Archive for: Public Affairs

EconTalk (at www.econtalk.org) is among the most popular and respected podcasts on the web.  Voted Best Podcast in the 2008 Weblog Awards, it is hosted by Russ Roberts, Professor of Economics and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Posted weekly, the program usually features Roberts interviewing a distinguished economic thinker.  On February 8th, Roberts broke from this format to discuss his own thinking about why trade is good.  Drawing on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, 18th and 19th century respectively giants of economic thought, he explored how trade increases personal productivity by a factor of a hundred and more.  As he summed up, “Self-sufficiency [in a person, a tribe, or a country] equals poverty.” Read

I’m a movie fan. I’m also an Oscar fan. One of the compensations for cold winters was always waiting with anticipation for the Oscar nominations to come out, when I could compare the various nominees, agree or disagree with the picks, and try to guess which nominated movies were in serious contention. This year’s nominations came out last week, and I still can’t name all of the nominees for best film. There are simply too many of them. Trying to recognize the achievments of more films, the Academy has doubled the number of Best Film nominees, from five to 10 — thereby diminshing the attention paid to each of them.

Who can focus on 10 movies? Who can take seriously that long a list of “excellence” in one year? And who can look forward to an Academy Awards show that will be even longer than usual? The Academy’s decision to double the number of Best Film nominees is a classic mistake in messaging — a failure to recognize that less is more.

What we have here, as Strother Martin might have pointed out in Cool Hand Luke, is a failure to communicate.

Sometimes it’s not what you say, but who says it that matters.

At least that was the case in 1957 – two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were barred from Central High School – when Louis Armstrong gave one of his most notable performances.  But this wasn’t a musical riff.

According to a recent interview on National Public Radio, Larry Lubenow, a journalism student working at The Grand Forks Herald in Little Rock, AK, was sent to interview Armstrong about a concert.  Instead he got an (obscene) earful about politics and race relations that ultimately caught the attention of President Eisenhower. Read

We often see clients who ask us to defend them against studies that make unsupported connections between their products and  health or environmental claims.

Alex Lundry of TargetPointConsulting shows how scientific-looking charts can suggest outcomes that are nonsensical.  For example, the universe of data you select is critical.  (One of his charts shows that President Obama, when compared to every president going back to McKinley, is the all-time “pirate killer.”  His record is sadly diminished, however, when you go back to Jefferson and Madison.) Read

Does Goldman Sachs have a God problem? A God complex? An ungodly headache?

Goldman, once a venerable institution known for keeping close counsel, is now a lightning rod for populist criticism of the financial sector. And its latest public relations efforts don’t seem to be helping.

The bank’s very success – turning a profit in excess of $3 billion last quarter – is exacerbating the problem. Americans are in no mood to celebrate Wall Street success. With deepening bonus pools and bulked up compensation packages, Goldman isn’t winning any friends. Read