Tag: Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon Makes a Key Observation

On By southwerkIn Politics

Barack Obama and the limitations of probabilistic decision making | Felix Salmon

For Obama, if a decision doesn’t work out, he’s OK with that, since he reckons there’s a statistical certainty that a good third of his decisions will fail to work out. And he takes solace in the idea that so long as the process of arriving at the decision was a good one, by which he means that it was properly technocratic and probabilistic, then he did the best that he could have done.

But that kind of decision-making framework leaves very little room for ideals — for actually putting into practice the kind of vision you have for America. By making decisions on a case-by-case basis, you can end up missing out on building something bigger and much more coherent. In 2008, America voted for a man who was truly excellent at staring into the distance, a man looking at the big picture, and at a centuries-long legacy. Instead, hampered by the financial crisis and by a dysfunctional Congress, they got a man who spends his days weighing success probabilities: a tactician, rather than a strategist.

Barack Obama and the limitations of probabilistic decision making | Felix Salmon

“Little room for ideals:” Exactly, the President lacks the desire to fight on moral or ethical grounds but governs based on some kind of intellectual calculus, a bloodless exercise in which losses are measured in much the same way as a  a lost chess game.

Mr. Salmon hit on something I have long suspected, and I very much wish both he and I were wrong but we are not. The President lives in a world devoid of ethical calculus. He lives by the probability of the possible. We voted for a new direction for American democracy, a different vision, but we got a President who cannot envision a different reality – only manipulate the current one.

James Pilant

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Just A Few Bank Burglaries?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, ethics, Government Failure, White Collar Crime

Felix Salmon writing in Reuters’ Analysis and Opinion –

In order to know that cases like these are “a tiny percentage of foreclosures,” you need to know what that percentage is, n’est-ce pas? So this defense is not particularly convincing, unless and until we can see some numbers. Surely, mistakes like these would happen occasionally even during the boom years. But if the percentages are rising, that’s clear empirical evidence that overwhelmed servicers are doing an increasingly shoddy job.

Next time a newspaper wants to write about this particular trend, then, let’s get the names of those bank representatives on the record, let’s ask them how they know that the proportion of dreadful mistakes they make is “tiny” or “minuscule,” and let’s be a bit more determined that we should be the ones making the determination as to how small the percentage is, rather than the bank’s own flacks.

Exactly. I made the same point several months ago when the banks said that only a handful of mortgages had been mishandled. The banks were lying about the scale of the problem. It turned out there were minimally hundreds of thousands. This does not give one confidence in bank claims of “just a few cases,” “a few bad apples,” and all those other things you say when you don’t want to admit the scale of your crimes.

I don’t believe Mr. Salmon is mistaken in his assessment. Breaking into people’s homes and taking their stuff is an extremely intimidating tactic. You can just imagine the desk bound suits chortling over a business lunch about how they forced the deadbeats out.

Let’s get some lawsuits going. They are the public’s last line of defense and we can be quite sure law enforcement, politicians and regulatory agencies will sit this one out.

James Pilant