The spin-to-truth ratio is rising

Posted on by

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt pointed me over to a “study” put out by Rick Falkvinge, a member of the Pirate Party, who claims that

for every job lost (or killed) in the copyright industry due to nonenforcement of copyright, 11.8 jobs are created in electronics wholesale, electronics manufacturing, IT, or telecom industries — or even the copyright-inhibited part of the creative industries.

Masnick has at least as many problems with Falkvinge’s methodology as I do, but the content industry plays this game too.  See this example of similarly muddled reasoning over at The Copyright Alliance Blog, which attempts to connect almost 14 million illegal downloads with the 2,000 production jobs in L.A.  Are readers really supposed to think that Hollywood blockbusters are imperiled?  If so, the Alliance Blog probably shouldn’t have picked as its example a movie that’s made over $800 million worldwide.  (At the box office alone.)

I think Masnick’s analysis is spot-on:

I don’t think anyone actually believes [Falkvinge’s] numbers are accurate. But it’s using the same basic methodology, assumptions and thought processes behind the studies in the other direction. You can also, obviously, claim that Falkvinge is biased. He is. But is he more biased than the entertainment industry legacy players who do the other studies? It seems clear that the industries are likely to be more biased, since they have billions of dollars bet on keeping the old structures in place. I think both studies are probably far from accurate in all sorts of ways, but if you’re going to cite the entertainment industry’s claims based on this kind of methodology, it seems you should also have to accept these claims. [emphasis added]

Numbers can be powerful weapons.  But it helps if they actually mean something and aren’t simply empty rhetorical flourishes.

Tying together being green, McMansions, and promoting urban development in Asia

Posted on by

As the world discusses how to reduce carbon emissions, Edward Glaeser (see a review of his latest book here) suggests that America is an odd position: we want to promote urban development in fast-growing Asian countries and yet we subsidize sprawl within our own borders.

America’s interest in promoting a hyper-urban Asia, so different from our sprawling nation, puts us in a slightly awkward position. How can a country of McMansions and Ford Expeditions preach the virtues of low-carbon urban living?

Freedom is America’s greatest treasure. This includes the freedom to choose where we live — city or suburb. But we should eliminate the mistaken policies that artificially subsidize sprawl. The federal government subsidizes transportation significantly more in low-density areas than in high-density areas, and that pulls people away from cities. Economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow found in 2007 that each new postwar highway that cut into a city reduced that city’s population by 18%. The home mortgage interest deduction induces people to leave urban apartments, which are overwhelmingly rented, and move to suburban homes. Because the deduction scales up with the size of the mortgage, it essentially pays people to buy bigger, more energy-intensive homes.

Reducing such policies, which push Americans away from our green cities, will enable us to make a stronger case for higher-density dwelling in India and China.

The key to Glaeser’s argument here is that the US government “artificially” makes suburban living look like the best choice. Without these subsidies, highway construction, mortgage benefits, etc., the suburbs might not look like the good option that they appear to be. Glaeser may be right – but I wonder if there still might be Americans who would want to pursue a suburban lifestyle. Perhaps this alternate version of American suburbs would be more restricted to the wealthy who could subsidize their own extra costs.

But Glaeser is also suggesting that there is the matter of looking like hypocrites: how can we as a country ask other countries to live in certain ways when we promote relatively ungreen suburbs? More broadly, should the many residents of China and India who have joined the middle class in recent decades get a shot at living in suburbs or should they have to live in more urban developments to help offset American patterns?

And I would also note the common citing of McMansions and SUVs as emblematic of the entire United States and its behaviors.

There’s IP in Olympics

Posted on by

There’s two interesting intellectual property tidbits that arise from Russia’s recent announcement of its three official mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

First:  Don’t Privatize Santa

Ded Morez, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, had led in early polling [to decide the mascot] but was pulled from the ballot at the last second when Russian organizers feared that their country’s folk hero would become official property of the IOC [International Olympic Committee].

Analysis:  I don’t know the intricacies of Russian IP law, but, here in the U.S., a public domain figure like Santa wouldn’t become re-protected just because a corporate entity used it (at least in theory, though some would argue that such behavior constitutes a large portion of Disney’s business model).  On the other hand, it’s probably best to never turn IP over to the IOC that you ever want to use again.  Under U.S. law, the IOC doesn’t bother with protecting its Olympic-related IP via general copyright and trademark laws (like everyone else).  Rather, they are personally, directly, explicitly written into the federal statute.  See 36 U.S.C. § 220506.

Second:  Plagiarizing the Past?

[T]he creator of Russia’s last Olympic mascot [Summer 1980] says [one of the new mascots constitutes] plagiarism….”This polar bear, everything is taken from mine, the eyes, nose, mouth, smile,” he told a Moscow radio station. “I don’t like being robbed.”

Analysis:  I’m going to let Chris Chase from the original Yahoo! article take this one:

Yes, both bears have eyes, noses, mouths and smiles, as do all cartoon bears. There’s only so many ways to draw an anthropomorphic cartoon bear. You don’t see Winnie the Pooh with snarling fangs, you know?

One is white and has a scarf. The other is brown and wearing an Olympic ring belt buckle. Other than the fact that they’re both from the ursus genus, there aren’t many similarities. The Sochi mascot may be unoriginal, uninspired and bland, but it’s not a copy.

Sounds like a great, practical description the merger doctrine to me.

The NFL: where having a really smart QB may be a bad thing

Posted on by

Part of the NFL scouting combine circus is the Wonderlic test. Alabama’s Greg McElroy, scored 48 out of 50, quite a high score. There is one commentator who suggests this may be a bad thing:

McElroy’s brainpower still has the potential be taken as a negative around the league, as explained by Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio:

That said, scoring too high can be as much of a problem as scoring too low.  Football coaches want to command the locker room. Being smarter than the individual players makes that easier. Having a guy in the locker room who may be smarter than every member of the coaching staff can be viewed as a problem — or at a minimum as a threat to the egos of the men who hope to be able when necessary to outsmart the players, especially when trying in some way to manipulate them.

So while McElroy, who was unable to work out due to injury, may be really smart, he perhaps would have been wise to tank a few of the answers.

Wikipedia’s entry on this has a listing of average Wonderlic scores by NFL position according to a longtime NFL scribe. The average score for a quarterback is 24. It appears that McElroy’s score ranks amongst the highest known scores.

Football is known as having players who are warriors or gladiators. Even so, having a smart quarterback seems to me to be a good thing, rather than a negative because it might challenge the supremacy of the coach. With the complexity of offensive systems these days, particularly with the check-downs and need to read defensive coverages, a smart quarterback might help. This seems like a weird issue of masculinity: in a relatively violent sport, who gets to be smartest in the locker room?

There would be a way to possibly figure out whether this issue with the coach is real (granted that enough Wonderlic data is out there): how do Wonderlic scores compare with the number of coaches a quarterback has (and controlling for a bunch of other factors)? And more broadly, do higher Wonderlic scores translate into more victories?

Telling graphs about American infrastructure spending

Posted on by

A number of commentators in recent years have pointed out the relatively small amount of spending on infrastructure by the American government. Here is another take on this, complete with some handy graphs. Additionally, here is some interpretation about government spending on education and technology:

Productivity-enhancing spending, according to Meeker, comes from three main sources: infrastructure, education and research and development investment. We’ve seen infrastructure spending collapse as a share of the budget since the 1960s. What about education and R&D?

In 1970, the U.S. (at the federal, state and local level) spent twice as much on education as health care. Twenty years later, health care closed the gap, and today, total government spending on health care is about 33 percent higher than education spending, which is more or less even with its 1970s levels.

Second, look at technology. R&D spending exploded in the late 1950s and 1960s on the back of government investments in aeronautics and science. Fifty years later, federal R&D has fallen below 1950s levels as a share of GDP, while the private sector has picked up the slack.

So after looking at figures like this, I want to ask what kind of strategies could be utilized to tackle the issue of infrastructure spending, particularly with budget issues looming all over the country?

Racial makeup of some (read: one) suburbs being changed by foreclosures

Posted on by

The suburbs are growing increasingly diverse (evidence here, here, here, and here). And this news story shows that foreclosures in the Detroit area may be helping minorities move to suburbia:

The foreclosure crisis made it possible…

Many of the foreclosed upon Southfield [Michigan] homes were going for $40,000 to $60,000. The median home value dropped from more than $190,000 to below $130,000 over the same period, according to Census figures.

With so many empty houses available, rents also dipped by hundreds of dollars. Renters increased from about 13,100 in 2006 to 15,400 in 2009.

The lure of low prices to Detroiters was obvious — as was the likelihood that their arrival would not be without issues.

“Blacks, like all Americans, want good schools and a safe community, and they can find that in the suburbs,” says Richard Schragger, who teaches local government and urban law at the University of Virginia…

Two things irritates me about this story. First, it seems to be based entirely on some anecdotal evidence from Southfield, Michigan. Is what is described in this article taking place in other metropolitan regions? The story provides little insight beyond this one Michigan community.

Second, the headline seems to highlight foreclosures but the real story seems to be about what happens when poorer Blacks move into the suburbs. The article says the result of this may be that more middle- and upper-class Blacks will continue to move to more far-flung suburbs. Should we conclude that foreclosures in certain areas are actually good for some people or do they change communities too much? The original headline, “Foreclosures helping change color of some suburbs,” is more ambivalent but when the AP story gets repeated in other sources, such as the Daily Herald, the headline changes: in the web edition, the headline is “Foreclosures accelerating changes in suburbs,” while the print edition has the headline “Foreclosures changing the suburbs.” The story says little beyond the Detroit area and yet the new headlines suggest foreclosures are leading to these specific changes throughout all (or most) American suburbs.

The location of the actual “Tally’s Corner” is revealed

Posted on by

Tally’s Corner is a classic ethnographic work:

It’s a remarkable book, an academic work – it grew out of Liebow’s doctoral thesis – that isn’t dry or boring. It’s an in-depth look at a group of men who routinely hung out on a Washington street corner in the early 1960s. These are poor men, flawed men, unemployed and underemployed men. But they are treated with respect. And although Liebow used pseudonyms, giving the men such names as Tally, Sea Cat, Richard and Leroy, they come across as flesh-and-blood individuals. When “Tally’s Corner” was published in 1967, the New York Times called it “a valuable and even surprising triumph.” The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) called it “nothing short of brilliant.”…

“Tally’s Corner” remains in print, has been translated into multiple languages, and has sold more than a million copies, an amazing feat for an anthropological text.

But there has been some confusion over the years about where exactly Elliott Liebow interacted with the men who were the focus of his study:

According to many sources, it was Ninth and P streets NW. Except Answer Man happens to know it wasn’t…

Liebow picked a location that would be easy to get to from his office and his home in Brookland: 11th and M streets NW in Shaw, a corner that had a carryout, liquor store, dry cleaner and shoe-repair shop. This is the first time the exact location has been revealed. “I feel free to say that because it’s no longer that street corner,” Harriet told Answer Man. “The carryout’s gone. That whole world is gone from that street corner.

It is often the case that ethnographic works conceal the location of the study as well as the identity of the participants. And it sounds like the location was only revealed now because the area has changed so much that no individuals or businesses could be identified at that corner.

I’ve had discussions with people about the exact location of ethnographic works, as if the location was some mystery that needed to be solved. The authors sometimes do a better job to conceal the location that others – it can often take quite a consistent effort. I feel like I have read some studies that try to use vague terms like “a liberal-arts college in the Midwest” but then later give enough clues (unintentionally?) for the reader to figure it out.

“Five myths about the suburbs”

Posted on by

From a writer whose first book was titled Bomb the Suburbs (first released in 1994), this might seem like an unusual column title: “Five myths about the suburbs.” But William Upski Wimsatt goes on to lay out five common misperceptions regarding American suburbs:

1. Suburbs are white, middle-class enclaves…

2. Suburbs aren’t cool…

3. Suburbs are a product of the free market…

4. Suburbs are politically conservative…

5. Suburbanites don’t care about the environment…

The first three points in particular line up with research about suburbs: they are government-subsidized communities (highways, mortgages, etc.) that have growing minority and poorer populations as well as increasing cultural opportunities. The last two points might be more contentious: the suburbs are not just conservative though they went conservative in the 2010 elections (see Joel Kotkin’s opinion here). I’ve also seen other analyses suggesting that exurbs, far-flung suburbs, are quite conservative so perhaps they are balanced out by more Democratic-leaning inner-ring suburbs. About environmentalism and going green, there are still seem to be plenty of people who think the suburbs are not green enough (see an example here) or perhaps can never truly be good for the environment.

Wimsatt’s conclusion is also interesting:

Everyone with a prejudice against the suburbs will have to get over it. Even me.

He seems to be suggesting that the suburbs aren’t as bad as some people once thought (and there is a long history of suburban critique). Perhaps this is an honest sharing of a revelation, perhaps it is simply prompted by the fact that a majority of Americans live in the suburbs and this is where the action is taking place.

Hard numbers

Posted on by

As I’ve mentioned before (including yesterday), everybody seems to be beating up the legal job market these days.  The American Bar Association apparently decided that it was time to inject some actual numbers into the discussion:

[Most prior discussion has] been based in great part on the tools of journalism: anecdote, instinct and the oft-competing wisdom of any experts we can find.

With this issue, however, the ABA Journal is offering our readers a new—and we believe different—view of the business and the profession.

We’ve teamed up with a nationally recognized expert on trends in the legal profession, William D. Henderson of the Center on the Global Legal Profession at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. We asked Henderson, a pioneer in the empirical study of the legal industry, to identify and map the movements of jobs and money.

There’s a separate page that allows county-by-county data searching.

Here’s the thing:  based on my look at the publicly available U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, underlying the ABA’s “report”, I’m not quite sure what the ABA has added to the discussion here.  Sure, they’ve generated some colorful graphs and county-by-county maps.  But as far as I can tell, all (and I do mean all) of this data has been around since at least May 14, 2010.  And it’s not like the ABA has done much analysis here; they’ve basically just sorted the size of salaries out by metro region and announced a few “surprises”.

Even more problematically, I’m not sure there are many clear takeaways due to the inherent shortcomings of this data.  Per the bottom of the article’s main page:

The [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] data are a representative sample of employed lawyers. The sample includes lawyers employed in law firms, state and local government, federal government, in-house lawyers in businesses, and nonprofits. Lawyers, as defined by the BLS classification (SOC), “represent clients in criminal and civil litigation and other legal proceedings, draw up legal documents, and manage or advise clients on legal transactions. May specialize in a single area or may practice broadly in many areas of law.” Equity partners and solo practitioners are not included in the survey. [emphasis added]

In other words:

  1. This data leaves out solo practitioners — fully 35% of all lawyers according to Harvard Law School’s research.  Analysis:  these salary numbers skew high.  (I suppose the lack of focus on solos isn’t too surprising since only about 7% of all solos belong to the ABA anyway.)
  2. This data only applies to employed lawyers.  Analysis:  This article tells us nothing about the marginal earning prospects of unemployed lawyers, including recently graduated J.D.’s who are “temporarily” employed in other industries (e.g., as servers in restaurants).

I get that this is “the first installment of a periodic series.”  But come on, ABA.  It’s more than a little disingenuous to claim that “the ABA Journal is offering our readers a new—and we believe different—view of the business and the profession” by “identify[ing] and map[ing] the movements of jobs and money” when you’re simply re-publishing eight month old government data with an arguably misleading slant and without substantive analysis.

Winklevoss twins continue lawsuit against Facebook

Posted on by

The key conflict in The Social Network (reviewed here and here) is the lawsuit that the Winklevoss twins bring against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. This lawsuit is continuing as the Winklevosses seek a larger settlement:

If they prevail, their legal appeal would overturn the settlement, now worth in excess of $160 million because of the soaring value of the privately held company.

The Winklevosses won’t say exactly how much they would seek in their high-stakes grudge fest with the billionaire Facebook founder, but by their own calculations they argue they should have received four times the number of Facebook shares. That would make any new settlement worth more than $600 million based on a recent valuation of Facebook at more than $50 billion…

Facebook has won multiple court rulings, and legal experts say the Winklevosses are likely to lose this one too…

The controversial origins of Facebook — who actually founded it and how — have been the subject of renewed debate since Hollywood offered its dramatization of the conflicting stories from the Winklevosses, both portrayed in “The Social Network” by actor Armie Hammer, and former Zuckerberg friend and Harvard classmate Eduardo Saverin, portrayed by Andrew Garfield. In 2005, Saverin sued Facebook for diluting his stake in the company and reportedly reaped a $1.1-billion settlement.

Zuckerberg has called the film, which received eight Academy Award nominations including best picture, “fiction.” In it, his character tells the Winklevosses: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

But that’s exactly what the Winklevosses said they did.

The article suggests that the Winklevosses can’t really lose here: if the courts say they shouldn’t receive more money, they still get to receive the initial settlement. We can ask how much The Social Network influenced the decision to seek more money. There were relatively few people in the media who concentrated on the veracity or one-sided nature of this story. For many who saw this Oscar-nominated film, Zuckerberg looks like a jerk.

Of course, this movie and portrayal should have little influence on the courts. And the Winklevosses say they have new evidence for the courts to consider. But I suspect the case was brought in part because of the positive portrayal of the Winkevosses in this film. If this case were in the court of public opinion (and perceptions), would the Winklevosses win?