Four points are worth noting.
• First, the effects of a severe recession experienced are large when the individual is between the ages of 18 and 24 – the so-called formative age – during which social psychologists think most of social beliefs are formed; the effects are not so strong when the recession is experienced later in life.
• Second, these effects are permanent because attitudes of recession-stricken individuals remain significantly altered many years after the severe recession ends.
• Third, we control for individuals’ endowments such as income, level of education, and ownership of a house that could also have an impact on beliefs. We thus measure the direct effect of a recession on beliefs; this effect could be even bigger if we added also the indirect effect through the personal endowments, which are also affected by a recession.
• Fourth, our estimation represents a lower bound of the effect of a recession on beliefs because our identification strategy relies only on regional shocks implicitly ignoring the effects of nationwide recessions.
Focusing on the financial market and using nationwide shocks, Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel (2009) shows that that birth cohorts that have experienced high stock market returns throughout their life report lower risk aversion, are more likely to be stock market participants, and, if they participate, invest a higher fraction of liquid wealth in stocks. In addition, cohorts that have experienced high inflation are less likely to hold bonds. Interestingly, stock market returns and inflation early in life affect risk-taking several decades later. These findings explain why different generations have different investment patterns.
Why do beliefs on the importance of luck, the role of the state, and redistribution matter for the economy? Today’s experiences and beliefs shape tomorrow’s political climate, and, ultimately, determine policies. Thomas Piketty (1995) has shown that people who believe that luck plays a big role are more comfortable with higher taxes. Similarly, Alesina and Angeletos (2005) and Benabou and Tirole (2006) show that the interaction between a belief in fairness or “in a just world” respectively are able to generate an “American” equilibrium with laissez-faire policies and just-world beliefs and a “European” equilibrium with social welfare and a more pessimistic view about how just the world is.
A new Big Government generation?
So, it is possible that the experience of the current severe recession is forming a generation that will be more risk -verse, invest less in the stock market, want more state intervention, believe more in redistribution, and accept higher taxes?
Large political realignments in the US have often coincided with traumatic economic events, which were supposed (but without firm evidence so far) to change attitudes and, ultimately, the political climate. Each crisis is a point of choice with important implications for the future.3 A consistent body of research is now showing how economic conditions affect beliefs and attitudes. However, it seems that politicians around the world are welcoming the new zeitgeist even without waiting for economists’ results. [More]
Therefore, it is simply stupid and a waste of time to say that massive budget cuts are the answer to our problem without taking account of inevitable congressional resistance. Of course, presidents can try to influence Congress to be more supportive of their requests. They can give speeches to joint sessions of Congress, as Barack Obama recently did, or go over the heads of Congress to the people and try to create grass roots pressure, as Ronald Reagan often did, or they can try to pressure, cajole or threaten individual members of Congress the way Lyndon Johnson did. But at the end of the day, a president has to find at least a majority of congressmen and senators to vote for something or it doesn't become law.
Devising a package of budget cuts large enough to prevent national bankruptcy must also deal with other realities that make them almost impossible to achieve. These include the changing nature of the federal budget and the changing composition of the population.
Many of those favoring budget cuts have ridiculous notions about how much of the budget can be cut without reducing services. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans generally believe that 50% of the budget is wasted. This suggests that they believe the federal budget could be cut in half without cutting anything important like Social Security benefits or national defense. [More]
"I don't want to sign something that is going to send my two boys out to war. We're probably fine for our generation but I don't know about theirs."
Her husband, Michael, didn't vote last time but will be supporting the Yes side on Friday, mainly for economic reasons.
He says: "I've no reason to vote No and it's not going to do any harm to the country. Why not give it a shot and see what happens."
The Fianna Fail-Green coalition is so unpopular that farmers, like other voters, don't believe it and want to punish politicians.
And yet at the same time they're frightened of the consequences of voting No and being seen to reject the European Union for a second time in 16 months.
Geraldine Langan, an organic farmer with three acres, from Ballydesmond in Co Kerry in the southwest, didn't vote last time but is reluctantly edging towards a Yes this time.
"Ireland voted No the last time and it puzzles me why we're going back to the polls again and we're more or less being forced to vote Yes," he said.
"What I've picked up in the last little while on it is that it could possibly be in our favour to vote Yes this time because of jobs and keeping in with the European Union."
One poll suggest that farmers will vote by a margin of four to one in favour of Lisbon on Friday.
That is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it does seem as though rural Ireland is moving from a No to a Yes position.
As for the Republic as a whole, we should have a fair indication of what way the country voted by mid-morning Saturday. [More]
Yet the real tragedy is that, by exaggerating the threat of global warming, we have awoken the beast of protectionism. There are always forces in society that demand that politicians create more barriers to trade because they cannot compete on an even, fair playing field. Global warming has given them a much stronger voice.
Already, politicians are responding -- and using the fear of global warming to create "green fences" against free trade. The U.S. House has passed the Waxman-Markey climate change bill with clear provisions to impose new trade tariffs on countries that don't agree to emission reductions. Eyes are on the Senate, where John Kerry sees these as "sanctions" against "renegade countries."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly called for a Europe-wide tax on imports from nations whose global warming efforts do not measure up to Europe's. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently backed the idea.
There is a real and growing prospect of an all-out trade war being waged in the name of climate change.
The struggle to generate international agreement on a carbon deal has created a desire to punish "free riders" who do not sign on to stringent carbon emission reduction targets. But the greater goals seem to be to barricade imports from China and India, to tax companies that outsource, and to go for short-term political benefits, destroying free trade.
This is a massive mistake. Economic models show that the global benefits of even slightly freer trade are in the order of $50 trillion -- 50 times more than we could achieve, in the best of circumstances, with carbon cuts. If trade becomes less free, we could easily lose $50 trillion -- or much more if we really bungle things. Poor nations -- the very countries that will experience the worst of climate damage -- would suffer most. [More]
In other words… the only species that “dolphin safe” tuna is good for is dolphins! The bycatch rate for EVERY OTHER species is lower when fishing dolphin-associated tuna vs. floating object associated tuna! The reason for this is obvious- floating objects attract everything nearby, while dolphins following tuna doesn’t attract any other species.
If you work out the math on this (and you don’t have to, because the environmental justice foundation did) , you find that 1 dolphin saved costs 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish.
By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.
Here we get into the ethical debate.
Is it worth saving dolphins, who were not and are not endangered, at the expense of sea turtles, sharks, and many other fish species who are endangered? [More]
The snaking line of more than 1,000 people queuing to enter the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Friday afternoon illustrated perfectly the surge of interest sparked by the announcement — just a day before — of the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered.Whaddaya think metal detector sales are doing in the UK right now? They were already pretty good.
Among those queuing to see the artefacts was Allison Buckley, 47, from Stafford. “It is almost as exciting as queuing to see the treasures of Tutankhamun,” she said, recalling the rush to see the Egyptian boy king’s death mask in London in 1972. “What makes this so exciting is that it has just been unearthed. There is still soil on the pieces and you can imagine it in the ground.”
The Anglo-Saxon treasures were chanced upon in a Staffordshire field by Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old unemployed metal-detection enthusiast. The find — almost 1,500 gold and silver items thought to date from the 7th or 8th century — has staggered archeologists. It will, experts say, completely reshape our understanding of the Dark Ages. [More]
The good news: The U.S. hog industry is contracting. The bad news: Because of extreme efficiency (higher pigs per litter), the rate of contraction won't likely be as strong as what the base numbers would suggest. The higher pigs per litter figure for June through August means there will be more hogs longer-term than what was expected. While we can't complain about high efficiency, there is still a greater need for contraction because producers continue to get more pigs per litter. [More]
Red ink is flowing, cash is hard to get, and cuts are being made. Prestage Farms, Clinton, North Carolina, will cull 10 percent of its sows across all farms by December, bringing the company's total to 125,000 sows, says owner Bill Prestage. "When we cull we won't replace. This is worse than 1998 because it's lasted longer. The big thing that killed us is ethanol. H1N1 hasn't helped, either."
Many of the largest producers report that sow cuts don't translate to market hog numbers dropping. In fact, small cuts may actually do the opposite. "If you cut 4 percent or less you go up in pigs produced," says Bob Christensen of Christensen Farms in Sleepy Eye, Minn., part of the Triumph Foods system. "You're not crowding the system and people are able to do their jobs better. You have to cut 6.5 percent of your sows to see a real decrease in pigs produced."
Sow productivity is at an all-time high for most of the largest companies, with many farms averaging 24-26 pigs weaned per sow each year. "That's world-class performance," says industry consultant Randy Stoecker. "People are weaning more than 11 pigs per sow and seeing less than 3 percent mortality from wean to finish. They cut back sows, but the output of pigs does not go down. We are strangling ourselves with production." [More][My emphasis]
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said Thursday in a statement to the Navy Times, ““I believe women should have every opportunity to serve at sea, and that includes aboard submarines.”.
According to the Navy Times, his comment comes one week after Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told congressional lawmakers that he thought it was time to end the ban against women on submarines.
Mullen’s successor, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, also said he is “very comfortable” addressing the crewing policy.
The Navy has 7,900 female officers and 44,000 female sailors, making up about 15 percent of officers and sailors in that active component.
How about the exceptionally close quarters and extended duration of submerged duty aboard submarines, etc., etc.?
Admiral Mullen and others think those issues can be resolved. [More]
On Wednesday, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics that already makes one of Europe’s best-known e-readers, plans to announce that it is entering the United States market with a $399 touch-screen e-reader.
Owners of the new iRex DR800SG will be able to buy digital books and newspapers wirelessly over the 3G network of Verizon, which is joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting such devices. And by next month, the iRex will be sold at a few hundred Best Buy stores, along with the Sony Reader and similar products.
By all accounts, e-readers are set to have a breakout year. Slightly more than one million of them were sold globally in 2008, according to the market research firm iSuppli. The firm predicts that 5.2 million will be sold this year, more than half of them in North America, driven by the popularity and promotion of the Kindle, which is available only through Amazon’s Web site. [More]
For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.
Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet. [More]
"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration.
Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth.
"For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.
Suren Dutia, CEO of TiE Global, a worldwide network of professionals who promote entrepreneurship, says the U.S. economy will suffer without these skilled workers. "If the country is going to maintain the kind of economic well-being that we've enjoyed for many years, that requires having these incredibly gifted individuals who have been educated and trained by us," he says.
Wadhwa surveyed 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked or been educated here before returning to their homelands and found the exodus has less to do with the faltering U.S. economy than with other factors:
•Career opportunities. At NIIT, an information technology company based in New Delhi, about 10% of managers in India are returnees, mostly from the U.S., says CEO Vijay Thadani.
Most go into mid- to senior management and make "excellent employees," he says. "They're Indian, so they understand India, and they have lived outside the country."
China's government entices some skilled workers to return with incentives such as financial assistance and housing, says Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. "China needs a lot of well-trained personnel" in fields such as finance and information technology, he says.
•Quality of life and family ties. People return to India to reconnect with their families and culture, Dutia says. "They have a support system there, family and friends."
Purchasing power is greater, he says, which allows returnees to afford more luxuries than they did in the U.S. Dutia describes a complex of "magnificent homes" in Bangalore. In the club room, there were "all these Americans and Europeans and expats on the treadmills with iPhones, watching CNN and BBC," he says. "Things have changed."
•Immigration delays. Multinational companies that belong to the American Council on International Personnel tell Executive Director Lynn Shotwell that skilled immigrants are discouraged by the immigration process, she says. Some can wait up to a decade for permanent residency, she says. "They're frustrated with having an uncertain immigration status," she says. "They're giving up." [More]
I could have written about this same phenomenon forty years ago, and the trend has been unfazed by good times and bad, well-intentioned and well-funded measures, and relentless hand-wringing. Somehow we can't get the image of idyllic small town America from our minds, and have decided it somehow represents the optimal choice of demographic dispersal. But I'm no longer sure that is even close to the truth, much less real expectations.The most dramatic evidence of the rural meltdown has been the hollowing out—that is, losing the most talented young people at precisely the same time that changes in farming and industry have transformed the landscape for those who stay. This so-called rural "brain drain" isn't a new phenomenon, but by the 21st century the shortage of young people has reached a tipping point, and its consequences are more severe now than ever before. Simply put, many small towns are mere years away from extinction, while others limp along in a weakened and disabled state.
In just over two decades, more than 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population. Nationally, there are more deaths than births in one of two rural counties. Though the hollowing-out process feeds off the recession, the problem predates, and indeed, presaged many of the nation's current economic woes. But despite the seriousness of the hollowing-out process, we believe that, with a plan and a vision, many small towns can play a key role in the nation's recovery.Civic and business leaders in the places most affected by hollowing out will tell anyone willing to listen how it is their young people, not hogs, steel, beef, corn, or soybeans, that have become their most valuable export commodity. Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning observer of small town life, believes that any story of small-town America is, at its core, the story of the people who stay and the ones who go. Yet, what is different at this moment is how, in a postindustrial economy that places such a high premium on education and credentials, the flight of so many young people is transforming rural communities throughout the nation into impoverished ghost towns. A new birth simply cannot replace the loss that results every time a college-educated twentysomething on the verge of becoming a worker, taxpayer, homeowner, or parent leaves. And as more manufacturing jobs disappear every day, the rural crisis that was a slow-acting wasting disease over the past two decades has evolved into a metastasized cancer. [More]
1969 - 21,752I have wandered though various reactions to this very obvious trend in my life. But after this long, it begins to dawn on you this is occurring for powerful reasons and strongly presages the future.
2000 - 19,657
2007 - 18,831
In 1990, 8 percent of Americans reported that they had no religious beliefs. Twenty years later, that's 15 percent. But when you look at younger Americans, you see that the proportion of "nones" is reaching 22 percent. The 1990s were the boom years for the Nones; and a huge 35 percent of the new Nones are ex-Catholics. No doubt, some of this is a reflection of the sex abuse crisis. But the intellectual collapse of Christianity under the leadership of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic theocons is surely relevant. The well-deserved inability of literalists to win many converts among educated people is also surely salient. The emergence of the politicized Christianist right - and its assault on Christianity as a freely chosen spiritual process - will surely lead to a continued and accelerating flight from organized religion.
But the Nones are not Ditchkins atheists. They express their position primarily as a form of skepticism and Deism. They are agnostics who do not dismiss the religious life but remain at a cool distance from it. This is, of course, one of the deepest American religious inheritances:
"American nones are kind of agnostic and deistic, so it's a very American kind of skepticism," says Barry Kosmin, director of Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. "It's a kind of religious indifference that's not hostile to religion the way they are in France. Franklin and Jefferson would have recognized these people."
The study estimates that in twenty years, the Nones will make up 25 percent of Americans. [More]
In addition to making sure that network operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications, and services of their choice, or attaching unharmful devices to the network, Genachowski wants to add two more rules.
The first would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management. The second principle would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.
Broadband providers such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon Communications have opposed regulation or new laws that would dictate how they could run their networks. Up until this point, the Internet has been free of any regulation. And these companies would like to keep it that way.
That said, the nation's two biggest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, have accepted the principles outlined by the FCC, when it comes to their wired broadband networks. Even though they don't think additional regulation is needed, they have agreed in principle with keeping their broadband networks open.
But the regulation that Genachowski is proposing will not apply to just wireline broadband networks, such as DSL and cable modem service. It will also apply to wireless services. And this is where the major phone companies will likely focus their opposition to the FCC's plans for new regulation.[More]
Long and rigorous testing? Puleeze. The real problem with Verizon, and to a lesser extent all the rest of the U.S. carriers, is that of a dumb pipe thinking it's smart. Verizon wouldn't give up enough of their shackles and handcuffs; they love to nickel and dime their customers by crippling devices and forcing people to their own crapola media and other "solutions." That's why BlackBerry's Storm, among it's other problems, doesn't have WiFi. That's why Verizon doesn't have a good phone. Early on inThese proposed rules would seem to make the market freer, which is the larger question here, I think. In fairness, I think it likely implementation of the rules would end the all-you-can-eat pricing for Internet service.iPhone's development, Steve Jobs probably talked to Verizon for about 30 seconds before concluding they simply were not capable of letting go enough to carry his revolution. They probably demanded upfront that WiFi be removed and music and video sales go through whatever POS "service(s)" they offer. By the way, of course Verizon's network gets the best marks (on a scale of that tops out at mediocre-at-best) in large part because they have no devices that use any real amounts of data, so there's no real load on their network. Put 10+ million data-hungryApple iPhones on Verizon and watch their mediocre quality scores plummet. [More]
First is that bandwidth is not, in fact, unlimited, especially in the wireless world. One reason ISPs are averse to neutrality regulation, they say, is that they need the flexibility to ban or mitigate high-bandwidth uses of their network, like BitTorrent and Hulu.com, which would otherwise run amok. Take away their ability to prioritize traffic, the ISPs say, and overall service will suffer.
“As long as there have been networks, people have had to engineer them to ensure that congestion doesn’t occur,” Carnegie Mellon professor and telecom expert David Farber said Monday (he’s the co-author of a cautious anti-net neutrality opinion piece published in 2007). Farber is especially concerned about the impact of the FCC’s position on wireless networks, where bandwidth is already very limited. “When you’re operating that close to capacity, you have to do a very tricky job of managing your spectrum. If you have unconstrained loads being dumped on you, something’s going to have to give.”
Case in point: AT&T has repeatedly stumbled in its ability to provide 3G wireless capacity, thanks to the unexpected popularity of the iPhone. Those difficulties lend credence to AT&T’s (and Apple’s) reluctance to allow apps like Skype and Slingplayer unfettered access to the 3G network: If the network can barely keep up with ordinary demand, just imagine what would happen if we were all live-streaming the Emmy Awards over our iPhones at the same time.
Take away ISPs’ ability to shape or restrict traffic, and you’ll see many carriers running into AT&T-like capacity problems. Their response will almost certainly be to make consumers pay for what they’re actually using. Want to BitTorrent all 6.7GB of the uncompressed Beatles catalog via 3G? Fine, but you’ll have to pay for the bandwidth you’re taking away from your neighbor. [More]
There are higher-yielding varieties of groundnut than those that farmers in Malawi tend to plant, but getting them to switch is tough. Better seed is pricey, increasing their risk. So researchers from the World Bank ran an experiment. With local NGOs, they offered the farmers loans. Some loans even came with a crop-insurance policy: if the season was dry and the yield a dud, the debt would be forgiven. The farmers' risk was lowered. Of farmers offered conventional loans, 33% signed up. With the added incentive of insurance, 18% did. The researchers were puzzled.
It's been more than 30 years since microfinance began its fantastic rise, spreading billions of dollars in credit to hundreds of millions of overlooked borrowers around the world. Insurance is the next big promise of financial services for the poor.
But there aren't many takers.
That's not from lack of interest on the part of suppliers. The Gates Foundation has plowed millions of dollars into microinsurance initiatives, and in June, LeapFrog Investments raised $44 million for the world's first microinsurance-investment fund. The few billion uninsured people worldwide have big insurers angling for their business--with not many standout results. "We haven't really figured out a good model," says Monica Brand of the microlending juggernaut ACCION International.
Xavier Giné, a World Bank economist in Malawi, has seen microinsurance sputter time and again, even in areas where microloans thrive. Unforeseen economic behavior is driving these opposite outcomes, he says. "When we think about credit, lenders need to trust the borrower. But in insurance, it's the exact opposite. You have to trust that the insurance company will pay the claim." It's hardly a stretch that people new to financial institutions don't. (My crop fails, and you pay me? Ha!) In India, Giné has found, it's actually risk takers who are more willing to buy insurance policies: the thing meant to hedge against risk is seen as risky. And perhaps not without reason. Insurers didn't pay off in Bangladesh in the 1990s, one of the earliest attempts at microinsurance. [More]
For although these senators question or don’t want a government option for health care reform, they see highly subsidized federal crop insurance in a much different light. In this, they’re joined by most of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House and fellow farm state senators.
All of them see “government crop insurance” as great; so, since 2001, about 58 percent of the farmer’s annual premium has been paid with taxpayer dollars. This subsidy is available to all farmers — big and small, rich and poor. That makes government-run crop insurance a major perk, one that’s prized by everyone from the smallest part-time farmer to the largest full-time producers who grow most of today’s crops.
And these crop insurance subsidies were not even affected by the prosperity of record grain price caused by the energy boom. Even after federal data had shown that total crop values jumped from $44 billion in 2005 to $90 billion in 2008, Congress still failed to end premium subsidies. [More]
What is not so easy to understand is why we choose to fund a vast network of insurance agents to induce farmers to buy heavily subsidized crop insurance, and why we need to pay private insurance companies large amounts of money to service the insurance contracts. Regional political interest in supporting agriculture in high-risk areas could be accomplished at much lower expense by eliminating program duplication through program consolidation, and by administering all programs through the FSA (as we are doing with SURE, ACRE, LDP, CCP, and DP). This would save on aggregate program expenditures, and it would save the large fees currently paid to crop insurance agents and companies.
One straightforward explanation for why attempts at such a consolidation were not successful in the 2008 farm bill is that crop insurance agents and companies have their own supporters in Congress. Together, supporters of crop insurance agents, crop insurance companies, and of agriculture in higher-risk regions make a formidable barrier to agricultural reform.
Different lobbying groups often need to support each other's priorities in order to keep the political coalition together. Thus, we see that the new FSA-administered SURE disaster program, which was a priority of senators from Montana and North Dakota, requires that farmers buy crop insurance, which automatically increases compensation to that industry.
It is possible that reform will come about simply through public awareness of the excesses of the risk management subsidies. But if history is any guide, it will take something more. Perhaps the need to finance trillion-dollar deficits as well as federal programs that provide benefits like clean air and water, transportation infrastructure, and nutrition will eventually force Congress to economize by increasing the efficiency of risk management programs in agriculture. [More]
Chayefsky imagines cynical television executives who create a ratings sensation out of the nightly rants and ravings of Beale. The host energizes the nation with his cry, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" It's hard to find a film that better captures the rotten vibe of the early 1970s, when America found itself suffering through one downer after another: failing companies, tense foreign relations, high unemployment, rampant incivility, spiraling deficits, corruption in high places, a seemingly endless war. Sound familiar?
Beck often cites Beale as an inspiration and a tribune for our own times. "I think that's the way people feel," he told an interviewer. "That's the way I feel" — like the fist-shaking, hair-pulling Beale. Whether channeled by a playwright on the left or a talk-show host on the right, anger and distrust can be dramatized and monetized. But do they ever really go anywhere?
The trouble with this prophecy is that we never find out what happens to the people watching Beale. Do they stay mad forever? Does their screaming ever lead to something better? Does the rage merely migrate, sending new audiences with new enemies to scream from more windows? And if the time comes when every audience is screaming, who, in the end, is left to listen? [More]
One answer may be found in an unlikely place -- in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.
Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about "reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth."
Nixon's presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:
"To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. ... To lower our voices would be a simple thing."
Some people's feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:
"In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.
"We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another -- until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."But maybe that has become impossible. The pedals are mashed against the floorboards now, and our engines are roaring too loudly for any calming voice to be heard. We seem to be approaching the bad part of the movie. The part where we find out that no one wins. [More]
Sociologists began hunting for ongoing, real-life situations in which better data could be found. A 2000 study of dorm mates at Dartmouth College by the economist Bruce Sacerdote found that they appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate, and vice versa. A 2006 Princeton study found that having babies appeared to be contagious: if your sibling has a child, you’re 15 percent more likely to have one yourself in the next two years. These were tantalizing findings, but again, each was too narrow to really indicate whether and how the effect worked in the mass public. What was needed was something more ambitious, some way of mapping out the links between thousands of real-life people for years — decades, even — to see whether, and how, behaviors spread. [More]We have seen more evidence of this type of contagious social behaviors (overeating, for one). While it certainly points out how much impact our friends have on us, it also works the other way around.
“Private stockpiles, built by many including the much- vaunted, pig-farming speculators, have clearly absorbed substantial quantities of metal,” Sucden’s Goldwyn said. “Much of this metal will remain out of the normal market place.”
Scotia Capital Inc. analyst Liu Na highlighted the role of Chinese pig farmers and other private speculators in the metals markets in an Aug. 17 note that cited reports from state-owned China Central Television. These speculators may become “quick sellers” if sentiment turned, Liu said in that note.
To be sure, Sucden’s Goldwyn wrote that the stockpiles of copper and nickel held by farmers and others in China may “not be ‘dumped’ back in the foreseeable future as some have recently suggested, wherever prices go.” Goldwyn didn’t give a reason.
The metals holdings by pig-farmer investors and other private speculators give “the impression that there is strong demand in China,” said Jiang at Shanghai Oriental. “But it is actually those who take a pessimistic view of the economy and are looking to preserve their wealth who are buying.” [More]
A housing "slump," a housing "crisis"? A "severe" price decline? According to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors, the median price of an existing home is up 8.5 percent from the low of last February. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median price of a new home is up 1.3 percent from the low of last December. Home prices may not be at all-time highs -- and there are pockets of continuing decline in some urban areas -- but overall they've clearly stopped going down and have started to recover. So why keep proclaiming a "crisis" after it's over?
"Turmoil" in the debt markets? Sure, but we've seen plenty worse. According to the FDIC, there have been a total of 13 bank failures in 2007 and so far into 2008. There were 15 in 1999-2000, the climax of the Obama-celebrated era of Clintonian prosperity. And in recession-free 1988-89, there were 1,004 failures -- almost an order of magnitude more than today. Since the Great Depression, the average number of bank failures each year has been 94.
Despite highly publicized losses in subprime mortgage lending, bank equity capital -- the best measure of core financial strength -- is now $1.35 trillion, more than the $1.28 trillion level of mid-2007, before the "turmoil" even began.
Financial market "crisis" and "meltdown"? Yes, from all-time highs last October, the S&P 500 has fallen 20 percent. But that's nothing by historical standards. Stocks have often fallen more than that over comparable spans of time. They fell more than twice that much in 1974 -- which was truly the worst drop since the Great Depression. Even the present 20-percent loss isn't what it seems. The damage has been heavily concentrated in the financial sector -- banks, investment firms and mortgage companies. If you exclude that sector, stocks are off 14.8 percent.
Some economic indicators -- export growth and non-defense capital goods orders such as industrial machinery, for example -- are running at levels associated with brisk expansion. Others are running at middling levels, such as the closely followed Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index. But it's actually difficult to find many that are running at truly recessionary levels. [More]
[More]Luskin's predictions were controversial again in 2008 when, in a September Washington Post[20] he cited evidence of what he claimed were factual errors made by Barack Obama and members of his presidential campaign concerning the state of the economy. Luskin claimed that the market was healthy, and Obama was simply using the state of the economy to discredit John McCain. However, two days later, on September 16th, the stock market had a record plummet, thus discrediting every prediction he made in his editorial.[21] Additionally, in the same editorial, he cited evidence that the economy was weak, but not in recession. He wrote, "…anyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of recession." Shortly afterward, following the sudden collapse of several large financial firms, the economy sharply worsened, and was subsequently declared to have been in recession all year by the National Bureau of Economic Research.[22] editorial,Foreign Policy included Luskin's prediction in its list of "The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008" on its website and noted that it gave additional opportunities for liberal bloggers to criticize Luskin.[23] The editors of The Yale Book of Quotations[24] He has been singled out for "some of the worst, money losing commentary of the past few years."[25] also made note of the inopportune timing of Luskin's editorial and included his prediction in their list of "Top ten quotes of 2008".He has been frequently referred to by Brad DeLong as "the Stupidest Man Alive" for, amongst other things, his continued support for literal interpretations of the Laffer Curve.[26]
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.But even though the numbers fit neatly to expectations, we don't really know why.
This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.
Like I said before, no one knows why our lifespans follow the Gompertz law. But it isn’t impossible to come up with a theoretical world that follows the same law. The following argument comes from this short paper, produced by the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota.Imagine that within your body is an ongoing battle between cops and criminals. And, in general, the cops are winning. They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal he is promptly removed. The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time. A criminal that remains in one place for long enough (say, one day) can build a “fortress” which is too strong to be assailed by the police. If this happens, you die.Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day. The likelihood of them missing a particular spot for an entire day is given (as you’ve learned by now) by the Poisson distribution: it is a mere.
But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle? Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day. Then the probability of them missing a criminal for an entire day decreases to. The difference between 14 and 12 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than 10 times. And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.
This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year.More questions than answersThe example above is tantalizing. The language of “cops and criminals” lends itself very easily to a discussion of the immune system fighting infection and random mutation. Particularly heartening is the fact that rates of cancer incidence also follow the Gompertz law, doubling every 8 years or so. Maybe something in the immune system is degrading over time, becoming worse at finding and destroying mutated and potentially dangerous cells.Unfortunately, the full complexity of human biology does not lend itself readily to cartoons about cops and criminals. There are a lot of difficult questions for anyone who tries to put together a serious theory of human aging. Who are the criminals and who are the cops that kill them? What is the “incubation time” for a criminal, and why does it give “him” enough strength to fight off the immune response? Why is the police force dwindling over time? For that matter, what kind of “clock” does your body have that measures time at all?There have been attempts to describe DNA degradation (through the shortening of your telomeres or through methylation) as an increase in “criminals” that slowly overwhelm the body’s DNA-repair mechanisms, but nothing has come of it so far. I can only hope that someday some brilliant biologist will be charmed by the simplistic physicist’s language of cops and criminals and provide us with real insight into why we age the way we do. [More]
