When to Write Poorly

Writing is a crucial skill to invest in, no matter what your field. Whatever other knowledge you have is worth little if you cannot effectively explain it to others.

In Western society, the onus for ensuring understanding falls to the writer or speaker, not the reader or listener. Malcolm Gladwell points this out in "Outliers," in which he discusses how foreign pilots would often crash because they communicated problems too subtly to air traffic control:

Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. … But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver orientated. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

Sometimes, however, clarity in writing is sacrificed for other goals.

In academic journals, writers aim to impress. Writing that is overly technical, poorly organized, and difficult to follow can still build prestige for the writer, even if the underlying arguments are rubbish. Additionally, complicated math is often used for show, even if simpler math would be more appropriate for the topic. Making your paper easier to understand only makes it easier for others to criticize your arguments or data.

In the legal world, writers aim to complicate. Lawyers write contracts and other legal documents in language that can only be understood by other lawyers, keeping them all in business. Lengthy, convoluted documents are less likely to be read carefully by the people signing them, to the advantage of the parties creating such documents.

In academia, writers aim to meet page requirements. A high school student might make his point in 5 pages, but he is forced to include 5 more pages of tangents, needless repetition, and other fluff to reach a 10-page minimum. Similarly, the majority of doctoral students will submit dissertations that are hundreds of pages long, no matter what the topic.

Should the NFL Play in the Summer Instead?

Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI, in 2007. CC photo from Chad Davis on Flickr.

Football prides itself on toughness. Unlike in baseball, NFL games are almost never canceled because of inclement weather. Although the players are expected to play through anything, is it wise for the league to expect the same from its fans?

Sitting shoulder to shoulder with other fans for a three-hour game no doubt is more pleasant on a sunny day than it is during a snowstorm, at least for the 23 NFL teams (out of a total 32) that don't play in domed stadiums. Holding all else equal, we would expect fans to be willing to pay higher ticket prices if it means enjoying the football game in more pleasant conditions. Is the NFL leaving revenue on the table by playing during the worst weather of the year (August to February)?

Probably not. Although watching football is more pleasant in sunny weather, so is a slew of other activities. By playing in bad weather, football can be king of winter, as it has fewer things to compete with. This is even more true for another important NFL revenue base: the fans watching at home. The NFL generates monster TV ratings in part because, for many fans, there isn't much they want to do in dreary weather besides staying home and watching the game.

The weather is less likely to affect football fans on the margin as it is for baseball fans. Many people who couldn't care less about baseball might buy a $10 bleacher ticket to spend a sunny afternoon at the ballpark with their friends, but fewer people are going to go to an NFL game on such a whim, with the average ticket price being $75.

YouTube to Auto-Caption Videos

From TechCrunch:

In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken.

This move will engender a lot of goodwill for Google, and rightly so, for enabling deaf people to consume video content that they otherwise couldn't. Even if the transcription is poor (and I've seen some pretty bad transcripts from humans covering live events), it's better than nothing.

More importantly, this will give Google more text to scan and analyze. The system will have a better idea of what each video is about and therefore be better at suggesting related videos. It will also make it easier for Google to correctly target advertising based on the content of each video. More relevant advertising leads to higher clickthrough rates and more money for Google's bottom line.

Naming Campus Buildings after Alumni

Chico State's O'Connell Technology Center.

George Mason University, where I attend grad school, seems to have more than its fair share of buildings with generic names: College Hall, East Building, Engineering Building, Fine Arts Building, Lecture Hall, Performing Arts Building, Student Union I, Student Union II, and West Building (see the campus map).

Compare this to California State University, Chico, where I went for undergrad (map). There is a Performing Arts Center and a Physical Sciences Building (where, oddly, I once had a Spanish class), but the other buildings are named for alumni or nearby counties.

The difference is probably due to the age of each school. Chico State is the second-oldest CSU campus, established in 1887. GMU was established as part of the University of Virginia in 1957 and became independent in 1972. Although Chico State today has roughly half the student population of GMU, it has several times as many alumni (living or dead).

If someone were to construct a model for optimal timing for the naming of buildings, what would it entail? Certainly it would factor in the number of noteworthy alumni and the number of campus buildings over time. The alumni base grows every year, and the number of campus buildings is growing at most universities, but it's hard to predict the rates and accelerations of either decades into the future.

The university doesn't want to name all of its buildings after alumni too quickly, as the accomplishments of future alumni may be far grander. But at any point, the university can sell the naming rights, so to speak, by offering to name a building after a graduate upon receiving a sizable donation (though of course not all namings are conditional on a donation). Although the university may be better off in the long run if it paces itself, in any given year, there's a temptation to name all the buildings and reap the donation windfall now. This is "mortgaging the future" in a sense, as buildings named now can't be named later (unless new buildings are constructed, and one could argue that the university could always find something to name after a large donor). This instant gratification is functionally the same as how Indiana leased the rights to a foreign firm to collect highway tolls for 75 years in exchange for a hefty one-time payment.

What are the drawbacks of naming buildings after alumni? First, constantly renaming the buildings at your school can lead to confusion, but the students are coming and going so frequently that it probably doesn't matter much. There's something to be said for having a name that represents the building's function, like the Technology Center, but why not make it the O'Connell Technology Center (as it is at Chico State)? Of course, naming buildings after living people runs the risk of the person ending up in an embarrassing scandal; although this isn't the perfect analogy, remember that the Houston Astros once played at Enron Field.

Incidentally, GMU already has a Finley Hall, so it won't be an issue for me if I become wildly rich and successful (not that I'm holding my breath).

D.C. Bag Fee: Focus on Trash, not Tax?

D.C.'s plastic bag issue, in brief:
(1) businesses bag items
(2) customers discard bags
(3) bags end up in the Anacostia River

D.C.'s solution: tax each bag 5 cents.

I ran across an article from the San Francisco Chronicle from 2005 talking about a 17-cent bag fee that was under consideration at the time:

Under the grocery bag proposal, there would be no refunds for shoppers who return bags and thus no motivation for people to paw through trash bins plucking bags out of the waste stream.

"There is no incentive on the back end," says Margaret Walls, a resident scholar and economist at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.

But why can't there be such an incentive? There are two phases of the bag pollution process: customers getting the bags and afterward disposing of them improperly. Why can't we subsidize solutions to the latter (namely, through recycling) instead of taxing the former?

Recycling of plastic bags, it turns out, is inefficient and far too expensive. According to one source, recycling a ton of plastic bags costs about $4,000, while manufacturing the same amount from scratch costs about $30.

In addition, to motivate any substantial amount of recycling of plastic bags, customers would have to receive a decent sum in return. The cost of a new bag to a grocery store is less than 1 cent, but it would take much more than that to get people to recycle. If we factor in the subsidies necessary to get people to recycle, the cost is far more than $4,000 a ton. So perhaps D.C. is right in trying to address the bag collection step instead of the bag disposal step.

Besides, one could argue that small monetary rewards have already been proven not to work. For years, grocery stores (at least in California) have knocked a few cents off your bill if you brought reusable bags, yet the vast majority of customers choose not to. Interestly, this is essentially the same as a bag tax, but the only difference is the framing or anchoring. A 5-cent subsidy for bringing your own bag is analogous to a 5-cent tax for not bringing your own bags, yet the compliance rate under the former is drastically lower than it is under the latter. Traditional economics is not very good at explaining this inconsistency, and it must defer to psychology or behavioral economics and discussions about risk aversion, or how a small loss brings out much more of an emotional response than does the equivalent small gain.

I've written a few other things about the D.C. bag fee, which you can read under my Environment and Recycling label.

Concerts and Hand Stamps

My hand 24 hours (and a shower and several vigorous hand washings) after a Rodrigo y Gabriela concert at the 9:30 Club in D.C. My fiancee's is below.

"I am never going back to 9:30 Club. Last time, my hand stamp took 3 days to wear off!"

Okay, so no one says that, or would act that way. Economists talk about how higher prices and added inconveniences drive away some marginal customers, but a longer-lasting-than-desired hand stamp from a concert has no apparent downside for the venue. A different kind of ink likely would vanish quicker, but what incentive does the venue have for using it? The disfigured splotches make for great free word-of-hand advertising as people return to work the next day. Heck, some dork might even write a blog post about it.

D.C. Bag Fee: Just Make the Decision for Me

I've recently switched jobs, and I noticed a peculiar thing about how two Subway restaurants are dealing with D.C.'s bag fee. Since January 1, District merchants have been required to charge five cents per plastic or paper bag they give to customers, in an effort to keep the bags from ending up in the Anacostia River.

My old Subway, by L'Enfant Plaza, gives customers their sandwiches without the plastic bag (though they are still wrapped in the paper). My new Subway, by McPherson Square, always bags the sandwiches and subtly adds the 5 cents to the bill.

While these approaches are opposites, I prefer either to a third option: being asked each time whether I want a bag and having a tinge of guilt no matter what I decide. While classical economics tells us it's better for consumers to have as many choices as possible, behavioral economics and psychology have increasingly suggested that perhaps we're better off not thinking about certain options (Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice" deals with this phenomenon in depth).

This has certainly been true for grocery stores; I know more than a few D.C. residents have gone out of their way to shop in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs to avoid the bag tax, even though they could get 20 bags for a dollar and hardly be out any extra money at all.

I've written previously on the D.C. bag fee here and here.