I was thinking about extreme measures in common usage.  Measures like boatload and shitload, for example.  Which is bigger?  I really don’t know how much is in a shitload of rubbish, do you?

Anyway, I figured that perhaps shitload was originally shipload.  This would make sense, as a ship is bigger than a boat (just like a boulder is bigger than a rock.)  The term boatload referred to a relatively small quantity of stuff, and shipload referred to a larger quantity. I’d like to see us go back to the original terms, as they are far more acceptable for use in good company.

I’m glad that’s cleared up.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome…is it the same thing, or not, as recently discussed in The Economist?

It’s appropriate to be talking about opportunity and outcome as the number of Americans in poverty rises, and may get worse, and we argue over the meaning of the 1%-99% divide. I sometimes describe myself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative (and I realize to many that’s an oxymoron, and maybe just a reflection of someone who registers Democrat but thinks they really should vote Republican). But affecting the economic well being of individuals in our society presents a fundamental challenge to anyone who claims to resolve within themselves this ideological dilemma. Being a fiscal conservative means wanting control of your economic outcome, and having the government butt out of affecting it, but being a social liberal means supporting government programs in the name of letting everyone play on the same level field. The irony, and conflict, arises when everyone starts off at the same point but ends up in very different places.

If people start with varying potential (capacity to take advantage of opportunities,) and immediately experience differential opportunities, then it’s almost impossible to imagine equality of outcomes. If all people start with the same potential, the ability to achieve equal outcomes depends on our control over the environmental factors, but they are not only numerous for each individual, they interact in complex ways across groups of individuals. Again it seems impossible to imagine equality of outcomes. That doesn’t mean we should abandon attempts, by the way.

Even if we could affect the path each individual follows, is equality of outcome a generally agreed-to goal? I’ve thought about this when discussing poverty with my public finance students. I distinguish between elimination of poverty and amelioration of the effects of poverty. While, by definition, we can’t eliminate (god forbid!) the poorest 10%, we can make ourselves feel better about how they live. And maybe that’s what public social programs are all about.

I have new logos for my two personas. I use them for my social networks and forum posts.

Philip Ganderton

Dr Phil Gandini

My darling Maria sent me this link about use and utilize. It reminds me of the times my English (now Language Arts) teacher admonished me for using big words when a smaller, and more common, word was not only good enough, but sounded better and far less pretentious.

Maria and I share a love of well written prose as evidence the author cares about both the idea expressed and the reader.  Writing well is a sign of respect for your reader.  And making use of the right word is fundamental to good writing!

Really?  Do we need yet another popular (best selling) book written by a true-believer economics professor helping us all understand the world we live in?  Yes, of course, that’s what economics, like every other academic discipline, is intended to do: to help us understand, and consequently control, our world, including ourselves.  But I just don’t get why there are so many books written by economists deconstructing everyday issues and events using economics so we can all realize we are either irrational, or worse, just plain stupid.

For me it started with the Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, by Steven Landsburg published in 1995.  Then came Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, published in 2009, which became such an instant hit that I had to read it just to answer questions from people who were reading it and wanted to check in with me, an ECONOMIST, either to confirm their understanding, or test mine.  Now it’s Tyler Cowen’s new book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.  There’s an interview with the author on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Don’t get me wrong, I think financial literacy is woefully lacking in the US, and we should be doing much more to improve it (despite what Suzie Orman is doing,) and I personally spent just short of 20 years appearing occasionally on the local rock station (94Rock) with DJ TJ Trout trying to help a few listeners better understand the economics of what current news story was upsetting TJ that week.  I was officially called the 94 Rock Economist, so I did achieve celebrity status, but I am much poorer than Landsburg or Levitt or Cowen…  Economists can, and should, devote a significant fraction of their time educating others, and researching a better understanding of the complex financial and economic world in which we live.

But a lot of what these popular economics books deal with is at least trivial, and often pointless.  Cowen advises staying clear of restaurants with lots of beautiful women, because patrons are there to pick up women, not eat, and the owner knows this, so isn’t investing much in the cuisine.  You can expect a pretty ordinary culinary experience for which you’ll pay a stiff beautiful-woman premium!  First, did we really need to be told that?  And is Cowen really smart to have told us what we probably figured out ourselves?  My guess is there’s a whole lot more going on at these bar/restaurants, and with their patrons, than Cowen’s simplistic analysis suggests or explains.

I went to graduate school with a guy who wanted to explain human sexual mating behavior using economic principles.  It wasn’t a new idea then, and it certainly isn’t a good idea, other than to realize economic theory has modeled some pretty fundamental behavioral responses to incentives that are widely applicable, and have helped researchers in many disciplines better understand and explain the behavior they have studied for a very long time.  But this doesn’t mean economists have all the answers.  I hope not, anyway.

I was listening to this article on NPR this morning and a statement was made about advanced journalism students failing to recognize the importance of “on the ground” journalists like Woodward and Bernstein in the uncovering and breaking of big news stories.  The idea presented by Tina Brown in the NPR spot had students believing they could look up news on the Internet rather than interview people and do the hard work of investigative journalism.  It got me thinking about my, and in general, our, use of the Internet, and what we find when we Google a word or phrase.

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia, and I use both traditional (Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR) and new (Slate, The Beast — although that’s just Newsweek in another guise) sources to learn about what’s happening in the world.  I use an iPad to access this information (I characterize the iPad as the greatest media delivery system invented so far) and enjoy both breaking news and “magazine” style articles including movie and book reviews.  I read with an open mind, but I’m also skeptical that not everything posted on the web is the TRUTH.

The question is: where does all this Internet material come from?  Is it all just recycled from other internet sources–if so, then where’s the chicken and where’s the egg?  Obviously there must be some external source of information from which the Internet, repackager and recycler though it is, gets the basic information.  An interesting consequence of this would determine what percentage of material on the internet is original, and how much is regurgitated.  I’d guess the latter outweighs the former by a large margin.

Most days I think of something to post to this blog, but by the time I get to work (where I do my best work,) it has slipped my mind.  Lots of things slip my mind these days.

Some of the ideas for posts sound great when I’m thinking them, but then after a little more thought I realize that reading them wouldn’t be so great!  Oh well.

Although the blogosphere is a large place and it takes all types, there are a few archetypes: the personal blog, the photoblog, the social/political commentary blog, the celebrity blog, or the product blog. Most people who start a blog go the personal blog route, and find themselves at a dead end pretty quickly.  Ultimately the only personal blogs that people read are those written by and about people who live really interesting lives.  Ordinary just doesn’t sell…

Everyone wants to write the Great American Novel, and a lot of time and energy must be expended before those handful of people who can actually write well emerge from the crowd. Just as everyone can run, but few win marathons, only a few people are writing really interesting blogs.  The access and democracy of the internet makes for lots of wannabes, (WordPress says that nearly 1 million posts were made to WP blogs today alone–over 190 million words!) I can imagine how many of those posts and words were read by other people, and most were read by the author alone.  Like this post…

I’ve never been to the Bordeaux region of France.  I’ve never been to France.  (I have been to the UK and Italy.)  But I drink wine from Bordeaux.  Quite a bit of it, actually.  The bottles I drink sell for between $15 to $25, which means I’m not drinking the best French wine by any measure (I would like to drink a Margeaux or a Haut-Brion before I die.)

I recently ordered a few cases of mixed Bordeaux from the 2009 vintage, which is being mentioned amongst the great vintages of that region.  I haven’t drunk enough wine to make a good comparison, but generally they taste great, like French wine.  I’m not educated or skilled enough to describe smells and tastes (other than “barnyard” which is a rather obvious smell and taste sometimes found in French wines that I’ve tasted,) but I can identify a complex pattern of chemosensations that appears unique to French wines, and particularly Bordeaux.  …and I like it!