Jonathan

Will Tony Blair’s Support for the U.S. Be His Undoing?

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Val e-diction asks this contrary question in his inaugural post, citing this Jerusalem Post column. The point is that Blair’s visceral pro-American orientation led him to offer early support for the war against Iraq, while Chirac and Schroeder have cynically opposed U.S. efforts in a way that may give them disproportionate bargaining power. The U.S. will thus have to pay off France and Germany to gain their cooperation, while Blair will gain nothing except the enmity of many of his Labour colleagues.

I doubt that this is how events will play out. Bush may decide that we don’t need the Euros (do we?). Blair’s political position may not suffer, especially if we defeat Iraq handily. Still, these concerns bear keeping in mind, particularly if the war goes badly.

Drifting Polls?

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William Sjostrom explains elegantly why opinion-poll results may show spurious variation over time and should not be taken at face value.

The Reviews Are In!

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Iain Murray (following Chad Dimpler) directs us to the latest release by one of the giants of our culture.

. . . Hasselhoff’s soothing voice- a voice that many compare to a polar bear mauling a box of weasels.

[. . .]

With every “Ooh Yeah”, “Baby” and “Whoa”, Dennis Handelshaft pushes his bowels to their very limit; what emerges is always solid.

Don’t miss it.

CNBC Doesn’t Get It

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It canceled the excellent Wall Street Journal editors’ talk show, the only TV show that I watched regularly. What a disappointment (and I’m not the only one who thinks so). Given the generally clueless, pointlessly argumentative, conventionally leftist journalism-school sensibility that pervades CNBC’s coverage, it was remarkable that the WSJ editors’ learned, civil, conservative discussions ever passed muster. And given the show’s uniqueness and obvious quality, the Investor’s Business Daily editorial attributing its cancelation to political bias at CNBC seems a likely explanation for what happened.

CNBC doesn’t understand its own business. They have a franchise in financial journalism but are pissing it away trying to be like CNN. Feh. I want information not intermediation. I want more straight business news and less politics and Beltway herd-wisdom. Enough talking heads, suck-up interviews with Hugo Chavez, and pointless soundbite exchanges between “experts” chosen mainly because they disagree with each other. Such dross is abundantly available elsewhere. CNBC’s edge came not mainly from analysis, but from unfiltered presentation of basic financial information: prices, govt statistical releases, consensus projections. The WSJ show, the only decent analysis CNBC had, was icing on the cake. How fitting that it was dropped and that the junk remains.

Increasingly, commercial television’s business model resembles the social model of an insecure teenager at an adult cocktail party: If you’re unable to say anything worth listening to, make yourself annoying enough and people will be forced to pay attention. However, given the expanding supply of news sources, this model is beginning to work as well in business as it does socially.

Decisionmaking Bias

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Megan McArdle blogged:

I’m hearing a fair number of comments along the lines of “Wow! She’s not jaw-droppingly hideous the way she said she was!” I don’t recall ever really mentioning my appearance. . . how did I convey the impression that I was 300 pounds and covered with warts? Of course, I suppose it’s better to set up low expectations than to disappoint.
This is a good illustration of a common decisionmaking bias that behavioral economists call anchoring. In this case, McArdle’s occasional self-deprecating wisecracks were the only information about her appearance that many readers had, and skewed their expectations in the direction of “low.” Some of those readers were therefore surprised to learn that she is actually quite attractive.

Other examples of anchoring abound. In my own experience, traffic became systematically faster on a stretch of local expressway when a “Minimum Speed 40” sign was removed. When I met women through personal ads, I found that any explicit mention in my advertisement of a personal characteristic that I considered negative, and wanted to avoid in prospective mates, was likely to generate at least one response from somebody who considered it positive. (For example, “dislikes Clinton” might have a brought a reply from a two-time Clinton voter.) The existence of anchoring bias implies, among other things, that it’s wise in negotiations to mention desirable, even exaggerated, outcomes and avoid mentioning undesirable ones (make low initial bids and high initial offers); that you should avoid joking about death or lawsuits with the doctor who is treating you in an emergency room; and that platitudes about accentuating the positive and minimizing the negative may have an empirical basis.