Author Archives: kevin

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An attempt to quantify my mood: the Kevin Burke Happiness Score

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Here's an estimate. These are in no particular order. Baseline: Is it November through February? Yes: -5 points No: 0 points Am I in Claremont or Philadelphia on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday? Yes: -5 points No: 0 points Am I in a foreign country? Yes: +10 points No: 0 points Is the sun currently shining? Yes: +2 points No: 0 points Am I dating? Yes: +10 points No: 0 points Actions which reflect my mood: Did I sleep 10+ hours the night before? Yes: -10 points No: 0 points Where did I sleep last night? Bed: 0 points Couch: -7 points Public Place: -30 points How many times did I hit the snooze button? None - hopped right out: +20 points 1-4 times: 0 points At least an hour: -15 points Am I appropriately dressed? Yes: +5 points No: -5 points Is my RSS reader empty? Yes: -10 points No: 0 points Do my friends know where I am? Yes: 0 points No: -10 points Did I skip breakfast? Yes: -15 points No: 0 points Did I finish my homework? Yes: 0 points No: -8 points Where and with whom did I eat? Alone: -15 points for each With friends: +10 points for each New restaurant: +10 points Events which change my mood: Have I exercised today? Yes: +15 points No: 0 points Have I talked on the phone for more than 20 minutes today? Yes: -10 points No: 0 points What am I listening to? New song: +10 points Whatever's stuck in my head: +5 points Old song: +3 points Nothing: -3 points Have I competed in a game today (board game or real life)? Yes: +8 points No: 0 points How many people are standing around? 1 other person I don't know that well: +15 points Up to 6 people, all of whom are close friends or family: +5 points per person 2 or more people, at least some of whom are not close friends: -5 points per person Did I receive any gold stars: an honest compliment, an unexpected text message, an invitation, or a good test/essay grade? Yes: +15 points No: 0 points How many drinks have I had today? None: 0 points 1-3: +5 points 4 or more: -10 points Did I get into a flow today? Computer code: +5 points per hour Blogging: +3 points Score: 60+ points: You are currently conversing with one happy dude. 20 to 60 points: I am in a pretty good mood. -20 to 20 points: Average day. -60 to -20 points: I could use a pick me up, but left alone I'll bounce back tomorrow or within a few hours. Worse than -50 points: Houston, we have a problem.

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Sign of the times

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'Only one movie on the [top 20 grossing in the 2000's] list was made from an original screenplay: Finding Nemo...the rest are all sequels or adapted from books, TV shows, amusement park rides, etc. Out of the top 50, only ten are not franchise films." Via Kottke.

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Nelson Lichtenstein

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I saw Mr. Lichtenstein the other night at the Ath. Liechtenstein wrote a book on Walmart slamming the company for their labor policies, low wages and more. For someone who spent so long around the company that's perhaps taken more advantage of global economics than any other, I was a little surprised to see that he himself did not have a firm grasp on economics. Yes, Walmart pays it workers low wages, and yes, they have probably done some things in the past that they shouldn't be too proud of. But if they paid their workers more, they'd either employ fewer workers or they would have higher prices. When we look at a company like McDonalds, it's very clear that the workers there are going to be paid really horrible salaries, because the whole point of fast food is to deliver cheap, good food. That's why people go there. And while the wages are low, and my dad used to point to the McDonalds workers as examples of jobs I could get if I didn't work hard in school, not very many people think that this is a gross injustice. If McDonalds paid more for workers, Big Macs would cost more, or people would have to wait longer for their food because they would be hiring less workers. Either of these things would shift more business to Burger King or In n Out. Well Walmart is like a retail McDonalds. The reason they have such good sales is because they have the lowest prices in the business. They focus relentlessly on cutting costs and passing most of those savings to the consumer. I got used to Target's prices, and then I went to Walmart the other day and their prices are way lower than Target's. Holy cow. My guess is that you can't have absurdly low prices and pay the workers a 'decent' amount. On the flipside, low prices leave all Americans better off, including Walmart workers and especially poor people, who have to spend less of their income on consumer goods because everything's so damn cheap. Furthermore, Walmart's success has enabled it to flourish and employ over 1 million employees in the United States. The pay might be crappy for those workers but it's better than no job. Also if a Walmart employee doesn't like their job they are free to leave, and many do. Sure they may occasionally work overtime for no pay, but if there was a better opportunity for them in the market, besides unemployment, they would take it. Low wages aren't extortion, they're a sign of the market clearing price for a job that isn't too difficult. Is there an equilibrium where Walmart pays a smaller number of workers higher wages, with less turnover, like at Costco? Maybe. My guess is that Walmart would move there if it could, and keep the same low prices and level of service.

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Drinking

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I have a new post up at CMCForum about how the school's attempts to cut down on the amount students drink will probably fail. I used some ideas from evolutionary biology and sociology to get to the punchline. The reaction is more or less what I expected; most people reading the article haven't heard that kind of an argument before. Moreover it's not really very nice to imply that people are all competing with each other, and some people have higher status than others. Hopefully I've made at least a few people think.

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Links for today

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mises For people earning less than $40,000 per year, the marginal tax rate is above 100%. This means that as people earn more money (but still less than $40,000), they actually get taxed more than the extra amount they are earning. This happens because SCHIP and other programs have discounts for people that phase out at certain incomes. The implication is that if you are earning close to $40,000, you are just as well off earning less money as you are earning more. From the Guardian, a whistleblower at the IAEA reports that the organization has overestimated the amount of oil still in the ground. This is in line with the David Rutledge talk I saw earlier this year, where he fit a curve to past oil production to show that the IAEA and the IPCC's estimates of oil in the ground were way too optimistic. If there's less oil in the ground, then there's less energy to burn and carbon dioxide to fill the atmosphere, implying that global warming models may overstate the problem. While global warming may be less of a problem, if we've already hit peak oil our economies are going to hit a wall when demand for oil vastly exceeds supply, which will be a much larger headache than a few-degree rise in world temperature. Here's a profile of food critic Jonathan Gold (subscription, or LexisNexis required). I hope to eat at some of the restaurants he found soon (and maybe try to get him to come to the Ath!) Here are 99 restaurants in LA that Gold recommended. I save interesting links I read on delicious.com. These show up in the "Recent Saved Links" bar to the right. You can also subscribe to them in RSS.

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Location, location, location

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In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam during a period of 30 days. 100% of those who said where and when they were going to do it completed the exam. Only 53% of the others did. In another study, drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay before 5 p.m. on a certain day. 80% of those who said when and where they would write the essay completed it. None of the others did.
From the Harvard School of Business blog.

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All of your discussion of public policy is pointless.

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Everyone, myself included, spends way too much time arguing about the optimal public policy and far too little time arguing about how to actually implement it. Robert Higgs at the Beacon wrote a piece a week ago explaining that, while he's excellent at explaining why the government is growing, he doesn't have a clue how to do anything about it (this is a common question asked to people who offer a devastating critique of the way things are). He received lots of pushback, so he wrote another post today explaining why reducing the size of government is such a difficult problem:
If one chooses the direct political option, where does one get the financing for it? Who will organize it? Who will lead it? What actions will it take? Will it try to place sympathetic candidates on the ballot for election to Congress? Will it attempt to influence sitting members of Congress by bribing them with campaign contributions or by threatening to recruit constituents to vote against them in the next election? My point is that once we select a specific means of stopping or slowing the government’s growth, an endless series of follow-up questions presents itself, as we encounter one problem after another, each of which must be solved successfully if we are to make headway. No doubt the greatest obstacle of all to any such effort is that thousands of organizations are currently working, directly or indirectly, to promote further growth of government. A 2005 article in the Washington Post placed the number of registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., at more than 34,750 and reported that their business was booming, creating “a gold rush on K Street.” Many of them have well-equipped offices, large capable staffs, including legions of lawyers, and established connections with incumbents in Congress, regulatory agencies, and other government offices, not to mention their friends on the courts. They also have millions upon millions of dollars to pour into their efforts to win friends and influence people, including the same mass electorate that an anti-Fed or other anti-government-growth political movement presumably seeks to influence. At this point in the historical process, anti-Fed proponents face a fabulously wealthy, tightly connected, deeply entrenched conglomeration of opponents who would sooner confine you, me, and all our friends and relatives at Guantanamo for nonstop torture than give up the Fed, which has long served, and continues to serve, their interests exceedingly well. So, yes, we can try to mount a political movement to abolish the Fed, but, given what we are up against, what chance of success do we really have? One in a thousand? One in a million?
If you view politics as a constantly evolving game, the current lobbyists and congressmen are the fittest contestants found so far. The winning strategy, up to this point, is a) to borrow from our children without any conception of how to pay back what we owe, and b) to favor specific interest groups, like seniors or the UAW, over the interests of the nation as a whole. These aren't new ideas; Madison and Hamilton discuss them in the Federalist Papers. The difference is that federal spending is now a behemoth. growth That's federal spending as a proportion of GDP. States tack on more spending on top of that. Over half of the money you earn is spent by people other than yourself. Furthermore, we're nowhere near any sort of responsible talk about how to pay for everything. Republicans - who are every day marching further down the road to becoming a regional party with two goals, discrimination against gays and no new taxes, balk at any strategy involving higher taxes and offer no realistic plans to cut the budget. Congress has a great opportunity to help close the budget deficit by allowing the Bush tax cuts to sunset at the end of next year, but in the teeth of a recession, and powerful lobbies I doubt this will actually occur. So we can sit around in the dorm or teatime at the Ath and discuss optimal public policy until three in the morning, and even get the world of rational people to call your policy 100% optimal - if you don't have a plan to implement the policy you're no closer to a solution than those guys on the street corner yelling that the world is going to end. Because if a politician turns his back on his party to "do the right thing," not only is she risking her seat but she's risking her relations with her friends, who are mainly other politicians and lobbyists. It's sad that peer pressure has an effect on our Congress, but it does. Right now the people that want government to provide solutions, especially without knowing how to pay for them are the winners, and anyone else needs first to figure out how to get their foot in the door.

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More news from the department of worry

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A report in New Scientist slams our worship of IQ. Money quote:
The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands.
Paul Graham thinks that persistence is more important. Coaching at Excel, with 200 kids per week distinguishing themselves for better or worse, has made me believe the same.

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Dogs and pigs: a double standard

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On the theme of animal suffering, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote an op-ed about eating dogs.
Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire? Our taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us. [...] Responding to factory farming calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information. We know what we see on undercover videos of factory farms and slaughterhouses is wrong. (There are those who will defend a system that allows for occasional animal cruelty, but no one defends the cruelty, itself.) And despite it being entirely reasonable, the case for eating dogs is likely repulsive to just about every reader of this paper. The instinct comes before our reason, and is more important.
I am not ready to give up meat (yet) nor am I ready to begin eating dog. I'm troubled, but am I bothered enough to do something about it? At the margin, my consumption of meat isn't changing much. Is it enough to say that I'll support higher taxes on meat, and the end of feed subsidies? As a vegetarian you might say that if everyone followed your stance then the horrible treatment of animals would end. But I can argue in turn that if everyone supported higher taxes on meat and the end of feed subsidies, then those problems would also be highly mitigated. In the end, I don't think my opinion or my stance matters very much. After a decade of being the pickiest eater in the family I'm now the most adventurous. My brother and sister are both vegetarians, which is great for them.

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Evaluation of my writing experiment

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Back on September 27th I made a promise to write at least one post a day between now and Halloween. It's been a fantastic success. When you write every day there's no pressure to "come back" with a really good post; you just write about whatever's on your mind. Also, getting in the habit of writing leads you to start reading things with an eye on writing about them; lots of times I'd write three or four posts and schedule them for consecutive days. I've also started writing for CMCForum which has about fifty times as much traffic. In three weeks I've written more posts there than any other author this semester; I would attribute this to making writing a habit and also not being as busy as many other students. I hope to keep writing every day going forward.

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