You Don't Want the Truth

I'm so naive.

In this, the Misinformation Age, I keep thinking that if only everyone would dig a little deeper, we could find some common ground.  Then we would spend less time throwing mud and more time discussing truth (or objective, verifiable reality, if your bad postmodern self doesn't like that other word).   

Then I heard this piece from NPR's Ari Shapiro.  It's 4:39 long, so feel free to indulge your curiosity. Warning: if this link doesn't work, you may need to search the Morning Edition page on July 25.

As it turns out, many of us don't give a rat's tuckus about the truth.  We're actually pretty content to be lied to.

I almost choked on my doughnut when I heard this section near the end:

SHAPIRO: This effort to dig down to the true meaning of a candidate's comments rests on a few assumptions. Most basically it assumes that truth matters. It assumes that people want to know what a candidate actually said and meant. It assumes that distortions are bad. In fact, behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely of Duke says those assumptions may be false. He's author of "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: Why We Lie to Everybody, Especially Ourselves."

DAN ARIELY: And we recently did a study on this. We just asked a few hundred people online to what extent they think that their candidates could be dishonest if it promoted their political agenda.

SHAPIRO: He found that people were totally comfortable with politicians of their own party being dishonest to get elected.

ARIELY: And by the way, for Democrats, this was a slightly more endorsed position than for the Republicans. So the Democrats are more willing for their politicians to lie to a higher degree than the Republicans.

Does NPR know that they produced a piece with this information in it?

I couldn't help but think that elections have become lying contests.  Truth doesn't matter.  What really matters in an election is how smoothly the candidate lies.  Dogma rooted in deception.    

Pass the popcorn!

An Open Letter to Ben Bernanke

Here's a post we did for work recently.  It's an open letter to our one-man band Fed Chairman (bless his heart).

The NCAA’s Death Penalty

You have to respect what NCAA President Mark Emmert was trying to do Monday when he effectively kicked Penn State down to the Football Championship Series for the next five seasons.  It’s his job to enforce the rules and culture of college athletics, and the athletic leadership at PSU really screwed this one up.  Turning blind eyes toward Jerry Sandusky’s hideous sins cost several boys’ their innocence and mental health.

And PSU president Rodney Erickson’s call to pull JoePa’s statue from the stadium while leaving his name on the library was deft.

But did the NCAA over-play this one?  I don’t mean morally, I mean practically.

Let’s separate Sandusky from the question.  That dude should be forced to walk the plank into a tank of almost-starved, lightly-chummed Great Whites.  Or maybe buried up to his chin in the desert, drizzled with honey, and left alone for a pleasant evening under the stars.  Better yet, how about we appoint a two-person committee of Hannibal Lechter and Kevin Spacey’s character from Seven to develop a moral improvement curriculum for Mr. Sandusky?

(You probably can’t tell, but I’m having a difficult time seeing that God wants to redeem Sandusky with the same passion as he does yours truly.  I’ll work on that.)

Let’s also separate the pending criminal charges for the living guys who covered up the abuse reports.

What I’m wondering is whether the NCAA itself is in trouble with this call. 

The fact of the matter is that even though the “WE ARE” nation is trying their best to put on happy faces right now, their football program is at the very least in a deep, deep hole.  And they may never get out of it.

PSU football was Paterno.  Bill O’Brien is probably a great guy but athletes went to PSU because Paterno won a lot of games, went to bowls, and sent kids to the NFL.  O’Brien is still untested as a college football head coach, and he just lost 20 scholarships and any hope for post-season play for 4 years.  Heck, he didn’t even recruit the stars they have now.  Why should kids like Silas Redd stay put when they’re getting calls from dozens of coaches to jump ship?  This could kill Penn State football. 

You might say, “Ho, hum.  We can all do with a little less college football.  So what?”

My question is: Who, exactly, can do with a little less college football?

The physics & chemistry majors whose brand new mass spectrometer arrived courtesy of the 19 year old kid that just caught a fingertip pass at the back of the end zone, making 100,000 otherwise docile men scream like preteen girls?
 
How about the Poly Sci prof who gets to teach a single section of 14^th Century Papal Policy, while “struggling” to crank out a single article every other year?  He might want to thank the 70 year old dude 8 blocks away that just peeled himself out of his $80 seat to buy two $60 hoodies for the grandkids.

Maybe the Title IX recipients could do with a little less college football.  I’m sure the women’s golf team is self-sustaining.  What’s that?  It’s nowhere near self-sustaining?  Hmm.  How about field hockey?  Tennis?  Swimming?

Perhaps university presidents, whose schools are somewhat more likely to receive state tax-payer funding if they have successful football programs?  No, I’m not making that up.  Read about it here, if you want (warning: this one involves math).

Indianapolis Star sportswriter Bob Kravitz recently described this issue—dealing too sternly with the big business of college football—as letting the genie out of the bottle.  I think grabbing a tiger by the tail is a slightly better metaphor, but either works.

Here’s the zinger: membership in the NCAA is voluntary.  It’s been a successful near-monopoly, but all it takes is a few large teams to feel like they’ve had enough.  Penn State starts talking to Southern Cal, who checks in with Ohio State, who then passes the message on to Florida, and so on.

As much as I respect what Emmert wanted to do with this one, part of me wonders whether the NCAA just instituted its own death penalty.  Heck, if the NCAA goes, maybe student athletes would finally start to be fairly compensated for their generous contributions to their university slop troughs.

What do you think?

The Economic Impact of the Affordable Care Act

There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to force someone to buy health insurance.  You might see it as a way of providing for the health care needs of poor people.  You might think that the “free rider” problem is a beast needing to be slain.  You might just enjoy making other people do things—you’re just sort of an authoritarian at heart.  

You could also believe, as President Obama does, that the individual mandate aspect of the Affordable Care Act will be a clear economic positive.

Well.

If that’s your conviction, I want to offer a few challenges:

1.     If the “larger pool” succeeds in driving average costs down, it can do so, actuarially, only by shifting costs from those who need health care services to those who don’t.  In essence the individual mandate converts the health insurance industry into a type of pay as you go system, like Social Security.  But even that benefit is only temporary: we have no reason to assume that Americans will on average now desire to live shorter lives, eat healthier foods, exercise more, adopt truly preventative behaviors, experience catastrophic accidents less frequently, sue their doctors less frivolously / be awarded less silly punitive damages, etc.  

2.     The negative impact on the medical device industry can’t be overlooked—how does the excise tax affect capital formation and innovation in what has been one of our areas of comparative advantage?
 

3.      I’m also not clear on the impact on small and mid-sized businesses: maybe they join pools and their premiums decline, or maybe they look at their average total cost per employee (e.g., the employer component of plan premiums) rising and decide to pay the $2k / head fee and drop the plan altogether.  In that case, can we be sure that state Medicaid pools can handle the increased enrollment?  

4.      Finally, hospital stocks were up after the Supreme Court’s decision because they have greater assurance that the ACA solves their bad debts problem.  But pharma was down (increased use of drugs still facing patent expirations + restrictive FDA = zero incremental enthusiasm), as were the insurers (these guys went for the grand bargain ostensibly because they would add a boatload of new low risk customers), and likewise the device manufacturers. 

Societal preferences aside, all of this sums to a murky economic impact at best, in my view. 

Push back--how do you see the economics of it? 

Is Materialism Dying?

No, probably not.  But here are two perspectives (neither of which is particularly new) as to why a purely physical cosmology is worth questioning deeply.

Ethical Motivation: where does our sense of right and wrong come from?  How does a purely materialist view of human origins account for self-transcendence?  Why, for instance, do we tear-up at stories of a young Marine jumping on a grenade to save the lives of his buddies at the cost of his own?  Why is greed bad but charity laudable?  Why do we value courage over cowardice, particularly in circumstances when retreat offers a much surer path to survival and therefore, the ability to pass on our DNA?

Here’s a short video of Leah Lobresco—a 2011 Yale grad and erstwhile atheist blogger—describing how she came to faith through an awareness of her innate ethical yearnings.  For those of you who were “razed” Catholic, this might just rekindle some hope.

Quantum Mechanics:  I read The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder last winter.  It’s mind blowing stuff, really—made me wish I’d never given up on science in school.  Schroder puts the sub-atomic world in a helpful scale to begin mulling the question of matter: if we were able to expand the nucleus of an atom to a sphere 4 inches in diameter, the electrons would be orbiting (at ~ ¼ the speed of light) about 4 miles out.  That means that something like 99.999% of the physical universe isn’t actually matter, but the space between matter (or energy).  You can’t jam your finger through a bunch of iron atoms in their solid state, but it’s not because there's this dense material preventing you from doing so.  It’s because of that odd little, but really strong force "tethering" the nucleus to the electrons.  

Moreover, what can we say about the strong and weak nuclear forces,electro-magnetic force, and the force of gravity; these 4 rules, these inviolable principles of nature, which never stop working?  At a minimum, I think we can say they, not the apparent material around us, form the basis of physical reality.

Keith Ward, whom I had the pleasure of hearing speak at General Theological Seminary during the spring of ’94, takes this sub-atomic discussion further.  You can view it here.  It’s pretty long, but well worth it.  

Here are the haunting questions from Ward’s lecture: what if all that sub-atomic junk (e.g., protons, neutrons, electrons) wasn’t actually matter itself?  What if the whole of our experience is the perception of inviolable rules—of wisdom, as Schroeder puts it—in action?  What does that mean for consciousness?

Neither of these are proofs for God’s existence, mind you—I gave up on that quest years ago.  They do suggest that what we commonly perceive to be the bedrock of reality may not actually be that.  

I’d also love to see somebody tackle the link between the fundamental laws of physics and consciousness / innate, selfless ethical yearnings, if that’s possible.

In the end, I suppose what I feel most from these two trains of thought is a new appreciation for God’s immanence. And that’s pretty cool, in a contemplative sort of way.      

What if Wisconsin Wasn’t About the Money?

Citizens United is to lefty political types what my son is to his three sisters: the ultimate target for blame-shifting.

Michael McConnell offers another explanation, which you can read here.

Now, I’m not saying that money doesn’t affect political races.  After all, why else would rational politicos spend so much on smear ads?  But, if you believe the CNN exit poll which showed that 86% of Wisconsin re-call voters had made up their minds before May 1 (i.e., before the major ad spending ramped up), it’s probably fairly safe to say that there is at least a point of diminishing marginal returns to money’s influence.

Maybe Wisconsinites deserve more credit than the left or right is giving them.

Maybe the high ROI from political ads just wasn’t there.

Maybe the recall was just a dumb idea, based on hyper-inflated fears and widely promulgated but utterly ridiculous notions of justice.

Maybe getting a 100% match on your pension contribution and paying 1/8 of your health insurance premium cost aren't such bad deals after all (maybe it was really a matter of "Who Moved my Cheese?").

Maybe curtailing the ability of government to secure its existence and perpetuate its growth through self-funding mechanisms is in the best interest of Wisconsin’s residents.

Maybe, just maybe, democracy was working in the land of cheddar: not because it's an inherent good, but as a reasonably fair and thoroughly practical solution to bad governance.  

Or maybe it’ll always be my son’s fault, despite any evidence to the contrary.

Denial: a River Running through the White House

The May jobs report released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics wasn’t as strong as any of us had hoped it would be.
 
Well, actually, it was awful. 

The expectation was for approximately +155,000 new jobs.  The actual number was +66k.  The unemployment rate reversed its trend and ticked up to 8.2% in May from 8.1% in April.  With favorable labor market conditions (more in a moment), we should have been adding 300-400k per month in this recovery.    

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis could only blame congress for not doing more during her interview on CNBC.  She also repeatedly pointed out that the economy had created millions of jobs since the president took office, attempting to put 2012’s dramatic slowdown into a type of perspective.  Even Alan Krueger, Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors can’t resist the urge (pressure?) to blame prior conditions, and keep blindly following the president’s prescription for growth. 

In other words, the pain isn’t our fault, but to the extent that anyone has benefited from job growth, the Obama administration deserves credit, oh and you really need to let us keep keep pulling more of the same kinds of levers we've been trying.

Please.

Let’s get some things straight:

1.      The government does not create private sector jobs.  Period.  The government can borrow money and spend that money on projects (so called “investments”), which may, or may not, have a positive impact on the decisions of private sector employers to hire workers.

2.      To the extent that we’ve had positive economic growth and a better hiring environment, it is because those private sector job creators were incentivized to hire people by the prospect for increased profits.

3.      Government intervention in the economy can only create incentives or disincentives for private sector employers.  Government operates at the margin, but it is never the primary reason for growth or contraction, for increasing or decreasing unemployment rates.

4.      You’ll hear more about QE3 now, but the Fed’s hands are tied.  The Fed creates more dollars (POOF!), then buys more bonds from banks, giving the banks cash to lend; the banks look for credit-worthy corporations and consumers who want loans; banks can’t find nearly as many credit-worthy borrowers many as previously and when they do, those corporations don’t want to borrow because they have no idea what the rules of the game are, and they’re not going to spend money on expanding (i.e., building stuff and hiring people) until they can confidently work a 5 year strategic plan; the banks have do something with their cash, so they park it at the Fed, which earns them 25 bps.  Right back where we started: bupkis.    

5.      Congress could spend even more money (which it doesn’t have) in the hope that it will incentivize private sector employers to hire people, but there is still no guarantee that any businesses will actually want to hire anybody.  Nor do we have any indication that the federal government knows where to spend the money once it borrows it.  One of the main lessons from Solyndra was that the smartest private equity guys are just not employed by the federal government.   

Let’s imagine we’re playing Monopoly and you land on Boardwalk.  You pull out your $400 and tell me you’d like to buy it.  I say “Sure! But, I need to tell you that some of the rules have changed.  First of all, the price may say $400 on the card, but it’s actually $500.  Also, if you want to put up any houses or hotels on it, you need to know that it’s going to cost you something more, but I’m not yet sure what either the additional cost per house or limitations on the number of houses will be.  Did I mention that I've printed up some more Monopoly money for my use?  Also, your Chance cards may not be valid...I'll get back to you.”

Would you keep playing Monopoly with me if I pulled that kind of stunt?  Of course not.  

Yet that’s the presumption of all of this nonsense from Washington: we can change rules, raise costs, point fingers, borrow beyond sanity, generate trillions of new dollars from thin air, invest in private enterprise despite an utter lack of expertise, and all of this is going to incentivize rational entrepreneurs to hire people.

Please.

Sir Winston Churchill famously said: “The Americans will always do the right thing…after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”  For the sake of the unemployed folks out there, let’s hope we’re getting close to doing the right thing.