Business Items

• Format - Longtime readers will be familiar with the bulleted format. After serving as the gold standard for Kafka blogging, it was retired some time ago in favor of something a bit more reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne. The great strength of the unordered list is that it allows me to provide a breadth of wit in a minimal amount of time. Thus, as I don’t anticipate having a whole lot of time in the coming weeks, you should expect to see this style of post make a dubious return until further notice.

• Olympics - Olympic curling will commence in less than three months’ time. Everyone in my meta-neighborhood looks forward to watching the men of the Duluth (MN) Curling Club defeat the Canadians on their home ice [PDF] and hopes someone gave Nicole Joraanstad a lucky broom and stone for her birthday last week.

• Literature - Yesterday, OR Books released Going Rouge, a collection of essays concerning Sarah Palin, edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed of The Nation. Also, the ignorant narcissist in question released her own book. Not even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal could review it without condescension.

• Extraterrestrials - Three weeks ago, ABC premiered V, a “reboot” of the 1983 mini-series of the same name. While the current version benefits from greatly improved special effects, its premise is gallingly laden with holes. For starters, the show appears to take place in a reality where no one has the common sense to ask why the aliens who’ve parked their mother ships over our major cities not only appear to be (quite attractive) humans, but also arrive with knowledge of human medicine. Such details would seem to be a tip-off that these extraterrestrials had previously maintained a presence on this planet. Seriously, they don’t even claim to be humans who’ve been lost in space, a la Battlestar Galactica.
  Taking that point a step further, it’s a bit odd that, even though these extraterrestrials address all the world’s major powers, they almost exclusively embody a Euro-centric ideal of beauty. Either alien research showed the peoples of Asia and Africa to be negligibly useful or someone at ABC thought I wouldn’t notice they were leading me to mistrust white people.
  In the show’s third episode, certain members of the extraterrestrial race were issued passports to visit the U.S. Were this procedural note not specious enough, the passports list “New York Mother Ship” as their home. By that logic, the population of Yemen could build a giant blimp, pilot it into a stationary position over Omaha, and then request permission to enter the U.S. National boundaries are assumed to extend vertically something like 12 miles. Regardless of home planet, aliens from anywhere other than Cuba would be required to remove themselves to international waters before proceeding in good faith negotiations.
  Although moved to the narrative periphery after the pilot episode, the extraterrestrials’ stated goal involves collecting water while providing hope and universal health care. Apparently ABC thinks the Club for Growth and Tea Party crowd will be most receptive to a narrative that leans heavily on indigenous paranoia.

“I wouldn’t trust Bank of America’s estimates on future loan losses anymore than I would trust Britney Spears to wear panties at a nightclub.” - Ted K, comment on Baseline Scenario

This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its preliminary report on October’s employment situation. (Table A-12) The good news is that this announcement should end the unheeded extrapolation of what Tuesday’s election results may or may not say about the country’s view of Barack Obama. The bad news, of course, is that unemployment continues to rise.

My first instinct was to report the bad news as “everything else,” but, on second thought, I think I can forage a few gray spots out of the darkness. For those of us who want to salvage hope from arguments that the X-12 ARIMA system of seasonal adjustment might be flawed will likely point out the growing discrepancy between raw and reported data. Prior to seasonal adjustment, unemployment (U-3) actually held steady at 9.5 percent between September and October, but the seasonally-adjusted numbers rose from 9.8 to 10.2. Similarly, the U-6 number (unemployed, marginally attached, and those employed part-time for economic reasons as a percentage of the labor force and those marginally attached) saw a raw rise from 16.1 to 16.3 percent with an accompanying rise from 17.0 to 17.5 after seasonal adjustment.

Since I’m not a mathematician, I leave seasonal adjustment to be a black box. As I understand it, however, the idea is that the raw data is adjusted to anticipate future corrections and whatnot. Looking at this month’s preliminary report, however, we see that it includes favorable revisions to the August (-201,00 to -154,000) and September (-263,000 to -219,000) job loss numbers. Admittedly, such corrections are somewhat quotidian in the grand scheme of our current economic quagmire, but they would seem to refute the inclination to prematurely adjust the employment description downward.

Of course, as previously noted, I’m neither a mathematician nor an economist. Considering the year’s propensity to barrel toward Xmas, it’s entirely possible that these inflated numbers reflect not only the strain being felt by economic participants but also the dearth of holiday-related hiring relative to previous years. One doesn’t necessarily doubt the seasonal adjustment, but he might hopefully look askance.

While we’re on the topic of looking askance, we might as well discuss Ron Paul’s proposal to audit the Federal Reserve. Despite the fact that Paul is a gold standard purist who sees the Fed as part of some technocratic conspiracy to annihilate liberty, the bill has now gained co-sponsorship from nearly half the members of the House. Currently, the General Accounting Office (GAO) audits all Fed endeavors unrelated to monetary policy; the Fed also retains an outside auditor to maintain compliance with its governing regulations.

Where I’m lost is why everyone speaking on the matter thinks auditing the Fed is a good idea. Certainly, it’s a bad time to be defending technocrats, but there are reasons monetary policy is left as a black box. On the one hand, transparency invites interference from elected officials willing to sabotage responsible stewardship as a means to providing constituents’ with artificial short-term gains. On the other, opening windows and doors through which capitalists might peer into the inner workings of monetary policy would tip the scales of the market even further in favor of those institutional actors large enough to exploit indicators of future monetary valuation activities. To be clear: I need someone to explain to me what the vast majority of individual Americans who go about their day relatively oblivious to the relative value of their currency stand to gain from a wholesale audit of the Federal Reserve.

Getting back to the matter of unemployment, I’d like to take a moment to reflect. When I first started taking notice of the numbers over a year ago, I did so because they provided an interesting bearing on the state of our collective economic descent. At this point, much of that patina of insight has worn away. Things are tough all over, and everyone knows it. If you don’t have a job, then you’re unlikely to find one. If you do have a job, then you likely spend too much time considering how long that situation will persist.

Some sectors will endure. The Post Office isn’t going to close, and the 3 million or so registered nurses (no wonder television abounds with medical dramas) find themselves, along with doctors and other medical professionals, in perhaps the last field experiencing reliable growth. Unfortunately, these sectors are few, and they tend not to produce exportable goods.

Other sectors have been forcibly saved. Upon reading that sentence, I imagine most minds wander to the domestic automobile makers now largely owned by the federal government and such financial service providers as were saved from collapse by a public pruning of their rotten fruit. At least a person can argue that the former poses a national security interest while the latter’s health in instrumental to global financial exchange. More questionable is the subsidy of realtors. They add no intrinsic value to the economy, yet they are the primary beneficiaries of the home-buyer tax credit President Obama today extended for another 6 months. Since the domestic housing market suffers from excess inventory, the tax credit merely facilitates the shuffling of existing stock, rather than actual building. If you can educate me as to how this continued inflation of housing prices serves the public interest, then please take a moment to do so.

As to the rest of us, well, we can all look forward to lifespans shortened by undue stress and the experience known as “unemployment scarring,” by which professional life and earnings are stunted in perpetuity. That kind of scar is better treated with democratic Socialism — or at least a strengthened safety net — than it is with cocoa butter.

“He took the thing that I said, which was kind of snarky, and turned it into a bumper sticker that, uh, is unbelievable” -The Daily Show

Monday morning I awoke to find that my cocksure fantasy Tight End had made chipped beef of his ACL and the Verizon website was none too interested in allowing me to pay my bill. Were such frustrations insufficiently ignominious for the outset of the week, I then found myself largely agreeing with Ross Douthat.

Let’s clarify a couple of things. The sentence ending “Chris Christie, who has spent his campaign promising not to be Jon Corzine and not much else” would be much improved if Douthat found the moxie to split an infinitive for comedic purposes and the ingenuity to formulate a sentence that didn’t repeat “not” in such close succession. Also, the description of the presidency as “part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat” — among other things — is highly disagreeable. Apparently Mr. Douthat now believes the executive branch is entirely figurehead.

Douthat does have a viable point, however, inasmuch as two national political parties can’t simultaneously provide unity within their membership and accurate representation of disparate localities. A Georgia Democrat and a New York Republican may hold essentially the same views, but they’re placed in opposition, nationally, simply because their opposition at home is radical in contrasting ways. This makes no sense. One or two more parties would allow the populace to sort itself more accurately into socialists, half-assers, and anarchists.

Moreover, I would assert — without substantive support — that evolving beyond a two-party system would provide for more accurate and expedient legislation. At the moment, every point of contention is broken into strict dichotomy. It’s a binary choice between the hard lines on either side, with any bill with a chance of passing drawing fire as being compromised. The system provides incentive for each side to either act or obstruct, depending on the situation, greater formal division could help marginalize those obstructing toward political rather than patriotic ends.

Let’s say, for instance, that we had three national parties: Socialist, Half-Assed, and Anarchist. As hard as their name would be to sell, the Half-Assers would always have a say in determining which party controlled each chamber of congress, and they could serve to mitigate crazy legislative proposals without forcing their collaborative partners to concede to their hard line opposition. It would be a system in which power was rarely centralized with radicals and the centrists weren’t held accountable to ideologues’ utterances.

Something tells me that’s not exactly the conclusion to which Mr. Douthat wants his argument taken.

It’s probably also not the conclusion many people will reach in light of what happened in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. In that race, Democrat Bill Owens won after being endorsed by Republican Dede Scozzafava, who was essentially forced out of the race by Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. Some people were surprised that Owens won. Perhaps these people were unaware that NY-23 borders both Vermont and Canada.

Since, as Gail Collins notes, Owens will be the first Democrat to represent the fightin’ 23rd since 1872, it’s safe to assume that he’s a conservative Democrat. Scozzafava was nominated as a moderate Republican. In the world I previously described, that would’ve been two Half-Assers running against each other. It would only make sense for the right-more of the two to cease her interposition once an Anarchist gained enough out-of-district (much like himself) funding to prosecute a serious campaign. Since the 23rd has more breadth than depth of conservatism (Did I mention that it borders Canada, where they already have socialized medicine — of a sort — and Vermont, which is represented by an Independent Socialist in the Senate?), it also follows that a Half-Asser would gain a plurality of the vote.

So far, we have 1 Socialist in Congress and no Conservatives. Let’s step that up. We need more candidates willing to stand by their Socialist and Anarchist beliefs. That way, those Republicans and Democrats who are currently so difficult to discern can finally unite the nation’s Half-Assers and really get things done.

Bonus: In David Brooks’ Tuesday column, he laments the state of dating in America. [FSM] love ‘im — as the Southern ladies say — he even uses the phrase “going steady” at one point.

Unfortunately, he also uses the sex diaries sent to New York magazine as his sample, despite acknowledging that “People who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans.”

Nonetheless, his main point seems to be a Luddite one, that modern telecommunication technology is drawing people away from traditions of monogamy into a more compartmentalized existence where individuals order from a menu of potential partners, depending on what needs he or she seeks to satisfy at the moment. “If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.” [Note: I understand the man is working with a fixed word count, but it wouldn't kill him to make the "then" explicit in his if-then statement.]

What Brooks overlooks is that comparison shopping is a revealed behavior independent of technology. As this paper from the May 2006 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics describes, male and female mate markets display different levels of elasticity. To put it simply, the proportion of women men might identify as potential mates shows little variation as the size of the available pool changes. By contrast, women tend to become more discerning as they are presented with more options. Perhaps what Mr. Brooks identifies as a problem is a product of improved communication technologies, but that’s only because such technologies have opened the door to contacting many more people than we might otherwise have known. If he has a problem with the actual behavior in question, then he should take it up with Lilith, not Verizon.