My TIvo hates me

Or, at least, it thinks I want to watch Oprah Winfrey. Which of course brings back this classic article, "My Tivo thinks I'm gay". I should be so lucky. Apparently, my Tivo thinks I'm the housebound mother of three with a fondness for very special episodes about life-changing second chances.

Kitchen sink, continued

If you're going to have good cooking gear, you need some recipes to cook with it. I lean heavily on Epicurious, but I also have a lot of cookbooks. A lot of cookbooks. Here are the ones I use all the time:

1. Julia Child I consider three of her books absolutely indespensible: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volumes 1 and 2), for when you have a lot of time to do something perfectly; the Way to Cook, for when you have a decent amount of time to do something very well; and Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, for all the shortcuts. Any of these is a really lovely gift for an aspiring chef, as is the new Julia bio. Did you know that Julia Child and I were the same height?

2. Marcella Hazan Her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is to Italian what MTAOFC was to French: the utterly indespensible how-to for everything.

3. Union Square My family uses the original cookbook and their new volume constantly for its relatively simple, delicious, hearty fare.

4. Jasper White is our seafood go-to guy; we're particularly fond of his lobster book.

5. Betty Crocker No, seriously. The 1950 picture cookbook is my bible for basic baking; it also contains a number of fine recipes for simple things like macaroni and cheese, eggs, and pancakes. I wouldn't touch their "foreign" recipes if you paid me. But hailing from the era just before processing and overreliance on things like salad oil turned baking into a largely lost art, this is probably the single best manual for turning out high-quality, simple, cakes, pies, and cookies. And the weird, anachronistic recipes for things like clam juice cocktail and chop suey, plus the hilarious hints for desperate housewives, are part of what makes the book such a delight to have around.

6. Jacques Pepin I am besotted with Fast Food My Way, which is all about cooking well in a hurry.

7. Alton Brown I actually don't particularly care for Brown's recipes. But his explanation of methods, and the science behind them, is first class; it will make you a better cook even if you never try one of his recipes. I own both I'm Just Here for the Food, and I'm Just Here for More Food, which is his baking book. Or I should say, I owned them--they were stolen by friends. This is a particularly fine gift for the engineers and scientists you know; even if they don't like to cook, the chemistry lessons and strange construction projects will get them hooked. There are books that do a more thorough job of explaining the science behind cooking, but none that do it so charmingly.

8. Gourmet magazine Their encyclopedic cookbook is just the thing to tackle a monster dinner party with; whatever you want to make, I guarantee it's in there.

I don't have recommendations for other ethnic cuisines, either because I don't think there are super good ones, or because it's a cuisine (Chinese, Indian) that I don't cook. Though considering the state of ethnic food in much of the district, I may have to start. But readers are free to offer theirs in the comments.

I don't need life--I'm high on drugs!

Mr Brian Beutler has a hilarious post about Public Service Announcments, which do seem to have gotten much creepier over the last few years. This, of course, immediately called to mind the best known PSA of my youth, which Mr Beutler is probably too young to remember:

My college roommate had a terrific poster of a plate of breakfast food, captioned: "This is your brain with home fries and a side order of bacon.

What to do? What to do?

Leaving aside race and IQ (and that last post comes quite a bit closer than I am comfortable with to touching the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole), IQ matters for social policy. We do need to know whether g, the general intelligence factor that IQ is supposed to measure exists, how much of it is simply genetic, and how much more of it consists of environmental factors that we can reasonably change.

Because, assuming that it exists, but that the biggest problem for low-income children is environment, I don't know what sort of policy interventions this reasonably implies. Contrary to the glowing paeans to early childhood interventions that I frequently hear when I talk about schools, as far as I know the gold standard of early childhood interventions was the Perry Preschool Project, and intensive preschool program for three and four year old children run in the 1960s. The results, while admirable, were extremely expensive (contra that website, I calculate, using the Rand results, that the cost per child was about $18,500 per year in today's dollars). This bought lower poverty rates, less teen pregnancy, and lower incarceration rates. But it helped establish the kids in the bottom tier of the working class, with median incomes in the range of $20K. It did not come close to bridging the gap between those kids and the world of the middle class.

Even earlier interventions might help somewhat, but the earlier you go, the more problematic such interventions become. The younger the kids are, the more individual attention they require, which is why preschool is more expensive than fifth grade. Even if you're willing to pay for it, where are you going to find these millions of highly qualified early childhood experts to become, in effect, the surrogate parents to these children?

Not that I'm against trying--early childhood intervention seems to me, like schooling in general, to be one of those goods that society has an obligation to provide children if their parents are incapable. But as I've written before, good early childhood programs have enormous scale problems; I'm not sure how we overcome them.

Ugly questions

Best post by far on the IQ/Race debate.

I am clearly not qualified to deliver a final opinion on the actual merits of the race/IQ debate. But I think that our social reaction to it is disturbing. And I do mean "our". I'm as creeped out as any latte-sipping liberal when people start arguing that blacks have genetically lower IQs than whites do. But hysterical revulsion is not the correct response to what is basically an empirical question.

In part, this is a justified reaction to the fact that so many of the people advancing these theories in public are clearly racists who have seized on a theory that validates their priors. But only in part. After all, the fact that any discussion of the possibility is greeted with hysterical revulsion guarantees that only two types of people will take the "pro" side in public: fearless iconoclasts who do not care what anyone thinks of them; and racists.

If there is a difference, and that difference is genetic, I assume, in my classical liberal way, that we are better off knowing than not knowing. But my sense is that it is currently not possible to examine the question in any rigorous way right now, because almost no one will touch the subject with a ten foot pole.

And yet, the question matters. We gauge the success of our social policy by looking at macro results under the assumption that everyone (in aggregate) starts off with the same basic genetic endowment. If this is not in fact true, that would alter how we should look at that data.

To be sure, I am not clear on how one entirely overcomes the deep entwinement of society, environment, and genes in this case. I was recently talking to a friend who was mourning the way he watched the girls get dumber as they hit puberty, lose their interest in math and science, in a way that seemed much less likely to be the result of estrogen on their math receptors than the result of social conditioning about what men should find attractive in women.

Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure we could be doing better than we are now, except that people on all sides are terrified of finding any answer that doesn't confirm what they already believe.

Flat earthers

At Vox EU, three professors write that distance makes a surprising amount of difference to trade in services:

Pundits regularly invoke the notion of a world economy that is either “shrinking” or becoming “flat.” Explanations of this alleged flattening include technological innovations in transportation and communication that have enabled goods and ideas to flow more freely. The offshoring of service jobs, particularly call centers and computer software in India, has grabbed recent media attention. In his bestseller The World is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2005) wrote of how he had “interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore.”

Most economists, cognizant of the gains from trade, do not view a “flat” world as an alarming prospect. As the 2004 Economic Report of the President remarked sanguinely, “When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically” (p. 229). In a press conference after the release of the report, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors at that time, Gregory Mankiw, elaborated on the remarks in the report saying, “Whether things of value, whether imports from abroad, come over the Internet or come on ships, the basic economic forces are the same.” As Mankiw and Swagel (2006) describe in their insideraccount, these seemingly innocuous remarks about outsourcing managed to arouse a controversy. This was partly because of election-year sentiments but also because the threat of service offshoring raises serious concerns for many onlookers. How will we maintain our standard of living, people wonder, when we have to compete with highly skilled foreigners who are willing to do our jobs for a fraction of our wages?

Just as mainstream trade theory identifies gains from trade, it also shows that real wages of some workers tend to fall as a consequence of freer trade. Mankiw and Swagel (2006) respond to these concerns by arguing that the accumulated statistical evidence on the offshoring of services demonstrates that the magnitudes remain quite small compared to the size of the labour market. This case for complacency recalls a debate between Leamer and Krugman over whether rising imports from low-wage manufacturers were responsible for rising wage inequality in the US. Leamer (2000) pointed out that prices are determined on the margin and the volume of trade is irrelevant for wage determination. Krugman (2000) argued that, on the contrary, trade volumes were crucial evidence on the changes in factor prices that can be attributed to trade. However, if recent growth of service imports continues unabated, the current trickle of offshoring could turn into a flood. Mankiw and Swagel’s argument would be more persuasive if there were strong reasons to believe that economic impediments to offshoring will curb its future growth.

Our research investigates whether geographic separation limits offshoring trade, thereby shielding domestic workers from direct competition with their foreign counterparts. We develop a model that envisions employers searching globally for the most suitable workers for any given task and posits that distance raises the costs of using foreign workers. These higher costs reflect travel, training, or translation time associated with using workers that reside far from where their services will be consumed. Firms choose workers that offer the lowest costs after adjusting wages for productivity and distance-based service delivery costs.

. . . Using theory and estimated distance effects, we are able to measure the extent to which geographic separation insulates local workers from foreign competition. The calculations reveal that, from the point of view of a London service purchaser, workers in Oxford can be paid 99% to 373% more than workers in Bangalore in productivity-adjusted wages and yet still be more attractive, once service-delivery costs are taken into account. This is because the Bangalore workers are 100 times more distant from London than the Oxford workers.

I find this outcome surprising, but of course the closer you are geographically, the more likely you are to have substantial immigration flows and cultural and institutional exchanges that make trade in services easier.

On a side note, why on earth is anyone using this dreadful "flat earth" metaphor? It makes absolutely no sense. If the earth were a flat plane, would it actually be any less far from Osaka to Los Angeles? Indeed, it would seem to me that a flat earth would make things farther from each other, since presumably, it would mean unrolling the surface of the globe. That would put some two points on the earth that are currently next to each other literally a whole world away.

Is America still the engine of global economic growth?

In the first part of the decade, with Japan still stagnating and Europe flirting on-again, off-again with recession, analysts spoke over and over of America as the engine of global economic growth. This went on for so long that I simply ran out of train metaphors while writing for the Economist.

Prospects have gotten a little perkier over the last eighteen months; Japan seemed to be (finally!) pulling out of its decade-long doldrums, and France and Germany posted growth rates that were, if not exactly roaring back, at least very solid.

But the promise has not quite played out, as the Wall Street Journal chronicles:

The notion that the rest of the world has "decoupled" from the U.S. came into vogue earlier this year, as overseas economies -- particularly emerging markets -- continued to post robust growth and Europe and Japan appeared to be enjoying a long-delayed upturn.

Policy makers joined the decoupling parade. In the spring, the IMF included a chapter in its April World Economic Outlook called "Decoupling the Train." The gist: The current weakness of the U.S. economy stems largely from housing woes -- and housing is less global than, say, computers and other parts of the U.S. economy. That is good news for the rest of the world.

But the U.S. is now flirting with something more severe than a mere slowdown. That -- along with rising oil prices and the specter of a global credit crunch -- is changing the picture.

Europe is showing signs of faltering, while Japan may be at risk of sliding back into recession. While developing economies like China are still on a steady boil, recent drops in their stock markets suggest investors are beginning to doubt their immunity to a U.S.-led slowdown.

Germany and Japan may be growing, but they're extremely dependent on exports, which means they won't serve as the markets that fuel growth in the rest of the world. That, for too long, has been America's job. Now that we're ready for retirement, it seems we forgot to train our replacement.

Me too! Me too!

Critics of the pharmaceutical industry often claim we could realize fantastic savings by eliminatng "me too" drugs that treat the same condition. Derek Lowe has an excellent post on the case of Merck and Novartis:

if both compounds had made it to market, wouldn’t the people who tally up lists of “me-too” drugs have considered the first compound (from Merck) to be the original, and the Novartis one to be the copycat? After all, they target the same enzyme for the same disease in the same way. (I should mention that a DPP-IV inhibitor itself is just the sort of thing the industry is supposed to be turning out, a completely new way to treat a major and growing public health problem, but we'll pass over that for now).

But these compounds were developed more or less simultaneously, with the two companies racing each other to the market. It’s not like either company sat back and watched the big profits roll in, and said “I need to latch on to some of that – let’s make one of those, too.” The whole thing was done on a risk basis, because while the biochemical rationale behind DPP-IV inhibition makes sense, a lot of things make sense and still go nowhere. No one really knew how the drugs would perform, either in the clinic or in the marketplace.

And take a look at the problems that the Novartis compound has. Like so many other toxicology hits, these came out of the cloudless sky. Well, actually, it’s more accurate to say that the sky over the toxicologists is never cloudless, because you never know what’s going to happen. In this case, Novartis has taken an especially painful and expensive beating, since the drug had advanced so far before the problems began to make themselves clear.

I’d like to ask some of the critics of the industry what they think about this situation. Me-too drugs are a particular arguing point with many of these people, so here we go: does that term apply in this case? If not, then why not? Should companies go after the same target in the same way at the same time? If not, then why not? How do we deal with the fact that any compound can fail at any time, other than turning companies loose to compete with each other and take as many shots at a target as possible? Do you have a better solution – and if not, well, then, why not?

Transatlantic

Ross muses on our strategic presence in Europe:

This is, I think, a very interesting geopolitical question: To what extent would Europe re-arm if America suddenly stopped garrisoning the continent? I think Steyn is right that the European model - small military, big welfare state - was originally rendered viable by the U.S. military presence. But I'm not sure that's true any more, now that the Cold War is over and the old national rivalries have given way to an end-of-history moment. What "responsibilities of adulthood" would Germany, for instance, suddenly feel compelled to take on if the U.S. closed its bases? A Franco-German arms race seem pretty unlikely; so does a sudden push to re-arm against the Polish menace to the east. Putin's Russia is a slightly-more-plausible catalyst for continental rearmament, but only by comparison with the alternatives. Moreover, if you look at defense spending around the world, countries like Germany and its neighbors are already spending much more on their militaries than many nations that live in rougher neighborhoods and don't have the U.S. to look out for them. (The much-mocked Italians, for instance, spend more on defense than Turkey, Israel and Iran put together.) It's awfully hard to imagine the absence of American troops from European soil would cause those expenditures to rise much higher.

What's more plausible, I think - so plausible that I'm just cribbing the argument from lots of other people - is that the overall rate of U.S. spending on defense (rather than the location of our garrisons) is so high and so unmatchable that it drives defense spending down for everybody else (not just the Western Europeans). If you can't compete with the hyperpower, why bother trying? (Especially when you can count on fear of the hyperpower's military to prevent the kind of large-scale cross-border attacks that used to be common, and have now all but disappeared.) The Pentagon's budget isn't just subsidizing Europe; it's subsidizing the whole world. And this would be true no matter where we stationed our troops.

I'm not sure I'm so sanguine that, if we Yanks upped stakes and went home, that the Russians wouldn't become more aggressive in a decade or so; it's very hard to observe the positive effects of our presence, even as the negative effects are easy to see. I don't mean that they would march into Hungary tomorrow; but they're certainly a lot more active, in nasty ways, in former territories we aren't implicitly protecting.

But say this is so. Should we take our ball and go home? What good are the bases doing us?

Onwards and upwards

I've always loved David Brooks' description of Bobos as people who think that a $10,000 home entertainment system is vulgar ostentation, while a $20,000 slate shower is a sign of quiet good taste. And now I love Laura for worrying about becoming one of them.

I say this, of course, while gazing, in quiet admiration, at the new full-sized stove my landlord just installed. Full sized stove! So this is how the other half lives . . .

Insult to injury

Some freelance socialist not only stole my bike from in front of my house, but left the lock. The deliberate taunting seems highly unnecessary.

How bad are defaults likely to get?

The answer is, no one knows, exactly. But they should be worst in 2008, improving thereafter.

The most vulnerable loans are subprime adjustable-rate loans issued with very low teaser rates at the peak of the housing bubble. Typically, those mortgages would reset after two years. Many of those borrowers, who had little-to-no equity in their houses, have just seen their rates reset to much higher levels, and have no hope of refinancing both because of the sharp contraction of credit for subprime borrowers, and because stagnant or falling home values mean that they have no equity to refinance with.

The refinancing problem is why we should see mortgage rates default rates rising even in the higher loan tiers. People in those mortgage classes are less likely to get into trouble because they have taken on wildly excessive financial obligations; when they default, it is almost always because someone has lost a job or the family has suffered some sort of similar financial setback. For the past few years, rising home values have given those people a financial cushion with which to ride out the storm, pushing default levels much lower than normal. That process is now reversing itself, though absent a recession, it's not clear whether the default rate in these classes will really rise higher than historical norms.

The biggest bulge of defaults should come next year, and by late 2008, the banks and the borrowers should know about most of the loans that are going to go bad. A recession would change this, of course--but unless it's deep, not by very much.

Should Greenspan have stopped the housing bubble?

I recently overheard someone bashing Alan Greenspan for not doing something about the subprime mortgage market. That something seemed a little fuzzy, but seemed to involve stopping banks from offering those dreadful, dreadful loans.

This seems to be a fairly common sentiment, so I think it's worth pointing out that the latest data we have shows that the overwhelming majority of subprime loans are still in good standing. Subprime securities are taking a bath because defaults are higher than were expected, not because everyone who got one is in trouble. The 85% of homeowners with subprime loans who are currently making their payments might not agree that Alan Greenspan should have, in his ineffable wisdom, prevented them from getting loans.

Nor, so far, is there much evidence that the subprime problems are causing much fuss in the broader financial markets. So it's far from clear to me that Alan Greenspan should have acted--and indeed, far from clear to me that Alan Greenspan could have acted effectively.

There's a disturbing tendency to think that every problem is the result of inadequate regulation. In fact, America's bank industry is, as Tyler Cowen points out, one of the most heavily regulated in the world. And not every problem can be solved by better regulation--some things simply can't be regulated without causing bigger problems than they solve. There is no perfect regulatory state that will allow us all to live in a serene economic paradise, and the sooner we stop looking for one, the more effective our regulatory state will actually be.

Update In calmer consideration, that was too flip. But the financial holocaust that was widely feared has not come to pass, and is looking less likely to occur with each passing day.

Words to live by

Inspirational words this Thanksgiving from friend and very talented photographer Lara Shipley:

No one would ever do anything if they realized how much they suck.

Like mother, like daughter?

Oh, Jesus, I'm going to vomit.

No, I'm not, because I refuse to believe that this is real. Like pretty much everyone else in the known universe, I have had ugly fallings-out with school friends. But my mother would have killed herself before she would have deigned to act like a teenager in order to embroil herself in my private dramas. And she would have had me committed had she caught me saying anything like what I just read on that website.

Update A commenter suggests that, as I suspected, this is fake. I can't figure out if this is more or less disturbing.

Demography is destiny

The much-discussed Washington Post op-ed column on Social Security is not my favorite--it makes much of the meaningless actuarial solvency of the social security system, rather than the relevant changes to the inflows and outflows of tax revenue. But it does make one good point:

Social Security isn't a big deal because the trustees' projections are based on unduly pessimistic assumptions, including anticipated economic growth that is slower than has been the case for the past several decades.

The projected slowdown in economic growth is based largely on the slower growth of the workforce, which is inevitable unless fertility rates or immigration soar beyond all predictions. Better-than-expected growth cuts both ways: It increases the amount of payroll taxes coming into the system but also the amount of benefits owed. Even if the economy were to grow significantly faster than predicted, that growth would push insolvency back by only six years. Weighing in the opposite direction: The trustees' projections on life expectancy may be too low -- good news overall, bad for Social Security.

Yes, the trustees' optimistic scenario shows Social Security solvent for more than 75 years, but that is so unlikely (fertility would have to return to pre-1970s levels, for one) that Social Security puts the chances at less than 2.5 percent.

Furthermore, Social Security's intermediate projections are in line with those of other experts. "There is a greater than 99 percent probability that total outlays over 100 years will exceed total revenues," the Congressional Budget Office found last year.

This is a pretty frequent theme among the more sophisticated opponents of social security reform, and it's wrong. First of all, because the changes in the SSA's predictions are only very partly based on economic growth; they're mostly based on things like longevity and birthrates. Demographic change is not a fast-moving disaster; aside from a few million immigrants, we now have pretty much all of the workers we're going to have in 2020. Indeed, it is much more likely that the SSA is being too conservative in forecasting future lifespans than that it is being too pessimistic about future fertility--which means that the pension forecasts are more likely to be too optimistic than too pessimistic.

Meanwhile, the current birth dearth means the labor force is going to grow a lot less slowly. And since economic growth is a function of labor force growth and productivity growth, that means that unless productivity takes off, the economy is going to grow more slowly in the future than in the past.

In addition, ceteris paribus, the retirement of the boomers means that national savings will fall. We currently have a very big generation in their peak savings years, and a much smaller generation drawing down retirement savings. When the boomers retire, this happy circumstance will reverse itself. So it's hard to see where this amazing productivity revolution is going to come from--especially since we're currently bearish on trade, which is one major place we'd look for productivity enhancements.

Then there are the higher taxes which will be needed to pay for social security and healthcare; they are very likely to be a drag on growth.

Finally, to the extent that we mitigate the labor force problem by either keeping seniors in longer, or importing more immigrants, we will be putting downward pressure on productivity. Immigrants are much more productive here than they are in their home countries; but they are less productive than the average American worker. Likewise, the dislocations of dealing with an elderly workforce will be a drag on productivity. At the same time, the elderly will be consuming a lot more low-productivity services such as home health care aides.

The upshot is, we are very, very unlikely to grow our way out of our demographic problem.

Hwæt!

I've held off on seeing Beowulf because I thought it couldn't possibly do justice to the original. It seems I was right.

Are we really descended from monkeys?

If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.

The source of complaint

The mind boggles.

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo., Nov. 21 — Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Tina and Ron Meier with a photo of their daughter Megan, 13, who killed herself last year after an online romance ended.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

Why would a forty-seven year old woman do this? Because her daughter had been slighted:

In seventh grade, Megan Meier had tried desperately to join the popular crowd at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, only to be teased about her weight, her mother said. At the beginning of eighth grade last year, she transferred to Immaculate Conception, a nearby Catholic school. Within three months, Ms. Meier said, her daughter had a new group of friends, lost 20 pounds and joined the volleyball team.

At one time, Lori Drew’s daughter and Megan had been “joined at the hip,” said Megan’s great-aunt Vicki Dunn. But the two drifted apart, and when Megan changed schools she told the other girl that she no longer wanted to be friends, Ms. Meier said.

When the family found out who "Joshua Evans" was--six weeks after it had happened, and not from the Drews, but from a neighbor whose daughter was involved--the Meiers took a little revenge on an inanimate object:

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

Under the circumstances, this seems rather restrained. Nonetheless, the Drews filed a police report complaining that, after all, all she did was mess with the mind of a 13 year old girl whom she knew to be on antidepressants. It's not like she put the belt in Megan's hand or anything, and besides, the death of your child is no excuse for destroying a brand new football table.

Chutzpah seems curiously inadequate. Who are these people?

I should say

That for all my deep criticisms of Jon Bowe's ideas about globalisation, the journalism of his book is very interesting, and much worth reading. We shouldn't forget who makes our clothes or grows our food, and how they live, even if that doesn't suggest any immediate solution to their problems.

Free to roam

In a huge turnabout, Verizon is unbundling its service from a phone purchase. This makes total sense for Verizon, which has the best network; the pressure will force other competitors to follow suit, and on network strength, Verizon wins in most (not all) areas.

This is enormous news for the cell phone industry. I suspect we'll ultimately see little to no bundling, other than some sort of very basic freebie phone, which is all to the good. Consumers complaining that they won't get cheap phones aren't thinking things through; the phone company wouldn't give you the phone if they didn't expect to get it out of your hide in phone fees.

I suspect that this will put enormous pressure on Apple's sweetheart deal with Cingular, as customers begin thinking of a phone as something that doesn't necessarily come attached to a two-year contract.

Coffee break

A commenter in the last post asks what I use for making coffee. The answer is this Cuisinart model, which uses an internal carafe. It makes good coffee, keeps it hot without that burned flavor because the carafe is internal, and has a little gauge to tell you how much coffee is left. Less mess, better coffee, and it's a huge hit at brunch.

<i>Real</i> libertarians didn't

. . . support the war. This is the emerging meme, mostly, interestingly, among people who are not themselves libertarians. Stand by for my post tomorrow: real progressives won't vote for Hilary Clinton.

The central problem that libertarians sort of tried to grapple with, and then gave up in favor of shouting with each other, is how to reconcile respect for sovereignty with libertarian contempt for the state--particularly in states like Iraq, where respect for human liberty was nonexistant. The libertarian literature on non-intervention as a principle in the face of vicious states has always struck me as inherently unsatisfying, and particularly, far to heavily reliant on positing previous US interventions as the primary cause of, well, everything bad in the world.

Yes, there can be other libertarian arguments against war--practical, Hayekian ones, based on the state's administrative abilities. But only the sovereignty argument arguably compels a libertarian to be against the Iraq war in order to remain a libertarian. And the sovereignty argument simply has deep problems.

A real non-interventionist has to accept that the United States should not have entered into World War II. Yes, Japan attacked us, but they did so because we were encroaching on their sphere of influence. Had we actually kept the navy within our territory, Japan would never have attacked, and we would never have entered World War II. And no, I'm not convinced by arguments that our intervention in WWI brought about WWII; our role, other than urging France and Britain to mitigate their vengeance, was fairly minor. Moreover, since we're not starting from some blank, non-interventionist slate now, this is not a compelling argument against entering into World War II at the time of World War II.

Some libertarians do accept that (as does Pat Buchanan). Most, especially the more moderate breed nurtured post-Reagan, can't accept a philosophy which means we should have allowed more millions to die in concentration camps, left the Russians and British to starve without lend-lease, etc. Their minds also turn to wondering how the American Revolution might have turned out had the French government adopted a similarly modest foreign policy.

If you are not willing to posit that Americans should stay home even when millions are being senselessly slaughtered, then you end up in sticky pragmatic arguments about the possibilities of inherently untrustworthy state power to counteract even more noxious state power, and how much in the way of cost we can reasonably be expected to bear in order to advance liberty. I don't think there's an inherently libertarian answer to those questions. Libertarians should be inherently more suspicious of the American government's ability to make things better than other groups--but by the same token, it seems to me that they should be inherently more suspicious of repulsive states such as the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

That doesn't mean libertarians who supported the war got it right; but I don't think that what they got wrong was ignoring libertarian principles.

Kitchen sink

I've had a couple of readers bemoan the absence of recipes, and my annual Christmas gift recommendations, from this blog. So today: foodblogging.

In this post, the Christmas gift recommendations; in the next, my long-awaited recipes from Iron Chef Blogger. Then, some tax policy stuff. It's a veritable smorgasbord!

First, the perennials: things that I recommend every year because, frankly, every chef should own them.

1. Kitchenaid Stand Mixer If you've never used one, it's easy to say "But it's just a mixer? Why would I drop several hundred dollars on a mixer?" Because if you want to do any sort of moderately serious cooking, there's simply no substitute for its speed and versatility. It's invaluable just for bread--if you've been wanting to try bread making, but leery of the coolie labor involved, the (included) dough hook makes it practically effortless. There are also a host of attachments for everything from grinding meat to making pasta; I own, and love, the ice-cream maker, which is better at making ice-cream than all but the hideously expensive machines with their own compressors.

Personally, I own the five-quart professional, but I look longingly at the six-quart model, though some people who do a lot of things in small batches complain that it's too big. I'm not a big fan of the artisanal models; some cooks like them because they use the tilt-head construction that's used on ordinary low-end mixers, which is what they're used to. But the tilt-head feature requires a less powerful motor (otherwise, it's too heavy to lift), which kind of misses the point of owning a Kitchenaid. It's still better than a lower-end mixer, but I'd save up my money for a more powerful model. After a week of using the bowl-lift, you won't remember you ever cared. This is probably the lowest-end model I'd consider buying. Costco often has very good deals on these.

I also have, and love, Kitchenaid's hand mixer. Don't bother with the dough hooks, though; the mixer may be powerful enough to knead dough, but your hands aren't.

2. Microplane grater This model is like the one I have. This is one of those little gadgets that make you wonder how you lived without it--no more scraped knuckles on your box grater. Suddenly, you'll find yourself adding zest to a lot more things; I'm very fond of steaming broccoli in the microwave, then adding a little butter along with the zest and juice of one lemon. I don't recommend the wider ones for lemon zest, but the coarser models are great for things like cheese. Don't be fooled by advertisements for microplane rotary or box graters; the whole point of using a microplane is that for many things, it is easier to scrape the grater against the food than vice versa.

3. Calphalon One Infused Anodized I'm a huge fan of these pans. The problem with traditional nonstick is twofold: first of all, you never get the brown fond that makes sauteed foods so delicious; and second of all, once it is scratched--and it will scratch--the food starts sticking to it, and you have to throw it away, because you can't clean it properly. Infused anodized pans have the teflon incorporated directly into the aluminum. They are not as non-stick as teflon pans--I keep exactly one non-stick pan, for cooking scrambled eggs--but they are more non-stick than regular pans, and you can use your metal utensils and clean them with brillo. They also heat beautifully, and look pretty darn attractive. They're pricey though, so if you don't want to spring for the full set (or the smaller one), the most important item is a good frying pan, followed by a saucier or sauteuse, and then one sauce pan. These can often be found "slightly irregular"--ie, marred--at outlets; unlike with nonstick, it doesn't matter if it's dented.

4. Good knives I'm a big fan of my Kyocera ceramic knives, and ceramic slicer for lighter work; they're very affordable, and maintain their edge longer than any steel. But they do shatter if you're thumbfingered, and they aren't heavy enough for many jobs, so I also have a fair number of Henckels knives.

5. Silicone rolling pins: In a gift of the magi moment, my mother and I gave each other these (mine blue, hers red) for Christmas two years ago, and we're both thrilled. You can make almost anything using a lot less flour, because the silicone resists sticking. I also highly recommend silicone ice cube trays and baking mats, but stay away from the bakeware: it's so floppy, you risk disaster every time you take something in or out of the oven.

New additions

1. Kitchenaid food processor: I used to have a Cuisinart, but reports are that quality has fallen off considerably, so last Christmas I invested in this high-end Kitchenaid. Honestly, it's just a joy. It lives on my counter (next to my mixer), and I use it all the time. It has three nested bowls, so you can prepare a full dish without stopping to wash. It also has an extra-wide mouth, so you no longer have to chop things small in order to fit them in that narrow tube. I now use it to aerate my dry ingredients instead of sifting (just pulse everything for fifteen seconds or so); grate cheese and chocolate instead of hand-grating; juice oranges for brunch; slice vegetables for hors d'oeuvres; emulsify my salad dressing; mix perfect pesto . . . honestly, it's rare indeed that I cook without giving this machine a heavy workout. Its motor is both powerful and quiet (well, until you stick something hard in there) and I've never had it fail, even with tough projects like grating chocolate. I note the pro model is now well down in price, near enough to the cost of this one that you might consider upgrading--but it's hard to see why. I haven't yet found a project it couldn't tackle.

2. My shockingly expensive Shun chef's knife is not for anyone who isn't planning to do a lot of chopping; it's a waste of money unless you cook a fair amount. But if you do . . . sigh. The weight and handling are simply perfect, and of course, it's lovely.

3. Oxo kitchen tongs. I like the ones with the nylon head, which I can use with my rare forays into non-stick cookery. If you are a cook, or know one who doesn't have these, they're a great little gift. I use them for everything from frying to pasta, and the locking feature is terrifically helpful.

4. Silicone oven mitts let you plunge your hand right into boiling water. They're also dishwasher safe. All of which adds up to best. oven mitts. ever.

5. I like cappuccino, but not paying a zillion dollars to my local coffee shop, nor fussing with steamers. My frothing wand and a little discreet microwaving have produced a very acceptable substitute at very low cost. It's even better when paired with fresh ground coffee, for which I like my cheap Krups grinder; the expensive burr models don't actually seem to produce noticeably better coffee.

The price of globalization

For those who have asked about my weirdly-drugged seeming performance on Bloggingheads, the answer is not that I was drugged, but that I had gotten home at 4:30 that morning after a 36-hour trip from Vietnam. My lunatic scheduling of a Bloggingheads immediately thereafter is what accounts for the rambling debate of tangential, rather than the pointed dissection of John Bowe's book.

Therefore, pointed dissection here: I found the book oddly unsatisfying. Part of the reason the diavlog is muddy is that I found the book very muddy; it continually makes large, sweeping categorizations of things that aren't really alike, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions.

Obviously, I am not predisposed to like the writing of a fellow who thinks that restrictive immigration policy and exporting our labor and environmental policies to countries that can't afford them, are the way to help poor people. But even saying that, the book was weirdly disjointed. It starts off with a case that is clearly slavery, or so close as to make no difference: workers were physically prevented from leaving until the picking season was up by an unscrupulous labor contractor who is now in jail.

But it then moves onto a case where the problem isn't physical coercion, but visa fraud and (arguably) fraud committed upon the workers. A plant in Omaha imported Indian workers on training visas who were forced (as is apparently common in India) to pay thousands of dollars to an unscrupulous subcontractor in order to get the job. They were then paid less than minimum wage, housed in crowded dormitories, given badly cooked food, and told crazy things about the neighborhood to discourage them from going off the premises. Nonetheless, they did leave the premises, frequently. And the main threat employed against them seems to have been that they would be fired and deported--i.e. that they would be fired, since an employer who terminates someone on a job-specific visa has a legal obligation to tell the government and otherwise take steps to ensure that the worker leaves the country. Is encouraging workers to go into debt that they then need to pay off by working for you slavery? It's certainly much less strong than the physical coercion argument.

But most of the book is about Saipan, and most of what he talks about has nothing to do with slavery. It has to do with Saipan's weird economy, which, as a US territory, was long based on labor-law arbitrage: Saipan could pay workers less than US minimum wage, but it was not subject to quotas under the multi-fiber agreement. It was thus flooded with guest workers who would never have been allowed to enter America, to the extent that, as in some Middle Eastern countries, local citizens became a wealthy minority elite, employing servants to do for them while they collected government handouts or worked at make-work government jobs. The guest workers, meanwhile, live in conditions that would hardly do for boy-scout camp in the US, work long hours, and have little fun. If they get pregnant, or lose their job, they get in trouble with their boss, and with the family back home. "What does this have to do with slavery?" you may be asking. So was I, all throughout the book.

Slavery self-referentially demands that we do something about it. Crappy jobs, on the other hand, evoke a more mixed response. Workers usually take crappy jobs because the alternatives are worse; self-evidently, this is true of the workers in the last two cases, because they don't want to go home. If you want to "do something" about those crappy jobs, it behooves you to carefully consider whether there is anything to be done that won't make a lot of very poor people worse off.

Among the many things that Bowe should try to tease out, but doesn't, are costs and benefits, cause and effect, winners and losers. Instead he simply posits that all the poor workers in the free market are losers out to rich capitalists, that globalization is the culprit behind their poverty, and that imposing higher wages and labor standards would make them all better off. Or, I should say, he implies those things; he never makes anything as indelicate as a conclusion.

Instead we get a great deal of bombast about democracy--while he lauds the notion that Americans should override the democratically elected governments of places like India, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Mexico, and of course, Saipan, when it comes to things like labor standards and wages. We also hear a lot about listening to people in the developing world, although not, apparently, any of the ones who say that they want to come here and work for less than minimum wage. And there is a great deal of muddled complaint about globalization.

Much of that is self-contradictory. Farmers want to protect their incomes from competition by people who offer goods more cheaply by working much longer hours for less pay; we both agree that this is bad. But somehow, when industrial workers want the same thing, Mr Bowe finds this admirable.

What is not self-contradictory is often plainly wrong. He blames globalization, specifically farm subsidies, for forcing people to leave farms to work in factories. Farm subsidies are at best an extremely weak influence besides overpopulation, environmental degradation, technological change, land titling problems, and the fact that factory jobs are vastly more productive than subsistence farming. He also frequently acts as if free trade were somehow responsible for developing world poverty, which is lunatic. Anywhere that poverty is worsening right now, you will find either terrible, terrible government policy (Cuba, Zimbabwe) or war (Gaza, Congo). At that, I suppose the latter is simply a subset of the former.

Anywhere that poverty is improving, you will find massive amounts of trade. Forcing the people with whom we trade to pay higher wages or enact higher environmental standards threatens to make their wages uncompetitive--a fact that Bowe should recognize, since he several times chronicles factories shutting down because the mandated wage is too high. Exporting our standards threatens to throw a spanner into the most effective--indeed only--poverty reduction mechanism we've ever found.

Bowe short shrifts this, first, by ignoring his own evidence. But when he can't ignore the fact that, for example, the workers in the welding case would have been stuck at low wage work in India without the visa fraud he decries, he comes down on the side of the comparatively rich locals over the comparatively poor immigrants. Too often the "slaves", seem to be less important than what their presence does to us.

Consider this, from his conclusion:

As we are seeing with global warming and the threats of increased temperatures, storm velocities, and ocean levels, we may, in time, come to see social pandemics as equally menacing--if predictable--threats. The issue will then become one of self-preservation more than justice. Never mind the question "Are you fine with your comfort relying on the misery of billions?" The question would be "Do you want them to come kill you?"

In May 2006 O Globo, one of Brazil's leading newspapers, published an anonymous interview with an anonymous subject said to be a prisoner housed in one of the country's notoriously hellish prisons. Many readers credited the sources as Marcos Williams Herbas Camacho, also known as "Playboy", the leader of the PCC, one of the nation's largest prison gangs. Reigning from prison, the outfit has killed scores of people in the last year and has staged more than three hundred attacks on police, bus stations, and public forums, humiliating farcical government attempts to maintain order. I don't know if these words were made up or came from Playboy or anyone else from the slums. All I know is that they sound pretty credibly like what a person mght sound like after being born in one. Before becomeing famous for crime, said the intervieweee,

I was poor and invisible. For decades, you never bothered to look at me. People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic music about "the favelas at sunset," stuff like that. Now we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are scared to death. We are the late blooming of your social conscience.

We're at teh core of what is beyond solution . . . we're a new species, a wholly different animal from you . . . there's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from the prisons, like an alien monster hidden in the cities' cracks.

We're on the edge of a postmisery that has begotten a new murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones, the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus growing on a big dirty mistake.

We're on teh attack. You are on the defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and merciless.

The solution, he was asked.

There isn't one. It's too late.

I have a hunch this interview isn't real. I've conducted many interviews, and the words just sound to pretty. But it doesn't matter. Because the sentiment they contains sounds very, very real.

Osama bin Laden, to my thinking, is just another name for Osama bin jobs, Osama bin minimum wage, Osama bin social justice. The poor will find ways to revenge themselves on the rich. And the ideology that provides the most comfort and justice to the largest number of people will prevail. If the revenge motive of brand Osama holds greater appeal than brand Freedom, well, I guess that means brand Freedom didn't do such a great job of delivering on its promises.

. . . when I first started writing this book, I considered myself a liberal. I thought it was mean that people and corporations with power aren't nicer to people with less power. Now I laugh at the idea. There are so many billions of poor people out there. They are not educated, but they're certainly not sutpid, and I very much doubt they can be lied to or angered indefinitely.

But to anyone in this world today who feels compelled to go on TV and talk about freedom or tell us all about hte glories of globalization and free trade and democracy--any writer, any politician, any corporate advertising person invoking htat stupid word freedom over and over again--I have some advice. Go out into this newly globalized world you're profiting from, go visit the people being "lifted" out of poverty, the workers who are making your products. Go live in their huts, eat their rice and plantains, squat on their floors, and listen to their babies cry. Sniff some glue and pray with them. Try to get justice from their police if someone hurts you. And then come back and let's talk about freedom.

I don't know if an author should take policy advice from a murderous thug, particularly one who seems to have honed his political philosophy in the fetid swamps of the slush pile at RKO's noir unit. All I know is, empirically, this is nonsense on stilts. Osama bin Laden, like the suicide bombers on 9/11, was not poor. Nor did they come from poor countries; most of them are Saudi. In fact, had he consulted Alan Krueger, he would have learned that richer, more educated people are more likely to support, and commit, terrorism than are poor illiterate ones. And describing brand Freedom as having failed in any country where al Qaeda is popular is . . . well, words fail me. Since John Bowe is so fond of listening, I suggest he go talk to people such as the ones in Egypt's Kadima movement about their attempt to do a market launch of brand Freedom in the face of resistance from local monopolist, brand Dictator.

The world's poor aren't coming to kill us--they can't, because we won't let them over our borders. And so regardless of what else we do, too many of them will be stuck with bad governments, abusive police, and all the other miseries of the developing world. And it seems to me very likely that if we let the John Bowes of the world run things, they'll also be stuck with subsistence farming, while journalists like John Bowe and me periodically go squat with them in their huts, harvesting colorful copy from their poverty.

At last, a candidate I can stand behind 100%

A vote for Mr. Splashy Pants is a vote for freedom. Thanks to Radley for finding this.

Ample supply

I join Ross in believing that the Republicans should stop spouting nonsense rhetoric about their plans to raise tax revenue by cutting tax rates. However, it's not clear to me that this is what Fred Thompson is doing here:

Former senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) today proposed a series of tax cuts as a way to stimulate economic growth.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the presidential candidate recommended extending President Bush's tax cuts, due to expire in 2010, eliminating the estate tax, repealing the alternative minimum tax and lowering the corporate tax rate to no more than 27 percent from the current 35 percent.

Thompson also said that he would adopt the approach of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives that would offer, as an alternative to the current income tax, a two-rate income tax system stripped of deductions and credits.

Estimates devised earlier this year by the nonpartisan staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation indicate that major parts of Thompson's plan would lose at least $2.5 trillion over ten years, nearly as much as the entire federal government is expected to spend this fiscal year.

In the interview, Thompson said such official estimates are often wrong and that his tax cuts would stimulate "growth in the economy" and bring in more revenue than expected.

There are three kinds of tax cuts rolled together: personal income tax cuts, corporate income tax cuts, and tax simplification (aka base-broadening). The latter two could plausibly be revenue raising. It's hard to tell which estimate the WaPo is referring to, "major parts" being endearingly vague, but I have my money on extending the Bush tax cuts. Tax simplification and cutting the corporate income tax would spur growth, and tax simplification might, by itself, bring in a significant amount of money, so I'm not sure it's correct to characterize Fred Thompson as dishing out the supply side Kool-Aid.

Real public policy

I'm opposed to many sorts of state interventions, but public health measures strike me as a no-brainer. I mean real public health measures: not nannying people about their trans-fat consumption, but preventing the transmission of infectious disease. The negative externalities of infection seem to me to give the state a perfect right--indeed, an obligation--to curtail your freedom to fanny about spreading cholera.

As Matt Zeitlen says, I do not recognize the "right" of parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.

It goes without saying that I don’t share Jesse Odegard’s sentiment that Marlyland needs to “stop being so dramatic” in mandating that kids receive basic shots or else not be allowed to attend school along with fining the parents for each day absent. Of all civil liberties, I don’t see the one to pigheadedly endanger and inconvenience children, who by law have to attend public school, with your un-immunized, disease-ridden child because you’re too twee to see your kid get some shots as one that needs urgent protection.

Vaccines work primarily not by protecting you, but by creating "herd immunity": denying the virus a reservoir in which to incubate. Public schools* used to be the perfect incubators, because there you have large numbers of people with no prior immunity herded together, making disease transmission a near-certainty. Vaccines have destroyed those disease reservoirs.

Now that the disease reservoirs are destroyed, of course, parents are tempted to free ride on society. They trust in other parents to vaccinate their children, thus maintaining a disease-free environment in which their own precious princes and princesses can run around safely without taking precautions. They do this for reasons logical and illogical--vaccines do pose some very small risk to kids, but more of their fears seem to be based on junk science like the thimerosol-autism connection. But even their real fears about the safety of the vaccine would be vastly outweighed by their fears of disease if other parents didn't vaccinate, so it's accurate to describe their behavior as free riding.

This behavior shouldn't be allowed for two reasons. First of all, contrary to popular belief, vaccinations don't necessarily provide lifetime immunity; that's why the vaccine's role in destroying the disease reservoir is so critical. If enough kids aren't vaccinated, they'll create new reservoirs, as has already happened in some places with diseases like measles and whooping cough. Adults whose immunity has attenuated over time catch the diseases, and as we all know, diseases you get as an adult are much worse than the same diseases are in kids. Refusing to vaccinate your kids thus endangers other peoples' lives.

Second of all, there's no way to create a social policy that says "90% of all children have to be vaccinated". Are we going to hold a lottery for the remaining 10%? Unvaccinated children are a direct menace to public health, which makes it reasonable to forbid them from going out in public.

* By which I mean, before you start screaming, "schools attended by members of the public", not the government-run school system.

Can it be true?

Unlike most transplanted New Yorkers, I do not pine for the shadowy canyons of Wall Street, the ever-milling rugby scrum of its famed avenues, the night life or the the-ater. I do, however, miss the food. DC proper is not yet a food town, though the food revolution that has shaken the rest of America seems to be peeping through the keyholes. I am probably jaded, having grown up 10 blocks from Zabars, but both ingredients and equipment seem much, much harder to come by here than in New York, and while some cuisines are well represented (the Ethiopian is by far the best in America), others are practically absent (cough-Chinese-cough). But the two most gaping holes in my life are pizza and bagels.

To be fair, this is partly because to a lifelong New Yorker, there is no other sort of pizza than the large, thin, New York slice. We may disagree amongst ourselves about the theological details--crispy or floppy, thick border or thin, sweet sauce or spicy, and how much grease is too much? But basically, we're all in the same church, and it's a highly localized one. Chicago pizza may be a fine foodstuff, as long as one consumes it without trying to imagine that it is actual pizza. But it is no substitute for the One True Faith.

We will, of course, pass discreetly over the Dominosian Heresy. This is a family blog.

But in the area of bagels, the problem is not one of perception; it is one of all too grim reality. Outside of New York, what is called a bagel is almost never a real bagel; it is a round piece of bread with a hole in the middle. It is also a crime against humanity; as one friend said: "Einstein's bagels are so awful, they're anti-semitic." A real bagel, no more than an hour or two out of the oven, has a delightfully chewy exterior surrounding a core of soft, warm bread. It does not cry out to be split open and toasted in order to disguise the fact that the store owner has been using it to check erosion in his back gully for several weeks before declaring it stale enough to sell to the general public.

I have been bemoaning the lack of bagels in DC for quite some time--long enough that a friend just sent me this item from gridskipper, alleging that decent bagels can be found in the DC area. I am extremely sceptical--but not too sceptical to try all eight. I'll report back as I go.

We're losing money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume

Scott Adams decides to blog less:

I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions.

High crimes

Stuart Buck points to this piece from Science Daily

Using data across a wide range of research, Sherman shows that most crime is committed by a small fraction of all criminals, at a tiny fraction of all locations, against a tiny fraction of all victims, during a few hours a week. By focusing police, probation, parole, rehabilitation, security and prison resources on these “power few” units with the most crime, the study shows how society could stand a far better chance at crime prevention without raising costs.

and asks:

I wonder how one is supposed to identify the "small fraction of all criminals" and the "tiny fraction of all victims" ahead of time, rather than in hindsight.

I wonder what we're supposed to do with them if we do manage to pick them out. Can one preemptively deploy the power of the state against people who seem likely to commit a lot of crimes? I sure hope not.

Hot for war

Bryan Caplan wonders why more libertarians weren't against the war:

When the Washington Times announced that libertarianism is trendy, I couldn't help but think "It would be a lot trendier if libertarians had been against the Iraq War from the start."

Plenty of libertarians were against it, of course. But if you remember how integral isolationist/ non-interventionist foreign policy was to the libertarian idea back in the '70s and '80s, the libertarian reaction to the Iraq War (and the War on Terror generally) has been quite astonishing.

I'd say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does. Moreover, unlike in Southeast Asia, one cannot make even a tenuous argument that American intervention somehow caused Soviet imperialism, creating the cold war that we then had to fight. Everyone's a consequentialist if the consequences are bad enough.

But that's just a theory; perhaps my readers have better ones.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

The inimitable Marie Gryphon catches Naomi Wolf in a very odd statement--at least, odd if you're Naomi Wolf:

Naomi Wolf's eulogy for American democracy in today's Washington Post contains the following, very curious passage:

"Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world; few realize that "due process" means that they can't be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely."

Has the third wave feminist and former Gore campaign consultant suddenly discovered the importance of the right to keep and bear arms?

I assume she was referring to the Fourth. But then, once you've seen one amendment, you've seen 'em all . . .

Preach it, brother Jim

Sayeth Mr Henley:

Good heavens. Three-quarters of a century of regulatory-state agriculture has left us with a system of subsidized corporate farms who deplete the soil, abuse animals and enjoy a coziness with state agents while the same state agents hassle independent operators and crusading eccentrics out of business. It’s as if, my man IOZ would say, there’s a pattern . . .

If you believe that extensive government regulation and “support” of American agriculture is worth it, you believe that the state bigfooting small farmers on behalf of large ones is a cost worth the benefits managed agriculture delivers. But there’s no pretending that the cost is some odd thing that somehow happened and can be yanked out of the structure. It’s a load-bearing pillar of the regulatory state.

Are you serious?

The response of liberal commenters to my post on the fact that social security decreases labor supply and national savings seems to largely be raw incredulity. "That's crazy talk!" about sums it up.

Well, in response to those who asked, I am not only serious, but also well supported. These assertions about the response of elder labor force participation, birth rates, and national savings to pension policy are, in declining order, extremely, very, and fairly robust. All of them are strong enough that none of the slew of economists I recently interviewed on the topic of America's aging economy voiced any doubt about the relationship, direction, or causality.

Speed demons

This post reminds me of another discussion I was recently in: why is America's high-speed rail so dreadful? The Acela delivers you, at enormous added expense, to Boston one hour ahead of the regional. On the DC-to-NY run, the added benefit is 10-15 minutes. The answer is that the Acela uses existing track, which is twisty, the better to serve every congressional district between here and Boston. Real high speed rail needs to be fairly straight, for the same reason you don't take hairpin turns at 120 mph in your car.

Of course, if we were not going to build high speed rail, the sensible thing to do was not to have a high-speed program at all. Instead we got the dreadfully expensive, yet basically useless, Acela.

Defining torture

While in Vietnam, the "what is torture" discussion came up once again. It seems to be an evergreen among journalists, though as you can imagine, there was not a lot of support for the Bush administration's definition in the group.

My definition is fairly simple. If you saw someone doing something to a soldier in a movie, and that act alone was enough to tell you that the perpetrator was the bad guy, then that's probably something American soldiers shouldn't be doing to anyone else.

Eurolicious

Sorry to link Clive so much in one day, but a) he's brilliant and b) I've got a lot of backed up posts on non-Asian topics from my travels. He writes, about Barry Eichengreen's take on the euro:

Barry Eichengreen has a post on Voxeu about how difficult it would be for a country to make an orderly exit from the euro. (The column draws on a longer NBER working paper.) The strength of the euro is squeezing Europe, and especially Italy, very hard. There is some talk of pulling out of the euro system. If only. Italy would surely benefit if it could. But, as Eichengreen explains, it literally cannot without precipitating a really fearsome financial crisis. . . .

A cynic's instinct would be to say that scholarly articles explaining why the euro system cannot break up mark the beginning of the end--but Eichengreen's logic seems impeccable. Italy would surely have been better off if it had never joined the system (an isssue Eichengreen does not go into here), but it is too late for regrets now. The title of the column is the only mistake I can see. "The euro: love it or leave it?" That surely ought to be: "The euro: like it or lump it [no question mark]."

Italy, for those who haven't been following along at home, has been badly squeezed by the euro for several reasons: first, it used to depend on serial devaluation to keep its manufactures competitive in the export market; and second, its economy is not quite in sync with the other two big economies (Germany and France), which means that the central monetary policy does not quite fit with what's happening in the local economy. (Ireland has the same problem, in other direction: its government is laboring mighty hard to keep growth under control).

I'm inclined to be more pessimistic than Messrs Crook and Eichengreen, but this may only be my youth speaking. I look at places like Argentina, which couldn't exit its dollar peg without a horrendous financial crisis, but eventually had to anyway, because the consequences of staying were worse. Italy's government is currently coping with permanent low growth and a creeping budget gap, but any number of nasty surprises could make its position untenable over long years. Moreover, once the first country exits the euro, the credibility of the currency takes a blow, which makes successive exits more likely.

Overall, I'd place the odds on the survival of the euro at about 50%, which makes me definitely a euro-skeptic. Europe is not an optimal currency zone. America isn't either, but we have a lot of things that make it tenable: high labor mobility (so depressed regions depopulate rather than stagnating), high capital mobility, and automatic fiscal stabilizers that transfer federal money, in the form of things like unemployment benefits, to depressed areas. These are no panacea, but they make the dislocations of central monetary policy bearable. Europe, on the other hand, is full of people who stay where they are no matter what the economy does, and the EU government does not, broadly speaking, transfer money by local need. At some point, I find it easy to imagine that the costs of exit could be outweighed by the costs of staying, particularly as euro-enthusiasm wanes.

Speaking of Paul Krugman

I wonder what happens to his career on January 21st, 2008? I presume we will have a Democratic candidate inaugurated; and so much of his current fame lies in his vocal opposition to a much disliked Republican president. I don't think it's crazy to speculate that, had Al Gore taken office in 2000, Paul Krugman would still be fairly obscure--better read by people like me, who loved his Slate columns, but not much noticed by the ordinary run of New York Times readers. What on earth will he write about when "Bush is evil" no longer suffices to fill column inches?

The real problem

For those of you who haven't noticed, my colleague Clive Crook has joined us in the blogging world. I've been lucky enough to have Clive as a colleague in both places I've worked as a journalist. For those who haven't been fortunate enough to meet him face to face, the blog is a decent proxy for the real thing.

In this post on Paul Krugman and Social Security, Clive, as usual, targets with laser accuracy the real problem with the Social Security system: not that it is bankrupt, but that it encourages people to make extremely bad decisions about providing for their future.

It starts with childbearing: social security systems seem to exert downward pressure on birthrates, in effect undermining their own actuarial base. Social security socializes the benefits of childbearing in providing for retirement, but no one has yet figured out how to socialize the main cost, which is turning your life choices over to a screaming pre-verbal dictator. People are thus tempted to free ride on the childbearing of others, and the more generous benefits are, the more they seem to free ride. This is one reason that Social Security, which used to have more than 30 workers for each retiree, now has only three, headed towards two.

Social Security also encourages people to leave the workforce earlier than they otherwise would. People are healthier than ever at 65, but while in 1950, almost half of all men over the age of 65 worked, that number is now less than 20%. This appears to be highly correlated with the spread of defined benefit pensions such as social security, which offer no advantage to delaying retirement. Indeed, Social Security perversely penalizes anyone who takes early benefit but continues to work, docking a third of their earnings.

Finally, Social Security discourages private savings. This is terrible for two reasons. If future fiscal problems force the government to reduce benefits, the people who didn't save enough because they relied on those promises will be made much worse off than they would otherwise have been.

The other problem is that Social Security is not a productive investment. Privately saved money is mostly lent to corporations that mostly use the money to do things that make the economy more productive, such as R&D and capital equipment upgrades. Social security "contributions" are lent to the government, where they are mostly spent on things that could not be remotely described as improving our economy's productive capacity, such as farm subsidies.

This transaction would actually be neutral (except for deadweight loss on the "contributions") if Congress used the Social Security money to reduce other debt; in effect, they would be doing our national saving for us. But in practice, though it is difficult to tease out cause and effect, the best evidence is that Congress simply spends the extra money as if it were tax revenue. Social security thus reduces national savings.

The demographic transition we are currently undergoing to an older society means that we need policies to increase the workforce and productivity as much as possible. What we have, in Social Security, is a program which actively works against these aims.

Presumed innocent

Mark Kleiman asks a good question:

Having worked on the problems of crime control for almost thirty years, I tend to be much more sympathetic to the viewpoints and operational needs of law enforcement agencies than the average of the people I usually agree with politically. But on one point, I find myself utterly unable to understand what my friends in the law enforcement biz could possibly be thinking: why isn't it as obvious to them as it is to me that clearing innocent people is just as important a goal of law enforcement as nailing guilty ones?

I agree 100% that this should be a coequal goal with convicting the guilty; but it doesn't surprise me that it isn't. Human beings are such irrepressible optimists, so naturally aversive to meditating upon their own failures, that psychologists have a technical term for the rare people who are predisposed to clearly and accurately assess their achievements: "depressives". When we fail, the natural urge is to cover it up--to others, in order to preserve our status, and to ourselves, in order to preserve our peace of mind. Undoubtedly, the folks at the FBI who decided not to notify people that they'd been convicted on faulty evidence reasoned that those people were all probably guilty anyway, and no real harm had been done, so why rock the boat?

The more important question, I think, is why the rest of us don't spend more time worrying about false convinctions. What I've read about the Jeffrey MacDonald case, for example, makes it clear that at the very least, prosecutorial misconduct and dubious forensic testimony played some role in his conviction. This should bother us whether or not he's guilty, since presumably the kind of games the prosecutors played with the evidence have been inflicted on other, less notorious, defendants who may have been innocent. Yet there's been little interest from any quarter.

Back up

This reminds me of a story someone I worked with once told me. Sometime around 1989, he was writing his dissertation (or was it a master's thesis? memory dims, so call it a dissertation). On a typewriter. For some reason I don't recall, it really had to be in on the first of May, else he would have to wait until fall to submit it. And so in early April he went to rural Pennsylvania to hole up at a relative's cabin and finish the damn thing.

On the morning of May 1st, newly typed dissertation in hand, he got into his 1980 Honda Civic and began driving back to Philadelphia. It was a beautiful day, and he rolled down the windows (the Civic, natch, had no air conditioning), revelling in the beautiful spring air, singing along to the radio, when suddenly he noticed a jarring percussive beat undercutting the song's bass line. He looked over to see what it was, and found, to his horror, that it was the pages of his dissertation being whisked, one by one, out of the open window by the wind. He pulled the car to a screeching halt, but about half of his opus was gone. He pulled into the nearest motel, rented a room, plugged in his typewriter, and started trying to recreate the thing from his rough draft. Of course, the pages didn't come out evenly, so he had to do it again. Twice. By the time he got to Philadelphia, whoever he was trying to give the thing to had fled. That's why he was spending his summer working for a Ralph Nader group instead of doing something useful. Or so he said.

This holiday season, be thankful you're not him. And how about backing up your hard drive while you watch the I Love Lucy marathon?

Public service announcement

I drove home from JFK, because the alternative was staying overnight in New York and waking up at 4:30 to get an early morning flight to BWI, fetching the train from BWI . . . and to hell with it, I'll rent a car.

At the National office at JFK I ran into a woman who was furious because National wouldn't take her debit card; they only accept credit cards. I sympathized because this had happened to me once on a trip to New York, at Budget; luckily, my mother had lent her credit card, going down on the rental as a second driver. The person in New York was not so lucky.

Returning the car at Union Station, I ran into another furious woman having the same problem.

I haven't been able to figure out why they don't accept debit cards, since presumably they could put a hold for the amount of the advance authorization they usually get on credit cards, but the fact is that at least in New York and Washington, they apparently don't. If you're planning to rent a car in the near future, don't show up with just a debit card in your wallet, or you'll be walking to your next destination.

Update In the comments, Freddie makes an interesting suggestion: having a credit card at least indicates that you have good credit: i.e., are not a total deadbeat who will abscond with the car. I never thought about it as a signalling mechanism, but this seems very plausible.

Kindled interest

I'm interested in Amazon's new eBook--not interested enough to pay $399 for one, but if anyone at Amazon wants to send me one to try out, I will be happy to report the results to you readers.

But of course, what I'm particularly curious about is how well the thing is selling. The Kindle is bound to have significant network effects; how valuable it will depend substantially on how many people use it, since that will affect not only how many titles there are, but whether the service is suddenly discontinued leaving you with a pretty white rock that's not even heavy enough to make a good paperweight.

I thus, naturally, turned to Amazon's sales rank system. But Amazon has found a way to neatly protect this valuable information from prying eyes: the system helpfully informs me that the product is "#1 in Kindle Store".

Let us give thanks

On the list of things to be thankful for, geography has to be at the top.

We all like to think that we basically deserve what we got. Oh, perhaps we had a couple of lucky breaks, but we worked hard and followed the rules, and we earned what we have.

But that is only true if you restrict your comparison class to other Americans, or other Americans with functional families. It certainly isn't true if you compare yourself to the rest of the world.

An African farmer can, through the same kind of hard work, diligence, and excellent planning that you exercised, become a perhaps slightly less hungry African farmer. He is not free to do the only thing which could possibly bring him anywhere close to your level of prosperity, which is move. If he tries to do the sensible, foresighted thing in order to assure himself and his family a better tomorrow, men with guns will meet him at the border to push him back into poverty. If he succeeds in evading the men with guns, he will be labeled an illegal immigrant, forced into the gray economy by his lack of papers, and routinely excoriated by talk show hosts.

Any American who thinks that they earned what they have is like a marathon runner who started 100 feet from the finish line. An accident of birth got you 99% of the way there. The last 1% may have been run at impressive speed, but there's something unseemly about bragging on it to much.

Department of Invidious Comparison

Anyone have any idea why both the third world countries I just visited offered excellent airport baggage service, while JFK took over an hour to offload my bag?

Update Alex Massie sends along this article on the full extent of the problem.

What is poverty, she said, and washed her hands?

One of the Vietnamese people I met here asked a question I had a hard time answering, even though she spoke excellent English: why, she asked, did DC have so much crime?

Even with no language barrier, I found myself staring across a cultural gulf I couldn't bridge in the 45 minutes we had to eat lunch. I wanted to say, "they are poor". But that seems a ridiculous statement in a country of 85 million people who are nearly all living at a lower standard of material consumption than the poor of DC. I feel a lot safer walking around in Hanoi than in most parts of the district, though of course, this may be tourist folly (I also felt safe walking through bits of Dublin that gave my host near-hysterics.)

But the poor of DC are still poor. It's still very hard to be one of them, and even harder to stop being one of them. I'm not a convert to the idea that the only thing that matters is material poverty; clearly, there is also something soul-killing about having your society brand you and everyone you know as failures. On the other hand, "culture matters" doesn't get you very far as a poverty eradication program; no matter how much money you give welfare mothers, they'll still be on welfare. And "they're poor" has proven to offer little in the way of crime-reduction strategies; we've been much more successful with things like more police on the beat.

I'm not sure what I mumbled, but I changed the topic pretty quickly. I wonder how often my hosts have done the same to me when they just couldn't explain.

Counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-culture

I refuse to renounce KT Tunstall simply because she is played in Starbucks. If anyone was suffering under delusions that I was music snob material, well, now you know.

A fine line between love and hate

One of the minor challenges of travelling in Cambodia has been adjusting myself to the different queuing habits of various places and travellers. There are the people who really don't queue at all, the people who view queuing as a fine way to get ahead of you by cutting in line, and the people who queue but hold slightly different standards about acceptable queuing behavior.

Of those groups the third is the most irritating. A South Korean man did something yesterday that would have been nearly unthinkable: he simply brazenly cut in front of me in the passport control line to exit Cambodia. (Yes, in both Cambodia and Vietnam, you have to pass through immigration both ways.) But I just said "No" firmly, and he want back to the end of the line. On the other hand, I stood in line with a bunch of Germans in a Siem Reap store, which turned into a nightmare. I was acting the way Americans act in queues . . . wandering five feet away to look at something, staring everywhere around the shop except at the clerk. The result was that about three German women cut in front of me.

I am assuming (it's been a while since I was in Germany, and I was paying more attention to the beer than the queuing rules) that this is just some cultural variant on queuing, rather than, say, a bunch of extremely rude women who knew an opportunity when they saw it. Which is not a ridiculous assumption. It's not inherent to queuing that you should be able to step moderately out of line and then rejoin it, though I'd argue that this is a superior equilibrium to everyone staring straight ahead. But what's important is that it has to be a collective equilibrium; you can't make up your own rules. If you don't, you (presumably) get what I did: a bunch of people cutting ahead of you. Rules about all of these trivial things are the operating system of our society--and one of the reasons that people of all nations don't do more business abroad. It's hard to agree on common terms if you don't even recognize all the new collective judgements that have to be made.

The nuclear option

We spent most of our time in Phnom Penh with the development community, including the extremely sharp and friendly people at the World Bank. There we discussed Cambodia's dire electricity needs--only about 10-15% of the population is connected to the grid.

Despite being a country of rivers, Cambodia is too flat to have a lot of good unexploited hydro. There are rumors about oil and natural gas, but they're still in the "fond hope" stage. How will Cambodia develop adequate electricity supplies? Coal is certainly on the table; they don't have their own deposits, but it's cheap to import from neighbors.

Why not nuclear? We asked. The World Bank doesn't support nuclear, though it's not clear why. Geopolitically, of course, there are proliferation concerns, and questions about whether developing countries can safely manage a nuclear plant. On the other side of the ledger, however, is the fact that without nuclear, all these developing countries are going to be dumping a gigantic load of carbon into the atmosphere. Shouldn't we at least be thinking hard about safer reactors for the developing world?

Department of non-leading indicators

One person on our trip who has spent a lot of time in Cambodia remarked, as we drove down to Siem Reap, that you're seeing a lot fewer monks here than you used to. Her best guess as to why is peace and economic growth; becoming a monk is a way to survive when you have nowhere else to go.

I can't find any good figures on the number of monks in Cambodia. On the other hand, I can't find any good figures on anything here; even GDP figures are fairly crude guesses about what is going on. It's better to watch things like infant mortality and literacy, which are comparitively easy to count. And perhaps we should also be counting the number of orange-wrapped figures in every crowd.

Strike out

Ezra Klein points me to this interview with the folks from the Writer's Guild on the strike:

They sat there and camped at that point, waiting for us to bargain against ourselves and come back with "Please, sir, may I have another?" which is the way our bargaining had gone on for 20 years, when both our unions had chief negotiators that were much more simpatico with the other side and were willing to make a behind-the-scenes deal and make the process a lot less contentious. This time we have a union organizer in charge of our union [David Young, formerly of the Garment Workers, the Carpenters and other unions], they (SAG) have a linebacker [Doug Allen, a onetime member of the Buffalo Bills]. We've got a militancy that we didn't have previously, and that has made for a refusal to play by rules that don't help us win and don't help us get what we think is fair.

I find it interesting that the union is getting more militant just as their bargaining position gets weaker. There's competition from the web, and from DVDs of their old programs; frankly, I haven't watched television since I left the US, and haven't missed it. Yet the union's strategy is to become more militant. My sense is that this is a common pattern--that unions are often the most aggressive right before they expire. But I don't have any rigorous study to back this up.

Not that I think the writer's union will expire. But I should expect its power to wane over the next 20 years, as newer non-unionized outlets take up more and more space in peoples' lives. I wonder what they expect?

Cambodia: what's not to love?

Gigantic, scary cockroaches, that's what. I'm not saying they should keep you away, but those are the biggest damn cockroaches I've ever seen. I get all crawly just thinking about it.

Garmentos

With both countries growing so fast, it's tempting to view Cambodia as just a few rungs down the economic development ladder from Vietnam. One's heart longs to say, in fifteen years they'll be Vietnam; in 25, China; in 40, Japan. But this is one of the great fallacies of development economics.

The development in Vietnam is palpably organic. There are a huge number of bottlenecks, particularly ports, electricity, and human capital; but it seems clear that all these things are just a matter of time.

Cambodia's economic development, on the other hand, still feels distressingly fragile. It basically has one industry, the garment trade, which employs about 300,000 people (almost all of them young women), and probably supports about 10% of the population directly and indirectly. Almost everyone else makes their living in agriculture, with a small government elite, a smaller tourism community, and a tiny small business sector.

Most developing countries start with textiles, just as England did 200 years ago. But Cambodia's garment trade is incredibly dependent on special treatment from America, where it sells almost all its wares. Since the expiration of the Multi-Fiber Agreement in 2004, which imposed quotas on textiles in the developing world, countries like China and Vietnam have been subject to special, stopgap measures to dampen down the flood of textiles they can pour into Western markets. In exchange for enacting higher labor standards (and also for being really small and poor), Cambodia has been exempted from this treatment.

In theory, this is a bad thing; trade should go where the market dictates. In practice, it's hard to criticize something which is pulling a lot of very poor people into decent-paying jobs. And Cambodia's 14 million population can hardly be said to be doing serious damage to China, or even Vietnam.

No, the real problem is that those protectionist measures won't be in place forever. They're due to expire in 2008, though they may be extended, or something similar put in their place, by Congress (especially since we'll be in the runup to a presidential election). If they do expire, it's really not clear what happens to the Cambodian garment industry. Cambodia's infrastructure is in dire shape; its roads are poor, its ports are inadequate, and its power grid is direly underbuilt. Some factories here are setting up in special development zones near the Vietnamese border, so that they can bypass these problems by purchasing Vietnamese electricity and using the port in Ho Chi Minh City. If the quotas go away, it's not hard to believe that some of them will simply choose to eliminate the middleman and set up in Vietnam.

Of course, Vietnam, too, could use the industry; for all of Cambodia's need, it's hard to root against the needy of Vietnam. But Vietnam has an economy that is clearly (if slowly) building multi-sector organic capacity. Cambodia is just taking baby steps towards development. Hopefully, another ten years or so of US textile purchases will help them build some of that up.

There are a lot of cows in the Cambodian countryside, just like America. Unlike America, the cows are really, really skinny. Think Kate Moss on Atkins.

The difference is the diet; we feed our cattle a lot more to fatten them up. The cows here are for protein; the cows in the west are for fat, and flavor.

But I'm not sure why our dairy herds should be so much fatter. Cambodian farmers should, I think, be making roughly the same tradeoff between having more cows, or better fed cows, to maximize their milk yield per hectare. But clearly they're not.

Stalking silk

On our way down from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap today, we stopped at a silk farm for lunch. The making of silk is one of those things that could convert me to Intelligent Design, if they had it for societies, and if the US Congress weren't such an obvious counterexample.

The way you make silk is this: you hatch yourself some silkworms by catching the butterflies. You carefully feed these worms mulberry leaves for a few weeks, which makes them huge. When the worms change color, you know they're ready to spin a cocoon, so you carefully stick them in a bunch of tree branches to do their stuff.

Okay, this much you could probably figure out by watching nature. But then:

You have to kill the silkworms before they hatch; otherwise, they'll bust the single continuous fiber, many meters long, that makes one strand of silk. So you boil them alive, or dry them on a hot metal sheet in the sun. Then you carefully unwind that single strand, and bundle it together with 40-50 other strands to make a single silk thread. This doesn't look or feel anything like silk; there's some kind of glue on it, so the intermediate product has the look and feel of a coarse fiber such as hemp or straw. You get rid of the glue by boiling the thread for two hours in a solution of soda ash. Then, and only then, do you have a single silk thread.

I don't know about you, but I would have given up somewhere before boiling the silkworms alive. Given how little value the stuff has at the intermediate stages, how did we ever get to the final product? I'm seriously befuddled by human ingenuity.

On account

I am probably the only person in the world who could sit on a bus, admiring the lovely tropical scenery, and thinking about accounting, but there you are. The scenery here is amazing. But so is accounting.

I was thinking about it because the US-Vietnam trade council, which shepherded us around Vietnam in partnership with the German Marshall Fund, was telling us about the ways in which they're trying to help new entrepreneurs get a leg up. One of the items they mentioned was teaching them basic techniques like budgeting and accounting. Communist countries developed their own systems for tracking production, all of them thoroughly terrible. This is not precisely surprising in a place where prices are meaningless and your inventory management ledger is not a tool to be used but a barrier to be got around. Would-be Vietnamese entrepreneurs haven't the faintest clue how to run a for-profit enterprise. This is true of entrepreneurs in all countries, but unlike their counterparts abroad, the Vietnamese have nowhere in their own country to learn about such things. The situation in Cambodia, as you would imagine, is even worse.

We use accounting as a synonym for boring. Actually, it's not; it's fun in the same way that basic math is--if you do it right, everything smooths itself out into beautifully symmetrical answers. But more importantly, it's absolutely crucial to running any kind of a decent company, or economy. Accounting is just the sort of institution that development types are talking about when they say that "institutions matter". Accounting is the inherited wealth of generations of smart businessmen trying to make themselves smarter. You may think our great economic legacy is the factories and railroads and steel mills that litter the landscape, but it's not; it's the system by which we tell ourselves what we've got. Europe had all that other stuff basically bombed into nonexistance, and built it all back in a couple of decades. Places without decent accounting find it hard to get anything much more complicated than a Yak farm up and running. It's certainly not possible to have a capital market rich enough to fund a developed economy.

The developing world is lucky because it can import that human capital. Europe had to build it up over 500 years or so, which is why it took England a lot longer to get to $20,000 per capita GDP than it did Japan.

The most important remittance of migrants abroad may be the knowledge and expectations they bring back with them; Tyler Cowen argues that Mexico has now turned the corner economically because a critical mass of immigrants simply expects more from governance and social institutions. The Vietnamese diaspora to America is slowly bringing a similar stock of capital home. And places like Nike factories are continually upgrading the human capital stock at every level. We toured a factory yesterday, and while Nike worries about its turnover rates, which average about 25% a year, this is good news for Vietnam. Every worker who goes to another plant brings a little bit of institutional capital with them. Over time, they, more than the construction companies, will build the infrastructure of a developed economy.

God Bless America

Like most Americans, I came here expecting something north of gentle chaffing about our role in the region. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even in Hanoi, everyone was absurdly friendly to the Americans. Some of this is politeness--why bring ugly history up?--and more may be commercial desire; we buy an awful lot of stuff from them. Nike's operations alone account for nearly 10% of Vietnamese exports, and the Cambodian garment industry is built largely on the special American quotas that have diverted Chinese production here in exchange for higher labor standards. Everyone in the region is intensely interested in learning English.

But it isn't all simple politeness, or need. For some of the people around Ho Chi Minh City, of course, we were the good guys in the war; I spoke to a fair number of people who had relatives who had fled to the States after fighting on the South's side in the war. And in Cambodia, I'm told, Americans poll fantastically well; public approval seems to be in the 80-90% range. Even the older generation seems to think that what we did wrong was not invading, but leaving after we had.

Invidious comparison

According to at least a few people I talked to today, only about 10-15% of Cambodians have electricity. Nonetheless, everywhere I go, including NGO's, is excessively air conditioned. I'm probably more sensitive than most because I bask in heat--I only know one other person who actually likes DC in August. But there's something weird about discussing the fact that no one in the country has electricity while everyone in the room is wearing long sleeves to fend off the excessive air conditioning.

Youth is wasted on the young

I've been doing a lot of research on the problems of America's aging society, so it's funny for me to hear the development officials here stressing out because Cambodia's population is too young. A third of all Cambodians are under the age of fifteen. My first instinct, after agonizing about extended retirements, is to say "And this is a problem?" but demographic bulges can be difficult anywhere they come. No one here knows quite what they are going to do all these new people when they enter the workforce. The garment industry is the only significant industrial employer, and it only employs about 300,000 a year (though it probably supports 5-10 times that number). It cannot absorb this enormous demographic bulge by itself, but it's very unclear where else they can go--besides to other countries.

One odd side effect of the demographic bulge is that apparently, there is relatively little interest in the Khmer Rouge tribunal; as one source put it, "The OJ Simpson got more attention than this thing is attracting." Older people are intensely interested, not to say overjoyed. But most of the population is too young to remember the genocide, and apparently there is a tendency to deny that it can have been as bad as their parents say. That's a natural impulse, to be sure; did my mother really hike to school through snow drifts over her head? But in this case, it is eroding the public clamor for long-overdue justice.

Institutional

Building on the last post, travel in Cambodia really drives home the new development mantra that "institutions matter". The Khmer Rouge period wiped out, along with a sizeable chunk of the population, almost all of the inherited knowledge about how things run. Everything fell by the wayside, even simple agricultural techniques, which you would think would be the one thing that a forced agrarianism would have retained. The US ambassador, who is the master of the pithy pull quote, told us that Cambodia has gone from being a net exporter to an importer of food because "the Khmer Rouge killed everyone who knew how to plant rice or irrigate a field". Rice yields in the country are a fraction of those in neighboring nations.

There are advantages to this for Cambodia now; the bad was (mostly) wiped out along with the good, although endemic corruption is one thing that seems to have survived the Khmer Rouge demonstration; perhaps this tells you just how deeply it's hard wired into us. The upside is that the ambassador says he's never seen a country so open to criticism and help; they have no traditions left to protect. He offers their progress in fighting HIV/AIDS as an example; no one in Cambodia had any interest in denying that there was a problem, or arguing about using condoms, or sexual virtue.

Obviously, this would not justify the genocide even if it were all upside; and it isn't. The new openness is a thin thread of silver in an enormous, brooding cloud that still hangs over the entire country. Social and family cohesion is weak, land title is often settled by dispossessing the informal squatters into dire poverty, corruption is endemic, and Cambodia is decades behind its neighbours in development. Those decades are told in human indicators like the achingly beautiful little children on the street with tiny elfin features, and hair bleached nearly blond by malnutrition.

No justice, no peace

We've left Vietnam and are now in Cambodia, which makes Vietnam feel positively western. The hotel we are staying at in Phnom Penh feels like something straight out of the British Raj. Built in the 1920's, it is laden with dark wood, vast cool, echoing spaces, and a gorgeous terrace upon which we breakfasted this morning in the shade of palm trees. At night, mosquitoes buzz languorously about my room. I sleep covered in thin cotton sheets and a heavy application of Deep Woods Off. Malaria may not be much of a problem around here, but Dengue Fever is on the march.

Obviously, the main piece of news here is the Khmer Rouge tribunal. 30 years later, Cambodia is seeking justice for Pol Pot's monstrous experiment.

The tribunal has been long awaited, but that doesn't mean it has been greeted with excitement in all quarters. Many of the human rights advocates who have been pushing for it have now washed their hands of the matter, declaring that it is going to be a farce. Cambodia's judicial system is in it's infancy; no one's clear on whether it can handle this trial.

The US government has so far declined to fund the tribunals, which was a big topic of discussion today when we met with the US Ambassador. So far the American State Department has not certified the tribunal's judicial setup to Congress (a prerequisite for obtaining funding). There are a lot of worries about the tribunal's french-style setup, which gives judges more leeway and permits the tribunal to somewhat curtail transparency--many of the documents, for example, will apparently not be released to the public. Nonetheless, one US official indicated that the embassy has recommended certification to Washington.

But that leaves problems with the administrative side: there have been allegations of corruption, specifically that some of the tribunal staff are unqualified, and have obtained their jobs through patronage or purchase. So it's not clear that the American government will come through with funds even if the judicial side gets the good housekeeping seal of approval.

Everyone we've spoken to so far has emphasized the shocking, nearly unique, absence of strong institutions in Cambodia. As the ambassador told us, "When the Khmer Rouge said they would take this country back to Year Zero, they did it." The country is still passing thousands of laws a year and struggling with land reform to replace just the basic legal infrastructure that was destroyed when Pol Pot came to power.

Cambodia needs to build its institutions for a lot of reasons--economic growth, democratic principle, social re-engagement--but this tribunal highlights the shortfall in a particularly painful way. It's very possible that it would be more effective five or ten years from now, when the government has had some chance to make headway on anti-corruption efforts and judicial procedures are more established. But "more effective" at what? Justice is now racing against time; the perpetrators are in their sixties, or later, in a country where life expectancies are under fifty. The deaths of over a million Cambodians demand some answer while the prosecution can still do something to the perpetrators besides spit on their graves.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Sayeth the Wall Street Journal:

MEANS-TESTING GAINS in both parties as long-term entitlement fix.

Republican Sen. Ensign of Nevada pushes plan to charge affluent beneficiaries more for Medicare prescription-drug coverage. "It makes no sense for Bill Gates's father to have his prescription drugs paid for by a schoolteacher or a firefighter or a police officer," the senator says.

Though he hasn't yet attracted majority support -- much less the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster -- his approach mirrors a presidential campaign push by Democrats Obama and Edwards on Social Security. They would bolster solvency by taxing the wealthiest more, while exempting those with incomes of between $97,000 and $200,000.

It is very uncommon to refer to increases in the income tax--which is essentially what Obama favors--as means testing.

Personally, I think means testing is long overdue, but by itself, it won't do that much to solve the problem. A super-agressive tax increase might put Social Security on an actuarially sound basis for years to come, but if you want to concentrate them on very wealthy families, as Democrats do, you're talking increases in the ugly area of the Laffer Curve just to fix one old-age program--leaving the bigger problem, Medicare, untouched.

Similarly, means-testing Medicare is a fine idea, but the proposals generally involve bouncing only a very small cost reduction. Medicare is even less amenable to means-testing than Social Security, because the benefits aren't tied to income. You don't consume twice as many drugs just because you're rich*, so bouncing the relatively small number of rich people out of the programme produces a correspondingly small decrease in the bill.

*Well, unless you happen to live in certain parts of Florida, but even there, unnecessary surgeries and tests are more the done thing

Everybody does it

Honestly, the question-planting thing just doesn't strike me as interesting. Politicians rarely say anything worth hearing whether they're answering your questions or someone else's. On the scale of political sins, this is somewhere between mopery and forgetting to turn off the lights.

Epigram of the day

The government can't fix society for the same reason that you can't remove your own appendix.

No comment

From Scott Adams:

I know I’ve been typecast because a hundred people sent me a story about a man in India who married a dog to atone for his past mistakes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071113/ap_on_fe_st/india_man_weds_dog

A number of things struck me about this wedding. I shall start with the most obvious jokes first.

The report was quick to mention that the dog is female. That was a relief because allowing a man to marry a gay dog would be a slippery slope.

More night thoughts

Thank God for Skype. Thanks to Skype, I can call everyone I miss back home. (Well, almost everyone: the rest of you, the postcards are on the way).

But it's no substitute for being there, y'know? I'm just saying: it'll be a cold day in hell before this replaces personal contact.

Thought for the day

From Cranky Professor:

[The problem with} this architecture of the mind, conceptual art we're forced to live in, is that it ages especially poorly. Imagine these 'ugly junctions' after the funicular has been running for a few years, jostling, shaking, and generally loosening up fitted panels - and the expense of replacing those unique glass panels when they have problems!

Scale matters

In an altogether excellent piece on medical innovation, Tyler Cowen notes:

The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected from Congress. It is not a success which can easily be replicated. The more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence allocation. We should guard this feature of the system jealously and try to learn from it. If we can.

This is a seriously, seriously underrated factor in public policy analysis, and I include the libertarian variety. The fact that you can do something awesome with $15 million does not mean that you could do something super-awesome with $150 million. It may simply not be possible to broaden what you are doing very much before countervailing forces--such as congressional interference (Exhibit A: the goddamn Acela)--kick in.

Since we've been talking a lot recently about vouchers, education is one area where this is fairly easy to see. You get a pilot program: a curriculum, a teaching method, a high-intensity preschool program (such as the Perry program) for disadvantaged kids. You do a rigorous study of that pilot. It produces terrific results. Naturally, we should roll it out everywhere!

Not so fast. That pilot program has a huge administrative staff whose sole incentive is to ensure that it is meticulously carried out. In the real world, that curriculum will be put into place by an administrator whose priority list is crowded with everything from mollifying the latest lunatic on the school board, to ensuring that she gets out of town for a three day weekend with her new boyfriend who she really thinks may be The One.

That pilot program is staffed with a narrow band of extremely highly qualified teachers, sifted from the best the environment has to offer. In the real world, whoever happens to be standing in front of the classroom come September 5th has to do it, even if they flunked Remedial Math four times and only got this job because the school board needed a body.

That pilot program is rigidly policed for deviations from standard procedure, because deviations will kill the accuracy of the result. In the real world, tranquilizing the kid who just pulled a knife during study hall may take priority.

The pilot program is supported by a crack team that will move heaven and earth to ensure its completion; if funds are tight, they will not sleep until they have procured another grant. In the real world, it's probably less important than redecorating the teacher's lounge.

The pilot program has buy in from all participants; schools, teachers or students who don't like it, don't believe in it, or don't want it anyway, have already naturally dropped out of the sample. They will thus be striving to actually put it into place as closely as possible as described in the prospectus. In the real world 60% of everyone will think this is a moronic idea, and most of the rest will strenuously resent the intrusion on their autonomy.

Result: what worked beautifully in pilot will generally fail miserably in wider execution.

In business, these facts are summed up (over and over) with the dolorous mantra: didn't scale. In the public sector, that realization is still coming very hard.

Tradition for thee, but not for me

We went to visit a high school today; one that aims to prepare elite Vietnamese students for the post-WTO world by ditching the passive rote style favored by many Asian educational institutions for a more interactive, American style of teaching.

I do not venture to say whether or not this will be successful, though the students were extraordinarily bright and engaging and nice; one shudders to think what would have happened had a gaggle of Asian journalists who spoke no English invaded a posh suburban high school in America. But one, completely unrelated thing stuck out:

The girls have three uniforms.

They have ordinary uniforms that look much like American school unifroms of an earlier era: blue skirt and white middy shirt with blue ties.

They have dress uniforms, consisting of a white skirt and white middy shirt with red trim and a red tie, and a fairly snazzy red beret to rest on top.

Then they have traditional white ao dais. What are those for, I asked.

Those are for Mondays, I was told. Mondays, apparently, are when the school salutes the flag and sings the national anthem.

And do the boys have a special uniform for Mondays?

Giggles. Nooooooooooooo. The boys always wear the same short-sleeved shirt, blue pants, and tie.

This is a really common pattern in almost every non-western country; the girls wear traditional clothes, while the men wear western suits and ties. It is not universal, but it is nearly universal enough to make me ask what integral part of the human psyche this stands in for, the men wearing the garb of the economically successful, while the women remain mannequins for the past.

I think the ao dais are much more attractive than western school uniforms (and don't get me started on the dress policies of the Riverdale Country School. But surely the men would look equally fetching in whatever the Vietnamese elite males wore 200 years ago?

Puppy!

My mother just got word that my family will probably be allowed a new puppy from a bullmastiff litter. There is, quite seriously, just about nothing in the entire world as cute as a bullmastiff newborn. Please join us in rejoicing.

Night thoughts

I had an interesting discussion recently about the 2008 election. Reliable Democrats seem so certain that it's a lock that it doesn't matter who they nominate. Nomination thus becomes a form of self-expression; and the self they seemingly most want to express is "Screw you, Republican jerks". Since Hillary Clinton best fills that bill, then she should be the nominee. The belief that she, alone, can best put the screws to Republicans, and therefore she, alone, must be the nominee, seems surprisingly common.

Mayhap. After my expressive dissonance on vouchers, I can hardly claim that self-expression is an illegitimate function of political discourse.

However.

I am put in mind of an aphorism I inherited from wise ancestors: the wheel goes 'round and 'round, and sooner or later, the fly on top is going to be the fly on the bottom. In political cycles, these days, that wheel seems to be spinning with peculiar alacrity.

Are we really so sure that America, in a year, will hate Republicans quite as much as it does now? Might it not be that if Iraq settles down--as it seems to be doing, whatever the reason (and forcible ethnic sorting strikes me as the most likely one)--and the economy mysteriously fails to go into recession, that the Democrats might have a bit more of a struggle than they are currently anticipating? It seems to me much more likely than not that America will have either a recession, or a bloody ongoing battle in Iraq, or both. Nonetheless: always have Plan B, said another wise ancestor. What's Plan B, if the economy and Iraq are both all right in time for Clinton v. Giuliani 2008?

Power to the people, Part II

Being in Vietnam makes visible the conflict that we're facing over global warming. Ordinary lifestyles here are very low-energy. Especially outside of Ho Chi Minh City, the primary mode of transport is the scooter, bicycle, or farm animal. Electrification has reached most, but not all, of the country, and few people can afford the panoply of appliances that make American lifestyles so energy intensive. I've flown into two cities at night now, and both times, the surprising fact is how dim they look from the sky.

But making their lives more energy intensive means burning more fossil fuels. Particularly in the early stages of development, it means burning nasty, polluting, carbon-emitting anthracite coal, which Vietnam not only uses for its own electricity, but increasingly exports to China. Vietnam has just about as many people in it as Germany, emitting a fraction of the carbon. Even if Germany cut its emissions in half, or more, it would not make up for Vietnam's industrialization.

I saw a farmer today peddling a cow to market in a trailer attached to his bicycle. This engendered considerable confusion--on my family's farms, the principle has always been that the animals expend energy to move you around, not vice versa. But it also speaks volumes as to just how much more energy the Vietnamese people could stand to consume.

Power to the people

Vietnamese growth potential is huge, but so are the potential bottlenecks. Perhaps the biggest one is skilled labor; firms are overbidding each other for a limited supply of college graduates. Some of the entrepreneurs we interviewed in higher-skilled sectors like IT reported that wages doubled last year. A little of this was clawed back by double-digit inflation, but most of that is pure gain. Workers down the value chain, by contrast, seem to be seeing increases on the order of 12-15%. That implies real wage growth of several percent a year, which is nothing to sneeze at, but not the boom that the educated workers are seeing.

The government is hoping to fill the gap with private schools (indeed, it has no choice; taxes are already very high for a poor country). Meanwhile, however, the energy market is cramping the boom from the infrastructure side. Electricity prices are controlled here, and as usual when that is the case, conservation is not exactly a watchword. The grid is maxed out, and the state electric utility, which has been cross-subsidizing rising fossil fuel generation prices out of its cheap hydro power, has apparently reached its financial limits. But decontrolling energy and fuel prices is politically very tricky, and it's not clear that there's the will to do so; the people we've interviewed are talking about full deregulation sometime in 2030.

There will not be industrial growth, or substantial further poverty reduction, without more energy. But without market pricing, they won't get it.

The beginning of the end of history

There's a natural tendency to blame Vietnamese poverty on the legacy of communism, and of course, some of that is fair. Vietnam suffers in many ways from the legacy of state-owned enterprises; things like financial markets, and financial accounting, are still novelties that budding capitalists are struggling to get the hang of. And corruption, which is such a big problem that it is actually mentioned as something that needs fixing by government officials we interview, is undoubtedly at least partly attributable to the insanities of a non-market system.

But in fact, Vietnam is mostly just poor because it's poor, just as it's always been poor--and just as the overwhelming majority of the human race has always been poor. Driving through the agricultural areas around Hanoi this afternoon, I was put in mind of a Chinese Communist propaganda film from the early 1950's, a screening of which I stumbled into one rainy London afternoon. It was, like all such films, filled with happy workers living in the soon-to-be bright communist future . . . all of them singing merrily as they reaped the many material and spiritual rewards of living in a collectivist society where no grain of rice went to feed the evil capitalist overlord.

What was surprising was not the obvious untruth of the promises, but how meagre they were. In the bright Communist future, there will be new roads . . . constructed by thousands of men digging out the hillside by hand. When the farmworkers pole out in flat boats to collect seaweed, everyone gets a brand new net. And the collectivist farm is going to have some tractors, driven by a tractor-controlling elite that (at least to judge from the plot) never marries outside the caste.

They were painting a vision of an impossibly bright future that would hardly have done for a weekend backpacking trip on the other side of the Pacific.

Communism stalled progress, but unlike in many parts of Eastern Europe, it didn't actually reverse it. And judging by the enthusiasm for education and human capital acquisition (one entrepreneur simultaneously advocated more spending on socialized medicine . . . and raising school fees so that there would be more money in the educational system) it seems likely to be a fairly temporary delay at that.

They might be giants, Part II

At the garment factory today, they were handing out men's shirts as parting gifts. I didn't queue up, as they seemed likely to be a tad voluminous, but at the end they had one left over: a size 45 shirt of rather bold multicolored stripes. One of the men we'd been interviewing rushed up and pressed it upon me. I tried to explain that even I did not wear a men's XXL--no, not even in Vietnamese sizes.

"No, no, for your husband!" he said.

Again, I tried to demur.

"For him," he said firmly. "Your husband is very tall. VERY tall. He can wear."

It seemed heartless to refuse someone who had tapped so directly into my mother's fantasy life.

Next door neighbors

The one question everyone here wants answered--including the Vietnamese--is how Vietnam will manage to compete with China. China's mountainous economies of scale loom over every discussion; Vietnam has no offsetting advantages to speak of. Vietnamese economists and trade officials speak of moving up the value chain, but while this works in domestic markets, where Chinese imports are usually on the very cheapest end of the market, it's not clear how that will translate into the export market.

Moreover, China uses its vast market power to bullyrag its neighbours, and those who would trade with them--the dispute over the Spratlys is the most prominent recent example. Everyone here seems very conscious that the 600 pound gorilla in the neighbourhood could come down hard on them at any moment.

On the other hand, China's rapid growth may be pulling its neighbors along with it. Moreover, the trade officials I've spoken to have been shockingly willing (for trade officials) to consider that providing cheap goods to their country's consumers might be, well, a good thing. One nice man went on at considerable length about the many consumer benefits of cheap motorcycles--less for the opportunity to buy one, than because the competition has forced down the price of the Japanese models (assembled in Vietnam) that he prefers.

And Vietnam does have one comparative advantage I can think of: it isn't so big. To be sure, it's been saddled with textile limits, but it isn't the target of the kind of ire that China's enormous market draws. It's not unreasonable to hope that the 600 pound gorilla may attract the attention of all the big game hunters in the anti-dumping movement, leaving the Vietnamese to trade in peace.

They might be giants

I am starting to feel as if I should just shout "Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum!" before I enter a room here. People back home stare occasionally, but here a near-majority point and chatter. Their eyes, meltingly, ask a question they have neither the courage, nor the English, to speak out loud. I cannot bear to deny them.

"188 centimeters," I say. It took me ten minutes to work out the first time, but now I'm practiced. Their eyes widen, as if I had suddenly gotten even taller. Smiles. Giggles.

"My God, you very tall girl."

"Yes," I agree. "Very tall."

Perhaps it was unwise to pack so many high heels. And what could I have been thinking when I tossed in the turquoise suede platforms?

Friends don't let friends beer goggle . . .

Ezra Klein speculates on the reality of the "beer goggle" effect:

I hadn't thought the beer goggles effect was real -- rather, I'd assumed the effect was a mixture of lowered social reserve (and thus reduced fear of social opprobrium) and higher horniness, which combined to overcome qualms you'd otherwise have about a potential partner.

In fact, I'm still not convinced the effect is real, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's a function of people being more interested in hooking up with each other, and thus mistaking attraction for attractiveness.

I'd say Ezra's onto something. Evidence: approaching thirty seems to have exactly the same effect. Followed by a sobering-up period as you observe what sort of marriages this seems to produce.

A whiter shade of pale

This is weird, and not terribly uncommon, as far as I can tell: Caucasian mannequins. They seem to be prevalent even in stores that look like they cater to the Vietnamese. I have no idea what this means, but I'm sure someone must know.

Public service announcement

Twenty-four hours worth of travel time gives one a lot of time for thinking, even with a new Nintendo DS Lite (sent to me, weirdly, as a free gift by Comcast). A lot of what I thought about was this blog, and the occasionally wearying job of political debate. The night before I left, I had a conversation with a friend about the practice of calling people closet cases, which he mildly defended by asserting that excessive protestations against homosexuality are often a way to bolster one's masculinity.

My point, which I stand by, is that calling someone a [censored] does not, in fact, advance the debate. I can think of no circumstances under which someone who is concerned about appearing too feminine will be moved to change his views because you called him a big, fat nancy-boy. Even if it were true, the effect of insulting someone on this level is never to cause them to reexamine their position; instead, it energizes them to seek out reasons that you're wrong, and moreover, a huge jerk whose other ideas are probably equally moronic.

In general, you don't imply that someone's gay because you think it might lead to a change of heart; you imply that they're gay because it's fun to tweak people with whom you disagree so vehemently. Indulging in this form of name calling feels good, but it's ultimately counterproductive--firstly, because in this case, it does help sustain the notion that calling someone "gay" is some kind of insult; and second, because it just makes everyone angrier. And anger is something that we're currently a bit oversupplied with.

Remember that scene in Conan the Barbarian* where he is asked about the purpose of life, and he responds

To destroy your enemies, raze their villages and hear the lamentations of their women.

There you have too much of the blogosphere in a nutshell. It is perhaps cathartic, but it doesn't particularly serve the ostensible point of all of this, which is the free exchange of ideas. If all I wanted to do was insult people, I could just spend the day riding mass transit, which offers an equally rich source of targets without the risk of carpal tunnel.

* Of course you do

Travel in a time of cholera

Another bit of authentic excitement for us tourists: northern Vietnam is having a cholera outbreak. The hotel is sliding elaborate warnings under our doors about twice a day:

Cholera is an intestinal infection. The bacterium is spread through food or water that has been contimated by the feces of an infected person. One to five days after infection, patients develop severe, painless, watery diarrhea, often called "rice-water" stools. Vomiting also occurs in most patients.

Usually, the symptoms are relatively mild and respond to oral rehydration. Severe cases of cholera (10-20%) can cause life-threatening dehydration. . .

All travellers to Vietnam should pay strict attention to hygeine and be vigilant in their choice of food and water.

Drink only boiled or bottled water, water that has been treated with chlorine or iodine, or carbonated beverages.

Aboid ice, as it may have been made with unsafe water.

Choose food that has been thoroughly cooked while fresh and is served hot.

Avoid street vendors, pre-peeled fruit or salad, fish and shellfish.

I was halfway through my salad at lunch today when I remembered this injunction. I kept eating on the theory that if I'd gotten cholera, I already had it, so I might as well enjoy it.

The food in Vietnam, incidentally, has the highest average quality of any place I've ever travelled*. Even the rubber chicken meals at the press club are actually worth eating.

*Some friends may recall my rhapsodies over Vienna, but this does not count. Since I am no longer able, for various reasons, to spend four solid days eating nothing but pastry, the comparison is not fair.

You say "cheating", I say "price discrimination"

Is it even really cheating when taxi drivers charge tourists more? My mother clearly thought so, and nearly made us miss our plane by getting into a fight with a taxi driver on the way to the airport. But it doesn't bother me that much. In the case of Vietnam (not so much in Greece), the "cheating" will not make so much as a ripple in my budget, while making the cab driver much better off. It seems less like cheating than Pareto optimisation. I don't see any moral reason why I should be treated exactly the same as a native Vietnamese, since after all, I won't be, when we show up at JFK and wave our respective passports.

The view from my window:

Hanoi, 1 pm

The Visible Hand

The effect of all those high-octane Western diets is very obvious in one way: I am a giant among women here. I presume that all tourists who walk into the stores here are followed by one or more of the multitude of store clerks who seem to sit there waiting for the sporadic traffic. But I suspect that they aren't usually the object of regard by all the other giggling, pointing attendants.

In a triumph of optimism, none of them can quite bring themselves to believe that no, their clothes really won't fit me. They go on all right, since I'm at least normal weight (I have no idea what heavy women do here.) But if they don't catch somewhere around the elbows, stranding the garment halfway over my head, I inevitably find that the waist is eight inches too high, and my not-terribly-broad shoulders strain the seams. The unoccupied clerks giggle harder as two or three now very worried shopworkers delicately peel the clothes back over my head, holding their breath as they wait for the terrible ripping sound. So far, luckily, it hasn't come, but I've largely given up shopping for apparel. My new focus is silk scarves, which even here are one-size-fits-all.

Monday science blogging

I don't know anything about science, so I pass you on to someone who does for this puzzler:

As you root through genomic sequences - and there are more and more of them to root through these days - you come across some stretches of DNA that hardly seem to vary at all. The hard-core "ultraconserved" parts, first identified in 2004, are absolutely identical between mice, rats, and humans. Our last common ancestor was rather a long time ago (I know, I know - everyone works with some people who seem to be exceptions, but bear with me), so these things are rather well-preserved.

Even important enzyme sequences vary a bit among the three species, so what could these pristine stretches (some of which are hundreds of base pairs long) be used for? The assumption, naturally, has been that whatever it is, it must be mighty important, but if we're going to be scientists, we can't just go around assuming that what we think must be right. A team at Lawrence Berkeley and the DOE put things to the test recently by identifying four of the ultraconserved elements that all seem to be located next to critical genes - and deleting them.

The knockout mice turned out to do something very surprising indeed. They were born normally, but then they grew up normally. When they reached adulthood, though, they were completely normal. Exhaustive biochemical and behavioral tests finally uncovered the truth: they're basically indistinguishable from the wild type. Hey, I told you it was surprising.

Isn't it quaint?

Vietnam is unbelievably picturesque. At least here in Hanoi, there are loads of women still wearing those pointy straw hats, and presumably not just because they know how much the Western tourists enjoy all this authenticity. The streets are also filled with women carrying baskets suspended on the ends of traditional yokes, such as the one pictured at right. The cognitive dissonance inspired by watching these women weave in and out of the motorbike traffic offers a slight thrill to camera-happy tourists like me.

But that thrill really isn't very thrilling when I stop to think about it. The labor productivity implied by all that basket-carrying is bleak in the extreme. For the last twenty-four hours, I've found it hard to venture outside of my (extremely overpriced, thoroughly Westernized, lovely and modern) hotel without mentally calculating the average hourly wage implied by a three-dollar, ten minute cab ride, or a woman hauling two meager baskets of cucumbers to a bustling street corner where she can squat and sell them for hours.

The figures I get mesh roughly with Vietnam's official per-capita GDP of about $800 a year. Many things such as real estate are cheaper, here, of course, so that figure isn't quite an accurate gauge of living standards. Purchasing power parity calculations put the actual standard of living at somewhere around $4,000 a year. It's hard for an American to imagine that sort of grinding poverty; it is a material standard of living lower than that enjoyed by the average homeless person back home (though of course homeless people suffer many other maladies that do not afflict the ordinary Vietnamese). One way to think about it is this: the economic types we've met with repeatedly state, as if it were not particularly interesting, that the average person in Vietnam spends the majority of their budget on food. That figure in the United States, even for poor families, is less than 20%--and that to procure a diet that is lavishly oversupplied with calories and protein.

The sight of people carrying goods in traditional ways, selling produce off the backs of bicycles, looks terribly romantic. I walked past two tourists today who were agreeably chatting about how beautiful and sustainable it all is. But it's hard to find anything romantic about human beings using themselves as mules.

I know when I'm bested

I hereby vow not to discuss literature with Alex Massie, even when I've actuallyr ead the works in question. Well played, sir.

Welcome to Hanoi

It is safe to say that Hanoi is not yet a tourist mecca, much less a commercial city. The people here are almost unbearably friendly, especially considering our little dustup 30-some years ago, and this makes it hard to treat tourists in the customary manner.

I had to get a photo taken yesterday for my Cambodian visa, which brought me to a tiny camera store located behind my hotel. The place was perhaps eight feet wide, and stocked largely with rolls of film, plus about eight Vietnamese people waiting on me. They offered me tea and a cigarette, and charged me $1.50 for the photo. Given the price of photo paper and color ink, if they do this for all of their customers, their profit margin must be a few cents.

The taxi drivers, too, have not yet got the hang of tourism. They take a deep breath and quote a price twice the going rate, which works out to perhaps an extra dollar.

I'm told Saigon is more what I'm used to in the way of tourist traps. I find out on Tuesday.

Why are Hollywood unions so powerful?

Alex Tabarrok asks and answers.

One thing I think he doesn't emphasize enough: the entertainment unions have been clever enough to give their members no incentive to defect. Unlike in many unions, top members are not slaves to seniority or scale. The unions set a floor on talent pay that is low enough that it does not come out of the pay of the stars. The ultimate cost of the high union scale is probably paid by consumers of extremely low budget indie films that now have to be made without union talent; this makes the cost of unionization the next best thing to invisible, and college students with excessive tattooing are at any rate not a very powerful constituency against a union.

It's not theft, it's capitalism!

Ezra approvingly cites Atrios saying:

I'm always surprised how many people fail to be sympathetic to striking workers simply because they perceive them to be "well-paid." Certainly one can always find a more worthy cause, a more desperate case, someone more "deserving." But ultimately this is about whether management gets to screw workers, and that's something we can all be concerned about whether it's janitors, Hollywood writers, or even millionaire baseball players.

The main issues for the WGA are rather simple - when the studios repackage their work until the end of time in new and exciting media formats, how much residuals should they get (if any). If you fail to "sympathize" with striking writers, you think that management should just expropriate the value of their work forever. In other words, you sympathize with management.

This is rather a creative use of the word "expropriation". The writers have a contract. They are selling a product--the right to their work--to the studios. The writers would like to sell this product on more generous terms; the studios would like to buy it on less generous terms. If either party is dissatisfied with the terms, it can refuse to enter the transaction. No one is stealing from anyone else, except in the sense that the shopowner I purchased eyeglasses from yesterday "expropriated" several hundred dollars from me, when I would much rather have had the eyeglasses for free.

I don't have a dog in this fight; I think both the companies and the writers are entitled to negotiate as hard as they like. I'm betting on the writers, though. How many more reality television programs and Law and Order reruns can America consume?

I'm also upping my Netflix subscription. Luckily, I haven't even started Lost or Babylon 5 . . .

The past is another country

I'm currently reading Since Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's chronicle of the 1930s. Towards the end, there's a fascinating passage about that crazy noise the kids these days are listening to:

Among many of the jitterbugs--particularly among many of the boys and girls--the appreciation of the new music was largely vertebral. A good swing band smashing away at full speed, with the trumpeters and clarinetists rising in turn under the spotlight to embroider the theme with their several furious improvisations and the drummers going into long-drawnout rhythmical frenzies, could reduce its less inhibited auditors to sheer emotional vibration, punctuated by howls of rapture. Yet to dismiss the swing craze as a pure orgy of sensation would be to miss more than half of its significance. For what the good bands produced--though it might sound to the unpracticed ear like a mere blare of discordant noise--was an extremely complex and subtle pattern, a full appreciation of which demanded far more musical sophistication than the simpler popular airs of a preceding period. The true swing enthusiasts, who collected records to teh limit of their means and not only like Artie Shaw's rendering of "Begin the Beguine" but knew precisely why they liked it, were receiving no mean musical education; and if Benny Goodman could turn readily from the playing of "Don't Be That Way" to the playing of Mozart, so could many of his hearers turn to the hearing of Mozart.

It seems literally impossible for us to hear swing the way Frederick Lewis Allen did--for our brains to render Begin the Beguine, or Don't Be That Way, or even Sing, Sing, Sing as a "mere blare of discordant noise". They sound smooth, sweet, nostalgic because we're trained from birth to understand those sounds, not only through the music, but through all the associations our culture has built up around those sounds. I've been downloading some of the popular music from 1912, the year Allen graduated college, in an attempt to get myself in that frame of mind, but after several listens through hits like Back to the Land of Golden Dreams I'm afraid it's impossible. Especially the noisy kids downstairs won't turn down that crazy hip-hoppety stuff they listen to.

I made the Times

The debate between Mark Schmitt and me on vouchers made the Times.

Suddenly Susan

A friend and I were just talking about Susan Faludi's dreadful sounding book, The Terror Dream, in which she apparently argues that 9/11 was an excuse to push women back into the kitchen. The New York Times book review is savage, making it sound as if Faludi has taken one tiny core kernel of truth--that 9/11 caused women's issues to recede into the background, along with every other issue that didn't involve religious fanatics who wanted to blow up Americans--and enlarged it 80 or 90 times until the whole thing is a vast right-wing conspiracy to do women wrong. I am working on my own book proposal, Ring of Fire, in which I explore the myriad ways in which the 9/11 backlash prevented my landlord from repairing my malfunctioning stove burner.

This brought us to Susan Faludi's home page. Apparently the best pull quote she could come up with is one from a Newsday reviewer, which celebrates Ms. Faludi's allegedly elegant prose by attempting to pen one of the worst sentences in the history of the english language:

“Journalism is her splendid trade. Susan Faludi listens like a tuning fork, and picks up unseen vibrations. There’s not a subject that she touches on that she doesn’t illuminate in prose as graceful as a gazelle.”

It's because I <i>care</i>

A while back I wrote:

It is astonishing how often I have arguments about environmental issues, and a few others, in which I state a belief that the political and economic realities mean that some pet solution won't happen, and am rewarded with an angry/exasperated "Well, then how do you plan to fix the problem?" It is as if they believed that to state a problem, is also to imply a solution.

There are plenty of problems in the world, from unrequited love to people with stubbornly obnoxious beliefs, that I have no plans to fix because the solutions, if there are any, seem self-evidently worse than the problems they would replace. Yet many people seem to believe that if I refuse to state such a plan, or agree to theirs, it must be because I don't want to solve the problem--that I hate people who are unlucky in love, or the environment, or at the very least selfishly wish to continue harming same--rather than from any honest belief that sometimes life's a bugger and there's not much you can do about it.

Julian Sanchez has come up with a more pithy name for this phenomenon: the care bear stare.

For those of you who didn't grow up (or have small children) in the 80s, the reference at the close of the previous post is to the cartoon Care Bears. The Care Bear Stare was a sort of deus ex machina the magical furballs could employ when faced with some insuperable obstacle: They'd line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem.

In politics, Matt Yglesias has identified the neocon's version of the Care Bear Stare, which he's dubbed the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. It holds that, like a Green Lantern's power ring, the American military can produce just about any effect imaginable if only the Will of the American People is strong enough. When any foreign intervention fails, this is proof that our will was insufficient, presumably due to the malign influence of fifth columnists in the media.

The left, of course, has its own version, which can be seen in claims that we know perfectly well how to solve problem X, if only we cared enough or had the political will to address it. A common variant holds that some vital function can't be left to the market, since only government can guarantee the right result, presumably by putting the word "guarantee" somewhere in the relevant legislation.

Saving Social Security

This article by Paul Starr makes the central error that comes over and over again in liberal analyses of Social Security*: it acts as if the general budget problem arrives at the same time as social security's budget problem.

This is wrong. The budget problem isn't in 2041; the budget problem is now. Sometime after next year, the Social Security surplus will shrink, starting to put pressure on the budget. Democrats trying to implement spending plans will start to find their tax increases eaten, not by national health care, but by seniors. By 2011, the problem will be large. By 2017, money will be flowing from the general fund to social security. By 2025, the hole will be about as big as it's going to get. Around about 2015, social progressive plans will be DOA. Republican tax schemes will be DOA. The only thing we will talk about for the following 15 years is where to find the money to pay for Social Security and Medicare.

Nor can we save money on Medicare as national healthcare advocates have suggested; aside from fairly trivial savings on pharmaceuticals which are likely to cost money in the long run by stifling innovation (drugs save money by replacing expensive procedures), Medicare already has all the advantages we've been promised in a national system. Its costs are still skyrocketing.

The problem that Starr identifies is real, however: raising the payroll tax cap is an enormous tax increase on high earners. You can have that, or you can repeal the Bush tax cuts; if you do both, you're talking about a marginal tax increase of more than 20 percentage points. I know I keep pounding the point that at American levels of taxation, the Laffer curve promise of higher revenue on lower rates doesn't apply. Well, at 55%, it's plausible to believe that it *does* apply. There is a limit to how much you can raise taxes on the rich.

But where he's wrong is to think that Democrats have some choice in the matter. They don't. They, like their political opponents, are going to see most of their dreams crash on the shoals of the Baby Boomer retirement.

* The mirror-image conservative error is thinking it matters whether the Social Security Administration is technically solvent

Stop! Before it's too late!

No, Brian, nothing you learn from Linda Hirshman is going to help your love life. Trust me on this. You're much better off with tried-and-true remedies like doing the dishes after supper and making thoughtful little phone calls at odd hours.

The rich really are different: they live in Chuck Schumer's district

Henry Farrell calls this op-ed from Heritage's Michael Franc a steaming heap of buffalo dung for claiming:

A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from mega-millionaire hedge fund managers.

The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: “The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed.”

Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new “party of the rich”. More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers – single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 – and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.

Says Mr Farrell:

If it is true that Democrats tend to represent richer districts, both basic logic and an elementary grasp of statistics should tell you that this does not imply that they represent richer voters. Indeed, not only does it not imply this, we know that it isn’t true.

I think this might be a tad out of date; as pointed out in his comments, Pew research seems to show Democrats slightly outpolling Republicans at the very top of the income scale. But the bigger problem is that this confuses the voting base with the constituency. Democrats indisputably represent more rich voters than Republicans; their constituency is the people in their district, not the people in their district who voted for them.

Moreover, politically, this matters a great deal. The guy from Heritage is actually making a good point: the constituency of the Democrats will force many of them to support the interests of the rich, even where they might ideologically prefer to oppose, because doing so is good for their district. Voters, especially poor voters, are highly influenced by local economic conditions. It is thus in Chuck Schumer's strong political interest to keep the financial services industry happy, whether or not they vote for him. Ditto Nancy Pelosi and Silicon Valley. Thus the current quandary on carried hedge fund interest.

The Democratic leadership seems to be increasingly drawn from its most affluent districts, because those districts are where the money is. This means that the Democratic Party as a whole will increasingly serve the interests of the affluent, even if the rich people in those particular districts don't vote for those politicians. Personally, as I said on Bloggingheads, I don't think this is that big a problem; rich voters are few enough that the service is likely to take the form of small but annoying items like the carried interest tax. But I can see why it worries Paul Krugman.

Doc in a box

I just made an appointment with one of those free-for-all clinics where you can get into see a doctor immediately, so long as you aren't picky about which doctor. This is all part of my frantic attempt to ready myself for Vietnam: antimalarial meds, ho!

I am solemnly informed that this is not the right way to get medical care; I should have a primary care physician who really knows my case well. But this does not actually describe any primary care physician I have ever had, who was reading off the chart just like a perfect stranger would have. Not only did my physicians clearly recall nothing about me; in many cases, I had to remind them of the details of my chart. So can any of my readers tell me what actual good having a single primary care physician, rather than just any old doctor at a walk-in clinic, makes?

The joys of ownership

Having decided not to buy a car because of the expense of operating and maintaining the thing, I was slightly distressed to hear that my bike needed to go into the shop for work. Just as with a car, I have absolutely no idea whether it actually needed the front hub realignment they gave me along with the replaced spoke I came in for. The nice thing is, though, that at worst my ignorance cost me $15, rather than the $1400 I was taken for the last time I went to see a mechanic.

This is your head on blogs

The first of a two part series with Mark Schmitt on inequality and vouchers is up at Bloggingheads.

A more perfect union

Why liberals think libertarians hate unions: they raise wages and improve working conditions for their workers at the expense of profits.

Why most libertarians I know who hate unions actually hate them:

Why isn't everybody doing this, since the technology works and has been proven overseas? There are legitimate concerns to be weighed. Unless the toll road already has high transponder market share, some fraction of cash customers may simply stop using the toll road if the cash option is eliminated. There are also real costs (staffing and technology) involved in video license-plate recognition and billing. And there is the problem of what to do with all the now-redundant toll collectors, especially if they are unionized.

We should not be prevented from implementing productivity enhancing improvements that make everyone better off, because a handful of people would rather be paid inflated wages to do it by hand. Yet more and more often, this is at the heart of union disputes--the infamous dockworkers strike a few years ago was centrally a dispute not about wages, but the fact that the ports no longer needed to employ so many dockworkers. Or look at all the workers that the Big Three auto workers are forced to pay to sit there on the off chance that they might someday be needed. Obviously this is not the only thing unions fight about--witness the current writer's strike. But to me, the central problem with unions, to the extent that there is a problem, is not that they demand higher wages, but that they reflexively oppose productivity enhancing change.

The hipsters you shall always have with you

Phoebe Maltz says:

A hipster lives in the world of irony, and as such hates sincerity, not global warming. Hipsters look with scorn upon student activists, politicians, and, of course, those bastard trust-fund-having, Williamsburg-colonizing hipsters. Al Gore's sanctimonious An Inconvenient Truth is quite possibly the least hipster cinematic production of all time. So much so that if pressed to define "hipster," I would point to that movie and say, "Something not like that."

That said--and this is the real point of this post--if "hipster" is being used in "Newsweek," maybe the phenomenon is finally over and the women of New York will at last trade the leggings in for the long-abandoned pants.

I have no idea how old Phoebe Maltz is . . . but she can't be very old if she thinks that the hipster phenomenon is going to be over soon.

Somewhere in the past few years, I crossed the threshold at which I m now old enough to remember how it used to be. Which makes it very hilarious to hang around people who think that they just invented sex and drinking binges. I was recently amused to be informed by a 28-year-old friend that, unlike the fogies I went to college with, people in his generation, frequently have friendly flings with buddies they do not actually intend to date seriously. No, really? Tell me more. And is it true that the people of your tribe slice the bread before you make the sandwiches?

Hipsters have been around at least since I was in college, which, as any fogey can tell you, is when the universe began, anyway. To be sure, we did not have iPods, and without cell phones we had to engage in rather elaborate signalling mechanisms so that people would know what bar you were likely to be at on Saturday nights circa 11 pm. But the ironic cynicism, the clothing rumpled with exquisite care, the chain smoking, the obsessive competition over who could discover the obscurest band, all these we had. We even had the habituating of coffee shops, though I'm not sure one could then procure a triple chai latte with soy milk. We used to write in them, you see; we had this stuff called paper that was very useful for creating parodic autobiographies of Karl Marx penned in the style of John Irving.

It will never be over, Phoebe. It will never be over. Only the players will change.

Navel gazing

Ogged says:

Best blog posts ever seems like a strange enterprise. I note, in passing, that male political bloggers seem to favor political and didactic posts (and not, say, any of dooce's extraordinary letters to her daughter) but more to the point, many of the "best" blog posts are written as moments in a conversation, and any standard of best that excludes, for example, those posts that Yglesias seems to write at least once a week that neatly crystallize or demolish an argument that's making it's way through the discourse, or ignores the power of repetition and mockery of something like Atrios's "very serious people," seems like a wrong and distorting standard to apply. So take this opportunity not to nominate your own favorites, but to say horrible things about these bloggers, who are oppressing us all.

I'm actually more interested in what people would select for their own best blog posts. Who do they think they are, at their best? So tempted, in fact, that I'm like, this close to tagging five bloggers . . . except that I'm afraid they wouldn't do it, and then I'd be like that kid who nobody comes to his birthday party. So if you're a blogger, and you think I might have tagged you, you should do this to prove me wrong.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about what my own favorite five posts were. Daniel Drezner's nomination from his own list might get the nod . . . or perhaps this one . . . or this.

Surely I must have said something serious, once. Pour encourager les autres, I shall try to get to this later in the week. Reader nominations encouraged.

Figures never lie, but liars figure

Greg Mankiw has a brilliant piece in the New York Times urging America not to take scary health care statistics at face value.

Bleg

My mother lives in DC and needs someone good with a truck and a couple of guys who can move two beds from Silver Spring to the district. For understandable reasons, she's worried about hiring someone off Craigslist. Any suggestions?

Can't we keep the "closet case" thing in the closet?

I wish people wouldn't do this:

I’m betting Mr. du Toit is a closet case.

I am, as you might expect, not a big fan of the post she is denigrating. But the practice of claiming that people who make anti-gay remarks must be "closet cases" has to stop. First of all, it partakes, however slyly, of the notion that calling someone homosexual is a slur. Second, it's unlikely to be true; gay men (it's almost always said about men) are only about 3-5% of the population, and a lot of those are now out. The remaining closeted gay men are vastly outnumbered, unfortunately, by the number of men who are intensely uncomfortable being around other men who do not like to sleep with women, even if they are doing something that doesn't involve women at all. And third of all, it's a warmed-over remnant of 1970's pop-Freudianism, which is to serious psychology what Scientology is to science. The underlying theory of aversion formation makes no sense when applied to any other context--would anyone seriously entertain the notion that people who are uncomfortable around racial minorities secretly fear that they are black?

A festival of unrelated extemporanea

Via Kevin Drum, I cam to this John Derbyshire piece, which led me to this piece by Adam Gopnick on C.S. Lewis:

When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory.

I'm not religious, but this strikes me as pretty pallid. Surely Gopnik doesn't really think that washed-out theology of New York's Upper West Side, in which Jesus came to tell us to turn the other cheek and be nice to the poor, and his rather unnecessary self-martyrdom was undergone largely to really drive home his point about progressive non-violence, is the sum total of Christian theology.

Jesus is a little more complicated than that. Says He, in Matthew 10:

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.

Indeed, Jesus is actually referred to as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David" in Revelations, most of which he spends being distinctly un-lamblike.

Contrary to what Gopnik says, a lamb or a donkey in Aslan's place wouldn't make it more accurate; it would rip the heart out of Christian theology. The sacrifice of the Lamb of God is extraordinary precisely because the Lamb of God is actually the Lion of Judah. A lamb that dies on the sacrificial altar is no more than one in a string of pointless sacrifices; the lamb has no choice in the matter. What is central to the Narnia stories, and to Christian theology, is that the lion, which could rend the sacrificiants limb from limb, instead deliberately eschews violence and lays himself down to be killed. The lion-as-lamb simultaneously acts to end the violent power that is lion-ness, and the passivity that is lamb-ness. It is an endlessly rich act, which Gopnik would have us replace with the martyrdom of the cow at the slaughterhouse gate.

Vote early, vote often

Sorry about the lack of posting; between work and an (extremely successful, to judge by all the empty bottles and the ottoman we set on fire) housewarming party, opportunity has been light these past few days. But apparently, I have been nominated for a weblog award. As longtime readers know, what happens when I do not win these things, is that I cry. Huge, wet tears rolling out of my enormous green eyes and searing the lightly freckled, yet delicately translucent skin of my fair face. No one wants that, do they? I didn't think so. I'm not going to tell you how to vote or anything, of course. I'm just letting you know.

Women's work

I really have no idea what we're supposed to do with this:

Victoria Brescoll, a researcher at Yale, made headlines this August with her findings that while men gain stature and clout by expressing anger, women who express it are seen as being out of control, and lose stature. Study participants were shown videos of a job interview, after which they were asked to rate the applicant and choose their salary. The videos were identical but for two variables — in some the applicants were male and others female, and the applicant expressed either anger or sadness about having lost an account after a colleague arrived late to an important meeting.

The participants were most impressed with the angry man, followed by the sad woman, then the sad man, and finally, at the bottom of the list, the angry woman. The average salary assigned to the angry man was nearly $38,000 while the angry woman received an average of only $23,000.

When the scenario was tweaked and the applicant went on to expand upon his or her anger — explaining that the co-worker had lied and said he had directions to the meeting — participants were somewhat forgiving, giving women who explained their anger more money than those who had no excuse (but still less money than comparative men).

The article goes on to conclude:

But Professor Glick also concedes that much of this data — like his 2000 study showing that women were penalized more than men when not perceived as being nice or having social skills — gives women absolutely no way to “fight back.” “Most of what we learn shows that the problem is with the perception, not with the woman,” he said, “and that it is not the problem of an individual, it’s a problem of a corporation.”

I agree that it's a problem women can't overcome by themselves, but what are the companies supposed to do? For that matter, how is society supposed to deal with this? Feminism has made a number of strides in the double standard, particularly as regards sexuality. Sure, sexual double standards are still there--I know a lot of men who would not date women who slept with them on the first date, which seems lunatic to me--but they're a hell of a lot milder than they used to be. Who here thinks I'll get fired if I announce that I used to live with a boyfriend?

But have the double standards on anger budged at all? For that matter, women used to be able to slap men who pawed us without permission, so maybe they've gotten worse--we're no longer supposed to be so passive, but if we express an opinion, we'd better be nice and apologetic about it. This is not a very good way to become CEO.

Facebook friends

Thanks to everyone who wants to be my Facebook friend, but I reserve that for people who I actually know in real life. The people who don't know me who are following me on Twitter . . . well, you're more than welcome to, but do you mind if I ask what you get out of knowing that I frequent the Townhouse Tavern on Wednesday, or that I'm going to Costco tomorrow?

More surprise good news

Payroll jobs grew by 166,000 last month. I don't know what's keeping this economy going, but whatever it is, I want some.

Update Sorry, a commenter says he doesn't know what Payroll jobs are. There are two surveys used to determine employment levels: payrolls (which surveys companies about their hiring), and household, which surveys people. The payroll survey is generally regarded as a more accurate barometer.

I'm afraid

I'm slammed with other work and preparations for Vietnam. Blogging will be light until Sunday.

Free to fail

One thing that strikes me about the arguments I've been having with voucher opponents is just how little they seem to understand how markets work. Markets don't work because they get it right the first time; they succeed because if at first they don't succeed, they try, try again.

A public school, by and large, cannot fail. If it screws up, no matter how badly, we will continue pouring money into it. This is particularly true because most of the employees of most systems can't fail either. They can be atrocious at their jobs, but provided that they are not actually molesting the students, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them.

Failure, to put it bluntly, works. Failure is nature's way of telling you "Hey, that doesn't work!" The American economy is vastly strengthened by the fact that companies are allowed to fail--and also by the fact that our crazy culture encourages us to try things that don't work.

In the first few iterations, this often looks inferior to a centralized system. Look, the critics say, they sat down and planned it all! Compare that to our messy, fragmented market where half the stuff doesn't work!

It can take a decade or more before the cracks in the planning appear. The planners, it turns out, didn't foresee that the world would change, and now the giant, planned system can't cope. One no longer hears so many complaints about how American cell services suck compared to Europe--not since their 3G debacle. I am fairly optimistic that in ten years, the current whinging about America's high-speed internet networks will be quieted when the decentralized model produces some unforeseen improvement.

At a conference last year, I saw an incredibly compelling presentation from the guy who does usability for Treo. He talked about design philosophy, and showed slides of a project he does where he goes into various institutions, divides people into groups, gives them spaghetti and some tape, and asks them to build the tallest self-supporting structure they can. The worst-performing group, you'll be unsurprised to hear, was MBA students; they spend all their time arguing about who will be boss. Engineers do okay. But the best performing group? Kindergarten students.

The students don't plan anything. They just try stuff, and if it doesn't work, they try something else. The presenter's argument was that if you want to do something quickly, and well, you need to have a lot of failure. Failure is the quickest way to learn.

But the way public schools are set up, they can't really fail--and so they don't succeed at the hardest task we've given them. The schools are not set up to learn; they're set up to follow the rules, and to serve their customer base, who are not in the case of poor schools the parents, but the various people who work for the system.

Ezra wrote a post criticizing my position on vouchers because there are, you know, really serious experts who care about education, and have all these awesome plans, and why the hell would we listen to some ideological libertarian whack job who just worships the market? I'd argue that first, all those plans suffer the fatal flaw of having to assume away all the poisonous interactions between the various constituents that have so far doomed school reform; second, they suffer the fatal flaw that the educational experts never fail either, because they just claim their plans weren't tried; and third, that serious planning may not be the right way to go about this. The right way may be to let a lot of people try stuff to see what works . . . and let a lot of other people copy what works because they're afraid of losing their jobs. While it's true that I think vouchers are good even if they just let a few kids exit an awful system, I also think it's true that they are the best shot we have at improving the system.