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Using social relationships as leverage, in Washington

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My favorite post from today comes from Ezra Klein, a blogger for the Washington Post, speaking about healthcare ("It's Not the Money, It's the Relationships"). The healthcare industry snaps up Senate Finance committee aides as soon as they retire, so that they can lobby for the industry. Because we are social creatures this makes for very effective lobbying, because we can't turn down our friends or refuse their calls.
The graphic is attached to this article, where we learn that the industry is spending $1.4 million a day to lobby Congress and is doing so with the help of a raft of onetime insiders. At times, the efforts at influence peddling border on the comic: One June 10 meeting saw Max Baucus's aides sitting down with two of Max Baucus's former chiefs of staff, who were representing different groupings of health-care industry interests. ... Refusing to return the calls of favored staffers and colleagues goes against every social grain in our bodies. It should be easy to separate professional responsibilities and personal feelings. But it isn't. ... One of the secrets about lobbying in Washington is that money doesn't buy access. It buys people who already have access. And that makes it much more insidious.
Maybe we should subsidize former aides to work in any field but lobbying. A ban on lobbying for a non-trivial period of time (e.g. longer than 2 years) would also be nice.

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Photo: Scoreboard at AT&T Park

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The Giants upgraded to a full-color, huge scoreboard two years ago. It's the best scoreboard I've ever seen, in terms of size, clarity, and content. This was the best photo that I could find (by the way, Flickr is much better than Google for finding photos). For the team that's up (the Dodgers) they also have in scorebook notation what happened to each of the batters that inning (double, 5-3, F8 etc). Photo credit:

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Should laptops come with Internet built in?

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Why can I get internet anywhere on my phone but not my laptop? As in, why do phones have Internet built in before laptops do? Laptops are a more expensive, sophisticated product and if they can stick a mobile Internet thingy inside a laptop. Internet dongles for a laptop cost about $60 per month, much more than for phones, which cost about $30 per month for unlimited use. 1) We pay for phones on a monthly basis, but we pay a flat fee for laptops. Mobile internet requires a monthly fee. 10 years of internet service up-front would add about $3100 to the cost of a laptop. 2) We are more likely to use our laptops in areas with a wireless signal, like our house or workplace. We don't use them so much on the go. I expect that just as air conditioning used to be a luxury item in cars and now it's a staple, Internet in phones will do the same, followed by Internet in laptops, as the electronics become cheaper relative to the cost of the device.

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Gethuman.com is down

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I am not sure why but if you try to go to gethuman.com, it no longer displays useful information about company customer service numbers but instead the homepage for Paul English, who founded the site. Google's cache of the page still works.

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Is there any more self-serving, harmful group in the US than teachers unions?

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Nearly every public school teacher in the USA belongs to a teachers' union. The unions have big lobbies in Congress, and donate lots of money to legislators, so they are favorable to the union agenda, which happens to be, keeping current members of the union employed. The teachers unions are responsible for laws that make it extremely difficult to fire teachers who receive tenure, and it only takes teachers two years to be granted tenure in most states. They also require that new teachers get certification, increasing the cost of entering the profession, even though education degrees have little effect on teacher performance. They are also responsible for a pay structure which rewards teachers for getting college degrees and for experience, neither of which correlates very well with teaching success. They oppose school choice, which would allow more parents to send their children to private school (or neighboring public schools) and provide competition for the public school system. The end result is that the teaching profession is resistant to any force which would make it better. In part because successful teachers are not rewarded, mediocre teachers are comfortable and there's no incentive to improve performance anywhere. The obvious losers are the kids, especially poor kids, who are receiving a worse education than they could get, and dropping out of high school in large numbers (the nationwide graduation rate in 2006 was 69.2). I'm not saying that we can get students to like school if we encourage better teaching (our brains are not designed for thinking), but we might be able to improve on the percentage of Americans that can accurately summarize data from a table (currently, 11%), compete in the modern workforce, and lift themselves onto a higher income track. The teachers unions will tell you they support "education," but that's wrong - they only support education as much as it helps keeps union teachers in jobs. That's why unions exist. So when the new head of the Education Department, Arne Duncan, gives a speech to one of the largest teachers' unions in the country, making the tiniest hints at positive steps we can make, to improve our nation's education system and give our kids, and other people's kids, a more prosperous future. The LA Times article included these gems:
A group in the California section of the audience booed loudly when Duncan praised Green Dot Public Schools, which independently operates more than a dozen schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District with union contracts.
Green Dot has increased attendance at its schools, made its campuses more safe, boosted graduation and college attendance rates, and standardized test scores. The founder, Steve Barr, "has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools," resulting in Green Dot's takeover, and subsequent improvement of, a horrible Los Angeles high school. Not to mention that Green Dot is one of the only independent school systems that actually uses unionized teachers. But rather than use their success as a model for our own failing schools, let's boo and hiss.
Not that the crowd was won over Thursday. "Quite frankly, merit pay is union-busting," said one educator to loud applause during the question-and-answer period.
I agree that merit pay is union busting. But if you're a good teacher, what is there to be afraid of? And why isn't the half of the teacher union that contains good teachers saying, "Yes let's have merit pay, please! I want to get paid what I'm worth!" Union members are not dumb; it's an easy mistake to accuse people that you disagree with as lacking in general intelligence. They've found excellent ways to protect their members, ensuring they have good benefits, high salaries, and protection against getting fired. It's natural for them to continue to protect their interest, and even to develop rationalizations for why teachers union policies are good for the country, and for education in general. But reading about the reaction to Arne Duncan's speech makes me feel sick to my stomach. He's trying to help, but faces massive opposition from dinosaurs like the teachers unions. Let's hope they go extinct soon. Update: Here is another example of how unions are bad for students; a union in Massachusetts voted to turn down an $860,000 grant, to help students improve their AP scores, because some teachers would have been paid more than others. I cannot believe that we as a country tolerate this sort of behavior.

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Top 5 food combinations

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This topic arose while we were dipping delicious homemade cookies into whole fat milk - the best 5 food combinations of all time. The rules are that the foods have to be enjoyable alone but much better together (so, PBJ was out because no one eats plain peanut butter, etc). The list is American-centric but, in no particular order: Chicken and waffles Wine and cheese Pizza and beer Bacon and anything Cookies and milk What do you think?

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Two formerly analog products in need of innovation

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Every address on the Internet has an associated IP address, a series of four numbers connected by three periods. For example, Google owns the range of IPs from 74.125.0.0 to 74.125.255.255. Typing the IP address into your user bar works - try it by typing 74.125.1.1 into your address bar, and the Google homepage comes up. We could browse the Internet this way, but it's a really crappy way to browse - it would be harder to remember web addresses if they were all numbers and harder for companies to advertise - they'd have to focus really hard on getting you to remember their IP address. And yet this is something that we do with phone numbers every day. Once upon a time, phone numbers were analog - you had to dial '1' before a non-local call, so the router knew where to send the call - and the second digit of the area code had to be '1' or '0,' while the second digit of the exchange (the middle set of 3 numbers in a 10 digit number) was never '0' or '1' so the phone company could send your call. But now, everyone has mobile phone numbers, and it's just as easy to dial New York from a mobile phone as it is to dial my next door neighbor. I can also send text messages to crazy numbers like 37523, like Verizon wanted me to do to enter some contest at the Oakland A's game on Saturday. My point is, why are we still using the actual numbers? Why can't we use screen names, which everyone agrees stand for a number, like we do with IP addresses? How much easier would it be to, instead of writing down your number at a bar, to say, Call me at "kevinburke"? Or for businesses to say, Dial "Verizon" or "James Sokolove" - a simple message at the end of their ads? We have a small attempt at this by bundling letters together on the keyboard (for example dial 1-800-FLOWERS), but when three letters are bundled together there are way fewer combinations, and the combinations have to be exactly seven characters long. One potential problem is this makes personal phone numbers much easier to remember and dial - your ex girlfriends and enemies would always know your screen name. On a related note, digital cable and satellite companies still make you browse channels in their linear order, and remember that 038 means ESPN and 551 is HBO, with 200 channels in between that I never watch. That's lunacy. I don't watch more than ten channels - let me assign my favorites and arrange them on the screen horizontally as well as vertically, like the new Safari 4 homepage. This would make browsing a snap (although the cable companies may arrange the channels as they do to protect bundling their cable packages instead of offering a la carte channels). Anyway, digital companies should embrace the freedom that new technology gives them.

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Six budget proposals for the California government

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The California government faces a $24 billion dollar shortfall. Here are some sensible proposals for helping cut the budget deficit, that will never happen.

#1. Charge market prices for utilities like water and electricity. Every other year, the State goes through a water shortage, or blackouts, because the state keeps the price of electricity and water artificially low, encouraging wasteful uses for water, like maintaining golf courses in Palm Springs. If utilities were allowed to charge market prices for water, gas and electricity, we would never have shortages, the state could raise more revenue from taxes, and consumers would make smarter decisions about consumption of resources.

#2. Allow companies to sponsor government things. People are used to sponsorships and advertisements – hence Oracle Arena in Oakland, giant billboards lining 101 in SF, even the school I attend, named for Donald McKenna. Why not allow companies to sponsor government operations? The MTA in New York is trying to sell naming rights to a subway stop, which, in an ideal world they would not have to do but should, because that gives them more revenue. California should consider the same. Unfortunately, CCSF just tried to let people sponsor courses that were about to be canceled, but the Board of Trustees is considering canceling the plan, which, in my opinion, is such a stupid decision to be grounds for throwing all of them out.

#3. Let public transit sink or swim. Public transit is, around the world, a money pit. In California less than 1% of all trips are made on public transit. Furthermore, subsidies for public transit average about 45 cents per passenger mile, while federal subsidies for highways average about 0.1 to 0.3 cents per passenger mile, which is not even a close comparison. With subsidies making up so much of public transit’s budget, their routes and ideas for new lines are political decisions – a Congressman wants the public transit to run to his district, or his mom’s house, etc. Furthermore, the subsidies make it impossible for private transit and bus companies to compete with public lines. Giant subsidies for public transit also mean that more money gets spent out of general transportation funds for public transit, rather than for highways, which are much more efficient.

I believe the government should let BART, Muni, LA Metro and the other lines to become nonprofit groups, responsible for raising revenue to match their costs. Then these companies would be forced to make business decisions – raise prices or close down lines that are unprofitable and focus on the lines that are making money. They would not build two new stations less than a mile from each other within five years, like they just did in Dublin/Pleasanton. The companies would have to figure out ways to keep worker salaries manageable. And the state would not have to subsidize these companies any more. 

(A quick caveat: BART is one of the best-run public transit companies in the country. And by best-run, I mean that people actually want to ride it, for the most part. In that case, it shouldn’t have much of an issue surviving without subsidy).

#4. Legalize and heavily tax marijuana. I don’t have much to add to this discussion, although the consumer benefit would far outstrip the revenue for the state. If you want to discourage something, tax it heavily – don’t ban it! The street price of marijuana is higher than it would be if it was illegal. All of the profits go to drug dealers, who use the money to invest in growing marijuana, which makes our ban part of the reason that the problem will never go away.

#5. Charge people fees for driving on the freeway. Traffic jams are terrible for three reasons. They waste time (and increase stress) for everyone that drives through them, they increase pollution, and they cause the whole region to become less desirable, because it takes longer to go places. This is because it’s free to drive on the highways, so everyone does, and everyone does so at times that are convenient for them, leading to massive backups. If it cost money to drive on the roads during peak use hours, people would reconsider their driving habits.

When London introduced congestion pricing earlier in the year, charging a fee for driving in the city center, overall traffic fell about 17 percent, but congestion fell 30 percent. My favorite example is SR 91 in Orange County, which was built by a private company because the regular highway was chock full of traffic but the local government had no money to build a new highway. There is no congestion on SR 91, because if there were traffic jams, fewer cars would pass through the toll plazas and the company would make less money. When there’s an accident, the company quickly sends a crew to move the car to the side of the road, to keep the cars flowing. While these services cost drivers in cash, they save money in time and frustration, because the highway is not congested. The state could sell off sections of highway to private firms, like the city of Chicago did with the Chicago Skyway (an immediate $1.8 billion cash inflow). Competition would ensure the tolls reflected the costs of maintaining and operating the highways.

#6. Raise sales taxes on socially damaging products. Alcohol served at bars (which leads to drunk driving), cigarettes (health problems, secondhand smoke), gasoline (pollution), fast food (obesity and other health issues), bullets not used on hunting grounds or firing ranges (which lead to murder, accidental discharge, etc), fall into the category of products which, when consumed, impose a cost on the public at large.

 

Most economists would support these proposals, but they will use the rest of their breath to tell you that most of these are regressive taxes. Higher costs for gasoline, transit, and utilities will hurt poor people more than they will rich people. This could be offset by a decrease in the income tax for the poor (a greater incentive to work) and an increase in income taxes on the rich, who have enjoyed historically low income taxes.

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Here – you throw this away

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Many students promote their events by handing out colorful flyers outside student dining halls. Most students will do anything to avoid taking one; successful defenses include mumbling, faking a cellphone conversation, or staring at the ground, essentially the same tactics people use when the homeless ask for money. While I don't often give money to the homeless I always take flyers for three reasons. 1. Most students hand out flyers within easy reach of a trash can - a tactical mistake. My time isn't worth very much either, which makes the cost of taking a flyer low. 2. The odds I will be interested in following up are low, but the potential benefit is large. Flyers expose you to a wider range of activities than normal, like reading a newspaper. 3. If you've ever had to hand out flyers, especially at a large school you know how soul crushing it can be to see people refuse to look you in the eye and ignore you. By taking a flyer or looking interested you can give a person a big boost.

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