NFL Super Bowl Ad on Player Safety

Slate reports that the NFL will air a 60-second ad during the Super Bowl focused on player safety:

The NFL, we learned Tuesday in the New York Times, will air a 60-second Super Bowl commercial about player safety. As with most NFL-produced moving images, the house ad will no doubt be slick and compelling. It’s directed by Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg, and sounds highish in concept: a moving timeline of NFL history in which one era digitally morphs into the next during the course of a single kick return, projecting a seamless advance in player safety from the days of the flying wedge to the leather helmet to the single-bar facemask to the horse-collar tackle. Actors portraying NFL greats like Gale Sayers and Ollie Matson make appearances. No word on whether Kevin Everett does too.

There is no way this won’t come off as a bit glib. I am sure the ad will have all the spick and span of a Nike commercial, but is the NFL tooting its horn about advancements in player safety really all that different from Apple posting videos on its website about improved supplier responsibility? We all know that football is a dangerous, debilitating sport, and that talented athletes get paid millions of dollars to trash their bodies for the enjoyment of fans and enrichment of owners. It’s not a particularly complex equation.

One wonders what the NFL plans to do with its other 90 seconds of free ad time during the game.

 

So Mitt’s a Mormon

Rick Perlstein of Rolling Stone says Romney’s religion doesn’t matter:

I’ve never been impressed with the argument that Mitt Romney makes for a weak Republican nominee because conservatives don’t like him. That’s not how that party works. Like they say, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” Don’t believe me? Think back four years. When the race was still up in the air, the venom aimed at McCain was ten times worse than anything being suffered by Mitt. I collected the stuff back then: Rush Limbaugh said McCain threatened “the American way of life as we’ve always known it”; Ann Coulter said he was actually “a Democrat” (oof!); an article in the conservative magazine Human Events called him “the new Axis of Evil”; and Michael Reagan, talk radio host and the 40th president’s son, said “he has contempt for conservatives, who he thinks can be duped into thinking he’s one of them.”…

Consider that little more than a generation ago, Catholics had it even worse than Mormons do now. “Theological qualms”? Try this one on for size: Once upon a time many, if not most, Protestant fundamentalists identified the Roman Catholic Church as nothing less than the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth – the dreaded “Whore of Babylon” described in Revelation 17 and 18. More prosaically, they identified Catholics as an alien force. Billy Graham reassured his followers in 1960 that it was legitimate to vote against Catholic John F. Kennedy out of religious prejudice, because the Roman Catholic Church “is not only a religious but also a secular institution, with its own ministers and ambassadors.”

Perlstein is right that Romney’s Mormonism won’t severely hurt his chances at the presidency, but he’s wrong about the reason. Perlstein says the conservative right will come around to Romney in time, his religion notwithstanding, and that given the choice between him and Obama, he will be their clear favorite. It is electorally flattering to the Christian right to claim that major elections hinge on how much they are willing to tone down their bigotry, but it doesn’t line up with the facts.

Romney’s success so far has been about getting out the vote, winning his core groups (moderates, seniors, and women), and not losing by too much among Newt Ginrich and Rick Santorum’s core groups (evangelicals and tea partiers). Romney is projected to win comfortably in Florida — and eventually the nomination — by executing on that strategy.

The Christian far right is a strange and powerful force in American politics, to be sure. They are vocal and well organized, and they don’t pull punches, as John McCain can attest. But they are also electorally incoherent. Newt Gingrich — a Washington-insider millionaire with a major political scandal and two divorces to his name — was the big winner among the evangelical voters of South Carolina. We have seen these kinds of results in state primaries before, but we have also seen that over the long haul, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and the people who think like them just don’t have that much sway over presidential races.

Romney is a Winner, and Rich

PPP reports that Romney is headed for a solid win in Florida this evening:

One thing Romney did a great job of was getting his voters out early. With the third of the electorate who have already cast their ballots he leads 45-32. That means Gingrich would have to win election day voters by somewhere in the 6-8 point range to pull off the Florida upset, but we find that Romney still has a 36-30 advantage with those are waiting to vote tomorrow.

Romney will win in Florida tomorrow because he’s winning his core groups of support by wide margins, while holding Gingrich to single digit advantages with his key constituencies. Romney is winning moderates by 39 (53-14), seniors by 12 (46-32), and women by 12 (42-30). Meanwhile Gingrich is only up 8 with Tea Partiers (39-31) and 6 with Evangelicals (38-32), groups he won by huge margins in South Carolina.

Romney’s electoral strategy has been pretty straightforward thus far, as one might expect from a pre-primary favorite: get out the vote, and dominate the core groups. Gingrich has been the one consistently resorting to the guerrilla tactics, and I suppose you have to give him credit for sticking this close for this long. One of the most intriguing parts of the PPP analysis, however, is this:

The hubbub over Romney’s tax returns early last week may have enhanced his chances in the state. The truth is that being wealthy and successful is not a liability with Republican voters- it’s a selling point. We find that 66% of primary voters have a favorable opinion of ‘rich people’ to only 8% with a negative opinion of them. All the awareness of how rich Romney is may have sent Florida Republicans a message that Romney is someone who knows what he’s doing.

Even if this weren’t true about Republican voters, I think it was still a smart move on Romney’s part to release his tax returns. Anyone who is aware that a) Mitt Romney is rich, and b) tax rates mathematically correspond to levels of income, should be able to deduce that Mitt Romney only pays a 13 or 14% tax rate. Concealing the numerical value of what he pays in taxes would have given fodder to a populist (albeit disingenuous) rant by Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum against wealthy yankee elites. But now, the news is out and people will soon forget about it. And as PPP’s data shows, there are a whole lot of people who simply like that Romney is rich. Perhaps Gingrich and Santorum should release their tax returns, too.

Apple’s Greatest Innovation

MIC Gadget has pictures and video of thousands of workers lining up on the streets outside the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, China. The iPhone 5 is about to go into production, and so this plant (and many more like it) needs lots of workers. Foxconn and Apple have come under heavy criticism lately for the poor working conditions at these manufacturing facilities, but of equal note (and perhaps greater importance for those interested in the economics of Apple products) is the compensation these workers generally receive:

…Foxconn is working with the city of Zhengzhou to double the size of the workforce at its facility there, recruiting an additional 100,000 employees. Well, these people saw the job advertisement posted by the Zhengzhou government in the city which showed the salary at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory is 1650 yuan (US$261) for basic salary, and the salary would be increased to 2400 – 3200 yuan (US$379-$506) after the appraisal. What’s more, workers do not need to pay additional money for dormitory and food. Foxconn incorporates the food and housing allowance into the basic salary. So, this attracted thousands of young job seekers to deliver their resumes to the Foxconn representatives.

If there were some way to get American workers to take this kind of salary, you would solve unemployment and outsourcing relatively quickly. Of course, there isn’t a way to do that, and that’s probably a good thing. Still, it is remarkable to look at these numbers and think about the duality of the world’s greatest corporation.

On one hand, Apple is one of the most revered technology companies in history. Steve Jobs is often thought of as the greatest inventor since Henry Ford. Apple’s rare combination of creative talent and unconventional business practices have been the subject of countless books and articles. Yet one of the details that often goes unmentioned in discussions about Apple’s ever-expanding market share in its various product categories, is the dumbfoundingly crude nature of its manufacturing processes.

The economics are quite simple, if jarring. Apple redesigns the hardware of the iPhone almost every year, at a tremendous cost. Since its introduction in 2007, the retail price has steadily dropped to a level ($199 with a mobile contract) that lots of people can afford. The phone is also available now on three different mobile carriers in the U.S., and may more abroad. So what you have is a device that takes a lot of time and energy to redesign and revamp on a recurring basis, being sold at a highly competitive price point in scores of countries across the globe, with a generous degree of consumer choice in mobile contract options. The result? Lots of market share. But how do they do it? That’s always the question with Apple.

Well, this is how they do it. There is a lot of remarkable innovation packed into Apple’s products — no one can doubt that. But there is also a lot of economic ugliness that goes on behind the curtain.

A Pill for Your Moral Ills

Peter Singer has a really interesting piece in “The Stone” on the notion of medically curtailing immoral behavior:

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched. If so, would people choose to take it? Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others? Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected…

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act. If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway. In any case, whether or not we have free will, we may soon face new choices about the ways in which we are willing to influence behavior for the better.

So on one view, all decisions are rooted in biochemical processes, meaning that we don’t really have free will, meaning that a drug to alter our moral behavior wouldn’t undermine free will. On another view, not all decisions are rooted in biochemical processes, meaning that there are naturally occurring differences in the way that different individuals express their free will. On this second view, there is no universal standard of free will, and so to alter someone’s brain chemistry doesn’t cancel out their free will, it just changes it. But in what way?

In order to prescribe any sort of medication, there must be a settled concept of what the desired outcome is. What will the patient look like when he is cured? When you treat a sinus infection, the desired outcome is for the sinuses to clear up. When you treat cancer, it is for the cancer to go away. But when you treat the brain chemistry underlying moral decision making, what does it look like to be cured of immorality? In order to be able to recognize this state, we would need to have a shared concept of what is a proper manner of expressing one’s free will. We would all have to agree, that is, on a universal moral code of conduct.

This is conceivable within the scope of the examples Singer uses; a truck driver who runs over an innocent child is clearly not acting in a moral way. But what about a teenager selling pot? What about a financial trader selling bad assets? What about a vindictive prison guard? What is dangerous — or immoral — enough to warrant behavior-altering treatment, and what is tolerable conscious behavior?

Part of the difficulty in positing a treatment for morality is that you have to first conclusively define immorality as a disease. That is a daunting task. Cancer has been cancer all through the ages, but morality has changed as our cultures and values have evolved. Several hundred years ago, if a woman was raped it was often she who was punished. Several hundred years from now, who rightly knows what society will define as moral or punishable?

Cancer is biological, so it must be treated biologically. Morality is cultural, so the only proper way to treat it is through social mechanisms. It is jaded — and in my view, empirically incorrect — to say that you cannot legislate morality. That is, in any case, where we must start. Better laws, purer lawmaking, and cleaner enforcement tend to steer morality on course. There will always be sociopaths out there, and I don’t suspect there is much that society can do about that. But the more germane question is this: if you live in a country where the government openly encourages infanticide as a means of population control, is it really so outlandish that a truck driver might run over a child?

Using Drones for Good

In a Times Op-Ed this morning, Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis discuss the humanitarian uses of drone technology:

With drones, we could take clear pictures and videos of human rights abuses, and we could start with Syria…

Imagine if we could watch in high definition with a bird’s-eye view. A drone would let us count demonstrators, gun barrels and pools of blood. And the evidence could be broadcast for a global audience, including diplomats at the United Nations and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court.

This seems to go a step beyond tracking suspected criminals with GPS, which was recently struck down by the Supreme Court in a domestic criminal case. So an argument for drone-spying has to turn on the premise that domestic laws don’t apply, or that we are at war with the country being spied on in some recognizable fashion (thus meaning domestic laws don’t apply). Sniderman and Hanis have a response to this, but I think it fails to convince:

This sounds a lot like surveillance, and it would be. It would violate Syrian airspace, and perhaps a number of Syrian and international laws. It isn’t the kind of thing nongovernmental organizations usually do. But it is very different from what governments and armies do. Yes, we (like them) have an agenda, but ours is transparent: human rights. We have a duty, recognized internationally, to monitor governments that massacre their own people in large numbers. Human rights organizations have always done this. Why not get drones to assist the good work?

Our agenda (however “we” is defined) might be human rights at the start, but who’s to say that if such a program became successful that it wouldn’t be applied towards others agendas? The reason to have international laws is precisely to prevent this type of argument, which says, “we have the moral high ground so we can do what we want.” It’s a slippery — and rather short — slope from promoting human rights through illegal spying, to just regular old spying.

Is This Worse than the 1930s?

For England and Italy, at least, Paul Krugman argues that it is:

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

The interesting part of the response to the financial crisis has been the act of equating austerity with confidence. It might be reasonable to say that confidence is what is needed in times of economic downturn — whether or not that yields a particular policy preference — but it is bizarre to say, “confidence is what we need, so austerity is what we will enact.” Yet that was precisely the response of several European governments:

How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further? Confidence! “I firmly believe,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet — at the time the president of the European Central Bank, and a strong advocate of the doctrine of expansionary austerity — “that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today.”

Politicians and economic experts should generally refrain from giving policy rationales that verge on the overtly psychological, but if one is going to venture into those murky waters, at least get the logic right! The word “austerity,” no matter how you utter it, really doesn’t encourage confidence, and the systematic tightening of government services — often the inevitable result of austerity — is a self-esteem killer for a struggling economy.