Seignorage Saves the Day

My boy Matt Yglesias advocates a novel plan for evading the debt ceiling, inspired by FDR's not-illegal-but-not-clearly-legal-either abandoning of the gold standard in 1933:

Section (k) of 31 USC § 5112, "Denominations, specifications, and design of coins" plainly states that the Treasury Secretary can create arbitrary quantities of new legal tender as long as it's made out of platinum:

(k) The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.

Why did Congress draft a statute that doesn't specify what denominations the platinum coin may be? I have no idea. But it's a gaping loophole in the basic monetary framework of the United States, and pretty clearly allows Secretary Geithner to at least temporarily evade the debt ceiling by financing the government through seigniorage.

I love this plan! It would certainly staunch criticism that the President is not a man of action, and I've been struggling for some time with the question of why we don't print more money when the world sees us as far and away the safest place for investment. A nice trillion dollar coin would be crossing the streams in a very exciting way.

Who Needs a Doctor When You Have an IPhone?

Technology pioneer Vinod Khosla has a great article about increasing the use of technology in the medical profession. He asserts that doctors are not all that good at diagnosis--there is too much information, and the knowledge base is constantly increasing:

Today's diagnoses are partially informed by patients' medical histories and partially by symptoms (but patients are bad at communicating what's really going on). They are mostly informed by advertising and the doctor's half-remembered and potentially obsolete lessons from medical school (which are laden with cognitive biases, recency biases, and other human errors). Many times, if you ask three doctors to look at the same problem, you'll get three different diagnoses and three different treatment plans. ...

Healthcare should become more about data-driven deduction and less about trial-and-error. That's hard to pull off without technology, because of the increasing amount of data and research available. Next-generation medicine will utilize more complex models of physiology, and more sensor data than a human MD could comprehend, to suggest personalized diagnosis. Thousands of baseline and multi-omic data points, more integrative history, and demeanor will inform each diagnosis. Ever-improving dialog manager systems will help make data capture and exploration from patients more accurate and comprehensive. Data science will be key to this. In the end, it will reduce costs, reduce physician workloads, and improve patient care. 

I am looking forward to a daily snapshot of my health, courtesy of my phone. That day is clearly at hand.

The House By the Creek

About a year ago, the judge I was working for asked me for a favor. He had written a children's book long ago, inspired by a family story from North Carolina during the American Revolution, and asked for my thoughts.  I read it, offered some editorial suggestions, and identified a local publisher in Greensboro that looked like it might be a good candidate for the work.

Six months later, I got an email from the judge asking for advice on a response that he had gotten from the company: basically, they were asking for a capital investment  to defray some of the costs of publication. I ran the message by my book trade brother, the former librarian known as Young Jeezy, and he was sceptical, asserting, that, although the company would probably do the formatting and publishing work, the extent of their support of the book would likely end there, meaning that it would likely not have a future as a Disney movie, or inspire a theme park in Orlando, let alone recoup the initial investment.

Still, the president of the company had written books about the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina, so I suggested to the judge that he at least talk to him. He did, and, impressed by the editor's knowledge of the industry and his connections to school libraries in the state (the most likely purchasers), he decided to go forward. He enlisted an artist friend to design the cover, and when I went to visit him at the court in September, he showed me the final draft, which looked beautiful.

Buoyed by a nice review in the Raleigh newspaper, the first printing sold out:

Leonard, a federal bankruptcy judge by profession, is the author of 95 of the most charming pages you or your kids will read in this or any other year. “The House by the Creek” is a truth-based tale of his great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, German immigrants named Valentine and Elizabeth Leonhardt.

The story opens, in 1781, with Valentine Leonhardt, a hard-working and prosperous farmer who had made his way in America after immigrating from Germany, showing his 10-year-old son, Jacob, a secret. He had Jacob pull a log out of the wall in the family home in Davidson County, and revealed to him some hidden gold inside a hollowed log. His instructions were specific. Jacob was to protect the secret hiding place no matter what, because the Tories might be coming, after Leonhardt and his three sons left within hours for what would be known as the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

You can order the book through your local bookstore at http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780936389370, although it's not clear when the next edition will be ready (the judge says it's in second printing, but my local bookstore didn't know when it would be available).  I've ordered one for my bookshelf, and one more, which I'll donate to the Carrboro Elementary School Library. It makes a nice gift, and if you want an autographed copy, I can definitely arrange that for you.

Back to the Hoodie

Fascinating Slate article by my boy Farhad Manjoo about an American company making sweatshirts locally, using innovation and direct sales to put out a higher quality product (he calls it "the greatest hoodie ever made") at a competitive price, somewhere between the  low and high ends of the casual wear continuum:

Among other things, he was able to hire a former industrial designer from Apple to rethink every aspect of the sweatshirt, from the way the fabric is woven to the color of the drawstrings around your neck. ...When you wear this hoodie, you’ll wonder why all other clothes aren’t made this well. And when you hear about how American Giant produced it, it’s hard not to conclude that one day, they all may be.

I can't say if the sweatshirt is as awesome as he says it is, but I do think that this business model is a harbinger of the future--quality goods designed and manufactured locally using automation and innovation to produce competitive products that are marketed directly to consumers. File this under the end of retail/race against the machine/return of manufacturing to the U.S. I think it's a win for consumers and the economy, even if the actual number of jobs produced is scant, and maybe even a net loss globally.

Nathan Brown on MoMo

When judicial independence in Egypt was a developing issue in 2005, I had just arrived in Cairo, and was trying to understand the intricacies of working on a US government-funded project to improve court operations that would go nowhere near judicial independence. I read Nathan Brown's Book, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf, and Professor Brown was kind enough to respond to a couple of emails I sent him asking for further information.

He's got an article in the New Republic trying to make sense out of the current imbroglio involving the president, the judiciary and the constitution. He thinks, and this is consistent with what I saw time and again in Egypt, that the President and the Brotherhood did not accurately predict the consequences of their actions, and that the resulting chaos is ever deepening:

The problems do not lie so much in the content of the constitution, which is filled more with missed opportunities than egregious authoritarianism. But that document, if it passes, will have to operate in a very difficult atmosphere. Rival camps have now formed and are preparing to face off in every arena: not merely at the polls but in the press, the courts, and and the streets. Only a continued aversion to violence and a fear that civil disorder could drag the army back are preventing more violent struggle.

Whatever togetherness that existed in the rush to oust Mubarak seems gone, and, were I inclined toward prediction, I would venture to say that things will not be settling down in Egypt anytime soon. But, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said: "I never make predictions about the future, and I never will."

Blogged Down

G Lo (and Worldwide, in the comments) call me out for my post about life with older girls not being as interesting as it once was:

I continue and appreciate each blog entry. But I question your observation that life with an eleven and thirteen year old is less of interest than life with a four and six year old -- I'm thinking that these are almost the most interesting years!

I think, in retrospect, that I was saying that it's harder than I thought to say something interesting on a regular basis. But maybe I'm just not thinking about it enough. so the perspective is welcome.

On an unrelated note, she also recommends a John Irving nook:

i know that most novels don't interest you, but I've just finished this John Irving book, the first that I've read. Among other attractions, it has a couple of settings familiar to you, although they are far into this very long book. My book list entry:

Last Night in Twisted River: A Novel by John Irving (A 2011 Post Notable Work) – Forty years in the life of a cook and his son, who is twelve as the story begins in a logging camp in northern New Hampshire and who, later as a writer, uses their peripatetic life on-the-run as gist for his novels.

Cynical/sarcastic/ironic me read a Prayer for Owen Meany in 1991 and  vowed never to read anything else by John Irving. It may be time to revisit that judgment.

Head Scratch of the Day

Worldwide lost the library's copy of Flannery O'Connor.s Everything That Rises Must Converge, and I went to make amends this afternoon, debating whether I should identify her as the culprit--"My Wife lost the book."

I decided not to implicate her, and the librarian reported that there were two ways to proceed: I could order a copy through the library, or place my own order and simply offer it as a substitute. The library could get it for me for $30, $5 more than the new Amazon price and $25 more that a used copy in good condition.

Don't libraries buy lots of books? How can it be that I can get a better price than they can? It doesn't make a lot of sense. And when I asked the librarian if they had considered printing their own copies of material available through Project Gutenberg, she looked at me like I had asked her if she knew when the Mongols ruled China.