So it was a poorly-kept office secret for a good long while, but I suppose there's no harm in announcing it now. As of today I'm no longer a lowly editorial fellow (read: "glorified intern") at Mother Jones, but will be staying on as an Assistant Editor here. That's exciting news for me, and it should squelch the very odd rumors that I'm moving elsewhere (at least for the time being). In practical terms, though, it might well mean that this personal blog has to taper off for a few days while I get adjusted. Probably not, but we'll see. Anyway, a big ol' "grazie!" to loyal readers of this site (and of MoJo), as well as all those who've sent links this way. Much appreciated!

Here are two fascinating stories about women and their slowly changing roles in the Islamic political world. Well, fascinating but sadly rather thin. I'd like to see a lot more reporting on the topic.

Meanwhile, it's a bit distressing that the interim Iraqi ministries simply lost upwards of $9 billion over an eight-month period last year. Whoops! Hey, this is the sort of thing that quickly erodes popular support for that fuzzy post-election national-unity feeling—and if anyone can tell me how "freedom on the march" will solve the problem, I'd like to hear it.

In a recent and rather brilliant Left2Right post, Elizabeth Anderson argued that libertarian-style "natural property rights" were incompatible with quality capitalism. As an example, she cited Hernando de Soto's work on squatters in the Third World, who all own their own land, but have no way of converting their property into capital. Fair enough, and as far as Anderson's argument goes, nothing further need be said about this. But one also wonders how to fix the squatter problem. So here we go. As I understand it, De Soto claims that we simply need to put in place some sort of legal regime that gives those squatters formal property rights—so that people can start mortgaging their homes and whatnot and get on with the business of, um, business. Capitalism for everyone!

Or perhaps not?

Just the other day, John Gravois wrote an interesting Slate piece about how de Soto's ideas haven't actually helped all that much in the Third World:

In various parts of the Third World, newly legalized squatters on the outskirts of cities are discovering that a property title supplies little of the benefit de Soto projects. Government studies out of de Soto's native Peru suggest that titles don't actually increase access to credit much after all. Out of the 200,313 Lima households awarded land titles in 1998 and 1999, only about 24 percent had gotten any kind of financing by 2002—and in that group, financing from private banks was almost nil. In other words, the only capital infusion—which was itself modest—was coming from the state.

Hm...

"If only we could fix the world's problems… then all the world's problems would be fixed!" I don't know who first used that quote to describe Thomas Friedman, but it cracks me up every time. Here's yet another variation on the theme, from his column today:

I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.

Really? It doesn't seem that simple. Hard numbers would help the debate here, and I don't have them, so I'm sorry in advance, but here's a rough case for skepticism. Most of the big advances on conservation and renewable energy will have to come from the United States. Not surprisingly, it will take years and years, or decades and decades. If that. (It's not immediately obvious that sensible alternative energy resources exist, though I'm cautiously leaning towards nuclear power.) Meanwhile, those massive developing countries—India and China especially—are pushing full steam ahead and demanding ever more oil themselves. They're certainly not going to be too thrilled with conservation or more expensive alternative energies for an even longer while. And after that? Hopefully we'll start seeing other emerging economies—Indonesia or Thailand or Congo—kick off China-like growth spurts, which means another wave of perilously high demand and high prices (especially as reserves start to dwindle).

So even if geo-greens ran the world, it would take a long, long time to hammer down the price of oil, and who knows what the Middle East will look like by then. Geo-greenism is a worthwhile goal—like all of Friedman's "Dude, I've got this unstoppable vision!" columns—but, um, we might want to think of a back-up plan too.

It seems that the big bad Arab media boogeymen, al-Jazeerah and al-Arabiyah, both put a relatively positive spin on Iraq's elections today. No one in the piece comes right out and says it, but it sure seems like criticism from the U.S. and other Westerners pressured the two stations into moderating their coverage. Nakle el-Hage of al-Arabiyah says, "There was a fear that some broadcasters will overdo coverage of violence, but we chose not to play that game." Heh, sure they did.

Regardless, this should give some ammo to those unnamed State Department Arabists who think the U.S. should be working with the Arab media, rather than censoring it. Right on. Al-Jazeerah's coverage today, if it was indeed positive, will go a long, long way towards hyping free elections in the broader Middle East. Especially since "[Arabs] are glued to their TV screens."

There's no way I can link to every last thing written about Iraq today, but Newsweek's reporting team has a truly outstanding cover story on the insurgency, as well as the harvest of intelligence we've reaped from failed suicide bomber Ahmed Abdullah al-Shayiah. Some of the revelations—such as the fact that the U.S. pissed off potentially friendly tribal leaders in the early days of war, or the theory that some of the Sunni insurgents really might be willing to make peace—will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Other points are quite new, though, such as their take on the mysterious fact that Iraqi Baathist insurgents suddenly made peace with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sometime around mid-September. Or the fact that the U.S. military could've easily disrupted the Baathist insurgency's infrastructure early on, if only we hadn't been so focused on hunting down foreign fighters. The whole thing's long, but well worth reading, and suggests that one election won't be nearly enough to win this battle.

Also, Fareed Zakaria is equally excellent with his pre-emptive take on the elections. "Elections are not democracy," he says, and yeah, it's obvious, but worth belaboring. Most crucially, Iraq needs to "create a non-oil-based economy and government." Word. Word! Iraq's economic development doesn't get a lot of coverage, but it really should—for starters, there ought to be more of a debate over whether neo-liberalism-style development is appropriate for Iraq. Robert Looney of the Naval Postgraduate School has done some stellar work on this topic, and I do hope that the State Department's thinking seriously about this. Iraq's first proconsul, Jay Garner, was fired for opposing the rapid (and mostly illegal) privatization and liberalization of Iraq's industries—but we haven't heard much about this issue since. Naomi Klein of The Nation gets into it from time to time, but she's a bit too shrill for me.

Oh, and the question I wanted to ask: When did Newsweek get so damned good?

Okay, I'll admit it—I've been swept up in the election fervor! From a rational standpoint, yes it's true that elections won't change much, and it's true that all the big problems still lie ahead. It's also generally true, as Swopa rightly points out, that these "one-man one vote" elections owe as much to Ayatollah Ali Sistani's agitating as to George W. Bush's foreign policy vision. But screw all that for now! How can this not be pretty fucking amazing:



Anyway, I'll have more later. The analysis below—written while a bit, um, tipsy late last night—still holds up. See also Kevin Drum's rough breakdown of the expected representation in the new Iraqi legislature. I'm also very pleasantly surprised that we haven't seen more feuding between the religious Shi'ites and the neo-Baathists around Allawi and Shaalan. But then, there are still millions of ballots yet to be counted, so keep crossing the fingers...

Gather round friends, and hear a tale of woe and misery: the tragedy of being a young investigative reporter for a small independent magazine with few resources or contacts, scant experience, and an office thousands of miles away from Washington. Well, okay, perhaps that's too much buildup. But the lament is real: for the last month I've been working diligently on a story about the lack of coordination between those intelligence programs that track WMDs and such. Clever, huh? Well sure. But as it turns out, I see that the GAO has just released a new report (PDF) on this very topic. Needless to say, they've done a bang-up job—given that they're, y'know, the frickin' GAO. Grrr.

Oddly enough, though, the report is curiously mute on the topic of whether or not the new National Intelligence Director will be able to get everybody onto the same page. (Isn't that what he or she is supposed to do after all—coordinate stuff?) But odds are probably not, especially after Rumsfeld and Duncan Hunter essentially neutered the new position. Oh well. Through the grapevine, I've also heard that having a coherent WMD policy from the White House would help matters. Uh-huh.

Christopher Albritton has some top-notch reporting on the run-up to the Iraqi elections (now underway), along with good explanatory material. His prediction: The United Iraqi List—the Shi'ite List "blessed" by Ayatollah Sistani—will win a plurality, but Iyad Allawi will keep his prime minister job. That's pretty significant if true: the prime minister will be an extraordinarily powerful position, serving as commander-in-chief of the armed forces (or "armed" forces if you prefer), and if I'm not mistaken, will appoint the National Security Advisor, who will keep his (or her) job for five years.

As a bonus, I thought I'd add a bit more context as to what happens after the elections. In theory, the Transitional Administrative Law—the interim constitution that governs this whole process—outlines the mechanisms by which the newly-elected National Assembly selects a Presidential Council and the Prime Minister. In practice, the TAL is very vague about a lot of this stuff, so who knows how the legislature will handle it. But here goes.

First, the National Assembly will select the three-person Presidential Council, which needs to be approved by a two-thirds vote. Essentially that means that the two major Shiite parties, along with the Kurds, will get to pick these people behind the scenes. I'm guessing that it will be something like Jalal Talabani (a Kurdish leader), Hussein Shahrastani (a Shi'ite close to Sistani), and Ghazi al-Yawer (a secular Sunni). In other words, it will be the same crew that was originally handpicked by the U.S. to lead the interim government. The Presidential Council gets to confirm all judicial nominations, and is allowed to veto any legislation passed by the National Assembly, who can only override it with a two-thirds vote. It's quite powerful.

So in all likelihood, the new government is going to be more of the same. The same folks who ran the interim government. The same folks who earned the distrust of ordinary Iraqis for getting too cozy with the Americans. None of this, mind you, is necessarily a bad thing, but it's telling. By the way, from Albritton's reporting, it very much sounds like the Shi'ites are ready to repudiate the interim constitution as a basis for Iraqi law if the constitutional drafting process gets too bogged down. That could lead to a lot of trouble, as I suggested a while ago.

Anyway, this is all speculation and obviously we'll see what happens in a few days, but it's instructive to note that high or low Sunni turnout doesn't fundamentally change the dynamic at work here. High turnout will obviously "bless" the new government and give it some legitimacy, but if the Sunnis feel like they're being overridden and marginalized within the National Assembly by the expatriate parties, as is highly possible, then the danger is that they'll become even more disillusioned with this thing called "democracy". It's one thing to get screwed by a political process imposed from without. It's another to get screwed by a political process that you joined precisely in order not to get screwed.

Oh, and when I say "we'll see what happens in a few days," I mean it literally. The ballots will be counted in multiple centers over the course of two or three days. Um, in theory that means the country should have like nine times as many vote-counting monitors as normal. In reality there are far, far less. Oy...

As Brad Delong says, this Elizabeth Anderson post—in which she deploys Hayek to smash the idea that pre-tax income is in any way a matter of desert—is quite brilliant. But her earlier post on the subject might be even better, in which she argues that natural property rights are incompatible with thriving capitalism. The woman's a force of nature!

Only one quibble: I'm not entirely swayed by her argument that a successful capitalist system needs limited liability corporations, at least of the sort constructed by our legal system. Sure we have them, and they work, and most (all?) liberal economies do it this way, but couldn't we get a similar result through the private insurance market? Surely there are "natural" ways to acquire limited liability, no?

As you can see, no posts today -- I picked up Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell this morning and the perfidious beast lured me away from the joys of the internet. (And what a massive beast too; I like to think I read fast, but the whole thing took upwards of eight hours, easily.) More on that later. In the meantime, I'm off to Berkeley for dinner and hoping to catch And You Will Us Them By The Trail Of The Dead downtown later... So farewell for now little blog!

Oh, and not much to report on the Iraqi election front. It's still worrisome. Still crossing my fingers. And I'm still baffled as to how anyone could possibly interpret tomorrow's events as a success or a failure. Let's face it, we could see 80 percent of Sunnis turn out to vote tomorrow, and Iraq will still be teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Alternatively, election day could be a bloody disaster, marred by bombings left and right, with miserable turnout, and Iraq could still conceivably glide along towards relative stability in the end. Or whatnot. So I don't really care about whether the elections are a "sham" or a "historic moment" or whatever other armchair narrative we decide to impose tomorrow. It only matters where they'll eventually lead Iraq -- and that seems deeply unknowable at this point, regardless of the outcome in the short term. Oy.


MORE: Nadezhda has some further thoughts.

Happy find! Scooping up a two-day-old San Francisco Chronicle off the floor of the bus this evening, I chanced upon this article about great band names. Their favorites, alas, are a bit weak. Just the other day, a co-worker into the punk-rock scene related a truly brilliant band name: Nebuchadnezzar's Pez Dispenser. Top that!

On a related note, Ezra Klein's totally off-base when he says that blogs are shallow and useless. Er, no. "Nebuchadnezzar's Pez Dispenser", people! Seriously now. Leave other classics of the genre in comments...

Andrew Sullivan asks: "How do we tell if the Iraqi elections are a success?" Oh, I dunno, maybe if less than a thousand people die? How's that for a goalpost?

Sorry, but what more do you want? And what kind of question is this, anyways? It's completely unanswerable. No, high turnout will not constitute a "success," as Sullivan seems to think. Democracies aren't created in a day, and that goes triple for Iraq. Do remember, there's still a thorny constitutional process awaiting the country, one that could easily result in overreach, mistrust, and violence. There's still an extremely volatile situation in Kirkuk that's more than capable of igniting a large-scale war. There's still a massive Baathist insurgency that shows no signs of abating. And there are still fanatical Shiites and fanatical Kurds and fanatical Sunnis all ready to clamor for power at the margins and cause havoc at a moment's notice. The elections won't change any of that.

So we just won't know. The fewer people dead on Sunday the better, but that's about it. Yes, it will be rousing, yes it will be inspiring, yes we'll all hopefully see plenty of images of brave Iraqis defying unimaginable danger and literally risking their lives to cast a vote. But by any sensible standard, there's no way we'll be able to sit back on Sunday evening and say "that was a success" or "that failed".

It had to happen sooner or later. The dangerous and not-very-well-paid job of stalking Roger Kimball has unofficially been outsourced! Kriston Capps takes up the proud tradition (begun here and here, and taken to a fierce new level here) in a great post on the sexual liberation movement. I should just add that while it may sometimes seem like these academic leftists are stupid, they're all too often not, and arguing against them requires a bit more effort than Kimball mustered up.

Oh, and while we're at it, the same goes for politicians—even the reputed dim bulbs like Jim Inhofe and Barbara Boxer are in fact quite intelligent. I bring this up only because a few days ago a couple of bloggers were mocking Ted Kennedy's proposal to expand Medicare to all uninsured Americans. Criminy. The man's been thinking seriously about public policy for longer than I've been alive; his proposals are at least worth a hearing. A Ted Kennedy-designed world might not be my ideal, but it certainly wouldn't send the country into chaos and ruin either. Though I do agree that the man's a political catastrophe...

In an undisclosed location last night, Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" was playing. A friend began railing (briefly) against the much-lamented fact that none of the situations in the song are, in fact, ironic. Yes, we've all heard that before, etc. etc. But listening to the damn thing again, I realized the complaint is not wholly true. This bit of the song strikes me as fairly ironic:

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids good-bye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
'Well isn't this nice...'

Airplane crashes don't happen very often, so sure, this counts as "poignantly contrary to what was expected." But that's about it. At any rate, I was also wondering if there was a literary term to describe the other bits of the song. "Traffic jam when you're already late"—normally we would just say, "well, that sucks, but it's not quite ironic." But perhaps there's some obscure Greek term for this situation.

I see the president is swinging back into action with his proposal for Health Savings Accounts and other health care goodies. Beh. Hopefully we've all seen the basic arguments against these ideas by now (for a refresher see this or this). No need to rehash the talking points just yet.

But if we're going to have a big health care debate—and I hope we do!—let's put a few ground rules in place. There are three distinct "big dilemmas" at issue here: covering the uninsured, controlling health care costs, and improving the quality of care. They all need to be looked at separately, and in general they all require somewhat distinct policy approaches.

The first issue, covering the 44 million uninsured, is the easiest to get a handle on; it simply requires a lot of money. Period. Now some methods of expanding coverage are obviously more expensive than others, and the differences often comes down to "targeting". Here's what I mean: If a proposal to expand coverage ends up attracting a lot of people who already have coverage, then it will obviously require a lot more money to cover X number of previously uninsured people. For instance, a recent paper by Jonathan Gruber suggested that simply expanding Medicaid was the most cost-effective way of covering 3 million previously uninsured people, because it attracted the fewest outsiders. Unfortunately, Medicaid targets so well because it sets up various bureaucratic barriers to entry and administrative hassles, so much so that many Americans eligible for Medicaid do not, in fact, enroll in Medicaid. There are a whole legion of other problems with the program, but I won't get into that now. You get the idea.

The second problem, controlling costs, is the one that attracts all the attention. But as you would guess, it's extremely difficult to accomplish. Bush has suggested tort reform for starters. Blah blah, we can debate this all day, but the only number that counts is $26.8 billion—that's the amount in health care spending that would be saved over the next decade by malpractice reform, as estimated by the Lewin Group. Since total health care spending is estimated to be about $29 trillion over that time, we're talking about a rounding error here. It's a non-solution.

What else? Conservatives like to flog "high deductible" insurance policies—policies with low premiums that force people to pay more costs out-of-pocket (up to the first $X, after which insurance kicks in). They're a big part of Bush's vision. The idea here is that if we're all shelling out our own money for care, we're more likely to be cost-conscious and less likely to get frivolous stuff we don't need, like wheelchairs with racing stripes or what have you. Er, maybe. More likely, though, high deductible policies simply force low-income families to cut back on care, even some necessary care. Everyone else carries on. Let's face it, if you make $100,000 a year, you're not going to skip a visit to get a "second opinion" just because you'll have to pay out of pocket. Not all people are equally price-sensitive.

Another option: President Bush is now talking about all this great new technology that will transform the industry and save us billions. Whatever. Politicians have been yapping on about the tech revolution in health care for ages. I wouldn't hold my breath for this one. Most of these changes will have to be mandated by the government, since as Phillip Longman nicely illustrated recently, most health care providers have very little incentive to take on expensive IT reforms that may not result in true savings for decades. Soviet-style innovation all the way down.

Meanwhile, many of the liberal "solutions" for controlling costs are no better. Re-importation of drugs seems sensible enough, and it will help a lot of people, but we really shouldn't be relying on other countries to control our health care costs. It's ludicrous. Meanwhile, cracking down on pharmaceutical companies via price controls doesn't seem any more efficient to me than simply expanding drug insurance coverage. Less efficient maybe.

So controlling costs is really quite tough. But here's one proposal I like touting. One of the reasons health care spending in the U.S. is so high, at least when compared to the rest of the world, has to do with wages. Health professionals must be recruited from the same talent pool used by other insanely high-paying industries (law, finance, etc.). That drives up wages and hence, since health care is very labor-intensive, overall costs. We could fix this rather easily, though, by promoting true free trade and lowering the quotas and professional licensing requirements that prevent many foreign doctors from coming to America. Voila!

Okay, then. I haven't even touched on how to improve health care quality. To be honest, that seems like the most hopeless problem of all. It's probably true that fully socialized medicine would only depress medical innovation. But it's also true, as Longman's piece demonstrated, that the free market doesn't deliver quality care either—mainly because customers simply don't put a high value on quality, even if they have loads of information about services available to them. So something in between is necessary. But what?
Continue reading "Framing The Health Care Debate"

In the upcoming issue of the New Republic, Michael Crowley writes that Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA)—the man who called a Social Security privatization a "dead horse"—may not be so fainthearted after all. To wit: "Thomas may be mercurial, arrogant, obnoxious, outspoken, and highly off-message. But, when this White House wants something, Thomas delivers." Seems about right, though it's a bit disturbing to find that some Democratic staffers and aides were downright exuberant after Thomas made his remarks. Suckers.

Anyway, that's not the main point here—the main point is the following passage, which I found interesting in an "Isn't Congress cool?" sort of way:

Few people remember now, but there was a time when the House Ways and Means chairman was a figure of titanic significance--often second in power only to the president himself. In January 1963, the committee's Democratic chairman, Wilbur Mills, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. (Mills was powerful enough to block, almost singlehandedly, the creation of Medicare for several years.) The next great Ways and Means chairman was another Democrat, Dan Rostenkowski, a Washington institution known as much for his steak-and-martini consumption as for being at the center of such epic Capitol battles as the 1983 Social Security reform, the 1986 tax reform, and the 1993 Clinton budget plan.

When Republicans took control of the House in 1994, they imposed six-year term limits on the chairmanships of Ways and Means and every other committee. Chairmen today simply don't have the time to establish themselves as warlords like Mills, who served for 18 years, and Rostenkowski, who served for 14. It takes a few years to make a legislative mark--or to get your face among the political-celebrity caricatures that adorn the walls of the Palm steakhouse.

Edward Gramlich makes the liberal case for Social Security plus private accounts. If there was a possible universe in which Democrats could hope to see anything so rational come out of a compromise with the Bush administration, then I'd be advocating a compromise. But there is no such possible universe.

Meanwhile, Gramlich argues that raising the retirement age against wouldn't be too unfair to those with physically demanding jobs:

That's a bad rap. The retirement age would rise very slowly, about a year every decade. The main impact would be felt by workers in their 20s and 30s today. The share of workers who work in physically demanding occupations is falling every year and is going to be very low by the time they retire. I would still permit people to retire early and get reduced benefits. They're probably going to get a benefit cut, whatever happens.

The share of workers is falling? Er, depends what you mean by "physically demanding". Usually we think coal-mining, heavy manufacturing, that sort of burly stuff. But in an important sense, many service jobs are quite physically demanding. Waiting tables is physically demanding. Doing housekeeping at a hotel is physically demanding. Heck, standing at a cashier all day and absorbing a barrage of snarls and complaints is pretty physically demanding. I've done all those things before, and I found them exhausting, even as an able-bodied teenager. Obviously there's still a world of difference between that and heaving a pick-axe in a mineshaft all day, and I see Gramlich's point, but an extra year of housekeeping at the age of 68 is nothing to sniff at. (And no, I don't want to hear about how life was so much more strenuous back in the 1850s. Come on now.)

Speaking of which, I recently found this paper (PDF) by Jonathan Gruber and Courtney Coile suggesting that increasing incentives to work "would significantly reduce the exit rate of older workers from the labor force." That's something we should start looking into.

Yeah, I haven't been writing up a storm around these parts lately. Life has been busy. Or hectic. Or both! But as ever, wonderful political stuff happens over at Mother Jones' fine new blog, so do check us out. I'll be back to stalk Roger Kimball a bit later on.

A rather cryptic hint from David Weman sent me to the Fistful of Euros award page, where I've been nominated for Best Non-European weblog. That's the good news! The bad news is that I'm firmly in last place, and at the risk of playing Ralph Nader to a worthier contender. So I'm throwing my support behind Chez Nadezhda. Chez Nadezhda's great! If you vote for them, all your wildest dreams will come true! Not to mention the fact that its proprietors—the mysterious (and mysteriously prolific) praktike and nadezhda—also run another great blog with, it must be said, a terrible name.

…I do have to say, though, that one of the other non-European contenders—One Good Thing—is quite amusing, sporting post titles like "Not All Sequels End With 'Electric Bugaloo'" or "Great Moments In Tampon History."

Glenn Reynolds raises an important issue in this post about mental illness and homelessness, and collects a number of good anecdotes, but it seems like there's still a bit of misinformation floating about. Let's start with the numbers. It's very difficult to know how many homeless people are mentally ill: estimates range pretty widely, often as high as 50 percent or so. Often these numbers measure different things—how ill is mentally ill? is a meth addict mentally ill? perhaps he may as well be, perhaps not—and obviously we would recommend different solutions for different levels of mental illness.

But we can pin a few things down with fair precision—the 1992 Federal Task Force on Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness pegged the number of homeless people requiring time in an institution at only 5-7 percent. I haven't come across any other numbers on this, and I'll assume it's pretty reliable. So yes, the de-institutionalization movement certainly turned a lot of people out onto the streets, and I'd agree that it was done poorly, but that's very different from saying that it caused the current epidemic of homeless people. And it's very different from saying we should fill the mental hospitals back up as a means of tackling homelessness.

It's important to note, I think, that it wasn't merely budget pressures or the concerns over patient's rights—as immortalized in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest—that led to state hospitals turning people out in droves. The development of new psychoactive medicines also played a big part; doctors had little idea that medication alone doesn't suffice for treatment. At the same time, psychiatry was looking more favorably at early forms of community-based treatment. In the 1960s, federal aid finally became available to the mentally ill, and community mental health centers were set up. So the country at least had the basis for a new form of treatment, one that really was far more appropriate for a good number of the mentally ill, many of whom now can enjoy relative freedom (as compared to being locked in a hospital).

The problem, of course, was that not all communities kept these services in place—the quality of these shelters and homes vary from region to region, and there's a pretty dire need for more aggressive case management. There's also a dire need for mental health services in prisons: a small, much too small, percentage of mentally ill prisoners receive treatment, even though many of these people are locked up precisely because that's the quickest way to get them into treatment. (You are far more likely to be locked up in prison for disorderly conduct if you're mentally ill, period.)

So it's a complex topic, as you'd expect, and I've brushed over it all far too quickly. Glenn's right in that there really is a resistance to recognizing that some homeless people are simply intractable, and can't be helped by even the most aggressive case management. At some point, institutionalization becomes the only option. But there are also a lot of intermediate steps between an open shelter and a hospital bed, and saying, as Jeff Jarvis does, that "the real issue isn't homelessness… [i]t's insanity," badly elides all that.

Today's cartoon, via Iraqi Press Monitor, is kind of odd:

CARTOON: (Al-Sabah) – A man addresses a lady. He doesn’t ask "Do you know how much I love you?" Instead, he asks "Do you know how much I vote for you?" The cartoonist refers to the fact that Iraqis are overwhelmed by the elections, and are forgetting everything except the elections – now their main concern.

Hmmm... On a related note, readers will know that I'm extremely pessimistic about the future of Iraq, have about 100 doomsday scenarios I worry about, and think it's utterly sickening that we haven't been able to secure the country and are sending hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis off to their deaths on Sunday. Still, stories like this—along with the thousands of election workers and millions of voters who are getting out and trying to strive for democracy—really are inspiring. That should go without saying, but sometimes it gets lost in all the (justified) carping and hand-wringing.

I never thought I'd say this, but I really wish the New Criterion would go back to its derivative warblogging days. Don't get me wrong, it's marvelous that Roger Kimball just got his copy of Philosophy for Beginners in the mail. And it's marvelous that he wants to blog all about it. I just wish he would read up a wee bit more before he started bashing academics. We've already looked at his thoughts on science, and now here's the latest, taking on the notion of "truth"—a proud philosophical tradition that started with Plato and ended with, um, Nietzsche apparently. Why end there? Who knows? Kimball suggests that "the school of impatience"—which I take to mean "the leftist academy"—is preventing us from asking the question, "What is truth?" nowadays. He also sneers at "many educated people" for being "deeply impressed" with Nietzsche. Again, perhaps this means leftists, but I'm not sure.

By the by, if you see Richard Rorty—who is both a leftist and an academic—running around telling people that 20th century analytic philosophers are mainly concerned with whether "our beliefs about the world... are somehow isomorphic to the pre-existing contours of reality", well, please tell him to stop. It's just so hard to rag on professors when they're not acting like little buffoons.


UPDATE: Crikey! He's already got another one up about "the perils of sexual liberation." The man moves quickly. Well, this is going to be a full time job keeping up.

It seems my lovable Dell laptop, Nessie, has become quite, quite sluggish of late. So sluggish, in fact, that I suspect foul play—some sort of bug or ad-software-thing or spyware or whatever the technical term is. In short, pests! Anyway, while I may have qualms about spraying DDT on humans, I certainly have no qualms about spraying it on my computer. Is there anything anyone can recommend? I tried googling around and found something called "AdAware", but I don't want to download something that will only make the problem worse, ala introducing rats into Australia.

And yes, I use Mozilla and all that. Yes, I'm considering getting a Mac when Nessie finally dies on me. Etc.

It's not a subject I know a whole lot about, but Asheesh Siddique has an interesting dissent from the growing Nick Kristof-inspired consensus that we should start spraying DDT all over the place to combat malaria. Asheesh cites this study on the adverse affects of pesticides, which seems convincing enough, though "may not be worth the risk" is the key hedge here. I do, however, like his alternative:

Kristof makes no mention in his op-ed about the main source of malarial mosquitoes: standing water. A really tough anti-malaria strategy in poor countries would actually focus on the problem of water quality management and reforming the often abominable (or non-existent) sewage systems and waste water treatment programs found throughout the underdeveloped world.

This seems like something we ought to do anyways, no? Perhaps a combination of selective DDT use and broader developmental goals? Anyways, I'm open to persuasion, though the case for DDT still sounds pretty powerful to me. Realistically, the World Bank, etc., isn't going to help create thousands of waste water treatment plants overnight, and in the meantime, a lot of lives need saving.

Matt Yglesias rightly notes that even if the Sunnis do get a hand in writing the new Iraqi constitution, the entire process is so riddled with veto points that any real reform seems utterly hopeless. Stalemate, frustration, and war is still a realistic option.

Anyway, I'm still working on a longer post about the Iraqi constitution, but let me just add a few things.

At this point, it's very likely that the Shi'ites will win upwards of 75 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, thanks to low Sunni turnout. If this happens, they can actually legally change the ratification rule (Articles 60 and 61) in the Transitional Administrative Law that allows 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces to nullify a written constitution. There's one veto point down. With a three-fourths majority, the Shi'ites could also reduce the number of votes needed to make amendments to the constitution by changing article 3A. (Ordinary laws, by the way, are very easy to pass as far as I can tell, see Articles 36 and 37.) So there's another veto point down.

Now this means, naturally enough, that the Shi'ites could run roughshod over the Kurds and Sunnis and write up and pass whatever constitution they damn well please. That's a real danger—the world is full of politicians who try to reach too far. Alternatively, though, the Shi'ites could realize that they really can't afford to piss the Sunnis off—and here the U.S. could threaten withdrawal to provide some pressure—and they all work together on a constitution that's now fairly pliable. (The Shi'ites could, for instance, offer to create an upper chamber, ala the U.S. Senate, that affords minority protection to Kurds and Sunnis, in exchange for abolishing the much-too molasses-like ratification and amendment rules.)

Oh, and there's another fun aspect to all of this. Ayatollah Ali Sistani—who will continue to exercise a very large influence over the Shi'ites—still thinks that the new National Assembly ought not to be bound by Iraq's interim constitution, the TAL. And as far as I know, the UN more or less accepted this view when it blessed the June handover. It's tough to know what to make of this. In the event of a stalemate, the Shi'ites could theoretically just throw away the interim constitution, since its legitimacy is pretty dubious. So Matt's not necessarily right when he says that "the status quo would just leave [the current interim government] in charge." That's legally true only if everyone's bound by the TAL, but Sistani is quite obviously not of that opinion.

Ezra Klein goes eponymous! As if eponymity wasn't already cool enough.

He's already kicking up dust with a post about labor. Suffice to say, I'm going to refrain from telling everyone that they really ought to pay attention to labor, and simply link to this essay from my former employers, about reviving unions. One part struck me -- one of those elitist and naive West Coast liberals who never really talks about unions -- as a bit eye-opening:

we continue to operate, in most of our work, on the assumption that unions are accepted and valued as part of this country's economic and political life -- a partner in a system of industrial relations. We see ourselves as supporters and beneficiaries of the very system that has rejected us. As a result, we interpret each new assault on unions and workers' rights as an isolated problem attributable to bad employers, economic change, and disloyal politicians, instead of viewing each gesture as part of a systematic effort to destroy us. Focusing on individual battles, we are blind to the war raging all around us. So we allow employers to open non-union facilities, out-source and subcontract union work, and viciously oppose our organizing, while establishing "cooperative" relationships with these same employers in the ever-declining unionized segments of their work force. And we act surprised, hurt, and confused when the Dunlop Commission's report describes an economy with worker "representation" but no unions. Yet we refuse to publicly criticize and break with our "friends" who drafted and supported a report that offers ammunition to enemies who want to gut collective bargaining.

Indeed. Anyways, I've strayed from the original point, which was: Ezra Klein has a cool new blog.

Chris Bowers' rant about liberals who downplay the importance of unions deserves to be taken seriously. Most forceful of all is this quote:

The fact of the matter is this: one of the main reasons Democrats are losing elections is because it is okay to be pro-environment and anti-labor, it is okay to be pro-Roe and anti-labor, it is okay to be anti-war and anti-labor, it is okay to be anti-patriot act and anti-labor, but it is never okay to be pro-labor and anti-any of these other things.

I've heard and read a lot of different "plans" for saving the Democratic party over the past few months, but one article that really struck me as feasible was Michael Lind's "Mapquest.dem" in the last issue of The American Prospect. The basic idea was that the Democratic party simply could not remain a national party while maintaining as its core New England liberalism—which he characterized by "reformism, intellectual elitism, and anti-militarism." This strain of liberal culture produces a lot of good, and is a driving force for progressive change, but it has never formed the basis of a national political majority. So he offers an alternative:

A majority Democratic Party would be defined, in contrast, by its regional wings: northeastern Democrats, West Coast Democrats, Great Plains Democrats, midwestern Democrats, and even some southern Democrats. The regional factions would agree on a brief national platform that is chiefly economic. But they would be free to express their regional differences in the areas of values and foreign policy.

You can see how this ties in with Chris Bowers' post. Under Lind's model, it would be okay for a Democratic candidate to be pro-labor and anti-Roe, or pro-labor and anti-environment, or pro-labor and pro-war, but not really anti-labor and any of those things. It's a very different way of doing business. And it's not clear that cultural liberalism would even suffer—especially since "reformism" would no longer be equated with intellectual elitism. And it's equally likely that economic gains among lower and middle classes could temper some of the cultural battles we now see played out.

Anyways, nothing revolutionary here, this is all just a concrete way of spelling out the "economic populism" advice offered by Thomas Frank and countless others. For a variety of reasons listed here, I'm not at all convinced that this is the way to go, but it's worth spelling out all the same.


UPDATE: Nathan Newman claims the problem isn't Democratic politicians so much as liberal pundits and the Democrats' "non-labor base of voters", who pretty much ignore all things labor. True enough. But again, a Lind-style national party centered on labor would pretty much force these folks to get with the program or leave and form some sort of Left Libertarian party.

Hey, cool! My interview with Kenneth Pollack from last month is now online. The key thing here is that Pollack doesn't really rule out any approach to Iran, but figures we might as well try them all, starting with the least risky (negotiations) and moving on to the most treacherous (bombing) if necessary and feasible. Obvious, maybe, but why isn't anyone doing it? He's got a bunch of other good insights too.

File this story under "I frickin' told you so two months ago."

(Okay, not really. File it under "I'll gladly trumpet whatever New York Times story supports my pre-existing views on Iraq." But whatever! Let me also add the key caveat: In the event of a civil war the radical Shi'ites will assume a much more powerful position, since they control all the Shi'ite militias.)

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I was absolutely, utterly, positively wrong about one thing: The effect of absentee ballots in Iraq. A little while ago, my conspiracy theory du jour concerned all those absentee ballots that were supposedly going to be counted in Jordan—a hotbed of pro-Allawi, anti-Chalabi sentiment. Chaos and disputes would follow! So thought I. But I never bothered to fact check the numbers; instead I just assumed that there would literally be a million absentee ballots, and they would all make a big difference in this election. Sadly, no. As Juan Cole points out, absentee voting will end up being paltry, barely making a dent in the overall voting numbers. Turns out Iraqis abroad didn't feel like registering. Oh well, time for a new crazy fear with which to whittle away the days. Any suggestions?

Here are the rules. If you're going to spend untold hours of your life whining about "postmodern science," first you need to do the following:

1. Read what Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerbend actually wrote. Browsing through the "summaries" you found via Google doesn't count. Just read the books—they're not very long, don't worry.
   
2. Understand that you just might not be the first person to "debunk" Karl Popper's idea that all scientific theories must be falsifiable. Sad but true.
   
3. Name your targets! Are there real, flesh-and-blood people with actual influence advocating postmodern science? Awesome. But for Christ's sake, name them. Fluttering your hands around in the air and talking about "leftists in the academy" doesn't count.

Anyways, Roger Kimball inveighs against "scientific irrationalism," but the term strikes me as vague and misleading. This isn't really my field, but it seems that with regards to science, a person could believe that a) the ontology of science is subjective, b) the epistemology of science is subjective, c) both, or d) neither.

Kuhn seems more like a) than c) to me—since for him there are still perfectly good and objective reasons for choosing one particular scientific paradigm over another. Not that the kids at the New Criterion are interested in this sort of debate, but there you go...

Okay, I'll admit, I've never understand the problem with grade inflation. Sure it seems hokey and filthy, but doesn't it all get recalibrated eventually? Here's what I mean. Let's say there was no grade inflation, and professors gave out A's for outstanding work, B's for great work, C's for average work, and so on. If everyone agreed to and understood this standard, then we'd all know—and by "we" I mean employers, graduate schools, peers who listen to the kid brag about his GPA—that 2.0 means you're an average student, 3.0 means you're really quite smart, while 4.0 means you're hot shit.

Not let's start inflating. A is for outstanding work, A- is for great work, B+ is for average work, B is for mediocre work. Again, eventually everyone's going to catch on, and a 4.0 GPA still means hot shit, a 3.5 GPA will mean you're kind of smart but not all that smart, 3.0 means mediocre, etc. etc. Unless everyone's getting an A in every single class, there's still a distinction to be made.

In a given class, two kids may get A's even though one kid worked much harder than another. So in that sense, as Andrew Samwick says, the distribution of grades really is compressed. But over a full college lifetime—36 courses or so—the smarter (or, okay, we won't say "smarter," but "more classroom-adept") kid will likely get A's more consistently, no? And the difference between a 4.0 and a 3.8 will be much more significant than it once was.

Anyways, Professor Samwick has some more smart thoughts on this—and isn't quite so cavalier about inflation. As a bit of additional anecdotal experience, though, I didn't think the standards at Dartmouth varied that much from department to department. I majored in both English (which you would expect to be inflated and fluffy) and Mathematics (supposedly cold and ruthless), and never felt like I earned an easy A or an unfair B+ or what have you. Plus, this stuff sort of depends. Kids gravitate towards departments where they're likely to excel. I had an intensely difficult time in my Computer Science classes—spending all-nighter after all-nighter in the lab—when some people could just crank out code. By contrast, some people just don't get literary criticism. So guess where we end up spending most of our time?


Continue reading "Inflate Away!"

Anyone following the occupation in Iraq knows that we haven't been able to whip up the Iraqi security forces into battle-ready shape. And most of us know that the U.S. won't be able to leave until we get that accomplished. So, naturally enough, we all want to see some sort of new and improved plan for getting the training done. Some bright idea. Something. Anything.

The problem, though, is that whatever new approach the Pentagon comes up with will be distinguished mostly by minor technical changes (varying up the training courses, finding new ways of integrating competent Iraqis in new units, etc.), rather than any sort of Bold New Method. As such, I don't really feel competent to judge whether the military's latest idea—to put more Iraqis out on the street, in place of American patrols—will actually work or not. The devil's all in the details. Prima facie, yeah, it could work. Or the new Iraqi patrols could just scatter and retreat and fail to fight like they've always done, in which case we'd be right back at square one, needing to send American troops back into the street.

But at this point, what else can be done? Condoleeza Rice was rightly horsewhipped by the Senate for not getting the Iraqi troops trained, but it's not as if there's some obvious way to do things out there, and she's just not doing it because she's an evil and dumb conservative. No, no. It's simply all fucked.

Cheers!

It's hardly the main point, but yikes, Jim Glass really did catch Paul Krugman in a bit of shadiness. Oh well. Back to the actual debate...

How exciting. It appears that the Pentagon has been secretly taking over the CIA's old paramilitary and covert operations role all this while. And they just plain forgot to tell anyone. Oops! Oy. I'd work up more outrage and froth, but it's late and I'm tired... Oh, and look. They trotted out Gen. "My God can beat up your God" to handle it all.


UPDATE: Okay, fuck it. A little analysis. Yes, at a brief glance, the Pentagon's move makes a lot of sense—and the 9/11 Commission backed it, so how bad can it be? Most of these covert operations really require, well, military capabilities, and it seems a bit silly for the U.S. to have two separate-but-parallel groups that can conduct these sorts of adventures. So the Pentagon may as well do it. In the old, Cold War days, the military was never really agile enough to carry out covert work, but the times and the troops they are a-changing. Nowadays, the Pentagon has about 10,000 Special Forces ready to do crazy shit, compared to about 700 or so "covert operators" in the CIA.

So that's the glance. Now for the hard gaze. Like the 9/11 Commission, I think the Pentagon might be better off trying to work with the CIA, rather than around 'em, creating joint teams for these sorts of adventures. The CIA really does know what it's doing here, and it sounds like the Pentagon is still sending fucking Keystone Kops into danger zones, the sort of thing that gets people killed. Turf wars being what they are, of course, CIA-Pentagon cooperation will never happen, but it should. Those crazy kids all worked together wonderfully in Afghanistan, and that's a good model for success.

Right. And then we get into the accountability and oversight problems—which, um, pretty much eclipse everything else. Jennifer Kibbe delved deep into this in last year's Foreign Affairs. Basically, military covert operations don't require nearly as much congressional oversight, if any. And under international law, covert military operators would have "combatant" status, which raises all sorts of thorny issues. So this all needs to be straightened out, and now, before we start seeing Special Forces run amok, without supervision, in all corners of the earth. So the fact that Rumsfeld carried this out without telling Congress is really, really disturbing.


DOUBLE UPDATE: Wow, check out the crazy jackass running the whole show! Turns out that Special Forces in Iraq are not amused by the new Pentagon covert squad: "These guys can't set up networks and run agents and recruit tribal elders." Another: "The guy actually put us in danger." Oy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to privatize California's pension plan for state employees and teachers. I'll be watching this story closely because a) Now that I live in California I should probably pay attention to what goes on here, and b) it has ramifications for the future of other public pension programs. Hint, hint, nudge nudge. As Stephen Moore of the pro-privatization Club for Growth says, "If California moves from a traditional defined-benefit pension plan to a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan, the nation is likely to follow." The stakes are high!

Here's one thing I don't quite get, though. Critics of the California state pension system complain that CALPERS gets very political with its investments, often meddling in boardrooms and whatnot. Now Tyler Cowen argues that this is one reason why we should think twice about investing the Social Security Trust Fund in equities.

Okay, but can't Congress quite easily pass laws to avoid this sort of meddling? They could, for instance, bar any and all Social Security stocks from voting in boardrooms. Or they could set explicit fiduciary standards saying that whatever independent investment board managed the Trust Fund follow a policy that was solely for the economic well-being of Social Security, and not for any other social or political objective. (The so-called "sole purpose" doctrine.) Now it appears that CALPERS follows a similar standard, but either the standards aren't written explicitly enough, or something shady is going on. Or am I just naïve and fiduciary standards aren't worth the paper they're printed on?

One more thing: Yes, if the government invested the Trust Fund in equities, it could be pressured into "activist" investing, as Tyler Cowen fears. But couldn't the exact same thing happen under Bush's privatization plan? As Rep. Bill Thomas helpfully explained, these are "personal" accounts, not "private" accounts, so there's nothing really stopping the government from monkeying around with the index of equities in which our "personal" accounts will be invested. If the government wanted to punish tobacco companies, for instance, it could pretty easily mandate that no private account carry tobacco stocks. So what the deuce is the difference?

Two semi-snarky, semi-serious comments on this Mike Allen piece about the semantics of Social Security. First, we have conservatives trying to pretend that they don't really want to "privatize" Social Security:

"Semantics are very important," House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.)said last week when a reporter asked about "private" accounts. "They're personal accounts, not private accounts. No one is advocating privatizing Social Security."

Um. So they're private accounts that can be raided by the government? No, really, in what sense aren't these accounts private? Who else has access to them? Are they subject to heavy oversight? Hm.

Oh, and then we get this part:

Democrats have their own linguistic problem: They want to banish the term "crisis." Democratic Party leaders are urging members to discuss future Social Security shortfalls as a "challenge" rather than a crisis, and assert that Bush is trying to manufacture a crisis to justify making changes that many Democrats say are unnecessary.

Friends, I'm sorry, but no. The word "challenge" sounds ridiculous. Reminds me of the old joke about p.c. nuts trying to use the term "vertically challenged" to refer to short people. Hey, why don't we just mock the term "crisis"? As in: "There goes the president with his 'crisis' talk again!" Or something about Chicken Little Republicans. Just please remember, the boy who cried wolf got eaten because everyone laughed at him. Just saying...

It's come to my attention that the RSS feed for MoJo Blog doesn't actually work. I'll see if I can alert our hard-working tech staff, but in the meantime, this feed apparently does the trick for hundreds of other loyal readers. Alas, it doesn't display signature lines, so you'll have no idea who wrote which post, but by all means, feel free to attribute anything eloquent and incisive to me.

In other news, I'm finally adding a blogroll, down to the right. I don't read a lot of off-the-beaten-track blogs, so by all means, feel free to suggest something (suggest your own if I've omitted it).

So says David Brooks:

...the core ideals of this country, articulated by Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Lincoln, F.D.R., Truman, J.F.K., Reagan and now Bush.

Good for him for throwing Whitman into the mix! I wonder if Brooks enjoyed this passage from Leaves of Grass as much as I did:

I remember I saw only that man who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see him close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

(from "Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City")

Beautiful! (By the way, the rest of Brooks' column wasn't all that bad, though naturally misguided. I'll try to come up with a less juvenile response tomorrow...)

With all this talk about Israel potentially launching air strikes against Iran's nuclear program, I'd like to see some one try to settle a rather key question here: Could Israel even strike Iran? I took up this subject on Friday over at Mother Jones, based on what I've been told by several Iran analysts. Upshot: Right now it just doesn't seem like Israel has the capacity to conduct days or even weeks worth of bombing from 1000 miles away. Perhaps they could do it if they refueled their short-range strike fighters over Iraq, but it would be pretty obvious who was helping them out, and in that case we may as well have just done the whole thing ourselves.

At any rate, Ted Barlow apparently heard the same thing from Ray Takeyh and Ken Pollack, though down in the comments to Ted's post, Gary Farber offered a dissenting view:

A couple of comments on niggling points: "According to Pollack, they only have 25 appropriate planes."

This is true if we’re talking about an attack this month. But the Israelis are taking possession of two new F-16Is per month until, as currently planned, their order of 102 of this plane is filled (it’s always possible the order could be extended or added to, as well). So their technical ability to hit Iran is constantly on the increase.

Seems convincing enough—though this shouldn't be a hard dispute for some enterprising reporter to settle. Regardless, air strikes are a bad, bad idea. Our WMD intelligence remains awful, we'd (or Israel would) no doubt miss some key targets, we'd likely hit a lot of civilian targets (since many of the facilities are in civilian areas), retribution in Iraq would be swift and severe, the nationalist furor would probably set Iran's democratic revolution back decades, etc. etc. So no way, no day. No shape, no form. Of course, if the White House ever decided to actually negotiate with Iran, then they would have to leave the threat of air strikes open, which means they'd have to pretend to be actually crazy enough to try something so utterly, well, crazy. Ah, diplomacy...

By the way, this strikes me as good news—former president Akbar Hashem Rafsanjani is planning to run in Iran's June elections. I know the minutiae of Iranian politics isn't all that exciting, but dammit, it's important. No, really. It's true, there will be no reformist candidates running this time around. But Rafsanjani is at least something of a pragmatic hardliner—as Ken Pollack nicely illustrated, he's shifty and he'll do whatever it takes to save his own political skin, but he's not totally averse to negotiating with the U.S. (or economic reform). If he gets elected, we might be able to sit down with Tehran and strike a deal. By contrast, if a neoconservative like Ali Larijani (here's more wackiness from this dude) gets elected, then who knows, maybe we'll have to start thinking about air strikes.

Bush's speechwriter, Michael Gerson, tries to explain the president's foreign policy vision:

Bush's speech appeared to put the United States on a course in which moralism and idealism, rather than realpolitik, form the philosophical foundations of foreign policy. But White House officials said that is a misreading of how Bush operates. "His goals are deeply idealistic," Gerson said. "His methods are deeply realistic. In fact, that was one of the themes of the speech, that this traditional divide between realism and idealism is no longer adequate for the conduct of American foreign policy."

Fair enough. I tend to think that criticizing Bush for being "too idealistic" misses the point, obscuring the man's real flaws. In fact, I'd go even further and say there isn't any serious divide between "realists" and "idealists" among major American thinkers and politicians. (Fringe paleocons like Pat Buchanan don't count, and the Republican isolationists in the House have shown so pliable that they don't really count either.)

Everyone has certain foreign policy ideals, as well as certain senses of limits, and those differ from person to person, but so what. I don't believe, for instance, that Michael Ledeen wants us to focus on ushering revolution into Iran, while I want the U.S. to negotiate with Tehran over nukes, all because Ledeen's an "idealist" and I'm a "realist". Rather, it's because we have very different empirical takes on the situation -- on the viability of revolution, or on the sinister intentions of Iran's mullahs. In certain possible worlds we could reach factual convergence on these issues without altering our theories of foreign policy.

So there's just not a grand distinction to be made. If we really want to categorize Democrats and Republicans, there are other important continuums -- the degree to which a politician/thinker actually wants to emphasize foreign policy (Bush maybe more so, Kerry maybe less so), or the degree to which politicians/thinkers are actually interested in understanding how the world works -- that are better for distinguishing the two parties.

While we're on the topic of Southern conservatism, Ed Kilgore wrote a beast of a post about the future of Southern Democrats. Clay Risen's TNR cover story on Phil Bredesen, Tennessee's Democratic governor, makes for a good companion piece. And before anyone starts talking about "winning the South via pocketbook issues," here's a key passage from Risen's profile:

To be sure, Bredesen wasn't just playing the good ol' boy manqué--he talked issues as well. But, what he realized is that, in the South, people won't listen to you on the issues until they are comfortable with you as a person. Or, as Brunson puts it, "Southern voters go through a two-step process. The first is a credentialing filter, which asks if a candidate shares their values. The second is on issues--education, health care, the economy. Bredesen understands you have to go through step one before you even start step two."

Bredesen actively appealed to Republican politicians and voters as well. "Here was a man who was willing to call Republican leaders in a county and say, 'You may not vote for me, but I'd like to pick your brain and share ideas,'" says his 2002 campaign manager, Stuart Brunson. It paid off: Bredesen brought in $22,000 from the Frist family, perhaps the state's leading GOP clan (Senator Bill Frist did not contribute). Even Ted Welch, a Bush "pioneer" and a Republican heavyweight, has nothing but praise for Bredesen. "I admire him," he says. "He will consider both sides and then pull the trigger."

Bredesen's ability to play both the number-cruncher and the small-town boy done good explains his high approval ratings, numbers he has achieved even while embarking on a decidedly unglamorous agenda, cutting the deficit and tackling TennCare. In fact, he seems to be so well-liked that voters trust him to make the right decision, regardless of whether they like the results.

In the New York Sun, Eli Lake tries to crack the mystery of how con man extraordinnaire Ahmed Chalabi became so popular in Iraq:

One answer is that by campaigning against him, Jordan's monarchy and America's spies gave Mr. Chalabi the legitimacy they insisted he lacked. Mr. Allawi, the CIA, and Jordan favored a strategy that essentially purchased Iraqi security through buying off many of the functionaries of the old Baathist regime. At the time, this rapprochement was sold as the only viable strategy for placating the violent Sunni terrorists who have declared war against the right to vote of their countrymen.

But in the rehabilitation of the Baath Party, many Iraqis became enraged at the prospect of returning to tyranny. It was Mr. Allawi who sent envoys to Syria in August to meet with senior leaders of the insurgency and invited a reconstituted Baath Party to help plan the elections Iraq will hold on January 30. One reason why proceedings of the special court to try Saddam Hussein stopped almost entirely during this period was out of concern it would further incite the decapitators, assassins, and car bombers.

I also wonder whatever happened to that whole "Chalabi-is-an-Iranian-spy" story? Oh well. Meanwhile, it looks like Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shalan, one of those infamous ex-Baathists in government, is threatening to arrest Chalabi. The incomparable Kathleen Ridolfo of RFE/RL has details. (And I do mean incomparable—she's one of the best Iraq reporters out there.) Yikes. I still think this split between the Baathist-heavy "Iraqi List" and the religious Shi'ite "United Iraqi List"—of which Chalabi is a member—is going to be gruesome. Never mind the insurgency.

William F. Buckley is getting weird these days:

There is — let's demonstrate — a law against murder. But how do you deal with the man who fired the bullet at the cuckolder in mid-stroke, egged on to do so by his daughter, who is suffering from a fatal illness?

Um...

Good catch, however, from WFB: Yesterday Bush turned the world into one big Lake Woebegone when he said that every man and woman on earth has "matchless value".

I'm not sure if I have any readers who also happen to be extremely web-savvy and altruistic, but it's worth a shot. As you can see, the post below is very long. I'd like to add a little blog feature that lets me expand/collapse long individual posts -- sort of like what Wizbang or Matt Yglesias do. But I have no idea how to go about it in Blogger. This isn't really what I want -- it would make every post collapse. I think this Javascript concept might work -- but I don't have the faintest idea how to implement it.

Anyways, I'd be truly, eternally grateful for any advice. My email's over on the sidebar to the right. Thanks!

UPDATE: Many, many thanks to all who replied and sent me this link especially. It's a little cumbersome, but I like it.

Stygius has much, much more on the subject of how the Democrats should build their message, noting that "a top-down imposition of a 'This Is Us' would prove ultimately exclusive." The post goes on to talk about building a more inclusive party in the South—and not through nifty linguistic "code words" imposed from on high.

Anyways, I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with all this just yet, but it made me want to expand the point below about conservative fusionism, by looking at the evolution of southern conservatism a little more closely. What follows is a very incomplete history, partly based on old research, but most of it sketched out rather quickly. (In other words, only semi-scholarly.) I sort of wish I could tuck it below the fold because it's long-winded, not entirely focused, and certainly won't interest everyone, but what can you do. UPDATE: Ah, good tricks. Click link for full post.

Right, then. The story of southern conservatism traces back, predictably enough, to the Civil War. After the fighting ended, conservatives in the South, finding themselves in a land ravaged by battle and humiliated by Reconstruction, sought solace in the myth of the Lost Cause. The idea was simple enough: those rootless, industrial Yankees had sacked a noble civilization, whose people were genteel, loving and socially stable. One needs merely to leaf through the pages of The Confederate Veteran, a journal of the late 19th century dedicated to preserving the memory of the war:

In the eyes of Southern people all Confederate veterans are heroes. It is you who preserve the traditions and memories of the old-time South—the sunny South, with its beautiful lands and its happy people; the South of chivalrous men and gentle women; the South that will go down in history as the land of plenty and the home of heroes. This beautiful, plentiful, happy South engendered a spirit of chivalry and gallantry for which its men were noted far and near.

After the war, with all that grandeur in ruins, the only solution, really, was to go out and revive the glory of the Old South. Wealthy industrialists, plantation owners, and Confederate veterans all came together to form the political coalition known as the Redeemers, who argued that the best way to resurrect the region was to industrialize, to match the North factory for factory. The New South would preserve the best aspects of the Old South—maintain the etiquette, social hierarchies, and religious piety crucial to civilization—only in modern garb.

Through it all, many Southerners viewed their suffering as a religious trial, a cleansing by fire. After Reconstruction, the South became the most church-going part of the Union, and a number of those churchgoers believed that redemption was imminent, that they need only understand the tragedies of the past to understand God's plan for the future. To be very simplistic about it, this religious worldview set the South in stark contrast with the North. New Englanders such as Emerson and Thoreau put their faith in individualism while castigating the corrupting influence of society. For their part, Southern thinkers preached the corruption of man, and placed their faith in the moral correction of society.

Anyways, eventually the Dixie communal ideal clashed with the heady industrial ethos of the early 20th century. Southern conservatives became ardent critics of the capitalist machine transforming America. They found an eloquent voice here in a famous collection of essays, I'll Take My Stand, written in 1930 by the so-called Agrarians, whose ranks included luminaries such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.

The Agrarians championed small-farm owners, arguing that the ideal society needs to be rooted in the land. They idealized the plantation model and denigrated capitalism for alienating workers from the land and hence, from their sense of history and community. No one, of course, was suggesting that the market economy should be abolished entirely. The Agrarians simply condemned the fanatical devotion to individualism engendered by capitalism. That ceaseless push for self-improvement led to selfishness and irresponsibility, which in turn led to the breakdown of family, community and civic responsibility.

For this new generation of conservatives, the key to combating all that excessive egocentrism in modern society—without descending into socialist dogma—was religion. Oddly enough, I once found a passage by the theologian Karl Barth that pretty much sums up the Southern conception of the religious community:

Thus the Christian approach surpasses both individualism and collectivism. The church knows and recognizes the “interest” of the individual and of the whole, but it resists them both when they want to have the last word. It subordinates them to the being of the citizen, the being of the civil community before the law, over which neither the individuals, nor the “whole” are to hold sway, but which they are to seek after, to find and to serve—always with a view to limiting and preserving human life.

Moreover, Southern conservatives found the ideal of a Christian community at odds with radical egalitarianism. Social stratification—and this meant class more than race—was necessary to stave off the sort of frenzied mass movements that could topple nations.

Now the usual opinion is that the conservative mania for social order was founded on starkly racist attitudes. Indeed, no one can ignore the question of race in any history of southern conservatism. But even that picture isn't so simple. In practice, some of the most vicious proponents of racism were often the Southern Progressives, who worked to encourage economic development in the region while creating the sort of liberal institutions and regulations necessary to maintain a stable community. Progressive Democrats especially benefited from the disfranchisement of black voters, which allowed politicians to avoid dealing with race issues and instead concentrate on industrial progress and the development of the welfare state.

In practice, though, conservatives supported whatever sort of segregation and disfranchisement policies that maintained social order. Whether this support was due to racism or merely a genuine belief in social stability remains a topic for debate. But I think it remains true, even today, that conservative enthusiasm for a social hierarchy cannot be entirely and honestly divorced from the specter of racism.

The happy alliance between social conservatism, the Baptist church and Confederate recidivism lasted only until the Great Depression, at which point the agrarian critique of capitalism lost much of its appeal. Although plenty of conservative Democrats broke ranks with Roosevelt over the New Deal, the majority of Southerners welcomed the sort of government intrusion that brought with it welfare reform and wage hikes. Agrarian thinkers in their university chairs might have bemoaned the extinction of small farms and agricultural communities, but no one else really seemed to mind. In reality, the New South’s economy had never been wholly agrarian, and the widespread use of sharecroppers had always belied the quaint image of the small farmer working his fields with his bare Southern hands. Agrarian conservatism could only be the ideology of a few wistful intellectuals, and never a mass movement.

It was at this point that the Southern Right needed to evolve in order to survive. Hence, conservatives began to align themselves more closely with the free market conservatism espoused by William F. Buckley, Jr. and the writers of the National Review, which rose to prominence in the 1950s. From an organizational standpoint, the National Review was sheer genius, uniting free market libertarians with cultural traditionalists and anticommunist crusaders. Southern Agrarian intellectuals like Donald Davidson were willing to soften their critique of capitalism in order to join Buckley’s tirade against the dissolute morality of modern society.

The publication of Russell Kirk’s wildly popular The Conservative Mind in 1953 helped formalize the Right's transition from anti-capitalists to full-blooded defenders of the traditional social order. Kirk declared himself an enemy of populism and radical change, arguing that drastic liberal reform from on high was dangerous and ill-suited to the concrete needs of everyday people. Most crucially, Kirk managed to help steer southern conservatives away from their natural anti-capitalist tendencies and got them to focus on social stability instead. The Southern right quickly fell into line.

Not that the alliance was easy. Buckley may have found no contradiction between the unrestrained market and social orthodoxy, but Southern conservatives have not always been able to reconcile the two concepts. The "Lost Cause" rallying cry has been slow to fade, and Southern intellectuals have often seen the doctrine of free-market conservatism as a direct attack against Southern culture. In the 1990s, many Southerners threw their support behind paleoconservatives like M.E. Bradford and Pat Buchanan, advocates of isolationism, small business and regional culture.

But in the years since, paleoconservatism has faded as a viable political movement, and with it, the Confederate nationalist strain of Southern conservatism has begun to atrophy. To be sure, the memory of the Civil War and the glorious Old South still lives on—one needs only glance at the flood of Confederacy reenactments and right-wing Southern "history" journals to see this. In 1994, the League of the South was formed as "an activist organization of unreconstructed Southerners pursuing cultural, social, economic and political independence for Dixie."

These are not fringe groups, and conservatives are still motivated by the "Southern ideal". But the phenomenon is dying out, however slowly. In the past decade, massive migration to the South has brought an influx of people who have little interest in Southern culture per se. Conservative strongholds like Georgia and Florida have lately showed an increase in moderate Republicans who care little for principled tax cuts and states' rights, and the number of registered Democrats has increased dramatically in the South over the past few years. The Confederacy is waning, little by little.

It is no surprise, then, that religion has supplanted nationalism as the driving force behind Southern conservatism. The rise of Protestant Fundamentalism in the 1970s induced many Southerners to abandon their historical roots. Whereas the traditional Baptist church arose out of the ashes of the Civil War and served largely to preserve that culture, the now more-prominent Fundamentalist churches preach transcendental truths independent of time and place. As Sam Hill, "the dean of Southern religion historians", has argued, the rise of Fundamentalism is steadily eroding the mythic foundations of traditional Southern culture.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for long enough—This weekend I'll try to write up a second part: "Where is Southern Conservatism Today?" And I haven't really dived into the gritty details of how the GOP, along with conservative intellectuals, managed to unite the various strands of southern conservatism. That too is an interesting story for another time. Here's a good partial examination, by Ramesh Ponnuru.

Continue reading "Southern Conservatism And Fusionism"

Deep in the bowels of this Mark Schmitt post on George Lakoff, I noticed a few comments worth quoting. First from praktike:

What Democrats need to recognize is that there isn't any "one message to rule them all"--the market for politics is extraordinarily fragmented, and the key to winning is to identify different messages and approaches that resonate with different audiences in such a way that the numbers add up in you favor.

Next from Billmon:

Praktike is quite right, and that's one of the reasons why when the Republicans want strategic communication tips, they don't read books by linguists -- they go to the advertising whores and the PR hacks, who have lots of experience slicing and dicing target markets.

That seems exactly right to me. And it's part of the reason why I'd rather have some "black ops" dude in the DNC Chair, rather than a "public face of the party" like Howard Dean or Martin Frost. I'm just not convinced that the Democrats even need a unified message, or a public face. Part of the question here is strategic. Do you start with some grand overarching narrative and then tailor that message to individual bits of the fragmented political market? Or do you build up a grand narrative out of various targeted appeals? It seems that long ago, the conservative movement did the latter—taking up some of the strong cultural themes lying around in white religious communities, gathering up various pro-market themes, and uniting it all under the aegis of anti-Communism. Granted, nowadays the GOP has one dude who says "freedom" three times a minute and everyone sort of knows that that's the vision, but it didn't start out that way.

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty

Um, who? No really, who? This girl, for one, looks pretty fucking distraught, but I don't think it's "liberty's global appeal" that she's questioning right now.

In the New York Times today, Susan Jacoby has more on evolution:

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the campaign against evolution has been avoidance of the subject by teachers, who, whatever their convictions, want to forestall trouble with fundamentalist parents. Recent surveys of high school biology teachers have found that avoidance of evolution is common among instructors throughout the nation.

Dear reader, let's think pragmatically for a second, evolutionist to evolutionist. If banning "intelligent design" means that no evolution gets taught at all, maybe it's time to reconsider putting them side by side in school. The next essential step, of course, would be for scientists to launch a very forceful and very public campaign against ID. Biology teachers can let their students know all about the arguments in this debate. They can point out the curious fact that all major scientists think ID is a crock of shit, and the theory's only prominent supporters are a few fringe theologists, fradulent mathematicians, and right-wing radio hosts. I say let's ridicule these fools to death. More later...

Greg Djerejian thinks thinks that the U.S. ought to explain a few things to the new Iraqi government:

Bush … must increasingly pound in the message that: a) Iraq is already sovereign, is embarking on historical elections, and that a national assembly and consitution will take shape thereafter, b) U.S. forces remain in theater solely to help bring about the successful conclusion of this hugely difficult political process..., c) that no permanent American bases will remain in Iraq, d) Iraq will have its own independent foreign policy (even an anti-Israeli, pro-Iranian one, if that's how things pan out, though I don't think they necessarily will).

Right. The problem is that it's awfully hard to pound on that message when stuff like this is going on:

A prominent Iraqi politician, who is running for the National Assembly as a member of the religious Shiite coalition, told me that the Americans had quietly let the leading candidates know that there were three conditions that they expected the next Iraqi government to meet. "One, it should not be under the influence of Iran," he said. "Two, it should not ask for the withdrawal of American troops. And, three, it should not install an Islamic state."

Really, where do all these crazy Arab conspiracies come from?

Maybe I'm being naïve about evolution. A few days ago, I sort of backhandedly suggested that if schools taught "intelligent design" and evolution side by side, any idiot would quickly see that the logical leap from the first to the second is not very strenuous. The thinking is that, by conceding on speciation, ID pretty much gives the whole game away. So, it seems, reality-based folks would be better off letting the two be taught side by side, expose ID as a hoax and a fraud, and be done with it—rather than keep ID enshrouded in mystery and hence keep the controversy going. The current strategy seems too much like banning The Catcher in the Rye—a dull, worthless book that stayed alive thanks only to censorship.

Anyways, in a very related vein, today I see that teachers in Pennsylvania are trying to storm the beaches and attack evolution:

The school board in Dover, Pa., south of Harrisburg, had an administrator read a one-minute statement to ninth graders in biology class yesterday saying evolution is not fact and offering a different approach called "intelligent design."

But doesn't it seem like evolution will only benefit from this sort of mystery around it? Here's something that all real scientists believe—something you have to believe if you want to do any sort of meaningful work in biology—and yet Ms. Thelma of the frickin' 9th grade is trying to wave her hands frantically and convince everyone that no, no, there's nothing to see here. Let's look at this other, magical theory. Nice theory! Lovely theory! Hehe...

Like I said, maybe I'm being naïve, but this seems like a surefire way to convince students that "intelligent design" is lame and stupid.

Imagine, for a second, that I'm a father. Call me Vlad. And imagine that I have a daughter Nell—an adorable brown-eyed cherub, my pride and joy, that sort of thing. Okay, now imagine that I'm a software engineer, and thanks to outsourcing, I'm scraping by on $30,000 a year. Meanwhile, little Nell's dream is to go to a top-notch Ivy League college, and since I can't afford it at my paltry salary, at the age of 8 Nell decided to start working as a seamstress in the local sweatshop (hey, the NLRB ruled it was okay!), bloodying her fingers to make Nike shoes at a wage of $3,000 a year. Every payday she gives me the check, which I'm supposed to deposit for her in an account that we like to call... the College Fund.

Now when Nell is about 8, I decide that I don't really want to work as hard as I've been doing. But it's hard to cut back on work and afford my present lifestyle, since expenses come to exactly $30,000 a year. What to do? Oh hey! I can just take little Nell's $3,000 a year, use it to cover my current expenses, and then promise to pay her back (plus interest) when graduation rolls around. Voila! I can now effectively scale back my work hours by 10 percent and maintain my standard of living. It's a brilliant plan!

Okay, flash-forward ten years. Nell just got accepted into Harvard, to become a poet (being a girl she has no aptitude for math or science, naturally), and she needs her College Fund to pay for the tuition. "Ah, Nell?" I say. "We need to talk. The College Fund doesn't really exist. Heh."

"Um, WTF?" says Nell. "I gave you the money and you promised to pay it back. What are you going to do, default?" She reaches for the phone to dial 911.

"No, no. No default! Hehe. No!" say I, fidgeting a bit. "What I mean is that the College Fund has no, um, economic significance. Yeah! Look, the money's not there in the bank. That's a fact. So either I suddenly have to start working much, much more in order to pay for Harvard, or else you're going have to readjust your expectations and find a school that you can afford on your current salary."

"Um."

"But it's okay! Look, Nell, this is precisely what would have happened if there was no College Fund at all. It's the exact same situation! Now let's look at these brochures for SFSU..."

Okay, corny dialogue aside, look. If I had really told Nell not to apply to Harvard and instead apply to the cheap community college down the street—all because I didn't want to work more—I would be condemned from every corner. Not just condemned; skinned alive. After all, I siphoned off Nell's money for ten years all so I didn't have to work as hard, so by rights I should now start working my ass off to pay for the Harvard education Nell was promised. Morally, that should be clear to anyone.

And yet Tom Maguire (who is usually top-notch on this subject) apparently thinks that the "deadbeat dad" logic has some allure! Consider what he says about the Social Security Trust Fund—namely, that it has no "economic significance":

Imagine that we come to 2018, and Social Security payroll tax receipts are less than legally mandated benefits. Because we have a trust fund, what happens? The Soc Sec Administration collects interest from the Treasury on its "assets", turns around, and says, we need the cash to cover the benefit checks we are writing. The Treasury then makes a payment to the Soc Sec Administration from the general fund. To cover this, the Treasury must, working with Congress, either (a) run a surplus in other funding; (b) increase outstanding debt, (c) reduce other spending, or (d) raise new taxes.

Now, imagine that we did not have a trust fund. Congress has still mandated a certain level of benefits for 2018, and the payroll tax will not be sufficient to cover them (under current projections). Consequently, the Soc Sec Administration will go to the Treasury to cover the shortfall. And to cover the shortfall, the Treasury, working with Congress, will either (a) run a surplus in other funding; (b) increase outstanding debt, (c) reduce other spending, or (d) raise new taxes.

Notice anything, ahem, familiar? Nell, get the phone...

Here's the deal: Over the past 20 or so years, Social Security has run a surplus, receiving more in payroll taxes—largely from low- and middle-income Americans—than it's paid out in benefits. In fact, this was all explicitly arranged by the Reagan administration. Now the program has taken that surplus and invested it in U.S. Treasury Bonds. The federal government has then taken the money and used it for a variety of spending—whether it be Bush's enormous tax cuts, or paying down the deficit, or fighting wars in far-off countries, or what have you. It doesn't really matter.

The point is that the government has used payroll taxes all these years to keep income taxes lower than they otherwise would have been. That's the crux. Had the Social Security surplus been invested in something else—private equities, for instance—then the federal government wouldn't have been able to get its grubby fingers on all that money, and we would've either had to raise income taxes or lower spending all that time.

So the only proper and moral thing to do is to raise income taxes in order to pay back the Trust Fund, preferably starting now. Slashing benefits in 2018 because we "don't really have a Trust Fund" would be like telling little Nell that she had to go to SFSU even though she saved up all that money all those years. It would be a massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income earners to high-income earners (who primarily benefited all this while from having income taxes lower than they otherwise should have been). According to Dean Baker, a default would mean that "more than $1 trillion (in 2001 dollars) would be transferred from the bottom four quintiles to the households in the top 5 percent of the income distribution." Heist of the century.

But seirously. The only "problem" we'll be forced to face in 2018, if we continue on our present course, is the fact that Bush passed a series of tax cuts in 2001-04 that the government couldn't afford. But that's not our retirees' problem, just like my enthusiasm for long walks on the beach isn't little Nell's problem—it's mine.

Anyways, I'm done now, except for two other points. One, according to CBPP, the Social Security shortfall will be less than 10 percent of the general budget deficit in 2018. So again, whatever "crisis" may come that year has very little to do with SS. The second point here is that Bush's privatization plan—at least if it follows the CSSS Model 2 plan—will only exacerbate our Trust Fund problems even further. So if you truly think 2018 is going to be a crisis, privatization will only make the problem worse.

Update: Edited a wee bit.

While talking about the "philosophy" behind Social Security, Chris Sullentrop channels the National Review's views on the topic:

National Review, in its response to [Michael] Kinsley's (in their words) "ingenious argument against reform," suggested that personal accounts would "increase incentives to work" and "induce people to save more."

Let's think about this for a second, because I think there's a non-trivial point lurking in the background here. Under the current system, Social Security really does reward work—the higher your average salary throughout life, the higher your benefits. Personally, I think that's a feature worth preserving, and an argument against making the system more progressive by slashing benefits for high-income earners.

But notice there's a twist to all this. Social Security calculates your benefits by looking at the highest average earnings over the highest 35 years of your life. It can be any 35 years. If you start working right out of high school, fine, benefits will depend on three decades that you earned the most. By contrast, if you wait a few years to further your education with college and postgraduate work (in the hopes of a higher salary down the road), then again, fine, benefits will be calculated over those later 35 years in life. If you want to take time off to raise a child, again, fine. Ditto for spending two years doing Teach for America, or Peace Corps, or whatever. You can make it up later on in life.

Private accounts, by contrast, favor only one possible sequence. Everyone will need to start working as soon as possible, in order to get your investment compounding in your account over the course of a full lifetime. If you go off to school for eight years and only then start working, you better hope that your new starting salary is enough to make up for those lost years when you had nothing invested in the stock market. If you take a few years off to do parenting, your retirement fund could take a huge hit. Ditto if you want to try to switch careers. You're in a race against the math of compound interest, and there's little room for error. Social Security, by contrast, leaves all sorts of room for error, and development, and pursuing other life choices. So long as you're earning a decent salary for any 35 years of your life, you'll have enough to retire on comfortably. The effects here won't necessarily be dire, but I don't think they can be completely dismissed, either.

In the annals of obscure news that shouldn't surprise anyone, the Washington Post discovers that subprime lenders discriminate against minorities, slipping their victims painful penalties, fees, and other assorted non-niceties. (Subprime loans are offered at higher interest rates to borrowers with high credit risk.) Odds are they also discriminate against the elderly and the poor, maybe even the sick little children.

But we knew all that. The question is: What Is To Be Done? Well, Congress could try to hunt down and destroy all instances of predatory lending. Slap down a law making balloon mortgages illegal. Not enough? How about half-balloon mortgages. Not enough? And then… and then… The downside is that financial companies are very smart, and can always come up with new ways to prey on their unsuspecting victims. Nothing sparks creativity like coming up with ways to screw black people over. An alternative would simply be to bring back the old usury laws and start regulating interest rates again. Obviously this means that a lot of people with risky credit or low-incomes will no longer be able to get loans quite so easily. But with debt skyrocketing and bankruptcies climbing with no end in sight, is that a bad thing? I don't know. Certainly it would stop the "great" credit card offers that get shoved through my mail-slot every day, but that's probably not the way to do public policy.

Whoa. Trawling through the transcript of Condoleeza Rice's confirmation hearings, I came across this little tidbit from Joe Biden, who's spent some time over in Iraq:

I've gone to the training facility for police in Jordan. With the American head trainer, I said without anybody there and I believe my friend and person who has an ideological bent considerably different than mine, my friend from South Carolina was there. I said, There's no one in the room. Please cut all the malarkey. Is this training program worth a darn? And the answer was no -- from our own trainer.

I asked the head of the Jordanian police force who was there and the Canadian Royal Mounted Policeman who was there as the triumvirate running the operation. I've been back and spoke with a General Petraeus on two occasions. He is a first-rate soldier. He has indicated he's just basically beginning. How many -- and this is my last question. How many security forces do you think are trained that can shot straight, kill and stand their ground? ...

RICE: Senator, I have to rely on what I get from the field. And by the way, I think that the trips that you've made and the trips that the others have made have given us information that we can go back with. And I appreciate your doing that. We think the number right now is somewhere over 120,000. ...

BIDEN: ... I think you'll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces.

Now obviously 120,000 is wildly off. But 4,000? That's all?

Courtesy of the Iraqi Press Monitor, here's a curious charge from Al-Adala, a daily issued by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq:

Vice president Ibrahim al-Jafari has accused the list of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of using government organisations for his electoral campaign. Jafari, a prominent figure on the Unified Iraq List, has criticised the some elements of the Iraqi army for preventing people from raising placards and signs of the UIL, and for using police cars to distribute pictures of Allawi. Jafari condemned the statements of some official who accused candidates of the UIL as agents of a neighbouring state.

Excellent! Allawi continues to learn well from his mentor. More seriously, though, I'm still very worried about all this tension between Allawi's list and the main Shi'ite list. (And not just because they have oddly similar names -- Allawi's "Iraqi List" vs. Sistani's "United Iraqi List" -- a muddle that would surely confound American voters.) Look at how the pre-election stage has been set. Allawi has declared martial law up through and past January 30. A good chunk of Allawi's support will come from absentee ballots, many of which will be counted in Jordan—which is notoriously pro-Allawi and wary of the religious Shiites (and has serious beef with Ahmed Chalabi, who is on the United Iraqi List). Meanwhile, other absentee ballots will be counted in Iran, which is notoriously pro-religious Shiite and wary of Allawi. From a god's-eye view, yes, it's possible this will all go off smoothly and there will be no fraud at all. But no one has a god's-eye view, and if either Allawi or Sistani or anyone else doesn't like the election results, there's ample room for conspiracy-mongering. That the conspiracy-mongering has already started doesn’t make me feel any better about this.

Much more interesting than Seymour Hersh's big "scoop" in this week's New Yorker, I think, is Jon Lee Anderson's long profile of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. It starts off sympathetically, and rightly so. Say what you want about the man—maybe he's a bit of a puppet, maybe his crackdowns on renegade Shi'ite groups are ill-advised, maybe he's too brutal at times—but Allawi sure is trying to hold Iraq together:

Allawi told me that he had met with former members of Saddam’s Baath Party. (Allawi began his own career as a Baathist in the nineteen-fifties, when he was young, long before Saddam’s rise to power, at a time when Baathism represented anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism.) "I ask these former Baathists, what is it you want to achieve—to bring Saddam back, to get the multinational forces out of Iraq? If it’s to bring Saddam back to power, forget it—khalas—he’s finished. He ended like a rat, hiding in a hole in the ground. This is not respectable. Or if you want to bring bin Laden or someone like him to Iraq, we'll fight you room to room. We won’t accept this, ever. If you want to get the multinational forces out, then join the elections. Use your vote to get them out."

I pointed out that such arguments had not attracted much support. "No," Allawi said. "The trend is not good."

No, it's not, and drawing the Sunnis in is going to be difficult—perhaps impossible so long as they believe that the insurgency can win militarily. On the other hand, Iraq's Finance Minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, thinks that Allawi actually isn't the best person to unite Iraq's various factions:

Mahdi said that Allawi’s main weakness was his inability to broker alliances. For the elections, he said, Allawi should have forged "a national ticket" that would have united their two coalitions [i.e. the secular Shiite list and the Sistani-"backed" religious Shiite list]. Allawi, Mahdi suggested, was a man more accustomed to conspiracy than to political horse-trading. Instead of building coalitions, Mahdi said with disapproval, Allawi had focused on helping former Baathists.

I've written here and there about Allawi's old Baathist ties before, and it's still an open question as to whether there's really a power struggle going on between the ex-Baathist elements of the interim government (Allawi, Defense Minister Hazem Shalan, intelligence chief Muhammad Shahwani) and some of the more radical Shi'ite movements floating around (Badr Corps, Hizbullah Movement Iraq, etc.) This struggle is poorly understood and not very well reported, though signs have cropped up here and there. All in all, though, it's not a good sign that Mahdi—an ex-Baathist and now a member of SCIRI, the Shi'ite fundamentalist party—thinks Allawi has beef with some of the more radical Shiite groups. Allawi, for his part, seems to acquit himself well here, but who knows.

Anyways, that's all sort of trivia. Now this bit of Anderson's story is pretty important:

A prominent Iraqi politician, who is running for the National Assembly as a member of the religious Shiite coalition, told me that the Americans had quietly let the leading candidates know that there were three conditions that they expected the next Iraqi government to meet. "One, it should not be under the influence of Iran," he said. "Two, it should not ask for the withdrawal of American troops. And, three, it should not install an Islamic state."

What? I don't see how the U.S. could possibly set those conditions—though they might try a few maneuvers to keep Allawi at the helm of the elected National Assembly. And who's to say that's such a bad thing? At least from Anderson's reporting, Allawi seems to know more than a little bit about chatting up those Sunni sheikhs and religious leaders who are actually willing to negotiate, so maybe he wouldn't be a terrible choice after all.

Praktike notices that some Kurds are grumbling about the upcoming elections in Iraq. But there's a twist—they're grumbling about their own soon-to-be representatives.

Indeed, we tend to assume that all is well up north with the Kurds, but this is hardly so. The region has been autonomous since the early 1990s, true, but they've never had much in the way of democracy. (The "elected" Kurdish parliament last met in 1995.) Meanwhile, the two main Kurdish parties—the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)—are largely corrupt patronages, who have spent much of their time fighting among themselves, starting a civil war in '96, uprooting their opponents, and allying themselves with either Saddam Hussein (KDP) or Iran and Syria (PUK) in the interests of grabbing power. If I was a Kurd, I'd sure be depressed that these folks are going to be the new government.

With scores of reporters and TV cameramen recording what happened, the firemen turned on their hoses, which exploded with a noise like machine-gun fire and sent columns of water crashing into children and adults alike, knocking them down, ripping their clothes, smashing them against the sides of buildings, sweeping them back into the street, driving them crying and bloodied into the park. When Negro bystanders hurled bricks and bottles in retaliation, Connor unleashed the dogs. They charged into the Negroes’ ranks with fangs bared, lunging wildly at running children and biting three severely. In a cacophony of snarling dogs and screaming people, the march column disintegrated and children and adults all fled back to the church.

--Stephen Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound

A shrill cry of terror, unlike any that had passed through a TV set, rose up as the troopers lumbered forward, stumbling sometimes on the fallen bodies... Periodically the top of a helmeted head emerged from the cloud, followed by a club on the upswing. The club and the head would disappear into the cloud of gas and another club would bob up and down.

Unhuman. No other word can describe the motions... My wife, sobbing, turned and walked away, sing, "I can't look any more..."

--Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement

Others today have been linking to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words and papers, which are indeed well worth reading. And over at DailyKos, Armando's lament that "we have no Martin Luther King for our time" is elegant and well-taken. It's true that without King, the vastly disparate outcries against racial injustice might never have found such an intense focal point in the 1950s and 60s. For that alone, he is remembered. In hindsight, many of the vast achievements of the Civil Rights movement seem precarious and fragile and entirely contingent on historical events and people. What if JFK hadn't been shot? What if Sen. Richard Russell had never changed his mind about filibustering the Civil Rights Act? What if King had been murdered a decade earlier? etc. etc. etc.

But in another sense, the civil rights movement really was inevitable, and for that we have to thank the unnamed hundreds of thousands described above, who simply marched, who stood up for what they believe, who were dashed against the sides of buildings "crying and bloodied", and who did it all without any realistic expectation that it could make a difference. They could only trust, as Martin Luther King told the marchers in Montgomery, that "truth crushed to the earth will rise again." It's still completely and utterly awe-inspiring.

Ayelet Waldman, Allison Kaplan Sommer, and Mary Garth all have excellent posts on David Brooks' Times op-ed on women, work, and children. (And three blogs I really ought to read more!) One good point running throughout is that men should also have greater flexibility in being able to sequence their lives. That sounds about right. For various reasons, it's still very much expected that men will enter the workforce immediately and never leave. And while it's all well and good to say that men should spend more time child-rearing—and indeed, that's slowly starting to happen—but if you look at the latest BLS statistics, women still spend, on average, over twice as much time providing childcare as men do. Simply wishing that men will pick up the burden won't make it so; something substantial needs to change.

Later on, I'll try to respond to some of the comments to my "caretaker voucher" post below, but I see that I completely forgot to link to Anne Alstott's Boston Review article on the subject. (Which is sort of inexcusable, since I had a hand in working on it while I was at the magazine.) But here it is. She comes at it from a very different perspective, but the policy preference is the same.

Okay, perhaps I was too flippant yesterday about David Brooks' op-ed on women forgoing children for the sake of their careers. He's still a tool, but the topic itself is important. So I just leafed through Neil Gilbert's essay, "What Do Women Want?", on which Brooks' piece was based, and it deserves a bit more substantive of a reply.

Gilbert starts by dividing up women over 40 into three basic categories. Traditional women have lots of kids—3 or more—and have had little or no career outside the home (29 percent of all women). Modern women try to balance it out, with one or two kids, a paid job, maybe some time off here and there to raise the little ones (52 percent). Postmodern women skip the kids in the interest of a career (18 percent). Now Gilbert thinks postmodern and traditional women are destined to do what they do: ie. a woman knows from relatively early on whether she wants to devote herself to kids or a career. I don't think that's right at all—an accidental pregnancy can suddenly sideline a career, and financial trouble can suddenly send a woman into the workforce—but whatever. So Gilbert focuses mostly on the middle category, "modern" women, whose life-choices can vary depending on what incentives social policy offers vis-à-vis having kids and working.

Now Gilbert notes that for this middle group, public policy in the U.S. is generally oriented towards "helping mothers work while raising children." Hence subsidized day care, paid maternity leave, etc. (And obviously we're not as generous in this country as, say, Scandinavia is.) But some women, he notes, might prefer to go through motherhood first, and then work later. So, he suggests, we should start offering subsidies to full-time homemakers with children under X age.

That's not a terrible idea, but it still seems like vaguely creepy social engineering to me. Since the government doesn't set prices as efficiently as the free market, it's possible that this sort of thing would overcompensate, and induce more women to stay home than otherwise would. Maybe. In general, using tax subsidies or government spending to influence social behavior can be a good thing, but we only ought to do it when we there's a real market failure that can't be resolved in any other way.

In the case of women and children, I don't think that's true. The main problem seems to be that parenting is vastly under-priced by the labor market. So the proper thing to do is simply to put a price tag on it. Why don't we give every primary caregiver, say, a $5,000 voucher (per year, per child) that can be used either for child care, the parent's own education, or retirement. The idea here is Anne Alstott's, by the way. Under this plan, a mother would be free to choose whether she wants to live a "postmodern" lifestyle (in which case she uses the money for child care), an "inverse sequence" lifestyle (in which case she raises the kid and then uses the money to go back to school), or a "traditional" lifestyle (in which case she is compensated with retirement money for raising a kid.) And note that we could figure out some way to give the voucher to the father—if he was the primary caregiver. No one's ever been able to figure how to make men assume more of the burden of child-rearing. But with the proper financial incentives that could all change.



More fun: Via Andrew Samwick I see that Phillip Longman has suggested something along very different lines—we should encourage people to have children by declaring that child-rearing parents pay less in Social Security taxes. That seems noble enough, though I'm not sure the payroll tax cut would offset the costs of having a child. Someone else could do the math. The real problem, though, is that Longman's policy would certainly encourage more mothers to stay at home (and let's not kid ourselves, they would be mostly mothers), and it doesn't really offer women the freedom to choose their own career path, as a voucher for primary caregivers would.

Douglas McGray has a wonderful article in the New York Times about how the Denver teacher unions learned to embrace merit-based pay. What's important here is that the unions themselves designed the system, while campaigning hard for its acceptance among teachers. The story starts back in 1999. With education funds in Colorado low ,and the union tenure system under assault from all corners, Brad Jupp and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association decided to hash out a little compromise:

[T]he Denver union proposed a two-year experiment with performance pay (later extended to four years), beginning in 1999. Only schools where at least 85 percent of teachers supported the idea would participate -- and only 16 of 104 schools did. But the union decided to be more than a reluctant partner: it raised more than $1 million from foundations to finance the pilot project and hired a Boston-based consultancy to help plan it.

And here's what the unions themselves proposed as criteria for evaluation:

The team settled on a complicated hybrid of bonuses for achievements that teachers told them they endorse -- for getting board-certified, for earning higher degrees in subjects they teach and for reaching individual goals they set with their principals. There would also be bonuses if their students improved on standardized tests, if the district labeled their school ''distinguished,'' if administrators gave them a good evaluation and if they taught a subject or accepted a school assignment the district identified as a high priority.

Interesting. That's not to say everything has been perfect. A few problems: the jury's still out on whether students actually improved under the system, and the system may eventually need to resort to stricter standards on raises—at the moment about 85 percent of teachers meet all their objectives and get pay hikes. From what I understand, this has happened in Britain as well, where merit-based pay effectively became an across-the-board raise. That's not a bad thing, I don't think—the teachers are still working hard to earn a raise, and the more teachers that do this the better—though it obviously brings up funding issues. Most parents love merit-based pay, but it comes at a cost—an average $60 per household property tax increase now, and possibly more in the future.

Now this I didn't know:

Activists could eat McDonald's out of business, if they wanted. Allegedly, McDonald's Happy Meal is a loss leader. This means that, whenever one buys one of those cardboard boxes full of fries, a burger and a piece of plastic, the company loses money – the fast food firm banks on making a profit out of the adult accompanying the kid, who will hopefully buy a full price meal.

So if, around the world, large numbers of people went into McDonald's and each bought a Happy Meal on a daily basis for a long period, the company would start reporting massive losses. This is McDonald's automatic self-destruct mechanism, its fatal flaw. What is to be done, eh? Crusties of the world unite! Go to McDonald's! Buy six happy meals at once! Bring down capitalism while stuffing your face with fat!

Alternatively, everyone could just ask for no ice in their soft drinks (just say you have sensitive teeth) and watch the losses mount!

The National Review's favorite military historian notices that war-critics have all sorts of explanations as to why Iraq is so fucked up, and therefore concludes that none of them can possibly be the One True Storyline. A proud, proud day for postmodernism!

The great Slate debate between Malcolm Gladwell (of Blink fame) and James Surowiecki (of The Wisdom of Crowds fame) rocks, it really does, but here Gladwell protests much too much:

I was recently horrified to learn that selective colleges in this country (I grew up in Canada) sometimes require applicants to send in photographs of themselves. Can anyone give me any possible justification for that?

Now Gladwell wrote a whole book about rapid cognition, and the use and abuse of those instant perceptions that people form. And surely making a rapid judgment on a person, based on a single photograph, will lead to some wrong conclusions. At the same time, though, thousands of people throughout that person's life have made similar rapid judgments based on the face, and when summed up, all that rapid cognition often tends to be self-reinforcing—or self-fulfilling. It would not surprise me at all to find that attractive people, on average, tend to be more successful and sociable and creative and intelligent than unattractive people.

Ditto with CEOs. Gladwell laments the fact that CEO's tend to be taller than average, and blames it all on bias. But the bias starts early on—tall folks tend to be cooler in middle/high school, they don't tend to get beat up as much for knowing the answers in math class, they tend to have more confidence, etc. (Believe me: I'm 6'2" now, but in the early, formative years I was painfully, painfully short and saw the business end of a headlock more times than I can recall!) So looking at a persons face or height—or better yet, having a large admissions/hiring committee look at a person's face or height (wisdom of the crowds!)—will probably give you a decent take on how that person interacts with and is received by the world.

Of course, colleges never want success or intelligence along only the standard axes—so there too, in the aggregate, it's worth looking for people who aren't as attractive in the usual way. Odds are these students have lived their lives differently, had abnormal interactions, perhaps benefited by a bit of solitude. It seems horrible to say, but surely you can learn quite a bit here, no?

In other Iraq news, Nadezhda goes to town with a long post on the upcoming elections. Quite crucially—and pace Noah Feldman's analysis—she thinks that most of the Sunnis have "have no interest in a rebuilt Iraq or in ever seeing the slightest glimmer of democracy emerge."

Eh, I'm not so sure. A while back I tried to figure out the Sunnis—who they were, how they divided up, what they all wanted. And it's worth remembering, for starters, that while many of the Sunni tribes are uncontrollable and fighting against us—especially the dangerous Albuaisa and Jumaila tribes which comprise (comprised?) over a quarter of Fallujah—not all of the tribes are so intent on mortal combat. In the early days of the war, many of the Sunni tribes actually cooperated with the United States, at least until we offended them or killed to many of them or couldn't provide order. Now that was a major fuck-up—worse, I think, then the Ba'th party purges, and it was due wholly to the fact that we had no clue how Iraq worked. But my hunch is that any federal system with, ahem, the "right" sort of distribution of oil resources could entice these various tribes to go along with a Shi'ite-dominated government. Saddam paid them off. We could too. Again, it's hard to get a sense of the numbers—the tribal system has weakened considerably over the last quarter-century—but we're talking about a lot of Sunnis.

Meanwhile, as I said back then, and as Marc Sageman and many others have said, not all Sunni fundamentalists are alike. Iraq has both the mainstream Sunni religious institutions—including the mosques, charities, and religious schools—that are sort of wacko but not really into politics, as well as the political fundamentalists who are actually advocating a Taliban-style Islamic state. (And each of these groups overlap with various tribal identities—it's all horribly labyrinthine.) The former—and here I would include groups like the influential Association of Muslim Scholars—by and large aren't waging jihad, although they're opposed to the occupation, tacitly condone the violence, and probably aren't too keen on seeing a Shi'ite state without religious protection for minorities. But under the right circumstances I think they too can be sold on democracy—if it leads to American withdrawal, if it doesn't threaten the state of Islamic law and scholarship, etc. etc.

So it's not hopeless. But that still leaves the $200 billion dollar question: What is to be done? And that includes all sub-questions, like: Should we postpone elections? and Should we withdraw from Iraq? The first one is easy: no. It's inconceivable that we could get all the violence under control even if we postponed elections for a month or two months, and so long as Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wants elections, elections will take place. Postponing simply won't happen—we've handcuffed ourselves to the January 30th date, and lots of people are going to die, and it's a horrific fucking situation, but there's no other option. The other questions are more difficult...

I've got an interview up with Noah Feldman, former CPA advisor and author of What We Owe Iraq, talking about the upcoming Iraq elections, the ethics of nation-building, and other fun stuff. Oh yeah, and a bit on how Anarchy, State, and Utopia explains factionalism in Iraq. Really.

Laura Rozen thinks the CIA's recruiting criteria are all messed up:

Hearing a bit about the experience of a few friends with real expertise in particular foreign regions and the accompanying language skills, there really is a pattern of them being stalled at the tail end of the recruiting process for the reason that the US governments' security clearance dimwits felt it would be too hard to clear them because these candidates have had so much international experience and knew too many foreigners. In other words, they are more qualified and infinitely more useful to the US than the straight out of college and grad school mostly white Americans who never traveled much abroad that the CIA has seemingly been more comfortable recruiting.

One friend was asked by the guy running her security clearance process, "What is Latvia?" in response to one of the countries she had reported visiting in the past seven years. It wasn't that he'd misheard. It was that he apparently did not know that Latvia was a place. Another acquaintance, fluent in a useful Asian language, after being recruited by one such agency, was ultimately told it would just be too hard to do a clearance for someone who had studied and worked in said country for a couple years.

And ex-CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle asks a good question in her new book, "Why is a male operations officer not censured for having a personal relationship with an agent, and a female operations officer is fired for doing the same?"

In the New York Times today, Gina Bellafante discovers some gender moralizing extant in all the coverage of the Jen Anniston/Brad Pitt breakup saga. ("All Brad wanted to do was settle down, have some children, do some charity work, but ol' Jen was too focused on her career. Bitch.") Intriguing stuff.

Meanwhile, David Brooks notes that 14 percent of women over the age of 40 regret that they have no kids, and therefore should be encouraged to choose a less-prestigious career in order to have more kids. Creepy. (Brooks tries to tie all this in, subtly, to Social Security privatization, even though private accounts will only induce more women to abandon the hearth and enter the workplace -- since there will be a greater premium on working and saving early on in life.) Oh, here's more wisdom from Brooks: Did you know that women don't acquire "the maturity and character to make intelligent career choices" until their "mid-30s"?

Anyways, back to Jenn and Brad! I've never understood why all the celebrity gossip out there doesn't receive more feminist scrutiny. Or maybe it does and I haven't noticed. But at least in the cultural studies sphere I'm familiar with, academic feminists spend a lot of time unpacking the sexist/heterosexist/etc. order perpetuated by movies, TV, books, etc. And yet all these magazines that chronicle the private lives of celebrities seem far, far more influential. For example, Maureen Dowd wonders what ever happened to the days of "snap and crackle of romance between equals," as seen in the old Audrey Hepburn-Spencer Tracey films. But in this day and age, the ugly and stormy real life romance between Hepburn and Tracey would have garnered more attention, and acted as more of a cultural role model than the movies ever did. Hey, at least that's the impression I got when I came down the elevator last Wednesday and all the IT people from the office upstairs were chatting about the big breakup (for what it's worth, they all think George Clooney is going to move in on Anniston).

Alright, since all the cool kids are doing it, let's try to design a policy that shores up Social Security's long-term deficit.

Back before the election, while still a Mother Jones intern, I did a wonky little series examining at Bush's second-term agenda. The very first article tackled Social Security privatization, touching on all the current liberal talking points: Private accounts won't cure insolvency, the system's not in "crisis", and the general budget deficit is the real problem. I still believe all that, obviously, and still support the insurance aspect of Social Security. I like the fact that it rewards work (a higher lifetime income means a higher benefit check) while still providing a safety net. I like that it's not means-tested, which has helped it maintain support among the middle class. All told, it's a healthy and successful program.

Still, as we think about how to shore up the program's finances over the next 75 years, I'd start by recommending these four little tweaks.

1. Put all state and local employees into the system. At the moment, 3.7 million such employees pay no payroll taxes, even though many of them end up receiving Social Security benefits anyways—since they eventually leave government. So they should be paying into the system all along. This change should be uncontroversial, and closes about 11 percent of the 75-year deficit. (All estimates according to this SSA report.)

2. This one's bloody, but pretty effective, I think. Pass some sort of immigration amnesty (or "amnesty") bill to get illegal immigrants paying into the system. President Bush's immigration proposal is a good start, giving all illegal aliens "temporary worker" status. We can debate the details, but the point here is that about 8 million illegal immigrants working in America don't contribute much in the way of payroll taxes right now. Giving them temporary status would boost revenue at minimal cost. And since the U.S. has never signed a totalization agreement with Mexico, we wouldn't ever have to pay out benefits to those Mexican retirees who have worked here for a few years. (We can debate totalization later.)

Moreover, Bush's plan—unlike the SOLVE Act proposed by Rosa DeLauro and Ted Kennedy—also sets no limit on how many temporary workers can enter this country, so it would probably boost total immigration even further. That's good for Social Security.

3. Invest 40 percent of the Trust Fund in a broad index of equities. This suggestion was first pioneered by Robert Ball, I believe. The Social Security surplus is currently invested in no-risk Treasury securities, and the theory is that by investing some of that suprlus in stocks instead, you can earn a greater return (and the government can absorb the risk).

The objection here—that the government would then have control over Corporate America—seems entirely trivial. We could simply bar Social Security-held stocks from voting. The investments, meanwhile, could be controlled by an independent Investment Policy Board, just like the Federal Employees Thrift Plan does, under various well-defined standards. This is no different from what the Federal Reserve Board or the Tennessee Valley Authority do. Government entities are perfectly capable of investing their holdings in the stock market.

Now if there really is an overly-high equity premium (i.e. stocks really have better risk-adjusted returns than treasuries in the long run), then the program can cut its long-term deficit by anywhere from 42 to 55 percent. More importantly, doing this keeps Trust Fund revenue out of the hands of the federal government, which currently just spends the Social Security surplus. That should force Washington to decrease the deficit.

4. Index benefits to a "smarter" cost of living index. As soon as you retire, initial benefits are calculated. These benefits then rise every year with the CPI—the usual inflation index. But this measure overstates increases in the cost of living each year—"Adam O'Neill" estimates by as much as .5 percentage points. There's no reason not to fix this. Notice this would not affect the way initial benefits are calculated, though it means a person's benefits never rise in real terms. It's also a progressive change, favoring those who live shorter lives. This would cover 40 percent of the deficit.

So add all those up and we've just closed the 75-year deficit—and maybe done better depending on the effects of the immigration proposal and returns on the stock market. After that, I think we can wait and see how we're doing. If things still look bleak after a few years, then I think we can add in a modest set of benefit cuts or tax increases. For instance, right now the payroll tax is paid only on the first $87,000 of wages. That ceiling could be raised rather modestly. We could also change the wage indexing formula slightly (see Adam O'Neill's option #2 here), so that the system becomes a little more progressive, although this would amount to a modest benefit cut. Or we could increase from 35 years to 38 years the period over which average indexed wages are calculated, which forms the basis for computing benefits (this would also amount to a slight benefit cut.) See here for all the possible solutions and their effects on the shortfall.

Okay, now there are a few improvements and add-ons I'd like to see made to the system. These will add slightly to the cost, no doubt, but with the tweaks above I think we can get to balance pretty easily.

1. Near and dear to my heart, fix the disability guidelines. I've got a longish post on MoJo explaining some of the problems with the current SSDI program. Suffice to say, it could be more generous. There would certainly be benefits here—Elizabeth Warren has estimated that better disability coverage could help as many as 300,000 families avoid bankruptcy every year. And it's not overly costly.

2. A modest benefit enhancement for minimum-wage workers, so that those workers with at least 35 years of covered and steadily rising earnings would receive a benefit level equal to the poverty line or above. (Diamond-Orszag have something along these lines.)

3. Increase the benefits for elderly survivors. Widows too often suffer a drop in living standards of around a third when their husband kicks the bucket. This could be done progressively, and again, Diamond-Orszag suggest one way to do it. Low-income widows could be supplemented from the system's funds. For higher-income couples, the survivor's benefit would be financed by reducing the couple's combined benefit while both are alive.

And then, only then, do we start talking about private accounts. Brad DeLong has some good suggestions along these lines.

Nathan Newman thinks the courts should stay away from those textbook stickers "warning" students that evolution is only a theory and should be approached critically. He says a lot about the backlash that court decisions like these can cause, but we can leave that debate for another time, because this bit was far more interesting:

My view is that if students actually looked at so-called "intelligent design" theory side by side with evolution, they will overwhelmingly choose evolution as the more convincing explanation of the origin of life. Court censorship of creation-science actually feeds the idea that evolutionists have something to hide.

That seems right. "Intelligent Design," after all, always struck me as one big concession from the start. ID theorists admit that variation within species can occur, they just stopp short of saying that actual speciation is possible. Um, fair enough, except for the fact that speciation simply means variation and mutation to the point where the two variations can no longer reproduce. Simple as that! So the slippery slope from ID to mainstream evolution is very slippery indeed, and I don't think it would take long for students to see that. Especially if they have stickers telling them to "think critically".

I'll confess I don't get a lot of strong reactions to anything I write over at the Mother Jones blog. I figure this is either because a) I don't really throw a lot of "bombs" (that's the term, right?), b) it's a new blog and not many people read it, or c) the only way people would know how to email me is if they find this site. Oh well. But I was a bit surprised that a bunch of folks emailed in to chastise me (and not always gently!) for admitting that I like No Child Left Behind. (Though it did get a very kind Eduwonk nod of approval!)

Anyways, I'll explain.

The idea behind NCLB seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Schools must meet standards. There's a timetable for meeting those standards. There are sanctions and remedies if schools don't meet the standards. It's all written up in federal regulations, and carried out by local districts. Bing, bang, boom. There's nothing about private schools, no vouchers, no union-busting. Conceptually, what's not to love if you're a liberal?

Now I think the problems with NCLB are a bit misunderstood, and subject to a fair amount of Democratic demagoguery. We get a lot of talk about "unfunded mandates" and classrooms without supplies and unrealistic expectations. But the actual flaws with the thing basically boil down to two:

1. Standards are often too strict where they should be more flexible, and often too flexible where they should be more strict. For starters, there's a complete lack of coordination on standards among states. For some odd reason NCLB makes schools accountable to a series of standards without saying what those standards actually are. We have no idea what counts as "proficiency," there's no indication of what sorts of tests should be used. It's utterly bizarre. You could argue, for example, that standards are inappropriate because every school and neighborhood is different. Fine. But if you're going to have broadly accepted standards at all, they might as well be nationwide—it's not like kids in New York need different types of math from kids in Alabama. Meanwhile, schools shouldn't be allowed to fiddle with their own timelines, making it so that all the big achievement gains need to come years in the future.

Then there are places where more flexibility would help. Larger and more diverse schools are at greater risk of failing, simply because they have many more demographic subgroups. NCLB doesn't distinguish between a school with one failing subgroup and a school with 20 failing subgroups. Disadvantaged schools should probably be rewarded for making progress, rather than simply for meeting some absolute standard. "Value added" metrics are more appropriate for a law like NCLB, I think. And the law shouldn't punish good schools that take on a lot of weak students. Then there are various problems with how testing cycles are scheduled. But you get the idea. It's all highly tweakable stuff—nothing radical.

2. Too many of the remedy provisions are misguided. If a school fails for two years in a row, the district must allow that school's students some form of public school choice. But a districts with one failing school often has many failing schools, or all failing schools. The choice isn't always there. Wealthy suburban schools may not want your poor, tired, huddled classes. A failing school in North Dakota can't send its students anywhere.

Meanwhile, the incentives for improvement are all wrong. The theory behind NCLB's sanctions and punishments was that schools would feel the heat and start on the path to self-betterment. Not so. A school that starts losing students to its neighbors may welcome the change—and it may even see test scores rise through sheer numbers.

Again, though, this can be easily fixed. On the "lack of choice" problem, Andrew Rotherham has suggested simply increasing the supply of charter schools (though holding them to NCLB's standards). And Marc Tucker and Thomas Toch have suggested that NCLB contain provisions for "assistance teams" of experts to intervene and improve failing schools. In other words, more bureaucrats.

Now some of these things require more money, but not all of them do. What we really need is a calm, good-faith discussion about what sorts of tweaks the law needs, where schools are struggling, what resources states do and don't need, etc. At the moment, though, we have hysterical Democrats on the left, and dishonest Republicans on the right who capriciously slash funding, monkey with the regulations, and pull stunts like Armstrong Williams. Truly a pox on both houses. But notice: As soon as a Democrat who believes in NCLB comes to power, this can all end, and we've got a wonderfully workable, progressive law in the making.

Now it's true that George W. Bush may envision NCLB as a means to dismantling public schools by driving them all into failure by 2014. But Bush isn't going to be president forever. At some point Democrats will come back to power, hopefully before 2014, and then they can very easily use the law to improve public schools rather than consign them to oblivion. But in the meantime, there's not much point in undermining faith in the thing among teachers and parents. There's no real political gain, and there's a huge policy downside. Unless we plan on junking the whole thing.

Somehow I can see this game becoming quite popular: "Open up your entire music library, hit shuffle, and see what the first ten songs to come up are."

1. "The Rat" – The Walkmen
2. "How Near How Far" – …And You Will Know Them By The Trail of The Dead
3. "Cheap Linguistics" – Magneta Lane
4. "How Soon Is Now" – Tatu
5. "Kathy's Waltz" – Dave Brubeck Quartet
6. "Eon Blue Apocalypse" – Tool
7. "Rebirth of the Cool" – Afghan Whigs
8. "Your New Aesthetic" – Jimmy Eat World
9. "Dreamworld" –Hot Water Music
10. "I'd Rather Dance With You" – Kings of Convenience

Whatever. That Tatu cover of an old Smiths song is a little embarrassing but I like it. I've only very recently started downloading .mp3s so it's a bit biased towards newer music—on the old Dell desktop I had all the crap you download when you first enter college. But I don't really like Led Zeppelin so I was kind of relieved when I stopped having to pretend I did.

By the way... Not sure where Matt's coming from here, but the "Sound of Settling" is an awful Death Cab for Cutie tune. "Song for Kelly Huckaby" is and always has been a better top pick. But really, this dispute pales beside the all-important question of why Ben Gibbard's head is so goddamn massive.

Dan Baum's New Yorker story on how the military—especially its junior officers—have been adapting in Iraq is really quite good. Read it quick before the permalink disappears into the weird New Yorker old-issue ether. (Why oh why don't these folks have searchable archives?)

Phillip Longman has a brilliant new cover story for the Washington Monthly, about how the Veteran's Health Administration may be a great new model for what our health care system should be. I'm surprised Kevin Drum hasn't started touting it yet. Anyways, one part really interested me. After illustrating quite nicely how better technology and whatnot can improve hospital care immeasurably—reducing errors, improving detection rates—Longman tries to figure out why private health care providers don't resort to such a thing. The answer is large-scale market failure:

Suppose a private managed-care plan follows the VHA example and invests in a computer program to identify diabetics and keep track of whether they are getting appropriate follow-up care. The costs are all upfront, but the benefits may take 20 years to materialize. And by then, unlike in the VHA system, the patient will likely have moved on to some new health-care plan. As the chief financial officer of one health plan told Casalino: "Why should I spend our money to save money for our competitors?"

Or suppose an HMO decides to invest in improving the quality of its diabetic care anyway. Then not only will it risk seeing the return on that investment go to a competitor, but it will also face another danger as well. What happens if word gets out that this HMO is the best place to go if you have diabetes? Then more and more costly diabetic patients will enroll there, requiring more premium increases, while its competitors enjoy a comparatively large supply of low-cost, healthier patients. That's why, Casalino says, you never see a billboard with an HMO advertising how good it is at treating one disease or another. Instead, HMO advertisements generally show only healthy families.

For health-care providers outside the VHA system, improving quality rarely makes financial sense. Yes, a hospital may have a business case for purchasing the latest, most expensive imaging devices. The machines will help attract lots of highly-credentialed doctors to the hospital who will bring lots of patients with them. The machines will also induce lots of new demand for hospital services by picking up all sorts of so-called "pseudo-diseases." These are obscure, symptomless conditions, like tiny, slow-growing cancers, that patients would never have otherwise become aware of because they would have long since died of something else. If you're a fee-for-service health-care provider, investing in technology that leads to more treatment of pseudo-disease is a financial no-brainer.

And this brings us to markets—by which I mean the role of choice and competition in the health care system. Markets can certainly be good for some things in health care—like controlling costs. For instance, it doesn't get talked about much, but one of the reasons health care spending is fairly high in the United States boils down to wages. Health professionals must be recruited from the same talent pool used by other high-paying industries (law, finance). That drives up wages, and since health care is so labor-intensive, that drives up the cost somewhat. Now we could fix this by promoting true free trade and lowering quotas and professional licensing requirements that prevent many foreign doctors from coming to America. Voila! Real free trade would lower costs! More obviously, market competition really does force HMOs and insurance companies to drive down prices, though at a cost (they tend to avoid the sickest people in society.)

But that's just cost. Quality is a different story. The sad fact is that most health consumers don't care about quality—they care about cost and choice. During the 1990s and Cleveland, the city tried to publicize information about which hospitals performed best. But nothing happened. So, not surprisingly, private health care providers respond in the appropriate way—by catering to cost and choice rather than quality. It reminds me of something Robert Crandall, CEO of American Airlines, once said to people who complained that airline quality (food, size of seats, etc.) sucked. I'm copying a friend's old paraphrase:

You know what, the airline industry is the most responsive industry to customers demands. we get you the lowest fare we can. There is no customer loyalty. If you can find a ticket that’s $30 cheaper but you have to sit in a slightly smaller seat you'll buy it. We've done all the optimization studies and based on customer behavior we are offering you exactly what you demand.

Indeed, and health care provides are offering exactly what consumers demand. As are pharmaceutical companies—it's not they're fault that they cater entirely to fat, balding and impotent men. That's where the demand is. The problem, of course, is that not everything consumers want is good for them. And when it comes to health care, what consumers want certainly isn't good for our looming health-care fiscal crisis. Certainly there are small things you can do to tweak the incentives here and there, but it's not enough. Maybe we need to start looking more closely at the VHA model.

At any rate, read Longman's piece. I'll have more to say about it later, I think.

Okay then. Not all our military translators are stuck in some warehouse in Qatar. Some of them are simply being fired because they're gay:

[T]he available data now confirm that, in addition to those fired before September 11, the military has continued to discharge gay language specialists despite the ongoing shortage. In total, according to Pentagon data, there were at least 73 people discharged from [the Army's Defense Language Institute] for homosexuality between 1998 and 2003. At least 37 of these discharges took place after the September 11 attacks. ...

The purging of gay language specialists persists in the face of ongoing pleas by military and political leaders to increase the numbers of Arabic translators. A Pentagon advisory panel recently reported that the United States "is without a working channel of communications to the world of Muslims and Islam." A Justice Department inspector general's report released in September 2004 said the government "cannot translate all the foreign language counterterrorism and counterintelligence material it collects," due largely to inadequate translation capabilities in "languages primarily related to counterterrorism activities," such as Arabic and Farsi.

But, y'know, gay soldiers would, like, totally mess up unit cohesion and stuff.

Have to say, David Frum seems dead wrong about this. As I understand it, an incipient civil war is one in which a few civil-war-like activities are taking place (Kurds and Arabs skirmishing in Kirkuk and Mosul, say), but nothing major quite yet, and hardly inevitable. An imminent civil war is one in which full-blown fighting is only weeks or days away. The former is troublesome; the latter is a catastrophe.

The key to these definitions, I think, is that the prototypical "civil war" is a full-blown one, with lots of people dying and countrymen squaring off against each other en masse. That's what we generally mean when we say "civil war". So the adjective "incipient" explicitly modifies only the size and scope of this concept—namely, by reducing it. But the adjective does not imply that the civil war is likely to start anytime soon, because we don't really have a prototypical or commonly shared notion of how rapidly civil wars unfold.

"Imminent", meanwhile, specifies only the civil war's point in time, which leaves us to imagine a prototypical civil-war -- i.e., a big one -- about to start any day now. I don't think that's a perfect explanation -- cognitive linguistics isn't my strong suit -- but it seems to get at the difference.

The Spanish defy both their cultural past and their circadian rhythms to push for a normal, siesta-free workday. Personally, I wish we used the siesta cycle here in America—I'm damn near useless between about 11AM and 2 PM, and I don't think I'm the only one. That was even more true in college: The 8:45 classes were always a hurdle to get up for—and my freshmen year I rarely did—but once I was actually there, all was well. Meanwhile, I could always make it to the 11:15 classes on time, but after that it was one big blur. (It was there that I perfected this pose, with the hand shielding the eyes just a bit more.)

But while we're at it, why not sever our own agricultural roots here in America and force schools to start class at a normal hour? Especially for teenagers, who typically need to sleep in until nine or ten or whatever it is. Come to think of it, I have no idea why we don't do this. For young kids it might be hard for parents to arrange drop-offs, but surely high-school kids can wait for the bus on their own, no? And having dated a teacher until very recently, I can all but assure that unions would happily sign up. So what's the catch—that we won't be able to fit three-hour baseball practices in? Is that anything a few floodlights can't fix? Or eliminating the insanity of Daylight "savings"? Ah, now this plan's all coming together...

I missed this when it came out a few days back, but Daniel Gross summarized a new paper from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who found that simply expanding Medicaid is a more cost-effective way to cover the uninsured than some of the alternatives. Well, not all the uninsured. But 3 million of them, at least:

If the government simply gave free public health insurance to everybody whose income places them at or below the poverty level, it could add the 3 million insured. Of those who could take advantage of such a program, Gruber concluded, 87 percent would have been formerly uninsured. Taxpayers would spend $1.17 for each dollar value of insurance gained. (The results are summarized in Table 5 of the paper.)

Next, Gruber examined a proposal similar to that contained in President Bush's 2004 budget, which would offer individuals tax credits (a maximum of $3,000 per family) to buy insurance. In order to get 3 million new insured under this scheme, the program would have to be large. Only 37.4 percent of those who would respond to such a credit would have previously lacked insurance. Taxpayers would lose $3.24 in tax revenue for every dollar value of insurance gained.

An employee tax credit, which offers a credit to those uninsured who are offered health insurance at work, but don't buy it, would be even less effective. Only 5.7 percent of those who would take advantage of the offer would have lacked insurance before. Taxpayers would thus lose $5.82 in revenue for each dollar in insurance gained.

Finally, Gruber analyzed a proposal similar to one proposed by former Rep. Richard Gephardt in the 2004 campaign—give employers tax credits for providing insurance on top of the deduction. To add 3 million new insured individuals through this route, taxpayers would lose $2.36 in revenue for each dollar in insurance gained.

Interesting. Now Gruber's no fan of Medicaid. He and David Cutler published a Health Affairs paper (PDF) long, long ago showing that Medicaid expansion caused private coverage to decline by about 50 percent. I'm not sure if in this new paper he factors in companies dumping their low-income employees off their coverage and onto Medicaid. (On the other hand, this would happen with individual tax credits as well.) Then there's the question of whether Medicaid actually offers decent coverage. By many accounts it does not. But it's also better than no coverage at all. So there we go; an easy solution!

So this evening I stumbled across this depressing old ABC report about how the military badly needs more Arabic translators:

The shortage of Arabic translators in Iraq has made it harder for U.S. soldiers to protect themselves, jeopardized interrogations of suspected al-Qaida terrorists in U.S. custody in Cuba and left almost no one to defend American policy on Arab television stations.

Like I said, depressing. Offhand, I've heard stories of soldiers getting shot at or bombed after walking right past Arabic signs telling all the civilians to keep away. So where the hell are all our translators? Ah, here we go. Deep below the fold, in today's Washington Post front-pager about the now-defunct hunt for Iraq's WMDs:

Several hundred military translators and document experts will continue to sift through millions of pages of documents on paper and computer media sitting in a storeroom on a U.S. military base in Qatar.

Um, what? True, these folks aren't just wasting their time sniffing around for WMDs—instead they're dredging up stuff on war crimes, and possibly the fate of an old fighter pilot shot down a decade ago—but what the f? Intelligence on the Sunni insurgency is awful. Iraq is going to shit. People are dying. Do we honestly have several hundred military translators to spare in a storeroom in Qatar?

I don't have a lot to add to this whole DNC Chair debate, to be honest. It comes with falling on the wonky side of the pundit sphere—I love talking about the mechanics and pitfalls of, say, the Iraqi Constitution (about which I''ll hopefully have a long post soon), but not so good on figuring out What The Democrats Need To Do. All in all, Tom Schaller's case for Simon Rosenberg sounds very convincing, but these arguments can probably go back and forth all day.

So here's my trick. As a shorthand for having no political sense whatsoever, I'll fall back on asking what the Republicans would do. The GOP, after all, did well in 2004—despite basing their national campaign on a couple of disastrous and unpopular policies (Iraq, Medicare, the economy) they obviously had a good message and a great ground campaign. The RNC was dishonest, steady, evasive, ruthless—in short, stellar. So I would encourage everyone to read this old profile of RNC Chair Ed Gillespie, and at least ask whether Democrats need an Ed Gillespie of their own. Because he seems to know what he's doing.

From the profile, Gillespie seems like a serious backroom kind of guy—knows how to win minor tactical battles, do damage control on the talk shows, wheedle fund-raisers and lobbyists, flit in and out of Congress, get people the positions they want, get op-eds placed at the right time. But he doesn't strike me as a visionary, like Rosenberg, or a party icon, like Dean, or even a great manager. He's just a one-man Delta Force unit. So to tell you the truth, I don't know what Democrat fits this description, but whoever it is, he or she is the person I'll back.

What's that? Mahmoud Abbas' election may not lead to peace in the Middle East? Surprise:

Nonetheless, a full-blown, final-status peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians is "probably more remote today than it was five years ago," according to Dore Gold, an adviser to Sharon, and researcher David Keyes. They argued in a recent essay, "What If Bush Invited Sharon and Abu Mazen to Camp David," that Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, was stridently attached to such deal-breaking demands as "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel during peace talks convened by President Clinton at Camp David in 2000…

The key obstacle is each side's unwavering stance that the other must first make concessions, such as those laid out in the stalled, U.S.-led "road map" to peace, but neither side is willing to do so. Uninterrupted fighting since September 2000 has claimed nearly 5,000 lives and has only entrenched each side's resolve.

For the Israeli government, the first step must be an end to Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis, a demand echoed by the Bush administration. For the Palestinians, the first step must be an end to the Israeli military crackdown on Palestinians.

This wouldn't really count as newsworthy, except that lately it's struck me that Iraq may soon be facing a very similar deadlock. Spencer Ackerman keeps talking about a potential "grand bargain" between Shia and Sunnis, where the latter agrees to enter government in exchange for Shiite calls for U.S. withdrawal. But you have a serious prisoner's dilemma here (or whatever the relevant game theory term is): The Shia need assurances that the Sunnis really will lay down their arms; otherwise the new Iraqi government will be defenseless without U.S. protection. (And on the off-chance that they're not defenseless, it will be because the radicals in the Badr Brigades are off building up their militias and running death squads.) Neither side may want to blink first.

Furthermore, the Association of Muslim Scholars and other major Sunni groups may not even have the authority to call off the insurgency. AMS doesn't speak for the Baathist dead-enders, or the more radical Islamist groups like Zarqawi's Al Qaeda for Holy War or Ansar al-Sunnah. Maybe a deal is doable, but no one wants to take the first step only to get screwed.

Oh well. And no predictions/stellar analysis of Israel-Palestine here. Obviously we won't know much until we see how the local elections in the West Bank and Gaza unfold (esp. in non-Fatah-dominated areas), along with Palestinian Legislative Council elections in May. Other than that, all questions. If Hamas makes a strong showing in the PLC, does that mean the body becomes even more hard-line, or does that turn Hamas into a more moderate political body? Hell if I know.

In the New Republic today, Jeremy Buchman argues that, if conservatives appoint a bunch of judicial activists who dismantle the New Deal system, they'll suffer the same backlash that the left did with Roe v. Wade. Seems doubtful. Abortion (at least first-trimester) abortion is an all-or-nothing thing: either you legalize it or you don't. The backlash is immediate and fierce. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to roll back New Deal legislation, bit by bit, over a longer period of time.

More generally, there's a bit of an asymmetry here. Most of the stuff that liberals want to institute or legalize needs to happen all at once—legalized abortion, gay marriage, universal health care, the Kyoto protocols—so it's easy for the right to get people worked up over it. Meanwhile, the right can bleed unions to death, or pick off environmental regulations, or slowly let the minimum wage get sunk by inflation, without crossing the public's outrage threshold.

Whoa. The Nation really has its very own UN Correspondent? Fascinating. And a pretty good article too! Reminds me that I want to do a follow-up to find out how reliant we still are on the Chalabi-connected Oil Ministry documents for our Oil-for-Food evidence. I'll admit I don't always keep up Claudia Rosett's "Pulitzer-worthy" scoops in Opinion Journal...

My favorite part** of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's Iraqi Press Monitor is its summary of Iraqi political cartoons. Here's today's:

CARTOON: (al-Mada) – On their wedding night, the bridegroom looks at his watch and tells his bride, "Let us do it as quickly as possible before the power goes off." This is in reference to the continuous blackout of electricity in Iraq.

IWPR killed the punchline, but that's pretty good. Now the relevant question is whether or not continuous blackouts would lead to more sex or less. (And yes, this is all in very bad taste.)

Actually, here's (sort of) a more serious question, which is unfortunately also in poor taste at a time when they're gearing up the death squads in Iraq. (I've got a more serious death squad discussion here.) But oh, here goes. It's well known that the French aren't funny. A widely known secret. They can do farce, slapstick, overblown satire, punning and wit. Add to that buffoonery, drollery and lunacy, and you can pretty much sum things up from Moliere to Plantu. But where is funny? Nowhere, alas.

Now when The Economist asked this question a long time ago, they blamed France's Cartesian mindset, which can't process even middling jokes like these: "The governor of the Bank of England began an address to an assembly of bankers with these words: 'There are three kinds of economists, those who can count and those who can't.'" Un hm. Cartesian mindset. Now that sort of theory is way too general to possibly be true, but let's be offensive and pretend it is true.

Now from reading the descriptions of Arabic cartoons in IWPR over the past year, it seems that Iraqis have the exact same problem. There is drollery, satire, and wit. And it's all very logical and goofy, but nothing quite like what the English consider truly "funny." Then again, I don't know—I'm just reading translations of cartoons from a country where life sucks ass almost every single day. But if I have any readers out there who know Arabic, is this suspicion true? Do Iraqis have a very French-like sense of humor? Inquiring minds want to know.



**That is, my favorite part besides reading Asharq Alsawat's constant "smoking guns" against al-Jazeerah. And the idea that anyone would take the "independent" newspaper al-Sabah seriously.

Mark Schmitt thinks that Bush actually has two goals in the great Social Security phase-out scheme. First, of course, is to raze the program to the ground. The second, though, is to paint the Democrats as hidebound defenders of the status quo, and the Republicans as the party of bright and shining reform. So as something of a tactical prescription, he recommends that Democrats don't get too knee-jerk on the opposition front, or at least try to worry about winning that second battle.

Fair enough, though it doesn't seem like that big a problem for Democrats to defend Social Security. It's a hugely popular program, especially once people realize there's no crisis, and even kids my age will likely draw full promised benefits when we retire. So there are all sorts of lines to use here: "Yes, there are plenty of things in the status quo that are worth keeping, like clean air, or the First Amendment, or universal suffrage, because they all work well."

There are other diversionary tactics here too. Contrary to David Brooks' fascinating lurch into divination, most of us don't oppose private accounts because we're afraid they'll "create more Republicans." No, we oppose the plan because right now we need to focus on looming budget and Medicare crises, so borrowing trillions to destroy what is essentially the most financially stable program in the entire federal government seems stupid and dangerous. To perpetuate a favorite metaphor: if your car's on fire, your brake lines are slashed, your engine's making weird creaking noises, and your back wheel needs a little air, it's pretty easy to set priorities. Yes, you'll be a defending the status quo on that back tire, but so it goes.

Correction: Oops! Never mind. When I say "even kids my age will likely draw full promised benefits when we retire", I'm guilty of hedging. Scratch the "likely." Most 18-year-olds today were born in 1986. They will retire, at the latest, in 2053 at the age of 67. According to the CBO, the program will still be dishing out full benefits by then.

This got buried during the holidays, but Muqtedar Khan wrote an interesting op-ed on a new group of American Muslim scholars, activists, and community leaders, who are launching the Muslim Group on Policy Planning. Needless to say, seeking out Muslim input here at home is a crucial part of any broader Muslim engagement policy.

Oh, and this piece, about why Washington should embrace the European Union, deserves a look. Especially: "A successful EU will not mean the emergence of a military competitor: it requires an amazing feat of imagination to conceive of issues or areas in which the EU might act against U.S. interests."

Um, yep. Not a whole lot to say...

Readers of this site—all three of you!—know that I'm a big fan over the liberalization/democratization debate. The discussion boils down to one question, really: is it better for a developing country to become a democracy first and then work on economic development, or should the economic stuff come first so that people can become rich enough and educated enough to have a democracy?

One way this plays out is when the "democracy first!" folks say that you can't have good economic growth without things like transparency in your financial institutions, the rule of law, low corruption, and that these things all require democracy. (More on this here.) But that argument always struck me as odd. After all, Singapore's not really a democracy, but its government doesn't go around seizing people's stuff and monkeying with the law. Same with the East Asian "tigers" during their boom years in the 1950s. Not democracies. At a glance, democracy is probably more likely to lead to good institutions and the rule of law, but so can a benevolent dictatorship.

Anyways, I just found this NBER paper (PDF) by Glaeser, Shleifer, La Porta, and Lopez-de-Silanes that goes into this critique in more depth. After doing the analyses, they find that the good democratic stuff everyone loves—constitutional limits on sovereign power, judicial independence, etc.—have no predictive power for the growth of per capita income. "[I]nstitutions," the authors claim, "have only a second order effect on economic performance." So what does have an effect? Human capital—stuff like primary school enrollment, which shapes both institutional and productive capacities of a society." Most importantly, they're all very skeptical of pushing countries with low levels of human capital into democracy.

Let me just add that the work of Shleifer, La Porta, and Lopez-de-Silanes on these sorts of subjects has come under heavy fire. Previously, they've argued that a country's economic success depends on good deal on what kind of legal tradition it has—British-style common law or French-style civil law. Nicholas Thompson discussed their work in Legal Affairs, along with some of the criticisms. Still, it's interesting.

Interesting idea. There's been some talk that Democrats should denounce violent video games in order to earn their "values" bona fides. Nonsense. Just tax the damn things a bit. As expressions of disapproval go, this has to be one of the most productive and least problematic around.

The National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez is great. She believes, apparently, that because reporters have biases, we should just give up on the whole idea of objective reporting and make all journalists "opinion journalists." Hey, that's brilliant! The only problem, I think, is that if our reporters were all as willfully obtuse as the "journalists" at the Corner, our newspapers wouldn't describe anything even remotely resembling the world.

For many things, that might not be a problem, though if everyone started basing their economic outlook on NRO Financial, rather than on the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, Wall Street would be run into the ground within two, three years tops. The market, I imagine, tends to punish undue Foucauldian discourse-making. (Think of this as Marxism, Donald Luskin-style!) So no thanks. I'll stick with the current model: newspapers and real journalists striving for objectivity and actual digging, while bloggers and others look for errors and pound their chests excitedly when they finally catch something.

Matt has a typically sharp post about the interplay between health care and Social Security. I wrote on this a while back, covering more or less similar points, and just want to add that there's one good way to make this all concrete. At the current growth rate of health care spending, Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket health expenses will eventually (20-30 years down the line) start gobbling up about half of all retirement income. That's if no changes are made to the health care/Medicare boondoggle. Now, if Bush passes his Social Security phase-out plan and benefits are slashed by indexing them to wages, seniors could start realistically seeing their entire guaranteed benefit going towards health care. That means that for all other expenses, they have to rely entirely on the returns in their (risky) private account. Effectively, that means no guaranteed safety net whatsoever.

Another thing to keep in mind is the rising incidence of debt among seniors, which also decreases the functional value of Social Security benefits. Some of this debt stems from the fact that seniors tend to gamble more than the general population (Bingo is very popular), but that's not all. We also have misguided housing policies in the U.S. that tend to increase and extend mortgage debt long into retirement. Meanwhile, predatory lending practices often hurt seniors the most. Not all of this is fixable, but some of it is. Simple things like better credit counseling—and more importantly, figuring out how to induce seniors to actually seek out credit counseling—would help. On the other hand, policies that try to reduce gambling among seniors might be too paternalistic for some, but it should at least be explored.

The larger point is this. I tend to think we can probably reduce Social Security benefits for seniors in the future in order to make the program solvent. Ideally, benefits should be higher in real terms than they are today, because standards of living rise, and as the U.S. becomes richer as a nation, the pie gets bigger and there's more wealth to share with those who worked all their lives to make this country prosperous.

But we don't necessarily need to reach the extremely generous benefits that are promised by Social Security today. As promised by the program, seniors retiring in 2050 will have benefits that are 40 percent higher in real terms than they are today. Under the do-nothing plan, where the program eventually needs to cut benefits because the Trust Fund runs out, those benefits can be 20 percent higher. That seems okay. But at the same time, we should be working on things to increase the functional value of those benefits, which means finding ways to scale down senior debtedness, lowering health care costs, etc. etc. There are ways to make eventual benefit cuts in Social Security less painful and something we can live with.

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I've been swamped with various research projects and deadlines at work, and I'm going through a bit of a career change that might affect my posting frequency for awhile—though eventually I should get adjusted. More on that later.

Anyways, the posts are still flowing over at MoJo Blog, so go check it out. Topics today include why the international aid regime is so screwed up, and why Robert Zoellick might actually be a bigger neocon (as I understand the term) than John Bolton. No idea what the latter actually means for the direction of the State Department, though. One thing to watch over the next few years is whether we continue to use the military as our primary means of diplomacy—a trend captured in Dana Priest's excellent book, The Mission (discussion here)—or whether the Bush administration will adjust that elusive border where diplomacy ends and the military begins.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Bush tax cuts made situations like this possible, no? Tsk, tsk. Family values.

And yes, I cruise the Craigslist personal ads sometimes. Ahem.

Alberto Alesina, an econ prof at Harvard, has an interesting little article here, contending that simply talking about various political reforms can have real-world effects. In Germany, for instance, politicians have been yapping about gutting the welfare state for the last decade, without actually doing it. As a result, people are consuming less. In the U.S., that would be great; in Germany not so much.

Now how can we use this in the U.S.? Well, if we really want to boost the savings rate, we can have politicians run around screaming about how Social Security is in a crisis, and as a result, everyone panics and starts saving more, so that they're not wearing rags and eating grass in their old age. Hence, savings go up, investment gets boosted, growth skyrockets, and voila, Social Security is no longer in a crisis. A self-negating prophecy!

On the other hand, if politicians run around talking about how everyone's going to get these great private accounts to retire on, and if everyone believes that, then people start saving less (thinking that the private accounts will take care of everything). But if we never, in fact, get private accounts, then we've all decimated our savings for nothing, and the savings problem gets much, much worse.

Anyways, lots of scenarios. But it goes to show that there could be real economic benefits from talking up the Social Security crisis. Unless, of course, all this crisis talk leads to actual privatization. Yikes.

Well hell. I was waiting for George Lakoff to tell us how to frame Social Security... so that I could immediately turn around and do the exact opposite. But in this case, he seems to give some pretty good general advice. I have little doubt, though, that whatever frame he does come up with will be pleasantly misguided, so fair warning...

I don't have time to go into this now, but for a pretty persuasive case that Social Security is in crisis, or at least has some major problems that can't be waved away, go see Victor's work at Dead Parrots. Some of the better posts include:

1) This important clarification of some of the productivity assumptions in the Social Security report. If you do all the math, even increasing economic-wide productivity to a very high 2.1 percent doesn't get you to 75-year solvency. (Which would imply 2.5 percent productivity growth in the business sector.)

I'd add two comments. Spikes in the real-wage differential can produce real problems—it can boost the level of promised benefits for one age cohort (because their average wages go up), who then find that the next generations can't pay off the benefits (because productivity and hence the tax base drops again.) Also, I don't think high productivity growth will always give you positive real-wage differentials (which is what really improves solvency). The last few years have been a case in point.

2) This critique of the Diamond Orszag plan. (This post gets unfair at the very end, when he says that the plan "will likely be a drag on real GDP growth." The CBO report on the plan projected real growth of 4.07 under Diamond-Orszag, compared to 4.11 under the do-nothing plan, and 4.13 under privatization.)

However, the main liberal talking points still stand, I think. Even if we did nothing, the "intermediate case" scenario (exhausted Trust Fund, automatic benefit cuts in 2052) really isn't all that bad -- benefits in the future will still be higher than they are today. And Social Security is a problem that's very far off. Meanwhile, much more pressing and immediate problems exist today. If Medicare was under control and the Federal budget wasn't running massive deficits, I'd worry more about Social Security, frankly.

Also, as for Kevin Drum's cool graph, I want to note that under CSSS Plan 2, which is what Bush seems to be proposing, most people do get smaller benefits, yes, though low-income people actually get higher benefits than they would under the do-nothing plan. (Since benefits are boosted for low-earners.) It probably doesn't change anything, but it's worth pointing out.

UPDATE: As Brad Setser points out in comments, (among other good points) I was using the Trustee's data and Kevin was using CBO data. I'm not sure why the two models give such different results (the Trustee's analysis seems easier to follow.) My general point is still okay -- low-earners get screwed less under the privatization plan than everyone else -- but Kevin was right, in the CBO's analysis even low-earners do worse than they would under the "leave it alone" plan. Although the distinction between low-earner and average senior seems artificial. Any retiree who a) has medical bills and b) still has to pay rent or existing debt, needs every penny he or she can find.

From John Yoo's defense of Clarence Thomas today:

Thomas has always displayed suspicion of misguided efforts to cure society's ills with the latest academic theories.

In one 1999 case, the court invalidated a Chicago anti-gang ordinance that prohibited loitering. Thomas dissented, criticizing the court's highhanded approach: "Gangs fill the daily lives of many of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens with a terror that the court does not give sufficient consideration, often relegating them to the status of prisoners in their own homes."

Is there an academic theory saying that society's ill can be cured by letting gang members loiter? I'd like to hear it! And hey, that Thomas quote sounds suspiciously like Richard Posner-esque reasoning to me. Hm...

Hm, it seems that the gender wage gap is continuing to shrink. Which would be welcome news, but it mainly seems to be the result of a shrinking manufacturing base—which tends to be male-dominated. Meanwhile, female-dominated industries like health care continue to expand. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Ideally, I think, we'd like to see the wage gap shrink because a) women were entering male-dominated industries in greater numbers and, b) the wage gap within individual industries was shrinking. But is any gender wage gap shrinking welcome news?

For those who want to know more about the Iraqi insurgency—whose newfound size is unfortunately making an old prediction of mine look better and better—read this recent CSIS paper. Lots of interesting stuff. For instance:

Insurgents and Islamists learned that a mix of silence, multiple claims to be the attacker, new names for attacking organizations, and uncertain levels of affiliation both make it harder for the US to respond. They also produced more media coverage and speculation.

As of yet, the number of true false flag operations has been limited. However, in Iraq and elsewhere, attacks have often accompanied [sic] by what seem to be deliberate efforts to advance conspiracy theories to confuse the identity of the attacker or to find ways to blame defenders of the US for being attacked. In addition, conspiracy theories changing the US with deliberately or carelessly failing to provide an adequate defense has proved particularly effective.

I don't know the first thing about Batman, but Matt's post brings up a good question. Realistically speaking, how much could any one superhero reduce crime in a city? In the Spiderman movie, I believe crime fell something like 57 percent under Spiderman's watch. (Or maybe it rose drastically after he hung up his costume, I don't remember.) Is that plausible?

All this probably depends on what kind of superhero we're talking about, but I don't imagine there's that much fluctuation (could Superman really reduce crime by that much more than Batman?) Anyways, it seems that superheroes are mostly good for stopping big, dastardly, conspiracy-type criminals that ordinary police officers can't stop or won't. So here you have the possibility of an arms race, where villains start coming up with bigger, more elaborate schemes and organizations to wreak havoc. But in actuality, the masterminds would either move to another city or de-centralize their crime syndicate, in the grand tradition Al Qaeda. A relentless superhero might get very far cracking down on gangs and gang violence—though he or she would probably have to couple those efforts with a liberal prevention program (better schools, etc).

What about ordinary crime? A superhero can't be everywhere at once, so he doesn't really change the expected value of committing a crime for most people. And for irrational or spur-of-the-moment crimes, a superhero obviously has no effect. Now if the superhero were particularly brutal, there might be some deterrent value, but then that raises ethical questions. On the other hand, the New York Times the other day noted that, while the city could reduce murders to a relative handful, that left the hardcore cases, the recalcitrants. An adept superhero might prove useful in cracking down on these last few, particularly difficult cases. Who knows.

But if you were a police commissioner, and Batman suddenly appeared at your doorstep, it's not obvious to me what the best way to employ him would be.

Rich Lowry sees affirmative action potential in Social Security privatization:

The current Social Security system disadvantages blacks for reasons related to their historic mistreatment. Private accounts would go some way toward addressing this legacy of discrimination — as Democrats typically put it — but the supposed fiercest advocates of black interests are precisely the ones who will stand in the way.

Hey, that's brilliant. Though I bet the "fiercest advocates of black interests" are probably trying to figure out, you know, how to raise the life expectancy of African Americans. Lift many of them out of poverty. Reduce prison rates. Better health care. That sort of thing.

On a more serious note, Lowry's argument is wrong. Well-intended, I'm sure, but wrong. If you look at this chart, there's almost no difference in benefits per dollar of Social Security taxes paid among different races. (Except for Hispanic women, who get a really good deal out of the whole thing.) It's true that African Americans have shorter life expectancies, but they also have a higher disability rate, lower average wages (SS is a much better deal for low-wage workers), and tend to have more survivors.

Lowry also claims that African-Americans can bequest their savings upon death to a community, or survivors, or some such thing. That's true if they die before retirement. After retirement, they would receive annuity payouts, and there's no way to bequest from annuity. I suppose you could buy life insurance or some such thing, but I can't imagine that will happen very often.

As the Wall Street Journal reported just the other day, the new Justice Department memos on torture stay mum on the question of whether the president has the authority to supersede anti-torture laws. To tell you the truth, I'm a bit tired of debating all this. So here is something else I've been idly wondering of late. What do we even need a president for? Is it better to have one than not? Is the presidency a flawed institution?

(Warning! What follows is a rather amateur effort. Political scientists, by all means, avert your eyes.)

Most democracies, of course, don't have anything resembling the American president, who a) is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, b) is not at all beholden to his party (ie: he is not selected by the legislature), and c) can claim to speak for an entire country. At least, ever since Andrew Jackson in 1832, presidents have claimed that they represent the "will of the people", with their mandates and whatnot. The American president is also, interestingly, both the ceremonial head of state and the powerful prime minister.

Practically speaking, the most important role for presidents is foreign policy. Presidents have wielded almost unilateral control over this area, especially ever since 1964, and perhaps this has been for the best. The Cold War, for instance, can be viewed as a clash of wills, leader against leader, person against person. An American leader with less stringent powers—say, an Israeli-style prime minister who needed constantly to string together coalitions in order to conduct his foreign policy—might not have been able to act as steadfastly against his Soviet counterpart. Maybe.

On the downside, Congress seems to have very little ability to control the president on foreign policy. Cutting off military appropriations in the midst of a war can definitely work—as with Vietnam in 1973—but this sort of thing is generally considered "unpatriotic" when thousands of troops are overseas fighting. We all remember a certain $87 billion, after all. On balance, though, I tend to think the presidency is the right institution to conduct American foreign policy, though it may require a bit of tweaking and checking.

Now what about domestic policy? Here the president also has considerable leeway in setting the domestic agenda, even if he or she doesn't necessarily win the election based on that agenda. In part, I think, this is because the president is the only national politician, and hence the only one who can really symbolize the broad view of where the country as a whole should go. Even Senate Majority Leaders are restrained in vision by their local constituencies (see Tom Daschle). House Leaders are less restrained, thanks to the advantages of incumbency, but House Leaders generally get where they are thanks to a) the inertial nature of the House (its makeup isn't very responsive to changes in national attitudes), and b) various maneuvering from within. Denny Hastert is in charge only for internal reasons, not because he represents the people. No, only the president really has anything approaching a legitimacy to set an agenda, even if that legitimacy is often problematic, or entirely fictitious.

Now this puts a lot of unfair pressure on the president, sad to say. As heads of states, presidents are expected to be moral exemplars, symbolic leaders. But since they are the only people with any claim to the title of national agenda-setter, they necessarily must also get down into the mud of politics. As Robert Dahl once memorably said, presidents must be both "shrewd politicians and gifted statesmen." It is an impossible balancing act for most.

Even more vexing is the fact that presidents must handle both foreign and domestic policy, even though these two things are not always related. Bill Clinton endured criticism for focusing too much on domestic policy, but really, why is this so unnatural? There is no intrinsic reason why someone with a liberal ideology should have this or that foreign policy. Nor is it always the case that someone with a foreign policy vision should have a "corresponding" domestic policy vision. Presidents do have both visions, because they have to, but the two are often inconsistent. We have, for instance, George W. Bush, who believes in both a mighty army abroad and low taxes at home. Or flexing our free trade muscles abroad but corporate favoritism at home. The world is usually too big to fit under one political ideology.

Now this contradiction manifests itself in interesting ways when it comes to voting. Real partisans, I think, tend to vote primarily on domestic policy and then more or less agree to whatever foreign policy "their guy" happens to take up. If Al Gore had been elected in 2000, and then embarked on a great democracy-promotion venture abroad, including an invasion of Iraq, I suspect that most Democrats would have rallied behind it, while most Republicans would have pooh-poohed the whole thing as counter to the "national interest." I probably would have.

On the other hand, many swing voters may vote based on foreign policy without agreeing to the domestic policy of the president they elect. That seemed to be the case in 2004, where many swing voters agreed with Bush on his "war on terror" stance, while rejecting his agenda here at home. The problem is that it comes all in a package.

Unfortunately, there's often no reliable way for anyone to vote for, say, a Republican foreign policy and a Democratic domestic agenda. You can vote for a split ticket, but the Senate and House are relatively localized, and even if a majority of Americans vote for, say, Democratic senators (as has been the case over the past three cycles), they can still get stuck with a Republican Senate. (Nick Confessore outlined this state of affairs nicely here.) To put it another way, voters get a real national referendum on foreign policy every four years, but they get no such referendum on domestic policy.

If this is indeed a problem (and I think it is), there are two solutions. We could split the presidency into two separate roles—a commander-in-chief and a domestic agenda-setter. Wisdom-of-crowds types who opposed a National Intelligence Director on the grounds that it was too "centralized" should love this idea. They won't, of course, but they should. Personally, I think it's a bad idea—the squabbling would be too severe.

A better solution is to make Congress a truly national institution. There are a couple of ways to do this. Here's but one. First, we could split the Senate into two. Give each state one Senator, and have the remaining 50 elected at-large via the Hare method. In any given election year, 1/3 of the state senators and 1/3 of the at-large senators would be up for re-election. Meanwhile, we could reduce the number of district seats in the House and have the rest elected by proportional representation.

This means that every two years, the country as a whole gets to vote on a domestic policy from the party of their choosing. (Third parties would probably play a larger role in this system, too.) It reduces the influence of gerrymandering and the undemocratic nature of the Senate, both of which prevent a real referendum from ever taking place. Every four years, meanwhile, the country could clearly vote on both a foreign policy in the presidential election, and, if it so choose, a different domestic policy.

Andrew Samwick notes that the Social Security Trustee's Report probably understates future longevity rates. The implication, it would seem, is that Social Security could be in even worse shape than people expect.

But here's an honest question: would longer lifespans for old people necessarily put Social Security in a tighter bind? After all, you would think that much of this lifespan gain might come from people living healthier lifestyles in their prime years (diets, not smoking, etc.), which would decrease a lot of expenses later in life and enable people to get by with relatively smaller benefits. (Obviously this isn't true if obesity rates continue to rise.) Then there's disability. Presumably, health care will get better and better, and disabilities will fall, which eases the strain on the Social Security program—by enough to make up for the longer lifespans. That seems to be what's going on here, if I understand the Trustee's report correctly.

Meanwhile, if health care is getting better and better, doesn't this mean that productivity for working Americans is getting better and better too? (Better health care leads to better productivity, but better productivity also leads to better health care!) So that puts Social Security on a more stable footing. I don't know how to get at more exact numbers or projections though.

The New York Times gets this exactly right:

The difference between the rich and poor countries, Dr. Sieh said, was that the rich ones had improved their building techniques and their political systems to deal with inevitable disasters.

In the Pacific Northwest, where offshore faults could generate a tsunami as large as last week's ocean-spanning waves, officials have created "inundation maps" to know more precisely what would happen in a flood and prepare accordingly. And in response to the threat of earthquakes, buildings on the West Coast now are designed to sway over shifting foundations, and new highway overpasses are no longer stacked like the jaws of a huge horizontal vise.

Istanbul, Tehran, New Delhi and other increasingly dense and shabbily constructed cities, on the other hand, are rubble in waiting. When an earthquake leveled the ancient Iranian city of Bam in 2003, for instance, more than 26,000 people were essentially crushed by their own homes. Several earthquake experts refer to the "seismic gap" as a way of describing this difference between the ability of rich cities and poor ones to withstand earthquake damage.

One of the many horrifying aspects of working in a flood observatory during college was keeping track of floods in Bangladesh, where heavy rain would literally wash away hundreds of thousands of shoddily-built homes each year, leaving untold number of families homeless and often unable to get to higher ground. Meanwhile, collapsing rubble would kill hundreds, and disease would spread very quickly. Ditto for flooding along the Yangtze in China, or the myriad rivers in India. It's the sort of thing that never happens in the Western world. A little urban development and planning would go a long way here -- farther, perhaps, than sophisticated multi-billion dollar tsunami warning systems. For more context, read this Mike Davis essay in New Left Review, via Critical Montages.

MoJo Blog is up and running again, kicking off the new year with various forms of outrage and whatnot.

I'm not sure why the Moscow Times is only now reviewing the new Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. I remember reading it, in paperback, last spring, so it's at least two years old. But whatever! That aside, the reviewer here is much too harsh. I don't speak Russian, but I do know that the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation was the first to make me really think that Dead Souls was hilariously funny. (I'd read a Penguin paperback edition and some other edition previously.) So unless you're really a stickler for pedantry—or if for some reason you require a translation that "remains faithful" to an original text you'll never read anyways—I'd recommend it. Highly.

UPDATE: Okay, this edition of Dead Souls has actually been out since March 1997. I guess it's good that the Moscow Times doesn't feel bound by immediacy, but still...

Fred Kaplan tackles the ins and outs of the Pentagon budget process. It's a bit unwieldy, but the basic lesson is that, because of the way money is appropriated and spent, all those recent cuts in spending authority won't translate into actual spending cuts for a long while.

Meanwhile, it seems vaguely ridiculous to me that Congress can approve a five-year, multi-billion dollar weapons program one year, and then cancel it the next. On the bright side, yes, you can eliminate a lot of waste this way. But on the not-so-bright side, Pentagon planners spend a lot of time defending the merits of individual programs each year, rather than focusing on long-term strategic planning. In The Pentagon's New Map, Thomas Barnett notes that, during the 1990s, Pentagon planners would actually start creating and projecting distant threats (like China) in order to justify big, expensive programs year after year, like aircraft carriers. Clearly something is awry here.

Digby raises an interesting issue: If we're really going to lock up suspected terrorists indefinitely in some far away holding cell, why not hold suspected murderers indefinitely too? Or suspected rapists? Is terrorism really so qualitatively different from those other crimes?

More to the point, too, why should a conservative think that terrorism is any different from murder, really? The usual answer, I take it, is that terrorism inspires fear among the general population, so it affects more than just the person or persons killed. But so do hate crimes, arguably, and conservatives don't tend to favor giving hate crimes special legal status. The "terror" effect of hate speech is also usually discounted or trivialized. Now I don't want to lump all "conservatives" together here, but I don't see how anyone could hold that:

a) "Hate crimes" do not deserve their own special category of crime,
b) The effects of hate speech are not important enough to require any restrictions on hate speech,

and also

c) Terrorism is such a special and egregious category of murder that it requires drastic measures, including the elimination of due process, etc. etc.

Obviously nuclear terrorism is something to think about here -- since that's obviously a special and egregious category of murder that can't really be compared to hate crimes -- but I imagine that most suspected terrorists are quite evidently not suspected nuclear terrorists.

Wow. A tender and clear-sighted obituary of Susan Sontag, written by Christopher Hitchens of all people, that does more than obsess over a single sentence she uttered after 9/11. Nicely done.

James Bennett has a really interesting review of books on Euro-American relations in the latest National Interest, though I'm not entirely read to adopt his Euro-bashing approach. (Um, nor do I believe that Europe is going to gang up with China and the Islamic world to form a bloc that competes against the "Anglosphere-plus-India-plus-Japan-plus-Russia team". What?)

Chris Albritton did some reporting and found out that Iraq's secular prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is actually quite popular around the Shiite south. That seems to square somewhat with recent poll findings, though I suspect that if Ayatollah Ali Sistani comes out and explicitly endorses the Iraqi United List, the latter, more religious slate will beat Allawi's list by a pretty overwhelming margin.

The wild card, I think, are the absentee ballots that will be counted in Jordan. If Allawi does better than expected on the strength of absentee voting, I for one expect some good ol' fashioned cross-border post-election wrangling.

The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that the Iraqi United List isn't all that fundamentalist. True, a Sistani associate, Ali al-Hakim, is no. 1 on the list, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, is number 2. But a lot of the other top Shiite candidates—Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Ahmed Chalabi, Hussein Shahrastani—are all fairly moderate, with relatively secular outlooks. Moreover, the two big religious parties only make up about 40 percent of the main Shiite candidate list. This is a difference of degree, to be sure -- sharia is still going to be the law of the land no matter what, and the Shi'a clergy will still have a lot of influence on social decisions -- but I think there will also be a lot of leeway towards economic and political liberalization, etc. etc.

Now, obviously if someone like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim gets the prime minister slot, that changes things. But not by that much; the prime minister slot doesn't seem like the most powerful position around. Ayad Allawi is relatively powerful mainly because a) he has a lot of input into what the U.S. military does, b) he has secular, ex-Baathist friends in important positions like the Interior and Defense ministries, c) Sunni involvement in the interim government is pretty much limited to the figurehead "president" position, and d) Allawi declared martial law. In all likelihood, whatever prime minister the National Assembly selects won't enjoy nearly the same amount of authority. Unless, of course, a civil war breaks out and the government needs to grant itself "emergency powers."

A lot of people will no doubt get up in arms about this story about how Congress is resisting the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to reduce the number of congressional committees that oversee intelligence. And it is a scandal. But the issue's also a bit more complicated than the story makes it out to be.

Here's some background: You'll recall that way back in the day, the 9/11 Commission recommended that Congress consolidate its 88 committees that oversee intelligence into one or two main committees. This seemed like a no-brainer, since as everyone "knows," intelligence officials spend far too much time testifying and not enough time doing intelligence.

Right?

Well, not quite. Having too many oversight committees is a relatively minor problem. In the course of writing this piece a while back, I talked to a number of congressional staffers who told me that most of the testifying goes on in the two main committees anyways. That seems plausible enough. To be sure, the system's an unwieldy mess, and Senators and Congressmen get bitchy about the overlap, but it's also not making the country less safe.

The real problems, it seems, are that congressional overseers are too inexperienced to oversee intelligence—especially because they remain term-limited—and that they focus much too much on scandals, personal investigations, and real attention-grabbing stories. There's no incentive for anyone to, say, double-check the CIA's white papers; doing that sort of grunt work, after all, doesn't help anyone get re-elected. Plus, the media doesn't get too attend closed-door intelligence hearings, so there's very little relevant pressure from congressional watchdogs.

On the other hand, you have the argument that the agencies have become too meek and risk-averse, too worried about doing anything that will cause a stink on Capitol Hill. Limiting the number of oversight committees might come in handy here, since there would be fewer directives and requests coming in from Congress. But it's also related to the misplaced incentives above. Members of Congress can get a lot of publicity by going public with some scandalous spy operation or other. They get considerably less publicity from making sure that spy operation goes off smoothly. It's a real problem, though the solutions aren't at all obvious.

I see "influential evangelical" James Dobson has promised to target some of the red-state Democrats up for re-election in 2006 (Byrd, B. Nelson, Bingaman, etc.) if they dare block any of Bush's conservative judicial nominees. Frightening! I do wonder, though, what Dobson would do even if the Democrats confirmed all of Bush's judges. Would Dobson tell evangelical voters to stay home in '06? Would he endorse Ben Nelson and Robert Byrd? Would he contribute to their campaign coffers? Would he not be as enthusiastic about endorsing their opponents?

Or would he just use all his influence to try to get them defeated anyways, because they're relatively weak and vulnerable? Hm, yes. Yes, I think that's it. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, I'm going to say we've seen this sort of deal offered before.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge think the U.S. and Europe are slowly converging with regards to their views on Islamic terrorism. The evidence:

The murder in November of Theo van Gogh, a provocative Dutch filmmaker, at the hands of an Islamic militant has been called Europe's 9/11. Though the two events are obviously not fully comparable, it is certainly true that American conservatives, such as Francis Fukuyama and Bernard Lewis, have found a wider audience recently for the idea that radical Islam is inimical to European traditions of tolerance.

That may be so, but I'm not sure this translates into actual policy convergence. European states still seem mostly concerned about keeping down illegal immigration from the Middle East, and trying to steer their large Islamic populations onto more moderate paths. None of this will put Europe in a mind to start bombing Syria or Iran anytime soon. Stemming illegal immigration, for example, mostly involves putting more development money into the Arab world, rather than pushing for actual democratic change. (Though you could argue that most of the Arab world economies are so state-dominated that economic reform absolutely requires political change. I don't really know.) So I'm not sure Europeans will interpret Bernard Lewis in the same way that, say, Paul Wolfowitz did.

The other thing is that, when it comes to meddling in the Middle East, Europe tends to be far more risk-averse than the U.S., since countries like France, Spain, Germany, etc., are the ones that will mostly have to deal with any unrest or instability in the region. We tend to forget it, especially after 9/11, but the United States is still relatively "safe" from Islamic militarism, all the way on the other side of the Atlantic.

So about, let's say, 30 minutes before the new year, I got dumped by my girlfriend of about two years. Ouch! Needless to say, I didn't pay all that much attention to the midnight countdown. Hm, I'm not sure a political blog is the greatest place to talk about this, but then what is. Needless to say, I'll probably waste a lot of time doing the weepy schoolgirl thing, and maybe I'll even stroll around, brooding like this fellow for a bit. But I'll suck it up soon enough and get back to putting up more of the great free content we've all come to know and love on this site. It's a lot more fun than moping...