Sins that cry out to heaven for justice

SAW AN EXCELLENT PANEL THIS EVENING ON THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE HOAX, featuring K.C. Johnson (author of Until Proven Innocent, with Stuart Taylor), James Coleman, Mike Gerhardt, Lyrissa Lidsky, and Angela Davis (no, not that Angela Davis), author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, which I bought on Kenneth Anderson's recommendation and which is excellent, especially as a companion to K.C.'s book. The discussion was excellent and very fair. Lots of talk about what Nifong got wrong, plus the important point that the kind of misconduct for which Nifong was disbarred and punished is committed regularly by prosecutors who almost always get off scot-free even when it's exposed. We really need a better mechanism for policing prosecutorial misconduct, and it's not clear what that should be -- independent audits of cases by a sort of inspector general? I'm not sure.

Learned behavior

What's to be done about those gaps in parenting skills? The parents aren't crack addicts, so social services will never get involved. This is where the schools have to step in. They have to level out these differences. All day nursery schools. Free books for toddlers.Towns need to offer parenting classes and organize babysitting cooperatives. Churches have to organize parent groups.

More government genius

Should female olympic athletes be tested for gender anomalies?

The testing was originally instituted in the 60s because communist countries were accused of trying to pass men off as women in order to dominate the Olympics, but as the website Feministe points out, "Note how Soundarajan is not identified as a male [in the New York Times]. The article uses feminine pronouns, for goodness' sake. Her only crime was being intersexed, having one of those genetic abnormalities that can cause the test to yield false results. In fact, it doesn't appear that there are any cases of this kind of screening revealing men cheating by pretending to be women at this level of competition at all."

Another reason this testing is fishy: the Olympic organizers aren't testing men for genetic abnormalities. Men with Klinefelter syndrome have two X chromosomes and Y, so are genetically more similar to women than the average man. Since scientists have already proved that these genetic differences give athletes no advantage, is there any way to call this situation anything other than outright discrimination?

This doesn't seem obviously unfair to me.  Women and men compete in different classes because if they didn't, there wouldn't be any female athletes at high levels.  Testosterone is crazy that way.  So there's no reason to worry that men with an extra X chromosome have an unfair advantage in their sport.  Call me when men start competing in rhythmic gymnastics.

Save a dollar or save a life: choose one.

That said, people on my side of the issue should admit that we could lower overall health care costs (or at least slow their rise) by having a true single-payer plan and putting most doctors on fixed salaries in small cooperatives, thereby altering their incentives to spend on wasteful capital expenditures.  (How many years would it take for costs to fall?)  That's not, however, what we'll be getting, so beware the bait and switch.  Under any plausible health care reform scenario, health care expenditures in America will rise rather than fall.  If only we had a betting market on this...

Addendum: Here is Arnold's more direct reply. 

I'll bite:  nationalizing the health care system to an NHS style system would probably save money, at least in the short run.  Obviously, if you paid doctors at the GS-15 rate, the system would cost a lot less.

But this raises a lot of questions:

• Is it politically feasible to put doctors on a GS-15 salary?  I don't see it happening; just look at the way that the AMA has skewed Medicare reimbursement rates.  And even if we did, I expect that over time you'd see a rather dramatic departure of top talent from the medical sector.  Some doctors are purely motivated by a desire to serve humanity.  Most aren't.  The government has a problem attracting the highest caliber workers because high-caliber workers do not want to be paid on a civil service scheme--not only because of the low average wage, but also because the system is set up to reward seniority and credentials, not talent. 
  
• Are government systems good at innovation?  C'mon.  The only vaguely innovative government sector is defense, which achieves that innovation by wasting money by the barrelful.  Yes, yes, the VA computer systems.  Against which, I give you . . . the rest of the government.  I can make any idea look swell if I get to pick the single successful example and ignore the other failures.
  
• Will an American national health care system look anything at all like the idealized version debated on the pages of liberal policy magazines?  No.  It will look like Medicare.
• How much money do administrative costs suck out of our wallets?  There are a lot of administrative costs in the private sector.  Advocates for single payer like to argue as if the entire administrative overhead of private insurance companies is dedicated to denying valid claims and culling sick patients out of their files.  But given that administrative costs are only 15% of private spending, and that most administrative costs are boring things like negotiating with doctors and processing claims, any savings here is likely to be a rounding error in the budget.
• How much of our capital spending is actually wasteful?  Today's wasteful capital spending is tomorrow's cheap MRI.

1. Reduce administrative costs
2. Squeeze out pharma profits
3. Preventative care

Annals of polemicism

It's hard for me to read this without thinking of Ken Rogoff's immortal open letter to Joseph Stiglitz.  Consider this passage from Professor Cochrane:

As usual, academics need to waste two paragraphs before getting to the point, which starts in the first bullet. To really enjoy this delicious prose you have to first read it all in one place.

• Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University's reputation in the face of its negative image. The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population, leading to the weakening of a number of struggling local economies in the service of globalized capital, and many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of "market democracy." 

 

Yes, there are people left on the planet who write and think this way, and no, I'm not making this up. Let's read this more closely and try to figure out what it means.

 

"Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University's reputation in the face of its negative image."

 

If you're wondering "what's their objection?", "how does a MFI hurt them?" you now have the answer.  Translated, "when we go to fashionable lefty cocktail parties in Venezuela, it's embarrassing to admit who signs our paychecks." Interestingly, the hundred people who signed this didn't have the guts even to say "we," referring to some nebulous "they" as the subject of the sentence.  Let's read this literally: "We don't really mind at all if there's a MFI on campus, but some of our other colleagues, who are too shy to sign this letter, find it all too embarrassing to admit where they work." If this is the reason for organizing a big protest perhaps someone has too much time on their hands.

 "Global south"

I'll just pick on this one as a stand-in for all the jargon in this letter.  What does this oxymoron mean, and why do the letter writers use it?  We used to say what we meant, "poor countries. " That became unfashionable, in part because poverty is sometimes a bit of your own doing and not a state of pure victimhood.  So, it became polite to call dysfunctional backwaters "developing." That was already a lie (or at best highly wishful thinking) since the whole point is that they aren't developing.  But now bien-pensant circles don't want to endorse "development" as a worthwhile goal anymore.   "South" - well, nice places like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are there too (at least from a curiously North-American and European-centric perspective).  So now it's called "global south," which though rather poor as directions for actually getting anywhere, identifies the speaker as the caring sort of person who always uses the politically correct word.   

 

"The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades...."

 

Notice the interesting verb tense. Let's call it the "accusatory passive." "Has been put in place.." By who, I (or any decent writer) would want to know?  Unnamed dark forces are at work.

 

"Many would argue that they have been negative for much of
the world's population... weakening ... struggling local economies"

 

I can think of lots of words to describe what's going on in, say, China and India, as well as what happened previously to countries that adopted the "neoliberal global order" like Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Billions of people are leading dramatically freer, healthier, longer and more prosperous lives than they were a generation ago.

 

Of course, we all face plenty of problems. I worry about environmental catastrophes, and their political, social and economic aftermath.  Many people are suffering, primarily in pockets of kleptocracy and anarchy.  Life's pretty bleak about 5 blocks west of the University of Chicago. In my professional life, I worry about inflation, chaotic markets, and their possible death by regulation. There is a lot for thoughtful economists and social scientists to do. But honestly, do we really yearn to send a billion Chinese back to their "local economies," trying to eke a meager living out of a quarter acre of rice paddy, under the iron grip of some local bureaucrat? I mean, the Mao caps and Che shirts are cool and all, but millions of people starved to death.

 

This is just the big lie theory at work. Say something often enough and people will start to believe it. It helps especially if what you say is vague and meaningless.

Why aren't there hordes of economists studying meaningful alternatives to market capitalism?  Because we've been experimenting with various other systems--both localism and extreme centralization--for over a century, and the experiment produces the same damn result every single time:  human lives that are nasty, brutish, and short.  And no matter what the professors who signed the Milton Friedman letter may believe, we haven't discovered any alternative to neoliberal policies, other than "be sitting on commodities during a boom", which is good luck, but not really good advice.  The problem with neoliberal policies was not that they drove people into poverty, but that they weren't nearly as effective at driving people out again as we once hoped.  Yet they are still more effective than anything else we've tried.

Neoliberal policies are hated in poor countries because they are associated with economic pain.  But the association in most peoples' mind runs the wrong way, as Ken Rogoff pointed out:

Governments typically come to the IMF for financial assistance when they are having trouble finding buyers for their debt and when the value of their money is falling. The Stiglitzian prescription is to raise the profile of fiscal deficits, that is, to issue more debt and to print more money. You seem to believe that if a distressed government issues more currency, its citizens will suddenly think it more valuable. You seem to believe that when investors are no longer willing to hold a government's debt, all that needs to be done is to increase the supply and it will sell like hot cakes. We at the IMF--no, make that we on the Planet Earth--have considerable experience suggesting otherwise. We earthlings have found that when a country in fiscal distress tries to escape by printing more money, inflation rises, often uncontrollably. Uncontrolled inflation strangles growth, hurting the entire populace but, especially the indigent. The laws of economics may be different in your part of the gamma quadrant, but around here we find that when an almost bankrupt government fails to credibly constrain the time profile of its fiscal deficits, things generally get worse instead of better.

People in Nigeria, for example, tend to blame the Western bailout in the 1980s for the economic misery that followed.  But the economic misery was the result of the collapse in oil prices; the fiscal reforms were aimed at keeping a bad situation from getting even worse.

The idea that Chicago should scuttle the Milton Friedman Institute because it makes other professors unpopular with economic illiterates is shameful, and moreover, something that I presume few of these "scholars" would tolerate if the ignorant were targeting their own fields.  That this should be coming out of a university with Chicago's reputation for intellectual rigor is mortifying.

Morality and animal welfare

GDP: A few pictures are worth a book

Check out these maps of GDP

When you see the map, it becomes radically apparent just how firmly Britain was the root of the Industrial revolution.  With the lone exception of Japan, the darkest places on the map are either next to Britain, or former British colonies.  And aside from Saudi Arabia and Chile, all the growth seems to spread outward from those Anglosphere points of infection.  Nowhere, not even Saudi Arabia, has the income density of Western Europe and North America.

This map tells pretty much the same story, but adds a lot of new information:

GDP again seems to spread out from the Anglosphere infection--but only where there are ports.  Ten thousand years or so after the first humans built sailing ships for trade, the coast still matters immensely.  In fact, there are only two prosperous landlocked countries of any size:  Austria and Switzerland.  And at roughly 8 million people apiece, neither of them is what you would call "large".  It's telling that three out of four of Europe's landlocked countries are best known for their bank secrecy laws--an export that requires little effort to transport.  The energy savings of moving goods by water is so immense that a good coastline is a really good substitute for rich neighbors--think Chile.  Meanwhile, those who wonder why Africa remains mired in poverty can observe how few dark spots there are along the coasts.  In part this is horrible institutions, but it's also due to the fact that Africa has very few good sites for ports--the best ones are on the north and south of the continent.

The final map shows growth:

Growth is inversely correlated with wealth, but positively correlated with having rich neighbors.

It's a pity that geography is so rarely taught in schools above the third grade level--there's an enormous amount to learn about societies just from looking at maps.

Update  In the comments, Susan of Texas informs me that schools have started teaching geography again.  I'm glad to hear that we're finally rectifying a tragic mistake.

I know I saw that recession around here somewhere . . .

More than just a motto?

Your morning smile

Modern morals

Trade: should America go bi?

The dispiriting thing is that the talks could founder over the refusal to compromise, when the costs of compromise were indeed so low. (The political costs, I mean. When a country binds itself not to resort to protection, the economic costs are not just low but negative.) Governments no longer judge a successful Doha Round to be capable of delivering them a net political gain. Since that was the reason for the WTO in the first place, the game appears to be up.

Multilateral trade liberalization brought the world an awfully long way after 1945, but that era has come to an end. The trade-reform agenda is unfinished--especially in the developing world--but future progress, if any, will come from unilateral unreciprocated liberalization, or from discriminatory bilateral (or plurilateral) agreements, or some blend of the two. There has been a lot of the first lately, which is good. The danger lies with the second. It is a trend that the United States pioneered with its proliferating (until recently) regional FTAs. A rationale often offered for that approach was that regional FTAs were building blocks for broader multilateral liberalization, with the WTO presiding over the subsequent assembly. Skeptics said no: regional FTAs would complicate the system and create frictions that would make broader trade reform more, not less, difficult. I'd say the skeptics have been proven right.

The FTA tendency is capable, given an enfeebled WTO, of eventually unwinding some of what has been achieved over the past half-century. (On this, see Jagdish Bhagwati's new book.) If a growing China, India and Brazil follow the US example and use their muscle to develop their own hub-and-spoke networks of trade preference, the eventual costs in forgone trade and income could be great. The logic of trade protection never sleeps.

With Doha breathing its last, bilateral deals, or regional trade agreements, are the best liberalizers can hope for (though even that hope may be pretty anemic).  The traditional stance of ardent free-traders such as Clive and myself has been to oppose bilateral deals on the grounds that they obstruct broad multilateral action.  Well, now that broad multilateral action seems to be out of the question, we have to decide:  are they better than nothing at all?

I'm not sure.  On the one hand, they break down local interest groups that obstruct trade.  On the other hand, they can divert trade flows in ways that are even more distortionary than broad tariffs.  And they will probably create their own new interest groups--clothing retailers with relatives in the Panamanian garment trade, say--that will fight just as fiercely as the loathesome sugar lobby does today.

In pure theory, probably not.  On the other hand, bilateral deals with America could help some poor people in Latin America right now.  How many eggs am I willing to break in the hope of someday getting an omelette?

Compromise at work

The death of Doha

It's a small world after all

Marc Pesce delivers a few facts and a lot of breathless prose.

Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's time we've gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

...fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty...each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously...Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule...the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes...All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw. Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Pesce claims that cultural change is going to accelerate. I wonder what this means for educational and political institutions.

Your morning smile

Good news

The health of a nation

The fourth problem is a problem. (1) We as a country seem to believe in a relatively small government. (2) We also seem to believe that health care should be provided on the basis of how dire your need is rather than how thick your wallet is. (3) And we have good reason to suspect that our health care capabilities will become larger and better as time passes. (2) and (3) are inconsistent with (1). (1) and (3) are inconsistent with (2). (1) and (2) can go together only if (3) is false. I think that (3) is true. That leaves us with a societal choice to make: do we abandon (1) or abandon (2)? I favor throwing (1) over the side, but this is an important issue we can talk about.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Obama's economic plans: just say no (to much of it)

Obama calls for more tax benefits to individuals but more taxes on high-income earners. He would keep in place some of the Bush tax cuts and institute a permanent R&D credit. He would increase the maximum capital gains tax rate from 15% to 25%, tax hedge funds managers' share of their clients' earnings as ordinary income rather than capital gains, and implement a payroll tax surcharge on people who earn more than $250,000 annually.

On trade, Obama suggests renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, and implementing strong environmental and labor provisions in future trade deals. He wants to see a permanent renewable-energy tax credit to promote investment in wind and solar resources. He's in favor of legislation that would help workers join unions if they wish.

What do the two approaches have in common? Both could prove expensive. A recent study by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank, says both candidates "have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next 10 years"--Obama by $3.4 trillion, McCain by $5 trillion. The White House said Monday the federal deficit will reach a record $482 billion in fiscal year 2009--about $75 billion more than previously thought, thanks to the recent economic stimulus and economic downturn.

Comment problems again

It's not theft, it's public service

If James L. Harris really did what police say he did, then I would like to award him a Happy Mutant Criminal Award certificate. The 18-year-old is accused of stealing at least three Miami-Dade Transist buses, and driving them on their routes. Police say Harris wore a Miami-Dade Transit employee uniform, did not steal the fares, and returned the buses to the depot each night.

He's been charged with three counts each of third-degree grand theft and burglary of an occupied conveyance.

Why are they charging this guy?  It seems like they ought to hire him.  If only so that he can get the therapy he needs through Miami-Dade's no-doubt generous benefits package.

The meat of the issue

Do you scoff at those pale Tofu dogs in the health food aisles of the supermarket? Are you one of those people who taunt vegans by talking about Big Macs? A new study suggests that you should think about biting your tongue: According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it's soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can't even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing. (It should be noted, though, that not all vegan products are equally deceptive: a soy hot dog, in contrast, only fooled 37 percent of subjects. And I'm guessing the soy ice cream fooled nobody.)

The clever experiment went like this: a large group of people were given a "human values" test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on "social authority" - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the "vegetarian" sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on "social power values" tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system. The scientists also conducted a similar experiment with Pepsi. Sure enough, people who fit the Pepsi demographic - they think having an "exciting life" is very important - always preferred Pepsi, even when they were actually drinking a generic cola.

This research conforms to a growing body of evidence suggesting that our gustatory preferences are an incredibly subjective thing.

The thing is, I hate vegan sausage.  Of course, I wasn't super fond of non-vegan sausage, but vegan sausage is a mealy mess. 

On the other hand, this strikes me as broadly true.  I've cooked vegan food for a number of people who liked it as long as they didn't know it was vegan, but nonetheless look skeptical when another vegan meal is proposed.  Most of those people seem to have a sort of determination not to like anything except meat, as if one bite of tofu might send them skipping out into the woods to dance round the meadows with the twee fairies. 

Illusory

Your afternoon smile

Budget woes

The sluggish U.S. economy and the cost of this year's economic stimulus package will push the federal budget deficit into record territory in fiscal year 2009, the White House said Monday.

The Office of Management and Budget said it expects next year's budget gap to soar to $482 billion, $75 billion higher than its previous estimate. The deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is projected to come in at $389 billion, $21 billion lower than the administration's February forecast.

To be sure, the OMB is believed to bias its estimates upward, so that it can have the joy of a downward adjustment at the mid-session budget review.  Nonetheless, this sends a rather clear message:  danger, Will Robinson!

As luck would have it, I was on a conference call with the McCain campaign this morning while they talked about their plans to make American jobs grow.  As such things go, relieving the deadweight loss of income taxes is not a terrible strategy.  The devil, however, is in the details.  Particularly the details about where the money is coming from to pay for the tax cuts.

The majority of the federal budget is spent on a few things:  entitlements, defense, and interest on the national debt.  Which of these, I asked, as so many have before, is McCain going to cut?  Well, erm, none.  Not needed.  We'll get there by attacking wasteful spending.  Then sometime in the comfortably distant future, we'll reform social security and draw down spending in Iraq.  It's all in The Plan. The problem is, they can't find an independant institution to sign off on the coherence of The Plan.

Not that Barack Obama impresses me all that much more--HIS plans rely on some rather heroic assumptions about health care costs.  Either way, we're in for a bumpy ride.  Can America get a second job?

Insiderism

Do not go gentle into that Dark Knight

Continue reading "Do not go gentle into that Dark Knight" »

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More media me

The Society-Agent problem

Here is what I think too many women who identify as feminist, including myself, too often overlook:

When you tell someone "it's not just you; it's millions of women," do not be surprised when that person gets hung up on "it's not just you," and takes no comfort from "it's millions of women."

Because I think when feminists talk to other women who are, at best, on the fence about feminism, they forget this. I know I forgot it. I forgot that one of the losses I had to grieve when I threw my lot in with feminism was the idea that I was special and that, as someone special, I could beat the system all on my own. I was cute enough. I was funny enough. I was a "guy's girl" enough. I was laid-back enough. I was smart enough. I liked fucking enough. I could totally do this, and just as soon as I did, oh, how I was going to have a good long laugh at all the pathetic loser women down there who couldn't.

Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?

And not just that! I wasn't just saying goodbye to everything I was going to do; I was also having to scale back the credit I had enjoyed giving myself for everything I had done.

Did I leave an abusive relationship?-Yes, and go me.

Was I able to leave that abusive relationship because of work other women had already done for me?-Uh, well, okay, kind of-but wait, why can't we talk about my awesome courage some more first?

Was I able to leave that abusive relationship because of certain privileges I held, privileges of which I was completely unaware?-I don't think you heard me! I LEFT AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP. IT WAS HARD. I DID A LOT OF WORK TO GET THERE. YOU CAN'T DENY MY ACHIEVEMENT LIKE THIS. I REJECT THIS JOY-KILLING NARRATIVE.

I also completely forgot how much importance this thing that you can call patriarchy or kyriarchy, I really don't give a shit which, places on individual women being special, standing out, being unique, being the exception, being the "atypical" girl, being a creature unlike any other.

So when you tell some woman, "You've got to get on board for the good of all of us," please do not forget that first, she's got to get okay about saying goodbye to a familiar pattern, that I'm-special pattern. Second, she's got to get okay with realizing that everything she has already accomplished to date may not be entirely the result of her innate and unique awesomeness. it may not even be entirely the result of her hard work and elbow grease. She may, in fact, have to share the good along wtih the bad.

If you don't hold out something for incentive here, if you don't suggest the possibility that smashing old patterns might even wind up benefiting her personally, odds are good that you can chalk another one up for the whatever-archy and subtract one for the cause. But at a minimum, if you're going to bother at all, then be prepared to sit there with her through a sort of mini-grief process, because hearing that it's not just you, when you've been taught to believe that it's all up to you, can be harder to accept than you might think. Obviously, this goes double for fans of Ayn Rand.

You lose something when you let go of an old pattern, and maybe you even needed to lose it, maybe that old pattern was hurting yourself and hurting others, too, but you still probably process breaking out of it as, initially, a loss, because that's what it is.

There's a temptation, when you embrace the idea of privilege, to go too far in the other direction--to write off everything as the product of forces beyond your control.  This makes social conservatives and a lot of libertarians crazy, and I can see why.  I think that conservatives tend to give themselves too much credit for doing things that were enabled by a solid middle-class upbringing.  As I wrote a number of years ago, it's easy and true to point out that poor teenagers wouldn't stay poor if they finished school, didn't have babies out of wedlock, and eschewed criminal activity--but how many of us had the courage to defy our parents and peers, drop out of high school, and sell drugs?  Every time I think about how much my parents did for me just by choosing a peer group that valued college, I close my eyes and thank my lucky stars.

The problem of poverty is not that it's impossible to get out of -- lots of people do.  It isn't even that you need to be some sort of superhero.  The problem is that poor kids have no margin for error.  I got to be a screw up who nearly flunked out of college, and thanks to parents and schools that cared desperately about my fate, nonetheless turn it all around, pull a 4.0 in my major, and graduate on time.  The first time a poor kid pulls that kind of crap, he's back at home looking for minimum wage work.

But if the right goes too far in congratulating people for pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, I think the left often goes too far in crediting nebulous social forces over individual agency.  It's not only incorrect, but also, it seems dangerously passive.  Women have been encouraged to be passive for centuries.  It's good to recognize how much of what we achieve is possible because we stand, so to speak, on the shoulders of giants.  It's very good for women who find the more radical, humorless brand of activist kind of annoying (and I am often among this group) to recognize that their willingness to be radical, humorless, and not very well liked was a necessary component of the massive advances we won a few short decades ago.

But it's not good to tell yourself that really, it wasn't you, just your environment.  Luck plays a giant role in all of our lives, but we all know people who have grasped extraordinary luck with both hands and flung it away.  Women of my generation are phenomenally lucky to be able to walk out of an abusive relationship, not because some protective male relative has arranged it, but because we don't deserve to be beat on, and we don't have to endure it to secure social approval or economic security.  But we still have to walk the hell out, and lots don't.  Society can't make them walk out, though it still may be able to do something for their daughters.

So it seems to me that celebrating your courage and hard work is a fundamentally feminist action.  You don't need to deny the concept of privilege to recognize that we are not only products of society--that, in the words of Scout Finch, virtuous people are those who do the most, but those who do the best they can with what they have.  When you say I did this, you send the most important feminist message at all--that women have the power, and the right, to improve their lives.

White men can't dance

That's so meta

To whom should corporate boards be responsible?

So, presumably, the obligation to maximize profits is a matter of enlightened self-interest. Posner argues, plausibly enough, that a company that doesn't maximize profits is weakening itself in competition with other firms. To be more precise, the probability of bankruptcy or hostile takeover is presumably increased by deviations from profit maximization. But this doesn't mean that the probability of firm survival is maximized by maximizing profits. And there's no obvious reason why socially concerned managers couldn't conclude that the strategy that yielded them the best expected personal value, adjusted for the risk of corporate failure, was one in which the company pursued broad social goals.

Everything you ever wanted to know about taxes but were afraid to ask

Small is beautiful

Position limits on oil trading: why not?

Your morning smile

Gored!

Annals of DC driving: Robert Novak edition

A Politico reporter saw Novak in the front of a police car with a citation in his hand; a WJLA-TV crew and reporter saw Novak as well. The pedestrian was hospitalized but there were no details about the person's condition. Novak was later released and left the scene.

"I didn't know I hit him," Novak told Politico. Novak said he was a block away when a bicyclist stopped him and said, 'You hit someone.' He was cited for failing to yield the right of way.

The best part is that commenters are coming into the DCist thread and saying that they, too, have been hit by the Novakmobile.

Radio free you

Black market, black heart

Apparently, the workers who distill the sassafras oil also eat and sell endangered species. Great.

Back in the day, when I was more attuned to these things, people didn't seem to think much about the social and environmental effects of illicit drug use. That always seemed to me to be an odd blind spot: I knew plenty of people who worked for various good causes by day, and supported organizations that helped to destroy inner-city neighborhoods by night, for instance, without noticing the conflict between their principles and their use of cocaine. I suspect that that has changed. I hope so.

Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring

The deal includes several compromises. It would allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase loans of as much as $625,000 in high-cost areas of the country, a lower number than many House Democrats wanted but higher than some Senate lawmakers originally envisioned. It would also give the new regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more control over the compensation packages received by top executives at either housing-finance giant, an unusual mark of government control over a publicly traded company.

Words to live by

If you don't own a TV, go buy one. This way you'll never be tempted to unnecessarily mention

If you don't own a TV and are able to refrain from relating this fact, then, uh, carry on.

TO CLARIFY: You don't have to watch it, of course. That's your call. But by owning a television, most attempts to proudly explain your aversion to the medium will become so bogged down in qualifiers that they'll never escape your lips. This will be well worth the $19 investment.

ALSO: Obligatory Onion reference.

that you don't own a television, preventing everyone else from thinking you're a supercilious jackass.

Remember, these days, when you say "I don't own a television", you're not just misleading people into believing that you spend all of your spare time reading Proust in the original Sanskrit; you're also signalling that you don't have a Wii.  This is a major social liability.

Media me

Now suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Senator . . . but I repeat myself.

Legislation meant to crack down on oil speculators passed a key test vote in the Senate on Tuesday.

The test vote on the legislation, which was backed by the Democratic leadership, was 94-0. The support of 60 senators was needed for debate on the bill to proceed. It was unclear when a final vote on the legislation would occur.

With gas prices edging over $4 a gallon, lawmakers are rushing to introduce legislation meant to lower prices at the pump.

Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, one of the Democrats sponsoring the bill, said the quickest way to lower prices at the pump is to stop speculators from driving up the price of a barrel of oil.

"First things first. If you are running a race with hurdles, jump the first hurdle first," Dorgan told reporters Monday. "The reason we have oil at $130, $140, $145 a barrel -- like a roman candle going up, up, up -- is because we have excessive, relentless speculation in these markets.

"Nothing in supply and demand in the last year justifies the price of oil."

Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America argued that market fundamentals do not explain a $40 to $60 per barrel "speculative premium" that he said he believes exists on the price of oil.

Unfortunately what I think is unprintable.

Let me see if I can phrase it in a more ladylike way than the exclamations that spring immediately to mind.

The first thing I think is that my liberal friends should stop saying their party is more credible on economic issues.  Because this is even stupider than McCain's doubling down on the gas tax holiday--and McCain's gas tax mania is plenty stupid.  At least McCain's gas tax manipulations won't actually do something except give a small amount of additional money to oil companies and loathesome governments.   This monstrous bill, on the other hand, might actually do some damage.

The second thing I think is that when I interviewed the CFA on bankruptcy reform some years ago, I thought they were well-meaning if a tad hysterical.  I have revised that estimate substantially downward since reading that story.  If they were a stock, they'd have moved from "hold" to "sell short".  

Let's look at the basic economics here.  I agree that there is a "speculative premium" in the market--the price changes obviously do not simply reflect change in demand conditions or other new information.  They're too volatile.

That doesn't mean that this speculative premium is wrong.  Speculation is not a synonym for "gambling"; it's a synonym for "guessing".  The speculative premium reflects people guessing that the mismatch between supply and demand will be even greater in the future than it is now. 

Sometimes speculators are wrong, of course--just ask my classmates who took out $100,000 worth of student loans for business school so that they could hold onto that valuable Webvan stock.  But sometimes they're right--the Confederate speculators who made a fortune buying and holding staples in the Civil War guessed, correctly, that the South would be getting a little hungry by and by.

Of course, this makes people angry who want to consume cheaply now, which is why you hear so much talk about war profiteers.  But in fact, the speculators were providing a very valuable service.  Without them, the confederacy would have consumed those staples early in the war at an artificially low price, and been even hungrier later.

There's a good chance that this is what the speculative premium in the marketplace is doing now--forcing us to hoard a resource that is about to get even scarcer.  There's also a good chance it's not, of course.  But my guess isn't any better than theirs--and at that, my guess is a lot better than the idiots in Congress sponsoring this legislation, since they aren't even trying to make a reasonable estimate.  They're simply pandering to constituents and consumer groups who think cheap gasoline is a civil right.  Pandering is only what I expect, of course, but in this case, their proposed reforms are aimed at making the market work less well--making it less liquid, and blunting the valuable information that high prices are giving us.

Welcome to the doldrums

Infrastructure is so . . . stimulating

I agree that Fed policy alone may not be enough to get the economy back on track, I've argued that for a long time. But tax cuts are not the only option for stimulating the economy, government spending can also be used, and in theory on short-run stabilization policy, a one dollar increase in government spending has a bigger impact on GDP than a one dollar tax cut. Infrastructure is an obvious target for spending, it's surely needed, but there are other areas that could use help as well.

Which got me to thinking about deregulation in the phone industry. Its been twelve years since the 1996 Telecom Act. I remember how it used to be when you wanted to get phone and internet service back in the day. I called the local phone company, got a two hour window, and someone showed up during that two hour window. Now, with deregulation, we have competition - now I can't get phone and internet service not just from one but rather from two companies that won't show up to provide me with that service. One company that provides the service, even if its a monopoly, beats two that do not in my book.

Now, before someone points out that the service is better now - internet is faster - well, technology advances. My guess is that the improvement in technology available to the consumer from 1984 to 1996 is more significant than the improvement from 1996 to 2008. (Anyone remember using a BBS?) And the improvements on the cell phone side of the business seem to come mostly on the manufactured hand-unit, which was never regulated because it isn't a natural monopoly. The rest comes from the switch, and that isn't manufactured by the former natural monopoly either.

So I thought a bit about deregulation, and realized its not just in the phone industry that service has gone to heck. How about them airlines? And I understand that there were a whole bunch of people waiting out front of IndyMac the other day. The fact is, in a lot of industries, deregulation has not lived up to expectations. Not for consumers, but not for the companies either. How many airlines went out of business in order to provide lousy service with a nickel-and-dime attitude today? How many phone companies? I'm sure its been a success story in some industries, but maybe it behooves us to think about how to do it so that it truly lives up to the many promises we heard.

At last . . .

Media management

Ryan Lizza writes, if not a hatchet job, a distinctly unflattering piece on Obama in the New Yorker.

The next week, Lizza--along with the majority of other reporters--does not get a seat on Obama's plane during his Middle East tour.

And suddenly every reporter and his brother-in-law are shocked--shocked--that maybe Obama would be engaging in payback.

"This is not the change we have been waiting for," sniffs Jeff Goldberg.
Rachel Sklar wrings her hands and calls it a "worrisome signal."
Joe Gandelman lectures, "If this was mere happenstance, then it's an example of poor and short-sighted staffing."

Give. Me. A. Break.

First, it's not clear that there was any payback here, but please: the press got this from the Bush Administration every day for eight years, and only now it's getting the vapors? Please.

And no, it's no good to say, as Gandelman does, "Some partisans will invariably say: 'Well, this happens under Bush.' And then talk about change."

I realize that this will come as news to the privileged reporters of the Beltway elite, but: change is not about you.

Change is about the nation's priorities. It is about policy. It is about whether the President cares about the thin slice of the super-rich, or about the broad American working class. It is about whether we will face up to the upcoming climate crisis, or ignore science in the face of the energy industry's agenda. It is about whether we look at facts in foreign policy, or pretend that what we want is what exists.

It is not about whether elite reporters get their favorite donut flavors aboard Air Force One.

One of the biggest challenges reporters--especially political reporters--face is the problem of access.  Journalists are dependent on sources for information.  Sources use that to get spin--they punish reporters who print things they don't like.

The Bush Administration has been famous for its punitive attitude towards journalists, and this makes it look like Team Obama has been studying their tactics.  Being on the campaign plane matters for someone covering the campaign; this is not a matter of what flavor donuts are on the plane.  Mr Zasloff's sneer is like comparing censorship to an argument about whose name comes first on the article.

It's no defense that the Bush administration does it--when the Bush administration does it, they are wrong.  So is the Obama campaign, and frankly, I'd expect Zasloff to know that "the Bush administration did it" is not exactly the bar we want to set for our politicians.

To quote Tom Stoppard, "Information is light".  Politicians like to make policy in the dark; it's the job of journalists to force them into the sunshine where we can watch the bastards.  If you excuse petty punishments of reporters on the grounds that all that really matterrs is the policy, you'll soon find that you've lost not only the reporters, but the good policy.  Half the sins of the Bush administration were committed because they were so successful at hiding their actions from the media.

Bloggingheads, continued

I've been memed

Exurbs delenda est

Humans are complicated, part 11,284 in a continuing series

The N Word, revisited

The happiest day of your life . . .

I don't understand why Will Wilkinson finds this so surprising: children don't make you happy, even though society tells you it does. Surely, a great deal of our raising involves society tricking you into doing things that are not in your immediate self-interest. Similarly, I assume that contrary to the popular stereotype, men actually must do much better out of marriage than women do, because society expends so much energy on telling women that they cannot be happy unless they marry, and trying to make sure they can't be happy by stigmatizing women who don't. If women genuinely got more benefits out of marriage, we wouldn't have so many social institutions that punish them for failing to enter that happy state.

And the intuition is backed up by the research--married men are healthier and happier, while the effect is more ambiguous for women. Most of the "marriage bonus" comes from men.

It's probably also true that in a pure state of nature rape is fun, stolen food tastes just as sweet, and hitting other people in the head is a pleasurable activity. Luckily, we have a society that lies to us about these things--lies so long that it actually becomes true, which is why most of us don't enjoy watching rape scenes and excessively graphic violence.

Unlike Will, I'm not okay with the human race dying out in a single generation, so I'd say it's a noble lie. And II'm sure glad my mother didn't have access to the latest happiness research.

The N Word

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post on why, yes, black people can call eachother "nigger" and white people can't. It's the same reason that my Jewish friends can make complain about their cheap relatives, why my female friends and I can call each other "bitch" when not even my closest male friends are allowed to deploy the word, and for that matter why I can't call your mohter "Mom" and you can't call my boyfriend "darling". Context matters. It is not the job of black people to set an example for whites on this score. They are not raising us.

In a side note, he hates white people who use "the n-word" as a euphemism. I have to say, I cringed, because I'm sure I've said it to him. But as far as I can remember, I've spoken the actual word aloud exactly once, when I was in kindergarten, and my mother slapped me so hard that my head fell off and I had to carry it with me to school like a lunchbox for three weeks.

I suspect that most white people who can't speak the dread name aloud, even as an example, have a similar history--an atavistic intuition that lightning will smite you if it passes your lips. But now that I think about it, the "n word" locution is pretty grating. You shouldn't dress up a racial epithet in the kind of cutesy euphemism you use when potty training three year olds.

No, really, tehre's no justification for descreating commyunion wafers

A number of people in my comments are claiming that PZ Myers is perfectly justified because some nuthatches sent him death threats. Other commenters are questioning whether he really got as many death threats as he claimed.

Last item first: jesus, who cares? One death threat is one death threat too many.

First last: So the argument is that it's okay, when someone does something awful, to find someone else who agrees with him about something and urinate on their shoes at a fundraiser?

Desecrating a communion wafer because Bill Donohue is an officious jerk is like paining swastikas on the tombstones of a Jewish cemetery because Abe Foxman said something that pissed you off. Your action will, to be sure, upset the jerk public figure. It will also outrage millions of his co-religionists who have done nothing to you. That no one has been physically hurt by your actions is the defense of a toddler.

Macaroni and Cheese

Someone just asked me for the macaroni and cheese recipe I used in the first Iron Chef Bloggingheads. Happy to oblige. There are a couple of departures from the traditional in this recipe. It uses a lot of cheese--basically, a two-to-one cheese to pasta ratio. It combines sharp cheddar with gruyere for flavor, and a small amount of processed American and Provolone cheese for smooth melt. You will be tempted, if you are a foodie, to eliminate the Kraft singles, but in fact they are crucial to getting that smooth velveeta-like texture without the awful velveeta-like flavor. And they use rotini rather than the traditional elbow pasta in order to give the cheese something to hold onto.

As the ingredients below attest, this is really, really not good for you. But it's worth it. Also, it will give you an opportunity to use your scale

1 pound rotini
12 tablespoons butter, softened
6 tablespoons of flour
2 cups of whole milk
1-2 cups of heavy cream (you may replace one cup of the cream with 1 small container of sour cream)
2 pounds of good sharp cheddar, grated
1/2 pound of gruyere, grated
3 Kraft American singles
2 slices of Kraft provolone
1 teaspoon dry mustard
Pinch of paprika
Pinch of freshly ground nutmeg*
Fresh ground black pepper**
Salt
Panko (japanese bread crumbs--if you can't find these, use unseasoned Four-C ones, but the panko make a nicer crust)

(optional for those who like it spicy)

Dash of cayenne pepper
Pinch of crushed red pepper flakes

Preaheat the oven to 375. Boil the pasta in a large pot of water with a tablespoon of salt. Do not be tempted to use a smaller pot because it makes the water boil faster; without dilution, the accumulated gluten will make the pasta sticky and slightly off-tasting. When it is cooked to slightly more al-dente than you would normally eat it, drain and return to the pasta pot. Don't forget to take the pot off the burner if you've got an electric stove--we're doing crispy noodles next week.

Meanwhile, make your white sauce with the butter, flour, milk, and cream, according to the instructions in my old macaroni and cheese recipe--the one I used before I learned that a little bit of processed cheese goes a long way.

Grate all of the cheeses, including the American cheese, in your food processor. If you don't have a food processor with a grater attachment, grate the gruyere and chedder, and chop the other cheeses fine.

In one bowl, mix 1.5 pounds of cheddar with 1/3 of a pound of gruyere, and all of the American and provolone. In another bowl, take the box of panko and mix it with the remaining cheddar and gruyere, and 3 tablespoons of soft butter.

When the white sauce is finished, stir in the spices, except for the salt and pepper, and the larger portion of cheese. Salt and pepper to taste.

Combine the cheese sauce and the pasta in the pasta pot. Meanwhile, use the remaining butter to well grease a large casserole (or two smaller ones, or adorable little ramekins like they serve at E). At this point, if you want to make ahead, you can refrigerate the bread crumbs and macaroni mixture separately, in well-covered dishes, for up to a day.

When you're ready to cook, top the macaroni mixture with the panko and cover the dish(es) with tinfoil. Bake, covered, for 40 minutes (60 minutes if it has been refrigerated). Uncover and bake for another 20 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and crispy looking.

* Don't give me that look. You can buy nutmeg in a disposable grater from the same folks who brought you the disposable salt and pepper grinders--you'll find them in the spice section of most supermarkets.

** I saw you looking at the pre-crushed pepper. Don't even think about it. The stuff has the taste and consistency of wood ash.

Grow the hell up, internet

I've been thinking recently about the tendency of bloggers and commenters to take a post they don't like and say "I don't even need to bother to refute this because it's so self-evidently stupid". No, actually, you do. That technique may have worked on the C String of the high school debate team, but it hasn't since. What that statement screams is "I can't refute it, and it's a really good point, so I'm just going to assert that I don't need to and hope you don't realize that I'm an idiot."

False hope.

There's a lot of idiocy on the internet that I, like every other blogger, look at, recognize as unbelievably flawed, and toy with the notion of refuting. Then I realize that shooting fish in a barrel isn't really very much fun, and annoys the fish, so I go find something more productive to do. This mental scenario is repeated millions of times a day by all of your favorite bloggers.

The thing is, when I encounter someone whose argument really is so boring that it isn't worth refuting, I don't refute it. I don't link to it. I don't say anything about it, because I feel my readers probably have enough idiocy in their lives. If I link someone, I am conceding that they are worth arguing with--that their argument is worthy of refutation. This is what intellectually confident people do. Only people who are pretty sure they can't win try to claim a moral victory--the blogging equivalent of standing at the Olympic starting line and saying, "Well, I could outrun everyone, but that's so obvious that I needn't bother getting my shoes dirty."

I bring this up a propos of a completely different sort of childishness: saying or doing things merely because other people find them offensive. This goes on here (and you know who you are), and I wish it would stop. And sadly, it also goes on at some top-notch bloggers. I like PZ Meyers, but this is really, really juvenile:

All of these have in common the lack of any "actual" damage — no one is physically hurt or loses money as a result — and great offense to people who share particular beliefs or a particular emotional bond. It's hard for non-believers in the doctrine of Transubstantiation to grasp the emotional impact on believers of mistreating the consecrated wine and wafer, just because the doctrine itself seems so impenetrable: unlike the corpse-and-gravesite examples, you can't just imagine that it was your own mother's corpse or gravesite. But "hard" shouldn't mean "impossible."

Naturally, PZ Myers is being a jerk about it, begging someone to steal him a consecrated wafer so he can desecrate it on camera. For someone who loves calling the dearly-held beliefs of other people "childish," Myers has an astonishing capacity for infantile behavior.

Equally predictably, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is being an equal and opposite jerk, trying to get the University of Minnesota, where Myers teaches, involved in the controversy.

Myers and Donohue deserve each other; but what did the rest of us do to deserve either of them?

Yes, I know that Meyers has been the target of some religious nut jobs because of his writing on evolution. On the other hand, he clearly invites it. And no matter what he feels has been done to him by the god-fearing community, this is wildly inappropriate, for the same reason that you do not respond to your political enemies by urinating on their shoes at a fundraiser.

I'm thinking of declaring August "Grow the hell up, internet people" month. Who will join me in my crusade?

Ground Zero: If you build it, they won't come

When we started talking about what to rebuild at Ground Zero, there was a strong faction urging us to "build them back, taller" or some variant thereof. As many of you know, I started this blog when I was working down at Ground Zero for one of the recovery company. My feeling was that the twin towers footprint should be preserved as a simple memorial: an open grassy space with the outlines of the buildings laid in bricks or something similar. My feeling was that the only way to appreciate the magnitude of what happened was to be able to see, across an open space, just how big the buildings were. I also felt that we should have a public space where people could be--not work, not shop, but simply enjoy other people.

But there was another reason I was against building new buildings there; the twin towers never really worked. It took a massive financial boom to make them desirable locations, and even then, they weren't a great address. Tall buildings don't work that well--above about fifty stories, the elevators needed to transport the people start crowding out the usable office space. This is why the WTC had those ridiculous "sky lobbies" where you had to change elevators to get to the top floors. Needless to say, on 9/11 the sky lobbies turned into death traps.

Once you throw in the fact that whatever gets built there will probably exert a magnetic fascination upon Al Qaeda and their ideological brethren, you've got a building that could only be built by the government (as, indeed, was true of the originals--they were pet projects of Nelson Rockefeller). There's nothing noble or grand about building office buildings where nobody wants to put an office. And I don't feel that Gettysburg is somehow "giving in to the Confederacy" because people no longer farm there.

Exhibit A: Merrill Lynch has pulled out of negotiations to take space in Larry Silverstein's buildings. It seems to me that it's time to rethink the whole project of putting more office space there, and turn the area into a national monument. If you're worried about losing commercial space--though this is hardly a current issue for New York's beleaguered financial industry--there are green spaces and low rise in the surrounding area that could be bought with eminent domain and built up.

Safety first

This is eminently sensible, eminently frightening, and eminently unlikely to be acted upon. People need the illusion of saftely when the real thing isn't available.

Her voice sounded like money . . .

Chris Bertram asks:

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched the excellent Now, Voyager the other night. A very fine performance from Bette Davis, who makes the transition from dumpy and downtrodden to shining society beauty brilliantly. But enough of the plot spoilers. Especially in the opening scenes, everyone sounds upper-class English. Perhaps not as cut-glass as Brief Encounter , but close. Maybe some of the characters are supposed to be English (Dr Jacquith, played by the English Claude Rains might be), but others, such as the matriarch Mrs Henry Windle Vale (played by the English Gladys Cooper) are definitely supposed to be American (upper-class Bostonian). And Bette Davis herself, is, obviously, an American actor playing an American character (but still sounding English). So, did Bostonian aristocrats in the 1940s actually speak with English accents? Or were the dramatic conventions such that English actors (Rains, Cooper) didn’t have to change their voices?

It's odd that an entire American accent disappeared virtually overnight: the upper class American accent that covered not only the northeastern seaboard, but California as well. Some of my friends parents had it, and a few famous people are still hanging on, like former New Jersey governor Tom Kean. But the accent of the Roosevelts, Julia Child and Katherine Hepburn pretty much up and vanished sometime in the late 1950s.

Why did this happen? Television tends to flatten regional accents, of course, but how come Britain held onto its aristocratic tones, while America's slipped softly and silently away?

Get on the scale

The earlier post reminds me: you should really get a kitchen scale. For baking, there's just no substitute. Depending on weather condidtions and the container you keep it in, the same amount of flour can vary by almost 100% by volume. Professional cooks weigh.

This Oxo scale looks pretty nice, and I'm a big fan of their products, but there are cheaper ones, and you can almost always pick up a bargain at a kitchen outlet store. Things to look for:

1) Taring--you should be able to hit a button and have the scale reset itself to zero before you add the next ingredient. This lets you do everything in one bowl.

2) Both metric and english measurements. That lets you use recipes from around the world.

3) Finely grained measurements--don't buy anything that isn't sensitive to at least a gram/an eighth of an ounce.

4) Good large surface--you don't want to fiddle with it

5) Small footprint--the tall models with artistically architectural bars leading up to a glass platform look cool, but you can't store it anywhere. Go for something that's basically flat and and inch or so thick so you can tuck it away when you're not using it.

6) Volume: for things like stock bones or fruit, it's nice to have a scale that goes up to at least 10 pounds.

Air Unprofitability

Unsurprisingly, the airlines aren't doing too well right now. I'll be looking for another round of bankruptcies before too long, as companies try to shed suddenly-unprofitable routes--which means planes, debt, and labor.

Mr Bernanke, tear down this inflation

Consumer inflation rose at 1.1% last month, with even the dreaded core inflation posting higher than expected increases. I'd say it was clear before, but if it wasn't then, it sure is now: the attempt to ride out the oil and monetary shocks with monetary stimulus is not a good idea.

As inflation hawks go, I'm not particularly hawkish. I think moderate inflation is good, since it relieves the stickiness of nominal wages and helps the economy adjust to mild shocks. But the current inflationary cycle is moving past "moderate" into "dangerous" at a rapid clip. When the central banker tries too hard to balance unemployment and inflation, the result is creeping inflation that eventually has to be shut down painfully--just ask Paul Volcker.

The Federal Reserve has spent 25 years winning back the inflation fighting credibility that it lost during the 1960s and 1970s. Inflation has been fought so successfully that inflationary expectations are no longer even a glimmer in peoples' financial calculations. But a few more months of this, and that will start to change. The Federal Reserve will have to clamp down, hard, to prevent high inflationary expectations from being written into contracts and labor agreements. Better a moderate recession now than a really severe one when the Fed has to wring the inflation out of the economy.

Worse yet, the Fed's credibility will be much harder to rebuild the second time around. Once is an aberration; twice is a pattern. It's time to bite the bullet and raise rates.

Weights and measures

I rarely endorse conspiracy theories, but this one I believe. Mr Morrow, tear down this wall!

The war on drivers, continued

Just kidding. While out with a bunch of friends last night, I realized that the real friction is not between drivers, bikers, and pedestrians; it is between commuters, and people who live here.

People who commute into DC have put the city into their mental "Work" basket. Wherever they are in the city, they tend to act as if they are in some commercially zoned suburban office park, where children and pedestrians basically don't belong. They feel entitled to be in an environment designed to move cars from point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. Bicycles and pedestrians slowing down their commute seem like unreasonable intrusions.

For residents of DC, the city is the mental equivalent of your suburban cul-de-sac. Children live here, dogs walk here, people take a stroll of a fine summer evening. When we see commuters behaving as if they were on a highway, rather than in a residential area, we get, well, a tad miffed. And as you've probably guessed, I think we have the right of it.

Commuters into DC do not even have the excuse for their sense of entitlement that commuters into New York or San Francisco have: that without them, the businesses wouldn't be there, and the economy of the city would drastically suffer. The business of DC is mostly various non-profit, or very thinly profitable, entities that do not pay significant taxes--only a quarter of DC's revenue comes from sales and business taxes, and of course a lot of those are paid by the residents. The business that does bring substantial revenue into DC, tourism, is not going anywhere, because they're not going to move the Washington Monument to Silver Spring.

Nor, as some of the commuters have alleged, do their gas taxes pay for the roads. Federal highway funds provide about 20% of the capital budget for DC streets; the rest comes from those of us who live and pay taxes in the city. Most commuters don't even buy gas here. Unlike in other cities, the residents of DC are already, on net, paying for the privilege of having commuters here. Those of us who are not lucky enough to own sandwich shops downtown do not find this particularly rewarding.

And DC is just not built for high speed commuting. The streets are narrow, and almost all of them pass through residential neighborhoods. Yet commuters screamed in outrage when DC proposed slowing down the high-speed corridors that have made the neighborhoods they pass through actively hostile to their residents. Their argument was--well, I want to get home. The thing is, so do we. Only when we get there, we find you rocketing your car through it as if you were auditioning for the Indy 500.

Milton Friedman and Chile

Oh, Lordy, the nuts with a shaky knowledge of history, but the talismanic word "Pinochet" have crawled out of the woodwork to assert that Milton Friedman did, too, cause a dictatorship!

There are several problems with this theory:

1) Milton Friedman spent all of an hour with Augusto Pinochet

2) This occurred years after the coup.

3) The "Chicago Boys" reforms didn't even start until 1975, although I believe they did hand the brick to Pinochet the day after the coup. The Chicago Boys were not behind the coup; rather, they helped Pinochet undo the Allende nationalizations after he had already taken power. Early Pinochet economic reforms were along standard right wing Latin American crony capitalism lines. In fact, many of the reforms that the Chicago Boys put in place, such as opening trade, acted against traditional entrenched business interests.

Chile's economic miracle was indisputably the product of a vile dictatorship that overrode normal political considerations to make sweeping reforms before inexplicably dissolving itself in 1980. But the policies that led to the economic miracle did not cause the dictatorship, which would have been just as horrible without the Chicago Boys; indeed, as far as I know the worst abuses occurred right after the coup, as the regime was consolidating power.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, a few people in the comments are citing China as an example of how capitalism undermined democracy. Apparently I missed the section in history class where we covered the vibrant democracy that existed in China prior to pro-market reforms. Because in the history I learned, the openness and transparency required to support the market reforms have enabled what little movement towards liberalization China has had.

Fat of the Land

Ta-Nehisi Coates and I do our first Bloggingheads on obesity, culture, and more.

Are Obama's supporters trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

As we all know, I will not be voting for John McCain (though this does not mean that I will be voting for Obama). So it doesn't exactly please me to see the polls tightening. On the other hand, it doesn't exactly surprise me, either, what with cartoons like the one in the previous post. Obama's supporters are far too cocky right now. They're already celebrating their coming trampling of booboisie. And methinks that glee is not playing well in middle America. The reason people like my red-county aunt are thinking of voting Obama is that they find him inspiring. If this election turns into another round of "Whole Foods versus those obese louts at the Piggly Wiggly", people like her will hasten to vote against Whole Foods.

Somewhere, Jonathan Swift is weeping bitter tears of rage

This is . . . stupid.

I want to laugh . . . but I can't laugh with the cartoonist, only at him. It's extraordinarily sad to witness someone whose imagination is so limited, their viewpoint so parochial, that they can't even adequately parody the other side.

An effective political cartoon, or merely a funny one, would have tried to imagine what a sympathetic cartoonist would have drawn, and then exaggerated it. The core fact about the Obama cover is that it was drawn by someone who likes Obama. This cartoon is so obviously drawn by someone who hates McCain that it fails on the most basic level. It might work as a nasty cartoon about McCain (though, really, Cindy McCain's drug problem is hard to make funny). But it does not work as a parody of the cover. And the tagline, conveying "I hate you, Morlocks" with such stunning efficiency, merely makes the artist look like a mean-spirited boor. Of course, a lot of committed partisans like cheering on mean-spirited boors as long as they agree with them, so I guess it doesn't fail at every level.

Pondering the iPhone

Reihan borrowed Peter's new iPhone to write a review of it for Slate; the gist is, it's pretty good, but after being turned away thrice, he's not going there. I suppose it's time for me to weigh in.

Since Reihan already had an iPhone, and I don't, he's choosing between the marginal upgrades--mostly the GPS and the 3G network, and his old phone. I, however didn't have one before, so I get to be all gee-whiz about features the rest of you have had for a year. Which are, as I have repeatedly been told, pretty great. The phone interface is unbelievably easy to use--so easy that my technophobe mother and luddite crank sister want to join me on an AT&T family plan with iPhones of their very own. Unlike Reihan, I've had absolutely no trouble with call quality--indeed, it seems quite a bit better than the reception on my old Razr. And the iPod sounds great.

On the new side, there are a host of new apps that take advantage of the GPS feature, and I've installed most of them. The killer app is, obviously, using Google maps to get you un-lost. But people have also coded a bunch of social networking applications that let you, for example, see where all your friends are. The ones with iPhones, anyway. And if they don't have iPhones, they should be dead to you.

Just kidding. Since I'm the early adopter on a lot of these applications, it remains to be seen how useful they will be. But things like Twitterific, AIM, and Facebook are already pretty key.

The phone does have two downsides as far as I'm concerned: short battery life, and fragility. Peter broke his less than 12 hours after we emerged from the Apple Store. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine how you could make such an easy to use interface without making the thing fragile; touch screens are inherenty vulnerable. And while the battery life apparently suffers a bit in comparison to the old iPhone, that's the price you pay for significantly faster download speeds. I'd rather hook up my iPhone to the laptop once a day than spend fifteen minutes waiting for a YouTube video to download. And Blackberries are battery hogs too--if you want to check email, you'll pay for the privilege with frequent recharges.

Blast from the past

Over 100 Chicago professors proudly sign a letter declaring their ignorance of economics:

Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University’s reputation in the face of its negative image. The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population, leading to the weakening of a number of struggling local economies in the service of globalized capital, and many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of “market democracy.”

When the University of Chicago invests so heavily in culturally and politically conservative thought we wonder about its commitment to strong intellectual diversity in the tradition of the Kalven Report. Consider, for instance, the following passage in the Proposal to Establish the Milton Friedman Institute, which construes a certain orthodoxy as the starting point for any discussion: "Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences." Given the fact that our University is known for its commitment to interdisciplinarity, methodological diversity, and to discussion across political lines, some colleagues seek to secure these principles in both the structure and governance of the Institute and feel this commitment is belied by the Institute's founding documents. Some colleagues are disturbed by the specter of the University of Chicago becoming another Stanford, with the Milton Friedman Institute taking on the imposing campus presence of the Hoover Institution. Many of us are also perturbed that other units of the University that routinely engage the issues that the Friedman Institute is designed to address were not included in the planning, nor included in the ongoing core scholarly endeavors of the Institute.

This from a University that has cultivated a reputation as one of the most intellectually rigorous campuses in the country. I'm tempted to weep.

Where to start with this festival of willful misunderstanding? I was surprised to hear that Milton Friedman is reviled in "The South", since I follow the Argentinian, Venezuelan, and South African economic press closely-ish, and I've never once heard the man's name mentioned. The only country that seems aware of his existence, or that of the "Chicago Boys" is Chile, and they kind of like him.

Second, their assessment of the effects of the "neoliberal global order" is forehead slapping, head shaking, did-they-really-say that? stupid. I haven't heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise. If you put all 100 in a room with unlimited access to Lexis-Nexis and a mountain-sized peyote stash to bring their quasi-communist fantasy life into 3D technicolor, they still couldn't name a country where neoliberalism has undermined a vibrant democracy. Nor where Demon Capital has made things worse. The worst you can say for the neoliberal order is that it doesn't make things better the way we hoped it would. Any place you can name that has been deeply screwed up since global capital arrived was at least as corrupt and otherwise awful before the capital swooped in to plant garment factories in the edenic swamps of rural poverty.

The last paragraph makes these eminent professors seem, to put it charitably, not quite bright. Otherwise, how does one find a statement like this inflammatory?

Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences.

Do they think that we should do analyses that doesn't pay attention to individual incentives or the role of markets in allocating goods and services? Are they under the impression that there is still a debate on this? I thought the fall of the Soviet Union had rather spectacularly demonstrated that it's hard to allocate goods and services without markets. Indeed, one wonders where all these professors get their groceries.

Or perhaps they merely think that we should design our policies without regard to market alternatives. Not even the commissars managed that; you can't even reject markets without regarding them.

It's foolish to get enraged at these powerless twits. But someone has to writhe in shame at this folly, and clearly, their intellects aren't up to the task.

You know . . .

I wasn't going to buy a gun, because, hey, what would I do with it? But the chicken guano rules that DC is imposing make me want to buy a handgun just to annoy the twopenny tyrants who thought them up:

Here's what they're proposing:

* Allowing an exception for handgun ownership for self-defense use inside the home.

* If you want to keep a handgun in your home, the MPD will have to perform ballistic testing on it before it can be legally registered.

* There will be a limit to one handgun per person for the first 90 days after the legislation becomes law.

* Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.

* Residents who legally register handguns in the District will not be required to have licenses to carry them inside their own homes.

May I really carry it inside my home without a license, just as if I were a free citizen in a country that respects individual liberty? I am overcome with gratitude, really overwhelmed with the state's generosity . . . permission to cry, sir?

Early adopter's dilemma

I have been back-and-forth about Blu-Ray. Is it worth committing to a new format, when probably in five or ten years we'll just be downloading in hi-def? If I do get a Blu-Ray player, should I get a PS3, which is allegedly Profile 2.0 compliant, or do I wait for fall, when the newer, cheaper Profile 2.0 players are supposed to come on the market?

Now Amazon is trying to force my hand with a Buy Two Get One Free sale on Blu-Ray discs. What do you think, readers? Should I take the plunge, even if I won't be buying a player for a couple of months?

What if they held a war and nobody won?

James Joyner wonders how we'll know if we achieve victory in Iraq.

Dark Knight is great: You heard it here first

So I saw Dark Knight yesterday, having browbeaten a critic friend into taking me along as his "plus one". The film had slight structural problems, notably a somewhat anticlimactic ending that after an explosive middle, which made it feel a tad long. But overall, it was pretty damn great.

And what about Heath Ledger? I went in prepared to be cynical, since he's probably going to get an Oscar nomination for his role even if he was awful. And . . . he was good. Really good. Not what I would think of as an Oscar quality performance, if for no other reason than that they don't really award Oscars to summer action movies. But I wouldn't be indignant if he walked away with it.

The only movie I've ever seen him in was "10 Things I Hate About You" (yes, yes, I've never seen Brokeback Mountain). I mostly knew him for being extremely pretty. So I was surprised to see him be so good in an adult movie. And if he gets the Oscar, it would be a kind of justice, because his performance suggested that, but for an unlucky combination of pills and alcohol, he might have won one down the road.

Jacob Grier: No [Expletive deleted] Way!

My name is Megan McArdle, and I endorse this message

Obamania

Add me to the list of people who think the furor over the New Yorker cartoon is way overblown. If Jake Tapper really thinks that "It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing", he needs to get out of the coastal cities. I'm pretty sure the right wing hasn't taken its marching orders from The New Yorker for at least twenty years.

Update Ta-Nehisi disagrees.

A challenge to drivers who are angry at bikers for selectively disregarding traffic laws

. . . like Sonny Bunch:

Though I am by no means an expert in jurisprudence, constitutional or otherwise, it seems to me that Wilkinson has created an entirely new concept of law, one rooted in choosing not to follow statutes…solely because they inconvenience you! Now, I don’t think every law should be followed blindly–there are times when a law is so unjust it should not be obeyed–but I don’t think civil disobedience extends to refusing to obey the law because it tacks three minutes on to your commute. Lest we think that this is an idea unique to Wilkinson, we see similar (though less obnoxiously phrased) thoughts over at Megan’s joint.

Which of you has never gone above the speed limit? Anyone, anyone? Don't bother, I don't believe you. Ditto anyone who says they've never jaywalked, which is, I assure you, against the law.

Coordination laws, like driving regulations--where the laws themselves have no moral content, but are merely a convenient way to enforce a common standard--are different from things like laws against stealing. Indeed, so different that you don't even think of speeding as breaking the law, allowing you to get morally outraged at bikers without even thinking of yourself as doing exactly the same thing on the highways.

The reason cops don't ticket bikers when they fail to observe stop signs at uncrowded intersections, etc, for the same reason that they don't ticket people going 5 mph over the speed limit--those people do not cause many accidents. That's because a bike going down a one-way street does not crash into cars. A bike passing through an intersection has neither the mass nor the velocity to hurt a car. A bike running a stop sign is maintaining a speed too slow to kill a pedestrian. Moreover, the fact that bike/pedestrian or bike/car crashes are at least as likely to hurt or kill the rider makes bike riders much more cautious than car drivers are likely to be.

I'm not excusing bike messengers who roar through stop signs at 20 mph--but I'm no danger to anyone proceding cautiously through a red light at an empty intersection. Furthermore, in my experience, drivers are much less likely to be enraged by a rolling bike stop than they are when I am obeying the law--driving in the middle of the lane in front of them, moving much more slowly than they are. If you're so hot on bikers not obeying the traffic laws, you should stop to consider that if we were obeying all the traffic laws, we'd ride like cars drive--right in the middle of the traffic lane. But I suspect that if bikers started obeying this particular traffic law, we would not be hearing applause from the drivers.

Tee-hee!

Who says the left has no sense of humor? I mean, who aside from August J. Pollak, that is?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Too big not to fail

Sorry to be a little late to the party on the Fannie/Freddie debacle; I managed to burn my right middle finger rather spectacularly last night on a pot handle, and though JP Freire, the American Spectator's MacGyver-like managing editor, rapidly sped to the rescue with a silicone oven mitt full of ice, typing is still somewhat slow.

Back to Fannie and Freddie. For those who haven't been following along at home, last night, in another "Sunday Save", the Fed and Treasury announced that they stand ready to bail them out. For years, there's been a moderately lively debate over whether Fannie and Freddie's status as Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) means that the government has implicitly guaranteed their portfolios. Those who have wasted hours arguing this burning question in the nation's bars and debating clubs can settle up your bets and argue no more: it does indeed. As Clive Crook says:

US taxpayers are about to find out what their long-standing and (strictly speaking) non-existent guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will cost them. One way to think of it is this: take the US national debt of roughly $9,000bn and add $5,000bn. Not bad for an obligation still officially denied.

Steven Bainbridge adds:

Fannie and Freddie should have been fully privatized years ago, so that they were subject to market competition; alternatively, although less ideally, they should have been brought back into the government to be regulated more effectively. Leach was right that leaving them as they were was a disaster waiting to happen. And now it looms larger than ever, with potential disastrous implications . . . Want a worst case scenario? The government takes over Fannie and Freddie. The immense increase in the national debt causes the bond rating agencies to cut their rating of Treasury securities from their traditional AAA. Along with other economic problems (whether its mostly whining or not), this spooks investors, especially foreign investors. Foreigners abandon the dollar for the euro, dumping treasuries. The collapse of foreign investment in Treasuries makes our massive current account deficit unsustainable. At which point, things really go to pot.

All because our leaders in Washington failed on a bipartisan basis to address the problems at Fannie and Freddie. Why didn;t they do something? Because Fannie and Freddie bribed them and because they’re petrified of being painted as anti-consumer, as even the Times finally noticed . . .

Arnold Kling also has some rather pungent commentary:

1. For some reason, I am reminded of a Vaudeville scene in which firemen are squirting hoses at the set to try to put out an apparent fire, and management comes out on stage to say, "Don't worry, folks. It's all part of the act." My point is that it's very important at this time for people like Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke to make it seem like they know what they are doing.

2. It seems as though nobody wants to admit that the FM's are done for. Yet the new proposal on the table to have the government back more of the firms' debt and perhaps buy equity is so radical that I have to assume that there is no returning to the status quo.

3. If you could do it over again from a regulatory perspective, you would want to see the FM's market shares a lot lower and the market shares of other institutions, notably banks, a lot higher. I have to assume that this will be the thrust of policy going forward. It's just not something that is going to happen tomorrow.

4. I used to work at Freddie Mac, in the late 80's and early 90's. Back then, the capital regulations gave the FM's an advantage over banks in holding low-risk mortgages. We understood that, and we stuck to low-risk lending. As times changed, and the market shifted to high-risk loans, it would have been logical for the FM's to say, "This is not our market," and allow their market shares to drop. But top management, at least at Freddie, is pretty green (I'm not sure they could spell "mortgage" when they took over in 2003. When friends of mine described the behavior of the new management team, I decided to sell my Freddie Mac stock. This was at least four years ago.). Between that and government pressure to provide "affordable housing," the FM's decided that they needed to get on the subprime bandwagon rather than stop it.

5. A fundamental debate in economics is between central planning and the spontaneous order of the market. The collapse of the FM's, and of the housing market in general, can be viewed as a failure of central planning. Unfortunately, the dynamics are such that when central planning fails, you typically get more central planning.

In my view, the central problems with FM/FM are two:

1) Because they are government sponsored, the government let them get away with practices that would never fly in the private market. Contrary to the belief of many on the left, this is par for the course; just take a look at what's happening to state and local government pensions now that the federal government has forced them to account for their liabilities like normal pension funds do.

2) They are too big not to fail. Their mortgage portfolios cover so much of the market that any significant problems in the mortgage market will make them technically insolvent as soon as they mark their securities to market. Any attempt to clean up their portfolios, by, for example, selling off some of their underperforming securities, will move the MBS markets against them, making the problem worse.

It's not clear that bringing them fully into the government is even a second- or third- best solution; the government is not set up to be a hedge fund, nor should it be. Once the immediate crisis is over, it's time to strip their GSE status and break the companies up into less risky firms.

Of course, that's easy for me to say, sitting here on my couch in my comfy pajamas. Actually doing this is going to be a monstrous messy task.

That's for <i>girls</i>, he said scornfully . . .

The feminists are mad because I said SF isn't girly. I think SF is girly, because I'm a girl, and my father gave me my first 3 SF books for my eighth birthday (Tunnel in the Sky, Sargasso of Space, and the third one escapes me). I spent one summer in Bantam Doubleday Dell's science fiction department, which was all female. I have an entire elaborate space opera planned out in my head which I may someday write, if my fiction writing stops being terrible.

But I think it's kind of hard to deny that there are a lot of women who do not like science fiction because it doesn't fit into their conception of girly. Stating that you are a woman who likes science fiction, and lots of women like science fiction, is theatrical, but it's beside the point; the demographic is overwhelmingly male. Connie Willis and Megan Lindholm and Sheri Tepper are great (I mean, at least until Tepper went off the deep end and started writing novels that implied men would be so much better if they were . . . women), but they are not the core of the genre. We can angrily declare that SF is so woman-friendly all we want, while women nod politely and bypass the SF section for the mysteries or the bodice rippers. Or we can try to convince them that they are making a tragic mistake, because what they are looking for in a romance novel or a good mystery can also be found in the SF section.

Really good SF taps the same emotional space as a fairy tale or a fantasy--the magic of reading about a world where the rules are different from, though no less coherent than, your own. (The people who thought I was saying "Women all want pretty little princess fantasies should actually, I don't know, read some fairy tales. Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm are considerably more complicated than the Disney versions.) It's a shame to miss out on it.

So I open the comments to my readers: what are good "starter SF" novels for people who think they don't like SF? (Male, female, or both). I hereby unnominate the entire oeuvre of William Gibson, but nearly anything else is fair game.

Note to trolls

This is my blog, not a publicly owned free-for-all; you do not have the right to consume my comments threads with flame wars. If you want to do this, you should start your own blog, where you can launch interpersonal attacks to your heart's content. Here, I expect you to add to the conversation, or leave us.

I have used my deleting tools very lightly, because I want to be welcoming, and because once you start deleting people's comments, its hard to ensure that you do so evenhandedly. However, we're in a new wave of trollery, and I'm getting complaints again. So if your comments fit any of the following models:

1) Almost all of them contain personal insults directed against another commenter

2) You find yourself posting entire comments dedicated only to expressing your dislike of other people on the thread who have NOT been making personal attacks.

3) The proofs you offer consist largely of stating that your opinions are self evidently obvious and people who disagree with you are amoral morons.

4) They provoke multiple people into complaining about your hostility

Chances are good you are a troll. And chances are better than even that in the near future, I am going to start deleting your comments and leaving snarky notes in their place.

There are plenty of commenters who disagree with me vehemently, and are also valued members of the community; if you find yourself unsure as to how to leave a comment without trolling, try asking yourself WWFD (What Would Freddie Do?). Remember, Smokey the Bear says, "Only you can prevent flame wars".

Quis vexabit ipsos vexatores?

Charles Giacommetti sent me the following email:

So one of your sycophants ... didn't like what I was saying, so he Googled my name and posted the name, address, and phone number of a different Charles Giacometti.

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/iphone_relief.php#comment-2473930

Nice commenters you have there. All class.

To which I responded, "I'll delete it, but given that you've been harassing people to use their real names, you could hardly complain if it had been your actual information."

Charles fired back:

I am not harassing. I am addressing people directly, and challenging them to not be cowardly. Do you really not understand that the real harassment here would be if your little brown shirts started calling this poor stranger? I would not be surprised if they already have.

If it had been my real information, and I had been harassed, I would most certainly hold you and The Atlantic culpable.

Please direct me to your superiors at the Atlantic so that I can let them know you endorse this kind of harassment. I would like both email addresses and direct phone numbers please.

You may consider them notified.

Indeed, I hope that none of you called this fellow, or in any other way bothered him. I do not encourage offline harassing of web commenters, whatever the provocation. This is one of the reasons that I welcome commenters who use handles; on this blog, it's the content of the comments that is important. The proper punishment for trolls is the silent derision of anyone who reads them, and of course, the fact that they are the kind of people who become internet trolls. If you did call this fellow before I took down his name and number, I would appreciate an anonymous tip off on this thread so that I can contact him and apologize for the inconvenience.

Please do not stalk the trolls. Also, do not talk to them. This seems like as good a time as any to remind readers that your attention--no matter how richly provoked you feel--merely encourages them to further heights. Your tears of just rage are sweet, sweet nectar to comment trolls. Presumably, they engage in this behavior because they feel that no one listens to them. Only you can help make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Give me some credit

Jamelle is the second person to say this to me, in re my credit check at the AT&T store:

Congratulations Megan McArdle, you just had your first taste of what being a black person is like.

In all seriousness though, African-Americans are far more likely to be subject to those kind of credit investigations than a white person of equal means, since on average, African-Americans are more likely to have some sort of serious credit liability.

As far as I know, they run credit checks for any monthly cell-phone contract; that's why people with bad credit have to get pre-paid phones. Certainly, they checked my credit when I bought a broadband modem, which starts at $40 a month.

Credit is one of those weird areas where there is a lot of belief in discrimination, but as far as I can tell, not all that much evidence. Most credit checks are part of an automated procedure that either happens or it doesn't, and most loan issuance is done virtually automatically by a computer that either says yes or no based on your credit history. Now, there are border cases that require human review, and it's possible that had my name been "Malika" instead of Megan, they would have turned me down.

But if that were happening on a widespread basis, loans to minorities would be insanely profitable. They're not; rather, they seem to be about as profitable as other types of loans. Yes, I've seen the research arguing that people in black communities get worse loan terms than their credit score suggests. As far as I can tell, this research failed to control for some pretty major factors, like assets.

I don't want to go to far down the Gary Becker line--it's possible that companies could all be behaving irrationally. But the evidence that they are seems pretty thin--in fact, just barely solid enough for plaintiff's lawyers and journalists to revive it every few years. If the companies were statistically discriminating against African Americans, giving them worse loan terms than they really qualify for, they should be paying off those loans at higher rates than whites.

They're not. Most of the aggregate research I've seen fails to reject the null hypothesis that there is no discrimination in loan markets, which means that if there is discrimination, it is not catching huge numbers of people who are more likely than their loan terms would suggest to pay their bills on time. Just to be clear, we're not talking about research that says that blacks who get a higher interest rate don't pay off at the same rate as whites who get a lower one--you can't blame the default rate on the higher interest rate. We're talking about the fact that minorities do not outperform their own loan class. If loan companies really were discriminating, issuing subprime mortgages and car loans to credit-worthy minorities should be a license to print money.

The evidence for discrimination in the labor market seems strong--nay, nearly incontrovertible--to me, at least at lower skill levels. And it's clear to me that African Americans have a lot of structural barriers to wealth accumulation, But I remain unconvinced that credit rationing is one of those barriers.

The suspense is killing me

I can't actually sync my new phone with iTunes, because it needs iTunes 7.7, and Apple's download servers seem to have crashed. This seems to me like the sort of thing the folks at Apple might have seen coming.

Credit crunch

While I was buying the iPhone, they pulled me aside for a credit review. Since I have good credit, this was shocking--and humiliating. For a middle class American, telling your two friends in the store that the AT&T folks are having second thoughts about giving you credit feels a little like confessing that you're a criminal. This is even though I know plenty of journalists with bad credit, the vicissitudes of the industry being what they are. I found myself earnestly protesting to the store clerk that seriously, I really do pay my bills on time, and I don't run a credit card balance.

It turns out they just wanted to look at the activity on my account, since I've just applied for a car loan, and bought a Verizon broadband modem. But in a way, it's a reminder of just how obsessed our society has become with borrowing money. The worst thing that happens to you if you borrow too much money is--it gets hard to borrow still more money. Yet during the recent financial crisis, commentators refer to bankruptcy, or foreclosure, as something akin dying of cancer, rather than losing your credit cards and moving to a rental flat. This may be because we so often confuse credit rating with moral virtue: good people have good credit, and bad people . . . well, best not say the "B" word out loud, lest the dread disease should spread to you.

I can't say that I've noticed that a good credit report is an obvious testimony to sterling character. I've known plenty of people with A+ ratings who I wouldn't trust to take care of my goldfish. And I don't even have a goldfish.

Of course there are irresponsible profligates who borrow money they've no intention of repaying. But most of the people I know with awful credit histories have rather more understandable explanations: a divorce. An unexpected illness. Trouble finding a job when they emerged from graduate school with hefty loans. Freelance jobs that took too long to pay--or went bust without reimbursing sizeable expenses.

The worst part is that the profligates are immune to the shame (or seem to be). It's the decent people, the ones who were overtaken by events, who cringe when the store clerks motion them aside.

Confess, he said, confess and be saved

Freddie, now proudly with his own blog, has some cogent thoughts on working through racism in public in America.

iPhone relief

Early this morning, the Apple folks appeared with water for the needy liners

I imagine this is what it feels like to be a refugee--you sleep outside, and then smiling people in uniform hand you supplies whether you ask for them or not.

This was followed by an even more crucial relief

They know their demographic

Notes from the line

I slept surprisingly well, considering that I am not accustomed to sleeping on the street. Team Blogger came prepared:

. . . though we were not prepared for the guy in the chair next to us, who snored with impressive volume and consistency.

I was awoken at 6:15 by a nice man from the Apple Store explaining what documentation we needed (driver's license, credit card, knowledge of our social security number--things without which no American is legally allowed to leave the couch these days). By then Peter had already woken up, gone to Starbucks for coffee, started blogging, and presumably, saved several Guatamalan orphans from an earthquake. He looks fresh as a daisy. I look like a candidate for Extreme Makeover.

Apparently, I also missed the first market transaction: someone who arrived here yesterday around six pm had sold their place in line for a rumored price of $100. This seems extraordinarily low to me, and indeed, he seemed to feel that way himself--reportedly, the negotiations included multiple exclamations of, "that's like $2 an hour man!" At $100, the hourly rate still isn't good, especially considering it involved sleeping upright in a chair--something less than $10.

Of course, whatever the inconvenience, you can only charge what the market will bear. But methinks he sold too soon. The line started growing sometime in the wee sma' hours when we were still in dreamland. My father reports that as of 6:15 am, the line at the AT&T store at 95th and Broadway, one block from my childhood home, was growing at 2 or 3 a minute. We're not doing that well, but it's still expanding at a pretty healthy clip, and I expect by 8, it will be fairly impressive. Nearer to the time will be the best time to sell--when the delta between the wait at the front and the wait at the back will be the largest. There is also a healthy market in quarters for the parking meters, since the cops have threatened to tow anyone who overstays their time by a minute.

But Peter and I have a healthy supply of quarters, and a premium place in line; these are the people ahead of us:

The line's a little disorderly, but no matter, because in a touching display of spontaneous order, the first people here started a paper list to keep track. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised--there's a Cato intern who's been here since 7 pm.

iPhone Vlogging

We've been in line since about 11:30. Thanks to the camera in my laptop, and Peter's editing genius, we bring you our very first vlog:

What gains from cap gains?

Justin Fox takes issue with Charlie Gibson:

GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

I've left out Obama's responses, which were mostly about fairness 'n' stuff, because he failed to give the only appropriate answer, which was that, no, history doesn't show that. Yes, capital gains tax cuts invariably result in a revenue increase the next year, because investors aren't idiots: If they see a cut coming, they're likely to delay capital-gains-generating transactions until after the tax rate drops. But I don't know of any serious economist who thinks that cutting the capital gains tax rate increases revenue over time.

Gosh, I hate to defend either Fox News, or supply-siderism. But this is not the same kind of craziness as claiming that massive marginal income tax cuts raise revenue. Optimal tax theory pretty much hates capital gains taxes because they, as their very name suggests, impede capital formation. Also, capital is much more mobile than labor, which is why countries like Sweden focus their taxation on incomes. In fact, when I look at the graph he posts, it seems to tell me a very different story than it is telling him.

By 2007, capital gains revenues had nearly returned to their 2000 highs in real dollars, even though the indexes hadn't regained their previous (real and/or nominal) heights. When you consider that the capital gains revenues in 2000 were coming off nearly 20 years of uninterrupted growth, this in fact suggests that the capital gains tax raised revenues. Moreover, the inflection point is at the time of the cut to 15%, with revenues marching steadily upward thereafter.

Now, I'd be the last person to suggest that correlation is causation--I'm only pointing out that if they didn't raise revenues, you couldn't prove it by this graph. Moreover, there is a not-ridiculous argument that over the long term--five, ten years--they do raise revenues, by spurring capital formation and economic growth. This is very different from the supply sider argument that you could jam personal income tax rates to 1% and enjoy higher tax revenues therefrom.

Boundary cases

The earlier post on doggy death benefits got me to thinking: what are the debates that I recognize as legitimate pluralistic disagreements? There are lots of issues where I am pretty sure that I am right, but recognize that the people on the other side have valid value judgements that they are calling differently from me. I'm not talking about technocratic disputes over adverse selection or regulatory capture--I mean core arguments about deeply held values.

On my list:

1) Abortion. I'm pro-choice, but I think that it's a really, really difficult call between the rights of women to control their bodies, and the rights of fetuses to get born. I think there are narrow, self-obsessed ideologues on both sides of the debate, but I think that most people in the middle are doing their best to wrestle with a hard issue.

2) Gay marriage. I'm basically pro, but I take the Burkean arguments seriously.

3) Immigration. Again, I'm pro--but while I think the anti-immigration side makes often ridiculously ahistorical arguments about how current immigration differs from past waves, I think that more-open-borders folks like me don't give enough respect to the real cultural frictions that immigration causes.

4) Affirmative action. I think it's a bad idea, for multiple reasons. But I also understand those who think that we need to do something about the racial mess that slavery has left us in, and think that this is the best something we're probably going to get.

5) Taxes. I don't have any very well thought out position on the optimal level of taxation in society. I take seriously both the justice arguments of the libertarian absolutists, and the notion that anyone living in a wealthy society owes their prosperity at least as much to the wealthy society as they do to their own skill and hard work--and if you doubt this is true, I suggest you go try to deploy your rugged individualist talents in Zimbabwe. I think society has a duty to care for those who genuinely can't care for themselves, but I am against an ever-expanding notion of what constitutes "can't".

6) Intergenerational equity. I don't mean social security, which I think is largely a stupid program. I mean questions about how we should privilege the interests of people who exist now over those who will exist in the future. The environment is the most obvious, but not the only, area where these questions come up. To me, health care is another one; the core issue is that we can probably help some people by moving to a single payer system today, but only by destroying the innovation machine that will help many many more people down the road.

7) Humanitarian intervention. I am often tempted by the isolationist stance, the cool purity of its single-rule decision making. Then another Darfur rends my heart. I don't mean to address the prudential, utilitarian calculus, but rather the question: if there's a good chance that we could make things better, should we? And under what circumstances?

8) What value to put on art? Nature? These are intangibles. Yellowstone would not exist without substantial government intervention. Am I libertarian enough to think that's a bad thing? Ask me an easy one . . .

I'm sure there are others. What about you?

Gone, but not forgotten

Ted Kennedy comes back to the Senate in order to block cuts in Medicare payments for doctors. The New York Times rather gleefully calls this a stinging defeat for Republicans. This makes it sound as if the whole thing were some sort of glorified athletic contest, where the important thing is that our team wins. But the question is rather more important than that. Basically in the late 1990s Congress passed a law tying Medicare payouts to GDP--if they grow too fast, relative to GDP, reimbursements automatically drop. Ted Kennedy came back from medical leave to override that automatic cut, just as Congress has every year in recent years.

All very well, and many physicians will tell you that they just can't afford to treat Medicare patients for much less. But this--not some bogeyman in a pharma marketing department--is why the cost of Medicare is rising so fast. If we don't have the political courage to slash reimbursements, or to ration care, then the Democrats should give up any pretense that they are going to slow the growth of entitlements, and just admit that they're for the thing growing as fast as it can, forever.

Have house, won't travel

This is not good news:

Movement into and out of U.S. cities slowed sharply last year as the housing bust forced more Americans to stay put, according to new Census Bureau data.

. . .

Demographers attribute the migration slowdown to the slumping housing market, which is making it harder for sellers to unload houses and is encouraging buyers to wait for prices to fall further. Many Midwestern and Northeastern cities continue to attract new young residents, many of them renters, who move there for jobs. But because the housing market is so weak, some young urban couples who would normally be headed to the suburbs to start families are staying put, as are retirees hoping to move to the South.

High levels of labor mobility are one of the great strengths of the American economy. If our housing market is tying workers to slumping areas, it will take longer--and more pain--for the country to pull out of the current slowdown.

iAlert

Apparently the lines have been forming at the New York Apple stores for "days" (or so one correspondent reports), but when I drove past the Clarendon Apple Store around one, there was no noticeable queuing--indeed, the store seemed pretty quiet. Nonetheless, Peter Suderman and I will be camping out in the line tonight, bringing you the latest in liveblogging from the Apple hype machine. I feel no desperate urge to get my hands on one of the VERY FIRST 3G IPHONES, but I can't resist a spectacle. Presuming there is one, that is. They don't call me "Miss Zeitgeist" for nothing . . .

Gone to the dogs

Becks wants to know how we can keep rich people from giving their money to dogs. I'm not sure I get this--rich people donate money to the ASPCA all the time, and I, for one, tend to think this is laudable. Protecting animals from suffering--the intent of Ms. Helmsley's trust--seems like the kind of thing a decent and prosperous society does, although of course, I would say that, wouldn't I?

The op-ed she links is written by a law professor who seems to regard Ms. Helmsley's money as belonging to said law professor, with sort of a lifetime tenancy agreement. If Ms. Helmsley declines to disburse this money as Professor Madoff sees fit, we're supposed to be outraged at the injustice of it all.

I can make all sorts of arguments for what shouldn't get charitable deductions, like museums--but then people like Tyler Cowen and Kriston Capps put forth very emotional arguments against me. The very idea of a liberal, pluralistic society is that we all have a lot of divergent ideas about what constitutes the public good, and therefore need a lot of room to pursue those notions without government interference. Using government fiat to declare that some purposes are valid, others not, is the antithesis of the American idea. Instead, we basically say that as long as you aren't using the money to benefit yourself or your descendants, it counts as charity.

Moreover, the law professor's complaints are, in this case, silly. The charitable estate tax deduction matters a lot to people who have heirs whose inheritance they would like to maximize--but given that the appalling Ms. Helmsley sued the family of her single dead son into penury after he died, it's hard to see how this would have made a difference to her bequest. Had we taxed her estate fully, the dogs would have ended up with less money, but needy children would have gotten no more.

You could argue, I suppose, that the government could have taken the money and given it to needy children. But looking at the budget shows that most of it would have gone somewhere else: affluent old people, wealthy farmers, defense contractors, holders of US debt, road builders, government employees, and so forth. Indeed, the law professor's favorite target, Head Start, isn't exactly a shining star in terms of poverty reduction.

My preference would be to eliminate the estate tax and tax the cash as it hits a person or entity. That wouldn't fix this 'problem', but then, I don't think anything will. On the other hand, it would make it harder to structure estates to avoid taxation (personal income of that sort is hard to structure), and it would allow us to be much more granular in achieving our goal, which is to avoid plutocratic accumulations of wealth, not punish people for getting rich and dying.

Public service announcement

I just want to point out that there is some really interesting discussion going on in the comments to my post on oil bubbles, with an engineer weighing in on aircraft efficiency, and some investors talking about their experience as commodity traders, so if you don't normally read the comments, I highly suggest you check it out.

Gotcha!

On the other side of the spectrum, some more stupid nitpicking: the New York Times discovers that Barack Obama, in his autobiography, may have made his life sound more interesting than it really was. A politician? Painting himself in the most politically convenient light? My God, pass the sleeping pills--I've lost my faith in humanity, and with it, my will to live.

Do economists <i>really</i> support John McCain?

Kevin Drum, among others, is excited by the news that some economists appear to be recanting on their support for McCain's economic plan:

Now, this is good sport, to be sure, but there's also a serious side to this stuff. Somebody who's not me ought to start dialing up the other 280+ signatories and find out just how much of McCain's plan they really support. Do they think the current Social Security funding mechanism is a disgrace? Are they in favor of a gas tax holiday? Do they think his multi-trillion tax cut will increase revenues? Inquiring minds want to know.

I wouldn't get too excited. I got the same press release, and I've been wondering whether to blog it, because running an eye down the list of signatories, it doesn't look like the Politico exactly dialed at random. I'm familiar enough with about a quarter of the list to be able to confidently predict their reaction if telephoned, and to a first approximation, pretty much all of them would enthusiastically support McCain over Obama. Most of the article seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill--Gary Becker supports McCain's plan without having studied in detail every single provision. This is news? How many of the economists who signed the John Kerry letter four years ago could have given you chapter and verse on his economic plans? I bet I could have beaten 99% of them in a quiz on Kerry's policies--aye, even things which made the second page of his position paper. Nor, when pressed, would very many of them have been willing to put their professional credibility on the line by supporting every provision of it.

The economists who signed the letter aren't choosing "John McCain's platform over The Platonic Ideal Economic Policy". They're stating whether they prefer it to Obama's plans. And overwhelmingly, they seem to--the Politico found one out of twelve who says he'll probably vote for Obama, and given where he teaches, this was probably one of their better shots.

If anyone bothers to call them, I'm pretty sure they'll get a few not-very-political types who were recruited by enthusiastic colleagues, and then a boring litany of "Maybe not perfect, but a lot better than the alternative". Listening to that being said 300 times will not exactly bolster the case for Obama.

What's in a name?

Nick Gillespie points to the most popular baby names of 2007, compared to 1950. Two interesting things:

1) The long tail: the 10 most popular baby names now account for only a tenth of the babies born in the US, rather than a quarter

2) The return to the bible: More than half of the names are biblical, most from the Old Testament. Is America getting religion? Or have we gotten so irreligious that "Ethan" sounds vaguely exotic?

Oil: are we in a bubble?

After long thought, I am coming around to the notion that oil may be in a bubble. Why? Because everyone is acting as if the natural trajectory of prices is ever-upward. Sound familiar?

Oil is a fairly easily storable commodity. If you think that you can get a better price for it tomorrow, the natural thing to do is buy it and store the stuff. This should push the price upwards until there is no remaining arbitrage opportunity in buying now and selling later.

The best estimate of the future price is therefore the current price. For it to move upward, rationally, you need new information--i.e., information that none of us knows now. The basic logic behind the predictions I hear of ever-rising prices--the supply is fixed, oil is neat stuff that helps grow economies, there are a lot of economies that want to consume more of the stuff--is all well known to everyone. You should assume that the price is roughly as likely to fall as to rise.

But people are acting as if the overwhelmingly likely outcome is a continuing increase. This shows not merely in the fact that it's damned hard to find a small car on the lots these days, but also in all sorts of policy debates. This suggests a couple of things to me:

1) There are probably more speculators in the market on the upside than the downside, pushing the price above its natural level

2) We are probably irrationally overinvesting in fuel-saving technology.

Now, as I've said repeatedly, I think the price of oil should be higher, helped along by a carbon tax. But there's no reason to think that the wellhead price is more likely to rise than to fall. If I were brave, I'd short oil and buy an SUV. Instead, I'm timidly sharing my thoughts with you, and investing in a small car. But in my defense, small cars are also easy to park.

Buy now, pay later

James Poulos notes that California legislators are betting that their rich citizens have too many social and economic ties to the state to leave. In the short term, they're probably right. But in the longer term, it's not so clear. The real question for California will be, do they get new rich people to replace the current crop? Or do high taxes impede capital formation, and encourage entrepreneurs to site their companies everywhere.

Contra the more dogmatic Republicans, I don't think it's obvious that the answer is "yes". California has a lot of complementary assets, especially its coastal location, that make it attractive to locate there. But as many European countries are finding out, even a very attractive location is not desirable at any price.

Part of the problem with these questions is that there is often a tipping point. The tax policies and so forth often look like they aren't costing the state any growth--right up to the point that a whole bunch of companies relocate at once, and build the kind of complementary cluster (finance, tech, media) that has been driving your economy in some more business-friendly clime. The same factors that made it hard to drive those companies out will make it hard to get them back once they've moved.

Though I'd assign air conditioning the larger role, in part this is what drove the movement south that devastated the Rust Belt. And it's telling that fifty years later, places like Buffalo are still saddled with a tax-and-spend system that they literally can't afford--the city recently ended up in receivership despite large transfers from the state government.

Them's the rules

There are a lot of complaints about bicyclists blowing through stop signs/red lights while drivers have to sit there, fuming. Here's the thing: the traffic laws are there to protect you, and the other cars. They are not handed down by God from Mount Sinai. They have no moral content.

Bicyclists should not proceed through lights and stop signs at top speed. But the stop sign is there to make the car slow the hell down to non-lethal speed. A bicycle rolling a slow five miles per hour through a stop sign, rather than coming to a complete stop, is not threatening anything except the temper of the jealous driver next to them. You will also have noticed that there is generally no question of their going out of turn at a crowded stop sign--when there's a car coming the other way, bicyclists stop, because they don't want to get killed.

Obviously, in crowded traffic, bicyclists should obey the same traffic laws as the cars, and most do; those who don't, get no sympathy from me when they are killed or sued. Bicyclists should yield to pedestrians at crosswalks, and again, most do, mostly because we tend to get thrown from our bikes when we run into them.

But cars are forced to stop and wait even at not-particularly-crowded intersections because if we didn't slow them down, they would inevitably be moving fast enough to severely injure or kill someone. Bicyclists do occasionally run into people and hurt them--though at least as often it's a case of one of those genius pedestrians on cell phones who dart out from between cars right when I'm passing by--but this is really rare. Even with the traffic laws, pedestrian deaths from automobiles are far, far more common. And a fast moving bicyclist crashing into a pedestrian is at least as likely to get hurt as the pedestrian, when their velocity hurls them off the bike and lets the ground exert its stopping power. The situations simply aren't parallel.

As for the people claiming that the roads were made for cars--well, actually, the roads I ride on were made for horses and trolleys and bicycles, not cars, which weren't invented when they were laid down. Nor, as far as I can tell, are DC streets paid for by your gas taxes; they seem to be paid for by my tax dollars, which is pretty damn generous of me considering I don't even own a downtown sandwich shop.

When America sneezes, the world catches cold

The slowdown in the American housing industry is bad news for Mexican remittances.

Department of kind of awful statistics

I should probably just shutter the blog and redirect it to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but he keeps coming up with neat stuff. This on black illegitimacy. The stunning statistic that 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock is driven, to be sure, by the fact that many poor black women have a lot of children. But it turns out it is also driven by the fact that married black women have fewer children than married white women.

Ta-Nehisi suggests a reason for this that makes sense to me:

I'm effectively--if not legally--married. Been with the mother of my eight year old son for ten years now. More on this later. (I promise!) But basically when he was born I felt that he was the bond between us. In other words, he literally was the marriage ring. We'd both love to have more kids, but we simply can't afford it. Furthermore, we don't have particularly wealthy parents to fall back on. I think that's the situation a lot of married black folks find themselves in. They simply feel that they can't have more kids.

It's well known that the black middle class has a lot less in the way of assets than whites of similar income levels--hardly surprising, given the legacy of generations of discrimination and poverty. But that also means that things that a lot of white middle class people take for granted--like help with a down-payment on a house when you have your first kid--are less available. Middle class black parents have less in the way of a parental safety net than their white equivalents, so they're less likely to have a second kid.

So even though the statistic is basically correct--as Ta-Nehisi says, "Even if married black parents had kids at the rate that white married parents did (or better yet, Hispanic parents), black babies would still make up a disproportionate share of kids borne out of wedlock"--it's still worth interrogating, because the picture is considerably more complex than is generally implied.

Cringe

Spackerman points to this embarassing statement by press secretary Dana Perino:

"Some of the terms I just don’t know," Perino told Fox News's Chris Wallace. "I haven't grown up knowing the type of missiles that are out there: Patriots and Scuds and cruise missiles and Tomahawk missiles. And I think that men, just by osmosis, understand all of these things. And they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a Destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area."

Most men I know, particularly (non-defense) journalists, can't lovingly detail the differences between missiles. But you know who can? My Aunt Cathy, who's been working on security and defense issues since the sixties. Somehow, that second X chromosome did not prevent her from learning enough about defense to get a PhD and serve in places like the NSA, the Defense department, and the Naval War College.

Women are certainly underrepresented in defense, but they aren't absent, and neither they nor the men they work with learned their craft by osmosis. They learned by hard work and study, the same way that other difficult trades are mastered. Presumably that list does not include White House press secretary.

Drivers or bikers: who sucks more?

Predictibly, drivers are complaining about the bikers being all unsafe and illegal and everything. The bikers are biting back. Who's more dangerous?

I commute by both bike and car, and it's no contest: cars. Bikers are keenly alive to their own safety, and tend to pay a lot more attention to the cars than the cars pay to them. Moreover, many drivers in DC seem to believe that it is against the law to be in a mode of transportation that goes more slowly than their own, and therefore complain about such "violations" as trying to merge into the exit lane of a traffic circle. Memo to drivers: whether it's a car or a bike, you're supposed to yield to someone trying to exit. Yes, I know that this means you'll get to your destination a full TEN SECONDS later, Princess Precious. We all have our crosses to bear; let this be yours.

Speaking as a car owner, the aura of entitlement around car commuters here is really amazing to behold. They're positively outraged that DC is moving to demand pricing for parking, and to close fast-moving arteries that shunt commuters to their destination at the expense of making the neighborhoods virtually unwalkable at rush hour. They don't even have the excuse of New York commuters--that their jobs and entertainment bring the city a lot of revenue. Government agencies don't pay any sort of taxes; nor do think tanks, NGOs, or most money-losing media organizations. And suburbanites tend to hang out in the suburbs at night, and shop their on weekends. In short, they want us to pay them for the privilege of hosting their cars 12 hours a day, and picking up the lucrative sandwich shop revenue which they apparently believe is the sole fiscal support of the city.

They are also terrible, terrible drivers. I don't know what it is about DC, but the city hosts a kind of driver that I have never encountered before: aggressive, yet hesitant. Usually you get one or the other.

Making DC safe for bikes

A cyclist was struck and killed today by a garbage truck. The street where she was killed is on my commute; it could have been me.

JP Freire, the American Spectator's managing editor, writes:

There are four of us in the office that regularly bike. It's the easiest mode of transporation in this town, but the refrain in my explanation to others has always been that D.C. drivers are truly reckless. While it's not clear, based on this story, whose fault it is, I'm reminded of a number of situations in which I learned important lessons about life, death, and balancing the two on a two-wheeled, man-propelled vehicle. Chief among these is that no one seems to be aware of the need to yield to bikes. And cyclists don't realize how the drivers are unaware of this, thus taking their safety for granted.

I don't think more bike lanes solve the problem, because they're usually not well-marked, and cars don't look for bikes in their rearviews. I'd suggest more signs around town reminding drivers to check their mirrors for cyclists.

The problem isn't that the bike lanes aren't easily marked; it's that drivers ignore them. If you want to make the streets safer, put in more bike lanes, and ticket drivers who drive in them. Yes, that means you, Mr "My passenger couldn't POSSIBLY cross the street so why don't I park in the bike lane for ten minutes while she gets out on the side she wants to be on?" I have an irrational, but strong, belief that these are the same people who write angry letters to the Washington Post complaining that bicyclists don't obey traffic rules.

Ending racism: are we there yet? Huh? Huh?

Meanwhile, Julian Sanchez had a very good post in response to Ta-Nehisi. You should read the whole thing, but I've been thinking hard about this piece:

Is it possible to be so opposed to racism that it becomes more difficult to root out racism?

Just follow me for a second here: What image springs to mind when you think of “racism”? A Klansman burning a cross? Adolf Hitler? George Wallace barring the schoolhouse door? Images like these are iconic, easy to invoke, and extreme. They remain current because they are potent illustrations of where racism leads; their ugliness, their repugnance, is manifest.

There are still, of course, sectors of American society where the crude racism of the epithet and the noose is casually accepted. But , happily, this sort of thing largely is beyond the pale in polite company. And this makes it beguilingly easy to conclude: “Well, I don’t go around slinging racial epithets or fuming with hatred at this or that group. Therefore I can’t be one of those awful people. Why, some of my best friends…”

But the variety of racism more common today is more subtle than that, and in a way more pernicious for it, since the overt bigot is unlikely to wield much social power. It’s the subliminal reaction of the manager looking for a new cashier who, for some reason he can’t articulate, just doesn’t think the minority candidate seems quite trustworthy enough. It’s this person who we most want examining his own attitudes. But to do that means being prepared to start from the difficult premise that even he—educated, urbane, kind, and so on—may indeed harbor racial biases. Like Hitler! Like a Klansman!

Now, there’s an obvious way around this, though it should make us uncomfortable for different reasons. We could make a point of talking about race bias and stereotyping in a more gradated way. At one pole is the Klansman. At another, there’s that “typical white person” who is more guarded and alert walking past a black guy at 1am on 7th and V than he would be walking past a similarly-dressed white person.

The discomfort here comes from the thought that allowing these gradations entails licensing some forms of racism—regarding them as understandable, even acceptable. And for very good reasons, this is not the kind of conversation we want to have: “So, is this particular instance bad racism or sorta-understandable racism?” There are whole modes of thought we just want to be entirely beyond the pale.

While I think Julian's onto something important here, I wonder if this is even relevant for most of the white community. Most people just don't seem very interested in battling subtle bias.

The earlier anti-racism movements had clear goals. Free the slaves, change the Jim Crow laws, tell people they ought to treat black candidates the same as all the others. The new battle is against an endless battle against one's own thoughts. This sounds fine for people who are professional intellectuals, especially if they are focused on race or gender issues. I think that when feminist blogs say, "Everyone is sexist--we are not blaming you, but we need your help to stamp it out" they think they're extending an olive branch. But to most people, I suspect it just sounds exhausting.

And, to tell it true, the newer forms of sexism and racism aren't as bad as what proceeded them. With civil rights, we were asking people to slay dragons. Now we're asking them to spend the rest of their lives exterminating mosquitos. It may be true that a swarm of mosquitos is almost as bad, in toto, as a single dragon. But they don't summon the same sort of emotional energy.

Is there reverse privilege?

Ta-Nehisi Coates had a typically thoughtful post last week on crime and race:

I was just reading this entry from Ezra Klein where he notes that fully half of his friends have been mugged. That is just a shocking number to me. I got to thinking back on my days in the District, and I couldn't even think of more than three or four people who I knew that had been mugged. As I reflected more on it, I came to a very uncomfortable--if obvious conclusion--if you're a mugger in D.C., a young, white, bookish blogger probably looks like the perfect mark.

For most of my tenure in D.C., I was going to Howard University. This was before the advent of gentrification, and it was generally thought that Howard students, themselves, were easy marks. But me and most my friends knew that to be a simplification. It's true that if you walked through, say, Clifton Terrace star-gazing, if you're roaming the streets acting like it can't happen (as us ancient hip-hop heads say), you were very likely to get stuck. But as anyone whose spent some time in the city knows, if you moved through the streets with purpose, if you kept the ice-grill on and looked like you were all business, if you kept that sixth sense of yours buzzing, the chances of you actually falling prey were pretty low. I may have had one encounter my whole time in D.C. You may attribuite that to me being 6'4, but the same was true of virtually all of my friends because they tended to be, like me, kids who didn't have a thuggish bone in their bodies but were still intimately acquainted with, as Dre would say, the Strength of Street Knowledge.

In reading all of these blog postings about crime in the District, I am beginning to understand--to some extent--the fear that white folks must have of black crime, as something different than the fear that black folks have. I live in Harlem, still a relatively unsafe section of New York, but having lived in Harlems all my life, I acutally feel almost as safe there as I do here in Aspen. I know that violent crime most often happens in situations in which people know each other, or in situations in which someone looks like a target. I tend to not hang with criminals, and I do what I can to not make myself a target.

But how would I feel if I knew my skin color alone made me an easy mark for the most degenerate elements of a community? Heh, probably the exact same way I'd feel driving through the small towns of Texas. That's not entirely fair--random street crime is still more common than hate crime. What I'm driving at is this: For the first time in my life, I have some sense of what the white guy who is ignorant of all things about black people is thinking when he drives through certain parts of town and rolls up his window. Because his very whiteness makes him an easy mark, he has to fear things in a way that I never do.

White people writing about race are always walking a minefield, so I'll have to ask you to assume my goodwill here, and forgive any infelicities.

I've been talking a bit about privilege recently--how the ways in which their dominance makes their lives easier become invisible to the members of the dominant group. It's interesting to contemplate a sort of reverse privilege, in which some key component of the dominant group experience is somehow emotionally invisible to other groups.

I think it's safe to assume that minorities and women know more about life in the dominant group than the reverse--if for no other reason than the ways that media centers around their experience. But that can be tricky. Have you ever noticed how Europeans think they know way more about life in America than they actually do, because they watch our television and movies? I'm pretty sure that I know more about men's world than they know about mine--but I'm also confident that I don't actually know what it's like to be a man.

I don't know what to do with that insight, except to note that probably, this makes the actions of the dominant group seem more malicious than they are. While we were at Aspen, Ta-Nehisi and Kenyatta and I talked about the fact that most white people have some older person--a relative or a family friend--who is an extremely good person, and also says racist things. Most of us don't confront those people, except perhaps in a "Now, grandma, you know you shouldn't say those things*" kind of way.

I assume that this looks, from the outside, like we endorse or at least accept those opinions. But most people I know have wrestled with the problem. That most of us have concluded that we can't raise an 85-year-old might be cowardice, but to me it feels like choosing my battles. Building racial harmony in the nation's nursing homes is not high on my list of priorities. And if you become the Family Flake, the one who picks fights with Uncle Howard every Christmas, you lose any opportunity for more gentle persuasion.

I really don't want this post to come out as "See--black people don't understand how hard white people have it!" Rather, I'm continuing what I tried to say in this post: that both communities, because they have a less than perfect understanding of the others' experience, are more suspicious of each other than they need to be.

* For example only; my grandmother is a lovely woman from whom I have never heard the slightest racist utterance.

Save more (of the planet) later . . .

The United States has pledged to sign a treaty to cut greenhouse emissions in half . . . by 2050:

In a statement Tuesday on climate change, President Bush and the other G-8 leaders said they would work with other countries to "consider and adopt" the 50-percent reductions as part of the new United Nations treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. The leaders made it clear in their statement that they expected developing countries such as China and India, whose economies are also major polluters, to play a role in reducing emissions.

Meeting on the scenic Japanese island of Hokkaido, the leaders also promised to make more immediate cuts in emissions over the next two decades, though they did not offer a specific numerical target. They indicated that they intend to write into the new treaty language that would bind them to "implement ambitious economy-wide mid-term goals in order to achieve absolute emissions reductions."

This is probably the only way we're going to get major emissions reductions; the politics of immediate cuts are just too ugly. Better to put it off until the current crop of negotiators is safely dead. When, likely as not, a new round of negotiators will vote to ignore them.

The Law

I hadn't noticed that America's largest kosher meat processor has been recently plagued by scandal, though an Orthodox friend tells me that this is huge news in the kosher community. Apparently, it's created quite a shortage of kosher meat. A big part of the controversy is the slaughter practices, which, at least according to PETA activists, violate the spirit if not the letter of kashrut.

I wonder if this doesn't have some connection to the weekend's discussion of rules-vs-principles based regulation. Kosher law is incredibly detailed, in part because rabbis were trying to do what my religious studies professor called "building a wall around the torah"--setting up one's life so that it is almost impossible to accidentally violate a commandment. So the original prohibition against boiling a kid in the milk of its mother becomes a set of very elaborate rules designed to make sure that no specks of milk and meat ever come into contact in one's digestive system.

For the unscrupulous, this opens up an area of opportunity. The original kosher slaughter laws were designed to, among other things, minimize the suffering of the animals. But they predated the assembly line, when speed became profit. So now a slaughterhouse can hoist an animal up by ropes and hang it upside down to make it bleed out faster, while still arguing that it has not violated kosher law. In letter, yes. In spirit, this seems to obviously violate the principle that one should minimize animal suffering.

Of course, various Jewish communities constantly debate and update laws for just this reason. But just as with government regulation, the rules will always be a little behind the clever bastards looking for loopholes. Whereas if the slaughterhouses were required to stick to the objective of making the animals suffer as little as possible, it would be pretty clear that a lot of these practices flunked the test.

What's the best car purchase to help the environment?

I am trying to work my way through the implications of this article from Slate, on the environmental merits of buying a Prius v. a used car.

In order to do an apples-to-apples comparison, let's pit the Prius against a car that's frequently cited as its closest nonhybrid equivalent in terms of weight, size, and other specs: the Toyota Corolla. Would it be more energy-efficient to buy a brand-new Prius or someone else's old Corolla? Since certified, pre-owned cars tend to be less than five years old and are refurbished before going on sale, let's generously assume that your used Corolla will last exactly as long as your new Prius: 11.5 years, or 172,500 miles. (The average American discards a car every eight years, but that's more often than necessary: A well-made vehicle will typically last 15 years.)

According to the federal government's 2008 fuel economy guide (PDF), a Prius averages 46.5 miles per gallon (assuming half of a driver's time is spent on city streets and half on the highway). Beyond 172,500 miles, then, the Prius will consume 3,710 gallons of gas. Each gallon contains approximately 124,000 BTUs of energy, so that translates into 460 million BTUs' worth of burned fuel. Add in the production energy, and the new Prius is responsible for a grand total of 573 million BTUs over its lifetime (not including disposal costs).

A Corolla with an automatic transmission, by contrast, averages 30.5 mpg—more than eight miles per gallon better than the average car on America's roads. Over the vehicle's lifetime, that translates into 5,656 gallons of gas containing more than 701 million BTUs of energy. Since the Corolla we're considering is used, we won't add to that total by factoring in production energy.

This ignores, of course, your impact on the market. As good environmentalists know, we are all part of the vast, interconnected web of the ecosystem. You cannot calculate your impact simply by estimating how much carbon you emit in your own commute.

The supply of used cars is pretty well fixed--they have to be in pretty horrible condition before they're junked rather than resold for a pittance. So the correct calculation is not how much you will emit by driving one, but how much you will emit compared to the person who would have bought the car.

But then, that person would probably have bought another car. If they would have bought a Prius, you've simply swapped places. If they would have bought another car, you've increased demand for a less fuel-efficient option.

On the third hand, as far as I know most industry analysts still believe that Toyota breaks even, or loses money, on the Prius, and so the normal price signal sent by buying a car--"increase supply of that model"--may not operate. If the person who would have bought a used Corolla instead buys a new Corolla--or someone far down the purchase chain does--you've probably done more for the environment than you would by buying a Prius, because you've actually increased the supply of fuel-efficient cars.

In fact, it seems to me that the best option is to buy a used SUV and drive it very little. But I have a feeling that this would not give a potential Prius owner everything they are looking for in a car.

Me, I'm buying a used, little car and driving it very little, mostly because it saves gas and makes parking easier. But that's just the kind of selfish rat I am.

Presto!

A propos of absolutely nothing:

Good neighbors

Thanks to multiple delayed flights and a gross shortage of cabs, I didn't get home from Aspen until about 6:30 this morning. Apparently, I was so tired that I left my keys in my front door, because I found them this morning when I finally woke up.

I just got a call from my landlord. When he asked me if I was still alive, I developed a sudden and irrational fear that something had gone wrong with my rent check--but no, my upstairs neighbor had noticed, and called him to make sure I was all right.

It's a small thing, but maybe because I grew up in New York, I find it heartwarming. DC has a high crime rate, but many other amenities.

Detroit woos gay drivers

While coming back from a completely fruitless trip to the grocery store (Why do you hate vegans, Giant? WHY?) I was listening to NPR cover a new publicity stunt by Detroit: the big three are hosting a speed-dating contest for gay consumers, during which they will presumably also be barraged with information about the awesomeness of American automobiles.

To me this is actually more interesting from a marketing perspective than a social one. Gays are a very small, if affluent, demographic--something less than 3% of the population, AFAIK. They are also disproportionately concentrated in urban areas with relatively low car usage. Nonetheless, Detroit is spending time and money trying to up its share of the gay car-buying market by some infinitessimal amount.

This tells you just how competitive American markets are these days. Marketing is a cutthroat business, one in which, increasingly, no demographic is too small to avoid the blitz.

Except, apparently, DC vegans, for whom it is too much trouble to stock soy milk, seitan, and a little extra-firm tofu.

Marginal revolution

Orac has a great post on the cost-effectiveness of cancer treatments, particularly Avastin, an extremely expensive angiogenesis inhibitor.

Basically, what is being discussed here is whether a drug affects overall survival (OS), which is mortality from all causes in a cancer patient, versus whether it affects progression-free survival (PFS), which is the period of time before a given tumor progresses. Surprisingly, at least to non-oncologists and lay people, OS and PFS are often unrelated. If, for example, a drug slows tumor growth sufficiently to demonstrate a significant affect on PFS, it doesn't necessarily mean that OS will be better too. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Moreover, it's long been a debate over whether PFS is a valid endpoint for approving a drug. Traditionally, the thinking has been that if a drug does not improve OS, then it probably shouldn't be approved as a first line agent given up front to new cancer patients who have not been treated yet, although it can be approved as a second-line or third-line agent, to be tried after first line agents fail.

However, thinking has been evolving over the last few years towards accepting a somewhat looser standard of valuing PFS. . .

. . . resources are not endless, and one has to ask how much a few months of PFS without a concomitant increase in OS are worth. I don't know the answer to that one, as this is a very difficult debate that we in the U.S. have thus far been able to avoid. Our colleagues in nations with nationalized health care systems cannot avoid it, though. For example, in Canada, it's been estimated that the addition of Avastin to breast cancer and lung cancer treatment would add $299 million a year to Canada's health care costs. In a country like Canada, the only choices are to cut money out of other programs to pay for this or to raise taxes. In the U.S., our insurance premiums just go up.

Everyone in the healthcare debate is looking for a villain: heedless consumers, careless doctors, grasping pharma companies. But the truth is, most of the increase in health care costs comes from new treatments, not abuse of the system. And a lot of those new treatments raise a question: how much are we willing to pay for marginal improvements in survival, or quality of life?

As Orac says, so far we've ducked that question because we have no central planner that has to make it. But eventually, we're going to have to face it through the mechanism of rising premia. And there's no easy answer. It's easy to dismiss these improvements as marginal, but marginal is not the same thing as "insignificant". Baby steps will eventually bring you to the same place as one giant leap--it just takes a little longer. My understanding is that the reason we've made such immense advances in pediatric oncology is that the oncologists just kept grinding away, producing minor improvements that over time added up to a gigantic increase in life expectancy for children with cancer.

Carbon permits: who pays?

Matt says that Obama has McCain beat all hollow on energy policy:

And it's true. Barack Obama's energy policies -- focused on improving efficiency and developing renewable energy sources -- are pretty much party line answers because the Democratic party line is largely correct. McCain, by contrast, is a mess. He wants a cap and trade system to combat global warming (good) but wants to organize it so that the costs are borne entirely by consumers rather than polluters (bad). He says he's against subsidies for renewable energy because subsidies are a bad idea (understandable if a little pie in the sky) but wants massive subsidies for nuclear energy (because nuclear firms give him campaign contributions). McCain wants to get us off our addiction to oil (good) but he has no record of improving mass transit or fuel efficiency (bad) and his big idea is to wreck the economy of the coastal United States through offshore drilling which he falsely claims will lower short-term fuel prices. On top of all that, he proposes to lower gas prices through a "gas tax holiday" that's been denounced by experts across the ideological spectrum.

The question of auctioning carbon permits, vs. giving them away to companies, is often framed as a question of whether companies or consumers pay the cost. This is false. Consumers are going to pay the cost no matter what. Oil is in short supply, which means they'll pay to the point where the market clears no matter who gets the revenue. And utilities are generally heavily regulated companies with so-so profit margins--Con Ed, for example, which provided electricity to both me and Matt growing up, has a 7% net margin and an ROE of roughly 11%. Pepco, which currently serves us (I think--my rent includes utilities), does 4% and 9-10%. The costs of carbon, whatever they are, will pass through.

As they should. The only reason to have a carbon trading scheme, or a carbon tax, is to force carbon emissions down; otherwise it's just a stupidly inefficient tax that requires a gigantic new collection bureaucracy. And unfortunately, for the foreseeable future the main way we're gong to do that is to get people to use less energy. Taking money from Conoco doesn't further this goal unless the cost is passed through to consumers.

The core issues in the auction vs. giveaway question are two:

1) The distribution of costs between consumers and the government. A giveaway leaves the surplus in the hands of consumers; an auction gives the money to the government.

2) The distribution of benefits within the energy sector. A giveaway benefits industry incumbents, who can use their lobbying power to secure them. An auction benefits the holders of capital.

Austan Goolsbee talked a lot about that this weekend; he argues (correctly, I think) that a giveaway carries a high risk of corruption/regulatory capture. But he didn't frame the question as a showdown between consumers and power companies, because no matter how the permits are allocated, the consumer is going to pay the price.

The libertarian menace extends its reach

Our mind control drugs begin to work on Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Marvin Gaye.

Incidentally, Ta-Nehisi and his partner, Kenyatta, are spectacularly awesome people, just as I suspected they would be. Meeting them was the highlight of a pretty neat festival.

Can we stimulate our way back into growth?

Arnold Kling ably sums up the core issue in a Ken Rogoff piece that has taken the econoblogosphere by storm this morning:

His view is that rising commodity prices are a message that demand is rising too rapidly. In the U.S., inflationary fiscal and monetary policy is to blame. In many developing countries, government subsidies that insulate consumers from rising commodity prices are at fault. As Rogoff sees it, markets will eventuall adjust to tame the commodity boom, but the process could take years. Meantime, an economic slow-down is in order.

This is an interesting point of view. Rogoff, not known as a right-winger, seems to have broken sharply from other Keynesians, notably Robert Shiller.

Think of this disagreement in terms of the textbook aggregate supply metaphor (which I don't care for, but that's another story). On the left-most (horizontal) segment, the economy is in recession, and expansionary policies raise output without adding to inflationary pressure. On the right-most (vertical) segment, the economy is near capacity, and expansionary policies add to inflation without doing much to increase output. Shiller fears that we are on the left-most segment, and Rogoff is arguing that we are closer to the right-most segment.

Another way to put this is that stimulus works when you have a demand shock, but doesn't when you have a supply shock.

In 2001, we had a demand shock. The real productive capacity of the economy had changed very little, but several psychological blows had (at least arguably) reduced aggregate demand. But now we're facing at least one supply shock: scarce oil. We can't stimulate our way out of a real shortage.

I thought this went without saying

But apparently not:

So let me get this straight, your son should be rewarded for telling the truth, and he really doesn't hate blacks, because he supposedly has a black friend. You would think that maybe, just possibly, one or two of those black friends that you claim he socializes with, would have told him that it might not be a good idea to burn a cross as a sign of love, respect or camaraderie. When most people want to be friendly to new people in the neighbourhood, they stop by with a cake, or a pie even.

Call me crazy but burning a cross just doesn't seem to say welcome to the neighbourhood. Perhaps all of the images popularized in the media of men in white sheets burning crosses just looked like some kind of weird celebration of Halloween. Maybe he believed that when they were screaming, "white power" as the crosses burned they were making a statement about how wonderful bleach is at keeping whites, white and not actually pushing a racial agenda.

I favor brownies, myself. That way, they can eat them even if they haven't unpacked the silverware yet.

Table Talk

Marc Ambinder, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sean Parker, and I discuss the future of digital storytelling.

Israel's right to exist

Right now I'm at what Allstate is calling an "Ideas Exchange" on the topic of covering Israel in the media. For us, it's basically a fancier version of The Table, so I'll put up video later.

Right now Ari Shavit is talking about the way that many Israeli journalists feel compelled to justify Israel's existence. That is a question, he says, that Israelis shouldn't feel afraid to face, even though he calls himself "a proud Zionist".

I think the mistake that Israel makes is to try justify itself in terms of the UN resolution, the Holocaust, the bible. Very few people outside of ultra-religious US communities are willing to accept that Israel should be a Jewish state because G-d promised them they could have that land. The Palestinians didn't have anything to do with the holocaust. And the belief that UN resolutions are the ultimate binding moral authority is one that Israel certainly does not embrace outside of this one resolution.

The justification for Israel, like the justification for Northern Ireland, is simply that it exists. Whatever the injustices that went into its creation, the people are there and they are not going anywhere. The wrongs of yesteryear cannot be righted without doing further injustice, so whatever the rightness or wrongness of their cause, the Palestinians are going to have to accept that they cannot have things as they would have been if Zionism had not happened.

Perhaps it is not possible to self-conceive this way--perhaps America could not be America without believing that King George III was not merely a guy who thought he could talk to trees, but something very close to the devil incarnate. And to be sure, putting aside the claim that they deserved a Jewish state on that piece of land would probably force some very uncomfortable changes in Israeli policy. But I think it would be pretty helpful if we could, because too much of the debate over that land revolves around an ultimately pointless argument about Israel's right to exist.

No just war, no peace

I just asked Stephen Carter a question--and I'm going to ask the Aspen Institute for the video of his answer. The question is one that I've been worrying at for a while: what do you do with captives of an entity that considers itself at war with you, but when there is no state to declare an end to the conflict?

His answer is too rich to do justice, which is why I want the video, but a couple of points:

1) Captives who fight out of uniform are not covered under Geneva. This presumably includes the prisoners at Guantanamo. Nonetheless, he says, we should treat them as if they were.

2) Geneva, and more broadly just war theory, is meant to deal with states. This is a gigantic problem with quasi-military terrorism.

Not just why, but how

Carter is now discussing the problems inherent in the twin principles enshrined in both just war theory: proportionality and discrimination.

Proportionality means that you should use the method that will produce the fewest casualties. But taken to its logical extreme, this would dictate that commanders are obligated to take an objective in a way that kills 100 of their guys and 200 of their guys, instead of in a way that kills 10 of your guys and 1,000 of their guys. Indeed, some proponents of international law do argue this. But it is morally thorny (and you can then start asking what minimizes net casualties over the course of the war, rather than current ones). Moreover, if you have a theory of war that tells commanders they should sacrifice large numbers of their men to save the enemy, you will have a theory of war that is never applied to an actual war.

The problem of discrimination is also difficult. We think of just war theory as telling us that you can't target civilians, but in fact it says you can't target "non-combatants"--that's why you can't shoot prisoners. But this becomes extremely difficult. Who is a non-combatant? The cooks? A general back at headquarters? Infantry troops who happen to be asleep?

He dives a little bit into the issue of prisoner treatment. Like pretty much everyone else in the room, he's an anti-torture hardliner. But he also points out how little most of the people arguing about the Geneva Convention actually know about its provisions. For example, we may all agree that you shouldn't hurt people to get them to cooperate--but the laws of war also forbid giving prisoners so much as a Hershey bar in exchange for cooperation. This makes sense under the logic of the convention, which as much as anything, is a list of ways for warring states to avoid wasting energy on tit-for-tat practices. But it has little to do with the moral intuitions that drive most of us to get angry when people violate the Geneva Convention.

To fight or not to fight?

I'm now at a lunch talk by Stephen Carter called "The Tragedy of Just War Theory". The most interesting thing he's pointed out so far is that when Americans say "someone should do something" to stop a conflict somewhere, this is almost tantamount to saying "we should do something", because at a most generous estimate, there are four military forces in the world capable of deploying into a conflict zone and shutting down the war: America, Britain, Australia, and Israel. For diverse reasons, the other three are very unlikely to deploy without our support. We're it. "If you are an American," says Carter, "it is not enough to know what you are against. You must know what you are for."

Perhaps the list of conflicts in which we should intervene is very short--the hard left and the paleo right would say that it is zero. But we have to recognize that if we don't, no one else is going to do it for us--the African Union cannot make peace in Darfur, none of Iraq's neighbors can help it if it erupts into civil war, and so forth.

That means that when we decide not to intervene, we are making a decision that no one should act to halt the conflict. That, says Carter, should be a decision--not something that we simply let slide by default while we murmer that really, something ought to be done.

Bank regulation: is delevering the answer?

The panel--and already, some of my commenters--are talking about the role of regulators in keeping banks from levering up too aggressively. As I've said elsewhere, repeatedly, this is one of the few proposed reforms that seems like a slam dunk. And pretty much everyone, across the board, agrees.

On the other hand, keeping leverage levels down may not protect the economy from a crisis; it may simply keep the tab down for the taxpayer. To see why, consider the arguement about reserve requirements advanced by my old macro professor, John Huizenga. In theory, a reserve requirement makes the bank safer, right? After all, it means the bank has to have, say, 20% of its outstanding loans in hard cash at any given time. That's money that protects against bank runs.

Actually, no, it doesn't--because the bank has to have 20% of its outstanding loans in hard cash at any given time. It can't give that money to the depositors, because doing so reduces the reserves faster than it reduces the bank's liability.

Say depositors who collectively account for 10% of your demand deposits all come and ask for their money. You give them half your reserves. But you only reduced your reserve requirement by 10%. That means you need to make up that lost 40% somewhere. Fast.

Imagine there were a law requiring you to have $100 on you at all times. For most people, this initially seems like ample means to cover their daily spending. Then you realize that because you always have to have that $100, you actually need much more than that to take care of your needs.

In theory, the bank regulator can lower the reserve requirements in times of crisis. But as Professor Huizenga pointed out, one thing that regulators do not like to do in times of crisis is announce "Hey, your banks have less cash than they used to!"

The reserve requirements protect the regulator--it limits the loss in the case of a collapse. And that's a worthy goal. But Huizenga argued that it didn't really make the banks all that much sounder. I am still mulling what this implies for regulatory action on investment banking leverage.

Cut rate

Talk has turned to the ratings agencies. The problem of these agencies has produced consternation across the ideological spectrum. They're the kind of private institution that anarcho-capitalists count on to substitute for government regulation in their ideal world. But just as governments often exhibit the same pathologies we demand they cure in private markets, in this crisis, private institutions seem to have demonstrated a classic public choice problem: the benefits of sound ratings are distributed, but while the costs are concentrated. It's thus easier for banks to undermine the ratings than for all those zillions of people who benefit from good ratings to organize to push the system back towards balance.

One could also argue that, to the extent that fraudulent lending was a problem, this was the source of it. In theory, borrowers have just as much incentive to get the mortgage broker on their side as the lenders do--there's a fixed sum of money passing back and forth. But the lenders make a lot of loans, and the borrowers only take one, which makes it easy for the lenders to develop a system which encourages brokers to screw their clients.

I don't know how much this actually happened, because there is no--I repeat, no--good data yet on mortgage broker fraud, and it's very possible that this wasn't a significant problem (no matter what you've read in the New York Times). There are countervailing forces that mitigate against it--competition between brokers, and the fact that each loan is a life-or-death matter to borrowers in a way that it simply isn't to a bank. But if it was a problem, this is probably why.

I don't know what to do about this. The normal answer is regulation, but the ratings agencies get watched pretty closely by the SEC, which is why the whole thing makes liberals queasy. Also, the regulations on them were just tightened in 2006, which isn't helpful when you are looking to do something!

The law of rules

Bill Mayer and Clive just had a very interesting exchange on the topic of the American versus the British approach to financial regulation. American regulation is extremely rules focused--everything not compulsory is forbidden. Britain is nominally looser, with the caveat that you can't get away by saying that "the rules didn't say I couldn't!" You are expected to run a sound institution, and if the regulator decides you haven't . . . start practicing saying "I retired to spend more time with my family. In the waiting room at the courthouse."

Bill Mayer is in favor of this approach, though Clive points out that Britain has had its own problems. ([cough]Northern Rock[cough]). I am broadly in agreement with the notion that American regulation is far too reliant on detailed rules. These are sought by the companies to provide them safe harbor from litigation, but the result is often severe dysfunction. My old accounting professor, Roman Weil, made a similar argument about American accounting standards to Congress in the wake of the Enron debacle, which lays out why these attempts to solve problems with exponentially multiplying rules is ultimately foolish.

Why didn't we do something?

I'm now at a panel on financial regulation, moderated by the inimitable Clive Crook. The panel is, as Clive put it, a "dream team" for discussing the question. Beth Brooke is currently discussing whether the problem was inadequate financial regulation, and making a persuasive case (to me, at least) that it was not. As long as house prices were rising, the decisions that the borrowers and lenders made were rational. And I'm pretty unconvinced by the argument that the housing bubble could have been popped by better regulation. The last, desperate mortgages might have been avoided through better regulation of the mortgage brokers, but much of the horrible debt had already been accumulated by then.

At this point in the coversation, many eyes turn to the Fed and blame Bernanke for excess liquidity. But given the aggressive determination of Asian central banks to keep their currencies low relative to the dollar, and the foreign savers seeking safe haven here, I find it hard to see how this would have ultimately helped. Higher interest rates would simply have raised the value of the dollar, causing further lending by Asian central banks, and of course, they would have made America even more attractive to foreign investors.

Pretty is as pretty does

I should mention that the festival itself is rather nice. There are all sorts of neat little bobo enjoyments--I rode a segway courtesy of Intel (whee!), and Chevron has sponsored free pedicabs to take people places--I intend to ride one before the weekend is out. I've heard some incredibly interesting people speak. And of course, the scenery is spectacular.

It's incredibly pretty. Too pretty. A place that has excised all of its flaws loses much of its beauty, like a face where the plastic surgeon's knife has dipped one time too many.

Aspenitis

Given its reputation, I expected Aspen to be considerably more hippie friendly than it is. I don't know why I thought this, because I have been to Aspen before. Aspen is a monumental shrine to wealth, clothed in the false modesty of a self-conscious homage to America's small town past. It is the Potemkin Village of the post-consumer culture. The place always puts me in mind of the "American" restaurants abroad--it looks like a diner, and the menu sounds like a diner, but when the food comes the chili cheesedog is made with bratwurst and limburger, and they've slathered your french fries with mayonnaise.

Outside of the downtown, as far as I have been able to tell, Aspen has no sidewalks. All of the restaurants cost a fortune for mediocre, but lovingly described, food (none of it, alas, vegan). The Radio Shack is tucked unobtrusively into a basement, lest anyone discover that people here need batteries and cordless phones. And everyone in the town looks eerily alike, as if you had stumbled into a lost sequence from the Village of the Damned. They have the same tans, the same deliberately not-too-attractive preppy clothes, and all appear to have their hair cut by the same barber. It's Nantucket-Over-Mountain.

I find something disturbing about places this affluent, this sheltered. It's a place where wealthy people talk unironically about the problems of the world, while lobbying frantically to ensure that they stay several thousand miles away.

Bleg

Any recommendations for vegan food in Aspen?

Happy birthday, America

There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free--if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending--if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained--we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us! They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength but irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Hear, hear.

Health care

Kemp shocks me by pushing a project near and dear to my heart--switching America's government provided insurance to catastrophic income insurance, rather than the current screwed up system. My proposal is that the government should pick up the tab after you've expended 15% of your annual income.

Goolsbee responds by saying that consumer driven health care helps you on the price side, but then you get less on the preventative care side. This is fair. But something that isn't emphasized enough is that a lot of preventative care can be iatrogenic. Drugs and treatments have side effects; people die on operating tables. There are some diseases where preventative care has overwhelmingly clear benefits--diabetes management, for example. But diabetes patients spend enough on insulin and needles to quickly pop a catastrophic cap--at least, if they're poor enough to need the money, they do. And compliance is a far, far, far, far, far bigger problem with diabetes than cost. People don't eat too much and ignore their insulin because they can't afford a doctor's visit; they do so because dieting and injecting yourself with insulin is extremely unpleasant.

Indeed, it's possible that consumer driven care would improve preventative care for some conditions--if you have to pay $1,000 for an emergency room visit when you get slack on your asthma management, you might get a lot more motivated.

More broadly, I'm suspicious that a shift towards preventative care is going to save tons of either lives or money. I don't object to it, exactly. But I think its advocates make far too many claims for its grandeur.

Tax cuts--they're what's for dinner!

Back to Republican bashing. We're in the Q&A session now, and it's hard not to notice that no matter what the subject, Kemp brings the topic back to tax cuts. I love me some tax cuts--at least as long as they're accompanied by complementary spending cuts--but they've turned into the ginseng of the Republican party, a broad-spectrum economic snake oil that cures whatever problem you currently have.

Trade

They've moved onto trade. Goolsbee is dodging and weaving like George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle. He claims that the agreements are riddled with loopholes. This makes no sense. The loopholes in bilateral trade agreements all run in favor of protected industries in the US--not surprising, since our partners get more out of trade agreements than we do. The protectionist movement in America isn't upset about the bits of the trade agreements that have loopholes; they're upset about the bits that don't.

More reasonably, he points out that we'll have more support for free trade if we take care of the people who lose out. Kemp rejoinders, also reasonably, that we don't have any very good way to make them whole.

Now Kemp loses it by claiming that NAFTA was negotiated by Clinton. This does not make him look like a genius, especially when Goolsbee corrects him. Still, the fundamental fact that Goolsbee is advocating a platform which I, for one, certainly hope he doesn't really believe, kind of shines through.

Tax talk

Goolsbee and Kemp are now onto taxes. Just on debating points, my old professor is wiping the floor with the good Secretary.

In part, this is because he has the better side of the argument--Jack Kemp is trying to defend moderately hard-core supply side arguments that don't really add up. And Goolsbee justly points out that under the current system, Warren Buffet's secretary has a higher average tax rate than he does.

I'm not actually on board with Austan's main project, which is to get the government spending more money. But neither am I on board with the Republican tactic of making stuff up in order to win the argument. The problem is, the only good way to win the argument is to talk about the economic effects, not of lower tax rates, but of lower spending. And no one wants to be the guy telling the voters he's gonna take away all their government goodies.

Jesse Helms is dead

I don't want to speak ill of the dead. So I won't.

House of cards

I'm at a panel with Austan Goolsbee and Jack Kemp on the American economy. The first question is about the housing crisis. Kemp blames it on excess liquidity, and says that we shouldn't be bailing out lenders; we should have directed the rebate towards homeowners.

Goolsbee talks about the decline of lending standards, and asks why we didn't pass legislation against it. He says that lenders were lobbying hard against the right sort of laws. But there's a deeper question to that: why were they lobbying against something that turned out to be against their best interests? You have to look at what sort of psychological conditions create bubbles; they operate on both sides.

He also brings up two things a lot of economists are worried about: first, a "second wave" of foreclosures that's expected to come in 2009 as people exhaust their savings; and second, the fact that people are turning to credit cards now that they can't tap their houses for equity.

My sense from talking to people at places like the FDIC is that these things are not quite as worriesome as some analysts would have it. The second wave is unlikely to be as sizeable as the first, and the securities have already been written down so far that it's hard to see this having a big economic impact--which is not to say that it won't be a tragedy for those who are foreclosed on.

I confess I was worried about the credit card industry giving us a second liquidity crisis, since most of their debt is securitized as well. But the bankers I talked to pointed out that the duration mismatch on credit card debt is much lower than that on mortgage debt. A credit card, aka revolving debt, is essentially taking out a new loan every month (which is why they can change your interest rate and terms at will). As soon as defaults go up, the credit card companies shut down the lines of credit--there's no long lag where the economy can accumulate a massive supply of debt with unclear default rates. Moreover, the credit card lenders, at least according to my sources, have much better tools for managing these risks, precisely because the shorter durations give them much better information on their borrowers.

Brian Beutler is going to be fine

They removed his spleen, and he's expected to make a full recovery. However, he's going to be left with some major medical bills, as Spencer Ackerman notes. There are multiple relief funds set up, but the more the merrier; if you want to help Brian out, you can PayPal me the money at mmmcardl@gsb.uchicago.edu, or you can send a check to me via the Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington DC 20037. Try to write a note on any PayPal transfers about what it's for, but I don't get that many, so I'll know anyway. Brian's pretty awesome in person, but he's also a hell of a journalist, and he's done a lot of great work on issues like FISA. It's horrific enough being shot; doubly so that it should be financially ruinous. I strongly urge any readers who are familiar with him or his work to contribute.

Update I thought this went without saying, but apparently not: divisive political issues. Not going to be debated. On my blog. In reference to the shooting. You are severely testing both my patience and the limits of my good manners. Liberals who want to make the point that health care is expensive can consider it made. Conservatives who want to make the point that national health care shouldn't be necessary can do so by sending Brian money to help cover his medical bills. End of discussion.

As easy as 1 . . . 2 . . . 87 Ways to Save the Earth

So I have arrived safely in Aspen. I'm listening to Thomas Friedman urging America to lead the way towards "abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons". His approach sounds like the approach near and dear to my heart--can the talk of a "Green Manhattan Project" and use prices to signal inventors to get cracking on the problem. But it's not clear whether he's talking about a tax or subsidies. Taxes I like. Subsidies are going to replicate many of the worst features of a "Manhattan Project"--the government will pick the winners, with no guarantee that it will do a very good job.

He's also talking about reconfiguring the power companies to shift their incentives away from selling you more dirty power. A regulatory shudder is going up my spine. I mean, it sounds nice, in theory. But imagine a food processing company paid not to sell you fattening food, a bar paid not to sell you liquor, a doctor paid not to give you healthcare. The opportunities for unpleasant unintended consequences.

At this point he sort of goes off the deep end and talks about how great it would be if we could be China for a day--have the government get in, totally reorganize the energy market, and then go forward from there. He bases this on a conversation with Jeff Immelt, who thinks the world would be a better place if this happened.

Where to start? Very few people think that China is succeeding because of its awesome industrial policy--China is succeeding very much in spite of its industrial policy. Indeed, its industrial policy is threatening to drag down important sectors of the economy, like the banking system, which may well cause the whole thing to implode.

There's also this dodgy belief, fervently embraced by many liberals advocating regulations--"Look, even a big business head who would be regulated believes it's a good idea! It must be!" Au contraire, mon frere. The heads of big businesses often love big new regulatory bodies, because they have the resources to best negotiate a complex regime. The end result of this kind of radical regulation is usually that the big companies capture the regulator and use it to shut out competition.

A government reorganization of the energy market might produce a fabulous new system that saves us ton of energy and money. It's much more likely, however, to become a sclerotic boondoggle that will soon spend most of its time in petty arguments between bureaucrats and regulatees over small rule changes. And it's not necessary. You don't need to reorganize the energy market to get companies to make people save energy. If you raise the price of pollution, consumers will demand less of it. Better yet, they will save the energy in whichever way is least painful to them, minimizing the loss of consumer surplus from the intervention.

Maybe it's just that I'm a natural pessimist, but these sort of optimistic attempts to change the world by easy fiat seem like cheap escapism to me. No one wants to write a book saying "Do this--it will really suck!" So instead we get promises that the whole thing can be practically painless. It won't be. We don't waste most of the energy we use. It goes to heat and cool our homes, wash our clothes, cook our food, and transport us and the stuff we consume from Point A to Point B. There are some things we can do that are easy--but most of them will involve having less of stuff we like, such as personal space.

Ultimately, I think we will find cleaner forms of energy, and also, I think we'll find that living a little denser isn't nearly as bad as most people imagine it will be. But rest assured, during the transition, we'll notice. The changes will be right up there in our faces.

Network me

So this is kind of interesting: facebook now has a blog network application. You can add yourself as a reader of mine here, if you're so inclined. I'm not sure what the purpose of it all is, but I'm expecting some sort of fantastic emergent synergies that push us all several leagues closer to the Singularity.

Highway to hell?

Over the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of people, particularly on television, freaking out because auto makers are losing money, and auto dealers can't sell SUVs. I thought the days were long past when anyone believed that what is good for General Motors was good for the country, but apparently not. People seem to connect the purchase of large, gas guzzling cars to prosperity in some deep reptilian part of their brain that will brook no argument.

First of all, not all automakers are doing badly. I am contemplating the purchase of a Mini for its excellent fuel economy and terrific easyness of parking in a crowded city. The problem is, you can barely get your hands on one, because everyone else in America just had the same thought. If anyone knows where I might acquire a 2008 model with a manual transmission and not so heavy on the options packages, preferably in a non-hideous color, you will be my new best friend.

But as I was saying. We are witnessing the market adjust to changing conditions. The fact that not so many people want SUVs is not some sort of national tragedy. The auto companies will retool and produce more small cars. We will buy them. Perhaps we will occasionally take the bus. This is not, itself, enough to produce a recession.

The delusion that SUVs languishing on the lot are the primary cause of America's economic malaise seems to come from the same kind of paltry economic logic that causes people to claim that America is doomed because it has stopped making stuff and now just produces services. A car is an ends, not a means. In the grand scheme of things, the transition from Hummers to Corollas is going to have less effect on American well being than the transition from tallow to vegetable oil in the McDonalds Fry-o-lators.

To be sure, oil prices and a hell of a financial hangover have made the economy look a little sickly of late. But we would still be having pretty much the same recession if we were all driving around in Jeep Grand Cherokees. We'd just have a slightly higher viewing angle.

Travel

I'm in transit to Aspen. Talk amongst yourselves. Consider this the Thursday request thread.

Crime doesn't pay

I just found out a friend of mine got shot three times in the stomach last night in my neighborhood during a mugging. He's in the hospital, possibly facing major surgery.

This seems like a terrible time to launch into a diatribe on gun control, so I'd appreciate it if no one in the comments did, no matter what side you're one--indeed, I'll delete the comment promptly if you do. But it seems like a very good time to launch into a diatribe on the low quality of DC policing. DC has a lot of cops, a lot of wealth, and no excuse for its extraordinarily high crime rate. I was born on 94th Street and Broadway at a time when the Upper West Side above 86th street was considered a no-go zone by the town's wealthier inhabitants. My father worked for the mayor during the blackout and associate crime wave, yet my mother has never felt as unsafe as she has since moving here.

Hell, I've lived in West Philadelphia during its 90s nadir. I've never felt as unsafe in a place as I do in DC. Almost everyone I know here has had some sort of personal contact with a criminal intent on robbing them, whether successfully or not. I'm lucky that I live near a well-lighted street--but frankly, the sheer menacing stupidity of a criminal who trails two people several blocks isn't reassuring, it's frightening. The fact that he thinks this tactic might work speaks to a certain lawless aura in the city. And I live in the safe part.

When DC does try to "do something", it's something stupid and quasi-fascist like locking down neighborhoods instead of putting more cops on the beat and using the advanced police tactics that are now the norm in every other city. From what I know, Fenty seems like a better mayor than DC's previous disasters, but the city government remains corrupt and incompetent. No one should have to spend their lives feeling this afraid.

We apologize for the inconvenience

I am once again receiving the accusation that I "set up redirects" or "block" access to posts I don't want people to see on my old site. Given that I've just reproduced the post in question here, this belief is a little odd. Nonetheless, let's put this, too, to rest once and for all, because it does pop up over and over.

My former host's method of dealing with comment spam was to use fairly stringent permissioning on old posts. I have no idea what the permissions regime is, but whatever they did frequently causes linked old posts to come up with 404 errors. This has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the post--you will get the same effect on posts about cooking equipment or music. It is also not, as some conspiracy-minded folks have theorized, related to where you are--it happens to me all the time. The problem almost always goes away if you refresh.

The propensity to construct vast frameworks of malfeasance and sin where simpler explanations will do is not one of the more helpful traits of the political blogosphere. Here is the sort of simple thought experiment that should help you sort through the likelihood of this kind of thing:

Q: as the author of the blog, does Megan have control over the administrative interface?
A: Yes, probably she does

Q: Does the administrative interface allow her to delete old posts?
A: Given that it's Movable Type, why yes, I believe it does so allow.

Q: If that's true, why didn't she just delete the post instead of wasting fantastic amount of time manipulating the permissions so no one could see it?
A: Oh. Right. Maybe there's another explanation.

I think deleting old posts, or blocking access to them, or radically editing them, is, ahem, chicken guano. I've taken down things I shouldn't have written because they accidentally brought someone into the public sphere who hadn't asked to be there. But I've never deleted a post for any other reason, except for a rare few that I accidentally published while still considering whether they deserved to see the light of day, and those all within a minute of publication. If there's anything you're having trouble seeing on my old site now, it's technical trouble, not blogger malfeasance.

What's good for the travel industry is good for America

Henry Farrell posts on the latest government boondoggle. He describes the various degrees of silliness at great length, which renders further comment by me unnecessary, a good thing since words rather fail me when contemplating this stupid proposal. To paraphrase Greg Mankiw on the minimum wage, the idea is a subsidy to promote foreign travel to the United States--paid for by a tax on foreign travel to the United States.

Should I call myself a feminist?

This is not exactly a burning question for America. Nonetheless, it raises some interesting issues that are worth exploring, so heck, I'll explore them.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a group dinner with Kenji Yoshino, a gay law professor who wrote a fascinating book called Covering. The book talks about the way that pressure to conform to group norms prevents people from fully participating in society. Moving from "Don't have sex with men because we'll kill you" to "don't have sex with men because we'll arrest you" to "don't tell anyone you have sex with men because they'll shun you" to "it's okay to tell people to have sex with men, but don't force anyone to acknowledge that fact by acting different or flaunting your relationship with your partner" are all improvements over the previous--but at the end of the day, being forced to act the way the majority does is profoundly limiting. In some trivial sense, everyone has to do this, of course, but most people don't have to hide the dominant relationship in their lives because it makes other people uncomfortable.

He talked at length about the phenomenon of "reverse covering"--the way in which members of non-dominant groups are forced to reinforce their identity as members of those groups, even when they don't want to. This can come from either inside the group, as in the case of black teenagers who are punished by their peers for "acting white", or from members of the dominant culture. Women, for example, are pressured to both cover and reverse-cover; as he says, "to be 'masculine' enough to be respected as workers, but also 'feminine' enough to be respected as women."

What I asked him, after the dinner, is how far you can reasonably press a dislike of reverse covering. For a group to be a group, it must be able to say, not only "this is what we do", but "this is what we don't do"--you can't call yourself a Christian if you worship the risen Christ, and also Moloch.

His answer, the right one, I think, was "that's a hard question". You can't call yourself gay if you aren't sexually attracted to members of your own sex--well, I mean, you can, but you shouldn't, not that I think this is a real problem. But gay culture has defined any number of other characteristics that it views as central enough to a gay identity that it punishes defectors pretty severely. Is being liberal an important component of gayness? On most dimensions, it doesn't seem like it should be--yet the gay conservatives among my friends and loved ones, particularly the lesbians, are often punished for their views by the community.

Which brings us to feminism. I view myself as feminist(ish) because I believe the following:

1) Society is set up in ways that limit women's choices and opportunities--men's too (it's awful hard to make the choice to stay home with kids, or become a nurse), but women more. Men are not, for example, socially punished for monogamy the way that women are socially punished for promiscuity.

2) Privilege exists, and is in many unfortunate ways invisible to those who possess it.

3) We should try to change those things.

I differ from the feminist mainstream on many of the questions of how we should change this. I don't think that subsidized childcare should be a civil right, I think comparable worth is a very bad idea, and I don't view abortion rights as fundamentally a question of female equality, but rather as an incredibly complicated attempt to trade off two important and incommensurable values that has no overwhelmingly obvious answer. I'm probably more willing than most feminists to give credence to the possibility that, say, women have lower IQ variance than men and are therefore less likely to show up in the tails of the cognitive/income distribution--though I also think that people often see what they want and expect to see, which makes those kinds of arguments rather more tenuous than their advocates allow.

But the basic thing, to me, is that I endorse the project of changing social values to increase the scope of human possibility.

But for many feminists, that's too basic. For many, to be a feminist, you have to want to make radical state-sponsored change to the economic system in order to promote equality. You have to grant rape accusers extraordinary presumption of truth-telling. You must endorse a hard line on abortion rights. If you do not agree with these propositions, you are a non-feminist, or an anti-feminist.

And maybe this is fair, at least the "non-feminist" part. I think increasing the equality of women is a very important project--but I think society has a lot of important projects. I also think that when you're trying to orchestrate these kinds of social and political change, you should think hard about whether you're actually increasing the scope of human freedom, or restricting it. Radically coercive social or economic regimes may increase women's equality in part by decreasing everyone's freedom, and given my values, I don't think that's a win. So if you define being a feminist as someone for whom fuller equality is the most important consideration, rather than simply something that we should all work pretty hard for, then you should probably exclude me from the list.

Personally, I'd like to see feminism take on as expansionist a definition as possible without rendering the concept meaningless--something closer to my list than whatever, exactly in the head of people who label me an "antifeminist". Not because it particularly matters whether I get to wear the proud Scarlet F, but because bringing more people into the tent would make feminism less of a dirty word in many quarters. It would give what I view as the movement's most important work--that of exposing and trying to change the structural problems in society that limit women's choices--more reach, albeit at the expense of driving many radical solutions to those problems.

But it's not something I'm going to have a fight about. The feminist movement has a right to define what constitutes being a member, and I'm not going to appropriate their label if it bothers them, any more than I'm going to start calling myself a Catholic who just doesn't happen recognize the authority of the Church. If you read any feminist blogs, you'll know that they spend an enormous amount of time trying to define the core values of feminism, and while I may disagree with the definitions they end up with, if they dislike my opinions on the matter, well, it's their movement.

But that does leave women (and I suppose men) like me with a bothersome question: what do we call ourselves? I share a lot of opinions on structural cultural issues with feminists, even when we disagree on the solutions these imply; I think we've come a long way, baby, but I don't think we're quite there yet. If I am to leave feminists in peace, I need my own word. Suggestions are welcome.

Let's get this out of the way

I suspect that I shall spend the rest of my life being pursued by lefty bloggers who think that linking this six year old post is a substitute for argument. Nonetheless, it occurs to me that while I have repeatedly dealt with it in various places, I probably haven't here. So here's the deal. I'm going to talk about it now, because it was, frankly, a pretty stupid thing to write, and mea culpas are good for the soul. Then I'm never going to talk about it again. I have yet to see anyone deploy it against me who could even vaguely be accused of acting in good faith. On the other hand, there are readers in good faith who are surprised by it, and I think I owe them an explanation.

I first reproduce the entire thing, so that there will be absolutely no question about its contents. This is not difficult, because the entire thing is only about 100 words long, but I do understand that space may be limited on other minds blogs.

Diane E. has a link seeming to indicate that the scruffier element of Saturday's peace rally is planning on demonstrating for peace by, er, wreaking mayhem. Nothing says "Stop the Madness of Western Imperialism" like a white college student from Winnetka opening a can of whup-ass on some Korean vegetable stand!

So I was chatting about this with a friend of mine, a propos of the fact that everyone I know in New York is a) more frightened than they've been since mid-September 2001 and b) madly working on keeping up the who-the-hell-cares-if-I-get-hit-by-a-truck? insouciance that New Yorkers feel is their sole civic obligation. Said friend was, two short years ago, an avowed pacifist and also a little bit to the left of Ho Chi Minh. And do you know what he said? "Bring it on."

I can't be mad at these little dweebs. I'm too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.

Starting with a little bit of context: Diane E. wrote the sadly now defunct Letter from Gotham blog. Though her politics--indeed, like mine--changed in those first few post 9/11 years, I think it's safe to say that she would have a very pungent reaction to anyone calling her a neo-con loving warblogger. The post is now gone, but any of the libertarian antiwar bloggers should be happy to confirm that Diane E. was not a rumormongering warhorse who hated peace. The post was written in response to a credible belief that there were antiwar protesters who thought it would be fun to get a little WTO on New York.

Thankfully, this turned out to be a false rumor. That said, I still shouldn't have written what I did.

Not because I'm particularly sympathetic to rioters--which is what people who think it would be fun to turn a peaceful protest into a violent scene are The proper response to such people is to restrain them, by violent force if necessary. I certainly hope that if I were standing behind such people at a protest, I would have the physical courage to jump on them and use my 140 pounds of bony mass to wrestle them to the ground.

(As an aside, I note that riots certainly aren't necessarily the fault of the protesters--I was at an ACT-UP die-in in Philadelphia around 1991 that turned violent because the coffin some of the protesters were carrying tipped over onto the barricades, and Philly's trigger-happy police interpreted this as an attack. Needless to say, we were the ones who got beat on, not them. I mean "we" only in solidarity--the police tended to focus on the folks with the nose rings and the purple hair. Sadly, I had neither the physical courage nor the devil-may-care attitude towards the law that would have allowed me to use my 130 pounds of bony mass to wrestle a baton-wielding cop to the ground. I made like a two dollar bill and got scarce.)

I shouldn't have written it because even if whacking a rioter in the head is necessary to stop the riot, it's not funny. It's not funny even when the rioter is a total scumwrangler who is deliberately wreaking mayhem--any more than it is ever funny when a thoroughly repulsive criminal gets raped in prison. To the extent that either the state or private citizens are forced to use violence to prevent violence, it should always be more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger. This is not amusing.

Why did I write it? In part, because blogging was a new medium for the warbloggers, and many of us had an unfortunate tendency to say the kind of ridiculous things that one says without meaning them at bars in 3 am, except in print where everyone can enjoy them forever. If you've ever declared that people who jump queues should be shot, you have some sense of what I mean.

And I was young, and lots of things seem inappropriately funny when you're young--in your mid-twenties, empathy is often largely theoretical. This is perhaps the only good thing about aging.

And also because I'm a lifelong New Yorker who lost a lot of people in the towers, including the first boy I dated in college, and I'd just finished up working at Ground Zero, aka The Pit. I was more than a tad overemotional at the thought of my city getting another dose of random ideological violence. Though again, that's not an excuse. Only an explanation. Looking backward, I wish I hadn't let those emotions rule so many of my opinions so thoroughly.

So I shouldn't have written it, full stop. No excuses. But the way it's used in the blogosphere is, for want of a better word, pathetic. Those who link it never, ever mention that it referred to violent protesters, even when they have to do some exceptionally creative editing to avoid that fairly central fact. Indeed, they often explicitly state that it referred to peaceful protesters, even though there is no possible reasonable reading of that post which interprets it as randomly exhorting violence against people who were lawfully marching in protest of the war. I have been a peaceful protester, though obviously not against this war. Moreover, my boyfriend at the time was a peaceful anti-war protester; I can assure you that I didn't want him damaged, and since the relationship continued for years afterwards, I'm pretty sure he didn't think so either.

That post is supposed to impugn my character. What does it say that the people who link it are invariably either outright lying, or deliberately misleading inflicting creative omissions on their readers?

But fair is fair--it's legitimate to judge people on what they write, and for better or for worst that post, and for that matter this one, do say something about my character. What, you'll have to decide for yourself.

The peculiar institution

I'm rereading Robert Fogel's titanic work on slavery, Time on the Cross. The work was incredibly controversial when it came out, because it completely overturned a lot of the standard economic claims about slavery. Here's the list from the first chapter of the revisions it made to the standard model:

1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purhcase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunies in manufacturing.

2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or some orther form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.

3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wage of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.

4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of factory farming.

5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.

6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.

7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myt. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would be normal for them to have left the family.

8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced.

10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the south grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 186, per capita income increased more rapidly in teh South than in th rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a level of per caita income which was high by the standard of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per-capita income until the eve of World War II.

As you can see, there was something in there for everyone to get angry about, and they did. The debates are still going on, though the work has held up remarkably well.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, everyone should read the book. Second, it reminded me of the definitional problems of feminism.

Bear with me. Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.

What Fogel brings to mind is that the argument about the personhood of slaves was a similar sort of instrumental argument. Recognizing their personhood would in fact have destroyed a highly functioning economic system; therefore, many people advanced the argument that slaves couldn't be persons. This is rubbish.

To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.

The third thought is sort of related: there's a lot of instrumentalism in arguments about the Civil War in some libertarian circles. The Civil War, in my humble opinion, makes it impossible to jointly hold two beliefs dear to libertarian hearts:

1) No country should ever wage aggressive war

2) States (or for that matter, smaller geographic units) have the right to secede from the polity if it stops meeting their needs.

The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. If you don't think that, say, Saddam's awful behavior posed a valid moral reason to invade*, then it's hard to make an argument that we had a right to invade to end slavery. Even a prudential argument doesn't work very well on this metric--we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.

I reject proposition one and say that aggressive wars can be justified on humanitarian grounds. Prudentially, they probably rarely work, but as a matter of moral theory, okay, it was worth having the Civil War to get rid of slavery. Yes, even if we did it under the penumbra of "preserving the union" rather than "ending slavery".

Others bite the bullet and say, okay, we didn't have the right to invade the South. This is logically consistent, but it leaves you with the problem of saying that aggressive wars are worse than slavery. There is thus a largish cottage industry among those who hold this view in claiming that slavery would have ended anyway.

Time on the Cross is a pretty thorough refutation of this belief. Slavery was not an economically inefficient institution that was withering away. It's doubtful that we could have had our moral cake and eaten it too. Certainly, the book makes it clear to me that the very least we could have hoped for was decades more of slavery.

*(I am leaving aside the now-obvious, and arguably then-obvious, fact that the war was prudentially undesireable, and addressing only the belief that aggressive wars are definitionally morally illegitimate.)

Correction

Kathy G. is absolutely right; I have no empirical data to back up my claim that Jesus weeps about coding problems. Once again, she has caught me, though in my defense, I don't think she has produced convincing evidence that Jesus does not weep about coding problem. Nonetheless, I think that at this point we have to regard this assertion as unproven. I regret the error.