The discussions of copying norms and new bloggers reminds me of something. Well, several things. First, it reminds me to urge you to check out the Economics of Contempt blog, a new econ blog. Its shadowy proprietor and I had a rather . . . er . . . spirited exchange last Thursday regarding the Coase Theorem (If you're not familiar with the topic, I highly recommend this interview with Professor Coase from Reason). He argued that libertarians invoke the Coase Theorem much too freely, when it cannot actually be fully applied to the real world.
I replied that while I think the theorem does have a lot of valuable insight to offer into economic and regulatory problems, I quite agree that it is far too often applied profligately. In a world with unequal endowments and non-zero transaction costs, you need a lot of modifications before it can be usefully applied. However, in the conversation in question, zero transaction costs were among the more reasonable assumptions being made--it was one of those conversations where by the time you're done, you've had to give everyone an in-brain computer in order to fully explore the basic philosophical questions. I didn't mention this because it wasn't really germane to the point of the post, which was about normative justice intuitions, not The Coase Theorem and Land Use.
He updated his post, and we parted friends.
The next day, as you may recall, Kathy G. unleashed a rather . . . er . . . spirited criticism of the same post, with basically the same point: the Coase Theorem isn't realistic. We . . . well, I wouldn't say we parted friends.
Which brings me to the second thing I was reminded of: an email I received from the Economics of Contempt's shadowy proprietor the other day.
I saw that you linked to a post by Kathy G in which she trashes you for not having the courtesy of linking her. Well, I thought you'd be interested to know that Kathy G actually stole her post about the Coase theorem from me (I write the Economics of Contempt blog that you commented on yesterday). I looked at my blog traffic last night, and I thought it was odd that there was someone from Chicago who had looked at my post about your use of the Coase theorem 5 times, because I really didn't think it was THAT interesting. And when I read Kathy G's post about the Coase theorem and saw that she used the exact same obscure Ronald Coase quote from 1981 that I used, it was a dead give-away. I looked at her traffic, and sure enough, she has the same IP address as the person who looked at my post about the Coase theorem 5 times yesterday. I find it hugely ironic that she would excoriate you for not linking to her on one day, and then lift the majority of her post from someone else without linking to them the next day!
I honestly don't care whether Kathy G links to me or not -- I had never even heard of her until today. I started writing my blog to amuse myself, not to gain internet recognition. And I'm not big on calling people out for their linking practices, since I'm a little unsure of the proper linking etiquette myself. But if you're going to attack someone for not following the proper linking etiquette, you should probably wait at least 24 hours before you steal a post from another blog without linking to it.
In a follow up email, he added:
Here's why I'm 99.99% positive Kathy G was the person from Chicago who looked at my post 5 times yesterday (other than the fact that she says on her blog that she's from Chicago). The person's IP address was [redacted], and that was also the IP address of the first two entries from Chicago I saw on Kathy G's blog this morning. That person found my post the first time by searching for "'preference maximization' and coase," and Kathy G harped on your use of the phrase "preference maximization." The third time that person looked at my post she had searched for "mcardle coase transaction."
Kathy G used the same two quotes from Coase that I did, including the really obscure 1981 quote. Of course, Kathy G also quoted Coase's next sentence from the 1981 essay, which I didn't, but that's probably because I LINKED TO the paper when I quoted it.
I wrote in my post: "The Coase theorem "dictates"? ... It's a neat trick, and a lot of libertarians I know use it, but it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Coase theorem."
Kathy G wrote in her post: "But to argue that the Coase theorem "dictates" anything in the real world, as per McArdle, is to grossly misunderstand it."
I think that's more than enough to say it was her, but you're probably a better judge of this kind of thing.
Note to all new bloggers: this sort of thing is generally, at least in the blogging circles in which I travel, considered to be rather poor form. Worse, indeed, than accidentally neglecting to provide a link to someone you have already conceded to exist.
That doesn't excuse me for forgetting the link--I shouldn't be so careless on that score. But if you use substantial parts of another blogger's post, you should mention that you found it somewhere else. Direct paraphrase without even attempting attribution is regarded with less horror by bloggers than it is by English professors . . . but not all that much less horror. Especially since linking a source is a lot faster and easier than footnoting.
The answer to the question I posed in the title is, basically, "Always!" As Nick Gillespie noted yesterday, "there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers." Besides, as he also noted, if you go over the line you're very likely to be caught.
Lower rates, for now
As expected, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by another 25 basis points, and signalled a pause. Beyond that, who knows? The Fed wants to signal simultaneously that it will do whatever it takes to keep the financial system liquid--and that it will be tough on inflation. These goals are mutually exclusive. Monetary policy for the next six months will respond to whichever happens to worry the board most at the moment.
I don't mind legalizing polygamy (though I disapprove of the practice), but would such legalization prevent an FLDS type of episode? Maybe the goals of the perpetrators are rape, abuse, and power-mad intimidation, rather than polygamy per se ("polygamy: merely a means to an end.") In that case polygamy legalization won't limit their ability to set up isolated, authoritarian, quasi-state cult compounds for their nefarious purposes.
Alternatively, if illicit polygamy is a marketing point that draws people to the compound in the first place, legalization may well help. Oddly legalization helps most when the religious belief (in polygamy) is relatively sincere and the abuse accumulates through evolutionary processes of increasingly bestial behavior; legalization helps least when the religious belief in polygamy is for cynical reasons of control and could easily be replaced by some other marketing point.
Is there entry into the market for polygamist cults? The FDLS and similar churches are no doubt attractive to a certain sort of man, but the leaders of cults generally want to suppress the supply of males competing with them. It seems to me that these cults largely increase by high birthrates, exit prevention for female members (via early impregnation), and forced exit for young males.
What little I know about cults indicates that male leaders do not advertise their sexual exploitation of female members. In the case of plural marriage, Joseph Smith didn't start practicing it until the mid-1830s, when his church already had several thousand members; other church leaders adopted the practice in the 1840s, when the group was more established and the membership numbered in the tens of thousands. The practice was not mentioned to the public until ten years after that. This would seem to indicate that the practice evolves in authoritarian, remote religious communities to which people are attracted for other reasons.
As I understand the history of the Mormon Church--though Will knows it much better than I--the Mormons were getting attacked by their neighbors and migrating to ever-more-remote locations long before said neighbors knew about the multiple wives. They didn't announce the practice publicly until after the trek. And they renounced it when they needed to be integrated into the rest of the country.
If polygamy were legal, the men in the FLDS still couldn't do what they wanted, which is to have sex with young girls. For that, you need mental control over the girls and their parents. I don't see the legality of the practice as reducing the incentives to act as the leadership did--they weren't hiding from the law, they were hiding from anyone who would tell women they had other options. Besides, from what I understand, polygamy is rarely the only weird and illegal practice that such cults engage in.
Like Tyler, I don't mind legalizing polygamy, though I'm pretty sure I'd never consider the practice personally. But I'm skeptical that this would prevent things like the FLDS's 13-year-old brides.
Update Incidentally, that post has the funniest comment I've read all week:
d.cous., if a society allows young men to study engineering, it does not care enough about 'disenfranchised young men' to warrant a ban on polygyny.
Of course, I immediately thought of this internet treasure:
Silver Line is back on track
Woo: apparently, the DC metro area is going to get the Silver Line to Dulles after all. This is great news--not only do we desperately need more rail capacity, but also, rail to the airport is one of the most obvious slam dunks. No one wants to pay $100 to park their car for a week.
Boo: on the other hand, the line is only going to run to Falls Church. This is the same stupid decision that New York made, running the airport train to Jamaica rather than into Penn Station or Grand Central. No one wants to change trains six times with a week's worth of luggage, either. Plus, the DC metro system desperately needs more central capacity. It's time to bite the damn bullet and build another bridge or tunnel across the Potomac.
Reality check
Pretty funny:
This did not, however, stop me from lusting after the MacBook Air I saw yesterday.
Award time
National Geographic's Yourshot section, where a friend works, has been nominated for a Webby award. Please go vote for them, not because it's run by my friend (well, not entirely for that reason), but beacuse it's an awesome idea: National Geographic lets amateur photographers send in their photos, and publishes the best of them on the web. This kind of interaction between amateurs and major media outlets should be encouraged wherever possible, especially when the result is the dissemination of really neat photographs.
The trouble with taxes
I'm with James--I think Al Franken made an honest mistake, and that mistake was trusting his accountant not to be an utter fool. It's all very well to say that he should have checked, but tax law is insanely complicated and getting more so every year--most of us don't have time to be a tax attorney and a success in another career.
I would wager that most of the people piling on do not have a great deal of 1099 income earned in a variety of states. It took me basically an entire day to do my taxes this year, and I only had to deal with two, New York and DC. Allocating income between them, calculating the differing deductions for each state, figuring out which business deductions I was entitled to against my freelance income, and which could be applied against my salary . . . hours of fun for the entire family. And the problem is getting worse every year as the tax codes get more and more complicated at the state, federal, and local levels.
Serves you right for doing them yourself, one of you is about to say. Get an accountant.
What, and end up like Al Franken?
GM's money machine
For the longest time, the conventional wisdom in analyst circles was that auto manufacturers were "banks with a manufacturing subsidiary". Detroit didn't make its profits on the cars--they were sort of like loss leaders for the juicy auto loan business.
That's why it's been so surprising watching GM's travails with the spinoff of GMAC. Two years ago, GM sold 51% of the business to private equity firm Cerberus, the same folks who bought Chrysler. The deal was not only supposed to give GM some much-needed cash, but also boost GMAC's credit rating by severing it from the auto giant's woes.
This has not quite worked out as planned. GMAC's debt dipped into junk territory thanks to its residential mortgage unit. Meanwhile, it is still hoovering money out of GM's balance sheet. Last March, the company had to transfer $1 billion to the ailing finance company to shore up its financials, as per the terms of its deal with Cerberus.
This morning GM announced a $3.3 billion dollar loss. (To put this in perspective, they lost basically the entire annual GDP of Rwanda in a single quarter.) Hundreds of millions of it stems from losses at GMAC; hundreds of millions more are related to ongoing problems at Delphi, the auto parts supplier that GM spun off a few years ago.
Perhaps the most frightening part is that this is actually better than many analysts were expecting--the massive hemorrhage has brought forth cautious optimism. Now if only they could make a car someone wanted to drive . . .
One of the aspects of the rising price of fossil fuels that I haven't seen written about much is the fact that chemical fertilizer is largely made from natural gas. That's going to put pressure on food prices--and it suggests a natural end to the green revolution, even if that end is some time away.
The New York Times has an article on that subject today. Rising demand for grain, especially to produce the meat demanded by newly richer Asians, is bumping up against short-term inelasticity of supply. Obviously, that's going to feed back into food prices.
I wonder if it won't also start feeding back into clothing prices--cotton is an extremely nitrogen hungry plant. And I believe that most synthetic fibers are also derived from fossil fuels.
When I think of the oil economy, I usually think of innovations in transportation, or electric power. I rarely consider how much oil has freed us from the basic concern about eating and putting clothes on our back.
Do drugs make gangs, or do gangs make drugs?
This conversation about drug legalization was long and wide ranging. One possible view is that gangs exist wherever there is poverty; if it isn't drugs, it's sugar or milk or whatever they can control. The essential ingredient for gangs, in this view, is a large supply of young men with few alternatives in the legal economy.
In the middle was Tyler, arguing that legalizing drugs would reduce crime, but not by that much, because the gangs would persist.
On the other side was me, arguing that the crime reduction benefits should be large.
I've been thinking a lot about this over the last few days. It still seems to me that gangs are hard to support when there is good policing. Gangs flourish in places like Rio because the police force is corrupt and doesn't care about the favela inhabitants. They flourish in drugs and prostitution because contracts are not legally enforceable--if you can't sue to get the drugs you're owed, you need to use violence. Since there is safety in numbers, you get a gang.
As it happens, I'm reading The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier's excellent book on poverty traps in the developing world. As you can imagine, it has something to say on the subject of lawless bands of young men preying on the populace. A lot of it backs up the first position. "Civil war," Collier says, is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war."
He expands:
. . . according to psychologists, on average about 3 percent of any population have psychopathic tendencies, so you can be sure that some of those in the recruitment line will be psychopaths. Others will be attracted by the prospect of power and riches, however unlikely; if the reality of daily existence is otherwise awful, the chances of success to not have to be very high to be alluring. Even a small chance of the good life as a successful rebel becomes worth taking, despite the high risk of death, because the prospect of death is not so much worse than the prospect of life in poverty.
Later he notes:
So what characteristics did make people more likely to engage in political violence? Well, the three big ones were being young, being uneducated, and being without dependents. Try as one might, itis difficult to reconcile these characteristics of recruitment with an image of a vanguard of fighters for social justice.
And even if you nominally resolve the source of the conflict, that doesn't necessarily end the violence:
Once a war has begun, the economic damage undoes the growth achieved during peace. Worse, even aside from this economic damage, the risk of futher war explodes upward. Civil war leaves a legacy of organized killing that is hard to live down. Violence and extortion have proved profitable for the perpetrators. Killing is the only way they know to earn a living. And what else to do with all those guns? . . . the emerging pattern seems to be that guns become cheap during conflict because so many get imported through official and semiofficial channels that a proportion of them leak onto the informal market. The legacy of conflict is cheap Kalishnikovs . . .
The end of the political fighting ushers in a boom in homicides. Presumably, this is part of a wider surge in violent crime.
So at least in the early stages, this seems to indicate that legalizing drugs wouldn't reduce crime too much; indeed, by disrupting a somewhat stable market, it might increase crime.
But over the long run, I think Collier's evidence supports my position. At the same time that he tells us that rebels are often attracted to money and power, he adds:
The key point of Weinstein's research is that in the presence of natural resource wealth--oil, diamonds, or perhaps drugs--there are credible prospects of riches, so that some of the young men in the queue to join will be motivated by these prospects . . .
Slightly later on, he says:
And where are the violent groups most likely to form? One might think it would be in the districts that are most deprived of social amenities, for that is supposedly what it is all about--oil wealth being stolen by the oil companies and the federal government instead of being used for the benefit of local communities. But Aderoju found that . . . there was no relationship between the social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead, the violence occurred in the districts with oil wells.
This suggests that an opportunity for economic rents--like, say, a line on a way to import a highly illegal substance--at the very least increases the supply of potential gang members, and gang violence.
There's also the fact that we seem to be exporting our drug-related violence elsewhere; according to the book, 95% of the world's supply of hard drugs are produced in conflict countries. Obviously, this is in part because conflict generates a zone outside of government control--but given the observation that violence clusters in areas where there are economic rents, it seems plausible to say that profits from the drug trade also increase the incentives for violence.
So I stand by my conclusion that the social benefits of legalization would be large, both here and abroad. It would not be without cost--I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't see more drug addicts if we legalized them. But the spectacular violence associated with vice trades, and the glamor drug rents lend to criminality, seem to outweigh the social cost of more drug abuse.
Of course, this does raise the question of what all those young men will do with themselves.
Update One participant emails:
On the one hand you argued that the drug wars implied huge wasted rents leading to crime. On the other you cite Levitt etc on the low returns to drug dealing. These two positions cannot be reconciled. If there are mostly winner take all rents in drug dealing, and the average returns are small, then the artificial rents due to drug control cannot, ipso facto, be large. Thus, one has to ask, if small rents with winner-take-all markets are sufficient to generate this huge amount of crime, then (probably) smaller rents due to legalization (and having to find substitutes) should still be sufficient to generate gang problems in the absence of a cure to the policing problems in poor areas with dysfunctional groups.
My response is that it all depends on the relative opportunities--absent the drug rents, would other rents be high enough to attract so many people into the tournament? Or would the legal sector become relatively more attractive?
That's an empirical question that I don't think we can answer without legalizing drugs and waiting fifteen years. But I suspect that there is a tipping point--that the gangs are supported in part by the fact that so many young men in their neighborhoods are criminals, which creates a culture hospitable to criminals. If you start moving more young men into legal work, you may hit a tipping point where criminality becomes stigmatized, and the social institutions that support it collapse. I'm not saying that there would be no criminals, obviously, but that the dominance of crime in some areas would cease.
Still, this is a very good point that I'm still pondering.
By request: a long post in which I link Kathy G several times
Kathy G has been repeatedly taking me to task for not linking her post on monopsony. I don't like to make a policy of linking to people who whine that I am not linking to them--indeed, rather the opposite. (Other new bloggers take note). But in this case, I actually tried to link to her; I just forgot to paste in the link, which I do all too often, a careless habit that I am trying to curtail. So, fair enough.
Hereareall Kathy G.'s posts on monopsony, at least as far as I am able to determine.
Another note to new bloggers: you've heard that "blogging is a conversation". Unfortunately too true. By the time you've been doing this for six years or so, you will often sort of forget that the conversation you are having now is not with the same people you were talking to four years ago. You will thus find yourself accidentally referring to past arguments as if everyone reading the current post had lived through them with you. Just as you do in a bar at 2 am when everyone's been arguing for a while, you will, without quite realizing it, make references that are only really comprehensible to a few long-time readers.
I hear economists on the left endorse a monopsony model of minimum wage employment that sounds frankly ludicrous to me, and should to anyone who has worked in fast food or retail--how could employers in industries that fragmented, with turnover rates well over 100%, possibly collude? On the other hand, it's a pretty plausible model for academic environments where a squillion graduate students are all chasing three jobs.
When I wrote this I was thinking of a very long-ago debate that raged through blog comments on my very first blog, the one with the eye-searing candy-colored pastel boxes, using an extremely buggy comment system that I don't even think exists any more. Back then, we didn't have all these bells and whistles that you ungrateful kids take for granted--why, I had to carry water for the comments uphill three miles, and then boil it over an open fire . . .
Price inflation gauges eased in the first quarter. For instance, the price index for personal consumption expenditures rose by 3.5% after increasing 3.9% in the fourth quarter. The PCE price gauge excluding food and energy rose 2.2%, after increasing 2.5% in the fourth quarter.
It's usually best to specify that you're using an annualized quarterly figure, or a year-on-year figure . . . otherwise, the readers are apt to start stockpiling gold in the basement.
On a more serious note, the economy actually grew last quarter, albeit by a miserly 0.6%. Outright recession is starting to feel somewhat less likely to me, though even if we technically dodge two quarters of economic contraction, I expect we'll see very slow growth for some time to come.
There's also the problem of how much of that inflation is rising oil prices, and the resulting productivity shock therefrom, and how much of it is Helicopter Ben opening the monetary spigots. The Fed is expected to cut again today, but if they let inflationary expectations get well and truly established, the cure will be worse than the disease.
April 29, 2008
Random musing
I defy Jeremiah Wright: I have always clapped syncopated. And there is no chance that I have any cultural or genetic African heritage--indeed, if I were any whiter, you could use my albedo to end global warming.
Luckily, I'm not running for president, so no one will bring it up. I mean, except me.
Bloggingheads
Dan Drezner and I talk about torture, tenure, and war.
The health of a nation
Just got off the McCain campaign's conference call on its health care agenda. No earth shaking news, but it was interesting listening to the campaign defending its choices.
The plan's heart is mostly in the right place: break the link between employment and health care, make the plan revenue neutral (ish), change Medicare reimbursement so that we pay for results rather than procedures.
The problem is, it's heavier on theory than practice. Every health care economist in the country wants to pay for health rather than treatments. The problem is, health is very hard to measure--as David Cutler told me, "Health care and education are the two fields where output is hardest to measure. It's not surprising that costs in those areas are increasing much faster than inflation." When output can't be measured, input will be.
Medical care, like education, is also dependent on inputs from the clients. You will have a frantic political battle from doctors against any proposal that makes their income dependent on how many of their diabetics really give up the corn chips.
Likewise, the campaign didn't really have a good answer to the pooling problem: what happens to people with expensive pre-existing conditions when they have to buy insurance on their own? That's one of your primary lobbies for universal health care; I doubt the McCain plan will satisfy them.
The senator is proposing one thing that I think is a terrible idea, pharmaceutical reimportation. Naturally, this is the part of his health care plan with the highest probability of passage.
Department of useless exercises
President Bush is having a press conference on the economy this morning. For the life of me, I can't imagine why. No one is exactly waiting with bated breath for his crack assessment of the nation's economic problems--this is not what we pay the president for. And he's not going to do anything about them, because he's already a lame duck. Nonetheless, I, like all the other reporters, will dutifully discuss this press conference as if it mattered.
Copy errors
Avoiding minor plagiarism is an occupational hazard of writing. There are only so many ways to say "Trichet told a press conference that monetary policy would continue to be tight for the rest of the year"; if you weren't at the press conference, you're going to end up using some close variant on a phrase that probably appeared in half the copy filed about it. To whom do you attribute it, if anyone?
This, however, is not minor, and also, not hard to avoid. I've very much enjoyed some of Joseph James Twitchell's work, and now it's clear why; he stole large chunks of it from some of my favorite writers, like Virginia Postrel and Grant McCracken.
I'm really not very sympathetic to writers who do this, and then claim that their note-taking was somehow at fault. I can recognize my own writing from 100 yards away, even if I don't remember having written it--when I go through my old blog, I don't need to look at the author line to discern which was written by Mindles, which by me. Indeed, writing style is so consistent that I can finish long-forgotten passages in my head before I've read to the end. I find it very, very hard to believe that Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and now James Twitchell read these passages in their notes and then thought that they had written them. It's plausible to me that a particularly vivid phrase might occur to you as if you had coined it. It is not plausible to me that you accidentally remembered several paragraphs of someone else's work.
This sort of thing is particularly sad because Twitchell has written some vivid and interesting work--I particularly remember his descriptions of taking his wife and daughter shopping at luxury stores. It's not that he can't write; he chose not to.
Update Nick Gillespie's thoughts are, as always, well worth reading.
Update II Broader thoughts on plagiarism from Glenn Reynolds.
Update III James, not Joseph. Joseph Twichell was Mark Twain's close friend.
Question of the day
I just got my first 401 419 scam email from China. I can sort of understand how these emails might have worked three years ago, but at this point, everyone gets at least a few a day. This should breed a certain cynicism in the recipients. So who are all these people who have just gotten their first email accounts, and also, not watched any television or read any newspapers for the past five years?
April 28, 2008
Best and worst of the 20th century
Alex is holding a contest for the most overrated and underrated presidents in history. Like Ross, I'm concentrating on 20th century presidents, since I don't think you could even call people like Franklin A. Pierce "rated", much less calculate the degree of error.
Most overrated: FDR. Every time I contemplate what the country would look like had Senator Robinson lived to shove the court packing scheme through Congress, I get the cold shivers.
Most underrated: Jimmy Carter. Yes, I said Jimmy Carter. Carter's foreign policy . . . well, 'nuff said. But Carter was actually in many ways the architect of the economic changes that Reagan got credit for. It was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed, thus giving the institution the backbone to finally get serious about inflation. And it was Jimmy Carter who started the ball rolling on deregulation, despite the fact that many of the regulated industries employed a lot of the Democratic base. Carter is credited with the awful economy of the 1970s, even though he had no control over inflation or oil prices.
As a post-president, I wish he would stop trying to conduct his own foreign policy and go back to building houses for poor people. But as a president, he wasn't nearly as bad as most people believe.
Weird science
This explains a lot. (Not workplace safe: sorry to any who clicked before the note.)
Dated
Right Wing News interviewed me this weekend for an article on dating conservative women. No great insights, but you do get to learn about shooting rats at the dump.
On a related note, I realized the other night that I still haven't really emotionally grasped the fact that I am never going to have superpowers.
The nomination battle
Arnold Kling summarizes quite succinctly just how much the stars aligned to put Obama in the lead:
Since my father's death, I have been trying to think about how to articulate his views on politics. Insider politics, as exemplified by Congressional earmarks defended here, struck him as normal and rational. Outsider politics, coming from libertarians or other radicals, struck him as irrational.
For the public at large, he took seriously the results of studies of voting behavior. Based on those, he predicted that Obama would not win the nomination, much less the Presidency. Historically, one's vote can be predicted quite well by one's parents' party affiliation, by one's ethnic group, and by one's economic class, in that order. I don't think my father took into account the Democratic Party's rules, which worked out this year to the detriment of Clinton by putting caucuses in states that she might have won as primaries, by negating a state with a large elderly population (Florida), and by negating a state with a large blue-collar population (Michigan).
Arnold thinks that as soon as the dust has settled, the party will unite behind the nominee.
I would guess that this will be less true of a Hillary Clinton nomination than of a Barack Obama nomination. The identity politics just doesn't resonate the same way for her base. For reasons that I can't quite articulate, I think that even the sixty year old women who strongly personally identify with her will be less angry and disappointed with a Clinton loss than blacks will at an Obama loss. If Kennedy had had the nomination snatched from him at the last minute because the party elders thought a Catholic couldn't win--or worse, because some Democratic voters were uncomfortable with a Catholic president--you'd have had a great deal of trouble motivating Irish-American turnout come November.
There are also the swingy Democrats who liked McCain in earlier Republican primaries. Those people are in the Obama camp right now. The war has changed the picture somewhat, of course, but Hillary will have a much harder time keeping Obama's supporters from defecting to the other side than he will hers. Obama also appeals to some of McCain's support among independents.
That said, I'm overall unconvinced by the large numbers of people who say that they'll vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win. Most of them will fall back in line, and of the ones who don't, most of those will stay home. What problem there is comes down to turnout. If Barack Obama is the nominee, I expect that blacks will react the way the Irish-Americans, and to a lesser extent the Catholic community, did about Kennedy--i.e. if they had to stand in line on a bed of hot coals to vote for him, they'd happily do it. You'd barely need an urban turnout machine. Hillary motivates some women this way, I think, but not as many, and too dispersed to do the party much good.
Meanwhile, if Clinton is the nominee, the Republican turnout problem is largely taken care of--even people who are sick of Bush and don't much care for McCain will hustle to vote against her. No obstacle will be to great for those people to overcome; the polling place could be destroyed by a flash flood, and they'd just swim to the next town.
But it's not clear to me how big a problem this is for either party. The election still seems mostly like a referendum on Bush. Which spells Democratic victory in November.
It turns out I have three friends who just ran half-marathons this morning, all of which I heard of within three minutes of each other through three different messaging formats. Congratulations Matt, Rick, and Catherine. Better you than me.
We now return to your regularly scheduled execution
I heard something that sounded very odd on the radio yesterday: news that Florida's governor had expressed his "gratitude" that lethal injection was once again legal, and his intention of getting a death warrant out there as quickly as possible.
I oppose the death penalty, for somewhat idiosyncratic reasons. Some of those reasons are well captured by the passage in The Plague where Tarrou talks about his father.
I was at lunch with some blog people today, one of whom wants to recruit an economics blogger and asked for names. I basically drew a blank. All of the high-traffic economics bloggers I read are either professors, in some similarly rewarding profession, or already tied up by a media organization.
I think this is becoming broadly true of the wider blog world: the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job. I blogged the primary from Matt's house on Tuesday, and almost everyone in the room were being paid to blog. Two years ago, we were all amateurs. That's a skewed sample, of course, but all of us had relatively widely read blogs not only before we took a salary, but before we knew each other. I don't mean to say that there are no high trafficked policy blogs not run by professors or professionals, since this is clearly not true. But the numbers seem to be dwindling. And most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization "You should hire this blogger" seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. There's a lot more amateur talent remaining in other fields, like science blogging, but I wonder how long this will last.
I'm not sure what this means for the blogging world. It's still largely an amateur medium, but it's hard to see how many new bloggers can compete with someone who gets paid to do it, unless they are independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material. Will it become as hard to break into blogging as it is to break into print?
The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
Lots of people, including [cough] me [/cough] argue that the current administration is gutting the fourth amendment. They also argued that the last administration was gutting the fourth amendment--the lefty lawyer I worked for in Philadelphia was quite eloquent on the topic at the time. Bush I gutted the fourth amendment, also Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. Well, actually, their supreme courts did. That fourth amendment sure has a lot of guts.
Orin Kerr points out that this is a slight bit of romanticism:
I wonder, though, when exactly were the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment? Clearly the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment could not be from 1791 to 1961, before the full application of the Fourth Amendment to the states. Before 1961, the Fourth Amendment didn't do much, as most police work was state local and the Fourth Amendment either didn't apply at all (until 1949) or didn't make any difference in practice (from 1949 to 1961). In 1961, with Mapp v. Ohio, the Fourth Amendment suddenly became a hugely important control on routine police investigations: Maybe if you want to pick a time of the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment, you say 1961.
But no, that can't work. 1961 was before Berger and Katz, before the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test and before the Fourth Amendment applied at all to bugging or wiretapping. So the good old days probably don't include from 1961 to 1967. Maybe we want to start the good old days on December 18, 1967, when the Supreme Court handed down Katz.
Maybe. On the other hand, the record in that period is sort of mixed. A few months before Katz, on May 29, the Supreme Court had dramatically expanded the warrant power and overruled the mere evidence rule in Warden v. Hayden. And just a few months after Katz, in Terry v. Ohio, handed down June 10, 1968, the Supreme Court took a significantly watered down approach to the Fourth Amendment to regulate police/citizen interactions on the street. It's kind of hard to know how you balance these cases: for example, was Terry a gutting of the full Fourth Amendment protection, or an expansion of the Fourth Amendment to street enounters? I think it's pretty mixed record to find the real high point of Fourth Amendment protection.
The Supreme Court's record since 1968 is also somewhat mixed. It is clearly correct that there are some cases that clearly narrowed Fourth Amendment protection, like United States v. Leon. But a number of the cases that critics say "eviscerated" the Fourth Amendment simply refused to expand Fourth Amendment protections or addressed issues that had never been resolved, like the many cases on aerial surveillance. And then there were also some cases that expanded protection, like Payton v. New York or Kyllo v. United States.
If you had to identify a "high point" of Fourth Amendment protection, I suppose you might pick the window from December 1967 to May 1968, or maybe the six years from December 1967 until some of the pro-law enforcement decisions of the Court in 1973.
This reminds me of P.J. O'Rourke's description of the Vasa, a restored ship on display in Stockholm:
The Vasa was, as the guidebook put it, "the mightiest royal warship of her times". The Vasa's wreck was discovered in 1956, and she was raised almost intact after five years of work by diving crews. The hull was enclosed in a shed and sprayed with wood presesrvative for another seventeen years. Then restorations began and finally, in 1990, the Vasamuseet opened, a noble, copper-sheathed, tent-shaped structure housing the ship and seven floors of displays and exhibits. Which is all well and good. However, the Vasa was launched on August 10, 1628, sailed 1,400 yards, and sank like a brick. "The mightiest royal warship of her times"--her times being August 10, 1628, from 4:30 until 5 in the afternoon.
It also puts me in mind of something I wrote a while back:
I'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.
Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.
That's not to say that liberals shouldn't want more progressive taxes and social spending, policy wonks more sustainably structured entitlements, social conservatives more traditional cultural values, or libertarians more freedom. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the way things are and say "they could be so much better if . . . " What we shouldn't do is compare our present to some highly airbrushed past, or mindlessly extrapolate trends, and thereby hastily conclude that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.
Just to reiterate: I do not like the Patriot Act. I very much do not like it. But I dislike it because it gives the state powers I don't want the state to have, not because I think it's a short step from here to Nazi Germany. It's a lot of pretty long steps from here to Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia), and thank God for that. It means we still have time to repeal the damn Patriot Act.
Sad capitulation
I think I'm going to stop paying attention to trade in this election. Fast track is dead, and I see no hope of its revival. Doha is in Cheyne-Stokes. Congress is intent on killing bilateral trade deals, and gearing up for FarmFEST 2009: Rumble in the Cornfield. Most trade is, thankfully free; that which isn't, just isn't going to get much freer in the foreseeable future. All the current trade deals we are considering we're concluding were sealed under fast track authority (which forces Congress to vote up or down on agreements without amendment; practicaly, without it trade deals are impossible.) It doesn't really matter what the president thinks, because Congress isn't having any.
Support for free trade is, I think, a character issue--and for this, I give John McCain kudoes. But I see no reason to vote as if trade liberalization were a live concern. It's more in the category of motherhood, apple pie, and that can-do American spirit.
Random observation
I just saw Clay Aiken shilling for some QVC special he's hosting. He already looks like an aging has-been.
Fair is fair
This is a fascinating case: when you bid at a charity auction for a unique item, how much of the bidding price can you claim as a tax deduction? My instinct is to say that the price you paid is the fair market value. But I'm sure tax experts would disagree.
Kathy G worries that I failed to point out that perfect Coasean conditions never hold in the real world. This is absolutely correct. There are also no universes composed entirely of two identical spheres. Additionally, the inalienable rights with which all men are self-evidently endowed are frequently, in practice, alienated. I regret the omissions.
Kathy G. is further confused by the concept of "preference maximization". Often when I speak to non-economists, I try to explain things in the terms that they are most likely to understand, rather than the terms that appeared in my Micro textbook. I find this helpful, because almost none of them have read my Micro textbook. Luckily, the person I was talking to was not among those who failed to understand what "preference maximization" meant. Indeed, so far as I can tell, Kathy G. is an army of one in this respect. But confess I have not done a comprehensive research survey; I am relying entirely on the absence of confused emails, comments, or blog posts from anyone besides Kathy G.
For those who, like Kathy G, did not understand it the first or second time, the idea is that absent transaction costs, no matter who you endow with the initial bargaining right, the person with the strongest preference will end up with that preference satisfied. I regret the lack of clarity.
Kathy G additionally says I should have specified that Coasean bargaining is impractical in the absent of clear property rights. I thought that went without saying, since the discussion revolved around who had a clear property right. I regret the error.
Kathy G. avers that the Coase Theorem does not "dictate" anything. Please white out the word "the Coase Theorem dictates" on your screen and replace with "the Coase Theorem would seem to indicate". I regret the infelicitous choice of words.
Finally, Kathy G. says that I should not have tried to apply the Coase theory willy nilly to the real world. This is a very important point. Unless you are a trained economist, like Kathy G., the safest thing to do is only apply it to imaginary worlds. For instance, the sort of world that you are usually discussing when you speculate on the wisdom of giving people unlimited rights in either noise, or the freedom therefrom. I regret any injuries, financial setbacks, broken friendships, harsh words, marital problems, community board showdowns, lawsuits, or blood feuds that may have resulted from unwise attempts at home Coasean bargaining.
April 24, 2008
Strategy or vendetta?
I find this argument thoroughly unconvincing. One could as easily argue that the purpose of torture is to satisfy our strategic objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The proper answer to which is, who cares? It's wrong.
Consider the results of the firebombing of a city for which the justification was sapping the will of civilians to make war:
"We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Now my rnother possessed only a little bag with our identity papers. The basket with the twins had disappeared and then suddenly my older sister vanished too . Although my rnother looked for her immediately it was in vain. The last hours af this night we found shelter in the cellar of a hospital nearby surrounded by crying and dying people. In the next morning we looked for our sister and the twins but without success. The house where we lived was only a burning ruin. The house where our twins were left we could not go in. Soldiers said everyone was burnt to death and we never saw my two baby sisters again."
"Only someone who has been in such a sea of flame can judge what it means to breathe in such an oxygen-deficient atmosphere . . . while battling against terribly hot, constantly changing currents of fire and air. My lungs were heaving. My knees began to turn weak. It was horrifying. Some individuals, especially old people, started to hang back. They would sit down apathetically on the street and just perish of asphyxiation."
"Margaret Freyer, for instance, ascribed her survival once she had left the doomed cellar on the Struvestrasse--the streets were already like ovens--to the fact that she had chosen to wear knee boots when she went outside that winter night to visit a friend. In the heat, the tar on the streets melted. Others who tried to flee through this viscous quagmire rapidly lost their slip-on shoes, even their lace-ups, which stuck in the tar. Their feet were so badly burned they could no longer move. They died."
"Hundreds of desperate human beings, some already on fire, found their way to the Altmarkt. They plunged gratefully into the apparent safety of the cool, plentiful water. As the night wore on, however, the searing air of the surrounding conflagrations and the accumulated effect of all the burning human beings who had crowded into the reservoir began to have an effect. The heat within became intolerable, the air unbreathable. In the tank, hosts of survivors, many injured, many poor or nonswimmers, tried to clamber out again, only to find that the Altmarkt reservoir had not been built as a swimming pool. There were no bars or handles, no ladders. On the contrary, the sides of the reservoir were smooth cement, upon which it proved almost impossible to obtain a purchase.
. . . a very few of the strongest swimmers and nimblest climbers managed to get back out. The great reservoir in the Altmarkt was both a terrible place of struggle that night and . . . a watery grave for hundreds of unlucky people.
The next day, when rescue gangs cleared their way through the square, half the huge quantity of water had evaporated. A macabre ring of charred corpses surrounded the reservoir; those were the bodies of those who had not quite made it to the reservoir before they burned to death, or were overcome by fumes. In the Seidlitzer Platz tank, which was about fifty feet square, would-be survivors had crowded the water up to the rim--it was shallow enough to stand upright--until it could take no more. The next day they were still there, most still packed next to each other in orderly fashion. All dead of asphyxiation.
In smaller tanks, the water became so hot that the people in them were literally cooked."
These are mostly taken from Frederick Taylor's Dresden, which I highly don't recommend buying unless you enjoy vomiting. Keep in mind that these are the eyewitness accounts; presumably those who didn't survive saw even worse.
I simply cannot believe that we did this more in sorrow than in anger.
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the state
This is why I think you can control the degree of atrocities that happen during war, but not eliminate them.
New home sales are lower, and new home inventories higher, than they have been since the early 1990s, aka the last housing recession. We're not quite in peak homebuying season yet, of course, but it's hard to see how the market could much dent this kind of inventory build up, especially since I'm told that it's pretty hard to get a mortgage right now with a sub-700 credit score. According to My Fico, that's almost half of all Americans.
Is tanning on its way out?
This article says that it's falling out of fashion among the wealthy. The use of tanning salons has long been a class marker in New York City, though I understand that it's different elsewhere. But last time I looked, the vacation tan line was still treasured.
I do think the super-deep tan is less popular than it used to be--you don't see as many leather-women around as you used to. But I find it hard to believe that it will go out entirely, if for no other reason than that blinding white skin seems to highlight imperfections much better than any other color. Is there any society in history that combined a desire for white skin with a desire for short shorts?
They measure latent demand for mortgages as the percentage of mortgage applications turned down in that particular zip code in 1996. What they are saying is that in zip codes where lots of folks were turned down in 1996, you see lenders approving many more loans, and at lower risk spreads in 2001 through 2005, fueling the home price bubble. The lower risk spreads tells me that this was not predatory lending, but the opposite.
Keep this in mind when people say that better regulation could have prevented this problem. It sounds like what they are talking is that lenders charged exorbitant interest rates to hapless borrowers. In fact, lenders were guilty of charging borrowers too little for loans, as well as approving too many unqualified borrowers. If you think that alert regulators would have cracked down on lenders for providing too many home ownership opportunities to Americans, especially minorities, then you believe in a different political environment than what I remember.
The subprime borrower is, at this point, a largely mythological figure. I frequently hear and read people stating with total confidence that they're mostly investors, or poor credit risks who knowingly and with malice aforethought lied about their income and assets in order to borrow money they were well aware they couldn't repay. I hear other people stating, with equal confidence, that the main problem in these markets was fraud by mortgage brokers and "predatory lending" by banks who hypnotically suckered people into signing disadvantageous loans.
I have no idea how these people know these things. As far as I know, there is no reliable data on how many people lied on their mortgage applications, how many people were victims of fraud by mortgage brokers, and what percentage of property owners in distressed markets are flippers. What statistics we do have are often misleading. One often hears, for example, that half of subprime borrowers could have qualified for at least an Alt-A loan, but it's not yet been made clear to me whether this means that their FICO score was good enough to put them in Alt-A category, or whether their loan characteristics--things like loan size, CLTV ratio, documentation, borrower asset base, and borrower income volatility--actually qualified these loans for better rates. I have pretty good credit, but if I took out a no-doc 100% CLTV jumbo loan I'd have to pay a very high interest rate on it.
I'm not sure if we'll ever know the ratio between borrower fraud/lender fraud/joint and several stupidity. The data collection needed to measure that accurately seems, to say the least, extraordinarily daunting. But whether or not we get it, I have no doubt that ten years from now you will still be hearing multiple totally confident, thoroughly incompatible, assessments.
Recipeblogging: Potato leek soup
I took my first try at Potato Leek Soup without chicken broth last night. It tastes weirdly chickeny, even though I am very sure there are no animal products in it.
At any rate, it is delicious. I got the recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. In exchange for telling all my readers to go out and buy it, even if they are not vegetarians, because the recipes are unbelievably simple and delicious, I hope he will permit me to reproduce it.
Olive oil
3 leeks
3 medium potatoes
Vegetable stock (I used a combination of Giant's house organic brand, and Swanson's)
Salt and pepper
Peel the potatoes and cut into cubes. Wash the leeks very well (be sure to check inside the outer layers for the sand that you will inevitably find there) and slice the whites and the light green parts into thin slices. Saute the leeks and potatoes in olive oil for five minutes, then cover with vegetable broth and cook until potatoes are very tender, about five minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.
You can puree it, and if you like, toss in some cream to make vichyssoises. But I've been eating it chunky, and it's really delicious that way--there's something about potatoes in broth with the little slices of leek that feels very spring. The only problem is I used too much olive oil, so go with a light hand there unless you prefer your soup fatty--2 teaspoons to a tablespoon should be enough.
Cri de cour
As I contemplate the purchase of another velocipede, this spectre haunts me:
You are what you eat
As Matt notes, Maureen Dowd may have penned her stupidest column yet, on Barack Obama's eating habits. Apparently, he doesn't shovel it in well enough to be a real person.
He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.
In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.
But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.
This is stupid in many ways. Candidates spend most of their time sitting still, usually en route to somewhere else where they will sit still. They also get fed roughly 90 times a day. Usually by people who are trying to lavish the candidate with their tastiest--which is to say, heaviest--local delicacy. To finish it all, they'd need a gavage tube.
But also, this is one of those depictions of small town America that always reminds me of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entries on colonial subject peoples--I mean, clearly the person who wrote the entry had caught a glimpse or two of a Zulu, but just as clearly, they'd never actually talked to one. Maureen Dowd's idea of western Pennsylvania sounds suspiciously like it came from a straw poll of Colonial Club cocktail hour.
I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time in the territory just north of western Pennsylvania. And yes, their diners do offer some large servings. In this, they are exactly like the diners in Manhattan, except that the eggs have some flavor, and they usually have extremely good raisin toast.
To be sure, my relatives don't really grok vegetarianism--when I became one in college, my grandmother memorably asked me "Can you have steak?"
But shockingly, fifteen years later, I still haven't been ejected from the family. In fact, other than needling me about missing a great pot roast, no one has ever said anything about it to me at all. Making deep human judgments about people based on what they do, or do not, put into their mouths seems to be pretty much limited to the cities.
Justice denied
I've often been frustrated by libertarians who deny that there are boundary cases--who insist that all situations can be easily and correctly solved by the application of a few handy first principles. It seems obvious to me that many important principles are fundamentally incommensurable in some situations, and no simple rule set can correctly specify a single correct outcome in every case.
So I was interested last night to find myself arguing with an anti-libertarian who argued that there are no first principles--that a preference for chocolate ice cream has the same normative value as a preference for not having slavery, i.e. none. The only question he was interested in is how to allocate the various losses and gains between people who can't satisfy their preferences.
At some level this makes no sense--stating that satisfying people's preferences is valuable is itself a normative axiom. But as we delved deeper into the particular case we were arguing, land use restrictions, it got very weird. I was arguing, not particularly surprisingly, for a fairly strict construction of property rights that gives your neighbors little say over how you use your land, unless you are using it to hurl bombs at their house1. He was arguing that communities ought to do what they want, as long as this allows the majority to satisfy their preferences, with some sort of just compensation for the losers; he believed this power was actually less oppressive than limited state power as long as people could "vote with their feet".
But then we got into noise pollution, and he demanded to know if I thought people should be allowed to play loud music in their houses, if you can hear it. Not deafening music, which I would be against; just loud. I pointed out that as long as the transaction costs for side deals are relatively low, which they should be in the kind of leafy, large suburb we were discussing, it didn't really matter whether he had the right to play music, or I have the right to enjoy silence; the Coase Theorem dictates that we will end up with preference maximization.
But I shouldn't have to pay for quiet, he said.
"Vote with your feet," I said. Things didn't progress very far from there.
I've met a fair number of people who say they believe that there are no first principles. But I don't think I've ever met one who really never advances normative justice claims. I think it's just not in us.
1This leaves aside air and water policy, on which I have no good opinion except that we should strive to keep the thing as simple and non-coercive as possible.
April 23, 2008
Bike notes
I don't mean to brag, but I taught Matt Yglesias everything he knows about the bike commute from U Street to the Watergate. Now Tom Lee weighs in with advice. The bike maintenance people are always really nice to me. But I presume that that's because I have no idea what they're talking about, and they charge me accordingly.
Reader thoughts? Yes, I know, they're all unbearably twee, but I'm not planning to bike to Mount Everest, just the grocery store. Also, has anyone ever heard of a woman's bike for someone over six feet tall?
Note to James Bennet
You can have my Fritos when you pry them from my cold, dead, slightly greasy hands.
Everything's better with insurance!
A couple of days ago, Ezra Klein wrote a post on "pay as you drive" insurance that I wanted to respond to, but I, er, forgot. Well, no time like the present!
The question is how you move towards such a system. Currently, low-mileage drivers subsidize high-mileage drivers. Progressive, for one, is rolling out a pay-per-mile scheme, and it's a pretty good bet that only low-mileage drivers will sign up. This might make the project unprofitable. Or it might spur to throw their lot in with low-mileage drivers, raising rates on the high-mileage drivers or off-loading them onto other insurers. This in turn might force the other insurers to move to pay-as-you-drive schemes. It's essentially the same risk shifting that happens in the individual health insurance market, where insurers price their product to advantage healthy enrollees and keep trying to drive out sick people. The difference is that we actually want to discourage driving, or at least make people pay for it, while we don't want to keep folks from getting necessary health care. This is that rare devious insurance cost shifting scheme that I actually like!
This, of course, highlights the reason that adverse selection is even nominally a problem in health insurance markets: the government works very, very hard to prevent firms from pricing to risk.
The main problem I see in the movement to pay-as-you-drive insurance is that so much of the benefit is a positive externality. Progressive gets moderately better profits with the ability to price discriminate more effectively, but I assume that if this experiment actually works, those profits will be rapidly competed away. Meanwhile, most of the benefits go to people who get them whether or not they have pay-as-you-drive insurance: people driving on less congested roads, breathing less smoggy air, enjoying the beachfront property that is not covered by rising sea levels. I'm happy to think that we might move to a new, better equilibrium, but the cynic in me has doubts.
Why did Dresden happen?
Daniel Larison's critique of my post makes even less sense to me.
McArdle uses an unusually bad example to back up an unfortunate position. Of course, it is true when you opt to bomb civilian centers, especially in an indiscriminate, fire-bombing way, that you have at that time chosen to commit war crimes, and it is also true that people who have reconciled themselves to the mass slaughter of civilians have chosen to justify pretty much anything in the name of fighting the enemy. It does not follow that because you have gone to war against another state that you have therefore necessarily embarked on a course that requires you to engage in those war crimes. The choice to commit those crimes comes later, and that choice becomes inevitable only if those crimes are absolutely necessary to achieve victory. In fact, such crimes tend to stand out for just how utterly unnecessary and excessive they are. If you accept the inhuman calculations of total war and unconditional surrender, you might say that war crimes are inevitable, but if you really accept the logic of total war you don’t believe that there is anything done in war that violates morality or law, because total war is the practical negation of both. The category “war crime” presupposes a distinction between combatants and non-combatants that total war effaces, so one either repudiates total war as immoral and an invitation to the commission of war crimes as a matter of policy, which it is, or one should cease to speak of war crimes.
Even so, the example is almost uniquely bad to make McArdle’s case. Dresden was not an effort to try to “save Allied soldiers,” the dubious justification that is also usually given for the vaporisation and incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, but was very definitely and consciously an exercise in inflicting terror on the civilian population and was purely a punitive raid conducted under the catch-all of “strategic bombing.” No strategic goals were advanced in burning the people of Dresden alive (not that this would have made it less of a war crime had some such goal been advanced in some way), and we should never pretend that Dresden was anything other than a bombing carried out to satisfy a vendetta in the most horrifying way imaginable.
I am not arguing that what the Bush administration did was inevitable, only that at the point when you decide to commit atrocities, the nation is almost never thinking of how the war started, but of the suffering that has come since. We did not firebomb Germany because "they started it"; we firebombed them because they'd killed a lot of people since then.
As for the second half, while I agree with Mr Larison that a lot of the motivation behind Dresden was sheer revenge, my understanding is that in fact it was argued for on the basis of the idea that terrorizing the civilian population would help shorten the war. I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that it actually did so, and at any rate I don't think saving the lives of some of your soldiers is a terribly good reason to set fire to tens of thousands of women, children, and old men. But the war had gotten the high command, and much of the population of Britain, to the point where they cared so little about German civilian lives that this made moral sense to them. They could have chosen differently, and I wish they had. But I don't think that the character of the war's beginning--which, let's not forget, revolved around the invasion of a country that very few Britons cared about--had much to do with that decision.
My colleague misunderstands me
Andrew Sullivan says, of my argument that war crimes are not tied to having bad motives for your war:
I'm sorry but this is preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical. The United States has managed to go to war for two centuries without the president authorizing and monitoring the torture of prisoners. The Bush administration's legalization of torture and withdrawal from Geneva is unique in American history. Yes, wars will lead to individuals committing war crimes in the heat of battle. Yes, it carries a horrifying logic. But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented. Bush really is uniquely awful as a president in this respect: an indefensible war criminal, who has permanently stained the country he represents and betrayed the soldiers who expect decency and lawfulness in their commander-in-chief.
I did not say that what the Bush administration has done is no different from what any other president has done. I said that what the Bush administration has done was not the result of choosing what Glenn Greenwald called an "aggressive" war in Iraq. (To be distinguished, presumably, from the peaceful, passive sorts of wars that other countries have.)
What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn't stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don't. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.
I am arguing that it is dangerous to attribute war crimes to the type of war you are waging, because the implication is that when you fight a "good" war, you won't have war crimes. That tilts the calculus too heavily in favor of future wars.
In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million.
Where did all the Smiths go from 1984 to 1990? I can believe it flatlined after 1990, but it's hard to believe that the count could have changed so much in 6 years.
Perhaps it's the difference between the SSA and Census methods of counting?
My theory is that after "Getting Away With It" was released in 1989, millions of people changed their name to avoid any possible association.
April 22, 2008
A good night for Hillary?
MSNBC says "It was a really good night for Hillary Clinton . . . it was enough. Enough to keep going."
This seems like a fairly inventive new use of "really good".
Why aren't the superdelegates committing?
As Matt points out, they undoubtedly already know which way they're going to go, so why are they subjecting us all to this painful ordeal?
Working theories:
1) They are afraid of retaliation by a vengeful Senator Clinton
2) They are afraid that she will somehow get the nomination, and retaliate from the Oval Office
3) They need the Clintons to fundraise for the general
4) No one wants to be the guy who put the last nail in the Clinton campaign's coffin.
Collective action problems: not just for economists any more.
My question is if the media really is an all-powerful force shaping the debate, why can't we band together and tell everyone that the race is over, thus making it true? Where's the vast media conspiracy when you need it?
The niceness primary
Barack Obama's concession speech is vastly more gracious than Hillary Clinton's victory speech. I suppose it's a lot easier to be gracious when you've got the election nearly in the bag.
As Dave Weigel just pointed out, this is the last victory speech Hillary will get to give without counterprogramming from Barack. A grateful nation breathes a sigh of relief . . . the light at the end of the tunnel is dim and far off, but at least we can see that the tunnel will end.
Dialing (it up) for dollars
Hillary is using her victory speech to beg for money. This doesn't project the kind of triumphant, "yes we can" attitude that I think you want when you're claiming that there is some marginal possibility you might get your party's nomination.
Invidious comparisons
Amount of money spent on buying advertising in Pennsylvania: about $16 million
Total GDP of Cameroon: about $17 million
Instead of advertising campaigns that basically did nothing to change the electoral math, we could have basically doubled the incomes of a nation of desperately poor Africans. Think about this when they start talking about their poverty policy.
Update Yes, I transposed a decimal. I am an idiot. New invidious comparison: with that money, fifty thousand of the world's poorest citizens could have been pulled out of deep poverty for a year.
Fight the conventional wisdom
While we're waiting for the results, I'm going to join Ross in defending the debate. Not because I think that the questions were useful; I think they were vacuous nonsense. But I really wonder if any of it matters.
You can't judge a candidate on their policy platform; half of it is shameless pandering with fictional numbers, and the rest of it won't pass Congress.
No matter what you think the most important issue is now, the odds are extremely good that the candidate's most important task will be dealing with something that neither you nor (s)he foresaw.
Trying to judge candidates on their "character" seems equally foolish. Candidates are essentially on an eighteen month first date. Their task is to seem unrealistically compelling until it's too late for anyone to do anything about it.
There's a rich body of literature suggesting that job interviews are actually counterproductive. You are much better off hiring people (or not) based on their resume and/or body of work. Interviewing actually reduces your chances of hiring a satisfactory candidate.
I'm beginning to think that the same is true of election campaigns. They're just saying whatever they think will make us like them, so why bother with it? Look at their voting record and call it a day.
No one will take this advice, since even the decision scientists who issue it conduct job interviews. But it sure would make this whole thing a lot less tedious.
The questions no one is asking
Which way did the Amish go?
In a political vacuum, no one can hear you scream
Everyone I've talked to today has been thoroughly dispirited. We've spent four weeks building up to a primary that will . . . change nothing. No one wants to cover a campaign that revolves around the slender mathematical possibility that Hillary Clinton could, in a massive miscarriage of justice, take the superdelegates and thwart the poll results; it's like watching a World Poker Tour comprised entirely of librarians drawing to inside straights. At this point, her most likely winning strategy seems to be arranging for Sirhan Sirhan to get out on work-release.
Nonetheless, your brave bloggers soldier on, bringing you the freshest updates from cable news. As usual, I'm watching this with a passel of bloggers who are vastly more interesting than the talking heads on television.
The vacuity of cable news, part 876 in a continuing series
Someone on MSNBC just said "The number one issue for voters is . . . change".
Update He just mentioned that Pennsylvania is the second oldest state. I'm from the Pennsylvania Non-Sequitur Society . . . Blue is a beautiful color!
The housing market: as bad as we think, or worse?
The existing home sales figures released today offer little cause for optimism. Sales fell 2%, and the inventory of unsold homes ticked upwards--there is now enough supply in the housing market to satisfy almost ten month's worth of demand.
A deflationary mindset has entered the market. Buyers are holding out because they think house prices will go even lower, and this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've been thinking about buying a house recently, and a number of people have told me that I should wait until it bottoms. Some of them are the same people who back in 2004 were telling me to buy before America ran out of houses.
Trying to time the bottom is a fool's game, and anyway I want to live in the house, not flip it. But as long as most people feel as they do, the housing market will continue to crater.
Indeed, the economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal suggest that the problem may be even worse than we think, because so many homeowners are holding back from selling until they can get what they think of as a "fair" price--i.e. at least 10% above what they paid for it in 2005. The people who are selling now are the ones who really have to sell, either because they can't meet the mortgage payments or because they have to move to another city. I looked at eight houses last Wednesday, of which two were foreclosures. All of them had been on the market for two months or more. The agent told me about one client who was moving to another city but couldn't sell his condo because he'd have to show up at the closing with a check for $40,000.
Eventually some of those people who are holding onto their houses by their fingernails will have to sell too, into a market where most buyers are demanding super bargains. If you don't have much equity in your house, now would be a good time to tighten the belt and start paying extra on the mortgage.
Obama joins the autism panderers
I know: it's straight-up public choice theory. Parents who think that vaccines cause autism will vote on the issue, while people who think that this is bunk will not. But couldn't they just keep quiet?
Rules are for thee, not for me
John McCain is now aggressively exploiting loopholes in . . . wait for it . . . McCain-Feingold. Presumably this is all right because as we know, McCain is not like those other nasty politicians who take money as part of a corrupt quid-pro-quo. McCain is taking money in order to fight the good fight, which makes it okay to raise the funds By Any Means Necessary.
I was against McCain-Feingold, so I normally don't get particularly interested in violations thereof. But as far as I'm concerned, politicians who voted for McCain-Feingold are the only people who should be bound by its silly and counterproductive rules. And Messrs. McCain and Feingold should be straightjacketed with them.
Jefferson 1: Still not free
Incidentally, I went to a fundraiser last night for the Jefferson 1, aka Brooke Oberwetter. [full disclosure: I play poker at her house pretty regularly]. As I blogged last week, Brooke was arrested for asking a Park Policeman why she was being told to stop her silent dancing and leave the Jefferson Memorial. Everyone pretty much expected that after they'd annoyed her by taking her to jail, the police would drop the charges.
Not only haven't they dropped the charges; they've added a new one, "demonstrating without a permit", even though the gathering clearly does not meet park guidelines for a "demonstration". Brooke is having to pay for a criminal attorney to shepherd her through a federal court case. This has gone from mild harassment to outrageous, not to say perfectly ridiculous, [expletive deleted].
The original charge, interfering with an agency function, is also perfectly ridiculous. Making it stick would require proving that Brooke had disobeyed a lawful order. Since the order does not appear to have been lawful, this will be difficult.
There are two theories of why this is going forward. It may be that the agency is simply reluctant to admit that it erred and back down, which would be embarassing, particularly since they are still recovering from their recent failures at crime control in the national monuments, which culminated in the rape of a young girl near the Smithsonian. (So much for the commenters who derided me for pointing out that the police might have something better to do than prevent mall dancing.
The other possibility is that they're trying to head off a civil suit; the only way they can be sure of this is to get a criminal conviction, so they're going for it, however unlikely this may be. There's a large downside to this strategy, of course. I can't speak for Brooke, but if the police forced me to spend large amounts of money defending a spurious criminal charge, there would be a civil suit, no matter what the personal inconvenience involved.
There certainly should be one. The purpose of the justice system is to protect the public, not to keep them in line.
Fundamental attribution error
Another mistake I think people make when they discuss police brutality, or war crimes, is to attribute them to some characteristic of the population that joins the military or becomes a police officer. One of my commenters says:
I think a lot of folks who join the military (not to mention police officers and prison guards) have authoritarian or sadistic tendencies which in turn increase the probability of war crimes being committed, especially given the stress of being under fire, in a strange land, among hostile locals.
What would you expect from people who sign up for a job where you maim and kill people you don't even know, just because someone else told you to do it?
(sorry if I offend anyone; I know a few of you just signed up for the tuition support or needed the money and got more than you bargained for)
Maybe this is so, but I'm skeptical. I've known a lot of quasi-pacifists with aggressive, domineering personalities and a startling lack of empathy. Give them slightly different political beliefs and an M-16, and I sure wouldn't turn my back on them.
It seems highly probable that there's some selection bias. But a desire to kick some ass is only one reason to become a police officer or a soldier. There's also a desire for justice, an interest in protecting your community, a sense of duty to something larger than yourself, a desire to do something really important with your life, like, say, put it between your beloved home and war's desolation. What do I expect from people like that? Quite a lot, actually.
But as the Milgram experiments show, most people given unlimited power over other human beings tend to abuse that power unless there are adequate institutional safeguards against us. We are natural bullies. And in mobs, we quite often make each other worse. Military culture fights this natural tendency with a pretty rigorous code of conduct--but in the end you've got a bunch of boys out on a corner with big guns. There's only so much that a code of conduct can do.
The hidden benefit of veganism
Last night, at Matt Yglesias's book party, I was chatting to a couple of friends about my recent conversion to an animal-free lifestyle. The one thing I didn't expect was that it actually reduced the amount of time I spend thinking about food. This surprised the hell out of them, and it also surprised the hell out of me, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
If you are a woman who grew up in the eating disorder culture of Manhattan (and I assume many other places), you never really get over a certain obsession with what you eat. With time and a certain amount of determination, you learn to stop berating yourself for eating fattening, unhealthy food, and hopefully you unlearn the grotesque habit of turning everything you've eaten for the last week, and everything you plan to eat for the next one, into a major conversational topic. Nonetheless, there's still a little voice in the back of your head that speaks every time you open your mouth to put food in it, saying "Should you really eat that?" Mostly, I learned to tell it to shut up. But it was there, just the same.
That question has pretty much vanished from my mind. It's not that everything I eat is healthy--I breakfast much too frequently on ice cream sandwiches or plain white bread. But while it's pretty easy to miss key nutrients, it's pretty hard to actually eat an artery-clogging diet. And there are plenty of vitamin supplements for the nutrients.
If you care about animal welfare, it similarly removes that vexing question: "Where did this come from?" Everything I eat, I eat in good conscience. (And yes, I'm aware that rats die in fields of grain, etc. I'm all about harm minimization, not absolute purity; I wouldn't hurl myself in front of a moving train to save a rat either.)
The result is that I actually spend less time worrying about what I eat, even though I spend somewhat more time figuring out where to find food I can eat. The hedonic tradeoff is, surprisingly, on the side of veganism.
Ask the blogger
When I say that war crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war, am I trying to excuse the Bush Administration?
No. The point is that when you choose war, you choose war crimes--and that this is true regardless of why you are choosing the war. You may be going to war for reasons that even the staunchest of libertarians would support, like defending your territory from violent attack. Just the same, if the war grinds on for any length of time, you will get people violating the Geneva Conventions, doing obscene things to enemy soldiers (dead and alive), and launching attacks that would horrify the population if they were watching a third party do them. By the time you're a year or so into it, the public and the soldiers are reacting to the last attack and the mountain of dead, not to who started it. Dresden would have been unthinkable in 1939; by the time it happened, anything was justifiable if it saved Allied soldiers.
There are better and worse institutional safeguards against this sort of thing, and the most charitable thing you could possibly say about the Bush administration is that they seemed wholly indifferent to the need to maintain those safeguards. But this, too, has nothing to do with whether we were the aggressor; it's a matter of military culture and administrative decisionmaking.
Naturally, occupations breed certain sorts of transgressions, because the population is resistent. But occupation is hardly the sole province of the aggressor. It's certainly far from clear to me that our current occupation is producing more such incidents, or breakdowns in the justice system, than our occupation of Germany did.
The civil war is producing lots of war crimes committed by Iraqis and foreign terrorists on other Iraqis. But though I agree that we have responsibility for stupidly unleashing a civil war, you can't really categorize a suicide bomb in a market place as an American war crime.
Likewise, I am against the media management. But it's rather milder than what we've done in wars that were indisputably just.
The point is, these things are part of the cost of war, not of the cost of "wars started by the Bush administration" or "wars with bad motives" or "wars we don't like". Sometimes, they are a cost that is worth bearing. Often, they are not, and if I were to consider whether to support a future war, I would weigh them heavily. But they should be weighed even if you think the war is just and right, because they will happen.
My tip on becoming a successful academic is to be careful how you define success. Any tenured professor has a great life by most standards. However, the default sentiment in academia is bitter jealousy. The folks at lower-tier schools think they belong at top-20 schools, the folks at other top-20 schools think they belong at Harvard, and the folks at Harvard think that they deserve more recognition than the other folks at Harvard.
Once you get on the ego treadmill, not only do you become bitter, but you have to start viewing others not for their intrinsic qualities but for their usefulness as stepping stones. If you can stay off of the ego treadmill, then success becomes more a matter of being near friends and living in an area with the type of amenities you prefer.
In my experience, this is true; relative to other professions, professors don't seem to be having much fun. Everyone in any job has their list of jerks who don't deserve the success they've had, jobs they wish they'd gotten, and amenities they wish their job had. But for many academics, those lists seem to be the bitter cornerstone of their professional lives. I've never seen a group of people--including investment bankers--more obsessed with status.
I could be suffering from sample bias, or my own blinkered prejudices, but I'm hardly the only one to point this out, so let's assume that I'm on to something. What's the explanation? I can think of several:
1) The money is so low relative to the professions they might have gone into. Journalists also suffer from this bitterness. Interestingly, the more lucrative their current options are, the less bitter the professors seem to be--economists and engineers seem relatively cheerful compared to English and History professors.
2) It's so easy to tell exactly where you rank in the academic hierarchy. Well, I don't find it easy, but they all seem to. Unless you're very near the top, your ranking is reinforced every time you attend any sort of professional event. If you are near the top, you promptly switch to wondering why you're paid less than an entry level investment banking analyst.
3) It's so hard to switch jobs. Job mobility is so low that you can't salve your ego by telling yourself that your current job is merely a waystop en route to something better.
4) Academics have few alternative status hierarchies Getting tenure is an all consuming process that leaves very little time for developing other hobbies. And the job virtually definitionally does not attract the kind of people who will be happy putting their career on a back burner to family or lifestyle.
5) Academics have virtually no control over where they live They usually seem to go where the best job is, regardless of whether or not the local area suits them. In many cases, this further focuses them inward on academia, because there aren't all that many other people around who share their interests.
Those are just my guesses; academics among my readers are encouraged to offer more.
Update One commenter makes an important point: it's all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.
Freight rail is booming primarily because of the 3:1 fuel efficiency superiority of rail over trucks. Ryan Avent notes that "This boom is all the more impressive given that the railroad companies will pay for about 65 percent of the network expansion" while trucking companies do not, of course, pay for the roads.
Clearly trucks have a massive inherent advantage as a method of doing the last-mile of shipping, but for long-haul stuff a more rational federal policy environment in terms of carbon pricing and road/rail funding balance would give further momentum to this boom.
What I'm told by my father, the transportation authority, is that the rail companies actually don't want traffic that goes less than 1,000 miles; they lose money on it. Obviously, carbon pricing might change that equation, but I doubt it would enough to work those trips down to, say, 500 miles; the whole problem is that the costs are all fixed. Also, rail hub-and-spoke may not be more energy efficient than truck point-to-point if the rail cars have to travel far out of their way to hook up with a train. My understanding is that the shorter the haul, the more likely it actually is that the car will need to take a circuitous route. Rail companies are not interested in jobs that require constant coupling and uncoupling of single car loads.
Demand for freight rail is still booming, and I hope we'll see the network much expanded over the next ten years. But I don't think we're in for the demise of the long-haul truck trip just yet.
Other book notes
I also just finished Psmith, Journalist, which had somehow escaped my Wodehouse collection until now. This I recommend unreservedly. I especially recommend it while watching The Wire, as I am now doing, because Wodehouse's humorous description of New York City gangs before World War I is startlingly similar to the Baltimore streets, except with different slang and Irish names.
Khaled Hosseini strikes again
I just finished Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. As with the Kite Runner, I enjoyed it, but I felt slightly dirty afterwards. Hosseini has a gift for storytelling, and an insight into a culture that Americans don't know much about; that alone is enough to make his books absorbing reading. But his prose tends towards the florid. And he doesn't have the courage to let injustice triumph, which makes the whole thing feel a little like Little House on the Prairie in burqas. Sad things happen to everyone, but ultimately his good characters achieve peace, while the cartoon baddies get their comeuppance.
I still like him. But his novels give me the same sensation I get when watching a Steven Spielberg film--a tragic sense of how great this could have been if he would just can the speeches and make the whole thing a little less photogenic.
Commodity soothsaying
Readers are fond of asking me for forecasts, particularly, recently, in the commodities market. I see three possibility for the commodities markets:
1) They will go up
2) They will go down
3) They will stay about the same
Further than that I am unwilling to say.
Others aren't quite so cautious. There's a bit of discussion amongst the blogs of Paul Krugman's piece on commodity prices; Ryan Avent has a pretty good round up. The case for a continued upward trajectory seems very compelling to me. The problem is, market trends generally look most inevitable right before they're about to collapse. Or as one analyst I knew once said, "I keep telling [my colleagues] no! no! no! If you think the market has capitulated, it hasn't capitulated!"
Every time I am tempted to make confident forecasts about commodities markets, I fix my mind firmly on the spectre of The Economist's $5 a barrel oil cover, which heralded the early innings of the current fantastic run-up in oil prices. That story was written by a very, very smart energy analyst who has forgotten more about oil markets than I will ever know. If he can't foresee major market movements, I'm darn sure I can't.
Strike out
From what I understand, broadcast television never recovered from the blow it was dealt by the 1988 writer's strike; once viewers had found other outlets, many stuck with their newfound friends. Now it seems that this may be happening again:
Just because your favorite dramas and comedies are back on the air after the writers strike doesn't mean you're necessarily watching them. A preliminary look at ratings of returning programs on the big broadcast networks reveals that the "majority of original programming has failed to return to its pre-strike levels among key demos," according to Havas media-buying shop MPG.
The firm found that audiences are "coming back to some of the shows, but not most of them," said Nina Kanter, VP-director of communications analysis at MPG.
I feel like I used to mark off some of my week by television schedules--if it was Wednesday, that meant there would be an episode of House on the TiVo. Now that's pretty much fallen away. Nor can I say I particularly miss it, between Netflix, books, the internet, and the Wii. Most of the people I've talked to seem to feel the same way. It's early to tell yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if ratings took an even deeper dive this time around.
School loan cruch
The subprime problems continue to spill over into other credit markets. Now student loans may be hit. Pete Davis has a long post that explains what's going on in the market:
What's behind all of this?
First, the mortgage crisis has driven investors away from securitized assets, including student loans. That has driven up the cost of financing student loans beyond the interest income and fees from those loans.
Second, last year, the law on student loans was changed, effectively cutting the federal subsidy in half.
Third, a pitched battle has been fought mostly between Republicans and Democrats over who should make student loans. When President Clinton came to office in early 1993, he was able to establish direct lending from the taxpayers to students, but just about every student loan bill until last year's pared back direct lending in favor of private lending.
Now that the mortgage crisis has spilled over into student lending and private lenders are pulling, you have to ask yourself, "Why are we going through this?"
I've been asking myself that about student loans for quite some time. It's still not clear to me how much, if at all, they benefit the students they are supposed to help. It seems at least equally plausible that they're simply feeding the tuition inflation which makes it impossible for a normal kid to work his way through college--that is, that all the benefits of the student loans are not being appropriated by the students, but by the faculty and administration, and the non-borrowing students, who get to enjoy the shiny new facilities that tuition inflation helps pay for.
In fact, by relieving immediate price pressure, they may make poorer kids worse off, because they have to pay back all that inflated tuition with interest--they can't even discharge the debt in bankruptcy.
That's just one story you could tell, of course; I've no doubt that college administrators can come up with a rousing defense of tuition inflation. But I find it hard to believe that the relief from price pressure hasn't had at least some effect.
Leading indicators?
Banana Republic and J-Crew seem to be having literally non-stop sales; the day after one ends, another sale notice appears in my mailbox. And the gimmicks are getting more complicated--a 20% discount is disguised by promising $10 off for every $50 you spend. Also, some of their sale items have been there for months. Hardly surprising, since Gap Inc reports sales declines. Can I haul out the "R word" yet? Please? Please?
The <strike>Ministry of Propaganda</strike> White House on War
Matt writes something that's true, but also weirdly specific, about the administration media management strategy:
If you think, as John McCain and George Bush and about 30 percent of Americans do, that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea then you need to engage in a lot of propaganda operations. After all, realistically we are much more likely to leave Iraq because politicians representing the views of the 70 percent of the public who doesn't think that an indefinite American military operation in Iraq is a good idea than we are to be literally driven out by Iraqis who oppose the U.S. presence.
This is just one of the ways in which a protracted Iraq-style engagement tends to undermine the small-d and small-r democratic and republican values on which the country was founded. You see this in the way that David Petraeus has become a key official administration spokesman and you see it in the Times story about semi-covert operations happening on our cable networks. During Vietnam, of course, we had the government's security apparatus spending time working against anti-war groups, and for all we know this sort of thing is why the Bush administration is so eager to wiretap people without warrants.
There's a weird tendency to diagnose a bunch of different aspects of war as being somehow unique to the sort of war we're fighting now. When I did that Bloggingheads debate with Glenn Greenwald, he kept speaking of torture as being an inevitable result of "aggressive war". But this is silly. War crimes are not a special characteristic of the invading side; we did lots of things in World War II that would now be recognized as war crimes (Dresden, Tokyo), as well as number of run-of-the-mill war crimes like shooting inconvenient POWs and desecrating bodies. Nor was Sherman's March to the Sea strictly within the Geneva Conventions. People who are trying to kill each other tend to get sloppy about the niceties of things like not slapping around your prisoners for information--whether they are the invader or the invadee.
Similarly, propaganda campaigns are a) a characteristic of any major government program and b) particularly characteristic of military operations; government control of the media during World War II was vastly more extensive than anything they even dare hint at now, though it perhaps loses out to Woodrow Wilson's administration in the creepy totalitarian sweepstakes.
We're not seeing the Bush administration trying to manage the media because of the kind of war this is--they were doing it back when the war was extremely popular, too. The administration is trying to manage the media because that's what politicians do, especially in the area of foreign policy, where there are few voters to bear eyewitness to their deception. You have to watch the bastards all the time, not just when they're doing something you don't like.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt
Alex Knapp has an excellent post on the silliness of comparing a one-time nuclear explosion to global warming:
First of all, I’m relatively certain that the coral at the atoll are not the same coral that died in the nuclear testing.
Second, let’s not forget that the nuclear explosion was a very quick, one-time event. On the other hand, increasing average atmospheric and ocean temperatures is something that is happening over time and lasts much longer. The comparison here is like arguing that The Godfather is unrealistic because Don Corleone couldn’t possibly have died from the increasing cholesterol in his body leading to a heart attack. After all, he had been shot six times and survived!
Third, anyone who is familiar with the impact of pollution on coral reefs knows that the primary concern about carbon dioxide with respect to the reefs is not about temperature and climate change, but rather that increasing CO2 emissions are causing the oceans to become more acidic, which has the potential to cause coral reefs to simply dissolve.
The good news is that the debate has shifted from "No it's not!" "Yes it is!" to the more constructive area of arguing costs and benefits. The bad news is that the same people who clung for too long to the assertion that global warming was not happening are now trying to downplay the costs. The worse news is that their counterparts on the other side are just as determined to downplay the costs of abatement. Meanwhile people like Sir Nicholas Stern seem to tackle a thorny philosophical problem by starting with the answer and working back to the question that produces it. And global greenhouse emissions roar upwards still.
It took me 3 weeks the first time, about 1 week the second time. I remember setting my alarm to 5am so I could work on the cube for two hours in the morning before going to school. Eventually I got my time down to a little over 2 minutes (which is just about the longest I can concentrate on anything). There were two kinds of cube solvers: those who held the cube in a stationary orientation and spun the edges around, and those who kept turning the cube around in their hands to get just the right orientation for each move. I was of this second type, which I think kept my efficiency down. One of my math professors in college told me that he'd solved the cube in theory--he taught abstract algebra--but had never bothered to do it in practice. This impressed me to no end. A guy down the hall from me had a 4x4x4 cube, which at one point we tried to see if we could solve using only 3x3x3 operators. I don't think we succeeded.
It's been years since I've done the cube. Last time I tried and tried and tried and got stuck. If I ever want to do it again, I think I'll have to figure out some operators again from scratch.
It came out when I was in grammar school. I solved it once, by extremely long trial and error, and had the wisdom to put it down and never tried to repeat the stunt again. An acquaintance took a more direct method, pulling off the plastic pieces and reassembling them in solved formation. But no one I ever met had a Rubiks Cube theory.
The search for meaning
Rather than get involved in possibly the stupidest straw man argument of all time, I simply offer this as a public service to those who missed it the first time around:
April 20, 2008
Oh, dear
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it.
The Tinfoil Hat Brigade
A number of people have suggested that I should post some of my more . . . interesting emails and comments. You ask, I provide.
This week's tinfoil hat award in the category of email goes to emailer Tish:
Obviously, you think appearances are everything. Gawd, you're ugly! And soooooooo masculine! Are you a dyke? I'm not sure how you're going to fix that.
Too bad you think Obama is too skinny and too effete. You drink lattes? Do you do yoga, too?
You're just SO special!
This would probably have more punch if I weren't already used to being called "sir" at least a couple of times a month.
And in the comment category, this treasure from commenter "You're not even unintentionally funny" (that does seem a cruel thing for a mother to say to her newborn child):
You're a lanky imbecile. Shut up.
It just gets more fun all the time, doesn't it?
Apparently, this commenter felt that the gravity of the post--on Cindy McCain's recipegate--required the deployment of the big guns: my height and weight. My secret shame stands exposed.
I'll try to do a more thorough job of finding the crazies next week.
Confidence games
Advice Goddess has some rather scathing words for Rebecca Solnit's piece on being silenced by men who patronize her.
I have to say, I actually recognize the phenomenon that Solnit is talking about. About once a month, some liberal blogger links to a piece I have written, declaring that I am an idiot who doesn't know what I'm talking about. The subject is almost always economics. Often the liberal blogger himself doesn't know anything about the topic, but having heard other people assure him that I am a complete idiot who doesn't know what she's talking about, he feels on relatively safe grounds. Frequently, he also links to a criticism of what I have written that does not, in fact, prove that I am a complete idiot who does not know what she is talking about.
The fun begins when the readers begin emailing and commenting to the effect that I am a complete idiot who does not know what she is talking about. For they all have two things in common:
1) They are men
2) They really, really have no idea what they are talking about. When I write back pointing out the elementary errors they have made, providing an elementary explanation, and a question as to, say, which model of minimum wage employment they are endorsing, they "softly and silently vanish away".
I'm pretty sure that if I were a man, most of them would not agressively accuse me of knowing nothing about the topic I write on solely based on the assurance of someone else who knows nothing about the topic I write on. Perhaps I am wrong, having never been a man, but based on watching public interactions between same, I surmise that the attacker would credit the notion that the man might have done something--other than being cute and possessing ovaries--to get his job, and therefore leave room for himself to back down. He would not start on the assumption that the man would be unable to respond to the overwhelming power of "you're an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about."
But complaining that they push me into silence would be shameful. First of all, it misses the most important point about these people, which is that they are completely hilarious. These stories are completely hilarious even when the person involved is not a pompous jerk--I laughed for about an hour at a story told by a scientist that involved explaining some major physics theorem to the airline passenger next to him, only to find that he was explaining it to the guy who had discovered it. But when you add cocksure misogyny to the picture, you've got comedy gold. I like to circulate the funnier emails to friends in the economics profession--it's hours of fun for the entire family.
But beyond that, really, who cares? Are you seriously going to outsource the design of your social persona to some guy who thinks that women who disagree with him are definitionally stupid? The behavior is sociologically interesting and socially annoying, but on the list of things that has radically impaired my life, this ranks well below the TSA. Honestly, the hardest part of these encounters is that awkward moment when he realizes that you know what you're talking about and he, alas, does not. Everyone pauses in silent embarassment. But I have learned that you can ride out your empathetic shame by fumbling in your pocketbook for a mint.
I don't mean to excuse their behavior; they're sexist jerks. But the correct response to sexist jerks is to ignore them and speak the hell up anyway. Eventually, the declining returns to being a sexist jerk will drive the species into extinction.
The Air America network, which provides much of the programming on KKZN-AM (760) ended its relationship last week with hostess Randi Rhodes. Rhodes had recently been suspended from Air America for her humor presentation at a San Francisco nightclub, in which she called Hillary Clinton a "big f---ing whore" and Geraldine Ferraro "David Duke in drag" and "a f---ing whore." Such wit!
But no sooner had Air America dumped her than Clear Channel hired her. So Rhodes is now back on 760, in the 1-4 p.m. weekday slot. Clear Channel's decision is not entirely consistent with the theory that Clear Channel is dedicated to a right-wing agenda. Indeed, the fact that Clear Channel has made 760 into a "progressive" talk station, with lots of Air America programming, demonstrates what has always been obvious to the nonparanoid: Clear Channel's objective is to make money, and Clear Channel will do so with whatever mix of programming and hosts will bring in the largest audiences, and hence the largest advertising revenue.
It is unfortunate, though, that Rhodes is back on the local airwaves. She caters to hatred and nutty conspiratorialists. For example, a promotion for her show claimed "The difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." After the 2004 election, she spent lots of time trying to promote her theory that John Kerry had actually won in Ohio.
Last October, Rhodes speculated that the fires in Southern California might have been deliberately set by Blackwater. The year before, she publicized a supermarket tabloid article claiming that Laura Bush had moved out of the White House because George Bush was having an affair with Condoleezza Rice. She also claimed that Israel was committing "genocide" in Lebanon.
My no-doubt-regrettable tendency when reading things like this, however, is to guess that all heavily political talk radio show hosts are crazy conspiracy theorists, and assume that Randi Rhodes probably isn't much different from her counterparts on the right.
The problem is, I have no evidence for this. And I'm not going to acquire any, because doing so would force me to actually listen to Randi Rhodes and Rush Limbaugh for an extended period of time.
I am thus immune from, not to say monumentally disinterested in, that stock staple of political journalism: "Look what a whack job/evil bastard one of my opponents is!" The quotes have to have them advocating genocide and denying the Civil War before I am ready to believe, without further evidence, that they are especially evil. This can make the task of reading political blogs slightly wearying.
Inflation calculations: backwards or forwards?
The New York Times has a story on hourly wages that states:
The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction….
Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class….
I'm curious to know who those "many experts" are; I'm not familiar with the notion that $41K is the entry level to the middle class, and in hourly wage households, at least AFAICT, it's generally assumed that the wife works.
Surely $20 an hour in the 70s would be $60 or so an hour now, adjusted for inflation? It makes a big difference to this article and the author has totally failed to explain the issue. ‘Fewer people of this class make even 1/3 as much per hour as they did 30 years ago’ is a very different message from ‘fewer people of this class make this inflation-adjusted wage.’ It seems clear the article implies the former but muddies the waters with the nominal wage, ironically further masking the dramatic decline of the blue-collar middle class.
Er . . . she's got it backwards. They are inflation-adjusting the $20 wage--back to the 1970s. A $20 an hour wage in 1973 would be about a $100 an hour wage in today's dollars. Even if you think that the bygone industrial days were a halcyon era of plenty, this should flunk an elementary gut check. $100 an hour translates into an annual salary of about $200K a year in today's money. Yet per-capita GDP has more than doubled since 1970.
I think the story's more than a little silly--hourly wages just aren't a very good way to organize most non-industrial workplaces, so enhanced manufacturing productivity sort of definitionally means that they'll fall. But it's not quite as silly as Belle seems to think.
Georgia on my mind
I have to say, I don't like to hear that Barack Obama is going slow on supporting Georgia against Russia's land-grab. Russia not only attempts to exert economic and military hegemony over its neighbors; it has a distinct dislike for free elections.
On the other hand, I don't know enough about South Ossetia and Akhazia to say whether they really want to be part of Russia, or just don't want to be part of Georgia. I suppose my feelings about local self-determination extend to the right to join massively unfree megastates.
The thing is, Barack Obama doesn't seem to have any actual objection to supporting Georgia's bid; he's just moving cautiously. This is letting Russia establish, as Jonathan Kulick says, "facts on the ground".
April 18, 2008
Saving Paul Krugman from himself
Okay, I've had my share of issues with Paul Krugman, and I'm a big fan of Suzanne Vega. (Well . . . her first two albums, anyway). But this is just. not. right.
Oh my God. How could I have missed the fact that Suzanne Vega is blogging for the Times?
In my next life I want to be a songwriter — precisely because I can’t imagine how it’s done. I’d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written “The Queen and the Soldier.”
Paul Krugman is a much, much better economist than Suzanne Vega is a musician. The Queen and the Soldier, which I have listened to just about one squillion times, is not as good as strategic trade theory. And I take nothing away from Suzanne Vega when I say that.
The plot thickens
I didn't realize that Shvarts continues to insist that the project was real. Who's lying? I'm not sure I can tell.
Michael O'Hare wonders why the Dutch all have such crappy bikes:
I asked about this and everyone immediately said "if you had a good bike it would be immediately stolen." On reflection, I'm not satisfied with the answer, for a couple of reasons. First, the Dutch are about as law-abiding as Americans, perhaps more. Second, the serious lock that has kept my pretty good bikes secure on sketchy streets in two US cities for decades is available for purchase all over the world.
Third, and most important, I don't see how this belief could be justified by real data, because there were absolutely no bikes worth stealing anywhere I looked. I didn't follow up to ask whether my informants actually knew anyone who had tried this and lost a bike to theft, but I can tell you if I tried to make a living, or even walking-around money, stealing bikes there, my business would never begin, owing to want of targets.
I think I've come upon a national urban legend illusion, perhaps initiated with facts before the era of proper locks, but maintained only by oral tradition and lack of data.
Personally, my experience backs up the Dutch. I have, in the last ten years, purchased three bicycles, along with three top-of-the-line Kryptonite locks. Ratio of bikes-with-kryptonite-locks:bikes-that-were-stolen? 1:1. The last two times, the thieves were considerate enough to relieve me of any anxiety I might have felt about locking my bike insufficiently securely by leaving the lock locked around the bike rack to which I had secured my vehicle.
The last time this happened was this winter, with a 12-year-old Schwinn that had scratches on the paint and loose spokes on the front wheel. I had locked it to a post about ten feet off U Street, a very busy thoroughfare at virtually all hours. Short of painting the entire thing with some sort of fast-acting poison, I'm not sure what else I could have done to protect myself against theft.
This is one of the reasons I have delayed buying a new bike; having obtained permission from my housemates to lock the bike in the vestibule, I'm now deciding whether to try to find an even scragglier bike, or get the nice one I actually want.
Gadget of the week
Just got my Kindle, upon multiple recommendations. Will report back when I've used it a little.
Ezra Klein gets exactly what he deserves
If you order a bagel in DC, you should only expect this sort of travesty. Open offer to Ezra: if you provide the lox and cream cheese, I will provide you with one (1) frozen H&H bagel upon which to eat it. Even frozen and reheated, this is a vastly superior option to any bagel so far discovered in DC. And I use the word "bagel" very loosely. As a friend recently remarked, "DC bagels are downright anti-semitic".
Technology of the future
I just interviewed Microsoft about their new HDTV-over-IP product, about which I hope to blog today or Monday. The most interesting part was the potential for features and customization. Watching Pope Benedict speak at the UN right now, I hope the first one they invent is the ability to turn off the TV news not-very-simultaneous translation of speeches in languages you understand, which is, at least for dimwits like me, so distracting that I can't follow the damn thing at all.
Failing that, I suppose I'll at least be able to tune into a foreign news channel. Presuming they cover things like religious figures speaking at the UN.
Interesting point about the 3.4 oz rule
From commenter Coyote:
Back when this policy was new, I asked a screener, "volume or weight?" He said, "Huh?" I answered that "ounces" in English units were both a measure of volume and weight, and for most substances these two numbers would be different.
The screener looked more puzzled, but then eventually answered "volume." I believe this was the correct answer, because the rules talk of "3 oz containers" which only make sense in the context of volume.
So, having gotten the "volume" answer I expected (though with more puzzlement than I anticipated) I then pointed out that the toothpaste he was attempting to confiscate for the good of the Republic was actually measured in ounces of weight. The toothpaste was "net wt. 4 oz." So I Observed that the volume was much less than 4 ounces, so I should keep it.
After staring at me, and I think wondering if he could shoot me, the screener gave an answer right our of Spinal Tap: "But it says 4 ounces." (But it goes to 11!)
Anyway, I let him have my contraband toothpaste and moved on, not wishing to get detained or make the no-fly list. But it was absolutely clear that whoever crafted and disseminated the policy did not know the difference between weight and volume. I still to this day meet screeners who don't understand the difference. Though since then I have seen airlines amend their web sites to say "weight or volume" thought the department of Homeland security has never added any such clarification to their web site.
Rally round the flag
I hadn't realized that I missed such rich opportunities for snark by foregoing the debate:
Remember that woman from the debate last night who the moderators showed videotape of asking whether Barack Obama "believes in the flag"? Her name is Nash McCabe.
Josh Marshall may try to present this as some sort of anti-Obama conspiracy, but this is an issue of vital importance. The flag is real. I've seen it. And I certainly don't want a flag-denier as our next president. Just think of what he might do to the national history curriculum . . .
Lock up your dictionaries
The banality police are coming for our reference books. They've already gotten to the internet thesauri--rendering it useless for journalist. How long until Bartleby goes down as well?
All I ask is that the bureaucrats paid to harass me and violate my privacy do it with a bit of irony, and I’m willing to play ball. Irony about the crappitude of the situation gets me in a good mood. Giving orders and pulling the loyal citizen BS gets me in a bad mood.
Still, the good worker and peasant wasn’t as bad as the guy a few years ago who thought that he was apologizing when he said that it’s Richard Reid’s fault that I have to take off my shoes. Look, I’m not generally a fan of going batshit over terrorism, but even I would have to draw the line at letting Richard Reid give orders to the TSA. Yes, his IQ is well above that of most TSA employees, but I still think it sets a bad precedent to let him set policy.
Having a ridiculous reaction to something is not the fault of the person who did it--even if that person is a terrorist attempting horrific acts. I don't mind removing my shoes, particularly--indeed, my parents will testify that they had quite a problem teaching me to keep them on. I achieve minor renown in college for walking around Philadelphia barefoot all summer. But the act of moving in compliant herds through the TSA lines, mindlessly adhering to the most ridiculous procedures the government can think up, contributes to making us what Joseph Schumpeter called "state broken". Citizens should not acquire the habit of following orders with no good reason behind them.
My current obsession, however, is with the bizarre precision of our directives. This weekend, I contrived to accidentally fly to California sans luggage. Upon arrival, I had to spend an outrageous sum of money at Sephora (there being no nearby drugstore) replacing things like moisturizer, in which I was only comforted because the containers were all under four ounces. When I got to the airport to fly home, however, I was informed that the limit was 3.4 ounces, and that my expensively acquired toilette items were destined for the bin. I could, I was informed, check my bag--a suggestion that was made without much hope, since my new carry-on was a Macy's shopping bag.
How, exactly did we pick 3.4 ounces? What substance, exactly, will detonate at 3.5 ounces, but not 3.4--and also not when multiple 3.4 ounce containers are poured into a large receptacle? Such thoughts occupied my mind as I ruefully surrendered my contraband. Which I did not because I am state-broken, but because there was a gun behind the request.
Flag lapel pins should not be mandatory for US politicians. They should not be mandatory for anyone. They should not be the product of social pressure. They should not be understood to reflect on anyone's resolution to care more, or call upon the public to acknowledge how much more they appear to care. There is nothing wrong with a flag lapel pin, although I would not wear one regularly unless I were in the flag lapel pin manufacturing business. But we have got to make ourselves admit that the lapel pin is a tacky little thing that is only ennobled by the flag put on it, and that the more patriotic work you want the flag to do, the more the flag is actually diminished by its puny size and the cheapness of the tin it's pressed upon.
On the plus side, as refreshing as it would be to see politicians actually drape themselves in jewel-bestudded sashes of red, white, and blue, in only a few moments everyone would have one, patriotism would fuse with fashion, and instead of mandatory tacky little things we would swim in a creped-up sea of tacky enormous things. The best the lapel pin can say for itself is that so far it has shown no signs of slyly getting any larger.
Laugh of the day
Now that's a debate I would have paid cash money to see.
Man's Men
I don't know that I agree with Mark Kleiman that Barack Obama's masculinity won't be an issue in the coming election. On the one hand he's tall, but he's kind of, well, scrawny looking. But also, the political space I think he's trying to occupy--building understanding and reconciliation between hostile voter grops--is generally seen as a woman's role. And he's running against a much-decorated fighter pilot renowned for chasing women until his walker started getting in the way. I'm not saying it will be decisive, but it's probably something Obama needs to address,a nd I'm not sure how they will.
Update A surprising number of commenters sent here by other blogs seem to believe that implying I am a lesbian is a gross insult. An even more surprising number seem to think that it is a wicked "gotcha" to point out that I too, am kind of on the beanpole side, as if this fact had perhaps escaped my notice. For the apparently large number of commenters who have just immigrated from Mauritania, American women are not usually flustered and ashamed when you tell them how skinny they are.
Most distressing of all, however, is the fact that they seem to have completely missed the point. I am a Barack Obama supporter, albeit of a rather tepid variety, worried about a potential issue in the general election, not a detractor looking for nasty things to say about him. I don't think it's weird or crazy to worry that a Democrat promising to end the war and trying to project a super nice-guy image may lose the testosterone race to a fighter pilot promising 100 more years. This does not imply approval of philandering, other fraternity-boy antics, or the 100 years war.
You may now return to crafting insults about the indeed sizeable gap between my front teeth.
April 17, 2008
Just what the pro-choice movement needs
An "artist" who confuses freedom of conscience with freedom from conscience.
Update Ah, not actually thoroughly amoral, just someone whose moral sense is sufficiently stunted that she thinks there is something surprising and "ambiguous" about the general public's reaction to the idea of deliberately creating a fetus for the purpose of fingerpainting with its blood. Presumably for her follow up she will reprint the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in crayon in order to explore western culture's complex relationship with religious minorities.
Help is on the way
Matt has a smart post about the geography of federal assistance:
One thing that I think is worth saying about this is that it may be a lot harder to help the people who currently live in economically depressed communities than it is to help the communities themselves. Oftentimes the best way for a person to improve his or her economic condition is to move someplace else -- to somewhere where his or her skill set can provide greater rewards. But in the United States, political representation is done by geographical area, so the tendency is for the residents of a given depressed area's representatives to be represented by legislators who want to bring help to the place rather than to the people as such.
This is basically Ed Glaeser's point: we should be encouraging people to move, not bring back Buffalo's glory days.
I'm basically in sympathy, but I think that this thought needs to be tempered with an appreciation of why people stay where they are. For people like me, and Matt, and Ed Glaeser, mobility is an underlying fact of our demographic; I could move to almost any city in America right now and find someone there that I know.
After talking to the economists at Mercatus who are working on their Katrina project, however, I'm a little less gung ho on the notion that the solution for New Orleans' problems is for everyone to move to more prosperous areas. The cultural clash between New Orleans people and residents of the cities they move to is apparently pretty strong, because of things like how loud and when music should be played--questions that have no "right" answer, but which everyone feels strongly about. Even in districts where they are of the same race and rough income level as the incumbent residents, New Orleans people apparently feel ostracized. That's pretty hard to take as a permanent condition.
More importantly, poor people in New Orleans had virtually no financial capital; instead, they had very rich social capital. Networks of friends, family, and neighbors substituted for things like credit and savings when they had personal or financial problems. In a strange city, with no network and no financial resources, they feel incredibly helpless and exposed--with good reason.
Those are the same reasons that many people in declining rural and industrial cities stay where they are. When I was doing an article on the economy of upstate New York, one of the most striking things I noticed was that people who talked about moving in search of better jobs almost all had at least one close relative who had already left. The people who were afraid to go were the ones who didn't know anyone outside of Buffalo, or Rochester, or Syracuse, or Wayne County. That's a problem it would be pretty hard for the government to fix.
Written on the rocks at the beginning of time
Students who have been exposed to the idea that free will is a cognitive illusion are more likely to cheat. No word on whether proctors who have been exposed to this notion are less likely to turn them in. Luckily, most of us were programmed, at the moment of the big bang, to ignore people who tell us that free will is an illusion.
Forget about my issues with John McCain; I'm not sure the nation can survive four years with such an inept liar in the office of First Lady. What on earth is she going to say the first time Lyudmila Putin says "What do you think of my suit?"
The bizarre thing is that there's a perfectly (almost) innocent explanation: most of us don't have that many family recipes, and given the way that tastes have changed over the last fifty years, many of the ones we do have are best left in the attic along with the other dark family secrets. Pimento loaf and some noodles-in-lard-sauce, anyone?
A lot of my favorite recipes come from Epicurious, or Julia Child, or Betty Crocker. I've tweaked a lot of them, but how much do you have to tweak it before it becomes yours? No one any longer expects a wife to have spent thirty years in the kitchen becoming a self-taught gourmet, and thank God for small favors. The honorable thing to do is attribute, of course, but the McCain team still seems to be intent on pretending that Cindy McCain derives all of her recipes from First Principles. What's the shame in admitting you used a cookbook?
Debate of the day
It's spring, and I'm feeling frivolous. I didn't watch the debate last night, out of a strong feeling that shutting myself inside with all that bland bloviation might drive me to madness. Luckily, the debateblogging makes it crystal clear that I missed nothing except the opportunity to snark at two exhausted politicians.
Instead I had a drink outside (mmmm-fresh cut grass), during which I got debate with a friend on the critical question: would you download your consciousness into a robot?
There are, of course, a lot of factors to consider. How good is the robot? Is it more attractive/stronger/faster than you? What's the MTTF? How good are your backup systems? Will you still enjoy normal human pleasures like eating? What about sleeping?
Then there's the question of tradeoffs, which becomes particularly difficult if we posit a robot self that is in some way less than idea. Do you download now, or like a lapsed Catholic, wait until you are near death and try to pull out a last-minute save? Is a few more years of gourmet meals worth the risk of a Sudden, Unexpected Mortality Event? And do you really want to live forever? Wouldn't you get bored?
I open the question to my readers: robot consciousness--yea or nay? Now or never? And how many of you would be willing to count on a death's door Hail Mary pass?
We had a good discussion. But two of the most interesting parts of my time at WAMU didn't make it on the air.
One came right after the show. After hearing so many listeners complain about having to pay for electronic filing when that saves the government money--an objection I entirely agree with--I had to inquire further. So I told Williams about my own positive experience with Virginia's free e-filing and asked him if the IRS was thinking about following this example.
He answered affirmatively, saying that the IRS was considering ways to reduce the cost of e-filing and remove other obstacles to it (he suggested, for instance, that as an interim step the service might require professional tax preparers to file electronically). In a follow-up e-mail, he pointed me to this summary of state e-filing initiatives; I was surprised to see how many states had moved to free, direct online filing.
The other was Williams' reaction when I got into my usual rant about how the complexity of the tax code has turned a fundamental rite of citizenship into some sick little game. I could see him nodding vigorously in agreement, and during the next break in the program, he said as much to me directly. A little later, as we were both heading out of WAMU's offices, he mentioned that before he started at the IRS, he'd spent 14 years working on tax policy in Congress, going back to 1986's tax reform--and even with all that experience, he was never quite sure that he paid the right amount in taxes each year.
I spent about half an hour trying to measure my oddly shaped house and home office, and then realized I didn't qualify for a deduction. Then there was the time I spent calculating exactly how much of my home television and internet consumption consists of work. And don't even get me started on allocating bank statement interest income between New York and DC . . .
But it's good to know the professionals are confused too.
Speaking of child safety . . .
Honestly, it's a wonder any of us made it out of childhood alive, isn't? Note to Mom and Dad: I'm not ruling out a lawsuit for child abuse.
Ms Fix-it speaks
Apparently, customers can now offer Starbucks suggestions on how to improve their service. Naturally, this makes me all giggly and flushed with spontaneous order.
I therefore rushed to take part of this vast experiment in distributed intelligence. My humble offering: tell the whoever runs the flamethrower they use on their coffee beans to throttle back on the oxygen and leave some actual flavor in the roast. Otherwise it's just too easy for potential customers to economize by dissolving a charcoal briquette in eight ounces of industrial solvent.
I'm struck that so many commenters seem to assume that if only Americans could be made aware of the real facts, they'd all vote for Democrats. I'm not sure that's so. For one thing, it assumes that everyone will freight a given piece of data with equal significance. In my experience, however, we typically invest those facts which accord with our presuppositions with the greatest weight. So if you present a smorgasbord of facts to your average voter, they'll tend to seize upon those which support their point of view, and discount those which do not.
So it's not just a matter of telling voters that only a tiny fraction of the most affluent taxpayers end up shouldering the estate tax - it's about convincing them that that fact is significant, even controlling. We tend to assume that others will interpret factual data the same way that we ourselves do. We think of ourselves, after all, as perfectly logical, and have difficulty perceiving that we filter our perceptions of the world through a whole array of beliefs and values.
Recognizing that people aren't paying attention to the facts that we ourselves find most important not simply because they've been bamboozled is the first step to persuading them of our point of view. That acknowledgement suggests that we need to give them not just a new set of facts, but a new frame of reference with which to interpret those facts. And that gets back to Appiah's point. People didn't like the estate tax because it seemed unfair - why should you have to pay a second round of taxes on earnings just because someone dies? That sense of unfairness left them predisposed to certain arguments - that the tax hurt small-businesses and family farms, for example. You can't counter that by pointing to the small number actually affected by the tax - that's mistaking the symptom for the cause. The way to counter the argument is to make the case for its fairness: by pointing out that the rich got that way because America endowed them with opportunity, and that the tax preserves the chance for others to have similar opportunities.
And that's broadly true of voters who cast ballots "against their economic interests." They do so not because they're stupid, and not because - as Drum would have it - social values are somehow more important in their lives than in the lives of Democratic voters. We're not going to win them back by telling them they're stupid, that they've been fooled, or that the facts contradict their beliefs. We'll win them over by showing how our policies actually accord with their beliefs. That if they care about preserving family, gay marriage is a boon and not a curse. That progressive taxation is about ensuring a fair playing field, and not about penalizing the succesful. That not waging ill-advised wars overseas will actually strengthen our national security. In other words, by abandoning the futile quest to provide them with 'facts' that will change their beliefs to match our policies, and demonstrating that our policies actually accord with those beliefs.
The same holds true, of course, in reverse, for those who wish to press the opposing sides of those issues.
Better, faster, higher . . .
Derek Lowe has a provocative post pondering the future role of drugs that enhance cognition. He speaks as someone who doesn't drink and has never used recreational drugs:
I’ve been meaning to write something about this story for a while, but one of the problems has been that I’m still quite divided about what I think about it. (Normally my opinions come to me more quickly, for better or worse). Some background: people who’ve known me personally for a while generally know that I’m personally very much opposed to chemically altering the way that I think or feel. I never drank in high school, for example, which I can tell you made me stick out a bit in late-1970s Arkansas. Nor did I in college or afterwards; I still don’t drink now. And that personal prohibition goes even more for other recreational drugs, as you’d imagine.
My reason for that has long been that I enjoy my brain the way it is, and have seen no reason to mess up its function for fun. But the advent of cognition enhancing drugs is a scalpel to dissect that line of thought. What if the ingested chemicals add to some of the parts of my brain that I value the most? That “mess up its function” clause has been taken out and flipped upside down. And what if it’s for work, and not for recreation? Is that more allowable, because it’s somehow less frivolous? (All right then, what if I were to enjoy having a better memory, which I likely would?) That gets to a less creditable reason for my objection to alcohol and other such drugs – perhaps I’m not just objecting to them on practical grounds. Perhaps I’m objecting because I don’t want other people to have a good time, at least not like that.
I didn't drink for three years because it reacted badly with some other medication I was taking. Not drinking is, it turns out, a very good way to find out which of your friends and acquaintances are alcoholics. It's also an interesting window on yourself, pre- (and post) temperance. When other people get drunk, you sort of cringe for them--you imagine how you would feel if you were saying or doing those things right now, sober. Which is not the actual social space that inebriation occupies; we're more tolerant of various sorts of silliness in people using brain-altering drugs, and also, it's fairly likely that if you're drunk, everyone else around you is too drunk to much remember whatever you're saying. But it's psychologically very difficult to convince your empathy muscles of that.
Watching people perform fantastic memory stunts does not trigger the same reaction.
I'm much more tolerant than Derek of using various sorts of brain-altering drugs. think Thomas Szasz greatly overstates his case, but I think he has a valid core insight: we medicalize various mental states in order to give ourselves an excuse to treat them--and also in order to give society (and the state) control over how and to whom that treatment is administered. I think depression and ADD and so forth are fine categories insofar as they point towards which therapies might be most helpful for a given person. But if anti-depressants make you feel better, and you want to feel better, I don't see any reason that you shouldn't take them, even if you aren't depressed. Likewise, if you want to concentrate, or stay awake, or have a better memory. And if smoking pot makes you feel better than Prozac, I think you ought to be able to self-medicate that way.
Americans are generally deeply uncomfortable with the idea of giving people that kind of unfettered control over their mental state. In some way, altering our mental state seems to deeply violate the self--I think that's why so many people with depression insist so strenuously that the self on drugs is their "true" self, while the depressed self was some diseased aberration.
As I've writtenbefore, I don't think that there's any metaphysical state which can be defined as the "true" self, such that people shouldn't depart from it. We all have multiple potential selves within us, none of which is more "real" than any other. To me, the important question is: does the self I have now want to be different from what it is in some fundamental way? If so, you have a perfect right to seek other, more satisfying selves, whether through drugs, transcendental meditation, or voting for Barack Obama.
With a stunning lack of originality, what I worry about is the long term effect of these things. Mark Kleiman once said to me "Amphetamines don't actually give you more time--they just let you borrow it from the future at an extremely high rate of interest." The new class of cognitive enhancers seems to be less usurious, but what happens to the only brain you've got once you've been soaking it in chemicals for thirty or forty years? Paging Timothy Leary's ghost . . .
When Clinton was refusing to release her tax returns, there was a lot of speculation that she was hiding something from the voters. Now I wonder if she wasn't simply trying to keep competitors from flooding into the market in search of excess returns.
Anachronism of the day
Via Ampersand, this commercial triggers three thoughts:
1) I can't believe that people ever imagined marriages revolving around anything this trivial, even in la-la advertising land where people frequently spend hours discussing the merits of various laundry soaps.
2) I can't believe that my mother grew up in an era where this kind of humiliating message was routinely broadcast.
3) I can't believe that anyone finds it that hard to make a cup of coffee. Did it used to come encased in a hard shell, or something?
Insider trading
I don't mean to brag, but I know Peter Suderman. Personally. Why, just last week, his encyclopedic movie knowledge and biting wit were showcased at libertarian movie night. I helped him move. (Up four nausea-inducing flights of stairs). We run into each other at Big Bear all the time. Often when I find myself standing next to him outside Black Cat at one in the morning, listening to his witty opinions on new bands, I think to myself, "I wonder what the proles do for entertainment?"
All of which is by way of saying that this is a pretty great post.
April 16, 2008
Financial times
When I debated with Glenn Greenwald, this is the kind of financial problem I was talking about. I have various problems with the Times, but in many ways they provide the broadest and deepest hard news coverage in America. They are also finding it very hard to stay profitable, even after adding all sorts of fluff like the Style section. That's the economic reality constraining editors.
How large is large?
Give me a large enough lever and a place to stand, said Archimedes, and I can move the world. Well, our lever may finally be big enough. Apparently, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association is announcing that the market in credit default swaps is $62.2 trillion, just about double its size last year.
That's a big number: $62,200,000,000,000. But the mind can't grasp all those zeros--it just sort of slides past them, like a car skidding on too much ice. But here's something that might make it a little easier: $62.2 trillion is just about equal to the entire output of the world last year. Every single thing made or grown, bought or sold--at least as best we can count.
Kind of makes you wonder what a run on the market might look like, hmmm?
Monster Cables: Cease and desist
You frequently hear hand-wringing about how the gentle art of writing letters is dead. Not so, my friends, not so; this is one of the finest missives it has ever been my privilege to read.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.
I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement. Your client then uses this collection of licensing agreements to convince others under similar threat to accede to its demands. Let me be clear about this: there are only two ways for you to get anything out of me. You will either need to (1) convince me that I have infringed, or (2) obtain a final judgment to that effect from a court of competent jurisdiction. It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind. If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.
I will also point out to you that if you do choose to undertake litigation, your "upside" is tremendously limited. If you somehow managed, despite the formidable obstacles in your way, to obtain a finding of infringement, and if you were successful at recovering a large licensing fee--say, ten cents per connector--as the measure of damages, your recovery to date would not reach four figures. On the downside, I will advance defenses which, if successful, will substantially undermine your future efforts to use these patents and marks to threaten others with these types of actions; as you are of course aware, it is easier today for your competitors to use collateral estoppel offensively than it ever has been before. Also, there is little doubt that making baseless claims of trade dress infringement and design patent infringement is an improper business tactic, which can give rise to unfair competition claims, and for a company of Monster's size, potential antitrust violations with treble damages and attorneys' fees.
I look forward to receiving the information requested and will review it promptly as soon as it is received.
That's just the highlight reel--the rest is just as good, so please read the whole thing.
I'm a pretty strong supporter of intellectual property rights, but it's fairly clear that there's something deeply, deeply wrong at the patent office. Too many garbage patents are being approved in all sorts of fields, and they're too often used as a weapon by large companies against smaller competitors who may not have the capital to bankroll a lawsuit.
Yes, yes, I know: it's our old friend Regulatory Capture carrying a gavel and a slide rule. But unfortunately we have to have patents in order to have inventions, and even more unfortunately, intellectual property is stunningly important to our country's future. Most unfortunately, almost no one cares enough for this to ever become an electoral issue.
Man may labor from sun to sun . . .
Over at Unfogged, LizardBreath had a recent post on the way that professions which bill by the hour are sort of inherently hostile to women. There's a suggestion in the comments that things would be better if law firms switched to contract pricing.
It's sort of a mystery to me how professional services decide whether to be project-based or hourly rate. There's a broad dicta that when output can't be measured, input will be . . . but I can't exactly draw a bright line between investment bankers, who take a commission on deals, and securities lawyers, who are paid by the hour.
That said, I think it's a fantasy that project billing would make law firms more mother-friendly. Investment banks are not exactly hotbeds of femininity, either. If law firms are really goldbricking, a switch to project-based pay would simply encourage them to take on more cases. Professional firms have a great deal of firm-specific human capital invested in their workers, and an incentive to split the partnership pie with as few people as possible. As long as the work remains extraordinarily highly paid, firms will try to squeeze as many hours as possible out of their employees.
It is interesting to contemplate why we've seen such a lifestyle switch over the last century. White shoe lawyers used to work much less hard than laborers. Now they probably clock at least twice as many hours a week as a typical warehouse worker. I have a hunch that it has to do with communications leaving less downtime, and also with increasing returns to knowledge, but I suspect that the decline of inherited wealth probably also plays a role. And probably many other things besides.
The rights order
The post on guns triggered a query as to my position on the 1964 civil rights act. My thoughts are not particularly original, or cogent, but here goes:
1) Though I endorse the principle that private property owners should be able to use their possessions as they wish, slavery was America's Original Sin, and segregation was an outgrowth of a bitterly unjust and state-enforced order. Just on those grounds, I'm probably prepared to make an exception to general principle.
2) I'm not particularly friendly to public accomodation laws in general, though I'm not a lawyer, and fully recognize that I may simply be missing important facets of the debate.
But even if I endorsed the principle that racist shop owners ought to be free to exercise their beliefs, one's right to discriminate against people on the basis of race or creed is literally the last right I am interested in defending. When we have rolled back eminent domain abuse, ended state nannying about our health choices, curbed prosecutorial abuses, obliterated corporate welfare, stamped out farm subsidies, ended the moronic drug war, established well-funded school voucher programs, pruned our overgrown tax code, torn down our trade barriers, shoved the government all the way out of our bedrooms, rationalized regulation, and gotten the Supreme Court out of the business of approving nativity scenes in remote town squares . . . well, then I might be prepared to sit down and ponder, philosophically speaking, whether one's fundamental human right to be a repulsive racist should be recognized by the legal system in this context.
Last time I looked, we still had a ways to go on those other things yet.
Evidence? Who wants evidence?
Ezra Klein recently called for a national medical effectiveness agency:
The final point is that we don't currently have good drug effectiveness information that could help insurers make value-based decisions. As such, they make cost-based decisions. The insurers are behind a national body that would produce this research, as well they should be. Zirkelbach is suggesting that the tiering system, with its somewhat arbitrary nature, is all they can do in the meantime.
I was thinking the same thing when I wondered why the FDA doesn't actually do the clinical trials; surely, the drug companies could pay for the trials the FDA conducts, which would remove the taint of self-interest from the proceedings, and ensure that results don't get buried.
But there are, as this post notes, some political problems associated with assembling that kind of data; how does that information get used? The question I worry more about, though, is does that information get used?
I've been reading (actually, listening to) Supercrunchers, by Ian Ayres. The gist of it is that the advent of huge datasets and better statistical methods is enabling us to replace intuition with vastly superior data-based analytics.
He covers everything from predicting wine quality, to Direct Instruction, to evidence based medicine. And the major unifying theme: in every case, experts have fiercely resisted quantitative methodology. This is why DI and EBM are still not widespread, even though they clearly offer vastly superior results: the professionals who need to implement them don't want to.
Ayres attributes this to overconfidence: even when we know that the script beats the human, we still think that we can beat the script. But he does not, in my opinion, linger long enough on the major source of resistance: the script makes professional jobs less fun. Being the voice, and arms, of a computer is a lot closer to being a data entry clerk than what doctors and teachers envisioned when they entered the profession. So despite overwhelming evidence, both efforts have stalled.
If we're going to have a federal institution do anything, it should be facilitating the roll-out of these kinds of data-driven systems. But the political power is on the side of the providers. I wonder with efforts like the one Ezra proposes whether it wouldn't be dogged by similar problems.
Gunning for a job
Florida has just passed a law preventing property owners from barring shoppers and employees from bringing guns onto their property and leaving them inside of locked cars. Glenn Reynolds says "Seems reasonable to me." I'm not so sure. I'm second to none in my love of the Second Amendment, but that's for the government, not private owners. My freedom of speech does not extend to telling my boss he's a flaming jerk (and aren't I lucky that James Bennet is such a great guy!). I'm not sure why my right to bear arms should include the right to bear them on someone else's land.
Monthly facebook notice
I love each and every one of you. But I already have two hundred facebook friends, thanks to various high schools, colleges, graduate schools, jobs, and urban social networks. I reserve friending people on facebook for those I actually know in real life; otherwise, my feed gets overwhelmed with the lives of people I've never met. If I haven't responded to your facebook friend request, that's why--it's not you, it's me.
A not particularly brief, very personal, very <i>feminine</i> rant
There was a debate on this subject a little while back that I didn't link because it centered on me, which seemed a little too much like whining, particularly I'm not sure I have anything to whine about. But one of the women offered an interesting analysis: women who blog about "female" subjects will be punished by being taken less seriously; Ezra can post recipes, but I can't.
I read that comment and thought, "What decade is this?" Are we still under the impression that we have to dress up like men, at least metaphorically, in order to be treated as equals? Seeing women call on other women to eschew feminine pursuits in order to improve our collective position makes me deeply, deeply sad. This is what we were supposed to be fighting--the ingrained notion that domestic pleasures are women's work, and that women's work is fundamentally frivolous.
I am to be sure, something of a girly girl, with thirty pairs of shoes in my closet and a really astonishing collection of hair styling appliances. But I don't think of cooking as some sort of spiritual extension of my womb. Cooking is fun, particularly if you like to eat well and don't have a ton of money with which to satisfy that desire. It doesn't get any less fun if you have an Adam's apple.
I bring this up now because last night someone I'd recently met asked me how much of a role I thought misogyny played in the liberal blogosphere's er . . . energetic . . . reaction to me. I'm not qualified to comment on that; obviously, when someone doesn't like you, the most psychologically comforting explanation is "sexism". Then this morning, someone emailed me Roy Edroso's screed. It was good for a smile--until I reread it and noted that he'd called me a "lipstick libertarian"? What the hell? I'm hard put to think of a way to pack more snide sexism and heteronormative stereotypes into two words. I do wear lipstick (well, usually gloss), and more than occasionally eyeliner and mascara and a little shadow. And what the hell does that have to do with my political ideas?
I do not know whether being a woman has ultimately helped or hurt my career, and I don't waste time worrying about it. But I get a little testy when Kerry Howley and I, among many others, see the comment threads on our media appearances degenerate into extended wardrobe critiques, or debates about whether and under what conditions one might "hit that". I'm irritated when interlocutors both left and right assume that my second X chromosome has conveyed upon me a sacred obligation to agree with their political ideas. I'm annoyed that a typically female narrative style, which touches on personal experience, is derided as fundamentally unserious--particularly when it is so derided by people who admire it in feminist bloggers. And I'm perilously close to despair at finding that so many of my correspondents not only believe that pointing out that I am 35 and unmarried is a devastating insult, but apparently expect me to share that opinion. Was I born in 1973, or am I living in it?
I will say that I'm particularly shocked to find that about 95% of this comes from the left, particularly the fraternity potty talk--my right wing commenters usually limit themselves to saying "you're pretty", which is the sort of thing no one, male or female, minds hearing. Why the hell is the phrase "lipstick libertarian" being written by a left-wing blogger, much less published in the Village Voice? Would my blogging really improve if I traded in my Prada boots for a pair of Doc Martins?
Update Yes, I know the many uses of the phrase "lipstick lesbian"; indeed, I count several as friends and loved ones. But the facts remain:
1) Lipstick lesbian is used to imply that wearing makeup somehow makes you less serious and authentic.
2) Would the phrase "lipstick libertarian" have ever been used about a man?
Am I humorless? Perhaps. But while I used to feel like my gender didn't really matter on my blog, lately it's come to feel like half the commentary I attract contains some mention of the fact that I'm a woman. Given that few people see a need to remark on the fact that male bloggers are male, I find it annoying.
I have a little list . . .
Apparently I've made Roy Edroso's hate list. Honestly, I feel like he could have done better. My friends offer more biting and incisive criticisms. Even when sober. But of course, it's an honor just to be nominated.
Amusing tidbit of the day
A friend sends along this joke, apparently au courant on Wall Street:
Q: How do hedge fund managers work 27 hours a day?
It's the annual contemplation of what, exactly, is the stupidest question I was asked while filling out my taxes. The early favorite was the state of New York, which wanted to know if I had, during the year, experienced any depreciation on an asset purchased prior to 1960.
On the other hand, DC wanted to know if I was some sort of a lawyer. And whether I was a first-time homebuyer. Also, am I in any way disabled? Might I have lived abroad for any portion of the year?
That seemed hard to beat. But New York swung back at the last minute with a roundhouse punch: did I engage, at any point during the year, in the production of maple syrup? Yes, that's it's own tax category in the Empire State. As the descendant of a long (long, long, long, long) line of New Yorkers, I have to wonder, couldn't they have found something a little less foolish to subsidize? Like, say, a crash program to put Groucho glasses on the Statue of Liberty?
April 15, 2008
More tax tallies
Eddy Elfenbein takes a stab at what it would take to make a flat tax revenue neutral. The answer is about 32% tax on income above 37K.
Where does it all go?
Geezers and guns, my friends, geezers and guns. That's what our taxes buy us. You'd think I'd at least have gotten a free-Glock-with-purchase.
New York's Safety Police
Like Matt, I think the uproar over this is ridiculous. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was allowed to walk home from school by myself, past several housing projects, across major avenues, and through a neighborhood generally regarded as a short step away from the slums. I'm not sure whether I got to ride the subway, but then, back in the 1980s, the New York subways were actually dangerous. I was certainly shopping alone at Bloomingdales in junior high. And I'm pretty sure that my best friend, who went to school on the east side, was riding the crosstown bus unescorted even younger than nine.
I don't understand why, as New York has gotten safer, parents have gotten more overprotective. At a dinner party last summer, a woman apologetically explained her decision to stay home with the kids on the grounds that she had to take them to and from school every day. How old were these kids? 13 and 9. At thirteen I would have committed seppuku rather than bear the shame of having my mother escort me to school. And I'm trying--and failing--to picture the look on her face had anyone suggested such a ridiculous idea. Yet to hear this woman tell it, all the parents at her child's school shuttled their children back and forth.
The details of the raid on the Polygamist cult in Texas are coming out. It's horrifying. Girls married off to men when they hit puberty. Boys taught to be sexual predators. There's the strange clothing requirements. The cult got rich out of gangs of unmarried mothers getting welfare. Some 400 kids may have to go into foster care, and the system is overwhelmed. The kids are going to require serious counseling. The Texas courts may rule that polygamy is inherently abusive to children, which the AZ and UT courts have never ruled. Some links here, here,here, and here.
This brings to mind an argument I once had with Bryan Caplan at lunch; polygamy, he said, should be good for women, since it increases demand for them, and thus enhances their bargaining power.
In theory perhaps, I said, but in practice, the only cultures that practice it are also ones that radically restrict womens' freedom.
Now I think that those two things may be linked: that polygamy in fact does enhance the bargaining power, and thus any society that practices it ends up radically restricting their rights in order to counteract that power--thus, twelve year old girls married of to sixty year old men.
Incorporate dreams
Every time I suggest eliminating the corporate income tax, I am beset by horrified people saying "But . . . what's to stop me from becoming a corporation and evading taxes that way?"
Well, what's stopping you now? Your rent is money thrown to the winds; a corporation's rent is an expense deductible from income. Your car payment is a millstone around your neck; for a corporation, it's another deduction. Your travel is an expensive pleasure; corporate travel just further ratchets the amount Uncle Sam collects at the end of the year. Even at a 35% corporate income tax rate, this would be a big net win for most people. So why don't you become a corporation and take advantage of this fact?
Because the IRS won't let you, that's why. When the "corporation" buys things that are clearly for your consumption, that's taxable income to you. People who have thriving businesses and report very little income get a long, hard look from the audit department, and usually walk away with a hefty penalty for tax evasion.
There's no reason that it would be any harder to keep people from evading taxes this way if we eliminated the corporate income tax. The IRS would catch you the way they catch most tax evaders: comparing your alleged income to your bank accounts and zip code. This is why you occasionally see bewildered live-in housekeepers on television surrounded by a squad of auditors.
More signs of the coming climate apocalypse
I just saw the biggest bee I have ever encountered. It was literally almost the size of my thumb. Clearly we are returning to the Carboniferous era. New investment strategy: I have just placed a bid on eBay for 17 tanker trucks full of deet.
Make dialog, not war
Long, long Bloggingheads between me and Glenn Greenwald. I'll be blogging more about this later, but I've got an enormous backlog of posts I want to get up . . . sigh.
Update Chris Shea of Bloggingheads sends along a shorter clip, which is a decent summary of our dispute:
Taxes revolt
I'm in the midst of paying my taxes (you know what's more fun than freelance income and business expenses? That's right--moving between states mid-year!) So it's time for our annual Megan McArdle tax rant. Every libertarian fiber in my body has been quivering with indignation for a solid twelve hours. Obviously, like everyone else I do not enjoy contemplating my cash outflow to Uncle Sam--I can think of a lot of uses for that cash. That, however, is the price of living in a free society. What bothers me is that it's so bloody complicated.
I should not have, in the course of paying my debt to society, to spend nine hours answering questions about my educational habits, proclivity to recycle, the location of my potentially qualified small business, whether or not I happen to farm, or any of the 87 trillion other things TurboTax wanted to know. It might have been 87 zillion. Frankly, I lost count.
More than two hundred years ago, we fought a whole revolution and everything to get the government to leave us the hell alone. Now it thinks it's entitled to know whether I am a qualified small business owning woman. Small business? Check. Woman? Check. Qualified? Who the hell do you think you are, Mr. Tax Man?
All this useless activity is so that our politicians can look like They Care by giving tiny tax breaks to all of their favorite people--that is to say, the people who vote for them and give them money. All of these tax breaks, almost without exception, do the most good for the people who least need them. Meanwhile, they waste time for the rest of us, distort the economy, and require us to pay extra people to process tax returns. It's lose-lose-lose all around unless you owned a seal-fur farm between 1987 and 1991.
As others haul out the plastic inflatable Santa every Christmas, I showcase the Jane Galt Tax Plan every April 15th.
1) Get rid of all our poverty programs, except those aimed at the disabled, and temporary unemployment assistance, and institute the negative income tax. That is to say, the system should be continuously progressive, from a steep negative rate of up to 100% on very low earners, gradually declining until it zeroes out around $28,000 a year, and then rising gradually until it maxes out around 35% on the top brackets.
2) Eliminate FICA and pay for Social Security and Medicare out of general revenue. It's time to stop pretending it's a pension system, when there are no assets in the "trust fund"
3) Eliminate the corporate income tax
4) Eliminate the special treatment for capital gains. All income should be taxed at the same level, regardless of its source.
5) Eliminate all deductions. Period, end of statement. No mortgate, student, child, etc. All causes are equally worthy in the eyes of the person who possesses the deduction; it is a waste of our time as a nation to sit around arguing about who deserves what.
6) Just say no to the Value Added Tax. In theory, it's a good tax. In practice, because it is extremely hard to tell what proportion of the price of anything represents the tax, it removes the good and natural pressure upon tax rates.
7) Get rid of the estate tax, and tax the capital gains on whatever is sold.
So why these particular features?
Well, the negative income tax does two things: encourages work by removing the disincentives created by potential loss of benefits; and means that the entire country, poorest to richest, faces a marginal tax increase if they want more spending: the poor have to give back some of their rebate, while the rich have to pay higher rates. For many on the left, that may of course be a bug, not a feature, as it forces the electorate to think much harder about whether or not they want new spending.
The arguments between conservatives and liberals often go like this:
C: The rich pay all the taxes
L: That's not true -- what about FICA?
Both have points. But the central issue that the conservatives are trying to get at is that the majority of the electorate does not face a marginal tax increase when they agitate for new spending. FICA may indeed be regressive, but its rates are unaffected by the level of spending in government. So a majority is prone to agitate for higher taxes, because they will not be paying those taxes.
I don't think it's a healthy situation for the electorate when a large majority is voting for spending that costs them nothing. To the minds of someone who pays no income tax, there's no cost/benefit analysis to be made; they're getting stuff for free. Even something of trivial benefit to them is thus better than not raising taxes. So we end up spending money on a lot of crap, because most of the voters don't care -- it's not their money.
On the other hand, liberals have a point about fairness. It isn't fair to say that some guy who brings home $20K should pay the same quarter of his income as Warren Buffett. The decrease in Joe Schmoe's standard of living represented by that 25% is much greater than the decrease in Warren Buffett's SOL from taking a quarter of his loot.
A negative income tax increases fairness, removes perverse incentives from the current benefit system, and makes sure that everyone has to think about whether they really want that new spending they're voting for -- enough to give up some of their cash.
Killing FICA increases fairness while removing some of the obstacles to reform by eliminating the fiction of an insurance program.
Eliminating the corporate income tax while equalizing treatment between capital gains does a number of things. It mitigates the current bias towards (tax deductible) debt financing. It ends all the ridiculous distortionary crap that corporations do to get around taxes. It ends the bias towards retained earnings that helped produce such interesting results in the stock market. It takes away a large chunk of the ability of the rich to avoid taxes by deferring their income in capital gains. It ends the tax preference for stock options that helped make the start of the new millenium so lively. Under this plan, income is income is income, no matter where it comes from. Thus we can stop the multi-billion dollar industry in shifting income from tax-disadvantaged to tax-advantaged forms.
If you just end the corporate tax without changing capital gains, you keep much of the distortion and shelter for the rich. If you eliminate special capital gains treatment without eliminating the corporate tax, you bias the economy away from investment, because now income is taxed at a high level twice -- once when its made by the company, and a second time when its distributed to the company's owners. This way, we tax it once, when it hits a real person.
We eliminate deductions for two reasons. First of all, they're distortionary. If it makes economic sense for adults to go to school, they will go to school. Giving a tax credit for it just encourages marginal activity that wouldn't pay for itself without a subsidy. Try thinking of it not as a tax credit, but as you giving someone else money to follow their dream of learning Old Church Slavonic, and you see what I mean.
Second of all, deductions are the way that the rich make sure that they pay a lot less taxes than the upper middle class. There is a reason that Barbra Streisand thinks that income taxes should be raised; she isn't going to pay much more tax. Most of her money is in assets, earning more money. It's the guy who owns the gas station down the street who's going to get it in the teeth. If we want to tax the rich, let's tax them, not give umpteen zillion deductions so they have the same marginal rate as your average bike messenger.
That's fine, I hear you say, but why all the deductions? Why not just the bad ones?
Because, as we've found since Reagan's simplification, there's no such thing as just one deduction. If you want the mortgage tax credit, you're going to need to give someone else the land-use abatement, and then there's the guy with his Urban Empowerment Zone Qualified Small Business, and next thing you know, we haven't gotten anywhere. The only way to get a clean code is to get rid of all of them. This won't be fun for many people. Housing prices will drop, for starters. On the other hand, so will tax rates. And come on -- why should an apartment renter be paying more taxes so you can frolic in the greenery?
Why get rid of the estate tax? Because the revenues raised are trivial, and people spend an enormous amount of time and money structuring their estates to get around them. Again, a disproportionate share of the tax is paid not by the super rich, but by the poor schmucks with one or two big assets they can't structure to get around the tax. On the other hand, when it's sold the inheritors should pay all the capital gains -- if you get rid of the estate tax, you should get rid of the stepped-up basis as well.
As I wrote way back when, guaranteed to satisfy no one but it's owner . . . but at least I feel better.
The rest of you should probably get back to your taxes.
Culture clash
This excellent post by Publius on Thomas Frank triggers two thoughts, one frivolous, one not.
First, the frivolity: it is time to stop referring to ourselves or our demographic as "latte-sipping", etc.
The second potential argument is more interesting. It’s not that economics causes the culture wars, but that the culture wars are distractions from economic issues. This one hits far closer to the mark. There’s no doubt that Republicans fan the culture war flames to distract working class voters from other issues.
This “distraction” argument is the one Democrats use the most often, but it too has weaknesses. In particular, it’s not clear why cultural issues should play second fiddle to economic ones. Objectively speaking, economic issues don't necessarily have more value than cultural ones. Sure, most of these cultural grievances seem silly to me, but I drink steamed milk with espresso (sometimes even with delectable pumpkin spices) so what do I know. But seriously, if I thought abortion was truly murder, then marginal tax rates would be a lower priority.
You can now get a perfectly serviceable dry skim milk cappuccino at the Dunkin' Donuts in my mother's largely working-class hometown, which is smack in the middle of the reddest county in New York State. Time for a new metaphor. Soy chais, perhaps.
Non frivolous point: Publius is particularly smart here:
But what is irrational is for working class Americans to support Republican economic policies themselves. It’s one thing to support the Republican Party, but it’s quite another to support its regressive, anti-work, pro-wealth economic policies on the merits. If working class Republicans were acting rationally, they should at least advocate for more populist economic policies within the confines of the party.
But you don’t see that. Unlike the IP example above, it’s not like a big chunk of working class Republicans support the party on cultural issues, yet push behind the scenes for more equitable tax codes or more labor-friendly legislation/regulation. Most are as gung-ho on tax cuts for the rich as they are on gay marriage and abortion.
It’s here, then, that Frank’s “false consciousness” argument gains steam. It’s not so much that the culture wars are distracting people from economic issues. It’s that the culture wars cause people to prefer specific economic policies that they should be opposing.
Specifically, the anger and resentment triggered in the culture wars bleed into the realm of economics. If the liberals like it, it must be wrong. For instance, if contemptible secular liberals prefer gay marriage, then whatever economic argument they are making is probably wrong too. In this sense, the culture wars cause many working class Americans to give their “proxy” to Republicans, even on economic issues.
But of course, the thing runs the other way: liberals reject things merely because conservatives believe them. Our cultural and economic beliefs cluster irrationally on both sides, as Michael Huemer has noted:
Two beliefs are ‘logically unrelated’ if neither of them, if true, would constitute evidence for or against the other. Many logically unrelated beliefs are correlated—that is, you can often predict someone’s belief about one issue on the basis of his opinion about some other, completely unrelated issue. For example, people who support gun control are much more likely to support welfare programs and abortion rights. Since these issues are logically unrelated to each other, on a purely cognitive theory of people’s political beliefs, we would expect there to be no correlation.
Sometimes the observed correlations are the opposite of what one would expect on the basis of reason alone—sometimes, that is, people who hold one belief are less likely to hold other beliefs that are supported by the first one. For instance, one would naively expect that those who support animal rights would be far more likely to oppose abortion than those who reject the notion of animal rights; conversely, those who oppose abortion should be much more likely to accept animal rights. This is because to accept animal rights (or fetus rights), one must have a more expansive conception of what sorts of beings have rights than those who reject animal rights (or fetus rights)—and because fetuses and animals seem to share most of the same morally relevant properties (e.g., they are both sentient, but neither are intelligent). I am not saying that the existence of animal rights entails that fetuses have rights, or vice versa (there are some differences between fetuses and animals); I am only saying that, if animals have rights, it is much more likely that fetuses do, and vice versa. Thus, if people’s political beliefs generally have cognitive explanations, we should expect a very strong correlation between being pro-life and being pro-animal-rights. But in fact, what we observe is exactly the opposite.
Some clustering of logically unrelated beliefs could be explained cognitively—for instance, by the hypothesis that some people tend to be good, in general, at getting to the truth (because they are rational, intelligent, etc.) So suppose that it is true both that affirmative action is just and that abortion is morally permissible. These issues are logically unrelated to each other; however, if some people are in general good at getting to the truth, then those who believe one of these propositions would be more likely to believe the other.
But note that, on this hypothesis, we would not expect the existence of an opposite cluster of beliefs. That is, suppose that liberal beliefs are, in general, true, and that this explains why there are many people who generally embrace this cluster of beliefs. (Thus, affirmative action is just, abortion is permissible, welfare programs are good, capital punishment is bad, human beings are seriously damaging the environment, etc.) Why would there be a significant number of people who tend to embrace the opposite beliefs on all these issues? It is not plausible to suppose that there are some people who are in general drawn toward falsity. Even if there are people who are not very good at getting to the truth (they are stupid, or irrational, etc.), their beliefs should be, at worst, unrelated to the truth; they should not be systematically directed away from the truth. Thus, while there could be a ‘true cluster’ of political beliefs, the present consideration strongly suggests that neither the liberal nor the conservative belief-cluster is it.
On the other hand, perhaps some of the clusters aren't quite as unrelated as they seem. In small communities, economics can be a way to exert social control. And I don't mean that in necessarily a bad way. In many ways, communities are much better disbursers of charity than the government; they have the local information to determine who is needy and who needs some strong encouragement to get a job, take the baby to the doctor, and mow their lawn. As anyone who has had to move in with their parents after a financial reversal can attest, Mom is an excellent social worker--it's absolutely astonishing how fast you get your life back together when you have to sit down with her at the dinner table every night.
Small communities are also extremely attuned to property rights, because things like property lines matter to them in ways that they don't matter to city dwellers; conversely, they have a lot less shared space relative to private space. Those core beliefs about things like property rights and work arguably build up into something akin to the Republican economic agenda.
April 14, 2008
Dear Megan
Reader Sidney asks: "I have a date this weekend with a gal who's 6'3. Any tips?"
Candied parsnips. We all love candied parsnips. Little known fact, but true.
Well, seriously:
1) If she wears high heels, compliment her on them.
2) Do not make tall jokes.
3) Do not ask her if she played basketball. Or rowed. Or played volleyball. Or modeled. Or . . . you get the picture.
4) "I bet it's really hard to find clothes that fit" is also not a crowd-pleaser, as it carries the implication that the ones you're wearing, don't.
5) If you get there . . . kissing her standing up will feel desperately weird if you are not at least 6'4, and if you are taller than her, it will feel weird to her (don't be surprised if she stands on her tiptoes in an unconscious attempt to get back to "normal"). Also, all of your normal instincts for that special moment will result in awkward crane-like movements of your head as you discover that nothing is where you expect it to be. Unless you think that you can finesse this smoothly, best to make your initial move while sitting down.
As there’s no america.craigslist.com, I’m posting this here since the topic I’m about to rant about took place in your district.
I’m referring to April the 13th, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. A group of people decided to show up to the Jefferson Memorial (which is open 24 hours) at 11:55 at night (as to not interfere with anyone else who might have been there earlier during the day) and dance. Dance, that is, equipped with headphones and MP3 players, so as not to disturb anyone else. Not my cup of tea, but this is the US, isn’t it?
About 10 minutes into this, the police had arrived, apparently telling everyone to “shut the fuck up”. When one woman asked why they were being stopped by the police, she was shoved up against a pillar, cuffed, then booked and held. Of course, none of this was witnessed by me, and I’m going off of published articles. The first link below tends to be a bit slow, so there’s another similar story linked below it.
Now, we all know what’s going to happen. The charges will be dropped and we’ll all forget about it. But that’s not the point – how often are we going to let certain police departments stop people on a whim, only to drop the charges later?
There was an excellent comment in the latter link, which reads:
“I think a peaceful gathering at midnight on every Saturday from now on is in order. I predict that the government will change the rules to ban protests there once this starts.
I can't think of a better way to re-enforce the Founding Fathers views than to start the push back at the steps of the man who expressly demanded we do it.”
Well I second that.
I’m not from DC – but I’m damn willing to head out there with a few friends and have a peaceful stand-around. Not a protest, not some inane statement. Just a group of us standing around, acknowledging what happened, and hopefully sending some small message that this just isn’t fucking acceptable.
So what do you say? April 20th, 11:55 at night. If I get a few dozen people interested in this, we’ll make it happen. I’ll throw up a website or a mailing list or something so we can stay in contact and organise this better if I get some feedback.
But now’s your chance. Now you can finally take note of something like this and do something. Even if that something is just meeting other people who feel the same way.
Please. This transcends political parties, this should transcend everything. We are Americans. Let’s stand together for a night. And then…
Will downloading kill the music business, part 3,980,876,312
I'm pretty much an absolutist on downloading music--I only do so when the artist is voluntarily giving it away. I've long voiced worries that the file-sharing culture will kill the music business, making us all worse off--a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Don't worry, file-sharing advocates reply; bands can use albums as loss-leaders for their concert revenue.
This has never seemed very convincing to me; live performances are limited in a way that albums are not. I can expand the amount of music I listen to, but frankly, these days if I see three live shows in a week, that's a huge week for me--and most people my age don't go to any, because concert venues don't like infants. Depending on concert revenue is limiting in terms of market size, and also, it seems to me, puts a time limit on an act; once your core demographic hits thirty, you'd better start looking for another job.
The American has suggests another reason concert revenue will not replace album sales:
Concerts might be a short-term fix. As one national concert promoter says, “The road is where the money is.” But in the long run, the music business can’t depend on concert tours for a simple, biological reason: the huge tour profits that have been generated in the last few decades have come from performers who are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. As these artists get older, they’re unlikely to be replaced, because the industry isn’t investing in new talent development.
When business was good—as it was when CD sales grew through much of the 1990s—music labels saw concert tours primarily as marketing vehicles for albums. Now, they’re seizing on the reverse model. Tours have become a way to market the artist as a brand, with the fan clubs, limited-edition doodads, and other profitable products and services that come with the territory.
“Overall, it’s not a pretty picture for some parts of the industry,” JupiterResearch analyst David Card wrote in November when he released a report on digital music sales. “Labels must act more like management companies, and tap into the broadest collection of revenue streams and licensing as possible,” he said. “Advertising and creative packaging and bundling will have to play a bigger role than they have. And the $3 billion-plus touring business is not exactly up for grabs—it’s already competitive and not very profitable. Music companies of all types need to use the Internet for more cost-effective marketing, and A&R [artist development] risk has to be spread more fairly.”
Albums are a classic high-fixed-cost, low-marginal-cost industry--the kind where you want volume sales to defray large up-front expenses. What I hadn't though of before is that, in a sense, so are concerts. The larger the venue, the higher the profit--so a very fragmented music industry may not provide enough money for anyone to make a career.
Music is basically a tournament business: a few people get rich, encouraging many others to toil in poverty. This almost certainly generates more new music than paying everyone $18,000 a year for the rest of their lives. If the tournament runs out of prizes, what will happen to those of us who like having a lot of new albums to listen to every month?
Counting Crow
Another insight that I gained into credit markets during the conference is how oppressive small credit markets can be. We all romanticize the days when you could get a loan from your local banker on a handshake and a smile. We forget how that system could lock in local oligarchies, because would-be entrepreneurs couldn't get financing. This could enforce deep repression: consider the fate of a restaurant owner under Jim Crow who had let blacks eat at his lunch counter. I doubt he'd get another loan from the bank any time soon.
That gave me a related thought, which is that staunch federalists (and I'm a fairly staunch one) need to take into account the ways in which all of the theoretically private transactions under Jim Crow were used to enforce a radically unjust regime. I don't know where I stand on this; I'm just mulling it a bit.
Credit crunch
I went to a Liberty Fund conference on consumer credit this weekend, where a good time was had by all. This brought a number of thoughts to the fore, which I scribble down in no particular order:
1) There is an enormous amount of moral panic about debt in western society. (I presume in other societies too, but I don't know.) Over and over, the fact that people can and will make bad decisions about debt is presented as a legal reason for restricting their choices. Yet when I think about the bad decisions my friends have made, and the consequences on their lives, getting in over their head with credit cards or a house is probably the last thing on the list. Unless you are in a position that requires some sort of security clearance, the worst thing that happens to you if you borrow too much money is . . . you will find it harder to borrow more money. Much worse consequences have come from marrying the wrong people, procreating at the wrong time, majoring in the wrong subject, taking the wrong job, or choosing the wrong hobby. Yet almost everyone, including liberals, would be repulsed by the notion of trying to "fix" this problem by curtailing liberties--should we require poor people to get counseling before they change jobs?
2) The moral panic results in a huge amount of paternalism about debt. Credit alarmists frequently focus on college students, with the implication that they are still children who needed to be walled off from bad credit decisions. This is bad enough, but at least they're arguably still growing up. It becomes truly offensive when that attitude often spills over to other groups--minorities, the poor--who are also spoken of the way we talk about children: as people who presumptively cannot make good decisions. Better to restrict their options than let them make a bad decision.
Poor people are more likely to make bad decisions about credit than the more affluent, because people with bad decision-making skills are more likely to become poor, and also because the affluent have more knowledge about credit that they tend to transmit to their friends and offspring. The question is not whether some people will deeply regret their decision to borrow; it is whether you or they are more likely to correctly assess their situation. My money's on them.
3) The moral panic also extends to people who meet those needs: we view paycheck lenders as in broadly the same class as pimps, casino owners, and drug dealers. Particularly disturbing seems to be the notion that people make profits providing money to the poor. Yet there's little evidence that payday lenders make especially high profits; even non-profits who try to get into the business have found themselves charging interest rates they previously regarded as usurious. Poor people are, in fact, poor lending risks; the high interest rate compensates for the high default rate.
4) Many of the provisions supposed to "help" the poor with their credit end up helping the middle class. For example, capping interest rates means that people who cannot be profitably lent to at lower rates will be denied credit altogether. Some of them will benefit, because they will not borrow money that would have made them worse off. More of them will be pushed into worse alternatives: pawn shops, loan sharks. Meanwhile, the capital will towards the better credit risks, lowering interest rates for them.
5) A huge problem with reporting on credit markets, as with so many other issues, is that current harms are highly visible, but current helps are largely invisible. Because of our deep shame about debt, people who are in financial trouble rarely say so unless it is made public against their will--i.e., their house or car is repossessed. So the person who has been pushed into bankruptcy by high credit card debt tells her story to the New York Times; the person who managed to finesse a personal crisis with Mastercard keeps quiet and thanks their lucky stars.
6) America, more than any other countries, is a nation of debtors. Our laws and institutions are uniquely debt-friendly, from 30-year fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalty (a happy fantasy in other places) to remarkably easy bankruptcy. Even after our "draconian" reform, American consumer bankruptcy remains by far the easiest in the world; at least in 2005, when I wrote about it, no other country even had Chapter 7.
7) There's a remarkable tendency to view credit as the root of problems even when the causal links aren't particularly good. Expensive credit is more a symptom of poverty than a cause of it. And most American commentators view the housing bubble as a result of excessive credit (either from Fed stimulus or overseas savers). Yet Europe, where credit is much tighter, has had much more spectacular housing bubbles than we have. Having the price of your house fall 25% is a big problem even if you don't have a pricey subprime mortgage.
8) There's an enormous amount of folk mythology in the reconstruction of events in the debt markets. This is certainly exacerbated, and perhaps caused, by the fact that journalists writing about debt almost always find some incredibly photogenic family who were defrauded. In many peoples' minds, this is constructed into a narrative of innocent borrowers victimized by predatory lenders. On the flip side, others paint a picture of speculators committing fraud to secure unwise loans. These narratives are then presented as uncontested fact by commentators.
I am aware of no data that shows how many people were defrauded by their mortgage brokers, versus simply taking on an unwise amount of debt; or how many houses in default are owned by flippers who were speculating on price increases. I am aware of a lot of people confidently stating that one, or the other, is the problem in the subprime market.
9) Credit does have a lot of spillover effects--if everyone else defaults on their mortgage, the price of your house will go down and the price of your borrowing will go up.
10) People who want to use regulation to keep other people from taking on debt they can't pay forget that lenders also want to keep those people from taking on debt they can't pay--and the lenders have a lot more information about those people than regulators ever will. If you can find a reliable way to separate the people who will default from those who won't, I promise that the banks will use it. If not, the only way you can stop those people from defaulting is to deny credit to broad classes of people, the majority of whom would not have defaulted.
11) It's not clear to me how much consumer credit changes net happiness, rather than simply time-shifting the pleasure and the work required to obtain it. If time shifting payment back actually causes us to misprice the good (because we erroneously put it in the "free" mental basket), then debt is actually a hedonic negative. On the other hand if it allows you to peg your activities to the hedonically maximizing time (take a lavish European vacation before you have kids), then it's a plus. Or it could just be a wash.
I suspect that some of our strong cultural preference for deferring gratification is simple puritanism: as someone once said, "if the hangover preceded the inebriation, drunkeness would be regarded as a virtue". This has probably made us as a society vastly richer than we otherwise would be. But we're pretty rich now. Can't we take a break?
Flash forward
Note to Park Police: this is how you deal with a flashmob full of crazy people. Last clause possibly redundant.
Which cops?
A reader points out that it was the Park Police, not the MPD, who made the arrest in the case of my dancing friend:
As I understand it, the police officers involved were United States Park Police officers, not Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers. Your post references “DC’s finest” and the drop in violent crime and murders allowing the police time to enforce various laws (I realize you were being tongue in cheek to make your point). That characterization of the involved officers could lead, and already has led, to individuals believing MPD officers made the arrest. The difference in the agencies may seem trivial or unimportant to the overall point of your story, but it is, potentially, a big issue for [the DC police force].
Fair, and I cherish the hope that DC police would have felt they had something better to do than arrest people for dancing.
Bloggers of the future
AFF College Bloggers contest has finally concluded, and I'm pleased to announce that the winner is Dartblog, with second place going to Oregon Commentator, and third place to Surveillance State. All three are excellent blogs, and I highly recommend that you check them out.
It's here, it's here, it's finally here!
Spencer Ackerman has a new blog. The name alone is worth a visit.
Head on--apply directly to the problem
Just watched Barack Obama respond to the controversy over his remarks. I was mostly off the news grid this weekend, but they certainly make me cringe--more on this later. For the nonce, I wanted to note that I am terrifically impressed by the way the Obama campaign tackles its missteps head-on. Barack Obama admitted that he chose his words badly, and said it probably wouldn't be the last time. Compare this to the Clinton campaign's reaction to the Bosnia fiasco. Admitting your errors quickly and apologizing makes a story yesterday's news. I still think his remarks will be damaging--good issue management doesn't always make issues go away. But I think he mitigated the damage as much as was possible.
Markets in . . . not quite everything
Tyler Cowen does not expect the male birth control pill to be popular. Nor do I. He lists several possible reasons but misses what I think is the main one: incentive structures. As any woman can attest, it's all too easy to miss one or more of those pills. It's therefore very difficult to trust someone else to take them. It's especially hard if you are the one who will bear the heaviest price for a failure. As long as women have the stronger incentive to avoid pregnancy, it will be easier to trust them to keep taking their pills. Especially if you don't live together and thus can't watch him taking it at the same time every morning. The transactions costs on making a Coasean bargain are simply too high.
April 13, 2008
Dancing fools
I was very sorry to be missing this, as I'm out of DC for the weekend, but not as sorry as I am now--someone just got arrested.
The background: twenty people were at the Jefferson Memorial, dancing to the private groove of their own iPods so as not to disturb anyone. Apparently cops showed up and ordered them to disperse anyway, despite the fact that they were not doing anything obviously illegal. One of the libertarians joyfully (yet tastefully and quietly) celebrating the birthday of a favorite founding father questioned why they should have to move along--at which point one of DC's finest shoved them up against a pillar, cuffed their hands behind their back, and hauled them away.
As a resident of DC, I'm certainly overjoyed to hear that violent crime has fallen to a level where we can spare valuable police resources to fight the silent scourge of . . . dancing. Now that we have no more murders or muggings, it seems to me that we should also be looking at newsboys who smoke, women who attend the theater, and of course, the iniquitous habit of playing cards on the sabbath.
I wasn’t aware dancing at a public monument was prohibited by any statute—but given that my friend’s immediate social circle is largely composed of journalists, bloggers, and constitutional lawyers who sue the government for fun, I predict hilarity.
Rule #1 of things like this: know who you're dealing with. Of course, respect for one's civil rights should not be predicated on happening to know a lot of troublemakers with podiums.
First I’d like to make a few things clear. We decided to use iPods to be respectful of other people’s experience at the Jefferson Memorial. No music was heard by anyone other than those wearing headphones. We chose midnight so that we wouldn’t disturb anyone. There were about six other people there that were not with us or the police. If you were one of these people I’d like to hear from you to get your account of what happened.
Perhaps six minutes into the event, security tried to stop us and kick us out of the memorial. Most of the Jefferson fans questioned the officers to try to understand what authority they citing to use force against us. Unfortunately I wasn’t near the “Jefferson 1” so I can’t tell you what she did or didn’t do but she was hauled away, handcuffed, in a police van and charged with disorderly conduct.
So in the 2008 version of the USA you cannot dance at the Jefferson Memorial without being disorderly it seems.
Everyone I spoke with says there was no noise, there were no threats, and no laws broken (the park police I spoke with–including the arresting officer (who, oddly enough, denied to me that he was the arresting officer)–declined to say why she had been arrested).
The police refused to answer any questions, referring all calls to the communication number of the Park Police, which at this hour is closed. They also refused to give their badge numbers.
I’ll post some video tomorrow morning of two flash mobbers who say she was doing nothing at all–she was barely even dancing. Her crime was apparently to ask “why?” when the park police told the group they had to disperse. Note too that this was at around midnight. No one was bumping into tourists, or obstructing anyone’s way. I guess the only conclusion, here, is that it’s apparently illegal to dance on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial–even with headphones. You know, post 9-11 world and all. Harmless fun will be interpreted in the most threatening context imaginable.
As Julian notes, the problem here is not that one of my friends, an educated white girl, had to spend five hours or so being harassed by the police. It is that the police think that questioning orders constitutes disorderly conduct. And that the result of questioning them is probably a lot more than moderate harassment when the questioner is not an educated white girl with a lot of camera toting friends.
If I tell you to walk down a street that is dangerous, am I morally culpable when you get mugged? After all, I didn't mug you. The muggers did.
I agree with the people who say that the muggers are morally culpable than the person who gave the directions--rather, the ones who say that the chap who engages in ethnic cleansing or sets off a car bomb in a crowded marketplace is morally worse than the US.
But I don't agree with those who say that we are therefore absolved of all responsibility. Our invasion created the conditions in which bombings, kidnappings, and so forth that weren't taking place before, now are. It seems ridiculous to me to say that we have no responsibility for the innocent people who have been terrorized by these thugs.
This is not an argument over whether we are bad or not. It's an argument over whether we have any responsibility for mitigating the bad results of our actions. I'd say we obviously do. Taking in some of the people who have been forced to flee the violence seems like a no-brainer.
The news business
Should the profit motive dominate journalism? While I think that people overascribe the role of profits in determining what gets published, there's certainly some truth to that--just read through a women's magazine and ask yourself why not one of the products they review is ever described in less than glowing terms. Most big media publications are surprisingly sanguine about losing major advertisers thanks to nasty coverage--one of my favorite reporters at The Economist seemed to average one giant company a year, more or less. But if no self-respecting major media editor would spike a story to keep business, they do have to pay attention to which coverage areas get advertising support; hence, the New York Times Style Section.
In the comments section to another post, beloved commenter Brooksfoe suggests that maybe we need public financing:
The other troubling implication of Megan's line of argument is that she's saying it is inevitable that journalism driven by the profit motive and funded by advertising will be vapid.
This is essentially an argument for massive public funding of broadcast journalism, or aggressive regulation. If it is left to advertising-funded, for-profit broadcasters to determine the shape of the political debate, that debate will be stupid and misinformed. Hence we need publicly funded, not-for-profit broadcasters to be at least as wealthy and powerful as the for-profit ones. As I recall, CNN's and FOXNews's budgets are well over $1 billion a year each.
Alternatively, one could return to old-fashioned regulation requiring broadcasters to broadcast at least 1 hour of nightly news, and a return to the Fairness Doctrine. This would be confusing to implement, obviously, in the era of 1000-channel cable broadcasting.
We do have public funding of news coverage: PBS and NPR, though they are increasingly reliant on private donors. Perhaps America should have a public broadcaster like the BBC--but that public broadcaster costs every household in Britain over $200 a year.
But that wouldn't change the basic calculus of television news provision unless you actually started heavily regulating the news. I don't see any way to do that. The FCC was empowered to regulate what went on the air because the television companies were licensed to use slices of a publicly owned commodity in scarce supply, the airwaves. I don't see any constitutional way for it to interfere in the provision of private television service to this kind of extent, particularly since the McCain-Feingold cases. If you can't prevent third parties from airing campaign ads, I don't see how you can prevent private companies from airing whatever the hell they want. But I'm no constitutional expert, so I'd love to hear lawyers weigh in.
Even if it could be done, legally, however, I don't think it should be done. I have a very visceral reaction to any suggestion that the government should get into the business of telling us what information we need. It is possible that this would fix some of the problems with news provision (although it's also possible that it would simply boost sales of Wiis and Blu-Ray players. But the cost would be tremendous. The general experience of government regulation of media content is dreadful; it is simply too easy for the government to decide that content it doesn't like is content we don't need. Would we really be better off with a "Fairness Doctrine" which allowed Bush-appointed regulators to declare that every criticism of the president had to be counterbalanced by someone articulating the administration's side of things?
Quote of the day
From a friend who wishes to remain anonymous, via IM:
I like to think that, every time i listen to a WSJ podcast, a hippie loses his wings.
No perfect world
Pharmaceuticals really are marvelous things. They're responsible for most of the increases in life expectancy that took place in the 20th century, and believe it or not, even with rising drug costs they save us money by replacing more expensive treatments like surgery. Saving money is nice, of course, and so is the extra economic growth we have from keeping more productive people around. But the really great thing is the number of active life years it adds to the world--active life expectancy is actually increasing faster than ordinary life expectancy in the US.
Unfortunately, no cloud is without its silver lining. In the case of pharmaceuticals, it's the fact that some small number of the people who take them will thereby be made worse off. The regulatory and liability systems try to control that, but as Derek Lowe points out, they can't fix everything:
This illustrates why either extreme of that argument is untenable. On the make-‘em-pay side, you have trial lawyers arguing that if companies just wouldn’t put defective products on the market, well, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about, would they? Test your drugs correctly and things will be fine! But Exubera’s pre-approval life was as long and detailed as could be. The testing went on and on – and after all, insulin itself has been on the market for more than half a century. What more would a company need to say something is safe?
Then there’s the other side – total pre-emption, which says that the FDA is there to regulate and sign off on safety and efficacy, and by gosh we should have them do it. Once this mighty agency gives its stamp of approval, that settles it. But again, the FDA put Exubera through all kinds of paces. If every drug took that long and cost that much to develop, we’d be in even worse shape than we are now, believe me. So what’s the agency to do?
The truth, as far as I can see, is that no one can guarantee the safety of a new drug. If you want to take that further, guaranteeing the safety of an existing drug isn’t possible, either. Every known drug is capable of causing trouble at some dose, and every known drug is capable of causing trouble at its normal dose in some people. Every new drug has the possibility of doing things no one ever anticipated, once it gets into enough patients for enough time. Every single one.
Complete safety doesn’t exist, and never has. You can have more safety, if you’re willing to take enough time and spend enough money. But you can take all the time we have on earth, and spend all the money available, and you still won’t be able to promise that nothing bad will ever happen. Pretending that either the drug companies or the regulatory agencies can make that fact go away is a position for fools and demagogues.
Libertarians tend to chafe at the notion that companies should be liable for something they couldn't predict. On the other hand, neither could the person who took the drug--why should they bear all the costs? Liability, in theory, pretty effectively socializes the risk of something that has great public benefits.
The problem, of course, is that juries aren't particularly well equipped to handle scientific arguments. Liability as a solution for medical disasters errs both ways--it often fails to punish the guilty, and does snare the innocent (see Breast Implants, class actions against). The liability system evolved during an era in which most problems were basically comprehensible to the average juror. Now with things like environmental pollutants, construction safety standards, medical malpractice, pharmaceutical liability, and securities law, jurors are dealing with things that take advanced degrees (or the work experience equivalent) to understand.
I don't know what the solution is; perhaps we should push the VICAP model more widely for pharma risk in cases where the side effects were simply unpredictable. But that has its own problems.
After the Vietnam War, the United States resettled 1.4 million Southeast Asian refugees within its broders, the largest such resettlement in the nation's history, but the US has hesitated even to acknowledge the current crisis in the Middle East. This reluctance to respond rests on a narrative of impending triumph. A 2006 State Department report found that "changed conditions" in Iraq "have expanded the possibiities for refugee repatriation," and added it is hoped that significant numbers of Iraqi refugees located throughout the Middle East and Europe will soon be able to return home." In 2007 the State Department acknowledge that an "explosion of sectarian violence" had led to widescale displacement within and from Iraq," but maintained nonetheless that "the primary goal continues to be to support efforts to create conditions that will allow Iraqis to return home." Later that year, the administration even campaigned against a bipartisan initiative to create a special immigrant visa for Iraqis who now worked for US organizations and found their lives endangered. That initiative eventually passed Congress, but the plight of former US employees, particularly translators, remains the sum total of the discussion of the crisis within American media and political circles.
The result is that, although more than 30,000 Iraqis were resettled in the United States after the 1991 Gulf War, only 3,775 Iraqis were granted entry between the beginning of the 2003 invasion and the end of January 2008.
. . .
For many Iraqis, it is Sweden that is the promised land. When Leif Eriksson assumed responsibility for migration at the Swedish Embassy in Damascus in 2005, he was assured that it would not be a demanding posting. Since then, however, his country has emerged as the only Western nation to accept large numbers of Iraqi refugees . . . In all, more than 115,000 Iraqis have made their way to Sweden since 2003, and the great majority have been granted asylum.
Sweden? Sweden? A country full of a few million excessively blond people is taking in more Iraqis than the country whose beloved national icon is inscribed "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?" We're being beaten by Sweden? I don't even know where to begin. Let me reverse Michelle Obama: for the first time in my life, I'm utterly ashamed of my country.
I'm in favor of more open borders generally, of course, but at least that's a valid debate. Refusing to take even a trickle of the people displaced by our invasion is a deep stain on our national honor that anyone, left or right, should be eager to erase.
I just don't understand
Glenn Greenwald presents a thoroughly incoherent response in which he professes not to understand why Dan Drezner and I might be offended by his saying:
What really underlies the mentality of people like McArdle and Drezner are two pervasive though toxic afflictions — a drooling, self-loving American exceptionalism, along with a self-interested refusal to acknowledge that there is anything truly wrong with our political and media establishment because they both support and are part of that establishment.
I certainly hope for the same forbearance when I argue that Glenn Greenwald is a self-serving media hound with a size-twelve ego squeezed into a size-four soul, and that the root of his rage is less a profound moral grievance than a narcissistic belief that his ideas are of such transcendant clarity, his concerns of such monumental importance, that any failure to obey his dicta can only stem from the most base of motives.
I mean, I'm not saying that or anything. I'm just saying that I'm glad to know that if I did utter the above, Greenwald wouldn't take it the wrong way.
As regards the war, I think his charge of American exceptionalism is actually pretty fair; I think the US has done a better job of occupying Iraq than, say, Iraq did of occupying Kuwait; and my belief in the basic goodness of America, a belief I still hold, made me think the war would be a way to get rid of a dictator and make the Iraqi people better off. My error was in not recognizing that our strength is not the strength of ten merely because our heart is pure. My conviction that we had the wisdom and power to take the fate of another country into our own hands was overweening arrogance, and it's too bad that other people, mostly Iraqi civilians, have paid the price. I think the war also hasn't been good for us, though I'm less concerned about that. The financial cost is not particularly important, but the cost in lives was large, and the cost to our national polity, and to the lives of soldiers who have been thrust into a brutal situation, has been enormous.
But this has absolutely nothing to do with the John Yoo memos, which as I understand matters are more about the war on terror than Iraq; it's not clear to me that our government policy in Guantanamo and elsewhere would be any different if we had not gone to war. (Indeed, it might have been more brutal).
I hope I haven't suggested anywhere that the media ought to report less of things that make my decision to support the war look bad. If I have inadvertently said such a thing, let me disavow it now. But mostly, as I've said elsewhere at tedious length, my arguments are not normative; they're positive. I disagree with Greenwald's assessment of why coverage is structured the way it is, which is simplistic and overreliant on nasty motives. Greenwald has repeatedly tried to obscure the difference. I find it hard to believe that he actually can't recognize a distinction between "is" and "ought"; either way, it does not reflect well on him.
Regulate or bust
A while back I was having lunch with a left-wing economist who ominously informed me about a new GAO report showing that the FDA was barely inspecting overseas chemical supply plants. This sounds terrible.
"How many people have gotten sick as a result of this?" I asked.
Well, none, it turns out, at least as far as the GAO report is concerned. But they could, he pointed out. What was protecting consumers from unscrupulous businesses killing them?
Presumably the same pressures operate in the OTC market, I pointed out, and we are not much worried that Pepto Bismol will suddenly start slaughtering its customers.
I am not one of those libertarians who think that there is no place for regulation. But I think there are limits on the sorts of things that regulations make better, rather than worse. Regulations that provide transparency usually work very well; extremely complex regulations that attempt to produce certain outcomes usually work badly, if at all. OSHA is probably a lot less successful than, say, making companies insure their employees against on-the-job injuries.
But on the left there is often a presumption that the simple absence of regulation is itself dangerous--that cutting regulation, or diminishing the power of regulators, is de facto evidence that you are hurting the American public. So if something goes wrong, the fact that some sort of regulation was trimmed, or never enacted, is generally identified as the culprit, even when the connection is murky.
There's also a default assumption that what we need is more regulation, rather than, say, better regulation. Any existing regulation is given a safe harbor from examining whether it does a good job; it's mere existent constitutes a presumptive right to live.
April 9, 2008
Media's sacred trust is sadly not a sacred trust fund
Don't I have obligations as a journalist beyond crass money grasping? Haven't I been invested with a sacred trust that shouldn't be held hostage to profit? Indeed I have: to report stories that are factually correct and more importantly, to the best of my knowledge and ability, fundamentally true. But I don't think that I have a duty to lose vast sums of money doing so--I already took quite a hefty paycut when I devoted my MBA to journalism. I gave, as they say, at the office. So did everyone else who took their college degree into journalism, from editors on down. Nor do newspaper owners exactly mint money.
But this is actually sort of besides the point that I was trying to make when I said that newspapers can't print stories readers don't want to read. Both my conservative and my liberal commenters have gotten bogged down in an argument about whether it is possible to make a profit selling stories of the kind Glenn Greenwald desires. I doubt it is on mass scale, but it sort of doesn't matter.
The object in writing these stories is presumably to get people to read them, not merely to acquire the moral satisfaction of a job well done. You cannot get people to read them if they do not acquire your paper. If you fill the paper with stories they do not want to read, they will not take your paper even if it is free. Just ask the people shoving gratis dailies at harassed commuters in subway stations.
You can slip stories that people do not particularly care to read in among a lot of stories that they do want to read. Editors do this all the time, which is how they win pulitzers; those series are generally things that very few people want to read, but impress other editors. Editors also like important stories about topics of vital national interest, which is why they run stories about things like John Yoo. In a general daily that is not owned by Murdochs, Sulzbergers, or Grahams, those stories are already getting quite a hefty readership subsidy from Barack Obama's bowling prowess and the parrot who phoned 911 during a house fire.
Writing more stories will not bring in the many, many subscribers who aren't reading the ones you've already printed. It may chase away casual readers who were willing to peruse one or two, but not eight in a month. (It will also chase those readers away from other vital topics, like mark-to-market accounting).
In short, Glenn Greenwald wants major media outlets to use more of their real estate to push the stories he wants. He claims that this is possible because in fact, readers want to read those stories, only the media is too lazy to print them. I aver that this is weapons-grade poppycock; media outlets have a very good idea of what people read, and if there were vast unmet demand for such stories, editors would have met it.
If experience, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, is simply the name we give our mistakes, then the expertise that Daniel Bouton has gleaned over the last two-and-a-half months ought to place him among the leading authorities on detecting fraud and managing financial risk.
That is what French legislators are expecting on Wednesday, when Mr. Bouton, the chairman and chief executive of the beleaguered bank Société Générale, meets with them to answer questions about the state of banking regulation in the country.
Mr. Bouton will be speaking in his capacity as president of the French banking federation. But he is likely to be asked to address some unanswered questions about how Jérôme Kerviel, a junior derivatives trader, managed to pile up 50 billion euros in unauthorized bets without raising the suspicion of his managers at Société Générale.
The real problem with the media is . . .
Of course, I would have to turn in my MSM Secret Decoder Ring if I did not follow up my criticism of Glenn Greenwald's take on "What's Wrong With the Media" with . . . my own take on "What's Wrong With the Media". Caveat Emptor.
Some of my current readers will no doubt be surprised to hear that I actually share Glenn Greenwald's frustration with the "Obama: Hot or Not?" coverage the often dominates campaign news cycles. I just disagree with his diagnosis of the underlying causes. Mr Greenwald locates the problem in a corrupt journalistic culture that wants to protect itself and the powerful by denying readers vital information. I think the problem is a side effect of powerful structural changes in the marketplace.
100 years ago, readers had three choices if they wanted news. They could actually be there. They could talk to someone who had actually been there. Or they could read about it. Print media has been in decline since radio offered a fourth competitive source. I don't expect that to reverse any time soon.
The golden age of news, as far as many journalists are concerned, was the 1950s-1970s, when serious, wonky anchors led America through the news from 5-7 every evening. I have my doubts as to whether this was actually as wonderful as many people think; oligopolies set off my libertarian bat-signal. But I am in agreement that we have certainly lost something since then.
The fragmentation of media is good for people like me and Glenn Greenwald, since we get to go deeper into issues than any television station, maybe any news outlet, ever could. But it has had funny effects on the MSM news cycle. The news cycle is now dominated by television because everything is so fragmented. Even though television stations are losing viewers, the decline of the print press and the fragmentation of the web mean that television's role in forming the "common narrative" is growing even as television itself becomes less common.
Television news is very hard to produce--I've guest hosted a show, and it left me with giant respect for what it takes to do well. And television news is very, very good at certain kinds of coverage--war footage is more compelling than war correspondence. But there are lots of stories that television is really, really, really bad at. Stories like John Yoo, or the subprime crisis.
Complicated policy stories that involve a lot of reading make terrible television. The three networks used to force those kinds of stories on their readers, at least to some extent, because they could; between the hours of five and seven you could watch stories about John Yoo, or, well, I guess you could finally regrout that bathroom tile.
Proliferating competition from other news outlets, and from all the non-news entertainment on the television, the web, the DVD player, and the video game console, mean that viewers are much harder to retain. Thus, more and more television coverage focuses on the stories that are easy to cover--the Jeremiah Wright story, for example, which looks much different when you read the speeches than when you watch incendiary clips. Or John Edwards' hair. Or Hillary's tears.
Unfortunately for print journalists, what television will cover drives the major narratives of the campaigns--this may be why campaigns seem, at least to me, to be ever more focused on personality than on substance. We have to write about Obama's bowling score, because the fact that television covers it makes it important. If this is one of the things that will decide the election, it's news, even if it's completely stupid. Most non-journalists don't realize this, but the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge. It comes from the fact that television news directors often take stories off the Times.
The other sad truth is that readers--even readers of the New York Times--like those stories. Whether or not we should, we care tremendously about the ordinary things that signal to us what kind of politicians our leaders are.
I'd argue that whether George Bush became president had a lot more to do with what happened over the last eight years than John Yoo did. Presidential candidates are big stories. And because trivial details of their lives matter tremendously in the elections, those trivial details are big stories. Not because journalists think that they're metaphysically important, but because they drive political outcomes.
What Mr Greenwald sees as malign influence, I see as a structural problem that I don't know how to solve. And in some sense, I'm not sure that we should solve it. Mr Greenwald accuses me of being elitist for saying that Americans are morons who don't care about torture memos. I think there's something elitist about that claim--that people who don't care about what Greenwald and I want to write about must therefore be morons. I figure most of them are people who've had a long day with work and kids, and just don't have the energy for parsing complicated, troubling stories. Some people derive energy from reading political news that makes them angry, but most people don't. They just want to relax and have a few hours of enjoyment before they get up and do the whole thing again tomorrow.
I don't know that this diagnosis is right either, of course, but the main thing is that I don't see something judgemental in observing that most people don't want to read what Mr Greenwald and I would most love to write. I think that it's rather more elitist to assume that failing to share the burning interests of a handful of hypereducated wordsmiths necessarily means that there's something wrong with you.
Sic transit gloria mundi
So Pope Benedict is visiting DC soon. There is a big push to get people to metro to the event. The metro commissioned an ad featuring a "Pope Benedict" bobblehead doll, which it is now spiking after the diocese expressed concerns.
My initial reaction is that the diocese has no sense of humor. Though to be fair, this comes from someone who dressed up as the Pope for Halloween in 10th grade.
"Our concern is that this was a bad bobblehead," said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese. "You had unauthorized merchandise and you had a misdressed pope."
The bobblehead portrayed in the Metro video was wearing a red skull cap, known as a zucchetto, and a red cape. "Popes don't wear red skull caps" and they don't wear red capes, only white ones, Gibbs said.
"We think there's a better way to encourage people to take Metro," Gibbs said. "This is the Holy Father, and I think a lot of people would not be comfortable with a bobblehead ad."
The video showed a 7 3/4 inch bobblehead of Pope Benedict XVI riding a Green Line train, buying a special one-day pass, and demonstrating proper Metro etiquette, like standing on the right going up an escalator.
Rubbing along
A number of people wrote, blogged, or commented to point out that monopsony does not require collusion, only substantial search friction. This is very true. However, I saw no emails, posts, or comments that actually explained why it might be reasonable to believe that the minimum wage job market is particularly characterized by search friction. Retail and fast food are pretty much the least frictional job markets there are. You're talking about industries that have annual turnover rates well in excess of 100%--I've heard numbers in excess of 1000%. If there is substantial search friction, the workers sure seem to enjoy the rubbing. By comparison to this explanation, tacit collusion among hundreds of employers seems positively reasonable. But perhaps I am missing something.
Wild horses
I think just about anyone who's spent any significant time around horses knows at least one person who's been seriously injured or killed. Broken backs, broken necks, fractured skulls--I knew one woman whose skittish horse reared up while they were on a very steep hill and fell over backwards on top of her, fracturing both legs in several places, one arm, rupturing her spleen, doing severe damage to her liver, and knocking her unconscious for an extended period of time--which was good, because it took a long time to medevac her. If you've ever seen a movie where a horse struggles up after a roll, you have a pretty good idea of what it might be like to be trapped under that back while a half a ton of writhing quarterhorse ground the saddle horn into your belly. I was there a year later when she climbed back atop that same horse, and it may be the bravest thing I've ever witnessed.
Periodically, this leads to complaints about the safety of the various sports. This seems to happen when rising incomes bring a lot of new people into the sport, and they (or their parents) belatedly discover that yes, large animals are extremely dangerous, especially if you perch atop them while they leap a six-foot hurdle.
Apparently, three day eventing--sort of the Iron Man triathlon of the equestrian world--is now in one of its periodic self-examinations. The article isn't very detailed--though it does have a lovely, stomach-churning graphic of what happens when your horse takes a fence badly wrong--but it seems that as usual, the fight pits beginners and casual hobbyists against the elite competitors.
It's hard to know who to side with. Elite riders are usually better heeled than the amateurs, and like other star athletes are often unbelievably arrogant . . . well, I won't use that word on a family blog. This makes their "let them eat cake" attitude towards the folks who end up in wheelchairs or coffins a tad grating. And it's frankly ludicrous to hear people say that in a sport where the basic equipment starts in the tens of thousands of dollars and marches rapidly north into the millions, they can't afford some $100 pins to make the fences a bit safer.
On the other hand, my impression is that most of the elite riders, like other star athletes, really are willing to take a substantial risk of death or paralysis in order to achieve excellence. Part of their seeming arrogance is, I think, a failure to emotionally comprehend why everyone else doesn't feel the same way. And I understand why they resent having their performance held back to the standards of weekend hobbyists.
April 8, 2008
History repeats . . . sort of
Just in case you thought I was kidding about grooving on long wonky posts about important topics in financial regulation, I now pick on Ezra Klein. This is just not right:
It's got to be a scary moment if you're a conservative. The economy is in a meltdown that can be directly traced to insufficient regulation. In other words, it's in meltdown because you suck at running it, and refused to listen to warnings that subprime loans required more oversight, Glass-Steagall made sense, and somebody should really be keeping an eye on these increasingly odd financial instruments and the obvious housing bubble that was feeding them. There's only one thing to do: Blame liberals.
I in fact sort of agree with the point that Ezra goes on to make, which is that it's a severe stretch to lay the housing bubble at the feet of the Community Reinvestment Act. It is reasonable to blame the notion that homeownership is a priceless boon which should be extended to as many people as possible. That idea infected regulators, politicians, and potential homeowners at ever greater rates over the last ten or fifteen years, and it led to subtle changes at all levels which encouraged overlending/overborrowing. But the CRA was largely a sideshow to this.
However, this paragraph is just wrong in both implication and particulars. In some sense, this obviously could have been prevented by regulation; we could have outlawed all mortgages below Alt-A, for example, and jacked up capital requirements to fifty percent. This is a trivial observation, like noting that if we'd only kept all the hijackers off those planes, 9/11 never would have happened; you need to actually posit a regulatory framework that could a) prevent disaster b) do so without gigantic other costs and c) actually get passed before everyone knew that the disaster was going to happen.
The deeper implied argument, that there were regulations that we could have and should have implemented sooner, is somewhat true. Higher capital requirements, for example, are pretty much universally agreed to be long overdue. But financial regulation is usually better at preventing the last crisis than the next one. Consider some of the financial crises that rocked us in recent decades: currency speculation, banks recycling petrodollars to developing nations that defaulted, interbank lending, program trading, credit risk misvaluation. They all have one thing in common--leverage--which is why higher capital requirements do make sense, and it might be time to start looking at hedge funds. But while that would hedge the government's downside risk (only right, if it is going to be providing bailouts), it's not clear that this would have actually prevented the meltdown. Basel II is pretty much the state of the art in financial regulation, but as Seeking Alpha has noted:
With all due respect to the Nout Wellink and the other members of the BCBS, we do not believe that the implementation of the Basel II proposal or anything that looks remotely like it would have alleviated the ongoing collapse of the market for complex structured assets. When an entire asset class literally dies in a matter of weeks, the risk is infinite. To us, measuring the liquidity or market risk of a Structured Investment Vehicle ("SIV"), with or without the Basel II framework, makes about as much sense as using statistics to predict corporate credit defaults.
Remember too that most of Basel II is based upon the very quantitative models and rating agency methods which caused the subprime crisis, thus offers of assistance from Basel II's creators within the BCBS should be viewed with caution. Basel II merely mimics the business processes of the Sell Side investment houses, systems which are intended first to enable new financial transactions and, as a secondary matter, manage the risk.
The fairly uncontroversial argument that some regulations might have mitigated our current problems has been transformed, in the minds of many commentators, into a belief that the meltdown must therefore have been the result of deregulation, or of rapacious financiers deliberately crippling the regulatory apparatus. Hence the frequent invocation of that magic name, Glass-Steagall, which of course can summon the spirit of FDR to fix the economy if only the president is brave enough to speak it three times aloud.
Contrary to popular belief, Glass-Steagall isn't magic, and also, hasn't been repealed. (Actually, there were two Glass-Steagalls, but for convenience, we shall treat them as a unified system). The sensible thing that Glass-Steagall did are pretty much all still in place--most notably the creation of the FDIC, which is thankfully still doing a pretty fabulous job of insuring bank accounts and winding up the affairs of insolvent banks. Glass-Steagall did other less sensible things which have slowly been eliminated. Regulation Q, which allowed the government to set interest rates on accounts, was gotten rid of in 1980, which is why you get a good interest rate from your bank instead of a free toaster when you sign up. It has not been much missed.
In the 1980s, commercial banks were allowed to affiliate with companies that floated securities, provided that this wasn't their primary business, and to offer a wider range of brokerage services. Citibank's in-house mutual funds are a rip-off, but they did not create the recent problems in the financial markets.
In 1999, we got rid of the rules barring commercial banks from owning investment banking arms (or vice versa, though this really hasn't happened much). This was supposed to keep speculation from taking out peoples' bank accounts, but two years after its passage, Glass, who had pushed for the provision, called it an overreaction and tried to get it repealed. At any rate, the commercial banks, which is what this regulation was designed to protect, have not been the problem during this meltdown. The act did nothing about hedge funds, and the most affected banks--Bear, Lehman and Merrill (which were threatened by the contagion) are pretty much pure play investment houses; Bear needed the balance sheet of a big commercial operation, JP Morgan, to bail it out.
That leaves that other talismanic incantation: "Regulate subprime markets". But what does this mean? Should we have capped interest rates? Set minimum credit rating or down-payment standards? Made securitization illegal? Securitization is still on net almost certainly a good thing, and I must point out, was itself invented by the government to boost homeownership. More to the point, how would you have generated the political will to do any of these things in, say, 2004?
Regulators are best at providing transparency and punishing fraud. But the opacity and fraud in the subprime market seem to have come out of the mortgage broker system, which is regulated at the state level. And the problem wasn't a lack of regulation, per se; it was bad regulation. In some states, the mortgage brokers had captured the process; these are the states that have the biggest problems. But it's hard to trace California's housing disasters to the fact that its legislature has been swept by deregulatory fervor.
I suppose one could make an argument that the subprime market was created by the end of usury laws. But there's a pretty decent literature showing that the alternatives the poor fall back on when interest rates are capped are even worse: pawnshops, loan sharks, or whatever desperate disaster they're borrowing money to avoid. And the usury laws were effectively repealed in 1980, which doesn't track any better with the timeline of the housing crisis than does the 1977 CRA.
The nature of the crisis is such that it fits some convenient narratives: the libertarian belief in overwhelming moral hazard, the Austrian fixation on the money supply, the liberal belief that a lack of regulation necessarily invites disaster. Now, each of these narratives has something worthwhile to offer to the discussion, but all of them are entirely too neat to provide anything like a comprehensive explanation, much less a solution.
What I found on Google Blog Search today
History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as abbreviated but evocative film noir. I see myself in something slinky and black, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and drinking pernod. Glenn Greenwald will, I hope, agree to sport something in a subdued gray flannel.
Can we export democracy?
Actually, people do; both economic development and democracy spread outward from a very few points on the globe; the closer you are to one of those places, the more likely you are to live in a developed democracy.
But Chris Coyne makes a very convincing argument that you can't do it at gunpoint. I highly recommend that all my readers listen to Econtalk every week, but this episode is particularly good, and particularly relevant to one of the central policy debates that will decide this election.
Note to Glenn Greenwald's commenters
Our server is a little slow right now, something we're working on. Your comment is going up; it's just taking a while. Please don't keep hitting "re-post". Thanks.
A great business opportunity
This is most of my (slightly edited) response to one of Glenn Greenwald's angry readers who has declared that he is no longer reading the MSM, and that good journalists could make readers interested in any topic. I thought it worth sharing:
If you think that it is possible to make the public read about anything, I invite you--or for that matter, Glenn Greenwald--to go do so. There are a large number of good journalists out there. Hire them, and send them to write the stories you think everyone is deliberately undercovering. Then sell lots of papers with those stories in them. It should be a simple matter to make money doing this, since the only thing required is to have good journalists. If your thesis were true, this would be an excellent place to put all of your retirement savings.
But in fact, you'd lose everything. People wouldn't buy the paper if the headlines didn't interest them. It is hard to make people read stories in a paper they don't own.
If they did buy it, they would skip past the stories that we're supposed to force upon them. There are plenty of usability studies about how people consume media. I suggest that you go read them before blithely asserting that the media have some vast untapped power to make people read things that they don't care about.
Nor is there any previously unexploited reservoir of interest in these topics. The broadcast media have extremely good data on exactly what people watch, and when they choose to change the channel; stories like the ones that Glenn and I want to cover are the ones that make them flip the channel. Web media have very good data on what people read and how long they read it; stories like the ones that Glenn and I want written do not attract large numbers of readers.
I think it's great that you and people like you are seeking out different voices. But there is no conspiracy, not even of the cosy oligopolistic "why bother" type. Almost every journalist in Washington came here wanting to cover the kinds of things Glenn Greenwald wants written about; almost every editor here was one of those reporters, and assumed their current job hoping to break these kinds of stories. They are simply limited by the tastes of their readers.
Reading is fundamental
Sigh. Glenn Greenwald lashes back. Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure:
The "points" they make along the way are just painfully self-refuting and outright false (self-evidently so), so I'm only going briefly to address a couple of those points for illustrative purposes. I want to focus, instead, on some substantive, broader points which their mentality demonstrates.
McArdle's principal point is that "Americans care more about [Obama] than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president" and that "most people don't care about minor government functionaries." Just think about that for a moment. Megan McCardle thinks that John Yoo is basically the DOJ version of Lynndie England -- just some low-level guy who went off on his own and did some isolated, unauthorized bad things in the past that our political leaders have now corrected.
She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.
This quite takes my breath away. Because the only reason that one could possibly disagree with Glenn Greenwald about anything is that WE JUST DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HIM!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!!
Obviously, I know who John Yoo was, and what he did. From the point of view of the American public, however, he is a minor government functionary, much like--oh, say, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Please try this exercise: without using Google, name the US Trade Representative. The chair of the CEA. The head of OFHEO. The other members of the Federal Reserve's FOMC. The deputy secretary of the Treasury. The head of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The current commissioners of the SEC. The Chairman of the FDIC. The leaders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I know all of their names, because that's my job. I am willing to bet that Glenn Greenwald couldn't name all of them on the spot; he might well not be able to name any of them. That's no slur. Almost no one whose professional life does not depend on the knowledge has any idea who they are.
To the great American public, these are, yes, minor government functionaries--minor functionaries whose rounding errors probably result in more lives saved or lost than could ever plausibly be attributed to John Yoo. I do not like this fact, but I do acknowledge it. Nor do I think that yelling at journalists will much change it.
I do not mean to thereby conflate torture with economic development; the former has a moral horror, even in small numbers, that even very bad development policy lacks--which is why, yes, the Holocaust is worse than the Ukrainian famine. But if torture is important enough to be front page news, so is knowing who is responsible for guiding trade policy in the world's leader on liberalisation, who will be steering us through a financial crisis that could cause economic problems around the world, and who is working on fixing the globe's deepest and broadest capital markets.
I would dearly love to see those names splashed across every front page every day--not because I write about them, but because I think Americans should know these things. But only someone delusional would claim that they are outranked by Obama's photo ops merely because journalists just aren't trying hard enough. Nor, I think, does Glenn Greenwald really believe that vital topics like mark-to-market accounting are being left out of the nation's A sections because the editors think pictures of Hillary's new hairdo have greater metaphysical importance.
And that's the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime -- war crimes by any measure -- and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle -- who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic -- will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won't stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.
And she wants it that way, as she argues that the media should tell her more about Obama's bowling score than about these dreary, boring stories about DOJ memos. That's why the Government can and does continue to do what it does -- because our elite establishment opinion-makers aren't just profoundly ignorant, but happy about it, grateful for it even.
Greenwald error number two: I don't cover politics; I cover economic policy. These are not the same thing, which seems like the kind of thing that people who set themselves up as media critics should be aware of.
And given that I write about something that roughly 99% of the population considers less interesting than the newest diet fad, it's clearly ridiculous to assert that I am happy about the American public's raving disinterest in complicated policy stories. I spend much of my life whining to editors that the eight paragraphs on financial math are really interesting, dammit!
Now, is the problem that all of you really do want to know about how to calculate bond duration, and my mean stupid editors are misguided? Or is it more likely that you would skip to the next article--hey, did you realize you can lose twelve pounds in two weeks?
I am not defending John Yoo, or his memos, or the government's behavior. I am simply pointing out that when it comes to the journalistic coverage of same, Mr Greenwald has the correlation running the wrong way: the public doesn't know because it doesn't care, not because the journalists don't want to tell them. If the public did care, Mr Greenwald would have more readers.
Frankly, his assertions sound bizarre, even lunatic, to anyone who has ever met a journalist or a newspaper editor. And the later part of his rant, during which he accuses me and Dan of supporting the media establishment because it is helping us cover up our war crimes, ranges into the kind of frenzied conspiracy-theorizing that I generally associate with Ron Paul's more wild-eyed supporters. You know, the ones who tell you that when the rEVOLution comes, you'll be the first one with your back against the wall. The ones who aren't really arguing with you, but rather using you as a stand-in for everyone they've ever disagreed with, including the kids who made fun of them for wetting their pants in first grade. The ones who are filing their bizarrely capitalized missives from atop the massive stockpiles of canned goods and ammunition they have stored in an abandoned copper mine.
Now, some of my readers are arguing that we journalists have a duty to give the public what they don't particularly want. Okay, well, you really should know how to calculate a bond duration; if you have fixed income investments, as you should when you're near retirement, you'll want to know the weighted average maturity in order to balance your income across time. The mathematics for simple instruments is fairly easy; I can explain it in perhaps ten minutes of moderately involved reading, then you'll want to spend perhaps an hour or so doing excercises at home to make sure you've really nailed it. Ready?
That's ridiculous. You didn't come here to be bored by some formula you can look up if you need it; you're here to talk about foreign policy!
. . . oh hear that hollow laugh. That, my friends, is the sound of an eager young journalist's soul dying just a little bit every day.
Are vegetarians evil?
This site says yes. You might think hard about my secret army of PETA ninjas before you make rash remarks about my tax policy ideas.
Pharmaceutical liability
Derek Lowe ponders whether FDA approval should pre-empt liability:
Arguing will now commence on whether pre-emption is a good idea or not. I've thought for some time that all approved medications should be labeled as "investigational new drugs", and that everyone taking them agrees that they are participating in a post-approval clinical study of their safety and efficacy. (I suppose that's my own form of pre-emption). But there's room to argue if the FDA is ready to take on the full responsibility of drug approval, without the option of later redress in the courts if something goes wrong. (Counterargument: that's what they're supposed to be doing now. . .) And all of these schemes have to make room for new information turning up, or for outright fraud (which is most definitely in the eye of the beholder). Personally, I'm glad not to be a judge.
I wonder why the FDA doesn't do the clinical trials itself. Our drive for liability stems from our fear that the pharma companies know something they aren't telling us--so why not give the responsibility for testing this stuff over to a presumably neutral arbiter?
April 7, 2008
I blame the media
Glenn Greenwald complains that Barack Obama's various pecadillos are covered more than John Yoo because journalists are a bunch of arrogant lightweights:
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation's coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly.
Daniel Drezner responds:
To me, this indicates the following:
1) Comparing NEXIS searches of events where the media cycle has yet to play out with events where the media cycle has played out is really disingenuous way of making one's point;
2) There are more press mentions of an event when the target of the media inquiry actually responds to the press. To my knowledge, John Yoo has said nothing since the terror memo was leaked, and the Bush administration has clammed up as well. Barack Obama, on the other hand, clearly did respond to the Jeremiah Wright business, leading to multiple news cycles about that issue;
3) Shockingly, the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future (i.e., who will be the next president?) than in events that look back at the past. [Isn't that a slanted way of contrasting these events?-ed. Compared to Greenwald's slant? No, not really.];
4) Glenn Greenwald might be a good blogger/columnist, but he's not that great at social science.
For a guy who works in the media, he doesn't know much about his profession, either.
Start with Barack Obama. Americans care more about him than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president. Indeed, if one in ten Americans had even heard of John Yoo, I would be shocked, because most people don't care about minor government functionaries, no matter how pivotal their role may be in screwing up the world. I live in Washington DC, the throbbing heart of political trivia, and my sister works for HUD. Nonethelss, I had to look up the name of Alphonso Jackson, the HUD secretary, when allegations surfaced that he had grossly misused his office to help friends. After being forced to step down, he garnered slightly more Nexis hits than John Yoo's name in the last month. But both lost out to Jamie Lynn Spears, who ooh! might be secretly engaged.
This is not because journalists are insulated from their readers. It is because readers buy more papers with headlines about Jamie Lynn Spears than they do with headlines about Alphonso Jackson or John Yoo, since as I think I just mentioned, they have never heard of either person. You can lead a consumer to stories of vital national importance, but you cannot make him care. You can just make him pass over your paper in favor of the Enquirer.
It's all very well to say that journalists should cover the more serious stories, and bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, and maybe occasionally me, make such complaints all the time. But even really successful bloggers on things like economic and foreign policy have fewer daily readers than a struggling local paper in a moderately sized midwestern city. Now imagine those readers evenly distributed across a nation of 300 million, and then ask yourself why their concerns do not headline every paper. As well to wonder why they aren't all carrying stories on fire response times in the Syracuse, NY area.
Obviously, I think John Yoo's adventures are a matter of slightly greater national importance. (As indeed do our nation's media, who--aside from the Syracuse Post-Standard--ran virtually no coverage of the topic over the last month.) But voters can't do much about John Yoo now, other than choose a different type of president. Maybe they should do that by eagerly scanning Obama and Clinton and McCain's platforms--though I am at a loss to think how one might have divined a John Yoo from the anodyne folia of the Bush 2000 campaign. As far as anyone can tell, however, this is not how voters decide. Believe me, nearly every journalist in DC wants to write in-depth stories on foreign policy questions, and nearly every editor in the nation would dearly love to sell them. If there were a millions-deep wellspring of interest in the topic, some enterprising publication would already have tapped it dry.
What sort of movies scream "give me liberty or give me death"?
For those who are, as one commenter said, "Dying to know what kind of movies get watched at Libertarian Movie Night", this week's film is cult classic The Americanization of Emily. It's a comedy starring Julie Andrews as a patriotic British woman during World War II, who falls in love with an officer (James Garner) whose self-proclaimed ideology is "cowardice". I first watched it with my dad more than twenty years ago, and highly recommend it to everyone, including the friends I am about to inflict it on.
Suggestions for future movie nights more than welcome in the comments; so far I've come up with "Enemy of the State" and "The Incredibles".
End tenure for tenure
So while I was away, there was a fair amount of blogging about whether John Yoo should be fired. I think Timothy Burke has undoubtedly the best post relating to the topic, even though it actually isn't about Yoo. It's about the question of why tenure is special.
I have absolutely no qualifications to weigh in on the legal merits of Yoo's arguments, so I won't; but I'm not sure I understand why he shouldn't be fired for them. The benefits of systems in which people can't be fired except in extremis--civil service, closed shops, academia--are real, but the lack of accountability that this creates seems like it might be worse than the problem it cures.
To be sure, no one who is thus protected from firing agrees with me. Even the conservative and libertarian professors I know mostly seem to defend tenure. On the other hand, I know no thinks that this is a good arrangement when they are the customer of a person or corporation with perfect job security. Who longs for the days of the old AT&T monopoly? Or gets a glad feeling in his heart when he contemplates the fact that Comcast--and only Comcast--has the right to sell him cable service?
In the case of the professoriate, tenure seems to me to create a series of disasters. I find it striking to listen to left-wing academics describe their vision of the American labor market--striking because it is not a very good description of the operation of the private sector job market, but it is a very accurate portrayal of the harsh and unduly binary outcomes of the tenure-track job search.
I hear economists on the left endorse a monopsony model of minimum wage employment that sounds frankly ludicrous to me, and should to anyone who has worked in fast food or retail--how could employers in industries that fragmented, with turnover rates well over 100%, possibly collude? On the other hand, it's a pretty plausible model for academic environments where a squillion graduate students are all chasing three jobs.
But beyond the effect on academic ideas about economics, the whole system is designed to attract and retain the risk averse and compliant. It may also be to blame for the near-perfect arrogance of many academics, who outrank even doctors and investment bankers on this score. Those who survive the tenure process tend to put a high value on its gatekeeper function--not only for keeping bad academics out of tenure, but also for keeping bad ideas away from the rest of us. The logic of tenure implies that they tell us what to do, not the other way around, dammit--and this is not exactly an unusual belief to find among academics.
Then there are the assorted characters that every academic complains about: the guys who won't do a damn thing for the department except show up and teach their two; the ones who stopped publishing anything other than op-eds the day their tenure (or full professorship, or chair) came through; the ones who get away with bullying the junior faculty because after all, they'll be on your tenure committee; the various forms of workplace social affective disorders that develop upon the realization that no one can do a damn thing to you; the guy who leaves the real teaching up to the TA because all he cares about is getting publications or, post-tenure, time on the golf course; the capricious crankery that goes into various kinds of decisions; the dead-enders who get invested in pointless or wrongheaded projects that never come to completion; the junior faculty who are afraid to disagree with powerful superiors they know are wrong; the senior faculty who hang on long after they are capable of doing good research or good teaching, because there's no way to ease them out.
All of these things occur in private companies too, of course. But they aren't inherent. In businesses these things aren't fixed; on faculty, they can't be. The damage is much mitigated by the fact that faculty have to have a certain degree of self-control to get where they are. But then, it is undoubtedly much exacerbated by the fact that one of the job's main attractions is freedom from accountability.
And then there are the cases like John Yoo's. Why should his university have to continue to associate with the author of ideas they find odious? Why should he not pay the price for his ideas? It seems to me that if there is one thing worth paying for, it is one's beliefs.
Ah, you will say, but then people will be afraid to express strong beliefs. True. Do we want academics who lack the courage of their convictions?
I suppose we must. We've certainly built a near-perfect system for finding them.
Inside Washington Weekly
The morning after I got back from Puerto Rico, Peter Suderman, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and I joined David White on the Inside Washington Weekly podcast. A brilliant time was had by all.
Kitchen tips
A reader sends along some ideas he calls "Kitchen MacGuyvering":
Previously I'd suggested softening butter in a bowl of warm water (which works in minutes). Further kitchen MacGuyvering yields the following tips:
To butter a pan (particularly an ornate cake mold), put the pan in the freezer and melt the butter in a microwave. Swirld the butter around in the pan vigorously; it freezes quickly.
An alternative way of separating egg whites is to cut the corner out of a sandwich bag and break the egg into it. Blow into the bag as you would a balloon and squeeze, and the white is expelled leaving the yolk intact.
I haven't any need of the trick myself any more, but you can also, if you need fast egg-white separation, clean your hands very well and then crack the egg into your palm and let the whites run out through your fingers. And if you want a no-mess way to butter and flour your cake pans, there are now cooking sprays that do this; Pillsbury and Crisco make one, and there's another kind called "Baker's Joy". Especially good for bundt pans.
I'm at work on a squash/coconut curry for this week's libertarian movie night. If it turns out well, I'll post the recipe on the blog.
Bryan Caplan says that parents who are outraged about Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy should just calm down--teen pregnanc is much less of a big deal than we assume. Will Wilkinson responds:
I appreciate the concluding sentiment: that other people’s reproductive choices are none of our business. But then why not say just that?
Bryan has this pet theory that it is a good idea to sire a teeming brood in order to maximize future happy-making grandkid visits, thus staving off loneliness and despondency in old age. But I’m afraid the theory is at bottom mostly a theory of why Bryan thinks his wife should have more kids, rather than a theory of what will make people in general better off. For one thing, it seems mighty, um, gendered to me, failing to take the opportunity costs of childbearing for women very seriously at all. A sixteen year-old girl gets pregnant, and the perspective Bryan assumes is that of a grandparent? Weird.
Yes, little Miss Spears is rich and will be fine. But for most sixteen year-olds, the cost of having a kid is simply immense, possibly destroying any serious ambitions before they develop. So what’s the problem with a woman who decides to devote her life to meaningful life-constituting projects that do not involve stretch marks and minivans? Apparently she is a bad example to sixteen-year-old girls who might otherwise consider ruining their lives to make grandpa happy sooner. Really? April Fools? Reading Bryan on kids, you sometimes gets the sense that he thinks the primary function of women is to serve as incubators of grandfatherly delight.
I'm not sure I understand what the argument is about. This is about the objections of (potential) grandparents; looking back on my own experience of having been a sixteen year old girl, I doubt that many of the (potential) mothers are desperately concerned that Ms. Spears may be setting them a bad example.
If Darwinian evolution, and simple observation, hold, most people love their kids more than their grandkids. They don't want their children to procreate because they are willing to screw up their childrens' lives in order to secure for themselves the priceless boon of a grandson to spoil. They seem to believe that this will make their children happy. Bryan's point, as I take it, is that if you are choosing a role model who will result in more lifetime happiness for your child, you should prefer Jamie Lynn Spears to the increasing number of role models who will encourage your kids never to spawn.
Bryan may be incorrect about this, and the parents may be wrong that reproducing will make their children happier. Obviously, if I didn't think it was possible to have a happy life without children, I would already have some--though I'm not sure that Will and I, two childless thirty-five year olds, will get very far lecturing people who have actually raised children on its hedonic aspect. But I don't think that the question is which role models we should allow parents to selfishly impress on their children. And I don't think that Bryan Caplan does either.
I also don't think that this maps very well onto the idea of patriarchal men pressuring women--at least in my experience, women are both more likely to panic both about the idea of their daughter having a baby at sixteen, and at the idea that their daughter will never have a baby at all. They also seem more likely to want children from their daughters than from their sons. This could be the insidious patriarchy, or it could be the fact that women think their experience of having children was too special too miss; I have no way of establishing which is true.
What I do think that Bryan misses is the fact that the grandparents panicking over a pregnant sixteen-year old girl, and the example it sets for their children, probably are fairly focused on the costs to themselves. When a girl who isn't rich gets pregnant, it usually means that her mother has to heavily co-parent an infant, just when she thought she was ready to relax. Even if you think that your children will be better off having early children than none, or that you will be better off having grandchildren than none, when you add the extra cost to you of your daughter's early childbirth, your preferences may change.
Monday morning poll
Radley Balko wants to know who your favorite founding father was. My vote is for George Washington, but Thomas Jefferson is (unsurprisingly) leading the pack.
This is pegged, incidentally, to the new HBO miniseries, John Adams. A friend and I watched the first two episodes post-brunch yesterday afternoon, and it really is terrific. By the end of episode two, we were lamenting the absence of a revolution to which we could credibly pledge our "Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor".
Department of Unnecessary Corrections
Thanks to the the correspondents who pointed out, in response to this post, that I am not a liberal. Well, actually, I am, in the original sense of the word. But of course it is quite true that I am not a liberal in the American usage. Which is, um, why that was funny. Ish.
Down the memory hole
I've been pretty skeptical of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man. I think it's well worth reading as political/economic history, but her thesis--that the uncertainty created by FDR's various regulatory adventures was a dominant cause of the Great Depression--seems wildly overblown.
In November 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into total war, the Fortune pollsters asked a sample of business executives a question that bears quite directly on the regime uncertainty at issue in this article. The question was “Which of the following comes closest to being your prediction of the kind of economic structure with which this country will emerge after the war?” The respondents were presented with four options, as follows (the percentage of respondents selecting that option as the closest to their own prediction is shown in brackets):
(1) A system of free enterprise restored very much along the prewar lines, with modifications to take care of conditions then current. [7.2 percent]
(2) An economic system in which government will take over many public services formerly under private management but still leave many opportunities for private enterprise. [52.4 percent]
(3) A semi-socialized society in which there will be very little room for the profit system to operate. [36.7 percent]
(4) A complete economic dictatorship along fascist or communist lines. [3.7 percent] (Cantril 1951, 175)
...If these poll data are even approximately indicative of the true expectations of American investors, then it is astonishing that the recovery of investment had proceeded as far as it had.
I still don't think Shlaes is right, and it's also not clear that you can simply blame FDR for the results in this pol. Collectivism was on the march throughout the world, and almost everyone thought it was The Future--even in those benighted parts of the world that had never heard of social security or the Hoover Dam. But I'm willing to assign a greater role to investment uncertainty than I was before.
Penn, we hardly knew ye . . .
I don't have a terrible lot to say about the Mark Penn affair. Obviously, his departure is a terrible loss for the campaign. I wouldn't call this "the worst possible moment"--but heading into a make-or-break primary is certainly one of the last times you want to see this kind of change. They, and all of their supporters, have to be wishing that they had gotten farther out in front of the news cycle on this one, doing their best to head it off before it turned into a major political setback.
But whatever mistakes the campaign made, I hardly see this as a fatal blow. They surely could have handled it better, but its not clear to me that Obama really could have stopped Mark Penn from leaving, and thereby creating a vacuum into which someone competent might step. This probably increases the probability that Hillary will win somewhat--but a 30% increase in a 1% chance isn't really enough to get excited about.
The plural of heart attack is not "epidemic"
The New York Times technology section follows the path blazed by its style section: three incidents constitutes a trend, particularly if the people involved are professionals.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Can someone sit down and explain statistics to the NY Times staff writers? Using small words and lots of pretty pictures? Perhaps Alex Massie might be available on a contract basis.
Update Ye Gods, the "story" has legs. CNN just ran a teaser for their coverage.
Update II Quote from CNN coverage: "Although bloggers who agreed with this story were hard to come by . . . " No suggestion that perhaps we should pay attention to people who, like, actually know what they're talking about.
Oh, dear
I don't know if this is a joke or not. I'm afraid to login and find out.
April 5, 2008
Like MacArthur, I have returned
Well rested, in possession of something that might be called a tan if you squint hard enough, and all the way through the second season of The Wire. Regular blogging to resume tomorrow, after I have done exciting things such as buying groceries, doing laundry, and playing with Bartleby.
Meanwhile, contemplate these questions from Andrew Samwick, now securely ensconced in his new blog:
Things did get interesting around the 33 minute mark, when Miller started peddling supply-side gibberish. Panetta and Sperling gave him grief, but the panel blessedly moved on. I started thinking about the right way to put the supply siders on the spot. Here are the two questions they should answer if they believe that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts raised revenues:
1. How much wider would the deficit be now if those tax cuts had not been enacted?
2. How much lower would tax rates have to go in order for you to stop insisting that further tax cuts would raise more revenue?
I wonder what we would get.
I would especially like to know at what tax rate, other than 0%, hard core supply siders think we could generate additional revenue for the government.
A few weeks ago, a couple of liberal friends came to watch me sit on AFF's panel on new growth strategies for the economy. I took the unpopular position that tax cuts were pretty much dead letter for the foreseeable future. To spend is to tax, and without any political will for deep spending cuts--which there isn't--we can't have true tax cuts. We can only delay the day of reckoning by a few years. Better, I said, to look for other ways to enhance economic growth and liberty: slashing regulation; eliminating relatively inexpensive government operations that distort economic activity and encourage unnecessary dependance on the state (Small Business Administration, I'm looking at you); and reforming the safety net to encourage more economic mobility.
An older man sitting next to one of my liberal friends leaned over and said "She talks nice, but she's too liberal for me."
Update Thanks to reader SG for hunting down the exact quote, for people who didn't know that MacArthur had said both "I shall return" and "I have returned":
"I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil."
- Douglas MacArthur upon landing in Leyte
I had thought that knowledge of the reference was sort of a package deal, but apparently not.
April 4, 2008
The Confederate Problem
[Jon Henke]
Before I step away from this blog to make way for Megan's return (tanned, rested and ready!), I want to make one more point about race. Matt Yglesias is exactly right here...
It seems that April is Confederate Heritage month. Why one would want to celebrate a heritage of violent rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate a system of chattel slavery is a bit hard for me to say.
[...]
Even odder, as best I can tell these days (it was different in the past) most of the folks who like to wave the Confederate flag are perfectly genuine when they get offended that others see them as waving a banner of violent white supremacist ideology. But if that's not the ideology you mean to associate with, then why not drop the flag and adopt some less provocative emblem of Southern folkways?
This is a very complicated subject, particularly as it applies to the Confederate flag (let's not get into the tedious discussion over whether it was really the Confederate flag or simple a "battle flag"; it's irrelevant). Most Southerners have a relationship with the Confederate flag that has nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. Over many years, it gradually became a symbol of regional identification, pride and, yes, rebellion. But rebellion in the sense of "James Dean" rather than "secession". This is exacerbated by the condescending, antagonizing way in which southerners are treated by outsiders, including the media and politicians.
In the South, the Confederate flag symbol is somewhat akin to the Washington Redskins name and logo, which also has offensive racial connotations. Owning/supporting a Confederate flag is generally understood to be no more intrinsically racist than, e.g., supporting, or owning the logo of, the Washington Redskins. The understood symbolism simply isn't racial.
On the other hand, there is no getting around the history of the Confederate flag, and no excuse for that history. Whatever people may intend by it now, it was, as Matt Yglesias writes, "a banner of violent white supremacist ideology." Many people, correctly, are deeply disturbed by the thing; they have no obligation to pretend it is anything but a banner of the ugliest, most inexcusable policy in American history.
So, we have one group of people who intend no offense, and another group who perceive great offense. Where do we go from there?
For starters, I'm reminded of a lesson I learned as a child: don't take offense where none is intended. It would be helpful if we stopped assuming that racism is at the root of every disagreement and misunderstanding. For instance, it's probably not helpful to reflexively assume that because somebody voted against a federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr, the motivation must have been racist. There are many great Americans without federal holidays, and - while racism was undoubtedly the case for some - one need not be bigoted against their ethnicity or race to disagree with creating a federal holiday in their honor. In Martin Luther King, Jr's case, however, they were wrong. Martin Luther King, Jr. ought to be considered the Last Founding Father for the work he did to finally hold those truths to be self-evident.
But the reflexive assumption of racism on the part of early opponents is counterproductive and unnecessary. When offense is not intended, it should not be taken...or assumed. Opponents of the Confederate flag and Confederate History Month ought not reflexively cry "racism" and demand penance.
But I'm also reminded of another lesson I learned in childhood: don't do things you know will offend others. Even if you mean no offense, courtesy and a decent respect for your fellow man demands you take their opinions and perceptions into account. Confederate History Month should be ended, and the Confederate flag should be discarded, replaced, as Yglesias suggests, with "some less provocative emblem of Southern folkways". The Confederacy and the Confederate flag are not worth celebrating. Their revolting history is too inescapable.
I don't suppose such a change of course would be easy for either side of this cultural misapprehension, but it would be best, in the end, for all of us. So long as each side chooses to be antagonistic, however, they will get the fight they expect.
The Netroots VS The Democratic Presidential Candidate
[Jon Henke]
Clearly, the Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been the top story of this Presidential campaign cycle, but one of the more interesting, and under-covered, sub-stories is the internal dynamics of the Left and the effect this campaign will have on them. Oddly, the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama contest is not really a battle between different factions of the Democratic Party. There's some DLC vs Progressive struggle, but that's only one element of it. The problem for the netroots - and Progressives in general - is that, despite both being very satisfactory in important ways, both Clinton and Obama reject the Progressive and netroots movement in some important way.
Fundamentally, what the netroots want is a Fighting Progressive. They want an unabashed liberal who will go toe to toe with the Republicans and punch them in the nose.
But what they have is a choice between a Fighting Pragmatist (Hillary Clinton) and a Kumbaya Progressive (Barack Obama).
No matter who wins, their victory represents a rejection of some core element of the Progressive and netroots movement. They will, of course, fall into line with the eventual nominee, but the disconnect with their candidate, and possible President, will be an ongoing vexation for them. In particular, it will create for the netroots a strategic problem. How will the netroots remain relevant and maintain the perception of Party leadership if the leader of their Party is repeatedly and conspicuously rejecting their core demand to either toe the Progressive policy line, or to be a hardened partisan brawler?
It will be fascinating to find out how they - both the netroots and the Party - navigate that dynamic. I can think of ways one side or another could manage the problem and even turn it to their advantage....but then, I'm content to let them work that out for themselves.
Our revels now are ended.
[Peter Suderman]
This week has been lots of fun, but I'm now returning to myregular digs. Many thanks to Megan for allowing me to help blog-sit while she gets some much-needed rest.
McCain and the Right
[Peter Suderman]
Not surprisingly, I'm not exactly a fan of James Dobson, and though I think there are sound reasons to criticize McCain, I'm not terribly impressed by Dobson's latest cranky outburst. I think evangelicals can and should be a force for good within right of center politics, but I don't think James Dobson is much of a force for good within either evangelicalism or politics. I do think, however, that Dobson's continued McCain bashing somewhat complicates things for Rick Perlstein, who just published a sharp piece in the Nation on the conservative movement's complex relationship with the current GOP nominee. On one hand, it suggests that the about face of opinion regarding McCain Perlstein writes about amongst conservative leaders is not at all universal. On the other hand, it underlines his point that many prominent conservatives may be somewhat out of touch with the conservative rank and file, the majority of whom don't seem to share Dobson's animosity toward McCain.
In general, I think that, despite painting with too broad a brush, Perlstein gets the conservative movement's relationship to McCain basically right. A lot of conservative leaders didn't think he was the best candidate, and said so before he won. But now that he is the candidate, most conservatives have decided, quite reasonably, that backing him is the best option available. I would take issue with Perlstein's contention, though, that McCain proved the leaders of the conservative movement unnecessary, that, as Perlstein says, he "called their bluffs." Yes, McCain won without a huge amount of backing from the right's opinion elite. But, as Ross has pointed out, a lot of that had less to do with tactical or political skill than it did with a significant amount of luck.
The Audacity of Awesome
[Peter Suderman]
The Vulture has the scoop on how Michael Bay, auteur of awesome, plans to outdo himself with Transformers 2. Basically: even bigger robots! I fully support this.
Here's the thing about Michael Bay's movies, especially Transformers: While objectively terrible (except for maybe The Rock, which might be possible to defend, at least up to a point), they're nonetheless incredibly fun to watch*. It's not even that they're so-bad-they're-good, like, say, Paul Verhoeven movies, or something like the recent Doom adaptation. No, there's something legitimately entertaining that goes beyond ironic enjoyment -- a weird creative spark.
The first thing, I think, is that he's a surprisingly capable cinematic craftsman. True, his actions scenes often appear to have been edited by a pack of nine year olds after a Cocoa Puffs binge. But his production design, sound, and candy-coated cinematography are all top-notch. The character designs in Transformers, especially, were spectacular; the intricately animated transformation sequences alone justified the price of a ticket.
He also displays a genuine and delightful devotion to over-the-topness. So many mid-list action directors seem content to produce functional, half-competent gunfights and car chases. They're okay doing basically the same things that action directors have done for decades. Bay doesn't want to reinvent the genre by any means, but he very clearly wants to make it bigger, badder, more ridiculous, more outrageous, more fun, more awesome, and, well, just plain more everything at nearly every opportunity -- and in general I think he succeeds.
By my count, today's op-ed has at least three of the five tropes.
Krugman's defenders might point out that he's actually right about a few of these points -- though I'm willing to bet that there's dissensus about which ones he's been right about.
What's puzzling to me, however, is that this tactic of redundant repitition renders Krugman unbelievably boring. After the 50th op-ed hammering home the same point, Krugman winds up alienating even his natural allies.
This is a genuine problem. Looking back over the past decade, Krugman has been right about some big issues (Bush's tax cuts, Iraq) even if his reasoning has not always been spot-on. During this campaign, however, his rhetorical effectiveness has been on the decline -- which means that even if he has a valid point, it gets lost in the ether.
In contrast, the campaign seems to have rejuvenated the minds of David Brooks and even, Lord help me, Maureen Dowd. I don't necessarily agree with them all that much either... but there's a curiosity of mind at work -- a willingness to play with ideas and themes -- that seems completely shut down in Krugman's work.
Why is this?
They Have a Plan
[Peter Suderman]
As a dedicated, life-long science fiction geek, I'm naturally pretty stoked about the return of Battlestar Galactica this evening. Numerous attempts to convert people into fans have led me to believe that it's probably futile to attempt to convince non sci-fi nerds of the show's virtues, but the Vulture gives it a try, noting that the key thing is that it's very much not Star Trek. Meanwhile you may have noticed the print ad for the new season, which features the characters posed to resemble the Last Supper, on high-profile pages in recent issues of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone (which should be points in the show's favor for non-nerds). Not only is it just about the coolest TV ad I've ever seen, it apparently contains numerous coded clues as to what may occur in the upcoming season (which seems to be something of a trend in TV advertising these days). The fifth Cylon is the doctor! (Okay, probably not.)
Update: Apparently, Sci-Fi will post the entire season four premiere online at noon (Eastern) today.
April 3, 2008
Taxpayers, have a look at your new portfolio!
[Peter Suderman]
A colleague notices that the New York Fed has released some details on the Bear Stearns bailout, which is probably a little bit important considering the public could end up footing the bill if things go south. The whole situation is a bigger mess than Ishtar and Waterworld combined (a movie which, okay, I'd actually like to see), but I tend to think skepticism, of whateversort, is a far more appropriate a reaction than the "Bernanke is my kind of guy" Fed-love we're seeing in some quarters.
<em>The Twitter Review</em>, anyone?
[Daniel Drezner]
Kevin Drum posts some notes he cobbled together for a review of Lee Siegel's latest God-awful attempt to rationalize his loathing of the Internet book, Against the Machine (in the end, he decided the book wasn't worthy of review).
Amidst his notes is perhaps the best one-sentence summary of the book yet: "Like a long Andy Rooney segment, except not as coherent."
I wonder if the rise of twittering as perhaps the briefest form of literature known to man could lead to a new kind of book review. Rather than have a book reviewed by a single person in 1000 words or less, what would it look like if 40 different reviewes offered 25 words or less?
In some ways, this kind of review style already exists, with book and movie blurbs and sites like Rotten Tomatoes. Still, those blurbs are extracted from larger reviews. It would be interesting to see how critics would respond to such a constrained word count.
What better way to test this proposition than guest-posting on a blog? As an experiment, readers are encouraged to write a twitter-style review -- 25 word or less -- of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The weakest of the series, with the logically fragile plot stranded -- literally -- in the woods for long stretches. A definitive ending, however.
Voluntary Regulation
[Peter Suderman]
Andrew Burnham, the British Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, thinks the time may be right to regulate decency on the internet. Time to deploy the enforcers! Or maybe not.
“[There is] an idea that there can be some kind of, albeit voluntary, regulation, some kind of consensus glued back together about standards and content, taste, decency, impartiality – all these kind of things in the new world.”
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but what, exactly, is voluntary regulation? The whole point of regulation is to enforce a rule that wouldn't otherwise be followed. Otherwise, why regulate? The closest thing I can think of to voluntary regulation is government pressure forcing major industry players to self regulate (usually this is politely referred to as "a decision to set standards" or some such flack-invented euphemism). But that's only effective when a few central players control most of the field -- not exactly the case on the net.
In the meantime, Burnham will have doubtless have plenty of fun trying to figure out how to define -- nevermind regulate -- decency on the net. The relatively limited broadcast indecency regs we have here in the U.S. make absolutely no sense, and I doubt he's likely to come up with anything more coherent.
Name Calling
[Jon Henke]
Talk radio host Bill Cunningham called him "Barack Hussein Obama" in February - earning a swift, justified denunciation from McCain - while Debbie Schlussel goes there routinely, using the full "Barack Hussein Obama" name in pretty much everything she writes about Obama. Bloggers, pundits and others join in routinely. The whole thing is shameless, undignified and a transparent attempt to exploit ethnic or religious prejudices.
Let's clear this up: other than the requirements of direct quotes, there are only two reasons for a person to use Barack Obama's full name...
You are producing a legal record, which requires use of the full legal name.
You are an asshole.
Really, that's it. And if you use...
...Mitt Romney's first name, "Willard"....you're not being clever, you're not "just using his real name." You are being an asshole.
...Fred Thompson's birth name, Freddie....you're not being clever, you're not "just using his real name." You are being an asshole.
Labor immobility
[Daniel Drezner]
Whenever economists of all political stripes compare the U.S. economy to Europe, one of the qualities that is presumed to give America an advantage is our flexible labor markets. Americans are more likely to move to places with better jobs than Europeans.
The rapid decline in housing prices is distorting the normal workings of the American labor market. Mobility opens up job opportunities, allowing workers to go where they are most needed. When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million men and women, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s work force, move annually from one place to another — to a new job after a layoff, or to higher-paying work, or to the next rung in a career, often the goal of a corporate transfer. Or people seek... an escape from harsh northern winters.
Now that mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people... are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring.
The problem isn't just the rapid decline in housing prices, however -- it's the uncertainty about the precise value of houses. Until the housing market bottoms out, potential homesellers will delay going through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief and internalize the loss of their house's value.
Politicians will not help this process -- indeed, a lot of politics is about wallowing in the anger and bargaining phases. As Daniel Gross pointed out in Newsweek about six weeks ago, the various proposals for bailouts and foreclosure freezes accomplish nothing but delaying the proper functioning of the price mechanism:
In general, cleaning up quickly after popped bubbles is good for the economy, because it enables everybody to move on. Over the years the American economic system has proved to be quite adept at doing so. And as Japan's experience in recent years shows, refusing to deal with the overhang of bad debt can condemn an economy to a lengthy period of slow growth. But I doubt there's the political will to allow the fast price discovery allowed by foreclosures to continue. While it would certainly bring long-term economic benefits, the short-term social, financial, and political consequences of a rapid clearing of the housing mess are too much to bear. As the year goes on, expect presidential candidates and government officials to keep throwing lifelines and buckets full of hope at the housing market.
Until people accept current valuations of their houses, they won't sell, which means an increasingly immobile labor force.
April 2, 2008
An Unfalsifiable Foreign Policy
[Jon Henke]
Commentary Magazine's Peter Feaver says we're still turning corners in Iraq, and there's bound to be a victory parade beyond one of those corners some day...
Over the past sixteen months, the United States has altered its trajectory in Iraq. We are no longer headed toward a catastrophic defeat and may be on the path to a remarkable victory. As a result, the next President, Democrat or Republican, may well find it easier to adopt the broad contours of this administration’s current strategy than to jeopardize progress by changing course abruptly. [...] The challenge…was to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor.
Justin Logan says this is a "heads-we-win-tails-you-lose" strategy for the Bush Administration. Matt Yglesias calls it "Kick the Can."
I'll make a prediction: for the rest of the campaign season, one of the following arguments can/will be made for pretty much anything that happens in Iraq...
[Something] is evidence that we are succeeding/failing in Iraq. Therefore, we must continue/withdraw.
[Something] is good/bad news, but we should be careful not to read too much into it.
One big problem with the current Iraq policy is that it is pretty much unfalsifiable. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. The lack of clear metrics and falsifiable predictions blurs the line between "has not yet succeeded" and "has failed". It would be helpful if proponents and opponents of the war would make clear, falsifiable predictions we could use to evaluate their prescriptions.
If the argument is simply that "it will eventually succeed/fail if we continue/withdraw", then there will always be sufficient evidence to justify continued rationalizations.
Politicians and Heritage
[Jon Henke]
Steve Benen is mulling John McCain's recent emphasis on his biography and family background, saying McCain "seems to be the first candidate in recent memory to make family history highly relevant to his campaign." Benen points to Ed Kilgore, who "can't recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker's ... Family Heritage." Mostly, it's just the sort of speculative psychoanalysis that derives from cynicism about opponents.
But....really?
Just a couple weeks ago, Barack Obama gave this speech...
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Barack Obama and his supporters have spent more than a little time talking about Obama's heritage. As well they should. It's an interesting and powerful story.
Webb is so white he wrote a book about it; Saunders quickly realized Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America could become the rare campaign book voters might actually read, one that doesn't pull punches. In its opening pages, Webb lists the slurs by which his people are known: "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder." ... [Webb] considers poor white Southerners victims of the "monstrous mousetrap" they themselves built for African-Americans. "The Southern redneck" he writes, has become the "veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust . . . the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country-club whites had always held the key to the Big House . . . at the expense of disadvantaged blacks and whites alike.
During Webb's 2006 Senate campaign (disclosure: I worked against him for a couple months), The Washingtonian pointed out that Jim Webb "traces his aggressiveness to heritage, a theory spun at length in his quasi-autobiographical 2004 book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. “Born Fighting” is also his campaign slogan ... Webb traces his own warrior bloodline to the Revolutionary War, and during a recent campaign visit to southwest Virginia took time out to show his wife and her daughter the grave of his great-great-grandfather, whose Confederate headstone Webb obtained from the Veterans Administration."
For gods sake, Jim Webb even gave a speech "to honor" the Confederate soldiers for their "courage and loyalty", adding that "there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery." Can you even begin to imagine what would be said if a prominent Republican politician had done all that?
So, John McCain talks about his own background and military service. Big deal. Settle down. There aren't deeper meanings and ulterior motives behind everything a Republican says. Sometimes a campaign speech is just a campaign speech.
A uniter and a divider?
[Peter Suderman]
As I wrote on the office blog at the time, there were a couple of passages in Obama's speech on financial regulation that bugged me. I continue to be bothered by the fact that despite his recognition that the current financial regulation system is outdated, designed for another era, and his equal recognition that we've dealt "with threats to the financial system that weren't anticipated by regulators," the solution is, well, more regulators! It's as if he sees the consistent inability of bureaucracy and regulation to keep pace with market innovation and then says, "But if we just made it a little faster, maybe this time…"
But reading through it, I was also impressed, in a way, not just by his typically soaring rhetorical style, but by his sharp rhetorical tactics. Basically Obama likes to present problems in a moderate conservative frame — and then use that frame to argue for fairly standard liberal policy. So you get passages up front that are positively rapturous in the way they describe the American market — calling it the "envy of the world" and talking about how it "provided great rewards to innovators and risk-takers." It's not quite Larry Kudlow, but it's more than just the generic "America is a land of opportunity" line that every politician has to recite from time to time. Those broad criticisms he mounts about the problems with an outdated regulatory system would be at home in speeches made by plenty of Republicans. But it's in the back end where he tends to switches things up, calling, in this case, for greater financial oversight, harsher punishments for "market manipulation," etc. It's a nice trick, one he employs quite a bit, and I suspect it goes a long way toward bolstering his image as a uniter. It's easy to give up rhetorical ground if you're strengthening your control of the policy territory.
Elizabeth Edwards has some questions about John McCain's health-care policy. I certainly think she frames her question in a way that ensures maximum political potency. But I have some quibbles and questions.
No plan, even with a mandate, really provides for truly universal coverage; Massachusetts hasn't managed to sign up everyone with its supposedly universal plan, and even in France, there's a very small percentage who are left uncovered. But granted, an Edwards-Clinton style mandate would guarantee coverage to more people.
She also asks if competition will really lower costs considering that we have competition today and costs are rising. Well, yes; costs are rising today, but that's in part because people weren't happy with efforts made by insurers to reduce costs. Costs briefly held steady in the mid 90s as a result of managed care, but there was considerable frustration with the limitations managed care put on patients. No one likes rising costs, but no one likes being forced into narrow care schemes either. Giving insurers more flexibility to design affordable plans, rather than piling on the state-level requirements, probably would push costs down, and allow those seeking coverage more options in what they want to pay for and what they don't. You can portray this as a "race to the bottom," as she does, but it also allows for more efficient insurance that's not weighed down by expensive, and often unnecessary provisions.
And while no insurer would be required to cover either Mrs. Edwards or McCain under the McCain scheme, that doesn't necessarily mean that either would be prohibited access to insurance either. Government and employer plans of the sort that both rely on for coverage would still exist. It's not as if McCain would take away anyone's care; he simply wouldn't push additional requirements on insurance companies.
It's easy, of course, to get bogged down in details: The question, in the end, is whether health care is a universal right. When someone falls ill, is it the responsibility of the collective—all the citizens of the nation -- to bear the costs of treatment? Or is it the responsibility of the individual, through whatever financial means, personal connections, or other agreements he or she has made, to arrange for care? And if there is an obligation, how far does it extend? Basic as these questions may be, it's tough to answer other, more specific questions until you have answers on these. A lot of people tend to answer purely pragmatically -- I don't care! I just want to provide better health care to more people -- or at least me -- on a short or medium term basis. That's understandable. But I also think it's that lack of certainty on the underlying principle which has caused a lot of the confusion and systemic problems in the way we currently provide coverage and care.
Red Light Cameras, Yellow Light Times
[Jon Henke]
The Virtuous Republic argues that "red light cameras have nothing to do with safety. They are simply means of taxation that you the voter have no say in." He's talking about this story...
Six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the amber cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. The local governments in question have ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.
Indeed, the incentives involved for the government are very perverse. If you reduce the yellow light duration, you'll get a bit more revenue. If you lengthen the yellow light duration, you'll reduce accidents and save lives. So public officials choose to....reduce yellow light duration?
[insert comment here about the monopoly power of government]
Shortening the yellow light below the minimum time is clearly wrong - i.e., illegal and unethical - but what about the more general disparity in yellow light duration? Some yellow lights last 4 seconds, others 5 seconds, others 6 seconds, etc. How can drivers make the stop/go decision with confidence when there is such a large disparity in yellow light duration?
Even if they don't shorten yellow lights below the minimum, drivers are unlikely to know until after they've been caught just how long a yellow light might be. That also seems problematic from a legal and ethical standpoint. Imagine a law against loitering under which you could be charged (without prior warning) for remaining in one place for too long...but the duration was not posted and you were not informed until after you had been ticketed/arrested. That would be clearly problematic, but how is it very different from the yellow light disparity?
The reason for disparities in yellow light times is obvious (speed, intersection size, etc), but the result is a law about which drivers are forced to make split-second guesses. And cities have an incentive to stack the deck against them.
Yo, Hillary!
[Daniel Drezner]
Following up on Jon's post below: it's nice that the Matts have super-sensitive antennae to John McCain's coded racial appeals (so coded, only .00001% of the population gets the subliminal message!). To return the favor, however, didn't Hillary Clinton make the most obvious racial appeal of the past 48 hours when she compared herself to Rocky Balboa? A white underdog challenging a flashy, well-spoken, African-American member of the overclass?
It would be entertaining to play this metaphor out to its logical conclusion, however. I think the following sequence of events would have to happen:
I) Obama narrowly defeats Clinton for the 2008 nomination, despite Clinton being perceived as the more deserving candidate;
II) Clinton narrowly defeats Obama for the 2012 nomination, despite suspending her campaign for a few months due to Bill Clinton's brief food coma;
III) Obama, now retired from politics, comes back as Hillary's campaign manager, teaches her to passably say, "Yes we can!" Hillary ultimately rejects this strategy, but still wins the presidency through the brilliant strategy of getting the GOP candidate to exhaust himself through negative campaigning;
IV) Clinton vanquishes Russia on behalf of the good old U.S. of A after Vladimir Putin brutally kills Obama in what was supposed to be a press conference.
V and VI) No one cares....
April 1, 2008
Dark Clouds
[Jon Henke]
First, Matt Stoller claimed that McCain's speech in Meridian, MS was a "racist dogwhistle" because a civil rights worker who had been murdered in a completely different Mississippi city had been born in Meridian. Never mind that Meridian is "not far from the naval air station where McCain once served as a naval flight instructor and McCain Field is named for his grandfather, a Navy admiral and native Mississippian."
Now, Matt Yglesias argues that McCain's emphasis on his biography is "the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people's potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way. McCain's putting together an identity politics counter-narrative steeped in nostalgia..."
(Sigh)
So that's it, then? Democrats - whether due to paranoia or calculation - are going to see racism under every rock, and they're going to exploit the hell out of it. This, as long as political points can be scored for it, will be our "conversation about race." That won't exactly help heal, ease or erase racial problems, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of such accusations.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the paranoia is just too deep and the temptation just too much to avoid that sort of thing. There is, of course, real racism in America and it deserves our swift public scorn...but "racist" is not a term to be thrown about lightly and without substantial evidence. Its overuse can only exacerbate real racial problems.
UPDATE: I've just discovered that Matt Stoller has acknowledged that he "was probably wrong on this incident, it doesn't look like a dogwhistle." I'm very glad to see it.
Can theaters be saved?
[Peter Suderman]
I'm a pretty big a booster of seeing movies theatrically, but these days even I tend not to go to the theater much except for early critics' screenings. The lines are too long, the time it takes out of a weekend is too much, and, especially at the big multiplexes, the crowds are busier talking and texting than watching the movie. Add even a moderately good home theater into the equation, and the reasons to head out to the movies are rapidly decreasing.
So I was interested to see Techdirt's Mike Masnick point to this Variety report on how some movie theater owners are finally reacting to competition from home theaters and looking at ways to add luxury elements to the theater-going experience.
Each complex will sport theaters featuring 40 reclining armchair seats with footrests, digital projection and the capability to screen 2-D and 3-D movies, as well as a lounge and bar serving cocktails and appetizers, a concierge service and valet parking.
But the circuit will especially push its culinary offerings -- made-to-order meals like sushi and other theater-friendly foods from on-site chefs (a service button at each seat calls a waiter). Moviegoers will have to pay extra for any food they order, however.
The Burbank-based company's hoping to attract 10 million "upscale and affluent" consumers per year to its theaters that will be housed in high-end shopping centers and malls. Each complex will typically house eight screens.
This sounds like a step in the right direction; the last decade or so has certainly proven that stagnating businesses can be reinvigorated by adding a veneer of luxury. The problem in this case, though, is that you can't fully disentangle the theater-going experience from the movies that are being shown. So to attract "upscale and affluent" consumers, presumably adults, you'll also have to find films they're interested in seeing.
Right now, the biggest audience for films is suburban/exurban teenagers — kids who can't go to bars, but still need and want to get out of the house. Consequently, that's the demographic at which the largest portion of studio movies are aimed. Are that many adults really going to want to pay $35 — the cost of a ticket at one of these high end theaters — plus food, parking, babysitter, etc. to see the new Harry Potter film, or even, say, bland romantic comedies like Fool's Gold? No matter how nice the theater is, I kind of doubt it.
That's not to say the business model is all wrong; I think it's a good start. But anyone investing in a theater like this should also think seriously about partnering with filmmakers to produce films that will appeal to the same affluent, adult demographic. You could start with the indie divisions at the big studios—fare like Michael Clayton and No Country for Old Men might prove more successful in this sort of venue. But the first place I'd look would be the pay-cable networks. In specific, I mean HBO, which has been more successful at creating content that appeals to that upscale demographic than any other studio in the last decade. Were HBO to regularly put out theatrical films, this would be a classy way to expand its brand, and exclusive content from a known and trusted source like HBO would offer a compelling reason for those tough-to-reach upscale viewers to give luxury theaters like these a shot.
Disneyland is revamping the "It's a Small World" ride to accommodate today's fatter passengers on its boats and, more controversially, to include Disney characters among the anonymous dancing dolls.
The family of the ride's designer, Mary Blair, recently joined fans in protest, sending a letter to the company denouncing the "gross desecration of the ride's original theme."....
"Small World" was designed for an audience that would rarely, if ever, encounter foreign cultures. Now it's a time machine back to a world in which international travel was rare and large-scale trade and immigration unknown.... Amid the complexities and conflicts of real globalization, the international appeal of Disney characters is as good a testimony as any that the children of the world really do share something in common.
I'm completely biased on this question.
The first and only time I ever visited the Magic Kingdom was when my wife-to-be took me there in my mid-twenties. The very first ride we went on was "It's a Small World." By the end of the ride I was so freaked out that I was convinced the dolls were whispering, "you must kill Mommy and Daddy" to the children. Maybe this is because I remain a Warner Brothers kid when it came to cartoons, but there it is.
I fully support anything that improves that ride, and I suspect Postrel is correct in arguing that the children would concur. Their parents, however, will likely rebel, because for them the ride is not about globalization, but nostalgia.
Question to readers: has anyone else had a bad Magic Kingdom experience, or does my reaction indicate the absence of a soul?
Wages or Shortage?
[Peter Suderman]
Dean Baker on tech employers who want to expand the number of H1B visas for high-skilled workers:
The argument from high-tech employers, that they simply can't get enough high tech workers in the United States is ridiculous on its face. If these jobs paid millions of dollars per year (like jobs at Wall Street investment banks), then highly skilled workers would leave other occupations and develop the skills necessary to work in high tech occupations. Obviously, Bill Gates and the other high tech employers cited in this article want to be able to employ high tech workers at lower wages. The issue is wages, not a shortage.
Dean Baker's a sharp guy, and he's not entirely out of touch here, but I think he vastly oversimplifies things. It's certainly true Microsoft could change education patterns and employment goals in the country if it dramatically boosted the salaries of certain positions. But it's not always that easy for employers to simply throw more money at salaries.
For example, I spoke to someone a few nights ago who owns and runs a successful coffee shop here in D.C. She said that one of the most difficult things about the business is retaining and managing staff. Finding employees who are reliable and qualified (whether those qualifications are as complicated as doctoral degrees or as simple as being able to work flexible hours) is tough in any business. Somehow I doubt this would be as much of a problem if she paid them all $50 or $100 an hour. That, however, is a plainly absurd idea.
Basically, though, that's what Baker's suggesting Microsoft do. While Microsoft obviously works on a vastly different financial scale, it still faces a similar difficulty: managing a finite amount of resources and trying to get the most return from them. Simply expecting the company to boost wages through the roof is unrealistic. But if those are the expectations, then advocates of keeping current restrictions are going to be disappointed when they see more and more companies following Microsoft's lead and opening up facilities like this.
Symbolic vs. functional
[Peter Suderman]
Atrios wonders whether a presidential victory by Obama, as an African-American, or Hillary Clinton, as a woman, would represent the more significant historical event.
One cannot deny that having a woman become president would be a tremendous advance for feminism, and perhaps more than an African-American president would represent an advance for the cause of racial justice
An Obama victory would signal that we've gone another step towards the future race blind utopia, and it would be a tremendous thing for this country, but having a woman as president of the United States wouldn't simply signal an advancement in attitudes, but would actual be more of an advance in and of itself.
Ezra Klein agrees, and I probably do as well, though I think there's plenty of room for disagreement here (quite a few of Atrios' commenters seem to as well). But I wonder: How much does, or should, this matter? Should historical precedent really play a part in a person's decision to vote for a particular candidate? My sense is that it depends on the way one looks at the office.
On one hand, if the president is merely someone who is elected to perform a set of duties—if you view the office primarily in a functional sense—then these sorts of precedents probably don't matter. Performing the specific duties of the office as well as possible is the only thing that matters, so any characteristic of the candidate that doesn't explicitly add to his or her capability in that respect is unimportant.
On the other hand, if you view the office in a more symbolic sense—as someone whose identity and character, apart from their specific management and decision-making duties, is crucial in setting a tone for the nation and in setting an example for the country's residents—then race and gender precedents are extremely important.
I lean toward the former, but I think both views are reasonable, and I doubt most people hew entirely to one view or the other. But whichever one they prefer probably says a lot about how much weight, if any, they place on identity-oriented precedents.
