On the topic of labor reform, this proposal for "open-source unionism," by Joel Rogers and Richard Freeman, seems like a perfectly good idea:

[Right now,] workers typically become union members only when unions gain majority support at a particular workplace. This makes the union the exclusive representative of those workers for purposes of collective bargaining. Getting to majority status… is a struggle. The law barely punishes employers who violate it, and the success of the union drive is typically determined by the level of employer resistance. Unions usually abandon workers who are unsuccessful in their fight to achieve majority status, and they are uninterested in workers who have no plausible near-term chance of such success.

Under open-source unionism, by contrast, unions would welcome members even before they achieved majority status, and stick with them as they fought for it--maybe for a very long time. These "pre-majority" workers would presumably pay reduced dues in the absence of the benefits of collective bargaining, but would otherwise be normal union members. They would gain some of the bread-and-butter benefits of traditional unionism--advice and support on their legal rights, bargaining over wages and working conditions if feasible, protection of pension holdings, political representation, career guidance, access to training and so on. And even in minority positions, they might gain a collective contract for union members, or grow to the point of being able to force a wall-to-wall agreement for all workers in the unit. … Joining the labor movement would be something you did for a long time, not just an organizational relationship you entered into with a third party upon taking some particular job, to expire when that job expired or changed.

That seems spot on, or at least a step in a spot-on direction. As mentioned before, it seems very unlikely that either organizing or political action will boost labor density by a significant amount, and the latest intra-labor feuding has a bit of a more-heat-than-light quality to it, in that respect at least. Taking the historical view, it's usually been new innovations, of just the sort Freeman and Rogers are discussing, that have lead to "spurts" in organizing. Now if a split in the AFL-CIO can make it more likely that innovations of this sort will appear—competition being the mother of invention and whatnot—then so much the better.

I've been reading Barry T. Hirsch's paper, "What Do Unions Do for Economic Performance," and while it's probably not the last word on the matter, some of his findings seem worth sharing. According to Hirsh, most economic studies show that, on average, the effect of unions on productivity is zero, although this varies from sector to sector. (Unions do good things for productivity, such as improving a firm's personnel policies, and bad things, such as restrictive hiring rules.) Unions also lower corporate profits, as expected, though they do not seem to have any effect on business failure. Some finer points:

1. The ability of unions to win benefits for its members depends, predictably enough, on the degree of competition facing both unions and workers. A company in a fairly competitive, largely nonunion industry can't just pass wage gains on to consumers in the form of higher prices. This explains why unions have taken firmer hold in less competitive settings, like the public sector.
   
   
2. Positive union effects on productivity are highest in sectors where competitive pressure exists—because management needs to respond to an increase in labor costs by organizing more efficiently, etc. But these are also the sectors in which there is the least scope for union organizing and wage gains. (Because of #1).
   
   
3. Says Hirsh: "This implies that steady-state union density in the U.S. private sector must remain small, absent a general union productivity advantage. By the same token, introduction of unions or the strengthening of other instruments for collective voice into highly competitive sectors of the U.S. economy is unlikely to have large downside risks for economy-wide performance."
   
   
4. Some theories have held that the union wage premium will provide an incentive for employers to upgrade the skill level of the work force, thus increasing productivity. But, Hirsh says, "empirical evidence for skill upgrading is weak." (One theory for this: employers may reason that if they were to train their workers, the union would just bargain for even higher wages next time around, thus restoring the premium, so the employers decide not to bother.)
   
   
5. "Union wage increases can be viewed as a tax on capital that lowers the net rate of return on investment," says Hirsch. Unionized firms tend reduce investment in physical and innovative capital, such as R&D, leading to slower growth in sales and employment.
   
   
6. There is some evidence that union companies in the U.S. have performed poorly relative to nonunion companies, which has led, to some extent, to a shift of production and employment away from the former sector to the latter. Since unions tend to lower profitability, this could explain the decline of unionized industries in the 1970s and 1980s. But Hirsch claims this is far from settled. (See #7).
   
   
7. Importantly, Hirsch emphasizes that many of these empirical findings don't always identify the causal relationships at play. Do unions really cause X effect on productivity? Sometimes it's hard to say. For instance, older plants tend to have lower productivity, but older plants also have, on average, higher union density. Plus, union status is often an endogenous, rather than random, variable. Nor is it clear, moreover that union effects on, say, sawmills can be generalized to union effects among industries of the future.

So what does all this mean? If Hirsch is right, union representation is likely to continue to decline in the private sector. Firms just won't happily follow, say, the CostCo model and expect that collective bargaining will enhance productivity or profits. So labor will have to rely, increasingly, on the government for support. Now Hirsch thinks we should be thinking of more flexible ways to give workers representation and participation; regulations that capture the gains and considerable benefits from giving employees a greater voice in the workplace, while limiting the economic losses that come with "excess" union rent-seeking. Maybe. I get more than a little bit skeptical, though, when he starts touting an alternative form of organizing called "conditional deregulation." Beware the Greeks bearing gifts and all...

Colbert King's op-ed today—laying out the case against the use of racial profiling against "young Muslim male"—hits a bunch of the really crucial notes, I think, but it's possible to expand this argument a bit. First, a few misconceptions to clear up. Racial profiling probably isn't motivated by bigotry. Many minority police officers support the practice, after all, because they see it, sensibly enough, as a statistical tool. Moreover, for some intents and purposes, the statistical tool can work. Racial profiling can, in theory, offer a more cost-effective way to attack a certain problem. If, say, most people committing X action are young Colombian men, and if a reliable way to identify young Colombian men exists, then racial profiling will reduce X action. Clear enough, and you can see why so many people find the concept so attractive. Nevertheless, it's still an awful idea and ought to be abolished.

One of the big worries is that defenders of racial profiling want the practice to evade the "strict scrutiny" that generally gets applied to various forms of racial discrimination. Police departments and other proponents argue that, in racial profiling, they aren't taking action based solely on race—which is true—but rather using race as just one of a variety of factors to identify suspects. As such, they say, "strict scrutiny" shouldn't apply. Indeed, many mayors and governors will denounce racial profiling when "race is the only factor," but approve of other types, as if this makes all the difference in the world. It doesn't. In the real world, most discrimination doesn't take race as the only factor. Let's say I preferred to associate only with white people (or hire only white people, or admit only white people to my grad school program), but I would make exceptions for blacks and Hispanics who attended Ivy League universities. Clearly I'm discriminating by race, although race isn't the only factor in my decision. Point is, when we start approving of those types of racial discrimination in which race is just "one of many factors," we start heading down a troubling slippery slope.

That's the conceptual problem. The practical problems with racial profiling are more straightforward. For one, it antagonizes the group of people being profiled. One might argue that in the case of anti-terrorism profiling, the targets here are relatively small in number. (Not that many people ride public transit or fly on airplanes, after all.) That seems plainly false. Even a "Muslim-looking male" who never boarded an airplane would still know full well that if he wanted to do so, he would likely be stopped, and that in itself could cause resentment. Nor is getting pulled out of a line at an airport or subway station, as a result of racial profiling, just a "minor inconvenience," since the person being profiled knows all the while that it's not just this one time he's being yanked aside; rather, he's likely to have go through this process many more times in the future.

Now, as it happens in the case of, say, young Muslim men in America, I'm not sure if the resentment that would flare up as a result of racial profiling would necessarily "create" new terrorists. Maybe not. (That still wouldn't make it right, just less dangerous.) But it might piss off people who would otherwise help in a terrorism investigation, or who might call the police on a tip, or whatnot. Significant? It could turn out that way.

By the way, how many people would be affected if the police start profiling "young Muslim men"? A lot. A whole lot. As King notes, "Muslim-looking" men encompasses a wide, wide swath of races and nationalities, from Nigerians to Iranians to Indonesians. (Those three don't look anything alike.) Then you have your Central Asian Muslims, who often resemble the Chinese more than they do Mohammed Atta, not to mention your Chechens and other Caucasian Muslims, who can often pass for white. And so on. A lot of different people are getting profiled and antagonized here. Then we have to deal with the fact that many of the people we might think are Muslims probably aren't; around three-quarters of all Arab-Americans follow Christianity, for instance.

Meanwhile, even if racial profiling isn't motivated by bigotry, over time the practice would very likely create racial tension, or bigotry, among law enforcement officers, who, after all, would be out there day after day looking suspiciously at every Arab or North African they see. (Not to mention that they would likely have, over time, many a tense confrontation with "Muslim-looking men" who resent being targeted.) Pretending that these security personnel could continue to operate in a race-neutral manner day after day seems extremely naïve to me. Meanwhile, the practice would encourage civilians to view anyone they considered a "young Muslim male" suspiciously, which would further inflame racial tensions. How could it not? To top it all off, as King notes, police officers engaged in racial profiling will be far more likely to overlook white terrorists, who are as old as the republic itself, and include such stalwarts as Eric Rudolph and the dude pictured to the right. A police officer focusing hard on what that swarthy fellow standing in line is up to will almost certainly miss suspicious behavior by the white dude with the crew-cut and bulky backpack. Nor, for that matter, does it seem like it would be terribly difficult for a "young Muslim male" to pass himself off as, say, Hispanic or Greek (or white, if from the Caucus region) or whatever if one really wanted to pull off some bombing or other.

But maybe not. If cops were to use racial profiling against what they thought were young Muslim men, it might well very reduce terrorist incidents. Who knows? Nevertheless, even if that was the case, the loss of this statistical tool would have to be the price we pay for racial equality. As with all things, trade-offs sometimes become necessary. If preserving racial harmony means that the DHS needs to spend an extra couple billion dollars on some other, less cost-effective, security measure, well, fine. That sounds like a worthwhile trade-off to me. Now sure, one can imagine any number of "ticking-bomb" scenarios to question these principles—say that we had impeccable intelligence that a group of four Arab men were planning to bomb the New York subway tomorrow, but didn't know who they were; what then?—but clever hypotheticals like these don't disprove the general rule here.

In the London Review of Books, Eric Hobsbawm discusses the history of the family in the 20th century, including some fun trivia: "How many people knew, for example, that up to the middle of the 20th century by far the highest rate of divorce ever recorded—up to 50 per cent—was to be found among nominally Muslim Malays, that there is less gender bias in domestic work in Chinese cities today than in the USA, that the highest divorce rates in the second half of the 20th century were to be found among the main protagonists of the Cold War, the USA and Russia, or that the most sexually active Western people are the Finns?" Well, I didn't. Nor have I ever really thought about the fact that the Russian Revolution did more to bust up patriarchal family structures than perhaps any other event—as, for instance, in the way that decades of Communism brought the Balkan zadruga, the patriarchal extended family, to an end. Very much worth reading.

Oh yeah, the post below reminds me of something a colleague and I were chatting about the other day. It seems to me that one of the reasons Democrats, especially so-called "New Democrats," have been snuggling ever-closer to the financial industry over the past decade might be, in part, because it's one of the few corporate sectors that doesn't conflict in an obvious way with any other major liberal interest group. Democrats have to get corporate donations from somewhere, after all, and the finance industry, happily, doesn't usually clash with labor unions. It's not part of the military-industrial complex. It doesn't pillage the environment. It screws over ordinary voters in opaque and non-obvious ways. What's not to like? Indeed, it's a pretty natural ally for a party in dire need of campaign cash.

The downside is that any party that jumps in bed with the financial sector is often going to end up backing the sorts of anti-progressive measures—from the recent bankruptcy bill, to financial deregulation, to inflation targeting by the Fed—that all strike me as far more malignant than, say, an energy company donating to Tom DeLay in exchange for the right to pollute or pour MTBE into our drinking water or whatever. In some ways, I'd feel better if, say, Hillary Clinton was getting her money from ExxonMobil and Halliburton, rather than Citigroup and MetLife. (Okay, probably not, but you get my point...)

When did "failure" shift from a term denoting something that happened to someone into a term denoting who someone was? Here's one theory:

Credit, speculation, debt: the spreading net of confidence created a need for confidential reporting on men's trustworthiness. The nation's first credit-rating agencies opened in the 1840s in New York, close to the banks and merchants who needed the information. The agencies invented a lexicon of succinct ratings to sum up a man: "dead beat" (when suing for payment was as pointless as flogging a dead horse), "bad risk," "a great loser," "good for nothing"--or the triumphant "A no. 1." Comically useless in grasping the value of any life, such judgments nonetheless registered as probity in a society fixated on the stark oppositions of credit and debit, gain and loss.

That's from Christine Stansell's review of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. (Bugmenot can help prise open the firewall if you don't have a subscription.)

Via Justin Logan, a somewhat old and thoroughly excellent Slate article about the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I didn't know that far fewer people have died in UFC (zero) than in boxing (many), but it makes sense; most of the fights I've seen are vaguely disappointing for those (as I was) expecting lots of carnage. Much more, as Plotz says, like sex. Riveting, nonetheless—and much less barbaric than the romanticized and mostly consequence-less violence you see in the movies. But here's something I wonder about:

If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport [i.e. boxing]. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.

Okay, but most hockey fights involve multiple punches to the head, without gloves. Not all fights, of course—most get by with a few poorly-aimed swings and end in a lot of hugging and jersey-grabbing—but on average a fighter that fights multiple times might land a good five or six head punches in a game. Yet very few broken hands! Is that because the helmet cushions the blow? I guess helmets are kind of softer than a skull. And face punches probably help too.

It warms the heart to see Michael Stipe take a milk bath in order to raise awareness about the developed world's overly-high agriculture subsidies, but I still don't understand why people get so exercised over this stuff. "Trade not aid!" cries Minnie Driver in the Times today. Eh, says I. Here's what we know. Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University has found that 33 of the 49 poorest countries are net importers of food. So on balance, those countries would all likely get kneecapped—at least initially—if developed nations were to slash their own agricultural subsidies, since the price of food would rise. Obviously rural farmers in the Third World would do very well, since they could sell their wares for more. But food consumers, especially in urban areas, could suffer from the rise in food prices; and since the poorest of the poor often spend up to a third or more of their income on food, we're talking about a fair bit of potential hurt here. (Meanwhile, if OECD countries fail to lift their own import restrictions, or if some countries lose their preferential access, then rural farmers could get squashed too, but that's another story.)

Now what about the countries or people that would be helped if agricultural subsidies got the knife? It seems unlikely that they'll be helped all that much, at least in the short term. The IMF estimates that world prices would only rise by 2-8 percent for rice, sugar, and wheat; and 4 percent for cotton. That's not nothing, though do note that this is a good deal less than the typical annual fluctuation in world commodity prices. But okay, wouldn't even a modest rise in prices ameliorate poverty? Eh, hard to say. A recent and not-online Foreign Affairs article points out that in 1994, countries in the CAF currency zone—including Burkina Faso and Benin—devalued their currency 100 percent, essentially doubling the price of cotton. This vastly exceeds even the wildest hopes for what would come out of Doha. Despite all that, rural poverty remained "stubbornly high" in Burkina Faso. So why should we think that a reduction in OECD cotton subsidies now—which would have a much more modest effect on prices—would achieve so much more?

I'm all for trade liberalization, really, I just don't see how it's going to shift the world's tectonic plates all that much. Read Richard Freeman on this topic: when it comes down to it, trade just doesn't seem all that important—immigration, technology transfers, and capital flows have far greater impact. Or read Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, who make a convincing case that drastic reductions in trade barriers probably won't save the world and lift 540 million out of poverty, as William Cline has proclaimed. (Many of those enriched by trade, for instance, would go from just below $2 a day to just above.) By all means, Bush should stop holding up the Doha talks and take his mighty scythe to all those trade barriers. Go wild! But this should only be seen, I think, as one relatively small part of a larger development strategy.

Studies have shown that inequality is intrinsically harmful because people care about their relative status in the economic order. Richard Wilkinson has argued that vast economic inequality can alter the makeup of a country's social relationships, inducing stress, anguish, and ultimately poor health. Bad news all around. So even if the rising tide is lifting all boats, we should still do everything we can to reduce inequality, no? Well, no, says Will Wilkinson, we should just get people to care less:

My relative success has no "polluting" effect whatsoever if you don't care about it. (You're a good Buddhist, say.) The "pollution" is a joint product of my move up and your preference to not move down. The correct approach to the problem, if there is a problem at all, depends on what the lowest cost solution happens to be. If you changing your preference is cheaper than taxing me, then you ought to change your preference.

Well here's the low-cost solution. Those who control the means of production should just come up with some sort of... distraction mechanism... yes, to get those who fret about being on the bottom of the totem pole to fret no more. Some sort of "opiate," we'll call it, delivered to the masses. Perhaps in pill form. Now since the poor in Europe seem to care more about inequality than the poor in the United States, that just means that the European ruling classes haven't yet perfected the false consciousness technique yet. What's the matter with Kansas? Don't worry about it, pop another Soma. No, I don't know. Read Will's post, it's interesting.

From a political standpoint, I'm fairly convinced that the Democratic Party should steer far, far away from its gun control stance: frankly, it's a losing issue and it costs them too many votes that could be used to forward far more important progressive goals. From a personal standpoint, I'm all for letting people have guns, but every now and again I read a story about the whining coming from the NRA and some primal part of me just wants to regulate the gun industry right out of existence, purely for spite. The assault weapons ban, granted, is frivolous and mostly useless, and the NRA was right to oppose it. Nevertheless, there's no reason that the gun industry shouldn't be treated like the auto industry—universal registration of firearms, granting gun owners licenses based on skills and knowledge of gun law, a liability insurance requirement, letting the Consumer Product Safety Commission test and rule on guns—and perhaps a modest limit on gun purchases (one per month, maybe).

Now it may be that the NRA opposes these common-sense measures because they fear that sensible regulation would just amount to one giant slide down the slippery slope to total gun confiscation—and admittedly, that fear has some basis in fact, since lots of liberals really do want to ban all guns—but by itself, the opposition to these sensible regulations is pretty much without merit.

Anyway, that's all by way of saying that I have mixed feelings about this liability shield for gun manufacturers that's coming up for a vote in the Senate. Some might argue that lawsuits against gun manufacturers as a result of misuse of a firearm are just frivolous, and will never succeed anyway. (After all, should alcohol makers face lawsuits for "foreseeable misuse" of their products too?) The first point seems true—strictly speaking, holding a gun manufacturer liable for the "criminal or unlawful misuse of a [gun]" by a third party seems idiotic.

But then again, say a gun manufacturer starts selling far more guns in states with weak-gun control laws, more than the people living there could possibly buy, and the excess guns end up in, say, the hands of criminals in a state with tight gun-control laws like New York? Should third parties be allowed to sue for "negligent marketing"? These aren't hypotheticals, of course; the courts have thrown out these exact cases—even supposedly anti-gun activist judges like U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein have ruled against the plaintiffs—although that trend could change over time, as legal thinking "evolves." (Surely the gun industry isn't just worried about frivolous lawsuits—they're worried they might start to lose these suits.) Meanwhile, negligent marketing does seem like a problem and not at all something in the spirit of the Second Amendment, or freedom to bear arms, or anything of the sort. We can all see what's at issue here—manufacturers are getting rich by circumventing laws meant to reduce gun crime. And when legislatures at the state and national level can't or won't do anything about it, then litigation can often step in and force an industry to account for its negligent product marketing and/or design, as it did to the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

Then again, it may be unwise to rely on activist courts to fight these sorts of battles. So there just might not be any answer to gun manufacturers running amok, at least barring a shift in popular sentiment at the national level. (And given that rural states are disproportionately represented in the Senate, that seems unlikely; unless, of course, the filibuster were to be abolished.) Now as it happens, I'm not convinced that guns are even among the top 10 biggest problems facing America today, so I don't lose a whole lot of sleep over this, but it still seems like a difficult issue.

Why does acupuncture work? I'm planning to go to a free session next week, purely out of curiosity, but I still want to know why. Surely the stated premise here— that we're all infused with Qi or "life energy" that gets clogged up now and again and just needs a bit of needling—is all just a bunch of arrant nonsense, right? I mean, right? Luckily, we have a less-mystical theory, courtesy of Scientific American:

[A] medicinal procedure like acupuncture may work for some other reason not related to the [Qi theory]. Electroacupuncture--the electrical stimulation of tissues through acupuncture needles--increases the effectiveness of analgesic (pain-relieving) acupuncture by as much as 100 percent over traditional acupuncture. ... Ulett posits that electroacupuncture stimulates the release of such neurochemicals as beta-endorphin, enkephalin and dynorphin, leading to pain relief. In fact, he says, the needles are not even needed--electrically stimulating the skin... is sufficient. Ulett cites research in which, using this technique, the amount of gas anesthetic in surgery was reduced by 50 percent.

These findings might help explain the results of a study published in the May 4, 2005, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which Klaus Linde and his colleagues at the University of Technology in Munich compared the experiences of 302 people suffering from migraines who received either acupuncture, sham acupuncture (needles inserted at nonacupuncture points) or no acupuncture. During the study, the patients kept headache diaries. ... The results were dramatic: "The proportion of responders (reduction in headache days by at least 50%) was 51% in the acupuncture group, 53% in the sham acupuncture group, and 15% in the waiting list group." The authors concluded that this effect "may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."

Hm. Although I can totally see how a "powerful placebo effect" could unblock the Qi...

Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Glenn Loury try to bring a bit of economic analysis to bear on affirmative action in a new paper: "Affirmative Action and its Mythologies." The first myth they discuss is one that's always seemed a bit bewildering to me: namely, the fiction that employers or educational institutions can somehow, magically, pursue affirmative action goals effectively without imposing "quotas". Hogwash, say these two:

[T]his distinction between goals and quotas is dubious, because to implement either a goal or quota requires that a regulator credibly commit to some (possibly unspoken) schedule of rewards/penalties for an employer or an education institution, as a function of observable and verifiable outcomes. The results engendered by either policy depend on how firms or educational institutions react to these incentives. If the penalty for certain "bad results" is sufficiently severe, then people will tend to say that a rigid quota had been imposed. If penalties for bad results are minimal, then the people will tend to say that a flexible goal has been adopted. Clearly, this difference is one of degree, not of kind.

Word up. Additionally, you can run into this sort of case, in theory: say the government is simply in the business of enforcing nondiscrimination rather than quotas. So Employer X comes under suspicion, say, because it's been hiring a disproportionately low number of minorities, though perhaps this is due to a low number of minority applicants or some other complex HR reasons. Whatever. Point is, the regulatory regime won't always be privy to all these "mitigating factors" and could in theory punish Employer X for discrimination. To avoid this possibility, Employer A may well end up adopting an implicit quota system regardless. Basically, it's hard escaping quotas so long as affirmative action remains a goal that's enforced with any sort of rigor.

Eh, come to think of it, conservatives have been saying the same thing for years, especially after Bill Clinton's "Mend It Don't End It" jingle went live. Ah, well. While they're at it, though, Fryer and Loury also take the time to knock down the popular idea that "color-blind" attempts to pursue racial diversity—such as the Texas state university scheme to automatically admit the top 10 percent students from all high schools—are a more efficient way of doing things, although admittedly much of this debate hangs on what people think the purpose of a university should actually be.

City Journal always strikes me as one of the most noxious magazines around. Mostly because its writers love to wade into decades-old debates, debates that have generated heaps and heaps of research, disregard all that research, and then flatly declare that liberals are stupid and conservatives were right all along about everything. Exhibit A is Kay Hymowitz's piece this month on how, contrary to the legions of liberal academics who have kept people poor and stupid for 40 years now with their pleas for welfare and whatnot, the one true cause of black poverty is that most black children grow up in fatherless homes. Liberals, Hymowitz declares, need to step out of their "don't blame the victim" mentality and realize this hyper-obvious fact.

Well, okay. Plenty of liberals have been thinking about the importance of family structure for quite some time: she even mentions two (William Julius Wilson and Sara MacLanahan), and then there was, um, the last Democratic president—a pretty prominent liberal, when you think about it. (Hymowitz makes it seem like Clinton was only "forced" to worry about family structure in the post-Gingrich era, but in fact, his 1992 campaign speeches included lines like, "Governments don't raise kids; parents do.") Beyond that, though, the relationship between marriage and childhood problems—let alone wider poverty—is complex and deserves a bit fuller treatment than the shallow gloss Hymowitz gives.

As it happens, the other day I was reading a collection of essays called The Future of the Family, edited by none other than Hymowitz' hero, Pat Moynihan, with a literature review of the effects of fatherlessness co-authored by... yet another one of Hymowitz' heroes, Sara MacLanahan! And lo, the results are a bit more ambiguous than the City Journal essay suggests. I can't possibly summarize the whole book here, but MacLanahan argues that, on the whole, research does indicate that fatherlessness is associated with lower test scores, greater levels of poverty, behavioral problems, delinquency, etc. for children. (For a dissenting view, however, do read Trish Wilson's post.) What's not clear, as MacLanahan points out, is why this might be the case. There could be a selection issue at work here: perhaps poverty causes both fatherlessness and negative outcomes for children, in which case single motherhood wouldn't be the root problem.

One study, for instance, found that "when pre-divorce circumstances are taken into account, the associations between family disruption and child outcomes become smaller, sometimes statistically insignificant." (Not all studies, though.) And then some of the findings are just plain odd. For instance, the academic achievement gap between kids in one- and two-parent families is moderately small in many social democracies like Sweden and Iceland—smaller than the gap in "neo-liberal" states like the U.S. or New Zealand—suggesting that a sturdy safety net can overcome the supposed disadvantages of single-parent families. On the other hand, the achievement gap is even smaller in Mediterranean countries like Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus, where child poverty is rampant and the safety net is tattered and frayed. But why? Basically, it's just not clear what works and what doesn't; it seems like losing a parent matters more in some places than others. But why? Dunno. Also, children in homes with a "resident cohabitating father" actually do worse than children in just single-mother families. But why? Dunno. The facts here aren't speaking for themselves, or else they are, but in ancient Aramaic.

One other thing: insofar as the fact of single motherhood itself is actually a "problem" (and I'm not convinced it is, but let's suppose...), there are basically two remedies. One, we can try to reduce the number of divorces by, say, making divorce harder to do, though that seems like a terrible option. Divorce is often very necessary, quite obviously, since even the best marriage counseling can't prevent every unhealthy or violent relationship. No kidding. Not only that, but placing restrictions on divorce could very well dissuade many adults from getting married in the first place, which would achieve exactly the opposite of what the family crusaders are gunning for here. Plus, changes in divorce laws would alter women's bargaining power in fairly fundamental and perhaps harmful ways—no one knows much about how this works. Policymakers might want to pursue publicly-funded marriage counseling (I believe Bush has advocated something of the sort, though I don't think anyone knows just how well it's worked yet.) At any rate, the divorce rate (per 1,000 women) has actually fallen over the past 20 years, from 22.6 in 1980 to 18.9 in 2000, according to a 2002 National Marriage Project study. Divorce just doesn't seem like a growing crisis in need of drastic action.

So let's look behind door #2. And door #2 is... reducing out-of-wedlock births in the first place. This seems like a pretty unambiguously decent policy goal, especially since 60 percent of all births are unintended, according to a 1995 Institute of Medicine study. (For her part, Hymowitz writes that back in the day "the truth was that underclass girls often wanted to have babies," but gives no evidence.) Now the tried-and-true way to reduce unintended out-of-wedlock births involves teen-pregnancy prevention programs that emphasize, yes, condoms and other "icky" items. (Hell, they can teach abstinence too, since that seems to work, though "abstinence-only" programs pretty clearly do not.) Measures to reduce subsequent pregnancy, like "second-chance homes" for teen mothers, or home visiting programs, seem to have had some success. Oh, and abortion—which, at the moment, is effectively unavailable to a good number of low-income women. But these are all pretty well-known liberal policy goals, I daresay.

If I understand this article correctly, Eliot Spitzer is doing his damndest to prevent crappy music from playing on the radio more often than is absolutely necessary. Well, then. Forget everything bad I've ever said about him (e.g., here); he's so my presidential pick in 2008 or whenever. On the downside, this budding Medicaid scandal in New York might bruise Spitzer's "social crusader" image, since from what I gather he was supposed to be in charge of pursuing and prosecuting instances of fraud. Nicely done.

Ah, it's up on the Mother Jones site: my essay on how corporations are marketing sickness. I'm somewhat convinced that the proliferation of pseudo-illness could be a deeper and more fundamental problem with health care in America than the fact that we don't have single-payer, or whatever. But I haven't come across anyone who has a grasp of how widespread a problem it really is, or how it affects insurance premiums or whether it bankrupts public health systems. Without better numbers, this debate gets very anecdotal very quickly.

David Galenson and Joshua Kotin have a theory on how innovation in the film industry works:

Why have some movie directors made classic early films, but subsequently failed to match their initial successes, whereas other directors have begun much more modestly, but have made great movies late in their lives? This study demonstrates that the answer lies in the directors' motivations, and in the nature of their films. Conceptual directors, who use their films to express their ideas or emotions, mature early; thus such great conceptual innovators as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Orson Welles made their major contributions early in their careers, and declined thereafter.

In contrast experimental directors, whose films present convincing characters in realistic circumstances, improve their techniques with experience, so that such great experimental innovators as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa made their greatest films late in their lives. Understanding these contrasting life cycles can be part of a more systematic understanding of the development of film, and can resolve previously elusive questions about the creative life cycles of individual filmmakers.

Er, a bit of elaboration might be necessary, especially since the paper isn't yet free for the taking. Galenson had originally developed a similar thesis for modern art—this article gives a readable overview—with a similar division. "For the conceptual artist, the important decisions for a work of art occur in the planning stage, when the artist either mentally envisages the completed work or specifies a set of procedures that will produce the finished work." As one might expect, then, most conceptual artists peak relatively early on—when they haven't yet been bogged down by pre-existing conventions and methods and can think up radical new stuff. Obviously they don't have to peak early on—conceptual innovation can in theory occur at any time in one's life; it's just more likely to occur at a young-ish age.

"Experimental artists," by contrast, make most of their innovations "in the working stage, as the artist proceeds on the basis of visual inspection of the developing image." This is the sort of thing that clearly gets better with age. Indeed, Galenson found that Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, who were more experimental, "peaked" at a much later age than did subsequent, more conceptual artists like Frank Stella and Jasper Johns. The Rothko pictured didn't just pop out of the womb fully-clothed, ya know. Andy Warhol was another conceptual artist who appears to have peaked early, in his late 20s-early 30s. The French Impressionists were experimentalists; Monet was doing marvelous water lilies until very late. The division obviously isn't hard and fast, though Galenson has argued elsewhere that it is a decent approximation for the spectrum of artistic approaches, though artists can change their position over time. Picasso was the most notorious Energizer Bunny in this regard—doing his cubist works in his mid-20s, "Guernica" at age 56, and so on. But, says Galenson, this is pretty damn rare.

At least for visual artists, Galenson measures "peaks" by looking at how much an artists' work is sold for many years later. Is this a perfect yardstick? Probably not, but as an approximation, it can reveal quite a bit. Moreover, to get the obvious out of the way, what we value about an artist now may not be what we value from the same artist 50 years from now, so that's a bit of a problem. How they measured the "success" of movies, though, I have no idea. Not knowing much about movies, I have no idea if this theory is even remotely plausible.

Cass Sunstein's typology of all the various modes of legal reasoning seems very helpful:

In order to determine what kind of justice [John G. Roberts] will be, it helps to understand the philosophical camps that have shaped modern constitutional theory. Over the past century, justices have come in four varieties. Majoritarians prefer to uphold the decisions of other branches of government unless those decisions clearly violate the Constitution. Perfectionists believe that, in order to perfect the Constitution, they should interpret it in broad terms that expand democratic ideals. Minimalists like small steps and prefer rulings in which the most fundamental questions are left undecided. And, finally, fundamentalists believe that the Constitution should be read to fit with the original understanding of the Founding Fathers; they are willing to make large-scale changes to established laws to return to that understanding.

His defense of judicial minimalism—ruling narrowly and setting aside judgment on fundamental questions—is also quite elegant: "[L]aw, and even social peace, are possible only because people set aside their deepest disagreements and are able to decide what to do without agreeing on exactly why to do it." Although one should also note that to a large degree, the social peace has been kept ever since the most notorious of majoritarian—or maybe perfectionist—rulings: Roe vs. Wade. Which is really quite remarkable, given that here you have a bunch of people who believe that legalized abortion is worse than the Holocaust, yet most of them are willing to uphold and support a government that enforces this law.

Obviously there are a few clinic-bombers here and there, but we never see social disobedience on a very broad scale. Judged solely by their actions, it sure seems like the Civil Rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s felt far more strongly about their cause than pro-lifers do about theirs. Again, whatever, people can do what they want, but you'd think something worse than the Holocaust would incite a bit more in the way of drastic action. Anyway, that's just to say that the "social peace" argument for judicial minimalism probably deserves some skepticism. To some extent the country isn't tearing itself apart; overruling Roe, likewise, would be horrendous beyond belief, I think, but it wouldn't upend the existing social order. Oh, and Sunstein thinks that Roberts is probably a minimalist, though the guy does exhibit some fundamentalist tendencies here and there; that's certainly something to ferret out during the hearings.

UPDATE: I should've googled around before posting this, because a quick search shows that the question of whether anti-abortion protestors are justified engaging in civil disobedience is actually a somewhat heated one among religious conservatives. The most obvious objection, of course, is that all the legal avenues to overturning abortion rights have not yet been exhausted, so it doesn't make sense for abortion foes to engage in widespread civil disobedience. Sorry, but that's a cop-out. Imagine this hypothetical scenario: Hitler is in charge of Germany, freely elected, and decides to fire up the concentration camps. He still has three years left in his term, and can be voted out at that time, so the country's citizens say, "Well, this genocide business is pretty bad, but we shouldn't defy the Hitler administration by extra-legal means when we have perfectly legal means of voting him out"? In a sense, that's what pro-lifers, at least those who believe that legalized abortion is worse than the Holocaust, are doing by biding their time, trying to win elections and get Roe v. Wade overturned by legal means.

As Jessica of Feministing reminds us, the Senate hearings have already started on the Violence Against Women Act, which certainly deserves to be reauthorized. From a policy perspective, though, I wonder if anyone has looked into spending public resources on teaching women self-defense against sexual assault. Currently, VAWA only funds "educational" programs, which are fine and important, but why not self-defense? And why not start in elementary school rather than junior high? As best I can tell, studies seem to suggest that "women who use physical and verbal resistance strategies are more likely to avoid the completion of a rape" (without increasing the chance of physical harm), though much of the data is fairly ambiguous, simply because no one's looked into the matter in-depth, or done the proper longitudinal studies. But they should. If teaching women to crush windpipes and gouge out eyes in junior high is something we really ought to be doing, I see no reason why Congress can't fund it.

Now that the split between the AFL-CIO and dissident unions seems all but official, it's time to make a few predictions. The New York Times suggests that the labor split will hurt the Democratic party, as the various unions will spend more time squabbling with each other and less time coordinating get-out-the-vote efforts come election day. The SEIU and other "Unite to Win" unions, meanwhile, think that electoral politics ought to come second to a focus on organizing. They have a point; labor density has gone down under both Republicans and Democrats, so it's not as if electing the latter to office has done them much good.

My more pessimistic take is this: neither organizing nor electoral politics will reverse labor's long slide. Politics for reasons given above. Organizing because the numbers are just too overwhelming. A few years ago, Harvard economist Richard Freeman ran the numbers on this:

To fund a massive organizing campaign would take, moreover, huge union resources. Turning Paula Voos’s estimates of the marginal cost of organizing a new member into 2001 dollars, the cost of organizing a new member would appear to be on the order of $2,000 – though it could be as low as the $1,000 that is the rule of thumb for some unions and as high as $3,000. Adding half a million new members annually at $2,000 per member would then require spending $1 billion, or about 20 percent of total annual union dues. Adding 1 million members would take about 40 percent of total dues.

A million new members is nothing to sneeze at, and this is precisely the strategy SEIU and the other dissident unions are going for. Nonetheless, even a million new members—and this falls in the "optimistic" category—won't fundamentally reverse the long decline in labor density. A million new members would only add a point in density; 500,000 new members would simply balance the loss of members due to workplace changes. So the Unite to Win unions are doing the noble thing, but ultimately they're highly unlikely to pull off a structural shift in the layout of the labor land; at most they'll stop the earth from being scorched.

I know I keep harping on this, but the historical record is instructive. Unions have traditionally exploded in size not because of a commitment to organizing, and not necessarily because of labor-friendly legislators in Washington, but largely because of historical accidents. Labor density has grown in "spurts," due to factors that were often difficult to predict. Unions went forth, multiplied, and prospered during World War I, for instance, because developed Allied countries needed the full cooperation of labor to mobilize and fight their splendid little war, and a slew of labor-friendly compromises ensued. Likewise, union density grew during the Great Depression for obvious reasons—people saw the need for unions—and during World War II because the government yet again needed cooperation. It's worth noting, though, that legislative compromise and popular support weren't the only reason for labor's success during the 1930s and 1940s—the rise of the industrial union, and the opening up of an entire new sector to organize, really fueled the surge in density.

So for those asking "What will save Labor?," the answer probably isn't "a greater commitment to organizing" or "electing more Democrats." Presumably the answer will involve some new way of organizing—structured around the internet, perhaps—or the rise of a new sector of unions that no one has yet thought of. Perhaps white-collar programmers angry about outsourcing will provide fertile new ground. Perhaps the Bush administration will drive the economy into the ground and the public will flock to unions. Perhaps Andy Stern's vision of a global labor movement winning representation at the WTO will prove the new face of unionism. Still, the politicking vs. organizing debate going on right now seems much too narrow, and, sadly, a bit hopeless.

Dan Darling points out something important: The similarities between the London and Sharm al-Shaikh bombings suggests that al-Qaeda may still be far more centralized than people think. From what I gather, Darling's big on Rohan Gunaratna's thesis that al-Qaeda still maintains a fairly robust vertical leadership structure, coordinating activities among a broad swath of associations, cells and "franchises" from on high. Bin Laden and Zawahiri, along with their various subordinates holed up in Iran and elsewhere, are still calling the shots to a large degree. You might say that al-Qaeda's structure isn't fundamentally different from that pre-9/11, except that there are fewer quality leaders, fewer training camps, and it's harder to coordinate stuff. Gunaratna's view—again, assuming I've recalled it correctly—sits in contrast to Jason Burke's more popular thesis that "al-Qaeda" itself isn't terribly important as an organization, and has mostly become a rallying point for a broader Islamic militant movement. The main threat, in other words, comes from a bunch of very loosely coordinated or uncoordinated terrorist cells often inspired by bin Laden but not necessarily acting on his orders.

Having re-read Burke's book recently, I should say that he does seem convincing when he argues that the structure of Islamic terrorism today may well resemble the structure of Islamic terrorism in the early 1990s, when bin Laden was as yet a relatively minor financier and skilled terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed operated somewhat as freelancers—albeit freelancers with access to training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan and virtually unlimited funds pouring out of private mosques around the Gulf. If Burke's right, that's the lay of the land post-2001, though the freelancers and terrorist cells are much, much less adept and ambitious than Yousef or Shaikh Mohammed ever were. On the other hand, Burke does seem to go out of his way to deny any links between, say, Zarqawi and bin Laden—or between Basayev's band of Chechen salafists and bin Laden—when that hardly seems certain at all, given what we now know. It's a brilliant book, no doubt, but it does seem a bit tendentious.

Clearly I don't know enough to "weigh in" on this debate. Intuitively, though, it probably doesn't have to come down to one or the other. Gunaratna could be right in that bin Laden, Zawahiri, al-Adel, and other al-Qaeda higher-ups are still very much coordinating a far-flung terrorist organization with franchises in Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. (The leadership here is probably a very small "hardcore" element, of 200 or less, as per Marc Sageman.) So sure, maybe the London and Egypt bombings were done with the help and blessing of bin Laden himself, from his cavern resort or wherever. But Burke could also be right in that al-Qaeda has become a rallying point or inspiration for wholly unaffiliated cells and freelancers to carry out attacks on their own. And then there's Sageman's middle-way view, that "al-Qaeda's fragmentation since the invasion of Afghanistan has left it metastasizing into local operations seeking legitimacy under its banner."

On the other hand, Islamic militants were killing tourists in Egypt long before anyone in the West even knew bin Laden's name, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see where the trails actually lead. Also, read Marc Lynch's post on all of this.

How does Lance Armstrong do it? Ah, dear reader, it's all in the freakish physiology: "Mr. Armstrong's VO2 max is 85 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. An average untrained person has a VO2 max of 45 and with training can get it to 60. 'Lance would be 60 if he was a couch potato and never trained,' Dr. Coyle said. 'For the average person, their ceiling is Lance's basement.'"

Oh, at last, I've revived the ol' internet connection here at home. In a way, that's too bad, I was so enjoying spending the weekend away from the dull glow of the computer screen. But anyway, here's a passage from Robert Kaplan's new book, Imperial Grunts, that's worth sharing—on how you "might learn as much about a culture from its weaponry as you could from its literature":

As [Lt. Col. Custer] demonstrated, while stripping the AK-47 down to its constitutent parts, it was a rifle designed for use by fifteen-year-old illiterates whose life was valued cheaply by the designer. "Illiterates won't clean a gun, or at least not meticulously, so the parts are measured to fit loosely. That way the gun won't jam when it's filthy with grime. But it also makes the AK-47 less accurate than our M-16s and M-4s, which have tight-fitting parts and must be constantly cleaned. And because illiterate peasants aim less precisely," he continued, "the lever of the AK-47 goes from safety directly to full automatic, for spraying a field with fire. With our rifles, the lever rests on semi-automatic before it goes to full auto."

The sites on the Russian rifle could be adjusted for greater accuracy, unlike on American rifles. The Kalashnikov had a bullet magazine that had to be gripped before it could be released, so it wouldn't be lost in the dirt, because magazines were dear in the old U.S.S.R. That made changing magazines slower, and thus further endangered the life of the soldier in combat. In the old Soviet Union, soldiers were more easily expendable than bullet magazines. By contrast, American magazines dropped onto the ground and could be lost, but it made for a faster, more fluent performance by the rifleman.

"The M-4 can hit a man at several hundred yards every time," Custer explained. "The AK-47 is more of an area weapon. We value our soldiers as individuals with precision skills; the Russians see only a mass peasant army."

Good stuff. Kaplan's book, by the way, is marvelous, although extremely annoying at times. He's clearly a far braver man than I could ever hope to be, but ultimately his priorities seem to be: 1) printing stuff that will ensure his continued access to military sources; 2) going out of his way to prick at "delicate" liberal sensibilities**; and finally 3) figuring out how the military works and how it needs to work. Once you figure that out, and filter accordingly, Kaplan's basic thesis—that small, highly specialized military units working without heavy bureaucratic constraint are the optimal way for America to run its far-flung empire, which, like it or not, exists—starts to sound like something worth discussing seriously.

[**An example of this. In a chapter on Afghanistan Kaplan notes, with approval, complaints from grunts that interrogation procedure is too lax: "Usually, an Afghan willing to be uncomfortable for a few days could stiff the American interrogators with impunity. Everyone complained about this." Yikes, seems like an argument for torture, huh? I mean, even the military folks are chafing at the kid gloves that Dick Durbin and Ted Kennedy want them all to wear! In context, it's clear that that's how the passage is meant to come across. But then one page later Kaplan quotes a military man saying about a mission in which they arrest a bunch of Afghan suspects: "The real object of the mission is to treat them respectfully, so that after they are released they'll tell their families how different the Americans are from the Russians." So those kid gloves, it seems, are essential to whole reconstruction project, not an impediment, huh? It seems so, but Kaplan can't admit that without first giving all those squishy liberals in D.C. a kick in the shins.]

Oh my word, this is the funniest thing I've seen all day. Powerline's uncovered the Top Secret Democratic Plan to out John G. Roberts as the plaid pants-wearing gay man he so clearly might be. Well, fuck it folks, that plan was our last, best hope to stop him. Anyway, Charmaine Yoest gives Operation Pink Elephant the flogging it deserves: "Of course it is the height of hypocrisy for the (allegedly) pro-tolerance crowd to start questioning someone's sexual preference." So true, but in our defense, we were desperate! This bit cuts deepest though: "John Roberts may have played Peppermint Patty back in the day, but here and NOW, the Left is playing Lucy with the football..." She means "Charlie Brown," I think, but 'ouch' all the same.

Oh, fine, just one more for the self-flagellating. This penetrating insight from Hindrocket: "Even during the Civil War, when the Democrats were fighting to preserve slavery, limits were observed. Now, all civility is gone."

Mark Benjamin of Salon has finished his four-part investigative series on reparative therapy for gay people. The last part, with links to the others, is here. (In the second part, he pretends to be gay and actually goes through therapy.) What's interesting is that Benjamin was unable to track down a single man or woman who had gone through the process and been "cured." He asked the president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality to point him in the right direction, but no dice: "He responds that his patients will not talk to me because they don't get a fair shake in the press."

One of the things I've realized while writing this piece on how drug companies "create" illnesses is that journalists are appallingly complicit in the whole thing. Magazines such as U.S. News & World Report will blare headlines such as, "Living with Adult ADD. New hope for coping with the distraction and anxiety." In reality, there's a good deal of serious controversy over what ADD really is, and how it should be treated, but you won't get much of that in the piece. The emphasis in these stories will usually be on the neurobiological basis for the disorder—which is only one theory among many, though obviously the one favored by drug companies—and there will usually be key product placement early on, along with a ringing endorsement from some doctor who likely moonlights as a paid speaker or consultant for the company in question. (In this case, the company is Lilly and the drug is Strattera.) "Real people" experiencing the condition will be supplied by a patient-advocacy group rightly trying to raise awareness for the condition, although that group will, in turn, often be funded by the relevant drug company.

That's not to say that Adult ADD is bullshit. That's the thing—I'm not in any position to say. The only information I as a regular non-scientist can get will come from these glossy magazines, where it's clear that one side of the issue—the industry-favored side—is being heavily pushed. This is essentially an advertisement for ADD—and hence its treatment—rather than any sort of investigative journalism. So then I think, "Well, gee, sometimes I feel distracted and anxious," and it's off to the doctor I go, who, of course, is far more likely to prescribe a medical treatment than, say, a lifestyle change to deal with my condition. If I'm lucky, my doctor won't be moonlighting as a paid speaker for Lilly, but I don't know. (Would I even know to ask?) And let's be clear here. This isn't a conspiracy to invent a disease out of nothing. Doctors aren't paid to prescribe drugs against their better judgment. No. It's more subtle than that—something like a confluence of interests that gathers around millions and millions of dollars in pharmaceutical marketing money.

At any rate, from what I gather medical reporters are getting slightly better at calling foul when "news" of the hot new illness sweeping the nation comes via blast-fax, but it's still a real problem. And in a sense, who can blame them? They're under deadline pressure, nothing sells glossy magazines like unearthing a new disease, and they need quotes and case studies fast. Meanwhile, though, health care premiums keep rising...

Anything I say about voter behavior is likely to be wrong. But I'll take another crack at it. Dan Kahan and Donald Braman of Yale have put out a new paper, "Cultural Cognition and Public Policy" that puts forward a somewhat-obvious, somewhat-neglected argument. Many of us like to think that, if only we could disseminate correct information about the world—say, the mounds and mounds of scientific evidence that global warming exists—people would come around to our policy views. Not so, argue these folks. If all our differences on policy questions were simply due to the fact that we all have imperfect empirical information, than these opinions would be randomly distributed. But that's not what happens. Cultural cognition plays a huge role here.

Drawing on the cultural theory of risk, Kahan and Braman graph cultural typology along two axes, with four compass points: individualist vs. solidarist, and hierarchist vs. egalitarian. Where a person sits along these axes is far more likely to determine your policy preferences on various cultural issues than party affiliation or "ideology." So, for instance, people who are more egalitarian or solidaristic are more likely to a) worry about global warming, and b) believe that it is real and a serious problem. Likewise, people who are more hierarchical or individualistic are more likely to oppose gun control as a matter of principle, but also more likely to believe that gun control actually has perverse effects. Willingness to believe certain facts is very much affected by cultural worldview. This also helps explain why a non-expert who believes that global warming is real is also statistically very likely to believe that, say, gun control can prevent violence, even though there's no reason why a non-expert should necessarily believe both empirical results.

As I say, that's all pretty obvious so far. Cultural cognition structures facts, and it also filters facts. An egalitarian person is more likely to listen to other egalitarians, and trust what they have to say. Likewise, scientists or researchers with a particular worldview are likely to be biased in their findings. Frankly, it's not much of a surprise that the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities always discovers that supply-side economics is bullshit, and it's not much of a surprise that I always trust them. Meanwhile, I'm prey to all sorts of mental biases that reinforce these positions. There's cognitive-dissonance avoidance (believing that what's noble is benign, and what's ignoble is dangerous—e.g., liberal belief that Guantanamo will fuel a global backlash.) Or group polarization, which Cass Sunstein has done much with. Meanwhile, I'm more likely to believe that I've arrived at my empirically-based beliefs through objective assessment, and that my opponents are hostage to some biased worldview. And I'm certainly not a perfect Bayesian. So biases due to cultural cognition accumulate over time.

Anyway, enough of that. How does this all affect voting behavior? Well, let's revisit the Tom Frank thesis: Voters are inclined to vote against their self-interest (i.e. Republican) because they're overly-swayed cultural factors. Now I once suggested that maybe it's not actually in the narrow self-interest of that many voters to actually vote Democrat. I wasn't happy with the post, though. So let's revise Frank in terms of cultural cognition: Voters' cultural worldviews incline them to believe that a given set of policies actually is in their self-interest to support, regardless of the facts. Moreover, voters don't spend nearly as much time as, say, bloggers do thinking about public policy. Instead they're inclined to trust whoever shares their cultural outlook on all empirical matters.

In other words, it might not be enough to say to a white working class male in Kansas, "Look, you're continually being screwed by the ruling class. They've dismantled labor protections. Your wages have deteriorated. And yet you go for it because they rile you up about gay marriage!" It won't work. Odds are, unless he believes you share his cultural worldview, he won't trust your assessment of economic life. Or to put it another way: "Moral values" voters probably didn't look at Bush and think, "Hm, he hates gays too," and thus forget all about economic self-interest. They probably thought, "Hm, he hates gays too, so his line about how Kerry's tax hike will hurt small businesses is probably true and important." Now what Bush said about taxes was utter bullshit. Good luck convincing anyone of that, though! The same might go for voter perceptions of foreign policy too. "Hm, he thinks gay marriage will harm society, so he's probably right that the Iraq war has made us safer." To some extent, the ability of rational persuasion to change that is limited, even if we did shut down right-wing talk radio.

That's not to say that everything depends on gay-bashing, though that's one possible conclusion. Nor is it to say that Democratic politicians could never connect with a certain class of voters. Obviously, if white working-class rural voters think that, say, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer shares their cultural worldview, they're more likely to trust him on various empirical matters that the non-expert can't evaluate on his or her own. And debates can probably be "reframed" to take them out of their usual cultural context, although I don't think George Lakoff is the man you want here. Kahan and Braman, for instance, suggest that reframing can happen if "the common perception that the outcome of [a] debate is a measure of the social status of competing groups" is dissipated. That's not Lakoff, right? But they explain no further. Well, that's all I have for now. Clearly there's much more to be said.

Question. Everyone keeps saying that this John G. Roberts fellow will get confirmed no matter what anyone does. And media folks keep saying, "Well, all this ruckus over the Roberts pick is really going to distract from the Plame Name Blame Game, but we're just reporters, so it's not like we can do anything about it!" And to top it off, it seems obvious that Democrats aren't going to "define the debate" through a pre-hearing media battle, or benefit in any way.

So...

Why doesn't liberal HQ just send out the memo telling everyone to lay off? When the confirmation hearings arrive in September, then Democrats can rattle off their questions and do what Lindsay Beyerstein says, but until then, focus on Rove-Plame, which actually seems to be hurting the Bush administration. I mean, yeah, John Roberts is going to make the world a worse place, but if that's going to happen no matter what, why not just let it go for now and get back to the task of castrating Karl Rove and the Republican Party? Oh I don't know...

Slate explains the "cat lady" phenomenon. Now that's all well and good, and I'm sure psychological expanations serve their purpose, but the more important question is this: How many cats does a lady actually need before she can be considered a "cat lady"? I say six. Six cats and you're a cat lady. Five cats and you just have a lot of cats. Well I guess that solves the Sorites paradox. Next up, my thoughts on whether or not words correspond to things in the world...

For those who have been following the debate, there's not too much of pressing interest in the Nation's roundtable on the future of labor unions. Except, I think, for the very end, when the moderator asks AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, SEIU president Andy Stern, and UNITE HERE hospitality president John Wilhelm if they think that a split in the labor movement could be good for organizing:

Sweeney: You know, this is not the 1930s and '40s, when US industry was on the rise and we were shifting from an agricultural to an industrial economy. We are shifting to service, working families have no basic healthcare, the working poor is growing and people are barely getting by. Right-wingers in Congress are actively attacking worker protections at every turn. It should tell you something that those right-wingers are salivating at the prospect of a split. Look at the Republican websites--they are gleeful, because the truth is, we have maintained power out of proportion to our numbers because we have been organized. A split will help no one…

Stern: The labor movement is incredibly divided right now. The only way it is united is at a table in Washington, DC, or because it uses the same initials after its name. But when it comes to dealing with companies like United Airlines or national strategies about how to organize Wal-Mart or healthcare workers, there is no unity. The airline industry, the most heavily unionized industry in the country, is Exhibit A, B, C and D. If we don't believe our lack of ability to coordinate and cooperate within companies and across them is a factor, we are crazy. I don't think a split itself will create a whole new wellspring of growth and hope. I don't expect immediate results…

Wilhelm: There is no question that the historical context is radically different, but I would point out that the CIO did not begin as a split but as a group of unions who wanted to try doing some things differently. The AFL expelled them. The question is, Will the federation take advantage of the greatest opportunity since the Great Depression to respond to what the country needs the most, or won't we? I don't think there ought to be a split. … But the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. …

Hm, interesting thoughts all around. One other thing to add, and this gets touched on very slightly earlier in the roundtable. My grasp of union history is somewhat fuzzy, but it seems, as Richard Freeman has demonstrated elsewhere, that labor density has historically grown in "spurts," during periods and under conditions that were very difficult to see and predict. So in World War I, for instance, developed countries needed the full cooperation of labor in order to mobilize and fight their splendid little war, and due to various resulting compromises, union density grew considerably. Likewise, union density grew during the Great Depression for obvious reasons, and during World War II because the government yet again needed cooperation. In the EU, union density grew considerably during the oil crisis inflation (but not, note, in the private sector in the United States during the same time). Likewise, experts have tolled the bell for various unions before—George Meany thought public sector unions were doomed in the 1950s—only to be horribly wrong.

So it's very often hard to foresee what's going to happen, and to some extent these productive spurts have to do with changes in labor law and legislation, but to some extent they also have to do with contingent historical events and the emergence of new unions and new modes of operating. One of the factors that were hard to foresee in the 1930s and 1940s was precisely the rise of the industrial union, which really fueled the surge in unionism during the Great Depression. (In conjunction with New Deal legislation, but not wholly dependent on it.) Likewise, during World War I, some of the main driving factors were the rise of war labor boards and mandatory arbitration. So it's very easy to rely too much on lessons from the past, which makes the question posed above something of a misleading one.

Yet another Harry Potter skeptic converted! (I, too, was once one.) Echidne has been reading the books and has, as usual, interesting thoughts on the matter. One very crucial point she brings up is that the whole wizard economy seems very ill-formed; everyone's still on the gold standard (and a gold reserve whose price is apparently unaffected by supply and demand here on planet Earth). The economy also seems to rely very, very heavily on slave labor—something that only Hermione (and at one fleeting point in the sixth book, Harry) seems bothered by. It's all very unstable. In fact, as with the thesis that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, I'm sure you could find some sort of economic rationale for Voldemort's de facto secession from the wizard world.

Via Tyler Cowen, I see that James Surowiecki is attacking the myth that aid doesn't work in the New Yorker. Good for him. As it happens, though, I wrote a similar article during the G-8 conference that's a bit less fluffy, and adds two other twists to this story: Besides the fact that aid isn't harmful, and can do good even in badly governed countries (and in the past has been addled by Cold War politics), one should also note that increased trade isn't nearly the panacea that people think it will be. In fact, some of the strongest solutions to pulling developing nations up out of poverty may involve neither trade nor aid, but things no one pays attention to. In particular, increased labor mobility and technology transfers can achieve quite a bit. Anyway, I don't link to MoJo articles all that often, but this one was pretty good, I thought, if a bit dry.

Here's a fun game. Tyler Cowen charted the evolution of his "favorite movie" over the years. This seems like an easy exercise, let's see... I was born in December 1981, so:

1985 – Big Bird Goes To China

1989 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Jan. '93 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Mar. '93 – Terminator 2

Apr. '93 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

1999 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

2005 – Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Surprise twist at the end, but let me tell you, I've revised my thinking dramatically since graduating college. Admittedly I have pretty boorish tastes in movies. Don't get me wrong, I think Persona is fantastic and the Bicycle Thief gets me teary-eyed every time I see it, but my approach is: if I wanted human drama and complex emotional interplay, I could always pick up a good novel. Allan Hollinghurst recently came out with something new, I see. That will do. Only the screen, however, can dole out the fast pace and thundering score that a rogue archaeologist with a whip and fedora truly deserves.

Well, I've always wanted to know this too. Jonathan Gruber and Michael Frakes do some research:

The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S.. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. (2004), who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet our results, as well as Chou et al., imply implausibly large effects of smoking on body weight. Thus, we cannot confirm that falling smoking leads in a major way to rising obesity rates in the U.S.

Can't seem to find the full paper, so I don't know exactly how they went about the study, but this seems like a very roundabout way of studying something that shouldn't be too hard to determine, no? Experiment group and control group? Oh I don't know, I'm just the blogger.

Hmmm... Stanley Fish says that it's impossible to be a "strict constructionist" without imputing some sort of intention to the words of the Constitution, as Scalia wants to do. Ramesh Ponnuru says no, you can:

Scalia's point, I take it, is that if we want to know the meaning of, say, the First Amendment, knowing the Framers' views about religious freedom does not settle the matter. The illustration usually brought up here is that if a secret letter from James Madison saying "what we had in mind was to prevent our new Congress from hiring chaplains," it wouldn’t matter. What matters is what the ratifying public of the time understood the words of the amendment to mean.

Okay, but… I'm very far from an expert on constitutional history, but as far as I can tell, several scholars have pointed out that, for instance, the Civil War amendments were very likely kept purposefully vague so as to attract broad support. (Eric Foner is big on this idea.) In that sense, if different parts of the "ratifying public of the time" took words like "freedom" to mean different things, the Scalia project is quite shot. I highly doubt the ratifying public—even if it has been a small minority within the larger public—all agreed on what the words of various amendments meant. But that aside, if it was in fact the framers' intention to keep certain language vague and leave it to future generations to adapt for their own purposes, Scalia would be pretty clearly working against the spirit of the whole enterprise. How do you get around this? It's much harder to dismiss this sort of intention than the "secret letter" Ponnuru is talking about.

Ha, ha. Just kidding; not yet. But if it ever comes time to write the manifesto, I plan to kick it off with the following little set of statistics:

In the 1990s the U.S. National Health Institute's cholesterol guidelines noted that thirteen million Americans could benefit from treatment with statins (i.e., drugs to lower your cholesterol.)

In 2001, the guidelines were rewritten, and that number jumped to 36 million.

In 2003, the guidelines jumped again, and this time as it happened about 40 million Americans could really use these statins.

Why the rapid increase? Are cholesterol levels in the United States actually getting worse and worse? Are more and more people at risk of a heart attack? Hard to say. But whatever you do, don't look at this page noting all the financial ties between writers of the NIH guidelines and drug companies. Really, it's totally irrelevant that eight out of nine experts rewriting the guidelines in 2003 were paid consultants or paid speakers or paid researchers for Pfizer or Merck or GlaxoSmithKline or Bayer or other companies that would stand to benefit in a major, major way from new "official" recommendations that would expand the statin market to millions and millions of otherwise healthy Americans. Totally irrelevant. And we wonder why health care costs are so high. Maybe because they keep inventing diseases and conditions for us to go get treated for.

That's not to bash statins. I have no idea if 40 million people need them or 40 thousand or what. They probably do many heart attack victims a world of good—although it's funny, independent researchers mostly seem to think their benefits for the rest of us are wildly overstated. Huh. Also, since my brain's still untarnished by the latest glossy Newsweek article pushing the latest disease dreamed up in GlaxoSmithKline headquarters, I would guess that some of those billions spent on, say, Lipitor might be better spent on public health programs instead. Then again, any scientific study I could dig up on public health is very likely to be funded by the diet and fitness industries—they've already got Paul Krugman in their thrall, why not me? And so it goes, with new diseases concocted and commodified every which way we turn. Some say Michel Foucault is dead. I just think he got hired by Merck.

Anyway, I'm finishing up a book review on this topic right now, but I really, really, really have no idea what can be done about this problem. (And the cholesterol incident is just the tail of the whale here.) Independent, government-funded review boards would be nice to have—something akin to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the U.K.—anything that could tell us whether the latest "diagnosis" now hitting the newsstands is really all it's cracked up to be. I've heard that the Public Library of Science here in San Francisco is working on something like that. But they're just one lonely voice pushing back against the onslaught. Perhaps the health wonks among us can mull this problem over, while I ponder what it means when two of our nation's largest industries (health and defense) can essentially manufacture demand out of thin air. Free market, they call it. Baffling, I say.

What are the campaign issues of the future? Clay Risen thinks that Wal-Mart will be the mammoth in the mudhut come '06 and '08. Democratic operatives have been heard sharpening their spears even now. So Wal-Mart. I guess it'd be a good idea for me to have a grand opinion on the subject, and even better if that opinion was the correct one. Well I can't do that all in one post, but here's an attempt to list out, as fully as I can, both the pros and cons of Wal-Mart's existence. Feel free to list additional points or corrections, and I will add to and revise the list as needed.

Pros:

1. The low prices increase wages for other people. (Wal-Mart's entry in an area can drive down grocery prices 15 percent.) For low-income families, groceries are a somewhat big percentage of the budget. [Update: See Ezra Klein's important dissent here; it seems Wal-Mart's "low prices" can be deceptive.]
   
2. The activity that Wal-Mart generates can benefit other nearby local shops. (Although this obviously isn't true if Wal-Mart is in an isolated rural-ish area, away from other shops, as is very often the case)
   
3. In urban areas, the competition can help produce variety among local shops, forcing them to specialize and benefiting consumers.
   
4. Is the pay particularly horrible? The average wage for Wal-Mart is $10.77. The national average for the service industry, according to a 2002 BLS Survey, is $9.77. Unions haven't made much inroad into retail generally. Starting pay at Wal-Mart for inexperienced workers is $7-8. This is well below living wage levels in many areas and pretty unacceptable, in my opinion. But perhaps it's less a problem with Wal-Mart per se and more a problem with the nature of pay and labor density in the entire industry. (Which means, true, that remedies will have to start with Wal-Mart.) It's also not clear that the "Mom 'n' Pop" stores being put out of business are paying much better than Wal-Mart.
   
5. Wal-Mart is just a temporary job for many. 44 percent of Wal-Mart's 1.4 million employees left for other jobs in 2003. Of course, if Wal-Mart uproots other businesses in the area, there may not be other jobs to go to.
   
6. Wal-Mart pays its managers 30 to 40 percent less than its competitors, a practice which could in theory help flatten inequality in the retail sector. (Maybe not, this is very unclear.) Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has a far lower percentage of college graduates among its managers than most companies, which, a bit, reduces the income gap between education levels.
   
7. As someone somewhere said, Wal-Mart probably did more than the Fed during the 1990s to hold down inflation. But I'm not sure how this works. If someone wants to make the case that Wal-Mart helped the Fed keep interest rates low, which therefore helped push unemployment down to 4 percent and hence push wages up, I'd be curious to see it.
   
8. Wal-Mart can, in theory, be a positive influence abroad—introducing more modern business practices, eliminating corruption, etc. There's some evidence that it has had this effect in China. (The flip side: it puts such pressure on its subcontractors and suppliers to keep costs down that the latter end up pursuing all sorts of labor violations in order to keep their Wal-Mart contract. Wal-Mart officials claim that they try to crack down on this, but see this post for skepticism on that front.)

Cons: (Here we go!)

1. Serious, serious labor abuses. (Off-the-clock work, lock-ins, running employees ragged.) This isn't just an accident. It's part and parcel of the whole system. Wal-Mart world headquarters expects labor costs to be cut by two-tenths of a percentage point each year. The only way to get there is to push people to work harder and cut corners.
   
2. Gender discrimination. One would hope this would be fixable—since basic gender discrimination is always inefficient—but then there's also pregnancy discrimination and discrimination against mothers, both of which are likely to be quite bad at Wal-Mart. (I don't see the store offering its clerks paid maternal leave, for instance.)
   
3. Yes, Wal-Mart's wages are particularly horrible. (See #4 above.) The average supermarket clerk makes $10.35 an hour. Sales clerks at Wal-mart make $8.23 a year, which translates into $13,861 a year.
   
4. Union-busting. Enough said. And Wal-Mart has an effect on union busting elsewhere. In 2004, unions had to make major wage and health concessions to supermarkets in California because of the threat of competition from Wal-Mart.
   
5. Wal-Mart was responsible for a bafflingly large part of the productivity boom of the 1990s. But most of the gains went to shareholders rather than workers. In fact, most of the "productivity gains" reaped by Wal-Mart probably shouldn't be counted as such. See Daniel Davies on this point.
   
6. A study by the San Diego Taxpayers Association found that Wal-Mart depresses wages for similar workers in the sector; in 2003 this was estimated to be between $105 million and $221 million. (But is this offset by the rise in purchasing power? And is this true in rural areas?)
   
7. Only 41 percent of Wal-Mart's workers are insured. The employee burden for health care is, on average, 42 percent, as compared to 16 percent nationally. In theory, this should force Wal-Mart's competitors to follow suit. (But, how many of these workers are already covered by their spouses or parents?)
   
8. Studies have shown that, for instance, one 200-person store can cost taxpayers $420,750 a year, due to all of the welfare programs that the Wal-Mart workers would qualify for. (Free lunches, section 8 housing, federal tax credits and deductions, Title I expenses, S-ChiP, energy assistance.) But this figure is misleading—how much would all of these workers be making if Wal-Mart doesn't exist. Presumably the welfare costs would still exist.
   
9. Wal-Mart can swamp other local businesses. Economist Kenneth Stone has found that, in small towns, retail sales collapsed a few years after Wal-Mart enters. And it's not just other retail businesses that are hurt: because Wal-Mart imports goods in bulk, it can make it hard for local or new manufacturers to break into the business.
   
10. Is Wal-Mart good or bad for upwards mobility? My guess is bad. In theory, both CostCo and Wal-Mart fill their management ranks from people who started out on the floor. But Wal-Mart's turnover is so breathtakingly high—some 70 percent—that a given worker has an infinitely smaller chance at rising up the Wal-Mart corporate ladder. But see #6 above—Wal-Mart does offer a better chance at promotion for those who didn't go to college.
    
11. Labor abuses in China. See #8 above.

That's all I can think of right now. Another thing to consider: how do different policy environments benefit or hamper Wal-Mart? In the 1990s Wal-Mart really took off. That was also a time when the federal minimum wage continued to decline in real terms, despite a minor boost in 1995, and the Earned-Income Tax Credit was expanded. Did that help Wal-Mart? (My thinking here is that, in theory, a higher minimum wage forces companies to pay low-wage workers more than they otherwise would, and the EITC allows them to pay those workers less than they otherwise would, although the actual impact of each seems difficult to calculate.)

Meanwhile, one of the arguments for boosting the minimum wage and/or labor density in the retail sector is that it would make it more difficult for Wal-Mart to keep improving its bottom line by slashing labor costs. In that case—and this is theoretical—the store might have to aim for productivity increases by other means, either by investing in its workers like CostCo does or what have you. Then again, as I said, the Wal-Mart model thrived in the late '90s, when full employment was putting upward pressure on wages for the first time in a long, long while. Why was that so? One possible answer: the increase in wages at the low-end of the payscale was hurting Wal-Mart's retail competitors, who often pay their workers even less, more than it did Wal-Mart. Or maybe low oil prices did it. Hmm...

Okay, now that I've finished the book, there are major issues to cover, so it's all getting stuffed below the fold, with serious serious spoilers. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how many readers here actually went out and read the book this weekend, so maybe I'll have to repost this in a few weeks if I want comments. Or after the movie comes out three years from now. Ah well...

The big question, of course, concerns Snape: has he really gone over to Voldemort's side, or is he still a secret agent for the Order of the Phoenix? I'm inclined to think the latter. Yes, true, he killed Dumbledore in this one; but he also had to: it's clear that Draco wasn't up to snuff, and Snape had made the Unbreakable Vow to jump in if Malfoy couldn't do it. Snape would've died otherwise (that's how Unbreakable Vows work!). The other point here is that Snape could only remain a serious mole on Team Voldemort if he killed Dumbledore. Otherwise, he'd be exposed as the Dumbledore-lover he really is. In fact, when Dumbledore was mumbling, "Severus, please..." just before he got zapped, my hunch is that he was asking Snape to remember just this very fact.

It sounds implausible, perhaps. And the book really keeps Snape's loyalties ambiguous right up through the end, though Dumbledore never doubts him. But consider this. When Snape is chatting with Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange in the second chapter, and rationalizes all his past actions to them, so as to convince the two Death Eaters that no, no, he's really working for Voldemort. (i.e. "I didn't know that Voldemort wanted the Sorcerer's Stone," and "I've been working at Hogwarts to remain a spy...") Right. All of his past actions can be explained convincingly in this dark light, except one. In the fifth book, remember, Snape quite clearly alerted the Order to the fact that Harry had gone to the Ministry of Magic to save Sirius, after Harry hinted as much in Umbridge's office. Snape didn't have to do this. In fact, had he been genuinely working for Voldemort, it would've been in his interest not to tell anyone and instead let Harry bite it right then and there. But Snape told Dumbledore. So I'm convinced he's still a Dumbledore guy. He's angry and bitter, sure, and probably hates Harry Potter like none other, but he's still going to be a double agent for the home team. That said, it's possible that he could've gone over to Voldemort between Book 5 and Book 6, but why? Nothing in the book suggests a reason for the change of heart.

Also, a friend suggested the theory that Snape was in love with Harry Potter's mother way back in the day, which would be consistent with: a) Snape telling Voldemort about the prophecy and then b) regretting it after Lily gets killed, along with c) still bearing a grudge against Harry.

Meanwhile, Draco Malfoy became a very interesting figure in this one, no? Perhaps not so in bed with the Death Eaters after all. It's quite clear that in the next book, Voldemort's Machiavellian approach towards his friends—it's better to be feared than loved—will be his undoing. Malfoy could be a big part of that. I don't know.

Will Hogwarts be open for Harry's senior year? I have a hard time believing that McGonagall can hold down the fort as headmistress, and it would be awfully odd and cheap if in the next book we see the same motifs as before, i.e. Gryffindor winning Qudditch as usual, trip to Hogsmeade, etc. etc. Plus, there are still at least four more Horcruxes to hunt down. My guess is that Harry leaves school. But no Hogwarts? That seems steep.

Structure-wise the sixth was one of the stronger in the series, and the glances back into Tom Riddle's childhood and history helped carry things along nicely, while the romances were amusing—even if I have a hard time believing that these kids are sixteen. (I mean, in this day and age...) On the other hand, the big "plot twist" in this one—that Rosmerta had been under an Imperius Curse—was a little lackluster, and other than that, this was much less suspenseful than some of the others. (I have a hard time believing anyone was genuinely surprised by the fact that Harry knew what Draco was up to all along.) And on the imaginative side, we weren't introduced to significantly more of the Harry Potter universe in this book, as we have been in previous installments. (The Quidditch World Cup, or the Ministry of Magic, or St. Mungo's, etc. etc.) The opening chapter, though, with Tony Blair or whoever, is a nice touch.

One other point: Harry Potter is really atrociously written. The way Harry has dealt with Sirius Black's death is nothing short of embarrassing, especially when he starts SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS, to alert us to adolescent anger. Now obviously this is all very much beside the point but it should be said, and it also makes me cringe when I realize that the inevitable Hermione-Ron hook-up in Book 7 will be depicted rather crudely. That said, Harry himself was also much less of a little prick in this one, and really grows up nicely in many respects.

UPDATE: Crikey. Rumor has it that the mysterious "R.A.B." featured at the end of the book is probably Regulus Black, Sirius' brother who was once a Death-Eater but tried to leave and was supposedly killed. Intriguing!

Continue reading "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"

Haven't been doing much meth-blogging of late, so here we go. Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor tries to show that meth is, in fact, rising as a problem, but as we've discussed before, the statistics are sadly ambiguous on this point. Nevertheless, he brings together three other important points:

1. "[A] study by the National Conference of State Legislatures finds that 10 percent of users were introduced to meth by their parents or other family members." Though I don't know how that compares to other drugs, I would guess that its higher than most everything but, obviously, cigarettes and alcohol.
   
2. Women are more likely to lose meth than men—perhaps because it's a weight loss drug, the theory goes. ("One federal survey of people arrested for all crimes found that 11.3 percent of women had used meth within the prior month compared with 4.7 percent of men.")
   
3. Even if, nation-wide, the meth problem isn't increasing per se—again, we just don't know—it is moving further north and further east, which explains the recent media spotlight. There were more meth lab incidents last year in Illinois than in California.
   
4. Treatment is horribly lackluster. "[O]nly 16 percent of counties surveyed have a meth rehabilitation center, which means that for most charged, jail is the only option."

#4 is the most troubling. What else do we have besides treatment? A reporter friend who lives in Northern California pointed out to me over the weekend that any serious meth-response strategy would have to involve cracking down on the superlabs in California; the decentralized mini-labs at home account for only 20 percent of the supply, after all. (Although they may account for a disproportionate percentage of meth-related problems, like counterfeiting and violence. I don't know.) That's true as far as it goes, but when has the United States ever cracked down on drug supplies abroad effectively? Very rarely.

The problems on this front seem to be twofold: first, because of exchange rates and markups and whatnot, disrupting the supply abroad only has a very limited effect on the price of drugs, and hence the demand, here at home. Indeed, a RAND report discusses lessons learned from the war on cocaine in the 1990s: "domestic enforcement was one-third again as cost-effective as interdiction and three times as cost-effective as source country control." The other point is that I wouldn't be surprised if interdiction, etc., abroad will become increasingly difficult as globalization continues, shipping costs go down, more goods enter the borders which means fewer goods can be checked, etc., etc.

Now one bright side: although there have been only a very few "successes" in source-country control, one of them occurred in Mexico, with the spraying of marijuana crops starting in 1975. So Mexico can be quite helpful. Unfortunately, it would have been infinitely better to have Mexican drug cartels growing pot than manufacturing meth. Which brings us back to our original question: did the war on marijuana help contribute to the rise in meth production and/or addiction?

Ah, sad. Wrote a post on Saturday about how I was, as a matter of principle, totally in favor of leaking the names of CIA agents, but thanks to lack of wireless couldn't put it up. And now Nathan Newman's beaten me to it. Oh well.

Perhaps the key objection to his post is that Valerie Plame was working on counterproliferation issues, rather than starting coups abroad or assassinating labor leaders or arming mujahideen or whatever the CIA usually gets up to. In one sense, that distinction doesn't much matter: let's say it had been Plame peddling phony information about Iraq's WMD capabilities in order to drag the United States into war, and Rove a hand-wringing peacenik who blew her cover to expose what was going on and avert a catastrophe. Then Rove really should have deserved a medal. In this case, though, Rove was the scumbag, and he deserves to be pilloried, but because he was part of an incompetent cadre of war-mongerers selling the country a false bill of goods, not because he outed a CIA agent. On the other hand, proliferation is a big problem these days—as I see it, nuclear terrorism is the only sort of terrorism to worry seriously about—and I'd like to see at least this division of CIA agents safe from the clutches of vindictive campaign managers and chiefs of staff.

On the other other hand, an unchecked CIA helped drag us into this whole al-Qaeda mess in the first place, and one would prefer they not get us into further messes in the future unchecked, and despite the fact that the agency has been neutered after the Church hearings in the 1970s, media pressure and constant sunshine is the only tried and true remedy for keeping our shadowy intelligence community actually in check. So going lax on the leaking rules seems in order to me. How about this: you out a CIA agent, you lose your job? Of course, the chance of a this sort of rule change happening in this day and age—when Democrats, in the shady and sordid tradition of JFK, are salivating mindlessly over the prospect of an expanded covert intelligence service in order to "look tough"—are nil, so whatever.

Seems my internet back at home no longer functions. Sad. Well, that will probably put this blog on the fritz at least until Monday. The more critical problem, though, is how I'll ever stay on top of all the latest Rove-Plame-Miller marginalia. Emergency survival plans include elbowing my way into the local book store to pry the latest Harry Potter from the cold, dead fingers of a frantic shopper, or else sitting up on Inspiration Point, SF, and contemplating the sound of Matt Cooper making an "Animal House" reference with one hand. Hopefully insight will come all at once rather than in stages.

At long last, Robert Leiken's excellent Foreign Affairs article on "Europe's Angry Muslims" is available online. It's worth reading, especially the parts that touch on Europe's resistance to "tougher" counterterrorism measures at home (with the exception of France, of course), and its struggle to reconsider its various approaches to multiculturalism. On that latter issue: Oddly enough, Leiken thinks that the American way of handling church and state—"separating religion from politics without placing a wall between them, helping immigrants slowly adapt but allowing them relative cultural autonomy"—is the model for Europe to emulate here.

Not sure what he means by that, though it's worth pointing out that if people like David Brooks had their way and Congress started funding a balkanized set of private religious schools, we'd be far more likely to see European-style separatism among religiously-inclined immigrants in the United States. Then again, we doesn't get nearly as many Muslim immigrants as Europe does, and certainly not nearly as many poor Muslim immigrants, which makes a difference. Plus, thanks to various historical accidents, most American Muslim communities are fairly well-established and well-to-do, so simple path dependency over here probably helps deter these radical communities from developing.

Sorry, that's a bit of a digress. What I meant to say was that if I were a European statesman, flipping through my catalogue, looking at the Fall 2005 line of improvements to multiculturalism, I wouldn't be too confident that the "American way" of integrating its immigrants is a model one. After all, the rate of immigrant segregation in the United States seems to be increasing drastically of late, even though racial segregation as a whole has remained constant. As I discussed in that link, most of this seems to have to do with the decline of cities and "natives" fleeing to suburbs and exurbs. In fact, structural and economic factors in the past may have had as much to do with our historic "success" in integrating immigrants as any sort of "philosophy" did. So what about the present day? If the United States had more poor Muslim immigrants pouring in, would we see the same sort of problems Europe's facing? Hey, fodder for the Pat Buchanan crowd to ponder... But liberals also ought to ponder, even pro-illegal immigration liberals like me.

Oh yeah, meanwhile, it seems that both Osama bin Laden and suicide bombings are becoming less popular in certain parts of the world. That's good, although this polling data also looks somewhat less than conclusive. Say: If 50 percent of Moroccans supported Osama bin Laden two years ago, and only 30 percent do now, that could just mean that 20 percent of Moroccans who very casually supported al Qaeda have found something better to do with their lives. At the margins that's heartening, but it's also possible that the number of true worshippers might have grown. So it's tough to say.

Still, the trend isn't overly surprising. Gilles Kepel has for a long time made a convincing case that bin Laden and other radical Islamists would eventually horrify the rest of the population and lose their popular support, just like radical Islamists did in Egypt. The United States just had to refrain from doing anything to fuck it up. Meanwhile, bin Laden and Zawihiri seem to have read the tea leaves and are adjusting their rhetoric accordingly, chatting less and less about the plans for the grand caliphate they've got hidden under their turbans. Good stuff. Whether Bush is responsible for all this or not, and how much, is an open question. Rough guess: I'll give him 40 percent credit. Was the Iraq war absolutely necessary to win people over to the nifty idea that democracy is the worst form of government but all the others? I'm inclined to think no. For instance, the energy spent smearing Joe Wilson alone could've been redirected to putting Hosni Mubarak in a headlock, pushing Egypt on the path towards bright and shiny reform, and won hearts and minds there. Same effect as democracy in Iraq? Possibly, only without all the dead people. Things for the latte-swilling crowd to ponder...

News that's pretty obvious, but still nice to see verified by science: Children who can fake a smile at Grandma's ugly Christmas present turn out to be "better-adjusted" at life in their later years:

In a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and Texas A&M University, researchers Jessica E. Kieras, Renée M. Tobin, William G. Graziano, and Mary K. Rothbart found that children's ability to put on a happy face when faced with a gift of an unattractive baby rattle was shown to predict their knowledge of the often-unspoken rules of acceptable behavior in society. The results speak to a child's potential to develop "socially appropriate expressive behavior" and a visibly even temperament, according to the authors.

Speaking of which, here's a counter-experiment proposal. My brother and I discovered long ago that if you look absolutely confident when giving a present you know full well to be unattractive, you're more likely to get a positive response when it's unwrapped. But if you show uncertainty, the resulting tension is likely to be unbearable. We've pulled off some seriously tacky gifts to family members with this tactic.

Things I didn't know: "The true cause of America's obesity epidemic is the government-subsidized over-production of corn. Thanks to Earl Butz, the Nixon-era agriculture secretary who inaugurated the current farm subsidy system, since the 1970s Big Food has been able to super-size soda pop (made of high-fructose corn syrup) and hamburgers (made of corn-fed beef) without having to raise prices."

Is it some sort of rule nowadays that subtitles on books need to be wildly overblown? Every day a new volume comes out describing how some unknown event or group "saved civilization" or "changed the world" or even "saved the world." (Real titles include: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. And A True History of How Pugs Saved Civilization.) And now the Washington Monthly is reviewing Charles Peters' new book: "Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Wilkie!' Convention of 1940 and How it Freed FDR to Save the Western World." Ohmigod! Obviously there's an arms race going on here, but if all I did was hang out in bookstores, I'd think this whole "civilization" thing was pretty flimsy, what with it needing saving by cods and pugs and minor politicians all the time.

Is it really the case that no one will buy a book called: "Dwayne: The man who didn't do anything ABSOLUTELY PIVOTAL in world-historic terms but has kind of an interesting life story anyway"? Clearly it's time for detente. Or even better, a cap-and-trade regime on claims to have saved the world.

Very interesting... via Balkanization, Nathan Brown got his hands on a leaked, and very incomplete, draft of the bill of rights for the Iraqi constitution. The early version looks quite, quite liberal, not at all sharia-heavy, though we'll see what happens; note also that this was drafted before the Sunnis got invited into the scribbling room.

This is a theory I've batted about now and again in the past, but Joseph Braude in the New Republic lays out a convincing case that Syria's Bashar Assad is actually in a very strong position right now and does not, in fact, deserve the dunce cap. He's put his domestic opposition in a headlock. He's divided the once-mighty U.S.-Europe unity against Syria by placating the latter's demands, at least nominally. Heck, even the new Iraqi government wants to be Bashar's friend. It's gotten to the point where Condoleeza Rice has thrown up her hands and stopped using "regime change" and "Syria" in the same sentence, just in case, you know, that's not the official policy anymore.

I don't really know quite what this means on the broader view, but Iran, I think, can learn some quality lessons here: If you look just law-abiding enough, Europe will quickly forgive you, drop all that unpleasant sanctions-talk, and send in its businessmen, while the United States will stew bitterly and mutter "crazy" conspiracy theories about evil intentions. So a transatlantic rift ensues, while the erstwhile "rogue" regime bats its eyes innocently. On that note, George Perkovich of Carnegie is now telling the Senate that Iran may not actually have anymore undeclared or hidden nuclear activities left—it's possible that the IAEA may come to this conclusion, and declare Iran in compliance with the NPT—which could all dovetail nicely with the strategy described above. Oh, but surely this administration is much too clever to fall for the same rope-a-dope twice in a row, right? Um... Still, what to do about Iran remains the brutal question. Perkovich has thoughts. The over/under on "Do nothing!" still looks good, though; maybe that's for the best.

I was catching up on Los Angeles Times' op-eds from the past week—when will Kinsley stop screwing around with wikitorials and give us RSS feeds?—and came across this one by Sarah Buel discussing one of the final-day Supreme Court decisions that didn't get much attention: Castle Rock v. Gonzales. The backstory: Jessica Gonzales had put a restraining order out on her estranged husband; one night he whisked her three kids away from her; she asked the Castle Rock, CO, police to enforce the restraining order and retrieve her kids; they dithered and then said no, instead going home to dinner. Well, the three kids end up dead in the trunk of a car, Gonzales is beyond livid, and sues.

Now the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gonzales didn't have a right to have the order enforced under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment—that is, the Castle Rock PD wasn't violating her property rights by using their discretion and failing to respond. Now on one level, it would be awfully odd if a property interest was created whenever a restraining order was issued. I'm not sure. Meanwhile, though, Antonin Scalia's majority opinion says: "A well established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes." Okay, that's also somewhat fair, I think. But Colorado had also previously passed a law specifically requiring police departments to "use every reasonable means to" enforce restraining orders, precisely because the departments had been so lax on this front. The whole point of the law was to take away their discretion. Perhaps I'm very wrong about this, but it seems like there's no possible way the Colorado legislature could've written a law to take away police "discretion" on this issue. Is that really true?

Anyway, this also reminds me that I should plug the cover story of the latest Mother Jones: a profile of Patricia Prickett, who has spent years trying to get law enforcement agencies to respond to domestic violence. Needless to say, it's like pulling teeth. The big hurdle on this issue, of course, is the Violence Against Women Act, which comes up for renewal this fall. The lesser-known hurdle, though, is that police departments themselves are exceedingly reluctant to focus on domestic violence, despite the fact that a coordinated response system can cut the relevant homicides and assaults down by half. (For a sense of the scale: 5.3 million women abused per year; 555,000 serious injuries; 1200 killed.) Naturally.

But as with Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the law can be pretty damn useless here. Most judges don't even know about the Violence Against Women Act, and can be easily swayed by "charming" batterers. Police officers, meanwhile, will sometimes actively dissuade victims from prosecuting, which they are certainly not supposed to do. As always, it's beyond fucked. This isn't something Congress can solve—completely—from on high. Without people like Prickett physically yanking people by the hair, hard, and hurling them in the right direction, nothing ever happens. Anyway, it's a good piece, so give it a look.

A quick extra note on the London terror attacks. I'll be the first to agree that it's a bit hopeless to try to caulk the walls and guard ourselves completely and totally against conventional bombs in buses and subways. And I also agree that war with Syria and Iran would be the height of idiocy (although from what I know of Michael Ledeen, he's fairly opposed to invading those two countries; rather he favors... um... getting "serious" about the terror-masters so that we can figure out a "better" policy. Oh, and we need to do it "faster, please.")

On the other hand, I'm not quite sure that al-Qaeda, because it's been so skimpy on terrorist attacks over the past four years (which is sort of true, sort of not), is probably much-weakened. That may be the case. Still, Michael Scheuer wrote a little-read analysis for Jamestown a few months ago that suggested something at least as plausible: Osama bin Laden might well be holding off on attacking the West—and instead leaving matters to those little franchises—not because al-Qaeda's too crippled to act, but because bin Laden and Zawihiri need to complete a "warning cycle" that Islamic scholars have insisted must precede any terrorist attack. (They were criticized after 9/11 for failing to do that.) I don't really understand many of the intra-Islam ideological battles that are going on here, but they're important, and both bin Laden and Zawihiri are certainly aware of them.

Meanwhile, assuming al-Qaeda still has the capacity to bring mass death to the United States—and who knows?—there might be any number of reasons for not attacking the West in full force just yet. Perhaps they'd prefer to wait until the United States is defeated in Iraq and then withdraws, assuming that happens. I could see how that might be the "smarter" thing to do from a strategic perspective, in which case Robert Pape's theory, that al-Qaeda is trying to get America's allies to leave Iraq, starts to make a lot of sense. Perhaps they need to raise the bar with the second attack or they'd suffer a major propaganda blow. It's kind of weak to follow-up on 9/11 by blowing up a bus, after all. So it's hard to tell what they're up to. Considering all the major al-Qaeda figures sitting pretty inside Iran, though, I have a hard time believing the group's been crippled beyond repair.

Mark Kleiman weighs in on the meth problem. His verdict: there's nothing much to be done besides restricting sales of pseudoephedrine, which could hopefully slow down the labs. Although he points out, as noted in the post below, that the pharmaceutical industry—especially Pfizer, maker of Sudafed—has blocked both federal and state-level measures to do this. With enough media pressure, I think, they may be shamed into relenting, but until then… Anyway, Mark Schone reported on the meth problem in Missouri for Legal Affairs last December and dug up a few more facts:

DEA statistics show that consumption of raw pseudoephedrine has risen rapidly since 1998—the time when the fraction of the population using meth leveled off. Since it doesn't seem like more people are getting stuffy noses these days, we can assume that meth consumption has increased and the proportion of heavy users is rising. (Pfizer, of course, disputes these numbers.)

Limiting pseudoephedrine may well be effective, but it can't be done on a state-level, clearly. Meth cooks will just go to other states. (Oklahoma banned over-the-counter pseudoephedrine and Arkansas saw its pharmacy sales skyrocket.)

States have spent millions busting meth labs, but it's pretty useless. An average cook might be found with enough for six users. Schone calls them "Beavis and Butt-Head meth cooks"; the problem is that there are so many of them.

By that token, stricter federal sentencing guidelines for meth cooks seems like a serious waste of money. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is proposing to increase the average meth sentence from 88.5 months to 115. On the one hand, that would bring a bit more racial balance to the federal inmate population, because most meth sentences are handed out to rural white males. On the other hand, as affirmative action programs go, this is a pretty idiotic one. Do we want to spend $20,000 a year for a federal cell some jackass cook who's a tiny fraction of the problem? No.

For states, prosecution is becoming too costly. The jails are all filled up. "No agency in Missouri keeps statewide statistics on meth offenders. [Of course.] Stats for all drug offenders, however, show that they're three times more likely to be on probation or parole than behind bars.

A federal drug strategy is needed. All that most county sheriffs want to do, really, is to kick the problem out of their county. If it goes somewhere else, whatever.

Another point is this. The restriction of pseudoephedrine sales would be nice, and a cost-free half-solution—well, cost-free for everyone but Pfizer—but it's also worth keeping in mind that only about 20 percent of meth comes from small, local labs. The other 80 percent comes from superlabs here in California (our gift to the red states) or, increasingly, Mexico. No doubt much money is being spent trying to crack down on those big labs abroad. That hasn't worked for just about every other drug in existence, so...

In the wake of this story in the Monday Times—on the horrific effects of methamphetamine abuse on the children of users—it's hard not to believe that this new epidemic is the most horrible thing ever and needs to be stopped at all costs. And from everything I've heard, that's true. But the article, notably enough, doesn't quite say give us any good solid statistics here—on the scope of the problem, or whether it's actually getting worse, or what have you. Let's see. The Times does note that the number of children admitted into foster homes, because of meth abuse, seems to be on the uptick in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Oregon, Tennessee, and North Dakota. Fine, but that rise could be due to any number of things—a higher number of raids on meth labs, and hence more children found, for instance; a greater awareness of the drug; or maybe a change in recording statistics—state-level reporting "can be spotty," after all, as the article admits.

Unfortunately, the available drug-use statistics are so awful, it's hard to get a sense for what's going on with this meth crisis, beyond anecdotes. According to SAMHSA, between 2002 and 2003—the last year for which user data is available—methamphetamine use actually declined from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds. Okay, whatever. This isn't a terribly important statistic, I think, since the main problem is usually the number of heavy users, not the total fraction of the population using a given drug. Obviously it's nice that fewer younger kids are using meth, since that might—might—reduce the pool of potential future heavy users. But it's not the main thing. Meanwhile, SAMHSA reports that total methamphetamine use skyrocketed between 1992 and 1998, but "[s]ince then, there have been no statistically significant changes." Um, that seems like an important fact to note. It's possible, obviously, that use has shot up between 2003 and the present day. No idea why that might be, but it's possible. Or perhaps the media has just started following more closely a problem that has always existed, and is bad, but not getting worse over time.

Alternatively, insofar as there might be an increasing problem, it could be that the total quantity consumed of meth is going up—meaning more heavy users, along with heavier users, and hence, an increase in problems like child abuse. But there's no way of knowing whether total consumption is actually going up—SAMHSA doesn't keep track of this statistic. Nice. Nor do we know if there are more heavy meth users now than, say, five years ago. This matters because the actual character of the problem affects the type of anti-drug strategy that's needed. (If you're worried about curbing total consumption rather than curbing the fraction of the population using a given drug, then treatment tends to be more cost-effective than law enforcement, as RAND analysts and others have shown.)

Then there's the problem of trying to figure out whether supply restrictions on cold medicine, as in Oklahoma, are really having a positive effect on the meth market. (Although one should note that if states can restrict meth ingredients in a pretty painless manner—at worst, people with colds need to hit up the pharmacist for their pseudoephedrine—well, there's no reason not to do that, although the all-powerful drug lobby may argue otherwise. The latter is a story that I wish would get more coverage, incidentally.) What we do know, however, is that sheriffs around the country are asking the Bush administration for more law enforcement money on the problem. But is that a good indication of what's going on? I honestly have no idea. If history's any guide, it's hard not to be wary of media reporting on drug epidemics. Already, it seems, we've been subject to misleading cover stories on the efficacy of treatment for meth addiction.

Anyway, consider this a preliminary post. I'll try to get into this in more detail tomorrow and over the coming week; so feel free to point out anything I've overlooked or botched. One other question: Would people use meth less if we just handed out pot for them to smoke? (The, um, "serious" way of phrasing this: Has the crackdown on marijuana led people to seek out meth as a cheap alternative?) And since pot is infinitely less harmful to everyone involved, doesn't this seem like the cheapest, most immediate, and obviously best solution? I'm serious, actually.

One of the more interesting law review articles I've read in awhile—okay, one of the only law review articles I've read in awhile—is Barry Friedman's "The Cycles of Constitutional Theory." The basic point, somewhat obvious, is that both progressives and conservatives modify their theories about how judges should interpret the constitution, not to mention the status of judicial review, based on the actual make-up of the Court.

Now I don't think this is because everyone's a dishonest hack, but rather, because political events can get people thinking in a certain direction. My dislike of the Senate, for instance, is quite principled, but it mainly came about because I saw that the chamber puts Democrats at a disadvantage, especially right now. If the party situations were reversed, I would probably still be amenable to the idea that the Senate is flawed, but more likely I just wouldn't ever think of it as a major problem. Still, something to keep in mind.

That said, I think there's something to Richard Posner's line: "Constitutional theory has no power to command agreement from people not already predisposed to accept the theorist's policy prescriptions." That not only seems right, it's also the way it probably should be. I don't see any principled reason why I should accept "originalism" or "strict constructionism" if they're guaranteed to produce the sort of things I think are quite bad. This idea can be taken to anarchic extremes, of course, but it doesn't have to. Cass Sunstein's "judicial minimalism" is very different from originalism, but it's not utter lawlessness either.

Now certainly stability is important for law, and that's one argument for originalism, but the law will also generally be stable even if a large body of precedent nudges constitutional doctrine away from the "original meaning." Likewise, I don't see why our understanding of the framer's "original intentions" would necessarily remain static over time—historical scholarship changes very frequently. New documents pop up, linguists reinterpret what was meant by X word, interpretations change. That's how history has always worked, and the upheavals can be fairly radical. And then there are liberal originalists like former Justice Hugo Black and Yale's Akhil Reed Amar, and while one might argue that they're practicing "bad" history—that was the charge leveled against many of the Warren Court's "originalist" decisions—wrangling over historical interpretations often gets us, once again, into murky and less than stable territory.

A lot of reports have been coming out lately on how methamphetamines are the newest drug plaguing the nation. Expect a Time cover story soon; War on Drugs to follow, etc. Awesome. Anyway, it's clearly the case that less attention should be paid to kids smoking pot in high school and much more on the meth problem creeping across the Southwest. And because that's so obvious, it probably won't happen. So it goes. What would be interesting, though, is to figure out how this sort of "plague" actually spreads. Is it linear? Does use keep spreading and spreading without bound until someone does something about it? Or maybe not. Maybe it's more like the Game of Life.

For instance, in the 1970s, cocaine use picked up around the country, became widely popular in the mid-1980s, and then dropped off. Of course, this "drop-off" is deceiving—in the late 1980s the total number of cocaine users fell, but the quantity consumed stayed constant, indicating that there were more heavy users out there. Since heavy users are the bulk of the problem—they overdose the most, they're most likely to be unproductive at their job or commit crimes—that means the problems haven't really subsided, even if the "plague" has. Now that drop in total users is often chalked up to the success of the "War on Drugs". And indeed, the percentage of young adults reporting cocaine use in the past 30 days dropped considerably in the 1980s. (It rose in the late 1990s, but not close to its previous levels.)

But what if drug epidemics follow their own natural tide and ebb? Since we know that drug use is spread primarily through social contacts, it may not follow a linear pattern. Perhaps it goes something like this: light drug use spreads through social networks. Soon the drug becomes popular. More heavy users start to appear, and the media starts picking up horror stories—like one that came out a few weeks ago about "meth mouth". New and widely-publicized research brings the bad effects of drugs to light. (Or those bad effects become apparent among friends, people you know, etc.) Eventually the social networks are all tapped out—drug use has spread to as many of your friends as it's going to spread to—and light use starts to decline, leaving only the heavy users. Plus aging probably has much to do with it. But anyway, this rise and fall might have nothing whatsoever to do with government policy.

So that's one problem with measuring the success of the "War on Drugs." Perhaps cocaine use would have fallen on its own in the mid-1980s no matter what. Alternatively—perhaps the epidemic was just picking up momentum, and use would have been even more widespread in the absence of Reagan's "War on Drugs." Who knows? Cause and effect becomes pretty difficult to untangle. Meanwhile, critics note that the price of drugs fell dramatically over the past decade, as "proof" that policy has failed. But a hundred different factors could account for this: advances in communications and shipping technology, port security weakened by the rise in global trade, a more sophisticated international market. Again, it's possible that in the absence of the War on Drugs, drugs would have been even more available. (As it happens, I do think the war on drugs is a wretched failure; just not for these reasons.)

Anyway, back to meth: The problem here, I think, is that if drug epidemics do have a natural ebb and tide, that seems like a big deal, and something you want to tailor drug policy around. For instance, law enforcement strategies—which make up the bulk of the War on Drugs budget—would be far more effective early on, when there are fewer dealers. On the other hand, treatment isn't very effective at reducing consumption early in the cycle because there aren't many heavy drug users. Later on, it's the reverse—treatment's vastly more effective, law enforcement less so. Likewise, if an epidemic's already peaked, then prevention strategies—like D.A.R.E. in schools or TV ads—are sort of a waste of money, whereas they seem to be fairly cost-effective early on. (That is, they're somewhat useless, but also incredibly cheap.)

Now the problem is this: Looking at the White House's National Drug Control Strategy budgets, the three big drug policy measures—law enforcement, treatment, prevention—always seem to take a more or less constant share of the budget over time. More to the point, the proportions here seem to be roughly the same as they were back in 1996. Now maybe this is all well and good. Still, if we're in the midst of an epidemic featuring, as one sheriff puts it, "absolutely the worst kind of drug the nation has ever seen," and if drug use has its own natural cycle, then we should see these proportions change quite dramatically over time, no? But that doesn't seem to be the strategy here.

Anyway, I find drug policy pretty fascinating, though it would be depressing to study or research this stuff full-time: In no other area of government do the facts matter so incredibly little when setting policy.

Steven Rose's essay, "Talking about Social Class," makes some worthwhile points. He argues that most voters probably wouldn't vote Democratic on the basis of perceived economic self-interest, even if the party adopted a bold, Thomas Frank-style populist platform. Since Rose phrases his thesis somewhat sloppily, I'm trying to restate it as precisely as possible: A populist platform might end up being popular for a variety of reasons, and it might in reality be in the self-interest of the majority of workers to vote for it, but it's unlikely that workers would overwhelmingly vote for it because they believed they would gain personally. (And that's not because they're stupid; it's because the benefits are highly non-obvious.)

The key statistics Rose hauls out: Only 23 percent of all adults earn, on average over the long run, under $40,000; which means that less than a quarter of all workers stand to benefit significantly from most safety net programs. (Democrats tend to overestimate this "safety-net constituency" since they usually only look at income data from a single year.) Moreover, the "industrial proletariat" in America is quite small—only about 34 percent of male workers and 10 percent of female workers—whereas about 35 percent of male and female workers have high end managerial and professional jobs, like the dude on the right. Under the circumstances, then, most people care about workplace issues like minimum wage, forced overwork, occupational health and safety, the right to unionize, unemployment benefits, and retraining, but this support is probably soft, and none of these issues are necessarily election-winners.

So what can the Democrats campaign on that would appeal to the perceived self-interest of voters? The Bush tax cuts? Eh, thus far, both Reagan and Bush have proved that deficits really don't matter. Now that's a bit of a lie: These deficits do matter because they're the wrong type of deficits to run, and they do matter because at the current pace, interest costs will eventually grow faster than GDP, leading to fiscal Armageddon. But over the past four years, inflation has been low, long-term rates are still bafflingly low, and the investment share of GDP is actually a bit higher than its long-run average. No, deficits just haven't mattered.

Hammering on the uninsured won't appeal to voters' perceived self-interest either. As Rose reminds us, 80 percent of Americans have insurance; Democrats simply aren't going to grab people with this issue right now. (Rose: "The Democratic edge in public opinion polls on health care is somewhat illusory because each specific policy initiative has much less support." True that.) Meanwhile, I've argued before that it's very keenly in that 80 percent's self-interest to keep the remaining 20 percent uninsured. Yes, moral arguments about "community" and "caring for your neighbor" might push the uninsured issue forward. Naked selfishness simply won't. And by the way, I'm extremely skeptical that some "inevitable" health crisis is going to hit and cause "the people" to rise up and demand single-payer.

Trade isn't a spectacular "self-interest" issue either, because very few people are actually affected negatively by trade. 82.7 percent of workers work in administration or business services, health care, education, or "low-skill sales and service," and most of these workers have actually benefited from the lower prices on goods ushered in by globalization. Now obviously people may have strong opinions on trade agreements, but again, few of those opinions are likely to be based on self-interest. In certain regions trade populism could potentially do well, but after Inez Tennenbaum's loss to Jim DeMint in SC last year—and that was the perfect experiment for this hypothesis—I don't know how widely applicable this is.

Meanwhile, the varieties of corporation-bashing can only go so far. Many people—many Republicans even—distrust large companies, it's true, and the recent Pew Press poll let us know that many of these voters even favor "business regulations" in the abstract. But on another level, as one of Rose's charts show, 43.5 percent of Americans work in "Office Administration and Business Services," and many of those workers, as he puts it, "have interests in common with their employers because the success of their company is necessary for them to keep their jobs." Again, it's not clear that workers would think it in their self-interest to vote for a party that promises to take on large corporations, although that stance may resonate just because so many people dislike elite institutions.

So is economic populism a lost cause? No, I don't think so. For starters, many progressive policies are still the right policies on the merits, even if they can't always be sold in self-interest terms. (If "only" 20 percent of workers are uninsured, that's important—even if it's not actually an election-winner.) Also, Thomas Frank-style populism would likely appeal to the self-interest of some voters, even if it's not an overwhelming majority. Let's not forget that John Kerry only lost by a little bit in the last election. Potentially another Democratic presidential candidate could craft a populist message, on Frank-esque lines, that could win over enough Bush voters to tip the presidential balance his or her way. With a little luck, who knows?

On the other hand, a more enduring progressive electoral majority definitely seems like it would be harder to forge on economic populism alone, barring a return of the Great Depression. That said, there are many other issues that haven't been discussed here—Peter Gosselin's focus on income instability, the issues Elizabeth Warren brings up in The Two Income Trap, Nancy Folbre's thoughts on how to help women balance work and family—which could well gain traction. Alternatively, Democrats could unleash the (plausible) argument that their policies are, in fact, much better for the economy as a whole, although I do believe an economic crisis would have to erupt before this argument could sink its teeth in. And if Social Security is still an issue come 2006, that certainly works to the Democrats' favor, although between bombs in London and Sandra Day O'Connor that possibility seems less and less likely by the day.

But Rose's larger argument—that the majority of Americans just don't feel screwed enough that they feel the need to act politically (and remember, it's probably only pundits who think that every single economic problem can and ought to be solved through electoral politics)—may well be true, and if true, probably important.

In the wake of the horrific London attacks today, Fred Kaplan has some thoughts on securing our own public transportation system here in America, but I'm not sure where he's going with this. A decent revamp of mass-transit security would cost about $6 billion, to which Kaplan says: "If President George W. Bush went on television tonight and called for a surtax to finance mass-transit security—the APTA proposal would cost about $20 per American—does anyone doubt it would pass in a flash?" Well, yes, I do. First off, the surtax wouldn't necessarily come to $20 per American, because the costs might not be distributed so evenly. What if they fell primarily on those who actually use mass transit, say, in the form of a fee hike? Now according to the APTA, Americans took 9.4 billion trips on the mass-transit system in 2003, so we're talking roughly a 64-cent hike per trip. To which I would say, "Oh hell no." And I don't think I'd be alone.

But hey, maybe the funding would work out as smoothly as Kaplan says. The more important point is this: it doesn't seem that there's any possible way of ensuring total mass-transit security, extra billions or no. If someone really wanted to blow up my 1BX bus in the morning, it wouldn't be very difficult at all, there's no conceivable security measure anyone could put in place to stop it, and a decent bomb could probably kill 30-40 people easy (it's a crowded bus). That's not to say that no security measures are prudent—presumably there's some sort of cost-benefit analysis someone can run on all of this, and obviously our critical infrastructure needs protection—but at some point one has to admit that terrorist attacks are pretty much inevitable if the will exists, rather than siphon off billions in Homeland Security funds every time we start worrying about another attack. An essay Stephen Flynn wrote a few years back describes best the sort of mindset that's needed here:

Today's terrorist masterminds know that the main benefit of attacks on critical infrastructure is not the immediate damage they inflict, but the collateral consequences of eroding the public's trust in services on which it depends. … As long as catastrophic terrorism is assured of generating a huge bang for the buck, current and future U.S. adversaries will make it the first arrow they reach for in attacking the country.

How much security is enough? For the foreseeable future, the threshold for success is when the American people can conclude that a future attack on U.S. soil will be an exceptional event that does not require wholesale changes in how they go about their lives. This means that they should be confident that there are adequate measures in place to confront the danger.

In other words, homeland security should strive to achieve what the aviation industry has done with safety. What sustains air travel despite the periodic horror of airplanes falling out of the sky is the extent to which the industry's long-standing and ongoing investments have convinced the public that it is safe to fly. Public confidence can never be taken for granted after a major jet crash, but private and public aviation officials start from a credible foundation built upon a cooperative effort to incorporate safety into every part of the industry….

Ongoing and credible efforts to confront risk are essential to the viability of any complex modern enterprise. Aviation safety provides helpful reference points for how to pursue security without turning the United States into a national gated community. First, it demonstrates that Americans do not expect their lives to be risk-free; they just rightfully expect that reasonable measures be in place to manage that risk. Second, managing risk works best if safeguards are integrated as an organic part of a sector's environment and if they are dynamic in adapting to changes in that environment. Third, government plays an essential role in providing incentives and disincentives for people and industry to meet minimum standards. Bluntly stated, security will not happen by itself.

I'd suggest reading his whole essay, but the crux of it is in that quote. The point of homeland security can't be to prevent all attacks from now until eternity. That's an impossible goal. The point is to minimize the dangers and fallout as best one can and ensure that the inevitable attacks don't "require wholesale changes in how [we] go about our lives."

Apologies for the lack of great free content on this site of late; I've been a bit harried trying to get in some quality reporting-hours so that I, too, can get in on these great new journalist shield laws. Um, if and when they ever arrive.

But on the light and frivolous side, let me endorse just about everything Margot Talbot has to say about Roald Dahl in the New Yorker this week. As it happens, before I settled on my eventual topic for a college English thesis, I thought very, very seriously about trying to root out all the hidden Marxist subtexts in James and the Giant Peach—something about the collectivization of agriculture, as I recall. The only flaw in that idea was that it was pretty idiotic. In that vein, Alvaro Vargas Llosa's hit piece on Che Guevara is also well-deserved. No sense wading into the "commodification of former bloodthirsty radicals" issue here, but Llosa hits on an even more burning question: Why did anyone ever hold Che up as some sort of master of asymmetric warfare when he was, in fact, horribly incompetent at that sort of thing?

A question or a modest proposal. Why don't the Senate Democrats put out a list of judges that they would nominate to the Supreme Court if they had their druthers? I don't mean put out an ultimatum, i.e., a list of conservative nominees they deem acceptable and hope Bush selects from the list. [EDIT: So I don't mean what Harry Reid's been doing of late.] The Democrats don't have much of a choice in who the president nominates, and setting boundaries in this way wouldn't appear to do much good. But presumably the purpose of an opposition party—especially one that can't do a whole hell of a lot about these Supreme Court picks—is to present an alternative to voters, to present a reason why it, and not the Republican Party, should be in power.

So what better than to say: "Here are people we think would make good justices"? Putting actual names forward is bound to garner more coverage then simply saying, "We would pick judges who support environmental regulations, yadda, yadda." These people could be liberals, or moderates, or whatever. It's just a way of signaling that these are the sort of reasonable and user-friendly judges Democrats would pick if in power, and compare them to the lunatic (assuming it's a lunatic) that Bush is putting forward. Is this stupid? Obviously it would be stupid if voters did, in fact, prefer the Roe-overturning, minimum wage-bashing, EPA-neutering justice entering stage right. But in that case the Democrats kind of have more serious problems on their hands. It's also a way of moving beyond this "philosophy of the stop-sign" nonsense.

Eh? I'd be interested to hear why this wouldn't be a good idea, if it's not. Another, more fun question is who you'd pick to sit on the Supreme Court. Personally, I'd be down with Robin West, Lani Guinier, Cass Sunstein, or Mary Becker, although the last might pose a bit of a problem because as far as I can tell, Becker actually hates the Constitution. Heh, right. Um, but the Democrats probably shouldn't float any of those names...

Jane Galt makes a point worth thinking about, in re the debate about Europeans taking more vacation. It's not clear that giving up wages in exchange for more time away from the office always means more leisure time. To take one obvious example, I don't like to cook very much, by which I mean that there's no job I could be doing that would not be preferable to cooking. (Well, maybe cleaning toilets, but even then...) Still, I try to spend a decent amount of time cooking—and I'm not awful at it!—because I'm picky and not a big fan of canned Spaghetti-o's every night. Shopping, cooking, and cleaning takes me a decent amount of time each day. At a certain point, I would much rather spend that time working if I could use the extra wages to order delivery or eat out. Even better examples exist—working overtime in order to make enough to hire a maid or buy a washing machine might be preferable to spending the time doing the chores yourself or hauling your nappy socks down to the laundromat. Or a dishwasher or a microwave. Comparative advantage and all.

But obviously not everyone's job is like that. I'm lucky enough now to enjoy what I do and will happily work late or bring stuff home, and I don't feel like someone else is exploiting me and my labor. But I've certainly had jobs before where I've felt like there, where I'd watch the clock hit 5pm, toss off my employee nametag and bolt. I would have much rather scrubbed my own toilet for two hours than work an extra two hours at, say, CVS in order to hire someone to scrub my toilet. So a decrease in the workweek would've been awesome for that job. More importantly, one's wage level is another consideration, it's easy to work less if you're not scraping to get by, etc. Now I don't know if anyone's done any studies on this question—I assume yes—but I'd like to know how and when, and for whom, less time at work actually translates into more leisure time.

Meanwhile, Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote (2005) suggest that more "mandatory" vacation time, as found in Europe, ends up having all sorts of "social multiplier" effects. That makes sense: from a pure productivity standpoint, it's pretty moronic that we have two-day weekends for all workers, rather than stagger everyone's "weekend" across the workweek. Much more would get done! But weekends are fun precisely because everyone else, in theory, is also off work, so you can go hang out. Likewise, long vacations are more fun if they occur when everyone else is taking vacation. But it's hard to coordinate this sort of society-wide vacation time without European-style labor regulations. Otherwise, presumably, a few workaholics put upward pressure on how much a person "ought" to be at the office.

Over the weekend, Larry Diamond laid out what seems to be the consensus "moderate" view on what the United States should do in Iraq: don't set a timetable for withdrawal but make clear that we would like to leave by such and such a date if certain things happen; split the "nationalist" insurgents from the "diehard" Islamists and ex-Baathists; figure out how to draw the Sunnis into the political process, and maybe bring in the UN to facilitate those negotiations. Perhaps he's right that this is the way to go; presumably as a former CPA adviser he's in a better position to say than 99 percent of pundits here.

But there's one other thing Diamond never mentions. Piecing together all the day-to-day accounts of violence in Iraq, it seems that one of the major sources of instability here—or more precisely, one of the things making Iraq a particularly nasty place to live right now—are the Shiite militias that dominate southern and parts of central Iraq. Spencer Ackerman has just written the definitive story of the CPA's failure to disarm these militias before June of 2004, and for a vivid description of that aforementioned nastiness, check out the ethnic cleansing going on just north of Baghdad, or this report of brave young extremists splashing acid on the faces of women who don't cover themselves up properly. (True, the acid-splashers aren't identified as Shiite militiamen, but the M.O. here resembles the "fashion police" roaming around Basra, et al.) Presumably these militiamen, too, are part of the "death squads" torturing and executing Sunnis with U.S. and U.K. support. (The "Wolf Brigade" for instance.)

Ideally the U.S. would help dismantle these militias and either pay the gunmen fat retirement stipends or just integrate them into a national army controlled by civilians. (Read Peter Khalil's January testimony as to why it's so important to set up an Interior and Defense Ministry run by technocrats—and why this is even more important than the much-scrutinized pace of troop training. Indeed, it's sobering to think that Bayan Jabur, the current Interior Minister—a position that already has way too much concentrated power—is a former Badr Corps militiaman. Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the history of the Middle East knows how security forces can be, and usually are, abused in the wrong hands.)

Anyway, the militia situation is a hugely complex one, but it seems obvious that, were the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, the Shiite militias would become even further entrenched, and all hope of their dismantling and disarming would be dead and buried. The Shiite government, meanwhile, would continue purging Sunnis from the security forces, for fear of a possible Baathist coup down the road. These don't at all seem like issues on which the Iraqi government would be more likely to compromise if only the United States started threatening to leave, as the Will Saletan theory has it. And because militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps are such a major source of sectarian tension, it seems likely they would only further entrench the Sunni insurgency. (Ackerman tells of Shiite militiamen strolling through Baghdad announcing, "If anyone in our neighborhood is killed, we will respond by killing people in Haifa." A political solution indeed.) Stopping this vicious militia circle seems just as important as the "drawing the Sunnis into the political process" goal everyone's focused on right now. How that's done, I have no idea. Does anyone? Spencer Ackerman's piece suggests not. Sen. Joe Biden says the same thing: the U.S. seems to have given up on this problem.

Also, for all you praying types out there, put in a good word for 75-year-old Ayatollah Ali Sistani, yeah? Reading this report by Hemza Hendawi, it seems clear that Sistani's about the only thing standing between Iraq and full-blown civil war. A 2,000-strong-crowd was seen chanting outside SCIRI headquarters: "Al-Sistani is the sword of the Shiites, if he gives the order we will burn down Latifiyah"—a Sunni town. Obviously he didn't give any such order, but here's hoping the man has top-notch bodyguards. The ayatollahs who would, potentially, fill his sphere of influence don't seem nearly as big-hearted.

Among the things in this world that are unexpectedly fascinating: the history of camouflage. Whether Picasso and the Cubist movement were responsible for its development has been, apparently, a subject of some heated debate.

There are quite a few good articles about the future of the labor movement in the latest issue of Social Policy. You have to register to read them, sadly, but it's free and not too much of a hassle. Many of the articles are more technical, about the nuts and bolts of organizing, but one point by Mari Matsuda of Georgetown strikes me as an important, if subtle, one:

[We need to] develop a working theory of homophobia as a tool of class oppression, and an organizing strategy to counteract it.

I don't know if a "working theory" is really what's needed here, but it is true that homophobia and homophobic appeals, especially within the ranks of labor, have created similar, if somewhat smaller, obstacles to organizing as racism did back in the '40s. And as Matsuda reminds us, the labor response back then was swift and unyielding: "When my father was a steelworker in Chicago, he saw grown men weep when they were voted out of a union they would die for because they could not let go of the racism they thought they needed." That's a lesson worth noting. The idea that strict economic populism can somehow "overcome" an unpopularity on social issues is, I think, a misguided one.

So I had nothing better to do on 4th of July then to plop out by the beach and leaf through Tom Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, and I have to say—beyond the inept prose, beyond the actually offensive metaphors—that I just don't get it. I don't get any of it. The whole book is, implicitly, very worried about whether or not the United States can be "competitive" in this day and age. A similar theme runs through most of Friedman's columns. And just a short month ago, our man was mugging it up with Sen. Evan Bayh at a PPI event outlining the need for a "national competitiveness strategy."

My big question, though—and maybe it's not a good one, but it's the one I've got—is: why should we care about "national competitiveness"? What does that term even mean? Countries, of course, are not like corporations; the United States won't get driven out of business because someone else does something better than us. We don't need to worry about profit margins and market share. Not only that, but most of our "products" we sell to... other Americans, especially non-tradeables and services. As Paul Krugman (before he entered his China-bashing phase) used to teach us, international trade and technological innovation isn't a zero-sum game. The United States benefits greatly if, say, Finland becomes much better at inventing new cell phone technology than we are; in fact, I hope they continue to do so, because my reception is awful here in the Presidio, and Finnish ingenuity on this front would be appreciated.

The main thing that matters, really, is that standards of living in the United States continue to rise. And that, as far as I can tell, has very little to do with what other countries are getting up to, and much to do with whether: domestic productivity is rising, wages and mobility are improving, people are able to buy more stuff for their money, and we're all happier and healthier. Not all of that has been happening over the past few decades, obviously, but very little of that slide seems to have anything to with national "competitiveness".

Now if Friedman's "competition" message was just patriotic-sounding camouflauge for the purpose of promoting otherwise intrinsically good policies, that would be fine, I'd join in the charade. For instance, it's okay to worry that Japanese and Korean kids are so much better at mathematics than our kids, because it's a signal that we could be doing things to improve our math education here at home, which would be a good thing. But it would be a good thing because better math skills are always a good thing, and they would be even if there was only one country left on the planet. They're not a good thing because we should be concerned about "falling behind" Japan and South Korea. Same with broadband. The fact that we're 13th in global broadband Internet usage matters because it means there's no good reason why you and I can't have faster internet. But unlike Friedman, I don't think the fact that Japan's kicking dust in our face on this is, in itself, any concern.

And then there's the danger from too much Friedman-ism: Worrying about a "national competitiveness strategy" could be a very bad thing if it leads to bad policies. Protectionism and government subsidies to flailing industries could be justified in the vague and hazy name of "competitiveness". Ditto with export controls on technology. Or gutting labor laws. Or fretting too much about trade deficits. (Brad Setser has done a convincing job arguing that the current trade deficit is both unsustainable and troublesome, but not, if I understand him correctly, for the reason that it's an indication we're "uncompetitive".) The point is that it's perfectly possible to jack up living standards and remain a prosperous, healthy and happy nation regardless of what other countries are doing relative to us.

The only reason I can think of for worrying about "national competitiveness" is this: arguably, it's a good thing that we live in a unipolar world where the United States is the undisputed hegemon. As Gregg Easterbrook has written, this period of American hegemony has coincided with a sharp decline in global conflict, and it's not implausible that preserving American military dominance is necessary to maintain this trend. This may not be the case. But if it is, then it would seem to be good for peace and happiness if we kept, say, our technological edge over any and all possible military rivals. But at least, then, let's be clear about our reasons here.

No? Or am I wrong and still hopelessly mired in my non-flat world, unable to see the walls tumbling down, the ceiling flying upward, and the windows opening up to the 21st century?

The "125 big questions that face scientific inquiry over the next quarter-century."

The Christian Science Monitor looks at the new wave of suicide bombers causing chaos in Pakistan:

"This is a new breed [of militants], as suicide bombings are a post 9/11 phenomenon here," says Fateh Mohammad Burfat, head of the Criminology Department at the University of Karachi. The bombers are "unemployed, illiterate, and belong to poor social strata. [They also] perceive the US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan as hostile acts against the Muslim world.... By suicide attacks, they get a sense of victory in the world and hereafter."

Hm. Seems that Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey were slightly off in their New York Times op-ed from a few weeks ago, when they argued that madrassahs don't produce terrorists. They may not produce the more sophisticated al-Qaeda masterminds who have been attacking the West over the years, or even most of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, but they do seem to be breeding plenty of local extremism in Pakistan, although it's hard to get a sense for how strong the connection is. (Bergen and Pandey, after all, found that only 1 percent of Pakistanis attend these schools; though that's still hundreds of thousands of people!) If there's anything scarier than the prospect of the Pakistani government collapsing, by the way, I'm not sure what it is.

More on the potential, possible battle between social conservatives and business groups over the next Supreme Court nominee:

Business may well be countering liberal messages with positive comments on a White House nominee. Business lobbyists said it was likely that business and social conservatives would find themselves on the same side of a nomination battle but noted they are not always allies. Justices who are heroes to social conservatives, such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, also have taken stands opposed by business, as in a 2003 case on punitive damages in which the two dissented from a court majority in favor of limiting awards.

"The point is that 'conservative' doesn't necessarily mean 'pro-business,' " Anderson said. Despite some decisions that rile business, Norquist is urging executives and owners to recognize that socially conservative judges are likely to be pro-business overall.

Norquist is probably right about this: how hard can it be to find a business-friendly judge who also wants to overturn Roe v. Wade? Dime a dozen. Another interesting, and I guess not surprising, tidbit from the piece: the Chamber of Commerce endorsed both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer back in the Clinton days.

El Salvador, here we come:

British and American aid intended for Iraq's hard-pressed police service is being diverted to paramilitary commando units accused of widespread human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings, The Observer can reveal. Iraqi Police Service officers said that ammunition, weapons and vehicles earmarked for the IPS are being taken by shock troops at the forefront of Iraq's new dirty counter-insurgency war.

Seems that the paramilitary units are being trained well: networks of secret detention centers, torture, extra-legal executions, the works. I don't know if this stuff is "effective" or not, but I guess we can't have it both ways. If people really want the U.S. out of Iraq, and fast, then we're stuck with ramping up the "Salvadoran" option here. Draw down the troops, keep a few hundred Special Forces trainers behind to bolster these nascent Iraqi death squads, likely composed of Shiites and Kurds, and then sit back and watch the dirty war against the Sunni insurgents (and civilians caught in the crossfire) unfold. Of course, it seems like we'll get death squads whether or not we have 135,000 troops in Iraq, so maybe we should just start withdrawing now.

The key thing to note about El Salvador, I guess, is that technically the strategy worked—after a certain point, political violence did decrease each year and the human rights abuses eventually waned. It just came at a horrific cost ("We have to pop their eyes out with a spoon," etc.) There are also a few differences between the two countries: the Salvadoran insurgents lost a good deal of support after the Berlin wall came tumbling down, and the U.S. military had been in the country for over a decade. Plus the whole "ethnic conflict" bit makes Iraq a bit trickier. Still, I guess you could make the case that we could draw down sooner rather than later, and the country wouldn't fall apart, provided the new government was sufficiently brutal, and we offered the right sort of "support".

Update: Ah, here we go.

Slate is getting pessimistic about foreign aid, it seems. First, Jacob Weisberg says that lavish aid promises at the G8 conference next week will, if unfulfilled, only increase skepticism about the power of world governments to "do something" about poverty. (As LBJ apparently "undermin[ed] liberalism" with his over-promised "War on Poverty.") Plus he offers up the usual skepticism about debt relief, trade policies, and unconditional aid. Now the LBJ problem doesn't seem like a big problem to me—even if the G8 finance ministers promise the moon and only deliver half a moon, or a very large moon crater, that still seems like quite a bit of moon. Are OEDC countries really going to decide aid is worthless if it only lifts 3 million people out of poverty rather than 10 million?

On the other points: Weisberg's debt relief objection seems, if true, entirely trivial. (He claims that countries are already welching on their payments anyway.) Trade is a more complex issue—I'm not convinced that wholly open borders is the best path towards development, but this isn't an issue I'm an expert on. The corruption issue, though, is more important. There are perfectly good reasons not to offer aid to certain countries, like Zimbabwe, which is all set to pass a law giving the Mugabe government totalitarian control over NGOs working in the country. But those are special cases. It's worth noting that the international community has managed to eradicate smallpox and (almost polio), and that was done not just in "nations that govern justly," but in the worst and most corrupt hellholes on earth.

The larger point, though, is that Jeffrey Sachs really isn't naïve about the countries he wants to help; anyone who reads his actual proposals can see that he's perfectly aware of the need to foster accountability, make sure tinpot dictators aren't squirreling money away, stick with proven projects. It's not like Weisberg is the first to think of the corruption problem. I do wish people would at least read Sach's book—or the UN Millenium Project report—before spitting on the whole affair. These development experts aren't just starry-eyed buffoons standing around with their heads up their asses.

Yes, it's true, I'm staying at home in on a Saturday night, reading and blogging; feeling too sick to do anything else. (I thought about not blogging and giving off the impression that I had some super-awesome nightlife, but eh, who would I fool?) That said, Robert Kaplan's soon-to-be-released book on the U.S. military's "adventures" in the developing world is really quite good, including this bit of advice on what to do if you're kidnapped in Yemen:

Adolph, trained as a hostage negotiator by Great Britain's New Scotland Yard, told me what to do in case I was kidnapped: "Don't protest. Be submissive. Show them pictures of your family to establish a relationship. After the first few hours, ask to see the sheikh. If they take you to meet him, it's all right. It's an authorized kidnapping, for the sake of convincing the authorities to give the tribe a new road or water well. They'll tell you the negotiations should be completed in a few days; figure two months. Foreigners have been known to gain weight in the course of being held hostage in Yemen. Each family in the village will host you for a while, to divide the cost of your food. But if they don't take you to see the sheikh the first day, start to worry. Then it may be an unauthorized kidnapping, and it's okay to think of ways to escape."

Okay, then.

Human Brain: analog or digital? The debate's on!

There's a fascinating article in the Washington Post today about how Sandra Day O'Connor was quite the business-friendly justice. "If anyone up there could have been tagged pro-business," says one clerk, "O'Connor would have been the one." Obviously she wasn't as pro-business as she could've been; looking at her swing votes, she upheld the EPA's authority to enforce the Clean Air Act, and upheld restrictions on campaign finance, for instance. But overall, she was even better than Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—who would sometimes let the Founding Fathers get in the way of a good business deal—on these issues.

Now my guess is that, regardless of what he's said about the virtues of originalism in public, Bush might well prefer to nominate someone with similar O'Connor-esque sensibilities on business, rather than someone who cares terribly much about seeking out a right-wing "originalist" view on the Constitution. These two views can conflict after all: it's worth noting that the Lochner Court, which many seem to see as Bush's Platonic ideal of an originalist Supreme Court, actually upheld "far more economic regulation than it struck down." I doubt that's what Bush is aiming for. Nominating someone with a pro-corporate background might be something to watch for: read Michael Scherer's Mother Jones piece from 2003, "The Making of the Corporate Judiciary," to get a sense of the broader course the White House has been charting over the past four years. And the stakes here are quite high:

About 40 percent of the cases from the past two Supreme Court terms had direct consequences for business, according to an informal Chamber of Commerce study.

That pace is likely to continue, if not accelerate, said Quentin Riegel, vice president for litigation at the National Association of Manufacturers. The group counts 10 business cases on the court's docket for the next term, including whether a joint venture between Texaco Inc. and Shell Oil Co. violated antitrust laws in its pricing decisions. IBP Inc. v. Alvarez asks if employers must pay workers for time they spend putting on and taking off work uniforms and protective equipment.

Class warfare, baby. Now obviously any nominee also has to be good on the big Dobson issues (abortion, gay rights, the ten commandments), but that doesn't seem like too tough a needle to thread.

Haaretz is running an in-depth article looking at Israel's strategic thinking on the question of Iran's nuclear ambitions. Most analysts, not surprisingly, think a nuclear-armed Iran will be a disaster, although a few unnamed experts think "a nuclear Iran would actually stabilize the region" by making deterrence the new strategic game. Meanwhile, experts tend to agree—although they'll never say it publicly—that Israeli really doesn't have an effective military option to disable Iran's nuclear facilities.
The only analyst I'd quibble with here is Dan Eldar, a former Mossad researcher, who thinks the United States is relenting on its hard-line towards Iran nowadays. Wish it was true, but what's the evidence? Eldar points out that the White House dropped its opposition to Mohammed elBaradei's third term at the IAEA earlier this month. But the Cheney crowd didn't have any choice on the matter—and elBaradei is hardly "soft" on Iran, unless you believe John Bolton (don't). Eldar then notes that the government has decided to try Larry Franklin, noted Iran hawk and Pentagon analyst who tried to push U.S. policy in a more militant by leaking sensitive information to the Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC. But again, that doesn't mean hawkishness is going out of style; the FBI has been handling the Franklin case, and the FBI's moves on this front can, I think, be fairly separated from whatever Bush's National Security Council is actually contemplating with regards to Iran.

That doesn't mean war is likely. From all appearances, the situation now seems the same as it was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that: there's no Iran policy. There are still prominent hawks in the NSC, like Dick Cheney, but they just want to be "hawkish," thwarting diplomacy but without actually thinking seriously about military strikes or fomenting regime change. So nothing happens. And I'm not entirely sure Ahmadinejad's role in the 1979 hostage crisis, if true, will change any of that—if anything, it will just keep the gridlock going strong. No, I think George Perkovich's prediction as to what will happen over the coming months seems more and more likely by the day:

Between now and September 2005, Iran will move to resume operating the uranium conversion plant at Esfahan, and it perhaps will resume testing centrifuges. Iranian officials will insist that such activities are entirely within Iran's rights under the NPT, and that they will be conducted in accord with IAEA safeguards. They will argue that the demands being made by Europe exceed any legal requirement, and that Iran is ending its voluntary suspension of enrichment activity because certain countries—read the United States and Israel—will never relent in their attempt to make Iran a backward, weak country. At the behest of these hostile states, the European Union will reject Iran's offer of the most intrusive possible monitoring and inspections of its nuclear activities. Iran will publish what it has offered and let the world judge who is being reasonable or not. Iran will not be able to do anything more to demonstrate that it will play by the rules in exercising its right to nuclear technology. Rather than be bullied by the United States, Iran will decide that it must rightfully resume its nuclear program.

The United States will seize on Iran's ending of its suspension and insist that the E.U.-3 should "do what they have promised" and take Iran to the U.N. Security Council. Popular opinion and many political figures in these countries will balk. Officials will leak that the United States was unprepared to take steps that "everyone" knew would be necessary to persuade Iran to accede to demands that it permanently cease uranium enrichment and plutonium separation activities. "How can Iran be expected to give up its nuclear capability if the United States is threatening regime change?" Many in Europe and elsewhere will argue that America intended all along to repeat the Iraq scenario and manufacture a case for war against Iran. As the E.U.-3 countries waver about when to refer Iran's case to the Security Council and what action to take there, members of the U.S. Congress will denounce French perfidy and German equivocation. Transatlantic recriminations will mount. In the IAEA and the United Nations, developing countries will decry U.S.-led efforts to ignore their rights and to impose a new form of nuclear apartheid.

In Iran, the U.S. Congress's reauthorization of secondary sanctions and the George W. Bush administration's eagerness to refer the Iran case to the U.N. Security Council straightaway will strengthen the feeling that Iran must hunker down to defend its rights to technological development. Known political reformers will not dissent. Student demonstrations will occur, demanding that Iran not give up its nuclear program. The new Iranian president will take a defiant stance, and all factions of the Parliament will unite to insist on exercising the "right" to enrich uranium. Iranian leaders will travel to China to sign new deals for investment in Iran's energy resources...

Of course, betting against this crowd dragging us into another ill-advised and bloody foreign policy conflict is a mug's game if there ever was one.

Continue reading "Israel and Iran"

In the Times today, Peter Steinfels argues that "traditional values" are still very much alive and well in the United States, whatever the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd may think. Around the globe we have "some of the highest levels of religious beliefs, conservative family values, absolute moral standards, national pride and other traditional values." And despite Bill Clinton's master plan to corrupt us all, the nation's become even more traditional:

One question in the World Values Surveys sought to distinguish "absolutists" from "relativists." It asked which of two statements came closer to the respondent's views on good and evil. Were there "absolutely clear guidelines" that "always apply to everyone, whatever the circumstances"? Or can there "never be absolutely clear guidelines," since "what is good and evil depends entirely upon the circumstances"?

By this measure, Americans were evenly split between absolutists and relativists in 2000, a significant change from 1981, when 60 percent fell into the relativist category. (It was possible to disagree with both options, which surprisingly few Americans did.) Again, America had far more absolutists than all but 17 of the 79 nations surveyed, and those 17 were all low-income or developing countries.

This 50-50 split is at least one sign of polarization. Yet it turns out that the division between absolutists and relativists, while modestly linked to religion, is only loosely coupled to attitudes on concrete issues, apart from abortion.

So why such a "widespread impression" that America's losing its traditional values, and why does the nation seems so deeply divided over the fact? Professor Wayne Baker has this odd explanation:

The author tosses out a lot of ideas. As guides to personal conduct, for instance, the nation's traditional values in fact collide with its values of self-expression. The tension caused by this odd national mix of values seems to provoke a high incidence of pondering the meaning and purpose of life, which Americans, believe it or not, do at rates higher than the people of virtually all other nations. Hence, the atmosphere of crisis.

Very intriguing! But he could also just blame the opinion peddlers on television. That and the apparently pressing need for James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Tony Perkins to raise millions and millions of dollars by riling up their supporters. Works for me.

Fired up the search engine to look around for an explanation as to why, in this day and age, the New Yorker insists on using the diaeresis in words like "reëlection" and "coördinate". Turns out it's nothing exciting; they're just sticklers—see also this bit of awkwardness—but along the way I did manage to find the definitive history of the "heavy metal umlaut," which presumably has been passed around before, but I've never seen it. Best part: the n-umlaut, as seen in "This is Spinal Tap" is "only found in the Jacaltec language of Guatemala and in some orthographies of Malagasy."

So the big news here in San Francisco is the impending BART strike. I don't ever use the BART myself, except for the occasional Berkeley or SFO airport trip, so quite selfishly I'm not sharing the greater Bay Area's outrage towards those "greedy," "selfish," and oh yes, "criminal" workers. But it's surprising, I don't know anyone who's siding with the unions—most people point out that BART workers have a pretty sweet average base salary of some $67,000 and leave it at that.

My understanding, though, is that this is being depicted as a simple tug of war in the media—i.e. workers want a big fat raise and cheaper health care, while poor management's facing a $100 million deficit—and that somewhat misses the real problem here. BART's workers are paid out of the operating budget, which the district has been trying to keep from growing for the last decade, and allegedly even transferring money out of it. Now the problem here is that construction costs—new stations, new lines, new projects—have been exploding since the mid-1990s, squeezing the operating budget and reducing the pool of money available for wages and health costs. Land developers and construction companies, of course, are always pushing for both further expansion and donate quite handsomely to election candidates for BART's board of directors. In turn they haul in a handsome profit with new projects in upper-middle class regions like Contra Costa.

Now this larger state of affairs seems pretty unsustainable to me, and my hunch is that even if the two sides reach a settlement unfavorable to the workers, the problem will still persist. Eventually there's going to be yet another fare hike, and the same battle will ensue. Commuters and workers should probably be on the same side here, rather than fighting against each other, no?

For mostly top-secret reasons, I was going through Ezekiel Emanuel's old posts about his health-care voucher proposal, and came across this odd line about the Value-Added Tax: "[The VAT] could be used in interesting ways for restraining imports and promoting exports." Hm, I've heard this in a number of places before, especially from manufacturing groups, unions, and Ross Perot—namely, that the VAT could help us boost exports and correct the trade deficit—and it's never quite made sense to me. First, here's a primer on the VAT; read it if you need to know how it works. Okay, now the idea behind the "VAT and trade" theory, as I understand it, is that exporters would not have to collect the tax from buyers abroad, and would instead be exempt from paying the tax to the government. (The WTO allows this.) On the other hand, importers would still have to pay the VAT for goods brought across the border. Seems unbalanced, right? It looks like a subsidy for exports and a penalty on imports, which should, in theory, help fix our trade deficit.

But that theory seems entirely wrong! For one, exports would still cost the same abroad as they did before, so it's not clear why exporters would start selling more. Second, it's true that imports would become more costly. But so would all other domestic goods, by the same amount. So it's not like consumers would suddenly lose their appetite for imports. And if for some reason there was an imbalance created, wouldn't the exchange rate just adjust accordingly? Now it's possible that a VAT could reduce the trade deficit by boosting savings, but that's about it. Or am I missing something blindingly obvious here?

From everyone's favorite Little Green Comments section, here's a handy ranking of "America's ENEMIES" (i.e., "They all seem to side against America and anything that looks like a W."):

1) "Borgs" (NOTE: not kin to Bjorn Borg)
2) America's MSM
3) World's Media
4) America's Democrat Party
5) al-Qaida
6) Workers World
7) Terrorists
8) Supporters of Terrorism
9) France
10) Most registered American Democrats
11) North Korea
12) PETA
13) Hillary Clinton
14) United Nations
15) Most Arab countries
16) Most Muslim countries
17) KOS
18) Iraq's Sunni "guerrillas"
19) China

So that would put me at… #10. That seems about right. I've always thought of myself as a much greater threat than North Korea, PETA, and the Sunnis laying down IEDs in Iraq, but not quite as bad as France. And no, I don't understand the bit about Borgs, either. What it does remind me of, however, is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.