There's been a penny sitting on the floor outside our bathroom for the past two days.

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“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez While in Scotland I met a guy who said he was from Oxford. Cool, I said, I spent three weeks there when I was 17. I thought about the Pitt Rivers (a legendary museum), and the grass in the quad you weren't supposed to walk on, ever, but those topics were both non-starters. And that was that; really boring, shutting that avenue down and forcing the conversation to restart from the beginning. What could I talk about? Later I was thinking about the didgeridoo guy. Every day I'd see him on Cornmarket Street outside the Tesco wearing dirty, loose-fitting clothes, and bare feet which were callused and caked with dirt. On one foot he had slipped on a sort of tambourine; the other foot had a pedal which beat a gong when pressed; between his legs was a drum, and of course he had a didgeridoo in his mouth. Every fifteen minutes or so he would play; just the didgeridoo at first, in long, slow bursts, luring in the crowd. Then he'd start with the gong and the tambourine, building up to the drums in a frenzied crescendo which could be heard for about three blocks in any direction. Any visitor or local would know exactly who the didgeridoo guy is. Here's video of him on the street. Here's his website (which I checked after recalling the previous paragraph from memory - I think the steel drums are new). So now when someone tells me they're from Oxford, going to Oxford or want to know what it's like, I'm gonna talk about the didgeridoo guy. So when you're trying to relate a great trip you had, a place you've been to, or just find some common ground, find specific good memories. They probably won't come to you right away unless you keep a journal or you're diligent about noticing them.

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Here's Abhijit Banerjee talking about why aid programs fail, even when they have adequate funding:

The real issue is often in program design. Our endlessly repeated line is that details matter infinitely. The difference between successful programs and unsuccessful programs is not the sector, it is how you do it. Has the implementer thought completely about the reasons why a program might not work? In my experience, even when you talk to very competent, well-meaning organizations, that is the step where you see the biggest gap. Perhaps because the paradigms are easily available to jump into, the last mile thinking just doesn’t happen. Details unexpectedly and often in unfortunate ways determine everything. You get the details wrong and you got it all wrong. So we often end up ritualistically talking about big picture research, and how this didn’t work or this did work. But in practice those big picture issues probably do not matter. What matters is that some programs are well designed and some are not. Our goal very much has been to draw attention to the detailing of that. Take water – within water there are any number of special solutions, and then a couple of things that seem like good ideas. The most valuable work is not in distinguishing water from health, but in separating the many meretricious ideas that get lots and lots of coverage and turning them into practical programs that are not overly complicated or unnecessarily expensive. There is a tendency to think, “I have a hammer so everything is a nail.” Everyone has their own particular bias and everything has to go through that filter. Ideology is a huge reason why you get bad design.

Banerjee's colleague Esther Duflo recently won a MacArthur grant. Their lab, the Jameel Poverty Lab at MIT, uses randomized trials to determine which antipoverty programs are actually effective. Hope more people can start doing work like they are. UPDATE: Alex Tabarrok points out that the problems facing Africa today are the same ones they faced in 1938.

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I will be blogging every day from now until Oct. 31. If I don't blog one day, then email me anytime before then and I'll give you a dollar next time I see you.

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Top chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bottom chart from Gallup. Hope they enjoyed the auto bailouts.

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I like The Daily Show. It's probably the closest thing on my TV to actual coverage. I've laughed at the jokes they tell and the hypocrisy they point out in cable news. I'm glad Stewart is willing to take people like Jim Cramer on, even though his show is on Comedy Central. One of their classic bits - which runs pretty much every day - is to run some commentary from cable news, or point out hypocrisy between something Republican commentators say and what they were saying when Bush was in office. Here's an example:

www.thedailyshow.com

This was funny, until I realized that cable news anchors aren't being paid to make sense, have consistent worldviews, tell the truth, or any other things we'd expect from experts. The only reason I thought it was funny is because we expect talking heads to be rational people. Sadly, American cable news viewers don't care for the truth; I think they're more interested in confirming their own worldview and disdaining/getting outraged at whatever the other side's doing. I'm surprised that people are amused by clips that point out hypocrisies in cable news. These bits are funny in the same limited way that Happiest People Ever, Shit My Dad Says and the DC Interns blog are funny; in a very specific way, that's good for about five seconds of laughs. I know this recipe works well for Comedy Central but I'm wondering if Stewart can't evolve his show a little bit. Perhaps I'm demanding too much of someone whose show runs on a comedy channel. I'll part with the video of Stewart ending Tucker Carlson's career on Crossfire.

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I was pretty disappointed by this show. The idea has promise - a divorced, broke, washed up high school football star resorts to prostitution to make ends meet and curry favor with the kids. His pimp is a wannabe poet, an artsy woman who is ill-suited for the smooth talking and innuendo that the job requires. In the hands of semi-competent writers this would lead to comedy gold. Unfortunately, Hung is not very funny. The two main characters keep screwing up the prostitution gig - but in ways that aren't really too funny, like Ray (the main character) falling for a client or Tanya getting suckered into providing free service. His kids are the complete rejection of Ray - out of shape, gothic, unpopular - but I can't really believe them being the dad's children. Furthermore you could tell from the second episode on that the show is setting up for Ray's ex-wife to order his services, there's no real way around it. The show's billed as a comedy, but I fail to see the humor. I should have stopped watching way earlier than I did.

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A sad paragraph of a Rolling Stone piece on the massive failure called War on Drugs:

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 — and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels — doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

This makes much more sense if you consider that the drug czar and other Washington politicians are much more interested in signaling that they are fighting drugs in America than actually doing something about the problem. Until signaling theory hits the mainstream, let's keep throwing money into a giant hole.

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Dean Kamen, defending innovation in healthcare:

The reason 100 years ago everyone could afford their healthcare is because healthcare was a doctor giving you some elixir and telling you you'll be fine. And if it was a cold you would be fine. And if it turns out it was consumption; it was tuberculosis; it was lung cancer—you could still sit there. He'd give you some sympathy, and you'd die. Either way, it's pretty cheap. We now live in a world where technology has triumphed, in many ways, over death. The problem with that is that it's enormously expensive. And big pharmaceutical giants and big medical products companies have stopped working on stuff that could be extraordinary because they know they won't be reimbursed, according to the common standards. We're not only rationing today; we're rationing our future.

I agree with him but add the following points. 1. Healthcare is expensive for two reasons: new treatments and machines are expensive and also doctors are ordering many tests and wasteful care because it's in their incentive to do so. 2. Insurance companies also have tremendous bargaining power, which means they only pay a fraction of what hospitals actually bill them. The result is hospitals bill more and more so the fraction rises. The uninsured actually have to pay the full amounts. I don't regard this as a good thing; see the discussion here. 3. We could keep the incentive for private companies, without patents, by offering large government prizes for innovation in healthcare, say, a $1 trillion prize for a cure for diabetes. Of course, that cure could be massively expensive to implement, but over time things become cheaper. General comments on healthcare: 4. Navarchos summarizes the problems with the current healthcare system very well, in about three paragraphs. If you are confused about what everyone is yelling about, and what Congress wants to fix start there. H/t Matt Steinglass. 5. I agree that our healthcare system has serious flaws but I have serious misgivings about the ability of the Congress to pass a bill that would make things better. There are too many people with a vested interest: insurers, hospitals, the elderly, the unemployed, businesses, etc. Furthermore any bill must address a number of different issues: it must address adverse selection, problems with an employer-based system, more coverage for the uninsured, and cutting expensive and rising costs at hospitals (for the waste reasons above), and we need some way to pay for it. 6. How do you tell a loved one "The treatment to save your life (or, more often, extend it by a few months) exists, but is too expensive?" If you haven't read Peter Singer's New York Times article on rationing yet, you should. I am worried that this problem may bankrupt the country.

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