I’m not a big fan of football analogies in politics (think of former Sen. George Allen absurdly carrying a football wherever he went), but Fran Tarkenton has a good one:
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
This would incentivize mediocrity, not excellence. It is also almost exactly how government-run K-12 schools are structured. Reform ideas that ignore those incentive problems are doomed to fail. Adding some competition to the existing near-monoply would do much to give teachers the same incentive to make the most of their talent that athletes currently enjoy.
Reason‘s Ronald Bailey (CEI’s inaugural Warren Brookes Fellow; a position you can apply for here) reviewed Michael Shermer’s excellent The Believing Brain for The Wall Street Journal. If you don’t feel like reading all 340 pages, Bailey summarizes them well:
Superstitions arise as the result of the spurious identification of patterns. Even pigeons are superstitious. In an experiment where food is delivered randomly, pigeons will note what they were doing when the pellet arrived, such as twirling to the left and then pecking a button, and perform the maneuver over and over until the next pellet arrives. A pigeon rain dance. The behavior is not much different than in the case of a baseball player who forgets to shave one morning, hits a home run a few hours later and then makes it a policy never to shave on game days.
It’s surprising how much of human behavior can be explained by what Shermer calls patternicity and agenticity. Like pigeons, we seek patterns and therefore find them. But we also have the ingrained instinct to believe that some kind of agent has to be behind those patterns: god, a politician, somebody, anybody. Every design must have a designer.
No wonder Hayekian spontaneous order polls so poorly, despite having the benefit of being true. Lessons abound.
CEI Senior Fellow Greg Conko has an excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Greg doesn’t think it’s right that the FDA is denying terminally ill patients access to potentially life-saving treatments.
The latest case in point is a drug called Avastin. It is approved for treating several types of cancer. But the FDA is moving to revoke its approval for treating breast cancer. This has, understandably, upset many breast cancer patients and their doctors.
The heart of the matter is who shall be in charge of treatment decisions. Should it be patients and doctors? Or should the FDA decide for them?
Greg thinks a decentralized approach is better. Different patients will react to the same drug in different ways. A doctor can see if Avastin works or not for a patient, and they can make the right decision from there. The FDA relies on averages and medians for making its approval decisions, ignoring individuals. The trouble with that is, as Greg points out, there is no such thing as an average cancer patient.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Greg about Avastin and the FDA here.
Have a listen here.
CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman talks about how ever-stricter energy efficiency regulations are making washing machines more expensive and less effective than they used to be. Sam recently wrote about the issue for The Wall Street Journal; you can read his article here.
Because I so often write letters — which are not always published — I thought I’d share them here.
Here’s one to the WSJ regarding an editorial this week:
Dear Editor:
Holman Jenkins concludes his editorial regarding the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s new report as nonoffensive, nonexplanatory, and “soft-hitting” (“What Caused the Bubble?” Business World, Jan. 29). While Mr. Jenkins correctly characterizes the report as chiefly political — rather than useful — in nature, FCIC’s account of what caused the crisis is very communicative.
The FCIC quite clearly communicated that the government is still unwilling to stop shifting baselines under investors’ feet. The report did not “say nothing,” as Jenkins suggests. Instead, the report urged investors to maintain their stranglehold on their purse strings.
Investors anticipated that the report would indicate how the government is approaching finance and regulation in this recession era. The Federal Reserve exists for the sole purpose of preventing bubbles. Businessmen want to know: Will leadership confess that the Fed failed utterly to perform its only job, and will the government finally stop subsidizing the boom/bust cycle surrounding that failure?
Bubbles are caused when investors hoard assets in response to government subsidies and bailouts obscuring risk. In times when government action is frequent, costly, and uncertain, investors cannot possibly predict what will come next, which will result in more bubbles.
All information from on high conveys that the period of uncertainty is far from over. As long as no one will admit that the government plays a role in economic risk and incentives, investors cannot trust the government to stop.
Kathryn Ciano
Washington, D.C.
Recent revelations about Microsoft’s internal debate over Internet Explorer’s handling of tracking cookies, as chronicled by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, have prompted harsh criticism from self-described privacy groups, who’ve called on Congress to investigate Microsoft’s actions. But as Jim Harper pointed out in an excellent WSJ essay, Web users stand to lose a great deal if online tracking is squelched by the hand of government. Data gathering on the Internet is largely harmless, and individually targeted advertising coexists with robust privacy safeguards.
Over on AOLNews.com, my colleague Carolyn Homer discusses these privacy tradeoffs, arguing that Microsoft and other Internet firms have a strong incentive to set privacy defaults that align with their users’ preferences. She points out that most consumers are, in practice, quite willing to live with allegedly “pervasive” tracking in exchange for the enormous benefits that targeted advertising makes possible. While many surveys and polls indicate consumers are very worried about their privacy, the actual decisions that consumers make every day tell a very different story (as documented extensively by Berin Szoka). From Carolyn’s piece:
A body of research reveals a sizable disparity between how much people say they value privacy and how willing they are to actually protect it. In a 2003 Duke Law Journal article, Michael Staten and Fred Cate found that fewer than 10 percent of users exercise their right to opt out and share less. Conversely, if given the opposite choice, fewer than 10 percent of users elect to opt in and share more. The vast middle is apparently indifferent.
If consumers were required to affirmatively opt in before sharing data, the Internet’s prevailing advertising-based business model would be decimated. The effectiveness of online advertising in Europe, for example, fell 65 percent after the European Union in 2002 required a blanket opt-in system. For more than a decade, the Internet has thrived on the assumption that most people believe it is a fair trade to receive free content in exchange for viewing ads. Mere advertisements shouldn’t be equated with gross privacy violations.
She goes on to discuss how privacy settings are evolving as consumer preferences adapt to new technologies and firms experiment with new ways to use and collect data. You can read the rest over at the AOL News website.
Maybe there is something to John Edwards’ “Two Americas” conceit after all. Except the warring factions aren’t the haves and have-nots. They are what Steven Malanga calls tax eaters and tax payers. And the two see the world very differently. See this revealing excerpt from today’s WSJ Political Diary (subscription required).
Pollster Scott Rasmussen uses several questions to break down voters demographically, but one of his most original tweaks is to differentiate between those voters he calls the “Political Class” and those he calls “Mainstream Americans.” The “Political Class,” representing about 14% of the electorate, tend to express “trust” in political leaders while rejecting suggestions that government is its own special interest and often works with big business against consumers. In contrast, “Mainstream Americans” represent about 75% of the voting public and identify with or lean toward a more populist skepticism about the intentions and actions of political leaders.
Striking is how the two groups divide on the question of repealing ObamaCare. “Mainstream Americans” support repeal by an overwhelming 73%, while the numbers are almost exactly reversed among the “Political Class,” 72% of whom oppose repeal.
Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Marc Scribner collaborate to bring you Episode 83 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover the ever-growing deficit, the Reagan legacy, Cablevision v. ABC, the RNC’s fundraising strategy and David Paterson on scandal watch.
Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott of the Capital Research Center and technical producer Ryan Young as special guest commentator for Episode 62 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the semi-proposed allegedly not-a-bailout of the newspaper industry, Steven Chu’s condescending views on energy policy and Google’s copyright troubles in France. We then look at the what soaking the rich has done to New York’s finances, Obama’s presence at the UN and a good old fashioned Washington, D.C. corruption scandal.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast 