Pater Familias

EXCHANGE RATES REVISITED. I have previously posted on the difficulty of predicting foreign exchange rate movements and questioning whether the large American trade deficit predicts a massive decline in the dollar. That post relied on Morgan Stanley’s views on exchange rates. This Economics Focus article in The Economist has some additional interesting analysis from a Morgan Stanley currency economist (Stephen Jen). Jen argues that American mutual funds may be a more important factor than foreign governments in increasing the percentage of their assets in non-American equities (from 15% to 22$ in the last four years). Mr. Jen argues that this may reflect a decline in provincialism with American institutions leading the way toward avoiding excessive reliance on home country assets.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN—ALMOST FIFTY YEARS LATER. Over the weekend, we saw a stunning production of A RAISIN IN THE SUN at the Darien Arts Center—wonderful performances, wonderful direction. I saw the play in the Chicago area many years ago, and seeing it again brought additional power to the experience. Mary Jane was seeing it for the first time. We both marveled at what a great play it is and at how much was lost when Lorraine Hansberry died young. The play brought back memories, and provoked thoughts of how so many things have not changed (We saw the play in a white suburban enclave). The end of the play shows the Younger family preparing to move in to an all white suburb. I commented to Mary Jane that this constituted a problematic happy ending. It turns out that was an understatement. I have now read this Wikipedia article which tells about how, when Hansberry was a child, the Hansberry family bought a house in what Lorraine Hansberry called a “hellishly hostile white neighborhood.” They faced protracted litigation (their case involving restrictive racial covenants went to the United States Supreme Court in 1940 when Hansberry was ten). Hansberry’s mother carried a loaded pistol when guarding the family at night. Hansberry as a child faced “howling mobs” surrounding the house at night and “being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.”

BUYING SUV’S AND VOTING AGAINST THEM. Kids, this article by James Surowiecki explains a concept that is important in both economics and law. Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, identified the concept years ago. It can be rational for me to own an SUV and also to be in favor of legislation restricting SUV’s. Nick, another example would be that it would be rational for a basketball coach to favor strict enforcement of rules against hand checking by defenders and yet to insist that his own players use hand checking if it is permitted. (Annalisa, hand checking is poking the player with the ball with your hands. Enforcement varies. There have been times when shoves hard enough to knock a player off balance have been permitted).

A HOSPITAL SUCCEEDS IN REDUCING INFECTIONS. I posted here on the importance of reducing infections in hospitals and on how much might be done cheaply (by random testing of whether hospital personnel have clean hands). This article describes how a veterans hospital in Pittsburgh has reduced the infection rate to about one third of what it had been. The hospital’s expenditure on hand cleaner has doubled. A troubling point in the article is the suggestion that hospitals might have had little incentive to reduce infections in hospitals because their treatment costs are reimbursed: “’I think it was assumed that hospitals didn’t mind treating these infections because they were getting paid for it,’ Dr. Shannon said.” An encouraging point is that the Veterans Administration has taken action to copy this hospital’s procedures at 140 hospitals nationwide. I have the impression that hospitals do not copy successful practices from other hospitals as much as they should.

BASEBALL PROSPECTUS. The link to umpire accuracy below comes from Baseball Prospectus. I want to put in a plug for the site because much of the site, including that article, is intended for subscribers only. Baseball Prospectus has wonderful statistical analyses of baseball. (People who do statistical analyses of baseball are called sabermatricians. I posted previously on the importance of Bill James as a pioneering sabermatrician.) Nick and I occasionally grump about the conclusions at the Baseball Prospectus site and in their annual publication, but we refer to them all the time.

UMPIRE RATINGS. Following up on yesterday’s post, here is a rating for accuracy in calling balls and strikes for each major league umpire. The percentages show that on average, the umpires miss about ten per cent of the calls on balls and strikes. They get a higher percentage of balls right because some balls miss by a yard and are easy to call. The best umpire gets 93.6 per cent of the calls right and the worst gets 86.8 per cent of the calls right. I think that baseball fans wrongly expect umpires to be close to perfect and get upset about any missed call. The article also shows that having individual umpire ratings be public information is not a disaster for the umpires.

SHOULD REFEREE RATINGS BE PUBLIC? The National Basketball Association is now faced with the nightmare of a referee (Tim Donaghy) being accused of betting on games he officiated. Did his bets influence his refereeing? Sports officials today are subject to regular review by means of tape. Box scores record the performance of players. Why shouldn’t the grading of the performance of officials be made public? (I recognize that union collective bargaining agreements may prevent this). It is not well publicized, but apparently major league baseball was pleased that it reduced the error rate on balls and strikes to 7% recently (about one missed call every half inning). It’s interesting to know that statistic. There is a model for what could be done. The Sun Belt Conference made public a review of the performance of their referees in the 2006 Alamo Bowl. The game announcers had criticized those referees and the report vindicated them. I recommend the report, which analyzes every disputed call in the game (and includes the important statement about one play: “This was one of those plays that could go either way and would make half the people happy and the other half upset.”) I think that Commissioner Stern of the National Basketball Association would be a lot happier right now if he could point to contemporary evaluations of the disgraced referee’s calls.

DANISH VOCABULARY (COMMENT). Molly commented as well about the few Danish words she knows. I also know only a few even though my mother was fluent in Danish. My mother was told by a Dane when she was in her seventies that she spoke well, but with a child’s vocabulary. The one time I was in Denmark, some Danes I met were amused that the few Danish words I knew would have been spoken to a child (my spelling for the following words): “shushkit”, meaning “impossibly messy”; “lille soldaten”, meaning, I think, “little soldiers” and used to refer to very small pancakes; and “fefanen”, which my mother used to say meant “the devil”, but which created more of a commotion when I used it than using “the devil” does in English.

DANISH WORDS (COMMENT). Molly commented that a Danish friend of hers had never heard of the word “mawngenown” (my spelling), which I posted about yesterday. I checked in a Danish-English dictionary, which I found on google. I consulted this dictionary and it appears that the Danes don’t even have a word for “grumpy” or “grumpiness.” It may be that the Danes have never had a need for the concept, being content with melancholy. My mother was known to tease. However, she usually gave the teasing away with a twinkle in her eye. It may be that the word came from her childhood and she was mistaken in its use (perhaps she was teased–I think it was that kind of family).

ROWLING FOR NOBEL PRIZE? I have seen that a fans have sought to nominate J. K. Rowling for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I think she is worthy of it. There have been few writers with her genius for telling a complex story–Dickens, Dostoevsky, Robertson Davies. Books that appeal to children are wrongly excluded from serious literature. And if not Rowling, why not Philip Pullman?