Dog Bites Man, Ben Stein Bites Management

I realize it's not fair to say Ben Stein is always pro-business, but his column today, When You Fly in First Class, It's Easy to Forget the Dots - New York Times, on United Airlines surprised me.

"So here it is in a nutshell: employees are goaded into investing a big chunk of their wages and benefits in UAL stock. They lose that. Then they lose big parts of their pay and pensions. They become peons of UAL. Management gets $480 million, more or less. 'Creative destruction?' Or looting?"

Partisan Thought Is an Oxymoron

The NYTimes Tuesday had a piece headed: A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious .
It reported on research:

"Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected."

No surprise to anyone who reads the comments on blogs on politics. Much as I struggle to fit events into historical perspective, and grant the good faith of everyone, even terrorists, even your humble writer feels emotional reactions to politicians.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

I'm a technosnob, looking down on all late adopters [though I'm no longer an early adopter], so this from a Rummy Nation makes me fear for the nation:

"A senior analyst from the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center at the CIA came to speak to our Principles of Biodefense class today. In an old-fashioned twist, his presentation was based on overhead transparencies, not PowerPoint. "

Or, it reconfirms the idea that FBI and CIA see themselves as above technology.

Two Theories on Crystal Meth

The Times today has an article discussing the possible spread of crystal meth to the East Coast big cities, Trashy or Not, a Drug Peril Creeps Closer. So far it hasn't happened

1. One is ecological--"The theory is that addicts well supplied with cocaine in big cities haven't craved a substitute, which suits traffickers just fine since their suppliers in Colombia and elsewhere don't want the competition from largely domestic brewers."
2. The other is classist--"The general impression among African-Americans is that this [methamphetamine] is a white-trash drug," said Sally L. Satel, a psychiatrist at the American Enterprise Institute who has interviewed drug addicts about methamphetamine. "African-Americans recoil from this drug. They told me they think it is a very low-class kind of drug, and there was a kind of revulsion to it."

Risk-Taking--Smart or Self-Assured?

Virginia Postrel in today's Times, Would You Take the Bird in the Hand, or a 75% Chance at the Two in the Bush? reports on research into risk-taking, and includes a 3-question quiz for self-assessment. The results seem to say that people, especially male people, who are smart are willing to take greater risks.

"'Even when it actually hurts you on average to take the gamble, the smart people, the high-scoring people, actually like it more,' Professor Frederick said in an interview. Almost a third of high scorers preferred a 1 percent chance of $5,000 to a sure $60.

They are also more patient, particularly when the difference, and the implied interest rate, is large. Choosing $3,400 this month over $3,800 next month implies an annual discount rate of 280 percent. Yet only 35 percent of low scorers — those who missed every question — said they would wait, while 60 percent of high scorers preferred the later, bigger payoff.

Men and women also show different results. 'Expressed loosely,' he writes, 'being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks.'

High-scoring women show slightly more willingness to wait than high-scoring men, while the differences in risk-taking are much larger. High-scoring women are about as willing to gamble as low-scoring men, while low-scoring women are even more risk-averse"

I have my doubts. [Totally unconnected to the fact I only got 2 of the 3 questions right.] I'd like to see research on self-confidence: do people who think they aced the quiz accept greater risks versus those who weren't sure. That seems to me more likely to be the key variable. Divide the universe into four sets: smart and know it; dullards who think they're smart; dullards who know it; and smart who are modest. The second group qualify for the Darwin Awards.

Better Bureaucrats Win in Palestine

As best I can tell, Hamas won in the Palestinian Authority elections because they are and/or promised to be better bureaucrats than Fatah. Even David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy
appears to agree with the analysis. Apparently Hamas has competed against the PLO in two ways: greater militancy in opposing Israel and greater efficiency in caring for Palestinians. As such they parallel the Republicans, who also have promised greater militancy in opposing our enemies and greater efficiency in government.

Dealing with Bureaucracies--Lines

In dealing with its public, a bureaucracy has to connect to its customers, which usually means setting up a sequence to deal with them and, sometimes, fitting them into service categories. Today I experienced some variations on this:

• Visited the VA DMV to renew my driver's license. In their system, you first line up to reach an information window, where the clerk assesses your situation and fits you into the bureaucratic cubbyhole (license renewal, vehicle registration, id card, more documents needed, interpreter needed), tells you what to fill out and gives you a code number. An automated PA announcement system calls out the code numbers to go to the various windows. This morning there was maybe a 15-minute wait. So I sat waiting for the call and fussing to myself over whether someone who arrived after me was being served before you. I couldn't tell, because there were different number sequences according to the type of transaction. It would seem the different clerks specialized in different transactions. [I know I should have faith in the system and I really do, but it is a weakness. The strength, at least this morning, is that people were informed quickly of where they fit--they didn't spend 20 minutes waiting for a clerk only to find they needed more information.]
• Later I visited the post office. You took a number from the machine and waited for your number to be called. There was only the one sequence, meaning every clerk had to be able There they had a number system, just like my barbershop, where every clerk could handle most any transaction. As with the barbershop, you could tell your place in line was safe.
• Finally I hit the Safeway. You get your groceries, pick the checkout line--express or regular--and wait in line.
  

From the Mouths of Waiters

Frank Bruni, the NYTimes restaurant critic, tries waiting tables for a week and describes the result in My Week as a Waiter. In doing so he collects wisdom from the waiters (who may qualify as bureaucrats, I'll have to think about it):

"'It's amazing,' Bryan tells me, 'how unadventurous people are....'"[in rejecting specials]

"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.... [setting expectations too high]

"Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something.

"You've got to fake it until you make it," she says...."

"Once again I try to tackle an entire section, seven tables in all. Dave is my minder. He tells me to make clear to diners that they need to be patient.

"If you don't control the dynamic, they will," he says...."

Investing Time

Blake Gopnik, the Washington Post art critic, went to various galleries/museums and looked at art, not special exhibits, just the regular stuff. It's interesting. One article suggests the difference between an amateur and a professional. Tuesday::

"The time the average museum-goer spends looking at a work of art, as clocked one morning at the Hirshhorn: Well under 10 seconds. [actually, when I go to the museum I usually spend between 30 seconds and a minute, covering the usual 60-100 piece exhibition in about an hour. ]

On the second day of my week, I decided to see what it would feel like to push the experience of a single picture as far as it could go."

He goes to see a picture that consists only of color stripes, and spends 2 hours looking at it. 2 hours!! But then, he'd spend a minute on something concerning bureaucracy that could keep me going an hour. Different strokes.

What Makes a Citizen?

Edward Rothstein has a neat article on the tests different countries give to immigrants apiring to become citizens--Refining the Tests That Confer Citizenship.

Questions include: "Where does Father Christmas come from? How old do you have to be to buy a lottery ticket? If your adult son declares he's a homosexual, what do you do? If a film or a book insults your religious feelings, what is your reaction? Why are aboriginal peoples seeking self-government? Who has the power to declare war?"

Raises questions of what we hope to achieve by the tests. Would life experiences be a substitute? (Like, if the immigrant provided x ticket stubs from baseball games, or had watched "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", or ??)