The Misery of Perfection

One of the unreal aspects of representative democracy is the divisions of the population into superficial subsets. True, we could probably come up with unlimited subsets--left-handers, blue eyes, good at math--but for some reason these sociological preoccupations separate us, divide us and make elections competitive when one would hope that elections would be clarifying and unifying. Here, on election day, one individual is assessed by another. Both individuals are special yet while the insights are personal and specific they are common and universal.

An excerpt from Agassi's book "Open:"

'Agassi and his manager approached Brad Gilbert, a fiery, veteran tennis player of good ability known as an overachiever, to offer him the job as Agassi's coach. But first, they wanted to hear Brad's assessment of Agassi's abilities:

"When Brad is finally settled, half a cold Bud Ice down his gullet, [my manager] starts.

"So, listen, Brad, one reason we wanted to meet with you is, we want to get your take on Andre's game.

"Say what?

"Andre's game. We'd like you to tell us what you think.

"What I think?

"Yes.

"You want to know what I think of his game?

"That's right.

"You want me to be honest?

"Please.

"Brutally honest?

"Don't hold back.

"He takes an enormous swallow of beer and commences a careful, thorough, brutal-as-advertised summary of my flaws as a tennis player.

"It's not rocket science, he says. If I were you, with your skills, your talent, your return and footwork, I'd dominate. But you've lost the fire you had when you were sixteen. That kid, taking the ball early, being aggressive, what the hell happened to that kid?

"Brad says my overall problem, the problem that threatens to end my career prematurely-the problem that feels like my father's legacy-is perfectionism.

"You always try to be perfect, he says, and you always fall short, and it f**ks with your head. Your confidence is shot, and perfectionism is the reason. You try to hit a winner on every ball, when just being steady, consistent, meat and potatoes, would be enough to win ninety percent of the time.

"He talks a mile a minute, a constant drone, not unlike a mosquito. He builds his argument with sports metaphors, from all sports, indiscriminately. He's an avid sports fan, and an equally avid metaphor fan.

"Quit going for the knockout, he says. Stop swinging for the fences. All you have to be is solid. Singles, doubles, move the chains forward. Stop thinking about yourself, and your own game, and remember that the guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Attack his weaknesses. You don't have to be the best in the world every time you go out there. You just have to be better than one guy. Instead of you succeeding, make him fail. Better yet, let him fail. It's all about odds and percentages. You're from Vegas, you should have an appreciation of odds and percentages. The house always wins, right? Why? Because the odds are stacked in the house's favor. So? Be the house! Get the odds in your favor.

"Right now, by trying for a perfect shot with every ball, you're stacking the odds against yourself. You're assuming too much risk. You don't need to assume so much risk. F**k that. Just keep the ball moving. Back and forth. Nice and easy. Solid. Be like gravity, man, just like motherf**king gravity. When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you're doing? You're chasing something that doesn't exist. You're making everyone around you miserable. You're making yourself miserable. Perfection? There's about five times a year you wake up perfect, when you can't lose to anybody, but it's not those five times a year that make a tennis player. Or a human being, for that matter. It's the other times. It's all about your head, man. With your talent, if you're fifty percent game-wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you're going to win. But if you're ninety-five percent game-wise and fifty percent head-wise, you're going to lose, lose, lose."'

Polls and Their Discontents

A fascinating little aspect of voting emerged with the exit polls done by pollsters after people had voted in the Bush-Kerry presidential election in 2004.

People were randomly interviewed after voting in a number of key voting districts in the country and the results showed Kerry ahead by 51% to 48%. The evidence was consistent and influential enough that the Kerry camp wrote acceptance drafts. The final results were about the reverse. A flap developed. The Democrats thought they had won and this discrepancy made them suspect fraud--quite a large fraud would be necessary. Eventually it was decided that people were either reluctant to admit they voted for Bush and lied or Bush voters declined to be interviewed.

There are a number of scenarios possible here, not the least being that Bush voters resented the press and were reluctant to help them in their interviews. But some may have been reluctant to admit voting for a guy for whom there was so much popular displeasure.

One wonders if such a polling error is brewing now.

Sunday Sermon 11/4/12

In today's gospel Christ is asked by a scribe which is the greatest commandment. It is interesting because questions usually are aimed at either defeating Christ in an argument or placing Him in opposition to the Law. In this instance the question is sincere and welcomed.

Christ answers to love God completely. His answer is actually very close to The Shema, a declaration of faith that every Jew of the time recited twice a day. And every Jew would have given the same answer to the scribe's question. (The first line of the Shema, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.") Then Christ does something curious; He goes further and gives the famous second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. This question was not asked. He takes a question that every Jew would see as demanding a narrow definition and expands it much further. He then says, "There is no greater commandment than these two," essentially joining the two as one. When the scribe agrees with Him, Christ says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

What is wonderful here is Christ's accepting of questioning as not just reasonable but as a way to truth, with faith as a process, a step to understanding.

Cab Thoughts 11/3/12

"I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things." - Benjamin Franklin

A reason to vote for Obama: The Natural Gas Act or Pickens Plan that would increase the use of natural gas in transportation has been stalled in Congress. Governor Romney opposes it, and Obama says he is in favor of it.

Galileo died in January 1642; on Christmas Day that year, Isaac Newton was born. Reincarnation anyone?

One wonders why the press took Cindy Sheehan so seriously but not Charles Wood.

I know I didn't build this, somebody else did, but I have to work this weekend, could that "somebody else" do it for me?

 

Good news: Another "Star Wars" is coming. There are so many unanswered questions......

A new acronym has crept into the medical literature: HRQOL. Health Related Quality Of Life. One can only wonder where it will go. Acronyms do soften the blow.

The aerospace company Boeing tested a microwave missile last week on a two-story building on the Utah Test and Training Range where computers and electronic systems were turned on to gauge the effects of the missile’s radio waves. The missile, known as CHAMP (Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project), fired a burst of High Power Microwaves at the building, successfully knocking out the electronic systems and computers, and even taking out the television cameras recording the test. The company implied that this technology might engender a new, more humane warfare.

Solar power is growing but just the new coal plants built in 2012 will produce about twice the electricity as all the solar systems in the USA and about 13% of the electricity coming from all wind farms.

A 2011 study in Applied Economic Letters entitled, Financial Wealth Effect: Evidence from Threshold Estimation by Sherif Khalifa, Ousmane Seck and Elwin Tobing found “a threshold income level of almost $130,000, below which the financial wealth effect is insignificant, and above which the effect is 0.004.” This means a $1 rise in wealth would, in time, boost consumption by less than one-half penny. Is this the wealth effect that Bernacki is trying to create with his "easing?"

St. Paul's epistle to the Galatians, which discussed an open approach to wel­coming converts: 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.' Theist or atheist, Christian or no, this is a revolutionary concept for its time.

There is some complaint in Ohio that non-English speaking foreigners--apparently Somalis-- are arriving to vote. What is interestuing is the demographics of the group. According to the Somali Community Association of Ohio’s web site, over 45,000 Somalis live in Ohio. Only 40 percent have become citizens of the United States, and only 25 percent speak English well enough to get a job.

The NYT reports America has 104 nuclear units and up to 25% of them have operating costs above competitive wholesale market prices.

A small note on the Libyan fiasco: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ” This from the CIA office. Obama supporters have been shielded by the certainty that Gen. Petreaus would have intervened if possible. His absence in the debate made everyone think he was a factor of nonintervention here. Now it seems he was not.

Obama's public position of opposing all drilling for carbon fuels is well established by friend and foe. If that is true, how can one explain Yergin's story in the WSJ on Tuesday asserting that the growth of oil production in the US since 2008 has been the highest of any country in the world. Perhaps we are just making progress from a small base while foreign sources are being pursued at full throttle all the time.

Sometimes (rarely) politicians and their accomplices reveal themselves. Obama may have uncloaked in the first debate. But this wonderful quote may sum up all of the Progressive: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!”--Woodrow Wilson

A truly funny man from London summing up his employment path to becoming a bookseller: "I ended up in London as a vagrant after a stint in Eastern Europe as The Worst English Teacher on The Planet™ and got an emergency job in a bar frequented by drunken book-dealers in London's Chinatown. They decided I was overworked and underpaid as a barman and invited me to experience the same conditions in the book trade."

A huge auction of modern first editions recently closed in London with some surprising results. Faulkner and Doctorow did not sell so well, Ian Fleming did. A Watership Down first went for only 1500 pounds while Amis' Lucky Jim brought 7000.

Golden Oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/10/chilean-miners-and-k-141.html

One wonders why the press took the Valerie Plame flap so seriously but not Benghazi.

AAAAnnnnnd a graph:

Broken Windows, Fractured Logic

Amazingly, people are beginning to ask if the hurricane is a stimulus, is an enhancement of the economy. They act as if Bastiat and the Broken Window Fallacy never existed.

In essence, the Broken Window Fallacy shows that money from the shopkeeper goes to benefit the glazier and only restores the status quo versus the scenario where the shopkeeper pays the glazier for something new that enhances the status quo. The Broken Window Fallacy is nothing more than wealth shifting.


Bastiat’s original parable of the broken window from Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (1850):

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”
Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Buying Pitchfork Futures

"Those to whom the system brings windfalls ....are the object of the hatred."

This is a quote from Keynes that appeared in a recent article by Dylan Grice in a rather unusual context. The object was to evaluate the beneficiaries of inflation using an old observation by Richard Cantillon (writing decades before Adam Smith) called the “Cantillon effect. He showed how those closest to the money source benefited at the expense of others. His original observation was of the mining of gold and silver. Those who benefited most were closest to the creating of the wealth and they, in turn, used that wealth to buy goods which raised the price of those goods down the line to the later consumer. In other words, the beneficiaries of newly created money spend that money and bid up the price of goods with their higher demand. Those who suffer are those who have to pay newly higher prices but did not benefit from the newly created money. Grice applies this concept to the printing of money and inflation. The banks take the infusion of money, use it and the resulting inflation hits those further down the food chain.

The net effect is social disruption. Those to whom the system brings windfalls ....are the object of the hatred.

We Have Met the 1% and It Is Us

The Republicans are really a pretty dumb political party. Somehow they have allowed the debate over the financial growth and stability of the nation to be distilled down by their opponents to the welfare of the nation's wealthiest citizens.

The point is not which individuals have the earnings of the people, it is whether the earnings of the people stay in the private sector or go to the government. Private economies do better across all income groups for a number of reasons--the main one being that the motives for the allocation of money in the private sector are not corrupted--so that the welfare of the entire community is better protected if the money stays private.

 

Identifying private money with the people who have the most of it is an easy and shabby deception historically associated with some very bad people.