mcardle takes leave of reason

Fortunately, it's only an MBA, but I think that Megan McArdle should have her U of C degree taken away for this (her thinking, however, is as rigorous as one would expect from a Penn undergrad):

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/whos_crazy_now.php#comments

Sorry, bringing a gun to a large rally (while well within your rights) is not a real smart thing to do and t-shirts referencing "watering" the tree of liberty are implied threats of violence.

Previously, she had been an informed opposition voice, but here: she should pull her head out of her ass.

Tort Refrom and Nudges

Over at andrewsullivan.com (of The Atlantic) there is an interesting back and forth going on about "Tort Reform" and health insurance as a legislative device.

My interest in this largely Republican meme (see Palin, Sarah who speaks about it somewhere I'd care not to link to) arose in reference to Thaler and Sunstein's _Nudge_ where they talk about tort reform not from a legislative perspective, but from an individual insurance one...

Why not charge for the right to sue regarding negligence claims (as opposed to assault and battery ones) in terms of insurance? Like limited tort in auto insurance (basically giving up the right to sue for those vague "neck injuries"), you pay less in premiums a month to stop suing for malpractice.

Unfortunately, Thaler and Sunstein are a bit vague on the implementation in practice (given that most of us "purchase" our insurance through our employer), but what if for medicare you were given the option of opting out of the right to sue and perhaps getting a small rebate (as in people who didn't would pay more for care) ? Would this save money? I'm unclear about the dynamics of implementation...

Hypocrisy for 500, Alex

Grassley voted for "End of Life Counseling" in 2003

If you spend enough time...

...in the bowels of the internet, occasionally you find someone writing something smart.

Americans are Idiots About Health Care.

Idiots Win... Though They Voted for it the Last Time Around

File under: hypocrisy or the current Republican party...

By the way, HELP passed the final version of the amendment--the one that pays for voluntary counseling--by unanimous consent. In other words, every Republican present supported it.

See TNR

...And the idiots win.

A Shame

it's always nice to have someone agree with you

Sarah Palin Is Right, If By "Right," We Mean "Hallucinating"
from The New Republic

pace Allen

I watched the health-care "Town halls" last night on C-Span. Well, for as long as I could stomach it.

Fuck it. Danielle Allen's ideas are idiotic. These are not people with legitimate fears about the health-care plan. They are whack-jobs. The challenge is to find the people with legitimate concerns and debate them, while not allowing the whack jobs to dominate the discourse. But then Professor Allen's last book wasn't about tuning out whack jobs and actually governing... It was about political dialogue in the context of attic political theory.

I'm all for dialogue, even with people you don't want to dialogue with and there are people who have legitimate concerns... Unfortunately, you don't see a lot of them referred to in the current debates.

Addendum to my previous posts

Here's a legitimate reading of the Palin response:

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/08/the_death_panel.php

and here's a brief reading of Aron:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=638912&contrassID=2&subContrassID=15&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

Healthcare and Discussions

One of my intellectual idols is Raymond Aron. Less celebrated than Sartre or Camus-- he never really wrote a work that captured the public imagination-- nonetheless he was a prominent and courageous French public intellectual during a period of radical transformation in the country.

Aron was, by French definitions, center-right (in the United States that would probably mean he was a craven lefty, but I digress), but unlike most on the right he opposed the French involvement in Algeria and wanted to end the war. However, unlike Sartre, for example, he did not formulate his pleas in moral terms. Instead, he crafted his arguments in light of French self-interest. His harsh realpolitik was ridiculed on both sides, but when criticized for his base arguments by more morally inspired figures on the left, he responded with something like "I agree with all of those things, but I am aiming to convince those people who don't agree with me."

So when Danielle Allen (super smart, interesting, etc.) pens an editorial in the Washington Post about the real concerns reflected in shouts about death panels and how the left should respond... I think two or three things:

1. Thinking like Aron, I wonder if we shouldn't be shaping our rhetoric towards our opponents more.

2. Via this interview, I don't think the "unintended consequences" that Allen talks about are all that relevant or even that possible. The leap from death panels to living wills is so ridiculous that I don't see the connection...

and

2b. Wonder if you can have a legitimate Aron style moment of reasoning with the likes of Sarah Palin.

Indeed, I am all for pitching this plan to the opponents of it... However, I think the pitch should be to the opponents you can reason with rather than the wack-job of Wasilla.

p.s.

You've got this paragraph from Allen, judicious in content, form, style, etc.-- explaining that the Palins of the world are arguing from a position of their emotional response to how things might play out (and using William James to say-- hey sometimes we need to think how people might respond emotionally to things, how nice):

These activists do not claim that the proposed reforms include policies whose explicit purpose is to ration, nor do the more careful among them claim that the policies will establish panels to help people decide when to die. They are not arguing about the semantic content of the policies; that is, they are not arguing about the meaning of the words that are actually in the relevant drafts of bills. Instead, they are considering, as the pragmatist philosopher William James put it, "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the [policy] may involve -- what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare."

Here's what Palin actually said:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Is Allen giving too much credit to Palin? Yes, of course she is. Does she have a point in giving too much credit to Palin? I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong.

pps My frustration with this article from Allen lies in her (noble?) desire to look to reason as a corrective to these emotional responses. You can't reason with the emotional... A lesson the academy never seems to remember.

ARRA, Tax Cuts, Behavorial Economics

Andrew Sullivan writes:

The stimulus has worked modestly so far, partly because it was a two-year program and its earliest stimuli were tax cuts which people saved.

Actually, the jury is out on whether these tax cuts were saved. In one of the small nods to "behavioral economics" of the ARRA, the tax cuts were not structured as they typically are in these situations-- as lump sum "refunds." Rather they were small incremental refunds on each pay check. The theory (derived from research/experiments) being that consumers would spend more of it then they would if they received a lump sum (which are almost entirely saved).

I can't find the data details... I imagine they aren't yet available: hence the "jury is still out" rather than "Andrew Sullivan is wrong-- yet again-- about economics."

sunday morning media musings...

Maureen Dowd-- you've got 24 inches of column space in the Sunday New York Times and you are running a publicity racket for "Julie and Julia" a movie that has so many commercials running for it that it is impossible to ignore... What a waste. If the Times gave a shit, they'd give the Sunday space to someone who isn't mailing it in.

Watched Mclaughlin group this morning... excepting the (accused) plagiarist Monica Crowley, I could see these same faces on these shows 20 years ago... One of the major reasons for the slow decline of the media is its insistence on recycling the same idiots...

also caught a little meet the press this morning... chuckled silently to myself when I realized the African-American Republican they trotted out was J.C. Watts... former representative. Eventually the Republicans will return... I think.

Is there a less engaging presence than David Gregory? Television equivalent of white-bread.

nail on head

see:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/209817

a "modest" summary of our fucked-up health care system...

My reply to Aaron Pressman

regarding your posts and reply (a copy is also available on my blog ignorancearbitrage.blogspot.com)...

In your original post your methodology was, in fact, singularly idiotic. It still is. To wit, "That beats the S&P 500, but it’s much worse than a simple mix of say 70% U.S. stocks and 30% bonds, which lost only 25%. A 60/40 mix dropped 19%.

And a year-end rebalancing wouldn’t have helped — at least not yet. If you set Swensen’s allocations up at the beginning of 2008 (and lost 23%) and then rebalanced at the beginning of 2009, you’d be down 17% so far this year. But if you let your winners ride, so to speak, and went with the portfolio as it stood, you’d only be down 12%." Your method was entirely short-term and short-sighted. Your follow up doesn't address that or admit responsibility for that.

I am heartened that you indicated the shortfalls of your perspective by broadening your horizon to a whopping 4 and a half years. Especially since the year you chose represents a peak in REITs, one of the diversified asset classes.

Why not provide us with 5, 10, 15 year comparisons of Swensen's approach? Probably because they don't support your arguments (neither does picking out the best performing mutual fund of a category).*

You comment, "Swensen’s seemingly conservative strategy worked fine under “normal” market conditions but failed miserably in the bear market." How you describe failure is by comparing it to a portfolio divorced of equities (or 60/40 portfolio, which it lost to by 7% in the really short term and beat in the mediumish term) in both the mediumish and short term.

Moreover, in your initial comments you dismiss the chief advantage of Swensen's rebalancing by commenting on 3 months of results. Poor, poor, poor. The chief advantage of Swensen's model is that it provides you with a low-impact method of recovering from your down year and also achieving equity like returns without the volatility of equities. Contrary to most investors (poor market timing instincts) rather than running from equities when they've been hammered you are running to them... Picking up LONG-TERM values. (Particularly in REITS which, given that this is a real estate crisis, have been predicably hammered.)

While I appreciate your attempts to "reach out" to your audience and appreciate your point that there is no magic formula (something in my reading of Swensen I never noticed... Indeed, he makes clear that his are suggestions), you seem to skewer Swensen simply for advising less-active investors into equities, when equities took a dump (Your reproach: Swensen in his book doesn't forecast the future. Bad Swensen).

Accordingly, while I agree with your contention that careful analyses of MPT (particularly in light of the growing correlation of previously thought diverse investment classes. Also, as commentators here have noted, why not commodities?) and the average investor are important, I disagree with your point that your earlier post advanced the debate (Indeed, it is a common trick to post schlock and then say you were merely advancing the debate-- the debate advancement was done by those who commented on your poor initial post. No thanks to your post.)

Consequently, I'd also like to thank many of the writers here for elevating Pressman's poor thinking into an interesting exchange.

* I ran a rough check using the (no longer working) Icarra portfolio of Swensen-- which hasn't been updated of late-- over the last 9.5 years vs. the S and P and a 60/40 portfolio... Swensen seems to be winning by with a return of 12,600 on 10,000 invested versus 10,600 for 60/40 and negative returns for the S and P 500. Moreover, his margin was achieved in a ten year secular bear market. If anyone could compare, or, better still, provide me with service that does what icarra does (and still works), I would appreciate it.

In the Hopper

I'm working on a book review of _When Genius Failed_

Several years late, I'm aware, but one that people have been referring to repeatedly as the crisis evolves and stock is taken...

ObamaCare (making the pitch for)

Stream of consciousness...

Health care reform-- like climbing Everest for the first time-- will be a long struggle... I'm in favor of it-- having lived for too long in Europe, I suppose...

What follows is a slightly disjointed marketing plan:

My father is an accountant by training... Left accounting went into management... Left big business to run a medium sized business... In order to save the company money, mom and he left his health care and switched to her's... As an accountant the old guy realized that more and more of the bottom line was being chewed up by health care costs... I remember clear as day, walking up the Boulevard St. Michel when my Rockefeller Republican father told me that the country needs national health care insurance.

The trouble is most small business owners are not accountants (a group with faults, no doubt, but one that is tends to focus less on ideology than numbers). Indeed, most small business owners regard themselves as up by the boot-strap types... doing it alone. And, consequently, they tend to think "Republican" falling into the idea that the market knows best-- even when (as with healthcare) the market is screwing them someplace uncomfortable and charging them double the market rate for the privilege.

What the President should do is start going to the belly of the beast and set up town halls with these small business owners- preferably with an accountant (like the old commercials, when the accountant speaks, people listen), and explain why this plan will help them in the long run to cut costs, put more money in their pockets, and grow their business...

(He should leave out that we're hoping they grow their business so that we can RAISE TAXES!!! [Insert Evil Socialist Laugh])

Like I was saying

Fed strategy to deal with inflation:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574300050657897992.html

As I said:

http://ignorancearbitrage.blogspot.com/2009/06/inflation.html

Dan Froomkin- gone from WaPo

A shame.

More later.

first you get this:

I must say that, to my mind, Steele has a point. It isn't the judicial rulings that trouble me so much as her non-judicial opinions and mindset. The constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity - racial and gender - and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation. I don't think it's disqualifying and I don't see any crude racialism in her rulings, but I do think it shows that for Obama, this kind of racial/ethnic view of the world is so endemic it's invisible to him. And it's off-message for his candidacy and life. But, hey, maybe he feels Scalia needs to get as good as he gives.

To which you quite rightly get this

You wrote,

The constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity - racial and gender - and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.

Maybe I have missed something, but I haven't seen any constant harping by Sotomayor over the past few weeks, and I haven't heard any in her history. I do see a constant harping on the "wise Latina" remark (made 9 years ago) and a constant harping on the Ricci case - not by her, but the abyss of 24-hour cable news. Yes, Obama has spoken about her race and gender. But it is an historic pick, and deserves mentioning what she has accomplished. She is a role model for young Latinas and Latinos growing up in inner cities, and the community is better for it.

and this:

So, I guess I was guilty of casual - if unintended - prejudices against gay marriage. Your constant harping (yes, harping) on the subject forced me to acknowledge the sanity and rightness of your argument for gays to marry.

So I'm too weary to describe all the ways in which your post lacks self-awareness. Please reflect on it some and let your readers know if further reflection brings the outrageousness of that quote into sharper focus.

To which our dear Mr. Sullivan replies:

The distinction I draw is the distinction made in Virtually Normal. I do not consider myself better than anyone because I'm gay; I do not think gay people have some superior wisdom; I seek civil equality so the sharp division between homosexuality and heterosexuality can eventually be elided. I've never shied from being honest or talking and writing about being gay, but I hope the goal of all of it is to move beyond the reductionism of the victimology of the left, not to entrench it. If Sotomayor had written an essay called "The End Of Latino Culture" or had written of the day she hopes Latino-specific political organizations disappear, I'd feel differently about her non-judicial record.

Let's go to Sotomayor, shall we... Where she acknowledges a shared idea of utopian justice, while retaining the practical knowledge that William Gaddis so bluntly summarized when he opened A Frolic of His Own "Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.":

For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.

By the way, a very balanced speech made in front of an organization promoting Latin Lawyers, where modestly (unlike Sullivan, I think) she promotes Latin judges as a source of (statistical) plurality which undoubtedly would hopefully close the gap between justice and the law while acknowledging that judicial modesty should triumph above all...

No victimology, simply thinking through the consequences of identity on judicial decisions. A rather rational and humble position, especially considering her Souterian reliance on precedent and legal process in what I've seen of her decisions.

P.S. The irony of Sullivan's reply is compounded by the fact that today Sullivan has been running a series of letters from various overachieving (gay) readers about how being gay has shaped their achievements.

P.P.S. Did he read this speech? I doubt it.

Lutz is a Putz, con't

Kausfiles (when it actually writes posts rather than tweets) can do some good stuff.

Take this takedown of Bob Lutz.

As I've stated, if you want to know why GM is in the state it is-- analyze the mindset of not only this guy, but the people who hired him and thought he would be a good spokesman...