Quiet Declarations

So here’s the deal: I write one measly article three years ago criticizing sugar import quotas, and suddenly I’m branded the resident subject matter expert by certain friends. But on the bright side, in this dubious role I recently stumbled across a little piece [hat tip: Jacob] that’s stirred up some of the old agitation that got me writing on sugar tariffs in the first place. Now I largely agree with Ben Muse’s position, and I’m not really bent out of shape by the unsurprising news brief he references from the International Sweetner Symposium. However, check out the website of the American Sugar Alliance, the primary lobbying body for the sugar industry. I couldn’t begin to fisk all the misconceptions advanced by this site… but for one brief paragraph I’ll certainly amuse myself by trying :)

First, I don’t see how arguing that protection should exist because of 372,000 sugar-related jobs is valid after saying that the growers, processors, and refiners directly represented totals 146,000. The remaining 226,000 must be highly indirect jobs who are either going to continue to rely on sugar at higher prices without protection (thereby not needing protection) or who are going to turn to a lower-cost alternative instead (thereby not needing protection). Now, let’s set aside for a moment the fact that inflating their scope of dependants essentially invalidates all their other statistics, and turn instead to the ridiculous statement that American consumers pay 22% less than “consumers in other developed countries”. Why are we concerned about only the price of sugar as compared to the few nations that are as senseless about protectionism as we are? I’d be far more concerned about the fact that we are boxing the most significant cash crop of many populous underdeveloped nations out of the primary market for sugar products with trade restrictions, which, by the way, results in a sugar price for domestic consumers that nearly triples the world price. I also like how the website implies that Americans producing 85% of their sugar domestically is a rationale for protectionism after it was protectionism that created such a high percentage in the first place. I could go on but the attacks would get increasingly bitter. Let me instead say that what disturbs me about the ASA isn’t the fact that they are a lobbying group — lobbying is commonplace and skilled lobbyists are capable of fantastic arguments — it’s that the pitiful justifications the ASA advances can be so easily dismissed by anyone who took tenth-grade statistics and an introductory economics class.

In a somewhat related story, shortly after reading this article I followed an interesting mini-debate between Todd Zywicki and Matthew Malewski on the extent to which the specific chemical structure of high fructose corn syrup can be attributed to weight gain as compared to the chemical structure of sugar cane. Now, if it can be proven that HFCS is to blame for making all those kids fat that are supposedly drinking too many soft drinks between classes, wouldn’t that make the battle cry for the government to help make us thinner decidely ironic? Story line: (1) government protects sugar (2) resulting sugar price increase drives soft drinks to HFCS (3) HFCS makes kids fat (4) the public demands that the government help make kids thinner.

Well, in the activist interest of using government intervention to protect us against our own poor choices and curb increasing obesity, allow me to propose a gesture that even the most ardent classical liberals might consider: let’s eliminate sugar protection and thereby encourage the market to reconsider sugar cane beverages as an alternative to HFCS. Let’s do it for the obese. Let’s do it for those poor souls who are helpless against what their hand transports to their mouth. Let’s do it for the children! Who could oppose such a humanitarian gesture?

If anybody hears about an alliance between anti-obesity activists and libertarians that stems from this post, and nobody down in Hell has reported a frost, do let me know…

This piece on John Kerry’s management style is exactly the type of thing my leadership-oriented mind enjoys weighing. When it comes to a President as Chief Executive, the choice is difficult but the debate is common to every large business in the world.

In one corner stands the quintessential micromanager. Spend years in the business accumulating a wealth of knowledge, making you both highly informed in what you do know and highly resistant to contradictory advice from others who are highly informed in similar areas. Use your intelligence to make slow, rational, and well-reasoned decisions in an often-painful process that may not be finished quickly enough for timely action and irritates everyone around you in the meantime. Occasionally ask ridiculous technical questions to keep your advisers on their toes, and as a rule act under the assumption that you are more informed and just plain smarter than the person with whom you are speaking.

In the other corner we have the �ber-macro version of governance. Surround yourself with a stable group of intelligence and competent advisers and pray (literally) that they never lead you astray. Favor stability at the risk of groupthink under the assuption that the resulting efficiency will lead to an improved decision-making system. Make decisions quickly based on the facts available and stand by those decisions until (and sometimes even after) the position becomes untenable. Regardless of how smart you think you are, learn to value decisiveness as your comparative advantage and delegate nearly all thinking activities to suboordinates while keeping a death-grip on the reins.

So, you’re a shareholder and you have two choices for your CEO. One has a MBA and 20 years experience as a chief executive, including 4 in the current position, but his history of decisive action includes several questionable calls that some argue are disastrous to the long-term stability of the company. The other has 20 years of directly-related business experience and extensive knowledge of the field, but virtually no management experience and widespread concerns of excessive deliberation and micromanagement.

One thing I always hate to hear is the “anything’s better than the status quo” argument. A lot of people hate Wal-Mart but no sensible investor would advance such a position at the shareholders’ meeting. The more reasonable argument goes something like “Do the numbers suggest that the firm is headed in the wrong direction? If so, can it be turned around under current policies or do we need a turnaround expert? If we need one, do we have a turnaround expert available or would we just be shaking things up?” These are tough questions, but they’re much better than the ones some people are asking. Instincts are great to have, but if emotional impulsiveness and bad information are considered bad qualities in a candidate then they should be no less acceptable for a voter. Anyway, there’s my two cents for the evening.

Score: Titans 12, Jaguars 15

Game Story:

Usually-stellar Coach Jeff Fisher is so impressed with new running back Chris Brown getting 100+ yards in each of his first two games that he changes his entire offense to a clock-grinding ground game, completely forgetting that the Titans have an amazing pass offense and that the Jaguars defense is best in the league against the run. Brown does get his 100 yards on about 634 straight carries, but in the meantime Fisher forgets to notice that the Jaguars are scoring points and the Titans are not. By the time Fisher realizes the clock is still running the players are in the showers and the fans are in their cars headed home.

Blown Coaching Move of the Game #1: The Titans have 1:40 left in the 1st half and 3 timeouts and run the clock out with the Jags receiving in the 2nd half.

Blown Coaching Move of the Game #2: The Jags have 1st and Goal at the 1 to win it with 1:00 left in the game and the Titans let the clock run down to 9 seconds left, thereby ensuring their own demise.

(Note: Fisher swears the ref didn’t see him call time out at the end. I believe him, but that doesn’t explain why he morphed into former Vanderbilt Coach Woody Widenhofer at the end of the first half.)

Injury Report: The Titans have 3 of 7 healthy linebackers, 1 1/2 wide receivers, and QB Steve McNair will be playing with a broken chest again.

Fantasy Update: McNair, due to his broken chest and his coach calling no passing plays, earned me about 1 fantasy point for attendance. This is roughly comparable to getting 200 points on the SAT for signing your name. Thank goodness Chris Brown is on my team too or else I would be the first fantasy player in league history with a negative point total. (Sidebar: will every quarterback in my fantasy league pick the week they play me to throw for 10 touchdowns and no interceptions?)

Jacksonville will not move up in the Evil Power Rankings this week because all slots higher are occupied by teams still worthy of their place in Hell (or in the case of the Raiders, Satan being worthy of his place in Oakland). But I also can’t fault the Jags for great defense and poor Titans coaching.

Next Game: Tennessee (1-2) at San Diego (1-2) Sun 10/3

A few weeks back my post on the top specialty license plates caught an inquiry about the “Choose Life!” plates that were approved by the state legislature. Here’s an update to that story (from the aspiring City Paper and not the pitiful Tennessean, whose front-page headline is currently “Judge Clears Way for Motorcycle Rally”.) It seems that the ACLU, dissatisfied with what it believes to be blatantly partisan legislation, is opting for a strategy that denies the legislature the right to approve any plates at all. However, this would presumably strip away the funding for all charities and nonprofits currently enjoying the proceeds of specialty plate sales.

While I agree with the assertion that the legislature was acting in a partisan manner (reflecting the will of the state’s citizens, but still…) I’m forced to question whether the ACLU’s motives are any less one-sided in this instance. More importantly, though, I’m less than prepared to support the ACLU if their tactic sends the whole system down in flames. While I can see the merit in removing the legislature as the middle man, my crusade against state overreach would not begin with state facilitation of voluntary contributions to charities.

[Update 09/24/04: I find this follow-up article to raise a far more compelling question: is it illegitimate for an elected body to practice viewpoint discrimination because they are preventing the public access to one side (de facto speech infringement), or is this legitimate on the grounds that they can be voted out of office if too far out of step with the constituency (small-r republicanism)?]

[Update 09/27/04: We have a verdict… speech infringement it is!]

Score: Titans 17, Colts 31

Stats that Should Matter but Don’t:

Passing Yards: McNair 273, Manning 254
Rushing Yards: Titans 153, Colts 129
Total Yards: Titans 389, Colts 373
Time of Possession: Titans 34:55, Colts 25:05

Intangibles:

Titans Yards Lost Due to Referee Error: 71
Titans Starting Quarterbacks Who Still Rule: 1
Highly Attractive Southern Football-Lovin’ 20-Something Ladies in Attendance: 17,483
Aforementioned Ladies Who Arrived with Me: slightly less (by which I mean 0)
Colts Players Likely to Succeed Without Manning: 0
Likelihood that at Least One Member of Holy Trinity Is a Manning: 96.2%
Percentage of Indiana that Actually Believes This: 94.5%
Percentage of Owners of this Web Site that Actually Believes This: 100%
Colts Fans Who Traveled to Game from Indiana: around 2,000
Colts Fans Upset by Post-Game Realization that they Still Live in Indiana: around 2,000

Power Rankings — Degree of Evilness
Rank / Team Name / Previous Rank
1. Baltimore Ravens (1)
2. Oakland Raiders (2)
3. Indianapolis Colts (5)
4. Jacksonville Jaguars (3)
5. New England Patriots (4)

Next Game: Jacksonville (2-0) at Tennessee (1-1) Sun 9/26

In spite of not posting anything new in the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered some interesting things about the hobby. First, if you have a day job that’s not university professor, and that job places unusual time demands on you, blogging goes bye-bye. Second, if your stress relief from said day job involves taking your laptop to a coffee shop in the evenings, and your laptop malfunctions due to a corrupt motherboard unexpectedly requiring purchase of a new one, you will find yourself with (a) one less outlet for stress relief, (b) one additional cause for stress, (c) even less time than before as a result, and (d) a propensity to squander what little time remains drinking heavily. And for the record, when said stress level is caused by short-term time management issues, drinking heavily cannot remedy the problem in spite of best efforts.

So, the good news. The groundswell at work has somewhat subsided. I have computer access again and will soon have laptop access. Jacob is visiting on his way back to Washington, which means coffee shop blogging is inevitable and incessant hounding will persist until I’m back into routine. Expect me to return with a vengeance this weekend.

But it may be incest to control disease outbreak! Check out this Crooked Timber post on a paper entitled “Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks”. If you have any kind of access to the American Journal of Sociology and an understanding of statistical research methodology I highly encourage giving it a look.

The authors did a population study of over 800 students in the pseudonamed midwestern high school “Jefferson High” and mapped romantic and sexual connections between the students. They found 573 students with at least one relationship of this kind, and their map looks like this:

For example, a light dot with lots of black lines connecting to it denotes a slut; a dark dot with lots of black lines connecting to it denotes a man-slut. This is an example of a spanning tree network because it connects lots of people in strings as opposed to an extremely interconnected core group. The data also points to some interesting characteristics that increase the likelihood of a relationship:

Adolescents at Jefferson tend to select partners with similar socioeconomic status, grade point average, college plans, attachment to school, trouble in school, drinking behavior, IQ, and grade. With respect to categorical attributes, partners tend to be similar in terms of sexual experience, suspension from school, and smoking. Less important is religious denomination. Evidently, students who smoke prefer other students who smoke. Alternatively, students who smoke induce smoking in their partners, perhaps because only smokers can tolerate kissing smokers.

In other words, Ladder Theory self-validates at an early age.

So, let’s say you’re concerned about disease prevention but you can’t keep students from having relationships, many of which lead to sexual encounters. Your optimal situation then becomes minimizing cycle length. So, a cycle of length 2 (which really isn’t a cycle) means two people each have a single relationship, confining the risk of disease only to themselves. Note that according to the map this occurs 63 times in the study. A cycle of length 3 is your next best scenario, but that requires at least two bisexuals and scarcity comes into play. So now your best option is to promote heterosexual relationship cycles of length 4. However, cultural taboos make it very difficult for students to date the ex-boyfriend of their ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, or vice versa. Crooked Timber calls it the “yuck factor”, and it forces students into alternate choices to a greater degree than predicted by random simulation. So basically, we’ve culturally eliminated all our safe choices, thereby forcing ourselves into a higher-risk spanning tree model. Natural selection population-control argument, anyone?

Those of you who’ve taken a sociology class may have been shown a documentary called The Lost Children of Rockdale County, which explores how a high school combating a syphilis outbreak uncovered a startling sexual network. One of the more fascinating revalations in the film was that the network in question did not occur predominantly among the “expected groups”, but rather academically and economically top-tier students whose parents trusted them so much that they bought all the alcohol and allowed all the supervision-free parties. It seems to me that the Rockdale County network would support the model derived from Jefferson High, with a core group of 17 infected students resulting in medical treatment for over 250 students. This indicates a far more important point though: that this scenario does not limit itself to particular demographic groups, making it far more difficult to construct a prevention strategy.

I’m reluctantly inclined to endorse the authors’ conclusions at this point and advocate mass education rather than targeted prevention. The reasoning is that society’s best strategy for reducing the spread of disease involves breaking up larger spanning trees into smaller ones. This is most effectively done by ignoring the more concentrated areas of the spanning tree (i.e. sluts and sex groups) and targeting the weakest links — in other words, educating the students who’ve only had two relationships to be more choosy and cautious. But wait: giving up on the outliers and focusing on the masses to save society? Isn’t this trickle-down sociology? I’d be interested to hear more thoughts on this.

It’s been suggested of late that I have a rather nasty blogging habit. Well, more than one actually (not posting often enough, posting two weeks late on subjects, etc.), but the one I’m referring to is my propensity to pawn non-political topics off on friends instead of chiming in myself. My purpose remains intentionally vague because I’m still discovering my niche, and as such the only thing I really care about is encouraging people not to go off on ignorant anti-[insert presidential candidate here] rants while we’re trying to discuss something thoughtful. But I may amend it as work slows back to normal and I settle into more of a routine here.

For now, the sky’s the limit. Politics is still my love and there’ll be no shortage of that, but expect to see a bit more personality — some road trip stories, periodic Titans updates, and ecclectic topics when the mood arises (though I doubt it will ever get this ecclectic).