Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal

The Trunk Monkey

Xeni Jardin of boingboing sends us to the trunk monkey:

Phil Carter: Go See Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight"

Phil Carter has seen the movie, and thinks it is your duty as a citizen of the United States of America to see it:

INTEL DUMP - Review: "No End in Sight": On Tuesday, I attended a screening of the new Iraq documentary "No End in Sight" in Los Angeles which was co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress and USC's Center for Public Diplomacy. (The movie is reviewed today in the New York Times.) Bottom line up front: go see this movie. It presents the history of the Iraq war in clear, sober, and vivid footage, and makes a compelling argument that we are past the point of "winnability" (whatever that means) today in Iraq...

Hoisted from Comments: The Protean Nature of English

Hoisted from Comments: Andres complains:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/mitt-romney-jum.html#comment-76949994: Besides agreeing with most of what is said above, I have to confess that the English language never ceases to frustrate me. Just when I think I have mastered its infinite nuances, along comes a phrase like "jumping the shark" that leaves me in complete confusion.

Compared to the solid certainties of the Romance languages (in which obscure metaphors are generally confined to poetry), English is altogether inscrutable; practically every minute a phrase is born that bears little resemblance to anything that has previously appeared and is therefore fully suited to fool or confuse its readers...

It's a requirement that you have a certain deep pop cultural literacy to understand the metaphors. It is a barrier to entry--a way of giving a certain class a leg up in authority.

Ezra Klein on Video, and Health Care too

He thinks things are looking up for that vast fifty-effective-word-a-minute wasteland of an information channel that is modern TV:

Ezra Klein: Logic, Media, Incentives, And Me: I sort of enjoy the double challenge of being questioned on television: You both need to make your point, but also frame your answer in such a way that it retroactively makes the question sensical. That's the real trick.

Increasingly, though, the incentives are changing. Assume that the incentive for going on television is to raise your profile (which is about 75 percent correct). If I went on television five years ago, a large part of my incentive would be to make the host like me. After all, these appearances pass in an instant, and most of you would never see the program. So if I want to reach the maximum number of people with my arguments and do the most to increase my visibility, I want to keep coming back.

Now, however, with YouTube and GoogleVideo and online archiving, a single, contentious appearance can be seen on the internet a million times. Everyone, after all, has seen Stewart berate Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, but very few of us had actually tuned in that day. Similarly, my segment on the Kudlow show, replayed on the internet a few thousand times, did much more for my reputation among the audience relevant to my success than have my more friendly, but bland, appearances on other shows.

Making sense often requires you to be disruptive, and not long ago, being disruptive was probably a bad idea. Now it's a good one. And since the channels are wising up and putting their videos online with advertising before them, they also want widespread online dissemination of appearances, and so their incentives are increasingly aligned with mine. Does this mean more folks will be making sense? Not necessarily. But it means their might be more room for sense-making.

Here's the video:

Ezra Klein on health care

Roman Nomenclature

Interesting that Roman women did not acquire names (as opposed to "the big daughter from the Balbus branch of the Atius clan who is married to one of the Marcii") until the very end of the Republic:

Roman Nomenclature: [F]emale children of citizen families were named with the feminine form of the clan into which they were born; hence, all women whose fathers had the nomen Julius were named Julia, and all women whose fathers had the nomen Cornelius were named Cornelia. In public, they would be identified by the possessive form of their father's cognomen (e.g., Julia Caesaris, “Julia, the daughter of Caesar”), or if married by the possessive form of their husband's cognomen (e.g., Clodia Metelli, “Clodia, the wife of Metellus”). If families had more than one daughter, they were distinguished by the words maior and minor (“elder” and “younger”), or prima, secunda, tertia, etc.

However, by the late Republic these conventions were changing slightly, in that elite Roman woman were sometimes designated by the feminine form of their father's nomen plus the feminine form of his cognomen, sometimes in the dominutive (e.g. Livia, who married Octavian and became Rome's first empress, was often referred to as Livia Drusilla, since her father was a noble named Marcus Livius Drusus). Starting with Augustus, names of the most prominent women did not necessarily follow the Republican convention, but rather reflected the family connections that were most significant to the namers. For example, the two daughters of Augustus' daughter Julia, who was married to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, would normally have been named Vipsania; instead one was called Julia and the other Agrippina. When Agrippina married Nero Claudius Germanicus (grandson of Livia), her three daughters were named Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla (referring to the family lines of both of their distinguished great-grandparents) instead of Claudia, which would refer to their father's nomen.

So why, in "Rome," is Atia called "Atia Julii" rather than the proper "Atia Balba Marcii" (after her second husband Lucius Marcius Philippus)? Presumably for the same reason that Pompey and Caesar are called "co-consuls" rather than proconsuls. The consuls for the years 50 and 49 were L. Aemilius Lepidus Paullus, C. Claudius Marcellus, and L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus...

Best James Bond Evar

Alec Guinness (in the six-hour BBC series "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy").

Answers to Never Asked Questions

(1) Yes, it is possible to watch old "Star Trek" episodes on the video iPod while waiting for the BART, and enjoy them (as much as one can enjoy Star Trek TOS episodes, that is: YMMV).

(2) Yes, Mark Lenard is a remarkably good actor to be able to do the things he does with the incredibly cheesy role of the Romulan Starship Commander in "Balance of Terror."

(3) Yes, if I had seen "The Enemy Below" before seeing "Balance of Terror," I would have found "Balance of Terror" to be an awkward and pathetic cheesy knockoff of a pretty good WWII submarine movie.

(4) Yes, because I saw "Balance of Terror" first, I still enjoy it: my brain paths are too-deeply engraved.

(5) Yes, I do want my HUDs from A Deepness in the Sky, as soon as possible please.

Your One-Stop Source for Star-Trek-Canon Blogging

Dymaxion World enters the Star Trek canon discussion:

Dymaxion World: Nerd moment: For my money, Star Trek VI is by far the best movie the series has produced, ever. Aside from being by far the superior script and directing of all the movies, I'm not sure how you can possibly top the multi-layered Cold War references. Most especially Christopher Plummer as a Klingon channeling Adlai Stevenson yelling to Kirk, "Don't wait for the translation, answer me now!"You could put that movie on every Sunday on Space, and I'd watch it every Sunday.

Honorable mention: Chekov in Star Trek IV, asking in faux-Russian accent "where are the nuclear wessels" to passersby in Reagan-drenched America. Yes...

I prefer this exchange from Star Trek VI: "We believe in alienable human rights!" "Inalienable.* I wish you could hear yourselves. Human rights. The Federation is a homo sapiens only club..."

I must disagree, however, with his claim that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the best. There are two better Star Trek movies:

• Forbidden Planet

• Galaxy Quest

The Classic Star Trek Canon

We have a preliminary list of views on some of Classic Star Trek from http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/classic_star_tr.html: which parts are canonical and which parts are obvious inferior forgeries:

Genuine and Canonical:

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Shore Leave
Mirror, Mirror
The Enterprise Incident
Arena
The Devil in the Dark
Balance of Terror
The Trouble with Tribbles
The Changeling
A Piece of the Action
Charlie X
A Taste of Armageddon
The Menagerie
Space Seed
The City on the Edge of Forever
Amok Time
The Omega Glory

Possibly Canonical, but Subject to Dispute:

The Gamesters of Triskelion
Star Trek: The Animated Series, various episodes

Definitely Heretic:

Spock's Brain (The Rex Momus heresy)
Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (The Bruce Moomaw and Jacob Levy heresy)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (the Stoffel and Bruce Moomaw heresy)

Classic Star Trek: The Genuine Item vs. Obvious Inferior Forgeries

Oooh. This could be dangerous. Classic Star Trek available on the iPod...

What is real genuine Classic Star Trek, anyway?

I believe that there is universal agreement that the genuine Classic Star Trek canon includes the three movies Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. (The other so-called "Classic" Star Trek movies--I, III, V, and VII--are, by universal agreement, dismissed as spurious interpolations added to the canon at a later date by unknown but untalented writers, producers, and directors.)

But I know of no similar agreement as to which of the one-hour Classic "episodes" are real Classic Star Trek and which are forgeries. Now that the first season is available on iPod format, this is an important question. I know of three first-season episodes that are definitely genuine: "The Devil in the Dark," "The City on the Edge of Forever," and "Balance of Terror." But what are people's views on the others?

Why Is TV so Low-Quality?

Back when there were only three networks and TV was entirely advertising-supported, this made a lot of sense:

Marginal Revolution: Why is TV so often stupid: Why is TV so often stupid:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

That is from David Foster Wallace. Here is the link, from Ben Casnocha.

You see, network TV made money not by providing the maximum value to watchers, but by providing advertisers with the maximum number of eyeballs. The two are not the same.

Now, however, we have cable, and hundreds of channels. So things should be changing. But I see no signs that they are.

TV: Nightly Business Report Commentary: Monday October 23, 2006: The Pace of Technological Change

Here's an interesting perspective on the global economy in the very long run: the pace of technological progress today--the speed with which we increase our productive capabilities--is roughly one hundred times what it was as recently as four centuries ago.

In the year 1 world population was about 180 million. In the year 1650 it was about 540 million. This tripling of world population was accompanied by very little improvement in standards of living: peasants--and most people were peasants--were as short, as malnourished, as hungry, and as sick in 1650 as in 1500. World real GDP only tripled in 1650 years--a pace of real GDP growth of roughly 0.07% per year, two-thirds of which is due to the fact that each mouth comes with two hands. The improvement in productivity in the pre-industrial world? 0.02% per year.

Compare and contrast that to the more than 2% per year of real productivity growth in the world economy today.

I'm Brad DeLong.

One-Click Rules!

We increasingly live in a complicated world in which those things that can be done in one click get done, and those that can't, don't. And those things that are done often acquire increasing salience. Hence the dominance of YouTube:

Gimme my embedded video! - Download Squad: Jordan Running: This has been bugging me for awhile, and I've just got to get it out in the open: If I want to put a cool movie trailer, a funny Comedy Central clip, or a news clip on my web site, why do I have to go to YouTube, where some kid has uploaded it in violation of the owner's copyright, and where as likely as not it'll be yanked a few days later, in order to do it? I'm talking about stuff that's already on the web--Comedy Central puts the best clips from its shows on its own web site, as does NBC for Saturday Night Live, and Apple.com has all the best movie trailers. But while I can stick a pirated clip from YouTube on my web site with two clicks, there's usually no simple, straightforward way to do the same thing from a legitimate site.

Some companies have shown signs of getting a clue. Google Video... some movies and TV shows--in particular those targeted at the youth market--now have a presence on YouTube... a few big record labels... but the selection remains pretty bare. What troubles me is that there's no discernible disadvantage for companies to put their own TV clips, movie trailers, and music videos online in a YouTube-like way. There can't be a technical barrier--the tiny dev team at Netscape.com put together their impressive embeddable video-sharing feature in a matter of weeks--nor a commercial one--movie trailers are advertisements, as are TV clips.... What's more, if they hosted their own embeddable videos, they could decide what plays before and after them instead of some kid on YouTube deciding for them, and though they'd be crazy to put anything longer than a two seconds before the video, after the video is a great time to advertise, as the Revver folks have discovered.

So, movie studios, TV networks, ad agencies, and record companies, here's my plea: Let me advertise your stuff on my web site. Hire some smart folks to put together a Flash player... give me HTML snippets to copy and paste... and let my visitors see your stuff, and your ads, without the extra clicks and without waiting for your lame Windows Media Player to load.

On Bloomberg TV...

On Bloomberg TV Today

Bloomberg TV: Programming Schedule: 9/6/2006 2:00 PM ET Bloomberg On the Economy Weekdays, Tom Keene interviews leading economists, politicians and strategists. Longer interviews that go beyond the headlines to provide a depth of economic analysis found nowhere else in the media. Podcast ready, these interviews address the economic news of the moment — and provide context and perspective that is a must-listen in a hurried world. Tom Keene and top economists. It's Bloomberg on the Economy.

http://bloomberg.com/tvradio/podcast/ontheeconomy.xml

The Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert is a national treasure:

YouTube - Colbert making fun of morning news for deriding his program

Colbert's clips from "Today" and "Good Morning America" are priceless. Colbert says:

I asked Congressman Lyn Westmoreland who proposed requiring the display of the ten commandments in the House and Senate chambers if he could name the ten commandments. What I should have asked him [according to "Today" and "Good Morning America" was this:

• Is tanning addictive?
• How long did it take you to grow that [beard]?
• Do you really need to wait a half hour after you eat to go swimming?

Clone High!

My cousin Philip Lord's short-lived series, "Clone High", is currently #7 in DVDs with a five-star rating on Amazon-Canada (it's not released in the U.S. yet). It's become a cult classic! See http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AABKGI/.

It has an extraordinary number of extremely funny and tasteless moments.

Plus, where else in the world can you watch Marilyn Manson sing about the importance of eating right and following the USDA food pyramid? And see photographs of Phil's and my grandfather--William Walcott Lord--batting for Harvard in the 1920s?

Chronosynclastic Infundibulum

It now appears that "Sex and the City" (minus the naughty bits) is available 24/7 on "normal" TV networks--i.e., not premium cable. But they don't show the episodes in order. And since multiple networks are showing episodes not in order, the sense of temporal rootedness is absent. It's as if Sarah Jessica Parker were a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel who had passed through the chronosynclastic infundibulum, so that she (subjectively) experiences the different days of her life in random order. It's peculiar.

More distressing, perhaps, is that each "thirty minute" episode appears to contain only 21 minutes of actual show--including credits. That's 18 minutes an hour devoted to ads and previews.

When did this happen? Back in the days when quatloos were quatloos, one could count on an hour-long episode like "The Gamesters of Triskelion" containing at least fifty-two minutes of genuine programmy goodness. Or so I remember...

Grading the Greenspan Fed

For Nightly Business Report, October 3, 2005:

Let me join in the crowds praising the monetary stewardship of the Greenspan Fed. The Greenspan Fed has done a superb job at monetary policy. It has kept inflation low and stable, and it has played a big role in keeping recessions small. It is true that circumstances were very favorable when the Greenspan Fed took over: the Volcker Fed had loaded the bases--created the preconditions. But the Greenspan Fed then hit the grand slam. On monetary policy, the Greenspan Fed deserves the highest grade: an A-plus.

But on other dimensions of policy--things that have traditionally been secondary concerns of the Fed--the Greenspan Fed has not done as well.

It is a fact that inflation can be kept low over the long term only if the government deficit remains small. Too-big deficits for too long have always produced rapid inflation in the past. They will always produce rapid inflation in the future. If the executive and the legislature won't raise the taxes to pay for government spending and keep the budget in rough balance, the market will take over and balance the budget--by levying the inflation tax.

If the Fed is going to do its job as long-term guarantor of price stability, it needs to be assisted by an executive and a legislature who understand the importance of rough budget balance. The Fed has to teach them: it has to be an advocate within the government for balanced budgets. Here, since 2000, the Greenspan Fed has fallen down.

What the Greenspan Fed has done on monetary policy deserves high praise. What it has not done on fiscal policy will make the job of its successors much more difficult.

Matthew Yglesias *Is* the Media Lobby

He argues that TV is good--or at least not bad--for you. His chances of persuading me and my wife to let our children watch more TV is about as great as his chances of persuading us to let them play "Grand Theft Auto."

There is one annoying thing about Yglesias's post. I am going to have to go read the study it refers to before I can figure out what the study's claim that "although kids reporting the lowest grades also tend to report the highest levels of media exposure . . . this relationship is not statistically significant" means. "This relationship is not statistically significant" can mean one of two things:

1. It's not important.
2. We don't have enough data.

When in the future I am pleased to be among the first to welcome our new statistically-sophisticated overlords, anyone who writes the phrase "not statistically significant" without immediately adding "(it's not important)" or ("we don't have enough data") will be sent to the agonizer.

TPMCafe || Politics, Ideas & Lots Of Caffeine: Kaiser found that 'although kids reporting the lowest grades also tend to report the highest levels of media exposure . . .this relationship is not statistically significant.' This contradicts earlier research, and what's changed is that high-achieving children nowadays consume more media than they used to. It appears that 'as media become more and more integrated into the lives of young people, the differences once located by academic performance are attenuating.'...