2013-12-08T13:25:24+00:00

The McDonald’s coffee case

December 8, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

The [newspaper: New York Times] returns to the famous McDonald’s coffee case, and explains why it’s been massively misunderstood. The trouble is that, as a self-contained argument, I don’t find this [newspaper: Times] redux all that convincing, either. Let me put a few words of preface here:

1. As a general matter, I will almost always defer to juries. I will *certainly* defer to them when it’s a choice between deferring to them and deferring to the public rumor mill. Whom do you trust more: a group of people who have sat before the evidence for seven days, then spent four hours arguing over the verdict, or people like you or me who only know what we read in the papers?

So it says a lot to me that the McDonald’s jury ruled unanimously in Ms. Liebeck’s favor. On that basis alone, I would defer to them and question my own ability to infer that this was “a runaway jury” or what have you.
2. This case seems to have turned into a shibboleth for liberals, just as much as for conservatives. If you suggest that *as an argument*, you’re not convinced that McDonald’s did anything wrong, you are immediately put in the bucket with *those* people — the people who believe that corporations are people, say. The same thing has happened with abortion: claim for a moment that you have any ethical troubles with it, but that *even still* it must remain legal, and you’re immediately in a bucket with the bad guys over there who probably want women to go back to coat-hanger abortions in back alleys. It happens all over the place in American culture. I don’t know if that’s at all new, but in any case: we’re dichotomized even when there is obvious territory for agreement.

Let me be clear, then, about my ideological priors. When it comes to a choice between a corporation and an individual, I err on the side of the individual — just as, when it comes to a fight between labor and management, I err on the side of labor.

My claim here is simply that, *on the basis of that video*, viewed on its own as an argument, I am not convinced that Ms. Liebeck deserved a large monetary reward. Maybe the way to approach this is to abstract away from the issue of McDonald’s; that company’s presence in the argument is going to pull in all kinds of other heated beliefs. So suppose you come over to my house and I make you a cup of coffee. [1] I heat up the water in my Cuisinart kettle. Here’s what the kettle’s temperature-control panel says:

160-degree water for 'delicate' beverages, 175 for green tea, 185 for white, 190 for oolong, 200 for French press, 'boil' for black tea.

I make all my coffee these days in a French press, so I follow Cuisinart’s instructions –helpfully laid out on the button — and use 200-degree Fahrenheit water. Or maybe I follow George Orwell’s advice — consistent with the black-tea button on the Cuisinart kettle — and I ensure that “The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours”. So the first thing to note, in contrast to the video: it’s not at all clear that very hot water — indeed, water even hotter than what McDonald’s used — is uncommon. [2]

So suppose I make you a cup of coffee using very hot water, you accidentally spill it in your lap, you get third-degree burns, you go to the hospital, they charge you $10,000, you’re there for a week, and I offer you an insultingly low amount of money to cover your costs. Am I now liable for your injuries?

I can see a good argument that abstracting away from McDonald’s actually loses a valuable piece of information here. If *I* pay a lot of money to make you whole, the court will not have made life better for a large number of people; it will have made life better only for the small number of people for whom I make coffee. Whereas if McDonald’s lowers the temperature of its coffee, the evidence laid out in the video says that that would save hundreds of people pain and suffering.

So instead, perhaps you should be suing Cuisinart: if they lower their recommended water temperature for coffee and tea, perhaps thousands of people will be made better off. Do you think that Cuisinart deserves to be sued here? Do I deserve to be sued?

Or maybe the callousness of my response is more the issue than the coffee as such. Had I offered you the full $10,000 to pay off your medical bill, along with money to compensate you for the time you spent away from work and so forth, maybe that would have solved it. Is it mostly the callousness of the response that inspired such a large award from the McDonald’s jury?

On a society-wide level, I wonder if this would be handled better or worse by insurers. McDonald’s would carry liability insurance, and everyone would carry health insurance. If people spilled coffee on themselves and incurred medical expenses, the health insurer would try to make itself whole for the hundreds of burn cases it had paid for; to do so, it might raise premiums on everyone, or it might choose to sue McDonald’s liability insurer. I’m really not sure whether this would be better or worse: would the health insurer not do enough to inflict punitive damages, or damages for pain and suffering, on McDonald’s? Or would the damages it chose to pursue be in some sense optimal?

Gentle reader: am I missing any obvious parts of this case? Am I giving short shrift to any important parts of the argument from the video? If I am, I’d love to hear it.

__P.S.__: I recall reading somewhere that Milton Friedman believed tort law, and tort lawyers, were the saviors of capitalism. As a general rule, my sense is that libertarians and anarcho-capitalists are fans of the common law over statutory law, because the former is much “closer to the action” than the latter. And in particular, an idealized anarcho-capitalist — one who isn’t just working for the czar — is going to allow the distributed intelligence of the market economy work its magic: if we’re going to neuter the regulators, we’re going to empower the juries. So it makes a lot of sense to me that a self-consistent libertarian will fight for an unlimited right to sue companies when they do something that harms the public. That is, sure, we’ll eliminate the FDA, but people will then be able to sue food companies whenever they put dangerous chemicals in their products.

I think this suffers from some realism issues, however. First, “weaken the regulators and strengthen the juries” might be sensible as a matter of theory, but it’s hard to envision that the society in which regulation is gutted is the same society in which juries are empowered. I’m curious if those two conditions have ever existed alongside one another. Second, this is of course an iterated game. First I sue you for putting chemicals in your food; next, you fight like hell to hide the ingredients in your food so that no one can know that they should sue you. And by stipulation, there’s no regulation left to step in here, so you’re not required to put ingredients on your packages, and I can’t sue you when you fail to advertise the presence of horse meat; what’s my cause of action?

So as a matter of practical living within an actual society, it’s hard to picture this libertarian paradise existing. Nonetheless: can anyone point me to a place where Friedman argues this? … Ah: here (via Krugman, via Marginal Revolution).

> ROBINSON So your view is abolish the FDA..
>
> FRIEDMAN Absolutely [ROBINSON And what comes up in its place?] what comes up? It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things. Do you think the manufacturer of Thalidomide made a profit out of Thalidomide or lost? [ROBINSON I see, ok.] And you have to have..people should be responsible for harm that they do. It should’ve been possible…[ROBINSON So tort law takes care of a lot of this.] Absolutely, absolutely..

I would like to see Friedman expand more on the lawsuit side of this. I understand as a matter of theory that he’s arguing “self-interest guarantees that the right outcome will obtain.” But one needs to unpack that. “Self-interest” could mean many things. In an iterated game, perhaps you’ll produce clean food because you want me to come back tomorrow. And “self-interest encourages you to do x” means specifically that more good than harm will come from your doing x. But that’s an empirical claim, and it depends upon the structure of tort law. The fundamental theorems of welfare economics only hold if all externalities are internalized — that is, if I pay the full costs of everything bad I do, and obtain all the benefits of everything good I do. Ensuring that all externalities are internalized requires an awful lot of institutions. We can’t just tap-dance over this problem; exactly how externalities will be internalized is essential to justifying the libertarian state.

[1] – It will likely be made, these days, with Equal Exchange Mind, Body and Soul beans. I actually get it by subscription, in the mail, every month from Amazon. That’s pretty convenient, you guys.

[2] – I’m leaving out a bit of technical detail here. After you pour water on the leaves or grounds, you usually leave them to steep for a few minutes. So even if the water was boiling at the moment of contact with the leaves, it wouldn’t be when steeping was done. I don’t know whether that means, in particular, that the water is in the safe zone by the time the coffee’s done steeping. That may be relevant here.

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

December 8, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/2 Comments

Soldiers marching, and ships forming imposing lines. The photograph of ships is apparently 'The Great Fleet assembled at Spithead for the King's review, 18 July 1914.'

This book is simply a must-read. If you’re like most of us, you really have no idea why World War I happened; that certainly was the case for me going into this book. I knew generally that there were some alliances, and that the terms of those alliances dictated that various people attack various other people. My knowledge essentially reduced to this Onion headline:

WAR DECLARED BY ALL / AUSTRIA DECLARES WAR ON SERBIA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY DECLARES WAR ON FRANCE DECLARES WAR ON TURKEY DECLARES WAR ON DECLARES WAR ON BULGARIA DECLARES WAR ON BRITAIN / OTTOMAN EMPIRE ALMOST DECLARES WAR ON ITSELF / NATIONS STRUGGLE TO REMEMBER ALLIES

Having read Christopher Clark’s magisterial Sleepwalkers, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I certainly have a decent sense of how the pieces fit together. Clark does a particularly admirable job trying to overthrow the notion — reinforced by the Versailles Treaty’s war-guilt clause [1] — that Germany was solely responsible for the war. He attacks this from any number of directions, foremost of which were 1) the French government’s hatred toward Germany, and especially Raymond Poincaré’s, 2) the media’s role in stoking the flames, 3) the various governments’ use of the media as a tool, 4) the fact that many different nations were mobilizing their forces, and that Germany by no means acted first.

To back up a bit … actually, let’s back way up. Why should you care about World War I? Why do I care about it, in particular? My interest in it is actually as a bookend to the “long 19th century”. Henry Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace traces the story from Napoleon’s final defeat until the structure of post-Napoleonic Europe had been more or less tentatively worked out. Skating past a lot of detail that Kissinger really ably dives into, the basic gist is that you had the Austro-Hungarian Empire trying very hard to keep itself together while nationalism was on the rise; you had Europe casting a wary eye toward France, which had so recently dominated the continent; somewhere in the distance you had the Ottoman Empire, which was veering toward collapse from the mid-19th-century on; and you had Britain coming into its own after the Industrial Revolution. Every slight move by any one of these powers led to a cascade of counter-moves to try to keep the uneasy peace. Soon after Kissinger’s story ends, you have Bismarck unifying Germany, thereby introducing another complexity on the continent. And by 1914 the whole thing fell apart spectacularly. A very-long-term intellectual project of mine is to understand, in detail, how exactly that happened. Were the seeds of 1914 planted in 1789? How about in 1815? Hobsbawm would say, I think, that World War I was a natural outgrowth of the French Revolution.

All of that might still not explain why you should care. I didn’t realize exactly why I cared until I was well into Clark’s book. The big question for modern life is: could we ever go back to a continental war? We’re in a world now where Europe is bound, if nothing else, by strands of commerce. (Here’s where I’d want to dig into trade statistics from before World War I to see whether this story holds up. I recall, also, that there was more migration across European borders before the war than there has been since. The Great War seems to have shut down borders permanently.) Is there some way to bond European states in some permanent, automatic way by their self-interest? Or would the end of the euro, for instance, bring us back to the bad old days? (I should probably reread Mazower.)

Then World War I is important for the changes that it wrought on the Continent. The war exposed the instability in the Russian monarchy: within four years of the gunshots at Sarajevo, the monarchy was over and the Russians had sued for peace. And not long after the war, the Ottoman Empire was done, and Turkey was its own country. And of course World War II was in many senses just the second half of World War I, or at least a resolution to the disastrous treaty that ended the first war. Much of the world we live in today is an outgrowth of the world that the Great War formed. Tying the history of the world from the French Revolution to the EU together into a single coherent thread is something I’d very much like to do.

So to run through the days before war quickly: as everyone knows, Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Hapsburg dual monarchy, on June 28th of 1914, thereby sparking the war. Clark starts, reasonably enough, with the runup to the assassination. Basically, preparations for the assassination ran deeply into the Serbian government — all the way to a man called Apis, who had earlier murdered King Alexander, and who died before a firing squad before World War I was over. The Serbian government’s complicity was known to all within days or weeks of the assassination. So first of all, it was by no means unreasonable of the Hapsburgs to declare war on Serbia. Point number one against the “it was Germany’s fault” argument.

Now the alliances fall in. On the one side you have France, the UK, and Russia. Exactly why France and the UK ended up on the same side is not at all obvious, and Clark picks it apart quite carefully. Indeed, the French had plans only a few years earlier to invade the UK. So maybe the hint to pick up from that is: history is not pre-determined. Next: why France and Russia? A substantial fraction of the book is devoted to answering just that question.

Russia was on Serbia’s side, though. Partly this gets down to dreams of a worldwide union of the Slavic peoples. And since Serbia was pretty clearly the bad guy in the assassination, this puts Serbia, Russia, France, and the UK on the opposite side from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the French and British thought (whoops) that Russia would be a great and unassailable power within a few years, so they wanted to be on Russia’s side when the inevitable conflict came.

Now add in the final days of the colonial era, with the European powers all snapping up countries in Africa, Russia trying to control Afghanistan, Japan invading China, and everyone hoping to swoop in after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and control the coast of Turkey. Germany, having only really been formed from Prussia and some other states in the late 1800s, was getting systematically excluded from the spoils: the UK and France didn’t want anyone else horning in on their possessions. It’s not obvious that this should make Germany an adversary to the other great powers, but it certainly didn’t bring Germany into the fold.

Unpacking all of these stories, and dozens more, down to the detail of individual actors and with the elegance of a novelist, is the great achievement of The Sleepwalkers. Highly recommended.

[1] – “Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

I hate to be a stickler about Krugman’s data analysis, but

December 7, 2013January 12, 2018/stevereads/Leave a comment

When he starts a column with the phrase “underneath the apparent stability of the Great Moderation lurked a rapid rise in debt that is now being unwound”, and uses this graph as evidence

debt as % of GDP. Shows a rise from before 1990, with a kink upward at around 2000Q4, then a decline when the recession ended.

, then someone who is as much of a fan of FRED as I am is going to want to reproduce Krugman’s data, whence we end up with

Same graph as above, but on a longer time scale. Basically debt as a % of GDP increased continuously from the early 1950s until the recession.

I’ll grant that something especially crazy started happening around the year 2000, but I don’t think you’d really single out that particular era, if this graph were your only bit of evidence, and say, “Ah ha! Debt really became unsustainably large right there!” Debt has been increasing continuously since the 1950s. The point of Krugman’s article lies in other directions (namely, how much of a hit on future GDP we’ll take because the country is now deleveraging), but my question would be: how far do we have to fall? Back to where it was in 1999? Or back to where it was in 1960?

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin

December 7, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

The only real thing to call out about this cover is that there's an iguana on it. He is important, that iguana.

If I tell you that this book is, in large part, about sex offenders living under an overpass in a notional Florida town that you should basically envision as Miami, I have explained the substructure for the plot but told you very little about what makes this book so haunting. If I then explain to you that what makes it haunting is what it says about living in America today — the gaudy high rises on the Florida coast; addiction to pornography; dysfunctional single-parent families; children with no friends other than those they meet online — I’m not really going to woo you into reading this novel.

So suffice to say that Lost Memory of Skin is a little gut-churning masterpiece that I was obsessively reading every chance I got over Thanksgiving. You should read it, too. It’s an exceptionally well-told story that somehow also manages to say a lot of really important and depressing things about American life in the early 21st century.

Peter A. Diamond and Peter R. Orszag, Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach

December 7, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

In this country, we seem to revisit the same topics over and over again; it’s the price of living in a democracy, I suppose. The charlatans want you to forget that we’ve been over the same terrain many times; they hope that your attention span is short. If they pound the same terrifying sound bites into your head over and over, they hope that you’ll eventually fear what they want you to fear. [1]

So it is with Social Security. It doesn’t matter how many times people explain that there is no Social Security crisis. There’s always going to be someone who hates it, so there will always be a market for mendacious arguments against it.

That’s where Diamond and Orszag come in, reminding us of exactly why Social Security is the way it is. It’s an annuity, which is to say that is pays you a fixed amount for the rest of your life, no matter how long your life lasts; that way you can’t outlast your savings. Better than that, it’s an inflation-protected annuity, meaning that your Social Security savings won’t be decimated as the years pass. And it provides benefits if you become disabled. And it’s a joint-and-survivor annuity, meaning that your spouse will get a fraction of your Social Security benefit after you die. Maybe better still, if you’re of a liberal cast of mind: it’s progressive, in that people who’ve earned little throughout their lives get a larger percentage of it back when they retire than do wealthy people.

So if you know nothing else about Social Security, keep that one-sentence rough definition in mind: Social Security is a progressive, inflation-protected, joint-and-survivor annuity. Anyone with a plan for “saving” Social Security had better explain either a) how they’re going to keep those attributes, or b) why a system lacking those attributes still deserves to be called “Social Security”.

Social Security has some problems, of course. The biggest is that the ratio of current workers to current retirees is falling. There are a few obvious responses to this. One is to cut benefits. Another is to increase the retirement age (which is, in fact, synonymous with cutting benefits). A third is to raise taxes. Diamond and Orszag, being affiliated with the Brookings Institution, pick the middle way: some taxes, some benefit cuts. Along the way, they lay out, in sober, quantitative detail, some other financing problems. One is that Social Security only taxes income up to a certain limit; because we live in a society suffering from rising inequality, the fraction of income subject to Social Security taxation has been falling (see chart at right).

There seem to be some obvious solutions here. One is to do whatever we can to raise the ratio of current workers to current retirees. How about allowing more people into the country, for instance, by liberalizing immigration laws? That’s entirely off the table in Diamond/Orszag. Next up: how about adjusting the taxable maximum (the “tax max”, as the SSA apparently calls it) so that the same fraction of U.S. payroll is always below it? Or how about removing the tax max altogether? That’s what we did to the Medicare tax starting in 1994.

Diamond and Orszag consider some variant of the former (increasing the tax max). Removing it altogether is just not centrist enough for them. It’s not at all clear why. I have to imagine that it’s because they wanted to put together a proposal that would appeal to some Republicans and some Democrats, and for that I have to salute them. I also, though, have to wonder if it’s a fool’s errand to try to woo a party that has been trying to sell us on Social Security privatization.

Diamond and Orszag devote one of the best chapters of Saving Social Security to these private accounts (the book dates from 2004, right in the thick of the Bush Administration’s push to privatize). With as much force as responsible scholarship will allow, they tear the idea of privatization to shreds. First, privatization would subject retirement savings to the ups and downs of the market. Riding the market may, as a general matter, be a fine idea, but that’s not the purpose that Social Security is supposed to serve. Social Security is supposed to provide a base level of savings that keeps the elderly out of poverty. Social Security is supposed to — and does — avoid financial mistakes that many of us make. For instance, when we cash out our 401(k)s upon retirement, we should convert them immediately into annuities so that our savings don’t end before we do; Social Security does this for us. If you claim that you want to replace Social Security with a system of private accounts to “strengthen” Social Security, but you don’t impose some sort of requirement on people’s private retirement savings — e.g., you don’t require that they buy an annuity, and you don’t require their savings to shift from equities to bonds as they age — then you’re not actually strengthening it; you’re replacing it with something else. If, on the other hand, you impose a number of restrictions on people’s private accounts, such that those accounts are just as constrained as the existing Social Security system is, then what problem are you solving? The cynical answer is that you’re solving the problem of insufficient fees going into mutual-fund companies’ pockets. Diamond and Orszag are not nearly so cynical. Or maybe they’re just very polite.

I’d be curious what Diamond and Orszag would write today, now that the White House and Senate are under the control of the Democratic Party. (Diamond was President Obama’s nominee to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. Orszag was Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget.) More to the point, we’ve just gone through a financial implosion that decimated many people’s retirement savings. Now would seem to be the right time to push to strengthen — truly strengthen — Social Security in automatic ways that would be hard to roll back. For instance, how about mandating automatic adjustments to the retirement age that factor in the poverty and race of the recipient? The poor don’t live as long as the wealthy, and black people don’t live as long as white people; why not allow everyone to have an approximately equal-length retirement by setting the retirement age to life expectancy minus a fixed amount? And why not eliminate the tax max? Diamond and Orszag don’t really argue the merits of an all-liberal (e.g., only increase taxes on the wealthy and don’t cut benefits) or all-conservative (the reverse) policy; they merely nod in the direction of both and then say that they’re aiming for something in the middle. Nowadays it’s not clear that they would claim many admirers on either side from this approach. (One of the book’s first footnotes cites Dean Baker’s book Social Security: The Phony Crisis, which apparently argues that there’s no problem to solve. It goes on the wish list.)

The following will probably sound snarky, when I don’t mean it to at all: Saving Social Security would be the Bible in a technocratic world. To quote Cosma Shalizi (who was writing on a different topic): Diamond and Orszag would love to be arguing from “just a little bit to the left of a technocratic center, and to debate those just a little bit to [the] right about optimal policies within a shared objective function, and pretend[] that it is a technical and not a political discussion. But … shit is fucked up and bullshit”. Such is the fallen world we’re in.

Generally speaking, I don’t know how to deal with Brookings these days. They seem like technocratic centrists in a world that uses technocratic centrists as its tools, if it uses them at all. With any luck, the world will shift back to a place where Brookings and friends can go back to being a central part of the discussion.

[1] – This just came up today, when Rick Santorum explained his opposition to ObamaCare in the same breath that he lauded Nelson Mandela, along the way telling us that the size of government keeps increasing. Never mind that the government is only large because we’re in a recession, and that if you instead look at government expenditures as a percentage of potential GDP, we’re right where we were in the era of the sainted Reagan.

I’ve had this running through my head for the past day, so the only thing to do is stick the rest of y’all with this beautiful earworm

December 6, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

“How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang”

December 4, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/1 Comment

Fascinating read, via the estimable Rick Perlstein (whose Nixonland you really want to read, and which I’ll one day get around to properly reviewing), via Corey Robin at Crooked Timber. [1]

I think of my friends in desperate pursuit of tenure — or even a job that promises tenure in a mirage-like way — and I wish them luck. I used to dream that academia would be free of all the bullshit that I expected the corporate world to be filled with, and that academics had endless freedom to research whatever they chose. My sense is that the latter just isn’t true. As for the bullshit piece: I’m sure academia has its own bullshit; it’s just different bullshit than the bullshit I deal with.

We’re all part of the capitalist machine, whether we like it or not. Fortunately, that means the solution to your problems is likely the same as the solution to mine: organize.

[1] – Robin one day leapt onto my radar, and has been writing astonishing essays ever since. His Reactionary Mind is on my list, though I think I need to read The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, by the great A.O. Hirschman, first. I also owe you guys a review of a Hirschman biography that I recently read, not to mention Hirschman’s own The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. What can I say; I’m behind.

The 1940 census is awesome

December 3, 2013/stevereads/1 Comment

The Census Bureau, 72 years after the 1940 census, put the raw data from the 1940 census up on the web last year. It is completely fascinating.

It’s also tricky, for me anyway, to find my ancestors’ information. My partner has an easier task for her grandparents: they lived in New York City, and the New York Public Library helpfully posted 1940 phone books expressly to help people navigate the 1940 census (thanks, New York Public Library!). No such luck for Burlington, Vermont. But by asking my parents, I was able to find my dad’s parents, 7 years before my dad was born, when it was just my grandparents and my aunt. Among the interesting tidbits:

* My grandfather was listed as unemployed (and seeking work) at the time of the census; in 1939 he had only been employed 30 weeks. He had been unemployed for the four weeks preceding March 30.
* In 1935 they had lived in Alburg, Vermont on a farm.
* My grandfather’s profession was listed as ‘weaver’ at ‘woolen mill’. I knew him as a watchmaker, though I imagine he was just an all-around handyman.
* As of 1939, his salary was $630. Looking around a bit, I found a Social Security Administration document from 1947, which says that the median family income in 1939 for a family with 3 people, with a male head of household under age 35 (my grandfather was 30) was $1,373. So as of 1940, it looks like my grandparents weren’t doing so well. I’ll be curious how that changes when the 1950 census data become available in 2022.
* Both my grandmother and grandfather had fourth-grade educations.

There are a couple things to note about this. First, my method for chasing down the census records was basically ad-hoc; I asked my parents, who asked my aunt, who guessed what their street address had been when she was seven years old and was basically right on the money. Even with that information, the census data aren’t terribly easy to navigate. With luck, you can use an address to get an Enumeration District, which is basically the terrain that a single census-taker covers. But even within an ED, there are a lot of scanned census forms to peruse. This seems like a case that would derive a lot of value from some crowdsourcing: people using the 1940-census site would be able to tag individual records or pages with whatever information they want to contribute: street addresses, names, etc. Over time, it ought to be possible to write SQL queries against raw census data (“SELECT * FROM 1940_data WHERE state = ‘Vermont’ and LastName = ‘Laniel'”).

Even in my partner’s case, which is less ad-hoc, not everyone had a phone in 1940. What would we do if we wanted to look up the census information of someone alive in 1940? I’m sure there’s a well-known way to bootstrap oneself to a family tree, but I’m not familiar with it. And I’d vastly prefer a SQL query to a complicated bootstrapping process.

Matt Yglesias has discovered the concept of the “library”

December 2, 2013April 21, 2026/stevereads/Leave a comment

I dunno. Tell me if you disagree on this one. He’s talking about a public library for cast-iron stoves, a public library for DVDs, etc. “Deliver the thing in an electronic form” is just an implementation detail; the overall architecture is just “people shouldn’t own things; they should rent them or borrow them or use them in non-tangible form.”

This reminds me that I really should use the public library for books more. I own too many books. The thing is, though, that I love beating the crap out of them, breaking their spines, taking notes in them, spilling coffee on them, etc. I’m something of a book sadist.

(I finished The Sleepwalkers and Lost Memory of Skin this weekend, by the way. Reviews forthcoming, for some definition of ‘forth’.)

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November 23, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

Achewood:

Steve Reads

Author: stevereads