Now This Is Genius Marketing

Of all the misconceptions people have about big business (<Heston>CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE</Heston>), one of the funniest is the idea that marketers control hidden persuaders that turn us into consuming automatons.  Just go read some of the marketing literature to see just how much of marketing "science" is old-fashioned guessing.

Marketing is an art, not a science, and this is its Mona Lisa:

I'm Not Sure What It Says About The World...

Or about me, but I've now got two different songs on my iPhone titled "Fuck You."  I had completely forgotten the first when I downloaded the second.

Alaikum Salaam

So Obvious

So, That Happened

Congratulations to the Republican Party, which won big last night.  This election was very much a correction, not a realignment.  Right now, it looks like the Republicans will end up with between 235-239 members in the House.  This is a return to the number of Representatives (232) the Republicans had in the 109th Congress, 2004-2006.  I still remain convinced that this movement rightward is the underlying long-term trend as the population moves south and west.

In other good news, attacking immigrants once again doesn't lead to victory.

Finally, the 2010 census will lead to redistricting before the next Congress and the Republicans have made extraordinary gains at the state level, giving them a chair at the table in most states.  Unfortunately, this will lead to the two parties divvying up highly gerrymandered seats for short-term gain.  Leaving aside the obvious democratic arguments against gerrymandering, I'm convinced that Republicans would benefit from districts drawn without regard to party strategy.  (The Democrats seem to think so, too.)

I Resemble That Remark

This is apparently somewhat controversial in England.  In the US, we have Old Jews Telling Jokes.

And Sturgeon Was An Optimist

Brit has kindly suggested that, as the iconoclast's iconoclast (making me an iconophile, and indeed I quite like a nice icon), I might one day write for the Dabbler on things that everyone knows but that aren't true.  (For example, that the Chevy Nova in fact sold very well in Latin America.)

Obviously, ever since I've been wracking my brain for something sufficiently obvious to be worth disproving, and I haven't really come up with anything.  The closest I've come is to knock down that terrible piece of trendy job advice: follow your passion.

Whatever you do, don't follow your passion.  Following soon becomes stalking; stalking becomes sneaking into it's bedroom late at night and abducting it; and abducting it becomes burying it at the crossroads while eating its still warm heart.  Following your passion will kill it.

This follows from Sturgeon's Law:  90% of everything is crap.  So, if your passion is movies and you become a film critic, what you actually spend your time doing is mostly watching crappy movies.  If you love cooking (which usually means you like making one big meal on the weekend after planning a menu and shopping for specific ingredients), what you actually spend your time doing as a chef is cooking crap.  (If you open a restaurant, rather than just become a chef, what you actually spend your time doing is losing money.)

Telling people to follow their passion is telling people that, if passion is their passion, they should become a prostitute.  Actual prostitutes are not in it for the sex.

As I've Always Suspected,

Virgin to launch space tourism in 18 months

I could have achieved so much more had I been less distracted.

Three Guys and a Strategy: There's Nothing You Can Do That Can't Be Done

Three Guys and a Strategy: There's Nothing You Can Do That Can't Be Done: "I've never quite understood what the Beatles meant to tell us with this line, but it turns out to be a very nice way to think about why many..."

For anyone out there interested in the Strategic Management stuff I post from time to time, two friends and I are now blogging Strategy at Three Guys And A Strategy.

Roman Holiday

The Secret Blog is in Rome, half to attend a conference and half on holiday with the Secret Wife.  (This academic life is kind of a blast).

Anyway, following on ten things about Montreal, here are ten things about Rome:

1.  When it comes to the Internet, Rome is still in the 20th Century.
2.  Paris and London are modern cities.  Rome and Venice are not.
3.  Rome, on the other hand, is cheaper than Paris or London.
4.  Romans really are garrulous, at least with each other.
5.  If I lived in Rome, I, too, would seriously consider a motor scooter.  Parking in Rome is about as organized as hide and seek at a child's birthday party.
6.  It is just incredibly hard for Americans not to tip.
7.  Historic Rome is surprisingly small, accessible and walkable.
8.  The Piazza Novanno (shown in the video) is beautiful and in all ways excellent.  A good day would be to sit in the shade at one of the many trattoria, watching the pretty women and art that fill the Piazza, drinking cup after cup of Italian coffee.
9.  There is a larger and more obvious police presence in Rome than in any American city.
10. English pops up everywhere, and not just in ways meant for tourists.

To PhD Or Not To PhD

I was minding my own business surfing through Roger Ebert's website, when I stumbled (do surfer's stumble?) across the following letter:

Q. I have watched and read your reviews for years with great honor.  I disagree so strongly with your review of "Eat Pray Love" that it makes me sick.  You just don't get it, and many others like you don't get it. You do not know at all what it is like being a woman in this day and age (or previously) who did not want to be defined by a man or married off to one. If you think Stephen in the movie was an OK husband, you are out to lunch.  He was horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (except on paper to people who do not need emotional sustenance). David was the narcissist from hell that  many of us have fallen for… do you not get that??????????? Many of the males of the species are frankly overrated and the women's movement has proven this (or frankly not sufficiently). I hope your wife will bring you up to speed. (Jeanine Carlson, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist)

Earning a PhD is quite an achievement; something of which to be proud.  Certainly, it is as much worthy of advertising as being an adult male (Mr.), adult female (Ms.), married female (Mrs.), physician (Dr.) or lawyer (Esq.), but for some reason people who attach PhD to their casual signatures seem to be mentally unbalanced at rates higher than that of the general population.  It's a useful signifier, but I'm not quite sure what it means.  As with much social science, causation is ambiguous and it might just be that psychologists are both nuts and very proud of their degrees.  Just in case, and assuming I do eventually earn my degree, I think I'll still sign my name without adding PhD, unless there's some good reason to do so.

"A court-ordered publication ban on the proceedings prevents the media from reporting on what was said in court."

Here we have the number one difference between the US and Canada:  not only a prior restraint on the press, but a ban on publishing what as said (in public) in open court.  Short of preventing certain people from speaking out on an election, it is hard to imagine a more core violation of the First Amendment (if, of course, the First Amendment applied).  Had I known, I would have been sorely tempted to go to court and then report what I heard once I returned to the (aptly named, in this case) Home of the Free.  Not because what was said was interesting -- I'm sure that it's anodyne eye-wash to the effect that she loves her mother -- but because governments simply shouldn't be allowed to get away with this shit.


The case is, as it happens, interesting.  A 19-year old woman came home late and was stabbed by her mother.  People seem to assume that the reason was the dishonor reflected on the family by having a late daughter.  All we are told about the family is that their name is Ebrahimi and they speak Farsi at home.  It also seems likely that they have not absorbed the majority culture.

Oh, Canada!

We tend to think of Americans and Canadians as a single people divided by Quebec, but after a week, more or less, in Montreal, I have to admit to some differences:

1.  They are serious about this French thing.  In fact, the more urgent the information on some sign, the less likely it is to have English on it.

2.  They really are nice, even the French speakers.  They are gracious enough to pretend to be fooled by my jaunty "Bonjour" and immediate douse me with a torrent of French.  I then say, "En Anglais, por favor," and off we go.

3.  They call their pastrami "smoked meat."  But it is just as delicious.

4.  In the stalls in public accommodations, the slide is on the door frame and the hasp is on the door.

5.  The McDonalds sell "double Big Macs," which are exactly what you think they are.

6.  More restaurants have full bars than you would find in the States.

7.  Waiters and Waitresses are both overly solicitous and subtly rude.

8.   Much more smoking.

9.  Even the casual food is better.  The croissants are much better.

10.  The portions are more reasonable (except at McDonalds).

All in all, Montreal would like to be the Paris of the New World, but succeeds in being the New York of Canada.

No Presents For Peter

The Secret Blog is in Montreal, having been admitted to Canada despite the following conversation.

Canadian Border Guard:  Good Afternoon.
The Secret Blog:  Good Afternoon.  (Hands over passports.)
CBG:  Where are you going?
TSB:  Montreal.
CBG:  What's the purpose of your visit?
TSB:  Pleasure..
CBG:  (Skeptically)  Pleasure?
TSB:  A vacation.
CBG:  Do you have anything to leave in Canada?
TSB:  [NO BATHROOM HUMOR!!!]  No.
CBG:  Do you have any alcohol or tobacco in the car?
TSB:  No.
CBG:  (Starting to wrap up) Do you know anyone in Canada?
TSB:  (Hit by a stray gust of honesty.)  Yes, Peter Burnet.
CBG:  (No longer wrapping up; suddenly paying attention.)  How do you know him?
TSB:  (Spell of honesty passes; I imagine myself trying to explain BrothersJudd or even just saying, "I met him on the Internet."  I need an honest, plain-vanilla answer)  I've known him for years.
CBG:  (Look saying, that's not what I asked.)
TSB:  He's a personal friend.
CBG:  (Pause)
CBG:  Are you bringing any presents into Canada?
TSB:  No.
CBG:  Welcome to Canada.

Can Kagan Be Confirmed?

Despite public apathy towards her, Elena Kagan was sliding towards confirmation.  There was no big reason to oppose her and she was about as good a nominee as Republicans were likely to see from President Obama.

But now a federal judge in California has ruled that, as a matter of federal constitutional law, marriage cannot be restricted to one man and one woman.  That decision will likely end up in the Supreme Court.  To predict that this improves Republican prospects for the mid-terms is easy; gay marriage loses whenever people vote.  But I wonder if it also puts pressure on sitting Republican senators (and, for that matter, Democratic senators from strongly anti-gay marriage states who need to get reelected in November) to oppose Kagan.  The vote is scheduled for tomorrow, which means a lot would have to happen quickly.

Don't Buy Green Bananas, Apparently We're Doomed

A recent study published in Nature claims that global warming kills phytoplankton.  A blogger claims that this means the end of life on Earth.  Kevin Drum argues that we could avoid certain death if we were willing to pay another $100 a year on our electric bill.  Megan McArdle, in a remarkably balanced post, points out that this is nonsense on stilts.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.  One of the reasons that I'm skeptical about global warming is that is too perfectly fits the agenda of the far left.  Capitalism is evil, the environment uber alles, our only hope is that we cede power to international institutions of technocracy and, by the way, we're going to need a whole lot more taxes.  If your recommended solution to a new, serious problem that pops up out of nowhere is exactly the same as the solutions you were recommending to our pre-existing problems, you'll have to excuse me if I suspect that the new problem is more convenient than real.

Which is why its somewhat annoying that, more and more, my preferred policy responses to the possibility of induced global climate change are exactly the same as my responses to most other policy problems we have:  we (meaning the entire human race) need to dump regulation and focus on getting as rich as we can as fast as we can.  At this point in history, richer functionally means smarter.  Richer societies can spend more money on pure research and on applied research.  We can put more minds to work trying to understand the problems facing us and more minds means more possible solutions.  Once we have a theoretical solution, being richer improves our chances of being able to turn theory into practice and makes us better able to withstand whatever problems global warming causes.

That of course assumes that global warming is a real threat.  On the other hand, if it's not a threat, well, we'll just have to make do with being richer and smarter.

Contrast that with the left's plan to impoverish the world because of the chance that global warming is a real threat.  We will live miserable lives and still -- taking the science seriously -- suffer global warming.  If the science is wrong, we will have made ourselves poor for no reason at all.

Say What, Now?

The New York Observer is reporting that a Democratic incumbent congressman, representing Staten Island, is circulating a list of "Jewish Money" donors to a potential Republican opponent.

The file, labeled "Grimm Jewish Money Q2," for the second quarter fundraising period, shows a list of over 80 names, a half-dozen of which in fact do hail from Staten Island, and a handful of others that list Brooklyn as home.

 "Where is Grimm's money coming from," said Jennifer Nelson, McMahon's campaign spokeman. "There is a lot of Jewish money, a lot of money from people in Florida and Manhattan, retirees."

 I know that the Left is the new home of antisemitism in the US, but this is pretty remarkable.  Taking as a given all the "what if a Republican did this" points, what could this jerk possibly have been thinking?  Presumably, he thinks that he knows his constituents.

It's Focal Bias Day Here At The Secret Blog

Recently, I've been seeing focal bias everywhere.  Both this post at Volokh Conspiracy and this post from Megan Mcardle are examples of focal bias, which is our tendency to think that a particular factor must be important because we're focusing on it.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

U.S. Atheists Reportedly Using Hair Dryers to 'De-Baptize' (NewsCore, 7/17/10)

American atheists lined up to be "de-baptized" in a ritual using a hair dryer according to a report Friday on U.S. late-night news program "Nightline."  

Leading atheist Edwin Kagin blasted his fellow non-believers with the hair dryer to symbolically dry up the holy water sprinkled on their heads in days past. The styling tool was emblazoned with a label reading "Reason and Truth."

That's How I Roll

Focal Bias

Truck Accident That Killed Rafters in Canyon Sparks Truck-Canyon-Rafter Reform Debate

Initial Reactions To McDonald v. Chicago

The Supreme Court has just held that the Second Amendment, interpreted in Heller to protect a natural right to self-defense by ensuring access to firearms, applies to (i.e., limits) the states as well.  This probably (but not necessarily) means that Chicago's gun ordinance, which has the practical effect of preventing private citizens from owning guns, is dead.

My off the cuff reactions:

1.  The privileges and immunities clause, which for more than 100 years has been thought to be dead, is really, really dead.

2.  Justice Thomas' lone opinion that the Second Amendment applies against the states because of the privileges and immunities clause, rather than through the due process clause, was necessary for him to concur in the result because he disbelieves in due process clause incorporation (as do I).

3.  Thomas' opinion is defensible, because the right to keep and bear arms really is a privilege of federal citizenship and arguably the amendment applies against the states on its own terms ("the right of the people" (emphasis added)), although the Supreme Court has long since rejected that idea.

4.  This opinion will be a seven day wonder, much like Heller and the corporate free speech decisions, with the media lamenting conservative judicial activism.  A few laws will be tweaked and someone in Chicago will get a new gun, but not much will actually change.

5.  The only exception might be that McDonald will weaken the NRA.  Not much existential threat to gun ownership if it's a recognized constitutional right.

Anyone Else Hate The Phone?

Over the last few months, I've started to realize that I hate the phone.  I hate being called, and I hate having to call out.  Calling someone now seems like intensely rude, hateful behavior -- "HEY, WHATEVER YOUR DOING, STOP IT AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!"  Whatever I'm doing when they call, that's what I want to do. And if I call actual people, I assume that they have something they'd rather be doing (since they're in the middle of doing it) than talk to me.  Having to call some business, and navigate phone trees, and wait for a customer service representative, is just Hell.  As you may have guessed, at this point calling me is probably the worst way to get me to do something, like buy your product or contribute to your cause. Frankly, at this point I'd rather you just drop by.  At least then you're making more of an effort than you're forcing me to make.

Is it just me, or are we all on the cusp of having our phones yanked out of the house?

The Secret Blog Is In Albuquerque

And this was its breakfast:

Remember: The American Word For American Is "American"

It's World Cup time come again, and the excitement is palpable as all the papers recycle all those same old stories.  This will be the year Americans love soccer; really, shouldn't the game where you use your feet get to be called "football;" all those soccer playing kids now grown to adulthood will sit riveted to their televisions watching adults play their childhood game (an argument never made for hopscotch); etc.; etc.; etc.  This year the big evidence is that Nike spent as much as $100 million producing an admittedly really cool commercial about the World Cup and that ABC/ESPN paid $100 million for the rights to broadcast the 2010 and 2014 in the US in English.  (Tellingly, Univision paid $325 million to broadcast the same games in the US in Spanish.)  These are apparently big numbers for soccer, although they are ridiculously small for the US.

And that's the point.  The rest of the football loving world should be doing everything it can to keep us convinced that soccer is a boring, pointless sport played solely because it's better than the alternative, which is sitting huddled in misery in some foreign country (oops, redundant).  In fact, I suspect that this is what actually is going on when some bloody foreigner tries to explain the joy of a 1-0 game, in which not a single goal was scored but which was won by that odd tie-breaker kick-off thing that looks like nothing so much as a pre-game warm-up drill.  I'm reminded of a criticism of Quiditch that pointed out that having the game end when the snitch is caught is like having a basketball game end when there's a knockout in a boxing match being held next door.  Soccer suffers from exactly this problem:  you could end it at any random moment (the score being much the same throughout) and then run that warm-up drill that has almost nothing to do with the actual game, in which, we're told repeatedly, the point is the beautiful passing and athletic jumping and falling down and pretending to be hurt....  Sorry, got lost there for a moment.  Where was I?

And that's the point.  If America really got excited about football, we'd just take over.  I'm not saying we'd always win the World Cup.  I'm saying that the World Cup would be run to suit us.  For instance, today, the US is playing England at 2:30 pm Eastern time, which is 7:30 pm in England.  If ABC/ESPN could actually get decent ratings, they would have paid a billion dollars for the World Cup, which is about what NBC paid for the last Olympics.  (The NFL is guaranteed about $4.4 billion per year in tv revenue through 2014, even if they don't play a game in 2011 when the CBA is up.)  For a billion dollars, FIFA would do what it's told, and the game wouldn't start until ABC wanted it to.  As demonstrated by the on-going NBA finals, that's 9:00 Eastern time, or 2:00 am English time.  So, if the rest of you all ever want to see a World Cup game in prime time again, without three times as many commercials, without cheerleaders (I assume foreigners don't have cheerleaders), pray that the US doesn't suddenly learned to love soccer.

Of course, it's always good to pray for something that's bound to happen anyway.

P.S.  Apparently, they don't do that tie-breaking thing at the World Cup.  Who knew?

Not Evil Or Stupid, But Conservative

One of the things that conservatives like to obsess about is why liberals are liberal.  The two most common explanations are referenced in the title, but sometimes I think that there's a third explanation.  At least in the US, I think that liberals are liberal because they are instinctively conservative, in the sense of being content with the status quo.  If you're content with the status quo and the status quo is liberal, then you end up being liberal.

That's why my conservatism isn't much shaken by the big questions status quo conservatism got wrong, which in the US are basically slavery, Jim Crow and civil rights.  Status quo conservatism is too prone to the position that some practice is unfair/unjust/oppressive, but now's not the time to rock the boat.  Once you've taken that position, it's never time to rock the boat.  The right position is that it's always time to rock the boat, if the cause is worth risking upsetting the boat entirely.  That's why, for the past 30 years, our reactionaries have been liberals and our radicals have been (non-status quo) conservatives.

Does Being The ...

Iconoclast's Iconoclast make me an Iconophile, or put me off in some third room by myself?

Sometimes I worry it's the one, and sometimes I worry it's the other.

Odd To Discover

That I hadn't forgiven Daniel Ellsberg, "a hero and an icon of the left."  I had just forgotten about him.  Apparently, he's just as big a horse's ass as he ever was.

I Bet You Think This Song Is About You

"Which One?"

I can't be the only person who had the above reaction to this headline.

Interesting Graph

"Comprehensiveness" basically means how good a job you do gathering all the relevant information about your industry and firm.

"CE" is corporate entrepreneurship, which is more or less how good the firm is at doing new stuff.

As comprehensiveness increases, so does CE, which makes sense.  But it does so faster for low-risk firms, which at high comprehensiveness engage in more CE than high-risk firms.

The chart comes from Heavey, G., Simsek, Z., Roche, F. & Kelly, A. (2009), Decision Comprehensiveness and Corporate Entrepreneurship:  The Moderating Role of Managerial Uncertainty Preferences and Environmental Dynamism, Journal of Management Studies, 46:8, 1289-1314.

If You Need Music For Your Hit Pop Song

Demography Is Destiny

Here is a nice little post on demography and why Japan -- definitely -- and Europe -- probably -- are screwed.

First Amazon Orders

Megan McArdle suggests going back and looking at your first Amazon order. Here's mine, from June 7, 1996:

Mrs. Mike, Spot Goes Splash, The Bootstrap Entrepreneur: Everything You Really Need To Know About Starting Your Own Business, A Crown of Swords.

Two young kids, my wife was starting a practice and I love trashy genre fiction.

All Is Vanity

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3 What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
5 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Why We'll Never Enforce The Immigration Laws

This article and video at CNN is biased and completely unfair to the pro-enforcement position. It also demonstrates why the US will never strictly enforce its immigration laws (and, from my point of view, never should).

Peer Review

I thought you might be interested by this announcement I've received:

[O]nly 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that 'peer review works well as it is.' (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192)

"A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research." (Horrobin, 2001)

Horrobin concludes that peer review "is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance." (Horrobin, 2001) This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors.

But, "Peer Review is one of the sacred pillars of the scientific edifice" (Goodstein, 2000), it is a necessary condition in quality assurance for Scientific/Engineering publications, and "Peer Review is central to the organization of modern science…why not apply scientific [and engineering] methods to the peer review process" (Horrobin, 2001).

This is the purpose of The 2nd International Symposium on Peer Reviewing: ISPR 2010 (http://www.sysconfer.org/ispr) being organized in the context of The SUMMER 4th International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management: KGCM 2010 (http://www.sysconfer.org/kgcm), which will be held on June 29th - July 2nd, in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I agree that peer review is a problem, but I think it's mostly a problem because we lie to ourselves and to the public about what purpose peer review serves. Peer review is about protecting what Kuhn called "normal science," by which he meant incrementalist, paradigmatic, non-revolutionary progress in understanding the world. Every once in a while, the paradigm shifts and normal science becomes impossible; the old understanding of the world is dead and a new paradigm is established. Kuhn says that scientists who worked in the old paradigm can't even work as scientists under the new paradigm, as their entire way of understanding the world has been undermined.

Peer review is meant to paper over the cracks and preserve the old paradigm as long as possible. Reviewers are gatekeepers, who allow into our best journals only those papers that sustain the current paradigm. In this way, scientists are trained only to propose and test incremental contributions to our understanding. Eventually, the cracks become too large and the old paradigm crumbles.

Peer review also promotes good methods and good analysis, although not best methods and best analysis. Moreover, methods and analysis are only two values among many. If the theory is interesting or the data is unusual, reviewers will let defects in methods and/or analysis slide. The real problem, though, is that peer review is in no way an audit of the paper or data despite our letting people assume that it is. If data is bad, no reviewer will be able to ferret that out, nor is review of the raw data a routine part of peer review. We assume that the authors did what they say they did, and dealt honestly with the data they found.

Not A Triple Tautology

In explaining the phrase épater le bourgeois, Wikipedia uses the wonderful phrase "French Decadent poets." This suggests worlds I had no idea of; poets who aren't decadent, Frenchmen who aren't poets, and even French poets who aren't decadent. Who'd a thought it.

If You:

1. Are in the left-most lane;

2. Are traveling slower than the speed limit; and

3. Have no one to your right,

you are doing it wrong.

Statistics III

The third installment of our little series on statistics is perhaps the most counter-intuitive lesson of all. The lesson is two-fold:

1. A sample only represents the population of interest as a whole if every member of the population of interest had the same chance of being sampled, which is what "random sample" means, regardless of how large the sample is.

2. Given a truly random sample, the accuracy of population estimates based on the sample depends only on the size of the sample, not on the size of the population.

("Sample" is used here to mean a subset of the population available for study, and thus not the population itself.)

Statistics II

Why don't statistics work backwards? There are actually many reasons, but three are key. First, statistics requires data and data requires theory. Second, theory is about causation and statistics are about correlation. Correlation does not imply causation. Third, it just can't work backwards.

1. You can't do statistics unless you have data, so data proceeds statistics. But you can't collect data without some theory that tells you which data is relevant. There is lots of unstructured information available about the world. It can't be analyzed unless its been sorted and classified, and since that necessarily must come before statistical analysis, it can only be sorted through theory. (Even with archival data, it only exists before it's relevant.) No one is ever going to regress corporate performance against CEO hair color because, even though the information is available, it makes no theoretical sense.

2. Theory is a proposed causal relationship between two constructs. Statistics depends upon the correlation between one or more independent variables (the possible cause(s)) and the dependent variable (the supposed effect). You can't get to theory from statistics because correlation does not imply causation, though causation requires correlation. There are lots of pairs of things that correlate, even very strongly, without being causally related. Sometimes that's because both are caused by some third construct. Consider, for example, this graph of the relationship between the number of lemons imported from Mexico and US highway fatalities:



(I stole this graph from Derek Lowe, who in turn stole it from a letter to the editor in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (Johnson, 2008).)

"R² = 0.97" means that Mexican lemons explain approximately 97% of the variability in US highway fatalities over time, an almost unheard of result in the social sciences and much better than lots of studies that have caused otherwise rational people to upset their way of life. Why shouldn't we, then, repeal the traffic laws and just start importing lemons willy-nilly? Because theory tells us that lemons don't cause a reduction in highway deaths, no matter what statistics tells us.

What's really going on in this graph is that we've gotten richer over time, mostly as a result of increased productivity resulting from advanced technology. Richer means that we're importing more luxuries, like Mexican lemons. Advanced technology means that cars can be safer and richer means that safer cars are affordable. (For all I know, it might also be that technology advances have made importing lemons from Mexico easier and cheaper, increasing demand.) In any event, imported lemons and highway fatalities only correlate with each other because they both have causal relationships with a missing factor or two. Only theory can tell us whether a factor is missing and what it might be. Even then, it usually doesn't.

3. The third reason we can't work backward is because that's just not how it works. This has to do with our acceptance of false positives, and with null hypothesis testing, so it's a little more complicated.

Statistics works by trying to figure out, if our two data sets really were random rather than systematically different based on the independent variable of interest, how likely it would be that we would get that distribution. Let's say we suspected, for example, that altitude effects whether a coin lands heads or tails. To test our theory, we flip a coin at ground level and at the summit of Mt. Everest. On the ground, we get 48 heads and 52 tails. At altitude, we get 62 heads and 38 tails. How likely is it that our distribution could happen at random? As it happens, I can test that: the chance of getting that distribution randomly is 0.047, or just under 5%. If I had gotten 61 heads on Everest, the chance would have risen to 6.5%.

As most of you know, the convention in science is that if the probability of a particular distribution being random is less than 5%, we can claim that the two sets of numbers are significantly different. The first thing to note about this is that this is only a convention. It is entirely arbitrary; there is no theory that makes 0.05 better than 0.04 or 0.06. If it were higher, we'd have more false positives, if it were lower, we'd have more false negatives. Just like deciding whether the speed limit should be 55 or 65, in the end all you can do is pick one.

The second thing to note is that this is not the same as saying that the chance that my result is random (and thus wrong) is 0.047. Implicitly, statistical tests compare my actual hypothesis (altitude causes a change in coin flipping results) to an opposite "null" hypothesis (altitude doesn't cause a change in coin flipping results). Generically, the hypothesis being tested is always "these two sets of numbers are significantly different" and the null hypothesis is always "these two sets of numbers are not significantly different." So the 0.047 really means, "the chance that my results are a false positive is 4.7%, if the null hypothesis is true. Of course, if the null hypothesis is false, then my theory is true and my results are necessarily not a false positive. In the real world, we can't know whether my theory is true separate from statistics, but strong theory, well founded on prior results, should be true. In other words, if my theory is convincing, the total chance that my results are a false positive is much less than 5%. (In some fields, the chance that my results are a false positive will be further reduced by replication, but in management we don't do replication.)

Now, what if we try to work backwards? The problem is that, for every hundred random regressions I do, I'll get (by definition) an average of five "significant" but false results even if there's no actual relationship in my data. Once, simply doing the regressions was onerous and something of a brake on this kind of fishing, but now, if I have the data on my computer, I can easily do 100 regressions in an hour. If I do a thousand regressions, I'll have 50 that are significant, and 10 that look really significant (p < 0.01). (One of the annoying things about popular science reporting is the focus on really small values of p. For reasons not worth going into here, if the probability of the null hypothesis being true is less than 5%, it really doesn't matter how small it is.) It is much, much, much more likely (actually, all but certain) that I'll find significance when fishing around than when testing theory. If we work backwards, we have no way of knowing what the chance of a false positive is.

[Because I want to make sure this point is clear, I'm going to beat it over the head a bit. If I come up with a theory and then test it, I know that the chance that my results are random (a false positive) is no more than 5%. Because my theory is strong and based on prior research -- and to be published it has to be vetted by experienced scholars in the field -- I know that the real chance of a false positive is actually quite a bit less than 5%. But if I work backwards, I have no idea what the chance of a false positive is. The particular relationship I found is less than 5% likely to be random, but I know -- by definition, and thus with certainty -- that if I do 100 regressions on completely random data, some of those regressions will be sufficiently unlikely (p < 0.05). In other words, when I'm fishing, the chance of a false positive is 100%, even though it is still true that the chance of any particular significant result being false is less than 5%. If I take that result and then fit a theory to it, I have no idea what the real chance of that result being a false positive is. Inherent in the math behind statistics is the assumption that I am testing a relationship I theorized a priori. That assumption is necessarily violated if I find the relationship and then develop the theory.]

Why can't we just go find significance and then go see if we can develop strong theory? Because we can always find a theory to fit if we know the end point.

Statistics I

Since it's become clear that I'm not going to write one long post on statistics, I've decided to write an infinite series of short posts on statistics.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

In this post, I'll start with the purpose of statistics: the purpose of statistics is to tell us whether two sets of numbers, that differ based on some characteristic that we suspect might be important, are really different. Although it can get very sophisticated (for example, we sometimes don't know the second set of numbers), that's really all statistics does or can do.

In particular, statistics can't work backwards. We can't see that two sets of numbers are different, and then work our way back to figure out what the difference is. Theory must drive statistics, but statistics can't drive theory.

Next time, what alpha means, and what what alpha means means.

The Annotated Brit

The inimitable John Inman:

The Nice Schizophrenic Next Door

We're making plans for a family trip to Montreal next summer, to correspond with a conference I've got to go to. (Peter -- Are you going to be in the vicinity in early August?) One of the conference hotels is the Fairmont Le Reine Élizabeth. There is something so deliciously Canadian about their insistence upon rendering the name of the Queen of England in French; it is just a constant delight.

Irony Is A Dish Best Served Cold

Remember when it was treason to sell the UK-based manager of six US ports to a state-owned UAE company? You probably don't remember who ended up buying out the six US ports instead: AIG, which is obviously a much more trustworthy manager of our precious national assets.

Are There People

... for whom it is good news when the world conforms to their expectations?

Remember The Uninsured?

Every once in a while, I have to forcibly remind myself that the long march to "Health Care Reform" started with the uninsured. It is wrong, we were told, to deny 15 20 30 40 million Americans healthcare. And who can argue?

So, the American people, coming off 8 exciting Bush years, when we had done pretty well but weren't really feeling that we had done much good (mistakenly, in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there), elected Barack Obama to do good -- including by getting health care to the uninsured.

But how to do that. One way, the traditional American way, is to provide health care insurance to the poor, the young and the old and simply let the uninsured show up when they need treatment. The other way is to get health insurance to everyone, which apparently requires spending trillions of dollars, mucking up everyone else's health care and losing sight of the uninsured along the way. The problem is that everyone who has insurance is pretty much happy with their health care, they just wanted to help their neighbors out.

Now, my neighbors are fine people and I'm more than willing to help them out, now and then. But there are limits and there's no point in my helping them out by giving up myself what they don't have. In other words, we might have reached the Robin Hood point, where the rich, having been robbed, are now the poor.

It Looks Too Much Like A Bribe To Actually Be A Bribe

Is It Just Me?

Or is Curious George at the Park Touch-and-Feel an unfortunately creepy name for a children's book?

Thought Experiment

AMENDMENT 28:

Except in time of war, the federal government shall have no power to tax but shall pay for all of its expenditures through borrowing, save only for fees charged to participants that cover the cost of their participation in enumerated voluntary activities.

The Zeitgeist Rolls On

In a New York Times article on fraud in a new book on the Hiroshima bomb, a historian describes the book this way:

“This book is a Toyota,” said Robert S. Norris, the author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. “The publisher should recall it, issue an apology and fix the parts that endanger the historical record.”

Just putting down a marker for the first time I saw the phrase "It's a Toyota" used to mean that the subject is a clunker.

Why Is Internet Advertising So Bad?

We all have, in the back of our minds, the idea that advertising is going to keep giving us our internet for free. But why is internet advertising so bad? If I see another ad about Acai berries, or about how a [fill in your location here] mom makes $77.00 an hour stuffing envelopes, I will cry.

In The United States

One of our faculty members has a habit of adding "in the United States" to any generalized statement made in her presence. If one of us says that pay tends to be the largest factor in employee motivation, she'll say, "in the United States." If we say that investing in research and development tends to be associated with increased profitability, she'll say "in the United States." If we claim that reciprocity is a universal human behavior, she'll say "in the United States."

Her point is two-fold. First, she doesn't believe in universal human behavior. Second, she's reminding even those of us who are positivists -- who believe that there can be generalizable rules of human behavior and thought -- that our conclusions can't outrun our data, and in management almost all data is from the United States. (In the social sciences generally, almost all data is Euro-American. In psychology, most data is from college students. Next time the media tries to tell you about some universal truth derived from psychology experiments -- usually some left wing truth -- remember that all they're really telling you about is how college students behave.)

I'm reminded of this warning by the recent proliferation of supposed "racial code-words" identified by the racialist left and defenders of President Obama. Various observers have suggested that calling Obama "socialist," or "un-American," or "Professor" is subtle racism. As James Taranto notes, "un-American" is not particularly subtle, but it seems odd to object to it as racist. Professor, on the other hand, is a very subtle insult, and not just as racial code.

Why are these insults and honorifics both being described at racist? Partly, I'm sure, simply to deflect criticism of President Obama. But partly for a peculiarity of thought in the United States. For a certain portion of our population, blacks are not only "other," but the only other.

It's fair enough to note that, if asked to imagine the prototypical American, most of us (and not just in the United States) would imagine a white male. "Aha," shout the racialists, "we knew it. Blacks aren't really American." I have a more benign explanation, of course, that allows for the Americanism of women and minorities (who are called minorities for a reason). Our prototypical American is probably also Christian, though probably goes to Church only on Christmas, Easter, to be married and buried. Nonetheless, Jews can be Americans, too. But if you can only imagine one American, you go with the majority.

For the racialists on the left and right, though, our little thought experiment has proved, conclusively, that blacks are the other in the United States. For certain racialists on the left, however, blacks are the only other. They'd admit, if pressed, that women, atheists, Asians, gays, etc., also seem to be other, but only to the extent that their experience is like that of American blacks. When they say that "gay is the new black," they don't mean to imply that black isn't still black.

So, in the United States, the racialists can't admit that calling someone "socialist" or "un-American" or "professor" is really about whatever those words literally signify. Rather, it's a way of pointing out that the object of those words is other than prototypically American, which is to say, black.

Today Makes Me Think ...

That sanity consists of being able to step outside the logic of your own argument.

RIP Dick Francis

Proof is a nearly perfect book.

What To Do, What To Do?

Although it's not really my concern, I'm fascinated by the question of what the Democrats should do about health insurance reform between now and the mid-term elections. Should they do nothing, and alienate their base, or should they force it through and energize their opponents even more?

Their base, which might even earnestly believe that HCR will accomplish something good, badly wants reform to pass. They want the Dems in Congress to pull out all the stops, using the reconciliation process (designed for budget changes that reduce the deficit) to nationalize 1/6th of the national economy over Republican opposition. If Congress won't do that, the base at least threatens not to turn out in the fall. After all, what's the point of voting for Democrats if you can't get one measly earth-shattering, unprecedented reform through?

On the other hand, the Tea Partiers and conservative Republicans hate reform, think that it is the tool of the devil designed to make all our lives worse and think that, by electing Scott Brown, we've won. Cheat us of our victory and we'll turn out in droves. Plus, using reconciliation in this way would be, in effect, the end of the filibuster.

Add to this that the Administration probably does truly believe that HCR is not only good, but the culmination of 100 years of striving for national health care and this might be the last real chance of passing it for a generation. What should they do?

Sometimes I Wonder

why I bother (here and here).

This study is the poster child for bad reporting of social science. The reporting is that the authors found that the judge's race makes an "enormous" or "dramatic" difference in the outcome of discrimination cases. Leaving aside the fact that the study is completely unreliable and doesn't allow us to draw any conclusions at all (which I don't really blame a lay reporter for missing), the fact is that the authors' own results show that the judge's race makes little (R-squared under the best possible circumstance is only 0.03, meaning that judge's race explains only three percent of the variance in outcomes) or no (in the authors' best analysis, judge's race was not significant) difference.

That's actually an interesting result -- if we could rely on it -- since everyone assumes (look at the comments) that judge's race will make a difference. A finding that suggests that we're too cynical is an interesting finding.

P.S. The comment thread at the ABA Journal, which has now degenerated to "it's the JOOOOs," amply demonstrates the problem with bad reporting of bad studies.

Sounds Teleological To Me

Aliens are likely to look and behave like us. (Richard Alleyne, Telegraph.co.uk, 1/25/10)

Prof Conway Morris believes that extraterrestrial life is most likely to occur on a planet similar to our own, with organisms made from the same biochemicals. The process of evolution will even shape alien life in a similar way, he added.
“It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian," he said.

"In the end the number of options is remarkably restrictive. I don't think an alien will be a blob. If aliens are out there they should have evolved just like us. They should have eyes and be walking on two legs.

"In short if there is any life out there then it is likely to be very similar to us."

Note that "Darwinian" here seems to mean "destined to produce symmetrical bipeds with heads."

PSA

If you use Gmail, check your Spam folder. Gmail apparently changed its Spam filter a week or two ago and it's been catching more real emails than it used to.

Epigramatically Yours

From a comment at BrothersJudd:

"Capitalism is simply what the left calls freedom, when it wants to curtail it."

Sensemaking

I was minding my own business last night, watching Fringe, when I noticed Charley in the background. That seemed somewhat odd, since Charlie had been killed last fall at the beginning of the season. I checked my cable listing, but it said that the episode was new in 2010.

Hmmm, something was up. An alt-universe story? Some sort of shape-changer Charlie (which would actually be the second shape-changer Charlie) coupled with a memory ray? Neither the characters nor the show seemed to be paying any attention to the dead walking -- although the story for the episode was about a girl who came back to life after being dead. Subtle, show, subtle.

I started to notice a nice shading to the characterizations. Walter seemed to have a harder edge and fewer tics than usual. He was more decisive and more confrontational. Olivia, on the other hand, seemed softer, more empathetic. Charley was more in the background than usual and his interactions with Olivia seemed cooler. Was that really Astrid's regular hair style, or was it bushier than it had been?

What could this all mean?

It didn't seem to be an alt-universe story, since Peter was there and Charley had no scar. The mind ray was still possible, but why wasn't the show suggesting any solution? I began to spin out ever more fantastic possibilities.

But when I looked on the internet, it turned out that Fox was just burning off an unaired episode from the first season.

Today Is 30

The Environment Is Just Grist For Our Mill

There's not much I enjoy about the humorless earnestness of green culture, but one thing that I find quite entertaining is how it is being coopted by businesses in order to push costs onto consumers.

A few examples:

Hotels now try to guilt guests into reusing their towels, relieving the hotel of the cost of doing its laundry.

Supermarkets now sell reusable grocery bags, relieving them of the need to provide bags, paper or plastic, and making the shopper do the work of schlepping their bags to the store.

It's nice to see that, to a capitalist, Environmentalism is just another way of making money.

Do you have any other examples? I would think that employment would be a fertile ground for this sort of thing, but perhaps we're all too suspicious of our employers.

Time To Start Watching Treasuries

10 year Treasuries seem to be heading towards 4% faster than expected (they touched 3.91% late last week). The yield curve is no longer inverted, for those who are about that, and, so far, interest costs for all that deficit spending we're doing are fairly cheap.

More Proof That Fascism Is Of The Left

If you can stomach it, you should go and read this Pat Buchanan column. Go ahead, I'll wait.

What I find really striking is not how silly it is (in 2000 the economy was booming, in 2010 we're just coming out of a recession: OH, WOE IS ME), but how, except for one paragraph and a hand-full of words, it could have just as easily be written by someone on the supposed left as by Buchanan, who has so long straddled the line between right and far-right.

Buchanan's is a sad story, though his functional anti-semitism prevents me from feeling too sorry for him. Working for Ronald Reagan, he was a force for good -- and for free trade. But he soon lost his soul in Washington, suffering the fate of those who take politics too seriously. He lost focus on where his path was taking him and lost sight of common sense some time ago.

I Remain Firm In My Position

that the decade doesn't end until next December 31.

In Real Life, Pocahontas Died Of Smallpox

It's a rainy day in Orlando, so we went to see Avatar today in IMAX 3D. It is excellent; well worth seeing. In fact, I'll wait while you go see it now.

That was fast.

A lot of the reviews (Roger Ebert's is a good example) claim that the movie is anti-American, or at least anti-war (and who am I to deny that the two amount to the same thing). But of course it's not possible to make an anti-war war movie. At the end of Avatar we're thrilled to see the Na'vi and their tree god demolish the mining company's mercenaries. When the leader of the mercenaries asks Jake (our hero) how it feels to be a traitor to your "race," we know he's the bad guy and cheer to see him shot twice with the giant poisoned arrows of our favorite Na'vi princess. We're not against the war, we're just against the humans.

As for anti-Americanism, there is some of that. It's just hard to tease apart from the anti-capitalism. The National Guard, slyly, answers this concern by running a full-throated ad for soldier/citizens before the movie. They understand that Jake does nothing that we don't wish our ex-Marines to do. Or, as Jake says, once a Marine, always a Marine, even if that requires that you side with the Indians against the Cowboys.

And that's the real transgression of Avatar. Cameron tells a story in which the Indians win, turning our founding myth upside down. That might be disturbing, if it were possible to take seriously. Avatar is a retelling of Disney's Pocahontas in which Pocahontas gets John Smith (excuse me, Jake Sully) and her people keep "their" land. It shares with Disney's Pocahontas the conceit -- perhaps better suited to science fiction -- that the Indians are fundamentally different from you and me -- when they talk to trees, the trees talk back. We have machines; they have a mystic bond with the land.

Cameron spends no time on the question of what else the Na'vi don't have, besides mechanized killing machines of all types and sorts. We don't see many Na'vi older than what, for the humans, amounts to the late 20s. We don't see healthcare or education that isn't exceedingly practical. We don't see the arts or even much in the way of crafts. Na'vi fashions are, to put it mildly, minimalist. The Na'vi have no interest in anything the humans have. Indeed, both the Na'vi and the humans seem weirdly uninterested in what makes their mountains fly, and how much that would be worth on Earth. It seems fair to say that no Na'vi Adam Smith is pushing for free trade. How many Na'vi children die of dysentery or malaria or malnutrition? The Na'vi are at one with nature, but it's made clear that the bond doesn't make nature any nicer.

In Avatar, the Indians were able to use their mystic bond with all life to use nature as a weapon and send the white man (literally and figuratively) packing. In real life, Pocahontas died of smallpox in Gravesend, England.

Merry Christmas To All

May non-dominational authority figure of your choice bless us every one.

What Is Performance?

One of the hardest questions in Strategic Management -- the study of why some organizations outperform other organizations -- is how to measure performance? Is there one universal measure? Does it depend on industry or structure? How do we make sure that our comparisons are apples-to-apples?

So what measurement do you use to say this organization outperforms that organization?

I Put The Over/Under At Two Days

Dear Prudence,

My partner and I are adopting twins! We plan to raise them without diapers. There's a method for this, and most of the world goes without diapers. We will also use only organic clothes and linens, and only natural wooden toys. I'm wondering how we can politely express this to the people attending our baby shower. It would seem a bit brash to simply tack a list of what we don't want to the bottom of the invitation. I'm afraid that giving no indication about our organic preferences would lead to us throwing out or giving away almost all of the gifts we receive, and that doesn't seem right, either.

—Two Dads, Two Kids, One Problem

Identify All Legal Issues And Briefly State The Controlling Law

Sam Scientist from Springfield was hired by Big Pharma Inc. to research new drugs. On his first day, Sam, who was the company’s first African-American employee, was given an employee handbook that said that employees would be treated fairly, that he would only be fired for good cause and that Sam was here to work so no unproductive doodling was allowed on the job. While doodling one morning while on a corporate jet on its way to a conference in Boston, Sam invented an ink that would make someone forget anything they had read printed in that ink after two weeks.

Sam’s manager punished him for doodling by putting a memo in his file that Sam now had one strike. Big Pharma Inc. filed a patent for the ink invented by Sam. Sam was not given any of the profits from his ink, even though other scientists, all of whom were white, were given bonuses for inventing new drugs.

Big Pharma Inc. started a subsidiary, Fair Use LLC, to publish books using Sam’s ink. Fair Use LLC was owned 50% by Big Pharma Inc. and 50% by Big Pharma’s CEO and his secretary/mistress. Fair Use’s business model was simply to republish all best sellers without paying royalties to the authors. When Sam complained that he should be given 25% of Fair Use LLC, he was fired.

An Inquiry

Does anyone know the point of the really odd comment spam I've been getting for the last week or so?

The Hardest Choice Since Sophie's

Orrin raises the possibility that we can defeat health care reform, or defeat President Obama, but not both. This is similar to the idea that attempting health care reform saved Clinton's presidency by electing a Republican House and making him into a caretaker President. Of course, with Clinton we defeated healthcare reform but were stuck with the President for two terms.

With Obama, it's a harder choice. Clinton, at least, was relatively innocuous on foreign affairs and even, with NAFTA, the ICC and Kyoto, good for the country. I really don't want healthcare reform, which if passed will torture us for generations, but Obama (Nobel speech excepted) can't be trusted with foreign affairs. What do we do?

Cognitive Dissonance Explains It All

In the course of making fun of Ann Althouse for voting for Obama on the assumption that he was lying about his belief in God, I had a minor epiphany.

When our intentions, attitudes and behaviors don't match, we suffer from cognitive dissonance, which turns out to be a pretty powerful force. It is not, though, generally powerful enough to change our behaviors, so most often we avoid dissonance by changing our attitudes and/or intentions. So even if Obama joined the church as a cynical move to find a political power base in Chicago, years of attendance combined with his intention to live an authentic black life in America, would cause cognitive dissonance most easily eased by changing his attitude and believing in God.

To Think That Epistomology Must Be A Subset Of Ontology

Is wrong. But I can't decide if it is a mistake born of optimism or pessimism.

This Is Fun To Play With

Hampshire County is where I live; Nantucket County is where Nantucket is.

Well, I Was Wrong About That

Instapundit posted this coffee ad without comment, but I remembered it as soon as I hit play. In the 80s, coffee was worried that it might be permanently replaced by soda and other soft drinks; that Americans were losing their coffee addiction. These series of ads were meant to boost coffee drinking among the young (which, at the time, included me).

Although by 1984 I was drinking coffee by the pot, I didn't think that the industry had a chance to remain anything but an also-ran. Coke uber alles.

The research into entrepreneurship indicates that one of the few traits that really seems to separate entrepreneurs from the rest of us is a representation bias. That is, entrepreneurs think that their own experience, tastes and judgment are more representative of the population at large than is actually the case. So, if they like some new product, everyone else will, too. If that's true, than I'm the anti-entrepreneur. I think the things that I like are doomed to failure.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

Seems like a good time to revisit anthropogenic global warming: what do we know, what can we assume, and what can we do it about it.

Anthropogenic global warming is a series of nested propositions:

1. The global temperature is rising. This is the heart of AGW, and until this week, it was the real consensus of informed scientists. After the CRU leaks, it turns out that we can't even be sure that the globe has been getting warmer over the last century. Other questions are, what is "global temperature" and is it even relevant. Maybe we should worry about peaks and not averages. Maybe we should worry more about temperatures at the poles or at the equator rather than global averages. Because it turns out that the only good temperature record we have lasting longer than decades is for particular spots in the US and Japan and some of those will have changed due to local urbanization (and in at least one case, because someone pointed an air conditioner dump vent at the thermometer). Of course, at some point we all agree that the globe's gotten warmer; we used to be in the little ice age, which ended about 1880, so the world has clearly gotten warmer since then. Of course, that's been a good thing, leading to the need for proposition 2.

2. Rising temperatures would be bad. In fact, the experience of mankind is to the contrary. Rising temperatures are good. We get more crops, we gain arable land, fewer seniors drop dead shoveling snow, etc. So AGWists need to posit large increases in temperature that push us past a tipping point at which civilization is devastated (or, at least, Bangladesh is under water). We can't get there through CO2 alone, though, even though AGWists put a lot of time into arguing proposition 3.

3. Carbon dioxide causes higher temperatures. This is probably true. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas in that it absorbs sunlight and emits heat at levels higher than the atmosphere generally. But the direct effects of carbon dioxide on temperature are well understood and relatively mild; about one degree for every doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Since we're unlikely to double CO2 even twice from this point on -- even as India and China industrialize -- that really isn't going to get us over the tipping point, so

4. Carbon dioxide warming will be amplified by positive feedback mechanisms -- that we've never seen, can't describe and don't understand. The historical evidence seems pretty clear: temperature increases have been followed by atmospheric CO2 increases but never preceded by them. Even worse for the AGWists, we do understand at least two negative feedback mechanisms: more CO2 leads to more plant growth, which, by reducing the Earth's albedo, cools temperatures be reflecting more energy into space; and rising temperature leads to more cloud cover, which reduces Earth's albedo, etc. Basically, AGW's appeal to science just breaks down here, even though positive feedback is absolutely essential to the AGW as disaster scenarios.

5. Industrialization, which leads to release of CO2 into the atmosphere, causes AGW. This is actually more problematic than it appears, because industrialization also leads to the emission of particulate air pollution and other gases, like sulfur dioxide, that cause atmospheric cooling. Do the traces of CO2 we release into the atmosphere overpower the traces of SO2 we release into the atmosphere? Your guess is as good as the CRU's. At least one AGWist theorizes that the reason there hasn't been any warming over the last 10 years has been because of the increase in SO2 pumped into the atmosphere by India and China. That, of course, implies that the clean air act threatens to destroy the world.

6. Global warming is bad because it's anthropogenic. Lot's of AGWists seem to argue that we are obliged to do something about global warming because it's anthropogenic. But what difference does that make? If global warming were natural but disastrous, should we let it? If it were man-made but good (a real possibility, of course) should we stop it just because we're changing "nature?" This (and the continued opposition to nuclear power) is where it becomes clear that AGW isn't scientific at all for many proponents; rather it is political/religious/spiritual.

Stupid President

I don't really dislike Barrack Obama. He's no Bill Clinton -- the best president in my life time I never voted for -- but he isn't (yet) Jimmy Carter, either. I'm all for an arrogant foreign policy but I do understand why the nation was ready for a break.

But Obama's habit of kowtowing (almost literally) to foreign prince's and potentate's is disgusting. And not just disgusting, but stupid. He's the American president. He's the head of state. HE IS THEIR EQUAL. He is their equal on principal, because that's what Americans believe, so no American should give Elizabeth or Abdullah or Emperor What-his-face-sama anything but a brief nod. But he's also their equal as a matter of mere protocol. The Administration just looks dumb when they do this and I wish they would stop it.

Um...Huh?

I enjoy reading Camille Paglia, who is also responsible for the post below this one. Her most recent Salon column viciously attacks Nancy Pelosi, national health care, Hillary Clinton and Richard Dawkins. What's not to like?

And then she says something like this:

What mal-education goes on at killer prices at the elite schools! Skyrocketing tuition costs are legalized piracy. It's a national scandal, which the mainstream media has shamefully neglected. A few weeks ago, I was bemused to discover the bill from my first semester (fall 1964) at Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The tuition was $200, which was offset by my state scholarship for that amount. My shared room was $150; linen was $6.50. Board at the cafeteria was $225. The physical education fee was $2, and there was an activity fee of $17.50 and a general college fee of $12.50. The grand total my parents owed for the semester was $413.50 -- for which I received the superb education that is still the basis of my professional life as a teacher and writer. If only the billions upon billions that this country has thrown down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan had been redirected to education and healthcare!

That someone as smart as Paglia doesn't understand that, not only have we thrown billions (probably trillions) of government dollars at higher education, but that those billions are the reason college costs so much today, is discouraging. Of course, Paglia, like me, feeds at the big ed/governmental trough, which can warp even the smartest observer.

The Second Time As Farce

Remember when the spat between Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd was the battle between good and evil?

Place Holder

I'm feeling some internal pressure building up to blog (or maybe even write) about how Harvard Business School destroyed American business. Basically, it's a story of two post-war trends. First, a belief in planning -- the more massive the better -- as the answer to every problem. Second, the decision of the large foundations -- Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller -- to pour money into management education so long as it looked "social scientific."

It turned out that these trends left management a little up in the air. Isn't wasn't quite clear what we should be teaching. As a result, a lot of schools hired psychologists and sociologists and focused on what we call micro management (yes, really). Basically, this was human resource management. The problem is that it's never been possible to convincingly (i.e., scientifically) show that any particular hr technique leads to better firm performance. Basically, hr (also called organizational behavior) focused on reducing absenteeism and turnover while increasing what's called "organizational citizenship behavior, which is doing things for your employer that aren't, technically, your job. For example, the person who takes it upon herself to empty and clean the lunch room refrigerator is demonstrating OCB. Frankly, it's all sort of a mess of warring medium-term theories and we can't even say with certainty that employee satisfaction is a good thing for the company.

This left Harvard with a problem. HBS does not see itself as being in the business of churning out middle managers and vice presidents of human resources. It sees itself as being in the business of turning out CEOs whose value is in their ability to lead their company to sustained high returns. Before the focus on planning and scientification, they did this by hiring retired CEOs to come in and tell war stories to the graduating MBA students. This is probably as good a way of teaching strategic management as any, and survives today in the Harvard case study method. But it's very ad hoc and highly unscientific.

The other problem facing Harvard was that there's no obvious place for economists in this new management education. Economists are social scientists, but they assume that over time there are no meaningful firm level differences. All firms, in the long run, are fungible in economic theory. So it's not just that economists don't have much to say about the proper strategy to pursue to obtain sustained high returns, it's that they don't think that there can be any such thing.

All this came to a head in the person of a economics student at HBS name Michael Porter. Porter was studying IO (industrial organization) economics, which is the branch of economics that advises policy makers on how the legal environment should be structured to promote competition within industries, and thus avoid sustained high returns. Porter, true to his training, accepted that firms within the industry would, in the long term, all look identical and thus there was no point on wasting time on firm strategy. But he turned IO economics on its head and started educating executives on how to use lobbying and industry-level devices (e.g., trade associations and collective bargaining agreements to reduce competition within the industry and block entry, allowing all of the established firms in the industry to share sustained high returns. Basically, the Porter school (Porter, by the way, would object to this as an overly simplified summary of his views) teaches that the most important strategic decision made in business is about what industry to enter, after which there isn't much any individual firm can do to set itself apart from its competition. After that, all you can do is work together with your "competition" to try to rig the game at the industry level.

Porter's success at Harvard, and Harvard's success at educating CEOs, seems to me to explain much of what we've witnessed over the last few decades. (Porter published his early and most influential work in the late 70s and early 80s.) The co-dependent corporate state and the corrupt bargains struck by management, labor and government owe quite a bit to the presence, at the top of the corporation, of CEOs educated to think that management consists of rigging the game.

Cupcake Bloggers Are The Unacknowledged Legislators Of The World

The Invigorating Sight Of New Non-Green Shoots Of Unhope

Poll: US belief in global warming is cooling (Dina Cappiello, AP, 10/21/09)

Americans seem to be cooling toward global warming.

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip, even as the U.S. and world forums gear up for possible action against climate change.

I could get all wigged out about the AP's ignorance of the scientific consensus that "pollution" causes global cooling and part of whatever warming happened in the latter half of the 20th century was due to cleaning up the air. But why spoil this moment.

Dr. Duess

(WARNING: The following is not in any way nuanced, satirical or sophisticated. It is not an allegory for our times. There is no hidden meaning or moral, and those searching for one will be shot. The Proprietor)

Giants come,
Witches come,
Rumbling, bumbling giants come.
Slithering, dithering witches come.
How they run!
How they come!
They come to the house of Johnny Rum.

Johnny Rum is home in bed.
Johnny Rum with a cold in his head.
Laying in bed, cold in his head,
Johnny hears the giants run.
Mom is gone.
Dad is gone.
Billy and Jilly and Tilly are gone.

Johnny Rum grabs the phone,
Johnny Rum, home alone.
Johnny Rum calls 911.
"Witches, you say?"
"Giants, you say?"
"Please check your number and dial again,"

The Queen of the witches comes to the door,
The Queen of the witches chills to the core.
The biggest giant comes to the door,
The biggest giant, with the head of a boar.
Knock, goes the door,
Knock, goes the door.
"Who's there?," goes Johnny Rum.

A giant rumble comes to Johnny,
A witchy shrill grabs for Johnny,
"We've come for you," rumble the giants.
"We've come for you," shrill the witches.
"Abandon hope, Johnny Rum."

Johnny Rum knows the score.
Johnny Rum has learned the lore.
Johnny Rum opens the door.

A bucket of water pelts the Queen.
A bucket of water melts the Queen.
Melt, Queen.

The largest giant snorts and steams.
Johnny runs.
Johnny dashes.
The largest giant bends and bashes.
Johnny grabs his big shoe laces.

Johnny ties and knots and splices.
Johnny joins and knits the laces.
Johnny runs, the giant follows,
Down he goes into a hollow.
The earth shakes.
The ground quakes.
Bones break.
Mountains flake.
Thunder wakes.
In the mountains, a dam breaks, a lake quakes, a flood wakes.

All the witches scream in horror,
All the giants run in fright.
The ground shakes; the ground quakes.
A flood comes.
A rushing, gushing, shaking, quaking, moaning, groaning, frowning, drowning flood comes.

In the swirling waters, all the witches start to melt.
In the twirling waters, all the giants start to fall.
Giants run,
Witches run,
Rumbling, bumbling giants run.
Slithering, dithering witches run.
They run from the house of Johnny Rum.

Mom is home.
Dad is home.
Billy and Jilly and Tilly are home.
Johnny Rum is in his bed.
Johnny Rum, with a cold in the head.

Coase Gets His Second Nobel

Donna this morning mentioned that she heard on NPR that some American had been awarded the Nobel for his work on the boundaries of the firm. After making the mandatory Barrack Obama joke, I said that it must be Oliver Williamson, and I was right.

As it happens, I just spent a measurable portion of my summer reading Williamson and about Williamson. (I've pulled three of his books from the shelf, The Mechanisms of Goverance, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism, and The Nature of the Firm, and I highly recommend them. Williamson is an accessible writer and if you're interested in why some functions necessary to produce a product are in the firm and others aren't (and who isn't), Williamson makes for a good read.) The old saw is that an economist is anyone who calls himself an economist, but I think of Williamson as an organizational theorist. Org theory is a name more than a discipline -- psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists all write org theory -- and the line between org theory and strategy (my field) is whisper-thin. If you look at organizing, you're an org theorist, unless you look at whether different ways of organizing effect performance, in which case you're in strategy.

As Prof. Williamson would be the first to admit, his work owes much to Ronald Coase. Coase first asked why organizational boundaries exist where they do? This is a more subtle question, and a more fundamental question, that first appears. The question really is why, if the market is so great at delivering the right product at the right price, does so much economic activity take place within the firm, where decisions are made bureaucratically by a hierarchy. Why have an HR department when the market could deliver the right worker for the right price? Why did Ford try to control the entire supply chain from mining the iron ore through selling the completed car, but buy it's tires from Firestone?

Coase's answer was that it must cost less to do it that way, at least in the long run. As Williamson says, "What is one to do with a 'gift' that is patently right, eludes analysis, and upsets foundations?" Essentially what org theory (and economics) did was ignore it for 50 years until Williamson based his career on building on Coase's analysis. His first book, and in some ways his best book, is Markets and Hierarchies (1975) which does a great job of combining work on information theory, organizational innovation, transaction costs and the behavioral theory of the firm.

Overall, Williamson's work allows us to make predictions about broad trends in org theory. Recent advances in information management and the collapsing costs of communicating across distances led to a predictable (and predicted) increase in outsourcing and vertical dis-integration. In other words, we're now in a period in which we should expect to see market mechanisms substituting for hierarchical/bureaucratic command and control mechanisms. Which is just another reason that the move to nationalize healthcare is a bad idea.

In fact, the work of both of this year's economic laureates suggests that nationalizing healthcare is a bad idea. (Elinor Ostrom's work suggests that the revealed preferences of local consumers does a better job of allocating scarce resources than diktats from national hierarchies.) Predictably this will be ignored by the very people who expect us to defer to the wisdom of the Peace Prize committee.

Next To The Nobel Committee Wearing Sashes Announcing "We're Racist Dupes And Hypocrits"

This news couldn't be any better.

I've been thinking over why I find this news so amusing and so gratifying. It comes down to a line from Deep Space Nine: "A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness."

What we really want is for our intellectual opponents to come to us one day and admit that we were right all along to believe that they couldn't really believe the bilge that they were speaking. We were right; they were wrong; and they knew it at the time.

Of course, in real life that never happens, making this the next best thing.

I'm Sure I'm Against It ...

It is university policy to provide equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants for employment regardless of their race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, atypical hereditary cellular or blood trait, marital status, civil union status, domestic partnership status, military service, veteran status, or any other category protected by law

Rutgers University web site

But what the heck does it mean?

Should'a Put A Ring On It

Does Single Ladies even have any competition yet for best pop song of the century?

And The Olympics Goes To Rio

Heh. Heh, heh. Heh.

Step Away From The Google

Not to hijack the, "There's too much internet" meme, but this thread is the poster child for "too much internet."

Being intelligent and yet socially awkward =/= Asperger's Syndrome.