Twitterpated!

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine this past weekend about the rise of Facebook and Twitter and that type of "Internet 2" stuff that ancient fogies like myself don't understand.

It almost made me see the appeal. Almost.

Apparently, signing onto these things lets you construct your own online identity. Okay, I knew that part of it but I just don't care about having much of an online identity. This is fine for old folk like me, but the article makes the point that for kids today an online identity is not optional. You will have one because most people you know will have one and if you don't participate, they construct yours for you in your absence. So I can see the appeal of the minimal policing of these things to make sure you're not being unfairly characterized by others.

But then there's Twitter. Twitter, if you're like me and only very passingly aware of it, is a service that lets you send out little "tweets", short text-message length updates on you: what you're doing, how you're feeling, what you're seeing, whatever. The article does a good job of explaining why one might want to watch a feed of these "tweets" from someone: it adds up, over time, to a good sense of their life. That is, the experience becomes sort of the 21st century version of the old days of being forced to live and work around the same people all of your life, you get a good sense of who they are, what they care about, how they live, etc.

The article does a less good job of explaining why on Earth someone would want to spend any part of their day texting the world that they "just made a sandwich" let alone why they would want to do it day after day*. I guess if you're getting a good buzz and sense of shared existence from reading other folks' tweets, you might develop the urge to "join the conversation" or whatnot. The article also tries to sell putting out tweets as a sort of chance to meditate on what you're doing, kind of take a meta-look at your own life. But I just can't see "I made a pastrami sandwich!" as any kind of worthwhile meditation on anything, deep as I find the cured meats to be.

So yeah. Interesting article, gave me a fleeting glimpse of insight into the world of those wacky kids whom I spend all my days yelling at to "Get off my lawn!"

*Yes, of course I am fully aware of the irony of someone who writes a blog questioning the desire of someone to shout into the ether. Perhaps these twitterers are as aware as I am that they are merely talking to themselves, as what they 'contribute' should not be read by anyone.**

** Note: I'm not actually talking about you, my loyal readers, who number somewhere between 1 and 4, given the day. You folk obviously appreciate my genius and can easily see the worthiness of my contributions here. I'm talking about all those people who don't read my fantastic rants.

Title Note: "twitterpated" is an actual word. It's a good word, one of my faves right up there with "canoodle", though unlike canoodle, you'll need a serious, serious dictionary, like the OED, to find the definition of twitterpated. Luckily, I have such a dictionary. Though not in online-linkable form, alas.

Basic Economics

So I read a bit on my Fla vacation of a week or so ago.

First, I finished Tom Sowell's Basic Economics.

It was quite good. I think I shall attempt to lend it to my more economically illiterate friends.

The basic tack he takes is to describe the workings of the economy in layman's terms and using approachable examples. He takes particular time in each chapter walking through common economic misperceptions explaining why they seem to make sense but then showing how when you fully think through their implications they are wrong. Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter to just these fallacies and has also published an entire separate book on the subject.

The main point that he repeatedly returns to is that to evaluate a policy it is important to not just look at its intended effects but also the incentives it will create and, if possible, the results in previous instances where the policy was attempted. (And history being as long and varied as it is, it's almost always possible. Despite popular belief to the contrary, there is precious little new under the sun, particularly when it comes to governmental action.)

The idea being that just because you have noble intentions and your policy seems straightforwardly directed to meeting them, it may well be creating incentives that will work in just the opposite direction. An example he uses is rent control (which is a subset of price controls more generally). It sounds like a great and simple idea: housing is too expensive, make it cheaper. That way poor people will be able to afford it.

But what it does, in fact, is make it less attractive to build and maintain housing. Thus, over time, you get less housing and the housing you have falls into worse and worse states. Often very expensive housing is not covered under rent-control laws (the thinking being why try to keep costs down on mansions or whatever) this, of course, makes it more attractive to build luxury housing than affordable housing and so you get more and more luxury housing and less and less affordable housing, exactly the opposite of what you intended.

Prices, in general, are very important. They represent easily understandable information about reality. This is why attempts to change them without changing the underlying reality always cause unintended problems. To go back to the housing situation, high rents in an area are telling you that lots of people want to live in an area that does not have enough housing to fit them all. Artificially constraining the price of housing does not correct this imbalance: instead it exacerbates it by causing more people to try to live there because the price seems low, thus you end up with a housing shortage. Left alone, the high rents would be attractive to builders who would come in and build more housing, the greater housing would mean that there would be fewer people-per-place to bid it up and voila, cheaper housing. Now this might cause other issues that you are trying to avoid, like turning your sleepy town into Manhattan but life is all about trade offs.

In fact, if I could sum up the importance of economic thinking in a nutshell that would be it: that there are really no 'solutions.' Because we live in a reality of finite resources, there is only an endless set of trade offs.

At any rate. This book report got kind of off topic so I'll cut it here. Short version: well-written, useful book. I give it two snaps up in a circle.

Norks are weird

Article on "hidden majorities" of women and minorities

Here's an article on "hidden majorities" of women and minorities that brings up the constitution's 3/5's compromise. The author here doesn't explicitly get the point of the compromise wrong but the way she brings it up kind of hints to me that she's the type who would get it wrong. And since it's a huge pet peeve of mine, I'm going to explain it here.

So often people bring up the 3/5's compromise as a sign of how awful our founding fathers were. "Look," these types of people say, "they were such racists that they codified into law that black people were only worth 3/5's of a white man!"

This gets the point of the compromise precisely backwards. Setting aside the fact that the constitution quite purposefully never mentions race, the argument was about how much slaves would count when apportioning representation. That is, the constitution establishes that we will have a census and that our representatives in the House of Representatives will be apportioned among the states based on their share of population.

(At least that's how it is now. Originally, of course, the plan was to just add more Reps for new population, keeping the ratio of people-to-Rep constant at around 30,000. Now, the number of Reps is fixed at 435 and only the apportionment between states is adjusted to match population shifts.)

So given that you were going to be doling out Representatives based on population, you are naturally going to have more power going to states with higher populations. So how should slaves count? Under the deluded "How racist it is not to count them as full people!" argument, you would count them as one each. But given that they are owned by other people, all you are doing is increasing the power of the slave-holders. If you count them as less than one per slave, you are decreasing that power.

This is why it was the anti-slave Northern states that were arguing for not counting slaves at all -- not because they thought slaves weren't people but because they didn't want to give all that power to the slaveholders that they opposed. On the other side, you had the slave-holding states arguing that slaves should count as full people -- not because they thought of slaves as their equals but because they wanted more power. Thus the 3/5's compromise. The reason they were counted as less than a full person was due to the anti-slavery side.

God how I wish people would get this straight. Getting it wrong betrays not only an utter lack of knowledge about the constitutional creation process but also a pretty shaky grasp of the logic of political representation.

After bringing up the 3/5's compromise, the author goes on to say this:

Women were counted as zero-fifths -- at least symbolically -- unable to vote nationwide until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, behind Australia
and Canada and lots of other countries.

This is just plain idiotic. Slaves weren't allowed to vote either so by this logic the 3/5's compromise was really a 0/5's compromise! Yeah! Oh wait, no. This is just the author trying to be a little more clever than she is apparently capable of being.

I also don't particularly like the snide naming of a couple of countries and the "lots of other countries" that beat us to women's suffrage. Why not point out that "lots of other countries" still don't allow women to vote? Or have other basic rights? Or you could point out that Canada is currently engaged in a debate over whether they should have the right to free speech, a right that, if you lack it, makes voting largely irrelevant.

Yes we were slower to the punch on women's suffrage than some and eons ahead of most of the globe on that and so many other issues. It's a shame we weren't born perfect but then nobody is.

Fun with Perspective!

George Clooney seizes the rare opportunity to grab a giantess and make a wish!

All that glitters...

Fascinating Washington Post article about a Turkish immigrant millionaire's daughter's Sweet 16 bash.

Great quote from one attendee:

"Honestly, it's been challenging at times raising our daughter around all of this," says Melanie Braun, mother of Ayse's best friend Maddy. She gestures around the club. "It's not our lifestyle at all. But the Halacs are a wonderful family, very generous. I think Ahmet contributes to charities in Turkey, or something."

"Contributes to charities in Turkey or something". Priceless.

I also liked the bit about how Soulja Boy, one of the celebrity rappers paid to attend, was under the impression that it was a club appearance, not a private party. He charges more for private parties.

Easy Come, Easier Go...

Disturbing article about a Chase private banking client who had hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from his account over a period of months.

The disturbing part is how easily it happened and, of course, if it can happen to uber-wealthy investor types being handled by the "Private Banking Group" (read: sycophants who will bend over backwards to retain the really, really rich clients) and they have little recourse, what does that say for us peons?

Still, I hope to someday be in a position to have $300,000 stolen from me in 15 months and not really notice that it's missing.