Congressional staff salaries

MR links to a database -- Legistorm -- that's posted salaries of congressional staffers on-line. All the information was available on "paper" before, but some of the politicos aren't happy. I suspect they don't want to field questions as to why the 14-year-old male staffer was paid a 6-figure salary.

I'm always in favour of more disclosure as opposed to less disclosure.

Reading fast

One of my bad habits is that I read very fast. I find myself skipping blocks of text, and I have to force myself to slow down when I read something with the intent of "studying it" or I have to re-read the passage.

MR had a brilliant article on reading fast.

The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago.

Tyler has another reading tip:

Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.

I can't stress how important this is. I don't have cable, and I watch practically no TV during the week save for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and Prime Minister's question time from the web, which has freed up a lot of my time. I don't think I'll ever go back to watching as much TV as I used to. I remember a speaker in school likening TV to "brain candy" i.e. it sure tastes good, but it rots your brains.

Here's an idea that I must put to use:

Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers. I start ten or so books for every one I finish. I don't mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it. I am ruthless in my discards.

I need to be more ruthless in my discards. So readers, do you read fast? Do you have any suggestions on how I can change my reading habits so that I savour what I read?

Hyperopia: An excess of farsightedness

MR links to this story from the NYT where a professor and his student have come to the conclusion that those who had chosen work over pleasure tended to feel more dissatisfied with their choice later on then those who had chosen pleasure over work.

So why have I posted this? But even though I tend to choose "work" over "pleasure," I don't feel any pangs of remorse. I suspect -- as one commenter points out -- on how you define "party." As an undergraduate, I actively looked for ways to avoid going to parties. I would rather sit around with friends and talk/debate or go to the symphony or retire to my room to catch up on my reading. And yes, I'm boring that way!

“In the long run,” Kivetz says, “we inevitably regret being virtuous and wish we’d been bigger hedonists.”

I can see this being true in certain situation, but I don't think its always true. But then, nobody on his/her deathbed ever wished that he or she had put in more hours at the office.

T minus 4

In four days I will be heading back to India. I can't wait to meet my friends, family and rediscover all my favorite eating places!

Mexico - Part 2

I haven't posted the remaining pictures from my time in Mexico, so here goes.

Juarez, Mexico

One weekend I decided to take a bus and go to Chihuahua, Mexico. In Chihuahua, I went to the
Museo de la Revolucion Mexicana - (Museum of the Mexican Revolution), Museo Casa Benito Juarez (Mexico's first President), and a few other places. And yes, the canine below was in a park in Chihuahua.
My hostel in Chihuahua (Casa Chihuahua). This was run by a fantastically sweet couple, and is by far the best hostel that I've stayed at.

Colorful boots in the marketCondiments at a roadside Tacaria in Juarez, Mexico

I had Mole style food for the first time on my last night in Mexico.

I loved my time in Mexico -- the people were very warm and friendly, the girls exquisitely beautiful, and the food was divine -- and I can't wait to go back.

Yes, if you're reading this you ARE rich or will be during your life

Now before you shake your heads and dash of e-mails accusing me of being presumptuous...

The richest 2% in the world own half the world wealth according to a comprehensive study by the United Nations University. The bottom half of the world's adult population accounted for only 1% of the global wealth.

To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.

...The concentration of wealth within countries varies significantly but is generally high. The share of the top 10% ranges from around 40% in China to 70% in the United States, and higher still in other countries.

As Greg Mankiw put it "So, from a global perspective, if you have net worth of more than $61,000, you are rich."

If you're interested in seeing how you stack up on income, play with the Global Rich List calculator. The results should astound you and show you how fortunate you are. You are in the top 1% for the planet if you earn more than $36,000 per year.

I find the inequality quite startling and what the world needs are more individuals like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Soros who use their resources to help those who haven't been fortunate enough to have access to reserouces that are taken for granted in the Western industrialised world.

If there's one book that you read...

At the risk of sounding a bit doctrinaire, I strongly suggest that you read Stumbling upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard. This is not a self-help book, but instead is a remarkably witty and erudite book complete with lots of studies and evidence that will explain why human beings are so bad at choosing what makes them happy and what you can do to change that. Please read it, and here's a link to a 20 minute talk by Gilbert to whet your appetite.Publish

One of Gilbert's points -- and what Buddhist monks have long known -- is that beyond a certain minimum money doesn't really bring one happiness, but the belief that money = happiness has to be present ( in spite of it being untrue) for the world's economy to survive.

Hidden fees and bad math

Greg Mankiw links to:

1) A guest lecturer in his economics class whose recent column in the NYT explains why companies have "hidden" fees.

Their argument assumes the existence of two kinds of consumers — sophisticates and “myopes.” Sophisticates play the hidden-fee game well. They seek out low advertised rates and whenever possible avoid or find substitutes for the hidden fees, using cellphones at hotels, steering clear of the minibar and setting their printers to draft mode. Myopes, by contrast, obliviously sip $5 Cokes.

2) According to Verizon $100 = 100 cents. I laud the patience of the caller (a math teacher), because I would have been have hung up long ago. The call also provides anecdocal evidence of the state of math education in the US.

Opera -- Starter Collection

Tyler has a great collection of tips for Opera lovers.

I'm looking forward to:

The Ingmar Bergman film of Magic Flute is perhaps the single most inspiring introduction to opera, even if they are singing in Swedish. It is cinematic in conception, rather than a mere film of a performance, thus avoiding the DVD problem.

Here's what he says on Wagner:

If you are putting on four discs of Flying Dutchman, Tannhaeuser, or Goetterdaemmerung, and hoping to make sense of it, your planning has gone badly wrong.

Why I love The Economist (One of many)

The quality of writing & discourse in most corporations leaves a lot to be desired. Watch The Economist skewer a memo from a Yahoo executive and in the process expose much of what is wrong in corporate writing.

Yahoo!'s peanut-butter problem ( A disturbing trend in the literary genre of leaked corporate memos)

WRITING a manifesto good enough to cause trouble has been difficult ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set the bar rather high in 1848. So today's corporate bosses tend to call their manifestos “memos” instead. The genre has thrived in recent years. A decade ago, Microsoft's Bill Gates penned a classic, “the internet tidal wave”. Last year, Ray Ozzie, Mr Gates's successor as Microsoft's software boss, did quite well with “the internet services disruption”, a thoughtful treatise as such things go.

The latest example from Yahoo!, the world's largest internet company by some measures, reverses the trend. Brad Garlinghouse, a manager just senior enough to be noteworthy, has put forth a “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, which was helpfully “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal. It was meant as part St Crispin's Day speech to rally the troops, part corporate analysis of Yahoo!'s many troubles, part turnaround plan—and, it seems, part publicity stunt. But it turned out to be a redundant series of platitudes, split infinitives, clichés and mixed metaphors .

Yahoo!'s problems—it is lagging badly behind Google in advertising growth and market valuation—stem from a lack of focus, which inspires Mr Garlinghouse to evoke the metaphor of thinly spread peanut butter. But not, however, to the exclusion of other staples of the memo tradition, such as “silos”, “analysis paralysis”, “dropped balls”, and so forth. Mr Garlinghouse briefly gets specific, suggesting that 15-20% of Yahoo!'s staff should be laid off, but then returns to his theme, namely that “the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy” (sic).

He repeatedly proclaims his loyalty: “I love Yahoo! I'm proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I'm proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.” He then signs off with a final exhortation: “Catch the balls. And stop eating peanut butter.” Is it any wonder that Yahoo! is struggling?

Ah yes, what would a conversation or memo in the corporate world be without mention of "dropping balls," "touching bases," and "hitting stuff out of the park."

Milton Friedman

While I sometimes disagreed with Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman's positions, I greatly admired and respected him for his prodigious intellect, his superlative debating skills, and his ability to revisit the data and acknowledge that alternative hypothesis could also exist.

My favorite Milton Friedman quote was "to spend is to tax." This is very important in an era where increases in spending (defense, entitlement, bridge to nowhere etc) are made by those who decry and vilify those who even suggest "raising taxes."

Brad Delong starts his obituary to Milton Friedman with:

"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed nineteenth-century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his Essay on Coleridge. "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."

For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer. His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument.

...As George Shultz likes to say: "Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

...His world-view began with a bedrock faith in people, in their ability to make judgments for themselves, and thus an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that was layered a deep faith and conviction that free markets were almost always the best and most magical way of coordinating every conceivable task. On top of that was layered a powerful conviction that a look at the empirical facts--a marking-to-market of your beliefs to reality--would generate the right conclusions. And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily-captured tool for the enrichment of cynical and selfish interests that sought to grab whatever they could. Suffusing all was a faith in the power of argument and the utility of reason.

...This did not mean that government had no role to play. Enforcement of property rights, adjudication of contract disputes--the standard powerful rule-of-law underpinnings of the market--plus a host of other government interventions when empirical circumstances made them appropriate: Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is Milton Friedman's. Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's largest anti-poverty program: the Earned Income Tax Credit. And, most important, government had a very powerful and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary system working smoothly through proper control of the money stock. If there was always sufficient liquidity in the economy--enough but not too much--then you could trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or hyperinflation.

...Milton Friedman's thought is, I believe, best seen as the fusion of two strongly American currents: libertarianism and pragmatism. Friedman was a pragmatic libertarian. He believed that--as an empirical matter--giving individuals freedom and letting them coordinate their actions by buying and selling on markets would produce the best results. It was not that he thought this was natural law--that markets always worked best. It was, rather, that he believed that places where markets failed were atypical; that where markets did fail there were almost always enormous profit opportunities from entrepreneurial redesign of institutions; that the market system would create now opportunities for trade that would route around market failures; and that government failure was pervasive--that any expansion of government beyond the classical liberal state would be highly likely to cause more trouble than it could solve.

...For right-of-center American libertarian economists, Milton Friedman was a powerful leader. For left-of-center American liberal economists, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary. We are all the stronger for his work. We will miss him.

Greg Mankiw explains why he is both a Friedmanite and Keynesian.

In my view, unless you have learned a lot of economics from both of these great thinkers, you haven't learned enough.

I'm always surprised by people who claim that Friedman and Keynes were polar opposites. In fact, they were both of the same mould!