Institutional Inertia

Two instances of possible institutional inertia today.  Note that I can't be sure on either instance, but I can and do speculate that bureaucracies do not respond rapidly to changing situations, which can be bad or good.

McArdle and her credit union.  
 In this case Megan McArdle and her husband are buying a house.  McArdle goes through their logic of what their maximum is, then calls their credit union, which is willing to approve a loan for twice amount they want, which shocks her.  Here I suspect the credit union never made major changes in its policies in the last decade, at least not in response to the Great Recession.  Most likely their clientele and the geographic area they serve were not subject to a big run-up, and thus the number of foreclosures was within tolerable limits for the credit union.  And even if they weren't, the bureaucratic dynamics of such an institution probably delay their response.


DC and homicides (via Yglesias). DC is on pace to have the lowest rate of homicides since the 1960's, a fact commented on by Yglesias.  What he didn't comment on is the increase in clearance rate, which is something readers of Homicide would be very conscious of.  In this case bureaucratic/political inertia means the number of homicide detectives isn't being reduced as fast as the homicides, so there's more time to pay more attention to each killing, resulting in more clearances.  Here bureaucracy in the way jurisdictions allocate funds means DC is gaining on the down dip; there's a virtuous cycle.  But when homicides increase they'll lose on the up cycle; there will be a vicious cycle.

2 Blocks Bad; 12 Blocks Good?

In Animal Farm, the mantra was: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad".

According to this NYTimes piece on the proposed Cordoba community center/mosque, there's currently a mosque 12 blocks away from the World Trade center site.

But using Google maps it seems there's a limited facility .2 miles away.  When I say "limited", I mean this is included on their site:

Bathroom access is limited. Please make wudu before coming to the Masjid.

 Sorry for the incovenience.
Jazaka Allahu Khyera.

Acting White

"Acting white" is described at Wikipedia as usually applied to African-Americans (and by Ralph Nader to Obama). But this post has a graph indicating Hispanic students turn against their peers with high grades more strongly than do black students. The article to which it refers is worth reading, though it dates to 2006.

The idea is that the peer group fears losing its most successful members so tries to reinforce its sanctions to maintain its integrity.

Slater as Bureaucratic Operative

James Q. Wilson calls those bureaucrats who deal directly with the public "operatives".  They're the DMV clerk, the checkout person, the cop on the beat, the airline attendant.  Although the customer is always right and the public is the boss, I suspect many can empathize with Mr. Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who lost it.

"Re-up for the Bennies"

I dredged that phrase out of my memory prompted by the On Language piece in the NY Times magazine (which discussed "bennies" as a pejorative phrase in New Jersy.  It's also in Chapter Five of this online book.  

For us draftees it was a sarcastic fling at the RA's (enlistees), telling them to re-enlist for the great fringe benefits, like serving in Vietnam, but it usually was stimulated by any specific grievance of the moment.

Will Our Kids Be Better Off in the Future?

Kevin Drum comments on a Peggy Noonan column and attracts a bunch of comments. [Update: here's Scott Winship and lots of polling.] Noonan as quoted by Drum:

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought — wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances — that their children would have better lives than they did....Parents now fear something has stopped....They look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes — too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it — will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up.

Drum agrees but based on the dominance of an elite:

it's the fact that we increasingly seem to be led by a social elite that's simply lost interest in the good of the country. They were wealthy 30 years ago, they've gotten incomparably more wealthy since then, and yet they seem to care about little except amassing ever more wealth and endlessly scheming to reduce their tax burdens further. Shipping off our kids on a growing succession of costly foreign adventures is OK, but funding healthcare or unemployment benefits or economic stimulus in the midst of a world-historical recession is beyond the pale.

Seems to me you need to distinguish a bunch of different intended meanings in the answer to such pollster questions::

• the answer may be in terms of relative status, where status is an "excludable good", as the economists mights say. Will my child, the son of a farmer, live a better life because he'll be President? But for anyone who becomes President, many million can't become President.  If you want your child to move from the bottom 10th in wealth to the middle 10th, someone else has to drop in relative wealth.
• or a slightly different answer: Will my child, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, live a better life because he'll be a doctor, a lawyer? We've probably got a greater percentage of our population in the law and medicine than in the past, so this interpretation is more "absolute status".  Granted that as the number of lawyers and doctors increases in society, their status may slightly decline, but I'll ignore that.
• or in terms of money, adjusted for inflation:  Will my child earn more than I, or accumulate more wealth during her lifetime than I? Depending on whether we're talking household or individual, this seems to be the area liberals focus on.
• or in terms of welfare:  Will my child live better than I? Have a longer life, better health, more friends, more opportunities, etc. This seems to be the area conservatives focus on--the effects of technological progress.  We drive better cars, have better housing, etc.
• or in terms of the nation.  Will my child live in an United States which is thriving as a nation?
• or in terms of the world.  Will my child live in a world which is more peaceful and more prosperous than the one I lived in.
• or in terms of social norms.  Will my child live in a society with which I'd be comfortable?

IMHO, though I don't have children, I'd bet people who are 10 years old today would, in 2070, agree the answer for most of the above, excluding the first and last, would be "yes".  For my parents, the answer for all of the above, except the last, was "yes".

Funniest Take on Legislators Today

"Generally this ["rational basis" test] is an easy hurdle to clear, because the court is very deferential; if it weren’t for bad ideas about what they want to do, and how they want to do it, many legislators wouldn’t have any ideas at all"  From John Holbo at Crooked Timber on the Walker decision on Prop 8.

Chinese Trash

Early in the week there were some stories (WSJ here, with slide show) about trash on the Yangtze river threatening the operation of the Three Rivers Dam in China.

That's a reminder of how far and fast China has come--even in the western interior of the country their citizens have become wealthy enough to have trash.  I remember when they were so poor and so thrifty they recycled everything.

Michelle and Jackie as Marie Antoinette?

Michelle Obama is catching flack, even from Ms. Dowd in the Times, about her vacation trip.  Reminds me of when Jackie Kennedy and Caroline took a long trip to Italy, I think.  (May have been some hobnobbing with nouveau riche like Onassis and royalty.)

Should Government Be Wrong Half the Time?

Post at Google Operating System on their failures (e.g., they just dropped Wave).

Google's Peter Norvig has a more detailed explanation for this attitude:

"If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be."

Makes sense to me, although I must admit as a supervisor I wasn't happy about any failures. The distinction is between learning and executing; it's good to fail while learning, but when you say you have the answer, you'd better have the answer.  That may also tie into the free market--it's good for learning, but government can compete when the learning is done.

[I know, some anti-government wiseacre thought to herself when she read my title: if the government was wrong only half the time, it would be an improvement.]