This tournament has had fewer upsets than any tournament up to this point - all of the top 12 seeds advanced, as well as two #4 seeds and a #5 seed. Note that if you want to have all of the higher seeds advance you'd make the difference between seeds constant in the bracket, not the sum of the seeds of the teams playing. Right now the second round is 1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, 3 vs. 6 etc. - all of these games sum to 9. But if you wanted the higher seeds to all win, you'd have 1 vs. 5, 2 vs. 6, and 4 vs. 8 - a constant difference of 4 seeds. The committee could accomplish this by mistake by making the 7 and 8 seeds stronger and the 5 and the 6 seeds weaker, although I don't see evidence that they did this. The NCAA Tournament is bound to have good games, it's just a matter of when - a lot of upsets in the first weekend means that the second weekend will have the top seeds sweeping up in the second weekend. I'm hoping the games this weekend are excellent.

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$165 million is about 50 cents for every man, woman and child in the USA. $170 billion is $500 for every man, woman and child. We just don't have the mental tools to grasp these sorts of numbers.

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Today Bernard Madoff plead guilty to eleven charges of fraud. He said he never invested the money, instead he placed it in a Chase Manhattan account and paid clients out of that. So, maybe when clients withdrew money you paid them with a fraction of what later clients gave you. And you're getting close to zero return, as opposed to the constant single digit return Madoff's clients were allegedly receiving. But most of the money should still be there; if it was put in the bank as he said. Madoff made these statements today in front of a judge, which puts a higher price on a lie. By all accounts Madoff was not a flashy guy. Rich but not flashy; perhaps he spent $1 billion of the $50 billion investment on himself and his family. So what happened to the money? Were the initial investors repaid in full? Is it right to take money from them and distribute it evenly among Madoff's clients?

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Here are two stories from the Book of Judges.

Judges, Chapter 19: A Levite and his concubine are traveling in a strange country. An old man in Gibeah, a town of Israelites, offers them shelter for the night. A mob comes upon the house and demands the housekeeper give up the Levite, so that they can sodomize and rape him. Just like the story of Lot, the old man offers his virgin daughter first, but this doesn't get the mob's goat, so the Levite offers his concubine. This time there's no intervention from God or angels, and the mob takes the concubine and rapes her all night long. The Levite awakes in the morning to find his concubine "fallen down" at the door of the house. He says "Up, and let us be going." She dies, so he props her body on the back of an ass for the ride home. Upon reaching home, he cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends "her into all the coasts of Israel," so that they'll want to get revenge too. Chapter 20 details the revenge against the offending tribe.

Why is this story in the Bible? What lesson are we supposed to take from this story (or in the words of our professor, how shoud one write a midrash about this story)? This is eight chapters after Judges 11, similar to the Abraham-Isaac story, except in this chapter the father actually sacrifices his child.

For more on the Bible read David Plotz's excellent series for Slate.

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Here's a look at futures contracts on house prices, in today's NYT:

Here's a look at house prices divided by median family income:

I'm short housing futures...

Hat tip in both cases to Big Picture.

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Public trusts spend a lot of time and money trying to get us to change our behavior with regard to smoking, gambling, drunk driving and other vices. I believe that most of these ads are ineffective, because they don't frame the issue in a way that people can relate.

Most people think of themselves as moral, upstanding citizens, the same way most people think that they are above average in attractiveness, intelligence, driving skill and other categories. It's good for our mental health that we think of ourselves in a positive way.

The problem with drunk driving ads and DARE programs, etc. is that they present drunk driving as a good vs. evil narrative. But when most people think of themselves as good then they reject the ads as not addressed to them, addressed to other "evil" drunk drivers. The chain of logic becomes, "I'm a good person --> Good people don't endanger other people's lives, get arrested, or kill people in their cars --> This ad is not for me." No one drives drunk with the intention of

Furthermore, the ads are preach to us when we're sober. Just as no one plans on becoming a murderer, I'm not sure people plan on becoming drunk drivers. Dan Ariely has a chapter in his book, Predictably Irrational, about how people's responses to questions about their sexual preferences change when they are aroused vs. when they are in a neutral setting. They become so much more willing to engage in risky sexual activity that talking to an aroused person is like talking to a completely different person than the sober one. We can say the same thing about drunk people. We're preaching to the sober choir; everyone's against drunk driving when they're sober. But God help us when people get wasted.

I think ads need to stress that all of us are potential drunk drivers. We need to take steps to make sure that we make the right decision even when we're under pressure. Consider the following scenarios.

• You're driving on the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. The plan is to go bar hopping with a high school friend, and then sleep on the couch in his apartment. After four or five drinks, the conversation's flowing and you head to the bathroom, while waiting in line you start talking to an attractive girl who's waiting for the ladies room. She seems pretty interested, and mentions that she and a few friends are leaving for a club, would you like to join. So you head to the dance club and start dancing with this love interest. Your high school friend, bored, wanders off to try his luck elsewhere in the club. After about an hour of dancing and laughing you ask if she wants to take the party elsewhere. She resists at the last minute - mentioning that she doesn't want to leave her friends, she just met you, etc. Bummed, you go to find your friend. But he's nowhere in sight, and you look down and see that your phone's dead. The phone had his address and number saved in it. So now you are alone in the city at 2AM with nowhere to sleep and no way to get in touch with your friend.
• You're celebrating a friend's birthday on a Wednesday night. Everyone gets completely plastered, stays up till 4AM and spends the night at his house. You wake up at 8 AM to go to work, and on the way to the bathroom realize that you're still wasted. But you just got hired for this job two months ago.
• You drove to a bar in the suburbs. You start talking to an attractive girl sitting at the bar, and things are going well. She's playing with her hair, you're both smiling and laughing, you put your hand on her knee, and as the drinks pile up you are falling deeper and deeper in drunk love. You haven't had sex in six months, so you're pretty excited and anxious to seal the deal. Now it's time to go; you had your last drink an hour ago. If the two of you took a cab you'd have to wait twenty minutes, pay a large fare and get someone to drive you back to the bar in the morning.
• It's Saturday night and you're at a house party, shotgunning beers, playing pong, taking shots, singing Journey and having a good time. Plenty of your friends are there, but also a lot of people that you don't know. You're in the kitchen talking to friends when you hear your ex girlfriend make a loud entrance, saying hi to friends. "Fuck," you say - now it will be harder to have a good time. At least by this point in the night you have a good buzz going. The night progresses and you see your ex deep in conversation with a guy of marginal quality. You're angry that she's displaying such bad taste. So you go outside to hang out in the hot tub, down in the basement to smoke, or upstairs to listen to Jimi Hendrix, for about an hour. You stumble back to the main room, where the lights are out and nearly everyone's passed out, and ask where your ex went - the answer is in a bedroom, with that guy. You're furious, and more angry because there's nothing you can do. All of the couches and beds are filled with sleeping bodies, you have your keys and your house is the next exit down on the freeway.

My goal here is to make the viewer understand the situations in which people drive drunk, and the situations they could be in in the future that would lead them to drink and drive. Drunk drivers are not "evil" people; they're people trying to get home, get to work, or get to a friends' house. The problem is that when people drive drunk they endanger themselves and the people around them.

I am not trying to justify drunk driving. I just think that the ads that are supposed to change our habits don't do a very good job, because they don't take into account the banal circumstances that lead people to drink and drive.

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Fiddling around with this chart of unemployment, I noticed that West Virginia has a large white patch - low unemployment and few layoffs, indeed job growth in some areas, in the past year, while the area surrounding it has higher unemployment.

The state's personal tax burden is slightly above average and it ranks 36th in corporate tax climate, so it's not necessarily employer friendly.

My first thought was that Robert Byrd's legacy was helping the state - it has a large number of federal and government employees, and government is one of the few areas still hiring today. But that's not the case - government employment only rose at a 1% rate last year. West Virginia has one of the lowest median incomes of any region, so keeping people employed is not as expensive as in other regions. In addition, workers compensation is pooled and paid by the state, not by firms.Furthermore, the coal industry has done well, adding workers at an 8% rate while the other private fields shed workers. The state has also spent responsibly, paying down liabilities when they had surpluses.

So pack up everything and move to the Mountain State! Or not.

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When, in 2003, [Icelanders] sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves.

Later on:

You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

From Michael Lewis.

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Some wise people have been saying we should quickly nationalize failed banks and sell them to investors at discount prices, like we did with Washington Mutual in October 2008. Other people don't think nationalization is such a good idea. Paul Krugman says we've been socializing bank losses while allowing shareholders to keep profits (a lose-lose for the taxpayer). Well come on - let's go hard or go home. Given a choice between letting banks fail (shareholders absorb losses but keep profits), nationalizing (government absorbs losses, keeps profits) and muddling through (government/taxpayers absorb losses, don't get any profit) I would prefer either of the first two.

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Deficit spending is financed by issuing bonds, which are bought by large institutional investors, and repaid thirty years down the line. Interest accumulates each year; at the moment the yearly interest rate on a 30-year treasury bill is 3.67%. It's important to recognize that the money has to come from somewhere; if we spend more now, we'll have to pay for that spending later.

The problem of course is that these bills are going to come due when everyone issuing them is retired. The generation of young people is going to foot the bill, many of whom don't have a vote - try explaining to your 5 year old that everyone just voted on a policy that will decrease the share of his paycheck he can spend when he's hitting middle age.

Perhaps we are doing the right thing by transferring so much money from this generation to the next but I doubt it, given that our generation's taxpayers are just beginning to exercise their vote and the current generation has been able to vote for some time. It makes sense for this generation to vote in selfish politicians who will spend more now at the expense of youth who don't have the franchise.

I'm angry that the government is spending so much more than it's receiving. Because that means a bigger share of my paycheck will go to the government, even if the day itself is far away. Unfortunately, most people of my generation are for increases in government spending; it appears that having to pay taxes makes people more conservative in this regard.

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