Louie and Good Friday

In Season 1 Episode 11 of Louie, Louis C.K. tells the story of his fictionalized self's boyhood encounter with Good Friday. A nun at his Catholic school, frustrated with her failure to convey the enormity of the Crucifixion, invites a medical doctor to describe in meticulous and gruesome detail the body's response to the "brutal punishment" inflicted by the Romans on the lowest of criminals.

The climax of the doctor's account occurs when he hands young Louie a spike and mallet and orders him to drive the nail through a classmate's hand. The boy, of course, won't do it.

"What's the matter?" asks the (wonderfully creepy) doctor. "You can't do it? Well then why did you do it to him?"

The doctor's accusation echoes through the near-empty church as points to the giant Crucifix at front of the Church. "You drove in his nails with your sins, the Son of God, and you let him die."

Young Louie and his classmates are appropriately scandalized. Stricken with grief, Louie later returns to the Church where he topples the Crucifix, pulls the nails from Jesus' hands and feet, removes the crown of thorns from his head, ands cradles Jesus' body while repeating, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

The screen fades to black and the following two scenes show two very different reactions to Louie's action.

We cut first to a conversation between the nun and Louie's mother. The nun is unhappy about Louie's "vandalism" but promises to forgo "legal action" if he is punished at home.

Next, Louie privately confesses his guilt to his mother, explaining that it was for his sins that Jesus was punished.

"Is that what they're teaching you in there?" asks his mother incredulously. "It's not true. You had nothing to do with that man being hurt. I mean, you were nowhere near the place."

Louie protests. "But I'm bad and I sin."

"You're not bad. Listen to me, you're a good kid. You make mistakes, you do bad things sometimes, but you are a good person."

"But what about Jesus?"

"Jesus was a really, really nice guy who live a long time ago and he told everybody to love each other, and boy did he get his for that."

Louie is confused by his mother's insistence that he attend church despite her unbelief.  "Why do you make me come here?" he asks.

"I don't know," she replies. "I thought it was selfish. Just because I don't have religion, not to give it to you...I mean, it's a big deal, religion. You might want it someday. But if I had known it was going to stress you out this much I never would have done it."

"So there's no God?"

"All I know is that you have to be good to people whether there is or there isn't. You have to take that on yourself. Nobody's going to watch if you're good but yourself. It's all on you."

"Wow."

A pause. "Hey, you want to get some donuts?"

Both reactions, the nun's and the mother's, deserve criticism. The nun's failure is more glaring given her position as a spiritual teacher. Indeed, she reveals that her own understanding of the crucifixion is as bad as her students. What other response did she hope to induce but this kind of bold, whole-hearted contrition? It is the nun's sacred duty to direct Louie away from guilt and toward repentance. She must finish the Easter story by telling Louie the part about grace and forgiveness. Instead, she squashes Louie's soul. She uses the Gospel to control rather than liberate.

The nun treats Louie as a hopelessly wicked person. But the mother's message is hardly any better. She tells Louie that his righteousness is his own responsibility. "It's all on you," she tells him.

But of course Louie is not a good person. Louis C.K. sets the tone for the series in the pilot episode with the following stand-up routine.

"My life is really evil. There are people who are starving in the world and I drive an Infiniti. That's really evil. There are people who just starve to death. That's all they ever did. There are people who are born, and they go "Oh, I'm hungry", and then they die. And that's all they ever got to do. And meanwhile I'm in my car having a great time and I sleep like a baby. It's totally my fault because I could trade my Infiniti for a really good car, like a nice Ford Focus with no miles on it, and I'd get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying from starvation with that money. And every day I don't do it. Every day I make them die with my car."

Of course, the true Good Friday message explodes both these extremes. Louie is not a hopeless sinner, but neither is he responsible for `saving' himself. On Good Friday we celebrate this reality, that `righteousness' is not something we earn through merit (for who amongst us could qualify) but someone we receive as a gift, a gift purchased by another at great price.

Alleluia.

Drive Thru to the Middle Class

The past month has seen an escalation in the number of one-day strikes by workers in the fast food industry. Thousands of workers in several cities across the USA have participated in these job actions. Their principal demand is an hourly wage of $15--nearly twice the current national minimum wage of $7.25. And things continue to heat up, with a nationwide strike planned for August 29.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has supported these strikes. Its president, Mary Kay Henry (MKH), even appeared on the Colbert Report to state her case. 

While there are undoubtedly many voices and perspectives among the strikes, the SEIU's views (as exemplified by MKH's statements on Colbert and elsewhere) serve as a benchmark. That is unfortunate, since their arguments have serious weaknesses, both rhetorical and substantive. I will highlight three.

(1) When Stephen Colbert refers to fast-food workers as "just teenagers working part-time jobs" , MKH replies matter-of-factly that the average age of these workers is 28. What she wants us to infer, of course, is that the typical fast food worker is a person in their 20s or 30s, and quite possibly providing for a family. She presents a picture of strikers as hard workers struggling to make ends meet, over and against a popular perception of fast food workers as teenagers earning money for video games and iPhones.

Her picture may be correct. But I can't help but suspect that she is selecting a statistics to mislead her audience. There are all kinds of distributions of ages that could yield a mean of 28. Our natural inclination is to think in terms of a normal distribution (i.e. a Bell curve) with most ages group closely around the mean. But the age distribution of fast food workers could be very skewed. Consider the following two groups workers, listed by age. 

Group A; 17, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 37, 40

Group B: 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 33, 45, 58

Both groups have an average age of 28, but their demographics are clearly very different. In particular, group A contains a single teenager while group B contains three. And in my experience, the age distribution reflected in group B is much closer to what I see in a typical fast food restaurant. Indeed, group B is a much better sample of the overall age distribution in fast food industries than group A.

See here.

MKH and her allies would be better served by giving us more precise measures of the age distribution.

(2) MKH (and others) like to contrast the low wages received by workers with the "record profits" and "billions of dollars" earned by the corporations. This is a dramatic but completely misleading comparison, akin to comparing an apple seed to a full grown orange tree and declaring that an orange is massive relative to an apple. Take McDonald's as an example. Last year it reported $5.5 billion in profits last year, a number the unionists like to cite as evidence of exploitation. But that number needs to be given the proper context, viz., that the earnings come from operations at literally thousands of restaurants (14,000 in the US alone) and are distributed to McDonald's shareholders in the form of dividends. So to get a better sense of whether $5.5 billion is an extreme number or not, we could compare it with the amount of money that shareholder's have invested. Five seconds of research reveals that McDonald's has a market capitalization (the total value of its shares) of $95 billion, meaning that the return on investment is a little less than 6%. That's par for the course for equities, and hardly a sign of exploitation.

(3) The most alarming aspect of MKH's position, is her vision for the future of the American middle class. According to her, the goal of the current job action is to transform bad, low wage jobs into good, middle class jobs. In MKH's future, flipping burgers at Wendy's ought to be a viable career for the middle class.

This is ridiculous. Yes, it is sad that many people have found it necessary to work fast food jobs in order to make ends meet. It is sad that some people have been stuck in these jobs for years. But when did we as a society resign ourselves to thinking that an extended career at Burger King constituted a reasonable path for an otherwise able adult? When was "pizza delivery boy" added next to "plumber" in the dictionary of middle class employment? When did the jobs our parents did as teenagers become the jobs we imagine our children will do as grown men and women?

Let me quite clear: fast food jobs are jobs for teenagers. That this is not true today for many people is sad and deserves a response. But the proper response is not to transform these jobs into "middle class jobs", as though such a transformation could magically happen simply by raising the minimum wage. Because the problem here is not that fast food workers are paid too little. The problem is broader economic weakness and persistent low incomes for certain segments of the population. And these problems--the real ones--will not be solved by anything put forward by MKH or the striking workers.

Resurrection!

I have decided to resurrect my reader-less blog in order to exercise my atrophied writing skills. To kick things off, why don't I pick up roughly where I left off and make my predictions for the Canadian olympic hockey team.

Canada is obviously very deep at forward (especially centre) and only a little less so on defence. Goaltending is a glaring weakness. Here is my team, with those players who I consider locks (barring injury) highlighted in red:

FORWARDS

John Tavares	Sidney Crosby	Claude Giroux
Eric Staal	Steven Stamkos	Martin St. Louis
Logan Couture	Jonathan Toews	Patrice Bergeron
Rick Nash	Ryan Getzlaf	Corey Perry

Spares: Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle.

The top two lines shouldn't have too much trouble putting the puck in the net, and the third line will be beastly to play against. With Toews (a lefty) and Bergeron (a righty), Canada can easily dominate the face-off circle against any opponent. It's crazy to think that no one on the fourth line is a lock, but because of an embarrassment of riches up front, the Team Canada brass will undoubtedly take early season performance into serious consideration and I wouldn't be surprised if someone else plays their way onto the team.

DEFENCE

Duncan Keith	Drew Doughty
P.K. Subban	Shea Weber
Dan Hamhuis	Alex Pietrangelo

Spares: Jay Bouwmeester, Kris Letang.

The Canadian blueline will consist of smooth skaters, deft puckhandlers, and punishing hitters. Like the forward, the defensive corps will likely best the best in the tournament. I would love to put a player like Marc Staal on the team, but I think he's a risky choice at this point considering his eye injury from last season.

GOAL

Carey Price

Roberto Luongo

Corey Crawford

There are no locks in goal as far as I'm concerned. It's quite possible that none of these three makes the team. I think Price has the best shot of being the starter. If he can recapture the form he showed prior to the late season meltdown suffered by the entire Montreal organization, he will be a no-doubter.

Team Canada 2010: Final Picks

With the roster scheduled to be announced tomorrow at noon, this is my last chnace to post my picks for Canada's hockey team at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Not a lot of changes from what I've said the last two times. See here and here. Marleau has played his way on to the team (it helps that he is part of the league's most potent line, which can be transplanted wholesale to the national team). In contrast, Lecavalier and Carter have played themselves off the team. Note that Jordan Staal is on the team on the strength of his penalty killing. Also, Keith has replaced Phaneuf and Fleury has replaced Price.

--- Rick Nash --- Sidney Crosby - Jarome Iginla
Patrick Marleau - Joe Thornton - Dany Heatley
Jonathon Toews - Ryan Getzlaf - Corey Perry
- Ryan Smyth --- Mike Richards - Shane Doan
------------------ Jordan Staal ----------------

--- Pronger ----- Weber ---
--- Keith -------- Boyle ----
Niedermayer - Bouwmeester
----------- Green -----------

Brodeur
Luongo
Fleury

Introduction to Microeconomics: H1N1 Edition

Health officials in Ottawa have enacted a policy that will prevent people from waiting in line at H1N1 vaccination clinics on behalf of another. This policy effectively prohibits one of the few ways in which the inefficiency of the rationing system can be diminished.

Normally, market prices ensure that demand equals supply. If there is too much demand for a good or service, then the price will rise until enough potential consumers exit the market to re-establish equilibrium. And vice versa. The market for H1N1 vaccines is a great example of an unbalanced market. Demand for the innoculations far outstrips the ability of health authorities to deliver them. People are routinely lining up for five hours or more to receive the vaccination. A co-worker of mine regaled me this morning with the story of how he and his father-in-law showed up outside a clinic at 3:30am on Saturday; twenty others had beaten them there.

Now, these shots could be priced in such a way that these long waits would disappear. But selling the vaccine at a market price seems distinctly immoral to Canadian sensibilities. Fair enough. It is desirable that all members of our soceity have access to the H1N1 vaccine--should they desire it--with regard to income or ability to pay.

But when a good is rationed, long and undesirable queues are inescapable. And these queues place a disproportionate burden on some segments of society, in the same way that a market price would weigh more heavily on low income individuals. More speciifcally, queueing imposes a larger opportunity cost on those whose time is more valuable, i.e. high earners. A corporate executive or an electrician must give up 5+ hours of productive work just to get the vaccination. That is a huge cost relative to the McDonalds wage earner or the unemployed person.

With the great disparity in opportunity costs between individuals, the new policy makes little sense. Why shouldn't a person who earns $100 an hour (your lawyer or account perhaps) be able to pay somebody $15 an hour to save his place in line? Such a transaction would be beneficial for everbody by vastly decreasing the inefficiency of the vaccination campaign. H1N1 will impose a large enough economic cost without enacting such foolish policies.

We Are the Pirates Who Download Anything

I wonder if these two G&M stories are connected.

Oct 20: Canada has earned a dubious distinction as a world hub for illegitimate file-sharing websites and a leader in Internet piracy. Canada now hosts five of the most popular pirate sites in the world.

Oct 21: If you've ever tried to access popular video-streaming sites Hulu and BBC iPlayer and music-streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, you've probably been greeted with an apologetic – yet blunt – message telling you that, sorry, the service isn't available in Canada.

MLB Player Awards 2009

The MLB regular season is over, so it's time to hand out the individual awards for this past year of big league baseball.

MVP

American League: Joe Mauer, MIN. The consensus pick among baseball writers appears to be Joe Mauer and I can't say I disagree. He will lead the AL in batting, OBP and SLG%, a feat that has not been replicated since George Brett's MVP-winning 1980 season. Consider Mauer's excellent defence at catcher and his team's improbable run without Justin Morneau, and he becomes a heavy favourite.
Runners-Up: Mark Teixeira, NYY; Miguel Cabrera, DET
Pre-season rankings: 1. Justin Morneau, MIN; 2. Miguel Cabrera, DET; 3. Mark Teixeira, NYY.

National League: Albert Pujols, STL. As I predicted in April, Pujols will win his third MVP award in five years. Among other categories, he leads the league in home runs, runs scored, OBP, SLG%, and extra base hits. While his most recent attempt at the triple crown will fall short, Pujols will still rank in the top 3 for RBI and batting average. I could go on but no further evidence is necesssary.
Runners-Up: Hanley Ramirez, FLA; Chase Utley, PHI.
Pre-season rankings: 1. Albert Pujols, STL; 2. David Wright, NYM; 3. Manny Ramirez, LAD.

Cy Young

American League: Zach Greinke, KC. Greinke leads the league in ERA (2.06) and sports an incredible strikeout-to-walk ratio (237 K, 49 BB). Moreover, his solid 16-8 record should not be a drawback when no pitcher reached the 20-win plateau. But the real reason Greinke should win this award is that unlike the other candidtates, he dominated all season. Felix Hernandez didn't heat up until June and Roy Halladay swooned briefly in August. C.C. Sabathia also had less than stellar moments. Greinke, on the other hand, started the season with an incredible 40+ inning run and ended it the same way, with barely a bump in between.
Runners-Up: Felix Hernandez, SEA; Roy Halladay, TOR.
Pre-season rankings: 1. Roy Halladay, TOR; 2. Jon Lester, BOS; 3. C.C. Sabathia, NYY.

National League: Chris Carpenter, STL.The NL Cy Young will probably have the tightest voting of all the individual awards this year. But Carpenter's league-leading ERA (2.24), his 81% winning percentage (17-4 record), and his incredible stretch run give him the edge over team-mate Adam Wainwright (19-8, 2.63 ERA) and strikeout machine Tim Lincecum (15-7, 2.48 ERA).
Runners-Up: Adam Wainwright, STL; Tim Lincecum, SF.
Pre-season rankings: 1. Johan Santana, NYM; 2. Brandon Webb, ARI; 3. Tim Lincecum, SF.

In hindsight, my pre-season projections were undone by injuries to David Wright, Johan Santana, Brandon Webb, and Justin Morneau. Man-Ram's suspension was also costly. On the plus side, I did predict that Greinke would be among the AL leaders in both ERA and Ks, although I didn't expect enough wins for him to seriously contend for the Cy Young.

NHL Regular Season 2009-10: Part II

Sometimes sports projections are tedious. Like now, when we can pretty much count on a third straight MVP-calibre season from Alexander Ovechkin. And until oldtimes like Brodeur and Lidstrom actually slow down, they will remain strong contenders for end-of-year hardware.

In the MVP category, I forecast Ryan Getzlaf and Rick Nash to take big steps forward and put themselves in the mix alongside the perennial candidates.

Chris Pronger will make his strongest case for the Norris trophy in years. His assignment in Philly will be to shut down the East's top stars, namely guys like Crosby, Ovechkin and Parise. This is a tougher assignment than in the West, where rosters are balanced rather than top-heavy. Look for Duncan Keith to finally be recognized as an elite defenceman, and for Bouwmeester to finally make good on his potential.

Here are my five top choices for the major trophies:

Hart Memorial
1. Alexander Ovechkin, WSH; 2. Sidney Crosby, PIT; 3. Ryan Getzlaf, ANA; 4. Evgeni Malkin, PIT; 5. Rich Nash, CLB.

Art Ross
1. Alexander Ovechkin, WSH; 2. Evgeni Malkin, PIT; 3. Sidney Crosby, PIT; 4. Pavel Datsyuk, DET; 5. Joe Thornton, SJ.

Maurice Richard
1. Alexander Ovechkin, WSH; 2. Ilya Kovalchuk, ATL; 3. Rick Nash, CLB; 4. Dany Heatley, SJ; 5. Marian Gaborik, NYR.

James Norris
1. Chris Pronger, PHI; 2. Duncan Keith, CHI; 3. Jay Bouwmeester, CGY; 4. Nicklas Lidstrom, DET; 5. Zdeno Chara, BOS.

Georges Vezina
1. Roberto Luongo, VCR; 2. Martin Brodeur, NJ; 3. Tim Thomas, BOS; 4. Cam Ward, CAR; 5. Henrik Lundqvist, NYR.

Frank J. Selke
1. Mike Richards, PHI; 2. Mikko Koivu, MIN; 3. Ryan Kesler, VCR; 4. Sami Pahlsson, CLB; 5. Joe Pavelski, SJ.

Jack Adams
1. Brent Sutter, CHI; 2. Andy Murray, STL; 3. Mike Babcock, DET; 4. Bruce Boudreau, WSH; 5. Todd McLellan, SJ.

Calder Memorial
1. John Tavares, NYI; 2. James van Riemsdyk, PHI; 3. Victor Hedman, TB; 4. Viktor Stalberg, TOR; 5. Matt Gilroy, NYR.