Global Review

Responding to John & Andrew

2012-01-25T10:46:00.005-05:00

My friend John asked me what I thought about Andrew Sullivan's paean to Obama's first term. Since I wrote so much, I can't help but post it here.

Andrew Sullivan doesn't understand economics. He calls the missed predictions on the recession "miscalculations". You can't miscalculate a guess at the future - it's a guess. And what's more, recessions aren't purely exogenous, like (say) hurricanes. They are ameliorated or exacerbated by gov't policies. He also gives Obama too much credit on unemployment. Sullivan writes:

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team.

In fact, the projection/promise of Obama's team (Romer & Bernstein) was that unemployment would not even *reach* 8% without the stimulus (1). Since there is no conclusive economic evidence that stimulus spending helps an economy in recession (2), it's not unfair for critics of the administration to hold them accountable for economic policies that saw unemployment rise from 7% to 10% under his watch (3). The Obama team's main defense is "we didn't know how severe it was going to be". But if you want to play doctor with the economy, being capable of making accurate diagnoses is pretty important!

Back to Sullivan. His defense of the Obama economic record is an imaginary counterfactual - without the "floor" put under the recession by the stimulus package, we could have ended up in the second Great Depression. Well, given that economists already refer to this period as the "Great Recession", and unemployment is still at 8.5%, it's pretty much the worst economic period since the Great Depression, and there's no guarantee that it's over. More to the point, Sullivan is relying on his imagination to construct the counterfactual. But there have been many recessions since 1940, and all of them have ended faster than this one. So, if you arbitrarily compare this downturn to a previous one, chances are the previous one will look less painful, mostly because the economy usually has bounced back rapidly, not hung around in the doldrums for 3 years.

Also, the whole tone of Sullivan's piece is a little funny. Republicans are wrong because Obama is a moderate, pragmatist at heart. But liberals are wrong because Obama is really a leftist. They can't both be wrong!

I guess Sullivan is writing press releases for the Obama administration. He glibly quotes the presidents own spin: "To use the terms Obama first employed in his inaugural address: the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem" ... and then goes on to say, "If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin". Um, ok.

That characterization certainly fails the smell test in, for instance, the battle over the debt ceiling. The president wanted to raise the debt ceiling; freshmen Republicans had been elected by promising not to do so, and senior GOP members wouldn't sign on without real concessions. When it became clear that a simple solution was not going to arise, the GOP offered to sign a short-term bill that would raise the ceiling for about 6 months more spending in exchange for concomitant concessions. The President said absolutely not - and refused to even consider any compromise that would allow the issue to arise again before his reelection. Obama has shown a consistent and uncompromising willingness to push off hard decisions to the other side of the election. He's willing to lower taxes, but only for the election year. He's willing to make a final decision on Keystone XL, but only in 2013 (the GOP forced his hand on that one). From the NYTimes:

The move is the latest in a series of administration decisions pushing back thorny environmental matters beyond next November’s presidential election to try to avoid the heat from opposing interests — business lobbies or environmental and health advocates — and to find a political middle ground. President Obama delayed a review of the nation’s smog standard until 2013, pushed back offshore oil lease sales in the Arctic until at least 2015 and blocked new regulations for coal ash from power plants.

Of course, this doesn't contradict Sullivan - the president is indeed playing a sort of "Long Game", but that long game is mainly about retaining power. To do that, he's willing to mortgage the future (with short-run tax policy, e.g.) in exchange for an electoral boost now. This isn't new behavior. Look at the ends of the last few 8-year administrations. Bush fils' 8 years ended with a 2007 recession. Clinton's 8 years ended with the burst of the dot-com bubble. By contrast Bush pere raised taxes, governed responsibly, and saw a mild recession under his watch - and lost his re-election campaign. The lesson? If you want the country to serve you for 8 years, shift consumption to the present - boom now, bust later.

Every indication is that Obama is following this pattern. That's not a long game, that's a shell game.

Keep the soup in SOPA and the bum in PIPA

2012-01-18T08:29:00.005-05:00

Email your representative today to let him or her know that internet users don't yearn for censorship or content control by the Federal government and a few powerful corporations. If we wanted to live in a world like that, we would've moved gone into lobbying.

If you don't know what all this is about, read this very informative interview of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the internet's knight in shining pixels. For a quicker take, see XKCD. In any case, you can't look up SOPA and PIPA on Wikipedia, because it's been taken down today in anticipation of the consequences of those bills.

Fire the Army

2012-01-12T21:50:00.003-05:00

It's time for small-government conservatives to rally around the president. Mr Obama has proposed downsizing the Army to a leaner, meaner, more mobile force. Implicit in the cuts to classical combat forces is the promise that we will not again attempt a decade of conquest and pacification of distant, restive countries, as we did in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The president's proposed cuts would offset the perpetual growth of the military and the military-industrial complex, which is as strong and as corrupt as ever. It would shrink the size of government and lower the permanent tax burden on American taxpayers. It would underscore the vital Constitutional principle of civilian control of the military.

The general change in strategy would seem sound coming from a Republican president, right? We need a more mobile, responsive military. We can't waste lives and treasure trying to force democracy on people at the point of a gun. Of course, a Republican (other than Ron Paul) wouldn't dare decrease total military spending. Is that because of a real concern for national security? Or is it because the GOP depends as heavily on military and military-industrial donations and votes as the Democrats do on dependents of the rest of government.

Conservatives, don't let your party loyalty confuse you: President Obama is right on this issue, and it will strengthen - not weaken - the conservative cause to rally behind him and stand up against interests whose real goal is to dip as deeply as they can into the public fisc.

Write your GOP congressman or senator and let him know that you are conservative first and Republican second. And shrinking the size of government - including wasteful military spending - is fundamentally conservative.

Burying the lede?

2012-01-12T08:20:00.004-05:00

In a front-page story today, the Washington Post discusses Mitt Romney's role with Bain Capital, specifically as it relates to Staples, Dominos, and the Sports Authority:

In 2006, [Staples] revenue outside North America accounted for 13 percent of revenue. In 2010, the share was 21 percent... from $4.7 million in 2006 to $10.8 million in 2010... During the depths of the recent recession, it laid off about 140 employees... In 2004, Staples bought a small company called Hartford Office Supply...

In March 2008, Domino’s announced that it was cutting roughly 50 employees...

Sports Authority in 2003 merged with Gart Sports...

While some of these numbers seem quite trivial (a 50-employee cut for a megabusiness in the depths of the Great Recession is not bad at all), the story buries the lede: Mitt Romney has secretly remained a Bain Capital director throughout his time as 2002 Olympics CEO (1999-2002) and Massachusetts governor (2003-2007), and even during his two presidential candidacies (2007-present)! This is big news: Mitt Romney is still the puppetmaster behind layoffs at Dominos, sets executive wages and global strategy for Staples, and is trolling for Sports Authority takeovers.

Alternately, it could be that the Jia Lynn Yang just wrote a really lazy article, didn't bother doing the research to learn how these businesses changed during the years when Romney was actually involved.

Tax Cut Extensions

2011-12-19T08:27:00.003-05:00

The House GOP is right (and both Senate parties wrong) on the economics of the payroll tax cut. Whether one believes that tax cuts help spur economic activity by increasing Aggregate Demand or by increasing incentives to productivity, a two-month measure is basically worthless. People, especially business owners in this case, don't make long-term employment decisions based on a few dollars difference for 2 months.

Of course, one can qualify the statement on rightness here: temporary tax cuts are a dumb idea in general. Do we want people hired for short stints or for the long term?

8 and a half years ago

2011-12-16T18:34:00.004-05:00

Officially, the conflict in Iraq has ended for the United States. This is a good moment to reflect, and I'll repost one of my proudest pieces of writing. I published this on my old blog, Instant Replay on March 10, 2003, ten days before the invasion.

Instant Replay Invades the Iraqi Question

IR has come under tremendous pressure from U.N. inspectors to take a position on the United States' buildup in the Persian Gulf and the possibility of going to war against Saddam Hussein's corrupt regime in Baghdad.

Having taken a month and a half off from blogging has given me the clarity to address this firmly. I will attempt a linear argument, but I'm a bit pressed for time, so don't hold it against me that I can't make a comprehensive 12,000 page declaration.

Instant Replay believes that Saddam's regime is as corrupt, ungodly, and "evil" as government can be. The Iraqi people I know have no love of Saddam, and most Arabs think he's a little nuts. Saddam Hussein has earned his ouster, and he deserves anything anyone can throw at him. It's not a question of whether Saddam deserves to be keelhauled; it's a question of whether the United States - or anyone - should do it.

There are three arguments for disarming Iraq by force. One is humanitarian: war now will save lives in the long run. One is political: Iraq may be linked to al-Qaeda and is undoubtedly linked to Palestinian insurgents, on whom the U.S. and Israel are waging a war. The last is legal: Saddam has disregarded a long series of UN resolutions and has developed WMDs.

So Saddam deserves to be ousted, and there exist a few good reasons to oust him. IR believes that if the UN Security Council can agree to a course of action, that course should be followed. That may involve another six months of inspections, during the heat of the Iraqi summer. It also may involve another six years of circus, like the last six years. Either way, Saddam has put himself on the international agenda, and the world community has a responsibility to deal with him.

IR believes that the United States has tenuous legal grounds at best for entering the war. The U.S. does have moral footing of some sort, though. However, most importantly, the U.S. should not preempt the UN for political reasons.

The disastrous consequences of unilateral action will include a sharp split from our important allies - Europe, Russia, China, others - in the war on terror, increased terror against the U.S., and a loss of flexibility in dealing with the very real threat of North Korea.

By disregarding not only the UNSC but - more importantly - our allies, we are sacrificing post 9/11 favor for worldwide resentment. It's not that the Russians will become suicide bombers, it's that they won't tell us before some Uzbek does. In the post-Cold War world, we need allies more than we need victories. I don't know that Bush's people - all of whom are Cold Warriors who cut their teeth on Nixon and Reagan battles - understand that. Bush needs to listen to his Daddy, who was the #2 architect of the New World Order (Gorby was #1, imho), and ignore Samuel Huntington, author of "Clash of Civilizations."

The gains from conquering Iraq would be modest and mainly deterrent. However, I believe that the costs could be much higher. The U.S. will give ammunition to every Islamist pedagogue, their versions of Samuel Huntington, and the "Clash of Civilizations" will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of Bush's strongest hawks point to Israel as a country who really knows how to deal with terror: by cracking down hard. Has anyone noticed that Israel is the most fear-ridden, terror-stricken country in the developed world?? Following longstanding Israeli tactics of preemption and punitive aggression will only lead to an Israelization of America.

This argument brings us back to the starting point: the war on terror. While IR won't commit to this position, it would like to raise the question of the wisdom of waging such a war. Since one successful terrorist can win the entire "war" by slipping through and blowing something really important up, isn't this a war we can't win? Seizing assets and arresting militants by cooperating with other countries is great. But intervening militarily and punishing those who host terrorists - the same way we punished villages hiding Viet Cong guerrillas - may be "right", but it doesn't augur success.

The last paragraph in particular proved hauntingly correct over the next eight years. After getting comments from a few friends, I posted follow-up posts that strengthened my not-now position on the war.

While I respect (some of) those who support war on Iraq, I only respect those who can give a reasonable political answer for their convictions. In response to David's comments, saying that being against a preemptive invasion of Iraq is "an avoid war at all costs mentality" is building a straw man. I supported the war in Afghanistan, and I argue vigorously with pacifists, since sometimes options are really exhausted.

DJN's naivetee is unsettling. He writes, "A new Iraq will be great news for missionaries." That couldn't be farther from the truth. If Iraq conquered the U.S. and changed our regime, would anyone (even Democrats) be more likely to embrace Islam? With the American evangelical community as hawkish as ever, Christians in Iraq face the prospect of persecution from neighbors, and Christianity could be set back by decades in an already anti-Christian country. Christianity was first crushed in that part of the world when the predominantly Christian Roman Empire went to war against the Persian Empire. Persian Christians were persecuted and Christianity was looked at as an enemy religion. If Christians want to spread Christ's love, war should not be their tool of choice.

Ali Baba misunderstands the purpose of the United Nations. His domestic policy background seems to taint his view of diplomatic relations. Other countries are not in danger of dictating American foreign policy. The U.S., on the other hand, habitually dictates foreign policy to many states beholden to us for aid and support. As well we should. The world of international affairs is anything but equal, and the parity of states in the UN General Assembly is an important instrument of free speech, but not of global decision-making.

I have never argued that the U.S. should bow to the UN in all its policies. That said, the UN is an excellent forum for gauging world support. In Gulf War I, we were helped by most of the world, and Secretary of State James Baker did a tremendous job at rallying support. He didn't have to do that so that we could act, he did it so that we could act with the best possible results.

Instant Replay's position is that Iraq deserves to be disarmed, but that it is not America's problem only. If Saddam has WMD's, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and perhaps Europe are the ones who should be scared. As long as the U.S. has the possibility of war hanging over Saddam's head, we're safe. Once we start a war, we've got a target painted on our backs. Instant Replay's position is not about morality, it's about politics, and as I told David recently, Republicans need to give up being "right" for once and act in their own - and the country's - best interest.

The prescience above shows the value of having 3/4 of an undergraduate degree. If only someone in the Bush White House had been so ill-educated!

The Grinch that Gouged Christmas

2011-12-12T16:47:00.005-05:00

Butter in Norway is selling for something like $500 a pound. You read that correctly: five hundred dollars a pound. This is the result of the perfect butter storm: weather led to less milk production and lower fat content in milk. A bizarre high-fat-diet health care fad led to an increase in demand for butter. Now, with dark December upon them, Norwegians are heating up their ovens for the de rigueur Christmas butter cookies.

In a free market, this would lead to a big increase in butter imports from Europe's many dairies, and a very small increase in the world price of butter (how many butter cookies can 5 million Vikings eat?). But Norway doesn't have a free market for butter. It's byzantine centrally-planned dairy czars were cracking their knuckles and licking their buttery fingers as prices rose and butter-smugglers were seized. But the shortages went too far - and now TINE is the Grinch that gouged Christmas!

What went wrong here? First, the Norwegian government allowed a single monopoly to control virtually the entire dairy industry. Then, it gave the monopoly control of its tariffs and quotas on dairy imports! This paragraph is astounding:

TINE, the largest Norwegian diary coop who is also responsible for managing the Norwegian diary market has been under significant criticism fo insert linkr its management of the dairy. As a result, it was forced to ask the Ministry of Agriculture to temporarily reduce its import tariff rates from NOK 25.19/kg (€3.24/kg) to NOK 4/kg (€0.51/kg) to overcome the predicted weekly market shortage of 50 tonnes during December. This exceptional measure will only remain for the month of December and allows any trader to import butter at this rate.

In case you hadn't figured this out, quotas (like Norway's) are worse for consumers than tariffs. A tariff raises the price of imports, but it does so by a certain level. A quota, by contrast, limits import supply, and in the event of big shifts in supply and demand, it can do massive damage to consumer's pocketbooks - while the profits all flow to foreign companies! But this is the system chosen by a government that will only act when it is ordered to do so by an evil monopolist bent on robbing its fellow citizens.

So celebrate your freedom from public-private partnerships by cooking some Norwegian butter cookies this Christmas season. After all, the Norwegian consumers are helping keep the price of butter artificially low for those of us who emigrated!

Newsflash: Mitt Romney Is Rich!

2011-12-12T10:53:00.003-05:00

Mitt Romney inadvertently revealed that he is rich enough to lay $10,000 on a wager. This was evidently news to many reporters.

We know he's rich. Get over it. More importantly, he was right.

Richard Cohen models sophistication and nuance for country bumpkin Repubs

2011-12-05T20:49:00.003-05:00

In a WaPo column about how "lucky" President Obama is (really! I guess Cohen reads different news sites then I do), Richard Cohen characterizes the GOP with this uplifting chestnut:

It is simply amazing that in a country of 313 million people, many of them literate, the political opposition consists of ignoramuses, dimwits, contrarians, Christian jihadists and, now, two men so thoroughly hollow that a moral principle would make a rattling sound inside them. I am talking of course of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

It's a good thing Republicans can't read, or they might feel insulted!

Herman Cain: the Movie

2011-12-03T15:40:00.003-05:00

Herman Cain's meteoric, mercurial presidential campaign was brief and fascinating. It's a story that was made for Hollywood.

Of course, the Hollywood version is a little different:

Herman Cain: The Movie: a down-on-his-luck, divorced motivational speaker with two unhappy teenage children is having a hard time feeding his family, and needs to boost his popularity, so he decides to run for president. The campaign starts slow, but gets more and more fun as Cain realizes he's spending other people's money to run his personal marketing campaign. Polling around 5 or 10%, he considers the gambit a success, and gets ready to ride the "successful" campaign out to a 4th-place Iowa finish and a lucrative post-race career.

But then disaster strikes: the frontrunner freezes in a debate ("Oops!"). Cain manages to say something brilliant, and immediately becomes the front-runner. This was unexpected! And unpleasant. All of a sudden, the media pay attention, voters expect him to campaign in early states (he'd run in opposite areas, to guarantee that he made the news with each appearance), donors call for accountability, and he and his family find themselves in the maw of a real, nasty campaign.

Cain needs an escape, but one that will generate even more publicity and not let on that he didn't actually want to be president. His sole confidante comes up with a plan: they pay off a woman who used to work in the next office to claim that she was sexually harassed by Cain. But she's not a convincing storyteller, and the media find out that she just got a big payment (but can't trace it to Cain). With the attack discredited and obviously political, Cain is now a victim-hero, and rises even further in the polls.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Cain is depressed, hiding from his campaign, and goes out into a rainy night in Portsmouth, and ends up hitting on women in a sketchy bar. This is hilarious, but he finally finds someone who will take him home. The story leaks, and as his campaign goes down in flame and fireworks behind him, he falls in love with the woman from the bar. Naturally, he ditches his motivational speaking career and moves to some grimy section of Portsmouth with his true love. (I told you it was Hollywood).

The Gingrich Bubble

2011-12-02T13:39:00.004-05:00

~~Donald Trump~~
~~Michele Bachmann~~
~~Rick Perry~~
~~Herman Cain~~
Newt Gingrich

So it looks like a two-man race between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. But remember, just a month ago, nobody but Romney and Cain could break 20%. And three months ago, it was nobody but Romney and Perry, with Perry the presumed front-runner. So don't get too excited. That being said, the voting starts in a month, and there isn't much time for Gingrich to fade and be replaced by Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, or whoever else is left.

Why should we expect Gingrich to fade? Because he's damaged goods. He's only polling well because he performed well in the debates, where he was better-informed, more forthright, and less catty than anybody else on the set. Those are not, unfortunately, Gingrich's most universally described character traits.

Conservative Jennifer Rubin wields the knife, with quotes from Ramesh Ponnuru:

very serious flaw... perils of Gingrich... innovative-sounding... wholly absurd... incendiary... grandiose... abrasive... opportunist... serial infidelity... multiple ex-wives... lobbying... lobbying... lobbying... ultimate Washington insider... self-indulgent... obtuse... dishonest... megalomania... recklessness... disorganization.

Her argument is a lot more nuanced than what I've presented. But this particular list of flaws seems a lot more damning, especially in the current political environment, than Romney's wishy-washyness or over-produced image. More to Rubin's point, conservative opinion leaders have already turned on Gingrich, and conservative voters will follow.

Be Our Valentine?

2011-11-30T14:15:00.005-05:00

So the Red Sox hired Bobby Valentine as their new manager. I guess they're working on the theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity? I know Valentine comes with a great knowledge of the game, and - according to his friend Tim Kurkjian - a whole lot more:

Humanitarian? Ballroom dancer? Science fair guy? Gourmet chef? Restaurateur? Director of Public Health? Valentine is all of these things. How? Where does he find the time? He told me 25 years ago, "Sleep is overrated,'' and it must be, because I don't know when he sleeps.

That all sounds great, but remember what they told us about Carl Crawford before he donned the scarlet hose? Yeah, that wasn't true and neither was this.

Great Conservative Books: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

2011-11-24T08:32:00.003-05:00

Jane Jacobs was probably a liberal. After all, she lived in Greenwich Village, considered suburban sprawl part of the "great blight of dullness", and moved to Canada to protest the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, she wrote one of the greatest conservatives treatises of the last century.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is required reading today in any urban planning degree, and Jacobs' ideas receive lip service from the very profession against which she animadverts so vociferously in Death and Life. But the uninitiated reader will be struck by how Jacobs' criticism is directed not only at the content of centralized urban plans but at the entire concept thereof. To be sure, urban planners are far wiser for Jacobs' efforts, inasmuch as they submit their theories to empirical facts and actual people.

Writing against the backdrop of the massive postwar expansion of government-built and -run urban housing developments, Jacobs defends organic neighborhoods and fine-grained diversity in uses (residential, commercial, industrial, and public buildings). She coined the phrase "eyes on the street" and originated the idea that most of public security comes from neighbors, not from police. For anyone born in the last forty years, it's hard to remember that public housing developments were built to be the clean, safe, "middle class" alternative to slums; the very notion seems further fetched that moon colonies to a modern observer! Yet even after twenty-five years of failed public housing developments, the orthodox urban planners of Jacobs' time were still hoping to destroy such "slums" as Boston's North End and replace them with modern, correct housing developments.

Jacobs eviscerates these government experts, sitting in their offices with maps. If she had written today, she would have said that they planned cities like a kid playing SimCity 2000: zone this big swath residential, zone this big swath industrial, build a cluster of public buildings here, and build lots of parks. If housing values drop, build more parks. What else does a city need to make it successful? The work of urban planners in the 1960's was childish: rather than seek to understand functioning cities in all their complexity, they actively tried to destroy and replace them with models which their limited minds could comprehend. They were engulfed in the fatal conceit of central planning, believing that the latest-and-greatest urban plans had to be superior to the chaotic working of the system on its own.

The expert planners she mocks think of themselves as artists or architects, fashioning city blocks to look all the same for the sake of "visual order" (this attitude today is most prevalent in Europe, where uniformity is valued and enforced more than in the US). But Jacobs sees the beauty underlying the visual cacophony of lively cities (p. 391):

[Cities'] intricate order - a manifestation of the freedom of of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans - is in many ways a great wonder.

Freedom is better than uniformity; that's a high conservative value.

Jacobs was conservative because she claimed not only that she had a better way to do city planning, but that the mainstream approach was actually worse than doing nothing. Socialist-liberals view government as essential to the correct functioning of economy; Jacobs (like conservatives) sees it as a foreign element introduced into the natural order. It may be beneficial, but it need not be. With government officials as with doctors: first, do no harm. As John Cochrane points out, many non-Keynesian economists supported massive government stimulus during the recession simply because "we have do something", even if they didn't believe the "something" would help!

Jacobs was conservative because she saw the uselessness of huge, overall plans. No official, no matter how enlightened, can know the character, desires, tendencies, and trends of every neighborhood: and who can successfully plan for what they don't even know? A key part of her book is the need to devolve tasks to smaller units of government, which could comprehend their own area and its needs. This point has been glossed over by many of her would-be disciples, who want to preserve their jobs and their power, and thus continue to make citywide plans that they think Jacobs would approve of. But Jacobs disapproves of citywide plans!

Jacobs was conservative because she hated the power of unaccountable bureaucrats. On page 407 she writes:

The eight rulers who site behind the raised bench (we cannot call them servants of the people as the conventions of government have it, for servants would know more of their masters' affairs)

Jacobs was conservative because she saw people, regardless of education or station, as being the best ministers of their own good. Socialist-liberal types (you can always tell them at parties) believe that they (they themselves!) could make better decisions for the huddled masses, and know better what's best for those less fortunate. You, the interlocutor, will usually be admitted for politeness' sake to the class of the enlightened, but some "others" outside the conversation are not sophisticated enough to make good economic decisions. Jacobs is disgusted by this attitude among the urban planners of the time (p.271):

Conventional planning approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic... To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of of understanding and acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are.

She goes on to point out that slums remain slums because those who are successful want to leave, not because of some character of the people (black, immigrant) or the housing stock ("too dense", run down).

Jacobs had other ideas which are not characteristic of conservatism, but ought to be. She points out the myth in urbanized (now suburbanized) society that there is some rural, bucolic ideal which is better and healthier for humans. The myth is a conceit, imagined by city-dwellers who have forgotten the reality of how brutal nature is. Jefferson (a Democrat!) is the greatest culprit in imposing this myth in America. Jacobs writes (p. 444):

Jefferson's intellectual rejection of cities of free artisans and mechanics [was silly], and [so was] his dream of an ideal republic of self-reliant rural yeomen - a pathetic dream for a good and great man whose land was tilled by slaves.

This pernicious rural ideal pervades city planning. Jacobs mocks the city planners of her time (and often of the 2000's as well) whose solution to anything is MORE GRASS! Crime is high in public projects? They don't have enough grass! Children are poorly educated? They need grass! If only, goes the dream, children could grow up in nature (and not in human society) they would be good and great. (And enslave others, like Jefferson?). This is, after all, a conservative idea, too: people are basically selfish, and society has to harness and limit that selfishness. Socialist-liberals believe that people are basically good, and make terrible public policies founded on this notion. Jacobs points out that children grow up and socialize best by playing on sidewalks and streets - but social planners decry the presence of children on the street, and paternally try to force them off the streets and into playground cantonments. She cites an 'exhaustive American study of recreation' and comments (p. 84):

"The lure of the street is a strong competitor [for playgrounds]... It must be a well administered playground to compete successfully with city streets, teeming with life and adventure. The ability to make the playground activity so compellingly attractive as to draw the children from the streets and hold their interest from day to day is a rare faculty in play leadership, combining personality and technical skill of a high order."

The same report then deplores the stubborn tendency of children to "fool around" instead of playing "recognized games." (Recognized by whom?)

Jacobs is conservative because she is skeptical of scientific orthodoxy. Socialist-liberals often mock conservatives for being skeptics toward the latest scientific consensus, even though the scientific method itself is based on skepticism - and science (especially social science) has so often been wrong. Jacobs traces the origins of urban planning back to some late-19th century French architects, who imagined beautiful (but not functional) cities. The scientists worked backwards from their conclusion to create scientific justifications for it. (A side note: never let a socialist-liberal make fun of you for being anti-science: the Obama Administration ignores decades of economic research that shows stimulus spending doesn't work.)

Conservatives should read Jane Jacobs' magnum opus; so should liberals who don't understand why conservatives are so skeptical of government. Paradoxically, liberals usually love cities better than conservatives, and they will love the aspects of this book that celebrate unique neighborhoods and the liveliness of cities. Conservatives will love Jacobs' red meat about the incompetence of governments and the failure of central planning, and their minds may benefit from learning to love cities as expressions of freedom and getting over their Jeffersonian rural ideal.

Buy it for $11, or get it at your local library: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

Every Five Days

2011-11-21T17:56:00.004-05:00

Justin Verlander only contributed to his team every fifth day, when his turn in the rotation came. That's why it's so impressive that he won the AL MVP, over Jacoby Ellsbury, Jose "Signs" Bautista, Curtis Granderson, and Miguel Cabrera.

Aside from the merit of the individual players, the perennial complaint among an outspoken minority of MVP voters is that pitchers should not be eligible for the award. In this case, Verlander overcame the prejudice of two Cleveland-area reporters. (Incidentally, when the Red Sox's Pedro Martinez was the most electrifying honkballer in the world in 1999, he wuz robbed by two New York City reporters. Is this principal or bias? That's another question.) One of the justifications for prejudice against pitchers is that they are only involved "every five days". Even though he was masterful in his 34 starts, how could Verlander have the impact of a Jacoby Ellsbury, who played on offense and defense in 158 games?

Jim Ingraham of the Ohio Herald-News, enjoying his 15 minutes, explains his position:

I'd wrestled with this for a long time. If I was ever going to vote for pitcher for MVP, it would be him this year. He hasn’t appeared in 79 percent of their games, any starting pitcher really doesn’t appear in 79 percent of his team’s games in a year. Would you vote for an NFL quarterback for MVP if he only appeared in three of his team's 16 games?

The natural objection is that while Verlander only played 34 games, he was much more involved (and subjected to much more wear-and-tear) than anyone else in those 34. In fact, he pitched to an average of 28.5 batters in each game. By comparison, Ellsbury only faced pitchers 4.6 times per game and only touched the ball on defense 2.5 times per game. So how involved was each player? Ingraham's claim is that extensive involvement matters, but intensivity is no object. Why should that be the case? Would Ingraham vote for a player who pinch hit in all 162 games and batted .400? If not, then what's the logic?

In terms of sheer involvement, here's how the top 5 MVP candidates add up. I'm excluding errors from the defense metric, but they wouldn't make much difference.

Player	Batter v. Pitcher	Defense	TOTAL
Verlander	969	45	1014
Ellsbury	729	394	1123
Bautista	655	325	980
Granderson	691	365	1056
Cabrera	688	1366	2054

Looking at this table, we can see that (1) total number of defensive actions doesn't matter to the voters; otherwise they'd vote for an infielder(like Cabrera) every year. Most of baseball is determined by the duels of pitcher versus batter, and a durable starting pitcher like Verlander is directly involved in a good deal more of those duels than someone who is only involved in one out of every nine of his team's at-bats!

The Deleterious Effects of Inflation

2011-11-04T14:02:00.003-04:00

Economists have long known that inflation is harmful. Christopher Drew's NYTimes article shows a new arena in which inflation is stunting growth.

The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work [in creating the 40% drop out rate in science, technology, engineering, and math majors], like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

At the elite college where I teach, grades for our Principles of Economics class are strictly curved - the median must be a B or B+, guaranteeing that a lot of freshmen who never got less than an A- in high school are going to be staring a "C" in the eyes next month. But that's a gatekeeper class: only the top half are allowed to major in economics, and after Principles, the grading becomes lax. Students expect A's and B's; employers have come to expect that all decent students average at least a 3.0.

One of my students, discussing her C average in Principles, asked if she should leave economics. One of her friends - a senior - regrets studying economics: "If I had majored in Psychology, I would have gotten A's and been able to get into a better M.B.A. program".

Professors know that tough grades lead to worse "teaching evaluations" by consumer-minded students. Students know that many employers use a fixed GPA cutoff as a filter to cull the hundreds of applications they get for coveted entry-level jobs. The equilibrium in this game is grade inflation, where A is the new B, and A- is the new C. And it's not as though the elite institutions are holding the line: at Harvard, the modal grade is an A.

The solution to grade inflation is for leading schools - the top liberal arts or research universities would be a natural starting place - to agree to a school-wide grading scheme. It's probably too demanding to say that every class must have the same average grade, but perhaps each major or department could be required to run the same average each semester, with some classes having lower and others higher averages, but none outside some set range.

In order to ease the transition, it might be wise to leave the old A-B-C-D-F system, with its awkward weighting (an "A" is worth four "C's"!). Switching to a ten- or one hundred-point scale, with a fixed average at 5 or 50 would allow equal room at the top and bottom of the scale, and recognize that student outcomes are normally distributed. It would also tell employers and grad school, "I come from a school with a fixed-median grading system. You can trust this GPA."

Starving Somalia

2011-11-02T12:09:00.003-04:00

Jeffrey Gettleman has a probing 'news analysis' article in the NYTimes today about the slaughter in Somalia being perpetrated by the Shabab militia in the name of Islam. This isn't news, and echoes much of what we learned from Gettleman three months ago.

But the situation hasn't gotten better:

I heard many bad stories about the Shabab in these camps. Most people here fled Shabab zones, often starting out their journey with five or six children and arriving in Mogadishu with just one or two left. There is nothing else they can do. They either buried their children along the way or left them dying under a tree.

I heard many bad stories about the Shabab in these camps. Most people here fled Shabab zones, often starting out their journey with five or six children and arriving in Mogadishu with just one or two left. There is nothing else they can do. They either buried their children along the way or left them dying under a tree.

It is abundantly clear that this is only a "humanitarian" crisis in the sense that the deaths of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and others in Nazi concentration camp were humanitarian crisis. Indeed, people are suffering. But the problem is political, not climatological. Save the Children reports a fraction of donations for better-publicized disasters. That makes sense: donors don't even know if their money can get to those suffering in Somalia!

Gettleman points out that while the Shabab are the problem, it's not clear that the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu is the solution:

[The T.F.G. is] a divided, unpopular collection of politicians and former warlords based in Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-riddled capital... Many analysts say the T.F.G. has performed dismally in responding to the famine (and to the Shabab), and in recent weeks, government militias have looted food and shot starving people.

'Government militias'. Got that?

The U.S. is making a mistake in propping up the notion of Somalia. This artificial country, cobbled together out of a British and an Italian colony, has a population that seems homogeneous only to outsiders. The clans - despite sharing a language - hate each others' guts. And at least two regions (Somaliland and Puntland) have successfully governed themselves independent of Mogadishu for twenty years. But rather than recognize functional self-government, the West showers money on the warlords who have been least able to make peace with each other!

A better response to the crisis would be for the U.S., E.U. and others to withdraw recognition from Somalia. No law says that every inch of the world has to belong to some country (Antarctica doesn't), and we should take a skeptical approach to a region that has nothing approximating a state. At the same time we should formally recognize Somaliland and Puntland and help them negotiate their border disputes, help them develop strong institutions and trade ties, and generally become productive members of the world community.

As for the lawless part of Somalia? Offer assistance to authorities (tribal, elected, whatever) that govern with the consent of their people, that allow economic freedom, freedom of speech, and provide security. In areas without such an authority, the international community can conquer specific refugee towns, and secure them itself. If threats to basic human need and security recede, the international presence can likewise recede.

Humanity existed before government, and just government proceeds from the consent of the governed. This can't be forced - it must be demanded by the people. Until the southern Somalians begin to build their own society, outsiders will be powerless to have any influence beyond the physical realm.

Bachmann the Pharisee

2011-10-31T16:07:00.004-04:00

I can't add anything to Michael Gerson's succinct annihilation of Michele Bachmann's raison d'etre as a candidate. She's running as a conservative 'Christian' who will restore morality in American public life, which she intends to do by punishing children for the crimes of their parents. That's expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy 24:16.

Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.

But that's a verse taken out of context! Surely if we read what surrounds it, we'll see that it doesn't apply to the case of undocumented aliens.

14 Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy, whether he is a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns. 15 Pay him his wages each day before sunset, because he is poor and is counting on it. Otherwise he may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. 16 Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin. 17 Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. 18 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this. (NIV)

Yeah, so there is that.

Trials for Tyrants

2011-10-25T20:11:00.002-04:00

While few tears have been shed over the death of Muammar Qaddafi, some commentators feel (or at least feel an obligation to say they feel) uncomfortable with the lawless execution of the tyrant. A trial, they suppose, would have been more proper, although beatings and death at the hands of a mob of his "children" was quite fitting.

But why? What would a trial accomplish? The purpose of a trial is to establish guilt. More precisely, it is to establish whether the individual in question committed the crimes in question. But Qaddafi himself made the laws of Libya, so those can hardly be trusted, and any other definitions of crime must then be imposed from without or post hoc, not an attractive basis for legal action.

Indeed, the crimes for which Qaddafi was (rightfully) executed are those most general ones, defined by humanity everywhere and nowhere. They can be codified, as has been under various forms in the Hague, but need not be.

Again, to what purpose is a trial? To establish whether the individual in question committed the crimes in question. If the crimes can only be imperfectly defined, the principal job of a court would be to establish the facts as they relate to the involvement of the accused.

What did Qaddafi know and when did he know it? He knew everything, and he knew it when he commanded it to be done. The only question for a court, thus, would be to establish Qaddafi's identity! It seems that was done correctly by the kangaroo court in the street.

What more could we want from an official court? An appearance of fairness? Please. No court could appear fair to both sides, since the question of guilt is philosophical rather than factual. An adherence to rule of law? Ad-hoc courts set up to try specific individuals under a unique, indeterminate statute are often needed, but do not represent law. The executioner, a young Mr. Bibi, did right by Libya and the world, and spared his country a travesty of justice.

Occupy the ATM: Tips for the 99%

2011-10-24T10:18:00.005-04:00

Do you want to make a statement about the outsize role of banks in our economy? Do you want to see financial intermediaries have less influence in politics? Are you sick of "too big to fail"? There's a simple way to reduce the role of giant banks and the international finance system in your life.

Use cash.

When you make a purchase with a debit or credit card, the company issuing the card makes money. Global Review applauds the Obama Administration for reducing the amount that debit-card users can charge retailers for each debit transaction - it's now 24 cents, down from a previous market average of 44 cents. Global Review doesn't like regulation for the sake of regulation, but this one (partially) solved a significant externality in retail markets.

Consider the current situation: few retailers can charge different prices for cash and debit transactions. Such a policy is costly to enforce and it looks bad to customers. So instead, almost all American retailers accept debit, raise prices somewhat, and swallow the loss on those who use debit. Economically, that looks just about the same as a tax on cash transactions: when you use cash to buy something, you're paying a debit markup to subsidize those who benefit from the convenience of using debit.

Don't get me wrong: debit is a great convenience. But those who benefit from the convenience should pay for it. Bank of America's $5 monthly fee is a good start, but a per-transaction fee would be much better. Most of us want a debit card for big purchases (who wants to carry $500 in their wallet?), but would switch from debit to cash readily if a 50-cent fee was attached to each small debit purchase.

So if you want to show your sympathy for mom-and-pop stores, for waiters and waitresses, for manufacturers and farmers (or your antipathy towards bankers and finance whizzes), switch to cash. It's like dropping a quarter in the tip jar on the counter, but it costs you nothing.

Note: Saying "Credit" instead of "Debit" is just the same. If you're using a Debit Card (i.e., one that's tied to a specific checking account), it's not really a credit transaction at all, just a signature-based debit transaction, and the same law applies in both cases.

Ron Paul Blames the Fed

2011-10-20T13:26:00.004-04:00

Ron Paul laid out his critique of the Fed today in the Wall Street Journal. He's absolutely right on some points:

The debt is now so large that if the central bank begins to move away from its zero interest-rate policy, the rise in interest rates will result in the U.S. government having to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in additional interest on the national debt each year. Thus there is significant political pressure being placed on the Fed to keep interest rates low. The Fed has painted itself so far into a corner now that even if it wanted to raise interest rates, as a practical matter it might not be able to do so. But it will do something, we know, because the pressure to "just do something" often outweighs all other considerations.

However, his argument rest on an odd premise:

The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913.

But what about every single boom and bust before 1913? The U.S. tried various monetary arrangements, including decentralized money (state-issued), silver-backed currency, gold-backed currency, having a National Bank, not having a National Bank... and they all gave more or less the same result. It's true that the Fed hasn't fixed all our problems, as Christina Romer showed. But when Paul advocates returning to the Gold Standard, he seems to claim that the Golden Age will have no recessions and no booms. That's absurd.

It's surprising to economists that the Fed is capable of controlling market interest rates with a tiny lever; but it does so. That tells us that the fundamentals underlying interest rate determination in a free market are weak. If free-market interest rates were solid, steady, and grounded, then a little overnight lending rate would barely be able to budge them. Thus, I look at financial markets and conclude that interest rates would in all likelihood be volatile and unpredictable in a free market, leading to malinvestment, booms, and busts in much the way that Paul describes.

Gold is not the answer.

Don't Text While Driving (now with data)

2011-10-17T19:20:00.002-04:00

How can we measure the impact of texting while driving on safety? Turn off the texting service! Blackberry's 3-day disruption this week wreaked havoc on the incomes of ambulance-chasers and auto-body shops in the United Arab Emirates. Reports the National:

A dramatic fall in traffic accidents this week has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.

Gen Tamim said police found "a significant drop in accidents by young drivers and men on those three days". He said young people were the largest user group of the Messenger service.

Any Emirati readers know how large a market share Blackberry has? If this was the gain from a single service going down, it's not hard to imagine that phone calls and texts of all varieties account for half of the accidents in a hyper-connected place like the Emirates.

Hat tips to Andrew Davis & Tyler Cowen.

Occupy Boston

2011-10-15T14:36:00.003-04:00

On my way home from exploiting the workers of the world (I bought cheap produce at Haymarket), I ran into the Occupy Boston parade. It was led by a pickup truck with a sound system, which must have been paid for by a labor union because the man with the microphone made "UNION.. UNION" one of his staple chants, even though the crowd behind him showed very little interest in that particular interest group. They were, evidently, not only the 99%, but also part of the 87.6%.

Most of the protesters seemed reasonable: they chanted things like "this is what democracy looks like!", which would be more audacious if the police were oppressing them instead of stopping traffic and closing off public streets for them. A large plurality wanted to end the war, but their signs were subdued. We've come a long way from angry demands for peace or "NO BLOOD FOR OIL" signs dripping with red ink. The tone of the anti-war signs today was "It's about time we brought the troops home".

The Federal Reserve system took some flak from the parade, who were salivating as they turned off Washington and down Summer toward the craven Reserve Bankers in their Dewey Sq. tower. Well, if it were a weekday, that's where they'd be.

The Ron Paul people were right behind the Lyndon LaRouche people. Behind them was a man carrying a sign that said "I AM A MAN". Was he being ironic, or has irony died? I couldn't tell. Another guy's sign bemoaned the fact that he couldn't purchase a senator. A dissatisfied group of older citizens evidently had purchased a senator, but got a lemon: their banner was an open letter to Senator John Kerry, with a laundry list of policy items they wanted him to pursue. I didn't see the Senator there, so hopefully they sent him a copy in the mail.

As the parade trailed by the chants blurred together - they were weak chants, really, lost in the commercial bustle of a city built for the 99% who buy into the capitalist system.

Some of the signs I saw were sensible - "END THE WAR" and "MILTON FOR PEACE". Others were mean-spirited, like the chant "STOMP THE RICH!". A few were wishful thinking, like "WE DON'T NEED YOUR JOBS, YOU NEED OUR LABOR". Unconvincing. And a few were downright idiotic - "END THE WAGE SYSTEM!" Didn't we fight a Civil War to guarantee every American the right to participate in the wage system? Do you really want to go back to the other way?

The parade tailed off. There was a woman wearing a wig with an unopened can of cat food balanced (or glued?) right on top of her head. She certainly seemed happy with the way America is right now. So did the guy riding a tricycle with one pooch sitting behind him on the trike and another pooch riding on a little wagon he was pulling. He had a large American flag and the dogs had red-white-and-blue bandannas. The last man in the parade was a jester with three different woodwinds in his belt riding a unicycle.

The kids are alright.

Rubio on Bahrain

2011-10-14T12:04:00.002-04:00

How come guys like this don't run for president?

Jennifer Rubin of WaPo notes that Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) took a stand against indiscriminately selling weapons to autocratic allies. He wrote to Secretary Clinton,

I appreciate Bahrain’s concern about Iranian ambitions in the region and the potential threat to the country’s stability, but I believe the government’s response to the disturbances actually threatens the country’s long-term stability, jeopardizes United States' standing in Bahrain and the Middle East, and plays into the hands of Iran. . . . It is in that context that I urge the administration to review the propose arms sale to Bahrain and to delay any item that package that could be used to disrupt, monitor or otherwise restrict the Bahraini people’s right to peacefully assemble and petition their government.

As Rubin comments, "the ability to apply American values in specific contexts and to see, in essence, all the pieces on the chessboard is not a skill everyone has." Her hope is to see Rubio elected Vice President. If he's as cogent on other issues as he is on how American should deal with autocratic allies, he'd be an improvement over the last few nationally-elected politicians.

Rick Santorum is an Idiot

2011-10-11T22:31:00.003-04:00

Rick Santorum was senator of a state that has lost a lot of old-line heavy manufacturing jobs as America's comparative advantage has shifted away from those 19th century leaders. It's tough on a lot of Pennsylvania towns, so Santorum knows a lot about this.

And he has a plan.

Hopefully, nobody heard it. But if I understand it correctly, from tonight's debate, he wants to put zero taxes on manufacturing and zero taxes on overseas profits. So we're going to give you a huge incentive to bring jobs back to the U.S.... and a huge incentive to keep them overseas. And it's going to be paid for by all the businesses that are actually doing well despite the economy, the high corporate taxes, global competition, etc.

This is like something from Atlas Shrugged: let's tax the successful so that the unsuccessful can continue in their dysfunction.

No hard feelings to Pennsylvania, steel workers, or anybody, but: those jobs aren't coming back. You can't distort your way out of the 21st century, and a stable American economy will be built on people doing things better than anyone else in the world - and exporting it - rather than by people doing what they did best 50 and 150 years ago and complaining that the world has passed them.

The former senator continues to combine all of the worst aspects of Republicanism into a complete package of shrill, nativist, pro-war, anti-business, anti-gay, anti-technology poopstorm of ~~incontinence~~ incompetence.

Primary Election Debates: New Format Needed?

2011-10-11T12:31:00.002-04:00

What's the opposite of looking forward to something?

I'm looking... backward? ... to tonight's Republican debate in New Hampshire. Is it the 4th? The 9th? I don't know. Will I watch it? Heck no. I can read about the gaffes and the gotchas tomorrow morning.

But here's what I would watch. A kitchen-table debate, featuring two, three, or four of the candidates, and a few well-known personalities from the host state, with maybe a random outside voice thrown in. So South Carolina could host a televised forum with candidates Romney, Bachmann, and Cain, plus local GOP leaders Gov. Nikki Haley (a conservative), Sen Lindsey Graham (a moderate), and somebody more local - a state rep or a mayor - plus an outsider like Gov. Mitch Daniels (Indiana). In a separate forum, maybe a week later, other candidates - Perry, Paul, and Santorum, say - could sit down with Rep. Tim Scott (tea party), Sen. Jim DeMint (conservative), a moderate local, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

A forum like that would put intelligent questions into the discussion, with real critiques. The local GOP leaders, especially if they haven't endorsed anyone, would want to bring out quality. They'd want to probe enough to see if the candidates have depth, but not play "gotcha" games or ask softball questions, as media moderators are wont to do.

The smaller setting would allow us to get to know the featured candidates in a setting which is a little more realistic. Rick Perry looked awful at dealing with the stand-up debate banter. But how does he do talking about substantive issues with genuinely inquisitive fellow partisans? I want a candidate who can create consensus in his own party, not one who's an expert marksman in debates. The issues discussed would tend to the local, and would force candidates to show some specialized knowledge and state-specific preparation. At the same time, televisation would mean that candidates couldn't pander shamelessly, as they probably do in informal settings with state figures.

The primaries are important because they determine the quadrennial standard-bearer of a party. However, none of those running for president is ultimately as central to being Republican today as some of the leaders who chose not to run - men like Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels. Let's give a voice in the nominating process to those who know how to govern, how to legislate, and how Washington works. In return, they would benefit us by bringing real substance out of the candidates.

In a year without a Democratic incumbent, this would work just as well on the left side of politics. The Obama-Clinton nomination was decided almost entirely on style; voters would have been served by a real investigation of the candidates' substantive differences.

End the War!

2011-10-09T09:30:00.002-04:00

For all the protesters who don't know what to protest, I have a suggestion: the War in Afghanistan. It's gone on 10 years, thousands have died, and we haven't achieved any goals besides ousting the Taliban (took 9 months) and killing Bin Laden (took 9 years). It's time to declare victory and leave! Why isn't there a robust protest movement castigating the president and the complicit Republicans for not drawing this pointless bloodshed to a close?

Nobody's Savior: the Mitt Romney Story

2011-10-04T19:51:00.003-04:00

I like best cases. The best possible outcome of an NBA lockout would be something like Simmons & Kang's renegade basketball league.

The best case for Mitt Romney's campaign was put forward by David Brooks, he of the center-right, the eastern elite. He doesn't go overboard in praising Romney, and he points out that in the last 11 months Romney has run a brilliant (& lucky) campaign, going from 23% in the polls to... 23% in the polls.

[Republicans] don’t want Organization Man. They want Braveheart.

But Brooks argues that Republican activists are distracted by the desire to score points in the media and cause a stir. The real challenges for the GOP are (in increasing order of importance) (1) defeating Barack Obama on an open field of battle and (2) governing effectively and implementing the policy goals that are common to all Republicans.

He also points out what brings presidents down:

He could probably work well with the leaders of his own party... More presidents have been undone by the Congressional leaders in their own party than by members of the opposition.

Romney may be able to guard against ideological overreach. Each successive recent administration has overread its election mandate.

He comes from a blue state. In government, it really helps to have a feel for how people in the other party think. Neither President Obama nor George W. Bush had this.

Finally, Romney can be dull. Political activists like exciting candidates. But most people, who have lower expectations from politics and politicians, just want them to provide basic order. They want government to be orderly so they can be daring in other spheres of their lives.

Perhaps it's not a ringing endorsement of a candidate when the concluding line is that "he is nobody's idea of a savior." But Brooks is right when he says that's a strong case for electing Mitt.

Bad Call

2011-10-04T09:26:00.003-04:00

In a bygone era, this bit of (dial)tone deafness by the Obama administration would have gone unnoticed. After all, they just want to update a bureaucratic item to deal with new technology, and the proposal should raise government revenue. What's not to like? Well, this is the proposal:

President Barack Obama wants Congress to make it easier for private debt collectors to call the cellphones of consumers delinquent on student loans and other billions owed the federal government.

The change "is expected to provide substantial increases in collections, particularly as an increasing share of households no longer have landlines and rely instead on cellphones," the administration wrote recently. The recommendation would apply only to cases in which money is owed the government.

Said Lauren Saunders of the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center: "People aren't paying their student loans because they can't find a job."

It's like the old joke about the definition of chutzpah*: when a president's policies cause massive job loss, and then the president begs for tougher debt collection because the deficit is hurting his job security.

* With apologies to James Taranto, for borrowing one of his favorite tropes.

Means-Test Your Way Out of Debt

2011-09-28T20:12:00.003-04:00

Marc Thiessen spends a column on the Republican House laundry list of spending cut wishes. Citing mostly Paul Ryan, he checks off a familiar litany of wasteful Washington:

Slow the growth of Social Security for the rich.
Reduce or remove Medicare for the rich.
Means-test the DC Scholarship Program, and swing the money from providing a wide choice of colleges to affluent college students to providing a wide choice of elementary schools for poor kids.
Remove farm subsidies for wealthy farmers.
Cut Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae loose from the Federal apron-strings.
Eliminate corporate welfare for favored corporations (like GE) or industries (like solar panels).

To these proposals, Global Review says a hearty "amen". In addition, get rid of agricultural subsidies which raise the price of foodstuffs, essentially stealing from the poor & unemployed and giving to the wealthy and landed.

Conservative Chicanery

2011-09-24T09:06:00.009-04:00

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. In the current debate on the "Buffett Tax", some conservatives are perpetrating a statistic more mendacious than Mephistopheles himself. A great example is John Steele Gordon, writing a pompous editorial with the attitude of a pedant.

Mr. Gordon is playing at Mythbusters, but he's neither entertaining nor enlightening. He writes to correct five misconceptions, some of which are more germane than others. The Mephistophelean "myth" is that "Millionaires pay proportionately less income tax than poorer people." What's so insidious about this "myth" is that it is, in fact, a myth: Millionaires pay proportionately more income tax than the rest of us, and - in fact - some 50% of all taxpayers pay no Federal Income Tax. Note the qualifiers.

Left out of this narrow definition of income tax are the FICA ("payroll") taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare*. These usually amount to 15.3%** (13.3% in 2011 with the stimulus tax break) of all income earned up to $102,800. According to Gordon, families with incomes above $1 million payed 23.3% in income tax. Adding in FICA, they would have paid at most 24.8%. Families earning between $50,000 and $100,000 would see their average tax rate jump from 8.9% (if Mr. Gordon is to be trusted) to 24.2%, which is very, very similar. Those earning less than $50,000 pay substantially less.

Now, President Obama is still wrong in saying that millionaires pay "less taxes than the rest of us". He's also wrong in defining earners who make $250,000 a year or more as "millionaires", a puzzling stretch of nomenclature. A family earning $250,000 in straight earned income (say, a successful doctor) might be chipping in about 35% of their income to the Federal till. That's a lot.

Mr. Gordon goes on to perpetrate another fallacy: he says that "dividends are paid out of corporate profits that have already been taxed. So Buffet's [sic] equity earnings are doubly taxed: He pays 35 percent at the corporate level and 15 percent on his own return." This is also specious. First, it applies only to dividends, not capital gains, and the latter amount to 70% of taxed income on investments***. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells us that the total tax on investment profits might be about 15% + 0.3*35% = 25.5%. That's a marginal difference at best. Taking into account that high-rolling investors are likely to do a lot more trading and earn from capital gains, while dividends go disproportionately to cautious folks with retirement accounts, the "dividends are taxed twice" argument is a poor defense of the very rich.

Second, few companies pay the full 35% rate; they have tax shelters, rebates, and gimmicks just like wage earners. Third, the corporate profits tax is taken into account by investors when they purchase stocks. They decrease their investment in American firms concomitantly, lowering the marginal product and thus the wage of American workers. So workers suffer (although somewhat less) from the high corporate profits tax too.

In summary, let's look at the average tax rates we've calculated.

Millionaires pay less than 24.8% of all income on average
Middle-class families pay about 24.2% of all income on average
Investments by the affluent are taxed at something less than 25.5%, taking corporate profits tax into account.

This tax structure looks pretty flat, but only on its surface. The myriad loopholes, breaks, progressivities and regressivities make it a moonscape of craters and ridges. More important than raising or lowering taxes on any large, average group is true tax reform: making the code transparent and boring. Whether the tax code is flat or progressive, it ought to be smooth. Could somebody in Washington pick up that phrase?

Footnotes
* FICA taxes were instituted to fund Medicare and Social Security, but in practice are tossed into the same Federal till out of which all the government's obligations are paid. It makes no sense to consider these separately from income taxes.
** Half of this 15.3% comes out of workers' paychecks, half comes from their employer. As my Intro to Econ students can tell you, this doesn't make a dime's worth of difference: no matter who writes the checks, relative elasticities determine who bears the cost of the tax.
*** Calculated from IRS data for tax years 1980-2005, from this IRS spreadsheet.

A Dish Best Served Cold

2011-09-14T08:30:00.002-04:00

When Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was pressured to resign his house seat after tweeting a picture of his homophonic member, it was to protect his fellow Democrats. Weiner was a very national candidate. He was the "Next Mayor of New York City" in everyone's calculus. He was a "scourge" of Republicans nationally, employing social media to do battle around the country.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Now, in the wake of his embarrassing scandal, just a day or two after Obama's Don't-Call-it-Another-Stimulus Plan speech, the seat has gone Republican. The NY Post concludes:

That a Brooklyn-Queens district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 could swing to a GOP candidate who was outspent and outmanned -- and where unions poured in enormous resources in the final hours -- doesn't bode well for a president facing re-election in a queasy economy.

Public Policy Polling minced no words when it reported Sunday that Assemblyman David Weprin, handpicked by Democratic leaders as their so-called sure-shot candidate, was undone by a president whose approval rating in the district came in at a dismal 31 percent.

"If Obama's approval in the district was even 40 percent, Weprin would almost definitely be headed to Congress. He’s getting dragged down by something bigger than himself," the polling group declared in projecting a Turner victory.

Ponzi Schemes

2011-09-09T11:08:00.004-04:00

The most notable exchange in the Republican debate from two nights ago was Perry standing by his characterization of Social Security as a "Ponzi Scheme". Is that a fair label? I'll give you the facts; you can decide. Is that good politics? Probably not, especially if it's ever separated from the words "... and we need to fix it now."

What is a Ponzi scheme? It's named for Charles Ponzi, an Italian-American swindler who set up a scam in Boston's North End promising to make massive profits arbitraging postal stamp markets. He signed up investors rapidly, told them (mendaciously) that they were making huge profits, and continued to sign up new clients at an astonishing rate. Most didn't withdraw their "profits"; those who did were paid out of the principle invested by new clients. The scheme continued for years.

There are many modern Ponzi schemes, most famously those of Bernie Madoff and Nevin Shapiro. The concept is simple: as long as more and more people buy in, the fund remains solvent and (very) profitable. When some hiccup interrupts the flow of new cash, however, the truth is revealed: there aren't any real investments behind those glossy statements.

Social Security, as originally proposed, was a pension fund for working Americans. They would pay in during their working lives, and - if they lived until 65 (at a time when the median lifespan was 63) - withdraw the investment later. It equalized payouts somewhat across people, so your money wasn't yours specifically, but the idea was that it would be in a Trust Fund for you when you retired.

That didn't last long. Within a few years of its creation, the accumulation of a large Social Security Trust Fund was blamed for the 1936-37 recession, and the fund was diminished in 1939. Since then, the system has principally relied on the current contributions of American workers to cover payouts to American retirees. There has been a surplus all along, but instead of saving the surplus, it has been borrowed by the Treasury. Thus, the Social Security Trust Fund largely consists of IOU's from other parts of the Federal Government.

Of course, unlike a swindler's scheme, Social Security enrolls everyone - workers can't just opt out if they realize they won't be paid later. And the process is transparent. We know that there's nothing in the Trust Fund, and we have for decades. The risk isn't that people will opt out of Social Security, or try to withdraw money early (you can't), it's that the ratio of workers to retirees will change drastically when the Baby Boomers retire.

If no reform is enacted, there are a variety of ways that Social Security could weather the storm. It could decrease benefits across the board. Congress could raise the retirement age to correct the ratio. Social Security could cash in its Treasury Bonds and force the government to drastically cut spending or raise taxes elsewhere. Social Security taxes could be increased sharply to cover the gap. Another possibility would be to sharply increase immigration of young workers from abroad.

What's sobering here is that Social Security isn't America's biggest worry. After all, the Baby Boomers will eventually die off, and the generations after them are in more normal proportions. Two other responsibilities of the Federal Government - Medicare and the National Debt - are projected to grow boundlessly. Nobody knows who's going to pay for those.

Republican Debate

2011-09-07T20:41:00.005-04:00

Comments on tonight's debate at the Reagan Library.

Good call opening with a back-and-forth between Perry and Romney. That's what we came to see.
Michele Bachmann should fire her hairstylist.
I'm glad Ron Paul pointed out that Reagan's presidency didn't go so well. Huge deficits aren't conservative.
Romney shredded Perry on Social Security & electability.
What's Jon Huntsman's deal? I think his candidacy could be really valuable, but I still don't know what he's running on. In the same breath, he recalled how important was Ronald Reagan's optimism, how optimism is a great characteristic of Americans, and then repeated his catch-phrase line that America's "core is broken". You're running on, "The core is broken"? Fire your staff and start over! The one good point Huntsman made was that he appeals more to independents and Democrats who will be important in the general election.

Competitivism

2011-08-31T12:00:00.003-04:00

The American system of economics - what is commonly called "capitalism" - would be best termed "competitivism". The system isn't particularly favorable to owners of capital, nor in the era of the knowledge economy is capital the main feature of production.

Here's a great example. The true capitalists (owners of capital) want to merge two large concerns, AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile. This would allow them to provide more service with less capital, and would reduce competition in mobile phone service and monopolize the market for those with unlocked SIM-card phones. The U.S. government, true to its competitivist values, is suing to block the merger, on the grounds that it would too drastically reduce competition. In a market with only a handful of large firms, the unification of too much capital under one management is detrimental to consumers and workers - even though it is favorable to capitalists.

Corporations are People

2011-08-25T10:06:00.003-04:00

As reported in The Fix, Mitt Romney has 'doubled down' on his "corporations are people" blurtation*. The Fix quotes:

In a campaign stop Wednesday in New Hampshire, Romney brought up the remark — which some have portrayed as a gaffe — unprompted.

"Corporations — they're made up of people," Romney said. "They’re just groups of people that come together for work. When you say 'tax corporations' — the steel and the vinyl and the concrete, they don't pay taxes. Only people do."

Romney, of course, is dead right. This is a basic economic principle, which I'll be covering in my Intro to Econ class in a couple weeks. If a corporations profits are taxed, the corporation can respond in some combination of four ways: charge higher prices to consumers, pay lower wages to workers, compensate owners less, or go out of business altogether. Leaving aside the ultimate exigency, who pays the tax depends on "elasticity".

Can consumers readily switch to a substitute? Then prices won't change much. Can workers easily get new jobs? Then wages can't be lowered. Can capitalists easily invest in higher-return options? Then profits won't fall much.

In the current economy, which option seems most likely? In the case of a nationwide tax increase, it's very difficult for workers to find jobs not subject to the new taxes and difficult for consumers to switch to untaxed substitutes. They have to way of avoiding the tax. Capitalists, meanwhile, can pull their money out of the U.S. and invest anywhere else in the world, particularly the many stockholders who aren't American anyway. Thus, it's likely that raising corporate taxes would harm consumers and private-sector workers, while scaring capital investment away from America. Why don't we drown some puppies while we're at it?

Here's hoping that Mitt Romney doesn't suffer for his willingness to be honest about Economics 101. That's up to the media, who can choose to report fairly (e.g. with a quote from an econ professor) or unfairly.

* If "blurtation" is not yet a word, it obviously should be. Is there an existing synonym I'm missing?

Stick to Philosophy

2011-08-24T13:51:00.002-04:00

Philosopher (or alchemist?) Gary Gutting likes to write about important issues, applying philosophical principles to current events in a NYTimes blog called "The Stone". Perhaps he should stick to philosophy. In his most recent piece, weighing in on Perry's economic record, he tries to remain above the fray but only succeeds in sounding pompous. First, he makes a logical error in attributing to Investors Business Daily a "logical fallacy" of confusing correlation with causation. But the IBD article never explicitly claims "causation"; perhaps Gutting disliked IBD's lack of nuance, but that's a far cry from logical fallacy. He is both unkind and wrong there.

Worse, he blunders into economics with this gem.

Of course, it is often easy to see that a particular policy produced a short-term economic effect: Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program caused an increase in car sales.

That may be "easy", but it may or may not be correct. Most economists suspected (both before and after C4C) that the largest impact of the program would be intertemporal substitution - buying a car now instead of earlier or later. Wikipedia summarizes scholarly (and otherwise) evidence and opinion on both sides.

Social science, unlike philosophy, deals only rarely in clean cases. Most economic events have large second-order effects to consider. And philosophy, unlike alchemy, has nothing to do with the Philosopher's Stone.

"We run government like a ranch"

2011-08-19T16:09:00.002-04:00

The NYTimes today surprised everyone by giving OpEd page space to Texas Governor and GOP primary candidate Rick Perry, who bragged about how he's been able to slice, dice, cut taxes, raise revenues, and make everyone happy during the recession. It might be a bit too good to be true, but the conservative principles are unmistakable:

For six years [Texas] has been one of the only states in America with a budget surplus: this year it is a record $433 million, proportionally equivalent to a federal surplus of $858 billion. Thus we've been able to cut taxes, invest in education and infrastructure and keep essential services intact. We recently got our first bond rating upgrade in 26 years. And we're not simply riding the Western energy boom, [which accounts] for only 9 percent of our budget surplus.

How do we accomplish what most states and the federal government cannot? I like to say we run government like a ranch. In ranching — my old job — you either pinch pennies or go belly-up. We do the same in government. Perhaps Washington can try it.

For one thing, we challenge every expense. If it isn't absolutely necessary, we eliminate it. When the recession came we found $80 million in savings, which helped us avert a budget crisis. Little things added up: we renegotiated state contracts, cut our energy consumption by 20 percent, auctioned off state vehicles and canceled building projects and computer upgrades.

This type of penny-pinching rarely occurs in Washington. As a small example, I was recently at a military base where a private firm ran security. Why, with the toughest soldiers on earth, would the federal government spend extra cash to rent security guards rather than let troops take turns guarding the fort?

Finally, we don't spend money until we've found the lowest price. Around here, government contracts aren’t a way to take care of friends. Quite the opposite: we use our purchasing power to get the lowest possible rate. When the real estate market softened, we told commercial landlords who rented space to the state that if we didn’t see rent reductions, we'd move to cheaper premises when our leases were up. Most complied, saving the state almost $4 million.

How does the federal government negotiate? Consider Medicare drug purchases, one of the largest federal budget items. We are often told the cost of entitlements can be brought down only by cutting services. Nonsense. In 2003, in one of the greatest sweetheart giveaways ever dreamed up by the White House and Congress, they agreed to pay retail rates for Medicare drugs, even when everyone knew they could negotiate lower, bulk prices. The cost to taxpayers? An estimated $600 billion a decade.

Except, that wasn't written by Rick Perry. It was actually written by Governor Brian Schweitzer (D-Montana) about his own state. But could you really tell the difference?

Krugman on Texas

2011-08-15T11:46:00.005-04:00

As if doing the White House's bidding, Paul Krugman's article today is devoted to deconstructing the "Texas Miracle", which Gov. Rick Perry is sure to run on in the presidential election if he wins the Republican primary. Texas, after all has grown 2.4 times as fast as the rest of the economy since the "end" of the recession.

Krugman makes some good points:

It's true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state's still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending...

[Texas] has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America... [people] are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular. And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.

After these, he wanders off into a mire of toggling back and forth between real and nominal numbers, and alternately allowing or ignoring dynamic effects, depending on how they help his case. But let's return to the cogent parts above. So Texas' oil industry had positive overflow to the rest of the state? So what does Krugman think we should do with oil? That's what I thought.

And Texas has surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending, despite two decades of Republican dominance. Because it was Republicans who were always pushing for easier and easier mortgages, right? No? That's what I thought.

And people are moving to Texas for cheap houses, so the state must have a higher-than-average unemployment rate, right? After all, if housing is really cheap, and you don't need to heat your home much, it's a good place to live if you're unemployed. The Texas rate, which Krugman calls "high" was 8.2% in June. Is that higher or lower than the national unemployment rate? That's what I thought..

Krugman tries to argue that immigration causes lower unemployment; but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, particularly since Americans willing to move states are rarely doing so while remaining in their jobs. If people were only moving for cheap houses and warm weather, we would see unemployment increase. Thus, if Texas had hypothetically closed its borders to the rest of America, it would have had an even lower unemployment rate!

Krugman brings his line of reasoning to a tormented conclusion:

[A]rguing from this experience... involves a fallacy of composition: every state can't lure jobs away from every other state...

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don't believe him.

The fallacy of composition only exists because Krugman assumed that inflowing population led (somehow) to lower unemployment. Once we switch the causality to the more likely direction (low unemployment attracts immigrants), we should conclude that other states should indeed imitate Texas, since it is not only doing better than the rest of the country, but it is helping the other states out by employing many of their unemployed!

It still could be the case that Texas' success is not duplicable: if all its growth came from the oil sector, for instance; however, with oil prices in normal territory for most of the last 2 years, that's unlikely. So when Mr. Krugman presents himself as the economist who knows how to create jobs, don't believe him.

Toxteth

2011-08-10T14:31:00.011-04:00

Two tales of one city:

Taking shelter from the driving rain on Lodge Lane in Toxteth, he tells her why he has taken to the streets. "These are my boys. I'm not just going to stay at home and miss out on all the fun."

The 25-year-old, who did not want to give his name, described an "adrenalin rush" as gangs of youths, thought to number 200 at the height of the troubles in the city which centred on low-income areas in the South of the city, but sparked also on the other side of the Mersey in Birkenhead.

"Police patrol these streets every night of the week and we only get to riot every few years. They can't come here laying down the law like they do all year round. People are rioting because the riot is finally here."

Idriss Majad used to be a legal investigator in Iraq, before fleeing violence in the country and seeking asylum in the UK. After receiving permission to remain, he opened a shop, just last month.

"I came to this country for safety and when I got permission to stay I tried to invest. I borrowed money and I invested everything I had in this shop," he said.

He estimated that with the stock, mainly cigarettes, stolen and the damage done to windows, the counter and shutter, it would cost him around £5,000. "It is huge for me. Already I can't make nothing, but I was building for the future. It is miserable, I am very nervous but I have to carry on with my business because I don't want them to win."

Great reporting on both sides of the riots in Liverpool by Alexandra Topping for the Guardian.

Riots: What's a social network to do?

2011-08-10T12:23:00.003-04:00

As riots spread across England, thrill-seeking, morally bankrupt "youths" are spreading the mayhem, eluding cops, and coordinating robberies with messages like:

the riots have begun, windows smashed, bike wheels taken, mandem pullin out bats n pitbulls everywere, BC this to show respect for the rioters! Join in !

Apparently, Blackberries are as universal in England as cell phones are here, and these "poor" teenagers are rich enough to have them. Some have called on Twitter, Blackberry, and other social media corporations to shut down their services at certain hours, or suspend accounts. They've resisted: they want to stand for free speech and avoid being government tools.

Rightly so: social media is media, and a free media is vital to a free people. These same tools were applauded when they carried the spark of revolution forward in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere earlier this year.

However, the corporations are not bound to keep their service constant, and they can respond wisely to the situation before them. Instead of seeing this as a fight between pro- and anti-free media camps, Blackberry, Twitter, and co. should look for some technical or market solutions to the abuse of their services. I'm sure readers can come up with other ideas, but some ways to slow the spread of violent messages include:

Restrict the number of recipients on texts
Raise the price of a text. How many teens can afford to send out a blast to fifty friends at 50 pence a pop? And hey - you'll make bank.
Put in a time lag of 30 seconds on texts/tweets; that will give police and voice callers a brief time advantage.

And my personal favorite:

Spell-check tweets originating on mobile devices in England. Bounce back anything that isn't dictionary-perfect.

fourrandomcommonwords

2011-08-10T09:29:00.002-04:00

I just think I might be forwarding this XKCD cartoon for the rest of my life to every system admin who requires that I choose a mixed-type password. Maybe I can print it out and post it on their office doors after hours, too?

The Green Terror

2011-08-02T08:51:00.005-04:00

The NYTimes has a gut-wrenching review of the situation in Somalia.

Much of the Horn of Africa has been struck this summer by one of the worst droughts in 60 years. But two Shabab-controlled parts of southern Somalia are the only areas where the United Nations has declared a famine, using scientific criteria of death and malnutrition rates.

The Shabab - dudes or young men in Arabic - are a nasty hybrid of street gangs, old-school warlords, and self-righteous Salafi sheikhs. They terrorize outsiders a little, and terrorize Muslim Somalis daily.

The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory. The group is widely blamed for causing a famine in Somalia by forcing out many Western aid organizations, depriving drought victims of desperately needed food. The situation is growing bleaker by the day, with tens of thousands of Somalis already dead and more than 500,000 children on the brink of starvation.

People from those areas who were interviewed in Mogadishu say Shabab fighters are blocking rivers to steal water from impoverished villagers and divert it to commercial farmers who pay them taxes. The Shabab are intercepting displaced people who are trying to reach Mogadishu and forcing them to stay in a Shabab-run camp about 25 miles outside the city. The camp now holds several thousand people and receives only a trickle of food.

Sharia law, in any manifestation of which I am aware, is 'morality for thee but not for me.' When the stringent laws of 7th-century Arabia are married to the Al-Qaeda credo of absolution through jihad, they metastasize into a diabolical terror of hedonistic puritanism, where the most guilty flog the most innocent in a bloody quest for the forgiveness of their own sins.

Where's Dorchester?

2011-07-19T11:26:00.008-04:00

As I reacquaint myself - and acquaint my wife - with Boston, we often question where exactly something is. Where's Dorchester? I was born there, and I think of it as a mixed-race neighborhood near the bay and the Neponset, served by the Red Line. Dorchester's centers are Fields Corner and Codman Square. As a young child, I lived at two of its extremes: Edward Everett Square and Lower Mills.

But now people - students, outsiders - talk about Dorchester as if it were everything south of Dudley Square. And they say, "Don't go there - Dorchester's dangerous". Dangerous?

And my wife asks about the region between Mass Ave and Melnea Cass Blvd: is it the South End or Roxbury? And what's the boundary between the South End and the Back Bay? Do these lines move with demographics: if people are black, then it's Roxbury? That's an unpleasant definition.

As it turns out, we're not alone. The Globe has an interesting article and a great map addressing the question.

Poverty Escape

2011-07-15T13:35:00.002-04:00

Fixes at the NYTimes has an inspiring report on the Family Independence Initiative, a poverty-escape program with a really new focus. Rather than prescribing actions, they give small monetary rewards to poor families who achieve their own goals. The commitment to let the families themselves lead is noteworthy:

Lim Miller gave his staff strict instructions that they could not offer any advice — not even friendly suggestions. For some, this proved too difficult; he had to fire people who couldn’t help but be helpful. Lim Miller was convinced that the assumption of incapacity behind the helpfulness was a big part of the problem.

It's not clear how duplicable this approach is - or whether it's better than joining a church or ethnic club - but the results certainly make me want to find out:

After two years, FII reported that incomes across all its sites had increased, on average, by 23 percent and savings were up 240 percent... A quarter of the families that had been receiving government income or housing subsidies — CalWorks or Section 8 — dropped them. Families reported improvements in health care, children’s grades, reductions in debt, enrollment in training programs and home ownership — all audited.

This confirms the conservative or "American-dreamist" viewpoint that for most people in America, success is within their grasp. It also confirms the economic principle that success has positive spillovers to those nearby. Perhaps the main innovation here is bonding together those who are committed to succeed, which is a contrast to "safety net" style programs, which evict those who succeed, and isolate those stuck in poverty.

Like I said before, can't the church do this just as well?

Letter to the Editor

2011-06-29T16:07:00.004-04:00

I submitted the following to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, concerning a series of incidents in my old neighborhood.

The Rochester Police Department is recklessly endangering its members' safety. After the unfortunate arrest of Emily Good, the RPD could have apologized and used the incident to reach out humbly to 19th Ward neighbors. Instead, the men in blue feel slighted, and retaliated against their critics by selectively ticketing Good's supporters for obscure parking violations. In addition, Good was the victim of a Thursday break-in that appears politically motivated. Officer Mario Masic arrested Good because he felt unsafe with her around: he should feel unsafe without her around. Tips from residents who care about their communities and cooperation from witnesses to crimes are crucial to putting real malefactors behind bars. Police arrogance like this will make tipsters and witnesses more reluctant to cooperate, and leave the real criminals free to strike again. What is more important to police safety: upholding their pride or building relationships?

A smaller point is that Good was also proved wrong by the incident. She suspected that Rochester's finest are racist in profiling suspects. But they proved quite equitable in casting unfair suspicion on a petite white woman! Officer Masic may be a fool or he may be scared sh*tless of working the Ward, but he's no racist.

Studies in leadership

2011-06-27T17:06:00.003-04:00

Walter Russel Mead's blog post about Al Gore is less interesting to me in its particular message - that Gore must step down for the global-warming movement to succeed - than in the general leadership principle espoused therein. Mead notes:

Not all character flaws are inconsistent with positions of great dignity... But while some forms of inconsistency or even hypocrisy can be combined with public leadership, others cannot be. A television preacher can eat too many french fries, watch too much cheesy TV and neglect his kids in the quest for global fame. But he cannot indulge in drug fueled trysts with male prostitutes while preaching conservative Christian doctrine. The head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving cannot be convicted of driving while under the influence. The head of the IRS cannot be a tax cheat. The most visible leader of the world’s green movement cannot live a life of conspicuous consumption, spewing far more carbon into the atmosphere than almost all of those he castigates for their wasteful ways. Mr. Top Green can’t also be a carbon pig.

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes. You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother. You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books. But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

Mr Gore's leadership, the apotheosis of elitism, is also the antithesis of Jesus' prescribed form of leadership: to become a servant. Think of the difference between Gore and another Democrat who lost a presidential election, Jimmy Carter. Despite Carter's failed presidency and odd opinions, he has made himself a credible advocate for the poor and maintained a public voice for three decades.

Redefining Honor

2011-06-21T10:48:00.002-04:00

Is the Middle East changing? Is the Arab Spring about democracy, transparency, and individual rights, or just about the price of bread? This amazing Washington Post story of true chivalry suggests that something deep is afoot.

A group of men have committed themselves to an unlikely way of challenging the violence that has swept Syria in recent months, pledging to marry women they have never met.

One [horror story] involves four sisters, from the nearby town of Sumeriya, who were allegedly raped by pro-government Shabiha militiamen. "It made us so mad. Such an injustice. We have decided, we will marry them," said Ibrahim Kayyis, a 32-year-old baker from Jisr al-Shugour, a town that was stormed by troops.

To reclaim their “honor,” families in Syria have been known to kill raped female members. Even if families allow such women to live, they are not eligible to marry.

"We sat and discussed that we want to change this. We don’t want to change just the regime in Syria, but also this kind of stuff. So we will marry them in front of everyone," Kayyis said... Mohammed Mourey, a pharmacist from Jisr al-Shugour who has set up shop in a concrete shack in Khirbet al-Jous, initially proposed marrying the women. "They are victims of the revolution, and we will protect them," he said. Mourey said that when he first thought of the idea, 15 men came forward to volunteer.

This is a small act, on behalf of a single family, but it is the type of meme - like the frustrated vegetable seller - that could go viral in Arabic culture, and change the attitude towards rape and women's honor for the entire generation.

Ideas are dangerous - but to whom?

2011-06-17T09:42:00.006-04:00

David Brooks recommends we read a book entitled "Reckless Endangerment". It isn't the latest from John Grisham, but it could be. He elucidated, and I quote at length, since NYTimes is gated:

The Fannie Mae scandal is the most important political scandal since Watergate. It helped sink the American economy. It has cost taxpayers about $153 billion, so far. It indicts patterns of behavior that are considered normal and respectable in Washington.

The Fannie Mae scandal has gotten relatively little media attention because many of the participants are still powerful, admired and well connected. But Gretchen Morgenson, a Times colleague, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner have rectified that, writing "Reckless Endangerment," a brave book that exposes the affair in clear and gripping form.

The story centers around James Johnson, a Democratic sage with a raft of prestigious connections. Appointed as chief executive of Fannie Mae in 1991, Johnson started an aggressive effort to expand homeownership.

Back then, Fannie Mae could raise money at low interest rates because the federal government implicitly guaranteed its debt. In 1995, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this implied guarantee netted the agency $7 billion. Instead of using that money to help buyers, Johnson and other executives kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. They used it to further the cause — expanding their clout, their salaries and their bonuses. They did the things that every special-interest group does to advance its interests.

Fannie Mae co-opted relevant activist groups, handing out money to Acorn, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other groups that it might need on its side.

Fannie ginned up Astroturf lobbying campaigns. In 2000, for example, a bill was introduced that threatened Fannie’s special status. The Coalition for Homeownership was formed and letters poured into Congressional offices opposing the bill. Many signatories of the letter had no idea their names had been used.

Fannie lavished campaign contributions on members of Congress. Time and again experts would go before some Congressional committee to warn that Fannie was lowering borrowing standards and posing an enormous risk to taxpayers. Phalanxes of congressmen would be mobilized to bludgeon the experts and kill unfriendly legislation.

Fannie executives ginned up academic studies. They created a foundation that spent tens of millions in advertising. They spent enormous amounts of time and money capturing the regulators who were supposed to police them.

Morgenson and Rosner write with barely suppressed rage, as if great crimes are being committed. But there are no crimes. This is how Washington works. Only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor. Representative Barney Frank, whose partner at the time worked for Fannie, was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.

Most of the people were simply doing what reputable figures do in service to a supposedly good cause. Johnson roped in some of the most respected establishment names: Bill Daley, Tom Donilan, Joseph Stiglitz, Dianne Feinstein, Kit Bond, Franklin Raines, Larry Summers, Robert Zoellick, Ken Starr and so on.

Of course, it all came undone. Underneath, Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.

The scandal has sent the message that the leadership class is fundamentally self-dealing. Leaders on the center-right and center-left are always trying to create public-private partnerships to spark socially productive activity. But the biggest public-private partnership to date led to shameless self-enrichment and disastrous results...

The final message is that members of the leadership class have done nothing to police themselves. The Wall Street-Industry-Regulator-Lobbyist tangle is even more deeply enmeshed.

Brooks' warning about the "center-right and center-left", which are the political inclinations he feels most strongly, reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's conclusion to Heretics:

I know that there are current in the modern world many vague objections to having an abstract belief... A common hesitation in our day touching the use of extreme convictions is a sort of notion that extreme convictions, specially upon cosmic matters, have been responsible [for] bigotry. But... in real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all. The economists of the Manchester school who disagree with Socialism take Socialism seriously. It is the young man on Bond Street, who does not know what socialism means, much less whether he agrees with it, who is quite certain that these socialist fellows are making a fuss about nothing...

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions... Bigotry may be called the frenzy of the indifferent... In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack... Bigotry in the main has always been the the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood...

There are people, however, who dig somewhat deeper than this into the possible evils of dogma. It is felt by many that strong philosophical conviction, while it does not produce that sluggish and fundamentally frivolous condition which we call bigotry, does produce a certain concentration, exaggeration, and moral impatience, which we may agree to call fanaticism. They say, in brief, that ideas are dangerous things...

Ideas are [indeed] dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas... It is a common error... to suggest that that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they are so sordid or so materialistic. The truth is that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can be so sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any ideal that they find lying about.

While the crimes detailed by Brooks and the dangers detailed by Chesterton are not the same, they are symmetric. In both cases, those who were generally well-accepted pose the most danger. Great fiscal crimes are committed not by those whose clear-eyed fanaticism leads them to excess in pursuit of an ideal: those are normally checked by the balances of republican government. Rather, the great fiscal crimes and abuses of public funds are centrist, pragmatist ideas, ideas that are inoffensive to everyone: homeownership, American auto manufacture, and fighting terrorism. Nobody is against these things, so everyone is willing to make a deal - a quid pro quo to support more money for Fannie Mae, more money for General Motors, or more money for Homeland Security.

Both Brooks and Chesterton suggest that the only ones immune from this disease of moderation are the extreme. Brooks concludes:

People may not like Michele Bachmann, but when they finish "Reckless Endangerment" they will understand why there is a market for politicians like her. They’ll realize that if the existing leadership class doesn’t redefine "normal" behavior, some pungent and colorful movement will sweep in and do it for them.

Democrats Refuse to Raise Revenue

2011-06-15T09:16:00.004-04:00

The Washington Post story on a key vote about ethanol subsidies focuses entirely on Republicans: the Post gives them a backhanded compliment about appear[ing] to break with two decades of GOP orthodoxy against higher taxes, voting to advance a plan to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in annual tax credits for ethanol blenders. That's right, before mentioning that a GOP Senate majority was willing to do away with ethanol subsidies, the Post needles them about raising taxes.

The story gets to a Democratic representative in paragraph 7. He said it's "encouraging" that the GOP is considering this cut, as if the Democrats are sane, normal people, and the GOP is a recovering ethanol addict who must be brought along. But Democrats voted 46-6 against the measure. That's the big story: Democrats are so committed to protecting the special interest of ethanol farmers that they are unwilling to raise revenues!

The Washington Post finally interviewed a Democratic Senator who voted against removing the subsidy... never. In fact, the article never explains why Democrats opposed the bill. It might have had other provisions that they disagreed with, but we're not informed. The only Democrats interviewed (mainly VP Joe Biden) seem generally in favor of ending subsidies... but again, it's not really clear.

LA Times and SF Gate articles seem to clear up why the Dems opposed this slam-dunk revenue raiser:

In the end, [co-sponsor Sen Diane] Feinstein [D-CA] voted against her own amendment as did Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Democrats largely voted against the measure after leaders encouraged a "no" vote on procedural grounds. (SF)

Democrats were upset because Coburn forced a vote without the blessing of majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who jealously guards the majority's control of the chamber. (LA)

So there you have it.

Medicare

2011-06-07T11:23:00.002-04:00

Paul Ryan's budget plan chose to fight the major ideological battle of our time on the battleground of Medicare. This may or may not have been wise, politically - witness the GOP loss in NY-26 last month - but it reflects the importance of Medicare in the budget and the urgency of addressing its insolvency.

David Brooks today asks where wisdom lives (a passing reference to the seven-pillared house of Proverbs). I quote liberally, since the original is gated, and add emphases:

The fee-for-service system is incredibly popular. Recipients don't have to think about the costs of their treatment, and they get lots of free money. The average 56-year-old couple pays about $140,000 into the Medicare system over a lifetime and receives about $430,000 in benefits back.... The Medicare trustees say the program is about a decade from insolvency.

Some Democrats simply want to do nothing as Medicare careens toward bankruptcy... For example, Nancy Pelosi said, "I could never support any arrangement that reduced benefits for Medicare." Fortunately, more responsible Democrats are looking for ways to save the system. This is where the philosophical issues come in. They involve questions like: Who should make the crucial decisions? Where does wisdom reside?

Democrats tend to be skeptical that dispersed consumers can get enough information to make smart decisions. Health care is phenomenally complicated. Providers have much more information than consumers. Insurance companies are rapacious and are not in the business of optimizing care.

Given these limitations, Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts. Under the Obama health care law, a team of 15 officials will be created to discover best practices and come up with cost-cutting measures. There will also be a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in Washington to organize medical innovation. Centralized officials will decide how to set national reimbursement rates.

Republicans at their best are skeptical about top-down decision-making... In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee projected that Medicare would cost $12 billion by 1990. It actually cost $110 billion... Medicare’s chief actuary predicted that 400,000 people would sign up for the new health care law’s high-risk pools. In fact, only 18,000 have...

Republicans point out that Medicare has tried to control costs centrally for decades with terrible results. They argue that a decentralized process of trial and error will work better, as long as the underlying incentives are right. They suggest replacing the fee-for-service with a premium support system. Seniors would select from a menu of insurance plans. Their consumer choices would drive a continual, bottom-up process of innovation... In less rigidly ideological times, many Democrats supported variations of this basic approach.

The fact is, there is no dispositive empirical proof about which method is best — the centralized technocratic one or the decentralized market-based one...

I'd only add two things. This basic debate will define the identities of the two parties for decades. In the age of the Internet and open-source technology, the Democrats are mad to define themselves as the party of top-down centralized planning. Moreover, if 15 Washington-based experts really can save a system as vast as Medicare through a process of top-down control, then this will be the only realm of human endeavor where that sort of engineering actually works.

If the current generation of leaders fail to restructure the cost structure of Medicare, the 2020's will likely go into history as a time of major economic upheaval: there just isn't enough money to pay for everybody's dreams. More than defining itself as the party of bottom-up innovation, Republicans need to sell themselves as the party of the Long Run. They need to give tough love to seniors in the name of having enough money to provide opportunities for their grandchildren. They need to rebuke short-run-only types in both parties who see savings and investment as bad economic outcomes. Pivot, Republicans. Don't just advocate against the government - you ARE the government! Advocate for the future, and against those who practice the politics of the mortgage.

Bruins with the Prince of Wales Trophy!

2011-05-28T11:18:00.002-04:00

I don't pay much attention to NHL Hockey, but with the Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals, I'm obliged to take note of summer ice. And for someone who only knows a little about the game, I thank Fluto Shinzawa of the Globe for writing a deep, incisive analysis of the series-winning goal, and the backstory on what made that particular play work.

Go Bruins!

Refuting XKCD

2011-05-25T13:08:00.003-04:00

Philosophy is not fundamental; mathematics is.

The wildly popular comic XKCD posted a mildly funny cartoon today with an intriguing rollover text.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at Philosophy.

I emailed my philosopher* and we worked on a few examples. N.T. Wright led to Philosophy in 8 steps. Brick took 21 steps; String Cheese 26. I tried my most recent Wikipedia search: Flag of Syria led to Philosophy in 21 steps as well. But then we tried Michelle Obama. She led through a series of political pages (e.g. Constitution) to Mathematics. And ended there: Mathematics leads to an infinite loop:

Mathematics
Quantity
Magnitude
Ordering
Mathematics

We had found a tree of pages that did not lead back to Philosophy. But what does Philosophy lead to? Does it also loop back to itself in a narrow circle of nearby concepts? Here's what we found:

Philosophy
Rational Argument (reason)
Rationality
(Mental) Exercise
Alzheimer's Disease
Dementia
Latin
Latium
Rome
Capital
Seat of local government
Local government
State (polity)
Social science
Scholarly method
Scholasticism
Academics (-ia)
Community
Group
Group (mathematics)
Mathematics

Mathematics, in the current configuration of wikipedia, at least, supervenes philosophy. Granted, the path is not made of obvious or deep concepts - Alzheimer's anyone? - and Wikipedia can easily be edited to reverse this relationship. But it's pretty telling, nonetheless.

* If you don't already retain a personal philosopher, I recommend doing so.

A Toast to Pawlenty

2011-05-24T14:10:00.005-04:00

But is he toast?

Yesterday former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced that he was running for president... He promised to end the era of bailouts and handouts if elected, including federal subsidies for ethanol. His remarks carried all the more weight because he was speaking from Iowa, a state heavily dependent on ethanol subsidies.

For speaking out against ethanol subsidies in Iowa, Pawlenty has Global Review's early support. Obviously, much more will be revealed about the many candidates for president in the coming months, but the soft-spoken midwesterner reveals some testicular fortitude by throwing down in Iowa with a statement that could torpedo his campaign in that crucial state. Here's hoping more Iowans are drawn to a message of responsible government than to the usual pandering.

Made in America

2011-05-18T08:50:00.002-04:00

Come June, the [former Hoover] plant will be churning out EdenPure space heaters, vacuums, air purifiers and other small appliances once made in China.

You read that correctly: a manufacturer is moving production from China to America. The hopeful Washington Post story discusses the recent growth in manufacturing: 250,000 net new jobs in the last 16 months. A lot of that is probably just bounce-back from the abysmal lows in the Great Recession, but in the case of the EdenPure plant, it's a legitimate turnaround from the long-term trend of off-shoring.

Of course, the new jobs have lower wages than the old ones, and probably far fewer are unionized. As the EdenPure CEO says, “everybody wants to manufacture in the United States. It is just the cost of doing it” that prompts companies to move factories offshore.

He decided to move manufacturing back from China because it takes two months to get products to market from his factories there. That lag led to supply and inventory headaches for his weather-sensitive products, particularly his signature space heaters. Those problems became less tolerable as his costs for making products in China and shipping them home began to soar. The clincher was when his company was able to re-engineer the space heater so it required fewer man-hours to build. Even with all of that, Suarez said, his production costs are higher here than they would be in China. Nonetheless, he said he is happy to be bringing jobs back to his home town, adding that he will probably hire as many as 2,500 workers over the next 18 months.

American manufacturing was once written off as a lost cause, with the endless cities of Chinese workers always willing to work for less. But maybe, having shaken off the union shackles, Midwestern markets will once again find a place for the semi-skilled factory worker.

The Debt Limit

2011-05-16T15:27:00.003-04:00

If the U.S. does not raise the debt limit in the short term, it will start to default on portions of its debt, and will see interests rates rapidly rise. The rising rates will increase the cost of rolling over existing debt, causing more default, raising rates further, and ... you get the picture.

If the U.S. does not cut spending by trillions in the medium term, it will partially default on most of its debt. The only realistic public policy result of the current spending trajectory will be sustained inflation of the dollar, lowering the wealth of anyone owning dollars or dollar-denominated assets (except TIPS). This would hurt the Chinese government and Americans who have saved for retirement or college. It would benefit the American government and Americans who have credit-card or mortgage debt. It would also raise interest rates on government debt issues to 19th-century levels and effectively cripple the government going forward.

Are there alternatives? Massive tax increases would cause a bigger recession than the recent one, and further lower tax receipts, so that's not a realistic solution for closing the deficit gap, although closing loopholes and capping exemptions would be smart.

Massive spending decreases will be painful, but are possible, if begun soon and stretched out perpetually. Leaving Afghanistan and cutting military spending commensurately is the first and most obvious of these cuts. Preventing Medicare and Social Security costs from ballooning in the next ten years is the next-most-obvious.

If this Congress and its successors do not find the courage to address the debt crisis, it will spiral beyond their control in ways they cannot imagine. The foolishness of the stimulus package - some of which still has not been spent! - is staggering in light of the current budget outlook.

Rain Insurance

2011-05-10T09:35:00.004-04:00

The NYTimes (gated) profiles a brilliant micro-insurance enterprise in Kenya. By linking payouts of farmers' insurance policies directly to measured local rainfall, the company avoids most of the costs of writing and enforcing an insurance policy.

The technology to measure rainfall in many locations cheaply and to transfer money almost freely to mobile phone accounts makes this possible: 21st-century technology created for the rich 20 years ago is now an integral part of life for those living on less than $2 a day. Three cheers for globalization!

Slavery and Mobility

2011-05-06T10:12:00.006-04:00

One of the great innovations in visual information display was demographic maps created by Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Coast Survey in 1860. These showed visually the concentration of slavery in narrow regions even within the South, and were among the most powerful tools of abolitionists. Blache was the first to use the now-familiar method of shading regions to show their demographic traits.

I was struck looking at this map how closely it resembles the current mapping of non-Hispanic blacks in the U.S. (Year 2000 data; from Social Explorer). Look closely at some part of both maps; you'll find that even at a county-by-county level, the concentration of blacks in 2000 is closely related to the slave population in 1860.

Godfather Obama

2011-05-04T09:57:00.002-04:00

Maureen Dowd (gated) gives us an awesome image of the President:

After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars.

If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.

Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

Memo

2011-05-03T12:49:00.002-04:00

To Republican Candidates for President.

From Global Review

Re: Death of Osama bin Laden

The president has allowed 36 hours to elapse since the death of Osama and not announced that U.S. forces are withdrawing from Afghanistan. This is wise and presidential, and he is doing the right thing. However, you are not president, and you have no due diligence to do; you must merely say the right thing. So say it now; be the one to shape the media narrative for the coming campaign, and preempt the president on the choice that he will necessarily make within a few months.

Call for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. You can couch it in careful language - "contingent on the intelligence found with bin Laden, with all due diligence, blah blah blah" - but be clear that the job is done, you applaud President Obama, and you want to see the young men and women of your district back at home. No more American soldiers need die. No more billions need be spent. The moment is perfect, the message is clear, and the only thing we lack is a voice.

Declare Victory and Go Home

2011-05-02T09:33:00.003-04:00

The United States is buzzing this morning with the news that her greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden, is dead. American commandos executed a daring helicopter raid in an urban area, killed bin Laden, three other militants, and a woman who was used as a human shield. They took bin Laden's body away, dumped it in the ocean, and radioed home: Mission Accomplished.

President Obama needs to give another speech within the month, in which he tells America and the world, "Mission Accomplished". Under President Bush, America invaded Afghanistan, and encroached upon Pakistan, in order to find Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for protecting him. Both of those goals have been met. The ancillary objectives - that the Afghan people would erect a functional, representative government, that Pakistan would root out Islamist militants - are nice hopes, but after nine and a half years, they are unlikely to be advanced any further by the presence of American soldiers and spooks.

Mr. Obama, bring the troops home. They did their jobs. They did not complain, and they served and fought in one of the world's least hospitable climates, or died trying.

The Arab world is at a historic turning point, and the presence of active American soldiers in their region is a stumbling block to the ascendance of pro-Western parties from the revolutions in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Palestine. America's presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is one of the motivations for those who would replace authoritarian thugs with totalitarian ones. Mute them by leaving the region, and allow the Arabs to focus on the true source of their malaise: corruption and unrepresentative government.

Pakistan also hangs in the balance, and has endured deep shame for allowing a power from the other side of the world to trample on her borders and control her skies. Thank Pakistan profusely, build them a world class library or park or something in Abbottabad, and get out. Get the CIA out, get the drones out, get the hell out. Give the Pakistanis closure, and let them mind their own house. Maybe they'll do a better job fighting militants when those militants are killing them instead of killing us.

This moment will not recur. There is no other clear objective remaining in the Pakistan/Afghanistan region. There is no sign, unlike in Iraq, that the potential for a stable, representative government exists. There is no Taliban force left that is worthy of being beaten on a battlefield. No other landmark moment will arise which can be plausibly - let alone correctly - called victory. If we do not leave now, we will not be able to leave with our heads high in the next twenty years. Delay is death; do it now.

What's more, Mr. Obama, victory and departure make great politics. Hawkish types are still grinning from the death of bin Laden. You can leave now without offending their sense of honor. Doves, who were so important to your election, are distraught that you doubled down on the Afghan War (so is the Norwegian Nobel Committee). Allow them to vote for you in 2012 with cleaner consciences. You can also unsubtly remind people that you did two things Mr. Bush couldn't: kill Osama and end the war. "I finished the job in Afghanistan"; the election talking point writes itself. "And I reduced the annual deficit by $117 billion." That's a nice touch as well.

Lastly, do you really expect to gain anything from remaining in Afghanistan? There is no imminent threat to the U.S. emanating from that region, and withdrawal makes it much less likely that America suffers a catastrophic loss or major terrorist attack.

You have achieved your victory, Mr. Obama. Now enjoy its fruits.

Keynes & Hayek, second round

2011-04-28T09:32:00.009-04:00

Another great video from your friendly neighborhood heterodox economists at GMU. The Hayek they feature is Austrian-lite; he basically propounds only those points well accepted in neo-classicism. In addition, they've got an excellent Ben Bernanke lookalike.

Gender Equality

2011-04-26T12:08:00.002-04:00

The NYTimes (gated) names names and harms reputations in an article about how colleges use creative "roster management" to get around the Title IX quota that prescribes a 1:1 ratio of women to men in college sports.

The article points out the unfairness of it all: only 46% of Div-I athletes are women, even though 53% of students are women. An activist is quoted, "Intercollegiate athletics are rare educational opportunities, subsidized with our tax dollars, which deliver superior lifelong returns on investment. When an athletic department engineers itself to produce only the appearance of fairness, they flout the law and cheat women."

To be sure, Global Review holds no brief for those who try to sneakily break the law. The law is the law. But this article is burying the lede! The real scandal here is that the Federal government believes that women must have equal athletic opportunities to men, but does not care whether men have equal educational opportunities to women. In its current application, the law rests on either the proposition (a) that women are more important than men, or (b) that athletics is more important than education.

Of course, the true reason for this law is historical, and the law is dated to an era when women were a minority on college campuses and when many of them felt incapable of advancing in society without the help of the government. While that may have been the case in 1972, surely it is not the case in 2011, in the most liberal branch of American life.

More generally, for those who believe that it is the government's job to continue leveling opportunities and rewards throughout life, why no law mandating that college enrollments be gender balanced?

Red Sox Hilarity

2011-04-21T08:29:00.002-04:00

Enjoy these 'photos' of Kevin Youkilis.

Crime and Punishment

2011-04-15T14:42:00.002-04:00

Alan Hevesi is a convicted thief and former New York State Comptroller. As the sole trustee - the one official responsible - for New York's $125 billion pension fund, he accepted bribes and corrupted his office. For this, he's been sentenced to jail. But only for 1 to 4 years! He supposedly accepted a million bucks as a bribe; that's more money than most New Yorkers make in a decade, let alone one-to-four years.

To put this in context, a Goldman Sachs programmer who stole codes is going to lockup for 8 years, and a small-time con artist is looking at 2.5 years. Can anybody find how much time a bank robber or serial car thief would face? I'll bet they get harder time than this scoundrel Hevesi.

The punishment should fit the crime, and the crime here involved a large sum of money and an egregious breach of public trust. Both of those factors militate towards harsher sentencing of big-time corruption by an elected official.

The Unserious Mr. Obama

2011-04-14T09:31:00.002-04:00

In days of yore, the two American political parties blamed each other for the national debt. They each offered a clear vision to controlling the deficit based on cutting each others' pet programs. Each blamed the other party for politicizing entitlement reform, and the minority decried earmarks while the majority indulged in them.

That was then; this is now. Now, the earmark factory has been shut down. Now, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has set the agenda for the next two years with a very detailed, often painful plan to bring the deficits to a manageable level. It's not very ambitious: it doesn't offer serious hope of finding a budget surplus, but it's a step in the right direction. Mr. Ryan's budget proposal includes a much needed simplification of the tax code. In order to keep that simplification revenue-neutral (and thus tax-burden neutral), it lowers marginal rates as it closes loopholes. On average, everyone will pay the same amount of tax - we'll just spend less time doing our taxes. That shouldn't be controversial.

More controversially, Mr. Ryan offers a reasonably bi-partisan Medicare reform. Instead of the government paying marginal increases in the cost of care, allowing providers to inflate costs and bloat overhead, government will cover most of the cost, but let consumers pay the marginal cost. That will give a big incentive to keep costs close to the amount of the government voucher. Obviously, there are issues with this approach (how do we deal with the truly poor? How do we calibrate the voucher amount?), but it makes general-equilibrium economic sense, and it maintains the key fixture of social insurance.

Most surprisingly, Mr. Ryan's budget doesn't do what past Republicans have done: find scads of savings in Democrats' favorite programs. The big savings come from Medicare, which has thoroughly bipartisan support. Mr. Ryan isn't trying to shut down the department of education, and he pays verbal homage to the social safety net. For a staunch conservative, that's a bit surprising.

Mr. Obama's response yesterday, and actions throughout his presidency, have been even more odd, coming from a Democrat. Rather than attack defense spending (as Democrats usually do), he's grown it. His current budget suggests that he's going to "work with" military leaders to find savings; the fact that he has no concrete suggestions for cuts should be shameful. After all, he's had two years as Commander in Chief! It's not as though the need for austerity is suddenly upon us. If Mr. Obama has been sitting on $33 billion annual savings in defense spending for the last two years, he owes us an apology. Seriously, if a peacenik Democrat can't find specific defense spending to cut, what can he find??

As the WSJ points out, Obama inflates the savings under his plan by adding two more years to the normal ten-year budget window. That's a cheap way to turn $3.3 trillion into $4 trillion. Probably the shadiness is more severe: by promising to make cuts during the next president's tenure, he can sound like a reformer without feeling the pain.

Mr. Ryan hopes to be in Congress for another 10 or 20 years, and his Medicare reforms won't kick in for a while; sensibly, he doesn't want to change things for current Medicare recipients, just for the under-55 set. Mr. Obama has no hope of being president more than 6 years from now, and he really has no power at all to bind his successors to his policies. If he has no way of doing something now - during the 2 remaining years for which we elected him president - then he's fundamentally unserious. Mr. Ryan, at least, has a good chance of being around to feel the pain when these long-term reforms come due.

Mr. Obama, while proposing an average of $330 billion of savings over the next 10 years, with 3/4 of that from spending reductions, just fought tooth and claw to prevent spending cuts of $60 billion over the current budget half-year. When, exactly, is all this saving and cutting going to start? Before the Tea Party Congress was elected, Mr. Obama originally proposed a 2011 budget with $40 billion more in spending - $40 billion more than the stimulus-bloated 2010 budget!

Obama reached for hope in his speech, saying:

Here’s the good news: That doesn’t have to be our future. That doesn’t have to be the country that we leave our children. We can solve this problem.

A president running trillion-dollar deficits, tying the fiscal hands of his successors, and leaving his daughters' generation to pay off massive debts wants us to believe he cares about the country "that we leave our children"? Mr. President, I'm pretty sure our children will be better off if they don't have to spend their entire lives paying interest on their parents' debts.

Name of the Year!

2011-04-13T15:23:00.004-04:00

Better late than never! The 2011 Name of the Year competition is underway. Cast your votes here. Get those votes in for Tuesday Muse, an Atlanta kindergartener who is excited to be at the dance, but is currently losing in the first round.

My favorites from this year's field are Heidi Hohl, Rev. Demon Sox, Cruise Citation Mangle, La'Peaches Pitts, and Yu Arufuka. For some reason, the bracket's right side seems much stronger than the left, where Mercedes Bunz and Flamur Kastrati pass for standouts.

The Wage Gap

2011-04-12T09:46:00.002-04:00

Carrie Lukas does an excellent job debunking the wage gap in an OpJo piece. Acknowledging that the average working woman makes 70% of the average man's wage, it's easy to see that this arises from endogenous factors, not irrational bias against women. The recession highlighted this, as it (predictably) hit men harder.

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap...

Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Of course, this doesn't prove that bias doesn't exist. But look at how things go when men and women look statistically similar:

In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts.

Intelligent accounting for bias needs to come on a much more detailed level: within specific occupations, and at specific companies. It's very difficult, in labor economics, to be certain that unobservable characteristics (say, personality or ambition) are not correlated with observable ones (gender, education, race), and given how drastically men and women differ in their economic choices, it's hard to convincingly show bias in most cases.

France Effects Regime Change in Cote d'Ivoire

2011-04-11T10:45:00.002-04:00

France put her tanks and men at the service of the recognized victor of Cote d'Ivoire's election, forcing out lapsed democracy advocate Laurent Gbagbo, who morphed into a kleptocrat once he lost the election. This is a surprisingly muscular response from France, and may be regretted, depending on how the new majority treats the defeated Gbagbo supporters.

More broadly, do the interventions in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire make Western military protection of democrats a general principal? The payoffs from this approach to the developing world could be very good or very bad.

Congress Budges

2011-04-08T23:33:00.003-04:00

With minutes left on the clock, Congress and President Obama compromised to pass a budget with $37 billion of spending cuts. That's pretty close to an even compromise between the $6 billion in cuts proposed by Obama and the $61 billion initially sought by the G.O.P.

Naturally, both sides praised themselves - "historic" said Senator Harry Reid and Representative John Boehner. The latter claims this will "save $500 billion over ten years". Really? As far as I know, it's a slightly-less-than-six-month budget, and this acrimonious process will start all over again in September. I'm pretty sure the 800,000 Federal workers who would've started unpaid vacation on Monday had this not passed won't be calling themselves "historic" for showing up to work and doing what they're paid to do. Memo to Barack, John, and Harry: we're not as impressed with you as you are.

After this bruiser, could both sides agree to a valuable reform? Let's move to two-year budgets. Each Congress will get to pass one, rather than spending half of every year haggling over increasingly irrelevant spending levels.

Ryan Agonistes

2011-04-05T10:28:00.002-04:00

"Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He is forcing everybody else to do the same." So says David Brooks, in an effusive column about Ryan's very serious, fiscally and philosophically sound budget plan, due for full release today. Brooks' take is as much hopeful as truthful: he wants everybody else to take a realist, no-sacred-cows approach to budgeting. Hopefully this will be true within the Republican caucus and maybe even at the White House; it's probably too much to hope that legislative branch Democrats take spending cuts and tax reforms seriously, rather than screeching about how the REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO TAKE YOUR MEDICARE AWAY!

That's not to say Republicans wouldn't do the same thing, in reverse, if it was a serious Democratic plan to raise and reform taxes or cut military spending. But until such a plan is forthcoming, the Dems are the only party that faces the tough choice: should I do good for my country or for my party?

A Defense of Calibrated Warfare: the Obama Doctrine

2011-03-29T09:46:00.004-04:00

President Barack Obama gave the best defense of calibrated warfare in decades (perhaps ever) last night. That is not, perhaps, as much of a compliment as it sounds: I can't think of a previous justification for calibrated warfare. Since Vietnam - a major failure of calibrated war - a series of smart U.S. policymakers has elucidated a clear repudiation of the concept.

Calibrated warfare is military action that falls short of full commitment. It implies that we might be willing to lose the war if it becomes too costly, a dangerous precedent for a superpower. The Weinberger and Powell Doctrines reject this approach, stating U.S. troops should only be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Otherwise, troops should not be committed. We have violated these doctrines frequently, mainly under President Clinton, whose disastrous decisions in Somalia cost thousands of American and foreign lives by convincing our enemies that America would give up once enough G.I.'s had been killed in any given conflict. It took President Bush's ugly subjugation of Iraq to convince the world that America can still handle death.

Calibrated warfare is a dangerous game; clearly, however, it is the right approach to Libya. Obama did an excellent job distinguishing between military and political goals in Libya. Like everyone else, Obama wants Qaddafi ousted. But that goal is beyond the scope of military action, precisely because the cost could match Iraq's. However, the goal of preventing a wholesale slaughter of Eastern Libyans was and is a worthwhile goal for intervention, according to the Obama Doctrine. Thus, he is committed to exercising American power only to meet that goal. If it helps topple Qaddafi, all the better, but we won't be putting Marines into Tripoli to capture the Colonel or to mediate with force between opposing Libyan factions.

This is an important step in formalizing ideas about America's role in the world. We said "never again" after the Holocaust; we said "never again" after Cambodia's killing fields; we said "never again" after Rwanda's genocide; we said "never again" after ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The use of force for humanitarian ends was clearly the only way to stop similar atrocities. Iraq and Afghanistan, however, made it clear that nation-building is beyond the capacity of our military. What's a superpower to do? Clearly stated, sharply delineated goals allow us to step in, stop a madman's military machine, and then step out - even if the result is dictatorship or low-level civil war. We're not trying to give the Libyans a democracy by force, just removing the imminent threat of Qaddafi's military.

Obama's approach is still riddled with problems, however. What happens if an even worse tyrant arises in Qaddafi's place? What if the Benghazi government carries out reprisal killings in the tens of thousands? How do we deal with low-tech massacres like Rwanda, where air power would be pointless? As much as Obama wants to avoid it, the Pottery Barn rule still applies: if a U.S. Air Force-created power vacuum results in the reign of a homicidal maniac, nobody is going to let the U.S. off the hook.

Taxation and Equality

2011-03-25T19:31:00.002-04:00

High tax rates combined with a Byzantine system of credits, breaks, loopholes, and shelters are one of the best ways known to reward big corporations and punish little ones. General Electric, with politicians in its pocket, can get away with getting a $3.2 billion payment from the IRS at tax time, in a year in which it earned $14 billion worldwide.

Lower taxes and simpler taxes level the playing field for businesses and citizens who can't afford to hire a small army of (sleazebag) tax attorneys.

Oh, and next time you're shopping for lightbulbs or appliances? Skip G.E. Buy another brand - which probably has to pay taxes - and support America.

Earnestness and Culture

2011-03-25T12:03:00.003-04:00

Check out the WSJ's review of In Search of Civilization by John Armstrong. Armstrong appears to have a classical view of civilization, updated to 21st-century relevance.

Tax the Rich? We do.

2011-03-23T09:17:00.003-04:00

Using well-respected OECD data, economists at the Tax Foundation found that the United States depends on its highest 10% of earners for a larger share of taxes than any other rich country. Looking only at income and payroll tax, the top 10% of U.S. earners pay 45% of taxes while earning 33% of all income.

Since European countries have higher tax rates than the U.S., for the most part, what this means is that we "undertax" our middle class relative to other rich countries. The difference is even starker when you consider that the U.S. has low sales taxes (which hit the poor and middle class hard) and will have the highest corporate income tax as of next month.

Next time somebody claims that the U.S. has a less progressive tax structure than Europe, Canada, Japan or anywhere else, ask them for data.

The Arab Revolt is in Dera'a

2011-03-21T19:19:00.002-04:00

Syria's protesters are not going quietly. Do we need any more evidence that the yearning for freedom from government oppression is universal?

Kudos to the commenter who knows whither the title of this post is drawn; no searching.

Mt. Morris

2011-03-21T09:10:00.006-04:00

For those of us who enjoy stopping in the town of Mount Morris on our way to Letchworth State Park, the town has become a more and more welcoming place, an emblem of small-town sensibility and charm. It's not an accident.

The NYTimes profiles the efforts of Queens businessman Greg O'Connell, a SUNY Geneseo alumnus, in remaking the town.

Things began to change in Mount Morris in 2007. That was when O'Connell quietly began buying up buildings — he now owns 20 — on Main Street... He restored the historic storefronts and interiors, cleaning the tin ceilings. He renovated the apartments on the second floors, bringing in fresh paint, oak and maple floors, new windows, nice bathrooms... O'Connell charges these businesses as little as $100 a month in rent, but he asks for things in return... O'Connell's leases require businesses to leave their lights on at night, to change their window displays at least four times a year and to stay open one evening a week. "If this place is going to make it," he says, "it’s going to be a community effort."

O'Connell became famous for developing Red Hook, Brooklyn, an area previously known for drugs and prostitution. There, he gained a reputation as a "socialist" - because he didn't build luxury condos on the cheap or flip buildings - while earning millions.

O'Connell says his wife won't give him permission to "do another town" - but if you've got a cool million lying around, visit Mount Morris and wonder if you could emulate the model elsewhere.

Year of the Weird

2011-03-18T09:12:00.003-04:00

This year is boggling the minds of those who have followed international organizations for any length of time. First, the Arab League voted to call for the use of force against one of its members for violently suppressing protest (while using force in another country - Bahrain - to suppress protests). Now, according to Drudge a crazed dictator in the throes of a civil war immediately ceased military operations IN RESPONSE TO A U.N. RESOLUTION!?!?!?!?!

Prior to this, no dictator has ever done anything in response to a U.N. resolution. The U.N. matters? What's the world coming to? And why can't I still be involved in Model UN and Model Arab League - they finally became cool!

March Madness

2011-03-16T16:34:00.004-04:00

Nate Silver has a nifty bit of math, backed up by data, which shows that the NCAA seeding system is "unfair" - in the sense that teams ranked 8th and 9th are at a significant disadvantage in advancing beyond the second round than teams ranked 10th to 15th. He proposes dropping the ranking and randomly seeding the teams outside the top 24 (who would have a big advantage).

I have a better idea. Seed all the teams - 1 through 64. Gather a representative from each team (coach, captain, math professor, sabermetrics whiz student, quant booster, whatever) in a TV studio on selection day. Extend the seeding show from 1 hour not to 2, as Silver proposes, but to 8 hours, and let the teams pick their own spots on the bracket. In order.

Got that? The lights go up... drumroll... the hosts reveal the entire field, ranked 1 to 64, as a list. Big LCD screens show that list next to the empty brackets, listing only game dates and locations. Team #1 - Ohio State, this year - takes the opening game nearest their home campus (presumably); that one's a layup. Team #2 - Kansas State - doesn't want to see OSU until the final, so they pick a starting game near home on the opposite side of the bracket. Then Team #3, and so on.

The fun begins in the muddled middle - a 4-seed team might make a statement by trying to take down a 2-seed in the opening game. An 8-seed might choose to play a 6-seed rather than take an open spot against (likely) a 9-seed in order to play close to home. Opening-round games would be challenges, not just calendar dates, and a team might choose to play its crosstown rival or the school that dispatched it last year. At the end of the day, the 15- and 16-seeds take what's left over: almost-certain losses to top programs, much as they do now.

There are three reasons to love this idea:

It's fairer than the current system. If you take a crappy position, you have no one but yourself to blame
It's fun. Great TV - coaches sweating, consulting spreadsheets and advance scouts, players issuing guarantees and chest-bumping. The speculation, second-guessing, and recriminations would be a March madness within themselves.
It makes economic sense: let people make their own decisions. Would an 8-seed be better off swapping with a 12-seed, as Silver suggests? Find out what they would do given the choice!

Civility Police

2011-03-16T12:08:00.003-04:00

Would those who blamed the incivility of public discourse for the shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several of her constituents please stand up? There are frequent violent threats being made toward an important public servant, and if you wait until after he's shot or dismembered (as the threats go), it will be too late. In addition, it appears that the police are ambivalent about maintaining order and protecting this figure from the threats.

Personally, I think this overheated rhetoric reflects mainly on the character of the speakers (or lack thereof), and is unlikely to lead to actual killing (likewise, that it played little or no role in the Arizona shooting). But it is far more specific and sustained than anything leveled against Giffords, so if you think incivility a serious threat, this is a very serious matter.

Hat tip to James Taranto at Best of the Web Today.

Harry Reid and Causality

2011-03-08T14:16:00.004-05:00

It's understandable that Harry Reid wants to protect the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. After all, he doesn't quite understand the causal relationships involved here:

"The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist." (Politico)

The Republicans want to end the existence of tens of thousands of people! That's like half the population of northern Nevada. And those callous Tea Partiers don't even care if those good folks exist.

On the other hand, if one's raison d'etre is a cowboy poetry festival, maybe nonexistence is a consummation devoutly to be wished. At Global Review, we simply wish that Senator Harry Reid did not exist.

Take it away, Kathleen

2011-03-07T08:30:00.003-05:00

"If you've got health care already, and probably the majority of you do, then you can keep your plan if you are satisfied with it... Number one, let me just repeat, if you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it." - Sen. Barack Obama, in the second presidential debate, 2008. He hit this talking point many times.

"We don't want to take away people's health insurance before they have some realistic other choices," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview with The Hill. The context is the 1,040 businesses that have been granted a one-year waiver before the government takes away their employees' health insurance plans and forces them to buy something else.

Kathleen! Stay on message puh-leeze.

A Comment

2011-03-06T16:13:00.002-05:00

I posted this elsewhere as a comment; reproduced here simply because (a) it's already written and (b) the topic is important.

Writing at HuffPost, somebody named Phil Zuckerman indulges his hatred for evangelicals with an essay entitled "Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus". He argues:

Evangelicals don't exactly hate Jesus... They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him. They can't stop thanking him. And yet, as for Jesus himself -- his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill -- most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain.

Zuckerman is intellectually lazy. Evangelicals are far from perfect, but they give more to charity (even non-church charities) than any other group in the population. Evangelicals and Catholics are pretty much the only group opposing easy divorce laws. Evangelicals led the anti-slavery movement and black evangelicals led the civil rights movement; evangelicals currently lead the defense of the unborn.

Zuckerman assumes that Jesus teaching about giving to the poor & eschewing wealth was an institutional command, not an individual one. That's a legitimate point to discuss, but by assuming that it's an institutional command (and ignoring data on individual charity) he begs the question and smears those he despises. I have a big problem with Christians who enjoy most of their wealth, but I don't think the government can legislate financial holiness.

Zuckerman assumes that Jesus was opposed to the death penalty; the only evidence for this is the story of the adulterous woman, which is weakly attested in texts, and requires a lot of interpretation.

Zuckerman assumes that Jesus was pacifist and anti-weapon. At times, it's true, He preached non-resistance. But He never preached non-violent resistance (just non-resistance), and He once told His disciples to go buy swords.

If you take Zuckerman literally, he's advocating a theocracy! He seems to think that we should legislate Jesus' commands, or in any case those which Zuckerman imagines to be Jesus' commands. In truth, what Zuckerman really hates about evangelicals is that they disagree with himself and his cut-and-paste Jesus.

There are excellent critiques of American evangelicism; this is not one of them.

Capitalist on Capitalism

2011-03-01T09:20:00.004-05:00

Vilified capitalist Charles Koch pens an op-ed in the WSJ today, attacking government overspending... on corporations. He doesn't say anything about public sector unions, but he blasts subsidies for corporations and industries, including his own. Call him a hypocrite if you will, but he's shining a light on Federal welfare for his own sector of society, not pointing a finger at others.

Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want...

Because every other company in a given industry is accepting market-distorting programs, Koch companies have had little option but to do so as well, simply to remain competitive and help sustain our 50,000 U.S.-based jobs... For example, because of government mandates, our refining business is essentially obligated to be in the ethanol business. We believe that ethanol—and every other product in the marketplace—should be required to compete on its own merits, without mandates, subsidies or protective tariffs.

Government's role in business should be, as outlined by Adam Smith, guaranteeing fair competition, breaking down barriers to entry, and enforcing contracts. Plaintive cries of "ruinous competition" were maudlin in Smith's day, and are all the more so in ours: get rid of ethanol subsidies, get rid of guaranteed government contracts for favored businesses, get rid of all forms of corporate welfare, and the economy will grow.

TSA Mea Culpa

2011-02-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

Global Review has been tough on the TSA. We were suspicious of the 'need' for Backscatter machines, skeptical of the need to bureaucratize airport security, and indignant about the dictatorial nature of airport security.

Assuming it is telling the truth, however, the TSA has answered our concerns. In a sweeping, unanticipated report released today, the TSA showed that it is in fact data-driven, sophisticated in cost-benefit analysis, and surprisingly effective. NYTimes reports:

Previously classified information released in the report includes the precise details on the capture of three terrorists. Arab Israeli citizens, they avoided detection through normal espionage and surveillance by procuring tourist visas and booking unsuspicious round-trip itineraries. The three had different destinations in the U.S., and arrived and departed separately. However, all three shared a return flight from New York to Tel Aviv. In addition, each one carried just two of the three components needed to assemble the homemade bomb which they planned to detonate. This ingenious arrangement meant that one could be detected and detained - or miss his connecting flight - without spoiling the plot. Additionally, if any of them were caught, he could plausibly argue that he did not, in fact, have the makings of a bomb, and might be allowed to walk away.

The first to attempt boarding, in Atlanta, was caught, and kept from using a cell phone to warn his co-conspirators. A state of high alert went out to other TSA personnel around the country. The increased level of scrutiny led to delays and missed flights, making December 10th, 2010, a heretofore inexplicably bad day for air travelers. The second, in Detroit, was caught two hours later, and the third fled upon seeing the level of security in Boston's Logan Airport. He was arrested a week later.

That's a pretty impressive episode (hence my at-length quote). But it's an anecdote, and the real impressive part of the TSA's report comes in the meat of the report. Over the last three months of 2010, the TSA's internal testing system ran systemic attempts to breach security at most TSA airports and all non-TSA airports. The results, in summary, show the TSA to be effective and the Backscatter a godsend:

TSA airports intercepted 62% of attempts.
Non-TSA airports intercepted 48% of attempts.
TSA airports with Backscatter intercepted 64% of attempts.

Backscatter machines intercepted 77% of attempts.
Patdowns intercepted 92% of attempts.
Screenings through metal detectors intercepted 61% of attempts.

TSA airports without Backscatter intercepted 63% of attempts.

In the report, the results are further broken down by types of contraband. Drugs, for obvious reasons, were almost always undetected, while guns and explosives were almost always detected.

The report further reports the number of complaints (and even lawsuits!) faced by the TSA before and after the introduction of Backscatter screenings as a measure of cost to flyers, as well as length of security delay in each attempted boarding. These results are unexciting, but quietly conclude that TSA methods are no more onerous on travelers than non-TSA, and the Backscatter only slows the queue when people opt out.

The report lists the internal data (names redacted) of agents disciplined for sharing images created by the Backscatter, or reprimanded by supervisors for inappropriate comments to customers.

Global Review is also data-driven, and must firmly change its position to support for the TSA and the Backscatter (pending longer-term health risk investigations). Paradoxically, it's not the particular figures that concern us as much as the overall picture of a crisply efficient, citizen-oriented bureaucracy (I never thought I'd get to use that phrase!). If the TSA is policing itself, choosing best practices based on science and not lucre, and making its decisions transparent, then it has the consent of this governed.

Of course, this is all a fiction, contrived by yours truly for expositional purposes. It also serves as a road map for what sort of action the TSA would have to take in order to win the trust of us skeptics. Is it too much to ask that government account for its decisions and employ basic scientific methods of evaluation?

Will on Wisconsin

2011-02-22T14:31:00.002-05:00

George F. Will, ever the sober-minded conservative, has the sober-minded conservative take on events in Wisconsin. As many have pointed out, government unions are fundamentally different than private-sector unions because, while the latter play tug of war against a management with whom they share the desire to survive, the former are playing tug of war against no-one and have no risk of extinction.

This episode, and the one in Indiana, are entrenching the Democrats as the party of "No" on fiscal reform. Not one penny, they screech, for austerity. Republicans, while they may be playing imperfectly are openly taking risks and are not fleeing their states to prevent votes or triggering Godwin's Law.

Of course, leftists are correct that Wisconsin Governor Walker's attempt to strip collective bargaining from public unions is about more than balancing this year's budget. True: weakening public unions will make Wisconsin leaner, more competitive, and less budget-constrained into the future. Public unionization is an anti-competitive practice aimed at shifting wealth from all taxpayers to a particular interest group; weakening or ending it will improve and cheapen government services.

Will concludes:

Walker, by a fiscal seriousness contrasting with Obama's lack thereof, and Obama, by inciting defenders of the indefensible, have made three things clear:

First, the Democratic Party is the party of government, not only because of its extravagant sense of government's competence and proper scope, but also because the party's base is government employees. Second, government employees have an increasingly adversarial relationship with the governed. Third, Obama's "move to the center" is fictitious.

TSA & Breasts

2011-02-22T10:45:00.003-05:00

Drudge highlights a pathetic pair of stories on the Transportation Security Administration. In one, TSA agents repeatedly failed to spot a gun hidden in a woman's bra as she went through the full-body scanners. The agents in question were not disciplined. In another, TSA agents so traumatized Alaska state rep Sharon Cissna (D-Anchorage) with a sexually invasive "pat-down" - after spotting scars from her mastectomy - that she has elected to return to travel to Juneau by boat. The agents in question were not disciplined.

We hear a lot about how the Backscatter machines are making Americans more uncomfortable, but not much about making them more safe. Isn't it time to end this experiment?

One cheer for the Tea Party

2011-02-21T13:20:00.003-05:00

In what was billed as a "victory" for President Obama, Congress rejected funding for a pointless new jet engine. Significantly, this occurred as the "Tea Party" representatives broke from traditionally pro-military-spending Republicans to join some Democrats in a 223-198 vote to remove funding. This is a small victory for Obama - he wanted the funding cut, defense secretary Gates wanted it cut - but it's an even bigger victory for the Tea Party, who accomplished what even a Democratic-controlled House couldn't do last year.

This is also the moment that Global Review has been waiting and hoping for: a concrete indication that the Tea Party was independent of the GOP Establishment, and will vote against frivolous spending from either wing. We may, years from now, look back on this vote as a turning point in Congressional spending.

Libya?

2011-02-21T13:12:00.002-05:00

Another week, another repressive North African dictator skedaddling. Libyans have risen en masse to protest and destroy symbols of the superannuated revolutionary, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Tellingly, the rumors have him fleeing to Venezuela, which offers a chance that the "Day of Rage" fever could follow him across the Atlantic. Are we allowed to fantasize about the fall of the Cuban regime? It's as ripe and outmoded as any in the Arab world.

The news is moving too fast to know what to believe. Hat tip to Carol.

As ManU is to the Yankees, so is Wolverhampton to the Browns

2011-02-16T08:55:00.003-05:00

Red meat for American Premiership fans, The Post Game compares each English side to an American team, which is great water-cooler fodder if there's another person in your office who knows what Blackpool is, or a helpful primer on the Premiers if you don't normally look below Liverpool on the tables.

Get Over Jefferson

2011-02-14T16:50:00.002-05:00

Ed Glaeser, a serious economist, has written a book on cities, and has a quick hit on NYTimes' Freakonomics blog. He praises cities as centers of innovation and environmentalism:

Henry David Thoreau’s sylvan lifestyle led him to destroy more than 300 acres of prime woodland (courtesy of an accidental forest fire he sparked). He would have done much less harm if he had lived in Boston...

Get Over Jefferson. America is, remarkably, still held captive by a Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers and country living.

I hope to get a chance to read the book - Triumph of the City - soon.

Joe "Naam" Biden

2011-01-28T09:40:00.006-05:00

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak stands for reelection every six years (after all, as VP Joe Biden says, he's not a dictator). The campaign posters usually have Mubarak's ugly face and the word Naam - "Yes", in Arabic. Until this decade, one couldn't vote for an opposition candidate; just "Yes" or "No" on Mubarak. In 1999, Mubarak's press reported that 94% voted Naam.

Joe Biden is a Naam guy (hat tip to Drudge). He can't think of any reason to label Mubarak a dictator; and doesn't particularly think that Hosni's 29 years in power are too many. After all, Biden was in the Senate for 36 years, and the sextennials just flew by. Mubarak is paid handsomely to advance the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, and Joe thinks of him as an "ally of ours" and "very responsible". Like Biden, Mubarak has been grooming his son to succeed him. These two guys go way back, and understand each other quite well, apparently.

Here's what's worse: Biden was picked to be Vice President on the strength of his foreign policy credentials. He's the wise old head, the adept diplomat, on the Obama-Biden ticket. And he should know better: Biden was in the Senate as the U.S. supported the Persian Shah right down to his defeat. He was on the Foreign Policy committee during the Cold War, supporting brutal South American dictators for geopolitical purposes. Most of America learned a lesson from that: it's not worth it in the long run. The dictator always falls, and the victims know who propped him up for so long.

Biden hasn't learned that lesson, and he's leading the U.S. (at least with his mouth) squarely onto the side of the mukhabarat goons, police brutality, control of the press and communications, and the Mubarak family dynasty. On the other side is the best chance for secular, non-Islamist regime change in decades.

Biden wants the world to know that the US is firmly in support of the status quo in Egypt. Naam Mubarak! That, my friends, is not change we can believe in.

The Unrest Spreads

2011-01-27T14:03:00.004-05:00

Serious protests are occurring all over the Arab World. Ten thousand people marched peacefully in Sana today; thousands more continue to march in Cairo and elsewhere despite the banning of protests. The Times says this is a new generation of malcontents:

He tolerated a tiny and toothless opposition of liberal intellectuals whose vain electoral campaigns created the facade of a democratic process... But this enduring and, many here say, all too comfortable relationship was upended this week by the emergence of an unpredictable third force, the leaderless tens of thousands of young Egyptians who turned out to demand an end to Mr. Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Stay tuned - the rumblings of this year (and of 2005) show that the status quo will not survive too much longer.

Sé Aysen Mwen An

2011-01-25T14:10:00.009-05:00

My sister continues to get recognition for her work in rebuilding Haiti. Apart from not knowing how to spell her name, this Northeastern University video is a great piece - and gives you the chance to help Kez financially, too.

Abortion Kills

2011-01-19T14:59:00.003-05:00

Paradoxically, it's only a crime when it goes wrong. By anyone's standards, this Pennsylvania "doctor" is an embarrassment:

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, faces eight counts of murder in the deaths of a woman following a botched abortion at his office, along with the deaths of seven other babies who, prosecutors allege, were born alive following illegal late-term abortions and then were killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors...

Investigators also said Gosnell allowed unlicensed employees, including a 15-year-old high school student, to perform operations and administer anesthesia...

The grand jury investigation revealed that, for over two decades, government health and licensing officials had received repeated reports about Gosnell’s dangerous practices. However, no action was ever taken, even after the agencies learned that Mrs. Mongar had died during routine abortions under Gosnell’s care.

Apparently, the local authorities cared more about keeping abortion "safe and legal" - and free from reproach - than they cared about protecting patients (let alone babies).

Immolation Is the Highest Form of Flattery

2011-01-18T09:29:00.003-05:00

How desperate is the Arab World for change? How widespread is the sense that the government is deaf to citizens' voices? Copycat self-immolations were reported this week in three other North African countries. In Tunisia's neighbor, Algeria, seven - count 'em, seven - protesters torched themselves (or tried to) in seven different towns.

The scary thing is that many of these kleptocracies don't care a lick for citizens, angry, burning, or burnt. A hundred Algerians, a thousand Egyptians could self-immolate without prompting anything from their governments but deeper politicization of the fire department.

Tunisia

2011-01-14T21:28:00.002-05:00

What's happening in Tunisia is amazing. One despondent unemployed man was able to accomplish more by immolating himself than the years of wrangling by Lebanese politicians, the millions in aid given to Egypt, or the invasion of Iraq. The NYTimes reports:

[T]he most dramatic change in the old Arab order in years was inspired by Mohammad Bouazizi, the 26-year-old university graduate who could find work only as a fruit and vegetable vendor. He set himself on fire in a city square in December when the police seized his cart and mistreated him...

Tunisia’s protests were portrayed as a popular uprising, crossing lines of religion and ideology, offering a new model of dissent in a region where Islamic activists have long been seen as monopolizing opposition... Tunisians’ grievances were as specific as universal: rising food prices, corruption, unemployment and the repression of a state that viewed almost all dissent as subversion...

Tunisia’s uprising electrified the region.

Today, instead of continuing to fight the uprising with his goods, dictator-for-life Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia, leaving his prime minister in control. Al-Jazeera reports:

Tensions remain high despite Ben Ali's exit, with protesters reported to be ransacking government buildings in the capital, Tunis, and other cities... Protesters are reportedly demanding that the new interim president, a close Ben Ali ally, stand down.

This revolution was one for its time. The tinderbox that Bouazizi lit was stoked by revelations in Wikileaks, which mostly reported that the president was vastly unpopular, and led a weak - "sclerotic" - regime. Knowing that their emperor had no clothes, Tunisians were bold to stand against the "mukhabaraat", or security forces emblematic of these Arab kleptocrats. Once the fire was lit (figuratively as well as literally), it spread (just figuratively) via Facebook and other social media. In another era, this never would have spread beyond one district; one month of 2010 and '11 was enough to engulf the country.

Little Brother Win, Part II

2011-01-12T14:31:00.003-05:00

Attentive Global Review readers remember the discussion about the value of the Red Sox's signing of OF Carl Crawford. Little Brother and I debated the relative merits of the multi-tool left fielder, and whether he was worth his contract.

At Christmas, Little Brother got the last word (or thousand words):

Human Shield

2011-01-08T09:59:00.002-05:00

Al-Ahram reports that Egyptian Muslims - up to and including the president's own sons - bodily protected Egypt's Coptic minority by surrounding their Coptic Christmas Eve services with a human shield. Any would-be murderer would have to blow his way through his own kind to do harm to the Christians.

Echoing m a t t, we hope this is a turning point in the stony relationship between Egypt and her Christian minority.

Little Brother Win, Part I

2011-01-01T19:00:00.002-05:00

My Little Brother has had trouble getting his driver's license. He's a fine driver, for a noob, but our state has very strict regulations about what kind of car one may test in. Since my parents don't have an emergency brake where the passenger can reach it, their minivan is out. So my sister agreed to let him use her car, with Kentucky plates. He showed up, and was asked for proof of insurance. Oops - it was at home: Fail. Reschedule.

This time, he asked me for use of my car (also out-of-state). I said "sure", but didn't check everything out until Christmas Day. Oops - my registration expired a week ago: Fail. Little Brother was distraught when we arrived, until a friend of the family's answered the phone and said, "Sure, you can use my car." The night before the test, we got a call from the friend, who said, "Why was it you needed to use our car again?" Because it has a middle e-brake. "Oops - we got rid of that car. Our new car has a foot-pedal e-brake. Sorry about that." Fail.

So the night before the exam, my dad got one of his colleagues to agree to let us use his car. Perfect, thanks, that's great, you're a real pal! We showed up at his house an hour and a half before the driving test, so Little Brother could practice his parallel parking. We looked at the car's documents... all in order. And we looked at the e-brake... right where it should be, next to the manual shifter.

The manual shifter?!? "Hey, bro, can you drive a stick?", I asked. "Oh no, are you serious? It's a stick-shift? I've never even tried to drive one."

So Little Brother and Dad spent the next 35 minutes learning to drive stick, and then drove up to the exam place. He stalled out 3 times during the test, prompting snide comments and laughter from the examiner. But: he passed. Little Brother Win. Happy New Year!

Powder

2010-12-28T20:26:00.002-05:00

Big kudos go out to Ragged Mountain in NH for letting us ski fresh powder from yesterday's storm. Two or three trails hadn't been groomed, but were open to skiers, and we got to experience it throughout the day: skimming through fresh powder in the morning, carving the natural moguls in the afternoon. My other ski-day highlight was being challenged by my brother to a summit-to-base race (1250' drop), and then beating him by less than a ski-length. He won the rematch.

Ragged is a modest mountain with prices a little high for its lack of elevation. But it beat out Waterville Valley today, which shut down most of its mountain with fear of wind gusts, and left us out in the cold after a long early-morning drive.