Here's my short take, following on Barbara's post Wednesday, on economists:

1. The single most valuable and durable lesson of economics is that incentives matter. Monetary incentives don't always matter more than other motivations, and sometimes people's behavior regarding money is a little nutty. But as an organizing principle for a social science, incentives matter is pretty good.

2. Economists respond to incentives, too. Real and potential financial awards affect what they choose to study, how they go about it, and what conclusions they draw. This doesn't mean all economists are evil sellouts. It means they're human beings.

3. For people who purport to believe that incentives matter, economists can be strangely touchy when anyone brings up point No. 2.

Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker has some advice for financial regulators writing rules to define new limits on banks' ability to trade for their own accounts: be as vague as possible. At least that's the message in this WSJ piece by Deborah Solomon (for which, to be upfront, Volcker declined to comment).

At first pass, that sounds a little nuts. If Dodd-Frank means to clamp down on proprietary trading at institutions that receive federal guarantees (like deposit insurance), then why wouldn't regulations spell out, as specifically as possible, what those banks aren't allowed to do? Solomon explains:

Mr. Volcker's concern, according to several people familiar with the matter, is that narrow or prescriptive rules would invite gamesmanship on the part of banks and could allow firms to evade the rule's intent. Already, some banks and their lobbyists are seeking to sway regulators and encourage them to narrowly define certain types of trading activities, according to government officials.

By being less specific, the logic goes, regulators will better be able to adapt to changing circumstances—and to banks' tactics. Solomon compares this approach to the one the government already employs in the realm of money laundering. Another good example is insider trading law. It's never been particularly clear what is, and what isn't, insider trading. This can lead to bumpy prosecutions, but it does serve the important purpose of preserving flexibility. Leaving a fair amount of case-by-case judgment in the system lets regulators tap what Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge," or the thing Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was getting at when he wrote of pornography: ""I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

In this Bloomberg column, Michael Lewis gives us reason to think this might be a good way to go. He writes:

The banks have no intention of ceasing their prop trading. They are merely disguising the activity, by giving it some other name. A former employee of JPMorgan, for instance, wrote to say that the unit he recently worked for, called the Chief Investment Office, advertised itself largely as a hedging operation but was in fact making massive bets with JPMorgan’s capital. And it would of course continue to do so. JPMorgan didn’t respond to a request for comment.

One conclusion: to have the best chance of ferreting out prop trading, regulators are going to need a lot of leeway in deciding what they go after.

Interestingly, though, Lewis comes to a different conclusion. He doesn't opt for vague rules, but rather very strict, draconian ones that would change the face of finance more dramatically than most people probably imagine Dodd-Frank doing:

There’s a simple, straightforward way… to construe the Dodd-Frank language, and it would reform Wall Street in a single stroke: to ban any sort of position-taking at the giant publicly owned banks… If that means that Goldman Sachs is no longer allowed to make markets in corporate bonds, so be it. You can be Charles Schwab, and advise investors; or you can be Citadel, and run trading positions. But if you are Citadel you will be privately owned. And if you blow up your firm, you will blow up yourself in the bargain.

If you have little faith in regulators' ability to keep up with Wall Street innovation* behavior and to use flexible rules to their fullest, then maybe Lewis's approach is the smarter one. I'm sympathetic to that argument; I've voted to chop up overly large and entwined financial institutions before. But I don't know if at this point that path is politically feasible. Dodd-Frank could have broken up the banks, but it didn't. And I'm not sure that since the bill passed, the political clout of the be-tough-on-Wall-Street camp has grown.

Yet that camp is, admirably, still fighting. A group of senators, led by Carl Levin, recently wrote a letter to the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, urging regulators to really crack down and not let Dodd-Frank get watered down in the rule-making. It's a good thing for people to hear, but so is Volcker's message—that often the toughest rules are the ones that specifically prohibit the least.

*I regret having used this word, so I have gone back and changed it.

The comments to my post here last week on Benoit Mandelbrot were for the most part significantly more sophisticated than the post itself. So, since my days at Chez Felix are numbered, I thought I should avail myself of the brilliance of his commenters while I still can to ask a very basic question: Is the practice of quantitative financial risk management one big con job?

That's one of the key arguments in Amar Bhidé's new book A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy. He says in the book that the approach to risk management that grew out of Harry Markowitz's portfolio theory, Bill Sharpe's Capital Asset Pricing Model (yes, I know it wasn't just his, but he was the first to publish) and Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton's option-pricing model—all of which netted Nobels for their (still-living) creators—is fatally flawed because it depends on predictions about future volatility, and no one knows how to predict future volatility.

The funny thing is that the Markowitz/Sharpe/Black/Scholes/Merton approach arose in part out of the realization that it's really hard to predict the trajectory of an individual stock—and that even if you did figure it out, others would start to imitate you, eventually affecting the the trajectory of the stock and rendering your predictions invalid. A stock's future volatility might not be easy to predict, they reasoned, but it was much easier to predict than the stock's future return. Bhidé turns that argument on its head:

Forming reasonable, subjective estimates of a stock's return can be a challenging exercise. Predicting whether and by how much IBM's price will appreciate requires researching and thinking about several factors such as its project plans, relationships with customers, existing and potential competitors, exchange rates, and the strength of the economy. With volatility, because there is no sensible way to think about what it should be, there is almost no choice but to take the "easy way out": Calculate historical volatility. Shade to taste.

Now the objection one often hears from those in the financial world is that practitioners have moved on from the simple volatility models of the 1960s and 1970s. And that they have. But the models they use still assume that they know how to predict volatility, right? Is there evidence that anybody actually knows how to do that—not just short-term but through an entire market cycle? Or is everybody just shading to taste?

Another issue with quantitative risk models that even many of their creators acknowledge is that when a particular method of modeling risk becomes popular enough, it begins to affect market behavior and creates new risks that the model cannot see. I think this may have been a major contributing factor to every financial panic of the past 25 years, starting with the 1987 crash. (Well, except maybe the dot-com bubble and crash. I can't really blame that on risk models. Although it is perhaps telling that the dot-com collapse wasn't really a panic.)

You can't prove the cause-and-effect, but it is clear that financial risk models have repeatedly broken down after years of seeming success. Which shouldn't be all that surprising: It is in the nature of financial markets that every good (that is, money-making) idea eventually becomes a bad one. The difference between a momentum-investing formula and a risk-management model is that a risk-management model is supposed to, um, manage risk. And so I guess the question remains: Are all financial risk-management models ultimately a joke?

I really don't know the answer. That's why I'm asking you folks.

New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson is Terry Gross's guest on Fresh Air today. I caught about ten minutes of the conversation while out driving this afternoon, and it reminded me of why I'm not a big fan of Gretchen Morgenson's work. She's just not very interesting to listen to, or read: Too flat, too broad-brush, too predictable, lacking in cleverness and nuance and curiosity. That's why I'd take a Joe Nocera column (or a Felix Salmon blog post) any day over a Morgenson offering.

But then talk on Fresh Air turned to the ongoing brouhaha over foreclosures of homes where it's not clear that the foreclosing bank can actually prove that it owns the mortgage. Morgenson pointed out that this is a problem she's been writing about since 2007. Has she been writing about it well? Not necessarily. Morgenson's columns and articles on this and other topics have been a favorite Felix target through the years. And remember how Tanta, Calculated Risk's late, lamented mortgage-banker co-blogger, used to get absolutely apoplectic over Morgenson's real-estate-related work. The anger comes about because Morgenson so often gets basic facts wrong, seemingly misunderstands the businesses she covers, offers assertions that she fails to back up with evidence—that kind of stuff.

Which makes it only more aggravating when she so often eventually turns out to have been far closer to right than her critics were. For example, Morgenson claimed in March 2007 that the mortgage market was headed for a big crisis. What a wild assertion! As one Felix Salmon wrote immediately afterward: "Morgenson adduces no evidence whatsoever that any crisis is looming at all." (I figure it's okay to pick on Felix for this because I came very close to writing exactly the same thing at the time but was just too lazy to actually do it.)

If this had just happened once, okay. But Morgenson was also among the first and most persistent on the case of the Wall Street scandals of the early 2000s. She also really spotlighted aspects of the financial crisis of the past few years that the rest of the media only got around to months later. Forget Nouriel Roubini or Bob Shiller; Gretchen Morgenson may be the most reliable early warning device around.

How does she accomplish this? I think it's partly that the same bullheadedness and simplistic approach that drives readers like me and Felix crazy actually enables Morgenson to zero in on targets that those more interested in nuance totally miss. It's also that Morgenson suffuses her work with a sort of high moral dudgeon—and disgust for the evil ways of Wall Street—that more "sophisticated" journalists won't allow themselves. The results speak for themselves: Sometimes battering rams work better than X-Acto knives. And I say that as someone who vastly prefers X-Acto knives (stylistically speaking).

Felix Salmon has written extensively about the ongoing mortgage crisis, from the problems with mortgage bonds to the impact of foreclosures on bank stocks. Here is a new video in which Felix offers a potential solution, in the form of principal reduction.

Posted by James Ledbetter.

Over at the Curious Capitalist, my former colleague Steve Gandel asks me to react to this NYT article about how economists manage to disagree on such fundamental questions as whether the government should spend more or less money in response to economic malaise. I've been perplexed by this sort of thing before. In this post from August, I worried about the influence of ideology, and then decided that maybe the bigger take-away is that we should spend less time listening to economists, who, after all, represent just one possible lens onto the world of human behavior, decision-making and social dynamics:

[T]he economy is as much a product of sociology and policy as it is pure-form economics. Yet we'd not expect a sociologist or a political scientist to be able to write a computer model to accurately capture system-wide decision-making. The conclusion I've come to: while economists may have an important perspective on whether it's time for stimulus or austerity, maybe we should stop looking to them as if they are people who are in the ultimate position to know.

After rereading my post, I started to wonder how economics and its famously flawed assumption of rational behavior came to dominate the discussion. If confidence is such an important part of getting the economy growing again, then why aren't we taking advice from legions of social psychologists? If multinational corporations are back to profitability but still not adding jobs, then why aren't we asking the organizational behavior experts for their models?

In search of an answer, I took a cue from Steve: I called Justin. He had all sorts of interesting things to say, like how economists after WWI thought long and hard about why they hadn't played a larger role in the war effort (ostensibly hoping to do better next time), and how in the 1960s economists moved to get everyone working from the same basic model partly because a unified voice would be more influential. That is to say, economics won out over other social sciences, at least in part, because the discipline got its act together. (Justin may fill in more of the details later, but, if not, you've always got his history-packed book to turn to.)

So what do we do now that economics doesn't, in fact, have all the answers? Well, some of us try to shoe-horn other approaches, like psychology, back into the picture. And some of us denounce academic economics altogether. But most of us just listen to the debate among economists and don't quite understand how it can be happening because these are the guys and gals who are supposed to know this stuff. We have so completely absorbed the economic world view in so many aspects of our lives—public policy is determined by cost-benefit analysis, doing good in the world has become return on social investment, efficiency has morphed from the best way to reach a goal to the goal itself—that it doesn't even occur to us that there could be a more illustrative starting point for asking a question or framing a debate.

That's one idea, anyway. The economists disagree because they don't have the tools to see the big picture. And most of us can't see that.

I don't understand why everyone is so surprised to find out that large corporations are funneling massive amounts of money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Last week's NYT report has been making the Internet rounds, and while I appreciate the point that the Chamber is much more partisan than its non-profit status would suggest—70 of the Chamber's 93 midterm campaign ads either support Republican candidates or attack their opponents, despite the Chamber's promise to the Federal Election Commission that it only talks about issues—there's also a curious amount of wonderment at big-company donations. Yes, Wall Street firms sent millions of dollars to the Chamber when financial re-regulation was on the table, and the insurance industry got out its checkbook when it was time to talk healthcare reform. Why would anyone be surprised?

The more counterintuitive and telling story, which the Times only flicks at, is how unsatisfied certain businesspeople are growing with the U.S. Chamber. A couple of weeks ago, New Hampshire's Greater Hudson Chamber of Commerce decided to break ties with the national organization, because, in the words of the Nashua Telegraph:

[I]t felt recent political advertisements by the national chamber in support of specific parties and candidates were in “direct conflict” with the foundation of the Hudson chamber. Jerry Mayotte, executive vice president of the Greater Hudson Chamber of Commerce, said the Hudson group is a nonpartisan organization. He said he can’t remember the last time they chose not to renew their membership.

Last year, the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut did the same thing. Tony Sheridan, the group's president and CEO recently explained why:

"My issue with the national chamber is their willingness to take a very narrow slice of a piece of complicated legislation - and it's generally the most negative spin they're taking, like health care, when we all know that the health-care system is broken - and claim that the sky is falling, instead of using the money to educate people," Sheridan said.

During financial re-reform, a number of local and regional chambers, including the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce, tried to get out a similar message when it came to the proposed Consumer Finance Protection Agency. In one op-ed, the CEO of the U.S. Women's Chamber wrote:

The U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce disagrees with the U.S. Chamber’s big business scare tactics regarding the benefits of a strong, independent Consumer Federal Protection Agency.  The U.S. Chamber would have small businesses believe that protecting the rights of bank and non-bank lenders to deceive, manipulate and bet against small businesses is good for the economy and good for our future – all evidence to the contrary.

The big take-away: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not the same thing as American business. It's easy for the U.S. Chamber—in fact, it's easy for any well-funded lobbying group—to say that they speak for an entire population. That's probably never going to be true. And in the case of the U.S. Chamber, it seems to be less true with each passing day.

The Treasury Department reported on Oct. 15 that the deficit in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, was $1.294 trillion. That's less than FY 2009's $1.416 trillion, but it's still really really big. Why is it so big, though? Is it because of all that stimulus and bailout spending? Or is something else going on?

To find out, I created a fantasy world. I figured out how fast federal spending and revenue grew over the last business cycle, from 2000 through 2007, and calculated where we'd be today if those growth rates had continued through 2010. I was originally motivated to do this for a commentary that's supposed to air tomorrow night on Nightly Business Report. But I'm thinking there's not a huge overlap between Felix Salmon readers and Nightly Business Report viewers, so I'll go ahead and share what I learned.

In my no-financial-crisis, no-bailout, no-recession, no-stimulus scenario, spending kept growing at 6.22% a year, and revenue kept growing at 3.45%. You can see from the difference between the two numbers that this was an unsustainable path. But it clearly could have been sustained for a few more years.

Where would it have left us in fiscal 2010? With $2.843 trillion in federal revenue and $3.270 trillion in spending, leaving a deficit of $427 billion. The actual revenue and spending totals for 2010 were $2.162 trillion and $3.456 trillion. So spending was $186 billion higher than if we'd stuck to the trend, and revenue was $681 billion lower. In other words, the giant deficit is mainly the result of the collapse in tax receipts brought on by the recession, not the increase in spending. Nice to know, huh?

Everywhere you turn these days, some bigwig policymaker is talking about the importance of financial literacy education. Here's Ben Bernanke doing it. And there's Tim Geithner and Arne Duncan. Even the President. It's easy to understand why we feel like we need this, what with all the bad financial decision-making of recent years. The only problem is, there's a fair amount of evidence that a lot of what we do to teach better financial habits, like courses in high school, doesn't work. Some research has shown that financial education is more likely to stick if it's focused on one topic and comes right before a person makes a related decision—learning about mortgages as you're house shopping, say, or getting a lesson in compounding interest along with your credit card.

But maybe there's a simpler approach. Maybe we should ignore real-world complexity altogether and just teach people financial rules of thumb.

A presentation at that microfinance conference last week got me going on this train of thought (although I'm by no means the first to ride it). In this experiment, researchers taught one group of small-time entrepreneurs in the Dominican Republic formal accounting, including double-entry bookkeeping, cash and working capital management and investment decision-making. Another group was taught simple rules of thumb, like "keep personal and business accounts separate" and "write everything down." The results:

People who were offered rule-of-thumb based training showed significant improvements in the way they managed their finances as a result of the training relative to the control group which was not offered training. They were more likely to keep accounting records, calculate monthly revenues and separate their books for the business and the home. Improvements along these dimensions are on the order of a 10% increase. In contrast, we did not find any significant changes for the people in the basic accounting training. It appears that in this context, the rule-of-thumb training is more likely to be implemented by the clients than the basic accounting training.

When I caught up with Greg Fischer to ask what the U.S. consumer-class take-away might be, he was appropriately modest about his findings and hesitated to draw any universal conclusions. I lack such compunction, so let me say that I think this result contains a very important piece of wisdom. People live complicated, busy lives and the learning they are most likely to put to use is that which is simple to remember and implement. In Fischer's study, some microentrepreneurs received follow-up training at their place of business: an educator stopped by to reinforce concepts and to answer questions. Once this happened, the group that received the formal accounting training applied what they had learned. But unless we want to set up a system in which your high school consumer finance teacher pops back up just in time for your first mortgage, rules of thumb might be the way to go.

And, actually, we already have many them. We just need to dig them out of the dustbin we tossed them into during the free-money euphoria. For example, don't spend more than 2 1/2 times your annual salary on a house. And don't take out more student loan debt than you expect to earn in your first year on the job (assuming you have the option). As Jack Bogle once said: "Your bond position should equal your age. I won't tell you this is the best investment advice you'll ever get, but the number of pieces of advice that are worse is infinite." It's not terribly complicated to figure out what we need to teach. We just need to jump to it.

People often talk (and write) about how commercialization is changing the nature of microfinance. Yet increasingly it looks like an even more fundamental shift is afoot. Microfinanciers are finally figuring out what their customers want.

The well-worn story of microfinance goes something like this. Lend a poor person in a poor country a little bit of money, and that person can invest in a business—by buying a sewing machine, say, or another cow. Over the long run, that person pulls himself out of poverty with the income generated by his endeavor.

One reason this story involves a loan is because in most countries it's a whole lot easier to lend money than it is to take deposits. (The latter requires a banking license, which the former doesn't.) But there's another reason loan-making is at the center of traditional microfinance: the people who started this work more than 30 years ago assumed that since mainstream banks didn't lend to poor people, there was a massive, untapped demand for borrowing.

The thing is, no one ever really asked poor people if business loans were the most important financial product they were missing. That's now starting to change, thanks in part to a recent wave of academic research. As it turns out, poor people lead complicated financial lives and they need money for all sorts of things.

Thursday I was at this conference, where Dean Karlan of Yale talked about research he's been doing with Jonathan Zinman of Dartmouth. In interviews with microfinance recipients in the Philippines, the pair discovered that some 46% of borrowers used a decent chunk of their business loan to pay down other debt and about 28% spent part of the money on a big household purchase—even though fewer than 4% of people in either category ever admitted this to their bank. (Disclosure: I was at this conference because I am now doing work for the Financial Access Initiative, which co-sponsored the event.)

This sort of finding—which quantifies what many practitioners have long suspected was the case—is having an impact on how microfinanciers go about their business. "We're an industry built on assumptions, and we've gotten to a point where we have to test those," said Carlos Danel, a co-founder of the Mexican microfinance behemoth Banco Compartamos. "Research is showing us that we actually don't know a lot about the customers we serve." That's why Compartamos is conducting a 4-year study with Karlan and other researchers to find out how customers use microfinance products, and how those products do—or don't—change their lives.

As Danel put it, microfinance is an industry that was born out of supply—one that came from people thinking about what organizations were capable of doing. Now, he said, the challenge is to figure out what poor people around the world actually need.

Tim Geithner has proposed to his fellow G-20 finance ministers that trade surpluses and deficits be capped at 4% of GDP. The idea is already running into criticism from countries that run big trade surpluses. German Economy Minister Rainer Brüderle warned against "planned economy thinking," according to Reuters, and  "makroökonomische Feinsteuerung und quantitative Zielsetzungen" (macro-economic fine-tuning and quantitative target-setting), according to Reuters Deutschland. "We doubt whether rigid numerical targets should be set," said Japanese Finance Minister Yoshiko Noda.

The sad irony in all this is that some other guy proposed limits on trade surpluses and deficits 66 years ago, and did it in a far more elegant and thought-through manner than Geithner has. And it was the U.S. that torpedoed the plan. To borrow from George Monbiot's lucid summary of John Maynard Keynes' proposal:

He proposed a global bank, which he called the International Clearing Union. The bank would issue its own currency - the bancor - which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange. The bancor would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus.

Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union, equivalent to half the average value of its trade over a five-year period. To make the system work, the members of the union would need a powerful incentive to clear their bancor accounts by the end of the year: to end up with neither a trade deficit nor a trade surplus. But what would the incentive be?

Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit (equating to more than half of its bancor overdraft allowance) would be charged interest on its account. It would also be obliged to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. But - and this was the key to his system - he insisted that the nations with a trade surplus would be subject to similar pressures. Any country with a bancor credit balance that was more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest, at a rate of 10%. It would also be obliged to increase the value of its currency and to permit the export of capital. If, by the end of the year, its credit balance exceeded the total value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated. The nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it. In doing so, they would automatically clear other nations' deficits.

Brilliant, right? Not impossible-to-enforce targets, but a system with incentives built in that would have made big trade imbalances unattractive to both sides. There's that little matter of creating a new global currency and getting everybody to accept it, but this was at the tail end of World War II. If the U.S. had decreed that the International Clearing Union was a go, the International Clearing Union would have been a go. But at the time, the U.S. ran big trade surpluses and assumed it would do so forever. Its delegates at the Bretton Woods meetings were vehemently opposed. So the idea went nowhere. Now Tim Geithner is pushing for clunky trade-surplus caps. It might be better if he just asked for a do-over.

I first met my friend David Neubert in the context of a website he co-founded, called The Panelist, devoted to “responsible and ethical investment advice”. Dave’s moved on to other things now, but he still has opinions on the ethical-investment front. If you refuse to buy stock in unethical companies, he says, you lose diversification. Instead, Neubert looks to change the behavior of companies he’s invested in:

I exercise my ethics through shareholder activism–by supporting, or rejecting, shareholder resolutions with my vote. I like to think of this practice as socially conscious investing…

You have more power than you might think. For example, I own 2,600 shares of Valero Energy, which means my vote amounts to 1/220,000 of the company. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot, but compare that to my vote for president of the United States (1/130,000,000 voters); or even mayor of New York (1/4,000,000 voters).

And believe it or not, your shareholder vote may very well make a greater difference than the votes of institutional investors. Most company boards realize that individual investors tend to be more enduring in their views and a whole lot more loyal, making them more desirable shareholders than fickle institutions. If an individual voices an opinion at a shareholder meeting or writes a letter, corporations recognize that there are likely thousands of others just like them and they listen.

I don’t buy it. For one thing, using the vote as a comparison is setting the bar unbelievably low, since voting is statistically certain to make no difference at all:

Even for the most passionate partisan, it’s hard to argue that voting is a good use of your time. Instead of waiting in line to vote, you could wait in line to buy a lottery ticket, hoping to win $100 million and use it to advance your causes—and all with an almost indescribably greater chance of success than you’d have in the voting booth.

And what of Valero, a dirty oil refiner? Is it likely to listen to small shareholders like Neubert? Well, Valero has spent $4 million of its shareholders’ money in support of Proposition 23, which would void California’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act. Shareholders like the Unitarian Universalist Association are opposed to that spending, for good reason: the act is a good one and Valero is essentially lobbying for the right to profit from pollution, even after a law banning such activity has been passed.

Here’s how the LA Times reported the shareholder move:

The challenge was dismissed by officials at Valero, which has contributed $4 million to the Proposition 23 campaign. Like the other resolutions, the one offered to Valero’s board comes from a relatively minor shareholder: the Unitarian church…

The filers are a “stockholder activist group,” said Valero spokesman Bill Day in describing the Unitarian Universalist Assn. of Congregations…

The resolutions’ backers acknowledge that they are unlikely to have an immediate effect on campaign spending by oil companies.

The Unitarians have about $15,000 of stock in Valero; Neubert has about $46,000. Clearly, these sums are dwarfed by Valero’s donations to the Prop 23 campaign and equally clearly Valero has made its mind up that theses people are gadflies who should probably just be ignored.

The fact is that Neubert and people like him are not going to change Valero’s behavior. And the diversification benefits of owning Valero stock have never been lower, in these days of ultra-high stock market correlation.

If you consider yourself an ethical investor and you care about global warming, then it’s really hard to justify an investment in Valero, a company which is spending millions of dollars trying to repeal one of the few U.S. laws which takes global warming seriously. Certainly the diversification benefits of owning Valero stock aren’t in themselves sufficient to offset the fact that you, as a shareholder, are ultimately responsible for Valero’s expenditures on the Prop 23 campaign.

Ethical investing can and must go further than the simple obligation which all shareholders have to take their ownership stakes seriously and to vote on shareholder resolutions. It’s all well and good being conscious of the fact that your company is behaving unethically — but once you come to that conclusion, the ethical thing to do is to sell those shares. Otherwise, you bear 1/220,000 of the responsibility for precisely that unethical behavior. Dave Neubert has, in effect, spent $18 in support of Prop 23. What has he done to offset that expenditure?

I'm going to a book party at a bar in Newton, Mass. tonight (yes, life here in metropolitan Boston is unspeakably glamorous) for Sam Howe Verhovek's Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World. It's a great little book—and I don't think the fact that Verhovek's brother is a friend of one my wife's best friends from high school (the reason I was invited to the book party) invalidates my positive opinion. I brought a galley along on a flight West a couple months ago and, despite being alarmed by Verhovek's accounts of exploding jet airplanes, couldn't stop reading. I had finished it by the time I landed in Reno.

The reason I'm bringing all this up (other than to impress you with the facts that I know Sam Howe Verhovek's brother and have been to the Biggest Little City in the World), is because there's a really fascinating tale in the book involving tax incentives. During the Korean War, Congress enacted an excess profits tax meant to keep military contractors from, well, profiteering. In its infinite wisdom, Congress defined excess profits as anything above what a company had been making during the peacetime years 1946-1949.

Boeing was mostly a military contractor in those days (Lockheed and Douglas dominated the passenger-plane business), and had made hardly any money at all from 1946 to 1949. So pretty much any profits it earned during the Korean conflict were by definition excess, and its effective tax rate in 1951 was going to be 82%. This was unfair and anti-business. If similar legislation were enacted today, you could expect U.S. Chamber of Commerce members to march on Washington and overturn cars on the streets.

It being 1951, Boeing instead sucked it up and let the tax incentives inadvertently devised by Congress steer it toward a bold and fateful decision. CEO Bill Allen decided, and was able to persuade Boeing's board, to plow all those profits and more into developing what became the 707, a company-defining and world-changing innovation. Writes Verhovek:

Yes, it was a huge gamble, but for every dollar of the dice roll, only eighteen cents of it would have been Boeing's to keep anyway. For Douglas and Lockheed, both in a much lower tax bracket, that was not so easy a call.

So that's it! High tax rates—confiscatory tax rates—spur innovation! Well, at least once in a blue moon they do. Which is an indication that there might be some important stuff missing from the classic economists' view of taxation, as summed up by Greg Mankiw a few weeks ago:

Economists understand that, absent externalities, the undistorted situation reflects an optimal allocation of resources. It is crucial to know how far we are from that optimum.  To be somewhat nerdy about it, the deadweight loss of a tax rises with the square of the tax rate.

Somehow I don't think that formula held true in Boeing's case.

Have you ever wondered how big a stock needs to be before it can be efficiently arbitraged? The Fundometry blog has done an investigation along those lines and the answer would seem to be somewhere around $400 million in market cap.

Here’s the chart:

What you’re looking at here is four different ETFs, split into quintiles according to the size of their components. So the bar on the far left is the smallest 20% of stocks in the IWC microcap ETF, while the bar on the far right is the largest 20% of stocks in the S&P 500.

The y-axis, meanwhile, measures correlation: the degree to which each of the stocks in that quintile is correlated with the index as a whole.

Clearly correlation is very high these days across the market and in general stocks seem to have roughly a 70% correlation with their index. But the smallest stocks — the bottom quintile of the small caps and most of the microcaps — have lower correlation, probably because they’re so small and illiquid that it’s hard to arbitrage them against their respective index.

Microcap stocks, in this chart, are stocks with a capitalization between $50 million and $500 million, while small caps are capitalized between $300 million and $1 billion. So judging by the chart alone, I’m thinking that about $400 million is the point at which you can expect your stock to be arbitraged as a matter of course against its index.

This issue is related to Harold Bradley’s theories about manipulation of the relationship between microcap stocks and obscure ETFs: below about $400 million or so in market cap, it seems there’s a certain amount of inefficiency in the market and therefore room, in theory, for stocks to be manipulated. (Yes, there might be fundamental reasons why very small stocks have lower correlations than their larger brethren, but even so, the fact remains that these stocks are hard enough to trade that manipulation can be profitable.)

Are these findings, then, grist for Bradley’s mill? Do they demonstrate that ETFs shouldn’t include microcap stocks? No. A lot more work needs to be done on that front. But at least now we have an idea of where the manipulation is likely to be taking place, if it’s happening at all.

Over at my old Time.com stomping grounds, Adam Cohen has written a fascinating article about the movement to have the federal minimum wage declared unconstitutional. This goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of the minimum wage as a campaign issue in the midterm elections. My question: Why do people care so much?

For much of its recent history, the federal minimum wage hasn't even been all that binding. State minimum-wage laws have led to higher pay, or companies paid more on their own. According to the Labor Department, only 980,000 people made the federal minimum wage last year. Even when you add in the 2.6 million workers who made less (people like tip-collecting waitresses and teenagers just working for the summer), you still only wind up with 4.9 percent of all hourly-paid employees-- and just 2.9% of the total U.S. wage-earning workforce.

Yes, it's true, in Econ 101 we all learn that price floors disrupt the most efficient allocation of resources in a marketplace. When it comes to low-wage workers, that leads to companies hiring fewer people than they would otherwise, leaving some folks who want jobs without them.

But those who make it beyond one semester of economics find out that the world doesn't always work the way a rudimentary model would predict. In fact, in recent years economists have struggled to find explanations for real-world situations in which higher wages do not, in fact, lead to lower employment. One theory: a higher wage forces employers to invest in their employees and figure out ways to make them more efficient (i.e., valuable). As Richard Florida likes to argue, boosting efficiency in low-wage (mostly service sector) jobs is exactly what we should be doing right now.

But I digress. Back to my original question: Why do people care so much about an economic policy that doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the economy? One reason might be because of the anchoring effect of the minimum wage. Even if only a few people are earning the minimum wage, its existence still sends a signal to the market that this is about what it should cost to hire an unskilled worker. That tinkers with the expectations of both companies and workers. Or, what I might be quicker to believe: talking about the minimum wage—whether you want to increase it or abolish it—is a proxy for saying "I care about struggling workers," or "I don't want government telling business what to do."

The problem with using the minimum wage to have this debate, though, is that no matter who wins, the victory will be hollow. If we want to help low-income families, we could do a lot more than change a wage many of them don't make anyway. And if we want to minimize government intervention in free enterprise, we might choose a battle that is meaningful to companies outside of such a narrow range—half of all minimum-wage workers have jobs in the leisure and hospitality industries.

Although maybe saying that just goes to show how naive I am about politics. Maybe in that realm the best battles to fight are the ones that are the least likely to change the status quo no matter what the outcome is.