To Sochi and beyond: measuring the economic toll of the Olympics

all out of love: The allure of Don Draper: why the ‘anti-hero’ in modern TV is so compelling

Don Draper commands attention—enough to merit an entire TV show, in fact. On the ’60s era drama “Mad Men,” Draper commits heinous acts and lives by an extraordinarily questionable code of ethics, yet still never fails to fascinate.
Askmen.com has hailed him as a “role model for men everywhere,” and he is among those named “men of the year” by GQ magazine almost every year.
Even for those aware of his flaws, Draper holds a peculiar attraction. His serial philandering and rampant sexism certainly earn him his fair share of criticism, but casually dismissing him as the villain of a TV show does ignore the bigger problem: people look up to this man.

all out of love: Silver dollars: donations aggravate Nate

Washington glows unlike any other on the right day when the sun reflects off the gold-lined pockets of America’s politicians and lobbyists. One can’t help but feel blinded by the sheer capitalistic nature of the situation. The politicians—kings of fame and faithfully exorbitant donations—can stride confidently through what has become their playground, unafraid of public opinion, any expectation of passing productive legislation, or holding themselves to a moral code.
This attitude permeates the entire city, and with good reason: campaign donations endorse it. Few can escape its alluring grasp, and fewer still challenge it. Yet one man can make even the hardiest Washingtonian shake in his Gucci slippers and inspire Congressmen to tremble beneath their oily campaign war chests. Mitch McConnell wakes up in the middle of the night screaming his name and Ezra Klein studied the ancient Haitian art of Voodoo to give himself a competitive advantage.
I’m talking about Nate Silver, the Jewish man from Eastern Michigan who everyone in Washington wants on their team. He first burst onto the scene in 2003, writing for Baseball Prospectus and revolutionizing the fantasy baseball industry. Silver then branched out in 2008, creating a political modeling website named FiveThirtyEight.com (a reference to the number of electors in the Electoral college) with the idea of reaching a wider audience than just fantasy baseball players. The website predicted the outcomes of nationwide elections using a weighted poll aggregator designed by Silver himself. His methodology first predicted a big win for the Democrats in 2008, which the Republicans conveniently ignored. But when he correctly predicted every senate race being held that year as well, he was impossible to ignore.
Republicans’ anger with Silver dissipated by 2010, when Silver correctly predicted a Republican takeover of the house. Then, the Democrats weren’t too fond of him. He later became a national celebrity over the 2012 cycle, with Republicans viciously attacking his pro-Democratic predictions. The Democrats, in turn, labeled him the second coming of the Oracle at Delphi. Most readers should know the story from here: Silver was right and everyone was awed. He went from loved to hated and hated to loved faster than Bill Clinton. And, just as Bill Clinton never seems to step out of the spotlight, Nate Silver has returned for the 2014 midterm election cycle. On March 23, he offered a decisive prediction: the Republicans would take the Senate 51 seats to 49.
But instead of offering the typical irate denouncement, Democrats responded differently this time. While maintaining that Silver’s predictions left room for error, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began sending out emails saying that because Silver predicted big losses, the Democrats needed to raise huge amounts of money to remedy the situation. At first glance, this may look ridiculous. It probably even looks ridiculous after the second and third looks as well. That’s mostly because it is.
Silver’s methodology relies on candidate quality, state partisanship, incumbency, and head to head polls. Both state partisanship and incumbency pay virtually no attention to fundraising capabilities; candidate quality and head to head polls both rely on a variety of factors, fundraising being just one aspect of them.
But their strategy could work. The Democrats have been known for huge fundraising capabilities in the past and this jolt from Silver’s dismal prediction may lead them to raise enough money to prove it wrong. Silver mostly confirmed what many political minds in D.C. have been thinking for months, but he also gave much needed publicity to a major problem for the Democrats—relying on donors funds to change their fate.
Regardless of whether one roots for the Republicans or the Democrats, money shouldn’t greatly alter the outcome of a campaign like this. Donors spent $7 billion on the most recent Presidential election and $4 billion on the 2010 midterm elections. This money sometimes goes to worthy advertising—like Mitch McConnell’s recent video that Jon Stewart turned into the national phenomenon of #McConnelling—but much of it goes to attack ads in places like rural West Virginia.
The clear answer here should be to return to the McCain-Feingold reform act of 2002—which didn’t even take all the money out of politics, but just put something vaguely similar to a cap on donations. Sometimes, however, the clear answer isn’t the popular one in Washington. And until something gets done, Silver may have to deal with the possibility of enormous donations skewing his models.

all out of love

To Sochi and beyond: measuring the economic toll of the Olympics

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Drew Van Kuiken

Columnist

February 27, 2014

One of the first lessons any young, New Jersey travel hockey-team player receives is one of decay. Even buildings as spectacular as those that host the Olympics fall to pieces after a few short years. I know this because I had a long, illustrious travel hockey career. It was full of small pleasures, from crack-of-dawn Tuesday morning practices to week-long road trips to Lake Placid, New York. Those days still inspire a special sort of nostalgia for me though—a time to consider my own personal athletic shortcomings. It also gave team parents an excuse to drink away the sadness that spending an entire week in Lake Placid, New York will inspire.

If you’re wondering why a group of 30 young boys would spend a week in a place as desolate, hopeless and sad as Lake Placid every year, liberal arts school is the right place for you and your inquisitive mind.

Most importantly, Lake Placid hosted the 1980 Winter Olympics, home to a rink that hosted the “miracle on ice” semi-final hockey match between the Soviet Union and the U.S. On yearly trips, my teammates and I wandered around Lake Placid, visiting the decaying 25-year-old attractions that once hosted the world’s greatest athletes. The ski jump was significantly creepier when surrounded by dense woods with no spectators in sight, and by then the Olympic bobsled course more closely resembled a small sledding hill.

While time treated Lake Placid like the early 2000s treated Lindsay Lohan, the town didn’t begin as an adorable child star. In 1980, Olympic spectators were stranded for hours, freezing and unable to find proper transportation. Even the athletes found the hotel accommodations—which were later turned into a prison—subpar. The games reportedly cost $90 million.

If you have not already heard, the Sochi Olympics cost $51 billion. The price ballooned despite reporters’ hilarious accounts of open wires, yellow tap water, and wolf-like creatures roaming the halls of their hotels. Aside from the hotel peculiarities, the rest of the event admittedly went off with few problems. Russia’s stadiums appeared to be beautifully built and security never became a huge problem. Even Sochi’s tropical climate couldn’t hold back the games’ ultimate success, since the snow Russia trucked in held up despite 50 degree Fahrenheit weather.

But Sochi may have run out of luck the moment the Olympics ended. The very same hotels that caused reporters so much anxiety will now have to bring in roughly double the guests that they’ve historically attracted. These hotels, the cheapest of which start at around $140 a night, don’t have any good strategies to attract visitors. Foreigners traveling to Russia typically prefer to travel to places that don’t require a visa to enter, and vacationing Russians either can’t afford the high prices or have so much money that they would rather leave the country.

Money theoretically shouldn’t have been a problem. Supposedly, half the investment for Sochi’s development originally came from private investors. But as projects turned unprofitable and stadiums never materialized, the Russian government stepped in and kindly forced its citizenry to shoulder over 90 percent of the total cost. The public may never get a chance to see the fruits of their investment, but they did put on a good two-week show.

One can hardly be surprised that things look grim for Rio de Janiero, which plans on hosting both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Despite the notorious difficulty of hosting even one of these events, Rio de Janiero decided to surpass even the highest of expectations. When FIFA asked them to build eight stadiums, they decided to build 12. This happened even though two of those stadiums now exist in cities that don’t even have a first division soccer team. The optimism proved infectious, with Brazilians reportedly ecstatic about the prospect of hosting both events.

But things have quickly turned south in Brazil. Protests erupted last summer asking for “FIFA-standard” hospitals and a construction accident in November killed two workers in Sao Paulo. Instead of heralding a new age, both the World Cup and the Olympics may prove a stinging reminder of how far Brazil has to come before truly modernizing.

Rio and Sochi only provide two examples of a much larger problem: placing massive, expensive and high-pressure tournaments in “exotic” or up-and-coming areas often places an undue pressure on already fragile economies. Countries, both developed and developing, treat the Olympics as a high-stakes gamble, wasting billions in public funds in the process. They trade two weeks of international glory for an eternal white elephant, withering away in sad, desperate and lonely places like Lake Placid. In the case of Brazil, they may have even traded the once-bright future of a rapidly growing country for a glut of state-of-the-art stadiums. All economic thought says this should stop, but it doesn’t. Very little value lies in gambling on hamlets hurriedly transformed into multi-billion dollar destinations, but countries continue to do it. The risk occasionally results in newfound tourist destinations like Barcelona, but more often this leads to a vast assortment of Lake Placids scattered around the world.

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