GIN AND TACOS

If you are at all interested in the current state of labor economics research (and really, who isn't?), you should read this interesting interview with Berkeley economist David Card, where he gives a high-level overview of his research since the early 90s. He is a brilliant academic, and he has contributed some ground-breaking work to a large number of the important issues of the past 20 years.

You may have heard the name from the New York Times magazine article about economists' views on immigration (where he lead the "not such a big deal" camp; check out his research), and his name shows up in popular debates about the growing inequality. Some of the interview is a bit technical, but the parts on immigration, returns to education, minimum wage and skill-biased technical change are all worth a minute (or several) of your workday time. Excerpt:

[Card] For example, what does it mean for a firm to have a vacancy? If a firm can readily go to the market and buy a worker, there's no such thing as a vacancy, or at least not a persistent vacancy. During the early 1990s, when Alan and I were working on minimum wages, it was our perception that many low-wage employers had had vacancies for months on end. Actually many fast-food restaurants had policies that said, "Bring in a friend, get him to work for us for a week or two and we'll pay you a $100 bonus." These policies raised the question to us: Why not just increase the wage?

From the perspective of a search paradigm, these policies make sense, but they also mean that each employer has a tiny bit of monopoly power over his or her workforce. As a result, if you raise the minimum wage a little–not a huge amount, but a little–you won't necessarily cause a big employment reduction. In some cases you could get an employment increase…

The No-Politics Friday ™ continues into 2007 while looking back on 2006. Starting a little over a year ago, I moved above a second-run dollar theater whose manager was also my landlord. So for a period I saw nothing but bad second-runs movies while getting free popcorn. Halfway through I moved to Champaign, Il, where my access to quality cinema was practically nonexistent (though I do thank the local art theater for trying its best). However, my roommate just got a television that could only be described as bitchin (and, god bless us everyone, it was an open-box special at Circuit City), which makes it a perfect time to catch up on movies via DVD.

So, as I've seen virtually no good new movies this past year, and am in a perfect position technologically and emotionally to watch a lot of high-definition dvds in my living room, the question goes to you: What were the best movies of 2006? Please answer in the comments, my netflix queue is hungry and wants to be fed.

Now of course I lied; I have seen some good movies in 2006 and would like to share them with you.

Half-Nelson

I'm glad to see Ryan Gosling break big as an actor, something I've been waiting for since he first made waves in the excellent "The Believer" (1999). Watching several talented actors face the brutality of inner-city poverty, addiction and the drug trade makes for a rough movie-going experience. The emotional impact is overwhelming; days later you may still be torn between whether to think "[Gosling is] charismatic, multifaceted, and sincere, and we can't really dismiss him without dismissing some part of ourselves" or "[Half-Nelson is part of] a series of new, grotesquely condescending movies..trumpet whites' hidden resentment about blacks' troubling, irremediable social status…hipster masochism."

Our Brand is Crisis

The best feature about Iraq I saw in 2006 was about the 2002 Bolivian election. In this documentary, the dark twin of The War Room (1993), camera crews follow the consulting team of "Greenberg, Carville, Shrum" as they attempt to win the Bolivian election for their client with the aid of modern political consulting equipment.

I knew of the movie before I saw it, and I was surprised by how drawn I was to Jeremy Rosner, the consultant who forms the center story. There's no bad faith or shameless profiteering on his part; he believes that what he is doing will ultimately aid democracy in South America. It is not hard to see in Bolivia echoes of the current political fallout in Iraq – where exporting democracy seems to be a series of color-coordination, negative aids from crafted third-parties, chi-squared evaluation of a candidate's honesty appeal, focus-group vetted slogans and controlling the terms of the debate, and how none of these things seem to be a match for deep-seated grievances on poverty, joblessness and cultural differences. You can hear in Rosner's post-election interview what we are already hearing from the neocons who thought democracy would triumph by default in Iraq.

Dave Chappelle Block Party

In a year where everything seemed to be falling apart, and where many of the best movies involved the worst of times (see above), seeing great musicians playing a street concert, doing what they love, with everyone having a great time, is a perfect antidote. One of the best concert films I've seen – the dvd has full performances of many of the songs, and they can be worked into a full-length viewing of the movie. Highly recommended.

So that's me. Your suggestions?

Trading at 460; could this be Mr. Horton's 21st century backroom?

A New York Times style article about Google's expanding New York office and the Silicon Valley 'campus' culture:

You could be forgiven for not knowing that a satellite Google campus is growing in downtown Manhattan. There is no Google sign on the building, and it's hard to catch a glimpse of a Googler, as employees call themselves, on the street because the company gives them every reason to stay within its candy-colored walls.

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners…Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan…

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. "Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here," said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily.

Two quick notes. (1) I know it's not the mid-90s anymore, but I hope everyone has read their Microserfs (errors reprinted, 310-311):

At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life but then at 30 you have to abandon the company, or else there's something WRONG with you.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from dive backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren't really many older poe in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence pro…

But just think about the way high tech cultures puropose protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERAGES! And the way tech firms won't even call work "The office:, but instead, "the campus"

2) Do you remember all those social awareness episodes of 80s television shows where the kid's best friend would get molested? I think the classic one was when the bike shop owner Mr. Horton got the better of Dudley from Different Strokes. (why oh why isn't this episode on youtube?)

Remember how in all those episodes the guy would lure in the children with cool toys, neat electronics and lots of candy? Am I the only one who feels a creepy connection between that and the same lures for high-tech programmers? I've been in a few of the new-not-at-all-like-the-old office "campuses" and I've gotten the same vibe you get from seeing Mr. Horton's backroom. It's the sense of "Gee, thanks for all the free nerf stuff and M&Ms, but at what point are you going to try to take pictures of me in the bathtub?"

I don't know what it says about an industry and its employees when the incentives to hire and retain the best and the brightest are indistinguishable from the techniques used to lure in children and sexually assault them.

First Pinochet dropped dead. Now Turkmenbashi has been promoted to Father of All Dead Turkmen. If deaths come threes among similar people, I'd be shitting my pants right now if I were Teodoro Obiang.

When I got to grad school three years ago and met my first Turkman (actually Turkwoman) I was introduced to the wonderful world of Saparmurat Niyazov (a.

k.a. "Turkmenbashi" or "Father of all Turkmen"). I have always had a soft spot in my heart for dictators. Not the cruel, authoritarian military ones – the batshit insane cult-of-personality ones.

And with Kim Jong Il quickly becoming less interesting as contact between him and the west increases, Turkmenbashi may have been the last picking-peanuts-out-of-crap crazy dictator left.
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He was a living answer to the question, "What would happen if we let Ol' Dirty Bastard run a country?"

Aside from the usual kleptocrat dictator fare (erecting golden statues of himself, plastering his face on every flat surface in the country, etc) he has had a productive career of codifying his bizarre eccentricities. To wit: