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Amol Kapila
Writing books about the Obama Administration is a lucrative business for journalists, particularly those who can get inside access. From the Washington Post:
When it comes to pursuing sources, the authors who work for major news organizations have a key advantage. They are in regular touch with Obama aides for their day jobs and can obtain tidbits by agreeing to embargo them until their books come out. But they also face a delicate balancing act, since tough stories might alienate potential sources and flattering ones might loosen tongues.
The last sentence indicates that there may be some quid pro quo going on, in which journalists provide favorable coverage or withhold bad news so that they can preserve their relationships with Administration insiders.
Glenn Greenwald reacts to this Post article for Salon, writing
That’s an understatement. Those oozing conflicts lead to things like this– a glowing New Yorker profile of Rahm Emanuel so sycophantic it made the skin crawl — followed up by an even more one-sided love letter to Larry Summers, both from the eager, wanna-be White House stenographer/author Ryan Lizza. It’s what causes Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter to proclaim one day (when Obama favored it) that real health care reform "depends on whether Obama gets approval for a ‘public option’," only to turn around less than two months later (once Obama said it was unnecessary) and proclaim that the Left is foolishly obsessing on the un-important public option.
In fact, journalists could withhold negative stories that might result in more revenue for their news organizations, only to reveal them in their book, thereby using their employer’s heft in order to gain inside access, denying their employer the benefits, and pocketing the gains for themselves, all the while denying the American people of honest analysis.
From a publication called the Washington Note:
Edward Luce, Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Times, who has been one of the few to resist the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ offers from the White House has found himself in a dust-up with the White House for his recent article co-authored with Daniel Dombey, "US Foreign Policy: Waiting on a Sun King".
Luce was given access to one senior official for the piece, but because Luce reported that National Security Adviser Jim Jones may be on his way out and that Obama’s national security team lacks a top tier strategic thinker — other than Obama himself perhaps — Luce has been pummeled by the White House who think he violated a quid pro quo deal to do a fluff story in exchange for access.
Luce reported to me, "The FT never does these kind of deals. "
Amol Kapila
While searching for an unrelated book on Amazon, I realized that after typing in the letters ‘at’, the first suggestion that came up was ‘atlas shrugged’. With ‘fou’, ‘fountainhead’ is the ninth suggestion. ‘ay’ yields ‘ayn rand’ as the first choice. ‘milt’ yields ‘milton friedman’ as #1.
This inspired me to try this on Google. ‘ay’ yields ‘ayn rand’ as #2. ‘atl’ yields ‘atlas shrugged’ as #7. ‘fount’ yields #5 as ‘fountainhead’. ‘milt’ yields ‘milton friedman’ as #1.
I doubt that these rankings have always been this high. Increased interest in libertarian ideas is the most likely culprit. I remain optimistic…
Amol Kapila
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give Google Chrome a shot, after having endured a couple of months of Firefox’s getting ever slower (even with fewer than 10 tabs open and not many plug-ins installed) and crashing more and more often. Initially, I was somewhat reluctant to give Google even more information about me, my browsing habits, etc., but I got over it, as (1) I don’t do anything I am ashamed of on the Internet. Embarrassing, yes, but nothing really bad or shameful; (2) Google probably has more information on me than I care to think about.
I liked the aesthetics of the browser. Initially, I was somewhat skeptical of the fact that Chrome starts a new process each time you open a new tab, as I was worried that the memory usage would get out of control. I often have more than 50 tabs open in Firefox (one of the reasons it is slow  ), and although the amount of memory taken up by Chrome varies considerably from process to process, the average is high enough to get me worried. The upside is that it improves security and prevents one tab from slowing down the rest. The latter is important to me, as I often find that, even if I don’t have 50 tabs open in Firefox, one (or a few) tabs can slow down the entire program or cause it to crash. Regardless, many reviews on the Internet says that Chrome uses less memory than Firefox, although this depends heavily on the number of Firefox extensions installed. While my experience and crude arithmetic indicate a higher total memory usage, I have not noticed many slowdowns with Chrome.
Today, I opened Firefox for the first time in a couple of weeks, became frustrated within 60 minutes by how suddenly it would slow down, even if I had only opened 0-2 new tabs, and decided to abandon Mozilla. The only Firefox extension that I will miss is the Del.icio.us extension.
Amol Kapila
This is funny, unfortunately because it is so often true.
Amol Kapila
Engineer Peter Yanev writes in the New York Times that the West Coast (in particular, the Pacific Northwest, like Seattle, where I currently reside) of the United States is less prepared than Chile was for a major earthquake. We should expect much more devastation and more casualties if a quake of a similar magnitude hits near one of our major cities, especially for as long as 120 seconds, as occurred in Chile.
Despite Chile’s exacting construction codes, which often exceed those of California and Japan, the performance of numerous high-rise buildings was worryingly poor….
But one thing is already clear: based on the kind of damage that buildings suffered in Chile, tall structures in the earthquake zones of the United States appear to be at much higher risk than we thought. This lesson should be of obvious concern to San Francisco and Los Angeles. But it is actually the Pacific Northwest that is most vulnerable to a mega-quake like Chile’s.
(HT: Chris)
Amol Kapila
Robert Scoble has an interesting post a while back on how Google is becoming the next Microsoft. Apparently, Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, “We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people,” which Scoble takes as meaning that the chances that Google comes up with the next big thing are slim. While Google’s growth has probably caused it to sacrifice some of its innovative culture, I doubt that the quote should be taken as a negative indicator of Google’s promise.
More interestingly, Scoble quotes Henry Ford as saying, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse,” the point being that blue-skies experimentation is the key to successful innovation. I find the idea of not listening to your customers interesting, as I have always thought that a key idea in entrepreneurship is to listen to the “voice of your customer.” I guess that following Ford’s quote comes with potentially high rewards, but at a high risk, whereas listening more attentively to your customers is lower risk, but may prevent you from doing anything revolutionary.
Amol Kapila
I love this story:
Grigory Perelman does not want our attention but he may merit it. He offers a model of behavior which very well may be foreign to our time, but, still, we ought to know that it’s an available option: grumpiness, misanthropy, and a radical lack of interest in publicity—and, it seems, money, too.
To be able to close the door. To slam the door.
Perelman is a mathematician from St. Petersburg, Russia—where he lives with his mother and sister—who, a few years ago, solved a century-old math problem, Poincaré’s conjecture. This is one of seven fabled math problems, the solution for which the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has offered $1 million—for each solution.
Perelman has not only so far shunned the dough, but when reached by a reporter said, with fabulous succinctness and practicality: “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”
I have always wished that we lived in a world in which people valued solitude more. In my experience, anyone who likes to be left alone is considered weird, antisocial, and potentially bad news.
William Deresiewicz writes in a similar vein, emphasizing that it is important to control the constant stream of stimulus we receive from the outside and the demands that others place on us in order to think for ourselves and to grow:
Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. (Italics mine)
I can relate, in particular, to the last two sentences above, italicized. Over the past couple of years, I have come to realize that it is of the utmost importance to give yourself space to think, that is, to think in your own idiosyncratic way, on your own terms, without regard to what other people may think of how you think. Constant exposure to the thoughts of others seems to get in the way of this (e.g., blogs, RSS, the Internet in general, television). Of course, we can discipline ourselves better and rise to the attention-economy challenge posed by the Internet, but I don’t think that such discipline will completely solve the problem. Our ability to think for ourselves will still be inhibited more than it would have been otherwise.
Some people manage just fine the challenge of thinking on their own terms, while simultaneously exposing themselves to a constant stream of others’ thoughts. Often times, in those cases, they don’t produce anything that original or interesting. Regarding those that do, I wonder if they actually listen to the thoughts of others when exposed to them, or just listen to their own evaluations of the thoughts of others. The latter, while preserving one’s mental autonomy, would negate some of the value of exposure to others’ ideas. It is also, in my view, an indicator of biased thinking.
A summary of the two articles linked to above can be found here. (HT: Chris).
Amol Kapila
Joseph Lavorgna, chief U.S. economist for Deutsche Bank, was on The Kudlow Report yesterday talking about how various US corporations (including, Berkshire Hathaway, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Labs, and Lowe’s Home Improvement) are able to issue two-year debt at lower interest rates than the Federal government right now. This tends to get masked because the Federal Reserve is holding short-term rates low using accommodating monetary policy. However, this is an omen that when the Fed raises rates, much higher interest rates may be in store for Uncle Sam.
Fact from the video: Uncle Sam has issued some $2.6 trillion in debt since the beginning of 2009.
From my previous post, quoting former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin,
By 2020, the federal deficit — the amount the government must borrow to meet its expenses — is projected to be $1.2 trillion, $900 billion of which represents interest on previous debt.
Amol Kapila
Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former director of the CBO from 2003-5) recently published an excellent article in the New York Times documenting government deception regarding the budget numbers used to pass healthcare. To those who claim that the CBO considers the bill good for the federal budget, he has this to say (italics mine):
How can the budget office give a green light to a bill that commits the federal government to spending nearly $1 trillion more over the next 10 years?
The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.
In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion….
Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years. And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see.
Moreover,
By 2020, the federal deficit — the amount the government must borrow to meet its expenses — is projected to be $1.2 trillion, $900 billion of which represents interest on previous debt.
(HT: Chris)
Amol Kapila
I have blogged in the past regarding the fact that what I care about is not policy successes, so much as more people becoming libertarians. (Read the comments in that post, too.). Poor policies, like those being billed as healthcare “reform”, are simply a symptom of an underlying problem, people having poor ideas regarding economics and politics. Fix the root, and the rest will take care of itself, at least in a democratic society.
While it is easy to get depressed observing the machinations in Washington, D.C., over the past couple of years, there has been substantial progress where it may count most: More people have become libertarians, and even more, who may not self-identify as libertarians, have grown to harbor a greater skepticism of government. The corruption used to shove the healthcare initiatives through the legislature was on full display, receiving (somewhat surprisingly) a reasonable amount of media coverage. Those who go on about poor incentives for government officials, government corruption, and in general, government failure outweighing any market failure suddenly look a lot better.
The bottom line is that the cause of poor policies like healthcare “reform” was many years of bad ideas circulating in society and taking hold in people’s minds. We are well past an inflection point, as the momentum is in favor of libertarian ideas (and in my view, probably has been for many years now). More precisely, the percentage growth in libertarians is probably greater than the percentage growth in non-libertarians. Hence, I remain optimistic.
government failure outweighing any market failure
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