As promised, here is my Food Pyramid of News:

This pyramid is restricted to news sources, not information sources in general.  A balanced diet of information would include books, (more) journal articles, and possibly online coursework like MRUniversity.

Blogs being at the bottom will be controversial to some people, but I stand by it.  The blogosphere is an extremely large, rich, and diverse place.  If I had to read news in only one medium for the rest of my life, I would choose blogs, hands down, no question.  Unlike radio and newspapers/magazines, it is conversational (between blogs) and interactive (between bloggers & commenters), which makes an enormous difference in terms of how much you can learn about the world there.  Note that if a blog is hosted on the website of a major newspaper (like WonkBlog or Paul Krugman’s blog) then I count it as a blog, not a newspaper, just for the purposes of this pyramid (i.e. for the purpose of deciding how much time to spend reading which types of news media).  Whether a blog is on a major newspaper’s website or not is sort of irrelevant otherwise of course.

Some people will want to switch Newspapers/Magazines with Radio/Podcasts, and in fact I’m one of those people, but I put them the way I did though because that’s what I think is more natural for more people.  It depends on how you spend your time, I think; people who spend a lot of time commuting, travelling, and exercising are going to find podcasts and radio a more convenient way to consume the kind of news you get from radio, newspapers, and magazines.  It doesn’t make a huge difference though.  The point is just that you need sources of boilerplate, just-the-facts versions of various news stories.  The home pages of major newspapers are good for these, as is NPR.  But don’t too much time there; diversify!

Social Media items can be blog posts, newspaper articles, or podcasts, discovered via Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or other sites.  The point is that some non-trivial amount of time should be spent finding items in those media via social media instead of via the homepages of major newspapers, blogs etc., because of how social media uncovers “unknown unknowns,” i.e. items you otherwise would not have discovered had you not been aware of the source before you found it via social media.  I put this in a small box though, only because it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaffe on social media sites.  The wheat, though, is still worth separating.

“Primary Sources,” for lack of a better term for a catch-all category, includes things like Fed data, journal articles, industry reports, think-tank publications, and anything else that might be cited in a newspaper article or blog post and summarized second-hand.  Very often a blogger or journalist will report using a primary source in the public domain, but s/he does so in an arbitrary, biased, or misleading way.

For example, a lot of people cite Card & Krueger’s famous minimum wage study, and interpret it to mean that “empirically, the minimum wage has no effect on unemployment.”  But without reading the paper yourself, or at least perusing it, you’ll be left wondering whether it really does mean what they say it means (or, worse, you’ll just accept the journalist’s or blogger’s interpretation as fact).  It’s worth spending the time to read it for yourself, figuring out what the methodology was, becoming literate in the study itself rather than just the interpretation, seeing where/when/how the study was done, putting it in the context of a larger literature, discovering that literature for yourself, and evaluating the findings for yourself, on the basis of your own reading of that study.  That is a relatively labor-intensive example, but it doesn’t need to be.  Things like inflation rates are much easier to fact-check.

So, visit those primary sources if they are publicly available, and don’t be afraid to delve into something you don’t understand very well.  It’s worth spending as much time doing this as you spend on Twitter and Facebook, no doubt.

A lot of people with advanced degrees are going to spend a lot more time checking out things like FRED data, journal articles, and think-tank pubs, but even for these folks I still think this pyramid works.  The reason is that much of what I’ve called “Primary Sources” here is not “news” to these people, but their profession.  Again, this pyramid is really just about news consumption, not information consumption generally, and as far as news consumption is concerned, that box works even for folks with advanced degrees.

Finally, television occupies a tiny little triangle at the very top.  Don’t watch cable, don’t watch Fox News, nor CNN, nor MSNBC, or (almost) anything else on television, for the sake of news.  Television is for entertainment, not news.  Do try to get a sense of what certain major television pundits’ views are on hot-button issues, but not because these people know what they’re talking about, but because a large number of Americans take those views seriously and it’s good to know what many Americans think.  Personally I do not take these people seriously at all, at least as far as their shows are concerned (there are some pundits, like Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow, whose books I take a little more seriously than their shows).  This triangle is basically the “sugar/sweets” section, i.e. mostly for entertainment, not news.  Other than keeping a pulse on those television pundits views, I don’t watch any news shows other than The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which, again, are purely for entertainment purposes.

This pyramid isn’t going to reflect everybody’s preferences, but I think it’s a good starting point for a lot of people.  If I had to guess how most people currently consume their news, I would guess that they basically flip everything upside down, with television on bottom and blogs near the top.  Primary sources are probably in the top triangle, which is tragic.

I’d appreciate constructive feedback in the comments section.  What does your pyramid look like?  I’m especially interested to know what news pyramids look like for people with different interests from myself.  This pyramid works well for an economics/politics person; what about an evolutionary biologist?

Via Marketplace:

Ben Trapnell says, given the chance, “I absolutely believe that unmanned aircraft systems will have more money invested in them from a civil context than they ever did from a military context.”  Trapnell helped found and now teaches at the Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems at the University of North Dakota.  The program offers — essentially — a degree in drones.

There is more here, including this:

Some of the program’s students finds jobs that pay them well out of college — starting at $60,000 or $70,000 a year.

…though I wonder what the word “some” means in that sentence, and whether there will really be so much demand for drones.  There is a lesson to be had here about higher education, uncertainty, risk, and luck in the market.

This piece by Ron Unz about the media has gotten some attention.  Frankly I don’t what’s so interesting about it.  The point is supposed to be that “the media” is not very good at its job (where “the media” is narrowly defined as newspapers and magazines), but I think that a) that’s sort of obvious at this point, and b) more related to human nature and readers’ biases than to major failures on the supply side (i.e. demand-side media bias matters much more than people complaining about “the media” tend to give credit for).

But in any case, here is one important passage:

“For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines.  Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me.  But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.”

Actually this is very nearly an ideal strategy for obtaining an accurate version of reality.  Ron’s mistake was that he stuck to just newspapers and magazines, without going further.

If he’d just slipped the blogosphere, NPR, industry reports, non-profit reports, podcasts, think thanks, some primary sources like FRED data etc., into that paragraph, then he would have had a very good information-consumption strategy.  If he’d also added his own biases to the list of biases he needed to keep an eye on, then it’d be pretty much the ideal strategy.

A good information diet consists of a variety of different sources of information, balancing them against one another and against your own priors, but that means reading a variety of media, not just a diversity within one medium.  You can’t just rely on newspapers and magazines.  Reading a “wide variety” of just those media is rather like eating a wide variety of breads as your diet, or investing in a wide variety of industrial stocks and calling it a well-balanced investment portfolio.

One of these days I’m going to draw and post my Food Pyramid of Information.  Blogs will be near the bottom, newspapers and radio just above that, magazines just above that, “primary” sources like FRED data and academic journals will be higher up, and if network television appears at all it will be in a tiny triangle at the very top (the “sugar/sweets” section).  This will vary from person to person, but that pyramid is a good starting point for the average Joe.

An insurable event.  (source)

Believe it or not, a London based firm has sold more than 30,000 alien abduction insurance policies throughout Europe.  Of course, you’ll need to provide proof of the occurrence to file a claim.

That is from Geico, and there are many more obscure types of insurance at the link.  They celebrity-body-part ones are great.  For the pointer I thank Weakonomics, and there is also more here.

Nixon and Mao, 1972.  These guys knew how to pivot. (source)

Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner (both Republicans) have written a lengthy essay in Commentary Magazine called How to Save the Republican Party.

Towards the beginning they suffer the delusion that conservatives are basically libertarians — a popular but wrong idea — but they do at least reject the idea that the GOP only has a “messaging” problem.

Not only do they set out numerous concrete policy proposals, they discuss an unusually wide variety of issues — on issue after issue, they defend the party’s current position where they think it needs no reform, but are refreshingly frank about what does need fixing.

It is a massively long essay that doesn’t even begin to give practical policy advice until many paragraphs down, so below I’ve excerpted every practical policy recommendation from the piece.

In doing so I have deliberately avoided all of the advice about messaging (there’s a huge amount of it), not because I think it’s unimportant* (plus their messaging advice is very good) but because many Republicans already know they have a messaging problem but aren’t focusing enough (I think) on policy.

I have also excluded a) most of the policy advice that already reflects the current GOP platform, and b) stuff I thought was too vague or underdeveloped to be meaningful.  So these are just raw, uncut, specific, wide-ranging policy pivots.

Here they are (numbered by yours truly, not the authors):

1)  [Cut] off the patent cronyism that infects federal policy toward energy, health care, and the automobile and financial-services industries…

2)  [Support] the breakup of the big banks…

3)  [In education, focus] on public and private choice, charter schools, testing and accountability, and merit pay for teachers and principals… [honestly, I think this might already be in the GOP platform, but I'm too lazy to check ...]

4)  improve job training,

5)  encourage college attendance and completion among the poor,

6)  discourage teen pregnancy,

7)  improve infant and child health,

8)  encourage wealth-building and entrepreneurship. …

9)  call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers… [Note:  Dubya did this and got 40% of the Hispanic vote in '04)

10)  champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants... [this is already popular among most Republicans, I think...]

11)  for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship. [this is the 800 pound gorilla...] …

12)  overhaul our prison system, and in a concerted effort to encourage civic and cultural assimilation of immigrants.  …

13)  significantly [increase] the child tax credit;

14)  [eliminate] various marriage penalties and harmful incentives for poor and for unwed mothers;

15)  evaluate state and local marriage-promotion programs and supporting those that work;

16)  [on climate change,] focus on adaptation and investments in new and emerging [clean energy] technologies…

17)  back an entrepreneurial approach to technical and scientific investment…

As Gerson & Wehner admit, this isn’t even close to a comprehensive set of reforms — they left out a lot on environmental policy, neglected to mention agricultural subsidies (though perhaps they were implied), skirted around social issues (for example how do you prevent teen pregnancy without rejecting abstinence-only sex education?), and gave exactly zero concrete foreign policy recommendations — but it is an admirable start.

It’s also clearly a proposal to move closer towards the center — not to sit on the 50-yard-line, but to maybe move from the 1-yard to the 25-yard line.

Wehner also recently participated in an event at Furman University inspired by and named after the piece with Gerson, hence it is called “How to Save the Republican Party.”   I think it was a constructive conversation.

* PS — I should stress that even though I choose to focus on policy, the messaging is still very important.  Many Republicans have recognized a need to retrofit their rhetoric, but as things like “Frederick Douglass Republicanism (TM)“ for example make clear, they are still a long way towards perfecting their messaging.

The White House and ONDCP blogs include a nice piece on drug policy today.  It includes this poster-type thingy:

Note that #s 1, 2, and 4 are all demand-side interventions, while #3 is an implicit rejection of numerous failed interventions on both the supply and demand side.  Regular readers of this blog will already know that I consider this the right approach.

Though I should also note the slight inconsistency among liberals on drug policy vs. food policy (see the last paragraph at the link).

There is also the fact that this is a pretty incremental step.

The sad part is that this is actually a fresh one. (Source)  Also, this one is from Burger King.

Utah man David Whipple has managed to hang on to a hamburger from McDonald’s since 1999. The extraordinary part isn’t the fact that he didn’t throw the burger out, though — it’s that the burger barely looks like it has aged.

Appearing by phone on the TV show “The Doctors” recently, Whipple explained that the burger was discovered many years ago in his coat pocket, oddly enough. It looked the same then as it does now.

In the Huffington Post.

The other day I wrote that the definition “conservativism” given by Ralph Reed at the most recent IQ2 US debate was confused.  Ralph had defined conservativism simply as being a philosophy of small government, which is wrong.

I have written about the (vast?) differences between conservativism and libertarianism before, as have many others.

Last night Jon Stewart added to the literature in his usual style.  He’s worth watching in full: