Quote of the Day

From a Bill James piece on Grantland.

The difference between an average team and a championship team, in a season, is only about 150 runs. Saying that the fielding difference between two right fielders is 25 runs is a little like saying that a 150-pound woman gave birth to a 25-pound baby. I'm not saying it's not possible; it's just hard to believe.

Later this week, I'll be listening to father of sabermetrics speak on a panel about Baseball Analytics at the Sloan Sports Conference. Looking forward to more analogies like this one.

Weblining and Online Privacy

Via the NY Times:

In the 1970s, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University named John McKnight popularized the term “redlining” to describe the failure of banks, insurers and other institutions to offer their services to inner city neighborhoods. The term came from the practice of bank officials who drew a red line on a map to indicate where they wouldn’t invest. But use of the term expanded to cover a wide array of racially discriminatory practices, such as not offering home loans to African-Americans, even those who were wealthy or middle class.

Now the map used in redlining is not a geographic map, but the map of your travels across the Web. The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.

More social surplus will inevitably be captured by producers if this trend continues (assuming the information allows them to more appropriately price their products and potentially engage in price discrimination). Is that a bad thing for society? Many consumers will certainly lose out, but what about society as a whole?

For a more upbeat perspective about online data issues, read this Nick Schulz piece about Facebook's decision to go public and how it could actually be a good thing for its users.

Political Faux Pas

Mitt Romney's comments about the very poor have gotten a lot of attention over the last week. One of my professors, who blogs over at Applied Rationality, wrote this in response to Romney's comments.

With respect to the Governor's 90-95 percent figure, he might be surprised (if he cared) to discover that 46.2 million Americans, 15.1 percent of our population, were officially poor in 2010. One third of Americans--more than 100 million people--lived in households with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line and were considered poor or near poor.  6.7 percent of American were in deep poverty, meaning that they were living in households with incomes that were less than half of the poverty threshold. Those are sizable groups that Governor Romney is tagging as un-American and unworthy of his concern.

Well said.