An Excellent Opportunity in the Offing

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The Bank of England is keeping its benchmark interest rates unchanged for the time being, and it says it’s changing the way it would change the way it reduces its holdings of government bonds at a time when gilt yields have risen to multidecade highs, including pausing auctions of those bonds until next year.

The BOE is doing this in part because gilt yields are at multidecade highs. Those highs also mean that the market prices for the gilts are at multidecade lows. Which creates the opportunity.

Instead of pausing its auctions, or perhaps in conjunction with them, the BOE might take advantage of those near historic low prices and buy back a passel (to use the technical term) of the gilts, particularly those with the longest time yet remaining to maturity, and retire them.

Of course, that would have its maximum effect only if the British government were to get its fiscal house in order and cut out its addiction to spending like there’s no tomorrow, which there won’t be if the government doesn’t. That, though, is another story.

A Faux Angst

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There is growing upset over the CDC having not yet opened its ordering process for States to order “their” supplies of Wuhan Virus vaccines for children.

It’s a falsely created upset. Leave aside the minor matter that it’s difficult to predict when the right time in the year is to administer a Covid booster shot, former CDC leaders said.

Reasonably healthy children, even sick ones with comorbidities extant, don’t need vaccine: between about six months old and pubescence, they are already immune to the virus. Before six months, their immune systems are not established, so the vaccine would do those babies no good, and it could be dangerous for them.

Here, though, is this, from Dr Demetre Daskalakis, formerly in charge of overseeing CDC’s immunization efforts:

Even if there’s a little delay, that’s creating a disparity[.]

It’s not fair. The angst has nothing to do with any actual need, only to do with equity. Some who don’t need the vaccine are getting it, so everyone who doesn’t need the vaccine should get it.

A Brief Thought on Responsibility

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In his WSJ piece centered on who, exactly, is responsible for AI mistakes—in the present context, AI functionalities “breaking out” and hacking other businesses—the news writer had this in his otherwise well worth the read article:

When you delegate to a person, your own burden can lighten, because part of your responsibility has gone elsewhere.

No, absolutely not. Responsibility is not a physical commodity that can be subdivided at will and to any extent desired. Responsibility cannot be delegated at all. The one doing the delegating—the one in charge of the program involved—retains all of his responsibility for the program and for the performance of every subordinate involved in the program, no matter how much authority he might have delegated.

Take careful note of that. What the delegator delegates is a measure of authority to carry out or to direct the carrying out of certain actions in pursuit of pushing the program forward. He is not delegating any responsibility at all; although he is assigning a measure of responsibility commensurate with the degree of authority he’s delegating. That responsibility he assigns, though, is de novo responsibility; it is not a portion of his own responsibility.

If responsibility were dilutable through delegation as the news writer suggested, it would be possible for the initially responsible person—the one in charge, perhaps—to dilute through delegation all of his original responsibility until he has none at all remaining, regardless of the good or bad performance (or intention) of any of the delegatees in the chain. How convenient that would be for a misbehaving or incompetent delegator.

Further, by retaining that which cannot be delegated, the delegator remains fully responsible for the performance of the delegatee to whom he has granted a measure of authority.

Another Brief Thought on Responsibility

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A WSJ Letters letter writer representing Share our Strength wrote to protest the paring back of Federal outlays to State SNAP programs. He had this early in his missive, and he was right:

We can agree that states should ensure eligible families get the proper benefits.

In the very next sentence, though, he had this contradiction:

But penalizing states without providing the resources to improve administration leaves more children hungry by pushing more parents away from SNAP.

The latter part of that may be true, but it’s not the Federal government’s responsibility to improve any State’s SNAP administration, nor is it the Federal government’s responsibility to provide resources for that improvement. Both of those requirements lie strictly and solely with the State involved.

And, using New York as his example, he offered this naked excusal for States’ failure to perform:

Honest mistakes can happen when overworked caseworkers using outdated technology to calculate benefits have to factor in a gig worker’s fluctuating income or a parent picking up occasional extra shifts.

If [New York] truly were serious about those error rates, it would satisfy its own (not the Federal government’s) responsibility and hire more (well-trained) caseworkers and upgrade the technology those caseworkers must use.

At bottom here is a State’s own decision regarding its own spending allocations. Nothing is stopping any State from changing what it chooses to fund and what set of Federal dollars it chooses to try to freeload off of.

All the Federal government can do, all it should do in our federal republic, is provide incentives to States to carry out their own responsibilities. Withholding financial transfers from States that choose to shirk their own responsibilities is a perfectly fine incentive, and one the Federal government should apply more broadly regarding money transfers to States.

If He Won’t….

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An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?