New names for "Soft Power"

In reply to the third in the series of Matt Yglesias talking about the term "soft power":

El Cid's #20 also describes the potential downside to "influence", which otherwise enjoys popularity as being accurate and already used commonly in this context.  Influence contrasts with control: it sounds weaker because it implies you _might_ affect behavior, or you might not.  "Power" suggests a guarantee of the result you want (if you've got enough).

I'm stunned that "non-military power" and "civilian power" have come up but no one's mentioned "peaceful power" or a variation.  Maybe other people think "peace" sounds too weak also, but I think it's got rhetorical weight.  No one calls himself a warmonger; no one says they're against peace.  Opponents could imply "peaceful" means unwilling to use military force, but I don't see that gaining traction. 

I think Matt's second notion -- the "appeal of the brand" -- can be summed up as "Respect".  Respect, like "political capital", can be thought of as an element of peaceful power (look!  it's catching on!).  However, it's a cleric in the Peace Power party: respect doesn't make other nations do what you want directly, but it makes the diplomatic resources, development aid, etc. more effective.  (Curse you, pseudonymous in nc at #24, for planting the RPG analogy seed!)

High salary = high risk = sometimes getting burned

In response to this Yglesias post:

Word to Ted's #25. And weaker than Ted, but still true: if you look back to Matt's post, he isn't referring to CEOs in general, but executives strictly in the finance sector. Maybe that makes a difference to you, maybe it doesn’t.

My pithy rewording of Matt: “The buck stops where the bucks stopped.”

C’mon, you know you love it. It’s pithy! Who doesn’t like pith?

---------------------

I stopped there in the comment, and dragging past the punchline is a mistake, but I CAN'T HELP IT.  I know.  My loquaciousness disgusts even me.

To explicate further, the idiom about "the buck", where it stops and where it is passed, is sometimes used to mean the blame, and rhetoric about credit and blame is what the original post was about.  But, especially in terms of policy and corporate bailouts or whatever, I usually think of "the buck" to mean the responsibility, which is not the same thing.

If I run a company, and some employee mistreats a customer, I might know nothing about it, had no control over it, couldn't've predicted it, etc.  I'm not to blame.  But it's up to me to do something about it.  It's my responsibility, and if I don't want to be responsible for messes I didn't cause, then I shouldn't've taken the "running the company" job.

The topic that came up in the comments thread (that Ted's 25 pointed out was off the topic of the original post) was about CEOs and why they get paid so much.  An analogy to pro athletes came up, which I think is generally appropriate.  As I see it, pro athletes get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, their careers are short (partly because that rare performance level can't be maintained in the face of aging), and there's a high risk that a career might get cut off even sooner due to injury. 

Elite business executives presumably get paid high salaries because there's a small supply of people with their talents, although the requisite skills are extremely hard to measure.  My impression is that CEOs have much longer careers than athletes on average.  Is their income at high risk also?

I think it generally is, and that's as it should be.  Top-level execs of big companies have responsibility for lots of things, including things that they don't have complete control over.  Sometimes things are going to go south on them, and they're going to suffer for it, whether it's really their fault or not.

Ah, there's the rub. 

They don't always seem to suffer for it, do they?

And I really think they should.  Not because they're to blame; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, but it doesn't matter.  They're getting paid orders of magnitude more than other employees putatively because they took responsibility.  If they're not willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune -- there's _lots_ of people who'll take that job, and greater supply implies lower prices.

Unless the whole thing is a clever scam from the start.  If everyone thinks you've got big responsibilities, then they'll pay you for that risk.  And if in fact you don't take responsibility, then there's no actual risk, and they're paying you for nothing, which is the best kind of work.  But that's crazy talk, right?

uncertainty in voting results

In a comment to this post from the Citizens about the Minnesota senate race:

I'm not a statistician, but "margin of error" refers to the likelihood of a survey not accurately reflecting the population the survey is taken from.

Since the votes are what decide the election (we don't care what the population who doesn't vote thinks), the vote is a census, not a survey, and doesn't have any margin of error in the statistical sense.

But, as Florida 2000 demonstrated, you are right in thinking there will be "a different tally every time they are tallied."  This isn't a mathematical issue, but a practical one.  Out of three million ballots, some are going to be weird, subject to interpretation, of imperfect provenance, etc.

I _think_ the error rate associated with this sort of thing varies a lot based on the exact situation.  Different voting machine types (and different voting machines) will produce ambiguous results at different rates; different jurisdictions will have different judges who consider different proportions of provisional ballots to fall into the category of "subject to legal interpretation."

If, after the error-checking of the recount, the difference is still only a couple hundred, the chances are good that there's enough "fuzziness" in some of the votes that the result will come down to luck -- who has the higher tally when the courts (or the election laws) say "enough".  But not necessarily -- it's possible that even a very small margin is demonstrably genuine in the eyes of the law, if the voting machines are so good they don't produce many ambiguous results.  (This is the point of electronic voting machines, although optical scanning offers a clearer paper trail to check results against.)

I say "in the eyes of the law" because there's no way to determine beyond the shadow of <i>any</i> doubt that every voter's intent has really been accurately captured.  This boils down to the impossibility of absolute certainty -- at some point we draw the line and say "yes, it's possible that this electronic voting machine switched the vote of every 10,000th voter and we didn't happen to catch it with comparison to exit poll data, but that possibility isn't worth pursuing."

In a comment to this Matt Yglesias post:

It's like the song says: you've got to be carefully taught.

Hearing that ("You've Got to be Carefully Taught") from the Wee Kids on the Kid Power album is surely before Matt's time.  (To be fair, I never saw the show on television, since it was a little before _my_ time too.  Still have the album though.)

And that seems like a harsh reminder that progress is won only inch by inch.  The same sentiment that was an indictment of racism in 1949, and bore repeating in 1974, is equally appropriate regarding homophobia in 2008.

The more things change, the more ... we must fight for change.

reply to Citizens' Bell Curve commenting on 538

I think Bell Curve should stop for a second before emailing Nate Silver.

Firstly, there's a statistical principle here. Bell Curve is completely right that the likelihood of any particular outcome is tiny, and not a good way to measure whether the outcome was "likely" or whether the poll is "suspect". But the usual statistical comparison is what is the probability of getting the actual (sample) result or further from the mean. The right thing to look for, then, is the probability that McCain got 74% or more of the sample.

Saying "McCain's result was 74%, so let's look at the probability that the poll (sample) would come up with _70%_ or greater" is unfairly helping your own argument, since you're throwing in the chunk from 70% to 74%. So that part of the argument needs to be refined in any case.

Here's what I looked at. There's bound to be a few flaws in it, but I think it suggests Nate's numbers are closer to the mark.

First, there's the chi-squared goodness-of-fit test, as described here and here. The chi^2=41.04 for a 98-person sample producing an outcome of 73 McCain, 25 Obama, when the population is 41.25% McCain, 56.35% Obama. That's a big chi^2 value; according to the distribution calculator I just downloaded, that corresponds to a level of significance (for a one-sided tail) of about p=2.18*10^(-11). That's pretty close to Nate's odds (which give a probability of 1.83*10^(-11).) Since his numbers are so specific, and I haven't hesitated to round off, I'm thinking Nate has some exact binomial distribution data to get the precise value, and it looks to me like he's counting the tail, not just the chance of that precise outcome.

But far be it from me to just throw yet another approach out there and not produce some apples to compare to your apples. With a name like Bell Curve, you can't fault the guy for going to the Central Limit Theorem. :)

Okay, the binomial random variable Y is the number of young polled people who said they favored McCain, which has n=98 and we posit p=.425. So the expected value is np=41.65 and the variance is np(1-p)=23.94875.

The Central Limit Theorem says that Z=(Y-41.65)/sqrt(23.94875) is approximately N(0,1). The actual result was 73 for Y, or 6.406135493 for Z. The probability of Z being greater than or equal to 6.406135493 is 7.4627*10(-11), which again is more in the ballpark of Nate's result than 1 in 150.

Also, referring to Dr. S's approximations, the sigma for this case was sqrt(23.949)=4.89, pretty close to his 5% estimate, and the jump of 31.35% was 6.4 sigmas, close to his estimate of 6 sigmas or so. Which don't appear on his table, because 6 sigmas means really really unlikely. (Other than fudging p(1-p) in the sigma, which is a low-error fudge, Dr. S _is_ using the CLT, albeit with some roundoff.)

I don't have the facility to replicate Bell Curve's computation of the binomial distribution directly of the probability of getting exactly 73 McCain voters out of 98, so I couldn't say why that number came out at lower odds (=higher probability) than these tests indicate the probability of getting greater than or equal to 73 McCain voters out of 98 should be.

But I'm very suspicious of the 150 to 1 odds Bell Curve ends up with, for the reasons given above.

LTG, it may uninterest you to know that "six sigma" is a business management strategy, (some might say "fad"), that involves co-opting statistical methods for quality management of business processes, or something equally buzzwordy.

Bob Gets Sentimental

Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, contemplating "Obama's campaign and the values of parenting:"

Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

Here's the thing, and I hope it offers Ta-Nehisi some solace -- I disagree. I think she did see the results of all her work. Her son grew up to be a good and mighty man. That we are electing him to be President is just our recognition of what she already knew.

In comment to Ta-Nehisi Coates

A comment to this right here:

I cannot express how excited I would be at the opportunity to be
your white spokesperson. Resume available upon request. Email me!

Either this idea of class-criticism is just strawmanship, or I'm
blind to the intricate folkways of white people. I, frankly, suspect
that it's both.

And, in my opinion, your suspicions are entirely correct. There is
quite a bit of strawmanship going on, as your original citation
evidences. (No one actually ridicules anyone for being a "rube", except
maybe carnies. Otherwise, "rube" is only used in accusations -- "he
thinks you're a rube!")

This purposely confuses _everyone's_ understanding of the intricate
folkways. Matt was right to point out that eating moose isn't white
ghetto-equivalent ("whetto?"), but it's being purposely confused with
shooting and eating squirrel or possum, which is. (Although this
indicator is a stereotype that rarely occurs in the wild.) Snowmobiling
is whetto when it's competing with cross-country skiing, but in the
wider context (competitive snowmobile racing?) it's comparable with
Ski-doos and ATVs, which are on the expensive side to really indicate
whetto (we're getting into nouveau riche tacky territory -- if you're
snooty about ATVs, you're snootifying against how those rich people are
spending their money indulging their whetto tastes, which introduces
new social dynamic twists -- but more on this in a moment.)

"She supports drilling!" and "...where did she go to school?" are
what the author imagines cartoons of ecofascists and bluebloods would
exclaim, and nothing more.

A point worth pointing out, vaguely related to this post by Matt,
is that what actual lower class whites do is only peripherally related
to the classist notion of whetto. Predominantly, the class tension is
between white people who spend their disposable income within some
cultural norm structure, and white people who spend their disposable
income in some other cultural norm structure that the first group
thinks is how dumb poor people would spend their money if they had any.

I'm serious about that spokesperson gig. And I can be more concise
than this -- more words, fewer words, using "trailer trash" instead of
"whetto", whatever you want. I aim to please.

In comment to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has a nice description of how the bailout of bad mortgage securities would get paid for. In response, I commented:

In this description, is "the Public" predominantly the Chinese government and sovereign funds I keep hearing about, or is that hyperbolic xenophobia?

I've heard both that the bailout would be paid by the taxpayers (who would be "on the hook" for the assets, in case they have no value), and that the feds could actually make money by buying low and selling high.

Both of these seem to be ignoring that the bailout will be paid for with borrowed (or soon-to-be-borrowed) money, so even if the feds did sell off the toxic paper for more than they bought it for, the net effect might still increase the deficit.

Comment on Alaskan budget

In response to this post at the Citizens:

Just in case you're curious, although I wasn't able to exactly match up the data from RbR's reference and US West's, it certainly seems (within a percentage point or so) that the tax breakdown corresponds to oil revenue this way:

Property tax (1.9%): this corresponds to the $65.6M paid entirely by the oil companies.
Select sales (6.4%): this corresponds to $218M paid (presumably) by consumers.
Corporate Income Tax (23.6%): this corresponds to $771.3M, of which 77% ($594.4M) is paid by oil companies.
Other (68.1%): this corresponds to $2,396.4M, of which 96% ($2,292.3M) is the production tax paid by oil companies.

I
should point out that the percentages don't match the numbers exactly,
and there's a little leftover taxes ($28.2M "Fish Tax", $16M
"Commercial Passenger Vessel Tax") that I didn't know how to
characterize. Together, these are less than 1.3% of Alaska's tax
revenue.

Summing up, that big "Other" chunk of the Alaskan tax
pie is almost entirely oil production tax. The purple Corporate Income
tax is mostly oil company taxes also.

Percentage of tax
revenue paid directly by oil companies is about 84%. Percentage of the
entire Alaskan budget paid directly by oil companies is about 43%, paid
by federal money is about 12%, and paid by interest on investments is
about 31%. About 10% is paid by Alaskan citizens in the form of select
sales taxes, fines, etc. The remaining bit (4%, though this is also
where the rounding error lives) is from other corporate sources, like
mining.

--------------

Palin's big triumph as governor
was getting a new oil and gas tax passed that increased the tax rate on
the oil companies. So, when you hear she "took on the oil companies",
this is what it's about. Strangely, the Republicans never describe it
as "raising taxes on businesses", which I'm pretty sure Fred Thompson
told me was equivalent to raising my taxes. Also, it increases unemployment and stifles the economy, I am led to believe.

If,
as RbR quoted, Palin said she "protected the tax payers", that demands
clarification. The tax payers in Alaska are clearly the oil companies,
and she's raised their taxes. I doubt they think that's protection. :)

What Bob does when he should be working

Feel free to follow along with Bob's websurfing -- it's almost like being there!

As you know, I follow Matt Yglesias (who has a new bloghome), and he posted this reference/comment on university education, in which he notes that Brad DeLong, in this "excellent post on the origins of the large lecture course",

observes that large lectures had a compelling logic in the pre-Gutenberg universe....Modern practice, by contrast, is a bit puzzling.

So I went and read DeLong's whole post, which is deliciously concise, which doesn't make for really effect procrastinating, so I read on and found my ego vicariously mollified in this comment:

Brad, if you are seriously interested in this, you should speak to Carl Wieman....

The comment goes on to summarize Carl's take on university ed, and suggests you can hear it direct from him:

You can hear him discuss what he is on about here:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=95882746&s=143441&i=1556149

This link, it turns out, is on iTunes, which I don't have installed, at least on this machine.

The rest of the websurf into the blogshore is less interesting -- Googling "is iTunes evil?" convinced me that it was, but not so much that I shouldn't install it to hear a (presumably free) podcast of Carl. But I'm not currently logged in with privileges enough to install it, and so then I figured I'd blog my experience for you to share.

The "large lecture" issue doesn't come up at my place o'business, but it does at Rebecca's. But the general concern of "is this the way to teach?" is the Pressing Issue of Our Time. Feel free to put your random thoughts or suggestions in the comments, and maybe you will start a voyage of webby discovery for some other slacker!

Click here to see the rest of this post...

Fashion Police

via Mr. Yglesias:
"Flint, Michigan Battles Crack Epidemic" is actually about a new law in Flint specifying how you're not supposed wear your pants. Check it out -- the graphic is fantastic.

Matthew Yglesias describes my own puzzlement as well.

My mostly unhelpful take, which echoes some of the comments on Matt's page (especially mine), is that the counterpoint to the conventional wisdom about Watergate ("it's not the crime that brings you down, it's the coverup"), the unconventional wisdom if you will, is that you can get away with murder if you really stick to the coverup story.

Empirically, Bush &amp; company saw this work with Iran-Contra (which gave birth to "plausible deniability"), and just took that ball and ran with it.

More abstractly, the whole idea of adversarial debate (political parties, litigation, etc.) is that there's some arbiter that'll decide that one side or the other has the better argument, or makes the valid point. In politics, this role might be filled by the rationality of the opponent (who concedes the point), or the media (the journalists report the point with supporting facts), or the elites (the pundits concede the point), or "the people" (the opinion polls convince the politicians to concede the point).

If all those potential arbiters are impugned, indecisive, or unwise, whoever's in power can do whatever they want. Any outcry or opposition can be met with sheer stubbornness, and there's no authority to make you submit to reason or punish your transgressions.

The first and last potential arbiters (the opponent's fair thinking and the public) are pretty idealistic concepts, and have been ignored routinely by politicians throughout history, usually without repercussion. (Note, however, that even though he knew it would be disastrous, Nixon &lt;i&amp;gt;didn't&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; burn the tapes. Maybe even &lt;i&amp;gt;his&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; understanding that there &lt;i&amp;gt;was&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; the rule of law, or at least no justifiable reason not to turn over the tapes, was what led to the truth coming out and the requisite consequences. Have some politicians concluded from this that they need to ignore their reason in the pursuit of power?)

In my opinion, a large part of the "difference" between 1974 and now is due to the failures of the other two arbiters (reporters and pundits). If every news network were running McClatchy's stories, and Broder and his peers were agitating for impeachment...

The failures of the media (reportage and commentary) are ample fodder for the blogosphere, but my notions about &lt;i&amp;gt;why&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; they're failing so spectacularly &lt;i&amp;gt;now&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; are ill-formed and naive. Clearly the qualification process for punditry (and journalism) has broken down, and most importantly, wrongheaded thinking and/or meaningless coverage isn't resulting in loss of audience, at least not enough to provide economic pressure to get rid of lousy news &amp; opinion.

But I don't know why that is, or why it hasn't been such a problem until now. Maybe James Watt put stupid juice in the water supply under Reagan, and their brilliant plan has finally come to fruition. (I did say "ill-formed and naive", right?)

Click here to see the rest of this post...

Kids These Days

I offer this claim: "young people are skeptical of the traditional
political ideologies, and even more skeptical of ideological claims and
arguments." Not only do I believe it, I believe it ties together many
of the insights offered here, which I will shamelessly plagiarize
forthwith. Seriously -- if you don't read the posts over there then you're an accomplice.

Obama's not a radical, and therefore pundits seem
confused as to what the young people see in him. But "young people"
aren't hippies or beatniks or yuppies or neocons anymore -- they've
seen (or heard about) those "isms" and have no desire to be the victim
of still more broken promises. Most recently, they've seen huge
deficits, violations of civil liberties, and an unprovoked war passed
off as "conservative" and they ain't buyin' whatever the next snake oil
guy is sellin'. (Or as Dr. S put it, they [and we] are starved for the
truth.)

But Obama's not offering suspect promises -- he's
offering "a voice for the truth." Young people (maybe us too?) want to
get off the fruitless swinging pendulum and do indeed yearn for
normalcy. The pundits have not realized (and some may not be able to)
that this is the new radicalism.

Of course, there's a
hidden ideology in what you think "normal" is. And in this sense
Obama's vision (as articulated by LTG) of a "post-racial, post-conflict
America at peace" is indeed pretty radical, and I think precisely in
line with what "the young people" think of as the ideal "normal".

But
it's not a particularly political ideology -- there isn't some broad
ideal scheme for how we should get from here to there. Instead, there
are plenty of "obvious" incremental steps toward that particular
utopia. Elect a black president. Base diplomacy on something more than
macho posturing. Get the heck out of Iraq. Stop torturing people.

It
is perhaps sad that we have sunk so low that there's a long list of
obvious problems (maybe a presidential term's worth) that can be fixed
before you run out of low-hanging fruit and actually have to consult an
overarching political perspective to guide your next move. But it does
give us the rare opportunity to try the radical experiment of
"rationality" for a while.

Or, alternatively, we could elect McCain.

Change is not an option, it is THE option.

(via Atrios)

This is horrific. Read it. Because you need to know.

Seriously, this the sort of scene science fiction writers put into stories to let you know it's set in a dystopia.

Oh, but there's more. (Here's a summary in case the NYT wants you to log in.)

You know, about 81.3% of the country think we're headed in the wrong direction. And 15% think we're headed in the right direction.

You 15% need to get on the freakin' bus.

It's broken. We need to fix it.

Really, always true

Another excellent rule from the blogosphere: when the media generates its description of you...

clipped from gofugyourself.typepad.com you don't want to add the word "incontinent" in there anywhere.

Indirect posting from Rebecca

(2:59:01 PM) me (Goog): Rebecca just sent me http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com/
(3:01:21 PM) Sarah: LOL!
(3:01:32 PM) Sarah: She must post it to the blog. She must!!!
(3:01:38 PM) Sarah: I love ageism!

I don't care if Hillary drops out or not

(This is basically a comment I made to this post over at the Citizens. I figured it was long enough that I might as well post it here too.)

Unfortunately, it seems that the "electability" argument the Clinton campaign has emphasized is being interpreted as racism by some, and that seems to be a root of the deep division in the party.

Fortunately, I have a solution!

All the hootin' and hollerin' about Hillary needing to drop out is based on one fear: that she really is in contention. If it came down to near-even pledged delegates, and backroom wrangling of superdelegates, it would be unseemly, unDemocratic, and characteristic of the chaotic big-tent can't-get-it-together narrative associated with the Dems. Even if you think she can't win, you must think that she can make it close, or you wouldn't care whether she was running or not.

But if, as Dr. S indicates, you think Hillary has no chance, then it's no big deal. Jerry Brown ran all the way through on principle, as many others have done, and it didn't sunder the party because it didn't really matter. But he made his point, and I'm sure his supporters appreciated his continuing to the end.

Hillary's saying she appeals to the working-class whites that might otherwise vote for McCain? Okay, we should listen to what her appeal to them is, maybe even put something in the party platform from her policy proposals -- heck, offer her some appropriate cabinet position or blue-ribbon panel to chair. Because that's what you do with also-ran candidates to re-unify them and their constituency to the party.

The only people claiming that the Clinton campaign has a chance is the Clinton campaign. If the rest of the world (starting with the Obama campaign, since the media is physically unable to admit the horse race is over) just takes that with the salt it deserves, very quickly the statements of the Clinton campaign are filtered through that lens, and I think they appear very different and much less threatening.

More on Harvard donations

Go look at it over on Gnomicon. (I know, I was lazy and didn't cross-post.)

A brilliant post update

"I thank the pernicious commentators for giving me an opportunity to shed more light on this issue."

From a brilliant post explaining that in fact Obama isn't a Muslim. Because extreme obtuseness is a very popular trend right now.

Assuming I had a can opener...

Sarah's brought up the issue of who to give your money to
before, and even though it's comparatively late, we should give credit to Brad DeLong for addressing the topic and arguing that Harvard doesn't actually need any more money.

Which I suppose raises a good point. Frankly, the two charities that have me wrapped around their finger are the local NPR station and PEA and I don't know why. I don't think those are the causes I care the most about. Are they the experiences I liked the most? Do they just run the better fundraising campaigns?

On a related note, my current employer is very keen on me donating money to them. As a cause, I'm somewhat sympathetic, but the whole scheme rankles greatly. What, my pay isn't paltry enough, I'm supposed to give some back? And then you can go to other donors and say "look what suckers our faculty are, we've exploited every atom of their generous nature" and that'll make them give you money too?

Hmf. Looks like Scribefire is putting unclosed em tags at the end of Blogger posts.

Follow the link for references to the tyrant king porn dragon

So, anyone near Indiana, is this a real person? Is this getting a lot of Indiana press, or is he an ultrafringe loon who is mostly ignored?

I'm not kidding about the tyrant king porn dragon. Apparently it's pulling Jews into sex slavery, according to Zirkle. (See, now you HAVE to follow the link, don't you?)

clipped from thinkprogress.org Tony Zirkle, a GOP congressional candidate in Indiana, recently came under heavy criticism for speaking to the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP) on the 119th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth. At the event, Zirkle “stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background.” On his website, Zirkle has responded to the criticisms by railing against Jews and prostitution:

At least 3 people care about prisons

This is for Sarah, who is one of the above 3. Some interesting posts in the comments (if you ignore mine), but no direct discussion of _why_ prison reform is a political third rail.

I suppose indirectly there's some evidence however: many people say our massive imprisonment gets results, and the fact that the rest of the world isn't as unique as us explains why we need to imprison 1 out of every hundred adults. So what's to reform?

clipped from matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com Yikes: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners." Needless to say, we lead the world in imprisonment. This seems like a serious problem, especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards.

Bike lanes

True other places too. I'm not a big biker, but I'd be far more tempted if it didn't involve chicken contests with cars.

clipped from matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com For example, the city fathers of Washington, DC should consider that though it's nice that they've established some bike lanes, the key thing would be for the lanes to connect with one another and go into the downtown area so they'd be helpful for people trying to get from where they live to where the bulk of the stuff is. It's like how the roads for cars don't just stop arbitrarily.

Why Matt Yglesias is my blogdude

This is the kind of sarcasm I look for in my daily reading. Sadly, I wish he had fewer soft targets to aim his righteous biting wit at...

clipped from matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com Michael O'Hanlon gets a Washington Post op-ed to lay out his surprising view that the surge is awesome and, indeed, is working so well that we can expect to start taking troops out of Iraq in early 2010 if everything continues to be so awesome. In essence, thanks to the super-duper success of the surge, all we need now is several years of additional war and for all of Iraq's problems to solve themselves. Mission accomplished!

Bob's Innumeracy watch

Apologies to Ms. Beard for posting the whole article, but hey, if your math wasn't deceptive I wouldn't be forced to do this.

The percentages cited for other cities use a middle-cost scenario, while the Phoenix range of costs for owning is the low-cost and high-cost scenarios. So even if you knew better, you'd need to read the article to find the apples-to-apples comparison, which is this: the cost of ownership in Phoenix exceeds the cost of renting by 78%.

That's what those percentages mean, by the way: the article drops some critical words -- it should be "...when ownership costs exceed rental costs by 50 percent or more, it indicates a bubble."

Oh, and that "47 to 64 percent"? That's dividing the cost of renting by the (low and high scenario) cost of owning, which isn't directly comparable to any of the other results. Also, since that result isn't particularly meaningful, it's NOT in the original report, as opposed to all the other numbers in the article.

clipped from www.azcentral.com Betty Beard The Arizona Republic Apr. 6, 2008 09:05 PM The recent rise in Phoenix's housing prices means that in some cases the cost of owning a house grew too high compared with the cost of renting one, says a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. Based on 2006 housing costs, the cost of renting in the Phoenix area averages $862 while the average cost of owning can range from $1,343 to $1,804, depending on interest rates, the report said. That means that Phoenix rental costs can range from 47 to 64 percent of ownership costs. The report says that when ownership costs exceed 50 percent, it indicates a bubble. Some "extraordinary" gaps include New York City, where it costs 109 percent more to own a home than to rent; San Diego, 133 percent; San Francisco, 161 percent; and Los Angeles, 168 percent.

more mortgage deduction

(shoulda been clipped in previous)

clipped from www.theatlantic.com What it does promote, studies show, is spending on housing—that is, people who would have been owners anyway pay more for their houses. Prices are higher than they would otherwise have been, and mortgages are bigger. As many owners have learned abruptly, this can worsen economic insecurity.

Mortgage deduction silliness

Via Matt Yglesias

clipped from www.theatlantic.com The mortgage-interest deduction is the backbone of American housing policy. It exists, ostensibly, to encourage widespread homeownership. In its favor, it doesn’t actually do that. But it does have consequences: It’s been one of the quieter causes of the housing bubble. The mortgage-interest deduction deserves special recognition for the stupidity with which it subsidizes something that should not be subsidized in the first place. I challenge you to design a subsidy for homeownership that is as wasteful, as unfair, and as harmful to the economy in the long run.