatest buildings after the age of 60, and Frank Lloyd Wright designed his after 70.

New Body of Lies Trailer

The new Body of Lies trailer (dir: Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo Dicaprio) gives more context. Looks more interesting than what I got out of the first trailer.

How Will Bush be Remembered?

Prospect magazine calls Bush the Truman of our times. The writer runs through many comparisons between Truman and Bush that suggest, perhaps one day, Bush will be remembered as having done important things during this period, particular on his foreign policy, and may even be considered one of America's greatest presidents, like Truman.

How did this same Harry Truman come to be universally viewed as a great president, especially for his foreign policy? It is all a question of time perspectives: the Korean war is half forgotten, while everyone now knows that Truman's strategy of containment was successful and finally ended with the almost peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire.

For Bush to be recognised as a great president in the Truman mould, the Iraq war too must become half forgotten. The swift removal of the murderous Saddam Hussein was followed by years of expensive violence instead of the instant democracy that had been promised. To confuse the imam-ridden Iraqis with Danes or Norwegians under German occupation, ready to return to democracy as soon as they were liberated, was not a forgivable error: before invading a country, a US president is supposed to know if it is in the middle east or Scandinavia.

Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was precisely that—a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy. While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.

Of course, the analogy with Truman is far from perfect: the Soviet Union was a state, not a state of mind. But even so, once Bush's victory is recognised, the errors of Iraq will be forgiven, just as nobody now blames Truman for having sent mixed signals on whether Korea would be defended. Of course, the Bush victory has not yet been recognised, which is very odd indeed because it has all happened in full view.

Woody Allen and Poetry

I'm reading the article, and as I do, I'm blogging about it, but one part struck me as interesting. Allen notes that because he never attended university, he reads broadly but without depth, because he never mastered studying in a systematic way. But he says he thinks that had he gone to university, he may have could've written poetry, because his work in humor is actually kind of similar.

I think that had I been better educated, I could write poetry, because a writer of comedy has some of that equipment to begin with. You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry. In a very compressed way you express a thought or feeling and it’s dependent on the balancing of words. [Allen] points to his famous joke: “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Of it he notes, “In a compressed way it expresses something, and if you use one word more or less it’s not as good.”

All Things Woody Allen

The Common Review reviews four Woody Allen books, some of which are new, some of which are old.

I went through a fanatical Woody Allen phase in college thanks to the influence of the intern in a local campus ministry. Boy, those days seem long gone - checking out each and every film of a directory's huge body of work, watching some of them over and over, over a year's time. I stopped watching his movies sometime around 1997 or so - I can't remember which one it was, but it was the one where Goldie Hawn and him are dancing and she starts floating (literally). I turned into a few more recently, like Matchpoint, but his movies are no longer events for me like they once were. Nevertheless, here's my favorite Woody Allen films. I reserve the right to change this list on a moment's notice.

1. Another Woman
2. Play it Again, Sam
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. Manhattan
5. Bullets over Broadway
6. Hannah and her Sisters
7. Annie Hall
8. September
9. Interiors
10.Stardust Memories

Technically, I should probably put Matchpoint in there somewhere, since I technically prefer it to watching Interiors again. But, I kind of think of that block of movies as the ones I liked a lot my junior year of college, and so don't want to screw it up by putting Matchpoint in there. I can't even tell you how happy Play it Again, Sam still makes me when I see it, though. Woody Allen's face in the opening scene, watching the Bogie scenes, alone in the dark in a movie theater, his face all contorted - that Bogie had his work cut out for him trying to teach Woody Allen a thing or two about the ladies.

Sex Ratios and Sex

Over at the Chronicle, Richard Whitmire discusses the effects of a skewed gender imbalance that has more women than men at American universities. The short answer: lots more sex. You can also read this breathless and brilliant study by some unknown, yet genius, young economist who finds that more girls than boys in a sexual network creates some opportunities for males with tastes for promiscuity to have more partners over time.

Andrew Young's got a Rap Sheet

Andrew Young, the Edwards campaign worker who claimed to be the father of Edwards' mistress's baby, has a pretty long rapsheet. Lots of stuff on there, including check fraud, burglary, DWI, and numerous traffic violations. He definitely doesn't seem to be the kind of campaign worker I had in mind until a few moments ago.

Lee Stranahan is covering this story pretty closely. Actually, he's obsessively covering it like his good name depended on it. the way I understand it, Stranahan wrote something critical of Edwards on the Daily Kos, which said more or less that liberals need to be front and center on this story, and he got brow beat and banned from Kos. Now he's going to get to the bottom of it with good old styled investigative reporter.

Which leads me to my next point. How awesome would it be to be a private investigator? Answer: Very.

Coffee and Paper

1. The only surprising thing about this blog is that it took so long to arive. "Bush pictures + lolcat meme = hilarity".

2. The public health/economic approach is to use tax incentives to engage in behaviors which are either healthier for the people (a kind of soft paternalism), or which reduces externalities associated with certain behaviors (like drunk driving). But then there is the fact of politics, where tax revenue and political purchases are related, and don't necessarily care about those social costs. Cigarette taxes for instance are important sources of revenue for many states, but the taxes have gotten so high that demand has fallen off considerably. In other words, we're on the other side of the laffer curve when it comes to cigarettes in many places, and by actually lowering taxes on cigarettes, states could increase tax revenue. But, isn't the goal to reduce smoking not raise revenue? Maybe not.

3. Obama may be the most followed on Twitter, but McCain is ahead on youtube. (ht to whoever I just saw that on).

Kind of light this morning. I'm busy trying to field a survey, which is not going as well as hoped, and so now I'm stuck re-calling individual respondents all day. As the group I'm targeting is a clandestine group who would prefer not to be contacted, it's going pretty slowly.

Elbow Dislocation

Argh!

God and Jerk at Yale

Rachel Toor says going to Yale screwed her up, and says it screws other people up as well.

In other news, Dartmouth graduates at mid-career make more than any other school (scroll down, or search for "Dartmouth"). At the 75th percentile, their grads are making $250,000. Jerks.

Random Links

1. Google Android available for pre-order (and $150) by September 2008? That's the rumor.

2. Steve Jobs is a scary boss.

3. MSNBC's new visualized news feeder is pretty cool, I have to admit.

4. Very pretty waterfalls in NYC. It's like a printer and a waterfall.

doping

Michael Phelps is a Dolphin. That was the headline of Drudge. Bunch of articles up about his smashing the record on the 4x100. I really, really, really, really hope we don't learn in a few weeks that he's been doping.

I wrote up a single prisoner's dilemma model of doping back in grad school that suggested to me it was individually optimal to dope, even though it collectively reduced social welfare since the costs spent on doping were too high. The basic idea in the model was that the action to dope both increased the chances of that person winning (and thus the payout), and also decreased the expected payout to someone else. In other words, you got better, but because sports are zero sum, winner take all games, your opponent did worse. It was a dominant strategy to dope because if the other person didn't dope, then you should dope (since it increased your expected payout) and if the other person did dope, then you should definitely dope since in that world you needed to dope to improve your chances of winning (which were now worse since your opponent was doping). From there it was simple to show that it was a nash equilibrium that all players doped.

What I thought was interesting, though, was that not only did all people incur a cost to dope, but because the gains to a player negated the gains to the other player, in equilibrium the doping advantage to one person was washed away by the doping advantage given to the other person. It was a simple model, so basically I just made doping increase your payout by A, and decrease your opponent's payout by B. Then when everyone doped, you got an increase in your payout equal to A-B. In other words, you had some ambiguous effect on individual performance because everyone was doping, and thus negative externalities were (-B) were imposed on all other players in the match.

There was enough in that simple model to make me want to look at it more, but I never did. But I still think it's probably right that you've got basically an arms race when it comes to doping. It's inefficient to dope, collectively, because the outcome is basically the same if everyone is doping (e.g., the batter is a bigger hitter, but the pitcher pitches much faster and more accurately, plus the fielders are faster), but now society is incurring the costs associated with doping, whatever those are (mainly the expenditures and the health costs).

Not really sure how to deter it, particularly when the probability of detection seems to be falling given the never-ending breakthroughs in sports medicine. At some point, I suspect the costs to enforce anti-doping rules are going to exceed the costs to society of having athletes dope. When that point comes, we may have to accept the fact that a certain amount of positive doping is efficient, and to try and get it down anymore is going to be worse.

The Lonesome Cowboys

The Lonesome Cowboys cover Kanye West's "Golddigger."

My Black Book

My Black Book is just what it sounds like - a simple online database that lets you input detailed sexual history information. The site has a few features, like the ability to track trends over time by hour of day, week and monthly activity, that makes it really interesting. The site claims that a survey found that 1 out of 3 survey respondents claimed to have a sex log of some kind (no, not a log they had sex with. That's gross. A black book!), and so this is the web 2.0 version of the traditional black book.

It's still pretty beta and raw, so FYI. But, it's working well enough to go ahead and make an entry. Some things that I wish it had. I wish it had the ability to differentiate between true health risks. For instance, if you're married and do not use condoms during sex, then you're going to get labeled as a high sexual health risk person, even though there's little to no sex risk since you're connected to the larger sexual network due to the monogamous nature of the relationship. So, it'd be nice if it could try to be a little more sophisticated, or at least allow you to note whether the partner was your monogamous partner (e.g., spouse).

Interestingly, for my research, the site does theoretically allow you to measure concurrency. Morris and Kretzschmar in 3 different papers, worked out the implications of different rates of concurrency in a sexual network, and showed that higher rates of "temporal overlap" (i.e., concurrency) in sexual relationships will result in a faster spreading STI. It will depend on the rate of transmission of the individual STI, the kinds of sexual practices which are engaged in (i.e., anal sex, unprotected vaginal sex, etc.), and the connectedness of both parties to the rest of the network, as well as the overall connectedness of the network itself. Morris and Kretzschmar work out the conditions in their various papers, which can help think through how that type of temporal spacing of partners will affect the overall epidemic itself. But, back to Black Book 2.0, because the site allows you to record each session by partner, time of day and day of week, you can theoretically measure the degree to which pairings are concurrent. Since that is such a high health risk, not just individually but collectively, it'd be good if the site would consider trying to post that information back to the user.

That said, I've opened up an account. Even though it's going to be rather boring since mine is a monogamous account, I still couldn't help it since I love data and pretty graphs.

James Bond is Never Going to Give You Up

hattip to JQ

Some interesting new papers

The Journal of Economic Perspectives is out and the theme is children/fertility and the US Trade Balance. There's also some other miscellaneous pieces you should check out, like this Michael Kremer and Dan Levy article that examines the effect of drinking on educational outcomes using, wait for it, random roommate assignments. Here's the abstract:

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which college students who drink alcohol influence their peers. We exploit a natural experiment in which students at a large state university were randomly assigned roommates through a lottery system. We find that on average, males assigned to roommates who reported drinking in the year prior to entering college had a Grade Point Average (GPA) one quarter-point lower than those assigned to nondrinking roommates. The effect of initial assignment to a drinking roommate persists into the second year of college and possibly grows. The effect is especially large for students who drank alcohol themselves in the year prior to college. In contrast to the males, females' GPAs do not appear affected by roommates' drinking prior to college. Furthermore, students' college GPA is not significantly affected by roommates' high school grades, admission test scores, or family background. These findings are more consistent with models in which peers change people's preferences than with models in which peers change people's choice sets. Surprisingly, the policy of segregating drinkers by having substance-free housing could potentially lower average GPA in the university.

Next, we look at this interesting article entitled The Lengthening of Childhood by David Deming and Susan Dynarski. The abstract reads

Abstract

Over the past 40 years, the age at which children enter first grade has slowly drifted upward. In the fall of 1968, 96 percent of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. By 2005, the proportion had dropped to 84 percent, mainly because a substantial share of six-year-olds were still in kindergarten. About a third of the increase in age at school entry can be explained by legal changes. Almost every state has increased the age at which children are allowed to start primary school. The other two-thirds of the increase in the age at school entry reflects the individual decisions of parents and teachers who choose to keep children out of kindergarten or first grade even when they are legally eligible to attend. This practice is sometimes called "red-shirting," a phrase originally used to describe the practice of holding college athletes out of play until they have grown larger and stronger. Red-shirting is referred to as "the gift of time" in education circles, reflecting a perception that children who have been allowed to mature for another year will benefit more from their schooling. As we will discuss, little evidence supports this perception. It is indeed true that in any grade, older children tend to perform better academically than the younger children. In the early grades there is a strong, positive relationship between a child’s age in months and his performance relative to his peers. But there is little evidence that being older than your classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ, earnings, or educational attainment. By contrast, there is substantial evidence that entering school later reduces educational attainment (by increasing high school dropout rates) and depresses lifetime earnings (by delaying entry into the labor market).

Finally, an interesting time use paper appears. This one is entitled Parental Education and Parental Time with Children by Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst and Melissa Kearney. The abstract reads:

Abstract

This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one’s children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers with a high school degree or less. This relationship is striking, given that higher-educated parents also spend more time working outside the home. This robust relationship holds across all subgroups examined, including both nonworking and working mothers and working fathers. It also holds across all four subcategories of child care: basic, educational, recreational, and travel related to child care. From an economic perspective, this positive education gradient in child care (and a similar positive gradient found for income) can be viewed as surprising, given that the opportunity cost of time is higher for higher-educated, high-wage adults. In sharp contrast, the amount of time allocated to home production and to leisure falls sharply as education and income rise. We conclude that child care is best modeled as being distinct from typical home production or leisure activities, and thinking about it differently suggests important questions for economists to explore. Finally, using data from a sample of 14 countries, we explore whether the same patterns holds across countries and within other countries.

All interesting, and there are several others in there you should check out maybe.

Bernie Mac, King of Comedy

Man, did he or did he not have this huge auditorium eating out of the palm of his hand? RIP.

GI Joe Trailer

When we were kids, MoLT and I played a lot of GI Joe. I mean, a lot. My whole childhood is confusing images of transformers, GI Joe, X-men, and MoLT, sometimes involving the public library, sometimes involving the woods behind his house, and always involving guns and bikes. It's too bad, then, that MoLT is relocating to the Dirty South, otherwise it would've been nice, with 6-year-old in tow, to have seen this new Animated GI Joe when it comes out. Since I was always Snake Eyes, and he was always Storm Shadow, it's very nice to see my man completely devastate these Cobras. It's much grittier, "war is hell," than the original GI Joe, wherein only lasers were used, and the only times lasers ever hit a target was (a) if it was an airplane or vehicle of some kind (and always it caused an explosion of the said vehicle, but only after/as the Cobra/Joe was ejecting) or (b) if the target was a robot. Humans were never killed, for some reason, but that little detail looks like it will no longer apply, as Snake Eyes single-handedly goes medieval on these Cobras. (ht to I Watch Stuff)



Update. Note this isn't the live action Joe set to pop August 2009. That one, though, could be great, and as Ray Park is Snake Eyes, it'll give him undoubtedly the chance to redeem himself for being that stupid Sith apprentice before.

Hacking the Boston Transit Authority

Three students from MIT explain how they hacked through the Boston subway system, and it's fascinating.

Taking of the Pelham One Two Three

Oh glory. Hulu has The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three. Check it out. (ht to MoLT).

Apatow Attack

Box Office Mojo has a matchup of all the recent Judd Aptow films: 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the new Pineapple Express. Check out the production budgets for each and their box office totals (domestic).

1. 40-Year-Old Budget. Production budget ($26m). Box Office: $109m
2. Knocked Up. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: $149m
3. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: $63m
4 . Superbad. Production budget ($20m). Box Office: $121m
5. Pineapple Express. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: ???

The worst of these was FSM, which only doubled the production budget. That's already probably in the top 1 percentile of movies in any year in terms of their return on investment.

The real key is that Apatow's movies are low cost comedies that have a big draw to girls and boys, young and old, and have a big life on the big screen and the secondary markets of DVD, etc. You figure that out, and you're rich. Movies like his will continue to get made as I'm sure many distributors are looking for safer films that can have a high probability of earning a good return on investment, and so they want more of these in their portfolio.

But in the longrun, I wonder how many of these Apatow can crank out. Part of the secret is that his actors are relative new comers - old friends and colleagues from his "Freaks and Geeks" days. But they're growing, making big bucks thanks to him and these films. Steve Carrell is probably just in too high of demand to go back to making many more Apatow films, though I wouldn't be surprised if he showed up again one day. But, you would think that the members of his troupe will be expecting pay raises if they keep making him money like this, making it more difficult to keep costs down for future Apatow produced films.

Ebert on FSM

There's a great paragraph towards the end of Ebert's review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall that was very close to the kind of things I was trying to express in my review. I thought I'd post it here.

Like most Apatow-influenced movies, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is, at heart, about forgiveness. We all do stupid, destructive and self-destructive things for which we're probably not going to forgive ourselves, so the best thing in the world is when somebody else forgives us. In the movie's moral universe, there are no irredeemably bad people -- just those afflicted to various degrees with shallowness, immaturity, selfishness, obliviousness, ambition.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (4.5 out of 5 stars)

My wife and I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall written by and starring Jason Segel. Segel was the very tall friend of Seth Rogen from Knocked Up, and if you click through both those links, you'll see metacritic scores Knocked up an 87 to Sarah Marshall's roughly 65. Ebert, though, because of his good wisdom, decent heart, and genius gave it 3.5 out of 4 stars. I am more like Ebert on this than the rest of Metacritic obviously, but what else is new.

The movie stars Jason Segel as Peter, a music composer on a prime time crime television show (in the vein of CSI and Law and Order: SVU) starring his girlfriend, Sarah Marshall, played by the awesome Veronica Mars - I mean, Kristin Bell. Almost immediately into the movie, Sarah breaks up with him for a famous musician, breaking Peter's heart into a million pieces. Peter first tries to screw his way through the misery, meeting some interesting girls along the way, but doesn't much succeed, and so after talking with his step-brother (played awesomely by the SNL guy who plays the brother from this awesome Dear Sister spoof skit that my family and I have watched probably 100 times on youtube), he goes to Hawaii to get away. But, of course, once he gets there, he learns that Sarah and her new boyfriend, "Lothario," is there too. That more or less sets the stage for a week in hell that ends in Peter making some meaningful discoveries about who he is and who he is not.

I want to say more, but to say more, I'd have to say too much, so I won't say anything. This is of course a Judd Apatow produced film, and it's Segel's writing debut and his first time as leading man - both of which he was great at. You can see that the script has got heart in it, but was definitely workshopped some by Apatow because it's flat in some places which I think probably just reflects Segel's first time at this. It has all the marks of an Apatow film, though - deeply obnoxious and crude and simultaneously loving, full of male and female friendships, genuine love, beautiful and ugly people, and in the end, redemption for everybody. Apatow's world is a world where people laugh but at no one's expense, except for maybe sometimes at their own expense. It's also a world of friends - friends who love one another, who can lean on one another, who are steady with one another. And best of all, it's a movie where men who are beautiful deep down can be discovered by women who value them for that beauty.

The Apatow formula, if you can call it that, is also one in which the movie refuses to dumb down life for the audience. One of the things that you could see in this movie is that it was an extremely formulaic romantic-comedy, with "types" of characters that historically could've easily been fit with simplistic two-dimensional characters - the bitch ex-girlfriend and her pretentious boyfriend, for instance. Instead, we have "the bitch ex-girlfriend" whom we cannot easily hate because though she mistreated him, we also see that he mistreated her, and though she made bad decisions, it's not like she didn't try to get him to change. There's plenty of fault to go around, and the movie just refuses to allow you to gloat and hate anyone because of things they've done. For that reason, Apatow should be given a gold medal. How often does Hollywood tell us stories that indulges are own selfish insecurities by forcing us to assault characters for their misdeeds? FSM doesn't let you do that. Like the other Apatow films, it's full of forgiveness and real people. Who knew that the vulgar sex comedy could really be such a vehicle for viewing the human heart so well?

So definitely see this one. See it with your lady friend. But I should warn you. You'll see a ton of full frontal male nudity, and it will be hysterical and terrifying at the same time. Also, see Ebert's review of Pineapple Express, which he also gave 3.5 stars.

Oh, and by the way. The movie is perfectly cast. I mean, perfectly. How Paul Rudd manages his performance as a friendly, stoner surfer instructor is beyond me. Paul Rudd may very well be the greatest comedic character actor ever. The Jack Lemmon of our generation maybe?

Crime Prevention in the Short and Longrun

Saw this in the new Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. It's entitled "Crime, protection, and incarceration" by Allen Wilhite and W. David Allen.

Abstract

Criminals impose costs on society that go beyond the direct losses suffered by their victims; crime casts a shadow of uncertainty over our daily economic and social activities. Consequently, individuals and society as a whole choose to direct resources to crime prevention. In this study we analyze a virtual society facing such choices. Individuals, neighborhoods, and cities make crime prevention decisions and adjust their decisions over time as they attempt to balance the cost of crime with the cost of fighting it. The society that ultimately emerges exhibits aggregate criminal characteristics that mimic patterns of crime observable in the natural world. We then use this virtual society to conduct a series of anti-crime policy experiments, the results of which illustrate how different approaches to crime protection and incarceration can vary in their efficiency at reducing crime. As expected, more effective anti-crime measures tend to reduce crime, but the impact of prison is less clear. The model suggests that throwing more criminals into prison may reduce crime in the short run but may actually increase it in the long run.

Now, back to my va-cay-cay! It's boiling hot in this va-cay-cay, and despite plans to bike around the city, we're both thinking the pool back at the hotel sounds like a lot of fun!

Economics Does Not Lie

So says Guy Sorman and we're all the better for it. City journal summarizes, with Chiappori's help, 10 widely held propositions by economists.

1. The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems
2. Free trade helps economic development
3. Good institutions help development
4. The best measure of a good economy is its growth
5. Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth
6. Monetary stability, too, is necessary for growth; inflation is always harmful
7. Unemployment among unskilled workers is largely determined by how much labor costs
8. While the welfare state is necessary in some form, it isn’t always effective
9. The creation of complex financial markets has brought about economic progress
10. Competition is usually desirable

Rap Book

The American Spectator reviews John McWhorter's new book, All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save America. I bought the book, and thought of bringing it to read on my vacation, but decided to instead just finish Elizabeth Pisani's new book and then start Greg Clark's book.

Faith and Development

Susan P Wyche of Georgia Institute of Technology presented a paper Re-Placing Faith: Reconsidering the Secular-Religious Use Divide in the United States and Kenya. The presentation focused on a study she conducted in Nairobi, Kenya. She referenced compelling statistics about the growth of Pentecostal Christian faith in Africa. Using compelling growth statistics, she made the case that in order to understand emerging markets, it is necessary to understand the role faith and spirituality play in the lives of people in these markets.

She also uses sketches, during interviews, to help respondents open up.

Va-cay-cay

Blogging will be light (read: nonexistent) for the next 4 days/3 nights, because the wife and I are traveling to our state's capital for some much needed R&R. Like Neal Stephenson's new novel, I'll be trying to nourish my attention surplus disorder by spending the next 72-90 hours focusing on one things for very long stretches of time, and thus of course won't have my laptop with me. In the meantime, though, I'll continue blogging in the wee hours of the morning, since I was so hyperactive about the vacation, that I woke up at 4:30am and now cannot go back to sleep.

Matt Dances to Yahoo

It's funny how seeing Matt dancing to that music makes anything seem incredibly inspiring. Here he is dancing at Yahoo.

The Art of Relaxating

Dr. Ronald Chevalier sometimes gets stressed out. (ht to Superficial Writer)



If you want to see more of Dr. Chevalier, you can do so by networking socially with him at Friendster!

Economists for McCain

Got this in the mail:

Economists' Statement in Support of John McCain's Economic Plan

We enthusiastically support John McCain's economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles that have made America great.

His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their explosive growth and place accountability on federal government agencies.

His plan would keep taxes from rising, because higher tax rates are exactly the wrong policy to restore economic growth, especially at this time.

His plan would reduce tax rates by cutting the tax that corporations pay to 25 percent in line with other countries, by completely phasing out the alternative minimum tax, by increasing the exemption for dependents, by permitting the first-year expensing of new equipment and technology, and by making permanent a reformed tax credit for R&D.

His plan would also create a new and much simpler tax system and give Americans a free choice of whether to pay taxes under that simple system or the current complex and burdensome income tax.

His plan would open new markets for American goods and services and thereby create additional jobs for Americans by supporting good free trade agreements such as the one with Colombia and working with leaders around the world to avoid isolationism and protectionism. His plan would also reform education, retraining, and other assistance programs so they better help those displaced by trade and other changes in the economy.

His plan addresses problems in the financial markets and housing markets by calling for increased transparency and accountability, by targeted assistance to deserving homeowners to refinance their mortgages, and by opposing so-called reform plans which would raise the costs of home-ownership in the future.

The above actions, as well as plans to address entitlement programs--especially Social Security, Medicare and other government health care programs--and his regulatory reforms--especially in the area of health care--constitute a broad and powerful economic agenda. Because of John McCain's experience working with the American people in all walks of life, with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and with leaders around the world, we are optimistic that these plans will become a reality and will create jobs and restore confidence and strong economic growth.

The names of a few of the signaturees are:

More than 300 economists have already signed the Economists' Statement, including: Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Vernon Smith, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Steven Davis, Francis X. Diebold, Martin Eichenbaum, Martin Feldstein, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Anne Krueger, Deepak Lal, Burton Malkiel, Paul W. McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Tim Muris, June O'Neill, Michael E. Porter, Kenneth Rogoff, Richard Roll, Harvey Rosen, George Shultz, Beryl Sprinkel, John Taylor, and Arnold Zellner.

Strangely, no Mankiw on there. I wonder why? He's a Republican, as far as I can gather.

Anthrax Evidence Coming Out

Can't tell if the evidence is out already, or about to come out. Google has about 7000 articles related to its coming out, though.

One thing that I thought was interesting is in regards to the theory that this was likely a scientist with a vaccine, or working on a vaccine. Law enforcement has noted, for instance, that the letters alerted the recipient that the letters contained anthrax, which allowed them to minimize the risks immediately by sealing areas off, and also to explore things like vaccines, for which Ivans may have some patents. Regardless of its true, it's an interesting theory. Why would a terrorist alert the recipient to the contents of the letter, especially when it's clearly a sophisticated, weaponized aerosol version of anthrax. If it was serious, and that suggests it was, you'd think the sender would be wanting to maximize damage, and telling the recipient what the white powder is seems the opposite of that.

So, I can see the logic of this hypothesis, and it's credible. I'm looking forward to seeing the data to support it. That they are releasing all of it is also kind of telling. If it was a government conspiracy, you'd also expect the opposite behavior.

Fred Season Two Sneak Preview

David Galenson

Everyone is talking about the NYT article about University of Chicago economist, David Galenson. Kottke mentions it, and then points to this interesting new book by Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, which lays out his theories of the life-cycle of creativity and how it differs for different kinds of people.

I saw the NYT article in Starbucks the other day, but didn't read it, but wanted to read it - I just couldn't then because I didn't want to spend the one and some change bones on it. But, I've really been interested in Galenson for years, because in my Labor II class in grad school, we had to each pick two papers to present to the class, and one of mine that I got assigned was a paper by Galenson. The paper had to do with estimating the life-cycle of artists from two distinct schools: the abstract expressionists (eg, Pollack) and the pop art movement (eg, Warhol). Superficially similar as they are both "abstract," he shows how the artists working in those movements appear to be cut from different cloths based on auction price data on the paintings and the age of the artist when s/he made the piece. Basically, for the abstract expressionists, there's "returns to experience." The average age of the painters is older from that period, and painters appear to make their more valuable work later in life. This is because there is a set of accumulated skills in abstract expressionism that come with experience. The pop-art workers are different - they make huge breakthroughs at very early ages, and then peeter out. So, you see a mean age for these workers (based on the Sotheby auction prices) for the best works that is negative correlated with the prices of the paintings. Meaning, they do their best work when they're younger.

I've seen a paper somewhere trying to replicate this approach on economists. Many people break up economists into two camps: the theoretical economists, who are almost pure mathematicians, and the applied economists, who are usually more empirical. You see similar things as to what Galenson found, I seem to remember - the theoretical economists doing their breakthrough work at very young ages (Paul Samuelson's dissertation, for instance, changing the field), while others make their most significant contributions later in life (I want to say Jacob Viner was an example). I like to think I'm, obviously, in the latter camp, otherwise I'm in big trouble!

Quick Reads

1. Dan Carlson, in his ongoing series on the best television of the last 20 years, writes about Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. Good review.

2. Andrew Gelman's new book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way they Do looks interesting. Just in time for the election. Here's a list of facts vs. myths which are on the book jacket:

Myth: The rich vote based on economics, the poor vote "God, guns, and gays."
Fact: Church attendance predicts Republican voting much more among rich than poor.

Myth: A political divide exists between working-class "red America" and rich "blue America."
Fact: Within any state, more rich people vote Republican. The real divide is between higher-income voters in red and blue states.

Myth: Rich people vote for the Democrats.
Fact: George W. Bush won more than 60 percent of high-income voters.

Myth: Religion is particularly divisive in American politics.
Fact: Religious and secular voters differ no more in America than in France, Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries.

Pretty interesting. You can get the book from Amazon. And, correction, it looks like it was published a few weeks ago.

3. Buffy the cartoon, the pilot, is on youtube.

4. Brian May, guitarist for Queen, finished his PhD in Astrophysics and found a publisher for his dissertation. It's at Amazon. I'm betting this will be the best selling astrophysics book in history. If it sells more than 2, actually, it'll be the best selling astrophysics book in history. But, I bet they're hoping for a kind of Stephen Hawking, Brief History of Time - that erudite coffeetable book which everyone had in the 1990s, but no one had read, as it was actually quite dense. Correction, at $71.96, maybe Springer wasn't looking for a bestseller.

5. Virginia Postrel writes about Kerwin Charles and Erik Hurst's bling studies on conspicuous consumption and inequality in The Atlantic. Of it, she writes "The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes."

6. Ian Ayres reminisces on when Obama was editor of the Law Review and he oversaw publishing Ayres now famous paper on discrimination in negotiations over automobiles.