WHO IS SLEEPING THE BIG SLEEP? That is a trivia question that my brother Elmer likes to pose. The answer is given in the last paragraphs of Raymond Chandler’s book THE BIG SLEEP: Rusty Regan, the chauffeur, is sleeping the Big Sleep. Who killed him? I raise the question because in this weekend’s Financial Times, the story is retold about how Howard Hawks, when he was directing the movie, sent a telegram to Raymond Chandler, asking who had killed the chauffeur. Chandler “famously wired back: “No idea.’” The story is indeed famous. The imdb website has a Frequently Asked Question: Who shot the chauffeur? Its answer is: “Neither the movie nor the book tells. It’s rumored that even author Raymond Chandler had no idea when that question was put to him by the screenwriters. Those who have seen the movie and/or read the book are split over it being (1) Brody, (2) Lundgren, or (3) the chauffeur killed himself.” The story is wrong. In the last pages of the book, Philip Marlowe confronts the killer and then explains, in classic fashion, what happened.
Archive for August, 2008
WHO IS SLEEPING THE BIG SLEEP?
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008CHECKLISTS FOR DOCTORS REVISITED.
Monday, August 25th, 2008CHECKLISTS FOR DOCTORS REVISITED. Late last year, I posted here on Atul Gawande’s article urging the use of checklists by hospitals to prevent infections. This article by Betsy McCaughey reports on progress that has been made. Medicare is taking the position that certain infections should never occur in hospitals: “Medicare calls certain device-related bloodstream infections, urinary tract infections and surgical infections after orthopedic and heart surgery “‘never events.’” Medicare will begin refusing reimbursement to hospitals for treatment of these infections. Beth Israel Medical Center in New York has instituted a checklist and has not had a central line bloodstream infection in the cardiac intensive care unit for over 1000 days (with savings estimated at over $1,500,000). And, as the article describes, the American tort system is beginning to target these infections.
RECESSION PREDICTION.
Sunday, August 24th, 2008RECESSION PREDICTION. I rashly said in a post a couple days ago that I would make a prediction on whether there will be a recession. (I don’t think we are in a recession now). This was rash because I am really on the fence. It seems to me that the opinions of economists are pretty evenly divided. According to an article in the Financial Times for August 18, the Merrill Lynch fund survey of fund managers reported that almost half think that there will be a technical recession in the next 12 months, while two months earlier only one third thought there would be a recession. I see that on July 31 I said in an e mail to a friend that I thought the chance of a recession was 70%. Yet now it seems to me that there has been a full year to adjust to the real estate and financial crises, and the economy is still growing. I don’t see why the export sector should not continue to be strong. So I now have changed my view. Make it a 40% chance of a recession.
THE BELOIT UNIVERSITY REVIEW OF THE GENERATIONS.
Sunday, August 24th, 2008THE BELOIT UNIVERSITY REVIEW OF THE GENERATIONS. Kids, this annual reminder of the world that college freshmen have lived in is directed more to older folks, but if you reverse the items on the lists, you will get an idea of what people took for granted back in the day. I have always been fascinated by each new generation’s view of current history. That is, a college freshman now is as far removed (19 years) from the fall of the Iron Curtain as a college freshman in 1964 was from the end of World War II. And World War I was in the distant past in 1960; now the end of World War II is as far away as the Spanish American War was then.
WHY JOURNALISTS SHOULD NOT MODERATE DEBATES.
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008WHY JOURNALISTS SHOULD NOT MODERATE DEBATES. I have posted several times, including here and here, that Presidential debates are spoiled by journalists who get in the way of discussions between the candidates. This article by Michael Schaffer in The New Republic, with the subtitle “Why journalists are so bad at running presidential debates”, supports my position. Schaffer praises the recent debate between Obama and McCain which was moderated by Rick Warren, the minister. The key: Warren “asked the candidates to walk through their positions.” For example, he “lobbed” a question “about where the balance between security and freedom lies.” The result was, apparently, “an interesting conversation.” Scheffer points out that reporters are looking for scoops with the result that “something billed as a debate, an opportunity to watch aspirants explain or criticize one another’s important positions …[morphs]… into parallel grillings or desperate searches for “gotcha.”
LANDSCAPE AND SKY.
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008LANDSCAPE AND SKY. In the article on traffic I linked to yesterday, Tom Vanderbilt quoted the writer Maurice Maeterlinck writing about the automobile in 1904: “Maeterlink enthused that ‘in one day,’ the car gave us ‘as many sights, as much landscape and sky, as would formerly have been granted to us in a whole lifetime.’” The speed of our cars makes the driving experience something that a writer in 1904 could not have imagined, but I submit that we take for granted the amount of landscape and sky that the automobile has granted us, even if we have to wait for the car to stop moving before we can appreciate that landscape and sky.
DO WE NEED TRAFFIC RULES? (COMMENT).
Friday, August 22nd, 2008DO WE NEED TRAFFIC RULES? (COMMENT). Annalisa commented here that when I was helping her learn to drive, I told her that when cars were merging that they would “sort themselves out.” Here is an article about Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who argued that “traditional traffic safety infrastructure warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so on is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.” Monderman is most famous for what he did in a crowded four-way intersection in the town center of Drachten. He removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. The drivers—without guidance—sorted themselves out.The key was that the residents believed that the intersection was dangerous—Monderman’s goal. You may be reminded of David Mamet’s conclusion, posted on here that a director is not needed for a stage play because, to paraphrase, the actors will “sort themselves out.”
SPANKING MACHINES (COMMENT).
Thursday, August 21st, 2008SPANKING MACHINES (COMMENT). My niece Molly commented here that she likes the family stories I tell here because her father tells different ones. I saw Molly and her family over the weekend, and I asked her what stories my brother tells. She said that he tells the story about the spanking machine. Her daughter Mia grinned at the mention of this story. This is the story about the spanking machine: When my twin brother and I were quite young, we were, I gather, wrangling and generally misbehaving while my mother was shopping. I recall the store as being something like Sears Roebuck. There were a lot of machines on display. My mother said, “We’re going to buy a spanking machine. What color would you like?” I said red. My brother said blue. We started wrangling about that until we realized the full import of what had been said.
IT’S NOT A RECESSION UNTIL THE COMMITTEE SAYS IT IS.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008IT’S NOT A RECESSION UNTIL THE COMMITTEE SAYS IT IS. I posted a couple days ago on the definition of a recession, expressing a preference for the simple test of two quarters of negative growth in Gross Domestic Product. I should have added that, of course, real GDP should be used (that is, the effect of inflation should be eliminated). I also have to acknowledge that there is an official definition of “recession” and the two-quarter-negative-growth-in-GDP definition is not it. There is a committee of the National Bureau of Economics (the “NBER”) that officially determines whether there has been a recession. This article labels the two-quarter definition as the “folk definition” and describes the process the NBER committee follows. The NBER process gives the committee a great deal of discretion. The NBER definition is “a significant decline in economic activity, spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” A drawback is the delay involved. A chart in the article shows that for the troughs of the last two cycles (March 1991 and November 2001) the NBER announcement came 22 months and 21 months after the event. I prefer the precise two-quarter definition, but a committee of sportswriters picks the “Most Valuable Player” in each major league every year on even more nebulous criteria, and the result is generally accepted.
IS THERE A RECESSION? WILL THERE BE A RECESSION?
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008IS THERE A RECESSION? WILL THERE BE A RECESSION? Kids, I think it’s a good idea, just to make it more interesting, to keep making your own predictions (guesses) about what is going to happen in the economy. (I know we don’t know enough to really make a prediction, but that doesn’t stop people from making predictions at sporting events). The early estimates for GDP in the US showed that the GDP for the second quarter of 2008 grew at an annual rate of about 2%. The lag in determining final GDP numbers means that it is conceivable that there was actually a decline and the first quarter of a recession may have already begun. I heard an economist on Bloomberg radio today saying that it is expected, however, that the GDP figure will be revised up, not down. Nevertheless, the economist predicted a GDP drop in the third quarter. Although the real estate and financial markets are disasters, the rest of the economy, especially the export sector, is doing well. (Forty years ago, when I was studying economics, the export sector was less than 4% of the US economy and was always ignored). You can keep your prediction to yourself, and I will force myself to make a prediction in a couple days.
