Translator of the day

Source here.

The Halo Effect: We thought because Tiger was so good at being a golfer

he also must be very good at to have and to hold, forsaking all others, keeping thee only unto her as long as you both shall live…

Tim Fernholz swats Matt Taibbi

ouch!

Quotes of the day

While faith contains an element of reason, it is essentially moral rather than intellectual. ... "Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight." But Christmas either means more than is popularly supposed or it means nothing. We had better decide.--A.W. Tozer

Why was alchemy a terrible idea? It was only chemistry without a sound theory. Chemistry would not have been developed unless alchemy had come before. In the same way, social science today lacks a sound theoretical basis. Economics and sociology are the alchemies of today; not quite scientific, but essential precursors to the sound social science of the future.--pj

Don't forget that even today's 2% to 4% bond yields aren't as paltry as they look, because inflation remains close to zero. The 6% interest income you remember earning a decade ago came at a time when inflation ran about 3%. You might protest that inflation, as officially measured, is understated today—but it is probably no more inaccurate now than it used to be. In real terms, you are only slightly worse off now than you were then.--Jason Zweig

The essence of capital provision is bearing economic risk. The flow of funds is like the flow of urine: important, even essential, as one learns when the prostate malfunctions. But “liquidity”, as they say, takes care of itself when the body is healthy.--Steve Randy Waldman

It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.--Paul Samuelson

The very young Paul Samuelson bore an odd resemblance to, of all people, Buddy Holly.--Tyler Cowen

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson.--Robert Solow

I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?--John F. Kennedy, to his professor Paul Samuelson

Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending. All these findings suggest that conventional models leave something out. A clue as to what that might be can be found in a 2002 study by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti. (Mr. Perotti is a professor at Boccini University in Milano, Italy; Mr. Blanchard is now chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.) They report that “both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending. This effect is difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.” These studies point toward tax policy as the best fiscal tool to combat recession, particularly tax changes that influence incentives to invest, like an investment tax credit. Sending out lump-sum rebates, as was done in spring 2008, makes less sense, as it provides little impetus for spending or production. LIKE our doctor facing a mysterious illness, economists should remain humble and open-minded when considering how best to fix an ailing economy. A growing body of evidence suggests that traditional Keynesian nostrums might not be the best medicine.--Greg Mankiw

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. ... Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.--Frank Herbert

I still have to keep going to Washington and sucking up. Because the problem is when you have a baby with an Uzi, right, they might accidentally mow you down. But here's the thing . . . they're brilliant people. It's just that the idea of a market in health care never occurred to them. ... You can't buy what [healthcare] you want. America will have one car. Everyone will have access to transportation, which means that everyone will have a black Escalade, with spinners. That's it. There's no Hyundais, no bicycles, no nothing. These poor people who clip the things off the backs of cans to make the tomatoes cheaper are subsidizing the hypochondriac who gets his shoulder done with an arthroscope because it clicks when he serves at tennis. ... It is kind of too bad that all these software companies that we're really close to putting out of business, these terrible legacy companies, with code that was written in the '70s, are going to get life support. That's why I call it the Sunny von Bülow bill. What it is, basically, is a federally sponsored sale on old-fashioned software. ... This is a market: its a set of agreements, it's a language. What's needed is a way of exchanging value and making choices, that's ethical—and, you know, nobody, nobody, not nobody, has said a word about that.--Jonathan Bush

10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger

Wow, really bad timing, huh?

When you politicize an industry

be it cars, mortgage lending or health insurance, you invite interventions on behalf of the rich and powerful. The less rich and the less powerful foot the bill. Before you tell me that members of Congress are already covered by a public health plan, reflect on the difference between giving them the power to reshape a public health plan that covers 535 people on the one hand, and a health plan that covers tens of millions on the other.

I have never been more convinced of Global Cooling and its coverup

until I saw this:

Via Chris Masse.

Under current law

it is not legally possible to “use” returned TARP funds for a new stimulus proposal.

Tiger, I begged you

or, perhaps, I told you so. Rachel Beck agrees: Tiger Flubs Crisis Management 101.

NGDP will fall over 1% this year. Last time it fell that sharply?

Nineteen thirty-eight.

Quotes of the day

A new study by Hedge Fund Research found that, from January 2000 through May 31, 2009, hedge funds run by women delivered nearly double the investment performance of those managed by men. Female managers produced average annual returns of 9%, versus 5.82% for men.--Cathy Arnst

But how do the laws of economics fare against a tougher opponent: the laws of sexual attraction?--Adam Martin

There are huge gains to be made, for instance, in decreasing hospital-acquired infections and paying attention to the inefficacy of many types of chemotherapy. Also, it may be that less interaction with the healthcare system in general would be a very good thing.--Stephen Dubner

The ability of [James] Cameron's oeuvre to seemingly print money for his backers is rivaled perhaps only by the Federal Reserve. His last three feature films (Titanic, True Lies and Terminator 2) have grossed $2.7 billion worldwide. As Levin notes, those movies each made more than 60 percent of their gross overseas. Attention Avatar haters: Don't bet a against a guy who can make grown men hoot, tween girls weep and Tom Arnold seem funny.--Derek Thompson

Why sell 50 when we can sell Kanye? ... Money is not going to make you happy. A new idea is what makes you happy. ... In my house, Carmelo Anthony is bigger than 50 Cent. ... My son is more important to me than I am to him. ... Am I being honest right now? Yeah. Most people would answer that question with a yes. Even the liars. ... You know how a person is made for something? Eminem is made for hip-hop. The best rapper is a white man. ... I like generals. I like Napoleon. I like strategy. The majority of them are praised for mass destruction, but it's exciting to see how it comes to the mind mentally. Is Charles Manson a serial killer? No, he isn't, because he ain't do no killing. He's a coward. He was just crazy enough to influence people to kill for him. There were a lot of Charles Mansons in my neighborhood. There were no Napoleons. Hip-hop is arrogant because people are arrogant.--50 Cent

The question of courage is something I've thought about for a long time. Tell me if I'm wrong, but courage is when a man in a difficult situation acts as if he truly believes he's right. And in the end, he is right. When I was young, we were taught not to dunk. We were taught not to stand out from the rest of the team. It's different now. The young guys in China are new age. They want to show their stuff. But I am old-school. It was a big adjustment when I first came here to play at a camp. The coaches told me to dunk, but I would lay the ball in. Finally, the coaches made everyone else on my team run laps when I didn't dunk. I didn't want my teammates to be punished because of me. That's how I learned to dunk. ... The alcohol in China is made of rice. It's strong. You know it's strong when you drink it. So you have an idea what it can do to you. But here, you have alcohol that doesn't taste very strong. So you think you can have many shots. You don't find out the truth until the next morning. I haven't done much trash-talking. But last year, I did complain about a call. Nobody could believe it. So I said, "I've spent a lot on English lessons. I want to get my money's worth." The official was laughing. My American strength coach says he liked me better before I could talk English. We don't have a tip culture in China. If you give a tip to an old waiter, he might feel like you don't respect him. But I think the younger waiters would take it. ... When I got my first paycheck playing in China, I thought, I'm making money now! I'm independent! That first month I went broke. My next paycheck was two weeks away and I didn't have anything in my pocket. That was a good experience to have before coming to the NBA. Our first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. Napoleon. Roosevelt. That would make a good table for dinner. Power means different things in different times. But the more I read, the more I think power is about intelligence. Kobe's heart is as strong as his muscles. ... Our honeymoon was in Europe. One stop was Venice. Cost fifty dollars for a ride in the gondola. There was also the romantic package. Three hundred dollars. That gets a bottle of red wine and a man playing music. But I don't really drink red wine. And you can hear the music coming from the other boats. So the fifty-dollar package seemed like the way to go. ... Sports teach you how to be quick. Injuries teach you how to slow down.--Yao Ming

I'm sorry, I tried to be all breezy and cynical about this, but it's time for Democrats to tell Max Baucus that it's time for him to resign. Not because he had an affair with an employee, which doesn't bother me as long as it doesn't bother the employee. But nominating your girlfriend for US Attorney, and then withdrawing the nomination when a paper says they're about to break the story, clearly indicates that you know it's unsavory. Say what you want about Republicans, but they have a much better sense than their opponents of when it's time to grab one of their own and throw him off the sled to the wolves running behind.--Megan McArdle

While mere exposure to green products may “prime” us to think about social consciousness and perhaps improve our behavior, if we actually buy a green product, we appear to take it as license to act like jerks.--Ryan Sager

Green jobs are NOT a zero sum game where nations are competing for a fixed number of them. If China or Germany or anyone develops "innovative energy technology", that is NOT bad for us. It is in fact *awesome* for us, as we can then adopt it and use it. People, ideas are public goods. That is the whole basis of new growth theory. If China is now doing cutting edge R&D, that is an unmitigated blessing for everyone on the planet.--Angus

Fiscal policy is discussed in terms of whether it can create jobs. Monetary policy is discussed in terms of its impact on inflation. Which sounds better, jobs or inflation? Obviously jobs. ... If your intuition still tells you that monetary policy is more of an inflation threat than fiscal policy, you are probably right. But that is because, and only because, you intuition is correctly telling you that monetary policy is a far more powerful tool for boosting NGDP. Which begs the question of why so many economists support fiscal stimulus, and so few criticize the Fed. --Scott Sumner

If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don't protest that your cellphone isn't part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don't give me that "It's not attached to me" argument. You're already a cyborg. Deal with it.--Scott Adams

I remember asking my older cousin, "How do they do that?" My cousin must've been about eight, and he said, "Oh, that's just special effects." I can still remember hearing those words for the first time. In some respects, I can chart everything I've ever done since back to that moment.--Peter Jackson

What struck me as I watched these movies was that a good deal of the Hollywood magic these Halloweentown witches perform is surprisingly part of ordinary Americans’ everyday world. Not truly magically, of course – it’s due to science and markets – but it’s nevertheless marvelous and amazing and wonderful. We gently press a button and the sound of a Bach concerto recorded a decade or a half-century ago fills our room as if it were being performed live, then and there. We turn a knob and out comes a jet of clean water for us to shower in, at whatever temperature we choose. We crawl into giant hunks of metal and plastic, filled with highly explosive liquids, press a few pedals and we’re traveling down highways at superhuman — even super-equine — speeds. We hold tiny devices in our palms, press some more buttons, and we’re talking to other human beings who are miles, maybe thousands of miles, away from us. We flick switches and lights turn on or off at our whim. I could go on and on and on ... There’s an irony in this fact: the more deeply and widely that people believe in magic, the less magical are their lives, while the more fully people untangle themselves from belief in myths and magic, the more magical their lives become. That is, the many marvels of our world – proximately the consequence of technology, ultimately the consequence of free markets and rational thought – are possible only insofar as we no longer really believe in magic. ... But one serious species of belief in magic continues to haunt us: politics. Many of us – indeed, most of us – believe that high priests who utter or write certain words according to treasured ceremonial prescriptions and done in certain temples (usually made of marble and topped with domes) can perform magic. They can’t. But they try and try – and too many of us simply have faith that their rituals are effective.--Don Boudreaux

The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.--Kurt Andersen

For anyone with a sense of history, the idea that a post-cold-war bubble embodied a new world order was obviously absurd. The built-in instability of capitalism had not gone away - it had been accentuated, as the US and other western economies became ever more dependent on unsustainable debt. Far from being in­destructible, the neoliberal market order was highly fragile. But millennial fantasies regarding a short-lived variety of capitalism were far from being the only delusional beliefs that helped shape events during the decade. ... The intellectual default of politicians cannot be remedied by returning to the ideologies of the past. It is shared by much of the public, and comes from a chronic inability to engage with reality. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn the delusive fancies on which so many policies are based. A run on sterling in the event of a hung parliament after the next general election; the cataclysmic defeat that will follow Barack Obama's decision to reinforce inevitable failure in Afghanistan; a spiral in oil prices after a flare-up over Iran; the collapse of the dollar as the world finally loses patience with American solipsism - any one of these eventualities, together with others that cannot be foreseen, could be a catalyst for rethinking. But the omens are not encouraging. The make-believe that surrounds climate change - epitomised in the empty statements of intent regarding unachievable goals that will be the only outcome of the Copenhagen meeting - shows that the biggest challenge for the future is being evaded. It looks as if we may be wandering in the ruins of the Noughties for some time.--John Gray

Yitzhak Ganon was taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau hospital, where Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death," conducted grisly experiments on Jewish prisoners. Ganon had to lie down on a table and was tied down. Without any anesthetics, Mengele cut him open and removed his kidney. "I saw the kidney pulsing in his hand and cried like a crazy man," Ganon says. "I screamed the 'Shema Yisrael.' I begged for death, to stop the suffering." --Christoph Schult

Egalitarians only outnumber libertarians by about 2:1. If you adjust for the initial leftism of the humanities, it seems like libertarian arguments must be making a lot of converts among the philosophers.--Bryan Caplan

To be sure, the government can design the regulation to make arbitrage and jurisdictional competition more costly. But the tighter the straitjacket we put bank governance into, the less ability the industry has to evolve to meet the challenges of modern finance.--Larry Ribstein

I won’t rehash all the evidence that his misrepresented his own views. And before [Paul] Krugman's fans write in saying; “There is no contradiction, he’s always said inflation targeting can work, he doesn’t think that merely increasing the money supply can help once rates hit zero” you might want to check out the next paragraph in the new Krugman piece ... Yes, [having the Fed expand credit] could do a lot indeed. Last March it would have been even more helpful. On March 1st I asked Krugman to endorse this sort of plan. I am glad that he has finally done so.--Scott Sumner

As I said the last time I blogged about this bozo, it’s not his conclusions I’m objecting to. It’s his apparent belief that “No you may not” is a substitute for logical analysis based on clearly stated principles that are at least stable enough to be maintained for the length of a newspaper column.--Steve Landsburg

Now, it’s no surprise that Immelt’s speech is an ode to the glory of governments and businesses working together. Governments around the world are GE’s biggest customers. The U.S. government saved GE Capital. The U.S. government will need to approve GE’s sale of NBC Universal. And Immelt is a high-profile member of President Obama’s economic recovery board. But shareholders should ask themselves whether hitching GE to the Obama administration is the right strategy. Sure, GE and the White House may transform the U.S. economy into some new private/public manufacturing utopia. But given GE’s recent past and its current leadership, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about such a renewal.--Evan Newmark

It’s especially important for those persons who support minimum-wage legislation to realize that employers can almost always, at the margin, substitute away from human labor and toward mechanized or electronic “labor” — that is, capital. Mythical indeed is the notion that employers must hire a given, or minimum, number of low-skilled workers. As the cost of hiring such workers rises, employers have greater incentives to substitute away from employing such workers. This machine whose operation I witnessed today at Target testifies to the futility of minimum-wage legislation to improve the lot of most low-skilled workers.--Don Boudreaux

But tax policy is a blunt instrument, and it acts on the economy a lot like a water balloon: every time we squeeze one end, the other end swells up bigger than before. Moreover, I am sad to say that all available evidence seems to indicate our water balloon is a whoopee cushion, too.--Epicurean Dealmaker

Let's play Three Truths and A Lie

or One of These Stories Is from The Onion.

UPDATE: And this one is even too crazy for The Onion.

Chart of the century

Source here (via Megan McArdle). The author, Willis Eschenbach says:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Quotes of the day

Are the naughties the best decade ever?--Tyler Cowen

... mindless trend extrapolation is bad, bad, economics. The fact that we only saw cost-shifting of 21 cents on the dollar ten years ago does not mean that we can continue getting those sorts of results ad infinitum. That's why it's pretty easy to get a 5% discount in a jewelry store, and pretty hard to get an 80% discount. The larger a percentage of Medicare recipients in the patient mix, the higher the percentage of costs that hospitals will have to shift, because it will become harder and harder to make matching cuts.--Megan McArdle

For reform advocates, this is not good news. At 40% approval, it probably passes. At 30% approval--what Social Security reform enjoyed by the time it imploded--it's not going to no matter how the Senate massages their plan. Democrats cannot pass a bill this large on a straight party line vote if the only people in the country who want it are Democrats.--Megan McArdle

Great Britain's minister of economics and finance announced today that the government intends to levy a heavy tax on banker bonuses. ... So who's the real winner from this move? New York City. Even though the British government claims that this tax is a one-time event, bankers there will not soon forget when the government cut their bonuses by 50%. After all, if the government did this once, it could do it again. Any Americans who thought it sounded like a good idea to work in London instead of New York must be questioning their logic. I'll be interested to see what kind of brain drain this causes in London.--Daniel Indiviglio

Earlier this week DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, moored ten, 8 ft red, weather balloons in undisclosed locations across the United States. The DARPA Network Challenge offered a prize of $40,000 to the person or group who first identified all the locations.--Alex Tabarrok

Copenhagen: 1,200 Limos, 5 Hybrids, 140 Private Jets, and CO2 Equal to Alexandria VA (41,000 tons)--Mark Perry

... due to complex female sexuality, the man is supposed to accept the sex part of the deal fluctuating from day to day and year to year for unknown and unexplained reasons.--Robin Hanson

Otherwise known as apocalypse now?

Google, that is:

[Eric] Schmidt's philosophy is clear with [Maria] Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

Via Steve Bainbridge.

Climate change conferees arriving in Copenhagen avoid the carbon reducing buses

and go for the higher carbon emitting cars. (Via Don Boudreaux)

UPDATE: Graham Winfrey, channeling Dennis Gartman, has much more:

We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand [so]... we're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.

When asked how many of the delgates had asked for a "hybrid" fuel driven limousine, the same company owner said

Five. The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark
, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish.

Quotes of the day

The short sushi, long kimchi trade is not without its dangers.--Christopher Swann

Knowledge is becoming more specialized and more dispersed, while government power is becoming more concentrated.--Arnold Kling

Proponents of a transactions tax misunderstand the way markets work. The bubble in home prices in the United States was not caused by the rapid buying and selling of individual family homes. The financial crisis was primarily a liquidity crisis and a credit crunch, and the major problem with collateralized mortgage-backed bonds was that they declined significantly in value and became illiquid. A transactions tax that would have reduced trading and made repurchase agreements more costly, could have made the problem even worse.--Burton Malkiel and George Sauter

Trying to shut down criticism in the name of science is the real attack on science.--Clive Crook

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be. Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”) And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s about ten years, folks.--Robert Bradley Jr.

... when free marketers warn that Democratic health care initiatives will make us more “like France,” a big part of me says, “I wish.”--Matt Welch

The shock is to [Tiger Woods'] flow of income from his endorsements. This is equivalent to losing the lottery and having money taken from you. The bottom line is that Jacob Mincer was a more important dude than Tiger Woods. At the end of the day tapping a ball into a hole in a minimum number of strokes just isn't that important.--Matthew Kahn

History is the monster. And there is no escape. You can't talk your way out of it--at every step we're confronted by our own laziness. It warps our stories, reduces beautiful and complicated narratives about race, sports, agency into cartoonish fairy tales. It's sad. I always thought that what we needed in this country wasn't so much cash payments, but some respect for history. Not history as an excuse for hamburgers, hot dogs and chips, but history as a way of understanding who we--despite ourselves-- really are. And for African-Americans, history really is the balm in Gilead. I think a lot of us can come to some peace, can come to understand that whatever happened to us, there are limits on what anyone can do to make it right, and while those limits have to be pushed, some of this we're going to have to carry ourselves. And then with a even broader sense we can understand that our suffering is not singular, that it isn't the only suffering. And finally--and most important to me--we can understand ourselves as Zora Hurston did, as more then a litany of abuses, as more than a walking protest, as something apart and distinct from what someone else did to us.--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Peacemaking quests came in two kinds: scabs and abscesses. A scab is a sore with a protective crust, which may heal with time and simple care. In fact, if you bother it too much, you can reopen the wound and cause infection. An abscess, on the other hand, inevitably gets worse without painful but cleansing intervention. ‘The Middle East is an abscess,’ he concluded. ‘Northern Ireland is a scab.’--Bill Clinton

Yet because Clinton doesn’t do introspection, he doesn’t go on to draw the obvious inference: he was a scab president.--David Runciman

I used the word quaint in referring to provisions in the Geneva Conventions that require the signatories to provide the prisoners of war privileges like commissary privileges, scientific instruments, athletic uniforms. I think those provisions are quaint. I did not say nor did I intend to say that the basic principles of the Geneva Conventions in providing for humane treatment were quaint. So if I had to do it again, what I would not do is use the word quaint and the Geneva Conventions in the same sentence.--Alberto Gonzales

... it comes as a shock reading The Clinton Tapes to discover just how little George [Stephanopoulos] mattered to Bill [Clinton] during the time when Bill meant so much to George. ... The things [Clinton] loves are politics, hard data and his family, in roughly that order. The thing he hates is the media, above all newspapers, on which he blames almost all his troubles. His love of politics is not a love of the sort of low-level politicking in which Stephanopoulos and his fellow staffers indulge. Rather, he has an unquenchable fondness for politicians themselves, with all their foibles and all their weaknesses – it is, in other words, a kind of self-love. ... Clinton liked politicians who played dirty because they made him feel better about his own peccadilloes. He also liked anyone who was susceptible to his charms, which was true of many more politicians than it was of newspaper journalists. Most of all, though, what Clinton liked about his Republican opponents was that he was better at politics than they were. ... He gets it badly wrong in 1995, when he spends most of the year worrying obsessively about Colin Powell, whom he suspects of planning to run for the presidency and fears is the one person who could beat him. When Powell decides not to run, these anxieties suddenly look silly, but Clinton can’t let it drop. ‘The mistaken prediction about Powell seemed to gnaw at Clinton,’ Branch writes. ‘His mental churn pulled up a fresh clue. Every upward step for Powell had been paved by patronage and appointment, observed Clinton, including his post in the Reagan White House. Powell was a career staff officer at heart.’ In the end, Clinton nailed his man, as Powell’s horribly ineffectual spell as George W. Bush’s secretary of state was to show. ... Here is the ultimate insult in the Clinton lexicon: Gore had been posturing like a journalist when he should have been thinking like a politician. For Gore, Clinton is the posturer because he can never come clean about the demons that drive him. This gives Gore the moral high ground. But Clinton has the killer political argument. ‘By God,’ Branch has him exclaim, ‘Hillary [who was winning her New York Senate seat at the same time Gore was losing the presidency] had a helluva lot more reason to resent [me] than Gore did, and yet she ran unabashedly on the Clinton-Gore record. With that clarity, she came from 30 points down to win by double digits.’ ... Who can say if one person really loves another, but Bill appears here to be genuinely fond of his wife, and genuinely frightened of her. He is thrilled when she becomes a senator and he shows plenty of respect for her political judgment – she spots that Colin Powell is all medals and no trousers well before he does. Yet behind all this solicitousness it’s not hard to see the guilt bubbling away, as it does in Clinton’s relationship with Chelsea, whom he adores, pampers and, of course, betrays.--David Runciman

Matthew Lynn provides 5 inflation plays that could outperform gold

and I strongly agree with two of them (hint: the ones with 'equities'). I'm not sure about luxury goods and collectibles, though; I have a liquidity bias, and that high end stuff is notoriously illiquid and comes with higher taxes and transaction costs. Oil can be good, but needs active trading. Real estate could also be good, especially with financing (if you can get it).

If I had been able to take this course 25 years ago

I wouldn't be so far behind.

Yet another economist bet

This one is about college enrollments a decade now, between Bryan Caplan and Alex Tabarrok.

Bryan puts the over/under at 10% of current percentage; and takes the over. Not sure where they will execute it.

Forget about CEO pay, Part Deux

Athletes are paid more. Vince Fernando rounds them up.

Part Un here.

I'm thinking that top athletes are responsible for tens of thousands of jobs, and top CEOs for hundreds of thousands. Seems like entertainment has higher value than job creation.

Which actually explains quite a bit.

Quotes of the day

... though Red was established with the express purpose of generating charitable funds to “help eliminate AIDS in Africa,” the entity behind the campaign is not itself a charity.--William Easterly and Laura Freschi

Esquire's editors apparently can't tell the difference between bending the cost curve, spending less money, and reducing the deficit. These are not the same thing.--Peter Suderman

My brother and Woods both had affairs because they were looking for a validation that only sex with strangers gave them. That Woods's preference in road beef is, at best, medium-rare, just goes to show: In his mind, every time he made a new conquest, it was like the president of the chess club rocking the big-tittied cheerleader under the bleachers. Every hookup was another chance for him to prove to himself that he wasn't what he remembered he once was.--Chris Jones

It is important that research and development spending is devoted to developing new, alternative technologies instead of simply propping up today's inefficient technology. We can find a case of the latter in Germany, which pays a huge amount to cut tiny amounts of carbon through supporting solar power. This support costs €0.43 per kWh, which is equivalent to spending €716 to cut every ton of CO2. Yet the expected climate damage of each ton is about €4.--Bjorn Lomborg

In the interest of self-preservation, my [corporate spy] colleagues and I try to stay within the law—no stealing, no trespassing, no wiretaps (that's where Steven Seagal's pal Anthony Pellicano made his mistake)—but that leaves a lot of gray areas. You don't want to do anything that might land you in the newspaper, in a courtroom, or in front of a congressional committee. And yet, every once in a while, you pay someone to sleep with the homely sister of a CEO's nemesis and pump her for information. A Hollywood agent once text-messaged me while she was on a date to ask, "Does this guy own or lease his Mercedes?"--anonymous

And some quotes from Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together (via Tyler Cowen):

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

We promise according to our hopes; we fulfill according to our fears.

What often prevents us from abandoning ourselves to one vice is that we have several.

We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves we have no great ones.

There are few people who are more often wrong than those who cannot suffer being wrong.

Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so.

President Obama just made the specious claim that "we have made college more affordable"

Government subsidies inflate costs, thereby making things less affordable.

Think about the things that are subsidized (e.g. healthcare, ethanol) and things that are not. What stuff is more inflationary?

Scott and Arnold are having a very interesting conversation

on macro. Interesting, of course, if you are into that sort of thing.

James Hansen on the folly of cap and trade

here:

At the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.

My first post on cap and trade here, back in June 2008:

Global warming may be a problem; maybe not. Cap-and-trade will definitely be a problem.

He's Barack Obama; he's come to save the day!

JibJab's latest.

Quotes of the day

Once scientists set out to mislead the public, they can no longer expect to be trusted. End of story.--Clive Crook

Is John A. Paulson, the hedge fund manager who earned billions betting against subprime, a one-megahit wonder? --Saijel Kishin

I started praying when I came to Treasury. At Goldman, I didn't pray. Not once. 'Cause I just didn't care. At Treasury, there were so many times.--Neel Kashkari

We don’t live in a perfect world with perfect people. We live in a world where we fail. We live in a world where some people borrow money they shouldn’t be borrowing, and where other people lend money they shouldn’t be lending. That’s the way it’s always been, and always will be. So do we judge Bernanke and Geithner for the failings of our imperfect world? Or do we judge them on how they rose to the occasion to save us as our failings overwhelmed the economy?--Evan Newmark

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky was once asked about his success on the ice. He responded by saying, ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’ He didn’t chase the puck. Instead, Gretzky wanted his hockey stick to be where the puck would be going next. He scored many goals with that strategy, and I believe monetary policymakers can better achieve their goals, too, if they follow the Gretzky strategy.--Charles Plosser

The dollar is faith-based. There's nothing behind it but Congress. But now the world is losing faith, as well it might. It's not that the dollar is overvalued—economists at Deutsche Bank estimate it's 20% too cheap against the euro. The problem lies with its management. The greenback is a glorious old brand that's looking more and more like General Motors.--James Grant

The best solution to reducing the real burden of the public debt is neither inflation nor higher taxes, but more rapid growth of the American economy. This involves lower, not higher, taxes on investments and incomes of small and large businesses. It also requires greater concern about the fact that the US is falling behind many other countries in the proportion of its young population, especially males, who receive a higher education.--Gary Becker

If I had to "sell short" one country or city-state in the world today, it would be Dubai.--Tyler Cowen, back in December 2007

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it. The timing is significant for our story. The peasants took action one month before the “reform” congress of the party was announced. Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages. One farmer said, “When one family’s chicken catches the pest, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.” Ten years later, in August of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev lifted his nation’s 50-year-old prohibition against private farming, offering 50-year leases to farm families who would subsequently work off of contracts with the state. Few accepted the offer; Russian farmers were too accustomed to the dreary but steady life on the state or collective farm. Thus began reform of agriculture in Soviet Russia. The results in each country could not have been more different. Chronically depressed Chinese agriculture began to blossom, not only for grain but for all crops. As farmers brought their crops to the city by bicycle or bus, long food lines began to dwindle and then disappear. The state grocery monopoly ended in less than one year. Soviet Russian agriculture continued to stagnate despite massive state subsidies. Citizens of a superpower again had to bear the indignity of sugar rations.--Paul R. Gregory and Kate Zhou

Among the points of interest in the unfolding climate scandal is the fact that the term “climategate” rapidly eclipsed global warming in the number of links produced by a simple Google search. As is standard, Google’s auto-suggest function facilitated this, several days into the story’s evolution. Anyone typing in the letters c-l-i would see the suggested time-saving choice of climategate. Within a day or two of the auto-suggest function being added for “climategate” it had become the top item in the list. Suddenly, though, on Monday December 1, Google stopped offering “climategate” as a choice to those who typed c-l-i and even to those who typed c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t. Strange. Intrigued, I sent a few questions to Google’s Global Communications Department ...--Harold Ambler