Daniel Akst

No More Jive Turkey

2009-11-19T16:34:13Z

Last year at Thanksgiving we bought a turkey from a local farm and it cost $58. I couldn't help noticing, around the same time, that our local supermarkets were offering a comparably-sized bird for $8.

The local turkey tasted quite good, but I've enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we're going to buy the supermarket turkey and find a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to which we can donate $50. In fact I suppose we can donate $65 or $70 if we take account of the tax deduction.

I recognize the benefits we derive from supporting local farms, and believe me, we spend plenty on the stuff they produce, mainly because it tastes so much better. But I'm having a hard time justifying the egregious additional turkey spending in the face of greater human needs, especially on the occasion of Thanksgiving. I'm grateful we have a choice in the matter, and I will use it to help feed the poor.

(Photo: xybermatthew/Flickr)

An Arresting Development

2009-11-11T18:20:49Z

From today's Wall Street Journal:

In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

These numbers are remarkable. Having never been arrested, I will confess to feeling a little left out.

Also, look at the increase in marijuana arrests. Nearly two million annually! What a ridiculous waste of resources, and what a needless infringement on individual rights.

Toying with Bigness

2009-10-31T15:54:01Z

I've blogged in this space before about the many ways in which modern life promotes bigness--in business, government, finance, health care and so forth. Here's another: the New York Times is reporting that a new federal law requiring safety testing of toys, adopted in response to an influx of unsafe toys from overseas, may be a threat to artisanal toy-makers who use maple, beeswax and other wholesome stuff. It seems they can't afford the testing.

We've seen situations like this many times before. People are horrified to discover the dangers of some sensitive product--say, milk--and government reacts with legislation. But that legislation requires new equipment, testing and procedures. The result, often, is rapid consolidation into a handful of much bigger providers. It's just very difficult to bear the burden of expensive new requirements unless you happen to be doing a great deal of business.

This toy controversy is an example of how difficult it can be to balance the desire for regulation ("there oughta be a law!") against the desire for niche products (uncured ham, progressive education, handmade toys) that often run afoul of even the best-intended legislation.

Photo Credit: Flickr User monozygotic

The Future of the Book

2009-10-16T15:53:06Z

Recently my wife and I got iPhones. There's a lot to say about them, but most of it has been said, so I'll spare you. What I find most interesting and surprising, after about a week of ownership, is what spectacular reading devices they've turned out to be. In fact I find it easier to read a newspaper on my iPhone than I do on paper, probably because of the low-light problems associated with presbyopia. The iPhone screen resolution is just dazzling, and anyone with a special interest in the future of books, reading etc really ought to head over to the nearest Apple store and play with one. I read parts of The Mayor of Casterbridge on mine, and have installed the NY Times and Wall Street Journal apps.

Once you get started with this, any doubt you might have had about the future of ink on paper will likely fall away. Simply put, there is no future for ink on paper, at least not in the mass distribution and consumption of text. I've only briefly played with a Kindle, but I believe that Apple's long-rumored tablet (basically a big iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone) has the potential to be truly transformative, if it's priced right.

I wonder if they are considering some kind of subscription-subsidy model, like the iPhone with AT&T. Why not sell people the tablets cheaply if they agree to spend a certain amount each month on reading matter for a couple of years?

Although there are serious implications for people like me, who make their living with a keyboard, I think the shift to e-books is mostly a good thing, and has the potential to help revive literacy, as email has done. But this may be entirely wishful; it's only human to see virtue in necessity, and this change is coming whether I like it or not.

(Photo: Flickr/Christopher Chan)

Help the Poor. Go Buy Something From Them.

2009-09-29T16:32:35Z

From John Cassidy's forthcoming book, How Markets Fail: "In China between 1981 and 2005, according to a recent study by researchers at the World Bank, the poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 22 percent, a drop of almost two thirds. By the end of the period more than 600 million Chinese had been lifted out of poverty."

Mondo Condo

2009-09-27T21:05:31Z

This striking paragraph is from the excellent Calculatedrisk blog, which is filled with useful data and insight:

. . .this is a reminder that new high rise condos are not included in the new home inventory report from the Census Bureau, and are also not included in the existing home sales report from the NAR (unless they are listed). These uncounted units are concentrated in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and other large cities - but as these articles show, there are new condos almost everywhere.

The NAR is the National Association of Realtors. Also Alan Abelson, in Barron's, has a column about the sword of Damocles (or perhaps the crabgrass avalanche) hanging over the housing marke, in the form of foreclosures waiting to happent:

Amherst [Securities] estimates this massive overhang at seven million units. That's the equivalent of 135% of a full year's existing-home sales and chillingly greater than the 1.27 million units that made up the overhang in early 2005, when the housing bubble had just begun its dizzying and more than a little lunatic ascent.
Put another way, of the 56 million units that the Mortgage Bankers Association says make up the mortgage universe, Amherst gauges 6.94 million units are in what it dubs the "delinquency pipeline" eventually headed for liquidation. And it reckons that another 300,000 mortgages replenish that unwelcome flow every month.
Essentially, then, this shadow inventory represents a massive furtive supply of future foreclosure.

The full Abelson column is here, but i'm not sure it's available to non-subscribers. For some broader perspective, consider that Moody's and Zillow agree that about a quarter of homes are "underwater," meaning they are burdened with mortgages greater than their value

Technology, My Foot

2009-09-21T21:32:25Z

Today I went to see a very capable podiatrist who really had no idea that he had ever seen me before. His office has only paper records, ships them off-site after three years and gets rid of them after five, at least according to what they told me. So I whipped out my ancient, steam-powered Treo 650, performed a global search that took perhaps two seconds, and said: "February 20, 2003 at 2 pm." Voila, electronic medical records.

Death by Uninsurance

2009-09-18T13:39:48Z

A new Harvard study estimates that lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans annually, which is 2.5 times as many as the previous best estimate commonly cited in the health care debate. This is a big difference (27,000 additional lives). But it still pales in comparison with the more than one million Americans who die annually by their own hands--which they use to light cigarettes, lift forks and convey too many alcoholic beverages to their lips.

That so many die as the result of behavioral causes is no argument against universal health coverage, and the new Harvard study bolsters the case for covering everyone, which I suspect we could do just by harvesting some of the incredible waste in the system today. But the vast loss of life associated with bad habits does suggest that we could do vastly more good by changing people's behavior, whether by exhortation, better education or sumptuary taxes.

Tobacco offers a promising precedent; smoking is down by something like half since mid-century, as I recall, and while this has contributed (perhaps significantly) to our national weight gain, on net this reduction in smoking has saved many lives and much suffering and expense. Further reductions in tobacco, as well as an assault on over-eating and unhealthy foods, might produce similarly large gains.

A pdf of the study is here (it's quite brief) and an even briefer essay on the whole subject, from the Wall Street Journal, can be found via my earlier Atlantic posting about the devastation we inflict on ourselves by our unhealthy lifestyles. There is vast room for improvement in this area, and progress in it could be a major force for reducing our runaway health-care costs--not to mention saving the lives of so many of our fellow citizens. President Obama has rightly called on students to work harder in school. Why not rally the rest of us to save ourselves from early death?

(Photo: Flickr User Siege N. Gin)

The End of Civilization

2009-09-06T21:35:29Z

Ok, I exaggerate. It's a headline! Still, it's stunning to read that the headmaster of a fancy Massachusetts prep school is giving away the 20,000 books in the library and converting the joint into a "learning center" containing giant flat-screen TVs and a $12,000 cappuccino machine. Read it and weep here.

Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster is so politically tone-deaf that he thinks it's a good idea to do the whole TV-and-cappuccino rec-room transformation at the same time as he abolishes the library. Why not just announce a new environmental initiative to heat the facility by burning volumes from the library? It's not just eliminating books. It's going green!

Off Base Betting

2009-09-02T15:15:55Z

Here is one of those stories guaranteed to convert a few more readers to libertarianism. New York's seedy Off Track Betting parlors, part of a state-operated system intended to raise money for public purposes while taking business from illegal book-making operations, actually lose money. So here we have the government spending taxpayer dough to enable and encourage people to do something that is almost certainly harmful. Not to worry, no doubt the state funds treatment programs for problem gamblers as well.

]]> Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/2959600237

Handy Heuristic

2009-09-02T01:49:54Z

The Boston Globe reports on financial troubles at WGBH, the nationally important public broadcaster up there, which just two years ago celebrated the opening of its expensive new headquarters. Why should anyone care outside of Boston? Because it's a great example of what invariably seems to happen when a company builds itself fancy new offices. Just look at the New York Times, with its Renzo Piano tower on Eighth Avenue. As soon as these places are done--sometimes even before--the company gets into trouble.

These myopic projects are launched by businesses quite literally at the pinnacle of their powers, and they are a sure sign of hubris. It says right in the Bible, a new HQ goeth before the fall. In fact when I was a young business reporter at the LA Times, wearing a high collar and a skimmer as I banged out my copy on an ancient Remington, cigarette dangling from my lip, we always used to say that you should short any company that builds itself a new headquarters. If only you could short a PBS station...

PS--Surely there is fodder here for some graduate student, since of course I am relying on memory and anecdote. Where is the study analyzing the performance of companies that build new headquarters? It's a thesis waiting to happen.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carpeliam/1578386591, http://www.flickr.com/photos/paalia/3596228512/

In a Nutshell

2009-08-29T19:38:22Z

Mike Winerip has a fine, sad story in the New York Times about a 58-year-old man who went from a highly paid executive position to 18 months of unemployment. Of course billions of people (in war-zones, hospices, etc.) are worse off. But what I found interesting about the piece is that this man's life seems to encapsulate everything that is best and worst in American life.

On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable to most people not long ago--or to many of the world's people today. On the other hand, he's a strange, free-floating form of being, lost in time-space, a victim of the intense specialization and mobility that modern life fosters. When things were good, he used this freedom to leave his wife. Since he could work from home (at a job he can barely explain), he moved from suburban Washington, DC, to somewhere in Florida. Then his job went away and he moved to suburban New York, where he thought there would be more opportunities. But there are none. Prospective employers want applications to be submitted electronically, then never respond to them, so that the whole thing seems an exercise in futility, like yoo-hooing frantically into the void. Now he has no job, no apparent community and no particular prospects. He lives alone, of course. I should think his current situation, to many of the world's people, would be terrifying.

Yet he strives to reinvent himself. He's writing genre novels, taking notes on his Blackberry. It's great that he doesn't just sit home, drinking beer and watching TV (like everyone else!), but what a sad pickle. I cannot think of a recent article that captures more effectively both the great opportunities and terrible pitfalls of life in our society.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exalthim/226974610

Quick, Option the Rights!

2009-08-26T19:53:23Z

For years Hollywood has peddled crappy, simplistic movies about a heroic little person standing up to greedy corporations, unfeeling bureaucrats and other such stock villains. So it's hard not to feel there's some kind of poetic justice in the attacks leveled at the Motion Picture and Television Fund (and it's many rich and famous trustees) over plans to close the organization's venerable home for the aged.

You can read all about it here. The problem is that the Fund's geriatric center takes care of a tiny number of people at enormous expense. It runs huge deficits. And the costs are borne by the many thousands of other beneficiaries who rely on the Fund for benefits.

But since the people in the geriatric facility are quite old, and since the charity's various boards includes such zillionaires as Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen, the battle over whether to close the facility is shaping up to be a Hollywood classic complete with plucky victims, cold-hearted tycoons--and a cast of thousands of invisible losers in the form of other Fund beneficiaries who need services and are no less entitled to them than the oldsters who are soaking up millions by their refusal to move. (Like any good picture, this one is rich with social metaphor.)

Never mind. Who cares about all those other people and the justice of their claims? What matters here is finding the cranky but lovable leader of the old-timers. It's Home Alone meets The Sunshine Boys! Let's just hope there's a hot young nurse for our hero to team up with.

The Shock of the Old

2009-08-24T12:54:37Z

Bedbugs are getting more and more attention lately, which makes me wonder if anyone is ever going to test my pet theory about this -- that the growth of the problem is related to the ability of the Internet to bring together buyers and sellers of used stuff.

Craigslist would seem to offer the ideal natural experiment. Some enterprising economics grad students needs to look at the dates on which Craigslist established itself in various locales, and then see if there is any correlation with the rise of bedbugs in those cities. (For those who aren't aware of it, Craigslist is hugely popular for buying and selling used furniture, including beds, futons etc.)

But why stop at bedbugs? Craigslist is also commonly used for sexual hook-ups. I wonder if there is any city-by-city correlation with STDs? More mundanely, Craigslist is draining the lifeblood of newspapers by grabbing their classified ads, which on Craigslist are free. Is there a correlation between the arrival of Clist in a city and the decline of the local paper?

This bedbug business threatens to short-circuit what seemed an economical and environmentally sound trend: buying all kinds of things (furniture and clothes especially) second-hand on Craigslist, eBay or at garage sales. We've done a lot of this at our house, but I suspect a moratorium is about to descend.

(Photo: Wiki Commons)

Where Are The Headline-Seeking Pols When We Need Them?

2009-08-23T16:37:26Z

For awhile now I've been dragging my feet on the task of upgrading our family's cell-phone service. It's the usual story: we want iPhones but we also want Verizon. There are four of us so it costs too much. And in general I have the idea that the cell-phone companies are gouging through their control of the regulatory environment.

Having just returned from Europe, I find the shortcomings in American cell service particularly stark. If you too have a sense of being vaguely wronged (I have to marry a company for two years just to get a phone?!), check out this scathing piece on the whole subject, which lays it all out pretty nicely. The executive summary: we are getting royally screwed by anti-competitive practices and regulatory capture. And we pay for it every month.

It would seem to me that some ambitious politician ought to be able to make a lot of hay here. Evidently we can't expect much from Congress, which is largely bought and paid for (all of them? really? well it seems that way anyway). And sadly, Eliot Spitzer didn't get around to taking on these guys before he crashed and burned. Perhaps Andrew Cuomo (NY's current Attorney General) will do something. I can't imagine a more potentially popular crusade.

(Photo: Flickr User masochismtango)