Luckovich

Is the TSA Just Security Theater?

The Economist hosts a week-long debate on the topic. Bruce Schneier says yes:

"An even more meaningful response to any of these issues would be to perform a cost-benefit analysis. These sorts of analyses are standard, even with regard to rare risks, but the TSA (and, in fact, the whole Department of Homeland Security) has never conducted them on any of its programmes or technologies. It's incredible but true: he TSA does not analyse whether the security measures it deploys are worth deploying. In 2010, the National Academies of Science wrote a pretty damning report on this topic.

Filling in where the TSA and the DHS have left a void, academics have performed some cost-benefit analyses on specific airline-security measures. The results are pretty much what you would expect: the security benefits of most post-9/11 security changes do not justify the costs."

The Art __ Video Games

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. recently opened a new exhibition: The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect. It runs through September, then goes on tour. I arrived with high hopes: most regular consumers of video games have for years recognized their merit as an artistic medium, and it's great to see a real art gallery concur. Furthermore, flaunting the most artistic aspects of the highest-quality games is a great way to re-introduce the rapidly-changing industry to a wide swath of older non-players who often seem to define all video games by their shittiest, most addicting and violent elements. Unfortunately, I walked away sorely disappointed.

The show is basically divided into three sections. First, an introduction to the medium and a brief justification for the exhibit's existence. This area is eclectic and contains some cool concept art and quotes from game designers. Next, viewers have the opportunity to actually play some games: huge screens and modified controls are set up for legends like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros., as well as more recent games like Flower. The final section, which comprises most of the exhibit, is a series of identical kiosks, one for each major game system (Nintendo, Xbox, etc.). A touchscreen lets the viewer watch game clips and listen to a brief analysis using a hand-held telephone speaker. Each kiosk sports four popular games from the system, one each for the following categories: 'action', 'target', 'adventure', and 'tactics'.

On the face of it, the exhibition suffers from three basic defects. First, there exists a strong focus on the gameplay mechanics and technical details of games, rather than on their artistic aspects. Innovations in graphics resolution and context-sensitive control schemes are interesting, but not really relevant. Compounding this is an unfortunate desire to provide mainly representative samples of games. Due to the restrictive nature of a gallery show, viewers are only able to get a small taste of a game relative to its length and richness. But instead of having this taste draw from the best, most artistically sophisticated moments of a game, we're supplied with boring screenshots and clips from mundane parts. And here's the thing: the best video games simply can't be broken down like that. People play for the peaks of enjoyment--the boss fights, the cinematic cutscenes, the particularly quirky or detailed rooms or characters. Incidentally (though perhaps not), these peaks also tend to be the most 'artistic' in the classical sense, and were unfortunately mostly absent from the exhibit.

This brings me to the second point: the poor use of the gallery format to showcase the artistic aspects of video games. Generally speaking, it's best to let the art do the talking in any show, which means limiting intervention to decisions about the order of works and to small white informational  plaques with vacuous blurbs. For art forms specifically designed with the gallery show in mind, this works pretty well. Visual artists want to differentiate their work, and so galleries are filled with a diverse assortment of art--paintings of different sizes and shapes, sculptures, etc. The problem comes with gallery shows consisting of art never designed for the gallery. If the exhibition topic is visually homogeneous (say, video games played on simple television screens), there exists a design challenge: how to convey the art's diversity and richness to the viewer? This exhibit certainly failed that challenge, and in spectacular fashion (20 identical plastic kiosks, really!?). There's great scope for exploring the capacity for gallery space to amplify the artistic value and diversity of video games, but instead the exhibition muted the artistry through dull homogeneity. Imagine the sublime voice acting of Bioshock booming through the gallery corridors, or the cinematic cutscenes of Blizzard enjoyed in a darkened theater setting. Many modern video games are filled with screenshots of such visual heft that they almost scream out to be displayed on a massive wall in some gallery, but instead we get tiny television screens.

Thirdly, the general failure of the exhibit to demonstrate the artistic aspects of video games is due in large part to the way it is organized conceptually. Essentially, the gallery is a list, compiled using two dimensions of analysis: time (past to future) and gameplay emphasis (action, target, adventure, tactics). Although employing a chronological structure is understandable for contextual reasons, I take issue with the equal weighting of each historical period. Frankly speaking, video games today are much more artistic than they were in the past. With access to higher informational content and processing power, there is simply more space for artistic pursuits within games (as well as non-artistic pursuits; video games are much longer now). As such, more gallery space should have been spent showcasing modern games. On a related note, as the video game industry has grown in size and prestige, its games have changed dramatically. We have games-within-games, narrative-based games, multiplayer games, sports and simulation games, etc. All of this complexity confounds and renders meaningless the categories used by the exhibition kiosks. Older, less complex games adhere to these categories better, but it begs the question: why, in an exhibition purportedly featuring the artistic value of video games, do we have an organization scheme driven by gameplay mechanics?

This brings us to the real conceptual problem: the muddling of the different dimensions of value of video games, preventing the distinctly artistic value to shine through. Usually when an art gallery picks some obscure topic traditionally considered non-artistic and does a show, it works pretty well. That's because the topic's other dimensions of value are relatively boring. Take motorcycles, for example. Say I wanted to do a show about the art of motorcycles. You can imagine it: exquisitely detailed and creative paint schemes, strange metalwork, etc. The show would probably be good, in part because it would be focused squarely on the artistic stuff. Motorcycles have other dimensions of value, but no museum-goer much cares about the safety, transportation, speed, or comfort of the motorcycles. But here's the problem for video games: their other, non-artistic dimensions of value are really interesting. Gameplay mechanics is interesting! The difficulty balancing and camera angle setup and controls stuff are really fascinating and worthy of thoughtful inquiry also. But that stuff isn't artistic per se, and shouldn't have dominated an exhibition marketed as showcasing the art of video games.

The bottom line seems to be this: the relation between the idea of art and the video games themselves was vague and confusing. The show had some good bits, but overall it seemed more suited to a 'history of video games' classification than anything else. So what would a more conceptually sound exhibition look like? Without trying to define what art really is, there seems to be an important distinction between the art in video games, and the art of video games. This distinction can best be described as a continuum, going from existing artistic categories to novel artistic categories. Let me explain. First, video games showcase a wide variety of art from many existing media (music, architecture, interior design, story, etc.). Second, video games allow the player to experience this art in new ways (musical cues based on player decisions, exploring the architecture of a virtual building, etc.). Third, video games also create new artistic categories (immersiveness, storyline linearity and replayability, etc.). There's certainly quite a lot of nesting within this continuum (many video games contain short films, which are themselves collections of other media), and I don't think it's possible to draw a strict line between any level. It's not clear what cinematography actually is, but it's a useful concept and over time the public has accepted it as a legitimate dimension of artistic value. Perhaps it's too big a job for a single art exhibition, but it would be great to see a show starting with areas like 'architecture in video games', or 'the music of video games', then gradually moving on to higher-level stuff like 'storyline interactivity' or 'multiplayer experience' in later rooms. And then you could get into the artistic movements...

Calories Are Not Just Calories

"Another way to view the connection to the Black Swan idea is as follows. Classical thermodynamics produces Gaussian variations, while informational variations are from Extremistan. Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as simple energy deficits and excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If, on the other hand, you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workouts provide your body with information about stressors in the environment. As I have been saying throughout, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics, with the same physics envy, and the same mentality, and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both humans and societies are complex systems."

That's philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from the new section, 'On Robustness and Fragility' in the updated edition of The Black Swan. It's a bit jargon-heavy, but goofy neologisms are a signature trait of Taleb's, and probably constrains original thinking less compared to other more stylistically-traditional authors. It's just a taste of what's to come in his forthcoming book 'Antifragility,' which extends the ideas in Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan into positive territory, rather than just negative (e.g. discussing what we can and should do, rather than just what we can't and shouldn't). Expect fascinating sections on economics, philosophy of biology, epistemology, medicine, and nutrition.

For a further preview, check out this great EconTalk interview with Taleb. I'm especially excited to get Taleb's full take on the potential health benefits of fasting, especially after reading this great cover story in Harper's.

They're All a Bit Crazy, But...

Andrew Sullivan endorses Ron Paul for the GOP presidential nomination. He's for Obama in the the general election, but has some good points.

Ramirez

Whither Our Technological Utopia?

At fairly regular intervals it seems I stumble across someone writing about the importance of the humanities--and that math and science and economic growth are muscling their way into everything, to the detriment of human flourishing. This thesis was best articulated by C.P. Snow in his classic essay The Two Cultures, and more recently Mark Slouka's spectacular essay Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School. The trouble, we're told, is the jettisoning of humanistic study for its own sake in favor of economic growth and national competitiveness as the sole ends in public life.

Yet in the past few years I've noticed something strange. More and more math, science, and technology advocates are making essentially the same argument for their own side: that the monolithic goal of economic growth is stripping from the world the intellectual justification of their pursuits. The wonder of science and technology has always been felt most strongly through big, paradigm-shifting advancements, and for whatever reason their frequency has declined lately. Peter Thiel addresses some of these issues in his sprawling essay The End of the Future; Neal Stephenson, in his essay Innovation Starvation, bemoans the loss of inspirational national projects and critiques the current mood in science fiction.

A recent Scientific American article suggests that NASA, with its vague ambitions and neutered horizons, should repurpose itself to identify dangerous asteroids and develop defenses against them. While this is certainly a worthy goal given the costs and benefits, such a change would give me pause. Must NASA have a specific, clearly measurable goal? Is a vague and open-ended mandate not what inspires and defines the agency? Perhaps I'm just a softie--a big asteroid project might be better than no project at all.

Power Players: Daniel Kahneman

Most of us are probably familiar with behavioral economics, which studies how and why human behavior deviates from the assumptions held by classical economics (e.g. the rational actor). Probably fewer are familiar with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who, along with Amos Tversky, helped launch this interdisciplinary field. Despite having tremendous influence, most of his ideas have been interpreted and popularized by others. The demands of marketing and originality have thus built up a rather large corpus of Kahneman-boosting material, each highlighting a specific facet or application of his work. All the more enticing, then, when his first book for the lay public, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was released in late 2011.

Instead of simply identifying some small gap in the popular literature, Thinking, Fast and Slow is essentially a grand synthesis of behavioral psychology and economics: Nassim Taleb's focus on randomness and biases in epistemology (The Black Swan), Roy Baumeister's research into self-control (Willpower), Ian Ayres' thoughts on intuition and expertise (Super Crunchers), Cass Sunstein's theories on risk assessment (Risk and Reason), and Richard Thaler's conclusions about the normative implications for public policy (Nudge) all receive attention. Kahneman weaves these aspects together with storytelling, experimental accounts, and interactive games to articulate one simple theory: that human decisionmaking is governed by two systems, one fast, emotional, and unconscious, the other slow, calculating, and deliberate. Even with a high level of familiarity with these topics, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a great book to read, if only because it's written by the master himself. The few biographical bits scattered throughout the book are really interesting, describing Kahneman's work as a young psychologist working for the Israeli military.

Check out a great interview with Kahneman here, his fantastic TED Talk here, and a superb book review by the great Freeman Dyson here.

Information Nexus

1. Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?
2. Christopher Hitchens on Dying
3. The Future of Punctuation
4. Best Analysis I've Seen on the European Debt Crisis
5. 45 Most Powerful Photos of 2011

Quote of the Week

In his “Republic,” Plato put forward the ideal of a state ruled by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical capacity for applying it to concrete problems.  In reality, no one has theoretical expertise in more than a few specialized subjects, and there is no strong correlation between having such knowledge and being able to use it to resolve complex social and political problems.  Even more important, our theoretical knowledge is often highly limited, so that even the best available expert advice may be of little practical value.  An experienced and informed non-expert may well have a better sense of these limits than experts strongly invested in their disciplines.  This analysis supports the traditional American distrust of intellectuals: they are not in general highly suited for political office.

But it does not support the anti-intellectualism that tolerates or even applauds candidates who disdain or are incapable of serious engagement with intellectuals.   Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

Gary Gutting, from a superb blog post at The Stone.

Imagining a Maker Revolution

This week's Economist magazine has a fantastic overview of "makers", describing some of the key technologies and businesses involved in this potentially paradigm-shifting (or destroying) movement. Sharing many similarities with open-source software, the maker movement is essentially open-source manufacturing, and is often grouped together with nanotechnology, synthetic biology, quantum computing, fusion power, and environmental sustainability as a potential tech trend that could lead the developed world out of its current innovation stagnation.

So what might happen if a huge chunk of consumer goods suddenly shifted production from factories to individual households? First let's consider the cultural response. There's no doubt free-market cheerleaders praise the Schumpeterian idea of 'creative destruction'--in the abstract. But when it comes to the individual industries at risk of being 'creatively destroyed', they tend to fight tooth and nail for survival: protecting themselves with political concessions and acquiring regulation, and by insulating themselves from competition through collusion and creating barriers to entry for new firms. We see a great example of this currently with the battle over SOPA, a proposed internet censorship bill.

Now, I'm certainly no strong adherent to communist philosophy, but parts of its critique of capitalism explain pretty well the elite response to disruptive innovation. Most new technologies or business practices might eliminate small industry segments, but nothing more. In these cases free market cheerleaders stay relatively passive. But if there are changes on the horizon that threaten big moneymaking in any systemic way, we see opposition. The internet was successful in changing the world in part because of its rapid development, and also because no one saw it coming. Economic revolutions that are obvious and occur slowly (environmental sustainability, say) provide plenty of time for capitalists to defend the status quo.

So let's bring it back to the maker movement. I could see a big backlash occurring by elites: "it will crash our consumption-based economy because people won't have to buy stuff anymore! Not to mention the job losses in retail and manufacturing! And has anyone really considered the threat to national security! Terrorists could be making guns and bombs right down the street from where your kids have little league practice!"

On the other hand, I'm not so sure small-scale distributed manufacturing would really be as disruptive as many predict. Even with a 3-D printer in every home, I doubt a very large proportion of people would tinker and design much. Outside of a small core of devoted amateurs, most of the blueprints for stuff would probably still come from big-name brands. Does anybody really think Lego would disappear if it wasn't manufacturing its own plastic blocks? Among rich-world companies, the shift away from manufacturing to ideas and marketing has been occurring for some time due to globalization. At this point it doesn't really matter where stuff gets made; high schoolers will always be willing to pay a little extra to print out hoodies with the trademarked Abercrombie logo on it (intellectual property rules would become really important under a maker revolution, but that's a topic for another blog post).

But this brings me to my last digression: a maker revolution's impact on developing countries. If the rich world no longer needs anyone to make its stuff, then what happens to the developing world? There are two likely development paths. First, the collapse of labor demand might arrest growth for some time (natural resource extraction would still be a source of growth, although with distributed production various cradle-to-cradle resource streams would likely develop in the rich world). Second, the developing world could chart a novel development path. When a country develops necessarily affects how a country develops, and just as Africa has leapfrogged on telecommunications using cell phones, so too might distributed production allow poor households to jump directly into relative material wealth. I'm not sure what will become of this intriguing movement, but generally the easier it is for creative people to turn ideas into tangible reality, the better.

Inside the Black Box

I recently saw Margin Call, a new film offering a fictionalized account of the 2007 market collapse. The movie takes place almost entirely within the Manhattan trading offices of a faceless financial institution presumed to be a major player in the unregulated mortgage-backed securities market. The action starts when a junior risk analyst discovers that the company is exposed to catastrophic losses, setting off a crisis mode within the management team. With disaster imminent, the firm faces two awful choices: be the first to sell off as many toxic assets as possible (directly causing a crash but ensuring the company's survival), or doing nothing and waiting until some other firm sees the danger and starts its own fire sale. As you may have guessed, there's not much of a choice.

The film is technically well-executed, with a great cast and an energetic pacing, but its main strength is in the sheer number of interesting questions and concepts packed into each scene. Chiefly among them is the inherent tension between the interests of the company and its employees. Throughout the film, there are two distinct narratives: one concerning the survival of the firm, and the other focusing on the economic "survival" of the individuals working there. The former is a linear narrative unfolding over the course of the whole movie; the latter is more interesting in that each major characters' precarious situation is only revealed gradually and in sequential order, moving up the layers of corporate hierarchy.

We start with the lowly risk analysts and traders. Then on to the department and floor managers. Then the division heads and VPs. And finally, after an artful build-up, the almost mythical CEO is revealed. At every level, the higher-ups are portrayed as living embodiments of the corporate will. Only after the attention shifts up a level do we see their very human predicament and the harsh incentive structure forced upon them which induces such misanthropic behavior. If the institution needs something to be done and an employee won't do it, then they're out. And someone new comes in who will.

Margin Call seeks to muddy the moral waters of the 2007 crisis in a most delightfully challenging way--by confounding the culpability of the rich one percent banksters we love to hate. To cite a classic example: assume one manages to balance a pencil straight up on its eraser. Obviously it will be precarious, and will soon topple. How shall we best assess causation in this example? In one approach we could  identify the particular wind gust that finally tipped the pencil from its perch. In reality, however, this situation is best explained by stating the obvious: that the pencil was tenuously balanced and obviously would soon topple, in one direction or the other. To blame a particular wind gust would be foolish. Its the system that counts.

Other topics explored include equality, the moral deserts of Wall St. traders and executives, and the work/play balance of life. It's a great movie, check it out.

The Information Cocoon of U.S. Politics

In a new opinion piece, the German newspaper Der Spiegel eviscerates the current Presidential crop, and U.S. political culture more generally. A translated excerpt and summery can be found here. What is striking to me about this sharp critique isn't exactly the fact that it comes from Europe, although that is mildly terrifying (it means word is spreading about our Republican Party). Rather, it is the fact that I find Der Speigel's appraisal of our campaign so novel at all. Political coverage in the U.S. has chugged along this cycle quite oblivious to the unprecedented changes that have occurred over the last two years. The Republican Party is radically more conservative, it's presidential contenders are plumbing new depths of  puerility, and huge swathes of the population are openly disdainful of science and rigorous thought--notably on climate change risk assessment.

Maybe it's the media's craven policy on ideological balance, or perhaps it's the entanglement of media and government by way of money and manpower. Surely journalists' desire for their work to go viral plays into politicians' calculation that any publicity is good publicity, especially for amateurs with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Whatever the cause, it seems clear that the craziness of our politics scales with the looseness of our media, creating some quite noxious incentives. It's heartening that the rest of the world does not share our political rot, and yet horrifying that our news media knows it not.

Let's Have a Jubilee Year for the Tax Code

The federal tax code in this country has some problems. It's inefficient. It's regressive. It reduces national competitiveness (high corporate tax rates). It's out of touch, rewarding old industries and technologies while inhibiting innovation. It punishes productive behavior (income) while rewarding less productive behavior (renting real estate) and sometimes arbitrarily shifting economic activity from one thing to the other (buying bonds over stock, or purchasing health care through employers). It's also insanely complicated. Decades of new laws granting tax credits, exemptions, or special rates have narrowed the tax base and reduced revenues. On a sort of meta-level this complexity has increased the tax code's regressivity: richer taxpayers can afford accountants that navigate the arcane landscape of loopholes and deductions, effectively lowering their tax liability.

Of course, all this is nothing new. Washington has been talking about simplifying the tax code for decades. Yet legislators continually compound the problem by passing new tax credits and exemptions for particular groups at a steady pace. If you're in Congress and want to help out a certain group (demographic population, interest group, whatever) why take the heat in next year's election for creating a new Washington spending program (with all it's bureaucratic inefficiency) when you can simply add a targeted tax credit?

It is an unavoidable pattern that over time, democracies will add more laws than they repeal. Elected officials' legacies are measured in no small part by what sorts of new institutional commitments they get passed and implemented. A good example is George W. Bush creating the Department of Homeland Security. A more mundane, yet still significant example is President Obama adding a daily economic briefing to the existing national security morning briefing. The point is that keeping the status quo tends to be easier than changing it, and even though passing laws is difficult in our political system, once a law is passed it tends to stick around. How long will it be until a President receives a daily environmental briefing on top of the other two? Jonathan Rauch, in his aptly titled book Demosclerosis, explores this phenomenon and how it has contributed to a gradual calcification of our government, especially the tax code. Each tiny little tax credit is defended vigorously by the narrow group that benefits most from its continued existence, thus nobody wants to start a fight over something so insignificant in the scheme of things.

So what can we do about this incremental malaise? Obviously, passing some good tax reform laws would help tremendously. It's probably within the realm of possibility that sometime in the near future Democrats and Republicans will come together and make the technocratic fixes we've all heard about, broadening the tax base by eliminating worthless tax credits, reducing rates and increasing revenues and all that. But no matter how good a one-off fix might be, it still fails to address the deeper structural and institutional forces that push the tax code to become increasingly sclerotic, calcified, and complicated over time. So here's my thought: why try to fix them at all?

It's pretty clear that some things in Washington just wont change, and the ratchet of inefficiency is one of them. Lawmakers will always try to get reelected, reward particular groups, and establish a legacy of accomplishments. So what we really need is some sort of reform that channels these inner demons of our democracy into something good--or at the very least manages them. So I propose applying an idea that's been around for quite some time to the problem of our tax code: the Jubilee Year.

In biblical times, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah observed a tradition whereby every fifty years, a special "Jubilee Year" compelled a universal remission of sins, debts and prison terms for households and individuals. The practice was later picked up and formalized by Christians in 1300 under Pope Boniface VIII. Since then, symbolic festivities have replaced the original economic and political basis for the cyclical tradition.

The central idea of the Jubilee Year--a periodic wiping clean of economic and political commitments--is exactly what our tax code needs. Every fifty years, the federal tax code should scrub clean and revert to some minimal and simple core, wiping away all the special deductions, credits, loopholes, and targeted rules that have accumulated. After each Jubilee Year, legislators can get right back on with their business of rewarding interest groups and establishing a legacy, now with the added comfort of knowing that their policies aren't contributing to the long-term problem of bureaucratic inefficiency and loss of government dynamism. With good implementation and a little bit of luck, a Jubilee Year for the tax code might just stave of institutional senility for years to come.

A Better Kind of Pundit

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post is one of the best political journalists and bloggers currently operating, mostly because he injects wisdom from political science into his commentary and analysis. Most political journalism is terrible because it makes no attempt to separate important details from unimportant ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than with presidential politics. For many reasons--not least it's easier to report and explain--journalists obsess over things like leadership, campaign minutiae, personalities, style, etc. Unfortunately, that stuff just doesn't matter very much when compared to deeper structural and institutional forces like Congress, the fed, macroeconomic trends, or voting systems.

In a recent debate with columnist Matt Miller over the prospect of third-party candidates, Klein articulates his position:

But I want to be really clear here. My answer is super unsatisfying. It is horrible. It is depressing. It makes you think nothing will happen for a long time. But that’s because that’s true. I mean, when you say what’s your answer, I don’t have an inspiring answer. I don’t have a something easy to get up and give a beautiful speech on. I’ve heard politicians give beautiful speeches. And I am sure — I’ve now looked at the literature to back this up — I am sure that those speeches are not going to bring change. Not the sort of change that you want, not the sort of change that I want. I am sure that if your guy got elected, he or she would come in and go to Congress and say, I want $50 billion for universal pre-K, and I want a transaction tax for the financial industry, and I want to make our health care system more like Singapore’s, and I want an energy tax that moves the corporate and payroll taxes over to carbon. And Congress would laugh at them, and that would be that. Because the president is not a king and he’s not a dictator.

And so my answer is that unfortunately, we have to do this hard, unpleasant, incremental work of making things better piece by piece, 5 percent, 10 percent of the time. And you know what? If that’s not equal to the scale of our challenges, well, the reality is that our institutions are unequal to the scale of our challenges. And that’s a hard thing to explain. But that’s why I spend so much time trying to explain it, and why I fight efforts to tell people that a third-party president can sweep in and solve our problems.

Reinforcing his point, Klein's fantastic review of Ron Suskind's Confidence Men is definitely worth checking out, as is this super-long breakdown of the economy since Obama took office. The blog post, 'Shrinking the Presidency Back Down To Size' also offers a nice summary of Klein's hobby horse.