Matthew Yglesias' post on "broken windows" policing reminded me to link to a great Legal Affairs debate on the subject, between Bernard Harcourt and David Thacher. Both seem to agree that social science research is very inconclusive as to whether "broken windows" policing and cracking down on public disorder and graffiti and panhandling and the like actually helps reduce the crime rate. Intuition suggests that it should, but the research says otherwise.

Anyway, Harcourt says "broken windows" policing is a waste of time, and diverts resources away from more serious police functions. Thacher says that even if it doesn't reduce crime, order maintenance is still worth doing in itself—because disorder is gross, and can destroy public spaces (that, in turn, affects the poor the most). That sounds reasonable, but there are two things to be wary of here. In practice, "broken windows" policing usually relies on a major increase in misdemeanor arrests, even when that's not the intent. And inevitably, the people who are arrested here are disproportionately minorities—a disparity that can have very poisonous effects. Plus, as Harcourt points out, perceptions of disorder are often shaped by race: a recent study, "Seeing Disorder," found that people see more disorder in neighborhoods with higher numbers of blacks, Latinos, and in places with higher levels of poverty, even when there isn't, in fact, more disorder.

But even so, Thacher still makes the case that order maintenance in public spaces is necessary and right, and "soft" order maintenance measures—social services, building proper public facilities, etc.—won't always do the trick. He also points out that even if law enforcement is a racially unjust system, it still might be better than other options:

No one relishes the use of coercion to deal with problems like disorder, whether the coercion is exercised by police or by anyone else. Institutionalizing the mentally ill and many of the other alternatives to order maintenance policing that you describe in your second paragraph obviously raise their own civil liberties concerns, as you clearly acknowledge. (Michel Foucault… recognized these dangers as clearly as anyone, as have those he inspired.) One advantage of police order maintenance is that no one can fail to recognize that it is coercive.

Therapeutic solutions like institutionalization make it dangerously easy to jump too quickly to the claim that "it's for their own good," but it's harder to kid ourselves that way about police order maintenance. It puts us on our guard. It forces us, hopefully, to recognize the need to face the tough questions you rightfully asked yesterday: Do we really have good reason to intervene against this disorder? Is this really wrongful conduct? Or are we just being finicky, intolerant—even racist?

That's a clever argument, but very, very dubious. David Cole's No Equal Justice makes a good case that those who have the luxury of debating the justice system have in fact been very, very good at "kid[ding] ourselves" about disparities in the system—especially since the many double standards in law enforcement "allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor." It's allowed people to avoid "tough questions" about the tradeoff between liberty and security. Plus, voters seem to be especially irrational about crime control in a way they aren't about many other things. In no other policy field, it seems, are the experts who know how to control crime, deal with drug use, reduce incarceration rates, etc., so thoroughly ignored. It's true that the subtle coercion inherent in other social policies is often ignored, but to say that law enforcement policy "puts us on our guard" seems wrong.

But at any rate, it's a nuanced debate, far better than what I've presented here, and definitely worth reading in full.

I don't know what to say about the president's new "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq. There's nothing new here, besides hope that everything ends up working out somehow. But that aside, this Time piece on Iraq is actually pretty informative, and has some reporting on the various Pentagon plans being floated for withdrawing troops:

There isn't one plan, but several, each containing various options for Army General George Casey, the top U.S. military officer in Iraq. Pentagon officials acknowledged last week that the number of U.S. troops could be cut to 100,000 by the end of 2006. But Casey will face two "decision points" next year--one in March, when he can fully assess the effects of the Dec. 15 election, the other in June, when major U.S. units have to be told if they will deploy.

At this stage, almost no one is talking about a rapid, large-scale troop drawdown. Inside the Pentagon, officers privately caution that troop levels could even rise if Iraqi security forces don't shape up as expected, if the insurgency grows more fierce or--of greatest concern--if civil strife evolves into full-fledged civil war. In fact, a senior Pentagon official tells TIME that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his planners last week to make sure they have a contingency option if things go very badly in Iraq next year.

Even if the U.S. does decide to withdraw troops, it won't simply flee. Washington is spending millions on fortifying a few Iraqi bases for the long haul. "The challenge for us is, what is the right balance--not to be too present but also not to be underpresent. This will require constant calibration," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad tells TIME. Indeed, last August, Army chief of staff Peter Schoomaker said that as many as 100,000 Army troops could remain in Iraq for four years.

Presumably this also depends on what the new Iraqi government wants, which may be what comes up in that March "decision point." I have no idea whether it's even possible to keep 100,000 troops in Iraq for the next four years, or whether a "contingency option"—sending more troops in if civil war breaks out?—is at all feasible. I assume a lot of soldiers would have to go back for fourth or fifth tours, with all the bad effects that will have. Still, Time doesn't make it sound like a massive drawdown is in the cards, though admittedly it's like reading tea leaves here.

Also, Elaine Grossman of Inside the Pentagon recently reported on actual debates within the military about strategy in Iraq. Officers "have complained privately that the military strategy seemed adrift, lacking clear objectives or measurable progress." Originally the strategy involved killing lots of insurgents. Then in spring 2004 the military shifted focus, making Iraqi troop training its first priority. But after that started, insurgent attacks on civilians rose dramatically, so now the military wants to focus on protecting civilians. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is apparently very interested in Andrew Krepinevich's "oil-spot" theory and very recently had a "Red Team" of analysts recommend a new strategy along those lines. Part of this new approach, it seems, would involve recruiting Sunni tribal leaders for security purposes—"with mixed results" so far. (They're also putting together three "provincial reconstruction teams"; why this wasn't done before, I have no idea.)

So that seems to be where things are heading (again, tea leaves...), although not surprisingly, many people think it's way too late for this "new strategy" to work, especially since the new plan will, it appears, rely heavily on local militias—death squads—to "protect local populations," not exactly a recipe for stability. Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of things in the country, especially on the political front, that the U.S. can no longer control...

This Mark Schmitt post brings up a good point. Yesterday I posted on how the defense appropriations process was heavily swayed by the $40 million spent on lobbying each year. Not that I know personally; most of that comes from reading Wastrels of Defense, by Winslow Wheeler, the former national security staffer for Pete Domenici. He's in the know, and if he's saying there's a ton of "legal corruption" going on, there probably is. (Plus, he makes a good case.)

Still, in theory it's possible that many lobbying dollars have far less insidious effects. In the case Schmitt mentions, Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wrote a letter requesting funds for a school desired by a Louisiana Indian tribe, and two weeks later Jack Abramoff told the tribe, a client of his, to send Dorgan $5,000 in campaign contributions. That could be corruption—i.e., Dorgan was paid to write the letter—but it might just be that Dorgan was going to write the letter anyway, seeing as how he's always done a lot of work for Native Americans, and Abramoff knew this, and so he had the tribe send some money to make it look like his lobbying efforts were worthwhile, even though Abramoff had done nothing. I guess it's inevitable that the people who hire lobbyists will be the ones getting ripped off now and again, although that hardly means that all campaign contributions are innocent.

Ellen Willis' essay, arguing that the world needs more "utopian thinking," is very much worth a read. She's right that utopian thinking has gotten a bad rap ever since Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin argued that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany came about all because people rejected "liberal pluralism" in favor of a "monolithic ideology." As a quick aside, I agree, monolithic ideology's bad news, but the idea that fascism came about because of "utopian thinking" has always seemed incorrect to me. Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism made this point nicely:

Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy common enemies.

Mind you, this isn't the only way to think about fascism; it all depends, I suppose, on whether it's seen as a revolutionary movement, or a counterrevolutionary one. Paxton believes the latter, and his argument rests on the fact that while fascist movements may have been ideological—although hardly very philosophically coherent—they only actually came to power in Germany and Italy, in places where the conservative elite feared the rise of the left. (In Romania and Austria, fascist movements were crushed by conservatives.)

And once in power, the two fascist regimes didn't really have a coherent philosophy of governing, apart from a drive towards national and social domination—and, in the Nazi case, racial purity (one could call the Holocaust a "utopian" project, although I don't know how much that clarifies). Neither pursued a utopian political order as such: both Hitler and Mussolini pretty much used existing state institutions as needed, in an ad hoc fashion. There was no philosopher of fascism, or system builder, except for maybe Carl Schmitt—though it would be hard to call him utopian. So I don't know, the idea that fascism is a brand of "utopian thinking" doesn't seem quite right.

Reading the New York Times' report on Shiite death squads in Iraq—which seem to have semi-official backing from the Interior Ministry and have killed or abducted a reported "700 Sunni men" over the past four months—it's hard to figure out how this all got started. Laura Rozen suggests that Pentagon officials had planned for death squads (or as they put it, the "Salvadoran option") all along. But this bit from the Times suggests that things aren't quite going according to plan:

American officials, who are overseeing the training of the Iraqi Army and the police, acknowledge that police officers and Iraqi soldiers, and the militias with which they are associated, may indeed be carrying out killings and abductions in Sunni communities, without direct American knowledge.

Praktike points out that the original Newsweek piece on the Salvadoran option wasn't exactly correct, and the United States may have never intended to create "death squads" per se. In 2003, Special Forces veteran James Steele was charged with organizing "special police commando units" that were mainly supposed to target insurgent leaders. Those units, of course, drew heavily from Shiite and Kurdish militias, including, no doubt, the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade. Meanwhile, some of the Badr militamen running a torture camp in Baghdad may have been trained by American interrogators, but that doesn't mean they were intentionally trained as death squads. (U.S. forces uncovered the torture palace, after all.) And some of this death squad behavior probably came about because of genuine infiltration by the Badr Brigades, Mahdi Army, etc., without U.S. knowledge.

Either way, the end result was the same. The Pentagon's early attempts at a "dirty war" have pretty clearly spiraled out of control, and the death squads seem intent on going far beyond anything the U.S. ever envisioned. SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has been chafing at U.S. efforts to rein him in. The Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, no longer shares information with the U.S. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that fanatical Shiite militias would be somewhat less than charitable about policing their former Sunni tormentors. (Or maybe it did, and there was nothing they could do about it.) Yet again the Pentagon's discovering what a few "bad apples" can do if given half a chance.

Back when the Newsweek article on the "Salvadoran Option" was first published, Jason Vest wrote an important piece noting that military analysts have long concluded that the "death squads" in El Salvador, far from being a brutal force that just so happened to be effective, actually prolonged the conflict against the leftist insurgency there. It seems, reading the Times, that current military officers are aware that an Iraqi army filled with Iranian-backed thugs carrying out reprisal killings and running torture camps isn't going to end the violence in Iraq either. On the other hand, according to Seymour Hersh, the president sure seems enthusiastic about backing Shiite butchers so long as they "complete the mission." As one official described the president's thinking, the battle against the insurgency "may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win." Lovely.

Maybe Bush will get his way, and that's how the U.S. will stake out its exit. Even if saner voices prevail, though, it's not clear that they can actually do anything about it. As the Times reported back in August, the U.S. is already wary of giving the Iraqi army heavy weaponry in part because they're worried that some of the Shiite groups will use them for "civil conflict". But if they don't arm the security forces, then there goes the exit strategy. On the other hand, Jim Lobe reports that Zal Khalilzad is going to start chatting directly, for the first time ever, with the Iranians about stabilizing Iraq. In a former age, this was known as the John Kerry policy, but I guess real men wait until the car is totaled before asking for directions.

In the Fall issue of Dissent, John Judis revisits a perennially fascinating topic: the religious roots of American foreign policy. There are a couple ways of look at this issue. Judis spent a lot of time in his last book, The Folly of Empire discussing how America's image of itself as God's chosen nation—as Abraham Lincoln said, the "last, best hope on earth"—has inspired the idea that the United States has a "calling" to transform the world. Not only that, but American often casts its conflicts in terms of good and evil, which, as Walter Russell Mead pointed out, means that it tends to fight viciously and rarely, if ever, accept defeat.

These religious ideals certainly aren't the only things driving American policy (external events and dangers matter too), but they play a large part; after all, far and away most foreign policy thinkers believe that the United States does have a duty to transform the world. Sometimes those ideals do more good than folly. Often not. As Judis points out, the main differences among the different schools are tactical—liberal internationalists, for example, tend to value multilateralism and a sense of prudence, they believe in the magical healing powers of global capital, and they don't usually descend into the trance-like messianism of George W. Bush, as recently described by Seymour Hersh:

In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President's religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that "God put me here" to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that "he's the man," the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

It's insane. But as Judis touches on, and Anatol Lieven really dives into, a president with a divine sense of purpose is hardly the scariest religious impulse in American foreign policy. That honor belongs to the various forms of millennialism in the United States, which can hold that it's America's duty to bring about the millennium—as the 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards said, "the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God… shall begin in America"—a mentality which can incline one towards reckless and revolutionary foreign policy. Alternatively, the broad prophetic belief in the Rapture—as depicted in the Left Behind series, which has sold 62 million copies—tends to foster paranoia and national aggression of the worst sort. Here's Lieven:

Not only is this [prophetic] tradition deeply and explicitly hostile to the Enlightenment and to any rational basis for human discourse or American national unity, it cultivates a form of insane paranoia toward much of the outside world in general. Thus The End of the Age, a novel by the Christian Rightist preacher and politician Pat Robertson, features a conspiracy between a Hillary Clintonesque first lad and a Muslim billionaire to make Antichrist president of the United States. Antichrist, who has a French surname, was possessed by Satan, in the form of the Hindu god Shiva, while serving with the Peace Corp in India.

It would be wrong to think these sorts of views have no effect on shaping Republican foreign policy—or Democratic foreign policy, for that matter—although it's hardly a necessary leap from millennialism to a neoconservative foreign policy that's intent on revolutionizing the world through armed aggression. Many populists over the years have put the millennial impulse in the service of a more isolationist foreign policy—in which, as William Jennings Bryan put it, "Our mission is to implant hope in the breast of humanity, and substitute higher ideals for the ideals which have led nations into armed conflict." In other words, the U.S. will set a good example from afar. Pat Robertson has advocated something similar, although he also seems to dabble in political assassination these days.

At any rate, religion—especially crazy religions—won't up and vanish from the United States anytime soon. So Judis argues that the most successful American policymakers will "focus on America's objectives, as given by the millennialist framework, while still retaining a complex and non-apocalyptic view of means and ends, capabilities and challenges." Or, as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it, one must have a sense of irony towards the "pretentious elements in our original dream."

That may be. On the other hand, the standard bearer of a "non-apocalyptic view of means and ends, capabilities and challenges" tends to be the "realists" within the foreign policy establishment—those, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Condoleeza Rice, who believe that America must remake the world in its own image, but should be cautious about how to do so. These include the officials who dissuaded George W. Bush from pushing a hard-line, neoconservative stance against Russia and China in early 2001, and who convinced the president to adopt a more pragmatic approach towards Iran, North Korea, and Syria—stepping back from messianic talk of "evil" regimes—in 2005. But even if these "realists" don't drink from the same millennial Kool-Aid as the neoconservatives, they very much serve their own master: namely, American militarism. Lieven again:

This relative caution on the part of Realists in the U.S. establishment reflects in part the nature and interests of the U.S. military-industrial and security elites. These elites are obviously interested in the maintenance and expansion of U.S. global military power, if only because their own jobs and profits depend on it. Jobs and patronage also ensure the support of much of Congress, which often lards defense spending bills with weapons systems the Pentagon does not want and has not even asked for, to help out senators and congressmen whose states produce these systems. And as already noted, to maintain a measure of wider support in the U.S. media and public, it is also necessary to maintain the perception of certain foreign nations as threats to the United States and a certain minimum and permanent level of international tension.

But a desire for permanent international tension is different from a desire for war, especially a major international war which might ruin the international economy. The American generals of the Clinton era have been described as "aggressive only about their budgets." The American ruling system is therefore not a Napoléonic or Moghul one. It does not actively desire major wars, because it does not depend on major victorious wars for its own survival, and it would indeed be threatened by such wars even if the country were victorious. Small wars are admittedly a different matter.

(Needless to say, an approach that fosters a "minimum and permanent level of international tension," with, say, China, without intending to go to war can still lead to war—even by accident.)

So these seem to be the broad constraints on American foreign policy. On the one hand, there's the widespread, quasi-religious idea that America is the chosen nation called on to transform the world, with all the genuinely noble and appallingly ugly impulses that brings. On the other hand, there's a security establishment that doesn't buy into these millennial fantasies, but still remains committed to the endless "maintenance and expansion of U.S. global military power." Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is held in high regard by the Democratic establishment, sees the world as a "Grand Chessboard," which gives a sense for what that's all about. If this is all correct, then any hopes for a sensible foreign policy in the near future are probably foolish. A lot will have to change before then. Fortunately, Barbara Rossing's book on why the Rapture is bad theology is now out in paperback. A good stocking-stuffer, for sure..

The Duke Cunningham story, I'm guessing, will mostly focus on the corruption angle. And why not? You have a congressman on the defense appropriation committee taking bribes in exchange for helping a defense contractor win contracts. What a sleazeball, etc. But in an ideal world, some attention would get focused on the much larger problem of the defense appropriations process in general, which makes this sort of corruption almost inevitable.

Defense contractors live or die on the contracts Congress decides to hand out. Most of them have grown up under the command economy that is the annual defense appropriations bill, and wouldn't know how to survive in the free market. Understandably, then, contractors tend to put a lot of effort into lobbying and influencing legislators. Between 1997 and 2004, the top 20 defense contractors made $46 million in campaign contributions, and spent $390 million on lobbyists—and were rewarded for their efforts with $560 billion in contracts. Then there's a permanent revolving door between government and the defense industry, which is laid out in gory detail by the Project on Government Oversight. A lot of money gets sloshed around, and while most of it isn't flat-out bribery, it often comes close. Under the circumstances, what happened with Cunningham was bad and illegal, but not completely out of step with the larger trend.

Even more interesting than Cunningham, meanwhile, is MZM Inc., the company that bribed him. The Los Angeles Times reports that the company has received "$163 million in federal contracts, mostly for classified defense projects involving the gathering and analysis of intelligence." Just to be clear, a firm that bought a house for a corrupt Congressman is doing "classified" intelligence work. Okay, then.

Via Mark Thoma, a good counter-intuitive point by Paul Krugman about the American welfare state:

We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens.

Since I have Hacker's book on my desk, here are the numbers: In 1995 Germany and Sweden spent about 27 percent of GDP on after-tax social welfare expenditures—and two percent of that was "private" spending (i.e., by employers). The United States, meanwhile, spent 25 percent of GDP—and 8 percent of that was private.

Granted, the American "divided welfare state" is comparable to or better than Swedish-style socialism for those workers who happen to have stable jobs with good pensions, 401(k)'s, corporate day care, and gold-plated health care benefits. But for everyone else, it's inequitable, regressive, and a source of uncertainty for those increasingly at risk of losing their jobs. (Indeed, it's becoming a worse deal even for many workers with stable jobs, as they face greater cost-sharing for health care or as companies default on their pension funds, or what not.) In the old days, though, businesses loved it, and some of them even backed the creation of entitlements like Medicaid and Medicare as ways of reinforcing the status quo.

But now many companies look ready to shift more of the welfare burden onto the government, and move towards a European-style welfare state, although Daniel Gross has noted that there are two types of companies here—those that, like GM, want the government to pick up its health care and pension costs, and those, especially newer, high-tech companies, who still want tiny government. Meanwhile, 60 percent of workers still get their health benefits through their company (although that number's declining), so it's not clear how many voters actually want to shift to a European-style welfare state, at least right now. Change won't be easy, although the opportunity is certainly there. Also, those companies that no longer want to be on the hook for, say, health care costs aren't necessarily going to push for single-payer, or France-style health care. They could just as easily be convinced to agree to the Bush administration's horrible HSA proposal, which would shove people onto the open insurance market. That, I think, is going to be a major fight.

One other miscellaneous point: It's worth noting that most of the legislation that expanded the employer-centered "private" welfare state was passed with very little public debate. The Revenue Act of 1978, for instance, slipped in an obscure provision to create 401(k) plans, which was estimated to have a "negligible effect on budget receipts" by the CBO—today it costs the government over $100 billion a year, for a program that mostly benefits the well-off. It would be naïve to pretend that public opinion has an all-powerful effect on public legislation, but even by those standards there's been a breathtakingly small amount of oversight on the expansion of the private welfare state.

In the wake of the Bush administration's pseudo-announcement that it has plans to draw down troops from Iraq by the end of 2006, here are two worthwhile posts on the subject, by Dan Darling and Mark Safranski. It really does seem that the wretched state of the Reserves and the National Guard, along with GOP concerns about the 2006 midterms, is the main driver here.

As to what comes next, I won't try to predict. John Robb thinks the U.S. is going to stage a "controlled chaos exit," relying on Shiite and Kurdish paramilitaries to keep order as the Iraqi state dissolves. Ayad Allawi is worried that death squads will run rampant. Juan Cole reports that the U.S. may make a stronger push to negotiate with Sunni insurgents. And Seymour Hersh is reporting that the U.S. will continue to use massive airpower to bomb insurgents, and whoever else happens to get in the way, after the draw-down. Understandably, he—along with a number of Air Force officers, apparently—thinks this is a bad idea.

Well, maybe any or all of those things will come to pass. Nadezhda seems to have the best prediction here, though: "[F]or at least the next six months, it's hard not to predict a continued absence of a clear strategy. In turn, that means a continued reliance on messy improvisation, with the quality of outcomes in part dependent on the talents of various improvisers." How does the saying go? "I don't see any method at all here, sir."

A few weeks ago, kactus of the excellent OurWord.org had a moving post on the often sadistic bureaucracies that welfare recipients are forced to navigate, sometimes on a daily basis: "I've decided that there must be a giddy sense of power that comes from being able to command poor people to stand in line, at the drop of a hat." Definitely worth reading in full, and I meant to link to it before, but forgot until coming across a related passage in David K. Shipler's The Working Poor:

The system is also plagued by welfare cheats. They are not people who receive welfare illicitly. The more damaging welfare cheats are the caseworkers and other officials who contrive to discourage or reject perfectly eligible families. These are the people who ask a working poor mother a few perfunctory questions at the reception desk, then illegally refuse to give her an application form, despite the law's provision that anyone of any means may apply. It is a clever tactic, say the lawyers, because they cannot intervene on behalf of a client who has applied.

The welfare cheats are the officials who design Kafkaesque labyrinths of paperwork that force a recipient of food stamps or Medicaid or welfare to keep elaborate files of documents and run time-consuming gauntlets of government offices while taking off from work. "I have clients with daily planners that are filled more than mine are," said Ellen Lawton, an attorney at [a nutrition] clinic.

If you want to stay on welfare, you have to provide pieces of paper proving that your children have been immunized and are attending school. If you want food stamps, you have to deliver pay stubs and tax returns. If you want a job, you need day care for your children, and if you can't afford it, you have to get a day-care voucher, and if you want a voucher, you have to prove that you're working. Getting a voucher involves multiple visits to multiple offices—during working hours, of course. Caught in this Catch-22, one mother put herself on waiting lists at infant day-care centers all over the city; meanwhile, her caseworker told her that she had to get a job before she could get day care paid for. Lawton quoted the caseworker: "So if you're on a waiting list, you need to find somebody who's gonna watch your kid."

Every demand for a document provides an opportunity for a cutoff, because no matter how meticulous a recipient may be, pieces of paper seem to get lost in the bureaucracy. "I just had a client like this last week," said Lawton. "She had received three different notices informing her in three different ways that she was being cut off. One of the issues was that she hadn't provided a certain piece of paper about her attendance at a [job-training] program. And she said she had provided the paper, but they lost it. Fine, we provided another piece of paper. She receives another notice that she's going to be cut off. Well, it's actually a different computer system that's generating notice, so she has to take time off from her program to go and get another piece of paper, bring it to the office…. Being poor is a full-time job, it really is."

It also promotes absurdity. One mother, desperate to get her asthmatic child out of a harmful apartment, obtained a letter from her pediatrician saying the house was making the child sick, which technically qualified her for emergency assistance, Zotter said. But the welfare department's receptionist turned her away three times, telling her that she already had housing and couldn't even apply for temporary shelter as long as she wasn't homeless. The mother seriously considered moving out and making herself homeless to qualify. As the lawyer was explaining forcefully to a caseworker how the welfare department had broken the law, "she gave up and she moved to Atlanta, because she said she just didn't feel like the system was helping her."

Just under half such cases can be solved with an attorney's phone call, Zotter estimated. One involved the mother of another patient who was denied an application for emergency food stamps. "If you're really low income you can get food stamps within twenty-four to forty-eight hours," Zotter said, "and then they do your verification and see if you really qualify. And they wouldn't let her apply for it. I just called them up and said, this is her income, she has no resources, she qualifies for this, you have to give it to her. And they did."

Blessed are the poor who have lawyers on their side.

A few scattered thoughts. First, especially with Medicaid, it's worth noting that many programs have perverse incentives on this front. When states are facing budget crunches, they certainly try to make things difficult and deter as many low-income families as possible from signing up—and these efforts are usually greatest during downturns, when more people than usual need coverage. Those eligible also tend to be, as Shipler notes, the easiest people to deter. This partly explains why some 10 million people who are eligible for Medicaid are not enrolled, although there are lots of other reasons. On the other hand, if everyone was enrolled in one universal health care system, there would be no need for extensive verification, and much of the bureaucracy could be slashed. (And Medicaid's administrative costs are already lower than the private sector.) Not to mention the fact that no one would be turned away.

Second, it's very likely that the conservative push to hand programs such as Medicaid entirely over to the states will give those states even greater incentive to save money by deterring people from signing up. (On a related note, see this paper by Michael Bailey for evidence that "devolution" creates a race to the bottom, as states try to reduce the level of services they provide in order to dissuade recipients from moving to their states.)

There's also no reason to think the increasing drive to privatize social services would improve the "Kafkaesque labyrinth." The situation kactus describes seems like a result of prevailing cultural attitudes towards welfare recipients, that, as she says, they should "wait in line without complaint, cuz that's what you get for daring to be poor and looking for a handout." Shipler's book gives a similar sense, that attitudes towards the poor play a huge role here. See this interview by Richard Moffitt for one theory on why this cultural shift came about. (Although he seems to overlook a point or two...)

For anyone who, like me, hasn't been keeping up with all the Abramoff-related scandals in Washington, Matthew Continetti has two very readable overviews in the Weekly Standard. The SunCruz affair in particular, which ended in a mob slaying, seems like a very big deal. Although it's hard to see what the point was of bribing Rep. Bob Ney to insert mean things about a casino owner in the Congressional Record. Obviously it's unethical, but is this really the best way to intimidate a stubborn casino seller into selling his boat? It's a bit unclear. And Ney's defense seems to be that he wasn't bribed to make those remarks, he just often puts random things handed to him by lobbyists in the Congressional Record. Fun times...

Thanksgiving weekend without the family has basically been time for reading a bunch of books I've been meaning to read. One is Anatol Lieven's excellent America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, which tries to diagnose American foreign policy—always a fun game. In the introduction Lieven takes issue with those on "the Left" who lump Bush's foreign policy in with Bill Clinton's, seeing them both as "reflecting the enduring dynamics and requirements of an imperial version of American capitalism." To this he says:

This analysis is indeed partly true, but in emphasizing common goals, left-wing analysts have a tendency to lose sight of certain other highly important factors: the means used to achieve these ends; the difference between intelligent and stupid means; and the extent to which the choice of means is influenced by irrational sentiments which are irrelevant or even contrary to the goals pursued. Of the irrational sentiments which have contributed to wrecking intelligent capitalist strategies—not only today, but for most of modern history—the most important and dangerous is nationalism.

That seems right, and as someone who thinks that the foreign policies of both the Bush and Clinton administrations do reflect, in part, "the enduring dynamics and requirements of an imperial version of American capitalism," and have many things in common, I think it's worth trying to sketch this point out a bit.

I imagine the "left-wing" storyline Lieven's discussing would argue, more or less, that the "enduring dynamic" of American politics since 1979, both at home and abroad, has been class warfare. This story would start in the 1970s, when inflation endangered the share of national wealth reserved for the top 1 percent of Americans—a share which plunged from 35 percent in the 1960s down to under 20 percent in 1976. (Real wages, meanwhile, reached historic highs during the 1970s.) For a time, Lord Keynes' vision of the "euthanasia of the rentier" was perilously close to becoming a reality, and that just wouldn't do.

Luckily for the rentier, Paul Volcker came to the rescue in 1979, using the Fed to break inflation's back—along with many an American worker. And Ronald Reagan's parallel attack on labor and progressive taxation helped ensure that the upper classes would never again have to endure the trauma of the '70s. Thomas Edsall's 1985 book on the Volcker/Reagan backlash, The New Politics of Inequality, argues that these moves were partially the result of a concerted drive on the part of the upper classes. For example: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena." By the end of Reagan's term, that class had certainly restored itself to power—the top 1 percent owned 40 percent of the wealth once again. (A parallel restoration occurred under Thatcher in England.) While it's easy to get too conspiratorial here—presidents only have so much power, after all—there's surely something to Edsall's account.

Continuing the story: Bill Clinton's two terms saw "neoliberalism" go global, as they say. One leftist explanation for the '90s boom is that investors were doing stunningly well pillaging countries overseas. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have noted that U.S. holdings abroad skyrocketed in the '80s and '90s, and, at points during the Clinton era, American firms were making as much in profits overseas as they were at home. Then there was the shadier sort of pillaging described in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Even the Ming Dynasty at its peak was never so efficient at exacting tribute from foreigners.

Not only that, but the prescriptions of the "Washington Consensus," as they say, minted new upper classes abroad—in Mexico and Russia, among others—and brought about a string of debt crises and devaluations in the '80s and '90s that seemed to do little more than redistribute wealth to the first world, as investors swooped in and bought up foreign assets at bargain prices. Eric Toussaint notes in Your Money or Your Life, since 1980, "fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center." Whether there are any redeeming features of this system is another debate. (I think there are.)

So far, so tedious. But within this "Leftist" view of the past 25 years—which, in part, I agree with—it's sometimes difficult to see how foreign policy conforms to the "enduring dynamic." Often it doesn't. In the Reagan years, foreign policy was motivated by a blend of Cold War concerns and pro-business intervention. That fits. But Bush I and Clinton are harder cases. It's not always obvious how their foreign policy moves benefited, say, business interests. The first Gulf War secured the Middle East oil supply, true, but James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans makes clear that that was hardly the only consideration. Kosovo and Bosnia, meanwhile, had a string of ulterior motives guiding intervention—some genuinely humanitarian—as did many of Clinton's foreign policy moves. Military power hasn't always advanced the neoliberal "agenda" as efficiently as leftists would expect. (Indeed, some of them—like Bosnia and Kosovo—did a lot of good, whatever their motives.)

In general, I'd agree with Andrew Bacevich that American foreign policy tends to be driven by a self-sustaining militarism, along with what Lieven sees as nationalism and the "American Creed," the idea that America's duty is to spread freedom and liberty around the world. The "requirements of an imperial version of American capitalism" gets a role too, but different presidents will chart very different courses, depending on ideology, specific events, their level of competence, etc. There's a lot of randomness involved, and those courses won't always follow the "demands of capital." Mark Engler recently pointed out that Bush's foreign policy, and the "war on terror," has been very bad for business, which seems intuitively true. The upper classes may have little to quarrel with when it comes to Republican rule, but the "liberal internationalism" of the Clinton years—with its focus on relentless globalization, undemocratic market institutions, stable alliances, and a vast empire of bases abroad—was arguably much better for business worldwide. Again, this was a function of competence, ideology, specific events, etc.

Now Lieven's very convincing when he argues that the current Bush's foreign policy has been mobilized, to a greater degree than his predecessor, by nationalism, which, in many cases, "wreck[s] intelligent capitalist strategies." It's reminiscent of the days prior to World War I, when the reigning pacifists were German and British business elites, who were overruled by inept politicians and nationalist sentiment.

But one thing Lieven might have noted is that, insofar as this "neoliberal revolution" over the past twenty years has led to increasing economic instability at home, stoking the fires of nationalism might be one of the few reliable ways that a politician like Bush can gain electoral support. Certainly liberal pundits who suggest that the Democratic Party must focus on foreign policy to win more elections believe this. In that case the tension between neoliberalism and nationalism might end up being an "enduring dynamic," with the Clinton years being a bit of an aberration. I can't really say. It's worth noting that the sort of leftist structural views discussed here (and by Lieven) often end up being much too rigid and quite wrong.

Continue reading "Enduring Dynamics"

Two weeks ago San Francisco passed a ban on guns within city limits, the strictest such ban in the country: not only are all sales banned, but everyone must turn in his or her handgun by next April Fool's Day. The betting line, it seems, is that the new law won't survive a court challenge. From a practical standpoint, though, many opponents of the law have argued that at any rate these sorts of bans won't affect gun ownership, or gun violence, in the city, since criminals will still be able to buy guns from either the underground market or outside city limits. Only law-abiding citizens will be affected, etc.

That sort of logic usually makes sense—after all, bans on narcotics don't seem to have any appreciable effect on the drug market—but it's probably not quite right. Four economists—Philip Cook, Jens Ludwig, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Anthony Braga—have just put out a study looking at Chicago's underground gun market, and found that a ban on handguns in that city seriously increased the amount of "friction" in the gun market, making it much harder for the average person to get access to guns.

Unlike with drugs, the relatively small number of buyers, sellers and transactions in an underground gun market creates "thinness" in the market, which leads to serious transaction costs. Repeat business in the gun market is rare, since generally you just need one gun, so most buyers generally don't know where to go, or who to trust. It's hard to advertise, after all. Plus, many buyers in the underground markets don't know the first thing about guns, and will often buy guns that may not even work, just for show. (Ammo is even harder to find; for obvious reasons you're generally not allowed to load a gun and "test it" during a sale, and many youths don't even know what sort of ammo they need.) And friction creates more friction—a lack of sellers reduces the number of buyers, which in turn discourages sellers. (Moreover, many people who want a gun, especially for "unlawful purposes," don't ever end up leaving the city, so buying a gun legally from the suburbs isn't usually an option.)

Now here's the caveat: gangs, obviously, have readier access to gun markets, but for a variety of reasons gangs don't just start giving guns to anyone who wants one, and that includes low-level gang members. Not only are gangs wary of hostile takeovers, but gun violence is often bad for business—it scares customers and attracts the police. So regulation is very tight, especially within gangs, where only about 25 percent of all members even have a gun. But that's still a lot of people with access, which probably explains why Chicago doesn't have much lower levels of gun violence than other cities, even if it is harder for the average person to get a gun.

In that case, it's reasonable to think that increasing the friction in gun and ammo markets, coupled with some sort of collective-deterrence strategy against gangs—as happened in Boston's Operation Ceasefire—would reduce gun violence. It's hard to tell. But either way, it's an interesting study, and a useful corrective to the view that it's "impossible" to regulate the gun market.

The other day I pointed to research showing that temp work wasn't really the best way for anyone, especially those kicked off the welfare rolls, to move up the ladder and land a steady job. That brings up the obvious question, "Well, why don't temp workers organize?" What are the obstacles? Especially since about 27 percent of the workforce is employed in "nonstandard" arrangements.

As it turns out, back in 2000, the National Labor Relations Board actually ruled in MB Sturgis that temp workers who perform the same job as regular employees at a company share a "community of interests," and unions can organize and negotiate for these workers. That obviously affects a lot of things, including wages and benefits, but one of the best is that contingent workers could have access to employer-provided training programs that can eventually help them get full-time employment. Here's the sort of thing temp workers could, in theory, take advantage of:

In the telecommunications industry, where complex new technologies are constantly being introduced, large employers such as Verizon and SBC Communications have long partnered with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to offer telecom workers advanced technical training. Now, through the union’s CWA/NETT academy, other workers can take advantage of an array of programs offering training in the highly specialized skills telecom employers need. After only three years, CWA/NETT has already graduated more than 1,000 workers.

Some smaller firms have adopted a similar approach. For example, Tucker Technology Inc., an Oakland, California, information-technology firm, offers its clients a range of hardware- and software-design and sophisticated installation services. Through its partnership with the CWA, Tucker is able to train the cabling technicians, design engineers, and other workers it needs.

The catch, though, is that Sturgis is no longer valid. The Bush-appointed NLRB overturned it in November of 2004—ruling instead that temp workers could join forces with employees and unionize only if both the temp agency and employer agree to it. In other words, never. Granted, the relative impact of this is rather small, since in practice Sturgis mainly affected those temp workers in unionized industries—roughly 10 percent—but it still matters. While we're at it, one might ask why the "independent" Federal Reserve Board sets aside five votes for heads of institutions owned by commercial banks, while the NLRB certainly doesn't have nearly half its seats reserved for unionists, but obviously I just don't understand democracy very well.

In the L.A. Weekly, Vince Beiser has an article on the life cycle of a Caesar salad, looking at all the underpaid labor and overtoxic chemicals that go into making one, from start to finish. Good piece. It's also worth quoting Mark Krikorian's bit on the economics of immigrant farmworkers: "Foreign labor is concentrated in the harvest of fresh fruits and vegetables. And if you look at the actual numbers, you'd see that since labor accounts for such a small part of the retail price fruits and vegetables, giving farm workers a 40 percent raise would increase grocery costs for the typical American consumers by $8 a year. Eight dollars. A year." Okay, then.

In the latest New Republic, Jason Zengerle has a lot of fun with Stephen Hayes, the Weekly Standard writer who's made a career out of insisting that Saddam Hussein really did have links with al-Qaeda. It's worth being clear about the various distinctions here, though. Hayes has tried to refute the idea that Saddam had "no" connection with al-Qaeda. He's probably right. It's hard to believe there weren't a few winks and nudges here and there. I certainly don't know. But what Hayes definitely hasn't shown was that there was a connection worth invading over, which, when you get down to it, is sort of the heart of the issue.

And it's a pretty high bar. Say al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein did have a "collaborative relationship," as Hayes alleges, and bin Laden was asking Iraq to hook him up with some Chinese mines, or whatever. Is this a "threat"? Sure, it could be. Are there ways of dealing with it short of invading Iraq? Of course. Disrupting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan would have, presumably, helped put a damper on any possible relationship. Catching bin Laden would have helped. Clamping down on terrorist finances, focusing intelligence on monitoring the relationship, tightening sanctions on Iraq, heck, making Saddam paranoid with messages that bin Laden is screwing his daughter. What do we spend $44 billion a year on if not for this?

I certainly don't know if those things would all work, we'd have to ask the experts, but surely invading Iraq isn't the only way to disrupt a "collaborative relationship." Not to mention the fact that the actual invasion appears to have strengthened al-Qaeda, so relationship or no, this wasn't really the optimal response. The case for war, meanwhile, was built around the suggestion that Saddam was going to hand bin Laden a nuclear bomb any day now. That would have raised harder questions about war, but it was always ridiculous, and as it turns out—even in Hayes' universe—wildly untrue.

Sam Rosenfeld has a very good Tapped post about aid to Africa, noting that while turning poor African countries into democracies with 10 percent GDP growth a year is very hard, spending a bit of money to provide them with bed nets for malaria is not. That's right. I think, though, he's attacking a straw man here. Very few "aid critics," even William Easterly, think that modest steps like sending malaria nets to Africa are useless. Easterly would probably laud it as the sort of thing we should be doing. But that's not what people like Jeffrey Sachs are proposing.

Sachs argues that you can't solve one poverty problem without solving a whole host of others, and wants to send nations not just malaria nets but trees that replenish nitrogen in the soil, rainwater harvesting, better health clinics, etc. etc. The UN Millenium Project is very broad, and as such, is open to the usual criticisms. In fact, critics of Jeffrey Sachs sometimes cite the Gates Foundation's malaria net work as their preferred, more modest alternative. See the end of this piece, for instance. It seems like a distinction without a difference but these are heated debates.

Now as it happens, I think Sachs' broad approach is a good one. Even if only an eighth of UN aid makes its way to those who need it, that's still a lot more than before. And as I reported here, aid to developing countries is generally more effective than it's given credit for, and much of the squandered trillions in African aid in years past can be explained away by the fact that there was a Cold War going on, and first world nations didn't exactly hand out aid with, ah, humanitarian ends in mind. Yes, there are a lot of sorely-needed ways to improve the aid process, and aid alone won't save any country, but on balance, it does more good than harm. (The benefits of increased trade, meanwhile, while certainly positive and worth reaping, are generally overstated.) Plus, at the margins, you get stuff like malaria nets that have concrete results.

But that's not to say aid—even very modest aid like providing malaria nets—won't do any harm whatsoever. Unless African countries can figure out how to grow, they'll remain dependent on humanitarian aid, which, while not the worst thing in the world, is a dangerous place to be. And too much squandered aid—even if it's still doing some good—can discourage donors from working in Africa. It can even help prop up dictatorships or encourage corruption. There are a lot of things to worry about. But it's true, the pessimists about aid to Africa sometimes go too far.

Okay, okay, yesterday's post on health care and GM was very badly expressed, so let me try again, the short(er) version. Any health care reform that can free employers from the burden of providing insurance for their workers—let's say, Medicare-for-all—will make the economy far more efficient in all sorts of good ways. Very good ways. It will also be far, far more equitable from a health standpoint. So yes, bring on reform.

But like any redistribution of wealth, reform will create winners and losers. A company like GM will "win" and become more "competitive" if, after reform, it can lower the total compensation it pays to workers. Presumably it thinks that it can. Arguably, the UAW would try to fight for that pot of money suddenly "freed up" by health care reform. Certainly my local would do exactly that, especially if we all suddenly faced higher taxes to pay for Medicare-for-all or whatever. Unions tend to be justifiably proud of their hard-fought health benefits, and won't give up that money easily. Management will want that freed-up money to go to profits, obviously, or R&D, or whatever. Maybe they can learn to share. Lion, lamb, etc.

In an abstract "perfect" market, total compensation wouldn't change at all (since that's the price of labor, determined by supply and demand), and health care reform wouldn't reduce the labor costs of businesses one whit. We don't have "perfect" markets in the real world. So figuring out who the winners and losers are all depends on where and on whom the taxes and costs fall after the dust all settles. In the short run, the transition could get ugly. In the long run, we have a more sensible and equitable system. That's all I'm saying.

If health care reform, like Medicare-for-all, can lower total health care costs without hurting health outcomes—and the European experience suggests this is very likely—then the winners will win much more than the losers lose. Think of it like free trade. Maybe we'll all be winners. One can hope. By the way, it seems that DLC darling Jacob Hacker has proposed his own plan for universal Medicare. Here's a magazine article where he justifies it. It's good stuff. I back it. Maybe someone other than Dennis Kucinich will propose something similar in 2008. One can hope.

In this week's New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews Tony Judt's Postwar and turns up a few surprising tidbits. Why, for instance, was Europe so peaceful and stable and prosperous after World War II? Judt credits, more than anything else it seems, the previous thirty years of what was essentially a "ruthlessly efficient" ethnic cleansing campaign:

The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions, and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. . . . The stability of postwar Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

Obviously that's not the only theory out there to explain Europe's postwar success, and since nationalism—what counts as one's "own people," as Judt puts it—tends to be as much an artificial construct as anything else, it's not as if "war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions, and genocide" are necessary for peace and prosperity. Still, gruesome to think about, not least with an eye towards modern-day Iraq. On another note, this part—Menand's words, not Judt's—seems pretty unconvincing:

Western Europe became a place of social planning, nationalized economies, and strong states not because democratic socialism was in the Continental genes but because there were no reserves of private capital and few viable non-governmental institutions around to put the world back together again. The "European model," Judt says, was mostly an accident. There was no great political vision; necessity and pragmatism ruled the day. As Armstrong wrote, you cannot eat ideology.

That doesn't seem right. Even long prior to the war Europe had a much more expansive welfare state than the United States—see Table 2.2 of this paper; the difference in social spending across the two continents wasn't much greater in 1960 than it was in 1937.

There are a all sorts of historical reasons other than "Continental genes" to explain why the United States has always had a smaller welfare state than the "European model": until the 1930s the U.S. was dominated by a Supreme Court that protected private property and business at all costs; path dependency followed from that; there's the fact that Roosevelt and the New Dealers, along with the mainstream AFL, co-opted and effectively destroyed more radical and socialist movements in this country; there's the fact that ethnic and racial divisions fractured the American labor movement and influenced public attitudes towards welfare, etc.

Even prior to World War II, European revolutions and incidents of social unrest were very effective at spurring new social spending—especially since, given that the countries were so much less spacious, elites faced greater danger from rioting than they do in this country. There's a long tradition of it. I'm sure there were some accidental components to the creation of postwar Western European welfare states, but it wasn't all an accident.

Evidently, the scientists who study human consciousness are in the habit of making advances and breakthroughs every now and again. This long quote on how cognition might work is from a very fascinating New York Times piece today on hypnosis research:

[N]ew research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function… One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

Very cool!

Continue reading "You Are Getting Sleepy..."

On a random suggestion from a blog comment somewhere on the internet, I started reading Jennifer Mittelstadt's From Welfare to Workfare, which, among other things, revisits the debates over welfare back in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal reformers conceived of welfare as a form of income support for needy mothers, recognizing the value of work and the ways to support that for low-earners while trying to avoid moral hazard. All sorts of smart progressive ideas were making the rounds back then, many reaching across what's seen as the liberal-conservative divide on the subject today.

But what started as an extremely thoughtful and nuanced debate eventually went down in flames when neoconservatives hijacked it and seized on reform as a means of "rehabilitating" women who were too "dependent" on welfare—by shunting them into jobs as soon as possible. On this view, Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill in 1996 was a rousing success, since it did after all reduce welfare rolls, which, for many, seems to be a good in itself. Mittelstadt's book traces a lot of the gendered and racialized assumptions that went into this view, which deserves a post or two in itself. (Here's one short article on the topic.)

At any rate, this isn't really the place to revisit the debate over welfare reform. No doubt there will be time for that if and when Congress ever decides to reauthorize the 1996 bill (they've put it off several times already). But it was a way of introducing an interesting new paper by Susan Houseman and David Autor, which examines the temp agencies often used by states to get welfare recipients into work as soon as possible:

We find that moving welfare participants into temporary help jobs boosts their short-term earnings. But these gains are offset by lower earnings, less frequent employment, and potentially higher welfare recidivism over the next one to two years. In contrast, placements in direct-hire jobs raise participants' earnings substantially and reduce recidivism both one and two years following placement. We conclude that encouraging low-skilled workers to take temporary help agency jobs is no more effective - and possibly less effective - than providing no job placements at all.

But hey, at least welfare rolls are reduced! Sort of. No, not good. On the other hand, before getting too excited about those "direct-hire jobs" mentioned above, Harry Holzer of Brookings has argued that even in those, many lucky welfare-to-work "recipients" get stuck on the lowest rung of the job ladder, with permanently low earnings, in part because they generally get "placed" into the first job that comes along—jobs which often offer little prospect of advancement. Whether these stagnant jobs are "better" for the person in question than remaining on welfare depends—on whether, for instance, the pay and "sense of achievement," etc., outweigh the increased child care and transportation costs, increased income volatility, etc. (among a thousand other things). For some it obviously is; for many it's not.

Ideally, low-earners would find jobs with decent pay and actual upwards mobility, but those jobs aren't exactly falling off trees, so it takes time, continuous training and support, a tight employment market, and perhaps even financial incentives for decently-paying employers to hire former welfare recipients. (The 2004 Senate authorization bill actually had a provision of this sort.) But judging from the most recent welfare bill that came out of the House, though, the debate is still in the clutches of 1960s neoconservatives and their offspring, so these aren't problems we're likely to worry about anytime soon.

Continue reading "Rehabilitation"

Conventional wisdom in this country has it that American businesses are uncompetitive partly because they have to spend so much on health insurance for their workers. Here's a common variation, from Dean Bakopoulos:

[W]e must implement a system that guarantees universal healthcare. American industry — from National Steel to Starbucks — would benefit from having the burden of health insurance lifted off its back. Why else would GM be aggressively investing in nationalized-healthcare Canada while U.S. plants shut down?

Why indeed? I certainly don't know. But I'm not convinced that the conventional wisdom is entirely right. At least let's hash it out. There's reason to think that national healthcare wouldn't, in itself, make American businesses more competitive. Or rather, it can only do so by radically restraining costs.

Let's say that each year GM paid each worker $40,000 and spent $5,000 per worker on health insurance. That's a major drag, right? Well, look. Say national health insurance is then created, some system that doesn't rely on employers. Depending on how it's financed, GM could still be on the hook for that $5,000, so long as total worker compensation doesn't change—which it shouldn't, so long as it's set by the market. Maybe companies will now pay that $5,000 in wage form, to attract the same caliber workers as before (or because unions demand it). Or maybe the new insurance system will be financed by payroll taxes or individual mandates, in which case the company might have to pay each worker $45,000 so that the workers can cover the cost. But total compensation shouldn't change, in the abstract world.

Alternatively, those companies that currently don't provide any insurance can, after reform, share the burden with companies like GM, via taxes or whatever. But then you're just taking from one company to help out another—American businesses overall don't necessarily become more competitive. There are probably ways to redistribute the load that make sense, and that's why we have policy wonks, but the point is there's nothing prima facie business-friendly about this.

In reality, of course, things would look far more complicated. The current tax system makes things complex. And some health insurance systems are more efficient than others. National health insurance is probably cheaper, on aggregate, than our current system, in which case everyone would be paying less. Then businesses obviously would become more competitive. But what if the new system was more expensive—given that 45 million new people would need to be covered? GM's fortunes would depend largely on how the system was financed and how good it was at controlling costs. European companies are more competitive on this front presumably because Europe rations its health care and so spends less (with similar, if not better health outcomes). If we could do that, it wouldn't matter quite as much how health care was delivered—cutting costs is where the benefits to business would lie, primarily.

There's another aspect here. Right now, when insurance premiums go up each year, GM usually has to cover the increase, which goes up faster than wages do, unless it wants to shift some of the cost onto workers—a move that usually causes a big stir and is somewhat hard to do. But if GM was paying its workers entirely in wages, and the government handling health insurance, then GM might be able to get away with avoiding the "necessary" wage increases whenever there was a premium hike. In that case, GM would save money and become more profitable by giving its employees a pay cut—who get, say, a payroll tax increase or premium hike from the government, but not enough of a corresponding wage increase from GM to cover it. But who knows.

I certainly think a national health insurance system is necessary in this country, one not tied to employment. It would help workers move from job to job more easily while remaining insured, and would guarantee that everyone had insurance. It's fair, moral, decent, etc. And it would likely be progressive, which the current tax deductions for employer-backed insurance certainly aren't. And so on. But would it be a boon for American businesses? It primarily depends on whether the new system could control costs and prevent premiums from rising so quickly.

UPDATE: There are a number of good (and, I think, persuasive) comments to the contrary that are worth reading...

Continue reading "Does GM Need Socialism?"

Here's something you might not often consider: "[T]he flipside of Moore's law is that consumer appetite means we're junking technology like there's no tomorrow… Ninety per cent of our electronic waste is thrown into landfill, particularly scary when you think that each computer contains several hundred toxic chemicals. According to EU figures, consumer electronics are responsible for 40 per cent of the lead found in landfills." The upside is that, thanks to all this new technology, electronic equipment is usually smaller, meaning less waste, and gizmos like the i-Pod mean that there are fewer CDs we need to throw out. But which effect prevails?

Brent Staples has an interesting New York Times piece today that looks at one of the hidden strengths of the Japanese educational system—the fact that it actually takes the time to train and develop teachers:

[There is] growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as "lesson study," allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom.

The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight - if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.

This seems so commonsensical that one wonders whether American schools really are so deficient in this regard. A Google search brings up an old Joanne Jacobs post with an excerpt from a subscriber-only Education Week piece that suggests, if I'm reading it right, that American teacher development too often focuses on "generic teaching techniques" rather than more valuable specifics—"what teachers must cover and [how] students think about that content." It goes on: "[R]esearchers also have a hunch that it’s important for teachers to engage in learning sessions collectively—maybe with other teachers from the same department or grade—so that they can meet later to reflect on what they learned." That doesn't really answer the question, but it seems to suggest they don't already do this.

Meanwhile, this very short policy brief points out some of the problems with the Japanese school system, including the oft-heard critique that Japanese schools turn their students into robots and stifles their creativity and individuality. Interestingly, in the 1990s, Japan's Ministry of Education adopted a "loose education" system, which trimmed textbooks, reduced workloads, and gave kids Saturdays off from school. But the country's test scores started slipping and pretty soon parents and teachers were rebelling, putting stricter standards back in place. Rote-intensive learning's making a comeback. So there seem to be serious trade-offs here.

In Foreign Affairs this month, Alexander Cooley has a good piece on the politics of American basing agreements that's worth a read. He does make the good point that the U.S. often seeks out basing agreements with authoritarian regimes, apparently on the theory that these countries will be more reliable allies from a military standpoint. But in fact, dictatorships can be unreliable, as Uzbekistan showed a few months ago, and Cooley argues that the U.S. is less likely to criticize a non-democratic regime for bad behavior if it has bases there, making reform less likely. (On the other hand, one might argue that, unless the United States has some sort of working relationship with an authoritarian country, whether it be military or economic ties, there's no hope of encouraging any sort of reform in those countries.)

Cooley then argues that democracies are in fact much more reliable footholds for our vast basing empire, and since agreements are negotiated openly, those bases are less likely to aggravate extremists or provoke a backlash. And they're actually more stable, since opposition leaders are less likely to campaign against an American presence negotiated by an authoritarian regime, as is now happening in South Korea. From a strategic standpoint, that's valuable. It's true, bases in democracies get a bad name because Turkey wouldn't let itself be used as an invasion platform in 2003, but that was something of an exception.

So it's an interesting piece, but it's not clear how much this advice applies to the current American basing empire. The Pentagon controls at least 725 military bases in about 130 countries around the world, valued at some $118 billion and employing half a million people. From a foreign policy standpoint, some of the bases seem to serve good purposes, some of them serve dark purposes—the ring of bases in Central Asia certainly have an "it's all about oil (and gas)" feel to them—but most of them seem to exist just to exist, and grow, and expand, as all bureaucracies tend to do. In time they create their own rationale for being there.

And few people have really taken the time to figure out whether this basing madness is all necessary for foreign policy—whether we actually need listening stations and covert operations in every corner of the earth, or whether they just exist for their own sake, because the military and its intelligence agencies are, for lack of a better phrase, addicted to control, addicted to seeking military and intelligence solutions to every problem, addicted to expanding their budgets every year. I certainly don't know. (Donald Rumsfeld seems to believe that the footprint of the empire needs to be reduced, but not its omnipotence.) If that's the case, then democracy, non-democracy, whatever; policymakers won't much care where the bases go, just so long as they're pervasive. Indeed, Cooley's piece seems to be searching for the right basing arrangement to carry out a preferred foreign policy, but it seems just as plausible that the reverse is how things tend to work, and the bases end up driving foreign policy.

Christopher Dickey, who seems to have a good ear for goings-on in the Middle East, has this twist on the debate over when and how the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq. Basically, he says, the United States is no longer in the driver's seat:

So topsy-turvy is the policy at this point that we’re not going to imagine leaving until the Iraqi government demands that we go—and you can be sure the Iraqis who are now taking power will do just that. When? As soon as they and their Iranian allies have consolidated their hold on the southern three fourths of the country and its oil. [n.b. And not, as the Pentagon prefers, when a national Iraqi army can take over security.] ...

The Bush administration no longer sets the agenda in Iraq, in fact, and hasn’t for at least two years. The watershed came in November 2003 when there was a dramatic spike in U.S. casualties and Washington suddenly scrambled together a policy for transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis instead of pocketing it indefinitely for the Pentagon and the oil companies, as originally intended. The American invasion, which was supposed to be proactive, has led to an occupation that is entirely reactive, and it’s clear—or ought to be—that the castles in the air constructed by Wolfowitz and his friends have been blown away by facts on the ground.

There's certainly evidence that that's the case. Ahmad Chalabi, who is almost certainly an Iranian ally of some sort—if only a temporary ally—and may well become prime minister in December elections, has already suggested a tentative deadline for withdrawal, telling Congress that 2006 should be a "period of significant transition" for the United States, echoing language in a recent Senate defense bill. Moqtada al-Sadr is uniting Sunni and Shiite radicals in Iraq in support of U.S. withdrawal. The Pentagon even has a plan to do so, if necessary, drawing down to about 80,000 troops by 2006. (On the other hand, maybe Chalabi won't be prime minister after all: polls show that Ibrahim Jaaferi, who seems to want the U.S. to stay, is still pretty popular.)

It's hard to say what the end result would be of a forced drawdown plus the pro-Iranian Shiites "consolidat[ing] their hold on the southern three fourths of the country." Chaos, probably. War, maybe. Ezra Klein argues that if the United States got out in front on this and pre-empted the Shiites by withdrawing before said consolidation happened, it would force Chalabi and his belligerent Shiite allies to play nice with the Sunni insurgency. That's certainly possible. On the other hand, a troop drawdown could just as easily spur each and every Iraqi party to panic, grab whatever gun or armed ally they can find, and make war more, rather than less, likely. Sabrina Tavernise reports today that already "20 cities and towns around Baghdad are segregating" by sect, an ominous sign. Trying to predict how Iraqis will react to our future American actions seems pretty dubious. It's much safer to predict that whenever the troop drawdown comes, it will be conducted no less incompetently than every other aspect of the war so far.

The American Scholar magazine doesn't seem to have a website, or web presence of any sort, but in the print edition there was an amusing article about how Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer wasn't very funny, in a humorless liberal sort of way. Basically you have this kid who's being skinned, lashed, hit, tanned, and cracked upside the head by his sadistic Aunt Polly until he becomes a docile instrument of production. As the lady says, "It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having a holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've got to do some of my duty by him."

Now that's all very obvious to anyone who reads the novel, and the interesting part is how Tom the Marxist subverts all that, but the book becomes cruel when, in turn, Tom starts brutalizing animals. He torments a little pinch-bug and then claps his hands and giggles sadistically when the pinch-bug starts harming a dog. Then he force feeds a cat some nasty medicine or other that obviously causes the beast no small discomfort. Now I don't have a serious position on animal rights, but I can see how this might all be appalling from a certain standpoint. On the other hand, Nikolai Gogol made a career out of showing how bureaucrats who were tormented by their bosses in turn torment their inferiors, and that was usually funny, though he at least made you feel bad about it. Oh well. Interesting little magazine.

Via Hilzoy, ABC News is running a partial list of the "harsh interrogation techniques" that were authorized by the CIA in 2002 to use on detainees. Here's one:

Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

And then there's this old reliable:

Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

Well bully for him. But I don't get it. "Confess"? Why would the CIA want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to confess under torture? Why would that even help them? They already assume he's guilty. They can't use confessions obtained this way in court, ever. A confession doesn't seem useful at all. The CIA wants information, not confessions, and as a neverending parade of officials have acknowledged, torture is terrible at dredging up information.

According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them on a dozen top al Qaeda suspects in order to obtain critical information. In at least one instance, ABC News was told that the techniques led to questionable information aimed at pleasing the interrogators and that this information had a significant impact on U.S. actions in Iraq.

There you go. But at least that guy confessed. Would an innocent detainee caught in the system "confess" as well? Sure, after a bit of waterboarding he'll confess to anything. That way, the CIA can justify holding him indefinitely, put him through a few more mock executions, and pump him for bad information that risks getting soldiers in Iraq killed. This is depraved. The ABC report also notes that at least one detainee died of hypothermia after a junior military officer in Afghanistan "learned" and then "misused" these techniques. Oops. Well, no doubt that detainee "confessed" as well, so no worries, eh?

No, really, why is this still being debated? How many more news reports like this do we have to read? Torture isn't effective, the CIA certainly can't use it effectively, not now, not ever, it's misleading our soldiers, it's depraved, and it's turning American officers into sadists. Little wonder "at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques"—three officers, by the way, who seem to have a lot more guts than anyone else in this whole sordid affair. At least they can make clever t-shirts: "I tortured al-Libbi and all we got was this lousy war in Iraq." Bloody hell.

Continue reading "Torture is Awesome, Clearly"

One policy question that comes up now and again is whether the U.S. government should do more to subsidize child care—and if so, how? Gary Becker gives us a lecture on the virtues of so-called free markets:

I believe it would be a mistake for the US, Germany, or other countries to emulate the Swedish approach [which subsidizes day care for all working mothers]. For starters, middle class and rich families can pay for their own childcare services for young children, such as preschool programs, whether or not the mothers are working. … It is much more efficient to have better off families buy childcare services in a private competitive market than to spend tax revenue on preschool government-run programs for the children of these families. [But poorer families should get greater day-care subsidies, says Becker.]

Okay, but let's ask why Sweden has a government-run day care system while the United States has a "private competitive market." Because the Swedes love their socialism, and damn the consequences? No, it's because Swedish child-care workers are actually paid more than dirt—a substance that in turn makes more than American child-care workers—and hence, very few Swedes could actually afford day care in the private market. Child care workers make, on average, 66 percent of the median female wage in America; in Sweden it's 102 percent. If American child care workers were ever able to unionize or get paid a decent wage, or if child care centers were forced to adhere to higher quality standards, the "free market" for day care in American would break down completely.

At any rate, my guess is that in the future, child care is going to become more and more unaffordable no matter what country we live in, since it's not an industry that will go through major productivity growth or cost reductions. The price will keep rising of its own accord—no matter how much immigration and American-style capitalism manage to slow wage growth in the sector, they can't stop it. So once child care becomes as unaffordable for the middle classes as it currently is for the lower classes, the government will be forced to step in and offer serious child care subsidies. (At the moment, families below the poverty line pay on average 28 percent of their income for child care; for middle-class families, it's 6.6 percent and rising.) It's inevitable, even in this country. Good, I say.

That won't necessarily mean complete socialism for child care; the government could always offer families vouchers and let them choose their own day care center or whatever, but the vouchers will have to be generous. Another clever innovation is to foster the private "family care" sector—i.e., paying stay-at-home parents to take care of other kids as well—which France has been trying to do in order to rein in public child-care spending. This wouldn't substitute for a publicly-funded child care system, but it could complement it. I'm too lazy to look up the details, though. Greater workplace flexibility, like flextime and family leave, work too. If anyone knows how to convince fathers to pitch in with child-rearing, go for it. I certainly don't.

Personally, I've always liked ideas that put an actual price on unpaid "non-market" activities like child care at home. One nonprofit group, Time Dollar USA, has created "service banks" that allow community members to pay each other in "time dollars" for "volunteer" activities. Say Grandma Nellie looks after your kids each day, and you pay her in time dollars. Then she uses those dollars to get someone to take care of her if she ever gets ill. Or whatever. It's an interesting system, although "professional" social service agencies tend to look down on it, and I think in Florida back in the '80s a pilot program for service banking was sabotaged by a skeptical legislature. But other than that...

This is pretty random, but this window has been open on my computer for three days now and it may as well get posted. The FBI just updated its list of the top ten art crimes. Not top ten of 2005, it looks like, but top ten ever. So here they are:

7,000-10,000 looted and stolen Iraqi artifacts, 2003

12 paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, 1990

2 Renoirs and 1 Rembrandt stolen from Sweden's National Museum, 2000 (Recovered)

Munch's The Scream and The Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo, 2004

Benevenuto Cellini Salt Cellar from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2003

Caravaggio's Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco from Palermo, 1969 [pictured]

Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius violin from a New York apartment, 1995

Two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam's Vincent Van Gogh Museum, 2002

Cezanne's View of Auvers-sur-Oise from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, 1999

Da Vinci's Madonna of the Yarnwinder from Scotland's Drumlanrig Castle, 2003

So if anyone has any information... Also, it's odd that the Caravaggio got stolen way back in 1969, but the other crimes have all taken place in the past 5-10 years. Were people not stealing masterpieces back in the 1970s and 80s? Have all those pieces been found? Have thieves only very recently figured out how to take the really valuable stuff? Reading the individual reports, it seems like all you really need to do is walk into a museum with a mask and a gun and take what you want.

Normally, I'd just to link to a story like this on the mini-blog to the right, but Rebecca Lemov's article on the history of "soft torture" is extra-good, so it should go here. In the 1950s the CIA tried to figure out special techniques to "break" people during interrogations—experiments which included feeding unsuspecting johns LSD, and electroshock therapy—but all they ever was how to turn a person into a "confused and desperate human being."

I'm probably one of only a handful of "dovish" liberals who still thinks, maybe, that we should stay in Iraq until the country stabilizes or the government kicks us out. Call it weak-kneed moralism—staying might be the only way to prevent a wider civil war that would leave millions dead, and there's a possibility the U.S. can prevent that. But it's not something I'm sure of, and at any rate, indirectly supporting more of this and this isn't exactly something to feel good about. That all aside, though, the recent attacks on John Murtha's call for withdrawal from Iraq need something of a response.

Wading through the cesspool here, it looks like the most common right-wing criticism of Murtha involves some variation of, "That coward, we can't leave, leaving would be tantamount to surrender, it would undo all the progress we've made, it would be a victory for Zarqawi, it would make the U.S. weaker, we need to 'finish the job.'" Most of those points might be true—not the "coward" line, which is vile—but they're all sort of irrelevant. James Fallows got at what's actually relevant here:

America's hopes today for an orderly exit from Iraq depend completely on the emergence of a viable Iraqi security force. There is no indication that such a force is about to emerge. As a matter of unavoidable logic, the United States must therefore choose one of two difficult alternatives: It can make the serious changes—including certain commitments to remain in Iraq for many years—that would be necessary to bring an Iraqi army to maturity. Or it can face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.

Now Fallows thinks that a "long-term commitment" is, for better or worse, the way forward, but understands that the United States "may not be able to leave honorably." That's the nut of it. Either the U.S. can create a working Iraqi army and stabilize the country or else it can't, and in that case, it's going to have to "retreat" eventually, and Zarqawi or whoever wins. And yes, bad stuff will happen. But there won't be any way to avoid it.

It would be nice if Donald Rumsfeld showed that he cared about training an army, but he seems to be too busy working on a plan to justify the next generation of billion-dollar weaponry instead of worrying about the war he dragged us into. It would be nice if George W. Bush showed that he gave a shit, but he seems too busy boozing up and staggering after Democrats with his fists out. For two years Congress has been snapping its fingers in front of the man's face, trying to get him to wake up and explain his plan to train the Iraqi army, and there's still not enough progress. Understandably, people like John Murtha are throwing their hands up in the air.

Everything else—talk about "surrender" or "retreating" or "Michael Moore" or whether anyone "wants the terrorists to win"—is a red herring. Read Fallows' article. Either a viable Iraqi security force can be trained before the U.S. Army has a "manpower meltdown" or it can't. Murtha, along with many other withdrawal advocates, seems to believe the latter—hence his call to get out and try to pacify Iraq diplomatically, if possible. Not a single person now calling him a "coward" has even tried to address that point.

Continue reading "Murtha and His Critics"

In the middle of a stomach-churning essay on child soldiers, Caroline Moorehead points out that so many militias recruit children, in part, because the global trade in light arms makes it so easy for children to fight. "You no longer have to be rich enough or strong enough to carry a Kalashnikov: it weighs little more than a small dog and, in parts of Africa at least, costs about the same as a chicken." Obviously there are a million reasons why militias recruit children. And obviously people can be killed with machetes. Still, she has a point—if guns were scarcer, you're less likely to give one to the six-year-old.

In general, I don't much care about gun control within the United States. I think arms manufacturers are as belligerent and reckless as drug companies or the oil industry or any other set of large corporations—that is, very. In a not-so-benevolent Plumer dictatorship, they'd be regulated into the dirt. But if Americans want an assault rifle in every home, what do I care; there are more important domestic issues out there.

But the global arms trade is very different, in both its "respectable" and underground parts, especially the trade in small arms. There's little evidence that the vast overflow of small arms does anything other than worsen conflicts in the developing world. Assault rifles sold by, say, Italy and Japan to say, the Algerian government usually end up in private hands. 60 percent of the 639 million small arms in existence worldwide are privately owned, so obviously this "leakage" happens frequently. (Often, as was often the case during the Cold War, it's intended by the seller.) So first it's Algeria and pretty soon, Ugandan rebels are buying up ten thousand surplus rifles on the black market and handing one to little Johnny.

Obviously you want to shut down those black markets—more on that in a bit—but that's ultimately futile so long as the supply of light arms is so expansive. But there's not much hope that things will change anytime soon. For awhile it looked like the end of the Cold War would help to shut off the arms production madness from the "developed" world that started in the 1970s, a boom that served no useful purpose save for enriching manufacturers and getting a lot of people killed. But the "war on terror" has given G-8 countries the excuse they need to loosen controls on conventional arms exports—despite the fact that these weapons kill far more people worldwide than, say, chemical weapons (some 300,000 a year).

That means that repressive regimes that like to gun down marchers in the streets can now count on landing that arms deal they've been hoping for, so long as they promise to aim them at terrorists now and again. That's a problem in itself, but it also In the U.S., Congress is nowadays much less likely to clamp down these sales, as it did in 1998, when it stopped the Clinton administration from arming Turkey's bloody crackdown on the Kurds (years too late). And needless to say, arms sold to repressive regimes, which tend also to be the most corrupt regimes, tend to find their way to the general population—and little Johnny—more easily. (One should note that government-to-government exports aren't the only problem; insurgent groups and anyone else can easily purchase small arms in the US domestic market. Gun shows are great for this.)

The prospects for solid export controls and other sensible measures don't look good, either—this past July, the United States helped kill a UN proposal to create a system for tracking ammunition. It's hard to expect otherwise. Arms manufacturers have always had a death-grip on policymakers here and in Europe—for years they've been invaluable for pump-priming the economy when needed and creating jobs for constituents. Moreover, many of these Cold War manufacturers can't just "convert" to peaceful purposes, as various military industries did after World War II. Like a felon who's spent all his life in prison, the arms industry, which has always worked in the shadows—bribes, smuggling, laundering—probably won't adjust well to the civilian sector. So that means they're going to have to keep arms exports, and defense spending, running at full blast in order to avoid a decline. (It's especially bad in Russia, where only 10 percent of firms received state orders in 2001.)

So cracking down on the production of arms in the West looks like a dim prospect. Even if it could be curbed, that's only part of it—the secondary arms trade is so massive, and "upgrade services" have become so plentiful, that many arms can be easily recycled from one conflict to the next, without buying anything from the West. Plus, developing nations have been starting their own arms industries since the 1980s; in fact, it's one of the best ways to weather international sanctions—as both Israel in the 1960s and South Africa in the 1980s discovered—and a way to engage in a little "industrial policy" at home. The black market on arms, meanwhile, is even tougher to crack down on than the black market in drugs, since it's generally sanctioned by most national governments.

Some arms control experts suggest that "supply-side" controls will only work at the margins, at most, and one needs to focus on the demand side. That means somehow getting developing nations to stop fighting wars and other bloody conflicts. But why do countries and groups within countries fight and demand weapons? Because they're poor, usually, and everything that comes with that. Why are they poor? As Branko Milanovic has shown, because they keep getting involved in wars and other bloody conflicts. Why are those conflicts so deadly? Because it's so easy to buy arms.

This bit, from William Darymple's "Inside the Madrasas," was unexpected:

Under Sami's vice-presidency [radical political parties] have just imposed a Taliban-like regime on Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, banning the public performance of music and depictions of the human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the Colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.

The Colonel's lucky. We're not half as forgiving here in San Francisco, where black-clad anarchists regularly throw hammers through the windows of the KFC on Valencia Street. Even if it is a strange place to put a KFC...

How big is the intelligence budget? Usually we don't know because it's classified. Except this year we do know—it's $44 billion. How do we know? Because someone accidentally let it slip a few days ago:

At a public intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.

Big mistake? No, not at all. That $44 billion number shouldn't have been a secret in the first place. Several former CIA directors have already come out and said that the overall intelligence budget figures should not be classified, that publishing these numbers wouldn't harm national security so long as individual budget items were kept secret. The Brown-Aspin Commission in 1996 concurred. Indeed, from time to time I do wonder why no one ever takes article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution seriously:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Yet this statement has obviously never applied to either the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency. So why don't constitutional orginalists ever start complaining about this? One explanation is that this clause has been violated almost continuously since the country's founding. In 1790, Congress appropriated $40,000 for "intercourse between the U.S. and foreign nations," but didn't require George Washington to account for how he actually spent the money. In 1794, Congress gave the president $1 million in a similar fashion—the money ended up being used as ransom money for American hostages in Algiers. Regardless of how useful these moves were, they were clearly unconstitutional, allowing Congress to decide willy-nilly when and where it gets to spend money without public oversight.

My preference would be to make everything related to intelligence and defense fully public, and carve out exceptions only if absolutely necessary, after long debate. Excessive secrecy has rarely served the country well. Now that the CIA is getting in the business of running a network of secret prisons around the world, and who knows what else, that holds doubly true. But this will never happen, especially since Democrats seem to place a premium on CIA secrecy these days. More realistically, Congress should at least publish overall figures for the intelligence budget and the basic purposes for which they're spent.

Meanwhile, the GAO, the government's auditing arm, still has only limited access to reviewing CIA programs. At the time of the Pike Commission in the early '70s, the agency had no access to any budgetary information whatsoever. Today, the GAO has "broad authority to evaluate CIA programs," but it still faces limitations: it lacks access to the CIA's "unvouchered" accounts, and has no way to "compel" access to foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information. As I said, we're not likely to get sunlight anytime soon, but giving the GAO increased access would be a good start.

Hmmm… Kevin Drum says the National Enquirer is "not exactly the most trusted name in news." Yet a while back, Jack Shafer claimed that the Enquirer is actually extremely accurate, and has a very rigorous fact-checking process. Who's right? Think of it this way: no magazine one runs a greater risk of getting sued for libel than the Enquirer, so one would assume they make sure everything is at least technically accurate, when carefully parsed. And unlike, say, the New York Times, the Enquirer is willing to "burn" misleading sources by not paying them for any more stories. And they did get the "Rush Limbaugh is a drug addict" story right...

Via Alina Stefanescu, here's a 1984 CIA comic book that was air-dropped over Grenada to make the US invasion a bit more palatable. Fascinating. At one point, a political prisoner in Grenada complains to his American liberators that he was held in prison without charges. "No charges! Grenada was run by communists. Communists don't have to make charges." And then he was tortured. Not that I'm suggesting anything. Mostly I'm just surprised that they didn't draw Ronald Reagan in a more manly fashion than they did. Bulging biceps or something. What kind of watery propaganda is this?

Bill Cosby has often criticized poor black parents for spending way too much on fancy sneakers for their children—as he puts it, "$500 shoes". Alex Tabarrok looks at the BLS' Consumer Expenditure Report and says that he has the numbers to back this up:

I was curious so I went to Table 2100 of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and found the following for 2003:…

Expenditures on footwear by whites and other races: $274
Expenditures on footwear by blacks: $440.

Chalk one up for the good Dr. Cosby.

Um, okay. Except that according to the survey, the average black "consumer unit" has 50 percent more children than white "consumer units," so if anything, those two numbers are roughly proportional, at least if we're talking about sneakers for kids. (Age explains some of it as well.) Meanwhile, according to those same CEX figures, blacks spend proportionally much less on "entertainment" as a percentage of their income, less on tobacco, less on alcohol, less on video games than whites do. Totally irresponsible, you know?

No, in general, I'd agree that most poor families could stand to learn better budgeting techniques. Who couldn't? I'd also agree that just about every family could stand to spend less on shoes and more on, say, books for their kids. But it's also clear that a very large number of poor families won't escape poverty simply by practicing extreme frugality, as many libertarians seem to believe.

Nor is "personal responsibility" always as easy as it looks. A few summers back I lived with a single black mother in New York (long story why) who once pointed out, in so many words, that her two kids were being barraged with corporate shoe advertising from the moment they woke up in the morning to the minute they went to bed, and buying them sneakers, or splurging on eating out, or other "unthrifty" activities, were one of the few ways she could reward them for doing well in school, and that it's very easy to give in to children wanting and demanding and hectoring after an 80 hour work week. (And moralists take heart; she blamed herself for giving in.) I know a near-infinite number of what Cosby would consider "good parents" who've caved after less.

Not that this generalizes to all situations, and at some point you want to avoid making too many excuses for people, but it gets a bit irritating to hear that "all" poor families need to do is tighten the belt, stop being so frivolous, and they'll be fine. Meanwhile, David Shipler points out that newspaper reporting on poverty has become appallingly thin since its heyday in the 1970s, which probably explains why most of these conversations tend to involve glib writers sitting at their keyboards chatting ignorantly about this stuff. Me especially. It's not a good scene.

Nathan Newman dredges up a telling little quote from Samuel Alito's 1985 application for some promotion or other. First there's Alito's contention that "the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion." That's a big deal, obviously, but there's also this:

In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment.

As Nathan points out, by "reapportionment," Alito apparently means he's not happy with the Warren Court's various "one person one vote" decisions (here and here), which prevented state legislatures from drawing up voting districts in such a way that they could pack tens of thousands of urban voters into a single district and then lightly sprinkle hundreds of rural voters into another. These district lines, naturally, were usually drawn up to water down the voting power of African-Americans in the South by cramming them into urban Bantustans. (Some might say the Warren Court didn't go far enough on this score; legislatures are still allowed to count prison populations towards the size of an individual voting district, despite the fact that those prisoners can't actually vote.)

But I'm curious about another part of his statement. What Warren Court decisions concerning "criminal procedure" drew Alito's ire, exactly? Was it Gideon vs. Wainright, ensuring that all Americans must be provided a lawyer if they cannot afford one? Mapp v. Ohio, making evidence that was illegally obtained inadmissible in court? Escobedo v. Illinois, doing the same for evidence obtained by improper interrogations? Would he rather citizens not be informed of their Miranda rights? Does he think the Court took a wrong turn in Hernandez v. Texas when it said that Mexican-Americans could not be excluded from juries? Inquiring minds want to know. For the most part, criminal procedure occupies the majority of the Supreme Court's time, and it would be nice to know what manner of "law and order" justice we're dealing with here.

Weird topic, but okay. Daniel Gross says: "When mutual funds grow too big, they become unwieldy." Well, probably. But why is that? He says "the law of large numbers dictates that it's difficult to sustain performance and growth when you're really big." Aren't there more specific reasons though?

If a fund grows large enough, after all, the number of stocks available for the manager to select shrinks. (A $2 billion fund looking for, say, a 5 percent holding in various companies [anything else is probably too big to acquire/sell] would have thousands of companies to choose from; a $100 billion fund doing the same can only choose from a handful of very large companies.) Plus, for very large funds, transactions either become more expensive or else will taper off, because of various fees and the like. At a certain point, a large enough fund will effectively be tracking the market, in which case investors get a very bad deal—basically, they receive market return minus the large fees the managers siphon off. The phenomenon Gross is describing isn't just likely; it seems pretty much inevitable. Maybe there are other theories out there.

Sadly, I don't invest in anything. If I did, I can't see why mutual funds would be a good deal. By design, the interests of investors and managers are badly misaligned. Managers will generally prefer to boost their own fees as high as possible, and to expand their funds as much as possible, both of which are bad for the investor. Plus money spent on marketing and advertising. This goes double when some other large financial conglomerate buys up a fund, or if the fund goes public. The shareholders and/or buying corporations are only going to get a nice fat return if the fund managers boost their fees and whatnot. Maybe someday it will all get reformed but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Justin Logan points out that most of our current problems in the Middle East started way back with the first Gulf War in 1991, a war that looks unwise in retrospect. Back then, many Democrats rightly opposed Bush senior's "needless foreign intervention" in the Middle East, something they apparently couldn't bring themselves to do in 2002.

That seems worth noting. The ongoing debate over whether the Bush administration distorted the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs is important, but misses the larger point, I think. Even if Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted nuclear weapons," as Dick Cheney once claimed, it still wasn't worth going to war. A nuclear-armed Soviet Union was never able to control the oil supply in the Middle East, there's no reason to think a nuclear Iraq could have, if that's what we were fretting about. And Saddam Hussein may have had connections with terrorists before 2002, but nothing worth invading over; he was never so stupid as to risk annihilation over unprovoked attacks against the United States. (And, at any rate, things certainly seem to have worsened on that score since the invasion.)

At best, smart sanctions by the UN would have kept Saddam from doing anything nasty; at worst, deterrence and coercive diplomacy could have been deployed if necessary. Force if absolutely crucial. It's hard work, juggling all that, but that's why we pay our leaders the big bucks. The current Democratic criticism of the Bush administration, however—that the dude lied about the WMDs—is apt, but seems to imply that if only he hadn't been lying, the war would have been a good idea after all. Wrong.

Once the security aspects are dismissed, all one can say is that deposing Saddam's regime and democratizing Iraq, if properly done, would have made the Middle East a "nicer place," no doubt. But what of it? The question of why it was ever our responsibility to make the region "a nicer place" deserves a closer look. It certainly harkens back to the first Gulf War, which, as Justin Logan says, "set a precedent that the United States would be the guarantor of global security, [so] that other regions didn't need to concern themselves with mundane and archaic problems like the balance of power." (If that precedent hadn't already been set.) So how did we get to that point? And why, apparently, are both political parties in Washington still stuck on that notion?

The thinking that led to the first Gulf War seems looks in retrospect. After the Soviet Union fell, minor threats that once looked perfectly manageable suddenly appeared intolerable. Goals that once appeared ridiculous and out of reach—like trying to bring democracy to a region at gunpoint, or projecting military force in order to secure a resource base halfway around the world—suddenly appeared entirely doable. But both ideas are illogical. Threats that were manageable once upon a time are still manageable. Goals that were ridiculous once upon a time are still ridiculous. Nothing should have changed.

I'm almost tempted to cite prospect theory—the behavioral theory that people will take greater risks to avoid losses than they would to win something—to explain U.S. behavior. After 1990, the United States was at the peak of its global power, and in that situation, prospect theory suggests that American presidents will, more often than not, take great risks to avoid losing that status—intervening in the Middle East, say—whereas they wouldn't have taken such risks to gain that status. The September 11 attacks, it seems, only heightened this sense. Al-Qaeda, an organization that honestly poses a relatively small risk to American security, from a historical point of view, was suddenly worth taking very large geopolitical risks to curtail. Needless to say, this is a bit irrational.

It wouldn't be wrong to say that deeper structural forces prevent the United States from ever reverting to a more modest foreign policy. The 1991 Gulf War was probably a mistake, but something like it was probably inevitable. Historically, a state's "interests" tend to grow and expand as its power does, as Robert Jervis once pointed out. The historian John S. Galbraith argued that the British kept getting drawn deeper into Asia and Africa by the "turbulent frontier": once you occupy a certain region, suddenly the unpacified borders of that area become a pressing concern, so you move to pacify those areas, and so on. Or, as Chalmers Johnson likes to say, imperialism drives war rather than the other way around.

Perhaps this is unavoidable. Perhaps it's even what the U.S. should be doing. Someday, when the current political climate has cooled, liberals can honestly debate the merits and dangers of Clinton-era imperalism. Already we have strategists like Thomas Barnett arguing that the proper for the Pentagon is to go all the way, to pacify all of those borders—with the siren song of globalization—until there is no "turbulent frontier" left. But it's hard to say whether doing so is truly in the national interest or just seems like it, for all of the reasons listed above.

Continue reading "Revisionist History"

It's hardly the main point of his piece, but Paul Bloom argues that Europe isn't really more un-religious than the United States, it just looks that way:

[T]he religious divide between Americans and Europeans may be smaller than we think. The sociologists Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Pennsylvania State University, write that the big difference has to do with church attendance, which really is much lower in Europe. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley, they argue that this is because the United States has a rigorously free religious market, in which churches actively vie for parishioners and constantly improve their product, whereas European churches are often under state control and, like many government monopolies, have become inefficient.)

Most polls from European countries show that a majority of their people are believers. Consider Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. But four out of five Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after death.

The point about a "free religious market" in the United States that enables churches here to "improve their product" makes sense. A while back, the New York Times Magazine had a great piece on how evangelical "megachurches" have managed to expand their congregations at a time when church attendance in the United States has either plateaued or decline lately. It's all in the marketing and innovation:

It's hard to imagine a more effective method of religious outreach, which is, after all, the goal of evangelical churches like Radiant. As McFarland told me: ''I'm just trying to get people in the door.'' To that end, Radiant has designed its new 55,000-square-foot church to look more like an overgrown ski lodge than a place of worship. ''For people who haven't been to church, or went once and got burned, the anxiety level is really high,'' McFarland says. '' 'Is it going to be freaky? Is it going to be like what I see on Christian TV?' So we've tried to bring down those visual cues that scare people off.''

In fact, everything about Radiant has been designed to lure people away from other potential weekend destinations. The foyer includes five 50-inch plasma-screen televisions, a bookstore and a cafe with a Starbucks-trained staff making espresso drinks. (For those who are in a rush, there's a drive-through latte stand outside the main building.) Krispy Kreme doughnuts are served at every service. (Radiant's annual Krispy Kreme budget is $16,000). For kids there are Xboxes (10 for fifth and sixth graders alone). ''That's what they're into,'' McFarland says. ''You can either fight it or say they're a tool for God.'' The dress code is lax: most worshipers wear jeans, sweats or shorts, depending on the season. (''At my old church, we thought we were casual because we wore mock turtlenecks under our blazers,'' Radiant's youth pastor told me.) Even the baptism pool is seductive: Radiant keeps the water at 101 degrees. ''We've had people say, 'No, leave me under,' '' McFarland says. ''It's like taking a dip in a spa.'' …

The spiritual sell is also a soft one. There are no crosses, no images of Jesus or any other form of religious iconography. Bibles are optional (all biblical quotations are flashed on huge video screens above the stage). Almost half of each service is given over to live Christian rock with simple, repetitive lyrics in which Jesus is treated like a high-school crush: ''Jesus, you are my best friend, and you will always be. Nothing will ever change that.'' Committing your life to Christ is as easy as checking a box on the communication cards that can be found on the back of every chair. (Last year, 1,055 people did so.)

That's good thinking, and not the sort of thing you're likely to see in a state-backed church, which makes one wonder why so many religious folks want to kick down the wall between church and state in the first place. (In fact, back in the day, when the Supreme Court first banned prayer from school, many religious leaders supported the court's decision for just this reason—to avoid state stultification of religion.) This also recalls the secular case for religiously-based social services, which seem to do more to break the grasp of theology than anything else. Although, as Paul Bloom notes, it probably doesn't make people any less religious personally—that seems to be an accidental evolutionary byproduct of our cognitive tendencies to a) distinguish between material objects and abstract ideas, and b) see patterns—some might say "intelligent designs"—in random events. At least that's the theory.

The "pro-growth progressive" discussion continues over at TPMCafe. One implicit question is posed here: "Is economic growth always good?" Just for the hell of it, let's revisit some long-discarded left-wing views on this. In Foreign Affairs recently, Joseph Stiglitz reviewed Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and laid out some of basic issues:

In short, the debate should not be centered on whether one is in favor of growth or against it. The question should be, are there policies that can promote what might be called moral growth -- growth that is sustainable, that increases living standards not just today but for future generations as well, and that leads to a more tolerant, open society?

Right, that's the line we're hearing from the left-of-center: "Growth is of course good, it should just be fair growth—focusing on median wage growth, say, rather than the cult of GDP." And sustainable growth is better than unsustainable growth, presumably. Along these lines, we want growth that maximizes utility—over fifty years, 4.5 percent growth that benefits all is better than 5 percent growth which leaves a fifth of the population behind. Sperling's book seems to be about laying out a bunch of hyper-technocratic policies that try to find this vaunted middle ground. Maybe he gets the details wrong (I think he does), but that's at least his aim.

But what if we aimed even further afield? Let's throw out some random numbers: right now Americans spend $28 billion per year on candy, gum, and potato chips, and some $36 billion on cigarettes. Plus billions go towards advertising. But after that's all done, we end up spending further untold billions on health care to treat "lifestyle-induced" diseases—which make up a chunk of the national medical bill—and scribble out checks worth billions to the weight-loss industry. Together, all that money increases GDP, and produces "growth". But as pudgy, emphysema-ridden human beings trying to diet and stay healthy, do we really get anywhere with all this spending? Pay to get fat, pay to lose weight; pay to tar our lungs, pay to get healed. Ignore the larger questions of human freedom. If we magically didn't have any of these things, growth might be lower, but it's not immediately clear we'd be qualitatively any worse off, right?

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way. Presumably Frito Lay links up with the rest of the economy in a way that helps "useful" (whatever that means) industries grow—helping the aluminum industry, for instance. Or it creates jobs that in turn boost consumer spending. The math behind compound annual growth is pretty compelling. So do these broader "gains," across the economy, outweigh the "harm" created by, say, the gambling and prison industries—both of which contribute mightily to American economic growth? A region in Eastern Oregon, as I recall, was "growing" rapidly thanks to a state prison and nerve gas incinerator in the area. Is that "good"?

Economists say that first world countries must focus on increasing their growth—grow, grow like the wind!—so that we can help poor countries grow and make the lives of their people better off. But what happens when the United States is growing thanks to its sprawling arms industry, which in turn fuels conflict abroad? Would a little less growth have been "better"? (Sorry for the double quotes, I'm addicted.)

On a few issues, obviously, we calculate and make these trade-offs; environmental regulation, for instance. On a deeper level, we don't really know what we're getting for all this growth. Better lives? Better compared to what? The 1900s? Is that our yardstick for progress?

We've known for a long time that rising incomes, in themselves, don't increase human happiness, since our expectations of what makes life good expand as that income rises. And one's happiness is usually relative to one's place in society, not one's absolute level of wealth. Benjamin Friedman's book, at one point, suggests that economic growth can almost be thought of as a form of social control—as long as a person's own income is rising, he or she cares (somewhat) less about his or her relative place in society. Maybe. The United States over the past 30 years is a strange data point for this—median wages have stagnated, inequality has vastly increased, but as this paper shows, poorer Americans care less about inequality than their European counterparts who, it seems, are doing better. Interpretations welcome.

B. Friedman also notes that economic growth correlates with the openness of a society, increased tolerance, democracy, etc. But we could easily have a fallacy of composition here. Which aspects of growth produce these things? Perhaps it is too difficult to separate it all out. Movements afoot to create things like the Genuine Progress Indicator seem enticing, and could potentially be of use to policymakers. Personally, I've been dazzled by the Mustache of Understanding, so never fear, in the end I'll probably come around to the "pro-growth" position. Perhaps we'll get some green economists on board at TPMCafe to wreak havoc and convince us otherwise.

Continue reading "The Anti-Growth Abyss"

All those theological disputes in the Middle Ages probably didn't generate half so much heat as the intra-Democratic debate over trade. Why is this? I can see why there are arguments between the various camps, but I've never really understood why liberal "free traders" look bug-eyed at trade-critics as if the latter were lunatics sacrificing sheep to Baal. What is trade, after all? Isn't it just a market for goods and services that happens to use multiple currencies. In that case, it cannot be "free" any more than the U.S. economy can be "free," for obvious reasons. So it's fair game for basic liberal meddling, no?

Most NAFTA liberals support regulations in the "trade" between states, like a federal minimum wage to prevent a race to the bottom, along with environmental and workplace regulations—at the price, no doubt of some "inefficiency." Obviously you want to design these regulations properly, hence the room for dispute, but they're not illegitimate as such. Liberals allow rent-seeking at home, why not across borders? Labor unions here at home, like trade barriers abroad, "distort" the market; the question is who you want to help and why, at what cost. The WTO sucks for the same reason that rule-by-lobbyist over the past thirty years in Washington has sucked. Obviously Milton Friedman would find this reasoning flawed, and maybe the analogy's imperfect here and there, but why so many liberals should find this all the height of heresy is very curious.

P.S. Kash sheds some useful light on the debate here.

In Slate, Witold Rybczynski argues that urban sprawl isn't a uniquely American phenomenon—something spurred on by our automobile-heavy culture and single-use zoning laws. No, sprawl's something that happens in all cities at all times; it even happened in ancient Rome! "Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization." Um, okay. But that doesn't mean the sort of sprawl you see in American cities is always inevitable, right? Clearly there are degrees and different types here. So what causes which sorts?

One of the more fun papers I've ever come across is "The Spatial Distribution of Population in 35 World Cities," by Alain Bertaud and Stephen Malpezzi, which tries to pin this down. Perhaps not very surprisingly, they find that the "density gradient" of a city flattens out, i.e., people start fleeing for the suburbs, as income and population rise—supporting Rybczynski's point that this stuff is partly inevitable and can never be totally squelched—but on the other hand, transportation costs and urban regulation do make a big difference too.

By the way, and very curiously, Bertaud and Malpezzi cite a past paper of a similar sort noting that higher crime in the central city seems to decrease sprawl while better education in the city increases it. That's a bit hard to explain, to say the least.

James K. Galbraith argues that expanding homeownership is a good and proper policy route for helping working families to increase wealth. George Fredrickson made a similar point in a recent New York Review of Books essay, "Still Separate and Unequal," where he discussed the vast wealth gap between white and black Americans, and argued that historical disparities in homeownership were to blame:

How did this vast inequality come about? It was mainly the result of the greater white access to home mortgages that were insured and subsidized by the federal government. Before the 1930s a home buyer had to put down 50 percent of a house's price and could get only a relatively short-term mortgage, perhaps only ten years. By the 1950s, as a result of a series of federal housing programs, including the GI Bill, most Americans could get long- term mortgages—up to thirty years— with a down payment as low as 10 percent. By 1984 seven out of ten whites owned their own homes, worth on average $52,000. But only one in four blacks owned a home, worth, on average, less than $30,000. ...

The advantages of whites over blacks ... were more characteristically Northern than Southern; they manifested themselves in the growth of virtually all-white suburbs outside the major cities and virtually all-black ghettos within them. This new form of racial segregation was not simply the product of private choices, among them the refusal of white home-owners to sell to blacks, blockbusting and the racial "steering" of home buyers by real estate agents, and the personal prejudice of bankers asked to approve loans for blacks.

The urban segregation that has contributed so much to the persistence of black inequality came about in large part because between the 1930s and the 1970s federal housing agencies refused to approve mortgage loans in neighborhoods that were "redlined," which meant property values were deemed uncertain because of the presence of blacks.

True enough. All the same, modern-day housing policy to correct this imbalance, especially for those on the bottom of the scale, sometimes seems misguided. The Bush administration, like its predecessor, has made a point of offering subsidized mortgages to low-income and especially minority families, which is a great idea in theory, as Galbraith's and Frederickson's pieces might suggest. But so long as homes remain unaffordable for 80 percent of all renters, including 21 million renters who couldn't get mortgages under even the loosest of underwriting standards, these sorts of policies will only go so far.

Lower-income families that can afford homes, meanwhile, often end up with units in need of costly repairs or are located in poor neighborhoods plagued by crime and unemployment. Not the best way to create wealth, obviously, or reduce the inequality and segregation Frederickson's talking about. In Baltimore a few years ago, reporters discovered that homes basically falling apart were being "patched up" and sold to low-income families at inflated prices. In the South, 40 percent of low-income home-buyers were steered into trailer parks on leased land. Not to mention the fact that extending homeowner credit to low-income and/or minority neighborhoods usually opens the door to predatory lenders to walk on in.

Plus, it's not even clear that owning a home is always a fantastic wealth-enhancing strategy for low-income families. It's true that the median wealth of low-income homeowners is 12 times that of renters with similar incomes, and most of that comes from the home. But renters and owners tend to be very different people to begin with, at different stages of the life cycle, in different financial situations. How "good" of an investment owning a home is often depends on when an owner enters the market, how long it holds the property, local market conditions, etc. On the downside, some low-income families who buy a home can quickly find themselves assailed with all sorts of costs—insurance costs, property taxes, utility bills—and often borrow against the equity of their home in a financial pinch, erasing any wealth.

That's not to say Galbraith or Frederickson are on the wrong track; clearly they know what they're talking about. Still, we hear about policies to promote homeownership—from both parties—as a strategy for helping working families, but they deserve far more scrutiny. It's troubling, for instance, that the percent of mortgage loans that end in foreclosure have risen from 1.24 in the 1990s to 1.46 these days—a potential sign that people are being steered into homes before they're ready. A truly progressive housing policy, perhaps, would increase the stock of affordable housing and help out low-income renters until they're ready to own a home. What we have now looks more like a policy primarily intended to benefit lenders—who, these days, depend on sub-prime loans to low-income families to maintain their profits—while slashing rental-assistance programs like Section 8.

Continue reading "The Trouble with Housing Policy"

One of the hidden benefits of having a scarcely-read blog is that I can change my mind about an issue at noon on Election Day and not worry that I've somehow led readers astray.

Both Kash Mansori and Mickey Kaus knock down some of my earlier objections to Proposition 77, Schwarzenegger's plan for redistricting reform here in California. Both of them argue that the propositions "compact district" criteria wouldn't cram California Democrats into urban Bantustans, as I feared, because they're already crammed as tightly as possible into those districts. In fact, Kash argues that if the proposition passes, Democrats might even gain seats. I think this depends entirely on how that panel of retired judges draws the lines, and especially on how they divvy up Los Angeles, but yes, theoretically it's possible. More likely, though, Schwarzenegger wouldn't have done this if he didn't think it would knock off enough Democratic seats to keep them away from the 2/3 supermajority needed to pass a budget.

Kaus, for his part, notes that even if the redistricting only made a dozen seats newly competitive, that's still more than is the case now—the California legislature is slightly less competitive than the old Soviet Politburo. (Fortunately our Bolsheviks have term limits.) That's true, although it's not entirely clear why we should prefer that the fate of the legislature rest in the hands of "swing voters" in a dozen random districts. Injecting a little "competition" into a broken system can sometimes just leave you with a broken system prey to the odd bouts of randomness. Is that even a partial fix? Perhaps not.

More interestingly, Kaus notes that simply taking gerrymandering power out of the hands of party bosses would curb the power of those bosses, making for a less centralized legislature. Actually, I think that Schwarzenegger's redistricting reform could have the opposite effect, partly, as the most senior members of each party would start to hail from geographically safe, and ideologically extreme, districts—whoever represents San Francisco and Orange County, say; places that will never be competitive—and hence, the polarized leadership would become even more powerful, since they're the only ones with extra cash on hand and no need to worry about re-election. That's something to think about before adopting a "compact district" system nationwide. The Congresspeople who stick around the longest will inevitably end up hailing from places like Provo, UT and Berkeley, CA. (Of course, we already have something like this under the current system.)

Kaus also suggests that redistricting would create more compromise within the legislature, which could put an end California's insane government-by-initiative, something that has certainly crippled the state. That's an important angle, although I think the temptation for governors and wealthy interest groups to appeal directly to voters is too great, and initiatives will continue. Even "competitive" legislatures will fail to act now and again, and when that happens, it's initiative time. This won't end.

So bottom line. There are much better anti-gerrymandering reforms out there. Under Schwarzenegger's proposal, redrawn districts would have to be approved by voters, after million-dollar campaigns, and if a scheme was voted down, it would still go into effect anyway. That's ludicrous. The benefits to this redistricting reform are, I think, wildly oversold. Maybe the downsides are as well. In that case, the important question is this: Would passing Proposition 77 make other, better redistricting reforms more likely (because it sets the reform ball rolling) or less likely (because enough voters will be satiated with this "reform")? The answer to this question should decide one's vote. I will probably still say "no". But if the initiative fails, as seems likely from the polls, it's important to get another, better redistricting reform on the table.

Continue reading "Last-Minute Wavering"

Andrew Samwick has the lowdown on two provocative arguments about gas taxes by Jayanta Sen. Sen's first paper argues that a tax on imports of crude oil, far from crippling the economy, would "transfer wealth of $100 billion+ from [oil-producing] foreign governments to the U.S. consumers," along with decreasing oil use.

The second paper points out that if the major oil-buying countries—the U.S., EU, Japan, China, India—all formed their own cartel of oil importers, they could save further billions by bargaining down oil prices with OPEC. The U.S. alone would save some $200 billion a year. Good stuff, but I can see one downside to the second idea: uppity American seniors might start to wonder why economists all think "OPIC" should be able to ratchet down oil prices but Medicare shouldn't do the same with drugs.

Scientific American considers the evidence:

This new understanding of life's origins has transformed the scientific debate over panspermia [i.e., the theory that life originated from tiny seeds across the cosmos]. It is no longer an either-or question of whether the first microbes arose on Earth or arrived from space. In the chaotic early history of the solar system, our planet was subject to intense bombardment by meteorites containing simple organic compounds. The young Earth could have also received more complex molecules with enzymatic functions, molecules that were prebiotic but part of a system that was already well on its way to biology. After landing in a suitable habitat on our planet, these molecules could have continued their evolution to living cells. In other words, an intermediate scenario is possible: life could have roots both on Earth and in space.

That's the debate, anyway. One crucial question is whether outer-space organisms coming to Earth on the meteor express could have survived the hot trip through the atmosphere. Hard to do. Not only that, but they'd also have to have survived being rocketed out of their planet of origin. Not fun, either. Both moves seem "plausible theoretically," but eventually scientists will have to scrounge up some bacteria and put them through interstellar hell to see whether the little critters actually survive, say, a trip from Mars to Earth after meteors dislodge chunks of rock from the former. Very cool. In a related vein, I was once told that the Yucatan meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs probably deafened every living organism in the world immediately on impact. Also cool, but it's surprisingly hard to find confirmation for this on the web.

I shouldn't really discuss Gene Sperling's book any more until I actually, er, read it, but here's another point he brings up. One consistent plank of Democratic economic policy is the idea of "forced savings." Liberals rebelled, rightly, against privatizing Social Security and replacing social insurance with individual stock portfolios. Nevertheless, most Democrats believe that we should still have some sort of "add-on accounts" that would force short-sighted Americans to save for retirement. Some economists even believe that a higher savings rate will lead to higher economic growth, and exhort us so. Seems fair, but let's look at the numbers here more closely.

Looking at the BLS's 2003 Consumer Survey, the people who save in this country are overwhelmingly wealthy. The bottom income quintile pulls home $8,201 a year before taxes, and spends $18,492. Meanwhile, the top quintile hauls home $127,146 a year before taxes, and spends $81,731. The poor are borrowing to the hilt and the rich are happy to oblige them. At the end of 2004, the amount of after tax income that went towards debt service was roughly 16 percent, and those numbers are much higher for low-income families. Bankruptcies are skyrocketing. So why are these families borrowing so much? Robert Pollin of EPI put out a study in 1990 arguing that the bottom 40 percent of Americans were borrowing to compensate for stagnant or falling wages. More recently, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi's Two-Income Trap compiled similar evidence—the 6,000 percent increase in credit card debt between 1968 and 2000 didn't come about because people were buying frivolities; they're simply trying to tread water, pay for health care, that sort of thing.

Now obviously if you're in the creditor class, this state of affairs looks pretty damn good. Not only do you earn interest on your surplus funds, but mass borrowing among low-income Americans reduces pressure for higher wages, by letting them buy stuff they couldn't otherwise afford, and it certainly makes America look like a middle-class consumer society, thus staving off the angry hordes from rioting. (For neoliberals who believe that society will be "fair" when everyone can own a pretty prom gown, this is fantastic. Ditto for those who think we should measure poverty by whether or not a person can afford a refrigerator.) One might also note that workers with their Visas maxed out are much, much less likely to go on strike, agitate for social change, or do anything unseemly.

The downside, of course, is that among the lower classes, very few people have much wealth to speak of. The richest 10 percent of Americans own 79.8 percent of all financial assets. The bottom 40 percent, collectively, own as much in liabilities as in assets. (Average wealth among the bottom 10 percent has been consistently declining since the 1960s.) Among minorities, especially African-Americans and non-white Hispanics, the disparities are even worse. In 2001, the average black household had a net worth equal to about 14 percent of the average white household. It's a real problem.

So the answer, then, is forced savings, right? Well, I don't know. If real wages had been growing at a decent clip these past three decades, households might have saved much more than they did. So that's one solution right there, along with Edward Wolff's idea of a wealth tax for redistribution. In contrast, government-funded "savings incentives" usually just provide tax shelters to the wealthy, who as we've seen are the lucky few who can afford to save. Having the government drop extra pennies in the accounts of the poor will help, but would barely cancel out the staggering liabilities among the poorest 40 percent.

And what about the larger economic benefits to savings? Will boosting the savings rate in this country boost growth? Hard to say. In this congressional testimony, James K. Galbraith noted that increasing the savings rate—by government fiat, say—could just as easily depress consumption. Traditionally, economists haul out graphs showing that higher savings rates are associated with periods of higher economic growth, but it might just be that it's the latter causing the former (i.e., wages rise so people can save more). A bit of skepticism never hurts.

This doesn't sound good at all:

Most ominously, the Ku Klux Klan has been increasingly active in northern Alabama and southeastern Tennessee, using immigration to revive its white-supremacist message.

That's from Clay Risen's New Republic piece on rising anti-immigration sentiment in the south. Much has been written on the ways in which racism helped to cripple the rise of the welfare state in the United States. Anger at immigrants, especially Mexicans, could easily do the same. The San Francisco Chronicle did a long story recently on the backlash against Hispanic workers coming in to New Orleans and doing work for rock-bottom wages. There's not really a happy answer to tell anybody here. I used to think that the immigration issue would split apart the Republican Party, caught between its Tom Tancredo nativist wing and its need to appeal to Hispanic voters. But that might be the wrong way to look at it.

Needless to say, liberals have been way too fond of agreeing with each other since Bush came to office, so it's time for a bit of ideological bickering. Over at TPMCafe's BookClub this week, Gene Sperling is discussing his new book, The Pro-Growth Progressive, which apparently tries to reconcile liberal and policies to promote economic growth. So, for instance, we get calls for "fiscal discipline," and individual forced savings, along with plans to strengthen health and education, which policies will supposedly make our workforce more "competitive." Oh yeah, and free trade uber alles. (By which I assume he means ending protectionism for blue-collar workers, and not for professionals or pharmaceutical companies.) In other words, DLC policies are the real pro-growth platform; accept no substitutes!

Now I haven't read Sperling's book yet—it's sitting on my desk and looks good—but color me unconvinced so far. At most, this looks like tinkering at the margins. Yes, yes, as a country we should certainly be investing in universal health care, strengthening public education, and providing other support services for working families and individuals—though not because these policies will definitely boost economic growth, but because they're the bare minimum requirements of a decent society. Any benefits that accrue from acting decent—IWPR, for instance, has argued that providing seven days of sick leave to workers would save companies $21 billion a year—are mere niceties. If they were a drag on growth, we should still do them.

Would better education be good for economic growth, and help people get the jobs they need, as Alan Greenspan would argue? Perhaps at some level, but that's not the core problem here; read "The Job Ghetto" by Katherine D. Newman and Chauncey Lennon and it becomes clear that educated workers in Harlem are being turned away from work they're perfectly qualified to do. Or read this old post. A lack of jobs and wage support, rather than a lack of education, is the thorny brush here. Meanwhile, a single-payer health care system will, of course, relieve businesses of the burden of dealing with health insurance, and that will give GM, Ford, and the rest a tidy boost in profits—and might even make them competitive, as Tom Friedman loves to say—but so long as globalization continues to further inequality, and workers see little of the benefits of economic growth, there's not much reason to care.

So here's where we part ways. Ultimately, the Democratic Party is still toeing the old Newt Gingrich line on macroeconomic policy, which is roughly: let the Fed do its job crushing inflation—and raising rates when unemployment gets "too low"—and get the budget back into balance. Then fiddle with progressive policy. This has been the ideal despite the fact that the late '90s showed that unemployment can go much, much lower than previously thought, and the Fed's rigid enforcement of 6-7 percent unemployment during the Reagan, Bush I, and early Clinton years was a swindle of colossal proportions, keeping wages stagnant. Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker are a must read on this. Meanwhile, the "fiscal discipline" obsession I don't get; if we repealed the Bush tax cuts and spent all of that money on health and education, we would still have those big deficits, but that wouldn't be a problem. Take care of people and our kids will be smart enough to figure it out. After that, it's time to reduce inequality and ensure that any future gains in productivity are shared with workers, rather than fattening corporate profits. There are other ideas but we're running out of space.

Not that the DLC platform—which, as best I can tell, is what Sperling's supporting—isn't worth fighting for. It's good. Great, even. Things like the EITC make a real difference in people's lives. I'd canvas for it. It's probably "good politics" too, for all I know. But what I'd prefer, as I wrote in a book review back in April (which has a lot more examples of the sort), is for the Democratic Party to come up with an actual economic vision, rather than an array of wonky policies to tack onto the current structure of American capitalism. As Jack Kemp always said, if you're going to go for it, you should really go for it. Especially if you're not even running for election.

Continue reading "Pro-Growth Progressives"

I've been trying to think of something clever to say about the fate of liberal interventionism in the wake of the Iraq war, but nothing's coming. Nadezhda, though, brings up a good point:

[I]t's a mistake to focus too much on Iraq as a centerpiece of a debate over when to intervene. Humanitarian concerns, and even democracy promotion, were simply not why the BushAdmin went to war.

That comes after her excellent explanation of how the war's key architects, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, aren't really neocons, but rather nationalists who "want to sustain US hegemony by... by continually using US power to eliminate enemies and dissuade potential competitors." True enough. On the other hand, you'd be hard pressed to find any "intervention" by the United States done primarily because of "humanitarian concerns." Kosovo often gets trotted out as a "good" liberal intervention—done to prevent ethnic cleansing, as the story goes—but here, for instance, is how Sidney Blumenthal described the Clinton administration's thinking in 1999:

Kosovo was the central challenge remaining to full European integration after the fall of the Soviet Union. If the crisis there were allowed to fester and ethnic cleansing allowed to succeed, Europe would be inundated with refugees. The human tragedy would be appalling. This might well demoralize the center-left political parties, but right-wing ones would seize on the developments to gain influence, exploiting fears about increased immigration and asylum seeking. NATO would seem a feckless, purposeless organization: If it could not be mobilized to ward off this new threat in Europe, what use was it? The incentive for former Warsaw Pact countries to join it would be drastically reduced; NATO expansion would become an empty exercise.

Moreover, the absence of U.S. power would trigger traditional rivalries among the European countries and hamper Britain's influence, given its link to the United States. Reform in Russia would be slowed down or derailed, as conservative political forces there would be galvanized by Serbian defiance of the West. And without the Balkan puzzle solved, Turkey and Greece might also be propelled into renewed conflict.

Notice that the fate of the actual people being massacred ranks far below strategic concerns—saving NATO, stopping all those filthy refugees from flooding Europe, and making sure the conflict doesn't spread outwards. Indeed, in his first radio address after his Senate trial, Clinton focused on the national security threat posed by Serbia, rather than humanitarian issues: "Bosnia taught us a lesson: In this volatile region, violence we fail to oppose leads to even greater violence we will have to oppose later at greater cost." Human rights, obviously, played some part in the selling of the war, but the fact that Kosovo really was important strategically—at least in Clinton's mind—explains why we went. It was a direct threat to the "liberal internationalist" order, much like Saddam Hussein was a threat to Dick Cheney's world order.

Now fair enough, the U.S. can't stop humanitarian crises everywhere, and if we're going to choose between, say, Kosovo and the Congo, we may as well factor in "national interest" to make that choice. And as world orders go, I somewhat prefer Bill Clinton's to Dick Cheney's (which is why, among other things, I think the Iraq war was a much worse idea). Still, as with Iraq, the humanitarian reasons for the Kosovo intervention were mostly a happy gloss to make people feel better about the war. Meanwhile, the "Clinton doctrine"—which stated that the United States has the right to intervene, without UN approval, when countries commit gross human rights violations—does little more than provide the United States an extra excuse, in case it needs one, to use military force abroad for other purposes.

For liberal interventionists, all of that might be okay so long as human rights are still served—who cares why we're stopping genocide so long as we're stopping it, right?—but in practice, that doesn't always happen. In Kosovo, NATO failed, for starters, to deploy adequate security after the bombing campaign ended, and as a result, ethnic Albanians began retaliating against non-Albanians—kidnappings, looting, murder, the works. "Oops." Maybe that was just a mistake in the execution, but funny how we seem to hear that excuse a lot. The United States also "blundered" by failing to secure Baghdad in early 2003. "Oops." Etc. A long string of mishaps ensued in both places. Was that just because rebuilding a country is extremely difficult? Well, yes, but it's also true that interventions that aren't carried out primarily for humanitarian reasons will, more likely than not, end up making a lot of these sorts of mistakes.

So what does all this mean? Even an administration that truly cares about using military force to promote democracy and human rights abroad—something we're never likely to get, mind you—will still have to pick and choose where to intervene. So it will likely choose based on strategic concerns, or other ulterior motives. (Public opinion is another big factor—it's hard to sell a war on morality alone.) Those "other" concerns will often end up dominating the conflict, and could thwart the humanitarian focus, or even make the intervention counterproductive from a human rights standpoint. This certainly won't always be the case—Britain's military presence in Sierra Leone in 2000 wasn't exactly carried out with the noblest of intentions, but it still did a great deal of good—but the logic of intervention is pretty grim. At the very least, it's reason to be wary. Phrased another way, while I think that, for instance, NATO should stop the genocide in Darfur, I would also be very suspicious if, in an alternate universe, NATO actually was interested in sending troops into Darfur. If that makes sense.

At any rate—and this post is dragging out, I know—we should also realize that in the years since the Cold War ended, war and genocide have been declining dramatically, and this hasn't come about because of humanitarian interventions by the U.S. and other First World powers. No, it's come about, in part, because colonial empires and Cold War rivals have stopped inciting war in the Third World, and because the international order has become more "activist" in all sorts of non-military ways. According to the 2005 Human Security Report, since 1990 we've seen:

A sixfold increase in the number of preventive diplomacy missions between 1990 and 2002

A fourfold increase in peacemaking activities between 1990 and 2001

An elevenfold increase in the number of economic sanctions in place against regimes around the world between 1989 and 2001

A fourfold increase in the number of UN peacekeeping operations between 1987 and 1999

One could go on. And the HSR provides evidence that these things, along with economic development and human rights law, all work as far as making the world less violent. Meanwhile, the rapid spread of democracy in the 1990s has helped to curb war, and most of that has been accomplished without American invasions. The basic lesson here, it seems, is that "humanitarian interventions" are really a somewhat minor issue in the grand scheme of things. (Although I still worry that allowing things such as, say, genocide in Darfur undermines that order by setting a bad example for other would-be genocidaires.) So while I doubt that liberal interventionism can ever serve as a workable basis for U.S. foreign policy, the positive side is that it may not matter much. The hard evidence suggests that the most effective things the U.S. can do for human rights are, first, to stop fueling conflict abroad—regulating the global arms trade would be a nice start—and second, to bolster the international order that genuinely has done a lot for world peace of late.

Over at Tapped, Ezra Klein points out that, as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation starts bailing out more and more troubled companies by taking over their pensions, it will start controlling more and more stocks, which means that Congress will technically "own" a greater share of corporate America. Bam! Instant socialism! He also points out that privatizing Social Security would have had a very similar effect—if Congress could choose the index funds in which workers invested—thus "potentially wreaking all sorts of havoc."

Interesting thought, though it's hard to see how worried we should be about all of this. Here in California, the two big pension funds—CalPERS ($180 billion) and CalSTRS ($125 billion)—have, under Angelides, engaged in a limited bit of activism, dumping tobacco stocks and the like, but it never seems to go anywhere. Divesting doesn't have much effect on a company's share price. On the other hand, a government-run pension fund could acquire enough shares in a company to influence the vote on this or that. Maybe this is cause for concern, though I have a hard time believing that activist pension-funds could do any more damage to the economy than hedge funds that regularly buy up shares of a company, tip the vote in favor of bad mergers, and then reap the profits at the expense of shareholders—as probably happened with the Compaq-HP deal. So I'm conflicted. William Greider's "The New Colossus" made a decent case for activist public pension funds like CalPERS, but there also won't always be progressive activists at the helm, obviously.

At any rate, reading Roger Lowenstein's "The End of Pensions" reminded me of yet another way in which America's pension problem is related to Social Security privatization—or any mandatory savings plan. For years, many companies have been predicting wildly optimistic rates of returns for their pension-fund stock holdings so that they could scale back contributions to the fund and use the cash for other purposes. Which, in turn, drives up the price of their own stocks, many of which were held by... pension funds. Can we all say "Ponzi"? Right. But the system's falling apart now that those rates of return have failed to materialize, and there's no way out for corporate pensions, which are under-funded by some $450 billion.

The Bush administration, to its credit, wants to tighten the rules for pension funding. But if firms were required to set aside even more money for pensions, many might go bankrupt, or stock prices might decline, which would in turn further endanger pensions, and on and on. Conversely, if the PBGC started bailing more funds out—with taxpayer money—that would only increase the "moral hazard," causing more firms to make risky investments. Either way, disaster. One conceivable exit strategy, then, is for Congress to create mandatory savings accounts for all workers and hence pour all that taxpayer money—or the Social Security Trust Fund—into the stock markets, creating a bubble which could help some of those rickety pension funds out. It's not clear that this would actually work, though. So disaster's probably inevitable, unless someone dreams up a clever exit strategy.

Now and again I say to myself "You know what this world needs? More blog posts on sumo." So here's a good Washington Post piece about the rise of—wait for it—blond sumo wrestlers, who, it's hoped, will "become a metaphor... for a reluctantly globalizing Japan." But is it? Everyone's always wondering, after all, when Japan plans on opening the floodgates and letting in immigrants, so as to avoid becoming a country filled only with senior citizens—and the pension burden that comes with that—but it's doubtful sumo will drive the needed cultural change here. Japan has had foreign-born wrestlers for years, including Mongolian and Hawaiian yokozunas, but that doesn't seem to have changed much, substantially. Still a fairly xenophobic place. This is a problem too.

Usually this stuff just deserves mockery, but oh, what the hell. It looks like every conservative on the planet has his/her knickers in a knock because black Maryland Democrats have been making "racially-tinged attacks" on Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a black Republican running for Senate. Well, what of it? When it comes down to it, I don't think throwing Oreos at a politician—as Morgan State students did to Steele in 2002—is ever that productive. That's just me. But conservatives are calling it "racist". The trouble is that everyone seems to mean something different by the word. So...

Just hash out the background assumptions. Many liberals, give or take, believe some variation of the following: 1) power and inequality in this country matters a great deal, especially economic power; 2) black Americans, as a group, have very little power—economically and socially; 3) "racially-tinged" remarks are vile mainly insofar as they reinforce unjust power relations. So long as you believe these three things, then no, a black progressive calling a black politician "Sambo" won't always be considered racist. It just doesn't necessarily follow. Especially when he did it after Steele tacitly endorsed Gov. Ehrlich's appearance at an all-white country club. (Actually, Steve Gilliard's post assumes two more things: 4) black Americans have never had anything handed to them, and can only eliminate racial inequality by sticking together; and 5) any black person who defects from that cause, like Steele, and joins a party that actively perpetuates racial inequality, is by definition hurting black Americans much more than, say, a white person doing the same.)

Anyway, so much for semantics, I guess. Any of those five points would be a good starting place for discussion. (#5 is the fun one, obviously.)

Psst. Quick tip. If you're keen on joining your neighborhood right-wing militia, you definitely don't want to look like an amateur. Like these guys:

Their faces were streaked with green and black paint, and they listened closely to their training instructor, Super Six, an infantry veteran of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, who motioned them off the range. Moments later, the now-rested marchers took their positions at the range, and Six sat back beneath a tree to watch. "For some of these guys it's just fun and games; they just aren't serious," Six said, idly thumbing rifle rounds and snickering at the gaudy firearms and projectile launchers fastened to a few of the shooters' guns. "Scopes are fine for hunting, but for shooting people, they're distracting," he said. "They keep you from seeing the guy sneaking up beside you."

Right, then. Leave the scope at home. That's from a Legal Affairs piece about the rise—well, continued rise—of homegrown militias since 9/11, a phenomenon the FBI seems content to ignore, more or less, at least so long as unhinged "eco-terrorists" still roam the streets, torching SUVs and chaining themselves to chemical plants or whatever it is they do. As for these militias, usually they don't do much harm in themselves—they swill beer, waste ammunition, and plan their defense against the UN invasion set to sweep in from Canada. Except that every now and again they inspire some lonely Army private to pile a few tons of fertilizer in his truck and go blow up a government building. Not so hilarious then.

Jerome Siegel of UCLA asks the baggy-eyed question: why do animals need sleep? Why does anyone need sleep? Why do different species vary so widely in the amount of sleep they need? Here's his evolutionary theory:

"The analogy I make is between hibernation and sleep," [Siegel] said. "No one says, 'What is hibernation for? It is a great mystery.' . . . It's obvious that animals hibernate because there is no food, and by shutting down the brain and body they save energy." Sleep, Siegel suggested, may play much the same role. As evidence, he cited research that has found systematic differences in the way carnivores, omnivores and herbivores sleep: Carnivores sleep longer; herbivores, shorter; and omnivores, including humans, are somewhere in the middle.

"If animals have to eat grass all day, they can't sleep a lot, but if they eat meat and are successful at killing an antelope, why bother to stay awake?" he asked.

On the other hand, mammals at greater risk of being eaten -- such as newborns -- spend large amounts of time asleep, presumably safe in hiding places devised by their parents. Supporting the evolutionary explanation, Siegel's own research has shown that when the luxury of safe hiding places is unavailable -- in the ocean, for instance -- baby dolphins and baby killer whales reverse the pattern found among terrestrial mammals. These marine mammals sleep little or never as newborns and gradually increase the amount they sleep as they mature.

So animals doze off because they haven't got much else going on. Okay. But why is there no override? And why is it so painful to avoid sleeping if, historically, we've only done it because, "Hey, why the hell not? No food here..." Maybe the next great leap in human productivity will come when scientists figure out how to let us forego sleep. That could be exciting. Or maybe extraordinarily violent, what with people forced to be around each other all the time. It's hard to say how much of human society is the way it is because we need to sleep for eight hours a night. In the sleepless future, maybe, people won't even need homes; or at least, it's not clear that we would have developed the concept of a "home" in the first place if we didn't need sleep. Or maybe it's just good to have a place to do laundry. Hmm, must go find coffee now...

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Richard Miniter kicked around what he calls the "myth" of the "suitcase nukes." Most likely, he says, the Russians never made any such thing, and what sort-of-portable nukes did exist have almost certainly been destroyed. Good news if he's right, of course, though some of his points seem less than airtight. For example, here's Miniter's account of the Denisov investigation in 1996, which looked into allegations by Alexander Lebed, a Russian general, that anywhere from 50-100 Rissoam "suitcase nukes" were unaccounted for:

Lebed's onetime deputy, Vladimir Denisov, said he headed a special investigation in July 1996--almost a year before Lebed made his charges--and found that no army field units had portable nuclear weapons of any kind. All portable nuclear devices--which are much bigger than a suitcase--were stored at a central facility under heavy guard.

Well there we have it. Or do we? Here's a less-glossy account from the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in late 2002:

It should be noted that almost nothing is known about the methods of the [Denisov] commission's work: for example, whether it checked only records or was able to compare the actual inventory to records as well (if only records were checked, it cannot be said with certainty whether more warheads were missing or whether any warheads were missing at all). Since the commission was disbanded before it was able to complete its work, it has remained unclear whether it was able to confirm the alleged loss of warheads (i.e., it looked everywhere and failed) or simply did not have time to clarify the situation (Denisov's statement seems to imply the latter). It is not even known who the members of the commission were.

Not quite as comforting. Also, some scientists have claimed that any suitcase nukes would have been controlled by the KGB, and so not listed in the records Denisov looked at, although this seems unlikely. In the end, people have said all sorts of things about "suitcase nukes," and it's truly hard to separate fact from bluster. The CNS report concludes, persusasively, that "the existence of smaller devices custom-designed for [Russian] Special Forces, probably analogous to American small atomic demolition munitions (SADMs), should not be ruled out… with a caveat that their existence should not be taken as fact." Fair and balanced, that one. But there is evidence, for instance, based on artillery shell designs, that the Russians engineers could have created such a weapon. And the records are too patchy to prove that they didn't.

Whether any of these theoretical weapons actually could have been stolen after the crack-up of the Soviet Union, meanwhile, is "impossible to say," and I don't think Miniter refutes the concerns of CNS conclusively. But. One very encouraging point, which Miniter hammers on, is that any truly portable nuclear device—weighing around 60 lbs.—would have had a very short maintenance period, like most Soviet weaponry, and would probably have deteriorated by now. Another point: the most likely time and place for a stolen nuclear suitcase bomb would have been in or around Chechnya in the early 1990s. The Chechens, certainly, have had ample reason to threaten or actually use such a device. But they haven't. Huh. So the balance of hunches definitely favors Miniter's thesis, no doubt, although this is also the sort of thing we really, really don't want to get wrong, and it would be nice to get some more solid information on this.