Monthly Archives: October 2018

Decisions

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In a Wall Street Journal article Monday, Google’s MFWIC, Sundar Pichai, defended his decision to support the People’s Republic of China with a Google “search” engine that’s carefully compliant with PRC censorship requirements.

What interests me this time, though, is this bit:

Mr Pichai…played down the idea that the Project Maven decision was made only based on employee feedback. He said Google has also listened to experts in ethics and artificial intelligence.

Project Maven is a DoD program intended to develop artificial intelligence for American national defense purposes—including, yes, an improved ability to kill our enemies when they attack us.

Pichai’s rationalization of his decision to turn his back on our national defense doesn’t matter. Our enemies are developing AI and will use it against us. Pichai’s decision only potentiates those enemies’ relative capabilities.

Don’t be evil.  That used to be Google’s motto.  How is it evil to help our country defend itself?  How is it not evil to help our enemies, even if without AI support (other than “search” AIs)?

Now the corporate motto, handed down from parent Alphabet, is Do the right thing.  How is refusing to help our nation defend itself a right thing?  How is helping our enemies a right thing?

Sundar Pichai knows the answers to these questions full well.

Pharma and Drug Prices

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The Trump administration has proposed a rule that would require companies advertising drugs to provide the list prices of those drugs in their advertising—including their television advertising.  Big Pharma is opposed, and wants instead to be left to voluntarily provide pricing information by having links in their advertising that would guide folks to a separate Web site.

I sympathize with Big Pharma on this. Government regulation already is out of hand; the Trump administration is reducing that, and this is an unnecessary addition.

There is an alternative.

The FDA could compile a list of drug list prices; region-by-region retail prices at places like Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, amazon (note that this is not an exhaustive list of retailers); and the tier within which each drug sits.  This list then could be made available on the FDA’s Web site home page above the fold.

This more central source, in addition to encouraging competition among drug companies, would encourage more competition among retailers.

Income Taxes and Retirement Savings

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Professor Benjamin Harris (Kellogg School of Management) made a case for redoing our 401(k) retirement savings system.  He had several good points, too: the tax break today compared to the taxes due on withdrawal during retirement’s usually lower tax rate is irrelevant to those whose current income is low enough to go untaxed or not taxed much.  Contributions are tax deductions vs tax credits equal to a portion of contributions.  The whole system is complex from a tax-figuring perspective (what are the tax brackets in play for a particular saver, what taxes will be in play when the saver retires, how will investments perform in the interim).

Overlooked, though, is a larger alternative, even if it is a more difficult alternative to achieve.  It’s far from impossible to achieve; this year’s tax reform and cuts represent a major step in this direction.

The whole complexity of the tax question, along with most of the tax question itself, would disappear with a low, flat income tax rate.

Discrimination

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The discrimination suit against Harvard is underway, and the first day produced some interesting claims.

William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s admissions dean since 1986, defended the policy [of favoring some applicants over others on the basis of race] by saying the letters to white students in more rural states help the school recruit from areas where students may be less aware of Harvard.

This is nonsense. If student awareness were the goal, instead of sending letters to favored individuals, Harvard would advertise, would communicate with the junior high schools and high schools of those rural areas.

Race is never the reason a student is admitted or rejected from Harvard, he [William Lee, a WilmerHale partner representing Harvard] said, adding the school considers race as one of many factors, in line with Supreme Court precedents.

This is disingenuous at best. If race is never a reason, it wouldn’t be missed if it were eliminated from consideration.

In addition, there is a clear designed-in disparate impact at work here, but since it’s not an impact against a favored group of Americans, it’s not discussed.

A Couple of Questions

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I don’t often cite PowerLine, but here’s a statistic that wants a little discussion.

It wasn’t easy for the Times/Siena poll locate its sample of 800 likely voters. The poll made 51,983 calls in search of those 800 likely voters.

This is what The New York Times said about the sample—absent the hype:

Can Democrats turn Texas blue? We made 51,983 calls, and 800 people spoke to us.

Hyped or blandly reported, this is a statistic without context, and so it’s meaningless.

Is the list called actually a randomly drawn sample?  That’s the only way the 800 can be considered random and so representative.  The NYT, well down in their description, admits their sample is not random.

People who respond to surveys are almost always too old, too white, too educated and too politically engaged to accurately represent everyone.
…
Pollsters compensate by giving more weight to respondents from under-represented groups.
…
But weighting works only if you weight by the right categories and you know what the composition of the electorate will be.

There’s a hint in that last, too.

Is getting 800 respondents out of 52,000 tries typical?  What’s the trend over the last, say, dozen or so elections, both Presidential and mid-terms considered separately as well as together?  NYT chose to be silent on that.

Is telephoning really a good way to get a random sample?  Sure, things have changed since the Harry Truman polling debacle, but….  We’re out and about a lot more today, too, and it’s easier to just ignore incoming calls from numbers we don’t recognize.

 

Aside: what’s not being talked about in the NLMSM (I wonder why…) are these two statistics from the same Times/Siena poll, carefully ghosted so as to be made less noticeable: Beto O’Rourke’s Approval/Disapproval rating

41% favorable rating; 44% unfavorable; 15% don’t know

compared with Ted Cruz’ Approval/Disapproval rating:

51% favorable rating; 42% unfavorable; 7% don’t know