« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 » November 2007 ArchivesNovember 30, 2007My TIvo hates meOr, 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. November 29, 2007Kitchen sink, continuedIf 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 questionsBest 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 earthersAt 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.” 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. November 28, 2007Is 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. 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). TransatlanticRoss muses on our strategic presence in Europe:
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 upwardsI'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 injurySome 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 byInspirational words this Thanksgiving from friend and very talented photographer Lara Shipley:
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 destinyThe 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:
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?The source of complaintThe 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. 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. 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:
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 sayThat 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. November 27, 2007Free to roamIn 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 breakA 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. Real 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 sinkI'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 globalizationFor 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:
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. November 26, 2007Ample supplyI 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. 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 policyI'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. |