That Kyocera Ad

A distinguished-looking man with cropped hair and professorial glasses walks across a screen and starts talking about costs and ownership periods. We feel at first that we've stumbled into a lecture hall, but this turns out to be a pitch for Kyocera, a Kyoto-based company that makes printers and other office equipment.

The professorial man in the ad is in fact a professor: Peter Morici of the R.H.Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. But he is hardly a household name, and when I first saw the ad I had the feeling he was supposed to remind me of someone else.  But who?

I've decided that Morici was chosen less for his economist credentials than for his resemblance to the Ur-expert in economics, the late Paul Samuelson.



The above is a photo of Samuelson. Do the comparison yourself to Morici as he appears in the above YouTube video. Same glasses, same hair, same suit, quite similar face.

I'm reasonably certain that the  ad agency recognized the resemblance, and chose their spokesman on this basis. After all, generations learned the basics of economics from the many editions of Samuelson's textbook, so a visage like that is natural for this role.

None of which would be worth mentioning except that Ben Stein has made it a cause of controversy and even litigation. Here is the complaint. Stein was apparently considered for this role in Kyocera's ads, and then rejected, apparently on the ground that his expressed views about the unreality of global warming were at odds with Kyocera's own eco-friendly branding.

Stein has filed a lawsuit, claiming that Kyocera breached a contract with him. That claim seems certain to go nowhere. If you read the complaint, above, you will see no allegation of specific facts to the effect that there was what lawyers call a "meeting of the minds." There doesn't seem to have been any contract to breach before Kyocera backed out of the arrangement they had been considering. Considering something doesn't bind you to it.

Ben Stein is the son of a fanous economist, Nixon advisor Herb Stein. Ben Stein also played a teacher of economics (at the high school level) in a movie. The point of the movie, as it happens, was that the protagonist wasn't in that day when Ben Stein's character was droning on about the Hawley-Smoot tariff. This movie role is cited without irony in the complaint, apparently in hopes of persuading the court that there must have been a contract to hire such an obvious choice for their commercial as he. 

But the more risible aspect of the litigation is Stein's contention that he is the victim of religious discrimination. "A host of federal laws protects Americans from being discriminated against on the basis of religious beliefs." This could be intended to render the unwinnable issue of whether Stein was ever actually a party to a contract irrelevant. It is just as illegal to refrain from hiring Stein because he is a Jew as it would be to fire him for that.

Ben Stein isn't really saying, though, that he was fired for a religious adherence to Judaism. He is saying that he was fired for a religious adherence to Global-Warming-Isn't-ManMadeism.

The complaint says: "BEN STEIN said [he] was by no means certain that global warming was man-made ... [he] also told Hurwitz to inform defendants that as a matter of religious belief, he believed that God, and not man, controlled the weather."

Felix Salmon has some fun with this in his Reuters blog.

Ben Stein Watch: now The Times is Free (of him)

Ben Stein has been fired from The New York Times. Perhaps "fired" is not exactly the right word, since Stein was never on the payroll in the first place. His formal relationship was that of a regularly featured free-lancer. That relationship, at any rate, has come to a close.

On Thursday, August 6, the Times released a statement that said: "Ben Stein's fine work for us as a columnist for Sunday Business had to end, we told him, after we learned that he had become a commercial spokesman for FreeScore, a financial services company. Ben didn't understand when he signed on with FreeScore that this might pose a potential conflict for him as a contributing columnist for the Times, because he hadn't written about credit scores or this company. But, we decided that being a commercial spokesman for FreeScore while writing his column wouldn't be appropriate.

"We are sorry to lose him as a columnist, and appreciate his work for the Times over the years."

He was never doing "fine work" for them as a columnist, and they're probably clever enough to be happy he's gone, not "sorry to lose him." So let's get the FreeScore stuff out of the way.

FreeScore tells people that it will get them their credit SCORE for free. And that is true. But the credit score is just a number, and for most people is not very useful. If you have a low credit number and you suspect it is based on faulty information in your credit reports, you want the credit report, not the number. And FreeScore is in the business of selling you the report (which you could get elsewhere for free). It is in short a bait-and-switch operation to get money from suckers.

Ben Stein is entitled to shill for a bait-and-switch operation if he wants. Likewise, the Times is entitled to stop running his columns for that reason or other reason. "Good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all" will suffice to terminate a free-lance column. The subject doesn't especially interest me.

The relationship ought rightly to have been terminated long before, and on weightier grounds. For The New York Times found itself with a business columnist who doesn't appear to have known diddly about business. Perhaps (to interpret the matter charitably) they realized this and thought the situation awkward. Perhaps they used the "credit report" thing as an elegant way out of the awkward situation. It is good to think so. At least, he has lost that platform.

Why was he so bad? Well, let's go back to January 2008, when Ben Stein invented the label "trader realism" in an effort to make himself seem profound. Wow, a new theory of finance. Trader realism! There just was no there there. Even in the 21st century, when dead-tree newspapers increasingly seem anachronistic anyway, trees should not die for this little!

The gist of that silly column (which began with discussion of the meatloaf that Stein used to eat at the kitchen table with his economist father Herb), is that professional traders, (like judges in the "legal realism" model) start from their desired conclusion, and work backward to rig up the necessary premises.

"Traders can see masses of data any minute of any day. They can find data to support hitting the 'buy' button or the 'sell' button. They don’t act on the basis of what seems to them the real economic situation, but on what’s in it for them."

Of course, classical economists would say, traders act on what's in it for them! So does everybody in the system, at least according to the classical model Stein may think he's refuting here. The difference may be this: Stein thinks the decision whether a "sell" or a "buy" has more "in it for them" has a non-rational, even an irrational, element based on, say, the corporate politics of the broker-dealer, quirks of bonus policies, idiosyncratic personalities.

A classicist who doesn't wish to conform to stereotype too tightly can of course acknowledge that traders sometimes act in ways hard to model. Still, those who consistently act on irrational factors will lose money. They won't stay in business for long. And if there are a lot of traders, and a lot of trading going on, then the irrational aspects are factored out within the whole system, the noise is filtered out and the market conveys information efficiently.

Stein's reason for believing this model is wrong and his "trader realism" has pierced a veil? An uncheckable anecdote. A "close friend of mine, now deceased," who used to be a trader in London for a major financial house, told him a story about shorting IBM on a dare from the boss, and then geting on the phone to spread rumors, talking down the price of IBM so his short position would pay off.

That's it. After the household meatloaf, the law school memories, the trader/judge analogy, we get around to a theory based on a single recollected story from one unnamed person who has shuffled off the mortal coil. Wow! On such evidence, many people seem to believe that Elvis continues to walk about and order Slurpees at various Quickie Marts.

He should have been fired after that. His performance as a "business columnist" got worse, not better, thereafter. He went from a zero into the deep negative numbers.

Sorry, Ben. Glad you're gone.

Ben Stein Backs Out

This year's graduates of the University of Vermont won't have the benefit of hearing Ben Stein speak at their commencement.

UVM had invited him, and just as a stink was developing over this (his anti-Darwinism movie especially has made this an unpopular choice in many circles) Stein gracefully withdrew.

Richard Dawkins himself had written to the president of UVM to complain and that individual, Daniel Mark Fogel, wrote back in a letter that praises Dawkins' work and "scientific leadership," before letting Dawkins know, "We have recently learned that Mr. Stein will be unable to receive the honorary degree here or to serve as Commencement speaker."

[Here's my slightly early shout-out to Charles Darwin. Happy 200th birthday, CD!]

Intriguingly, Fogel thought it necessary to add that it wasn't the movie on biology that induced UVM to invite Stein in the first place. It was "our expectation that his remarks would address the global economic crisis and that he would speak from his widely acknowledged area of expertise on the economy."

That intrigues me because, first, if a college gives someone an honorary degree and invites him to give the commencement address, isn't it pretty much up to hom what he then talks about? What were they planning to do if he started to discuss how evolutionary theory is all a fraud and the practitioners a cabal? Call campus security and have him dragged away?

Second, though: why would they want him to talk about economics? He seems to be something of a numbskull on the subject, as I've documented on my other blog, Proxy Partisans from time to time.

I suppose if they wanted some enlightening inside stuff about the Nixon administration, or the backstage story of the making of Ferris Bueller, or suggestions on "how to produce a game show that is all about how smart you are," ... in any of those cases he could be their go-to-guy.

But his economics babble in recent months has been awful stuff about something he calls "trader Realism".

And while I have your ear ... why is the University of Vermont abbreviated UVM? Is it just a way of distinguishing itself from the University of Virginia by using a letter to stand for the second syllable of its state name? It's in Burlington, so why not UVB?