artdiamondblog.com – Page 505 – Art Diamond's web log

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.)

Alert Street Vendor Hero Saves the Day

“Lance Orton, center, who sells T-shirts, said that as a veteran he was proud of his actions. But he spurned most questions.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Hernando de Soto has shown that entrepreneurial street-vending is an important path for the very poor to constructively improve their lives. And yet governments around the world, including ours, consistently make it hard for street vendors to ply their trade.
Yet, on balance, street vendors make our lives better, not only through their products and services, but also through their alert eyes that make our city streets safer. Jane Jacobs made the point that the presence of good people observing the streets is a key ingredient of urban safety, one that was too-often removed by well-intentioned, but ill-conceived city-planners’ urban-renewal projects.
The incident recounted below also adds one more case to the well-documented conclusions of Amanda Ripley, who showed us that our safety in avoiding and being rescued from disasters rests in the alertness, preparation, level-headedness and good will of ordinary citizens on the scene.
There may be professionals who are better trained, but outcomes often depend on what is done quickly, and usually only those who are on the scene are able to act quickly.
And although the politically correct will glower at you for mentioning it, there are obvious implications for the issue of gun control.

(p. A19) Even in Times Square, where little seems unusual, the Nissan Pathfinder parked just off Broadway on the south side of 45th Street — engine running, hazard lights flashing, driver nowhere to be found — looked suspicious to the sidewalk vendors who regularly work this area.

And it was the keen eyes of at least two of them — both disabled Vietnam War veterans who say they are accustomed to alerting local police officers to pickpockets and hustlers — that helped point the authorities to the Pathfinder, illegally and unusually parked next to their merchandise of inexpensive handbags and $2.99 “I Love NY” T-shirts.
Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, the vendors — Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, who both served during the Vietnam War and now rely on special sidewalk vending privileges for disabled veterans — said they told nearby officers about the Pathfinder, which had begun filling with smoke and then emitted sparks and popping sounds.
. . .
But in a city hungry for heroes, the spotlight first turned to the vendors. Mr. Orton, a purveyor of T-shirts, ran from the limelight early Sunday morning as he spurned reporters’ questions while gathering his merchandise on a table near where the Pathfinder was parked.
When asked if he was proud of his actions, Mr. Orton, who said he had been selling on the street for about 20 years, replied: “Of course, man. I’m a veteran. What do you think?”
Mr. Jackson, on the other hand, embraced his newfound celebrity, receiving an endless line of people congratulating him while he sold cheap handbags, watches and pashmina scarves all day Sunday.
. . .
As for Mr. Orton, he rested on Sunday at a relative’s house, leaving others to talk on his behalf. “When he was in Vietnam, he said they had to make decisions and judgments from their gut, from their own feelings,” said Miriam Cintron, the mother of Mr. Orton’s son. “His instinct was telling him something’s not right. I guess he was right.”
She said Mr. Orton would mediate disputes between the police and other vendors, and when something did not look right, he would alert the police. “He always said, ‘Downtown is where they’re going to come to, and I’m going to be right there,’ ” Ms. Cintron said.
When Mr. Orton left Times Square about 7 a.m. on Sunday, he did so to a hero’s reception. As he walked down the street, employees from Junior’s restaurant stood outside applauding him. He briefly entered the restaurant before heading toward 44th Street.
Using a cane and wearing a white fedora, Mr. Orton limped away and hopped a cab home to the Bronx, but not before repeating a terror-watch mantra: “See something, say something.”

For the full story, see:
COREY KILGANNON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT. “Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes.” The New York Times (Mon., May 3, 2010): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 2, 2010 and has the title “Vendors Who Alerted Police Called Heroes.”)

The most relevant Hernando de Soto book is:
Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

The most relevant Jane Jacobs book is:
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

The Amanda Ripley book mentioned is:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Profits on Economics Documentary May Not Be Dismal

(p. B6) If Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of “Freakonomics,” were to examine the movie business, they might ask: Why do documentary filmmakers keep doing it?

It can’t be the money, because the world is awash in documentaries that make little at the box office or are not distributed at all. Occasionally, though, a documentary makes a buck for those involved — and the new documentary based on “Freakonomics” could do just that.
Magnolia Pictures is expected to announce on Monday that it has acquired domestic distribution rights to the film, which was produced by the Green Film Company and directed, in parts, by a series of well-known documentarians. Those include Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (“Jesus Camp”), Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight”) and Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”).
“Freakonomics,” the film, got started when Chad Troutwine, a producer who worked on an earlier multidirector movie, “Paris, Je T’aime,” became interested in the best-selling book, which looks into matters like the socioeconomic implications of baby naming.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY. “‘Freakonomics’ Documentary May Be a Rarity: Profitable.” The New York Times (Mon., April 5, 2010): B6.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 4, 2010.)

The source information on the revised edition of the Freakonomics book is:
Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Maddison Showed Per Capita Income Stagnation from 1000 AD – 1820 AD

Angus Maddison. Source of photo: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/

I neither met Angus Maddison, nor ever heard him speak, but I have often seen his work praised by those whom I respect.
One example is the praise given to Maddison by Brad DeLong in his wonderful “Cornucopia” essay that documents the benefits from the process of creative destruction.

(p. B10) Professor Maddison, a British-born economic historian with a compulsion for quantification, spent many of his 83 years calculating the size of economies over the last three millenniums. In one study he estimated the size of the world economy in A.D. 1 as about one five-hundredth of what it was in 2008.

He died on April 24 at a hospital in Paris after a long illness, his daughter, Elizabeth Maddison, said.
. . .
In his research, he tried to reconstruct thousands of years’ worth of economic data, most notably in his 2007 book “Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 A.D..” He argued that per capita income around the globe had remained largely stagnant from about 1000 to 1820, after which the world became exponentially richer and life expectancies surged.
. . .
In his archaeological excavation of the economies of other eras, he was “trying to explain why some countries achieved faster growth or higher income levels than others,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “Confessions of a Chiffrephile” published in 1994. He wanted to know what some countries did right and what others did wrong, and to figure out how growth influenced culture, and was influenced by it.
Professor Maddison often referred to himself as a “chiffrephile,” or lover of numbers, a term he invented to characterize economists and economic historians like himself who were prone to quantifying the world.
While macroeconomic research in the last few decades was dominated by elegant mathematical models and technical wizardry, his focus on meat-and-potatoes data and cross-country historical comparisons has come back into vogue in recent years, especially in the wake of the financial crisis.

For the full obituary, see:

CATHERINE RAMPELL. “Angus Maddison, 83, Who Quantified Ancient Economies.” The New York Times (Mon., May 3, 2010): B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated April 30, 2010 and has the title “Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies at 83.”)

The Maddison book mentioned in the obituary is:
Maddison, Angus. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

FDR’s Bad Bet on Aksarben

The “RA” mentioned in the passage quoted below, refers to FDR’s “Resettlement Administration” program.
“Aksarben” is much better known to Nebraskans today as a much-beloved, but now defunct, horse racing track in Omaha, than as Nebraska’s part in FDR’s government housing debacle.

(p. 69) With a staff of (p. 70) 13,000 and a mammoth $250 million to spend, Tugwell made plans for resettling thousands of tenants and marginal farmers into new model communities.

The result was a disaster. “It was all done awkwardly and wastefully,” Tugwell later confessed about the work of the RA. Even Roosevelt himself conceded, “I don’t think we have a leg to stand on,” when confronted with the high costs of the model towns Tugwell was building. Drawing model communities on paper was one thing, but it was another thing to relocate real tenant farmers into affordable houses far away in real towns with functioning services. One of Tugwell’s model communities was Arthurdale in West Virginia. A major problem there was that the ready-made houses could not fit their foundations. Once that problem was solved, the planners discovered that most residents, people from poor backgrounds, could not afford to live there. That protest became a common one in model communities all over the nation. Finding meaningful and profitable work for unskilled laborers was another recurring complaint.24
What that meant was that sometimes the RA had communities built, but no residents either willing or able to move in. An example of this was Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward), a “dream city” of thirty-eight green-shuttered houses, each on seven acres of land twenty miles west of Omaha on the Platte River. The problem was that no one wanted to move in. Ak-Sar-Ben became deserted. Nearby farmer Henry C. Glissman observed this project and drew this conclusion: “I predict that in time these homes will all be abandoned and stand as a gruesome monument to a government’s inefficiency and folly in fostering a movement that to a practical mind has the earmarks of failure from the start.”

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 in original.)

The Nanny State Versus Fun

“A boy slides down the enclosed “Monster Slide,” which drops riders the length of three flights of stairs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

We took Jenny to several children’s museums when she was young, but none was as neat as the City Museum.
It appears that it has continued to get better in the years since.
My view is that a child’s parents should generally decide what risks their child should be allowed to take. Parents have a right to be parents, and they generally do a better job of it than the government does.

(p. A1) The City Museum, housed in 10-story brick building, shows none of the restraint or quiet typical of museums. A cross between a playground and a theme park, it recycles St. Louis’ industrial past into such attractions as slides made from assembly-line rollers. Just about everything can be touched or climbed, including dozens of Mr. Cassilly’s sculptures, among them a walk-through whale on (p. A10) the first floor.

Despite the whiff of danger, or perhaps because of it, the City Museum is one of St. Louis’s most popular attractions. Its 700,000 annual attendance is roughly twice the population of St. Louis and dwarfs the turnout at refined destinations such as the St. Louis Art Museum.
The injuries and lawsuits put the City Museum at the center of an enduring argument over the line between liability and personal responsibility. Some of the injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks through signs or other warnings.
Mr. Cassilly counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore. “They [lawyers] are taking the fun out of life.”
. . .
Mr. Cassilly trained as a sculptor but made most of his money as a developer, having bought, renovated and sold some four dozen homes and commercial properties over the years. In 1993 he paid $525,000 for two downtown St. Louis buildings once used by a shoe company, and opened the City Museum in 1997. It’s now a for-profit enterprise that he co-owns with a local investor.
He says the museum is about first-hand experience, a “computer-free zone” where rules are kept to a minimum. At the “skateless park,” kids run up and slide down wooden skateboard ramps now used as slides. One smaller ramp has a rope swing that kids use to swing across the ramp, not always successfully.
“I slipped and the edge scraped my leg,” said Garett Vance, 11, sitting atop what the museum bills as the world’s largest pencil with a museum-provided ice pack taped to his leg. His mother, Mindy Vance, says a friend warned her that the museum was dangerous but she wasn’t deterred.
“You take a risk when you go anyplace,” says Ms. Vance, a nurse-practitioner who lives in Springfield, Ill., about two hours away.

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY. “This Museum Exposes Kids to Thrills, Chills and Trial Lawyers; Defiant St. Louis Venue Owner’s Claim: Attorneys ‘Take the Fun Out of Life’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 1, 2010): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Visitors passed through a dark tunnel. The injured and their lawyers say the museum is deceptively dangerous and doesn’t do enough to publicize its risks. Mr. Cassilly, the founder, counters that it is as safe as it can be without being a bore.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

School Choice “Lifts the Performance of Public-School Students”

(p. A15) There is . . . clear evidence that many private schools outperform public schools academically. The first children to enter the Washington, D.C., voucher program, for example, now read more than two grade levels above students who applied for the program but didn’t win the voucher lottery.

Researchers from Northwestern University will soon release a study on how competition from Florida’s education tax-credit program is impacting the performance of children who remain in public schools. The preliminary evidence is that school choice lifts the performance of public-school students significantly.
Florida’s scholarship program appears to be the first statewide private school choice program to reach a critical mass of funding, functionality and political support. As an ever increasing number of students in Florida take advantage of the scholarship program, other states will find it hard to resist enacting broad-based school choice.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM B. SCHAEFFER. “Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution; A scholarship program could produce a new era of choice.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 30, 2010): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)