Appalling Vanity

Every so often, I read something so revolting that the only thing I can think to do is engage in an act of public shaming by writing about it on my blog.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what vanity looks like (all emphases mine):

But I see myself, and Mark Thoma, and Brad DeLong, and Mike Konczal, and Simon Wren-Lewis, and a few others as something quite different — as voices in the wilderness. 

Now, you may say that it’s a pretty cushy wilderness — and in my case it definitely is; not just monetarily, but my spot at the Times is a dream gig for many journalists, I have a million Twitter followers, etc. etc. You may also say that there is indeed a choir that hears my preaching — and for sure there is; plenty of liberals read me for reassurance in what they already believed.

But other people also read me — often with distaste, but still they do hear what I say. What I and other econobloggers write is heard at the ECB, the IMF. the European Commission, CBO, the White House, Treasury, and so on. So there is some outreach.

And against all this power of conventional wisdom — which is often, by the way, at odds with basic economic analysis and the preponderance of evidence — you have … a handful of progressive economics bloggers. Some of them — well, mainly me — have prominent perches...

He might be right or he might be wrong, but who can tell from beneath the thick, slimy coating of his all-consuming, overweening vanity?

For shame.

An Unrequited Gift

So much of my life has involved running. To me, it's an interest, a hobby, and a form of meditation. It's provided me with rich experiences, college scholarships, and a means by which to control my blood sugar and adjust to my diabetes. It's a means by which I've met new friends and a glorious source of therapeutic solitude. Suffice it to say, running has had a profound impact on every important aspect of my life.

What's interesting about this is that I was inspired to run by someone who, to my knowledge, was never interested in running and who, after inspiring me to run in the first place, never again ran much of anything at all.

It was the last day of school, at the end of my second grade year. The day kicked-off with a one-mile race from the top of the hill, down Main Street, finishing at the school. Almost every student in the school used to run this race. Afterward, I found my way to my classroom, and the only other people there were my teacher, and another student we'll call BD.

The teacher asked us what place we finished in the race. Since BD had finished before me, she asked him first. I remember the look on his face as though it was yesterday. He had an enormous smile on his face, and his eyebrows were raised in surprise, pleasure, and pride. He was beaming as he declared, "Eighteen!"

That's remarkable. It's remarkable that a second-grader would finish so far ahead of so many of the other students in the school, including a substantial number of students who were as much as five years older than he was. (He was eight years old at the time.) Keep in mind that in our school the typical class size was about thirty students, and each grade level had about three classes each. So, every grade consisted of about 100 students. This means that a second-grader who places 18th in a school-wide race has managed to out-run no less than 80% of the entire field of sixth-graders, plus however many fifth-, fourth-, and third-graders he bested.

I remember hearing this and being impressed. But I also remember thinking to myself, "I bet I could do that..." Or perhaps I wondered whether I could do that. I do remember going home and telling my mother that BD had ran so well, and I remember that she told me I could do it. Whatever the particulars of my thoughts, that was the day I was inspired to become a runner, to take running seriously, and to actually try to excel at it as a sport, rather than just something I did.

Arguably, that day - and in particular, the fact that BD ran so well that day - has affected every day of my life since. I owe BD an eternal debt of gratitude for the mere fact that he ran well. Clearly, BD had a gift, a talent for running. I went on to be the kid in my community who was known as a great long-distance runner, but how might life have been different if BD had attended to his gift? Would we have inspired each other to run faster? Would he have smashed all my best running times? Would we have become good friends?

Alas, BD's talent for running proved to be an unrequited gift. As I mentioned above, he did not pursue an interest in running over the years, at least not to my knowledge. He went to my high school, so if he had been interested in the track team, I would have known. For sports, he was always more in basketball, football, and baseball. Later, I believe his interests turned to hunting and the great outdoors. I have not communicated with him since I was a child.

Yet, he had a profound impact on my life, and I wonder how great a runner he might have been, had he received more encouragement to develop his gift. I suppose that should have been my responsibility, as thanks for his having inspired me to become the person I became, and I failed him in a way. A child can't be blamed for lacking the wisdom of an adult, but perhaps one of the downsides of being shy is that one can never properly pay back the many debts we owe to people who inspired us along the way.

Fitness Experiments #2.2

So two rather significant workouts in one day lead to multiple mild blood sugar lows today. If you're diabetic like me, you should remember to back off on the long-acting insulin when you make significant increases to your daily training regimen.

I'm no doctor, so make sure you consult with yours. What I can tell you about is my own personal experience, which is this: Mealtime insulin seems to behave more or less the same way. What's changed is the fact that I feel like I have too much long-acting insulin on board. If you end up in the same boat I'm in today, then watch yourself very carefully.

For example, I woke up on time and ready to work out this morning, but promptly went hypoglycemic (mildly). Going for a run this morning would have been pretty stupid, so I skipped it, ate a predictable breakfast, and went about my day as usual.

This afternoon, I plan on doing last week's back/bicep workout (see Fitness Experiments #2), only in reverse, similar to what I did yesterday. But the fact of the matter is that I've trained pretty hard the last few days and I'm not going to push myself ultra licitum just for the thrill of it. If I feel a little unwell, I'll half my workout and get some food.

I do intend to workout twice tomorrow, but I will reduce my Lantus dose accordingly.

Be safe out there.

Fitness Experiments #1.1?

I was able to get up this morning and go for a run first-thing, as I mentioned I wanted to. This is a huge win for personal motivation. Sometimes just taking the first step to prove you can do something ends up being the biggest hurdle in front of you. I say that now because I am still stoked about my success this morning. If I can continue to wake up early for morning workouts, then I really will be able to call it a success.

Here's a brief tangent: In order to pull this off, I really had to make it impossible to fail. I shaved at night so that I wouldn't have to do it in the morning. I packed a week's worth of lunches for myself on Sunday afternoon, so that I wouldn't have to do it in the morning. I laid out my running clothes so that all I had to do was roll out of bed, put my shorts on, and head out the door. It all worked like a charm. It's amazing what a little organizing will do. While some may feel that this was "a lot of work to do on the weekend," it really wasn't. I made my lunches at the same time I made lunch on Sunday, and I scaled the operation so that I just had to put the food in boxes. I take a shower after every workout, so shaving was just another couple of minutes on top of my evening shower. It all really came together.

But I didn't do all that work just so that I could swap-out my afternoon workout for a morning workout. My intention was to workout twice. Now that I have some cardio out of the way, thanks to a fabulous morning run, I can focus on my afternoon strength training.

Last Monday's "fitness experiment" was a good one. To eliminate all the guess-work here, I could easily just repeat it every Monday until I've mastered it. I did end up over-reaching last Monday, which means shooting for the same number of sets and reps this week would still result in an excellent workout.

But it's always nice to do things a little differently. So today, I'm going to try doing the same workout in reverse, starting with the tricep dips and ending with the standard push-ups. If I still have energy left-over by the final couple of sets, I'll turn them into clapping push-ups for an added plyometric boost.

And I ran this morning, which means I can skip the afternoon cardio, right?

Wrong.

Some Links

I have a theory that almost everyone who is a Roy Orbison fan is a good person. Roderick T. Long is apparently a Roy Orbison fan. Assume my theory is true and complete the syllogism.

Nick Rowe asks a good question about r and g.

This new (actually "re-branded") economics blog promises to be... promising. Some of you may remember one of the authors from previous Stationary Waves installments of "Some Links." Case in point.

Williamson is skeptical of Piketty. But, more importantly, Williamson has redesigned his blog!

We can now manufacture beta cells by cloning DNA.

Speculative, but interesting: Magic Johnson may buy the L.A. Clippers. When he announced his HIV infection, I remember thinking that he was basically dead. I also remember feeling a sense of stigma surrounding him. I feel neither now that I am a grown man. It would be cool to see him own a team.

Sunday Throw-Away Post

That is Arcadia Trail Park. It's nice. I ran there today and yesterday.

I've been trying to pry myself out of bed at 5AM to do morning workouts. I've been trying to do this for, oh, say, six months or more. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to do it. It's not that I'm particularly sleepy, it's that right at the moment when I want to be motivated, I'm simply not.

But tomorrow I'd really, really like to be motivated to work out in the morning. I want to either go for a run or jump some rope.

I'm posting that here so that I feel extra-guilty tomorrow if I can't do it. I'm pressuring myself to rise to the occasion. Please keep me honest.

A Few Brief Thoughts From Facebook

Some Facebook friends and I were having a discussion, and there were a few things coming out of that discussion that I would like to reiterate here.

First, one of us expressed the idea that liberals (leftists) seem to care more about racism and "the little guy," while conservatives seem to be more focused on "the welfare of those that aren't at the bottom." I didn't think that was quite right, so suggested a correction. While leftists seem to care more about about correcting for the direct welfare effects of things like racism, rightists seem to be more resigned to the idea that government reallocation of resources is Pareto inefficient (or Kaldor-Hicks inefficient, if you prefer).

That went over well enough, but even though I was the one who offered the correction, it still doesn't quite sit right with me. It doesn't feel fair enough to leftists.

Earlier in the conversation, I had pointed out that many rightists and libertarians are attracted to those belief systems not because they believe in liberty, but because those belief systems offer them a philosophical justification for some pretty hateful tendencies. It's not exactly a secret that many non-leftists harbor latent or not-so-latent bigotry. While many people fervently believe in the right to (for example) freedom of speech, some simply give lip service to the idea because it makes them feel more justified to say hateful things.

Similarly, there are many genuine leftists out there who belief that socialism is definitely the way to go; but still, there are a lot of people who blabber socialist rhetoric simply because it provides them with a justification for robbing the rich and fancying themselves poor. Or because they want larger welfare checks or higher wages.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that some people espouse a particular philosophy out of pure ideological conviction, or perhaps even due to rigorous logical or empirical analysis. But a lot of other people cling to any lousy argument, so long as it justifies their priors.

It's probably worth it to know which kind of person you're dealing with before you enter a political discussion with them. (FYI - No one involved in my recent FB discussion was the "bad" kind of political adherent.)

Fitness Experiments #4 - Friday Killer

Everyone hates leg day. Everyone, that is, except me. I happen to love leg day, but this is probably because I don't have a strong incentive to bulk-up my leg muscles. So, for me, leg day involves a lot of movement that is just plain fun.

So today let's go out there and really enjoy the fun of it all. Here's my version of fun:

First, do three super-sets as follows:

• 15 pull-ups
• 15 hanging leg-raises
• 30 seconds rest

Then, do a ladder consisting of the following:

• Box Jump
• Burpee
• Side by Side Jump Over Box/Bench/Platform
• Lunge (one per leg)
• 30 seconds rest

First do one of each, then two of each, then three... Keep adding one repetition until you cannot do any additional sets.

Have fun!!!

Fitness Experiments #3

Today is intended to be a shoulder day. There is only one small problem with shoulder day: it is difficult to get a really good shoulder workout using only calisthenics. Thus, I am going to let creativity guide me here. This is what I have come up with:

• 4 sets of 10 front raises from push-up position. (10 per arm.)
• 4 sets of 20 decline push-ups. (Put your legs on bench or platform)
• 3 sets of 10 handstand push-ups.
• 3 sets of 6 dips w/ forward lean. (Courtesy Jason Altidor: Do a tricep dip as usual, but go slowly and lean forward as you dip.)
• 4 sets of side planks. (Four per side, maximum hold isometric.)
• 10 sets of jumping rope as follows: (a) Jump twice between each revolution of the rope for as long as you can until missing a jump; (b) Jump once between each revolution for as long as you can; (c) Jump twice on one foot, then the next, as though in a skipping motion, for as long as you can; (d) Jump once per foot per revolution, as though in a running motion, for as long as you can. [All of this should take you approximately 30 minutes to complete.]

This, too, should be a difficult workout. Try your best - you can do it!

Movie Review: Transcendence

Hollywood occasionally attempts to appeal to more intelligent movie-goers by producing films that are intended to appeal to brainy people. The main problem with most of these movies is that actors, writers, and other artistic types are usually so far-removed from the world of science, mathematics, and logic that the attempts come off as worse than hackneyed. They feel like scripts written by precocious grade-schoolers who just heard the word "multiverse" or perhaps just finished a Madeleine L'Engle book.

So it is with Transcendence, a film about artificial intelligence that, in my opinion, wrote more than a few checks it simply couldn't cash.

The film tells the story of Will Caster, a genius engineer leading ground-breaking research in artificial intelligence. Caster and his colleagues believe that artificial intelligence represents the next major breakthrough in human evolution, but a hippy-ish terrorist group feels otherwise. When an assassination attempt leaves Caster with only a few weeks to live, his wife decides to "upload" his personality into a computer. The endeavor is a success, and the AI - which may or may not be the real Will Caster - becomes sentient and self-interested. With the help of Caster's wife, the AI builds a laboratory in the Nevada desert, where they are free to conduct breakthrough technological research and amass a small army of employees and solar panels. The advanced intelligence and computational power of Caster-cum-computer proves to be an eerie and invasive presence in the lives it touches, and as its relationship with the human beings around it starts to change, the movie's primary conflicts arise from the question of just who this computer really is, and what it really wants to accomplish.

The most immediate problem with Transcendence is that - yet again - Hollywood has chosen to insist that true genius always comes at the cost of social intelligence. The cool kids in L.A. simply can't be trusted to depict a character who is both a genius - intellectually superior to the L.A. arts crowd - and as cool and socially deft as the L.A. socialites.

A still more significant problem with Transcendence is the way technological advancement is portrayed: as a series of magic miracles and "major breakthroghs," rather than the slow march of scientific progress. The computerized Caster, free of the limitations of human intelligence, quickly figures out how to build human tissue from scratch and create solar panels from the soil. Its desert laboratory is a series of technological demonstrations. But in the real world, computerized minerals don't float through the air to do the bidding of a central processor, and no sentient computer would waste time and resources demonstrating scientific experiments the outcomes of which can be perfectly calculated in advance. Hollywood thinks science is magic, or at least they have no other way of depicting science, except as some kind of mystic miracle.

Worst of all, the writers of Transcendence don't even seem to have a good handle on human behavior. Humans are motivated not by the miracles of scientific accomplishment, but by pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance. A super-computer equipped with a human mind would never waste its time on scientific advancement when it could spend its time like the infamous rhesus monkeys who starved to death because they preferred cocaine to food. A computer that can 3-D print human bodies and conjure up nano technology from thin air can and certainly would quickly solve its boredom problem, write a perpetual pleasure algorithm, and become worthless.

This, indeed, is the whole problem with ideas about "the singularity." Computers don't need to reproduce or think up solutions to complicated scientific problems. It's humans who seek those ends. All a computer needs to do is remain active and pleasured. As such, ideas about the singularity being anything other than a waste of time are, in my view, improbable.

There is not much in this movie that would appeal to nerds like me. And unless non-nerds hold a latent interest in the singularity - but not a strong enough one to actually inspire them to go learn about it - there is not much in Transcendence that will appeal to them, either. In short, it simply isn't a very good movie.

I was hoping for something more like The Lawnmower Man, but instead, I got a vapid and artistically drained attempt to reboot 12 Monkeys. My advice? Skip this one.

Paradigms, Part III - Okay, Fine! I'll Talk About Piketty!

Everyone is talking about Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital. Some on the left have lauded it as a great argument for why the government's welfare safety net system should be expanded. Some on the right think otherwise. I haven't read the book, but I'm deeply skeptical that anything like that book could be used to substantiate a political opinion. This skepticism leads me to conclude two things:

1. Piketty's most vociferous fans probably think that Piketty has "proven" something that he has not, i.e. they think his work is more revolutionary than it actually is.
2. The principle benefit of the theory outlined in Piketty's book is that it provides a scientific veneer for an existing set of political priors.

If this doesn't remind us of the perils of paradigms, I don't know what does.

We learn from Piketty that large rates of return on capital imply financial gains for business owners and some displaced employees. This is a good lesson, but not a revolutionary one. Most of us know this without needing to be told. Holding on to this paradigm too long leads us to conclude unlikely things about the world economy; at that point, we're better off letting go of his model, relaxing the constraints, and living in the beautiful, un-model-able nuances of the real world.


Familiarize Yourself
Before you formulate an opinion on Piketty's main idea, you owe it to yourself to find out what he's actually saying. I'm not a reliable source of economic summaries, so do your due diligence. Jonathan Finegold Catalan has already located a free version of the appendix in which Piketty articulates his underlying idea. (Read it, understand it, then come back and finish this blog post of mine. Start on page 36.)

In particular, I think Finegold Catalan does an excellent job of summarizing the key idea when he writes:

The heuristic the book sells to the reader is r > g. That is, if the return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth, inequality will increase. The concept, explained like that, is somewhat cryptic. It’s an easy heuristic for those who don’t want to get bogged down in the theoretical argument. The theoretical argument is actually not that complicated (theory makes up a very, very small minority of the book). Piketty makes it near the end of the sixth chapter of his book. His argument is that if the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is > 1, the share of income accruing to capital will grow relative to that of labor.

My Reaction
I'll start with the positive:
Piketty's idea is prima facie correct. If you make more money investing in new machinery than you do by doing "business-as-usual," then this will tend to produce situation-specific income inequality.

Imagine Peter owns a sandwich shop. Peter wants to open a new restaurant: Peter can either choose to hire Roy to make sandwiches in the new shop, or invest in a sandwich-making robot. If Peter makes more money investing in robots than in employees, then Peter - who is wealthy enough to own more than one sandwich shop, unlike Roy - will make an increasing proportion of his income from machines. Roy, who never gets hired, loses in this scenario. You can see how "inequality increases" here because people like Peter earn more money while people like Roy earn less.

Now the so-so:
One objection here is that somebody has to build the robots. Roy may lose out on sandwich-making employment opportunities, but he wins big at the robot-making factory. So there is no reason to merely assume that inequality increases when Peter buys more robots. It might, or it might not. It depends on the particulars of the case.

Piketty makes clear that when he's talking about r and g he means for the whole economy. So he's not just talking about Peter and Roy, he's talking about everyone in the whole world. The claim becomes this: If investing in robots makes more sense for all the people in the economy who make the most money than "business-as-usual," then inequality will increase.

This is a stronger claim, and a more easily disputed one. Suppose we live in a two-good economy where people either make sandwiches or build robots. As sandwich-makers seek to replace employees with robots, robot-builders will need to hire more people to build those robots. The more robots we need, the more we need people to build robots! This will be true, unless the robot-builders also replace robot-builders with robot-building robots...

But doesn't this just kick the can down the road? Who designs and builds the robot-building robots? Somebody has to. The production process has to begin somewhere, and that's where the people will be, if for no other reason than to build the robots that will perform all the other tasks.

Now the negative:
Thus we come to the Achilles' Heel of Piketty's ideas about capital. If capital were a giant, amorphous blob of electrodes produced en masse and then formed like clay into whatever shape required to perform whatever task, then Piketty's claims would be a lot stronger. But capital - especially modern machinery used to produce modern goods and services - is highly diverse and highly specialized.

For example, insulin cannot simply be cranked out by a machine. Recombinant RNA must first be grown in a laboratory (by some combination of humans and machines), and then shipped to a manufacturing facility (by some combination of humans and machines) before the machines at the factory can produce insulin in vats. Synthetic insulin is among the most complicated products in a modern economy, and it requires people to produce it.

On the other hand, assembling automobiles is an almost fully roboticized process.

Modern vehicles and modern medicine are both incredibly important and lucrative and technologically advanced fields. The same macroeconomy that produces the modern automobile produces synthetic insulin.

In short, we can say many superficial things about "manufacturing," but we cannot make specific claims about the "capital" involved in both industries that accurately describe both industries. Different parts of the economy behave differently.

In economic jargon, r and g aggregate up to the macroeconomy, but that includes the summation of a lot of positive and negative numbers, numbers greater than 1 and numbers between 0 and 1. Just like the price of iPads can decrease while the price of gasoline increases, so the price of insulin-making robots and car-making robots can go in opposite directions. Just because the aggregate number is X doesn't mean it's X for every industry in the world.

We can assume-away all the variation in an economy if we want to, but it doesn't provide us with the kind of insight needed to arrive at important policy conclusions.

Conclusion
Piketty's ideas will resonate with leftists who are hungry for a technical justification for implementing leftist policies, such as steep taxation on the rich or on capital itself, and large welfare payments to people who do not own large amounts of capital. It's equally likely that rightists and libertarians will scoff at Piketty's claims and seek to explain why they just cannot be true.

The truth doesn't lie in the middle. The truth lies in the strength of expressing ideas only vaguely, and steering clear of specifics. That is, the truth is that Piketty's ideas are accurate as a shotgun theory and inaccurate otherwise.

Piketty's theory isn't wrong, but it doesn't provide a good justification for leftist social policy, either. Those two facts are bound to disappoint leftists and non-leftists alike, and this is why it's important to take paradigms as learning tools, absorb the knowledge, and then cast the paradigm aside again.

UPDATE: Arnold Kling's view is similar to mine when he says:

The way I see it, Piketty and Solow work with models that incorporate homogeneous workers (with no differences in human capital) and homogeneous capital (with no differences in ex ante risk or ex post returns). The real world is so far removed from those models that I simply cannot buy into the undertaking.

Solow's take, as referenced by Kling, is here. 

An Aside From An Aside: Greed

Stephen Williamson, quoting Tom Sargent, says something that made me think. First, the quote - and to be clear, the first paragraph is a quote from Sargent; the part in brackets is Williamson. The bold emphasis is my addition.

I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words. Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches. 

[I had to think about whether I agree with the "organized common sense" view of economics. If common sense is supposed to be what the average layperson possesses, then economics is not common sense, as it's sometimes (if not often) counterintuitive. For example, Adam Smith told us that greed can be a good thing. That's certainly not part of collective wisdom, I think. But Sargent was trying to put the Berkeley graduates at ease. He's telling them that doing economics is just a matter of putting pieces of straightforward logic together to come up with a coherent set of ideas.]

The word "greed" really just means "self interest," and self interest can be good or bad, depending on the circumstance. This is the revelation that Williamson credits to Adam Smith. His saying so made me think of another word that functions similarly: pride.

Like greed, pride is often disparaged as an unsavory characteristic. But unlike greed, and depending on where you grew up and how that word was used in your place of origin, pride can have a decidedly positive connotation, too. Members of visible minorities who are often subjected to bigotry, for example, are often encouraged to be proud of who they are. When a loved one does something that we greatly admire, we often tell them that we're proud of them. And even when we accomplish something very difficult ourselves, we don't mind too much describing it as "something we are proud of."

In the case of pride, it's not the pride itself that seems to be the problem, but whether our pride is expressed as an affront to others. Pride can be an act of disparaging other people, and when that's the case, pride is bad. In other cases, it's either good or at least harmless.

I'd suggest that greed works the same way. Self-interest in and of itself is natural, and positive, and results in our ability to survive and thrive. If you're not a happy person, I challenge you to make anyone else happy. You'll find it's impossible; only happy people make others happy. But when greed is expressed in such a way that it deprives others of their just desserts, that's when it goes wrong.

Why do I bother writing about this? Only to highlight the fact that language is often a very inadequate way of expressing things. Words don't perfectly capture the ideas we hope to express. The moral ambiguity of pride and greed is a good example of that.

What Are We Teaching Our Youth?

From Slate.com:

In the fall of 2008, when I was 11 years old, I wrote to the CEO of McDonald’s and asked him to change the way his stores sold Happy Meals. I expressed my frustration that McDonald’s always asked if my family preferred a “girl toy” or a “boy toy” when we ordered a Happy Meal at the drive-through. My letter asked if it would be legal for McDonald’s “to ask at a job interview whether someone wanted a man’s job or a woman’s job?”

A few weeks later, I received a short response from a McDonald’s customer satisfaction representative claiming that McDonald’s doesn’t train their employees to ask whether Happy Meal customers want boys’ or girls’ toys, and my experiences were not the norm.

This response was unsatisfying, so I began visiting more than a dozen local McDonald’s locations with my father to collect data. Ultimately, we brought a complaint to the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities against McDonald’s for discriminating on the basis of sex. Despite our evidence showing that, in our test, McDonald’s employees described the toys in gendered terms more than 79 percent of the time, the commission dismissed our allegations as “absurd” and solely for the purposes of “titilation [sic] and sociological experimentation.” All in all, this was a pretty humiliating defeat.

The byline in this article indicates that its author, Antonia Ayers-Brown, is a junior in high school. This would seem to indicate that Ms. Ayers-Brown's parent(s) or legal guardian(s) have nothing better to do than to help her bring human rights lawsuits against fast food corporations for the manner in which their employees distribute toys.

No matter where you stand on the burning issue of complimentary toy distribution, we should all agree that parents who would teach their children to litigate when they see something objectionable are frankly teaching their children the wrong lessons.

Fitness Experiments #2

Yesterday's workout was heavy on the triceps and calves, but strictly adhered to the calisthenics principle I'm working with. Today's experiment is more of the same (calisthenics), but the emphasis is on back, bicep and abdominal muscle groups.

• 4 sets of 15 one-arm bicep rows from push-up position. (Get in push-up position with your hands holding dumbbells; raise one dumbbell into your chest, and return to starting position. Alternate arms.)
• 2 sets of 10 standard pull-ups.
• 2 sets of 10 reverse grip (underhanded) pull-ups.
• 1 set of 10 standard pull-ups - hold the "up" position and move first to one side, then the next.
• 4 sets of 15 hanging leg raises.
• 4 sets of 15 hanging oblique twists.
• 4-5 mile run.

Obviously, this will not be a very easy workout. I'm going to do what I can, aiming to finish.

Important Note:
If you're not used to doing a lot of bicep work, there is a risk that you will hurt your bicep or possibly develop some light tendonitis or "tennis elbow." So take it easy and use common sense. Remember a burning sensation in your muscles that subsides during recovery periods is "good pain." Burning that doesn't go away with rest, or sharp pain (pinching or stabbing) in your tendons or joints is "bad pain." If you start to feel some bad pain coming on, reduce the number or repetitions you do.

The goal here is to complete the workout; there is no shame in not being able to complete it. As long as you get a good workout, you've succeeded.