Bleg

A number of people have recommended getting tailored clothes while in Vietnam. Does anyone have a recommendation for a specific tailor in Hanoi?

A commenter asks

. . . but don't I support paying for poor people to get medical care?

Sort of, yes, but it's complicated, and looks absolutely nothing like what Ezra wants, which is a system that covers 95% of Americans while perhaps 5% pay extra for private care. My idea about helping the poor get medical care is more about helping them enter the private system, not exit it. If I were in charge, the government share of healthcare would shrink, not rise--I'd provide more for some kids and poor workers, but a lot less for old people.

Reminder

Every single time I write about health insurance, commenters and emailers flock to tell me that I wouldn't feel this way if I, or anyone I know, had been sick and uninsured.

I'm afraid the empirical evidence indicates that you're wrong. I was uninsured, with asthma and an autoimmune disease, for years as a freelancer. I was then, if anything, more opposed to national health insurance than I am now. If I were blocked from knowing, through a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, whether or not I would be uninsured for the rest of my life, I would still be opposed to nationalizing health care. 95% of the time when this accusation is made, I know a lot more about being sick and uninsured than my accuser. Don't criticize until you've walked a mile in my Medicaid mill . . .

It's the system, man

I was reading Matt Zeitlin on Social Security, a post in which he says:

The real problem with her argument is that Obama’s rhetoric on Social Security buys into a particular frame — that social security reform is an urgent agenda item — that really serves two purposes: One, to find a large “crises” that the David Broders of the world can blame on both parties and two, to create an enviroment where conservative proposals to destroy Social Security will become acceptable (Garance collected some great quotes to this effect).

This echoes the accusation that I want to "Destroy the public school system". There's an implication that conservatives have no reasons for this--just a wanton desire to destroy anything good, especially if it goes against their weird, talismanic belief in the markets.

Forgive me if I suggest that this itself implies a weird, talismanic belief in the superiority of the status quo. A lot of the articles I read from the left simply assume that the school system, or the social security is worthy of defense.

But I come neither to praise public programs, nor to bury them. To me, the programs are a means to an end: educating all of America's children, keeping the old and weak from starving. The question is, do they do a good job at reaching these ends, and at what cost?

If I were designing a system to serve these ends from scratch, would they look anything like the current system? No, obviously, because I'm a libertarian; my solution would look a lot like a means-tested voucher. But even a liberal trying to put together a school system or a retirement program would be very unlikely to design anything even remotely like what we have today. So why are they so hysterical about "destroying the system"? I'm interested in the people it serves, not the bureaucracy and the buildings.

Will Wilkinson explains it all to you

A peek into the shadowy world of libertarian think tanks:

Stogsdill is an underrated innovator. He was, by the way, demonstrating what happens when grandiosely interventionist foreign policy attempts to prop up puppet regimes. For my part, last week I had a functioning Rawlsekianism going strong inside a Mount Rushmore snow globe.

No, I can't explain. Just read the whole thing.

Tarzan confused

Tyler Cowen sums up what a lot of us are feeling right now:

The housing sector is down twenty percent and the price of oil is flirting with $90 a barrel, maybe $100 to come. Yet the quarterly growth rate was just reported at 3.9%:

The economy expanded faster than expected in the third quarter, led by a surge in consumer spending and exports, the government reported today.

It is wrong to think we have turned the corner, but it is also wrong to think the doomsayers understand what is going on.

I have been expecting a recession for several quarters now. So far, I have been consistently wrong.

Politically, I think this is going to make things very interesting. I presume a Democrat will be elected in 2008. The longer we go without a recession now, the more likely it is that whatever Democrat we elect will have a deep recession during their presidency, something that hasn't happened to them since Carter. Cactus may think the Democrats have some magic economic mojo, but I'm betting on the business cycle. Don't get me wrong--we've still got a year to go, and I think it's more likely that Bush will catch the end of the current expansion than his successor.

The next term is going to be pretty interesting, in terms of watching what wonks say about presidential impacts on the economy. If Bush doesn't end up with a recession on his watch, the next person in office will almost certainly catch a nasty twofer: a deepening hole opening up in the budget due to entitlements, and a recession that will make any such problems desperately worse. I expect a neat (and amusing) flip between Democrats proclaiming that deficits don't matter, and anyway, the president has limited power over the economy; and Republicans righteously screaming about fiscal responsibility.

No exit

Ezra says that my position on exit from the public school system makes no sense:

Her argument, in a nutshell, is, "Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't." What? Since when do libertarians think making something cost money is the same as prohibiting you to do it? Poor kids can exit the system. They just need to become rich kids. But does Megan apply this theory widely? Does she agree that the Federal Government should pay for all Americans to have health insurance from any insurer, either public or private, that they want, at least until Aetna begins working better? Because if she does, then I've massively misunderstood her writing up till this point. If she doesn't, however, then her constant screech of hypocrite throughout this argument makes no sense -- particularly given that she has awesome, employer-funded insurance, while all millions of Americans are trapped on the individual market.

But this . . . makes no sense.

We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.

The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there. There are many goods that poor people can't afford to buy. Some of them we think of as basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to secure for themselves, like food and housing. Some of them are not basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to buy, like BMWs. As a society, we've decided that education is one of those goods, and I wholeheartedly agree. That's why, when the government system doesn't work, I think it has an obligation to provide those without means a way to exit the system, just as when the local county mental hospital has a fire, the government has an absolute moral obligation to put the patients somewhere else rather than forcing them to squat in the ruins because they're planning a big new building that will be available no later than 2031.

But that doesn't mean I think the government needs to allow us to exit from every system that is less than ideal. I can only buy pants at about four stores in America, and that's a damn shame, but it doesn't cry out to heaven for (government imposed) justice. The fact that Ezra believes that universal health insurance is also a good the government should supply does not impose on me the need to agree with him--and indeed, as I've said at unfortunate length, I don't. The "gotcha" only works if I really, secretly, in my heart of hearts, think healthcare is in the same class of goods as education. The notion that deep down, libertarians really know that liberals are right is widespread, but guys, I swear: honest, way down deep, in the uttermost depths of our souls, we really do think your ideas about domestic social programs are dead wrong.

What's even weirder--and Ezra is not the first person to bring this up--is that Medicaid works on my model, not theirs. Medicaid recipients meet the income barrier, and then they go to any doctor who will take their Medicaid card. No one forces them to go to the nearest doctor, or asks them to apply to the doctor lottery. That's what the NHS does, and almost everyone in the liberal health care policy establishment, including, IIRC, Ezra, agrees that it is a really bad system for providing health care. At least, I think that's what they believe, because every time the NHS comes up, they rush to assure me that when we have national health insurance, it won't be some crappy, government-run system like the NHS; it'll be like France where you get to (wait for it) choose your doctor and have the government pay. It's almost like the government was giving you a voucher or something.

What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special? I have a model for what goods the government should buy versus what goods the government should actually provide directly; it has to do with geography, non-excludability, and transaction costs. But what is your model for saying that education is in a special class of goods that are rival and excludable, have ordinary levels of transaction costs, and yet nonetheless need to be provided directly by the government? Any of the problems that distinguish education from other goods, like inelastic demand, information asymmetries, and performance measurement difficulties, apply to health care as well, perhaps more so. So why do you want healthcare by la Sécurité sociale, but education by the NHS?

Happy Halloween

You wan to be really frightened? Watch two physicist prove--scientifically--that ghosts don't obey known physical laws.

I recently came across a cable channel devoted specially to older viewers. Now I can't find it. Anyone know what it is?

This one's for Freddie and Kate

I lied: I have to respond. I didn't call you hypocrites. You do not, as far as I know, have children.

I reserve the charge of hypocrite for parents who have moved to good school districts, but "support public schooling" by voting against vouchers. The rest of you, I think are wrong, but perfectly fine, moral, upstanding human beings. 'Kay?

Addenda

I don't. Care. About. The. Teachers.

I don't dislike them. Nor do I like them. I don't care whether they are, or are not, represented by a union. I think they should be paid more, not because they're lovely, special people, but because I hope that would let us attract and retain a higher caliber of teacher.

I care about educating the kids. Once we have done that, we can turn to arguments about the teachers. Until then, paeans to what great people public school teachers are are just completely irrelevant. The janitors are probably great guys too, but the school is not there for their benefit. If it made the kids better off to fire them all tomorow, I'd happily sign the order to do so. I mean, I'd feel bad for them. But not enough to keep them employed at the expense of educating the kids.

Nor am I interested in vouchers because I'm trying to prove a point. If the public schools in inner cities were managing to educate more than a handful of the students, this would be somewhere on my list of priorities around "privatizing the post office". The existence of public schools qua public schools simply doesn't interest me. The only goal I am interested in discussing is educating the kids. Any other goals, people, or ideology attached to the school system are stunningly uninteresting until that primary purpose has been met.

Suburban parents exit the system for three very good reasons: one, the system is completely broken. Two, they don't have the faintest clue how to fix it--by which I mean, actually make any significant part of the system function normally. Three, it is not the job of the child to fix the system. It is our job to provide him an education. He should be expected to remain in the system only if the system can do that; otherwise, he has a right to get educated elsewhere while we try to fix it. And if we can't help everyone, then at least as many as possible should be so aided.

Now I'm done talking about vouchers. Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't. My model of voucher beliefs predicts that people will get angry at me when I challenge their beliefs without changing their minds, and indeed, they are right. And myself, I'm too angry on the subject to do much good. The people saying that they want details before they'll commit: look, obviously design matters. If you concede the right of exit, I'm happy to debate details. But until you do, it's a waste of time.

Back to morality

I know, I'm flogging a dead horse. Fly, Flicka! Fly, damn you!

It boils down the fact that I think either exit is the proper moral response to a failing system, or it isn't. It can't be good for some people, but not for others.

Many people trying to convince me that suburban liberal parents against vouchers are not gigantic, honking hypocrites, are groping towards an economic concept. Conceding that they think the school environment does make a difference (otherwise they wouldn't have moved to a good district), they say that it's okay to pull your kid out of a system that's failing, because unless other parents stay, yours won't do any good. But its still okay to bar those who cannot afford to escape on their own means from using government means to do so, because the system will collapse.

Let me give you a word for the concept you're expressing: economists (and other sorts of social scientists) call it a collective action problem. It's a problem that arises when we can all be made better off by doing something, but only if we all do it at once. If only some people participate, the system breaks down.

One classic example is casual Fridays. Say you work at a competitive workplace where everyone tries to dress up as much as possible in order to impress their superiors. Everyone would be better off if the uniform were converted downwards into something cheaper and more comfortable. But without some means of enforcement, some brown-noser will show up in a suit to get an edge, and pretty soon we'll all be back in suits and ties. (Or in my case--eek!--panty hose).

There are a variety of ways that have been explored to overcome these problems; the general solution is management fiat, combined with shunning those who violate the code. Fiat is generally the easiest (which is not to say the best) solution to the problem.

Voucher opponents are essentially saying, "It's a collective action problem. I bow to the inevitable, even though I don't like it."

And actually, I agree: it is a collective action problem, and moreover, one that is not reasonably amenable to fiat. I see no way, unless education radically changes, to keep schools from being fairly geographically concentrated. Nor any way to force yuppies to stay put when they spawn. After the other parents have left, you are entitled to leave to.

Here's the thing, though: collective action problems rarely have partial solutions. If exit is the correct solution for players 1-55, it is also the correct solution for players 56-200. Once you have committed to exit, you are committing to the fact that other players will either follow, or suffer terribly. Having conceded that exit is the best thing for your child, you imply that it is also the best action for every other player. Moreover, as the person near the head of the queue, your exit is much more damaging to the system than the exit of the 100th player. You exited because you could, not because you had a moral right to; the 100th player has a much greater moral right to exit than you do.

Saying that it is moral for you to exit the system, while denying exit to the 100th player, is the economic equivalent of "might makes right". You have no greater moral right to exit than that 100th player; in fact, considerably less of one. You merely have the economic means.

And that's something that liberals are supposed to fight.

This worries <i>you</i> because . . . ?

Kevin Drum, who is opposed to vouchers, says of my post:

. . . it somehow fails to address the single biggest problem with school vouchers: oversight. If you're going to receive taxpayer dollars, then you have to agree to taxpayer oversight. That means that NCLB applies to you. It means that minimum state curriculum requirements apply to you. It means that teacher union rules apply to you. It means you have a lot less authority to pick and choose which kids you're willing to accept. And, yes, it means you can't use taxpayer money to proselytize for whichever religion your board of directors happens to favor. Like it or not, that's a no-no for public funds, especially when kids are involved.

But as near as I can tell, this is anathema to people who run private schools. They won't accept any oversight, let alone the level of oversight that's inevitable with any widespread voucher program. Taxpayers simply aren't willing to shower money on anything that calls itself a school without having some say in how the money is used. And rightly so.

Roughly speaking, this is why I tentatively favor charter schools but not voucher schemes. Charter schools allow for experimentation, which is good, but also accept state oversight. I don't really see how things can work any other way.

For one thing, if this is in fact true, then what do voucher opponents have to worry about? No one will accept the vouchers? Problem solved: the public schools will be saved!

For another, the state regulations are part of the problem with the schools, and no, it is not necessary to port them all over, which I agree would make vouchers useless. You can set basic curricular requirements and test kids to see how many are making the cut (and how far they've come since the previous year) without, for example, importing the ludicrous credentialing system most schools currently use, or the 97 layers of administration. We manage to pay college tuitions just fine without deciding who can teach what subject and how.

For third, Kevin seems to be under the misimpression that you cannot use federal dollars to get prosletyzed. The many students attending our nations' christian colleges on federal student loans and Pell grants would be very surprised to hear that. You can use federal education dollars to study anything you want, including, AFAIK, for the ministry. The federal government, it seems, will not only pay to get you prosleytized, it will pay to teach you how to do it to others, provided only that the payment is viewpoint neutral: i.e., you, not the government, decide what you want to study. There's very clear case law on this from the Supreme Court.

And weirdly, the taxpayer has done all of these things, even though Kevin says they won't. If Kevin, a taxpayer, were to join us in advocating for vouchers, perhaps more taxpayers would see their way clear to doing so again at the secondary level.

I agree it's an uphill fight . . . but it's clearly not impossible, because we've already done it.

Ultimately, one can't say better than this

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing bread."

Stealing bread at least arguably protects the poor right now however invisibly . . . widespread theft would destroy the system that creates bread for them to steal (and the rest of us to eat).

But the minds of our nation's poor children are already starving.

Okay, this is funny

In an earlier thread, MEH asks:

Maybe I missed the Memo, but what does the IRA have to do with 9/11?

John Thacker gives the correct answer:

There was a (false, sadly) hope that the experience of actual terrorism in NYC might make some of the Hibernian fools realize that it's not so romantic when it hits home, however nice it sounds to struggle against perfidious Albion across the Atlantic.

But Paul Zmrisek gives an answer that is better than correct:

The Irish joined forces with the Jews to carry out 9/11. Haven't you heard of the dread Roth IRA?

Puns are the lowest form of humor. But that didn't stop me from laughing.

I should add . . .

I think that the argument that we need to carefully shepherd the poor through life is not only kind of creepy, it's also contributing to the fact that we need to shepherd the poor through life. People dependent on the system don't get good at behaving like middle class people--paying their bills on time, etc. Instead they develop a lot of skills at dealing with government bureaucracy (or they give up). Once the gas has been turned off a few times, one generally learns to pay the bill rather than go without heat. What one learns from bureaucracy, on the other hand, is that the world is a capricious yet rule-bound place where you are either powerless against the system, or looking for a way to cheat it.

The poor are not children, except for the ones who are actual children

As libertarians go, I'm close-ish to a "left libertarian"; among other things, I think there's a role for government in guaranteeing a decent life for the needy, and intervening to right environmental problems that stem from unpriced negative externalities.

So what's different from liberalism? To the extent that the problems of the poor are inadequate money, I think that we should solve this problem by . . . giving them money. Not giving them food, shelter, or health care; just giving them money, and letting them decide what they want to buy. If they want to eat cornmeal mush for a month while watching cable television, let 'em. I think the government's job is to make sure people have the ingredients of a decent life, not to tell them what that decent life is.

(Health care is complicated, because there's a free rider problem and some pretty huge cost variance; I'll deal with that in a different post. But as a principle, I want to make sure that people can afford the stuff I think constitutes the bare minimum of a decent existence; I do not want to march them down to the store and make sure they buy it.)

Will the poor make bad decisions? Yup. Most poor people have already made a lot of bad decisions about things like schooling and childbearing; they'll probably make more. But they're not children; they're adults. It is not the government's job to make sure that they make good decisions. If someone is so impaired that they need the government deciding what kind of consumer goods they should buy, then they certainly shouldn't live on their own, much less vote; they should be placed in a group home or an institution where they can be properly supervised.

It's not as if poor people are the only kind of people who make bad decisions . . . I could regale you with some personal horror stories, starting with majoring in English, and moving on through the belly button ring to last night's attempt, while working late in an office near no restaurants, to substitute 14 flaxseed oil capsules for dinner. But had a government official stepped in to tell me that I really shouldn't waste years of my life on a guy who wasn't any good for me . . . well, shotguns are illegal everywhere I've lived, but that's the proper response to any government that fannies about dispensing such advice.

The government is really very good at distributing cash, with only the normal deadweight loss attendant on taxation. But it is an abysmal dispenser of advice on how to live your life, which is why the Declaration of Independance promises not happiness, but only the space to pursue same. I'm very open to arguments that private charity can't cover the cash needs of the poor, but I'll pit a private institution against the government in the "better living through social work" game any day of the week, and twice on the last day of the month.

Obviously, I'm against most forms of government help for adults, but is there anything as creepy as the notion that the government is supposed to improve you? If I want to be improved, I'll take on the project myself, thank you very much, and I extend people who are short of cash the respect of believing that they are probably much like myself in this regard. Either help them, or don't; there are valid arguments on both sides. But don't badger them to death.

These nannying arguments always make me think of one particularly bitter New York night, seeing a woman in a fur coat sweep past a homeless man braving the subzero weather in a sweatshirt. Figuring that no matter what he had done to himself or others, he didn't deserve to be left out on a night like this, I gave him five bucks on my way into the deli. Therein, the fur-coat lady said to me "He'll just spend it on drugs, you know."

It is one of the few times that I, whose middle name is "L'esprit d'escalier", have ever managed to muster a snappy comeback line on time. "I hope so," I responded, "because personally, if I were out there tonight, I would want some serious drugs."

In the case of kids, I'm game for a little more supervision; I'm happy to mandate vouchers for schooling and health care to make sure that they get some of each, and I'm willing to make those contingent on meeting some basic set of criteria. (Don't get too excited, liberals; I'm talking "Teaches reading, math, and a science class that includes evolution", not "Employs only union teachers with education degrees and a ream of useless certifications".) But I am left cold by the notion that we have to keep poor parents from having any say in the lives of their kids. If the kids are that badly off, pull them out of the home (indeed, adoption by more affluent families is the only broad remedy that is actually demonstrably effective at improving the lives of poor children, a remedy whose effectiveness is matched only by its utter repugnance).

If you are not going to do this, and thank God we aren't, do them and their parents the service of believing that even poorer, darker skinned people with a variety of social and economic problems love their kids every bit as much as you love yours--and certainly a lot more than you love theirs.

Local knowledge

I am Irish American, as I think I may have mentioned (and if I didn't, I imagine the name gave it away). I have spent a decent amount of time in the Irish-American community (think Irish dance lessons and traditional music performances), and my family has certainly spent much more.

As you may know, Irish people have a certain disdain for Irish Americans and their romantic conception of a largely imaginary Emerald Isle. Irish Americans who talk about Ireland are frequently derided as ignoramuses who know little about the actual Ireland, and operate under the delusion that their heritage, or perhaps their gene, qualify them to opine on it. Fair 'nough; I love me some cable knit sweaters, but frankly even I'm a little sick of all the "Celtic and Irish Handicraft" outlets springing up like shamrocks after an Irish rain in the malls of America.

I was, however, a little taken aback to experience the reverse phenomenon when discussing, with an Irishman in a bar, the fact that some Irish Americans still supported the IRA even after 9/11, a fact that I find more than a little shameful. Of course, I come from perhaps the only Irish American family in the world that gives money to the SDLP. But I digress.

But that's so 1990's, he said. Everything's different now. You don't know what you're talking about. This roughly echoes something Kieran Healy said when I posted on the subject several months ago.

Indeed, much has changed in Ireland. But we weren't discussing Ireland. We were discussing America. And I know a lot more about being a third-or-more generation Irish person in American than he, or Mr Healy does. Nonetheless, I went back and checked with other sources in the Irish American community.

Yup, indeed, donation to the IRA continued long after 9/11, with an explicitly martial tone to the solicitations.

Now I'm trying to figure out who's got the mote, and who's got the beam. God bless the Irish . . . no one else will.

Marching for meters

One thing that should be noted about the DC cab market is that the zone system is byzantine and opaque, to the vast enrichment of the cabbies. I happen to live three steps north of U Street, which is the dividing line between zone one and zone two; I spend a lot of time doing elaborate kabuki rituals with the cabbies, who invariably try to drop me on whichever side of the street takes me into a second zone. My mission--and I always choose to accept it--is to force them to drop me on the zone-minimizing street side, without acknowledging that they are trying to cheat me.

Cabbies also charge an additional full fare for multiple stops, making it completely pointless to ride share, and otherwise take the average consumer for all he is worth. Cabs cost here twice or more what they cost in New York for all but a handful of special journeys--funnily enough, the ones that are frequently taken by congressmen and their staffers.

It's very clearly a system set up to help a semi-organized interest groups rook the tourists at the expense of the locals; but as more affluent and politically active people who take a lot of cabs move into the district, this was bound to change. So I'm not surprised that the cabbies are complaining; only that they have settled on the big cab companies as the source of their complaint with the meter system.

Frankly, I'm not terribly sympathetic. They can damn well cheat tourists by accidentally taking them from Capitol Hill to the Mall via the Beltway, like all the other cab drivers have to. What makes them think they're so special, anyway?

Consumer culture

For most people, a lot of their beliefs are consumption goods. The irrational clustering of political beliefs--there is no logical reason that one's views on abortion should be so tightly correlated with one's view on business regulation or nationalized health care--indicate that there is a very strong social component to the formation of allegedly principled beliefs. The anger with which opposing views are met, and the in-group/out-group social dynamic of most political debate, suggest that for most of us, fitting in with our friends and feeling good about ourselves are at least as strong a component of belief formation as careful reasoning from first principles.

In most areas I'm okay with this (I'd better be; I have no reason to believe that I'm any better than anyone else on this score). But there are some areas in which I don't think it's okay, and the views held by wealthy suburbanites about vouchers are one of those areas. They are consuming a view of themselves as caring about a common public system that is the opposite of the truth; the gap between their kids schooling experience, and the experience of a kid growing up in Watts, is much much larger than the gap between their kids school, and Groton. They have demonstrated by their own choices that they think school choice is extremely important. They then proclaim that it doesn't work for poor kids, or that poor kids need to stay where they are for the sake of the system. They are consuming a view of themselves as egalitarians at a very cheap price . . . to them. The cost to the kids, unfortunately, it having their whole lives blighted.

That they proclaim to be doing this out of care for the communities that their exit (from the schools, the tax base, and the economic life of the city) is crushing, sends me over the edge.

Moreover, this is a good that they would not consume if there were any price at all to holding it. If being against vouchers meant their kid losing 30 points on their SATs, they'd do a 180.

Empirically, I may be wrong; vouchers may not work. But we know that the current system isn't working. And poor kids should not bear the burden of making affluent liberals feel better about themselves.

Another question about DC cab drivers

How come all the stories in the media feature cabbies opposed to the metering system, but all the cab drivers that I have talked to, and that Mr Brian Beutler informs me he has talked to, are not against it? Our sample size, of course, is something like n=6. But I'm not sure I know anyone who's met a cabby opposed to the meters.

Yeah, I don't know either

Why do the DC cab drivers think that metering is a prelude to domination of the market by big companies? Matt wants to know. So do I. It doesn't seem to make sense, but they probably know their market a lot better than I do. Anyone have any idea?

What else is there to say?

Ezra Klein posts an interesting graph showing that cost increases, not demographics, will the biggest factor in pushing up Medicare spending to unsustainable levels.

This is why we need a government funded system, modeled along France's, that can control these costs. If we don't get a comprehensive government program to provide healthcare for the elderly, their medical care could well bankrupt the nation.

Let me put this another way, Part II

In re: Britons travelling abroad for health care. UHC, or single payer, or whatever you want to call it, advocates are promising that we can have awesome health care at lower cost by switching to their model. No tradeoffs! Rationing is just a lie by conservative health care opponents who hate poor people! Look at Europe!

If this were actually true, the number of Europeans seeking health care abroad, other than cosmetic procedures, should be zero. If the health care is really every bit as good as what's available on the private market, they shouldn't turn to the private market. Americans seeking lower-cost health care abroad does not invalidate the market model; seeking lower cost alternatives through trade is a venerable free-market tradition. On the other hand, Europeans paying their own hard-earned cash in order to exit a system which allegedly provides exactly the same thing, for free, poses a problem for national health care advocates.

Let me put this another way

How many educated people who:

a) Oppose vouchers
b) Have children who do not attend inner city public schools

would still oppose vouchers if they were the only way to get their child out of an inner city public school? How many of them would accept that their child had to be left in that school because the systemic effects of allowing their child to exit that repulsive school would be dreadful?

Respectfully, I believe the answer is "null set".

Opposing school vouchers is, for basically every single person who does so, a completely costless belief. You get the pleasure of "supporting public education"; someone else's kid, whom you will thankfully never meet, loses their future.

Obviously, this is not exactly a unique phenomenon; most people are more sympathetic to policies whose costs they don't bear. But at least most of the libertarian policy wonks I know have endured extended periods without health insurance. Find me the parents who oppose vouchers when it's their own child who has no exit.

Random question of the day

What's the Facebook protocol for dealing with someone with whom you were only Facebook friends because they were dating one of your friends, after they break up with your friend? Assume that it wasn't a particularly horrendous breakup (in which case an ostentatious de-friending might be in order), but you're certain you'll never see them again, and don't want them cluttering up an already cluttered Facebook page.

Yes, I am feeling about 12 today. Work with me.

Huh?

Andrew points to an article showing that 70,000 British people a year fly abroad to get basic life-saving procedures such as hip replacements, heart bypasses, and dentistry.

Ezra responds that 100,000 Americans go abroad for plastic surgery a year! And untold numbers more are going for non-cosmetic procedures. This would be a more devastating critique if

a) Britain were not one-fifth the size of America

b) we had hard figures on how many people in America were seeking procedures abroad that are normally provided in a timely manner by national health systems

Ezra also claims that Americans are creating the industry; Britons are just free riding. Beg pardon, but if Americans were going abroad en masse for dentistry, I'm pretty sure that Hungary wouldn't be their first destination.

But the weirdest thing is that he seems to think that low-cost free market care is an indictment of the free market. And yet, this subtly undercuts the argument that Ezra et al. consistently make: health care in Europe is cheaper than health care in America; health care in Europe is paid for by the government; ergo, if America had health care like Europe's, it would be cheaper.

Let me try my own version: privately provided health care in Bangkok is very, very cheap, much cheaper than publicly provided health care in Europe. Ergo, Europe should privatise health care.

The liberal instantly recognizes that this is ludicrous: cost structures in Europe are much different from cost structures in Bangkok. But the same is true of America and Europe.

Health care systems suffer from Baumol's cost disease: it's a labor-intensive service that doesn't offer huge scope for gains in labor productivity. The number of hours it takes to manufacture a car is consistently falling, but the number of hours it takes to perform doctor's visits is roughly the same as it has always been. As a society gets richer, in order to attract workers, the labor intensive service has to pay competitive wages with the sectors where productivity is rising rapidly; that means that costs for labor-intensive services rise faster than the general price level.

Bangkok's doctors are so cheap because a doctor making a modest wage by British standards can have an enormous house and a flock of servants to take care of him, putting him in the very top echelon of Thai earners. Nurses too, can make an American pittance and still live very well. As Bangkok gets richer, the servants and the gigantic house will not be so affordable--and neither will the health care.

Likewise, America is richer than Europe; it therefore has to pay its doctors, nurses, etc. more. (A doctor in France makes about what a moderately experienced RN makes here.) Also, health systems held down wages in previous periods, which is much easier to do than inducing everyone to take a 75% pay cut now. If we did slash wages by that much, workers would exit the public system in droves, immediately destroying it. We literally cannot get there from here.

Campaign woes

For journalists, anyway. By travel troubles last week prompted me to remark that I haven't been on an on-time flight in at least a year (though to be sure, I don't fly very often.) My colleague Marc Ambinder responded that this is making it much harder to be a campaign journalist than it used to be. Journalists covering the presidential campaign can basically expect to spend most of the next 52 weeks on the road; the worse flying gets, the worse their lives become. If presidential candidates want to cast themselves in a sympathetic light, they should come up with a plan to reduce the congestion at a few key hubs, particularly JFK, that make listed departure times such a cruel joke.

You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism's main selling points*.

* The first person who suggests that this is an endorsement of fascism gets sent back to fourth grade for remedial reading class.

Vouching for vouchers

Forgive me--I'm about to get testy again--but this thread on 11D really does seem to me to showcase in stunning technocolor the moral bankruptcy of voucher opponents who have pulled their own kids out of failing inner city schools. They have no good answer for why their choice is morally worthy, but vouchers are horrifying; their response to the deep need of kids in failing schools is a slightly gussied up version of "screw you, I've got mine." Their children's future, you see, is an infinitely precious resource that trumps their principles of distributional justice and community solidarity, but they cannot imagine putting the futures of poorer, darker skinned children ahead of sacred principles such as "Thou shalt not allow children to attend schools run by the Catholic Church" and "Supporting the public schools (even when they suck)". I could do a better job arguing against school vouchers.

Indeed, I shall, though of course largely for the purpose of illustrating why I find these arguments unconvincing:

1) Vouchers don't work This is the best argument against school vouchers. But it's still not very strong. For one thing, the studies that show this are small, and often funded by the teacher's unions. For another, the worst those studies purport to show is that vouchers don't make a difference in educational outcomes; the parents are still happier, and the vouchers cost less than the existing school system.

However, it's also not really all that clear that the vouchers had no effect; one effect school choice seems to have is that it forces schools that want to keep their doors open to improve.

But most tellingly, this argument is incompatible with removing your own children from failing schools. Either the school makes a difference, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, why are you moving to the suburbs in search of a better school district for your kids?

It is indeed true that poor kids have a huge number of problems that are resistant to change; even relocating the whole family to the suburbs seems to have little to no impact on outcomes. Vouchers are no panacea, and they may not work at all. But we know that what we're doing now isn't working, and moreover, hasn't worked for going on fifty years. Unless you've got compelling evidence that your plan will overcome all the barriers that have doomed urban school reform for decades, and actually succeed in educating more children (rather than enriching the lives of teachers, administrators, and curriculum salesmen, who certainly have been helped by the many failed educational overhauls), why not let a thousand points of light bloom?

2) Voucher advocates are total hypocrites too, because why don't they start private vouchers, huh? Bet you never thought of that! Actually, we did, my love, and thanks for giving me an opening to plug the Children's Scholarship Fund, my charity of choice. If you support vouchers, you should be supporting their amazing work.

3) The community doesn't want vouchers. Awesome. Then the community won't take vouchers, and you'll win by default. If what you mean is that some people claiming to speak for the community, want other people who are members of that community not to be able to have vouchers, then I'm less than interested in your argument.

4) Vouchers are a subsidy to rich people. Then means test them, by all means. Anyone who makes more than $100K a year can't have them.

5) Vouchers destroy the public school system So? Having a public school system seems like a dumb goal to me, but even assuming that the very existence of such a system is somehow a worthy thing to aim for, surely it's achievement should be a second-order priority. The primary goal, it seems to me, should be educating America's children to reach their fullest potential; after that goal has been achieved, we can turn our attention to things like having teacher's unions and public schools.

There's something very odd about the way that a lot of people treat health care and schooling--as if they were special, magical goods that can only be provided by the government. Yes, these are vital goods that people are ill-equipped to evaluate. But food, shelter, and clothing are even more vital, yet few of us believe that this means we should all get our produce from giant collective farms, or move into public housing projects. We recognize that the way to ensure that everyone has what they need is to give them the money to buy it . . . and, arguably, to have building codes, the FDA, the USDA, and so forth to ensure that consumers are protected from hidden dangers.

Why don't we want to have giant collective farms? After all, the government could realize marvelous economies of scale and huge cost savings from its enormous purchasing power. The administrative costs would fall too--after all, almost all of the money you pay for food goes, not to the farmer, but to the various middlemen who purchase, process, store, ship, and distribute it. We could probably cut our national food bill in half!

Somehow, we recognize the factors in production of food and clothing that make the government a less attractive provider than the market. And even most of the left has recognized that Section 8 vouchers are better than housing projects--they didn't yank people out of poverty, or magically solve all the problems attendant upon being poor, but they did improve peoples' lives by giving them some of the control over where they live that the rest of us enjoy as of right.

But honestly, there's no reason that vouchers will destroy the public school system provided that the public school system is doing a decent job of educating our kids. This argument sounds to me like an implicit confession that public schools can't compete with private ones.

6) There aren't enough private schools Right. Do you realize that in 1995, not a single iPod had been manufactured? That must mean that the iPod I am currently holding in my hand doesn't actually exist! I'm living a lie . . .

The fact that there are not now enough private schools to educate kids doesn't mean that there won't be, if we offer to pay private schools to educate kids.

7) Public education is vital to creating a common identity as American citizens I would find this a slightly more compelling argument if it weren't made mostly by people who live in affluent communities where their fellow citizens are strongly discouraged from moving by zoning and other ordinances that bar the construction of cheap housing. You think some kid growing up in East New York, looking at the crumbling walls as an inexperienced teacher fumbles the lesson plan, thinks to himself "But at least I share a common identity with the kids in Bronxville's public school system whose cars I will someday have the privilege of parking"?

Actually, this makes me think that a lot of the opposition to vouchers is about that affluent suburbanite's need to maintain the delusion that they care about inner city public schools. Memo to suburban voucher opponents who "support public education": you're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.

8) Vouchers don't make things any better; they just give the appearance of working by pulling the successful away from the unsuccessful, in the process dooming the latter to failure As I said before, you can't have it both ways. Either the school environment matters--in which case, this argument is false--or they don't matter, in which case it can't harm the unsuccessful kids to lose the successful ones.

Or perhaps you think peer effects are the only thing that matters--in which case, we should close the damn schools and let the kids go to work, where at least they'll get some money in exchange for not learning much.

And morally, as I said in my earlier post, unless you have chosen to live in the inner city and allow your kids to bring up the tone of the place, you have no [expletive deleted] right to say that someone else's kids should be left in a failing school for the benefit of a third set of kids.

9) I don't want my tax dollars used to pay for religious education Waaaaaaah. The fundamentalist down the block doesn't want his tax dollars used to pay for teaching evolution. I don't want my tax dollars used for 97% of the things my tax dollars are used for; welcome to representative democracy. And in Catholic schools, where most of the vouchers would be used, the religious education is voluntary; lots of non-Catholic kids go there without being proselytized. If this bothers you that much, we can discuss requiring schools that accept vouchers to make religious education optional. But let's go back to why we're debating this policy in the first place: the kids. This is about the kids, right? And which is worse: that junior might hear, once a week, some sort of religious message which, to judge by the people I know who went to parochial school, has a fairly dim chance of sticking; or that junior won't be able to read and write and will spend the rest of his life moving heavy things from one place to another?

10) Vouchers wouldn't pay the tuition at a top-notch private school Okay, I went to the school that is now vying with Matt Yglesias' alma mater for the title of "Most expensive private school in New York City". It gave me a terrific education, better than that received by any of the kids from expensive suburban public schools with whom I went to college. But talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good! A private school doesn't need to be Groton in order to make it worthwhile sending needy kids there; it just needs to be better than the hell-hole they currently attend. And frankly, that's a really, really low bar. There are a lot of kids for whom a trip to Chuck E. Cheese would be safer and more educational than a day at their district school. I could just as easily turn around and use this argument to prove that we oughtn't to have public schools unless every last one can be Dallas's Talented and Gifted magnet school.

11) There's no way to assure the quality of private schools Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Seriously? The problem with private schools is that they can't match the same level of quality we've come to expect from our urban public school system? And what else have you learned in your visit to our planet?

Plus ca change . . .

Terry Teachout writes:

My mother's life, in short, is a bridge between two profoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she's never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)

I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art. For now I seem to be staying fairly open to new things--my experience as a blogger suggests as much--but I have yet to send my first text message, nor does my somewhat superannuated cellphone contain a digital camera. On the increasingly rare occasions when I feel the need to take a picture of something, I buy a disposable film camera, the postmodern equivalent of a Brownie, at the corner drugstore.

I'm not sure he doesn't have it backwards. Right now, I remain an avid consumer of new art and new technology . . . I just installed my first NAS this weekend. But music is the most pervasive form of art that most people consume, and most people I know stop listening to new music in their late twenties or early thirties, long before they're done buying DVD players and flat panel televisions. They do consume new books and new movies, but their patience with new styles seems to evaporate. And most people prefer the relentlessly unvarying style of Thomas Kinkade to a trip through the MOMA.

Incidentally

If anyone from Banana Republic happens to be reading this, God bless you for the tall sweaters. For the first time in my life, I am typing in a women's sweater that does not leave 2 or 3 inches of wrist flapping in the wind. And any other clothing manufacturers who want to think about expanding their lines of tall offerings into more of their sweaters, jackets, and t-shirts . . . well, tall women have higher earnings than average, is all I'm saying. I am prepared to become a slavishly loyal consumer of any store that will allow me to walk into their store and buy any piece of clothing I want without worrying about inseams, sleeves, or waists that fall somewhere around my upper ribcage. Just something to think about.

Department of tall studies

Finally, we get our due.

This takes my thoughts off in two unrelated directions. First, it reminds me of someone . . . I can't remember who . . . telling me that he'd just seen a bakery in New York titled "Bonjour Croissant", which had encouraged him to consider migrating to Paris and opening a diner called "Hello, toast!". I wish I could remember who it was . . . but I do remember that it came in response to the cunning bit of Franglais titling I had just espied, a (mercifully short-lived) restaurant on the Upper West Side called, I kid you not, "Avec un Petit Buerre". We talk a lot in this country about compulsory licensing of guns, but it seems to me that we might better focus on preventing the abuse of French-English dictionaries.

On a completely unrelated note, last night I was talking to a friend who is himself 6'4 or 6'5, who was nonetheless surprised to hear that for a woman, hitting 6'2 at the age of 11 kind of, well, sucks. I'd just read a story about human growth hormone treatments for short kids, which in passing alleged that 1/3 of the parents of very tall girls (5'11 expected height or higher) are offered estrogen to stunt their growth. He found this shocking. I found it shocking, but understandable. After all, it's such hell to be a tall girl.

"Really," said he, as if it were an immensely surprising revelation.

My first instinct was to ask what planet he had grown up on, but others seemed to share his surprise. I suppose I had thought that the drawbacks were obvious--particularly when I was growing up, when tall girls had a choice between wearing men's clothing, or looking as if they'd suddenly outgrown everything they were wearing. All the tall women I know slouch ferociously, and I'm told that we're much more prone to eating disorders--hardly surprising, given the nicknames that kids apply to tall, heavy girls. Not that "Beanstalk" and "Mosquito" were huge improvements. And I have only recently come to terms with the fact that for the rest of my life, no matter how I dress or how long I wear my hair, someone will call me "Sir" at least once a week.

Now I like being tall. But then . . . spending six years as the tallest person in her school is not a fate I would gladly wish on anyone, particularly not the person I loved most in the world. The thing seems so obvious to me that I still find it hard to believe that it wasn't equally obvious to everyone else. The private hells of adolescence are surprisingly private.

Blast from the past

I'm watching the Republican presidential debate. Or at least, keeping an eye on the bastards. This is the sort of thing tht makes Mark Kleiman complain that Rudy seems to be running for "Sadist-in-Chief. Which, incidentally, naturally reminded me of Mark Steyn's still-hilarious take on Kerry's stance on the death penalty:

The senator's opposed to the death penalty. Fair enough. A lot of folks have a visceral revulsion at the principle of state execution. But whoa, hang on, no, that's not it. He's not some milksop Dukakis type. Mr. Kerry's opposed to the death penalty because it's too wimpy. "Putting somebody to sleep on a gurney" isn't cruel enough for Mr. Kerry's tastes. Keep him in jail watching cable TV decade after decade. "That is tough, my friend," says Mr. Kerry, not like dying, which -- in case he hasn't mentioned it this soundbite -- is something he knows a lot about: Only gutless pansy types let these killers off easy by sending 'em to Old Sparky. This is Mr. Kerry's answer to compassionate conservatism: sadistic liberalism.

Ivy madness

Why is it so much fun to hate Ivy Leaguers? In part, because they (well, we*) can often be so hateable. For years, I toyed with the idea of offering a prize to the first Harvard grad I met who did not, in the first ten minutes of conversation, manage to work that fact into the conversation somehow. ("I see you're eating a bagel there. You know, when I was in school in Boston, I liked to eat bagels . . . ").

I guess I did offer a prize, of sorts; we dated for years.

And don't get me started on the people from Harvard Business School, who, unbeknownst to themselves, were the source of untold hilarity at each and every summer internship program, as they strove to reassure us that they thought that our MBA program was every bit as good as Harvard, honestly.

But really, who cares? As far as I can tell, an Ivy league degree is at best a modest boost. One of my roommates from Penn was, when last heard of, still working at the library and mooching off other peoples' weed. On the other hand, few of the smartest and most talented people I know have Ivy League degrees; it seems to be a better indicator of where you started out than where you'll end up.

The weirdest thing to me about Washington is that this snobbery--and the inevitable reverse snobbery--are more prevalent than in any other city I've lived in. Friends who went to state schools tell astonishing stories of pervasive, yet casual, slights on their school and the people who went there. You would think that a city dominated by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists would have more of the common touch, but apparently just the reverse.

*There is no way to write this without being accused of parading my Ivy League degree. I'm going ahead anyway.

Assuaging the evil empire

I trust I won't be courting controversy with anyone when I assert that the government of North Korea is the closest thing we currently have to a purely evil state. Why, then, is the New York Philharmonic actually considering playing there? Given that pretty much everyone agrees that the North Korean state is obsessed with seeking legitimacy outside its self-inflicted purgatorio, I find it hard to understand why that august musical institution would seek to grant it. Newlywed Terry Teachout (congratulations to you & your adorable bride) has the scoop.

Reminder on comments

If your comment *never* appears, that's not me, that's the spam filter. I have no idea how it chooses what to eat, but I have no hand in it. We get hundreds of spams a day, so it's an unfortunately necessary evil. I try to scan for caught real comments, but if I'm travelling, I may not get to it. If your comment has been lost in this way, just email me and I'll fish it out.

If I moderate your comment, I will, without exception, leave a note in its place explaining why. This is how I avoid the temptation to "disappear" good questions, as unfortunately happens on some blogs. If you didn't get a note, and your comments has not appeared, it's because I never saw it.

Cost benefit

There is actually an interesting underlying point to yesterday's post, which is that it's very hard to get customer service right. There's always a tradeoff between cost and service, and what you want is something that maximizes the return on your customer base. So companies periodically have an incentive to push the envelope, to see how badly they can treat you before you'll walk.

I know, I know, I'm a libertarian, I love the market? Why don't I love this? Well, I don't unlove it, exactly, because it's certainly not unique behavior to corporations. Spouses test how far they can push their spouses, friends do it to friends, employees to bosses, and so forth. No one knows the limits of the human heart; the only way we can find out what they are is to grope blindly for them.

That said, I'm pretty sure that the clerk at the hotel was not under the impression that I might be okay with her giving away my room.

What she did think is that I might not do anything about it. What Comfort Inn did to me usually has a low price; whoever bribed that night clerk essentially paid her to spend twenty minutes on the phone with me shouting at her, when she wasn't doing much anyway. Most people, tired and exhausted, will just forget it the next day, particularly those who are traveling on an expense account, as most airport travelers are. Even if they did have the will, most people certainly don't have the means to do what I did--to record their credit card company exposing the lie and then confront the hotel clerk with it. (Although the means I used can be acquired for well under $50, and include free, if occasionally wonky, phone calls anywhere in the United States.)

The reason I wrote that post--other than a fair amount of righteous anger that I needed to use up somewhere--is that I shouldn't be the only one who has that redress. All journalists know that we have an out, in really bad customer service situations: we can call the press office. We don't even need to threaten them; if our name is in their database, the press office will make it all better very, very fast. All the journalists I know are also cognizant of the fact that it's really kind of appalling that we have a special out, and use it very rarely. I've never done it myself, though I did once call the press office at Dell to let them respond to something I'd written about their customer service.

But it shouldn't be true that Comfort Inn has to make good and apologize to anyone who has the knowlege and means to force them to capitulate, and no one else; it shouldn't be the case that selling someone's room out from under them, which really is a loathesome practice (I wouldn't have gotten on that flight in the first place had I not thought I had a room at the other end) has such a low cost.

I have no taste for revenge at all; past wrongs just don't interest me. But I do think that the cost of doing things like this should be a lot higher. And the way they get higher is that when things like this happen--truly outrageous things that are in no way a matter of opinion about the correct level of customer service--is that everyone goes back to the company and forces them to spend time, energy, and money making it right to the best of their ability. Letting it go may be good for you, but it's bad for everyone else, especially the next poor bastard who has to sleep on the floor of the Jet Blue terminal because the hotel sold his room.

On a footnote--and here is where I once again revert to sounding like I'm 12 rather than 34--it had never occurred to me that when you bribe a hotel clerk for a room, this is what you are bribing them to do to someone. Thankfully, I've never bribed anyone--I lack the chutzpah--but I'd feel pretty awful if I had, and I'll never laugh at it when someone else tells such a story again.

A clarification

My reference to the "exotic wilds of Upstate New York" was tongue in cheek; I'm actually staying in my mother's hometown. Indeed, right now I'm in the front room of what was once my grandmother's house, and now belongs to my Aunt Annie. I do not think y'all are hicks, and if I did, I sure wouldn't say it within 250 miles of Aunt Annie.

Thanks for the invites and the advice on tourist spots, but this is a flying tour. However, I'll be back up at Christmas if there's any interest in a Rochester or Syracuse AI reader meetup (I'm in between the two).

Comfort Inn: No Comfort, No Inn

Remember, LORD, against Edom
that day at Jerusalem.
They said: "Raze it, Raze it
down to its very foundations!"
Oh, Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens
You destroyer
Happy be he who repays you
The evil you have done us

I had what I think could be fairly termed a very bad day yesterday. Only the end of it, of course. Everything started to go wrong at the exact moment, around 3:00, when my editor and I decided that I should go to upstate New York for a few days in order to round out a story I'm working on.

By 5:30, I had an airline ticket for 8 PM and a rental car. By 7PM, I was at the airport bright eyed and bushytailed, ready to jet off to the exotic wilds of Western New York State. By 12:30, I expected to be there, ready to report on the quaint customs of the locals. It was one of those glamorous journalist moments you often dream about, but rarely experience. Rolly bag in one hand, wallet in the other, I stuck my credit card in the slot and printed out my boarding passes.

Now, I am not particularly good at math; a little light calculus is about my speed. Nonetheless, when I saw that my flight from New York City to Rochester was scheduled to depart at 10:55, while my flight from Washington to New York City was not scheduled to take off until 10:44, I suspected that there might be some flaw in the planning. I also noticed, apropos of nothing in particular, that the takeoff time for my flight was some two hours and forty-four minutes after Jet Blue's preternaturally perky website had told me I could expect to be upping wheels. I presented my bewilderment to the desk clerk.

"That flight's delayed," she said, unecessarily. I explained about the connection. "Yes," she said, "there's no way you're getting to Rochester tonight." Weather up and down the East Coast, you see, was playing havoc with schedules.

I do not mean to paint her as callous. In fact, she was incredibly nice and apologetic, and spent 20 minutes in a tag-team strategy session during which flight times were checked, hotel sites consulted, and desired wake-up hours considered. Expedia informed me that I could stay in New York City near JFK for $152 a night, plus applicable taxes and fees. After considering that my alternative was to take a $60 cab ride back from Dulles, and then do the entire thing all over again the next morning at 4 am, the hotel room looked positively cheap. To be sure, it was a Comfort Inn, and Comfort Inns do not, in my experience, always live up to their name. But how bad could it be, I asked jauntily, clicking "book it now" and then marching off to security.

Do not, my children, ever speak those words out loud. You are challenging the travel gods to do their worst, And in these days of cavity searches and theological arguments over whether my prescription face cream is, or is not, a banned substance, their worst can be very, very bad indeed.

I suppose you have already guessed that my plane did not, in fact, take off at 10:44. By the time I had gotten to the gate, its ETD had already changed to 11:30. Subsequently, it would change to "Whenever the plane gets here from wherever the hell it is," which, for future reference, turns out to be sometime around 12:15.

I hadn't realized Dulles was so cold at night. The coffee gave out around 10, whereupon I was reduced to wrapping myself in every piece of clothing I'd brought and trying to sleep. I suspect that if I hadn't tidily thrown away my much-used coffee cup, some kind stranger would have dropped a quarter in it as I lay swaddled in sweatpants and herringbone tweed suit jackets. At 12:15 they boarded us. At 12:25, we took off. At 1:00, I stumbled out into the terminal and hailed a cab.

Where is the Comfort Inn, Jamaica? Asked my driver.

It is, I proudly informed him, having already memorized the address in the interest of maxmizing my sleep time before the 9:25 am flight to Rochester, at 87-05 Van Wyck.

Where is that? Asked my cab driver. I will note, in passing, for those who have not enjoyed the many benefits of residence in New York City, that the Van Wyck is the road to JFK. From the airport, it is about as hard to find as your own feet. Nonetheless, he called for directions.

I should have known. I should have known when, before they would give him directions, they asked him who he was.

You know what happened, don't you? You do. But you can't quite believe it. You've heard the urban legends, about hotels who give away the rooms of travelers on delayed flights, because someone else is willing to pay more money for them. But come on, you're thinking. They didn't really

At least, that's what you're thinking if you're anything like me. Indeed, the same thought kept running through my head as I listened numbly to the hotel clerk explain that she had had to cancel my reservation because she had been unable to charge my credit card, and had therefore thought that I was not coming.

You deadbeat, her voice said.

Let us dissect this a little. My Visa card, a worn but proud little piece of plastic with my alma matter's crest right on it (that in itself is a long story), is nowhere near its limits, because I'm one of those anti-debt freaks. Moreover, the credit card had already been authorised by Expedia, through which I booked the room. At 8 PM. What were the odds, really, that I had booked a (nonrefundable) room at 8PM and then decided not to come by 10PM?

Furthermore, the clerk had had a good four hours or so before I got on the plane in which to discover that the card was unchargeable and call me. This had not happened. When I pointed this out, the details of whom, exactly, she had tried to call became extraordinarily fuzzy. Maybe she hadn't tried to call me; maybe she'd just gotten bored waiting on hold to Expedia and hung up, and sold my room. But on one point she was crystal clear. She had tried to charge my credit card--twice!--and been unable to do so.

Over the next three minutes, I went through more emotions than a small-town amateur dramatics society doing Hamlet: the Musical. I wept. I cajoled. I threatened. I raged. I pleaded. All of which was no avail; she had no rooms. And the reason for her insistence that she couldn't charge my card became abruptly clear: since they hadn't charged the card, she said, they had no obligation to find me another one.

I a gesture of great munificence, she did finally give me the number of several other hotels in the area. You will not be surprised to hear . . . as indeed, I was not . . . that they had no rooms at 1:30 am, what with all the delayed flights.

So there I was sitting in a taxi at the mouth of the Van Wyck Expressway with no housing. I ordered the cab to take me back to the airport, paying $10 for the privilege of a private midnight tour of the Greater JFK Landscaping Program.

As he made his weary way back to the airport, I called the credit card company to find out what had happened. Why would they have declined the charge?

They hadn't, they said. Indeed, they had authorised a charge of $172.00, this being what $152 works out to after taxes, licensing, and applicable fees.

Perhaps that had been Expedia. Had the hotel attempted to authorise further charges and been declined?

They forwarded me to authorisations. Nope, no one had attempted to authorize any sort of charge, except the ones they'd approved.

Another call to the clerk, who kept on with her story. She'd tried to authorize the card, twice.

I pointed out, first, that the moral thing to do would be to find me another hotel room; and second, that I am a naturally vindictive person who was going to have a very long talk with customer service tomorrow about the hotel's booking practices. This was greeted with about as much interest as if she'd accidentally tuned into the gardening report. I tried to charge it, twice, she repeated . . .

(You debt-ridden hag. Maybe if you paid your bills, you wouldn't be huddled on the floor of an airport terminal at 2 am, trying to keep warm by wrapping your yoga tights around your exposed skin.)

I called Choice Hotels main reservation line. They chose to listen silently to my plight, offer to find me a room at the three hotels I had already discovered were booked solid, and let me go without regret.

At 2 am, I got Expedia involved. The Expedia phone rep, who seemed to be located somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, and therefore not close enough to do what I wanted him to, which was storm in like the gnome in the television commercials and save me, called the hotel. He returned to report that she had tried to charge the card, twice, to no avail.

I was, by this point, pretty much the only person left in the terminal. The guy sweeping the floors asked me why I didn't go home. I have no home, I replied sadly. However, the cavernous and deserted space did give my shouting into my now-dying cell phone a sort of echoing grandeur that helped put me in the correct righteous mood.

But they are lying, I said. The rep did that customer service rep thing where they don't say anything commital, but nonetheless convey the impression that you are a lunatic.

I checked with the card company, I said, twice. No one attempted a further authorization on the card after the first, successful one.

He remained noncommittal. He isn't there to judge. If my credit card bounces like Ricochet Rabbit, well, we all have hard times occasionally. The main thing now was to get me off the phone.

Of course, there was nothing the telephone guy could do anyway; it's not like they give their outsourcing center the power to shut hotels out of the network. But in the cold light of day, I do hope someone is taking a long, hard, look at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens.

Eventually, the Expedia clerk seemed to realize that this was not some customer complaining that the Ficus in her hotel room doesn't smell fresh, and that being as I was stuck in the terminal with nowhere to go, I had literally all night to prosecute my complaint. Once he grokked that finding me another hotel room was the best way to get off the phone, he sprang into action. He did not, alas, offer to pay for the extra charges thus incurred, but at least he tried to make sure I had, y'know, a blanket and some good ol' central heating.

Ah, central heating. You young people don't know how lucky you are . . .

The Expedia guy rapidly discovered what I already knew, which is that the reason the clerk had given away my room is that in the immediate vicinity of JFK, hotel rooms were in extraordinarily short supply. Something about like copies of the National Review on Soviet newsstands, actually. But circa 2:55, a room at the Hampton Inn was found for only $150 more than the original room I'd booked had cost.

Their credit card machine was down, said the guy from Expedia, and anyway Expedia can't do same day bookings, so I'd have to go straight there and give them my card. His voice implied that I seemed nice enough, and he sure hoped I got away before the machine was repaired and they found out I was a deadbeat. I was saddened at the lost opportunity to prove that I can, so, front three c-notes when the occasion requires, but overjoyed at the thought of bed. I jumped into a cab, checked in with lightning speed, and managed to get a solid 3.5 hours of sleep before I had to get back up to make my flight. Unfortunately, there was no real time for frivolities like showers, but thankfully I'm pretty sure the octagenarian in the seat next to me had long ago lost her sense of smell.

The Hampton Inn, JFK, by the way, was lovely: nothing much to look at, but big soft beds and some very helpful clerks who tried to aid me in getting the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens to pay my freight. Sadly, this was to no avail, but they put me up anyway, and this morning, when I overslept slightly and missed the airport shuttle, found me a delightfully insane woman who drove her minivan up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to get me to JFK on time.

Because I thought I owed the clerk the courtesy of checking with the credit card company again, I did so when I finally got to a computer today. I got the same answer, which is that my card had been charged, and no further authorizations attempted. Because I'm a little bit crazy, and also because i already have the technology in order to do phone interviews, I recorded that call. And then I talked again to the people at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens.

Yes, the man there said, it our records show we tried to authorize your card and failed.

I just spoke to my credit card company and they say that isn't true, I said.

I don't see anything here, he said, with the beginnings of dismissal in his voice.

I recorded the telephone call with the credit card company, I said, as sweetly as I could muster (which, I'm afraid I must confess, wasn't very.) Would you like to listen to it?

I want to get to the bottom of this, he said. Let me check my records and call you back.

Which he just did. And what do you suppose their records show? They show that the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, charged my card last night sometime between 8 and 9 pm. And then . . . no, it's okay, stop holding your breath . . . did not attempt any further authorizations.

I can't imagine what could have happened, said the manager.

I am so un-cynical about things like this that a friend recently looked at me after a particularly Polly-annaish statement to the effect that people usually make political arguments in good faith, and said, "And what else have you learned about us during your stay on our planet?" Nonetheless, even I, who cannot do math and believes that everyone is a good person, deep down inside, could figure out what had happened: someone had offered her more money for the room. The rain delays at JFK meant that hotels near the airports were packed solid; I chose the Comfort Inn in the first place because it was the classiest of the remaining three hotels available on Expedia. (No, seriously: one of the other places was, last time I looked, known to rent rooms by the hour).

I want to find out what happened, said the manager; I will call you back tomorrow.

I can't wait to hear the explanation for the clerk's vociferous insistence that she had--twice!--attempted to charge my card. The thing demands a rather high degree of artistry. Has she recently gone off her meds, leading to a recurrence of her visual hallucinations? Is she a compulsive liar? Have they confused me with the other Megan McArdle who booked a hotel room at 8 pm yesterday through Expedia? Did God, acting through the credit card machine at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, cause it to malfunction so as to force me into a wandering exile?

Obviously, whatever the explanation, it will not make me any less filthy or exhausted, or give me, in retrospect, a more productive day out of my few here. There are only two things I can do: rant to you, and file a new learning away in the indelible memory box: when you have a choice between any "Choice" hotel, particularly a Comfort Inn, and especially the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, choose the fleabag that rents rooms by the hour. At least the people who mug you there won't try to convince you that it's your fault.

Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens Delenda Est

How I feel right now: this about sums it up.

Story in the morning. I'm going to bed.

Musn't say the V-word

I read this sort of thing and I just do a slow burn.

In the end, though, I couldn't sacrifice my son to an education system that seems at best inefficient and at worst willfully corrupt. As much as I admire Mayor Fenty, I can't help noting that his children go to a private school.

And if he doesn't send his kids to D.C. schools, why should I?

The more interesting question is why should all of the parents who don't have the choice to send their kids to a private school, or move to the suburbs? How do you write an article this long without noting that there are a whole lot of parents in the DC school district, each with their own child just as precious and unique and worth saving as David Nicholson's kid, who don't have any choices? How does the word "voucher" not appear once?

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers "destroying" the public schools by "cherry picking" the best students, when they've made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today. Now, I don't accuse David Nicholson of this particular sin . . . yet. Right now he's only guilty of the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should excercise educational choice. Perhaps he favors vouchers to help the kids he's left behind. But if he does, I sure wish he'd mentioned it.

Improving education

This article on education policy from The Economist makes an observation about improving schools that seems obvious to the point of banality:

Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold—McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says*, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly “first-of-its-kind” (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.

But this is surprising:

You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

School systems that get good teachers do so not because the pay is extraordinary, but because teaching is a high status job. In fact, successful countries may be successful because they restrict the number of teacher training slots, which makes teaching hard to get into, and therefore well-respected.

But I don't know what that suggests for America. How do you make teaching into a highly respected job, one that top graduates (rather than, as now, mostly the bottom third of the class) want to go into? It seems like there's a chicken and egg problem.

My solution (and here I violate everything I just said earlier by advocating a Federal program): create a Federal corps of really, really, well paid teachers (starting salaries in the high five-figures). Let those teachers take their salaries anywhere, which should help solve the problem of underserved rural districts; $75K is a fortune in a country area. Make admission to the program dependent on having a four-year degree in something other than education, and passing a really, really hard test that combines general knowledge and knowledge about whatever subjects they want to teach. Gradually expand until teaching is on par with banking, consulting, law, medicine, or journalism as a preferred destination for high-performing graduates.

Climate change or acid rain?

Ken Caldeira suggests slowing warming with sulfate particles. Greg Mankiw worries about unintended consequences. I may be misremembering, but . . . weren't sulfates the things from coal plants that caused acid rain?

Bigger, stronger, more . . . national

Ezra endorses this comment by one of his readers:

Another advantage of government funding over philanthropic funding is the theoretical ability to do better macro level allocation of resources. If you have, say, 10 billion dollars in one bucket you can have a team of experts figure out the optimal allocation of those resources across a broad range of needs, whereas if that 10 billion dollars is private charitable giving the allocation will be made in chunks of hundreds, thousands, and millions of dollars by individuals who can't see the big picture. Restricted money for sexy causes is a lot easier to raise than unrestricted money for more general and less sexy purposes, and individual organizations and donors allocate funds according to their own interests. So you get things like disproportionately large amounts of money for in vitro fertilization research and disproportionately small amounts of money for free preventive medicine for the poor. Not that there's anything wrong with IVF research, but it ought to be a lower priority compared to other things. It's not the fault of the charities or the donors that this misalocation happens, but it's a problem nonetheless.

Interestingly, this is exactly the argument that was offered for why socialism would be better than capitalism. I don't find it ridiculous; indeed, in 1935, I'm sure I'd have found it incredibly compelling. It took a genius like Friedrich Hayek (and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet Union) to show why giant national solutions rarely outperform a competitive market.

The problem, it turns out, is that the central planners with the big picture have to design one-size-fits all programs that by their nature have more error built in because they don't have good local information. Also, when the planners make mistakes, as they inevitably will, those mistakes are bigger. They are also harder to detect because again, the planners have a much poorer grade of information about what is happening on the ground than local players do. And because there's no competition, there is no one to grade your performance against, and also, much less incentive to fix mistakes--particularly since those mistakes tend to generate constituencies devoted to protecting them. (See subsidies, farm.)

I'd say in most cases, charity is best provided as far down the government food chain as possible, or privately, where both the information and the incentives are better. The Federal government is like an aircraft carrier: a huge, ponderous weapon that needs a whole lot of special conditions to operate efficiently. People who want everything Federalized do so because they want the "best" weapon trained on the problem. But biggest is not the same as best. Sometimes, an aircraft carrier is the only thing for the job. But often a tiny little cruise boat that can go farther and faster, and bug out when needed, is much better suited to the task at hand.

Is the surge working?

I'm really, really sceptical of reports that the surge is working, or the violence is down in Iraq. Obviously, those of us who supported the war have far too much incentive to want this to be true, and to overlook disconfirming evidence.

However, after reading this Michael Yon article, I went looking for some possible disconfirming sources. The Brookings index confirms that US military casualties are down. And the Iraq Body Count seems to indicate that civilian deaths have fallen dramatically; the usual Ramadan surge is entirely absent. (I know that IBC is not an accurate guage of the overall number of deaths, but right now I'm interested only in the direction, and the IBC seems like a good proxy for that.)

Caveats: Ramadan is earlier this year; the usual spike in attacks may not have been a function of the holiday, but of the weather, which steadily cools off throughout September and October. Even if the drop is real and sustained, it may not be attributable to the surge; the 2006 operational tempo may simply have been unsustainable. And if it is working now, that wouldn't erase the 100k+ who have died as a result of the invasion.

But if the falling body count doesn't vindicate past policy, it should guide policy going forward. If Iraq is calming down, to me that probably makes the case for a unilateral immediate withdrawal less compelling.

That was quick

The anti-war libertarian flirtation with the Democratic party may be even shorter than I expected. Definitely so, if Hillary Clinton is the presidential nominee.

Patience, children

Ezra and Brian are complaining that it's hard to get anything done these days:

I think it's almost certainly wrong that we're not overwhelmed by the volume of tragedy in the world -- there'd have to be something genuinely wrong with you to be able to absorb the current moment in some coherent way. So what many of us do is pick and choose. But once an issue is selected, there's no real step two. Marching doesn't work. Exhortations to write a letter or shoot an e-mail seem increasingly hoary, particularly as the process is taken over by organized pressure groups able to flood legislators with millions of e-mails. Volunteers are generally misused, and even when a campaign tries to construct a movement out of them, it can backfire, discrediting the whole enterprise (see Dean, Howard, and those $%*^*# orange beanies). The utter inadequacy of contemporary methods of protest and social action has been well established -- it's even been recast as narcisstic. As Martin writes:

. . .

At the end of the day, there's really one good option: Donating money. Possibly even raising it. And so political activism becomes indistinguishable from consumerism, and relies on funding other people's ability to make a difference. Some groups, like Moveon, have done brilliant work at involving their small-time funders in the process, closing some of that gap. But the average campaign or cause is not nearly so innovative. And so most who want to be involved, who want to make a difference, are left writing a check, and never, themselves, feeling impactful.

First of all, the notion that this is some sort of uniquely horrible moment in world history is absurd. I grew up with the very real fear that one day, without much warning, I would simply vanish in a radioactive cloud. The fear of nuclear annihilation was the ever-present undercurrent to the lives of children living in major urban areas, or near military installations, in a way that you simply cannot comprehend unless you've lived it. Compared to the threat of global thermonuclear war, any of the world's current problems, including climate change, are trivial.

With the exception of climate change--and even then, remember, it was already happening twenty years ago; we just didn't see it--pretty much everything one can think of is better than ever. Wars are fewer, and kill fewer people. Everyone's richer. Racism and xenophobia are bad, but not as bad as they used to be. Women have more freedom and opportunity than at any other moment in world history. Health care is better. Our teeth are cleaner, straighter, and less cavity-filled. We know more, do more, and enjoy more than human beings ever have before. I mean, things may look pretty grim compared to the three years at the end of the last millenium, but that's life: you have good years, then you have less good years, then you have better years again.

But of course, people now in their early twenties don't really remember anything before the late Clinton administration; no wonder everything seems like it's going to hell in a handbasket. Their baseline is an unsustainable economic bubble in an unprecedented peacetime lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not only did things used to be worse; very few people managed to do anything about it. Think of the communists languishing for decades, their only substantial achievement stealing nuclear secrets for Stalin. Or the student movement of the 1960's which contributed to the end of the war, but lost on everything else they wanted, and moreover only fought against the war because half of them thought Ho Chi Minh was the good guy. Or the decades it took for the NAACP et. al. to get America to the point where we could even have a civil rights movement. The narrative where you pour out of the classroom, tell everyone how wrong they are, and sit back and wait for magic social change is a fantasy cooked up by the Baby Boomers. Who, by the way, destroyed the effectiveness of protest by creating a protest culture which emphasized alienation from, rather than solidarity with, the larger culture.

Update Brian says his argument is not that the world is worse, but that the avenues of action are fewer. Fair enough, but I don't think that's really true. I'll re-emphasize two points above. First, most grassroots action never achieves anything, because most grassroots action is at odds with what the majority wants. You can wave your polls about the environment until you're blue in the face, but I maintain that the public gets a lot angrier about rising gas prices than about climate change, which tells me where their actual priorities lie. People look at the civil rights movement and think "Yeah! That's the way to do it!" but it was preceeded by decades of slow, painful work preparing for it. Likewise, it took decades to get women the vote. Most major political change occurs at a glacial pace.

In passing, I wonder if the left isn't having a hard time getting it together precisely because sixties nostalgia is making it hard to, as conservatives did in the sixties, develop a thirty-year plan.

The other thing I would emphasize is that protesting minorities generally succeed when their letters, marches, etc. emphasize their role as part of a larger culture. This is why the breast cancer lobby is overwhelmingly more successful than, say, the antiwar movement.

But on a lot of issues, the grassroots culture really emphasizes alienation rather than connection. Antiwar protests might not have stopped the war no matter what, but it's a safe bet they'd have garnered more sympathy and respect for their views had more of the protesters shown up dressed for the Elks Lodge Annual Dinner Dance rather than Sunday afternoon in the Village. Undoubtedly, in an ideal world conformity to restrictive social norms would not be a prerequisite for activist success, but you're stuck with the primate tribe you got born into, where it largely is. The boomers got away with it because they were the largest generation in American history, and had recently been given the vote. No one else will get to repeat that feat.

Ouch

Cato-at-Liberty has some harsh words for Jon Chait:

For those who think that it’s just conservatives, such as Ann Coulter, who are mean-spirited, they should check out the new book by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor of the New Republic, entitled The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.

I managed to get through the introduction and first chapter of Mr. Chait’s book. Alas, I could read no more. Here are some of Chait’s characterizations of supply-side economists and supply-side economics–from the 1970s to the present day–in those first 44 pages:

“Pseudo-economists”, “cult of fanatical tax-cutters”, “amateurs and cranks”, “patently ludicrous ideas”, “preposterous ideas”, “theological opposition to taxation”, “ideological fanatics”, “insane”, “detachment from reality”, “extremism of their agenda”, “triumph of the extreme”, “a cult”, “quasi-religious”, “totalistic ideology”, “crank doctrine”, “sheer monomania”, “plain loopy”, “magical”, “sheer loons”, “deranged”, “wingnuttery”, “utterly deluded”, “crackpot economic theories”, “lunacy”, “ludicrous,” etc.

You get the idea.

One of the worst features of modern political discourse is the inability of critics to distinguish between being crazy, and being wrong. The supply siders of the 1980s were not crazy (Jude Wanniski and George Gilder notwithstanding); they were simply incorrect. The supply-siders of later vintage believed, on very flimsy evidence, that tax cuts raised tax revenue, for the same reason that progressives believe, on what to me looks like very flimsy evidence, that their national health care program will be the first American health care program in history to realize net cash savings: it is much nicer if the things you earnestly long for do not involve any tradeoffs. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case*.

I've recounted elsewhere my experience with supply-side dogmatism at a conservative publication; it's both shocking, and deeply wrong. However, that doesn't make Jonathan Chait right. Even as I wrote that, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review was writing this about the New York Sun:

Presumably what they mean is that the top income tax rate is higher than the revenue-maximizing rate, but I'm not sure why they think that it is. Bush's tax cuts appear to have caused revenue to be lower than it would otherwise have been, which suggests that we're already below the revenue-maximizing tax rate.

Which suggests that hard-core Lafferism isn't quite the monolithic dogma that Chait suggests.

Broadly, that's my biggest problem with the book: it's so terribly simplistic that you can't really learn anything interesting about the Supply-side movement, or Republican economic policy, except that Jonathan Chait hates them. Except I didn't really need a whole book to tell me that; two minutes with one of his articles is more than enough to convey Jonathan Chait's searing contempt for all those who disagree with Jonathan Chait.

Large swathes of economic history are left out, or their implications ignored, because they don't fit Chait's cartoon version of evil rich people swaggering about in top hats as their lackeys on K Street and in the think tanks cravenly put one over on the good and great American people. And he makes truly embarrassing errors that seem to indicate that he hasn't really mastered the economic theories he's dismissing, which makes one disinclined to trust the rest of the book. The result is a work that is, as Cato's poster notes, venomous--but without the usual compensating virtue of being amusing.

* The fact that Europe has generally longer lifespans than America at lower cost is multi-factorial, with the health care system the least important--or perhaps irrelevant--variable lost in lifestyle, crime, genetics, and even the way that statistics are collected dwarfing the role of health care. Likewise, on the cost side, there is an extreme degree of path dependence in the mechanism that allows French doctors to, for example, make less than an experienced RN in the United States, and other than slashing pharmaceutical payouts, which account for a trivial percentage of US healthcare spending, and moreover, save money on other procedures, no one has offered a plausible political mechanism by which the US could get there from here.

From your lips to God's ears

Says Liberal Rob in the comments:

if selfishness is the *only* explanation of anti-tax agitation, how do you account for libertarian journalists and policy wonks living on salaries in the low five digits who will in all probability never break $100K? What is their selfish interest?

It is the belief that some day (soon!) they will join the ranks of the elite millionaire pundit class; at which time, having achieved wealth, they do not want to be obligated to give any part of it (or as small a part as possible) back to the society in which they have succeeded. Or if they do not hold out such a hope, they have been brainwashed (willingly or not) into believing in a philosophy that does not serve not only their own self-interest, but that of society as a whole. There is no other explanation than that, once you strip away all the obfuscatory language.

I didn't even know there was an elite millionaire pundit class, outside of Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh, but gosh, how do I join?

Robert Reich joins the pod people

The Economist has a new podcast up with Robert Reich, the former Clinton Secretary of Labor, discussing income inequality.

The right to privacy

Among the sillier critiques of the idea of private charity as a substitute for public, is that there are so few private charities providing all the things that government does.

Savor that for a moment. Roll it around in your mind. No one gives welfare beneficiaries cash. Why could that be? Okay, if you really don't know, answer below the fold.

To be sure, I'm not confident that private charity could fully replace government charity, and I'm certainly not eager to raze our current raft of poverty programs on the odds that private groups might keep children from starving. I think a big part of the problem with the libertarian movement is that it's filled with people theorizing about the new libertarian state, or agitating for it, but very few trying to set up the auxiliary services, like private charities for other causes, that will be needed in the new system. This leaves them vulnerable to the charge that they don't actually care about any of the people that this private charity is supposed to help.

There are great libertarian style charities, like the Children's Scholarship Fund. More of us should be donating to them, promoting them, and most importantly, starting and running them. Not me, of course; I've got better things to do. But someone oughta.

Continue reading "The right to privacy" »

Tax, theory and practice

Should income taxes be progressive? There's some debate in today's comment section. To me, the moral answer is obvious: yes. Warren Buffet sacrifices a lot less by losing 30% of his income than some regular schmoe loses when he gives up 15%.

But optimal tax theory makes that more complicated. Taxes on the wealthy have especially high deadweight loss. Warren Buffet might not stop working if you ratcheted his tax rate up to 60%, but a goodly number of highly paid consultants, lawyers, small business owners and so forth would, and though it's common to portray them as leeches on society, in fact, they make a lot of stuff run a lot more smoothly.

The wealthy also have more latitude about when and how to take their earnings, because they aren't living paycheck to paycheck. That means that they will spend a lot of time and energy avoiding taxes. Do not natter about closing the loopholes. Above the complexity level of "Me Urgh! You give Urgh all your acorns!" there is no such thing as a loophole free tax. And come to think of it, I bet Urgh didn't get all the acorns, either.

If high taxes on the wealthy have very high efficiency costs, you can well end up with a smaller economic pie that doesn't actually make the poor much better off. That's why optimal tax theories tend to favor a relatively flat tax, with progressive distribution.

To me, the research suggests a relatively low level of taxation, but one that is steeply and continuously progressive to, say, a ceiling of perhaps 40% (combined federal, state and local), and goes negative for some income level. In other words, everyone should face pretty much the same marginal rate on an extra dollar of income--the poor, as well as the rich, should have to decide whether they want higher taxes and more government spending, or more cash and less spending. And all middle class subsidies should be abolished.

Note that the political odds of anything close to optimal taxation are about the same as the odds of my throwing the winning pass in next year's Superbowl.

The personal isn't political (always)

Julian Sanchez, who is finally back to blogging after a well-earned rest, weighs in on the silly rhetoric of selfishness:

. . . there are surely some very wealthy libertarians out there. But the folks who find themselves on the wrong end of this sort of rhetoric tend to be pundits, journalists, bloggers, and other folk who like arguing in bars. And the overlap between those groups is, to a first approximation, nil. If I were "selfish," I would be arguing for universal healthcare funded by confiscatory taxes on brackets I'd need Hubble to glimpse. What exactly is our stake in the tax burden on the top one percent supposed to be? A big payout for our loyal hackwork from the Gnomes of Zurich? They really are screwed if their only advocates are money-grubbers so dim as to eschew law or consulting for journalism.

I am frequently told, when I say that I am against single payer, that I wouldn't feel that way if I were uninsured.

But I was uninsured for years, and I was still against national health care.

But you were healthy, I am told. You wouldn't feel that way if you'd been sick and uninsured.

But I was sick, with a couple of expensive chronic diseases. Not like kidney failure or anything, but a pulmonologist and a raft of prescription inhalers can take quite a bite out of the monthly budget.

But you weren't sick and poor, I'm told.

But after taxes, rent, and $1K in student loans, freelancing sure didn't generate a lot of spare cash.

But you weren't poor from birth is the general rejoinder.

. . . and around it goes. Apparently, the only people allowed to comment on health care are uninsured diabetics from East New York . . . which makes any discussion moot, because that sure doesn't describe any of my interlocutors.

There's a weird presumption that the political must be personal. To be sure, class and income and background affect our thinking in subtle ways. But they don't make it impossible to develop, or maintain, a principled belief that runs against one's own immediate self-interest. What's the Matter with Kansas? might more properly have been titled What's the Matter with Thomas Frank?

I protest!

There's a horde of angry Arabs outside my office, yelling about the destruction in Iraq.

Interestingly, they are not taking on US foreign policy, but Saudi Arabia, whose embassy (I just learned) is across the street from the Watergate. This appears to be the group running the protest, and this is their explanation:

Saudi Arabia's Government is aware of the groups who directly support terrorism by hosting and supporting those who issue calls and ideologies that encourage terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. Muslims across America denounce the destruction of the Islamic holy shrines which represent our religious, architectural and cultural heritage. Similar calls for destruction are responsible for the bombings of the Al-Askariyya Shrine in Samarra, Iraq twice last year, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. Such radicalism is present in Saudi Arabia and is also responsible for the destruction of the Jannat-ul-Baqee cemetery in Madina, Saudi Arabia on April 21, 1925, where several companions and family members of the Prophet are buried. The destruction of Jannat-ul- Baqee is a major crime committed by the Wahhabis within Saudi Arabia against the people of Islam and is a great loss to the heritage of Islam. Saudi Arabia has unfortunately been turned into a school for nurturing terrorism. According to the latest report by US military, more than half of the foreign fighters entering Iraq are coming from Saudi Arabia (Los Angeles Times, July 18 2007). Not to mention 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals. Al-Baqee would like to promote the awareness of such Wahhabi efforts aimed at further division of the Muslim community which are fueling Intra-Islamic terrorism and destruction around the world. We appeal to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to end all governmental support and ties to the Wahhabi structure in the Saudi Kingdom and worldwide. As a close U.S.-ally, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has an obligation for providing freedom of worship and honoring human rights for all within its borders. Al-Baqee calls upon the Saudi Govt. for the restoration and preservation of Islamic Holy Sites (i.e. Jannat-ul- Baqee) and encourages Saudi government to use its influence to restrain Wahhabi rhetoric that is fueling much destruction around the world.

It's hard to compete

The New York Times thinks that our low taxes are making us uncompetitive with the rest of the world:

Politicians on the right have continuously paraded the specter of statism to rally voters’ support for tax cuts, mainly for the rich. But the meager tax take leaves the United States ill prepared to compete. From universal health insurance to decent unemployment insurance, other rich nations provide their citizens benefits that the United States government simply cannot afford.

The consequences include some 47 million Americans without health insurance and companies like General Motors being dragged to the brink by the cost of providing workers and pensioners with medical care.

Greg Mankiw points out that this is silly:

Employer-provided health insurance is just a form of compensation that happens to be provided in kind rather than in cash. What the Times seems to be saying is that because companies like General Motors have promised levels of compensation too large to make them competitive in the international marketplace, we should shift the responsibility for some of that compensation from the companies to the taxpayer.

An alternative approach is for the companies to reduce compensation to levels they can afford. One might respond that reduced compensation would be hard on workers. But so would the higher taxes needed to pay for the national health insurance the Times is lobbying for. There is no free lunch here.

But what he doesn't point out is that one of their main assertions--that GM is losing competitiveness because it has to pay for health care and pensions--isn't even true. GM's foreign competition comes from Japanese and German cars; the next biggest player, the Koreans, has less than five percent of the market. And Japan and Germany have employer-paid health insurance just like American companies.

I have no idea how the meme got started that American companies are losing competitiveness because only they have responsibility for their employees' health, but it shows up quite a lot, along with the even more erroneous belief that our pension problem creates a competitiveness disadvantage; for the record, Germany and Japan have their own gigantic pension problems.

GM's problem is not that it has to supply health care for its workers, but that its health care costs seem to be running about 200% of the national average. That's union bargaining power, not the national health care system. It is true, of course, that a national system would remove the union's ability to bargain up health care costs, but as Greg Mankiw points out, the bargaining power wouldn't go away; one expects that it would just be used to extract some other form of compensation, such as better pension coverage, earlier retirement, or higher wages.

Confusing political economy with personal virtue

Apparently, a number of people in the comments genuinely did not understand the point of my last post. Okay, let's go over it again.

It is common to hear Democrats/progressives complain that Republicans/conservatives/libertarians are selfish because they want to cut taxes instead of spending that money on national health insurance or expanded welfare benefits or some other social program.

But this makes absolutely no sense. Democrats are not advocating spending their own money on the poor; they're advocating spending the money of a very small group of voters who lean Republican. One might argue that this very small group of voters is selfish, but they are not the majority, or even a plurality, of Republicans staunchly opposed to taxes. Or other people opposed to taxes. Of all of the libertarian bloggers out there advocating lower taxes and social spending, I'm hard pressed to think of one who wouldn't personally benefit more from the increased social spending than from the lower taxes.

The majority of people opposed to purchasing the higher-taxes/lower-social-spending combo pack may be wrong on some utilitarian basis, but whatever their sins, they are not the sin of selfishness.

Yet public debate often features an underlying moralistic current in which Democrats act as if they have captured the moral high ground on matters of the public purse--as if advocating public charity were some lesser form of engaging in private charity. It isn't. It may be necessary to take money from third parties in order to give it to other third parties, but doing so at absolutely no personal cost to yourself is not an act of virtue.

Oh Frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! She chortled in her joy

Tim Harford finally has a blog.

The lives of others

I don't know why Matt should find this remarkable:

Still, the main psychological point remains that there's a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.

After all, we've already internalized the notion that advocating taxing other people in order to give their money to someone else is somehow morally akin to charity.

An economic analysis of the bike commute

In which we consider the costs, as well as the benefits, of riding our bike to work.

Riding our bike to work means that we may occasionally be attacked by marauding curbstones. On the benefit side, we are not being mugged by auto-mechanics, or unpleasant dictatorships with thoroughly undeserved good luck in geography. Overall, the bike is still a clear winner.

Blegs

It looks like I'll be going to Vietnam and Cambodia for ten days in November to check out the economic and business environment. It's a pretty jammed schedule, but I should have some free time. What can my readers recommend?

Meanwhile, the heat and the extended daylight savings time have so far kept the SAD away, but I know it's coming as soon as my body catches up to the calendar. Do those light things work, and are they worth the expense?

Bloom Energy bike commuters

Bloom Energy bike commuters
Originally uploaded by richardmasoner

Besides, lots of cyclists on the street make for a lively, inviting community -- the kind of place where families want to live, where business owners and retirees want to stay. And those things make a huge difference to local economies. Every retiree who stays in a neighborhood effectively creates a local job through his or her spending, as I noted in "Green-Collar Jobs."

Friday headset blogging

After watching Matt use it on Bloggingheads television, I ordered this Logitech notebook headset on Amazon. I like to listen to music while I work, and even more than that, I like to conduct my telephone interviews on Skype so that I can record them straight to my hard drive. Amazing fact number one: I ordered it yesterday afternoon, and even though I didn't opt for overnight service, it was on my desk when I got back from lunch today. Amazing fact number two: the sound is better than my old headset. Amazing fact number three: I no longer look like I am preparing to land a World War II cargo plane. I think I'm in love.

Oof

A hell of a correction from the AP:

LONDON (AP) — In an Oct. 11 story about a study examining global abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, The Associated Press erroneously reported that nine out of 10 women will have an abortion before age 45. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and the World Health Organization calculated that an average woman would have 0.9 abortions in her reproductive lifetime (between the ages of 15 and 44), given currently prevailing rates. The figure was arrived at by combining higher abortion rates in some areas and lower abortion rates in others; some women have multiple abortions and others have none. The rate is an average and it does not mean that nine out of 10 women worldwide have abortions.

Why can't states run single payer systems?

Ezra's speech on state health care programs comes out against them, but neatly avoids the obvious: the reason that they all failed was that they were incredibly expensive. Moreover, they were vastly more expensive than the planners had anticipated, which knocked budgets out of whack. This in spite of the fact that the programs were very well positioned to take advantage of all of the collective bargaining, administrative, and preventative medicine efficiencies that advocates of national health care keep promising us will shave the cost of such a system. Whatever those savings are, the evidence seems to be that they are outweighed by the fact that if you make health care free, and don't ration it, people use a whole lot more than you were expecting them to. Your costs, accordingly, shoot through the roof.

TennCare didn't get into trouble because there was a recession; it got into trouble because it was godawful expensive and getting more so by the minute. Costs were projected to rise by about 75% over the next five years, and even though the federal government would have picked up almost half the tab, Tennessee couldn't afford to pay it. The failure of the various state initiatives is an instructive look at our future.

Close to home

I haven't been yelled at for, like, nine hours, and we seem to be running short on flame wars, so how about a little Israel blogging? Matt observes:

People often note that there appears to be a more vigorous debate over Israel's approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict in the mainstream Israeli press than there is in the mainstream American press. This is, however, the kind of judgment that it's hard for a casual American observer to make with much confidence. Writing in International Security, however, Jerome Slater takes a more systematic comparison of coverage of the conflict in The New York Times and in Haaretz and concludes that, indeed, Israelis debate this matter more freely.

If this is true, I wonder why it would be true. My tenative thoughts:

1) No one in Israel is worried about being called anti-semitic.

2) Ethnic groups in safe exile tend to be more committed to territorial possession than the people back home who actually have to get shot at in order to obtain or retain the land. This is certainly true of the Irish.

3) Being correct about Israel/Palestine matters a lot more in Israel than it does in America. People expressing views here (or in Europe) are more often staking out ethnic or political solidarity with a cause. People in Israel have a certain level of solidarity assumed, and are in a high-stakes battle for the lowest cost solution, which permits and even demands a wider breadth of views.

4) Newspapers in Israel are just better than newspapers here.

Obviously, four is not the correct answer. I don't know how much to weight each of the other three.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodbye . . .

The gold standard of health insurance studies is the 1982 RAND study, which was a randomized controlled study of health care usage. One of the surprising findings was that when you pushed the cost down, usage went up, but health didn't.

However, Alex Tabarrok points to a major flaw in the study:

Of the 1,294 adult participants who were randomly assigned to the free plan, 5 participants (0.4 percent) left the experiment voluntarily during the observation period, while of the 2,664 who were assigned to any of the cost-sharing plans, 179 participants (6.7 percent) voluntarily left the experiment. This represented a greater than sixteenfold increase in the percentage of dropouts, a difference that was highly significant and a magnitude of response that was nowhere else duplicated in the experiment.

What explains this? The explanation that makes the most sense is that the dropouts were participants who had just been diagnosed with an illness that would require a costly hospital procedure. … If they dropped out, their coverage would automatically revert to their original insurance policies, which were likely to cover major medical expenses (such as hospitalizations) with no copayments.

Who drops out of your study is an important factor that is far too often overlooked, especially by journalists. Weight loss studies are particularly bad for this--the people who aren't losing weight are, naturally, the ones who tend to drop out, which vastly overstates the success figures. But all sorts of medical studies are prone, including, it seems, this one.

Necessity is not the mother of subsidy

This is something one hears an awful lot:

So, if two incomes are mandatory for the basics of middle class life -- home, car, kids, dog, then childcare is now a necessity for most families. Those babies don't raise themselves. Yet, where is the child-care discussion in this presidential debate?

Food, shelter, or clothing are also necessities for children. But no one suggests that the government should provide them, except in the cases of those who are too poor to provide for themselves. Why should childcare be any different?

The best offense is a good defense?

Robin is, to be sure, correct that our military does not perform the traditional libertarian task of protecting our borders from invasion. Instead, it protects our interests abroad--and does so well enough that Europe, for all its complaining, is happy to free ride. This suggests that we are, for all our faults, doing a fairly good job of protecting the broader interests of liberal capitalistic democracy. A world in which China and Russia and Iran were using their military might to protect their interests, while we squatted behind our borders, would be possibly a nobler one, but I find it unlikely that it would be a better one in any utilitarian sense.

Market makers

Should we cut our defense spending in half?

To politically balance my previous suggestion to cut US medical spending in half, let me now suggest we cut US military spending in half. I haven't researched this subject anywhere near as much as medicine, so I can't argue as strongly. But the simple argument seems compelling: The US with 27% of world product has about 46% of world military spending (up from 40% in 2000). Yet our "defense" needs are few, as we are rich, isolated, have friendly neighbors, and haven't been invaded for centuries. And it is hard to see how "offense" spending at this level could possibly be cost-effective.

Well, there's one way: the US could be like Alcoa. That is, we are huge, and rich, and this makes us the low-cost provider of military services to the world. We are so cost-effective that no one else even bothers trying to enter the market to compete against us. We've achieved this position in part just by being huge and rich, but also in part through path dependence: over the last fifty years, we've gained a lot of relevant expertise at having a giant high-tech military.

If we cut our military spending in half, however, it might be worthwhile entering the market to compete against us. At 1-2% of GDP, other countries probably could field an army against us. Yes, we're isolated, but that also makes us vulnerable to things like interdiction of shipping, which is why we ended up in both World Wars last century. Plus, the invention of the intercontinental ballistic missile renders discussion of our isolation somewhat moot.

Imagine Europe if the US were not a global hegemon. I imagine Russia engaging in a rapid military buildup, taking back some of its lost territories, and wielding a great deal of influence over the ones on its new borders that it did not formally control. Europe would have to rapidly build up military strength, but this would be exceedingly difficult, because they've lost the knack. No European country can currently project force much beyond its own borders, several can't project it even within their own borders, and all of them have high levels of government spending that would get in the way of military buildups. Who will train new soldiers? What companies will design and build their military equipment? Who will secure their supply chain of critical resources while they do so? Industries do not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus; they rely on a lot of prior art. Once you've lost that prior art, you are at a severe disadvantage in the market, whether the market is for widgets or a powerful military.

Roll those taxes

Robert Reich suggests a new tax policy for America:

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich (earning over $500,000 a year). Plus an annual wealth tax of one half of one percent on net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets....If the Democrats stand for anything, it’s a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation.

But Greg Mankiw notes:

Realistic optimal tax problems don't usually yield solutions similar to Reich's proposal, even for a social planner who has strong preferences for equality. High tax rates at the top generate a lot of deadweight loss for each dollar of tax revenue. In most standard optimal tax models, a more redistributionist social planner would give more to the poor and higher marginal tax rates for everyone, but she would not focus disproportionately on the the very top of the income distribution. And she would not add an extra penalty to capital accumulation, as Reich is proposing.

This is particularly true because Robert Reich is forgetting about state and local taxes. It might be fair to have the rich pay half their income . . . but when you factor in other taxes, many of them do. My old colleagues moving to New York City from London were frequently heard to say "What is this rubbish we've been talking about America having low taxes? My taxes are higher here!" That's because New York State and New York City together levy an additional income tax of 10% once your income is over $100K, which pushed two-income families above Britain's 40% top tax bracket. A 50% tax rate on top incomes would result, for New Yorkers, in a 60% effective total income tax rate total, with their incomes further eroded by the city's 10% sales tax. Since pretty much the entire increase in inequality in the last few decades seems to have come from a few zip codes in the high tax zones around New York and San Francisco, this matters.

People talking about "fair shares" of tax income often forget to factor in state and local taxes, which, given the geographic income distribution in the country, often produces heavily skewed results.

Meanwhile, the wealth thing is ludicrous. $5 million is the value of a moderately successful family business that throws off a couple hundred grand in income a year. You're going to hand those people an extra $25,000 tax bill each year for the sin of being self-employed? This does not sound like a recipe for enhancing America's singularly dynamic economic performance.

this is your head on blogging

Yglesias and I discuss the terrifying prospects of a Giuliani presidency, the unexciting prospect of a Hilary candidacy, and the weird absence of Jews in shows about rich people. It occurred to me as I was watching this that the anasemitic character of Gossip Girl has its echo in Beverly Hills 90210, where IIRC only one character, who started out minor, is Jewish . . . not exactly an accurate representation of an area dominated by the entertainment industry.

It also occurred to me that there is a relatively benign explanation: media executives are leery of portraying rich New York day schools, or the entertainment industry, as being chock full of Jewish people for fear of encouraging the stereotype that Jews control all the media and the money in this country. Though I'm not sure the opposite pretense is actually any less disturbing.

You jest

Matt and Ezra claim that the left does not treat teacher's unions with kid gloves.

Okay, I guess if you define implementing an extraordinarily minimal standard of performance, and small bonuses for people who exceed that standard--both economic propositions where the evidence on the Republican side is considerably better than the evidence against the Laffer Curve--as bold, visionary propositions, then Democrats and the Left do not kowtow to the teacher's unions. By the same standard, I am declaring every conservative writer who does not actually advocating slashing income taxes to zero to be a radical, free-thinking independent.

The budget deficit falls again

Thanks to George Bush's amazing deficit reduction plan, the budget deficit is now only 1.2% of GDP. If this trend continues, by the time George Bush leaves office, the budget will be within a hair's breath of being balanced. I can only hope that Democrats don't squander this precious legacy of fiscal responsibility.

Continue reading "The budget deficit falls again" »

Defining genocide down

I first read this article and thought "this is the last gasp of the K Street machine."

Then I thought: wait a minute, the Democrats are in power now. The K Street machine should already be pushing up daisies. Where's the awesome lack of corruption that Jonathan Chait promised me?

Family . . . who needs 'em?

A few days ago, I asked what it would mean to live in a culture with no family. Gabriel Rossman offers this fascinating analysis:

Who needs brothers, sisters, brother-in-laws, sister-in-laws, nieces, nephews, and cousins? It’s not as if we can’t substitute non-familial friends. There are two problems with this. First, family ties are unique in that they can’t be replaced (you can stop talking to your brother, but you can’t recruit a new brother to replace him) and this makes them very important in low trust societies. It could be that a lack of relatives could drive people to trust strangers of necessity and you’ll have a decline in corruption, or it could be that they just won’t trust anyone, transaction costs will go way up, and nothing will get done. Second, in the United States non-kin strong ties are rapidly disappearing as people are basically discussing serious issues only with their spouses and parents. While I’ve seen no evidence that this change is also occurring in low fertility countries, if it is then the “mass society” nightmare scenario of atomized individuals wasn’t wrong, just ahead of its time.

Think positive

Derek Lowe dives into a problem that is far too poorly understood by most of the public: the problem of false positives.

The news of a possible diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease is very interesting, although there’s always room to wonder about the utility of a diagnosis of a disease for which there is little effective therapy. The sample size for this study is smaller than I’d like to see, but the protein markers that they’re finding seem pretty plausible, and I’m sure that many of them will turn out to have some association with the disease.

But let’s run some numbers. The test was 91% accurate when run on stored blood samples of people who were later checked for development of Alzheimer’s, which compared to the existing techniques is pretty good. Is it good enough for a diagnostic test, though? We’ll concentrate on the younger elderly, who would be most in the market for this test.The NIH estimates that about 5% of people from 65 to 74 have AD. According to the Census Bureau (pdf), we had 17.3 million people between those ages in 2000, and that’s expected to grow to almost 38 million in 2030. Let’s call it 20 million as a nice round number.

What if all 20 million had been tested with this new method? We’ll break that down into the two groups – the 1 million who are really going to get the disease and the 19 million who aren’t. When that latter group gets their results back, 17,290,000 people are going to be told, correctly, that they don’t seem to be on track to get Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, because of that 91% accuracy rate, 1,710,000 people are going to be told, incorrectly, that they are. You can guess what this will do for their peace of mind. Note, also, that almost twice as many people have just been wrongly told that they’re getting Alzheimer’s than the total number of people who really will.

People look at tests with small error rates--a false positive rate of, say, .5%, and conclude that if they test positive, that means it's overwhelmingly likely that they have the disease. But this is true only for conditions that are relatively frequent. Take a test for a disease that has a false positive rate of 5%, and a disease prevalence of 1 in 1000--lupus, say. If you test positive in a random assay, what are the odds that you actually have the disease?

Most people--even, apparently, a shocking number of doctors--would say that the odds are 95%. But this is all wrong. If you test 1,000 people for lupus, 1 of them will correctly test positive for lupus--and 50 of them will falsely test positive. The chances are only 1 in 51, less than 2%, that you actually have the disease.

These are in fact the actual numbers for anti-nuclear antibody tests and systemic lupus, at least as relayed to me by my immunologist after I got a borderline positive result on a screen. These suggest that no one should ever do a random ANA; the information it gives is garbage, particularly since they don't treat lupus until you manifest symptoms. Yet lots of doctors, including mine, do.

School or sleep?

All throughout high school,I was unable to sleep before midnight or one, which was a little hard on me, because I had to leave for school before 7 am. I became rather too adept at dressing in my elevator. In college, I became a nocturnal creature, going to bed around 3 or 4 and rising around noon.

Apparently, this is natural (I now get up between 7 and 8 without an alarm); teenagers are simply naturally nocturnal for some strange reason. Matt Zeitlin wonders why we don't use this information to schedule school:

In middle school and the high school I would have gone to, class starts at 8:05, while at the school I attend now, classes start at 8:35, and if you’re lucky, you can a first period free at least once a week. Speaking as a sleep starved teenager, those extra 30 minutes in the morning are incredibly valuable. How any school could ever start before 8:00 is simply astounding and probably proof that teachers or some other force has become too powerful in the district, because starting times that absurdly early are never in the interest of the students.

I've often wondered about this in New York City, where staggering school schedules to start at, say 10 would not only let teenagers sleep, but also smooth the usage of the trains rather than crowding kids on at the same time as rush hour commuters. I initially theorized that they were matching the schedules to parents, but by middle school, this isn't a consideration in New York . . . and I doubt much of one in the suburbs either, where I presume most kids take the schoolbus or drive. So how come school starts so early?

Pet peeve

If I ever go on an online dating site, you know what my pet peeve will be? People who say of thought experiments "But that's not true in the real world!"

The capacity for abstract thought is perhaps the most precious gift of our foresighted ancestors who elected evolution over another 10 million years poking anthills with sticks. Why are these people so determined to fling the fruits of this noble legacy away? I tell you, whenever someone tells you "but that's not how it works", know ye by these presents that lurking somewhere back in their family tree was a hairy primate whining "I'm tired of walking upright! Why can't we give up this fire nonsense and head back into the forest?" And that primate was hated by all the other, smarter primates in the tribe.

Models and thought experiments are designed to illuminate principles, not mirror the real world. We already have something that looks and works exactly like the actual world: that is, the world. However, if you want to learn much about that world beyond "Water is wet" and "Fire burns", you need to simplify in order to see deep truths more clearly.

Sentences that start, "In the real world . . . " or "Tha'ts just a model . . . " are indeed damning indictments, but not of the simplification.

What's the matter with Lomborg

In the comments to my post on MRSA, a commenter says:

Providing access to primary care to those who are currently only getting emergency care is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the problem of reducing medical error. (hat tip to the first person to get the reference.) While there may be a reduction in the rate of increase in costs after several years, there will need to be an immense effort made to train an army of primary doctors and get them into the communities where they're needed.

Please, stop reading Lomborg. Malaria and global warming are both serious problems. There is simply no reason whatsoever to pit them off against each other. This is even more the case where the solutions to the two problems require different commitments.

This is a very common complaint among liberals about Bjorn Lomborg, who basically argues that global warming is not a high priority relative to other things we could do to alleviate human misery; better to spend a little money on adjusting to global warming and a lot on malaria eradication, than a lot of money preventing global warming and a little money on malaria.

As it happens, I think Lomborg is probably wrong. But I think this criticism of Lomborg is wrong too.

Continue reading "What's the matter with Lomborg" »

Should I resent having been evicted?

There's a weird presumption among liberals that libertarians have no right to accept human decency in interpersonal interactions because, after all . . . the market!

People have a legal right to mutter "bitch" as I walk past, blog extensively about how fat and unattractive I am, or ignore my ideas on the grounds that Irish Catholics are naturally stupid. Businesses have a legal right to provide sullen and unhelpful salespeople, filthy premises, and cheaply made products that fall apart one day after the warranty expires. All Americans have the legal right to say nasty things to their spouses, watch football instead of talking to their kids, stop bathing, and drop dear old friends in favor of richer, more attractive ones.

I would not dream of making any of these things against the law. But I can still be appalled when people do them. Being a libertarian means recognizing the limits of the formal legal system to regulate human behavior--not recognizing the formal legal system as the only limitation on human behavior.

My landlord was entitled to evict me on a month's notice, forcing my 62 year old mother to commute to pulmonary rehab from upstate New York. And though I could have made trouble for my landlord in New York's famously tenant friendly housing court, I didn't, not only because I didn't want the hassle, but also because I genuinely believed that they had the legal right to evict me.

But that doesn't mean I have to like the way they treated me, or think it's fair; I just have to accept it as the price of living in a modern (classical) liberal system.

Update I forget I have new readers now. I was evicted at the end of April because my landlord sold the building and the new owners kicked everyone out in order to, apparently, do a quick flip. I didn't do anything, other than occupy an apartment they wanted to sell, to bring it on myself.

I take it all back

A conservative publication, which I will not name, just spiked a book review because I said that the Laffer Curve didn't apply at American levels of taxation, even while otherwise expressing my vast displeasure with the (liberal) economic notions of the book I was reviewing. This isn't me looking for an alternative explanation for the spiking of a bad review: the literary editor accepted it, edited it, and then three hours later told me it couldn't be published because it violated their editorial line on taxation.

I suppose I ought to have known, but I didn't. Go ahead liberals, pile on: you told me so. The Laffer Curve and the supply siders pushing it seem to be the teacher's unions of the right.

One way to think about health care

Tyler Cowen suggests a number of ways to think about health care spending; more on that later. But here's a metric we might use to compare our various policy options. According to a study that even the New Republic's Jon Cohn admitted he thought was probably exaggerated, being uninsured killed 18,000 people a year this decade. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, on the other hand, apparently kills 19,000 a year.

MRSA is the result of inadequate hygiene in hospitals, and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Doctors and other medical workers have gotten lazier about hygiene since the invention of antibiotics, in line with other sorts of risk-taking behavior (more than one wag has suggested that the best way to eliminate auto accidents would be to mount a spear on the steering wheel pointed straight at the driver's heart.) They also prescribe antibiotics even when they are not clearly indicated, "just in case" . . . or worse, when they know they won't do any good, but want to get an ignorant and demanding patient out of their office. Third place for blame must, of course, go to the patients who do not finish taking their drug courses, which allows partially resistant bugs to survive and eventually breed highly resistant bugs . . . and what with my awful memory, you can put me in the dock along with almost everyone else.

MRSA is just one of the infections that are thriving in this environment. What would be the cost of a war on infection in hospitals? One suspects it would be a lot less than insuring 44 million people.

This might be one of the items that Tyler suggests libertarians should think about. There's a clear public health cause here, as with vaccines; doctors who prescribe indiscriminately, or people who don't take all their pills, are in fact placing a substantial burden on the rest of the public.

Non libertarians can, of course, go along wishing that we would have national health care and a War on Infection. But it's worth asking yourself: in a world of scarce resources, where you could only have one, which would you choose? And by what principle?

Caveat emptor

I see that the apartments from my old apartment building, 55 West 95th Street is finally on the market. These are the lovely folks who evicted me on a month's notice from the apartment where I'd rented for more than three years. My hatred for them is both broad and deep after the various disputes over payment, whether overstaying my lease for a week while my mother found substitute housing required eviction, and a general lack of interest in the actual people involved in the transaction.

Still, I have to say, I'm pretty curious to see what the apartments are like . . . and more to the point, what kind of a lunatic would buy them. The pipes burst three times during the last year I lived there, ruining a number of my clothes and, from what I understand, flooding all of the apartments above me even worse. By the end of my time there, there was no hot water to speak of for most of the day, and the heating was more in the nature of a fond hope than a working system.

I briefly considered buying the apartment I lived in, except that the management company inexplicably demanded, for my cave-like first floor apartment, about what it would cost to buy a one bedroom twice the size in a tony Central Park West building. Then my mother pointed out that the landlord seemed not to have done any work in the building for about thirty years. I had been under the assumption that they were going to gut renovate the thing: put in new boilers and pipes (every time the super talked about the condition of the pipes, he would start shaking his head in sadness), really repair the roof, get the electric up to modern code, and so forth. But it's only been four months since I moved out, which seems barely enough to have finished cosmetic updates on the apartments. Or am I missing something? Can you actually fix deep infrastructure like pipes and so forth in a 60 unit building where ten owners/rent-controlled holdouts are still living, refinish the apartments, and get them on the market by September, which is apparently when these things went on sale? Or did I dodge a bullet?

Update I should note that most people get apartments inspected when they buy them. If the pipes are indeed as awful as I remember them being, & the boiler as spotty, wouldn't that show up on inspection? Who's buying these things?

Department of awful statistics

I saw this on Feministing and thought: huh?

A new study by the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization shows that abortion rates are similar in different countries whether the procedure is legal or not. Shocking, I know. Of course, what wasn't similar was the risk to women's health.

The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.

Moral of the story? Safe, legal abortion is the best bet. Always.

This is a common meme among feminists; indeed, I myself was, in the long fled days of my youth, guilty of propagating it. I'm not quite sure why I thought that abortion was a magical exception to the rule that when you make something much harder and more costly to do, fewer people do it. In fact, the source for this oft-repeated claim turned out, when last I examined to to be fairly awful. This new claim comes with a better pedigree, but not, alas, noticeably better evidence. Here's what the New York Times has to say:

A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.

Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.

The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.

“We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the W.H.O. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said in a telephone interview. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.”

I can't see the Lancet study, which is gated. But the summary does not back up this claim. The study says that abortions are generally high in the developing world, where it is usually illegal, and low in the developed world, where it is usually legal. It also tells you that abortion is relatively unsafe in the developing world.

But it seems mad to extrapolate this to a blanket statement such as "Law does not influence a woman's decision to have an abortion." For one thing, we know of cases where the law absolutely and indisputably did exert such an influence, such as Communist Romania, where abortion bans caused the birth rate to soar. For another, societies where abortion is illegal are probably different from societies where abortion is legal in other ways, such as attitudes towards birth control. Also, enforcement of laws varies even when the laws don't (abortion was technically illegal in Germany for most of the post-war period). And finally, since the variation is almost entirely among developed countries where access to birth control may be spotty for economic, political or social reasons, this would not necessarily tell us much about developed nations. As I understand it, most abortions in America are obtained by women who have had more than one abortion, which seems to indicate that for at least some segment of the population abortion is a substitute for birth control, rather than birth.

Similarly, saying that "making abortion illegal doesn't reduce its incidence, but only makes it more dangerous" is nonsense on stilts when the comparison is largely between developed countries with legal abortion, and developing countries with illegal abortion. Having an abortion in Burundi would be more dangerous than having one in America even if their government legalized the procedure, made it free, and awarded a medal and a complimentary fruit basket to every woman who had one. I am pretty sure that abortion, like almost every other activity, gets more dangerous when it is legally prohibited. But from what I can make out, this study doesn't do a good job of demonstrating that truism.

Cross-country comparisons--what statisticians call latitudinal studies--are fraught with difficulty because of all the differences in law, enforcement, data collection, social norms, political culture, health care systems, and so forth. That's why it's important to also look at longitudinal studies--studies that examine the same place over time. And all the reputable studies I'm aware of, which to be sure are not an exhaustive list, show pretty much the expected result: if you legalize abortion, you get more of it.

In America, especially, the evidence that legalizing abortion resulted in more abortions seems pretty rock solid. Steve Levitt wrote about this in Freakonomics, and I blogged an excerpt some time ago:

In the first year after Roe v. Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the United States (representing one abortion for every four live births). By 1980, the number of abortions had reached 1.6 million (one for every 2.25 live births), where it levelled off. . .

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in America had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in adoptions of foreign babies). Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.

I'm still in favor of legalizing it, of course, for moral and practical reasons that I've gone into elsewhere. But the case for legal abortion stands on its own. It doesn't need nonsense statistics to back it up.

Random question

Where's the most reputable place to do a title search in DC?

The perils of buy local

How much carbon goes into the food we eat? Recently I've been beseiged by buy-local fanatics, claiming that if I eat Guatamalan raspberries, I'm killing the earth with the carbon needed to transport them. Interestingly, I've also been proffered this argument by people who are against major action on global warming; their argument is that I'm actually killing the earth by biking, because the food I eat consumes a great deal of carbon growing it and transporting it to my grocery store.

Now, color me sceptical about that latter, because despite what you might think, very few gas stations are sited atop natural gasoline springs; the gasoline has to be pumped out of the earth, refined, and then transported to your gas station. I would be very, very, very surprised if doing so consumed less energy than growing and transporting the single delicious Macintosh apple it takes to replenish the calories I expend biking 2 miles to work each day.

But this did cause me to try to figure out how much energy the various options consume, and frankly, the answer is, I have no clue. There are so many second, third, and eighth order effects that my brain is spinning. Oh, sure, you burn carbon transporting tomatoes from Chile . . . but the Chilean farmer who grew them probably consumes a lot less carbon than the tomato farm down the road. And don't ask the tomato farmer, either, because he doesn't know how much carbon goes into producing all of the various things he consumes in order to maintain his lifestyle as an American artisanal tomato farmer. Not only has no one done a good analysis of this subject; I don't think anyone could.

That's why if we're serious about cutting carbon dioxide emissions, we need a carbon tax, and not CAFE, or other sorts of piecemeal regulatory solutions.

Continue reading "The perils of buy local" »

No relatives

I've been working on a piece about demographics recently (more TK), and one of the great pleasures was interviewing Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr Eberstadt is one of those rarest of creatures: a scholar at a think tank with a strong ideological identification, who is nonetheless greatly respected by people all over the ideological spectrum.

His op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, which I was just re-reading, is a case in point. It raises a question about China that I haven't seen phrased quite this way before:

In Beijing, Shanghai and other parts of China, extreme sub-replacement fertility has already been in effect for over a generation. If this continues for another generation, we will see the emergence of a new norm: a "4-2-1 family" composed of four grandparents, but only two children, and just one grandchild. The children in these new family structures will have no brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts, and no cousins. Their only blood relatives will be their ancestors.

It is no secret that China is already a "low trust society": Personal and business transactions still rely heavily upon guanxi, the network of personal relations largely demarcated by family ties. What exactly will provide the "social capital" to undergird commercial and economic development in a future China where "families" are, increasingly, little more than atomized households and isolated individuals?

Having grown up with the kind of family where the copious extended relatives sometimes seem slightly surplus to requirements (Save the date: Fortieth annual Taylor Family Reunion is now set for July 17th, 2011!) I find it hard to wrap my mind around the idea of no sibling, no aunts or uncles, no cousins . . . no great aunts asking your grandmother in a stage whisper when you are going to find yourself a husband . . . umm, okay, well, it still sounds awful.

But what does it mean to be in a society where, essentially, every tie is voluntary? Do the ties that bind you to your parents get stronger--or weaker, because there is so little cross-reinforcement? Does trust in strangers grow, or erode because people get no practice in giving without immediate compensation? And without great aunts to attend your wedding and ask your grandmother in a stage whisper why you couldn't find someone who doesn't drink so much, who will support China's nascent chafing dish industry?

There's millions in it . . .

Scott Adams asks:

I also envision a sport I call Bumper Soccer. It’s based on the most fun I ever had while participating in something resembling a sport. When I was an undergrad at Hartwick College, in Oneonta NY, we played soccer year round. In the winter, we played in the gym. And when the gym was taken, we sometimes found the door unlocked to a small exercise room with a low ceiling, a number of padded support columns, and a rubbery floor. We used it, quite illegally, for soccer. It was ridiculous fun, because the walls and columns added a dimension to the game. To beat a player, you could do a give-and-go off the wall or a column. And because the space was small, you were always near the action. A few times we played with more than one ball at the same time. It was frantic and amazing and great exercise. You ended up laughing the entire time. And the small space and columns were a great equalizer for different levels of skill. Speed and height didn’t count for much in there. We usually played coed.

Best yet, from a business perspective, it packed a lot of people into a small space. I often wonder what I would pay per hour to reproduce that experience, and it’s a lot.

What’s your best idea for indoor recreation that does not involve sex?

I've always wondered why someone doesn't buy cheap wood furniture and glassware by the cargo container, rent out safety outfits, and let people whack the hell out of stuff with big hammers. We're a stress laden society. And who hasn't, when some inanimate object has stubbed their toe or otherwise thwarted them, wanted to vent their rage by destroying it? I'm also a big fan of plinking nearly empty aerosol cans with .22 rifles, and those have to be pretty cheap to acquire. America needs more outlets for its destructive tendencies that don't involve wrecking other places, or our own economy.

Via Marginal Revolution, this is exceptionally neat. But what does it mean if it keeps switching direction?

Public service announcement

If, like me, you had a TiVo with lifetime service, which you regretfully bid farewell when you upgraded to HDTV, apparently you can now transfer your lifetime membership to a new HD DVR (though not the ultra-fancy Series 3.) I do love me some TiVo, so I'm thinking about it. For those who don't know, TiVo is to the DVR you rent from your cable company what my recordings of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic through Beethoven's symphonies, are to the Muzak Beethoven's Fifth broadcast over the PA of your local supermarket.

A happy surge in Iraq

This self-flagellating column by Jonathan Rauch about what he got wrong on Iraq made me go looking at the Iraq Index from Brookings to see just how guilty I should feel this month. (Who doesn't enjoy a spot of self-flagellation?) Instead, I got a happy surprise. The security statistics (other than coalition soldier deaths, which are sharply down), are spotty, and I wouldn't know enough to interpret them even if they weren't. But they do have two objective and easy to verify economic statistics that happen to be closely tied to the security situtation: electricity and barrels of oil pumped.

Barrels of oil pumped had been drifting steadily downwards thanks to insurgent attacks, but in September it popped back to where it was in September of last year. This is, mind you, still below its pre-war level, so this isn't exactly a rousing endorsement of the invasion. But electricity, which has been the metric that generally induces in me the greatest sense of despair, soared in September. The country is now producing more electricity than it ever has before--an average of almost 5,000 megawatts in September. That's 25% more than the prewar level, and also, 6% more than the previous peak in August of 2004. This is a very, very welcome sign . . . although also a very, very tenative one, as these numbers tend to fluctuate quite a lot.

Blogging will be light

I'm on deadline, and also have to give a speech to some MBA students. Go interact with that "real" world I keep hearing so much about.

Is academia serious about diversity?

. . . asks Greg Mankiw. It's hard to come to the conclusion that the answer is "Yes". Faced with overwhelming evidence that there is a massive, massive underrepresentation of conservatives at the elite level, almost none of them even considers, in passing, that there might be some sort of structural problem. No, clearly the reason that conservatives don't make it into the academy is that . . . they're inferior.

It's not as if we're talking about a severe shortage of fly-fishers either. One would think that a committment to diversity would start with a committment to diversity of thought. But then, having thoughts that disagree with the thoughts that academics have probably means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?

Don't get me wrong: I don't think there's any sort of conspiracy against conservatives in the academy. I think, rather, that a combination of more subtle factors erects a wall that it's harder for conservatives to climb over. Unless they are really, really brilliant, academics, like everyone else, need personal connections to help them up the academic ladder, from recommendations to mentors to advisors. Those personal connections are always much easier to make with people you agree with. Nor would I discount the possibility that, just as women's work can be subtly dismissed because we know women aren't as bright as men, academics who think that conservatives are stupid would factor that into their assessment of someone's intelligence--and then factor that assessment into their assessment of someone's work. And of course, one's ideas are to some extent socially constructed; simply by virtue of the arguments and information we hear, even if there is no social pressure to conform, being surrounded by a political culture will tend to drag our ideas in their direction.

And the idea that academia exerts no pressures to conform is spectacularly hilarious to anyone who's ever spent any time at all around academics. Perhaps the funniest sight I have ever witnessed is the spectacle of a sociologist cruising straight past the analyses of power relationships and group norms that they apply to every single other facet of human existence, and insisting that the underrepresentation of conservatives in academic could only be explained by the fact that conservatives are a bunch of money-grubbing intellectual lightweights who can't stand rigorous examinations of their ideas, and moreover are too intolerant to fit into the academic community.

The sociologist, you see, is inside academia, and so able to analyze it better than outsiders. Also, the sociologist knows that neither they, nor any of their friends, is biased, so the answer must be that there's something wrong with conservatives.

It's odd, given this lack of bias, that one repeatedly hears from untenured academics who are in the closet. "Passing" is not usually a behavior one finds in a community where there is no prejudice.

Now, I think that affirmative action for conservatives would be an even worse idea than regular affirmative action; conservative intellectual life doesn't need to get any flabbier than it already is. But the Larry Summers speech should certainly give one pause. That it seems to have made so little impression on liberal academics should make the rest of us very worried indeed.

The ungovernable city

You should all read David Freddoso's brilliant, angry, hilarious piece on the DC gun ban.

I hope that now you can understand where I am coming from when I read District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer’s hysterical court filing in the Heller case, which may strike down the District’s 31-year-old comprehensive ban on gun ownership.

“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”

What an excellent example of unintended humor — the District’s government is a national leader in standing by while its citizens die. Our homicide rate hit a 20-year low in 2005 — just 29 victims per 100,000 residents. That is slightly better than New York City’s rate (30.7) under Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, when the Big Apple suffered 2,250 homicides.

In 1991, the D.C. murder rate reached an astounding 81 per 100,000 — that was two years after Mayor Marion Barry famously told the Washington Press Club, “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

D.C. residents are strictly forbidden from owning handguns, even in the privacy of their homes. Any long guns must be registered and kept “unloaded and disassembled.” It is not even legal, strictly speaking, to assemble and load your gun when you hear an intruder downstairs. A lower court ruled the ban unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to take up the case.

In the debate over the gun ban, there is a strong statistical case that an armed citizenry is safer than one disarmed by unconstitutional laws, but this argument is not even necessary. There is absolutely no valid case that the District’s gun ban makes me safer as a District resident. When Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty (D., of course) penned a September 4 Washington Post op-ed stating that “The handgun ban has saved countless lives,” were they really suggesting that without the ban there might have been 1,000 murder victims in 1991, instead of just 482? The implication is that D.C. is so totally ungovernable that only a total deprivation of constitutional rights can make it barely livable.

National health care advocates are feeling pretty s-chipper

Number one item in this post on Graeme Frost:

1) I told y'all this was going to happen. Maybe next time you'll listen, hmmm?

Weirdly triggered angry email from liberal commenters, who offered this as an example of my tendency to make snotty dismissals of liberals. This is weird because, of course, I was talking to conservatives, in re my earlier post on the general political unwiseness of attacking programs that give money to cute children.

Meanwhile, conservatives think I'm nuts, and also maybe a closet liberal, because I think that the battle over S-Chip--whatever the merits of the case--is doing more harm than good to the righteous crusade against government-run health care. But I'm not the only one who thinks this; so do the advocates of national health care. Or at least one of them, anyway:

Granted, MoveOn's support can be a mixed blessing, as the critics of the war found out after the infamous "Betray-us" ad. And, let's face it, health care may never be the kind of galvanizing issue that war is. But the fact that Bush's S-CHIP veto is already sparking protests suggests this may be the beginning of something new--and, for the supporters of universal coverage, something promising. By galvanizing universal health care's advocates, Bush's veto might do a lot more to make universal health care likely than expanding S-CHIP ever would have.

One reason not to nominate Hillary

I'm really not sure I can stand a full year of squealing paeans to the fact that she's a woman. I'm kind of repulsed by the notion that I should support her policies just because their author comes with a set of ovaries attached. I will be glad, naturally, if she wins, to see that America has come far enough in the battle against sexism to elect a woman. But that's not a reason that I should vote for her. I will be even gladder, after all, when the fact that Hilary Clinton has two X chromosomes is seen as unremarkable enough to pass without comment.

Hail, Hillary!

Radley Balko doesn't like Hillary Clinton:

As a libertarian, it will at least be entertaining to watch the left squirm while defending Hillary Clinton's "right" to employ the same executive powers and engage in the same foreign policy blunders they now argue that President Bush has superceded his authority in claiming. And it'll be equally fun to watch the right cry foul when President Hillary claims the same powers they have so vigorously fought to claim for President Bush. The problem, of course, is that entertaining as all that might be, an increasingly imperial presidency isn't good for our republic.

Neither is our overly interventionist foreign policy, or the continuing erosion of our civil liberties, be it in the name of "family values," government paternalism, the war on drugs, or the war on terror.

Activists on the left need to recognize that Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic primary is the GOP's last best hope to elect a Republican to continue pursuing President Bush's pursuit of these unfortunate policies. And judging by her political career and recent voting record, they should also realize that even if they succeed in electing Hillary Clinton to the White House, it's likely that the only real resulting change in Washington will be that come 2009, we'll merely have a Democrat pursuing the same misguided policies.

In our magazine, Caitlin Flannigan is also disenchanted, for slightly more personal reasons:

Hillary started taking Socks with her on personal appearances, and a cartoon version of him was installed on the White House Web site, so that children could take virtual tours of the building with Socks as their guide. And then, of course, there was Hillary’s crowd-pleaser, Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets. The book showcases the way Hillary wanted to be seen as a first lady: not an aesthete like Jackie, not a shopaholic like Nancy, not a country-club dowager like Bar. Hillary wanted to be seen as warm, spontaneous to the point of being a little bit silly sometimes; someone who always has a twinkle in her eye whenever children are around. The book is, perforce, cloying, super-cute, and pun-riddled, and it would stand today merely as a curio if Hillary had—for once in her life—avoided her characteristic flaw. If only she had resisted the urge to drift past the homey anecdotes and family photographs, everything would have been fine. But, Hillary being Hillary, she had to turn the book into a lecture on pet care, and the person whose shining example we should all follow was none other than Hillary herself.

In Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, we are hectored never to give away a pet, always to regard one as an “adoption instead of an acquisition,” and to be forever on guard for its physical safety (cold comfort to Buddy, who had barely sniffed his first Chappaqua crotch before the poor beast ran off and got killed by a car, as had the Clintons’ previous dog, the much-loved but equally ill-tended Zeke). Hillary tells us that the Clintons “didn’t take on the responsibility of our pets lightly,” and more than anything, the reader is left with a vivid impression of Socks’s central position in the heart of the Clinton family: When they arrived in Washington, they brought with them from Little Rock their “family traditions, favorite pictures, and personal mementos to make the White House feel more comfortable.” But it was only when Socks appeared on the scene—bringing with him his “toy mouse”—that “this house became a home.” (Hillary’s literary exploitation of Socks continued long after she discarded him. On the second-to-last page of her memoir Living History, she offers a dreamy, after-the-ball portrait of her family savoring their last days in the White House: wandering down to the Children’s Garden one last time, Chelsea and Hillary admiring the handprints of former presidents’ grandchildren, Bill tossing the ball for Buddy, while Socks … “kept his distance.”)

Hillary’s insistence that we follow her example in pet ownership, when she should really be on Cat Fancy’s Most Wanted list, makes her a tiresome bore. But exploiting the emotions of good-natured people (including “many of the retired servicemen and women who live at the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in Washington, D.C.,” whose bravery and patriotism she honored by having them send out kitty-cat “greetings” to Socks’s correspondents)—well, that’s just another example of her three-decade-long drift from the girl she once was to the woman that circumstance and ambition have made her.

I have, as of yet, no real opinion about the race, except, as stated before, that I think Giuliani is crazier than a funhouse full of drunk chimps. But what I wonder about Hillary is: do Democrats really like her? Or do they just think that other people like her?

That, after all, was the main problem with John Kerry: he was a Democrat's notion of what a Republican wanted to vote for. After all, he served in 'Nam! I know of exactly one person who was really enthused about Kerry before he won the nomination--and that person worked for the Kerry campaign. Yet somehow, my friends were actually surprised when it turned out that no one else liked John Kerry any more than they did.

I get a similar lukewarm vibe about Hillary from many of the people I know. They themselves will vote for her in the general election because she's a Democrat. But the reasons that they offer that other people will vote for her are kind of lame. Like, she's female. Or she's a Clinton. Or . . . hey, have you noticed, she's a woman? Women love that. And they're half the population!

No one ever argues that they'll vote for her because she's got sound policy ideas and a winning personality, which kind of seem like the criteria Democrats ought to be using.

What's weird is, in their quest to nominate a candidate who can win, it seems like Democrats are going to pick the one with the greatest chance of losing. After the disaster of the Bush administration, it seems hard to imagine any Republican pulling a victory out of this next election. But Hillary seems like the Democratic candidate most likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Unlike the other Democrats, she has absolutely enormous negative baggage, and it's all going to come out during the general election. The only reason it hasn't already (or so I mote) is that the other Democratic candidates are trying to avoid doing anything to tarnish the nostalgic glow that currently surrounds the last Democratic presidency. The GOP candidate will have no such restraint. Moreover, I think Democrats are underestimating just how suspicious Americans will be of a presidential roster that goes Bush . . . Clinton . . . Bush . . . Clinton.

It's not that I think she's likely to lose, exactly . . . but given how lukewarm they seem to be about her ideas, I don't understand why Democrats are willing to take the chance.

Free the family farm

Of farm subsidies, Matt Zeitlin says "Don't make it fair; make it die" and asks:

Why should “family farmers” be subsidized at all? What is a family farmer? If subsides are bad because they undercut the prices of local farmers in the developing world, doesn’t the wheat a “family farmer” grows still undercut a Ghanan farmer? What about the quotas and tariffs that unfairly advantage all American farmers?

Family farmers needn’t all die out in a world without perverse subsidies and price supports. The growing interest in local, organic and humanely grown food all benefits small, non-industrial farms. But it’s still not clear to me why it’s in the government’s job to devote billions of dollars protecting any farmers — be they family or corporate.

Ultimately, well meaning groups like Oxfam and well meaning people like Yglesias and Garance are just going to have this rhetoric of the noble family farmer — who’s never been a smaller portion of the US population — used against them to justify the continuance of our insane agricultural polices.

The utter wrongness of our farm policy is one thing that almost every urban American, from conservative through libertarian straight on via liberal into crazed enviro-anarchist, can agree upon. And they're right: farm subsidies are stupid; go mostly to large businesses that should either figure out how to make money on farming without subsidies, or deploy their capital more productively; and exacerbate poverty among the poorest of the poor, farmers in the developing world.

And yet, there's a certain callousness to the way we dismiss those farmers. My mother grew up on a small farming town in western New York state, and there was something worth preserving in that way of life. It was, to be sure, narrow and parochial, two things that city-dwellers hate. But it also found a way to include everyone in the life of the community, from poor to rich, dumb to smart, infant to dodderer. And the bonds that those people had were tighter and more dependable than those of a mobile society. My grandfather died surrounded by every single living person he had ever loved--his wife, his children, the best friend from high school who was also his brother in law. My great aunt Helen, who lived at the assisted living facility attached to the hospital where he died, was with him eight or more hours a day. It was a better way to die than anyone in a younger generation could hope for.

I would hate it, of course; I'm not cut out for small-town living. And even if I wanted to live that way, there is no way to actually preserve it. Farm subsidies, aside from all their other flaws, are hopeless at actually keeping communities like that going, because like every other form of government intervention, end up benefitting not the telegenic recipients the policies are aimed at, but the special interests who are sufficiently well-connected to divert the policy to their own ends.

We could, however, be more sensitive to why those communities continue to support subsidies. If you have ever had a glimmer of sympathy for a brownstone owner who wants to keep their neighborhood exactly as it is even though this means that the poor will have trouble finding housing, then you should be able to grasp why farmers want the government to help them preserve something they love.

Why do they hate us?

Alex Massie ponders the question. Myself, I don't care what they say or do--"they" are a bunch of troglodyte enemies of freedom whose outsized envy of a success motivates them, not to try to surpass our achievement, but only to tear down ours. I will never denounce, much less renounce, the proud franchise I was born to. Nor will I permit others to do so in my presence. And no matter what Alex may argue, I will never, ever bring myself to believe that a rank political opportunist like Hillary Clinton could possibly get us out of the mess we are in.

Strange, if true

Wikipedia claims that

There is no legal requirement for individuals to join the Social Security program. The Social Security Act does not require a person to have a Social Security Number (SSN) to live and work in the United States.[22] Any "duty" to apply for and obtain a Social Security number can be summarised in this way: you get it if you need it or request it. There is no legal compulsion to do so. However, once joined there is no general provision for individuals to opt out of or quit the program.

My reading of the citations is that you don't have to join the program . . . but you still gotta pay the tax, so it's a distinction without a difference. Do any readers have thoughts?

I'm shocked . . . shocked!

Various people are expressing various kinds of shock at what Matt calls "the latest weird conservative sex scandal". Here's what surprised me the most: I hadn't realized, until I read part of the autopsy report, that if I die in any sort of weird or violent way, the lasting official record is going to involve some guy in a white coat describing most of my body parts as "unremarkable".

Home, sweet home equity

In the comments to my previous thread on home equity and mortgages, Cactus defends the notion that, once again, electing any president who is a Democrat has special, magical effects on desireable economic variables such as the amount of equity people have in their homes. The problem with this, as with most of Cactus' other demonstrations of amazing Democratic presidential economic power, is that it gives us an Underpants Gnome theory of economic good:

1) Elect anyone who is a Democrat to the office of president

2) ???

3) Awesome economy!

In the case of housing, however, this is particularly useless, since we already know what variables drive home equity:

1) How much you can affordably borrow against your house.

2) How much inflation is eroding the value of the money you have already borrowed against your house.

3) The value of your house

We also know, to a first approximation, what has driven these changes over the last fifty years:

1) More sophisticated credit rating systems

2) Increased global capital flows

3) The shift towards house financing via long-term amortizing mortgages following World War II

4) The growing trend towards securitization of mortgages

5) Changes in federal reserve policy that caused inflation to accelerate in the mid-to-late 1960's, then decline post-1981 as the Volcker Fed finally cracked down

6) The market reaction to above, which resulted in slow secular decline in interest rates from the 1980s to today.

7) Changes in the relative tax preference for housing-secured debt in 1986, which caused homeowners to prefer mortgage debt over other forms of consumer borrowing.

8) A slight rise in homeownership, particularly in recent years; first time buyers tend to be unusually debt-heavy.

Some of these things are affected by presidential policy, but most aren't, and moreover, those that are will almost never show significant variance within the term of the president who enacted the policy. That's because home equity is a stock, not a flow; except for inflation, any significant change in the amount, or terms, of new debt will take years to show up in the home equity figures.

For example, Lyndon Johnson's privatization of Fanny Mae, and Carter/Reagan era bank reforms undoubtedly enhanced the securitization trend, but mostly decades after they left office. Likewise, the breakdown of Bretton Woods ultimately gave us the global capital flows that so boosted the mortgage market in the 2000's, but made little difference during his own time. The one presidential policy that can reasonably be said to have enhanced home equity while those presidents were in office was the great inflation of 1966-1981. But since the side effect of this laudable boost in home equity was the slow-motion implosion of our economy, I'd hardly rush to take credit for that.

A man's place . . .

This is a terrible idea. Men don't belong in the workplace; all that testosterone floating around can derange the process of normal deliberation. Plus, it can addle their brains, making them unfit for their sacred duties at hearth and home. His wife will regret this when it's time to regrout the bathroom tile.

That can do spirit

Derek Lowe has a highly exaggerated notion of my abilities:

But some of the most important chemical reactions in the world take place down there. Take the Haber-Bosch process for producing ammonia – “Right,” I’m sure some readers of today’s newspaper are saying, “you take the Haber-Bosch process, whatever it is, and get it out of here.” But by making ammonia from nitrogen in the air, it led to (among other things) the invention of man-made fertilizers. That reaction has kept billions of people from starving to death, and kept huge swaths of wilderness from being turned into farmland. (Read up on Norman Borlaug if you haven’t already for more on this).

You can Haber-Bosch yourself some ammonia simply enough – just take iron powder, mix it with some drain cleaner (potassium hydroxide) and stir that up with some alumina and finely ground sand (silica). Heat it up to several hundred degrees and blow nitrogen and hydrogen across it; ammonia gas comes whiffing out the other end.

However, his post on the new Nobel prizewinner in Chemistry is excellent and you should read it.

Music Tuesday

As mentioned in the earlier Radiohead thread, I generally need to listen to an album several times before I decide if I like it. Open thread: how do you listen to new music? How long does it take you to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down?

Lose big or lose small

Regarding my earlier point on S-Chip, Instapundit asks:

Of course, not debating would have the same effect, wouldn't it?

It's a fair point; I suppose, in the end, it's a judgement call. I think that making this a loud debate frames Republicans as people who want to deny health care to children. On the other hand, I think that if Republicans had let S-Chip go through, that would rob the Democrats of many of their poster children for a broader national system next year. I'm sympathetic to the arguments about creeping socialism, etc; but ultimately I think that this political battle is lost, so it's best to cede quickly.

On the other hand, as I've stated, I'm broadly sympathetic to the goal of providing health care and other goods to children, so perhaps your mileage will vary.

I could write a book . . .

Every day on my way to work, I mentally compose a book as I ride my bike through the streets of DC. This book is aimed at the pedestrians and cars who seem ignorant of the basic physics of bicycles--the pedestrians who act as if my bicycle and I were a slow-moving car, and the cars that act as if we were a pedestrian. The book would be aimed at communicating one simple, but apparently incredibly difficult to grasp, concept: unlike a slow-moving car or a pedestrian, I cannot suddenly stop or reverse direction.

Today I composed Chapter Three: The Reason I Want to Get into the Right Lane is That It's Dangerous Over Here On the Left (And Not That I Have Failed to Sufficiently Appreciate the Grandeur of Your Magnificent Internal Combustion Vehicle). This is the follow-up to Chapter Two: If You Run a Red Light and Hit Me (Because I Can't Stop) I Will Die Even Though I Am Wearing a Helmet. Chapter Four will be the first of our many chapters aimed at pedestrians; I have tentatively titled it "Pedestrians Who Leap Out in Front of Me and Get Hit (Because I Can't Stop) Will Probably Get Hurt Worse Than Me, the Helmeted Bicyclist".

It's a work in progress.

Radio free me

Downloaded the Radiohead album. Everyone gets a special individual link, which I assume is to do a special individual piracy trace if you upload it to a file sharing site. I would like to test this, but can't figure out how to do so without actually sharing the files, which I think would be wrong. But I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

The album itself? Due to the way I imported it, iTunes is playing the songs out of order, which is curiously charming. So far I like it enough that I'm toying with bumping Radiohead replacement albums up higher in the music priority queue. But it might start sucking towards the beginning or something.

Schipp'd

Now to piss off everyone I haven't already: I think the battle against Graeme Frost is incredibly ill-chosen, and also, as I've said, I can't really get particularly energized about the idea that some kid, somewhere, is sucking my tax dollars illegitimately. Assuming the worst case scenario is true, and his parents are irresponsible clods who could and should have gotten him health insurance: well, they didn't. That's not his fault. The decent thing to do is to take care of him anyway.

However, I am also not prepared to get all huffy and indignant because conservatives dared to question whether Graeme Frost needed S-Chip. Obviously, nut jobs harassing the Frosts, or calling employers, or performing all of the other nutty invasions of privacy that I have read about, are vile creatures who have gone far, far beyond the bounds of human decency, with less reason than is generally offered by the perpatrator of the latest road rage indignity. But a number of people seem to believe that the very act of questioning whether Graeme Frost really needed the state to pay for his health care is somehow tantamount to accusing him of mopery while simultaneously suggesting that he be chopped up into small pieces and served flambeed to a party of laughing Republicans along with their Bébé Irakien en Croute.

The reason that Democrats put him up on the radio in the first place is that they thought Graeme Frost's need was a better argument for S-Chip than any boring old policy discussion. Well, if you make Graeme Frost's needs the measure of the program's success, then you can expect the program's opponents to question Graeme Frost's needs.

Democrats put him on the radio, of course, precisely because they expected him to be some sort of trump card whose need could not successfully be challenged. And in fact, I think they succeeded. But children should not be played like trump cards.

In the end zone

Matt channels Ed Glaeser, pointing out that over the last 50 years, the ability of local groups to block upward development through zoning and other legal restrictions has massively raised the price of housing in urban cores, pushing families who might like to live more densely further and further away in search of affordable housing. This, of course, makes them pollute more as they drive to and from their distant jobs. He sensibly suggests that one way to rectify this problem is to loosen zoning restrictions. Horrified commenters declare that the solution to zoning is not to end it; we just need to do it right.

Allow me to channel another very smart economist, Milton Friedman, from his brilliant book, Free to Choose:

Continue reading "In the end zone" »

This just in

As mortgages become a more popular means of financing homes, home equity falls. Also, once mortgages are common, high inflation increases the amount of equity you have in your house, relative to the residual value of your mortgage. And don't forget to tune in at 11 for our special investigative report: government subsidies cause increases in whatever it is they are subsidizing.

Hmmmm . . .

Following this link from Andrew Sullivan, I come across USA Today's comment policy:

By posting a comment, you affirm that you are 13 years of age or older.

Thirteen? I've seen eighteen, obviously, and presumably alchohol sites want you to be 21. But what the heck is 13 the age cutoff for? Can you make a minyan on a comment thread?

Some thoughts on the Graeme Frost issue

I'm on deadline, so I haven't been following the ephemera of S-Chip as closely as I might. Apparently the Democrats paraded some kid name Graeme Frost in front of a camera in support of S-Chip. Now conservatives are claiming that the kid is actually affluent, and therefore shouldn't be getting gummint money for health insurance. My thoughts:

1) I told y'all this was going to happen. Maybe next time you'll listen, hmmm?

2) Anecdotes, no matter how photogenic, are terrible ways to make policy. It doesn't matter how crappy your public policy is; I guarantee I can find one very telegenic person who is better of under your godawful boondoggle of a system than under almost any other potential system. But argument by anecdote is what we seem to be stuck with, particularly in the realm of social policy affecting children. Isn't democracy marvelous?

3) If Think Progress's account of the case is basically accurate--the family owns its own business, has a lowerish-middle class income, but lives in a basically nice neighbourhood--this actually raises important issues about benefits that no one is asking. To wit: should we expect families to sell assets in order to qualify for benefits? On the one hand, Medicaid's ludicrous rules keep disabled people in crippling poverty. On the other hand many people, including me, don't want to pay for the health care of someone so that they can stay in their Park Avenue mansion. At some point, it is reasonable to expect people to liquidate assets in order to pay for expenses, rather than expecting society to pick up the tab. But I'm not sure what point is reasonable.

I don't think this is particularly interesting as it applies to S-Chip; frankly, I doubt there are enough low-income families with children and sizeable assets to make it even worth debating the issue. But it is a very important question regarding Medicaid, because of all the elderly people who shelter significant assets in order to get Medicaid to pay for their nursing home care.

In the case of a spouse, this seems (usually) legitimate, again with the Park Avenue mansion exception: I don't care how long you've lived there, if you're squatting on five or ten million worth of real estate, you should sell it and pay for your spouse's nursing home, rather than asking the payroll clerks and bank tellers of the world to lend a helping hand. But normally, I don't think it's reasonable to demand that anyone make themselves homeless in order to qualify their spouse for a nursing home.

But that isn't the only reason people shelter assets; often they're doing it so that they can leave something to their children. This doesn't strike me as at all reasonable. You have a right to have society pay for your nursing home care if you are destitute and will otherwise suffer and die. You do not have a right to have society pay for your nursing home care so that you can leave the house and some financial assets to the kids. Aside from its rather repulsive moral logic, it's regressive; the people who benefit are upper-middle-class kids who have already benefitted quite a lot from their fortuitous choice of parents.

We need a better, more granular system than we have for deciding who qualifies for public assistance: one that doesn't force families of modest means out of their homes, but also doesn't allow wealthy families to gain the system as they currently do.

4) That said, even if Graeme Frost is basically middle-class-ish, that wouldn't be a stunning indictment of S-Chip. No system is without error; all will let through some people who don't deserve benefits, and miss some people who do. That there has been one error, in either direction, is not necessarily an indictment of the system, but merely an indication that we live in an imperfect world. Moreover, in the case of children, I'm perfectly content to bias the system towards including too many undeserving children, rather than take the chance of missing too many deserving ones. I find S-Chip's practice of covering adults problematic, but frankly, the prospect that Graeme Frost might have gotten some undeserved healthcare ranks, on my list of things to worry about, somewhere between pandemic toe fungus, and finalizing the guest list for my Chicago Cubs World Series Victory Party.

5) Reading the comments on this, I have to ask conservatives and libertarians: is this really the hill you think we should die on? I do understand your objections to the program, but an informal survey of swing voters, in their current incarnation as my mother, indicates that this is killing you with the moderates. Save it for national health care next year, is what I'm saying. This debate is framing the issue in a way that is going to make things harder, not easier, when Hilarycare is on the table again.

Free the fruit

You know, having grown up in a family where I was herded into the fields¹ every summer to pick fruit, I am still astonished that there are actually people out there who will pay for the privilege of doing so. There's a reason they used to have big parties to celebrate the end of the harvest season: harvesting things is not fun. Eating things you've harvested is fun. But the actual harvesting part is dull, repetitive labor that is amusing only for the hordes of bugs that feast on you while you do it. I mean, a day in the country is nice . . . but it's even nicer when you're not bent into an unnatural position, desperately trying to free all the fruit from some spectacularly dull-looking specimen of plant life which is doing its passive aggressive best to defeat you.

¹Okay, my grandfather's multi-acre garden. You try explaining the difference to a ten-year old.

Markets in everything

Tyler Cowen points us to the market in fake plane trips for people who want to get a taste of the real thing, but can't afford an actual flight:

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the “virtual journeys” of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if “Captain” Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing.

But at least part of the journey is realistic:

The plane has no lighting and the lavatories are out of order. The air-conditioning is powered by a generator. Even so, about 40 passengers turn up each Saturday to queue for boarding cards.

The past is another country

A while back, on my old blog, I triggered a lot of anger by pointing out that if you applied the same standards to Victorian America as the "Arab culture is rotten to the core" folks do to the Middle East, the revered pioneer ancestors who built America suddenly turn into . . . a bunch of sick monsters whose culture was rotten to the core.

Now Bryan Caplan is poking the same hornet's nest:

Critics of multi-culturalism often mock its proponents for (a) cultural relativism and (b) disrepecting Columbus. The problem, as I've explained before, is that Columbus was a pioneer of slavery and barbarism. The only way to excuse his behavior is to say "Oh, you can't judge Columbus by our standards. In those days, people thought that slavery was OK. Everyone was doing it."

If that excuse makes sense to you, you're a cultural relativist. Change your heroes, or change your meta-ethics!

This cuts both ways, of course: you cannot, as some leftists do, simultaneously argue that pre-1960s Western culture was rotten with sexism, racism, etc., and also that you cannot judge people living in non-Western cultures by our own standards. If the equality of all men and women really is such a universal truth that it is reasonable to demand that Victorians should have divined it, then it is also reasonable to expect the tribes of Papua New Guinea have done the same.

Myself, I'm an unabashed cultural relativist. I don't think it's reasonable to hold either our ancestors, or our brethren abroad, to our cultural standards. But I think its especially unreasonable to apply those standards only to select groups of people I already have reason to dislike.

Guarding the guardians

Dan Drezner links a possible relative writing about going on an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel:

I've found myself picking over the question: how much has my opinion on Israel been moved?

It's not hard for me to acknowledge that I'm much more sympathetic to the predicament of Israel than I was before I saw the place so extensively with my own eyes. Traveling the countryside has given me a much clearer picture of its precarious state, with a mere 9 miles separating the West Bank from Tel Aviv - less than from Boston to Concord, and easy distance for rockets. You can certainly see why Israel wouldn't give up the West Bank until it has a partner it can trust. Its existence - and the lives of the people we met - are at risk.

Before the junket, I would have described myself as admiring of Israel but increasingly disturbed by its human rights violations.

Now I would say I find myself aligned with a growing group of former Israeli leftists, those who once believed a peaceful solution was imminent but after the debacle of Gaza have, with heavy hearts, lost their bearings and moved toward the center.

Is this a seismic shift? No. But I also have no way of knowing where I would stand had I paid for the trip with my own money, organized my own interviews, and gotten equal access to the Palestinian point of view.

Our guides, to their credit, showed us the separation wall at its most formidable and depressing. But what life is like on the other side of that wall - whether families are eating olives and grilled fish, what their hopes and dreams for the future are, whether they dream of a nonviolent resolution to the conflict - of this, I have no personal experience.

It's only anecdotal, but the one journalist I've known who went on an Israel junket that included both Israel and the Palestinian territories did not return with an improved opinion of Israel.

My personal feeling is that no journalist, or Congressman, should go on any junket sponsored by a group with as clear an agenda as AIPAC has. Information gathered in person, with vivid technicolor skies overhanging the ancient landscape, feels much realer than something you read in a stupid book. That means you tend to overweight it. A skilled gatekeeper can easily sway your opinions, even while putting a patina of balance over the thing with carefully chosen "negative" exhibits.

Liquid assets

I was chatting with a transportation expert over the weekend about carbon taxes and so forth. His view is that carbon taxes are, for cars, mostly window dressing. The price of oil varies by much more than any politically feasible carbon tax in America. Moreover, if global oil production has really peaked¹, then supply constraints will become a dominant contributor to the price as well. America will move to smaller, denser housing, not because the government tells them to, but because they will no longer be able to afford the heating and transportation for large, dispersed homes.

Where carbon taxes may make a difference is in preventing coal-to-liquids from becoming a viable substitute for gasoline. CTL has a terrible carbon profile, and it isn't particularly good for other bits of the environment either. This sets up an interesting political problem for the future. The public debate over carbon has focused on driving, because right now it's mostly aimed at securing voluntary consumer cooperation, and consumers don't have much control over what sort of plants their power generator uses. But if oil truly becomes as expensive as the peak oil folks think, coal will suddenly become a major battleground, as producers promise consumers cheap(er) fuel--and Senator Byrd shifts his efforts from paving West Virginia into one shining sheet of asphalt, towards gaining massive CTL research subsidies. You may see the West Virginia delegation increasingly allied with Michigan.

¹a notion of which I am somewhat skeptical, although Hugo Chavez is certainly doing his best to make sure that the-artist-formerly-known-as-Venezuela's-bitumen never makes it onto the world oil markets in any quantity

Okay, so

I don't want to hear any more cracks about how rooting for the Yanks is like rooting for the House, okay?

Focus, people

I haven't read the Obama plan yet, but I think I already disagree with Ryan Avent's take on it:

I’m a lot less excited about the billions of dollars promised to research efforts on things like carbon capture and sequestration, or “the next generation of biofuels and fuel delivery infrastructure, accelerating commercial production of plug-in hybrid vehicles, promoting larger-scale renewable energy projects and low-emission coal plants, and making the electricity grid digital.” Not that those wouldn’t be great things. It’s just that 1) if we price carbon correctly, firms will have lots of incentives to do this stuff anyway, without billions in public money. And 2) there are large opportunity costs to spending money on projects for which the payoff is unsure–namely, we can’t spend that money on things NOW that we KNOW will pay off.

Look, it’s very nice to see that Obama mentions planning and mass transit. What he doesn’t do is attach anything remotely reminiscent of a dollar sign to those paragraphs. And that’s a mistake. Next year, federal funding for mass transit and Amtrak combined will total about $3 billion. A mere 2 percent of the $150 billion Obama is talking about spending on research would double the budgets for those programs; that is, small amounts can have big effects. Everything we know about cities with public transit suggests that such systems can substantially reduce per capita carbon outputs. Combining any program to increase the price of carbon with investment in public transit would result in an immediate and tangible reduction in carbon emissions. Of this we can be absolutely sure.

The reason I disagree was outlined in the one part of the much discussed Nordhaus/Shellenberger article that I think really nailed it:

Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans, better medical treatment, and greater personal and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want, but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce their emissions if doing so slows economic growth. Given this, the challenge we face as a species is to roughly double global energy production by mid-century while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half worldwide (and about 80 percent in the United States), so that we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

. . . environmental lobbyists in Washington today are overwhelmingly focused on addressing global warming through two overlapping strategies. First, they want to establish a cap on greenhouse gases that decreases over time. Second, they want to make clean-energy sources cost-competitive by increasing the cost of dirty energy. While there is great debate about how to best implement these strategies--whether through traditional command-and-control regulatory mechanisms, market-based cap-and-trade approaches, or an outright tax on carbon emissions--there is little question that the solution is pollution regulation.

It is not. The challenge is simply too large. In 2007, human beings will consume roughly 15 terawatts of energy worldwide. That level of energy use will rise rapidly over the next 100 years due to population growth and increasing living standards, especially among the global poor. By the year 2100, humankind will need to produce and consume roughly 60 terawatts of energy if every human on earth is to reach the level of prosperity enjoyed today by the world's wealthiest one billion people. Even if economies were to become much more efficient, the total terawatts needed to bring all of humankind out of poverty would still need to roughly double by 2050 and triple by century's end.

Consider China. Today, the country is rumbling with rising prosperity, rising expectations, rising demands for freedom--all fueled by cheap, dirty coal energy. This year or next, China will surpass the United States as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, the average Chinese still consumes less than 20 percent of the energy consumed by the average American, meaning that the Chinese contribution to global warming is going to grow tremendously. After all, neither the Chinese people nor the Chinese government will accept any solution that does not allow energy consumption comparable to our own.

The only way to double global energy consumption while cutting global warming emissions in half is by developing new sources of clean energy.

Cutting driving in America will undoubtedly reduce our oil and carbon consumption. But it will do nothing to reduce consumption elsewhere. If oil production has peaked, as a growing number of experts believe, then having Americans burn less oil in their cars will do nothing but transfer that oil to be burend in less efficient engines in China and India. This is fine poverty policy, but it will do nothing to reduce global warming.

A carbon tax needs to be part of a policy to produce alternatives to cheap Chinese coal and growing demands for automobile use in the developing world, not part of a strategy to see how virtuous we can become while ignoring what is happening in the developing world. I see Obama's plan for pouring billions into R&D as a way to accomplish that. Mind you, I'm not sure I like the plan. But as a general strategy, I think finding clean and cost effective technologies should be the priority over eking out efficiency gains from the technologies we already have. After all, if we have them, so does China--and china is nonetheless overtaking us as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gasses.

The phantom menace

Kriston Capps explores the world of continuously accelerating razor development.

Update Ryan Avent, on the other hand, will not throw any more money into the rapacious maw of Big Razor . . . at least until spring, that is.

How do you solve a problem like uninsured middle-class types?

Tyler wonders what will be done with people who are required to by health insurance, but don't. The answer, I think, is "they'll get treated". The object is not to play chicken with people; we can't make a credible committment not to treat people without insurance (and thank god for that.) The object, as I see it, is to force the people who care about things like legality to get insurance rather than rolling the dice. The people who don't care about such things will continue costing us some fraction of the small amount that caring for the uninsured currently costs us now. It may only be a slight improvement, but it's still an improvement.

If at first you don't succeed . . .

With all this talk about IQ, I was tempted to take one of those web IQ tests. And of course, what comes to the fore is the very, very obvious way in which racism could affect IQ: by affecting hard you try when you get to a difficult problem.

I hate those stupid "rotate the object" questions; I'm not good at them, and they're boring. So when confronted with one, I was tempted to give up. But I thought to myself: you know you can do this, since you've done it before, and besides, I want to see what kind of number it pops out.

Consider all of the environmentally imparted values in that thought:

1) IQ tests are important and worth trying on
2) You are a smart person who can solve problems
3) You have solved this kind of problem before, and therefore can do so again.

Then think of someone who has grown up in a home, a neighborhood, or a school district where these tests aren't important and worth trying to excel at, where you perhaps internalize a belief that members of your racial group aren't good at these tests--or even shouldn't be good at these tests--and where you may not have encountered these kinds of problems before, so you don't know that you can solve them.

It's not at all hard to imagine that a black person with exactly the same capability to solve the problem as the white person sitting next to them might nonetheless fail to solve the problem. And of course, played out on a sufficiently broad scale, this will look like a heritable group difference, since almost all black kids are raised by black families--and even where they aren't, are going to be treated as black by everyone they meet, and internalize whatever messages our culture sends about blackness. There's also some evidence that people perform worse on tests when they are told that their gender or racial group doesn't do well on the test--and are black kids ever told anything else?

So yes, I think that IQ tests could easily widely overstate the intractability of IQ, particularly for intergroup distributions. I'm not sure where that leaves us, since it's hard to alter society in the ways that this analysis suggests. But at least it's a little more hopeful than "They're just born stupid."

Update Edited to correct the weird wording

Why is Africa so screwed up?

I have been asked this question before by commenters pushing hard-line racial theories of IQ. From which it's clear that they really do believe in an innate theory of intelligence, because there is, after all, an extensive literature on the subject with which none of them seems to be familiar.

Yes, Asia had a colonial regime, and Africa had a colonial regime, but that doesn't make them the same continent. Asian colonization was nowhere near as extensive as African colonization, and my understanding is that it tended to rely much more on co-opting existing power structures than building entirely new ones. That's because Asia had existing power structures to co-opt--local imperial barons that controlled large amounts of land. Moreover, much of Asia was not, in fact, colonized: the biggest Asian success stories right now (China, Japan, Korea) had repeated incursions by Western interlopers, but were never colonized in the formal sense that Africa was. It's worth noting that the bits of Asia that were colonized tend to be in worse shapes than the bits that werent.

At any rate, there's a whole, very large literature on why Africa is particularly screwed up. The awful climate under which most of it labors. The bad maritime geography: apparently one of the two coasts offers extremely little scope for building ports, the rivers don't go where you want them, and when they do happen to meander near something interesting, they are hard to navigate. The huge patchwork of ethnicities. The bad borders--in Asia, borders were drawn somewhat along ethnic power lines, whereas in Africa, they were drawn mostly to suit the convenience of whatever western country wanted to do business there after the colonian powers left, and there is an emerging literature indicating that border that cut across ethnic lines are a recipe for conflict, and thus poverty. The unique medical problems of Africa--what with us having emerged there, the local bugs have had longer to develop a taste for us than elsewhere, and there are lots of reservoirs of new disease in our near genetic cousins. And that's just scratching the surface. Africa has a lot of unique factors that we've identified causing huge problems in other places, all squished together into a toxic cocktail.

It's not that it's impossible that IQ varies by race--but we've got a lot of other variables that can account for our problem, so why look to race first, last, and only?

Update Yup, those were typos; one Asia changed to Africa, and one India to Korea. Next time, coffee before blogging, not the other way around . . .

Cut of death

Radley Balko has a devastating story in today's Wall Street Journal about a Mississippi medical examiner who appears to think that he is on CSI. The reality is more like the Keystone Kops:

In January, Mississippi's Supreme Court took an unusual step. In the murder trial of 13-year-old Tyler Edmonds, the court tossed out the testimony of the medical examiner who had conducted the autopsy of the body.

The reason? The medical examiner in the case, Dr. Steven Hayne, had testified under oath that he could tell from the bullet wounds in the body that Edmonds and his sister simultaneously held the gun to fire the fatal shot. Of course, as the court concluded, it is impossible to make such a determination from examining bullet wounds.

Former Columbus, Miss., Police Chief J.D. Sanders has been trying for years to draw attention to Dr. Hayne. "There's no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne," he says. "There may even be some on death row."

In addition to state Supreme Court justices and police officers, defense lawyers, crime lab experts and state medical examiners have all made public their concerns with his practice, and with the testimony he has contributed to hundreds of cases over a 20-year career.

Although Dr. Hayne refused to speak with me, the concerns about him start with his own words. According to his comments on the stand, he performs anywhere from 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies a year. The National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) says a medical examiner should perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. After 325, the organization refuses to certify an examiner's practice.

"You can't do it," says Vincent DiMaio, author of Forensic Pathology, widely considered the profession's guiding textbook. "After 250 autopsies, you start making small mistakes. At 300, you're going to get mental and physical strains on your body. Over 350, and you're talking about major fatigue and major mistakes."

Weekend games

I'll be off blog for much of the day, so here's a random exercise to occupy you: go look at this painting, and then suggest the perfect song to accompany it. I'll nominate Mansard Roof, by Vampire Weekend, which is what I was actually listening to when I went looking for it the other day. There's something about an afro-caribbean-ish beat sung by a bunch of white boys that seems to go especially well with that painting.

If anyone else but me finds this intriguing, I'll make it a standing feature.

Group hug

Are the best journalists kind of, well, sociopaths? Chris Hayes points to this brilliant piece by Ron Rosenbaum:

I find it hard to be as cutting, or even as critical, as I really feel about people who allow me to enter their zone of privacy. I blame my parents for teaching me manners—the best investigative journalists don't have the best manners. The best investigative reporters might be called "sociopaths for truth." I think you know the type I'm talking about. And the very best of these are often good at faking empathy and then coldly eviscerating the empathized-with one.

Some writers are built this way, happy to sacrifice the person for the story. But not enough anymore! Janet Malcolm famously wrote (in the opening of The Journalist and the Murderer) about the way writers gain the trust of their subjects and end up “betraying them without remorse.” It may have been true when she published the book, in 1990, but is it now? It sounds cold, but not enough reporters and writers are willing to betray or even alienate their subjects. If they do, they risk being denied access to other subjects. They’re no longer part of the club.

Writing about policy and business from 30,000 feet, I'm largely protected from this, but certainly not immune. I find it hard to say even the obvious things about people I've interviewed who are clearly odious media whores, self-destructive louts, or merely deeply silly. And the closer you get to people, the harder it gets . . . which is why most journalists lean farther left the closer they get to on the ground reporting. This does not make them right, mind you; there is a tendency to ignore any costs to their policy prescriptions that are not personified right in front of them, which often means advocating policies that would make society in aggregate worse off. But it's certainly understandable.

I'd say another emerging problem in journalism is that journalists and the people they cover are becoming more and more concentrated in a few cities. And that means that they're all each other's friends. Which means that it's harder to say mean things about each other.

Luckily for me, all the journalists I know were quite comfortable saying nasty things about me before I met them in person--and vice versa. But as a general phenomenon, I think it's important.

The nattering nabobs of negativity

You know, as Thoreau points out, the chattering classes never report on all the good news on civil rights. Checked out the Third Amendment recently? Looking pretty good, isn't it? In fact, two marines came by demanding a room and a light supper last week, and I told them "The hell I will; we're not officially at war." They grumbled, but they left. Take that, Al Qaeda.

What is racism?

In the comments to the previous thread, Freddie said something that got me thinking. Part of the problem with talking about race and gender in America is the definition of racism and sexism. Most of us use a working definition of racism and sexism that is something like "Holding (bad) false beliefs about racial minorities and women". But if that is our definition, everyone is going to fail a racism/sexism self-check: no one believes that their own beliefs are false. I'm sure that Tom Metzger's disciples mostly believe that their views about blacks are absolutely true, and therefore not racist.

This is why many feminists prefer to focus on institutional outcomes rather than how you, a successful member of the patriarchy, feel about things. The problem is, institutional outcomes have many possible determinants; even if there were no institutional discrimination at all, pregnancy would make outcomes different, in ways that are harder to make justice claims for remedy than cases of straight bigotry. But the other extreme doesn't work either.

I am my own lodestar

This is why I love Mark Kleiman:

If, like me, you're heartily tired both of

* People who dogmatically deny either that some sort of generalized cognitive ability is measurable, and that IQ testing is a decent though imperfect proxy for that measurement, or that different human population groups with different genetic heritages might have different distributions of cognitive ability

and

* People who use the fact of intergroup differences in average cognitive capacity and the possibility that they are partly genetically mediated to justify indifference to the facts about how much worse off, on average, the descendants of slaves in this country are than the rest of us

I've had my fair share of battles with both the "neck-down Darwinists" and the black-people-are-just-naturally-stupid crowd, and I've never felt noticeably improved by either side. It takes some chutzpah to argue that intelligence is not heritable, and variant--frankly, I don't know why these people are arguing with me when they could be teaching their dog nuclear physics. But this is no stupider than using IQ to explain all differences in racial and gender outcomes, when we have good evidence that plain old discrimination is alive and well in the labor market. Resumes with identifiably black names on them are much less likely to be picked out of the pile than identical resumes with white names, and IIRC, there's also evidence that white job seekers are more likely to be offered a job after an interview than black applicants, even when they've been coached to give the same answers.

Similarly, while I am broadly comfortable with the notion that male IQ distributions may have fatter tails than female distributions, and that this may account for the difference in representations at the top of the academy, it's hard to avoid the evidence that women are judged by a different standard than men. For example, the "natural" difference in the representation of women and men in the ranks of professional orchestra turned out to be mostly due to the "natural" bias of the judges; when the auditions were "blind" (done behind a screen), suddenly we found out there had been a lot of talented women hidden under those skirts. Similarly, as Neil the Ethical Werewolf points out in the comments to Ezra's post on unionization,

A world without the patriarchy would be one in which these experimental results did not obtain:

Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated mathematics papers on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was "John T. McKay" than when the author was "Joan T. McKay." There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave.

Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, "It's hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way."

A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time.

I've wondered about this occasionally reading the posts accusing my more . . . er, vehement critics . . . of sexism in their treatment of me. This always elicits hysterical denials, proclamations that of course they are just objectively responding to my awfulness.

But of course, the people in those studies, those auditions, didn't think that they were being sexist. Oh, perhaps some of them really did think "Women aren't good [violinists/scientists/etc], so I'm not going to even bother to listen--next!" But most of them undoubtedly thought that they were doing their level best to evaluate the performance--it's just that they'd already started out by deciding that the person who's work they were judging, being a woman and all, probably wasn't all that bright. And if challenged on it, they would have undoubtedly indignantly responded that they couldn't be sexist--after all, they're [scientists/musicians/whatever]. Besides, they love women scientists--they talk about Marie Curie all the time. It's just that this woman--okay, and this one over here, and this one too, and maybe that group there--all happen to be producing substandard work.

I don't actually have an opinion on whether sexism helps motivate my more obsessional critics; it's not an area of women's studies in which I'm particularly well versed, and I'm probably the person least qualified to judge whether my gender is helping me, as my critics aver, or hurting me, as my supporters claim. Although I confess, I can't help but wonder when people turn up in my comment section to accuse me of ignorance when their very comments make it obvious that they are markedly less well-versed in the subject than I am, and moreover, seem to have gathered their fierce confidence about my ignorance from some other commenter, always male, who also clearly knows less about the subject at hand than I do. At such times, I do tend to wonder whether they would have taken quite such a belligerently condescending tone with a man.

But that's just passing bemusement, the most vivid recent example of a broader thought, which is that self-examination is not always the best way to determine whether you are discriminating. Most of modern discrimination does not consist of calling someone "nigger" on the street; it consists of deciding, in the blink of an eye, that you'd really rather hire someone else. You don't need to think "someone else white"; statistically, that's the result--even when the candidates or their resumes have been carefully selected to be identical. Statistically, you are less likely to get hired as a black man with a clean record than as a white ex-con.

I think a lot of us, in considering whether America, especially our little part of it, is racist or sexist, rely mostly on this kind of self-check. "Do I want to use the N-word? Nope! No racism here!" And yet, statistically, we all seem to be discriminating. And statistically, the perpetrator is as likely to be me or you as some unpleasant stranger. I don't think I've ever discriminated--but I don't know. I can't remember every resume I've ever looked at, and even if I did, I doubt I could piece together why I rejected most of them. But I doubt its much consolation to the black people I didn't hire that I had no urge whatsoever to lob the n-word in their direction.

I don't think affirmative action works, for a variety of reasons, but with data like this presenting a sketchy but coherent emerging picture of systematic discrimination, it's not hard to understand the moral logic that motivates the program's supporters. And while I found the hysterical reaction to Larry Summers more than a little embarassing, it's also not hard to understand why their supporters get a mite testy when their opponents say that underrepresentation of blacks and women in high-level jobs just proves that they aren't good enough. Genetics could be a factor in distributional differences (and I think probably is, within groups)--but in a society that seems to have measurable levels of latent discrimination, I don't think there's any way to tell how much of a factor it is in inter-group outcomes.

Ummmm . . .

Dana Goldstein asks:

And speaking of money, how come auto workers are unionized, but house cleaners and hair dressers aren't? How come research continues to show that even when we control for maternity leave, time off of work, and different levels of education, women still make only 70 cents on the male dollar?

Ezra points out:

I quite agree with Dana. The patriarchy lives! That said, the reason auto workers are unionized while hair dressers aren't has much more to do with the legal and cultural moment when the unions launched their organizing drives against the auto manufacturers, and the differences in organizational structure between hair salon employees (diffuse, lots of small businesses) and manufacturing employees (concentrated, large amounts of machinery which create value outside of the worker). Part of the reason unions are having such trouble organizing is that various laws have made organizing tougher, and beyond that, it's simply harder to unionize service sector employees, and when you do, there are fewer gains to distribute, as each individual worker's labor creates comparatively little value.

He fails to point out that that "70 cents" figure is decades out of date; it's now 80 cents, and rising, and nearly disappears when you control for work experience and hours. He also doesn't point out that where women did work in factories, they were also unionized: You may have heard of the International Ladies Garment Worker's Union, which used to be one of the largest unions in the United States. It's also rather sexist to assume that their hairdressers are women; most of the male blue collar workers I've ever met had their hair cut by male barbers.

Then Ezra, inexplicably, says this:

So salon workers aren't unionized for much the reason that truckers aren't unionized, and for much the reason that only 7 percent of the private sector workforce is unionized. Things just aren't going that well for the unions. Which is a shame. Particularly for salon workers, who, as The Nation usefully explains, really need some regulatory help.

There are about 2.8 million truckers in America. Roughly 10% of them are self-employed, mostly as owner-operators. There is also a trucking union, known as the Teamsters, that covers 1.4 million people, though not all of them are truck drivers. Truck driving is a comparitively well unionized industry, though perhaps not compared to the days when Jimmy Hoffa could snap his fingers and extort bribes from practically any company in the country.

Bugs are people too

As longtime readers know, I was pretty outraged over Michael Vick's cruel ideas about the sporting life. Now The Cranky Professor finds a new outrage: cricket fighting. Unlike him, I'm actually kind of icked out by this. Even bugs shouldn't get poked with sticks for sport--shades of the proverbial boys pulling wings off flies. Yes, I know, I'm an oversensitive pansy. If I wanted to be part of nature red in tooth and claw, I'd be running around naked on the veldt.

Ask a shallow question . . .

For those who really mean it when they talk about the marriage market, I give you: Q&A.

Mr Brian Beutler explains it all

. . . about Ann Coulter. I'm linking him just for this line:

"It probably won't make me a hero to feminists if I point out what a despicable gorgon Ann Coulter is, but here goes: Ann Coulter is a despicable gorgon! A vile she-Grendel!"

All right for me, but not for thee

So Ann Coulter apparently said we'd be better off if women couldn't vote, because women vote for social democratic policies. The left half of the blogosphere seems to think she's getting a pass because she's conservative, as rounded up by Ryan Avent:

Garance spots the loathsome Ann Coulter dreaming of a world where women can’t vote, and Ezra laments the hack gap–if we had more hackish Democratic firebreathers, this kind of thing would never, ever get a pass. Good point, Ez. Imagine, if you will, that a prominent liberal commentator, the kind who might appear at major Democratic speaking events with Democratic presidential candidates, said he longed for a day when whites or southerners couldn’t vote. You couldn’t get the volume dial low enough to tune out the Limbaughs and O’Reillys.

So I’ll do my part. This is despicable. Outrageous. We shouldn’t tolerate another moment of the conservative illiberality that loves torture, war, and xenophobia, and delights in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Denounce her statement, GOP candidates, or fear the voters. You know, more than you already should.

They seem to be missing the rather obvious point: Coulter isn't getting away with this because she's a Republican; she's getting away with it because she's a woman. If a conservative male had called for taking away the vote from women, Republicans wouldn't be able to get to the microphone fast enough to denounce him. They know where their political interests lie. Just like only white male southerners are allowed to complain about crackers (well, and Al Sharpton), and Bill Cosby has a lot more leeway to criticize black cultural norms than I do, Ann Coulter gets to fantasize about taking the vote away from women because she is a member of the class that would be disadvantaged.

Garance thinks that "The idea that today’s G.O.P. leaders are craven and idiotic enough to associate themselves with someone who could say such a thing will catapult women to the polls." I think this is extremely wishful thinking. If a man had said this, it might. But when a woman says it, you don't think "tool of the patriarchy"; you just think she's kind of crazy. And the political parties are crawling with all sorts of moonbats; have you read some of the stuff that comes out of the environmental movement? I mean, some of it is even stuff I agree with, but informal survey indicates that when I voice this agreement, most Americans think I'm . . . kind of crazy.

Just to be clear, I hate Ann Coulter as much as the next person, and don't criticize her more only because I can't bear to read anything about or by her. But I don't buy the notion that her looniness is protected by the vast right-wing conspiracy--and what she said isn't exactly a far cry from the "expel Jesusland" jokes I seem to recall hearing from quite a few liberal journalists after the 2004 election.

Update: what about her other crazy statements, asks a commenter? Good question. In the end, I think she gets a general pass because she's a woman; you certainly don't hear any male conservatives publicly referring to politicians as "faggots". Or maybe there's a generalized "Ann Coulter exception" that has nothing to do with her second X chromosome. But whatever it is, I don't think it applies to white male commentators.

The rights of the people: now available, for the first time, to the people!

Jonathan Turley writes a nice op-ed on the second amendment:

Principle is a terrible thing, because it demands not what is convenient but what is right. It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

More important, the mere reference to a purpose of the Second Amendment does not alter the fact that an individual right is created. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is stated in the same way as the right to free speech or free press. The statement of a purpose was intended to reaffirm the power of the states and the people against the central government. At the time, many feared the federal government and its national army. Gun ownership was viewed as a deterrent against abuse by the government, which would be less likely to mess with a well-armed populace.

Considering the Framers and their own traditions of hunting and self-defense, it is clear that they would have viewed such ownership as an individual right — consistent with the plain meaning of the amendment.

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that ... here's the really hard part ... the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

I've always had a hard time believing that people who thought the right of "the people" was a collective right could be arguing in good faith--at least, not if they'd read the rest of the constitution. After all, no one would take seriously an argument that the right of "the people" in the fourth amendment "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" was a collective right that could only be enjoyed if you joined the National Guard.

Turley is not the only liberal legal scholar who has turned on this interpretation, and it seems to bode a welcome retreat from the notion that the constitution means--whatever we think it ought to have meant. Having realized that a plastic constitution could also, horrors, be manipulated by people they disagreed with, the "living constitution" proponents seem to be retreating to the notion that constitutional interpretations ought to have a least a tenuous relationship to the underlying text. I'm not a constitution-worshipper, but I think society functions better if you change the rules by changing them, not by declaring that they mean whatever those in power say they do. Yes, I'm aware that this happens to some degree in every society, but the less of it the better, thank you very much. We needn't make the perfect the enemy of the reasonable.

More Wagner fun

Tyler Cowen offers this anecdote:

A story is told that Richard Wagner was walking on a street in Berlin one day and came across an organ-grinder who was grinding out the overture to Tannhäuser. Wagner stopped and said, "As a matter of fact, you are playing it too fast."

The organ-grinder at once recognized Wagner, tipped his hat, and said, "Oh thank you, Herr Wagner! Thank you, Herr Wagner!"

The next day Wagner returned to the same spot and found the organ-grinder grinding out the overture at the correct tempo. Behind him was a big sign: "PUPIL OF RICHARD WAGNER."

Which reminds me of a story a friend used to tell. I do not vouch for its truth, but it is amusing.

Allegedly, in the Italian city of Cremona, at one poin the Guarneri, Stradivarius, and Amati instrument workshops were all on the same street. One day the other instrument makers awoke to find that Amati had put out a sign claiming to make "the finest instruments in all of Italy!"

Not to be outdone, the Guarneri workers spent all day laboring on a lavish gilded sign, which they hung before the next daybreak, proclaiming that theirs were "The best instruments in the entire world!"

Whereupon Stradivarius retired to his workshop for half an hour and emerged with a simple sign saying "Best violins on the block."

Curveball

This Volokh Conspiracy thread on a student suing over a curved "C" set me wondering: why are curves so common, anyway? Both my schools graded on a curve, which arguably served as a check against grade inflation--but are the incentives for grade inflation really so great that it couldn't be held back by a general agreement among the faculty that a "C" is average?

Moreover, the curve isn't merely for overall performance; it's done on each exam. In some classes, a 55% on an exam can be an A. But why do faculty, particularly at the undergraduate level where the task is mastery of a basic body of knowlege, set exams where the majority of the students can't answer a majority of the questions? Or, conversely, as I've also seen happen, where the difference between an A and a C is a few points, because everyone scored in the high 90's? Is figuring out what your students are likely to know really so hard for an experienced teacher?

Epigram of the month

I was preparing to name "Gogol Bordello is hell's Bar Mitzvah band" the epigram of the week. But that was before Scott Adams knocked it out of the running with this gem:

At the risk of oversimplifying, our current energy policy in The United States involves shooting bearded people.

Je mehr die Zeiten sich ändern . . .

Upon Alex Massie's advice, I downloaded this ridiculously cheap Ring Cycle from Amazon. It's a live recording from Bayreuth, which naturally recalled to mind Mark Twain's discursionon his voyage to see the Radiohead of his day. It's nice to reread it and realize that some things never change . . . like opera snobbery:

I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal," but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:

"Singing! That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the
interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money back on those two operas.

Update And who could forget Twain's other, even more famous review of Wagner, from A Tramp Abroad:

Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree--otherwise an opera--the one called "Lohengrin." The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the hour hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible. To have to endure it in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder. I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers, of the two sexes, and this compelled repression; yet at times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly keep the tears back. At those times, as the howlings and wailings and shrieking of the singers, and the ragings and roarings and explosions of the vast orchestra rose higher and higher, and wilder and wilder, and fiercer and fiercer, I could have cried if I had been alone. Those strangers would not have been surprised to see a man do such a thing who was being gradually skinned, but they would have marveled at it here, and made remarks about it no doubt, whereas there was nothing in the present case which was an advantage over being skinned. There was a wait of half an hour at the end of the first act, and I could not trust myself to do it, for I felt that I should desert to stay out. There was another wait of half an hour toward nine o'clock, but I had gone through so much by that time that I had no spirit left, and so had no desire but to be let alone.

I do not wish to suggest that the rest of the people there were like me, for, indeed, they were not. Whether it was that they naturally liked that noise, or whether it was that they had learned to like it by getting used to it, I did not at the time know; but they did like--this was plain enough. While it was going on they sat and looked as rapt and grateful as cats do when one strokes their backs; and whenever the curtain fell they rose to their feet, in one solid mighty multitude, and the air was snowed thick with waving handkerchiefs, and hurricanes of applause swept the place. This was not comprehensible to me. Of course, there were many people there who were not under compulsion to stay; yet the tiers were as full at the close as they had been at the beginning. This showed that the people liked it.

It was a curious sort of a play. In the manner of costumes and scenery it was fine and showy enough; but there was not much action. That is to say, there was not much really done, it was only talked about; and always violently. It was what one might call a narrative play. Everybody had a narrative and a grievance, and none were reasonable about it, but all in an offensive and ungovernable state. There was little of that sort of customary thing where the tenor and the soprano stand down by the footlights, warbling, with blended voices, and keep holding out their arms toward each other and drawing them back and spreading both hands over first one breast and then the other with a shake and a pressure--no, it was every rioter for himself and no blending. Each sang his indictive narrative in turn, accompanied by the whole orchestra of sixty instruments, and when this had continued for some time, and one was hoping they might come to an understanding and modify the noise, a great chorus composed entirely of maniacs would suddenly break forth, and then during two minutes, and sometimes three, I lived over again all that I suffered the time the orphan asylum burned down.

Go, Goolsbee

One of my professors at Chicago, who I now know (I didn't at the time) is a Republican, advised us to vote the economic advisor, not the president. In 2000, that vote would have been for the brilliant Larry Summers (Gore) rather than the lackluster Larry Lindsay (Bush). This time around, I am tempted to follow his advice and vote for one of his colleagues, Austan Goolsbee. One of my favorite professors in business school, Goolsbee is now the economic adviser to Barack Obama. He is brilliant, pragmatic, and so compelling that even George Will likes the guy enough to write an entire column about him. My only fear is that he is too interesting to make a good political appointee.

Defending Vegetarian honor

Matt Zeitlin writes:

I read Christopher Hitchens’ heartbreaking piece about a 23 year old soldier who was inspired to enlist by reading Hitchens and was killed in action in Iraq. The soldier, Mark Daily, was a UCLA graduate, registered Democrat, an agnostic, had early doubts about the war and even was once a vegetarian.

We're* not pacifists, you know. Indeed, some of us are quite feisty. I could have joined the military with a clean conscience in 2002--except for the part where I'm a 4F asthmatic with lousy eyesight who was medically unfit for the State Department. But that had nothing to do with my tofu-loving ways.

* Technically, I'm not a vegetarian: I eat humanely raised and killed meat. However, given the difficulty of locating such meat, and the expense of buying it, this is generally a distinction without a difference. Moreover, I was a vegetarian at the time of the Iraq War's inception.

If you build it they will come

Winterspeak asks:

The primary complaint seems to be that rents in Dubai are too high -- which is not unusual. What is unusual is the top demand -- to force property owners to prove occupancy within 12 months of ownership/property completion. Essentially, this argues that owners are keeping their properties empty to drive rents higher. This may be possible if Dubai property ownership was a monopoly, where the owner could restrict supply to increase price (and therefore overall profit) but I think it is quite impossible these days to have the words "Dubai" and "restrict supply" in the same sentence -- the entire city is one enormous construction site.

Does anyone know why rents in Dubai are going up so fast during a period of massive residential construction?

At a guess, the answer is that doubling oil prices have pushed up many incomes in the businesses that cater to the oil industry, which in Dubai is nearly all of them, so that even skyrocketing supply is not keeping up with demand. I'd also expect that the flow of oil money has encouraged people in other parts of the Middle East to seek apartments in Dubai (as well as New York and London and Paris, which is one of the reasons real estate markets are so robust in those cities). This may be why, earlier in his post, he cites a renter's group demanding that landlords prove their apartments are occupied--if I were a middle income renter priced out of the market, I'd be kind of irked at absentee tenants maintaining pieds-a-terre.

All this will undoubtedly iron itself out eventually, one assumes, since as Winterspeak points ou Dubai is basically one massive construction site. But the temporary dislocations can still be painful when you've been dislocated from your house.

Deep in the blood

One of the big challenges to the perfectly rational value maximizer beloved of economic models is the existence of altruistic punishers--people who will, in experiments, spend their own money to punish people htey perceive as having acted unfairly. These people do so even though there is no particular likelihood of seeing those people again, suggesting that this is some sort of genetically programmed response, found in a significant fraction of the population, that helps quell opportunistic behaviour. Now there's some evidence for the genetic explanation: apparently, identical twins tend to play the same strategy in ultimatum games.

Beauty is only culture-deep

Andrew notices that the winner of Miss Arab World is veiled. What strikes me is that the runners-up, and possibly the winner under all those layers, are at least twenty pounds heavier than the average American beauty contestant. There's real, live, actual body fat under those dresses--and the judges, presumably male, still thought these women were attractive! What's more, the girls are revelling in it, wearing mermaid-style dresses that emphasize their lush curves. Looking at more photographs from the pageant, there seems to be a decent inverse correlation between how westernized a country is, and how thin its representative is . . . although even the thinnest girls would be on the heavy side for Miss America.

It's kind of impossible to overstate how grossly unrealistic American beauty pageant winners have become. The photographs from Miss Teen USA in the 1930's show very pretty girls with normal bodies . . . every one of whom would be on a Spartan diet and excercise regime if she wanted to compete today. Compare them to the Miss America swimsuit competition today, with its starved bodies topped by huge breast implants.

It's for the children!

I've been fairly mystified by the Bush administration's decision to push so hard against the SCHIP bill wending its way through Congress. To be sure, it's not a good bill. The main idea seems to be that we should expand a program aimed at poor children to cover more adults and middle class kids--and pay for it with a highly regressive tobacco tax. It's especially awful from a party trying to reclaim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, since one of the prime effects of tobacco taxes is to reduce smoking, which means that this program's funding stream is self-defeating, and will undoubtedly require more money from general revenues. But is this the hill the Bush administration really wants to die on? Regardless of the underlying merits of the case, it is squandering what little political capital it had left, and positioning Republicans as the party that hates poor kids.

Now Greg Mankiw posts a defense of the veto from inside the White House--and I still don't get it. The administration seems to feel that this is the camel's nose under the tent for some sort of universal government run program, a fear to which I am sympathetic. If poor kids lose their coverage, won't this give the pro-single-payer forces a lot of photogenically unhealthy kids to campaign with next year? That seems like a bigger danger than having New York State cover some portion of health expenses for families up to 400% of the poverty line--particularly since the problems in the financial markets may well damage New York State's revenue stream, and thus its appetite for expensive experiments.

David Irving is icky

Despite a lengthy stay in Britain, I still occasionally confuse David Irving with David Icke. And to be sure, I'm not certain which one's crazier. But I do know who's ickier, and it's not Icke.

The mind of an imposter

Every time I read one of these things, I wonder at what motivates someone to make up an entire career, a whole set of credentials. Part of it is almost admiring, since I'd never have the chutzpah. But more of it is just curious. Why do it? Is it the middle-class equivalent of a fourteen year old kid stealing a minibike--unable to conceive of getting the credentials through legitimate means, they simply help themselves to the unearned when no one's looking? Or is it something more sinister, some positive enjoyment of the fraud?

Our cousins across the pond

Scottish journalist Alex Massie, currently marooned in Washington DC, meditates on the differences between American and British journalistic culture:

This post reminded me of a terrific piece Sarah Lyall (one of the NYT's under-appreciated stars) wrote for Slate a couple of years ago. She made the mistake of attending the British Press Awards dinner. The Pulitzers these are not. Most papers crow about their own successes while failing to even report the existence of winners from other titles. Happily, however, there are enough award ceremonies for almost everyone to claim the title "Newspaper of the Year". In their own way, the hacks treat these awards with the proper level of contempt and, since no-one spends all year dreaming of ways to win them we are at least spared the epic, 17-part thumb-sucking series on "Life" or "Death" or "Being a Deaf Quadraplegic" the American papers publish in a bid to win Pulitzers...

Mental note: scratch pitch to the London Times on the secret lives of carpoolers.

More cops, less crime

In 2005, New York City, with a population of approximately 8 million, had 539 murders. Washington, DC, with a population of 600,000, had 195.

There are a lot of explanations one could offer for this, but one of the best ones is the prevalence in New York of beat cops. DC actually has more cops per citizen--one for every 153 citizens, versus one for every 210 in New York. But after almost a year in DC, I've still never seen a cop walking on the street. I see them frequently-ish in their patrol cars, but almost never walking around among the population.

To be fair, DC is less dense, so it's harder to patrol than New York--but New York had patrolmen long before it had skyscrapers. And increasing the number of police on the street is among the most effective ways to reduce crime--unsurprising, since even people with very poor impulse control are able to keep from committing crimes when there's a policeman standing right there.

The good news is, DC may be changing its policy. In the wake of a particularly bloody weekend, DCist reports that the city is putting more cops on the beat. The local blog spotted a beat cop a mere three blocks from my house -- on a weekday.

A magazine for the ages

Thanks muchly to Stuart Buck for the pointer to this gem.

From Dr. Boli's alphabet of occupations:

J for the Journalist, chasing a story,
Following up every hint, lead, and clue:
Not for the fame—no, and not for the glory,
But only because it’s the right thing to do.
No, she won’t quit working until the sun rises:
She’s making our planet a much better place.
Of course, if she happens to win a few prizes,
She’ll modestly smile and accept with good grace.

The genius behind it deserves some kind of award, but I fear greatly for his sanity.

Best. Photograph. Ever.

No, I can't explain it. just click.

In theory, practice is the same as theory. In practice, it differs.

Ryan Avent speculates that the reason that Americans are opposed to a carbon tax, despite their avowal of support for action on global warming, is that they don't understand how the tax works very well.

I'd say they understand it all too well: a tax will make it more expensive for them to drive, forcing them to do less of it. If they didn't like driving right now, they wouldn't be doing so much of it.

This is true of a lot of policy plans for which advocates claim a groundswell of mass support: people support them in abstract, but in actual particulars, they are against them. People support universal healthcare--until the majority who are perfectly satisfied with their health care right now hear the details of the plans, and the taxes required to pay for the plans. People like wars, but not the part where we spend a lot of money and soldiers die. People think we should do something about the environment--but only as long as it doesn't involve driving less, or buying smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles and homes, or giving up the long-distance plane flight to Disneyworld, or . . . well, when you come right down to it, what Americans have so far proven willing to do is buy biodegradeable cleaning products once a year, and waste a lot of carbon dioxide talking about how the government should do something.

Bureacracy hath its privileges

Apparently, the SEC has its own, personal Dunkin' Donuts. That is, it's located inside the SEC building, so unless you get wanded, and presumably, inveigle someone to tell security you belong there, you cannot get in.

I'm mad enough that the government has put metal detectors between me and the airplane. But when government security is standing between me and my french crullers, I think they've gone too damn far.

Super homo economicus

Understanding economics, says Scott Adams, is like having a mild superpower. I'm pretty fond of economics. But I'm not sure I wouldn't rather be able to fly or shoot flames out of my hands.

Radiohead goes free

The economics bloggers are, understandably, excited about Radiohead's decision to literally charge what the market will bear, allowing its new album to be downloaded for any sum you like, as low as a (British) penny. Tipping is, as Greg Mankiw points out, one of the most mysterious phenomena economists study. No one understands why the social norm is so strongly self-enforcing that Americans give tips to almost anyone who provides a personal service, even though most of those transactions are with people you'll never see again. Free Exchange calls it "a bold and potentially costly move for a band whose previous six LPs have sold millions of copies", but Tyler Cowen thinks that financially, it may be a smart move:

1. Radiohead is an indie cult band with extreme loyalties from its partisans and the possibility of attracting more such partisans by seeming "cool."

2. Radiohead peaks high on the charts (#3 for their last release, if I recall...) but I believe they sell the product pretty quickly and don't have a long run at the top. Again, they'd like to widen their fan base.

3. Radiohead's gambit has reaped enormous publicity, but this won't be the case next time.

4. Many donors will give to a highly visible "cause of the month" (remember the outpouring of support for the tsunami victims?) but they won't necessarily give on a regular basis.

5. Radiohead probably has an especially high ratio of touring to CD and iTunes income; see #1. This scheme is a natural for them but not for Kelly Clarkson.

What we will see is lots of lesser bands (and authors) giving their work away for free, but that trend has been underway for some time.

Obviously, I had to try it. It turns out that the download isn't quite free: there's a $1.00 charge for paying by credit card, and if, like many Americans, you forget to double whatever pittance you decide to tip them, you could end up paying quite a respectable sum.

This brings up one of the more interesting points. While the download is free, the physical discs with all the notes and bonus material are 40 quid . . . or about $80. This is quite a lot to pay for an album, even if you really, really like the band. So in effect, Radiohead may have created a really effective price discrimination system: the free download might not only rope in lukewarm fans like me who would have put off the purchase, possibly to forever, but also create goodwill that encourages more of their fans to buy the super-expensive (in America) discs.

Another way it might work is that the very popularity of the free (or low cost) download might force dedicated fans to spend a lot in order to signal their committment to the band. Music has a substantial status component to its consumption. If everyone and their lame younger brother has downloaded the new album for a pittance, you might have to order the discs just to set yourself apart from the hoi polloi.

There's another economic aspect that a reader pointed out: the exchange rate. Both downloads and discs are currently priced in pounds, and the pound/dollar exchange rate is both bad, and probably going to get worse. With Bernanke cutting rates, and Mervyn King of the Bank of England holding them steady, the pre-orders will likely get more costly by the day. This doesn't benefit Radiohead (rather the reverse), but it means that smart fans will lock in now.

I think I'm in love

Just in case you're one of the three people who haven't already seen it:

No problem here

Is Social Security really just all fine, its alleged demise a crazy Republican talking point? Matt's accusation echoes a number of the ones that I've seen on liberal blogs:

The Post even includes bonus inaccuracy:

Because Social Security increases are pegged to wages, rather than inflation, economic growth alone won't solve the problem. Fiscal responsibility first is fine; fiscal responsibility only is an irresponsible dodge, as Ms. Clinton well knows.

This is just wrong. Social Security benefit increases are, indeed, partially tied to wage rates but it's still true that the faster the economy grows the more affordable promised benefits become. Indeed, that's the basic premise of pay-as-you-go financing of social insurance schemes. The relatively poor present borrows from the relatively rich future. All the Post would need to do is to look back at past SSA Trustees' Reports and they would see that when the economy grows faster, the outlook for Social Security's finances gets bigger. They would also see that if the SSA updated its projections of likely future productivity growth to reflect the post-1995 return to pre-1973 levels of high productivity growth, that the alleged financial problems would substantially diminish.

It may (or may not) turn out that, in fact, the economy does not grow fast enough to close the financing gap. But this isn't a logical fact about the nature of the program, it's a contingent hypothesis that the Post seems to be subscribing to even though its editorial writers don't appear to understand what the hypothesis is or how Social Security works.

But I don't think this is right. Start with the unfortunately common meme that the Social Security administration's claims have historically varied. Yes, they have, but not lately. The SSI trust fund figures did grow for a few years in the late 1990s, due to a combination of changes in assumptions about labor force participation, productivity, birthrates, and average wages. But since 2002, the dates for the trust fund exhaustion have fluctuated around a rough mean of 2040.

And though the long term projections have gotten somewhat better as a result of improving fertility, the short-term projections have gotten slightly worse. Ten years ago we thought that program income would fall below program outlays in 2019; now the projected date is 2017. Meanwhile, the estimated year in which the social security surplus will peak has also moved steadily backwards, to 2010. In 2011, a small hole will appear in the general fund budget as OASDI revenues start to decline, a hole that will become a gaping wound by 2020. From the Social Security Administration's perspective this is fine, but from the taxpayers perspective, this is a huge problem that needs to be, well, fixed--and from which economic growth is unlikely to rescue us.

More broadly, Matt's criticism of the "economic growth won't save us" argument seems to misstate the underlying changes that drove the improved predictions. If you actually look at the difference between the assumptions in the 1997 trustee's report and those in the 2001 report, you'll see that the improvement in assumptions came only in part from real wage growth (a decent proxy for productivity). More of it came from changing assumptions about birthrates, unemployment rates, and the interest rate that the SSA collects on its assets. But unemployment rates can't just keep falling forever, particularly since the Baby Boomers are our largest generation, and older workers tend to stay unemployed longer. Likewise, birthrates could shoot up, but demographics is a slow-motion train wreck; to fix things in 2041, you'd have to be having the babies to fund it right now, so they have time to get out of college and get some work experience. We aren't. Indeed, the latest data from the census bureau show that the birthrate for child-bearing women fell slightly in the early part of this decade. Meanwhile, death rates never seem to reach that much promised plateau, making the problem worse.

If economic growth were going to save us, it should have while we were paying for the unusually small age cohort that preceded the boomers. If productivity growth could save Social Security's finances, we should have seen it push back the date at which the government starts paying out more in OASDI benefits than it takes in in taxes. Instead, the reverse is true.

Cui bono?

Tyler Cowen makes one excellent point and one debatable one in the comments:

Cities are mostly low-carbon because they discourage people from having children, or limit the number of children people decide to have. (Taxing education, or other correlates of children, is in fact one substitute for a carbon tax.) But cities also export their complementary and indeed financially required pollution to more distant geographic areas; that means that cities are not low-carbon per se.

Dense cities are a tax on having children, but that's not an inherent quality of cities. If we had taller buildings next to spots of green space, you could have more residential space and a convenient play space, and built-in play spaces for your children. If you had school choice, you could solve many of the fears about the urban school system that lead affluent families to flee the city. If the tax system weren't set up so that localities bear the responsibility for caring for the indigent, you wouldn't have affluent families moving out to get away from the tax burden. A dense city is in many places a better place to raise a child than a suburb: you spend a lot fewer years shuttling the kids around, and there are many more options and activities for them than for suburban children. But current political culture makes them child-unfriendly.

To be sure, one cannot just wish away current political culture, but if I am imagining something as unlikely as a change in transportation subsidies, cannot I then imagine a more sanely conducted city government?

On the carbon export angle, I completely agree. City dwellers are far too self-satisfied with their allegedly low-carbon lifestyle, too willing to impose carbon taxes in the belief it won't affect them much. It is especially irritating to hear people who take multiple annual long-haul flights complain about SUV drivers, but the general phenomenon is broader than that. I expect that in the event a carbon tax is enacted, I will see a lot of my costs go up--as they should, to the extent that I am exporting my carbon emissions elsewhere. But nonetheless, I don't think they'll go up as much as those of people in suburban homes, because heating, cooling, and driving to those homes really is simply massively less efficient than doing the same thing in an urban area.

It's fun, but is it charity?

I agree that the self-congratulatory round of charity events in New York City is rather spectacularly useless and self-serving. No one who buys expensive tickets to a charity gala should be preening themselves on their fine charitable instincts.

What happens in a charity dinner or auction is that people get something they value, for which they pay somewhat more on the grounds that "it's for charity". But they deduct, not the price premium they were willing to pay for a charitable event, but the entire value of the purchase. Unfortunately, the IRS doesn't have any way to look into peoples' souls and determine how much they would have paid, so we let them get away with it.

However, there often is a meaningful donation, which is the services and venues offered to the event planners. If the Waldorf-Astoria hotel donates its grand ballroom to a charity dinner, it sacrifices quite a lot of foregone income, and deserves our applause. Perhaps we should limit the tax deduction for charitable events to this sort of in-kind giving.

Hard core

Daniel Gross adds his voice to the chorus of people complaining that "core inflation"--inflation excluding food and energy prices--is a silly measure. They're mad because this silly measure is the one the Fed pays most attention to.

And the Fed is right. The reason the Fed watches inflation is to try to determine if the money supply is in excess of money demand. If it is, there will be too much money chasing too few goods, and prices will start to rise.

But those price increases will be broad, general price increases, led by demand. The problem is, food and energy prices are generally most affected not by fluctuations in demand, but by fluctuations in supply--or in the expectation of future supplies.

Gross compares American inflation to China, where food inflation is rampant. But in China, most people still don't have enough to eat by rich-world standards. That means that when they get a little extra money, they will often bid up the prices of food commodities, particularly expensive ones such as pork. Until supply increases to match increased demand, this will result in skyrocketing, demand side prices.

In America, however, food is a trivial part of almost everyone's budget. People who get a little extra money in their pocket don't spend it on putting more protein in their diet: they buy a nicer washer, an iPod, a nice trip to the Jersey Shore. Price fluctuations are driven by the size of the harvests here and abroad. Similarly, the change in the price of oil has not been caused by a sharp shift in American demand, but by increasing demand elsewhere running up against a limited supply.

In other words, though it may hit your wallet hard, these two kinds of inflation don't tell us much about the state of the money supply--whether it is too big, too small, or just right. They just tell us that the domestic market for these goods has experienced some kind of negative supply shock. And that's not in the Federal Reserve's power to correct.

Counting carbon

A number of years ago, I was discussing rent control with someone who had managed to snag a government-subsidized co-op. "But you have to understand," he said earnestly, in response to my eminently reasonable economic arguments, "If it weren't for rent control, someone like me couldn't afford to live in Manhattan."

My response, though I never said it out loud, was a puzzled "So what?" Living in Manhattan is not a civil right. It's ludicrous to think that we should construct an elaborate regulatory system that degrades the housing stock and helps push the vacancy rate down to 2%, all so that averagely paid government workers can afford a two bedroom apartment near Lincoln Center. If you want to live in Manhattan, you should prepare yourself for a job that will pay you enough to do so. Or you can do what I did, and cram yourself into 400 square feet of cave-like space on the first floor of a building where the hot water supply ranges from temperamental to nonexistent. But the idea that the government has a duty to reallocate the very limited supply of attractively located Manhattan apartments to . . . well, to the kind of people who know the guy who allocates the supply of attractively located Manhattan apartments . . . seems so transparently awful that I was struck dumb.

My conservative readers are no doubt nodding along in glee. But here's the thing: how come so many of you are complaining that, in the event of a heavy carbon tax, it would suddenly become less affordable to live in Kansas, or the suburbs?

Continue reading "Counting carbon" »