Credit Where Credit is Due

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Remember "It's the economy stupid?" The first President Bush certainly does, because that phrase famously summed up the soon-to-be President Clinton's campaign focus in beating him. Here's the thing – Clinton ended up getting too much credit for the economic recovery that occurred during his first term, and Bush-the-first didn't get enough credit for making the tough and politically disastrous policy decisions that kick started the recovery in the first place.

Why bring that up now? Because it's interesting to see how President Obama is blamed for things that he literally has no control over, like high gas prices, but gets no credit for things he had a direct hand in, like an improving economy. He is also being criticized for budget deficits that were largely made necessary by the policy decisions of his predecessor, President Bush-the-second. Could Obama have made policy choices that kept the deficit from growing as much as it did in his first term? Sure, but many economists think that would have been much worse for the economic recovery we're seeing. In fact some argue that his policies weren't aggressive enough – that larger short-term deficits might have led to a faster, steeper economic recovery. 

What further complicates the issue in this election cycle is that President Obama came into office as the US economy was in an unprecedented-in-our-lifetime freefall. In the same way that it's difficult to prove a negative, it's also difficult for a sitting President prove that the economy could have been in worse shape if his policies had been different. Quite frankly it's easier for a challenger to say that things could/should have been much better and that it's the President's fault that they aren't; he literally doesn't have to prove it since it's a matter of opinion.  That's how Clinton took out Bush Sr. and that's how Romney is trying to take out Obama. 

It remains to be seen if the recent economic improvement will be enough to convince voters that Obama is worth keeping around. If it's not, Romney will inheret a growing economy and unless he really screws up he'll be given far more credit for it than he deserves.

We’re #79!

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According to this website Wake Forest University is the 79th most expensive university in the country based on total cost (Tuition + Room and Board + Required Fees). Wake's total for the 2012-13 school year was $54,860. Other notables:

#1 – Sarah Lawrence College ($61,236)
#4 – Columbia University ($58,742)
#7 – Dartmouth University ($57,996)
#9 – University of Chicago ($57,711)
#36 – Boston College ($56,516)
#39 – Georgetown University ($56,362)
#48 – Penn ($56,106)
#53 – Duke University ($55,871)
#67 – Yale ($55,300)
#73 – Brown University ($55,016)
#78 – Notre Dame ($54,905)
#84 – Stanford ($54,508)
#85 – Harvard ($54,496)
#92 – University of Richmond ($53,970)
#98 – University of Miami ($53,102)

Know Whereof You Speak

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This video of a woman calling Obama a communist, and then not being able to explain why he was a communist, was an uncomfortable reminder of what it feels like to be caught using words beyond your comprehension when debating/arguing/philosophizing. When I was in high school I accused my brother of being a fascist and he realized pretty quickly that I didn't actually know what a fascist was, and so asked me to explain why he was a fascist.

Oops.

Let's just say I've done a much better job since then of not using adjectives I don't actually understand.

Minds Like Empty Rooms

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Harper Lee, in a letter to Oprah Winfrey about her love of reading books, talks about working to learn and having things happen on soft pages:

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.

And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

Everybody Rides!

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Last week I was honored to be able to speak at the 2012 ConvergeSouth conference, and one of the real highlights was meeting Tracy Myers. If you live in the Piedmont Triad and have a functioning TV set you've probably seen one of Tracy's commercials, but you may be surprised to learn that he's probably the most aggressive social marketers in the local small business community. At ConvergeSouth he gave a very good keynote presentation about his marketing approach and it would behoove any small business person interested in using social media to build his brand to check out how Tracy is approaching it. 

Here's a fun fact: Meyers is a fellow resident of Lewisville.

Will Obamacare Lead to a Part Time Nation?

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Darden Restaurants, parent company of restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, is experimenting with limiting the hours worked by some of its employees to see if it can avoid provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – a.k.a. Obamacare – that go into effect in 2014:

Analysts say many other companies, including the White Castle hamburger chain, are considering employing fewer full-timers because of key features of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Under that law, large companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week.

If they do not, the companies can face fines of up to $3,000 for each employee who then turns to an exchange — an online marketplace — for insurance.

"I think a lot of those employers, especially restaurants, are just going to ensure nobody gets scheduled more than 30 hours a week," said Matthew Snook, partner with human-resources consulting company Mercer.

Darden said its goal at the test restaurants is to keep employees at 28 hours a week.

Analysts said limiting hours could pose new challenges, including higher turnover and less-qualified workers.

It would seem logical that employers would limit employees to part time status whenever possible in order to avoid fines for not providing health insurance, but on the other hand employers already spend much more than $3,000 per full time employee on health insurance – $10,522, of which the employees paid $2,204, according to the Society of Human Resource Management – so it would seem even more logical for them to stop providing health insurance altogether and lower their expenses by over 50% overnight. 

Here are some other questions:

  • How many companies, in industries that have not historically had high levels of part time employees, will start turning jobs that had been done by one full time employee into multiple positions filled by part timers? 
  • Are there provisions in the ACA that would prevent that?

 

Swiss Table Manners

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Found this list of Swiss table manners via the excellent Swiss Miss blog and think they're useful beyond the borders of Bankerland:

  1. Be on time.
  2. Always wait for everybody to be served before beginning to eat.
  3. All meals are usually started with the words "bon appetit" or "guten Appetit."
  4. If wine is served, wait until the host begins the toast.
  5. When toasting, chink your glass with everybody at the table and look each person in the eyes before drinking.
  6. Keep your wrists on the table, but never your elbows. Do not place your hands in your lap.
  7. Remember to always say please and thank you.
  8. French bread is always torn rather than cut with a knife.
  9. Lift your forearm from the table while moving the fork to your mouth.
  10. Use your left hand for the fork and the right for your knife and gently push food on your fork.
  11. If you are served cheese as a wheel, it should be cut from the centre into slices (as you would slice a pie).
  12. When finished, put your knife and fork parallel to one another on your place as if they were hands on a clock indicating 5:25. If you don't do this, your host will serve you more food.
  13. Finish everything you take on your plate. The Swiss do not appreciate waste.

Additional children rules: make sure children wash their hands before meals. Children generally must wait to leave the table until everyone is finished.

Good luck with that last one.

Where Efficiency Goes to Die

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"Baumol's disease" provides an interesting explanation for why service businesses like health care can only be so efficient. Can they be more efficient than they currently are? Absolutely, but any improvements made will not bring delivery costs down to the levels found on the product side of our economy. From Steven Pearlstein's column in the Washington Post:

No matter how innovative people were in coming up with new technology and new ways of organizing their work, Baumol and Bowen reasoned, it would still take a pianist the same 23 minutes to play a Mozart sonata, a barber 20 minutes to cut the hair of the average customer and a first-grade teacher 12 minutes to read her class “Green Eggs and Ham.” Based on this observation, the duo predicted that the cost of education and health care would inevitably outstrip the price of almost everything else.

Now, 50 years later, Baumol has updated and expanded his observation with a new book,“The Cost Disease,” which sheds some useful light on our current economic debate.

The basic facts are well-known to most Americans: Over the past 30 years, overall prices have risen 110 percent, median income has risen 150 percent, medical costs have risen 250 percent and college tuitions have risen 440 percent.

To hear the politicians talk, you’d think the rise in tuitions and medical costs was an American phenomenon. But as Baumol points out, the growth rates are pretty consistent across all developed countries.

The whole column is an interesting read, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Pearlstein's the Robinson Professor of Political and International affairs at my alma mater, George Mason University. 

The Glaze

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This quote from Mark Bowden's book Worm: The First Digital World War – a book I haven't read but  sounds very interesting so I'm going to get myself a copy – comes via Rex Hammock's blog:

Mark Bowden describes a phenomenon called “The Glaze” that “every geek has experienced” when talking about technology with a lay person: The unmistakable look of profound confusion and uninterest that descends whenever a conversation turns to the inner workings of a computer.

If you change the end of the sentence from "a computer" to "my job" that sentence perfectly describes the look on my family members' and friends' faces whenever I talk about work. There's a reason I've earned the title "King of BS (Boring S***).