armchair pundit

Americans, it’s well known, aren’t interested in soccer. Americans prefer the other football. We don’t like hockey either, which isn’t surprising, since it’s a lot like soccer played on skates. It’s hard to find definitive rankings of U.S. sports by popularity, but every source I’ve found lists the top three as:

1. Football
2. Baseball
3. Basketball

Hockey is always fourth or fifth, or even lower, and soccer barely makes the list. UFC, NASCAR and WWE (which isn’t even a sport) are way more popular.

Soccer, of course, is the world’s most popular sport, so this yet another way the U.S. is an outlier on this earth. But why is it so?

Here’s a theory:

Soccer and hockey go for long stretches where there’s no clear winner. You see lots of players running (or skating) around in a beautiful exhibition of athleticism, but the scoreboard is the only thing that tells you what team is on top.

This is not the case with football, baseball and basketball.

Football is split up into four downs and ten yard spans. The team with the ball gets four chances to go ten yards. The game completely stops between each down. A down lasts for maybe five to ten seconds, and during those few seconds the team with the ball either moves forward or they get pushed back. If they don’t move at least ten yards forward in four tries (really, three), they have to give the ball to the other team.

So for every down – and every set of four downs – there’s a clear winner and loser. That’s a winner every five to ten seconds.

Baseball is even more atomic. Baseball is broken down into pitches, outs and innings. Every pitch results in a ball, strike, foul, hit or out. In other words, every pitch has a winner and a loser. Every inning too.

In basketball, it’s possessions. You get the idea.

Americans like things we can win, and the more opportunities there are to win, the more we like it. If a sporting event is a metaphor for life, then Americans don’t want to wait til the end to know whether they won or not. We want the opportunity to win over and over again; we want another shot after losing a down, or a pitch or a possession.

This is how we do everything in America. Look at our financial industry or our healthcare system. We seem to prefer a healthcare system with clear winners and losers, over one where everyone is protected. We prefer to an arguably corrupt financial system that we can game, over one that would guarantee prosperity for all. Not only do we like to win, we like there to be losers.

The chance to win once every few seconds  is more enticing than the idea of running around for 90 minutes having fun.

[image above via juiceanalytics.com]

Yes old friend, I’m talking to you. You with the high-paying office job, the fine house in the suburbs, the lovely wife and the precocious daughter who’s just about to start first grade at a fancy private school – a fancy private school incidentally that has not ceased to exist despite the fact that free public education exists too (some of it very good even). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have come into possession of something you might be interested in. It’s a one-way ticket to a place called Alternate America. An America where the federal government is small, minuscule. Where it stays out of the way and doesn’t meddle in the business of business. Where markets and men are free. It has always been this way in Alternate America. Oh, yes, and this ticket is good for your whole family.

Whoa, hold on there friend. I’ll give it to you in a minute. Let me read you some fine print first. There are some warnings and disclaimers here… I know I know, lawyers. Always covering somebody’s ass. But bear with me.

Here’s some stuff about food:

In Alternate America, there are no ingredients on many food labels. There’s no nutrition information either, because the FDA doesn’t exist. Liberals created the FDA in 1906, during what has come to be called the “Progressive Era.” Scary! On the other hand, some food labels have more nutrition information than you could ever want. There are breakfast cereals that guarantee a boost in IQ for example, and potato chips that prevent certain cancers. And there are some magical drugs. Something called “thalidomide” for example is a wonder cure for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches. At least that’s what the advertisements say. Anyway, if you decide to take this ticket to Alternate America, you should definitely buy some of that IQ-boosting cereal for your little girl, to help her do well in school! I’m sure it’s safe.

You might want to be careful about fruits and vegetables. There’s no EPA to set pesticide residue limits or regulate the chemicals that can be used for food packaging. But all plastics are basically the same, right? I doubt there’s any chance something bad could leech out of the container into your daughter’s apple juice. And the companies that make those pesticides say there’s nothing to worry about.

Oh… says here that some people have been claiming their kids have been getting sick a lot – stomachaches, headaches, fatigue – ever since they bought some toys made in China. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe you could buy some kind of lead-testing kit, just to be safe, since no one else will be testing the toys. Some companies say their toys are 100% lead-free. Just buy those “lead-free” toys. You believe em, right? One more thing… Stay away from the tap water. Definitely.

Hmm… there’s a lot more here about food and drugs, but let me skim ahead…

Oh, liberals were responsible for that whole women’s suffrage thing, so your wife isn’t eligible to vote. But you probably don’t care about that, because you don’t like the government anyway.

Let’s see, what else…?

If you lose your job, you’re kind of screwed. There’s no unemployment insurance. More big government stuff created by liberals. At least you don’t have to pay to help other people who lose their jobs.

Medicare and Social Security don’t exist, so make sure you save your money wisely. Hopefully you’ll always have that high-paying office job, and hopefully you won’t hit any unexpected financial speed bumps in the next 25-30 years. I’ll cross my fingers for you. Some of your friends probably won’t be so lucky, but screw em.

Travel in Alternate America is a little dicey. There are no interstate highways. The roads in general are really bad, but they do the job I guess. No one really owns them, and no one has found a good way to make money by building and maintaining them. Luckily you’ll be able to afford a car with seatbelts. The nicer cars have em. Hopefully you’ll never have an accident, because most drivers don’t have any kind of insurance. Why would you pay for insurance if you don’t have to? There aren’t a lot of really beautiful things to see in Alternate America anyway. There’s no Grand Canyon for example, because the government didn’t want to get in the way of all the companies who wanted to build dams along the Colorado River.

Oh, I should also warn you that airplanes are pretty scary. Regular maintenance costs a lot of money, so the airlines in Alternate America try to milk everything they can out of the parts they have before replacing them.

I’ll skip ahead here… there have got to be some things you’ll really like about Alternate America…

Oh, here’s one… No progressive taxation! Of course, that means Alternate America was not able to wage WWII, build the atomic bomb, put a man on the moon or win the Cold War, since most of the revenue in regular America comes from progressive taxation. And you like all that awesome war stuff, right? Go America!

No progressive taxation also means there’s no Internet in Alternate America, because it cost the Department of Defense (in regular America) a lot of money to build.

Well, those are some of the highlights of the fine print. Still want that ticket?

If Sarah Palin falls in the forest and the media ignores her, does it make a sound?

I shouldn’t have to wish for Sarah Palin to go away. After all, what is Sarah Palin but the losing candidate for vice-president in an election that happened 10 months ago, and the former governor of a state most of us never think about (sorry Alaska)? If the winner of the vice presidency is awarded with “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived” (in the immortal words of John Adams), then what does the loser get?

As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin generated a lot of media buzz last summer because she was a woman that no one had ever heard of, and the GOP picked her to be John McCain’s running mate. Pure shock value basically. In a sensible world, the buzz would have quickly dwindled to the sub-audible hum that most veep candidates garner. Except that it turned out she was kind of a dimwit. OK, so that was a bit newsworthy, and Palin was good for a few ammusing “joe six packs” and “you betchas.”

But then it really should have been over.

When McCain lost the election, and she went back to Alaska, that should have been the last we heard from or about her – barring a sex scandal or some kind of meltdown. Like suddenly quitting her job.

But this is the governor of Alaska we’re talking about, and we only care about her because she ran for vice president. When a former veep candidate resigns from office in the least-populous state, it warrants a few paragraphs of coverage for a day or two.

So who’s still talking about Sarah Palin? I don’t read the conservative press, but the New York Times has run several Op-Ed pieces in the last few days and another front-page story yesterday. The Huffington Post has posted probably 50 Palin stories in the last week. The Daily Dish, which usually has better things to talk about, has been beating the dead horse too.

Can y’all stop now please?

It’s been a while since I posted here, and I’m introducing a new category: Elimination Dance.

Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor.  At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, “Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis.” Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. “Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board”) until a single couple remains.

(from the description of Michael Ondaatje’s book by the same title)

This new category, in other words, is for all the things I wish would go away. My first is small-government fanatics. For some reason I’ve allowed myself to rant in the comments of a couple friends’ blogs this week in response to passionate small-government fanaticism and comments I somewhat unfairly deemed as such.

The rest of this post is a lightly-edited re-post of a comment I left on my friend Jay’s blog…

Small-government fanatics seem to believe we are a prosperous and successful country in spite of our government – rather than because of it, whereas I believe the truth is very much both.

We are beneficiaries of two centuries of government protection and support – much of which we basically seem to take for granted at this point, and much of which few people would really want to go back and undo. Of course there have been missteps too, but the small-government libertarian crowd usually fails to acknowledge the ways in which we have benefited.

One core principle of small-government fanatics is free markets, or as my friend Jay unambiguously put it: “The free market is one of the greatest gifts to mankind in all of our history.”

I think, however, that total market freedom almost inevitably leads to “tragedy of the commons” scenarios. People and businesses will pursue their own desires even to the detriment of everyone’s needs. They pursue immediate individual gains that risk (and often cause) generalized future catastrophe.

If government does not serve to protect the commons from the individual, then what – or who – will?

Before the FDA required drug companies to prove their products were not dangerous prior to putting them on the market, there were numerous incidents of contamination – sometimes maiming or killing thousands (thalidomide, diethylene glycol). What’s the free-market alternative to this? The free-market response might be to put a company out of business because one of their products killed a few thousand people, but um… the company KILLED people. That was the free-market drug industry before the FDA.

What about a more straightforward tragedy of the commons? I have a hard time envisioning a free-market solution to protecting fisheries from individual companies competing against each other to pull in the biggest catches. The companies know when they are pushing fisheries toward collapse, but they also know that if they hold back, then others will just step in and out-fish them. What’s the free-market answer?

This is similar in nature to what happened in our financial markets. Smart people knew they were taking insane risks that were not sustainable, in order to reap huge short-term gains. But they also knew that if they didn’t do it, plenty of other people would out-gain them in the short term, and they would be fired.

For whatever reason, it’s easier for me to stomach this problem with the financial markets (as part of the cost of doing business – even if it hurts a lot of innocent bystanders), than with things like forests and fisheries. Damage done to forests and fisheries is longer-lasting.

I have a hard time believing our country’s major parks and wilderness areas would ever have been created without our government deciding to do so (imagine how many more dams could have been built along the Colorado River and how many more trees harvested in Appalachia if companies were free to do so). I’m personally happier to have the parks and wildernesses.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about atmospheric carbon and climate change for five decades, warning us about a point-of-no-return. We probably needed to start doing things differently 10 years ago to avoid the point-of-no-return, but what free market incentive existed to do so? None, and that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in.

If you believe there are no situations when the collective good is more important than individual gains, then my argument is lost on you. I don’t believe this. And it’s hard to imagine who would aim us toward the collective good if the government was not trying to do so.

It’s fair to argue that the government does not operate effectively or efficiently enough, but I think the answer is to improve it, not to eviscerate it.

I think it’s good and necessary to debate each threshold of government intervention (currently, healthcare), but I think we need to acknowledge how much existing government protection and support we take for granted and would not want to give up.

In the tradition of The Giant Pool of Money, its spinoff Planet Money and this fine piece of writing by Henry Blodget in the Atlantic Monthly, here’s a nice piece of animation that explains how we blew up the economy:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

There are a lot of people lining up for stimulus dollars, a lot of ambitious and long-dormant projects being dusted off by governors and mayors across the country.

But there’s another group of opportunists taking advantage of the debate. I’m talking about the G.O.P. who are stonewalling and stalling in the name of prudent spending. At least that’s what they’d like us to think. They’re going through the proposed bill line by line and collectively decrying as wasteful almost everything in it.

I suspect something else is behind the political theater.

It’s possible the Republicans think they have nothing to lose by delaying or even derailing the President’s plan. It’s reasonable for them to believe they won’t be blamed if the final plan they approve ultimately fails to fix the economy. If it fails, the Republicans can be pretty sure that the president and not congress will bear the blame. Likewise if it succeeds, he will get most of the credit. Congress will share very little of either.

I’m not sure I’m so cynical as to suspect the Republicans of trying to engineer a failure, but looking at it as a purely political opportunity, they have much more to gain from failure than they do from success.

As I wandered through the crowded mall in Washington D.C. on Inauguration Day, chatting with people and overhearing many other conversations, a theme emerged.

Or rather, two themes.

Folks of older generations as well as the African-Americans on the scene seemed to see the day in largely symbolic terms. Obama is our first black president, sworn in the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Obama represents a significant step toward realizing Dr. King’s dream of a just world and one in which men are judged by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin.

This symbolism was not completely lost on the younger folks on the mall, but people too young to have personally witnessed (or participated in) the civil rights movement seemed to see the day more pragmatically. To them, the election of Obama represents a shift back to a government that values competence and toward a post-partisan one that welcomes debate, seeks consensus and eschews ideology.

I think the big deal about Obama is that both perspectives are true, although I count myself mostly as one of the latter group.

In politics, superficial things matter, and if dark skin isn’t enough to kill a person’s chances of becoming president, then a funny name often is. I remember people saying in 1988 that “Michael Dukakis” was too ethnic-sounding a name for the White House. If that’s the case, then “Barack Hussein Obama” should have been catastrophic – especially in these Islamophobic times. Obama, however, transcended his name and his race (not to mention his exotic upbringing and his lack of experience) almost at the outset of his campaign. He transcended it and brought enough of us along with him to get elected president.

At a cocktail party before the inaugural ball, a question was circulating: “When did you decide you were going to vote for Obama – instead of Clinton, or McCain, or someone else, or no one at all?” One person said it was when her 10-year-old daughter told her she thought Obama would be the best president “for the future.” Another person said he refrained from choosing until Obama seemed like the candidate who had the best chance of defeating McCain.

As for me, Obama had me at “no red states or blue states, but only the United States.”

Who killed the economy? Hint: call your lawyer.

The witch hunt to expose the people responsible for the current financial crisis has been underway for several months, and there is no shortage of suspects. This week, however, I read a couple of articles that together lay out the best case so far.

Why Wall Street Always Blows It by Henry Blodget in the current Atlantic Monthly puts the reader in the shoes of someone sitting on a bad mortgage and at risk of being laid off. He surveys the list of candidates to blame for the mess we’re in.

• There were the predatory lenders of course. Mortgage brokers sold millions of “ticking time bombs” known as ARMs, and they encouraged people to lie about their incomes. But this was fine because a) home prices were going to go up forever, b) the buyers were probably going to sell before the mortgage rate adjusted anyway and c) they got fat commissions and bore none of the risk.
• There were the sleazy real-estate agents. Many probably knew it was a bubble but wanted to close as many sales as they could before it popped. On the other hand, real estate agents are always trying to close as many sales as possible, and most were probably as deluded and blind as everyone else.
• What about home buyers? If a mortgage broker encourages you to lie about your income, does that make it OK? A lot of people who knew it was a bubble expected it to burst five years ago and stayed out of the housing market only to see a gazillion idiots get crazy rich. Only then did they finally decide to jump in – right at the peak. The bottom line is that too many people forgot a home is a home first and an investment second.
• There’s Wall Street of course. ‘Nuff said.
• On the other hand, Investors demanded that their banks and brokers deliver higher returns than all the other banks and brokers, and if they failed, then the investors simply moved their money to one of those other ones. When this happened, bankers and brokers got fired. So, the career incentive (to not get fired) ended up outweighing the incentive to invest prudently, and bankers and brokers made more and more risky bets in a race to outdo each other.
• There’s the SEC, whose leaders seemed to be mostly concerned with positioning themselves for future jobs in the Wall Street firms they were supposed to regulate.
• And there’s Alan Greenspan, who most people now agree kept interest rates too low for too long.

The second article was a two-part Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn:

1. The End of the Financial World As We Know It
2. How To Repair a Broken Financial World

Lewis and Einhorn look at many of the same players, but they focus more on the SEC and the ratings agencies:

It’s almost as if the higher the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

A big theme across these three articles is incentives. No one had any reason to care about the larger and long term consequences of what was happening. The short term – in some cases just the next commision – was all that mattered. Everone was making money, so everyone just assumed the system was working. The few naysayers who insisted it shouldn’t be working – or, preciently, that it would soon stop working – weren’t taken seriously.

Bernie Madoff’s victims are a case in point. They were happy enough not to ask any questions about where the exceptional returns were coming from, as long as there were returns. That Madoff, like most scammers, was unwilling to disclose anything about his investment strategies didn’t stop them from handing their money over.

Investors’ enthusiasm for complex and inscrutable investment vehicles like CDO’s and credit default swaps was not that different. People didn’t care to know what was happening inside the black box, as long as money was coming out of it.

Americans accept the reality of a broken and corrupt system – even take pains to preserve it – as long as enough people think they can personally profit from it. Most people may over-estimate their ability to predict the collapse of the system in the hope of timing their exit. They lose money and eagerly join the witch hunt.

Nonetheless, Americans still prefer this corrupt system for the same reasons people play the lottery. The lottery has a few winners and a multitude of losers, but the people who spend loads of money playing it no doubt imagine they will win someday. A corrupt system by its very nature offers opportunities for crafty and motivated people to “win,” and the possibility of tremendous wealth for a few is more enticing to too many Americans than guaranteed prosperity for all.

And this is why it will never be fixed.

The other day on my bus into downtown SF, a down-and-out looking guy stepped on and asked if anyone could give him the dollar he was short on bus fare. Amazingly, five or six people stepped up to oblige, and it got me thinking about the economy. I’ve seen people ask for money on the bus before, but I’ve never seen five people leap to lend a hand.

Hard times can create a kind of brotherhood. The word compassion literally means to suffer together, and when we don’t have to work too hard to put ourselves in another man’s shoes, then maybe we’re more inclined to help each other out.

Economic growth is not something that can go on forever. The last hundred years of exponential growth and unrestrained consumption has taken a serious toll on the earth and left entire cultures wrecked in its wake. For our own survival on this planet, we need to curb our appetites, but the dilemma has been how to slow down consumption without throwing the economy into turmoil.

Well our hand has been forced, and maybe we have the answer: You can’t slow down consumption without hurting the economy. The economy is in turmoil and consumption is way down. Each exacerbating the other. But maybe nothing good comes without some hard work and sacrifice – concepts that are antithetical to American existence. We have indigestion, and maybe this is just the medicine we need.

We can look forward to tough times, that’s certain. The last eight years have left some fresh scabs, but it’s the last hundred years that did the real damage. Tougher times are still ahead, but maybe there’s an upside. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

As we endure this downturn and after we come out the other side, maybe we’ll do a better job of taking care of each other, and the planet we share.

Yesterday, NPR’s On The Media aired an interesting segment about Bush and language. It wasn’t another jab at his butchering of English; it was a look at his administration’s creative branding of its policies, programs and  initiatives:

Gladstone’s guest, “Republican wordsmith” Frank Luntz, doesn’t anticipate that much of Bush’s lexicon will stick, but he seems to be referring to Bush’s oratory, rather than the Administration’s knack for naming. Regretfully, I think we’ll have to live with some of these names for a while (not to mention the damage they’ve done). In no particular order…

• Operation Enduring Freedom. I think you have to establish freedom before it can endure. As I read on a bumper sticker once: “We’ll Liberate the Shit Out of You.” Remember when this one was…
• Operation Infinite Justice. Because Bush’s top adviser is… The Lord, and The Lord apparently likes Tom Clancy novels. Either way, this war introduced us to…
• Unlawful enemy combatants. Not just enemy combatants, but unlawful ones. In any case, this means that even though we’re in the middle of a “war” on terror, the people we’re fighting are not “prisoners” of said war once we capture them. They’re “detainees.” And they’re unlawful. How convenient for us. Or maybe not, since the government can decide that any one of us is an unlawful enemy combatant pretty much whenever it wants to and with no explanation whatsoever. Think about this before you chuck your shoes at the president smart guy, or you might be subjected to…
• Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Don’t worry though, it’s not torture. Sigh.
• The Axis of Evil. We have to trust him on this. He talks to The Lord, remember?
• Homeland Security. They tell us what color we are – red, orange, yellow (like Lifesavers… literally), and they keep American cities from being destroyed (except by hurricanes). We all feel much more secure with them around.
• Patriot Act. It tells us how to act patriotic.
• No Child Left Behind. And seven years later, no children are behind! Right?
• The Clear Skies Initiative. Because who’s not for clear skies? Wait, Bush? Really? But what about the name? I don’t get it.
• The Healthy Forests Initiative. Because who’s not for healthy forests? Wait, Bush? Really? But what… oh, I think I’m starting to understand.
• Compassionate Conservatism. Ahhh, this is where it all began.

For a final word on Bush’s knack for naming, I leave you with Jon Stewart.

Aspirational Time Horizon