Adam Anderson: August 2009 Archives
Apparently this is the one-thousandth entry on this blog. Yikes, I must be getting old or something.
About a year ago, I initiated a new chapter in my long and depressing saga of blogging experiments by creating a new blog caffeinophilia. The question was whether a blog with a tightly-focused theme, unlike the ramblings here on überfluss, would attract a larger and more steady readership. The answer is a crushing no, and the results underscore the fact that content is irrelevant without a solid base of promotion.
The new blog caffeinophilia contains reviews of coffee and tea shops from the perspective of someone who does not drink coffee. It is a guide to finding caffeine without coffee, particularly in Seattle, Chicago, and Portland. From this standpoint, it is a relatively unique site, but not one incapable of developing a small but regular readership.
Yet the failure could not be more spectacular. Despite a flurry of posts during this summer, the site has attracted a mere 11 hits in the past 30 days, 4 of which were me. There appear two main reasons for this: lack of promotion and Yelp. Both are obvious, but the Yelp effect did not occur to me when I was originally creating the blog since it was before I became a regular Yelp user. Essentially, Yelp has eliminated the need for independent online restaurant reviewers, by having information on virtually every restaurant and coffee shop known to man. The user reviews are frequently of poor quality. Still, no one ought read my paltry collection of tea reviews when Yelp contains so much information.
So what is the next experiment? I have been impressed with the success of Cosmic Variance, a blog on mostly on cosmology co-authored by a collection of physicists, now engulfed by Discover Magazine. I also enjoy reading the Becker-Posner Blog, although I occasionally find their entries repetitive. In particular, the use of multiple authors on these sites permits more rapid updating and multiple perspectives on the same issue. So, anyone want to start a new blog?
The new blog caffeinophilia contains reviews of coffee and tea shops from the perspective of someone who does not drink coffee. It is a guide to finding caffeine without coffee, particularly in Seattle, Chicago, and Portland. From this standpoint, it is a relatively unique site, but not one incapable of developing a small but regular readership.
Yet the failure could not be more spectacular. Despite a flurry of posts during this summer, the site has attracted a mere 11 hits in the past 30 days, 4 of which were me. There appear two main reasons for this: lack of promotion and Yelp. Both are obvious, but the Yelp effect did not occur to me when I was originally creating the blog since it was before I became a regular Yelp user. Essentially, Yelp has eliminated the need for independent online restaurant reviewers, by having information on virtually every restaurant and coffee shop known to man. The user reviews are frequently of poor quality. Still, no one ought read my paltry collection of tea reviews when Yelp contains so much information.
So what is the next experiment? I have been impressed with the success of Cosmic Variance, a blog on mostly on cosmology co-authored by a collection of physicists, now engulfed by Discover Magazine. I also enjoy reading the Becker-Posner Blog, although I occasionally find their entries repetitive. In particular, the use of multiple authors on these sites permits more rapid updating and multiple perspectives on the same issue. So, anyone want to start a new blog?
One of the more charming reports off the news wire this week was Sarah Palin's declaration that Obama's health care reform will establish a "death panel" to decide whether to kill her parents and newly born son Trig. Various sources mention Newt Gingrich giving tacit support to Palin's remark.
Palin's remarks and the general rhetoric in opposition to the present proposals for healthcare reform illustrate the astonishingly infantile state of discourse on this issue. Even someone who despises the current reform proposals cannot reasonably agree with most of the major criticism being hurled at the present bill. The general criticism being lobbed at Congress and the president, for example, is similar to Palin's: that government bureaucrats will ration healthcare and thereby decide who lives and dies by some sort of formula for social optimality, particularly targeting the weak and the elderly.
Even if this is the case, I don't understand why this is valid criticism. Firstly, the government decides who lives and dies, who is worth saving and worth killing, all of the time. Nearly every EPA regulation is calculated, for example, using cost-benefit analyses that usually assign a value of about $7 million or so to each life. The reason why your drinking water has the levels of lead, copper, and mercury it does is because a government bureaucrat decided through "heartless" and "cold" calculations that it wasn't worth society paying to save a few extra people with more stringent regulations. Conservatives usually (and correctly, I believe) favor this kind of approach, so I fail to see why they now reject it.
Secondly, it's not clear that a regime of "death panels" would be any worse than the status quo. Palin's concern is apparently for the elderly and the handicapped. But private insurance generally refuses to cover the elderly and handicapped in the status quo. It is currently the government who allows these people to live, and I am not aware of any features in the current proposal to significantly decrease coverage for such groups (though I confess that I'm no expert on healthcare reform). It's hard to understand why Palin would support a status quo in which the elderly would be summarily killed were it not for very costly government intervention.
And finally, the opposition appears to lack any serious alternatives to the Congressional plan. This is the unfortunate consequence of having overwhelming Democratic control in the House, Senate, and White House. Without much ability to advance legislation, the Republicans' only incentive is to attempt to block everything and spread as much fear and paranoia as possible. This is not a reflection of any sort of intellectual or moral deficiency on the part of Republicans; it is simply the optimal strategy for any powerless minority in government. Any alternatives they propose can be shot down by Democrats, so their only option is to regain power by fomenting disgust with Democratic policies. This is the same way that Democrats overtook Republicans in the last two elections. The solution to this would seem to be to vote for centrist Republicans to rebalance Congress and restore their incentive to engage is productive discourse. With the likes of Palin, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly still having a stranglehold on Republican rhetoric, this appears a sadly distant possibility.
Palin's remarks and the general rhetoric in opposition to the present proposals for healthcare reform illustrate the astonishingly infantile state of discourse on this issue. Even someone who despises the current reform proposals cannot reasonably agree with most of the major criticism being hurled at the present bill. The general criticism being lobbed at Congress and the president, for example, is similar to Palin's: that government bureaucrats will ration healthcare and thereby decide who lives and dies by some sort of formula for social optimality, particularly targeting the weak and the elderly.
Even if this is the case, I don't understand why this is valid criticism. Firstly, the government decides who lives and dies, who is worth saving and worth killing, all of the time. Nearly every EPA regulation is calculated, for example, using cost-benefit analyses that usually assign a value of about $7 million or so to each life. The reason why your drinking water has the levels of lead, copper, and mercury it does is because a government bureaucrat decided through "heartless" and "cold" calculations that it wasn't worth society paying to save a few extra people with more stringent regulations. Conservatives usually (and correctly, I believe) favor this kind of approach, so I fail to see why they now reject it.
Secondly, it's not clear that a regime of "death panels" would be any worse than the status quo. Palin's concern is apparently for the elderly and the handicapped. But private insurance generally refuses to cover the elderly and handicapped in the status quo. It is currently the government who allows these people to live, and I am not aware of any features in the current proposal to significantly decrease coverage for such groups (though I confess that I'm no expert on healthcare reform). It's hard to understand why Palin would support a status quo in which the elderly would be summarily killed were it not for very costly government intervention.
And finally, the opposition appears to lack any serious alternatives to the Congressional plan. This is the unfortunate consequence of having overwhelming Democratic control in the House, Senate, and White House. Without much ability to advance legislation, the Republicans' only incentive is to attempt to block everything and spread as much fear and paranoia as possible. This is not a reflection of any sort of intellectual or moral deficiency on the part of Republicans; it is simply the optimal strategy for any powerless minority in government. Any alternatives they propose can be shot down by Democrats, so their only option is to regain power by fomenting disgust with Democratic policies. This is the same way that Democrats overtook Republicans in the last two elections. The solution to this would seem to be to vote for centrist Republicans to rebalance Congress and restore their incentive to engage is productive discourse. With the likes of Palin, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly still having a stranglehold on Republican rhetoric, this appears a sadly distant possibility.
My latest conversation with my adviser for the summer was on the topic of graduate school and promising areas of research. I began to arrive at the conclusion that I should move in the direction of either theoretical particle physics or experimental particle astrophysics, with the latter likely promising the most fundamental discoveries in the near future. At any rate, I was amused when he digressed into pontification and remarked, "Physics is not like biology. In biology everything takes an extraordinary amount of time to test in a laboratory. Theoretical physics doesn't take much time at all. It just requires quality time." So theorists are just lazy? Or more to his point, they ought to be lazy from time to time.
After years of bashing the neoclassicals, the likes of Krugman and his followers finally saw critical assessments of macroeconomics and financial economics appear in The Economist two weeks ago, including a personal jab at Mr. Lucas himself, Fama and the efficient markets hypothesis, and arguably of the University of Chicago itself (or at least of certain "lakeside universities"). Now the grandfather of modern macroeconomics retaliates in the latest issue's Economics Focus.
In part, Lucas's rebuttal is very correct. Economic crises are usually unique events with unforeseeable causes, and it would be hard to imagine constructing testable scientific models to predict them. The most reliable approach is to figure out ways of coping with crises when they appear, and the Keynesian and neoclassical prescriptions being carried out by Congress and Ben Bernanke appear to be doing their job. Lucas falls a little short by failing to provide a paradigm for economic research as an alternative to Krugmanesque abandon-ship mentality toward modern macroeconomics. And it would have been nice for him to provide a little perspective on how we might be able to better understand financial and economic bubbles, if at all. But it is nice to see someone defending economics for a change.
Some critics, of course, like to observe that some economists DID predict the economic crisis accurately, and they therefore retort that Lucas's belief in the impossibility of predicting crises is merely HIS inability to predict crises. But this is simply an unscientific viewpoint. There will always be models and people that predict crises correctly by chance alone. Accurate prediction of a single crisis should not be a source of credibility. What is needed instead are robust models that make consistently correct predictions under a known set of circumstances. If the models of Krugman, DeLong, et al. do this, then so much the better for them.
In part, Lucas's rebuttal is very correct. Economic crises are usually unique events with unforeseeable causes, and it would be hard to imagine constructing testable scientific models to predict them. The most reliable approach is to figure out ways of coping with crises when they appear, and the Keynesian and neoclassical prescriptions being carried out by Congress and Ben Bernanke appear to be doing their job. Lucas falls a little short by failing to provide a paradigm for economic research as an alternative to Krugmanesque abandon-ship mentality toward modern macroeconomics. And it would have been nice for him to provide a little perspective on how we might be able to better understand financial and economic bubbles, if at all. But it is nice to see someone defending economics for a change.
Some critics, of course, like to observe that some economists DID predict the economic crisis accurately, and they therefore retort that Lucas's belief in the impossibility of predicting crises is merely HIS inability to predict crises. But this is simply an unscientific viewpoint. There will always be models and people that predict crises correctly by chance alone. Accurate prediction of a single crisis should not be a source of credibility. What is needed instead are robust models that make consistently correct predictions under a known set of circumstances. If the models of Krugman, DeLong, et al. do this, then so much the better for them.
