It's been a pleasure to share this space with my esteemed co-bloggers, whose work I've very much enjoyed.
And thanks so much to everyone who commented on my posts this last week.
I'm sure I'll see you in the comments section now and then. I also post occasionally at www.telegraph29.com, so add it to your RSS reader if you've enjoyed my stuff.
Finally, thanks so much to Megan for letting me post here. I've read this blog for quite awhile, so it was a thrill to contribute. And it will be great to have you back.
It seems to me there are three main factions within the Republican Party, and while we can see strengths and weaknesses in each of them, the future of the Right is far from clear.
Progressive Republicans (aka: Teddy Roosevelt Republicans) - These are the Republicans who may be solid allies on many issues, but who also seem to want a Great Leader who can do Big Things. They are Crusader Conservatives - generally reliable on limited government, but willing to go off on Big Government crusades.
Illustrative Quote: "The object of government is the welfare of the people," (Teddy Roosevelt)
Goldwater Republicans - These Republicans vote for limited government, individual liberty and strong defense; they may have various opinions on social issues, but they subsume those views to the goal at hand: limiting government
Illustrative Quote: "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom." (Goldwater
Bush Republicans - these voters may or may not care about limited government, but they're willing to accept Big Government, so long as the government does socially conservative things. (See: Mike Huckabee, Christian Democracy)
Of those mentioned, many have fallen into a fourth camp - Status Quo Republicans. They are mostly focused on winning that next election and consolidating their own power.
So, where does the Right stand?
At this point, the Progressive Republicans are in the drivers seat - partly because John McCain (a Progressive Republican) has the Republican nomination, and partly because a charismatic figure with some Big Ideas beats factions with no attention-grabbing ideas. At this point, no other faction has the policy ideas and grassroots support to challenge for leadership. But that position can only be maintained by a charismatic leader for a short time. It is not sustainable, At some point, the other coalitions will see to fill the core policy vacuums McCain may leave open.
The Bush Republicans are doing badly right now - you've all seen the polling - but the social conservative/evangelical base is still strong (as evidenced by the out-of-nowhere Huckabee campaign) They're not gone yet, and they could make a quick comeback with a charismatic candidate. Like, you know, Mike Huckabee. If they do that, it will mark the GOP's turn towards the European Christian Democracy style of political parties.
Finally, there are the Goldwater Republicans. They have been relegated to lesser roles, or turned into Status Quo Republicans. While a few still make appropriate noises on the Hill, a lack of publicly appealing, political viable ideas for limiting government has rendered them mostly impotent. The Goldwater Republicans have the greatest opportunity, however, because it is they who will have the most compelling arguments against Democratic and/or McCain polices, and it is they who will need to begin driving a narrative about the impact of Big Government policy. If they do it well, they will have a chance to reassert the Goldwater brand. If they don't, they will probably become marginalized.
It's impossible to tell which of these factions will dominate. Your predictions are welcomed.
May 30, 2008
Wilkinson libertarianism
[Conor Friedersdorf]
This post is sorta required reading if you're trying to stay engaged in the discussion about what exactly libertarianism is.
...there's really something very strange about the conceit that flying to Iraq and taking a guided tour courtesy of the U.S. military is the best way to learn about the country. I went to Spain for a week once, saw the central parts of Madrid and took some day trips to noteworthy towns that were easily accessible by train, but to answer even very basic question about Spain like "how wealthy is this country?" or "how many immigrants live here?" you need to look up the data not wander around.
Matt is right that there are a lot of things visiting a country can't tell you, but my experience of travel is that there are a lot of things visiting a country can tell you that you'd be hard pressed to glean from merely reading up on the place.
Prior to taking residence in Seville during the spring of 2004, I'd lived there for 6 months, read up on Catholicism in Spanish history and enjoyed several descriptive passages about the Holy Week processions that transform the city each year.
As you can imagine, the picture I formed in my head from my reading proved untrue to the experience of actually being in the city for the relevant week. It went beyond my notion of the aesthetics involved -- seeing Semana Santa gave me a whole new perspective on how Catholicism is practiced in different cultures (I attended Catholic school growing up), and challenged my notions about how a secular culture might host a very public religious celebration.Were we fighting a war in Andalusia that included a strong religious aspect, I'd certainly count it as an advantage for a decision-maker to have seen Semana Santa up close.
That's not to say that John McCain will necessarily be better at Iraq policy than Barack Obama (or that Barack Obama will be better at Kenyan policy, for that matter), but were I elected president, I'd want to visit the places I'd be making decisions about to the extent possible, and I hope that whoever prevails between Senator McCain and Senator Obama visits Iraq, among other places. It's much easier to grasp the import and consequences of your actions when you've actually seen the country you're going to bomb or pacify or police or withdraw from, the Iraqis you're going to befriend or kill or enlist or abandon or empower, and the soldiers who are going to be risking their lives for the cause.
Finally, a word about the politics of all this: Matt says that "active duty generals are hard surrogates for Obama to push back against." One effective way to push back would be to say, "When I went to Iraq, I asked my military guides to show me the very same place you are talking about. Here is the lesson I gleaned from talking to the people I met there." The more I think about it, the more I conclude that Obama and the country will be better insofar as he makes a couple productive trips to Iraq.
Your fix of Megan
[Conor Friedersdorf]
The eminent proprietress of this blog is returning tomorrow, but for those of you who can't stand the wait here's a quick dose of Megan, talking about her support for high levels of immigration, opining on stagnating wages and musing on her Irish heritage.
I'm quite curious about how today's Latino immigrants will feel about immigration once they've been around as long as the Irish. Though perhaps we'll all be thinking whatever our robot overlords tell us by then.
Libertarians and many conservatives often talk about lower taxes as a matter of liberty. But a higher tax isn’t more coercive than a lower one. You’re either being coerced or you’re not. A guy who mugs five people with thin wallets is no less guilty of coercion than a guy who mugs five people with thick wallets. The harm from coercion might be greater if more is taken, but there is no more or less coercion. But if you don’t think that the size of the opportunity set is a matter of liberty, then you should not think of lower taxes as a gain in liberty, but just as a reduction in harm. Yet libertarians and conservatives don’t tend to talk this way. Why not?
I think the way to think about this is to remember that taxes have two effects, which economists would dub the income effect and the substitution effect. The income effect is the one most people think of when they complain about taxes: when taxes go up, people are able to consumer less of stuff than they were before. Under the substitution effect, in contrast, consumers react to rising taxes by shifting their consumption to something that's untaxed. For example, if you raise taxes on income, people shift to consuming more leisure.
The income effect dominates for low tax rates. The substitution effect dominates for high tax rates. As tax rates approach 100 percent, the tax system increasingly comes to resemble a prohibition on whatever is being taxed. And that has two important consequences: first, the definition of what's taxed becomes all-important. And second, tax evasion becomes a more and more serious problem.
For example, in an economy with a 99 percent tax rate, barter would be extremely common. Rather than paying the mechanic to fix my car, I'd ask him to fix my car in exchange for mowing his lawn for a month. Rather than giving me a raise, my boss would let me have a company car. If there's still a deduction for health care, health care plans would suddenly get obscenely generous, as all sorts of perks only tangentially related to health care would suddenly come with health care plans. And of course businesses would live and die by the tax status of various transactions. When "income" is taxed at a higher rate, people do less of things that lead to "income," as that's defined by the government.
And that, in turn, would mean that the IRS would have to get increasingly involved in policing every aspect of peoples' lives to make sure that no tax-evading bartering was going on. Has your daughter been volunteering to watch your lawyer friend's kids because she provided some free legal advice to you a few months ago? Did the contractors who re-did your deck really do it for $1000, or did you give them some money under the table? Should your company have to report the fair market value of the meals they provide you at work as income for you? To achieve the same compliance rate, the IRS would have to hire more agents, conduct more audits and investigations, and bring more people to court over alleged tax evasion.
Moreover, tax loopholes would become an increasingly potent mechanism for social control. You'd see a huge increase in lobbying over the tax code, which gives Congress and IRS officials much stronger positions of authority. A lot of people think we've inflated home ownership rates with the home mortagage deduction. Imagine how potent such incentives would be if the tax rate were 90 percent.
Finally, you'd see a large increase in the black market, as more and more people did business under the table rather than report income that would be largely confiscated anyway. Forcing people into the black market undermines liberty in a variety of ways, including weaker property and contract enforcement, a need for secrecy, and being vulnerable to extortion from government officials. A world in which almost everyone earned money on the black market is a world in which tax officials have the power to harass anyone they wanted.
The effect is easiest to see at the top end of the tax scale, but the effect exists all along it. As a recently self-employed individual, I'm newly conscious of all the ways that the tax code shapes my behavior. I can deduct computer purchases as business expenses, so I am, on the margin, more likely to buy computer hardware. Hiring a plumber means that both he and I have to pay income taxes on the transaction, so on the margin I'm more likely to fix the plumbing myself to avoid that tax wedge. At a lower tax rate, I'd be more likely to hire the plumber.
In all of these cases, the effect of higher taxes isn't just that I'm able to buy less stuff, it's that the incentives of the tax code more strongly distort my behavior. One way to look at the tax code is as a series of rewards and punishments for doing certain things. The tax rate is a scaling factor for all of these rewards and punishments. If we think a $1000 fine is more coercive than a $100 fine, which I think it is, then a 95 percent tax rate is less coercive than a 50 percent tax rate.
Jack Shafer, Slate's excellent media columnist, offers up an e-mail interview with Michael Crichton. I want to highlight this bit:
...the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We've already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn't giving them the full story. By a long shot.
There's a lot of truth to that. I'm a voracious consumer of media, but prior to the Rev. Wright fiasco I'd never heard of Christian sermons of his style. It's a tradition I've read up on since. Weird that rhetoric inflammatory enough to dominate public discourse for weeks on end never garnered any kind of sustained attention before.
I'm also always struck by media coverage of religion. The Catholic church, for example, is often in the news. Few people are unaware of its official stance against birth control. It's a topic I argue about sometimes when I get together with a good friend who studies theology at Catholic University. He hasn't convinced me that the Catholic position on birth control is correct, but it sure is a lot more sophisticated than many of its opponents imagine, mostly because the reasoning behind the Catholic position on birth control is rarely fleshed out.
As someone who has read a lot of libertarian philosophy I'm a poor judge of popular exposure to views like those espoused by Ron Paul. Those who read this blog are probably similarly handicapped. Just in case, though, are there any readers who'd never heard certain arguments until Congressman Paul raised them during his campaign?
The right loyalties
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Apparently Bob Dole has written a scathing letter to Scott McClellan.
An excerpt:
In my nearly 36 years of public service I've known of a few like you. No doubt you will 'clean up' as the liberal anti-Bush press will promote your belated concerns with wild enthusiasm. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, 'Biting The Hand That Fed Me.'
As an American taxpayer I'd like to think that I am the hand that fed Mr. McClellan, along with my fellow citizens. He owed loyalty to the United States of America, our constitution, laws duly enacted by our legislature and our citizenry. It may be that Mr. McClellan betrayed some of those loyalties, but the mere fact of criticizing the president after having left the administration isn't "biting the hand that fed" him.
Strangely, the Bush Administration thought that Scott McClellan was the best spokesperson they could find to articulate their policies. They hired him because they thought it was in their best interest, not as a personal favor to the erstwhile press secretary. Insofar as his book is accurate they've got no grounds to gripe, and the country is better off for having another account of what happened.
Much the same can be said of Bill Richardson, by the way -- James Carville is wrong to call him a Judas for serving in Bill Clinton's administration and later endorsing Barack Obama. As a writer, whose name escapes me, aptly asked, if Barack Obama is elected should we expect every member of his cabinet to pledge their support for President Michelle Obama in 2024?
A couple of commenters suggest I'm questioning the motives of adoption officials and pet shelter volunteers. Take Freddie, for example:
The natural thing to assume, of course, is that these employees genuinely think that what they are doing helps the animals, and are perhaps misled in thinking that. Ah, but that doesn't get you approving links from libertarian bloggers; that doesn't "take someone down a notch"; that doesn't, in short, ridicule and condemn.
Look, every time I go to the airport, I have to stand in a long line, take off my shoes, empty out my pockets, dump out any bottles of liquid I might have, put any small containers of liquid in a 1-quart "zip-top" bag, and have my ID checked against my boarding pass. There is, in fact, precious little reason to think that most of these rituals make anyone safer. For example, as Bruce Schneier put it to TSA head Kip Hawley in an interview:
You don't have a responsibility to screen shoes; you have one to protect air travel from terrorism to the best of your ability. You're picking and choosing. We know the Chechnyan terrorists who downed two Russian planes in 2004 got through security partly because different people carried the explosive and the detonator. Why doesn't this count as a continued, active attack method?
I don't want to even think about how much C4 I can strap to my legs and walk through your magnetometers. Or search the Internet for "BeerBelly." It's a device you can strap to your chest to smuggle beer into stadiums, but you can also use it smuggle 40 ounces of dangerous liquid explosive onto planes. The magnetometer won't detect it. Your secondary screening wandings won't detect it. Why aren't you making us all take our shirts off? Will you have to find a printout of the webpage in some terrorist safe house? Or will someone actually have to try it? If that doesn't bother you, search the Internet for "cell phone gun."
Now, I have no doubt that virtually all TSA officials sincerely believe that relieving me of my bottle of water is crucial to preventing the next September 11 attack. Part of this is that they aren't very smart. Part of it is that they're trained to follow instructions without engaging in a lot of critical thought. But in any event, I have no doubt that they're sincere.
That doesn't change the fact that most of what happens in an airport screening line is a waste of everyone's time. An enormous amount of time is being wasted for little to no increase in security. Bruce Schneier coined the apt phrase "security theater" to describe the process: the goal isn't to make people safer; the goal is to make people feel safer.
I think much the same thing is happening in the adoption process and at the local animal shelter. It's not that adoption case-workers or pet shelter volunteers are consciously wasting peoples' time to make themselves feel more powerful. I'm sure they sincerely believe that their efforts are helping kids and cats, respectively. But I think they're wrong.
A big part of the problem is that people have a natural tendency to over-estimate their own importance. Nobody takes a job he believes is a waste of time, and people self-select into professions they happen to think make a big difference in society. So TSA security screeners believe they're making air travel safer, even when the evidence says they're not. Patent attorneys believe they're promoting innovation, even in industries where the evidence says otherwise. And adoption officials naturally believe that they play a vital role in ensuring kids get placed in loving homes.
Now, I'm sure that adoption officials do a lot of good. But it's possible to do too much as well as too little. Virtually every profession that involves an element of coercion needs a version of the Hippocratic Oath. In the case of adoption, that means that adoption agencies should err on the side of permitting adoptions unless they have good reason to think the home will be abusive or neglectful. Adoption workers should approach their jobs with an attitude of humility, recognizing that the vast majority of adoptive parents will do a better job than the foster care system.
This isn't about questioning adoption officials' motives. I have no doubt adoption workers sincerely believe they're acting in the best interest of children. But the fact that they believe it doesn't make it true, and it's precisely because adoption professionals have a tendency to pursue sincere but misguided policies that we need to constrain their discretion. The ban on race-conscious adoption decisions in one such constraint.
In a post criticizing inaction on global warming, the Heritage Foundry writes:
Respectable economists don’t pretend to know what the world will look like much beyond 25 years, let alone 90.
While modeling requires assumptions like that, it’s probably true that "respectable economists" don't put a lot of faith in their assumptions over the very long term. But then, shouldn’t it also be the case for, say, economists who write about the long-term fiscal situation?
Medicare presents the greatest challenge to Congress and taxpayers, accounting for $36.3 trillion of the $46.9 trillion 75-year projected shortfall. Congress should take both short- and long-term approaches to solving the Medicare crisis.
Certainly, the long-term economic outlook is extremely uncertain, but I’m not sure what “who knows!” is a better answer to cumulatively worsening climate problems than to cumulatively worsening fiscal problems.
Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who directs the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, believes that the concept of striving for color blindness is sound. She foresees problems if race once again becomes a key determinant...
"What cannot be done is have a pass/fail test that turns on whether you give the politically correct answers," she said. "If social workers are allowed to use training to determine who can adopt, there's lots of experience showing they abuse that power."
Some time back, my children decided that they wanted kittens, so we took a trip to the local Humane Society. It was an interesting experience. We ended up spending several hours waiting in line to receive one of a small number of permissions to "adopt" a pet, filling out forms, and then being interviewed by a Humane Society employee to make sure we were suitable adopters.
What was puzzling about the experience is that kittens are a good in excess supply. The Humane Society has more of them (and of cats, puppies, and dogs) than it can find homes for and, although it does not like to say so, routinely kills surplus animals. Rationing goods in excess supply is not usually a problem. Yet the Humane Society was deliberately making it costly, in time and effort, to adopt a kitten, and trying to select which lucky people got to do so, despite their knowledge that the alternative to being adopted was not another adoption but death. Why?
Part of the answer was that they gave out only seven adoption permits at each two hour interval because that was as many as they could process, given a limited staff and the requirement that each adopter be suitably checked and instructed. But that raises a second question. Since they did not have enough staff to process everyone who came, why insist on extensive interviews? Better owners are no doubt superior, from the standpoint of a cat, to worse owners, but almost any owner is better than being killed, which was the alternative.
So far as I could tell, the only real function of the process was to make the employees feel important and powerful, handing out instructions and boons to humble petitioners. That suspicion was reinforced when the woman interviewing us insisted very strongly that cats should never be permitted outdoors, stopping just short of implying that if we would not promise to keep our new pets indoors she would not let us have them. On further questioning, it turned out that she did not apply that policy to her own cat.
We left the Center petless, obtained two kittens from a friend (and very fine cats they have become), and I wrote an unhappy letter to the local newspaper with a copy to the Humane Society. The result was a long phone conversation with one of the women running the shelter. She explained that there were two models for such shelters: one in which animals were given out on a more or less no questions asked basis and one involving the sort of "adoption procedures" I had observed. When pressed on the fact that the real effect of her shelter's policy was to discourage adoptions and thus kill animals that might otherwise have lived, she responded that if they followed the alternative policy nobody would be willing to work for the shelter, since employees would feel they were treating the animals irresponsibly. That struck me as a kinder version of the explanation I had already come up with.
I wonder if something similar isn't happening in adoption agencies—that adoption officials spend a lot of time screening parents not because such screening is better for kids generally, but because doing more screening makes the adoption officials feel important. If this is happening, it's obviously a much more serious problem when the victims are children than kittens.
The chapter from which I got that passage is worth reading in full, especially the passage preceding it in which he makes a compelling case for legalizing adoption markets, which would obviate many of the problems with the current adoption system.
Incidentally, memo to David Pogue: Law's Order is freely available online, yet I purchased a dozen copies for a book club I was running a couple of years ago. Giving away an electronic version of something doesn't mean no one will buy a paper copy. In some cases, it might even bring more publicity to your book if (for example) it causes bloggers to quote favorably from it and encourage their readers to buy it.
A friend points out this post, which flags this depressing story on trans-racial adoption. The law sensibly prohibits adoption officials from taking race into account in placing children in adoptive families. Given that children in foster care are disproportionately black and adoptive parents are disproportionately white, this rule almost certainly works to the benefit of black kids. Yet inexplicably, a variety of adoption advocacy organizations, including the National Association of Black Social Workers, opposes color-blind adoption rules. Indeed, a 1972 statement by the NABSW took "a vehement stand against the placement of black children in white homes for any reason," and stated:
We fully recognize the phenomenon of transracial adoption as an expedient for white folk, not as an altruistic humane concern for black children. The supply of white children for adoption has all but vanished and adoption agencies, having always catered to middle class whites developed an answer to their desire for parenthood by motivating them to consider black children. This has brought about a re-definition of some black children. Those born of black-white alliances are no longer black as decreed by immutable law and social custom for centuries. They are now black-white, inter-racial, bi-racial, emphasizing the whiteness as the adoptable quality; a further subtle, but vicious design to further diminish black and accentuate white. We resent this high-handed arrogance and are insulted by this further assignment of chattel status to black people
The language about "black as decreed by immutable law and social custom for centuries" is strikingly reminiscent of the language of Judge Leon Bazile in Loving v. Virginia, that "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents." If the prospect of black kids being raised by white parents is "high-handed arrogance" because it will "diminish black and accentuate white," couldn't the same be said of children born to inter-racial couples?
Race and culture are separate concepts. There's nothing remotely tragic about a black kid being raised with "white" cultural assumptions (or vice versa). If a black kid is raised by white parents from a young age, then the white parents' culture is the black kid's "cultural heritage." The black kid isn't missing "his" culture any more than I'm missing my culture because I speak English rather than Gaelic. This isn't to suggest that a black kids raised in white families won't encounter the occasional bigot who feels there's something wrong with white parents raising black children, but the problem there is the bigot, not the decision to allow the adoption.
On Seville
[Conor Friedersdorf]
In his famous book on Spain, James Michener wrote that “Sevilla is a feminine city, as compared to masculine Madrid and Barcelona, but if one finds here the ingratiating femininity of grillwork on balconies and grace in small public squares, one finds also the forbidding femininity of a testy old dowager set in her preferences and self satisfied in her behavior.”
If a stranger could inspect but one city in Spain and if he wished to acquire therefrom a reasonable comprehension of what the nation as a whole was like, I think he would be well advised to spend his time in Sevilla.
A Sevillano will tell you his is the best city in the world. He may be right too, but he has no shame admitting that he’s never traveled elsewhere.
“Why would I leave?” he’ll say.
Sometimes I recall all this and wonder, "Why did I leave?"
All of which is to say that you should probably travel there ASAP.
Everyman on the Street
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Awhile back I penned a profile of Greg Packer that I think captures something about the modern media, though I can't say quite what.
Mr. Packer, America's most oft-quoted man on the street, arrived outside a New York City Barnes and Noble at 3 a.m. on the day I met him, squatted on the sidewalk and grinned. The Long Island resident, 43, was first in line for a 12:30 p.m. book signing by NFL fullback-turned-sportscaster Tiki Barber.
"He couldn't believe that I was first in line," Packer said gleefully. "I told him, 'Business as usual.' I've met him a few times, mainly at signings. Everybody understands that's what I do, including Tiki himself."
The story of what Greg Packer does (which I once posted to another blog but otherwise haven't published) began sometime in 1995, when he suddenly began to fancy being quoted in newspapers. His pastime went largely unnoticed until
In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.
Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it "within a pro-choice realm," and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.
"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body," Ms. Massa said. "We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature ... The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do ... Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."
The vaunted right to not have people disagree with you in ways you find offensive. Here's a weird detail:
Margaret Fung, co-president of York's Students for Bioethical Awareness, the school's only anti-abortion group, was not consulted.
"It's just very strange that I was never contacted," she said. "I guess that means we can't use the student centre building."
Somehow I'm not surprised that they didn't call her up. The school's administration, to its credit, is criticizing the policy.
GOP groupthink
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Daniel Larison on an NPR poll that doesn't reflect very well on Republicans:
It has an interesting feature that measures agreement with a series of statements with and without partisan labels. On the whole, the overall difference in support or opposition for a given position between the “partisan” and “non-partisan” respondents is not that great (the GOP’s position loses approximately 60-40 regardless of labeling), but there was one figure that caught my attention in the breakdown of the Iraq responses. When told that it was the Republican position, Republican respondents were significantly more likely to support that position than otherwise. Agreement was 69-28 in the “partisan” group and 55-38 in the “non-partisan,” so when not conditioned to respond tribally according to party loyalty Republicans were much less likely to support the party’s standard Iraq position. Put simply: when voters are considering the policy substance offered by the competing parties, the Republican position scarcely wins a majority of its own partisans and loses badly with everyone else. It will hardly be news to anyone that supporting the war in Iraq is a losing issue for the GOP, but past polling has given the misleading impression that the party is overwhelmingly supportive in such a way that makes Republican dissent difficult. Perhaps these results point towards a more evenly-divided GOP that would tolerate more open opposition to the war.
These results certainly point to Republican voters who ought to be more independent-minded, whatever conclusions they reach.
There is no open marketplace for medical technology in the developed world, however. Instead, we see a very different set of incentives dominating the state of research and development. Regulatory bodies like the FDA have every incentive to stop the release of new medicine: the government employees involved suffer far more from bad press for an approved medical technology than they do from the largely unexamined consequences of heavy regulation.
These consequences go far beyond the obvious and announced disapproval of specific medical technologies: the far greater cost lies in all the research, innovation and development that was never undertaken because regulatory burdens ensure there would be no profit for the developer.
This brings up an interesting point. Many on the Left are outraged when they hear of some medical treatment being declined by a health insurance company or health care provider. But where is the outrage about the overwhelming number of medicines, treatments and devices that are delayed or declined each year by the FDA?
The health insurance companies and health care providers have competition. I can take my business elsewhere. Meanwhile, the FDA is a monopoly. With perverse incentives. Not the sort of thing the Left is usually anxious to defend.
There's a research project in this for some enterprising investigator.
Find out how many medical treatments and procedures have been declined by health insurance companies and health care providers over the past 5 years.
Contrast that with the potential medicines, procedures and devices that have been rejected, delayed or buried in regulatory tape, and the likely treatments and procedures those would have provided.
I would speculate that you'll find the unintended consequences of FDA regulations have had a far larger impact than the cumulative declined treatments of the health care industry.
The War on Terror is not a tyranny pact!
[Conor Friedersdorf]
This excerpt needs no introduction, for it is terrifying no matter the context:
During arguments last year, government lawyers said the courts should give great deference to the president when the nation is at war.
"What you assert is the power of the military to seize a person in the United States, including an American citizen, on suspicion of being an enemy combatant?" Judge William B. Traxler asked.
"Yes, your honor," Justice Department lawyer Gregory Garre replied.
And get this:
The court seemed torn.
One judge questioned why there was such anxiety over the policy. After all, there have been no mass roundups of citizens and no indications the White House is coming for innocent Americans next.
Ah, so once there are mass roundups of innocent American citizens who are held as enemy combatants, then we can get anxious.
Hillary's opponents are sexist (especially the women)
[Conor Friedersdorf]
The New Republic has published a piece about Nancy Pelosi backing Barack Obama in the contest for the Democratic nomination. Upon seeing it I thought to myself, "Finally, a blow that the Clinton campaign can't explain away by cynically playing the gender card."
Think again!
Some Hillary folks believe that Pelosi assumes Obama would provide better coattails for down-ballot candidates to ride. Others think Hillary is considered too centrist to win Pelosi's love. Still others suspect the speaker has calculated that she'd have more influence under President Obama than President Clinton--partly because Obama has more limited Washington experience than Hillary and partly because, as the Hillary adviser snarks, under Clinton, Pelosi would lose the advantages that attend being "the most senior skirt in the land."
So sexist Nancy Pelosi is opposing Hillary Clinton because she is a woman! (What other reason could there be?) And remember when Hillary told us that being a woman politician meant constantly battling sexism? Never mind! Today's cynical talking point is that being "the most senior skirt in the land" actually confers desirable advantages!!
One almost has to write in the style of Wonkette to communicate the utter absurdity of it all.
"Feed history"
[Conor Friedersdorf]
If you care at all about Scott McClellan's book you should read this Peggy Noonan column. Otherwise don't.
The sympathy I feel for illegal immigrants who've established roots in the United States is hard to exaggerate. Were I a poor citizen of Mexico or one of its southern neighbors, I'd do my utmost to get to America, legally if possible, but illegally if need be. The fate of my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be a weightier concern than any qualms I'd have about committing a misdemeanor without victims (well, sort of without victims -- the cumulative effect of illegal immigration is damaging, but the cost imposed by a law-abiding illegal immigrant is very small, or perhaps even non-existent depending on your income level and industry).
Is it really the case, however, that the United States sent a clear signal to illegal immigrants that they could reside here without incident? The act of physically sneaking across a border under cover of darkness cannot help but impart that on some level your presence is being actively discouraged. The illegal immigrants I've interviewed over the years were constantly worried about workplace raids, even during lulls in enforcement, and painfully aware that lots of Americans objected to their presence in the country.
It's tricky to tease out the signal that "America" is sending -- the reality is that we're sending lots of different signals. Nor is this unique to immigration. Certain signals suggest that Americans want lots of cocaine, prostitutes and pirated music. The large market for these -- and their varying level of tolerance by law enforcement -- can hardly be taken by drug dealers, pimps and Napster copycats as permission to break the law.
So what is the most legitimate signal that the United States is sending about immigration? Imperfect though it is, I'd have to say that the laws duly enacted by Congress are the best expression of the true desires of our polity. Opinion polls confirm that a majority of Americans have long wanted immigration laws enforced more stringently than is the case.
Personally, I oppose illegal immigration, favor a border wall and believe that a large population of non-citizen residents, particularly concentrated into enclaves, is corrosive of self-government -- it cannot be healthy to have municipalities where a large proportion of residents cannot vote for the elected officials they live under.
But like Bob Wright, I don't want law-abiding illegal immigrants rounded up and deported. Instead I favor these measures:
1) Large fines for companies caught knowingly employing illegal immigrant labor.
2) An expensive border wall that makes it much harder to get here illegally, thus enabling us to adopt generous policies to handle those already here without creating an incentive for further illegal immigration.
3) An amnesty that kicks in after illegal immigration is drastically cut.
4) Higher levels of legal immigration.
5) Resistance to a guest worker program at all costs.
Perhaps I'll post again to defend these proposals at greater length.
Bob Wright is also suspicious that the Bush Administration is orchestrating immigration raids for political purposes. I can't blame him.
Laws of great consequence, when sporadically enforced, afford great potential for government actors to abuse their power, whether for political gain, to advantage certain corporations over competitors (raid them), etc. I expect this will be a problem whether John McCain or Barack Obama is elected this fall. It is unimaginable that a newly elected administration would act on immigration without considering the political implications.
OK, this will be my last post on the subject of free content, but I wanted to highlight this excellent comment by Lance Linden from the previous post:
Let's say that down the road is a burger stand run by a retiree. Because the retiree has other sources of income, she need not sell her hamburgers at a price that would max-out her revenue. She sells her burgers because she loves to cook and likes having something to do with her time. Your argument as I read it ("everyone is made worse off by there being less of this superior output. The fact that you can get enough 'to pay the bills' is irrelevant") is that this retiree is harming the burger-eating community by reducing the incentive of restaurants to make better, cheaper burgers. This does not make sense to me.
Price points are shaped by the seller's financial needs, goals, and expectations, and sometimes those goals are capped at merely "pay the bills." These price points, regardless of how they were reached, influence the marketplace. Sellers who choose higher price points need to compete in other areas, thus enforcing *stronger*, not weaker, incentives to create higher-quality content. This is as true with creative and information-based works as with hamburgers or anything else tangible. The only difference is the information can be created and increasingly be distributed more cheaply than stuff that can be eaten or dropped on a foot.
This is the great thing about markets: they tend to self-equilibrate. If the amount of content supplied at a price of 0 is inadequate, consumers will be hungry for more content and will be ready to open their wallets, leading to a non-zero price. If, in contrast, there's a lot of content around for free, then it will be a struggle to get people to pay for your content unless it's significantly better than the free stuff. Which of these conditions will obtain is an empirical question that will only be answered in the marketplace. But there are good reasons to think that, for most types of content, the equilibrium price will be zero.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether any given writer, musician, or programmer is able to make a living, or whether his salary is a "living wage" with good benefits. If some people are willing to create high-quality content at very low costthat will place downward pressure on profits and wages in that part of the market. That's unfortunate for the people competing with them, but there's nothing unfair about it, and it doesn't really matter how people manage to provide so much free content—whether it's done as a hobby, supported by third-party charity, or thanks to a clever "free-based" business model. All that matter is that the content is being produced.
The concern seems to be that profits might go so low that nobody is able to produce high quality content at all. But this confuses cause and effect. To the extent that producing high-quality content is unprofitable, it's precisely because there's so much high-quality content being produced that it's pushing profits down. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to predict that in the future content will become so plentiful that no one is able to produce it any more.
You'll notice that you commonly hear protectionists make the same kind of argument about "unfair" competition from overseas workers: competition in industry X is causing job losses in industry X, so what if competition in general causes all of our jobs to go away? Back before he was shrill, Paul Krugman tackled this argument in one of my all time favorite essays. At bottom, the argument suffers from a fallacy of composition: The fact that more competition in one sector reduces jobs in that sector doesn't mean that more competition everywhere means everyone loses their jobs. Likewise, the fact that competition from the web is costing jobs in the newspaper business doesn't mean that the long-term result will be no jobs in the news business at all. Quite the contrary, the reason things are so grim in the newspaper business is that there's more and better content available from other sources. The newspapers' decline is an unfortunate side-effect of a generally positive trend, not a harbinger of future problems.
And just to be sure there's no misunderstanding: none of this has anything to do with copyright.
Abortion, cont'd
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Andrew posts some reader reacts to my post on artificial wombs and abortion, which he generously linked yesterday. Thought-provoking stuff.
Barack's body man
[Conor Friedersdorf]
On the streets of DC these days there's a new freebie publication called Bit O' Lit that provides short excerpts of newly released fiction and non-fiction. It's a nice option for Metro reading when The Onion isn't available and a good way to stay up on mass market fiction, though I can't actually say I have much of a desire to do that.
Instead I usually focus on the non-fiction section. The excerpt I've enjoyed most is from Gene Healy's new book, The Cult of the Presidency. I've been looking for an excuse to blog about it. His post here on Barack Obama's "body man" saves me the trouble. It would drive me nuts to have an assistant always at my elbow attending to my every need, though perhaps I'd feel differently were I running for office.
Another voice for the RSS
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer I've recently discovered and very much enjoy. His worthwhile blog is here. And this week he is guest posting for Matt Yglesias.
Here's a sample:
I grew up in de facto segregation. I didn't have a white classmate until I was in high school. I didn't have any deep relationships with anyone who wasn't black until I was in my early 20s. I also had some very retrograde views about gays (I'm probably most ashamed of that). When I started working in Washington, I had some truly beautiful colleagues, many of whom I'm friends with today. But when I started the gig, I wouldn't hang out with them after work; I thought something might happen if I got drunk around them. That didn't change until my job hired another brother and he informed me of how ignorant I was. A short time later, I moved to New York, and was shocked to live in a place where the black/white dichotomy didn't really exist. I mean it's here, but not in the same way.
My point is this--it's quite likely that had I not been shaken out of my ignorance, had I not let go of my prejudice, you wouldn't be reading this right now. It was not simply ethical for me to become a more open person--it was to my advantage. I know that the math isn't the same for white people, but the point, I think, still stands. Let me end with a nod to America's greatest past time. The Boston Red Sox were the last team in pro baseball to integrate. And for their belief in the grand purity of the Great White Race, they sacrificed a shot at Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and probably a World Series or two. White racism rewarded them with decades of heartbreak. Not saying racism was the only factor. But it didn't help.
Blog posts are more aesthetically pleasing when they don't end on an excerpt.
My former boss David Boaz has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal on our presidential candidates' contempt for ordinary Americans:
Hypocrisy is not the biggest issue. The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."
They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.
What’s funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative – for a while. Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don’t have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.
I’m pretty far from being a John McCain booster, but does Obama not get that he’s running against a guy who spent the directly analogous years of his life in a fetid jungle prison being hung upside down and beaten with sticks until his bones broke?
So what went wrong? Patent law is a mind-numbingly esoteric subject, and one I'm still learning about myself, so I'm not going to try to attempt a definitive answer in a blog post, but let me make a few general observations.
I largely agree with Bessen and Meurer's description of the general problem: the patent system does an inadequate job of providing notice of patent boundaries. Real property has a variety of mechanisms—fences, no trespassing signs, regular property lines, records on file with the county—that make it easy for someone to figure out when he might be trespassing and with whom he needs to negotiate. Patent law has few, if any, comparable mechanisms. If a smart inventor gets an idea for a new (non-chemical) product and wants to find out whether it's already covered by patents, there's no practical way for him to do that. For any given product, there will be thousands of patents that are potentially relevant—one estimate says that the typical e-commerce site would need to check more than 11,000 patents, for example—and a patent lawyer will charge several hundred dollars per patent to do the necessary checks. Even if an aspiring entrepreneur managed to raise the several million dollars it would take to clear all the patents related to a new product, that wouldn't give him any real assurances because the opinion of any given patent lawyer isn't legally binding. The patent lawyer might tell the inventor that a given patent doesn't infringe, only to get sued and discover that the judge or jury disagrees with the patent lawyer. And of course even an exhaustive clearance effort wouldn't catch submarine patents (which don't surface until after the entrepreneur has started selling his product) or patents in other fields that are interpreted so broadly as to cover inventions far afield from the original patented invention.
A good example of this latter case is Patent 4,528,643, "System for reproducing information in material objects at a point of sale." The invention described by this patent is nominally a mall kiosk that can sell on-demand tapes of music stored at a remote location. "Point of sale" is retail jargon for computerized cash register, and almost everyone assumed that's what the patent covered. However, the owner of the patent, E-Data, began asserting the patent against e-commerce sites that didn't have "point of sale locations" in the conventional sense, and the court bought this broader interpretation. Suddenly, a patent for a mall kiosk became a monopoly over a broad swath of e-commerce technologies. Prior to the court cases regarding the patent, most patent lawyers would have told a potential e-commerce developer that the patent didn't apply to them. But they would have been wrong, and the developer could have faced millions of dollars in royalties.
As a result, in many high-tech fields, especially software, it's taken for granted that any non-trivial product infringes numerous patents, and that finding all the relevant patents is effectively impossible. So startups' standard strategy is to build their product without worrying about what patents they might be infringing, and hope to grow fast enough that they'll be able to hire good patent lawyers when the inevitable patent lawsuits arrive. Once the startups have some free capital, they begin a process of patent stockpiling, attempting to amass enough patents that they'll have some leverage against adversaries in patent litigation. Companies that fail to do this—that spend all their resources on engineers rather than patent lawyers—wind up in the unfortunate situation of Vonage. Vonage, the Internet telephony pioneer, was sued by Verizon, a far less innovative company by almost any measure, because Verizon had spent resources amassing patents while Vonage had focused on actually developing useful products. Vonage ultimately had to pay Verizon $120 million in damages. No one disputes that Vonage developed its technology independently, but independent invention isn't a defense to claims of patent infringement.
Bessen and Meurer's notice theory also explains the relatively better record of chemical patents. Chemical formulas provide a reasonably objective way to distinguish different inventions. Chemical and pharmaceutical patents can be indexed by molecular formula, and it's then reasonably easy to conduct a search to see if a particular chemical has been patented. There's no comparable way of describing inventions in most other fields, so the boundaries tend to be a lot less clear.
So what should be done? There are three broad reforms that I think could make a difference. First, the courts need to be much stricter about allowing patents on abstract concepts. Patents should cover a specific physical device, not a broad category of functionality. Where patent claims are broad or vague, they should either be given the narrowest possible interpretation, or they should be declared invalid altogether.
Second, the patent office should institute reforms to better define the boundaries of patents, and the courts should defer more to these determinations. Currently, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which oversees patent appeals, has a tendency to re-interpret the scope of patent claims without regard for the interpretations given by the lower courts and the Patent Office. Patent examiners should carefully record, in detail, what a patent covers, and then courts should defer to these descriptions. Bessen and Meurer also recommend that the Patent Office offer a service, for a few hundred dollars, of providing opinion letters on whether a given patent infringes a given invention. Unlike an ordinary legal opinion, a Patent Office letter would be giving weight in any future litigation. This seems like a good idea.
Finally, the Federal Circuit should end its unfortunate experiment with patents on software. Supreme Court precedents disallowed patents on software until the 1990s, and the software industry was plenty innovative. A series of decisions by the Federal Circuit eviscerated the rule against patents on software. Bessen and Meurer's statistics indicate that software patents have the lowest value and the highest litigation rates, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the surge in patent litigation corresponded with the legalization of software patents (although those certainly weren't the only bad decisions the Federal Circuit made in the 1990s). The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the Federal Circuit's de facto legalization of patents and software, and in my view they ought to reverse it at the first opportunity.
To return to the original theme of this series, I hope it's clear why I'm uncomfortable with the analogy between patents and traditional property rights. Outside the pharmaceutical industry—and especially in the software industry—the patent system is more like a rent-seeking operation for the benefit of the patent bar than it is a functioning system of property rights. It's possible that the reforms I suggest above (and others Bessen and Meurer propose in their book) could improve things sufficiently that patents will work as property. But until that happens, I think it's a category error to regard patents as a type of property right.
Alan Jacobs, blogging at the American Scene, (where I'm also a sometime contributor) wasn't impressed by Mike Masnick's post on "free"-based business models. I find Alan's post a little bit ironic because I'm pretty sure that (unless Reihan is playing favorites among American Scene bloggers) he didn't get paid to write his post. His post was titled "MY WRITING DOESN'T WANT TO BE FREE," but I was still able to read it without paying for the privilege. Something doesn't compute there. Anyway, Alan says:
When Poole points out — in response to the surprisingly common argument that bands, say, can give away their records for free and make money with live shows and t-shirt sales — that computer programmers don't program for free and sell mousepads on the side, Masnick replies, serenely, that that comparison doesn't apply because programmers get salaries. Well, precisely. But rock musicians don't. Freelance writers don't. This is Poole's point, and David Pogue's too. They write for a living, so if they make their writing available for free, how do they pay the bills?
I think the problem here is one part miscommunication, and one part failure of imagination. In point of fact, some programmers do give away their code (in the form of contributing to free software projects) and sell goodies (in the form of setup and support services for that software) on the side. Of course, most of the time, these business models are pursued not by individuals, but by firms. As I pointed out on Monday, this is the business model of several software firms, including Red Hat and MySQL. But the essential point is the same: giving away your "main" product as a way of selling complementary products is a perfectly viable way to make money.
Of course, the individual programmers in such companies get salaries, but that objection confuses free content with free labor. Content, once produced, can be produced infinitely at near-zero cost; Red Hat and MySQL can give copies of their operating system and database, respectively, to anyone who wants them at near-zero cost. In contrast, labor is and always will be scarce. Obviously, it would be insane to suggest that writers, musicians, programmers, and other creative professionals should provide their labor for free. As a freelance writer and sometime programmer, I would object to that as loudly as anyone. But on the other hand, virtually all the content I produce is given away for free, supported in some cases by advertising or other publicity-based business models and in other cases by charitable contributions. I and the organizations I work for "make my writing available for free," yet so far I've been able to "pay the bills." Amazing how that works.
Now, Alan wants to know how David Pogue could make a profit off of his book. My guess is that Pogue dramatically overestimates the negative effect releasing an electronic version of his book would have on sales of the paper book, and that he ignores the possibility that an electronic version might even spark additional interest among some readers in the paper copy. I have purchased several paper books that had free online editions simply because the paper book is more convenient for curling up with on the couch.
But in a sense this is beside the point. As competition in the market for information goods continues to increase, more and more creative professionals are going to find that their competitors are releasing works for free, supported by sales of ads, concert tickets, consulting service, or other complementary goods. The transition to "free"-based business models is virtually complete for news and opinion and it's becoming increasingly common with music and software. (And of course television and radio have operated on this model for decades) I'm not going to predict when it's likely to happen with books, or what the book-based business models of the future will be, but the point is that if it does happen, no one is going to keep buying David Pogue's books simply so he can continue feeding his family.
If you can figure out a free-based business model for your creative works, it's a huge competitive advantage, because it's much easier to reach a larger audience if you don't ask people to pay. That's why we've seen a steadydrumbeat of failedpaywall-basedbusinessmodels in the newspaper business. Evidently Pogue hasn't figured out a business model that will allow him to make money while giving away his manuals, and that's fine. Maybe none exist. But Pogue's lack of creativity isn't evidence that no one else will figure something out. And it certainly doesn't prove that "free"-based business models in general are doomed to failure.
Conor Friedersdorf argues that that gay marriage should be culturally acceptable to those currently opposed because it will help to create and communicate a more pro-marriage, pro-monogamy society. That's a good point, but I think it reinforces a problem we have in the gay marriage debate - that is, the distinction between the religious conception of marriage and the legal construct of marriage. A couple years back, I made the libertarian argument for gay marriage, based on this distinction. With some minor changes, I'll reproduce that here...
That distinction — the sometimes invisible line between civil and religious law — is the problem; especially when the two are conflated. There is certainly some correlation between legal and moral, but immoral is not equivalent to illegal, nor is moral necessarily equivalent to legal.
Consider: gambling, premarital sex, drunkenness and gossip are immoral in the judeo-christian moral system, yet no libertarian (and very few conservatives) would criminalize them. On the other hand, there's nothing immoral about driving 45mph in a 35mph zone or crossing a national border without authorization. Yet only an anarchist would eliminate all traffic or immigration laws.
Clearly, there's no direct, inherent connection between legality and morality, and leaving aside outright anarchism, there ought not be.
This notion that the civil law ought to be distinguishable from moral law might be a bit disconcerting to those who consider their moral values inextricably linked with their political values, but it need not be. John Locke — perhaps the philosopher most responsible for the 'natural law' philosophy of our founding documents — argued that there were three kinds of "laws that men generally refer their actions to, to judge of their rectitude of obliquity".
1. The divine law.
2. The civil law.
3. "The law of opinion or reputation, if I may so call it."
Of Divine Law, Locke wrote, "men judge whether their actions are sins or duties"; of Civil Law, "whether they be criminal or innocent"; of the Law of Opinion, "whether they be virtues or vices."
If we assume — arguendo, in order to respond directly to the opposition's argument — that homosexuality and gay marriage are contrary to God's Law, then we have a classic conflict of Divine Law, Civil Law and the Law of Opinion. Extending "marriage' to homosexual couples is against divine law, but failure to do so violates our civil law of equal rights, and public opinion is mixed.
So, let's dig down a bit on those conflicts.
If we want to follow Locke's distinction between God's Law (Divine), Man's Law (Civil) and peer pressure (Public Opinion), we need to distinguish between the partnership sanctified by a Church ("Religious Marriage") and the interpersonal contract recognized by the State ("Civil Marriage").
We might call them "Holy Union" and "Civil Union". These are not the same things.
Religious Marriage, according to the various institutions that conduct it, carries with it certain specific moral duties and meanings. Civil Unions, defined by law and enacted by State institutions, carry very different meanings and obligations. Nowhere in the Bible can I find any reference to religious marriage requiring "status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions", or "judicial protections and evidentiary immunity".
Yet, with no religious basis at all, we've incorporated those benefits into civil marriage. How can we still argue that civil marriage is equivalent to religious marriage. We have conflated two separate modes of law, in the process introducing religious judgments into civil law. Therein lies the fault: as Locke had it, peers enforced the Law of Public Opinion, "politic societies" (i.e., properly enacted government) enforced the Civil Law (which consisted of protecting "life, liberty and estate"), and God enforced his own law.
But we've confused them, as if a God somehow requires the assistance of politicians.
From a libertarian standpoint, the fact that civil and divine marriage share the same name is irrelevant. They are separate and distinguishable. No religious person is obligated to accept a Civil Union as a Holy Union, nor are the non-religious obligated to accept a strictly Holy Union as a Civil Union.
The ideal libertarian solution would be to have the government get out of the 'marriage' business altogether; to have government enforce civil contracts, and to have religions perform their religious ceremonies, if and how they choose to do so.
But since we don't live in Libertopia, we're left with a purely civil legal privilege available to one set of people, but not to another set, simply because that civil legal privilege arose from a religious ceremony. At least, within our cultural heritage; among some other cultures, marriage had little to do with religion. If those who object to gay marriage on religious grounds would be consistent, then let them also reject the civil privileges of marriage not contained in the Bible.
Until such a time as we could clearly distinguish the two in legal terms, however, the civil legal privileges of marriage should be extended to everybody.
Mark Schmitt's questionable analysis
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Mark Schmitt has a piece in The American Prospect that offers one wonderful passage and several to which I object.
Let's take them one by one.
Conservatives like to construct an elaborate tale of betrayal in which the true faith can be restored by wresting it away from the unseemly ambitions of Republican politicians. But that story denies the reality that the downfall of both the party and the movement began on the very moment that Bush shed all the hedges and compromises--such as "compassionate conservatism" and the Medicare prescription drug benefit--and began to try to govern like a conservative. The Bush era ended two days after the 2004 re-election when Bush declared, "I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Starting with the effort to privatize Social Security, everything went straight downhill. The rejection of the Republican Party came not because it failed conservatism but because conservatism failed.
Hmm. I thought the rejection of the Republican Party happened due to a failing war, a souring economy, ineptitude symbolized by the failures after Hurricane Katrina, a series of political scandals that showed some GOP leaders to be corrupt idiots, an unpopular president -- need I go on? A half-hearted effort at Social Security reform is the least of the reasons for the GOP's unpopularity.
Next, however, comes the wonderful passage:
If the intellectual commissars of the opposition party were Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who in Grand New Party propose supplementing a mild social conservatism with actual economic supports for fragile families, our political system would be nicely balanced.
Grand New Party is an excellent book that you should definitely read. I disagree with a fair amount in it. But I'd gladly sign onto any project in which Ross and Reihan are my intellectual commissars.
Now back to the questionable passages:
The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the "pluribus" categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain's inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics.
One problem Democrats have is a mindset that treats welfare, crime and immigration as "symbolic issues." Bill Clinton "took welfare off the political agenda" by passing a once in a generation reform that led to an unprecedented decrease in welfare rolls, largely by encouraging lots of women who were formerly on welfare to get jobs. Crime got taken off the agenda because thousands fewer people were being murdered every year than at the height of America's crime wave. Immigration policy has perhaps the most dramatic impact on the future of the nation than any other issue. Dismissing these things as "identity politics" is willful blindness.
Traditionally, the phrase "identity politics" has referred to the Democratic coalition's caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close.
!?
Advantage barely trained 22-year-olds
[Conor Friedersdorf]
The Urban Institute has published a paper on Teach for America that suggests the recent college graduates it employs are an impressive bunch.
As the abstract notes (emphasis mine):
TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers. Moreover, they suggest that the TFA effect, at least in the grades and subjects investigated, exceeds the impact of additional years of experience, implying that TFA teachers are more effective than experienced secondary school teachers. The positive TFA results are robust across subject areas, but are particularly strong for math and science classes.
Eduwonk notes:
What this study should do is shift the burden off of Teach for America to prove why TFA'ers should teach and onto critics of TFA to show, because they're as good or better, why they shouldn't. It should also spark a renewed debate about how we train and license teachers because it's frankly not a ringing endorsement of the status quo that kids just out of college with a five week crash course turn in results like this. Just think about the results from a system that gave schools more flexibility about hiring, encouraged mentoring and support for new teachers, and included rigorous preparation...
UPDATE: I've clearly got too many Eduwonk posts open in my browser. (Thanks to AR for the pointer -- the above Eduwonk quote refers to an earlier study lauding Teach for America.)
The genius of TFA is that they've figured out a way to screen for some of the other traits that matter to effective teaching. Unfortunately, as is often the case in our field, rather than replicate or learn from that people are still mostly attacking it...in our industry if you build a better mousetrap you either get an argument about mice or they just come to your door and burn down your house...
In my last post, I suggested that effective property systems have two important chracteristics: clear boundaries and positive incentives for productive activity. I showed a graph from Bessen and Meurer's Patent Failure suggesting that patents on chemical and pharmaceutical products appear to be behaving as a well-designed property system ought to. Now, the bad news. Here's the same graph for the rest of the patent system:
Again, the dashed line is total profits attributed to patents, while the solid line is the cost of patent litigation to potential infringers. As you can see, the situation is very different in non-chemical industries: in the late 1990s, the costs of litigation from non-chemical patents were several times as large as the profits those patents generated for their owners.
These statistics, if accurate, are quite extraordinary. If real property worked this way, we'd see $4000/month in litigation costs arising out of trespassing allegations for every $1000/month rental property. Needless to say, there wouldn't be much real estate development in such a legal environment.
The obvious response is that we shouldn't be overly concerned with "trespassers" (alleged patent infringers) because they shouldn't have trespassed in the first place. But this is where the point about unclear boundaries come in. What we're seeing here is not that some companies are deliberately infringing on other companies' patents as an alternative to investing in R&D. Rather, the problem is that there are now so many patents on the books, many of them quite broad, that it is effectively impossible to develop almost any kind of technology without infringing numerous patents. Even worse, because the boundaries of patents are so fuzzy, it's generally not even possible to predict which patents will apply to which technologies. Even an innovator who earnestly tried to avoid infringing, by licensing or inventing around all the relevant patents, is likely to run afoul of a patent his lawyers didn't find, or to face litigation over a patent his lawyer thought didn't cover that invention. What this means is that the patent holders and the alleged infringers are largely the same companies. Microsoft, for example, holds close to 9000 patents, yet it faces dozens of patent lawsuits every year from smaller companies.
How seriously should we take Bessen and Meurer's numbers? Their book just came out so I have yet to see serious criticism of their findings. And I don't know this area well enough to have a strong opinion about how seriously we should take their specific methodology. But to my non-statistician's eye, they appear to have done their homework. On the profit side, they survey a lot of different estimates of patent values and tend to accept the highest reasonable estimates, giving the patent system the benefit of the doubt. On the cost side, their results may be more open to challenge. It's important to note that the litigation costs they estimate are not limited to direct expenses like attorney's fees and expert witnesses. Rather, recognizing that litigation imposes significant costs beyond attorney's fees, they attempted to estimate costs by observing changes in stock price in response to the announcement of lawsuits. If the efficient market hypothesis is correct, this should give a reasonable estimate of the total costs of patent lawsuits to defendants. However, the error bars are likely to be large, so the numbers should be taken with a few grains of salt.
Another important caveat is that their methodology is focused on publicly-traded companies. Their methodology doesn't work for non-public firms or individuals because they don't have stock prices that can be used as a basis for calculations. And indeed, it's likely that things are less grim for smaller inventors because they tend not to get sued as often. However, it's important to keep in mind that the bulk of research and development is done by publicly traded companies, and large companies tend to hold the most valuable patents. So even if the patent system works better for smaller companies than larger ones, the net effect of non-chemical patents is still likely to be negative.
A final point to keep in mind here is that the bar Bessen and Meurer are setting for the patent system here is incredibly low. In a well-functioning property system, litigation shouldn't simply be lower than associated profits, it should be a small fraction of profits. We can see this in the rates for title insurance, which costs a fraction of a percent of the value of the house. Likewise, movie studios typically obtain errors and omissions insurance to cover themselves in case someone discovers that they've inadvertently used copyrighted material without getting the necessary permissions. In contrast, it's virtually impossible to get insurance that will cover inadvertent patent infringement, because there's no reliable way to verify that the necessary patent rights have been obtained the way insurance companies do with copyrights and real property.
So even if Bessen and Meurer's litigation cost estimates were off by an order of magnitude—if litigation consumed a half of patent profits, rather than four times their value—that would still be strong evidence that the patent system was in desperate need of reform. (As reader Rolf Andreassen points out, even the pharmaceutical graph I showed in the previous post wasn't stellar—litigation costs were eating up about a quarter of patent profits at the end of the period, and they were rising rapidly) A well-designed property system is one in which the costs are not just lower than the profits, but are a small fraction of them. Unless there are really massive flaws in their numbers, which seems unlikely, the patent system needs an overhaul.
In my final installment I'll talk about how things got so bad, and discuss some possible reforms.
The phrase "intellectual property" to describe the patent and copyright systems has become so commonplace that few people give it a second thought. Superficially, the copyright and patent systems are structured like traditional property systems, and this has become the dominant way we think about these legal regimes.
But determining whether a legal regime is a well-behaved property system is an empirical question, not merely a matter of semantics or tradition. For example, I'm sure that New York cabbies consider their taxi medalions to be their property—and valuable property at that—but few economists would characterize the creation of such a scheme as "strengthening property rights." Effective property rights systems have two important characteristics. First, they enhance certainty and promote efficiency by establishing clear boundaries to contested resources. Real property, for example, has a system of surveying and claim recording that allows any interested person to determine who owns each plot of land and what its precise boundaries are. Second, property rights create positive incentives for productive activities by rewarding people who produce new assets or enhance existing ones.
The first consideration cannot be an argument for treating patents as property because ideas are non-rivalrous. Once an idea has been created, it can be used freely by anyone. Hence, the analogy between patents and traditional property rights rests entirely on that second characteristic: that patents, like real property, creates incentives for productive behavior by giving inventors exclusive rights over the use of their inventions. Indeed, patents can be considered an effective property system only to the extent that it performs this function. If the existence of the patent system, on average, makes invention a more profitable activity than it would be otherwise, then it makes sense to consider patents a kind of property right. If, in contrast, the patent system creates no net incentives for innovative activity, or worse if it creates a net disincentive, then the usual incentive-based arguments for property rights simply don't apply to the patent system.
And indeed, the second characteristic (positive incentives for innovation) depends crucially on the first (clear and predictable boundaries). As we learned from Hernando de Soto, "property" systems without clear boundaries and predictable rules are an impediment, not an aid, to economic growth. A system in which boundary lines are unclear—if, say, a given plot of land is claimed by a dozen surrounding residents with no clear process for determining who is the rightful owner—the resulting uncertainty and the costs of litigation will swamp the positive incentive effects of the legal regime.
That insight is the starting point for Patent Failure, an important new book by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. A well-functioning patent system should look like this graph, lifted from page 139 of their book:
This shows how the patent system affects the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The dashed line at the top shows the profits from all chemical and pharmaceutical patents, while the solid line on the bottom shows the costs to alleged infringers of patent disputes—some of which, we should remember, are innocent. As we would hope, the top line is significantly above the bottom line. The net incentive for innovation created by the patent system is the different between these lines—the profits to patent holders minus the costs to alleged infringers from patent lawsuits. While the uptick in litigation in the late 1990s is worrisome, the patent system seems to be working the way it's supposed to in these industries. The positive incentive effects of patents appear to be significantly larger than the deadweight costs of patent litigation.
In my next post, I'll show you what the graph looks like for the rest of the patent system, and discuss the implications of this for patent policy.
Election '08: The poetry factor
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Barack Obama:
Vulnerable to haiku,
Unlike John McCain
"Change you'll have to pay for"
[Jon Henke]
Free trade is a difficult concept for politicians to advocate, in large part because of the concentrated costs/dispersed benefits problem. While comparative advantage and competition can be exlained, there's a long-standing maxim in politics: if you're explaining, you're losing. But today's Wall Street Journal - in a story with the great title, "Change You'll Have to Pay For" - makes a point that should be emphasized much more often in the trade debate.
Here's one "change" presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently believes in: higher prices. Witness his letter last week urging President George W. Bush not to submit the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement to Congress for ratification. Mr. Obama's objection, as stated in his letter, is that the deal "would give Korean exports essentially unfettered access to the U.S. market and would eliminate our best opportunity for obtaining genuinely reciprocal market access in one of the world's largest economies." In other words, ordinary American consumers would get too good a deal.
For an idea of how good, look at automobiles, about which Mr. Obama professes particular concern. The free-trade agreement would eliminate America's 2.5% tariff on most Korean car imports. Even better, it would phase out the 25% tariff on pick-ups and light trucks. Overall, the Korean trade deal would boost the U.S. economy by $10 billion to $12 billion. Mr. Obama thinks this benefit to U.S. consumers isn't worth the risk that South Korea might not live up to its promise to eliminate its own 8% tariff on U.S. autos and cut its bewildering array of nontariff barriers, such as arcane safety standards. This despite the fact that the deal includes enforcement provisions if Korea backtracks.
Obama is offering a subsidy to Unions, paid for by higher consumer prices. Needless to say, Obama is supported by quite a few powerful Unions...whose election-year financial and mobilization support is essentially crucial to Democratic Party success. Incidentally, as the WSJ points out, Obama "inserted a statement opposing the Korean trade deal into the Congressional record only days before securing the endorsement of the powerful Teamsters union."
But only a small percentage of the US labor force is unionized - meanwhile, 100% of the US labor force are also consumers. That Obama endorsement was awfully expensive for you and me.
That's a point we should make more often. As McQ once wrote, Unions are opposed to free trade because their "priority isn't the consumer." Their priority is maintaining their own advantage, and "if the consumers suffer because of that, well, you know - tough."
It's difficult for politicians to make that case because it requires a bit of explanation, but pro-trade advocates and politicians should do more to emphasize these two points:
(1) Opposition to free trade is opposition to consumers.
(2) Opposition to free trade is opposition to freedom.
(3) Free trade is the world's greatest anti-poverty program - both abroad (where it lifts people out of desperate, wretched poverty) and at home (where benefits mostly accrue to average Americans) - and some of its greatest foes are the relatively wealthy benefactors of the Democratic Party....which purports to be deeply concerned with poverty and consumers. Until it jeopardizes their own wealthy contributors.
Portrait of a failing media company
[Conor Friedersdorf]
William Dean Singleton is Vice Chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group, Inc. He owns dozens of newspapers -- most notably the Denver Post, but also the Los Angeles area newspaper chain where I got my start.
As a former employee of Mr. Singleton's Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and San Bernardino Sun, I feel it is my duty to tell him that one of his properties, the Web site LA.com, is atrocious. It vexes me every time I look at it. Here you have a domain name that anyone would envy, a site that could bolster Southern California revenues and help fund good journalism if only the content were halfway decent.
Instead the site is a hilarious parody of what clueless middle-aged media company vice-presidents imagine that young people want to read. As I write this, for example, the flash player on the front page is scrolling through 5 categories of content. The chosen categories: "Panini, sex, film, travel, sushi."
Panini?
Let's investigate further. Say you go to the site hoping to find a good Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica. Using the not-very-user-friendly search function, you execute a wide search -- show me every Mexican restaurant in the area! Apparently there are four Mexican restaurants to choose from in Santa Monica. How could I not return to LA.com next time I'm looking for someplace to dine?
The larger problem on the site is that every single thing it attempts to do is done much better by numerous other Web sites. Yeah, I could look at the photo gallery from a recent poker party at the Playboy mansion, but if I want to look at playmates (or poker players) why would I possibly go to LA.com?
Or consider the celebrity gossip section. The lead item is pegged to the series finale of The Gilmore Girls. It aired May 15, 2007. I am not making this up.
I'll not belabor the point. Browse the other sections yourself if you doubt that each one is laughably bad. I'd laugh too were it not for the fact that newsroom cuts are happening all over Southern California -- which is no surprise for a company that turns its most promising Web property into what LA.com currently is.
Given the size of the company, perhaps no one has pointed this out to Mr. Singleton before. Now there's no excuse not to do better. I had a great experience as an employee there. I sure do want the company to succeed. But I am less than optimistic about its prospects.
A good essay by Paul Graham on cities and ambition:
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
Here in St. Louis, the message is "you should have met the right people in school." The cliche here is that the first thing St. Louisans ask when they meet each other is "what high school did you go to?" The answer tells them about the speaker's social class and often his religious background. Also, if you want to be successful in Missouri you don't don't go to the highly-ranked Washington University, but to the University of Missouri in Columbia, which is where the kids of other rich and powerful Missourians go to school. Needless to say, moving to St. Louis in your 20s isn't a brilliant career move:
No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
When I lived in DC and I told people I worked at a think tank, virtually everyone knew what that was and many were interested to know which one and what I did there. When I go to a party in St. Louis, the people I meet not only don't know what a think tank is, but a lot of them don't know what public policy is. I've taken to just telling people I'm a writer, which is something most people have heard of.
Here's Graham's take on DC, which he admits he hasn't lived in long enough to be sure of:
In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There's an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.
May 27, 2008
Care about marriage? Let gays do it
[Conor Friedersdorf]
You're probably familiar with the conservative case for gay marriage, articulated most eloquently by Andrew Sullivan on many occasions. Here is one:
Conservatives have long rightly argued for the vital importance of the institution of marriage for fostering responsibility, commitment and the domestication of unruly men. Bringing gay men and women into this institution will surely change the gay subculture in subtle but profoundly conservative ways. When I grew up and realized I was gay, I had no concept of what my own future could be like. Like most other homosexuals, I grew up in a heterosexual family and tried to imagine how I too could one day be a full part of the family I loved. But I figured then that I had no such future. I could never have a marriage, never have a family, never be a full and equal part of the weddings and relationships and holidays that give families structure and meaning. When I looked forward, I saw nothing but emptiness and loneliness. No wonder it was hard to connect sex with love and commitment. No wonder it was hard to feel at home in what was, in fact, my home.
For today's generation of gay kids, all that changes. From the beginning, they will be able to see their future as part of family life — not in conflict with it. Their "coming out" will also allow them a "coming home." And as they date in adolescence and early adulthood, there will be some future anchor in their mind-set, some ultimate structure with which to give their relationships stability and social support. Many heterosexuals, I suspect, simply don't realize how big a deal this is. They have never doubted that one day they could marry the person they love. So they find it hard to conceive how deep a psychic and social wound the exclusion from marriage and family can be.
Gay marriage ought to be legal. Most conservatives and libertarians I know who are 30 or younger feel the same way, even if we'd rather that judges not impose it. (The established rules of our state constitutions protect so many rights under a strict constructionist reading. Loose constructionists, though most seek to guarantee more liberty, risk undermining the liberty we already possess by permitting interpretations that haven't any grounding in the text.)
There are non-bigoted arguments against gay marriage -- basically the view that any change to a vitally important, long held institution should be resisted. But I never quite grasp why some conservatives find the notion of gay people getting married a bigger threat to traditional family norms than the alternative -- that is, gay people who aren't married living together and having sex, raising children, etc., within a gay culture where monogamy is a less powerful norm.
Isn't that a more transgressive lifestyle, by the lights of conservatism, than gay people being married? And isn't it obvious that is the choice that society faces? Andrew wrote about the conservative norms gay marriage would communicate to young homosexuals. I'd add that the same goes for young straight people!
If you're a conservative who opposes gay marriage, do me the favor of considering a hypothetical, which I've long sought a response to:
An 8-year-old goes to play at the house of his friend, who is raised by two lesbian women. The environment is a loving one. So this playmate, whose straight parents are married, is going to absorb one of two possible norms.
1) My friend lives in a happy home. His parents are married. When people grow up and love each other, and want to have kids and a happy home, they get married. (I hope I get married one day.)
Or
2) My friend lives in a happy home. His parents aren't married. When people grow up and love each other, and want to have kids and a happy home, sometimes they get married like my parents. Other times they don't get married, like my friend's parents. (One day I may get married and have kids, but maybe I'll just have kids and live with the person I love.)
Conservatives should prefer the former scenario.
Yet many advocate gay marriage bans that bring about the latter scenario -- not just when kids happen to meet gay parents in elementary school, but when they see gay people in television shows or movies, start having dinner at a gay professor's house in college, or converse with gay friends they meet in their twenties.
These gay people, if they cannot marry, are going to cohabitate and have kids anyway. Why undermine the norm of married family life by denying them the ability to practice it? Why create a whole category of people to spread the norm of unmarried family life?
You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women.
Is this true? Earnest question! I've got my doubts...
The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at it's base.
That's just absurd. It doesn't diminish the pervasiveness of sexism in the world, or the disgusting treatment of women in many fundamentalist cultures, to point out that were every woman to vanish from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan tomorrow, the extremist Islamists in those countries would still want to kill infidels, stone gays, etc.
If Senator Clinton's understanding of extremists and fundamentalists is really as simplistic as that she is unfit to head our foreign policy. Oddly a really compelling defense of the above statements is that Senator Clinton, when talking about sexism, can be assumed to be disingenuously spouting anything that might help her politically.
As an aside, a lot of charities are doing their best to help women victimized by religious extremists. If you're looking for a charitable cause it's a worthwhile one.
Cock fighting in Bali
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Via the always worthwhile Iqra'i, a classic of anthropological writing:
As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker
table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there.
Actually, it is men.
I'm surprised I've not seen more written about this attempt to prosecute a landlord for renting to illegal immigrants.
LEXINGTON, KY. — Four illegal immigrants who rented from Lexington landlords have testified they showed only Mexican identification when they applied for apartments.
The immigrants, who are to be deported, testified in depositions that they did not present American driver's licenses or Social Security cards. One, Adnan Ramirez-Jimenez, even showed a Mexican voter registration card, indicating Mexican citizenship, and a manager wrote on his rental application, "first time in USA."
Ramirez-Jimenez testified that he did not show apartment management at Cross Keys Apartments any proof he was in the country legally.
The depositions were filed in U.S. District Court in Lexington in the criminal case against William Jerry Hadden, 69, and his son Jamey, who are charged with 24 counts of harboring illegal immigrants and 24 counts of encouraging illegal immigrants to remain in the country.
The case appears to be the first time the federal government has tried to prosecute landlords for renting to illegal immigrants, defense attorneys say.
It's a mistake to make criminals out of landlords for renting to illegal immigrants. Document fraud makes it impossible to verify the legal status of potential tenants. Criminal charges for failure to do so creates a perverse incentive to discriminate against all Hispanics and Asians when renting.
I'd also rather not put landlords in the position of either evicting longtime tenants that they know to be good people, or breaking the law. When possible it's best to avoid passing laws that create unnecessary crises of conscience for law-abiding citizens.
The federal government should focus on identifying and deporting the many illegal immigrants in our prison system, many of whom will be released back onto American streets at the end of their terms. As "landlords" of the prison system you'd think they could handle that job, particularly if they expect citizen landlords possessed of fewer resources and subject to fair housing laws to do the same.
On the whole wide world
[Conor Friedersdorf]
The most engaging conversations about race that I've seen lately are between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury. I offer an excerpt not to agree or disagree with what they say, but to suggest that their demeanor and forthrightness serve as a model for how these sorts of conversations ought to happen.
I'd sure like to take that class.
(I should note, by the way, that I am an assistant editor at Bloggingheads.tv)
Chris Matthews: A Better Man Than You Think!
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Anyone who read the hit job on Chris Matthews in the New York Times Magazine, which I objected to here, should also read this corrective by Hendrick Hertzberg.
I don't share Hertzberg's politics, nor do I much care for cable news personalities, but this sounds right:
The profile that ran in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago captured some of Chris (the insecurity, the self-promotion), but some is not all. The insecurity without the huge appetite for life, the self-promotion without the empathic social conscience that lurks somewhere behind all that love of the political game—these give a distorted impression. Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society.
Evidence:
The future of the abortion debate
[Conor Friedersdorf]
An orthodox Catholic I know cares more about abortion than any other political issue. He votes for candidates based largely on his expectations about the kinds of judges they'll appoint or confirm, behavior I completely understand given the certainty he feels that every abortion is a murder. At the other extreme are pro-choice voters whose number one issue is protecting Roe vs. Wade from being overturned, preventing any restrictions on abortion, etc.
These are by their nature long term political struggles, or so you might think: the composition of the Supreme Court is always going to change, legislatures can be influenced to hue closer to one side or the other, etc.
But I predict that what we now think of as the abortion debate is going to radically change within our lifetime in a way that makes many of the strategic gambits employed by both sides irrelevant, or at least beside the point.
Specifically, I think that technology is going to make fetuses viable outside the womb earlier and earlier. In fact that is already happening. And eventually there will be artificial wombs, enabling doctors to extract a fetus from a pregnant woman during the first trimester with a procedure no more invasive or dangerous than abortion, and to keep that baby alive in an incubator.
Today we are used to thinking about a woman's right to end a pregnancy as the functional equivalent of ending the fetuses' life. In the future, however, that need not be so. A woman could be afforded the right to end her pregnancy, but be denied the right to end the life of the fetus. Although I am not an expert in abortion jurisprudence, it is at least conceivable that this could happen without any need to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
It is conceivable that adoptive parents would step in to raise children who would've been aborted prior to artificial womb technology, though it is unlikely that enough adoptive parents could be found to raise all the children now aborted. It is possible that society's views about killing fetuses would change in the pro-life direction once that change didn't entail forcing women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, and that the government would be in the business of funding large scale orphanages.
It is even conceivable that women would find themselves in the same position that some men find themselves in now: forced to pay for the upbringing of a child they'd rather have aborted. Were I a strategist at a pro-life or pro-choice advocacy group I'd be spending a lot of time and effort figuring out when changes like these are going to happen, what I thought about them, and how I could shape them to advantage my side.
UPDATE: This paper considers similar arguments in far greater detail.
Ross on guilt
[Conor Friedersdorf]
I've been hoping my Atlantic colleague would weigh in on liberal and conservative guilt more eloquently than I have. And so he has.
Some of the commenters are not convinced by my assertion that web-based news sources will pick up the slack from mainstream newspapers. Peter Bautista, for example, writes:
Take all these blogs, for instance (including those here at The Atlantic). Almost none of them do their own reporting - they're commentary on original reporting done by others. Without those reporters, what are the blogs going to talk about? The Atlantic blogs have the institutional support of the Atlantic magazine, which can pay reporters, but a magazine's reporters can't don't cover the immediate breaking news that a newspaper reporter does. If there are no newspapers, who's doing the original daily reporting?
The first point is that as I understand it, at least one of the Atlantic's bloggers Marc Ambinder actually does do original reporting. But setting that aside, here's the macro-level trend in the news business: The 20th century's major information distribution technologies—newspapers, magazines, and television and radio broadcasts—were characterized by economies of scale. One large newspaper could operate more cheaply than 10 smaller newspapers that together had the same circulation. As a result, the industry got highly concentrated, with large, monolithic institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post hiring large staffs of reporters that covered every conceivable subject.
The 21st century's dominant information distribution technology, the Internet, isn't characterized by the kind of economies of scale. As a consequence, the optimum size for a news organization is likely much smaller than it was in the 21st century. What we're seeing is the disaggregation of the news business. Instead of dozens of media organizations with staffs in the hundreds or thousands, we're likely to see thousands of news organizations with a few dozen—or even fewer&mdash employees.
Tim is quite right that newspapers aren't the same thing as journalism. The former can die even as the latter thrives. He is also right that there's been an explosion of Online news outlets, though to be fair many of them cannibalize the reportorial content of newspapers, itself paid for by print advertising.
I happen to prefer magazine writing and blogs to most, though not all, newspaper articles. And I am confident that national news, international news and commentary is going to get written whether newspapers survive or not.
But I am less sanguine about another part of the newspaper bundle: the part dedicated to local news.
As I've mentioned before, I got my start at an 80,000 circulation newspaper in Southern California that covered a dozen or so municipalities: Claremont, La Verne, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontanna, Chino, Chino Hills, Pomona, Diamond Bar, Norco, Ontario, Montclair and a few adjoining cities on occasion. One beat reporter was assigned to each municipality. My beat, Rancho Cucamonga, included 130,000 residents, a half dozen school districts, the Cucamonga Water District, a municipal redevelopment agency, a community college, assorted San Bernardino County government offices, a huge construction industry presence, etc.
Obviously I couldn't provide adequate oversight of all those different subsections of local government. It took quite awhile even to sift through all the campaign finance disclosure forms for members of the City Council, figure out various alliances and allegiances, understand which developers with business before the planning commission had funneled campaign contributions through shell limited liability corporations in order to confuse me...
The stuff I saw city officials do knowing that I was a particularly dedicated reporter watching them closely convinced me that during the many times when no one was watching -- for months before I got hired at that newspaper and months after I left, for example -- they were serving the public even less well.
I shudder to think what went on at the many government agencies I never had time to investigate in even the most cursory way.
Now that the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin has been ravaged by budget cuts some cities aren't getting covered nearly as well as the uneven treatment they got back in 2002 when I started. In its coverage area, there is a gang problem, transportation planning is a mess, political corruption is common -- it's the kind of place where a dedicated reporter can be guaranteed of helping to advance federal prosecutions, as my friend Will Matthews did, or prompting a recall effort against elected officials for breaking open meeting laws, as I did.
I understand that there are hyper-local blogs run by gadflies who can cover some of this stuff. But the institutional support of a newspaper, while not technically necessary for local coverage to thrive, is nevertheless very important. A financially healthy newspaper has some institutional memory, so that when the lone hyper-local blogger goes on vacation, or moves to a new neighborhood, or gets paid off by the local developer, someone is there to continue important coverage.
A healthy newspaper has an attorney on retainer so that when a powerful local threatens a frivolous liable suit if a controversial story runs, the story gets run -- I've known local news bloggers who uniformly didn't publish such stories when confronted, though they were in the right, because who wants to get sued over their blogging hobby?
A healthy newspaper bundles content that people want to read, like the score of last night's Lakers game, with content that few want to read -- the complicated story about the conflict of interest the city attorney has as he negotiates the retirement compensation of the fire union members, for example -- but that is useful to have in the newspaper because it forces elected officials to be more accountable.
Finally, no matter how dedicated a reporter you are, it isn't fun to sift through a 400 page planning commission agenda or search through an archive of property deeds 50 miles away at the county seat. People do these mundane tasks for pay, not as a hobby. One or two local blogs might attract enough advertising to support a half-time reporter, but none can support anything approaching the staff of a healthy newspaper.
As newspapers continue to lose money and layoff employees, the loss of local government watchdogs is what concerns me. I've been worried about this for awhile.
Because without local watchdogs you end up with this.
The Newspaper Industry vs. the Journalism Profession
Rob Hyndman points to this touching tribute by Howard Kurtz to the more than 100 Washington Post reporters who have accepted buyouts in the Post's effort to reduce its headcount. The Post has a storied history and a bunch of talented reporters. Thomas Rick's Fiasco is a great summary of what went wrong in the early months of the Iraq war, for example, and Ricks was among those leaving the paper. So I'm not unsympathetic to those who feel we're losing something valuable in the gradual implosion of the nation's newspapers.
However, I think Kurtz, like a lot of commentators on the changing media landscape, have an unjustified fetish for newsprint. This was prominently on display near the end of Kurtz's column:
The ticking time bomb here is the wholesale abandonment of newspapers by younger people who grew up with a point-and-click mentality. When I was speaking at Harvard recently, a smug graduate student said, "I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?"
"What are you going to do about it?" I shot back. If people want to tune out the news, no one can compel them to change their habits. We can be smarter, faster and jazzier in providing information, but we can't force-feed the stuff. If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.
The "wholesale abandonment of newspapers" is simply a reflection of the fact that the web now provides a wealth of new technologies for delivering news and information. Websites are more comprehensive, more customizable, more timely, and, yes, more engaging, than newsprint. Video—whether delivered via cable or YouTube—isn't inherently less serious or substantive than newsprint. And of course there are a ton of textual news sources to choose from that aren't "newspapers" per se.
Kurtz's dichotomy, between "newspapers" on the one hand, and "Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods" on the other, simply fails to grasp this diversity. There is nothing magical about paper and ink, and there's absolutely no reason to lose sleep over the fact that people in the year 2050 are unlikely to learn about the previous day's happenings by retrieving a bundle of newsprint from their front steps. Journalists are an indispensable part of a free society. Newspapers are simply a technology that many journalists happen to have used to convey their ideas during the 20th century. That medium is now being replaced by a more versatile medium called the Internet, and that's not a bad thing from almost any perspective.
Of course, newspaper partisans contend that the Internet is is actually failing to pick up the slack left behind by newspapers—that we're losing Thomas Ricks and getting "Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods." But this is more newspaper parochialism than anything else. There has been an explosion of new online news outlets in the last decade, and while few of them replicate the monolithic "all the news that's fit to print" model of the classic newspaper, they collectively cover the same ground, and in many cases they do it in greater depth. It's sad to see a great institution like the Washington Post struggle to balance its books, but the newspaper industry is not synonymous with the journalism profession, and the latter is going to be just fine.
I'm sure I'll have a great deal more to say on this subject at the new site I've launched with Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton, The Next Right. In the meantime, while I cannot identify a specific point of failure, I can pretty easily summarize the journey to failure in just two quotes.
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. ... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. ... This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
May 26, 2008
"America the Beautiful"
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Here I want to draw attention to an excellent passage from the essay America the Beautiful -- I thought to re-read it after writing my earlier post on diamonds and reading Tim's better post riffing on the same theme. By way of background, Mary McCarthy is talking about the fact that the citizens of a nation often insist that the foreigner's view of their homeland is a false one.
The American, if he is to speak the highest truth about his country, must refrain from pointing at all. The virtue of American civilization is that it is unmaterialistic.
This statement may strike a critic as whimsical or perverse. Everybody knows, it will be said, that America has the most materialistic civilization in the world, that Americans care only about money, they have no time or talent for living; look at the radio, look at the advertising, look at life insurance, look at the tired businessman, at the Frigidaires and the fords.
In answer, the reader is invited first to look into his own heart and inquire whether he personally feels himself to be represented by these things, or whether he does not, on the contrary, feel them to be irrelevant to him, a necessary evil, part of the conditions of life. Other people, he will assume, care about them very much: the man down the street, the entire population of Detroit or Scarsdale, the back-country farmer, the urban poor or the rich. But he himself accepts these objects as imposed on him by a collective "otherness" of desire, an otherness he hast not met directly but whose existence he infers from the number of automobiles, Frigidaires, or television sets he sees around him. Stepping into his new Buick convertible, he knows that he would gladly do without it, but imagines that to his neighbor, who is just backing his out of the driveway, this car is the motor of life.
More often, however, the otherness is projected farther afield, onto a different class or social group, remote and alien. Thus the rich, who would like nothing better, they think, than for life to be a perpetual fishing trip with the trout grilled by a native guide, look patronizingly upon the whole apparatus of American civilization as a cheap Christmas present to the poor, and city people see the radio and the washing machine as the farm-wife's solace....
The inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness appear, in practice, to have become the inalienable right to a bathtub, a flush toilet, and a can of Spam. Left-wing critics of America attribute this result to the intrusion of capitalism;right-wing critics see it as the logical dead end of democracy. Capitalism, certainly, now depends on mass production, which depends on large-scale distribution of uniform goods, till the consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make house-room in his soul. The buying impulse, in its original force and purity, was not nearly so crass, however, or so meanly acquisitive as many radical critics suppose.
The purchase of a bathtub was the experience of a spiritual right. The immigrant or the poor native American bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to take a bath, but because he wanted to be in a position to do so. This remains true in many fields today; possessions, when they are desired, are not wanted for their own sakes but as tokens of an ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is a vulgarization of Jefferson's concept, but it too is a declaration of the rights of man, and decidedly unfeasible and visionary...We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub... The American does not enjoy his possessions because sensory enjoyment was not his object, and he lives sparely and thinly among them, in monastic discipline.
She wrote that for Commentary in 1947. Was she right? Are her characterizations still true of the United States?
Discuss.
What Ezra said
[Conor Friedersdorf]
It seems a guest on Fox News has joked about how it would be nice if we could kill Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. How despicable.
UPDATE: She apologizes here. Thanks to commenter Daniel for the pointer.
Racism and conservatives
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Matt Yglesias, my favorite liberal blogger, weighs in on liberal guilt:
Ron Rosenbaum sings the praises of so-called "liberal guilt." I largely agree. He says, though, that "What I don't understand is why there doesn't seem to be any conservative guilt over racism." I don't actually find this puzzling at all: There's little conservative guilt over racism because political exploitation of racial animosity has been an integral element of the conservative movement's political strategy ever since the day when the conservative movement stopped issuing straightforward defenses of white supremacy.
Under the circumstances, anyone who feels too upset about racism can't make it far in the conservative movement. You don't need to be a racist, as such, but in your public work you need to express much much much more concern about the alleged evils of "political correctness" or some such than you do about actual racism.
Note the way that Matt conflates feeling guilt over racism with caring about racism, or prioritizing its amelioration. These things are not the same. Plenty of conservatives (not to mention non-guilty liberals) conclude that personal guilt for the racism of others is nonsensical, but are horrified and moved to action when confronted by actual racism.
It's also worth noting that the presidential candidate who has done the most to exploit the racism of others this election season is liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton, whose campaign, though bullish on sexism, has spent a lot more time talking about how it is constrained by political correctness in its campaign against Barack Obama than being concerned with actual racism.
But oddest of all is Matt's assertion that you can't get upset about racism and make it very far in the conservative movement. The most obvious rejoinder is to point out that black Republicans like Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell, all people who've done pretty well within the conservative movement, have demonstrated repeatedly through their public pronouncements that they regard racism as a significant problem and abhor it.
The rejection of racism by mainstream conservatives hardly ends there, though. Let's recall, for example, the Trent Lott fiasco, as chronicled by the New York Times:
Early, widespread and harsh criticism by conservative commentators and publications has provided much of the tinder for the political fires surrounding Senator Trent Lott since his favorable comments about the segregationist presidential campaign of 1948.
Conservative columnists, including Andrew Sullivan, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, and publications like National Review and The Wall Street Journal have castigated Mr. Lott for his remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, arguing that the conservative movement's credibility on racially tinged issues like affirmative action and school vouchers has been squandered.
Mr. Sullivan, on his Web site, and Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Washington Post, are among those who have called on Mr. Lott to resign. Others, like Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel and the radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, have said the remarks were indefensible but were not necessarily reason enough for Mr. Lott to step down. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal stopped short of a direct call for Mr. Lott's ouster, but named three Republicans it preferred in the post.
The responses by conservatives have provided a marked contrast to the contention -- put forth most recently by former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore -- that the nation's conservative news media acts as a monolithic Republican support system.
Robert Bartley, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, said, ''I don't know that there's anything close,'' when asked if he could remember such a revolt against a conservative leader by those who are usually like-minded on the issues.
Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, said that young conservatives particularly feel undermined by Mr. Lott's comment.
''The reaction to this on the right has been tinged with outrage,'' Mr. Lowry said. ''I think that's a product of decades of hard work that conservatives have done on racially charged issues out of idealism and principle. To have those positions tarred, even inadvertently, with this backwardness on race is extremely distressing.''
The Trent Lott example is useful because it happened way back in 2002. How is it that the conservatives who criticized him are still welcome in the movement if Yglesias is right?
But this wasn't a unique event. Much the same thing could be written, for example, about Sen. George Allen's "macacca moment." When blatant racism is in the news it isn't at all surprising nowadays to see mainstream conservative pundits denouncing it.
How To Begin a Column
[Peter Suderman]
The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur.
When I'm not guest-blogging for Megan, I'm a regular contributor to Techdirt, a blog that focuses on the technology industry. The site's owner, Mike Masnick, has gotten a lot of attention for a post he did on Friday about making money by giving stuff away. It's a response to New York Times columnist David Pogue, who attacked the "Slashdot argument" that "books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed." Pogue helpfully explains that simply giving away copyrighted material free of charge doesn't magically make one rich.
Now, as Mike points out, this is a bit of a straw man. Nobody is arguing that simply giving one's creative works away for free will magically allow one to make a living. Rather, the argument is that giving away information goods (which have zero marginal cost) can expand the market for other goods that can then be sold at a profit. The most obvious example is advertising—lots of sites give away content or applications in order to sell ads. But this isn't the only example by a long shot. Musicians can give away their music to sell more concert tickets. Free software companies like Red Hat, IBM, and MySQL give away software in order to increase demand for their support contracts. In addition to advertisers, successful bloggers give away their blog posts in order to build up their traffic and get speaking fees and book advances.
Most of these business models have become newly viable as the Internet has pushed the cost of transmitting information close to zero. Fifty years ago, you needed expensive equipment to produce information goods like newspapers, television broadcasts, or music albums. And it was therefore necessary to charge for the finished product in order to recoup those costs. Not surprisingly, the businesses that have grown up around those 20th century distribution technologies are not too enthusiastic about business models that involve giving away for free product that used to fetch them a nice fat profit margin.
This kind of discussion invariably turns to "piracy," and especially peer-to-peer file sharing. It is commonly suggested that the real problem is that kids these days don't have enough respect for copyright law, and that all that's needed is to better educate them about the importance of respecting copyright. Now, I have some sympathy for this point of view. I don't participate in illicit file sharing and I don't have much sympathy for folks who do so and get caught. Nevertheless, I think this line of argument misses the point rather badly. Because although the short-term problem facing many content industries may be illegal sharing of their copyrighted materials, the long-term threat is that their prices will be undercut by competitors who share their own intellectual creations free of charge. This has already happened in the news and punditry world, as thousands of bloggers and news sites provide for free the news that newspapers charged for a couple of decades ago. And it's beginning to happen in the music industry. The fundamental challenge facing the incumbent content industries is not "piracy" but dramatically increased competition.
What makes this difficult is that it requires some creativity to figure out which business models will be successful. As Mike points out, "give it away and pray" isn't a viable business model. Figuring out what to give away and how to monetize the resulting attention is a difficult problem that everyone, from Facebook to the Atlantic is struggling to solve. But plenty of businesses have succeeded, with Google as the most important poster child. But businesses that specialize in information—news, music, movies, software—have no choice but to take it seriously, because if they don't their competitors surely will.
Radar Magazine has an interesting piece by Christopher Ketcham that asks, "Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?"
Usually a news consumer can safely assume that the answer to any question posed in a headline is "no". Hopefully that's the case here, though given the Bush Administration's track record on secret government programs it's hard to be sure.
What struck me about the article is that Americans haven't really had much political discussion about what should happen in a national emergency. I'd like to see that question raised in one of the upcoming presidential debates, though the risk is that asking about such matters will distract us from Rev. Wright and Televangelist Parsley.
New York, NY
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Unlike Megan, a Manhattan native, I spent just 18 months living in New York City's oft-mocked Park Slope while doing a master's program at NYU. Prior to that I'd lived in Seville, Spain a couple times, Paris for a summer and otherwise hadn't lived anywhere other than Southern California for longer than a month. I am a man who likes warm climates, laid back people and Mexican food, so I can't say my departure took me away from the place I ultimately belong. Another Californian captured my sentiments on leaving better than I can render them, though I don't think I'd yet stayed at the party too long.
In fact, now that I'm living in Washington D.C., where the social scene more often involves hanging out at friends' houses and conversing over drinks, activities that I prefer to extravagant parties, I've got to say that I miss the New York scene, not for its pretensions, but for the sheer amount of stuff going on at any moment. I never imagined, coming from Los Angeles, that I'd be stunned by the offerings of any American city. I find it hard to communicate to anyone who has never lived there.
A sense can be got from flipping through all those pages in The New Yorker that most of us skip en route to Talk of the Town. Or by browsing the restaurant and bar pages on New York Magazine's Web site. (My parent's neighborhood in Orange County, CA and my Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope, are similarly mocked as places for people with expensive strollers. Fair enough, but Costa Mesa, where I grew up, offered maybe 5 bars within walking distance -- I walk long distances -- from my house, whereas Park Slope had probably 50 bars within a 10 minute walk of my front door.)
But I always get a kick out of Nonsense NY, a weekly e-mail I still get sent that lists events on the what I suppose is the hipster/performance artist social scene. To give you an idea of its niche, it notes that "Nonsense does not straight list rock shows in New York unless they occur in tandem with puppet shows or jump rope tournaments or in subway tunnels or in graveyards." I don't care for graveyard rock shows, but I wish I lived in a city where enough stuff was going on that they were happening.
This weekend, for example, here are some of the NYC events advertised:
I'd like to associate myself with the remarks of my esteemed co-blogger regarding diamond engagement rings. I got engaged last fall, and after reading a variety of articles on the subject, including the Atlantic article Conor mentioned, Amanda made clear that she'd be happy with a non-diamond engagement ring, as she wasn't keen to have me sending thousands of dollars to African despots as a way of proving my love to her. She was also unenthusiastic about perpetuating a "tradition" that was manufactured by the diamond cartel within our grandparents' lifetime.
I investigated getting a cultured diamond, which are identical in every way to "real" diamonds except that I can be sure there were no child soldiers involved in extracting them. Most cultured diamonds are yellow diamonds, which are rare in nature but no more difficult to create in the lab. There's some beautiful jewelry available with cultured diamonds in them. Unfortunately, the closest cultured diamond shops were in Chicago, and the makers of cultured diamonds have focused on catering to the high end of the market, which made most of the options way out of my price range.
So instead I chose an engagement ring with a cultured ruby as its centerpiece. She liked it. And because we're believers in gender equality, we decided it would be good if she got me an engagement ring too.
I, for one, am looking forward to the impending commoditization of the gem industry. Cultured diamonds are still rare enough that they haven't put much downward pressure on diamond prices, but it's only a matter of time before the technology improves to the point where almost any diamond can be manufactured for a couple hundred bucks. And without the option of spending thousands of dollars on a garish status symbol, men will be forced to exercise more creativity in choosing tokens of affection.
Your daily fix of Megan
[Conor Friedersdorf]
I appreciate the point that Megan and John are making. It's a shame that sexism is a factor in this election. But I'm one Hillary hater who is repulsed by the New York senator for reasons that haven't anything to do with sexism.
It seems to me that those of us who've long suspected she is power hungry to the point of derangement -- I started thinking that way when it occurred to me that, knowing her husband is a philanderer, she nevertheless joined a campaign to vilify the young women he exploited as sluts and liars -- have been vindicated by events.
The latest example is Senator Clinton's insistence that a plan she endorsed to strip Michigan and Florida of its delegates is actually a retrograde attempt to disenfranchise voters, and that her opportunistic attempts to reverse that decision share moral characteristics with the civil rights and women's suffrage movements.
Were Senator Clinton's primary opponent Dianne Feinstein, or if she faced Elizabeth Dole in a general election, I'd still think that only one frighteningly Machiavellian candidate who'd put her own interests above the good of the country was in the race.
As it happens, she faces Barack Obama and John McCain, two rare politicians I respect, though I've got disagreements with both men. I'll say this though: just as William F. Buckley once said that he'd rather that random people chosen from the Boston phone book govern us than the Harvard faculty, I'd happily substitute the average educated American woman for the average member of the United States Congress.
Warren Christopher vs. <i>Recount</i>
[Peter Suderman]
Unlike the Indiana Jones films, Recount, which aired last night on HBO, is actually based on real events, namely the brouhaha that went down in Florida after the 2000 election. That hasn't, however, stopped Warren Christopher from getting his undies in a bunch over the film's portrayal of him:
Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears.
“I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”
Yes, but that's why it's fiction rather than history. Even when working on projects like this, dramatists just don't have the same responsibility to historical veracity as scholars. They're working in different mediums. No one reads a history department monograph and complains that the pacing is off in the third act; similarly, I think it's a little silly to complain when a movie fails to meet the standards of academia.
And I'm not even sure Christopher came off all that badly. Watching the film last night, I got the sense that he was being portrayed mostly as too cautious, too worried about maintaining the dignity of the process and not worried enough about winning -- not the right approach, but certainly a respectable one.
Moreover, I think it's a little odd that Democrats seem to be leading the charge to complain about the film as it's ultimately sympathetic to their position (and that's even if you discount the fact that the GOP portrayals, especially Laura Dern's SNL-like take on Katherine Harris, are arguably less flattering than the portrayals of the Democrats). Both sides are shown to have mishandled the situation, but the film pretty clearly suggests that the process was severely botched, a large number of voters were disenfranchised, and that if all the votes had been counted, there's a good chance Al Gore would have won.
[B]elieve me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It's filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie -- the "crystal skull" -- is a phony.
My faith in, well... pretty much everything is now totally ruined!
Somewhat more seriously, the column's author is almost certainly correct that the Jones films are responsible for a bevy of public misperceptions about the field of archaeology -- a sort of CSI effect for professional seekers of civilizational remains. No doubt the field is considerably more boring than Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and a gajillion dollars worth of special effects would make it seem. There are (and I'm just guessing) probably fewer snakes, fewer guns, and fewer encounters with mystical death cults and Biblical relics that make your face melt off.
But to that I say: So what? Pop culture portrayals of, well, pretty much everything tend to be inaccurate. Sex and the City wasn't really a documentary about single life in New York. The Shield wasn't a textbook on police corruption. The West Wing wasn't C-SPAN, but instead an idealized portrait of Washington politics. Fiction isn't history, sociology, or news reporting -- and thank goodness. I promise you that while the White House can be an interesting place to work from time to time, the vast majority of what goes on there does not have the makings of great drama, or even a moderately diverting 42 minutes of network television. Drama, entertainment, and pop culture rearrange, reshape, and reimagine the real world, or even just discard it entirely. Sometimes this is done to inform, sometimes to question, and sometimes, heaven forbid, just to entertain.
Worse, though, is the author's follow-up complaint that the Jones films don't project the modern archaeologist's carefully honed global sensibilities:
It's not just that the films are harmlessly caricatured visions of old-fashioned archaeology; they are filled with destructive and dangerous stereotypes that undermine American archaeology's changing identity and goals. At a time when our national political debates are centered on our relationships with other cultures, when the question of talking to rather than attacking perceived enemies has become a contentious presidential campaign issue and when claims for the repatriation of looted relics are being seriously addressed by courts and professional archaeological organizations, the thrill-a-minute adventures of Indiana Jones are potentially dangerous and dysfunctional models for both modern archaeology and American behavior in the world.
The sensitivity on display is touching, really, but somehow I don't think any Jones film is all that likely to lead to an international incident (unless maybe you're worried about riots sparked by foreign box-office numbers). If anything, archaeologists ought to be thrilled to have a public representative who's obviously much more fun than some of his cranky real-life counterparts.
John McCain earned the title "Captain Amnesty" for his work on immigration reform, but on Friday his campaign confirmed that he's pro-amnesty all around. A statement from the campaign said that (contrary to the remarks of one surrogate) McCain thinks that telecom companies who broke the nation's wiretapping laws should get a free pass. A statement from the McCain campaign says the Senator supports telco amnesty, but thinks it should be granted "with explicit statements that this is not a blessing for future activities."
As I pointed out back in February, this position doesn't make any sense. Our nation's surveillance laws provide for civil and criminal penalties for companies that participate in warrantless wiretapping programs. The purpose of those penalties is to give companies an incentive to follow the law. But if we give a free pass to companies that broke the law this time, will we be surprised when they're even more inclined to break the law the next time around? If McCain were really serious about the "don't do it again" caveat, I would expect that at a minimum, he would favor investigations and some kind of token penalty to at least acknowledge the principle that lawbreaking has consequences.
It's important to remember that we're not talking about a one-time lapse at a time of national emergency. It's not the case, for example, that these companies only participated in warrantless wiretapping in the days or weeks after the September 11 attacks. At least one telecom exec claims that the NSA began approaching telecom companies as early as February 2001, and these programs continued for years after the September 11 attacks without Congressional authorization or court oversight. Granting retroactive immunity under those circumstances would be a tacit admission that the law is toothless, and a green light to future telecom company executives that when the president asks them to break the law, they can do so without worrying about the consequences.
Consider Las Vegas after 12 hours: already there is an urge to escape. The once quaint sounds of the casino floor clank against the nerves. You discern wrinkles beneath the caked-on makeup of haggard cocktail waitresses and paunch on black-jack dealers whose slouches gradually deepen.
Earlier on wedding parties brush past, tuxedos pressed and bridesmaid dresses flowing, fresh flowers pinned as boutonnières and bundled into bouquets. Friends beam as groom kisses bride: a happy future seems assured.
Hours later, a woman in a wedding dress stands alone, teetering drunk, her husband passed out upstairs. Her veil dangles from a blackjack table, anchored by a rum and coke; its ice is long since melted and a rust colored-ring remains when she yanks up the veil, tipping liquid onto the green felt where the dollar dances of her loved ones were gambled away.
In Las Vegas anyone who lingers very long finds its luster is lost, a particularly harsh sight in a city where the lights never dim.
It is, however, an excellent place to watch March Madness.
May 25, 2008
Give me your diamonds
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Awhile back I wrote a piece against bridal magazines, but forgot to inveigh against a related scourge: the diamond engagement ring.
If I'm lucky I'll one day take a knee and ask an intelligent, spirited woman for her hand. It is a moment I'll cherish -- I'd be honored to offer some token of my esteem, even one that stretched my means. Should my beloved savor art I'd hope for sufficient funds to commission a painting. If she loves Yo-Yo Ma I'll do my damnedest to call in a favor. I can even imagine a woman whose passion is jewelry. She's studied its craft, is particularly taken by its aesthetic, and revels in its symbolism. I'd gladly purchase whatever diamond ring is within my reach for that woman.
As it stands, however, men are asked to believe that every single woman happens to prize an extravagantly expensive and utterly useless stone—perhaps mined by African children at the point of a bayonet—not because it's an opulent status symbol whose envy-inducing *bling bling* is forever, but because it's the most "special" thing that we can present her (or so the shadow people would have us believe).
In a way, it's bizarre that women given engagement rings don't respond by saying something like, "I'd love to marry you." (Beat.) "And thank you so much for this ring. (Eyes welling up.) I cherish the thought behind it, and I'll keep it forever if you'd like. (Happy tears.) On the other hand, we could take it back and use the money to spend several months together in coastal Italy."
But the culture -- which I absolutely don't think is the fault of women, in case that isn't clear -- seldom leads to my fantasy engagement. Instead the diamond ring thrives as a status marker disguised as a tradition, the bigger the spectacle the better.
And here lies an opportunity.
Here is what I propose: a charity, first marketed to Hollywood stars, that allows people to donate the stone from their diamond ring, directing the money to a cause of their choice. Let's say someone chooses an environmental cause. In return she gets a valueless green stone the same size as the diamond she gave. She puts the stone in the setting on her ring. She is thus able to show off her virtue in the same way she formerly showed off her vice.
This would work best if it caught on among Hollywood types first -- perhaps the same stars who drive around in hybrid cars. This is a half-baked idea, I know, but perhaps the core concept can be improved upon? I'm open to suggestions before I sucker one of my attorney friends into filing the non-profit paperwork for me.
UPDATE: See this piece on diamonds from The Atlantic archives.
Hi, my name's Tim Lee and I'm one of those think tank people Megan warned you about. I'd like to thank her for letting me share her soapbox for the week. You can learn more about me at the link above.
Today the Libertarian Party nominated Bob Barr as its presidential standard-bearer for 2008. I've got a love-hate relationship with the Libertarian Party. As a small-L libertarian, I typically find the major party options to be wretched, and this year's options are especially bad. So it will be nice to have someone on the ticket who I can be reasonably sure will mostly take positions I generally agree with.
Unfortunately, the LP has a knack for picking candidates who are not just uninspiring, but often acutely embarrassing. The 2004 candidate, Michael Badnarik, was a low point. As I wrote at the time, despite billing himself as a "constitutional scholar," he was completely clueless about American government. His speeches and interviews were chock full of assertions that could have been corrected with 30 seconds of fact-checking, and his overall message was that of a paranoid, government-hating crank.
And because presidential elections are virtually the only time a lot of people pay attention to politics, a lot of people wind up associating libertarianism, the ideology, with whomever the LP chooses to nominate every four years. And since the LP's candidates are often clueless, politically tone-deaf, or otherwise unappealing, small-L libertarians get stuck trying to explain that, no, most libertarians aren't for legalizing child pornography, and no, not all of us have turned our skin blue by drinking a "homemade antibiotic laced with silver."
Bob Barr isn't in the same category. He understands the basics of public policy and appears able to get through an interview without embarrassing himself. However, he seems to have a whole different category of baggage: questions about whether he's actually a libertarian. During his tenure in Congress, Barr showed few libertarian tendencies, voting for the Defense of Marriage Act, opposing medical marijuana, and signing on to the Patriot Act. I saw him speak here in Missouri last year and he gave a pretty convincing Road to Damascus speech, but libertarians are justifiably suspicious.
Personally, I'm doubly wary of supporting the guy after the Ron Paul fiasco. Like Will Wilkinson, I gave money to Paul in 2007, before I learned of his continuing association with the bigots who sent out racist newsletters under Paul's name. In retrospect, Paul's anti-immigration rhetoric and his tendency toward conspiracy theories ("Wall Street bankers" are a staple villain in his stump speeches) should have been red flags that temperamentally, Paul was more a conservative nationalist than a libertarian even if he happened to have reached libertarian conclusions on a lot of policy issues.
The issue section of Barr's campaign website makes me nervous that we're in for a repeat of that fiasco. It's incredibly thin—a dozen or so bullet points in total—and one of the four categories is "secure our borders," which suggests Barr may harbor the same kind of borderline xenophobia that has infected both the Paul campaign and much of the modern conservative movement. That's not the impression I want voters to get of libertarianism.
Ultimately, I wish the LP would just go away. The structure of American elections dooms third parties to perpetual failure and obscurity, and that, in turn, creates a vicious cycle where the most talented activists and potential candidates go elsewhere, causing the party to be even more out of touch and politically tone-deaf in the next election. But given that the party is going to nominate somebody, Barr was probably the best choice. He's a reasonably credible candidate, he's got decent media skills, and so far, at least, I haven't seen him take any positions that I strongly disagree with (since his road-to-damascus conversion in 2006, anyway). But I don't plan to support his candidacy because while he may be the least-bad option on this November's ballot, he certainly isn't the kind of person I want associated with libertarianism. And every vote he gets will mean more visibility for the embarrassing candidate the party is likely to nominate in 2012.
People are always using the chicken/egg question as shorthand for situations where it's impossible to determine what actually came first.
But if you believe in evolution, it's clear that once upon a time there were two animals that we wouldn't quite consider chickens, that those not-quite-chickens mated, that an egg was laid, and that out of that fertilized egg hatched the first animal that meets whatever our definition of chicken is.
Soon I'll run out of links to the best financial stories I've ever read, since I don't read financial stories very often, but another gem is this piece by Michael Lewis, who is the kind of crazy genius that can make anything seem interesting -- even the career of a middle-aged investment consultant.
Here is a sexy excerpt:
Then he caught a break. He met a girl who liked him. The girl went and told a friend about him. That friend was the business manager for the Rolling Stones. One thing led to another, and the Rolling Stones handed him $13 million to invest.
The argument in the piece is that you shouldn't ever give $13 million -- or even $1,300 -- to anyone to invest in the stock market for you, because the whole profession is a dishonest racket where arrogant con men get paid ridiculous sums to perform work that is of no value to their clients or society.
There is another Michael Lewis piece that I can't find online -- anyone have a link? -- about how hot his wife is and what it is like to be married to someone that beautiful. He loves her a lot.
Let them serve alcohol
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Sometimes I read The Dupont Current, a free Washington D.C. newspaper that's rarely talked about, ubiquitous on stoops, and riveting (in a confirms-your-worldview sorta way) if you're the kind of libertarian whose blood boils at the absurd local regulations that hamstring small business owners.
Staff writer Jessica Gould, who formerly inspired my utterly ineffectual tirade on behalf of a local ping pong table, writes this week about the Dupont Circle advisory neighborhood commisioners, who "want to nurture a thriving restaurant row on the stretch of P Street between the circle and 22nd Street."
It's no easy task, they say. High rents and disruptions stemming from a recent streetscape project have made it difficult for small businesses to survive. So, at last Wednesday's meeting, the commissioners voted 7-0 with one abstention to petition the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to modify the West Dupont Circle Moratorium.
My libertarian instincts are rendered powerless by this mess! Should there be a "restaurant row"? It's impossible for these would be economic planners to know. What do local residents think? My guess is that most haven't any opinion -- if asked they'd say something like, "What does the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board do? And what is the West Dupont Circle Moratorium?"
If they read Jessica Gould they'd know:
The moratorium caps the number of liquor licenses in an area that extends 600 feet in all directions from the intersections of 21st and P streets. It has been in place for more than a decade, with renewals in 2000 and 2005. The current moratorium lasts five years... the commission is requesting a midterm amendment to allow two more restaurants the possibility of acquiring beer and wine licenses within the moratorium zone.
Does it seem insane to anyone else that a restaurant hoping to open its doors near what is effectively the downtown of a major metropolitan city -- the nation's capitol, in fact -- is unable to serve wine or beer, never mind liquor, if it happens to be located inside a 1,130,400 square foot area, where liquor can be served, mind you, but only by an arbitrarily limited number of establishments?
Does it seem additionally insane that the business of local government these days in Washington D.C. is for one body of citizen representatives to beg another body of bureaucrats to relax idiotic regulations so that new restaurants can operate profitably?
Predictably the commission isn't asking that anyone be allowed to get a liquor license -- they've written their request "narrowly," Ms. Gould tells us.
In other words, they've tried to pick the businesses they feel are most desserving of liquor licenses. I've no reason to think that the body is corrupt, or that a restauranteur in that neighborhood would do well to kiss up to commissioners in any way possible to get preferential treatment... but I'd sure conclude that I'd better do all that just to be safe were I a restaurant owner.
As local newspapers across the country lay off reporters or fold entirely, these are the kinds of stories that aren't going to get covered anymore -- planning commission stories that are boring as hell to report, written by journalists whose prose are too cluttered by city official speak (Gould is better than most), and that are therefore read by few residents, though the issues at play are core to the economic success of neighborhoods.
So keep on the local planning commission beat, Ms. Gould, and I'll do my best to encourage DC's libertarian establishment to pay attention to your scoops. Of course, once you get enough attention you'll move up to a better publication, a less talented journalist will replace you and all my efforts will have been counterproductive.
I have no short term solution for that problem. The long term solution is convincing people that local government matters, and that it's worth paying more for engaging coverage of their municipality.
Harnessing your knowledge
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Imagine that a Great White shark and a Bengal tiger are going to fight to the death. How many inches of water are needed for the shark to win?
May 24, 2008
Art museum heresy
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Vacationing in Europe this summer?
Strike the Louvre from your Parisian itinerary. Walk swiftly past its pyramidal entrance, tossing a smug wave to the suckers standing in line. A lifetime in the City of Lights would be squandered if you never explored the world’s most famous art museum, but a vacationer passing a week or ten days there is better off exploring other museums, or eating a leisurely lunch at a sidewalk café, or strolling along the Seine.
“But I’ve heard of the Louvre,” you might protest. “The Mona Lisa is there! How could I tour Paris, perhaps for the only time in my life, and return home without seeing it?”
Indeed, it is expected that you’ll visit.
“Has it changed since my honeymoon?” your coworker may ask.
“Is it really as Dan Brown describes?” your hair stylist might inquire.
Tell them that the Louvre is a labyrinth where mobs crowd famous works three people deep, particularly the Mona Lisa, entombed beneath three feet of bulletproof glass. Lesser known works mostly span artistic periods visitors know nothing about; the line alone stretches longer than it would take to visit two smaller museums.
My favorite Paris collections trace a single artist’s career, showing his works in context; its galleries aren’t crowded, the mood isn’t frenzied and you can leave after an hour, before successive rooms become a chore rather than a pleasure to ponder. Even a visitor intent on a hoard of great paintings is better off at the Musée d’Orsay, whose extensive collection is quite manageable compared to the Louvre; more importantly, most visitors will find its genres more enjoyable.
Another muddled analogy is useful: the Louvre is akin to a library of history’s best classical music; enough major symphonies, classic concertos and delightful string quartets exist there to occupy a dozen orchestras for decades. But the music people savor today is rock & roll and its offspring.
That’s why casual music fans are far more engaged exploring the moment when rock’s birth altered the course of Western music than sifting through the many centuries of musical evolution before it. Elvis Presley, The Beatles and other legends of the late 1960s came in a single epoch… sort of like the transformation that swept European painting and sculpture circa 1880: enter Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh and others by 1915.
Hence my litmus test: if your idea of a fun concert is a 10 day classical music festival where the best orchestras in the world perform influential but mostly unfamiliar classics, the Louvre is the art museum for you. Those who’d prefer Woodstock, however, should visit the Musee d’Orsay instead.
What's guilt got to do with it?
[Conor Friedersdorf]
Imagine a Vietnamese American, 18 years old, born to second generation immigrants in Southern California. He is talking about his excitement at voting in a presidential election for the first time this November. "I like John McCain for a lot of reasons," he says, "but part of why I'm voting for him is to alleviate my guilt for the way he was tortured in that Hanoi prison cell so many years ago."
That would be odd, wouldn't it? An 18 year-old Vietnamese American hasn't any reason to feel guilty for Vietnam War era crimes. Now let's say that this youth's grandfather and great uncle personally tortured prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton. It would be easier to understand the guilt felt by the youth, but as easy to assure him that he shouldn't feel personal guilt for the crimes of his ancestors -- and that he shouldn't let any guilt he wrongly feels sway his vote for the most powerful electoral office in the world.
My hypothetical doesn't exactly map onto the racial guilt some white Americans feel for slavery and Jim Crow. It's worth keeping in mind, however, as we consider Ron Rosenbaum's weird argument about "liberal guilt" and voting for Barack Obama because he is black. He begins by wondering why it is that liberal guilt is a term of derision:
You hear it all the time now from people who sneeringly dismiss whites who support Obama's candidacy as "guilty liberals." There are, of course, many reasons why whites might support Obama that have nothing to do with race. But what if redeeming our shameful racial past is one factor for some? Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last. Instead, their feeling must be disparaged as merely the result of a somehow shameful "liberal guilt."
Already his argument is confused. It is one thing to feel sincere excitement at the prospect of a black president, or to believe that his blackness will itself benefit the United States. It is quite another thing for those feelings to be rooted in guilt.
"Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before," Rosenbaum writes, "but if we want to praise America's virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America's sins, else we praise a false god..."
Actually, its perfectly rational to acknowledge America's historical sins, even to the point of supporting government action to remedy them, whereas it is irrational to feel guilt for events that occurred before one's birth.
That irrationality explains disdain for "liberal guilt." So it's striking when Rosenbaum writes the following:
It's especially surprising to hear "guilt" being disparaged by conservatives, since they present themselves as moralists; they are quick to decry liberals for seeking to abolish guilt over various practices conservatives deem immoral. But was slavery not immoral? For those conservatives who make a fetish of "values": Was not the century of institutionalized racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of "flawed values" that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? For those conservatives who are forever speaking of the way they value history and memory more than liberals: Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they're no longer legally institutionalized?
Do we abolish its memories and its effects? Do we abolish the very consciousness of the past and pretend we have a clear conscience?
For heaven's sake, does this man see no distinction between guilt for an act one actually committed and guilt for another's action that one couldn't have possibly prevented? Critics of liberal guilt (it isn't just conservatives) don't disagree that slavery was immoral, or that America ought to remember as much! We disagree about whether people should buy into collective guilt, if such a thing even exists, not due to complicity in an evil act, but because dead people who shared one's race, ethnicity or nationality committed some evil act.
Later in the piece we're given a perfect illustration of where this mindset might take us:
As a Jew, I think I have a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before I was born. It would be hard for me to understand an African-American not being angry about 400 years of murder, rape, and enslavement on the basis of race. Anger, like guilt, shouldn't be the endpoint, but anger at injustice is not illegitimate and can be a starting point, a spur to moral action.
Surely it is legitimate to be angry about the murder of millions of Jews, or the enslavement of millions of African Americans, whether or not one is a Jew or an African American. I am a Caucasian gentile. Does Mr. Rosenbaum imagine I have less reason to be outraged by those horrors?
I'll leave it to others to highlight the other egregious slurs against conservatives found in the piece. And to those who think that collective guilt over past misdeeds should help determine one's vote for president, suffice it to say that the debate over whether blacks or women are worse off is going to get even more complicated if the relevant data points extend back throughout all of human history.
Thanks to this story, Minnesota political bloggers can proudly lift their laptops above their heads and, like button-down internet He-Men, bellow, "I have the power!" So good for them! It's pretty neat to get a big story in the New York Times about how awesome and influential you are.
But I'm not sure there's really all that much of a story here. The piece is titled "Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers." I suppose that's not exactly wrong. But what it really shows is the power of the news media and journalism -- which is just not all that big a deal. As fellow guest-blogger Tim Lee told me in an interview last week, it's a mistake to "confuse journalism with a particular technology of news distribution." So it's true, as the story says, that the success of these blogs in getting out particular political messages has shown that "no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics." But mostly it's just true that no political candidate in the country can afford to ignore any news media interested in his or her race -- whether that means blogs and podcasts, local newspapers and television, or national magazines and syndicated talk shows.
Ode to spring
[Conor Friedersdorf]
On this lovely afternoon, I'll begin my guest blogging tenure by sharing the best passage ever written about picnics, penned by the estimable James Michener for his nonfiction masterpiece Iberia.
I have never bothered much about whether or not people will remember me when I am dead; but I am sure that as long as my generation lives, in various parts of the world someone will pause now and then to reflect, 'Wasn't that a great picnic we had that day with Michener?' I have lured my friends into some extraordinary picnics, for I hold with the French that to eat out of doors in congenial surroundings is sensible: in Afghanistan we ate high on a hill outside Kabul and watched as tribesmen moved in to attack the city; at Edfu along the Nile we spread our blankets inside that most serene of Egypt's temples; in Bali we picnicked on the terraces and in Tahiti by the waterfalls; and if tomorrow someone were to suggest that we picnic in a snowstorm, I'd go along, for of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do. Picnics are the apex of sensible living and the traveler who does not so explore the land through which he travels ought better to stay at home.
I don't mean to discourage you from reading my excellent co-guest-bloggers, or following my link to the best piece of financial journalism I've heard all year, or eating indoors if that's what you're into -- but daylight is fleeting, and before I post again I'm off to enjoy some outdoor wonders.
The Saga of Emily Gould
[Peter Suderman]
As Ross and Sonny note, narcissism is indeed at the heart of Emily Gould's cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine. Gould's tenure at Gawker fed her self-obsession; every page view helped further her transformation from jaded Brooklyn resident into unhinged, egotistic snark beast. Gawker both expanded her horizons and terribly limited them; from the perch of her overflowing inbox, she could see everything in the world (or at least Manhattan). Yet quickly enough she became the only thing she cared about within it. The entire city of New York mattered only insofar as it was a reflection of Emily.
Yet, in some form, this worldview has always fueled the blogosphere, even in the political realm. And it is not always pernicious. Many of the successful early pioneers made a point of sharing personal details. Jonah Goldberg wrote about his wife, his dog, his favorite television shows; Andrew Sullivan wrote about his sleep apnea; Glenn Reynolds posted about his interest in digital cameras and science fiction. Matt Yglesias writes about basketball, indie rock, and living near U Street.
The professionalization of the blogosphere has reduced this to some extent, yet it's still evident on numerous popular blogs. Bloggers write about their lives, their interests, their cities, their friends. On many blogs, the author's life becomes part of the story -- you read these bloggers as much for who they are as for what they have to say. This is what accounts for the sense one sometimes gets that one "knows" the blogger. Blogs serve as running commentary on the world at large (or some part of it), yes, but also as extensions of the lives of their authors. To become a regular reader is to share and take part in that life, and that's a large part of the blogosphere's appeal. It's also a function of both the frantic pace and pressure of the professional blogosphere: The easiest content to produce is that which is inspired by what's nearest to you.
The combined lure of easy content and personal attention is tough to resist; Gould didn't, and the distinction between her online life and everything essentially disappeared. The author and the subject became one. Does Gould deserve criticism for this? Perhaps. But it's also a function of the medium -- its pace, its content demands, and even its readers, who encourage personal revelation. The blogosphere always pulls this way. It's magnetized toward self-obsession.
Guest bloggers
I'm off to the beach for a week, and though I may blog, I won't be doing so full time. Instead you--you lucky devils--will get the combined efforts of Peter Suderman, John Henke, Tim Lee, and Conor Friedersdorf. Have a good week, and be nice to them and each other, please.
May 23, 2008
Own-to-rent
Economics of Contempt is tentatively defending the "Own-to-rent" plan proposed by Dean Baker.
I must admit, when I first read Baker's proposal, it struck me as a gross interference with property rights to give tenants the right to rent the property for so long (especially after foreclosure). But the more I thought about it, the more comfortable I became with it. Yves Smith, in defending the proposal against Ken Bunnell's charge that it will degrade communities because renters tend to make bad neighbors, captures it perfectly: "Give people property rights, and they act like they have property rights."
I have great respect for EoC, and for Andrew Samwick, who is a fan. But as it happens, I've been going to a lot of events on the crisis and consumer credit over the last few weeks. And the consensus on this plan is it can't be done, for multiple reasons:
1) What is the "fair market rent" to be determined by an "independent appraiser" on a 90% empty exurban development without the legal minimum sales to form a homeowner's association?
2) The tenants may be willing to invest in upkeep, but who fixes the plumbing when it breaks? The servicers are not rental agents. Moreover, they have no legal ability to become rental agents under their contracts. There is no entity in the position to take the role of landlord to these people. This is seen as the biggest--nay, insurmountable--obstacle. The only way this would work is if the government took possession of the homes, i.e. gigantic government bailouts.
3) There will be considerable political pressure on the "independent appraisers" to keep the fair market rental value down, handing the banks a loss.
4) Most of the people with the really problematic loans probably can't afford to rent their house, either.
5) To the extent that they could afford the rents--i.e. that houses were massively overvalued--you're putting a big capital loss on the bank's balance sheet and keeping it there, year after year, rather than writing it off.
6) The worst hit homes are in "developing areas" that are now rapidly "undeveloping", meaning that there aren't adequate services there. Encouraging people to stay in those areas is not, in the long run, a good idea. It also isn't a good idea to make people less mobile during an economic downturn.
7) Some of the worst hit homes are in areas where the tax base will not support the cost of basic services to the developments that the government is encouraging people to stay in.
8) Who gets to vote on the board of the homeowner's association? Are various servicers supposed to send people to represent their interests? Who pays the property taxes? You're sticking banks with a long term asset that neither they nor the servicers are set up to handle at all.
9) Keeping bad assets on bank books for years and years was, many argue, the main factor that made Japan's economy so festive in the 1990s. We should probably not repeat their error.
The rent-to-own plan is an attempt to engineer a bailout for free. And like most such "free" goodies, it seems like it will probably end up costing us more in the long run.
Woman's work
I don't mean to suggest, when I say that sexism is a bigger handicap for a presidential candidate than racism, that Hillary Clinton is losing simply because she's a woman. Many people I know think that the Clinton campaign has had only one main problem, but unfortunately that problem is named William Jefferson Clinton. And Ms. Clinton is not a charmer like her husband; her strength is ideas, not charisma. This would, I think, be true if she were a man with all the same genes except the second x chromosome. Indeed, she'd probably never have been a politician in the first place.
But I do think that sexism is a deeper and subtler handicap than racism is when it comes to leadership roles. She might not have won if she was a man. But as a woman, it was harder still.
This works on so many levels. There's the shock that anyone is, in 2008, still calling themselves preppie. Especially since even in the 1980s I never actually knew anyone who went to prep school to use that word.
Then there's the hilarious arrogance of the men. It reads like something in the kind of bad feminist short stories people used to write in my college creative writing classes--the ones where the teacher used to say, "But Willow, no one's actually that malignantly stupid."
And what would I not give to be a fly on the wall when one of these erstwhile Romeos sidles up to a tattooed chick at the Black Cat and tries to woo her by telling her how much he loves Death Cab for Cutie*.
There's also the shock of seeing most of the bars I go to regularly described as hipster hangouts. If there's anything less hip than me, I rarely run into it.
Of course, it seems like now I may have to find some other bars. Not that I'm in any romantic danger from 25 year old preppies looking for the kind of girl you Don't Take Home to Mother. But I'm not sure I can bear to watch their excruciating humiliation. Don't worry that she'll be turned off by your polo shirt, friend. It's not your clothes--it's you.
Maybe the Zappos approach could be a solution: Zappos offers newly trained employees $1,000 to quit, because they only want people so dedicated that they would rather keep the job than take the cash. How about we do that with cops?
Offer them a bigger amount, say $10K, after they graduate from the Academy? And again after 10 years of service, and again after each 5? Presumably only people who are really dedicated to service would stay on. And police work is one of the most demanding, eroding jobs out there; those who don’t want to do it their whole life should be allowed to cash out.
In fact, I think this would be a good idea for all government jobs. I view public service as a sort of temporary sacerdoce, something the most brilliant should do briefly and with dedication, so that we have a government that is as small as it is well run. Maybe such a system could accomplish that.
I think we, the voters have to shoulder some of the blame--not demanding numbers from them. But it would be a big help to cull the supply side as well.
Another weird fact about my childhood
So a little while back, the building I grew up in, good old 250 West 94th Street--changed its name to The Stanton, in honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had lived at the house which was torn down to build the current apartment building. My parents had moved out by then, so my family bears no responsibility for this piece of aspirational theater. But I hadn't realized it was such a controversy--such a very funny controversy:
“To me, in my bones, ‘The Stanton’ sounds wrong,” Immy Humes said. “It’s invisible! She was bad, she was radical, she was ornery—no compromise. So when they want to make everything nice and tidy, it seems against her spirit.”
Leina Schiffrin, who lives on the sixteenth floor, sides with Humes. “I think ‘Cady Stanton’ would be all right, but ‘The Stanton’ is ridiculous and pretentious,” Schiffrin said. Plus, she said, “one neighbor discovered that there’s a halfway house called The Stanton.” (The Stanton House, at Stanton and Attorney Streets, which is run by the Educational Alliance, is for “mentally ill chemical abusers.” There is no awning.)
The ballot offered only two choices—“Stanton” or “250”—but, Marty Katz said, “we had lots of write-ins.” Someone suggested “The Mailer,” in honor of Norman Mailer, who lived in the building and, in 1960, stabbed his wife there. Someone else suggested “The Oppenheimer,” as in J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” who was born in a house on the site in 1903. A third tenant suggested “The Land,” after the former resident Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera.
Dan Drezner and I did an emergency blogginheads this afternoon when a bunch of people suddenly cancelled, which is already up.
May 22, 2008
Tradeoffs: who knew?
The New York Times, and a whole bunch of bloggers, lament American's move to make flying more costly and less convenient. We seem to have a grand national amnesia when it comes to carbon and flying. Cap and trade isn't going to do any good unless we do less of things like drive and fly--and most of the city loving coastal types I know want to do much, much more flying, because international travel is incredibly important to them. Yet a few long haul flights a year are the carbon equivalent of driving an SUV in an exurb.
Either we get upset about doing less driving and flying, or we get upset about climate change. We cannot simultaneously fix both problems.
The underpants gnome theory of Israel/Palestine
My colleagues Matthew Yglesias and Jeff Goldberg are having a lively argument over the West Bank settlements, and the infamous Walt & Mearsheimer. Says Matt:
But of course Walt and Mearsheimer didn't say that all Jews are acting against the best interests of their country (which would be outrageous) nor did they say that some Jews are acting against the best interests of their country (which would be trivial -- Jews disagree about lots of stuff and some of us must be wrong). Rather, they said certain "pro-Israel" institutions, including AIPAC, are harming American interests.
Goldberg, meanwhile, charges AIPAC with preventing the United States from putting any meat on the bones of its policy against Israel's West Bank settlements. Walt and Mearsheimer agree with this. Goldberg argues that unless Israel removes those settlements, it will increasingly find itself becoming an apartheid-style country where a Jewish minority rules over a disenfranchised Arab and Muslim minority. Walt and Mearsheimer think so, too. The difference is that Goldberg primarily sees this as bad for Israel whereas Walt and Mearsheimer primarily see it as bad for the United States but surely it can be bad for both! And even if not, the disagreement here is about something relatively minor with both sides agreeing that the American failure to apply pressure is a bad thing, and both sides pointing the finger at AIPAC.
Surely there should be room for some difference of interpretation here that doesn't involve either party to the dispute being motivated by racial hatreds.
Leaving aside the evergreen argument about who sucks more, what I genuinely don't understand is what the proponents of West Bank settlement think their end game is. I know what they want, which is to annex the West Bank. But given that
1) The Palestinians will not voluntarily leave no matter how miserable you make them, especially since many of them have nowhere to go
2) Israel is not going to do what it would take to get them to leave, which is to round them up and force them at gunpoint, while killing lots of them, including women and children, to make their point.
3) Even if Israel did do so, the international community would stop it. Even the US is not going to support anything that involves millions of women and children being moved across the border at gunpoint
4) Neither Egypt nor Jordan would take the shreds that the settlers would presumably like to leave all the remaining Palestinians in, however much fantasizing people may do about how someday Egypt and Jordan are going to decide the Palestinians are their responsibility instead of Israel's.
An occupation cannot go on indefinitely. At some point, you stop being the occupier and start being the government, even if you don't want to govern those people. In a decade or so, unless the Palestinians get their own state, Israel is going to start facing growing pressure to give the Arabs in the West Bank full political rights.
In other words, the Israelis are not going to get the land without the people; they're a package deal. And if they get the people, demographics being what it is, they will lose a Jewish state. Even if the Arab majority doesn't start kicking the Jews out, all the particularly Jewish institutions of Israel will eventually be totally undermined.
It's like the hardliners have an underpants gnome theory of expansion:
1) Build settlements
2) ???
3) Greater Israel
What feasible strategy do they think goes between 1 and 3?
Note: When I say "Leaving aside the question of who sucks more", I really mean it. I will ruthlessly delete any comment on this thread that even faintly whiffs of "Arabs are barbaric animals/Zionists are fascists", rehashes who has done what to who, or makes claims about how who would have treated whom in different circumstances. Those debates convince absolutely no one, and they invariably degenerate into flame wars. However you feel, go rant at your friends about it.
Bank on it
The old adage is that a banker is someone who lends you an umbrella, then asks for it back when it is raining. The banks may find out this home truth for themselves: UBS joins the string of financial institutions looking to raise major amounts of capital to shore up their balance sheets. The institutions that are doing this are, of course, the ones who screwed up most spectacularly in the mortgage crisis. I wonder if the road shows will contain a slide reading: But this time will be different, I swear!
It keeps growing, and growing, and growing . . .
So, weirdly, I recently found out that Joseph Stiglitz is married to my old babysitter. Apparently, they are blissfully in love, with the local gossip reporting that they are so happy as to make those who know them madly jealous.
This has absolutely nothing to do with inflation targeting, the actual topic of this post. However, I thought that this fact was too bizarre not to pass on.
The World’s central bankers are a close-knit club, given to fads and fashions. In the early 1980’s, they fell under the spell of monetarism, a simplistic economic theory promoted by Milton Friedman. After monetarism was discredited – at great cost to those countries that succumbed to it – the quest began for a new mantra.
The answer came in the form of “inflation targeting,” which says that whenever price growth exceeds a target level, interest rates should be raised. This crude recipe is based on little economic theory or empirical evidence; there is no reason to expect that regardless of the source of inflation , the best response is to increase interest rates. One hopes that most countries will have the good sense not to implement inflation targeting; my sympathies go to the unfortunate citizens of those that do. (Among the list of those who have officially adopted inflation targeting in one form or another are: Israel, the Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, South Africa, Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Hungary, Peru, the Philippines, Slovakia, Indonesia, Romania, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, Iceland, and Norway.)
Today, inflation targeting is being put to the test – and it will almost certainly fail. Developing countries currently face higher rates of inflation not because of poorer macro-management, but because oil and food prices are soaring, and these items represent a much larger share of the average household budget than in rich countries. In China, for example, inflation is approaching 8% or more. In Vietnam, it is even higher and is expected to approach 18.2% this year, and in India it is 5.8% . By contrast, US inflation stands at 3%. Does that mean that these developing countries should raise their interest rates far more than the US?
I'm not sure I'd call inflation targeting a fad. Nor would I call monetarism discredited. Targeting money supply growth with a fixed rule has been abandoned--indeed, even Uncle Miltie conceded that it had failed. But the central insight that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon still seems to have legs. It seems especially odd to say that inflation is rising because oil and food are a large share of household budgets, because central banks usually pay much less attention to headline inflation than to "core" inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices. Increases in the relative price of even important goods that have become scarce is not really what Milton Friedman was talking about; he was referring to an increase in the general price level, which indicates that the money supply is growing faster than demand.
A huge portion of the inflation in China and Vietnam comes from the fact that their financial systems are extraordinarily primitive--better than scratching your accounts into clay tablets, but not all that much.
Asian central banks like to buy dollars and sell their own currency in order to subsidize exports. Some argue that this is a valid way to jump start their economies, others that this is misguided mercantilism, but we valiantly wave those arguments aside. They do buy huge amounts of foreign currency and sell their own, which makes their currencies artificially cheap.
If you do this, you are going to get inflation. There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that you're releasing more currency on the market; another is that you're keeping exports expensive, which protects inefficient local producers and reduces household purchasing power. Either way, you get inflation.
Central banks often try to "sterilize" these transactions by issuing bonds on the domestic market, which soaks up excess currency. But their domestic financial markets are, as previously mentioned, built out of popsicle sticks and held together by baling twine and rubber bands. The answer to this problem is to force state controlled entities, like banks, to buy your government bonds. The banks cannot absorb an indefinite number of bond. Indeed, it is believed that many of them are technically insolvent thanks to mismanagement and local officials who use them as slush funds, though information on this is hard to come by.
The result is that the currency transactions are, as economists delicately put it, "imperfectly sterilized". Hence, inflation, and also, the interesting (in the chinese proverbial sense) possibility of a spectacular collapse at some unspecified time in the future.
Matt writes:
This certainly sounds logical to me, though as a non-economist, most things proposed by staggeringly brilliant economists tend to sound logical to me. But it sounds intuitively correct that a country that imports all of its gasoline can’t keep gas prices down by shrinking the money supply, or that if it did, that monetary policy would have to be deflationary in every other area, and thus ruinous. And, obviously, gas prices tend to get passed through to the rest of the economy.
On the other hand, Vietnam’s inflation problem isn’t driven solely by rising commodity prices, but also by a vast influx of investment currency over the past 2 years which has created tremendous upward pressure on the dong. As the government tries to hold down the dong to safeguard exports from getting more expensive, it has to basically increase the supply of dong, which creates inflation. And this is exacerbated as the dollar is falling against other currencies, as well as against oil, which is still Vietnam’s biggest export. The advice of most economists has been that this is untenable, and they’ll have to let the dong rise against the dollar somewhat to alleviate inflation.
Still, Stiglitz’s point seems very solid, right? The current situation does seem to indicate that inflation isn’t, in the old Friedmanite formulation, always and everywhere a monetary problem. Then again, wouldn’t this have already been discovered in 1974? What was the economists’ position then?
As an aside, I think I have to point out that Vietnam needs to do a number of things to its currency system, first among them changing the name. Otherwise, I predict it will be very hard to reach their goal of becoming a major US trading partner.
On to Matt's questions. The government can keep the price of gasoline down by targeting the money supply, but only, as Mr. Steinglass points out, in a ruinous fashion. Moreover, this would just change the general price level, so the relative share of gas in the household budget wouldn't change. If I double your income and double the cost of the goods you buy, we've accomplished nothing except marginally increase the demand for the ink they use to print paychecks. You cannot make a scarce good more abundant by monetary fiat.
As for the Friedmanite dicta, I'd say it still holds: inflation in the general price level is a result of there being more money than demand for money. Sudden scarcity--which is what higher food and energy prices represent--results in a shift in the relative value of everything in the economy. You now have to give up more of other goods to get the same amount of oil, because there is less oil to go around.
What happens when oil and food become scarce? Either people use less of them, or they sacrifice more other goods in order to consume food and oil. That means demand falls for other goods, which should push the prices of those goods down. The people who consumed a lot of oil will be worse off, while those who consumed relatively little will be better off.
An increase in the price of everything can only come as the result of too much money. This is not the same as noting that household budgets now buy less stuff; they buy less stuff because there is less stuff. Basically, a large increase in the price of oil or food is a one time productivity shock to the economy which reduces GDP from where it otherwise would have been.
Take a look at this graph of America's M2 growth. M2 is a measurement of the money supply which includes cash, checking accounts, savings accounts, and a few other safe-as-houses sorts of accounts. It's grown at a pretty startling clip over the last year, almost 10%. Not super-surprising, then, that we're seeing high inflation.
The reason we're getting this inflation is that the Fed is trying to support aggregate demand in the face of the housing collapse and the oil crunch. Though inflation much above 2% is a bad thing for the economy in the long term, higher inflation can, in the short term, alleviate the pain by making people feel richer so that they don't freak out and stay home guarding the TiVo. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that, but this post is long enough already, so I'll leave you with the pronouncement that no, inflation targeting is not a bad idea.
Who are you going to believe--me, or a Nobel-Prize winning economist?
Oil, oil, toil and trouble
It looks like the International Energy Agency are getting ready to admit what a lot of us have feared for quite some time: oil's going to be a lot scarcer by and by.
For several years, the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently. Now, the agency is worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.
The decision to rigorously survey supply -- instead of just demand, as in the past -- reflects an increasing fear within the agency and elsewhere that oil-producing regions aren't on track to meet future needs.
"The oil investments required may be much, much higher than what people assume," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist and the leader of the study, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "This is a dangerous situation."
I admit I was initially skeptical when analysts started arguing that OPEC has had systematic incentives to inflate their reserve figures (because their quotas are set based on their stated reserves). That's looking more and more and more plausible.
Meanwhile, OPEC countries often aren't fully developing what they've got. There's still a spectre haunting OPEC--the spectre of the great crashes of the 1980s and 1990s, when sudden price declines threw their economies--and their political systems--into turmoil. Plus there's the fact that most of their oil companies are state-owned behemoths. For all the commenters who pile in here to tell me that the government isn't either less efficient than the private market--well, go tour any of OPEC's state oil companies (with the possible exception of ARAMCO, which the Saudis won't let you see anyway) and report back. They're a mess.
As I understand it, oil field development isn't just a matter of leaving it in the ground or pumping it; there is an optimal rate (or a few) to maximize the field's total production. The underinvestment, or malinvestment, in places like Venezuela is actually making the country worse off over the long run.
The IEA's report will be far from perfect, since some of the biggest producers, like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are not cooperating. Nonetheless, it's a big improvement over the previous forecast methods:
The IEA's study marks a big change in the agency's efforts to peer into the future. In the past, the IEA focused mainly on assessing future demand, and then looked at how much non-OPEC countries were likely to produce to meet that demand. Any gap, it was assumed, would then be met by big OPEC producers such as Saudi Arabia, Iran or Kuwait.
But the IEA's pessimism over future supplies has been building for some time. Last summer, the agency warned that OPEC's spare capacity could shrink "to minimal levels by 2012." In November, it said its analysis of projects known to be in the works suggested that the world could face a shortfall by 2015 of as much as 12.5 million barrels a day, unless there was a sharp drop in expected demand. The current IEA work aims to tally the range of investments and projects under way to boost production from the fields in question to get a clearer sense of what to expect in production flows.
What to expect, apparently, is a sharp mismatch between supply and demand that will be corrected via higher prices. We don't know for sure, of course, because the report won't be out for months, but this comports with most analyst sentiment--and of course, the now record $135 a barrel.
I used to be able to follow those "record" prices with the comforting statement that they weren't really records in real terms. But now we're in uncharted territory.
May 21, 2008
Stop in the name of conservatism!
Steven Bainbridge says conservatives shouldn't be looking for new ideas:
To me, this is basically wrong headed. I can’t think of anything more contrary to the spirit of Burkean conservatism than a seach for the “next big thing.” Indeed, I would argue that a large part of the problem with modern conservatism is that Bush and the K Street Gang were more concerned with finding something big to do than with standing athwart history shouting stop.
Instead, it is the Libertarians and the progressives who are Big Idea people. Despite their obvious differences in philosophy, they share the absurd belief that if only their big idea(s) came to pass, society would inexorably progress towards some ideal.
In contrast, I stand with Buckley ("Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse") and Bill Bonner ("Traditional American conservatism was not a doctrine of world improvement, but a mood of skepticism toward all “isms” and empire builders").
I understand that, but as a policy matter, conservatives need to figure out how they're going to stop the juggernaut. Reagan did it with tax cuts, big increases in defense spending, and deregulation. The first two are pretty much out of the picture, and no one's mounted a serious drive at deregulation for more than a decade. It would be nice if one could win an election on "Don't just do something--stand there!" This would quite warm my little heart. But it doesn't work. Conservatives need to figure out how they are going to roll back the bad ideas and prevent new bad ones from getting through. For that, they need a proposal a bit more eloquent than "Stop!"
Hagee's latest
The coexistence of evil and an omnipotent benevolent God is a thorny question that still vexes theologians. John Hagee is certainly right to wonder how God could have let the Holocaust happen. But . . . well, I'm kind of speechless. Go read for yourself. How long before McCain has to publicly repudiate him?
Should first cousins marry?
William Saletan defends cousin marriage on the grounds that you aren't that likely to have a baby with a birth defect. I think he's got the problem wrong: it's not an individual risk, but a population risk. Yes, an individual cousin marriage has a fairly low probability of birth defects. But if cousins keep marrying each other, they will reinforce some nasty recessives. That's why small populations that don't outmarry--the Amish, for example--have problems with birth defects, even when they aren't practicing cousin marriage. Whittle your mating population down to a thousand people and you're asking for trouble.
I’ve been in this business for almost 19 years now. That means that the drugs that were discovered during my first few years of work are now either on the market or expected to be there soon.
That's from Derek Lowe, drug researcher. This is why pharma needs big margins on the things that finally hit.
Are conservatives out of ideas?
Liberals got made when this question was asked about them four years ago. But I'll admit it--in my opinion, the conservatarian coalition is basically out of ammo. A basic commitment to free markets was enough to hold the coalition together through communism and into the current decade. But "tax cuts are awesome" is not the universal solution to every problem, and moreover, they're totally unaffordable thanks to entitlements. (Obama's plans are totally unaffordable too, for the same reason, but that's a rant for another day).
There is, however, a nascent optimism in the conservative and libertarian policy worlds. The last five years have been pretty demoralizing. Now I'm seeing more and more people who are actually looking forward to going into the wilderness for a little while, where they can get their heads together without having to worry about the intellectual compromises of actual politics. There's disgust at certain policies that they can't stop, like the revolting farm bill. But people are kind of excited about figuring out what the next big thing is.
Nor are they particularly worried that they will be kept out of the promised land for forty years. After all, four years ago we were talking about a permanent Republican majority.
Reviving extinct DNA
It's a long way from bringing back extinct animals, but this is still pretty cool:
I think it's a huge pity; Brijit was a great idea, well executed. The good thing about the market is that is usually kills companies that do a bad job. Unfortunately, it sometimes kills the good guys, too.
The privilege olympics: sexism or racism?
As the post-mortems of the Hillary campaign gear up, one of the things I'm starting to hear discussed is who suffered worse: Hillary from sexism, or Barack from racism?
I suppose you'd expect me to say this, but my vote goes to sexism. I think it is much harder to be perceived as a leader when you're a woman. Women always walk a fine line between looking weak and looking bitchy--indeed, I'm not sure the line's even there in upper management positions. Women have had a harder time making it into the CEO's office. Everyone watched Carly Fiorina's ascencion to the head of Hewlett Packard and her spectacular implosion, with the subtext that maybe a woman just can't run an important company. By contrast, how many of you knew that Stanley O'Neil had stepped down as CEO of Merrill Lynch after criticism of his performance--much less that he was black?
I don't mean to belittle the racism that clearly still exists, and there really do seem to be an appalling number of people who will not vote for a black man. But we don't have any cultural problem with images of black men as leaders--think of any of a hundred movies where black men are military leaders, politicians, family patriarchs, and so forth. By contrast, there aren't very many images of strong women successfully and sympathetically holding a traditionally male leadership role.
We've heard a lot of worry about what Barack Obama believes--is he a closet black nationalist? But much of the focus on Hillary Clinton is about who she is: a controlling ice queen, a petulant weakling using her tears to garner false sympathy. I've heard more than one man say to me that he couldn't vote for her because she reminds them of their mother. This carries with it a cultural presumption that we don't want a president with maternal qualities. Personally, I don't agree with her message. But I can think of worse things than having the president tell the federal agencies to clean up their damn rooms.
Vegan star power
Apparently Oprah is going vegan for three weeks as part of a "cleanse". Vegan.com is doing a special series for her audience who are trying it with her: a podcast a day for 21 days. Tip for Oprah, or anyone else contemplating The Big Switch: from your first day menu, you aren't getting enough protein. Keep it up and by the end of the week you'll think you're missing eggs, when all you need is a good tofu scramble. It's really not hard to toss some cubed tofu on a salad or add some seitan curry to the menu. And Alessi makes a really quite delicious vegan split pea soup mix.
Performance anxiety
Anyone who's seen The Wire is intimately familiar with the process of playing with crime statistics to make them look better, rather than actually controlling crime. Radley Balko has a dreadful real world example:
Arthur Tesler was the only officer to take part in the Kathryn Johnston raid who didn’t take a plea bargain. Despite admitting that he lied, helped cover up Johnston’s murder, and stood watch outside while other officers handcuffed the bleeding 92-year-woman—allowing her to die while they planted marijuana in her basement—he was convicted today only on the charge of lying to investigators. He’ll face a maximum of five years in prison.
The one good thing to come out of the case is we got to see just how vast, deep, and pernicious the culture of corruption and disregard for civil rights ran in Atlanta’s police department. Tesler testified that narcotics officers were required to serve nine warrants and make two arrest per month, or they’d risk losing their jobs. This led to routine lying on warrants and bullying and intimidation of informants. What we don’t know is how many people were wrongly raided, arrested, and jailed because of all of this.
The agency problem is the fancy economic term for what most of us already knew intuitively; what benefits the stockholders doesn't necessarily benefit management. For example, I can think of many executives I've worked with on "re-engineering" projects, who, if they wanted to be honest about what would make their department work better, would "re-engineer" themselves right out the door and let somebody competent take over. Somehow, however, it was always one of their minions, usually one they didn't like too well, who was found to be superfluous. There are all sorts of ways in which this agency problem affects managers actions to the detriment of their shareholders, but one of the most widely known is in compensation.
If you know anyone in corporate sales, you probably already know of the hilarious shenanigans in which the sales force engages in order to meet their quotas. The purchasing manager at my old job was good for 10K or so of thoroughly bogus orders at the end of the month or the quarter to help our sales reps meet their quotas; in return they gave us a little extra off our regular purchases. These orders were invariably cancelled, after a decent interval, due to the whims of our fictitious clients. None of this was good for the companies for whom these sales reps worked; it benefited only the sales force.
But trying to prevent these gymnastics has proved futile. Change the quota from orders to sales and they'll ship the stuff out and have it "returned", incurring shipping charges both ways; change sales to "final sales" and they'll leave, because no one's willing to have their income that dependant on the whims of people they don't know. This applies even more to executives, who have much more power to manipulate matters so that they keep their job.
I was talking about CEO pay. But the problem matters more in the criminal justice system. We grade our prosecutors not on being right, but on winning. Cops are given stupid quotas rather than a mandate to, you know, actually reduce crime. Years ago, I read Joe McGuinness's Fatal Vision, on the once-infamous Jeffrey MacDonald case. At the time, it seemed like a fascinating insight into how you investigate a case. Then a few years ago, I came across Fatal Justice, a book on the case--and the role that McGuinness played in it--which offers pretty compelling evidence that MacDonald is possibly innocent and certainly the victim of forensic incompetence compounded by gross prosecutorial misconduct. If this happens in the spotlight, what's going on in the dark corners of the criminal justice system?
Well, things like this outrage, apparently. The Atlanta PD needs to remember that its job is to fight crime, not just put people in jail.
May 20, 2008
More on milk
If you want to know just how ridiculous our agricultural programs are, consider this: for about half a century, we priced milk based on how far the cow was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. No, I swear, I am not making this up. Apparently, the USDA scientifically determined that Eau Claire was the perfectest place in the entire world to keep cows, and that therefore the farther you were from that fabled city, the harder you must find it to produce milk.
Of course, this created a magnificent self-fulfilling prophecy; since famers in Wisconsin got the lowest price, only the most efficient ones survived.
In 2002, we reformed the system. Now we use a weighted average of the Wisconsin and Minnesota prices to determine the support levels for the rest of the country. You really cannot make this stuff up.
... The vouchers are made out for very specific items. You can't blow it all on Twinkies. There were vouchers for cheese (Monteray Jack or cheddar), whole milk, frozen juice (orange, apple, or grape), and formula. Formula was the real prize. Baby guzzles about $100 of formula a month.
The vouchers have very specific dates on them. They have to be used up by a certain week or they become void.
Now for the weird part. You can't redeem your voucher for formula and walk out of the supermarket. You had to buy everything, the cheese and the juice and the milk, whether you wanted it or not. Most annoyingly, they required you to purchase vast quantities of milk. Like two or three gallons per week. Far more than an average person could consume. We had to give away some of the milk to neighbors so it wouldn't go bad.
Now for the annoying part. You had to cart all that milk home. Not every supermarket accepts WIC vouchers. We had to walk to a far off supermarket over on Broadway. All that milk doesn't fit in the back of babystroller, so you had to have someone help you get it all home. I suppose if you had car it wouldn't be such a big deal. But I'll let you in on a secret. A lot of poor people don't have cars.
Surely, there was some deal with the milk farmers over this one. Some Vermont Senator got a little pork back home in exchange for my backache.
That was the abbreviated story of us on WIC. I could tell you how humiliating it was to get the voucher signed by the store manager. Or long waits at the WIC office to get recertified. Or the required parenting classes.
That Senator would be Jim Jeffords, he who titled his autobiography My Declaration of Independance. Vermont has extorted far more than its fair share of ridiculous dairy subsidies from the USDA; I presume that all the former undersecretaries of the last fifty years are even now lounging in complementary ski resort condos while hoovering down free pints of Ben and Jerrys.
This is . . . a word I won't use on a family blog. If you can't trust people to figure out how much milk they need, then they should be in a group home.
Oh, dear
Ted Kennedy apparently has a malignant glioma, otherwise known as a Stage 3 brain tumor. The prognosis does not sound good.
Knowledge is power
Ezra hopes that more information would make us thinner:
Contrary to my statement yesterday, the government could certainly reduce obesity by fiat. They could ban vending machines and junk food from schools. They could force all restaurants with more than five locations to post caloric information on the menu. They could subsidize fruits and vegetables rather than grains, corn, and meats. They could orient food stamps and the Women's, Infant, and Children nutritional program towards healthier foods. All these moves would reduce obesity, though it's arguable by how much.
If you wanted my pick among them, it would be posting caloric content in restaurants. It's a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information. This, after all, is how markets are supposed to work best. Consumers have better information, can pursue their preferences in a more coherent manner, and the market can provide, adapt, and innovate in response.
Weirdly, this may not always be true--apparently Vernon Smith's team has found that adding more information to markets can make them work less well. Once you've realized the awesome blossom you want is 2,000 calories, you may decide it's as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Indeed, most of the people I know who struggle with their weight are extremely good calorie counters, because they've been on so many damn diets.
But sure, it's worth trying, though I also worry that this will be a barrier to small firms expanding, and will tend to shift the market towards even more highly processed food where the calorie content can be accurately measured. The closer your food is to nature, the more it varies in nutritional content.
How many libertarians do spend a lot of time arguing against this requirement? Most libertarians I know are basically in favor of greater transparency unless the compliance costs outweigh the benefits. Certainly, I think the government should take an active role in making information as accessible as possible, and I don't get a lot of pushback on that from the libertarians I hang out with. It's the "everything not forbidden is compulsory" kind of regulation that we hate.
Your random daily interlude
You know he's gotta be thinking "Would they have done that to Darth Vader?"
Clawing at the slippery slope
At Volokh, Dale Carpenter offers what seem like some some very weak potential arguments for drawing the line at gay marriage, but not polygamy.
*There is nothing in principle that necessarily leads from the recognition of a new type of monogamous union (same-sex unions) to the recognition of polygamous unions. Consider the recognition of inter-racial marriage (a type of monogamous union), which reversed long-standing legal bans on miscegenation and departed from deep cultural disapproval of it dating to colonial times and before. Many warned that reversing miscegenation bans would lead to polygamy, but it did not. To the objection that dyadic inter-racial unions would lead to polygamy, the proper response then was, "Why would it?" One response to the fear that dyadic same-sex unions will lead to a polygamy slippery now is, "Why would it?" Opening marriage to one change because the change seems justified does not mean that opening marriage to every change is justified. Every proposal for reform rises or falls on its own merits. Gay marriage advocates have made extensive (and contested) arguments about why it would benefit individuals and society. It is up to polygamy advocates to do the same.
The ban on gay marriage is sustained not by solemn policy arguments, since there is no actual hard evidence on either side. It's a social taboo that rests on Burkean principles: no society we know of has ever had gay marriage, which maybe ought to tell us something. The legal ban on interracial marriage was a local phenomenon in the South, and the laws were invalidated by a court with a northern majority. Once you have established that society's ideas about what constitutes a valid marriage are not a relevant consideration, I find it hard to see how you can forbid a marriage just because one of the partners happens to also be married to someone else.
*From a Burkean/Hayekian perspective, it's relevant that polygamy has been historically tried and rejected in many human societies. We do not write on a blank slate when it comes to polygamy. Lessons have been learned from this experience and those lessons have led us away from polygamy in the West, in part because polygamy as practiced has been seen as inconsistent with liberal values, individualism, and sex equality. SSM has not been tried and rejected and is not inconsistent with, indeed arises from, Western values of liberalism, individualism, and sex equality. While the burden is on gay marriage advocates to show why we should try it, I think actual historical experience with polygamy suggests that the burden on polygamy advocates is much heavier.
This seems back assward. The fact that no society we know of has ever had gay marriage is not a Burkean argument for it. The law of averages being what it is, we are probably not the first culture to ever think of the idea. So if it isn't around, this suggests that societies which tried it either didn't survive, or abandoned the practice.
*Plural unions have historically most often taken the form of one man having many wives. It seems likely in practice it would take that form in the future. This raises many concerns different from those raised by same-sex marriage, including the greater potential for abuse of women and children. These same concerns do not arise with SSM, which should improve the lot of women and children in gay families (if SSM advocates are right about the benefits, a contestable but separate point).
Huh? How does having more than one wife make a guy more likely to beat his kids? To be sure, polygamy tends to be embedded in societies that tolerate more wife beating. But the polygamy is not the cause of the beating. To make this assertion stick, you'd have to have some evidence that abusive husbands are more likely than others to take more than one wife.
On first glance, the argument seems kind of plausible: husbands who come from cultures that tolerate spousal abuse will be more likely to engage in polygamous marriage. But think about this. The women in abusive marriages to those men are almost certainly going to be from the same culture, the children of conservative parents. They wouldn't be allowed to marry outsiders anyway; plural or single, they'll end up wed to someone who might have been raised to think its okay to slap your wife around once in a while.
*Polygamy will likely mean that marital opportunities will diminish for some men, since a few men who are very wealthy or otherwise attractive as mates will have many wives. This constricts the marriage market for less desirable men, which leaves some with no mates at all or delays their marriages as compared to their opportunities in a non-polygamous society. And unmarried men present all kinds of difficulties for societies. By contrast, SSM will mean that meaningful marital opportunities will be available for gay persons. More people will be married. Thus, SSM expands marriage opportunities while polygamy contracts them.
When opponents of gay marriage argued that marriage should be kept for men and women because it was fundamentally about reproduction, opponents said "Bosh! If that's so, how come we allow infertile people to marry?" This argument merits the same response. If it's so unfair that some men will be left without wives, how come we don't force women to marry them? Because that's an outrageous violation of human liberty, that's why. How much better is it to force women to choose between remaining single, or marrying their second (or third, or nineteenth) choice husband, so that said husband may have all the benefits of married life?
It is not possible to increase, on net, the number of marriages in the country in this way; it is capped at the number of women. Polygamous marriage of the type Carpenter describes contracts the marriage opportunities for some men, while expanding them for other men and most women. Indeed, mathematically, the number of marriage opportunities almost certainly expands under this system, since it puts married people back on the dating market.
Polygamy might decrease the number of married people. On the other hand, it might also decrease the number of single people, since a gender imbalance in the numbers of even marginally tolerable mates will result in some people being forced to remain single. Since my understanding is that men die younger and are more likely to be severely cognitively disabled, this probably relieves a burden on women.
*With polygamy, many basic rules of marriage will have to be changed. For example: if the husband dies intestate, who inherits? How are death benefits split? How are child custody disputes decided if a partner wants to divorce the group? If the husband exits, do the wives remain married to each other? On and on. We could craft answers to these questions, but it will involve a dramatic retooling of marriage as a two-person institution. None of these issues arise with SSM; aside from a few technical matters, the marriage rules remain the same. As a legal matter, SSM involves changes in the wording of statutes that specify “husbands” and “wives” and little more. The basic legal design of marriage as a dyadic institution, embedded in literally hundreds of ways in state and federal law, remains untouched.
I'm no lawyer, so I'm probably missing something important here. But the question of what to do if he dies intestate seems obvious: split the spousal share among the wives, and the children's share among the children. In the case of the polygamous marriages discussed above, the question is easy; the husband is married to each of the wives individually. In the case of more complicated marriages, presumably the marriage ends if all parties want it to, and goes on if some want to stay, with a division of marital assets along basically the same lines we use now. I think the hardest question is what to do with children who may have multiple fathers, but of course, genetic paternity can always be established, or joint child support requirements. These are issues that need to be settled, but they don't seem like things that can't be settled.
Perhaps none of this is conclusive against polygamy nor do I offer it as such. I am sure polygamy advocates have responses to these and other concerns about it. But I do think it suggests that SSM and polygamy present quite different questions of history, experience, logic, and public policy such that we are entitled to treat them as separate issues. We may, despite the concerns and the historical trend against polygamy, one day accept it. But the debate about accepting it will not, I think, turn on whether we have first accepted gay marriage.
Ultimately, I think the gay marriage debate made us ask "What is marriage for?" And the answer we came up with is "Dunno, whatever you want, I guess." Having said that, I don't really see grounds on which we can ultimately deny polygamous couples groups the same right.
Let me be clear that this is not some backdoor argument against gay marriage. I frankly don't see why legal polygamy should be any worse than gay marriage. Which is good, because I'm pretty sure we'll see it within the next few decades.
Bombs away
I can't remember whether I posted this clip or not, but I should have, so here goes:
Bleg
A number of readers have asked to see what I share via Google Reader. I'm happy to put a widget on the blog that will display this, if someone can tell me of such a widget. I know there's one for Wordpress, but we're on Movable Type. Any ideas?
Remember Megan Meier, the 13 year old girl who killed herself after a 47 year old woman who lived in her neighborhood impersonated a 16 year old boy on the internet for the purposes of developing a relationship with Megan, and then breaking it off in the most emotionally devastating possible way?
Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.
Tina and Ron Meier with a photo of their daughter Megan, 13, who killed herself last year after an online romance ended.
Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.
The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”
Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.
Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.
After looking into the case, local and state law enforcement authorities could not find any criminal laws that Drew had broken. But last week Thomas P. O'Brien, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, brought four federal charges against her: one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. "To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation," O'Brien said. "But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look."
Contemplating Ms. Drew's actions offers the unsettling feeling of peering, as through a cracked door, into the gaping maw of human depravity. But it seems to me that it isn't a legal crime.
The Victorians had the right idea about what to do with disgraceful but not illegal behavior: force the perpetrators to change their names, move to a distant town, and hope some day to live down their shame. They just had the wrong idea about what constituted suitably disgraceful behavior.
My understanding is that the Drews have already lost their business and probably have to move; I presume that shortly they will also lose their assets to a lawsuit from the Meiers. They will most probably spend the next five or ten years hoping desperately that no one recognizes their faces from the evening news. Bending the laws to prosecute them almost gives them too much dignity.
Home, sweet home
Last night on television I heard an ad so mendacious that I wonder if its authors couldn't be sued: "Train to be a construction manager! Projected to be a huge growth field through 2012." Only if you're able to relocated to Dubai.
This morning, a bracing dose of reality: Home Depot's earnings have cratered. There is no field associated with housing that is going to be a good place to be for the next couple of years--unless it is nailing foreclosure notices to front doors.
Will the <i>real</i> free traders please stand up?
Bob Davis is worried that if elected, Barack Obama may find it difficult to push the same sort of trade pacts as his predecessors. He couches his concern as a fear that Obama may "find it hard to govern as a free trader," but of course none of his predecessors governed as free traders, they governed as selective protectionists.
Trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA were designed to remove barriers to trade in manufactured goods, thereby putting manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This not only put downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers, but on the wages of non-college educated workers more generally.
These trade deals did little or nothing to remove the barriers that protect highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. There is no economic theory that shows protection for manufactured goods is more harmful than protection for highly paid professional services, so the concern expressed here seems to be that Obama may not pursue trade policies that redistribute income upward with the same vigor as his predecessors.
It is also important to note that a major thrust of recent trade agreements has been to increase protectionists barriers in the form of increased patent and copyright protection. These forms of protection lead to enormous economic distortions, since they can raise prices several by several thousand percent above the competitive market price. In the case of patent protection for prescription drugs, the cost can also be in the form of lives, since many people in developing countries may be unable to afford the patent protected price for life-saving drugs.
Strengthened patent and copyright protection are also inconsistent with free trade, although these measures do also have the effect of redistributing income upward.
Where to start? Items:
1) Legal work is, in fact, now being outsourced to India.
2) Doctors are largely protected not by trade barriers, but by geography. You might as easily argue that we are protecting the hairstyling industry (and to be fair, my last bill at the salon does look a little bloated and inefficent). Things that can be outsourced, notably radiology, increasingly are being outsourced, and the government has not so far intervened.
3) While standards can function as trade barriers, and are often set up for that express purpose, this is not definitionally true. Our air pollution standards are a barrier to the import of cheap Chinese automobiles, but it would take a pretty hard core libertarian to argue that they're a trade barrier. Similarly, requiring lawyers to have demonstrated some facility with US law before they advise clients is not on its face a totally crazy idea. I am certainly open to the argument that we should follow California's lead in relaxing the education requirements, but I don't think the bar exam can be meaningfully construed as a trade barrier.
4) The evidence of income redistribution upwards from trade in low-skilled manufactured goods is pretty thin. More jobs have been eliminated by technological progress than by outsourcing--the US produces more manufactured goods now than it did in 1970 with a much smaller workforce. Furthermore, much of the benefit of trade is captured, not by the wealthy, but by even poorer workers in other places.
5) Immigration is not generally recognized as a trade barrier, because most people think that citizens have some valid interest in who their neighbors and co-voters are. I certainly agree that we should expand high-skilled immigration. But lawyers, for obvious reasons, aren't high on the list of eager emigrants; all their intellectual capital is tied up in the knowledge of a specific legal system. Doctors and consultants are eager immigrants. Thankfully, we let a lot of them in, though I quite agree we should be admitting even more.
6) Property rights are not inconsistent with free trade. I cannot justify selling stolen televisions on the grounds that this is just the working of the free market. The US thinks, with good reason, that intellectual property protections benefit everyone in the country over the long run. Thus, it enforces them by preventing other industries from selling property here that has, legally, been stolen.
How is this different from labor and environmental standards, liberals will ask. Well, we have copyright and patents because otherwise, you have goods with an enormous positive externality, but virtually no positive internality. Companies that use patented ideas without paying for them are creating a big negative externality--reduced incentive to innovate--while internalizing all the benefit from doing so. This is one of those situations where we look for some sort of legal arrangement, which we might call, oh, "intellectual property law", to keep those skewed incentives from making us all ultimately worse off.
In the case of labor and environmental standards, whatever negatives there are are largely internalized to the countries. The awfulness of low wages and environmental standards is presumably even more awful if you are already extremely poor with limited recourse to a safety net. You're unlikely to end up with an inefficient outcome.
7) Some of the biggest growth areas for outsourcing are software and engineering, aka highly paid professional jobs.
A simple request
I just added two new blogs to my RSS reader. I am going to request that people now stop having great blogs I have to put in my RSS reader. I can't keep up with the ones I've already got.
May 19, 2008
A few things it is wise not to do
1) Drive home from a dinner party immediately after playing Mario Kart
2) Smoke while pumping gas, as (I just realized) all the Ethiopian cab drivers seem to do at the gas station across the street from me
3) Wear high heels and then merrily plan to walk home two miles
4) Leave home without your Kindle once you have gotten used to it. I had to sit in a Chinese restaurant for ten whole minutes today without a thing to read.
5) Order the Kung Pao Bean Curd from Peking Express
These are the lessons of my life in the last twenty four hours. I know you're all glad I shared them with you.
Markets are hard
After a little thought, I'm not sure that I made what I was thinking quite clear on my earlier post on McCain's healthcare plan: markets are hard. We used to think that, like Topsy, they "just growed". The experience of Russian shock therapy belies this. Once bad government regulation has screwed things up, fixing them is not always just a matter of removing the original bad law. Nor of simply willing, via legislative fiat, that a better one shall grow in its place.
Markets in everything
Immigration raid threatens national supply of Glatt Kosher meat.
Policy: getting there from here
I was having a discussion today with a friend about McCain's health plan, and its purported goal of breaking the link between employers and health care provision. This is a good thing to do, but I'm not sure it will happen. I suspect that if the McCain plan passed (a damn slim chance), what you'd see is a benefit going to some of the more affluent self-employed, while most people continue to purchase health insurance from their employer with their now-individualized tax subsidy.
The problem is, because of the subsidies, the market for individual insurance is very thin, and the market for employer insurance is extremely well established. There's also a very strong social expectation of getting insurance from your employer. Removing the subsidy might eventually create a more robust individual market, but at the very least, I expect it will take a really long time.
Ignoring institutional inertia is a general problem with policy theorizing. It's certainly not limited to libertarians--all the liberals I hear talking about national health care seem to imagine it being implemented in a magic fairyland where the AMA and the AHA have not developed gigantic lobbying arms in order to more effectively siphon cash from Medicare. This enables them to design a perfect system based on cherry picking their favorite features from each European country, rather than working on the assumption that whatever we get in the future is probably going to look very much like what we already have.
It is good to develop ideal frameworks--I certainly have a lot of my own. But the problem with shiny, perfect framework is that it's easy to become so dazzled with it that you ignore the actual political landscape in front of you. It takes a hell of a scorched earth battle to get that space clear enough to build from scratch.
The story of liberty
Atlantic intern Conor Friedersdorf has a terrific piece up on Doublethink on the problem of conservative journalism:
Escaping this ghetto requires understanding why the media slants left. Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn’t any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths. An instructive example is rent control. A newspaper reporter assigned that topic can easily find a sympathetic family no longer able to afford its longtime apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood. Their plight is a moving brief for a rent ceiling.
As almost everyone long ago conceded, however, opponents of rent control offer superior counterarguments. Limiting rent degrades the quality of a city’s housing stock, causes shortages as a dearth of new units are built, and spurs a black market where well-connected elites game their way into subsidized flats. A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off. His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won’t occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer’s incentive to build it.
The right, in other words, has a problem with narrative. The stubborn facts of this world contradict pieties left, right, and libertarian, occassionally forcing each group to revise its thinking. But the core critiques of liberalism intrinsically resist the narrative form. Who can foresee the unintended consequences of government intervention in advance? Who can pinpoint the particular threats to liberty posed by an ever-growing public sector?
He goes on to mourn the lack of dedicated conservative and libertarian journalists specializing in narration. There is some, of course . . . but then I remember that one of my favorite such pieces was written by Michael Lynch, who has now left journalism. I'm keeping my eye on Conor, however.
Why scrap WIC instead of reforming it?
Well, if you've got a magic secret bullet for derailing the farm lobby, please get down to the Republican Congressional leadership's offices pronto and help them stop the vile travesty of a farm bill that's about to be passed.
Short of that, it's really hard--nearly impossible--to alter programs in such a way as to take away benefits from a key constituency.
So I propose a two step program for reforming WIC:
1) Build a new program that actually does something useful. Let it accumulate bureaucratic power, hopefully under another agency than the USDA.
2) Have it assimilate WIC. It's well known that a bureaucracy can only be killed by another, more powerful bureaucracy.
But I doubt WIC itself will ever be any good. It's been thoroughly captured by the farm lobby.
Nature, nurture, or what?
Daniel Drezner is pondering women in science and technology: do they leave because they're pressured to, because they think it's unfeminine, or just because they'd rather do something else?
I actually found technology relatively family friendly, if only because women were such a novelty that companies liked having them around. On the other hand, it was definitely a boy's club; I experienced some really stunning sexual harassment during the years I was a consultant, not to mention having to sit quietly at lunch while my colleagues discussed the women they were checking out.
But ultimately I left not because of a hostile environment, or because I worried that it was masculinizing me. I left because I just didn't care as much as the guys I worked with. When I came in on Monday morning and people asked me what I had done, the answer was usually something like going to a club, or sailing. When they asked the guys I was competing with, the answer was more likely to be "I built a fiber channel network in my basement." It seemed likely to me that my career would suffer from competing with the monomaniacal, so I left to find something more in line with my obsessions.
But that's only my experience; I can't speak to anyone else's. Especially since the entire time I was a technology consultant, I only ever worked with two other women, and one of them left to have a baby two months later.
WICked inefficient
I've taken a lot of flak for saying that food stamps are a program whose time has gone. But I hope we can all agree that it's time for WIC to take the long walk behind the barn. The goal of the program is laudable, and even (gasp!) something I think we should be spending government money on: making sure that poor, er, proto-babies get adequate prenatal nutrition. But as it has been implemented, the thing is a massive handout to dairy farmers.
Put down the "Vegans are evil" picket sign; my problem isn't that we're giving them milk and milk products. The problem is that the list of foods available is weird and not particularly nutritious. Fruit and vegetable juice, but not actual fruit and vegetables. Milk products, but no soy milk or cheese. Hey, I don't like either. But there's no reason to give people dairy products, but not fortified soy milk. And juice is much worse for you than the high fiber plant foods in their original state.
Obesity is a much bigger problem for poor people than undernutrition; there's no reason that we should be pushing fattening foods on poor women, except that the lobbies that produce these foods will not tolerate having any of them removed from the list. Meanwhile, there's no attempt to ensure that pregnant women and young children are getting a really balanced diet, even though new research is showing that the different components of prenatal diet may have a large effect on lifelong predisposition to obesity and disease.
Credit only where credit is due
I agree that tax credits for school choice are not a very good idea. The regressivity is not a particularly big problem; you can simply make the credits refundable. But economically, there is no difference between a tax credit and government spending, except that tax credits are more complex and less transparent.
But it is different, you will insist; with a tax credit, you get to keep your own money, while with actual spending, the government takes your money. Yes, well, that is true for you, where you is someone who gets the tax credit. But unless we cut spending somewhere else, that is not true for me, where me is a childless single. Since the government is taking less of your money for other spending, it has to take more of my money to cover the shortfall. This is no different, either economically, or morally, from taking money from me to give to you in order to educate your children at the school of your choice.
Indeed, tax credits are worse than spending, because they're not transparent. Since they don't show up as flows in the federal budget, it is harder to keep track of what we are spending on them. Of course, for people who want the programs thus funded, this is a feature, not a bug. But as a general rule, it's best to stick to Megan's Third Law: We should never unnecessarily multiply the complexity of the tax code. It almost always costs you more in the long run. And if libertarians and conservatives really want to attack the scope of the state, the first step is insisting on transparency no matter whose ox gets gored.
In defense of ample copyright
James Wimberly thinks that copyright terms are too long:
The catchy "bare necessities" song that Disney gave Baloo is solidly copyrighted. But we can quote it under the fair use doctrine, and it nicely makes the essential point: the 21-year limit of Queen Anne's Act (footnote) provided adequate incentives for authors; the 95 years or life-plus-75 years of contemporary IP law is a giveaway to a clever lobby of wealthy engrossers of the commons. If you don't believe me, check out Justice Breyer's dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft and the amici brief in the case of 17 eminent economists. The SCOTUS majority didn't pretend that the Mickey Mouse extension law was defensible policy, it just held that Congress was constitutionally entitled to its mistake.
BTW, this particular piece of bad policy was imported from Europe. The European model for IP extravagance was the French Revolutionary legislation making "moral rights" in a work eternal and heritable : the scriveners had become the new nobility. So Shakespeare's heirs could sue Tom Stoppard, or Kipling's Disney, for traducing the sacred essence of the author's work. In practice this doesn't happen rarely happens even in France, but the principle created a sentimental fog over IP in progressive minds which has played into the hands of the lobby.
Footnote
Technically Queen Anne gave a skimpy 14 years for new works and 21 only to old ones. I'll generously let Disney keep 21 - a year more than Intel gets for its patents. When I last looked Intel was doing all right.
I think this is too strong. My understanding is that the French took a stronger line on IP precisely because the abolishment of copyright around the time of the French Revolution had bankrupted much of the publishing industry and resulted in a race to the bottom that destroyed the market for new works; commission a book, and if it failed you'd take the loss, whereas if it succeeded, your rivals would copy it within weeks.
I also think it's a mistake to bring up Queen Anne's Law for a couple of reasons. Few writers managed to actually make a living at their writing during that time; they had patrons, government jobs, or some other form of income. That suppressed and/or altered their output, not for the better.
Also, at a time when the average life expectancy is 40, a copyright term of 21 years provides more than adquate incentive. In the modern day, we're trying to persuade young writers and artists to essentially make a large capital investment in their art by irrevocably committing to a career in their art. If at 45 or 50 their most successful works no longer produce revenue, the writer who produced his or her best work at 25 has a big problem. Hedging their bets by keeping a second career going does not make them or us better off.
It seems to me that the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors--people who already have their retirement taken care of.
Nor do patents or software make a good comparison. Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires. Moreover, society reaps much greater rewards from technology copying than from the reproduction of art. We are better off with more Mark Twain works than with 50 lesser writers quoting him liberally.
It is obvious to me that current copyright terms are too long. 21 years may not be enough to get writers to invest their all in their craft, but 95 years seems excessive; I don't think we will get more work out of 35 year old authors by promising to someday pay royalties to their as-yet-unborn grandchildren. And clearly, retroactivity is a gift to corporate interests that is actively contrary to the public good. But there is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes.
Microsoft sends Yahoo flowers and candy
Having failed at acquisition, Microsoft is coming back at Yahoo another way:
According to people familiar with the matter, Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo a deal related to advertisements that run next to Internet search results, a large business that is dominated by Google Inc. The move by Microsoft appears to be an attempt to stop Google from entering a search-related deal with Yahoo that's now under discussion and could be announced in coming days.
In a statement, Microsoft said only that it has raised with Yahoo the possibility of a "transaction" that isn't an acquisition of all of Yahoo, and declined to be more specific. However, Microsoft also said in the statement that it "reserves the right to reconsider" the possibility of a bid for the company, depending on developments or talks with Yahoo or its shareholders or other parties.
The language in the statement, while vague, appears to represent a notable shift in Microsoft's stance. In recent days, Microsoft had told Yahoo representatives that it no longer intended to pursue a takeover of the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a statement, Yahoo said that it "has confirmed with Microsoft that it is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo at this time." But Yahoo added that it remains "open to pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders." The company said its board will review its alternatives "including any Microsoft proposal."
Most finance literature suggests that companies do too many mergers. Many people--including corporate managers--think of a merger as a way for a company to acquire a valuable asset. This only works, however, if the other company does not know that it has a valuable asset on its hands, and its shareholders will therefore sell to you on the cheap. This does sometimes happen, of course, but more often not. That's why it's the stock of the target company, rather than the acquirer, that rises on the news of a buyout. Stupid mergers have destroyed an enormous amount of buyer's shareholder value.
Mergers should really only be undertaken in a few situations: where there is an undervalued asset the company doesn't know about (rare), when there are economies of scale to joint operations (pretty rare, and likely to be eaten up by the costs of combining operations), or when there are significant barriers to doing a deal. The most prominent case of that last is something called co-specialized assets: when doing a deal would require the supplier to invest heavily in specialized equipment to produce for the buyer.
Once you have, say, totally retooled your plant to produce widgets for Acme, Inc., you're in a kind of vulnerable position. Another changeover would be expensive, so they have a great deal of negotiating power. These kinds of problems can sometimes be resolved by contracts, but sometimes they can only be resolved by moving the firms under one roof. Proprietary information is a special case of this, where the owner of the information is vulnerable.
But managers prefer mergers to side deals, since it gives them an empire. It's only when mergers are frustrated, as now, that they start exploring the deals that should have been a first, rather than a last resort.
May 18, 2008
Kindle notes
If possible, I love my Kindle even more than I did when I reviewed it a few weeks ago. I've got about 50 books on it, and I love always having something with me to read. I also love the ease of using it one handed, and checking my email from anywhere. As far as I'm concerned, it's better than a book. The biggest downsides are that not everything I want to read is on it yet, and conversely, that it's awful easy to spend a hell of a lot of money browsing. But there's so much cheap content from the public domain that this is not a huge issue.
Arnold Kling, however, has a different experience:
It turns out that my reading style is to scan. Sometimes I'll be in the third chapter of a book and start asking myself what the author is getting at. So I'll flip to the conclusion. Or I'll jump ahead to what I think is a more important chapter. Although one can use the Kindle that way, it takes a lot more thought and effort than with a paper book.
My main concern continues to be with what is available on the Kindle. The typical semi-academic nonfiction that I read tends to be unavailable. My guess is that if I stick with the Kindle it will skew my reading in the direction of more popular nonfiction.
I'm not the first one to say this, but it's probably bad to try to replicate an older media experience using a new technology. Instead, if a new device is going to have real impact, it has to be adapted in unexpected ways. For that purpose, the proprietary Kindle format and the closed operating system are its most serious flaws. If it could be hacked, I could imagine it being used for email or blogging. Or it might become a vehicle for new scholarly journals, or cheaper textbooks.
But as a closed system, you have to compare it to book technology. It is easier to purchase, carry, and store books on the Kindle. But it is harder to read them.
I find it easier to read than a book, because it's so little work to turn the pages. On the other hand, I tend to read straight through, rather than paging forward. I find it easy enough to go to the next chapter using the table of contents menu choice that this hasn't even registered on my list of potential annoyances.
I think the usefulness depends a lot on how you read. If you read a lot of books, it's great; if you only read a few, it's not worth the money. If you travel, it's vital; if you rarely leave home, it's probably not. And if you're a plodder who starts and goes straight through, it's probably better than if you like to flip. Still, most people I know who have them, love them.
A number of people have said, in the comments and in email, that it's just rational for store owners to follow blacks around. I'm not going to dispute that blacks commit more crime than whites. But if you resent black people assuming that you're a racist just because some other dumb [deleted] once gave them a hard time, then you probably already understand why they get upset about being followed around stores.
Food interlude
Let's start of with a nice Friday morning post in which all of you make fun of me for being a hippie with bare feet and a bottle of chardonnay in one hand, a bunch of arugula in another.
For my three vegan readers, this was too useful, however, so I will just have to endure the no-doubt true charges of being excessively twee: a complete list of what's vegan at Trader Joe's. If you don't eat meat, and you don't read Vegan.com every day, you're doing yourself a disservice.
We now return to our regularly scheduled economic libertarianism.
May 15, 2008
A long post on race that is not particularly original, and will probably get me in trouble
I recently surprised the hell out of a male friend who considers himself fairly feminist by mentioning that I got catcalled an average of at least once a day. Like Ezra, he'd basically never seen it happen, and had assumed it wasn't really much of a problem.
It doesn't bother me as much as it bothers Catherine (and I was recently told by a middle aged woman that it will bother me even more when it stops.) But it's weird that this fairly common feature of my life is invisible to the men I know. And for the record--thank you gents, but I do not actually enjoy having random strangers remarking on the length of my legs, or what they would like to do with them. And there is a special place in hell reserved for men who grope women in crowded bars.
In a similar vein, I had no idea that black people get followed around retail establishments--even though I worked retail on the (then) very racially integrated Upper West Side. Then a friend mentioned, offhand, that it happened to her at least once on most shopping trips. I was shocked. She's the most uptight, upright person I know, and a skilled professional. I never thought of following anyone around, but if I had, I would never have imagined following someone like her around a store. But once she said it, I saw clerks do it to other minority women.
That's why I'm willing to cut Reverend Jeremiah Wright really quite a lot of slack: because my perception of the level of racism in America is considerably affected by the fact that it mostly doesn't happen around me. When my friend and I went into a store, she was protected by my halo of whiteness--she's with a white woman, so she's probably not a thief. In the company of white people, blacks aren't treated like they don't belong somewhere.
I don't mean to imply that I think we're still living under Jim Crow. And it's not necessarily even a function of dominance. A white friend mentioned going into a black gay bar where he was the only white man, and suddenly feeling . . . invisible. No one was rude, but no one looked at him either--it was as if he was a slightly out-of-place chair. "Imagine," said this fairly conservative gay man, "what it must be like to feel like that all the time."
I can't. But I'm guessing I'd be kind of resentful about it.
Watching the Obama/Wright fooforaw unfold, I was reminded of two things: a bad television show, and a good C.S. Lewis piece. The bad television show was something called Black. White. on FX. The show took two families, one black and one white, and made them up to look like members of the other race, then put them in various situations. The makeup jobs were not very convincing, since there's a lot more to ethnicity than skin tone. But I guess since you're not really expecting someone to dress up in blackface--or whiteface--it was good enough to pass.
There was one scene where the black father, Brian, took the white father, Bruno, to buy a car. Bruno was the lone holdout saying that racism just wasn't a problem, which made Brian pretty mad. So they went to buy a car so that Bruno could see what it was like to be treated like a black man in that situation.
Surprisingly, even Brian had to admit that it didn't go as badly as he expected; Bruno was treated better than Brian had ever been. The show didn't really explore this insight, but it seems really important: racism isn't a fact, it's a process. If people follow you around stores sometimes, you're tense and expecting bad treatment when you go in. People react to that by being tense and hostile themselves, and it escalates. The very fact that Bruno was wrong about racism probably got him better treatment: he wasn't expecting to be slighted, and that undoubtedly changed the way he dealt with the salesman. Or you can say that still having internalized the dominant paradigm, he treated the salesman as an "us" rather than a "then".
That's why I thought, too, of C. S. Lewis, and what he wrote about the commandment to "Love thy neighbor":
. . . we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently "Love your neighbour" does not mean "feel fond of him" or "find him attractive". I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? Well I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty ones. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all of my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
Things have gotten better, and continue to do so. But even though most blacks and whites do not consider themselves enemies, the two communities often do not consider each other as being part of the same "self". If a white clerk is rude to you, maybe it's racism; if a black clerk does it, she's just having a bad day. If a black kid sells drugs, he's a dangerous felon; if a middle class white kid does it, he's a good kid going through a phase.
I see the two communities looking suspiciously at each other and saying "Once you have perfected yourself, then I will love you as myself." But this will not work. The very act of watching the other, at a distance, for signs of change creates the problem we want to solve.
And I saw Obama's speech as trying to bridge that divide--to say, as someone who had one foot in each community, "This is why the way they do things you don't like--not because they're different, but because they're very much like you." To be sure, he did it in a hamfisted way. But the grandmother example was, I thought, less an attempt to throw Grandma under the bus then to say that "racism is not the same thing as being an evil person". I'd venture to say that most white people know at least one older person who is both an extremely good, moral and virtuous person, and a racist. When it is a grandmother, a beloved teacher, a longtime employer, or a friend's parent, we discount their unacceptable beliefs, because we have personal proof of their general goodness. Thus we come to understand that good people can have very bad ideas. I think it was perfectly fair of Obama to extend that same charity to Reverend Wright.
Part of the problem is that both communities were outraged, and neither seems to have very well understood that his speech had offended the other as deeply as it had offended them. Criticizing Wright, an elder in a community that deeply values respect and deference to your elders, was as big a deal as admitting that, yes, many of us have friends and relatives who say appalling things sometimes. The other problem is that Obama comes out of a very specific white community, the academic/professional elite. It's a community that prides itself on being less racist than the more benighted classes, and that couldn't help but come through. And the rest of the white community is profoundly sick of being lectured by us on morality, so being told that Obama thought they were all secret racists didn't go down very well.
The truth, which is hardly original to me, is that we are all racist, in that we still think of race as an important difference. Which of course, it is, if only by virtue of the fact that we all think so. But I don't think that Obama meant to be insulting, and I don't even think he is elitist in the way that his critics believed. The fact is that Obama does know more about race than most of us, because he actually knows what it's like to be inside, and outside, of both communities. That's worth listening to even if it doesn't always come out quite right.
Your monthly reminder
Please. Don't. Feed. The. Trolls. It causes a dangerous swelling of their ego, and uncontrollable vomiting of ill-informed screeds into the comments section.
The principal/agent is everyone's problem
A couple of days ago a commenter asked me why we couldn't just cut a deal with the teachers unions: higher pay in exchange for surrendering control over work rules. As it happens, I think that would be a very good deal; I don't see how we can get top notch teachers by turning them into underpaid civil servants. I also don't think we can cut that deal.
The problem is, the union sits in the middle of that transaction. And for the union, this is an unambiguously bad deal. They don't get a commission on the higher salary they win for their members. And dismantling all the dispute-resolution and work rule apparatus would substantially slash their power. Problems like this are the reason that the West Coast ports couldn't cut a deal with the longshoremen to pension off the current workers at full pay in exchange for the elimination of their jobs, even though my understanding is that this is one of the options they explored. Full pay for no work would have been a great deal for the membership, but a death blow for the union.
That's what's at the core of the recently uncovered secret agreements SEIU seems to have made with employers:
Two of the nation's largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.
The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers' rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership "that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements." That includes not disclosing them to union members.
The agreements involve workers who provide food, laundry and housekeeping services on an outsourced basis. The employers are Sodexho Inc. and the Compass Group USA unit of London-based Compass Group PLC. The unions are the 1.7 million-member Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and Unite Here. The unions say they negotiated a similar agreement with Aramark Corp. but that Aramark broke the deal last year, and they're trying to reach a new one. An Aramark spokesman declined to comment on that.
The unions defend the agreements and their secrecy, saying they've helped workers join unions in growing industries at a time of declining union membership in many sectors. Last year, 7.5% of private-sector workers belonged to unions, compared with 17% 25 years ago. The agreements have "resulted in tens of thousands of workers getting unions" and been a major advance for the labor movement, said the president of Unite Here, Bruce Raynor.
This undoubtedly helped SEIU, but the benefit for the workers is more ambiguous. Like a corporation or any other organization, SEIU wants to do good things for its membership--but its first priority is the health of the SEIU. That's why charities find new missions when the old one disappears, rather than dissolve themselves and give the money to an existing group.
SEIU is undoubtedly the most successful union out there right now, in terms of growing its organization. But it seems to be doing this in part by compromising the purpose of the union.
Some have alleged the military government is hoarding international food aid that is arriving and giving out spoiled and poor-quality food instead.
UN spokeswoman Michele Montas said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had expressed concern that aid was being diverted to non-cyclone victims.
Montas said so far there was no evidence. But Brian Agland, CARE Australia's country director in Burma, said some of his local staff have samples of the rotting rice being distributed in the Irrawaddy delta.
Meanwhile, apparently air drops won't work very well. And a UN humanitarian invasion is out of the question, apparently. So we're left with . . . watching evil triumph.
What's in a name?
If you're blogging on Burma, you've probably wondered whether to call it Burma or Myanmar. Turns out they're both right--and wrong. Myanmar is the formal, literary construction, while Burma is the everyday sound. But the r sound in both is a Western addition.
The next phone
It's looking more and more like Apple is going to announce a 3G iPhone at its Worldwide Developer's Conference on June 9th, with units probably shipping in July. That will probably be the point at which I buy one, since my current contract expires in August, and I really need a phone that does double duty as a PDA. Given that the Atlantic is a mac shop, the iPhone is the obvious choice.
Also, to be perfectly honest, it's pretty.
But at first, the "3G" looks like it won't be anything to write home about. AT&T's EDGE network is already inferior to Verizon's EVDO, and it's pretty much got its hands full handling the data requirements of the previous versions of the iPhone. Those of us committing to one of the new models will be taking quite a leap of faith on AT&T's rollout.
Meanwhile, Sprint bleeds customers and revenue. Verizon has the better netwrok; AT&T has the iPhone. Sprint has . . . Nextel, which hasn't caught on outside industries like construction, and is further threatened by broadcast technologies like Twitter. America may end up with a wireless duopoly unless something changes, fast.
Subsidized farmers: little house on the prairie or gone with the wind?
There seems to be some bizarre idea in the comments and email that the farm bill aims to preserve subsidies to farmers with revenue of more than $1 million. To be sure, I think the subsidies should be removed for everyone, but that would indeed be less surprising.
However, this confuses revenue and income. We are talking about Adjusted Gross Income aka "How much you made last year".
People earning more than $500,000 in adjusted gross income from non-farm sources would be ineligible for crop subsidies and land stewardship payments. Farmers with more than $950,000 a year in agricultural income would lose 10 percent of their direct payment for each $100,000 a year in income.
This is not going to affect struggling farmers, for the reasons outlined in Ag Weekly:
Ron Abbott, Idaho farm programs chief with the Farm Service Agency in Boise, expects the number of Idaho farmers affected will be low. He reviews forms and taxes regularly and is quite familiar with farmers’ adjusted gross income.
“With the numbers that we review, that AGI is a negative number. Gross income may be high, but that AGI is way down,” he said.
“It’s not uncommon, literally, if you generate $1 million, you’ll spend $900,000 to $950,000 generating that. Profit in farming is about 2 to 3 percent; it’s a very narrow margin. Their expenses are just outrageous,” he said.
That’s why he doesn’t expect many Gem State farmers will be affected by the lower cap.
Farms with $950,000 in Adjusted Gross Income are big, flourishing farms. I'm not sure whether my farming relatives ever saw $1 million in AGI in their long, long lives.
Farm subsidies overwhelmingly do not go to struggling farmers; they go to large, flourishing concerns. This is not surprising; corporate farmers have the resources to become extremely skilled at collecting the subsidies. They also, to be sure, provide most of our food, since farming has large capital costs that get bigger every year.
May 14, 2008
Poverty from the inside
A commenter posted something in an old post on food stamps that I think is worth sharing:
Clearly a large number of the critics of the food stamp program have never actually lived in conditions which necessitate the program.
I'm a 19 year old full time college student and my mother and brother rely on the food stamp program. Without this program, they would literally not be able to afford food.
A little background:
My mother is mentally ill and cognitively impaired. She suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, severe depression, and minor brain damage caused by incorrectly administered Electroconvulsive therapy.
My brother is 16, and my parents share joint custody of him. They switch off every two weeks.
Between child support and social security, my mother recieves $10,000 per year to live off of. After paying rent, the cost of which is mitigated through a great program known as Section-8, and her bills(power/phone/HEAT), she is left with a marginal amount of money for her own use. I'm currently living at home for the summer. This month she has $20 to split between gas for her car, which is extremely fuel inefficient, and whatever else may arise. In the winter she often lets bills pile up in favor of paying for heat, as Vermont winters are frigid.
She receives a base of $75 per person in food stamps. She receives around $38 per month for my brother, as he spends half his time at her house, the full $75 for herself, and a small amount($20?) for me, as I'm only at home during college vacations. That comes out to $133 per month in food stamps. She has $20 in discretionary spending this month.
To the critics of this program: try growing up in that household and then get back to me. As another insight as to why the poor purchase food that is unhealthy: unhealthy food tends to taste better than healthy food. Potato chips vs celery. When you have no pleasures in your life, no luxuries, you're damn well going to pick the food that tastes better.
I also have a major criticism of this program. So long as I live at my mom's house while I'm not at college, I cannot feasibly get a job. If I were to get a job, my mother would loose her food stamps because there would be a "provider" in the household. I'm exploring alternate possibilities, but without a job, I don't even know if I'll be able to afford to continue my college education. I'm literally playing it by ear right now - there is no better option. I'll know whether or not I'll return to college in a few weeks, when I get my new financial aid letter.
How are the poor supposed to rise from poverty if they can't afford an education?
I think this illuminates several aspects of the debate over food stamps:
1) The poor really are not living lives of joyous leisure on their frantabulously lavish benefits.
2) People who are cognitively disabled--mentally ill or retarded--need more supervision and help from the government, not less.
3) As I've said before, I think the non-cognitively-disabled poor need more wage top-ups and less government decisions about what they should spend their money on.
4) The system is set up so that poor people face ludicrously high marginal tax rates--they can literally exceed 100%, as benefit loss outweighs the additional income. People with fabulously expensive and disabling diseases who can't hold down a regular job are barred from doing any work at all, lest they lose their Medicaid, disability, and food stamps. They also cannot have any assets. Surely preventing people from cheating the government does not actually require forcing people with obviously debilitating chronic conditions to have less discretionary money per month than most middle class kids get in allowance.
This is one of the reasons I'm so gung-ho on a negative income tax to replace most benefits--it doesn't have this ugly feature of sudden benefit loss, but it also doesn't require us to subsidize a hundred middle class people for every poor person we help. It won't work for people who are disabled, of course, who would need a separate system. But for most poor people, and for the rest of us, I think it would be a vast improvement.
5) His point about potato chips versus celery point was made by Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:
The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
I have nothing to add.
Advice that should be unnecessary
I don't believe people need these job seeking tips. Wait . . . yes, yes I do. I once interviewed a guy who took out a meatball parm in the middle of the session and started chomping away. And then there was the chipper fellow who, when asked to describe a technical challenge he'd overcome, launched into a story that began "I forgot the CMOS password I'd set on the CEO's laptop" and ended with his running a magnet over the motherboard. Oh, not to mention the chap whose resume claimed he had gone to Penn, but clearly had never even been to Philadelphia on a field trip. And how could I forget the guy whose breath reached all the way across the conference table and threatened to asphyxiate me . . .
Frankly, it's a miracle unemployment is as low as it is.
Thinkers in the tank
Andrew Coulson graciously responds to the slings and arrows I hurled at think tanks. I understand that EPI wishes to respond as well, so things should get lively around here.
I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it.
But any movement is prone to groupthink. Yea, whenever two or more libertarians are gathered together, you have at least three opinions. But those opinions almost never extend to "You know what America needs? A single-payer national healthcare system." Likewise, I'm pretty sure the break room at EPI never hears the words "Right-to-work laws are awesome!" Groups extend to their own less scrutiny than they extend to those who disagree with them. They form their own domains of knowledge that tend to exclude sources of disconfirming data. Agreement on core principles like "Society should maximize individual liberty" means a lot of questions never get asked.
I don't think that think tanks fudge their numbers. I know Cato pretty well, so I know it's full of earnest, extremely smart people who genuinely believe what they write, and are scrupulous about doing high-caliber work. Most of them are smarter than me, and all of them are probably more likeable in person. But in any sort of policy debate, there's always the danger of asking yourself the question you want to answer.
Say you want to know whether Bush's tax cuts made the tax code more or less progressive. You can ask whether the gradient between brackets has gotten steeper, or you can ask whether the rich now pay a higher or lower percentage of the nation's tax bill than they did before. Those will give you different answers to the original question.
Hence the dueling factoids over whether Bush's tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the rich. The left likes to look at the average amount individuals got, which leads to the conclusion that the rich got a lot more. The right likes to look at who got a bigger share of the tax cuts, which leads to the conclusion that the poor and the middle class were the big winners. Neither of those ways to frame the question is obviously wrong.
It is easier to do this when everyone who works with you, and most of the people you socialize with, agree with you. They also influence who you consider reliable sources--the extreme version of this is Chomskyites, who reject any source that disputes The Great Man's lies more fanciful interpretations of events. But everyone does it. Liberals like are fond of Card and Krueger. Conservatives like love Neumark, Wascher, and Murphy. The group acceptance of what are the "best" sources seriously influences work based on them.
I'm not saying academics are immune to this--indeed, the CK/NW divide is a good example of the tendency. But academics tend to ask narrower questions--not "Is the minimum wage a good idea" or "who benefits, rich or poor?" Instead they ask things like "what are the effects of the minimum wage on employment?" Now, often those figures get used as if they answered one of the other questions, either because the media needs a good lede, or because the professor has an axe to grind. But there's somewhat less room for choosing your data sources--and at least in economics, it will matter if your colleagues across the political aisle reject your approach. Cato loses little credibility with libertarians if CBPP publishes a withering critique of its work (I mean, it would if any such critique were possible.)
I certainly agree that academics and government employees are not some sort of objective priests who cannot be swayed by thought of politics. I wasn't, for example, very impressed when Kenneth Thorpe estimated that Kerry's healthcare plan would cost $900 million--then a few months later dialed down his estimate to very nearly exactly what Kerry was planning to raise from rolling back the Bush tax cuts. In that situation, I thought that AEI's estimate was probably much closer to the actual mark, and said so. Though to be fair, in part that's because I assume that every government health care plan is going to cost twice the most pessimistic estimate.
In an ideal world, we'd all assess the claims and check the numbers for ourselves.
But readers can't or won't do that. Without reading the studies, I need to rely on reputational credibility to assure them that the data are sound. Think tank numbers are totally useless in a cross-ideological debate. No one on the other side will accept them. And because the think tanks have usually chosen different questions that produce different answers, we bloggers end up in an extremely tiresome round of "dueling think tank studies". Unfortunately, everyone on the other side has a +3 anti-free-market shield on, and I never get through.
I imagine I will not be invited to Cato's annual dinner, and probably EPI has stricken me from the Christmas card list. But I didn't mean to malign Cato, or for that matter EPI, though we're a lot less ideologically compatible. Both are full of honest people who believe what they are writing. But when an institution gathers scholars together specifically to advance an agenda--even an agenda as broad as "Free markets and free minds"--that changes how you use their work, if for no other reason than that it makes a broad swathe of your audience mighty suspicious.
I do think Mr. Coulson is absolutely right about one thing: right wing, and particularly libertarian, think tanks get harsher scrutiny from the media than left wing, academic, or government figures--I once scratched a reference to the Manhattan Institute because the editor wanted me to label it "ultralibertarian" while pasting "nonpartisan" on some left wing group whose name escapes me. I ditched the paragraph rather than make the switch, which may be why they never commissioned work from me again.
The problem is, I don't think that the media are, in general, very good watchdogs about this sort of thing. Most reporters can't read a financial statement, don't know how to handle statistics, and would run screaming if you suggested a regression. That's why I think the most interesting work is the stuff that covers debates within the movement--things like net neutrality, or "libertarian paternalism", for example, or the internal debates on both sides about health care policy.
Anyway, Cato . . . what I'm trying to say is, I adore you. And EPI, I don't know any of you, but I'm sure you're all pretty swell folks too. Even if you don't invite me to your annual dinners, y'all are welcome at my place any time.
The benefits of cap and trade?
A commenter writes:
With a carbon tax, there would be a number of second order rebound effects(People buy more fuel efficient cars, and then proceed to drive more) that could actually increase emissions in the long term.
Because of this, the effects of a carbon tax on carbon production are uncertain, and the tax would have to be adjusted frequently if we were to meet any sort of international targets. Megan herself frequently posts about the wisdom of frequently changing taxes.
With a Carbon credit scheme, we not only make international carbon trading and hedging strategies far simpler, but we also have complete predictability about the effects.
1) There are no rebound effects with a tax. Rebound effects come from fuel efficiency standards. Those standards raise the price of the car, while lowering the price per mile driven. The result is that people drive more, which claws back some of the gains from fuel efficiency--estimates range from about 10% to 30%. Meanwhile, the added expense of new cars keeps older, less efficient cars on the road longer. If I recall correctly, it took about a decade for cars built under CAFE to reach half the national fleet.
2) True, but as things go, ratcheting up excise tax rates on a commodity of which we are trying to discourage consumption is pretty anodyne.
3) We don't have complete predictability about the effects of international carbon credits. If we did, they'd be a fabulous idea. As things stand, it is very unclear that they do more good than net environmental harm.
The benefit of cap and trade is that you know where you're going. The problem with cap and trade is that it is more vulnerable to gaming, and there are threshold effects. The problem with a tax is that you don't know the price you need to get to the goal you want. But the benefit is that it starts working from dollar one, and it's harder to evade by, say, purchasing dodgy offsets.
Furthermore, the commenter assumes that we actually know the optimal level of carbon. I don't think we do.
The President has expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed Farm Bill wending its way through Congress. He wants farmers whose annual incomes exceed $200,000 to be denied subsidies; the present cutoff is $2.6 million and Congress will not go below $950,000. The President's concern with farm subsidies cannot be taken very seriously, since in 2002 the Republican Congress with Administration connivance greatly increased these subsidies and at the same time repealed some of the modest reforms that the Clinton Administration had introduced in 1996. The Administration's current proposals would, if enacted, be a step in the right direction, but they will not be enacted, and, judging from the 2002 legislation, they are intended I suspect merely to embarrass the Democratic Congress.
What I don't get is why the Democratic Congress is letting itself be embarrassed this way. Of all possible reforms, this would seem to be a no-brainer. How many fabulously wealthy Democratic farmers in swing states can there be?
And now, a good word for teachers
The flip side of the union coin is that teachers spend way too much time dealing with red tape. The bureaucracy that has grown up around schools as we expect them to fit in teaching around social work and performing investigations for the DEA, is ridiculous. This is true at the school level as well; teachers and principals need a great deal more flexibility to manage problem children than they currently have. I see the bureaucracy and the increasingly inflexible union work rules as part of the same process: teachers hampered by rules demand more rules of their own, which makes the administration want more rules to curtail the power of the teachers . . . the system worked a lot better when schools were both more flexible, and more accountable.
Nor will miracle teachers make up for the deficits of deprived homes. Teachers in inner city schools are dealing with marginalized kids, many of whom have parents who can't or won't cope. This is the hardest teaching their is, and it's no wonder so many give up. Especially since we can't take the obvious step of paying them more and the bureaucracy less.
I don't agree with Phillip Howard on everything, but in this I think he's right: the vast tangle of rules we've erected to ensure that our public servants don't ever make a mistake has instead ensured that they never get to do anything quite right.
Is cap and trade the future?
I agree with Matt that, as a moral matter, any cap-and-trade permits should be auctioned rather than given to current emitters; I see no prior right to pollute that must be honored in the breach. As a political matter, it's not a large amount of revenue, and the giveaway to the companies will probably go a long way to pacifying their lobby--plus you don't risk a situation like the British bandwith auction where everyone overpaid, netting fat fees for the treasury, but setting back investment for quite a while.
As a practical matter, I agree with the economist I lunched with yesterday that cap and trade is doomed as long as it includes offsets and doesn't price the carbon cost of foreign goods. Otherwise, all we do is displace consumption of fossil fuels to China--an excellent, though thoroughly inefficient, charity program, but no good for the environment. In fact, the net environmental result might well be negative. China and India use fossil fuels in a much less efficient, much more polluting way, because clean technology has a higher capital cost; a ton of coal or a barrel of oil consumed in China produces less output and more pollution than the same ton or barrel consumed here.
Meanwhile the most optimistic hope for the global offset market is that it will pay a fair number of companies to do things they would have done anyway. The darker possibility is that it will encourage developing-market companies to keep polluting facilities open longer in the hopes of selling the offset. Indeed, they might even build new ones so that westerners can pay to shut them down.
The results from Europe's scheme have so far been pretty underwhelming, though everyone keeps assuring me that they're going to take off any day now. Theoretically, cap and trade is indistinguishable from a tax provided that you know either the true externality cost of emissions, or what level of emissions is socially optimal. Since we know neither, and cap-and-trade so far looks pretty weak, I vote for a tax instead.
Of course, I'm the only one so voting, so probably we'll get cap and trade, and probably it won't do very much good. I just wanted to lay the ground for a triumphant "I told you so" later.
Not that this makes me happy; quite the reverse. I think we should do something serious about global warming. I just don't know how to overcome the political and technical problems to do so.
It's the system, man
You can disprove any position if you force your imaginary opponents to take the maximal side. So if you say of teacher's unions "smashing them will not magically raise test scores", all I can say is, "Well, d'uh". And while I understand that teachers also lobby for things that are good for kids, like better supplies, this does not make powerful teacher's unions a good idea. Teacher's lobby for kids when it happens to coincide with their interest. Unfortunately, in urban areas, it often doesn't.
I should probably clarify that I'm talking about twenty, maybe thirty failing urban school districts/agglomerations in the United States. I could care less whether Scarsdale has a powerful teacher's union that negotiates triannual ten month paid leave in Hawaii. And the problem in rural areas is not the teacher's unions, it's the geographic fact of no possible competition, and often the net outmigration of educated people who might make good teachers.
But in those urban areas, the teacher's unions are a big honking problem. This is not some crazy right wing opinion about unions in general; it is a specific problem with public employee unions. The cops and firefighters have their own issues, about which I will happily wax lyrical some other day, but in the end most of them boil down to getting paid ridiculous amounts of money to do no work. If the laziest ten percent of New York's teachers spent all day drinking coffee and doing "literature review", this would be a fiscal problem, but not a desperate one. The problem is, we stick the teacher's union's problems in our classrooms.
But getting rid of the teacher's unions would not lead to some happy paradise where all the students were Doogie Howser. The teacher's unions are one cog in an enormous dysfunctional system. The school boards, the education bureaucracy, the principals, the other "political stakeholders"--precious few of them poor parents--also factor in. If you got rid of the teacher's unions and left the rest of the institutions in place, I would be shocked if the schools noticeably improved.
But while taking away much of the teacher's union's power is definitely not sufficient, it does seem to be necessary. They resist changes to their work practices that the best evidence (see Ayers, Supercrunchers) seems to show works with disadvantaged kids: rote memorization, and phonics. These replace the tools that upper middle class give their kids earlier--even if you went to a whole language school, if you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you had phonics, too, when your parents taught you to "sound it out".
Instead, they agitate for things like smaller class sizes. It is true that schools with smaller class sizes tend to do better--but this is not surprising, since they tend to be more affluent. Pilot programs with disadvantaged kids also seem to show a benefit, but these suffer from the same problem that I discussed in a previous post about the Perry Pre-School: who's staffing your smaller class sizes? If smaller class sizes means employing more marginal teachers, it's far from obvious that this is a net boon. To the kids, I mean. It's an obvious win for the union.
This is why almost all educational ideas fail: they don't scale when you take the highly motivated grad students and gifted teachers out of the equation. That's why I'm tepidly gung ho about Direct Instruction: it has been proven to work with ordinary teachers using ordinary resources.
I don't care if the teachers have unions to negotiate over salary and benefits. But I think the power to block terminations and set work rules should be entirely stripped from them.
But this will not do anything unless you also take on the principal's union, prune the rapidly multiplying deadwood in the educational bureaucracy, get someone who knows their way around a regression analysis to pick your curriculum, and get serious about accountability for the schools. I don't want to defang the teacher's unions for the fun of it; unless you're planning to do these other things, you might as well leave it alone, too.
Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow
The trick to overcoming procrastination is even simpler. Ready? Here it is:
Get off your fat badonk and stop procrastinating. Right now. No, not after the Gilmore Girls rerun ends. Now now.
Will you do this? No. You will not. You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.
Understand that this will never, ever change. You will always be lazy, and you will always procrastinate. I know it's tough for you to hear, but it's a harsh truth that you need to internalize.
I'm serious about this. It's bad enough that you're so damn lazy. People like you can't afford to be delusional on top of all your other problems. Oh, I'm sure you imagine yourself growing out of this silly procrastination phase. In the future, you'll get an early jump on projects, work at a steady pace, and always finish ahead of schedule. You'll take the time to do things right—instead of nipping under the wire in a rush of half-assed, flailing chaos.
It's a beautiful dream, my indolent chum. And I'm here to shatter it. Again, I speak from experience in these matters. When I was young, my procrastination was merely debilitating. As I age, it gets far worse.
Take, for instance, this assignment. I first learned of it two weeks ago and, since then, I've gotten really, really superb at Guitar Hero III.
The good news is, I will get really good at Guitar Hero III. Because right now, I'm amazingly terrible. It took me an hour to get through the first song.
(Note to any Atlantic editors who may be reading: this post written at midnight and responsibly scheduled to run first thing in the morning.)
May 13, 2008
Peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
Though I tremble to do it, I have to agree with John Tierney, in a qualified fashion, contra Mark Kleiman:
1. The point of environmental management isn't to denounce sin, it's to get prices right. The problem with GHG-emitting activities is that they are artificially underpriced due to the lack of a carbon tax (or equivalent mechanism, such as cap-and-trade, for internalizing the external costs of those activities). With the right prices, the cost of conferences with physical attendance will rise, improving the competitive position of alternatives such as high-quality teleconferencing, which allows people to meet virtually rather than physically. But if people want or need to confer in person, and are willing to pay the full price including the price of the environmental damage their travel does, they can do so with a clear conscience.
2. Rich people use more goods and services than poor people. That's what "rich" means. Of course multi-millionaires have larger gross GHG footprints than you and I do. So what? If Tierney wants to work on decreasing income gradients, I'm all for it. But of course he's not. He just hates the idea that some rich people use their wealth to promote ideas he dislikes.
3. A large gross carbon footprint doesn't imply a large net carbon footprint. That's what offsets are about. Once GHG contributions are priced appropriately, there won't be any need for private offset purchases. But in the meantime someone who wants to be personally GHG-neutral can get there by writing checks for the activities necessary to offset his or her footprint.
1. We don't have an accurate price. We don't know how much the planet will warm. We don't know how much economic damage this will cause, or upon whom it will fall. We have not settled upon a way to price the interests of future generations in a cooler climate and a ready supply of fossil fuels. We have not even established an irrefutable argument for our status quo bias.
We will almost certainly establish the "correct" price by observation: does it make people do a lot less flying, driving, and power consumption? It therefore seems reasonable to me to evaluate whether your attendance at a conference actually leads to less flying, driving, and power consumption. An academic or journalist who flies for work five or six times a year spews more carbon than an SUV loving Texan who vacations at Grandma's.
2. Many wealthy environmentalists emit not merely much carbon, but tons of moral outrage. If they moralize about other peoples' cars, other people are entitled to moralize about their private jets.
3. Offsets are not the moral equivalent of indulgences--but they are just about as effective. I have no doubt that many who use them devoutly believe that they work, but I don't think many of them care to investigate the matter too closely. In some sense it's a technical question, but as far as I can tell, that technical question is not solveable.
Tree planting is risible unless you commit to keep the land planted forever. Shutting down third world pollution creates a rich market in polluting factories, and also does a lot of things that would have been done anyway. Other projects are even more questionable. None of them, as far as I can tell, attempt to account for rebound effects. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but as far as I can see any cap and trade system that isn't global, and/or includes offsets, will do (to a first approximation) basically nothing to halt global warming.
I'm not saying this makes them wrong about climate change: hypocrites can speak the truth as easily as the virtuous. But I do think that if you are deeply committed to combatting climate change, you have to actually do your best to reduce your carbon footprint, not attempt to offset it. No one in Mark's or my demographic wants to hear this, because we like flying places, and we get to do a lot of it for work. No criticism of Mark implied--I'm just as guilty, or not. But we shouldn't get mad at Tierney for pointing it out, whatever his motives.
A stitch in time . . .
Ryan Avent responds on teacher's unions:
Things in New Orleans have improved. But they remain terrible. What’s more, too many institutional factors changed for us to have a good idea what generated the improvement. And statisticians out there might note that when tracking changes over time, it helps to keep the sample constant. For an economist to look at a city’s educational system, subtract a quarter of a million poor people, then look at it again and suggest that destroying the teachers’ unions made all the difference is…well it’s not exactly a rigorous analysis.
For my money, the best new research on this subject emphasizes the role of parental skill levels in achievement and the importance of investment in disadvantaged children when they’re young. Union busting is a waste of time; it’s like changing the oil on a car missing a wheel and hoping for huge performance improvements.
I agree that there's a sample problem, but it also seems that more kids in New Orleans now are qualifying for free lunch than did before, so I'm skeptical that this explains the change. Also, the test scores improved from 2007 to 2008. And the pattern of improvement--strongest in the younger grades--is what you'd expect if the school were the major factor rather than the demographics.
I'm familiar with the research on parental skills and early childhood intervention. I just don't know what to do with it. So far I have not seen a single successful early childhood intervention that is even arguably scaleable: you're talking about intensively monitored programs using top-notch personnel, all of whom are deeply committed to the project's goals and procedures. The longest data set we have is, AFAIK, the Perry Pre-School Project, which produced exceedingly modest gains for a pricetag of more than $20,000 per child per year in today's dollars. Again, that's with a small program of highly committed staff.
What we got instead was Head Start, which produces small gains that most evidence suggests disappear a few years after the kids exit the program. Even if we wanted to do Perry Pre-School, or something even better, nationwide, where would we find the staff? Pre-K sounds great, but it's very likely to be slightly glorified baby sitting outside of affluent school districts that don't need it in the first place.
Since we're not (I hope) going to take kids out of the disadvantaged homes they are born to, the schools are what we're stuck with. And there are programs that work--at least, better than what we have now. They just bore the hell out of the teachers.
I'm not against early childhood intervention, if it works. But it's not going to save us from having to teach the kids better in grades 1-12.
I hate it. I am terrible at it. As a consequence, I bought nothing in Turkey other than tickets to various things, room, food, and a poster of Ataturk. And I overpaid for all of these things, I’m sure, which has left me a bit bitter about the place. Surely this is inefficient overall, no? I understand the price discrimination argument for haggling, especially in a country with a lot of poverty and tourism. But probably hundreds of my dollars stayed in my pocket because I didn’t have good information about the quality of products and I knew the retailer is better at bargaining over the surplus than I am, so… there was no transaction and no surplus.
I can't help but hear the voice of Tyler Cowen echoing in my head:
It is you people, you who resent Coase (1972), you people who induce wage and price stickiness and widen the Okun gap. You people, who don't know what it means to sit back and enjoy your consumer surplus. You beasts!
I weep for Will's missed opportunity. I too have haggled in Turkey, and I have a feeling I'm pretty bad at it. I bought a rug that I am sure could have been obtained for less money if I were a sharper dealer. Who cares? The rug was good wool, had tight knots at the back, and I really liked the design. The important thing was not what it was worth to a Turk; it's what it was worth to me. Which is, a lot more than I paid for it. Most of what is bought in Turkey by tourists is cheap clothing and decorative goods that can be readily visually inspected.
It is only right and natural that we should want to maximize our consumer surplus. But as long as you are getting consumer surplus, you should make the deal. Besides, "one price" is no guarantee that you are getting a good deal. It saves time and lets you free ride on the judgement of others, but Consumer Reports, and America's livingrooms, are full of evidence that their judgement isn't always particularly good.
To be sure, I should not have bought a beige rug. But I still love it. And I'm still wearing the earrings I bought in Greece despite the fact that I know nothing about gold jewelry.
More on think tanks
I like think tanks. Some of my best friends work for think tanks. I think they do a lot of good work. But the political policy ones do their best work when they are trying to decide policy within a movement; that's when you start seeing real innovative work. They are also very good at providing critiques of academic work in their areas of interest.
When they turn to fighting outsiders over, say, the minimum wage, the quality of their work sharply degrades. They have limited ability to change their policy position, because the donors will revolt; if they can't get an answer the donors will like, they don't ask the questions. They also only hire scholars who agree with them. That already biases their work, but then you have to contend with the groupthink problem: when everyone at the office agrees with you that your opponents are idiots, and you socialize mostly with other people in the movement, your thinking gets a tad lazy.
So if the only support for your positions comes from movement think tanks (plus maybe a few marginal academics), your position is probably extremely weak. Indeed, if someone from the other side were pulling the same trick, you would be the first to notice this. Independent studies commissioned by think tanks are especially suspect. You can't check their calculations, and survey design is easily manipulable to get the answer you want.
That's why I rarely grab, say, a Heritage or CEI study on the minimum wage and offer that as evidence for my claims. As it happens, on this issue I broadly agree with them. But even if I were willing to vouch for their numbers, it's pointless, because no one who disagrees with me would accept them. So I go to the BLS, the Census Bureau, the CBO, the JEC, the GAO, or an academic study instead. In cases where I can check some of their numbers, I'll use it as a secondary source. But it's never my primary source for a policy position.
Think tank data
Have I said this before? I think I have. But let me say it again. You are not allowed to argue in favor of school choice if the only evidence you can come up with is two links from Cato. You are not allowed to argue against global warming if you are relying entirely on a report from CEI. You are not allowed to talk about the recording industry based only upon press releases from the Progress and Freedom Foundation. And you are definitely, definitely not allowed to talk to me about the minimum wage if the best evidence for your position comes from EPI.
We can argue back and forth about whether think tanks buy scholars who agree with them, or pay scholars to agree with them; I'd argue for the former. And in fact, I think many think tanks do very good work, and I take figures from everyone at one time or another. But EPI is not, on the minimum wage, a serious institution. It is funded by unions who want the minimum wage raised because it makes their labor more competitive, and because there are union contracts pegged to the minimum wage. The evidence against the minimum wage could be overwhelming, and EPI would still be publishing surveys showing that it raised middle class incomes by 300% and also, made workers 17% thinner without diet or excercise.
For example, saying that most of the benefit of a minimum wage increase accrued to adults is not a good argument. This is exactly what you would expect if it caused disemployment among teenagers.
The main thing to remember about the minimum wage is that it is trivial. If the minimum wage actually made a substantial improvement in worker's conditions at the expense of employers, it would also almost certainly cause substantial disemployment. But it doesn't, so it won't. Anyone who tells you anything different, on either side of the debate, is trying to sell you something.
Do unions matter?
Liberals often complain that those of us who support school choice are just interested in smashing the teacher's unions. And to some extent, they have a point. To be clear, I do not object to the teacher's unions because they have a union. I object to the teacher's unions because teachers are among the competing interests that run low-income school districts for the benefit of the various interest groups, rather than the children. The union merely gives them more power to move value from children to teachers.
I do not say that they are malicious, though certainly in many cases the union clearly recognizes that they are benefitting their members at the expense of the children. But more of it is that the entrenched institutional arrangements, many of them enshrined in union contracts, are extraordinarily impervious to change. When an entire system has grown up around union arrangements, tweaking any substantial part of it threatens to throw the whole system into disarray.
Unions also give teachers power to resist changes that make their jobs less fun. I think the teachers genuinely believe that these changes are bad; but I also think that they strenuously resist learning anything to the contrary. There is really good evidence for the benefits of direct instruction in teaching disadvantaged children. But direct instruction moves the teacher into being more of a technician and less of a creative professional. Ian Ayers talks about this in Supercrunchers, giving the example of bank loan officers, which used to be a skilled, prestigious jobs, and are now almost a clerical role. Doctors and teachers are resisting an attempt to do similar things to their jobs through, respectively, evidence based medicine and direct instruction.
But it's more than that. In New York, the principal's union resisted an attempt to attract the system's top principals to failing schools by giving them a substantial bonus payment in the tens of thousands of dollars. The union vetoed this because the extra pay wouldn't accrue pension. Huh? It was entirely voluntary, the system couldn't afford pension payments, and the principals would have gotten an extra $25 grand or so. But no dice. Any change threatens the union, because it puts the delicate balance of power between all the competing interest groups in play.
Liberals rejoinder that it isn't the unions--it's the funding/poor kids/infrastructure/class size/textbooks. This sort of thing is hard to disprove conclusively, of course. But here's a data point: New Orleans smashes it's teachers union; test scores rise dramatically, even though it's still ministering to poor kids testing substantially below grade level.
Food, glorious food . . .
I've got a new Bloggingheads up with Raj Patel, the author of Stuffed and Starved, a book on world food policy. All of my Bloggingheads are, of course, must-see TV, but there's something a little extra special about watching the libertarian vegan debate the left-wing anti-globalization economist on trade, obesity, and public health.
One thing that I sort of whiffed was in explaining the debate over the role of developed nation farm policy in world poverty. There has been an argument for a while that farm subsidies are actually good for poor countries, because it provides them cheap food. The problem with this argument is that within poor countries, the farmers are almost always the poorest of the poor; almost all of the people living below $1 a day are subsistence farmers.
Suddenly we're seeing a reversal of the problem: rising world food prices are probably helping rural farmers (though it's not totally clear how much those farmers participate in the cash economy); urban workers, who are now getting hurt, are suffering and in some cases, rioting. There rarely seem to be unalloyed positive developments in the poorest countries.
May 12, 2008
Even more on the minimum wage
Jake Young, with an excellent post on conditional models:
Now I am not an economist, and I am not qualified to speak to the relative merits of each of these models.
However, I am a scientist, and I have do have experience dealing with conditional models. By conditional models, I mean that there are circumstances under which the model applies and explains a lot and circumstances under which it doesn't. I can give you an example. If you work in animal behavior, you learn very quickly that animals -- like people -- respond to incentives. Give the rat a treat, and you can get the rat to do what you want. However, incentive learning does not apply under all circumstances. One example is habitual learning. If you teach a rat that every time it presses a lever that it gets a treat, it will press that lever a lot. However, after the animal has repeatedly done this over and over for a long time, you find that if you remove the reward the animal will just keep on pressing that lever -- even though it gets nothing for it. We say then that the response has become habitual and resistant to reward devaluation. So I could say that incentives matter in learning generally, but there are circumstances where they don't.
This is what I see when I read this debate about the minimum wage. It could be that the perfect competition model functions rather nicely except in the particular circumstance of a small increase in minimum wage. The question then becomes: what is small? Is it 10 cents? Is it a dollar? When scientists create models, we also have to spend a lot of time defining when and where they apply. Under 99% of situations humans deal with, Newtonian mechanics predicts outcomes just fine. It is just situations near the speed of light where relativity becomes important.
I'd say that within a dollar or so, increases in the minimum wage produce employment effects that are generally too small to measure. They also don't seem to produce much of a measurable reduction in the poverty rate, which is not surprising, because so few workers actually earn minimum wage.
We do have a lot of good literature on price controls, though, and the results are generally pretty much what you'd expect. Artificially raise the price, and you get too much supply and not enough demand; artificially lower it, and you get too much demand and not enough supply. Lowering product quality may compensate for some of these problems (employers turn off the air conditioning and end overtime; landlords stop painting and become profoundly disinterested in pest control.) But there is no such thing as a free lunch.
These effects mount over time. Rent control was a great deal in New York in 1955. By 1990, rent controlled, or rent stabilized apartments were generally pretty squalid--do not believe television shows showcasing palatial apartments available for a song. Any apartment that great is occupied by a 90 year old lady who moved in during World War II, and you can bet the landlord has a camera on the door so he can prove that whoever tries to inherit it on joint tenancy did not actually live there. More typical was my ex-boyfriend's rent stabilized deal on the Upper East Side--$1400 a month for two small bedrooms overlooking an airshaft, a stove that hadn't worked since about 1970, and don't forget to step over the dead roaches as you come through the door. The better the deal, the more likely it comes with a "key fee", aka a very large bribe that returns much of the consumer surplus to the landlord. And of course, the owner of such a desireable property can afford to be choosy about tenants, so they tend to go to affluent people.
Rent control/stabilization is also the reason that developers refuse to build housing for anyone poor enough to attract sympathetic politicians to their plight--and thus, in part, for New York's sub-2% vacancy rate. When I was apartment hunting in DC, I surprised the hell out of potential landlords by showing up with notarized copies of my credit report, wads of cash, and checks ready for deposit and first/last rent--the standard procedure for procuring an inexpensive apartment in New York. Apparently, the standard procedure here is to think about it for a few days and then mosey over and sign a lease sometime that month.
But over the short term, price controls can look like they are working (for some values of the word "working"), because price elasticity is almost always much greater over the long run than short term. The real reason that minimum wages haven't been particularly worrisome in the United States is that there hasn't been much of a long run over the past few decades; inflation and GDP growth have eroded its value before it got too onerous. Of course, supporters of the minimum wage are working very hard to change that.
Jindalmania
I saw Bobby Jindal talk last week at the National Press Club. He's being widely touted as McCain's potential running mate, though I agree with Ross that this would be a mistake--for Jindal. No one should run for office this year as a Republican who doesn't have to.
Mostly I was incredibly impressed. He looks like the president of the high school chess club, so it's something of a shock to my elitist coastal ears to hear a rich good-old-boy southern accent issuing from him. But he's a hell of a talker, and most of what he says actually makes sense.
One interesting thing I learned is just how far Jindal has come in fighting Louisiana's institutional problems. Bush detractors get mad when I say this, but it really is true that the total ineptitude of the state and local governments was a major reason that things went so tragically wrong during Katrina. FEMA is a small agency with a few thousand employees; it is a funding mechanism for recovery efforts, not some sort of Super EMT Squad. FEMA does well in states that have competent and responsive government agencies, and not so well in places that don't. (The staggering incompetence of rebuilding efforts is another rant--but also, a symptom of broader government problems rather than necessarily something specific to FEMA. But then as I say, that's another rant.)
With a river of federal money flowing in, Louisiana, which used to be stuck at the bottom of state corruption indices, could have gone back to business as usual while the politicians and the powers that be diverted a few rivulets to their own use. Instead, Jindal and the legislature passed anti-corruption laws that in a surprising turn of events actually seem to have done something about corruption--suddenly the state is getting the best scores in the country. They pushed through disclosure rules for all government officials--state and local, appointed and elected. He got a law passed that forbid legislators from doing business with the state. And he took on a tax and regulatory structure that had been built around the notion that companies couldn't go anywhere, and could hence be bled dry.
Huey Long deliberately built a bridge lower than standard so that boat traffic couldn't go upriver. The days when New Orleans could enforce that kind of dominance are long gone, but the old institutional structures remained. For example, Louisiana had special taxes on utilities, on new equipment purchases, on businesses that borrowed money. The unsurprising result was that companies deferred maintenance and refused to buy new equipment, making them uncompetitive unless they paid low wages. It's classic rent seeking behavior by the legislature, and Jindal actually got rid of it; new businesses are now locating there, and others are upgrading.
This reminded me very much of Jonathan Rauch's terrific book, Government's End. The book is a sort of basic primer for public choice theory, and a must-read for anyone who cares about policymaking. One of the things he points out is how lobbies tend to accrete over time, so that it becomes harder and harder for the government to do anything. He suggests that postwar Europe actually had more effective economic and political institutions because the war smashed the existing power structures, giving them more freedom to make policy. (I'd argue that at least since 1992, the EU has taken away their edge).
Katrina seems to have created a similar situation. With the old power networks disrupted, there was an opportunity to actually build institutions that functioned better than the old sclerotic ones. Louisiana seems to have been very lucky in getting a governor who is actually focusing on institution-building which will--if it works--give the state vastly more economic and political flexibility for years to come.
Of course, I'm just in that first flush of puppy love, when a journalist meets a handsome young politician who just might be The One. Soon enough, I'll undoubtedly find things about him to hate. But frankly, it's rare enough to meet one I like. True love may have to wait.
Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ideas about the minimum wage
Both at Crooked Timber, and in my own beloved comment threads, the suggestion has been made that the minimum wage is really swell because it gets rid of low-productivity jobs that only pay the minimum wage.
This sounds lovely--if you are the kind of person who has the skills to get one of the higher productivity jobs. Not so great if you're a high-school dropout with no appreciable credentials. In effect what you're talking about is a massive transfer from the weakest members of society.
Let's say raising the minimum wage makes them unemployable, while creating new, higher skilled jobs making and maintaining the equipment that replaces them. Good for skilled workers. Possibly good for society in some sense, though raising unemployment is rarely a net boon. Definitely awful for the lowest skilled workers, who now can't get a legal job.
Helping the moderately paid worker by forcing the least skilled out of the legal job market is a very, very bad policy. Whether or not you think that the government ought to be in the business of transferring wealth from one segment of society to another, I hope we can all agree that at least the transfers oughtn't to go upwards.
The vapidity of cable news, part 998 in a continuing series
The cable news shows this morning were full of wide-eyed anchor larvae reporting that with gas prices high, people were driving less, and instead using more public transit! Oh, for a land in which the downward-sloping demand curve was not such a constant source of surprise and wonder to the broadcast media.
Detox
I've been tempted to order those ridiculous detoxifying foot pads, just to see if they really do pull anything black and scary looking out of my skin the way they do on the commercials. But my general opinion mirrors Orac's:
"Detoxification."
Whenever I hear that term, I'm at least 90% certain that I'm dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed "alternative medicine" for a while, because "detoxification" is a mainstay of "alternative" treatments and quackery for such a wide variety of diseases and conditions. Of course, toxins are indeed a bad thing, and we close-minded reductionist "allopathic" physicians do indeed use detoxification when appropriate. What differentiates us from "alternative" medicine practitioners is that we have this extremely annoying tendency (annoying to alties, that is) to want to know exactly what toxins we are dealing with, to verify that they are present in concentrations that can cause problems or damage before instituting any sort of treatment for them, and then to tailor our therapies to remove the specific toxins causing symptoms and to verify that we are successful. Not so for the "detoxification" as practiced by so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) practitioners. CAM "detoxification" most often does not specify which "toxins" are being "detoxified," or when it does it is intentionally vague about them. Occasionally, they will get specific (mercury as a cause for autism), but the problem with specifying a "toxin" as a cause for a disease is that doing so allows for falsification; it also allows scientists who know something about the disease to assess the specific toxin as a cause for a disease for biological plausibility. Not surprisingly, rarely is the mechanism biologically plausible.
More monopsony madness!
No, no, I know--I have to stop or you just won't be able to stand the excitement. Anyway, Younotsneaky, one of the world's awesomest economics bloggers, does it with math. Meanwhile, in the comments to the Kathy G. post, Tyler Cowen says what I said, better, in one paragraph:
You either think that the demand curve for labor slopes downward at the relevant margin or not. If you don’t think it does, you need to argue for that directly. Arguing that the labor market is not perfectly competitive—while true—does not get you there. And if you admit the demand curve slopes downward you are already very close to Kevin Murphy’s point of view.
More disasters in Asia
An earthquake in China may have killed 3,000 to 5,000. Meanwhile, in Burma the estimates on the high end are that one million may die from post-disaster epidemics.
There's an unreality to the horrific numbers that emerge from developing country disasters--Americans could be told that 500,000 had died in a Bangladeshi apartment building fire, and we'd just sort of nod and say how awful it all is. But Jesus, we are lucky. Economic development does a lot of things, but one of the best things it does is give us the means to cope with adversity. It's tempting to think that subsistence farming is less fragile than complex economies--after all, you can rebuild everything yourself. But development gives us surplus food. Roads for evacuees to get out and relief workers to get in. Doctors and drugs. Mosquito nets. Earthquake proof houses. Advanced storm warnings, and communications systems to distribute them. Construction equipment. Trucks, boats and cars. Emergency generators. Spare people to flood the disaster area with help. And lots of spare room for people whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed.
It also--arguably--gives us democratic governments that have to worry about public opinion. There was a lot of noise after Katrina about how America didn't care about the poor people who were affected. I won't argue that we couldn't have done better before and after the storm; we could have, and should have. But the picture of America as oblivious to its people's pain looks pretty fatuous in comparison to a Burmese government that seems ready to let hundreds of thousands die rather than allow relief workers to infect its people with news of the outside world.
Meanwhile, since a lot of Americans care about people even outside the American bordes, seems like a good idea to up those disaster relief donations. I tossed my contribution to the Salvation Army, because when I worked at Ground Zero they were regarded as the most effective of the relief agencies.
Monopsony madness
At long last, Kathy G comes back on the minimum wage.
Most of the post is responding to an argument I have not made: that the minimum wage decreases employment. To be sure, I might make that argument--but then again, I might not. I think the empirical evidence is ambiguous, and though the bulk of it reinforces the intuitive belief that if you raise the cost of labor people will use less of it, there is a plausible argument that this is the result of publication bias. (Just to be clear, I haven't investigated this argument, so I am not endorsing it; I just think it's possible.)
I still think that the minimum wage is terrible policy, but that rests more on the fact that most of the people who receive it are not poor, and we have much better, more direct ways to target poverty than possibly introducing structural rigidities into the labor market, or encouraging employers to make working conditions worse. Whatever unemployment effect there is of US-sized changes in the minimum wage is too small to be detected amidst statistical noise.
So saying, for example, that Card and Krueger redid their study and found "no decrease in employment" is not useful. In fact, it's a big shift in the goalposts: before we were arguing about whether employment increased.
There's been a lengthy back and forth over Card and Krueger, and I'm about as sick of it as Card and Krueger are. People who want to believe that you can jack up wages ad nauseum without creating unemployment will abuse Card and Krueger to support ACORN's living wage programs. People who think that raising the minimum wage by a penny could plunge the economy into a new Great Depression are going to dispute the thing even if Jesus Christ Himself walks across the Potomac to endorse its conclusions. I can no more alter their fixed opinions than I could stop an earthquake by holding onto the ground. Especially since my personal opinion--"most work on price controls suggests that they're probably wrong, but it's hard to say for sure"--leaves me in a poor position to haul out the sword of righteousness and start laying into the infidels.
So back to the original argument: does the low wage labor market look like a monopsony? That is, does it act as if there is essentially one employer? My answer remains . . . ummmm, no.
Ms. G's argument relies heavily on the question that invariably gets deployed by the commenters I call The Jedi Masters of Econ 201: "If you lower wages by one penny, will everyone quit? If not, you've got a monopsony". The technical answer is that we don't know, because the government keeps employers from finding out.
But the real answer is that this is trivial. Almost no markets in existence look like the models in the economics textbooks; if Ms. G is going to reject generally applicable market principles in any situation that doesn't exactly correspond to perfect competition, then she should stop taking economics classes now; none of the models will be any use to her.
We don't have much trouble identifying Standard Oil or DeBeers as monopolies even though they are not actually the only companies in their markets and did not actually have perfectly unlimited pricing power. We have little trouble understanding that the US car market is no longer an oligopoly, even though the actual number of sellers has not actually expanded that much. Even commodity markets do not always look like perfect competition.
But despite the fact that the housing market is not perfectly competitive, rent controls still degrade the housing stock and restrict supply. Cap and trade works a zillion times better than simple fiat legislation. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Since wages rarely fluctuate by a penny in these inflationary times, the correct question is not whether such small fluctuations engender a perfectly competitive reaction. The right inquiry is whether noticeable wage gaps cause workers to move. Last time I looked, they did.
Likewise, noting that some workers have heterogenous preferences does not get you very far. Virtually all real world markets have a spectrum of customers with varying degrees of price sensitivity, depending on their affinity for other variations in the product. Nonetheless, they tend to function basically as you expect them to: when companies raise the price of their products, customers react by consuming less of them.
Basically all of these arguments seem like quibbling. "Monopsony doesn't require that turnover rates be low"--no, it doesn't, but you'd better have a good explanation for why it's so high if preferences are so heterogenous. You'd also better be able to demonstrate that you can keep wages low while others raise them and still have an adequate labor force. There may be data showing that this is true in the broad mass of the minimum wage market, but I have not seen it.
The core question is: if minimum wage labor markets are a monopsony, how come we don't find more evidence of statistically significant increases in employment following minimum wage increases? One answer is that it is a monopsony, but employers are not using their pricing power to supress wages/employment--in which case, I'm not sure why we care. Or possibly Ms G, like me, thinks that the changes in American minimum wage policy are generally too small to pick the employment effect out of statistical noise. So perhaps a different way to think about it is this: how much money would you be willing to bet that if a city enacted a $12 minimum wage, employment in that city would grow faster than employment in the surrounding area? I'd put $1,000 on the opposite happening. And I'm not much of a gambler.
May 9, 2008
Debt burden
Ezra Klein responds to my post on middle class debt with this chart. I hope he'll forgive me for ripping it off, but it's hard to talk about without looking at it.
Says Ezra:
So this stuff is increasing. The "all debt as a share of income" number is particularly worrying, as it's increased as much in the 2000-2005 period as in the 1979-2000 period. Megan might say it's all a function of asset bubbles, but economists I've talked to say the upper-bound estimate for the impact of asset market bubbles is half of the decline in the savings rate. Significant, but not, on its own, the whole story. So something is going on here. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Michael Mandel, the chief economist at Business Week, calls the following graphic "the world's scariest chart," and while I don't think it quite compares to this one, it's not far off
I would argue that this doesn't tell us what we really want to know, which is: how much is this debt costing us?
Look at the first chart. What's striking is how much the top line differs from the bottom line. If what we were seeing was America plunging itself into debt to finance consumption, they should all be rising roughly in line with each other. In fact, the top line breaks away from the others.
What's going on here? Ezra misstates just slightly: it's not all debt as a share of income, it's all debt as a share of disposable income. That is to say, income after taxes. In 1949, personal disposable income was 95% of GDP; by 2007, it was 89%. So part of that increase is simply that the share of income dedicated to taxes has risen substantially.
That is not, of course, the entire story. There's also the fact that in 1940, homeownership rates were around 45%; it's now almost 68%. All of that transition was financed by debt, and not only by debt, but by a dramatic shift in the type of debt: the emergence in the 1950s of the thirty year fixed-rate amortizing mortgage as the dominant form of home financing. Prior to that, mortgages had been much shorter, and usually featured balloon payments.
Meanwhile, the dramatic rise in effective income taxes on the middle class at federal and state levels made the mortgage interest tax deduction much more valuable, encouraging people to take on more debt. As you can see, most of the increase is actually housing debt.
On the revolving debt side, you'll notice that the largest increases take place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, is basically flat in the 1980s and 1990s, and then ticks up again in 2000.
This represents a number of different trends: first there was the auto loan revolution in the 1950s and 1960s; then came the introduction of Diner's Club, shortly followed by Amex, in the 1960's. Almost all of this debt was either secured by automobiles, or paid off each month; the latter represents float, not real revolving debt.
In the 1970s, the effective repeal of bank usury laws made Mastercard and Visa ubiquitous, causing debt to march upwards again. This is actual credit expansion. But it's hard to be sure how much, because this era is the death of another kind of debt: installment buying.
If people massively expand their asset base by a house and a couple of cars, not to mention labor-saving appliances like dishwashers and washing machines, 40% of it all debt financed, this is not an obviously worrisome trend. Especially since a lot of that represents a shift from expenses like rent to debt payments, which is not actually a net deterioration in people's finances. Nor is it clear that we should mourn for the days when the repo man could take away your furniture, television, and appliances.
There's another trend buried in there that matters a great deal: the secular decline in interest rates that began in the 1980s when Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, went postal on inflation. As interest rates fell, debt rose as a percentage of disposable income, but that's because people could afford more debt on the same payment. This does not represent a material adverse change in peoples' circumstances.
Now, in fact, I agree that people overleveraged themselves in the last eight years, encouraged by ultra-low interest rates; that is now showing up in the DSR, which is now rising toward 15%. But I do not agree that this is the sort of financial holocaust that some argue. The housing bubble peaked in late 2005, meaning that we are now deep into the weeds of negative equity and teaser resets. This year should be the worst for mortgage performance, and yet the most recent figures show that the worst quality loans, subprime, have an overall foreclosure rate of 2% and a delinquency rate of 14%. These are not happy numbers--they represent hard times for a lot of families. And I expect that they will rise still further in the next report, due out in early June. But that's not "demise of the middle class" level; subprime ARMS, the problem market, account for only 7% of outstanding loans.
Nor is this as unique as many commentators seem to believe. The percentage of people who had negative net worth was about the same in 1962 as it was in 2000, the latest census year. The middle class certainly isn't in nearly as bad shape as it was in the 1980s, when high interest rates combined with falling inflation to make the debt they had hella expensive.
I am not trying to be a Pollyanna. Americans need to pay down some debt, and that process will be unpleasant. But they have adequate resources to do so, and the debt they have taken on largely represents an improvement in living standards and a transition to an ownership society that I think is overall a very good thing. More importantly, I find little evidence for Elizabeth Warren's claims about why Americans have all this debt--which is to say that they're being forced into it by heartless capitalism, a lzay government, and rising inequality.
More on Brijit
About a month ago, I linked to Brijit, a new media aggregation website. The idea behind it is intriguing; it's sort of a curated Google News. If you're like me, you have too many newspapers and magazines, and too little time. The idea behind Brijit is that they tell you what you need to read.
I went to see their offices a couple of weeks ago, which are conveniently located a couple blocks from my house in DC. It looks pretty much like every start-up I've ever seen: hyper-energetic boss surrounded by a bunch of young hopefuls crowded around a table with laptops and bottles of iced tea. Jeremy Brosowsky, the thirtysomething founder, has already started and ended one magazine, but this is his first venture on the web.
In his books Bobos in Paradies, David Brooks talks about status-wealth disequilibrium; the wealthy coastal cities are crowded with people who have money made in un-fun jobs, and people who have fun jobs that don't pay so well. The ideal, Brooks points out, is for members of one group to marry the other, to even things out, but unfortunately it generally doesn't work out that way.
The Brijit concept is similar: take people who have time but no money, and marry them to people who have money but no time. Or rather, pay the people who have a lot of time on their hands to read stuff, and then tell the people who have money but no time what they really need to look at, and what they can safely skip.
Brijit has a stable of writers covering 100 magazines and websites; when I talked to them, they'd just added YouTube. The editors scan the magazines to see what they want to look at, and then put out requests for reviews of those articles. Contributors submit a review and recommendation, generally about 100 words--up to three can bid on one article. The editors pick the best one, pay the contributor $5-8 per review, and copyeditors touch it up and put it on the website. It seems kind of paltry pay, even by freelance standards--just 20 to 30 cents a word. But most of his contributors are students and so forth, who are getting paid for something they'd do anyway: read.
Over time, the writers get clips, experience, and a reputation with Brijit--for example, one of their contributors does virtually all of their Sports Illustrated coverage. And hopefully Brijit gets eyeballs, and eventually advertising money, though they're a while from break-even. They already have thousands of readers a day after a few months of operation, and I expect that they'll have thousands more as soon as the bloggers discover it.
I think I'm crazy too
Economics of Contempt:
Call me crazy, but I think a permanent doubling of food and energy prices would slow our rate of economic growth pretty significantly. How long it would take incomes to recover "at current rates of economic growth" is irrelevant when the doubling of food and energy prices would lower the rate of economic growth.
Given that we and all our machines run on either food or energy, it's a pretty safe bet to say that doubling their prices would have a sizeable impact on growth.
Other Megan on the web
Peter Suderman, David White, Michael Brendan Dougherty and I talk about the week in politics at Inside Washington Weekly.
Dan Drezner makes full professor
And spills the secrets of that arcane priesthood. If only we had tenure, I'd spill the awesome secrets of professional bloggerdom, but they can still kick me out of the club. And I'd hate to miss tonight's champagne pool party.
Ask the blogger
Another reader emails:
You just answered a reader question about oil prices, I hope you'll answer one about oil company profits, too.
My understanding is that oil companies buy crude oil from various places, refine it into gasoline, and sell that gasoline to stations around the country where we pump it into our cars. Recently, the cost of oil has skyrocketed, as have oil company profits. My understanding of the oil companies' defense of their profits when grilled by Congress
a while back was "It's not our fault that we're doing well: we don't control the cost of oil -- we can't help it that it's expensive, and when gas is expensive we make more money."
This seems exactly backwards to me: what kind of industry sees profits go up when its costs go up? Shouldn't expensive crude oil be terrible for an industry buying that oil and selling a derivative product to customers used to it being very cheap and lightly taxed?
If you answer this I might ask why so many economists want to get rid of the penny at the same time that businesses seem perfectly happy to buy them on their own accord.
Last question first: businesses like pennies because they believe that pricing something at $4.98 is psychologically different from pricing it at $5.00. Economists hate pennies because you shouldn't have a unit of exchange that can't buy anything. Pennies cost more to make than they are worth, and then waste valuable human time carrying and counting the things.
First question last: there are multiple oil industries. Not everyone extracts oil; those that don't are seeing their margins decline, just as you would expect. It is the companies that own oil fields which are posting high profits.
Northern Ireland is the new China
The BBC interviewed me on the subject of Americans investing in Northern Ireland a couple of weeks ago, and the result is up here, in a report where I make a couple of brief cameos.
Medical Style Section
The New York Times discovers cutting yourself only twenty years after my high school classmates. Stand by for this weekend's special report: Sometimes, Teenagers Drive Out into the Woods and Drink Too Much Beer.
Has the Republican Party lost its moorings?
I certainly have trouble discerning any sort of coherent ideological plan in the last eight years. Jon Henke and Patrick Ruffini are trying to change that.
May 8, 2008
Ask the blogger
A reader writes:
I would like to see you do an article about the current oil prices. I am no economist but have a basic question. If oil production is about the same as three years ago and oil refineries are running at about the same capacity (maybe less due to Katrina, political unrest, etc.) , why is the price of oil more than double from three years ago? I know that the demand for gasoline is probably up which would certainly explain higher gas prices but it would seem that a relatively fixed refinery capacity breaks that relationship between oil and gas prices.
Three reasons:
1) Rising world demand Rising incomes in Asia are pushing up demand for oil to power transportation and industry.
2) Supply worries When investors worry that future oil prices will be high due to a supply disruption, they bid up the price now and stockpile. No one's quite sure how much this speculative aspect plays a role. But security worries in Iraq and Iran, civil unrest in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia's simmering problems, and Hugo Chavez's populist antics with PDVSA, the Venezolano state-owned oil company, all have people worried.
3) Supply inelasticity Pretty much every country on earth is pumping as much oil as they can except Saudi Arabia, and it's very unclear how big even their cushion is--certainly no more than a couple of million barrels a day in a world thirsting for the hundred million mark.
We don't know whether these worries are permanent or short term. One argument says that OPEC nations have been grotesquely exaggerating their reserves in order to raise their OPEC quotas, and that therefore we are at or near the natural limit of the oil that can be economically pumped. Another argument says that countries, especially OPEC nations, are simply slow to ramp up their capacity because they are still haunted by the memory of the price collapses in the 1980s and 1990s, which devastated their economies and politically threatened many oil regimes. It's worth noting, however, that one of the main oil supply bulls is now predicting that oil will hit $150 a barrel.
In the short term in the US, the main constraint is refinery capacity, especially in small regions with their own boutique mixes, such as Chicago. Over the longer term, the constraint is willingness of various places to build processing plants for our gasoline, port capacity to handle transshipment, and of course, how much we're willing to pay for the oil that goes into our gasoline.
Either way, I'd look for prices to stay high for a while. Of course, bubbles always look most solid right before they pop, so take that for what it's worth.
Car talk
When the right points out that Detroit's union contracts are making it difficult to return to profitability, the left generally responds that the problem lies not with our unions, but with our stars . . . why cannot they be more like Toyota?
Toyota seems to be asking that question of itself: its profits are sharply down. You'd think that oil spikes would be a license to print money, but the US is one of its biggest markets, and the dollar decline is hurting them badly.
This is obviously not Detroit bad--but it's very odd to see Ford's earnings rising while Toyota's fall. Toyota's US plants are also getting older, and with them, their workforce--the same problem that has dogged Detroit. Toyota doesn't operate under the same labor constraints as the Big Three, but my understanding is that it has a different constraint: laying off older workers would trigger a hell of a backlash against their product.
Honest question
Invading Burma to disburse humanitarian aid seems (note my ironic understatement) like sort of a bad idea. But if they continue refusing to let aid workers in, what's wrong with violating their airspace to carpet bomb the place with relief air drops?
Poor Gordon Brown
It is sort of like watching a gang of seventh graders take down the substitute teacher. That isn't exactly surprising. What made Gordon Brown a great Chancellor of the Exchequer is exactly what makes him an awful PM; the man has the charisma of ground carp. That said, I was expecting a slow fade as New Labour's schtick wore thin, not this spectacular eruption.
Video of the day
Dog training
I just use a taser.
May 7, 2008
Figuring out how to get help to Burma
It's still not clear how much help Burma is going to allow in. The French foreign minister is making noises that sound curiously close to a humanitarian invasion:
In response, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested that the United Nations should invoke its “responsibility to protect” civilians as the basis for a resolution to allow the delivery of international aid even without the junta’s permission.
The UN, understandably, wants to stick to more conventional sorts of pressure. But what kind of leverage does the rest of the world have? They barely interact with us.
Then there's the food problem: Myanmar's rice harvest seems to have been devastated, though of course, it's pretty hard to get any information about what's going on. The reports we have seem to be at about the level of neighborhood gossip; they're filtering out through a network of aid workers that is, as one might imagine, under considerable strain, not to mention the eye of the regime. But at this point it the rice markets seem pretty convinced that Myanmar's going to flip from exporting to importing rice. The last thing the world needed right now was less grain on the world market.
It seems to me that now would be a very good time for the US to call a temporary halt to its ethanol program, and ship that grain to where it might actually provide a net benefit. Of course, who knows if they'd let it in. But then, it's hard to think of any place that grain wouldn't be better used than in American cars. And of course, anyone who wants to take me up on my earlier suggestion could try one of these recipes tomorrow night. Or hell, just pop in some convenience foods.
Truer words were never spoken
What he said. Squared. And waiter . . . hold the goddamn steamed vegetables with nothing on them, please.
The Death of the Middle Class, Myth #2: Drowning in Debt
Warren's next scare statistic, introduced around the ten minute mark, is the massive increase in revolving debt. Revolving debt (that's basically credit cards and bank overdrafts, for those who don't speak Accountant) has skyrocketed since 1970 as a percentage of personal disposable income.
Warren's audience seems not to have noticed that this is kind of a weird number to pick. Having more of a particular kind of debt doesn't tell you much; if you take out a home equity loan to pay off your credit card, your financial position has (arguably) slightly improved, even though your housing debt just jumped. What you really want to know is the overall level of indebtedness. Warren covers this by implying that she's just using revolving debt as an example; "I could have used consumer loans or mortgage debt", she says, and "it would have been much the same".
This is desperately, hopelessly wrong. Not an exaggeration or a misreading; just flatly untrue.
I cannot read the little squib at the bottom of Warren's chart to find where she got her data, but the gold standard for this sort of thing is the Federal Reserve Board, which among its many other functions keeps tabs on how much credit is sloshing around various markets. The class will please turn to FRB web page G.19, "Consumer Credit Outstanding (Millions of Dollars; Not Seasonally Adjusted).
You will note that the Federal Reserve didn't even begin measuring revolving debt as a separate item until January 1968; this was the birth of the modern credit card era. You may also notice that revolving debt increased fourfold just between then and the end of 1970. You will probably further note that the growth of non-revolving debt slows down around then, as credit cards began substituting for installment buying.
In December 1970, the American public carried $5 billion worth of revolving debt, and $128 billion worth of non-revolving (secured and fixed-term debt). In December of 2004, the American public had $1.3 trillion worth of non-revolving debt--and $823 billion worth of revolving debt. One number had increased by a factor of 10; the other by a factor of 160. Saying that these two increases are "much the same" is like saying that a newborn kitten is pretty much indistinguishable from a full-grown lion.
Of course, these figures are in nominal dollars, which is to say, not adjusted for the inflation that has taken place. In constant 2004 dollars, according to the excellent inflation calculator provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the outstanding non-revolving debt was $625 billion, while outstanding revolving debt was $24 billion. It doesn't take much math skill to see that the increase in the two figures is nowhere near the same magnitude.
Warren then goes on to do something really, really weird: she puts up a chart showing the savings + revolving debt as a percentage of personal disposable income. This is a useless figure, though her audience appears to think it is deeply significant. For one thing, it doesn't show all forms of debt, which is what we really care about. For another, to get a good financial picture, you don't add those two things; you subtract, which tells you whether you're running a surplus or a deficit. But the biggest problem is that she's comparing a stock to a flow. A stock is everything you have--the inventory in a store, say. A flow is the shipment of canned goods you got in today. You never compare the two directly; it's meaningless. If I tell you that your mortgage is 80 times the size of this month's 401(k) contribution, are you saving too much or too little?
It's especially useless because we don't know what the interest rate on the revolving debt is. In the high-inflation early eighties, the debt would have been smaller relative to people's incomes, but high interest rates would have jacked up their monthly payments; by the late 1990s, the reverse would be true.
The correct comparison would be total assets to total debt, or savings to debt service payments. As it happens, we have some data on that; though the available time period is not quite the same as Warren's, it is close enough for government work. In the Federal Reserve's 1964 survey of consumer finances, the average household net worth was $22,588 ($137,641 in constant 2004 dollars). In 2000, it was about $200,000 in constant terms.
But we're so much more unequal! People will cry. Bill Gates is screwing up the average. Indeed this is true . . . but apparently he was back in 1964 as well. Back then the median net worth was $7,550 ($46,000). In 2000, it was $55,000. To be sure, not an impressive increase. But families hadn't gone backwards--and the 1964 figure counts some things the 2000 figure doesn't, like life insurance policies. And the number of families with negative net worth was about the same in 2004 as it was 40 years earlier: roughly one third.
Having seen that the stock has, in fact, improved for both mean and median households (insofar as we can tell from discontinuous data series), let's look at the flow: debt service payments. Warren's weird chart implies that they must be piling up on households like never before. Well, this is kind of true.
Now where was I? Ah, yes. Unfortunately, the series only starts in 1980--recession territory. Back then, households were using 11.13% of their personal disposable income to service mortgages and consumer debt. By mid-2004, when Elizabeth Warren was giving that speech, the DSR had soared to . . . 13.5%. All of which seems to have been housing debt and property tax payments, since the Financial Obligations Ratio (the DSR + auto leases, property taxes, and homeowner's insurance) for renters actually fell slightly.
Americans are simply not being bankrupted by their credit cards and mortgages. 2% of my income is a lot--I sure wouldn't want to have to write that kind of check out for no reason. But it wouldn't push me into bankruptcy, or even out of the middle class.
When it comes to tax policy, change is bad
It is true that the gas tax is fairly trivial. It is also theoretically true that a windfall tax could claw back the lost revenue, though I have my doubts. So why does it matter? Because when it comes to regulations, one should never arbitrarily increase the complexity or uncertainty of the law.
Complexity is bad because it ups compliance costs, often makes evasion easier, and because complexity itself increases uncertainty: as tax laws proliferate, it becomes harder to know whether you are in compliance. It also makes the government's administrative overhead multiply like those bacteria that can kill you in five minutes after first contact.
Uncertainty is bad because it reduces the ability of people and corporations to plan for the future. It's hard to estimate your ROI if the tax laws that govern your investment change every year.
Change is bad in general because every time the tax law changes, your nation experiences a sudden loss of human capital: all the understanding of how the old law becomes useless, and people have to spend valuable hours learning to understand the new law. This is often time that could have been better spent doing new deals, or regrouting the bathtub. Mold doesn't take care of itself, you know.
Obama's plan is bad because windfall taxes increase complexity and uncertainty. They also reduce the incentive for investment by lowering the return on it.
McCain's plan is bad because the gas tax holiday complicates tax administration and compliance, and because the revenue has to be made up somewhere else. That somewhere else is almost certain to be one more complicated tax of some sort.
Clinton's plan is doubly bad because it combines the uncertainty of a windfall tax with the complexity of both the Obama and McCain plans.
That's not to say that the tax code should never change--the 1986 tax simplification was a big winner. And simple changes in the rate structure, up or down, don't have much of these effects--at least within the narrow range in which US tax policy fluctuates. But the kinds of short term games with the tax code that all three candidates want to play are pretty much invariably a terrible idea.
The Death of the Middle Class, Myth #1: No one can afford to save any more
Elizabeth Warren starts her talk off with the falling national savings rate. The savings rate has indeed fallen; in fact, it has become nonexistent. But Warren, like many commentators, implies that this is because families are too strapped to save. In fact, it's because of the two successive bubbles in the stock and housing markets. Families responded to the run up in their net worth by saving less. If you look at assets, rather than savings rates, people in the boomer generation--the generation that is in its prime savings years now--look pretty much like their parents.
Now, you could argue that this was foolish, and I in fact agree with you; Boomers need more savings than their parents, and they shouldn't have been so confident in massive paper gains. But that's not the same thing as saying that they were forced to forgo saving in order to provide for their kids, which is essentially what Elizabeth Warren argues. The asset model is a standard explanation that pretty much any economist in the country could give you; either Elizabeth Warren didn't ask any, or she ignored what they said. Even if you think this explanation is wrong, I think you need to explain why your model is a better fit.
Is the middle class really doomed?
I've now seen this video at several liberal blogs, and someone has to stop it. Apparently, that someone is me, since no one else has stepped up. Mine is a high and lonely destiny.
Warren has an intriguing thesis: that women going into the workforce has resulted in few real consumption gains to families with children because all the money is going to childcare, and to bidding up the price of houses in good school districts. Meanwhile, families are more fragile, vulnerable to outside events, because Mom no longer functions as an all-purpose backstop. Meanwhile, the government is not providing the things those families need: childcare, high quality education, a more generous safety net, health insurance. The result: more bankruptcies, less financial security. The talk is provocatively titled "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net"
As you can imagine, this thesis is extremely beloved of liberals, who like its endorsement of more government benefits, while ignoring the fact that this could equally well argue for having women stay home.
Nonetheless, I think it's an interesting thesis, and having read the book, I find it eminently plausible. The only problem is that it does not actually seem to be true.
As a general matter, my problems with Warren's work are fourfold:
1. Her arguments tend to rest entirely on particular statistics; if you look at another statistic that describes the same thing a slightly different way, her results have a tendency to collapse. Indeed, she often seems to almost deliberately pick the most useless number for measuring the effect she wants to get at.
2. She often switches nearly at random from one way of describing something to another: from percentages to absolute amounts, from individuals to households. All of these switches have the effect of concealing the holes in her work.
3. She either isn't familiar with, or ignores, fairly standard alternate explanations for the statistics she uses.
4. When she creates her own measures, they use overbroad standards for the things she wants to measure, while leaving out important variables.
Why (almost) all of her arguments are wrong in particular is so long that I'll break it up into various posts. Warren is pretty much the public face of moral panic about credit, and as such has a lot of influence. And also, a lot of the things she says are common tropes that should be addressed, so this seems like a good opportunity. More in succeeding posts.
Is it over?
A number of commentators are saying it's finally over, that Hillary will have to drop out now. Well, yes, but nothing has changed. The numbers are exactly what they were two days ago; there were no surprises last night. So what's going to make her drop out now?
Price elasticity of gasoline, again
A number of readers seem to be confused by my previous post on who gets the benefit of a gas tax holiday. If inelastic demand means that the consumers are paying a lot of the gas tax, how come when we lower the gas tax, they don't get that money back?
Because the supply curve is kinked, that's why.
Supply is elastic on the downside--companies can take the stuff off the market and store it if they don't like the price, or throttle back their refineries. But there's no way to expand the supply, because Americans can't import gasoline from abroad; each mix must be specially formulated to the air quality regulations of its regulatory region.
Because supply is unresponsive to price on the upside, and prices are already quite high enough for companies to make a profit, the price of oil is currently basically set by consumer demand: they bid the price up to the point where they want to consume the maximum amount that refineries can supply. Oil companies can't sell more gasoline by lowering prices, and they also will not sell any less gasoline, because the current price is the price at which consumers want to consume all the gasoline they produce. Hence, if you lower the tax, the price stays the same, and 18.4 cents goes to the oil companies for every gallon.
Now, one might say that this is good because it will incent them to find more oil. But this is not, in my opinion, a very good argument. First of all, we're also considering mucking around with windfall taxes, which are a much bigger disincentive to invest than any piddling 18.4 cents per gallon. Second of all, oil companies can discover more oil, but they are hard put to increase refinery capacity, because no one wants any refineries near anyone; virtually all of our refineries are decades old, with improvements coming from throughput enhancement rather than new built capacity. The limiting factor on gasoline right now is refinery capacity, not oil supplies. And third of all, they're already making really quite a lot of money. We don't need to give them even more.
Fourth of all, of course, a gas tax is a user fee for roads, which is good, and also encourages people to invest in more fuel efficient cars, which I think is also good. So it's a rare example of a tax that should be much higher, not lower, IMHO.
Why is this getting so much attention? Does it really matter? Well, I don't think that fiddling with the gas tax is going to bring the US economy to its knees. But it offers some interesting lessons about markets and elementary price theory, which many of my readers seem to be interested in. Also, I really like making charts.
May 6, 2008
Ma'am, please step away from the pander with your hands up
What do Americans care most about this election season? The troubled housing market, and the short supply of oil. That's why HIllary is here with a plan. Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.
The evening drags on
I can't stop thinking about that PJ O'Rourke quote: "She had that wonderful gift some old ladies have of letting everything in her brain run right out her mouth."
Amusing moment of the evening
Barack Obama says "McCain is using the same tactics that George Bush used to get elected." Someone in the back of the audience shouts "Hillary too!" Campaign plant or freelancer? We report, you decide.
Obama will stop the mean corporations from stealing all our jobs
Gack. Now Obama is ranting about how he's going to make the corporations give us super fuel-efficient cars, find awesome new sources of oil, make renewable energy affordable, and invent a really delicious fat-free ice cream. However did we manage to get through the first 200 years without Barack Obama to beat some progress out of the corporations that have been holding us back?
Victory is <strike>ours</strike> <strike>theirs</strike> elusive
Obama's North Carolina victory speech is in full swing. My favorite part os these speeches is the shout outs to minor officials, random local dignitaries, and that nice lady who sold the good Senator a donut and a cup of coffee this morning. What a smile, that Ella Mae. Gave our candidate the strength to go on, it did. Ella Mae, couldn't have done it without you. Together, we're going to bring change to America. And I know you can, because this morning you counted out that dollar ninety-six like a champ. Didn't even have to use a calculator.
"So there's no chance she's going to drop out tonight, is there?" asked one of my companions, plaintively. The consensus of the room is no. I see this contest carrying on past June--like, June 2082. Our great-grandchildren will battle in a post-apocalyptic America desiccated by global warming and littered with the corpses of uninsured union members whose textile jobs were outsourced to Alpha Centauri.
The exotic East
Taking a break from primary blogging, there's a minor discussion going on in various bits of the blogosphere over what texts the Pentagon should have been reading to learn about the Middle East. Over at Crooked Timber, Kathy G. suggested that they should have been reading Orientalism instead of the somewhat kooky Arab Mind. Matt is skeptical. James Joyner suggests "Wouldn’t we be even better off if, instead, they used a book that hadn’t been widely discredited? Say, Bernard Lewis’ Islam and the West?"
This is basically a fruitless debate, because as in the Israel/Palestine debate--for which this is basically a proxy--there is precious little middle ground. Middle Eastern Studies professors are, as far as I can tell, overwhelmingly in the Edward Said camp; they regard Bernard Lewis the same way those in the Lewis/Pipes camp regard Said.
The fundamental problem with all the books is the same: they're all trying to offer an inside perspective on the culture from outside the culture. The Pentagon is not going to read Edward Said for the same reason that most Middle Eastern scholars like him: he writes as an outsider deeply critical of western culture. No government institution can accept such a text as canonical, certainly not here.
The problem is, Kathy G. is right: regardless of the book's errors, those are the sort of things the Pentagon should be reading, even if the work in question has problems. Our planners spent too much time reading western opinions on Arab culture, when it was at least as important to know how we looked to them. That's not something an outsider can or will tell you. And I'd say that Edward Said's main error was in thinking that because the west is the hegemonic culture, he was immune from this problem.
Talking heads
The Clinton and Obama campaign third string spokespeople are on MSNBC babbling about how their candidates are destined to win. Both of them are insisting that a victory is inevitable; neither of them are taking any cognizance of the other person making claims that flatly contradict their own. As the tension mounts--as a nation waits breathless to find out whether Hillary Clinton is going to prolong our agony with a net loss of 13 delegates, or whether she will soar to a net loss of only 8 delegates--they are valiantly filling the air with observations of astonishing triviality. "You know, this is all about the votes," says one of the bland women I have never heard of. In a moment, one of them is going to start commenting on how there are all these cameras and lights and things in the studio. The other will undoubtedly respond by picking up a fire safety flyer and reading us the fine print. Hell, at least we might learn something.
If only one could put out political blather with a little stop, drop and roll.
Obama wins Noth Carolina. Nothing changes.
So Obama has failed to collapse in North Carolina. At the house where I am watching the primaries, the hot topic of discussion is the marvelous inaccuracy of the exit polls. These are conducted by eager young college students with clipboards asking intrusive questions about your voting habits and religion. As you can imagine, the only people who wish to answer these questions are other eager young college students. As far as I can tell, the demographic data for people over the age of 65 is based entirely on one woman in Des Moines who thought she was opening a bank account.
Indiana is still a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. No, not really. It's probably going to go for Hillary. Time to order more Xanax. Luckily, I'm told it will be cheaper when we get a new president who allows pharmaceutical reimportation.
Of course, by then I'll probably need antipsychotics.
Daily geekery
For some reason, this puts me in mind of my consulting days--one day in particular, actually, when I was working at a client with a network outage. The router had broken down, and we were waiting for a new one to arrive from the supplier. The know-nothing head of IT told a woman I was working with that they needed the internet back up right away.
"The router is broken," she explained. "We are waiting for a new one."
"But the traders can't trade," he said, as if we were perhaps just hiding the internet from him for fun.
"What would you like me to do?" she asked sweetly. "Get on the phone with the other router and start transmitting the data manually?"
"Take this down," she said to me. "One, zero, zero, zero, one, one, zero, one. Next byte . . . "
He left in a huff.
Anyway, apparently that's how Google does things too.
What's wrong with chain restaurants?
Plenty, according to some of my readers. My take on the subject is that chain restaurants aren't bad. They just aren't good, either.
Chain food reduces the volatility of your dining experience. You rarely have a really great meal, a memorable meal, at a chain. (Your date throwing up his Shrimp Fra Diavolo does not count.) But you also rarely have a really bad one. People have forgotten about all the really bad restaurant food there used to be--and still is, in places that don't have the density or income to support chain restaurants. People look at the rich individually owned markets of the few big cities that have them, and the great family owned places in their own area, and conclude that chain restaurants must be dragging America's food tastes down.
I beg to differ. The chains are putting a floor on quality; any family owned restaurant that cannot provide at least as good food and service as a chain has gone out of business. The average family owned restaurant is probably better than a similar chain, but that doesn't mean that if the chains went away, we'd have better food. We'd have a lot of soggy pasta and awful hotel buffets--remember those, small town America? Not an improvement.
And for a more mobile country, chains make a lot of sense. If you travel a lot, search costs start to matter. In other words, there's nothing wrong with chains. Because the best thing about chains is that if you don't like them, you don't have to eat there.
The vapidity of cable news, part 1 in an ongoing series
News anchors in re Hillary's gas tax plan: "The economists don't like it, but there are no easy answers".
Yes, yes there are. There are easy answers. The easy answer is "Don't do stupid things of no possible value to the electorate." Just observe how easy this is. I look at the plan to have a gas tax holiday. I note that it is a stupid thing of no possible value to the electorate. Then I do not support the plan to have a gas tax holiday.
To be sure, having blogged for years, I have some experience in these matters. But I do not want you to think that this can only be done by a few lucky souls whom nature has prepared through extraordinary natural talent, fortunate circumstances, and herculean training. Anyone who is not severely cognitively disabled, functionally illiterate, or named Lou Dobbs, can perform this feat in the privacy of their own living room. You do not even need expensive, specialized equipment. In fact, I will let you in on the secret right now.
1. Go to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration page. Look at the refinery utilization statistics. And the world oil production figures. And, of course, the figures on gasoline consumption. They have all been cleverly marked on the page for just this purpose.
2. Take one (1) frosty beer from the refrigerator. Those who do not have beer in the refrigerator may substitute a soft drink, a glass of white wine, or a hard cider. Do not attempt to replace the beer with Zima or wine coolers, however. These are known to cause your IQ to drop by 30 points.
3. Sit down in a comfortable chair with your beverage of choice.
4. Think for two minutes.
You too will be blessed, as if by heaven, with the easy answer: do not fool around with the stupid gas tax. No, I swear. It works every time.
To be sure, there is a worry: all the economists think that fooling with the gas tax is a ridiculous idea. And of course, when you are considering a policy, the last thing you want to do is consult people who study this sort of question for a living. Those are just the kind of ivory tower know-it-alls who will try to get you to go to the hospital to have your appendix removed just because you are spiking a fever and displaying Rovsing's sign. Myself, I don't throw in with all those out-of-touch surgeons; I put my faith in a good, old fashioned cup of tea.
But we also need to recognize that not every single thing eminent economists say is wrong. For example, I once asked Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama's economic advisors, what time it was. He said it was 3:00. He was absolutely correct--it was 3:00, which I know because he read it off the clock on the wall in the room where we were both standing.
Must we abandon common sense merely because economists occasionally speak it? No, I say, a thousand times no, no more than we would abandon children and dogs merely because Hitler was fond of them.
If you think for two minutes, you will realize that you have stumbled upon one of those extraordinary cases where people who have spent their whole lives studying a subject actually understand it as well as, or even better than, people who have spent their whole lives scheming to get their hands on as much political power as possible. Perhaps you thought that you, like most people, would go your whole life without encountering such an unlikely situation, but now it is upon you. I say, trust your heart. Throw your lot in with the economists, and stick to your guns even when they start talking about regression coefficients. No matter how frightening your fellow travellers, finding the right course is easy--so easy that even a politician could do it. If only they would.
The government giveth, and the government taketh away
I agree with Kevin: forget playing with the gas tax, and focus on eliminating all the of the ridiculous direct subsidies to oil companies. I promise, they'll keep pumping the stuff anyway.
Update Alex Knapp had the original thought; forgot to link him too. Let me correct that error now.
May 5, 2008
Kindling a flame in my heart
All right, I've had the Kindle for a couple of weeks now. What do I think?
Love it. Best thing since sliced bread.
Yes, I have the same complaint everyone else does: it's easy to hit the "next page" button while you're handling it. Luckily, it's also easy to hit the "previous page" button; doing so has perhaps eaten up ten seconds over the last two weeks. Also, I feel like it could be slightly bigger.
How do I love it? Let me count the ways:
1. E-ink. It's as easy on the eyes as a book. Actually easier, because you can resize the text.
2. Newspaper subscriptions. I take three: the Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Yes, I could read them for free online. But that isn't like reading a newspaper; it's like reading a website. I read newspapers on the Kindle the way I read print ones, which is to say I at least scan each headline. This means I catch things I otherwise wouldn't have.
3. Highlighting, notes, and bookmarks. Invaluable for blogging: I can mark something I'm reading to blog later. That's how I wrote the recent entry on gangs. Of course, you can do this on print books, but then you end up with a zillion flags, and paging through to find your place.
4. Portability. I am now never without a lot of reading material. Anyone who travels frequently should have one. But I carry mine with me everywhere, so I can whip it out whenever I have down time. It weighs practically nothing, and tucks in a smallish purse.
5. Instant shopping. If I want a book, and it's available on Kindle, I have it immediately. Though unless you watch yourself, this is a feature as well as a bug.
6. Basic web. I can check gmail and Wikipedia wherever I am on free wireless.
7. Table of contents. I can go straight to the chapter or article I want without paging for it.
8. One handed reading. I like to read propped up on one arm, or hanging onto the pole in the train, or while drinking coffee outside; because I only need to hit a button to page forward, this is easier than doing it with a print book.
9. Space. My apartment is basically at book capacity. The Kindle means I'm not bringing more unstorable books into the house.
10. Search. Kind of remember a phrase in a book? Now you can search the whole book for it instead of desperately leafing through in hopes that it catches your eye.
The only real caution I have is to dog-ear your page before you let a friend look at it. Otherwise they'll lose your place. Of course, this is true of print books as well. Also, you can't read it in the bath. But other than that, it's practically perfect. Do I miss the tactile sensation of a book? Not really. For me, reading is mostly about the words, not the paper.
Update Forgot another benefit: cheap books. Kindle books typically trade from 20-50% less than print.
Update II Readers note that you can too, read it in the bathtub, courtesy of the folks at Ziploc.
Update III Some things you can't do with a Kindle. It may not cure cancer, but it kind of is a religious experience.
Who will reap the benefits of a gas tax holiday?
Where have you been, Megan, my readers cry! Here it's been days since the gas tax became an issue, and you haven't weighed in. What are we to make of all these confusing arguments? How can you abandon us when our head aches so?
Okay, well, I did get several emails asking me to explain the debate.
Like about a zillion economists and most other people who were not whacked upside the head with a stupid stick, I think it's worse-than-useless pandering. There's not so much a debate as a bunch of economists saying "this is bad policy" and two campaigns sticking their fingers in their ears, saying "lalalalalalalalalal I can't HEAR you!"
However, there is apparently some interest in a) how we know who bears the cost of the gas tax and b) more posts with charts. And there's nothing I like doing more than drawing charts. It's rather Econ 101, so economists can skip it, as can anyone who likes to snot in a sophisticated manner about how simplistic Econ 101 is. For those who are interested, it's after the jump. The rest of you go and write indignant letters to your congressmen telling them not to reduce the gas tax.
A number of readers want to know what I think about this. Short answer: I think they are nuts whose movement is going nowhere. In one hundred years, they will be remembered with the same fond amusement as we give to the Victorians who spent time investigating whether rocks had spirits, and the existence of fairies.
Other readers want to know what I think of the tragic death of Eight Belles at this year's Kentucky Derby. For those who don't know, the filly fractured both her ankles at the finish after coming in second. PETA is claiming that the horse was injured and the jockey should have pulled up.
I was sick and slept through the race, so I can't comment on the jockey's conduct. I'm not against horse racing per se; anyone who has ever worked with show horses or race horses knows that the good ones really love what they do. They sort of are like human athletes--they are extremely competitive and they like to perform. Balky horses who feel kind of middling about running flat out don't make it to the Derby.
The risk of injury is tragic--particularly because horses can't survive any serious injury to their legs. But I don't see that risk as a reason to stop horseracing, when racehorses are extraordinarily well treated and have lives that are, as near as we can determine, pretty enjoyable for them.
I do, however, think that humans have a responsibility to the animals we breed. I'm not sure that we should race two and three year olds, who are lovely and fast, but also have bones that aren't fully formed and may be more vulnerable to injury. I'm very sure that we should make all the racecourses in America switch to synthetic track. I also think eventers should rip up their courses and replace the picturesque stone walls with something less liable to catastrophic injury.
Too, I think we should take a long, hard look at extreme breeding. I feel this way about show dogs, which are getting more inbred and disease-ridden with every passing year as breeders obsessively try for perfect physical characteristics at the expense of health--and at least in the breed I'm familiar with, bullmastiffs, keep making the dogs bigger even though this makes joint trouble much more likely.
Racehorses, too, are often bred for speed and racing spirit to the exclusion of nearly everything else. If you value speed over soundness, you're going to end up with a lot more injuries. Even if you don't care about the horses, there are human jockeys that also often get hurt when this happens.
Horse people really, really love their animals--it's ridiculous to put them in the same basket with industrial pig farmers. But they're also wrapped in an insular community, which tends to lead to complacence: as long as all those other horse lovers are doing what I do, then it must be all right. Plus there's a collective action problem--one breeder can't breed horses for soundness if everyone else is shopping only on performance. With all the bad publicity various corners of the horse world have recently had, I hope that the equine world will get serious about policing its collective action problem and set up tougher standards that alleviate some of these problems.
Reasons for the netroots to love Fox News
They're pounding the hell out of Hillary this afternoon. I've never seen such blatant editorializing about a candidate, even on Fox News--someone just said "she thinks she can get away with whatever she wants" in re the Michigan delegates. They also display very visible regret when forced to mention that she's catching up in the delegate count. If the station really does have secret Republican Mind Control Rays over the independents, Obama just got a five point bump.
False contempt
Matt Yglesias points out just how affected most of the wide-eyed contempt put on by New York snobs is:
Ezra Klein's right to bemoan the sneering condescension in this NYT piece on suburban chain restaurants. For me, this is made all the worse by the knowledge that the attitude of contempt is almost certainly fake. I was actually born and raised in Manhattan by fancy-pants parents who wouldn't dream of darkening the door of an Outback Steakhouse. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge by father has never tasted the joys of Chili's (those two are my favorites).
All of which has mostly made me aware of how rare this is. Most of New York City's elitists grew up in very conventional middle class suburbs and then moved to the city sometime after college. They may look like -- indeed, be -- Greenpoint hipsters now, but they come from the same places as all the other college educated white people in this country.
I was raised on the Upper West side by a woman who made her own croissants. I am actually one of the three people in the country who is neither an Orthodox Jew, nor living in a vegetarian cult, and yet has never eaten in an Outback Steakhouse. And there is nothing--nothing--more grating than born again food snobs writing articles like this.
First of all, as Matt points out, the odds that you grew up like we did, without darkening the door of a chain restaurant, are slim-to-none. I probably meet someone else who was raised in Manhattan an average of once or twice a year. Raising two children in a six room apartment and paying half a million dollars to educate them is the province of a few dedicated hobbyists.
Second of all, if there's anything sadder than people who act like having grown up in New York makes them the apex of the social universe, it's people who act like this when they grew up in Shaker Heights.
And third of all, those of us who enjoyed that rare experience have a genuine sense of the exotic when confronting a suburban chain restaurant. I've been on multiple first-time excursions to various chain restaurants with native New Yorkers, and the modal reaction is to wriggle with joy like a small puppy. I have no idea why it should be so exciting to eat what is basically decent hotel food, but I suspect we all have a lingering sense of having been left out of some vast national shared experience.
Besides, I have eaten perfectly good meals at places like Ruby Tuesday's, Friendy's, Legal Seafoods, and Chili's. I like Pizza Hut breadsticks, KFC mashed potatoes, and Houlihan's stuffed mushrooms, even though these things were not easily available when I was growing up. In fact, that article made me so indignant that I'd march out right now and eat at Outback Steakhouse right now, if they had more vegan options.
May 3, 2008
Sad records
I've been told everything's larger than life in Dubai, but Jesus, this is horrible.
May 2, 2008
Weekend media alert
UK readers can see me talking about American investment in Northern Ireland tomorrow at noon on the BBC. Those who are not located on the green and pleasant isle can apparently stream same starting at 8 am.
Maximal justice is minimal
Every so often, I watch Law and Order, and see Sam Waterston twist the law somehow to catch a bad guy, and I get that happy sense of victory you do when the cinematic good guys win.
Somewhat later, reality sets in. The law isn't a game. (I know lawyers will disagree with me--so, okay, the law shouldn't be a game.) Obviously, the law is complicated, there will always be boundary cases where a hard law produces and unsatisfying result, and so forth. But we shouldn't celebrate this tendency.
I don't fault only the prosecutors, by any means--it's not clear to me why we have the exclusionary rule, rather than some other means of punishing government officials who poke their nose where it doesn't belong. The officials are, after all, not the ones who actually suffer when a guilty person goes free because they pushed the boundaries of a warrant. And I'm pretty unexcited about restricting juries from hearing various forms of evidence because it might taint their delicate little minds.
But there is a qualitative difference. A defender's job is to get his client off. A prosecutor's job is to serve the public, and the law, not to rack up convictions. Nor to find inventive ways to stack the deck against defendants. Prosecutors abuse their power, often from the best of motives, and worse, we hand them the motives by demanding jail time rather than actual justice.
Of course, it strikes a special chord in my heart when the abuser is the tax man.
Occasionally tax issues arise that affect many taxpayers. Tax shelters, for example, can be sold to hundreds of individuals. It doesn't make sense to issue hundreds of identical decisions. To avoid results like the 90 virtually identical Antarctica foreign earned income exclusion decisions that have been issued in the last couple of years, the IRS and taxpayers agreed to resolve a set of cases involving the "Kersting" tax shelters. After test cases were tried, the parties agreed to "stipulate" the remaining cases based on the result of the test cases.
Then the IRS attorneys decided to stack the deck. They worked out a favorable secret settlement with the taxpayers in the test case. Perhaps not coincidentally, the taxpayers then didn't defend the shelter successfully.
The Tax Court had resisted applying the secret settlement to all similar taxpayers, but following a reversal by the Ninth Circuit, they changed their mind. The Hartman decision issued yesterday ordered the IRS to apply this secret settlement to all of the taxpayers involved in the shelter to correct "a fraud on the Court." It is no small group; according to the tax court's decision yesterday: "As of Mar. 13, 2008, 1,173 Kersting project cases remained on the Court's inventory of docketed cases in which decisions have never been entered."
The court ordered the IRS to administratively adjust the accounts of all of the Kersting project taxpayers.
Paul Caron also has a long post on it, excerpting the Court's decision, which reads in part:
“Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.” ... “To say to these appellants, ‘The joke is on you. You shouldn’t have trusted us,’ is hardly worthy of our great Government.” To tell Kersting project petitioners they should not have trusted respondent to try the test cases honestly and fairly and the Tax Court to formulate an appropriate sanction when respondent failed to do so would be equally unworthy. ... “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” ...
Respondent’s attorneys committed a fraud on the Tax Court during the Kersting test case proceedings that was a fraud on the Court in every case bound by the results of the test cases. Extending to every petitioner whose case was bound by the results of the Kersting project test cases, by piggyback agreement or the Court’s order to show cause procedure, the benefit of the Thompson settlement strikes us as an appropriate accommodation of the competing considerations; it is a sanction for the misconduct that is consistent with Dixon V and is “no more than necessary” to maintain public trust in the judicial process that employs test case procedures. ... We are protective of the integrity of our judicial process and concerned about deterrence. We are “entitled to send a message, loud and clear.” .... We hold that sanctions should be imposed in the cases of all Kersting project petitioners in which stipulated decisions were entered on or after June 10, 1985, the date the Kersting project test case proceedings began.
In an email, Paul follows up:
As often happens in big cases (because there is no Tax Court procedure for class actions), the IRS and investors in this tax shelter agreed to try one case as the "test case" to decide the issues and then the other cases would follow it. But the IRS reached a "secret settlement" with the test case taxpayers, thereby screwing the taxpayers in the other 1,300 cases. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit exposed all of this and ordered the Tax Court to sanction the IRS by imposing the same settlement on the remaining taxpayers. But the IRS entered into settlements with some of the other taxpayers on less favorable terms (to the taxpayers), and the Tax Court in the earlier Lewis opinion refused to reopen those settlements. The Tax Court yesterday changed its mind, finding that the IRS's conduct was so sleazy that it should impose the same sanction in all 1,300 cases.
The opinion is extraordinary -- it is rare for a tax court judge to quote ethics and morality, via Aristotle, Hobbes, Rawls, in criticizing the IRS's conduct (page 74 of the opinion).
It's nice to see a court reminding the IRS that its mission is not to collect the most taxes from the most people, but to ensure that tax law is accurately and fairly applied.
Fewer dead babies
A follow up to Andrew's post on Victorian death images notes:
In regards to the Victorian post-mortem photographs, notice how very, very many of them are children. Sometimes infants, sometimes toddlers or school-age kids, but children. Not teenagers who might have been working (it was the Victorian era, after all), not young adults who might have died by violence that perhaps they might have been partially responsible for. Children. I'm an ICU physician in a busy pediatric intensive care unit. I've seen enough children die to last me the rest of my or anybody else's life. I'm as aware as anyone what an awful, nearly-irrecoverable mess we in this country have made of the environment, of national and global politics, of the economy.
But one thing tells me that there's a chance for humanity - so many fewer dead children.
The thing that struck me is how sickly the children in the photos are, dead and living. Oversized heads, pinched faces, scrawny bodies. Presumably the legacy of poorer nutrition and endemic disease. It's really astonishing how lucky today's Americans have been in both time and space.
[In 2008] There were 64 cases from January through April 25, more than in all of 2006 and the highest number during that four-month period since 2001. None have yet proved fatal, but officials said they expected the total to keep rising.
“We haven’t seen the end of this,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fourteen patients, or 22 percent, have been hospitalized, mostly for pneumonia.
If more parents stop vaccinating their children, here's a preview (postview) of what things might look like:
Before 1963, when the vaccine became available in this country, there were three million to four million cases of measles annually. The disease killed 400 to 500 children a year and put 48,000 in the hospital.
The vaccine wiped out transmission here by 2000, but the disease can easily be imported because there are so many cases overseas. Worldwide, measles still kills 242,000 children a year.
Pertussis is now killing, as best we can determine, something like a dozen infants a year. Polio is still not gone from the world, and seems to be making something of a comeback this year. The list goes on--American parents who have never seen an epidemic, because their parents vaccinated them, are putting everyone's children, and not a few adults, at risk.
I assume this is self limiting--if anti-vaccination goes far enough, a bunch of unvaccinated kids will die, and then their parents will be more scared of the disease than the vaccine. But it would be really nice if we could convince them in some other way than leaving them with a bunch of dead kids.
And it would really help if our politicians would take the first step by not encouraging their beliefs.
Food notes
"Supply is low, demand is high. We have gone from three meals a day to two. Then it will be one meal. Then we will die," said Yoseph Yilak, head of the local [Ethiopian] grain traders' association. "Why is the world taking corn for fuel? It will mean the death of many people."
The problem is completely overblown in the US, where food is just not that large a piece of peoples' budgets. But it is an enormous problem in the developing world, particularly in Africa, where people can't compete with US demand for inefficiently produced ethanol, and Asian demand for meat. I've started hearing scattered comparisons to the Irish famine, when the oddly (government) structured markets meant that the country was a net grain exporter while two million of its citizens either starved or migrated. Unfortunately, migration has tightened up quite a bit since then; hungry Africans largely have nowhere to go.
What can we do? Start by converting our food aid to cash to encourage local production, rather than shipping our grain there. Increase food aid, obviously. Refuse to buy ethanol, if that's even possible--it definitely isn't in places where it's a mandatory additive, and I'm not sure it's possible anywhere. End (oh, pipe dream!) our ridiculous ethanol subsidies. Try to drive a little less.
One thing you can do--and it's a suggestion, not a moral pronouncement, so please, no anti-vegetarian screeds--is cut down on your meat consumption. Meat is a gigantic consumer of grain, and dairy and eggs are also gigantic grain sucks. If most Americans dropped their meat consumption back to three or four days a week, or went vegan one day a week, this would have a measurable impact on the world price of grain. Obviously, on an individual basis, it's not much--but every pound of meat you don't eat is many pounds of grain that go back on the market to feed someone else.
Yes, yes, I know, this sounds all hippy-dippy, like the three weeks in 1976 when your Mom made you boycott grapes and eat hempseed cereal. And obviously, this is not a long-term solution, since we hope that the market will eventually adjust and provide more supply. But in the shortish term, it might help the market adjust by some way other than starving some of the customers until they no longer demand . . . well, anything.
Also, you may have noticed that meat is getting kind of pricey. Best bet is that it will go up before it goes down, since meat is essentially grain cubed, with a time lag. Get a good cookbook--I recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian--and you'll barely notice that you're eating less meat. I'm not urging anyone to discover the joys of marinated tempeh breakfast strips (mmmmm . . . tempeh), but there are lots of vegetarian foods that you would eat even if they weren't vegetarian, just because they're really good. Macaroni and cheese, potato soup, mushroom pie? What's not to love?
You can also use less meat when you cook with it--if you think vegetarian food is too much like joining the Viet Cong, may I point you to the excellent Betty Crocker 1950 Picture Cookbook, which you definitely couldn't accuse of being too culinarily avant garde. It's rife with comfort food designed in an era when people watched the amount of eggs, cream, and meat they used, because those things were expensive. It's especially good if you don't really know how to cook, because it was basically designed for new brides. Also, the advice for bored housewives in the back is alone worth the cost of the book.
And in a really weird roundabout way, you might help lower your gas bill; grain needs fertilizer (especially in Africa) and fertilizer needs natural gas. It's pretty much an all-around win.
Sheer genius
If you are ever tempted to make the silly argument that something obviously works or a company wouldn't have done it . . . well, just focus on this.
No right
A number of people have argued that since prostitution was illegal, and Palfrey knew she was risking jail, I have no right to be indignant that she got caught, and sentenced to jail, and then killed herself rather than take her sentence like a man. Or rather, like a man would take it if men got sentenced to jail for their involvement with the prostitution industry.
They have further argued that "rage" is not the proper response to the illegality of something that a majority of my fellow citizens think should be illegal.
I just can't accept that. Would I apply the same logic to economic crimes in the Soviet Union, ca. 1925? Would I say of a shop owner who killed himself rather than face the gulag, "Well, you can't blame the state--he knew the risks when he started buying and selling for profit."
No, because I don't recognize the state's right to criminalize trade--more deeply, I don't recognize the right of the state to interfere in voluntary transactions between consenting adults that do not directly and concretely harm a third party. Not harm as in "Comrade Bakunin needs many more customers at his state store", but harm as in "The poison is leaching onto the property next door."
When an unjust law makes someone's life so unendurable that they end it, I lay much of the responsibility at the foot of the law, the system that contributed. Yes, clinical depression is complicated. But suicide very often has a traumatic trigger, and it's pretty clear that the trigger here was the unnecessary prosecution of a woman who wasn't doing anything the government had any business interfering with. I can understand perfectly the complaint that you don't want a brothel in your neighborhood--but that's a zoning problem, and anyway, she was running a call girl ring. The finer hotels in our nation's capitol have not been noticeably degraded by the presence of the occasional young and improbably well dressed woman tapping discreetly at the doors to a few of their rooms.
And I really can't accept the notion that I'm not entitled to be enraged at a law that a majority support. First of all, I reserve the right to be enraged when the paper boy drops my newspaper on the steps instead of the vestibule and passersby steal it. And second of all, I think that there are a lot of sorts of laws that don't become more just because a majority likes them. Slavery was not okay because a majority of southerners supported it. Imprisoning small traders was not okay because a majority of Soviet Russians hated them. Etc. I don't think that anti-prostitution laws are on the same level of injustice as slavery--but I do think that they are among the things the state has no business interfering in. Especially when it is discreet and out of the public eye, as this woman's business was. Her employees were not exploited streetwalkers, and she was not a pimp beating them up for their cash. Nor were they bothering anyone who didn't want to employ a prostitute.
Don't get me wrong--I take a very dim view of married men who consort with prostitutes, and mere words are inadequate to describe what would follow if I found out my husband had done so. But I certainly wouldn't blame the prostitute, nor think that she should be arrested while my husband got out of jail. Nor would I think that the real problem lay, not in my jerk of an imaginary husband, but in the state's failure to adequately police the prostitution industry.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be
The campaign isn't over, and it's already in reruns:
First, I will just outsource the invidious comparisons to Ezra Klein:
DC Madam who ran a prostitution ring? Shamed, sentence to decades in prison, and now dead by apparent suicide.
David Vitter, Republican Senator who used said prostitution ring? Still a US Senator.
Now onto the fact that this woman was hounded into prison, broken, and driven to take her own life by a state intent upon ruining this woman for . . . arranging a sexual transaction between two consenting adults.
For this, we have law enforcement? Are there no more rapists roaming our streets? Have murders ceased to be a problem in this fair land, this shining city on a hill? Did all the burglars join Criminals Anonymous? Have the drunk drivers decided to binge only in the comfort of their own living room? Has embezzling stopped? Are the human filth who mug old ladies all safely behind bars? Do no boiler room scams still lurk in the nation's seedier industrial parks? Because, you know, even if I thought prostitution should be illegal . . . well, chaps, I'd put it on the goddamn back burner until all the crimes involving thugs attacking, defrauding, or stealing from innocent, non-consenting citizens had been solved.
To be fair, no one's tried to mug me for several months. But I hear that there are still a few small matters right here in our nation's capital that should be cleared up before we can, in good conscience, turn to the important task of preventing women from demanding cash for something other women only do for fun. Love the Madonna, hate the Whore?
Was "saving" women from prostitution so important that we needed to make a woman's life no longer worth living? Do we really need to kill the women in order to save them? Because last time I heard, we thought it was kind of awful when the Taliban did those things.
Thursday random music note
If there's one thing that Kathy G. and I can agree on, it's that Dolly Parton is pretty remarkable, both as a person, and as a musician. Music snobs who wish to challenge this statement are invited to send their seconds around to my lodgings this evening.
I highly encourage you to read the whole post--it's got some terrific YouTube clips, including, I am not making this up, Dolly singing "After the Gold Rush" with Linda Ronstadt and EmmyLou Harris. As a passionate fan of the original, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, though it definitely has novelty appeal. But the rest are definitely fascinating, especially the early clips--I'd never seen what she looked like when she was starting out.
My modest contribution is this song, which is . . . how else can I put this . . . adorable.
I hereby dub the practice of sharing a single MacBook power cord between two or more users the "Scuba"
Health care costs: no, not insurers' fault either
News flash: health care costs so much because we consume so much, not because evil insurers are price-gouging:
Myth No. 1: Insurers' profits are responsible for our health care costs.
This is the most pervasive and most crowd-pleasing of the health care myths. The profits of the big health insurance companies are central to the rhetoric of the health care debate, figuring heavily in the Democratic primary campaign. Barack Obama's platform includes a promise to force insurers to spend enough on care "instead of keeping exorbitant amounts for profits and administration." Michael Moore, the director of Sicko, has hammered the point repeatedly, thundering about how insurers maximize profits by "providing as little care as possible."
The problem here is that between them the five biggest health insurers—UnitedHealthCare, Wellpoint, Aetna, Humana, and Cigna—which cover 105 million members, last year had profits between them of $11.8 billion. This is not a small number; these are very profitable companies. But total U.S. health care costs last year were in the area of $2.3 trillion.
So, with a membership that included a little more than half of the Americans covered by private insurance, these five insurers' profits came to 0.5 percent of total health care costs. (One interesting point of comparison: In 2006, the income earned by the 50 biggest nonprofit hospitals alone came out at $4 billion.)
What's sauce for the goose . . .
In the comments to yesterday's post about Al Franken's tax woes, Curmudgeon asks:
Post Enron, I thought 'I just did what my accountants said' was no longer a valid excuse - legally or in the court of public opinion. Isn't this is the same excuse Skilling and Lay used?
This is not quite the same thing. For starters, as I undertand it, Al Franken wasn't engaging in concealing his financial position--he paid taxes on the income in Minnesota, when he should have paid taxes on it in seventeen different states. For another, the CEO of a corporation should expect to be reasonably familiar with the principles of financial accounting, and the various implications of moving substantial liabilities off balance sheet. Expecting a comedian to understand the tax law is somewhat less reasonable.
People pay their accountants to look at their records and tell them whom, and how much, to pay. Al Franken reasonably relied on his accountant to tell him to do the right thing. If he'd tried to conceal the income, I wouldn't have much sympathy, but he didn't. He just paid the taxes to the wrong place.
I sometimes have some ambivalence about the Law, which is far beyond my control these days. Like most parents, I'm frequently startled by the unexpected turn my 18-year-old offspring takes. (I'm happy to say that my 15-year-old offspring—my daughter, Ariel Godwin—surprises me at least as often, although invariably in happier ways.) When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison.
Overall, though, I'm content that the Law has as much popcult traction as it does. My feeling is that "Never Again" loses its meaning if we don't regularly remind ourselves of the terrible inflection point marked in human culture by the Holocaust. Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror—well, I think Nazi Germany does count as a first in that regard.
And to a great extent, our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again. Key to that obligation is remembering, which is what Godwin's Law is all about.
It’s a little depressing, on multiple levels, to see Jessica Valenti and Pam Spaulding celebrating because protesters at Smith College managed to shout down some bigoted halfwit who’d been invited to give a speech to the College Republican group on campus. Apparently, the “awesome feminists of Smith forced [anti-gay speaker Ryan] Sorba out after a mere twenty minutes of speaking, when he was drowned out by protesters.”
It’s sad first at a principled level, because two women who student feminists around the country look to as guides are endorsing the utterly illiberal idea that the proper response to bad speech—and after skimming a draft of Sorba’s preposterous forthcoming book, I can confirm that his remarks were destined to be both loathesome and stupid—is to silence the speaker. The man’s views may be repulsive, but the students who invited him were entitled to have an opportunity to evaluate those views and come to their own conclusions about their merits. Indeed, had the protesters sent in a couple of halfway-bright students from the biology and philosophy departments during Q&A, I’m confident they could have made the poverty of his reasoning embarrassingly clear to all in attendance. It probably would have made a hell of a YouTube clip, as well. Instead, by choosing bullying over persuasion, they handed this jackass the moral high ground, for what I can only assume is the first and last time in his life.
It’s also sad at the tactical level, because it shows how little some folks have learned from a decade of David Horowitz’s antics. Congratulations, guys: You’ve just elevated this obscure clown into the online right’s celebrity du jour. I’m glad you enjoy the video clip of the students shouting Sorba down so much, because you’re about to see a lot of it, on a hundred conservative blogs, as proof that those awful boorish feminists are so afraid of Sorba’s “ideas” that they’re unwilling to engage him in debate, or indeed, to even let anyone hear whatever “devastating” case he was planning to make. How many times does this scenario have to play out before people start to recognize that it always ends up as a PR coup for the supporters of the silenced speaker?
. . .
Conservatives think Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are “hate speech”. “Men’s rights” activists say feminists regularly engage in hate speech. Presumably they, too, would like to send a message that those speakers are unwelcome on their campuses. You can say “well, their view is wrong and the Smith students’ view is correct,” but insofar as the disagreement is still there, this is pretty unhelpful: Everyone thinks they’re right, and so everyone feels entitled to drown out the speech they dislike. You end up with the meaningless principle: “Free speech, except when we feel strongly enough about how terrible and wrong it is.”
I suppose that works out fine in Northampton: If someone’s invading your safe space, someone whose ideas and way of life are not just wrong but deeply abhorrent, an assault on your identity and community by their very presence, then the community can hound them out—at least if enough people feel strongly enough about it. But I’m guessing LGBT folks in the rest of America might be less sanguine about living under that set of rules.
I don't know if it's new, or if I'm just projecting, but why do so many people seem to be rejecting the notion of civilized discourse as a process? Too many people seem to view speech mostly as a weapon--useful only insofar as it can be used to attack your enemies. Would the world really be a better place if we all believed Marsh's adage that language was given to us to enable us to conceal our thoughts?
It's stupid because if your ideas really are that obviously superior, you oughtn't to need to shout someone else down--the act betrays a certain sneaking suspicion that your ideas mightn't be good enough to succeed through persuasion. And might I add that personally, I'm kind of sickened by the notion that women need a special "safe space" for discussion. All discourse should strive to be civilized, but my delicate little female psyche doesn't need protection from stupid ideas, thank you very much. Having not ridden on a fast train or engaged in vigorous athletics recently, my feminine mind is still (just barely!) strong enough to withstand their assault.
It's also stupid because you can't run a country this way, especially when you're in a small minority. There is no shortcut to consensus; you can't muscle your way to political legitimacy. Indeed, that's why dictators are so keen to shut down dissent.
An open letter to Cadbury-Schweppes
Two days ago, I discovered your new Cherry Chocolate Diet Doctor Pepper. My heart leaped. A song sprang to my lips. Finally, something to break the tedious monotony of the 97 Diet Cokes I consume every day. Once, often twice a day, I have been trekking down to the CVS in my office building that carries your product to replenish my stock.
Today, I discover that you are planning to discontinue this product--nay, that you already have, as today is May First, and Wikipedia states that you are only producing it through April.
I am shocked and hurt. I grieve. I thought we'd found something beautiful together, and yet as soon as I give my heart to you, you shamelessly break it. Ain't I a woman? If you prick me, do I not bleed? Have you no shame, sir? At long last, have you no shame?
Well, I have none. I beg. I plead. I grovel and abase myself. Please do not discontinue my new favorite soda.
Or at least, tell me where I can buy a few cases.
Sincerely,
Megan McArdle
Awesome
Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC:
Here's a list of reasons that won't work. More to the point, OPEC isn't restricting production right now; pretty much everyone is working their capacity flat out. Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC for not producing oil from wells they haven't drilled yet. Next: a lawsuit against Ford for not building us the cool flying cars we were promised in The Jetsons. I WANT MY FLYING CAR!!!!
Can management be taught?
Synopsis: No.
Daniel Davies has an interesting post which starts:
I think that actually, there probably is “a general skill called management which works in any and all domains”, and, just to raise the tariff and secure gold medal position for myself in the Steven Landsburg Memorial Mindless Contrariolympiad, I’ll also defend the proposition that this skill is pretty closely related to what they teach on MBA courses. But first a couple of remarks on Blackburn’s own “Myth of Management“.
In his very definition, Blackburn pretty much gives it away; he says that “[the myth of management] claims that people can be managed like warehouses and airports”. What does this even mean? How do you manage a warehouse or an airport if it’s impossible to manage people? If he had said “like machines” or even “like factories”, then it might have been comprehensible, but a warehouse which doesn’t have any people working in it is just a shed full of stuff and doesn’t require any management because no deliveries or shipments are being made. And an airport without people is just a warehouse for planes. Warehousing and transport are two very labour-intensive industries.
There are two possibilities here. One is merely that Blackburn is a snob – that writing as a professor of philosophy in the THES, he felt entitled to assume his audience would know that “people” meant “middle class people”, and would agree with the implicit assertion that “people” of this sort were capable of independent thought and could not be tied down, man, unlike the meat robots who packed their books for Amazon or swiped their tickets at Heathrow. But to assume this would be wildly uncharitable. The other, and I think more likely, explanation, is that Blackburn has no idea whatsoever about what managing a warehouse or an airport would entail, and no real interest in finding out.
I agree with Daniel at the fundamental level: management is a skill; many components of that skill are transferrable across industries; and it can be learned.
But I do not think it can be taught. Definitely not in an MBA course.
Your mileage may vary, of course. But in my opinion an MBA is a good way to get some very general analytical tools that you can build on when you actually get a job, a great way to meet future successful people who will help you get your next job, and a fantastic way to signal to future employers that you are smart and motivated enough to get into a good program. It's also a decent way to meet your future spouse, and a hell of a lot of fun. And of course, in America has become the most efficient way to pile up gargantuan quantities of student loans.
But a freshly minted Harvard MBA is, IMHO, barely more competent to manage a company than he was when he went in; there are a fair number I wouldn't trust with a warehouse. Some of them just aren't management material--me, for example. Others will learn, on the job, the combination of leadership skills and strategic thinking that make someone a good manager--or at least, hone the ones they already have. But two years of listening to teachers talk, no matter how many projects and management labs you garnish it with, is not, in my opinion, sufficient training to manage anything besides the task of getting yourself into a good company where you can learn the rest.
Of course, the individual programmers in such companies get salaries, but that objection confuses free content with free labor. Content, once produced, can be produced infinitely at near-zero cost; Red Hat and MySQL can give copies of their operating system and database, respectively, to anyone who wants them at near-zero cost. In contrast, labor is and always will be scarce. Obviously, it would be insane to suggest that writers, musicians, programmers, and other creative professionals should provide their labor for free. As a freelance writer and sometime programmer, I would object to that as loudly as anyone. But on the other hand, virtually all the content I produce is given away for free, supported in some cases by 
However, I think Kurtz, like a lot of commentators on the changing media landscape, have an unjustified fetish for newsprint. This was prominently on display near the end of Kurtz's column:
So this stuff is increasing. The "all debt as a share of income" number is particularly worrying, as it's increased as much in the 2000-2005 period as in the 1979-2000 period. Megan might say it's all a function of asset bubbles, but economists I've talked to say the upper-bound estimate for the impact of asset market bubbles is half of the decline in the savings rate. Significant, but not, on its own, the whole story. So something is going on here. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Michael Mandel, the chief economist at Business Week, calls the following graphic "the world's scariest chart," and while I don't think it quite compares to this one, it's not far off
