The Berkeley Blog

How ‘Moneyball’ can make a great downtown

Ethan Elkind — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:05:30 +0000

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball was more than a book about how the small-market Oakland Athletics employed unconventional, statistics-based methods to beat bigger-money teams in the game of baseball. The genius of the book — and I’m probably biased here as a lifelong Oakland A’s fan — was its ability to expose human beings’ flawed sense of perception.

When trying to observe trends, such as how well a batter hits with runners in scoring position, the human brain tends to privilege emotionally powerful anecdotes, such as memorable hits in big situations. Some teams award million dollar contracts on this basis, despite the contrary ... More >

Is it best to be greedy in tough economic times?

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:47:30 +0000

There’s a certain logic to the idea that greed is good when resources are scarce: when there’s not a lot to go around, what could be better than hogging the goods for oneself to ensure one’s survival?

If this logic were to hold true, one would expect natural selection to have favored self-interested behavior as a response to a lack of resources. In fact, however, new research seems to suggest just the opposite. My colleagues at Berkeley (Piff, Kraus, Cote, Cheng, and Keltner, 2010) have found that across many indexes of self-interest, those with fewer resources choose a strategy of sharing ... More >

Ranking the presidents on the environment

Dan Farber — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:36:27 +0000

Keith Poole has spent years devising measures of political ideology. The late Phil Frickey and I used his scholarship in our work on public choice theory. He has now produced similar information about Presidents, incorporated in the following chart:

It would be useful to have a similar measure for environmental policy. The early part of the graph would look much different. Until Reagan, the differences between Democrats and Republicans on environmental story were fairly modest. On the Republican side, the rankings between Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II seem about right, although the gap between Bush I and the other two ... More >

The sad spectacle of Obama’s super PAC

Robert Reich — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:24:43 +0000

It has been said there is no high ground in American politics since any politician who claims it is likely to be gunned down by those firing from the trenches. That’s how the Obama team justifies its decision to endorse a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited sums for his campaign.

Baloney. Good ends don’t justify corrupt means.

I understand the White House’s concerns. Obama is a proven fundraiser – he cobbled together an unprecedented $745 million for the 2008 election and has already raised $224 million for this one. But his aides figure Romney can raise almost as much, ... More >

Air pollution levels in China

Dan Farber — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:07:47 +0000

The Economist commissioned a study of particulate pollution in China, using estimates based on satellite data. The results are predictably grim:

World Health Organisation guidelines suggest that PM2.5 levels above ten micrograms per cubic metre are unsafe. The boffins have found (as the map shows) that almost every Chinese province has levels above that. Indeed, much of the country’s population endures air so foul that it registers above 30 on the PM2.5 scale, with Shandong and Henan provinces topping 50. Because these readings reflect the average pollution that a typical resident in a province is likely to endure during a given ... More >

America’s jobs deficit, and why it’s still more important than the budget deficit

Robert Reich — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:48:50 +0000

The most significant aspect of January’s jobs report is political. The fact that America’s labor market continues to improve is good news for the White House. But as a practical matter the improvement is less significant for the American work force.

President Obama’s only chance for rebutting Republican claims that he’s responsible for a bad economy is to point to a positive trend. Voters respond to economic trends as much as they respond to absolute levels of economic activity. Under ordinary circumstances January’s unemployment rate of 8.3 percent would be terrible. But compared to September’s 9.1 percent, it looks quite good. ... More >

Occupy 2012: Another 1968?

Claude Fischer — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:44:10 +0000

The 1968 presidential election was pivotal. It was also extremely close. Democratic Vice-President Hubert Humphrey lost to Republican candidate Richard Nixon by 0.7% of the popular vote; Humphrey lost several big states by less than 2 or 3%.

That loss ended the most progressive eight-year period in American history since the New Deal — voting rights, medicare, anti-poverty programs, etc. And in defeating Humphrey, the voters rejected the person who had for forty years most represented progressivism in America politics, ever since he led the fight for a civil rights stand in the Democratic convention of 1948. Instead, Americans chose a ... More >

The poor storm: Ending mass incarceration in America

Jonathan Simon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:38:33 +0000

“But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it — which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common ... More >

Have goals? Try this strategy for maximizing success

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:55:23 +0000

OK. So let’s say you have set a goal for yourself– sticking to your diet, perhaps, or adopting a learning orientation, or maybe not being hurt by prejudiced remarks. The number of life tasks in which we must set goals for ourselves, with the hope of achieving them, is almost endless.

Source: Wikimedia commons (photo by Jason Gulledge)

What can you do to maximize your chances that you’ll succeed at your goal?

Let’s take the example of dieting. In my last post, several readers and I shared some principles that help us eat (and live) more healthfully. One reader, Terry, correctly drew ... More >

The biggest risk to the economy in 2012, and what’s the economy for anyway?

Robert Reich — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:33:03 +0000

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago, said the “critical risks” facing the American economy this year were a worsening of Europe’s chronic sovereign debt crisis and a rise in tensions with Iran that could stoke global oil prices.

What about jobs and wages here at home?

As the Commerce Department reported Friday, the U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent between October and December – the fastest pace in 18 months and the first time growth exceeded 2 percent all year. Many bigger American companies have been reporting strong profits in recent months. GE ... More >