Marginal Revolution

The wisdom of Tim Harford

Libertarian paternalism is the brainchild of Profs Thaler and Sunstein, but nudging is not. Nudging is good architecture, good design or good marketing and most nudges have been invented by private sector companies. Prof Thaler’s best policy idea – a pension plan called Save More Tomorrow – was tried by a manufacturing company rather than a government.

Effective nudges are so common in the private sector that politicians should be asking themselves why.

Here is more.

Rules for eating in Chilean restaurants

1. Order the avocado ("palta," not "aguacate") whenever you can.

2. Order crab, in any manifestation possible, whenever you can.  There is nothing you should prefer over the crab.

3. Scallops are next in the hierarchy.  The sea urchin is quite good if you like it.

4. The fish is of excellent quality but the preparations are usually boring.  The greater the number of sauces you are offered, the less likely you should take any of them.

5. Fear not the mayonnaise.  It is good.  Really.

6. Parmesan cheese on either clams or scallops is excellent.

7. If you can, try a ham and cheese sandwich, roast beef, figs, mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, honey, butter, and the juices.

8. Provided you obey these rules, do not be put off by simple-sounding menus.

9. The overall quality of the food is very high, but the very best restaurants are not much better than the good restaurants.  This is often the case in areas with excellent natural ingredients, as human labor becomes a less important input.

10. A subtle blending of Chilean and Peruvian food is occurring in Santiago; the Peruvian restaurants by the way are first-rate.

The economics of Joseph Biden

Here are his votes on trade issues.  They could be better, noting that this is unlikely to be his major function.  Cato gives him 42 percent on trade issues, noting that he once wanted to ban all toy imports from China.  Here is Biden on budget issues; more conservative than I would have thought.  Here is Biden on internet issues.  David Brooks offered an interesting personal portrait of the man:

Honesty. Biden’s most notorious feature is his mouth. But in his youth, he had a stutter. As a freshman in high school he was exempted from public speaking because of his disability, and was ridiculed by teachers and peers. His nickname was Dash, because of his inability to finish a sentence.

He developed an odd smile as a way to relax his facial muscles (it still shows up while he’s speaking today) and he’s spent his adulthood making up for any comments that may have gone unmade during his youth.

Today, Biden’s conversational style is tiresome to some, but it has one outstanding feature. He is direct. No matter who you are, he tells you exactly what he thinks, before he tells it to you a second, third and fourth time.

Maybe he would have done well in academia.

Walter Benjamin's tips for writing

An occasional MR reader sent me these:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.        

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion. 

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds. 

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.    

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.   

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.   

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.   

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.   

IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.   

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.   

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.   

XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.   

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

Go Mason!

U.S. News and World Report ranks George Mason the #1 up-and-coming National University.  The economics department and the law school are doing very well but so are many other innovative departments.  The report notes:

Established in 1972, Mason is a relatively young university. Not bound by tradition and old ways of thinking, the university and its faculty embrace technology and new approaches to learning. Mason was the first university in the country to offer doctoral programs in conflict resolution, bioinformatics, computational social sciences, and information technology; and the first to offer a graduate degree in biodefense.

Library fines, part II

A US woman has been arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay fines for two overdue library books.

Heidi Dalibor, of Grafton, Wisconsin, is the first to admit that she ignored calls and letters from her local library.

She also admits that she ignored a notice to appear in municipal court or pay the fine, reports the News Graphic.

But the last thing she expected was a knock on her door by Grafton police.

Here is more.  Here is my previous post on library fines.  By the way, she paid the fine and kept the books.

Assorted links

1. Why don't all peoples form neat, orderly lines?

2. Japan will label carbon footprints for many items

3. Charles Mann, on our eroding supply of dirt and the economics of soil.  I am a big fan of Mann (he wrote the superb 1491) and this is one of the best magazine pieces of this year if not the best.  On top of all the good economics in this piece, learn how the "black revolution" -- putting carbon in the soil -- may solve agricultural problems and alleviate global warming at the same time.  Hat tip to Kottke.

4. The latest: "Chile's lower house of congress has suspended plans to boost a $1,626 gasoline subsidy for each of its members."

5. Vegan-libertarian debate and discussion

6. The new Neil Stephenson book

Do self-help books make us happier?

Ad Bergsma says yes:

Advice for a happier life is found in so-called ‘self-help books’, which are
widely sold in modern countries these days. These books popularize insights from psychological science and draw in particular on the newly developing ‘positive psychology’. An analysis of 57 best-selling psychology books in the Netherlands makes clear that the primary aim is not to alleviate the symptoms of psychological disorders, but to enhance personal strengths and functioning. Common themes are: personal growth, personal relations, coping with stress and identity. There is a lot of skepticism about these self-help books. Some claim that they provide false hope or even do harm. Yet there are also reasons to expect positive effects from reading such books. One reason is that the messages fit fairly well with observed conditions for happiness and another reason is that such books may encourage active coping. There is also evidence for the effectiveness of bibliotherapy in the treatment of psychological disorders. The positive and negative consequences of self-help are a neglected subject in academic psychology. This is regrettable, because self-help books may be the most important—although not the most reliable—channel through which psychological insights find their way to the general audience.

Here is the full issue, of the Journal of Happiness Research, and I thank whichever web site led me to this, sorry I forget.

I like that word: bibliotherapy.

Reexamining the benefits of free trade

I have yet to read this paper, by Antoni Estevadeordal and Alan M. Taylor, but it appears to be of considerable interest for recent debates on free trade.  The main argument is that trade really does raise growth rates by a noticeable amount:

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries` growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If "getting policies right" is wrong or infeasible, this leaves only the more tenuous objective of "getting institutions right" (Easterly 2005, Rodrik 2006). However, the empirical basis for judging recent trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; trade policies are poorly measured (or not measured at all, as when trade volumes are spuriously used); and the most influential studies in the literature are based on pre-1990 experience (which predates the "Great Liberalization" in developing countries which followed the GATT Uruguay Round). We address all of these concerns -- by using a model-based analysis which highlights tariffs on capital and intermediate goods; by compiling new disaggregated tariff measures to empirically test the model; and by employing a treatment-and-control empirical analysis of pre- versus post-1990 performance of liberalizing and nonliberalizing countries. We find evidence that a specific treatment, liberalizing tariffs on imported capital and intermediate goods, did lead to faster GDP growth, and by a margin consistent with theory (about 1 percentage point per annum). Endogeneity problems are considered and other observations are consistent with the proposed mechanism: changes to other tariffs, e.g. on consumption goods, though collinear with general tariffs reforms, are more weakly correlated with growth outcomes; and the treatment and control groups display different behavior of investment prices and quantities, and capital flows.

Here is a non-gated version, though it is more than a year older.  If there is any piece that can get Dani Rodrik blogging again, this is it.

Addendum: New updated, ungated version.

The culture that is Dutch

Jean Marie, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

In the Dutch parliament there was commotion today because it happens to be the case that parents can apply for some EXTRA day-care allowances (state subsidized) when they want to go on holiday WITHOUT their children. As a matter of fact: the tax department explicitly draws their attention to this fact.

Here is a bit more information (in Dutch).

Assorted links

1. The book boyfriend

2. Should you laugh at UFO research?

3. Is there excess conformity in economics?

4. A new theory of the genetic origins of homosexuality

The Worst Idea I have Heard Today

One idea that might prevent a repeat of the turmoil: a commission that would vet financial products before their release, akin [to] the Food and Drug Administration’s evaluation of drugs before they’re released to the market. McFadden suggested, “we may need a financial-instrument administration that tests the robustness of financial instruments and approves only the uses where they can do no harm.”

Nobel laureaute Daniel McFadden quoted at Real Time Economics.  Do tell what will be left when we approve only things "that can do no harm."? 

Might I also suggest that before calling for a financial FDA, Prof. McFadden should investigate what economists who have studied the matter have concluded about the safety and effectiveness of the real FDA.   

Why oh why, etc.

The WaPo web site headline is "Few speculators drive vast oil trading market".  How about "influence" instead of "drive"?  The inside heading switches to the word "dominate" instead of either.  There is lots of talk about financial firms comprising a large share of the trading but never a consideration of the significance of the net position of those firms.

The Atacama desert

It's the world's driest desert.  We've seen flamingos, vicunas, llamas, and beautiful smaller birds.  The mountains are stunning.  Tierra Atacama is arguably the best hotel experience I've had.  Cheese on seafood actually can taste good, even in the desert; that is the real Chilean miracle.  Bolivia is about twenty kilometers away.  I am told there are 100,000 active land mines around (all marked and thus safe); the only question is which neighbor is a bigger worry.  The town of San Pedro de Atacama remains in that rare sweet spot between under- and over-touristed.  Very good sweaters go for $26.  One restaurant advertises that the apples in its "Apple Pie a la Mode" come from the United States; Alex at least will get the joke.  A visit here is likely to convince you there is life on Mars.

Top economic misconceptions of the lay people you wish you could correct?

That was the first request.

Economic misconceptions interact with values to skew overall judgment, but the value judgments are usually the main problem.  Consider how "anti-foreign bias," to borrow Bryan Caplan's term, often causes people to oppose free trade.  The main problem isn't bad economic understanding, though that often is present.  Rather the person has an emotional commitment to whatever economics, and other positive arguments, make the protectionist position sound higher status and more justified. 

Consider an analogy with political scandals.  It's not quite right to pinpoint "mistaken beliefs about John Kerry's wartime record on Swift Boat matters" as the main problem, even though the beliefs are indeed mistaken. 

Better thinking may do us more good than "better economic understanding" per se.

Both Alex and I have blogged that nationality (or sometimes ethnicity or regional background) is often the best predictor of a person's economic views and yes that includes among economists.  Given the diversity of economists' views across nations, we are part of the problem too, thereby again illustrating the essential unity of mankind.

Still, I do believe in right and wrong and that means that the viewpoints of some nations (grossly construed) are better than others.  So the top economic misconception out there in the world is "unjustified dislike of the United States," noting that there are also justifiable reasons to dislike many aspects of this country.

Eric Posner is now blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy

Eric is very, very smart and knows lots of economics.  Here is his first post; excerpt:

The busy international legal activity that occurred during the post-Cold War era – the establishment of international courts, the involvement of the Security Council, the advance of international trade law – will slow down and perhaps even reenter the deep freeze into which it was shunted during the Cold War. The irony is that liberal internationalism could advance only as long as the United States was the sole superpower and in the mood to advance it.

Assorted links

1. David Leonhardt has a long, thoughtful article on the economic thinking of Barack Obama.

Markets in everything

A 16-year-old Saudi girl drank a bottle of bleach in an attempt to commit suicide to escape a forced marriage to a 75-year-old man, press reports revealed Sunday.

The girl identified only as, Shaikha, said her father was forcing her to marry the old man so that he could marry his 13-year-old daughter in an exchange deal, Bahrain's Tribune reported.

Here is the full story.

Request for requests

What would you like to hear about?  What questions do you have?  No promises are made, but your chances can only go up.

Different Ways to Know the Mind of God

Stephen Hawking famously thought that physics would reveal the mind of God.  In fact, Hawking gave physics a 50:50 shot by the end of the last century.  Guess he lost that one.  But fellow Nobelist Jim Heckman has beat Hawking to the punch using "powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings."

Let Y be God's attitude arrayed on a scale ranging from zero to one. This is an unobserved variable. Let X be the intensity of prayer in the population. It too is scaled between zero and one. The population density of prayer is summarized by a univariate density f(X) which has been estimated by Father Greeley (1972)....

The paper, which goes on like that for a while, is actually quite interesting but if you are looking for the bottom line it comes at the end:

The method presented here is applicable to a number of important problems....For example, one can extend current empirical work in a variety of areas of economics to estimate the effect of income on happiness or the effect of income inequality on democracy.

Thanks to David Glenn and Lee Spector for the link.

The drink-ice cube ratio

Sorry Europeans, but some drinks taste better with ice cubes.  The key is to get the ratio right.  As a first approximation, there are two main problems.  First, the ratio of drink to ice cubes may be too high.  In that case you start off by doing some drinking merely as an act of investment in the future quality of the drink.  (Ideally I would prefer to pour some drink on the floor, though I am too civilized for that.  Alternatively, this can be reason to dine with a companion, who will sop up your excess.)  Another reason the ratio becomes too high is if the waiter comes by and pours excess drink into your glass, so that he may take away your can or bottle "too soon" for his own not quite legitimate purposes.  This can be avoided by placing your bottle or can in an inconvenient, hard to reach place.

Country restaurants in Thailand sidestep these problems by sending around a staff member to replenish drinks with fresh ice cubes and restore the proper ratio; trust is essential.

Second, the ratio of ice cubes to drink may be too high.  If you order two drinks you rarely find (for whatever reason) that both have too many ice cubes.  You can put excess ice cubes from your water glass in your Coke but not vice versa.  If you order both mineral and plain water two-way transfers are usually possible and thus the tastes of your two drinks end up insufficiently diversified.

Three more links from Atacama

1. Profile of Art DeVany, via Michael Blowhard.

2. Another excellent David Brooks column: "The System is Winning."

3. Are dreams more negatively biased than reality?

Milton Friedman is Responsible for Scarcity

Should we be surprised that the Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago is opposed by the likes of Marshall Sahlins?  I happily farm it out to Brad DeLong:

Sahlins's claims that it was "the market-industrial system [which] institutes scarcity"... seemed to indicate a total, willful, and culpable ignorance of practically all of the non-market settled agricultural societies of the past ten thousand years.

By the way, guess where these institutes are located?

• Enrico Fermi Institute
• James Franck Institute
• The Kavli Institute
• The Franke Institute

Assorted links

1. The latest in resale price maintenance

2. Paul Krugman's (unfinished) reading list for international

3. New physics blog, via Razib

4. Lengthy article on Bob Barr

5. The cost of getting ready

The rule of law, a quick primer from Argentina

I don´t usually link to videos but I loved this one.  Note: I believe the action is staged, not real.  But still, all you Chilean pessimists need to reconsider.  You set the bar for Chile pretty high (which is good, I might add).

I thanks Carlos Scartascini for the pointer.

Why is lobster getting cheaper?

David Gross writes:

At root, the global forces that are driving up the price of food don't significantly affect the vacation lobster business in Maine. Commercial and consumer demand doesn't vary much for off-the-boat lobster. Sure, many lobsters are sold to processing plants. But unlike other seafood products—think of canned tuna, or clam sauce, or frozen fish fillets—lobster is not produced or marketed on a mass global scale, which also means there are no speculators trying to make a killing on lobster futures. The fact that people are eating more and better in China and India isn't much boosting the demand for lobsters from Maine. Even in the United States, lobster remains to a large degree a regional product.

Consistent with Gross's hypothesis, lobster is phenomenally expensive in Chile right now, in either absolute terms or especially in relative terms (compare for instance to Chilean sea bass, which is half the U.S. price or less but Chilean lobster is at least twice the U.S. prices from a sample of n = 2; Chilean sea urchin is cheap too and delicious).   

But why is lobster cheaper?  Gross samples prices in Maine and higher gas prices may mean lower demand from tourists.  But I am a little confused by Gross's additional explanation:

Distributors seeking to maintain their margins are cramming down the fishermen. And with limited local outlets (even swelled by summer visitors, the population of coastal Maine is relatively small), lobstermen can't hold out for higher prices.

Imagine a multi-product firm which applies mark-ups on different commodities.  (If everything is perfectly competitive there won't be cross-product effects.)  If the marginal cost of buying salmon goes up, can the mark-up on lobster then go down?  Is it that the retailer, now faced with higher salmon costs, "threatens bankruptcy" to get a better result from the bargaining game with the lobster supplier?

Fallacies about sovereign wealth funds

Here's one of them:

One often reads statements that sovereign wealth funds provide unique benefits to the international financial system because, for example, they make needed capital injections into western financial institutions. No one should doubt that the recipients of those capital injections have benefited from them, and in time the citizens of the countries with the funds may benefit as well. However, sovereign wealth funds are not net providers of capital to western financial markets. For the most part, they are merely recyclers of global financial flows. In this respect, they do not differ from central banks and other government-controlled entities or from private sector investors. The only issues are where they invest, how wisely those investments are made, and how accountable the investors are for their decisions.

Here is the whole piece, which is generally quite good.  So what is wrong with this passage?  It's not attaching enough importance to the idea of gains from trade.  If capital has "left" the U.S., it's because there was some gain from that transaction, such as when we buy oil.  There's then a subsequent gain if those revenue are invested wisely in the United States.  It's not just a wash through "recycling."  If you spend some money in stores, and then some people then invest in our company, that's not a wash either.

Markets in everything

Mr Caballero's clothes can withstand shots from 9mm pistols to AK-47s and clients fearing knives can pay extra for stab-proofing.

The market is South Africa and the inspiration is Colombia.  It's the stab-proofing that impresses me.  Here is the story and I thank NS for the pointer.

Two links, from the Atacama desert

1. More polemic against the Milton Friedman Institute, from Marshall Sahlins.

2. Play MR Jeopardy again: the answer is Andrew Jackson, what is the question?  This is from Andrew Sullivan, who is the first blogger I ever read and remains one of my favorites.

I, Dirt

Potting mixes often contain sphagnum peat moss from bogs in Canada or Ireland. Bark fines might come from a sawmill in the Deep South. Coconut "coir," a peat moss substitute, gets shipped all the way from Asia.

A common ingredient in potting mixes is perlite, which makes the soils airier while also retaining moisture. In its final form, small white pellets, it appears to be something synthesized in a factory. In fact, it comes from a volcanic sand mined on the Greek island of Milos. Shipped to the United States, the ore is heated to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it pops into kernels.

The always-interesting Joel Achenbach writing in the Washington Post.

Real business cycle theory is not dead

Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe and Martin Uribe report (ungated here):

In this paper, we perform a structural Bayesian estimation of the contribution of anticipated shocks to business cycles in the postwar United States. Our theoretical framework is a real-business-cycle model augmented with four real rigidities: investment adjustment costs, variable capacity utilization, habit formation in consumption, and habit formation in leisure. Business cycles are assumed to be driven by permanent and stationary neutral productivity shocks, permanent investment-specific shocks, and government spending shocks. Each of these shocks is buffeted by four types of structural innovations: unanticipated innovations and innovations anticipated one, two, and three quarters in advance. We find that anticipated shocks account for more than two thirds of predicted aggregate fluctuations. This result is robust to estimating a variant of the model featuring a parametric wealth elasticity of labor supply.

Jerry-rigged, yes.  But the principle of Occam's Razor isn't as strong as many people think.  If the mechanisms governing real world outcomes actually are that complicated, and if the simpler theories have failed, than jerry-rigging it is.  And, as Christina Romer has pointed out, deflationary money shocks are still bad for output and employment, which means the theory has at least an extra branch.

The power of competition, or should there by library fines?

From the UK:

"Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late," said library consultant Frances Hendrix - a loud voice in the debate which has been taking place on an online forum for librarians. "It's all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers." Liz Dubber, director of programmes at reading charity The Reading Agency, agreed. "My personal view [is that] they're past their sell-by date because they do sustain a very old-fashioned image of libraries which is out of sync with today's modern library environment and the image libraries are trying to project - tolerant, responsive, flexible, stimulating," she said.

Some critics have described the fines as "alienating."  But are there alternatives?:

One librarian suggested adopting the ancient practice of some monasteries, in which monks who offended in the handling of books were publicly cursed. Another pointed to Soviet Russia, where they said that offenders' names were published in newspapers to shame them into returning their books. In New Zealand town Palmerston North next week, library users returning late books are being challenged to beat librarians on Guitar Hero to have their fines waived.

In any case this economist will suggest higher fines for very new and popular books and also commonly used reference manuals, combined with lower fines for everything else.

Tipping is hard

And should I also say that writing software is sometimes easy?  Stephen Dubner lists some of the new iPhone applications:

iTip, from palaware
iTip, from Uncouth Software
BigTipper, from PureBlend Software
TipCalc, from BAMsoft
Tiptap, from Made with Bananas
Tipulator, from tap tap tap
Tip Calc, from Charles Ying
Tip, from Carlos Perez
CheckPlease, from Catamount Software
Tips, from Kudit.com
mTip, from Pascal Mermoz
TipBuddy, from Justin Jeffress
Gratuity, from TapeShow
QuickTip, from Spare Change Software
Tippety Split, from Manta Ray Software

DSquared asks, Zimbabwe listens

Reeling from the highest inflation rate in the world, barred by the government from using U.S. dollars for purchases, Zimbabweans turned to a new money source Wednesday: gasoline coupons.

Here is the full story, thanks to Tony McGovern for the pointer; he cites this blog post as well.

Portrait of Nouriel Roubini

Find it here, he is called "Dr. Doom."  Paul Krugman interprets.  Nouriel was one member of a stellar Harvard Ph.d. class, including also Abhijit Banerjee and Alan Krueger, among others.

U.S. fact of the day

High school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high school females over the past 25 years.

Here is the link, with a photo.  Loyal MR readers will know that I am a strong and genuine non-paternalist.  But if you are a paternalist, and you are looking for one place to start, well...it's not just the injuries that should point your attention in this direction.  We have to raise tax revenue from somewhere, right?  Currently we are subsidizing cheerleading and, along the lines of Robert Frank's column, that makes no more sense than subsidizing fuel. 

Obama insecurity

Obama has many good qualities but this does not prevent the circulation of massive amounts of "Obama insecurity," as evidenced by some of the comments on a recent post.  (It's not about disagreeing; note how the tone changes.)  For some people no comment on Obama, other than the purely laudatory, is anything other than a hackish right-wing attempt to forge an alliance of lies with Karl Rove and his ilk.  But an election need not be framed as a war where all remarks must be strategically proper and in line with the objective of electing a preferred candidate; a blog is a discourse first and foremost.

The mood on Obama reminds me of the response of some MR commentators to Eric Lyon on Radiohead.

I cannot imagine how devastated and hopeless the Democratic left would feel if Obama loses.  That response would be a big mistake but in part it explains "Obama insecurity."  The left is uneasy that so many of their hopes are pinned on this man and as Paul Krugman points out he is somewhat unknown.  There is a secondary fear that Obama is in fact committed to the notion of America as a center-right country or at least is unwilling to challenge that idea. 

"Obama insecurity" hurts his electoral chances and hurts the intellectual future of the left as a corrective force in American politics.  There's not a convincing or credible path toward painting his enemies as immoral, even if that is what you believe.  Some campaign lies are painting Obama as weak, inexperienced, and non-American or even anti-American.  Responding with a dose of "Obama insecurity" only plays into the hands of those who would turn this into a race of emotions and innuendo.