Times.konradturski.com - Political and Economic Commentary by a Postgrad in London

This is an equation, courtesy of a certain Robert H. Topel, published in the American Economic Review. What is x, subscript i, superscript jm? What does theta stand for? What on earth is big F? Sadly, Robert H. Topel refrains from explaining any of that. The exception is dotted z superscript jm, which is defined, of course, as the cost-sharing weighted average of five aforementioned skill groups.

Dear economists: purposefully making your papers absolutely unintelligible to all but the uninitiated just to prove how handy you are with the Greek alphabet and how proficient you are with Word’s Equation Editor, is not acceptable. Please revise your work, this time properly defining all variables, subscripts, and randomly-placed dots. Thank you.

Hillary’s website today lists her popular vote total as 17.41m, compared to 17.23m for Obama.

This is rubbish. Hillary’s two numbers do not include a single person from the following states:

• Iowa
• Nevada
• Maine
• Texas [Caucuses]
• Washington, my home state

…because in those states “party officials did not report any popular vote breakdown between the two candidates.” So much for voter enfranchisement. Obama won in all those states except Nevada.

Now, if only we could devise some ingenious method whereby we could compare the voter preferences of caucus states and ballot states. We could, for example, give each state a number of “points” based on its portion of the U.S. population (we could call these points “delegates”) and then divide each states “delegates” based on the portion of caucus or ballot goers that voted for each candidate. Then we could add up all the delegates and just compare them to see which candidate reflects voter preference! But this can never work because math is sexist.

No seriously, even married economists seem to exist in a perpetual state of Nash Equilibrium.

Lost in the coverage of Spitzer’s resignation is the fact that so much - if not all - of whom and what Spitzer was battling represent the things that we despise, and for all the most basic reasons. He fought Wall Street power brokers, corrupt legislators, and, yes, prostitution rings. I cannot help but worry that another political generation will grow up with the resignation that comes from the experience of knowing that it is not even worth trying to fix some the base evils. Look what happened to the last one who tried.

Indeed, we are so disenchanted and sometimes enthusiastic to catch Spitzer at the universal sin - hypocrisy -  that sometimes it easy not to appreciate that that chasm that we understand to separate Spitzer’s words and his deeds, is more human than so much of the tacit, synthetic pragmatism that we accept when we lower our expectations to the point, where by some measure, we elevate ordinary politicians above Spitzer because, by not trying, they never raised over expectations. Spitzer failed because he dared to raise our expectations to where they were, where they should have stayed, before our first heartbreak, or our first political scandal, or our first encounter with that smoke-filled world of money, power, and wickedness.

That Spitzer not only lost, but succumbed to those vices - $80,000 for prostitutes is no blue collar crime - does not change the fact that he fought the good fight, and no one can doubt that the his wager - his political career, his own credibility, his own marriage - was placed because, like too few people, this was a struggle he thought he could win, and he bothered to try.

I would like to think that for Spitzer, like for too few others, the chasm between words and deeds assumed a Manichean dichotomy between right and wrong; he lost that fight, but does that change the fact that he fought the only thing worth truly fighting for? Could there be anything else? A bridge-building project for your district, added to the latest federal budget, perhaps?

So He lost the battle between words and deeds, and now that is hypocrisy. I accept that, but there is more to the story. Let me just say that I believe words can be more important than actions, if they are spoken for the right reasons, honestly, candidly, and with the best of human nature in their sights.