Hodak Value

I always thought it interesting that kids derive a lot of fun from biting off pieces of a chocolate bunny. I wondered what vegetarians thought about that.

Many people get squeamish about the death of animals, especially baby animals. All babies are cute in a way that's somehow recognized across species. So, when the Discovery Channel showed a gaggle of furry goslings being gathered up by a hungry arctic fox, one felt a sense of relief when the geese parents came back to chase the predator away, making it drop everything. But when the fox sneaked around and grabbed a helpless gosling, and the geese parents looked distraught, one shared their distress. One felt their pain, until the fox reached its little kits with the bird. After the furry little kits shared their meal and were rolling and playing, one was grateful that their mom was able to provide for them.

That's the way it is. We root for the subject animal. We boo the seals ominously swimming around the icy shores waiting for penguins to jump in. We're told that the death of a penguin seeking food in the sea also means death to her baby penguin waiting for that food on shore. So, seals are vicious, blood-thirsty ocean creatures. That is, until the show is about seals. Then they're cute, playful creatures trying not to be eaten by those vicious sharks. And when a polar bear attacks a walrus colony, one's heart immediately goes out to the pudgy, old walruses. And when the walruses successfully evade predation and the polar bear eventually collapses from hunger, we see that the cost of avoided bloodshed was the death of a noble creature.

Fact is, nature is a bloody, violent place with every creature's life hanging in the balance, in mortal competition with both their rivals and their prey. "Nature, red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it, has always been difficult for 'nature lovers' to accept. But it demonstrates the inevitability of trade-offs in every part of the world. It means that when we see a cute little tiger cub waiting for it's mom and think, "I hope Simba gets what his little tummy needs!" one has to accept the criticism of being against antelopes and gazelles. Predation is an unhappy fact of life for many. But what would the world look like without it?

The assailant was District Attorney Mike Nifong. The victim was the lady with the blindfold and scales.

The accused Duke lacrosse players have finally been exonerated. For those of us who have been following this case, the dropping of these charges is long overdue. The players and their families have gone through hell, paid their lawyers over $2.5 million for the privilege, and lost a year of their young lives in the netherworld of a prosecutor out of control. Their coach lost his job. Their teammates lost a good shot at the NCAA championships--the pinnacle of what lacrosse players have worked their lives to achieve. The best coverage of this whole, sorry affair has been provided by KC Johnson. He will undoubtebly put it all together in a much-deserved bestseller.

My own interest in this affair stemmed from my son's decision to apply for and accept Duke's invitation to their Class of '11. When I asked him about the lacrosse affair, he responded in his somewhat typical, mercenary fashion that he should probably send Nifong a thank you note for making it that much easier for him to get in. I agree with the implied premises behind his quip. Yes, this probably was a year of slightly reduced quality and quantity of applications for Duke, and since the students would eventually be found innocent, the school's reputation should nevertheless remain intact.

I would qualify these statements by mentioning the behavior of some of Duke's administration, including President Jim "Throw 'em under the bus" Brodhead, and the politicized faction of their faculty that used their student's plight to press their own agenda. In either of those regards, however, I don't think my son would have fared better at any other elite university, except that Duke's loony left may have been sufficiently spanked by the deservedly bad publicity to lay low for, perhaps, the next four or so years. I doubt it, though.

Of course, the long-term negative effects of this prosecution will be borne by future rape victims who will have a harder time having their voices heard. Among the outrageous enablers of this false prosecution were supposedly feminist advocates who played the victim's siren song long after everyone else got tired of the screeching.

The passing of Boris Yeltsin is being greeted with generally favorable obits, and some residual criticism for his toleration for corruption, initiation of the Chechnyan conflict, and other questionable calls during his time at the helm, to say nothing of his sometimes embarrassing personal behavior. Such criticisms suggest an unstated belief that his perceived shortcomings could have been avoided without other, possibly worse, consequences. For example, maybe he could have accomplished what he did without the corruption that plagued his tenure. But it's also possible that corruption might have been the grease that enabled him to begin turning the rusty wheel of capitalism by quickly divesting the state of its control over the economy. Many things he might have done to significantly prevent corruption might have also stalled the whole effort. I'm not saying this would have necessarily been the case, or that it wouldn't possibly have been a better tack anyway. I'm just saying that nobody knows how much better events overall could have turned out with a different package of policies.

How did overall events turn out? Better than most anyone could have expected at the height of the cold war. Well into the 1980s, most people could hardly see an endgame to Soviet communism without a hot, possibly uncontained conflict. The peaceful, almost banal disintegration of the Evil Empire is, I think, among the most underrated achievements in human history.

What Gorbachev wrought by simply stepping back when the Wall began to crumble, Yeltsin consolidated by boldly going forward when the communists were ready to be swept away. I know I would have greatly benefitted from being stinking drunk when standing atop a tank to face down the last, deperate masters of the Red Army. But that's what Yeltsin did in one of his soberest moments.

All these little critiques of the parts of the package we don't like are a symptom of a utopianism not unlike the one Yeltsin killed off. The downsides of his decisions are visible--a corrupt relationship with a mafia-like oligarchy, a war in Chechnya, centralized power under Putin, stumbling onto a stage and swatting at an obstruction before recognizing it was a microphone. But what would we have gotten with a sober, uncompromising master of realpolitik who could stand up to the Oligarchs? We could have gotten Putin, ten years earlier.

Russell Roberts does an excellent job dissecting a common argument for government regulation by breaking it down in terms its components. Specifically, he goes after the imbedded assumptions of this statement:

...perhaps you are uncomfortable with the idea of government intervening to assist the financially stupid. But I think there are many cases of the financially, legally or scientifically stupid asking the government to restrict their choices.

The first error is that "the government" is a thinking entity capable of intent. Russell dissents by calling the government a "sausage factory of legislation." Even this, I think, dramatically understates the fragmentation of government "intent." Don't forget the executive branch. Whatever remains of the original good intent after the 'sausage factory' process has turned it into a law, it is quickly discarded by the bureaucracy needed to implement it. At that point, intent has been boiled down to rules that every single person must follow. Anyone who has had to jump through the hoops set up by the bureaucracy to comply with its requirements knows that this is not a system where good intent is institutionalized.

As for government capabilities, consider for a moment the knowledge possessed by the most enlightened, empathetic bureaucrat versus that of the average person actually involved in a transaction. What are the odds that the bureaucrat will really understand the particular issues and tradeoffs you face better than you or whatever advisor you might bring into the transaction? Sure, the odds are there. It's possible that a government agent might know what is good for you better than you do, but it would be a gross understatement to suggest she might not. Especially when you consider that the government's agent is not an expert at anything other than following specific rules that cannot, by design, account for the particular concerns you, as an individual, might bring to a particular transaction. As Russ pointed out, lending rules may prevent loans that shouldn't happen, but they certainly also prevent loans that would be mutually beneficial to borrower and lender. What is the proportion of each type? That would be an interesting question, but it is never even asked by legislators, which brings us to incentives.

By far, the most problematic area in regulation and enforcement is incentives. Every single agent of government is as much a slave to their personal incentives as we are to ours. Laws are made by people seeking votes. Thus, they are shaped by institutions with political clout, including those being regulated. The resulting rules are enforced by people just like you and me. Many of these bureaucrats are honest and diligent, but many are not. The problem is that, unlike a business subject to market discipline, there is no mechanism to keep a check on those in government who have the power to make your life as difficult as possible in order to make their lives as easy as possible. And, for all the theorizing about the potential economic benefits of certain regulations, there is no market test for government, other than the coarse, often undetectable reactions of market agents leaving the regulatory regime.

There is one more thing about the statement that Russ left unchallenged: the magic word "asking." Who are the people "asking" to be regulated? A commenter to Russell's post put it very well by suggesting that people who want to be regulated could simply be given the ability to opt in, or the rest of us given the ability to opt out. For instance, I think I can deal pretty well with nearly perfect freedom in my financial transactions, subject to the normal protections of anti-fraud laws. I have an MBA in finance. I may not always know what I'm doing financially speaking, but does Congress know better? Does the bureaucrat with the power? But my choices are limited and my costs are higher because of financial regulations "protecting" me. For me, as well as most people, the costs associated with that loss of freedom, with the inability to truly "ask" for the government's protection, is very high. How high? I'd like to know. But the legislators imposing those costs don't even ask what they are, let alone provide them in good faith in weighing the costs and benefits of the mandates.

I found this comment on The Borgas Blog. It echos the sentiments of many people who have been citizens since birth:

I'm an immigrant who took the citizenship oath last December. I've been through the system. From my experience, the immigration system works if you decide to follow the rules. Before I immigrated, I never overstayed my student or tourist visas. When I decided to immigrate, I paid the fees, had a physical, was re-immunized against all those childhood diseases (including the oral polio medication), had a criminal record check in my country of birth, an interview in the US Embassy, and paid the required fee. I also had to prove that I had sufficient funds to support myself for a period of 5 years, and promise that I would not be a burden on the US people by agreeing not to apply for welfare (yes, this is true!) After fulfilling the residency period, I applied for citizenship, paid the fee, was finger printed (for the 4th time), had an FBI background check, passed the English language test (required even though my first language is English), passed the US history test, and interviewed for suitability by the INS/BCIS. I gladly did this. I followed he rules and everything worked well during the entire process. In my experience, if you follow the rules, the immigration system works well.

On the one hand, it's hard to argue with the rule of law and its adherents, and immigration law, which seems so messed up to so many people, has clearly evolved to account for many little things that the less informed continue to rant about, like checks for background, ability to provide for oneself, etc.

The key phrase for me, though, was "when I decided to immigrate..." I'm not sure that reflects the typical path, suggesting that this comment may reflect little more than the fact that the winners of the lottery are fine with the lottery. I also won the lottery by being born (abroad) to a U.S. serviceman. Both of my parents are immigrants, but they came over in a window of time when European refugees and Holocaust survivors weren't subject to as stringent visa caps.

On the other hand, I went to business school with someone who married and had kids in the U.S., but was suddenly barred from returning from a visit with family abroad until she gave up her job at Price Waterhouse and promised never to work again in the U.S. (yes, this is true!).

Back to the commenter above:

Our Congress's capitulation to illegal residents over the views of US citizens devalues US citizenship. Most legal immigrants I know share these views. Now that I am a registered voter, I'll be making my views known.

Translation: The hell with her. Now that I'm in, I don't mind if we slam the door shut. Or, if I can get a piece of it, let's charge an arm and a leg for entrance. Who are these people tyring to take my jerb?

Ah, it's so easy to be the lucky one!

In this article:

The House, eager to do something about record high gasoline prices in advance of the Memorial Day weekend, voted narrowly Wednesday to approve stiff penalties for those found guilty of gasoline price gouging.

The bill directs the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department to go after oil companies, traders or retail operators if they take "unfair advantage" or charge "unconscionably excessive" prices for gasoline and other fuels.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., its chief sponsor, in urging his colleagues to support the bill said the issue was whether "to side with Big Oil (or) ... side with consumers who are being ripped off at the gas pump."

The bill calls for criminal penalties of up to $150 million for corporations and up to $2 million and a jail sentence of up to 10 years for individuals found to be engaged in price gouging.

...the bill's supporters argued that states can't combat energy price gouging, leaving motorists at the whim of arbitrary oil company pricing.

What concerns me is that most of the people who voted for this bill are really not that stupid (damn, there I go). Congress has commissioned numerous studies on price gouging over the years, under Democratic and Republican administrations, and they all come back with the same verdict. It's the voters who go in for the conspiracy theory behind such laws. The clearest evidence of the irrationality of that position is the utter lack of explanation about what leads to occasional gas price decreases. (It's a one-way conspiracy? Big Oil was less greedy last month?) The point of this law is that the answer to why prices sometimes go down is clearly not current price gouging laws.

So what would be the predictable consequences of such a law? Well, rational business persons, when faced with possible $2 million fines and 10 year jail penalties for raising prices will:

(a) avoid situations where they might need to raise prices on a volatile commodity by always keeping them high,
(b) stop selling altogether in times of emergency, when the actual or opportunity cost of the commodity exceeds the "normal" price.

What businesses won't do is try to make a decent return on a volatile commodity by allowing the price to come down when supplies are easy and not raise them when supplies are tight. And businesses certainly won't take a chance on finding a market-clearing price for gas in the very times of emergency when gas, in fact, becomes most valuable to the public. So, then everyone will have theoretical access to gas at the "conscionable" price, but people who would have gladly paid more than the $1.50 or $2 (equivalent to $6-$8 per gallon) it might have cost them to drive five miles they desperately wanted to travel will instead stay put for fear of running out of their "reasonably priced" gas.

Adam Clayton Powell IV, assemblyman from East Harlem, has been accused of being the laziest legislator in Albany. As reported in the New York Sun:

Of the thousands of bills introduced this year, Mr. Powell can take credit for not a single one. If Mr. Powell doesn't introduce a bill in the next month, he will have made it through three consecutive session years without acting as the prime sponsor of any piece of legislation.

Most institutions create more rules than than they destroy. Their rules keep piling up. In the private market, a company will either have leaders regularly cleaning out the rules, like when Jack Welch took GE's huge procedure manual and simply threw it in the trash, or the firm eventually collapses under the weight of its rules, left in the dust of its more nimble competitors.

The government, of course, can't go out of business. So, if you believe that it's possible to have too many laws, then one can't view the current trend as a good one. In fact, your only prayer is someone like Adam Clayton Powell IV.

So, how does he get away with it? This is someone who mysteriously gets elected on something other than a promise to do something. This is a politician who apparently doesn't stand up to be heard. Here is someone who apparently has little interest in telling other people what to do. This man, if mere mortal he be, somehow resists the lobbyists and activists, media crusaders and other assorted, professional busybodies who place incredible pressure on every one of our representatives, promising them funds and publicity and god-knows-what, so they can get state power behind some pet initiative that would clearly fail to get the voluntary support of their fellow citizens or pass any kind of market test.

Adam Clayton Powell IV, as long as your streak lasts, you are my hero.

I'm putting together a presentation to a group of board members who requested that I start with some basics about the role of directors. So, I'm starting with the most basic question of all: why do companies exist? This is not a philosophy seminar, and we don't have time for Coasian details, so I have to get right to the point:

- Shareholders create companies with their investment in exchange for a residual claim to the company's profits
- Shareholders hire managers with the expectation that they will manage the company to legally maximize those profits
- The board's job is to oversee management to insure that the shareholder's interests are put first.

Managers, of course, have a zillion trade-offs to make--supplies, labor, new investment, etc.--in their quest to maximize shareholders' profits. Even for insiders, overseeing the quality of these trade-offs is a very difficult task, but directors should understand in whose favor those trade-offs must ultimately be made.

For most outsiders, including critics, those trade-offs are invisible. But they still criticize. Business critics at least nominally hold the shareholders' interests at heart when offering advice about new technology or grand strategy, which are sexy when they pay off, but often don't. Kodak's critics, for example, as well as their workers and communities, thought the company's transformation from a chemical to a digital company was long overdue. Kodak's shareholder's blanched. They were content to milk the chemical company of whatever cash flow was left from chemical film rather than take that cash and plow it into something their managers had no clear competence in pursuing. Everybody loves a daredevil, as long as it's not their baby on the ledge. Thus, "harvesting" is a highly underutilized strategy.

Social critics don't even pretend to have the shareholder's best interests at heart. And they hate "harvesting." They would have us consider owners to be just one of many "stakeholders" for whose benefit the firm should be run. These people see the company not as the product of investment and risk-taking, but simply as a given, something to be milked for their own "good" ends based on some nebulous "social contract." They advocate for "rights" of communities, workers, etc., competing with the rights of shareholders, supported by cash that would otherwise go to the shareholders. And where they have been most successful, they later complain about the decline of their communities and a lack of jobs.

My job is easier. I just have to help directors do their job.

That quote came from a 21-year old student who flew back from Europe with the TB guy, meaning she may have been exposed to infection. Yes, it was selfish of him. But I'm somehow bothered that we apparently have students, journalists, and probably many readers who believe that "selfish" is a worthwhile distinction in this matter.

My personal suspicion of this strange label began as a child hearing my mom complaining about my "selfishness" when it appeared to me that her real complaint was about me not satisfying her wishes in lieu of mine. Like every child, I wanted to make my mom happy, but I was still bothered by the logic of her complaint. I suppose that most kids internalize the negative connotation of "selfishness" as guilt when they make trade-offs in their favor versus other people. For some reason, I couldn't do that. I grew up considering other's interests and feelings in a fairly normal way, but I also came to view "selfish" as a fundamentally dishonest accusation, an indictment of the accuser more than the accused.

Don't get me wrong--I would be quite upset about someone deciding to put me at risk by bringing an infectious disease into my passenger compartment. In this case, it was a personal injury lawyer who must have weighed the liability risk of what he did. But I wouldn't whine about his behavior being selfish. My complaint would be that it was coercive--he didn't give me the choice. He brought me into the trade-off of staying in Europe and probably dying versus getting to the U.S. and probably living, while exposing me to a minimal risk. His selfishness in making that trade-off would be no less than my selfishness in denying my consent (or complaining about being exposed.)

One could just as well view this situation in the obverse and say that it exposes a lack of heroism. The infected man was not heroic by staying put in Europe to die. The complaining student was not heroic in suggesting that this mans life was worth the small risk to her. In other words, selfishness is here, as everywhere, on both sides of the equation. So what? Either side could have adopted a heroic stance. Heroism is praiseworthy, but optional.

Literal question. And I mean you personally.

The answer begins with a theory that not all of us have to die--ever. Please follow.

The Immortality Crossover. Right now, life expectancy is increasing by about two months per year. That means that a decade from now, if you've survive till then, your life expectancy may be nearly two years longer than someone who right now is ten years older than you. That increased life expectancy will be due to enhanced treatments developed between now and then. And the pace of advancement is accelerating. At some point, life expectancy will be increased by over one year for each year that goes by. Whoever is around at that crossover point will have a good shot at living indefinitely.

Are we there yet? That crossover point could, conceivably, be within the grasp of a generation that has already been born. The first immortals may be walking (or perhaps crawling) among us.

Can we keep our foot off the brakes? The pace of advancement for medical treatments will depend on exactly two things--the amount of resources devoted to such development, and the efficiency with which such resources are utilized. With regards to the first, total expenditures are rising. Everyone wants to live longer and healthier. With regards to the second, that spending is being funneled through both the private and public sectors. Both areas are contributing to advancement, but the public sector spending is more politicized and less efficient. The profit-driven, private sector is much faster and more focused on getting returns from their investment. Impact matters to them. It's a fair bet that the more that the market is involved in allocating our health care spending, the more efficiently that (rising) spending will be used to develop new treatments. So, who would want to risk the pace of development by either slowing down the amount we spend on health care or the degree to which the market allocates that spending?

Hillary: The socialists and progressives among us have a view of how the world should work. In their world, Bill Gates could have just as well been a successful bureacrat in the Office of Computer Technology Development in the U.S. Department of Commerce. He could have helped government direct investment in software development. Our best software developers could have just as well worked for the National Institutes of Computing instead of Lotus or Adobe or Oracle. Our computers might even be better if they were required to pass muster with a government FCA instead of being allowed to be sold by any college student with Internet access. And if they could have sucked enough tax dollars out of the private economy, the government could have subsidized equal access to computer technology every step of the way.

Mike Nifong, the Duke lacrosse case prosecutor, finally resigned as Durham District Attorney. The coverage of Nifong has been fairly unrelenting. One who would have professed skepticism about the press's feeding frenzy over the three accused Duke players might have to wonder if the press isn't going overboard in its condemnations now, especially those who were so overboard the other way before. The press is an outrage machine. I learned long ago that one can believe maybe half of what they read in the news, but which half?

In the Duke lacrosse case, the best place to go for the full story remains here.

UPDATE: It's all over for Nifong. Well, actually not all. Now come the civil cases...

You'd think that the financial press would understand, you know, finance...until you read stories with headlines like "Blackstone IPO Rallies 13% On a Down Day."

First, what happened: Blackstone's investment bankers priced their shares at $31 to those subscribers lucky enough to be let in on the IPO, pre-trading price. At Friday's open, those shares immediately began trading at $37. They jumped up to $38, before quickly settling down to about $36, finally easing down to $35 by the end of the day. The rest of the market also started with an upward blip shortly after the opening, only to meander down over the course of the day, finishing down about 1 percent.

Next, the story around what happened: Most of the press counted the IPO subscription price as the starting point, and the final price after the first day of trading as the end point in their calculation, yielding the aforementioned 13 percent gain. They noted this gain in contrast to the decline in the overall market.

Here's my version of the story: The investment banks under-priced Blackstone's IPO, distributed to their favored clients, by about 15 percent. The floated shares subsequently lost about 5 percent of their actual market value on the first day of trading. This loss was greater than the overall market decline, suggesting either a high beta or significant disappointment.

Isn't it ridiculous that homeland security funds are being taken away from New York and given to terror targets like Louisville, KY, or Omaha, NE? That's the understandable reaction of New York politicians.

"Why do they persist in giving money to places that need it a lot less than New York City?" said [New York Senator Charles] Schumer, a Democrat.

"They still just don't get it," said [New York Rep. Peter] King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. "New York is by far the No. 1 terrorist target in the country, and no one else is even a close second."

As a New Yorker, here is what I don't get: Why should I expect people from Nebraska or Kentucky to pay for my security in New York any more than one should expect me in New York to pay for security in Nebraska or Kentucky? In other words, why should these tax dollars be funneled through Washington at all? It's not like New York is a poor state. It's not as if New Yorkers don't choose to live there, acutely conscious of the risks of terrorism. It's not like God said that New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers in middle America are bound to cross-subsidize each other on matters of local protection, even from foreign enemies. Politicians playing God have decreed that, but it doesn't mean it has to be that way.

Everyone knows that the only reason Kentucky or Nebraska is getting Homeland Security funds at all, which include taxes collected from Kentuckians and Nebraskans as well as New Yorkers, is that (1) every state has representation in Congress, (2) Congressional representatives are in the business of getting the most for their respective constituencies, and (3) by just saying the right thing like, "Hey, terrorists can strike ANYWHERE," congressmen can dip into that tax pool to spread the wealth around. Anyone who expects legislators to act like anything other than politicians must have been a hole for the last couple of centuries.

Now, I can see that if New York, or any state, were being attacked by a foreign army then, yea, we all chip in for the common defense. I'm sure President Bush and the fear-mongering hawks on both sides of the aisle will say, "Well, Hodak doesn't get it. This is a WAR! Anyone who wants to treat terrorism as a criminal matter is basically surrendering to the enemy."

Hmm, "war" or "criminal matter?" Politicians benefit from eliminating useful distinctions, like the possibility that the fight against terror could be viewed as both a war and a criminal matter. If they bought into that distinction, then they could allocate money to the military for the "war" aspect of this fight, i.e., hitting terrorist bases in Afghanistan or wherever, and allow the states to carry on the domestic, "criminal" aspects of the fight, like car bombs and shootings, ideally coordinating with the Feds rather than getting into pissing matches over turf.

In other word, they don't have to funnel all that homeland security money through Homeland Security in Washington. Congress could allow local politicians to raise what they need locally to defend their localities from acts that are indistinguishable from crimes. In other words, we don't have to impose a beggar-thy-neighbor system for what is plainly local spending. Congress doesn't have to bribe us with our own money to do what we need to in order to defend ourselves.

Only the worst managements do it. It's a recipe for unintended consequences, like pushing for higher sales, and ending up with crappy profits because you gave up too much secure the sales. Or pushing for higher profits and ending up with crappy returns on investment because you invested too much to gain those profits. I see it all the time.

Guess what? You do too, when watching those managing our country:

“The longer I’m here, the more I’m persuaded that Iraq cannot be analyzed by these kind of discrete benchmarks,” [Ryan C. Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq] said.

After the Iraqi government drew up the first list of benchmarks last year, American officials used them as their yardstick, frequently faulting the Iraqis for failure to act on them...

Measured solely by the legislative benchmarks, he said, “you could not achieve any of them, and still have a situation where arguably the country is moving in the right direction. And conversely, I think you could achieve them all and still not be heading towards stability, security and overall success for Iraq.”

For those of you not into basketball history, Red Auerbach was a heck of a coach. His Celtics won eleven NBA titles in 13 years. Maybe you remember how dominant the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson were the '90s. Those Bulls would have had to win another five straight championships to match Auerbach's record.

So, Red didn't trust benchmarks, or "the stats" as he called them. Like all great coaches, Auerbach had a mental framework for what it took to win at his game: The person with the best shot should take the shot; the team should ensure that that person gets the ball; the team should prevent their opponents from getting good shots... Pretty straightforward. All that mattered to him was the score at the end of the game. He stayed away from the stats, especially as they applied to individual performers.

There's only one stat I was ever concerned about. When this guy's in the game, does the score go up in our favor or go against us? The Boston Celtics never had a league's top scorer. We won seven championships without ever placing one Celtic in the top ten.

No Celtic got rated according to how many points or rebounds or assists or anything else he might have compiled. Each man was assessed according to his contribution toward making us a better team. That's all I cared about. In our system, the guy who sets the good pick was just as important as the guy who made the shot.

Now, imagine his coaching task if, before every game, he went behind a curtain and could only manage his team by receiving stats and the play-by-play announcement? The inherent limitation of "managing by the numbers" becomes quite plain.

The pervasive collectivist instinct discussed in certain posts here may seem discouraging to some of you, but take heart. I believe that the future belongs to those who love freedom. The evidence, though all around us, is sometimes disguised as braying by government officials. To wit:

It's simply unconscionable from an ethics standpoint for this company to go in from this unfair bargaining position...It's just exploiting a desperate town.

Actually, Lenoir did once have those revenues, but they lost them in the competition to keep their previous local industry. Alas, this is not really news. Localities always have to compete, and not just in the U.S. This competition is simply getting more visible, all over the world. That's economics.

People who lose jobs to competition don't like the laws of economics any more than people who fall and hurt themselves appreciate the laws of physics. But there is no point pretending they're not real, or that the government can override them. Economic relationships and consequences are becoming increasingly transparent, to the point that anyone can see them. Eventually, taxation and regulations will be competed down to the lowest level needed to competitively provide essential services. Yes, troubled readers, we may very well be on the path toward libertarian Nirvana. All you have to do is live long enough to see it.

Most proponents of universal health care see the basic trade-off as health of the poor versus leisure of the well-off. Most economists, however, believe that the real trade-off is between access, cost control, and innovation. You can't have more of one without less of the others. They also observe that in the real world, those trade-offs tend to place cost control first and innovation last. Access, sandwiched in the middle, is invariably compromised by rationing due to cost control. Elected officials have the last word on these trade-offs, and no one facing election in the next two-to-four years will spend scarce political capital on investments that might pay off in the next decade.

So, while proponents of universal health coverage posit that one can't trade-off lives versus dollars, the laws of economics force those very trade-offs both today and into the future. The only difference between lack of universal coverage versus the lack of innovation is that those deprived of coverage can be filmed by Michael Moore today to get sympathy for universal coverage in this election cycle. Those deprived of innovation won't be victims for years or decades, and Moore, if he hasn't died from self-inflicted wounds by then, won't have any idea which of the people dying from incurable diseases might have been cured if there had been greater rewards and incentives to innovation. Eventually, entire generations may be spared if innovation could proceed quickly enough.

So, the degree to which innovation affects life expectancy is an interesting question. This question has been partially answered by Frank Lichtenberg, a researcher at Columbia University. In short, innovation dramatically affects life expectancy, much more than policy-makers might suppose (or wish to acknowledge). Lichtenberg finds that life expectancy has increased very unevenly across the United States. In the last 13 years, life expectancy has increased by three to four years in some states while it has gone up less than a year in other states. Lichtenberg shows that two-thirds of that variation is due to differences in the availability of newer drugs, based on different Medicare policies across states.

This study indicates that the development and use of new medical goods and services...have been responsible for many recent gains in the health and longevity of Americans.

Health policy advocates have long contended that the FDA's power to review medical treatments has lead to far more patient deaths than lives saved. The theory, supported by a growing body of evidence, is underpinned by a simple set of incentives. If an approved drug leads to someone's illness or death, it may get all over the news, and we know how the FDA's antsy, congressional patrons would react to that. If an unapproved drug might have prevented hundreds or thousands of deaths, there would be no media or congressional reaction, because no one would likely know about it. So, the FDA has an institutional bias against drug approval below the very highest margins of safety, a decidedly non-economic standard, one that costs countless lives.

The exception that proves the rule: AIDS drugs. Here, the FDA's cumbersome, time-consuming, costly review process was highlighted by a politicized, media-savvy group that acutely felt the lack of progress in the development of treatments.

Last year, the FDA's authority was successfully challenged in court by the Abigail Alliance. This group was founded on behalf of 20-year old Abigail Burroughs (pictured above) who was denied access to a drug in 2001 that had passed Phase I trials. The drug that was later approved by the FDA, after she died. Imagine an FDA bureaucrat patiently trying to explain to you why a particular drug might have only an 9.3 percent chance of working on your dying child, and thus preventing your doctors or the drug manufacturer from selling it or giving it to you until more tests are done on its efficacy.

So, for the non-politicized masses with rarer diseases or no press agents, how far will the FDA go to protect its authority to tell dying patients what potentially life-saving drugs they may or may not take? After the court's Abigail Alliance decision last year, the FDA filed a brief challenging the standing of Abigail Alliance members who have all died since their original briefs were filed in 2003. That's right. The FDA, which arguably hastened their deaths, is arguing that their death undermines their standing to challenge the FDA.

That might be a statement about the size of their agency's balls, or about the agency's desperate grasp at a remedy for a judgment that threatens their regulatory body.

I was a paper boy in high school. I would get up at about 5 a.m., go to my drop point where a stack of papers would be waiting for me, and deliver them through the neighborhood in time for me to get back home and get ready for school. Once a month, I would go around door-to-door to collect money from the families on my route. It was generally the only time I saw them. They would tell me what a fine job I did, and often tip me a quarter or 50 cents. A couple of customers even tipped me a dollar. I always remembered who they were. Every now and then, someone might tell me that I wasn't always getting the paper to them early enough, or that they preferred to get the paper at their side door rather than their front door, and I would adjust my deliveries to accommodate them.

Collecting money was a pain. I might have to go to some houses two or three times before finding someone home. After I collected the money, I would count up what I owed the newspaper, based on the wholesale price of the subscriptions, and put it in an envelope to give to Mr. B., the man who dropped off the papers for me each morning. The difference between what I collected and the wholesale price is what I got to keep.

One day, Mr. B. drove by to pick up the money, and he asked me if I would be interested in giving up collections. He offered to send out invoices, collect the money by mail, and instead of picking up an envelope of cash from me once a month, he'd bring me a check. He said it would be more efficient all around. Win-win.

I thought about it. The prospect of saving several hours a week not having to collect money definitely appealed to me. On the other hand, if I didn't collect it myself, I would lose the tips, which were nice, and what little interaction I had with my customers, who were also generally nice, and who sometimes let me know when I needed to change something in my delivery. In the end, I decided that it was worth it to let Mr. B. handle collections.

The next month, instead of running around to collect money, I sat back in my room at home, finished some homework without having to rush, and generally enjoyed what seemed like a little time off. Then I got my check from Mr. B.

I looked at it, and quickly realized it was less than I expected. I asked him what happened to the rest. He smiled, shook his head, and explained that he subtracted the administrative costs associated with collections. I told him that he didn't tell me about these administrative costs when he offered to do this. I was willing to give up the tips, but not this administrative cost, too. I told him this no longer seemed like such a win-win to me, and that I would just as soon return to the old way of collecting. Mr. B. smiled, shook his head, and said that there was no going back. I felt rooked.

That was my first experience with hidden trade-offs. After that, I became more careful whenever someone offered me a "win-win" opportunity. When a salesman promises me some sort of deal, I insist on understanding where, exactly, the value will come from. Will I be giving up some level of service in exchange for reduced costs? If not, where do the productivity gains come from? Sometimes, I would get good answers, and take a chance on the deal. If I didn't get good enough answers, I would pass.

I love getting value for my time, energy, or money, but I always react to offers with a little skepticism. Certain people tend to gain my trust pretty easily. They tend to be deliberate, precise types who back up their claims with logical explanations and sound data. I'm glad to have the kind of training that enables me to understand their explanations and evaluate their data, otherwise my skepticism would have long ago degenerated into cynicism. Other kinds of people have very little credibility with me. They tend to smile and shake their heads when explaining why their last deal didn't work out as well as they had promised. I no longer pursue their promises, no matter how wonderful they sound. Politicians generally belong to that group.

I wish more people had my experience of feeling duped at a time when the cost was low but the impact was high. Such an experience might coax more people to better learn how to evaluate promises. Unfortunately, it seems that most of my fellow citizens tend to be either credulous or cynical. I think that many of the problems we face today arise from that imbalance.

The Daily Dish picks up on a new study from Democracy Corps that purports to find a collapse of support for the GOP among young people.

Money quote:

Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day. The range of the issue disagreements range from the most prominent issues of the day (Iraq, immigration) to burning social issues (gay marriage, abortion) to fundamental ideological disagreements over the size and scope of government. This leaves both potential Democratic nominees with substantial leads over Rudy Giuliani, but importantly, both Democrats still have room to grow their support among younger voters. The current problems with the Republican brand are not fully reflected in young people’s preferences for President.

I'm sure this generation now coming of age will one day look back on the growth of government in the first couple of decades this century (especially if we get the kind of president that Democracy Corps wants), and wonder how their parents/grandparents who professed to care about them so much could have stiffed them so badly.

(HT: ProfessorBainbridge.com)

That was the headline of a WSJ article today. It begins with the story of Invitrogen Corp. having spent $2.5 million and 10,000 man hours on SOX requirements.

Officials at the Carlsbad, Calif., biotechnology company think the costs are excessive. But they say Sarbanes-Oxley helped to spur other changes that made Invitrogen a better-run business.

* The government requires all restaurant food to be tested for bacteria before being served to customers. "Incidences of Food Poisoning Reduced"
* The government lowers highway speed limits to 40 mph. "Fewer Deaths on Our Nation's Highways"**
* The government mandates blender blades be diamond-tipped. "Smoother Smoothies for Everyone!"

If positive, absolute benefits were the primary criteria by which laws should be passed, we'd end up with nominally more benefits, but with significantly less of the things that we could have had if our resources had been allocated elsewhere. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately, newspapers can't write compelling stories about the things we don't have as a result of resources that were not devoted to them.

Congress, of course, counts on invisible opportunity costs staying that way. That's why they didn't simply mandate that companies put the proposed SOX rules up to a shareholder vote. They had neither the good will nor the good sense to do that. Letting people decide what to do, letting them weigh their interests for themselves, is not what lawmakers do.

** (HT: Larry Ribstein)

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission had $3 billion to spend on improved voting processes. They released a report detailing the amount of spending so far by each state. This is a pretty straightforward report dutifully produced by an bureaucracy whose name certainly evokes the "we're here to help" joke. However, I think it's very interesting how the news outlets picked it up.

The Wall Street Journal noted that that "just 60% of the $3 billion" had been spent. "Just" sounds like "not enough." The AP, in a story picked up by the New York times and others, sported the headline, "Some States Slow to Spend Voting Aid." There is no mistaking the connotation of being "slow." This article's headline said that the states were "behind." Who wants to be behind on something?

But is it bad that the states have not yet spent 100 percent of these funds allocated to them? The press is clearly implying that these underspending states may not be living up to their responsibility to provide secure voting, possibly forcing us to relive the Florida 2000 debacle. But is that what is really happening? Or might it, perhaps, be a sign that some states are less deliberate or more spendthrift than others? Or that some states are merely more bureaucratic and indecisive?

Or, is it possible that the federal government somehow, perhaps, misallocated $3 billion of funds to the states?

From this story, we see where a good education can get you:

Karsnia, 29, joined the airport police department just out of college in 2000 and was promoted to sergeant in 2005. Last year, he earned a master's degree in criminal justice, leadership and education.

He has arrested at least a dozen men in the airport's bathroom for sending signals he believed were aimed at initiating sex.

Of course, with leadership training, one might decide it's not enough to wait for the fly to come to the honey. If you're after gay men, how much does it take to reel them in? I mean, if gay men are as promiscuous as hetero men (maybe a gay commenter can fill me in on this one), then entrapment can't be very difficult. I know that if it were illegal to initiate a heterosexual encounter in a public place, it wouldn't take much for a cute female cop with "leadership" training to quickly net a horde of defendants.

Couldn't we have these people with master's degrees selling hot dogs, or washing windows, or cleaning gum off the sidewalk, or anything that actually improves our quality of life rather than adds to a climate of fear and mistrust?

The big voucher vote in Utah is coming tomorrow. It doesn't look good for the forces of choice--the betting is that the vote will be about 60% to 40% against vouchers.

I see this outcome as a consequence of path dependence. Public schooling still holds sway for the majority of Americans who went to perfectly good public schools. The only people who know how bad public schools can get are the inner city poor, who tend to support vouchers in large numbers. What does this have to do with path dependence? Consider this counter-factual: if we had all gone to private schools of varying quality, i.e., say schools in wealthier parts of town being much better than schools in poorer sections, as they are today, and the choice was vouchers as proposed (i.e., higher amounts for poorer people) or the creation of government-run schools, how much of the vote do you think would go for the voucher option? I think vouchers would win, and I don't think it would be anywhere as close as 60-40.

The fact that we're starting from a reality of public schools give unions huge financial power, of course, since the public sector is the only place a union can thrive. It also gives them the ability to say things like this:

Union members understand the idea of privatization. When you start to privatize anything, you lose the control of quality, such as highly qualified educators and how the money is spent.

For poor kids stuck in crappy public schools, the first part of that--"quality"--may seem like a sick joke. But most suburbanites got theirs, and they don't want to risk losing it just so some poor (often read: minority) kids can get some, too. The second part--"how the money is spent"--is, of course, what the unions really understand.

Hershey's, the renown candy company, is controlled by the Hershey Trust, a school for disadvantaged kids. The Chairman of the Hershey Trust is former Pennsylvania Attorney General, LeRoy S. Zimmerman. Says Zimmerman:

The Hershey Trust, which is obligated to manage its assets solely for the benefit of Milton Hershey School, a school for children in need, has made clear it has not been satisfied with the Company's recent results.

Zimmerman became chairman after a previous group of trustees in 2002 voted to sell the Hershey's company to Wrigley's for $12.5 billion. Local Pennsylvania politicians vehemently opposed that takeover, and successfully thwarted it. The trustees that had voted for the takeover were kicked off the board, leaving the trust firmly under the control of people with strong ties to the local community, but without any direct interest in the trust or the company. And now, Zimmerman insists that that trust's "resolve to retain its controlling interest (is) an obligation both of our stewardship, and of Pennsylvania law."

I would think that one's stewardship might involve some concern about the 25 percent premium that Hershey's shares commanded as a result of Wrigley's takeover bid, then lost and never recovered after the bid was scuttled. That's about $3 billion, about $1.2 billion of which is no longer available to those children in need.

Beyond that, Zimmerman's comment is a lie. Trust experts say that Hershey's documents do not stipulate how its assets are to be invested. Basic portfolio theory says that being invested in a single company is just about the least prudent management for the funds of any school. In fact, if they had sold out at any time during or after the Wrigley's bid, for about the next year, and reinvested the proceeds in the S&P 500, the trust would today have been over 50 percentage points better off than with their investment concentrated in Hershey's.

Even before the Wrigley's bid, a Pennsylvania law exempted the Hershey Trust from any duty to diversify its investments. After the failure of that bid, the state passed additional legislation requiring a trust to take into account "the special relationship" and the "economic impact" of any business asset sale "on the community".

Thus, Pennsylvania politicians who effectively control the Hershey trust have proven themselves willing to sacrifice the interests of needy children for the sake of local politics. And now, they get to act outraged about the poor performance of a company they can't manage, but upon whom they all depend.

I think this picture presents a pretty compelling case for why spreading a little more civilization would be a good idea--for someone else to try.

These images will be impossible for the Muslim Council of Britain to overcome no matter what they say. The Sudanese ambassador is whistling in the wind by calling this affair a tempest in a teacup. Politicized Islam, however ugly, is not too different, of course, from politicized Christianity, except for a few centuries of civilization.

I saw this in the WSJ:

Kremlin officials argue that Russian voters are still too tainted by decades of communist rule to be relied on to make responsible choices in the voting booth. "We're a very leftist country that's not the least bit concerned with obeying the law," said one.

At the meeting with foreign analysts in September, Mr. Putin said Russia would need "strong presidential power" for years to come. Parliamentary democracy -- of the type tried in the early 1990s -- would be "very dangerous" for Russia, he said, for at least another decade.

The heretical thought that rarely surfaces is that weakening democracy in favor of markets could be a good thing. No matter what you believe about how well markets work in absolute terms, if democracy starts to look worse, markets start to look better by comparison.

One of the great things about being super-famous is that you have access to certain consumption items not available to the rest of us. One of those cool items is an influential audience for fuzzy ideas that you're still working through. The media will trumpet your ‘on-the-job' learning about philosophical and policy issues as if you have something meaningful to add.

So, it turns out that Bill Gates has been engaging in DIY economics to develop an idea he's calling "creative capitalism." He introduced this term in a Harvard speech last June.

But at the time he had only a "fuzzy" sense of what he meant. To clarify his thinking, he decided to prepare the Davos speech.

On Jan. 1, following a family vacation, Mr. Gates boarded a commercial flight in Auckland, New Zealand, and during the 21-hour, two-layover journey back to Seattle he started writing his speech.

Gates's business success speaks for itself, and he has had a very public life for nearly two decades. I'm sure it's easy for him to see all the ad hominem attacks he's exposing himself to by trying to trumpet a BIG IDEA that has nothing to do with exploiting a monopolistic software standard. He wants to help the world's poor by tinkering with capitalism. Gates has no doubt seen the public eye-rolling every time some celebritard spouts off on policy issues. He knows, even though he's infinitely smarter than your average stage monkey, that he will be called hypocritical, amateur, and naive. Well, I don't have any problem with Bill Gates thinking out loud about global poverty, even if the naive part rings particularly true. I think that any fresh thinking about the problems of the poor should be welcome in light of decades of failure by various public and private groups to help the poor.

My older son sent this video clip to me as a homage, I suppose, to the philosophy of how he was raised (at least his dad's contribution).

The advanced version of this lesson is to combine several of these things into a single activity, like model rocketry. Unfortunately, even that is threatened with being regulated into oblivion.

The stimulus debate rages on. Here is the current level of the debate:

"Every economist will tell you that stimulus spending will get into the economy much quicker than a tax rebate," says Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy, estimates that every dollar spent on extending jobless benefits will generate $1.64 in new economic activity. Income tax rebates, he said, generate $1.26 of economic activity for every dollar they cost the Treasury.

"It is hard to think of a group of Americans who are more likely to spend the marginal dollar than families that have been forced by job loss to scale back their normal standards of living," said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton University economics and public affairs professor.

"Most people find a job in the last two weeks of their unemployment," Gregg said. "That's human nature. They stay on unemployment almost until the end and then they find a job. If you extend it another year, those folks who could be productive, producing a job, creating economic activity by having a job will stay on unemployment even though there may be a job out there that they could take."

Most people are against earmarks, it seems, except those who dish them out.

The political logic of earmarks is impeccable. If you're a Congressman or Senator, there's this big pot of money on the table. If you don't reach into it, others will, and will leave you with nothing. Do you want to be Congressman Can't Bring Home the Bacon? Individually, congressmen may largely agree on the idea of getting rid of pork barrel spending. It would actually make their jobs easier, more ennobling even, to focus on the bigger issues of state than who should get what from the public trough. But the people with the power to change the system are the ones who benefit the most from it. They have the most control over the pork. They are the most adept at using that pork to maintain their power. They indeed grew up in this system of power for money, and frankly wouldn't know what to do if it were drastically changed. So, earmarks are ingrained in our politics.

The economic logic against earmarks is just as impeccable. When a congress-critter proclaims that they secured $500,000 for a new Teapot Museum, their constituents may be thinking, "Do we really need this?" But what many of them are also asking is, "How much money did I send to Washington? If I'm getting this little part of it back, why didn't they just let me keep it and spend it?" In other words, there is probably little to be gained from my congressman spending my tax dollars on some private benefit for me. I'm perfectly capable of paying museum admission, if I'm interested in patronizing. If I'm not, then why I am I being made to pay for it?

Let's not even get into how constitutionally or morally suspect the earmarks process is.

Some people are fooled into thinking that someone else is paying for the goodies that our congressmen "bring home." But any reasonably educated person (as opposed to overeducated, perhaps) knows that it's a little like the person who stole your silverware coming back for a visit bearing a nice gift of a serving fork. Gee, thanks.

Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, that is. We've never hung out, but the Governor strikes me as a decent guy. He's caring, intelligent, and has a sense of humor. His economic literacy, I'm not so sure about that.

Governor Rendell devoted his entire talk last night discussing our infrastructure. He noted that Pennsylvania and the rest of the nation are suffering horribly from deferred maintenance. He had the numbers to prove it. Good enough. But, there was one point he repeatedly brought up:

The states can't do it alone. The states supply 75 percent of the spending on infrastructure, but it's not enough. Ours is the only federal government among the wealthy nations that does so little for its infrastructure. The federal government has to be part of the solution.

Governor, isn't that saying that the taxpayers of Pennsylvania should pay for infrastructure in Alaska, and taxpayers of Alaska should be paying for infrastructure in Pennsylvania? That bargain hasn't worked well for Pennsylvanians in the past.

His answer to the first half would have been shocking if it didn't come from a politician: "The federal government can always find the money." That's right, he literally said "find." The money is out there, the government simply needs to "find" it. Nobody in the room who heard this non-answer seemed surprised. His answer to the second half was barely better: "We'd need to insure accountability in the distribution of such funds via a panel of experts." We know how that works out.

We've continually seen cases of a government agency that has failed using that failure as an excuse for more money and more power. I should name this the MM/MP phenomenon as a short-cut, since it's the most common thing heard from government agencies. The current example is Congress considering expanding the budget and mandate of a Federal Airline Administration that is already largely ineffective and unnecessary.

The main premise of the FAA is that the government cares more about your safety than the airlines that serve you, as if the airlines were indifferent to the prospect of killing some of its customers and frightening the rest away. For anyone who thinks the FAA can do as good a job as the airlines themselves in monitoring safety, consider this comment from someone in a position to compare government versus private airline inspectors:

As a company that is a supplier and maintenance provider to airlines we are frequently audited by both the FAA and the QC departments of airlines. In general the airlines auditors are better, more thorough, and stricter, but at the same time more fair and consistent. Not being restricted to the "letter of the law" they can be flexible in areas where it makes sense and putative on issues that may not be technical failings but would cause problems. The airlines QC departments also act pretty independently and don't seem to mind calling attention to an issue even if they know it will cause delays or hassles on the operations side. The FAA provides more of a bureaucratic hurdle, and from what I see makes decisions as seemingly arbitrary as that traffic cop. We recently had new inspectors for our district rotate in, and now we are enduring shut down threats over procedures that were fine for the previous 4 years under our old inspectors."

Lou Pearlman was given an unusual sentence for defrauding investors of $300 million. He was nominally sentenced to 25 years in prison. However, the judge offered to reduce his sentence by one month for every $1 million Pearlman was able to return to his victims.

I'm not sure what the legal implications of such an offer might be, but the incentive issues are compelling. The first-order incentives are pretty clear: Pearlman has a strong incentive to return most, but not all of the money. Why not all? Because of economic laws, which are not subject to negotiation.

Pearlman is currently 53, so a 25 year sentence pretty much takes up most of his remaining life expectancy. I would bet that if he could buy his way out of that sentence in an all-or-nothing transaction, he would do so at any price. But most economic decisions are at the margin, and this one is one of them. As the sentence gets reduced, the marginal value of each month in prison is likely to go down. For instance, he may well decide that six months in prison is worth $6 million. I probably would. This remains true even if he's resource constrained. For instance, if he only has enough to buy his way out of 15 years, he might still decide that the 121st month is worth an extra million, especially if he's able to realize some returns on that million during the 10 years and a month he'd spend in the slammer.

The second-order incentives are a little more problematic. Regardless of whether Pearlman is resource-constrained or not, he's simply paying for his crime at cost. If I defraud someone of a million, I shouldn't be given the option of giving back that million and calling it even; there should be some extra penalty, either in cash or prison time (except that I personally don't believe in swelling our prisons with non-violent offenders).

Also, is a million per month the right price? Or does the routine fraudster get a lower rate? Maybe it's $100,000 per month for an executive? Or $10,000 per month for Guido? (Hey, I'm just sayin'.) More importantly, how much are prosecutor's going to be selling freedom for? Government agents, like economic agents, will go with what the traffic will bear. So the question won't be, "What is the appropriate price of freedom in this case?" It will be, "How much you got?"

I'm sure there are other considerations besides.

As Ted Kennedy begins his battle with cancer, we're treated with a story about how his work in the Senate may be paying off in the form of his treatment choices:

"It's really hard to think of anyone who's helped biomedical research in this country or the National Institutes of Health more than he has, and hopefully he'll get some benefit from how he's helped others," said Dr. Patrick Wen, clinical director of the Center for Neuro-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

I also hope that Dr. Wen is much better at connecting the dots in his research than he is between his last statement and this one:

Economics comes into play, as well. Simply put, the market for brain cancer drugs pales, compared with that for other malignancies, with only 9,000 people a year in the United States diagnosed with the kind of cancer that has beset Kennedy.

"Because the numbers are relatively small," Wen said, "the incentive to develop drugs for brain tumors is less than for breast cancer or prostate cancer."

The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act, among other things, reduces taxes on lawyers with an offsetting increase in taxes on investment managers and corporations. If that doesn't sound like the kind of bill a Republican would vote for, think again:

Republican Congressman David Hobson supported the bill with the following justification:

“Probably the responsible vote is ‘no,’ but how do you explain that in a media that’s frantic over gasoline prices? Frankly, this has nothing to do with gasoline prices, but you can’t explain it, and it taxes the rich guys,” Hobson said.

It means that he must have thought there was a pony somewhere in the manure pile that was this legislation.

As it turns out, most of this bill was aimed at extending tax breaks to a myriad of industries. Would he be inclined to sup