Category: Culture

Wading Toward Home

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Michael Lewis (with his better half, Tabitha Soren riding shotgun taking pictures) visits post flood New Orleans:

Immediately he had a problem: a small generator that powered one tiny window air-conditioning unit. It cooled just one small room, his office. But the thing made such a racket that, as he put it, “they could have busted down the front door and be storming inside and I wouldn’t have heard them. There could have been 20 natives outside screaming, ‘I’m gonna burn your house down,’ and I’d a never heard it.” Fearing he might nod off and be taken in his sleep, he jammed a rack filled with insurance-industry magazines against the door. (Haywood sells life insurance.) In his little office, he sat all night – as far as he knew, the last white person left in New Orleans. He tried to sleep, he said, but “I kept dreaming all night long someone was coming through the door.” He didn’t leave his air-conditioned office until first light, when he crept out and squinted through his mail slot. In that moment, he was what Uptown New Orleans had become, even before the storm: a white man, alone, peering out through a slot in search of what might kill him. All he needed was the answer.

Anthropologists Help Explain Consumer Behavior

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Instead of poking around tribal villages in Papua New Guinea or Amazonian rain forests, cultural anthropologists are invading suburbs and cities to find out how people use products while eating meals, working in the office, and even while driving. “We live in a culture where knowing your customers one by one as individuals is more important than ever before,” said Ross Goldstein, a researcher with the BRS Group. “Large mass demographic trends are no longer as predictive as they once were because the marketplace is too diversified.”

Vikings to Announce a New Stadium Deal

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Brandt Williams:

On Tuesday officials from the Minnesota Vikings and Anoka County will formally announce that they have reached an agreement for a new football stadium. The $675 million, retractable-roof stadium would be built on a 700-acre site in Blaine. The total cost of the project, with roads and other infrastructure, could be as much as $790 million. The Vikings are expected to contribute up to $280 million with the rest of the funding to come from Anoka County and state taxpayers.

I wonder if any NFC North team actually needs a new stadium, given the dreadful outlook this fall. Perhaps they will all finish 3-13? Beyond that, I’m sure we can use this money in much better ways, than by subsidizing the rich.

Gladwell on our Healthcare System

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Malcolm Gladwell:

One of the great mysteries of political life i the United States is why Americans are s devoted to their health-care system. Six times i the past century—during the First World War during the Depression, during the Truman an Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in th nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce som kind of universal health insurance, and eac time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, th United States has opted for a makeshift syste of increasing complexity and dysfunction Americans spend $5,267 per capita on healt care every year, almost two and half times th industrialized world’s median of $2,193; th extra spending comes to hundreds of billions o dollars a year.

Tyler Cowen offers a number of counterpoints, links really, to Gladwell’s words.

Favre Yearns for Quiet

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Larry Weisman:

He recently had the windows of his truck tinted a dark shade to secure perhaps a little anonymity on the roads in this football-mad city of 100,000. Any Packers player is recognizable here. Favre? Anywhere, anytime.

“When I stop at a light, I don’t stop beside a car in the next lane,” he says. “If there’s two cars, I’ll pull up between them. I notice where I’m going to park. I envision what’s going to happen if I park there or here. People say, ‘It’s terrible you have to live like that.’ But it’s not. I love playing football. Some people live for being known, for sitting and being seen, but I always joke that I’m going to be like Don Meredith and suddenly be gone.”

Lind: Return of the Militia?

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William Lind:

This column continues #128, on the results of Colonel Mike Wyly’s Modern War Symposium, and specifically the discussion of what a state armed service designed for Fourth Generation war might look like. Since our number one goal should be to prevent 4GW attacks on American soil, our working group at the Symposium concluded such a service should be a militia.
The militia would be organized into three levels of types of companies. The first would be deployable world-wide, when our country had to respond to some event overseas. We anticipate that many of its members would be cops, as is true now of some Reserve and National Guard units, which means it would have a natural inclination toward de-escalating situations. This is what the FMFM 1-A, Fourth Generation War, suggests is the key to success in many 4GW situations.

Stock Options: Do They Make Bosses Cheat?

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My sister, Mary forwarded this interesting, brief summary of research (PDF) on the shareholder effects of large option grants to the chief executive.

QUESTION for shareholders: If the company’s directors give lots of options to the chief executive, should you be happy or nervous?

The traditional answer from academia was that big options grants were good. They aligned the interests of executives with shareholders, and they helped to offset the tendency of executives to avoid risky but potentially profitable investments.

But it turns out that the conclusions were based more on optimistic theories than data. Now, with option grants having become the largest portion of chief executive compensation – worth more than either salary or bonus for the average boss – analysis of data on corporate performance provides some disturbing results.

It appears that really big options grants make it more likely that companies will fudge their numbers and that companies with such grants are more likely to go broke.