Mo Ibrahim's good idea is to reward African heads of state that govern well with a $5 million prize upon retirement, and $200K annually for the rest of their lives. I agree that the prize should be bigger, but it seems to me like giving the reward after retirement is a little too far away to really change a potential despot's behavior. Just as there have been a number of studies showing that the severity of a punishment doesn't really affect a criminal's behavior, but the chance of being caught does affect his behavior, the prospect of a far-away reward doesn't really seem likely to motivate an African leader's behavior. I propose the following changes. First, set up a bank account for every African leader, that they can't touch until they retire. Then credit the account when they do well for their countries and debit their account when their countries slide further into corruption. The Ibrahim Prize Foundation produces the Ibrahim Index, a comprehensive measure of every sub-Saharan African country's quality of governance. I say if a leader raises his country's score on the Ibrahim Index by 1 point, he should get $500K. This way the leaders know right away that they're earning positive money, even though they can't touch it until after they leave. I think the eventual amount of money given away will be about the same. After all, if Ibrahim is giving away money, that means leaders are earning the prize and that's a good thing. Is that such a tough idea? It's a huge improvement on the way the prize is currently set up. If you give everyone a bank account their incentive to do good rises dramatically. A large reward far in the future is just that, too far in the future. Between now and then a leader might die, get deposed or earn substantial amounts of money for screwing over his country. This form of bribery is also extraordinarily cheap compared to everything else we're doing, like aid. One problem is that a leader with $0 in his account could just let his country slide dramatically. But that isn't worse than the current situation, and we just start paying him for improvement once he gets the country back to where it was when he started.

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I keep things clean:

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First I write an article for the Forum explaining the controversy behind Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, SuperFreakonomics. Then I read this post on their blog today:

An overwhelming majority of the teachers surveyed associate “traditional” names with positive character traits and non-traditional names with weak performance and bad behavior. The name Kevin has particularly negative connotations; as one teacher wrote, “Kevin is not a name — it’s a diagnosis!”

I guess I am just reinforcing stereotypes.

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In this week's New Yorker, Dana Goodyear has a fascinating profile of James Cameron. The profile is a series of stories about Cameron with some life detail filled in; it leaves you with a very good picture of who Cameron is. Here's Cameron on the making of Terminator:

One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.” Cameron came home and recruited Wisher and Frakes to help him with a storyline centered on the chrome skeleton he had begun to think of as the terminator. He analyzed the common traits of the ten most successful movies of all time: an average person in extraordinary jeopardy was a major trope. His story posited a future when much of Earth has been destroyed in a catastrophic nuclear war; out of the rubble, a race of machines rises up and tries to eliminate the few remaining human beings. To win the war for good, the machines send a cyborg terminator back in time, to 1984 Los Angeles, to kill the woman, Sarah Connor, a waitress at a burger joint who will later give birth to the leader of the human resistance.

Note that Cameron didn't try to reinvent the story; he found some new idea and fit it into a popular trope, in other words, he made a movie that people want to watch. Terminator was, of course, a big hit. I did not know that Schwarzenegger was initially going to be the good guy.

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I have a post up on CMC Forum about California's plan to impose new standards on manufacturers of large televisions. Read and debate.

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Every new car with a dashboard navigation screen has a feature that doesn't let you fiddle with the controls while the car is going over 10 miles per hour. This is annoying but maybe for the best, as if you are trying to punch in an address while driving on the freeway you're not going to be focused on the road. But the safety feature isn't complete, as you can still fiddle with the audio and temperature controls at any speed. My guess is that the car companies know that changing these controls isn't safe but if they banned the controls at high speed there would be a significant backlash from consumers. The most annoying thing is that if you have a passenger in the car, it's logical to assume that the driver can focus on driving while the passenger enters new directions into the nav screen. This division of labor is perfectly safe. And furthermore cars can tell if there's a passenger, because if there's a heavy weight in the front seat and the passenger doesn't have their seatbelt on a blinking light flashes on the dash. Why can't car companies combine those two features so if there's a passenger in the car you can control the nav screen while moving at high speed? That's a pretty simple innovation. Obviously you can hack around it by putting a few watermelons in the front seat or something but people hack around the driving system as it is, by idling along until they've entered in directions, or accelerating all the way to a red light and then braking suddenly, so that they maximize the amount of time they have to punch in directions. Perhaps there's a law against entering in directions while driving over 10 mph but I doubt it.

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Today's must-read article is this report by Democracy Corps summarizing the results of their focus group testing of conservative Republicans and independents. They sampled one group of Republican voters in Georgia and one group of white, non-college voters from Ohio (the independents). To summarize,

these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

The quotes from the Republicans are harrowing; they back up the above conclusion 100%. Obviously the beliefs of any group of voters will sound a little wonky but these people are living in a parallel universe. The Republican politicians' problem is that to win the primary they need to win over these conservative (if conservative is really the right word) voters, but to win the general election they need to win over independents, who have worries about Obama but generally don't believe that he, as the arm of a secret cabal, is going to bring about the ruin of the United States. Furthermore the base believes that most Republican politicians have "sold out" - the only figure they support enthusiastically is Sarah Palin. How can I prove that Obama isn't trying to bring about the destruction of America, that Fox News isn't the only media channel telling "the truth," and that we are not going to become a socialist economy? I'm not sure that I can, with words; think about how hard of a job the evolutionists have, and the science is on their side all the way. But I could with bets; asking someone to put their money where their mouth is is the easiest way to get them to say what they really believe to be true. Perhaps we could ask them to, as Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan suggest, put their money where their mouth is; force them to make specific bets on their political beliefs. If, as they suggest, the rest of America is wrong and uninterested in knowing the truth, there would be a lot of money to be made by betting on a government takeover of other sectors of the economy, or on the growth of GDP, etc. But for a large group of people to be this wrong about the state of things cannot be good for the country at large.

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Via Kottke here is a (two-week-old) Wall Street Journal article about how sports strategy improves relentlessly.

Considered more broadly, Constructal Law may be the closest thing to a grand unified theory for the evolution of sports. In a sports context, the river is the relentless search for the easiest way to score or win more often. In soccer, there is the indefensible through-ball, passed between two defenders to a striker sprinting into open space. In basketball, the two-handed set shot eventually gave way to finding the tallest, fastest players who could jump the highest and dunk.

I've had this thought before; I think that the worst teams that play today could beat the best teams from twenty years ago. Teams adjusting to a rule change resemble a new marketplace; some try out outlandish new things, evaluate their success and the best solution emerges quickly. This is why every team at the Olympics almost exclusively used the pick & roll; when you have shooters and good ballhandlers it's close to impossible to prevent a team from getting a good shot. Furthermore this is why the referee's decision to award penalty kicks has taken on an increased importance in soccer, and diving has become such a problem; free goals are few and far between, so it's worth taking a risk to earn one. Sometimes the efficient outcome in a sport makes the resulting game pretty ugly. That's when rulemakers have to step in and change things. Twenty years from now I hope people will be embarrassed at how many football coaches punted and kicked one-point PAT's, and how many baseball teams used sacrifice flies and sacrifice bunts.

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I've started reading books in the middle, rather than at the beginning. When you have a lot of books it's a quicker way to get to interesting material. Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. If you enjoy learning, you're not a typical student. Willingham surveys child psychology and teaching literature to come up with seven arguments. Along the way he demolishes the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory of learning. I never really understood how kinesthetic learners were supposed to grasp philosophy anyway. Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). This has been covered by other people, but it's still good. Vanderbilt uses traffic as a launching point for a host of interesting discussions, like coordination problems caused by real-time traffic software and how to make people pay more attention to the road. Recommended reading for Southern California drivers. Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Finally, the library delivered a copy. Cowen defends autism and explains that the autistic cognitive style is prized by our society; he points to nobelist Vernon Smith, for example, who has come forward as a self-diagnosed Asperger's child. Like David Gordon I wonder if Cowen is painting too wide of a brushstroke. Cowen also jumps from argument to argument, rarely spending too much time on any one topic, which may be a blogging tendency but which I don't like too much in a book. All in all I thought it was very good. Steven Skiena, Calculated Bets. Skiena is a computer science geek who has had a lifelong fascination with jai-alai; in this book he shares details of his quest to make money betting on jai-alai. In short, yes you can make money, but you can't make very much, as only about $15,000 gets wagered on any game and if you bet too much you start changing the odds. Unfortunately his strategy involved making bets on specific trifecta combinations, which means that although horse racing is also a pari-mutuel game, the techniques don't cross over. Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. I was fairly disappointed by this book. Although I don't know what a travel book should say besides, "Start traveling." Benoit Mandelbrot, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. Mandelbrot is a Nobel prize winner who thinks that modern portfolio theory is not a good model to explain market movements. Check and check. The first half outlines the history of modern portfolio theory and the problems with the model, and the second half explores his neat work with fractals and market price movements.

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Often when someone delivers a devastating critique of an industry or particular policy issue, like healthcare, the immediate follow up question is, “Well, you seem smart, what should we do about it then?” From my experience most of the time this question is asked like a layperson would to a shaman, but the answers generally lack insight. And this strikes me as a very tribal, ask-the-wiseman approach to the issue. Now that the speaker’s presented the analysis, we should all be equally likely to implement the correct solution. Or should we?

If you think you have an excellent solution, how would you display your bona fides? One way would be to present a great diagnosis of the problem. But I think good solutions are few and far between.

From this post on government expansion by Robert Higgs.

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