Two great podcasts I've been listening to lately:
Black Jack Justice
I cannot say enough good things about Decoder Ring Theater's presentations of Black Jack Justice. It's a golden-age-of-radio-esque presentation about two private detectives, Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl detective. The stories have dialogue and sound effects that recall programs from the 1940s, as well as nicely crafted internal monologues both from Jack and Trixie's perspectives. Each program is about 25 mins long and are all well-written by Greg Taylor.
I'm pretty sure that Black Jack Justice counts as a romance novel because it's character-driven and because of the constant banter between Jack and Trixie. Because the plotlines need to be wrapped up in 25 mins, some of the episodes end a little too quickly and too cleanly. But the characters are funny, rich and vivid, the detectives confront a variety of interesting and controversial issues such as domestic violence, and the dialogue is very good.
The highest compliment I can pay to Decoder Ring Theater is that I have been "rationing" the episodes because I don't want it to end.
The BS Report
I've been a fan of Bill Simmons since before he moved to ESPN, and I regularly listen to the BS Report, his podcast.
I'm intrigued at how Bill Simmons has evolved from a sports-writer into an excellent interviewer and conversationalist through his podcasts. He routinely scores interviews with stand-up comedians such as Jeff Ross and Patton Oswald, writers such as Chuck Klosterman, writers and producers for SNL, fairly high-profile actors such as Jon Ham, and of course sports figures such as Steve Nash, Mark Cuban and even the legendary Jerry West. I think one of the most appealing aspects to Simmons' podcasts is that they aren't interviews so much as they are discussions about a variety of topics. He lets sports figures talk about movies and TV shows, and talks sports with the actors. He also interjects his own ideas into the conversations, which makes it less of an interrogation and more of a free-flowing discussion. And best of all, he's funny.
I want to give a particular plug to Chuck Klosterman's most recent podcast (part 1 and part 2). Simmons and Klosterman are both funny and smart and their discussions are always fascinating. I had never heard of Klosterman until the BS Report but I will be buying his latest book of essays to read between the semesters.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Too big to fail?
Too big to fail?
Gary Stern, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, co-authored a book called "Too Big To Fail" with Ron Feldman. At first glance, this book could be tossed into the pile of books flooding out of the wake of the financial crisis of ought-8. Except that this book was published in 2004, and sounds incredibly prescient based on Stern's conversation with Russ Roberts on Econ Talk.
Economists and libertarians regularly sound the alarm about "moral hazard", whether it's in relation to this most recent financial crisis, or in many areas of public policy. To put it as succinctly as I can, moral hazard means that you will act differently if your actions are insulated from any risks that your actions engender. So you will probably bet more aggressively with someone else's money than you would bet with your own money, especially if you get to keep any winnings garnered by your bets.
The moral hazard argument goes that bailing-out a firm is bad because the people taking the risks get paid if the risks pay out, but the tax-payers take the loss if the risks don't pay out. This sounds an awful lot like gambling with someone else's money, and it creates perverse incentives for future decision-makers to behave irresponsibly because they know that they will be bailed-out.
Before we move on, it's important to understand what, exactly, happens when there is a bail-out. My understanding is that, in general, bond-holders get bailed-out while equity-holders get wiped out. What does this mean? Equity
holders own stock in a company, so they reap large profits if the company does
well, but they can lose their entire investment if the company goes
bust. A bail-out of a trouble firm usually forces equity-holders to take big losses. Bond-holders, on the other hand, are essentially the firm's creditors: They loan money to the firm at a fixed interest rate, and expect to be paid back their principal plus interest, regardless of how well the firm does. Bail-outs usually protect bond-holders from big losses.
Why does it matter that bail-outs protect bond-holders but wipe-out share-holders? One of the counter-arguments is that, while bail-outs do create a moral hazard, there is still tremendous pressure from equity-holders for the firm to act responsibly because the share-holders don't want to lose their investment. The bond-holders, who are usually the ones who get bailed-out, don't really care if the firm acts irresponsibly because they are going to get back their investment anyway. So they're not exerting any major pressure on the institution because they're protected one way or the other.
Here's the key insight I took from Stern and Roberts. The pressure exerted by equity holders for firms to act responsibly is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Why is this the case? The majority of people and institutions who own stock are almost universally well-diversified, which means that they never own too much of one company (or one sector) that if that company goes bankrupt that they'll lose very much. There simply aren't any equity holders who have so much at stake with the success of one company the they're going to bother putting much pressure on that company to act responsibly. And the bond-holders don't own the company in the same way that the share-holders do, so they couldn't exert much pressure even if they wanted to. And bond-holders don't really care anyway because they are the ones that get bailed out.
This brings us to the decision-makers---the investment bankers and managers and CEOs---who are running the company. What are their incentives? As Stern and Roberts point out, investment bankers get paid a big salary, but they also get paid stock options. So they themselves are equity holders in the company and have an incentive not to bankrupt the firm. However, employee stock-options are rarely structured such that employees can cash out everything all at once, so the stock options are a little more theoretical than shares of stock you or I might have purchased in the firm with funds in our IRA. Now, throw onto this mix the fact that many managers are paid bonuses based on the "performance" of their firm, and you can see the moral hazard for excessive risk-taking start to take shape: You'll be paid more in bonuses if your risky bets pay off, and while you'll lose your stock options if those risks don't pay out, you can't exercise all of those stock options anyway, so there's nothing truly lost out of your pocket. Plus you're being paid a very large salary all along the way, and you'll be able to exercise at least a small number of your stock options. So why not take excessive risks to jack up your bonuses and the value of the few stock options that you can exercise?
The point is that there is no single investor on the hook for enough losses when a firm fails to put pressure on that firm to act responsibly. Equity-holders are either diversified investors with a plethora of other stock, or employees of the firm who can't exercise all of their stock options anyway, while the bond-holders get bailed out if the firm goes bust.
There's much more great information in the podcast, and I'm sure there's even more information in the book, such as a history of bail-outs over the last couple of decades. But one thing is for sure: I'm much less sanguine about the claim that some firms are too big to fail, and much more critical of why we let some firms get too big to fail in the first place.
Gary Stern, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, co-authored a book called "Too Big To Fail" with Ron Feldman. At first glance, this book could be tossed into the pile of books flooding out of the wake of the financial crisis of ought-8. Except that this book was published in 2004, and sounds incredibly prescient based on Stern's conversation with Russ Roberts on Econ Talk.
Economists and libertarians regularly sound the alarm about "moral hazard", whether it's in relation to this most recent financial crisis, or in many areas of public policy. To put it as succinctly as I can, moral hazard means that you will act differently if your actions are insulated from any risks that your actions engender. So you will probably bet more aggressively with someone else's money than you would bet with your own money, especially if you get to keep any winnings garnered by your bets.
The moral hazard argument goes that bailing-out a firm is bad because the people taking the risks get paid if the risks pay out, but the tax-payers take the loss if the risks don't pay out. This sounds an awful lot like gambling with someone else's money, and it creates perverse incentives for future decision-makers to behave irresponsibly because they know that they will be bailed-out.
Before we move on, it's important to understand what, exactly, happens when there is a bail-out. My understanding is that, in general, bond-holders get bailed-out while equity-holders get wiped out. What does this mean? Equity
holders own stock in a company, so they reap large profits if the company does
well, but they can lose their entire investment if the company goes
bust. A bail-out of a trouble firm usually forces equity-holders to take big losses. Bond-holders, on the other hand, are essentially the firm's creditors: They loan money to the firm at a fixed interest rate, and expect to be paid back their principal plus interest, regardless of how well the firm does. Bail-outs usually protect bond-holders from big losses.
Why does it matter that bail-outs protect bond-holders but wipe-out share-holders? One of the counter-arguments is that, while bail-outs do create a moral hazard, there is still tremendous pressure from equity-holders for the firm to act responsibly because the share-holders don't want to lose their investment. The bond-holders, who are usually the ones who get bailed-out, don't really care if the firm acts irresponsibly because they are going to get back their investment anyway. So they're not exerting any major pressure on the institution because they're protected one way or the other.
Here's the key insight I took from Stern and Roberts. The pressure exerted by equity holders for firms to act responsibly is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Why is this the case? The majority of people and institutions who own stock are almost universally well-diversified, which means that they never own too much of one company (or one sector) that if that company goes bankrupt that they'll lose very much. There simply aren't any equity holders who have so much at stake with the success of one company the they're going to bother putting much pressure on that company to act responsibly. And the bond-holders don't own the company in the same way that the share-holders do, so they couldn't exert much pressure even if they wanted to. And bond-holders don't really care anyway because they are the ones that get bailed out.
This brings us to the decision-makers---the investment bankers and managers and CEOs---who are running the company. What are their incentives? As Stern and Roberts point out, investment bankers get paid a big salary, but they also get paid stock options. So they themselves are equity holders in the company and have an incentive not to bankrupt the firm. However, employee stock-options are rarely structured such that employees can cash out everything all at once, so the stock options are a little more theoretical than shares of stock you or I might have purchased in the firm with funds in our IRA. Now, throw onto this mix the fact that many managers are paid bonuses based on the "performance" of their firm, and you can see the moral hazard for excessive risk-taking start to take shape: You'll be paid more in bonuses if your risky bets pay off, and while you'll lose your stock options if those risks don't pay out, you can't exercise all of those stock options anyway, so there's nothing truly lost out of your pocket. Plus you're being paid a very large salary all along the way, and you'll be able to exercise at least a small number of your stock options. So why not take excessive risks to jack up your bonuses and the value of the few stock options that you can exercise?
The point is that there is no single investor on the hook for enough losses when a firm fails to put pressure on that firm to act responsibly. Equity-holders are either diversified investors with a plethora of other stock, or employees of the firm who can't exercise all of their stock options anyway, while the bond-holders get bailed out if the firm goes bust.
There's much more great information in the podcast, and I'm sure there's even more information in the book, such as a history of bail-outs over the last couple of decades. But one thing is for sure: I'm much less sanguine about the claim that some firms are too big to fail, and much more critical of why we let some firms get too big to fail in the first place.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
What do education reform and health-care reform have in comon?
I've been reading (listening to podcasts?) about health-care reform and education reform lately, and both issues have one thing in common: We measure the inputs but not the outputs.
What does it mean to measure inputs but not outputs? Basically we measure what goes into the system, typically in terms of dollars, but we don't do a very good job measuring what comes out of the system.
In health care, this means that we measure health treatments (tests, medicines, doctor visits, specialists and so on) but we don't measure health outcomes (does the patient get better?). For schooling, we measure spending on education, but we don't have fine-grained data on student outcomes. It's true that NCLB has forced all states to use standardized testing, but only at a very course-grained level. We could do much, much better.
Why do we measure inputs? There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious, and probably most important reason, is that measuring inputs is fundamentally easier than measuring outputs.
Why is this the case? Well, consider the task of measuring health outcomes for a heart surgeon. A crude approximation is to measure the percentage of successful surgeries performed. Except maybe the best surgeons perform the most difficult surgeries, so they're going to fail more because they're better. So we need to take into account the difficulty of the procedure being done, which makes measuring the outcomes more difficult. Furthermore, some successful surgeries are more successful than other successes (and some failed procedures are worse than other failures), so we need to adjust for that as well. At the very least, we need standards for evaluating degrees of difficulty of the surgery to be performed, and we need to follow-up for years after the surgery to see how well the surgeon's work holds up.
Now consider measuring health outcomes for a general practitioner responsible for caring for people for many years. How do we measure a successful outcome? Average lifespan of the patient? Quality of life of the patient? What does a successful outcome even look like?
The point isn't that we can't measure health outcomes. We can track degree of difficulty for surgeries, we can do follow-up with the patient. We have the technology to do that. We can compare a GP's patients against the general population, while controling for factors like the region of the country, the age of the patients, their income, their heritable disease risks, and so on. We have the technology to store and analyze all this data, we just don't do it aggressively enough.
Once we can track health outcomes, we can evaluate doctors based on health outcomes. And once we can do that, we can stop paying doctors based on treatments administered, which can be very expensive, and start paying doctors for better health outcomes. So long as doctors are paid for treatments, there is incentive to order every test that a patient's insurance will pay for. I don't see how this can not lead to over-consumption of health care for people with insurance, since they're not paying for the extra tests, and litigation-averse doctors will happily order every test covered by insurance.
We have a very similar problem in education, namely that we measure how much money goes into the system, but we have crude measurements of what comes out of the system. And it's hard to evaluate teachers for the same reasons that it's hard to evaluate doctors: some teachers have wealthy students with highly-involved parents, and some teachers don't. Sometimes the best teachers educate the worst students, where 50% of the students passing a basic proficiency exam is a big success.
As in medicine, these challenges don't mean that it's impossible to evaluate student learning in a more fine-grained way. It just means that it's going to take some more work to collect better data.
One intriguing idea is Value-Added Testing (VAT), where you measure a class at the beginning of the year to establish a baseline of what they know, then again at the end of the year to see what they've learned---in other words, what value has the teacher added to the students' knowledge? This controls for some of the problem of diverse student bodies.
Another exciting trend is performance-based pay, or merit pay, for the best teachers. Right now, faculty salaries are determined by seniority and not much else. So if you work for 10 years as an industrial chemist, then decide to teach high school chemistry, you make the same money as a 22-year old college graduate. In fact you probably make less because you don't have the teaching certificate that the 22-year old has, and you have to go back to school to earn that certificate. And while I'm not very familiar with the literature, I'm pretty sure that there's very little correlation between teaching certifications and performance in the classroom.
So you can't switch into teaching and make good money, and if you happen to be an excellent 22-year-old teacher, the only way to get a raise is to wait until you've been there long enough. So long as you don't get fired, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you teach, you get the same raises everyone else does. It doesn't matter if the teacher next door is terrible and you're great; you get paid the same. Very few competitive industries pay everyone the same; why do we expect it to work in education? I don't think there are enough selfless individuals who will work long hours for little respect and no chance at a raise.
Are there problems with merit-based pay? Certainly. Basing pay entirely on standardized testing or value-added testing puts an awful lot of pressure on tests, and tests never tell the whole story in education. Plus it creates a huge incentive to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else. Merit-pay will have to include other metrics, like classroom observation and follow-up studies on how well the students do down the road. But it's hard to imagine a worse system given the amount of money we spend on education in the US.
The point of all of this: Statistics matter. In 1986, we thought that batting average and home runs were the most important statistics; most fans didn't understand the value of on-base percentage. Hell, most general managers didn't understand the critical importance of OBP. Baseball stat geeks have revolutionized our understanding of the game of baseball by looking at the data in great detail.
How the heck can we understand baseball so well, but we don't know nearly enough about health care or education?
What does it mean to measure inputs but not outputs? Basically we measure what goes into the system, typically in terms of dollars, but we don't do a very good job measuring what comes out of the system.
In health care, this means that we measure health treatments (tests, medicines, doctor visits, specialists and so on) but we don't measure health outcomes (does the patient get better?). For schooling, we measure spending on education, but we don't have fine-grained data on student outcomes. It's true that NCLB has forced all states to use standardized testing, but only at a very course-grained level. We could do much, much better.
Why do we measure inputs? There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious, and probably most important reason, is that measuring inputs is fundamentally easier than measuring outputs.
Why is this the case? Well, consider the task of measuring health outcomes for a heart surgeon. A crude approximation is to measure the percentage of successful surgeries performed. Except maybe the best surgeons perform the most difficult surgeries, so they're going to fail more because they're better. So we need to take into account the difficulty of the procedure being done, which makes measuring the outcomes more difficult. Furthermore, some successful surgeries are more successful than other successes (and some failed procedures are worse than other failures), so we need to adjust for that as well. At the very least, we need standards for evaluating degrees of difficulty of the surgery to be performed, and we need to follow-up for years after the surgery to see how well the surgeon's work holds up.
Now consider measuring health outcomes for a general practitioner responsible for caring for people for many years. How do we measure a successful outcome? Average lifespan of the patient? Quality of life of the patient? What does a successful outcome even look like?
The point isn't that we can't measure health outcomes. We can track degree of difficulty for surgeries, we can do follow-up with the patient. We have the technology to do that. We can compare a GP's patients against the general population, while controling for factors like the region of the country, the age of the patients, their income, their heritable disease risks, and so on. We have the technology to store and analyze all this data, we just don't do it aggressively enough.
Once we can track health outcomes, we can evaluate doctors based on health outcomes. And once we can do that, we can stop paying doctors based on treatments administered, which can be very expensive, and start paying doctors for better health outcomes. So long as doctors are paid for treatments, there is incentive to order every test that a patient's insurance will pay for. I don't see how this can not lead to over-consumption of health care for people with insurance, since they're not paying for the extra tests, and litigation-averse doctors will happily order every test covered by insurance.
We have a very similar problem in education, namely that we measure how much money goes into the system, but we have crude measurements of what comes out of the system. And it's hard to evaluate teachers for the same reasons that it's hard to evaluate doctors: some teachers have wealthy students with highly-involved parents, and some teachers don't. Sometimes the best teachers educate the worst students, where 50% of the students passing a basic proficiency exam is a big success.
As in medicine, these challenges don't mean that it's impossible to evaluate student learning in a more fine-grained way. It just means that it's going to take some more work to collect better data.
One intriguing idea is Value-Added Testing (VAT), where you measure a class at the beginning of the year to establish a baseline of what they know, then again at the end of the year to see what they've learned---in other words, what value has the teacher added to the students' knowledge? This controls for some of the problem of diverse student bodies.
Another exciting trend is performance-based pay, or merit pay, for the best teachers. Right now, faculty salaries are determined by seniority and not much else. So if you work for 10 years as an industrial chemist, then decide to teach high school chemistry, you make the same money as a 22-year old college graduate. In fact you probably make less because you don't have the teaching certificate that the 22-year old has, and you have to go back to school to earn that certificate. And while I'm not very familiar with the literature, I'm pretty sure that there's very little correlation between teaching certifications and performance in the classroom.
So you can't switch into teaching and make good money, and if you happen to be an excellent 22-year-old teacher, the only way to get a raise is to wait until you've been there long enough. So long as you don't get fired, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you teach, you get the same raises everyone else does. It doesn't matter if the teacher next door is terrible and you're great; you get paid the same. Very few competitive industries pay everyone the same; why do we expect it to work in education? I don't think there are enough selfless individuals who will work long hours for little respect and no chance at a raise.
Are there problems with merit-based pay? Certainly. Basing pay entirely on standardized testing or value-added testing puts an awful lot of pressure on tests, and tests never tell the whole story in education. Plus it creates a huge incentive to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else. Merit-pay will have to include other metrics, like classroom observation and follow-up studies on how well the students do down the road. But it's hard to imagine a worse system given the amount of money we spend on education in the US.
The point of all of this: Statistics matter. In 1986, we thought that batting average and home runs were the most important statistics; most fans didn't understand the value of on-base percentage. Hell, most general managers didn't understand the critical importance of OBP. Baseball stat geeks have revolutionized our understanding of the game of baseball by looking at the data in great detail.
How the heck can we understand baseball so well, but we don't know nearly enough about health care or education?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
In defense of partisan politics
I highly recommend listening to EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts.
Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.
In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).
Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.
There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.
The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.
Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.
All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.
I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.
Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.
In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).
Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.
There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.
The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.
Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.
All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.
I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The mean face of mental illness
I'm the trustee for my disabled aunt, who hasn't worked for over 30 years due to severe anxiety. It's a gut-wrenching, challenging job for me because she's mentally ill, but not obviously so, and I don't always know how to treat her. She has a college degree, she's a good artist, and she can pass for a perfectly functional person at first glance. But if you look a little deeper, you see a messy picture. She lives in a filthy condo packed full of junk, she has no friends, and if she doesn't get what she wants, she lashes out as fiercely and as viciously as a cornered animal. I've heard her, as an grown woman, say to her own mother, "I hate you and I wish you had died instead of Dad."
The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.
But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.
For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.
One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.
What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.
And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.
What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.
The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.
But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.
For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.
One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.
What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.
And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.
What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
How made-for-sci-fi channel movies are like Scooby Doo
Made for sci-fi movies are great. Not "Lord of the Rings" great, or indy movie great, or even summertime blockbuster great, but genre-film great. Some decent dialogue, some comic relief, a few decent tricks with the genre-induced expectations, some stock characters and some depth, and occasionally decent direction. Sure, the plots usually unravel halfway through, but I enjoy these movies on a weekend. Especially when I'm folding laundry or doing other chores.
I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.
Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.
I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!
Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.
Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.
Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.
I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.
Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.
I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!
Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.
Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.
Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A different angle on the auto industry bailout
I've heard all the regular theories about the failure of the American auto industry---that the unions have created an unsustainable set of benefits for their retirees ("the unions are to blame!"), the the companies haven't been agile enough to handle foreign competition ("poor corporate culture is to blame!"), that the companies are managed so poorly that there's no way for them to compete ("the management is to blame!").
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
- The big three automakers in the US cannot legally run their own dealerships.
- The car companies cannot close franchises without paying back the full franchise fee to the franchisee.
- The big three must produce and advertise a certain number of (possibly unprofitable) cars for each of their franchisees, or else they need to close the franchise by paying back the franchise fee.
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
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