from WSJ.com: US Business http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304017204579231071515501550.html?mod=pls_whats_news_us_business_f
via IFTTT
Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, thousands of fans thronged Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for the Army-Navy football game. As festive as the mood was inside the stadium, it wasn’t nearly so cheerful for the Philadelphia police officers who had to herd the crowds. The game was frequently held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and just as visiting fans were showing up the day before, holiday shoppers also would descend on downtown. On those Fridays after Thanksgiving, the late Joseph P. Barrett, a longtime reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin, recalled, even members of the police band were called upon to direct traffic. The cops nicknamed the day of gridlock Black Friday, and soon others started to do the same.
Retailers worried the phrase would scare people away. A few weeks after the 1961 game, which President John F. Kennedy had attended, the P.R. pioneer Denny Griswold described in her industry newsletter, Public Relations News, the efforts by Philadelphia merchants and city officials to rebrand the day Big Friday, in reference to the start of the holiday shopping season. (“The media coöperated,” Griswold wrote.) Big Friday didn’t stick, but the idea behind it did, in Philadelphia and, eventually, beyond. A few decades later, when the term came to describe a day when retailers’ ledgers shifted “into the black” for the year—a connotation also pushed by marketers—people assumed that had always been the connotation.
That idea never made sense to Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an amateur etymologist. “Since when was ‘Black Friday’ ever used in a positive manner?” she wrote in an e-mail. She searched for the earliest uses of the phrase, finally landing on Griswold’s reference, a discovery Taylor-Blake reported to the listserv of the American Dialect Society.
It turns out that a lot of what we’re told about Black Friday is invented by retailers and the marketing experts they hire. Retailers like Black Friday because the earlier customers start their holiday shopping, the more they are likely to spend over all. This year, the competition is heightened because of a relatively short window between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In search of holiday-season profits, retailers work to exploit people’s worries about missing a good deal—and the media, looking for a fun story, joins in.
Black Friday has also developed a dangerous undercurrent. Five years ago, a Walmart employee at a Long Island store was trampled to death by a frantic crowd. The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration now recommends that stores staff their entrances with uniformed guards and place shopping carts “and other potential obstacles or projectiles” away from the doors. Black Friday also is ruining retail workers’ holidays, as it creeps earlier into Thanksgiving: on Thursday this year Kmart will open at 6 A.M., Walmart at 6 P.M., Target at 8 P.M.
Though local television news cameras dutifully scan the lines of bundled shoppers waiting in lawn chairs outside their favorite stores, reinforcing the notion that shopping on Black Friday is obligatory, increasing numbers of Americans are opting out. A Nielsen survey published November 18th reported that only thirteen per cent of consumers plan to visit a store this Friday, down from seventeen per cent last year and continuing a four-year slide that has been largely precipitated by the growth of online shopping—which, of course, now has its own marketer-created term, Cyber Monday.
Black Friday doesn’t even necessarily offer the best discounts, contrary to what retailers want their customers to believe. Rather than selling most merchandise at full price and marking down what doesn’t sell, stores now engineer their prices, so that the “discounted” prices are actually at the level they had wanted all along. Some “door-buster” items, in limited quantities, lure people into stores. Many gifts, though, have lower price tags at other times. The consumer-price research firm Decide Inc. analyzed data for the Wall Street Journal last year and found that Elmo dolls, Ugg boots, Samsung TVs, and KitchenAid stand mixers were less expensive on other days. (Decide closed its services in September, after being purchased by eBay.) Consumer Reports indicates that many home appliances and small consumer electronics are cheapest in December.
Last year, Black Friday was the busiest day for shoppers visiting stores, according to ShopperTrak, a Chicago firm that tallies the numbers of people visiting retailers. But there were plenty of procrastinators, too: the Saturday before Christmas was the second-busiest day. In fact, four of the ten biggest shopping days this year are expected to come in the week leading up to Christmas, ShopperTrak projected. It’s harder for retailers to plan for that wave of spending late in the season, so they focus instead on enticing shoppers to buy on Black Friday, locking in their profits weeks earlier. (The amount spent on TV ads promoting Black Friday reached eleven million dollars last year, according to Nielsen, nearly five times the 2011 total.)
Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American founder of the British department-store chain Selfridges and the first to post in his stores the number of shopping days until Christmas, understood that retailers must seduce their customers; he titled his history of merchant cultures “The Romance of Commerce.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Selfridge and other retailers used the Christmas season to spin a fantasy of a happier life, invoking the Victorian era’s emphasis on children and the domestic sphere. Puncturing the myths surrounding Christmas, even cynically manufactured ones, can make a person feel like the Grinch, but Bonnie Taylor-Blake, the amateur etymologist, hasn’t suffered. “I’m fortunate that family, friends, and co-workers I’ve shared this story with are, like me, skeptical at heart,” she said. She doesn’t care much for shopping; on Black Friday, she plans to stay home.
Photograph by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty.
Until recently, Thanksgiving Day was sacred. Retailers kept their doors closed until midnight, so the boundary between dignified family dinners and frenzied bargain hunting remained inviolate. Walmart breached this rule in 2011, announcing that its holiday sales would begin at 10 P.M. on Thanksgiving Day. Sears and Kmart followed suit. The following year, Walmart began its sales at 8 P.M. on Thanksgiving Day. And now Walmart has announced that its sales this year will begin at 6 P.M. on Thanksgiving—with many of its online sales having already started almost a week earlier, on the Friday before Thanksgiving. This trend is known as “Black Friday creep,” and it continues because large retailers recognize that many of their consumers are impatient to begin shopping.
Scientists have wondered for some time what makes certain people—and certain species—more patient than others. Eleven monkeys delivered part of that answer in an experiment in 2005. Some of the monkeys were common marmosets, and the others were cotton-top tamarins. The two species share many similarities. They’re both very small, weighing about as much as a tub of margarine. Their brains are small, too, accounting for about two and a half per cent of their body mass. They live in the lower and middle canopies of large trees in South American rain forests, where they’re raised by both of their parents. But tamarins are impetuous while marmosets show restraint. During a series of trials, the monkeys had a choice: they could pull a lever that immediately released two pellets of food, or they could pull a second lever, which would reveal a richer reward of six pellets, but only after a delay. The delay varied across the trials, which allowed the researchers to calculate how long the monkeys were willing to wait, on average, for the bonus pellets. The tamarins were willing to wait an average of just eight seconds for the bonus pellets—any longer, and they pulled the lever that revealed the meagre, two-pellet prize. In contrast, the marmosets were willing to wait an average of fourteen seconds for the bonus pellets, almost twice as long as the tamarins were willing to wait. When the tamarin has long since given up on the bonus pellets, the marmoset waits patiently and comes away three hundred per cent richer.
What is it about marmosets that endows them with twice the patience of tamarins? For all their similarities, the two species have a very different relationship with food. Most of the time, tamarins eat insects. Insects move quickly and spend no more than a few seconds at a time exposed to the gaze of hungry predators. Patience just isn’t a virtue in the world of an insectivore, where waiting means skipping dinner. Marmosets, on the other hand, eat very few insects, preferring instead the gummy sap that flows from tree bark. After scratching at a tree for several minutes, they’re rewarded with a few precious drops of sap. Researchers have argued that these vastly different foraging experiences explain why the monkeys show different degrees of restraint in the lab. The implication here is that patience is learned rather than endowed; a monkey gets better at waiting when he waits more often, just as a weightlifter becomes stronger the more he lifts weights.
Humans who are chronically forced to wait acquire a different skill: they learn to seize fleeting opportunities. In a paper published in 2011 by the Journal of Consumer Research, Kurt Carlson, of Georgetown University, and Jacqueline Conard, of Belmont University, described the political aspirations of Thomas Zych, a write-in candidate during the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. Zych’s surname had placed him at the end of alphabetical lists beginning in preschool, and continuing through high school and college. He was forced to sit in the back row, for instance, and he sometimes missed out on the privileges that were offered first to the Abels and Andersons but never quite reached the Zuckermans and Zolas. Zych’s Presidential platform was simple: to abolish alphabetical lists from every sphere of life.
Those years of waiting made Zych hungry enough to stage an anti-alphabetism campaign that could never succeed. In fact, there’s evidence that hunger isn’t unusual among people with late-in-the-alphabet names. When Carlson and Conard offered a limited supply of free basketball tickets to a pool of M.B.A. students, those with surnames at the beginning of the alphabet (from A to I) took, on average, longer than twenty-five minutes to respond; those with surnames at the end of the alphabet (from Q to Z) waited an average of only nineteen minutes. Later, the researchers offered a second pool of students the chance to participate in a study in exchange for cash and a bottle of wine. The A-to-I students waited an average of six and a half hours to respond, whereas the Q-to-Z students waited an average of five and a half hours. Years of privilege seemed to have made the A-to-Is complacent, while years of waiting had made the Q-to-Zs hungry.
Several years ago, my colleague Eesha Sharma and I wondered whether financial hardship might change how people respond to attractive products with limited availability. In one of our experiments, students at New York University’s Stern School of Business told us how they felt about their own financial positions relative to their peers’. While the students completed the experiment, we placed a small bowl of M&M’s nearby. We made sure that the bowl was filled mostly with one color of M&M’s, with only a small number of pieces of a second color. While the students who described themselves as privileged ate the M&M’s indiscriminately, choosing an equal proportion of each color, the self-described deprived students rushed to eat the scarce M&M’s. When you remind people that they’re deprived, they become drawn to whatever happens to be scarce nearby, as though possessing a scarce object corrects the imbalance.
Of course, nature also plays a role in determining how people respond to scarcity, as do a number of other factors. Yet a lifetime of waiting also appears to teach you to snatch fleeting opportunities that other people might ignore. Walmart, Sears, and Kmart know that many of their consumers share the hunger of Presidential candidate Thomas Zych and the N.Y.U. students in our study who felt financially deprived—and so Black Friday creep continues.
Adam Alter is the author of “Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave,” and an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Some of the ideas in this article are discussed in modified form in “Drunk Tank Pink.”
Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty.
In the final paragraphs of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber drops his academic detachment to offer a solution to the financial impasse whose historical background he has just laid out in hundreds of pages. “It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt,” he writes.
“Jubilee,” a word derived from the Hebrew yovel, was translated in early Greek Bibles as “a trumpet blast of liberty.” In the Old Testament, a Jubilee was to occur every half century, at which time slaves were to be freed and debts forgiven. In ancient Babylon, King Hammurabi inaugurated his reign by cancelling agrarian debts. This eliminated a potential source of revolutionary discontent among the peasantry, and it acknowledged what the economist Michael Hudson has called a basic mathematical and political principal: debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid.
Household debt in the United States now equates to more than eighty per cent of G.D.P., a proportion that has risen steadily since the nineteen-fifties. Companies that are owed money—from credit-card issuers to hospitals and doctors—regularly sell uncollected bills to outside debt buyers, who pay a fraction of the claim’s face value in exchange for information on the debtor and the right to attempt to collect payment in full. A vast secondary market exists in which financial institutions buy and sell such debt, often several times over, until the debtor finally pays, or the debt holder gives up. Debt buyers have little incentive to advertise who they are, or how they got your bills. The homepage of Sherman Financial Group, a large consumer-debt collector, features a large photo of puppies and little else. And debt collection can be an unsavory business: the Federal Trade Commission has said that it receives more consumer complaints about debt collectors than about any other industry.
In response to such complaints, the F.T.C. conducted a wide-ranging study of debt collectors and debt buyers in 2009. “Debt buying can reduce the losses that creditors incur in providing credit, thereby allowing creditors to provide more credit at lower prices,” the report said. “Debt buying, however, also may raise significant consumer protection concerns.” The report includes information gleaned from debt buyers working with almost ninety million consumer accounts over a three-year period. One striking finding: the country’s largest debt buyers paid an average of four cents for every dollar of debt.
In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, a movement called Strike Debt revived the idea of a grand debt cancellation. They called it the Rolling Jubilee and drummed up donations to purchase medical claims in bulk, with the help of a debt buyer sympathetic to the cause, for pennies on the dollar. Over the past twelve months, the group raised more than six hundred thousand dollars. It used four hundred thousand to buy a bundle of medical bills worth almost fifteen million dollars. This year, nearly twenty-seven hundred debtors across the country received an unusual letter from the group, indicating the amount of their debt and informing them that they “are no longer under any obligation to settle this account with the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else.”
The project turned out to be one of the few Occupy offshoots that has had a tangible effect on people’s lives. The group made three separate purchases, buying hundreds of delinquent hospital bills each time, without knowing the identity of any individual debtor beforehand. It then contracted with a mailing group to send letters to those debtors without violating their privacy, according to Thomas Gokey, a Strike Debt organizer. The Rolling Jubilee learns about the beneficiaries of its charity only if a debtor chooses to make contact.
Terry Lavalle was homeless and uninsured when he slipped on a patch of ice near Framingham, Massachusetts, and got a concussion. That left him with a thirty-one-hundred-dollar bill he couldn’t pay. Four years later, he opened a letter from the Rolling Jubilee. “I was stupefied,” Lavalle told me. “I didn’t know if it was legitimate or not.” He took the letter to the bank, which looked up the Rolling Jubilee online and told him it seemed valid. Lavalle called the hospital in Framingham and was told the bill had been paid.
The amount of debt erased by the Rolling Jubilee has been tiny compared to the over-all level of medical debt in the United States, Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University and a Strike Debt organizer, told me. The purchases are largely symbolic. But what would happen if Rolling Jubilee-style programs became more widespread?
If the Rolling Jubilee started spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying debt it had no plans to collect, the increased demand could send the price of that debt higher. Why sell your bad loans to a debt collector for four cents on the dollar, when you can sell to the Rolling Jubilee, which doesn’t care about making a profit, for ten cents? A price increase on the secondary market would have echoes in the primary market: lenders, assured of a decent recovery for their defaulted loans, might have more incentive to issue debt to risky borrowers—the antithesis of Strike Debt’s goals.
The Rolling Jubilee’s most powerful tool is thus its most controversial. It’s a bit like the N.Y.P.D.’s Cash for Guns Program, which, by paying people a hundred dollars for guns they turn in, helps get guns off the streets and, potentially, reduce the violence that comes with them, but does nothing to limit the market for guns, or to prevent participants from buying another one. Similarly, each purchase the Rolling Jubilee makes helps prop up the system it critiques. It also directly helps relatively few people who might not even realize what’s been done for them.
“It’s wonderful that they’re thinking about how to deal with debt, but I don’t think it’s a substitute for meaningful thought about how to fix the underlying problem,” Mary Spector, a consumer-law specialist at Southern Methodist University, said. “I think it’s an expression of the most charitable, progressive sort, but perhaps they could work with lawmakers on how to reduce debt at the front end, instead of at the back end.”
Early skeptics also worried about the tax implications of the plan: because debt cancellation is typically treated as income and can be taxed, could Strike Debt leave the people it claimed to help worse off than if it had done nothing? Strike Debt says it consulted a team of attorneys who believe debtors could be immune to such consequences if the debt is treated as a tax-exempt gift and not as a taxable income gain. But the theory has not yet been tested by an I.R.S. audit, as far as the Rolling Jubilee has heard.
The way the debt purchases are made—in bulk, without details of the underlying bills—raises another concern. Do the Rolling Jubilee’s beneficiaries even notice that their debt has been extinguished? “I forgot about the bill, to be honest,” Lavalle said. He was homeless for another two years after his hospital visit, and the first letter he received about the bill was from the Rolling Jubilee.
The debt purchases were a way to start a conversation, Ross said. They help illuminate the inner workings of the consumer-debt market and show that there is another way to deal with debt collectors. The goal, according to the Rolling Jubilee’s charter, is to create broad resistance to the debt system, “with the ultimate goal of creating an alternative economy that benefits us all and not just the 1%.”
On a recent Friday, the Rolling Jubilee celebrated its anniversary in the basement of the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew (the patron saints of artists and bankers, respectively) in Brooklyn. The event was decidedly more low-key than the movement’s launch party, a year ago, a sold-out gala in a Manhattan club with performances from the comedian Janeane Garofalo and from members of Sonic Youth and TV on the Radio. Over foil trays of free pasta, soda, and craft beer, a few dozen twenty- and thirty-somethings chatted at tables squared along the fringes of the fluorescent-lit space. The evening’s festivities got underway with a bit of theatre: eight Strike Debt members performed a dramatized call to action, growling as they bounced around the room enumerating the evils of the debt market and assuring their listeners, “You are not a loan.”
Ross, a Scot with dark, shaggy hair and Prada glasses, watched from the side, a strip of duct tape on his hand scribbled with the words “safe space”; he was one of several people at the event tasked with facilitating disputes, should anyone feel threatened during discussions—an echo of Occupy’s early days in Zuccotti Park.
The party marked a shift of focus for the Rolling Jubilee. The group will wind down its medical-debt purchases by the end of the year, using its remaining two hundred thousand dollars in donations to start chipping away at student debt. The majority of that debt consists of federal student loans, backed by the U.S. government. But there has been a sharp rise in recent years in the percentage made up of private student loans, which can be purchased and traded by debt buyers. That gives the Rolling Jubilee a chance to replicate its medical-debt efforts.
Student-loan debt is the only form of consumer debt that has grown since the crisis of 2008, according to the New York Federal Reserve Board. It stood at about three hundred and sixty-three billion dollars in 2005; it now tops a trillion dollars. Outside of mortgages, student loans represent the largest personal debts in the United States. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing this month, Rich Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said his office has received thousands of private complaints about student loans in the past year. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2010, established the Bureau in response to the home-mortgage crisis of 2008. “At a field hearing in Miami on student-loan debt, it became clear that there are many troubling similarities to the mortgage market before the financial crisis,” Cordray told the senators.
Ross argues that student debt and medical debt are illegitimate because education and health care should be human rights, not opportunities for private profit—that is, they should be free in the first place. (His employer, incidentally, offers one of the most expensive undergraduate degrees in the country.) This is easier said than done—providing health care and education is expensive, and someone has to cover the costs—but the sentiment behind it is commendable.
Graeber writes in “Debt” that a jubilee “would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to arrange things in a different way.”
Down in the basement, group discussions to plan the future of the student-debt project segued into a sing-along. A tall, lanky guy with a banjo sang a tune adapted from an essay by the Dust Bowl folk singer Woody Guthrie. The song has become an anthem of the Jubilee: “I think what I thought of this morning, I think what I thought of at three. I owe more money than I can pay back, more money than I’ll ever see.”
Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty.
The frames that surround works of art are often overshadowed by the paintings within them. For Marcelo Bavaro, the frames themselves are a kind of art. Bavaro, fifty years old, is the co-owner of a frame shop called Quebracho Inc. He is a fourth-generation frame maker: his family began crafting frames in Florence in the early nineteenth century. They left for Argentina in 1907, bringing their trade with them. Now situated in a studio in Brooklyn, Quebracho is known for restoring and creating hand-carved, gilded frames that are often commissioned by large art institutions like the Met. The company has constructed or restored frames for works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Marina Abramović, among many others.
Frames have long played a marginal role in the art world, but, as Leo Carey wrote in a 2006 article about Tracy Gill and Simeon Lagodich, who built a new frame for Camille Pissarro’s “The Climbing Path, L’Hermitage, Pontoise,” curators have started to pay closer attention to framing in recent decades.
Using many of the same tools that his great-grandfather used, Bavaro, along with the ten full-time craftsmen he employs, plies his trade in much the same way that it was done two hundred years ago. The frames are costly—a hundred and fifty to eight hundred dollars per foot—and a single commission can take up to ten weeks to finish. “There are other ways of making money with much less effort,” Bavaro says. “This is painstaking.”
In 1982, the decision analysts Marc Alpert and Howard Raiffa asked students in their classes at Harvard to estimate figures like the number of eggs produced daily in the United States. They were each asked to give a range so wide that they believed there was a ninety-eight-per-cent chance it would include the right answer. Instead, the correct figures fell inside the students’ ranges less than a third of the time.
Innumerable decisions depend on forecasting what will happen in the future. Indeed, economic forecasts are so important that the U.S. government generates forty-five thousand of them each year. And yet, as Nate Silver notes in “The Signal and the Noise,” these forecasts often aren’t very good. Silver’s political-forecasting work has shown that good statistical analysis of quantitative data can provide much better forecasts than can human intuition. But what happens when forecasts must be made without the benefit of, say, the mountains of polling data that inform Silver’s statistics? That is, what happens when you have to rely, in large part, on educated guesses from humans?
In 2005, the political psychologist Philip Tetlock found that the pundits who give the most interesting interviews tend to be rewarded with more coverage in the press. But this “interestingness,” he wrote in “Expert Political Judgment,” is weakly correlated with accuracy. Pat Buchanan’s forecasts are bold and, often, totally wrong: consider his July, 2012, prediction that Bashar al-Assad would “be gone” by Labor Day that year. Buchanan’s low accuracy earns him a grade of D from pundittracker.com. But that hasn’t stopped Fox News and “The McLaughlin Group” from featuring his views.
In the courtroom, too, juries find confident witnesses more persuasive, according to research by Gary Wells, a psychologist who studies confidence among eyewitnesses—this despite the fact that witnesses’ confidence, like that of the pundits, is largely uncorrelated with accuracy. In one study, Wells staged a theft and then tested eyewitnesses’ ability to identify the culprit, as well as the persuasiveness of their testimony. It turned out that jurors were more persuaded by witnesses who appeared more confident. Yet witnesses’ confidence was nearly worthless in predicting their accuracy.
In the Harvard forecasting study, the students acted as if they knew the right answers, making predictions that were far too precise. The enormity of the errors impelled Alpert and Raiffa to write to their students in exasperation: “Be honest with yourselves! Admit what you don’t know!”
Even seasoned professionals, working in their domains of expertise, fall victim to overconfidence in forecasting. Itzhak Ben-David, John Graham, and Campbell Harvey recently asked chief financial officers of American corporations to predict the returns of investing in the S. & P. 500. The researchers asked for ranges that should have included the right answer about eighty per cent of the time. In fact, returns fell inside the range less than one-third of the time.
And yet accurate forecasting depends in large part on admitting what we don’t know—that is, having a well-calibrated lack of confidence. Even the wisest minds and most sophisticated computer models can’t predict with certainty what will happen in the future.
For the past three years, I have been working on the Good Judgment Project with Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers. The project is part of a first-of-its-kind forecasting tournament. Together with thousands of volunteer forecasters, we have been predicting geopolitical events for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the research arm of the U.S. intelligence agencies. We have forecast, to pick just a few examples, the probability that Angela Merkel would win reëlection in Germany, the probability that Bashar al-Assad would fall in Syria, and the probability that the Afghan government would resume peace talks with the Taliban.
It works like this: IARPA asks us questions about events relevant to U.S. foreign policy, and we open those questions to our forecasters—a collection of smart, curious, and well-informed laypeople who represent a broad cross-section of educated professionals. They are, on average, about thirty-five years old. More than sixty per cent of them have post-graduate degrees. The forecasters rely on many public sources of information to make their forecasts: newspapers, blogs, press releases, Twitter feeds. They also try to get closer to the source, consulting others and even soliciting help from strangers on Web sites like Reddit. They attempt to gather and digest the available information objectively, without over-reacting to hype. Then they submit their predictions on the Good Judgment Project Web site. After we learn the outcome of a given event, we can go back and score people’s forecasts. We reward good forecasts with better scores and post the names of the best forecasters on an online leaderboard. Our forecasters have an impressive record, but that’s not because they are world experts on the topics they are forecasting or because they have access to a trove of complicated data. Instead, they benefit from a little bit of online training—in which we discuss, among other things, acknowledging uncertainty and avoiding overconfidence.
We asked our forecasters whether Dmitry Medvedev would be inaugurated as President of Russia after the 2012 election. When the question opened in September, 2011, our forecasters gave Medvedev a decent chance—about thirty per cent, on average. But after a couple of events at which Medvedev signalled deference to Putin, the consensus forecast dropped close to zero and stayed there. The forecasting began with a great deal of uncertainty, but updated swiftly in the face of useful information.
Something else happened when we asked who would succeed Benedict XVI as Pope. There were four leading candidates, but our forecasters put their collective probability of becoming Pope below fifty per cent, on average, right up until the question closed in March of 2013. With little useful information leaking from the papal conclave in Rome, our forecasters faced a great deal of uncertainty, making it difficult to have much confidence in any forecast. The forecasters—unlike many pundits, courtroom witnesses, or corporate executives—admitted it. And that is what made their forecast so good.
Photograph by Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty.
My great-great-uncle Benny, according to family lore, took the rap for Nucky Johnson. In “Boardwalk Empire,” Nucky is the city’s treasurer, immortalized by Steve Buscemi and his rubber-cement cheekbones; in real life, during the Prohibition, he was the sheriff who ruled Atlantic City, and Uncle Benny was one of his lackeys. Other members of my family were more naïvely involved in Atlantic City’s underbelly: my grandmother, as a child, innocently carried chits from bookies to guests in her family’s hotel. But, despite the seamy side, my older relatives remember the city as a thrilling place, with its diving horses and Tony Grant’s Stars of Tomorrow.
When Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” in 1899, Americans already loved to travel. Vacations were once a privilege for the wealthiest, but by the turn of the century cheaper and faster railroads opened up tourism to the middle class. Atlantic City was in the right place at the right time. Through the early nineteen-sixties, it was the Eastern seaboard’s go-to summer resort: a short train ride from New York City and Philadelphia, the town offered affordable entertainment for everyone. By the nineteen-seventies, though, Atlantic City had lost its purpose. If you wanted fun, you could fly to Las Vegas; if you wanted a breeze, you could crank up the air-conditioning. In 1976, New Jersey passed a bill that legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City, which helped, but not enough. By the time I was growing up there, in the nineties, little remained of the glamorous place my grandparents remembered. My brother and I used to count the cash-for-gold stores along Pacific Avenue; we once identified eighteen of them in four blocks.
Now Atlantic City risks losing even its modest status as a regional gambling center. Over the past couple of years, Pennsylvania and Delaware have legalized gambling. In 2012, Pennsylvania became the second-largest gambling market in the United States, behind Las Vegas and surpassing Atlantic City. And, this month, New York approved an amendment to allow seven casinos in the state. Since 2006, Atlantic City casino revenue has fallen by more than forty-one per cent, from more than five billion dollars to three billion last year. With gambling legalized in the surrounding states, Atlantic City casinos have lost much of their pull: Why travel an hour and a half if you can lose money in your own backyard?
Two years ago, the casinos of Atlantic City pooled together to fund the nonprofit marketing organization Atlantic City Alliance, meant to persuade people that the town is good for more than gambling. This is how the Alliance describes Atlantic City: “From sandals to stilettos and foie gras to funnel cakes, Atlantic City offers something for everyone.” (It’s a little hard to picture exactly what’s supposed to be going on: Paris meets the Iowa State Fair?) And, in April of 2012, the Alliance announced a new slogan for Atlantic City: “Do AC.” That phrase, which supplants “Always Turned On,” which had earlier replaced “America’s Favorite Playground,” seems crafted to mean pretty much whatever you want. The city hopes that a new online-gambling law in New Jersey—which requires online platforms to partner with physical casinos within state lines—will help boost gaming revenues. But “Do AC” also promotes a vision of Atlantic City as a resort destination beyond night life and casinos. If the city can only attract more tourists, the thinking goes, perhaps real-estate developers will follow, building housing and entertainment complexes in the city’s many vacant lots that will, in turn, attract even more tourists.
Six months after Atlantic City announced the “Do AC” campaign, Hurricane Sandy grazed the city. Though the storm ripped up sections of the boardwalk, the main structure remained sound. The media coverage of Sandy’s damage to the Jersey Shore focussed largely on Seaside Heights, of MTV fame, which was more thoroughly wrecked. Hurricane Sandy’s damage to Atlantic City has been as much psychological as physical: though the city promises it is in fine condition, and open for business, tourists still seem skeptical.
Atlantic City’s newest casino, a 2.4-billion-dollar glass behemoth called Revel, was conceived as a luxury resort destination. Revel is distinguished—if you can call it that—by a white sphere, the world’s largest pinball, balancing on top. But in February of 2013, a little over a year after opening its doors, Revel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (In May, the casino completed Chapter 11 restructuring.) The luxury model didn’t attract enough visitors to make up for the over-all slump in gaming revenues. Now Revel is trying to attract more people with features such as the “DigiPit,” a performance space on the gambling floor where acrobats writhe and tumble in front of the people playing on digital gaming machines.
On November 5th, Don Guardian upset the incumbent Lorenzo Langford to become the city’s first Republican mayor since 1984. He is hopeful about its prospects. “What Atlantic City does best is reinvent itself,” he told me. Guardian agrees that Atlantic City should go beyond gambling; he described a long-term vision that includes an Epcot-like “world bazaar” that would celebrate the town’s diversity, with Indian food, African art, and an R. & B. museum. But that’s still far in the future. Meanwhile, the Atlantic City Alliance offers plenty of suggestions for things that business travellers and families can do once they get to Atlantic City—the Convention Hall, Gardner’s Basin, the Film Festival—but none of them are really compelling reasons to go. The casinos aren’t spectacular enough to be an attraction on their own, and the hotels and piers from the forties have literally crumbled. Atlantic City might try to dress itself up as a glitzy club destination or a family-friendly haven, but the truth is that the town has to offer what it has always offered: a beach, a boardwalk, and some places to gamble. Once upon a time, that sounded like a lot.
Photograph by Michael Perez for The Washington Post via Getty