More on this later, but my vote for the "One Post You Must Read On Our Current Financial Crisis, If You Only Have Time To Read One" award goes to this post from Brad DeLong. What I like is that it provides a good summary of "how we got here" while doing so in a way that generally avoids the perfect hindsight-driven tendency to pronounce Greenspan, et al nothing more than a bunch of fools and knaves. If your explanation is based on everyone having been fools, you are likely to miss something big.

Megan is offended that NY City and State is putting up $220 million towards the Yankees' new stadium. So much so that she declares:

I'm feeling more affection for the Nationals by the minute.

I understand Megan's aversion to spending public money on sports stadiums (especially as most studies find that municipalities don't get much economic bang for the public buck), but this is almost as short-sighted and impractical as....voting for Ron Paul or something. First, the Nationals are themselves one of the worst offenders in recent years when it comes to extorting public money for their stadium - a city council revolt led DC to cap their outlays at "only" $611 million for the Nationals' new stadium. And it's not as if DC is that much more flush, or has fewer social problems, than NYC.

For better or worse, most new stadiums built over the past 20 years or so have been built whollly or mostly with public money (though the trend has been decreasing in recent years). By (very, very low) relative standards, New York has gotten off relatively easily with the new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets - neither project would crack any top-10 list of municipal stadium boondoggles.

And while the Nationals are on the way up, I still expect that New York will earn a better return on its investment than DC - at least on the field.

Blogging to resume later today, after the completion of a major writing project (to be unpublished, alas).

So Bear Stearns has essentially collapsed. Megan and Felix Salmon have commentary.

This is going to be a verrrrry interesting week in the markets. If you don't typically tune into the business news, this might be a good time to start. Will Lehman make it to Wednesday? Tune in tomorrow, on CNBC!

If things go badly, we could be in a financial version of "Ten Little Indians."

Via a commenter at Tom Maguire's, here is an interesting article on autism from a physician's perspective over several decades of practice. Here is an excerpt:

In some children the clinical signs and symptoms of autism had been present from birth. In others, the child was quite normal (neurotypical) at birth and reached developmental milestones, including language acquisition at the usual times and in the usual manner. But then at age two, three or four, a conspicuous regressive process began robbing the child of all of that natural progress. Interestingly, in these late onset cases the parents all had some sentinel event that, in their mind, accounted for the cause of this dreadful regressive pattern: "ever since he fell off the pier and nearly drowned"; "the time he got trapped in the silo"; or "ever since he went into the hospital to have his tonsils removed".

The point is that there is a natural tendency on the part of parents to seek out and blame some event or procedure for the onset of such startling regression in a child who has otherwise been developing normally. ... Obviously, in seeking causes, one has to separate out temporal relationship to causal relationship.

(Emphasis added.)

Interestingly, he believes that there has indeed been an increase in incidence of autism over the decades, but not at "epidemic" levels.

My piece on autism, vaccines and John McCain is up at Pajamas Media.

A soon-to-be-cousin-in-law asks me what I think of the recent brawls between the Rays and the Yankees.

Here's what I think about it:

-zsdjghsg-

Sorry, I fell asleep and my head hit the keyboard.

More seriously, Peter Abraham says it all, far better than I could:

The idea that this somehow represents the "new" Yankees under Joe Girardi is laughable. Let's review for a second:

A Class A catcher with a .261 career batting average and six home runs in 247 games got run over and broke his wrist. Most of the regular players were home when this happened. I would venture that most of them couldn't pick Francisco Cervelli out of a lineup.

A non-roster left-hander who practically none of the regular players have ever spoken to grazed one of Tampa Bay's players with a pitch.

Then Shelley Duncan, who has played in 34 big league games, decided to go all Rambo with his slide into second base.

...The Yankees are a class team with class guys like Jeter, Pettitte, Posada and Rivera leading the way. Girardi was part of that group as a player and will be that way as a manager. You don't motivate a $205 million roster by vowing revenge on the Tampa Bay Rays. This is baseball, not minor-league hockey. You think Girardi wants to sit in the dugout and make up silly excuses for what Shelley Duncan did? That's not why he wanted the Yankees job.

The Yankees don't care if people pose for home runs or nonsense like that. They care about beating you to death with their relentless lineup then watching you flail weakly at Mo's cutter in the ninth inning. They worry about winning, not sideshows.

The idea that they "sent a message to all of baseball" is ridiculous. Having All-Star caliber players at nearly every position and the best young pitching in the game is sending a message. Shelley Duncan sliding spikes high into second base is not what the Yankees are about.

That sums it up.

As far as whether this pugnacity augurs well for Tampa this year, I will try to elaborate on this in my baseball previews (which I hope to start posting in the next week or two), but I am indeed terrified of the Rays. But fights between them and the Yankees in spring training have nothing to do with it - rather, what worries me is the number of burgeoning stars they have all over the place, and the possibility that the pieces will fit together in very short order.

Red Sox fans likely remember some crazy brawls over the years between the Sox and the Rays (this game being the most famous example). You might have noticed that they didn't lead to much success on Tampa's part. Combativeness isn't new in Tampa - good players are.

(With the trade of Elijah Dukes over the winter, the Rays have even lost the excuse of having one of the very few players who could legitimately cause everyone else in the ballpark to fear for their safety, especially after the game. One more strike against this theory.)

Here's Jim Cramer on his friend Eliot Spitzer:

Very touching and sad.

(Via Felix Salmon.)

Laura wonders how Silda Wall Spitzer can attend press conferences with her hopefully-soon-to-be-ex-husband:

Why do political wives stand by their man? Why do they stoically stand next to their husbands at the podium as the dirtbags admit to sleeping with prostitutes and young men? Most women I know would morph into Loretta Bobbitt in a similar situation rather than Silda Spitzer.

Silda is urging Eliot to stay in office. At this point, I would be throwing his clothes out of the window of their 5th Avenue apartment and letting them rain down on the reporters below.

I can think of many reasons why Mrs. Spitzer would at least try to put up a brave front in public.

The first problem is, Laura is approaching this like a normal person. There is nothing normal about a political family. I just blogged about this. Let's quote Andrew Ferguson:

But does "super type-A personality" really describe the kind of person who runs for president nowadays? It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one. Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.

From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology. You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.

There's no rest, because there's not a moment to waste: The handful of minutes away from the kaleidoscope are spent chatting with the scorpions of the press, the ill-dressed, ill-mannered reporters from the prints and the pretty, preening peacocks of TV, each of them either a know-it-all or a cynic or a dope, take your pick, and each of whom, for professional and other reasons, will deploy all his energies and cleverness to the task of trapping you into a misstatement or ungenerous remark or expression of irritation so he can convey to his editors and the world that--at last!--you've made a gaffe; and if you won't make a gaffe then he will convey to his editors and the world how "scripted" and "over rehearsed" you sound; kind of slick, almost robotic, inauthentic.

When the scorps are dismissed, in the seconds before you pass from the freezing van to the overheated gym or boardroom, a sycophant whose name you can't remember hands you a cell phone that connects you to a rich man whose face you dimly recall from another boardroom last summer and you beg him to give you money, or more often--considering the grinding pressure you feel for cash, always for cash--you beg him to assemble a circle of other rich men that he can beg on your behalf, and when you sign off you don't have time to be grateful. There will be more calls before dinner and after dinner, and dinner is a cold thigh of chicken in a sump of clotted gravy served from a steam table in a freezing cinderblock banquet room at the Lions Club, and a hundred pairs of eyes fix themselves on you--a celebrity, someone they've seen on TV--as you dribble the gravy on your shirtfront. And after you release the same words and hear the same complaints you go to bed in a Hampton Suites for five hours of sleep on starchy sheets with dimly visible stains whose origins are impossible to discern, and from the corner the digital display on the microwave flashes 12:00 12:00 12:00 . . .

And you do all this so you can wake up the next morning and do it again. Because you like it.

The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people").

This. Is. Not. Normal. And no candidate can long undertake this kind of effort with an unsupportive family - either the candidacy goes or the family does. A spouse that supports this kind of effort is buying into a pressurized lifestyle that outsiders can barely understand, much less relate to. (Michelle Cottle's profile of Michelle Obama in this week's TNR is also worth reading along these lines.) Remember Elizabeth Edwards' insistence that her husband redouble his campaign efforts in light of her cancer's recurrence? That type of commitment to the husband's political career is closely related to what drives a political wife to attend a press conference regarding that which any other couple would try with all their might to keep private. Dean Barnett, no friend to Democrats, understood this:

I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW BAD I FEEL FOR ELIZABETH AND JOHN EDWARDS. I'm familiar with the body-blow of a sudden diagnosis that turns your world upside down. It's incredible - you walk into a doctor's office and within a span of minutes you find out your life will never be the same. In the back of your mind you nourish the hopes of miracle cures or that you might be like that guy in Dubuque who got the same diagnosis but oddly enough lived forever, but the reality of the situation sits there in your mind. You can't shake it - it just won't leave.

But you try to carry on. I think I may know some of what the Edwards are feeling. They've been running for the White House for seven years now. And make no mistake - as Hugh points out in his book, running for president is a family affair. It's more than a dream and an ambition for them. It's a big part of what defines their lives.

So they walked out of that doctor's office refusing to let her disease take their lives away. Some people are calling their decision courageous; others find it puzzling. Having been in a situation analogous to theirs, I think I have some understanding and I know I have some sympathy. They're working through all of this. Their first instinct is not to surrender. That's good, and it's what you would have expected. People who seek the presidency aren't the types who give up or even compromise easily.

Whether high-level politics selects for people capable of this level of commitment or causes it - likely both - the end result is that families committed to politics at this level simply cannot, and do not, react in ways that would seem "normal" to outsiders. The pressure (which after a certain amount of habituation, becomes more internal than external) to keep up the public facade is overwhelming in a way that outsiders can barely imagine.

I still think this is one of the underrated reasons for the recent increase in political dynasties: they're the only ones who think of the lifestyle as normal, which confers a major competitive advantage in and of itself.

I don't really know any politicians, but some of my best friends are rabbis or rabbis' wives. For pulpit rabbis (and I am sure the same is true for other religions' clergy families), the pressure to be "on" and present the appropriate public face 24/7 to the community also can be pretty overwhelming, and the entire family is enlisted into this project by necessity. It is part of what you sign up for, if you're the wife - and the kids learn quickly that they have no choice (yes, many wonderful rebellions are inspired by this realization). If you think that political wives can be resentful (as shown by certain lines attributed to Mmes. Spitzer and Obama over the years), trust me on this one: you have NEVER had a candid conversation with a pulpit rabbi's wife.

Finally, there is one point that isn't restricted to political or rabbinic families. When everything is falling apart around you, it is natural to seize at any part of the situation that you can control. It wouldn't surprise me if women in Mrs. Spitzer's situation try to keep up an "appropriate" public facade purely as an attempt to control what they can, to hold the husband-induced chaos at bay in at least one way. I don't think anyone can criticize a woman for this reaction.

Some time ago, Matt Yglesias drew up a list of substantive items that weren't getting enough attention in the Democratic primary. Two of his items caught my eye. First,

Federal Reserve: Are Clinton or Obama happy with the past 25 or so years of conservative Republican leadership at the Fed or would they like to take things in a new direction?

I had a couple of thoughts on this item:

1) I wonder - does Paul Volcker count as part of the "past 25 years or so of conservative Republican leadership?" Most Fed-watchers would draw a bright line between pre-and-post Volcker eras, and see primarily continuity between his reign and that of undisputed conservative Alan Greenspan. The wrinkle is that Volcker is a lifelong Democrat who recently endorsed Barack Obama.

2) More importantly, the one thing that has been made clear through the current economic turmoil and the Fed's current tough spot is that while there are debates about the role of the Fed at a given time, they don't usually break down easily along partisan lines. For example, if Paul Krugman (a born blogger whose day job is something to which he is far less suited) has disagreed with anything Ben Bernanke has done in the current crisis, I've missed it. A number of Republican economists, by contrast, have accused Bernanke of loosening credit too much too fast. And even Greenspan was far less dogmatic in his actions as Fed chairman than one would assume from his biography or reading his memoir. So it's far from evident that (a) the phrase "conservative Republican leadership at the Fed" is a meaningful description of what has happened at the Fed over the last 25 years, or (b) that a Democratic President who wanted to take things in a new direction at the Fed would succeed in doing so (unless he or she appoints some pure hack).

Second from Matt's list:

Judiciary: Assuming a Democratic Senate allows for relatively easy confirmations, do Clinton or Obama intend to continue appointing 1990s-style moderates, or would we see a return to the liberal jurisprudence of a Thurgood Marshall?

I also have two thoughts about this one:

1) When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Bill Clinton called her the "Thurgood Marshall of gender equity law." Yet on the Court, she has been generally considered fairly moderate. So you never know, even if a judicial candidate is the closest thing to Marshall.

2) This deserves a post unto itself...but let's just come out and say it. When Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Court to fill Marshall's seat, most people scorned his chances of ever matching the record of Marshall. Well, Thomas has been a far, far superior Justice to Marshall, using any possible criterion (such as influence on the Court and the development of the law generally, skill of opinions, etc.) other than the crudest form of results-oriented judging I am quite confident (as confident as I can be without actually going to the trouble of asking anyone)that many, many respectably liberal legal academics would agree with that assessment (especially if they could do so off the record).

To clarify: this only refers to the two men's records as Justices of the Supreme Court and not their legal accomplishments as a whole; Marshall is surely a more important figure based on his civil rights record. But I view Marshall as a legal parallel to James Madison - a man of monumental impact whose least important role was his service as President.

May be updated as things develop....

1) Fred Siegel has some very complimentary things to say about our soon-to-be-incoming governor, David Paterson:

Paterson, an avowed liberal, is an engaging man, willing to listen to people he disagrees with. I had dinner with him several times at B. Smith - and despite our policy differences, I found him easy to discuss matters with and willing to debate the issues.

A longtime minority member of the state Senate before becoming lieutenant governor, he'd bring to the governor's office the legislative perspective and understanding of how the capital works that Gov. Steamroller has so notably lacked.

He even gets along well with Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno; he just might be able to bring a welcome spirit of openness to Albany.

Not incidentally, he is the son of Basil Paterson - one of Harlem's famed Gang of Five, along with Rep. Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins, Assembly Ways & Means Chairman Denny Farrell and Harlem clubhouse boss Percy Sutton. The group has long run Harlem's political scene.

Basil was New York City's first black deputy mayor - as well as the first black candidate for statewide elected office (lieutenant governor) in New York, and under Gov. Hugh Carey the first black secretary of state. He once held the same state Senate seat his son would later in effect be given by the Harlem leadership after its then-occupant died in office.

But, while his father may have effectively anointed him a state senator, David has kept an arms-length over the years from the Gang of Five - repeatedly running for office even as his father endorsed opposing candidates, and taking some taboo positions, including prominent support for vouchers and school choice.

Mickey Kaus, control yourself!

2) Laura wants to know more about the Emperor's Club. Slate complies.

3) Daniel Drezner recently postulated the existence of a "Noam Scheiber effect," based on his history of carefully reporting the dynamics of the Dean and Obama presidential campaigns immediately before said campaigns imploded encountered temporary difficulties.

Well, in 2005, Scheiber wrote a lengthy and positive profile of Elliot Spitzer for the NYT Magazine, speculating that his record as NY Attorney General prefigured a template that Democrats could use for recapturing national power. I think we can now chalk up another data point for the Scheiber effect.

Memo to Franklin Foer: Wouldn't Scheiber be the ideal candidate to write an in-depth profile of the Boston Red Sox in connection with the upcoming season?

4) HA! (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

5) This is funnier.

6) And this line is funniest.

Like Tyler Kepner, I would never have expected Mariano Rivera to name this guy as a mentor:

...I asked him if anyone had helped him out when he was a young Yankee. Rivera surprised me with the first name he mentioned: Steve Howe.

I always thought it was amazing how well Howe pitched when he initially joined the Yankees after being out of the game for so long. One trivia note: the GM who released Howe for the final time in 1996 was Bob Watson, who Howe induced to fly out for the final out of the 1981 World Series.

Via Greg Mankiw, here's a useful interactive guide to the subprime mortgage mess.

And in honor of Paul Krugman's horrifying-yet-too-convincing column (in which he reminds us all that it is easier to make a tightly constructed argument for doom if you don't spend all your time ranting about the evils of GWB or Barack Obama), here's an excerpt from my favorite personal-finance book, Andrew Tobias' The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. Tobias has a chapter about miscellaneous investment topics, and here (quote may be slightly off) is his definition of a margin call:

A margin call is what alerts you to the fact that your life is going to hell and that you never should have gotten into the market when you did, let alone on margin.

It looks like we can talk about Elliot Spitzer's political career in the past tense, as he has been linked to a prostitution ring.

It's too bad his political fall wasn't linked to his performance as governor, not to mention his perfection of the shakedown artist act while he served as NY State's attorney general. But we'll take what we can get.

UPDATE: Speculation is that Spitzer will resign. Perhaps he can start a consulting firm with Jim McGreevey. Maybe Rudy will join as well.

FURTHER UPDATE: Assuming Spitzer resigns, this would make quite the trifecta for the tristate area, between him, McGreevey and Connecticut's John Rowland (albeit the latter went to jail for old-fashioned corruption rather than anything spicier). Is it something in the local water?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Slate's XX Factor blog is all over this one - just keep scrolling; too many good posts to link.

LAST UPDATE: This is the best headline of the whole story; almost believable. The pretend story is pretty good too:

Discovering that the exclusive international ring of prostitutes known as the "Emperor's Club" charged up to $5,500 an hour for their services, New York governor Eliot Spitzer vowed to put an end to this price gouging practice.

Four people alleged to have run the "Emperor's Club" were charged with conspiracy to violate federal prostitution statutes, while two of them were also charged with laundering more than $1 million in illegal proceeds.

"That kind of excessive compensation is simply outrageous. Prostitution is allegedly a victimless crime,” Spitzer said in a press conference that took place only in our imaginations. “But now we see that its customers can become its victims.”

Spitzer added it was especially shameful that one of the most trusted names in prostitution had engaged in this shocking betrayal and rank greed.

I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME: This ABC News story (via TPM) has more details on what Spitzer could be charged with. I hadn't thought that merely being a "client" would get Spitzer indicted, and that is in fact not the case: he may be charged with "structuring" transactions so s to avoid mandatory bank reporting laws.

According to a friend who knows more about this area than I do, if Spitzer gets charged under the money laundering statutes, the end of his political career will be the least of his problems:

The Sentencing Guidelines on money laundering were unbelievably draconian last I checked, and that was before the Patriot Act. Like, 20 year sentence bad.

The most important takeaway from the ABC News story is that this isn't merely a bad break for Spitzer: he wasn't merely a name in an escort service's "black book" that leaked after the service got busted, as often happens in Hollywood. Apparently, his suspicious money transfers were what instigated the entire investigation:

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.

It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club.

..."We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it," said one Justice Department official.

Spitzer, who made his name by bringing high-profile cases against many of New York's financial giants, is likely to be prosecuted under a relatively obscure statute called "structuring," according to a Justice Department official.

It doesn't appear that this will end with Spitzer's resignation and disgrace. If this ever went to trial...the NY tabloids will have a field day.

Since when has George McGovern taken up a fellowship at the Cato Institute? I'm not sure there is a better explanation for this op-ed.

...Reihan Salam is breaking new ground in dramatizing roles based on real-life famous figures. His interpretation of Hillary Clinton is more subtle, evocative and true to life than any of the above actors' recent Oscar-winning performances:

I have been working on a much longer piece dealing with the whole autism/thimerosal/John McCain affair for another (paying) site. It will hopefully be published soon, and I will link to it when it is.

No time to do justice to this topic, but David Pinto has a link to a fascinating and controversial piece on steroids in baseball:

Quinn is a second-generation disinformation artist. He takes his cue from a much younger Armen Keteyian who was largely responsible for beginning the late-20th hysteria about steroids some 20 years ago in his article written as a sordid eulogy for ex-NFLer Lyle Alzado. And almost 20 years after his screed he sat in front of Dr. Fost and apologized for being an accidental progenitor of the same type of disinformation Quinn - and those who do the same as him - spreads today. Almost 20 years later Keteyian sat in front of virulent anti-steroids buff, Gary Wadler, formerly of the world Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and found that Wadler had no scientific evidence to back his claims that steroids were the evil he claimed they were; found that Wadler had no idea that Fost’s work existed. Sadly, Wadler was reduced to pathetic phrases like, you’re playing Russian roulette with your health, and why would you take a chance using them even if they aren’t harmful?

Here we are, with scientific evidence before us in the way of a peer-reviewed study that clearly shows that steroids taken under a physician’s care have no deleterious effects on healthy males over the age of 25 and that every male, because of a natural reduction in the amount of testosterone produced by the body, should take monthly injections of steroids to lead a healthier life - and the study is shunned like an “amulet” - that was actually nothing more than a pendant - might have been during the Salem witch trials.

Also, see this post from the same blogger. It is too long and good to excerpt, but anyone interested in the historical context of drug policy needs to read this.

This article advocating "settling" for a not-so-perfect husband has attracted a lot of attention, and there certainly is much to say about it. For some reason, it reminded me of a recent piece by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, which does one of the best jobs I have seen of summarizing the relationships between economic changes and the family. I find it hard to argue against their observations. Their conclusion:

So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let's be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children. Returning to the language of economics, the key today is consumption complementarities - activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives "hedonic marriage".

...Thus marriage isn't dead, it is, again, transforming. Hedonic marriage is different from productive marriage. In a world of specialization, the old adage was that "opposites attract," and it made sense for husband and wife to have different interests in different spheres of life. Today, it is more important that we share similar values, enjoy similar activities, and find each other intellectually stimulating. Hedonic marriage leads people to be more likely to marry someone of their similar age, educational background, and even occupation. As likes are increasingly marrying likes, it isn’t surprising that we see increasing political pressure to expand marriage to same-sex couples.

Lori Gottleib summarizes marriage differently:

Once you're married, it's not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it's about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

If that's not a description of marriage as a "forum for shared production" (at least in the post-industrial age) rather than "hedonic," I'm not sure what is. Her article is all about deemphasizing the hedonic function of marriage in favor of the more prosaic and productive aspects - and not just children, but also the more practical benefits of having a permanent partner. Perhaps her article should have been published at Cato Unbound as a response to Stevenson & Wolfers' piece.

I am currently reading Ian Ayres' Super Crunchers, and it's quite good. But in the introduction, he makes some mistakes regarding one of his examples of the analysis of large databases (the "Super Crunching" of the title). Specifically, he cites the now-famous example from Moneyball about how Billy Beane instituted a new draft philosophy for the 2002 draft, allegedly de-emphasizing the opinions of scouts in favor of a more statistically-driven approach. Ayres specifically cites the example of Jeremy Brown, the infamous "fat catcher" whom scouts hated but was drafted anyway on Beane's orders due to his great hitting stats in college. (This blog may have discussed Moneyball once or twice.

First, while Michael Lewis' account of the A's approach to the 2002 draft - especially regarding Brown - was an all-time classic of journalism, the philosophy of that draft has not held up well. Specifically, Ayres wrote that Brown "has progressed faster than anyone else the A's drafted that year," and then cites his brief 2006 callup. Those two sentences create a very misleading impression (especially the "has" tense). Brown did rise through the high minors quickly and was (according to Moneyball's epilogue) the first 2002 draftee invited to the A's major-league spring training, but Brown's career stalled soon thereafter. Fellow 2002 draftees Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton and Mark Teahen all reached the major leagues long before Brown's 2006 debut. Those three have gone on to major league careers of varying levels of success, but Brown only appeared in 5 games before being designated for assignment in 2007 (probably around the time Ayers' book was going to press). Brown in fact just announced his retirement.

More generally, the data-driven approach taken by the A's in the 2002 draft was not particularly successful. Another major part of their philosophy, as detailed by Lewis, was the near-categorical rejection of high school players in favor of college players, supported by old research conducted by Bill James among others. Well, we now know that those conclusions haven't been accurate for a while. ($$) The A's themselves have in recent years drafted many high school pitchers, generally regarded as the riskiest possible category of prospect. Moreover, as Derek Jacques notes ($$), most of the other prospects specifically identified in Moneyball as draft targets identified through the A's statistical analysis did not come close to making the majors. It is incorrect to say that scouts' importance to the identification of prospects has decreased in the years following Moneyball's publication - if anything, the opposite is true.

Finally, I'm not sure that Ayres picks the righ theoretical example to illustrate the data-mining that is at the heart of his book. While there are thousands of baseball prospects considered for drafting every year, the differences in their playing contexts (high school vs. college, different areas of the country and levels of competition, etc.) work against the idea that a large database of common baseline experiences can be constructed and analyzed. Baseball people look at their statistics, but the contexts are so different as to make it difficult to analyze usefully in the aggregate - which is what "Super Crunching" is about.

But sabermetrics does present a really good example of what Ayres is looking for: the efforts in recent years to build better defensive metrics. Whether it's David Pinto's "Probablistic Model of Range," Bill James and John Dewan's "Plus-Minus System" or an alternate model, the new measures of defensive performance rely on analyzing thousands of plays in the field. So let's pretend this was the example Ayres meant to cite.

I like this analogy:

[W]hy did the Houston Rockets draft Yao Ming? They couldn't not draft him. The lessons for financial markets are obvious. Drafting Yao Ming is like writing the disguised naked put. You see the money in front of you, you see the return in front of you, you see the potential in front of you, none of the alternatives are so glamorous, and so you can't not do it.

The comments on that post are interesting as well. I don't know whether the 7'4" injury tendency is real or an artifact of small sample size, but I know that in baseball, 6'4" seems to be the biological limit for catchers' ability to have long careers (may be $$)

I should have something substantive to say about the Democratic primary race and today's primaries, and may later today.

But for now, I listen to journalists and pundits complaining about the lengthier-than-expected primary season and respond: "More, please." Why hurry? November is a long way off.

Right now, I want to see the equivalent of a Game 7 of the World Series between two teams in which I have no rooting interest that goes deep into extra innings, in which rosters fall apart and players' assigned roles totally fall by the wayside - preferably one in which the preceding game also went into extra innings. (Closest real-life examples: Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS, Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS, Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.) We can even speculate about a brokered convention, which is the equivalent of a position player coming in to pitch.

In other words, merits be damned: Go Hillary!

This is one of the funniest things ever written about Canada.

Sigh.

Did John McCain really have to throw a bone to the discredited mercury-mongers? A further data point that you shouldn't let your kids grow up to be Presidential candidates.

I'd like to believe that Megan is right and that McCain pandered out of a combination of ignorance and not wanting to tell a potential voter that her firmest beliefs about her child's autism are without basis. There may be more to it than that (or to the idea that McCain's science adviser is Don Imus). McCain does have a minor history with the mercury types: specifically, he has met with representatives of an organization dedicated to pushing the mercury connection (not that there's anything wrong with meeting with them) and sent a letter (together with Sen Lieberman) to Ted Kennedy (and the Republican ranking member) asking themto hold hearings on the topic.

(Note that this same organization sent letters to certain of the other Presidential candidates asking them to respond to various autism-related questions. The staffs of Senators Biden, Edwards and Obama (see the January 2, 2008 section) made sure that they didn't buy into the mercury/vaccine claims.)

That being said, McCain does not have much of a record on pushing the thimerosal issue (quite unlike the lunatic Dan Burton in the House). (Writing a letter to a fellow Senator is a reliable way of getting noisy constituents to shut up and keep the campaign contributions coming.) His campaign website has nothing on the topic (unlike Barack Obama's). Absent further developments, there is little reason to think that McCain would push the issue or that he really knows or cares much about it. But I do wish someone would set him straight.

I also liked Jonathan Kulick's lovely retort.

UPDATE: Arthur Allen has more on how McCain is connected to the mercury militia. Allen also notes that "McCain isn't known to have any familiarity with vaccine safety issues."

Over at the bottom of the right sidebar, you can find a link to subscribe to this site's new-fangled RSS feed.

And I am thinking of adopting the title of this post as the new tagline. Thanks, Glenn.

In a recent bloggingheads.tv episode, Reihan Salam cited a fascinating article from the NY Times Magazine from a few months ago about the Syrian Jewish community. I have been meaning to comment on it since it came out, as it contains numerous points that are worth expounding. In no particular order:

1) The "Edict" is, in some ways, merely a more explicit version of the traditional Orthodox position on conversion. Conversions for external motives are generally not accepted (and, to massively oversimplify, doing so for marriage can be deemed an invalid "external" motive). And traditionally, families would mourn an intermarried party as if he or she had died. The SY Edict parts ways with normative practice, though, in wholly rejecting even the possibility of conversion. And - as the quotes from the article demonstrate - the motivation is based on blood-essentialism. Any religion passed down by birthright must by definition have a heavy blood and clan component, but the possibility of conversion and voluntary acceptance of the "yoke of the commandments" balances that out, keeping the focus on the ideals. The SY Edict decisively tips the balance all the way towards the tribal.

2) And this leads to another trait of the SY community, which is described obliquely in the article: by focusing on blood, other traditional elements of the religious community - such as observance itself - take a backseat in determining identity. For example - as hinted in the article - the SY community famously does not put the same stresses on Torah study for its own sake as the Ashkenazim have done in recent centuries. Nor is there any indication that other traditional demarcations of comunal identity - such as Sabbath observance - have that level of importance in delineating SY boundaries. If the ultimate expression of American Jewish identity is "It's complicated" - a maxim that has launched thousands of books and media careers, as well as paying the college tuitions for the children of a thousand therapists - SY communal identity is as uncomplicated as it gets.

3) Speaking of Torah study, the anecdote about Rabbi Ovadya Yosef is an amazing one. Imagine the Pope coming to a small American Catholic ommunity to vouch for someone, and further imagine that community blithely ignoring his verdict. There are very few examples where that Catholic analogy would work well in a Jewish concept. This is one of them.

4) Despite the universal prohibition of intermarriage, I think that few segments of the American Orthodox population (outside of the most chareidi) would truly cut off all personal contact with an intermarried family member for decades on end (and yes, this likely does contribute to the increase in intermarriage). In order for the SY Edict to work, parents have to be willing to buy into it enough to impose the consequences on their children. And they are. (The carrots of the elaborate communal welfare state help they buy-in.)

Don't tell the children.

A longer version of that sentence below the fold:

This article seems uniquely inappropriate for the point it is making as to the importance and uses of Presidential charisma. Not that its assessments of FDR or Obama necessarily are wrong, but the main anecdote seems to make precisely the opposite points.

Specifically, bank runs (as shown in It's a Wonderful Life) are indeed a self-perpetuating crisis of confidence, and can stop as suddenly as they start once confidence is restored that claims on the bank will be honored. A great Presidential speech, such as the one given by FDR, can be useful in creating such confidence. But it helps even more if it can be conclusively demonstrated that such claims would, in fact, be honored. And that is exactly what Congress did prior to FDR's speech, in creating federal deposit insurance [UPDATE - I erred here, see below].

The article doesn't deny that the Congressional action helped, but it gives most of the credit (via the Robert Caro quote) to FDR's speech and then uses that assignment of credit to build an argument as to the uses and limits of Presidential charisma generally. That seems strange to me, given that the specific problem of bank runs (a) is more susceptible to matters of confidence than most other issues (does anyone think that more confidence in our health care system would solve its problems?) and (b) were solved by a legislative action that did more to guarantee the necessary confidence than any Presidential speech possibly could.

Maybe it was a "you had to be there" moment. But those of us who weren't there often have a leg up in analyzing such moments, for that very reason.

UPDATE: It also would have helped to get the facts straight. The "legislation securing the banks" cited by the article's author was not the creation of federal deposit insurance, as I erroneously stated, but the Emergency Banking Act, which infused enough capital into the banking system to avert the crisis. I think the general points remain true, namely that (a) FDR's famous speech only came after legislation fixing the problem (albeit not in as permanent a fashion as the FDIC) and thus may be given more credit than it deserves, and (b) bank panics are more susceptible to these type of fixes, making them of limited utility for assessing the usefulness of Presidential charisma. But I did err, and thanks to commenter Spencer for pointing it out.

Sort of.

Maybe baseball doesn't naturally translate to the agenda of today's Republican Party, but there is little question that the way the game is played (as opposed to its business context or other aspects) is more akin to a classically liberal, lassiez-faire society than to any alternative.

Specifically, the game is primarily played as a series of individual contests: pitcher v. batter (even fielder v. ball), to which there is no alternative (a player can't pass his at-bat to a teammate). In these contexts, the participant virtually always benefits his team the most by achieving maximum individual success. A home run is always a better outcome than a single - full stop.

While there are certain situations in which a player is called to refrain from maximum individual success, such as a sacrifice bunt, those are marginal events (and the sabermetric scholarship has demonstrated the limited extent of their benefits). Truly, a baseball player promotes the good of (his team's) society by pursuing his own self-interest. When the baseball powers that be were inventing a false creation myth, they should have used Adam Smith rather than Abner Doubleday.

(I note that Fred Barnes argued the opposite in an old Weekly Standard article ($$). That in and of itself might becounted as evidence in favor of my argument. But also - to put it mildly - he didn't really engage the nature of the game. I think making fun of Fred Barnes is the definition of a worthy bipartisan initiative.)

Incidentally, much of what you need to know about baseball and politics, at least at the ownership level, is contained in the following statement: George W. Bush practically counted as a progressive as the Texas Rangers' owner. Showing foresight that he didn't bring to Washington, he consistently dissented from the owners' war on the players' union in the early 1990s that culminated in the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series (he was only one of two owners to vote against requesting the resignation of commissioner Fay Vincent, the event which set the owners' course for war). And he was far from the most conservative owner when it came to politics, either. In fact, his predecessor as Rangers' owner, Eddie Chiles, was an oilman who doubled as a conservative radio commentator. His broadcasts always started with the words "I'm mad."

Hi.

It's been a while.

This blog started six years ago (give or take a few weeks). In honor of that anniversary, let's see about restarting. No guarantees, but I'll try.
I have never been able to stick to my blogging plans before. That being said, I'm not sure how much I'll focus on the daily news cycle, or even the quadrennial election cycle. I have a long-running list of topics I've been meaning to blog about, and I'll try to focus my limited energies on that list, even if the topics therein aren't in the day's headlines.

Over the years, some people have told me that I should allow more personal details to come through on the blog. For the few readers who don't know me personally, here's a minimal start: I am a lawyer in NYC, who represents funds and other actors in the investment management industry. (Yes, this does place some limits on what I can post about, notwithstanding my thin pseudonymity.) The topics I write about are summed up in this blog's tagline, though I hope to branch out a bit. (Yes, I am a recovering comics geek, in case the pseudonym didn't make it obvious.) On that note, I have a son who is severely autistic, which is - put mildly - a black hole to time and energy. And why blog? It starts with narcissism and goes downhill from there.

I actually dipped a toe back into the blogosphere last summer at the Baseball Crank, and continue to make regular appearances in the comment threads of the blogs belonging to the three real friends I have made through the blogosphere. I hope to make more (such friends). (I also may or may not have made an appearance at this super-anonymous blog over the summer - I fear being hunted down and silenced if I am any more explicit.) Also, I regularly e-mail various bloggers with ideas for posts - which they often take up. Once you go that far, it seems silly to not blog.

And who knows - this blog may eventually have some new-fangled features like an RSS feed and a sidebar that is not four years out of date. But please note that there likely is no blogger out there who is less of a techie than I. (Technology is one of the only areas in which I am not a geek.)

Thanks for coming by.