I’ve noticed something recently. Increasingly, I see my clients, particularly higher managers or equivalent, using pad computers, mostly but no exclusively iPads and mostly although not exclusively bought by their companies. I would really like to see the statistics on ROI on this.

When I see this I can’t help but wonder if we’re not going to experience something similar to what happened when PCs hit the market nearly 30 years ago. When PCs first hit the market they were status symbols. The less likely you were to use them the more likely you were to have them. As the prices went down (which they did for a while) they became increasingly common and ultimately ubiquitous. However, despite the investment well into the billions companies really had very little to show for it.

I recall a Forbes cover article that delved into what companies were getting for all of their investment in desktop technology and the answer was not very much. Then several developments took place in quick succession that changed everything. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The Internet was opened to the public in 1992. NCSA’s Mosaic web browser, the first to gain popularity in a Windows environment, was produced in 1993. And Windows 95, the first reasonably stable and generally useful version of Windows, able to make real use of the burgeoning World Wide Web, came out, of course, in 1995. The rest is history.

After fifteen years of investment companies actually began to see a return for their money. It took three things: critical mass in adoption, stability, and massive networking.

Given how hot tablets are I suspect that companies are buying a lot of them. I don’t have any hard figures to support this but I suspect that hospitals and docs are buy a lot of them with federal grant money as part of the push for electronic recordkeeping. Are they already seeing a return on the investment? Or will it take a critical mass and some special oomph?

BTW, I’d planned a post on this next item which, somehow, never materialized. Most apps never recover their cost of development. Hope springs eternal.

Tyler Cowen posts on income mobility and raises a lot of the points that I did here. For example:

How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I do not know how much of current American (or other) immobility is due to this factor, but I find it discomforting that complaints about mobility are so infrequently accompanied by an analysis of this topic.

Take a look at Bruce Krasting’s examination of the cement industry worldwide (scroll down: it’s in the middle section):

The big Swiss cement company Holcim announced a charge to assets as a result of a write down of fixed assets. Here’s the headline and a look at Holcim’s stock performance. Note that the stock got clipped for a 1/3 of it value about 8 months ago.

European, American, and Middle Eastern cement producers are all having a bit of trouble, understandable with the declines in construction. Then comes the interesting part—China’s cement production is 25 times Europe’s or the U. S.’s:

China’s cement production has been on a tear for years. But it’s slowing down. The production for 2011 will come in at 1.88mm metric tones, an increase of only 6% over 2010 (the slowest in 15 years). The Cement Association of China is forecasting that 2012 total production will be “about the same as 2011”. We shall see. I saw this article on cement pricing in Sichuan province.

In China cement production is a substantial component of GDP. If cement production just remains the same, that sounds like pretty substantial economic headwinds to me, particularly with the decline in appetite for imports from China that we may expect from Europe over the next year.

Here’s an interesting factoid (I’ve mentioned it here before). After energy production and transport, guess which sector is the next greatest producer of greenhouse gases? Yep, that’s right. Cement production.

of future results. That’s the essential message of John Tamny’s recent post which ends with these remarks about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:

What commentators should not do is use Bernanke’s now-naïve utterances against him. He was wrong about looming problems in the mortgage markets, but so were many market participants – by definition. And then what commentators should do is use the information gleaned from the Fed transcripts to rail against any and all banking regulations which, by their hubristic presumption not to mention simple logic, are doomed to fail.

However, the real meat of the post is about how limited a tool regulation is:

To state the obvious, regulators, and this includes the allegedly brilliant academic minds at the Fed, will always be late to problems, thus rendering regulation worthless at best, and tragic at worst for regulations creating a false sense of security that inevitably magnifies in harmful ways the similarly inevitable errors that occur in a marketplace comprised by fallible individuals. Better is it always to limit regulation to something that doesn’t even require effort by lawmakers; as in if you fail, you will be allowed to go bankrupt.

But what happens if you simply can’t allow a company, whether it’s an auto maker or a bank, to go bankrupt? I’ve already expressed my opinion on the subject, probably too often: don’t let them get that big in the first place and split ’em up when they do. I don’t believe that there’s a multi-billion dollar company in existence that didn’t grow to its present size through some form for rent-seeking, whether it’s a direct subsidy, government contracts, or the protections for competition that intellectual property law provides.

Failing that I’d cap the compensation for any company that requires a bailout from the government at the level of a GS-14. GS-14s are mostly supervisors and managers. Here in Chicago they earn between $110,000 and $140,000. The next level, the appointee level, earns between $140,000 and $200,000. That would take the starch out of their sails.

The key point here is that regulation is inherently retrospective. It deals with things as they were or as they have been. It is unable to respond to the counter-moves of intelligent actors by its very nature.

That’s why I prefer more organic approaches to controlling behavior, whether we’re talking about the behavior of individuals or corporations. Such approaches include removing subsidies, protections from competition, and backstops.

Yesterday in the roundtable discussion on ABC’s This Week George Will characterized former Pennsylvania senator Rich Santorum as an evangelical Christian. A bit later he was gently corrected by another of the panelists: Mr. Santorum is, in fact, a Roman Catholic albeit of a very conservative type (very much the sort actively encouraged by John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI). Back to this later.

I’m not a sports fan. I’m not parituclarly a fan of evangelical Christian denominations. I am especially not a fan of political organization from an evangelical Christian pulpit or any pulpit for that matter. I’m somewhat bemused by all of the furor surrounding Tim Tebow.

I wouldn’t even know his name if it weren’t for this furor. Commentaries on the furor frequently contrast the reaction to the treatment of Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, and Shawn Green, Jewish baseball players who demurred from playing on the High Holidays. The commentators sometimes speculate that they aren’t particularly concerned about a Jewish theocratic takeover of the U. S. I think that’s only partly correct.

Judaism is a tribal or national religion rather than a universal one like Christianity or Islam. Although they accept converts as a rule they don’t proselytize. Christians, on the other hand, do proselytize—indeed, it’s an obligation of their faith.

Largely out of a sense of self-preservation born of a millennium of European persecution, Jews tend to keep their religion out of the public square and, although I have no specific evidence to confirm this, I suspect that they’re uncomfortable with others displaying their religions in public. I think this is less the case than once it was, at least locally. Here in Chicago, for example, it used to be the case that synagogues were virtually invisible. That’s no longer the case.

I suspect that, particularly in the national news media, that Messrs. Greenberg, Koufax, and Green avoided criticism because public anti-Semitism was no longer acceptable there. Or perhaps it was because they were baseball players, something of a national religion itself.

I’ve got to admit that I’m confused about the worries about theocracy. Of course the values held by evangelical Christians inform their political views and of course they want to see them enshrined in law. The same is true of humanists and atheists. Is it possible to have a theocracy without believing in God? If your definition of theocracy is displaying your beliefs in the public square, allowing them to inform your political views, and wanting the law to instrumentalize those views, I think it’s obvious that it is.

The constitutional prohibition of funding religion through tax dollars and protection of the free exercise of religion is not a demand to remove religion from the public square but a call for tolerance of the religious views of others. We may not agree with those others but I don’t think we can simultaneously accomplish the tolerance required while despising them. We can disagree, deny, be amused, be confused, but not despise.

I don’t know what George Will’s religious beliefs are, if any. I suspect that he’s a secularized Episcopalian. Confusing Roman Catholicism with evangelical Christianity is peculiar to say the least, particularly for someone who was an undergraduate religion major. Are all of those religious nutcases really the same?

Doug Mataconis has a post over at OTB on behavior and diet:

I’ll take Kuang’s description of the European cultural attachment to food as true, but it’s also true that Europeans tend not to live the same kind of on-the-go lifestyle that Americans have taken upon themselves. Taking two hours out of the day to prepare a meal isn’t quite as big a deal under such circumstances, and the attraction of popping a frozen pizza in the oven not nearly as apparent. That, combined with the fact that Europeans don’t seem to be nearly as sedentary as Americans, is likely one of the main explanations for why they are able to equal our caloric intake yet not suffer as many health consequences.

The post that Doug quotes from compares us, unfavorably of course, with Europeans.

We are not Europeans. According to the Census Bureau more than a third of Americans are Hispanic (mostly of mixed Native American and Spanish descent), “black” (presumably, of sub-Saharan black African descent), native American, Asian.

Even “white” Americans are not Europeans in several important ways. First, “white” is inclusive not only of Americans of purely European descent but those of Semitic and other non-European descent as well.

Second, it’s estimated that between 30% and 50% of Americans who self-identify as “white” have some Native American, Hispanic, or sub-Saharan black ancestry. Indeed, it’s suggested that most “white” Americans who believe themselves to have Cherokee, Arapaho, Paiute, or other ancestry actually have sub-Saharan black ancestry but that’s a subject for another post.

Third, most importantly, and unlike Europeans, Americans are mutts. I, for example, am Swiss, Irish, French, German from the Rheinland-Pfalz, Bohemian, and Scots-Irish. Most Swedes are 100% Swedish. Danes are Danes, Tuscans are Tuscans, Scots are Scots. Sure, those are admixtures, too, but in the very distant past and much less so than is the case with most Americans. Anybody who’s walked down the street of a small town in Scotland, England, France, Germany, or Italy where if you see with the right eyes the people look like members of a very large extended family by comparison with what you see walking down the streets of any but the most isolated American towns. That’s less true than it was even 50 years ago and there are some cases, e.g. Sicilians in which the people are as much mutts as we are. Sicilians are a wild stew of Italian, Greek, Turkish, Albanian, sub-Saharan African, and Lord knows what.

We know that heredity influences metabolism, how you process food. Anyone of primarily European descent who’s been out drinking with a group of Japanese men (as I have innumerable times) has undoubtedly seen that with his or her own eyes in quite dramatic fashion. We know that heredity can influence the metabolism of animal protein, fat, milk, and sugars as well as alcohol. We have no idea of the totality of the ways in which heredity influences how what you eat affects you. I strongly suspect that most people haven’t come to the obvious conclusion: you and I can eat identical diets, down to the milligram, and do identical things and we won’t have the same experiences.

I strongly suspect that there is more junk science and pseudo-science in nutrition, diet, and weight loss than in any other area of human experience because the stakes are so high. So, for example, I am highly suspicious of the epidemiological studies of very low fat diets because they rely so heavily on Chinese data. Not just because the data may be suspect but because I doubt the applicability of the findings to people who aren’t Chinese.

Yes, Americans are fat. Our rate of obesity is the highest in the world. And we eat too much, what we eat is crappy, and doesn’t even taste good. The power of marketing! We’re a large country and a lot of what we eat is bred to ship and store well not to taste good or be particularly nourishing. We have the highest average per capita daily calorie intake of any country in the world (although I seem to recall the Basques have a higher average daily calorie intake but haven’t been able to find the reference).

However, the country with the second highest rate of obesity is Mexico and the average daily calorie intake there is 15% lower than here while the calorie intake in Portugal almost identical to what it is here whereas the obesity rate is half ours.

I think that there’s a complicated relationship among how much you eat, what you eat, exercise, stress, heredity, your intestinal flora (which is likely affected by your use of antibiotics), and who knows what else. The studies comparing Japanese people in Japan with Japanese Americans isn’t just comparing what they eat (Japanese Americans are fatter). Exercise, behavior, and for all I know intestinal flora are different in thousands of ways. Anybody who claims to have found a simple solution is kidding themselves. Or you.

Barry Riholtz samples a graph from the Wall Street Journal illustrating the history of Bank of America’s acquisitions since 1990 and how it came to be such a ponderous, failing giant.

From my perspective that history goes back a bit farther. More than 50 years ago I opened a passbook savings account and a checking account at Clayton Bank in Clayton, Missouri. My dad was the bank’s attorney and continued in that role until his death. Its top managers were frequent guests in our home and our entire family were on first name bases with them. Clayton Bank issued me an American Express Gold Card in 1976. I closed the savings account somewhat sadly several years ago but the checking account is still my primary personal checking account.

In the 1980s Clayton Bank was acquired by Boatmen’s Bank which was on a tear of bank acquisitions in Missouri at the time which lead to it becoming Missouri’s largest bank. A high school friend of mine was the son of one of the bank’s officers who, as it turned out, had gone to law school with my dad. They, too, were frequent guests in our home and we were on a first name basis.

Boatmen’s Bank was acquired by NationsBank in 1996, one of the acquisitions that lead to NationsBank, which had a substantial history of acquisitions of its own, becoming the South’s largest bank.

In 1998 Bank of America acquired NationsBank.

My wife had been doing her banking at LaSalle Bank. Bank of America’s acquisition of LaSalle in 2006 meant that for the first time in our married life we were doing our banking at the same bank.

It’s not clear to me who is being served by all of these acquisitions. Clearly, it is not the banks’ customers. Each acquisition has been an inconvenience and although most of these marriages are years in the past I still occasionally encounter some issues because my checking account was opened in Missouri, IMO bizarre for a bank with a national presence.

It’s not the banks’ shareholders. A quick check of share prices will confirm that for you. That these megabanks are, rather obviously, unmanageable suggests to me that the banks have not benefited organizationally by the acquisitions. I suspect that any possible increasing returns to scale were realized many acquisitions ago.

I can only discern one group that has obviously benefited: top management of a bank with total assets of $500 billion can garner higher compensation than top management of a bank with assets of $50 billion who can garner high compensation than top management of a bank with assets of $1 billion.

I’m sure my pals at the old Clayton Bank are long dead but I know for a fact that their income wasn’t measured in millions (or the equivalent 40 or 50 years ago).

As much as anything else this post may be an illustration of how far afield I’m taken in writing a post. One of my regular daily stops is the opinion section of the Christian Science Monitor, a generally excellent online newspaper. This morning when I read this in a a CSM editorial:

This week, the US Department of Education began a campaign to uplift the nation’s “civic health,” mainly through reform of higher education. It sponsored a report called “A Crucible Moment,” compiled by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, that provides ways to restore one of higher education’s mission as the “carrier of democratic values.”

The task is not easy. “I know that we can’t easily measure civic consciousness or test it or boil it down to a number on a spreadsheet. But we value it and honor it because it is central to our identity as Americans,” says US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

my immediate reaction was “Huh?!” All sorts of things are jumbled together in the editorial—civic consciousness, civics education, and knowledge of the details of our government (like “Which party has a majority in the U. S. Senate?”).

I decided to look at one aspect of civic consciousness that is highly studied: voter turnout. As it turns out there are some things that are only weakly correlated or not correlated at all with the likelihood to turn out and vote: leisure time, race (at least in the 2008 election) and there are some things that are strongly correlated with turning out and voting: age, income, IQ (see also here), education.

I am skeptical that voter suppression is a significant reason for low turnouts among the poor (just as I am skeptical about claims of widespread systematic voting fraud). If that were the case I think we would see many, many more cases in the courts than actually are. Either that or there’s a conspiracy on an unimaginable scale. I’m pretty skeptical about conspiracies that would involve tens of thousands of conspirators all keeping their mouths shut.

However, with respect to the correlation between education and voting there’s a funny thing. Education predicts whether individuals will vote, but over time rising levels of education did not increase aggregate turnout. That’s referred to as “Brody’s Puzzle”, after Richard Brody who made the observation back in 1978.

One of the references above suggests something rather interesting: there may be a genetic propensity, mediated by IQ, to vote. My inclination is to think that the correlation between education and voting is mostly because education is a weak proxy for intelligence as is income (and, for that matter, age). It may be that there’s some complex of genetic predispositions, learned behaviors, and abilities that predisposes one to civic participation including voting.

I was unable to uncover any demonstration that particular curricula were associated with higher levels of voter turnout. If you’re aware of any, I would appreciate knowing about it.

My key point here is that it sounds very much as though the Department of Education is spitting into the wind on this. Civic participation and voting are probably among the many things that may be learned but not taught.

My initial reaction to the editorial was that the decline in civic participation might be related to a decline in participation in organizations for the young that encourage civic participation, e.g. the Boy Scouts. I’ll write more about the Scouts another time. Were you aware that although only 2% of the population of the U. S. are Mormons, 20% of those enrolling the Boy Scouts are Mormons? Me, neither. I can’t help but wonder if there’s some relation between that and two of the present Republican candidates for president being Mormon. Civic participation, organizational and institutional participation and support, etc. I may touch on this again.

Update

More on genetics and voting here. The guess is that the genes mentioned influence “pro-social” behaviors. Basically, the more likely you are to be a joiner the more likely you are to vote. Dunno.

There seems to be something in the wind. Maybe I’m over-analyzing this, maybe not.

Several of my clients have seen something along these lines over the last couple of years. They’ve had a relationship with a customer or client sometimes going back 50 years. Suddenly, they’re out. No warning. No hints. It’s not that they screwed up or that the customer or client doesn’t need the product or service or that the customer or client is suffering.

In one notable case my client was informed by their client that, after more than 50 years, their services would no longer be required and they’d been replaced. I continue to be (erroneously) on some distribution lists and the new service provider is apparently running into serious problems. Based on what I’m seeing I would be surprised if they, too, weren’t out in short order.

It may be a generational thing. Longstanding relationships and understandings disappear as people retire or die. I think there’s a difference in attitude. People are more radical these days. I don’t mean that in a political or ideological sense although those things may go hand in hand.

The difference between a radical and a moderate is that when a radical doesn’t know what a switch does he or she throws it to see what happens. When a moderate doesn’t know what a switch does, he or she figures out what it does before throwing it.

That may be part of the reason that our economy is so slow to recover. Not the fundamental reason but a contributing reason. People have been throwing a lot of switches without knowing what they’ll do.