Tuesday, January 26, 2010

It makes you feel warm and comfortable, and nobody notices.

David Brooks writes a good column. But tell me, why is writing a good column very much like wetting your pants in a dark suit?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:33 AM

Is there some cerification board out there somewhere?

Hey, I'm just as respectful of authority as the next guy, but tell me -- is there some official agency somewhere that gets to decide things like this? UPDATE: Is this the administration's reaction? UPDATE II: Other reactions suggest the President has liquidated himself by performing a self-inflicted lobotomy. Who was it who said you couldn't make this stuff up? UPDATE III: Okay -- it was funny at first but now it's getting truly repulsive. Not that I think anything should be censored or prosecuted, but still, the more I read this morning the more this all sounds like pure and simple political hate speech.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:08 AM

Sunday, January 24, 2010

But the Left is supposed to know all about history I thought...

David Michael Green's tirade against the Democrats, is lots of fun, but its grasp of history seems, well, sort of shaky: [The Democratic Partis is] the same party that could run a decorated combat hero against a war evader in 1972, only to be successfully labeled as national security wimps. Just to be sure, it then did the exact same thing again in 2004. I don't get it. Was Nixon automatically a war evader because he was a Quaker, even though he did in fact serve in WW II? Maybe I'm missing something.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:14 AM

Didn't Mel Gibson star in one of them?

Remember the "save the farm" social action movies of the 1980s? What was that all about, anyway? Here's the answer.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:23 AM

Saturday, January 23, 2010

What's wrong with the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee?

Other than the fact those who wrote it don't understand the finance sector, nothing.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:27 AM

The economics of modern fascism...

Yes, this essay is old -- Robert Reich is of course no longer Secretary of Labor -- but it strikes us as even more relevant today than it was when it first appeared. UPDATE: This, on the other hand, is current and just as relevant.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:35 AM

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Orthodoxy gives way to Heterodox Economics

The internal contradictions were too much. The system was no longer viable in its then-present form. And the modern world emerged.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:56 AM

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Climategate: a question...

Nobody I can find has asked this yet. So, here goes: Why weren't the raw data kept up to date as part of the ongoing program? Anyone working with time series data knows you don't just add a new number to the end of a series at the end of the month -- rather, the whole time series gets re-written, transferred from older storage formats to newer ones, re-cataloged if possible and appropriate, etc etc etc. This is PART OF YOUR JOB! How can anyone possibly throw out raw data to save space? What was judged more important? Here's another extra-credit question: none of the participating governments threw out their data to save space I would venture to guess. Indeed, all have almost certainly recoded all necessary data series in the most up to date machine readable form, so reconstructing the lost data ought to be, if not an easy project, then at least a doable project. So, let's get cracking! UPDATE: Finally somebody else is saying something similar! Frankly it's about time!

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:32 AM

Monday, November 30, 2009

Economics of End of Empire...

The only thing I find surprising about this essay is the author's apparent discomfort with the article's predictions.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:51 AM

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Dr. Antler says...

No, I'm not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on TV. But even I can see the reported numbers in this Washington Post article make absolutely no sense. 1. According to the article, for every 1000 women screened there will be roughly 500 false positives. What? There's a 50 percent false positive rate? 2. According to the article, 33 unnecessary biopsies result from roughly 500 false positives. What? Out of all women told they may have a serious illness only seven in every hundred follow up with additional investigation? What? I could go on, but you see my point. There are major numeric sins of numeric omission evidenced in this article. UPDATE: Am I certifiably paranoid to thing the above-mentioned Washington Post article bears some relationship to the events reported in this article?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:31 AM

Friday, October 30, 2009

Disposable-Income-Free Recovery?

DPI appears to be turning into a lagging indicator. As this chart from FRED shows, even though GDP grew, disposable personal income did not. For a quick summary of steps required to get from GDP to DPI click here.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:23 AM

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Back to Ditko...

First read this. Then read this.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:42 AM

Why our world doesn't resemble Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"...

References for this article: (a) monopolistic power may be an exclusively sociopolitical construct, and (b) monopolistic power is (for reason (a) above) historically quite likely to give way to more competitive forms of socioeconomic organization. In other words: Marx's law of increasing concentration has it completely backwards. UPDATE: Indulge your penchant for Utopian fantasy for one moment. Imagine a world in which property rights to all (electronic) medical records reside with the patient -- and, in this very same world, we can order computer software with an inexpensive electronic interface that plugs our car into our laptop and tell us in simply everyday language whether anything is wrong. Wouldn't it be fun, nice, and (yes) less expensive?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:33 AM

Shifting the cost curve up by shifting the supply curve back...

This disturbing article is dated 2005 -- if I can find anything more recent and more authoritative, I'll post it in an update. This even-more disturbing article appears in today's Investors' Business Daily. If even one in ten of the polled doctors makes good on his or her declared intention to retire early, the upshot is "health care reform" will generate the most disastrous labor shortage (i.e. shortage of doctors) in American history. UPDATE: An advantage of the current debate is the way it has mainstreamed at least some understanding of the "47 million uninsured" internal statistics. Case in point (about which we've been arguing with friend and family for years): just how many of the "47 million" might suffer personal financial damage owing to an individual mandate?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:55 AM

Monday, September 14, 2009

Bureau versus Business...

Via Instapundit, an essay purporting to show how and why the public option will resemble the IRS. Let's briefly review the difference between two alternate forms of what Max Weber called "modern rationality" (or, uh, something like that). A business has goals and meets these goals by (a) dealing with the public and (b) earning a profit by doing so. If condition (b) is not met the business ceases to exist. The point here is that this form of organization has a kind of a life of its own, a culture, a means of (in effect) "staying alive" through the repetition of certain procedures. A bureau also has goals and meets these goals by (a) dealing with whomever it is designed to deal with (sometimes the public, sometimes others) and (b) establishing and maintaining credibility with its overseer (whomever that may be). The problem here is a bureau's main method of establishing credibility is to expand both its mandate and its physical size. Whereas a business automatically fails if its goals are not met, a bureau automatically expands under the same circumstances. Thus we're really afraid of any upcoming creation of Fannie Med and Freddie Quack.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:23 AM

Friday, September 04, 2009

Sooner than global warming, more serious...

Via Instapundit, a sobering article on why default is likely.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:45 AM

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Islanders: pray for return of the cargo planes...

At Huffington Les Leopold says: These benefits did not fall from the sky or from the generosity of their employer. Verizon workers won these benefits by uniting with each other and with their union, the Communications Workers of America. They fought a series of strikes over the past three decades (with Verizon and with the companies that preceded it) to secure their benefits and to hang onto them against stiff company assaults. But isn't this a mentality that might claim cargo cults actually work? If these wonderful benefits can actually be generated by strikes, wouldn't GM workers have absolutely nothing to worry about?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:51 AM

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Why do we use such a silly name for the problem?

Paul Rosenberg angrily indicts the economics profession with the rather uninformed notion that all-powerful regulators were napping rather than regulating: The fact that this bubble was clearly visible as early as 2002, and that significant negative consequences of a collapse were already foreseeable, is a powerful indictment of the failure of the economics profession as well as the rest of economic establishment--the real estate lenders, the wider financial sector that gobbled up mortgaged-based securities, the regulators, who were busy doing their Rip Van Winkle imitations, the business and financial press--you name it, they were all in fail mode. We might smile affectionately at Rosenberg's misunderstanding of economics' basic principles were it not for his angry nearly-encyclopedic tabulation of quarter truths. Deregulation, Reagan, trickle-down theory, tax cuts -- all these he says caused a housing crisis that ought to have been prevented by wise and stalwart regulators. What he doesn't seem to know is bubbles have been well understood as near-impossible to to stop -- for a wide variety of reasons -- since the seventeenth century. And, since then, everyone has also known nothing but a bubble's eventual "bursting" (whose accurate timing remains an economic-theoretic-holy-grail) can bring them to an end. All this, of course, is why we call them "bubbles" in the first place.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:16 AM

Friday, August 28, 2009

What to do?

Banks are more concentrated than ever. 40% of all savings deposits are in J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. 50% of all mortgages, as well as two thirds of all credit cards, are issued by these three plus Citigroup. Interesting -- the numbers reflect some need for regulation, no? The problem is the numbers were in large part created by regulation. These are the "too-big-to-fail" institutions, proving that what you get when you save institutions that are too big to fail is institutions that are even bigger than too-big-to-fail! UPDATE: If you can somehow manage to avoid hyperventilation you'll probably agree these numbers aren't really so disturbing or unusual. Some highly competitive industries can be shown to be comprised of as few as two firms with an 80% market share, and many others competing nicely for the remaining 20%. The United States represents a huge marketplace. A simple 5% US market share is actually a very large number in everyday terms.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:05 AM

Thursday, August 27, 2009

He invented Spider Man and Dr. Strange

I've just learned my childhood hero Steve Ditko is (a) alive and (b) a follower of Ayn Rand. You might call his masterpiece, "The Unchecked Premise," a comic book adaptation of the basic principles underlying Atlas Shrugged.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 12:57 PM

New business cycle speaks...

Via Instapundit, Doctor Doom speaks his mind. It seems to me Roubini is using a metaphor he doesn't really need -- borrowing to pay interest on public (or private) debt is obviously unsustainable. No need call it a Ponzi scheme to win readers over or capture their attention. His strongest argument -- that inflation as well as inflationary expectations are nearly impossible to halt once they've taken hold -- is seriously weakened by the simple fact we've not yet had a runaway inflation preceded by a well-known historical incidence of just such an event. In 1972 we were arguing over simple price-ignorant Keynesian models versus Milton Friedman's exotic notion monetary elements are primarily responsible for sustained price movements. Now monetarism is so familiar its very terminology needs to be explained to students. In short: since we know now what we didn't know then, outcomes will be different.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:31 AM

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Quote of the day...

Howard Dean: The reason tort reform is not in the [health care] bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on. And that's the plain and simple truth...

Link posted by Steve Antler : 5:49 PM

Culture of poverty returns...

in (once) Great Britain. By the way, a quick review of the numbers says that (very) roughly 9% of the population now live in households comprised entirely of the unemployed. UPDATE: Meanwhile, elsewhere in the economy... UPDATE II: And elsewhere, we see how the "public option" is working out by looking here and here... True, these are all anecdotes -- but we're now in a battle of anecdotes, aren't we?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:35 AM

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

NYT debunks peak oil...

Peak oil is a myth -- this must be true considering the source.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:05 AM

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Wait long enough and everything happens...

Nat Hentoff is finally and actually frightened by a White House administration.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:32 AM

Friday, August 14, 2009

The Death Panel Chart

Via Instapundit this valuable little essay on the likely shape of things to come. And by the way, here's a chart showing probably likelihood of medical intervention as a function of age under the rational sort of system now being proposed by the House: This link takes you to the original 2009 Lancet article by Persad, Wertheimer, and Emanuel. Read it and decide for yourself how you feel about the issues involved.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:43 AM

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What do those fat cat insurance companies actually rake in?

If numbers like these can be trusted and substantiated, it is only a matter of time before the substance of the current debate shifts in a major alternate direction

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:51 AM

Monday, August 10, 2009

Call screening not set up for this...

Via Instapundit, Chicago-style direct political action slams Chicago talk radio.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:46 AM

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Just wanna get this off my chest...

During the past fifteen years I've had exactly two incidents -- no more than two -- in which African American males at least 12 inches taller than me stood close to my face shouting grievances attributed to racial discrimination. In one instance I was personally involved -- a disgruntled employee who, being fired after working for only one day, demanded the same Thanksgiving bonus given to those who had worked ten years or more for our business. In another instance I was an innocent bystander, standing face to face with a tall, muscular black individual who felt a policeman had just insulted him. I was told, at the top of this persons' lungs, "this is why we kill people like you" and other such things. So my questions are these. First, had a police officer been present, would either of these individuals have been arrested for disturbing the peace if they refused to stop intimidating me after being warned twice? Second, if someone behaves this way to a police officer rather than a private citizen is some sort of protected speech involved that is different from that concerning private citizens? Is it okay to yell, insult, and harass police officers but against the law to do the same thing to private citizens? Or, rather, were the two very frightening confrontations described above simple examples of protected free speech?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:30 AM

One of those fixed costs that just keeps on giving...

It keeps on giving trouble. Business good? Business bad? No matter. Pay your property taxes of vacate in favor of somebody who can pay them. Or, perhaps, in favor of nobody but an empty, unoccupied and unused business facility. And just to make sure we're all on the same page, this is happening on the liberal East Coast, land of social justice and equality.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:08 AM

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Greedy doctors going after our childrens' tonsils?

This highlight (one of the very few specifics) is being widely criticized in comments for its ignorance of the basic principal-agent issue involved. The primary care physician makes the decision to refer someone's kid to the surgeon. It is the surgeon -- not the primary care doctor -- who rakes in all those "tonsil bucks." Does the current system include some sort of widespread kickback scheme? UPDATE: More here. UPDATE II: And who minds the overseers?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:24 AM

Friday, July 17, 2009

Be forewarned...

The Shanghai Composite Index will collapse between July 17 and 27 according to this report. Via Technology Review, which seems to take a dim view of the methodology. (Hat tip to T.D.) UPDATE: More here via Instapundit. UPDATE II: Coming soon? Late?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:41 AM

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Fannie Med and Freddie Quack...

Mankiw speaks out on public health care: In practice...if a public option is available, it will probably enjoy taxpayer subsidies. Indeed, even if the initial legislation rejected them, such subsidies would be hard to avoid in the long run. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants created by federal law, were once private companies. Yet many investors believed -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the federal government would stand behind Fannie's and Freddie's debts, and this perception gave these companies access to cheap credit. Similarly, a public health insurance plan would enjoy the presumption of a government backstop. UPDATE: And don't forget to read Atlas Shrugged to get a handle on what's going on right now! UPDATE II: And via Instapundit we have this.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:51 AM

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Greenback movement revisited?

California will issue IOUs instead of checks. Will they circulate? At what discount? Don't you just adore new and exotic forms of money?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 12:56 PM

Culture of Anglosphere rules again?

I know this is totally off-the-wall and insensitive to all the specifics of Iranian politics and society, but do current behind-the-scenes events amount to early stages of a bicameral system modeled on England (with a powerful but still-appointed and yet-advisory upper House of Lords)? Just a thought. Anyway, here's the article: According to unconfirmed reports Rafsanjani is currently lobbying and meeting with members of the Assembly of Experts to gain support for the removal of Khamenei and for replacing the position of Supreme Leader with a form of collective leadership. Those last words are where I skidded to a stop. "A form of collective leadership"? Yes, just like the House of Lords!

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:26 AM

Anglosphere in early stages of recovery?

Australia rescuing itself from global warming cultism? Perhaps: [T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:14 AM

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Fairmodel, all others on hold...

Whenever any numbers (e.g. money supply) move outside reasonable historical limits the equations making up large models must be judged unreliable predictors. The models can be used, but the results can't be trusted. More and more it appears we're outside the realm of reliable modeling, at least during the forseeable future. This amazing story underlines the point vividly. UPDATE: They're fake. Whew! UPDATE II: Via Instapundit, the story continues...

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:41 AM

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Less necessary? Less?

Medicare disproportionate share payments compensate certain hospitals for higher operating costs incured in treating their larger share of low-income, uninsured patients. The administration has only now discovered they can save about $106B in health care costs under their new plan because, as Peter Orzag says, "(a)s the ranks of uninsured decline under health reform, those payments become less necessary..." Well, duh, glad you finally noticed! And by the way, what's with this "less" necessary? How about "un"?

Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:26 AM

Friday, June 12, 2009

Robert Reich Reveals Reality...

You decide how to read this: Whatever it's called -- public option or chopped liver -- it has to be able to squeeze Pharma, Insurance, and the rest of the medical-industrial complex. And the more likely it is to squeeze them, the more they'll fight it. And the greater the opposition from Republicans, and from Dems who either believe any bill has to have some Republican support or who have sold themselves out to the medical biggies. To me, the operative word is "squeeze." In the ideal Reich universe (as in Canada) medical care becomes a zero sum game for all: your treatment means doctors or drug companies earn less, or, alterately, other patients wait longer. That's it. That's the secret of the single payer solution.

Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:04 AM

 
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