This is a test (but not a trick)
I'm interested in understanding why MR has such a high-quality comments section. I'd like you to consider this passage, from today's Guardian (not today's Onion), and try to write high-quality comments on it.
The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's
permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that
"available research" showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were
involved in child sex abuse.
Let's see how you do. If you can indeed produce high-quality comments, it means you're better than the other blog commentators. If you can't, maybe it means that Alex and I are in some way better with regard to what we post and how we present it. In that case, once our splendid framing is off-scene, you revert to your usual, rotten selves. I want you to end up with most of the credit.
The Ultimate Productivity Blog
I found this at the excellent Twitter site of Michael Nielsen, recommended by an MR reader. He also refers us to this interesting article on neurology and athletic performance and this piece on the surprises of mathematics.
Here is his blog and here is his blog post on the future of scientific journals. Here is Michael on the future of science.
Most of all, I like his six rules for rewriting.
Hail Michael Nielsen, who justifies Twitter all on his own.
*SuperFreakonomics*
Doing the math, you find that on a per-mile basis, a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.
The subtitle of the book is Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance and you can pre-order it here. The authors are…come on guys…need I tell you?
The Harper and Collins press blurb offers this summary:
"SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we
think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such
questions as:
- How is a street prostitute like a department-store
Santa? - Why are doctors so bad at washing their
hands? - How much good do car seats do?
- What's the best way to catch a
terrorist? - Did TV cause a rise in crime?
- What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway
deaths have in common? - Are people hard-wired for altruism or
selfishness? - Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
- Which adds more value: a pimp or a
Realtor?"
I would stress different angles. My favorite part of the book was the presentation of the List-Levitt critique of experimental economics. In particular the authors discuss whether the subject participants are more cooperative to begin with and also whether they are primed to please the experimenter. The biographical information on John List is fascinating. There is a very good revisionist account of the Kitty Genovese story; the neighbors didn't perform as miserably as many people think. Terrorists are especially likely to rent rather than buy, especially unlikely to take out life insurance (which doesn't pay off in cases of suicide), and likely to have a large number of cash withdrawals relative to other transactions.
Geo-engineering, as a response to global warming, receives more pages than any other single topic.
This book is recognizably in the style of Freakonomics, a book I suspect you already have made up your mind about. I will say only that SuperFreakonomics is a more than worthy sequel, a super sequel you might say. If you're a fan of Freakonomics, you'll like this too. This really is the fall season of big, big books.
Sobering Reality
In praise of Twitter
I am surprised how many people still think Twitter is a fad or a waste of time. I view Twitter — or some modified future version thereof — as everlasting. Most of all, the search function helps you tap into a real time conversation on just about any topic you want, including the lecture you just gave. Google is wonderful but it's hard to sort through the mess and figure out where the conversation is now. For sampling opinion on either movies or music, Twitter is essential, or even for researching a forthcoming blog post. Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force. If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.
At least now, the people on Twitter are smarter on average than the people whose choices feed into Google. I am not sure that particular benefit will last forever,
If you can find some people worth following, so much the better. But the value of the medium doesn't much depend on what they had for breakfast.
Many people use Twitter to ask for advice; I have yet to learn how to do this well.
Assorted links
1. The fate of the polymath, including a discussion of Richard Posner.
2. Does Germany have fun right-wingers?
3. David Cronenberg to remake "The Fly.
4. Markets in everything: Psycho donuts.
Who should I follow on Twitter?
Please let me know, comments are open. If you don't have a mental model of my intellectual tastes by now, let the heavens fall. And if you can, please give their Twitter handle.
Why are some CDs longer than others?
Adam Smith, a loyal MR reader (yes that is his name), writes to me:
I had a very MResque thought today I wanted to share with you. Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They're usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW's The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).
Is there a relative price argument for these differences? Or even signaling? Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they're capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler. Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling. Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.
I'll offer a few points:
1. The average career of a rapper is short. A long CD increases the chance that something will "stick" and the rapper won't get too many other chances to try.
2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises. That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future. Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don't convince you nothing will. Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.
3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons. In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.
4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary. Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality. One prediction here is that "compositional jazz" albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.
5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience. This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.
The Stiglitz-Prescott View
Here is Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz quoted by Free Exchange:
We’ve really extended the safety net beyond to big to fail, and my view is that there’s been no convincing argument that any of this was ever needed. It was based on the notion of fear – that if you didn’t do it, the whole financial set of markets would fail. Economics would have suggested that if you did a debt to equity conversion, converting long-term debt into equity, the financial institution would be well capitalized, there would be no reason to panic, and there would be more confidence in the market. But those who saw an opportunity to use scare tactics to get what they wanted did use those scare tactics, and it worked.
Here is Nobel prize-winner Ed Prescott quoted by Brad DeLong:
[P]eople got scared…. The press scared people. People running for office scared people. Bernanke scared people; Paulson scared people…. [P]eople began not to know what was going to happen. Then they stopped investing–by investing, I mean getting a new car or fixing up your house. And that led to the economy–it was depressed a bit that fourth quarter of last year…[With] benign neglect the economy would have come roaring back quite quickly…
Free Exchange says that Joseph Stiglitz's views are "insane" and Brad DeLong says that Prescott "does not live in the consensus reality with the rest of us." I am not sure why they are so confident.
William Safire quotations
Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
And:
The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
I also like this one:
Never assume the obvious is true.
Here are more.
Assorted links
1. Interview with Daniel Kahneman.
2. More on why executive compensation was not the problem.
3. The Irish pint isn't actually that traditional after all.
4. Hair dye as a countercyclical indicator.
5. "The true number may be lower" — you don't hear that one so much.
The McFarthest spot
Strange Maps reports:
Somewhere in South Dakota is the McFarthest Spot, the place in
the US geographically most removed from the nearest McD’s…If you
started out from this location, a few miles north of State Highway 20
(which runs latitudinally between Highways 73 in the west and 65 in the
east), you’d have to drive 145 miles to get your Big Mac (if you could
fly, however, it’d be only 107 miles).
They have a good map to go with it; I believe, by the way, that he means the continental U.S. and thus he is excluding Alaska. I would have expected the Nevada desert to win out.
*Too Big to Save*, by Robert Pozen
For the last two years I've been receiving requests — email and otherwise — for a readable, educating book on the financial crisis. And while various books on the crisis have had their merits, no one of them has fit that bill. Until now.
Robert Pozen's Too Big to Save: How to Fix the U.S. Financial System is the single best source for figuring out what happened. It is the go-to book if you are a non-specialist and want to understand: how credit default swaps work, the significance of Basel II, mark-to-market, how the various Fed bailouts operated, the meaning of the toxic asset plans, and many other matters.
This is not so much a presentation of a macro narrative on the crisis as an education manual on the moving parts. Its value stands above and beyond any particular partisan view. Pozen, by the way, offers policy recommendations at the rough rate of about one a page and most of them are quite micro. Even if I do not agree with everything he says, his proposals are unfailingly reasonable and well-argued and grounded in fact in some manner.
You can pre-order the book here.
Here is my previous post on the book.
By the way, Pozen does refer to blogs and he even cites blog posts.
The Danish mortgage model
The Danish model has another critical and innovative feature. Holders can retire their own mortgages by purchasing the same face amount of mortgage bonds at the prevailing market price. To prepay a mortgage by purchasing bonds, the home owner must give advance notice of several weeks to the MCI [mortgage credit institutions], which designates by lottery the specific bonds to be purchased. Thus, if rising interest rates or other factors cause mortgage bonds to trade at a discount, home owners can reduce the principal or retire the whole mortgage by purchasing an appropriate mortgage bond at a discount.
That passage is from Robert Pozen's new and notable Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System.
You can't do this in the United States. You can pay off your mortgage but the "face value" of that transaction does not vary with market conditions. In essence the Danish system creates a new contingent claims market for homeowners who do not understand how to use interest rate futures and options. De facto, the homeowner receives some implicit insurance against the prospect of negative equity in the home.
Here is The Economist on the Danish model. Denmark also allows for speedy repossession of property, in case of default. Here is a more general discussion of the Danish model, which emphasizes transparency. Mortgage finance is conducted by explicitly designated institutions and originators retain a financial interest in the loan, even following securitization. The emphasis is on plain vanilla products. Here is Wikipedia on the Danish mortgage model. Here is a longer study.
“I like your lunatic”
Speaking of dinner, when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable
lunatic, he was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days
later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two
men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small
talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on
every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making
horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. “I
like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The
host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re
pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”
The remainder of the article, which concerns why good writers are not always good speakers, is interesting as well.