I make no money from blogging, hardly anyone reads my blog and if I ever run/hold a significant public position my blog will probably hurt my job chances. So why blog? I can think of three main reasons.

1) Focus my thoughts – Ideas come through writing and articulating my thoughts can help me give them shape and depth. But I could just as easily do this in a journal, which leads to:

2) Vanity – I can show off on my blog. Because I’m bright but not that bright and want to distinguish myself from the crowd. The blog gives me a place to share what I’ve been thinking about, and to show off how much I read and know.

3) Historical record – I can track my intellectual progress and what I thought was interesting at various points in time.

"He refused to go to college classes and focused his relentless will on bending the Worcester Polytechnic Institute to his purposes. "I said, ‘I’m paying my tuition to have the entire faculty as business consultants. I recognize that is not consistent with your model, which is, You know better than I and I have to take this much math and these electives, and all that stuff is valuable, but right now I’m focused, I’m allowed to make a rational decision, I can pay you this tuition and avail myself of this extraordinary faculty, but I’m not going to waste my time in class because the opportunity costs would be too high."

"He" is Dean Kamen.

On the topic of good questions to ask other people. I would say that I have awesome ideas and never follow through on them. An old teacher compared me to a Tesla coil, fizzing and sparking in twenty different directions but not very far in any of them.

Michigan won the game on the defensive end. They got behind early mixing man-to-man and zone so in the second half they went exclusively with a 1-3-1 zone. Interestingly when the ball got below the level of the top of the key their zone looked much more like a 2-3 with the baseline player as the permanent ball-side wing, the center dropping down to the block and the weakside wing dropping down and the weakside guard sliding in. Then when the ball was rotated back to the top Michigan rotated back into a 1-3-1, rendering UCLA’s zone rotation ineffective. Michigan also did an excellent job of keeping hands in the passing lane – one easy way to beat the 1-3-1 is through quick passing but they weren’t able to do that yesterday night. UCLA had 17 turnovers and often settled for contested 15-footers, including a contested floater by Shipp when they were down 2 with a minute to go and needed a better shot. UCLA’s weakside players were not very active – when they were they often got fed for layups or penetration opportunities because of a rushed closeout.

Michigan’s "1-3-1 into a 2-3" is a really good zone to play if you have one excellent, long defender and an active center, because the long defender can be the strong side wing every time. Like every zone but particularly this one, the weakness is rebounding on the weakside. Of 32 missed shots at the UCLA basket, UCLA grabbed 15 to Michigan’s 17. John Beilein’s teams are usually poor at rebounding – West Virginia was a horrible rebounding team under Beilein but an outstanding one a season later under Bob Huggins.

I thought Michigan was very sloppy in the halfcourt. Their screeners often missed UCLA defenders or took a bad angle into the screen. and defensive pressure forced them far away from the basket, making it extremely difficult for them to run their offense. Fortunately UCLA’s defense broke down after a few passes, because despite the haphazard formations, and their inability to run more than the same play over and over again, Michigan was able to get open looks at the basket. DeShawn Sims was the difference maker for Michigan. He made some very nice plays and hit a few fifteen foot jumpers. He finished the game 9-15 from the field, and the rest of the team shot 12-38 (31%). John Beilein, the Michigan coach, believes strongly in the power of the three-point shot, but his team shot only 5-20 from 3 today. If Michigan can add offensive power and rebounding skill to their already strong 1-3-1 defense, they will be a dangerous team later on in the season.

I’m convinced that the Big Three need to go into bankruptcy just so they can rid themselves of the unions… If I were Ford I wouldn’t want to keep my plants in Detroit either. The money quote:

Ford sources said it is the sort of plant the company wants in the United States, were it not for the United Auto Workers, which has historically opposed such extensive supplier integration on the factory floor.

Watch this amazing video (3 mins) of Ford’s most efficient plant, in rural Brazil. The accompanying article is here.

"Though Steve has studied subjects as diverse as quantum physics, classical philosophy, Latin, Greek, electrical engineering, communications theory, and the history of exploration, he has no college diploma, and this makes him feel somewhat inadequate and defensive. "The blessing part of high intelligence is that it seems that you’re equipped with a telescope and a microscope, and other people have binoculars and a magnifying glass. The curse part is probably when you have a feeling that there is so much that you could be doing but haven’t lived up to the possibilities. "It’s easy, when you’re interested in lots of things, to get sidetracked. You start studying one thing, and that leads to the next thing, which is also interesting. Before you know it, months have gone by and you’re very far afield. I enjoy the sharp upward learning curve associated with new knowledge, but, frankly, I often become bored with the tedious plateau associated with expertise." Unfortunately, Steve says, expertise is far more marketable. "You want to find work where you can utilize your talents," he says, "but how do you put on a resume that you’re probably going to see things more clearly, have better ideas for strategies, have a better overall view than anybody else in the entire company? And do people really want somebody like that? Highly intelligent people are not seen as team players. They’re seen as loners with their own ideas, as people who are difficult to deal with. Some people get more despondent and isolated as they age, and it’s very, very difficult. Others take that as a challenge–how to interact with other people, how to talk with other people. I kind of took that route. I took a lot of drama courses, read a lot of things. If you become actively hostile against the environment around you, that’s like a certain kind of hell."

That’s from an old Esquire article about four incredibly bright individuals. I think the solution is to have people work for you, not the other way around.

For a good summary of the arguments for and against bailing out the auto industry, see Becker and Posner. It’s rare to see them disagree; usually they take the same side of an argument.

I am against bailing out the auto companies. Bankruptcy should mean that you’ve run out of money and you should try doing something else. I am for unemployment and trade assistance of fired GM employees. There’s no reason to give more money to companies that continually made bad decisions and have lost market share.

How can you identify good teachers before you hire them? Could you or I design a written exam that would weed out the good teachers from the bad, or does the test medium make that task impossible?

How different would schools look if you designed curriculum to make students smarter, not more knowledgeable? Especially if you could teach students to overcome their natural cognitive biases.

Why has no one started a company hiring amazing teachers and getting them to teach video lectures to thousands of students at a time? We have the technology to make it work. I feel like teaching shoud be scalable, obviously you have to have someone watch the people in the classroom. Yet most people would reject this idea outright. If the teachers are good enough (if you’re picking the best ones in the country) the kids will pay attention, even if he’s thousands of miles away.

Economists teach Ricardian equivalence, the idea that when government spends money, someone must pick up the tab. Is it fair to vote to issue bonds now when the people who will pay off the bonds thirty years down the road are not yet old enough to vote on the matter? For that matter government borrowing Ricardian equivalent, or does it generate enough extra revenue to pay for itself later?

Does pessimism cause migraines?

Is it right, or desirable, that markets are so big now that one fake press release can wipe out $2.5 billion in net worth? The article is old but this happened again recently with a recycled United Airlines article.

Why do schools blow so much money on sports programs? Sports are meaningless. Yet if someone at your school can cure cancer, they’ve done amazing good for the world.

The University of Chicago in the 60′s and 70′s had the absolute smartest economics and finance people in the world – Milton Friedman, Myron Scholes, Friedrich von Hayek, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, Eugene Fama, George Stigler, and more. Does such an amazing concentration of people exist in any field today? Could government get such a group to assemble (isn’t this a public good)?

Portfolio theory suggests that it’s very difficult to outperform the market as a whole, thus you should buy a whole bunch of index or no-load mutual funds and hold them for a long time. Yet when you buy an index fund you are buying a small portion of thousands of firms. If more and more people are buying index funds, is shareholder responsiblity/oversight diluted?

“I do feel bad about that trophy I threw in the Mississippi, because you don’t want to pollute an important, historic waterway,” he said. “But I don’t want any of those trophies. I appreciate the gesture, but a coaching award distracts from the essence of a coach’s job, which is to educate the students. You can only justify the existence of a team at a college campus if being on the team benefits the athletes’ educational experience."

That is Tom Donnelly, the track and field coach at Haverford, who represents everything I believe about coaching and athletics at the college level. I’ll write more about collegiate athletics when I have more time.

Fascinating Michael Lewis article about three guys who shorted every financial firm involved in the subprime crisis going back to 2004. Hat tip to EconLog.

Dennis Litsky, founder of the Met Schools, talks about his vision for school.Three days a week are in the classroom and two at internships in the community. The school has much higher attendance, graduation, and college acceptance than the surrounding Rhode Island schools. More here.

New movie from the director of Trainspotting called Slumdog Millionaire, about an Indian slum child who wins a million dollars on a game show.