Category Archives: Culture

The creative nature of football innovation

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case keenum Inasmuch as Texas has always been a hotbed of innovation in football, this guest Freakonomics post by law professors Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman caught my eye:

The theory behind copyright is simple – if we allow anyone to copy a good new idea, then no one will come up with the next one.  The theory makes perfect sense – in theory. [.  .  .]

There has been a lot of innovation in football, in both offensive and defensive systems.  But there has been virtually no attempt to copyright or patent these innovations.  There are some serious doctrinal hurdles, but it’s not impossible to imagine the law providing protection. [.  .  .]

So why do football coaches continue to innovate, even when they know that their rivals will study their innovations, take them and use them?  That is, why do football coaches engage in intellectual production without intellectual property?

The authors go on to characterize football as one of the industries in which innovation is best facilitated by intense competition rather than by copyright protection of new ideas. But what is interesting is that, even with the innovations of the pass-happy offenses of the past decade or so, the top teams at the highest levels of college and professional football continue to be the ones that balance an effective passing offense with a solid rushing attack that can wean time off the clock to protect a lead.

Sometimes the more things change in football, the more they remain the same.

Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel

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Another classic from the late and legendary Texas singer-songwriter, Townes Van Zandt.

The Myth of Superiority

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goodandbad Clear Thinkers favorite Peter Gordon is a very astute fellow:

David Brooks wrote about The Genteel Nation and “gentility shift” last Friday. He was addressing long-term labor market problems that have nothing to do with aggregate demand or any lack of “stimulus,” but rather with the tastes of young people making career choices. He cited the example of Michelle Obama, telling an audience of young women, “Don’t go into corporate America … become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse … Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.”

It’s an old theme and many people think of the choices before them as between being self-serving and "helping people". I am not sure what sacrifices the First Lady has had to make in her personal life in order to get on the high road, but given a platform, we hold forth — and also tell ourselves all sorts of stories about ourselves. There is always the lovely conceit that some of us are all about "helping people" and, thereby, so much better than the rest.

Labor markets provide their own signals (in terms of compensation packages as well as employment and unemployment prospects), but the problem with rhetoric such as the First Lady’s in the Brooks cite is that it nourishes the idea that we see repeated on so often that our own pay is “unfair” in light of the job’s assumed social worth.

Many public sector unions have managed to extract promises from their politician employers that these employers cannot keep. There is naturally unhappiness and resentment, but not at the employers. Rather, at the “stingy” taxpayers who just don’t get it: those who have chosen to “help people” simply “deserve” more.

Labor markets signal facts of life that challenge the “gentility” view of the world. But the gentility view fortifies the idea that market signals are "unfair" and further politicization is the way. This is the way we get street demonstrations such as the ones we saw in Paris last week. We’ll always have the barricades.

This dynamic is the other side of the coin from what leads us to ostracize famous people such as Ken Lay, Tiger Woods and Roger Clemens. We try in any way to avoid confronting our innate vulnerability, so we use myths to distract us. We rationalize that a wealthy and powerful person did bad things that we would never do if placed in the same position even though we really have no idea how we would react to such incentives. As a result, we scorn and ridicule the rich and powerful as we attempt to purge collectively that which is too shameful for us to confront individually.

Be wary of those who justify their world view on the supposed moral superiority of their cause versus how markets would reward that effort. As Gordon notes, this view assumes that market signals are unfair and that political corrections are the answer. The mob is never wrong in the moment of its action.

What disaster is worse?

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drug-war On one hand, the vested interests in America’s unending War on Drugs continue to rationalize the enormous cost of drug prohibition by suggesting that the alternative is worse:

Every past administrator of the 37-year-old Drug Enforcement Administration is calling on the Justice Department to sue California if its voters decide to legalize marijuana in November.

Peter Bensinger, who ran the D.E.A. from January 1976 to July 1981, said legalizing the recreational use of pot, even in one state, would be a “disaster,” leading to increased addiction, traffic accidents and trouble in the workplace.

Meanwhile, the WSJ’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes about the wages of the War on Drugs just across the Texas border near El Paso:

Ju√°rez is dying. Since the beginning of this year, more than 2,200 people in the city have been murdered. Since 2008, the toll is almost 6,500. On a per capita basis this would be equivalent to some 26,000 murders in New York City. Drug warriors play down these numbers by claiming that some 85% of the dead were themselves involved in trafficking. But that claim is dubious since in many of the murders-more than 90% of cases this year-there hasn’t even been an arrest. And what about the hundreds of innocents, the other 15% of the victims, that the government admits were not criminals? [.  .  .]

In the 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drug suppliers abroad-because American consumers had consistently demonstrated that they had no interest in curtailing demand-illicit drug use in rich countries has remained fairly constant. Only preferences have shifted.

A report released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that “drug use has stabilized in the developed world.” Cocaine use in the U.S. has dropped in recent decades, but there is “growing abuse of amphetamine-type stimulants and prescription drugs around the world.” The report also said that “cannabis is still the world’s drug of choice.” In other words, billions of dollars in warring has left us about where we started, except, according to the report, that the indoor cultivation of cannabis is now a major source of funding for criminal gangs.

As I’ve noted many times, America’s War on Drugs is lost and it is long past time that we require our leaders to acknowledge that and end it.

Even if legalization would increase drug abuse and addition (not clear, but certainly possible), at least such a policy would allow the abusers to harm themselves rather than impose substantial risk of harm on innocent citizens.

The War on Drugs is dangerously close to becoming a war on us.

Jackie Evancho

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What a talent! The other side of the coin from Paul Potts.

Lightnin’ Time

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Another one of Houston’s treasures, the late, great Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Preparing for Life

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john-grisham I’ve never been a fan of John Grisham’s novels, although I concede that a couple of them have been made into entertaining movies.

But after reading this Grisham/NY Times op-ed, I’m a big fan of John Grisham:

I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this, and I shall never mention it again in writing.

Then, during the summer of my 16th year, I found a job with a plumbing contractor. I crawled under houses, into the cramped darkness, with a shovel, to somehow find the buried pipes, to dig until I found the problem, then crawl back out and report what I had found. I vowed to get a desk job. I’ve never drawn inspiration from that miserable work, and I shall never mention it again in writing, either.

But a desk wasn’t in my immediate future. My father worked with heavy construction equipment, and through a friend of a friend of his, I got a job the next summer on a highway asphalt crew. This was July, when Mississippi is like a sauna. Add another 100 degrees for the fresh asphalt. I got a break when the operator of a Caterpillar bulldozer was fired; shown the finer points of handling this rather large machine, I contemplated a future in the cab, tons of growling machinery at my command, with the power to plow over anything. Then the operator was back, sober, repentant. I returned to the asphalt crew.

I was 17 years old that summer, and I learned a lot, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company. One Friday night I accompanied my new friends on the asphalt crew to a honky-tonk to celebrate the end of a hard week. When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window. I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.

Many of us had similar experiences to Grisham’s before finding our life’s work. In talking with young folks these days about their uncertain futures, I find myself often advising them that uncertainty is, for most of us, an unavoidable part of life. Although often difficult at the time, those experiences help define our character and spirit.

I decided to go to law school while working on a loading dock on Produce Row in Houston. I’m eternally grateful for that loading dock. What was your loading dock?