No kidding. This has always puzzled me too:

Calculations by Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and by others have shown how an extra dimension of space can pop mathematically into being almost like magic, the way the illusion of three dimensions can appear in the holograms on bank cards. But string theorists admit they don't know how to do the same thing for time yet.

As usual, comments with special insight into the origins of the universe should be kept under 3,000 characters.

"Are we talking a broadly seamless transition from centralised Roman control via local barbarian kingdoms to the medieval world, or something rather less comfortable?" Yes, good question. Here's a crack at the answer.

Lots that could be said about Ruth Milkman's op-ed on labor unions in the New York Times today, but let's start with this sentence: "Employers have abandoned the paternalistic job security measures, pensions and fringe benefits of which they boasted a few years ago." That's quite right, but it also seems to oversimplify the story of how firms have restructured and reorganized quite drastically over the past 30 years, as well as how that change has affected job security, mobility, and overall economic inequality in America. This story's obviously a complicated one, but I think it needs to be spelled out briefly, because Milkman's claim that workers are in the same plight they were back in 1935 strikes me as misleading in fairly important ways.


In 1935—in fact, through the post-World War II era and up to the mid-1970s, American industry was largely organized along mass-production lines. Large firms dominated, growth depended mostly on market stability and expansion, and, in the workplace, control was divvied up between unions and management. Labor negotiated wages and benefits, agitated for better working conditions and grievance procedures, leaving management to the planning and decision making. For unionized workers, wages and advancement were determined largely by seniority, and workers often stayed with a single firm. (Lay-offs would happen, especially for those low on the union totem pole, but many would be quickly re-hired by the same firm during a recovery.) For higher-level workers, too, promotion within a firm was quite common. Most workers started at an entry-level position, acquired a lot of firm-specific knowledge and skills, would learn on the job, would train for higher positions, and would receive a fatter paycheck with each promotion. For workers of all skill levels in these firms, job security was solid and the pay was good. (Obviously, as Ed Kilgore has noted, the 1950s and 1960s was terrible for those who didn't get to latch onto the new industrial bonanza, but leave that somewhat aside.) The large firms, on the other hand, were quite constrained: it was difficult to fire workers, it wasn't easy to cut pay (since pay was linked with one's rigorously-defined position), and it was more difficult to hire from the outside than to promote from within. In this sense, then, mobility was a relatively natural process—workers could "advance" fairly easily within their firms, whether they were unskilled or skilled.

Eventually, of course, American firms decided that they could no longer afford this practice. In the mid-1970s, productivity growth was sagging, and bold new managerial models became all the rage. Many companies decided that they couldn't maintain their rigid "internal labor markets," or the job security and well-defined job classifications that went with them, and decided that labor flexibility was the yellow brick road to competitiveness. This theory applied to both high-skilled workers and low-skilled workers, although the latter were hurt far more, and businesses' attempts to create more "flexibility" among low-wage workers have been much-aided by the loosening of labor legislation over the last three decades. Meanwhile, the weakening of internal labor markets has had a major effect on mobility, wage growth, and inequality: Median wage growth by mid-career fell by 21 percent in recent years; there are now 40 percent fewer workers in the central part of the wage growth distribution; etc., etc. (See this book for a long string of evidence that insecurity has increased and mobility declined over the past 30 years.)

At the same time, not all businesses emphasize finding profits by cutting wages—i.e. avoiding unions, subcontracting, making better use of unskilled workers—so maniacally. Some firms emphasize innovation as the path to success, and focus on investing in workers, having employees perform a variety of tasks, offering new incentives to workers, etc.—which can in turn lead to high wages, job security, and a decent shot at advancement and upward mobility. Of course, you have to be lucky enough to get those jobs. In practice, many firms use both methods of organization—the "high road" and the "low road," which means that if you're on the high end, life is still pretty good. If not, then not. (One argument for raising the minimum wage is that it will give more firms incentive to take the "high road" invest in more of its workers, since "low road" practices, like subcontracting and rapid hiring and firing will become less profitable.)

At any rate, as one can see, there's a rather vicious "two-tiered" system being put into effect within firms. I've been reading a new book from the Russell Sage Foundation, Moving Up or Moving On, which finds that low-earners do much better if they "move on" to different employers rather than "move up" in the same firm. It's not quite like the old days. Stronger unions would ameliorate many of the ill-effects here—especially declining wages—but not all; things wouldn't go back to the post-WWII "glory days" by any means. Meanwhile, although I've argued in the past that the education gap doesn't explain the rise in economic inequality over the past few decades, it is the case that the change in firm structure has affected workers of different education differently. Firms no longer invest quite as much in on-the-job training—why bother, if a worker isn't going to be with the firm for life, as used to be the case? To remedy this problem, policy wonks usually propose variants on worker training or education. Meanwhile, Timothy Bartik has proposed "labor-demand policies"—government incentives to "induce employers to provide more or better jobs"—which seem promising.

One other key question is, To what extent has the change in firm structure been dictated by actual economic necessity—by the "market"—and to what extent by changes in the legal landscape? Changes in labor regulation have obviously had an effect, but it's also not entirely obvious that American firms could have continued to thrive with the more restrictive labor policies of the 1950s and 60s. Maybe they could have; I just don't know. Same with the deregulation of unionized industries since the 1970s—to what extent has this affected mobility and wages? And to what extent was it necessary? Meanwhile, the shift in governance towards shareholder control, and the greater emphasis on the short-term "bottom line," has also affected how firms operate. This is a difficult story to untangle, and I'm not up to it right now.

At any rate, while unions are not obsolete by any means, it's not clear that they alone can counteract the various trends that have caused businesses to reorganize and restructure in ways that have, quite dramatically, increased job instability and decreased mobility over the past thirty years. On the other hand, one hugely important thing unions can do, as Matt Yglesias pointed out in a post that disappeared somehow, is provide a counterbalance in Washington D.C. in the push for more labor-friendly government policies, and defeat the business lobbyists. I've discussed before how the AFL-CIO is badly overmatched on the lobbying front nowadays, and it's a real problem.

Not this again. The National Review's Andrew McCarthy is demanding that liberals answer his questions about the connections between Iraq and 9/11. Okay, fine, let's take a look at his first question:

Ahmed Hikmat Shakir — the Iraqi Intelligence operative who facilitated a 9/11 hijacker into Malaysia and was in attendance at the Kuala Lampur meeting with two of the hijackers, and other conspirators, at what is roundly acknowledged to be the initial 9/11 planning session in January 2000? Who was arrested after the 9/11 attacks in possession of contact information for several known terrorists? Who managed to make his way out of Jordanian custody over our objections after the 9/11 attacks because of special pleading by Saddam’s regime?

Oh yes, this was hot news last summer, and much-trumpeted by 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman. Initially, it was thought that Shakir was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. Bam! Smoking gun! But no, as Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post, that line of thinking seemed to be a case of conflated names. On the one hand, we had Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, an Iraqi national and known al-Qaeda greeter in Malaysia. Meanwhile, Iraqi military documents, unearthed in 2003, had revealed the existence of Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, a member of Saddam's Fedayeen. The same person? It doesn't seem so, despite the similar names. Newsday also reported that the CIA had concluded "long ago" that the al-Qaeda greeter was not an officer in Iraq's army. This stuff was all in the 9/11 Commission report as well.

Okay, so far none of this contradicts what McCarthy's saying. He isn't claiming this Kuala Lumpur greeter was Fedayeen, but rather an "Iraqi intelligence operative." Well okay, a follow-up article by Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay reported that Shakir, the greeter in Kuala Lumpur, had been "employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer." Presumably that's what McCarthy means when he says "Iraqi Intelligence Operative." On the other hand, Landay also noted: "There's no evidence that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir attended the meeting [with two of the 9/11 hijackers, planner Ramzi Binalshibh, and mastermind Tawfiz al Atash]." And Newsweek had reported previously that this Kuala Lumpur greeter had been employed at too low a level—by the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia—to be involved with Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat. So it's hard to say just what, exactly, this greeter's role was in the attacks, or how complicit Saddam Hussein was in all this.

Now McCarthy thinks that liberals should be "moving heaven and earth to find out the answer." Well, maybe we should. On the other hand, maybe the Bush administration could just tell us. As Spencer Ackerman pointed out at the time, the government has Tawfiz al-Atash, one of the guys at the Malaysia meeting, in custody. You would think for all the waterboarding at their disposal, they could've cleared this mystery up by now. And if it's the smoking gun McCarthy thinks it might be, then why hasn't the White House released anything? I can't imagine they'd keep this stuff secret if it was that spectacular. And keep in mind, that Stephen Hayes—the chief driver behind this story—has called Shakir "the strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11." This is the Holy Grail for Iraq-9/11 buffs; so why won't the president offer them a swig? Because it's all a crock of shit maybe?

Meanwhile, McCarthy's claim that Jordan released Shakir from custody "because of special pleading by Saddam’s regime" is a little tendentious. Hayes originally reported that U.S. intelligence officials disagreed over whether Iraq's demands for Shakir's release were simply "pro forma" or something that "reflected an interest… at the highest levels of Saddam Hussein's regime." In the end, according to Hayes, the CIA agreed to let Shakir go, because the Jordanians were convinced he was a member of Iraqi intelligence and wanted to "flip" him. But the Jordanians' main evidence here seemed to be that Shakir was good at counterinterrogation techniques, which, as Dan Darling pointed out, Shakir could've picked up from any number of places besides Iraq. Again, murky, murky. So back to the main point: it seems that the White House could clear up quite a bit with regards to that Kuala Lumpur meeting, no? So why don't they?

update: Hey, maybe the Shakir story is what has Robin Hayes in a twist! By the way, my favorite Rep. Hayes story has to be this one, where the gentleman from North Carolina called his colleagues "hand-wringing bed-wetters" when they expressed a bit of, um, unease over the purchase of the C-130J, a transport airplane with "so many flaws that it cannot fly its intended combat missions." (That dud is also, I think, the plane featured proudly atop Hayes' hyper-patriotic homepage.) Say what you will, but this brave warrior would never leave a wounded defense contract behind.

Hard to believe anyone would take the time to actually 'debunk' the hucksters who give out psychic readings, but this essay's still a fun read. "Apart from all these ploys, the psychic has other things working in his or her favour. For instance, we all have a tendency to remember claims that are correct and forget those that aren't." Devious. Early in my teenage life I called one of those 1-900 telephone psychics with every intention of hanging up rudely before my first three free minutes expired, but my medium on the other end just stalled for time, asking the sort of long, drawn-out questions about information she could have easily Googled nowadays. Come to think of it, phone psychics probably do use Google nowadays. To be fair, though, being a phone psychic is probably much harder than doing it in person.

David Cunningham's Boston Globe piece on the social- and class-based origins of the Ku Klux Klan is very much worth reading.

Matt Yglesias raises a good point about Iraq: Is our goal a stable Iraq in the sense of a central government with more-or-less a monopoly on violence that we can then leave, or is our goal to hunt down and kill every last terrorist in the country? My guess is that the White House's ideal is a stable Iraq with a central government that has more-or-less a monopoly on violence, but also one whose government can and will cooperate with American counterterrorist forces to hunt down al-Qaeda in Iraq, Baathist remnants, and other assorted terrorists in the "Sunni triangle" for years to come. Again, the White House won't tell us, but I'm guessing the broader aim is not so much a large and permanent occupation, but something akin to what Robert Kaplan has called the "supremacy by stealth" model—Iraq would very much resemble Columbia, with a quasi-permanent U.S. "advisory" team and maybe a number of Special Forces units in Iraq. Just a guess.

Meanwhile, over at Tapped, Matt makes the strong case for setting a timetable to withdraw from Iraq as a way to achieve, presumably, a stable Iraq whose government has more-or-less a monopoly on violence. All his points sound reasonable in the abstract, and I can't say with confidence that he's wrong, but here are a few reasons for doubting the timetable strategy.

First, Matt claims that the U.S. presence currently allows "Shiite and Kurdish leaders [to] pursue counterproductive maximalist agendas while counting on the U.S. Army to keep them in power." Well, okay, but they're not pursuing maximalist agendas, really. The leaders compromised on a new government, finally. Ayatollah Sistani is talking about a new district voting system that would give the Sunnis greater electoral representation. The government agreed to a drafting committee with the Sunnis. Talks and negotiations have been rocky, sure, but not nearly as intractable as many expected, and that's how democracy tends to work.

More to the point, that's how it should work: Drafting a constitution and agreeing to government is a tricky business, and far better that all the parties involved take time to hash out the difficult issues now than hastily agree to some unstable power-sharing system thrown together in the hopes of staving off conflict. I can't think of many successful constitutions that have been tossed together in this way. The latter scenario fairly resembles what happened in Angola in 1992—a truce and hastily agreed-upon elections that each side thought it would win—and that led to ten more years of civil war. (Kevin Drum's analogy to the California budget doesn't seem to fit here.) Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine that contentious issues like Kirkuk would get resolved peacefully just because the U.S. wasn't there. The theory that people will happily compromise on issues like resource control and historic lands all because the threat of unchecked war looms is, to say the least, an odd one. Although, in fairness, I don't see how Kirkuk will ever get resolved peacefully, occupation or no.

Matt's next point: "Arab governments acknowledge that a total breakdown in Iraq would be bad for them, but they're reluctant to take action and strong public stances because doing so is unpopular. They'd rather shift the responsibility to the United States." That's a good point, but the question is what, exactly, could they be doing that they're not doing now? Perhaps there's a scenario in which the U.S. starts withdrawing and the other Arab states all pressure Syria to cut off support for its respective insurgents. If, in fact, Bashar Assad can do anything about the Syrian terrorist network, this would be a good thing, but then the question is how big a deal foreign fighters and money are to the insurgency. Meanwhile, whatever benefits flow from greater neighbor involvement need to be weighed against the fact that domestic intelligence against the insurgency would likely dry up. It seems likely that you'd see far fewer native Iraqis willing to snitch on Zarqawi and the rest if the U.S. was on its way out—as seemed to be the case with the British in Aden. Finally, it's worth noting that one of the biggest sources of insecurity, the rampant organized and unorganized crime, will almost certainly increase, and increase dramtically, without the Army around. (Although I've seen more than one analyst note that, right now, the military just doesn't have the troops to handle this particular problem anyway.)

Then there's the John Derbyshire/William Saletan argument that if the U.S. would just set a timetable for withdrawing it would somehow "concentrate" the minds of those Iraqi troops-in-training, break the culture of dependency, and motivate them to shape up in a hurry. Eh, wasn't that the idea behind "Vietnamization"—that if the ARVN were forced to fend for themselves, they would take responsibility for themselves? It's a point that sounds really quite enticing in the abstract, but it's a lot to gamble on. That's why if we do draw down, I think we'll probably have to modify our goals and aim for "managed anarchy" and rule by roving militias rather than a stable Iraq whose central government has a monopoly on violence.

The big asymmetry here, meanwhile, is that of the two gambles—keeping troops indefinitely and setting a timetable for withdrawal—the "stay the course" option seems reversible, at least in theory, if things aren't going well around, say, fall of 2006. If the U.S. starts withdrawing and all hell breaks loose, I imagine it will be virtually impossible to send troops back, which could look very, very bad come midterm election time. That factor, I think, will make all the difference for the White House.

Now and again, trawling around conservative blogs, I come across Chris Muir's "Day by Day" cartoon, which isn't too shabby—it would be much funnier if I was a right-winger and didn't hate freedom so much, but what can you do. Still, there's something that's always bothered me about Muir's otherwise-deft illustrations, and it didn't really dawn until I saw today's episode:



The woman's pose in the last two frames is truly bizarre. Go find a person roughly two inches taller than you, put your left elbow on his or her right shoulder, and then try to hold a conversation. Not the main point, sure, but still odd that a cartoonist thinks that that's something people do; also odd that the guy on the left actually interpreted this as an intimate gesture...

Well this is un-freakin'-real. I'm sure there's a clever culture-of-life joke out there just waiting to be unleashed, but those sketches are too disorienting to bring anything to mind. Hey, this was also the plot of a Stephen King novel, wasn't it? Only the "twin brother"—mostly some teeth, eyes, a hank of hair—in that instance was lodged in the back of the guy's brain? Can't quite conjure up with the title right now, but that one was nightmare-inducing, for sure.

Ruth Franklin's cover story on motherhood in the New Republic this week is really quite good: wide-ranging, contentious, the whole deal. Not surprisingly, one more-or-less unstated current throughout the piece is that theses motherhood woes could be infinitely reduced if men actually pitched in once in a while; no shit, right, but no one has even begun to figure out how to do this. Sweden, for example, has tried various financial incentives to encourage dads to take parental leave, but as far as I know, it hasn't even come close to correcting the imbalance. Worth noting, I suppose, that many of these problems may not be policy problems per se. That aside, though, this passage from Franklin's piece struck me as a fairly obvious policy problem:

Unfortunately, what women want and what employers want are not entirely the same. … Opting out [i.e., for motherhood] is relatively easy for women who can afford it, but opting in--returning to work--is more difficult. In the study conducted by Hewlett and Buck Luce, only three-quarters of women who wanted to rejoin the workforce were able to do so, and only 40 percent returned full-time. (Tellingly, 93 percent of the women who took time off wanted to return at some point to their careers.) When they do return, women who have opted out can be penalized by a cut in earning power of more than one-third.

As it turns out, Heather Boushey of CEPR has been doing a lot of work on this very subject, and recently put out a study showing that scheduling flexibility—that is, allowing workers to set or alter their schedules—and anticipated paid leave for family caregiving, have either positive effects or little to no effects on wages. (Other types of workplace flexibility, like part-time work, obviously do have a huge effect on wages.) Currently, of course, there is nothing of the sort being offered. Even the Family and Medical Leave Act, a policy which helped catapult Bill Clinton into office in 1992 by giving him the support of married women—the first time in over a decade that any Democratic candidate had won this group (hint, hint)—even that only requires employers to offer 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and even that still leaves 43 percent of workers, those in small businesses, uncovered. And yes, business groups are trying to roll back the FMLA. No wonder, etc.

At any rate, that's all obvious, and something good liberals such as Nancy Folbre have been harping on for years. (Democrats, in their infinite wisdom, did everything they could to shy away from the issue in 2004. I notice that Anna Greenberg did a poll finding that only 19 percent of married women cited "women's rights" as a reason to vote for Kerry. Hm, I wonder why...) The feminist case for reform here speaks for itself. One interesting thing to wonder, though, is whether businesses will start coming around to the "family-friendly" side eventually. Perhaps. The Institute for Women's Policy Research recently put out a report arguing that providing seven paid "sick leave" days per year would yield a net savings to business of $28 billion, thanks to higher productivity and whatnot. I'm sure the Chamber of Commerce will be on hand to quibble over the figures here, but the principle is at least out there and reasonable.

On the broader scale, businesses are going to have to start grappling with the reality that, as a nation, we're investing a ton in female education—women have more undergraduate degrees than men, etc.—and not getting as much "payoff" as we could be, thanks to the fact that the workplace is basically structured to prevent women from reaching their full potential, work-wise. Franklin cites two economists who note: "Indeed, companies that can develop policies and practices to tap into the female talent pool will enjoy a substantial competitive advantage." Smart point, and while I'll admit that conservatives usually have good reason to be wary of the "conservative" case for X left-wing policy, in this instance I think that case is actually a good one.

Anthony Cordesman's recommendations for Iraq certainly deserve a serious look. Love or hate his conclusions, the man knows what he's talking about. As it happens, Cordesman's of the "stay the course, be patient, and take the 50-50 chance at winning this thing" camp, only without the air-headed optimism that you see from the Cheney administration. (Another person against early withdrawal or timetables? Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abul Ghait, along with a bevy of other Arab analysts who are worried about regional collapse.) I think I'm of this camp too, though with the caveat that let's cut the bullshit here: if we have genuine reason to think that staying the course won't produce a stable, democratic, peaceful Iraq—or hell, just a stable Iraq—then the sooner we realize that the better.

In that case, it will be time to move on, I honestly think, to Daniel Byman's plan for a targeted draw-down, along with a severe narrowing of goals. Instead of a peaceful democracy we'll shoot for managed anarchy; instead of a well-trained and professional national Iraqi security force we'll have Afghanistan-style rule by militia—so long as the oil keeps flowing, the major terrorist training camps are disrupted, and there's no large-scale civil war. We'll be cruel and heartless bastards, and we'll have failed Iraq utterly, but at least we won't be getting thousands of troops killed for a project that's hopeless. The question, though, is at what point do you decide that staying the course is in fact hopeless and Byman's semi-withdrawal plan is the least bad option for Iraq? Well, here's the thing: I can't tell. You can't tell. I'm not even sure Congress can tell. The person best-positioned to make that call is, most likely, the president himself, after a series of serious and wholly non-deluded conversations with his top military leaders and advisors. In other words, we're fucked.

Unless, of course, Bush's air-headed optimism somehow turns out to be right. Quite the gamble.

...similar wishful thinking from Herbert Meyer, a senior intelligence official in the Reagan administration.

While everyone's huffing and puffing about China, the May issue of the American Prospect had a nifty little story about Japan that offers a nice counterbalance. Not only is Japan not in poor economic health, claims Eamonn Fingleton, it's doing perfectly fine these days, with a strong manufacturing sector, the largest current-account surplus in the world (although I'm not sure that's always such a good thing), a leading position in certain very-key industries, and its citizens are affluent in a way most countries can only dream about. So why, then, do we get all these scare stories about Japan's permanent depression? Ah, the ol' Tokyo propaganda:

In short, the "lost decade" story was a hoax. The Western media were duped by a total reversal in Japan’s public-relations program. Whereas Japan had once aggressively emphasized both its real and imaginary strengths, that emphasis switched in the 1990s to a highly counterintuitive “bad news” strategy.

Very devious! Of course, the one strike against Japan—and Fingleton doesn't discuss this—is that the country is aging rapidly, and unwilling to take on new immigrants. That could end up hurting, although I'm somewhat skeptical that the "aging society" problem is, in fact, as big a problem as it's made out to be. Meanwhile, let's not forget that China's aging pretty rapidly too, and will probably reach some geriatric point long before it reaches Western levels of productivity, which means it will be much less-equipped to deal with its swarms of seniors than Japan will. On the other hand, the benefit of being an authoritarian country like China is that it can use brute force to handle its aging society: coerce young couples into having lots of babies, say, or cutting senior citizens off from their pensions. Russia has been experimenting with the latter, to rather brutal effect.

Yikes. Diane Ravitch is none too keen on a trend of late—namely, politics seeping into mathematics:

Partisans of social-justice mathematics advocate an explicitly political agenda in the classroom. A new textbook, "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers," shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics are: "Sweatshop Accounting," with units on poverty, globalization and the unequal distribution of wealth. Another topic, drawn directly from ethnomathematics, is "Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood." …. The theory behind the book is that "teaching math in a neutral manner is not possible." Teachers are supposed to vary the teaching of mathematics in relation to their students' race, sex, ethnicity and community.

Huh. Well, I don't have any trouble with elementary kids teaching about sweatshops, poverty, and unequal distribution of wealth—the earlier the better! On the other hand, I'm not convinced that there's any better way to teach mathematics than just drill numbers and rules into your students' heads, the strict, boring, and wholly unethnic way. Anecdotally, this seems true, and yes, even of minorities—an ex-girlfriend of mine was a fourth grade teacher in a poor, all-minority school in Redwood City this past year, and she taught multiplication via the old-fashioned method, with a "finish 60 problems in 60 seconds" drill (and you have to keep taking the test over and over until you can finish; drudgery!), which seemed to work very well. But I'd be curious to hear evidence to the contrary. (By the way, nothing breaks my heart like the phrase, "As long as kids know how to use a calculator, they're fine.")

One thing I don't think is so silly, though, is the whole self-esteem factor. For some odd reason, people who struggle with math often say, "I'm just not a math person"—something you never hear with any other academic skill. ("I'm just not a writing person"? "I'm just not a reading comprehension person"?) That ain't right! So something like "Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood" seems, at least on the surface, like a perfectly good use of time and resources.

Interesting sidenote on the Ten Commandments monument. According to the latest Pew Poll, support for the Ten Commandments is, as you'd expect, overwhelming among Americans—which is certainly why many liberals would rather just let this go, avoid being branded as militant religion-haters, and fight more important battles elsewhere. What's interesting, though, is that even among "seculars"—i.e. atheists, agnostics, non-believers—only 48 percent think the display is "improper". No real point here, that's just smaller than I would've thought.

More flooding the zone from SCOTUSblog on the Grokster decision. Susan Crawford tells us not to worry about Grokster, which "gives certainty to tech companies." Worry instead about the Brand X decision, which "takes it away":

In BrandX, Justice Thomas gets very confused about the internet and ends up essentially announcing that everything a user does online is an "information service" being offered by the access provider. DNS, email (even if some other provider is making it available), applications, you name it -- they're all included in this package. And the FCC can make rules about these information services under its broad "ancillary jurisdiction."

This is very very big. This means that even though information services like IM and email don't have to pay tariffs or interconnect with others, they may (potentially) have to pay into the universal service fund, be subject to CALEA, provide enhanced 911 services, provide access to the disabled, and be subject to general consumer protection rules -- all the subjects of the FCC's IP-enabled services NPRM. I've blogged about this a good deal elsewhere, but I want the news to be heard here: the FCC is now squarely in charge of all internet-protocol enabled services.

Well… I've been googling around trying to figure out what, exactly, this means in plain English, to a technically-inept American like myself, but frankly, I have no idea. Presumably the decision affects competition in some undefined way. And consumer groups were in Brand X's camp, so that seems good? Uhhh...

The SCOTUSblog coverage of the Ten Commandments cases is pretty thorough and it would be hard to add anything substantive here. One point though. I'm fairly sympathetic to the view that a government that endorsed a particular belief system, however broadly conceived, would be marginalizing a wide array of people who don't share that belief system. A Muslim or an atheist visiting the Texas State Capitol, seeing the Ten Commandments display, would have good reason to feel uncomfortable, excluded, and perhaps even unwelcome.

But those reasons, I think, have very little to do with the Ten Commandments per se. Take all the statues down and Muslims and atheists will still have good reason to feel excluded or marginalized around the Texas State Capitol, thanks to all sorts of cultural and social factors that are really quite pervasive. By the same token, if those cultural and social factors somehow up and vanished, if Muslims felt accepted by American society and their beliefs considered part of the mainstream, then it's hard to imagine that a Ten Commandments statue would have any effect at all. So it's hard to believe that the monuments are either necessary or sufficient for creating those ill feelings of exclusion. (In fact, I think the same could apply for school prayer—neither necessary nor sufficient to make non-praying kids feel uncomfortable and excluded.) Now perhaps one could stand by the idea that it doesn't matter if these symbols are important or not, the government shouldn't be in the business of promoting any sort of symbol with even the potential for discrimination. Well, fair enough, so long as the anti-monument forces are clear that they're fighting for a principle rather than a practical victory.

Another point worth noting was Douglas Laycock's: "The Congregationalists learned [to keep religion out of politics] when the Unitarians started winning elections." That's right. I'm trying to remember my history here, but wasn't it James Madison, atheist extraordinaire, who argued against the Establishment Clause? His reasoning, I think, was that all the different religious sects in America would act as a check on each other, ensuring that no one religion triumphed, and do it far more effectively than any law on paper ever could.

Something along those lines is still correct today. Right now the religious wars are fought largely between a tiny secularist minority and a tiny evangelical right minority, with the bulk of religious America somewhat apathetically siding with the evangelical right on these issues, just because they too are "religious" in a broad sense. On the other hand, if there was no Establishment Clause, my hunch is that different religious sects would be far, far more wary of each other, they'd all be battling it out over government endorsements of religious symbols, and that, I think, would be more effective at keeping religion out of politics than the current dynamic. Maybe that's wrong. It's also worth noting that that tiny evangelical right minority, the James Dobson crowd and the like, has so watered down its faith in order to appeal to their fellow religious conservatives—transmuting actual theological beliefs and differences into a vague and mushy alliance of "values"—that they've pretty much turned religion into a set of meaningless platitudes. Someday I'll write a long and appropriately disdainful post about how the values evangelicals are the biggest bunch of relativists operating in the world today. But not now.

In the wake of this puerile Michael Barone column, just one more point about Karl Rove and Afghanistan. Rove's big attack on liberal groups like MoveOn.org, etc., is that they weren't prepared to pummel the Taliban after 9/11—and despite Eli Pariser's dancing around the point, I'm willing to believe that was the case. Fine. In this case, MoveOn was wrong; invading Afghanistan as quickly as possible seems in retrospect the right thing to do: it disrupted al-Qaeda's operations, and it ended up being good for the people of Afghanistan—despite Bush's initial and very vehement insistence that the war on terror would not be about "nation building," it became, in fact, about nation building, which in this instance was good and proper.

But what's forgotten here is that it was also a tremendously good thing to have some people, even a tiny minority, who were digging in their heels against invasion, people who were worried about mass casualties and collateral damage. The U.S. military, to a large extent, went out of its way to avoid civilian casualties during Operation Enduring Freedom. There were horrific accidents, like that much-cited wedding party assault, but our soldiers were far, far more delicate about their bombing raids and attacks than virtually any military has ever been against any country ever. There was no "Highway of Death" as there was during the first Gulf War. For that, I think, you do have to credit the antiwar movement in part, which hamstrung the military in a positive way, and levied a great deal of humanitarian counterforce against the unending beat the war drums during those early days in the "war on terror."

People like to complain that the United States is hampered in its wars and operations because we have to be so delicate, we have to abide by the rules of war, we can't just raze villages and torture whoever we want whenever we want. (Obviously that happens, and it should, but overall there's a lot of restraint here.) But not only is this a good thing from a moral standpoint, it's a good thing strategically as well. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the consensus in the CIA was that the Russians wouldn't get bogged down in a Vietnam-style quagmire because they weren't bound by decency or moderation—they could smash whatever they wanted. Those quagmire predictions turned out to be false, and they were false because the Soviets were so ruthless. (Well, that and the mujahideen were being armed rather handsomely by rogue elements of the CIA.) Point is: the liberals edgy about war immediately after 9/11 may have been wrong, but the pressure they were putting on those who were right was essential. Perhaps it makes good political sense for "moderate" Democrats to turn and denounce our hand-holding Kumbaya brethren on the far left. Personally, I'd rather not be embarrassed by them, and acknowledge that even if the peaceniks shouldn't be running the Pentagon—and won't ever be—they still play a crucial role in any healthy democracy. And I say that as someone who's pretty obviously not a peacenik.

Mark Blumenthal, Mystery Pollster, scratches around in the archives and finds... that Democrats reacted to September 11 just like Republicans did, ready to lock and load all the way to Kabul. Well, no kidding. One thing that's interesting to note, though, is that the post-9/11 situation was fairly unique in that we actually had someone to go to war with. After a terrorist attack that left a lot of people wanting to smash and pulverize something back into the Stone Age, it just so happened that there actually was a country we got to go smash and pulverize—a concurrence which, I think, helped George Bush maintain his fantastically high ratings through late 2001 and all through 2002. It was obviously quite satisfying for a lot of people to invade Afghanistan in a way that it wouldn't have been satisfying to hand out indictments or send the CIA off on secret terrorist-hunting missions. But what if there hadn't been an Afghanistan to smash up? Things would've been trickier.

Initially, of course, the Bush administration tried to negotiate with the Taliban and get them to turn over bin Laden, Zawihiri, Abu Zubaydah, and the rest. That didn't work, but if it had worked, and bin Laden had been handed over on a silver platter, there may not have been an invasion at all—judging by Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Rumsfeld wasn't all that excited about attacking Afghanistan in the first place—and instead the U.S. would've been sitting around handing out indictments and prosecuting terrorists. True, there still would've been some military action: the U.S. would have almost certainly bombed more al-Qaeda camps in the region, and the Taliban likely would've collapsed eventually after alienating all those Islamic militants it had been counting on to fight the Northern Alliance. But the whole thing might've been much less than the full-scale war we actually got.

Now it's true that indictments and precision attacks on bases wouldn't have been enough for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc., and in our alternate universe, after the bin Laden trial finished, the administration would have likely fired up the war machine and trained its sights on Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, without a successful Afghanistan invasion under his belt, the president would have had a much harder time making the case that we could succeed against Iraq. The stunning and rapid defeat of the Taliban really was pretty decisive in convincing people that war was no big deal—and much of that credit, as I've said before, goes to Bush, who pushed hard for a seemingly-impossible invasion before winter set in, and avoided getting bogged down by NATO. A more cautious president like Al Gore, I think, might have waited until spring of 2002 to invade, at which point he would have had less public support, and probably a more difficult war to fight on the ground. And that would have meant no Iraq, for sure.

But back to the point: a lot of the unity surrounding the Afghanistan campaign came from the fact that it was a very clear and obvious thing to do in response to 9/11 (although the country was still considered the "graveyard of empires", etc., and few thought the invasion would be easy). We simply didn't have to weigh the dilemmas of, say, attacking a nuclear-armed Pakistan—if Musharraf had been held responsible there would have been much less of a popular consensus behind our next move. That holds true today, I think: if there's another terrorist attack tomorrow, there's not going to be an Afghanistan to attack—even Syria and Iran will be tricky—and without the obvious war option handy, there will be, I think, much less agreement on what to do.

It's a pity that Mark Steyn's such a swamp-feeding blowhard, because he writes so marvelously well. Take his lavish column on the flag-burning amendment, which expounds on the "I'm okay with dissent; I just think actual dissenters should be rounded up and shot!" theme beloved by right-wingers everywhere. (His version: "I'm okay with dissent, because it helps identify the traitors in our midst more easily!") Vile stuff, but his opposition to the amendment itself can't be improved: "A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned, that's not a sign of its weakness but of its strength."

Also note that for all intents and purposes, it's impossible to ban flag-torching. Seriously.

Via mini-praktike, I see that "an international consensus ha[s] emerged blaming Syria for stoking violence in Lebanon, Iraq and against Israelis." Well, true that. Syria is pretty slimy in a lot of ways. But what, pray tell, is the international community going to do about Syria? The article notes, "Rice has not said what other forms of pressure might be applied," presumably because there aren't many other forms of pressure available. We're not going to invade or start bombing. We've already thrust in the sanctions sword to the hilt. Europe, of course, could still slap down its own sanctions, but it's not clear that they want to—France and other EU countries are presumably still wary of getting dragged into a more hardline stance against Syria than they'd prefer—and it's not clear that sanctions would do any good, besides hurting the Syrian people and giving Bashar Assad an excuse to blame the West for all of his problems.

Perhaps the hope is that if Europe makes angry noises about Syria, Bashar will get worried enough to withdraw his intelligence agents from Lebanon, quit assassinating Lebanese opposition figures, and do something about the jihadist corridor leading into Iraq. But Bashar's international position just doesn't look all that weak, and maintaining some shred of control in Lebanon is obviously very important to him. The consensus seems to be that the United States has Syria by the short and curlies these days, but I don't see that at all. Not to stretch the analogy too far, but our Syria policy is starting to resemble our Cuba policy more and more each passing day. See also Fareed Zakaria's important column on the broader theme here.

David Fiege makes a very good point. Harsh punishments, for all we know, don't really deter regular crime very well, including burglaries, murders, or other crimes of desperation, or crimes done in the "heat of the moment". But white-collar crime—corporate fraud especially—isn't like that. The criminals know full well what they're doing, have time to plan it out, and think very, very carefully beforehand about the costs and benefits of their actions. The threat of seriously brutal punishment really ought to be able to deter corporate criminals like John Rigas or Dennis Kszlowski. So why not threaten to toss these crooks into ordinary Leavenworth-style prisons, where the soap is always slippery and the guards are always, um, watching over you? That ought to put a stop to corporate fraud real quick.

The aim, they say, is to respect sexuality; not to debase it by giving in to crass bodily urges and the like. But judging from this Rolling Stone profile of abstinence-only Christian youths, not only do these people have the filthiest of minds, but the poor lads have no hope of ever getting beyond their own base lust:

The Every Man [a popular book series on abstinence] premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. …

"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves.

Not to mention the fact that this entire chastity movement is, like pornography, obsessed with women as objects—the "purity ring" given by fathers to their daughters, and returned on wedding day, is the obvious example here. I sound like I'm smirking, perhaps, and I am. This is all very silly. If for some reason I wanted to convince a broad swath of youth that there was nothing more to life—or women!—than sex, thinking about sex, dreaming about sex, worrying about sex, finding sex symbols in everyday life, sex, sex, sex, etc., this is exactly the sort of movement I'd design. Don't think of a white elephant. Oh well, people can do what they want; it's just a little ironic that these young lads are calling their peers "sexed-up heathens." Uh-huh. But the article's wholly engrossing; give it a read.

Stygius is probably very right about this: the tide of polls turning sour on Bush and Iraq probably doesn't mean there's some widespread clamor for withdrawal. What it most likely means—insofar as you can translate polls into preferences—is that a lot of Americans really, deep down, want the president or some other authority figure to sit down with them, explain what needs to be done in Iraq—see, for example, Kris Alexander's charts and graphs on this—along with what our military experts think can be done in Iraq, and readjust our priorities if the latter doesn't quite stack up with the former. If a stable, democratic Iraq isn't an achievable goal, then perhaps it's time to proceed to our Afghanization phase. Certainly that's what I'd like someone to explain. On the other hand, I'm not sure anyone in the Bush administration "really" knows what they'd like to achieve—do they plan on keeping bases there indefinitely?, for instance—and there's something quaint and naïve about asking the president to level with us.

One other major problem is that "military leaders" don't even seem to agree on what can physically be done in Iraq. The commander-in-chief thinks all is blossoms and roses. Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey sound more sober about the insurgency, but admit it will cost a lot of "blood and treasure" to win this thing. And then you have Lt. Gen. John Vines insisting that we need to draw down "relatively soon." Who's right? The top generals may know a lot, but it's not obvious that they know better than the officers lower down, and they might even be wrong. So who's right? No idea. The point is that there doesn't seem to be a "correct" appraisal of Iraq that we could somehow all see clearly if only our leaders would level with us.

Now as it stands, I'm tentatively against what seems to be the Democratic idea of setting a deadline for withdrawal, in part because I do think Iraq would go to hell if we left before certain goals are accomplished (but what are those goals?), and in part because I don't quite buy the argument that announcing withdrawal would "scare" the newly-elected Iraqi government into sweet, sweet compromise rather than engaging in the furious bits of brinksmanship they've been engaging in thus far. That seems wrong. Yes, true, the negotiations between the Sunnis and Shiites have been ugly at times, and will continue to be ugly—hey, they're ugly here in America too—but they haven't been intractable. I don't see how announcing our withdrawal would magically speed things and get a constitution pounded out. More to the point, I'm not sure a series of rapid and hasty compromises by the Shiites, made under the threat of a U.S. withdrawal, will lead to a stable Iraq down the road.

Meanwhile, it seems true that the training of Iraqi security forces needs to be done right and can't be done on a timetable—five to ten years seems to be the timeframe usually given. And I'm also not quite sure the Iraqi government would gain any newfound legitimacy from not having the United States around, or by having the U.S. announce a deadline for departure. Perhaps they'd gain legitimacy among the Sunnis. But then perhaps many Sunnis would hate a Shiite-led government no matter what. At any rate, PM Ibrahim Jaafari seems to be threading the needle here by begging the U.S. to stay in private and pricking against the occupation in public. So that seems to be the trend for the time being; we're in for at least two more years of the same. Still, so long as we insist on staying until the "job is done," without any sort of forceful timetable, it's not unrealistic to think that we're looking at an open-ended occupation that's trying to achieve impossible goals, an occupation that will last until the Army breaks apart. Which is why Daniel Byman's idea of a targeted drawdown, along with narrowing our objectives to pursue some form of "managed anarchy" in Iraq—i.e. avoiding large-scale civil war, deterring a coup, making sure the oil supply isn't disrupted, and preventing Afghanistan-style terrorist camps from forming—might end up being the least bad of a menu of very bad options.

In the New Republic this week, Joseph Braude brings up a new slant on the oil dependence problem; namely, that other Arab countries are running out of oil and thus relying increasingly on imports from Saudi Arabia. And that means, says Braude, that oil-dependent countries could increasingly start to resemble oil-less Jordan, forced to tolerate radical, Saudi-funded Wahhabi clerics and mosques in their country:

[Jordanian King] Abdullah depends on Saudi Arabia for cheap, subsidized oil; he has none of his own. So there are limits to what he can do to stem the flow of Saudi soft power into his country. Hardly a friend of freedom and democracy, Jordan's king is increasingly viewed in Washington as a disappointment on the issue of political reform. If you're a secular liberal and want to start a national party in Amman, you're in for a rough fight. But, when Saudi-backed preachers play politics in the country's mosques--even, at times, campaigning against the king's own pro-Western policies--Abdullah suddenly shows off his tolerance for pluralism....

At an April conference of the pro-Saudi Salafi movement in Amman, local and foreign preachers, including a guest from Saudi Arabia, spoke out against Jews, Christians, Shia, feminism, and globalization. Sheik Muhammad Nasr denounced the latter as a "scourge" and an "American-led plot to disrupt Muslim unity." These sentiments aren't exactly simpatico to an authoritarian state with a ubiquitous queen, a warm peace with Israel, a large urban Christian community, a Shia refugee population, and membership in the World Trade Organization. Yet the clerics who delivered these tirades were left alone by the government. .... Salafi clerics are staunchly backed by Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia is indispensable to the Jordanian economy.

The solution here seems to be to help promote energy independence among countries like Egypt, Yemen, Syria—which also happen to be fantastic sites for solar and wind energy projects. Sounds good, although I do wonder how this will all work in practice… Presumably greater energy independence among Arab nations won't lower global demand by nearly enough to tighten the petrodollar spigots flowing into Saudi Arabia—especially with China and India growing without bound, and the Republican regime in the United States hostile towards energy independence. That means that the House of Saud will always be rich enough to fund a growing network of radical mosques around the Middle East, no matter what other Arab countries do. (At least until X years far into the future when they run out of oil altogether.)

So okay, let's say Jordan wasn't dependent on Saudi crude, but the Saudi-funded mosques and clerics were still there. What, exactly, could King Abdullah do about it that he can't do now? Somehow stop money from crossing his borders? Um... Actually crack down on the Islamists? That gets rid of the hostile Wahhabi problem but would, presumably, inflame the sort of ill feelings that led to things like the rise of al Qaeda, no? I just have a hard time understanding why the rise of Wahhabism around the region is a problem that could be mitigated somewhat if only other countries weren't so beholden to Saudi oil supplies.

Oh no! It's not just liberals who are the terror-loving traitors. It's the president too:

Jenna and Barbara Bush, the president's party-hopping 22-year-old daughters, said Wednesday their father has shown them the importance of moderation and restraint.

Karl is not going to be pleased...

In the category of "fascinating stuff I wish I knew more about, but hey, maybe it turns out I don't really need to after all"—er, yes, that's a category—is this paper by Peter Westen on free will and determinism: "I argue… that the relationship between free will and determinism is a false problem, that is, a problem that we are incapable of resolving, even in theory. The proper response to a false problem… is to stop thinking about it." Duh, okay. Actually, his punches seem to land pretty solidly, but what do I know? And also, why is this sort of thing published in a law journal rather than peer-reviewed for a philosophy journal? Doesn't that make it suspect from the start?

Somewhat relatedly, while waiting for the bus this morning I saw a headline in the SF Examiner showing the chap who cloned Dolly declaring that we need to slow down the stem cell-push so that we can have a proper "debate over when life begins." Now we hear this line a lot from people like Leon Kass—that everyone needs to slow down and take a breath so that we have time to think about the ethical issues. Really? Are there any ethical issues surrounding stem-cells that haven't been debated to death already and might somehow get resolved or clarified in the next year or two if bio-ethicists could just get a little breathing room to think harder about them? It doesn't seem so. It comes down to: "clump of cells: rights or no rights?" which has been scoured pretty thoroughly and isn't any closer to getting resolved. On the other hand, I can think of a number of issues with regard to the genetic enhancement of human beings that probably haven't been wracked over nearly as thoroughly, and are actually capable of being clarified. So it's probably best to train our attention on those issues, and fast, before Gattaca descends upon us.

This is pretty clearly the proper way to think about the issue.

Okay, frankly, I'm losing interest in this Dick Durbin story. Yes, in my ideal world, most Americans would agree that chaining someone to the floor and letting them shit all over themselves is not the way to treat other human beings, but apparently that's too much to ask. What really keeps me up at night is the fact that we have complete fucking idiots running Congress:

Asked what the next step for Durbin would be, an aide to Frist told FOX News, "Well, when you say something that appears all over Al Jazeera, you have a lot of work to do."

Now I've seen drones like Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds engage in this sort of mindlessness about al-Jazeera before, but that's fine, it's expected of people who don't know anything about the Middle East and, frankly, aren't much interested. Bill Frist and his merry band of Oompa-Loompas, however, should know better. You know, given that we're fighting The Most Important War Ever over in the region and all. It might help to know, for instance, that Zarqawi and his goons despise al-Jazeerah for hurting their cause. It might help to know that al-Jazeerah is one of the few forums in the Arab world for legitimate debate about the future of democratic reform. But no, it seems the top priority for Frist and company is to undercut al-Jazeerah to the point where the only major news network left in the Middle East will be everyone's favorite Saudi propaganda outlet, al-Arabiyya. You know, if I were in the pocket of King Fahd this would be my strategy too. Except I'm not.

So I intend to blog about Curtis Cate's new Nietzsche biography without ever discussing either a) Nietzsche himself or b) any of his ideas. With that out of the way, here's yet another extraneous passage from the book:

By this time [i.e. May 1871], Fritz was seriously upset by the bloody turmoil in Paris, where a band of revolutionary "patriots," outraged by Adolfe Thiers's and his bourgeois government's meek acceptance of Bismarck's peace terms, had occupied the city hall and many other public buildings. The Communards... had chosen this inopportune moment to establish a new proletarian regime... It seemed, from newspaper reports reaching Basel, as though all of Paris was on fire... and now came news that the Louvre, with its priceless library and art collections, was ablaze... The news left Nietzsche absolutely shattered.

Well, who wouldn't be shattered? Watching the poor rise up and torch the Louvre is a scary experience! Interestingly, though, here in the United States we've never really had these sorts of class-related riots and rebellions, that is, the sort that threaten the actual seat of government. Sure, there were all sorts of violent outbursts by the working classes in the 19th century, and again in the 1930s and 1960s, but never anything that threatened Washington D.C. in the way that Paris was upended multiple times over the past three centuries, or even in the way London was threatened in the 1880s.

But so what? Well, some economists have argued that widespread social unrest tends to lead to increased income redistribution and greater democratization, that the latter are responses to the former. But presumably you need the right sort of social unrest. The scary sort. And one of the things that helps foster truly scary rioting is urban density. Indeed, according to this paper, across OECD countries "there is a significant positive effect of density on redistribution: 38.6 percent." So one theory might be that America, thanks to its lower population density, was able to avoid the sort of nation-threatening riots that helps bring about the expansion of the welfare state.

Of course, the alternate explanation, as given by the second paper linked there, is that greater density increases empathy for the poor—a person is more likely to support a larger welfare state if he or she lives near, say, the slums; in America, it's easier to get away from the poor than it is in Europe—which in turn increases support for income redistribution. Another possible explanation is that our "open frontier" somehow made lots of people in America feel like rugged individuals and thus less likely to support the nanny state than were their French counterparts. Another explanation is that this is all bunk and there are an infinite number of reasons why the U.S. never developed a European-style welfare state. But that's no fun. And who knows, maybe it really was because we never had the, um, Nietzsche-esque fear of the proletarian put into us.

The rumors are wrong. A Uruguayan 10-centisimo coin does not work as a substitute for an American quarter in Coke machines. Neither does a Japanese 10-yen for that matter. I feel so lied to...

More on Uzbekistan. Daniel Nexon of the new and excellent Duck of Minerva says it's time to cut Karimov loose. Nathan Hamm's not so sure. Duck of Minerva makes an impressive case, but I think I'm still with Nathan on this one. I do agree that "ugly" actions—like, say, cozying up to Uzbekistan—can hurt America's legitimacy and moral authority around the world, and that's bad. But I'm not convinced that all ugly actions are the same—every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Our undying support for Husni Mubarak's regime in Egypt, for instance, obviously has real costs and makes people hate the United States—to the point where they're blowing up our skyscrapers. That's terrible. But support for Uzbekistan isn't like that. As Nathan has pointed out before, it's not at all clear that most Uzbeks are chafing at the bit and hate the United States for supporting Karimov. (In fact, they don't seem to give us much thought at all.)

Meanwhile, sure, there's a whole barricade of human rights and liberal groups out there blasting the United States for siding with Karimov and his torture chambers. But let's face it: as much as I respect these groups, they're not going to stop criticizing the United States for moral hypocrisy anytime soon. That's not to say they're wrong, it's just that these aren't the sort of "swing voters" who will start to consider the United States the world's shining beacon or morality all because we disengage from Uzbekistan. (There's a useful point about incentives to be made here.) So how much legitimacy do we actually lose from supporting Uzbekistan? Daniel Nexon might well be right that it's a lot; I just want to see the evidence.

Onto Nexon's more important point: If Uzbekistan's really in danger of sidling up closer to China (and he argues that this potential sidling is probably overblown), then that just proves that we never had much leverage over Karimov in the first place. Well, that's true, and as Nathan says it seems unlikely that we'll be able to shove Uzbekistan down the democracy path anytime soon. Still, engagement could lead to all sorts of minor little pushes and nudges behind the scenes: aid and cooperation with Uzbek NGOs and civil society groups, for instance. And then there's military cooperation which, as Joseph Braude explains here, can at least get you a few steps closer to democratization, by promoting transparency in defense planning and democratic control of security forces. (Steven Cook has done some thinking along these lines too.) Just because we don't have much leverage over Karimov, and can't "force" him to, say, hold free elections, doesn't mean nothing positive can come out of friendly engagement. In theory. Of course, if Karimov's intent on scuttling the Uzbekistan-U.S. relationship, as he seems to be, then there's no sense chasing after him. Engagement doesn't mean frantic pandering. Foreign affairs are ugly but they don't need to be pathetic.

Last note: I am worried about the United States getting dragged into Uzbekistan's internal conflicts. If there is, as Nathan says, a risk of the country "collapsing into a chaotic civil war," one would prefer that the U.S. had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, who are we kidding? If civil war did happen, the U.S. would get involved like it or not, so it may as well stick around for the time being, preparing for that possibility.

Over at TPMCafe, Petey brings up my favorite pasttime—hammering away at just how un-democratic the electoral institutions of the United States really are—and points out that these un-democratic institutions also happen to be hurting the large-d Democrats. "Red" states, for instance, get disproportionate representation in the Senate, the electoral college, etc. etc. Yes it's a real shame, though believe me, the fortunes of the Democratic Party is not what keeps me up at night. Nevertheless, Petey also notes that the likelihood of real electoral reform, which would include: abolishing the Electoral College, experimenting with proportional representation, giving the hundreds of thousands of citizens living in our nation's capital some sort of political standing, maybe even passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing—oh I dunno—the right to vote, maybe... sadly, the likelihood of those sorts of major changes happening is nil.

For the most part I agree, although I still intend to clamor for this stuff at every turn. One should also note that not all electoral reform is out of reach; smaller stuff at the margins is certainly possible. For example, if we can just disabuse little states of the notion that they benefit from the Electoral College (they don't), maybe we can get that monstrosity abolished. Meanwhile, it's often forgotten that single-member House districts didn't become a federal requirement until the 1960s—there's no reason we can't reverse the trend and start electing representatives on a statewide basis. And some state -level experiments—like doing away with bicameral legislatures, which are really quite ridiculous when you think about it—could be tried. Heck, one day liberals might even get to install a few Supreme Court Justices who don't believe that the whole purpose of Equal Protection Clause is to deny minorities political representation. One can hope! So yeah, there are incremental things to be done, although I agree, even those aren't easy.

Nevertheless, there's one major blight to our democratic system that is both entirely shameful and easy to fix. It has to do with prisoners and voting rights. Ideally, one day I'd like to see all prisoners given the right to vote—yes, even while they're in prison. (The picture on the right is a Canadian prisoner voting in 2004.) But that's so whoppingly pie-in-the-sky that I'll settle for a constitutional amendment that guarantees ex-felons, at least, the right to vote. That 1.4 million Americans who have repaid their debt to society cannot vote is not something that should stand.

Nevertheless, many people are opposed to even that, and while I think they're wrong, I don't think they're unreasonable. What is unreasonable, however, is this: despite the fact that prisoners can't vote, they are still counted for census and reapportionment purposes to swell and fatten House districts. Going back to the partisan theme here, since prisoners are usually shipped from heavily minority urban areas to prisons located in overwhelmingly white rural areas, this, shall we say, benefits one party more than the other. Republican State Sen. Dale Volker in New York, for instance, gets to count the 11,000 Attica prisoners as part of his district, despite the fact that they certainly aren't allowed to vote for him, or anyone else for that matter. Effectively, the whole scam redistributes power away from urban communities.

This sort of practice, of course, isn't new. It's exactly what Southerners did with slaves prior to emancipation—the slaves would be counted in the census as part of the population (each slave counted as three-fifths of a person), so as to give Southern stats more House seats and more Electoral College votes, but those slaves could not, of course cast a vote. Now regardless of how you feel about giving prisoners the right to vote, there is nothing even remotely approaching a principled argument in favor of counting the 2.5 million disenfranchised prisoners for census and reapportionment purposes. It has to end. And just this one tiny, simple, wholly defensible reform would make the United States at least a wee bit more democratic. Hey, change has to start somewhere.

Hilarious: "I got a threshold, Jedi. I got a threshold for the abuse I'll take. And right now I'm a race car and you got me in the red."

Via Unfogged.

During the 1950s, Herman Kahn was part of the RAND Corporation's cadre of hyper-rational authorities on nuclear war, who was paid to ask, "what if?" What if the Soviet Union lobbed a few nuke-studded missiles our way? What if they struck first? Second? His book on the subject was based on two assertions: "The first is that nuclear war is possible; the second is that it is winnable," and churned the stomachs of many readers for the calm manner in which he laid out the aftermath of nuclear winter:

The most infamous pages in "On Thermonuclear War" concern survivability. What makes nuclear war different, Kahn points out, is not the number of dead; it's a new element—the problem of the postwar environment. In Kahn's view, the dangers of radioactivity are exaggerated. Fallout will make life less pleasant and cause inconvenience, but there is plenty of unpleasantness and inconvenience in the world already. "War is a terrible thing; but so is peace," he says. More babies might have birth defects after a nuclear war, but four per cent of babies have birth defects anyway. Whether we can tolerate a slightly higher percentage of defective children is a question of trade-offs. "It might well turn out," Kahn suggests, "that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia."

The book proposes a system for labelling contaminated food so that older people will eat the food that is more radioactive, on the theory that "most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer."

Of course, the whole purpose of his book was less to inform than simply to exist, to have certain illocutionary effects. In order for deterrence to be a credible strategy, the Soviet Union had to believe that we were actually crazy enough to fight—and accept the costs of—the worst of nuclear apocalypses, and that's where thinkers like Kahn came in. Reading about his life and thought, it's impossible to believe that there weren't people genuinely crazy enough to try to win a nuclear war. Which was, I suppose, what they wanted Moscow to believe. (I believe Mao Tse-Tung once made a similar threat, noting that if 200 million Americans died in an atomic exchange, that would mean the end of the United States; 200 million dead Chinese would be a mere blip on the radar.)

Now the interesting, and maybe less appalling, question is whether a similar deterrence strategy could work today, against terrorism. What if the United States made it clear that September 11-type attacks were no big deal. What if the general tenor of national security discourse ran: "Okay, well even 12,000 or 20,000 dead is tragic, but life will go on, and society won't collapse." Would that change anything? Say I'm a terrorist trying to achieve X amount of terror; ideally I'd like to do it in the cheapest way possible—perhaps by exploding a suicide bomb in a mall. But if I know that American society is perfectly willing to absorb a minor attack like that, then the stakes are raised. A bomb in a mall would be useless. To achieve X amount of terror, I would have to go blow up a chlorine tank or something. Or try to get my hands on a nuclear suitcase. If America had a cavalier attitude towards terrorist attacks—rather than the fairly frantic one we do have—would that persuade some terrorists to try to up the ante and think up even more deadly attacks, or it would it discourage some terrorists from even trying? ("What's the point, Americans can't be terrorized.") There may be some terrorists who would like to set off a nuclear bomb in Times Square regardless of our opinion on the matter; but surely there are some terrorists who respond to incentives, no?

Since the two health care posts below took a few perhaps undeserved swipes at doctors, I should say that today's physicians are really quite excellent by historical standards. I've been reading Curtis Cate's new biography of Nietzsche, which had this gruesome little tidbit about Dr Joseph Wiel, one of the foremost "gastric" specialists in 19th century Germany:

After carefully examining Nietzsche's belly [dude had ulcers], he decided that his patient was suffering from 'chronic stomach catarrah.' The cure he prescribed involved an early morning use of cold-water-injecting clyster—that all-purpose instrument of anal torture which Moliere had so mercilessly lampooned in several of his comedies. Next, the amiable Dr Wiel prescribed a dietary regime of four small meals a day, almost exclusively composed of meat. They were preceded in the morning by some Carlsbad fruit salts and accompanied for the midday and evening meals by a glass of Bordeaux wine. And, as an ultimate refinement, the application to the earlobe of blood-sucking leetches!

Sad to say, it didn't work.

Also tucked inside Quadagno's book is a fun Lyndon Johnson anecdote that's too good not to share. Here's LBJ, right after the passage of Medicare, trying to win over the American Medical Association and persuade doctors to support the new measure:

On July 3 Lyndon Johnson agreed to meet with AMA officials who had come to complain about socialized medicine. ... As the doctors sat around the table, waiting politely for the president to speak, Johnson gave them the "treatment." He first told the assembled physicians, "Your country needs your help. Your President needs your help." Would they be willing to serve in Vietnam, treating wounded civilians? When the doctors immediately responded that they would, Johnson told an aide to get the press. In front of assembled reporters, the president praised the doctors' willingness to help the Vietnamese. Then when reporters, primed by aides, asked the physicians if they would support Medicare, Johnson replied indignantly, "Of course they'll support the law of the land." Turning to AMA president James Appel, he said, "You tell him." "Of course we will," Appel meekly replied. A few weeks later the AMA publicly announced its intention to support Medicare.

The "treatment." Ha. Very slick. Of course, doctors still loathed Medicare for quite some time, at least until they found out that they could run up their costs and fees and still get reimbursed, thanks to the lax cost controls set up by the initial bill. A junior Halliburton in every hospital, that's what it was.

So it only took me, oh, two whole months, but I finally got around to finishing Jill Quadagno's excellent book, One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance. It's a little thin on the details—sadly, no in-depth explanation as to why the Clinton health care reform spluttered out in here—but it gives a useful historical overview of the struggle over national health care. Fun, fun. But let's cut to the chase: Why doesn't the United States have universal health insurance, when just about every other OECD country does? Well, after reading the book, here are six big theories:

1. Fear of socialism: Maybe Americans are different from our neighbors abroad and have a special dislike for state-run programs. There's something to this: opponents of national health care have made a lot of headway by raising the specter of socialism against various attempts at reform: from their defeat of the AALL campaign in the 1910s to the AMA's mobilization against Harry Truman's national health care plan in the 1940s to the backlash against "government-run" HillaryCare in the 1990s. (Even John Kerry's health care reform got tarred with the "government takeover" brush last year, and it was scary enough that he needed to respond.) But why then, Quadagno asks, did Medicare pass, when it too was labeled "statist"? One answer might be that the mid-1960s was a relatively unique time when federal intervention had won newfound legitimacy—thanks to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts—and the specter of socialism was no longer as strong as it was in, say, the 1950s. So it's a theory to keep in mind.

2. Weak labor movement: The labor movement here in the United States has been, on average, much weaker than that in other countries. For one, it has never really had its own party. (By European standards, the Democrats are a sad-sack excuse for a labor party, and that's even more true historically.) Meanwhile, union infighting during the first half of the 20th century meant that there was never a unified labor movement for national health care; union leaders like George Meany and Samuel Gompers preferred to secure health care benefits through collective bargaining agreements with large corporations, rather than going through Congress. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s, the AFL-CIO got too distracted and failed to back Ted Kennedy's national health care proposal to the hilt, and in the 1990s was too embittered by the NAFTA battle to support Clinton fully. On the other hand, when organized labor threw its full weight behind disability insurance and Medicare, both got both passed, so perhaps a more focused labor movement would have brought national health insurance to this country. Perhaps.

3. Racial politics. This is probably a major reason why the United States has a less redistributive welfare state overall than other OECD countries (see Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote). And it helps explain the failure of health care reform too. The main factor here is that Southern Democrats from the 1930s through 1960s were unwilling to support any health care program that was run by the federal government; after all, that would put Congress in a position to enforce racial integration in hospitals. Couldn't have that. (Notably, the Southern Democrats did not block disability insurance in 1956, which was designed to be run by state health departments.)

4. Structural explanations: Quadagno doesn't really discuss this one, but as we know, it's hard to get stuff passed in the United States: we've got a lot of checks and balances in Congress. Meanwhile, let's not forget that our representatives are elected by winning pluralities in geographically-based districts. As such, they have infinitely more incentive to favor spending programs that are geographically targeted and local—yes, the sweet smell of pork—rather than universal benefits that affect the entire country. That means that Congress as a whole will be, by design, less concerned with national health care. But heh, longtime readers are probably sick of hearing me harp on this subject, so I'll let it go for now.

5. Path dependency: Ah yes, "path dependency" is a big one, and Quadagno only touches on this briefly. There are certain "accidental" features of history which have sent the United States down certain paths that then became ingrained over time. For example, the fact that we happen to have an 18th century-era constitution obsessed with property rights—something few, if any, of the other OECD countries have—meant that our courts have traditionally been more hostile towards welfare states than those abroad. And small differences can accumulate over time. During the Progressive Era, the Supreme Court helped to constrain pushes for broad-based social insurance, which in turn helped private insurers step in and fill the void, and those private insurers metastasized and grew powerful over time, thus opposing national health care.

Meanwhile, the "accidental" fact of World War II led many companies to compete for workers by offering health benefits—since wages were frozen during the war—which in turn enticed unions into trying to bargain for better benefits directly rather than push for a national health program. And the passage of Medicare in 1966 helped siphon off senior citizens who might otherwise have been a powerful ally in a push for, say, comprehensive single-payer health care in the 1970s. Certain policies and accidents of history create strange, and sometimes enduring, legacies.

6. Special Interests: This is Quadagno's preferred explanation. "[E]ach attempt to guarantee universal coverage has been resisted by powerful special interests who have used every weapon on hand to keep the financing of health services a private endeavor." First it was doctors, then it was the insurance industry, now it includes the pharmaceutical industry. Only when these interests have been divided and conquered has real health care reform passed. Insurance companies supported disability insurance over the protests of the AMA. Both hospital administrators and insurers again left the AMA hung out to dry in the Medicare battle. But in the 1970s, the insurers gained new allies—including the National Federation of Independent Businesses—to thwart reform. I like this explanation: As I've said before, the only way I see national health care getting passed today is if reformers split the opposition. Maybe placate large businesses and Big Pharma while attacking private insurance. Or something. But you can't go up against everyone at once: that's what Clinton tried to do and got himself kicked in the teeth.

Now the sad part is that nearly all of these factors are alive and well today, except perhaps racially-based opposition to universal health care. (And I'm not even sure about that one: nativism and hostility towards immigrants, after all, played a huge role in both the battle over Clinton health care and welfare reform.) So the prospects for national health care look severely daunting, and unlike some liberals, I don't think it's possible to wait around for a health care crisis to hit—in fact, I don't think that crisis will ever hit; even if premiums do skyrocket out of control and businesses start pushing their employees off of their plans, I'm guessing that demand for comprehensive change will likely be diverted by piecemeal reforms enacted by Congress. Throw the rabble a scrap or two and they'll stop clamoring for revolution. But really, single-payer won't magically appear one day; reform will only come after a long, hard slog right through the obstacles listed above.

Curzon makes the case for continued engagement with Uzbekistan, and is none too happy with the fact that relations between Tashkent and Washington seem to be taking a turn for the worse. The argument here seems plausible (here's Nathan Hamm's version); as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem any major downside to engaging Karimov—besides upsetting those who hate "hypocrisy" in U.S. foreign policy—and it's not like the Uzbek government will stop boiling prisoners citizens alive now that we've shuttered up our airbase there. Plus, there's a decent fear that if we don't maintain a relationship with Uzbekistan, China will, which means we can kiss any hope of reform goodbye. Our military ties, at least, give us some leverage over Karimov, no? So yes, it's a tough country to work with, and yes, our Uzbekistan policy is never going to be pretty, but engagement seems like a better stance than total isolation. (That said, there's always room for improvement—we certainly don't need to send terrorism suspects to Uzbekistan to be tortured, etc.)

But that said, after reading this article, it seems that the main trend going on right now is that it's Uzbekistan who's souring on America, rather than vice versa. In that case, if Karimov's so paranoid about the United States fomenting revolutions around Central Asia, there doesn't seem to be any reason for the Bush administration to go well out of its way to reassure him. But I don't know. Of course, it never helps when both the Pentagon and State Department are pushing forward two wildly different Uzbekistan policies at the moment. Egad.

I'm not sure who Saad al-Faqih is—the head, it seems of a Saudi opposition group—or what how credible he is, but the Jamestown Foundation thought enough of him to get his perspective on al-Qaeda and its goings-on in Saudi Arabia. Read the whole interview, it's quite informative. His take is that AQ goofed last year by attacking Saudi civilians and hence provoking a crackdown by security forces. "Al-Qaeda," Faqih says, "has lost ground militarily, politically and ideologically." So now the group needs some way of regaining credibility, and in that vein, Saudi intelligence is hearing that 200 jihadis have returned from Iraq and are preparing to attack the royal family, which could be the boost al-Qaeda needs.

Hmmm. Now we often hear scholars like Gilles Kepel make the case that Islamic terrorism is inherently unpopular, and will eventually defeat and discredit itself in the long run. The only thing that can save it is if, say, the United States feels the need to suddenly start invading Middle Eastern countries, kicking up hornets' nests, and so creating a whole new generation of jihadists. Case in point, I guess.

Hey! I don't see what's so "dumb" about believing in paranormal stuff—haunted houses or mental telepathy or clairvoyance or UFOs. I certainly do! Although I'm not at all sold on astrology, and not because I think these horoscope predictions are so vague as to be trivially true—most of the time I find them exactly wrong! The Chinese calendar seems more accurate, usually...

But seriously, why not believe? It's fun! Makes life more exciting, a bit of coal-burning for the imagination, that sort of thing. And no, I don't believe in paranormal phenomenon enough to, say, stop paying attention to scientific explanations for various events—that would, of course, be harmful—and beliefs in haunted houses don't really lead me into any sort of substantive policy positions, as certain religions might, or as a dour view of witches might. But I imagine that holds for most others. So really, paranormal beliefs might be some of the healthiest sorts of beliefs to have, no? (And yes, this wasn't really Digby's main point, but still...)

A while back David Brooks noticed a tidbit bobbing about in some recent Pew poll data: 76 percent of "poor Republicans," he declared, believe that most people can get ahead with hard work. Yet only 14 percent of Democrats, according to Brooks, believe the same. "Poor Democrats are more likely to believe they are in the grips of forces beyond their control." Now it's worth noting that Brooks misrepresented the actual data here. The 76 percent number is of "pro-government Republicans," only half of whom have incomes below $30,000 per year. Calling them "poor Republicans" is a bit misleading. (The "disadvantaged Democrat" group was actually poorer on average.) Nevertheless, grant that, in the poll, poor Democrats were more likely to say "hard work and determination are no guarantees of success for most people" than poor Republicans. So okay, then what does this mean?

At the time the op-ed came out, I thought the dichotomy seemed a bit odd. For starters, the belief about "forces beyond one's control" can include two very different things. One, that structural social and economic forces lead to poverty; and two, that fatalistic causes like bad luck or illness or whatnot lead to poverty. Obviously a person can believe a mix of those two ideas, but each one leads to pretty different conclusions. If you believe that structural forces are at the root of poverty, then you're going to be more likely to believe that some sort of drastic reorganization of society is necessary to combat poverty. But if you believe more in the "bad luck" theory of poverty then you're going to be more likely to believe that social insurance—ala Social Security or unemployment insurance or Medicaid—is the best way to help the poor. It's possible that poor Republicans, for instance, believe in fatalistic reasons but not in structural reasons. Maybe. That's a distinction worth exploring.

The other thing that struck me as odd about Brooks' dichotomy was that it's entirely possible to believe both that poverty exists for reasons outside a person's control, and that a person can get ahead through hard work. There's no reason it has to be either-or. In my (not at all vast) experience working with disadvantaged youths, most people, I found, really did believe both. That may surprise David Brooks, but it shouldn't: who on earth would want to believe that he or she is poor, that no amount of hard work will guarantee success, and that the only thing to do is sit around and wait for politicians in Washington to lend a helping hand? Very few people, I'd wager, ever think like this: it's too depressing of a worldview. My hunch is that the poll question Brooks cites obscures just as much as it reveals.

Anyway, I was planning to point all this out when the op-ed appeared, but didn't really have any evidence to back myself up, so I just let it drop. But earlier today I was reading a paper by Matthew Hunt, "The Individual, Society, or Both: Black, Latino and White Beliefs about the Causes of Poverty," that used polling data to bolster the above argument, somewhat. Hunt found that, in general, whites are more likely to single out individualistic causes of poverty (and success) than blacks or Latinos. Blacks are far, far more likely to cite structural explanations. But, here's the kicker: blacks and Latinos tend to attach importance to both individualistic and structural reasons for poverty and success. As it turns out, it really isn't either-or.

How does this work? Well, Hunt found that when whites say or believe, "I made it because of me," they tend to view "society as an open system in which people have similar chances, personal responsibility is the rule applied to everyone, and poverty gets explained in the terms of internal/individual-level factors." If I made it on my own, then anyone can. By contrast, among black and Latino respondents, "assuming personal responsibility, or saying 'I made it because of me,' does not preclude—indeed it can increase—the acknowledgment that structural barriers exist in society." Success breeds awareness of what sorts of hurdles need to be overcome. It's a real difference in outlook. (A follow-up study is here, though I can't access the full text.)

Now obviously this racial divide doesn't line up exactly with the dichotomy found in the Pew poll (although... only 22 percent of "pro-government Republicans are black or Latino, as compared with 46 percent of "disadvantaged Democrats). Nevertheless, the issue here is a bit more complicated than Brooks lets on.

"Soft power"—defined generally as the advantage a country gets from having other countries respect it, or like it—often gets disparaged here in the United States. "Why," the question goes, "do we need to care whether other people like us, so long as we have a massive military, plenty of economic strength, dominate all the international institutions, and can generally get other countries to do whatever we want them to do? We don't need to be loved so long as we have respect."

Well, maybe not.

In this week's New Republic Joshua Kurlantzick has yet another "China on the rise" story, only this time with a twist: China's gaining influence around the globe not merely because of its economic "hard power", but because it's also acquiring a good deal of soft power as well, not to mention engaging in a bit of deft diplomacy. People are starting to like China. In Australia, late in 2003, George Bush paid a visit, was protested and booed by both citizens and parliament, and jetted out after 21 hours. By contrast, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited a bit later on and was given a standing ovation by the legislature. Not surprisingly, Australia is starting to do Beijing's bidding: Tibetan activists were barred from the reception. Meanwhile, other Asian countries consider China, and not the U.S., their closest friend and ally. Developing countries are increasingly welcoming China's technology-driven, semi-socialist development model over the neoliberal "Washington consensus", a consensus, mind you, that has frustrated a number of Third World countries who have remain mired in poverty despite (as they see it) following IMF and World Bank recommendations slavishly.

Now a lot of this shift is economic in origin. If it came down to it, most people would obviously prefer America's democratic system to Beijing's one-party state. As horrendous as our own human right's abuses are, they pale besides China's. But many people genuinely do like the fact that China is focused on getting rich rather than obsessed with battling terrorists. China's growing diplomatic influence also comes from the fact that it's willing to ally itself with regimes we refuse to fraternize with—Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iran Burma. Still, the larger lesson stands: China's not just a big beast gorging itself in isolation. It's also making friends. Lots of friends.

So okay. This doesn't mean China's a threat, necessarily. Just because it's China doesn't mean alarm bells need to start ringing. Having another benign superpower in the world, especially one willing to invest in developing countries, can be a good thing. What's important is to make sure that the United States and China don't collide. But China's growing influence can be a bad thing, however, if it means that our influence is on the wane, and with it, pressure for better human rights and democratization around the globe. (We may be inconsistent on this front, but we're still the best game in town.) Some American officials understand that, and Robert Zoellick in particular is trying to re-emphasize economic concerns in his visits to our allies, and strengthen diplomatic ties. But our waning influence may also mean the United States needs to rethink its approach to Third World development, for instance, and perhaps even engage in regimes we'd otherwise prefer not to engage. It's laudably idealistic to cut all ties with Iran because of its human rights abuses, but if the end result is that Tehran simply aligns itself more closely with China, then we aren't really getting anywhere.

Bryan Caplan asks what the value of health care is, and concludes that at the margins, it's not very much. In some ways, he's right: most of the increase in life expectancy over the past thirty years, for instance, has come from improvements in public health rather than advances in medical technology. If we really wanted to boost our life expectancy numbers, the best way to go about it, I think, would be to set up effective public health programs—dieting, exercising, anti-smoking campaigns—and improving income inequality (yes, really). Health care is quite obviously valuable to individuals: that's why we pay so much for it, when we can, and often when we can't. But in the aggregate, it's not everything. (Of course, is there even any use in considering things in the aggregate?)

A related question, meanwhile, is what the value of insurance really is. Economists have found in the past that insured Americans generally spend about 40 percent more on health care than the uninsured. But it's not at all obvious what the effects of this disparity on individual health actually are. These spending numbers could be skewed by the fact that people are buying insurance because they expect to spend a lot on health care in the near future. Or perhaps the uninsured simply need less care, on average, for other reasons.

Earlier this year, Joseph Doyle of MIT did an interesting study on this question by looking at inpatient treatment for victims of severe auto accidents. Since people, usually, don't choose to be in car accidents, this gets rid of any distortion due to self-selection. What Doyle found was that hospitals spent about 22 percent less on uninsured inpatients, who also received 20 percent fewer days of care, on average. The uninsured received fewer spinal fusions, less skeletal traction, fewer organ operations, less plastic surgery. They did get more stitches, however! Now this disparity certainly had an effect: Doyle found that the mortality rate for the uninsured is about 1.5 percentage points higher in a sample with a mean mortality of 3.8 percent. (He also has some very noteworthy data on the differences between different hospitals, along with evidence that Medicaid reimbursement rules encourage more costly treatment.)

Now all that implies a 0.45 percentage point increase in the lifetime risk that an uninsured person will die in a serious auto accident. Solid evidence that there are real consequences to being uninsured. It's not because the uninsured have weird personal characteristics, but because they're treated differently by providers. As you would expect. In an added twist, Doyle argues that the money saved by not buying health insurance more or less compensates for this risk. (He assumes the value of a life is $3 million and the price of a catastrophic health insurance policy with a $1500 deductible is about $300 a year.) So "the benefits and costs of catastrophic insurance are roughly similar."

At any rate, this is all sort of moot, since "the average person" is only so important when it comes to policy. Some people suffer a great deal from not being able to afford insurance, far, far more than that 1.5 extra percentage points of mortality, and those are the individuals who, in particular, have been failed by our health care system.

Armando offers up one of the better quotes I've seen yet on Dick Durbin:

The issue isn't whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren't different enough.

That's Israeli historian Avi Schlaim. The outrage over Durbin's remarks—and Amnesty's "gulag" report before that—is, to be honest, one of the most asinine and depressing episodes I've had the misfortune to witness. Cut the crap. Durbin very obviously wasn't calling American soldiers Nazis; no one more sentient than a deepwater sponge was genuinely confused about this point. It's also clear that Durbin's words, whatever you think about it, isn't a "propaganda victory" to the terrorists. I know it's in vogue for "serious" thinkers to believe that "the terrorists" are slumped around headquarters, devoid of propaganda material, and waiting, just waiting for the Senate Minority Whip to give them something that will reinvigorate the movement. It's a grand little theory with just one minor flaw—it's not true.

Back to Durbin. I'm all for Nazi and gulag comparisons, as you know; used correctly, they can be fairly illuminating—see this post for instance—but perhaps its time to put them to rest, at least as far as public official are concerned. There are more eloquent ways to speak out against torture. Or blunter ways. (Q: Why shouldn't we torture detainees, even scumbag detaineees? A: "Because we're the fucking United States of America, that's why.") The word "Nazi" is a blunt and inflammatory instrument, and using it needlessly hijacks the debate, even if Durbin did point out something that needed pointing out. The detainee abuse he described was not the sort of thing anyone should expect of the United States of America. Don't like the Nazi reference? Fine, try "Baathist Syria" or "Mubarak's Egypt". The point is the same, and no less damning.

When actions carried out by our military interrogators can be confused with even the most "minor" of atrocities carried out by some of the worst regimes in history, then no, that doesn't make our soldiers Nazis or a Soviet thugs, but it does mean it's time to worry. When our op-ed pages are filled with academics and other pseudo-intellectuals taking pains to point out exactly how we differ from Nazi Germany—how our torture is quantitatively different from their torture; how our enemies are worse than their enemies; how at least we haven't killed 13 million people yet—then yes, it's time to worry. The issue isn't whether or not we're the same as Nazis, because we're clearly not; it's whether we're different enough.

Louis Wain, an artist at the turn of the 19th century, was obsessed with cats, loved them, painted them everywhere and on everything. Early on in his life, he preferred comic scenes like this one, arranging a few lovable little furr-balls around the table, all smirking at their rakish comrade's wry cat-joke:

          

Kierkegaard had Regina Olsen, J.M. Barrie had the Llewyn-Davies boys, and Louis Wain's four-legged muse was a black and white cat named Peter. (Wain started drawing Peter, in fact, to cheer up his wife, who was a) dying of cancer and b) scandalously, his youngest sister's governess.) Sadly, though, in the last 15 years of his life Wain suffered from schizophrenia, was admitted to a mental hospital, and continued his cat work on through the advanced stages of his illness. A bit psychedelic in this one:

                    

More in the tie-dye vein:

                    

And in the later stages, total cat breakdown:

                    

Amazing! These pictures, by the way, are sometimes shown in psychology textbooks, although I'm not sure what they're supposed to show, besides maybe the worldview of a single schizophrenic with cats on the brain. More Wain art here, here, and especially here.

Browsing on Craigslist late in the afternoon. Some employer or other here in San Francisco is looking to hire a naming specialist. "Huh," says I, "How hard can it be to sit around and name stuff?" Pretty damn difficult, it turns out—you can take a test here: "The brand ignorant might find some of [these names] cold, obfuscating, random or even clumsy — but in truth they are carefully constructed to communicate very specific ideas." I flubbed every question. The test comes from a blog run by a real, honest-to-goodness naming specialist, who also offers up this post, where we learn that "John Doe" is "G. Raymond" in Canada and "Seán Citizen" in Ireland, and this post, giving us the perfect name for the perfect poultry product.

How burdensome is Sarbanes-Oxley, really? Carl Bianik tries to figure it out, and rules that it's a murky picture all in all. I'd add, though, that the real benefits of the law seem all but impossible to calculate. What's the value, for instance, of avoiding the next Enron or Worldcom? Well, it seems like it would be pretty damn high, but then again, no one knows exactly which companies would've gone bust had it not been for Sarbanes-Oxley, so who can say?

What do we mean when we say "middle class"? Former Rep. Martin Frost had an editorial yesterday titled "Democrats Must Reconnect With Middle Class." He cites a new survey showing that, among white voters making between $30,000 to $75,000 a year, some 45 percent of the vote, Bush beat Kerry by 22 points. Now there are a lot of ways to slice those numbers up, granted—one could start by noting that this is such a broad category that it more or less defeats analysis; of course the Democrats need to do better among a set of people making up 45 percent of the vote... really, now—but my question for now is this: are income levels useful for defining "middle class"?

One way to define class—and this is hardly an original thought—is to look not at income but at power. Power in the workplace. Power in the world. The working class, from this point of view, can be defined as those who do their jobs under strict supervision, have little control over what they do or how fast they do it, and have no power over anyone else. Notice I picked this definition somewhat deliberately; these are precisely the sorts of people who, under labor law, can join a union. Obviously the definition's not hard and fast. I'm in a union, after all, because at work I technically get no input into the Mother Jones budget, and have precisely zero authority over any other employee. So that's the law. In practice, though, I do have the ability to hire, promote, and fire interns, I get to work at my own pace, and have wide discretion over what projects I want to pursue. So I'd put myself in the middle class, even if I make far less, income-wise, than many who would be considered working class. Intuitively, this classification makes far more sense than calling me "working class" and, say, a well-paid, unionized electrician "middle class."

So that's the working class. According to economist Michael Zweig, in his book The Working Class Majority, these workers make up some 62 percent of the labor force. This is your "typical" American right here. Way up at the other end of the spectrum are the owners and capitalists and rulers. They run boards of directors, control budgets, make economic decisions that affect thousands of workers, that sort of thing. Again, citing Zweig, this is about 2 percent of the labor force. (Meanwhile, the owners and capitalists with real power, serious national and political power, probably number no more than a couple thousand.)

In the middle is, well, the middle class. That includes everyone, I think, from small business owners to the foreman on the floor to doctors, corporate attorneys, senior managers, accountants. These are the folks with some significant amount of power and authority, are generally able to socialize with each other, but are still "in the middle"—they're not the ones making the final decisions. (Even many small business owners lack the sort of authority and autonomy that large business owners and CEOs and COOs and what have you can wield.) Doing the math, this is about 36 percent of the labor force, and can stretch from workers making $25,000 or less to $300,000 or more.

So that's another way to look at class, a very Marxist one, as I said, and one that isn't necessarily based on income levels. Looking at "why class matters" is far beyond the scope of a single post, but here's a question: From a political or policy standpoint, does this distinction even make a difference? Yes, I think so, but it often depends. Some issues, like the unaffordability of health care, or Medicaid cuts, are going to concern low-income voters more than middle- and high-income voters, regardless of class. (Although health care costs are, obviously, fast becoming a concern of middle-income voters too.) Same with welfare, or predatory lending, or public transportation.

On the other hand, labor issues are going to concern working class voters of all income levels. Unions, after all, aren't just about getting better pay and benefits. They're also about gaining some semblance of autonomy and respect for workers: that's why unions devote so much energy fighting for various workplace rules and grievance procedures and standards for discipline and seniority; so that workers aren't treated as arbitrary and expendable "labor inputs." Of course, not everyone in the working class sees this as important; plenty of workers would prefer to just get along with management rather than act as a countervailing force. (Plenty of workers think they'll launch out of the "working class" someday.) But unionization is a working class concern.

So, too, are things like job instability. My guess is that many "middle class" workers, regardless of income, are more sanguine about fluctuations in the job market, because they're far more optimistic about their upward mobility. On a personal level, for instance, outsourcing worries me far, far less than it might someone from the "working class" making far more than me, if only because he has less control over his work; in important ways he's, well, at the mercy of capitalists. That's an important and likely a real divide between the middle and working classes, although I think it needs to be developed a bit more. But those infamous polls that show that 40 percent of Americans either believe they're in the top 1 percent of the income bracket or will be soon? I think we've found them. And I haven't even said anything about those much-vaunted "social issues," which could very likely intersect with class divides in important ways. Education is a major factor too.

At any rate, damned if I know what the Democrats need to do to win elections. But I do know that dividing up voter blocs by income level isn't the only way to look at the world, and it may be unduly constraining or misleading. Class, in the sense used here, still matters.

Uh-oh. Yet another barrier to innovation: "[T]he social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible... Then the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile."

Well this is an angle I've never considered:

In fact, Ghilarducci argues, allowing the pension system to deteriorate serves a long-term interest of business: avoiding future labor shortages when the baby-boom generation moves into retirement. "All this retirement policy is really a labor policy," she asserts. "It's motivated by these experts who say, Hey, wait, we're going to need to do what we can to encourage people to work longer. A whole range of economists and elite opinion makers is talking about a labor shortage where, God forbid, wages would increase. That's what they're worried about--making sure there isn't a corporate profit squeeze, that skill shortages and upward wage pressures are checked."

Now I've never heard any experts say this, and I pay fairly close attention to the debate here. But as conspiracy theories go, this one makes sense! Speaking of which, though, for a while I've wanted to bring up the strange case of the "notch babies," namely, those people born just after January 1, 1917. Thanks to some fiddling with the Social Security benefit formula, the "notch babies" were all scheduled to receive substantially smaller benefit cuts than those born just prior to that date. Everyone expected that these poor workers would all have to work longer, past their nominal retirement age, and hence, would suffer poorer health than their predecessors. As it turned out, though, the "notch babies" all enjoyed much better health than those born six-months earlier. Perhaps, the theory goes, this was because many of these "notch babies" responded to their benefit cuts by working longer or finding part-time jobs, which helped them avoid isolation and inactivity, both of which tend to be unhealthy things.

Now that's not an argument for cutting Social Security benefits. Nor is it an argument for extending the retirement age: working later into life isn't healthy for all workers, especially if, say, you're shoveling coal or welding stuff. What it is, though, is an argument for finding ways to let seniors work longer or take on part-time jobs if they want, which could in turn have all sorts of splendid little health benefits. Figuring out how to eradicate age discrimination, along with setting up worker re-training for seniors, and even some health care reforms, could do the trick. This way the needs of the elderly and the needs of Ghilarducci's dastardly "experts" who want to get people to work deep into old age could become aligned, and all would be well in magic-happy land.

The L.A. Weekly has a disturbing piece about Christian groups that are organizeing boycotts against companies that support the world-famous radical homosexual agenda™:

Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) announced it was ending its boycott of corporate giant Procter & Gamble — maker of household staples like Tide and Crest — for being pro-gay. Why? Because the AFA's boycott (which the organization says enlisted 400,000 families) had succeeded in getting P&G to pull its millions of dollars in advertising from TV shows like Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. P&G also ended its advertising in gay magazines and on gay Web sites. And a P&G executive who had been given a leave of absence to work on a successful Cincinnati, Ohio, referendum that repealed a ban on any measures protecting gays from discrimination was shown the door. …

But the P&G cave-in to the Christers is only the tip of the iceberg. In just the past year and a half, AFA protests and boycotts — or even the simple threat of boycotts — have been enough to make a host of American companies pull their ads from TV shows the Christers consider pro-gay or salacious. Desperate Housewives has lost ads from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty Mutual, Kohl’s, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog and Lowe’s after the AFA’s One Million Dads campaign targeted the show’s sponsors. Life as We Know It got the same AFA treatment — and lost ads from McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John’s International, Chattem and Sharpie.

This sort of thing, it seems, is far, far more widespread than people are really aware of. Now I don't quite understand the word "Christer" here—is that a popular new phrase I'm unaware of?—but the underlying issue here seems somewhat tricky. Clearly there's nothing unconstitutional about organizing these sorts of boycotts; they certainly don't violate the First Amendment, and as far as I know, boycotts of these sorts are actually protected under the First Amendment. But is it still okay for this sort of thing to run rampant?

Corporations, of course, can express themselves however they want, and for the most part can "say" what they want. But they still have a responsibility to their shareholders, first and foremost, so any sort of action that undercuts shareholder value—like, for instance, provoking a boycott—is something that companies have, in a sense, no right to do. Certainly when liberals organized a boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting right before the election, over the company's plans to air an anti-Kerry movie in late October, that was the argument used. But couldn't this go too far? What if a company, say, started demurring from hiring Republicans—or those who champion the "radical homosexual agenda"—because doing so would provoke boycotts and undercut shareholder value? If that was the case, wouldn't we say something's gone badly awry? (And that is the case with the P&G boycott, which led to one pro-gay executive being fired.)

Can't say there's an easy answer here. Obviously liberals organize boycotts all the time, and, at least from a liberal standpoint, they really can accomplish a great deal of good: sticking it to sweatshop sponsors like Nike and Gap, for instance. But here we're seeing organized boycotts doing a great deal of harm; namely, limiting broader public discussion about homosexuality by forcing those who would sponsor pro-gay viewpoints to back down or suffer the consequences. Again, this isn't a First Amendment violation, but there's clearly a great deal of intimidation against free speech going on. So is there any sort of meaningful distinction here, between, say, the Sinclair boycott and this, or do you have to just accept the harm that boycotts can do with the good? Intuitively, I think you do, and the Christian boycotts described above should be fought with private action (say, public consumer support for companies targeted by the AFA) rather than, say, laws or regulations or the creation of a social norm against boycotting. But I'm open to argument here.

A few days ago, Sebastian Mallaby chimed in on the inequality debate with the claim that better education would solve our most pressing problems. The real trouble with the American job market, according to Mallaby, is that rapid technological change has left too many workers behind, unable to compete in the modern world. What we really need are better schools that can get those lower-class workers up to speed; then everything would be peachy, or at least drastically better.

It's a nice thought, but as I wrote over at Mojo, it's probably bunk. Now it is true that workers with less education have fared much, much more poorly over the past few decades. According to the Economic Policy Institute's ever-useful The State of Working America, from 1979-2000 real hourly wages declined by 1 percent for those with less than a high school education and 0.1 percent for those with only a high school diploma. (Wages climbed, albeit grudgingly, for those with some college, a college degree, or an advanced degree.) So the picture Mallaby's painting here seems plausible enough on the surface; it really does seem like there's a vast uneducated underclass that is being left behind by the modern, high-tech world, and that's why inequality is increasing.

But there are other, better reasons to believe that the education/technology explanation doesn't tell the whole story. For one, according to the EPI book, the timing and rate of technological innovation don't quite line up with the rise and pace of income inequality. The late 1990s are a special aberration here: remember that we had a writhing, thrashing technology boom overtaking the nation. But that was precisely the period of time when hourly wages were finally rising for the uneducated, and wage inequality was decreasing between groups of different education and experience. Doesn't quite jibe with Mallaby's story, eh? Meanwhile, according to EPI, over half of the growth in income inequality has occurred within groups of roughly similar education and experience. Many educated workers have been losing out in the new economy. How would more schooling alone solve that problem?

Meanwhile, high-tech, high-skilled jobs are not the only ones being created en masse by the "new" economy: the demand for low-wage, de-skilled jobs is still astoundingly high. Indeed, a study by economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane has noted that two types of companies are becoming prominent in the new economy: "Some firms may choose to compete for larger shares of standardized products produced by low wage workers carrying out relatively simple tasks. Other firms may choose to tailor production to a high value-added, high quality product at the upper end of the market." Mallaby's technology story would make more sense if only the second type of firm existed in America. But it doesn't.

Indeed, of the occupations expected to add the most jobs over the next decade, the overwhelming majority don't require a college degree: a list that includes cashiers, salespersons, truck drivers, receptionists, food preparers, and office clerks. And there's no reason to think these jobs will disappear anytime soon—who's going to serve coffee at Starbucks? cook our food? mop our floors?—at least until we invent suitable robots to do the tasks. But until then, though, there's no reason to think that improving education will automatically help this particular set of workers, whose wages have been stagnating or declining. Something else needs to be done, whether that's strengthening unions, boosting the minimum wage, pursuing full employment policies, or some other measures. Education's a laudable goal, and I'm all for it, but education alone won't fix the inequality problem in the United States today.

Oh, thanks. Tom Friedman lets us know that our whole problem in Iraq is that we're just not thinking seriously enough about it. With a little more brainpower, maybe a bit of the ol' pacing back and forth, we could crack this nut and get back to lauding the triumph of human technology. Or whatever it is we'd prefer to spend our time doing. This is a bit silly, of course, because people actually have been thinking seriously about Iraq for a long time. The usual suggestions you hear bandied about—we need to include the Sunnis in the political process! No, wait, we need to train the Iraqi forces!—aren't exactly novel. It's not as if no one on the ground has thought of this stuff. And it's not like there's some novel idea or exit strategy out there that just isn't being discussed because we're all too lazy or because Rumsfeld's too stupid. Like Juan Cole likes to say, "Sometimes you are just screwed."

Now as far as bright ideas go, Praktike suggests that the United States could always make nice with Iraq's neighbors—Iran, Turkey, Syria—and get them to pitch in. For sheer ingenuity, I like it. This is exactly the sort of thing I thought John Kerry might be able to do for Iraq when I was writing about it last fall. Trouble is, it's hard to see exactly how far this approach will go towards stabilizing Iraq internally. Probably not very. Meanwhile, Daniel Byman of Georgetown/Brookings suggests that the "least bad option" for Iraq is a drawdown to about 15,000-20,000 troops along with rejiggering our actual objectives (It's long but worth reading):

As part of a proper drawdown, the United States would steadily reduce the size of its presence... [which] should consist of three elements: a division-sized army or Marine Corps unit bolstered by additional specialties such as civil affairs units (15,000–20,000 troops); an advisory presence (i.e. several battalions of special operations forces and marines); and, covertly, a large intelligence presence. With such a presence, the United States would be creating a force that could influence Iraq but not control it.

The division would help back up Iraqi forces and deter Iraq’s neighbours from meddling – but it would rarely see combat on its own. These forces would act as a force multiplier... More important, the force would symbolise the US commitment to Iraq’s external security... The division would also inhibit a coup...

The primary mission of the special operations forces and Marine battalions would be training. ... The United States might at times also use massive firepower on suspected [insurgent] bases...

The United States also should work to identify local warlords who are most able and willing to defeat the jihadists. These leaders, in turn, would receive additional US funding, training and, if necessary, intelligence and arms. We should have no illusion about many of these allies. Although ideally they would be both militarily capable and liberal democrats, in reality many of them will be traditional notables or thugs who have little patience for democracy...

Taking on the bulk of security responsibilities will move the [Iraqi] government much farther toward legitimacy than it has gone so far. Similarly, the massive drawdown in the US presence sends the clear message that Washington does not seek to occupy Iraq indefinitely.... Any government should be encouraged to demonstrate its independence from the United States except on the most important areas. Ideally a drawdown would bolster new leaders, creating the impression that it was their wishes (not US strategic concerns) that led to a decline in the US presence… Iraqi security forces would have more of an incentive to take on the burdens of security, as US forces would not do it for them -- a shift that in theory (though not always in practice) would change their level of motivation.

The United States would also be able to prevent al-Anbar province and other Sunni areas from becoming foreign jihadist centres, as happened in Afghanistan. Such a prospect is perhaps the greatest disadvantage of a full withdrawal from Iraq.

Distinguishing between the foreign jihadists and Iraqi insurgents is vital here. The groups fighting the US presence and the interim government in Iraq today are a motley mix of ex-regime elements, foreign fighters, Iraqi Islamists (both Sunni and Shi’a) and nationalistic Iraqis. Iraqis fighting the United States and the Iraqi government who desire to preserve Sunni prerogatives, expand Shi’a power, or who are angry over the US troop presence in their country are of great concern in Iraq but – in contrast to the jihadists – are not likely to attack US forces around the world or strike in the US homeland. Thus, the United States should emphasise the jihadist danger over the local one.

The United States should make it clear to all local fighters that the United States will ally with their rivals if they work with foreign jihadists. Such an alliance would consist of training and supplies from US forces, money via intelligence officers and, if necessary, direct assistance from elements of the division. Given that most jihadists in Iraq are at best allies of convenience for local fighters, such a deal should not be hard to accomplish. Moreover, the foreign jihadists are located primarily in urban areas, where they are highly vulnerable if the local population turns against them in conjunction with local fighters.

Such a shift would entail considerable costs for Iraq, of course. The crime and security situation would get worse, as the limited policing mission performed by some US soldiers would end. Sectarian strife would probably increase, as communities looked inward for security. ... [T]he potential for Iraq to slide from civil strife to civil war is real. The implications for democracy would be considerable, as security in Iraq would depend far more on the goodwill of local leaders and warlords, few of whom are true democrats. Iraq’s ‘democracy’ would look more like Afghanistan’s.... Some of these costs, however, are already being paid. Crime and strife are rampant now. Several of the most popular political groups ... are groups that established themselves through their guerrilla role, not because they are strong peaceful political movements. A US drawdown, nevertheless, would accelerate these already unfortunate trends....

Cynically, the United States could declare the security situation ‘stabilised’ or the Iraqi forces ‘sufficiently trained’ and use the election as cover to draw down. However, drawing down without recognising the need to narrow objectives would be exceptionally dangerous. If the United States simply declares victory and reduces its presence, the remaining troops will have too many missions to carry out effectively with little sense of prioritisation. Moreover, the United States will not be prepared for some of the inevitably nasty results of a drawdown if it rosily pretends that Iraq has turned the corner.

Basically his idea comes down to the Afghanization of Iraq. Now I can't say whether this is a good idea or bad idea—really, that's up to the folks who are in a position to assess the military situation on the ground—and it would strike me as faintly ridiculous to "debate" this idea around the blogosphere. It's even entirely possible that "stay the course" could end up working. Still, in the event that "stay the course" isn't working, my hunch is that Byman's paper gets at what a "bright idea" for Iraq will look like: ugly and unpalatable, and not something that makes for a good talking point or soundbite on a Sunday morning talk show. I'm not sure that's what Friedman's looking for, but there you go.

Whereas I should be doing actual work—well, that or blogging about this or that latest outrage—I'm wasting time reading Edward Glaeser on why New York City became the most dominant city in America. This is great stuff. A little mix of geography, historical accidents, the immutably weird patterns people tend to follow, a few economic phenomena and—bam!—you've got a major metropolis to end all major metropolises. Here's the abstract; the paper itself isn't technical in the slightest and a fascinating read:

New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation’s premier metropolis. What accounts for New York's rise and continuing success? The rise of New York in the early nineteenth century is the result of technological changes that moved ocean shipping from a point-to-point system to a hub and spoke system; New York's geography made it the natural hub of this system. Manufacturing then centered in New York because the hub of a transport system is, in many cases, the ideal place to transform raw materials into finished goods. This initial dominance was entrenched by New York's role as the hub for immigration.

In the late 20th century, New York's survival is based almost entirely on finance and business services, which are also legacies of the port. In this period, New York's role as a hub still matters, but it is far less important than the edge that density and agglomeration give to the acquisition of knowledge.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find myself a little density and agglomeration...

Our friend Qaddafi in Libya. Why is he still a colonel? Did he get passed over for promotion? I don't understand.

update: Oh, I see. Bless you wikipedia Slate. (Although bless wikipedia for filching from Slate, I guess.) Here 'tis:

Unlike other military dictators, Qaddafi did not promote himself to the highest rank of General upon seizing power, but rather accepted a ceremonial promotion from Captain to Colonel and has remained at this rank for the last thirty five years. This no doubt appears odd to western militaries, in that a Colonel can rule a country and serve as Commander-in-Chief of its military, but in Qaddafi's own words Libya's utopian society is ruled by the people, so he needs no grandiose title or a supreme military rank.

Qaddafi remaining a Colonel, even while military ruler of an entire country, is not a new concept among military dictatorships. Gamal Abdel Nasser remained a Colonel after seizing power in Egypt while Jerry Rawlings, dictator of Ghana, held no military rank higher than Flight Lieutenant.

Uh... there was a dictator of Ghana named "Jerry Rawlings"? Says who.

Since the Heritage Foundation is in the news today, I thought I'd go back and read one of my favorite Legal Affairs Debate Club debates from a few weeks back. It's the one between American University's Jamin Raskin and Heritage's Matthew Spalding over whether non-citizens should have the right to vote in local elections. Here's the paraphrased version:

Raskin: Immigrants often comprise a majority in many localities, have a vested interest in the public school system, and pay taxes. So it makes sense for them to be allowed to vote in school board, PTA and city council elections. If anything, this will help foster a sense of civic responsibility among non-citizens, and pave the way towards citizenship. Plus, states did it all the time in the past!

Spalding: Doesn't matter. We don't have to let them vote. We don't have to let anyone vote that we don't want to. That's what citizenship's all about. Letting those people vote would just water down citizenship. Do you hate citizenship?

Raskin: Er, no, but it might be a good idea...

Spalding: But we don't have to do it if we don't want to!

Raskin: Um, okay. By the way, since you love citizenship so much, perhaps you'll agree that we need a constitutional amendment to enfranchise the 8 million U.S. citizens who don't currently have the right to vote: namely, inhabitants of Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, Washington D.C., as well as felons.

Spalding: You're wrong. The Constitution says we don't have to let any of those people vote if we don't want to.

Raskin: Er... bu... Okay, back on topic then. U.S. courts have argued over the years that since non-citizens on our land pay taxes, can be conscripted, are subject to our laws, they have a natural right to—

Spalding: But we don't have to let them vote. We just don't, okay? Even motherfucking Aristotle says we don't have to.

Raskin: Now we want to be careful not to get too xenophobic here...

Spalding: No, the problem is that YOU hate America. And immigrants hate you.

Er, the actual debate was a bit wordier, but that's more or less the gist. Truly a classic of the genre. What we need now is some sort of... summer camp, where we can train the next generation of these delightful little Heritage folks. By the way, I think Raskin's idea is quite sound on the merits. And a constitutional right to vote goes without saying. And Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., and the rest all ought to get Senate seats and other forms of representation. But Congress would never go for it, obviously, unless we could rustle up an equal number of backwoods territories that would be likely to vote Republican, to balance it all out. Hm, perhaps we can take over Saskatchewan...

The Center for Court Innovation is an interesting organization I stumbled across earlier today. Tragically, someone in charge of the website thought it would be a cute idea to make all the text aligned right, but once you're done fuming at that, the actual idea being touted here—"problem-solving courts"—seems like something worthy of attention:

This amounts to a significant departure from business as usual in the courts – an institution that is not known for embracing change lightly. What does this look like in practice? Instead of adversarial sparring, prosecutors and defenders in some problem-solving courts work together to encourage defendants to succeed in drug treatment. Instead of embracing the tradition of judicial isolation, judges in problem-solving courts become actively involved in their communities, meeting with residents and brokering relationships with local service providers. Perhaps most importantly, instead of being passive observers, citizens are welcomed into the process, participating in advisory boards, organizing community service projects and meeting face to face with offenders to explain the impact of their crimes on neighborhoods.

Here's a New York Times article on the subject. Law Professor Timothy Casey goes in-depth into some of the challenges here. And this post by Peter Levine on the subject explains the civic significance of these sorts of courts.

Back when I was in college and obsessed with things like the classification of 3-manifolds and the zeta function over a finite field, and was thinking about going to graduate school for mathematics, one of the sayings my classmates liked to pull out of their pocket protectors was that the best mathematicians do all their work at a very young age. Everyone knew the story of Evariste Galois, who revolutionized abstract algebra while he was still popping pimples and ended up dying in a duel by the age of 21. Naturally, when I was that age I had the pimples but not much else, which meant that there was no future for me whatsoever. Better to become a hack journalist and be done with it.

At the same time, though, the idea that you either revolutionize a field by the time you're 21 or drop out was plainly ridiculous. As math gets more and more complex and advanced, any scholar has to master more and more fields and theorems and techniques in order to get to the frontiers of mathematics, and over the years the trend should be that older mathematicians are making all the important discoveries, while the younger ones are racing to catch up by reading an ever-expanding foundation of textbooks and journals. Evariste Galois, if born today, would be buried in the library rather than revolutionizing anything. Indeed, innovation should get harder and more time-consuming as the years go by, because sadly, no one gets to be born at the frontier of knowledge.

It's not just math, either. Economist Benjamin Jones has just put out a new paper arguing that this trend ought to hold for all technological innovation. It makes sense: innovators can't just stand on the shoulders of giants past; they also need to spend the bulk of their early years climbing up the backs of those giants, and hence, it takes longer to acquire all the education necessary to do any decent innovation. Although we tend to think that innovation happens exponentially—Moore's law says the speed of a microprocessor doubles every 18 months—in fact, it may start slowing down if that "knowledge burden" increases over time. Jones says that, in fact, this burden is doing just that. (Yes, his model is more complex than simply pointing out that you need more and more education to get to the point where you can do original work, but that's basically what it comes down to.) By the same token, the death of the Renaissance Man—the innovator who is a master of multiple fields—is creeping over the land, and the extremely narrow-focused specialists are ruling the roost.

(There's one countervailing trend here that Jones only glances on. Many technological innovations may well make people smarter, or alleviate the "knowledge burden". The internet, for one, is a splendid little way of aggregating a good deal of information, and at a certain point, probably makes people smarter than they would be without it. Obviously you have to get to the point where you know enough that you can ask the right questions, but once you can, Google gets you down the answer path far more quickly and comprehensively than ever before. Still, on the surface, it doesn't seem like even the internet is enough to counteract the increasing "knowledge burden.")

Jones squares his theory with a number of empirical observations. For one, looking at a vast set of patent data, he notices that the "age at first innovation" is trending upwards at 0.6 years per decade. Specialization is increasing. Co-authorship is increasing. People are taking longer and longer to get their doctorates. And innovators are, more than ever, working in teams rather than alone. This also may well explain why total-factor productivity growth has been more or less flat in recent times even though R&D spending has been rising dramatically in leading economies. Obviously more spending on research and development is always a good thing, but it's not clear that it will create a proportional rise in innovation.

If we want to have a little fun here, we can take this study in places it was never meant to go. For instance, on the global stage, if the rate of technological innovation starts decreasing over time for those at the forefront, then it will be exceedingly hard for any one country to maintain its dominant position in the world. Tom Friedman likes to point at our crouching tiger, hidden dragon friend to the east and declare that the United States needs to innovate, innovate, innovate if we want to stay ahead of China. But what if this is like the tortoise running after Achilles? Sure, we might always be able to stay ahead, but if innovation gets increasingly more difficult, and China simply has to play the easier game of catch-up, then eventually they're going to converge with us on the technological front. That could go for our pre-eminent military position as well: our National Defense Strategy is, to some degree, predicated on the idea that we'll always have much cooler weapons than our enemies. But what if that gets harder to do over time? Eventually the gap will shrink, no?

Meanwhile, the prospects for long-run economic growth, especially productivity growth, start to look pretty pessimistic, especially when you keep in mind that the rate of global population growth is slowing down over time. (Indeed, robust population growth that provides society with more and more innovators, according to Jones, doesn't really alleviate the "knowledge burden" trend, but it helps. The problem is we don't even have robust population growth.)

Of course, the hopeful view is that we will come up with some cool technologies that make the "knowledge burden" shrink. For example, if we could somehow be teleported onto the shoulders of giants previous—imagine that we had some gadget like that in the Matrix, where knowledge was simply uploaded into the human brain—than the rate of innovation would take off again. Alternatively, if people start living and working longer and longer, then it doesn't really matter how long it takes to acquire enough knowledge to come up with an original idea, now does it? If we still have future versions of Evariste Galois, only they happen to be 75 instead of 16, well that doesn't seem like such a big deal. The question is whether this will be enough to counteract the "knowledge burden." As doomsday scenarios go, it's a fun one.

Here's something I'm curious about. As we know from reading our Tom Friedman, all the walls are tumbling down and windows are opening to the twenty-first century. Or something. Basically, globalization is upon us. Open borders and competition abroad and the free flow of capital will bring us massively good things in most of our Easter baskets, they say, but a few of us will get some rotten marshmallow peeps. In that case, good liberals suggest that active labor-market policies—such as job search and retraining assistance, or even creating public sector jobs for the intractably unemployable—will be necessary to help those who lose out from the ravages of globalization. Or the ravages of structural shifts in our economy due to advances in productivity. Et cetera.

Free-trader Gary Hufbauer suggests we need to spend far more than the $2 billion a year we're currently spending in order to help the 225,000 workers dislocated from trade each year. That's not a huge number, but presumably there are also other workers who need job retraining and assistance: those laid off because of advances in productivity or nifty new automated technology or even immigration, which intuitively should have a vastly greater effect than trade in this respect. At any rate, I'm not exactly sure why there needs to be a separate fund—the Trade Adjustment Assistance—for those small subset of workers who lost their jobs due to trade. Probably to stem demands for protectionism. But okay. The main question I'd like to know is how well these adjustment policies actually work?

Perhaps not all that well is one answer. Peter Lindert has suggested that active labor market policies produce only very modest payoffs in improved job-holding and earnings, "and therefore a near-zero rate of return." The return is very low for males, and slightly better for females—his explanation: "perhaps because females' prior disruption of training was less rooted in an aversion to school." Um, okay. He also claims, convincingly enough, that there are much higher returns on interventions early on in the life cycle—pre-school, infant care—and less so as people grow older. Of course, that doesn't much help those who lose their jobs because of outsourcing or trade or immigration or whatnot. It's also worth noting that there's a "payoff" not often mentioned here: namely, that active labor market policies can help build support for further globalization, if that's what people think we should be doing, by at least giving the appearance that the government is actually doing something to help.

Other economists seem to be a bit more optimistic on the effects of active labor market policies, as are John Martin and David Grubb in this study. Some mixes of policies, they find, do tend to work well—"counseling and job search are particularly cost-effective if they are combined with increased monitoring of job seekers and enforcement of work tests"—for a certain targeted portion of the unemployed. In the short term, though, many workers will be forced to accept lower wages. These policies aren't "magic bullets" for structural unemployment, they say, but if we're just talking about short-term dislocations caused by trade or immigration or businesses moving overseas or whatever, Martin and Grubb suggest they can do the trick.

Finally, Jan Bours and Jan van Oon argue that only job retraining has any effect on the unemployment rate—and in that it works quite well—and that's better than increasing unemployment insurance. Subsidized jobs, Bours and van Oon say, have no effect at all—which I think would include the sort of wage insurance programs the Heritage Foundation likes to push—though obviously these programs have their own upsides. So that's a tiny bit illuminating I guess. More on this some other time, perhaps.

More kabuki dancing around North Korea's nukes yesterday, as George Bush met with South Korean President Roo Muh Hyun and... didn't seem to get anywhere. Bush, not surprisingly, is tired of negotiating with himself:

As Mr. Roh was arriving in Washington, one senior White House official involved in preparations said the North "has gotten us to bid against ourselves two or three times." Now, he said, "the question is how long do you let this go without there being a consequence?"

Okay, fair enough. The White House doesn't like making concessions and isn't too thrilled with being jerked around by Kim Jong Il. What no one seems to grasp is that the United States simply isn't in a strong position here. It's tough, perhaps, for an American president to grasp—that all our power can't bail us out of this one—but the U.S. is holding onto the short end of the lever. According to the Times, for instance, Bush apparently gave Roh his assurance that he wouldn't attack North Korea, taking a major option off the table. In many ways, though, that's wise: in the Atlantic Monthly's recent war game scenario, the most optimistic assessment of a strike against North Korea was one that left maybe 100,000 South Koreans dead. Again: that's the best case. 100,000 dead—that's a September 11 every week for nearly a year—would count as a rousing success. And to neutralize North Korea enough to get to that point, we would need to fly 4,000 air sorties a day in the first few days of war. 800 a day was the rate in Iraq.

Meanwhile, sanctions seem to be off the table, and at any rate, neither South Korea nor China has any intention of using sanctions to dig holes underneath Pyongang's already-wobbly foundation, out of fear that the country will collapse and millions of starving, uncouth refugees will come pouring across the border. Indeed, as Joshua Kurlantzick pointed out in the New Republic, China seems to benefit more from the appearance of helping out than from actually helping to resolve the crisis. Meanwhile, no one seems to be talking about the fact that an implosion of North Korea could be an even greater security threat to the United States than what we have now: who's going to secure all those chemical weapons, and the nukes, in the ensuing chaos? Think the U.S. and South Korea can rush across the border and keep everything out of the hands of any and all unsavory characters? Really? Are we sure?

It really does seem like Kim Jong Il holds all the cards here, and while obviously the president himself can't (and shouldn't) acknowledge that public, I would hope he's acknowledging it privately. It sucks, because Kim Jong Il's a tinpot dictator, with bad hair, and a creepy smile, but never mind all that. Look at what's in his hand. Cards. Lots of them. Most of them. Under the circumstances, the U.S. doesn't have the luxury of jerking North Korea around, or standing tough and putting the onus on Kim Jong Il to make the next move.

At the very least, the White House ought to be pushing the diplomatic channel as far as it will go. That means making more concessions. We could, for instance, offer to sign a treaty ending the Korean War. That's not a big deal to us. No one in this country is confused about whether or not we're still fighting the Korean War. But it could be a big deal to North Korea. And after that, we may have to offer even more than we want to offer. That's what happens when you're in a weak position. The so-called "hardliners" in the administration refuse to recognize this and, it seems, were getting antsy over the possibility that the State Department might have been implicitly offering guarantees during the Six-Party talks. (Bizarrely, U.S. officials were never allowed to put forward actual negotiating positions during those talks, which led, predictably, to nothing getting done.)

Of course concessions may not work. We may end up with the sort of deal that North Korea cheats on—although it's worth noting that this view tends to be colored by the idea that North Korea was the only country to cheat on the 1994 Agreed Framework; they weren't, the United States actually welched first—and in the end, an attack might be the only viable option left. But we should at least be finding out whether we've pushed diplomacy as far as it can possibly go. Is that appeasement? Of course! That's what you do when you're not willing to take any of the other alternatives. We appeased the Soviet Union again and again during the Cold War, and they cheated on many of those deals, but as Robert Galluci said in the Atlantic piece, "we were still better off with the deal than without it." Or, to quote a more apt Galluci-ism: "What's your fucking plan, then, if you don't like this?"

update: See also Selig Harrison's Washington Post op-ed.

Here's a crucial question: Is Big Bird getting too old for this shit? No, I'm serious. Oh sure, the recent attacks on PBS' funding are an outrage and all, but my outrage-o-meter is sagging a bit here on a Friday evening, and anyway, the truly pressing questions of the day are in need of hard-hitting answers. So. Is Big Bird aging? Is he getting too old for TV? Is it time for him to retire? Perhaps. Look, here's a picture of the star himself, circa 1983, in his box-office smash, Big Bird Goes to China:

       

That's pretty much my favorite movie of all time, by the way. Especially when he finds the "headless water buffalo" at the end. ("How", I thought as I sat in swaddling diapers, "will he ever find a headless water buffalo? There's no such thing!" But the Bird came through. Plus he taught me how to say "ni-hau" and "sai-jen".) But notice how youthful and sprightly he is in that poster! How full of life! Moving on though, here's a more recent sighting of Big Bird, in the Washington Post today:

        

Yecch. Notice anything different? Quite a few more grey hairs around the forehead, no? And his coat's lost a lot of luster. Plus he seems to be sporting jowls and getting a bit of neck fat. Not quite as lively and animated in the eyes and mouth, either. Now all this may seem like part of the natural aging process, sure—it's been twenty years since he made BBGC, after all—but seeing as how Big Bird's really just an oversized puppet, it's not quite what I would've expected to happen.

In this week's New Republic, Clay Risen digs into the recent shakeup at the Security and Exchange Commission. It's a hugely important issue, but kind of obscure, and media reports on the topic have often been confusing, so this is a useful piece. For instance, I've never quite heard it explained why, exactly, the former Chairman, reform-minded Bill Donaldson, resigned in the first place. Risen explains exactly how the Bush administration all but engineered his ouster. (For context, keep in mind that there are five members of the commission, usually three from the majority party and two from the minority party, and Donaldson had been siding with the two Democrats):

[I]n late 2004 came fortuitous news for the business lobby: Democratic Commissioner Harvey Goldschmid announced that he would leave the SEC over the summer to return to Columbia Law School. Goldschmid and the other Democratic commissioner, Roel Campos, had provided Donaldson the support he needed to push through a controversial series of reforms.

By law, Bush cannot replace him with a Republican, and, traditionally, the president has deferred to the opposition party when selecting minority commissioners. But, while Democrats have already put forward a replacement for Goldschmid--the SEC's head of market regulation, Annette Nazareth--Bush is not bound to accept the nomination. In fact, he doesn't have to pick anyone at all; in the past, the SEC has operated with as few as two commissioners. So, beginning a few months ago, the Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbyists began pressuring the White House to hold off on replacing Goldschmid.

Without his vote, the Commission would split 2-2 on controversial decisions, effectively halting Donaldson's reform agenda. At that point, "The president didn't have to ask Mr. Donaldson to resign," says Mark K. Braswell, a Washington lawyer and former SEC enforcement official. "If you're Donaldson, you have two choices: You change course on your agenda to avoid a 2-2 deadlock, or you walk." Not surprisingly, Donaldson chose the latter.

Very sneaky. Very sneaky indeed. You know, a couple of weeks ago I was reading Robert Caro's account of Lyndon Johnson's tenure in the Senate, and occasionally—during those moments when I forgot what a scumbag Johnson was (albeit with a few redeeming qualities)—occasionally would be awestruck by how ruthlessly Johnson could find levers of power anywhere, how he could open doors that were thought to lead only to broom-closets and find instead the dusty fusebox that controlled the whole Senate. How he singlehandedly turned mostly-useless Senate positions—like the Majority whip—into seats of concrete power. In the abstract, it was a thing of beauty. But I daresay that Bush—or Karl Rove, or whoever is hatching all these evil little schemes—has LBJ beat in that respect. It's just too bad he's a scumbag without any redeeming qualities.

Anyway, Risen also notes that the day may come when the White House wishes Donaldson were still in charge of the SEC, especially now that Chris "Randroid" Cox is going to step in and wield his burdizzo against Sarbanes-Oxley and other business regulations:

Some worry that merely the impression of a rollback [of corporate regulations] could lead to an increased incidence of fraud. "If you send the message to business that you're calling off the dogs, that it's back to the good old days, you risk seeing a resurgence of the conduct that all these regulations were adopted to address," says Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. On Donaldson's watch, Bush could rest easy knowing that, when the mutual fund scandal or the American International Group investigation broke, he had Donaldson to absorb any flak--including calls for further regulation. "The fact that Donaldson had a credible regulatory reform agenda left Democrats with no effective message about the Bush presidency being weak on investor protection or corporate crime" Roper adds. "He really did insulate the administration against that criticism."

Well, that might be true. If another WorldCom or Enron erupts, say, six months from now, the blame would redound on Chris Cox' head, which means it would redound on Bush's head. When you stab the night watchman, and thieves slip into the keep, people can't help but notice that you're holding a bloody dagger. In theory. But then, Republicans managed to sidestep the corporate corruption issue during the 2002 midterms—waving the bloody bin Laden turban and all—and I'm not convinced they wouldn't be able to do it again.

There's a lot of health care talk going on over at the Washington Monthly, and Kevin Drum wonders whether preserving insurance-companie competition in health care, albeit under strict government regulation, would be a good idea on the merits:

[W]hat if we had, say, ten or twenty healthcare providers, all offering different plans? They're still tightly regulated, and there are minimums that all of them have to offer, but they're paid enough that they can afford to offer more than just the minimum. ... They all have an incentive to cut costs because their government reimbursement is a set amount, but they also have an incentive to offer state-of-the-art services in order to attract more customers than their competitors.

That sure sounds nice, but I think David Himmelstein, in a piece long, long ago in the American Prospect, gave a better picture of what would probably happen under tightly regulated competition. The insurance companies wouldn't compete by offering better services; they'd compete by trying their damnedest to pawn off the sick people on somebody else:

Managed Competition would be further undermined by insurers' efforts to attract healthy enrollees, so-called risk selection. Since 10% of the population consumes 72% of health care, the easiest way for insurers/HMOs to undercut their competitors' prices is to quietly avoid enrolling sick people in the first place, and drive away the chronically ill by offering unsatisfactory care. Immense financial reward accrues to insurers that successfully avoid risk, assuring extraordinary efforts to circumvent regulatory bans on risk selection.

Although managed competition in principle requires open enrollment, such requirements for open enrollment [are easily skirted]. Place sign-up offices on upper floors of buildings with malfunctioning elevators. Refuse contracts to providers convenient to neighborhoods with high rates of HIV (an example of medical redlining). Structure salary scales to assure a high turnover among physicians; the longer they're in practice, the more sick patients they accumulate. Assure the easy availability of services for the worried well, and inconvenience for those with expensive chronic illnesses.

In Medicare's HMO Demonstration Project regulatory oversight did not avert even flagrant abuses. Predictably, the HIPCs' efforts to adjust the capitation fee for predictors of health risk will be no match for the creative and subtle means devised by unscrupulous insurers/HMOs to avoid the sick. Millions will be spend on consultants who assist in targeting the most lucrative sub-markets. In a competitive environment, insurers that lower their costs by effectively dodging health problems are sure to succeed, those that tackle them are likely to fail.

That seems virtually impossible to get around, no matter how hard you try to stop it. The Washington Monthly health plan under discussion would presumably offer insurance companies greater compensation for picking up sicker patients. Himmelstein notes that that didn't work with HMOs, and it's fairly clear why. The main problem with these much-heralded "risk-adjusted vouchers", I think, is that different markets tend to price different health risks at different rates, so there would still be a slew of attempts to game the system. A given insurance company would go after only those customers whose risk it prices lower than the government does. This is all just a glorified form of gambling, not health care. Beat the Feds, win a prize. Now perhaps with enough ingenuity you can chase down all these dodges and abuses with a bunch of patchwork regulations, but at some point you have to wonder whether the benefits of managed competition are worth the costs. My guess is "no," although I'll admit that I don't know for certain.

(OK, edited: Didn't have the case against risk-adjusted vouchers quite right the first time around. But I think it's correct now.)

Here's an intriguing idea found via the comments to Kevin Drum's post on "If you could make one change to the tax system, what would it be?" The idea in question is the transaction tax, which would entirely replace all current federal taxes, and is being championed by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), which would be a very low—less than 1 percent—tax on every transaction involving a payment instrument: check, cash, credit card, anything else. Assuming for the sake of argument that the tax was .4 percent, then a person buying a $1,000 stereo would pay a $4 tax. A company buying $1 million worth of equipment would incur a $4,000 liability. And so on. You could even have a tiered system—bigger payments incur a bigger fee—depending on how you wanted to structure it. The exceptions would be payments amounting to less than $500, salaries and wages, and transactions involving individual savings instruments. Presumably you could also engineer other credits and deductions. (Or subsidize things like homeownership and the low-income salaries via direct government spending.)

The advantages here, as far as I can tell, are quite a few. For one, the economic burden would fall on as wide a base as possible, eliminating a lot of distortions caused by the current tax system. Foreign citizens and businessmen would be included too. It's also extremely difficult to dodge this tax, because even if you tried to shuffle money abroad, you'd still incur the tax. So presumably the government could raise a lot of revenue through curbing tax evasion. Plus, it could capture revenue from the underground economy. Now it would take some fiddling to make it progressive and keep certain tax incentives, but presumably that could be done. The main question, it seems, is whether or not it would distort certain forms of economic activity—short-term speculative trading, for instance—but again, presumably a big of jiggering could do the trick. (Actually, serious question: would a tax on speculative short-term trading be such a bad thing?)

Fun idea! And House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) seems to like it, although to be honest, I can't imagine the current regime in Capitol Hill passing a bill that cracks down on tax evasion. Another consideration here: I honestly can't tell whether this is the sort of tax whose rates would be very easy to increase ("Hey, the rate's so tiny, what's another tenth of a percent?") or very difficult to increase (since any hike, even a progressive hike, would affect so many different interests, opposition could be more widespread). And presumbably there are other problems I'm not seeing...

Via Feministe, this blog has a nifty study of the gender dynamics that take place at DailyKos:

Male participants dominated the discussion, being both more numerous and more frequently responded to than their female counterparts; of the 119 participants, 27 (21%) were identified as female, 80 (67%) were male, and 12 (10%) were of unknown or indeterminate gender. Though 51% of the comments made by male participants (79 out of 154 comments) were responded to, only 28% of the comments by women elicited a response (16 out of 56). What was most interesting was that there was no apparent cause for this disparity in the comments themselves.

Males and females made humorous or provocative comments at roughly the same rate, for example, and when they were responded to the "quality" of those responses was similar (i.e. a flame from a woman is as likely to receive a flame in response as a flame from a male)... but they weren't responded to at the same rate. The literature related to this kind of analysis shows that men tend to adopt a combative conversational approach in forums like DailyKos and that female participants in male-dominated forums often adopt male norms, so what we see here is that, on DailyKos, playing by the same rules doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get the same response... or any response at all.

Also, I must be the last person to hear about it, but supposedly there's a controversy going on at DailyKos right now over an "extremist set" that goes "looking for signs of female subjugation under every rock." Yes, those silly, silly feminists, at it again. You know how it goes. Anyway, you can read all about it over at Echidne's, whose take is insightful as usual. Scrolling through the Kos comment thread in question, the funniest bit, I think, was the handful of posters who used this line: "Well I showed the so-called 'offensive' ad to my lesbian best friend, and she thought it was great, so what's the big deal?" That's the spirit! If you've talked to one lesbian you've talked to 'em all...

It's in the category of "things that will never happen" but in this month's American Conservative, Jon Basil Utley argues against proportional representation:

To understand PR, imagine if our Congress were composed of four parties, Democrats, Republicans, a traditionalist Old Right Party, and Greens, each of the last two with 5 percent of the seats. Also imagine that each party is run by the old men who had been around the longest, perhaps a Senator Byrd for one and Bob Dole for another. There would be little new thinking and close political disputes would often be decided by the swing votes—the Old Right and Greens. That system of government, with even more parties, afflicts most of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Any political party that can garner at least 5 percent of the vote would obtain representation in Congress.

It gets worse. Each party runs nationwide, and its candidates are determined by lists controlled by each party’s machinery—usually old-timers who are owed favors and remember grudges. The old men name themselves to the top of the list while the younger start at the bottom, if the bosses approve of them. If the party then wins 40 seats in Congress, the first 40 names on the list get selected. Old politicians like this system: they rarely lose office. Also, reformers—often seen as troublemakers—can be eliminated by simply keeping them off, or at the bottom, of the lists. Corruption is endemic and protected as voters can’t throw out an individual representative. As long as their party gets at least 5 percent of the vote, the old-timers at the top of the list will always have seats in Congress and decide who else gets on the lists. In parliamentary governments, the winning alliance then votes for one of their old leaders to become prime minister.

Conclusion: we should never have P.R. here in America. Well, okay, but this assumes that there's just one way to do proportional representation: namely, have each person cast a vote for a nationwide slate, and then let the national party leaders apportion seats based on how many votes their parties received. But that's not the only way; far from it! For instance, we could turn our Senate into a more P.R.-like system by implementing the Hare method of voting. This is a bit complicated to summarize, but they do it in Ireland, and basically, every voter would rank up to, say 7 candidates, and your vote would be "transferred" to your second-place candidate if your top candidate already had enough votes to meet the threshold, and so on. No worries here about crusty old party machine-hands doling out seats.

Alternatively, for the House, we could turn each state into a single-district P.R. election, which would prevent consolidation of parties at the national level. Or each state could engage in a single-transferable vote election to elect its representatives. (Obviously this doesn't make a difference for the small states, but oh well.) Lots of options! The advantage here, of course, would be that people could have real elections, rather than engage in pointless exercises in re-electing incumbents with overwhelming majorities.

Utley thinks P.R. systems would engender too much instability—I doubt it—but he doesn't quite seem to appreciate how difficult it is to change things under the current regime. Say you're one of the 77 percent of Americans dissatisfied with Congress right now. Well, as far as the House goes, you can't vote the dirty rascals out of office. You can try to vote out precisely one dirty rascal. And thanks to the advantages of incumbency, you'll probably be unsuccessful. But if you are successful, it's very likely that switching the representative in your district won't make a shred of difference in Congress: you've voted out only 1/435th of the problem. In fact, all you've really done is screw yourself over, since now your representative is low on the seniority totem pole and isn't likely to bring home any more goods for your district. That's what you get for doing your civic duty!

Hm, now other people worry that proportional representation would deprive Americans of "local" representatives. I'm undecided on whether that's important or not, but we could always strike a compromise here: look at what New Zealand has done, with its "mixed member proportional representation" system, put in place after a 1993 referendum. Basically, every citizen gets two votes, one for a politician to represent your district and one for a party. So let's say there were 50 districts, and the Democrats won 30 single-districts, but 70% of the national vote. Then it would end up with 70 percent of the seats in Congress, with 30 of those "local" seats and the rest list seats. That way you can keep the pork flowing to your district, but still throw the bums out at a national level. Sounds complicated, but it's not, and nowadays New Zealand regularly enjoys higher-than-average levels of turnout. On the other hand, Bolivia went from regular P.R. to New Zealand-style MMP in 1994, and some scholars think that the shift caused the country to fracture. Something to worry about. And whatever, yes, yes, this is all impossible and will never happen.

Abstracts that make me want to read the whole paper:

Like most kinds of writing, academic writing rarely shines, but far more often than ordinary writing scholarly prose is murky and impenetrable. This brief jeu d'esprit considers several forms of bad writing, rejecting the claim, increasingly made in academic quarters, that "difficult writing" is necessary to the scholarly enterprise. Bloated, foggy, and enigmatic prose masquerades as profundity that escapes conventional mental grooves. In fact it is useless, unethical, and taken far enough, evil.

Do tell! On this front, I recall writing a lit-crit paper once on E.M. Forster's Passage to India with a sentence that proudly contained four dashes, three semi-colons, two uses of the word "jouissance," and one instance of the phrase "always already". Since you asked, no, it's not worth quoting in full. Still, at the time I had neither evil nor unethical thoughts on my mind, though it can be fairly stated that the whole thing was, in fact, quite useless. That much said, apparently three-hour films on Heidegger are all the rage these days...

update: Pity, the paper turns out to be not at all worth reading. (This is better.) Nevertheless, evil. It's a thesis that deserves a defender.

Huh. You mean massive income inequality isn't actually necessary to make the world go round? I am shocked, shocked I tell you. Also, Deborah Greier makes what should be an obvious point but sadly isn't: "[T]he government should not be intervening through the tax system to make the gap between the very rich and everyone else actually greater than it otherwise is (in the absence of tax)." No shit, right? Yet that's exactly what the current tax distribution does; income inequality is greater than it would be if there were no taxes at all! So why is Bush promoting activist government that increases inequality? It's a mystery. Okay, it's not a mystery. But still...

Over at Tapped, Matt Yglesias makes a good point about the politics of health care. It's a bit self-defeating for liberals to try and design a health care plan in the hopes that maybe, just maybe Republicans and other business interests will hop aboard and agree to this or that particular proposal. The onus should be on them to say what they'd agree to; in the meantime, it never hurts for liberals to start thinking up their ideal health care system and use that as a starting point for discussion. Single-payer, say. Of course, it's quite fun—and edifying, mustn't forget edifying—to discuss the whole gamut of health care plans, put them out in the public sphere, and even try to guess at what different interest groups might actually agree to. Insofar as that's the sort of stuff that should be thought about and debated, at least among policy nerds, I'm all for it.

But Democrats, given that they're out of power and all, shouldn't be in the business of proposing these sorts of things, in the hopes of coming up with some "workable" plan of action. On the other hand, proposing some pie-in-the-sky single-payer health care plan isn't going to help Democrats win elections anytime soon either. Over the long haul it would be nice to build up broader public support for this sort of thing. But in the immediate future, it's sort of a loser.

In fact, it seems faintly ridiculous for any Democrat to make any sort of concrete health care proposal right now. During the 2004 primaries, nothing was more faintly ridiculous than watching the different Democratic candidates unveil their "health care plans" and jab elbows over the details. What was the point of all this, besides satisfying some weird media demand for "a plan"? At a very broad level, sure, the different proposals gave us a decent sense of what the candidates were about: we could see that Dennis Kucinich wanted a broad government takeover of health care, and that John Edwards didn't really feel like spending all that much on the uninsured. Fine. But when it came down to it, it wasn't as if any of these plans were ever going to pass intact, and pointing out that Wesley Clark's plan would cover a few million more people than Howard Dean's was mostly an academic exercise in futility. Who cares, really.

Same with the general election: Kerry's reinsurance proposal was treated like it was going to be signed into law the second he took office, even though it was obvious it would be hacked up—or blocked altogether—by a Republican Congress, or altered by budget realities, just like it was obvious that Bush's "health savings accounts" would be expanded into a tax shelter for the rich, and his subsidies for the uninsured would probably be peeled back altogether. These proposals weren't even starting points for negotiations, necessarily, they were just... arbitrary policy papers. Now I loved the little Washington Post articles tallying up the costs and possible weird side-effects each health care proposal would have, but they certainly didn't tell me anything all that useful about each candidate, besides the very general fact that Kerry would try to spend more to help the uninsured and Bush could care less. But no one needed a white paper to see that.

What I'd like to see the Democrats do is rally behind a set of principles for health care reform, and use that as the basis for both campaigning and negotiation, rather than some semi-specific proposal that can be picked apart and anyway, would never survive first contact with House and Senate Republicans. For instance, liberals can probably agree that we ought to cover all uninsured Americans. There are a variety of ways to get to that point, but if that's something people think is important, then it's going to cost about $100 billion a year—it would be great if we could do it for less, but odds are anything cheaper is just unserious. Likewise, in a modern economy where people switch jobs frequently, and businesses are being rendered uncompetitive by spending billions on health care administration, it makes a lot of sense to decouple coverage from employment. Again, lots of ways to do that, but that should be an endpoint. And so on.

So yeah. I'd rather see the party agree on a broad set of health care goals before wonking itself out with an endless slew of competing policy proposals. I don't know if this is at all politically feasible; maybe not, I can imagine The Note would piss itself if any Democrat, especially in the 2008 presidential race, tried to run on a health care platform that didn't include "a plan". But I just don't see the point in the whole charade.

There are a lot of things to say about Elizabeth Drew's long assessment of the corruption surrounding the GOP reign in Washington. But my first thought, and I'm only about halfway through the piece, is that members of Congress simply don't get paid enough. Heh. Really, though, I don't see any way to restrict money in politics altogether—politicians will always be in the business of courting lobbyists, and lobbyists will always be in the business of skirting regulations and lavishing gifts on politicians. Powerful interests will always be powerful. The world will keep spinning. Et cetera. Sure, I'd genuinely like to see better regulations on all this, but ultimately, as with corporate governance, a lot of the money problems in Washington stem from the utter lack of integrity of the characters involved: DeLay, Norquist, Santorum, Ney, Abramoff, Bush. Obviously we need to kick the bums out. But we also need to figure out how to make sure future politicians can maintain at least a shred of integrity and don't fall as far down the K Street sinkhole as the current Republican regime has done.

The solution, perhaps, is more money. If members of Congress enjoy traveling, then let's give them enough cash to go traveling. What do I care? It's certainly better—and ultimately much cheaper—than having some trade association put up the funds to send the House Majority Leader to Scotland or wherever in exchange for some hefty tax credits. Now I'm not naïve enough to that think higher salaries for members of Congress would eliminate all corruption, but it would possibly eliminate some. In theory, higher pay would bring greater status, relative to lobbyists, for members of Congress, something that could presumably help out here. You'd also have fewer senators and representatives treating their whole legislative careers as one big favor-dishing prelude to a more lucrative K Street position. (Like, say, Billy Tauzin.) And then there's the bright but admittedly tenuous hope that higher pay would attract, well, a bit more talent to the halls of Capitol Hill. Um, like I said, admittedly tenuous.

Huh, the news that John Kerry wasn't a very good student seems to have provoked a bit of a debate about who was dumber: Bush or Kerry. I say both! No, wait… But if I had to choose, this quote from the Boston Globe piece strikes me as particularly damning: "Bush went to Yale from 1964 to 1968... He received one D in his four years, a 69 in astronomy." Astronomy? No, I kid. I seem to remember sleeping straight through my college astronomy class, and might well have failed were it not for a bit of creative number-fudging on my observations of the moons of Jupiter and a kick-ass term paper on dark matter, complete with diagrams drawn in black crayon. Ah, grade inflation...

The latest issue of the New Republic has a semi-defense of No Child Left Behind that I more or less agree with, but let's leave that aside now. In the article, Phillip Gordon argues that Democrats should start touting merit-based pay for teachers, something Kerry threw his weight behind during the campaign last year, and something I've endorsed in the past without thinking much about it. But there comes a time for actually thinking about things, I guess, so let's go. The reasons for doubting the magic and sparkly effects of merit-based pay might be familiar to many people, but not to me, so bear with a bit of blundering here.

The most interesting study I've read on the subject was an old one, done on 20 Social Security Administration offices that instituted merit-based pay, and found essentially no improvement in office performance—and this was despite the fact that in this case the measures of worker productivity were easily measured (i.e. accuracy of claims processing, time it took to settle claims). Other research seems to be a bit more ambivalent. Some more digging around, though, unearthed a pretty persuasive 1998 article by Jeffrey Pfeffer for Harvard Business Review (not online, sorry), which argues against merit-based pay, citing a study by consulting firm William M. Mercer. The results: 73 percent of surveyed companies in the preceding two years had tried to find way to tie pay to performance. 47 percent reported their employees found the system unfair and not at all sensible, and 51 percent said it added little value to the company. The Mercer study concluded that most merit-based pay did two things: "absorb vast amounts of management time and resources, and they make everybody unhappy." Hmmm.

Now I don't really mind if merit-based pay is "arbitrary" or "unfair" if it has a positive effect. But it doesn't always seem to. And the experience of businesses would very likely apply to merit-based pay in school, no? Not to mention the fear that teachers whose pay depends on boosting test scores, for instance, might well try to "cheat" on their students' exams. (Steven Levitt has showed that cheating of this sort does in fact happen.) It doesn't make sense to run schools more like businesses if the business model in question is, in fact, flawed.

The alternative, as detailed for instance here, is some sort of group-oriented incentive system where all employees share in the rewards of success. That sounds touchy-feely, but it might well work. Pfeffer cites a study of a manufacturer that put in this sort of compensation system: "grievances decreased, product quality increased tenfold, and perceptions of teamwork and concern for performance all improved." Nice! I don't think this is the sort of thing that would be impossible to put in place for schools, although I'm not sure what the specifics would be: perhaps reward all teachers in a given grade if their students improved collectively based on some metric, like value-added tests? Maybe. Meanwhile, the economists among us might worry about free riders, but my understanding of behavioral research is that free riders in this sort of situation are fairly rare; as mom always warned, peer pressure can be a hell of a thing.

So merit-based pay: not all it's cracked up to be? Seems that way. One crucial caveat though: In places where such systems have actually been put in place, merit-based pay for teachers ends up effectively being nothing more than an across-the-board pay hike. In one Denver pilot program, 85 percent of teachers met their objectives and received a raise. This appears to be the case in Britain as well. So it might be that, in practice, merit-based pay isn't actually merit-based pay so much as a much-needed raise for teachers that is wrapped in the sort of packaging that helps parents feel good about spending the money. Well, okay. I'm all for raising teacher salaries—by a lot—and if this "performance-based" talk is what people need to swallow the accompanying property tax hikes, well then bring it on. But actual merit-based pay? Probably not. Now giving schools more flexibility to fire ineffective teachers on the other hand...

The Becker-Posner duo are talking about retirement. In particular, they want to know if there's any way to lever old people who aren't quite, um, up to snuff, out of their jobs. They suggest competency tests. Meanwhile, Peter Lindert's book on welfare states—which I plan to bring up from now until, oh, eternity—has an interesting perspective on this. In particular, he suggests that public subsidies for early retirement have a negligible effect on GDP in part because they weed out less-productive older workers. He notices, for instance, that France devotes a large portion of its retirement benefits to people in the 55-64 age group: in the form of more generous pensions, disability payments, and special unemployment benefits. As you'd expect, there are far fewer people working at that age: 33.6 percent of French workers in that age group are employed, versus 55.1 percent in the United States. So why isn't this a big problem?

Well, the big one is that early subsidies for retirement, depending on how they're targeted, may actually weed out the least productive workers. Among various welfare states, Jonathan Gruber and David Wise found a greater retirement subsidy for those in the 10th salary percentile than those in the 90th. (This was done in a variety of ways; France did it with unemployment and layoff benefits.) They even found that some European businesses have tacitly approved and lobbied for these subsidies as a way of weeding out their least productive workers. And it seems to have worked. OECD data shows that a disproportionate share of workers in the 55-64 age group are highly educated. In France: "The share of men with a university education who were still at work in the 55-65 age group was 30 percent greater than one would have predicted had they retired as fast as the less educated."

Interestingly, many people have suggested raising the retirement age as a method of restoring Social Security's long-term actuarial imbalance. Eh, perhaps, but it's worth asking whether this could actually have a detrimental effect on the economy as a whole. After all, as Xavier Sala-i-Martin has argued, some older workers are so counterproductive to their company or business that their marginal product might well be zero. It's not clear that forcing many of these workers to work longer would be a good thing for anyone.

Interesting take on the Raich decision on medicinal marijuana from Orin Kerr:

More broadly, it seems to me that the theme of the Rehnquist Court's federalism jurisprudence is Symbolic Federalism. If there is a federalism issue that doesn't have a lot of practical importance, there's a decent chance five votes exist for the pro-federalism side. Lopez is a good example. Lopez resulted in very little change in substantive law. Yes, the decision struck down a federal statute, but it indicated that Congress could quickly reenact the statute with a very slight change. Congress did exactly that: It re-passed the statute with the added interstate commerce element shortly after the Lopez decision. Lower courts have upheld the amended statute, and the Supreme Court has shown no interest in reviewing their rulings. Because nearly every gun has traveled in or affected interstate commerce, the federal law of possessing guns in school zones is essentially the same today as it was pre-Lopez.

A few months ago I wondered what my future kids, if I ever had any, could possibly do to shock me, seeing as how I'm perfectly fine with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and all that. My favorite response: "They'll find a way, trust me." Okay, okay, I've finally seen the light on this one. Apparently in Germany, kids who find it difficult to mortify their liberal-minded parents are resorting to a brand new mode of rebellion: neo-Nazism. Oy. At this point, I think the best strategy here is just to pretend to be ultra-conservative. Yeah, it will suck if the son spends weeks and weeks agonizing over whether or not to tell me that he's gay, but at least he's not off lynching Jewish schoolmates and refusing to eat meat. Or whatever it is the neo-Nazis do these days.

In the grand tradition of Brad DeLong, here are a few things I'd blog about if time were infinite. But it's not, so instead they'll just have to make for good Monday morning reading:

Stephen Glain's overview of sinister goings-on in Jordan.

The Atlantic continues its series of oh-so-thrilling war games, this month with North Korea.

This is the most satisfying story I read all weekend.

Jacob Weisberg rehashes the square peg in a round hole that is our Cuba policy.

Surprise: politicians are worthless! Even the bright young lights of the Democratic party. Awesome.

"The Perils of Pervasive Legal Instrumentalism." It's more exciting than it sounds, I swear.

And certainly not least, Shakespeare's Sis on the links between Bolton and the Downing Street Memo.

Finally, since I rarely link to right-wing blogs—mostly because I'm close-minded and petty, see, but partisanship might have a little to do with it too—I have to say, this Donald Luskin post was pretty funny. Also via Luskin, I learn the new SEC chairman is a devoted Ayn Rand acolyte. I'm not sure what this even means, though. Alan Greenspan was supposedly a Rand devotee too, once, but I doubt anyone thinks of him as such nowadays. Save for his still-burning passion for the gold standard. Odd guy, that Greenspan.

John Nichols has a very interesting article in the latest issue of the Nation about the one place where progressive politics are on the march: urban areas. On the other hand, a few weeks ago Joel Kotkin argued that many cities are rapidly losing people, and should concentrate on more "pro-growth" policies—which means in part focusing more on jobs and infrastructure than attracting the creative class—that "boost the competitive status of urban centers."

Now I've always just figured that most city councils have already been thinking about boosting competitiveness, and the main reason it's not happening as quickly as Kotkin would like is simply because it's hard to pull off. But judging from Nichols' piece it doesn't seem like these new progressive hotbeds are actually making economic growth their chief priority—there's a lot of time spent passing resolutions against the Patriot Act or the war in Iraq—and then there's a lot of stuff, like trying to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, that might even hurt the competitiveness of urban areas. Especially if there aren't nationwide standards. Of course, there's a lot of pro-growth stuff going on as well: new child care programs, affordable housing, etc. Plus, the living wage doesn't seem to have been a job-destroying blight on urban areas, so who knows, maybe emissions reductions and other fun liberal goals won't be as "anti-growth" as often predicted, either. That's what experimentation's all about!

I missed this when it came out a few days ago, but Zogby has a new Social Security poll showing heavy support for Bush's plan to privatize the system. 52 percent liked it, 40 percent didn't. Of course, these numbers came after respondents were told that privatization would offer a "better" rate of return than the current system, which is patently false, so there's a bit of heavy fibbing needed to make the sale here. But I'm sure the White House is up to the challenge.

Still, I wonder how influential polls like these really are, especially when it comes to convincing members of Congress to vote one way or the other, or push for this or that reform. My guess is quite a bit, which makes the battle of polls an important one. During the mortal combat over estate tax repeal in the '90s, as chronicled by Graetz and Shapiro in Death by a Thousand Cuts, repeal proponents would put out poll after poll showing that the public favored estate tax repeal, and those polls helped convince Republicans in Congress to push forward on a tax cut that was once nigh unthinkable. What liberal pollsters rarely did, however, was to commission their own polls showing that estate tax repeal was in fact very, very low on the priority list of voters. Public opinion generally ran along the lines of: "Estate tax repeal? Sure, why not! Estate tax repeal instead of more education spending? Um, no." But only the first part of that got any airtime, and that discrepancy really helped shape the debate.

There's a similar dynamic going on with Social Security. Whether or not you think reform would be "nice," there's certainly a lot else that needs fixing first, not least the stomach-dropping general fund deficit. Dean Baker recently put out a list of ten potential catastrophes that will strike long before we'll need to cut Social Security benefits slightly in 2052—the doomsday scenarios range from exploding health care and drug costs to overflowing prisons and global warming—and while some of it's a bit silly and doom-mongering, that's exactly the point! We've got a lot of things to worry about, and it doesn't make much sense to go after what is currently the most financially sound program in the entire federal government.

At the Democratic convention last year, Barak Obama talked about inner-city education in the course of his keynote address, saying, "[Inner city folks] know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." Ah yes, acting white. We hear that a lot these days, and I've always wondered, is "acting white" an insult different in kind from other anti-intellectual insults? When I was growing up, for instance, I briefly attended a lily-white high school in upstate New York, where it was for the most part a capital offense, punishable by schoolyard beat-down, to hold a book in your hands. I wouldn't say anti-intellectualism is limited to a single race by any means.

At any rate, Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli of Harvard have done a lot of work on "acting white"—which can mean a lot of things, but in this context refers to the theory that weaker school performance by black students is due to the fact that it's not cool to get good grades—and their latest analysis is worth discussing. Obviously there's a long history of researchers trying to figure out why there's a persistent achievement gap between white and black students on various tests: explanations range from income inequality, differences in school quality, poor parenting, racially biased tests, racially biased teachers, or even, if you like shoddy Bell Curve research, genetics. But peer pressure and socialization is another oft-cited explanation.

The "acting white" explanation first cropped up in 1986, in a study by Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu. They found that black students aren't ridiculed by their peers for getting good grades per se, but are ridiculed for doing things that tend to get you good grades, like raising your hand in class, or "proper diction". A separate study in 1998, by Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, disputed these results, in fact finding that black students who were part of honor societies were more likely to see themselves as popular, and that in general, black students were no more "anti-intellectual" than their white peers. (Although obviously there's still a damned lot of anti-intellectualism in the world.) Similar findings were published by Karolyn Tyson and William Darity, Jr., who also noted that instances of anti-intellectualism were treated differently: among whites it "is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as racial neurosis."

At any rate, Fryer and Torelli revisited the subject, basing their analysis not on self-reported measures of popularity, but on "an index of social status" (how many same-race friends a student has, weighted by the popularity of each friend). According to their data, there is indeed a discrepancy between students of different races. For blacks, higher grades bring higher popularity until you reach a GPA of 3.5, at which point you start losing popularity. For Hispanics, you start losing popularity after reaching a 2.5 GPA. For whites, higher grades generally correlate with higher popularity all the way up. Interestingly, this effect is strongest at schools with fewer than 20 percent black students; it is virtually non-existent in predominantly black schools. (The results hold up when you vary up many other school characteristics.)

A few comments. Obviously the "acting white" phenomenon only has a strong effect on achievement if the loss of friends is high enough to act as a deterrent on doing well in school. Intuitively, I'm not sure it does. A black student with a 4.0 has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a similar white student. Friends are nice and all, but that's not a huge difference. It's also possible that the causal arrow is all wrong here. The "acting white" thesis suggests that smart black students get scorned by their peers, but it could simply be that black students who are unpopular for other reasons just end up spending more time in the library and hence, get higher grades. (That doesn't explain why smart black students are more unpopular than their white counterparts, though.)

Finally, the finding that there's not much of an "acting white" effect in predominantly black schools is important. (To be sure, there's probably a good deal of anti-intellectualism, but nothing over and beyond what goes on among, say, white students.) In their original study, Fordham and Ogbu had originally suggested that black students, because they were on average given shoddy schools and had lower job ceilings, and have long been seen as not very capable of high achievement, all decided that academic success was for white people and shrugged it off. Some have charged that this is a simplistic view of identity-formation. But more to the point, why is it that this effect only persists in interracial schools? I can think of a couple explanations, but none of them certain. And even more to the point, since we do have heavily segregated schools in this country—70 percent of black students attend predominantly minority schools—it stands to reason, then, that the "acting white" slander probably can't explain why all of these black students are falling behind their white counterparts. So Obama's probably off on this one; there are likely far bigger problems to tackle.

Daniel Gross loves a free lunch but can't seem to find one anywhere. For my part, American Express was offering free lunch down the street today in exchange for all my personal info, and I was happy to oblige. But I seem to be the only one. Here are a few more folks who can't find the free lunch:

Analyses by some of the nation's leading economists have convincingly demonstrated that the comparisons which private-account proponents often make of rates of return in Social Security to past rates of return in private capital markets are apples-to-oranges comparisons and do not withstand scrutiny.

For example, a landmark paper co-authored by economists Olivia Mitchell, a member of the President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security and a supporter of private accounts, John Geanakopolos, and Stephen Zeldes found that "the popular argument that Social Security privatization would provide higher returns for all current and future workers is misleading, because it ignores transition costs and differences across programs in the allocation of aggregate and household risk." The paper states: "A popular argument suggests that if Social Security were privatized, everyone could earn higher returns. We show that this is false."

A recent analysis that the investment firm Goldman Sachs sent to its subscribers explains these basic economic findings. The analysis, entitled "Seven Myths About Social Security Reform," includes as a leading myth that "Privatization is a much better 'deal' for Social Security participants." Goldman Sachs explains that "after adjusting for these two factors [transition costs and risk, which are described below], the difference in returns between personal saving accounts and the current system disappears. There is no free lunch available via privatization."

Meanwhile, I agree with much of what Megan McArdle's saying here: it would be nice if we could stop Congress from raiding our prefunded retirement plan. But we can't. So the thing to do, I guess, is not to privatize Social Security but to shy away from prefunding whenever possible. Maybe I'm joking, but probably not. At any rate, I don't see how private accounts are supposed to protect our retirement funds from politicians and their grubby fingers. It would be easy for Congress to raid private accounts. They could tax the disbursement. Or the government could just tax those financial brokers that are allowed to manage our Social Security accounts, who in turn raise our fees. Or, since the government decides where and how you invest your private account, it could simply force everyone to invest in those "mere IOUs" we like to call Treasury Bonds, and then run up all the debt it wants. That last little trick doesn't seem any more difficult than raiding the Trust Fund, does it?

No one would "own" their private account any more than they "own" their Social Security benefits right now. Congress can give and take away. The only solution, clearly, is to educate our kids and send them off to liberal colleges where they can be brainwashed into voting for the sort of politicians who won't run up staggering deficits the way the current regime has.

Egad. I've been doing interviews all day with prospective Mother Jones interns for the summer, and I have to say, it's awful. Not because the people are bad—far from it, they're all highly-qualified and genuinely interesting people. No, it's awful because I'm a terrible interviewer and never really have anything I want to ask. "Tell me about a time you excelled..." Oh no, wait, I don't care. Or if I do, odds are I'll get a scripted answer. Hey, I certainly give scripted answers to job interviews all the time, and they say virtually nothing about me. It's the nature of interviews! Or the worst: "what's your greatest weakness?" What's my what now? So I need to start thinking of some clever questions that either make people feel unduly awkward, or else elicit information I actually need. Suggestions welcome.

Why did people get so riled up about hunting down witches back in the day? Envy? Anxiety over fertility? A means to advance one's political (or clerical) career? Alison Rowland discusses.

I am so addicted to this game it's not even funny. No more blogging from me for the next three years; sorry, that's just the way it is. Come to think of it, this might even rival the great Tetris addiction my sophomore year in college, when I couldn't even get in the shower without staring at all the tiles, imagining the sweet, sweet pattern of lines and superblocks they could form.

Read Eugene Oregon on whether or not the situation in Darfur has "improved" over the last few months. Also, read Eric Reeves. It comes down to this, really: the gangsters running Khartoum are attacking aid workers, arresting members of Doctors Without Borders, arresting a translator for the UN Secretary General, and conducting massacres while Kofi Annan is in the goddamn country, all for one good reason—because they can. And that's sort of a problem. Besides the bloody fact of genocide in Darfur, which is a monstrosity in its own right and a latent security threat, didn't we establish in the run-up to the war in Iraq—on both sides of the debate—that letting regimes flout international law was a terrible thing that undermined the credibility of the international order? Yes? No? Yes? Well, consider it undermined.

If I were a budding dictator in the year 2005, contemplating genocide as a means of putting down an insurgency within my own borders, I'd be learning some very interesting lessons here.

UPDATE: Eh, I'm becoming less enthralled with the "we'd have to invade if we wanted to stop the genocide" school of thought. Not because it's untrue—heck, I wrote a whole article on the subject—but because the incremental battles here really are crucial and tend to get obscured by talking too much about "perfect" possible solutions. For instance, the ICG recently put out an assessment of peacekeeping needs in Darfur. It's still a lowball on troop needs, I think, but as Eric Reeves points out, it's the first time an organization has been willing to think "realistically about the essential features of true civilian protection in Darfur." The next step here is to convince the African Union to think in these terms as well.

David Brooks is training his fire on Europe. Liberals have failed! Europe's the proof! Eh, it's probably worth reading his whole column, but after that, onwards to the debate, and the first thing we'll do is kill all his premises. Is Europe really doing so much worse than the United States? Maybe not. Here's Robert Pozen:

Gross domestic product has grown at an average rate of 3.3 percent a year in the United States over the last decade, compared to 2.1 percent a year in the EU15. Per capita GDP growth, however, has been very similar: 1.8 percent a year in the United States, 1.7 percent in the EU15. The main factor driving higher U.S. economic growth is not greater productivity gains; it is a more rapidly expanding population.

Hard to blame the welfare state, then. I'd also note that, contrary to claims about burdensome "progressive taxation" in Europe, many of the tax regimes there often make use of the sort of things Brooks and other conservatives would like to see more of here in the United States. As Peter Lindert details in his truly fascinating book, Social Spending and Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century (see here), the big welfare states actually tax property and capital less heavily relative to social transfers than does the United States (or even the liberalized United Kingdom), and labor more heavily. Many of the welfare state democracies also tax consumption more heavily than we do here in the United States—again, something that many Republicans, including Brooks, have called for. Meanwhile, countries like Sweden tax dividends less heavily than low-spending states like the United States or Japan. Regardless of what Brooks may say, in many ways it's Bush and the Republicans who want to push our tax systems to something more closely resembling Europe's.

So what is to blame for Europe's relatively low growth (or at least portions of Europe; some European countries, like Sweden, seem to be doing fine)? Well, as Pozen says, demographics are probably a big part of it. Europe's aging more quickly, and hasn't prefunded as many of its pensions. The U.S. is better at immigration, so long as we can duct-tape Tom Tancredo and toss him in a basement. There's also, as Olivier Blanchard points out, the fact that Europeans work less, which is probably a bigger cause of lower income per capita (about 70 percent the U.S. average) than high taxes. But notice that all of those things are quite fixable. The EU expanded last year into Central and Eastern Europe, bringing about 75 million new people. If dealt with properly, that could obviously rectify a lot of demographic problems.

It's also not clear that the United States is going to trounce Europe forever. As Brooks never tires of reminding us in other contexts—namely, during the Social Security debate—productivity is going to slow soon enough. Now it seems doubtful that it will slow as much as, say, the Social Security Trustees predict, but our current supercharged rates of productivity growth probably aren't going to last forever.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is increasingly burdened by defense spending, and Europe is not. The United States, I'm told, has already reaped most of the productivity gains from having women enter the workforce en masse—that phenomenon has only just started to take hold in Europe (excluding Norway and Sweden). According to this article, only 55 percent of women work outside the home in Europe, compared to 65 percent in the United States. And southern countries like Italy and Greece could make huge strides on this front with the right policies and attitude shifts. Then there's the whole internet revolution thing: this study argues that European firms are still trying to implement their fancy new IT technologies and learning various retail techniques from the United States. Once they do, they can slingshot their way forward, as we did in the 1990s. It's also worth mentioning that we've got much larger budget deficits here in the United States, which is eventually going to kick us in the ass.

So I'm not ready to write off Europe just yet. Certainly its struggles aren't entirely the fault of leftist-style policies. Certainly not all of its policies are leftist-style. On the other hand, it's true, I think, that countries like France and Germany are in need of serious regulatory and labor reform. Fine. Say they scale down labor protections on these fronts, some 40 percent; they'll still be far more congenial labor environments than here in the United States. There's a lot of middle ground here and it doesn't discredit American liberalism for us to try to aim for that ground instead of a country "exactly like Germany now and forever."

Mark Kleiman runs a quick course in illicit-market economics: Reducing demand for marijuana could potentially make the price rise, not fall as would be expected. Good stuff. And indeed, drug prices are always a tricky thing and I don't think I ever quite understand them—if only because the difference between the nominal price and the actual price diverges wildly.

For instance, I could get heroin very cheaply here in San Francisco, in dollar terms, but in reality it's very "expensive" for me to find a dealer, brave the relevant neighborhood, avoid getting caught, and assuming various health risks (it is unregulated after all). Legalizing heroin might well lower the dollar price by a bit, but in reality it would become much, much cheaper for me to use, all things considered. On the other hand, marijuana is different—right now I know full well where to find it, dealers tend to be reliable, there aren't any real health risks (it's not like you can overdose on pot), and since I'm not a minority there's little chance of me getting tossed in jail for minor possession. Legalization would lower the full price for me by only a bit, assuming the nominal price stayed more or less stable. I think. At any rate, I'll be the first to say the War on Drugs is a stupid idea, but arguing against it on the grounds that the dollar price of drugs has declined doesn't seem all that sound. Surely it's raised the actual price for many—the question is whether there are better ways of doing so, which there are.

We hear a lot in some quarters about how liberals need to articulate some sort of foreign policy vision or set of principles—because, supposedly, it's both important on the merits will help Democrats win elections. On some level, though, I'm skeptical that foreign policy principles are always a useful thing to have, at least after a point. I bring this up because Patrick Hynes is highlighting a new article in the National Interest, by Rich Lowry, that outlines a bold new conservative foreign policy vision. It's not paleo-conservatism, it's not bloody-minded realism, and it's not even neoconservatism. It's... well, there's no catchy name, but here are Lowry's principles (quote):

1. The best defense is a good offense.
2. A healthy skepticism of government action.
3. A healthy appreciation for all instruments by which national power is projected.
4. A healthy appreciation for the role of democracy in fostering liberty.
5. A solid grounding in American traditions, "built on the four schools identified by Walter Russell Mead."

Um, okay. Now the funny thing is, I'd agree with all of those things, wholeheartedly even, and yet Lowry supported the war in Iraq and I didn't. Funny, that. In my case, it was because I leaned a little more heavily on principle #2 than Lowry did—the war seemed fine to me in the abstract, but my skepticism towards Bush administration actions at the time was beyond healthy—training for marathons in fact. (Thinking back on it now, though, I was wrong: the war probably wouldn't have gone much better under more competent management.) Others had other reasons. But a lot of opposition to the war—not all, but a lot—was based not on any kneejerk principle but cold hard empiricism. Saddam could be contained. Massive nation-building projects were untenable. There were better ways to spend all that blood and treasure and conduct "a good offense" elsewhere. Blah blah.

And that's really what it comes down to. The best defense is a good offense? Sure, I'll buy it. Lots of people would buy it. If we could take out North Korea's nuclear facilities easily and with minimal repercussion, many liberals would sign up. But we can't, of course, and that has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with 500 long-range artillery tubes pointed right at downtown Seoul. So things get tricky, and we all end up with some principle like, "The best defense is the minimal amount of offense needed to ensure you don't get blown up." In which case everything rests on that word "minimal," and that's what sober think tanks and military assessments and other classics of evidence-based analysis are for. Same with "a healthy appreciation for the role of democracy in fostering liberty," a maxim so banal as to be nearly meaningless. (Unless the game is to seize the high ground in ordre to make the case that liberals don't believe democracy fosters liberty, which Lowry may want to do.)

At any rate, Lowry's principles certainly never tell us what to do in a given situation. Ticking off the list, presumably Lowry believes that with respect to Iran, say, our best defense is a good offense... unless offense would do too much harm. Which it might. And government action might have certain defects, except when it doesn't. And we should use all instruments of national power but rely more on the ones that are working. And democracy in Iran would be cool but it can't be done badly. Right. No shit.

Obviously some foreign policy stuff reduces to first principles—as when, for instance, certain people think we have a duty to intervene when genocide takes place (unless it would do more harm than good), and certain people don't. No amount of empiricism will split the difference here—unless, say, you can show the latter group that genocide is a security concern. But most of our current foreign policy debates really don't need to reduce like that, even if they tend to in practice. Arguments that the world would be a safer place (or whatever we agree to value) if we projected military might around the globe, as opposed to strengthening multilateral institutions (or arguing about the relative balance between the two), shouldn't be a matter of pure principle so much as a matter of actual, concrete knowledge. Facts are wonderful things! And reality shouldn't get waved aside as one big deviation from true doctrine.

Now if we're talking about a presidential candidate who wants to win elections, then fine, it's probably good to have some foreign policy principles handy. Whatever the people demand. Principles do sound rousing and all. And in fairness, they at least give voters a sense of the sort of thing a candidate might well do in a given situation. But presidential campaign strategy really oughtn't, I think, be the same thing as an intellectual approach to foreign policy.

Ah, the Debate Club I've been waiting for: Mark Tushnet and Erwin Chemerinsky debate judicial review over at Legal Affairs. Earlier, long posts on this subject here and here. It should be said that, as fun as this discussion is, there's no conceivable way judicial review will ever be abolished, barring an unlikely constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court isn't suddenly going to wake up one morning and "discover" that it's been arrogating a bit too much power from Congress these past 200 years. On the other hand, if enough people start pulling Tom DeLays and carping on judicial review, judges might start showing more deference to the legislature. But I have no reason to believe that's true.

Once more it's time to visit our friend Neil the Ethical Werewolf, who suggests that Democrats start touting the ol' balanced budget. From a political perspective, sure, this is probably the sort of thing I would advise any candidate to do—the Bush administration really has made a hash of the deficit, and liberals may as well rub his face in it. But from a policy perspective, no, no, no. The balanced budget is an awful thing to pursue. I do understand that Bill Clinton eventually got to balance in 1999 and 2000, but it certainly wasn't something that needed pursuing—if anything, he caved in the face of GOP pressure on the issue, despite the fact that Gingrich's proposed budgets, which caused for massive cuts in social spending, were wildly unpopular. He held onto the surpluses not because it was good policy, but because he didn't want the Republican Congress to get its grubby hands on the extra money. (Jon Chait tells the story here.) Alas, then came 2000.

As a fiscal principle, the balanced budget makes no sense to me. In a downturn you're always going to want a bit of a deficit—not because of Keynesian public spending, but just because tax revenues are going to be down, unemployment benefits up, the states will all need additional federal revenue to keep ticking, and no one wants to start hiking taxes (or cut spending) during a recession. If we're really worried about exploding debt—as we should be—then it seems fine simply to keep the deficit roughly below the rate of growth, or keep the debt-to-GDP ratio stable, at around, say, its historical average of roughly 40 percent. No need to hike taxes even further or make more drastic cuts just to get the deficit down to zero. The difference between a manageable deficit of, I dunno, 2 percent of GDP and absolute balance is, after all, about $200 billion. You can do good liberal stuff with that money. Plus, there's no sense making a fetish of saving up surpluses for the future—if we've learned one thing over the last five years, it's that the surpluses just get squandered.

On the other hand, one thing I would like to see considered at the federal level is something that states make good use of: capital budgets, which borrow money and plan for long-term capital investments, just like any corporation would. (These budgets, obviously, don't need to be balanced as per state constitutional amendments.) I've never understood why the federal government doesn't have a capital budget. If there's anything we should be using debt financing for, it's on large public works and long-term infrastructure, no? Now the tricky thing is that, as I understand it, states are usually limited as to how much they can borrow by their credit rating, rather than any rules or regulations. Much like corporations. Obviously there's no such limit on Congress, so perhaps this wouldn't work nearly as well at the federal level. At any rate, I'd really like to know whatever happened to the committee that Clinton set up to study this issue.