Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Oh my this is quite a report!  It’s about those mandatory arbitration clauses which have become so popular in various terms and conditions.  This is a perfect example of how difference between left and right is how benefits from societies institutions; small economic entities v.s. large.  Unsurprisingly the arbitration system favors the large.

The report is one outrage after another, so it is difficult to pick one thing to highlight.  For example one of the arbitration companies had a press release saying 55% of the cases are settled for the consumer, neglecting to mention that they selected only those cases filed by consumers (a few hundred); a vanishingly small slice of the cases (tens of thousands) that move through the system.  Contrast that statistic to one arbitrator they look at closely, 96% of the cases he handled were settled for the credit card company.  On a few days they mention he handled half a million dollars worth of cases a day.  Later Schwarzenegger made this guy a judge.

I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this, Ask writes:

… used the at daemon to automatically recover … as root enter:

$ at 18:32
mail -s "put money in parking meter!" ask@example.com < /dev/null
^D
job 8 at Tue Sep 18 18:32:00 2007

I used to use it for lots of such pests. send messages like “back out esting patch,” “discard experimental foo install,”  “submit rebates,”  “check check cleared,” but I do such things with my Treo now.

This article is totally weird.  To begin: “scheduled pipeline maintenance in Colorado reduced the system’s capacity to export out of the Rocky Mountain region”.  So then what happened? “gas supplier Colorado Interstate Gas dropped the price”  I have no idea why they did that.  And there were buyers, in particular the city owned utility in Colorado Springs.   Now this stuff “normally trades at $3 to $4″ but the utility did pretty well: “2.6 cents”.   Sadly most of their storage was already full; so they only managed to save a few million dollars.  Too weird.

Consider this quote: “about 320,000 foreclosures - or repossessions - were begun in each of the first two quarters of 2007 he said, against an average of 225,000 per quarter in the past six years.” What are we to make of that? Some easy calculations: thats up 92 thousand per quarter or 42%; or from .9M/year to 1.28M/year.

To do more we need some other numbers.

In 2000 (pdf), there were 115 million housing units, and 105 of those were owner occupied. So 1.28M/year is about 1% of the total installed base of housing.

But it’s is probably better to look at the housing market flows, not the housing installed base: 6.4 millions homes were sold in 2006 in the US; so that 1.28M is 20% of that, up from 14% of home sales over the last 6 years. We can also look at inventories; and I find those numbers interesting. In 2004 there were 2.3 million houses on the market and in July 2007 there were 4.6 million. Makes for interesting times in the housing markets.

Of course this effects real people, displacing them from their homes. That 1.28M/year is a lot households displaced. Unemployment is another significant displacing event for households; a 1% shift in that rate effects 1.5 million people; over the last 16 years the typical year to year swing in that rate has been .55% so this 2-3 times that. It’s rude comparison, but you can compare this to international displaced people counts. I wonder how many people were displaced by Katrina?

Brad DeLong picks up some postings arguing that Google destroy’d the garden wall revenue model that the New York Times was using for Times Select and that others (e.g. the Financial Times and the Wall St. Journal) aren’t long for this world.

My first nit to pick here is that it wasn’t Google, but the tsunami of disintermediated content that blew up that business model. If you looking for the institution to blame it was the internet and it’s end-to-end design principles. Google had nothing to do with it. Well maybe it had a tiny bit to do with it; but it pains me how people are unable to distinguish the value of Google from the value of the content it is now the intermediary for.  This is like confusing the card catalog for the library, or Sony for the Shastakovich.
Brad then goes on to say something much more interesting to me.

I suspect we are headed for a winner-take-all situation here as well: journalists who acquire reputations as experts will do very well as they become draws for advertisers. Institutions–not so much. Anybody who trusted the New Republic under Michael Kinsley and then encountered the New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, and Peter Beinart learned a very painful lesson about focusing on institutions rather than people.

That is indeed the pattern. Winner take all maybe a bit exaggerated, but the pattern is clear; and this is the yet again the question of what the highly skew’d distribution of economic entities will look like going forward. As we skew more severely we end up with fewer intermediaries and everybody else cast into the role of a solitary player. Institutions fail, certainly, but it is ironic that in a single paragraph Brad can suggest that we should expect a single institution, Google, to win it all and then advise us not to focus on institutions; just on the solitary players.