Hodak Value

Today is International Workers' Day throughout the socialist and communist world, including the Daily Kos, who took this opportunity to slam Wal-Mart. They noted that Wal-Mart was investigated by Human Rights Watch, noting that:

Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental group based in New York, is best known for scathing reports on political issues such as the Rwandan genocide and the Congo's use of children in its military.

My standard for concern about an organization is somewhat different. If an organization has people beating down the doors to get in, it's probably not a problem how they're treating their workers. If an institution has people risking their lives to flee, that's probably an institution that needs some outside monitoring.

The workers of the world deserve better.

If you wanted to enhance the credibility of the teaching of good governance, wouldn't you go to an organization like the U.N.? Of course. That is why the U.N. has endorsed certain guidelines for business school education such as:

We will incorporate into our academic activities and curricula the values of global social responsibility as portrayed in international initiatives such as the United Nations Global Compact.

Gee, if I wasn't so busy preparing for my course on corporate scandals, I'm sure I could dig up lots of examples of U.N. initiatives to illustrate good governance.

OK, here is my proposal to alleviate the organ transplant shortage: If you want to be the recipient of an organ transplant at some point in your life, you have to register somewhere as an organ donor, something as simple as checking off the box on your license, before you need an organ.

This is admittedly a proposal born of very little study on my part--you could fairly call it ignorance. I don't know what percentage of people have checked off the organ donor box versus not. I don't know how many potential donors' organs go unharvested because they didn't check off the box vs. the total need for human organs. I don't know if we want to create a constituency that is indifferent to improved auto safety. But it seems to me that many people don't check off the organ donor box because of a combination of the "ick" factor and laziness. In other words, for silly reasons that could be easily overcome with a little incentive.

I also understand that certain people can't check off the box for religious reasons, thus likely placing those people below the line when it comes time for a transplant. I count my closest, dearest family members among this group. Screw em. If their religious beliefs take then out of the pool of donors, it should take them out of the pool of recipients, and leave the rest to God's will.

Seriously, I would be happy to give my brother one of my kidneys should he ever need one. But my heart, when I no longer need mine, should go to someone who placed theirs at risk of being at my disposal. I think that's as fair as inherently unfair circumstances can be.

A couple days ago, Don Surber wrote a great piece on the return on investment in lobbying Congress.

You bought Google at $100 and 3 years later is nearing $600 a share? Big deal. Microsoft has gone up 28-fold over the last 20 years? Yawn. You want to make the big bucks? Rent a congressman. Your return on your investment can be as high as $75 for every dollar invested.

Internet search company Google Inc. has registered in-house lobbyists for the first time since establishing a Washington office in 2005.

"We've expanded our presence because there are an increasing number of issues being debated in Washington that are of concern to our users," said Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google, which spent $580,000 in first six months of 2007 to lobby the federal government.

Is this a great country or what?

This from a public official:

I firmly believe and am confident of the fact that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened. You can quote me on that.

The DA and his supporters were trying to make the case that he is not a racist. I don't know. And given what I know about how the press covers such things, I'm inclined not to believe that the DA is channeling old George Wallace. But that defense becomes a bit strained when this DA has looked out on the massive protests against his prosecution

and concluded that peace was maintained only because Jesus put his calming white hand upon their black hearts. What else could it be? I mean, is it conceivable that a large black group could have possibly maintained peace on their own?

The WSJ had an article about the difficulty certain communities face in continuing efforts at school integration. It was suggested that the integration debate was driven as much by the politics of test scores as the politics of race. It turns out that the mostly black schools significantly under-perform the predominantly white schools, even where the average income of the black families appears to be fairly high. So, black parents are eager to get their kids into the predominantly white schools because they have a reasonable expectation that their kids will get better educations there. Conversely, white parents don't want their kids to go to predominantly black schools because...well, they're racists. Or at least that's a sentiment that the story writers appear willing to promote.

Ms. Horan says she moved her family to Milton from Boston 10 years ago seeking open-minded neighbors, only to be confronted by the same prejudices that she had hoped to leave behind. "Hurtful as it is to admit, racism is alive and well and living in Milton," she says. Mr. Lovely, the board chairman, denies any racial tension.

I'm fine with the demise of the "separate but equal" doctrine. I think that most people (80 percent of us, anyway) would protest government-enforced segregation. But very few of us (especially those of us who made the tough, personal choices to position ourselves to make useful trade-offs for our kids) see the sense in government-enforced desegregation. Both doctrines treat individuals as tools of the state, trying to coerce a certain social outcome.

Unfortunately, much of this issue is a consequence of the collectivist manner in which most school systems operate. The government is inherently a part of the solution because it is inherently at the root of the problem.

...as if a reasonable person needed any.

From Cato Unbound.

Today was a day to reflect on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. The idea most closely associated with Dr. King, and I think the most underrated aspect of his legacy, was the principle of non-violence. I believe Dr. King profoundly understood how non-violence would increasingly trump violence in an increasingly transparent society. I believe he “got it” that non-violence can show the bankruptcy of any social structure that relies on raw power for its survival.

Hillary got herself into some hot water last week by suggesting that Dr. King’s legacy was incomplete without the coercive backing of the Federal government. I think she was way wrong. I believe that Dr. King’s legacy was cemented by the change in attitudes brought about by his leadership of the civil rights movement. He changed those attitudes with the widely covered spectacle of peaceful people facing down hatred and guns with nothing more than their dignity. He did something that no opponent can survive in the age of television—he made the other side look bad. He made "Whites Only" signs disrespectable. He showed us the faces of hatred on the other side of the police lines, and they were ugly. The change in attitudes among the indifferent majority of whites arose from the marches and protests he led, culminating in his famous speech on the Mall. He set in motion an eventual acceptance and integration of blacks into American society in a way that even the most draconian laws could never have accomplished, and probably would have stifled.

Part of Dr. King’s genius was that he knew he was not facing a monolithic, caricatured white enemy. That very caricature offended his belief that each individual had a distinct character and dignity. His dream was one of mutual acceptance and respect. He did not envision integration as a zero-sum game.

I'm convinced that today few among Dr. King’s many vocal supporters really get the message of non-violence. Clearly, many repudiated non-violence immediately after his assassination, I believe to the detriment of his movement. Others relapsed into caricaturing their political opponents as racists worth fighting by all necessary means. Most politicians who claim to act in his name are often pushing for the use of state power to impose the kind of world they think is right, which is really just another way of using violence to achieve a particular social structure. They didn’t get the irony of forced busing, never mind its long-term economic consequences, worst of all for black communities.

I appreciate this holiday because it reminds one of the value of non-violence. I want to live in a world where violence, or the threat of violence--from every source--is minimized.

McCain gets down to brass tacks:

"I can lead this nation and motivate all Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest," he said while campaigning at a fire station in New Jersey.

A) Some other individuals' interest (not you or me or John McCain)
B) Some collective interest
C) John McCain's self-interest

"A," of course, is a dummy variable that makes this list comprehensively exhaustive; we can safely dismiss it out of hand. It's highly unlikely that John McCain intends to make your or my self-interest subservient to some particular for John Smith's self-interest.

"B" seems plausible. Almost everyone falls for it, but it can't be "B." "Interest" is a characteristic of consciousness, and a collective has no consciousness. No matter how much we're "all in it together," we can't taste each other's food, experience each other's triumphs, or (no matter how much our politicians try) feel each other's pain. Collective "interests" can be more loosely defined as the product of decision rules accounting for the interests of distinct individuals, but even with that semantically sloppy substitution of one kind of "interest" for another, that doesn't save "B." Decision rules can't yield rational results without defaulting to the decisions of a dictator. In other words, the "collective interest," if we attempt to glean it through a collective decision-making process like voting, is really just the leader's interests in disguise, or, at best, the interests of the most powerful agenda-setters.

So, the correct answer is pretty close to "C." Fortunately, it's easy to understand what John McCain's self-interest is; John McCain is all about getting elected. No one gets this far in politics by accident, without being acutely, intensely aware of where their personal interests intersect with the voter's willingness to hand them power--not McCain or Romney or Hillary or Obama. Each of these politicians has survived this far in an extraordinarily demanding tournament for power by selling the interests that motivate them as somehow more noble and worthy than yours or mine. Amazingly enough, they achieved this by disguising their self-interest as "something larger than our self-interests." And, more amazingly enough, tens of millions of individuals buy it.

UPDATE: BTW, Mr. McCain, Reagan would not have said that. His pitch was about how the government should serve the people (largely by getting out of their way), not the other way around.

A city council outside of St. Louis was the target of a disgruntled citizen who went on a shooting rampage. This story recounts the unfortunate loss of life that ensued. Two police officers just doing their jobs were slain. Two council members and the Public Works commissioner were killed as well. The mayor was also shot and is in critical condition. The story relates how the gunman was apparently aiming for council members, especially the mayor.

Now is not the time for jokes about how one might get to this point versus City Hall. I was reading this story for the tragedy that it was, for the Kirkwood community where this happened, for the families of those slain, and especially for the cops who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then I come across this:

Deputy Mayor Timothy Griffin said this morning. "This is a tragedy of untold magnitude."

That's a quote from a Serbian nationalist. What it looks like to rest of the world is that NATO and the UN have provided a space where Kosovars can express their collective preference about the locus of power over them, and they decided overwhelmingly to move it out of Serbia and into their own territory.

Kosovo has been recognized by some countries and denounced by others. The line of demarcation is pretty clear: If your country has managed to keep all its cultures and regions at reasonable peace with each other, then you are happy to see Kosovo gaining its independence. If your country is held together by raw power, and has a strong, separatist movement looking to pull power away from the center, then you are against the independence of Kosovo.

Today I went to my local federal court house for jury duty. Unlike the typical professional who sees jury duty as a nuisance, I actually like the idea of jury duty. As long as it doesn't get in the way of certain client or family needs, I think hearing a case would be pretty cool. I actually sat on a jury once, and haven't been picked since. According to lawyer friends, I should never expect to be picked again.

Since my last jury stint, over 20 years ago, the jury selection technology has gotten pretty sophisticated. Here's how one lawyer friend puts it:

Defense attorneys don't want smart people on the jury. They're looking for people with barely enough reasoning to follow a Mother Goose tale, but also with enough sense to know that they can't quite figure it all out.

Prosecutors and plaintiffs attorneys consider such people way too intelligent for their juries. They look for complete morons, people who don't even know that they don't know what the frig is being said by either side. They want people who believe conspiracy theories. It goes without saying that prosecutors like people who respond to authority figures with an "Uh huh. OK," reflex.

What this means for justice depends on what is being prosecuted. In traditional criminal cases like burglary or homicide, the accused are generally not too far from the typical cross-section of jurors in terms of class and culture. In white collar criminal cases, modern jury selection practices guarantee that the defendant won't have anything resembling true peers on their jury. They're more likely to have jurors saying things like "I didn't know anything about what they talked about." or, "For a man who knew every aspect of the business, why didn't he know what was going on?" The joke in the white-collar world is that you don't want to be judged by twelve people who were too stupid to avoid jury duty.

All the same, I like our judicial system. While far from perfect, at least it's not as politicized as our other branches of government. I think a lot of that benefit has to do with the randomness of jury selection. I actually believe that our legislature would be far better if congress-critters were selected by lot rather than by elections. What we'd lose in the quality of the individuals placed into office, we would more than make up for by the lack of influence peddling, false promises, savior complexes, and other cynical political theater that mark our current system.

I think I would be fine with the first 200 people in the phone book being our legislators for brief periods of time. Amateur lawmakers would know their temporary status, would probably not be too keen in working that hard in coming up with new rules, but would be keenly aware that they would be spending far more of their lives living under those rules than enjoying whatever gains they may have had in making them.

That comes from a famous quote by the recently departed William F. Buckley, Jr. The full quote was, "I'd rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the dons of Harvard."

Buckley was speaking to the leftist bias of Harvard's faculty, but I have always preferred to repeat that quote, at least the first part, as a paean to randomness. In particular, I believe that a degree of randomness in who governs us would be a good thing--I would like to see legislators selected by lot, much as we select jurors.

Selecting legislators by lot would have various benefits:

- It would eliminate the rampant corruption of the legislature. I'm not taking about a congress-critter taking bribes on the sly to urge on some bill. I'm talking about the wholesale, routine purchase, or at least rental of legislators by their big money supporters. Legislators need campaign contributions. They can't get elected without them. Therefore, they need to do what it takes to get those contributions, and what it takes is responsiveness to the concerns of the contributors.

- It would undercut the rationale for so much government spending. Most of those contributors want the government to do something for them. What kind of an ingrate would take a contributor's money--cash they use to get elected--and then deny that contributor something they want from the government? A one-term ingrate. The economics of the market for political power is the same as other markets in that money talks, bullshit walks.

- It would end the extortion of citizens by the legislature. Most of those contributors who aren't trying to get the government to do something for them are trying to keep the government from doing something to them. Legislators, especially powerful committee heads, are keenly aware of the power they wield, and they know how to use that power. In fact, they have little choice. Nature abhors a vacuum, worst of all a power vacuum. Whoever has the power to shake down moneyed interests stands to gain from using it. If they won't, someone else will.

- It will eliminate the excuse to undermine our free speech and other civil rights. The reason we haven't been able to stop money from corrupting our legislature is partly because so much is at stake, but also because campaign contributions are a protected form of speech. Limiting that speech endangers some of our bedrock liberties. Eliminate campaigns and you eliminate the need for campaign funding, and the need for any restrictions on campaign funding. Voila, more liberty.

- No more gerrymandering. Most people have a vague idea of how thoroughly corrupted the election process has become. While civic idealists trumpet the virtue of voting, most people instinctively know that they don't choose their congressmen--their congressmen have chosen them, through the re-districting process. In my urb, there is no point having anything but a Democratic candidate. I didn't choose her; the party bosses did that for me. Unless pictures come out in the week before election of her blowing a mule, this one has been decided. Even then, the election might still be close.

I know this modest proposal is far from perfect. The 25th guy in the Boston phone book might be a complete moron--I mean worse than the kind of people that typically get elected. Some of these people may not be rational, or even sociable. At least people who are elected are liked by some number of citizens.

There are those that might be concerned that Ma Kettle, Joe Sixpack, Don Ho, et. al might be too untrained and diverse to get much done. I think thats a feature, not a bug. I just don't think we are suffering from a dearth of laws, or that we just can't live without more of them every single term.

Nevertheless, I think the random representatives would get stuff done. Having sat on a jury, I know that the average person is generally reasonable, especially in situations demanding group deliberation. If anything, too many people are willing to go along to get along. But, on the whole, I have found random juries (albeit with some judicial screening) to be conscientious, conservative, and reasonable.

I think it's worth an experiment. Some town, or county perhaps, can try this before it gets promoted to the state or federal level. I think it would energize the citizenship of the place that adopted it. Let's do it for Bill B., God bless him.

Congress regularly blasts the military for being inefficient. And when the military puts a major contract up for bid, and the best consortium wins, Congress is outraged because the consortium includes a European company.

The troubling thing is that Congressional outrage is generally reported at face value.

"It's stunning to me that we would outsource the production of these airplanes to Europe instead of building them in America," said Republican Senator Sam Brownback about the Pentagon's decision.

"We should have an American tanker built by an American company with American workers," said Republican Representative Todd Tiahrt.

"It's stunning to me that we would outsource the production of these airplanes to Europe instead of building them in America," said Kansas Senator Sam Brownback about the Pentagon's decision. Kansas is where Boeing, the losing bidder, had promised to build the plane if they had won the bid.

"We should have an American tanker built by an American company with American workers," said Representative Todd Tiahrt, Representative to the Fourth Congressional District of Kansas, where Boeing would have made the planes.

Alabama Senator Richard Shelby welcomed the decision. "Not only is this the right decision for our military, but it is great news for Alabama," he said.

This entry begins to answer a very relevant, but rarely asked question in the debate on immigration: how much is immigration worth to relatively unskilled immigrants? In other words, if you were relatively poor living outside of the U.S., how much would it be worth to become one of the poor inside the U.S.? The answer appears to be a small but significant risk to your life plus $4,000.

That, plus the mindless persecution of native Americans from England, France, Germany, etc. who don't think we have any room for more. Plus the plans of idiot politicians who have no idea what they're up against in trying to stem this tide, and are willing to betray the liberties of those who live here legally to try to stop those that don't.

Now, if poor people are willing to pay thousands of dollars to get across our border illegally, how much can we increase the cost per person with all the measures that the most outrageous wall-builders are planning to implement? Will that increase their costs significantly? At all?

On our way back from dropping our big guy off at college, we looked at schools with our little guy. (We call him the "little guy" although he's now the biggest member of the family.) We looked at a cross section of schools--big, small, public, private, urban, rural, etc. His verdict was in favor of bigger, small-town campuses. UVA scored well on these criteria.

We also figured out on this trip that New York kids apply in out-sized numbers to schools in the mid-Atlantic. Why? The obvious answer is that there's lots of us. The more complete answer, especially when faced with paying private school rates for public schools (a.k.a., out-of-state tuition), is that many state schools (UVA, UNC, Maryland, etc.) are pretty good. SUNY, on the other hand, is among the worst systems in the country. New York state should be ashamed of itself, but then I know what New York politics is like, and shame is not part of the equation.

We also got some more insight into how the average kid chooses a college, even though this is our second student. One has in-school and on-line resources to help determine the appropriate criteria for choosing. One has publicly available judgments of various institutions along the dimensions of those criteria. And stuff. In the end, it seems to come down to reputation and physical attractiveness. And, of course, by that little thing we know of as admissions. And maybe who gives you money to offset those outrageous tuitions. (College or a new house?)

In democracies, politicians running for office must:

1) Claim that they want power for altruistic reasons,
2) Carefully disguise their raw lust for power, an obsession that necessarily consumes anyone willing to go through the gauntlet of modern elections,
3) Very carefully leave unmentioned the distinguishing characteristic of government while promising all sorts of governmental largess.

So it's kind of refreshing (in a pointy-headed, academic way) to see a regime where their thirst for power is completely out in the open, where those in power don't pretend to give a rat's *ss about anything other than keeping it. The Burmese junta is completely open like that. Amazing. Dissent or challenges of any kind? Not tolerated. Democracy? Out of the question.

In democracies, politicians disguise the fact that in a choice between their stated ideals versus getting power, most of them consider ideals expendable. In Burma, they are completely open to everyone (but their own people, if they can manage it) that in that in a choice between helping millions of their fellow citizens versus risking losing any part of their grip on power, their fellow citizens are expendable.

Quick, quick. Congress has a choice between saving the world in 2020, or getting votes in 2008, what do they choose?

This is not a trick question. It's a sigh of relief.

Bachelor congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is prompting all manner of innuendo from his proposal to give fashion models a special visa category. The editors must have worked into the night to craft this line:

Weiner introduced his proposal in the House late last year which has not yet been scheduled for a vote, though it was recently referred to the Committee of the Whole, where less rigid rules allow bills to be passed quicker.

HT: Reason

OK, so the headline isn't a shocker: "Utah NAACP President Still Opposes Vouchers." But the reasoning never ceases to amaze me:

It would go back to the past (before) Brown v. Board of Education. There would be segregated schools. The ones that would not have been able to afford the schools would've been children of color.

Pleazze, lady. The schools that our poor kids are trapped in lend a whole new meaning to "compulsory education"--a meaning where only half of the words count. It prepares far too many of them for the incarceration they will face--more than one-in-ten black males. If white society had imposed this school system upon our African-American population, it would be an outrage rivaling Jim Crow.

For once, you'd think the political leaders would actually do it for the kids. Instead, leaders like this political stooge are willing to continue sacrificing their kids en-masse on the altar of public education, just to prevent a few extra middle class white kids from going to private school.

Does this:

prepare you for this:

In case you haven't heard this before, it's the serious, bona fide position of the Animal Liberation Front, a group that is legitimately referred to as domestic terrorists.

They or their compatriots firebombed the home of a UCSC researcher while he, his wife, and two children were asleep. The family had to escape from an upstairs window. The Mercury News picks up from here:

While a spokesman said he didn't know who committed the act, the Woodland Hills-based Animal Liberation Front called the attacks a "necessary" act, just like those who fought against civil rights injustices. Spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak showed no remorse for the family or children who were targeted.

"If their father is willing to continue risking his livelihood in order to continue chopping up animals in a laboratory than his children are old enough to recognize the consequences,'' said Vlasak, a former animal researcher who is now a trauma surgeon. "This guy knows what he is doing. He knows that every day that he goes into the laboratory and hurts animals that it is unreasonable not to expect consequences."

Clark, the Santa Cruz police captain, said it was "unconscionable'' for anyone to defend such acts: "To put this on par with any of the human rights issues is an absolute insult to the integrity of the people who fought and went through the human rights movement. This is what people do when they have an inability to articulate their point in any constructive way. They resort to primal acts of violence. Any reasonable person would need a logic transplant to begin to understand this level of degraded thinking."

The media, on the other hand, are due for a correction. This person they generously refer to in the present tense as a "trauma surgeon" is no such thing. He has apparently not been employable as any kind of doctor since 1998. Even the PCRM, a fairly radical, but non-violent, animal rights group, distances itself from Vlasak.

Americans love a hero. The guy who can grab victory from the jaws of defeat. The person who can come from behind to win the title. Wow.

But the hero fetish can be a bit perverted. I was reminded of this by an article today about Michael Phelps where ESPN ranked his eight gold medals in order of "most impressive" based on a poll of readers. Setting aside the inherent silliness of such a ranking, the poll results said something interesting about people.

The victory voted "most impressive" by 60 percent of the readers was Phelps' win in the 100m butterfly. This was the race he almost lost; the only one where he didn't break a world record. Getting almost a quarter of the vote was the other come-from-behind victory in the 400m freestyle relay anchored by Jason Lezak. None of the other races where he or his team won convincingly by shattering world records got as much as four percent of the votes. Maybe it's just me, but I would consider the races he dominated as pretty impressive. In sports, though, excitement often means the last second save.

The infatuation of the press and public with the "last second save" is understandable in sports, but it doesn't translate well to business. For my money, too many American companies are built upon what I would call the "heroic management" model. They would never invest in better management systems when things are going well; they see their success as evidence that they don't need them. When things turn south, they can't afford advice about systems; they need (and prefer) to invest in heroic measures. If they pull out of the dive, their faith in heroics is reinforced; a company of heroes doesn't need better systems. That's how they think.

My attitude is that any system that depends upon heroics to succeed is a system that is designed to fail. In fact, most of the companies I work with regard "heroic management" as a retarded model. They see the need for heroics as a failure in some management process.

My first experience with this alternative model was at Toyota, when I went through their manufacturing training program at their plants in Fremont and Lexington. Toyota as a company, just like their auto manufacturing, is designed for continuous improvement. I have since seen and implemented similar systems at other firms that, from the outside, don't look much different from their peers, until you see the results over many years at a time.

Still, I can see why the "heroic management" model remains so popular. Steady performance and continuous improvement are BORING. It doesn't get you on the cover of Business Week. Bold strategies get you there, win or lose--with the shareholders often being the losers.