Big Toe’s Christmas Visit

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Big Toe’s Christmas Visit

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Our old friend Big Toe stopped by on a trek through the Southwest, and was on hand today to help us decorate the family Christmas tree. (That’s him hanging one of our rubber chicken ornaments.) It was great to see him.

Big Toe used to be Inkstain’s chief economist, but left a couple of years ago for a job at Lehman, and we haven’t really been in all that close touch, so it was fun to catch up.

While he was at Lehman, he worked in the group that developed mortgage-based credit default swaps. Big Toe always was something of a savant when it came to math but, funny story, apparently he’s the one who made some sort of mistake involving carrying the one or something – not sure about the precise details. I didn’t really follow, but apparently there was a big fuss about the CDS risk models, and Big Toe ended up on the outs with Bernanke. You would think that they’d be more forgiving about a little arithmetic error, but whatever. Big Toe was short selling Bear Stearns, so he landed on his feet.

Elephant Diaries: Science Journalism Edition

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Chris Mooney had a nice piece this week on Science Progress about the decline in science specialist journalists at major mainstream media publications. I think Chris nails the problem squarely, but I’d like to elaborate on the implication, because it applies much more broadly. Here’s Chris’s key point:

Science journalism, at its best, should also be a vehicle for making ongoing advances in science relevant to non-scientist members of the public.

Despite the declines Chris bemoans, there is, and I suspect always will be, a lot of great science journalism available. Publications aimed at what I call the “sciency” audience are available in print and on line in staggering volume, and will continue to be so. Science is an area where non-journalist bloggers have made an enormous contribution, every bit as worthy as what the journalistic pros do – often more so.

It’s not a lack of good science information that’s the problem here. It is the need to get that information to a non-science audience – the folks who would not, on their own, click through to a science blog or subscribe to New Scientist.

Chris’s complaint is a specific case of a general problem. Whatever issue you care about – we’ll call it issue “X” – you want information available not to others who also care and self-select to seek it out. You want to get it to the rest of the people, so they’ll understand how important it is.

This goes back to the issue of bundling. The newspaper (or CNN) is a bundle of unrelated topics packaged up and delivered to a broad audience. You get whatever issue you care about (the Britney stuff, crime, sports, the city council votes), and I get a chance to also expose you to some science, something you never would have self-selected. Or, if you’re self-selecting for the science, my colleague Dan McKay has a chance to get you to think about what the city council did. That model worked when there were few choices available for an information consumer other than subscribing to a morning newspaper or watching CNN to get the latest flow of news.

With the unbundling made possible by the Internet, people can self-select, and we lose that opportunity. So it’s not so much a loss of science journalism, as Chris suggests. It’s the loss of the opportunity pre-Internet bundling provided to trick people into reading it. There’s a long list of people saddened right now about the decline of the old bundled model because their X has less of a chance to get the exposure they believe is so vitally important.

(I thank a helpful reader on the terrific New Mexicans for Science and Reason mailing list, full of smart people who don’t need to be tricked into thinking about science, for bringing Chris’s piece to my attention.)

New Mexico’s Unemployment Rate

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New Mexico, National Unemployment rates

New Mexico, National Unemployment rates

Hoping Malcolm will like this one better. It’s New Mexico’s unemployment rate over the last 10 years, as compared to the national rate. (Red line NM, blue line national. Data courtesy of St. Louis Fed.)

The data speak for themselves (the data speaks for itself?), but since this is a blog, I have to say something, otherwise you could just go to the St. Louis Fed web page and play with the cool graphs for yourself, cutting out the blogo-middleman. So I’ll point out the obvious: New Mexico, beginning in the late 1990s, saw a shift from significantly higher unemployment than the U.S. norm to a level that, going into the current chaos, was significantly lower unemployment than the national norm. We’ve seen a spike in unemployment, but less of a spike than the national average.

Still Looking for Oil

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This is one of those signs that, just as people with financial skin in the energy game didn’t believe last summer’s $140-plus oil prices, neither do they believe that $40-ish will be the going price for very long. From Bloomberg last week:

Rental rates for deepwater drilling rigs continue to surge as a worldwide shortage of vessels used to search the oceans for oil outweighs the biggest drop in crude prices in a quarter-century.

Elephant Diaries: The Economics of Local News

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Saul Hansell explains the underlying economic reality that comes with the Internet’s unbundling of the previously bundled product that my various employers over the years have been tricking you into buying:

[T]he bad news for anyone who actually likes reading about where they live is that no one seems to be able to develop an online version of the local paper–including local papers.

The reason is pretty simple: The news gathering of local papers is heavily subsidized by other higher margin businesses.

The front news sections of papers attract readers and define the brand of a paper. But much of the money is made in other high-margin sections–low-cost content like TV listings and recipes as well as pure advertisements like classifieds and Wal-Mart circulars. Indeed, hometown papers to some degree compete with the Postal Service as much as other news outlets, because they can piggy back the delivery of advertising on their existing network of delivery trucks and kids on bikes.

The Internet has this nasty way of shattering bundles and undercutting distribution monopolies. A newspaper company or a local news startup can offer TV listings and classified ads online. But it won’t have the powerful natural monopoly of a traditional metropolitan paper. And thus it won’t have those extra monopoly profits to pay for the city hall reporters.

Hansell notes that national operations (like his employer, the New York Times), can make up for some of this problem with the national reach of their web operations, with the accompanying revenue. But at the local level, no model exists that can support the “city hall reporters” because the alternative web numbers are simply too small.

Elephant Diaries: The Superhero Metaphor

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My daughter, Nora, notes by way of metaphor the story line in the sixth season of Buffy when Buffy realizes she can’t support herself saving people from vampires. “Her younger sister and one of her friends suggest that she start charging people for saving them,” Nora said.

Me: I’m guessing that didn’t work out well?

Nora: She ended up working in fast food.

Every journalist I know has schtick these days about their alternative career path. Mine is welding.

Meanwhile, Back at Earth’s Climate

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The search for a solar-climate link continues. James Annan reports:

[T]he field basically consists of little more than people data-mining for correlations that usually fail to hold when tested on out of sample data, and for which there is no real evidence or even plausible modelling to support the hypothesis that there may be a significant effect. Of course it is obvious enough that gross changes in solar output will have some sort of effect, such as the orbital changes at Milankovitch time scales, and a modest sunspot-related influence. But nothing of much significance in the context of anthropogenic global warming.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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On being careful to distinguish what you know from what you don’t:

Carl Caves (no one calls him “Carlton”) is the smartest person I know.
My wife laughs when I say that, pointing out that I often describe someone as “the smartest person I know.” She is right. As the Journal’s science writer, I have the privilege of talking to a lot of awfully smart people.
But only a few get the label “smartest person I know.” Caves is one.
They share an important characteristic. In addition to knowing a lot, understanding it deeply and explaining it well, they are especially careful about understanding what they don’t know.