Michael Kevane

Embarassing… at least I didn;t yell, or throw down my bagels… (but I didn;t threaten to “report them”)…. this morning I got peeved at a $5 minimum sign (my order was $3.8)… but turns out… they were right… the retail industry lobbied and got their dream wish…

New rules: up to $10 minimum OK

The request received little notice because it was tucked into a bill that became an 848-page legislative behemoth — the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. As fierce debates took place over whether the legislation created or preserved “too big to fail” banks, and whether to set a cap on debit card interchange fees, the short section on credit card minimum payments survived, there on page 698.  It went into law in July 2010, and all those handwritten signs went from forbidden to federally blessed.  The law says that merchants can set a credit card minimum purchase of up to $10, as long as they treat all cards the same. It also allows the Federal Reserve to review and increase the minimum payment amount.  

To which I reply: “They’re thieves. They’re thieves. They’re filthy little thieves. Where is it? Where is it? They stole it from us, my precious. Curse them, we hates them! It’s ours it is, and we wants it!”

Read more: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-minimum-payment-purchases-law-1282.php#ixzz2fMX0juvM

Probably the best single guide to the behavioral perspective on macro… why it is relevant, why it is better, and what the models are doing…  Can be read over and over again for nuance.  Did he have help from Thomas Pynchon?

It’s easy for university administrators to ignore the fundamental truth here, and be constantly reaffirmed by their underlings, so that they can (with some old-fashioned cognitive dissonance) tell themselves they are perplexed and befuddled when suddenly a crisis erupts and they find out that nobody likes their policies.

A good illustration of this phenomenon appears in “Moral Mazes,” a book by the sociologist Robert Jackall that explored the ethics of decision making within several corporate bureaucracies. In it, Jackall made several observations that dovetailed with those of Arendt. The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

Jackall went through case after case in which managers violated this code and were drummed out of a business (for example, for reporting wrongdoing in the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant).

Incidentally, I think the same is true of many university committees.  Is this what FAVL employees are doing?  (just kidding, I hope)… but  still… how do I know they are not?

via The Banality of Systemic Evil | Common Dreams.

I have no doubt the paper is terrific and interesting and insightful, but the broad thrust of the economic history agenda seems to be that people kind of stay the same in many ways for a long time.  Well… it’s kinda weird.  On a global scale, the Chinese are still largely Confucian, and the Americans still largely Christian.  And they still speak the same languages for almost 300 years.  Is that remarkable?  Is there a theory that suggests that as the scale of “culture” gets smaller, it should be more quick to change?  Will children of body piercers and tattooers not embrace their body art culture?  Would it be significant if they did or did not?  Maybe the bottom line of this research is that “people have a lot of inertia unless something big makes them change”?

That is a new paper (pdf) by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, here is the abstract:

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South trace their origins back to the influence of slavery’s  prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves population in 1860 are less likely to identify as Democrat, more likely to oppose affirmative action policies, and more likely to express racial resentment toward blacks. These results are robust to accounting for a variety of attributes, including contemporary shares of black population, urban-rural differences, and Civil War destruction. Moreover, the results strengthen when we instrument for the prevalence of slavery using measures of the agricultural suitability to grow cotton. To explain our results, we offer a theory in which political and racial attitudes were shaped historically by the incentives of Southern whites to propagate racist institutions and norms in areas like the “Black Belt” that had high shares of recently emancipated slaves in the decades after 1865. We argue that these attitudes have, to some degree, been passed down locally from one generation to the next.

I find it odd that in the abstract they don’t mention black political attitudes.  Did they not differ from county to county?  Something to look at.

via Marginal Revolution — Small steps toward a much better world..

The irony is that council itself created Ulistac Natural Area 15 years ago from an abandoned golf course that was “going natural”… Here’s a very recent Yelp review:

The beauty of Ulistac is that it is left natural and a bit on the wild side. The amount of wildlife here is incredible. I can’t take a walk through here without seeing many new things each time. There is great variety in this small area. When the traffic along Lick Mill isn’t too crazy, you can really soak in all the sounds of nature. It’s incredible that you can get away to a natural and relatively undisturbed spot right in the midst of the Valley! I hope they keep it this way and don’t make it all tidy and manicured (for example, leaving the brush piles around is good as it provides habitat for birds and other creatures).

Here’s the city’s own website:

Ulistac Natural Area, 40 acres of open space that showcases seven distinctive natural habitats, opened in Santa Clara in 2001 after months of volunteer efforts to restore California native vegetation and preserve wildlife habitat. This land was originally used as a seasonal encampment for the Ohlone Indians (Ulistac was the name of an Ohlone chief)

Here’s the crazy proposition to turn it into a soccer field:

Members of the Santa Clara City Council want to move the city soccer field facility away from the NFL stadium on Tasman Drive.  They tasked the Dept. of Parks & Recreation to find new locations for the soccer fields and associated clubhouse and maintenance building.  At a strategy session on Thursday, Sept. 12,  the department presented the council with 5 options.  The council narrowed it down three and asked for further work to be done.  One of the three sites is Ulistac Natural Area.

If the soccer facility is built at UNA, it will be a rectangle that starts just north of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct and goes north almost all the way to the wetlands.  The rectangle will also extend back almost all of the way to the levee.  All that will be left will be the wetlands and the area immediately around and south of the bird and butterfly habitat garden.

Councilmembers Gillmor and Mahan spoke in favor of placing the soccer fields on Ulistac.  Councilmembers O’Neil and Matthews advised against it.  Councilmembers Marsalli, Davis, and Kolstad did not indicate their positions.  The stadium is supposed to become active in June 2014 and the general consensus was that the fields need to be moved before then.  Any of the sites will cost around $10 Million dollars to create.

I’d love to know whether the 49ers are picking up the tab, or is this something the city council, in the rush to get the stadium “forgot” about.  Moreover, I’d love to know how much current council members received in contributions from developers.  I’d also like to know whether Council feels that all the fast food restaurants in Santa Clara contribute to public well-being.  Because if not, why not use the funds to buy and raze a couple blocks of fast food restaurants and turn *them* into soccer fields.