Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Ayn Rand wrote 1088 pages of Atlas Shrugged to disprove the theory that every Russian immigrant can be a Nabokov. What I remember from wading through this sea of prose (about 15 years ago, to see what the fuss was about) was (a) an astutely observed description of the bureaucratic mind, and (b) the idea that the most productive American individuals flee the bureaucratic/socialist constraints to form their own society in the mountains of Colorado. My thoughts about the book at the time were that, like Karl Marx, Ayn Rand succeeded pretty well as a historian (describing the American fondness for bureaucracy and top-down government planning of the economy) but failed as a prophet. The share of the U.S. economy consumed by government has grown since the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged (chart), but few individuals have fled (example exception).

I’m a little embarrassed by this idea but now I am wondering if Ayn Rand might not have been mostly right in her prophecy, just wrong about the structure of the fleeing. In Atlas Shrugged individuals fled physically. What if we looked at the extent to which corporations have fled virtually?

If I recall correctly, not everyone sought to flee in Atlas Shrugged. The less productive chose to stay around as cronies of the government or collectors of government hand-outs. The least productive American enterprises certainly seem to be sticking around: education, health care delivery, health insurance, etc. I haven’t heard about an American hospital system engaging in a corporate inversion with an Irish hospital or funneling all of the profits through an offshore trust in the Netherlands. What about our corporate heroes, though, such as Apple and the pharmas? There is still a lot of accumulated wealth in the U.S. so they operate here but, perhaps with an eye toward the Tax Foundation’s tax competitiveness index (U.S. rank: 32/34), are virtually fleeing to other jurisdictions as their tax and/or profit home.

• “Curbs Don’t Stop Tax-Driven Mergers” (WSJ on inversions)
• “U.S. Beer Maker Says Tax Code Encourages Foreign Takeovers”
• “The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor” (nytimes article by Paul Theroux suggesting that managers of U.S. companies act against shareholders’ economic interests by locating factories in the U.S. South)

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As a society we have invested more than $1 billion in web sites, e.g., healthcare.gov, to allow Americans to search for health insurance. Is there an analogous site that lets Americans search for actual “health care”?

Newspaper articles complain that Americans go to the emergency room (“ED” as the docs call it) too much. To some extent this could be because the U.S. has so few doctors per capita and therefore regular doctors are typically too busy to see a walk-in. I’m wondering if there is also pressure on hospital emergency departments from the fact that it is hard to find a provider that (a) is open, (b) has available appointments, and (c) accepts one’s insurance. The market economy provides this for restaurants. For example, one can search with Yelp.com for restaurants that are nearby, open, and accept credit cards. What’s the analogous service for finding medical care? If there isn’t one, should we be surprised that people drive to the nearest hospital instead of spending a couple of hours making phone calls to various clinics and doctors’ offices?

[Fresh data: I have had a sore throat for a week, so today decided to look into the possibility of getting a “quick strep” test from a nurse. I called my regular primary care doctor’s office, meaning that I shortcut the process of figuring out where facilities were located and which accepted my insurance. I was on hold for 7 minutes and 45 seconds before the front desk staff could determine whether or not the office would be able to see me. As it happened, they were able to see me but not able to do a quick strep test. The doctor explained that for a small practice such as this one (she has about five partners in this office) the “federal CLIA” paperwork and regulation was too onerous to make it worth doing even the simplest lab tests on-site. How can CVS clinics do it then? “They’ve got a big company behind them so they can spread out the cost a lot better,” she responded.]

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“The Anti-Redskin” is an interesting Atlantic Magazine article on Ray Halbritter, the self-described “Indian the white man doesn’t want to see.” For students of American cronyism there are some interesting elements:

Halbritter was the sort of adversary the Redskins had never seen before: a leader of an American Indian tribe, with media chops, A-list political ties (he sat beside Obama at a White House event in 2013 and hosted a golf fund-raiser for John Boehner this August), and a bankroll big enough to keep the NFL’s third-most-valuable franchise under a blistering spotlight.

The Turning Stone Resort Casino, a ribbon of white stone and dark glass located half an hour east of Syracuse, is one of the top-grossing American Indian casinos, raking in well over $200 million a year in revenue from its slot machines, golf courses, and hotel rooms.

… The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, in turn, revoked his status as the tribe’s federally recognized representative. Halbritter drew on his ties with New York politicians; the bureau reversed its decision within 24 hours.

Six months before the showdown, Halbritter had inked a sweetheart deal with then–Governor Mario Cuomo to open Turning Stone. It was the first legal casino in New York State, and it didn’t have to share a cent of gaming revenue with any government. The deal’s generous terms, along with the tribe’s lawsuits—which sought to reclaim land from 20,000 property owners, many of them local homeowners—poisoned relations between the cash-swamped casino and the struggling rural communities around it.

What puzzles me about the article is how Dan Snyder and the Redskins are managing to resist the trend toward comparative victimhood that has swept America. Are people so busy worrying about gender discrimination and Ellen Pao that they don’t have time anymore to care about the hurt feelings of Indians?

Readers: What’s your best guess as to whether and/or for how long the football team in D.C. can continue to be “the Redskins”?

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I was enthusiastic about buying a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. My 1993 prediction of the death of Microsoft Office, in favor of collaborative browser-based apps, has stubbornly failed to come true. The Surface seems like a good travel companion. I can look at documents that are stored in DropBox and edit them with Office and then email them off to patent litigators (where my carefully crafted prose will ultimately be shredded 🙁 ). My DropBox plan is 1 TB. This seems to hold my current expert witness work plus a year of photos and videos (the rest to be archived on a 6 TB mechanical hard drive on my desktop computer, then backed up via CrashPlan).

One would think that the 1 TB of SSD is the most expensive requirement, with a Crucial driveretailing for $315 (though perhaps Microsoft pays less as a wholesale customer?). How much does the $315 of SSD pump up the price of a $900 Surface Pro 4? It is available only with a Core i7 CPU, which I don’t need, and 16 GB of RAM ($80 at retail?), which I do need, for a total of… $2,700 (to add insult to injury, it is not even available for pre-order in this configuration). This is more than I paid for my monster desktop computer, which includes a 1 TB SDD, a 6 TB mechanical hard drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

Who loves the Surface and wants to tell me that it is worth $2,700?  And how is that keyboard? Could one type out the Great American Novel on it?

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The best answer for “how risky is that?” is generally “how much would it cost to insure against that?” Now Zurich, the Swiss insurance company founded in 1872, is saying that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed the benefits of connectivity by 2019: report.

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

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TIME magazine recently ran “Polygamy Is Natural For Some People,” an essay advocating that polygamous marriages be recognized in the U.S.:

As far as my second wife and I are concerned, we’re married. But changing the law would afford her legal recognition and protection.

Legalizing polygamy actually empowers women. … If such relationships were legally binding, all spouses would be protected and have an equitable stake in the common property.

… Currently, some polygamists abuse the system by putting their additional wives on welfare. States only recognize one spouse in marriage, therefore making “single mothers” out of subsequent wives. Legalizing polygamy would also help neutralize some of the social stigma. People tend to confuse legality with morality. Same-sex marriage was illegal in many states until this summer. Interracial marriage used to be illegal. The laws only changed because people stepped forward.

Monogamy is natural to many. Polygamy is just more natural to us, and I’m fighting for our rights as a family.

Readers: Have you seen other examples of mainstream publications running advocacy pieces for polygamy?

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I strolled down to the MIT Sailing Pavilion to get a few late afternoon photos and discovered that MIT now requires students to wear helmets:

 

(wind at nearby Logan airport was reported at 6 knots)

Separately, what about the Hovding airbag helmet for bicycling? Annoying to have to charge it every 10 hours but it seems like a better idea than conventional bike helmets.

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Some of my women friends on Facebook have been promoting “Michelle Obama Dropped Some Wisdom Every Young Girl Should Hear,” a story in which America’s First Lady gives the following advice:

If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States today.

Is there a way to read this other than “Getting an education was primarily important because it enabled me to marry a richer and more powerful husband”? And, if not, why are women who style themselves as feminists (a version of feminism that is rather evolved from the 1970s “equality feminism” because many of those who liked this on Facebook have themselves chosen to marry high-income men and withdraw from the workforce) enthusiastic about this statement?

Related:

• section on modern ways to interpret “feminism” in our Rationale chapter

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Here’s an obituary from my suburb’s local newspaper: Peggy Schmertzler. I think that, in one life, it shows the fragmentation of family that has occurred in the U.S. due to a variety of technical and social forces.

The subject was born in 1931 and grew up in Baltimore. She moved to Boston to attend college and settled in a suburb with her lawyer-husband, thus severing her daily ties with her parents and any extended family in Baltimore.

Following a divorce lawsuit (the obit doesn’t say who sued whom, but statistically it is generally the woman who decides to sue (some Massachusetts data)), she moved to Cambridge, thus severing her daily ties with her husband and, presumably, former neighbors.

Her children then scattered to New Zealand, California, and a Boston suburb, thus severing their daily ties to each other and, for the non-Boston-area kids, eliminating the possibility of grandchildren having daily ties with this grandmother.

I’ve written before about how I think one reason that Mexicans might be happier than Americans, adjusted for income, is the central nature of Mexico. People either stay in their hometowns or move to Mexico City, but they don’t generally keep moving after that.

[Separately, the obituary shows how well-educated Americans are pulled into low-productivity-growth non-profit activities. Ms. Schmertzler “worked for the next 15 years in the nonprofit sector” and put 26 years of effort and time into “the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard.” (The GDP per capita of China grew from less than $2,000 per person to more than $8,000 per person during the same time period.)]

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“More grads choose industry over PhDs: Survey data reveal decade-long trend away from graduate school” is a story from MIT’s student newspaper.

I ran into a faculty member who is doing research for the federal government on where to fund PhDs. “We didn’t used to have postdocs in engineering,” he said. “But now MIT has more than one postdoc per faculty member. There are nowhere near enough assistant professorships for all of the PhDs that we are generating. So we’re exploiting them by paying them $50,000 per year.” (Paying a market-clearing wage is apparently now generally accepted as “exploitation.”)

Related:

• Women in science

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