May 2010 – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

“The Evolutionary Concomitant of Incessant Climate Change Was Human Resilience”

“Early Homo sapiens created these symbolic objects between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago. Using natural materials and creativity, they combined animal and human features into fantastical creatures and fashioned instruments for making music. “Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

The sort of artifacts displayed above have been used to argue that homo sapiens had essentially reached their modern capabilities at least by 40,000 years ago.
The handaxes below are fascinating, in that they clearly display progress, and they clearly display how slow that progress was.

(p. D13) The mysterious Ice Age extinction of the Neanderthals, losers in the competition against modern humans, still fires the popular imagination. So it’s startling to learn that as recently as 70,000 years ago, at least four human species coexisted, including tenacious, long-lived Homo erectus and diminutive, hobbit-like Homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia in 2003.

The sensational 1974 discovery in Ethiopia of “Lucy,” resembling an ape but walking upright, located human origins 3.2 million years in the past. Those same fossil deposits have recently yielded even more-ancient ancestors, who stood on their own two feet as far back as six million years ago.
Paleoanthropology is thriving, and human fossil finds–more than 6,000 and counting–regularly force revisions of old timelines and theories. Our species, Homo sapiens, turns out to have had an abundance of long-lost cousins, though scientists are still arguing about the closeness of those relationships. The new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose opening marked the museum’s centennial, provides a formidable overview of this still-developing story.
. . .
It’s long been accepted that different human species were adapted to thrive in specific climatic niches. Neanderthals had short, compact bodies to conserve heat and large nasal passages to warm frigid air, while some of our African forebears had long, skinny frames suited to hotter climes. But this exhibition contends that the evolutionary concomitant of incessant climate change was human resilience–the flexibility to make it almost anywhere, thanks to large, sophisticated brains and social networks.
Versatility apparently characterized even our oldest relatives. The ability to walk upright through the drier, more open grasslands did not immediately divest them of their penchant for climbing trees in the shrinking woodlands. A diorama of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) depicts her with one foot on the ground and another on a tree limb, symbolizing her straddling of two environments.

For the full review, see:
JULIA M. KLEIN. “Natural History; Our Species Rediscovers Its Cousins.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 11, 2010): D13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Handaxes — multipurpose tools used to chop wood, butcher animals, and make other tools — dominated early human technology for more than a million years. Left to right: Africa (1.6 million years old), Asia (1.1 million years old), and Europe (250,000 years old).” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“I Cannot Consent to Buy Votes with the People’s Money”

(p. 91) . . . Thomas Gore, . . . was first elected to the Senate in 1907, the year Oklahoma became a state. Gore had a populist streak in him, but he always recognized the protections to individual liberty that came from limited government. In the 1930s, therefore, he strongly opposed the federal government going into the relief business. Interestingly, Gore was made totally blind by two childhood accidents. He still managed to become a lawyer, and as a senator, he had to have family members or staff assistants read bills, books, and newspapers to him. Yet he claimed to see clearly through the political chicanery that would occur if the federal government entered the relief business. No depression, Gore argued, “can be ended by gifts, gratuities, doles, and alms handed out by the Federal Treasury and extorted from taxpayers that are bleeding at every pore.” On the issue of relief, especially, Gore argued that state and city officials “have immediate contact” with hardship cases and can best “superintend the dispensation of charity.” Soon after the ERA brought federal relief into existence, Gore said, “The day on which we began to make these loans by the Federal Government to States, counties, and cities was a more evil day in the history of the Republic than the day on which the Confederacy fired upon Fort Sumter.”

In 1935, Gore helped lead the charge in Congress against funding the WPA with $4.8 billion. After he spoke against the bill, thousands of people in southeast Oklahoma held a mass meeting to denounce Gore. They sent him a telegram demanding that he cast his vote for the WPA and, by implication, start bringing more fed-(p. 92)eral dollars into Oklahoma. Gore responded with a telegram of his own. Your action, he wrote, “shows how the dole spoils the soul. Your telegram intimates that your votes are for sale. Much as I value votes I am not in the market. I cannot consent to buy votes with the people’s money. I owe a debt to the taxpayer as well as to the unemployed.” Shortly after dictating these words, the blind Senator was led to the Senate floor to cast a lonely vote against the WPA.

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Russell Crowe as a Libertarian Robin Hood Fighting High Taxes

“Mr. Crowe as Robin Hood.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

Ridley Scott has directed some entertaining movies (Blade Runner and Alien to name two) and he also directed one of the most famous tech ads of all time: upstart Apple smashing the uptight corporate conformity of IBM.
And now he brings us what we could use about now: a libertarian Robin Hood who defends property rights and fights high taxes.
When all is said and done, liberal NYT reviewer A.O. Scott doesn’t much like the movie in the full review that is briefly quoted below. (But I want to see the movie anyway.)

(p. C1) You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!

For the full review, see:

A. O. SCOTT. “Rob the Rich? Give to the Poor? Oh, Puh-leeze.” The New York Times (Fri., May 14, 2010): C1 & C14.
(Note: the italics in the title of Scott’s NYT review, appeared in the print, but not the online, version of the review.)

Housing Crumbles Under Portugal’s Rent Control Laws

Stigler and Friedman’s only co-authored paper showed the flaws in rent controls. Although excellent, the paper apparently is seldom read in Portugal (or New York City).

(p. B3) LISBON — José Gago da Graça owns a Portuguese real estate company and has two identical apartments in the same building in the heart of Lisbon. One rents for €2,750 a month, the other for almost 40 times less, €75.

The discrepancy is a result of 100-year-old tenancy rules, which have frozen the rent of hundreds of thousands of tenants and protected them against eviction in Portugal. Mr. Gago da Graça has been in a lawsuit for a decade over the €75-a-month apartment, since his tenant died in 2000 and her son took over and refused to alter his mother’s contract, which dates to the 1960s.
“We’re the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a free housing market and that’s just amazing,” Mr. Gago da Graça said.
Rules like these, which economists also blame for contributing to Portugal’s private debt load, help explain why this nation of 11 million has followed Greece and Spain into investors’ line of fire.
. . .
The . . . rules helped protect tenants, but also led to a chronic shortage of rental housing. This, in turn, persuaded a new generation of Portuguese to tap recently into low interest rates and buy instead — often in new suburbs — thereby exacerbating the country’s mortgage debt and leaving Portugal with one of Europe’s lowest savings rates, of 7.5 percent.
“This system of controlled rents is a major problem for the Portuguese economy, but we will probably be waiting for a generational change to have room for institutional reform,” said Cristina Casalinho, chief economist of Banco BPI, a Portuguese bank. Beyond fueling housing credit, she added, the system “basically stops flexibility and mobility in the labor market because you can perhaps find a new job in another city but it will then be very difficult to rent a house there.”
. . .
“Nobody has had the political courage to change something like these rental laws and I don’t see the situation changing in the short term, even if I don’t think the Portuguese tend to react as dramatically as the Greeks,” said Salvador Posser, who runs a family-owned company renting out construction equipment.
Besides distorting pricing in the housing market, the tenancy rules have left physical scars. Portugal’s historic city centers are dotted with abandoned and crumbling houses that are either subject to a court dispute or have rental income that cannot cover repair and maintenance costs.
“This economic crisis is clearly keeping our very slow courts even more occupied because of the amount of conflict that it is creating between landlords and tenants,” said Menezes Leitão, a law professor and president of PLA, a property owners association.
Mr. Posser cited a recent estimate that 8 percent of the buildings in central Lisbon were deserted, in large part because of rent-related obstacles. In Porto, the second-largest city, less than 10 percent of inner-city housing is available for rent, which has helped shrink the population by a third over three decades.
“We’re still losing about 30 inhabitants a day,” said Rui Moreira, president of the Porto Commercial Association.

For the full story, see:
RAPHAEL MINDER. “Like Spain, Portugal Hopes to Make Cuts, but It Is Mired in Structural Weakness.” The New York Times (Fri., May 14, 2010): B3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated May 13, 2010 and has the title “Portugal Follows Spain on Austerity Cuts.”)
(Note: ellipses added.)

The original source of the Friedman and Stigler article (in pamphlet form) was:
Friedman, Milton, and George J. Stigler. Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem. Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1946.

CNN Says Omaha Economy is Strong Because Citizens “Living Within Their Means”

“Why Omaha, Nebraska, is seeing a small business boom and boasts of having one of the lowest unemployment rates.” Source of caption and video: http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2010/05/06/n_omaha_economy.cnnmoney/

Several days ago, CNN Money ran a very nice clip focusing on why Omaha’s economy has fared better than the economies of many other U.S. cities. The piece was mainly brief fluff, though pleasant, complementary fluff.
But the one message of substance was that Nebraskans, and usually Nebraska governments, work harder at not spending more than we take in.

(The reporter for the piece is CNN Money’s Poppy Harlow. Posted by CNN on May 6, 2010. Run time: 02:09.)

Under FDR, WPA Workers Were Coerced to Support Democrats

(p. 87) According to Lyle Dorsett, who has studied the Hague machine in detail, “Concrete evidence shows that from the outset of the New Deal, Frank Hague was in complete control of all patronage in the state.” And Roosevelt poured patronage into New Jersey in the form of massive public works (Hague owned a construction company), which included almost 100,000 WPA jobs annually during the 1930s and the highest rate of pay in the nation for these skilled jobs. One minor drawback to the high pay was that WPA workers in New Jersey had to “tithe” 3 percent of their salaries to the Democrat Party at election time. One WPA director in New Jersey–a corrupt but candid man–answered his office phone, “Democratic headquarters!”

Hopkins received mail regularly from people all over the nation who were denied federal jobs, or fired from them, because of their (p. 88) political views. Many of these letters are available in files for each state and housed in the National Archives. The title of these files is “WPA–Political Coercion.” The hefty New Jersey file is very illuminating. One WPA worker complained about a mass-mailed postcard he received that stated, “You are either on the WPA or employed in some government department and by virtue thereof you owe a duty to the [Democrat] Party to do your part in making the canvass. Failure to do your active share will be reported to our county chairman, and you may find your position in jeopardy.”

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)

Cheap New Technology for the Masses Is Financed by First Adopters’ High Priced Buys

“Buying on Day 1: Sayuri Watanabe came from Japan to be among the first to get an iPad last month at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) WHY would anyone rush to buy a product knowing full well that it would be cheaper — and probably better — in a matter of months?

Hundreds of thousands of iPad buyers did just that last month. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, crowed that in the first 28 days on the market, Apple sold one million iPads. He found it remarkable that buyers snatched up this new slate computer at twice the fervid pace of the first iPhone.
But what is truly remarkable about this surge in consumption is that early adopters — those who simply have to own a new gadget right away — cheerfully exhibited what might seem to be irrational behavior. These ardent consumers will stand in long lines, if that’s what it takes, to get an overpriced gadget ahead of everyone else they know.
A tough lesson about buying early could have been learned by the iPhone’s first buyers back in 2007. Those early adopters paid $600 for a phone. Two months later, Apple dropped the price to $400. Then, in June 2009, it introduced a better version, with twice the storage, for $200, one-third the original’s price.
. . .
Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of a new book, “The Upside of Irrationality,” has studied why earlier adopters do what they do. “It’s not about the cost-benefit analysis,” he says. And rarely is it a successful calculation of higher productivity, though many a person has tried to justify purchases of expensive toys that way.
It can be more about cementing one’s identity. Although people who want to be first with a product aren’t making a direct calculation — “I’d pay $100 for my ego” — they may derive value from showing off a new product or being perceived as being at technology’s forefront.
“I realized years ago that I derive great pleasure from buying a new gadget,” said Professor Ariely. “I bought a Segway.”
And public awareness may matter. Professor Ariely says the behavior is akin to how we can be more willing to do something good if the public knows about it.
. . .
But even if you would never be the first in your neighborhood to buy a gadget, don’t scorn the early adopters. They are working for you. “They, in a sense, provide valuable services to other consumers by their willingness to serve as a guinea pig,” said Jay Pil Choi, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, who wrote a much-quoted paper on herd behavior and the “penguin effect.”
. . .
HE described early adopters as pioneers. “If all consumers are striving for value and take the approach of ‘wait and see,'” he said, “the new products will never be able to take off or take much longer to succeed in the marketplace.”
He added, “Their early purchase allows the firms to go down the learning curve and enables a lower price for other consumers.”

For the full commentary, see:
DAMON DARLIN. “Everybody’s Business; Applause, Please, for Early Adopters.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MAY 9, 2010): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated May 7, 2010.)

“Empower Parents to Choose the School that’s Best for Their Children”

The author of the commentary quoted below is an African-American Democratic State Senator in Pennsylvania, and is running for Governor in that state’s Democratic primary which will be held on May 18, 2010.

(p. A17) As an African-American legislator, I’ve seen children in inner-city schools trapped, and I’ve seen kids in rural areas with no choice but to stay in underperforming schools. Changing the status quo is a big reason why I’m running for governor.

My mom was also a public school teacher, so make no mistake, I know how hard they work. At the same time, schools must also be able to terminate, not just reassign, poor performing teachers. And when we empower parents to choose the school that’s best for their children, it serves as a constant audit of a school’s quality because parents are able to leave bad schools and enroll their children in better performing schools.
I hope that Pennsylvania receives a Race to the Top grant. But unless we’re willing to fundamentally change the system, the money’s impact will be minimal. Children in our state can’t wait any longer: Now is the time for school choice.

For the full commentary, see:
ANTHONY HARDY WILLIAMS. “Pennsylvania Kids Deserve School Choice; Bad public schools hurt poor and rural children the most.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., MAY 12, 2010): A17.

PowerPoint Useful for Graphs and for “Hypnotizing Chickens”

“A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.” Source of caption and graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
. . .
(p. A8) Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
. . .
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

For the full story, see:
COREY ELISABETH BUMILLER. “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 27, 2010): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 26, 2010.)

An interesting, but overdone critique of PowerPoint by an intelligent expert on graphics is:
Tufte, Edward R. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003.

FDR Spent Other People’s Money Freely, But Was Stingy with His Own

(p. 75) . . . when Roosevelt was spending his own money, he was sometimes very stingy. For example, when Roosevelt traveled by train from Washington to Hyde Park, he always wanted a private car for himself and his staff: Servicing this private car, which might include providing dozens of meals, newspapers, and various amenities for the president and his staff would require great diligence and attention to detail. But for round-trip service on Roosevelt’s private car, he tipped the porter a mere five dollars. The reporters. on their car nearby, combined to tip eight to ten times more than the president did. Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune observed the unhappiness this created:

FDR wasn’t a heavy tipper at any time, but was less so aboard trains. He gave five dollars to the porter on his car for the round trip from Washington to Hyde Park, which included payment for what guests he might have in his car. In the press car we each gave two dollars for the trip, but there were about twenty of us all told. Sam [Mitchell, the porter] soon begged off the private car; the honor of serving the President faded for a man raising a family and sending a boy to college as well as paying for a home, when he could count on forty dollars in the press car as against five dollars in the private car.

Source:
Folsom, Burton W., Jr. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2008.
(Note: italics in original; ellipsis added.)