November 2012 Archives

President Obama traveled to Phnom Penh to invite Asian countries (excluding China) to join a new Trans-Pacific Parternship. The only problem? No one joined.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States.

President Obama is a national embarrassment. The reason he's so popular internationally is that most of the world is pleased to see America humiliated and weak.

Many people start running to lose weight or get fit but then begin to love running for it's own sake.

Tom Holland, running coach and author of "The Marathon Method," tells his clients that running for 3 miles was horrible for him too, but farther down the road things changed.

"It happens for different people at different times and different distances: that runner's high," he said in an interview.

For me the three-mile distance was the turning point. Getting myself in shape to run three miles seemed hard, and three miles felt like a million. Once I gained the ability to run three miles it was pretty easy to add on more miles. I don't think I've ever hit the wall even when I ran my half-marathon, but there was definitely a hump at the three-mile fitness level.

Why do runners love to run? There are a lot of reasons, but one of the top for me is that it's so linear.

Gregory Chertok, a sports psychologist with the American College of Sports Medicine, said many people are drawn to running because it's an uncomplicated activity.

"Put one foot in front of the other and when you work hard, you improve," Chertok said. "Not everything in life is so simple. You could spend 10 years in a ballet studio and not become a ballerina."

If you run longer, harder and faster you will become a better runner. You may never get a promotion from working hard, you may never win a prize, and your kids may end up in jail despite your best efforts... but you can get as good at running as you want to!

This zombie-themed sports equipment ad was banned during prime time in Norway. I think it's pretty fun.

(HT: RB, Blastr.)

Everyone knows that China exports zillions of gadgets and trinkets every year and benefits from this huge trade surplus, but China isn't self-sufficient. China imports vast quantities of oil and natural gas over the ocean and also suffers a staggering food deficit.

Structurally, China is at a huge disadvantage as it accounts for 20% of the world's population, but only 7% of arable land. Compare that with Brazil which has the reverse of those ratios. What that does for a country like China is to incentivise the adoption of technification. Let's look at their porcine market, which represents 50% of global production and consumption. In China, to slaughter roughly 600 mn pigs per year, which is about six times the demand in the US, they have a breeding herd of about 50 mn animals. In the US, the comparable number is only about 6 mn so there is a huge productivity lag. Owing to its structural disadvantages, China is much more focused on increasing efficiency. For that, it needs to accelerate technification. So, we're seeing a whole series of government incentives at a national level, a provincial level and a local level, focusing on the need to move toward integrated pork production because that's a key way to optimise total economics, both in terms of pig production, slaughtering, processing and also actually taking the pork out into the marketplace.

Using Wikipedia for a source here's a table I made of the ten most populous countries and their arable land to population ratio (both as a percentage of the world's total).

The bimodal distribution is surprising to me... it's as if food self-sufficiency plays no role in limiting population. I wonder if this is a modern phenomena or has held true throughout history?

Also interesting is that Russia has a huge reserve of arable land to go along with its huge reserve of energy resources. Given their proximity to China, I wonder if Russia be able to hold on to their territory as their population shrinks? Russia's land isn't all of high quality, but there's a lot of it.

(HT: Via Meadia.)

How should you be investing? Well I don't know where to put your money, but you should be investing your time in keeping your job. US companies are reducing investment, which means there aren't many great new jobs just around the corner. The economy is likely to get worse before it gets better.

I don't have much desire to read "50 Shades of Grey" but the debate over whether or not it's "great literature" interests me.

There's a couple of assumptions people are taking it on their own to make: 1) that EL James is not a great novelist. 2) that the trilogy is not an epic. 3) that her characters are forgettable. I think these assumptions are unfair and that most people at this point are extremely jealous of the success EL James is enjoying. I strongly disagree with all the assumptions. Clearly the characters are not forgettable (I will not forget the above passage so easily). Clearly it's an epic (all three in the trilogy are bestsellers) and clearly the marketplace has bestowed its grace on the talented writer. Then one blogger says its "not all about sales" but that "artist should be agents of change!"

First off, what is "great literature"? Why are all of these people trying to put their own assumptions on a concept that is pretty subjective. I've never once seen a definition of "great literature". There's two ways I can think to define it: 1) if I determine something is great, but that seems somewhat arrogant. And 2) If history determines something is great, i.e. a book withstands the test of time. Many books were published in 1952, for instance, but the only one I've ever read and will probably at some point re-read is "Old Man and the Sea".

Why would something withstand the test of time? It may or may not have great writing. That seems subjective and also determined by the colloquialisms of the time. If someone wrote like Shakespeare right now, for instance, they would have a total of zero sales other than the author's mother. But it does seem like great literature touches on elements that are universal (why are we here, what is the purpose of life, etc) or push the envelope on issues that are controversial. In the past that might've been racism, slavery, poverty, class warfare, the decline of the close-knit family, sexual taboos, etc.

Clearly "50 Shades of Grey" has done something to trigger the fascination (and sales) it has. It's sold over 50 million copies to become the fastest selling book of all time not because of the quality of the quotes above but because it hits right at the core of what the boundaries of a healthy sexual relationship might be and how wide those boundaries can get. Soft-porn and romance do not do that. "50 Shades" did. We can all be so lucky to write a book so thought-provoking. Artists are often met with hostility, disturb the establishment (including the ones who try to define art). They provide a sincere map of the human condition that both entertains and resonates with a "that's how I feel!". Is EL James soft-porn, great literature, or both. Time will tell. Not random bloggers (including me).

Altucher is basically using sales as a proxy for greatness, and that fits my broad intuition. Within any niche or genre I think that quantity sold is an adequate measure of greatness... and literature snobs should agree, given the zillions of "Best Seller" lists they vie for positions on.

More abstractly, if you can't measure it then it doesn't exist. Sales numbers are a way to quantify the I-know-it-when-I-see-it metric.

I good counter-arguement would be to perform a regression analysis on the time series of sales vs. "greatness" defined by some other measure (e.g., elite opinion). Do the ratings converge over time? Diverge? What's the correlation?

Barack Obama wants us to return to Clinton-era tax rates, so how about Clinton-era spending rates as well? And we don't have to use absolute-dollar values... let's go back to Clinton-era spending as a proportion of GDP.

In arguing for a return to Clinton-era tax rates for wealthy households, with a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent rather than the Bush-era 35 percent, President Obama suggests that Slick Willy cooked up precisely the right recipe for growth and prosperity. The boom times and economic dynamism that characterized the last five years of Bill Clinton's presidency strongly support that contention. But by addressing only the taxing part of the equation and not the spending levels, Democrats leave out the most important element in the winning formula.

Indeed, even if we went back to the good old days of Clinton taxation levels but maintained our current rates of spending, we'd suffer from devastating deficits of close to $1 trillion each year.

According to official government figures, the feds collected revenues totaling 20.6 percent of the gross domestic product in 2000, the final full year of Clinton's term. Under Obama in 2012, however, Washington spent money at a near-record rate of 24.3 percent of the GDP. Even with all of Clinton's tax revenues, that still would have left a deficit of 3.7 percent of GDP, significantly higher even than the worst full year of the much-reviled George W. Bush.

However, what effect would such cuts have on national defense? Clinton cut defense spending to the bone, and it's not clear we should return to pre-9/11 levels there. So maybe 20.6% of GDP isn't quite right, but 24.3% is certainly too high.

The future of education will look much different than the past few decades. My daugher's learning experience will be very different from mine. Salman Khan from Khan Academy predicts:

Here's what I think it could look like in five years: the learning side will be free, but if and when you want to prove what you know, and get a credential, you would go to a proctoring center [for an exam]. And that would cost something. Let's say it costs $100 to administer that exam. I could see charging $150 for it. And then you have a $50 margin that you can reinvest on the free-learning side.

I think that is consistent with the mission. You are taking the cost of the credential down from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. And the [software] system would tell them they are ready for it. So no paying tuition for community college and then dropping out, or even finishing the whole thing and saying "Oh, I'm $20,000 in debt and what did I get out of it?"

Now you are like, "Look, there is this micro-credential in basic accounting I can get for $150, and I basically know I am going to pass before I invest that money." That would be a huge positive for the consumers of education, and it could pay the bills on the learning side.

Removing the elite gatekeepers from education will be a huge benefit to human civilization. Cost will go down and quality/value will go up.

David Horovitz describes how Iron Dome has protected Israel from rockets while simultaneously creating political complications.

Successive days of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and efforts to reach Jerusalem? Well, that's worrying for sure. Those alarms are terrifying, no question. Plenty of Israelis from the center will now join the traumatized ranks of the Kassam-worn south. But injuries and death on the scale so gleefully contemplated by Hamas? Sorry. No, actually. We brought protection. We've got Iron Dome.

This being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, even in Israel's defensive victory, even in its staggering success in keeping its people physically safe, lies the danger of defeat.

When Israel's short-sighted critics insistently refuse to look beyond the numerical asymmetry, the very effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the latest weapon with which to attack Israel for its purported aggression. All those Gazans are suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet hardly any Israelis are dying? That can't be right. How can the Israelis claim to be the victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression? They're still alive.

Here's the problem: it's easy for the media to report on suffering, because very few people deserve to suffer. The audience instinctively knows how to line up its sympathies and the journalists don't have to work very hard to explain anything. It would be a lot more work for journalists to explain why the audience should side against the people who are most immediately, most visibly suffering.

The success of Iron Dome can be explained in one story. Each Hamas rocket that doesn't land and kill anyone doesn't get its own treatment because the potential victims are vague and faceless. When an actual Palestinian is killed the victim is specific and has a face, and the tragedy of the suffering wrenches the heart and draws viewers.

Our world is perverse in that we glorify people who suffer without looking into the cause of their suffering. A person who suffers for doing wrong deserves our pity, but should also stand as a warning to others and not simply be excused out of sympathy. In reality the suffering of the Palestinians is caused not by Israel, but by Hamas.

And Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing numbers because they are either directly involved in trying to kill us or -- to our genuine sorrow and Hamas's cynical delight -- they had the misfortune to be sleeping, walking, talking, studying or praying very close to a key Hamas terror chief, missile launch site, ammunition store or other element of the sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.

To put it succinctly, Hamas is doing its best to kill any and all of us in Israel, while cynically seeking to protect itself from attack by emplacing its offensive capacity among Gaza's often unwitting civilians. And Israel is doing its best to prevent its citizens being killed, while trying to thwart the attacks without harming Gaza's civilians. There's the relevant asymmetry.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.

Missourians re-elected Democrat Jay Nixon as governor by a decent majority, but we also just gave Republicans in the state legislature veto-proof supermajorities in both houses. Nixon has vowed to continue opposing a right-to-work law for Missouri, but with a supermajority in the legislature Republicans can enact right-to-work without the governor's consent. Will they?

I'm sure the unions will howl if right-to-work gets enacted in Missouri, but they shouldn't fret: Democrats now have supermajorities in the California legislature.

In the public interest all negotiations between the President, the Senate, and the House to resolve the fiscal cliff should be public and televised on C-SPAN. All sides should be forced to make their priorities and positions known to the public. No more closed-door negotiations about the fate of our democracy.

Few things are more characteristic of business as usual in Washington, D.C., than closed doors. Nothing will do more to end business as usual than opening them to C-SPAN cameras.

With the "fiscal cliff" of sequestration approaching, now is the perfect time to establish a precedent: The bigger the deal, the more important it is that negotiations be done in public.

It took about 12 seconds after the 2012 campaign winners were declared for the maneuvering toward a "grand bargain" to begin among President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner.

Everybody professes to favor compromise, but without open negotiations there is no way to know who actually offers concrete compromises and who merely talks about them.

The only people who benefit from closed-door negotiations are the negotiators, not the public. Open the doors!

Rush Limbaugh asks an important and difficult question: how can conservatives connect with minorities?

The usual suspects are out, and they're saying, "Rush, we gotta reach out now to the Hispanics and reach out to the minorities, blacks." Okay, let me remind you of something. Just ask you a question. And we will be getting your phone calls of course today, you weigh in on this, 800-282-2882 is the number. Let me take you back to the Republican convention. We had Suzanne Martinez, female Hispanic governor, New Mexico. We had Condoleezza Rice, African-American, former secretary of state. Both of those people imminently qualified, terrifically achieved. They have reached the pinnacles of their profession.

We had Marco Rubio. We had a parade of minorities who have become successful Americans. And they all had a common story: up from nothing, hard work, their parents sacrificed for them. Now, why didn't that work, folks? The answer to that is our future. Why didn't it work? Some people say, "Well, Rush, we pandered." No, we didn't pander. Everybody says that we need to reach out to minorities. We have plenty of highly achieved minorities in our party, and they are in prominent positions, and they all have a common story. They all came from nothing. Their parents came from nothing. They worked hard. They told those stories with great pride. Those stories evoked tears. It didn't work. And don't tell me that people didn't watch the convention or people didn't see it. I mean, there's a reason it doesn't work.

There is a reason, but what? I really have no idea. There are plenty of successful, laudable and influential minority and female conservatives. Why do the larger female and minority populations ignore and marginalize these people? What else can conservatives do to "reach out"?

If the Republicans can't win Presidential or Senate elections against such a damaged incumbent then it's time for some soul-searching. The Republican brand is trashed. There's enough inertia to carry the organization forward, but it needs to be significantly transformed.

Obama: What can I say? I don't think you're a very good president. I don't like your policies. I think you're weakening and endangering America. I think you're sapping our strength, innovation and spirit. You probably wouldn't think much of me either. Now I'm stuck with you, and you probably couldn't care less about me.

Romney: You had plenty of money and plenty of enthusiasm. You couldn't close the deal. Maybe you should have hammered Libya harder? Built a better ground game? Who knows. Northeasterners don't fare well on the national stage. I think you were the best of the bunch that Republicans put forward, and you did a reasonable job.

Virginia, Ohio and Florida: Seriously? Sigh.

House Republicans: You're less popular than just about anyone else in the country, but at least you can win elections. Please teach this trick to the rest of the conservatives. Do what you can to mitigate the bleeding over the next few years.

Tea Party: Despite it's enthusiasm, despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans believes that the government is too large, expensive and intrusive... the Tea Party has been a net loser for conservatism. Republicans would probably control the Senate right now if not for the Tea Party. Tea Partiers will argue that RINOs are no better than Democrats, but the next four years might change their minds.

Nate Silver and the pollsters: Good work. You should be proud. I always knew your methodology was sound, but I doubted that your input data (state polls) was accurate. It was.

Political pundits: Ugh. I couldn't even find time to read all the "Romney landslide" predictions over the past week. Are you people daft? Pundit malpractice.

The Economy: You're almost certainly going to improve over the next few years, and Obama will take credit.

Artificial intelligence: I guess we're going to need more socialism as artificial intelligence progressively displaces human workers.

Superstorm Sandy: Good job stealing news cycles and giving Obama the opportunity to look "presidential".

Terrorists: Guantanamo Bay prison is still open, and we've got plenty of Hellfires. Please don't stand too close to innocent civilians.

Rest of the world: Yeah, you love Obama. Let's see how that works out.

Well, looks like that's it. I'm surprised and very disappointed. It's hard to imagine that Obama could win a second term after such a disastrous four years.

Romney's fault. And guess what? Bush's fault.

So now what?

• Republican feeding frenzy.
• Obamacare is set in concrete.
• The Supreme Court's 5-4 conservative-ish majority will be broken.
• Democrats gloat.
• We learn the truth about Libya? Fast and Furious?
• Huge layoffs in the defense industry.
• I go to sleep.

Betsy Newmark notes that if Romney wins and the Democrats retain control of the Senate that there will be zero Protestants at the top levels of our government.

Given that Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic conspiracy against Protestants, here is an interesting observation that occurred to me if Romney should win and the Democrats maintain control of the Senate: in that scenario, there would be no Protestants at the top levels of any of our three branches of government. Romney and Reid are Mormons; Ryan, Boehner, and Durbin (Majority Whip) are Catholics, and Eric Cantor, the Majority Leader of the House is Jewish. And the Supreme Court has three Jews and six Catholics. Think about that in the context of the history of prejudice against Catholics, Mormons, and Jews in our nation's history. Having just talked about nativism in 19th century U.S. history, I find this factoid simply amazing - in some ways, just as eye-opening as the first African-American president.

As a protestant I don't feel threatened by this prospect in the least. I probably wouldn't have noticed if it weren't pointed out.

I just voted in suburban St. Charles, M (definitely a Republican stronghold). The line was longish, but I spent more time checking and re-checking my ballot than waiting. Someone needs to re-allocate the "line up by first letter of your last name" system... of the three lines, "P-Z" contained about 80% of the voters.

Heh, Frank J. Fleming explains that the president isn't the leader of the country:

I mean, really, why does everyone believe the president is the leader of our country? What he is, is the head of our government, i.e., he is the leader of the least part of our country. We have two groups in America: the people who work hard and create businesses and jobs and all the things that make our country great, and the screw-ups who get in the way of that. Government is by far the greatest force of the latter. So why do we as citizens think the guy we put in charge of the government and all the bureaucrats -- "King Idiot," basically -- is our leader? That's like saying a pothole is in charge of the road.

Read the whole thing. We really need a humbler government, and a humbler view of government.

The Democrats who ranted against the Electoral College in 2000 may come to be thankful for it this year. The presidential race looks close, but there's a very real chance that Romney may win the "popular vote" while losing the Electoral College. Frankenstorm Sandy may depress turnout in the generally leftist North East but most of those states will still go for Obama and they get the same number of electoral votes no matter how many people show up to cast ballots.

Mark Steyn nails it:

Imagine if Obama's 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built.

I bet we could have buried every power line in the United States for $1 trillion.

Megan McArdle has a great post about how we should treat problems, not just measurements.

Do the wealthy get to live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars than the poor? Yes, but I'm not sure how much this matters. I find the absolute quality of the housing stock and cars available to the poor much more important than the relative fanciness. Are their abodes warm and dry and safe? Are their cars reliable? As PJ O'Rourke once remarked, "The biblical injunction is to clothe the poor, not style them." You can argue that the poor do not have enough--enough safe homes, education, health care, reliable automobiles, etc. But they wouldn't have enough even if Bill Gates lost half his money.

Tyler Cowen also addresses "inequality":

The cyclically adjusted measures are an abstraction, and furthermore an abstraction based on estimating a modal quantity, namely potential output.

To give an analogy, I get uneasy when I read sentences such as "inequality caused X." "Inequality" didn't cause anything. Inequality is a statistical residue of some other actual processes. It is better to say what caused X (say "the rage and poverty of inner city residents") and, if relevant, connect this to inequality as well. Except that the cyclically adjusted deficit is an even more problematic causal concept than "inequality" because it relies on measurement of a modal, namely potential output.

The word "austerity" is a political concept and it does not belong in rigorous economics. Let's just say what happened. Note the simple causal language in my point #2.

Good stuff, and using proper terminology can help clarify thinking.

Awesome. Disney makes some fantastic movies so I'm excited to see how they revitalize Star Wars after the disastrous prequels. Can we do some sort of "reboot" but keep the original three movies?