Stilltitled

One – “pairing off”: the group facilitates emotional connections between pairs of people. Think match.com or IRC equivalents.

Two – “vilification”: the group focuses its efforts on identifying and vilifying external enemies.

Three – “veneration”: the group follows a religious pattern of adulation and contemplation.

–drawn from clay shirky’s citation of WR Bion’s Experiences in Groups in A Group is its Own Worst Enemy

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People who know they’ll be ridiculed for telling untruths are more likely to show restraint.

—Robert Frank, professor, Cornell Johnson School, remarking on the proper response to the tendency of politicians and advertisers to stretch the truth, considering its real effect on public understanding: via NYT, Economic View

There’s a lot of potential demand embedded in analysts’ expectations that I think will be very real

—David Goerz, Highmark Capital Management, $17b AUM: via Bloomberg.

Structural changes are often omitted from analysts’ assessments until the evidence is truly overwhelming and the implications have already imposed themselves. Structural changes are among the hardest things for analysts to identify and to price.

–Mohamed El-Erian, CEO PIMCO, $1.1t AUM: via Bloomberg.

There’s no way the European debt problems are going to be enough to derail the growth that’s taking place in our economy and in Asia. We’re in the camp that hasn’t revised down because of the pullback.

—Doug Ramsey, Leuthold Group, who expects  the S&P 500 will rally at least 19% by EOY: via Bloomberg.

Attempting to manage risk in an environment where everything that could go wrong does go wrong seems like a fruitless endeavor. The only defense that seems to work in months like these is being in cash.

—Brad Balter, Balter Capital Management, a Boston fund of funds: via Bloomberg.

The housing market problem in China is actually much, much more fundamental, much bigger than the housing market problem in the US and UK before your financial crisis. It is more than [just] a bubble problem.

—Li Daokui, professor at Tsinghua University, member of the PBOC monetary policy committee: via FT.

I hope people wake up — America has to suck it up. The country is 40 percent overweight, Bloomberg tries to close down schools that turn out only 25 percent of the ‘products’ that work and he can’t, the budget is completely out of whack. None of this is going to get fixed if people aren’t willing to sacrifice.

—Joseph Perella, at a panel discussion on Wednesday hosted by Thomson Reuters, supporting higher taxes but, perhaps dubiously, warning against higher taxes for investors: via NYT

During the last two decades or so, we have become accustomed to speaking or writing of ‘printers’ not as people, but as machines made of plastic, metal and other substances that sit on our desks: machines driven at least one remove from ourselves via the computer, keyboard and screen that now form parts of our daily lives.

—David Mckitterick, writing in Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830, 2003

The effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as reductions in class size.

—Dan Goldhaber, University of Washington, suggesting that repeated discussion of the class-size issue may only be a cover for hiring more teachers: via NYT. Notes and counterpoint, Dianne Ravitch via Education Week

Doris Lee, American Painter. Do you know anything about this painting? <please comment>

You probably did get some support to house prices from the credit, and as that wears off house prices may fall off a little bit. We don’t expect house prices to pick up noticeably for a long time. If the recovery continues, I expect home sales to pick up with the labor market.

—Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase: via Bloomberg

—David M. Blitzer, Chairman of theIndex Committee at Standard & Poor’s: via S&P

—Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Group in New York, had projected sales would rise to a 5.7 million rate for Monday’s home-purchase data: via Bloomberg

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

—Memorandum, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp: via Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, UCSF, Market Failure in the Marketplace of Ideas.

The memo is nine pages, double spaced. The typed, courier font blisters and breaks according to the expected irregularities of the mimeograph. Reading at a slight skew, the lines jerk up and down from page to page as if darting over imperceptible obstacles, though most likely from a clerk’s failure to scan them at the proper angle

The author yields little if any indication of any foreknowledge of the harmful effects of smoking. Instead, he offers a novel analysis of customers, products, message, and competition: “our customer I have defined as the mass public, our product is doubt, our message as truth — well stated, and our competition is the body of anti-cigarette fact that exists in the public mind.”

The writer later qualifies how truth must be the message: “Truth is our message because of its power to withstand a conflict and sustain a controversy. If in our pro-cigarette efforts we stick to well documented fact, we can dominate a controversy and operate with the confidence of justifiable self-interest.”

It’s hard not to respect the careful thought that went into so sinister a strategy. The emphasis on revealing the healthful effects of smoking. The importance of seeking the truth. The bald refutation of mounting evidence and the discipline to follow through. It is competent, all too competent.