Quote of the Day

I'll believe corporations are people when Mitt Romney goes to prison for murder.

-----   Venwodb

Qoute of the day

From Karl Smith.

There is no point to using reason if you have already decided what you believe.

This goes pretty much hand-in-hand with my idea that the vast majority of people arrive at their political positions with no regard for facts, data, logic, or any other aspect of reality. 

Post hoc reasoning is just confirming the bias, and that - contra Karl - is the point.

Sunday Music Blogging

Brandi Carlile and the twins at the Mt. Baker Theater, Bellingham, WA. March 19, 2010.



If you have come to expect anything from my Sunday Music offerings, it would certainly not be this.

I'll admit that I never heard of Brandi Carlile or this song until it was featured in this NPR All Things Considered spot.

Then, it became pretty special.




Enjoy.

Recovery Continues at a Ho-Hum Pace

The economy added 227,000 jobs in February.  The overall unemployment rate stayed at 8.3%.

As good news goes, this is pretty weak, but at least it isn't bad news.

This number would have been only average during the Clinton administration, when times were good.  The numbers ought to be much better than that during a recovery.  But we don't have recoveries any more.  This number is not a lot more than what it takes to keep up with population growth.

So, yeah, the economy is growing.  But it's not growing fast enough to do a lot of good, especially when every nickle of income growth goes to the top 50% of the population.

Here's the chart, for the private sector only, from Maddowblog.  OK news.  Nothing exciting.

Has America Lost It's Drive? - Pt. 4

In Part 3 of this series, (at RB, at AB) I wondered a couple of things. 

- With the vehicle/1000 people number in the range of 825 to 845 since 2004, is the market near saturation?
-  Is the January sales number of 14.2 SAAR (seasonally adjusted at annual rate) enough to maintain the vehicle/1000 people number?

For the first question, I have to again credit Roger Chittum for pointing me to this 2007 paper, Vehicle Ownership and Income Growth, Worldwide: 1960-2030, by Dargay, Gately and Sommer (32 page pdf, data through 2002.)  There's a lot to this paper, including projections into the future for vehicle sales and fuel consumption, worldwide.   My immediate interest is in their use of a Gompertz function to estimate vehicle market saturation as a function of per-capita income.

Here is one of their graphs.

 Graph 1  Vehicle/1000 Gompertz Function of Per-Capita Income

Their model indicates flattening above about $30K per year, and leads to a saturation point in the U.S. of about 852 vehicles per 1000 population.  Saturation points for various countries also depend on urbanization and population density.  See the paper for details and background.

This indicates that the U.S market is about 97% saturated, give or take a point.

What does that suggest for vehicle sales going forward?   Karl Smith led off the month pointing to this graph from Calculated Risk, estimating light vehicle SAAR for February at 15.1 million.  With that, on to question 2.
 
I already have the data in hand for vehicles/1000 population (see part 3.)  The data for the Calculated Risk SAAR graph comes from BEA, Table 7.2.5S.  Plotting a scattergram of YoY change in Vehicles/1000 population vs annual average SAAR for the years 1990 to 2009 gives us this picture.  (See notes, below.)

 Graph 2   SAAR and Change in Vehicles/1000 Population

This suggests that the break even point for vehicles per 1000 is right around 14.7 million annual average SAAR.

The official vehicle/1000 numbers are only available up to 2009.  But we have the SAAR data for 2010 and 2011.  Annual average SAAR for 2010 is 11.77; for 2011, it's 13.05.  You probably don't want to take the values suggested by Graph 2 too literally, but seeing the vehicle/1000 number slip to around 815 for 2011 should be a reasonable expectation.  This is still slightly above the 95% saturation level.

Average light vehicle SAAR for the first two months of this year is 14.65 - right at the break even point for vehicles/1000 population.  

 Notes on Graph 2

The red dots represent data for 2001 and 2002.  The SAAR values look reasonable.  The changes in vehicles per 1000/population do not.  An increase of 25 in one year, from 800 to 825, followed by a decrease of 10 in the following year with SAAR, nearly identical (17.46 and 17.15) makes no sense.  An average of the two, plotted for both years as yellow dots, by some odd coincidence, lies exactly on the best fit line.

The R^2 value of .43 is less than stellar, but not terrible.

Eliminating the two questionable points raises R^2 to a respectable .65.

Cross Posted at Angry Bear.

Some Thoughts on Writing

 Here's Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band doing a great old song, Just Friends.




Funny sometimes, how one thing will play into another.  After rehearsal last night we were talking about the horrible job the publisher did with the parts for a terrific Tommy Newsome arrangement of Just Friends, written for Don Severenson and the Tonight Show Orchestra.  It's nothing like the rendition by Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band above, which I included because I like it, and I can't find Newsome's on YouTube.  However, you can listen to a sample here.

The trombone parts are 6 pages long and every page turn but 1 is impossible.  Playing the trombone requires two hands at all times.  Ditto the bass, and the bass player showed me how his part had impossible turns - leading into the most important bass passages.  This type of scoring is lazy, thoughtless, and disrespectful of the musicians who have to deal with it.

The thought the bass player left me with, after some conversation, is that when you write something, you should make it impossible for your reader to misunderstand or misinterpret.  This applies to prose as well as music.   I try to write clearly, but I've never thought about it in quite this way.  The idea applies not only to the mechanics of writing, but also to organizing and presenting your thoughts and maintaining focus in your presentation.

Which reminds me of this criticism I wrote of Tim Worstall's Forbes piece.   There was a lot of commentary at the cross-post at AB, and Worstill had a lot to say there, including, "I am getting really rather mystified at all the people who seem to be so deliberately missing the point I was making," and finally, "To repeat, I am critiquing the use of the insurance model to provide such desired health care: not determining how such desired health care should be provided nor even venturing into the question of whether such health care is desirable or not."  You can read it all over at AB.

Maybe I was too impetuous, and should have read the article I was critiquing more carefully.  Now that I know his point, I can't go back, re-read, and figure out if I would have gleaned more with more care.  But Worstall did not make it impossible for me to misunderstand or misinterpret.

Even before rehearsal, I wrote a comment back to him, containing what I think is some pretty good advice..

 So we learn that, contra the title and the extended quote from Sandra Fluke near the beginning, your article really has nothing to do with either her or Limbaugh, and is only marginally related to contraception.  The real topic, if I understand it correctly now, isn't even the subtleties of insurance vs assurance, but rather idealized health care funding.  So, yeah - I will now freely admit that I missed your point - totally - but it was not deliberate, as you asserted in your first comment.

If you want to have your readers get your point, then, instead of glibly riffing on a current hot topic, I'll suggest that you actually write about whatever it is you are writing about, and not require your readers to either do a click-through to discover the actual topic in a different article, or have a close familiarity with your publication history.  When you put something out in the public sphere, you lose control of what readers are going to make of it, and you can't expect them to know your implied context.  So you need to help them along if you have a specific agenda.  An article that is intended to make some point really needs to not only stand alone, but also explicitly make its central point, without a lot of distracting digressions.

I'll also suggest that you use links to show source data, to corroborate assertions, or provide further reading for whoever might be interested in digging a little deeper, not to illustrate the implied point of the current article.   I had to read your comments here to discover what I think you might have been talking about there.  And my next thought was that your point was the difference between insurance and assurance, though I guess that isn't it, either.

That is not communicating effectively.  When you find yourself mystified by the problem of people misunderstanding what you say, then I'll further suggest that blaming your readers will not move you very far toward a solution.   

Is that harsh?  I can't decide.  I don't know if Worstall read these words.  But I'm going to take them to heart.  I've noticed that people will sometimes ignore the main content of my post, and go down a side track due to a flip comment or marginally relevant value judgment I made.  So - there is a lesson here for me as well.

I hope I'm wise enough to take my own advice.

Insurance and Birth Control

In this Forbes article, Tim Worstall says he agrees with generally available birth control, but questions why health insurance should pay for it.    Specifically he says:  "But I really cannot see the point of trying to have health care insurance which then covers a multitude of treatments that aren’t really insurable matters, contraception being just one of these (regular shots, ‘flu vaccines, general everyday low level treatments in fact)."  This is after he points out that, per Wikipedia, "Insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss."

The first question this prompts in my mind regarding insuring against (unwanted) pregnancy is what loss does that pregnancy entail?  The answer is large measures of personal freedom, hundreds of thousands of dollars in unplanned child-rearing expenses, and quality of life for the potential child resulting from the pregnancy.  These are significant risks, with ramifications for society at large, involving the employability and  productivity (in a purely economic sense) of the involved woman, and her uses of discretionary income.  Furthermore, unwanted children, particularly if the mother is single, are more liable to live in poverty and neglect, suffer from illness and abuse, become delinquent, and develop into adults that are psychologically disturbed, draw welfare, and commit crimes.

So, there are significant personal hardships and costly negative externalities that result form unwanted pregnancies. 

Is it ironic that in the past right-wingers have proposed the forced sterilization of welfare mothers? 

Also, the hormone therapy we call "birth control" has many other preventive medial uses, including controlling endometriosis.  So a focus in the merely contraceptive attributes is misplaced.

Currently, more than half the states mandate that hormonal birth control be included in prescription coverage, and since 1998, this coverage has been included for all federal employees.  There is ample precedent for this coverage, and insurance companies are well equipped to handle it.

Worstall conducts this thought experiment.

 Just to make up some numbers, say that the preferred method costs $30 a month. But that having the contraception covered by insurance will raise the premium by $50 a month. The insurance company does, after all, have certain costs associated with taking the premium then paying it straight back out again to buy the pill. Why would anyone do this? Why not purchase the pill for $30, stiff the insurance company bureaucrats the $20 and spend it on a couple of cocktails at a place where you might meet someone who thinks that your being a contraceptive user is a good idea?

Of course, when you're just making up numbers, its easy to have them suit whatever fell purpose you have in mind.  Suppose a much more realistic $16 per month, and the whole make-believe argument  collapses.

Besides, in terms of brute economics, the insurance company is better off paying for decades of contraception in $30 increments than one avoidable pregnancy at many thousands of dollars, if everything goes smoothly.   Let's just say you can't count on that. 

So far, this has been a basically economic argument.  Now let's look at an issue of fairness and parity.  More than half of the prescription programs cover Viagra.   Need I say more?

Worstall's argument has some logical consistency - he seems opposed to insurance coverage of other types of preventive care.  But this is ignorant and short-sighted.  A flu-shot is less than $25.  An office call is $90 and up.  Prevention, in general,  is cheap, and treatment is expensive.  If cost minimization is your goal, then the clear focus should be on prevention.

Worstall's problem, I think, is in relating contraception to a free-market business model, though, as I have indicated, he isn't even understanding that properly.  The proper focus also includes the high costs of the externalities that he conveniently ignores.

The real root problem though, is in trying to force-fit any health insurance system into a for-profit model.  There is simply no way to reconcile the conflicting goals of profit maximization and providing the needed services.  In fact, there are only three avenues to profit maximization: raise premiums, deny coverage, or emphasize prevention.

Whether this leads to the conclusion that a single payer, government mandated program is the best overall approach is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

 UPDATE: I forgot the great positive externality of contraception - it prevents hundreds of thousands of abortions every year.

Cross posted at Angry Bear.

Sunday Music Blogging

This is dedicated to those unfortunate denizens of Wall Street - street people in a different sense, I suppose - now forced to live on their measly $350,000 per annum regular incomes, since the bonus pool this year is reduced to a paltry $19.7 billion.

I can't say I feel their pain.  “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress."  It's really true.   I have no earthly idea what that must be like.

Maybe this will help.

Andrew Schiff Responds

Since posting this, I found that Ed was left close to speechless, though his commentors had plenty to say.

Andrew Schiff responds.

Does he have a point?  I'll let you decide.

Quote of the Day - Judgement to Rush

Since The Right Wing has no valid intellectual or ethical foundation, they have become dependent on extremism as a technique for communicating with and inciting their base.   Over time, this has, predictably, gotten progressively more extreme.  They are like addicts who have become inured to their drug of choice, and require larger and stronger doses to get the same kick.

The current flap over contraception - which I actually hadn't planned to blog about - is a typical example.  This is an issue that was settled among American Catholics by the mid-60's, and probably a lot earlier for most other people.  This demonstrates how far The Right Wing has had to reach, and how far they are willing to go to find the next contrived weapon in their culture war.

In this context, something absurd and under-the-bottom from the always reliable Rush Limbaugh - the addict of addicts - comes as no surprise.  This time, though, he outdid himself, first calling Georgetown U. Law Student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, then doubling down - as these ass holes always do when they are wrong - which is all the time - by saying she should post the sex videos so we can see them.  I guess he wants the tax-payers who presumably would support the preventive care insurance coverage to, in some sense, get their money's worth.

Here, Ms. Fluke responds.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But that is not the quote of the day.

Commenting on this Think Progress article, Second Advertiser Pulls Out From Limbaugh, Robert Moses says what fellow commenter Chis Williamson calls: "Officially the greatest thing ever written on Facebook in reply to something relating to Rush Limbaugh.:"

Pulling out is not a reliable method of prevention. The only 100% safe method is complete abstinence from advertising on his program.

That, my friends, is the quote of the day.

H/T to the LW.

What the Hell?!? Friday - Shared Sacrifice

Banking and trading revenues were way off in 2011 - whodda thunkit?

This means smaller bonus checks for people like Andrew Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc

 Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.

Wow.  I sure feel his pain.  When I was 46, we had four kids in college.  Two were on scholarships, and two went to very affordable and close-to-home Eastern Michigan U.  Our summer rental was one week at Devil's Lake in Michigan's Irish Hills.  I think It cost about $600 back then.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

Wouldn't it be awful if those kids had to go to a (gasp) public school and rub elbows with - oh, I dunno - maybe my grandchildren?  If they did, then maybe the Rethugs wouldn't be so keen on destroying public education.
 

Wall Street’s cash bonus pool fell by 14 percent last year to $19.7 billion, the lowest since 2008, according to projections by New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. 

“It’s a disaster,” said Ilana Weinstein, chief executive officer of New York-based search firm IDW Group LLC. “The entire construct of compensation has changed.”

Somehow, I have a hard time believing that is a bad thing.

Richard Scheiner, 58, a real-estate investor and hedge-fund manager, said most people on Wall Street don’t save. 

“When their means are cut, they’re stuck,” said Scheiner, whose New York-based hedge fund, Lane Gate Partners LLC, was down about 15 percent last year. “Not so much an issue for me and my wife because we’ve always saved.” 

Scheiner said he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said.

There's a whole lot more misery in the Bloomberg article I linked above.  Go read it if you're hard-hearted enough to indulge yourself in a little schadenfreude.

Maybe I'd feel some sympathy (though, to be honest, since these jokers bring home over a third of a million dollars - a 13x multiple of median income - before bonuses, and spend every god-damned dime of it - probably not) if these people were actually contributing to society, rather than collecting usurious rents for engaging in totally non-value added activities that have distorted and perverted the American economy over the last four decades.

That is just about the span of Adrew Schiff's life.  Pity the poor sap.  He really doesn't know any better.

H/T to the LW

Kerrey On

Former Nebraska Governor (1983-787) and Senator (1989-2001) Bob Kerrey is returning to his home state from New York to again run for the senate seat being vacated by the retirement of Ben Nelson.  The Democratic idea is that he is the only Dem with any chance to win that seat.   Kerrey is staunchly independent, and cannot be expected to toe the party line.  But if he were to replace Nelson, the bluest of blue dogs, that would almost be the equivalent of wining a seat currently held by a Republican - a seat that would almost certainly otherwise go to a Republican.

After a decade-long absence, the people of Nebraska might not embrace Kerrey again.  It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Kerry lost part of one leg during combat in Viet Nam, and received the Medal of Honor,  "For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty."

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell closed his program with this poignant clip of Kerrey, taken when he first won his senate seat.