Bandarlog


	Laziness Works Wait long enough, and somebody else will do the empirical research to test your crackpot sociological theories. A while back, you'll recall, I proposed that financial savings vehicles and social insurance are probably a strong factor behind declining fertility rates. Now a pair of academics have marshalled evidence supporting this thesis: Has Social Security Influenced Family Formation and Fertility in OECD Countries? An Economic and Econometric Analysis Isaac Ehrlich, Jinyoung Kim NBER Working Paper No. 12869 ---- Abstract ----- There is growing concern about a decline in the total fertility rate worldwide, but nowhere is the concern greater than in OECD countries, some of which already face the prospect of population decline as well. While the trend is largely the result of structural economic and social changes, our paper indicates that it is partly influenced by the scale of the defined-benefits, pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security systems operating in most countries. Through a dynamic, overlapping-generations model where the generations are linked by parental altruism, we show analytically that social security tax and benefit rates generate incentives for individuals to reduce not just the fertility rate within families, but also the incentive to form families, which we capture empirically by the fraction of adults married. We conduct calibrated simulations as well as regression analyses that measure the quantitative importance of social security tax rates in lowering both net marriage and total fertility rates. Our results show that the impact of social security on these variables has been non-trivial. Our calibrated simulations also enable us to study the effects of changes in the structure of social security on family formation and fertility. [Ben H.: 1/31/07 11:09]


	Pedantic Atheists My friend Gary (whom you've met, Doug) is working on an review essay of this rash of books by public atheists. The gist of his article is that the books are dull and pointless because the authors as a matter of first principals cannot take the opposing side's view seriously. [Ben H.: 1/31/07 11:04]


	Nice! Andrew Sullivan, the vicar of doubt, is debating Sam Harris, ueber-atheist, in a blogalogue. For me, this is like watching the Raiders play the Cowboys: the only thing to do is simply root for injuries and mistakes. Daniel Larison The house also recommends this review of Sam Harris' latest. [Ben A.: 1/30/07 19:31]


	Doug, this is genius. [Ben A.: 1/30/07 18:40]


	That is brilliant, though probably illegal under neo-blasphemy laws in much of Europe! [Ben H.: 1/30/07 16:32]


	Google's Multicultural Holiday Logo Program: Latest Entry Happy Ashura Everyone! [Doug: 1/30/07 16:24]


	The Backing of the Bloody Sock Curt Schilling endorses my hero (and Ben H nemesis) John McCain for 2008. Maybe Giuliani can get A-Rod... [Ben A.: 1/30/07 08:31]


	Cooking Dangerously "Grease the bottom of a 6 to 8-inch pot. Put in enough slightly salted water to fill to twice the depth of an egg. While the water comes to a boil put in a small bowl one egg. Swirl the water into a mad vortex with a wooden spoon. Drop the egg into the well formed in the center of the pot." The 1964 "Joy of Cooking" on poaching a egg, or perhaps on transferring it to the astral realm The State of the Union I Want to Hear I ask all Americans..." Via DJ Fontana Labs. [Ben A.: 1/27/07 18:36]


	Some Of My Favorite Art In Paris Parisian graffiti artists choose great noms de guerre, in my opinion. Here is a van customized by "fléo", which is a deliberate misspelling of "fléau", meaning "scourge". scourge! What a great name. One of these days I will upload a shot of a van I like even more, customized by "Sleez". I can't remember where in the metro I saw the tag of "C-VICE", which is a lovely multi-layered pun in French: sévissent means something close to "[they] rampage", and "c'est vice" means "it's vice [crime]". One imagines that these guys would be good at cryptic crosswords. ("Dasein" was clearly a white poser with no technique, but I have to admit the name was a good one.) [Doug: 1/27/07 16:02]


	Source of Litvinenko Poisoning Found According to Bloomberg News, UK police have concluded that the vector of Litvinenko's poisoning was a teapot at the Millenium Hotel. The police found "off-the-charts" levels of polonium in the teapot, which had remained in use for several weeks after the incident. Is it that surprising? The poisoners were just following normal Russian custom. You see, in Soviet Russia, teapot cook YOU! [Ben H.: 1/26/07 14:46]


	Enormous Successes Cheney lauds the "enormous successes" of the Iraq war in a defiant CNN interview. At one point this would have gotten my goat; now it just calls up a sort of sad nostalgia. Today there is no more to be gained from a Cheney interview about Iraq than a William Westmoreland interview on the enormous successes of Vietnam. (The fact that Westmoreland died recently only reinforces my point.) [Doug: 1/25/07 03:26]


	Failed Experiment Ever since I read somewhere that bitter almonds were used in savory dishes in Europe until a few centuries ago, I have wanted to try resuscitating the idea. Bitter almond is the characteristic flavor of those Italian amaretto cookies and liqueur. Bitter almonds themselves are nearly impossible to come by, since they contain a fair amount of cyanide until you cook them. What you find instead is bitter almond extract, and, even more frequently, synthetic bitter almond flavor (it turns out that the characteristic flavor is due to a single very simple molecule, benzaldehyde). Google disgorged one recipe for a savory dish with this flavor -- a fish dish with a cream sauce. This sounded a little too radical so instead, tonight, I made a blanquette de veau and added a quarter-teaspoon of the flavor to the sauce. Verdict: too weird. The upside is that I now have some benzaldehyde that can be put toward its intended purpose, desserts. [Doug: 1/24/07 17:05]


	What No Mars? Not much need be added to Fred Kaplan's commentary on the latest helping of bullshit from the president. I do have a theory about this though: the president did nothing to clarify the "surge" -- the deployment of 20,000 more U.S. combat troops over the next few months. It's unclear whether even this administration believes in the plan or knows how it will work. The surge's sole purpose is to allow future apologists of the president to say, "See, our soldiers were right on the verge of winning, until the Democrat congress in Washington tied our hands!" Well, I suppose if you can make that argument with a straight face about Vietnam, you can make it about anything. Also, props to Jim Webb for avoiding the rhetorical pulled punch that always annoys me. A lot of people call the Iraq catastrophe "predictable", as if somebody somewhere might have foreseen it had they gotten around to musing about Bush's plans. No, plenty of us actually did predict it. Webb: “We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable — and predicted — disarray that has followed." [Doug: 1/24/07 03:23]


	State Of The Union We going to Mars again or what? [Doug: 1/23/07 16:59]


	In all seriousness, I think the Slate article pretty much explains it. I would add that Dutch pension funds are the ultimate stupid money, so reasonable fiduciaries probably were less than keen on handing money to an old bureaucrat with no investing experience. I'd further add that given the very strict enforcement against US entities and persons of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the only way a fund can keep up with foreign competitors overseas is by having amazing relationships. Perhaps Albright can bring that to the table (and perhaps whoever really put together this fund is a talented and experienced investor). [Ben H.: 1/23/07 07:04]


	Watch Out Ben H Madeleine's got your number [Doug: 1/23/07 06:41]


	I vote positive. At least he's paying attention. [Ben A.: 1/22/07 23:40]


	No Idea ... which is not surprising, given my general lack of financial intelligence. Sorry. In further news from beyond the Dnieper, I have a hypothesis as to why the math question I mentioned seems not to have been solved: there's no Russians in the game. That's changing. Non-Wellfounded Iterations of the Perfect Set Forcing? Bring it on Vladimir. [Doug: 1/19/07 13:27]


	Credit-Positive Or Credit-Negative? Every so often, you run across a new fact about an investment, one that you know has deep significance, but whether positive or negative you can't for the life of you say. We recently made an investment in one of the top banks in the Republic of Georgia. The management team struck us as top-notch -- smart, savvy, driven, and excellent communicators. And since we did the deal, the bank's performance has been stellar. This bank is now on the road selling a Eurobond deal, a first for the Republic of Georgia. Apparently, though, the CEO's force of personality reaches beyond the boundary of the finance industry. Yesterday, we came across this web site. The man in the upper right hand corner is the bank's head dude. He not only runs the most succesful bank in Georgia; he's also the Donald Trump of the Caucasus, having hosted a Georgian knock-off of The Apprentice! Now, this clearly is a meaningful datum. But -- what do you say -- positive or negative?? [Ben H.: 1/19/07 09:46]


	Hard to beat this [Ben A.: 1/19/07 01:13]


	Laziness Threatened My math project is basically to map a structure of set theory onto a structure of relativity theory in a nice enough way that it becomes useful to equate the two -- to consider that the abstract math structure explains what's really going on under the hood of the physics structure. I know roughly what the physics structure is and so have been spending most of my time trying to figure out whether there's a math structure that allows this nice mapping. A good deal is known about the pool of structures I have to choose from. They are known as "structures of degrees of constructibility". Again and again my work keeps coming back to the question of whether, to put it very roughly, there are any such structures having sub-structures that look like straight lines. This is a very natural question to ask about these structures, and I think it's also natural to think that somebody would have answered it one way or another by now. But I emailed one of the experts in the field the other day and she replied that, to her knowledge, nobody had answered it. This kind of sucks because I was hoping to get off the hook, thanks either to a proof showing that no such structure exists, or to an example of such a structure that I could easily modify to suit my needs. Instead it looks like I've stumbled onto a problem that -- whether you think its philosophical motivations are compelling or loopy -- is mathematically deep. [Doug: 1/18/07 12:29]


	"The Swimming Pool" was basically soft-core pornography, more or less a vehicle for Ludivine Sagnier's chest. [Ben H.: 1/17/07 14:54]


	Strange Movie Experience Last night I saw a sneak preview (thanks to Dao's media mogul status) of a strange -- and, more importantly, bad -- movie, whose French working title is Angel. It's signed Francois Ozon, whom you might know from "Swimming Pool" (which I've seen most of) and "Water Drops on Burning Rocks" (which I haven't). Apparently the guy is a well-respected auteur. So I was expecting something all, you know, intellectual and stuff. But it quickly proves to be a cliche-ridden Victorian melodrama with bad acting and bad writing. Of course the director puts ironic quotes around everything to let everyone know he's above this kind of material. When the main characters kiss in the rain, the music swirls ridiculously and a rainbow appears. It's as if the director is sitting next to us saying "can you believe this Hallmark crap?" But of course you can only respond to him with the question: then why on earth did you make this movie? Why would anyone go see it? I allayed my unease by recalling that the titles said "based on a novel by Elizabeth Taylor". That would have explained everything: ditzy actress writes silly period-piece novel, then uses her great wealth to finance a movie version with a respected director, as a vanity project. (And director includes little winks to the audience as if to say, "Yes, I'm whoring myself, I'm aware of that.") But later it's explained to me that the Liz Taylor in question is actually a fairly well-respected British novelist from a few decades ago. I guess we just have to chalk it up to the inability of over-educated French people to do any job with sincerity. "I shall now go to my 'job' to make 'money', and participate in the 'economy'. Ah, what a fulfilling existence!" Luckily there are others who realize that making light entertainment films is actually a very difficult task -- and who enjoy doing it well. See, for example, "The Devil Wears Prada". [Doug: 1/17/07 14:29]


	TSA Fun I was waiting in line at JFK security Sunday, when a guy in front of me held things up in hushed colluquy with the TSA man. The TSA guy kept telling him "just take them out and put them in a bin and through the x-ray!" The passenger finally relented. He grabbed a bin and extracted from his pocket at least half a dozen gold-foil-wrapped condoms... I wanted to ask "so, I guess I don't need to ask if your trip is business or pleasure?" [Ben H.: 1/17/07 06:39]


	Counterpoint to Moral Anachronism Every so often, you see an old movie or read a book that reveals what we think of as a scandal of our own times to have in fact scandalized artists many decades ago. I recently caught Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole, a film made in the early 1950s. We hear a lot these days about the moral vacuity of the news media and its perverse fascination with lurid "human interest" stories, capable of titilating audiences but ultimately without importance. Criticism of this "modern" tendency provided the theme for Wilder's 50-year-old film. In it, Kirk Douglas plays a washed-up newspaper reporter who stumbles on a potentially juicy story: a man has been trapped in a deep cave, once used by Indians, by a sudden cave-in. Douglas climbs into the cave and earns the man's trust and his story. Realizing that the longer it lasts, the better he can milk it, he conspires with a corrupt sheriff to pursue a rescue strategy that will take several days longer than easier alternatives. In the meanwhile, the story captures the fleeting attentions of the nation, and thousands of people come to "stand vigil" -- which really means to take part in a literal carnival (the release title of the movie was actually changed to "The Big Carnival"). Jessica McClure -- call your office! [Ben H.: 1/17/07 05:09]


	Belated Post Re: Queen of Desserts Desserts without chocolate aren't worth the effort: I typically agree with you guys (or at least Ben H) on this. It is therefore great praise for my country of residence when I say that its chefs create exceptions to this rule. An apple-vanilla cookie-like thing at the seafood restaurant Gaya stands out in my mind. And possibly the best dessert I've ever had is the "Fine dacquoise au poivre de Séchouan, marmelade au citron confit, glace au gingembre" served with an obligatory glass of Sauternes, at Senderens (ex-Lucas Carton). I know it sounds like one of those cluster-bombs of random flavors that chefs feel they need to throw at rich diners with jaded palettes. It is not. Check it out next time you're over here. [Doug: 1/15/07 18:53]


	Not Moving I simply meant to express my frustration with plumbing problems. It should be pointed out, too, that ours are pretty mild in the grand scheme of home repair -- they will not require machinery so heavy that our street needs to be blocked off, as I recall happened with Ben H once. For some reason I just find home repair issues terribly anguishing. In New York I attended a meditation group one of whose members often talked about how apartment repairs were ruining her life. Now I see exactly where she was coming from -- we must share some psychological profile that causes panic in the face of hidden pipes and unscrupulous contractors. [Doug: 1/15/07 17:20]


	Whoa! Guess which politician said this: Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. I was surprised. Hat tip: Brian Caplan Spot On Ben H wins with this absolute gem: We do not understand what management is trying to accomplish with impassioned attacks on early 20th century capitalism. It is the house view that moral anachronism may well boost short-term results, but ultimately does not create lasting value. I have been meaning to write a long comment riffing on this, but have been too lazy. Before the moment passes, however, I thought I should commit at least the short version to prose. The reason Pynchon resorts to moral anachronism is the same reason that nazis, Klansman, and assorted bigots loom large in American literature and film. Everyone wants to think the best of themselves, to be in the right, and even more, to be righteous. Moral action, however, is difficult, tiresome, and costly; and so those seeking easy gratification often pretend that the measure of a person can be established by examinging the ideas he holds. The ideas of a robber baron, racist, or homophobe are indeed ideas to be shunned, of course. Yet what temptation has there ever been for Thomas Pynchon to hold these views? What reader of Thomas Pynchon has ever thought it defensible to lock the exit doors on his shirtwaist factory? None whatsoever, I am sure. The point, and I fear very much it is the only point, of certain parades of horribles is the implicit, and very gratifying comparison enjoyed by the author and reader. Behold, I am no robber baron, I am no Klansman: bully for me! Countless times I have met people stuffed to the gills with satisfaction beause they hold progressive views on the usual: race, gender, sexuality. Almost without exception, the people luxuriating in the glow of the moral purity hail, as I do, from backgrounds which makes these beliefs entirely unremarkable. If you are under 40 and born to an educated family, racial tolerance shouldn't be a point of pride; it is rather the baseline requirement for not being a moral monster. Moving? Are you guys leaving Paris, Doug? Or is this just home-repair related despond? If the later, I empathize. The only part of our new place that has not yet required a fix is the floor. [Ben A.: 1/15/07 01:21]


	Paris Apartment For Sale Cheap High ceilings. Great location. Some plumbing issues. Contact the author if he has not yet committed suicide by ingesting joint-sealing compound. [Doug: 1/12/07 11:59]


	Quite aside from the value of this clip as evidence for or against any particular prediction of the ultimate outcome of our occupation of Iraq, it will have an effect on the discourse of my office. From now on, "You Persian shoe!" will be an insult of first instance. [Ben H.: 1/11/07 19:07]


	"Crossfire" For Macacas Explain to me again how we were going to bring democracy to these people. [Doug: 1/11/07 18:30]


	The Surge It won't work; this WaPo military analysis of Bush's last ditch effort succinctly explains why. There can't be a real national government in Iraq until the Mahdi army is squashed. [In 2004] Troops from the Army's 1st Cavalry Division fighting in Sadr's stronghold of about 2 million Shiites in eastern Baghdad became enmeshed in a series of clashes resembling the movie "Black Hawk Down." Sadr's militias besieged isolated U.S. patrols and took over police stations, schools and municipal buildings. An Army officer who recently commanded a battalion in Baghdad predicted last night that the plan would fail because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government "will do things to maintain protection" of Sadr's forces. If Bush wants to get serious and slaughter tens of thousands of Sadr militants, well, Godspeed, but it will take a much more serious troop commitment, and I can't think of any more plausible way of getting the troops than this. [Doug: 1/11/07 06:30]


	All-England Summarize Pynchon Competition Let's grant that Ben wins with this entry: All characters share same core Pynchon dialog platform, augmented unconvincingly by dialect trim. Substituting "'n" for "and" and "jake" for "ok" is not sufficient when all characters tend to liken everything to "vector spaces". My bid for runner-up would be: Keep "V" and craigslist the rest. V deserves all the superlatives that have been heaped on it. Whether it also deserves blame for launching the era of the Luminous Novel* is open to debate. Otherwise? Lot 49 has the virtue of brevity but it is, in other respects too, kind of trifling. Gravity's Rainbow reads like a period piece now; if you want to know how anxious and confused the 70s were, it's more efficient to get some R. Crumb comics. I couldn't get past page forty of Vineland: dull. Mason & Dixon was swell but the consensus among those who've read both (I haven't) is that Barth's Sot-Weed Factor is better. No interest in this new one. *Dao owns one of these newfangled E-Books for professional reasons, and before leaving for Morocco I downloaded The Emperor's Children (the buzz of which had reached me). By the time I got to about page 38 the author had used "luminous" twice. Dao, who finished the book after I put it aside, reports that "luminous" is used again, as is "palimpsest". Let me suggest the following analogy. "Luminous" and "palimpsest" are the pancetta and black truffle of the book world. Sprinkling them liberally lets your customers know that they're being served by a Serious Writer -- just as sprinklings of pancetta and truffle let them know they're in a Serious Restaurant. Truly creative artists don't need these pre-packaged signifiers of seriousness. [Doug: 1/10/07 18:46]


	Another Tyrant Seizes Power Extra-Constitutionally Frustrated by my brutal final exam in computability theory, I lashed out by seizing the crown that, legally, is only conferred to finders of the fève in the galette des rois (pictured). This was some solace. Two martinis were more. [Doug: 1/10/07 18:04]


	A Latter-Day Demosthenes Chavez wasted no time in kicking off a new phase of his Bolivarian Revolution. At the swearing in of his new Vice President, he vowed to get from the National Assembly a new "Revolutionary Enabling Law" giving him broad powers to rule by decree. He further announced his intention to nationalize the phone company (CANTV) and the biggest electricity distributor (EDC), both controlled by US companies (Verizon and AES respectively). For good measure, he will also take away autonomy from the Central Bank. Finally, he responded to criticism on the part of OAS head Miguel Insulza over Chavez's earlier threat to revoke an opposition TV station's license: Por dignidad debería renunciar a la Secretaría General de la OEA. El insulso doctor Insulza por atreverse a jugar el papel de virrey del imperio. Caballero, Venezuela se liberó ¡Váyase con su insulsería a otro lado! ¡Vaya que es bien pendejo el doctor Insulza. ¡Un verdadero pendejo de la P a la O! Coming from rational political cultures, we tend to believe that ostensibly crazy world leaders are really playing some sort of deep, rationally motivated game. In the past, when Chavez would shoot off his mouth, analysts would impute various strategic motives to him: he's appealing to his base, he's rallying his forces in the National Assembly, but he doesn't truly intend to go ahead with whatever crackpot idea he's advocating. Yet over the years, he has generally gotten around to doing everything he's said he's going to do. Should be something we take into account when dealing with Ahmedinejad. [Ben H.: 1/9/07 09:04]


	And Bad Pynchon We initiate coverage of Against The Day with an AVOID* rating. The strong technical position of any Pynchon issue, given the large contingent of Pynchon indexers in the market, counsels against an outright short position. Yet the ATD's fundamentals are undeniably weak. Despite a 45% increase in page count over most recent Pynchon issue (Mason & Dixon [NEUTRAL]), hedonic value has experienced significant 25% work-over-work decline. This surprising and disappointing narrowing of aesthetic margins stems in our view from several poor strategic choices: - loss of focus: Pynchon has seemingly included every weird subplot, strange name, and bad joke that occurs to him. Management has become in our view hopelessly self-indulgent, possibly due to excessive artistic credibility that hinders board/editorial oversight. - failed character development process. Excessive emphasis on character differentiation by kooky name has perhaps led to absence of any other character differentiation. All characters share same core Pynchon dialog platform, augmented unconvincingly by dialect trim. Substituting "'n" for "and" and "jake" for "ok" is not sufficient when all characters tend to liken everything to "vector spaces". - Excessive reliance on narrow range of plot offerings. Punctuating every plot interlude with a bar/saloon scene was already showing signs of diminishing returns in M&D. Management has attempted to enliven with even heavier endowment of allegedly humorous song lyrics, but we see little prospect of success in this ad hoc initiative. - moral anachronism. We do not understand what management is trying to accomplish with impassioned attacks on early 20th century capitalism. It is the house view that moral anachronism may well boost short-term results, but ultimately does not create lasting value. This observation underpinned our frankly prescient UNDERWEIGHT call on Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman [COVERAGE WITHDRAWN]. We have also begun to review our ratings on the entire Pynchon oeuvre, as we believe ATD's results call into question several assumptions underlying our valuation thesis for the sector. We also take this opportunity to recommend a swap out of Mason & Dixon[NEUTRAL] in favor of The Sot-Weed Factor[SECTOR OUTPERFORM], as a way to maintain exposure in replica 18th century novels while upgrading in quality and shortening duration. A fuller report will follow. *(we depart from our usual UNDERWEIGHT rating scheme, because to rate such a physically hefty tome as UNDERWEIGHT would risk confusion) [Ben H.: 1/8/07 09:10]


	Bad Bond Am I misremembering, or does View To A Kill reach its climax with a blimp chase? [Ben H.: 1/8/07 08:41]


	Sunbathing Through the Apocalypse While Gorean true believers likely spent the day alternately gloating and fretting, I decided to take advantage of a 70-degree January day to go hiking. Perhaps we'll all end up under water, but in the mean time I won't turn up my nose at outdoor fun at a usually dreary time of year. [Ben H.: 1/7/07 01:55]


	Dumping Randy I can't back it up with any particularly trenchant statistics, but my intuition is that dumping the Big Unit will prove a wise decision on Cashman's part. Surgery or no surgery, it seems foolish to bet on meanginful performance improvement from an ornery 43-year-old. [Ben H.: 1/7/07 01:46]


	Commitment Enables Honesty Me: “On a scale of 1-10, 10 being exceptionally interesting, and 1 being completely boring, how interesting was that last story I just told.” Deb: “4, maybe” (to be fair, the story was about Ronald Coase) Early Analysis I don’t like it, but this gentleman’s simulations seem about right to me. The Yankees have one hell of a lineup. Good Mysteries Doug, as a palate cleanser after your unsatisfying Maigret experience, I would highly, highly recommend The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. [Ben A.: 1/6/07 23:42]


	From Bad Bond To Bad Maigret The book I read in Morocco (we just back) was "Maigret et le tueur", one of the 75 novels by Georges Simenon featuring Chief Inspector Maigret. On the rare occasions that I buy books in French, they're often used Maigret books, because they're short and simple enough not to overly tax my attention. The title of this particular one, combined with its publication date near the end of Simenon's life, should have tipped me off that at this point Simenon was just phoning in his novels. Probably a similar thing happens with police dramas on TV; after six or seven seasons of "Law and Order" I imagine it's hard to come up with new plots. But in this novel Simenon goes in the opposite direction of most TV shows in their decadent phase. TV shows tend to throw new and discordant elements into the mix in a frantic effort to stay fresh -- I won't mention the phrase that has come to be (over-) used to describe this phenomenon. Simenon instead subtracts elements from the story until it's utterly generic -- as the title "Maigret and the killer" suggests. Who is the killer? An utterly anonymous office worker. Why did he kill? Because he feels impulses to do so. How does Maigret find the killer? Here's where it seems like Simenon is totally out of ideas: Maigret basically just sits at home and sends out brain waves that force the killer to walk in and confess to him. He doesn't even trick the killer into confessing as, say, Perry Mason might. I would recommend looking elsewhere for a good Maigret book (although none of the ones I've read is so great that I would single it out). [Doug: 1/6/07 16:45]


	Memories View To A Kill is notorious in my family. Apparently I turned decisively against the geologist heroine (the drippiest, and least credible Bond Girl until Denise Richards’ World Historical turn as a nuclear physicist), and it seems I shouted “drop her” at the screen during some scene of extreme peril. I do not recall this, and suspect that my sister’s account is not altogether reliable. She was however, an exceptional older sibling for the purpose of movie guardianship. She took me to Repo Man when I was 9, The Terminator a few years later, and I almost got her kicked out of Mad Max 3 for complaining about what a crappy sequel it was. After that, she can tell any stories she wants. [Ben A.: 1/4/07 20:49]


	More TV We get Al Jazeera in English here. Most of the shows seem well-produced. The choice of talking heads is another matter. After the Saddam hanging they searched out a broad sample of Western opinions, from George Galloway to Vladimir Zhirinovsky (really). [Doug: 1/4/07 10:28]


	Vacation We are currently on a lastminute.com package vacation in Agadir, Morocco. Morocco is a fascinating country with a rich history, friendly people, beautiful towns and picturesque countryside. We however are mostly sitting by the pool and watching TV. The other night we saw what later research determined to be "A View To A Kill". I say "later research" because it was so awful we couldn't watch it to the end. It is a nice time capsule of the High Reaganist period though. A preposterously young Christopher Walken plays the villian -- so young he looks a bit like Eddie Haskell, and brings about as much menace to the role. Grace Jones is the villain's henchperson -- although I immediately recognized her angular haircut, I couldn't come up with the name. Apple II's are in evidence as the height of technical sophistication. Duran Duran provides the theme music. Roger Moore is lame (I believe he actually drives a ~~K-Car~~ Ford LTD at one point). Highly unrecommended. [Doug: 1/4/07 05:02]


	Another Liberal Formalist A rather leftish friend-of-the-blog has an article coming out in the Stanford Law Review advocating a suprisingly formalist approach to constitutional interpretation. [Ben H.: 1/3/07 08:34]


	Finally! A expressly liberal endorsement of legal formalism. May there be many more. [Ben A.: 1/3/07 00:59]


	THe Queen of Desserts The key, Ben A., to the enjoyment of the brownie Sundae, is to eat yourself just a hair over the line between satisfaction and nausea. I trust that you calibrated it properly. Happy New Year! [Ben H.: 1/1/07 23:00]


	The Apotheosis of Dessert You will be pleased to know, Ben H, that our 2006 concluded with the culmination of dessert technology: the brownie sundae. Some obsolete fruit aparatus, however, was also in evidence. [Ben A.: 1/1/07 18:21]


	Intersession for Adults You guys surely remember Harvard's "intersession" that stretch of a couple of days during which we students had no obligations hanging over us, a state of blissful freedom associated at most schools with winter break, but denied us by Harvard's idiosyncratic calendar. For hedgefunders on the calendar year plan, a New Year's long weekend (which we don't get unless New Year's Day actually falls on a Monday) is the adult version of intersession. The books have been closed; bonus numbers and checks delivered; the PNL counter set back to zero. It's like applying the last red bow to the last wrapped Christmas gift. You know that pretty soon, eager hands will tear apart all your handiwork, but that for a brief interlude you're done. Literary Misery Ben A, let me relay to you the good news: I managed at last to get my hands on a copy of Monrovia, Mon Amour (after two previous unfilled orders from online used-book dealers). As you might expect of an Anthony Daniels work, it was great. Remind me to lend it to you the next time you pass through town. [Ben H.: 12/30/06 02:25]


	Vacation, All I Ever Wanted Deb and I spent a few days last week in Vermont at an inn once frequented by bandarlog patron saint Rudyard Kipling. The mild December did not cooperate with plans for snowshoeing and skating, and so we spent the bulk of our time reading in front of the fire. Also, we saw a bunch of sheep. For me, this wasn’t a disappointment; it was paradise. The experience reminded me conventional my requirements for happiness are: With a clear conscience, enough to eat, a bit of leisure, and Deb’s company, I am content The great danger in having entirely bourgeois tastes, as I do, is a temptation to indulge in a kind of gimcrack stoicism. When introspection reveals you to be easily satisfied, you may infer that you could be satisfied come what may, that you have no hostages to fortune. This inference would be false. Just how false that inference is and how fragile are the conditions that enable even the barest human happiness were topics underlined by the books I brought with me. Is it perverse to read about human misery on your vacation? Maybe so, but there you are: The Polish Officer: Enough to Eat, and a Bit of Leisure In certain places at certain times simply to be alive is to be irredeemable screwed. Alan Furst seems to write only about people in these unenviable situations: A Bulgarian who turns 17 in 1938, a polish cavalry officer in 1939. These are people tempest-tossed by History, living in through a chaos from which no virtue or cunning can offer protection. Books like these make me enormously grateful to be American, to have been born in the late 20th century, and to live in a time where some madness seems unlikely to plunge me into a maelstrom of hunger, uncertainty, and violence. These books also make me impatient with certain 1st world complaints. Whiners on the left thinks us on the verge of fascism and economic collapse;* whiners on the right thinks we’re a moral sewer. Heaven knows we should have no patience with injustice, but the lack of context is offensive. These people should read more Alan Furst and stop bitching. As for the book itself, The Polish Officer does not reach quite the heights of Furst’s remarkable Night Soldiers but it resides in the upper tier of spy novels where genre and literature intermingle. Recommended. * This is a petty, petty aside, but how sweet is it that Paul “the deficit will push the US economy towards an Argentine-style fiasco” Krugman now maintains deficit reduction isn’t that important? Pretty sweet, I say Lord Jim: A Clear Conscience Lord Jim has always been a touchstone novel for me. For those of you who haven’t read this, Jim is a young man, something of a romantic, something of a dreamer, and with something of an exaggerated sense of his own virtue. He imagines himself a likely hero, and in time, the moment comes. It is not the test he was expecting, it comes on him unawares, it is over in a moment, and Jim fails it utterly. The first time I read this, it chilled be to the marrow. This seemed to me the such a foreshadowing of how my life could go wrong: swaddling myself in a haze of imagined and possible virtue, and then funking, decisively, the one time I was truly tested. More disturbing still: maybe I have already been tested, have already failed, and will come to realize this in time.* I first read Lord Jim almost twenty years ago, and the passage of time has in no way loosened its hold. Sins of omission are the main worry here Temperament, Ideology, and Bias* Caitlin Flanagan has a line to the effect that any action, no matter how enormously selfish, can now be justified under the banner of ‘empowerment.’ She’s right on this point, and she’s right generally: one gets a fair bit of analytical traction by regarding a person's ideology as nothing more than a justification for vice. Who doesn’t know someone like this? The stupid, abrasive person who glorifies assertiveness, the slothful and bigoted person resists change, the bossy person who advocates technocracy, the student council president type who wants statism of some form or other: these are all recognizable human types. So it is certainly a true observation. Unfortunately, because it can be applied universally the principle usually serves only as a rhetorial cudgel. Conservatism may represent, as Galbraith said, a desire to justify selfishness. Yet progressive ideology has also served as cover for unlovely sentiments. This will not help us set the marginal tax rate. Where the observation is useful, however, is in self-critique, and the examination of bias. To wit, be exceptionally skeptical of ideologies that flatter your vices. As one of my personal vices is sloth, and one of my intellectual vices is panglossian optimism, conservatism and libertarianism should probably get more scrutiny from me than they do. Also, I absolutely despise student council types, which is probably as good an indicator of ideological bias as a Freidrich Hayek T-shirt [Ben A.: 12/29/06 15:48]


	Yearly Dose Of Reality For The French The head honcho of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, rarely writes editorials but does do year-end wrap-up pieces. He blasts through the bullshit of French political discourse so effectively that I'd welcome more frequent interventions from him. You know how the French, and Chirac in particular, are always gushing about the magical virtues of "multipolarity" (and failing to disguise the fact that it's pure anti-American spite)? Colombani writes: At the UN, in any case, Beijing is defending tooth and nail one of its biggest oil suppliers, Sudan, whose regime is a blend of islamist tyranny and military dictatorship and is responsible for some of the worst atrocities perpetuated on its continent since the Rwandan genocide. In other terms, the "multipolar" world that Jacques Chirac calls for ardently will not be, ipso facto, a synonym for peace. [Doug: 12/29/06 09:15]


	Assessing Ford's Legacy: Wall Street-Style We spent much of the day on the trading desk assessing His Late Accidency's legacy. Would his passing close the NYSE for a full day, as did Reagan's? Or would the NYSE, reluctant to break its unwritten rule against closing for more than 3 straight days rob us -- I mean Ford -- of a half day of leisure? [Ben H.: 12/28/06 21:34]


	The Bandarlog Salutes James Brown It also reminds its readers of some unresolved issues of his musical legacy. [Doug: 12/28/06 17:49]


	News From Belgium Funny YouTube clip of a Belgian politician on a TV interview program, dead drunk. Apparently the drunkard in question has enjoyed a significant popularity boost since the interview aired. [Doug: 12/27/06 07:48]


	Behold! The sovereign version of Bumfight. [Ben H.: 12/23/06 10:46]


	Movie Minutes (Okay Seconds) I'm with you, Ben M., The Illusionist beats The Prestige, though the latter put in a good enough showing that I feel a little bad for the ill-luck its makers suffered in the timing of its release. I highly recommend Letters From Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood's come a long way since Heartbreak Ridge. He's dirty Harry and a great director. I doff my cap. I found the film particularly interesting in that I've always had something of an interest in how a literary tradition treats "the enemy." In fact, the portrayal in Livy of Rome's antagonists* was very nearly the topic of my senior thesis. I further recommend (though it will require getting your hands on a DVD -- the theatrical run was only in Brooklyn and for one week only) this movie. Doug, I know you enjoyed Herzog's Fitzcarrildo; you might like this one, too. It occured to me that there is another famous cinematic retelling of a historic feral child episode, from only a few years earlier. The weird thing is that you have the German director using the feral child trope to argue what I think of as the Rousseau-ian idea of the corrupting influence of society on naturally innocent man; while the French director's wild child is brought to happy tameness by the patient efforts at socialization by a schoolteacher. Go figure. * My observation, which I think does have some resonance in the American popular cinematic tradition, was that propagandistic Roman history faced an interesting dilemma. It needed to establish the inherent superiority of the Roman side, but also to glorify Roman feats of arms. But where is the glory in triumphing over an enemy of manifestly inferior virtue? Livy's way out consisted of settling on a stereotyped set of "barbarian virtues", with which he could endow the enemy: physical endurance, patience of suffering, heedlessness of danger, and tactical guile. These virtues rendered an enemy a worthy conquest, but did not challenge Roman self-conception of the inherent superiority of its culture and civilization. I see elements of Livy's Hannibal in John Ford's Comanche chiefs... [Ben H.: 12/23/06 01:08]


	End of An Era Ken H, the guy whom I have to thank or curse (depends on the day) for bringing me into the then-mysterious world of hedge funds a decade ago, has spent his last day at the office. In order to pre-empt any organized farewell, he moved his retirement up by a day. He flies to Cape Town tomorrow. And tomorrow I am left in charge of the NY office. Officially, the hand-off occurred in November, and I have for some weeks had responsibility for my new "reports" and business areas, but so long as Ken was physically present, all looked to him as the office's guiding light. That he's left feels really weird. We worked together for the last 10 years. He taught me most of what I know about finance. I don't frequently ask advice, because I find that most people's is totally useless. But Ken I would ask, and it almost always repaid the effort. His absence will take some getting used to... [Ben H.: 12/21/06 22:27]


	2007: Resisting the rotation method I dedicated most of 2006 to a mathematical problem whose solution would, I believe, have good philosophical consequences. Little progress was made. As I hinted a few posts ago, frustration is making me consider burning my math notes and re-entering the work world. If I went that route it would confirm that my character is essentially cyclical: having proved incapable of contenting myself with either a bourgeois life or a scholarly life, or of combining or transcending these lives, I would have nothing left to do except rewrite this post from almost exactly two years ago. Now, the fact that such a cyclical approach to life requires some self-delusion ("Yes, this time around I'm really going to find the energy required to succeed in the business world!" / "Yes, this time I'm really going to have the self-discipline to think through mathematics and physics to their very foundations!") doesn't necessarily make it a bad one. As I've lived it so far, it yields about 16 months of agreeable busyness followed by 6 of frustration -- not bad on balance. Nonetheless I don't think I'm going to give the wheel another spin. It's not that the balsamic-cured free-range Komodo dragon eggs would be ashes in my mouth (to combine two of my favorite Ben A phrases), it's that Dao and I already eat very well. (I highly recommend this Jamie Oliver risotto recipe with half the indicated butter and with the bacon and sage leaves fried for greater crispiness.) It's not that I yearn for granite counter-tops and other home improvements currently beyond our budget; the truth is that interior decorating is of little interest to me. If it's any one thing that keeps me from going back to full-time white-collar work it's that I suspect it would be duller to me now than in the past. One thing I will do in 2007 is meditate more and try to propagate some practical Buddhism here in Paris, where it is desperately needed. It's been unhealthy for me to spend all this time looking for a new abstract presentation of Buddhist metaphysics while neglecting the practices it's meant to reinforce. Even if all my abstract beliefs about the universe are false, I know from experience that Buddhist practice is good, and I can't satisfactorily explain why I have all but stopped meditating. But the other thing I will do is prove or disprove my main mathematical conjecture by a fixed deadline, or else stop working on it. The fact that I'll have some set theory professors to talk to here makes this goal realistic. So let's say that by next Bastille day I want to prove or disprove the following conjecture (it will make no sense to any reader but I record it here to add some gravitas to my self-imposed deadline). It is consistent with the ZF set-theory axioms that there exist a set B with the following three properties: (1) for all p in B, p = [{q in B : q <_c p}]; (2) for all subsets S of B, [S] is a member of B iff [S] = [S'] for some subset S' of S that is directed under ≤_c; (3) some p in B collapses an inaccessible cardinal. The square brackets here indicate constructibility degree -- [x] is the set of all sets y of minimal rank such that x is in L(y) and y is in L(x) -- and x ≤_c y means that x is in L(y). [Doug: 12/20/06 19:09]