December 2007 Archives

Indy Cornrows was at the game last night, and so was I. I was born and raised in Minnesota, but the real reason I was a Timberwolf fan was Kevin Garnett.  Here's a guy who played the game the "right" way.  Hustles, gets teammates involved, scores, rebounds.  And, of course, the reward he got is oodles and oodles of disrespect and criticism.  Cornrows was very impressed at how intense KG is.  No one around the league seems to know this, unless you were a wolves fan.

He got criticized because he never "took over the game in the fourth quarter" and/or "carried his team".  I always hated this.  I remember a game we played in JV where we were down 10-0 after 2 minutes and lost by one point.  I missed a free throw with 20 seconds left and felt like I lost the game.  Coach told the team "Hey, you dug yourselves a ten-point hole.  Don't go raggin' on Minton for whiffing one free throw."  Didn't make me feel better, and it didn't stop anyone from hating me anyway, but whatever.  You've got some guy getting you 22/12/5 every night and your bitching that his points, rebounds and assists don't count unless they're in the fourth quarter then you just don't get it.

And let's talk about this for a minute.  How does Allen Iverson get the rep as a "competitor" and "tough" and all these other macho accolades, when all the Answer has ever really done on any team that did not include Dikembe Mutombo is lose or play .500 ball (The 76ers were 426-444 from 96-97 through 06-07 in the lowly Eastern conference, while Kevin "apparently I cannot carry my team" Garnett went 475-395 in the west, where he played vs. Duncan, Nowitzki, Shaq, and Karl Malone each 4 times a year)*?  This is a man who ridicules practice.  Yet the everyone thinks of him as being a "fiery, intense competitor".  Because he can "takeover a game"?  Because he can "carry his team"?  Oh, please.

And, please, don't get me started, again, on how KG wasn't lucky enough to play 2 seasons with David Robinson, and several seasons with Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker, and yet everybody gets to tell him that Tim Duncan would never have missed the playoffs in Minnesota, oh heavens, no.  Sam Cassell and Wally Szerbiak.  11 years in Minnesota, and those are his two all-star companions.  Who here wouldn't laugh in Kevin McHale's face if he went to San Antonio and said "I'll trade you BOTH Sam AND Wally for Manu?"

Hate to break it to the fan boys.  It wasn't KG's fault that Minny never left the first round.  Rather, KG was the reason that the wolves somehow, MIRACULOUSLY, made it to the playoffs at all.  Seriously, This guy carried guys like Anthony Peeler, Troy Hudson, Gary Trent, and Michael Olowakandi to the playoffs.  Didn't carry his team!?  Which team were YOU guys watching!?

This title is going to become one of my recurring themes, for sure.  Ethanol is EVIL.  It doesn't help reduce global warming, it isn't cheaper or more efficient than petrol, but worse, some (also pretty evil) PR people have somehow managed to convince everyone that its a weapon in our fight to reduce global warming.  As a result, politicians in recent years have lined up to pump money into the (did I mention it's EVIL yet!?) Ethanol industry.

So, this is why economics matters.  This is why economics should be a requirement in every high school, rather than an elective that some business majors take and then promptly work really hard to forget.  A tiny, tiny bit of economics is all anyone needed to know in advance that these subsidies were Really Bad Things.

Food prices have risen 75% since 2005 (in inflation adjusted terms).  This matters a LOT to poor families.  And why?  Ethanol subsidies.

From the Economist:

"But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America's reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks."

The bolded part is pretty amazing.  And all the people everywhere patting themselves on the fucking back for how they're helping reduce global warming.  The sad part about this is that aside from the Economist, I haven't seen a single mainstream media outlet run ONE FUCKING STORY about how useless Ethanol is, and how reckless and destructive ethanol subsidies are.  Oh, sure, every once in a while a biochemist gets 30 seconds on CNN and mentions that Ethanol only really offers about a 1% fuel-efficiency savings over regular gasoline, but the interviewer is always quick to move on.

I'm a big fan of Greg Mankiw's Pigou Club, a huge opponent of agricultural subsidies (especially for EVIL PRODUCTS).

One thing I always like to consider when I look at a proposed policy, law, etc, is the law of unintended consequences, which is of particular importance to economists, because of Mankiw's 4th Principal of Economics: people respond to incentives.

And so it is completely surprising that Stephen Dubner over at the Freakonomics blog has apparently forgotten the law:

Sometimes a good idea is so obvious that you can't believe no one has made it happen yet. That would seem to be the case with something called the Impair Aware Alcohol Level Indication System. It's a machine you can put in a bar or restaurant that lets you measure your blood alcohol level so you know if you're fit to drive or not.

I'm not sure which surprises me more, the fact that Mr. Dubner thinks this idea is new (they tried this in Wisconsin when I went to college in the early 90s!), or the fact that Mr. Dubner, as an amateur economist, thinks the idea is good -- i.e. that he didn't think of the most obvious unintended consequence of the IAALIS, which is the very consequence that caused Wisconsin to stop using it almost immediately and that the first commenter at the above blog entry vividly describes:

We tried something similar once when I was an undergraduate in a fraternity. We bought a breathalyzer machine so we could ascertain whether or not someone was too drunk to drive home. Good in theory, but it quickly turned into "see who can blow the highest," which quickly turned into "wake him up so he can take the breathalyzer. I bet it'll be a new record!"

I think, as unintended consequences come and go, this one was easy to spot from miles away.

I blogged a few weeks ago about that paper David Romer wrote in which he said that football teams punt too much.  Well, it appears that someone was listening.  As Levitt on Freakonomics and Dave Berri at the Wages of Wins have both pointed out, a high school team in Arkansas has taken the strategy to its extreme: they never punt.  And, lo and behold, they're tearing up their league (see the TREND 3 section of the Greg Easterbrook story here).  Easterbrook does a much better job than I did at explaining how the "no punt" strategy makes perfect sense if you are used to thinking about probabilities.

Sigh.  I'll have to scratch NFL Coach off my list of dream jobs; when everyone catches on to this, the market won't quite be so inefficient.

House democrats have reached a deal on a bill that will enforce a 40% increase in fuel efficiency by 2020:

Automakers would be required to meet an industrywide average of 35 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks, including SUVs, by 2020, the first increase by Congress in car fuel efficiency in 32 years.

.....

"It is a major milestone and the first concrete legislation to address global warming," declared Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was involved in the discussion with House Democrats as the agreement with Dingell was worked out.

Sigh. I have some bad news for the politicians.  Fuel efficiency gains do not decrease consumption.  This is something that lawmakers have been confused about for decades.  Just make stuff more efficient, and we'll use less energy, right?

Wrong.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Yes, that's right, fuel efficiency gains lead to increased consumption.  this concept is illustrated quite beautifully in the book "The Bottomless Well" by physicists Peter Huber and Mark Wills.

If you think about it, it should be obvious why.  Say you own a car that gives you 20 mpg today.  What happens if I give you a car that gets 40mpg and take your gas guzzler away?  That's right, you drive more.  This is essentially the law of demand in action.

Notice that if you make "Price" be the cost of driving one mile, and you make "Quantity Demanded" the miles driven, what happens to the miles you drive as the fuel efficiency of your car rises?

The same is true of electricity and other fuels.  If things become more efficient, we simply find more things to use that consume energy.  LCD Screens are far more energy-efficient than CRT Displays.  So we scrap the 23" Magnavox and buy a 50" Sony flat screen.  We throw away the giant 19" CRT monitor and buy two 20" LCD Monitors.  We're using less energy per device but aren't consuming less energy in aggregate.

Energy efficiency is NOT going to solve global warming.  It's not even going to help in the battle.