The Wayback Machine: From Ten Years Ago: August 17-August 23, 2006
- 2006-08-22: The Blue Car Is the Red Car: Once upon a time we had a red car--a red two-door 1987 Acura Integra without air conditioning that we bought in the spring of 1988. We called it "the red car." After thirteen years we replaced it with a blue four-door 2000 Acura Integra with air conditioning. And for the first couple of months we had it, we would occasionally and accidentally (whatever that means) refer to it as "the red car"--even though we knew full well that it was the blue car. You see, I would argue, the neural circuits were well-engraved: an Acura Integra, the smaller of our cars, the more responsive of our cars, the non-station wagon--the features of the blue car were nearly identical to the features of the red car, so when our brains grasped for a verbal referent they had a good chance of picking the standard phrase we used for the red car. And, of course, neither of us had any trouble understanding what the other meant by the phrase "the red car"...
2006-08-21: A Warning: Jet Blue: Think, people. Think very hard before you sign up for JetBlue's nonstops from Boston to the West Coast. It turns out that their planes do not have enough fuel to get to the West Coast when the headwinds are strong. Thus a six hour flight that would be turned into a six and a half hour flight by strong headwinds is instead turned into an eight hour flight by an involuntary refueling stop in Salt Lake City...
2006-08-21: The Rise in U.S. Inequality: What the Labor-Side Real Professionals Say: Greg Mankiw wrote: "Policy choices such as tax rates and minimum wages have not been the main causes of increasing inequality. At least that is the consensus, as I understand it, of the professional labor economists who study the issue." That overstates it a bit, I think. The real professional labor economists argue. And my perspective--here in Berkeley under the intellectual hegemony of the terrifyingly brilliant David Card--is that the real professionals are arguing fiercely...
2006-08-21: Finance I (Remedial) (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?): Tyler Cowen did a bad thing in recommending Econospinning, by Gene Epstein.... You don't have to be a fundamentalist believer in efficient markets to know the following proposition: "About half the time the monthly employment report will be stronger than expected, and bond yields will rise; about half the time the monthly employment report will be weaker than expected, and bond yields will fall." But it appears that you do have to be a lot smarter than and know more about Wall Street than the Economics Editor of Barrons.
2006-08-20: Driving Forces Behind Rising Income Inequality: Tracking the Internet Debate: Piketty and Saez's latest numbers estimate that top 13,000 American households have multiplied their relative real incomes nearly fivefold since the 1970s. Then they received some 0.6% of national income. Now they receive nearly 2.8% of national income--an average of $25 million each, compared to roughly $5 million each had the relative income distribution remained at its 1970s levels. What are the CEOs, CFOs, COOs, elite Hollywood entertainers, investment bankers, and the very highest levels of professionals doing differently now in their work lives that makes them, in relative terms, worth five times as much as their predecessors of a generation and a half ago?...
2006-08-19: A Data Point: Sociologists Smarter than Physicist...: Cosma Shalizi,
sociologiststatistical physicist, has a truly remarkable intellectual encounter.... "One of my friends... had an adviser.... Two of his put-downs which stuck with me were 'I could go crazy tomorrow and find an appointment in the sociology department', and 'I don't want to criticize you, but that is the way superstring people think'. I was never sure which was supposed to be worse, but now I know. Sociologists have many faults, but they do know better than to try explaining a variable with a constant, while string theorists evidently do not.... That Prof. Motl reasons so badly here that he'd fail my freshman stats class is, of course, infinitely less offensive than fact that he's a bigot (of the 'we must squarely face the harsh light of my pseudo-scientific prejudices' variety). But I can't help feeling--hoping, even--that the two sorts of idiocy are linked..."2006-08-18: Jacob Weisberg Is the New Andrew Sullivan (This Is So Not a Compliment Department): Remember Andrew Sullivan back in his salad days, busily prostituting himself to George W. Bush as a member in good standing of the circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys?... The new Jacob Weisberg turns out to be nothing but the old Andrew Sullivan: "Why Lamont's victory spells Democratic disaster....the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat..."
