October 9, 2010
Keeping Our Distance, the Facebook Way By DAMON DARLIN
FACEBOOK is the best distancing tool since the creation of the Christmas card.
Sending holiday greeting cards began in the 1850s in England and spread quickly as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives. The cards, whether religious or not in theme, went to people you rarely wrote to and even more rarely spoke to, but for whom you still had a measure of affection — or curiosity. You wanted to know what was going on in their lives, and one exchange a year did the trick.
The cards kept the people in your social network at a distance, while maintaining ties to them. I recall my parents sending and receiving Christmas cards. I did it for a year after I married, but I stopped because it was just too much work.
Facebook, which tries to replicate our real-world relationships online, now helps me maintain those connections. But it does cards one better. It preserves the weak ties in my social network without creating obligations.
A problem I have with holiday cards is that receiving one creates an obligation to send one back. If you don’t, you can expect to be dropped from the friend’s mailing list. You have to send a card next year to re-establish the ties, fully expecting not to get a card in return because of the earlier faux pas. (I do still get four cards each December from non-obligation-seeking friends — and enjoy each one.)
There is no exact way to measure the decline of holiday cards. But the overall drop in the amount of December mail might serve as an approximate indicator. The United States Postal Service reports that the December volume of first-class mail — no catalogs, packages or junk mail — fell 18 percent from a peak in 2002.
Facebook, meanwhile, has grown to 500 million users worldwide and continues to find new users. And Facebook says it finds it hard to think that anyone would want to use their service to keep people away. And yet, last week, it introduced a new service that allows people to divvy up their friends into cliques, a tacit acknowledgment that we hold most of our Facebook friends at a distance.
But it is the lack of obligations that makes Facebook better than other forms of communication. It’s socially efficient and even appears to make staying in touch a whole lot less work. You can read about friends taking their children to soccer games, but your lack of response doesn’t mean that you will stop hearing about their birthday parties, swim lessons, prom nights and graduations.
You can even hide a friend’s messages and they are none the wiser. Facebook also lets people create hierarchies of friends so that information can be shared selectively. No one but you sees the cliques you assign people to. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Facebook has this effect. After all, technology has a grand tradition of distancing people from one another for the sake of efficiency.
The automated gas pump ensures that you no longer interact with a station attendant unless you have a hankering for a slushie and a Slim Jim. The bank A.T.M. has stopped us from exchanging pleasantries with the teller as we collect our $20 bills. And supermarkets are constantly experimenting with self-checkout technology that will remove the line-slowing interaction with a human clerk from the process.
Talking on the phone replaced face-to-face meetings. Now texting is taking the place of many phone conversations. But those calls may not be missed any more than we now miss talking to bank tellers, as they often require small talk and can be awkward to break off. For the recipients, they are an interruption.
(Of course, Apple is advertising face-to-face video phone calls with the same kind of emotion that AT&T used in its old “reach out and touch someone” campaigns. But I suspect that calls are a lost cause.)
Despite its ability to conveniently hold friends at a distance, Facebook can also bestow benefits to those users who make a little effort to keep track of what their friends are saying there. Cameron Marlow, a research scientist who has been described as Facebook’s in-house sociologist, says it relates to social capital: Your friends on Facebook have resources — a guest room or a job, for instance. You may want to know that information, but finding it depends in no small amount on serendipity and your ability to pay attention to their posts. But you also have to be willing to ask for those resources.
Mr. Marlow says that more in-bound communication increases one’s social capital. “The more they have communication with me, the lower the cost of me reaching out to them,” he said.
And a little reciprocity increases the amount of information we receive. The new feature, Facebook groups, allows like-minded friends to more easily share information.
EVEN people who aren’t very sociable on Facebook can benefit from the knowledge they gain about their friends. “You look them up; you see what they do,” Mr. Marlow says. “Six months later you could reach out. There is no social norm against reaching out.”
There was a day, he said, when “birthday or Christmas cards were the only way to reach out and say I care about you,” said Mr. Marlow. But now, whether you hold friends close or not, you gain timely and useful information as it trickles out, and not in a once-a-year data dump.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Friday, October 08, 2010
Make Wall Street Risk It All By WILLIAM D. COHAN
CTOBER 7, 2010, 8:40 PM
Make Wall Street Risk It All By WILLIAM D. COHAN
William D. Cohan on Wall Street and Main Street.
Tags:
incentives, investment bank, Wall Street
Two years after the near collapse of capitalism, we certainly have our fill of financial reforms. The 2,200-page Dodd-Frank Act, which President Obama signed this summer, creates an Orwellian alphabet soup of new agencies, oversight boards and offices intended to protect us from ourselves.
The problem is that since the incentives on Wall Street have not been changed one iota by the new laws — nor are they likely to be changed by any of the soon-to-be-written regulations of federal agencies — we’re no better protected from bankers’ potentially reckless behavior than we were before the latest round of reforms.
It’s not that Dodd-Frank ignored Wall Street’s past excesses. The law will ensure that some, but not all, derivatives will have to be traded on exchanges and that some, but not all, of the banks’ proprietary trading will be curbed and that some, but not all, of their private-equity and hedge funds will be shuttered or spun off. Dodd-Frank is also supposed to curtail Wall Street’s penchant for creating conflicts of interest, although how the law is going to do that is far from clear.
“In the end, our financial system only works — our market is only free — when there are clear rules and basic safeguards that prevent abuse, that check excess, that ensure that it is more profitable to play by the rules than to game the system,” President Obama said when he signed the bill into law. That rhetoric is fine, but unfortunately Dodd-Frank will do nothing to change the rules on Wall Street.
Nor, frankly, will the expected coming into force, in a couple of years, of the new Basel III capital rules, which will likely require banks to have common equity equal to 7 percent of the value of their assets.
Bankers and traders still have the same irresponsible, accountability-free incentives they have had for the past 40 years to generate as much revenue as they possibly can each year, regardless of the consequences. The change occurred when Wall Street firms stopped being partnerships, in which every partner put his full wealth on the line every day, and became corporations, which put the risks on their shareholders and creditors.
Dodd-Frank and Basel III both missed plum opportunities to change Wall Street’s incentive structure. Which is a shame, since it would not have been difficult. Human behavior is pretty simple actually. We do what we are rewarded to do. On Wall Street, people are hugely overcompensated for generating revenue, which they do by selling products (stocks, bonds, advice on mergers or investing) and by using their vast balance sheets to facilitate trades for clients and to take the risks others don’t want to take.
What’s made all this possible is the vast amounts of capital that Wall Street firms have amassed. Fifty years ago, Goldman Sachs had around $10 million of capital, which came from its partners; today Goldman has upward of $74 billion of capital, derived mostly from the generosity of its shareholders and the creditors who have bought Goldman’s public and private securities.
Over the past generation, this business model has worked well for one group in particular: the bankers, traders and honchos who work on Wall Street. These days on Wall Street, around 50 percent of every dollar of revenue generated is paid out to its employees in the form of compensation. What other business on earth does this? None.
And how would Dodd-Frank change this dynamic? It would give shareholders a nonbinding “say on pay” regarding the compensation of executives of public corporations. And even if a majority of shareholders expressed their displeasure, the companies would be free to ignore them. Yawn.
Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission will also have the mandate to explore whether a Wall Street firm’s compensation practices are contributing to excessive risk-taking and, if so, to try to do something about that, like making it easier for shareholders to oust directors. But that directive is an afterthought, too.
We already have definitive proof that Wall Street’s compensation practices lead to excessive risk-taking: witness the way Wall Street’s armies kept selling mortgage-backed securities filled with defaulting home mortgages long after the securities made any sense as an investment. Wall Street did the same thing in the 1980s with junk bonds, the same thing in the 1990s with Internet initial public offerings, and the same thing in the early 2000s with the debt of emerging telecommunications companies.
This sort of thing will happen again soon enough unless Wall Street’s senior executives have the clear economic incentive to closely monitor the risks their firms are taking and make it their business to ensure that the risks are prudent.
IN June 1987, Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead, who had previously been Goldman’s co-senior partner, reflected on the insider trading scandals that were roiling one Wall Street firm after another.
“Anybody who alleges that Wall Street is rotten I just don’t think understands Wall Street,” Mr. Whitehead told Institutional Investor magazine. “I think it’s a remarkable system that still works effectively at the heart of our free-enterprise system. But if we are going to avoid sweeping government controls and regulations, then it is incumbent on the system to clean up its act.”
Of course, Wall Street did not follow his advice about cleaning up its own act. Rather, Wall Street went to the other extreme, pushing its friends in Washington for less and less regulation all through the 1990s and early 2000s. Let the market regulate Wall Street, we were told repeatedly. Now we face the “sweeping government controls and regulations” that Mr. Whitehead feared.
This did not have to happen. For example, Goldman Sachs seems to understand the power of creating internal incentives to monitor and to regulate the risks the firm is taking. When Goldman went public in 1999, unlike other firms it decided that a group of its 400 or so top executives would get paid not out of the firm’s revenues, but instead from the firm’s pretax profits. If the firm has no pretax profits in any given year, these executives get (only) their six-figure salaries, not the tens of millions in bonuses they count on.
As a result, the senior brass at Goldman is hyperfocused on making sure the firm is always profitable, and it always has been. This may very well be the precise reason that Goldman alone saw the brewing mortgage meltdown and did something about it.
When other firms were losing billions of dollars in 2007 as the mortgage market exploded, Goldman made $17.6 billion in pretax profits, one of its most profitable years ever, and its top three executives split around $200 million. You would think the rest of Wall Street would emulate Goldman’s approach to compensating its top executives. But it hasn’t.
SINCE neither Goldman’s example nor Dodd-Frank and Basel III will change Wall Street’s behavior, we have to find a new mechanism. To my mind, its central feature should be that each of the top 100 executives at Wall Street’s remaining “systemically important” firms be personally liable for the risks they take. Not just their unexercised stock options or restricted stock, but every asset they have in their possession: from their cars to their fancy homes to their bulging bank accounts.
The days of privatizing the profits for Wall Street and socializing the risks must end. As radical as this sounds, in truth it would be no different from when — before 1970 — Wall Street was a series of private partnerships.
We can’t turn back the clock: Wall Street’s big firms will never again be private partnerships. Instead, I propose that each large Wall Street firm create a new security that represents — and is secured by — the entire net worth of its 100 top executives. This security would be subordinated to all other creditors as well as to all preferred and common shareholders; in other words, if a firm goes bankrupt, this security is the first to be wiped out.
Had such a security existed at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the net worth of the top 100 Lehman executives — no doubt totaling several billion dollars — would have been collected after liquidating everything they owned and paid to Lehman creditors, who under the current system will be lucky if they get back 10 cents on the dollar.
Wall Street’s first reaction to this idea — aside from profanities — will be that it cannot possibly be done. Or that it would somehow threaten the sanctity of our capital markets.
But, in fact, it can and should be done. Indeed, Wall Street has all the intellectual capital it needs in its own archives to construct such a security: in the old partnership days every partner signed an agreement requiring him (and rarely her) to put his net worth on the line every day. Surely, clever Wall Street lawyers can draft a 21st-century version of the old partnership agreement.
What’s more, Wall Street should take the initiative to do this unprompted. As John Whitehead warned, the banks’ failure to show responsibility will only invite more government intervention.
If, however, the firms balk, the S.E.C. should require this sort of accountability from the senior managements as part of its new regulations governing Wall Street compensation. Or Congress should take advantage of the still-brewing outrage against Wall Street to force the creation of such a security.
Pretty harsh, right? Maybe, but Wall Street deserves no sympathy. Had this security, or something like it, been in place at every Wall Street firm five years ago, there would have been no mortgage bubble, no financial crisis, no deep and unsettling economic recession with nearly 10 percent unemployment, no need for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and no need for Dodd-Frank or Basel III.
Why? Because human beings do what they are rewarded to do — especially on Wall Street — and if they are rewarded for taking prudent and sensible risks, that’s exactly what they will do.
This column appeared in print on October 8, 2010.
Make Wall Street Risk It All By WILLIAM D. COHAN
William D. Cohan on Wall Street and Main Street.
Tags:
incentives, investment bank, Wall Street
Two years after the near collapse of capitalism, we certainly have our fill of financial reforms. The 2,200-page Dodd-Frank Act, which President Obama signed this summer, creates an Orwellian alphabet soup of new agencies, oversight boards and offices intended to protect us from ourselves.
The problem is that since the incentives on Wall Street have not been changed one iota by the new laws — nor are they likely to be changed by any of the soon-to-be-written regulations of federal agencies — we’re no better protected from bankers’ potentially reckless behavior than we were before the latest round of reforms.
It’s not that Dodd-Frank ignored Wall Street’s past excesses. The law will ensure that some, but not all, derivatives will have to be traded on exchanges and that some, but not all, of the banks’ proprietary trading will be curbed and that some, but not all, of their private-equity and hedge funds will be shuttered or spun off. Dodd-Frank is also supposed to curtail Wall Street’s penchant for creating conflicts of interest, although how the law is going to do that is far from clear.
“In the end, our financial system only works — our market is only free — when there are clear rules and basic safeguards that prevent abuse, that check excess, that ensure that it is more profitable to play by the rules than to game the system,” President Obama said when he signed the bill into law. That rhetoric is fine, but unfortunately Dodd-Frank will do nothing to change the rules on Wall Street.
Nor, frankly, will the expected coming into force, in a couple of years, of the new Basel III capital rules, which will likely require banks to have common equity equal to 7 percent of the value of their assets.
Bankers and traders still have the same irresponsible, accountability-free incentives they have had for the past 40 years to generate as much revenue as they possibly can each year, regardless of the consequences. The change occurred when Wall Street firms stopped being partnerships, in which every partner put his full wealth on the line every day, and became corporations, which put the risks on their shareholders and creditors.
Dodd-Frank and Basel III both missed plum opportunities to change Wall Street’s incentive structure. Which is a shame, since it would not have been difficult. Human behavior is pretty simple actually. We do what we are rewarded to do. On Wall Street, people are hugely overcompensated for generating revenue, which they do by selling products (stocks, bonds, advice on mergers or investing) and by using their vast balance sheets to facilitate trades for clients and to take the risks others don’t want to take.
What’s made all this possible is the vast amounts of capital that Wall Street firms have amassed. Fifty years ago, Goldman Sachs had around $10 million of capital, which came from its partners; today Goldman has upward of $74 billion of capital, derived mostly from the generosity of its shareholders and the creditors who have bought Goldman’s public and private securities.
Over the past generation, this business model has worked well for one group in particular: the bankers, traders and honchos who work on Wall Street. These days on Wall Street, around 50 percent of every dollar of revenue generated is paid out to its employees in the form of compensation. What other business on earth does this? None.
And how would Dodd-Frank change this dynamic? It would give shareholders a nonbinding “say on pay” regarding the compensation of executives of public corporations. And even if a majority of shareholders expressed their displeasure, the companies would be free to ignore them. Yawn.
Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission will also have the mandate to explore whether a Wall Street firm’s compensation practices are contributing to excessive risk-taking and, if so, to try to do something about that, like making it easier for shareholders to oust directors. But that directive is an afterthought, too.
We already have definitive proof that Wall Street’s compensation practices lead to excessive risk-taking: witness the way Wall Street’s armies kept selling mortgage-backed securities filled with defaulting home mortgages long after the securities made any sense as an investment. Wall Street did the same thing in the 1980s with junk bonds, the same thing in the 1990s with Internet initial public offerings, and the same thing in the early 2000s with the debt of emerging telecommunications companies.
This sort of thing will happen again soon enough unless Wall Street’s senior executives have the clear economic incentive to closely monitor the risks their firms are taking and make it their business to ensure that the risks are prudent.
IN June 1987, Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead, who had previously been Goldman’s co-senior partner, reflected on the insider trading scandals that were roiling one Wall Street firm after another.
“Anybody who alleges that Wall Street is rotten I just don’t think understands Wall Street,” Mr. Whitehead told Institutional Investor magazine. “I think it’s a remarkable system that still works effectively at the heart of our free-enterprise system. But if we are going to avoid sweeping government controls and regulations, then it is incumbent on the system to clean up its act.”
Of course, Wall Street did not follow his advice about cleaning up its own act. Rather, Wall Street went to the other extreme, pushing its friends in Washington for less and less regulation all through the 1990s and early 2000s. Let the market regulate Wall Street, we were told repeatedly. Now we face the “sweeping government controls and regulations” that Mr. Whitehead feared.
This did not have to happen. For example, Goldman Sachs seems to understand the power of creating internal incentives to monitor and to regulate the risks the firm is taking. When Goldman went public in 1999, unlike other firms it decided that a group of its 400 or so top executives would get paid not out of the firm’s revenues, but instead from the firm’s pretax profits. If the firm has no pretax profits in any given year, these executives get (only) their six-figure salaries, not the tens of millions in bonuses they count on.
As a result, the senior brass at Goldman is hyperfocused on making sure the firm is always profitable, and it always has been. This may very well be the precise reason that Goldman alone saw the brewing mortgage meltdown and did something about it.
When other firms were losing billions of dollars in 2007 as the mortgage market exploded, Goldman made $17.6 billion in pretax profits, one of its most profitable years ever, and its top three executives split around $200 million. You would think the rest of Wall Street would emulate Goldman’s approach to compensating its top executives. But it hasn’t.
SINCE neither Goldman’s example nor Dodd-Frank and Basel III will change Wall Street’s behavior, we have to find a new mechanism. To my mind, its central feature should be that each of the top 100 executives at Wall Street’s remaining “systemically important” firms be personally liable for the risks they take. Not just their unexercised stock options or restricted stock, but every asset they have in their possession: from their cars to their fancy homes to their bulging bank accounts.
The days of privatizing the profits for Wall Street and socializing the risks must end. As radical as this sounds, in truth it would be no different from when — before 1970 — Wall Street was a series of private partnerships.
We can’t turn back the clock: Wall Street’s big firms will never again be private partnerships. Instead, I propose that each large Wall Street firm create a new security that represents — and is secured by — the entire net worth of its 100 top executives. This security would be subordinated to all other creditors as well as to all preferred and common shareholders; in other words, if a firm goes bankrupt, this security is the first to be wiped out.
Had such a security existed at the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the net worth of the top 100 Lehman executives — no doubt totaling several billion dollars — would have been collected after liquidating everything they owned and paid to Lehman creditors, who under the current system will be lucky if they get back 10 cents on the dollar.
Wall Street’s first reaction to this idea — aside from profanities — will be that it cannot possibly be done. Or that it would somehow threaten the sanctity of our capital markets.
But, in fact, it can and should be done. Indeed, Wall Street has all the intellectual capital it needs in its own archives to construct such a security: in the old partnership days every partner signed an agreement requiring him (and rarely her) to put his net worth on the line every day. Surely, clever Wall Street lawyers can draft a 21st-century version of the old partnership agreement.
What’s more, Wall Street should take the initiative to do this unprompted. As John Whitehead warned, the banks’ failure to show responsibility will only invite more government intervention.
If, however, the firms balk, the S.E.C. should require this sort of accountability from the senior managements as part of its new regulations governing Wall Street compensation. Or Congress should take advantage of the still-brewing outrage against Wall Street to force the creation of such a security.
Pretty harsh, right? Maybe, but Wall Street deserves no sympathy. Had this security, or something like it, been in place at every Wall Street firm five years ago, there would have been no mortgage bubble, no financial crisis, no deep and unsettling economic recession with nearly 10 percent unemployment, no need for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and no need for Dodd-Frank or Basel III.
Why? Because human beings do what they are rewarded to do — especially on Wall Street — and if they are rewarded for taking prudent and sensible risks, that’s exactly what they will do.
This column appeared in print on October 8, 2010.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature By JULIE BOSMAN
Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature By JULIE BOSMAN
The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabríel Garcia Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”
In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country.
In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”
Since 1901, 102 Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded. The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison, in 1993.
The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Mr. Vargas Llosa will receive 10 million kronor, or about $1.5 million.
Mr. Vargas Llosa is currently spending the semester teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.
The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabríel Garcia Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”
In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country.
In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”
Since 1901, 102 Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded. The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison, in 1993.
The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Mr. Vargas Llosa will receive 10 million kronor, or about $1.5 million.
Mr. Vargas Llosa is currently spending the semester teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.
The End of the Tunnel By PAUL KRUGMAN
October 7, 2010
The End of the Tunnel By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Erie Canal. Hoover Dam. The Interstate Highway System. Visionary public projects are part of the American tradition, and have been a major driver of our economic development.
And right now, by any rational calculation, would be an especially good time to improve the nation’s infrastructure. We have the need: our roads, our rail lines, our water and sewer systems are antiquated and increasingly inadequate. We have the resources: a million-and-a-half construction workers are sitting idle, and putting them to work would help the economy as a whole recover from its slump. And the price is right: with interest rates on federal debt at near-record lows, there has never been a better time to borrow for long-term investment.
But American politics these days is anything but rational. Republicans bitterly opposed even the modest infrastructure spending contained in the Obama stimulus plan. And, on Thursday, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, canceled America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.
So, about that tunnel: with almost 1,200 people per square mile, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, more densely populated than any major European nation. Add in the fact that many residents work in New York, and you have a state that can’t function without adequate public transportation. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to drive to work.
But right now there’s just one century-old rail tunnel linking New Jersey and New York — and it’s running close to capacity. The need for another tunnel couldn’t be more obvious.
So last year the project began. Of the $8.7 billion in planned funding, less than a third was to come from the State of New Jersey; the rest would come, in roughly equal amounts, from the independent Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and from the federal government. Even if costs were to rise substantially, as they often do on big projects, it was a very good deal for the state.
But Mr. Christie killed it anyway.
News reports suggest that his immediate goal was to shift funds to local road projects and existing rail repairs. There were, however, much better ways to raise those funds, such as an increase in the state’s relatively low gasoline taxes — and bear in mind that whatever motorists gain from low gas taxes will be at least partly undone by pain from the canceled project in the form of growing congestion and traffic delays. But, no, in modern America, no tax increase can ever be justified, for any reason.
So this was a terrible, shortsighted move from New Jersey’s point of view. But that’s not the whole cost. Canceling the tunnel was also a blow to national hopes of recovery, part of a pattern of penny-pinching that has played a large role in our continuing economic stagnation.
When people ask why the Obama stimulus didn’t accomplish more, one good response is to ask, what stimulus? Leaving aside the cost of financial rescues and safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, federal spending has risen only modestly — and this rise has been largely offset by cutbacks at the state and local level. Many of these cuts were forced by Congress, which has refused to approve adequate aid to the states. But as Mr. Christie is demonstrating, local politicians are also doing their part.
And the ideology that has led Mr. Christie to undermine his state’s future is, of course, the same ideology that has led almost all Republicans and some Democrats to stand in the way of any meaningful action to revive the nation’s economy. Worse yet, next month’s election seems likely to reward Republicans for their obstructionism.
So here’s how you should think about the decision to kill the tunnel: It’s a terrible thing in itself, but, beyond that, it’s a perfect symbol of how America has lost its way. By refusing to pay for essential investment, politicians are both perpetuating unemployment and sacrificing long-run growth. And why not? After all, this seems to be a winning electoral strategy. All vision of a better future seems to have been lost, replaced with a refusal to look beyond the narrowest, most shortsighted notion of self-interest.
I wish I could say something optimistic at this point. But at least for now, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel.
The End of the Tunnel By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Erie Canal. Hoover Dam. The Interstate Highway System. Visionary public projects are part of the American tradition, and have been a major driver of our economic development.
And right now, by any rational calculation, would be an especially good time to improve the nation’s infrastructure. We have the need: our roads, our rail lines, our water and sewer systems are antiquated and increasingly inadequate. We have the resources: a million-and-a-half construction workers are sitting idle, and putting them to work would help the economy as a whole recover from its slump. And the price is right: with interest rates on federal debt at near-record lows, there has never been a better time to borrow for long-term investment.
But American politics these days is anything but rational. Republicans bitterly opposed even the modest infrastructure spending contained in the Obama stimulus plan. And, on Thursday, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, canceled America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.
So, about that tunnel: with almost 1,200 people per square mile, New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, more densely populated than any major European nation. Add in the fact that many residents work in New York, and you have a state that can’t function without adequate public transportation. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to drive to work.
But right now there’s just one century-old rail tunnel linking New Jersey and New York — and it’s running close to capacity. The need for another tunnel couldn’t be more obvious.
So last year the project began. Of the $8.7 billion in planned funding, less than a third was to come from the State of New Jersey; the rest would come, in roughly equal amounts, from the independent Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and from the federal government. Even if costs were to rise substantially, as they often do on big projects, it was a very good deal for the state.
But Mr. Christie killed it anyway.
News reports suggest that his immediate goal was to shift funds to local road projects and existing rail repairs. There were, however, much better ways to raise those funds, such as an increase in the state’s relatively low gasoline taxes — and bear in mind that whatever motorists gain from low gas taxes will be at least partly undone by pain from the canceled project in the form of growing congestion and traffic delays. But, no, in modern America, no tax increase can ever be justified, for any reason.
So this was a terrible, shortsighted move from New Jersey’s point of view. But that’s not the whole cost. Canceling the tunnel was also a blow to national hopes of recovery, part of a pattern of penny-pinching that has played a large role in our continuing economic stagnation.
When people ask why the Obama stimulus didn’t accomplish more, one good response is to ask, what stimulus? Leaving aside the cost of financial rescues and safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, federal spending has risen only modestly — and this rise has been largely offset by cutbacks at the state and local level. Many of these cuts were forced by Congress, which has refused to approve adequate aid to the states. But as Mr. Christie is demonstrating, local politicians are also doing their part.
And the ideology that has led Mr. Christie to undermine his state’s future is, of course, the same ideology that has led almost all Republicans and some Democrats to stand in the way of any meaningful action to revive the nation’s economy. Worse yet, next month’s election seems likely to reward Republicans for their obstructionism.
So here’s how you should think about the decision to kill the tunnel: It’s a terrible thing in itself, but, beyond that, it’s a perfect symbol of how America has lost its way. By refusing to pay for essential investment, politicians are both perpetuating unemployment and sacrificing long-run growth. And why not? After all, this seems to be a winning electoral strategy. All vision of a better future seems to have been lost, replaced with a refusal to look beyond the narrowest, most shortsighted notion of self-interest.
I wish I could say something optimistic at this point. But at least for now, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel.
anhedonia | an·he·do·ni·a
an·he·do·ni·a (ăn'hē-dō'nē-ə)
n.
The absence of pleasure or the ability to experience it.
[New Latin anhēdonia : Greek an-, without; see a-1 + Greek hēdonē, pleasure.]
ANHEDONIC an'he·don'ic (-dŏn'ĭk ) adj.
In this movie, Zuckerberg designs a fabulous social network, but still has his reciprocity problem. He is still afflicted by his anhedonic self-consciousness, his failure to communicate, his inability to lose himself in the throngs at a party or the capacity to deserve the love he craves.
n.
The absence of pleasure or the ability to experience it.
[New Latin anhēdonia : Greek an-, without; see a-1 + Greek hēdonē, pleasure.]
ANHEDONIC an'he·don'ic (-dŏn'ĭk ) adj.
In this movie, Zuckerberg designs a fabulous social network, but still has his reciprocity problem. He is still afflicted by his anhedonic self-consciousness, his failure to communicate, his inability to lose himself in the throngs at a party or the capacity to deserve the love he craves.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Health Care’s Uneven Road to a New Era By DAVID LEONHARDT
October 5, 2010
Health Care’s Uneven Road to a New Era By DAVID LEONHARDT
Consider what it would be like to have a health insurance plan that capped annual benefits at $2,000. For any medical care costing more than that, you would have to pay out of pocket.
Examples of care that costs more than $2,000 — and often a lot more — include virtually any cancer treatment, any heart surgery, a year’s worth of diabetes treatment and care for many broken bones. Even a single M.R.I. exam can cost more than $2,000. A typical hospital stay runs thousands of dollars more.
So does this insurance plan sound like part of the solution for the country’s health care system — or part of the problem?
A $2,000 plan happens to be one of the main plans that McDonald’s offers its employees. It became big news last week, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was worried the plan would run afoul of a provision in the new health care law. In response to the provision, McDonald’s threatened to drop the coverage altogether, until the Obama administration signaled it would grant some exemptions.
This episode was only the latest disruption that the health law seems to be causing. Also last week, the Principal Financial Group said it was getting out of the health insurance business, while other insurers have said they might stop offering certain types of coverage. With each new disruption come loud claims — some from insurance executives — that the health overhaul is damaging American health care.
On the surface, these claims can sound credible. But when you dig a little deeper, you often discover the same lesson that the McDonald’s case provides: the real problem was the status quo.
American families spend almost twice as much on health care — through premiums, paycheck deductions and out-of-pocket expenses — as families in any other country. In exchange, we receive top-notch specialty care in many areas. Yet on the whole, we do not get much better care than countries that spend far less.
We don’t live as long as people in Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe or even relatively poor Jordan. Misdiagnosis is common. Medical errors occur more often than in some other countries. Unique to the developed world, millions of people have no health insurance, and millions more, like many fast-food workers, are underinsured.
In choosing their health reform plan, President Obama and the Democrats eschewed radical changes, for better or worse, and instead tried to minimize the disruptions to the current system. Sometimes, Mr. Obama went so far as to suggest there would be no disruptions, saying that people could keep their current plan if they liked it. But that’s not quite right. It is not possible to change a system as huge, and as hugely flawed, as ours without some disruptions.
•
McDonald’s offers its hourly workers two different health care plans, which are known as “mini-med” plans. In one, workers can pay about $730 a year for benefits of up to $2,000. In the other, they can pay about $1,660 a year for benefits of up to $10,000, The Journal reported.
In a memo to federal regulators, McDonald’s executives argued that their version of health insurance “positively impacts” the almost 30,000 workers who are covered. And that’s true. A plan with a $2,000 or $10,000 cap can cover some modest health problems and is better than being uninsured.
But should the litmus test for American health care really be better than nothing?
Mini-med plans force people to drain their savings accounts for dozens of common medical problems. They also force hospitals to let some bills go unpaid, which drives up costs for everyone else.
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has previously criticized AARP for marketing similarly limited plans to its members. “It’s not better than nothing,” Mr. Grassley argued, “to encourage people to buy something described as ‘health security’ when there’s no basic protection against high medical costs.”
Dr. Aaron Carroll, an Indiana University pediatrics professor who studies health policy, says of mini-med plans: “They’re great if you’re healthy, because you feel like you’re covered. But if you ever need them, they’re so skimpy, they provide very little.” Gary Claxton of the Kaiser Family Foundation adds, “They really just shouldn’t be considered health insurance.”
The plans’ skimpiness is the main reason they ran into legal jeopardy. Under the new law, most plans must spend at least 85 percent of their revenue on medical care, rather than administrative overhead. The McDonald’s plans aren’t generous enough to clear the hurdle.
At the same time, it’s probably unrealistic to expect McDonald’s to give workers decent health insurance. Many of those workers make less than $20,000 a year. A typical family insurance plan would raise their total compensation by more than half, destroying the McDonald’s business model.
The workers, for their part, cannot afford to buy insurance in the so-called individual market. Plans are even more expensive in that market, because it is dominated by people who desperately need insurance — which is to say, sick people.
This is where health reform comes in. It tried to solve the problem by creating what policy experts call a three-legged stool.
First, people will be required to buy insurance, to spread costs among the sick and the healthy. Second, insurers will be prohibited from cherry-picking only the healthiest customers, again to spread costs. Finally, the government will give subsidies to people, like McDonald’s workers, who can’t afford insurance on their own.
Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland all use a system along these lines to cover everyone, largely through the private sector, for less money per person than this country spends.
The recent disruptions in our health insurance market are partly a result of the fact that the stool’s three legs were not built on the same timetable. Some of the insurance regulations, like the one on overhead costs, are starting to take effect. But the new markets for health insurance, known as exchanges, won’t be up and running until 2014. This timetable has its problems, and the Obama administration will probably need to grant some more temporary exemptions.
In 2014, however, the choice for McDonald’s workers will no longer be between a bad policy and no policy. Through the exchanges, they will be able to buy a real health insurance plan — one that covers cancer, heart attacks, surgeries, M.R.I.’s and hospital stays. Dr. Carroll notes that many families will end up paying less than they are now paying out of pocket and will get more access to care, too.
For insurance companies, these changes won’t be quite so positive. They will no longer be able to sell plans that devote 30 percent of revenue to salaries for their workers. They will not be allowed to compete over which company can come up with the most ingenious ways to say no to the sick. Their benefits and prices will become more public, thanks to the exchanges.
The health care overhaul that passed Congress is far from ideal, as I have written many times in this space. But it does represent progress.
The fact that it is beginning to disrupt the status quo — that some insurance policies will eventually be eliminated and some inefficient insurers will have to leave the market altogether — is all the proof we need.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
Health Care’s Uneven Road to a New Era By DAVID LEONHARDT
Consider what it would be like to have a health insurance plan that capped annual benefits at $2,000. For any medical care costing more than that, you would have to pay out of pocket.
Examples of care that costs more than $2,000 — and often a lot more — include virtually any cancer treatment, any heart surgery, a year’s worth of diabetes treatment and care for many broken bones. Even a single M.R.I. exam can cost more than $2,000. A typical hospital stay runs thousands of dollars more.
So does this insurance plan sound like part of the solution for the country’s health care system — or part of the problem?
A $2,000 plan happens to be one of the main plans that McDonald’s offers its employees. It became big news last week, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was worried the plan would run afoul of a provision in the new health care law. In response to the provision, McDonald’s threatened to drop the coverage altogether, until the Obama administration signaled it would grant some exemptions.
This episode was only the latest disruption that the health law seems to be causing. Also last week, the Principal Financial Group said it was getting out of the health insurance business, while other insurers have said they might stop offering certain types of coverage. With each new disruption come loud claims — some from insurance executives — that the health overhaul is damaging American health care.
On the surface, these claims can sound credible. But when you dig a little deeper, you often discover the same lesson that the McDonald’s case provides: the real problem was the status quo.
American families spend almost twice as much on health care — through premiums, paycheck deductions and out-of-pocket expenses — as families in any other country. In exchange, we receive top-notch specialty care in many areas. Yet on the whole, we do not get much better care than countries that spend far less.
We don’t live as long as people in Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe or even relatively poor Jordan. Misdiagnosis is common. Medical errors occur more often than in some other countries. Unique to the developed world, millions of people have no health insurance, and millions more, like many fast-food workers, are underinsured.
In choosing their health reform plan, President Obama and the Democrats eschewed radical changes, for better or worse, and instead tried to minimize the disruptions to the current system. Sometimes, Mr. Obama went so far as to suggest there would be no disruptions, saying that people could keep their current plan if they liked it. But that’s not quite right. It is not possible to change a system as huge, and as hugely flawed, as ours without some disruptions.
•
McDonald’s offers its hourly workers two different health care plans, which are known as “mini-med” plans. In one, workers can pay about $730 a year for benefits of up to $2,000. In the other, they can pay about $1,660 a year for benefits of up to $10,000, The Journal reported.
In a memo to federal regulators, McDonald’s executives argued that their version of health insurance “positively impacts” the almost 30,000 workers who are covered. And that’s true. A plan with a $2,000 or $10,000 cap can cover some modest health problems and is better than being uninsured.
But should the litmus test for American health care really be better than nothing?
Mini-med plans force people to drain their savings accounts for dozens of common medical problems. They also force hospitals to let some bills go unpaid, which drives up costs for everyone else.
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has previously criticized AARP for marketing similarly limited plans to its members. “It’s not better than nothing,” Mr. Grassley argued, “to encourage people to buy something described as ‘health security’ when there’s no basic protection against high medical costs.”
Dr. Aaron Carroll, an Indiana University pediatrics professor who studies health policy, says of mini-med plans: “They’re great if you’re healthy, because you feel like you’re covered. But if you ever need them, they’re so skimpy, they provide very little.” Gary Claxton of the Kaiser Family Foundation adds, “They really just shouldn’t be considered health insurance.”
The plans’ skimpiness is the main reason they ran into legal jeopardy. Under the new law, most plans must spend at least 85 percent of their revenue on medical care, rather than administrative overhead. The McDonald’s plans aren’t generous enough to clear the hurdle.
At the same time, it’s probably unrealistic to expect McDonald’s to give workers decent health insurance. Many of those workers make less than $20,000 a year. A typical family insurance plan would raise their total compensation by more than half, destroying the McDonald’s business model.
The workers, for their part, cannot afford to buy insurance in the so-called individual market. Plans are even more expensive in that market, because it is dominated by people who desperately need insurance — which is to say, sick people.
This is where health reform comes in. It tried to solve the problem by creating what policy experts call a three-legged stool.
First, people will be required to buy insurance, to spread costs among the sick and the healthy. Second, insurers will be prohibited from cherry-picking only the healthiest customers, again to spread costs. Finally, the government will give subsidies to people, like McDonald’s workers, who can’t afford insurance on their own.
Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland all use a system along these lines to cover everyone, largely through the private sector, for less money per person than this country spends.
The recent disruptions in our health insurance market are partly a result of the fact that the stool’s three legs were not built on the same timetable. Some of the insurance regulations, like the one on overhead costs, are starting to take effect. But the new markets for health insurance, known as exchanges, won’t be up and running until 2014. This timetable has its problems, and the Obama administration will probably need to grant some more temporary exemptions.
In 2014, however, the choice for McDonald’s workers will no longer be between a bad policy and no policy. Through the exchanges, they will be able to buy a real health insurance plan — one that covers cancer, heart attacks, surgeries, M.R.I.’s and hospital stays. Dr. Carroll notes that many families will end up paying less than they are now paying out of pocket and will get more access to care, too.
For insurance companies, these changes won’t be quite so positive. They will no longer be able to sell plans that devote 30 percent of revenue to salaries for their workers. They will not be allowed to compete over which company can come up with the most ingenious ways to say no to the sick. Their benefits and prices will become more public, thanks to the exchanges.
The health care overhaul that passed Congress is far from ideal, as I have written many times in this space. But it does represent progress.
The fact that it is beginning to disrupt the status quo — that some insurance policies will eventually be eliminated and some inefficient insurers will have to leave the market altogether — is all the proof we need.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
One Culture’s Ratatouille Is Another’s Fill-in-the-Blank By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
October 5, 2010
One Culture’s Ratatouille Is Another’s Fill-in-the-Blank By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
WHEN Julia Child introduced it to Americans back in the 1960s, ratatouille was pretty exotic. But it caught on so completely that, for many people, that’s where the eggplant repertory begins and ends.
It was true in my kitchen for a long time, too. But when I began exploring the cuisines of the Mediterranean, I discovered that beloved ratatouillelike dishes exist just about everywhere you go. It’s no coincidence: Mediterranean cuisines have long had an affinity for eggplant, and eggplant has an affinity for olive oil, garlic and onions. When the new foods that came from the Americas — peppers, summer squash and especially tomatoes — took hold in the region, a number of closely related dishes were born, including what we call ratatouille — and a man from La Mancha calls pisto, an Ikarian Greek calls soufiko and a Turk calls turlu.
The dishes are all made with abundant olive oil and simmered slowly and for a long time, traditionally in earthenware pots. They are recognizably different, though, because of their seasonings. The beguiling sweet and savory flavors in a Turkish turlu — cinnamon and coriander, fenugreek, mint and dill — are nothing like the earthy flavors in the layered parsley and oregano-seasoned Greek briam, the paprika and vinegar-spiked juices of an Andalusian alboronía or the thyme-scented essence of a ratatouille.
The dishes vary in other ways. In Majorca and Greece, potatoes are added to the mix, which makes these medleys substantial enough to serve as a main dish. You find additional summer vegetables like green beans and okra in the stews from Greece and Turkey. One of my favorites, Catalan samfaina, is often used as a sauce for rabbit, chicken or salt cod. The ingredients are chopped very small, tossed with olive oil and cooked for hours until the mixture is so thick and caramelized that it’s described as a vegetable marmalade. Ligurian rattatuia, almost identical to its cousin and near namesake across the border, can also be classified as a sauce, to accompany gnocchi, pasta or fish.
When you get into the kitchen, know that no two Mediterranean cooks make the same dish exactly the same way. Some Turkish cooks use up to a cup of olive oil when they make turlu, while others rely on a mixture of water, olive oil and tomato purée as a cooking medium. One cook will layer the vegetables after first cooking them in olive oil, then finish the dish in the oven or on a slow burner while another will stir everything together. Majorcan cooks from one village or restaurant may use a pungent tomato sauce in their layered vegetable tumbet; others use simple chopped tomatoes.
In my kitchen, I stray from the authentic recipes. If one-quarter or one-third cup of olive oil will work for a recipe that calls for one-half to one cup, I’ll always go for the lesser amount. You can use more if you prefer the robust flavor, texture and heft of abundant olive oil.
And when I want to brown eggplant, I don’t fry it in batches in oil; I know how thirsty eggplant can be. Instead, I toss all of the eggplant with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and either roast it in the oven or brown it in a heavy nonstick pan.
Sometimes the stews can be watery at the end of cooking. One solution is to wait; time and again, I’ve left turlu or ratatouille overnight to find the juices reabsorbed, the stew thick and satiny the next day. You can also drain the cooked vegetables in a colander set over a bowl and reduce the juices to a thick, intensely flavored syrup that you then pour back over the stew.
These aren’t dishes that you throw together for supper after work. There are a lot of vegetables to chop (and in some cases to sauté) before the long simmer on the stove or in the oven. The simmering is pretty much unattended — an occasional stir if it’s not a layered dish — but you do have to be around.
Your efforts, however, can yield dinner for the rest of the week. The stews always taste better the next day (and the next — you can keep them in the refrigerator for about five days), as the flavors meld and ripen. They’re delicious hot or cold, and they freeze well. Leftovers become new meals as they’re mixed with scrambled or poached eggs (traditional especially in Spain and North Africa), spooned over a piece of fish or mounded onto a bruschetta.
This is time well spent.
Briam (Greek Baked Vegetables)
Time: 3 hours
1 medium eggplant
Salt
2 medium red onions
4 large garlic cloves
1 1/2 pounds potatoes, scrubbed, peeled if desired
1 1/2 pounds zucchini
2 large bell peppers, seeded
1/3 to 2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, to taste
2 pounds tomatoes, grated or peeled, seeded and chopped, or a 28-ounce can, drained
Black pepper
1/2 to 1 pound small okra, ends trimmed, optional
1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons chopped marjoram or oregano, or 2 teaspoons dried.
1. If the eggplant is thin and long, slice it about 1/4-inch thick. If it’s fat, halve it lengthwise, then slice in 1/4-inch-thick half-moons. Sprinkle with salt and put on paper towels for 30 minutes. Thinly slice the onions and mince the garlic. Cut the potatoes, zucchini and peppers into
1/4-inch-thick slices. Squeeze excess water from eggplant and pat dry.
2. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onions. Stir often, until tender and translucent, about 8 minutes. Add a generous pinch of salt and stir in the garlic. Cook for another minute or two, until fragrant.
3. Lightly oil a deep earthenware baking dish or a heavy Dutch oven. Put the tomatoes in a bowl and season liberally with salt and pepper. Stir in the remaining olive oil. Spread a thin layer of tomatoes in the baking dish or Dutch oven and top with one-third of the onions and garlic. Top with half the potato slices. Season with salt and pepper. Layer half the zucchini slices over the potatoes and season, then layer on half the eggplant, half the peppers and half the okra, if using. Sprinkle on half the parsley, about a third of the marjoram or oregano and some pepper. Layer another third of the onions over the vegetables and top with half of the remaining tomatoes. Sprinkle with half the remaining marjoram or oregano. Repeat the layers with the remaining vegetables, ending with a layer of onions topped with the remaining tomatoes. Sprinkle with the remaining herbs. Pour the juice from the tomatoes over the mixture.
4. Cover with foil or a lid and bake for
1 1/2 hours. Press the vegetables down into the juice and bake another 30 minutes, or until all the vegetables are thoroughly tender. Cool until warm before serving, or refrigerate overnight and reheat. If there is too much liquid, strain in a colander set over a bowl, reduce the juices over medium-high heat (place a flame tamer over the burner if you’re using the earthenware dish) and pour over the vegetables.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
October 5, 2010
Samfaina
Time: Up to 4 hours
1 medium eggplant, peeled and diced very small
Salt
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, very finely chopped
4 large garlic cloves, minced
2 red bell peppers (or one red and one green), peeled, seeded and sliced in thin strips or diced small
1 medium zucchini, peeled and finely chopped
Black pepper
1 pound ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped, or a 14-ounce can, drained.
1. Lay eggplant pieces on two layers of paper towels. Sprinkle with salt. After 30 minutes, squeeze out liquid and pat dry.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium heat in an earthenware casserole over a flame tamer or in a Dutch oven. Add onions and cook, stirring often, until they soften, about 8 minutes. Add a generous pinch of salt and the garlic, and stir for about 30 seconds. Add the remaining olive oil along with the eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini and black pepper. Turn the heat to low, stir, cover and cook until the vegetables are soft, about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Stir in the tomatoes, season with salt, cover again and cook until the mixture has reduced to a thick relish, 2 to 3 more hours, stirring occasionally. Taste and adjust seasonings. Before serving, allow to sit for at least 1 hour, or better yet refrigerate overnight.
Yield: 6 servings.
October 5, 2010
Turlu
Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup chopped mint
1/4 cup chopped dill
1 large eggplant, halved lengthwise and sliced about 1/3-inch thick
4 to 6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, to taste
Salt
2 medium onions, sliced
4 Italian frying peppers or 2 green bell peppers, cut in 2-inch slices
4 large garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, lightly crushed
2 medium zucchinis, sliced about 1/2-inch thick
Black pepper
1 pound tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped, or a 14-ounce can diced tomatoes, with juice
2 bay leaves
Chopped fresh herbs, for serving
Yogurt, for serving
OPTIONAL:
3 artichoke hearts, quartered
1/4 pound green beans, trimmed
1/4 pound small okra, ends trimmed.
1. Stir together the tomato paste, 1/2 cup water, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, fenugreek, paprika and half the parsley, mint and dill.
2. Heat a large, heavy nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Toss the eggplant slices with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and salt to taste. Lightly brown, 3 to 5 minutes, as much eggplant as will fit in one layer in the pan, then turn and lightly brown the other side. Remove to a Dutch oven or earthenware casserole. Repeat with the remaining eggplant. (Alternatively, toss the eggplant with the olive oil in the casserole, cover and roast at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, stirring halfway through.)
3. Turn the heat down slightly and add a tablespoon of oil and the onions to the skillet. Stir often until they soften, about 5 minutes, and add the peppers. Stir until the peppers and onions are limp, 5 to 8 minutes, and stir in a generous pinch of salt, half the garlic and the coriander seeds. Stir until the garlic is fragrant, about 1 minute. Transfer to the casserole with the eggplant. Add another tablespoon of oil and the zucchinis to the skillet. Cook, stirring or turning the zucchinis often until lightly colored on both sides and translucent, about 8 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, add the remaining garlic, stir for 30 seconds to a minute, and transfer to the casserole.
4. Add the tomato paste mixture to the skillet and bring to a boil. Deglaze the pan, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon. Pour into the casserole, and add the tomatoes, bay leaves, 2 more tablespoons olive oil, if desired, and the artichoke hearts, green beans and okra, if using. Season generously with salt and pepper and bring to a simmer (over a flame tamer if using earthenware). Cover, reduce the heat and cook gently, stirring from time to time, until the vegetables are very soft, about one hour. Stir in the remaining herbs and simmer for another 15 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings. If possible, refrigerate overnight before serving warm or at room temperature, with yogurt and chopped herbs.
Yield: 6 servings.
One Culture’s Ratatouille Is Another’s Fill-in-the-Blank By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
WHEN Julia Child introduced it to Americans back in the 1960s, ratatouille was pretty exotic. But it caught on so completely that, for many people, that’s where the eggplant repertory begins and ends.
It was true in my kitchen for a long time, too. But when I began exploring the cuisines of the Mediterranean, I discovered that beloved ratatouillelike dishes exist just about everywhere you go. It’s no coincidence: Mediterranean cuisines have long had an affinity for eggplant, and eggplant has an affinity for olive oil, garlic and onions. When the new foods that came from the Americas — peppers, summer squash and especially tomatoes — took hold in the region, a number of closely related dishes were born, including what we call ratatouille — and a man from La Mancha calls pisto, an Ikarian Greek calls soufiko and a Turk calls turlu.
The dishes are all made with abundant olive oil and simmered slowly and for a long time, traditionally in earthenware pots. They are recognizably different, though, because of their seasonings. The beguiling sweet and savory flavors in a Turkish turlu — cinnamon and coriander, fenugreek, mint and dill — are nothing like the earthy flavors in the layered parsley and oregano-seasoned Greek briam, the paprika and vinegar-spiked juices of an Andalusian alboronía or the thyme-scented essence of a ratatouille.
The dishes vary in other ways. In Majorca and Greece, potatoes are added to the mix, which makes these medleys substantial enough to serve as a main dish. You find additional summer vegetables like green beans and okra in the stews from Greece and Turkey. One of my favorites, Catalan samfaina, is often used as a sauce for rabbit, chicken or salt cod. The ingredients are chopped very small, tossed with olive oil and cooked for hours until the mixture is so thick and caramelized that it’s described as a vegetable marmalade. Ligurian rattatuia, almost identical to its cousin and near namesake across the border, can also be classified as a sauce, to accompany gnocchi, pasta or fish.
When you get into the kitchen, know that no two Mediterranean cooks make the same dish exactly the same way. Some Turkish cooks use up to a cup of olive oil when they make turlu, while others rely on a mixture of water, olive oil and tomato purée as a cooking medium. One cook will layer the vegetables after first cooking them in olive oil, then finish the dish in the oven or on a slow burner while another will stir everything together. Majorcan cooks from one village or restaurant may use a pungent tomato sauce in their layered vegetable tumbet; others use simple chopped tomatoes.
In my kitchen, I stray from the authentic recipes. If one-quarter or one-third cup of olive oil will work for a recipe that calls for one-half to one cup, I’ll always go for the lesser amount. You can use more if you prefer the robust flavor, texture and heft of abundant olive oil.
And when I want to brown eggplant, I don’t fry it in batches in oil; I know how thirsty eggplant can be. Instead, I toss all of the eggplant with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and either roast it in the oven or brown it in a heavy nonstick pan.
Sometimes the stews can be watery at the end of cooking. One solution is to wait; time and again, I’ve left turlu or ratatouille overnight to find the juices reabsorbed, the stew thick and satiny the next day. You can also drain the cooked vegetables in a colander set over a bowl and reduce the juices to a thick, intensely flavored syrup that you then pour back over the stew.
These aren’t dishes that you throw together for supper after work. There are a lot of vegetables to chop (and in some cases to sauté) before the long simmer on the stove or in the oven. The simmering is pretty much unattended — an occasional stir if it’s not a layered dish — but you do have to be around.
Your efforts, however, can yield dinner for the rest of the week. The stews always taste better the next day (and the next — you can keep them in the refrigerator for about five days), as the flavors meld and ripen. They’re delicious hot or cold, and they freeze well. Leftovers become new meals as they’re mixed with scrambled or poached eggs (traditional especially in Spain and North Africa), spooned over a piece of fish or mounded onto a bruschetta.
This is time well spent.
Briam (Greek Baked Vegetables)
Time: 3 hours
1 medium eggplant
Salt
2 medium red onions
4 large garlic cloves
1 1/2 pounds potatoes, scrubbed, peeled if desired
1 1/2 pounds zucchini
2 large bell peppers, seeded
1/3 to 2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, to taste
2 pounds tomatoes, grated or peeled, seeded and chopped, or a 28-ounce can, drained
Black pepper
1/2 to 1 pound small okra, ends trimmed, optional
1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons chopped marjoram or oregano, or 2 teaspoons dried.
1. If the eggplant is thin and long, slice it about 1/4-inch thick. If it’s fat, halve it lengthwise, then slice in 1/4-inch-thick half-moons. Sprinkle with salt and put on paper towels for 30 minutes. Thinly slice the onions and mince the garlic. Cut the potatoes, zucchini and peppers into
1/4-inch-thick slices. Squeeze excess water from eggplant and pat dry.
2. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet and add the onions. Stir often, until tender and translucent, about 8 minutes. Add a generous pinch of salt and stir in the garlic. Cook for another minute or two, until fragrant.
3. Lightly oil a deep earthenware baking dish or a heavy Dutch oven. Put the tomatoes in a bowl and season liberally with salt and pepper. Stir in the remaining olive oil. Spread a thin layer of tomatoes in the baking dish or Dutch oven and top with one-third of the onions and garlic. Top with half the potato slices. Season with salt and pepper. Layer half the zucchini slices over the potatoes and season, then layer on half the eggplant, half the peppers and half the okra, if using. Sprinkle on half the parsley, about a third of the marjoram or oregano and some pepper. Layer another third of the onions over the vegetables and top with half of the remaining tomatoes. Sprinkle with half the remaining marjoram or oregano. Repeat the layers with the remaining vegetables, ending with a layer of onions topped with the remaining tomatoes. Sprinkle with the remaining herbs. Pour the juice from the tomatoes over the mixture.
4. Cover with foil or a lid and bake for
1 1/2 hours. Press the vegetables down into the juice and bake another 30 minutes, or until all the vegetables are thoroughly tender. Cool until warm before serving, or refrigerate overnight and reheat. If there is too much liquid, strain in a colander set over a bowl, reduce the juices over medium-high heat (place a flame tamer over the burner if you’re using the earthenware dish) and pour over the vegetables.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
October 5, 2010
Samfaina
Time: Up to 4 hours
1 medium eggplant, peeled and diced very small
Salt
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, very finely chopped
4 large garlic cloves, minced
2 red bell peppers (or one red and one green), peeled, seeded and sliced in thin strips or diced small
1 medium zucchini, peeled and finely chopped
Black pepper
1 pound ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped, or a 14-ounce can, drained.
1. Lay eggplant pieces on two layers of paper towels. Sprinkle with salt. After 30 minutes, squeeze out liquid and pat dry.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium heat in an earthenware casserole over a flame tamer or in a Dutch oven. Add onions and cook, stirring often, until they soften, about 8 minutes. Add a generous pinch of salt and the garlic, and stir for about 30 seconds. Add the remaining olive oil along with the eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini and black pepper. Turn the heat to low, stir, cover and cook until the vegetables are soft, about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Stir in the tomatoes, season with salt, cover again and cook until the mixture has reduced to a thick relish, 2 to 3 more hours, stirring occasionally. Taste and adjust seasonings. Before serving, allow to sit for at least 1 hour, or better yet refrigerate overnight.
Yield: 6 servings.
October 5, 2010
Turlu
Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup chopped mint
1/4 cup chopped dill
1 large eggplant, halved lengthwise and sliced about 1/3-inch thick
4 to 6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, to taste
Salt
2 medium onions, sliced
4 Italian frying peppers or 2 green bell peppers, cut in 2-inch slices
4 large garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, lightly crushed
2 medium zucchinis, sliced about 1/2-inch thick
Black pepper
1 pound tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped, or a 14-ounce can diced tomatoes, with juice
2 bay leaves
Chopped fresh herbs, for serving
Yogurt, for serving
OPTIONAL:
3 artichoke hearts, quartered
1/4 pound green beans, trimmed
1/4 pound small okra, ends trimmed.
1. Stir together the tomato paste, 1/2 cup water, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, fenugreek, paprika and half the parsley, mint and dill.
2. Heat a large, heavy nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Toss the eggplant slices with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and salt to taste. Lightly brown, 3 to 5 minutes, as much eggplant as will fit in one layer in the pan, then turn and lightly brown the other side. Remove to a Dutch oven or earthenware casserole. Repeat with the remaining eggplant. (Alternatively, toss the eggplant with the olive oil in the casserole, cover and roast at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, stirring halfway through.)
3. Turn the heat down slightly and add a tablespoon of oil and the onions to the skillet. Stir often until they soften, about 5 minutes, and add the peppers. Stir until the peppers and onions are limp, 5 to 8 minutes, and stir in a generous pinch of salt, half the garlic and the coriander seeds. Stir until the garlic is fragrant, about 1 minute. Transfer to the casserole with the eggplant. Add another tablespoon of oil and the zucchinis to the skillet. Cook, stirring or turning the zucchinis often until lightly colored on both sides and translucent, about 8 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, add the remaining garlic, stir for 30 seconds to a minute, and transfer to the casserole.
4. Add the tomato paste mixture to the skillet and bring to a boil. Deglaze the pan, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon. Pour into the casserole, and add the tomatoes, bay leaves, 2 more tablespoons olive oil, if desired, and the artichoke hearts, green beans and okra, if using. Season generously with salt and pepper and bring to a simmer (over a flame tamer if using earthenware). Cover, reduce the heat and cook gently, stirring from time to time, until the vegetables are very soft, about one hour. Stir in the remaining herbs and simmer for another 15 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings. If possible, refrigerate overnight before serving warm or at room temperature, with yogurt and chopped herbs.
Yield: 6 servings.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Health Care’s Lost Weekend By PETER ORSZAG
October 3, 2010
Health Care’s Lost Weekend By PETER ORSZAG
Doctors, like most people, don’t love to work weekends, and they probably don’t enjoy being evaluated against their peers. But their industry can no longer afford to protect them from the inevitable. Imagine a drugstore open only five days a week, or a television network that didn’t measure its ratings. Improving the quality of health care and reducing its cost will require that doctors make many changes — but working weekends and consenting to quality management are two clear ones.
That’s why an effort at New York University Langone Medical Center to institute both of these changes is so important. If it succeeds, it will help point the way to the health care system of the future.
First, weekends. It’s never good to be hospitalized, but you really don’t want to be hospitalized on a weekend. There are fewer doctors around, and people admitted on Saturdays and Sundays fare relatively poorly.
One study in 2007 found, for example, that for every 1,000 patients suffering heart attacks who were admitted to a hospital on a weekend, there were 9 to 10 more deaths than in a comparable group of patients admitted on a weekday. The weekend patients were less likely to quickly receive the invasive procedures they needed — like coronary artery bypass grafts or cardiac catheterization.
It’s not just a safety issue but, for less life-threatening medical problems, also a matter of convenience. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to schedule your elective surgery on a Saturday if you wanted? Most hospitals don’t offer that option.
And then there are the economics of a $750 billion-a-year industry letting its capacity sit idle a quarter or more of the time. If hospitals were in constant use, costs would fall as expensive assets like operating rooms and imaging equipment were used more fully. And if the workflow at existing hospitals was spread more evenly over the entire week, patients could more often enjoy the privacy of single-bed rooms.
N.Y.U.’s first step toward seven-day service has been to keep certain functions going all weekend, like radiology study interpretation, magnetic resonance imaging and elective cardiac surgery. The cancer center also now provides some treatments on weekends. And some procedures, like elective Caesarean sections, are offered on Saturdays. So far, the doctors involved are on board.
A second innovation is quality assessment and management. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — or improve it. That’s why the federal government is now making key investments to encourage hospitals, clinics and doctors to adopt health information technology and report statistics on quality of care.
Robert Grossman, the dean and chief executive of N.Y.U. Langone, has gathered data from around the medical center into a “management dashboard.” This allows him to monitor not only financial information like operating margins and cash balances but also detailed quality data on individual doctors like 30-day hospital readmission rates and the number of infections associated with invasive procedures.
The patterns he has been able to discern this way have been eye-opening. The dashboard data revealed, for instance, that on any given day a disproportionately small number of eligible patients were discharged before noon, so that many people were kept in the hospital longer than necessary. Further analysis revealed a key reason: several routine procedures that some patients need before leaving, like the insertion of central catheters, were not performed in the morning. The medical center has since begun to offer the procedures earlier, and the percentage of discharges before noon has increased significantly.
So far, so good. But will these initiatives become a permanent part of the culture? And if the strategies do survive, how much difference can they make in the cost and quality of care?
N.Y.U. has historically not stacked up that well in cost comparisons with other hospitals. The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which tracks data on regional variations in Medicare costs, suggested that from 2001 to 2005 a Medicare beneficiary’s care at N.Y.U. during the final two years of his life cost taxpayers more than $100,000 — roughly twice the cost at America’s most efficient hospitals.
The Dartmouth data also indicate that the N.Y.U. patients received no clear benefit for the higher cost. They saw, on average, more than 14 different doctors, compared with fewer than 10 for patients at the most efficient hospitals. But the extra visits did not seem to produce better outcomes. In fact, seeing more doctors may have caused harm, as patients ran the risk of side effects and complications from additional tests, treatments and medicines.
N.Y.U. will know that its innovations in weekend operations and doctor assessment are working if, in time, they help improve the cost-effectiveness of care. If they do, it’s important that any practices found effective be adopted widely. Better ways of spreading such innovations will be the focus of my next column. In health care, experimentation is the mother of improvement.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010 and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
Health Care’s Lost Weekend By PETER ORSZAG
Doctors, like most people, don’t love to work weekends, and they probably don’t enjoy being evaluated against their peers. But their industry can no longer afford to protect them from the inevitable. Imagine a drugstore open only five days a week, or a television network that didn’t measure its ratings. Improving the quality of health care and reducing its cost will require that doctors make many changes — but working weekends and consenting to quality management are two clear ones.
That’s why an effort at New York University Langone Medical Center to institute both of these changes is so important. If it succeeds, it will help point the way to the health care system of the future.
First, weekends. It’s never good to be hospitalized, but you really don’t want to be hospitalized on a weekend. There are fewer doctors around, and people admitted on Saturdays and Sundays fare relatively poorly.
One study in 2007 found, for example, that for every 1,000 patients suffering heart attacks who were admitted to a hospital on a weekend, there were 9 to 10 more deaths than in a comparable group of patients admitted on a weekday. The weekend patients were less likely to quickly receive the invasive procedures they needed — like coronary artery bypass grafts or cardiac catheterization.
It’s not just a safety issue but, for less life-threatening medical problems, also a matter of convenience. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to schedule your elective surgery on a Saturday if you wanted? Most hospitals don’t offer that option.
And then there are the economics of a $750 billion-a-year industry letting its capacity sit idle a quarter or more of the time. If hospitals were in constant use, costs would fall as expensive assets like operating rooms and imaging equipment were used more fully. And if the workflow at existing hospitals was spread more evenly over the entire week, patients could more often enjoy the privacy of single-bed rooms.
N.Y.U.’s first step toward seven-day service has been to keep certain functions going all weekend, like radiology study interpretation, magnetic resonance imaging and elective cardiac surgery. The cancer center also now provides some treatments on weekends. And some procedures, like elective Caesarean sections, are offered on Saturdays. So far, the doctors involved are on board.
A second innovation is quality assessment and management. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — or improve it. That’s why the federal government is now making key investments to encourage hospitals, clinics and doctors to adopt health information technology and report statistics on quality of care.
Robert Grossman, the dean and chief executive of N.Y.U. Langone, has gathered data from around the medical center into a “management dashboard.” This allows him to monitor not only financial information like operating margins and cash balances but also detailed quality data on individual doctors like 30-day hospital readmission rates and the number of infections associated with invasive procedures.
The patterns he has been able to discern this way have been eye-opening. The dashboard data revealed, for instance, that on any given day a disproportionately small number of eligible patients were discharged before noon, so that many people were kept in the hospital longer than necessary. Further analysis revealed a key reason: several routine procedures that some patients need before leaving, like the insertion of central catheters, were not performed in the morning. The medical center has since begun to offer the procedures earlier, and the percentage of discharges before noon has increased significantly.
So far, so good. But will these initiatives become a permanent part of the culture? And if the strategies do survive, how much difference can they make in the cost and quality of care?
N.Y.U. has historically not stacked up that well in cost comparisons with other hospitals. The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which tracks data on regional variations in Medicare costs, suggested that from 2001 to 2005 a Medicare beneficiary’s care at N.Y.U. during the final two years of his life cost taxpayers more than $100,000 — roughly twice the cost at America’s most efficient hospitals.
The Dartmouth data also indicate that the N.Y.U. patients received no clear benefit for the higher cost. They saw, on average, more than 14 different doctors, compared with fewer than 10 for patients at the most efficient hospitals. But the extra visits did not seem to produce better outcomes. In fact, seeing more doctors may have caused harm, as patients ran the risk of side effects and complications from additional tests, treatments and medicines.
N.Y.U. will know that its innovations in weekend operations and doctor assessment are working if, in time, they help improve the cost-effectiveness of care. If they do, it’s important that any practices found effective be adopted widely. Better ways of spreading such innovations will be the focus of my next column. In health care, experimentation is the mother of improvement.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010 and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
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