Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior

If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what that behavior is meant to produce.

The Republican Field Of Hawks

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior on March 11, 2012 by SteveG

Truth Out has Eugene Robinson’s article A Field of Hawks.

The article starts with:

Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.

and ends with:

The United States and its allies should seek to eliminate the Iranian government’s will to make a bomb, not its capacity. I hope Romney realizes that while sanctions and diplomacy may not be working as well as we’d like, they’re the best tools we have — and that an attack at this point gets us nowhere. But if he believes his own rhetoric, this election may be about more than the economy. It may be about war and peace.

I can think of few things that would strengthen Iran’s will to make a bomb than the constant threats and sanctions. Iran may observe that we are a little more careful how we deal with countries that have a nuclear capability. If they are trying to build a bomb, which I might remind you our intelligence agencies say they have no proof of, it could just be so that they can get more fear if not respect from the international community.

So if threatening and sanctioning Iran seems to be counterproductive to the aims of the United States, then it would put our actions in the category of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.”

I don’t know if this is the reason, but the most obvious one would be that our real motives are to gain control of Iranian oil or to at least take it off the market so that oil prices will rise. That may not be the public’s motive, but you can bet the big oil company backers of the politicians would appreciate that.

Democratic darling has also been critic

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior on March 10, 2012 by SteveG

Well, this seems to be the week for the press to catch up to my blog. The Boston Globe came out with the story Democratic darling has also been critic, subtitled “In book, Warren targeted key figures”.

In her best-selling book, she charged that Senator Hillary Clinton abandoned her principles and supported a bankruptcy bill in exchange for campaign contributions. Warren accused Joe Biden, also a senator at the time, of selling out women. And she chided Patty Murray – the Washington senator who later helped recruit her into the race and is now leading the national effort to elect her – for wanting to shame bankrupt families.

This mirrors my post back in December, Elizabeth Warren And Hillary Clinton Trade Lessons. The headline on the continuation of The Boston Globe story on an inside page says, “Warren book may help or hurt her run.”

This furthers the point that I have been making to the Warren campaign with zero success. You cannot change the fact that Elizabeth Warren has written several books. I think the books are a tremendous asset to her campaign and should be advertised by her campaign rather than hidden by them. If she doesn’t make a big deal of her books in a positive way, someone else will turn them into a negative. Why wait around for the inevitable? Why not get out in front of the curve?

I don’t know how many times the campaign will have to be hit over the head with these ideas before they finally wake up. One almosts suspects that this behavior of the campaign falls under the category Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.”

Who Woulda Thought – A Manufactured ‘Crisis’ At The Post Office

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior SteveG's Posts on September 28, 2011 by SteveG

File this under the category, “Who woulda thought …”

In the article A Manufactured ‘Crisis’: Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions, we have:

Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits.

This is so obvious that it goes without saying, right? Oh wait, “major media coverage” is a dead give away. What if the obvious weren’t so true? Here is the rest of that paragraph or two:

While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

Who would have thought that Congress would purposely sabotage a quasi-government program just to prove that government doesn’t work?

H.R. 6407: Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act

109th Congress: 2005-2006

		Senate					House
Congress	Years	Total	Dems	Reps	Others	Vacant	Total	Dems	Reps	Others	Vacant
109th	2005–2007	100	44	55	1	—	435	202	231	1	1

I wonder if the Democrats realized what a booby trap was in the bill?

Ed Koch and NY-9

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior on September 15, 2011 by SteveG

I was looking for some news story about Ed Koch’s reaction to the loss of the Democratic candidate in NY District 9 so that I could comment on what he said. I suppose the article Ed Koch and NY-9 in The National Review will have to stand in for the video clip of Koch’s remarks that I saw. I wouldn’t normally quote The National Review, but if you want to show somebody saying something weird, this is as good a place as any to go.

The article first refers back to a March 29, 2010 A Passover Message to Americans from Ed Koch posted on a blog by Ron Radosh. In part the message states:

President Obama’s abysmal attitude toward the State of Israel and his humiliating treatment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocking. In the Washington Post on March 24th, Jackson Diehl wrote, “Obama has added more poison to a U.S.-Israeli relationship that already was at its lowest point in two decades. Tuesday night the White House refused to allow non-official photographers record the president’s meeting with Netanyahu; no statement was issued afterward. Netanyahu is being treated as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arms length. That is something the rest of the world will be quick to notice and respond to.”

“As if?” If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it is probably a duck.

The National Review article goes on to say:

Koch also clearly believes that Obama has broken with the supportive stance toward Israel shown by every previous president. Koch ends by saying: “Supporters of Israel who gave their votes to candidate Obama–78 percent of the Jewish community did–believing he would provide the same support as John McCain, this is the time to speak out and tell the President of your disappointment in him.”

Well, this Jew believed that Obama would give Israel better support than John McCain because, unlike McCain, we would have the guts to tell Israel the truth about their self-destructive behavior. In this regard the Obama administration has lived up to most of its promise.

I know that many in the Jewish community tend to justify any action that Israel takes, just because it is Israel. I don’t agree. Friends don’t let friends be self-destructive without trying to at least say something. True friends don’t even give hints to the self-destructive friend that the behavior is good or acceptable.

To think that Koch would vote against the best interests of the United State in order to support Israel reminds me of the the stereotypical claim about Jews. The claim is that we have greater allegiance to Israel than to the United States. Perhaps this is not what Koch is demonstrating in that Koch is truly way more conservative than the mainstream Democratic party even in regard to American domestic policy.

It is too bad that Israel does not seem recognize the similarity between its relation to the Palestinians and the relation of an abusive parent to a child. No matter what provocation a child may have committed, there is no excuse for the parent to be abusive. Moreover, the abuse often just inures the child to abuse and torture. Rather than reform the child’s behavior, the abusive way the child is treated is taken as the lesson in how to interact with others.

Certainly one might talk about, I won’t argue justify, the current Israeli position as a role reversal with how they were treated by the Palestinians in the beginning. Their current attitude could be thought of as the result of abusive treatment I described above.

So, on both sides, a distant observer can see where the behavior might be coming from. That does not commit that observer to agree that the behavior is acceptable. Each observer needs to try to change the behavior of the side on which the observer has the best chance of exerting influence. So if this Jew excoriates the behavior of Israel, there is no need to come back at me with, “Yes, but look at what the other side did or does.” I have very little influence in the matter, but if I have any chance and even a modicum of credibility on changing one side’s behavior, it is on the actions of Israel where I must concentrate.

If I can just convince one or two of Israel’s supporters in this country to consider the fact that Israel’s behavior is counterproductive or that Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior needs to be applied, then perhaps I will have accomplished something.

Cantor Could Rake In Windfall If Debt Ceiling Isn’t Raised

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior on July 1, 2011 by SteveG

The article Cantor could rake in windfall if debt ceiling isn’t raised explains:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) latest financial disclosure statement indicates that he owns up to $15,000 of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT, a fund that will likely skyrocket as U.S. debt becomes less desirable.

This is almost a perfect example of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior.

For any of you who could not understand how any patriotic Senator could stall raising the debt ceiling and possibly crashing the U.S. economy, maybe you just did not understand that Senator’s motives. Greenberg’s law tells you why you are barking up the wrong tree. It just doesn’t tell you which tree to bark up against instead. Even so, from understanding the law, you could make a pretty good guess as to where to look.

According to fund’s summary description posted on Yahoo!:

The investment seeks daily investment results, before fees and expenses and interest income earned on cash and financial instruments, which correspond to twice (200%) the inverse (opposite) of the daily performance of the Barclays Capital 20+ Year U.S. Treasury Bond Index.

I presume that means if the index falls by half, Cantor could double his money. If the U.S. defaults, I don’t know if a 50% fall of the index is as bad as it could get.

This brings on another application of Greenberg’s law. Why would Cantor sell out his country and risk going to jail for a measly $15,000 profit. Counter intuitive behavior? Maybe we don’t understand the full amount he stands to gain.

Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

This entry was posted in Books Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior Greenberg's Law of The Media on December 21, 2010 by SteveG

I have just read this fascinating book, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks, by British Medical Doctor Ben Goldacre. This book is chock full of examples of why Greenberg’s Law Of The Media is true.

I wrote the law based on my reading of the media and my 6-years of post high school mathematics training. I have never claimed that I was particularly good with the statistical end of mathematics, yet I could recognize a lot of the flaws in news stories. Because Ben Goldacre does seem to be a statistics expert, he is able to point out flaws in the media far beyond what I would have suspected. His explanations will make it easy to recognize these errors when I see them in the future.

In addition, he points out that flawed interpretations of statistics and probabilities extend far beyond the media and have consequences far more severe than a misinformed public.

It is not only that people (big pharma flacks) lie with statistics, it is also that people just don’t understand how to apply statistics nor understand how to interpret them. So, even with the best intentions in the world, if you don’t know what you are doing with statistics, what seem like perfectly reasonable conclusions to you are just not borne out by the numbers when they are understood correctly.

There are many experts who do understand all this and know how to figure out what is statistically significant and what is not. Their interpretations might surprise you, until the reasoning is explained.

In Chapter 11 titled Bad Data, Goldacre pulls together quite a few of ways that people get fooled.

He writes in a very entertaining way, and I can hardly do justice to his ideas here, but I will try to give you a hint at some of what you should know.

Using relative risk instead of natural frequencies.

Let’s say the risk of having a heart attack in your fifties is 50 percent higher if you have high cholesterol. That sounds pretty bad. Let`s say the extra risk of having a heart attack if you have high cholesterol is only 2 percent. That sounds OK to me. But they’re the same (hypothetical) figures. Let’s try this. Out of a hundred men in their fifties with normal cholesterol, four will be expected to have a heart attack, whereas out of a hundred men with high cholesterol, six will be expected to have a heart attack. That’s two extra heart attacks per hundred. Those are called natural frequencies.
Choosing your figures

He quotes from an article in the UK’s Independent explaining a change of heart in their policy on cannabis.

In 1997, this newspaper launched a campaign to decriminalise the drug. If only we had known then what we can reveal today . . . Record numbers of teenagers are requiring drug treatment as a result of smoking skunk, the highly potent cannabis strain that is 25 times stronger than resin sold a decade ago.

By the time he has finished, he shows that the number from the government report that the paper uses as its authority for the information says no such thing. He shows that you might conclude that the number is double, not 25 times higher. Even the doubling is a misinterpretation of the data. More over, this scare about the multiplying strength had been used years before by Ronald Reagan. Had you multiplied together the increase noted by Reagan in the 80s with the increase mentioned by the paper in the 90s, It would require more THC to be present in the plant than the total volume of space taken up by the plant itself. It would require matter to be condensed into superdense quark-gluon plasma cannabis. For God’s sake don’t tell the newspapers such a thing is possible.
Misunderstanding statistical significance

For his example he uses

…an article in The Times (London) in March 2006 headed: COCAINE FLOODS THE PLAYGROUND. Use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year, said the subheading. Was this true?

If you read the press release for the government survey on which the story is based, it reports almost no change in patterns of drug use, drinking or smoking since 2000.

He goes through the process of explaining how you get from some initial numbers used by the newspaper to the quite correct analysis in the government report to show that there was really almost no change.
Poorly chosen questions in a survey where the respondents choose whether or not to respond to the survey

This one is so obvious, I’ll let you go to the book to read his instructive example.
Misunderstanding the math of predicting very rare events

The examples are very revealing, but too hard to summarize here. One of the example he uses shows the futility of a psychiatrist’s trying to predict which of the psychiatrist’s patients is likely to commit a murder.
The prosecutor’s fallacy

This is related to the above, but in this case the prosecutor uses statistics to show that an innocent explanation for the crime is unlikely without telling you that the criminal explanation is even more unlikely. He uses an actual case to demonstrate this problem.
Using the occurrence of an unlikely event to prove that something weird has happened
In the introduction to this discussion of an actual criminal case, he uses a quotation from renowned physicist Richard Feynman to start you thinking about the absurdity he is about to describe.

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing . . .

If you don’t catch the absurdity of the point Feynman was making, then this comment by Goldacre, might help:

There is also an important lesson here from which we could all benefit: unlikely things do happen. Somebody wins the lottery every week; children are struck by lightning. It’s only weird and startling when something very, very specific and unlikely happens if you have specifically predicted it beforehand.

Later he explains what is wrong with the court case he uses as an example.

First he makes an analogy about blindly firing thousands of bullets from a machine gun at a barn and then finding and circling three bullet holes close together to prove that you are an excellent shot. He ties the analogy to the prosecution he is describing

You would, I think, disagree with both my methods and my conclusions for that deduction. But this is exactly what has happened in Lucia’s case: the prosecutors found seven deaths on one nurse’s shifts, in one hospital, in one city, in one country, in the world and then drew a target around them.

He generalizes the problem with what the prosecutor did.

This breaks a cardinal rule of any research involving statistics: you cannot find your hypothesis in your results. Before you go to your data with your statistical tool, you have to have a specific hypothesis to test. If your hypothesis comes from analyzing the data, then there is no sense in analyzing the same data again to confirm it.

More on the Tax Deal

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior SteveG's Posts on December 8, 2010 by SteveG

On Baseline Scenario, James Kwak writes More on the Tax Deal where he clarifies how Obama’s behavior comes under the heading of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior.

If we can infer people’s preferences from their behavior, then the logical inference is that Obama thinks the Bush tax cuts, taken as a whole, are good policy.

Prior to that statement, he had just explained what he thinks was wrong with extending the Bush tax cuts:

This was the best chance to kill the tax cuts once and for all. Yes, it would have been worse in the short run for the economy. But this is a huge price to pay for a modest stimulus made up entirely out of tax cuts (largely tax cuts for the rich). Instead, we are stuck with a huge reduction in the tax burden of the rich and a small reduction in the tax burden of the middle class–which, on balance, helps the rich and hurts the middle class–forever.

He goes on to point out:

Finally, are the “middle-class” tax cuts really worth fighting for? Or, to put it another way, why does Obama care about them so much? Contrary to the beliefs of the Tea Party, money doesn’t just get eaten by a big monster when it goes to the IRS. It gets spent on stuff that ordinary people want and need. So a priori, we can’t say that an additional dollar of tax revenue is good or bad for ordinary people.

I think Kwak’s ending puts Obama’s choices in the stark contrast needed to see what is going on:

So perhaps with the best intentions, the Obama administration, by making it more likely that the Bush tax cuts will become permanent (just like the AMT fix is permanent), is probably hastening the day when push will come to shove and Medicare will be gutted. The bigger the projected national debt, the more seemingly reasonable people in the middle of the ideological spectrum shake their heads sadly and say something has to be done about Medicare, as if it’s a fact of nature and not a fact of politics. As I’ve said before, no administration has tried harder to control health care costs and thereby protect the future of Medicare. But at the same time, they are digging deeper the hole on the funding side that, politically, is the big threat to Medicare–and to retirement security for hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans.

Apparently Obama is upset at people on the left for insisting on purity. In his view of the world, he drew a line in the sand: he was going to protect tax cuts for the “middle class,” and he succeeded. Maybe he did. Maybe we should be giving him credit for getting what he wanted. But if that’s the case, he’s drawing moderate-Republican lines in the sand. His priorities, as reflected in his policy decisions, are lower taxes (for everyone, not just the rich) and the smaller government that necessarily implies. And that’s why the left is angry.

Tax Cut Ironies

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior SteveG's Posts on December 8, 2010 by SteveG

James Kwak writes about the Tax Cut Capitulation on Baseline Scenario web site,

(Note to Barack: If you want to win a negotiation, you have to be willing to walk away. Take my daughter. If I threaten her with a three-minute timeout, she says, “I want a timeout for eight hours!” If I threaten to take away an episode of Dinosaur Train, she says, “I don’t want to watch Dinosaur Train ever again!” You have two daughters, right?)

Good stimulus policies bring about economic improvements that are larger than the government money spent. In economics this is called a multiplier that is greater than 1. Kwak quotes Mark Zandi about the multiplier on the package just “compromised”:

According to Mark Zandi (via Menzie Chinn), the multiplier for the Bush income tax cuts is 0.29 and the multiplier for accelerated depreciation is 0.27.

There is another thing wrong with the Obama capitulation other than the low multiplier:

Second, this can no longer be considered a two-year tax cut. This year, the Democrats gave in to the framing that letting the cuts expire would be a tax increase. President Obama has already nailed himself to the cross of “stop[ping] middle-class taxes from going up.” With that on his resume, how is he going to flip-flop and let those taxes go up in 2012? He won’t win a vote to cut taxes just for the middle class with fewer Democrats in Congress than he has now. So if he wants to preserve the middle-class tax cuts, he’ll have to compromise again.

Following along in the vein of Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior he says:

So finally, you have to ask, what does Barack Obama want? Does he really like most of the Bush tax cuts? Does he really think the bulk of the tax cuts are good for the country, and that going along with the tax cuts in the top brackets is a reasonable price to pay to keep them?

In a footnote explaining why the Bush (now Obama) Tax cuts were bad policy, he points out:

How bad? Here’s one example. In order to pass the bill using reconciliation–the first time reconciliation was ever used to pass a deficit-increasing bill–they had to limit the ten-year cost of the bill. One way they did that was by adding a provision that allows upper-income taxpayers, in 2010, to convert their traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs. This is unambiguously good for upper-income taxpayers, because it’s optional, so you can decide if you want to do it. So in the long term, it will result in lower tax revenues. But it artificially juices tax revenues in 2010, because when you convert you have to pay tax on the conversion amount now. That increased the amount by which they could cut taxes elsewhere in the bill. So, as my tax casebook puts it, the bill uses tax cuts for the rich to fund more tax cuts for the rich.

President Obama’s Capitulation Press Conference

This entry was posted in Greenberg's Law of Counterproductive Behavior SteveG's Posts on December 7, 2010 by SteveG

C-SPAN has a video of President Obama’s Press Converence about his caving to Republican demands for tax cuts for the wealthy.

I watched a good bit of it, but after a while, I couldn’t take any more of it. He just couldn’t get the concept that every time he is in a negotiation, the Republicans have him accurately pegged. He thinks this situation is unique, but the Republicans know how to make every situation like this one. Why wouldn’t the Republicans do this? It has been such a successful strategy for them.

If the President could only stonewall the Republicans as well as he stonewall’s the press in this press conference, he would be doing much better in his Presidency by now.

The President seems to find it much easier to give in to his adversaries than he finds sticking with his constituency. He’ll stonewall us, but give in to the opposition. Would it help if we became his opposition? I am ready to try that approach now. It doesn’t seem like he could be much weaker.

When you see a tug-of-war where one side is constantly giving up a foot and taking back six inches, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion as to where the flag is going to end up.

The President is supposed to be a Constitutional scholar. Perhaps he needs to go back and study the power of the threat of a veto, let alone an actual veto. Maybe the veto occurs when the bill goes past your absolute limit. He doesn’t seem to realize that the threat of the veto has to come with a large margin of safety. The Republicans know how to use the filibuster. Why can’t he observe and learn? He seems to observe and give up.

Is it time to consider the President’s action may come under Greenberg’s Law of Counter-productive Behavior?

If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.

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