Paradigm Shift

Today marks the end of a full two weeks in my new home: Columbus, Ohio. I have to say first that I was a little, well, suspicious of moving. I've lived all of my life (save for a handful of 3-12 month forays to other states/countries) in St. Augustine, a town as small as it is tiny. I love St. Augustine: its people, the lay of its land, and its back-of-my-hand familiarity. Simply, if you will, the cut of its jib.
So, although I have a great desire to see the rest of the world, it was with a little trepidation that I packed my things, closed for the last time my front door in St. Augustine and opened for the first time my front door in Columbus. I don't mean to imply that I've been permanently uprooted; I still have a family and many friends in St. Augustine. Well, as near as I can tell after this, the first of many fortnights, my new home is a good one.
Mandy and I love our apartment, and it already feels comfortable and lived in. It's a two-bedroom, and Mandy has taken the second bedroom as her office/lounge/bohemian-think-tank (I have an office shared amongst other grad students on campus). We have our own laundry room, for which my mother was able to procure a very affordable washer and dryer. Doing laundry without leaving the house is a luxury I haven't had since 2002. The bathroom is spacious, but the kitchen is cramped. Our apartment complex is right on the Olentangy river (pronounced tan-jee, not like 'tangy'), the smallish waterway that bisects Columbus. A bike/jogging trail runs right behind the complex, which, if traveled in a southerly fashion, takes me right to the OSU campus in about two miles.
We live in Clintonville, which is an older neighborhood just north of the University district. Our place is just off of High street, the main drag that runs right up and down down town.
Mandy and I are desperately (and successfully) trying to shift to a paradigm of productivity. Neither of us have ever been morning people, but for the past week (even on weekends) we've gotten up at six thirty and gone to bed as close to eleven as our meager internet addictions will let us. I'm exercising and studying every day; I'm staying on top of the dishes and the laundry; I'm even white-boarding my daily to-do lists, and subsequently erasing them, one at a time upon completion, with a satisfying swish. All fear or uneasiness that grad school will be too difficult or that I won't be smart enough to excel has vanished in the wake of my new found determination.
The days here are still summery, replete with sunshine and warmth and reminiscences of Florida. But one can tell, while walking about at dawn or dusk, that Fall is at hand, and that soon leaves will be brown, coats will be donned, and that breath will be steamy.

Wow, I keep leaving for months at a time. I know this isn't good for our blogger<->fanboy relationship, so I'll try to post with more regularity in the future.

Life is generally good. I've been accepted to The Ohio State University for grad school in the fall. I visited the campus a few weeks ago; it's pretty nice. I'll probably go there, since it's the only place I've been accepted to yet. I've still got two applications out (Penn State and U Minnesota), but I'm not holding my breath.

The wedding plans are nearing completion. We're tragically behind on sending out the invitations (any day now) but that's one of the last things we need to worry about.

I have a month of school left before I graduate. An actual Bachelor's degree has been this hazy, pie-in-the-sky goal for so long. Now that it's close enough to see (when I squint) it's kind of strange, almost as if not having my degree is one of my last vestiges of childhood, and when I walk across the stage I will emerge, on the other side, an adult. It gives me the willies.

Six Word Stories

There's an anecdote about Hemingway that he bet his colleagues that he could write a complete story in only six words. His story: "For sale: Baby shoes, Never worn." He won the bet. Now I can't stop writing them myself. Here are some of the best I've come up with since last night:

"Sun exploded. Explain later. Love, mom."

"Shh!" said Jeffrey to the Tyrannosaur.

"Six word story? Can't be done."

Bleeding, he cried "Mercy!" What trickery!

"Happily, I die!" And he did.

This last one is a collaboration between me and my colleague, Andrew. We decided six was too many and wrote a. . . wait for it. . . five word story.

Hemingway: Succinct. I, more so.

Got any good ones? Comment them!

At the beginning of my favorite love story, the protagonist looks in his journal and realizes that he hasn't written an entry in almost two years. He is awestruck by the amount of time that has passed by without his realization. It's been just over two months since I've last written here, and while that's not nearly as dramatic as a two year silence, I'm not quite able to figure out what happened to all the little days between then and now. [Note: it strikes me as weird that "then" can refer to both the future and the past. "That was then, this is now." and "I'll see you then." are both correct. We really should have two different words for this sort of thing.]

This is an tumultuous time for me. The future, which has loomed out of sight and around corners for so long, is rushing up at me. In a month, I'll have applied to graduate school. In four months, I'll be accepted or rejected. In six, I'll be married. In nine, I'll be living in another state. I have very little idea what my life will be like a year from now, save that I will be with the woman that I love, which is exactly the reassurance that turns my anxiety into excitement.

Strangely, I'm already beginning to miss St. Augustine. I love my crummy little apartment. I love the unevenly cobbled brick streets. I love not being able to go anywhere without running into three people I know. But. . . all things change. I think I've had (almost) all the adventures I'm bound to have in a sleepy little town like St. Augustine.

I get political

A Modest Rebuttal
My Take on Ann Coulter’s: They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority

Ann Coulter is good for me. She inspires me to be a better man. Every time I read one of her articles, I understand the importance of a rational, balanced perspective. Every time I see her on television (or more frequently, youtube), I am taught humility. Every time I hear her speak, I learn patience. Today, Ann Coulter taught me about the economy.

I just read an article [humanevents.com] that Ms. Coulter wrote about our ongoing economic crisis. In it, she blames the Clinton administration for all of the financial trouble our country is in. I don’t know much about politics or the economy, but that didn’t sit right with me. Didn’t Clinton leave office with the country in surplus? I was confused.

As I read more, the usual Coulter questions started popping into my mind. What are her sources? Where are the hyperlinks to supplementary material? Is the issue really as simple (and as one-sided) as she makes it out to be? Am I to take her at her word? Faced with a dearth of corroborating details, I did what I usually do. I went to Wikipedia.

I did not, however, use Wikipedia as it is normally used: the one-stop information shop. I used it as it is intended to be used: a well-cited, community-generated gateway to credible information on the internet. The following is the result of what I learned. I make no claims at uncovering any ground-breaking knowledge or even illuminating any new points of view. I simply went to Wikipedia’s page on the Subprime mortgage crisis and followed the citations to their original sources.

The thing that surprised me the most was that Ms. Coulter asserts that the only cause of the current crisis was legislation imposed by the Clinton administration almost a decade ago. She doesn’t explicitly state this, but the implication is pretty clear from the article. This was the first thing I researched, and I found a few causes that Ms. Coulter accidentally missed.

Excessive Housing Speculation [cnn.com]: In 2006, the total number of home sales dropped 4.1%. But investment home sales (homes bought to be later ‘flipped’ for a profit) dropped roughly 6%. The chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, David Lereah, said in April 2007: "Speculators left the market in 2006, which caused investment sales to fall much faster than the primary market." That is, the rich people trying to profit financially from the real estate market dumped more plots of land than the poor people that were unable to pay for their homes.. Of course, the rich investors sold their homes fairly while the poor people defaulted. But millions of investment homes were sold at a loss, which was not good for the market.

Securitization [msnbc.msn.com]: This allows unscrupulous mortgage brokers (or companies) to write high-risk mortgages and pass the risk on to third-party investors, primarily Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. “[Alan] Greenspan acknowledged that a number of people should not have been taking out those mortgages, but that the current crisis was due ‘not the subprime problem itself, but to the securitization of subprime.’" Unfortunately, Greenspan doesn’t back up his statement in this article with any data, so you’ll have to make up your own mind about this one.

SEC self-regulation [nytimes.com]: SEC Chairman Cox (a Republican, by the way) “acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down.” Of course, the article doesn’t qualify the word ‘contributed’. Did the self-regulation contribute a little? A lot? You’ll have to read the article and decide for yourself.

From President Bush's own address [whitehouse.gov] a few days ago: "For more than a decade, a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad . . .[t]his large influx of money to U.S. banks and financial institutions -- along with low interest rates -- made it easier for Americans to get credit.” The President makes a general claim about Americans. He doesn’t say it was easier for minorities to get credit, or for poor people to get credit. He doesn’t mention pressure from the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development [hud.com], or outdated, fiscally irresponsible policies from the previous administration.

My next question was more difficult. George Bush has almost completed two terms in office. How is it that he didn’t know about the “embarrassing” lending policies left to him by his predecessor? And why, if he did know, and they are such obviously poor policies, has he done nothing about them? Why is this such a surprise to everybody?

Now, let’s be fair. I know that President Bush is not solely responsible for the economic prosperity or scarcity of the whole country. I’m speaking in the general terms that Ms. Coulter uses: I’m speaking of Bush’s administration as a whole, the same way she lumps Clinton and all the Democrats together.

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article published, interestingly enough, nine years ago today:

“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

'From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 'If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.’''

It seems Peter Wallison, whoever that is, understood the potential risks way back in the nineties. What about something more current? Here’s an excerpt from a report [ssrn.com, abstract only] submitted in August to the Social Science Research Network:

We find that the quality of loans deteriorated for six consecutive years before the crisis and that securitizers were, to some extent, aware of it. We provide evidence that the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market follows a classic lending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. Problems could have been detected long before the crisis, but they were masked by high house price appreciation between 2003 and 2005.

I really can’t understand Ms. Coulter’s steadfast maintenance of the position that this, the current economic crisis, is Clinton’s (and his band of Democrats’) fault. People understood back when Clinton was leaving office the risks that these policies carried (Peter Wallison couldn’t have been the only one, could he?). Loans deteriorating for six consecutive years? Securitizers aware of it? Classic boom-bust?

The risks were not difficult to foresee for those who knew economics and who were paying attention. Coulter writes about the "embarrassment" of Clinton’s subprime lending policies. Well, we've had eight years to change them; why didn't we? The answer is that it hasn't been an embarrassment for eight years. We've had a real-estate boom for the majority of that time. It's only been an embarrassment since the bubble burst in 2006. The problem isn't that Clinton put into motion the policies that caused the boom, it's that George Bush didn't throttle them back before the bust. Indeed, Bush alludes to this himself in his address to the American people a few days ago [referenced above]:

“Our 21st century global economy remains regulated largely by outdated 20th century laws.“

Bush was speaking about financial regulation in general, not sub-prime mortgages. But his words hit the mark.

I wanted to understand this a little more. I wanted to know how this problem progressed from 1992 (when Ms. Coulter references her LA Times article) to present day. I found a lot of information in this article [washingtonpost.com] from earlier this year. It outlines some of the specific interactions between the HUD and Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. The following two paragraphs are a synthesis of information from that article and the Peter Wallison article referenced above. I’m only going to cover the main points. You can read the details for yourself.

In 1992, the HUD became responsible for monitoring Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and setting new goals for them every four years or so. In 1999 the HUD “proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.” That’s a six percent increase over three years, from the value . I don’t know about you, but when I first read the Coulter article, I felt there was a pretty strong implication that the infamous embarrassing Clinton legislation introduced a heftier hike than that. But when there’s no attempt at providing context, implications are all you have to go on. There’s more.

Between 2001 and 2004 “Freddie and Fannie's purchases of subprime-backed securities had risen tenfold.” That year, 2004, under a Republican president and a Republican congress (ahem, Ms. Coulter), the HUD “ratcheted up the main affordable-housing goal over the next four years, from 50 percent to 56 percent.” This is the same percentage by which the Democrats raised the bar in the nineties.

How can Ms. Coulter claim that this crisis is due to the Democrats, when the Republicans played the exact same game just a few years later? Indeed, one could argue that the Republican’s actions were more detrimental, as they came in later, and the bubble is more likely to burst the bigger it gets.

Maybe my arguments are not persuasive. Maybe, after digesting what I’ve said, you still feel Clinton and his Merry Men are to blame. That’s fine. But I hope you will agree that the story is decisively not as simple as Ann Coulter makes it out to be.

I am not trying to change your mind. I am not a political activist. I am not an economist. I am not a journalist. My intention with this modest rebuttal is simply to supply a contrast to Ann’s method of journalism. To show that a rational argument does not need the window-dressing of an impassioned voice. That a good idea can be explained, not indoctrinated. That being right doesn’t mean being angry.

Today I have learned another lesson from Ann Coulter. Ann has taught me about the economy. . . and something else. Another lesson that she reinforces every time I read one of her articles, or see her on television, or hear her speak.

Thank you, Ann.

Sorry ladies. . .

Mandy and I are getting married. I asked her on Saturday and, despite her normally good judgement, she said yes. We don't have any official plans laid out yet, except that it will happen sometime before we move away from Florida, which is one year (minus a few days) from now.

Resurrection

I heard they kick you out of the Blogoshpere after four months without posting. Whew, just made it.

Let's see. I haven't had any summer vacation yet. I'm taking a full semester's worth of credits during the summer. I have three weeks of no class before the Fall semester. But I'll probably come in anyway. I haven't been working on my research project as much as I should be (I should be working on it all time, I haven't worked on it at all), so I'll come in to do that. Also, my academic cohort Andrew and I have finally begun studying in earnest for the Physics Graduate Record Examination, the single most important thing for my application to grad school. Sure, grades and research experience are more important than the GRE, but those are spread over years of work. The GRE is one three hour test, and if I fail it, I pretty much fail at life. Not that it's a pass/fail sort of thing; you get a score and that's that. But let's be real here, bombing = failing.

I'm still high on Batman. I don't think I have anything particularly original to say. It was awesome. RIP HL.

In case you couldn't tell, I've pretty much stopped my regular crane folding. I realized that I've got better things on which I should be spending fifteen minutes every day. Like the GRE. I'll still maintain the count, and I'll get to 1000 eventually. I'm just not going to try to get it done before the end of the year.

I've been taking a philosophy class. It's actually pretty enlightening. I feel I can organize my thoughts better now; I can make ethical decisions more logically and with a more balanced perspective. I've come to form opinions on how I believe people should think. And somehow, that's become a dirty idea: "Don't tell me how to think, you fucking fascist!", and all that. People yell "1984!" and run away. I'm not trying to say there's one way that people should live their lives or that everyone should like the same things or vote for the same people or drive the same car. But that there are certain habits of mind (a phrase introduced to me by one of my texts) that enrich your life, and some that don't. Making life decisions based on YouTube comments is wrong. Plain and simple. There's no "You live your way, I'll live mine." here. That's a practice, a habit of mind, that will lead you to a shitty life. (Of course, this assumes that YouTube comments will always be retarded and inane. So, I'm pretty much on solid ground here.) I don't claim to know what the right habits of mind are, but I believe they are out there somewhere, and that every correct, life enriching decision I make brings me closer to them.

That is all for now.