4th Down

Why Belichick was right to go for it. Football coaches at most levels seem to forget that the rules allow four tries to attain the first-down line, not just three with a punt/kick down.
But football coaches are managers, and are more highly motivated not to screw-up rather than ultimate outcomes. They can always explain their behavior to ownership by showing they desired to keep it close and followed convention--as all their brethren are conditioned and motivated to do--rather than risk and fail.
More insight here, here, here and here.

TV of the Naughts

A.V. club, a subsidiary of The Onion media empire, has released its list of the 10 best shows of the Aughts. I haven't seen some of the shows, but I find little to disagree with except...

#2-The Soprano's.

David Chase is a despicable human being, far worse than any of his Garden State mafiosi. They may be cretins, but they are cretins with a purpose. Chase, similar in that he enjoys an easy payday, seemingly lost his.

I was a fan of the show. Back in the days before DVR (shudder) I always had the VCR set to record it. I never missed it and always enjoyed the dialogue, acting, writing...everything. The Pine Barrens episode shows what the show was capable of when firing on all cylinders. It was an extremely well done show. I remember hearing that Mr. Chase had always planned on the series running four seasons. Seeing the popularity of the show HBO backed up the Brinks truck and persuaded Mr. Chase to extend the series. This is where my beef begins.

First of all, it took entirely too long for the fifth season to get completed and put on the air (season 4's finale aired 08 December 2002; season 5's premiere aired 07 March 2004, see here). If, like me, you assumed the length of hiatus was dedicated to creative genius, you'd be wrong. Early in the fifth season, Tony & Carmella are separated, but there's a bear lurking about the neighborhood. So Tony, atta guy that he is, has his goons hang out in his house to make sure Carm and the kids are OK. As one of the goons goes to a closet/safe of some sort to get an entirely inappropriate weapon with which to defend the house, the camera, while perusing the arsenal, pauses ever so slightly on a hand grenade. I remember thinking, "boy howdy, I can't wait to see what becomes of that!"
The season then gets into what happens when a bunch of mobsters, the first batch to be tried and convicted by RICO statutes, gets released. Steve Buscemi, an actor of considerable abilities otherwise, plays an old friend who gets released and wants to live on the straight and narrow. He ends up pissing Tony off and gets killed. It took 15 months of hiatus to come up with and shoot this? Sure, other things happened, some of which was pretty interesting, but this was the arc of the season. And it sucked.

We all knew season six was the swan song. And since we just wasted 13 hours spread over three months, and our expectations were so high based on what had happened before, we all thought we were in for one beg treat.

And big it should have been. Not happy with what he churned out in the 15 months between season four and five, Mr. Chase took 20 months and one week between the finale of season five and the premiere (of the first part) of season six. After twelve episodes, we take a 10 month break for the final nine episodes.

I'm not going to go through what happened in the last season. For several reasons, chief among them is I don't remember what it was about, because it, too, sucked.

But then the show ended. After some very good tension build-up, with Tony and his (real, nuclear) family, seemingly happy and sitting in a diner, the screen suddenly cuts to black for ten seconds and then the credits role silently. Yeah, many critics thought it was "brilliant" and "true to the show" to end it thusly.

Pig shit.

The writer owes his audience some things. And story's have endings. That's the way it works. Imagine if Hamlet ended with our hero and Laertes lunging at each other (with the audience not knowing which sword's tip is poisoned) and Gertrude with a cup (the audience not knowing if it is the cup) poised at her lips. The Bard would have been found bobbing in the Thames. And rightly so. The auteur leaves things for the audience to figure out, and as an auteur-poseur Chase comes up small. I didn't wait over eight years and watch 86 episodes to figure this shit out for myself. I have to figure shit out for myself every day. I work. I challenge myself all the time. I strive to be a better person. But, dammit, when I watch TV, especially on a Sunday night, I want this stuff fed to me. And I, and the rest of the audience that helped make Mr. Chase an obscenely wealthy man due to his story-telling, was owed that much.

Remeber that hand grenade? There's a literary technique known as Chekov's Gun. Basically it is forshadowing. If a gun is introduced in a scene and isn't used, you can bet the gun will show up later and be a part of the story. Or, as Wikipedia has it: "The name Chekhov's gun comes from Anton Chekhov himself, who stated that any object introduced in a story must be used later on, else it ought not to feature in the first place. (Italics added). In other words, don't waste your audience's time. Nothing ever happened with the hand grenade. And when the season ended without it going boom (and the storyline sucking) I knew then that we were lost.

The storyteller has an obligation to his audience. If you're not a good storyteller, that's one thing. But Chase was a good storyteller. I think he wanted to end the show after four seasons and took almost five years (from the end of season four to the end of season six) and just spread some already thin gruel as far out as he could. And then when he got to the last page...he quit.

I enjoyed the first four seasons of the Sopranos and if the show ended there I would have no quarrel with it being placed on any "best of" lists. How it ended and what Chase did to his audience over that span destroys whatever credibility Mr. Chase had and ruined the show for me forever. I will never watch anything he has had or will have anything to do with again. If he will not respect his audience, why should we stick around?

The Broken Window

Great piece by Frederic Bastiat. What was true in mid-19th century France is tru today in America.

Jobs "Saved or Created"

Nice little piece on the fatuous claim that Obama's stimulus package "saved or created" 640,000 jobs.
And a related post by Greg Mankiw.

Government efforts to goose the economy in the short term by creating artificial shifts in the demand curve to the right, when all market players know there's no "there" there, do not work. This popular version of Keynesianism is wrong (and, at least in part, misconstrued).

A Microcosm on the Rise of a Monetary System

When I was younger I came to believe that money was, indeed, the root of all evil. I started thinking about this when reading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where Douglas Adams describes humans as, among other things, concerning themselves with little green pieces of paper. I thought that we did spend too much time worried about how much money we had, how much money we were paid, what things cost, where we were going to get more money &c. I also wondered where money came from and what was it's true value. Why is a one dollar bill worth a dollar? Things like that.
Like I said, I was young, idealistic and pretty ignorant. After this I briefly moved on to anarchism (properly understood) and things of this nature.
Shortly after these mental forays I left college and started working for real--or at least kind of for real, I worked in catering and restaurants, living with my parents and drinking most of my take. But I did become far more interested in acquiring those little green pieces of paper and far less interested in the inherent evil and the why and wherefores of its existence.

I meet the girl of my dreams, we move in together, get married, I get my act together, get real jobs, we have kids, buy a home, &c &c &c.

Well, I left college and never finished my degree and this started to bother me. So I started taking some preliminary classes at the local community college before matriculating at a nearby four-year school with a reputable and flexible "Accelerated Degree" program for working individuals. In the course of my studies I have taken first-year economics courses which have been invaluable. On top of these I've started doing some reading and research on my own and thoroughly enjoy studying the field of economics--which may explain why I wrote nothing on the field for the first few years I wrote here and have written more on it of late.

Anyway, this is for too much information as way of introduction. I recently heard a recording of a lecture given by Murray Rothbard on Money and Prices (aptly named "Money & Prices from a CD of lectures called Economics 101). In this particular lecture, while discussing the rise of money, starting with barter trade and its drawbacks, Professor Rothbard mentions a story I had heard before but thought apocryphal. It concerns the case of British POWs held by the Germans in World War II. Not having a medium of exchange for goods available to them, the soldiers started to use cigarettes as currency. The article, written by one of the prisoners and the most anthologised article in economics, is here.

It does a great job of showing how a monetary system can arise, how inflation and deflation occur and the problem of trying to influence the supply and demand of resources by outside forces.

Also, I picked up The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson which I look forward to reading.

The $10,000 suit

The $10,000 suit. Or why anti-globilization/trade restrictionists are wrong.

Michael Moore on Capitalism

Ok, I was getting a case of the vapors because at one point early in this Q & A I found myself almost (almost) agreeing with Michael Moore. He starts making some good points, I get my hopes up that he'll see the light and draw the correct and proper conclusions and then...

Piff

Gone. He is Michael Moore, after all.

He is right to agree with the student that what we have here is Corporatism as opposed to capitalism and he is right that many of the "capitalists" running some of our larger firms would like nothing more than to monopolize rather than compete. That is their nature. It is government's job to ensure competition (level-playing fields, easy entry and exit from markets, prohibition on market power, acting as a referee). The failure here is of the government.

The government long ago (New Deal) left its moorings and began to get actively involved in a whole bunch of things that it has no right or reason to get involved in. All in the name of equanimity and egalitarianism--also none of its business. His problem is with republicanism and not democracy. We are not a democracy and never have been. There hasn't been a "democratic" system in this country since the town councils of some of the New England colonies in the 17th/18th century. The representatives have become tools of the corporatists, that is not the fault of the corporatists but the failure of the representatives. They are responsible for their actions. Some of the reasons for this may be under-representation. The number of representatives has been 435 since 1911. The population then was ≈ 92 million (about 1 for every 211,000). Current US population is about 300 million and we have the same number of representatives (about 1 for every 689,000). Your representative cannot adequately represent a pool that large. The interest of the district is too diluted. Special interests of all stripes (including the corporatists) like and benefit from a concentrated pool of power brokers.

Another factor is the direct election of senators. The senators are beholden to their constituents directly, or so the story goes. When senators were elected by the state legislators they were much more in tune with that which directly affected their state. Now we have senators who act as if (and seem to believe) they work on behalf of the country. 300 million constituents!

But I digress.

Moore makes the point that things used to be much simpler, and uses college as his example. When he was in school banks didn't give student loans. You got financial aid from the school itself. What he fails to see was it was the governments involvement in education that has led to the runaway costs (completely out of line with inflation as measured by CPI). When the government started to feel as if everyone who wants to should be allowed to go to college, they started Sallie Mae to act as an underwriter to private lenders in an effort to get these lenders to provide loans to young people who have demonstrated exactly no credit worthiness (this being why banks didn't offer loans of their own volition).

This effort to equalize access to higher ed directly led to higher costs. Let's say you run a college. A certain per cent of the population can afford your tuition. If your tuition is too high you limit access to your product. The market works well to let you know what you should charge (supply, demand, price elasticity, substitutes, &c, &c). Then, all of a sudden the demand curve shifts to the right. Extraordinarily so. As did the financial resources of your pool of buyers. When all of your potential customers have lots of money at their disposal, prices tend to rise. I have mentioned here earlier that if Obama's plan to give every college applicant $4000 in return for community service (that he was thinking of making mandatory) there is a possible effect that the world would be a better place and we'd all get along much better. Possible. The definite effect would be that average tuition would go up no less than $4000 over CPI in less than four years. Definite.

Government invlovement in that which is beyond the purview of the government, no matter how well intentioned, always has unintended consequences. These consequences can sometimes be hard to see. Government involvement in healthcare has contributed to its excessive costs (also not allowing free access across state lines, not allowing individuals to deduct their health insurance costs as those who are insured through their employers can, and making portability far too difficult). Responding to the "crisis" of about 3.6% of the population chronically uninsured or uninsurable by socializing an an entire industry, or "competing" with this industry by creating a firm that has no need to concern itself with profits, consumer relations (have you ever called the Social Security Administration?), and that has the force of law behind it doesn't sound like competition to me.

Capitalism is democratic. Outside of monopolies (and perhaps oligarchies which we do have as well), firms must respond to consumers. Much more effectively than their elected ones can. Coke or Pepsi? Bud or Coors? That new car too expensive? Don't buy it. That new dish detergent has a pretty package and is a few cents less than the one you currently use? Buy it. That new McRib sandwich sucks? McDonalds won't be making them for long.

When the firms can get the legislators to enact legislation that makes it tougher for new firms to enter the market, they don't have to respond as efficiently as they would have to otherwise and can allocate their resources differently (say, bigger dividends). The legislators caving and writing and passing the legislation is their failure.

Capitalism is not the problem. Corporatism and the weakened republic is. The republic has been weakened by over-expansion (beyond Article I, Section 8) and under-representation.

I would like the free-market to be tried before we consider it a failure.