Oh Augustus, Now I Know Why They Call You "The Strong"

The blogerati are still having fun with a New York Times story on sexual partners—who gets how many (a Google blog search for "male female sex partners mean median" yields 200 hits as of 911 am pst Ag 22 (link; cf. link)). Surveys suggest that men claim more sexual partners (of the opposite sex) than women. But wait, object the arithmeticians: every time a man has sex with a woman, then by definition a woman must have sex with a man. So the number must be exactly the same.

Model it this way:

M1	F1, F2		F1	M1, M5
M2	F2, F3		F2	M1, M2
M3	F3, F4		F3	M2. M3
M4	F4, F5		F4	M3, M4
M5	F5, F1		F5	M4, M5

So, two each, and an average of two for everybody, and the green grass grows all around, all around. Call it the “frat boy” model: a boring, moderately promiscuous, society, where the guys do a lot of lying.

But contrast:

M1	F1, F2, F3,		F1	M1, M2, M3, M4, M5
M2	F1, F2		F2	M1, M2, M3, M4
M3	F1, F2		F3	M1
M4	F1, F2		F4	0
M5	F1		F5	0

Call this the “Victorian” model, with a lot of virginity and a lot of prostitution (though not, it seems, any pure monogamy). There are still 10 relationships on each side, so, an average of two each as before.

But while the mean is the same (definitionally), note the median. The midpoint on the male side is two relationships; on the female; only one. So measuring with the median, men do, in fact, have more relationships than women—solely because one or two poor girls are doing most of the work.

So far this is stuff that any good high school student could figure out, and a lot have. But now consider this case which doesn’t seem to have received so much attention:

M1	F1, F2, F3, F4, F5		F1	M1
M2	0		F2	M1,
M3	0		F3	M1
M4	0		F4	M1
M5	0		F5	M1

Call this the “Augustus the Strong” case, after the Elector of Saxony alleged to have fathered 385 children (link). One guy gets all the action. This is more or less what you would expect in a polygamous society, and it is what guys forget when they think that polygamy would be such a great idea. Note that we still have an equal number of M and F relationships-now, five and five—so the means remain equal. But the median for women is now actually higher (one) than it is for men (zero).

Fn.: A private communcation cautions that Augustus is called "the Strong" not because of his progenitive capacity as because he was capable of breaking horeshoes with his bare hands. Sorry, my bad. He was 5 9 1/2 and weighed 242 pounds. Oof. Also liked eggshell porcelaine. Sissy boy.

Fn2: I recall reading in The Economist many years ago that many more Turkish women report that they are married, than men. I assumed then that it was lying or, ahem, misunderstanding. Course it could be illegal polygamy.

Fn3: Apologies for the quirky formatting. I have spent far too much time trying to get it right; be glad that it works at all.

Some Stuff to Try

Boy, a really need to update my links:

IPienso. Development, business, social enterprise.

Little Devices that Could. Medical gadgets.

Schnier on Security. Practical and unterrified.

Knzn. Name says it all.

I Swear I Heard This on NPR

...about noon today, during Talk of the Nation (I was in the car): that the Iranians had released Haileh Esfandiari on payment of a bond of $300 million dollars.

Um.

That would be 300 million Iranian reals, which translates into $320 thousand dollars (link).

NPR needs to pay these guys more.

The Bad News: Tax Evasion is Still In

Remember the old joke about Moses coming down from the mountain:

The good news is--I’ve got him down to ten.

The bad news: adultery is still in.

Apparently tax evasion, also, is “still in” (link):

Pope Benedict XVI is working on a doctrinal pronouncement that will condemn tax evasion as “socially unjust”, according to Vatican sources.

In his second encyclical – the most authoritative statement a pope can issue – the pontiff will denounce the use of “tax havens” and offshore bank accounts by wealthy individuals, since this reduces tax revenues for the benefit of society as a whole.

It will focus on humanity’s social and economic problems in an era of globalisation. Pope Benedict intends to argue for a world trade and economic system “regulated in such a way as to avoid further injustice and discrimination”, Ignazio Ingrao, a Vatican watcher, said yesterday.

The encyclical, drafted during his recent holiday in the mountains of northern Italy, takes its cue from Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), issued 40 years ago. In it the pontiff focused on “those peoples who are striving to escape from hunger, misery, endemic diseases and ignorance and are looking for a wider share in the benefits of civilisation”. He called on the West to promote an equitable world economic system based on social justice rather than profit.

Reports I’ve seen so far don’t seem to mention the point, but this seems to be something of a turnaround for the church. Apparently just a few days ago, Silvio Berlusconi’s favorite priest was still telling Italian media that tax evasion was “not a sin” (link). He’s got a lot of flac for that, but up until today, I think he may have had some church law on his side. I can’t put my finger on it just now, but my recollection is that a 19^th-Century pope (my bet is on Leo XIII while Prisoner of the Vatican), embraced exactly that view as part of his standoff with the nascent Italian state: no duty to pay taxes to what was, after all, in the eyes of the Papacy, an illegal Italian state.

Consider also Pius XI: “Wherefore the wise Pontiff,” we are told, “declared that it is grossly unjust for a State to exhaust private wealth through the weight of imposts and taxes” (link). Continuing, he may seem to waffle:

"For since the right of possessing goods privately has been conferred not by man's law, but by nature, public authority cannot abolish it, but can only control its exercise and bring it into conformity with the common weal."[36] Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them.

50. Furthermore, a person's superfluous income, that is, income which he does not need to sustain life fittingly and with dignity, is not left wholly to his own free determination. Rather the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church constantly declare in the most explicit language that the rich are bound by a very grave precept to practice almsgiving, beneficence, and munificence.

51. Expending larger incomes so that opportunity for gainful work may be abundant, provided, however, that this work is applied to producing really useful goods, ought to be considered, as We deduce from the principles of the Angelic Doctor,[37] an outstanding exemplification of the virtue of munificence and one particularly suited to the needs of the times.

…but I don’t think there is a real waffle here: he’s just saying spend it right¸ or invest.

The Kerouac MBA

Per Matt Weiland, Jack Kerouac teaches “that low overhead and a sense of improvisation make for a good life” (link).

Setting aside Weiland, Kerouac and improvisation, this is actually pretty good advice, not so? It’s the percentage return that matters. My father, who was in the credit reporting biz, taught me that every restaurant gets sold three times—until the price gets low enough so the operating surplus can cover the debt. In my bankruptcy law days, I saw lots of businesses with lots of fancy equipment and no cash flow. That’s why successful dentists are, by definition, successful entrepreneuers. They have to persuade people to give them money for inflicting pain on them, and with all that equipment, they are all the time running away from the bank like they were running away from an unmanned power lawn mower.

Probably true of “improvision” too. Get Kerouac’s point through your head and you can skip business school.

One Bush Can't Win

Not that it bothers me all that much, but I have to admit I don't see how W can win on Hurricane Dean. If he messes it up again, why then we have Katrina II. But if he does not mess it up--why, it only proves that he takes better care of Texans than he does folks from Louisiana.

But You Knew

Over at Google Blog Search tonight:

Billy Hospitalized Graham gets 441 hits (link).

Australia Woman Sex Camel gets 8,738 (link).

Matt Yglesias and the Great Depantsing

Matt Yglesias has an uncharacteristically (for Matt) unsophisticated post up about the mortgage meltdown and the practice of banking (link). Matt puzzles over why the mortgage meltdown is creating such a pervasive problem. He discovers that the mortgage enterprises are, in some sense, like banks, and finds this insight, on the whole, comforting.

For most non-economist commentators, this probably draws a passing grade. But you might have expected ominicompetent Matt to realize that (a) there is no good, workable definition of what is a bank; and (b) correspondingly, everything is a bank, actually or potentially.

What’s a bank? The conventional old-style definition is that a bank is an entity that (a) takes deposits and (b) makes loans. Fair enough, but consider a life insurance company. It “takes deposits,” in the sense that we leave money on account with it for years at a time. It “makes loans,” in the sense that it tries to turn a profit with the money on account. And you could say that anyone “makes a loan” any time he extends credit. I read somewhere that Toyota isn’t a car company, it’s just a bank that happens to sell cars. At first blush, I assumed the quip meant only that Toyota was so choked with money it had to cook up ways in which to invest it. On second blush, it sank in on me that for Toyota—indeed for any car company, maybe for any big-ticket inventory seller—the installment credit side of the business may come to dominate, leaving the “inventory” side as some kind of a loss leader.

This is the kind of pitch banks make when they argue that they play on an unfair playing field—they are constrained by regulation, but others are not.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy with this argument, but there is an unsettling mirror image. That is: at the end of the day, still banks really are different from any other kind of enterprise. Banks are party of a system that runs on trust, and once trust ends, the whole system unravels. So banking is the only system in which one does not gain from the failure of one’s competitor. I’ve heard people describe it as the situation you get in a rugby scrum when somebody loses his pants: all the players mill around and make a racket while the unfortunate recovers his dignity. Then they give high fives all round and charge off again down field. I must say, I don’t envy Ben Bernanke tonight, as he tries to play “lender of last resort” (cf. Charles Kindleberger, passim (link)) for an entire galaxy. Is anyone strong enough to rectify the great depantsing. Anyone? Anyone?

Weekend’s Most Effective Strained Simile

Jack Shafer on the Washington press corps:

Imagine ants farming aphids for honeydew at Sans Souci, and you get the picture.

(Think about it) Shafer is reviewing Robert Novak’s memoir, in which Novak divulges (surprise!) that he really doesn’t mind that the world thinks him a flaming bunghole (in the Sunday NYT Book Review (link)).

Fn.: For no reason of which I can conceive, Shafer’s review is linked at a website featuring “Nicaragua agricultural news” (link).

Things I Never Would Have Known Had I Not Read the Airline Magazine

We came home from Maine Saturday by way of Southwest from Manchester NH via Las Vegas. That's a diagonal, and counting down time to fix a gummy tire, that was the longest time I've spent in a tin can on a domestic flight since, oh since I came back from Maine via Portland ME 10 years ago (I begin to descry a pattern here). I made a lot of progress on a big gnarly book, but here is some stuff I never would have learned had I not strayed to the onboard magazine:

• You (well--"somebody") can make $200,000 a year playing fantasy football. I assume Brian whats-his-name will shortly give us all a chance to play fantasy law prof. Or maybe he has already?

• At least two dentists find it worth their while to take out full-page ads for their cosmetic dentistry practice. Dental tourism in Houston?

• Forget dental tourism, think Cake Tourism.
  

A Smokin' Hot Babe, and a Meteor Shower (With Update)

All I could see form where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way
And saw three islands and a bay.

That would be Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Renascence, one of the poems which I, at least, associate with the State of Maine, where Mr. and Mrs. Buce disported themselves last week, lounging about in a regime of compulsory idleness. The picture is not a mountain or a wood, but it is a bay, or at any rate, a sound--Mericoneag Sound, off Bailey Island. And it may be an island—it’s a point off the end of Harpswell Neck, south of Brunswick, but it seems to be connected to the mainland only by one of those bridges that did not exist before the Europeans started to make a nuisance of themselves.

I picked up a good deal of Millay along about 1951, when she would have been my sister Sally’s favorite poet. We both remember our mother warning her that Millay really wasn’t of the first rank. We speculate whether mother was trying to protect her little girl from embarrassment—or to protect herself from embarrassment that her little girl should have such vulgar taste. Either way, I’d say the real point is that Millay certainly is memorable and accessible, and she seems to be a good deal more of a smokin’ hot babe than, say Emily Dickinson; perhaps a thousand times more than, say, Adrienne Rich.

I’ve always associated Millay with Maine. Per Wiki I learn that she was indeed born there, though she doesn’t seem to have spent much time there. Either way, I am happy to associate her with the exhilarating fresh breezy air and the low, rolling (slightly spooky) pine-covered woodlands. And the long mountains, and the islands. And the ocean, did I mention the ocean? Did I mention that it changes color and texture every time you look at it? I don’t suppose I can blame her for the fact that they seem to overcook their fish.

Here’s another bit of Millay that must be about Maine:

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

Oh, and Persieds. Yes, there were Persieds. We set the alarm for 1 am. I counted seven, all spectacular, but then we got sleepy and went back to bed.

Update: I see somebody just linked here from a Google Search. The search terms were: "hot babe in shower." Sorry to disappoint.

Travelling Again

I’m off to a teardrop on the coast of Maine to watch the Perseids, and to provide succor for Mrs. B’s carved and scraped shoulder. If all goes well, we may stage our own private reading of As You Like It. I assume I'll be out of wi-fi range, so I'm not even bothering with the laptop. Some things to do when I’m away:

Go to Credit Slips and read the cool posts by Emily Kadens about hanging bankrupts, etc.

Watch for a new liquidity crisis with the guidance of Mark Thoma, (who reads Brad DeLong so you don’t have to).

For sane skepticism about real estate, see Calculated Risk. For a more excitable view, see Housing Bubble.

If the oil market starts caterwauling, visit Oil Drum.

Save yourself the trouble of reading all those 10Ks with Michelle Leder. If you really like getting under the hood of financial statements, visit AAO.

For a new fave in the realm of acerb commentary, visit Jenny Diski (I really must update my blogroll). For a blue/white peacock on a blue/purple tree, visit my old friend Toni.

…and if this isn’t enough, for a really cool collection of new links, go here.

Mr & Mrs. B on Stoner

We’ve finished John Williams’ Stoner (link; cf. link). I feel impelled to add a word to what I said before, not least to showcase an offering from Mrs. Buce.

Executive summary: it is still an extraordinarily good piece of writing, although not the piece of perfection that some have deemed it. As a piece of prose composition it deserves highest marks—best thing I’ve read in English since Housekeeping (link) Individual sentences, paragraphs, pages, display great power and intensity. He recounts a love affair with precision and tact—I can find a snigger 90 yards away in a snowstorm, and there is none here. And a dying: he skirts the edge of, but never tumbles over, the cliff of mawkishness.

Aside from the protagonist, most of the characters are pretty much set-pieces. Indeed as I guess I did say before, his wife, Edith—the monster—is a convincing piece of villainy, but I find myself extending my sympathy to her. As one can say of a lot of people: it couldn’t be fun to be around her, but it must be even less fun to be her; I’m curious to hear her side of the story.

Stoner himself probably is a kind of “hero,” as the author wants to characterize him. But he’s a spectacularly passive hero, and this is the real issue: Stoner’s passivity damages not only himself but those around him, and you find yourself almost wanting to shake him to get him out of his box. Indeed, he does execute one bit of nerdy sabotage in mid-career: it’s mean and clever and effective and you can only wish he would do more.

If not for himself, then maybe for Edith, the villainous wife –even for the reader, it is almost past bearing that they had to live yoked together so hatefully for 40 years. Or for Katherine, the mistress whom Stoner, without lifting a finger, let walk out of his life (he hardly deserved the book dedication). Or if not for Edith or Katherine, then at least for the daughter. Yes, the daughter, Grace. He owed her better. No doubt that he loved her, but Loving is Doing Something About It, and Stoner did almost nothing about it at all.

Which brings me back to Mrs. B. I had said that I liked Stoner, but I didn’t think as highly of him as the author did. But that, Mrs. B said, is what makes it such an interesting novel: the character takes on such a life of his own that not even his author understands what he has done.

Well, fair point. This misunderstanding does add some texture, and since it was a good novel to begin with, I guess this makes it a very good novel, indeed.

Works For Me--China Finance

Works for me:

Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now

By Paul Craig Roberts

08/08/07 "ICH" --- - E arly this morning China let the idiots in Washington, and on Wall Street, know that it has them by the short hairs. Two senior spokesmen for the Chinese government observed that China’s considerable holdings of US dollars and Treasury bonds “contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency.”

Should the US proceed with sanctions intended to cause the Chinese currency to appreciate, “the Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.”

If Western financial markets are sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the message, US interest rates will rise regardless of any further action by China. At this point, China does not need to sell a single bond. In an instant, China has made it clear that US interest rates depend on China, not on the Federal Reserve.

The precarious position of the US dollar as reserve currency has been thoroughly ignored and denied. The delusion that the US is “the world’s sole superpower,” whose currency is desirable regardless of its excess supply, reflects American hubris, not reality. This hubris is so extreme that only 6 weeks ago McKinsey Global Institute published a study that concluded that even a doubling of the US current account deficit to $1.6 trillion would pose no problem. ...

And so on (link). But do I buy all the looniness in the comments? I do not. Do I think the dismantling of the US is part of a plot to advance world government? I do not. Oh, and thanks, Dave.

Hello Kitty

I missed this the first time around but it really is too good to ignore (link):

Cute Kitty Is Pink Badge of Shame in Bangkok

By SETH MYDANS

Published: August 8, 2007

BANGKOK, Aug. 7 — It is the pink armband of shame for wayward police officers, as cute as it can be, with a Hello Kitty face and a pair of linked hearts.

Skip to next paragraph

Yasushi Ukigaya/Kyodo News, via Associated Press

A police officer in Bangkok shows a pink Hello Kitty armband.

If an officer parks in the wrong place, comes to work late or drops a bit of litter, that officer would be decorated with an armband depicting Hello Kitty, the Japanese symbol of cuteness, no matter how many ribbons for valor he may already wear.

“Simple warnings no longer work,” said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division here, who instituted the humiliation this week.

“This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” he said. “Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.” ...

Thanks, Larry.

Newspapers and the Great Sucking Sound

In which I highlight two stories about the news biz:

• The New York Times paywall is crumbling: very good news? You're cheering? "Very bad news," says Michael O'Hare, "stop cheering" (link). Sure, it means you'll get free access to Maureen, for the moment. But the real point is that not even the Times can figure out how to make money in the news biz. "Enjoy your free Times Select while it lasts, folks," says Michael, "that sound you just heard was not the triumph of free information over selfish profiteers, it was the sound of the iceberg opening up four or five compartments below the waterline.

• Meanwhile Michelle Leder, who wades thorugh all those securities filings, has hit upon a story that perhaps needs more attention than it has received (link). It's about Gannett, the chain of chains, trading near its ten-year low. Michelle finds that they've adopted a "Transition Compensation Agreement," (link) aka provision for rats who want to leave a sinking ship.

Uh Oh

This does not make me happy:

You Are 84% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

So, I am only three points less feminist than Matt Yglesias. Matt slyly suggests he might be a hypocrite; me, I just want a recount: I don't think I am nearly as feminist as this chart seems to suggest (I felt the same way about the "liberalism" test last year). I think these issues are far more ideoligized and coarsened than is good for us (though less, I concede, than a few years ago), and that there are lots of complications we have barely begun to acknowlege. But I guess that when the chips are down, I am still a wuss.

I see there are a whole bunch of other blogthings at the blogthings website (link), aka "cool things to put on your blog." But oddly, most of them seem directed at women. At the risk of sounding unfeminist, isn't this a distortion? I know there are female bloggists (Blogettes! Let's hear it for the ladies!). But surely the vast majority are men? I confess I would, however, like to take a shot at this one.

Freud and the Nazis: Maintaining the Proprieties

The wife of Sigmund Freud, receiving unwelcome visitors in their Vienna apartment, maintains the bourgeois proprieties:

When the Nazis arrived at the door, Martha, having asked them to deposit their rifles in the umbrella stand, asked if they might care to sit down. This too, they refused. As they began to search the house, Martha went off, fetched the household money, and placed it on the dining room table. “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” she suggested, and this time, the gentlemen complied.

—Mark Edmundson The Death of Sigmund Freud ,
As read on the BBC Book of the Week

Juliet Dusinberre on Shakespeare the Reviser

I had an amiable disagreement with Mrs. Buce once over the place of low comedy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. I said it was like snakes in Iceland: no low comedy in Richard II. BLA-A-A-P WRONG. There is low comedy in Richard II, but it is in verse. And verse doesn’t work in low company. You can almost picture Shakespeare in the audience watching his own verse low comedy and saying BLA-A-A-P WRONG. Next time, prose.

Indeed, one of the most attractive aspects of Shakespeare’s shadowy persona is his capacity to learn from himself. He often does the same thing over again, but it is same-only-different, and often better. In her splendid new introduction to As You Like It (in the Arden Shakespeare Third Series) Juliet Dusinberre elaborates on the point:

As You Like It is perfectly poised between the comedies of the 1590s and the romances of Shakespeare’s post-tragic period: Pericles (1607-8), Cymbeline (1609-10), The Two Winter’s Tale (1610-11), The Tempest (1611), The Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-13) and Henry VIII (1612-13). Valentine’s joining of the outlaws in the forest in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (probably Shakespeare’s first comedy and perhaps his first play) offers a preview of Duke Senior and his exiled courtiers in the Forest of Arden. The relation of Julia and Sylvia in the same play (though in some ways nearer ot Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night than to Rosalind and Celia) nevertheless marks out—in Julia’s disguise as a page—the ground of Shakespeare’s virtuoso capacity to convert the convention of boy actors playing women’s parts from a restriction to a resource. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-6), despite the different atmosphere of the wood outside Athens in which the lovers, fairies and eventually Theseus and Hyppolyta all meet, the dramatist creates, as later in As You Like It, a ‘green world’ away from court. The Merchant of Venice (1596-7) and Much Ado About Nothing (1598-9) feature in Portia and Beatrice powerful women who, like Rosalind, suggest parallels with Elizabeth I, before whose court—as well as it the public theatre—most of the comedies would have been performed. Much Ado develops in the sparring of Beatrice and Benedick a flexible witty prose, perfected in As You Like It in the interchanges between Rosalind and Celia, Rosalind (as Ganymede) and Orlando, and between Touchstone and everyone else.

—Juliet Dusinberre,
Introduction to William Shakespeare, As You Like It 2-3
The Arden Shakespeare (2005)

Annals of Upstaging

I don't know enough about either baseball or PR to comment effectively, but wasn't it a stroke of PR genius to use Hank Aarons to sit on Barry Bonds' head as Bonds broke Aaron's home run record (link)?

The New Criminal Class?

CFO mag (via AAO) makes a count of Chief Financial Officers convicted of a financial crime over the last five years. Total: 63 (link).

It would be nice to have some context here--how big is the search set, what is the percentage?

But the number keeps reverberating: sixty three? Isn't that a lot? In the relevant time frame, I don't think we've had 63 Congressmen convicted -- and they, are Mark Twain kept assuring us, are our native criminal class (link). Sixty-three?

Harry Potter and the Cauldron of Scams

And welcome back, Taxmom (link)!

Ich bin ein Ventilator

Last month I wrote that "I'm a big fan of public transport" (link). Now I find myself linked to some kind of travel website which for whatever reason translates me into German (link). So:

Ich bin ein grosser Ventilator der öffentlichen Transportmittel...

Um, my German is just about zilch but I don't think a ventilator is a fan.

Well, better than being "a ignorant blowhard" (link).

Life Imitates Mel Brooks

Life imitates Mel Brooks: more cullings from Richard Overy, The Dictators (2004)

• “So anxious were [planners] to match [Stalin’s] vision … that the huge Moskva Hotel, built with the same over-high classical portico found on the designs for Berlin, was constructed with two wings of completely different styles because Stalin had mistakenly approved as a single design tweo separate submissions placed on a table in front of him.” (223)

• Stalin’s “favorite film was said to be the 1938 production of V olga! Volga! a musical comedy that ends with the triumphant completion of the Moscow-Volga canal by regiments of prisoner-labourers …” (238)

• There were 34 assassination attempts against Hitler, none against Stalin (though plenty of people wanted to). “Lenin was the victim of two attempts on his life. Many years later, a man was caught in the Lenin mausoleum trying to shoot the embalmed corpse.” (326)

• Those émigré Russians who try to be Nazis? Evidently the mustache was part of the rigging: “each [was] comically adorned with Hitler’s familiar toothbrush mustache and a uniform like that of a railway guard…” (336)

• Builders of a superblock at Magnitogorsk, the “new industrial city” forgot to include a sewer system (228). [I seem to recall reading about the same problem with a new barracks built by the Austrian Empire in the 1890s…]

War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery!

Civil rights commissioner calls for the reopening of US concentration camps (link) or, as they will henceforth be known, "dude ranches."

Middlebrow Culture Link of the Day

Mark Kleiman on Rupert Murdoch on Paul Gigot via Evelyn Waugh on Randolph Churchill (link).

Market v. Government: Real v. Real

Peter Leeson argues, on the evidence, that Somalia is better off under anarchy than it was under government (link). Max Sawicky is—actually, I’m not quite sure what he is, but I guess he is not impressed (link). But I think Sawicky may be too defensive. Fact is Leeson, who bears the clangorous title of “Professor of the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center,” has made a critical tactical concession—he has (implicitly) acknowledged that the superiority of the market is actually a testable hypothesis—not just an article of faith.

At any Mercatus Center worthy of the name, this ought to be enough to get him drummed out of the faculty lunch room. The customary market-libertarian approach is to compare actual governments with hypothetical markets in which case, inevitably, markets win—this is the market-libertarian analog to “under socialism vy all have egg in our beer!”

To prove that the actual, living government of a real nation, is so bad that not even a market economy can be worse—that’s an interesting proposition, if not perhaps exactly what Professor Leeson believes it to be. To argue that government is a cultural artifact and that a market is a cultural artifact—and that it is rational to compare real with real—now that strikes me as a blazing re-entry into the world of reason and good sense.

Of course, it may be that pigs will fly before Professor Leeson ever comes up with a set of data that actually contradicts his hypothesis, but this would hardly distinguish him from a lot of other economics, many of whose lives must be greyed by the lack of surprise in their results.

I look forward to his paper demonstrating that we will be better off when we abolish West Point and supplant it with citizen militias.

Idle afterthought: When Professor Leeson attends a faculty meeting, is he packin’ heat?

Inquisitive Afterthought: I wonder--and this time, I'm not even being sarcastic, or not really--how Professor Leeson would apply this lesson to Iraq? Should we get out now so the country will fall apart and everyone will be better off?

One more Dactyl (and Remembering the Nordstrom Girls)

It just struck me that this dactyl-hymnal thing might be more prevalent than I had realized (link). Now I am remembering what was, for me, the funniest amateur vaudeville act I ever enjoyed. That would be:

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:

Yep, that would be "Whispering Hope, (link), the work of one Septimus Winner who gave us also such winners as “Listen to the Mockingbird,” and “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” But you just don’t know what comedy is unless you heard "Whispering Hope" as rendered on home theatricals night in the 1940s by my mother, Esther Nordstrom, and her sister, Louise Nordstrom.

I guess you had to have been there and sadly, this was the day before tape recorders, but I can still picture them—both short, Esther roundish and Louise a bit spidery, arm and arm they’d enter; they’d bow in unison. Then totally deapan, in close harmony:

SOFT

As the voice of an a-a-ngel,

BREATH

Ing a lesson unheard

And so forth through –well, I don’t know how many verses, I was laughing too hard and so, I assume was everybody else in reach. They’d bow again, still unsmiling and exit as they entered. Like I say you had to have been there. But I also say: Esther’s been dead for over 20 years now—Louise, longer. There are many reasons to wish them with us again, but I can think of none more compelling than the desire once again to hear them do their rendition of “Whispering Hope.”

Church Music Footnote: Only remotely relevant, Mrs. Buce asks: is “Ave Maria” really the most god-awful piece of music Schubert ever wrote, or is it just that it is so consistently sung god-awfully by god-awful singers? Or maybe they are joking and we don’t get it.

Update: My sister Sally and my cousin David independently remind me that there was a third Nordstrom sister in the act: our aunt Selma. I never saw that version, but I can believe it: Selma, the youngest of the three (and the only one who never married), shared her sister's comic sensibility, although she was perhaps a bit gentler. Sally also points out that they all three had absolutely knockdown perfect pitch which, in this case, was part of the comedy.

Colliseum Smackdown: Christian v. Christian

There's bound to be a certain plague-on-both-your-houses attitude on the part of skeptics when they consider the pending smackdown between Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee (link). But as one who wouldn't on a bet vote for either one of them, I have to admit: I find Brownback to be a space cadet, and Huckabee (by dramatic contrast) totally engaging. Indeed I've always found Huckabee, on a personal level (as filtered through my TV screen) to be the most likeable person in the race, perhaps in either party. You're listening to a guy who (unlike, I gather, almost everyone in the galaxy) never found Ronald Reagan likeable. Brownback doesn't strike me as personally revolting (like Tom Delay and many others), nor as the kind of guy that makes you want to run and take a shower (like Mitt Romney and many, many, many others). Just weird. By contrast, I wonder what it is about Huckabee. Or me.

I'm Thinking of a Dactyl

I’m thinking of a dactyl (DAH duh duh). At least I thought it was a dactyl, but on second thought, I am not so sure. It’s the beginning of an old Protestant hymn, parked in my brain these last few days:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.

(On which, see link).

My first thought was: SOFT ly and TEN der ly—hm, dactyls. It’s worthy of note, because dactyls aren’t supposed to work in English. They work fine in Greek, as at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey:

Andra moi ennepe Mousa, polytropon hos mala polla

Tell me, muse, of the man of many wiles…

And even more famously in Latin, as at the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid:

Armo virumque cano…

Arms and the man I sing…

But in English, you tend to wind up with a Sousa march:

(When) I see the Stars and the Stripes,
Then my heart is a drum wildly beating…

Or worse, just about every limerick you ever learned:

(There) once was a lady from Natchez
(Whose) clothes were all covered with patchez

Duh da duh duh da
Duh da duh duh da

(She) said—“When ah itchez, ah scratchez!”

[Ever notice how hard it is to remember the couplet in most limericks?]

But in fact, there are more dactyls in English than you might guess. Here is the American Sidney Lanier, blogged here some months ago (link):

Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

[But it seems that English does seem to require that short “leading syllable,” unknown to Greek and Latin epic.]

An underappreciated English (American) example is Longfellow’s Evangeline (link):

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

But maybe the most dramatic example is Lord Byron, in the beginning of The Bride of Abydos:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

[The first line is apparently a riff on the first line of Goethe’s Mignon, almost the only line of German poetry I know:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn…]

But back to “softly and tenderly.” Is it a dactyl? Is it? It sure sounds like a dactyl—but wait, on second look, you realize that what you have here is a waltz (one-two-three, one-two-three). Can a waltz be a dactyl? Must we picture the preacher sweeping the organist across the floor?

The same goes at the other end of the line. Conventionally, dactylic lines end with a spondee (or at any rate, they do in classical epic): DAH duh duh DAH DAH. Spondees have a way of adding solidity, assurance. So correspondingly, I heard it:

SOFT ly and TEN der ly JES us is CALLING

[I apologize for the shouting orthography: I understand that Jesus calls more firmly in voice than he does in capital letters.]

But wait—this can’t be a spondee, even less than the first syllable is a dactyl. Again, we get firm, steady beats—but three beats. Can there be a three-note spondee? Certainly my sixth-grade teacher never told me about it, and I suspect she did not know if there can.

Curious footnote: “Dactyl” is not a “dactyl.” “Anapest” (duh duh DAH) is a dactyl (DAH duh duh). But “dactyl” is a trochee (DAH duh). As is “iamb,” and, come to that, as is “trochee.” As in (link):

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big Sea-Water

That’s Longfellow. A certain George C. Strong, otherwise unknown to me, nailed it to the wall (link):

   
He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside. … 

Poor Longfellow would have done well to stick to dactyls.

Final footnote: “spondee” does seem to be a spondee.

"Poor Millionaires" and Pensions

This morning's NYT story about the "poor millionaire" (link) gives me a chance to showcase two of my favorite equations. First this:


And then this:

That, plus a little data, is all you need for pension planning. In the top equation, "fund" means "the amount you will need to have on hand the day you quit work." To figure that, you need to know how much you will want to draw as a pension each year ("Pen"). You'll also need to know an interest rate ("r") and the number of years you expect to live ("n").

Once you know this, you can estimate how much you have to save each year to reach your goal ("Inv"), depending on how many years you have to save ("t").

For example, suppose you are a software engineer and you expect to be earning $80,000 a year when you retire at age 65. You want to keep on drawing that same sum every year in retirement. You expect to live for 20 more years. For an interest rate, throw a dart: say five percent. Then you will need to have on hand at retirement the sum of $996,976.80. To reach that sum, if you start at age 26, you'll need to put away $8,253.14, each and every year.

A few loose observations: first--if you are one of the lucky few who still has a job with a solvent pension fund, quit whining--you've got a great big balance sheet asset (here, c. $1 mill) that most people would push their grandmother in front of a truck for.

Second--for all the talk about IRAs, 401ks, blah blah, I don't think it has sunk in on us just how far you have to go by way of self-denial to get the capital fund you need. We've been able to lie to ourselves because we have been financing social security for so long on the Ponzi principle: new investors fund their predecessors. But like all Ponzi schemes, this works forever only if you have an infinitely expanding period. But with our birth rate, and Tom Tancredo standing shotgun at Ellis Island, we've pretty much played out that string.

Third--the little matter of "outliving your money." Most people think it uncool to estimate the date of their death, and to take the estimate to the bank. This is where you want a good annuity market, so you can pool the long-lived annuitants with the short. So far as I can tell, we don't really have a functioning annuity market. You can buy annuities, of course, but so far as I can tell, the interest rates are absurdly low, and the capital costs correspondingly high. So, suppose you use my previous example, except subtitute a rate of only 2 percent. Then the capital cost bumps up to $1,308,115, or about 30 percent more than my number.

Just why the market is so rotten, I cannot tell. My friend Bruce, who knows a lot about this than I do, says it is an adverse selection problem, but I don't believe it: almost any kind of insurance has some adverse selection problem, and I don't see how this one is specially insurmountable. I do recall learning way back in law school that insurance companies got burned on annuities because they underestimated longevity. Once you touch a hot stove, you never touch another, but maybe you never touch a cold stove either (but come to think of it, I also recall learning that they made out like bandits on straight life on the same principle--people payed premiums and kept their funds on account far longer than the actuaries had expected).

If you don't want to dip into your capital, God bless you, but of course you will need more money. For example, at the five percent rate, to make sure you could draw 5 percent forever without dipping into capital, you would need $1.6 million on account (at 2 percent, you'd need $4 million).


Note: Nothing here compels any particular conclusion re whether to retain social security (I am in favor) or whether to invest social security money in the general market (I'd like to give it a slow, cautious try).

Being Around the Rich

Do you want to be around people richer than you? Or do you like to be the richest guy on the block? Greg Mankiw (link) conceptualizes this issue pretty much in terms of a pecker-measuring contest, which is fair enough in itself but probably too limited. Consider going to the opera: when you take the elevator up at the San Francisco Opera House, the operator (sic) announces the floors: Mezzanine! Orchestra! And then, as your nose begins to bleed: Music Lovers! Translated, that would be: balcony, the cheap seats.

We tend to join the Music Lovers. It's part parsimony, part sheer constraint--but not least, because the people in the balcony are on the whole rather nicer than the folks down below. I've sat in my share of $300 seats and I can testify: the folks down there are far more interested in the display than the music; they arrive with a vast sense of entitlement and a near-unlimited self-absorption. I'll take the the Music Lovers any day.

I think the same principle may work at home. Mr. and Mrs. Buce live in a fairly modest neighborhood, in the sense that we could probably afford better. I suspect we are better off than (many of) our neighbors, but actually, I am not sure: a couple of these folks are old-time locals who could well have a lot stashed away somewhere, and others are people of considerable enterprise and industry. Anyway, the plain fact is I don't think about it much--not nearly as much as I reflect on the inescapable truth that they are mostly darn good neighbors. There is one sorehead, but for the rest, they are all you would want: they keep their nose out of our business, but they are civil and cheery when you meet them, and they keep an eye on the house when we are away--I got a concerned call on my cellphone one night when I was crossing Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, 3,000 miles from home. I'm even cautiously optimistic that we will be able to make a deal on rebuilding the common fence. On the whole, they fit the old joke about how the only reason to lock your car here is to keep folks from stuffing it with zucchini.

So, caution to Greg Mankiw: Wealth and comparative status may not be the only vectors.

Quote of the Day

On the Bancroft family, owners of the Wall Street Journal:

Watching the family flail these past few months, one couldn’t help agreeing with Ms. Chelberg’s assessment: the Bancrofts simply weren’t capable of owning Dow Jones. They were barely capable of selling it.

Italics added. That’s Joe Nocera, “Talking Business” in Saturday’s NYT on “How the Bancrofts Blew It,”—how the Bancroft family lost the Wall Street Journal to the Demon of Wapping (link [$]). I suppose it is a riff on the notion that “the argument is so bad that it isn’t even wrong.” Maybe he’ll get a book out of it, like this one.

,

Overy on State Terror

Is the United States a fascist dictatorship? Of course not. But it may be small consolation; think of those bumper stickers that say “George Bush—Not as Bad as Saddam.” But reading Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) is enough to give you the chills, particularly his chapter on “States of Terror”—the development and maintenance of terror mechanisms in each of his two subject states.

For starters, Overy makes the point that for the insiders, it wasn’t really terror at all:

For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations. Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected onto the victims of discrimination and state reporession. ‘Terrorists’ were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious thorugh orchestrated programs of public vilification.

—Richard Overy, The Dictators 177 (2004)

Overy goes on to show how neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia began as a fully-developed police state. In an unsettling parallel, he shows how each dictator advanced down the road state terrorism by deploying a vivid, dramatic, but in the end entirely fortuitous disruption—in Germany, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, in Russia, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. In each case, the emerging dictator used a dramatic challenge as a hook on which to climb towards absolute power, unanswerable and outside the law.

More generally, Overy shows how state terror grows by the frog-in-a-pot approach—slowly turning up the heat so the subject doesn’t quite realize what has happened to it until it is all over and done.

Overy also shows how, particularly in German, the forces of state terror ultimately become a law unto themselves, and how (if it is any consolation) the terror forces to some extent come to devour their own. For what it is worth, he also shows how conventional estimates of deaths from internal terror (but excluded the holocaust) are perhaps exaggerated—the number more likely in thousands or tens of thousands than millions or tens of millions. Small consolation: it’s still not a road down which any citizen or polity would willingly want to go.

Biden Again

I seem to be at risk of becoming a one-man Joe Biden campaign committee (link). Now that's a thankless job for you--not quite as thankless, perhaps, as representing Biden's colleague, Chris Dodd, or his former colleague Mike Gravel and all the rest of the I-forget-how-many also-rans in the Democratic primary. But I caught Biden at the National Press Club (via C-Span) and I gotta say--yes, his teeth are too white; his hair is too packaged, and he still prattles, but of all the candidates of either party, he is perhaps the one who is easiest to listen to, who actually says a little something that moves the ball down field. Some highlights (all from memory, I was on the exercise bike, and did not take notes):

• There aren't a dozen senators who sincerely believe that the President is on the right track; they're just trying to pick the right moment to bail--not to early (so as to offend the base) or too late (so as to go down with the ship).

• Left with the current mess, the next President will have a smaller margin for error than any President in modern times.
  

• He's the right guy to solve the health care problem because solving health care is a matter of making a deal (aka "reaching consensus"), and he knows how to make a deal (that for you, Hillary).

• The next President will have to be a foreign policy heavyweight (that for you, everyone else in the race).

Indeed, Biden on the stump makes so much sense, you have to wonder, why on earth is he running (perhaps particularly considering that stuff about margin for error, supra)? I can think of two reasons: one, perhaps the more obvious, is that he's not running for President; he's running for Secretary of State. But two: he simply thinks he is more experienced, better trained-okay, all-round more competent--than anybody else in the race.

It is to laugh: does anyone think we have ever elected the "most competent" person to the Presidency? Maybe Washington. By a stretch, possibly Eisenhower. Certainly not the great unexpected successes like Lincoln and Truman. Probably the best thing Biden can aspire to is to become a Democratic George Schulz--of whom Henry Kissinger said, if we chose a President for competence, it would be he.

Maybe the ultimate problem with Biden is that he came to the Senate at the age of 30, and we can never quite shake off the notion that he is a small, yipping cocker spaniel. Or maybe the problem is structural: at the NPC, someone asked him why, after Mark Warner left the race, did Biden not inherit the Democratic center? Not missing a beat, Biden responded:

"I did."

A Little Post Surgery Reading

Something light, to cool the turmoil:

I walked through the mountains today. The weather was damp, and the entire region was gray. But the road was soft and in places very clean. At first I had my coat on; soon, however, I pulled it off, folded it together, and laid it upon my arm. The walk on the wonderful road gave me more and ever more pleasure; first it went up and then descended again. The mountains were huge, they seemed to go around. The whole mountainous world appeared to me like an enormous theater. The road snuggled up splendidly to the mountainsides. Then I came down into a deep ravine, a river roared at my feet, a train rushed past me with magnificent white smoke. The road went through the ravine like a smooth white stream, and as I walked on, to me it was as if the narrow valley were bending and winding around itself. Gray clouds lay on the mountains as though that were their resting place. I met a young traveler with a rucksack on his back, who asked if I had seen two other young fellows. No, I said. Had I come here from very far? Yes, I said, and went farther on my way. Not a long time, and I saw and heard the two young wanderers pass by with music. A village was especially beautiful with humble dwellings set thickly under the white cliffs. I encountered a few carts, otherwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

“A Little Ramble”—Robert Walser, Switzerland, 1914 (tr. Tom Whelan)

Reprinted in Selected Stories, NYRB Classics (2002)

In her intro, Susan Sontag calls Walser “A Paul Klee in prose—as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett … the missing link between Kleist and Kafka.” He spent the last 23 years of his life in a sanatorium.

Success!

Surgery day at Chez Buce. We took Mrs. B. into the outpatient center to get some goop scraped off her shoulder bones. The patient is home and chirrupy and suitably scraped. So, a success.

And you know what? The outpatient waiting room has zero wifi. Nada. Bupkas. Zilch.

Judo Ghetto. I Mean, Ghetto Judo: Jon Stewart on Subprimes

I don’t suppose it will be around long, so go quickly to the Daily Show site and watch Larry Wilmore (“Senior Black Correspondent”) on “judo ghetto” (or maybe it’s “ghetto judo”—Stewart says “I think I have on of his albums”)—bringing down the man by defaulting on subprime loans. “Banks have tried to make subprimes the menthol cigarettes of loans,” Wilmolre explains. “But unlike menthol cigarettes these loans have a downside.”

“Duped?” he asks. “Believe me we know these loans are unfair, that’s why we stopped payin’ ‘em back.” And they list “Oprah” as co-signer--“they don’t check that out. … We’re allowed to use her as collateral.”

Update: Per Matt Hoffman, commenting at CreditSlips, I am told that this is a link.

Roughage

Women wrote to Hitler asking him to father their children. One woman wrote that her marriage had broken down because of her commitment to the leader: 'From the first moment when I heard of Adolf Hitler, he gave me a new faith, he brought me strength and power and love. He is my idol, and I will devote my life to him.' Women, so it was claimed, were to be seen at Hitler's Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden eating handfuls of the gravel that the Führer had just walked across.

--Richard Overy, The Dictators 131 (2004)

Annals of Good Government (Remembering Tubby Sanders)

One of the joys of working as a City Hall reporter in Louisville, Ky., in the early 1960s was that you got to know Wallace W. “Tubby” Sanders, surely one of the smartest, most high-principled, and all-round most competent public servants I ever had the privilege to know. It was Tubby who explained to me, inter much alia, that (a) most bridges are absurdly over-engineered; but (b) you almost never hear about a bridge falling down. It was he also who told me the story of the great Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster (link), an illustrative example of what happens when good bridges go bad.

You can guess why I am thinking of Tubby Sanders today. I’m not even going to try to keep up with the post-mortems and inevitable finger-pointing over the Minnesota bridge collapse. I do tend to think that Rick Perlstein’s campaign against infrastructure decay is one of the jewels of the blogosphere (link): our infrastructure is in a mess, and it is a spectacular instance of “defining government down.” That said, I note a couple of facts about the Minnesota case:

· It was 40 years old. In bridge years, that is not a lot.

· This is Minnesota, which has a reputation (caricature?) of being one of the best governed states in the nation.

Not really a bridge story: When Alf Landon was chosen to head the GOP ticket in 1936, one of the people who wanted to run for vice-president was New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges. He didn’t get it, not least because the Republicans couldn’t bear the thought of the campaign slogan “Landon Bridges falling down…” Better minds than mine may find a way to recycle it next year.

Fun facts: Number of casualties in the Tacoma Narrows collapse: one, a cocker spaniel. Name of cocker spaniel: Tubby.

Oops, Missed My Own Anniversary

I went back into the archives to figure out how soon I would reach my one-year anniversary in the blogosphere. Turns out I'm too late. It was this post, on July 25, 2006. Guess I'll have to save the paper hats and streamers until next July.

Negative Externalities: Chicago Sightseeing

Chicago tourism note: the guide on the architecture tour told us that for high-rise viewing, we should skip the Sears Tower and go to the bar at the John Hancock building. A helpful passerby told us to go one better and try the Cité Restaurant and bar at the top of the Lake Point Tower. We tried the Cité but they turned us down: didn’t like our tourist shabby (damn, I knew I should have painted those toenails).

So we moved on to the John Hancock where we found no such inhibitions. Indeed a quick survey of the bar at the John Hancock impels one ask: is there any costume too drab, shabby, vulgar or disgusting for this high-priced venue? We had felt a little sheepish at Cité but over here, we felt downright sartorial.

We can infer, can we not, that Cité is outsourcing its share of shabby people? Shouldn’t John Hancock be entitled, on some sort of nuisance theory, to compensation?

[Fn. And speaking of discrimination, they tell me the best view at the John Hancock is from the lady’s room. Can’t say.]

ARMs: Going, Going, Half-gone

Here’s the money quote of the day, from the NYT most-forwarded business story of the day (or maybe from Moody’s via the NYT) (link):

From 1994 to 2005, some 3.2 million households were able to buy homes thanks to subprime mortgages or other such loans, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com. About 1.7 million of them will probably lose their homes to foreclosure when all is said and done. More than half of the homeownership gains from subprime mortgages will be erased.

Might be nice for a bit more context here. That is, 3.2 million out of how many mortgages written in the relevant period? Out of how many total mortgages? Still, it sounds like a lot.

The Times goes on to speak of “the newfound conservatism of mortgage lenders, which will make it harder for tomorrow’s buyers to get a mortgage”—and adds: “(Thank goodness.)” Really? If half of all ARMs lose their homes, still the truth is that half of all will keep their homes, and I suspect maybe they would rather get to keep them, even under stress, than to have no mortgage at all.