On the iatrogenic explanation of post-recession stagnations

I think that title really reaches out of the screen and grabs the reader, don't you? :-)

Anyway. John Cochrane has been diligently working through New Keynesian macro models, and in this post he evaluates their ability to explain the long post-recession stagnation we've been experiencing, as well as their policy prescriptions. Some excerpts:

The level of today's consumption depends on the whole string of future interest rates, not just today's interest rate. So, if people expect the interest rate in 2014 to be lower, that is every bit as effective in raising today's consumption as would be lowering today's rate. 

Hence, "open mouth operations," "forward guidance," and "managing expectations."  If the Fed by just talking can persuade people it will hold interest rates low for a longer periods, when they are expecting rates to rise above zero, that expectation will "stimulate" today's consumption. If promises don't help, perhaps announcing a new "rule" which if followed would lead to lower rates for longer will help to change expectations. 

In this equation, more inflation lowers the real interest rate too. So, anything that boosts inflation is a good thing. Boosting inflation isn't primarily about a Phillips curve, direct "monetary stimulus," encouraging investment, and so on. It's a way to lower real interest rates inside the integral and shift consumption from the future to the present. 

Once again, increasing expected future inflation would be just as effective as increasing current inflation. Hence, calls for the Fed to announce a higher inflation target, or at least announce that it will tolerate more inflation before beginning to raise rates, as it has.

He points out what he sees as some of the limitations of this story:

New Keynesian models are a bit fuzzy on just why...the "natural rate" is sharply negative...Many of the formal models assume that consumer's discount rate (rho) has declined sharply, beyond the capacity of the interest rate to follow it... 

Now, a spontaneous outbreak of thrift, to the point of valuing the future a lot more than the present, seems a bit of a strained diagnosis for the fundamental trouble of the US economy... 

To be fair, all the papers I've read say clearly that they regard the decline in the discount rate rho as a stand-in for some more complex process involving the financial crisis... 

New-Keynesian introductions have something more complex in mind, involving the "frictions" of the financial crisis...But that too is really not our question. The  "frictions" of the financial crisis -- capital constraints at banks and financial intermediaries,  or the run in the shadow banking system -- passed quite a while ago... 

The question before us is not really why consumption fell so drastically in 2008 and 2009. The question is, why did consumption get stuck at so low a level starting in 2010?... 

This question and controversy is much like those surrounding the Great Depression...[W]hy did the US get stuck so low for so long? Was it bad monetary policy (Friedman and Schwartz), bad microeconomic policy, war on capital, and high marginal tax rates (Cole, Ohanian, Prescott, etc.), or inadequate fiscal stimulus (Keynesians)?... 

I guess you could argue for a constant sequence of unexpected negative shocks, so that each quarter, people are expecting the big consumption growth which just ends up not happening. But you can see how strained that argument is. It would be much more appealing to refer to a model and analysis that describes slumponomics directly. 

I think Cochrane is being a little too dismissive of the "string of negative shocks" idea. My suspicion is that a global financial crises can circle the world like a tsunami, rippling out from America and triggering crises in Europe, Japan, and China that then impact the U.S. a few years later.

But I agree that New Keynesian models are very stylized and opaque. It's easy to solve them, but not at all easy to tell what real-world economic forces correspond to the thing you're solving. New Keynesian models basically sacrifice realism for tractability, a sacrifice imposed on them - it seems to me - by the need to follow the kludgey DSGE modeling format. For example, we know that prices don't get set by Calvo pricing, and yet many New Keynesian models have this feature.

Anyway, Cochrane prefers a different explanation for the long post-crisis stagnation: an iatrogenic one. "Iatrogenic" is a medical term for when an attempt at treating a person causes even greater harm (such as when a routine operation paralyzes a patient). Cochrane supports the idea that government policies that arose in response to what would otherwise have been a short, sharp crash in 2009 ended up making things far worse by causing a long drawn-out stagnation. However, he admits some problems with this view as well:

Like the new-Keynesians,  I won't be that specific here about just why consumption fell so drastically in the financial crisis...From [my] perspective, consumers realized in fall 2008, that this recession was going to last forever rather than bounce back quickly, and they adjusted consumption downward accordingly. They were right. Just how they knew, when all the Government's forecasters thought we would quickly bounce back, is an interesting question.  Surely, my litany of free-marketer's complaints did not obvioulsy get suddenly worse in October 2008, just coincident with a run in the shadow banking system.  Well, maybe not so surely. Maybe consumers thought, we're in a horrible banking crisis, and our government is likely to prolong this one with ham-handed policies just like they did in the 1930s. But that's pretty speculative. And I do think (just as speculatively) there was a run in the shadow banking system, effective risk aversion spiked, and the financial crisis was more than just a signal of bad policy to come.  

But all that is a topic for another day...

Actually, I think there are two other big problems with the "iatrogenic" explanation of our stagnation.

First, and most importantly, there's the international aspect of the economy. Here's Cochrane's picture of how American consumption has "downshifted" since 2008:



A graph of GDP will look the same. But look at any rich country, and chances are that it experienced the same kind of "permanent downshift" in its consumption after 2008! European countries. Japan. Or look at the graphs for other countries that experienced financial crises - Japan and Sweden after 1990. Korea after 1997. And so on. They all look pretty much the same - a long trend, followed by an abrupt fall, followed by a resumption of growth at the previous trend but at a lower level. Here are two from Sweden and Korea:




Looks familiar, right?

How plausible is it that expectations of future government policy (and government policy itself) would react in exactly the same way all around the world? It does not seem very plausible to me, given the huge heterogeneity of governments and policies.

My second problem with the "iatrogenic" model is prices. Although (as Cochrane points out) the lack of deflation since 2009 is a problem for some New Keynesian models, the lack of inflation seems to me to be a problem for the kind of "permanent income" model that Cochrane prefers. In a simple Econ 102-type AD-AS model, if you have a negative shock to long-run supply (permanent income), prices have to rise rapidly at some point. The logic is simple: An impairment in productive capacity should cause shortages. But since the financial crisis, U.S. inflation has been very subdued:



Now, I realize that AD-AS logic is pretty simple. But I also know that it's very tricky and difficult to get macro models to tell you that a permanent supply shock has an impulse response on prices that never pokes its head above zero. You can do it, but it's my understanding that you need to use things like "news shocks" and other such assumptions about the timing of information arrival. It ends up looking pretty weird.

So I think that while there are definitely problems with the New Keynesian interpretation of the world, there are even more problems with the idea that government policy (and far-sighted citizens who guessed government policy years in advance) caused our long post-crisis stagnation. My intuition says the most likely explanation - unfortunately - is that there are some very deep things about how economies work that no macro model yet encompasses.

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Drug Companies: Stop Hiding Your Data

In one of the harsher comments to my earlier post on the use of "mystery placebos" in drug-company (and other) research, a post that got well over 32,000 visits, someone took me to task for alleging that pharmaceutical companies are evil, even though that's not what I said in the post. All I was trying to do with that post was call for a move toward standards for placebos, and also call for disclosure (by drug companies) of the ingredients of the placebos they manufacture for their own use, especially active placebos. The way things are now, nobody knows what's in a placebo except the drug companies, who aren't saying.

If I really wanted to show the pharma giants as evil, I'd have done a lot more than just write about lack of placebo standards. I'd have started by pointing to the disturbing pattern of research-hiding that characterizes drug-company research (the subject of today's post). Then I'd follow up with posts on defective protocol designs (this is practically a book), such as allowing test subjects to continue to take anxiolytics and other psychoactive drugs, on the side, while participating in SSRI efficacy research. (Or testing individuals for placebo-sensitivity and then removing sensitive individuals from studies before they begin.) Then I might talk about the completely bizarre practice of pooling results from different studies (studies that differ in the number of subjects, subject demographics, length of study, and other parameters), something FDA actually allows companies to do. I'd look at how GlaxoSmithKline suppressed suicide data on Paxil. Then I'd talk about illegal marketing of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics by Abbott and Johnson & Johnson, respectively. I'd talk about recent meta-studies that have shown that SSRIs like Prozac have no more efficacy than placebo, and less efficacy than certain older drugs, despite years of blatantly misleading propaganda to the contrary by Eli Lilly and others. (There's also the fact that SSRI studies have notoriously high drop-out rates, and most of the people who drop out do so either because the drugs didn't do anything or caused them to get worse. The drop-outs represent data that doesn't get reported.) And on and on.

But let's limit the discussion, today, to selective publication of research.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the major drug companies have engaged in a systematic practice of "hiding bad results." There is also a tendency of companies to spin-doctor research to show poor results in a favorable light.

In a 2010 study by researchers from the American University in Washington, D.C., the authors found:

Meta-analyses of FDA trials suggest that antidepressants are only marginally efficacious compared to placebos and document profound publication bias that inflates their apparent efficacy. These meta-analyses also document a second form of bias in which researchers fail to report the negative results for the prespecified primary outcome measure submitted to the FDA, while highlighting in published studies positive results from a secondary or even a new measure as though it was their primary measure of interest.

See "Efficacy and Effectiveness of Antidepressants: Current Status of Research,"  Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 2010;79:267–279, full PDF here.
 
A German study (published in 2010) found that company-funded trials are four times more likely to find evidence in favor of the trial drug than studies funded by other sponsors.

Another study, published in 2003, found: "Studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies were more likely to have outcomes favouring the sponsor than were studies with other sponsors (odds ratio 4.05; 95% confidence interval 2.98 to 5.51; 18 comparisons)."

In 2008, Erick Turner, M.D. and colleagues looked at 74 studies on antidepressants submitted to the FDA. They found that only half the studies were positive (showing good efficacy results). The unfavorable studies either weren't published (22 studies) or were spin-doctored to portray the results positively (11 studies) even though the results were actually poor. See "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy" (New England Journal of Medicine 2008; 358:252-260).

The Turner study found that if you looked only at published literature, you'd get the impression that 94% of trials conducted were positive. But if you take into account unpublished as well as published studies, only 51% of all studies are positive (for the 74 studies they looked at, on a variety of antidepressant drugs).

In 2004, then-NY-Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against GlaxoSmithKline, saying the firm committed fraud by withholding negative information and misrepresenting data on its antidepressant Paxil. Last July, the suit was settled for $3 billion, the largest drug-company settlement in history.   It's important to note that GlaxoSmithKline didn't just cut a settlement deal. They actually pled guilty to the charges.

In 2007, FDA visited GlaxoSmithKline's Research Triangle Park (North Carolina) offices after reports in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that Avandia, GSK’s popular diabetes drug, increased patients' rate of heart attack by 43 percent. FDA found that GSK failed to report information on nine studies related to Avandia. FDA subsequently forced the company to respond with a plan to ensure that all relevant studies are reported to the government in the future. (See news account here.)

Meanwhile the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, in conjunction with researchers from Canada, France and England, found that major drug companies routinely hid negative clinical trial information about 50 percent of the time. 

Is there a pattern here? I think so.

It's clear that FDA needs to make available all drug company studies (after they've been submitted to FDA) online, on its web site, as a public service. This would effectively cause all studies, good and bad, to be published (to the Web). We shouldn't have to rely on a subculture of drug injury lawyers to dig up, and air out, pharma research through expensive deposition and discovery processes. Nor should it be necessary for anyone to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get drug-company-submitted research out of the Food and Drug Administration. This is information that needs to be exposed, not hidden.

It's very simple. What the drug companies need to do is report their findings -- 100 percent of the findings 100 percent of the time. If they won't do it, FDA should do it for them. Otherwise consumers and legitimate scientists alike are being misled. Bamboozled. Not by accident but deliberately. That's what the data show.

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Test-Driving Adobe's Business Catalyst

Even though I work for Adobe, I want to give as honest an appraisal of Business Catalyst as possible here. So I need to stress up front that these are my opinions, not those of the company.

Normally, I spend my time using and/or documenting Adobe's 800-pound gorilla of the Web Content Management space, Adobe CQ. If you're not familiar with Adobe CQ, it's one of the most elaborate, flexible, and feature-rich enterprise-grade content management systems in the world, and it comes with an almost unfathomably elaborate marketing and analytics capability (I said almost, okay? it's fathomable), so that if you're a McDonalds or an Audi (or other Fortune 100 customer) and you need to roll out a worldwide website in 100 languages, and do all the things McDonalds, Audi, etc. do on their websites, Adobe CQ is what you need. There's nothing it can't do. Whatever it can't do, you didn't want.

By the same token, though, if you're just a little guy (maybe you have an art supply store and you just want a basic e-commerce site that will perform well under light to moderate load), Adobe CQ is massive overkill. Let's put it this way. If you want to become a private pilot, you don't start out in a Boeing 747. Right? You need something smaller, lighter.


Business Catalyst supports in-context editing, which lets you work on individual page elements in WYSIWYG fashion.

Business Catalyst is Adobe's SaaS offering in the "we host it, you build it with our great tools" CMS space. It combines website hosting with a rich design-and-management application layer so that you can create, publish, and manage a moderately complex business site (with newsletters, forums, blogs, events, etc.) without buying any servers and without trying to hook up so-and-so's CMS package with this or that ISP's hosting options. With Business Catalyst, you create and roll out your site in the cloud using browser-based UIs. Adobe hosts your site and you pay a fee ranging from $6.59 (yes, just $6.59) to $38.88 a month (with a 15% discount for biyearly payment-in-advance) to manage it yourself using Business Catalyst's tools.

At the $6.59/month level, you get all the usual page creation and management features you'd expect in any CMS these days (including in-page/in-context editing) along with sophisticated site analytics, a form builder, site search, and phone and tablet support, plus 100MB of storage and 1GB/mo. bandwidth. At the high end ($38.88/mo.) you get a shopping cart, e-mail campaigns, forums, web apps, CRM features, social media integration, and quite a bit more, plus a gig of storage (not enough, I know) and terabyte bandwidth. To see the detailed feature breakdowns for the various packages, go here.

Space forbids a complete description of the UI in this blog post, but suffice it to say that in the high-end version of Business Catalyst you get good tools for managing blogs, events, photo galleries, news streams, media assets, comments, FAQ pages, ad rotators, and forums, plus a useful web form builder, tools for URL redirects and Secure Zones, and quite an easy menu-builder capability.

Unlike others in this space who give you a million pre-canned page templates to choose from but no control over raw HTML (here I'm thinking of Spruz, in particular; a horrendously ugly and clumsy offering, in my opinion), Business Catalyst allows you to drop down to raw-HTML, CSS, or JavaScript any time you want. Which is good, because BC doesn't come with a zillion pre-made templates. What it lacks in this department it makes up for in Adobe Muse (and Dreamweaver) integration, though, and also there's a devilishly clever Extract Template feature in the Pages area of the Site Manager, whereby you simply select two existing Pages from your site, click a button, and then the pages are compared and all common content is saved off as a Template.

What's not to like in this system? Workflow capability is spartan. The workflow system is more of a daisy-chained e-mail (and SMS) notification system with timeouts than a true workflow system. It lacks splits, joins, quorums, retries, custom tasks, an extensibility API, and other things I automatically think of when I hear "workflow system." Very simple (but useful) content-approval and customer inquiry workflows are available out of the box if you need them. But here's an example of what you can't do (and maybe this will give you an idea what a real workflow system can do): Suppose a new member joins your site and you want the successful registration of that new person to kick off a workflow that provisions the user with various types of resources, such as a rich profile page, an access-controlled (public/member/private) photo gallery of his/her own, and an upload/download area for arbitrary assets (PDF, .docx, .ppt, whatever). I didn't see a way to set that sort of thing up (with or without "workflows").

Membership-management capabilities, in general, seemed to me to be on the sparse side, so if your main goal is to set up an Association or fraternal-organization site, check Business Catalyst's features carefully before proceeding.

Another weakness is storage. On all the plans I saw, the max storage was shown as one gigabyte. I'm hoping that's a typo. Any serious social site these days needs terabyte storage. (Imagine that you have 10,000 members and they all want to post a video.) But maybe Business Catalyst (which after all is for building business sites) isn't intended to be that kind of site builder.

If you're simply interested in building a nice webfront for your catering business (or whatever), one gig of storage will do fine and Business Catalyst will not only meet your needs, it will probably shock you with its capabilities. (The e-commerce capabilities alone are untouchable at this price.) For any kind of serious membership site, though, you're going to need more than a gig of storage, and you'll want rich user partitions with granular access control, plus friends/followers capability, and probably lots else. If you have highly specific social-site requirements, you'll want to look very carefully at Business Catalyst's capabilities to see if they're in the box already, because frankly (this is another serious drawback) if you need to build what's not already in the box, you're not going to find much in the way of extensibility APIs to help you. 

The only other caveat worth mentioning is language support. BC currently comes in English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish versions. Nothing else.

Bottom line, if you're in the market for a moderately complex Ning or Elgg solution, you might want to take a look at the latest incarnation of Adobe Business Catalyst first. The pricing is excellent, the UIs are easy to learn, the feature list is long, and (no big surprise) the integration with other Adobe products, particularly Muse and Dreamweaver, is better than good. Extensibility isn't strong and the 1-gig cap on storage seems a bit odd, but aside from that, Business Catalyst can only be called an impressive offering, especially for small-business owners who need good e-commerce and customer engagement tools at a budget price.

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Waiting for Elsevier to fall

My partner Sally has been working on a mental illness memoir lately, and she keeps digging up really mind-blowing research papers online (like this one involving 45,570 Swedish conscripts, showing that cannibis is almost certainly a risk factor, in young Swedes at least, for later development of schizophrenia). The only trouble is, many of the better research articles Sally digs up are pay-per-view only, and cost a prohibitive $31.50 per PDF, thanks to the robber-barons of Elsevier. (When you need access to scores of these papers, it becomes prohibitive in a big damn hurry.)

The rapacious pricing tactics of Elsevier and other academic publishers (e.g. Springer, Wiley) have been under attack by the scientific research community for years. The folks at Elsevier have been roundly skewered for charging as much as 20019,70 Euro per year for subscriptions to scientific journals. You can find some outrageous sample prices here. The prices are beyond unreasonable. They can't be justified. At all. Ever. Anybody who says they can be justified has obviously never made a living as a periodical publisher before (as I have).

A year ago this month, Fields Award winner Tim Gowers posted a controversial blog slamming Elsevier (and its likes) for its unconscionable journal-pricing practices. Gowers made it known that he would henceforth boycott Elsevier by no longer submitting any of his own research papers to Elsevier-owned journals.

A day after the Gowers blog appeared, one of his readers, Tyler Neylon, set up a web page where other researchers could pledge to boycott Elsevier.

As of today, some 13,225 researchers have joined the Neylon petition. Meanwhile, the Open Access publishing movement (in existence for some time) seems to be approaching critical mass, finally, and it's clear that a Gladwell-style tipping point has either already been reached or soon will be. Once it is, we'll witness the sudden and long-overdue humbling of Elsevier and its cohort. It takes no clairvoyance whatsoever to see that before the dust settles, Elsevier will either be crippled or toppled altogether, never to return to its former stature, much as Wikipedia irreversibly vanquished the once lucrative print edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

All I can say is, it's about time. And good riddance.

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How to win arguments by pretending to be a simpleton

"You just got hustled for a wad of cash / Man whatcha gon do? Act a fool!"
- Ludacris

Michael Shedlock has a guide on "How to debate Paul Krugman". He endorses the approach of "Austrian" economist Hans Hermann-Hoppe, which is, in a nutshell, "Relentlessly pretend to be an ignorant simpleton." If you think I'm kidding, see what Shedlock and Hermann-Hoppe have to say:

Economist Hans Hermann-Hoppe explains the Right Way To Debate Paul Krugman in the following video. 

 

The video is a mere 63 seconds long. Here is the key snip. 

"It is very important in replies to people like Paul Krugman, that we don't get involved in technical details. Ask some questions almost like a child. Explain to me how increases in paper pieces can possibly make a society richer. If that were the case, explain to me why is there still poverty in the world? Isn't every central bank in the world capable of printing as much paper as they want? I am sure the guy cannot answer this type of question. Nobody can answer this type of question. We always get bogged down in technical details of his argument instead of always repeating this question: Please explain to me how a piece of paper can make society richer." 

Would that work?  

Krugman would respond with incomprehensible gibberish "for wonks only" as well as typical Keynesian nonsense about how paying people to dig holes and other people to fill them up would start a chain reaction of growth. 

A child would see the answer was preposterous, but not a trained economist, politician, or brainwashed academic. Paul Krugman, keynesian economists in general, politicians wanting a free lunch, and most academics are all incurable. 

Nonetheless, Hans Hermann-Hoppe's answer is indeed the correct one. By asking questions a child will understand, some non-brainwashed people will see Keynesian and Monetary stimulus for what they really are: economic stupidity.

Actually, feigning stupidity is often an effective tactic in an argument, especially when your opponent is interested in explaining an actual idea, and you're mainly interested in making your opponent angry. I've used the tactic once or twice myself, in fact, back in my college dorm days, to frustrate and exasperate a comparative literature major (frustrating Comp Lit majors being a social good in and of itself). The discussions would go like this:

Comp Lit major: "Noah, you are not going to solve the Problem of Agency in one night!" 

Noah: "OK OK, let's think concretely about this. What about an insurance agency?"

Comp Lit major: "ARGH, you are just not getting this at all!" (storms out of the room)

I never did find out what the Problem of Agency was...

Anyway, Hans Hermann-Hoppe thinks Paul Krugman is the Comp Lit major - a serious, sober, do-gooding nerd type - and all he has to do to score a win is make Krugman mad. Actually, it's probably more than that; he probably thinks that because the audience for these debates is (in his mind) mostly ignorant simpletons, that if he acts like an ignorant simpleton, he will resonate with the audience - he will seem to them to be one of their tribe - and Krugman will seem like an alien outsider, with his equations and his thought experiments and his other nerdy nerd stuff. "Go home and play with your slide rule, nerd! We Cool Guys know that printing little pieces of paper can never make a country richer! High five!"

However, "Triple H" (as Hans Hermann-Hoppe will henceforth be heralded) makes a slight mistake. He's using a trolling technique that is optimized for dorm-room BS-ing sessions, not for the modern media. The world of the modern media is slightly different; it tends to be written down, which changes the playing field in several ways. For example, it allows greater use of counter-trolling techniques, optimized for putting foolishness on the spot. Consider the following analogues to Triple H's argument:

"Explain how you can possibly cure diseases by eating little capsules filled with mold. If this were the case, couldn't we all be perfectly healthy just by letting our fruit sit in a closet for a week before we eat it?"

"Explain how you can possibly float just by heating up the air in a balloon. If this were the case, couldn't our tea kettles levitate?"

"Explain how you can possibly stay healthy by washing your hands with water. If this were the case, wouldn't people who drank out of rivers never get sick?

"Explain how you can possibly generate energy by touching two chunks of metal together. If this were the case, couldn't we power the world with a steel welding plant?"

...and so on. (Inserting a "Durr hurr!" at the end of each such example is optional.)

Another difference between modern media and dorm-room discussions is that we can link to stuff. For example, here's Paul Samuelson's famous 1958 paper on the "social contrivance of money". And I can also quote excerpts from that paper:

We then find this remarkable fact...society by using money will go from the non-optimal...configuration to the optimal...configuration...[T]he use of money itself can be regarded as a kind of social compact...Perhaps the function of money...is to change [its] value as to create [the] optimal pattern of lifetime savings."

And I can also observe that this paper is incredible famous, and I can ask Triple H (and Michael Shedlock): Why don't you know this paper?

And I can also observe that this paper is very mathematically easy, and I can ask Triple H and Michael Shedlock: Why can't you do some simple algebra?

...See what I did there?

Or if I want, I can link Triple H and Shedlock to Paul Krugman's parable of the baby-sitting co-op, a simple explanation of a second way in which printing paper money can create real wealth. And I can ask Triple H and Shedlock: Hey guys, why can't you understand that simple example? It would only take you an hour - three hours, if you're not too bright - and understanding it could make a huge difference in the performance of your financial portfolios.

In the modern media, see, people have a little more time to read over the arguments, and think about them, than in a college dorm. Not a lot more, but a little more. (They are also considerably less stoned. I hope.) This little bit of extra time and thought allows us, after listening to Triple H and Michael Shedlock, to say: "Wait...Simply refusing to exert the mental effort to understand Krugman does not constitute a rebuttal of Krugman. 'I am dumb, therefore you are wrong' is actually a pretty silly thing to say."

Because you should always remember: On the internet, for every caricature, there is an equal and opposite caricature. Troll at your own risk.

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What Ostracism Really Means

It's a little embarrassing, but I only recently learned what ostracism is. Or used  to be.

Ostracism (Greek ὀστρακισμός, ostrakismos) was a formal political practice, in ancient Athens, by which citizens of the city-state would in essence hold a referendum on who was the biggest jerk in town. It was a democratic system for excluding someone from a social group by means of ballotized rejection.

The yearly ostacism would be kicked off in the Athenian assembly. The question was put in the sixth of the ten months used for state business under the democracy (January or February in the modern Gregorian Calendar).  If the assembly voted "yes", an ostracism (involving participation by all interested citizens in Athens) would be held two months later, in roped-off sections of the agora. 

Voting tokens from ancient Athens.

The word ostracism is derived from ostraka (singular ostrakon , ὄστρακον), which refers to the pottery shards that were used as voting tokens. Broken pottery was, of course, abundant and could be used as a kind of scrap paper. (Papyrus from Egypt was far too rare and costly to be used in a disposable way.)

Athenians would scratch the name of any citizen they wished to expel on pottery shards and deposit them in urns. Officials would count the ostraka thus submitted and sort the names into separate piles. The person whose pile contained the most ostraka (the unfortunate "winner") would be banished from Athens for ten years, providing at least 6,000 votes were cast. There was no formal charge, and no defense could be mounted by the person expelled
There is evidence that ostracism was often imposed on unpopular politicians. In one anecdote about Aristides the Just (who was ostracised in 482), an illiterate citizen who did not recognize Aristides in person came up to ask him to write the name "Aristides" on his ostrakon. When Aristides asked why, the man replied it was because he was sick of hearing him being called "the Just."

Perhaps the time has come to institute ostracism once again, starting in America's one and only true city-state, Washington D.C. It would be interesting to know who would get the boot. A Supreme Court judge? A Senator? A cabinet official? Somebody higher?

I say we run the experiment, using Washington as a pilot program, with the idea of rolling it out nationwide if it proves a popular success. Then it could be scaled horizontally to include more than one jerk per city. They could all be rounded up and sent to Afghanistan, where they belong.

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Are You a JavaScript Guru? Try This Test

Think you know JavaScript? Really? Are you sure? Try the following quick quiz. Guess what each expression evaluates to. (Answers given at the end.)

1. ++Math.PI
2. (0.1 + 0.2) + 0.3 == 0.1 + (0.2 + 0.3)
3. typeof NaN
4. typeof typeof undefined
5. a = {null:null}; typeof a.null;
6. a = "5"; b = "2"; c = a * b;
7. a = "5"; b = 2; c = a+++b;
8. isNaN(1/null)
9. (16).toString(16)
10. 016 * 2
11. ~null
12. "ab c".match(/\b\w\b/)


Answers:

1. 4.141592653589793
2. false
3. "number"
4. "string"
5. "object"
6. 10
7. 7
8. false
9. "10"
10. 28
11. -1
12. [ "c" ]

For people who work with JavaScript more than occasionally, score as follows:

(correct answers: score)

12: MASTER OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE
10 - 11: SAVANT
8 - 9: EXPERT
5 - 7: KNOWLEDGEABLE
< 5: RUSTY


 
NOTES

The answer to No. 2 is the same for JavaScript as for Java (or any other language that uses IEEE 754 floating point numbers), and it's one reason why you shouldn't use floating point arithmetic in any serious application involving monetary values. There's an interesting overview here.

No. 6: In an arithmetic expression involving multiplication, division, and/or subtraction, if the expression contains one or more strings, the interpreter will try to cast the strings to numbers first. If the arithmetic expression involves addition, however, all terms will be cast to strings.

No. 7: What you've got here is "a, post-incremented, plus b," not "a plus pre-incremented b."

No. 9: toString( ) takes a numeric argument (optionally, of course). An argument of "16" means base-16, hence the returned string is a hex representation of 16, which is "10." If you write .toString(2), you get a binary representation of the number, etc.

No. 10: 016 is octal notation for 14 decimal. Interestingly, though, the interpreter will treat "016" (in string form) as base-ten if you multiply it by one.

Don't feel bad if you didn't do well on this quiz, because almost every question was a trick question (obviously), and let's face it, trick questions suck ass. OTOH, if you did well on a test that sucks, you should take full credit. It means you're no fool.

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