Things I Like - Chicago

It’s time for another famous Chicagoan.

If you grew up in the Chicago area in the 70’s or 80’s, chances are one of your middle school or high school field trips was to Jane Addams’ Hull House. My field trip was a long time ago but what stuck with me was that Jane Addams was a social worker and she won the Nobel Peace prize.

It turns out that she was only the second woman (and the first American woman) to receive the prize which was awarded in 1931 in recognition of her international efforts for peace. But before this great honor, Jane was one of the country’s foremost promoters of social reform in support of women and children. Hull House was her most visible contribution to Chicago.

Founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House was the first Settlement House in Chicago. Located in the Charles Hull mansion on Chicago’s Near West Side, Hull House quickly grew to a complex of thirteen buildings, including a theater, art gallery, clubs, dining hall, nursery school, residence for working women, the only library in the neighborhood, and one of the first free gymnasiums in the country. More than a thousand people from the neighborhood came to the settlement each week for its education, artistic, and social programs.

The Hull House community encouraged a remarkable number of social reforms, many of which were pushed by women. Residents helped establish the world’s first juvenile court, the city's first public playground, and campaigned for improved housing regulations, sanitation, public schools, and ward politics. They also launched initiatives calling for passage of the Illinois’ Mothers’ Pension Law, occupational health and safety regulations, child labor laws, and woman’s suffrage.
~ Hull House Museum

The video below is a quick summary of her accomplishments – you can read more about her life and impact on Chicago here.



Happy 4th of July!

Steroids Trifecta

TW: Orioles fans must be so proud that their 2005 media guide managed not one, not two but the full trifecta of steroidal scum on the cover (Tejada, Sosa, Palmeiro).

Oh the Platitudes

TW: She is stunningly, cloyingly incompetent. A must see. If this person was running for mayor of Wassila I would say fine!!! But this person thinks she should be POTUS.

How many platitudes can one cram (and repeat) into a six minute speech. And she is resigning because "this point guard is being smeared" by unnamed enemies therefore she needs to quit her job in order to go to battle; and her infant child, the one she deploys (disgracefully) like a cheap prop at every turn, has been subject to derision; and by god she wants to fight for our soldiers.

Palin Resigns As Governor

TW: I understand amidst this Great Contraction being governor of any state is not the best platform from which to build a basis for higher office- declining revenues, rising costs and general voter angst and all. Tim Pawlenty saw that in MN and announced he would not run for re-election and the Governator probably wishes he had not sought re-election in CA.

Then you have the bopsie triplets- Mark Sanford said "F it what do I care, I am in love", preceded by the Blagojocrook, and Eliot "I pay to play" Spitzer-all have blown up in the past year.

But can you set yourself up any better than Ms. Palin has this week. A completely inane cheesecake piece in Runner's World ("sweat is my sanity"), your former campaign managers debating how crazy you are then the capper- resigning your office amidst the Great Contraction no less "because she has accomplished her goals". Talk about cuttin' and runnin'.

Funny how in a petro state one's approval can drop from 90ish% to below 50% pretty darn quickly. She is a corker.

I REALLY hope this does not mean she is considering NOT running. Because as much as I viscerally despise the concept of Ms. Palin, I would really miss her. If there is one thing that could get the Dems to a true super-majority amidst the Great Contraction in 2010 it would be her at the head of the ticket.

This quote gives me hope:

From WaPo:
"The first term governor is stepping down "so that she can take the fight for her issues elsewhere," according to a Palin aide."

This person's ambitions are high, perhaps to the point of self-delusion....YES!!!

This Week In 1930 (cont.)

From Saturday June 28th, 1930:
"Scaffolding has been removed from the tower of the Chrysler building, allowing unobstructed view of the world's tallest structure."

From Monday June 39th, 1930:
P.E. Crowley, pres. NY Central railroad: “I cannot believe that this country of ours, with its great and resourceful population ... can long remain in a state of depression, business or otherwise. I believe ... that we have turned the corner; that we will slowly but surely go forward to at least as great prosperity as has ever before been attained.”

From Tuesday June 30th, 1930:
New York Governor Roosevelt calls for system of unemployment insurance; says 90% of unemployment is not the fault of the worker, but cautions against insurance becoming “a mere dole which encourages idleness;” says line must be drawn against any person who refuses to accept an offered position.

Editorial: D.M. Marvin, economist for Royal Bank of Canada, says present depression caused by tight credit; points out that in spite of low rediscount rate many banks are not lending due to poor balance sheets; total credit extended by the Fed. Reserve banks fell from $1.621B last Oct. to $937M in June. Proposes Fed. Reserve banks inject $500M of reserve credit by purchasing government securities. Idea is worth considering, but must be done with care to avoid inflation.
[TW: now this one sounds familiar!! And bottom line is 80 years later we still don't know if this stuff works or not!!!]

From Wednesday July 1, 1930:
Bill Robinson [Bojangles], Harlem's greatest tap dancer, appearing in the Palace Theatre. Has been performing for 32 years. Famous for inventing new steps, such as the stair dance. So many performers are now imitating the stair dance that he's now doing his own imitation of himself doing it."

Porkulousity: Agricultural Version

TW: One of the big holes in western liberal democracies is the disproportionate power held by rural populations. The hole is created by geographically based representative bodies like the U.S. Senate. Porportioning power geographically instead of via population has its advantages for sure (the flipside of the geographically based system is population based systems which can be corrupted by big city politicans with their machines powered by pliant ethnic voting blocs) but it creates a constant challenge- agricultural interests rule (frequently co-opted by big Ag as opposed to the beloved if somewhat mystical "family farmer"). Other countries have the same issue which is why Japanese and Korean rice is so expensive and French and German milk so precious.

Agricultural interests are second to none at delivering pork to themselves. Their constituents may rail against "big government" but woe is the agricultural state rep or senator who does not "bring home the bacon".

From Economist:
"Many people have complained during the recession that too much authority has been concentrated in the executive and the Federal Reserve. They have a point, but the problem seems to be that the legislative branch of government has become entirely dysfunctional. What's more, it appears to be beyond reform. Ezra Klein is proposing some committee reforms that will never happen, but it's worth reading the logic behind the argument:

The problem with the agricultural committees, however, can be summed up in a single question: Why would you, as a young member of Congress, choose to sit on them?Everyone I have posed this question to -- and that includes members of Congress-- has given me the same answer: You are from a district or state that is reliant on the agricultural industry and you want to serve your constituents to ensure your reelection (very few members are motivated by a genuine affection for handouts to Big Ag). "Serve your constituents," in this context, means something pretty close to "secure large taxpayer subsidies for their products." Put differently, it means "rip off the rest of the country."

And that, of course, is exactly what we've done. Between 1995 and 2006, we've spent $177.6 billion subsidizing agriculture. About $50 billion of that has gone to corn (is it any surprise that the Senate Agricultural Committee is chaired by an Iowan?). Nor is this a progressive scheme: The top 10 percent of subsidy recipients averaged $36,000 a year in government money. The bottom 80 percent got less than $800.

Wise people will note that generous and foolish agricultural subsidies aren't exactly a uniquely American tradition. Still, the notion that multiple legislative committees are basically pork factories, and no one cares is kind of troubling."

Things I Like - Sciences

Mr. White has posted several times about ‘smart grids’. Everyone seems to know that the smart grid is a key component of an energy program based on clean and renewable sources. In the hopes that I am not the only person out there who doesn’t actually know what a smart grid is, I offer the following:

Today’s power grids are designed for local delivery, linking customers in a given city or region to power plants relatively nearby. But local grids are ill-suited to distributing energy from the alternative sources of tomorrow. North America’s strongest winds, most intense sunlight, and hottest geothermal springs are largely concentrated in remote regions hundreds or thousands of miles from the big cities that need electricity most.

Power engineers are…sketching the outlines of the next-generation electrical grid that will keep our homes and factories humming with clean—but fluctuating—renewable energy. The idea is to expand the grid from the top down by adding thousands of miles of robust new transmission lines, while enhancing communication from the bottom up with electronics enabling millions of homes and businesses to optimize their energy use.

The present mode of operation—essentially unchanged since the invention of power grids in the late 19th century—keeps blackouts at bay by measuring total consumer demand and throttling up and down on the supply of electricity from power stations as needed. It works, but it is a bad fit for renewable energy. Solar panels and wind turbines can stop supplying electricity at any time if the weather shifts. So even when the renewables are going strong, conventional power plants must always be at the ready to step in and carry the load.

Smart grids will do better by inverting the power system’s most basic rule of operation. Instead of adjusting power output in accordance with shifting demand, they will help consumers control their use of electricity, timing it to coincide with availability of the grid’s cleanest and cheapest power sources.
Discover Magazine

See the article for more detail but it appears that the smart grid concept is pretty simple - different power cables that can handle the higher voltage of wind and solar energy combined with power meters that help the consumer regulate usage. Why did I think smart grids were going to be a lot more high tech?

Schadenfreude Alert: Manhattan Real Estate Plunging

TW: I posted on my view of Manhattan real estate here back in October. The money quote:

"We lived in Manhattan for three years, awed the entire time by the real estate pricing and annoyed to the point of disgust by realtors who felt we were so blessed to have the opportunity to grace their beloved island (after all we were mere refugees from the wilds of Chicago). The only positive I relish in this whole mess is many of those folks taking a bath. But dagnamit it still ain't happenin'...."

Well it is happening now. Bite me Manhattan realtors.

From Bloomberg:
"Manhattan apartment prices dropped for the first time since 2002 in the second quarter as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. caught up to property owners in the nation’s most expensive urban market.

The median price fell 18.5 percent from a year earlier to $835,700...“The standstill that existed after Lehman Brothers has been broken, and it was the sellers that cried uncle,”

Values are falling broadly in Manhattan for the first time in the almost four-year U.S. housing recession, with declines now seen in co-operatives and condominiums of every size and price.

...The price of studio apartments declined 16 percent from a year ago to a median of $405,000...One-bedrooms dropped 17 percent to $650,000 and two-bedrooms fell 23 percent to $1.27 million. Three-bedroom units fell 37 percent to $2.35 million and four-bedrooms plummeted 47 percent to a median of $3.92 million.

...James Rosenthal didn’t want to wait. Rosenthal and his Upper West Side neighbor on Riverside Drive near 77th Street put their adjacent apartments up for sale in February 2008 for $6 million, hoping to lure a buyer that wanted to maximize the 3,800-square feet of combined space...Then Bear Stearns collapsed and the neighbors cut their price to $5.75 million, then to $4.96 million. The properties sold for $3.6 million, a 40 percent discount from the original asking price, on April 20, said Rosenthal, who is a senior vice president at New York real estate brokerage Brown Harris Stevens as well as a recent seller.

...“People can’t borrow as much,” said Prudential Douglas Elliman Chief Executive Officer Dottie Herman. “So they can’t spend as much.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=adzeEva9VcQo

Chez Casa Blanca

(click on image to enlarge)
TW: Was flipping through some photos at the Big Picture site from the Boston Globe. It is a great place for high-quality imagery of recent events. They have a series of shots from the Int'l Space Station. One of which happens to be Chicago's shoreline above. If you find the white protrusion into the Lake (Navy Pier) then head straight down on the photo (which is actually due west in reality) until you get to the river, you are then looking at chez yours truly.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Yes This Is a Great Recession

TW: I will not digress into the tedious memes now circulating. The "green shootists" (the happy talk about economic stats usually based on the dreaded 2nd derivative or rate of change improving) are being overtaken by the "brown weeders" (the grumpy talk about the economic stats in absolute and other terms still being quite nasty).

The above graph though portrays in one (relatively) simple graph the depth of this Great Recession. As one can see, the duration and depth of the plunge in employment (in % terms not absolute so the population growth over the past 60 years is equivalized) during this recession is the worst since WWII or more specifically since GD 1.0. One can also see that the declines will almost certainly continue. One does not need to understand calculus (i.e. 2nd derivatives) to eyeball how the lines on the graphs for employment do not just turn on a dime, they change gradually. The current line has a while to run yet.

Btw, I posted last month on how the birth/death model is softening the job loss number. The BLS threw in +185K jobs this month. The real numbers are likely at least that much worse.

Why Won't Dysfunctional Senators Resign?

TW: This piece makes a fair point about why is it that Senators cannot vote remotely on matters when they are ill etc. But to me the bigger question is why are folks like Byrd of WV and Kennedy of MA still in the Senate. They (like many before them, think Strom Thurmond) are unfortunately due to age and illness no longer professionally functional. A CEO, a doctor etc. would never be permitted to carry on in their condition.

Whats worse is that Byrd was recently re-elected even though he was incapacitated (Thurmond was as well). It is a failure of democracy. While I am sure both of their egos are now completely wrapped up in their senatorial roles, they are both doing a disservice to their constituents and country. They should resign.

From Economist:
"...why should the ability of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd to get out of bed affect whether or not they can cast votes in the Senate? Why not let them vote via teleconference?

Mr Zengerle thinks through all of the technical objections and doesn't come up with a dead-stop reason to prevent this. Arguably, it's another example of a congressional tradition that distributes power unfairly (it hurts Democrats now, but if a couple Republicans got sick it would be functionally impossible to filibuster) and randomly. The Senate is full of such archaic rules.

Why does it take 60 votes to break a filibuster if not all 100 senators are in their seats? Why can a senator put a "hold" on a nominee without explanation, and without revealing who he is? These rules don't get reformed largely because they are archaic. As one of Mr Zengerle's more grumpy readers says, "Just because it's 2009, doesn't mean we have to trash fundamentals of the Constitution or Senate Rules."

That's poor reasoning, but others are more persuasive. Instead of changing the rules to allow telesenatoring, perhaps Americans should simply elect men and women who are able to carry out their jobs. And perhaps those who can't should have the decency to resign their office. West Virginians elected a near 90-year-old man to be their senator in 2006. That he is unable to carry out his duties today is hardly surprising..." http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/07/let_my_people_teleconference.cfm

Sunday Funnies (On Thursday)

TW: There are too many stacking up, so a bonus addition...

Note to readers- the Blogger software's scheduling function which permits us to stream out posts at pre-determined times is not working (has not for a couple of weeks), as such our normal routine is scrambled. .

Things I Like - Books

I just finished one of my Printer’s Row Lit Fair books – I love it when I find a new author that I like, completely by accident. I had never heard of Joanne Harris before, although I had seen and really liked the movie Chocolat based on her book of the same name.

The book I picked up at the Fair was Gentlemen and Players – a somewhat macabre mystery although not the typical ‘who dunnit’ in any way. The story takes place at St. Oswald’s, an old private grammar school for boys in the north of England. It is told by two narrators – the school’s Latin master who has been there for years and is on the verge of an unwelcome retirement and a character known only as the ‘Mole’. This Mole is clearly bent on taking the old school down and doesn’t seem to care who might get hurt (or dead) in the process. The story behind the Mole’s purpose is told throughout the novel – the last several chapters were one unexpected revelation after another and kept me thinking back to previous chapters with this new information.

The author’s website has a nice book page with a brief synopsis and background for the story. She also includes an interesting conversation with herself about the book and how it came to be.

And speaking of authors’ websites – have you noticed that some are nothing more than commercial outlets with very little author input while others are as much fun to explore as the books themselves? The Joanne Harris site is one of the latter – informative and entertaining. I am looking forward to reading more of her work.

Americans Are Spoiled Regarding Health Care

From Paul Kedrosky and Economist:
"I've said something like the following before, but never so succinctly:
The trouble with health care in America, says Muriel Gillick, a geriatrics expert at Harvard Medical School, is that people want to believe that “there is always a fix.” She argues that the way Medicare is organised encourages too many interventions towards the end of life that may extend the patient’s lifespan only slightly, if at all, and can cause unnecessary suffering. It would often be better, she thinks, not to try so hard to eke out a few more hours or weeks but to concentrate on quality of life."

TW: Americans are spoiled with many things but health care perhaps more so than others. Over time Americans have become more and more risk averse. Risk averse to the point of dysfunction. The never ending effort to reduce risk in personal lives pervades our society. Combined with the unwillingness to make challenging decisions like end of life, we have a health care system oriented towards infinite costs.

We deal with this climb towards infinity with indirect rationing (i.e. lots of uninsureds and underinsureds). Furthermore we watch take home paychecks stagnate as incremental income is diverted towards health care plans (either private or public plans). The status quo is inequitable and unsustainable.

We must make choices, some of them VERY tough. Our political system is the means by which to formulate those decisions collectively. No, no, no politics accomplishes nothing. Lets reform.

Now This Is Some Fair And Balanced Journalism

TW: One can always count on Fox for balanced and deeply insightful analysis. Or actually just some bouncing around within their own little echo chamber.

Ms. Palin And the Politics Of Nothingness

From Taegen Goodard:
"A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn't carve out time for me to go for a run." - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in an interview with Runner's World, slipping in another dig about her campaign handlers.

TW: This quote from Ms. Palin caught my eye as a metaphor for her political career. Ms. Palin periodically makes it into the news, but if one reviews why it is always for the same thing- process BS about her complaining about something related to coverage of her (i.e. the Letterman thing) or someone else taking potshots (i.e. the latest Vanity Fair piece where McCain staffers rip her and the Politico piece where other Republicans rip other Republicans for how they rip Palin) or else just flat out inane whining like the above. In other words nothing of substance.

She is a politician whose only contribution to the national dialogue is her caricatures (from enemies and allies) and debating whether the caricatures are sufficiently fair and/or accurate. She is not one to add any substance to say addressing our fiscal challenges, relations with Iran, reducing income disparities, addressing climate change etc. Name one instance since November where she has participated substantively in the national governance dialogue. She is all pomp and no circumstance. She is a disservice to her party and her country.

Some Insight From Paul Samuelson

TW: Paul Samuelson is a liberal economist, Nobel Prize winner in economics and still dishing it out at age 94.

From Paul Kedrosky:
"A few more quotable quotes from that new interview:

On Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke
The 1980s trained macroeconomics -- like Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke and so forth -- became a very complacent group, very ill adapted to meet with a completely unpredictable and new situation, such as we've had.

On Robert Lucas and his acolytes (TW: Lucas is also a Nobel winner from U. of Chicago, a conservative)
Those guys were useless at Federal Reserve meetings.

On Alan Greenspan
But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.

On Milton Friedman
He was a libertarian to the point of nuttiness.

On bubbles
And I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time. It works both ways.

On the dollar:
I think it's almost inevitable that, with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there's going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar. And I doubt it can stay orderly, because all of our own hedge funds will be right in the vanguard of the operation.

On economic history: what would you say to someone starting graduate study in economics?
Well, I’d say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that. "

The Reproductive Social Issue Continuum

TW: Abortion is a divisive issue, no doubt, with no clear majorities and no readily reconcilable solutions. Issues like stem cell research are controversial but a majority supports the research. Issues like the use of contraceptives and sex education beyond gaga land abstinence propaganda enjoy clear majority support even though loud minorities oppose them on religious grounds.

The challenge for the Republicans is differentiating between the former and the latter. There is a continuum of reproductive and science issues. The Republicans still cannot break loose from some of their core constituents in order to adopt more centrist positions. Folks complained for years about Dems being hamstrung by special interests, the shoe is on the other foot with these issues.

From US News & World Report:
"As the White House readies its plan for finding "common ground" on reproductive health issues and reducing the need for abortion, a major debate has emerged over how to package the plan's two major components: preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion.

Many abortion rights advocates and some Democrats who want to dial down the culture wars want the White House to package the two parts of the plan together, as a single piece of legislation. The plan would seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies by funding comprehensive sex education and contraception and to reduce the need for abortion by bolstering federal support for pregnant women. Supporters of the approach say it would force senators and members of Congress on both sides of the abortion battle to compromise their traditional positions, creating true common ground that mirrors what President Obama has called for.

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan -- even though they support the abortion reduction part -- because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills."

Things I Like - Food

Have you heard the big news? The act of cooking might very well be what sent us down the path of modern day humanity. This revolutionary evolutionary idea comes from Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist from Harvard who usually spends his time observing and writing about chimpanzees. His latest book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, argues that the act of cooking our food led to major physical changes – smaller jaws, smaller guts and consequently larger brains.

These physical changes can all be traced back to the benefits obtained from cooking your food instead of eating it raw. As summarized in an excellent piece by Christine Kenneally at Slate:

Though there's no archeological evidence of controlled fire before 800,000 years ago, [Wrangham] realized that a cluster of changes in the human face, brain, and gut 1.8 million years ago could be explained by only one thing—regular cooked meals. His argument begins with the odd spend-money-to-make-money aspect of digestion: You must burn calories in order to release calories from food… Because raw food is harder to digest, it takes more calories to get the calories out of it, and you get fewer calories from it anyway.

Wrangham illustrates this with an array of observations and experimental evidence. He cites a BBC TV show about an "Evo Diet Experiment" that followed nine volunteers who gave up processed food for 12 days and ate only the kinds of food that humans are supposedly wired to eat, mostly raw nuts, fruits, and vegetables. At the end of the experiment, the volunteers had improved cholesterol and blood pressure, and they also lost a lot of weight, despite the fact that the food was chosen to give them the required amount of calories per day.

Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and takes no time to eat. Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural poisons inactive.
So the simple expedient of heating food gave us access to many more safe calories every day, which was a survival jackpot. Once we started to eat soft, cooked food, our jaws and teeth were no longer required to munch ceaselessly, and they became smaller and more delicate. That is why we don't look like apes anymore. Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare.

This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale…Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains.
~ Slate

So all you gourmet chefs, home cooks and backyard barbecuers can all proudly point to your cooking efforts and say ‘you’re welcome, humanity’.

The Circularity Of Cap And Trade

TW: This Marron piece laments the lack of revenue the cap and trade bill will produce since the emission permits for the most part are being given away as opposed to sold. He is correct in that if the permits were sold much revenue would have been created. But then he late in his piece states why the permits were given away. The reason cap and trade is moving forward instead of a better concept such as an explicit carbon tax is the political malleability of the cap and trade.

Marron titled his piece "Missed Opportunity" but all he is doing is sniping. Folks like Marron can lament the lack of revenue but I am highly confident he and other conservatives would be nowhere to be found if actual auctions of the permits were included in the bill.

Unfortunately conservatives offer no solutions only the status quo. They will attack cap and trade from various angles but again where are the solutions, if the bill includes taxes folks wave the bloody shirt of higher taxes. Yet the same folks are now waving another bloody shirt of "runaway" deficits. And oh btw what about those negative externalities created by carbon energy?

From Donald Marron:
"...I should emphasize that the idea of auctioning all of the allowances is almost certainly impossible as a political matter. Affected industries have enough clout to oppose anything quite that ambitious. And, indeed, one of the beauties of a cap-and-trade system (from an environmental point of view) is that politicians can use free allowances as currency to reduce opposition to the policies. Unfortunately, such horse-trading can easily transform into the pure power politics of pork..."
http://dmarron.com/2009/06/30/big-money-in-cap-and-trade/