Incisive News Analyst

The newest Rap News video has been released, and it's definitely further outside the box than previous episodes:

What I've Been Listening To

I've noticed that in the basket of mediums that comprise my information stream (blogs, books, magazines, websites etc.), podcasts play a surprisingly large role. As such, I think they deserve a nifty new sidebar to accompany my other lists. A quick rundown of some of the podcasts that I attempt (in vain) to keep current with:

Math Mutation: A fantastic little podcast that covers a wide variety of math-related topics. It's short and read from a script, which usually entails tons of awkward but endearing jokes that fall utterly flat. (2-5 minutes, monthly)

On Point With Tom Ashbrook: The single greatest current-events interview show ever. Covers everything, with an emphasis on policy, authors on book tours, and trends. I get a lot of reading list ideas here after listening to interviews with the author. Definitely worth checking our regularly. (45 minutes, weekdays)

EconTalk: GWU economist Russ Roberts interviews economists about their specialities, with an emphasis on epistemology and the limits of economic inquiry. Roberts, who also blogs, is a fairly ardent libertarian but manages to keep the interviews mostly impartial. (60 minutes, weekly)

Scientific American: This magazine has a number of super-short factoid-podcasts that I absolutely love. There's one for psychology/neuroscience, earth sciences, space exploration/astronomy, health/medicine, and technology. It's probably the single best way to stay updated on interesting new scientific research papers. (60 seconds, weekly)

Science Friday: An interview show covering obscure topics in science. It's fun because it's probably the only major public exposure for many scientists (outside of the 'ol academic journal, that is), which means everybody is always super-excited. (100 minutes, weekly)

It's All Politics: My guilty pleasure, and a political scientist's nightmare. This podcast is devoted solely to horserace politics and predicting outcomes. (23 minutes, weekly)

Political Gabfest: This politics podcast is actually really terrible, and I only listen to it in order to remind myself of the importance of rigorousness in studying political topics. (50 minutes, weekly)

Surprisingly Free: A great interview show about the economics of technology. Associated with the Technology Liberation Front, a great blog. (30 minutes, weekly)

Philosophy Bites: Interviews with academic philosophers about their specialities. Sometimes it's great, but more often than not I walk away thinking many contemporary philosophers are excellent wordsmiths, but end up saying very little. Rarely does a guest argue against accepted public wisdom on any topic of importance. (20 minutes, monthly)

What The Solyndra "Scandal" Says About Government and Innovation

It's pretty clear that the Solyndra bankruptcy has been blown out of proportion by Republican politicians looking for a great attack line. But this extremely minor event is interesting because it helps us understand the conflicting incentives faced by many government programs. As many commentators have pointed out, the bankruptcy is no big deal: firms like Solyndra receive federal assistance precisely because their footing in the market is (at least initially) shaky. In fact, a company that exists at the limit of technological innovation going out of business could even be seen as a positive indicator; a sign that government is taking risks.

Critics are not without a point, however. As a general principle, wasting millions of dollars is never a good idea, and sinking $535 million of loan guarantees into a company that goes bankrupt provides a pretty decent prima facie case for asserting a government boondoggle. But consider the implications of jumping immediately to criticism. Are we really prepared to say that government should never, ever, spend money on stuff that might fail miserably, even when there's a chance of a massive positive outcome?

All organizations must manage the tension between cost-effectiveness (which encourages conservatism and status-quo practices) and innovation (which increases productivity and encourages experimentation). This tension is especially vexing for government because criticism is so intense in both directions. If government doesn't innovate (or use cutting-edge technology), it's a calcified mass of bureaucratic inefficiency. But when new programs or institutions fail (as they necessarily will), spendthrift government squandered our money on ridiculous pipe-dreams. Generally the second outcome is perceived as worse (it certainly makes a bigger media splash), which breeds an unhealthy level of risk aversion among politicians and civil servants.

So what can we do? Well, unfortunately there's no real solution on the level of a single organization, but there are ways to get around the problem using a more systems-minded approach. The free market innovates because one big success can more than make up for several past failures. But this solution only works because failures disappear pretty quickly, which frees up capital for new experimentation.

Government's real problem is not that it loses some money on bets that don't pay off (like Solyndra); the potential rewards are well worth the risk and on the whole public support for innovation is a good idea. The problem is with businesses like Solyndra who receive government assistance and don't go bankrupt. Zombie assistance programs that continue to draw resources with no probability of big future rewards are the real culprit. Unfortunately it takes time to identify such programs, by which time vested interests have entrenched themselves around the new status quo.

Still, this gets to the core of the solution: government programs should be more willing to subsidize research and innovation, but--critically--be more willing to cancel funding once a program's long-term survival ability without government support becomes known.

There are exceptions, of course. If the magnitude of a potential reward is large enough, more loyal assistance programs might be called for. Nuclear fusion energy research is a great example: the joke that fusion is 30 years away and always will be is true--until it's not. The point is that for innovation, government should adhere to the principle of cost-benefit analysis, but only in the aggregate and only in the longer run. So don't complain about government boondogglery when one subsidy program proves to be a waste of money. It's the system that counts.

The Total War of U.S. Politics, PA Edition

A few months ago I commented on Ronald Brownstein's fascinating (and horrifying) observation about the changing nature of U.S. politics. He puts it best:

American politics increasingly resembles a kind of total war in which each party mobilizes every conceivable asset at its disposal against the other. Most governors were once conscientious objectors in that struggle. No more. 

During the health care debate it became clear that the courts, in addition to governors and state legislatures, have increasingly become players in national policy disputes. This political homogenization (eliminating political diversity in favor of party identification, e.g. political parties are the only coalitions) has in fact been occurring for years. The Senate and House have historically been dynamic institutions with ever-shifting coalitions based on multiple identities (region, state, gender, etc.), but lately political rationality based solely around national political parties has become the main driver of public debate.

So what are the limits to this ever-widening political total war? Nick Baumann reports on the latest attempt to bring new firepower to the fight: changing select states' electoral college vote apportionment rules from winner-take-all to a roughly proportional method based on congressional districts. Nebraska and Maine already split their electoral votes (Obama got one vote from Omaha in 2008), but if specific battleground states unilaterally make this change, it could be devastating for Obama's reelection prospects.

This plan hatching in Pennsylvania (also applicable in other Republican-controlled purple states like Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin) is a great test of how far down in the layers of federalism the partisan total war goes. That's because such a move on the part of Pennsylvania's Republicans would be explicitly favoring a political boost to national Republicans at the cost of local and state power. Let me explain.

Historically, states employed all types of different methods for selecting their electoral college votes, but over time they discovered that a winner-take-all system (like the one found in most states today) affords the most power and influence during the election contest. By grouping all their electoral votes together, a state maximizes its prize, forcing candidates to pay attention to it in the form of campaign visits and policy concessions. So by shifting away from winner-take-all, Pennsylvania would help the Republican presidential nominee at the expense of influence and attention. Just ask yourself, why would Obama (or his opponent) sink scarce resources into Pennsylvania when at most they might shift one or two electoral votes from the suburbs.

So it's clear that in the realm of presidential politics, there exists a major trade-off between state power and national party rationality. But Pennsylvania's boat-rocking doesn't worry me too much. I find it hard to believe that very many low-profile state politicians are willing to severely reduce their state's power in order to help out their national party. Just look at their actions on the related issue of presidential primary contests, where many states have pushed to move their nominating date earlier and earlier in order to garner influence and attention, all while drawing strong rebukes and threats from national party leaders. Although Pennsylvania's plan probably won't take off on a national level, it does seem like total-war true-believers are popping up in more and more local offices, and it might only take one state to swing the race in 2012.

Luckovich

Some Straight Talk on Obama's Jobs Speech

Ezra Klein gives a biting analysis of Obama's upcoming jobs speech:

Obama’s speech will achieve nothing. It will go nowhere because it has nowhere to go. A speech can rally the base, and maybe even temporarily change the topic in the news. But it can’t change the fundamental fact of politics right now, which is that the two parties disagree on the most profound question in Washington. It’s not: How do we fix the economy? It is: Who should win the next election?

As far as mainstream reporters are concerned Ezra Klein, with his emphasis on political science, provides the most accurate diagnosis of our country's political problem: perverse incentives due to bad institutional structures. Take the filibuster, for example. The minority party wins when the majority loses face publicly (say, by not proactively addressing national problems), and the minority has the power to make the majority lose. Political parties used to be internally diverse, with many ever-shifting coalitions based on regional geography, culture, religion, etc. But now party identity is the only thing that matters, which means we've basically got a parliamentary system without majority rule institutions!

The first president to bully the senate into changing its rules might be temporarily labeled a tyrant, but will quickly make up for it by passing lots of creative and meaningful policy. Even if those policies end up being terrible, voters will at least know who to hold accountable and can punish them in the next election. That would be a welcome development going forward.

The High Art of Entertainment Marketing

Everybody loves movie trailers (which are often better than the movies themselves), and it seems like the medium is popping up more and more among a wider set of industries. Video games long ago matured to the point where artistic narrative and immersive settings became the main focus for some titles, and now the marketing is catching up. This trailer, for a newly released dystopian sci-fi game, really shows how far they've come. The low costs of creating and distributing high-quality short videos also opens up new opportunities for fans previously confined to writing fan-fiction. Just check out this amazing short film based on the popular puzzle game Portal.

Shorts with sufficient quality and originality sometimes get picked up by major movie producers and made into full-length movies: 'District 9' was an adaptation of this short film, and the animated film '9' originated here. Even book marketing is getting in on the action, although finding the money for higher production values might be a challenge. It will be interesting to see where this trend leads.

Information Nexus

1. The New Bipartisanship
2. Tyler Cowen Answers Your Questions
3. This Truly is an Amazing Idea
4. This is a Really Popular Class at Harvard
5. Al Gore's Getting Frustrated

Quote of the Week

Philosophers Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl on group agency:

It may seem strange to consider things like corporations or nations or mobs or social classes as agents, but the issue often arises in reflections about whether one should make judgements that attribute collective responsibility. People did speak of the guilt of the German nation and demand that all Germans contribute to war reparations after World War I. When the government of a truly democratic nation goes to war, because its policy in some sense expresses "the will of the people," the country arguably acts as though it were a kind of single agent. People also, of course, speak collectively of the responsibilities of the ruling class, corporations, families, tribes, and ethnic groups. Because human life is populated by collectives, institutions, organizations, and other social groupings, agency can sometimes be dispersed or at least seem irremediably unclear. These "gray zones," as thinkers like Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, 1975) and Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, 2002) have called them, make determining agency in areas like sexual conduct and political action exceedingly difficult.

There are three ways of understanding how we talk about collectives as agents. One is that it's just mistaken and that collectives cannot be agents. The second is that collectives are agents in some alternative, perhaps metaphorical sense – that they are like real agents but not quite the same as them. The third is that collectives are as much agents as individual people, who are themselves perhaps not as singular, cohesive, and unified as many would like to believe.

From The Ethics Toolkit: A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and Methods.

Impossible Conundrum: State Secrets and Journalism

Intelligence Squared is out with its newest debate, asking the question: should freedom of the press extend to state secrets? This is one of these impossible "gray-area" questions that has no empirical answer because it deals with a tricky philosophical trade-off. Of course governments (and businesses, for that matter) need some level of secrecy to operate effectively. But clearly decisions regarding what stays secret should not be made solely by the organization in question, because their individual incentives (social status, turf, etc.) might not line up with what's best for society. It's a complex question with a lot of dimensions--perfect for this format.

The debate gets pretty spicy near the end, but never loses its intellectual heft. Enjoy:

Social Science for the Masses

I try to listen to podcasts fairly regularly, because I love the medium. They tend to be short, snappy, and can fill previously unused time with rewarding intellectual stimulation. I also get a lot of my book recommendations from podcasts: many non-fiction authors will do radio shows as part of their publicity process. It's fun to hear thinkers engage in verbal thrust and parry as well; too often writing is the only means of communicating information for academics and public intellectuals.

Recently I've discovered a fantastic new podcast: EconTalk hosted by Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University. Episodes consist of incredibly substantive interviews of scholars discussing social science topics. The podcast manages to snag lots of eminent thinkers (past guests include Gary Becker, Cass Sunstein, Nassim Taleb, and William Easterly) as well as more obscure researchers who have lots to say but access to few popular communications mediums (besides perhaps blogging). The quality of the interviews is probably the best I've ever heard (sorry Tom Ashbrook), and despite the host's strong libertarian leaning, the intellectual discourse is fair and sincere.

Archives on iTunes go back several years, and they're definitely worth combing through to pick out topics of particular interest. Philosophy Bites, a similar podcast dealing with philosophical questions, is also a fascinating way to hear academics share their insights.

Patent Pending: Syllaberry

By now some of us might be familiar with Bananagrams, a simple Scrabble-like word game that for some reason has a banana theme. Because of its success, several other fruit-themed word games have popped up: Appletters and Pairs in Pears. I won't comment on the quality of the game mechanics, but I will say that 'bananagrams' is a very clever name. 'Appletters' is much clumsier, and 'pairs in pears' is just plain rotten. Here's my suggestion/prediction for the next fruit-themed word game: Syllaberry (a play on syllabary). Instead of having an alphabet-based game where letters are the basic unit, Syllaberry could involve manipulating syllables in some way. Just a thought.

Heavyweight Non-Fiction

Most non-fiction books that cover conceptual topics (like science or social sciency stuff) can usually be split into two groups, those written by experts (like academics) and those written by non-experts (like journalists). Over the past six months or so, I've noticed a trend in my non-fiction book selection: I've become less and less discriminatory regarding the author's level of expertise. I've pretty much been selecting books based solely on how much the topic interests me. Once I realized this, I reflected a bit on which books really affected me and which ones didn't. My conclusion? Academic heavyweights write better books. [note: I'm only talking about widely-circulated popular non-fiction books; real academic textbooky books are in a different category altogether]

Experts writing about a topic within their field of research start off with an initial stock of credibility in my eyes, while journalists or other lightweight non-fiction writers have to earn that trust. Heavyweight authors tend to fill their pages with more original and creative ideas, probably because they have actual academic contributions from which to draw on. Lightweights, by contrast, are not direct knowledge-producers and must restrict themselves to analyzing and synthesizing existing research. Often this results in more novel topics and book titles for the lightweights (they've got to find the gaps), but it also means the topics are less ambitious and more marginal.

Malcolm Gladwell might be the best example of a lightweight author: great writing, clever and fascinating topics, tons of cool little analyses and observations. But if I compare his books with those written by actual experts in the research fields from which he draws upon, there's no comparison. Nudge by legal scholar Cass Sunstein and economist Richard Thaler gives a much better overview of behavioral economics and unconscious decisionmaking than does Blink, while Bursts by graph theorist Albert-Laszio Barabasi provides a much deeper and more rigorous understanding of social cascades than does The Tipping Point. 

I recently finished The Information by James Gleick (a lightweight), and I was stunned by the complete lack of creativity and original thinking. Marketed and publicized as a deep inquiry into the concept of "information," the book was merely a cobbled-together assortment of different scientific histories (a chapter on linguistics, one on logic, electrical engineering, early computers, etc.). The Hidden Reality by physicist Brian Greene delivered in a single chapter the most fascinating and unorthodox expression of the concept of information I've ever read. So don't be seduced by clever topics or good newspaper coverage (journalists surely promote their own). It's time to get picky and get smart. Read heavyweight non-fiction.

Some Thoughts on BitCoin

There has been a lot of buzz lately about BitCoin, a new alternative "currency" that exists entirely online and without any sort of central authority. Previous electronic currencies have been hindered by theft and double-counting, but BitCoin seems to have solved these problems by using a clever peer-to-peer interface. The Economist has a pretty comprehensive description of some of the technical details of BitCoin, but to get the basic gist here's a totally biased marketing video:



Although BitCoin is certainly an interesting idea, it has some pretty massive flaws:

Bitcoin does not have a central bank capable of printing and lending bitcoins; it has an "algorithm" which through some convoluted mechanism allows bitcoins to be "mined". Essentially it randomly allocates bitcoins to early adopters. This is a very good system for early adopters (free money!) It is a nonsensical system for a real currency, not to mention being obviously unscalable (what happens when everyone tries to mine bitcoins all day long?). To solve this second problem, the supply of bitcoins is algorithmically limited, which is again good for early adopters. But that brings us to...

The macroeconomic qualities of BitCoin make it extremely vulnerable to a depression-like collapse of demand, where everyone wants to hold onto BitCoins and not spend them. Add to that the riskiness of convertibility (exchanging BitCoins for U.S. dollars, for example) and the notion of BitCoin-as-a-game-changer seems ridiculous.

But many critics (and supporters) are getting too sensationalistic about BitCoin's scope and prospects. If you look at BitCoin in the context of other alternative currencies it's clear that this asset exists merely to promote and foster certain social or philosophic values. Some alternative currencies, like Ithaca Hours, promote local community. Some have built-in time horizons for spending or rapid value-loss in order to limit saving and boost consumption. BitCoin is merely an experiment that fits nicely into the quickly-emerging anti-authoritarian, tinkering, globalized, open-source anonymous internet civilization. Although fascinating, ultimately BitCoin is not nearly as important as the political fight to keep all internet transactions (denominated in major currencies) tax-free.

Check out this great EconTalk podcast about BitCoin.

Luckovich