Arise, ye prisoners of barbeque and holiday traffic

At 5:36 on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, it's hard to keep one's mind focused on substantive posts, and you wouldn't read them if I did. To judge by today's comments, it's all y'all can do to engage in a little desultory chitchat about music and giant grasshoppers. So here are a few fun¹ links for your Labor Day delectation:

From The Atlantic's mighty archive, Jack London on scabs, in which our intrepid author battles with deadweight loss and competition:

It is for this reason that a laborer is so fiercely hostile to another laborer who offers to work for less pay or longer hours. To hold his place (which is to live), he must offset this offer by another equally liberal, which is equivalent to giving away somewhat from the food and shelter he enjoys. To sell his day's work for two dollars instead of two dollars and a half means that he, his wife, and his children will not have so good a roof over their heads, such warm clothes on their backs, such substantial food in their stomachs. Meat will be bought less frequently, and it will be tougher and less nutritious; stout new shoes will go less often on the children's feet; and disease and death will be more imminent in a cheaper house and neighborhood.

Thus, the generous laborer, giving more of a day's work for less return (measured in terms of food and shelter), threatens the life of his less generous brother laborer, and, at the best, if he does not destroy that life, he diminishes it. Whereupon the less generous laborer looks upon him as an enemy, and, as men are inclined to do in a tooth-and-nail society, he tries to kill the man who is trying to kill him.

When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing. In the deepest holds of his being, though he does not reason the impulse, he has an ethical sanction. He feels dimly that he has justification, just as the home-defending Boer felt, though more sharply, with each bullet he fired at the invading English. Behind every brick thrown by a striker is the selfish "will to live" of himself and the slightly altruistic will to live of his family. The family-group came into the world before the state-group, and society being still on the primitive basis of tooth and nail, the will to live of the state is not so compelling to the striker as the will to live of his family and himself.

In addition to the use of bricks, clubs, and bullets, the selfish laborer finds it necessary to express his feelings in speech. Just as the peaceful country-dweller calls the sea-rover a "pirate," and the stout burgher calls the man who breaks into his strong-box a "robber," so the selfish laborer applies the opprobrious epithet "scab" to the laborer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labor-power. The sentimental connotation of scab is as terrific as that of " traitor" or "Judas," and a sentimental definition would be as deep and varied as the human heart. It is far easier to arrive at what may be called a technical definition, worded in commercial terms, as, for instance, that a scab is one who gives more value for the same price than another.

The laborer who gives more time, or strength, or skill, for the same wage, than another, or equal time, or strength, or skill, for a less wage, is a scab. This generousness on his part is hurtful to his fellow laborers, for it compels them to an equal generousness which is not to their liking, and which gives them less of food and shelter. But a word may be said for the scab. Just as his act makes his rivals compulsorily generous, so do they, by fortune of birth and training, make compulsory his act of generousness. He does not scab because he wants to scab. No whim of the spirit, no burgeoning of the heart, leads him to give more of his labor-power than they for a certain sum.

It is because he cannot get work on the same terms as they that he is a scab. There is less work than there are men to do work. This is patent, else the scab would not loom so large on the labor-market horizon. Because they are stronger than he, or more skilled, or more fortunate, or more energetic, it is impossible for him to take their places at the same wage. To take their places he must give more value, must work longer hours, or receive a smaller wage. He does so, and he cannot help it, for his will to live is driving him on as well as they are being driven on by theirs, and to live he must win food and shelter, which he can do only by receiving permission to work from some man who owns a bit of land or piece of machinery. And to receive permission from this man, he must make the transaction profitable for him.

Viewed in this light, the scab who gives more labor-power for a certain price than his fellows is not so generous after all. He is no more generous with his energy than the chattel slave and the convict laborer, who, by the way, are the almost perfect scabs. They give their labor-power for about the minimum possible price. But, within limits, they may loaf and malinger, and, as scabs, are exceeded by the machine, which never loafs and malingers, and which is the ideally perfect scab.

It is not nice to be a scab. Not only is it not in good social taste and comradeship, but, from the standpoint of food and shelter, it is bad business policy. Nobody desires to scab, to give most for least. The ambition of every individual is quite the opposite,—to give least for most; and as a result, living in a tooth-and-nail society, battle royal is waged by the ambitious individuals. But in its most salient aspect, that of the struggle over the division of a joint-product, it is no longer a battle between individuals, but between groups of individuals. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material, make something useful out of it, add to its value, and then proceed to quarrel over the division of the added value. Neither cares to give most for least. Each is intent on giving less than the other and on receiving more.

Why don't we celebrate Labor Day on May 1st like everyone else, particularly since May 1st commemorates the Haymarket Riot, an American labor milestone? Slate's Explainer, er, explains.

What's an animal lover to do for that special barbeque? Might I suggest Certified Humane Meat?

Various versions of the Internationale, to be sung during that somnolent post-gorging period.

Demotivating your workforce, from Despair.com

¹ For some values of the word "fun"

Wanna bet?

Judging what history will think of a president is, in the popular vernacular of yesteryear, a mug's game. Harry Truman declined to run again with a pre-election approval rating of just 23%, but we regard him pretty well, thanks mostly to desegregating the military. On the other hand, Warren Harding was well thought of throughout his administration; the scandals only came to light after his death in the third year of his term.

That said, this strikes me as pretty unlikely. I'd be a prepared to take a little action at Longbets if Karl Rove is ready to put his money where his mouth is.

Rah, rah, Ron?

Most of my libertarian friends seem to love Ron Paul. Their descriptions of his presidential campaign have a wistful "If only . . . " quality to them that I haven't seen in a political discussion since the write-in campaign by the girl's field-hockey team to elect Christian Slater president of the student council.

After my much-regretted decision to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, I've kind of been sitting on the political sidelines. I'm pretty sure I'll hate whoever gets elected. Rudy might be funny just to see the ACLU get all misty and nostalgic about the current administration, but that probably won't make up for having to wear uniforms and go to bed at 10 o'clock every night. John McCain lost me at the execrable McCain-Feingold finance reform, and has not exactly covered himself in glory since. I'm not even sure what one calls his peculiar politics: popuwafflism? Mitt Romney's specialty seems to be a blandness so total that I have difficulty recalling what he looks like, broken by inexplicably revealing stories about, for example, his penchant for strapping dogs to the roofs of cars.

Vote Democrat, you say, then. John Edwards teeth sure are pretty, but his economic polices sure aren't. Hilary Clinton . . . even if I were disposed to vote for her vintage 1967 earnest technocratic policies, I'd be more than a mite uncomfortable with a political lineup that went Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. Which means I'm probably going to end up voting for Obama just because I like his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee . . . and then regretting it as soon as he actually starts doing things.

But I digress. The point being that, having pretty much opted out of paying attention to politics, I've just kind of assumed that I would like Ron Paul to be president, if only the thing weren't totally impossible.

But then every time I hear about his actual policies, I'm pretty thoroughly appalled. He voted against CAFTA and wants us to withdraw from the WTO. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he's also hardline on immigration. He favors the stupid Cuba travel ban even though the Communist Menace evaporated almost two decades ago. And last week, sitting with one of his supporters at a wedding, I found out that he wants to move America back onto the gold standard. I cannot, in good conscience, even entertain the hope of electing a man who wants to outsource our monetary policy to Anglo-American.

Music Friday

So my downloads have reset, and I managed to get 100 downloaded with six minutes to go until midnight. I thought I'd update you on what I managed to download between 5 o'clock yesterday, when I realized that I had, in the excitement of moving and switching computers, forgotten to download any music this month; and midnight, when the downloads reset. I should note that there was a three+ hour break for dinner.

The Affair Yes Yes to You
Amon Tobin Chaos Theory
Arnold Schoenberg Verklarte Nacht/Chamber Symphony No 2
Beirut Lon Gisland
The Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts
godspeed you! black emperor Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
Infected Mushroom Classical Mushroom
Moondog Moondog
The National Boxer
The New Pornographers Twin Cinema
Okkervil River The Stage Names
Quentin Crisp An Evening with Quentin Crisp
Steve Reich/The Smith Quartet Different Trains
Tokyo Police Club Smith
Georgie James The Grizzly Jive
Death Cab for Cutie Dream Scream

As you can see, I was in an Indie kind of mood, which is not to disparage any of the other genres that were suggested; I will explore some of them with this month's downloads. But when you're in a hurry, it's best to stick with one or two genres; it's easier to distinguish what you like. And so far, I like all of it, except that I'm kind of ambivalent about The Affair. For that matter, I should like all of it, since several of those selections were repeats of things I lost to a hard drive failure and my poor backup technique.

As you can also see, anyone who was hoping for Yglesias-quality music blogging will have to slide back over to his blog. Thanks for everyone who made suggestions, and keep them coming; I have a hundred downloads every month.

Incidentally, I should mention that if you don't have an eMusic subscription, you should totally get one; mine costs $25 a month, or 25 cents per fully transferrable MP3. However, I do want to complain about the fact that after you get to 100 downloads a month, there's no further discount; the 200 song package costs exactly twice as much, give or take a penny, as the 100 song package.

Not that this has kept me from toying with the idea . . .

So hip, I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis

Thanks, Brian. I needed something to start the weekend off right.

David Brooks is funny

Ezra Klein suddenly notices after this column:

I think it was Abraham Joshua Heschel — after he broke off with Reinhold Niebuhr and formed Jefferson Airplane — who observed that though the ancients counseled, “Know Thyself,” in 87 percent of actual cases, profound self-knowledge is not transforming. It’s just disappointing.

And this is never more true than when the beach self takes over. There is a boardwalk game near where we vacation where you roll balls into holes to try to get your mechanical horse across a track faster than your 11 opponents. You pay a dollar a game and if you win you get a stuffed horse worth 75 cents. My beach self has played that game for 15 years, and I have never once gotten up without secretly wishing I was playing again.

In my heart, I’d be happy to play that game 11 hours a day at the cost of several thousand dollars, and the only thing preventing me is that the Slovakian girl behind the counter might conclude that American men are pathetic.

I question the economics, there; I'd guess the horse is worth more like 2 cents. But it is certainly true that a life without funnel cakes and salt water taffy is not worth living.

Actually, I too had just noticed Brooks being exceptionally funny, in this review of Drew Westen's book:

Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, “If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn’t a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father’s own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings.”

At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: “Why don’t you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors’ kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk.” If Democrats would go for people’s primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they’d win elections.

This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?

Of course, perhaps this is not fair: who couldn't write a funny review of a book by a man who thinks that the way to make an emotional connection with people is to make fun of recovering drunks? But it was rather wittier and more acerbic than I generally think of Brooks as being.

Update A reader argues that Westen's response makes this piece sound considerably less funny. I haven't read the book, but I have heard the good professor interviewed on NPR, and after listening to him for an hour, I have to say that he, and his thesis, came off as exactly the painfully parochial, self-unaware, thoroughly risible parody that David Brooks presents him as.

Oh, what a tangled web

I am totally terrified of spiders, along with almost anything else that has more than four legs. (Grasshoppers are okay). Past boyfriends will attest that you don't really know fear until you hear the electrifying strangled screams that emit from my mouth at the sight of, say, a largish cockroach. Naturally, therefore, I was unable to resist clicking on a New York Times headline that read "Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nightmare"

Actually, however, the story turned out to be pretty cool:

Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

. . .

Allen Dean, a spider expert at Texas A&M University, has seen a lot of webs, but even he described this one as “rather spooky, kind of like Halloween.”

Mr. Dean and several other scientists said they had never seen a web of this size outside of the tropics, where the relatively few species of “social” spiders that build communal webs are most active.

What about this Bush plan?

The administration has announced a plan to help borrowers in danger of default. Broadly, the terms seem to be:

1) Increasing the number of homeowners the FHA can insure, which will help them refinance at lower rates. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) doesn't offer loans itself; it just helps people with shaky credit or financials qualify for mortgages by guaranteeing to pick up the tab in case of default.

2) Suspending the tax penalty for people who get their loan values reduced. Normally, the IRS taxes any such reduction, in order to prevent companies from giving their employees "loans" which they then "forgive" as a way of evading taxes on salaries. I wouldn't be precisely shocked if some valued employees with employer-sponsored loans, but without financial problems, see their debt reduced during the tax holiday.

3) A joint initiative between Treasury and HUD to offer as-yet-unspecified help to people in danger of defaulting.

Overall, this seems to me like a pretty good package. It doesn't, as many of the more generous plans do, offer irresponsible borrowers free home equity at the expense of either the lender or the taxpayer. But it does give them a chance to get some breathing space by working out terms with their lender. And it stops the rather horrid practice of taxing people who've had to sell their house for less than the value of the mortgage.

Of course, one wonders how much help the Treasury/HUD initiative will really be--it may just consist of Federal employees saying, in stentorian tones, "You sure do have more house than you can afford, there." But overall, it seems like a pretty good package, and the expense to the taxpayer seems admirably minimized.

Nearly one-third of mortgages responsible for nearly one third of defaults. Reel at 11.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association found that mortgages on properties that aren't occupied by the owner -- mostly investment homes -- account for between 21% and 32% of the defaults on prime-quality home loans in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, states where overdue payments are mounting fast.

Wow! Those investors are a bunch of deadbeats. But wait:

In Nevada, Arizona and Florida, loans for properties that weren't owner-occupied accounted for nearly a third of all home mortgages issued in 2005.

So only in California is that number at all surprising. And it may simply be an outlier; no word on states where defaults by investors are abnormally low.

Mad Ireland hurt you into fundraising . . .

Last night at dinner, I was asked a question: why do Irish-Americans still care so much about Northern Ireland? Why do people two or more generations removed from Ireland still give money to the IRA?

My family never has given money to the IRA--in fact, we may be the only Irish Americans who donate to the SDLP. Nonetheless, I offered an opinion.

For Americans, I said, the Troubles never ended. Their families never experienced building their own, Irish state; they never lived in an Ireland that wasn't ruled by the British. And so the last thing they had of Ireland was the terrible memories of whatever forced them to leave. And in many cases, the memories were terrible; I have met people who had relatives killed at Croke Park or were otherwise terribly victimised by the Black and Tans. Their other memories were of being terribly poor--a friend's grandmother actually grew up cooking on an open fire that vented through a hole in the ceiling--and rightly or wrongly, they blamed the British for this.

Moreover, the ones who stayed on the coasts, in Boston and New York and Philadelphia, felt herded into ghettoes by Protestants only marginally less bigoted than the ones they'd left behind in Ireland. I'm not sure that my friends who have rechristened themselves progressives understand just how much of that movement was an explicit revulsion against Catholic immigrants, and the political power and structures that they had built.

My great-grandfather's generation was economically, politically, and socially quite constrained by this discrimination; my father's generation experienced it regularly; and even I occasionally stumble into its echos. The St. Patrick's Day party I attended in the Main Line, where the expert eye of the fifty-something hostess immediately picked me out as the only Irish person present, and introduced me to the guests accordingly. Or the seventy-something woman at a hotel I worked at who rechristened me "Millie" after some Irish maid they'd had in the twenties, and when her companion corrected her, grandly declared (I swear, I'm not making this up) that "The Irish don't care about things like that." Obviously, I do not feel that my life has been in any way affected, much less blighted, by anti-Irish discrimination. But when I run into things like that, I think I can understand how I would feel, if that sort of thing were a feature of my everday life, rather than a thrillingly anachronistic hint of a forgotten past.

All of this is true, but I think it is too kind. There is another reason that Irish Americans give to Gerry Adams and his merry band of Marxist maniacs, which is that it is all very far away. Irish Americans can, at relatively cheap monetary cost, purchase social status, solidarity, and the exciting feeling of striking a blow for Ireland! They suffer not one whit from the cycle of violence that they help sustain.

Bleg

I've got 76 downloads remaining on my eMusic account, and two days to download. Normally, I like to spread my downloads at a leisurely pace throughout the month, but I'm afraid I've been busy, so now it's time for a binge. What should I grab?

Update I thought you should know that this thread caused one of my friends to IM me last night with the opinion "Wow, your commenters DO have good taste". Keep up the good work, guys.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .

When did they write a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" into the constitution?

Airport follies

Maria of Crooked Timber asks a question:

Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport: – a shower – clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it) – daylight – an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT – nutritious but not too heavy food – a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.

And here’s what is generally available: – Gucci – Chanel – l’Occitane – Bodyshop – Lacoste – Nike – a few plastic seats – McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

. . .

So why the complete mismatch of trapped and exhausted consumers to luxury goods? Surely the airports have woken up to the fact that travelling is mass market. Or are travellers such a captive market that airports can completely ignore what they actually want…?

My answer: in an airport, foot traffic is very high, and space is at a premium. So you should expect to see things that go at a very high volume (McDonalds) or things that are very expensive per-inch-of-display-space, such as Gucci. Showers and napping capsules do not meet either criteria.

Now I am over here . . . now I am over there . . .

Perhaps what the economy needs is not a Fed chief, but a psychiatrist. It seems like it might need some lithium more than a rate cut.

This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates GDP, released its new estimates for the second quarter. Much to my personal surprise, it was a big upward revision. According to the BEA, the economy grew at an annualized pace of 4% in the second quarter, up from an earlier estimate of 3.4%. That estimate was itself a big upward surprise, after a very disappointing first quarter during which the economy grew at a tepid 0.6% annualised rate.

Whatever manic high we hit in the second quarter, needless to say, has now worn off. Economists are talking about something in the 1.5-2.5% range for the current quarter, with a projected downtrend heading into years end.

Talking telecoms

Peter Suderman questions whether Japan's broadband is really 8-to-30 times faster than ours.

The article he references is a little misleading; it compares the best broadband available in Japan (100 mbps) to the average in America. But America has fiber to the home to, and the comparison is considerably less invidious; we just have less of it, because it takes longer to build out a fiber network for a country with an average population density of less than 3000 people per square mile, than it does in a country where the population density hovers around 12,500 people per square mile. The article spends a lot of time focused on telecoms policy, when awesome telecoms policy is not going to give us better geographical conditions, or a newer copper network.

That said, better telecoms policy would give us competition for services, something sorely needed. Forget high speed internet; how come the government protects Comcast's right to be my sole provider of surly, desultory cable service? These days, it seems like the only hope is that the cable companies and the baby bells will meet on some windy plain, like Mothra and Godzilla, and destroy each other.

Update I grabbed the density figures off an internet site, and either read them wrong, or used a bad site. Commenter Internet Ronin says:

For the record, according to the United Nations, the correct numbers for population density for the United States and Japan in 2005: 31 people per square kilometer in the United States and 343 people per square kilometer in Japan. Japan ranks #30 out of 230 nations/territories while the United States ranks #172.

That doesn't change the point, of course; in fact, it rather augments it. But accuracy counts.

You think too much

I very much enjoyed Jerome Groopman's book, How Doctors Think. I love his writing at the New Yorker. But I am afraid I didn't think very much of the book's thesis, which is that doctors need to improve their clinical judgement rather than relying on evidence based medicines and statistics. "People are not statistics" is sloppy thinking; most of the time, we are. And there's substantial evidence that doctors do best when they treat their patients by the numbers.

Over at eSkeptic, Charles Lambdin voices the same criticism:

Groopman tells us he is troubled that new doctors seem to be trained to “think like computers,” that they rely on diagnostic decision aids and some seductive “boiler-plate scheme” called evidence-based medicine. Groopman’s position, when his various arguments are gathered and assembled, becomes untenable. He admits doctors suffer from innumerable biases that diminish the accuracy of diagnosis, reducing many diagnoses to idiosyncratic responses fueled by mood, whether the patient is liked or disliked, advertisements recently seen, etc. Thus Groopman agrees with decision scientists’ diagnosis of doctor decision making; but then he goes on to wantonly dismiss what many of the very same researchers claim is the best (and perhaps only) remedy, the way to “debias” diagnosis: evidence-based medicine and the use of decision aids. In place of statistics what does Groopman suggest doctors rely on? Clinical intuition of course, the very source of the cognitive biases he pays lip service to throughout his book.

. . .

Most doctors do not like decision aids. They rob them of much of their power and prestige. Why go through medical school and accrue a six-figure debt if you’re simply going to use a computer to make diagnoses? One study famously showed that a successful predictive instrument for acute ischemic heart disease (which reduced the false positive rate from 71% to 0) was, after its use in randomized trials, all but discarded by doctors (only 2.8% of the sample continued to use it). It is no secret many doctors despise evidence-based medicine. It is impersonal “cookbook medicine.” It is “dehumanizing,” treating people like statistics. Patients do not like it either. They think less of doctors’ abilities who rely on such aids.

The problem is that it is usually in patients’ best interest to be treated like a “statistic.” Doctors cannot outperform mechanical diagnoses because their own diagnoses are inconsistent. An algorithm guarantees the same input results in the same output, and whether one likes this or not, this maximizes accuracy. If the exact same information results in variable and individual output, error will increase. However, the psychological baggage associated with the use of statistics in medicine (doctors’ pride and patients’ insistence on “certainty”) makes this a difficult issue to overcome.

The statistics vs. clinical intuition debate has ensued for decades in psychology. Where one sides in the debate is largely determined by what one makes of a single phrase: “Group statistics don’t apply to individuals.” This claim, widely believed, ignores many of the most basic concepts of probability and statistics, such as error. Yes, individuals possess unique qualities, but they also share many features that allow for predictive power.8 If 95% of a sample with quality X has quality Y, insisting that someone with quality X may not have Y because “statistics don’t apply to individuals” will only decrease accuracy. Insistence on certainty decreases accuracy. As Groopman himself says, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

. . .

Physicians who allow themselves to think in such discretionary ways can find “exceptions” everywhere they look, and, augmenting a decision aid as they see fit, will only end up lowering its overall diagnostic accuracy. Why? Because human beings do not apply rules consistently. Mechanical procedures always lead to the same conclusion from the same input. Doctors are subject to random fluctuations in diagnosis caused by judgmentally-irrelevant factors including availability, priming, recency effects, inconsistent weighting of information, fatigue, etc., all of which reduce accuracy. What leads to a correct decision for one case may not for another, and variables that contribute to the diagnosis made may actually be uncorrelated with it.

This is hardly restricted to doctors. Every profession resists being told that there is a standard way to do things, that a cookie cutter can cut better than their skilled hand. Journalists famously hate the "inverted U" style of writing a news story, even though it really does seem to work better than anything else; it's boring to write, and leaves no room for individual style. Teachers don't like "teaching to the test" or rigidly programmed phonics curricula, even though the latter produces measurably better results than all but the very best teachers. Unfortunately, for many of us, it may be time to welcome our new robot overlords.

Ecoterrorism

I don't watch 24, both because I have no interest in looking long into the abyss, and because I find it just kinda tiresome. But it looks like next season, it may be my duty, as an eco-friendly urban type, to start:

int. CTU - day

JACK BAUER talks to JANIS GOLD.

JANIS GOLD
Our source tells us that the terrorists' plan is blow up Broward Dam. [should we make this a real dam? anything'd do] This would create mass flooding, cut power to the entire state, and destroy the habitat of the tidewater goby.

JACK BAUER
Dammit! Without that goby, what will our local heron population eat?

JANIS GOLD
Try not to think about that.

JACK BAUER
I can't help it! Every link in the food chain matters!

Jack punches his hand through a wall.

H/T Ezra.

Fast and loose

Over at Felix Salmon's place, guest-blogger Yves Smith chastises Alan Greenspan:

Remember, a central banker actually has very few policy tools, and monetary policy is a blunt instrument. Moral suasion is one of their powerful but often not effectively used instruments. Greenspan, unfortunately, was an enabler, fond of impenetrable statements that left everyone perplexed but not worried since in the end he'd open the money tap in times of trouble. It was a hollowing out of the role of the central banker who, as William McChesney Martin famously remarked, was supposed to take the punch bowl away just when the party was getting good. Greenspan didn't merely help create widespread asset inflation via overly aggressive rate cuts in 1998 and 2002, but also set a tone that makes it hard for his successor Bernanke to deliver tough messages.

If there were ever any doubts about Greenspan's willingness to rock the boat, they were dispelled, irrevocably, on December 6, 1996. Greenspan, the evening before, had used the now famous phrase, "irrational exuberance," as a question rather than a statement about a recent runup in the equity markets. The Nikkei fell 3% overnight. European markets traded down 2-3%. The Dow dropped 145 points before rallying late in the day.

And Greenspan took the trouble to clarify his remarks and retreat from any implication that stocks were too high.

Now readers might think this confirms Greenspan's power, but actually it shows the reverse. The stock markets are not the Fed's job. And worse, a Fed chairman should not try to talk the markets up. This revealed how Greenspan was hostage to the markets, and that attitude may have taken root at the Fed.

I'm not sure I'd cite William McChesney Martin as an example of a fellow who took the punchbowl away when the party got going; during the last five years of his twenty-year fed term, he allowed inflation to spike from 1.6% in 1965 to 5.7% in 1970, rather higher than is thought fitting by today's central bankers.

I think it's justified to fault Mr Greenspan for concern with the stock market . . . only most of the people mad that he worried about falling prices were also mad that he didn't pop the stock bubble by raising rates. As a friend reports, he once saw Greenspan heckled by one Punchbowl Paul, who demanded to know why he hadn't done something about the speculative bubble.

Greenspan blinked, then said "If you're asking whether we know how to use the tools of the central bank to deflate a stock market bubble, the answer is yes." He then stood silently while the various financial types in the room pondered just how high he would have had to raise rates, and margin requirements, in order to pop that particular bubble, and the fairly hideous economic effects that would have resulted from such an action.

But I don't think that the world would have been a happier place if Greenspan had kept the lid on the punchbowl in 1998 and 2002. We haven't had a really bad, deep recession in 26 years, and it seems reasonable to think that the Fed's willingness to control inflation, while releasing liquidity as necessary, are very much responsible for that change. Had Greenspan not opened the taps when times got tough and markets were unhappy, we might well have had some really nasty fallout.

The problem really is that central bankers, like most government institutions, are equipped to fight the last war. Alan Greenspan (and now Ben Bernanke) had excellent tools to deal with price inflation and liquidity problems. But our central bankers don't have much on tap to deal with asset price inflation, i.e. speculative bubbles. Nor do they have any way to keep a flood of capital from flowing into our markets and lifting all boats, so to speak . . . nor from flowing back out and leaving us to deal with the mess. In the latter case, I don't think that they should have those tools. But that means they can't protect us from all bad financial events.

Do libertarians dream of electric rational value maximisers?

A peek into my brain: last night I had a long dream wherein I frantically hunted for my copy of Robert Nozick's Irony, State and Utopia.

Seriously?

Did Tucker Carlson just admit on television that he and a friend jumped a gay guy for propositioning him? Yeah, it seems like he did.

The economics of despair

This is the second piece that I've read on Charles Karelis' new book, The Persistence of Poverty. Steven Pearlstein describes it thus:

The reason the poor are poor is that they are more likely to not finish school, not work, not save, and get hooked on drugs and alcohol and run afoul of the law. Liberals tend to blame it on history (slavery) or lack of opportunity (poor schools, discrimination), while conservatives blame government (welfare) and personal failings (lack of discipline), but both sides agree that these behaviors are so contrary to self-interest that they must be irrational.

After all, the reason we study, work, save and generally behave ourselves is that these behaviors allow us to earn more money, and more money will improve our lives. And, by logic, that must be particularly true of the poor, for whom each extra dollar to be earned or saved for a rainy day is surely more valuable than it is for, say, Bill Gates.

In economics, this insight -- that the fifth ice cream sundae is less valuable than the first one -- is enshrined in the law of diminishing marginal utility.

But what if this iron law of economics is wrong? What if it doesn't apply at every point along the income scale? If you and everyone around you are desperately poor, maybe it's perfectly rational to think that an extra dollar or two won't make much of a difference in reducing your misery. Or that you won't be able to "study" your way out of the ghetto. Or that if you find a $100 bill on the street, maybe it's logical to blow it on one great night on the town rather than portion it out a dollar a day for 100 days.

Tyler Cowen's description is a little more pithy:

If your car has lots of scratches and dents, getting rid of just one doesn't help much either.

There's a lot of interesting literature on the bad incentives faced by the poor. They often have punitively high marginal tax rates, because of the lost benefits; they also face a high personal "tax" in the form of poor relatives and friends, since earning additional money makes it very likely that they will be tapped for loans and other forms of financial help. This already explains a lot of the behavior that Pearlstein describes, as do various sociological phenomena.

But I find this thesis intriguing. One way to think about it is that the poor face a lot of problems with threshold effects. If I need an apartment and a car, and I have the down payment for a Hyundai and a basement efficiency, each additional dollar improves my lot. If I need an apartment and a car, and I have $30, I might as well spend that $30 on dinner and a movie, because I'm going to end up on Mom's couch tonight either way. Once you reach the threshhold, it's easy to make a straight tradeoff between two forms of utility. But if it's going to take you nine months to save the cash you need, your choice right now becomes fun, or none.

Another way to think about it is that if you are living on the edge, this lowers, rather than raises, the returns to planning. If there's a 50% chance that an unforeseen expense will force you into bankruptcy, why not load up on some credit card debt and have fun while you can?

I'm not convinced . . . but I've added it to my Amazon queue.

The good old days

Brad DeLong is absolutely stunning when he writes about economic history:

A quarter of American households in 1900 had boarders or lodgers (compared to two percent today). Half of American households in 1900 had fewer rooms than persons (compared to five percent today). A quarter of American households in 1900 had running water (compared to ninety-nine percent today). An eighth of American households in 1900 had flush toilets (compared to ninety-eight percent today). Less than a fifth had refrigerators, less than one-twelfth had gas or electric lights, less than one-twentieth had telephones or washing machines, and of course there were no radios or televisions or vacuum cleaners or central heating, to list just those major appliances that have greater than ninety percent coverage today.

And even if you did have a four room house, could you afford to heat more than one room of it? Many Homestead four-room houses became two-room houses--the kitchen and the bedroom--in the depths of the western Pennsylvania winter.

The diets of workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century were composed primarily of meat of widely variable quality, bread, butter, potatoes, oatmeal, and tea and milk–with luxuries such as sweets added in more or less regularly. We would find the diet somewhat monotonous (however, a lot of time and effort went into Þnding different ways to make potatoes). Almost always the first luxury that a working-class family moving up would purchase would be the services of a laundress: since laundry was expensive and difficult, few working-class families could maintain upper-middle-class standards of cleanliness. How often would you take baths if the water had to brought in from an outside pump, and then heated on the stove? How often would you wash your clothes if everything had to be washed out in the sink, if the fabrics were three times as heavy and the detergents one-third as powerful as the ones available today, and if as a result the laundry was a full day’s chore? Hand laundry was not a two hour a week task. Those who could afford the resources to maintain bourgeois styles of cleanliness flaunted it. White shirts, white dresses, white gloves are all powerful indications of wealth in turn of the century America. They said "I don't have to do my own laundry and ," and they said it loudly.

As a rule married women did not work outside the home–unless they were African-American, in which case they might well do their own family’s housework and be paid for doing a share of some white family’s housework as well. Meal preparation was not a one-hour-a-day but a four-hour-a-day task. Barring a shift toward larger-scale communal or cooperative living–a shift which simply did not happen even though anticipated, hoped for, and worked for by many feminists–within-the-household production and maintenance soaked up one-third the potential adult work hours. It made it next to impossible for married women (unless they were quite rich, or quite poor) to have independent careers and still fulfill the social expectations of household maintenance.

Infant mortality at the turn of the century was high. One in five babies in Homestead, Pennsylvania died before reaching his or her Þrst birthday. Adult men died, too, like flies (and adult women faced substantial risks in childbirth). Accident rates in the factory were such as to leave 260 injured per year–30 dead–out of a total population of 25,000 and a steel mill working population of 5,000. Each year, five percent were injured enough to miss work for some time (although only one percent per year were permanently disabled), and 1/2 percent per year were killed in factory accidents.

You can do the math. Start to work for U.S. Steel when you are 20. There is one chance in seven that the factory will kill you before you reach 50, and almost one chance in three that the factory will disable you. Is it any wonder that life insurance–disability insurance--group lodges that provide benefits (because the company provides few)--loom so large in American working class consciousness at the turn of the century? And is it any wonder that the Þrst component of the welfare state put into place, in many parts of the United States, was workmen’s compensation? Of course, in 1910 Homestead (or in 1930 Detroit, or in Los Angeles today) the most arduous and difficult jobs were done by minorities and immigrants: in 1910 Homestead by Slavs, in 1930 Detroit by Blacks, and in 2000 Los Angeles by Hispanics. At the micro level, such groups are concentrated in the most arduous and lowest-paid jobs because they are poor, because they have limited other options.

Most of the Homestead workforce only worked six days a week: for four out of five workers, the mill was shut on Sundays. U.S. Steel viewed this--shutting most of the mill on Sundays–as a major concession on their part, a concession that they hoped would produce large public relations benefits. From U.S. Steel’s perspective, each hour that a modern plant like Homestead stood idle was tremendously expensive. Variable costs--wages, raw materials, and transportation--made up perhaps 2/3 of total costs. The remainder were fixed: capital costs on the construction of the plant, and maintenance that had to be performed whether the plant was operating intensively or not.

Were U.S. Steel to move from two 12-hour shifts a day to one 12-hour shift, its output would be halved but its costs would be reduced by only 1/3, so total costs per ton of steel made would rise by 1/3. This was not a margin that U.S. Steel could afford. As long as it could Þnd workers willing to work the night shift, the Homestead mill (depressions and recessions apart) stayed open 24 hours a day on weekdays. And when things did change, they changed all at once-from two 12-hour shifts before and during World War I, to two 8-hour shifts (or three 8-hour shifts) during the 1920s, and during and after World War II. Yet Homestead jobs--at least Homestead jobs taken by native-born Americans--were good jobs by the standards of the United States. As historian Ray Ginger put it:

their expectations were not ours. A man who grew up on a Southern farm did not think it cruel that his sons had to work as bobbin boys [collecting spun thread in a textile mill]. An immigrant living in a tenement and working in a sweatshop yet knew that for the Þrst time in his life he was wearing shoes seven days a week...

And Homestead, Pennsylvania jobs paid well both by the standards of the United States and much more so by the standards of the world economy of the time. White households could make around $900 (of 1910 value) a year, placing them well the upper third of the U.S. population in terms of income per household in 1910. Relative to what could be earned by people of similar skill levels anywhere else in the world, a job in the Homestead mill was a very attractive job. Even the unequal America at the turn of the century was a very attractive place compared to the rest of the world. America was exceptional. In spite of the hours, in spite of the risk of death or injury, in spite of the working conditions, these were very good jobs by international standards: jobs worth moving 7,000 miles for, from Hungary or Lithuania to suburban Pittsburgh. For the economy of the late nineteeth century was for the first time in human history a truly global economy, filled with long-distance trade and migration, so people could take advantage of the opportunities opened up by industrialization.

Letting the air out

My former co-blogger, Winterspeak, muses on the problem with un-swelling the housing bubble:

Now that the air has gone out of the too-cheap credit that helped inflate the housing bubble, the question becomes how to undo the bubble with as little damage as possible.

When the internet bubble popped, this happened fairly rapidly: failed dot-coms closed down, their investors took a beating, and their employees moved onto other jobs, some of them still internet related but at better firms. Some went back to grad school. The end result was that the economy overall was fine, people who had invested in internet firms lost money, and the internet overall continued to grow apace, but now focused on better companies.

I think one inevitable requirement of unwinding the housing bubble market is that housing prices have to come down to fall in line with historic trends. In some areas this means very dramatic decreases -- maybe 40%+ in real terms? I'm not sure what a "deflated housing bubble" would look like if it did not bring prices back to historic norms. We are not going to see price declines of this magnitude unless we have very very motivated sellers, which means banks for older properties (which have been foreclosed on), and builders for newer properties. If prices do not fall, then transactions will dry up. I can see the government stepping in and helping owners (and their lenders) but I'd be surprised if builders will be helped that much. This means that areas that have had the most new construction should see the most dramatic price corrections.

That's good news for me, since Washington, DC was one of the most bubblicious areas. My new neighborhood is crowded with just-completed and partially finished condos.

But so far, prices have remained remarkably sticky. People are putting condos onto the rental market rather than take a loss. On a typical (non-August) day, the Craigslist real estate section is filled with ads touting "Brand new construction!" alongside demands that the renter accept a one-year lease with no smoking or pets.

There's no way to know, of course, but I've long wondered whether these rentals make financial sense. Are they covering their carry, much less the opportunity cost of the capital? Prices won't collapse until investors come to terms with the fact that their prior investment is a sunk cost, and pouring more money down the rathole won't make the problem go away.

That may take a long time . . . long enough that prices may never fall as far as they "should". Faced with selling their home at a loss, most people choose to stay put and pray. Instead, what we're likely to see is a very long period of stagnant prices. Inflation may have to do the work of bringing those prices back in line with historical values. In which case, I'd be better off taking advantage of those great rental deals . . .

The good old days.

From Dorothy Parker's "Little Curtis", written in 1927:

Slowly Mrs. Matson made her way down Maple Street. The morning sunshine that flooded the town's main throughfare caused her neither to squint nor to lower her face. She held her head high, looking about her as one who says, "Our good people, we are pleased with you."

She stopped occasionally by a shop-window, to inspect thoroughly the premature autumn costumes there displayed. But her heart was unfluttered by the envy which attacked the lesser women around her. Though her long black coat, of that vintage when coas were puffed of sleeve and cut sharply in at the waist, was stained and shiny, and her hat had the general air of indecision and lack of spirit that comes iwth age, and her elderly black gloves were worn in patches of rough gray, Mrs. Matson had no yearnings for the fresh, trim costumes set temptingly before her. Snug in her was the though of the rows of recent garments, each one in its flowered cretonne casing, occupying the varnished hangers along the poles of her bedroom closet.

She had her unalterable ideas about such people as gave or threw away garments that might still be worn, for warmth and modesty, if not for style. She found it distinctly lower-class to wear one's new clothes "for every day"; there was an unpleasant suggestion of extravagence and riotous living in the practice. The working classes, who, as Mrs. Matson often explained to her friends, went and bought themselves electric ice-boxes and radios the minute they got a little money, did such things.

Roundabout

The next question about higher Chinese wages is, what does it mean for us?

There's a lovely psychic benefit to thinking of Chinese workers getting wealthier, happier and healthier, all while supplying us affordable HDTVs. Some analysts, however, are worried that this benefit will come at a stiff cost to us: inflationary pressure from Chinese exports. For some years now, the falling price of goods from China has helped hold down inflationary pressure in industrialised nations. But with wage and commodity bottlenecks appearing, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, fretted publicly last year that rising Chinese export prices would reverse that pressure upward. As Chinese inflation has gotten stronger, other analysts have joined him.

This would be a particularly bad time for that to happen, as the central bankers, particularly America's, would like some room to cut rates if there are liquidity or other economic problems. If Chinese goods are getting more expensive, that will be harder.

But as my former employer wrote earlier this month, these fears are overblown. Much of the inflation is in local goods such as prepared food. And while wages are rising, productivity is rising even faster, holding down the price of the goods shipped. To the extent that export prices are rising, this is more a result of China's looser yuan policy than an outflow of domestic inflation.

Of course, to Americans shopping for electronics and other China-made gear, the difference is theoretical; price pressure is still up. But we could fight that by backing off the Congressional obsession with a weak-dollar policy. As the article concludes: "The real threat to America's inflation is not that Chinese export prices start to rise modestly, but that Congress is short-sighted enough to impose protectionist measures which prevent American consumers from continuing to buy cheap Chinese imports."

America: exporting high wages abroad

I'm always bemused by globalisation doomsday scenarios in which all of our jobs move to China (or India) in order to take advantage of low-wage workers. If we really do lose all of our high-productivity jobs, and no longer make anything worth having, why would the Indians and Chinese continue to ship us software programs and flat screen televisions? Obviously, for individuals this may be traumatic, but in aggregate, if our economy really gets less productive, we won't have to worry about a flood of cheap Chinese goods. Although if the Chinese and Indians do want to ship us their products in exchange for absolutely nothing, I'm willing to talk.

The other reason this doesn't work, of course, is that as these economies expand, demand for workers pushes up their wages. That's why we no longer buy cheap gimcrackery from Japan. According to the New York Times today, this is already happening:

For decades, many labor economists said that China’s vast population would supply a nearly bottomless pool of workers. So many people would be seeking jobs at any given time, this reasoning went, that wages in this country would be stuck just above subsistence levels. As recently as four years ago, some experts estimated that most of the perhaps 150 million underemployed workers in the countryside would be heading to cities.

Instead, sporadic labor shortages started to appear in 2003 at factories in the Pearl River delta of southeastern China. Now those shortages have spread to factories up and down the Chinese coast, specialists say.

This summer, Mary Gallagher, a Chinese labor specialist at the University of Michigan, visited five sportswear factories near Shanghai and Guangzhou. She found them all struggling to hire and retain workers. One had shut one of its two main production lines because it had nobody to sew shirts and other garments.

“Basically half the factory was shut down and one dormitory was empty,” Ms. Gallagher said.

In interviews, factory executives across the country complained of being forced to give double-digit raises in order to find and keep young workers at all skill levels. Three or four years ago, said Zhong Yi, vice general manager of a leather-jacket manufacturer in Hangzhou in east-central China, 800 to 1,100 yuan a month ($105 to $145) “was a good salary.”

“Now,” he said, “1,500 is the bottom” ($198).

Chinese officials are quick to say that there is no overall shortage of labor — rather, there is a shortage of young workers willing to accept the low wages that prevailed in the 1990s. Factories in cities like Guangzhou advertise heavily for young workers, even while employment offices consider it a success if someone over 40 can find any job in less than a year.

“Now they’re taking workers into their early 30s,” said Jonathan Unger, director of the Contemporary China Center at Australian National University in Canberra, “but anything older than that and they think they can’t take the conditions, the 11-hour days,” as well as work on weekends, and a tedious life in factory-owned dormitories.

Plant owners’ refusal to hire blue-collar workers over 35 or 40 is colliding with the demographic reality of China’s one-child policy. The number of workers in the 20-to-24-year-old range is already shrinking as more of them go to universities instead of entering the work force after high school, and the International Labor Organization projects that workers in this age range will edge slowly downward through at least 2020.

Stand by for Chinese politicians complaining that America is exporting its high wages and labor standards to countries that don't want them.

One wants to know, of course, how much this is affected by inflation in China. The Chinese government has not been able to perfectly sterilize its interventions in the global currency markets. All else equal, buying foreign currency in order to push down the relative value of your money should translate into domestic inflation; so in order to un-paribus the ceteris, the Chinese government has been taking a number of measures to soak up the extra liquidity, notably selling bonds. But there is a limit to the effectiveness of these techniques, not least because the fragile banking system cannot absorb an infinite supply of government bonds. As it is, the government has jammed more bonds into the system than the bankers want. Moreover, its rather primitive financial system makes monetary intervention less effective than it might be. The result of the currency interventions, and China's rocketing growth rate, has been steadily rising prices. The government is now exploring alternative anti-inflation measures, like price controls, to battle it.

Comment update

I just deleted a bunch of comments. On each, I left a note explaining why it was deleted.

I've tried to edit with a light hand; we'll see how that goes, and if it's insufficient, I'll get more aggressive. My object is to make this a relatively pleasant place to be. If you take a thread off topic, and it's funny, and people are enjoying it, I'll let it go; if you take a thread off topic, and we have to have seventy comments debating whether or not I should be stricken with a chronic disease in punishment for my health care apostasy, I'll shut that down pretty fast.

By the way, to everyone who thinks I need a little dose of chronic disease . . . well, thanks, I have several, notably chronic asthma and an autoimmune condition. I, like most other asthmatics, have come close to dying from my condition, so you don't need to waste any energy wishing that I could "learn what it's like". I was uninsured for two years with both conditions, and if anything, my opinions about health care were stronger than they are now. My opinions may be wrong, but they are not due to my ignorance of the "real world". So please, no more lectures on how I'd feel if I'd "been there" from people who do not appear to have been "there", or indeed anywhere in its close neighbourhood.

Comment policy

A number of my old commenters have written in to complain that it is impossible to have a discussion here because of the new commenters hurling verbal brickbats.

I'm very happy to have more left wing commenters these days; on any blog, there's danger of things turning into an echo chamber. I'm not happy to have commenters, left and right, derail threads with escalating name-calling.

Hence, for the first time, I'm going to start aggressively moderating the comments.

The rules:

1) No name calling. You may make fun of your opponents ideas as vigorously as you like. Be funny, sarcastic, bombastic, whatever. Call him a "Moron", "Fascist", or a four-letter word, however, and I will delete you. Likewise if you accuse people of secretly longing to [see the poor starve/impose their quasi-communofascist philosophy on freedom-loving people everywhere].

2) No derailing threads. This post was meant to be a bit of fun, reminiscent of the famous 2003 Thomas Friedman essay contest. Several commenters, however, are apparently unable to recognize fun . . . or else they don't think other people are entitled to have any. I'm deleting the off-topic comments, and future such.

3) No posting copyrighted content. I make my living by IP; and this blog belongs to a big media company that could get sued. Fair use is fine, but reproducing an entire article from behind some pay barrier is not.

4) No profanity. This is a family blog. Specifically, my family. When launching your nasty attacks, try not to say anything that you wouldn't want your mother and father to see written about you.

5) No referring to anything as "Fascist" or "Communist" unless the people involved are actually adherents of the 19th- and 20th- century political ideologies thus described. These words are not synonyms for "mean people" or "people who disagree with me".

I will not delete people for any other sort of content. There are blogs out there who delete reasonable comments in order to make the blogger look as if there is no good opposition to their ideas. This will not be one of those blogs. If you disagree with me, please stay and argue. Just do it respectfully.

One more note: if you put links into your comments, the spam filter will catch them. I'm trying to make those comments live as quickly as possible, but I've been rather busy.

Update Obviously, I'm not perfect. If you see something you think I've missed, email meganmcardle@theatlantic.com to let me know.

Summer games: fantasy teams

Last night I was trying to explain the relative intellectual standings of various presidential economic advisors to a former philosophy student. This led me to try to compare various CEA heads to their equivalents in philosophic eminence, which didn't go very well since I don't actually know anything about philosophy.

It did, however, lead to a hilarious session in which we tried to imagine a Presidential Philosophy Advisor . . . and then a whole series of other advisors from disciplines not usually invited into the oval office.

President: Karbala has become a hotspot again. Time to reformulate Iraq policy. What should I do?

Chairman of the Council of Philosophical Advisors Mr President, let's imagine a universe composed of two identical blue spheres . . .

Chief Literary Advisor I think the first thing we need to establish is whether we are going to take a synchronic or diachronic approach to constructing our ways of knowing.

Art Historian General Do we have a withdrawal strategy for the artifacts in the Baghdad museum?

Presidential Sociology Liason Wasn't there supposed to be coffee at this meeting?

I invite readers and other bloggers to offer advice to the president in the jargon of their academic field. And remember: if it's on point, it's not funny.

Uptempo

Megan at From the Archives makes an interesting point about the warring incentives of legislators and bureaucrats:

This doesn’t surprise me either, that the work was done in a state agency, then lingered for years. The work of the state is huge and sprawling and only barely managed. People at the top, the political appointees and the legislators, give instructions and change them with the new exciting trend. Mid-level civil servants finish their reports (perhaps even a nice thorough job) and the person who commissioned the work is long gone for another job. Or the legislator is swamped with exciting new problems. Flood! Climate change! Relentless plodding is the mark of low and mid level bureaucracies, but long-term follow through fails at the top. That is because of news driven governance in some part, and you fickle voters in other part. Really though, it always goes back to a constituency. If you cared about prison health care, those reports and audits would get implemented.

The politicians, like the public they serve, have the attention span of a gnat. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, are built to work in geologic time. Neither has any control over the other to force them onto their time frame. From my limited experience as a government contractor, this seems to result in less getting done than would if one party managed to force the other into its time frame; we spent a fair amount of time trying to sort through the competing demands of the "This is how it's done" bureaucracy and the "Everything's changing! News at 11!" fly-by reformers. Result: paralysis.

Bad reputation? Too bad.

Jack Shafer considers the problem of people whose reputations are harmed by mentions in the New York Times, and rapidly dismisses it:

One of the flaws in Hoyt's thinking is his belief that one's reputation is a possession—like a car or a tennis racket—when one's reputation actually resides in the minds of others. A person can have as many reputations as people who know him or know of him. Positing that the top link in a Google search of a name equals somebody's reputation is silly, and Hoyt's column only encourages that notion.

If Google users conclude that an individual is guilty of fondling a child just because a Times story reported his arrest, that says more about their gullibility than it does about the inadequacies of the Web or the Times. The Times is wonderful, but it's not a vaccine against stupidity.

Whatever their shortcomings, search engines are a million times superior to human memory, which they are rapidly replacing. In the old days, a reader was just as likely not to recall the exonerating or corrective stories about an individual published in the Times. At least the Web makes it possible to look for the pieces.

The Web also offers those wounded a variety of ways to manage their reputations and mitigate the offenses of the New York Times (and of other publications). For instance, instead of carping to the public editor about the damage the ancient Times story might be doing to his career, I advise Allen Kraus to purchase the allenkraus.com domain—which is available, according to a WHOIS search. Build yourself a simple home page, Mr. Kraus, containing your résumé and quotations from—and a link to—the later Times story that absolved you of any mischief. With a little enterprise, you could persuade colleagues and customers to link to the home page and boost it to a place of prominence in Google searches of "Allen Kraus."

This seems more than a little facile. Jack Shafer undoubtedly has loads of friends in control of sites with high Google page rank values. He also works in an industry where everyone's media-savvy enough to check L-N for follow-ups. Mr Kraus may not have those luxuries. The New York Times page ranking means that it's very, very hard to put your page above a noxious article about you. It's all very well to sneer that The Times can't cure stupidity, but it's a little rough if your paycheck depends on getting work from those stupid people.

Not that I have a solution, mind you . . . at least, not one better than the disease. But I don't think Allen Kraus is crazy to want to see if the New York Times can't fix this somehow. Nor is someone who made the Times for allegedly fondling a child, but not when the charges were dropped, which is not exactly uncommon. Yes, peoples' memories are also imperfect, but in most cases, they're also limited. Google means that all those inaccurate perceptions can now follow you around the globe.

Update Turns out Jon Garfunkel had much the same thoughts.

You're not as hot as you think you are

A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are.

You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly photogenic (I recall one girl in high school who was maybe a 7 in person, but a 9.75 in an 8X10 glossy) and like having their pictures taken; everyone else in the world is convinced that they don't photograph particularly well.

A cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago explained why to me last winter. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, in any given session we tend to anchor on the time slice image that makes us look our best. That, we decide, is the "real" us.

Photographs, however, are a random sample of the various arrangements of light, angle, and facial expression that we can be found in. The median photograph of you is probably the best approximation of your physical attractiveness. But that wars with your self image, which is anchored on other, better combinations.

You're also biased by the fact that no one ever tells you you're ugly. It's not merely that people inflate what they tell you (they almost certainly do); it's also that people who think you're ugly tend to drop out of the sample. They may not cultivate an acquaintance with you, and those that do will probably not spontaneously let you know that they find you kind of repulsive.

You're stuck in a web of congitive biases and a positive feedback loop. It's a wonder anyone does get married.

Which, by the way, is probably the best gauge of how attractive you are; how attractive are the hottest people who want to go out with you? They're probably only slightly more attractive than you are.

If you're married, of course, this is not useful. But there's always the old standby. Just make sure to upload a median picture.

It's so smooooooth

Okay, I have a lot of expensive kitchen equipment. I will defend my outrageously expensive food processor to the death. But a $400 blender? How many smoothies can you make? And how many people find blending so complicated that they need copious preset tasks?

The good news and the bad news

Peoples' incomes improved markedly in 2006; the poverty rate dropped, and household income marched upwards.

On the down side, the percentage of Americans with health insurance dropped rather precipitously, from 84.7% to 84.2%. What happened?

Well, the numbers do tend to jump arund, especially with the business cycle. But we're in the very late phases of an expansion, if not a recession; why should insurance coverage still be falling? Forget the fluffy AP stories; let's go to the tape.

The percentage of Americans covered by private insurance has been falling for a while, now. That's not some grand conspiracy of business owners. In part it's due to companies dropping people, but a sizeable chunk of the change is simply due to programmes like S-Chip, which encourage families to drop their coverage; and an ageing population transitioning into Medicare.

The public sector dropped pretty sharply last year, but not nearly as steeply as the government. After rising steadily since 1999, the percentage of people with government coverage dropped by 30 basis points. Out of a total increase in population of roughly 3 million, the private sector, which usually insures about 800,000 new patients a year, only insured a little over 500,000 new patients last year. That's a big drop. Meanwhile, the government, which generally insures a million or more new patients last year, this year took on . . . about 53,000.

The big slowdowns were in military healthcare, and in Medicaid. So at a glance, we're looking at two factors: state governments cutting back on Medicare spending, and the recruitment and retention shortfalls in the military, which mean fewer soldiers and dependents in the military healthcare system.

The other interesting detail confirms an ongoing story: immigrants. The percentage of native born americans with coverage dropped by 40 basis points last year; but the percentage of the foreign born without coverage dropped twice as fast.

Helicopter Larry

In the FT today, Larry Summers has a really terrific column on the subprime crisis that raises three very, very interesting questions:

First, this crisis has been propelled by a loss of confidence in ratings agencies as large amounts of debt that had been very highly rated has proven very risky and headed towards default. There is room for debate over whether the errors of the ratings agencies stem from a weak analysis of complex new credit instruments, or from the conflicts induced when debt issuers pay for their ratings and can shop for the highest rating. But there is no room for doubt that - as in previous financial crises involving Mexico, Asia and Enron - the ratings agencies dropped the ball. In light of this, should bank capital standards or countless investment guidelines be based on ratings? What is the alternative? Sarbanes-Oxley was a possibly flawed response to the problems Enron highlighted in corporate accounting. What, if any, legislative response is appropriate to address the ratings concerns?

Second, how should policymakers address crises centred on non-financial institutions? A premise of the US financial system is that banks accept much closer supervision in return for access to the Federal Reserve's payments system and discount window. The problem this time is not that banks lack capital or cannot fund themselves. It is that the solvency of a range of non-banks is in question, both because of concerns about their economic fundamentals and because of cascading liquidations as investors who lose confidence in them seek to redeem their money and move into safer, more liquid investments.Central banks that seek to instilconfidence by lending to banks, or reducing their cost of borrowing, may, as the saying goes, be pushing on a string. Is it wise to push banks to become public financial utilities in times of crisis? Should there be more lending and/or regulation of the non-bank financial institutions?

Third, what is the role for public authorities insupporting the flow of credit to the housing sector? The lesson learnt during the S&L debacle was that it was catastrophic to finance home ownership through insured banking institutions that borrowed short term and then offered long-term fixed-rate home mortgages. Now a system reliant on securitisation, adjustable rate mortgages and non-insured financial institutions has broken down.

Even more interesting is his conclusion:

Now, as borrowers face higher costs as their adjustable rate mortgages are reset, is not the time for the authorities to get religion and discourage the provision of credit.

I'm with Larry. One hears a lot of echoes these days of the infamous quote from Andrew Mellon, Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, at the dawn of the Great Depression:

[T]he “leave it alone liquidationists” headed by [my] Secretary of the Treasury Mellon... felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people”...

There are the people who don't think the government should bail out homeowners who bought houses they clearly couldn't afford, on the assumption that rising house prices would allow them to refinance before the rates reset; one of them, a friend whose limited personal funds forced him to buy a very small house sent me a link to this cartoon.

There are other people who sympathise with the homeowners, but like Daniel Gross, don't want to bail out the bankers who made massive subprime loans, or the hedge funders who bought the securities that those loans were packaged into.

On the "they deserve it" argument, I am sceptical on both sides. Many of the people with the worst loans were pushed into them by unscrupulous mortgage brokers. The mortgage brokers systematically concealed terms and got them bad rates, but the people in the house are the ones who have to move and deal with a devastated credit record.

This applies equally well to the subprime lenders and hedge funders. Unscrupulous mortgage brokers will not suffer at all if subprime lenders go under. The subprime lenders made loans stupidly, but in good faith. The hedge funders bought assets in good faith.

Now, in ordinary times, I would not say that isolated individuals with these problems deserve a bailout. We should help people who got rooked (and tighten fraud laws to prevent other such rookings), but not to the tune of a whole house. Renting has its downsides, but they are not so great that it should be the government's business to shove everyone into their own little plot of land. On the flip side, it's tough that banks that make stupid loans go bust, but as many European and Asian banking systems illustrate, the cost to keeping failed companies afloat is much higher than the reward.

I am therefore somewhat sympathetic to people who are worried about moral hazard. But only somewhat. On the consumer side, the problem has been largely taken care of by the fact that no one wants to issue mortgages. And on the bank side . . . well, we may have bigger problems than moral hazard.

That's the classic bank run scene from "It's a Wonderful Life", possibly the best scene explaining economics in movie history. It brilliantly illustrates how panic can put a solvent financial institution into insolvency . . . which is what FDR was talking about when he said "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Note that the solution the movie characters stumbled on was also the right one: inject cash into the economy in order to calm insolvency fears.

It is true that there will be some moral hazard attached to bailing out either banks or homeowners. Those who are bailed out, and their peers, will be more likely to engage in the risky behaviour that spawned the bailout, in the belief that the government will rescue them again. But in the case of a genuine credit crisis, the cost of moral hazard is much smaller than the cost of a genuine liquidity crisis--which will hurt, I might add, not just the homeowners and the bankers, but all of us who like to do things like borrow money, or have economic growth.

What about public health?

I was going to get to this later, but a couple of people have brought it up, so let's get it out of the way now: what about the sewers? Or vaccination? Or the many other public efforts that have made people well?

Those efforts are justified on a completely different moral logic than something like single payer. Because of the way that disease spreads, things like sewers and vaccinations are a genuine public good. That is, they have significant positive externalities from which your neighbours cannot be excluded. If I get vaccinated, that lowers your chance of disease, even if you don't get a vaccination. Likewise, if I treat my sewage, you become less likely to get cholera, even if you don't treat yours.

As long-time readers of my old blog know, I'm pretty harsh on people who don't vaccinate (or use sewers, either, though that one hasn't really come up). The problem with vaccines is that they've been too effective; effective enough that parents are (rightly) more worried about a small risk of side effects from a measles or polio shot, than they are about the risk of blindness, heart disease, or paralysis. That tempts them to free ride on other parents who do vaccinate.

As an individual, that's the smart strategy, but socially it's disastrous, since it destroys the compact by which we keep infectious disease at bay. Also, once there's a new reservoir of unvaccinated kids, their free ride becomes not that free.

But treating infectious disease to keep it from spreading is in a different moral category from a universal health care system. Curing my asthma will not protect the people across the street, or America, from danger.

Sick of being sick

A commenter responds to my last post thus:

People don't have a right to money from society simply because they have gotten sick.

I disagree. Now what?

Well, obviously, at some level we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

But it raises some interesting questions. Why do you disagree? If we should give money to sick people regardless of need, is it because being sick sucks and we're giving people bonus payments for having sucky things happen to them? If that's the case, why don't we give people bonus payments for, say, being really ugly, or being severely socially awkward, both of which seem at least arguably worse than, say, having chronic asthma.

Also, if they deserve money just for being sick, why give them the money in the form of healthcare? Wouldn't a cash transfer be even better? Then the people who wanted to be treated could spend the money on healthcare, and other people could spend the money on something they valued even more than healthcare. It seems like a Pareto improvement in net happiness over a simple single-payer system.

Finally, if they deserve money just for being sick, why don't we peg the money to the suffering the disease causes, rather than the cost of treating the disease? Inquiring minds want to know.

Attack on all fronts . . .

Brian Beutler doesn't understand why I find flipping back and forth between arguments so annoying:

See, I don't find this tendency annoying at all. In fact, one of the things I like best about being in an argument is when I can win that argument on a handful of different grounds. For instance, I can make both efficiency and morality claims about torture, the death penalty, profiling, health care, and the Brian-deserves-more-free-money initiative now making its way through Congress, and my argument is all the firmer for it. And I should add that keeping in mind both efficiency and morality is an obviously excellent way of picking a health care system, or for that matter any other system that depends on both efficiency and morality to be effective.

What actually is annoying is the tendency of one's opponents in a multi-flanked argument to complain that the war is being fought on too many fronts instead of either hitting back strongly, or, more preferably, ceding the point altogether.

The problem is not that the arguments are multi-flanked; it is that the multi-flanked argument becomes a way of avoiding conceding any particular point. Just as you have pinned down the crux of some particular efficiency argument, your opponent says "Well that doesn't really matter, because what I'm worried about is the morality of it." Then, when you look like you might be winning a point about morality, your opponent suddenly says, "Well, that doesn't really matter, because my system is more efficient!" Aggregate claims have to consist of propositions that are individually true, but this sort of argumentative style prevents us from ever determining whether they are, or not.

Obviously, if you're trying to defend a predetermined position, this is a feature, not a bug. And it's certainly a bipartisan vice. But it makes the debate pointless, especially since I can play, too! The result is that we go around in circles, reassuring our echo chambers of like minded supporters without ever having any sort of productive discussion.

Multi-flanked arguments are fine. In the case of health care, they're even necessary; health care, after all, is only a means, so you have to know what ends you mean to establish. But to make a sound aggregate argument, you need to examine each of the pieces separately before you aggregate them, particularly if not all of the pieces have buy in from the other side.

At this point, I'm simply trying to nail down some small priors before proceeding. Those priors are:

1) People don't have a right to money from society simply because they have gotten sick; to the extent that they have a right to health care, it is that they have a right not to die or suffer from lack of funds.

2) The distributive justice claims for single payer are, on the advocates side, stronger than the efficiency claims. They would prefer a single payer system that is less efficient than the current American system, to efficiency improvements in the current system that did not cover the 45 million uninsured people. I know (I KNOW!) you think that single payer is both more efficient and more just. I'm simply trying to establish a rank ordering of priorities.

These are the first building blocks of an argument about single payer. I don't actually think they're really controversial, if you stop thinking eight moves ahead. Does anyone prefer their efficiency claims to their distributive justice claims? Do you think that we should give Warren Buffett money for health care, not as a side effect of arranging the most efficient transfer of resources to the needy or otherwise deserving, but as a moral end in itself? Is anyone prepared to argue that Warren Buffett deserves a special bonus from society--tens of thousands of dollars worth of health care--just because he's old?

I don't think anyone does believe these things; or certainly not many people. People are treating fairly straightforward propositions as if they were trick questions. They're not. I'm just trying to frame the argument in a pretty neutral way.

People are also acting as if I believe that, by nailing down these first points, I have made some sort of comprehensive argument against single payer. Obviously not. Such an argument is far larger than a blog post could manage (which is why I'm doing it in baby steps). Thus, many of them respond "But single payer is awesome!", when I haven't gotten anywhere near a discussion of its relative awesomeness to other possible systems. At this point, I'm just trying to lay out the criteria by which we might one day evaluate its awesomeness.

Why worry?

One doesn't know quite what to say about the Craig revelations except to wonder about the statistics. If two Republican legislators get caught in a relatively short period of time . . . well, I know it's just a coincidence, but still. How commonly does this sort of thing happen in the general population? And if it doesn't happen commonly, why is it happening so often in our legislative bodies? Presumably they didn't run for office in order to enjoy broader opportunities to solicit undercover cops.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is just that I am a woman, but I am a little puzzled by this:

Radley Balko remarks "Guess there's some sort moral distinction between cheating on your wife via anonymous gay sex and cheating on your wife by paying for hetero sex with a prostitute."

I can imagine distinguishing between these cases, but I would think that any difference would tend to cut in favor of Craig rather than against him, since paying prostitutes for sex is a real crime and it's still unclear to me what it is Craig's guilty of -- he mostly seems to have been brought up on charges of "being gay in the Midwest." Either way, Hewitt seems to be drawing the distinction based on pure homophobia.

Legally, I agree that the cops have no business worrying about Craig's sex life, or for that matter, the sex lives of men who seek to employ prostitutes of whatever persuasion. But if I were Craig's wife, I'd be far more worried about my husband trolling random bathrooms for anonymous men, than by his sleeping with prostitutes. Given the relative risks of male-to-male and female-to-male HIV transmission, I'd be crazy not to worry more. Should that matter to the public, if not the police?

Mourning Di

Why are we still talking about Diana Spencer? I'm sure she was a lovely person. But I can't say that her record of achievement merits solemn hagiography. She was very pretty, and she was the most telegenic member of a vestigial royal family, and she was against land mines. Why is she on the front page?

Tighter . . . and tighter . . .

Mortgage holders aren't the only borrowers getting themselves into trouble:

US consumers are defaulting on credit-card payments at a significantly higher rate than last year, raising the prospect of problems in the stricken US subprime mortgage market spreading to other types of consumer debt.

Credit-card companies were forced to write off 4.58 per cent of payments as uncollectable in the first half of 2007, almost 30 per cent higher year-on-year. Late payments also rose, and the quarterly payment rate – a measure of cardholders’ willingness and ability to repay their debt – fell for the first time in more than four years.

Analysts at Moody’s, the rating agency, said the trend could be related to the slowdown in the US property market and a fall in the number of borrowers rolling their mortgage debt into new and cheaper home loans.

There are multiple avenues for the spread. The credit contraction, to begin with; just as it's making it hard for strapped borrowers to refinance, it's also cutting down on those zero balance transfer deals that some people use to get themselves out of trouble, or at least stave off the bailiffs.

But of course, there's also the fact that for the last ten years, many homeowners have resolved crushing credit card debt by borrowing money on the value of their homes. That's suddenly gotten much harder to do, which may be forcing people into default.

And, obviously, people who are having trouble meeting their mortgage payments may decide that Visa and Mastercard need to get in line behind the bank with the power to kick them out of their house.

No one knows which of those things is dominant, however; or even how deeply the two phenomena are related. As the article says:

But it is not clear that the borrowers defaulting on their credit cards are the same people defaulting on their subprime mortgages, it added. This is in part because underwriting standards in the credit-card sector have been more robust than in the mortgage industry. Also, many highly leveraged subprime borrowers, with little or no equity in their homes, may choose to default on a mortgage before risking being unable to charge everyday necessities to their credit card.

This doesn't seem like a good strategy; the conventional wisdom is hold onto the house! On the other hand, the conventional wisdom that said "Buy a house ASAP!" doesn't seem to be working out so well for subprime borrowers, so perhaps it's time to give the CW a rethink.

Class act

There's something sort of touching about this:

A top police sniffer dog working for an elite Mexican drug squad was stolen during an airport transfer by thieves who left a mixed-breed puppy in its place, the attorney general's office said.

Rex IV, a highly trained Belgian Malinois sheepdog with a string of drug hauls behind him, was checked on to a flight from Mexico City this week with seven other police dogs bound for an operation in the northern state of Sinaloa.

But when the dogs arrived at Mazatlan airport, Sinaloa, their police handlers discovered a small black mongrel puppy inside Rex IV's cage, with the sniffer dog nowhere to be seen.

"In 17 years I've never seen anything like this. It's rather delicate," a Public Security Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the worry was the dog could help smugglers find new ways to conceal drugs.

"It's like kidnapping an intelligence agent," he said.

You know, it's the little touches that count. Many thieves would just have stolen the dog. Or left a Belgian Malinois in its place in order to forestall detection as long as possible. But this bunch left a mutt puppy in order to stave off the discovery just long enough to make their getaway. I feel like I've just witnessed a virtuoso piano performance, or a perfect game.

Do the immigrants count?

Commenter Spencer says:

This is the biggest problem I have with libertarians. Why you always seem to think you improve standards of living with cheap labor is beyond me.

If the relative price of something is cheap you will use more of it. Consequently if you keep the price of labor low through immigration you encourage labor intensive production process. This does not raise living standards. If you want to raise living standards you want to shift the production process towards a more capital intensive process where the additional capital per worker allows them to be more productive and raise living standards.

That would seem to make closing the borders a win: Americans get higher wages and more automation. But it assumes that the immigrants themselves have absolutely no moral standing. Their lives aren't made better by the fact that America has automatic fruit picking machines.

Let us agree (how) to disagree

Says Ezra of my health care posts:

It relies on unproven and incorrect premises ("Most advocates of single payer, I think, care most about this justice claim. They may also think that they can make the system more efficient, but if one could somehow prove scientifically that a private system would be cheaper and better, they would still favor a public system as long as a substantial population remained uninsured); brackets the argument about efficiency then pretends it doesn't figure into reformer's claims; radically overstates individual culpability for illnesses; elides the fact that living a healthier life just means you die from something expensive later; mistakes an intergenerational compact (wherein each generation pays for the next, rather than making a one-time transfer) for charity; and appears to miss the fact that Medicare already exists, and so single-payer would not mean more resources would be transferred to the old, thus obviating the central point. And that's just a partial list!

It's hard to argue with vague generalities, but here goes,.

I could be wrong about the first claim, but if so, I would like to hear from a large number of single-payer advocates who will say that if the American system could be proven to provide higher quality care per dollar on average than other industrialised system, then they would be content to leave 40 million people uninsured.

The second claim isn't so; I don't pretend that efficiency doesn't factor into reformer's claims. I just left it off because health care is too big a topic to be attacked in one post. I have, as Ezra knows, in the past addressed efficiency claims; I will again in the near future.

But in health care, as with so many arguments, there is an annoying tendency on all sides to shift back and forth between arguments. One starts by arguing about morality (when is society entitled to take money from one group of people to give to another, and how much), and your earnest young policy reformers says "But what really matters is that it's more efficient!" Then you start to argue about efficiency, and suddenly your opponent says "But what about the suffering old people?"

This is not a good way to pick a health care system, or much of anything else. One should establish some first principles, and then use them to generate a health system which will hopefully maximise them. If you simply accept, as received wisdom, that a single payer system is either good or bad, and that people who disagree with you are immoral cretins, then there's not much point in our arguing.

But if you don't accept that then presumably the object of this discussion is (at least theoretically), not to simply find which argument is tactically most superior at the given moment to support your position; it is to establish the first principles and empirical data from which we will reason to a conclusion. And then try to reason to a conclusion.

Which is not to say that we will agree. Ezra and I will almost certainly not agree; we hold different priors about things like autonomy, individual rights, and government efficiency. Both of us have already reasoned to a conclusion from which, barring substantial new evidence, we will probably not budge. But we can at least flesh out our areas of agreement.

So that post was an attempt to establish, at perhaps unfortunate length, the first prior of my argument: that the old and/or sick are not entitled to get money from other people simply by virtue of being old and or sick. They may be entitled to get money for health care for other reasons: because they are needy, or because they were promised that care (or should have been promised that care) in exchange for joining the military. Or other reasons we might argue. But merely having aged, or gotten sick, does not in and of itself give you a moral claim on society; as I said in a prior post, Warren Buffet doesn't deserve to have my dry cleaner buy him health care simply because he is older and sicker.

That does not, as I think I repeatedly said, necessarily mean we shouldn't have single payer. It simply undercuts a particular argument in favor of single payer: that society has a duty to care for the sick, full stop. Society also has a duty to clothe the naked and feed the hungry, but we have successfully outsourced most of that duty to Green Giant and Calvin Klein.

But I am not claiming that this is the only, or even the main, argument deployed by advocates of single payer. I'm just trying to put it behind us, so that once we are talking about something else, I don't have to deal with someone saying "But . . . but . . . they're sick!." I am laying the burden on my opponents to convince me that the people we are helping are not merely sick, but also meet some other condition, such as need, that entitles them to the transfer.

I am well aware that Ezra and others are trying to make a sort of "Sick+" argument in favor of single payer. In order to help those who are needy, they say, we have to have single payer, because of problems with the way that medical markets work. I disagree, for reasons I will lay out presently. But I am certainly not under the impression that I have already refuted those arguments (at least not on this blog. I've just tried to map the boundaries of the dispute. Because I do, fairly frequently, have single payer advocates pounding on the table asking why I don't want to help sick people?

As for the rest of it, it confuses sufficient with necessary conditions (I don't need a lot of sick people to be very responsible for their conditions; I just need a few to be partially responsible, since in aggregate, the unsick are not at all responsible). The bonus random reference to healthy lifestyles is a rejoinder to another, different argument about cost-benefit analysis that I was not making.

It assumes an agreement about intergenerational compacts that I find dubious and do not share--to the extent that there are society-wide intergenerational duties, I think they run one way, from present to future, and involve a) conserving a common stock of resources and b) not bequeathing them debts. That means the government shouldn't run a deficit other than in times of war, and it also shouldn't promise expensive benefits to be paid out of the pockets of people who can't yet vote, or indeed breathe.

And it ends with a claim about Medicare that I've seen before, but which I find extremely odd. People don't magically start getting sick when they turn 65. The near old, those in their late fifties and early sixties, also consume a decent amount of care. Moreover, any single payer system I'd envision would cover nursing home care and prescription drugs and home health care workers, for which many seniors currently pay a substantial sum out of pocket. It's hard to envision how a single-payer system could fail to increase the net social transfer from young to old, though I agree with Ezra that that transfer is already large.

Consumer culture

Last night I went to see King of Kong, a documentary about a middle-school science teacher who tries to unseat the world record holder in Donkey Kong:

It's really a terrific movie. It's also a great sociological treatise for anyone who's interested in status concerns. In response to those who are worried that economic status competition is making us all worse off, people like Will Wilkinson have argued that modern society is so excellent precisely because it offers us proliferating status hierarchies in which to excel. Or as Tyler Cowen once told me, the secret to happiness is alternative status hierarchies, combined with self-deception.

The common rejoinder is that there is a meta-status hierarchy that comports with money:

Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass! Now this example is loaded – but it’s loaded to demonstrate a serious sociological point that Wilkinson doesn’t even begin to address. These indefinitely proliferating dimensions of status competition are connected to each other in their own implicit meta-ranking, which is quite well understood by all involved. Being a world-class scrabble-player isn’t likely to win you much respect among people who aren’t themselves competitive scrabble-players; the best you can expect is that someone will write a book that pokes fun at your gastro-intestinal problems . It’s a very different matter if you’re a world class soccer player; you’re liable to be invited to all sorts of fun parties, hit upon by beautiful people, stalked by the paparazzi and the whole shebang. Being a world class blogger is somewhere between the two, albeit certainly much closer to the scrabble-player than the soccer star. Even if you’re king of your own mountain, you’re likely to be quite well aware of the other mountains around you that make yours look in comparison like a low-grade class of a gently sloping foothill, or perhaps even a slightly upraised knob in the middle of a steep declination. You’re similarly aware of those less well-advantaged foothills or knoblets whose owners you can look down upon…. In short, people are highly aware of the relative rankings of their obsessions.

This movie seems like the perfect illustration of these competing claims. It involves a guy named Steve Wiebe, who's been laid off and never really hit the big time career-wise. He decides, naturally enough, to become the world's best player of Donkey Kong.

Unless I very much miss my guess, Seth Gordon, the director, would agree with Henry Farrell. There's a strong undertone of "OMG, what amazing losers" from start to finish, and the very fact that these guys care about who is the world's best Missile Command player gets repeatedly played for laughs.

But a lot of the time, that's just an assumption of a certain sort of elite who has already climbed fairly high on the status hierarchy they identify as the central one.

If you've ever spent time around competitive rock climbers, for example, you'll know that they really do believe that being the world's best alpinist is superior to being, say, Secretary of State, even though most people would rather meet Condi Rice than Reinhold Messner. Indeed, in many cases, their status hierarchy is inverted; being a total loser is better than being a certain sort of corporate cretin. And these aren't people who have chosen to opt out because they can't make it elsewhere; they're not noticeably less popular, intelligent, or competent than people who seek success in more traditional ways than a sub-four-hour solo of the Eiger.

Okay, one might argue, but there will always be weird little-cultlike pockets existing outside of normal society. Nonetheless, most people recognize the rough status pyramid that Henry Farrell is talking about. But even on that point, I'm not so sure. As I wrote last year:

Much status comparison is localised. Rich people don't compare themselves to the folks in the housing project ten miles away; they compare themselves to their neighbours. The poor, likewise. All the upper middle class people I know, including ones who make no money, like journalists and academics, believe that the working and middle classes secretly envy us our high social status. All I can say is, having recently spent several years at a working class job, if this is true, then the working classes must be extraordinarily good at keeping secrets.

Among print journalists, television is widely regarded as second-class (albeit, high paying) work. But try telling that to my relatives in western New York, who had never heard of The Economist, but woke up at 5 am to see me go on a now-defunct farm-team talking heads show on CNNfN.

Many of the people in the movie probably are conscious of having failed in the world outside video games. But the tendency among the coastal elites is to assume that the failure they experience is not having gotten a good book contract from Knopf, and I'm not so sure. I'd bet that for most of them, the failure is rather more brutal than not making it to a high prestige job: approximately 100% of them seem to be afflicted with pretty severe Asperger's--which is hardly surprising, given the superhuman concentration and obsessive attention to detail that is required to master those kinds of video games. These are people so socially disconnected that virtually all of them still dress as if it's 1982; would they really feel less alienated and unsuccessful in Sweden? Are they seeking refuge in video games because they'll never get tapped for the Supreme Court, or because they never get a promotion--or a second date?

Which is why ultimately the movie is inspiring. If there really was a unified status hierarchy, or even the kind of orderly meta-ranking that Mr Farrell posits, most of us would be completely screwed. Only a few people can be the smartest, richest, or most athletic guy in the world.

But having failed, like the rest of us, to become Bill Gates (or anything close), Steve Wiebe had an alternative: he could use his obsessive, socially awkward personality to become the best Donkey Kong player in the world.

Imagine Steve Wiebe's life in a world where Americans didn't work long hours producing soulless frivolities like video games.

What price labor?

Chris Hayes of In These Times and The Nation writes today on his personal blog:

There are few things that irk me more than when conservatives advocate for increased immigration for low wage workers by saying that immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want. I don’t want to buy a slice of pizza for $45. It doesn’t mean I don’t like pizza! I’m not particularly interested in writing a book for the total payment of $9. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to write a book!

But what about the demand side of the labor market, she asks? To invert Mr Hayes' formulation, I don't want a job eating live roaches. But at $1 million a roach, or thereabouts, I would take it. The problem is, I very much doubt that anyone thinks it's worth $1 million to see me eat a live roach.

Many of the jobs that illegals do are jobs that cannot economically be done by Americans. It does no good to say that American workers would be happy to gut chickens, or clean houses, or landscape your yard, for $20 an hour, if other Americans cannot afford to purchase those services at that price. If we had no illegals, some Americans would undoubtedly get their jobs at higher wages. Other jobs, such as fruit picking, would probably be automated. Meanwhile, many Americans would have to go without the services that illegals currently provide, such as landscaping, construction, and home care.

One particular consideration I think is underdiscussed is the fact that much of the labor illegal immigrants provide substitutes for women's home labor. And I don't just mean nannies for rich women. I mean cleaning services, and food processing, and dry cleaning, and grocery delivery, and all the other things that make it possible for large numbers of women to work outside the home. In an ideal world, of course, women and men would take equal responsibility for the household. But in the less than ideal world that we actually inhabit, an increase in the price of those services would probably mean that fewer women would find it cost-effective to work outside the home.

The economics blog world loses a voice

Max Sawicky is hanging up his hat. He'll be greatly missed.

Eighth best, maybe

My old employer's blog has a terrific post on "second best economics":

Suppose that I told you that in the absence of the necessary conditions for teleportation, the next best thing is to forget all about the conditions for teleportation and instead fly at near the speed of light. Would you find this helpful if what you actually had was a Toyota and a half-tank of gas? Many "second-best" policy recommendations are a bit like that: the ideal market is a fantasy, so here is an ideal government to fix things. Obviously, this is not very helpful. If we are going to be hard-headed empiricists on the lookout for real-world imperfections, then we must admit imperfections equitably and not blanch in the face of the often appalling failures of government to operate as intended.

The excerpt really doesn't do it justice. Please read the whole thing.

Alone in the dark

Back when I wanted to be a fiction writer, I wanted to be the kind of fiction writer who has a dramatic slide into the abyss. It wasn't long after I stopped writing short stories that it occurred to me that dying old, desperate and alone probably wasn't nearly as inspiring for the people it happened to as it was for twenty-year olds looking for an excuse to smoke too much.

Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald are Exhibits A and B here, as I thought when I read this from Terry Teachout the other day:

I admire Fitzgerald's best work without reservation--I consider The Great Gatsby the great American novel--but I can't think of another major writer who led a less edifying life. The story of Fitzgerald's drunken slide into artistic inertia is so pathetic that it's hard to take, and the more you read, the more depressed you get.

But then, a note from one of Terry's friends suggests, maybe there was something heroic about it after all:

I have read Great Gatsby three times and still can't feel why it slays people. In some funny way I think it is a guy book not a girl book. (I like Tender best.) But Fitz's life--that moves me! He had the guts to face his deterioration and write about it; to the end of his life he remained kind to other writers, and generous even to pricks like Hemingway; his naked admiration for their work and his appreciation for what it took from them to produce it; his never joining an ideological tong to protect his reputation, his never going left; his saying 'life is a cheat and the conditions are those of defeat and the only thing that stands and redeems is work' ; his love for the Murphys, for every excellent character he met; his admission of his failures; his attempt to make it work in hollywood; his note taking on thalberg; his brave open heart. I know he was an ass, but he was a wonderful endearing ass and in the end his life really did have some epic grandeur. I just had to hold high the Stand Up for Scott Fitzgerald banner today.

How low can you go?

In discussing health care, one often hears about how low America ranks on the WHO survey--37th in the world! This is true. But there are a couple of problems with it.

First of all, that survey is getting a little elderly; it hails from 2000. In the normal course of economics writing, that's pretty dated; my editors at The Economist would never have let me discuss health systems using a ranking that outdated. In general, an economics writer has to have a pretty darn good reason for using data more than a couple of years old.

Also, as John Stossel notes, many of the measures it uses, such as life expectancy, may be exogenous to the health system:

The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.

Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.

When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Now a liberal might argue that crime and auto accidents could be resolved by other items on the progressive agenda. I disagree (for starters, from what I understand, America's higher homicide rate long predates the emergence of the European welfare states), but that's a legitimate argument in favour of a broader progressive platform. However, it undercuts the belief that single payer is going to magically improve things.

Other indicators seem almost cherry-picked to make America drop down on the rankings. Equality of distribution, for example, is heavily weighted; so heavily weighted that quality of basic care suffers in comparison. That's why places like Morocco, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica clean our clocks.

Now, personally, I don't really care about equality of distribution per se. I don't care if Bill Gates gets super-awesome treatment; what I want to know is, are people suffering and dying from lack of care?

Obviously, those things are linked, and it's not unreasonable that an egalitarian would put that on their list of criteria. But one would hope that the WHO rankings would reflect, to a first approximation, where you'd rather get sick. Does anyone really think that they'd rather be the average consumer of health care in Colombia, than in Columbus, Ohio?

But what about the worst off, you might say? What about them? The WHO table isn't even a good ranking of where I'd prefer to be poor. I'd far rather be an uninsured day laborer in San Francisco, than in the Dominican Republic. For that matter, I'd rather be uninsured anywhere in the United States than an average citizen in Costa Rica.

This is a problem for those touting our low ranking. I can't say I know what our ranking should be; a lot depends on value judgements that it would be hard to gather consensus for. But whatever our true ranking is, I'm pretty sure we're not behind a significant chunk of Latin America. You don't see a lot of uninsured illegal immigrants trying to get home for the awesome health coverage.

No news is good news?

Emily Yoffe writes an article lamenting that clothes for young girls have gotten kind of suggestive. Which is true, but is she really just noticing? It feels rather as if Wired had run an article this month headlined "Will File Sharing Take Off?"

Lock-in

Apparently it has taken all of two months for people to figure out how to unlock the iPhone. I find it hard to imagine that this will make a dent in Cingular's profits--the majority of people aren't going to mess around with soldering guns and cards. On the other hand, I imagine people said the same thing about that crazy Napster network.

How racist was the Southern strategy?

Matt offers a slightly new view of the Republican "southern strategy":

It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.

And for a long time the strategy worked. Democratic politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt loyally upheld white supremacy. The dam began to crack with Harry Truman, and then under Lyndon Johnson the national party decisively broke with this corrupt bargain. With that done, white southerners just took their conservative views on taxes and national security into the Republican Party where such views belonged. Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.

I think Matt is obviously right that the South is not just conservative because they hate blacks . . . although it would be interesting to see how much the experience of Reconstruction altered Southern views of government.

The "Southern strategy" should imply not merely that Republicans started campaigning in the south (that would be logical if they thought they should win there . . . and would Paul Krugman really spurn white racist voters who supported, say, the Democrats on single payer?) It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?

Meet the new boss . . .

Arthur Silbur and I definitely don't see eye to eye on many things. But he hits the nail on the head when he writes:

Yesterday, in a post decrying the great haste with which the Democrats moved to accede to the administration's demands (which is, I note again, precisely what the Democrats did with regard to the MCA), Digby said -- with "Deep, Heavy, Sigh" (just so we know exactly how distressed she is):

Obviously, I'm not the only one who can't for the life of me figure out why the congress is doing this.

I suggest we take these leading lights of the progressive blogs at their word: they most certainly do not get it, and they absolutely cannot "for the life of [them] figure out why the congress is doing this."

I also note that, following the Senate cave-in, Atrios has dubbed Harry Reid the "Wanker of the Day." Will all this diminish in even the smallest degree Atrios's, or Digby's, or any other leading progressive blogger's efforts to ensure a huge Democratic victory in 2008? Of course not.

The reason for that is very simple, and it goes to the progressives' central articles of religious faith: The Democrats aren't really like this, not in their heart of hearts. The Democrats don't actually favor a repressive, authoritarian state. The Democrats are good, and they want liberty and peace for everyone, everywhere, for eternity, hallelujah and amen.

I say that not because he is lampooning Democrats--conservatives in recent years have been at the very least as bad in excusing Republicans, although the Bush administration seems to have finally exhausted their goodwill. But there's a more general tendency on both sides to posit a sort of metaphysical, platonic party that doesn't seek to give the government it controls ever more power . . . and then act as if that party were in office, or at least one election away from getting there. By which I don't mean that people hypocritically accept tradeoffs--hello, politics. I mean that people on both sides seem to be genuinely surprised when their party turns out to be fundamentally interested in seeking power for its own sake.

By the way, Arthur Silbur's got some medical problems and needs some financial help. After you read his piece, how about hitting the tip jar?

Okay, one more bad argument in favor of single payer

"Have you ever seen a working class old person?" is not a devastating rejoinder to my previous posts. (The answer, by the way, is yes, lots; my roots are decidedly proletarian.) Nor is "My sister, the starving artist, has cancer." If the working class old people cannot afford to pay for their own health care without assistance--which is by no means proven; the working class runs from McDonalds fry cooks to members of the UAW--then this might be an argument for giving money to working class old people. Or to the subset of the working class who cannot cover their health care. Or to your dying sister. It is not an argument for giving money to every single person who happens to be old and/or sick, whether or not they can afford to pay for their health care, which is what happens under single payer.

An even worse argument in favor of single payer

Several people have said that single payer must be moral, because it works just like other insurance: some people get more out of the pool because they have to tap it, while others get less.

Uh . . . do you really not understand the difference between voluntary and forced transactions? You are perfectly entitled to pool your risk with that of others at any price you care to pay . . . or not, just as you please. This action has no moral content, although I concede that The Church of the Suburban Methodist may have made purchasing adequate insurance one of its tenets.

Millions of people subscribe to US Magazine . . . and for that matter, the Methodist church. Would it be morally okay to force everyone to adopt some belief about the existance of God, or Salma Hayek, because millions of Americans have found it very satisfying to do so?

Update What about mandatory auto insurance? This is completely different. We don't force people to buy auto insurance in order to forcibly pool the risks of bad drivers and goods, thereby transferring money from the good drivers to the bad ones. We force people to buy auto insurance to protect others; drivers have a high potential to cause damage they can't pay for. It's a social arrangement to minimize externalities.

Moreover, we don't force everyone to buy insurance whether they have cars or not. We don't even force car owners to buy insurance. We just force people to buy insurance if they drive on public roads, in order to protect their fellow citizens from the possible negative consequences.

Another bad argument in favor of single payer

Many of my commenters have responded to my posts on single payer by saying: but the young and healthy will someday be old and sick!

Why, yes, they will. But why is that a good argument for taking money from them to give to old sick people, on the promise that some future young healthy people will give them money?

Morally, I don't see how the fact that I will be old and sick gives currently old and sick people a moral claim on me. Had I known, a year ago, that I was going to move permanently to DC, would that have justified the DC government in taxing me last August, on the grounds that in the future, I would be a resident of DC?

As an argument for single payer, this is even worse; at least some of the people who would have benefitted from my taxes last August will be paying taxes this August to help give me roads. The transfer inherent in single payer, on the other hand, is largely non-overlapping. The class of currently old and sick people (Class A) is justifying a transfer from the class of currently young and healthy (Class B) on the grounds that a future class of young and healthy people (Class C) will eventually make a similar transfer? So can I demand that you buy me lunch, on the grounds that at some point in the future, someone, somewhere, will probably do as much for you?

Now, let's think about those transfers. One of three things must be true:

1) The transfers from Class B will be the same size as the transfers from Class B. This is lunatic; Class B could simply spend the money on themselves.

There is a question of what to do if you live in a society that has, for whatever reason, already implemented such a stupid scheme. Morally, I think it is obvious that you do not dump those who contributed to it in good faith; but morally, I think it decidedly unobvious that the right thing is to keep the thing going. In general, the current generation should minimise the binding committments it hands to future generations, not least because what if the future generation decides it isn't so binding?

2) The transfers from Class B will be bigger than the transfers from Class C. Given that Class A seems no more deserving than Class B, this seems straighforwardly immoral.

3) The transfers from Class B will be smaller than the transfers from Class C. This is more complicated, because economic growth enters the picture . . . but by what right does Class A claim resources from Class B by committing Class C to repay its claims, with interest?¹ Particularly since current trends show health care expenditure growing much faster than the economy as a whole.

In other words, either we are trying to get rich by picking our own pockets, or we are unfairly taking from someone in order to give goodies to those who are now old and sick.

I want to emphasize something though: I'm talking specifically about a moral argument in favor of a single-payer financing arrangements. I'm not talking about "the morality of providing healthcare" or "the morality of caring for those who cannot help themselves". I think that the debate over single payer healthcare frequently features an underlying assumption that the old and sick are, by virtue of being old and sick, thereby automatically entitled to have someone else give them the rather large amount of money implied by a mandatory single payer subsidy. This seems unconvincing to me.

There are good arguments in favor of single payer, most of them having to do with market structures, which ultimately try to prove that we cannot accomplish moral ends that I think are at least arguably justified without erecting a giant single payer system. I find those arguments ultimately unconvincing, for reasons I'll elaborate next week. But I think they are at least arguable, unlike the premise that Warren Buffet is entitled to have his prescriptions paid for by my dry cleaner simply because Warren Buffet happens to be in worse health.

¹ But what about the budget deficit, I hear you cry? Yes, I quite agree. Except insofar as Classes A & B are using the money to secure the vital interests of Class C . . . by, say, fighting World War II . . . I'm against deficit financing. I don't think it mattes economically very much, but morally, I'm with you.

A Laffer curve for cigarettes?

Conservatives are very fond of the Laffer Curve, which says that sometimes, lowering taxes can raise revenue. Liberals love to make fun of it by pointing out that all the Republican claims that this would happen have, in practice, failed to pan out. The liberals have the better of the empirical, though not the theoretical argument. Tautologically, the curve must be true: at 0% tax rates, you raise no revenue; and at 100% tax rates, you raise no revenue, because why would anyone work? (Plus they'd find it hard to, having no money for food or shelter to keep themselves alive). Somewhere in between, the curve must maximise. Unfortunately for conservatives looking for practical justifications for tax cuts, that point is at some rate higher than current American income taxes.

But that doesn't mean the Laffer Curve still can't be interesting! There are, after all, other taxes than the income tax; and some areas may be hitting the Laffer point, as Jacob Sullum points out:

In an Asbury Park Press op-ed piece, Gregg Edwards, president of New Jersey's Center for Policy Research, argues that the state's cigarette tax—at $2.57½ a pack, the highest in the country—has reached a "tipping point" where a higher rate no longer brings in more money. In fact, he notes, the latest increase in the tax was followed by a reduction in revenue, from $787 million in fiscal year 2006 to $764 million in fiscal year 2007. The decrease in cigarette purchases is partly due to smokers who cut back or quit (an avowed goal of higher cigarette taxes), but Edwards notes that many smokers may be getting cigarettes online, in neighboring states with lower tax rates (cigarette sales in Delaware are mysteriously on the rise), or from the black market. The differential between New Jersey's tax and other states' is a smuggler's dream. Imagine what you could make by hauling a truckload of cigarettes from, say, South Carolina, where the tax is 7 cents a pack.

For cigarette taxers, of course, cutting back is a feature, not a bug, of the tax. (As it is for the kind of people who favour raising the income tax in order to dampen status competition). But Laffer effects don't always come from cutting back; they can also come from shifting activity. People may simply shift their shopping, or earning, elsewhere--to a place, or time period, in which it's more advantageous. Here in DC, a proposed car trip to Virginia seems to be an invitation to one's smoking friends to place cigarette orders. (In New York City, trips to Westchester and New Jersey had much the same effect.)

If New Jersey is simply an altruistic cancer-hating state, of course, that doesn't matter. Some people will cut back, which is good; and some other people will buy cigarettes in New York or Pennsylvania, which is too bad, but not really any of New Jersey's business.

This does not, however, strike me as a very good model of the behaviour of actual politicians. I will be curious to see what happens to New Jersey's cigarette tax henceforth.

I coulda been a viewer . . .

My colleague Andrew Sullivan has been hosting nominations for the best movie line ever. This is the most recent:

Which makes me realize that I've probably used that line 100 times or more in conversation, even though I've never actually seen the movie. I don't know why I haven't; it's just somehow never happened. But watching the clip, I was reminded that I love Brando, I love Kazan, I love old movies, and boy, I oughta.

So I'm taking nominations: what's the best movie you've never seen?

Set your Tivos . . .

Words fail me:

There is something about watching Saget perform his adult material for HBO -- after viewing a DVD set of the complete "sunny seventh season" of all "the fun and games, love and laughs," all the "remember-when joy" of "Full House."

Yes, that certainly must be something.

Actually, I once saw Bob Saget deliver a surprisingly dirty joke involving his four year old daughter, unauthorised calls to a 1-900 number, and spanking. And frankly, it's taken about six years of hard drugs to wipe the memory from my brain. Am I ready to brave the rapids once again? Let's set the DVR and see . . .

Good question

Medpundit asks:

Why do people think that a single-payer system would be any better than Medicare or Medicaid? The way things work now, Medicare gets the gold (more political clout in the over-65 population) and Medicaid gets the shaft (absolutely no political clout in that population).

One more stab at the apple

An exchange with a blogger who is apparently a philosophy student at the University of Virginia leads me to believe that many people are still misunderstanding my point about the morality of single payer healthcare. Many people responded to my first post by saying, "But we have a duty to care for the sick!" Trying to make myself very clear, I wrote 2,000 words explaining that even assuming, arguendo, that we have a duty to make sure people don't die from lack of health care, this is not a good moral argument for single payer. At which point I got more posts, including from said philosophy student, saying "But we have a duty to care for the sick!" Length having failed, let me try brevity:

1) Single payer transfers money from anyone who is young and healthy to anyone who is old and sick, regardless of their need for the money.

2) For this to be moral, the entire enormous class of people who are old and sick must have some justified claim on the money of the young and healthy.

3) The large class of old and sick people do not need the money; as a group, they are wealthier than the young, healthy people from whom we are transferring the money.

4) Therefore, we must look for another legitimate claim on society's resources.

5) Another such claim might be a fairness claim: the old and sick have been terribly unlucky, so we should pay for their health care even though they don't need the money.

6) This is not a good argument. Most of the old and sick are sick because they are old. Getting old may suck, but it is not unfair; it is inevitable. All of us will become old and sick, unless something even worse happens to us to make us dead. Some of the old and sick are just sick, and have never been healthy. But to calculate the relative deservingness of the whole group, we have to weigh the bad luck of those people against the bad luck of the currently young and healthy people who will, in the future, die young. As a group, there's no reason to think that the (currently) old and sick have had worse luck than the (currently) young and healthy, although obviously some members of each group are unluckier than others.

7) A third argument we might make is that the young and healthy should pay for the care of the old and sick because they have more responsibility for the problems than do the old and sick people themselves. This is self-evidently stupid. If even 100 people who are currently old and sick smoked and dranked themselves into early debility, while all the other old and sick people in America had absolutely no causal role in their own illness, this tiny aggregate responsibility for a few cases of lung cancer and cirrhosis would, to a near certainty, be larger than the responsibility the young and healthy bear for other peoples' ill health¹.

8) Thefore, as a group, the old and sick have no moral claim to massive transfer payments from the young and healthy. This tells us nothing about any moral claims individual members may have. For example, veterans could be entitled to care, regardless of need, because they incurred some part of their current illness on behalf on the nation.

9) Arguments that we shouldn't let the worst off members of society die are not valid moral arguments for single payer. They are arguments in favor of giving health care to those who cannot afford it, a much more limited project.

¹ What about car accidents, flu shots, and the like? For this to be compelling, we'd have to have some evidence that the relevant failures are unequally distributed between the groups. But the elderly are worse drivers than teenagers, they're more likely to have inflicted secondary smoke on the young than the reverse, and so forth. Even if we could do the utilitarian calculus, it seems unlikely to run in favour of the old and sick.

Shiny, happy people holding prada

Portfolio, Conde Nast's new glossy business mag, has Felix Salmon, the best financial markets blogger out there. That, I get. The magazine itself, not so much. People read business magazines because they have to know what's in them for work . . . only nothing in Portfolio is a must read. I mean, I know its supposed to be a sort of glossy lifestyle magazine for the hedge fund set . . . but those kinds of magazines make most of their money advertising a lifestyle to people who haven't achieved it yet. Most of Vanity Fair's readers can't afford to buy Prada bags or Dolce and Gabbana suits; they're buying a technicolor fantasy.

In the hedge fund world, the glossy format kinda works against you. It's hard to dreamily envision yourself on your eighty foot yacht when the pictures make clear that if you ever get there, you'll probably be a short fifty year old man with a potbelly and a blackberry constantly going off in your ear.

The formidable Elizabeth Spiers has a more complete examination of it's flaws.

Tomorrow's media conspiracy, today

I see that someone has made a movie about the 1857 Mormon massacre of settlers on their way to California. How long before someone, somewhere, decides that this is an attempt by liberal-controlled Hollywood to derail Mitt Romney's campaign?

People power

The Mediabistro bot-scandal has made the New York Times Freakonomics blog. (Congratulations, Kriston, Catherine!). Steven Dubner concludes:

1. The stakes don’t have to be very high for people to cheat.

2. When no punishment exists for cheating, it’s pretty damn appealing.

3. We have been accused of stuffing a ballot box or two ourselves, although there were no bots involved (that I know of).

4. Can you please point me in the direction of the Diebold folks who rigged those machines? I would love to interview them

Question, though: did the cheating necessarily change the results? For a category like "Hottest DC Media Type", which dangerously approaches baseball statistics, the voting is probably going to end up telling us not, who is hottest, but who has the most friends who will vote for them. Don't get me wrong--Kriston and Catherine are very, very hot. One might argue that the results of the contest accidentally mirrored the actual truth of the matter. But there's no independent reason to believe that this will generally be true.

They won the bot contest for the same reason they probably would have won a straight vote: they had the most people trying to help them win. The real lesson here is that it's a good idea to be the kind of charming, hot person who easily acquires friends with powerful blogs. Or something.

Watch out, animals rights activists

If we can't eat them, can we use them for fuel?

If animals don't want to be eaten, they should stop being made of meat

A reader points to the famous (well . . . famous to the three libertarian vegetarians I know, anyway) Robert Nozick meditation on our obligations towards animals from Anarchy, State and Utopia:

We might try looking at comparable cases, extending whatever judgments we make on those cases to the one before us. For ex­ample, we might look at the case of hunting, where I assume that it's not all right to hunt and kill animals merely for the fun of it. Is hunting a special case, because its object and what provides the fun is the chasing and maiming and death of animals? Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfor­tunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. It's unfortunate that as a side effect (not a means) of my doing this, the animal's skull gets smashed. To be sure, I could forego swinging the bat, and instead bend down and touch my toes or do some other exercise. But this wouldn't be as enjoyable as swinging the bat; I won't get as much fun, pleasure, or delight out of it. So the question is: would it be all right for me to swing the bat in order to get the extra pleasure of swinging it as compared to the best available alternative activity that does not involve harming the animal? Suppose that it is not merely a question of foregoing today's special pleasures of bat swinging; suppose that each day the same situation arises with a different animal. Is there some principle that would allow killing and eating animals for the additional pleasure this brings, yet would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings? What could that principle be like? (Is this a better parallel to eat­ing meat? The animal is killed to get a bone out of which to make the best sort of bat to use; bats made out of other material don't give quite the same pleasure. Is it all right to kill the animal to obtain the extra pleasure that using a bat made out of its bone would bring? Would it be morally more permissible if you could hire someone to do the killing for you?)

Such examples and questions might help someone to see what sore of line he wishes to draw, what sort of position he wishes to take. They face, however, the usual limitations of consistency arguments; they do not say, once a conflict is shown, which view to change. After failing to devise a principle to distinguish swing­ing the bat from killing and eating an animal, you might decide that it's really all right, after all, to swing the bat. Furthermore, such appeal to similar cases does not greatly help us to assign precise moral weight to different sorts of animals.

Your rights end at the beginning of my tastebuds

In the post I linked yesterday, Julian made a side point about animal rights that I think bears examining: we tend to base our notion of which animals have rights based on whether they are a) cute or b) tasty:

I will note of existing animal cruelty laws that most contain specific exemptions for agriculture and various other industries, in ways that seem hard to justify. At any rate, I'm having trouble coming up with some coherent view on which "Tender meat is tasty" counts as a justification for the appalling way we treat veal calves but "I like watching violent bloodsports" is no excuse for how Michael Vick treated dogs. If abuse with no better rationale than mild enjoyment is "gratuitous," then factory farming is gratuitously cruel. (Lest it sound like I'm on a high horse here, I should note that, by my own lights, I really ought to either be a vegan or at least consume only dairy of known, humane provenance.) Our inconsistency here suggests that animal cruelty laws are less a function of high principle than of the fact that we like both burgers and cute doggies.

That's not really an argument for failing to ban dog-fighting--surely we can perfect some of the laws while we wait for our perfect state. But it is a call to come up with a better justification for our reasoning than "puppies are cute". Personally, I'd find it hard to construct an argument that bans dogfighting but allows veal--which is why I don't eat veal.

But I'm still battling with the question of whether animals should have rights. I'm a utility maximizer for animals: I think that eating certified humane meat is a positive moral good, because it causes the creation of additional happy animals (insofar as animals can be understood to be happy). Likewise having a pet. But while I certainly have a duty to my dog, does he thereby acquire rights? I'm pretty sure I have a very strong moral obligation to ensure that my dog is taken care of, but I'm not sure I'd legally enforce that claim against someone else.

How awesome is Denmark?

Pretty awesome, notes Will Wilkinson, although also pretty boring.

This is, for those of you who aren't aware, a hot topic in libertarian economic circles because a largish group of liberals has been touting Denmark as a "nordic" model that other countries should follow. Roughly speaking, the model consists of high income taxes, high social spending, low capital taxation, light business regulation, and what one might call a "teach a man to fish . . . " approach to unemployment.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the Nordic revolution. For one thing, things that work in small homogenous countries don't work in big, heterogenous ones. German unemployment reform caused massive political problems with the east.

But mostly, I'm skeptical of the "next big thing" approach to economic growth. Remember how Japan was going to buy the whole United States and turn us into slaves in their Walkman factories until . . . ooops! Ten year recession. I recall that at around the same time, Germany was going to finally conquer America with its mad engineering skillz. America, you see, couldn't possibly compete against national healthcare and a consensus-based management approach that allowed companies to do real long term planning.

In 1991, German per capita GDP was $19,465¹, compared to $23,456 in America--Germans enjoyed about 82% of American income per head.

In 2005, the last year for which figures are available, American GDP was $41,789 per head, while Germany's was $32,039--or 76% of our level.

Yes, yes, I know, this doesn't capture all of the intangibles that make life in a social democracy preferable to the squalor of America's unfettered market capitalism. But the point is, back then, people were arguing that Germany's GDP would smoke ours because of their awesome industrial system. Didn't happen.

I'm also somewhat skeptical of claims about American exceptionalism. I find them more plausible than claims about a Nordic miracle, because America has been pulling away from Europe for a lot longer. And I can tell a plausible story about why it's so. But the consensus based management thing wasn't obviously crazy, and if Germany had posted another ten years of terrific growth, I might even believe it now. So I think one should be cautious about attributing economic growth to any model, no matter how plausible the story behind it. Economies are mysterious things, and if we actually knew how to make them grow, we'd all be rich.

I should also point out that it's particularly dangerous to do this with small countries. The smaller the country, the more its economic growth is likely to depend on a few discrete factors that may be unrelated to policy. A single company, Nokia, accounts for something like 3-5% of Finnish GDP. If they have a boom year, the Finnish government looks like a genius; if they have an off year, the Finnish government looks like a poor economic steward. But the Finnish government has no control over worldwide demand for mobile phones.

¹All figures quoted at current prices in PPP.

Epstein on healthcare

Instapundit and the Instawife interview the ever-brilliant Richard Epstein on health care.

Do well by doing right

Now Henry Farrell piles on:

The argument that states will only adhere to international law when it is in their interests to do so is a highly plausible one. But without a generally convincing account of what those interests are, it is not very helpful. We don’t have such a generally convincing account, nor are likely to do anytime soon. Instead, we have a number of competing accounts (state interests flow from the structure of the international system, state interests flow from those of powerful domestic interest groups, state interests flow from the normative structures that they are embedded in etc). Each of these can plausibly be said to capture part of the truth, but none seems like a viable candidate to provide a generally applicable theory any time soon.

Sure. It could be in a state's long term interest to adhere to international law, even when not in the short term interest. But that isn't, as far as I can tell, the argument that Messrs Bertram and Quiggin are making; they are staking a moral claim that a particular vision of international law embodied in the UN charter ought to compel our compliance not because it is advantageous, but because it is right.

If we leave aside that claim, and just address whether it is in the long term strategic interest of the United States to submit itself to binding international law in order to invite reciprocity from other states, then I have to ask "Why?" Does it really actually invite a lot of reciprocity, or is that "reciprocity" enforced by the same means of enforcement we have now without the international law, i.e. the US military? Does it really make people like us a whole lot more? Is the system sustainable--would the US be willing to undertake the role of enforcer in exchange for a measly single vote on the security council, or will the system break down, either because the US withdraws at a bad moment, or because the US decides that it doesn't need such a big military any more? What will wannabe great powers that don't see a long-term strategic interest in international law do if this happens? Is it even remotely politically plausible that America, or any unipolar power, will consent to hamstring itself this way? Can America even credibly commit to international law provided that it is the main enforcer of same?

I realize that I'm not exactly the first genius to ask these questions. But as Henry well knows, I'm generally pretty skeptical of the ease with which these kinds of institutions can be built. The EU has worked, to some extent, but it's taken 50 years, and in the past decade has repeatedly failed to advance integration against the short term interests of powerful national constituencies. And given what the membership of the UN looks like, I'm pretty sceptical that it even should be built. Are we really going to let Zimbabwe, Sudan and Libya vote on our foreign policy?

Might makes . . . might

Meanwhile, Chris Bertram adds:

I have three reactions to this. The first is that McArdle’s description of the possible motivations for individuals is just absurdly simplistic: people either maximise their own good, or society’s, and since the latter suggestion is silly, we must work on the basis that of the former. Huh? How about intermediate possibilities, such as that people have a good that they try to realize, but that they also recognize constraints on the reasonable pursuit of that good (such as that other people have lives to live, have rights etc.). The second is that her justification for the self-interest assumption for states isn’t a simple consequence of her self-interest assumption for individuals. If individuals were straightforward maximizers of their own good then states would act in ways that reflect the self-interested action of the most powerful individuals within them rather than the (long term? short term?) interest of the state itself. Maybe there would be convergence, and maybe not, but McCardle isn’t entitled to the conclusion that states act self-interestedly on the basis that individuals do (if they do).

I have four reactions to this.

The first is that I wish people would spell my name correctly. There's only one "c" in McArdle . . . and also, for future reference, only one of each of the other letters. Given the dangerous resource shortages we may soon face as a result of overpopulation, I think we all need to be extra careful about wasteful letter mistakes.

The second is that his first point knocks down a straw man. I don't need to assume that people will only act in their self-interest--although clearly this is actually true for some values of the word "self-interest". I just need to assume that self-interest is a sufficiently powerful force that it will dominate other values in many interactions. This seems to me to be self-evidently true.

The third is that his second point is true, but not interesting; a definitional quibble. Obviously the governments of many countries are not acting to maximize the interests of all of the citizens of the country, and apologies to anyone who believed that when I said "states act in their own interest", I meant "Robert Mugabe does what is best for The People of Zimbabwe". He damn well doesn't. But that in no way refutes the notion that, in foreign policy, the government of Zimbabwe will generally be less concerned with the good of mankind than with the good of its own state--whether or not those interests happen to coincide with the collective interest of all the people now living within the borders of The Artist formerly Known as Rhodesia.

But his last point is where we really get to the heart of the argument, I think.

My third reaction is that, as Bruno Frey and others have argued, the self-interest assumption turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Design a system on the assumption that people will act to maximize their individual good and they will act on that assumption. They’d be crazy not to: why hold back from the trough when the rules of the game assume that everyone will be pushing their own snout forward? But this proves nothing fundamental. A system designed on the basis of a certain level of solidaristic or community spirit may well foster such attitudes, especially if we have effective mechanisms for punishing those who act greedily or selfishly.

This rather deftly ignores my point. A system in which we assume people will not act in self interest is a system which has no enforcement mechanism. Punishment mechanisms are what you build when you assume that solidarity and community spirit are not sufficient--which is exactly what I have been saying.

The problem with an international law model is precisely that there is no viable means of enforcement. Social punishment mechanisms work best in small homogenous groups where there is strong consensus about the relevant norms. This is not, I should say, a very good description of the global community right now, where about the only consensus I can see is that no one likes having less power than the US. This is enough consensus to fuel a movement to deprive the US of some of its power, but not to actually resolve many of the other thorny issues that are currently rending the world. Who shall we disinvite from the annual Stag Dinner in order to save Darfur?

That leaves force. Who shall provide it? Is it really reasonable to assume that America will submit to punishment from a body where it is the only real enforcement, in a case where America thinks that it has the right of the matter? Am I creating a self-fulfilling prophecy if I assume that America will probably not be willing to spend 4% of its GDP on a military it is not allowed to use without UN permission? And would the world actually be a better place without that spending? America might, which is precisely the argument that a lot of libertarians make; I'm pretty sure we can keep the Canadian and Mexican hordes at bay on a lot less than 4% of national income. But I think you have to think hard about all the knock-on effects from a decline in American military might before you conclude that this would be a boon for the rest of the world, too.

What is torture, she asked, and washed her hands . . .

A commenter demands that I define torture. This is a little squishy, but here goes:

Would I be outraged if I heard about someone doing it to an American soldier?

I don't mean, "Would I feel bad?" I feel bad when people kill American soldiers, but I don't think that, say, all Japanese soldiers in World War II were irredeemably evil. That's war: you shoot at them, and they shoot back.

On the other hand, when I hear about the Bataan death march, I'm pretty sure it's evil, and should be forbidden by a legitimate state.

Some of the things the Geneva convention describes as inhumane don't strike me as torture--I wouldn't be outraged if I learned that American prisoners had been subjected to "insults and public curiosity", though I would if that "public curiosity" included "How do they look stacked up naked in a cheerleading pyramid?"

It still leaves open the boundary question, but I think that if most of us really tried to imagine how we'd feel if, say, the Syrian government held American soldiers--or American civilians incommunicado for two years while repeatedly waterboarding them, we're probably not, most of us, that far from agreement.

As a side note

John Quiggin says he's

. . . mildly surprised to find myself in partial agreement with Megan McArdle who notes “the wars that don’t happen in the Middle East, or Central Europe, because all the participants know that it would be a foolhardy invitation to US intervention”. The fact is that the (admittedly selective) enforcement of the interantional law against aggressive war, in which the US has taken the leading role, has had a significant effect in securing adherence to that law. But even without any obvious threat of US intervention, a great many states have abandoned the idea of military force as a legitimate instrument of public policy except in the context of (individual or collective) self-defence and UN-authorised peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. In particular, outright invasions of one country by another, with the objective of either annexing the target country or installing a puppet government, have been quite rare in the period since 1945. So the claim that international law is a dead letter is far from obvious.

This is because we don't agree. In fact, since 1945, "international law" has been enforced when some sufficiently powerful state felt strongly enough about it to do something, for various reasons ranging from post-colonial nostalgia to anti-communism, to strategic commodity security. To the extent that border disputes may have been restrained in those regions, they are restrained not because nations think "the fiery sword of UN legal justice will descend upon us" but because people think "the US doesn't like us going to war against our neighbors".

Obviously, all laws are only partially enforced, but at some point, it becomes meaningless to call this the rule of law; a law that is enforced only when the police chief feels that it will personally benefit him or someone he happens to like is not a law, it is an autocracy.

Moreover, I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but it's far from clear to me that if the UN charter were actually operational, such partial peacekeeping would even have happened. To the extent that countries are afraid of US intervention, they're afraid precisely because they know that China and Russia don't hold a veto.

We must set a good example for the children . . .

John Quiggin has a post up about foreign policy in which he calls me out. I'm still mulling the meat of the post, but something one of the commenters said struck me:

Sadly, I think most of my fellow countrymen are not going to understand the problems with the Drezner model until they’ve experienced how it works when some other country is top dog.

I have heard some variation of this argument before, though I don't know how widely it is held in the netroots. But if it is, I'm not sure what the point of arguing is, because this strikes me as completely lunatic. Is there anyone who believes that, should Russia or China surpass America to grab the mantle of world superpower, they will allow their actions to be bound by the kind of international law model that Quiggin is proposing? Or that if we voluntarily submitted to be 100% bound by the UN charter, this would somehow lay upon them an inviolable moral obligation to do the same? If leading by example were as effective as some of the netroots commenters seem to imply, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation should have obviated the need for the welfare state.

That leaves one with the question of what to do in a world in which the other states don't voluntarily submit themselves to be bound by a robust international law. Even presuming that we all agree that such a framework would be nice, should America unilaterally act as if we are already living in such a system, even though several of the major players manifestly will not reciprocate? That's a tricky stunt to pull off in a system with no enforcement mechanism outside of your own military power.

Animals rights

As long time readers know, I'm, well, crunchy-ish. I make my own yogurt, I fret about global warming, and I only eat certified humane meat. I don't care about killing farm animals, but I do think that their lives, however long they are, should be worth living on sheepish or piggy or . . . er . . . cowese terms.

So obviously, I've been following with avid interest Jim Henley's attempt to generate a libertarian theory of animal cruelty law, as well as Julian Sanchez's declaration that there isn't one.

Julian takes what I would say is the typical libertarian view, which is that only rights should be enshrined in law. I shouldn't try to steal someone else's husband, but I am legally forbidden from stealing their car, because they have a property right in the car, but not in the husband. That leaves a boundary question: are animals rights-having creatures?

As with abortion, there's no inherently libertarian answer to that question. But Julian and some of Jim's commenters seem to be taking a fairly hard line: rights are binary (you have them or you don't); and animals, which don't have agency, cannot have rights.

I'd say that there are different classes of rights-holders; babies are persons, but they can't vote, and they do have the right to be supported by the state. (Of course, some libertarians would disagree with that latter, but I'm pretty firm that they do.) So it seems plausible to me that animals could have limited rights--a right not to suffer for our pleasure, say--even though none of them will ever master the lute.

Should animals have that right? Obviously, both Julian (who is a vegetarian) and I, who will only eat animals that are not industrially farmed, have both decided that the suffering of animals matters, morally. But should it matter, legally? Creating new rights is a big deal.

Okay, I'll bite the bullet. As a first principle, you shouldn't be able to burn a sheep alive because it's fun¹.

¹ I mean, assuming you are a member of what I take to be the very small class of people who would find something like this fun.

Effective? Who cares?

Matt responds to my post on whether or not torture works thusly:

Megan counterproses that "people take the hard stance and say 'Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong.'" I think Megan thinks that people from the "torture doesn't work" camp are arguing in bad faith, but I'm really not. I don't think it makes any sense at all to say that there's a categorical moral against smashing people's fingers with a hammer or whatever other depraved acts of torture you may care to imagine. After all, I believe (as most people believe) that it's sometimes morally praiseworthy for the state to have its agents kill people with bullets, bombs, mortar shells, etc. so there's surely some end such that torturing someone would, if effective, be a just method of achieving that end.

The difference is that despite the horrors of war, there's a very strong argument to be made that if good people systematically disavowed war-making as a practice that bad guys would run roughshod over us. When Hitler's tanks start rolling across Europe, someone's got to shoot back. By contrast, I don't see any examples of societies using routinized legal torture to gain a decisive advantage over their foes or any evidence that the current era of torture has been a net positive in fighting al-Qaeda. To say that a method of investigation works "provided that you can verify the information" is, after all, merely to beg the question. Consulting a psychic works provided that you can verify the information, but spending person-hours chasing down the psychic's "leads" isn't going to make the country safer.

I don't think that Matt &c are arguing from bad faith. Indeed, I agree with them that torture in most cases isn't very effective. I don't agree with what we might call the "strong case" against the efficacy of torture, which is that it never works. If I have, say, a kidnapper from whom I want to get the location of his victim, and I can credibly promise to shoot out his kneecap if the victim isn't where he says she is, then I think I have a reasonable chance of finding out where the victim is by torturing him. If he knows, it is clearly in his best interest to tell me rather than a) playing dumb or b) giving me false information.

Now, those cases might be rare. Which is why many people, I assume Matt included, make what we could call the "weak case" against torture, which is that it generally isn't that effective. But I don't think that this is a very good argument to deploy if your goal is, as mine is, a legal ban on torture by the US government. The weak case doesn't prove we shouldn't use torture; it just proves that we should limit it to cases, such as the above hypothetical, where there is a reasonable likelihood that it will be effective. I doubt the rules for doing so would be as complicated as, say, the New York City building code.

The other problem with the weak case is that torture can theoretically be made more effective. Those brain scans are real; a workable machine might be less than a decade away. (It also might well not; the history of science journalism is littered with the corpses of "next big things" that turned out not to, y'know, actually work.) If you cannot make the case against legal torture without resorting to efficacy arguments, what the hell do you do if it becomes pretty damn effective?

My position is that even if it is 100% effective--in the sense of producing only true information--we should ban it. I don't trust anyone, not myself and certainly not the state, with the power implied by sanctioned torture. I don't want to live in a state that tortures people. And I don't think you need an efficacy argument to make that case.

Get me an editor, stat!

Eliezer Yudkowsky is very, very smart. But I'm not sure the world needed a thousand word post pointing out that, apparently, most people just regurgitate answers they don't really understand in order to get good grades. Stand by for the monograph on how sometimes, guys will say that they want a serious relationship, when all they're actually interested in is hooking up.

But is it <i>art</i>?

Kriston responds to my earlier post on sweatshop art:

Now, I get the sense that McArdle is baiting her readers (and this writer) to deliver forth an encomium to Art and Apollo and to denounce the Chinese for this cheapest debasement of the canon. And, because I know McMegan socially, I know that she wants to stake out the counterintuitive ground here and defend these reproductions as desirable against real and perceived critics who abhor them. But the art reproductions aren't the real issue (and not just because they aren't the real deal, though I am tempted to launch into a tangent on the problem of authenticity). The fact is, insofar as the global art market is concerned, a Dafen Holbein doesn't account for any more than a Soundgarden poster—they're both examples of cheap decor you can buy at Wal-Mart.

Which is not to say that China won't or has not already had a massive impact on the market. But with regard to this story, the significant point is that economic conditions in China are such that highly skilled labor can be organized (or exploited, if you prefer) as if it were the most basic unskilled labor. I'm not the professional economist, though, so I don't know whether this collapse of categories is an unprecedented or even significant aspect of the global market. Ryan? Felix? Tyler?

I think there are multiple questions here.

1) Are the workers exploited? I tend not to be interested in that question, assuming that whatever their alternatives are are even worse. Yes, it might be nice if they were paid more money, but if I think it would be that nice, I could just send them the money; there's no particular moral reason that people who buy art at Wal-Mart should foot the bill for their higher living standards.

2) Are the reproductions a bad thing? I tend to think it's nice that Americans of moderate means can have a better grade of cheap art in their houses, at the same time that Chinese art students can have a slightly better job than whatever was previously on offer. But that is crass pecuniuary opinion. I am willing, indeed eager, to listen to an argument from Mr Capps that this is culturally or artistically a Bad Thing.

3) Is it, as one of the people interviewed for the original article argues, a tragedy that their sense of individual creativity is being stifled? That was what kicked off the original question in my mind about how different this really is from the old workshop system; I don't get the feeling that young apprentices were encouraged to express their own, special selves.

4) The broader question, which I didn't ask but Kriston did, of what this means for art markets, and potentially other markets, that China can assemble highly skilled labour into sweatshops. My sense is that it just doesn't matter for the parts of the art market that I inhabit, where pride of ownership is intimately connected to provenance . . . but I might well be kidding myself. And of course much of the art market is not adorable little galleries and Picasso sketches at auction; it's Thomas Kinkade and hotel paintings.

Update By which I do not mean to imply that I buy Picasso sketches at auction. I mean I look at them in museums, and gaze enviously at people who can afford to buy expensive art at auction.

Weird

I worked from home for a little bit this morning, and from force of habit was watching BBC World News this morning. Bizarrely, there was a commercial for some product that focused around being a husband waiting for your wife to give birth. Well, that isn't really bizarre. But it was odd, because the commercial was so obviously made in Canada, for a Canadian audience. I knew our commercials went up there, but I hadn't realised there had been a reverse invasion.

Update What were the tells? The announcer had a Canadian accent, the hospital seemed pretty clearly Canadian, and the husband was searching for a honey bun in the vending machine.

Sweep!

If you're like me, you've shaken your head as the tweens and twentysomethings march off to movies based on their favorite video games.

Well now, there's one for us.

Does torture work?

One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn't work, so why bother? That's tempting, but it's too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances. Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn't seem necessarily so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase.

I'd rather see people take the hard stance and say "Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong." Otherwise, you're kind of stuck if someone comes up with a way to make it effective. I've been thinking about this in relation to the much vaunted lie detecting brain scans. Most people have talked about the implications for the criminal justice system--does the fifth amendment still apply? But what I wonder is, what does this mean for torturers? If you can actually tell accurately when someone is lying, torture suddenly becomes very, very effective, doesn't it? And yet, it would still be wrong. So make the case on those grounds. Efficiency is a dangerous red herring.

The real and the ideal

John Quiggin demands of Daniel Drezner:

Unless “vital national interest” is construed so narrowly as to be equivalent to “self-defence”, this is a direct repudiation of the central founding principle of international law, prohibiting aggressive war as a crime against peace, indeed, the supreme international crime. It’s more extreme than the avowed position of any recent US Administration – even the invasion of Iraq was purportedly justified on the basis of UN resolutions, rather than US self-interest. Yet, reading this and other debates, it seems pretty clear that Drezner’s position is not only generally held in the Foreign Policy Community but is regarded, as he says, as a precondition for serious participation in foreign policy debates in the US.

Dan and I discussed this on Bloggingheads: to what extent is the Netroots enraged because the foreign policy community focuses on what states will do, rather than what they should do?

Many economists (not all) might agree that it would be lovely if we lived in an Edenic utopia in which everyone did the best for society without thought of themselves. But almost all economists recognize that self-interest is a powerful force that must be dealt with, and therefore that economic policy must be designed on the assumption that people will try to maximise their own good, rather than society's. Similarly, foreign policy assumes that states will act in their own interest, and try to design a foreign policy that works within that constraint. The netroots (and many libertarians), who have a more idealistic theoretical model, are outraged. They are particularly outraged because they see that in certain cases, such as Iraq, their prescription would have produced a better outcome.

But of course, that doesn't mean that it necessarily works as a system--that Bill Gates gave billions to charity is not a vindication of communism. Having gotten it so dreadfully wrong on Iraq, I am seduced by the easy by-the-numbers approach posed by a non-interventionist foreign policy. But I wonder what I am not seeing--the wars that don't happen in the Middle East¹, or Central Europe, because all the participants know that it would be a foolhardy invitation to US intervention. I take this to be the foriegn policy defense of their position; and it's a pretty compelling one. For the same reason that it's only a good idea to be a pacifist in a nation with a strong police force, it may only be possible to be an idealist when realists are running the show.

¹ Yes, Israel is certainly a sore point, and our support of Israel makes Arab nations sorer. But Israel is not the only country in the Middle East. If Israel weren't there, the Middle East would still have plenty of conflict . . . Iraq didn't invade Iran, or Kuwait, to protest America's position on Palestine.

Carping on credit

The Wall Street Journal reports that Illinois is experimenting with mandatory credit counseling for people considering non-traditional loans:

Yet Illinois's experience to date shows how difficult it is to create even modest safeguards in the home-buying process. A previous pilot program similar to the new law was viciously attacked and rescinded in January, after only a few months. Instead of winning plaudits, the pilot program quickly became mired in charges that it would make it harder for minorities to buy homes. Mortgage brokers, fearing a loss of business, claimed that access to credit would tighten in the neighborhoods targeted by the law. Rumors flew that dozens of lenders had pulled out of the area.

The general response of economists is to dismiss this claim with a derisive laugh. If mortgage brokers find it harder to sell their wares when borrowers better understand the terms, then those are mortgages that shouldn't be sold.

But it isn't quite that simple. Much depends on the quality of the information given, which is why pro-choice activists often object to counseling requirements, and of course "crisis pregnancy centers" that counsel against abortion.

Even worse, there is some evidence from heterodox economics that more information doesn't necessarily make for better decisions. General economic theory dictates that the more information is available to participants in a market, the better ("more efficient") the outcomes in that market should be. But that dictum is not always borne out in economic experiments; sometimes more information makes things worse. And we're not talking about more information like "this is what your BABY looks like!" (or "it's just a clump of cells"). I mean more information about things with ostensibly neutral emotional valence, like the underlying value of traded assets.

Is an hour or two enough to give financially naive people good information about mortgages, or just to confuse them? Is the state biased towards being too conservative? Even if the information being given is good, is the information the borrowers are taking equally good? As any blogger knows, no matter how clearly and effectively you think you are explaining things, misunderstandings are rife.

I'm tempted to say that scaring low-income buyers off non-traditional mortgages is an obvious, unalloyed good, given what's happening in the property markets. But there's an uncomfortable whiff of the paternal about that instinct. 85% of subprime mortgages are still in good standing; presumably, many of those homeowners would not thank me for preventing them from buying their first house.

Did 9/11 ensure Republican hegemony in New York?

Dave Weigel disagrees with my characterization of the Democratic mayoral candidates:

Yes, Green nearly blew the primary election and gave it to Fernando Ferrer, an absolute special interest candidate and a puppet of Al Sharpton. He still had a 40-point lead over Michael Bloomberg and the numbers didn't really move until 9/11. That started a huge swing to Bloomberg which Green aided by freaking out and saying he would have done as good a job on 9/11 as Rudy. (This seems less offensive six years on.) Giuliani endorsed Bloomberg and his post-9/11 Midas touch gave him the election, narrowly.

Obviously McArdle (and a few million other people) lived through this, but so soon after Karl Rove's adieu it seems worthwhile to point it out. The GOP's lock on Gracie Mansion has less to do with New York's one-party interest group-driven politics than the political serendipity of 9/11, just like Bush's 2002 and 2004 election wins obviously owed more to his "bullhorn moment" and al Qaeda fears than Rove's Shaolin realignment-fu.

Mmmm . . . maybe. I concede that 9/11 had a big impact, but it's more complicated than that. The Democratic primary was supposed to be held on September 11th; one of my friends saw the towers hit as she came out of the voting booth. The primary ended up being held on September 25th, and Green's ultimate win may plausibly be attributed to a rightward shift post-9/11. The nomination in 2005 went to . . . Fernando Ferrer.

You seem to have confused me with someone else

SomeCallMeTim used to comment on my old site. He disagreed with almost everything I said, and occasionally was a little over the top with his attacks, but he was a sharp interlocutor who forced me to think. I miss him.

Hence, I was a little surprised to find, in the comments of Jim Henley's fascinating quest for libertarian arguments against animal cruelty, SomeCallMeTim characterizing me thusly:

This is going to sound like snark, but it’s genuine: seriously?

She was OK with Padilla, OK with Hamdi, and thought the Administration was more protective of civil liberties than a Kerry Administration would be. Those seem like bright-line tests to me.

But I willingly acknowlege that my understanding of “libertarian” is informed by what Mill and Nozick we read in college, as well as things said by you, Julian, and other libertarian bloggers (and things pointed to by the same). I will happily take your opinion as definitive, and stop making “schmib” references about Megan, Insty, or anyone else self-labeling as libertarian. And I sincerely retract and apologize for all such previous comments.

I still think those positions are deeply and grievously wrong. But if not actually anti-libertarian, I should (and will) stop saying or implying otherwise.

I was surprised because this is what I've said about Padilla: i.e., nothing. Here's what I've said about Hamdi: also nothing. And here's what I wrote¹ about Bush v. Kerry on civil liberties:

Civil Liberties [I support] Neither. I used to think that Janet Reno was the embodiment of all evil, after she helped gut the fourth amendment and pioneered the use of the paramilitary force to resolve child custody issues. Now I think that whoever becomes attorney general is driven mad by dreams of all the good they could do if only they had a lot more power. Both sides endorse the execrable drug war, which has done more to destroy civil liberties than any post-9/11 moves.

I was probably wrong about this--to the extent that one can know a counterfactual, that is. Though I stand by my assertion that the Clinton administration was pretty amazingly crap on civil liberties . . . as was Bush I . . . and this is why I don't write about civil liberties; it's too depressing. But it isn't what Tim seems to have thought; it was a generalised "pox on both their houses" feeling, the eternal weary burden of any libertarian, not a rousing endorsement of the Bush administration.

I often have this feeling that people on the web are arguing with some other libertarian. I'm fairly frequently confused with Jacqueline Passey or Kerry Howley, even though we don't actually look alike, write about the same things, or for that matter, agree all that often. Even more frequently, I am assailed for my position on some issue upon which I cannot remember having ever taken a position . . . or in some cases, upon which I have taken the opposite position. For example, I am weirdly being described as a "pro-torture" libertarian.

This is the closest thing I have ever written to something "pro-torture", an exploration of how we'd feel about torture if it were unmediated by the state.

I want you to imagine that there's a terrorist group that is threatening, not some faceless person somewhere, but your kid. Your husband or wife. Your beloved brother or sister. Your mother or father. They are planning to kill them. You don't know exactly when, or how, and hence you know that you can't protect them without taking away the liberty that makes their life worth living. Picture the face of that person you love. Picture them dying, horribly, from poison gas. The terrorist group is planning on doing that to them. You know it's going to happen, unless you can somehow prevent it.

Now I want to picture that you have a member of that terrorist group tied up in your livingroom. He probably knows about the plans, and if he doesn't, he certainly knows how to get the people who do know about them. Only despite the best efforts of the Feds, he isn't talking.

Now, are you going to give him back to the Feds to be sent to Gitmo in the hopes that a couple years down the road, he might tell you something -- if they haven't already gassed your child, that is? Or are you going to whip out the toolbox and get to work?

I think it's important to think of this in two ways. First, if you endorse torture, you should be willing to perform it yourself, for you are on the same moral level as the torturer. And second, all the victims of terrorists are someone's beloved sister, mother, son. You should not be more willing to sentence them to death for your high principles than you are your own loved ones. The torture debate is ineffective because it's debated at such delicate remove from our own lives.

In the end I concluded what I think most people believe: there are rare circumstances in which almost all of us would endorse the use of torture, the proverbial ticking time bomb in Manhattan. But that doesn't mean we should legalize it. If there really is a nuclear time bomb in Manhattan, and the CIA can find it by torturing one of the conspirators, I'm pretty sure they will regardless of the law. Meanwhile, if you legalize it, they'll start torturing people in ordinary cases, because well, it's legal, innit?

I've written this latter point over and over and over again, but somehow, only the post they think they disagree with (when it's actually discussed, we all pretty rapidly agree) sticks in their head.

I don't know why people think I'm pro-torture, except that I suspect they are angry that the morality of torture can even be discussed; they want to put it in the same basket of questions we dismiss with visceral horror, such as "Child pornography: good for society?" So even though I agree with them as a policy matter, and even as a moral matter², they are angry that I don't agree with them in the right way. Then they hear other people talking about how I supported Padilla and Hamdi, and this reinforces this increasingly unrealistic mental portrait of me.

¹It ought to go without saying, but just in case: obviously, the conclusion I reached about whom to vote for was wrong, though I stand by many of the sub-analyses; in particular, I was most wrong about the administration's staggeringly awful foreign policy, and amazing general incompetence.

²I haven't actually found anyone but a couple of Quakers who is actually willing to argue that if, say, their mother had been kidnapped by terrorists; and one of the terrorists were right there in the livingroom where you could stomp the information out of them, the appropriate course would be to forgo violence. Ditto ticking nuclear bombs in Manhattan. Yes, it's unlikely, but we're trying to clarify a moral principle, not set policy; we already agree on the policy, which is that torture should be illegal.

This is your head on blogs

Dan Drezner and I discuss the war, the financial panic, and my white jeans on BloggingheadsTV. If you've ever wondered what I look like early in the morning and with no makeup . . . well, now you know.

A middling mystery

One of Matt's commenters asks, in re Rudy:

Why do New Yorkers keep voting Republican? I don't care if they think it's cute-- they keep saddling us with awful ex-mayors who see it as a launching pad for national office. Enough. Vote for a greasy dem who's satisfied with a little graft and a few laughs and stop saddling us with egomaniacal, semi-authoritarian dweebs!

They vote Republican because the whole city is Democratic.

Let me explain.

For most offices, like city council, the Democratic primaries decide the election. That means that there are a lot of extremely powerful interest groups with very powerful electoral machines invested in the primaries. And they are far to the left of both America, and most of New York, which is why City Council meetings tend to sound like the forlorn remnants of a Socialist Worker's Reading Group.

These groups tend to nominate mayoral candidates who are a) fairly far to the left and b) extremely noticeably in hoc to many small interest groups who are not popular with most of the voters. However, a mayoral race is high profile enough that all the people who normally just reflexively vote Democratic will actually know something about the candidate. Like, for example, his name. And what makes the candidate popular with the interest groups almost definitionally makes them unpopular with the broad electorate.

The Republicans, meanwhile, nominate socially moderate, and somewhat fiscally conservative candidates who resonate with the majority of New Yorkers who are not members of a government union or activist group. Hence, Rudy and Mike.

Term limits, it should be noted, have made the problem worse; with the professional pols out, the little interest groups have grown noticeably in power. So New York may be facing Republican mayors for some time to come.

The morality of health care finance

I think this post wins the prize for boringest title ever. Also, it seems to be roughly one squintillion words long. But stay with me. This is important.

A post from my old blog on the morality of healthcare transfers has attracted an amazing amount of ire from the liberal bloggers and commenters flocking to complain about how evil I am. Most of them, in the course of criticising it, display what seems to me like an Olympic-caliber ability to miss the point. However, given how many of them did not understand what I was saying, it seems likely that I was more in error. Let me see if I can clarify.

There are some arguments that the market for health insurance is different and special, and therefore can be best provided by the government; I find those arguments unconvincing, for reasons I will explain another time. But that is not really an argument about the moral merits of the system; it is a claim about efficiency.

In discussing the morality of a single-payer system, those efficiency considerations are irrelevant. In discussing the morality, one thing matters¹: who is made better off, and who worse off, by the system?

Most advocates of single payer, I think, care most about this justice claim. They may also think that they can make the system more efficient, but if one could somehow prove scientifically that a private system would be cheaper and better, they would still favor a public system as long as a substantial population remained uninsured.

But wholesale transfers to large classes, from large classes, are not good moral philosophy unless those classes are very well specified to the moral effect you are trying to achieve.

For example, we could take money from taxi drivers and give it to surfers. Some of the taxi drivers would be bad people who don't deserve their money; some of the surfers would be sterling chaps whom society has failed to justly reward. But still, we all² recognize that this would be moronic, because virtue and vice are fairly randomly distributed within and between the two populations. There is no reason to think that on net, we would have enhanced social justice.

Now, Ezra's original post criticized Giuliani's health care plan on the grounds that it will transfer less money from young, healthy people to old sick people:

If you're healthy, a world in which Giuliani's plan was law would be a world in which it was economically foolish of you to purchase high quality, comprehensive coverage. And that would be fine -- for the healthy individual. But insurance works based on risk pooling. If our hypothetical 23-year-old only uses $10 of health care a year, but is now paying $80 rather than $100 for his plan, that's less money that can subsidize someone with a chronic illness.

This post makes what I think is a very common assumption among single-payer advocates.

A gigantic single-payer system is a pretty blunt instrument; it transfers money from one group, the young and healthy, to another group, the old and sick. It does not distinguish much more finely than that between the deserving and undeserving within that class. This is why discussions of particularly deserving or undeserving people within the larger class, such as your fine old Uncle Bob who served his country in two wars before becoming a minister, are irrelevant; as with the surfers and taxi drivers, almost any class we can specify will contain some very worthy members who deserve more from society than they have gotten. What we need to know is whether the class of old and sick people as a whole are much more deserving than the class of young and healthy people; whether our transfers do more good than harm.

Single payer advocates seem to invariably assume that the answer is yes. This is a natural reaction; the old and sick inspire our sympathy. But I am not sure that, as a group, they should also summon our sense of social injustice.

How do we decide which class is more "deserving"? Our intuitions offer dozens of ways, but I think these are the major metrics:

1. They are needy. The class we propose to benefit has greater need for the money than the class from whom we propose to take.

2. It's not fair. The class we propose to benefit has been unluckier than the class from whom we propose to take.

3. They are responsible. The class from whom we propose to take has in some way contributed to the problems we are trying to rectify.

How well do any of these describe the old and sick en masse?

Continue reading "The morality of health care finance" »

It's a regular soap opera out there

I'm writing about healthcare in a desperate, but probably ultimately futile, attempt to communicate my romantic attraction to Ezra. Meanwhile, apparently Matt is apparently linking to me in the hopes that we can someday hook up. Perhaps I'll consider it, since my hopeless pining has availed me nothing . . . but wait! Is Ezra coming around? Even though I dress like a ditsy teenager? Tune in next week, same time, same station . . .

Flash from the past

Speaking of Crazy Uncle Rudy, I wanted to link to Jim Henley's take on his Foriegn Affairs essay. I know, I know, you've already read it. But it's so hilarious, I can't resist:

Rudy Giuliani hired a ghostwriter to produce the requisite manifesto, “Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned,” for Foreign Affairs magazine. It’s full of lies, oversimplifications and vagueness, but makes up for all that by being very, very tedious. Because the genre requires him to name-check every part of the world - perhaps to assure the alleged author that it exists, perhaps to reassure the FA reader that the alleged author has heard of the world - you get whole sections of “I see India out there tonight. Keep rocking, India! And lemme give a shoutout to my peeps in Germany!” Those passages read like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on “The State of the World Today.”

The rest of it reads like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on “The State of the World Today” after being maddened by bees.

Though it does take a certain amount of . . . shall we say, brio, to hitch your wagon to the neocon star just as it goes supernova.

Public service announcement

Roy Edroso's commenters are accusing me of blocking the link to my piece on the morality of health care transfers. I'm not even sure that's actually possible, but assuming it is, I'm not doing it. Nor would I, since it seems cowardly, wrong, and also a complete waste of time, given that anyone who wants to read the thing can find it on my front page.

What's happening is that the permissions on my individual archive pages are rather tight. This was not done by me, but by my host, who says it is necessary to prevent comment spam. As a result, frequently when you try to click on a link to one of my posts, you get a message that says "Verboten!" I get it all the time, regardless of where I come from, or what the content is . . . my mac and cheese recipe is every bit as top secret as my opinions on intergenerational transfers.

This shouldn't be a problem here, and if you want to follow a link to the old site, and you get the verboten message, all you need to do is hit refresh. That always takes me to the page I was looking for.

I fear you may have misunderstood me

One of my commenters demands:

Lets say Rudy did just make a bad choice, no ulterior motives. Isn't that bad enough? Don't we want a president that makes good choices when he has to make a decision on these types of things?

Who were the other guys that recommended to him that they put the command center away from the big terrorist target? Wouldn't they make a better president.

I am not defending Rudy, the presidential candidate. Almost no one who has lived in New York wants Rudy anywhere near the nuclear football, nor would we like to see his strongly authoritarian instincts (however much they arguably may have done for New York's policing) unleashed on the federal justice system. Rudy is craaaaaaaaazy, albeit not in a way that made him a particularly bad mayor. And the decision to locate the command center where he did was stupid. I'm just not sure it was as stupid as it now seems, and I am skeptical of the claim that he put it there to keep as a love nest. Rudy was perfectly capable of getting crazy, stupid ideas, and then forcing them on everyone else, when there was absolutely no sex involved.

Why, sir, you're turning my poor head

I know that the sweet, sweet, bloggy love which has greeted my arrival at The Atlantic cannot go on much longer. But it sure is fun while it lasts. I never knew so many people cared.

Markets in everything

Sweatshop copies of great art. Weren't many of the originals produced in similar factory-like conditions? Professor? Mr Teachout? Mr Capps? Anyone?

Love shack

Mark Kleiman and I have been discussing the theory that the disaster recovery bunker in WTC 7 was placed so as to make the best love nest for Rudy Giuliani and his then-extramarital-girlfriend (now wife). Mark has just responded to a post I made on my old blog:

She makes two points:

1. Traffic near City Hall was tied up on 9/11, vindicating the decision to place the command center should be within walking distance.

2. Giuliani and Nathan had other places to canoodle, including "her apartment and the City's many fine luxury hotels."

As to point #2, as long as Rudy and Judi were engaging in discreet adultery rather than flagrant adultery, having the Mayor visit her apartment, or taking a room in a luxury hotel, would have created certain ... security risks. Much better to have the city supply the love nest. As noted above, Barrett's flat assertion that the couple repeatedly visited the command center has gone uncontradicted, so far as I know. What do you think they were doing there: fire drills?

As to point #1, I don't pretend to be an expert on emergency management, but as far as I can tell no one but Giuliani supported the decision to place the command center at WTC7, or the "walking distance" criterion that justified that decision. That ought to raise red flags. This is not a case where "common sense" deserves serious consideration when it conflicts with expert opinion.

Yes, traffic near City Hall was tied up. But traffic near any disaster site was likely to be tied up. If the disaster wasn't near City Hall, the Mayor and his staff could have been easily transported to whatever command center had been chosen. (Apparently the favored location was actually in Brooklyn.) In a pinch, NYPD has helicopters.

On the point about their illicit liasons I am under the impression that, whatever the danger, they did in fact routinely visit hotels and her apartment, which is how the thing became common knowlege; certainly, showing up at the bunker together wasn't exactly a good way to keep it secret. I'm sure they did go to the bunker . . . and if I had such a place, I think I'd be tempted to at least neck on the desk near the secret button. But that doesn't mean it was therefore purpose-built for illicit assignations.

On the second point, it wasn't just traffic near the buildings that was snarled; that traffic may have been better than uptown. Remember, the island was sealed shut in the middle of rush hour. Police cars and ambulances can only clear a route to get somewhere if there is somewhere for the other cars to turn into. In Midtown and the financial district at rush hours, the streets are literally a solid block of cars. They would have to drive up onto the sidewalk to give a mayoral entourage a clear path--except that there are cars parked along the side of the street, so they can't do that.

In retrospect, of course, it was dumb. But hindsight bias distorts our perceptions. People who were against an idea remember having been against it much more strongly (and for better reasons) than they actually were at the time; people who were for it forget or play down their support; and people who didn't take part in the decision vastly overestimate the likelihood that they would have correctly predicted the actual outcome. Thus, it starts to make sense to look for conspiracies . . . a mole inside the organisation, or a venal politician who placed a bunker to use it as a love nest. It is not impossible that this was the case, but it doesn't strike me as particularly likely.

Cruel victories

Jim Henley notifies me that Michael Vick has just pled, taking 18-36 months. If I were religious, I would suspect that this would be the least of the sentences he could expect. As it is, I'm not sure it's enough, but I'll take a grim pleasure in knowing he didn't walk.

Jim, meanwhile, is struggling with his inner vigilante:

Prosecutors will recommend 18+ months, though his own attorneys will ask the judge, pretty please, for less than a year. Since cruel and unusual punishment is wrong, I won’t recommend breaking Vick’s arms and legs and tossing him into a pit with his own dogs.

Everything old is new again

Clever, witty, and devastatingly handsome international Man of Mystery Brian Beutler now has a new website called . . . Brian Beutler. Please welcome its elegant, new-millenial simplicity to the blogroll.

Shaken, not stirred

Moving is always strange, especially for me, since I have no sense of direction. In generally takes me a couple of weeks in a new office before I can reliably make it to the bathroom without getting lost.

The move to this blog has been particularly disorienting, however, because along with the office, I have a shiny new Macintosh. The Atlantic is a Mac shop, and now I'm enjoying the much-vaunted usability, which of course isn't very, since I've spent fifteen years getting extremely, extremely good at using a PC. Then there's fielding all the instant messages from my friends with Apples . . . "So you're using a Mac? Awesome! You should totally come to prayer group on Saturday! John's bringing his guitar!"

The worst part is the gnawing sense that a few weeks from now, when I've stopped Jonesing for a left mouse button, it'll be me with the suspiciously glassy eyes, saying "I never really lived until I got my MacBook . . . "

Even fuller disclosure

Probably you should also know that I seem to have been mentioned in Tyler's book, although not by name. That could make me view the book either more or less favourably; Robin Hanson has not entirely enjoyed the experience. I'd tell you which it is in my case, but I'm not sure myself . . .

There's a little economist inside all of us

We live in a world of scarce resources. In such a world, unfortunately, not everyone can have the pleasure of knowing Tyler Cowen personally. That is pity, for talking to Tyler is a rare treat.

That is why I was so surprised to hear a friend say he was disappointed by Tyler Cowen's new book, Discover your Inner Economist. My friend, it turns out, had been hoping for something more along the lines of Freakonomics, or The Armchair Economist. Both are very good, very enjoyable reads, but Tyler's book is something a little different: it is a guide to living like an economist. It is also eerily similar to the experience of being Tyler's friend. If you have not had this experience, but want to, I urge you to go to the store and buy a copy.

Or as a post on my old Economist blog (though not by me) put it:

An earlier generation of these books, like Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist and David Friedman's Hidden Order, tackle the economic puzzles of everyday life by applying good old-fashioned price theory to novel situations. Many of the new spate of pop-econ page-turners reflect the maturation of economics as an increasingly empirical science.

Freakonomics is the bellwether of this shift. But Cowen's new book, which may seem superficially similar to old-style pop-econ, in fact is something different. It integrates a great many of the insights of Levitt-style work, as well as insights from behavioral and experimental economics (which Lozado, confusingly, opposes to Freakonomics-style work at the conclusion of his review). Cowen's synthesis of these new insights adds up to a level of psychological realism heretofore unseen in the pop-econ genre. If Cowen succeeds in offering excellent cute-o-nomic advice, and I think he often does, it's because economics as a whole is now generating a more empirically adequate picture of the world. For those of us weird enough to love economics, that's better than cute: that's beautiful.

Full disclosure: I fairly regularly go out to Fairfax to have lunch and be grilled by Tyler and his mob of Mossad-like interrogators economists from George Mason. Which tells you, at the very least, that I tend to like that sort of thing. On the other hand, if you're reading this blog, it's a safe bet that you do too.

Dont panic!

I am trying not to read any significance into the fact that just as I leave The Economist for this shiny new blog at The Atlantic Monthly, the financial markets melt down. Sure, the timing may be correct . . . the market began tanking about a week before my last day, which is par for insider trading deals. But it would be paranoid to take this as any sort of an omen. Wouldn't it?

Not that this is stopping anyone else in the market from looking for inauspicious auguries. Over the last few weeks, I've heard the situation compared to any number of financial crises that preceded really nasty recessions: the 1929 stock market crash, of course, but also more recent debacles, such as Japan and Sweden in the 1990s. Sweden's economy contracted for years, while Japan is only now, just-maybe-barely-we-hope?, pulling out of a slump that lasted for more than a decade. This was very amusing for anyone who owned a copy of Rising Sun, but somewhat less so for the Japanese people.

But for all the ponderous proclamations, the parallels between those economic disasters and our current situation are less than compelling. Don't get me wrong: what is happening in the markets is bad. Very bad. Now is not a fun time to be either a homeowner, or a hedge-fund manager, and from what I can tell I am the only person left in the United States who isn't at least one of those things. The stock market may fall for a longish time, some people will be thrown out of work, and the economy, which has been flirting with recession for quite some time now, may finally decide to go all the way.

But that does not mean that you should start pricing apple-carts or prime spots beneath bridges to pitch your cardboard box. Having a nasty market contraction does not mean that your economy automatically goes down the tubes. It particularly does not mean this in a large, diversified, fully developed economy such as ours.

The dire economic problems in Sweden and Japan, and America in 1929, were only touched off by financial crises. It was central banking errors that turned them into full-fledged disasters. As private markets were collapsing, the central banks kept money too tight. So what had been a temporary situation in a single market spread out in concentric ripples, until the resulting waves had pretty thoroughly scuttled the entire economy.

There were various reasons that this happened. Sweden was trying to defend its exchange rate; America was trying to stay on the gold standard; and Japan . . . well, Japan had a lot of weird reasons for what it did. But none of them apply in America now. Ben Bernanke is known, among those who follow the Fed, as "Helicopter Ben" for famously saying that he'd drop money out of a helicopter onto Americans if more traditional methods for goosing the money supply failed. He's acted pretty quickly to move liquidity into the markets, and pretty clearly stands ready to deliver more if he thinks it's necessary.

Even less appropriate are comparisons to developing countries. We have robust, deep financial markets; an independent central bank; a (no, seriously) fairly modestly sized debt and budget deficit; and most importantly, we all borrow in our own currency. We are not going to turn into [insert developing country that had a financial panic] even if Helicopter Ben falls asleep at the joystick.

So while I wouldn't say you should be exactly sanguine about the mess in the markets, it's not time to panic yet. Save that for the Yankees' pitching lineup.

Arriving later this month

A blog on economics, business, and other moral hazards.