J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2124

Perry Mehrling: The Money View Weblog

The Money View | Institute for New Economic Thinking:

Alan Grayson: Gabby Giffords: A Few Words

Representative Alan Grayson:

Rep. Alan Grayson: Gabby Giffords: A Few Words: A reporter called me a little while ago, and told me that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot at a public event. She is in critical condition. I'm going to let others comment on what this means for America. I just want to say what it means to me. Gabrielle Giffords and I served together on the House Committee on Science and Technology. She was the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, and I was a member of that subcommittee. Her D.C. office was one floor above mine. I saw Gabby dozens, if not hundreds of times, during our two years together. And nearly every time that I can remember, she was smiling.

Gabby is one of the most cheerful, charming and engaging people I have ever known. She's always looking on the bright side. She has something good to say about pretty much everyone. Bad news never lays a glove on her. She loves life, and all the people in it. No matter what is going on in your life, after fifteen minutes with Gabby, you'll feel that you can touch the stars. Everyone knew that Gabby would have a tough race in 2010. (She actually won with 49% of the vote.) But I always thought that if each of her constituents could spend that fifteen minutes with her, and see what she is really like, then she would win with 99.9% of the vote. (Same thing about Harry Teague of New Mexico, who lost, and a few others that I could name.) You would want her as your Congressman, because you would want her as your friend.

I know nothing about the man who shot Gabby, and what was going through his mind when he did this. But I will tell you this -- if he shot Gabby out of hatred, then it wasn't Gabby he was shooting, but rather some cartoon version of her, drawn by her political opposition. Because there is no way -- no way -- that anyone who really knows Gabby could hate her or hurt her. She is a kind, gentle soul.

My heart goes out to Mark Kelly, Gabby's husband, and the many, many people who love her. Gabby, we don't want to lose you. Please stay here with us.

Tom DeLay: Illegal Money Laundering Is What Saint Paul Would Have Done

Laylan Copelin:

DeLay sentenced to 3 years in prison: Judge Pat Priest sentenced Tom DeLay to three years in prison. The three-year sentence was on the charge of conspiring to launder corporate money into political donations during the 2002 elections. On the charge of money laundering, DeLay was sentenced to five years in prison, but that was probated for 10 years. That means he would serve 10 years’ probation. DeLay was taken into custody but he was expected to be released as soon as he posted an appeals bond. The judge then ordered the courtroom cleared except for the lawyers.

Prior to the sentence, DeLay spoke to the court. He was unrepentant. “I fought the fight. I ran the race. I kept the faith,” DeLay said.

Judge Priest said he agreed with the jury’s guilty verdict, returned in November, and would have instructed a different verdict if he did not believe DeLay conspired to break the law. He said there is no higher principle than that those who write the laws should follow the law...

Trouble In the House of Google?

Jeff Attwood:

Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google: If these dime-store scrapers were doing so well and generating so much traffic on the back of our content – how was the rest of the web faring? My enduring faith in the gravitational constant of Google had been shaken.... I can't help noticing that we're not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months.... Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for "iPhone 4 case" in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead.

People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment -- Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO'ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.

Like any sane person, I'm rooting for Google in this battle, and I'd love nothing more than for Google to tweak a few algorithmic knobs and make this entire blog entry moot. Still, this is the first time since 2000 that I can recall Google search quality ever declining, and it has inspired some rather heretical thoughts in me -- are we seeing the first signs that algorithmic search has failed as a strategy? Is the next generation of search destined to be less algorithmic and more social?

It's a scary thing to even entertain, but maybe gravity really is broken...

Vivek Wadhwa:

Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google: This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information.  But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.

But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).

Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. Previously, Skrenta had built Topix and what has become Netscape’s Open Directory Project. For Blekko, his team has created a new distributed computing platform to crawl the web and create search indices. Blekko is backed by notable angels, including Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Clavier, and Mike Maples....

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges.  So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites.  Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does.  One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites.  So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

The feature that I’ve found most useful is the ability to order search results.  If you are doing searches by date, as my students were, Blekko allows you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of your query and retrieve information in a chronological fashion. Google does provide an option to search within a date range, but these are the dates when website was indexed rather than created; which means the results are practically useless. Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML).  So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.

What Future Does Facebook Have?

The key question that everybody has when they go to the world wide web is a simple one: "What do I need to know?" Different web companies give different answers to that question:

Wikipedia: You need a summary overview sketch of a particular person, place, thing, or event that you already have in mind--and we will provide you with such a sketch, written by a tag time of altruistic left- and right-libertarians and by some people who care too much about the topic.

Google: You need to know what pages on the internet have been most linked to by others and that contain keywords that you already have in mind.

Facebook: You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.

Facebook thus has a different answer--and it may well be a better answer.

David Gelles:

Facebook’s grand plan for the future: After the public presentation I join Zuckerberg... for 40 minutes he talks animatedly.... “If you look five years out, every industry is going to be rethought in a social way,” he says. “You can remake whole industries. That’s the big thing.” His ambition, it turns out, is not simply to make Facebook an influential technology company, but the most important company in the world. “You can integrate a person’s friends into almost anything and make [it] instantly more engaging and viral,” he told me. “You care so much more about your friends. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s hard-wired into humans that you need to focus on what the people around you are doing. It’s this very visceral, deep thing. That, I think, is the structural thing that is going to make it so that all these industries change.”

Zuckerberg uses the word “social” a lot, and it’s not always obvious what he means.... To Zuckerberg, a more social world is one where nearly everything – from the web to the TV to the restaurants you choose to eat at – is informed by your stated preferences and your friends’ preferences, and equipped with technology that lets you communicate and share content with people you know....

Zuckerberg seems at ease. “The fear is behind him,” said a friend of Zuckerberg’s. “Until a year ago, he thought this might be the next Google, but he wasn’t sure. Now he’s sure. The fear is gone.” Facebook’s soaring user base and booming revenues are, strangely, not really what is behind this shift in disposition.... Facebook is no longer merely a social network, where users check out updates from friends, glance at photos and play some games. Rather, it is making moves to be an essential part of the entire online experience. The company is becoming people’s homepage, e-mail system and more....

“They made this very ballsy decision to transform themselves from a place where everyone came to – a destination – into a service that lets me take my information everywhere,” says Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt, a location services company that works with Facebook. Facebook colours this as a win-win for the sites with which it works. By giving sites such as The Times of India and TVGuide.com access to Facebook’s graph of friends, it allows them to draw in new traffic and easily acquire new users. When movie review site Rotten Tomatoes integrated with Facebook, the number of reviews on the site doubled. Facebook, of course, benefits too. By implanting its links and cornflower blue “f” logo on millions of pages, the company is enmeshing itself deeper into the fabric of the web, one site at a time....

If Zuckerberg is to be believed, we are rapidly moving from a world where the web doesn’t know who you are, to a world where the web knows exactly who you are. “What we’re imagining is very different,” says Chris Cox, who dropped out of Stanford to join the company in 2005 and is now one of Zuckerberg’s closest lieutenants. “If you imagine a television designed around social, you turn it on and it says, ‘Thirteen of your friends like Entourage. Press play. Your dad recorded 60 Minutes. Press play.’” In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends.

Zuckerberg points to companies such as Zynga (built on Facebook’s Platform) and Quora (a question and answer service founded by former Facebook employees, which relies almost exclusively on Facebook for users) as examples of companies building around social “from the ground up”. “The real disruption is going to come from people who are rethinking these spaces,” he said.... But seeing as Facebook alone is the keeper of the most comprehensive social graph on earth, what they really mean is building new companies and services around Facebook. And while this may sound hubristic, it reflects Zuckerberg’s belief that Facebook’s map of human relationships is among the most important developments in business history. “That, I think, is the strongest product element we have,” he said. “And [most] likely one of the strongest product elements that ever has existed.”...

Industry veterans stress that Facebook may not be the only identity one has on the web. “I think there will be a couple of different identities on the web,” said John Donahoe, chief executive of Ebay. (Ebay, which owns PayPal, works closely with Facebook.) “Facebook will be one of the identities you carry with you. The identity we’re focused on with PayPal is your monetary identity. It’s not one where you want to share all your information.” And while Facebook has the early lead, the changing nature of social structures makes this an inherently dynamic industry. “The fluidity of social networks is one of the reasons it’s not entirely clear that Facebook will be the be-all and end-all,” says one prominent social media executive. So far, however, no credible alternative has caught on...

Liveblogging World War II: January 10, 1941

German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement:

Wikipedia: On January 10, 1941, the German ambassador to Moscow von Schulenburg and Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov signed agreements in Moscow to settle all of the open disputes that the Soviets had demanded. The agreement... extended trade regulation of the 1940 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement until August 1, 1942 and increased deliveries above the levels of year one of that agreement to 620 to 640 million Reichmarks. The agreement also finalized issues over transit costs for shipped goods, settled issues over the delivery schedules for goods shipped in year two of the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, settled trading rights in the Baltics and Bessarabia and calculated the compensation for German property interests in the Baltic States now occupied by the Soviets.

Because of a stronger German negotiation position, German Foreign Ministry official Karl Schnurre concluded that, in economic terms, the agreement was "the greatest Germany ever concluded, going well beyond the previous year's February agreement." The agreement included Soviet commitments to 2.5 million tons of grain shipments and 1 million tons of oil shipments, as well as large amounts of nonferrous and precious metals. German Special Ambassador Karl Ritter, in a state of near-euphoria over Germany's achievement, wrote a directive to all German embassies that "While Britain and the United States have up to now been unsuccessful in their efforts to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union in any field, the Soviet Union has concluded with Germany, the largest contract ever between two states."...

On January 17, 1941, Molotov asked German officials whether the parties could then work out an agreement for entry into the Axis pact. Molotov expressed astonishment at the absence of any answer to the Soviets' November 25 offer to join the Pact. They never received an answer...

David Cutler Is Very Unhappy with the Idea of Repealing National RomneyCare

David Cutler:

Repealing Health Care Is a Job Killer: It Would Slow Job Growth by 250,000 to 400,000 Annually: A successful repeal of health care reform would revert us back to the old system for financing and delivering health care and lead to substantial increases in total medical spending. The consequences of this spending increase would be far reaching. It would hurt family incomes, jobs, and economic growth.

Repealing health reform would:

Increase medical spending by $125 billion by the end of this decade and add nearly $2,000 annually to family insurance premiums,

Destroy 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually over the next decade,

*Reduce the share of workers who start new businesses, move to new jobs, or otherwise invest in themselves and the economy.

This memo will review these effects in more detail with a particular focus on jobs...

Declining Marginal Utility of Wealth

A very interesting catch from Kevin Drum:

A Wee Question — Answered! | Mother Jones: Yesterday I asked a question about money. Nobody in comments guessed why I asked it, but before I tell you the answer I'll repeat the question. Here it is: Suppose that you lead a comfortable middle-class life. Let's say that you're in your 30s, married, two children, and you make $100,000 per year. I offer you a fair coin flip with the following possible outcomes:

Heads: You will be stripped of most of your assets and will earn $30,000 per year for the rest of your life. That's all you get, and neither friends nor family can top it up for you.

Tails: You will earn $1 million per year for the rest of your life.

Would you take me up on my offer to flip the coin?...

[M]y editor she suggested that one point worth making is that in America today, "someone making $100K has a lot more in common with someone making $30K than someone making $100 million."

Now, there's an obvious sense in which that's true, but I suspect that there's a more important sense in which it's not. Yes, the zillionaire jets around the world and owns a bunch of mansions and has a staff of aides and servants to take care of things. That's really, really nice. But our $100K wage slave also has a comfortable house, gets to fly around the world now and again, probably employs a gardener and cleaning service, has a pretty stable life, etc. etc. Also nice. On the other hand, a household earning $30,000 — which is well above the poverty line — lives a pretty precarious life on a variety of measures.

So how to get at the difference? Well, I figured one possible way is this: if you really were a fairly ordinary upper middle class wage earner making $100K per year, and you had a 50-50 chance of either joining the ranks of the elite or falling down to the bottom of the working class, which seems further away to you? The answer from comments was loud and clear: the bottom of the working class. I didn't count, but I'd say only about 10% of commenters were willing to take the coin flip. The other 90% would stick with their $100K lifestyle.

So what does this mean? Probably not much. But it's suggestive that in terms of lifestyle, if not political goals, a $100K wage earner actually feels somewhat closer to the zillionaires than to someone barely scraping by. We intuit, correctly I think, that life at the bottom of the working class is pretty damn tough, while life at the tippy top is more exciting, but perhaps not fundamentally different from life in the upper middle class...

Paul Krugman on Toxic Discourse

PK:

Climate of Hate: When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise... there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate. Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence. And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement. The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary. And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P. And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger... the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders.

Senator Durbin of Illinois

Richard Durbin says:

Those of us in public life and the journalists who cover us should be thoughtful in response to this and try to bring down the rhetoric, which I’m afraid has become pervasive in our discussion of political issues. The phrase ‘Don’t retreat; reload,’ putting crosshairs on congressional districts as targets, these sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response.... Let me salute the senior senator from Arizona, John McCain, whose statement yesterday was clear and unequivocal that we are not accepting this kind of conduct as being anywhere near the mainstream...