What's Paris Up To These Days Anyway?

The following emails are all currently in my GMail spam folder (edited to make the list a bit more family friendly).

• Lawson Westberg » Paris Hilton Lands Leading Role in New Broadway Musical Production‎ - Watch now 5:59 pm


• Dick Corron » Paris Hiltons P***y goes hungry whilst she is in custody!‎ - WATCH VIDEO CLIP 4:54 pm


• matilde Tokos » Prince Harry Proposes to Paris Hilton‎ - PLAY VIDEO CLIP 2:57 pm


• hjalmar Hemmi » Paris Hilton Leaves Michael Jackson for Editor of an Internet Spoof Rag!‎ - Download and Watch 8:14 am


• Mels Kong » Paris Hilton Pregnant By Aliens‎ - Watch the clip 5:16 am


• kazimierz domer » Paris Hilton: Professor Maxwell showed me his p***s during dinner! Gross!‎ - PUSH TO WATCH 3:51 am


• Ivy grieve » Paris Hilton breaks down after friend tells her she's an 'a*****e'!‎ - PUSH TO WATCH 2:52 am


• kanber beaune » Paris Hilton Wins Pulitzer Prize‎ - Watch the clip Aug 22

Idea of the Century

From the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" department comes a post on Slashdot by way of the LA Times that some super-genius out there posted a $999 iPhone application called "I Am Rich." What does it do? Nothing. Except prove that the application's owner is, in fact, rich enough to throw away a grand. We'll leave aside for now the implications that this episode has on my continuing criticism of the book Nudge's premise that people are stupid and irrational.

Take this 401(k) plan and Shove it

Automatically enrolling employees in 401(k) plans is all the rage these days. The theory that the mass of people are too stupid or lazy to recognize what's good for them has been around for quite a long time in certain government and academic quarters. But, not surprisingly, this theory turns out to be unpopular with the people themselves (as well as with others in government and academic quarters who've seen how paternalism tends to pan out -- hence William F. Buckley's famous quote about preferring to be governed by the first 100 names in the Cambridge phone book than by the Harvard Faculty).

The paternalists are back now with a brand new idea: "We'll make people do what's good for them, but we'll let them opt out if they really want to do the wrong thing! That way, we can say we're preserving their freedom, but in truth we know that they're still too lazy or stupid to undertake the effort required to opt out of what we're making them do!" Hence, a new oxymoronic name: Libertarian Paternalism. And, hence, automatic enrollment in the 401(k) that you can nevertheless always cancel.

Exhibit A in the libertarian paternalism front today is a new book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, a law professor and an econmics professor, respecitvely, at the Univeristy of Chicago. Because goofy one-word titles are all the rage in nonfiction books these days (Blink, Collapse, Freakonomics) the book is not called "Libertarian Paternalism" but rather called "Nudge."

So, what's wrong with a little Nudge? Sure it's paternalistic, but hey, if you don't like it you can always opt out right? And I've heard some fairly smart people make arguments against libertarian paternalism that the Nudge authors have ready answers for. I won't rehash those here because I don't have anything new to add.

What I will say is that libertarian paternalism has long made me apprehensive even though I couldn't quite articulate why. Now I'm starting to get an inkling and it comes in the form of that old devil, the law of unintended consequences. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about the popularity (with regular folks, not with the paternalistic types) of 401(k) debit cards.(Click here, subscription required) It's always been possible to borrow against your 401(k), but it's a bit of a hassle. Now along comes a card that you just swipe, sign, and viola, you've just made yourself a loan.

Borrowing money from your 401(k) is crazy unless you really need to -- your just robbing yourself. But, according to the Journal, the availability of loans makes people more likely to join a 401(k) in the first place.

The bottom line for Thaler and Sunstein is that a theory is only as good as its practical results. Yes, you can probably get people to contribute to their 401(k) by automatically enrolling them; the laziness that keeps people from enrolling also keeps them from unenrolling. But it's not clear that this changes ultimate behavior. Will people just borrow more on credit cards because they figure they're in good shape for retirement? Or, will they be even more direct and just borrow right of the 401(k) you just put them in? No one knows this for sure yet, so it isn't game over for Nudge. But it's worth considering that the Journal article also mentions legislation that would ban 401(k) debit cards. For everybody. No opt-outs. That's not a Nudge, it's a Shove, and it's where paternalism has always tended to end up.

Does my Facebook page count as my 15 mintues?

From A.O. Scott's review of "American Teen" a documentary about a group of high school students in Indiana:

But the members of the class of 2006, to which the subjects of in “American Teen” belong, are part of a generation whose media-saturated lives make Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan look positively naïve.

The Single Best Paragraph Yet Written on Inflating the Housing Bubble

Meanwhile, China and other big exporters to the U.S. had to find something to do with all the dollars we sent them. Many of those dollars flowed back into U.S. mortgage securities. That lowered the cost of home loans further, helping more Americans buy houses. We then needed more Chinese-made stuff to fill those closets . . .

Jame Hagerty, Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2008

Don't Bother Reading This (Book Review: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read)

So I've just finished a book called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." It's by a French professor of literature and psychoanalysis named Pierre Bayard. I recommend it, I found it entertaining and interesting. Despite it's title, the book is less about how to talk about books you haven't read then a refreshing call for us to cease being ashamed of not having read certain books. First, you don't have to have read a book to talk about it. I've never read Moby Dick but I can refer to all kinds of things about it that I'm sure are true. Second, even if you have read a book and you wish to converse with someone else about the book you and the other person may have completely different ideas about the book--so different, it's as if you didn't even read the same book. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's what makes talking about books interesting. Here, he gives a nice example of an anthropologist who, believing great literature is universal, takes Hamlet along with her for a stay with an African tribe. She tries to tell them the story, but it turns out that they don't believe in ghosts and aren't at all offended by Hamlet's mom marrying his uncle soon after her husband (and Hamlet's father's) death. So things kind of go downhill from there w/r/t the universality of literature.

Finally, Bayard notes that even if you really, truly, honestly did read the whole damn book, you've probably forgotten it by now. So what does it matter if you've really read it? You have some impression of the book (probably) but you could have the same impression without needed to actually have read the whole darned thing. This point intrigued me so, forthwith, a list of books I've read but forgotten, when I read them, and what I remember about them:

The Red Badge of Courage (7th or 8th grade): I hated this book very much. Our English teacher devised a brutally clever means of ensure we read the book under the guise of teaching us about symbolism. We had to keep a list of every page on which the word "red" or some synonym appeared. Let me tell you, Stephen Crane knew how to use his symbolism. But mostly I found the book boring and dry. Almost literally dry as in the one part I still remember has the main character wandering around bleeding after a battle in the oppressive summer heat wearing a wool uniform. The whole book felt like that to me.

A Catcher in the Rye (10th grade?): This book really annoyed me. It was supposed to speak to adolescents and it was even supposed to be risque with all its naughty words. I found it pretentious and ridiculous. First off, "damn" and "hell" just don't count as swears anymore. Not if you're older than, say, 8. Second, I thought Holden Caufield's use of swear words was all wrong. Like someone who's a fluent, but not native, English speaker.

1984 (10th Grade): I enjoyed this book a lot. (I'm sort of cheating a bit here because I've re-read parts of this recently (and it's even scarier now--it really is like a handbook for modern politics)). Still, whether you've read the book or not you probably already basically get it.

To Kill a Mockingbird (10th grade?): Eh.

Great Expectations (12th grade): I just hated this book. It was way too long and utterly pointless and ended with a surprise ending that I found utterly unbelievable. Surely Dickens' reputation is not being enhanced by this book? I like A Christmas Carrol though; or, at least, the Muppet Movie version of it.

Crime and Punishment (12th grade): I loved this book and it's one of the few books I read in High School with a scene so powerful I can still remember it vividly. Raskalnikov has a dream where a man beats his horse to death. It's unbearable. I need to read more Dostoevsky.

Madame Bovary (12th grade - college): Much to my surprise, and contrary to most of my classmates' opinions, I enjoyed this book a lot. I read every single word. I could not tell you a damn thing about it beyond it having to do with some woman in France who maybe had sex with people. Maybe someday I'll re-read it.

Descartes's Meditations (Freshman year college): I remember sitting down one afternoon and reading this whole thing through. I hadn't gotten through an entire assign book for the "Great Works" class all year and I was determined to crank this one out, and I did it. The only problem was, even though the words were passing in front of my eyes, I retained absolutely nothing. This is different from the Madame Bovary case above where I have since forgotten all about the book. I mean as soon as I stood up from my chair the only thing I could remember about Descartes was "I think therefore I am." And heck, I knew that much going in.

StickK it to me?

My fiancé Nicole has just finished reading the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. As I understand it, it's a about behavioral economics and its application in everyday life. What is behavioral economics you ask? Simply put, it's the study of how human beings actually behave in the real world and how that behavior challenges traditional economic assumptions about rational actors. One example in the book is the new company called StickK.com which was founded by a lawyer and an economist who specialize in behavioral economics. The idea behind the company is that people have goals that they want to achieve but often have trouble seeing them through. The goal that comes to mind for most people, of course, is weight loss. How many Americans have attempted to lose weight only to fail at their attempt, or to succeed for a time but then fail to keep the weight off? Well, the idea behind StickK.com is that people would have a better shot at losing weight and keeping it off if something painful were to happened to them if they fail. Specifically, at StickK.com you enter into a contract to pay money if you fail to achieve your stated goal. You don't pay the money to StickK.com, but to some other recipient. You can choose to pay the money to a friend or to a charity. But if you pick a friend or a charity that you like, you may not have sufficient incentive to meet your goal. So you can also choose to donate your money to an anti-charity. For instance, if you're pro-life you can donate to a pro-choice organization or vice versa.

Nicole thought this was an intriguing idea and suggested that we try our own StickK.com contract to loose weight. I dissented vigorously. Unfortunately, I sometimes have this tendency with Nicole where, when she suggests a new idea, I immediately and vehemently say no and list all the things that I think are wrong with her idea. This, quite understandably, agitates her immensely.

In the case of StickK.com, I find myself intuitively skeptical of the entire concept. Despite the success stories listed on the web site, I have to believe that the people who have successfully lost weight or quit smoking would have done so anyway. Or at least they might have done so with some level outside encouragement that didn't require them to donate money to charities they disagree with.

I did some research on StickK.com to see what the skeptics might be saying. Tyler Cowen of the Marginal Revolution blog thinks that StickK.com isn't likely to work. He says, "one group of potential customers doesn't really want to change, the other group is unwilling to give up control." I, for one, probably fall in to both camps. The idea of entering into some artificial, frankly silly, contract requiring me to donate money to groups I don't much like (and right when I'm already going to be feeling bad for not having met my goal) just doesn't have a whole lot of appeal to me. But I also have to admit that I don't think I trust my self-control enough to wager a sufficient sum of money to make my commitment contract really bite. For example, one of the founders of StickK.com mentions in the FAQs that he wagered $500 a week on his ability to lose 1 pound a week. This is a substantial amount of money for him, as it would be for me. Indeed after three or four weeks of not reaching my goal I would feel compelled to break my contract. University of Chicago Law School Professor Eric Posner (perhaps among others) has questioned whether a StickK.com contract is actually enforceable. After all, contracts are usually enforceable only when both sides agree to exchange something valuable and it's not clear that StickK.com is providing anything of value to its users. StickK.com would argue that it's providing a "commitment service" to its users, but this is, to say the least, a novel legal argument. What's more, at StickK.com you can select a referee who would tell the site whether or not you've met your goal, but if your referee fails to report for any reason StickK.com will just take your word for it. Yes you might be able to pick an unbending referee, and you do pay the full amount of your wager upfront (StickK.com will dole out the money either back to you or to your chosen recipient) but one can easily see the entire project crashing down the first time someone sues their referee, and StickK.com for good measure. Ultimately, people who aren't that committed to their StickK.com contract are likely to find a way out.

So what has this investigation of StickK.com done for me? Well, it's forced me to question how committed I am to losing weight. I'm not willing to wager a significant amount of money on my ability to loose weight at least in part because I don't think I care enough about weight loss to really force myself into doing it. But I did discover one thing that I am committed to. I set up a StickK.com contract to pay Nicole $10 a week whenever I immediately say no to one of her ideas or suggestions instead of hearing her out with an open mind. We'll see if StickK.com can change my behavior. For my sake, I sure hope it can.