Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.

These services are wondrous. They also risk lumping us into clusters of the like-minded and depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.

Giridharadas goes on to question whether the overreliance on metrics winds up hurting our ability to reason in other ways–or even articulate other sorts of wisdom. So, it turns out, do the folks behind a new study commissioned by the French government looking at how policymaking decisions about things like foreign-aid spending are made.

But the commission’s solution was revealing of our times: not more balance between qualitative and quantitative, but more metrics: new statistics on human well-being and economic sustainability to contend with data on production.

The commission’s chairman, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of a forthcoming book, “Freefall,” on the Great Recession, has been a critic of the world’s saturation by business logic. I asked him what he made of metricocracy. He said metrics were valuable tools but were in danger of squelching other ways of perceiving. But he argued that his commission had no choice but to speak in metricese.

The same battle has been raging in less highfalutin realms, too. Like baseball. Michael Lewis’ classic Moneyball represented an ode to the metricians, making a hero of the Oakland A’s GM who managed to exploit various player resources that had been undervalued by traditional baseball wisdom. And, sure enough, Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August soon offered a riposte, praising the gut-calls of a veteran manager.

Currents – Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? – NYTimes.com.

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.

Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn’t the only one doing such killings.

Mejia said two of the suspects were arrested carrying bottles of liquid human fat and told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter). The fat was sold to intermediaries in Peru’s capital, Lima, and police suspect it was then sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, Mejia said Thursday, but he could not confirm any sales.

I’m actually sort of baffled that this hasn’t yet become a pop-culture phenomenon. All sorts of make-up has animal product in it, and now the prices here seem to imply that Peruvian beauticians have discovered the ultimate in age-defying fat: Man’s. Of course, while I don’t want to cast doubt on the professionalism of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police, I did have some questions. For one thing, the suspects that were busted with the bottles of liquid human fat. My own blubber, at least, is in solid form at room temperature. So was this suspect carrying extremely hot bottles? Or had the contents been adulterated in such a way as to give them a lower melting point?

Also, isn’t there an easier way to acquire human fat–say, from the back end of a liposuction procedure? Or is it that the fat of a dead body is somehow better when it comes to crows-feet erasure? The AP story quotes physicians expressing “doubt about an international black market for human fat, though it does have cosmetic applications.” But wouldn’t it be better to find someone from the cosmetics business to talk about whether such a market exists? The piece offers us a Yale dermatology professor who calls it “pure baloney” to think that human fat has some sort of superior cosmetic application. But don’t large chunks of the beauty industry demonstrate that people are willing to shell out for all sorts of things deemed “pure baloney” by (presumably wrinkly-faced) scientists?

Anyway, I’m waiting for the L&O version. I figure at the last minute, McCoy decides to not just prosecute the Peruvian trigger-man but to also throw the book at the super-rich, Upper East Side beauty-obsessed end-users.

It’s also an example of the idiocy that results when an organization dedicates its resources to the narrowest possible end. The political play for gay-marriage foes in this case is to rally downscale voters, presumably on the logic that this is an elitist cause which will now be seen to have actual harmful side-effects for the poor. A smart game, except for the fact that the vehicle by which the poor will be harmed is the church’s own ham-fisted retaliatory threat. This is blackmail, plain and simple. And my hunch is that it will be seen as such, and blow up in the Archdiocese’s face. (Indeed, the Post’s reaction story, tying the ultimatum to a hardening of the D.C. Council’s stance, suggests things aren’t going quite as the church planned).

For gay-marriage proponents, though, maybe the smarter response would be to take the diocese at its word. After all, the law wouldn’t force any church to perform same-sex marriages, or even to rent out its property for such affairs. But all organizations would have to obey city anti-discrimination laws. And that seems to be too much for the church, which fears it might be forbidden to deny people in same-sex, government-sanctioned, non-Catholic marriages the same benefits given to people in opposite-sex, government-recognized, non-Catholic marriages.

So the diocese, after all of that highfalutin talk about the sanctity of “faith teachings,” simply wants to be free to discriminate. So how about we let them. A carefully crafted bill might mollify this week’s concerns while also exposing the blackmailers for what they are: “Charitable groups shall henceforth be permitted to engage in job discrimination, personal mockery, or just tacky hostility based on race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, veteran’s status, political party, age, disability, or anything else they choose.” Since they’re throwing themselves into municipal politics, perhaps the diocese would care to embrace that law, too.

I’ve had a lot of occasion to think again about Sesame Street recently, now that I have a child for whom Elmo represents both a surrogate babysitter and a gateway drug for television addiction. That puts me in a demographic whose very existence attests to Sesame Street’s old age: The group that’s now watching the show for the second time, as parents rather than as kids.

My return to the Street has generally been a sweet one. Like returnees to all sorts of real old neighborhoods, I’m heartened to find so much that’s the same: There’s Hooper’s Store, albeit under new management; there’s the fix-it shop; there are the trash cans and the front stoops and so many of the old neighborhood characters. Welcome Back, Oscar.

But maybe because it’s essentially the same, I find myself dwelling on what’s different. For oldsters, some of the changes are quite jarring. Snuffleupagus, for instance, has been outed: Once visible only to Big Bird, he’s been a normal character since the 80s, when producers apparently decided that the spectacle of grown-ups not believing Big Bird’s stories might keep actual kids from confiding important things to adults. Thus did a recurring anxiety of my childhood–oh, how they laughed at Big Bird whenever he talked about this “friend”–get banished.

Other changes are merely confusing. One of my friends, father of a toddler around my daughter’s age, pointed out to me recently that, even though Ernie and his rubber duckie remain stars, Bert seems to have vanished, like an out-of-favor Soviet politburo member. What gives?

The really bizarre thing for Thirtysomethings returning to Sesame Street, though, has nothing to do with the characters or the story lines. It’s purely contextual.

Back when the show was born, one of its major ambitions was to serve as a kind of uplift for the sort of kids who didn’t show up on The Brady Bunch. The cast was multiethnic. The setting was urban. Even for kids who grew up in quasi-suburbia, that was part of its magical appeal: It took the sort of Safeway-deprived neighborhood that all of America was abandoning and made it into a wonderland of sweet neighbors and valuable lessons and appropriately-themed festivals.

Forty years on, the magic still crackles, but for a different reason, as my daughter takes in a show. I suspect that doesn’t look to her like a tough neighborhood up on her TV, and not just because the graffiti got painted over during a post-1980 set redesign. Seriously: Look at those brownstones! That cute corner store! The foot traffic, for heaven’s sake! This isn’t a neighborhood all of America is abandoning. No, it’s a neighborhood her parents could never afford.

Instead, here’s the magic of early-21st century version: In this happy neighborhood, Gordon and Luis have managed to avoid getting themselves gentrified out to some distant patch of Rockland County, and even the fix-it store–I mean, who fixes things anymore?–has managed to avoid losing its lease to Starbucks. And thus can the assorted kids and muppets experience another generation of those aforementioned lessons and festivals and sweet neighborly interactions. Magic!

What this really suggests is that the cultural image of urban life has shifted, at least a bit. It’s not pure dysfunction anymore. In at least some places, life is so commodious for young folks–whose soccer-playing, tree-climbing childhoods parents once moved to the ‘burbs to ensure–that the market is effectively off-limits to all but the Bugaboo-propelled among Sesame Street’s audience. (Side note: When was the last time, other than in Major League Baseball’s embarassingly cheese Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities tv spots, that you heard anyone use that term as a euphemism for poor and minority).

Did Sesame Street hasten this change? Who knows–my hunch is that gas prices, traffic, sprawl, and immigration will continue to revive cities, both in real life and in popular culture. If the Children’s Television Workshop wants to make a new uplift show aimed at those kids whose lives have been erased from mainstream TV, perhaps they should set it in an inner-ring suburb somewhere.

On the other hand, the cultural evolution between when I watched Sesame Street and when my daughter began watching it has been both fast and unexpected. What will Hooper’s store symbolize by the time my daughter parks my grandchild in front of Sesame Street? I have a feeling we’ll eventually find out.

Vast, self-interested overinterpretations of the results, often by people who ought to know better (and probably do)

versus

Accurate, if equally self-interested, preemptive responses to said overinterpretations.

There are times, and the day after an election is one of them, when the blogosphere ceases to be a useful place for political opinion: It descends to a scrub between unspinnable people seeking nonetheless to spin one another, or at least shape the spin that’ll be produced by some other realm of the media that’s consumed by those undecided, uncommitted voter types that none of us in the hot air business actually know.

My head hurts.

WWLBJD! I feel like I hear things like this all the time in lefty circles. In this particularly case, it’s a nice scenario to ponder, indeed. Would LBJ have threatened to build a federal highway atop Lieberman’s house? Relocated his personal office to Alaska? Done all while wiping his ass right in front of Holy Joe in the Oval Office washroom?

Once upon a time, good liberals were supposed to disdain Johnson as a lying, manipulating, war-prosecuting bully. Robert Caro has dedicated, what, 312,000 pages or so to uncovering the 36th president’s conniving ways. And most of the efforts at LBJ rehabilitation in recent years have focused on his policy stances: He signed a Civil Rights bill even though he knew it would doom his fellow Southern Democrats. His Great Society, for all its mistakes, represented the last serious federal effort to help the poor. And so on.

But I think the under-appreciated reason why liberals of the post-Vietnam generation have warmed to LBJ has less to do with the noble policy ends and more to do with the ignoble means: We love that Johnson was such an ass-kicker! After years of having their hats handed to them by nasty GOP operatives, while finding their own side led by pols who seemed to have skipped their Machiavelli 101, the notion of a president willing to kick the other side in the balls is very appealing.

And, back during the campaign, it was part of Obama’s appeal, too. Yeah, the rhetoric was all hope and earnestness. But supporters in my circle, at least, all waxed rhapsodic about one of the fouding myths of his political career: The way he got an opponent kicked off the ballot in his first State Senate race. This was, people whispered, an ass-whupper.

Is he? I think the jury’s still out. His campaign tacticians won themselves enough respect that, since his election, conciliatory gestures–like his forgiving stance towards Lieberman’s endorsement of McCain–tend to be viewed as evidence of strategic genius, rather than as signs that he may be wishy-washy. And when his rhetoric does get partisan, as Matt Yglesias points out today, it’s invariably followed by stories suggesting he’s somehow betraying the promise of his campaign.

I suspect most Obamaphiles wouldn’t feel that way. Yeah, they voted for a guy with JFK’s air of cool. But I think a lot of them dug the idea that he also had LBJ’s inner thug on board, too.

The only question is what symbolic comeuppance will this hubristic ship receive? Icebergs have been done before, or course, as have undersea earthquakes and giant, reptilian sea creatures. But there’s still hijacking, Legionnaire’s disease, tsunami, a drunken captain, and that old favorite: murder.

Oh, yeah, there’s also this one: Unprecedented, massive global financial panic that strikes between when the ship was ordered and when it first set sail.

The Royal Caribbean ship makes its US debut Nov. 20. I’m not planning to be there.

]]> http://trueslant.com/michaelschaffer/2009/11/02/metaphor-alert/feed/ 1 http://trueslant.com/michaelschaffer/2009/11/02/world-series-fever/ http://trueslant.com/michaelschaffer/2009/11/02/world-series-fever/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:03:24 +0000 Michael Schaffer http://trueslant.com/michaelschaffer/?p=450 Here in Philadelphia–where I’ve remained for most of this blog’s recent hiatus–baseball fever is running high, despite the lengthening odds that the Phillies will beat back the Yankees.

As someone who moved here as an adult, I’ve never managed to make myself a serious fan of any of the local teams. Unlike the others, though, the Phillies do have a claim on my affection, albeit not the serious, tribal claim that marks the natives in these parts. For an outsider, especially one reared in transient-heavy DC, that tribal love is a thing to behold. I remember walking back from a party the year the Eagles lost the Superbowl and seeing grown men sitting on rowhouse stoops crying. Last year, when the Phillies actually brought home a title, people didn’t know what to do. The streets clogged with revelers and the air filled with the sound of pots and pans being banged, the sort of old-time tradition I imagine is lost in most other parts of the baseball universe. Predictably, trouble ensued: Winning is really not an established habit in these parts, so, inevitably, the combination of alcohol and revelry and crowds in the streets led to some bad things alongside the good. But the joy was real, and remains so: The night the team won the penant a couple weeks ago, I was coming back from New York and arrived just in time to see a girl, on some guys shoulders, flashing the throng of tough young Philadelphian guys. So when you do the math on this Series, you still have to conclude that Philadelphia, the city, needs it more. Even with their win last year, and even with the Yanks’ drought.

This isn’t necessarily a compliment to Philadelphia, the city, since if there was more going on here the rise and fall of sports teams wouldn’t be so important. But there you have it.

As it happens, this passion has seeped into my own house in the unlikely form of my wife. Never a sports fan, she’s taken to listening to sports-talk radio. These days, she’s up on all the outrages of the day in local sports. (The broadcasts really are better when the teams are losing; no one quite knows what to say when there isn’t anything to vent about). I see her enthusiasm about Eagles and Phillies as of a kind with her enthusiasm, say, for the movie Tommy Boy, or for our ill-trained Saint Bernard, or Owen Wilson’s Dignan character from Bottle Rocket, or for pretty much every character Will Ferrell ever played: In this case, the not-that-bright, not-that-polite, absurdly enthusiastic and ultimately well-intentioned protagonist is the oft-doomed universe of Philly fans.  And, in good movie form, of course their season would climax in a showdown with the rich, worldly, efficient titans from New York. Alas, I don’t think the Phillies will pull this one out via some screwball trick-play and the theft of a key Yankee’s underwear.

Back in 1997, the fast-food chain rolled out a new commercial starring Gidget–playing a male dog–as a determined consumer of Taco Bell products. Her signature line, “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” anchored the spots for three years. “The ads made the Taco Bell mascot wildly popular,” explains the AP, “although they provoked criticism from activists who accused them of promoting Hispanic stereotypes.

In the world of dog-lovers, though, Gidget was controversial for another reason. Like the Dalmatians in 101 Dalmatians, it was feared, she would lead to a run on Chihuahuas, a circumstance that would lead puppy-mills to start producing the animals in wretchedly inhumane conditions–and would lead to their adoption by frivolous, dog-as-accessory types who would quickly abandon them. The fact that a Chihuahua-equipped Paris Hilton kicked off a celebrity-lapdog craze a few years later only seemed to reinforce this fear.

A funny thing, though: A  researcher who studies the strange business of why breeds of dogs suddenly rise and fall in popularity  crunched the numbers and found almost no correlation:

Not surprisingly, some breed fads are initiated by the media. The best example is the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians. In the eight years following the 1985 re-release of the film, the annual number of new registrations increased spectacularly, from 8,170 puppies to 42,816 puppies. The peak in 1993 was followed by the steepest descent in popularity of any breed in AKC history—a decline of 97% within a decade. An even more dramatic example is the 100-fold increase in Old English Sheepdog registrations over the 14 years following the 1959 Disney movie, The Shaggy Dog.

It is often assumed that fads are inevitably instigated by media exposure. This is not the case. As Lieberson (2000) points out in his study of baby names, it often is impossible to definitively link an increase in the popularity of a cultural variant to a movie or television show. With dogs, there are only a few instances in which there is a clear, causal relationship between a movie and a breed epidemic. The fact is that 101 Dalmatians and The Shaggy Dog are the exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of the many hundreds of movies, television shows, and commercials featuring dogs have had little or no impact on the popularity of obscure breeds. Take the well-known Taco Bell television ad campaign that ran between 1997 and 2000 featuring a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua named Gidget (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”). The extensive exposure of the breed during 3 years of media saturation did not produce an increase in the popularity of Chihuahuas. Indeed, registrations for the breed declined 43% between 1998 and 2003.

The same goes, it turns out, for breeds that win the Westminster Kennel Club show. The winner may get to show up on the Today show, but the publicity doesn’t translate to showing up in more households, at least according to the admittedly incomplete stats on our national pet habits.

When I was working on my book about the pet industry, I had assumed that trade in pets would mirror the booming–$45 billion, nearly triple in 15 years–trade in goods for pets. But while there are business researchers who make a solid income telling would-be pet-business entrepreneurs about, say, just how many lines of upscale pet shampoo were introduced in the year 2005 (answer: a lot more than 1995), there was almost no one on the business side who knew anything about the rather more fraught question of where the animals came from in the first place. This boils down to commerce, to some extent: Buying and selling pets can be an ugly business. People who sell organic dog food to customers who see their pups as ersatz children realize that those customers might look askance at them if they were also selling those ersatz children like so many crates of tomatoes. One side-effect of this is that commercial breeding exists in a kind of statistical gray area.

Whatever the morality of it, though, its awfully interesting. It turns out that breed fads work kind of like baby-name fads–given to booms and busts, shaped more by random chance than by major events. “Barack,” it seems, is not necessarily any more likely to become a huge US baby-name as is “Barney.”

Which means that Gidget doesn’t necessarily have puppy mills or packs of euthanized dogs to answer for. Of course, she still spent three years shilling for Taco Bell, which is another question entirely.

The Washington Post has a nice story this morning looking into one of the recent phantoms haunting America’s foreign-policy ninnies: Iran’s alleged plans for a monstrously large embassy in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua.

As with so many such stories, no one is quite sure how the idea of a nefarious Iranian base in Daniel Ortega’s capital first made its way into circulation:

In the past two years, it has made its way into congressional testimony, think tank reports, press accounts, and diplomatic events in the United States and elsewhere.

“Iran recently established a huge embassy in Managua,” Nancy Menges of the Center for Security Policy told a House committee last year. “Iran’s embassy in Managua is now the largest diplomatic mission in the city,” wrote Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.

And in May, the Secretary of State, who had presumably learned her lesson about accepting AEI’s version of reality, got into the act as well.

“The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. “And you can only imagine what that’s for.”

Against that backdrop, reporters Anne-Marie O’Connor and Mary Beth Sheridan went looking for an alleged meda-Embassy in pokey old Managua. The result: Not much.

Here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy. Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing.

Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: “It doesn’t exist.” Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only “mega-embassy” in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: “There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell.”

…

Bayardo Arce, a senior economic adviser to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, likened the elusive “mega-embassy” to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “It doesn’t exist. They deceived the secretary of state,” Arce said. “We don’t have an Iranian mega-embassy. We have an ambassador in a rented house with his wife.”

If anything, Arce said, Iranian investment in Nicaragua has fallen far short of the expectations of the cash-strapped government. Nicaragua can’t even persuade Iran to pardon its $160 million debt, he said. “They haven’t invested anything. They haven’t built anything,” Arce said. “We haven’t even been able to renegotiate the debt. They say the Koran doesn’t permit them to. We’ll have to study the Koran to see if we can find something that condones it.”

…

“Who told Hillary that? Someone misinformed her,” said Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a leader of the opposition Constitutionalist Liberal Party and head of a legislative foreign affairs committee. “I never cease to be astonished that a country with such intelligence-gathering capacities could fall for such a canard. What now? Is Obama going to start talking about the Axis of Evil?”

In fact, the Case of the Missing Mega-Mission–the Iran-consular affair?–appears to be yet another case of Washington, prodded by intellectually slippery ideologues, falling for the hype of a Middle Eastern blusterer. Iranian president Mahmoud Admadinejad helped out, spending his first term travelling to Latin countries with no obvious strategic or cultural connection to Iran, and promising their residents all sorts of ports and trade deals and loan guarantees in the name of anti-Yankee solidarity. But according to those who’ve been watching, Admadinejad, perhaps because folks at home had other ideas about how to spend their dwindling oil wealth, never really delivered.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “can go around and sign all these things, but ultimately it’s the Iranian parliament that has to decide whether it’s going to give Managua $350 million to develop its port, and they haven’t done so,” said Farideh Farhi, an expert on Iran’s foreign policy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

But I somehow think this isn’t the last we’ll hear about Iran’s Secret Sandinista Staging Area. In fact, I understand the Iranian mission is located right next door to Managua’s brand-new Embassy of Niger. ]]> http://trueslant.com/michaelschaffer/2009/07/13/embassy-of-mass-destruction-2/feed/ 0