June 27, 2013

Slate: "Racism produced the NBA’s most notorious draft bust"

From Slate:
The Darko Ages
How magical thinking and racism produced the NBA’s most notorious draft bust. 
By Jack Hamilton|Posted Thursday, June 27, 2013, at 8:45 AM

Ten years ago, a young man destined to transform the sport of basketball was drafted into the NBA. He hadn’t played a single minute in college and had appeared on the cover of a national magazine before turning 18. “He’s going to own the game,” one scout declared. 
Darko Milicic did not own the game. A decade after he was chosen with the No. 2 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, he’s not even playing in the NBA. The only player drafted above him, LeBron James, is celebrating his fourth league MVP and second NBA title; the three taken after him—Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade—are likely bound for the Hall of Fame. ... 
Joe Dumars, white racist
How did so many of the league’s talent evaluators convince themselves of something that now seems so absurd? As Pistons GM Joe Dumars himself admitted last year, the Pistons didn’t know all that much about Milicic when they drafted him. “With Darko, we may have had two sources of information. That was it,” Dumars said. 
Darko was the dubious beneficiary of a hazy mixture of groupthinking and magical thinking, a pre–YouTube moment made of wishful scouting reports from distant lands and flavored by a hint of racism. Milicic was the idealized vision of the Euro prodigy, a fantasy of the young and impossibly skilled white big man that proved so elusive in reality that it was practically cryptozoological. ... And as one unnamed insider told ESPN the Magazine for its cover story on Milicic: “The brothers are gonna respect him.”
Ah yes, “the brothers.” In case the racial overtones of all this weren’t suitably naked, Darko offered a potent Great White Hope-fulness at a time when dominant white American big men had seemingly gone the way of Bill Walton’s right foot. The great imagined fear of the prep-to-pro era was that (black) American teenagers would use their talent to con generous NBA benefactors out of millions, only to turn their attention to dunk contests and rap albums as they destroyed the moral fabric of basketball. (The fact that the NBA finally banned American high schoolers the same year that it implemented its controversial dress code hardly seemed coincidental.)   ...
And Darko didn’t even have a totally terrible pro career—he logged serviceable years in Orlando, Memphis, and Minnesota, and for a long while his name graced one of the finest basketball blogs of all time. He just had a terrible career for a player drafted ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade, and as such is destined to spend eternity as the answer to a boringly easy trivia question.

As jody would say: two words: Hasheem Thabeet. The #2 pick in the 2009 draft, the 7'3" Tanzanian has been an even bigger bust, but is much less ragged upon than Darko. Thabeet signed a $15 million three year contract after his junior year at the U. of Connecticut. He started 13 games as a rookie, but has only started 7 games in the three seasons since. Through the same age, Darko started 185 games.

So, why is Thabeet just boring and forgotten (even though he started 4 games last season at age 25 for Oklahoma City), and Darko "notorious?"

Better late than never, I guess

The New York Times publicizes an important nutrition and weight study that should have been obvious years ago:
Are all calories created equal? A new study suggests that in at least one important way, they may not be. 
Sugary foods and drinks, white bread and other processed carbohydrates that are known to cause abrupt spikes and falls in blood sugar appear to stimulate parts of the brain involved in hunger, craving and reward, the new research shows. The findings, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that these so-called high-glycemic foods influence the brain in a way that might drive some people to overeat. 

Back in the 1990s, I'd get up in the morning feeling only slightly hungry, but then I'd remember that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So, I'd have a bowl of Cheerios. Hey, they're "fat-free" so they can't be bad for you. And then after the first bowl, I'd get sharp hunger pangs, so I'd have a second bowl. And then I'd still be hungrier than I was before I started eating, so I'd have a couple of more bowls before I finally felt bloated enough not to feel hungry anymore. Or often I'd run out of Cheerios, forcing me to stop.
For those who are particularly susceptible to these effects, avoiding refined carbohydrates might reduce urges and potentially help control weight, said Dr. David Ludwig, the lead author of the study and the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. 
“This research suggests that based on their effects on brain metabolism, all calories are not alike,” he said. “Not everybody who eats processed carbohydrates develops uncontrollable food cravings. But for the person who has been struggling with weight in our modern food environment and unable to control their cravings, limiting refined carbohydrate may be a logical first step.”

The more general point is that a lot of medical research makes only slow progress in the 21st Century because the inherited bias is still toward finding general mechanisms that affect everybody. But, researchers have already found most of the mechanisms that affect everybody, and now they are working in areas where people differ. Say that this Cheerios mechanism that drove up my weight affects only 5% of the populace. Conversely, Cheerios would then be neutral or even good for 95% of the population. Well, that's still 16 million people like me (at least until Schumer and Rubio are done with us, then who knows how many it will be; but that's more people to fatten up on General Mills products, fattening General Mills' bottom line, so it's all good, right?).

Still, if you can educate 16 million people to try eating in a fashion that's better for them, personally, that's a very good thing.

Jewish Daily Forward: "Jews Unite Behind Push for Immigration Reform"

From the Jewish Daily Forward:
Jews Unite Behind Push for Immigration Reform
Ethics and Self-Interest Drive Unusual Nationwide Effort

By Rex Weiner 
Published June 26, 2013. 
... “It’s about the right thing to do,” said Robert Gittelson, co-founder of Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and a Republican. In op-ed pieces and interviews, Gittelson, a retired Jewish businessman from California’s San Fernando Valley, has called certain GOP strategies on immigration reform “un-biblical” and “cruel.”

... After months of delay, the U.S. Senate is set to vote on the most comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 27 years. And Jewish groups across the country are acting together in a way characteristic of the community on few issues besides Israel. 
... Those leading an active push for the bill, which will offer a path to citizenship for some of the nation’s 11 million undocumented aliens, include the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Bend the Arc and the National Council of Jewish Women.
The Senate vote — and the even harder struggle that will follow in the Republican-controlled House — represents the fulfillment of a sustained campaign by the Jewish community for immigration reform, which has built momentum over the past decade. 
Whether or not the necessary votes are mustered from both houses to land a historic immigration law reform bill on President Obama’s desk, Jewish outreach, particularly in the Southwest — home to the largest share of America’s emerging and increasingly powerful ethnic and interfaith populations — promises to be politically and socially influential beyond the issue it addresses. 
California, with 2.6 million undocumented residents, is a front line in the battle for this reform. And a Jewish establishment ever mindful of its need to operate through alliances and coalitions to advance its own interests is not blind to the implications of the issue in a country whose demography is shifting rapidly. In addition to working with Latino groups, the ADL’s Southwest regional office has forged alliances with Asian groups representing undocumented Koreans, Chinese, Filipino and other Asian Pacific immigrants in the Southland. 
“It’s the ethical thing to do,” said HIAS president and CEO Mark Hetfield, of the community’s immigration reform activism. But he quickly added, “It’s in our strategic interest.” 
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, reflects the deepening relationship that Jewish groups are developing through their visibility on the immigration issue. 
“I really admire the way that the Jewish community has gone deep in support of immigration reform,” Salas told the Forward. A 15-year veteran of immigration rights activism, Salas fondly recalled a 2006 mass mobilization, when a procession through L.A. streets began with a cantor blowing a shofar and singing “Let my people stay!” 
Salas counted efforts by Jewish organizations as second only to Catholic groups in their impact. ... 
The Ford Foundation recently awarded a two-year $1 million grant to the AJC’s Bridging America Project, which is planning “joint advocacy workshops in Dallas, New York and Washington, D.C.; a ‘national conversation’ among Latino and Jewish leaders about issues of mutual concern, and conferences in Houston, Miami and New Jersey on the economic benefits of immigration, among other activities. 
Salas has also worked closely with the ADL, which keeps a keen eye on extremist groups that have set up vigilante patrols on the border between the United States and. Mexico. An ADL study reported that “violent incidents against illegal immigrants have been brutal and are occurring with greater regularity, further intensifying the atmosphere of fear and suspicion on both sides of the border.” The ADL has also tracked a rise in hate crimes, discrimination cases and bigotry against Latinos. 
In L.A. — a city where Latinos are nearly half the population and whose new mayor, Eric Garcetti, boasts both Jewish and Mexican heritage — Salas’s group also works with the Progressive Jewish Alliance, the Jewish Labor Committee and Bend the Arc, a progressive national Jewish group, in pushing for immigrant labor protections. 
“It’s not a one-way street,” Salas said. When it comes to Israel, the Latina activist suggested, the two groups’ relationship may help to modify anti-Israel viewpoints and foster dialogue rather than demonization. “It comes up,” Salas said, referring to the Middle East issue, “and there’s a perspective: ‘Isn’t this [U.S. treatment of Latinos] the same as in Israel with the Palestinians?’ It’s an opportunity to talk that through, to talk in the context of global immigrant policy, where people can be critical, but in good faith.” 
Newly arrived Latinos tend to show higher rates of anti-Semitism, said Amanda Susskind, the ADL’s Pacific Southwest regional director. She attributed the phenomenon, which shows up in surveys, to “exposure to some religious teachings.” But the next generation, she said, is no different in its relationship with Jews than the rest of Americans. 
Asians are also active in coalitions with Jewish groups addressing immigration issues. “We appreciate the partnership with our Jewish allies,” said Betty Hung, policy director of the L.A.–based Asian Pacific American Legal Center. An estimated 3 million undocumented U.S. residents are Asian. California counts the nation’s largest Asian population without legal resident status — about 400,000. 
APALC has been an active participant in the ADL’s Asian Jewish Initiative, founded in 2006, which brings together civic, business, academic and faith leaders in the L.A. community for social mixers, awards dinners and educational programs. 
For all this organizational solidarity, opponents of the reform legislation are not hard to find in the Jewish community. 
One outspoken Jewish opponent is Stephen Steinlight, a former director of national affairs for AJC who criticizes the bill as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants and opposes any “pathway to citizenship” for them. 
“My views changed,” he told the Forward, explaining his break with the AJC and his alliance with the conservative Center for Immigrations Studies. “AJC made no distinction between legal and illegal immigration,” he said. 
Steinlight, who characterizes the pro-reform Jewish leaders as “do-gooders leaning over backwards for the aggrieved,” sees immigration as a threat to American workers, especially under-employed African Americans. Groups like AJC and HIAS, he said, are “trying to make amends for doing nothing for Jews during the Holocaust.” 
Diamond acknowledged that views similar to Steinlight’s are not hard to find. “To my dismay, I have heard more than a few voices in the Jewish community — rabbis I respect, and other leaders — who have said to me, ‘This is not our problem,’” Diamond said. “My response is that this is very much a Jewish issue, one of the most critical issues facing us in this country, and certainly here in Southern California.” 
For Wendy Braitman, a member of IKAR, the L.A. Jewish congregation led by Rabbi Sharon Brous that has made social activism a mitzvah, it’s also personal. “I feel like it’s my story,” she said. Braitman embodies the grassroots dimension of much of the Jewish activism on this issue. In April, Braitman sat in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Washington office with a group of interfaith activists who paid their own way from the California lawmaker’s home state to lobby her. “I told her I was Jewish,” said Braitman, “and that the issue was of importance to Jews all over the country. As Jews we know what it’s like to live in the shadows.”

Wasn't that the subtitle to Barbra Streisand's autobiography? Barbra! A Life in the Shadows. Or am I thinking of Barbara Walters?
On the pro-reform Jewish right, meanwhile, support comes with the some of the same caveats that many conservatives have been using to hold up the pending legislation: that undocumented residents should be treated as lawbreakers who will be subjected to fines and blocked from full citizenship even if allowed to stay as permanent residents. Border security must also be beefed up, they demand, as a pre-condition to any reform. 
Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, emphasized that the final legislative package must be a bill that “addresses the challenges of illegal immigration and securing our borders in a way that will win the support and trust of the American people.” 
As an entrepreneur who built a successful garment manufacturing business, Gittelson is also focused on the bill’s labor implications. For one thing, Gittelson would like to see the cap on guest-worker visas — topped off in the Senate bill at 200,000 per year — match the actual demand for labor, which he says is 300,000 annually at the lowest. 
“The Senate bill shortchanges the economy,” Gittelson maintained. He blamed unions for setting the low quota. “We need a free-market solution, not a union solution,” he said. 
Gittelson’s CCIR co-founder is Samuel Rodriguez, a politically conservative evangelical Christian who is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Despite their reservations, Gittelson said, he and Rodriguez are standing with progressives on immigration reform. “When it comes to this issue, we see eye to eye, or at least 90%.” He has recently joined AJC’s Immigration Task Force. 
In Washington, as the bill has been pulled apart and slapped together, the Jewish community has advanced strong arguments for what should be in it — and what shouldn’t. 
Family reunification is high on the list of must-haves. Border security is ranked low. Border security is a valid concern, Diamond acknowledged, something he learned firsthand on his trip to the border near Tijuana. “But the issue is how we are deploying our resources,” he said. “Are we targeting gun smugglers and sex traffickers, or are we targeting that 27-year old man who’s been deported and is trying to get back to his family?” 
The legislative package submitted to the Senate also notably does not include the Uniting American Families Act, sponsored by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. This measure would have allowed an American citizen or permanent resident who was lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to petition for immigrant status on behalf of his or her same-sex partner as an immediate relative. 
This aspect of the bill is crucial to many Jewish activists. A coalition of nearly 100 New York interfaith leaders, including 37 rabbis, signed a letter to New York Senator Charles Schumer, urging his support for equal protections for LGBT Americans and their families. To their dismay, Schumer convinced his Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee to drop the measure from the bill, arguing that its inclusion would cost the support of key Republicans. Citing their own head counts, many of the measure’s supporters vehemently reject this argument. 
One victory that was won by Jews is a provision that directly involves Jewish interests: The Lautenberg Amendment, first passed in 1989, granted immigrant status to victims of religious persecution in their native lands. The law allowed the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews and was extended in 2004 to cover Christians, Baha’is, Jews and other religious minorities fleeing Iran. 
The law continues to assist religious minorities from those countries and from Southeast Asia. The new bill makes the law — which previously required annual renewal by Congress — permanent. Jewish activists saw that win as a fitting tribute to the late New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg. 
Ira Handelman, chair of AJC’s Los Angeles Public Policy Committee, said that if and when the legislation becomes law, the interfaith and immigrant-activist coalitions in which Jewish organizations are now involved may move on to tackle other issues. These include the ongoing national debates over education policy, economic development and social justice, apart from immigration. 
“Just because they sign something,” Handelman said, “doesn’t mean that’s the end. It’s the beginning.” 
Contact Rex Weiner at rexweiner@forward.com

As I pointed out in 2010, polls show that these kind of extremist views on immigration are much less common among regular Jewish-Americans than among their self-proclaimed leaders.
... But, this healthy state of affairs is bad for the balance sheets of a few powerful organizations. 
All this suggests that that fundamentalist frenzy of Ellis Island kitsch ethnocentrism that currently dominates acceptable thought about immigration has less to do with average Jewish-American citizens than it has to do with the déformation professionnelle of the leaders of explicitly Jewish organizations, of organizations such as the SPLC that are implicitly Jewish because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, that's where the money is; and the media types who interact with them. 
Hence, the key to understanding many of the reigning irrationalities in American thought is to understand that déformation professionnelle. Since those interest groups have declared themselves off-limits to critical analysis (literally, in the very name of the Anti-Defamation League), however, don't expect anybody to learn anything.

Aaron Hernandez: Witness-murderer?

From the New York Times:
The N.F.L. player Aaron Hernandez, who was charged with murder Wednesday, is also being investigated in connection with a double homicide in Boston in 2012, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. 
Hernandez helped lead the Patriots to the Super Bowl two seasons ago. 
It was not clear when investigators began to look at Hernandez in connection with the double killing or what they believe his involvement may be. 
Hernandez, 23, was charged with murder and five gun-related offenses in Attleboro District Court in Massachusetts on Wednesday in connection with the murder of Odin Lloyd, 27, whose body was found in a North Attleborough, Mass., industrial park June 17. Hernandez pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. On the murder charge, he faces a life sentence without parole. 
One official said investigators were exploring a possible connection between the two cases that could explain a possible motive for the Lloyd killing. 
The person said investigators were examining the possibility that Lloyd was killed because he had information about Hernandez’s suspected involvement in the 2012 double homicide, but cautioned that that was somewhat speculative at this point.

So, this is all speculation at this point, but I want to bring up the possibility that this execution-style murder of Lloyd might have been a cold-blooded, rational response to a previous murder as an example of a phenomenon that's almost totally overlooked in the death penalty debate. 

Think about it from a game theory standpoint. Say, you murdered two people in 2012 and have so far gotten away with it. In Massachusetts, the maximum penalty is life in prison: there's no death penalty. So, why not murder a witness who could rat you out?

Well, there are practical reasons, like you might get caught for the latest murder (which may be what happened here). Presumably, though, you think the odds of getting away with another murder are better than the odds of getting away with the original murders if the witness lives. So, the incentive structure in Massachusetts looks like this:

- Murder two people, get ratted out, get life in prison

or

- Murder two people, worry about getting ratted out, murder potential rat, risk get caught, get life in prison, ... but maybe you get away scot-free and collect your $40 million contract from the Patriots.

Thus, in terms of punishment incentives, the only thing Massachusetts has to deter you from murdering witnesses is lower punishments for the original double homicide. Instead of life in prison, maybe they'll let you out in 20 years. Maybe they'll toss in some Willie Horton-style furloughs. (After all we all now know that anybody who objected to Willie Horton's furlough is a white racist, and what could be worse than that?) 

But maybe the public doesn't think being extra nice to double-murderers to keep them from becoming witness-murderers as well is a good deal. We tried lowering punishments in the 1960s. That didn't work out well, so prison terms were raised substantially, which seems to have helped drive down the crime rate. But, a long sentence era would seem, from a game theory standpoint, to need the death penalty as a super-penalty to discourage witness murdering.

That's where the death penalty could come into play, changing the incentive structure:

- Murder two people, get ratted out, get life in prison

or

- Murder two people, worry about getting ratted out, murder potential rat, get caught, get the death penalty

Now, perhaps these cases are rare. I don't know. What seems odd to me is that despite all the debate over the death penalty, the subject of its usefulness to punish and potentially deter witness murdering almost never comes up.

There are a number of other life in prison situations where the lack of a death penalty is a problem. I often cite the obscure Sandra Bullock movie Murder by Numbers, in which she plays a detective interrogating an updated Leopold and Loeb pair of thrill killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt). It was a classic Prisoners' Dilemma game theory situation in which the two killers have a good chance of walking if they keep their mouths shut. (Confessions are useful not just in and of themselves, but that they help the cops recover a lot of physical evidence, as well.)

But why should one defect on the other if the punishments for both are life in prison? The threat of the death penalty gives an incentive to one to rat out the other: He pulled the trigger! I was just along for the ride. Give him the death penalty!

Keep in mind, however, that this situation increases the chances of the non-trigger puller getting the death penalty because the trigger-puller defects first.

P.S., I'm always fascinated by the disconnect between public policy discourse and the rest of everything. For example, the problem of "witness-murdering" has been a minor obsession for me since the Brown's Chicken Massacre in suburban Chicago in 1993, in which robbers at a fast food joint got away with their crime for about decade by the expedient of murdering all seven worker-witnesses. But, it's not as if the subject of witness-murder is restricted to the crime blotter: it's a major plot device in movies, TV shows, and detective novels. How many witnesses got murdered or threatened with murder on The Sopranos or The Wire? That was the main theme of the best episodes of Miami Vice a generation ago: just how ruthless would the heroes be in badgering a witness into risking his life by wearing a wire?

Obviously, at certain points in the past, judges and legislators thought hard about witness-murdering. But, at some point, the topic's innate relationship to the death penalty debate just got forgotten. The debate has ground on ever since in well-worn grooves without any thought of this topic that is omnipresent in our fictional worlds. It's a little bit like how the relationship between affirmative action and immigration simply doesn't register on 98% of the people who want to argue about affirmative action.

Marc Rich and the Rape of Russia

The death of metals and oil wheeler-dealer Marc Rich in Switzerland, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, has led to some rather bland notices in the newspapers, such as this one in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times' version is a little more forthcoming, but fails to mention his sizable role in the Rape of Russia in the 1990s.

Rod Dreher wrote in the New York Post on Feb. 15, 2001:
Overlooked so far is Rich's role in the looting of the disintegrating Soviet Union by Communist Party officials and their associates in the early 1990s. 
You can read about it in "Godfather of the Kremlin," an exhaustively researched book about Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, which was published last fall. The author is Paul Klebnikov, an expert on Russia and a Forbes magazine senior editor. 
The book details the myriad ways Berezovsky and his minions stole untold sums from the Russian people through international financial schemes. 
According to Klebnikov, Rich came into the picture around 1990, when the Soviet Union began to open up to outsiders. 
"Governmental authority began to crumble. All these local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own," the author tells me. 
Based in Switzerland, with its secretive banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia's plunderers carry out their dirty work. Klebnikov reported that Rich dealt in oil, aluminum, zinc and other raw commodities. 
"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," explains the author. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price. 
"'And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'" 
For at least two years, as the Soviet Union was in its death throes, Rich was that nation's largest trader of aluminum and oil on a spot basis. 
"He made a complete mint off of Russia," says Klebnikov. 
A former foreign-trade minister told the author that Rich instructed the robber-baron elite how to skirt the law by doing secret deals through shell companies and the like. 
"Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves," Klebnikov charges. ...
Rich's profitable relationship with the Russians ended in 1993, when the monster he helped create turned on him. The Russian swindlers became so good at Rich's game that they muscled him out of the action. 
"Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich, they bankrupted Russia," Klebnikov alleges. "As a result, you have a ruined economy, bankrupt government, and an impoverished population."

One reason nobody remembers this is because, despite the convenient alliteration, the Rape of Russia isn't a thing, not in the way that, say, the Rape of Nanking is a thing. The plundering of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s, which was egged on by the Clinton Administration, Wall Street, Harvard, and other highly respectable American institutions was misreported at the time as a triumph of the free market. And now it's mostly being forgotten. A 15-year-ago PBS Frontline documentary explained: 
The auctions, simply put, were imperfect. ... A series of privatization "auctions"--whose results were determined beforehandówere held by the GKI. (There are books out on this phase, but in essence, they held the firesale of the century. ) The engines of Soviet industry --oil companies, metals plants, utilities-- were sold for a song. Russia is among the world's richest countries in terms of natural resources--(The Natural Resources Minister, Viktor Orlov, can run down the list of gold, nickel, silver, timber, oil and of course natural gas--one-third of the world's reserves--for you.). And in short order, the riches were exported by the shipload east and west.

Ever wonder how Estonia, a country that produces no aluminum, became one of the world's top aluminum exporters?

Aluminum plants are typically gigantic investments built near hydroelectric dams. The Soviet Union churned out gigantic amounts of aluminum for its huge air force. Aluminum is pretty much of a commodity in quality, so the general cruddiness of everything Soviet mattered less in aluminum than in just about anything else: the Russians had hydroelectric power galore in Siberia and they had huge, valuable aluminum plants.
This was the market's main cancer: theft. The greed that motivated it (and still does) was impressive. But the theft will go down in history. Economists now talk about state corruption, and of course graft was a contributing cause of the market's death, but pure and simple robbery played the leading role. The rape of Russia's riches in its first decade of "independence" will doubtless be remembered in a century's time as unprecedented.

Is it remembered even in a decade or two's time? Not if the articles on Rich's death are any indication.

Here's an interesting paragraph from a 1991 BusinessWeek article on Rich:
Rich's lawyers continue to press for his return to the U. S., offering to pay multimillion-dollar fines he still owes. Rich's one condition is that he avoid prison. He may have allies in the State Dept. U. S. marshals have tried several times to trap Rich, most recently in September, when they alerted officials in Finland that he was due to arrive by private plane. But in that instance, as in previous ones, Rich got away. A. Craig Copetas, author of a 1985 book on Rich, says the marshals suspect that someone in State, which must be notified of such operations, is leaking their plans to Rich because they value his high-level contacts around the world. 

From Wikipedia's article on Marc Rich:
Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.[24] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich's pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.[25][26] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,[12][4] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.[11] According to Ammann, Rich had helped finance the Mossad's operations and had supplied Israel with strategic amounts of Iranian oil through a secret oil pipeline.[4] The aide to Rich who personally traveled to the U.S. from Israel and persuaded Denise Rich to ask President Clinton to review Rich's pardon request was a former chief of the Mossad, Avner Azulay.[20][27])

Sounds rather like Robert Maxwell, another James Bond supervillain-type. Unlike Maxwell, I fortunately didn't have to do business with Rich. Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel.

June 26, 2013

The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Surveillance

Back in B-School, we finance majors were taught that the Efficient Markets Hypothesis showed you can't beat the market in the long run. From Wikipedia:
Eugene Fama identified three levels of market efficiency: 
1. Weak-form efficiency
Prices of the securities instantly and fully reflect all information of the past prices. This means future price movements cannot be predicted by using past prices. It is simply to say that, past data on stock prices are of no use in predicting future stock price changes. Everything is random. In this kind of market, should simply use a "buy-and-hold" strategy. 
2. Semi-strong efficiency
Asset prices fully reflect all of the publicly available information. Therefore, only investors with additional inside information could have advantage on the market. Any price anomalies are quickly found out and the stock market adjusts. 
3. Strong-form efficiency
Asset prices fully reflect all of the public and inside information available. Therefore, no one can have advantage on the market in predicting prices since there is no data that would provide any additional value to the investors.

Most of the finance profs believed in #2, it seemed. And yet, the starting salaries for new MBAs on Wall Street were about $45,000, while run of the mill MBA jobs started at $30,000. But, the Wall Street premium had been narrowing in recent years of low prices and stagnant trading volumes and the growth of low commission mutual funds. So, the notion that Wall Street was becoming efficient and thus less inordinately profitable seemed plausible.

Then, in August 1982 that all changed when the Fed goosed the money supply and the Long Boom (mostly for Wall Street) began.

Still, perhaps it's worth taking seriously the logic of Semi-Strong Efficiency: "Therefore, only investors with additional inside information could have advantage on the market." Lots of Wall Street guys have made outsized profits over the last 31 years. Maybe some of them had inside information, just as the EMH would imply? Maybe the growth of surveillance had something to do with it?

After all, lots of Hollywood bigshots paid detective Anthony Pellicano to bribe phone company employees and cops to listen in on the phone calls of his clients' rivals and enemies. London tabloids hacked into the voicemails of celebrities routinely. How do we know this hasn't been common on Wall Street too, perhaps also using higher tech means such as back doors to telephone metadata and data mining looking for interesting patterns?

Affirmative action and immigration

From my Taki's Magazine column:
On Monday, in America’s fifth year of a black presidency, the five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices had an opportunity to abolish racial and ethnic preferences for violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “the equal protection of the laws.” They had affirmative action in their sights but were unable to pull the trigger, and so they merely sent the case back down to a lower court while recommending stricter scrutiny. ... 
Few have mentioned that the affirmative-action non-decision interacts deleteriously with the Schumer-Rubio bill that would boost immigration. The great majority of amnestied illegal aliens and new immigrants brought in under the bill, plus their descendants unto the seventh generation, would be eligible for racial or ethnic privileges.

Read the whole thing there.

June 25, 2013

Supreme Court rules Time moves in forward direction

And now, the Airing of Grievances
The longer I live into the future, the more everybody else seems to become obsessed with the past, the farther back the better. Thus, the immigration "debate" is less a discussion of what will be best for American citizens in the future (where, I believe, we are going to spend the rest of our lives) than an opportunity for the airing of grievances from Great-Grandpa's day. 

This would make perfect sense if Time ran backwards. 

Today, a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court aroused great controversy by overturning part of the Voting Rights Act  that treats various Southern states as hotbeds of Jim Crow on the grounds that, contrary to popular opinion, 1965 is not actually approaching, it's receding into the past. According to the Republican Justices' divisive opinion, strange as it may seem from reading newspaper coverage of, say, the Ku Klux Klan besieging Oberlin College or Marco McMillian's murder in Mississippi, 1965 was actually 48 years ago. Next year, it will even be 49 years ago.

The majority opinion argued that the conventional wisdom was misinterpreting the 1976 insight of constitutional scholar and theoretical physicist Steve Miller that:
Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'
Into the future  

What Dr. Miller actually meant by this is that the present moment, also known as "now," is progressing ever more into what was seen as the future from a moment in the past. Justice Alito suggested in a concurring opinion that this widespread misunderstanding was due to the fact that in 1976 both Dr. Miller and his fans were completely baked.

June 24, 2013

"Man of Steel"

Although directed by Zack Snyder (300), this reboot of Superman feels like co-storywriter Christopher Nolan's Batmanification of Superman. 

I like the idea of Christopher Nolan -- reactionary elitist foe of disorder and mob rule, the Duke of Wellington with $100 million to blow on CGI -- more than I actually like Nolan's movies.

If Nolan made claustrophobically airless art house films, I'd no doubt be vociferously championing his mastery of airless claustrophobia. But since his movies (e.g., Inception) don't need my help, I'm left nostalgically recalling the glorious expansiveness of Richard Donner's shots of midsummer wheat country in the erratic but likable 1978 Superman that launched the era of comic book movies.

It's a cliche that Superman is optimistic in a New Dealy nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself way, while Batman is drenched in dread of street crime, but Nolan seems to agree and thus isn't all that interested in Superman's silly but fun omnipotence. Nolan attempts to re-imagine the comic book hero as a semi-realistic space alien psychologically tormented by schoolyard bullies whom he can't punch back against because he's too strong. Whether a semi-realistic Superman is a glass half full or half empty is up to you.

Nolan isn't interested either in Lois Lane (who is played without spark by a maternal Amy Adams). That reminds me of how good Anne Hathaway was in The Dark Knight Rises as Catwoman to stand out as a woman in a Nolan film. In "Man of Steel," Lois Lane figures out quickly that Superman (the word isn't fully mentioned in the movie) is Clark Kent, but that just deprives Henry Cavill in the main role of a chance to do a little acting by playing two characters, as Christopher Reeve got to do in the original.

A big problem hanging over Superman movies right now is that Reeve's death leaves them kind of stumped about how to portray the central figure.

I suspect that in the long run, the way forward with Superman movies will eventually turn out to be to blend Reeve's tragic crippling -- a god falls to earth -- and struggle against his injury into the mythos. Over enough time, all these memories kind of blur together and the distinction between character and actor in the collective recollection gets hazy. Ultimately, somebody will figure out how to use that, but it's likely too soon at present.

(Lex Luthor is, thankfully, gone completely.)

In contrast, Nolan's nominal bad guy General Zod is teh awesome. Played by Chicago stage veteran Michael Shannon, who is the rare American actor to have the diction and stature to play Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Zod gets all the good lines. Born and bred to protect his people, this authoritarian militarist had teamed up with Superman's liberal scientist dad Jor-El (Russell Crowe -- not bad, better than Brando reading cue cards in 1978, but still overshadowed by Shannon) to try to alert the do-nothing planetary council to the mortal peril facing an imploding Krypton.

But they differ in their solutions. Like so many movies these days, Man of Steel has something or other to do with eugenics, but I can't begin to explain why Jor-El's plan for preserving Krypton's bloodlines is the nice liberal eugenic plan and Zod's is the evil racist eugenic plan. It has something to do with genetic encoding of Krypton's billions ... or something. 

Peter Schaeffer: The history of immigration and assimilation

Peter Schaeffer writes
The history of assimilation can be looked at several ways, all of them revealing. 
1. Perhaps the single most important point is that mass immigration was ended around WWI. The restrictive legislation of 1917 (the literacy act), 1921, and 1924 (Johnson-Reed) ended the great wave of mass immigration. Immigration continued on a much smaller scale and the composition was shifted. Because the new laws were based on national quotas, some countries were de-facto unrestricted (the UK, Ireland, etc.) while other reached their annual quotas rather quickly. 
The immigration restrictions had several positive effects. Wages and working conditions improved for immigrants over time. Since most immigrants worked in manufacturing, wage gains in manufacturing were particularly positive. Sectoral differentiation (by accident) favored immigrants in this period. Manufacturing was booming and farming was in decline. Since the immigrant population was predominantly urban and employed in goods production, this was a plus. 
Living conditions for immigrants clearly improved after mass immigration ended. The horrific tenements slums of the 1900 period were largely empty by the 1930s. Without new massive waves of immigrants, the prior cohorts were able to move up the social ladder into better housing (among other things). 
The immigration restrictions of the WWI period clearly aided assimilation in practical ways (waves and living conditions). However, they also sent a very important message to the immigrant communities. America rejected ‘diversity’ and demanded that the immigrants embrace America rather than the other way around. There points were were well understood back then and it was widely understood that the immigration cutoff (substantial reduction actually) had accelerated assimilation. 
2. The America of the 1920s and later was vastly better suited to assimilating immigrants than our nation today. We had a booming job market, no welfare state, middle-class unions (starting in the 1930s), English imposition, disciplined education, no multiculturalism, no bilingualism, no victimization ideology, intact families, rigorous law enforcement, etc. Beyond that, ‘Americanization’ (assimilation) was a widely embraced ideal and promoted heavily. Now we have the pernicious and very dominant ideology of ‘diversity’. 
3. In spite of much more favorable circumstances, assimilation took time. Some groups assimilated much faster than others, but three generations were typically enough to achieve earnings party with old stock natives. The mythology is that one generation was sufficient. It wasn’t. Even well after WWII, ethnic differences in earnings, social status, etc. were measurable. 
The political assimilation of ‘Great Wave’ immigrants was relatively slow but did occur. In this context, I will use the Catholic vote as a proxy for ‘Great Wave’ immigrants. By some measures, 1928 marks the zenith of Catholic alienation from the political mainstream. Al Smith got 90% of the Catholic vote (apparently) and was still easily defeated by Hoover. Indeed, he failed to carry his home state of New York (he was a former governor or New York). By the time JFK was elected, Catholic support for the Democratic party had fallen markedly. He won the Catholic vote, but by a notably smaller margin than Al Smith. A poll of Fordham University students in 1960 showed that most of the Catholic students favored Nixon over Kennedy (the Jewish students at Fordham favored Kennedy). Students at other Catholic schools favored Nixon as well. 
Perhaps more relevantly, Eisenhower captured a majority of the Catholic vote in 1956. In subsequent presidential elections, Republicans were able to easily capture the Catholic vote (if they could win at all). 
It’s worth noting that in an earlier era, ethnics were polled separately and political differences by ethnicity were material. By the 1980s, this practice had essentially disappeared because ethnic voting patterns were no longer different enough to measure. 
However, voting patterns are not the most important aspect of assimilation in my opinion. The assimilation of American values is far more important. Once again, studies show that ‘Great Wave’ immigrants embraced the values of old-stock natives (personal responsibility, individual effort, hard work and education as the keys to advancement, national loyalty, limited government, etc.). Basically, ‘Anglo-conformity’ worked. 
It is wrong to suggest that Jewish Americans don’t like WASP America. More like they resent it. The American Jewish community remains (privately) obsessed with the efforts of WASPs to exclude Jews from elite society. The fact that many of these efforts were more than 100 years ago doesn’t appear to matter. Nor does the fact that even with Jewish quotas in place, Jews were vastly overrepresented at Harvard and other elite schools. 
The bigger picture, that America has been a wonderfully hospitable nation with immense opportunities for personal and professional advancement is subordinated to resentment of country club prejudice in the 1920s. As a consequence, American Jews define themselves as outsiders and vote accordingly. 
As these notes should indicate, America was once a much better place for immigrants and their families. The historic advantages of assimilation, ‘Americanization’, Anglo-conformity, immigration restrictions, and a strong economy are all gone (along with quite a few other historic virtues). It’s also true that the immigrants were better historically. They were much more likely to be skilled, educated, etc. The ‘Great Wave’ immigrants has much lower skill levels and the turn of American society against immigration was largely a consequence. Contemporary mythology emphasizes the role of nativism in the restrictions of the 1920s. Declining skill levels provides a different and more germane explanation. 


FBI: Rodney King was right: Angelenos can all just get along!

A press release from the FBI shows the vibrant diversity and diverse vibrancy of 21st Century Los Angeles. (I'll put the names of the accused in bold.)
Twelve Los Angeles-Area Residents Accused of Attempting to Bilk Medicare of $22 Million Arrested as Part of Nationwide Crackdown  
U.S. Attorney’s Office

LOS ANGELES—Twelve Los Angeles-area residents—including California’s second-largest biller for chiropractic services, a physician’s assistant, and owners of durable medical equipment (DME) and ambulance companies—were taken into custody today in relation to seven criminal cases that allege they cumulatively submitted more than $22 million in false billings to Medicare....  
Dr. Houshang Pavehzadeh, of the Sylmar Physician Medical Group, allegedly billed Medicare more than $1.7 million for chiropractic treatments he never performed. During the scheme, which ran from 2005 through 2012, Dr. Pavehzadeh, 40, of Agoura Hills, became the second-largest Medicare biller in California for chiropractic services—even though he was not in the United States when some of the alleged services were performed. In addition to being charged with health care fraud, Pavehzadeh is charged with aggravated identity theft related to Medicare beneficiaries whose information he used to bill Medicare as a part of the scheme. When investigators tried to conduct an audit of Pavehzadeh’s claims, he falsely reported to the Los Angeles Police Department that he had been carjacked and that patient files requested by the auditors had been stolen from his car. Pavehzadeh surrendered this morning, and he is scheduled to be arraigned with other Los Angeles-area defendants this afternoon in the Roybal Federal Building. 
Nine defendants affiliated with DME companies were also charged in five separate indictments. 
Olufunke Fadojutimi, 41, of Carson, a registered nurse; Ayodeji Temitayo Fatunmbi, 41, formerly of Carson and now believed to be residing in Nigeria; and Maritza Velazquez, 40, of Las Vegas, were charged with health care fraud. The scheme allegedly revolved around Lutemi Medical Supplies, a DME company Fadojutimi owned and where Fatunmbi and Velazquez worked. According to the indictment in this case, Lutemi billed Medicare more than $8.3 million in claims, primarily for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs. Fadojutimi and Fatunmbi allegedly laundered Medicare funds in order to purchase fraudulent prescriptions for those power wheelchairs and pay illegal kickbacks to recruit Medicare beneficiaries. Fadojutimi was arrested this morning in Los Angeles, while Velazquez was arrested in Las Vegas. Fatunmbi is currently a fugitive being sought by federal authorities. 
Susanna Artsruni, 45, of North Hollywood, and Erasmus Kotey, 76, of Montebello, a licensed physician’s assistant, allegedly worked together to commit health care fraud out of a medical clinic on Vermont Avenue where they both worked. Kotey allegedly prescribed medically unnecessary DME, including power wheelchairs, for Medicare beneficiaries. Many of those power wheelchair prescriptions were then used by Artsruni’s DME company, Midvalley Medical Supply, to support fraudulent claims to Medicare. In only four months, the clinic and Midvalley billed Medicare more than $525,000 for these fraudulent claims. Artsruni has previously been convicted of health care fraud and was on pre-trial supervision at the time she allegedly laundered some of the proceeds of this fraud. Artsruni was arrested this morning, while Kotey self-surrendered. 
Three other DME cases were also charged, alleging fraudulent Medicare billing for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs that were sometimes never even delivered. In one case, Akinola Afolabi, 53, of Long Beach, the owner of Emmanuel Medical Supply, allegedly submitted more than $2.6 million in false and fraudulent billing to Medicare. In another case, Queen Anieze-Smith, 52, of Encino, and Abdul King-Garba, 47, of Westwood, the owners and operators of ITC Medical Supply, allegedly submitted more than $1.8 million in false and fraudulent billing to Medicare.

Shouldn't they have named their front operation Royal Medical Supply?
In the third case, Clement Etim Aghedo, 53, of Fontana, the owner of Ace Medical Supply Company, allegedly submitted more than $1.8 in false and fraudulent claims to Medicare. Afolabi, Anieze-Smith, and King-Garba were all arrested this morning, while Aghedo self-surrendered. 
In the seventh case brought as part of today’s takedown, three defendants affiliated with Gardena-based ProMed Medical Transportation, an ambulance company, were charged with submitting more than $5.9 million in false claims to Medicare between 2008 and 2011. ProMed’s owner, Yaroslav Proshak, 45, of Valley Village; general manager Sharetta Wallace, 35, of Inglewood; and office manager and biller Sergey Mumjian, 40, of West Hollywood, submitted claims for medically unnecessary transportation services and then created fake documentation purporting to support those claims. Proshak, Wallace, and Mumjian were arrested this morning.

This press release would make the Statue of Liberty proud.

"How Immigration Can Hurt a Country" in theory, not just in reality

U. of Indiana economics professor Eric Rasmusen offers a theoretical model of "How Immigration Can Hurt a Country." 
Can immigration (or capital inflow) hurt the welfare of a country? Yes, if there are decreasing returns to the factor, as this little paper will explain. The idea is important, and probably is new -- at least, I couldn't fi nd it by a google search -- but an economics journal would say it is obvious, I think, so I probably will not try to publish it in a journal. I will post it on the web instead. I do hope it gets into the academic literature and the policy debates. If it is received favorably, I will tidy it up and put it into journal style, adding cites and superfluous generality, and checking my arithmetic. My target audience is trained economists even now, however. Please let me know if someone has already made the external diseconomy argument. I wouldn't be surprised if someone had done so back in the 1920's.

I've found that economic theory is a useful servant for understanding facts, but many bright people seem to view theory as the master to which their awareness of reality must be enslaved. For them, this paper might be an eye-opener.

Supreme Court upholds college affirmative action, mostly

Here's Volokh's Conspiracy on competing interpretations.

June 23, 2013

Surveillance or Megaphone: Which is more important?

Morris Dees wants you
All this talk about surveillance reminds me that ordinary people already can know a lot about the rich and famous, but what matters is less what’s knowable than the socially approved attitude we’re supposed to hold toward that person.

For example, there’s been plenty of information online for over a decade documenting that Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center is a pretty hilariously rotten guy. The more I read about good old Morris, the more I'm reminded of Gene Hackman hamming it up as sleazy Lex Luthor in the original Superman movies. 

But, who cares about the facts? Morris is widely believed to be a saint and a scholar because we are constantly told what a great guy he is. This member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame has no sense of shame, so all the revelations about him can't pry his fingers from the megaphone.

Front Page News!

You may have thought that gay marriage was the most important question of all time, but the real most important issue ever is just coming into view, as prominently featured yet again in the New York Times:
Agency Rules in Favor of Transgender First Grader 
By DAN FROSCH  6:13 PM ET 
A Colorado school district discriminated against a transgender student when it refused to let her use the girls’ bathroom, the state’s civil rights division said.

I just realized that it's been at least a month since the Times did a major story on that MMA fighter who is struggling for the right to beat up women. Isn't the right of ex-men to get paid to practice violence against women what this country is all about? Why the silence, NYT?

The Obama Campaign and Big Data

Strikingly accurate representation of demographic most targeted by Obama
Here's an NYT Magazine article about a bunch of Obama Campaign quants who have decided to make their fortunes by letting corporate America (e.g., the nice folks at Caesar's Palace) use the same Big Data Mind Control techniques that Obama used in 2012 to motivate unmotivated voters like the representative Obama-leaning couch-potato illustrated above.
Data You Can Believe In
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
by Jim Rutenberg

Rutenberg is a political reporter, not a business reporter, so he tends to be blown away by the claims of ex-Obama staffers now starting up marketing data firms that they are radically out ahead of corporate America in their capabilities.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign’s budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. ...
The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney’s media team).

I think a more defensible argument is that at least the Obama staffers didn't loot the campaign the way some of Romney's consultants did. Obama took lots of functions in-house and paid salaries, while Romney hired consultants and paid their marked-up fees.
Now A.M.G.’s founders say the company is at the forefront of a move to turn upside down the way the $60-billion-a-year television-ad market has functioned since its start. And they hope to get very rich in the process.  

This article's notion that political marketers are so much more sophisticated than consumer marketers that the young guns of Obama 2012 will "disrupt" the way big business operates is not very plausible sounding. Political marketing has always lagged behind corporate marketing because of problems like lack of continuity and reliance on fashionable gurus who have gotten hot lately. The Obama campaign was able to maintain a core from 2008 to 2012, while poor Romney just hired a bunch of fast-talking consultants who saw him as their fat cat chance to pay for their kids' college educations off of a few months' work.
But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.  
Fortunately, there happened to be a rare expert in set-top-box data, named Carol Davidsen, working in the cave. ... Her previous employer, Navic Networks, was a very early pioneer in the field of set-top-box data collection. And she was one of the early programmers to figure out how to make a television, designed as a one-way path for sending programming into American homes, relay information back about what exactly a viewer was watching. 
Davidsen determined that Rentrak could roughly do what Grisolano wanted it to do: produce data that could be checked against Wagner’s list of most-persuadable voters to find matches. Rentrak had access to the set-top boxes in the homes of thousands of the targeted voters in every competitive market of every swing state.

This sounds like science fiction, right? Wow, the Obama campaign must have been light-years ahead of corporate America: they're capturing  data on what people were watching from set-top cable boxes!

Except I was doing exactly that for the BehaviorScan market research service on the Procter & Gamble account in 1983-85. For about 30,000 volunteer consumers, we knew every single thing they bought at every supermarket and drug store in town, plus every TV show and commercial they watched in their homes, and we could send different commercials to individual houses via their cable set-top-box.

The set-top box recorded the exact channel each panelist was tuned to by the second. We then employed workers to watch videotapes of all TV shows shown in those markets and write down which commercials started when.

My friend Chris managed the night shift of people who had been attracted to the notion of a job being paid to watch TV. Unsurprisingly, when they found out they had to fast-forward through the shows and only watch the commercials, they weren't the most diligent workers. Every time Chris went to the bathroom, they'd run off to a different floor and party. But they weren't hard to track down because they'd immediately turn their boomboxes up loud and start to boogie. He fired a few and they filed racial discrimination complaints with the EEOC. A federal investigator came by, but he turned out to be a fellow Irish-American Chicagoan; Chris's boombox story cracked him up and he closed the case.
(For instance, Rentrak had 100,000 people in its Denver sample, some 20,000 of whom were on the Obama list; Nielsen had a total of 600 people in Denver.) 

But there are lots of market research firms far more ambitious than Nielsen is with its TV ratings. The reason Nielsen always has only a tiny sample size and lags far behind in technology is because it has a monopoly on TV ratings and people seem to like it that way: they like having one set of ratings that sound authoritative because there aren't any competitors. Arbitron, which long had a radio ratings monopoly tried to get into the TV ratings game way back in the 1980s, but there wasn't much client enthusiasm.

Ad-buyers and ad-sellers both agree to use the same set of numbers, even if the quality to cost ratio is mediocre. One problem is that if you switch ratings companies then there will inevitably be changes in ratings due to the switchover, which drive clients crazy. Do you want to be the marketing research executive at CBS who has to explain to Les Moonves and Chuck Lorre that the change in ratings of Two and a Half Men from last week to this week that you are reporting is probably not real, but is just caused because you dumped Nielsen and signed up with a new lower-cost competitor that does things a little differently? For various reasons like these, monopolies or cartels in the various ratings business are remarkably defensible and enduring.
... The campaign determined that two of the top shows to buy were 1 a.m. repeats of “The Insider” and afternoon episodes of “Judge Joe Brown” — shows that were far cheaper than the evening news or anything being shown on the networks in prime time.  

The unsettling finding of our 1980s Big Data business was that it wasn't readily apparent from this vast amount of information we collected on consumers that changes in TV advertising had much impact on viewers' purchasing behavior. When we started testing and tracking, most brand managers were convinced that they could boost sales for existing consumer packaged goods by doubling their ad budgets, but our unbelievably sophisticated real world laboratory tests seldom showed that was true. About the best we could come up with is that if you have some actual news to tell consumers -- e.g., you've added a breakthrough ingredient to your toothpaste that is endorsed by the American Dental Association because it's so effective -- yeah, then heavy advertising move the needle. But for most famous old products, where all you have to tell consumers is the same old same old, more ads don't necessarily sell more product ...

This doesn't mean that TV advertising of consumer packaged goods is wasted. You certainly need advertising to get most new brands off the ground. After that, however, heavy advertising may mostly serve a deterrent effect of keeping out new entrants. Many CPG categories are something of a cartel, with the same famous brand names dominating decade after decade, in part because many CPG products work pretty satisfactorily and the CPG firms pay huge amounts of money to remind you that these products have long-established reputations as satisfactory.
In the end, an analysis by the Republican ad-buying firm National Media found that Obama paid roughly 35 percent less per broadcast commercial than Romney did.

To a lot of GOP consultants, who get paid because they pocket 15% of the cost of buying ads, the money wasted by the Romney campaign may have been less a bug than a feature.

The article goes on to lament how the one-time Obama saints are now selling out to corporate America, but the Obama employees getting rich off corporate America tomorrow seems more effective than the Republican consultants' tendency to try to get rich off the candidate today.

The big difference between what the Obama campaign could do in 2012 and what CPG marketers could do a generation before is in data mining social media, pushing the already well-pushed envelope of privacy.
The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said. 
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said. 
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”

No bias there! It probably didn't hurt that Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes had been an Obama campaign official in 2008.

Back in the BehaviorScan day, we only used data from volunteers who signed up in writing, we gave them money and prizes for it, and we certainly didn't extract data from their friends.

My presumption is that being able to show more closely targeted ads to the average individual is modestly profitable, but quickly gets countered, and life goes on.

In contrast, knowing a lot about certain individuals can be hugely profitable. If you happened to have the metadata from the CEO of General Electric's cellphone calls, you could probably make some serious money in the stock market anticipating mergers and acquisitions.

If you had happened to have, say, the cellphone metadata of Senator Larry Craig (R-Wide Stance), you could also make money. Hmmmhmmmhmm, the Senator spends a lot of time in public men's rooms ... maybe we should send him some coupons to promote our client's intestinal relief product? Or ... maybe ... we should blackmail him into inserting an obscure clause into tax legislation that will make us zillions of dollars? Which one sounds like a higher ROI?

Trende: "The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited"

At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende returns to the subject of the lousy white turnout in the 2012 election using the recent Census Bureau results from its post-election survey of who voted. His analysis is much like mine in VDARE.com, although he attempts to correct for "over-response bias" of people who lied that they voted when they didn't. (My hunch would be that blacks are most likely to boast they voted when they didn't actually get around to it, but nobody seems to have anyway to prove any theories like this, so I just use the Census Bureau's unadjusted shares of the total vote as the most respectable numbers.)
"The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited" 
As I noted earlier, if you correct the CPS data to account for over-response bias, it shows there were likely 5 million fewer whites in 2012 than in 2008. When you account for expected growth, we’d find 6.5 million fewer whites than a population projection would anticipate. ...
2. These voters were largely downscale, Northern, rural whites. In other words, H. Ross Perot voters. 
Those totals are a bit more precise and certain (and lower) than my estimates from November of last year. With more complete data, we can now get a better handle regarding just who these missing white voters were. ... 
For those with long memories, this stands out as the heart of the “Perot coalition.” That coalition was strongest with secular, blue-collar, often rural voters who were turned off by Bill Clinton’s perceived liberalism and George H.W. Bush’s elitism. They were largely concentrated in the North and Mountain West: Perot’s worst 10 national showings occurred in Southern and border states. His best showings? Maine, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Minnesota. 
We can flesh this out a bit more by running a regression analysis, which enables us to isolate the effects of particular variables while holding other variables constant. We’ll use county-level data ...

In his regression analysis, he's looking at total change in turnout (all ethnicities) by county from 2008 to 2012. I would prefer instead to use total change in turnout from 2004 (the recent peak of white people's participation) to 2012.
For those who didn’t click over to the chart, we’re pretty confident that the voters were more likely to stay home if they resided in states that were hit by Hurricane Sandy, that were targeted by a campaign in 2008, that had higher foreign-born populations, and that had more Hispanic residents. The latter result probably suggests a drop-off in rural Hispanic voters, who are overrepresented in an analysis such as this one. 

Texas has 254 counties, with an average population of about 100,000, each of which weigh in this analysis, while Los Angeles County, for instance, has about 10,000,000 million people.
We’re also pretty confident that the voters were more likely to turn out if they resided in counties with higher median household incomes, high population growth, a competitive Senate race in 2012, or that were a target state in 2012. 
Counties with higher populations of Mormons, African-Americans, and older voters also had higher turnout, all other things being equal. None of this is all that surprising. 
Perhaps most intriguingly, even after all of these controls are in place, the county’s vote for Ross Perot in 1992 comes back statistically significant, and suggests that a higher vote for Perot in a county did, in fact, correlate with a drop-off in voter turnout in 2012. 
What does that tell us about these voters? As I noted, they tended to be downscale, blue-collar whites. They weren’t evangelicals; Ross Perot was pro-choice, in favor of gay rights, and in favor of some gun control. You probably didn’t know that, though, and neither did most voters, because that’s not what his campaign was about. 
His campaign was focused on his fiercely populist stance on economics. He was a deficit hawk, favoring tax hikes on the rich to help balance the budget. He was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration as well as to free trade (and especially the North American Free Trade Agreement). He advocated more spending on education, and even Medicare-for-all. Given the overall demographic and political orientation of these voters, one can see why they would stay home rather than vote for an urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney.

I wasn't that impressed by the notion of Ross Perot as President (only Saturday Night Live pointed out that he was clearly going through a major manic depressive cycle in 1992, when he disappeared for the summer muttering about the CIA trying to ruin his daughter's wedding by claiming she was a lesbian). But I am impressed by Perot voters, whose reasonably coherent and patriotic economics scared the Establishment into making some decisions that contributed to the rising wage prosperity of the later 1990s.
3. These [missing white] voters were not enough to cost Romney the election, standing alone. 
But while this was the most salient demographic change, it was probably not, standing alone, enough to swing the election to Obama. After all, he won the election by almost exactly 5 million votes. If we assume there were 6.5 million “missing” white voters, than means that Romney would have had to win almost 90 percent of their votes to win the election. 
Give that whites overall broke roughly 60-40 for Romney [the Reuters poll showed 57.1 to 41.1 for Romney], this seems unlikely. In fact, if these voters had shown up and voted like whites overall voted, the president’s margin would have shrunk, but he still would have won by a healthy 2.7 percent margin. 
At the same time, if you buy the analysis above, it’s likely that these voters weren’t a representative subsample of white voters. There were probably very few outright liberal voters (though there were certainly some), and they were probably less favorably disposed toward Obama than whites as a whole. Given that people who disapprove of the president rarely vote for him (Obama’s vote share exceeded his favorable ratings in only four states in 2012), my sense is that, if these voters were somehow forced to show up and vote, they’d have broken more along the lines of 70-30 for Romney.

Okay, but in addition, in an election where white people who were apathetic in 2012 about Romney were fired up to vote, almost certainly the GOP would have won some marginal Obama voters.
This still only shrinks the president’s margin to 1.8 percent, but now we’re in the ballpark of being able to see a GOP path to victory (we’re also more in line with what the national polls were showing).

In this scenario, boosting the GOP share of the white vote from 58% to 60% percent, say, gives the GOP candidate the national popular vote victory. And there are obvious Electoral Vote opportunities where a lot of whites held their noses and voted for Obama in the north-central Slippery Six, each of which Romney lost narrowly because he didn't get a high enough share of the white vote: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. These states are not likely to be flooded with newly voting Hispanics by 2016, either.
In fact, if the African-American share of the electorate drops back to its recent average of 11 percent of the electorate and the GOP wins 10 percent of the black vote rather than 6 percent (there are good arguments both for and against this occurring; I am agnostic on the question), the next Republican would win narrowly if he or she can motivate these “missing whites,” even without moving the Hispanic (or Asian) vote. 
4. The GOP faces a tough choice. 
Of course, it isn’t that easy. Obama won’t be on the ticket in 2016, and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could have a greater appeal to these voters (current polling suggests that she does). But there are always tradeoffs, and Clinton’s greater appeal to blue-collar whites, to the extent it holds through 2016, could be offset by a less visceral attachment with young voters, college-educated whites and to nonwhites than the president enjoys. 
But the GOP still has something of a choice to make. One option is to go after these downscale whites. As I’ll show in Part 2 [not yet published], it can probably build a fairly strong coalition this way. Doing so would likely mean nominating a candidate who is more Bush-like in personality, and to some degree on policy. This doesn’t mean embracing “big government” economics or redistribution full bore; suspicion of government is a strain in American populism dating back at least to Andrew Jackson. It means abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances. This GOP would have to be more "America first" on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main Street/populist on economics. 
For now, the GOP seems to be taking a different route, trying to appeal to Hispanics through immigration reform and to upscale whites by relaxing its stance on some social issues.

By the way, economic populism isn't a bad way to not turn off Hispanic voters. In contrast, the conventional wisdom among the Republican Brain Trust that Romneyism plus amnesty equals success with Hispanics is the kind of thing that makes sense only if your main Hispanic friend is former Commerce Secretary-turned-amnesty-advocate Carlos "Hidalgo-American" Gutierrez.

Visas as civil rights for foreigners

Here's a squib in the New York Times that inadvertently reveals much about Establishment prejudices on immigration.
Supporters of Immigration Bill Offer Amendment Focused on Women 
By JULIA PRESTON 
Saying the immigration overhaul bill now before the Senate would discriminate against future immigrants who are women, 13 female senators have introduced an amendment that would make it easier for foreign women to come to the United States under a new merit system in the legislation. 
The amendment is part of a new effort by supporters of the bill to attract votes by framing immigration as a women’s issue. Its lead sponsors are two Democrats, Senator Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, and sponsors also include a Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. ...

The amendment the senators introduced late Wednesday would make a major change to the bill now on the Senate floor. It would create a separate tier for professions typically held by women, under a new merit-based point system for future immigration that would place more emphasis on job qualifications and less on family ties, which are the priority in the current system. 
The senators said women in foreign countries often do not have the same educational and career opportunities as men. “We should not cement those inequalities into our immigration laws,” Ms. Hirono said.

Sure, argue the 13 female Senators, these foreign women are uneducated and unskilled, but, you see, that's the fault of their own countries, so, ergo, therefore, and hence, it's America's responsibility to rectify this discrimination by handing out more visas. To not do so would be discriminatory, and that's the worst thing in the world.
Ms. Murkowski (R-Her Daddy) said the amendment would open up more visas for women in health care professions, to alleviate chronic shortages in this country.

Ah, the chronic shortage of Americans willing to change bedpans for less than the market rate of pay. This shortage is so chronic that I've been hearing all about it since the 1970s. It's almost as chronic as my money shortage. All my life, I've suffered from a chronic shortage of money, which I define as having less money than, all else being equal, I wish I had. I think the Gang of Eight should do something about that.