naked capitalism

Anonymous says:

nazi cows ;)

Richard Kline says:

Bovine A: "The things you have to do to get a decent meal around this place."

Bovine B: "If I didn't look pretty in pink, I'd take this amiss, but chin up old son."

Anonymous says:

re: Health care is dead on arrival.

I say, AMEN!!! These people couldn't run a bake sale, much less a taxpayer ripoff like this health care boondoggle.

David Habakkuk says:

'''We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,'' said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Digital Business. ''But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.''

Everything? What about, for instance, the rather critical question of how far recruits to the Afghan National Police have any genuine commitment to the idea of an Afghan nation — as distinct from family, clan or tribe? Insofar as that can be 'monitored and measured', it is not by the tools of statistics.

But if American strategists get the answer wrong, and base their strategy to win the war in Afghanistan on quite unrealistic expectations of about possibilities of creating 'national' institutions, then the U.S. is going to go down to a painful and humiliating defeat in that country.

A very astute former Brigadier in the Pakistani Army, F.B. Ali, said what he thought on the matter in a comment on the blog run by the former head of Middle East intelligence in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Colonel W. Patrick Lang. Commenting on the views of U.S. 'experts' on Afghanistan, as reported by the journalist Richard Sale, Brigadier Ali wrote:

"This would be comical if it weren’t so damn tragic!

"All these experts and leaders that Richard Sale quotes seem to believe that all that needs to be done to fix the ANP is reorganization, leadership, training, etc. Which world do they live in?

"The average ANP guy is an illiterate youth from the poorest strata of society, whose family paid a bribe to get him enrolled so that he could earn a living and, hopefully, alleviate their hardship. He doesn’t have any concept of state or country (very few Afghans have), or law and order, or service to the people. All he's interested in is to survive and make some money for himself and his family (after paying the cut his superiors up the chain of command demand). He isn’t in the least interested in 'holding and building', or fighting the ferocious Taliban. It isn't going to be any different in 2014.

"To see this huge, powerful country led down this garden path by idiots and conmen — it's downright pathetic!"

(See http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/07/crippling-obamas-counterinsurgency-strategy—richard-sale.html.

It seems from the NYT article that little has been learnt in the U.S. about the limitations of quantitative analysis since Robert McNamara applied it to the conflict in Vietnam, ensuring a catastrophic defeat, all those years ago.

kjmclark says:

Um, those of you concerned about the yaks should check the name of the file. Checking properties for the file, I get a filename of: In_Tibet,_yaks_are_decorated_and_honored_by_the_families_they_are_part_of.jpg

Hugh says:

For me, the big story of the day, the week, the year is that half of US homeowners are going to be upside down in their mortgages by 2011. I can not state strongly enough that this is a strong indication that depression has not been averted but delayed. There is a tremendous kaboom in the offing and I quite simply do not see our elites up to the task of seeing it, avoiding it, or having the least clue in how to deal with it.

run75441 says:

David:

"Everything? What about, for instance, the rather critical question of how far recruits to the Afghan National Police have any genuine commitment to the idea of an Afghan nation — as distinct from family, clan or tribe? Insofar as that can be 'monitored and measured', it is not by the tools of statistics."

Yes that can be measured also from the data collected over a period of time. It just becomes another X variable in multiple linear regression analysis. It can be measured relatively accurately with a high measure of confidence. Datafit can do it if we have a history of data.

It is not a matter of expertise, it is a matter of understanding the data and whether it is valid or not and not skewed to preference or influence which is what you are really arguing. Vietnam data, as this USMC veteran would tell you, was skewed to suit the administration's need to placate the public.

jlivesey says:

I come from a country with universal health care, and I am well aware of its advantages, especially for the lower-paid and for the self-employed.

However, if you look at the big picture of the US economy – and I mean the Very Big picture, stretching over several decades – what do you see?

I see the American worker, writ large, paying him or herself too much for doing jobs that can be done far cheaper elsewhere, while simultaneously voting for more and more generous social benefits, and until recently, all the cheap credit a consumer could desire.

Now forget the undoubted benefits of universal health care – and they are real – and instead ask yourself what universal health care means in the overall economic picture.

I think it means that an economy that already pays itself too much will lose yet another slice of competitiveness in the world market.

What's more, I think it means taking a society that can already consume consumer goods more or less without limit thanks to cheap credit, and adding to it the ability to consume medical services, again without limit.

I think it is a real tragedy that the US did not introduce universal health care when it was the richest and most productive economy in the world, but is today really the moment to follow the Europeans, ignore our loss of competitiveness, and attempt to win through legislation what we are not capable of generating through productive work?

David Habakkuk says:

run75441,

'Yes that can be measured also from the data collected over a period of time.'

But precisely what is at issue is what forms of 'data' can be obtained on the attitudes of the kind of people who are recruited by the Afghan National Police, and how one can collect and process it — and how accurate an understanding one can expect as a result.

Even in 'developed' countries, while people while sometimes are candid about what they think with strangers conducting surveys, they not uncommonly do not say the kind of things they would say to people close to them — particularly when they expect that their actual attitudes will meet with disapproval.

As a result survey data can sometimes be a highly accurate predictor of how people will behave, and at other times a wildly misleading one. The British Labour Party believed opinion polls which seemed to show that electors were unselfish people, prepared to pay higher taxes for better public services, and proposed tax rises to fund better pensions and child benefit. As a result they went down to catastrophic defeat in the 1992 election.

Where — as in the Afghan situation — there are deep linguistic and cultural barriers between those designing and conducting surveys, and those being surveyed, the problems are liable to be far worse.

While survey data has its uses, it simply cannot be a replacement for the kind of very detailed knowledge of how people talk and act which anthropologists acquire through fieldwork — and which good journalists acquire by extensive familiarity with the people on whom they are reporting.

The kind of data such researches provide are not, commonly, susceptible of being fed into a computer. Moreover, much contemporary education — particularly that given in economics and politics science departments — tends actively to shrivel certain intellectual faculties on which this kind of understanding depends: notably that of imagination.