Bradford Plumer

Submarines From Scratch

2010-02-17T17:15:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking about a new career in amateur sub-building. Here's 34-year-old Tao Xinglai showing that anyone can do it, really. All it takes is a little ingenuity and scrap metal:

Total budget? $4,400. Of course, if we wanted to take it up a notch, there's Peter Madsen, who built the largest homemade sub in the world, the UC3 Nautilus:

Total cost: "millions of Danish crowns"—though it was still cheaper than a professionally built diesel submarine. But it might be easier to build your own submarine in Denmark, where anyone can build their own vessel without permission, as long as it's shorter than 24 meters. Meanwhile, the state of New York seems to look less favorably on makeshift subs gurgling along the channel.

Post-Apocalyptic Hard Drives

2010-02-17T16:36:00.000-05:00

Suppose human civilization collapses one day. That's not such a zany notion—lots of past civilizations have collapsed. Maybe there's nuclear war, or giraffe flu, or maybe the Yellowstone supervolcano finally heaves and spews. It's a fat disaster for awhile, but eventually things settle down. New civilizations form, people figure out electricity, and so forth. (Actually, as Kurt Cobb argues, it might not be possible to start an industrial society from scratch a second time 'round, since we've already used up most of the easiest-to-access ores and fuels. But ignore that.)

Anyway, the question: Would historians of the future be able to examine our hard drives and servers and study what twenty-first-century folks got up to? (Surely all the best info on what caused the apocalypse will be in digital form.) How much of our data would still be intact? Apparently, no one really knows for sure:

Hard drives were never intended for long-term storage, so they have not been subjected to the kind of tests used to estimate the lifetimes of formats like CDs. No one can be sure how long they will last. Kevin Murrell, a trustee of the UK's national museum of computing, recently switched on a 456 megabyte hard drive that had been powered down since the early 1980s. "We had no problems getting the data off at all," he says.

Modern drives might not fare so well, though. The storage density on hard drives is now over 200 gigabits per square inch and still climbing fast. While today's drives have sophisticated systems for compensating for the failure of small sectors, in general the more bits of data you cram into a material, the more you lose if part of it becomes degraded or damaged. What's more, a decay process that would leave a large-scale bit of data readable could destroy some smaller-scale bits. "The jury is still out on modern discs. We won't know for another 20 years," says Murrell.

Most important data is backed up on formats such as magnetic tape or optical discs. Unfortunately, many of those formats cannot be trusted to last even five years, says Joe Iraci, who studies the reliability of digital media at the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, Ontario.

Actually, though, we don't even need to consider the apocalypse. The fragile state of digital storage is already causing trouble. NASA has a few people racing to recover old images from its Lunar Orbiter missions in the 1960s, which are currently stored on magnetic tapes and may not be long for this world. And the National Archives is struggling to preserve its digital records, which tend to rot faster than paper records.

A related tale of disintegrating media comes from Larry Lessig's Free Culture—though this one has a twist. There are a lot of films that were made after 1923 that have no commercial value anymore. They never made it to video or DVD; the reels are just collecting dust in vaults somewhere. In theory, it shouldn’t be too hard to digitize these films and put them in an archive. But alas, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that was passed by Congress in 1998, any film made after 1923 won't enter the public domain until at least 2019.

That means these films are still under copyright, and anyone who wanted to restore them would have to track down the copyright-holders (not always easy to do) and probably hire a lawyer. And who's going to go through that much trouble just to restore some obscure movie that only a few people might ever watch? Yet a lot of these older movies were produced on nitrate-based stock, and they'll have dissolved by the time 2019 rolls around, leaving nothing behind but canisters of dust. It's sort of tragic.

On the cheery side, post-apocalyptic historians will presumably have less trouble snagging copies of Avatar and Titanic—that's the sort of digital media most likely to survive, if only because there are so many copies lying around. So James Cameron will be our Aeschylus, huh?

I Don't Respond Well To Mellow

2010-02-16T17:38:00.004-05:00

Annie Hall is pretty much a perfect film. But as David Kimmel describes in I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes at the Great Romantic Comedies, it didn't start out that way. The original version of the film was an epic disaster, in dire need of hacking and kneading:

In the editing room, Annie Hall was an incoherent mess. [Co-writer] Marshall Brickman was appalled. “To tell you the truth, when I saw the rough cut of Annie Hall, I thought it was terrible, completely unsalvageable. It was two and a half hours long and rambled and was tangential and just endless.”

The original version was essentially Alvy free-associating about his life and his worries. Annie (Diane Keaton) was seen briefly and then disappeared from the movie for fifteen minutes. … Even the scenes with Annie—they were already there, of course—led to fantasies and flashbacks galore. The sequence where Alvy, Annie, and Rob (Tony Roberts) head to Brooklyn originally ran ten to fifteen minutes and had many more scenes than the one to two we see in the final film. Alvy and his date from Rolling Stone (Shelly Duvall) spun off to a scene where they wound up in the Garden of Eden talking to God. When Alvy is arrested in Los Angeles (after playing bumper cars in the parking lot), there was a long scene of him interacting with the other prisoners in his cell.

Like the sculptor who chips away at the block so that the statue hidden inside can emerge, Allen and [editor Ralph] Rosenblum began hacking away at the movie to see if there was something in the material worth saving. “It was clear to Woody and me that the film started moving whenever the present-tense material with him and Keaton dominated the screen, and we began cutting in the direction of that relationship,” Rosenblum later wrote. They tossed out entire sequences, tightened things up, and always kept the focus on Alvy and Annie. Even the scenes of flashbacks to Alvy’s earlier marriages were greatly shortened. Some characters were eliminated altogether. Said Allen, “There was a lot of material taken out of that picture that I thought was wonderfully funny. … It wasn’t what I intended to do. I didn’t sit down with Marshall Brickman and say, ‘We’re going to write a picture about a relationship.”

That's not overly surprising. A lot of Woody Hall's earlier films are, well, funny, but not exactly coherent—usually the plots are thin and heavily improvised, existing only so that there's something to hang an endless series of jokes and gags on. (They were basically live-action versions of his New Yorker pieces from the time.) And the movies work because the jokes and gags are hilarious. But with Annie Hall, it seems he finally pushed that habit to excess, at least in his first go-round. But hey, it's a good thing he did! Otherwise his editors might never have decided that enough was enough.

P.S. Though it's worth noting that sometimes the editors were too zealous. They had originally, for instance, cut out the famous scene with Annie's brother Duane. It was only later, once the film started doing well in front of test audiences and they figured eh, maybe they could afford a few indulgences here and there, that they snuck Duane back in. It's funny to think how Christopher Walken's career might've unfolded if they'd kept that bit out, since that was a big early break. Maybe he doesn't go on to do Deer Hunter the following year? And then what?

Lost In Translation

2010-02-16T16:12:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of English-language writers who sell a lot of books overseas—it's not uncommon for even lesser-known American authors to get their novels translated into multiple languages. But the reverse doesn't hold nearly as well. Only a very small fraction of foreign-language authors ever manage to get published in the United States. The last two literary Nobelists, Herta Müller and J.M.G. Le Clézio, weren't widely available in English until after they won their prizes (at which point publishers scrambled to crank out translations). Why does the flow mainly go in one direction? It doesn't seem to be because Americans are boors. Emily Williams, a former literary scout, offers up a more subtle explanation:

There has been a hegemony for years of English-language books being translated into many other languages, a cultural phenomenon comparable (though much smaller in scale) to US dominance of the worldwide film market. Bestselling American authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham and Danielle Steele and Stephen King have, in translation, reliably topped bestseller lists around the world. As the market for matching these authors to publishers abroad matured, it opened the door to less commercial writers and other genres (in nonfiction, for example, American business books continue to be in high demand).

A certain savvy in picking the right American books to translate developed into a valuable editorial skill in markets abroad. Imprints and publishing strategies were then established to capitalize on books in translation. Foreign rights turned into a profit center for US publishers, and scouting agencies sprang up to help navigate the increasingly complex marketplace.

The rising fortunes of US books abroad coincides with the rise of American pop culture in general, but also has to be partly attributed to a strong culture of commercial fiction… that, until quite recently, simply didn’t exist in many other countries. A foreign editor I worked with once compared US commercial fiction to Hollywood blockbusters: any one book might be better or worse overall, but there’s a certain level of craftsmanship you can depend on.

As a result, many countries abroad have editors and scouts who are focused on selecting U.S. books for translation. They can develop a deep expertise in the U.S. market. But on the flip side, foreign books come to the U.S. market from a whole slew of different countries and languages, so it's harder for a single editor to really know any one country or region really well and have a sense for which books will do well here. As a result, says Williams, the foreign-language books that do get translated into English often get picked via haphazard connections—an agent here has a close tie with a particular agent in Spain (say).

Granted, there are still far more foreign-language books translated into English each year than you or I could ever hope to read. But it seems likely that there's a very high number of undiscovered gems out there in other countries—books from Latin America or Europe that could catch on here and garner critical acclaim (or start a craze the way Roberto Bolaño has done recently), but simply haven't made it into English by sheer bad luck.

(Flickr photo credit: christing-O-)

Heavy Toonage

2010-01-29T19:20:00.003-05:00

Due to a series of increasingly frivolous Google searches, I just spent half an hour reading up on the history of Sunday-morning cartoons in the 1980s. (This all started with a legitimate work-related query and somehow careened out of control.) Anyway, I'm sure everyone's well aware that the big, popular cartoons of that era—"Transformers" or "G.I. Joe" or "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"—were created primarily to sell action figures and boost toy sales. But the story behind their development, as best I can make it out, is pretty interesting.

Back during the 1960s, Hasbro's G.I. Joe was one of the best-selling toys around, the first action-figure blockbuster. But that changed once Star Wars came out; suddenly, all the kids were demanding Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader dolls. Part of the shift came down to marketing: The Star Wars toys were being promoted by a ridiculously popular movie, while Hasbro wasn't even allowed to use animation in its G.I. Joe commercials. At the time, the National Association of Broadcasters had outlawed animated toy commercials, for fear that they'd blur the line between fantasy and reality for young children.

At that point, Hasbro came up with an ingenious idea. There were strict rules about how you could advertise toys, but there were fewer rules on advertising comic books. So the company's executives went to Marvel Comics and said, here, we'll give you the license for our G.I. Joe comic-book line and even spend millions of dollars of our own money advertising it. Marvel, naturally, leapt at the deal, and a best-selling series was born. Hasbro, meanwhile, could finally run animated ads about G.I. Joe. And it worked: By the 1980s, G.I. Joe action figures were leaping off the shelves again. (Of course, it helped that the comic-book series was relatively well-conceived; plenty of other toy-comic tie-ins flopped.)

After that came the cartoons. For a long time, the FCC had prevented companies from creating TV shows that centered on toys (Mattel had tried this with Hot Wheels in the 1960s and got smacked down). But by 1983, Reagan's FCC had relaxed this rule. Pretty soon, a new wave of toy-themed shows started hitting on the air: "Transformers," "Thundercats," "He-Man." The trend stretched all the way down to "Teletubbies" in the 1990s. The cartoons instantly transformed the toy industry—the most successful, "Transformers," sold $100 million worth of merchandise in its first year.

In his fascinating book The Real Toy Story, Eric Clark argues that this new cartoon-toy symbiosis also altered how kids approached playtime: "Because the backstory and the programs dictated play, the nature of play itself changed—TV took control of the play environment. The old adage that a child should dictate what the toy does was discarded." Part of me wants to believe that that's slightly overstated, and that kids are more creative than this. (I had a Transformer or two back when I was younger, and I never had them reenact plots from the cartoons—Elizabethan-style court intrigue and playground bullying scenarios were far more common.) But Clark's surely onto something here; it's hard to imagine that there could be such a massive shift in toy advertising without large effects on child psychology, no?

(Flickr photo credit: Brian McCarty)

Gruesome Tongue Twisters

2010-01-28T23:25:00.004-05:00

What's the world's most throat-chokingly difficult language? Here's a worthy contender:

On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we,” inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree,” which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that "the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)," while diga ape-hiyi means "the boy played soccer (I assume)." English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

I'm convinced! The piece also argues that, contrary to popular belief, English is a relatively easy language to learn: "verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add 's', mostly) and there are no genders to remember."

That may all be true, but figuring out how to spell words in English can be a nightmare; I do believe this is the only major language in which you can actually hold spelling bees. In Spanish, by contrast, a spelling competition would be pointless since it's trivial to write out a word once you hear it. Maybe the only other possible bee-language is French—except that French-speaking countries hold dictation contests instead, as does Poland with its "Dyktando." (These usually involve scribbling down, word for exact word, a long literary passage that's read aloud.)

Japanese, meanwhile, is a comparatively simple language to speak, but then you've got the vast jungle of different characters. I don't know if there are bees for that, but there is the Kanken, the national Kanji Aptitude Test, which tests for writing, pronunciation, and stroke order, and has twelve different levels: 10 through 3, pre-2, 2, pre-1, and 1—with 10 being the easiest and 1 the hardest. As I recall, your average well-educated native speaker should be able to pass pre-2. But level 1 is no joke—you have to know about 6,000 different kanji, and, in some years, only about 200 people in the whole country earn a passing grade. The rest, I guess, just have to mutter "hóabãsiriga."

Our Nerdiest President

2010-01-28T18:34:00.002-05:00

Huh, I had no idea that James A. Garfield was credited with discovering a novel proof for the Pythagorean Theorem (a clever one, too, involving trapezoids). He did this back in 1876, before he became our second assassinated president and while he was still serving in the House—as he tells it, the proof came up in the course of "some mathematical amusements and discussions with other [members of Congress]."

I'm not sure if the country today is better off or worse off for the fact that House members no longer sit around pondering geometry in their spare time. In any case, it seems Garfield was also working on a pretty expansive math-education agenda before he got shot. Oh, and bonus Garfield trivia: He took a nasty swipe at the Mormon Church in his inaugural address (not that it mattered much—the speech was sort of a low-turnout affair).

Exporting Depression

2010-01-28T17:54:00.002-05:00

Ethan Watters has a fascinating New Scientist report on how U.S. drug companies are basically "exporting" Western notions of mental illness to other countries, in order to create new markets for their products:

The challenge GSK faced in the Japanese market was formidable. The nation did have a clinical diagnosis of depression—utsubyo—but it was nothing like the US version: it described an illness as devastating and as stigmatising as schizophrenia. Worse, at least for the sales prospects of antidepressants in Japan, it was rare. Most other states of melancholy were not considered illnesses in Japan. Indeed, the experience of prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a jibyo, a personal hardship that builds character. To make paroxetine a hit, it would not be enough to corner the small market for people diagnosed with utsubyo. As Kirmayer realised, GSK intended to influence the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression at the deepest level. ...

Which is exactly what GSK appears to have accomplished. Promoting depression as a kokoro no kaze—"a cold of the soul"—GSK managed to popularise the diagnosis. In the first year on the market, sales of paroxetine in Japan brought in $100 million. By 2005, they were approaching $350 million and rising quickly.

Now, this sort of marketing of illness is hardly novel. Back in 2005, I wrote a piece for Mother Jones about the "corporate-sponsored creation of disease" (and, please note, that's not my paranoid lefty term for the practice, but a phrase taken from a Reuters Business Insight report written for Pharma execs). Drugmakers aggressively push iffy conditions like "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" in order to extend patents and boost sales. Not surprisingly, GSK again makes a cameo:

When GSK, an American drug company, wanted to repackage its best-selling antidepressant, Paxil, to treat "social anxiety disorder"—a questionable strain of social phobia that requires medication rather than therapy—it hired PR firm Cohn & Wolfe to help raise awareness about the condition. Slogans were developed: "Imagine being allergic to people." Posters featuring distraught men and women described the symptoms, which only seem like everyday nervousness to the untrained eye: "You blush, you sweat, shake—even find it hard to breath. That's what social anxiety disorder feels like." Journalists were faxed press releases so that they could write up stories about the new disorder in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. (Does the deadline-pressed journalist need a bit of color for her story? No problem: Patient-advocacy groups, usually funded by drug companies, can provide patients to interview.) GSK even got University of California psychiatrist Murray Stein to vouch for the drug. Stein, it turns out, was a paid consultant to seventeen drug companies, including GSK, and had run company-funded trials of Paxil to treat social anxiety disorder.

How devious. Anyway, the international angle is new to me and grimly riveting. Here's a New York Times Magazine piece by Watters that further explores the phenomenon, focusing less on the corporate angle and more on the broader fact that "we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. ... That is, we've been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures."

Dos And Don'ts For Running A Host Club

2010-01-27T19:01:00.004-05:00

The Kabukicho district in Tokyo is famous for, among other sleazy wonders, its host and hostess clubs. The idea here is simple enough: In a hostess club, you have paid female employees who chat with male customers, light their cigarettes, pour drinks, sing karaoke, and generally make the men feel, I don't know, titillated. It's not a sex club—more like a flirtation club.

And then the host clubs are the reverse deal: Male hosts wait on female customers, listen to their sorrows, flatter them, light their cigarettes, pour drinks.... Since Japanese women don't typically get "waited on" by men, these clubs fill a real need. Anyway, hostess clubs have no doubt been featured in light-hearted New York Times pieces before. But I was reading Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice, a terrific book about the city's seamy underbelly, and there's a part where a cop explains that many of these clubs are actually horribly manipulative:

"It used to be that the only women who went to host bars were hostesses, but times have changed. What we keep seeing is college girls, sometimes even high school girls with money, who start going to these host clubs. They love the personal attention, and maybe they get infatuated with the hosts, who milk them for everything they have. The girls accumulate debts, and at some point the management introduces them to a job in the sex industry so that they can pay off their debts. Sometimes the guys running the host bars are the same guys who run the sex clubs."

Not all host clubs run this racket—the respectable ones try to avoid plunging their customers into crippling debt—but many of the clubs are just thinly veiled organized-crime outfits. Meanwhile, here's one young host explaining the ins and outs of his job to Adelstein:

Sometimes the thing to do is to find an actor you resemble and then basically do an impression of the guy. You make the customer feel like she is with a celebrity. ... But most of the time I just say that I'm a graduate student in law at Tokyo University and I'm just hosting to pay the tuition. It makes the customer feel like she's contributing to society, not just to my wallet. ...

You have to be able to talk to customers about almost anything, even where they send their kids to school. So I subscribe to four women's magazines to make sure I know what kinds of concerns they have. They also like to talk about television programs, but since I don't have time to watch TV I stay current by reading TV guides. ...

The bad thing is that my parents hate that I do this, even if I don't plan on doing it forever. You don't have a personal life. Every day is like summer vacation, except that you don't really have freedom. You spend most of your free time waiting on customers in one way or another; sometimes you go shopping with a customer, sometimes you go to a resort with her.

Useful tips for anyone considering a career switch.

(Flickr photo credit: yumyumcherry)

How Many Moves Ahead?

2010-01-27T10:10:00.003-05:00

Famous chess players often get asked the same thing by reporters: "How many moves can you see ahead?" The query crept up, inevitable as the sunrise, in Time's interview with 19-year-old Magnus Carlsen. (He responded, "Sometimes 15 to 20 moves ahead—but the trick is evaluating the position at the end of those calculations.") Thing is, it's sort of an odd and not very well-defined question.

In an endgame, with just a few pieces left on the board, sure, a good player will plot out where things are heading down to the bitter end. But in the middle of a game? There are about 40 possible moves in the average chess position, so analyzing all the possibilities even just two moves out would involve looking at 2.5 million positions. No human brain can pull that off. Instead, recognizing patterns and assessing positions is the far more crucial skill, which is basically what Carlsen was saying, if you read his quote carefully. In The Inner Game of Chess, Andrew Soltis argues that most grandmasters don't usually gaze more than two moves ahead—they don't need to. And then there's Garry Kasparov's take on this question, in his fascinating New York Review of Books essay on computer chess:

As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees, Russkin-Gutman makes much of the answer attributed to the great Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among others: "Just one, the best one." This answer is as good or bad as any other, a pithy way of disposing with an attempt by an outsider to ask something insightful and failing to do so. It's the equivalent of asking Lance Armstrong how many times he shifts gears during the Tour de France.

The only real answer, "It depends on the position and how much time I have," is unsatisfying. In what may have been my best tournament game at the 1999 Hoogovens tournament in the Netherlands, I visualized the winning position a full fifteen moves ahead—an unusual feat. I sacrificed a great deal of material for an attack, burning my bridges; if my calculations were faulty I would be dead lost. Although my intuition was correct and my opponent, Topalov again, failed to find the best defense under pressure, subsequent analysis showed that despite my Herculean effort I had missed a shorter route to victory. Capablanca's sarcasm aside, correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves "seen ahead"—that computers rely on.

Speaking of computer chess, I wanted to bring up one of my favorite points: that, even though your average laptop chess program can now whip any grandmaster, computers still have trouble mastering the game of Go—even the most advanced programs get crushed by skilled children. Except that, it turns out, this talking point's now a few years obsolete. According to a recent Wired report, AI Go players are starting to beat ranking human players using the Monte Carlo method. Just another step down the path to robot domination, I guess.

(Flickr photo credit: Boered)

The Great Dinosaur Wars

2009-02-02T22:49:00.005-05:00

Excuse me, but I'm on a Wikipedia bender lately. I just can't stop clicking. So here we go: The Bone Wars? This was a real thing? Oh yes. Yes it was. In the latter third of the 19th century, we learn, a pair of rival American paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othaniel Charles Marsh "used underhanded methods to out-compete each other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones."

This wasn't as gruesome as it sounds: The rivalry did spur a race to excavate, which in turn led to the discovery of 142 new species of dinosaur, including childhood favs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus. A word of appreciation, by the way, for Allosaurus: The dinosaur books I gobbled up as a kid were usually divided into three eras: the Triassic (lame chicken-sized dinosaurs), Jurassic (now these were terrible lizards…) and finally the glorious Cretaceous (oh hell yes). The Allosaurus was a late Jurassic beast, usually shown scarfing down chunks of Brontosaurus meat, and he signified a child's very first encounter with the truly massive, peerless carnivores of yore—dominating the imagination for a brief while until you flipped a few pages and stumbled across the Cretaceous-era Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of all predators. (I understand now they have Spinosaurus and other gigantic brutes that put T. Rex to shame—well, T. Rex is still top lizard in my book.)

Anyway, back to our dueling paleontologists:

On one occasion, the two scientists had gone on a fossil-collecting expedition to Cope's marl pits in New Jersey, where William Parker Foulke had discovered the holotype specimen of Hadrosaurus foulkii, described by the paleontologist Joseph Leidy; this was one of the first American dinosaur finds, and the pits were still rich with fossils.

Though the two parted amicably, Marsh secretly bribed the pit operators to divert the fossils they were discovering to him, instead of Cope. The two began attacking each other in papers and publications, and their personal relations soured. Marsh humiliated Cope by pointing out his reconstruction of the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus was flawed, with the head placed where the tail should have been. ... Cope tried to cover up his mistake by purchasing every copy he could find of the journal it was published in.

In the end, Marsh won the Bone Wars, digging up and naming 80 new species of dinosaur, versus Cope's piteous 56. But paleontology itself was the real loser—not only was the profession's good name blighted for decades by their tomfoolery, but "the reported use of dynamite and sabotage by employees of both men destroyed or buried hundreds of potentially critical fossil remains." Oh dear.

Even worse, the two miscreants would often hastily slap all sorts of bones together in their race to unveil new species, and they often assembled incorrect skeletons that sowed confusion for decades. Marsh, it turns out, was the wiseguy who fit a human skull on a looming sauropod's torso and named his creation Brontosaurus (it later had to be rechristened Apatosaurus, once it was given its correct head—the real tragedy is that the new name was clumsier and not quite so fearsome: "Apatosaurus" means "deceptive lizard"; right, uh-huh, like there's anything deceptive about that dude.)

Outsourcing the Brain

2009-02-02T11:08:00.004-05:00

In a chat with The Philosopher's Magazine, David Chalmers lays out his theory of the "extended mind," arguing that our cognitive systems are more than just what's crammed inside that gray matter in our skulls. The mind should be thought of as a larger, extended system that can encompass even gadgets like the iPhone:

"The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I'm rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I'm doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they're in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of the mind, even though it's out there in the world."

This is where the iPhone comes in, as a more contemporary example of how the extended mind works.

"A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It's always there when I need it."

Chalmers even claims it holds some of his desires.

"I have a list of all of my favorite dishes at the restaurant we go to all the time in Canberra. I say, OK, what are we going to order? Well, I'll pull up the iPhone—these are the dishes we like here. It's the repository of my desires, my plans. There's a calendar, there's an iPhone calculator, and so on. It's even got a little decision maker that comes up, yes or no."

Fine, I buy it. (Scrabble racks!) The original paper that Chalmers and Andy Clark wrote on the subject invented an Alzheimer's patient named Otto who jots things down in his notebook so that he won't forget them. When you or I need to conjure up an address or name, we just summon it from some musty alcove in our memory. When Otto needs a fact, he flips through his spiral notebook. We consider memory part of the mind, so why can't we say that Otto's notebook is part of his mind? What's the difference? It's a short hop to declaring that an iPhone can be part of one's extended mind, too.

Maybe all this just means that "mind" is an unduly foggy term. Let's all thank the relevant deities I'm not a philosopher and don't have to tear hair over this. It is odd, though, how memory works in the Internet age. When I'm writing about energy issues, let's say, then instead of learning all the nitty-gritty details about how utility decoupling works or what the latest data on snowfall in Greenland says, I never bother memorizing the details. Instead, I'll just get a feel for the main concepts and remember where on the Internet I can find more information in a pinch.

Now, sure, I do the same thing with books or notes, but I rely on this method much more often now—and, of course, the Internet's always available, making the need to memorize stuff even less acute. My head's filled with fewer actual facts and more search terms or heuristics. Everyone does it. Emily Gould recently wrote a indispensable post about Mind Google, which works like this: Rather than reaching instinctively for your iPhone to settle some trivia dispute with your friends (who did the voice of Liz in Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties again?), you just rack your futile brain about it and then, later, when you're in the bathroom gazing at the tiles and thinking about something else entirely, the answer magically slaps you in the face. ("Jennifer Love Hewitt—of freaking course!")

So some facts are still up in the old noggin. I mean, it's not like you can just do without facts altogether. It's just more efficient to outsource a larger chunk of stuff to that great hivemind on the Web. Probably a net plus. Though I wonder if someone like (oh, say) Thomas Pynchon could've written Gravity's Rainbow if instead of cramming all that stuff about rocket science and German ballads and Plato and god knows what else in his skull, he was always saying to himself, "Eh, I don't need to remember this, I'll just look it up on Wikipedia later..."

One more thing about the extended mind. It ought to include other people, too. Shouldn't it? I know I have a bunch of stories and anecdotes I can't tell—or at least tell well—without some of the other participants around to help me fill in the details and color. In effect, I have to recreate the memory with someone else. I read somewhere once a devastating article about how older widows essentially lose a large chunk of their memory after their partner dies, because there are many events that could only recollect "together," with their spouse. No, wait, maybe this was in a novel? Or a This American Life podcast? Oy, my brain's a barren wasteland—off to wheedle the answer out of the Internet.

It's Hue You Know

2009-02-02T10:58:00.003-05:00

Here's a good Monday diversion: Wikipedia's master list of color names. Learn your cobalts and ceruleans and cyans. Some of the terms on this list are fairly obscure: Would you ever, in a million years, have guessed what color "Razzmatazz" is? (It's a sort of magenta.) But some of the names are hilariously perfect—"old rose" denotes the hue of aging, sickly rose petals. And some of the terms made me realize how easily I could distinguish shades I hadn't even realized were distinguishable until I saw the names for them: I could picture right away the difference between "Islamic green" (think Saudi flag) and "shamrock green."

More clicking around... There's also a complete list of every single crayon color that Crayola has seen fit to christen over the years. Some of the names have been changed, sometimes mysteriously so. In 1990, "maize" (a childhood favorite of mine, handy for drawing golden retrievers and buried sea-treasure) was replaced by the weedier name "dandelion." The color itself changed slightly, too: Appropriately, dandelion looks more like the drab patches of yellow you'd see on an abandoned lot while maize evokes sunny Ukrainian wheat fields. Why'd they get rid of it?

Some of the Crayola color names are frivolous and totally inapt: I have no use for "laser lemon" or "Fuzzy Wuzzy brown" or even "radical red" (which, perhaps to protect kids from creeping Bolshevism, actually denotes a watery hue that's more pinkish than Pinko). But some of the Crayola names should be added to the original master list of English color names—"Granny Smith green" is an amazing term, instantly visualized, and as best I can tell has no analogue on the grown-ups' list of colors.

A few clicks later, we learn that Hungarian is the only known language to have two "basic" words for red, "piros" and "vörös." Now, it's not so unusual for a language to have a different set of basic color terms than English does: For instance, both "blue" and "azure" are basic color terms in Russian, while only "blue" is a basic color term in English (in the sense that native English speakers consider azure a type of blue, which is not the case with, say, green). What makes the Hungarian case odd is that red is the most basic color—it's the third color languages acquire a word for, after black and white. Also, there's this queer business:

* Expressions where "red" typically translates to "piros": a red road sign, the red line of Budapest Metro, a holiday shown in red in the calendar, ruddy complexion, the red nose of a clown, some red flowers (those of a neutral nature, e.g. tulips), red peppers and paprika, red card suits (hearts and diamonds), red traffic lights, red stripes on a flag, etc.

* Expressions where "red" typically translates to "vörös": red army, red wine, red carpet (for receiving important guests), red hair or beard, red lion (the mythical animal), the Red Cross, the novel The Red and the Black, the Red Sea, redshift, red giant, red blood cells, red oak, some red flowers (those with passionate connotations, e.g. roses), red fox, names of ferric and other red minerals, red copper, rust, red phosphorus, the color of blushing with anger or shame, etc.

You know, those lists made sense for a few short moments, and then I was lost again.

Recycled Cities, Prefab Homes

2009-02-01T11:37:00.001-05:00

Over at The Nation, architect Teddy Cruz walks us through Tijuana, which has been built, in large part, using waste materials from neighboring San Diego—garage doors, box crates, old tires, even abandoned post-World War II bungalows that are loaded onto trailers and shipped south. Who knew you could recycle an entire city? There's even a YouTube clip, by filmmaker Laura Hanna:

That video, incidentally, was included in the Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibit at the MoMa, which was reviewed by architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen in the current issue of The New Republic.

Goldhagen's review, by the way, is provocative and very much worth reading. She observes that, compared with other countries, prefabricated homes are curiously rare in the United States. (In Sweden, by contrast, 85 percent of homes are largely prefab, and yes, Ikea offers models.) In theory, mass-produced homes could be cheaper, the quality could be more consistent, and—here's the bonus environmental angle—they're likely to be a great deal greener than the usual contractor-built ("stick-built") variety. There's no reason prefabs have to be hideous, either, or shoddy, or drearily uniform in appearance. Trouble is, building codes vary so widely from town to town in this country that it's impractical for prefab homes to take hold. Is that a good thing? Goldhagen says probably not:

What these exhibitions demonstrated is that there is no dearth of splendid ideas for prefabricated mass-produced housing. Were the best of these ideas adopted by the market—and in the right climate, more good ideas would be forthcoming—there is no doubt that the bulk of newly constructed houses would be less toxic to the environment, better built, and last longer with fewer repairs. They would more fully and attractively accommodate the ways people currently live.

Why do we continue to settle for residential litter in ever-more-degrading landscapes? That is the question these exhibitions fail to address. But of course it is not an architectural question. In social policies, better ideas by savvier architects will change little. For quality affordable mass-produced housing to be built, we need to create different conditions for a mass market. A new legislative structure must clear away the obstacles presented by non-standard, municipally controlled building codes and create enforceable national standards for prefab-friendly, environmentally responsible manufacturing and construction practices. Incentives must be offered so that the entrenched and intransigent construction industry, which has made plenty of money on its poorly conceived, shoddily built, environmentally toxic houses, will re-configure itself.

If the necessary legislation were passed and new market incentives put in place, and the designers and manufacturers of prefabricated homes made all the real innovations in quality and reduction of price that the automobile industry has made since the Model T, who would walk away from a better designed and better built home for less money?

Et voilà—the future of homebuilding in the United States? I have no clue, but assuming energy and environmental issues continue to be central in the coming years (and why wouldn't they be?), I'd expect the question to bubble up now and again. Greening the construction industry and our built environment, after all, pretty much has to be a big part of any push to nudge down those greenhouse-gas emissions.

(Cross-posted to The Vine)

Not What I Meant!

2009-01-11T16:32:00.005-05:00

My friend Francesca Mari has a great critique of the new film adaptation of Revolutionary Road:

Instead of adapting the novel, scriptwriter Justin Haythe seems to have read only the book's dialogue—to have typed up all the quotations, then deleted the document down to two hours.

Remaining faithful to a text doesn't mean lifting as many lines as possible. This is especially true with Yates, whose characters, if you were to only listen to what they say, vacillate almost exclusively between pathetic and cruel. The heart of his stories, the stuff that lobs a lump in your throat, comes from what the characters think, and then say in spite of it. Take, for instance, the book's perfectly constructed opening scene, the staging of a community play.

"The helplessly blinking cast," Yates writes, "had been afraid that they would end by making fools of themselves, and they had compounded that fear by being afraid to admit it." Gnawing on his knuckles in the front row, Frank watches his wife, initially a vision of the poised actress he fell for, devolve into the stiff, suffering creature who often sleeps on his sofa. After final curtain, he plans to tell April she was wonderful, but then watching her through a mirror as she wipes her makeup off with cold cream, he suddenly thinks twice: "'You were wonderful' might be exactly the wrong thing to say--condescending, or at the very least naïve and sentimental, and much too serious." Frank watches April through the mirror remove her makeup with cold cream. "'Well,' he said instead, 'I guess it wasn't exactly a triumph or anything, was it?'"

Haven't seen the movie yet, but I can see why that'd be a problem. Most of the book's best scenes involve a tension, usually cringe-inducing, between what the characters mean to say and what actually comes out of their mouths, either because they overthink things, or because they miscalculate how their words will come across, or because they're overcome by some fleeting childish urge to hurt, or because—most commonly—they just fail to take the other person into account. At one point, Frank plots out in his mind an entire conversation with his wife, and then gets enraged when she doesn't deliver her hoped-for lines.

That seems like a devilishly hard thing to convey in a film, assuming that there's not some hokey narrator voicing an interior monologue all the while—sort of like in A Christmas Story—especially since Yates relies on this trick so frequently. But now I'm trying to think of movies that do this well, and my brain's coming up blank.

(Image by Antony Hare)

To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time

2009-01-10T12:10:00.002-05:00

Here's a topic that's always mystified me. Go back to the late 17th century. Newton and Leibniz had both independently developed calculus, and, when they weren't bickering over who deserved credit, they were disagreeing about the metaphysical nature of time. Newton believed that space and time were real and independent from each other. No, countered Leibniz, time and space are just two interrelated ways of ordering objects: "For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order to things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together." Clever. But most physicists ended up siding with Newton—our basic intuition is that space and time both exist, and are separate from each other.

But then things got tricky. Once general relativity was formulated, we suddenly had this notion of space-time as a continuous fabric. In Einstein's universe, how time flows depends on one's location. In places where gravity is weaker, time runs faster. Technically, you age slightly more rapidly living in a penthouse than you would living down on the street level—think of it as a small dose of cosmic income redistribution. So that's one troubling little chink in Newton's theory.

Then we get even bigger problems burrowing down into the quantum universe, where it's not clear that time is even a relevant concept. How would you measure it? There are experiments to nail down all sorts of qualities about particles—their position, their momentum, their spin—but not how they mark time, or how long they'll stay in a certain place. Or, rather, there are plenty of ways to try to measure that, but all result in wildly different answers. Not only that, but electrons and photons don't even appear to be bound by the arrow of time; their quantum states can evolve both forward and backward. An observation of certain particles in the present can affect their past natures, and so on.

So how are we supposed to reconcile all this? Some scientists now seem to think that maybe Leibniz was right all along, and we should reconsider his argument more carefully. In a recent issue of New Scientist, Michael Brooks interviewed Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the Mediterranean, who argues that the simplest approach to time is to stop talking about how things change over time and, instead, just talk about how things relate to each other: "Rather than thinking that a pendulum oscillates with time and the hand of a clock moves in time, we would do better to consider the relationship between the position of a pendulum and the position of the hand." The notion of time is only a meaningful metaphor when dealing with, say, human experience. It's useless, Rovelli argues, for most of the universe.

That's a bit wild, and maybe we don't want to abandon Newton just yet. So one potential way to preserve time as a really-existing entity has been offered up by Lee Smolin, who argues that the reason scientists haven't been able to reconcile quantum physics and relativity—and bring the laws of the universe under one tidy grand theory—is that they aren't accounting for the fact that the laws of physics can evolve over time. In the early moments of the universe, after all, we know that the electromagnetic and weak forces were rolled up together. So why can't we see other such evolutions? Time is fundamental—it's just the laws of physics that change. (And, fair enough: There's no logical reason why the laws of physics have to be eternally true—they've only really applied for less than 14 billion years.)

Then there's the weird fact that the arrow of time always seems to move forward, as encapsulated by the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that the entropy or disorder in the universe is always increasing. That explains why cream mixes with your coffee over time—technically, it would be possible for me to dump in some cream, mix it around, and then have the two liquids sort themselves out: milk on top, coffee on bottom. But this is staggeringly unlikely from a statistical perspective, and the most probable states are some sort of mixture. Time moving in reverse—i.e., the milk and coffee "unmixing"—is very, very, very, very, unlikely. (Very.) So unlikely from a statistical perspective, in fact, that it basically doesn't happen.

But that raises at least one squirm-inducing question: How did the universe, then, start out at a low-entropy, extremely orderly state (which has been getting messier ever since) in the first place? Sean Carroll wrote a whole article in Scientific American earlier this year about this and outlined one possible (and possibly wacky) solution:

This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.

Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time—both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.

The idea of a universe with a backward arrow of time might seem alarming. If we met someone from such a universe, would they remember the future? Happily, there is no danger of such a rendezvous. In the scenario we are describing, the only places where time seems to run backward are enormously far back in our past—long before our big bang. In between is a broad expanse of universe in which time does not seem to run at all; almost no matter exists, and entropy does not evolve. Any beings who lived in one of these time-reversed regions would not be born old and die young—or anything else out of the ordinary. To them, time would flow in a completely conventional fashion. It is only when comparing their universe to ours that anything seems out of the ordinary—our past is their future, and vice versa. But such a comparison is purely hypothetical, as we cannot get there and they cannot come here.

Hm. These are things I don't really understand at all (feel free to drive that point home in comments!) and wonder if it's even worth the effort to try. Probably not. The other maddening fact about time is that there's not, alas, ever enough of it.

Little Lefties

2009-01-10T11:03:00.001-05:00

Are most parents closet Marxists? Caleb Crain says of course they are:

After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years—to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism.

But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective.

That's from Crain's amusing review of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, and I'd say it makes sense. What else is elementary school if not a marginally more humane version of the Soviet Five-Year Plans?

Doom, Sweet Doom

2009-01-05T21:12:00.004-05:00

Oh, man. Back in October, I ran across some evidence that the supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park capable of obliterating a good chunk of the United States might actually be losing its vigor, maybe even going dormant. Well, scratch that. Charlie Petit reports that since December 26, there's been an unusually large uptick in earthquake activity beneath Yellowstone—some 400 seismic events in all. Is the beast getting restless? Let's pray not, 'cause here's a quick recap of what doomsday would look like:

On the upside, if Yellowstone does burst, we could stop fretting about global warming for a spell, since all that ash would have a fairly sizable cooling effect...

Update: Doom averted for now! The AP added an update yesterday, reporting that the earthquakes appear to be subsiding, and that, according to one researcher, the seismic shudders "could alter some of the park's thermal features but should not raise any concern about the park's large volcano erupting anytime soon." Now I'm off to find something else to fret about.

Not Poppy, Nor Mandragora, Nor all the Drowsy Syrups of the World...

2009-01-05T18:05:00.002-05:00

So there's the good jetlag, the kind where you return home from parts unknown, collapse at 9 p.m., wake before dawn, and are just the most productive little honeybee that's ever buzzed. And then there's the other kind, the bad jetlag—awake all night, useless as an earlobe in daylight. Right now, I have the second kind, so I've been trying to stay awake by reading about sleep. People always tell pollsters that they don't sleep enough and wish they got more. That sounds iffy to me. Do people really want more? Why not less? And how bad is a little sleep deprivation, really?

Jim Horne, who runs the University of Loughborough's Sleep Research Centre in the UK, explains in New Scientist that most modern folks probably get enough more than enough sleep, about 7 hours a night. (Presumably excluding parents with newborns.) Americans didn't actually get 9 hours back in 1913, as is sometimes claimed, and just because you snooze for 10 or 11 hours on the weekend doesn't mean you're catching up on some supposed "sleep deficit"—odds are, you're just merrily and needlessly oversleeping, in the same way a person might merrily overeat or overdrink beyond what they need. Sloths will sleep 16 hours a day if caged and bored, versus just 10 in the wild. "Now wait a sec," the critic interjects, "That's well and good, but I must be sleep-deprived, because whenever three p.m. rolls round my eyelids get uncontrollably heavy!" Mine too. But Horne says that's just our bad luck:

My team recently investigated these questions by giving around 11,000 adults a questionnaire asking indirectly about perceived sleep shortfall. ... Half the respondents turned out to have a sleep shortfall, averaging 25 minutes a night, and around 20 per cent had excessive daytime sleepiness. However, the people with a sleep deficit were no more likely to experience daytime sleepiness than those without.

Can't decide whether that's comforting or no. On an only semi-related note, apparently the brain consumes just as much oxygen when it's "idling" as it does when problem-solving. So, uh, what's the resting brain doing, anyway? Douglas Fox reports on some theories, most of which involve daydreaming—the "idle" brain is likely doing crucial work, sorting through the vast mess of memories in your brain, looking at them introspectively, and deciding which ones to keep and how to classify them—good, bad, threatening, painful. "To prevent a backlog of unstored memories building up," Fox notes, "the network returns to its duties whenever it can."

So there's a (scientific!) rationale for staying up late and staring blankly at the wall during the day. That strikes me as exceedingly useful.

In Search of a Greener Laptop

2009-01-04T23:36:00.004-05:00

It's never that surprising to hear that some companies aren't quite as eco-friendly as they claim to be, but sometimes the examples are worth examining in detail. Last week, Ben Charny reported in The Wall Street Journal that Apple Inc., which has gone out of its way to flaunt its green cred, doesn't always stack up so well to its competitors: "For example, Dell and Hewlett-Packard report buying much more clean energy than Apple; Dell 58 times more, and Hewlett-Packard five times more."

Now, clean energy is a decent metric, though a computer's impact on the environment mostly depends on how much energy it consumes after it's been purchased. On that score, MacBooks do... okay. That said, I wish these comparisons would look more broadly at product durability. A company making laptops that last five years on average is greener than one whose computers last for just three, consuming fewer resources and spewing less hazardous waste—especially since e-recycling programs are often flawed. And, as EcoGeek's Hank Green reported last year, some of Apple's newer iPods and iPhones are designed to be virtually impossible to repair, which ends up encouraging people to junk their old gadgets and buy new ones.

For a longer discussion of this topic, Giles Slade's Made to Break is a fascinating book, and some of his insights on how businesses make short-lived products to encourage excess consumption should be taken to heart when trying to figure out just how green a company really is. True, the EPA considers "product longevity" as a factor in its EPEAT labeling for electronics, but that system is voluntary and doesn't work terribly well. Recommending that computers have "modular designs," say, hasn't stopped the average lifespan of personal computers from plummeting from six years in 1997 to two years in 2005. It's likely that rethinking the whole notion of "planned obsolescence" would involve very drastic regulatory (and probably cultural) changes. Maybe that's not desirable—maybe it's a good thing that our cell phones go out of style every 12 months. In the meantime, though, we could probably stand to require better buyback and recycling programs.

While we're on the topic, the Journal also had a fantastic dissection of Dell's claims to be "carbon neutral." Turns out, when Dell's executives fling that term around, they're only talking about Dell proper—they're not talking about Dell's suppliers or the people running Dell computers. Which basically means they're talking about just 5 percent of Dell's actual carbon footprint. And even that 5 percent achieves neutrality mostly via carbon offsets, which are often quite dubious (sure they're planting a forest—but how do they know the forest wouldn't have been planted anyway?) Well-meaning corporate initiatives are nice, but they're no substitute for better regulation and carbon pricing.

(Cross-posted to The Vine)

On the Drug Money Trail

2009-01-04T18:15:00.006-05:00

Talk about unnerving: In this month's New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell argues that "it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines" when it comes to drugs or medical devices. Big Pharma, she argues, has corrupted the clinical trial process too thoroughly. (Interestingly, the essay focuses primarily on drugs, although the approval processes for medical devices or, say, new surgical techniques are often even less stringent—surely big financial interests have a lot of sway there, too.)

Angell's full essay is worth taking for a spin, but note that the problems she discusses are especially acute when it comes to off-label uses of drugs. Once the FDA approves a drug for a specific purpose, doctors can legally prescribe it for any other disease they feel like. So drug companies design and bankroll often-dubious trials to "test" those other uses, pay some esteemed researcher a fat consulting fee so that he'll slap his name on the results (unless the results are unfavorable, in which case into the dustbin they go), and then lobby doctors—with gifts, if necessary—to start prescribing the drug for the new use. Oh yeah, step four: Profit!

But if all this subtle—and often not-so-subtle—corruption is hard to eliminate, as Angell says it is, why not create stricter FDA regulations on off-label use? Angell estimates that roughly half of all current prescriptions are off-label, and no doubt many of those are valid, but we've also seen, for instance, a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among children between 1994 and 2003, with many being treated with powerful psychoactive drugs off-label—side-effects and all. It makes little sense that a drug company has to spend years and millions of dollars getting FDA approval for one use of a drug, but then all other uses are automatically kosher, no matter how little reliable data exists. Or is this off-label "loophole" useful and effective in some way I'm not grasping?

On a related note, a few weeks ago, The New York Times had a great piece on how psychiatrists were gearing up to put together the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the "bible" of psychiatry. Edward Shorter, a historian in the field, was quoted arguing that psychiatry is not like, say, cardiology—no one really knows the causes of various mental disorders, so "political, social, and financial" factors often drive the classifications. Financial, indeed: As Angell notes, of the 170 contributors to the DSM-IV, 95 had financial ties to drug companies.

Now, does that help explain why, as Christopher Lane reports in his new book,
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, ordinary shyness went from being listed as a rare "social phobia" in 1980s DSM-III to a full-fledged "social anxiety disorder" in 1994's DSM-IV? Maybe, maybe not, though GlaxoSmithKline certainly found it profitable to push the idea of social-anxiety disorder on the public ("Imagine being allergic to people...") and marketing its antidepressant, Paxil, as a treatment.

That's not to say the disorder's fake, or that Paxil can't help people; just that there's a set of murky judgments at work here not grounded in rigorous scientific evidence, and a little more transparency would be nice. But alas, as the Times reported, the contributors to DSM-V have all signed non-disclosure agreements. No peeking behind the curtain. True, the participants have agreed to limit their income from drug companies to "only" $10,000 a year while working on the DSM-V, though, given that drug companies potentially have billions at stake on what does and does not go in the manual, it's not hard to imagine that they might try to, ah, push the envelope a wee bit.

Toooons.

2009-01-04T13:06:00.008-05:00

Well, lookit what we got here. It is possible to embed music on your lowly little blog! Very nice, and a bouquet of lilacs dispatched to LaLa.com. Now, what the world emphatically does not need is another mp3 blog telling you that, dude, the white scruffy indie kid over here likes the new Fleet Foxes EP. So I'll pass on that. But what the world might need is more Senagalese Afro-Latin big bands from the '80s that recently (albeit only partially) reunited. Like so:

Sutukun - Orchestre Baobab

Inside the Machine

2009-01-04T11:59:00.003-05:00

Over the holidays, I picked up an old, yellowing copy of Mike Royko's Boss, his best-selling and unauthorized—to put it lightly—1971 biography of former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. This may sound naïve, but I found the book incredibly eye-opening. Sure, I've always had a hazy sense of how urban machine politics worked, and I've heard a fair bit about how horrifically corrupt and mismanaged many big cities were back in the 1950s and '60s—especially if you were poor or black—but Boss doles out the gory details. And, yes, later historians have softened Royko's portrait of Daley as a corrupt, racist strongman, but as best I can discern, the book's held up reasonably well.

Daley didn't create Chicago's Democratic machine, but by the time he won his first mayor race in 1955, he had worked in all of its critical nodes—from key budget positions to state party chair—and was able to consolidate his control over the vast apparatus like no one else before him, or since. Not even Rod Blagojevich. Not even close.

It went like this: Chicago had some 3,500 precincts, each with captains and assistant captains and underlings galore who devoted their energy to turning out votes—or stealing them, if it came to that—in exchange for well-heeled patronage jobs. Not just government jobs, but jobs at racetracks or public utilities or private industries—the Machine had the power to all sorts of jobs to supporters, since, after all, these utilities and contractors relied on the Daley administration for contracts and business. And the Machine always delivered the votes. (True, it didn't win Illinois for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, though Royko argues that was only because Daley had lost faith in Humphrey by that point and focused on downticket races.)

At its peak, the Machine seemed practically omnipotent: Judges came up through the Machine. The top law firms were run by lawyers close to the Machine. Who else would you want handling a zoning dispute for you? And ward bosses usually used their power to enrich themselves. Companies rushed to pay premiums to insurance firms run by ward bosses, lest they fall afoul of the county assessor or zoning board. And Daley stood on top of it all. Only Daley could keep track of all the moving parts. Only Daley, who retained his party chairmanship, knew how much money was flowing in, and how much flowing out.

Most of his money came from contractors, since the hallmark of Daley's administration was building lots and lots of stuff in Chicago's downtown. The Dan Ryan Expressway. The John Hancock Building. Most of O'Hare Airport. And on and on and on. All Daley's doing. The revisionist take on Daley seems to hold that because he revitalized downtown he saved Chicago from the blight that later afflicted, say, Detroit and Cleveland. Maybe. Another revisionist take is that Daley got things built that a non-boss mayor never could have. Maybe. But there were costs, of course. Old neighborhoods were razed in the name of "urban renewal"—including a loyal Italian ward in the Valley—and replacement housing never built. Commonwealth Edison, which ran a hideously dirty coal plant responsible for one-third of the city's pollution, was allowed to evade pollution laws simply because a boyhood friend of Daley's sat on the board.

And Daley's tenure reads like an utter disaster when we're not talking about gleaming buildings. Royko points out the grim irony in the fact that black voters continued giving Daley his electoral majorities despite the fact that he gave them absolutely nothing. (Not that black voters always had a choice: Precinct captains weren't shy about issuing threats in poorer neighborhoods—vote or else you'll lose your public housing, and, yes, I think I will go into the voting booth with you...) During Daley's tenure, the black neighborhoods had some of the worst slums in the country, crumbling schools, and rampant crime—since police often focused more on extortion than crime prevention. (True, the police department did get cleaned up a bit after Daley appointed Orlando Wilson, a UC law professor, as police chief—but Daley was forced to do this after it was revealed that a number of his police officers were running their own armed robbery gang.)

Easily the most stunning part of Royko's book is his description of how Daley fended off Chicago's civil rights demonstrators—including Martin Luther King. Daley, of course, had no interest in undoing Chicago's sharply enforced neighborhood segregation. Even if he had wanted to—and there's no indication that he did—the city's white voters, who were prone to violence anytime a black person so much as walked through their lily enclaves, would've revolted. But Daley was able to do what the mayor of Birmingham could not and neutralize King by, essentially, co-opting him. The two would meet and Daley would insist that he was a liberal, point to all his well-meaning social programs, heap promises on high... it was all b.s., but what could King say to that?

Another provocative bit in Royko's book was his short discussion of the Black Panthers. The black gangs operating in Chicago during the 1960s were hardly angelic, though some of them did run health clinics and school-lunch programs and broker truces between street gangs. But Daley wasn't chiefly worried about the violence. He was worried that these groups might eventually turn to politics. After all, Daley himself had, as a youth, been a member in a violent Irish gang, the Hamburg Social and Athletic Club, which eventually became a "mainstream" political organization that organized voters, elected local alderman, and launched many a high-flying political career. It wasn't hard to envision the Black Panthers following a similar trajectory, so Daley ordered his police chief to declare war.

Like I said, I'm sure there have been plenty of reassessments of Daley since Royko's unrelentingly scathing account (which, incidentally, was banned from many a Chicago bookstore upon release by order of Hizzoner himself). But Boss is definitely worth reading. Very often, people will tell the story of urban decay like this: Cities were flourishing in the 1940s and 1950s but then fell to tatters in the late '60s with the rise of crime, integration, busing, white flight, and so on. Royko makes a very good case that the rot began long before then.

Ree-vamp! Ree-vamp!

2009-01-04T11:37:00.002-05:00

As it tends to do, New Year's Day came and went this year, and, as always, I made a few half-hearted New Year's resolutions—that's right, lurking somewhere deep within my to-do list is a note to "research gym memberships on Google"... fortunately, that's probably as far as that will ever get. But one thing I expressly did not resolve to do was revive this blog. No sir.

But... of course there's a "but." But then an errant bookmark click sent me tumbling down to this musty old site, and, hot damn, it's been eight whole months since I've written anything here. Not that I've abstained from littering the Internet with gibberish, no—The Vine over at TNR has kept me busy doing plenty of that. But, y'know, I do sort of miss having a personal blog, so maybe I'll take a stab at a relaunch. Luckily, this site has been stripped of all its former readers, which may let me take it in a brand-new direction. Perhaps I'll try less politics, more random and extraneous crap—this could morph into a music blog, or a glorified diary of my social life, or maybe I'll just put my hands in my pocket, hold my head high, and whistle nonchalantly for post after post. La da dee...

Anyway, we'll see how long this latest blog incarnation will actually last. Happily, this isn't an official New Year's resolution or anything—nothing filed in triplicate, nothing involving solemn swears—so if it doesn't work, I can just drop it at any time, though, if that happens, I'll no doubt put up some lethargic meta-post explaining why I'm quitting yet again. And yes, it is a good question who I'm writing this post for.

Work, Work, Work

2008-04-12T12:13:00.004-04:00

Okay, this here blog's taking a wee vacation (as if you couldn't tell). For now, I'm helping run The New Republic's new enviro blog, which still needs a name—The Vine? The Weed?—and may just be a temporary thing to coincide with our recent environment issue, but who knows.

Speaking of which, I've got a longer piece in the new issue of TNR on the big fight within SEIU that's going on right now. It's interesting, and I do think the debate at the heart of the feud is substantively quite important, and speaks to broader issues of what unions are for, and how they could survive and grow. I tried to lay things out as fairly and as clearly as I could, so... check it out.

Trillions Here, Trillions There

2008-03-21T19:36:00.002-04:00

Depressing: "Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends."

Hey Pig Piggy Pig Pig Pig

2008-03-21T18:43:00.007-04:00

"Hey, what's with the dearth of great free content 'round these parts?" Well, sorry, I've been waylaid with the flu or worse. "Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair / Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch," as Milton put it. But all's well now, so onto business. Michael Gazzaniga's forthcoming book, Human, has this entertaining history of the "animal courts" that were sometimes held in Europe during the Middle Ages:

From 824 to 1845, in Europe, animals did not get off scot-free when they violated the laws of man... Just like common criminals, they too could be arrested and jailed (animal and criminals would incarcerated in the same prison), accused of wrongdoing, and have to stand trial. The court would appoint them a lawyers, who would represent them and defend them at a trial. A few lawyers became famous for their animal defenses.

The accused animal, if found guilty, would then be punished. The punishment would often be retributive in nature, so that whatever the animal had done would be done to it. In the case of a particular pig (during those times pigs ran freely through towns, and were rather aggressive) that had attacked the face and pulled the arms off a small child, the punishment was the pig had its face mangled and its forelegs cut off, and then was hanged. Animals were punished because they were harmful. However, sometimes if the animal was valuable, such as an ox or horse, its sentence would be ameliorated, or perhaps the animal would be given to the church. If the animal had been found guilty of "buggery" (sodomy) both it and the buggerer were put to death. If domestic animals had caused damages and were found guilty, their owners would be fined for not controlling them.

There seems to have been some ambivalence as to whether an animal was fully responsible or whether its owner should be also considered responsible. Because animals were peers in judicial proceedings with humans, it was considered improper to eat the bodies of any animals that were capitally punished (except for the thrifty Flemish, who would enjoy a good steak after a cow was hanged).

Animals could also be tortured for confessions. If they didn't confess—and no one supposed they would—then their sentence could be lessened. You see, it was important to follow the law exactly, for if humans were tortured and didn't confess, then their sentence could also be changed. Many different types of domestic animals had their day in court: horses for throwing riders or causing carts to tip, dogs for biting, bulls for stampeding and injuring or goring someone, and pigs most commonly of all. These trials were held in civil courts.

The source is E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906). Now, Gazzaniga recounts this all to argue that "our species has had a hard time drawing the line between" humans and other animals—that we're frequently in the habit of ascribing agency to other species. But this long review of Evans's book offers a very different read of the medieval animal courts: "Goring oxen were not to be executed because they were morally guilty, but because, as lower animals who had killed higher animals, they threatened to turn upside down the divinely-ordained hierarchy of God's creation." That seems more likely, no?

A Tale of Two Teas

2008-03-11T23:21:00.003-04:00

Why is green tea so popular in Asia while black tea is all the rage in the West? Tom Sandage's A History of the World in Six Glasses proffers a theory:

The first tea was green tea, the kind that had always been consumed by the Chinese. Black tea, which is made by allowing the newly picked green leaves to oxidize by leaving them overnight, only appeared during the Ming dynasty; its origins are a mystery. It came to be regarded by the Chinese as suitable only for consumption by foreigners and eventually dominated exports to Europe. Clueless as to the origins of tea, Europeans wrongly assumed green and black tea were two entirely different botanical species. ...

It is not too much exaggeration to say that almost nobody in Britain drank tea at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and nearly everybody did at the end of it. ... [There was a] widespread practice of adulteration, the stretching of tea by mixing it with ash and willow leaves, sawdust, flowers, and more dubious substances--even sheep's dung, according to one account--often colored and disguised using chemical dyes. Tea was adulterated in one way or another at almost every stage along the chain from leaf to cup. ...

Black tea became more popular, partly because it was more durable than green tea on long voyages, but also as a side effect of this adulteration. Many of the chemicals used to make fake green tea were poisonous, whereas black tea was safer, even when adulterated. As black tea started to displace the smoother, less bitter green tea, the addition of sugar and milk helped to make it more palatable.

So there you have it. But why is black tea safer "even when adulterated"? Surely it doesn't have the power to neutralize the "dubious substances" on its own, right?

'90s-era David Simon

2008-03-11T13:37:00.003-04:00

Pulled up from The New Republic's archives, a great 1997 piece by Wire-creator David Simon that recounts, among other things, an amusing shoot from his first TV project, Homicide:

The day this scene was shot was not without its peculiar charm.

"You all want to be in a TV show?"

"Which one?" asked Boo.

"'Homicide.' The cop show."

"What do we have to do?"

"Sling drugs on a corner and get chased by the police."

They looked at each other for a long moment. Then laughter broke on the Southwest Baltimore crossroads of Gilmor and McHenry. Tae, Dinky, Manny Man, DeAndre, R.C.--all of them were willing to leave their real corner untended for a day, travel across town and play-act for the National Broadcasting Corporation. Only Boo was unsure.

"How much we gonna get paid?" he asked.

"You'll be non-union extras," I told him. "That means about $45 for the day. "

"Sheeeet," drawled Boo.

Forty-five dollars was fifteen minutes' work at McHenry and Gilmor. I knew this because, at that point, I had been around Tae and Dinky and the others for about ten months, and, for most of that time, they had sold drugs. I, in turn, had watched them sell drugs.

"I don't care," Tae said finally. "I wanna be on TV."

Boo stayed on the corner that day, slinging blue-topped vials of coke. The rest followed Tae across town to the Perkins Homes, a squat stretch of public housing that would serve as the pretend drug market. They filled out tax forms, waited out the inevitable delays and were eventually escorted by an assistant director to a battered side street. There, on the set, a props man handed them pretend drugs and pretend weapons, and the director, a very earnest white man, arranged them on the street in the manner most pleasing to the camera.

"You there, can you move to that doorway?"

Dinky stepped into the doorway.

"And you--can you show some of the gun? Right. Tuck in your shirt so we can see the gun."

R.C. arranged his shirt so the butt of the prop gun showed.

They filmed the scene over and over, with the director covering it from a variety of angles and distances. Each time, the pretend lookout shouted his warning. Each time, the corner boys ran from the approaching radio car. Each time, they were penned in the same alley, forced to the ground and given the handcuffs.

After the eighth or ninth take, the boys began to rebel.

"I'm sayin' this is bullshit," muttered Dinky. "They got all of us dirty like this. Dave, man, you know it wouldn't be that way. You know we don't do it like that."

It was true. The props department had stuffed fake drugs and guns and knives into the pockets of all the extras. Every last one of them would be caught holding, every last one would, in the make-believe world, take a charge. At Gilmor and McHenry, it was very different. The boys worked ground stashes, handling only a vial or two at a time. They kept the guns in rowhouse vestibules or atop the tires of parked cars. They didn't run at the first sign of a police car. They didn't have to run.

Well, it's a good show all the same.

Amis on Alcohol

2008-03-11T11:43:00.011-04:00

Yes, I know. Any discussion of either Kingsley Amis, hangovers, or (especially) Kingsley Amis' thoughts on binge drinking and its consequences must include Lucky Jim's peerless description of a particularly wretched hangover. So without further ado:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Now that that's out of the way, Alexander Waugh has written a whole essay on Amis' (rather extensive) views on drinking. "Beer drinkers," Waugh observes, "have bellies, gin swiggers sallow jowls, and wine, port, and brandy drinkers a 'Rudolph conk,' formed by a rosaceous labyrinth of tiny, luminous blood vessels assembling itself on the nose." Amis was a whiskey man himself and his telltale, Waugh offers, was the "Scotch gaze," a phrase that may be familiar in Aberdeen, but seems to be beyond the ken of Google. Ah, well. Amis, who was very often hilarious, insisted that hilarity and drink were "connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way," but I actually found this passage of his extraordinarily sad:

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Well, I won't belabor it, but read the whole thing if you need a break from Eliot Spitzer, or Democratic delegate counts, or whatever else is going on.

What's Wrong with Prostitution?

2008-03-10T17:26:00.013-04:00

Every time some public official gets caught with his pants down in a brothel, Scott Lemieux e-mails me to say I should dredge up stuff I've written in the past on the question of whether prostitution should be legal or not. Well, okay, I doubt I have that much to add, but seeing as how Eliot Spitzer's just been busted for "arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month," and seeing as how I am trying to make a good-faith effort to revive this little blog, why not take the low road and cannibalize some old posts on the subject?

The moral questions surrounding prostitution are thorny (is it ever freely chosen? is it always coercive?), so let's set that aside and just note that criminalization creates a host of practical problems—and usually makes the sex trade more dangerous. One recent study by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh found that many police officers rape prostitutes on a fairly regular basis, holding the threat of arrest over their heads (as do gang members offering "protection"). And, in the underground market, condoms are used only 20 percent of the time, versus the near-100 percent rate you see in legal-but-regulated Nevada brothels.

There's also something to the criticism that many attempts to stop sex trafficking end up hurting women who join the sex trade "voluntarily" (yeah, those are scare quotes). The International Justice Mission, for instance, a Christian organization that helps the Thai police bust brothels, frequently "rescues" women who don't actually want to be freed. "We need to make money for our families," one woman said after a raid in 2001. "How can you do this to us?" It's not as if those women can go find cushy office jobs instead. Most of them are faced with an array of bad options, and having the state insist that they pick one bad option over another doesn't necessarily improve their lives. (Of course, this may not be as true for the $5,500-an-hour prostitutes that Spitzer seems to favor, but who knows?)

So there's that. But I'm also not totally convinced that we should do what many sex-worker advocates in Nevada are calling for and decriminalize the business entirely. Now, these advocates talk and listen to actual sex workers and know infinitely more than I do about this, but there's at least some basis for hesitation. In 2003, the Scottish government, looking to revamp its own prostitution laws, did a massive report on different policies around the world, and discovered that legalization-plus-regulation comes with its own set of problems.

The study found that, as you'd expect, legalization often led to a dramatic expansion of the sex industry: In Australia, brothels proliferated to the point where they overwhelmed the state's ability to regulate them, and became mired in organized crime and corruption. In many countries, child prostitution and the trafficking of foreign women also increased dramatically. More importantly, surveys found that many sex workers still felt coerced and unsafe even after decriminalization. In the

Netherlands

—often held up as a model—a survey done in 2000 found that 79 percent of prostitutes were in the sex business "due to some degree of force." Back home, I'm not sure how well Nevada's legalization scheme has worked. Here's a study showing that women in regulated brothels face significantly lower levels of violence, although here's evidence that conditions are still frequently horrific.

I used to think the most promising approach was Sweden's. There, prostitution is considered "an aspect of male violence against women and children" and treated as such. Legislation, passed in 1999 as part of a broader "violence against women" bill, partly decriminalized the selling of sex while making the buying of sex illegal (pimping was already outlawed). On the other hand, prostitutes are still punished in various ways—known sex workers can lose custody of their kids, for one. And although the bill provides funds to help prostitutes who want to get out of the business, many sex workers say the aid is inadequate. Worse, because prostitution is not supposed to exist, there are now fewer drop-in health centers available for sex workers.

The actual effects of the law are still murky. Prosecutions of male buyers and johns went up dramatically, and street prostitution in Stockholm has dropped by two-thirds since 1999. But it's unclear whether the sex trade was simply pushed underground, as was originally feared. Official statistics give conflicting answers. Some studies estimate that the total amount of prostitution has remained unchanged, although one Stockholm non-profit estimated that about 60 percent of prostitutes took advantage of the social service funds and succeeded in getting out of the business. My sense is that there's just not a lot of reliable data here.

For an anecdotal take, Petra Östergren interviewed a number of Swedish sex workers who agreed that prostitution had been forced underground. Many now have to work indoors, alone, and are ripe for exploitation, especially by "rent pimps." A 2004 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, comparing the Swedish and Dutch approaches, argued that many Swedish sex workers are now "more difficult to reach by the support system," and their reliance on pimps—who can help them avoid police detection—"has probably increased." The Norway report seems bullish on legalization, but notes that even in Netherlands, a "gray market" has emerged, beyond the eye of the state, where trafficking and coercion remain prevalent.

So, yes, our currently policies are grotesque, but honestly, I don't know what the ideal alternative is. I'd lean toward legalize-and-regulate as the least-bad option, although the idea of providing generous support for women who want to get out of the sex trade sounds like the best idea on offer. But if Sweden can barely manage it, good luck putting anything like that in place in the United States.

Bug Off

2008-03-10T12:27:00.007-04:00

I can't say I have fail-proof advice for any storekeeper confronted with a pack of noisy (or even dangerous) teenagers congregating outside his door. Calling the police doesn't always work for long. Changing social mores isn't what you'd call a quick fix. Nicely asking them to loiter elsewhere...? Er, no. Still, there's plenty that's disturbing about the "mosquito" solution:

In Britain, adolescents are the new mosquitoes. Many storekeepers and municipalities now employ ultrasonic devices, of the kind hitherto used to scatter insects and rodents, to disperse young people wherever they habitually gather to make a nuisance of themselves.

The so-called "mosquito" devices--there are some 3,500 installed throughout the country--take advantage of the fact that only people younger than 20 can perceive and be discomfited by the high-pitched sounds the devices make, discouraging them from lingering in the vicinity.

Now, the owners of a building in Queens are fitting it with just such a youth repellent. No doubt other buildings will soon follow suit.

It is an easy answer to a difficult problem. Those adults should turn back now--lest they turn New York into a city that is chronically afraid of its young people.

Yeah, no doubt treating youths like cockroaches will encourage them to behave. How could it not? The author also wonders whether teenagers will eventually get used to the sound, as their eardrums are dulled by loud music and the like. It sounds curmudgeonly, but I can attest. My hearing is pretty dismal (mostly I blame Steve Albini) and I could never pick out high-pitched whines of any sort. And why are adolescent eardrums so sensitive, anyway? What changes when you turn 20?

Jam Session

2008-03-08T14:45:00.003-05:00

Why does traffic sometimes jam up on a road for no reason whatsoever? Japanese scientists from the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow (really) asked a bunch of people to drive around a circle at constant speed. Watch as jams materialize out of nowhere and then "ripple" back through the circle like a shockwave:

Here's the article. One theory: "I suspect the trigger would either be a particular driver who was more nervous than the rest, or a particular location on the circle where the capacity was slightly lower." The first makes sense—a quick tap on the brakes by one motorist can reverberate down the line until everything grinds to a halt. I wonder if it'd be possible to create a computer-guided "conveyor belt" for cars in certain high-jamming areas—on LA freeways during rush hour, say—to maintain a constant distance between cars. Think of the productivity gains! Though presumably most drivers would be loath to give up the feeling of control, even if you don't actually have much control being wedged in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

"Food Fight"

2008-03-08T02:32:00.003-05:00

Maybe it's just late at night, but I had to watch this video several times before I fully got it: "An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from World War II to the present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict." Totally mesmerizing, if a little nauseating:

Singular They

2008-03-07T21:43:00.010-05:00

Why, just last week, I was muttering to a co-worker that the use of "they" and "their" with a singular antecedent would someday, decades hence, be totally kosher. (That is, saying something like, "Whoever swiped my stapler better show their face"—rather than "show his or her face.") I guess I'd assumed the construction was relatively new. But it's not! Turns out, both Shakespeare and Jane Austen were quite fond of it. And hey, if it's good enough for those crazy kids...

Both links come via Geoffrey Pullum's vivisection of a recent David Gerlenter essay in The Weekly Standard, which had argued that the singular "they" was foisted upon us by 1970s-vintage feminists intent on castrating the English language. Whatever; here's an image:

Is There a Science of Scent?

2008-03-07T18:00:00.006-05:00

Evidently not:

Why is it that one molecule smells of spearmint, while its mirror image smells of caraway? No one knows. When scientists create new molecules in the laboratory, they may know every detail of a molecule's structure yet have no clue about what it will smell like.

In theory you could assign a number to every discrete "odorant molecule" out there, though what a dreary wine-tasting guide that would make. Speaking of, I had forgotten all about the hilarious wine-tasting session in Brideshead Revisited: "It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle." "Like a leprechaun." "Dappled, in a tapestry meadow." "Like a flute by still water." You get the idea.

Chicken for a Day

2008-03-07T16:19:00.003-05:00

The Charlotte Observer offers up a day in the life of Celia Lopez, an immigrant worker at House of Raeford, a poultry-processing plant in North Carolina:

6:45 a.m. -- Lopez walks through the gate of the sprawling plant. She's struck by the pungent smell of ammonia. She punches her timecard and puts on her gear -- rubber boots, apron, hairnet and two pairs of gloves. She rushes to position. Workers must be at their posts before the production line starts. No excuses.

7 a.m. -- The line starts. Lopez begins by grabbing and placing turkey breasts on plates to be weighed. Each plate must weigh between 6 and 6 1/2 pounds. She grabs meat with her right hand and uses her left to hold the plate, then pushes the turkey along the line. She'll repeat this process hundreds of times an hour.

9:30 a.m. -- If Lopez needs a bathroom break, she must wait until a supervisor finds someone to replace her on the line. This can take minutes or hours - if approved at all. "Bathroom breaks are a privilege, not a necessity," she said her bosses told her. If granted, she has 10 minutes to remove her gear, use the facilities and return.

11 a.m. -- Lunch.

11:30 a.m. -- Back on the line. She has processed hundreds of pounds of meat. The line is moving fast; workers struggle to keep pace, she says. Conversation is minimal.

2 p.m. -- Break. She looks for a wall to press her back against and stretch her muscles.

2:30 p.m. -- The next two hours are the hardest -- the piles of meat seem endless, she says. Her back cramps, pain spreading to her shoulders, arms and hands. She is exhausted from standing. Sometimes she feels dizzy.

4 p.m. -- She punches out. She changes out of her work clothes, washes her face and leaves.

4:30 p.m. -- She arrives home and takes a shower. "The meat smell gets stuck in your skin," she says.

About 7 p.m. -- She helps cook dinner for her family. Grasping a spoon is hard, she says. She uses two hands to carry a dinner plate. Basic tasks take longer because of the pain. "It's like ants crawling through my hands, up my arms," she says.

9 p.m. -- She takes two ibuprofen pills before rubbing her hands with alcohol and lotion -- a nightly routine.

9:30 p.m. -- She goes to bed.

Midnight -- 2 a.m. -- Lopez frequently wakes up, hands cramping. She squeezes her fists and rubs her fingers to get blood flowing. She may wake up four times a night; each time the pain is worse. She swallows more ibuprofen.

5 a.m. -- Her alarm sounds. The line starts in two hours. "Sometimes I cry. I just pray to God that he will show me the way."

Well, lots of jobs are unpleasant, some even brutal, but this particular company seems to be more savage than most. The Observer's six-part series reports that House of Raeford has frequently concealed injuries inside its plants from inspectors and routinely ignored the—mostly Latino—workers who grouse about debilitating pain. Several workers were hauled back to the line hours after surgery, so that the company wouldn't have to report time lost to injury. (One OSHA official was scathing: "This is abuse. I don't know what else to call it.") I was wondering why more workers didn't file grievances with their union, the UFCW, but apparently most immigrants are afraid to join, and membership is only around 30 percent.

Learning to Kill

2008-03-07T13:26:00.003-05:00

Most people simply aren't natural-born killers. That's the thesis of Dave Grossman's On Killing, anyway:

During World War II, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall interviewed troops that had seen action and collected data on firing rates. His results... were a shock to the American military establishment. Marshall found that among soldiers who were in combat situations, only 15-20% fired their weapons. The majority of soldiers, when it came right down to it, refused to kill; even to defend their own lives.

The non-firing majority were not cowards. They did not throw down their weapons and flee; they just refused to pull the trigger. Grossman offers data suggesting much of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) seen in veterans derives not so much from having been in danger, but from having had to kill.

After Marshall published his study, the military decided to revamp training so that it wasn't just teaching soldiers how to shoot, but how to kill. Human-shaped targets replaced the paper bullseye. "The firing rate among combat troops rose to 50% in Korea, and to 90% in Vietnam." But PTSD cases soared, and, in the last three decades, the military has further transformed its tactics—a greater focus on guided missiles, on bombs dropped from 30,000 feet—so as both to limit casualties and to distance soldiers from the physical act of killing; to make it, in a way, less difficult.

But what about Iraq? Obviously there are plenty of high-altitude strikes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's a great deal of up-close fighting—and killing—too. Spencer Ackerman has a (typically) smart piece in The Washington Independent today about the rise of counterinsurgency advocates inside the U.S. Army, who believe that, for a variety of strategic reasons, many of the trends of the past three decades need to be reversed. I don't know if they're right or wrong on the merits, though I guess I am curious about how Grossman's work fits in here.

When Cub Scouts Attack

2008-03-07T12:05:00.004-05:00

David Hajdu recreates a few choice scenes from the great comic-book scare in the late 1940s and early '50s. Parents and sweaty councilmen feared that leafing through a comic book would "stimulate sadistic and masochistic attitudes and interfere with the normal development of sexual habits in children." So:

Groups of students continued to burn comic books in school yards around the country, some under the sway of their parents and teachers, some in concord with them, some unsure of their own points of view and doubtful of the propriety of disagreeing with their elders, some emboldened to defiance through the burnings themselves. In one case—a grand public protest organized in Rumson, New Jersey, an affluent town near the seashore—the young people involved were exceptionally young, Cub Scouts, and they were only part of an elaborate plan arranged by a Cubmaster, Louis Cooke, a scout committeeman, Ralph Walter, and the mayor, Edward Wilson.

As it was announced on January 6 at a "fathers' night" meeting of the Rumson High School PTA, the event was to involve a two-day drive to collect comic books "portraying murderers and criminals," a journalist at the meeting reported. A group of forty Cubs would tour the borough in a fire truck, "with siren screaming, and collect objectionable books at homes along the way." Then the mayor would lead the boys in a procession from Borough Hall to Rumson's Victory Park, where Wilson would present awards to the scouts and lead them in burning the comic books. The Cub who had gathered the most comics would have the honor of applying the torch to the books. When the national office of the Cub Scouts of America declined to support the bonfire, and news¬papers as far-flung as Michigan's Ironwood Daily Globe questioned it, the Rumson event was revised to conclude with the scouts donating the comics to the Salvation Army for scrap.

A few weeks later, a Girl Scout leader in the farm-country town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Mrs. Thomas Mullen, guided her troop and local students in a comic-book burning, unencumbered. (The event had not been widely publicized in advance.) The scouts, fourteen- to eighteen-year-old members of Senior Troop 29, began gathering crime comics, as well as western and romance titles (because of their shootings and sexual innuendo, respectively), then turned the burning over to students at St. Mary's, a Catholic high school of about 275 housed in an austere redbrick building, a refurbished old hospital.

Following a script by the parish pastor, Rev. Theon Schoen, the students conducted a mock trial of four comic-book characters, portrayed by upperclassmen who pleaded guilty to "leading young people astray and building up false conceptions in the minds of youth." The trial, held on the school grounds after classes, concluded with a "great big bonfire," as one of the students, Bonnie Wulfers, would remember it. As the books burned, Schoen led the assembled group of more than four hundred students from St. Mary's elementary and high schools in a version of the now-standard pledge to "neither read nor purchase objectionable publications and to stay away from retail establishments where such are sold."

The craze culminated in the Senate subcommittee hearings of the early 1950s, in one of which Estes Kefauver held up the cover of Crime Suspenstories #22, featuring the severed head of a woman held aloft by an ax-wielding maniac. EC Comics founder Bill Gaines replied that a certain amount of blood was actually in good taste. ("A cover in bad taste," Gaines explained, "might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it.") In any case, a few years later rock 'n' roll became the bogeyman du jour threatening to rot the pristine mores of youth, and everyone mostly forgot about comics.

Tail-Wagging

2008-03-06T22:16:00.007-05:00

Kevin Drum points to a new Esquire profile of Admiral William Fallon, which includes this remarkable anecdote:

When the Admiral took charge of Pacific Command in 2005, he immediately set about a military-to-military outreach to the Chinese armed forces, something that had plenty of people freaking out at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The Chinese, after all, were scheduled to be our next war. What the hell was Fallon doing?

Contrary to some reports, though, Fallon says he initially had no trouble with then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld on the subject. "Early on, I talked to him. I said, Here's what I think. And I talked to the president, too."

It was only after the Pentagon and Congress started realizing that their favorite "programs of record" (i.e., weapons systems and major vehicle platforms) were threatened by such talks that the shit hit the fan. "I blew my stack," Fallon says. "I told Rumsfeld, Just look at this shit. I go up to the Hill and I get three or four guys grabbing me and jerking me out of the aisle, all because somebody came up and told them that the sky was going to cave in."

Now, I assume the ideal situation here would be for military commanders from China and the United States to stay in close contact, so that they can defuse tensions and avoid incidents that could escalate into something unpleasant. But then where would the defense contractors be? So not only do we get the Air Force and Navy hyping the China threat to justify a fresh generation of nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but anything that so much as smells like détente gets castigated. Thankfully, Fallon stood down the shriekers in this case, but those are some screwed-up incentives.

P.S. Plus of course there's this business about Fallon getting pushed out because he might resist a military action against Iran.

We Get It for Cheap?

2008-03-06T19:01:00.014-05:00

The rough consensus among climatologists these days is that, if we want to stave off the worst effects of global warming, we're going to have to stabilize carbon concentrations in the atmosphere at about 450 parts per million by mid-century (we're at about 383 ppm now). That means whopping emissions cuts, especially in the United States and Europe—but also in China, India, and elsewhere.

It all sounds so drastic, no? Except that a new OECD report calculates that reaching that goal could be done for cheap: The world's GDP in 2050 would be about 2.5 percent below what it otherwise would be if we did nothing. In other words, instead of being three-and-a-half times richer than we are now, we'll be like 3.4 times richer. (Figuring out how to distribute the costs fairly will be tricky, but hardly insurmountable.) So that right there is Al Gore's secret plan to impoverish us all.

Another theme in the report is that climate change isn't the only environmental problem in town. Water scarcity is becoming a bigger and bigger issue around the world, as Georgians and Arizonans no doubt know. So are various threats to biodiversity. Air pollution is choking China and India. The main point of the report, though, is that these things really can be tackled for a low price. And last I checked, the OECD isn't some radical hippie commune.

Meanwhile, this Bloomberg write-up notes that air pollutants cost the U.S. economy some $277 billion each year in health-related expenses. A friend half-jokingly mentioned to me the other day that you could probably do more to reduce health care costs by passing a cap-and-trade bill than by pushing for health care reform (not least in light of this recent study showing that increases in CO2 can worsen the adverse respiratory effects of ozone and other air pollutants). Who knows if that's true or not, although it probably would do wonders for public health if a climate bill provided incentives for, say, people to move to urban areas and walk and take public transit more.

Reanimated

2008-03-06T16:34:00.009-05:00

Via Maud Newton, the image archives at the new Reanimation Library in Brooklyn (which collects outdated and discarded books from thrift stores, stoop piles, and throwaway centers) has a lot of nifty pictures. A particularly horrifying one from The Handbook of Doll Repair and Restoration:

Another (a poster? a campaign ad?), from a book titled Civil Air Patrol:

Why Not Nullify?

2008-03-06T14:34:00.005-05:00

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented." So say the writers of The Wire. Radley Balko likes the sentiment, but has a practical concern: "[J]udges and prosecutors often set perjury traps that pick would-be nullifiers off during the voir dire process." He suggests laws that would force courts to inform jurors of their right to acquit no matter what the evidence says, if they think the law is unjust or immoral. (Which most drugs laws certainly are.)

Is that a good idea? Back during Prohibition, juries nullified alcohol-control laws "possibly as often as 60 percent of the time." But the practice has a more depraved history too, as when Southern white jurors could barely stifle a yawn anytime a pale-skinned defendant was accused of killing a black person. Since the late 1960s, though, courts have employed all sorts of strategies to prevent nullification, though they obviously can't ban it outright. Admittedly, the fact that Robert Bork deemeds nullification a "pernicious practice" makes me vastly more receptive to the idea.

Unuseless

2008-03-06T12:31:00.003-05:00

Very clever. Very clever, indeed:

From Wikipedia: "Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindōgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever." There's an entire society and everything.

Did He Just Say 'Endanger'?

2008-03-05T21:22:00.007-05:00

This is a great catch by Lisa Heinzerling. So, last week, EPA head Steven Johnson finally explained why he had rejected California's request to set its own, stricter tailpipe standards last December. His 48-page report argued that global warming endangered the public health of all Americans, and hence, California wasn't facing the sort of "extraordinary and compelling conditions" that would justify it being allowed to do its own thing.

Now, that's probably untrue. The increased risk of water shortages and forest fires due to climate change are likely to hit California harder than most other states. Also, according to one recent study, "global warming currently causes greater respiratory and cardiovascular disease in California per person than in other states through its impact on air pollution."

But set that aside. California's almost surely going to win this legal battle eventually. The fun part is that, under the Supreme Court's ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA last year, the EPA is required to start regulating carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as it makes an "endangerment finding." And what do you know, that's basically what Johnson's report was: It says that global warming is "unequivocal" and threatens to endanger public health. Granted, Johnson's trying to deny that that's what it was, but it sure looks and quacks like one...

Math Is Hard

2008-03-05T12:13:00.002-05:00

In The New Yorker, Jim Holt channels French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who has a theory that our brains come with a built-in sense for numbers, but not for doing mathematical calculations like multiplication or long division. That stuff is unnatural:

Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—"Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision," as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore.

It's not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: "two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six."

But multiplication is another matter. It is an "unnatural practice," Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.)

The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you're trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent.

A "double terror." I like that. From this, Dehaene goes on to suggest that maybe first-graders shouldn't be forced to memorize times-tables until they puke, but ought to be given calculators so that they can learn "the meaning of these procedures." This debate always gets heated, but I can't say I feel strongly. I've got my times tables under control, but it only really comes in handy when I'm resizing images for blog posts. By contrast, I have a very smart friend in private equity who still balks at 11 X 12 and 8 X 9 and the rest. But who cares? (I should say, however, that the finger system for multiplying by 9 is great fun regardless.)

Another coffee-table tidbit: In Chinese and Japanese, number systems are base-ten, rather than our slightly screwy system (for instance, we say "eleven" rather than "ten-one," as it is in Japanese). As such, the average Chinese speaker can hold nine digits in her head, rather than seven for English. French is particularly horrible on this front ("four-twenty-ten-five" is the way you say 95), and despite having been drilled repeatedly, I will never be able to do long division in French in my head. That doesn't bother me.

Call a Cab Cause a Cab Will Come Quicker

2008-03-05T07:13:00.003-05:00

Let's see if I can't resuscitate this here blog with a short little book review. Judging by the blurbs, Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood—about a sociologist who spends a year as a police officer in Baltimore's Eastern District—is going to be marketed to people who watch HBO's The Wire. And that's apt: There's plenty that's familiar here, from the slang ("hoppers," "real-PO-lice") to the descriptions of how drug corners are run. You can read the book's first chapter online. But the book also hits a lot of new terrain.

The police subplots of The Wire emphasize the futility of current drug-war tactics. Moskos agrees, and suggests that most Baltimore cops share this view, although many seem to believe the answer is more arrests, rather than fewer (morality and "asserting control" are often seen as higher goals than reducing crime). But The Wire's main characters are detectives in Homicide and Major Crimes, people investigating stuff. Moskos focuses on patrol officers, and has a slightly different argument about the ineffectiveness of much of what they do, day-in and day-out. Some background:

The advent of patrol cars, telephones, two-way radios, "scientific" police management, social migration, and social science theories on the "causes" of crime converged in the late 1950s. Before then, police had generally followed a "watchman" approach: each patrol officer was given the responsibility to police a geographic area. In the decades after World War II, motorized car patrol replaced foot patrol as the standard method of policing. Improved technology allowed citizens to call police and have their complaints dispatched to police through two-way radios. ...

Those who viewed police as provocative and hostile to the public applauded reduced police presence and discretion. Controlled by the central dispatch, police could respond to the desires of the community rather then enforce their own "arbitrary" concepts of "acceptable" behavior. Police officers, for their part, enjoyed the comforts of the automobile… Citizens, rather than being encouraged to maintain community standards, were urged to stay behind locked doors and call 911.

So, here we are today, and a patrol officer's top priority is to respond to any and all 911 calls ASAP. Problem is, a hefty number of calls are "bullshit calls"—pranks or people dialing in to harass enemies—or drug calls, wherein an officer pulls up to a corner, the dealers take a walk around the block, and return when the cop is gone. Stops and arrests are made, but less often than you might think. (Officers routinely take longer to handle a drug call just so that they can remain "out of service" and finish paperwork or eat lunch or avoid "bad" calls—a dead body, say.) Obviously there are serious 911 calls, too, but Moskos contends that there's way too much chaff:

Even when there aren't calls coming in, the possibility of receiving a call officers prevents officers from doing foot patrol, in-depth investigations, or any activity that may cause an officer to stray too far from the patrol car. Police isolated in squad cars will not know the community.

Yet dealing with problem people before they commit a crime, though perhaps undesirable, is a police officer's job. This isn't possible in an era of rapid-response.

With fewer cars and a de-emphasis of rapid response, police officers could better mitigate the problems of the drug corner. A better system would require police dispatchers or police officers to exercise professional judgment and separate legitimate from illegitimate calls (and affirm current legal protection for good-faith errors). Free from the tyranny of dispatch, officers could focus on quality rather than quantity of response. Walking the beat, officers would learn their area and gain the trust of more citizens. Freeing police resources would make response more consistent and reliable, even faster, for the very rare serious crime in progress.

That makes sense at a glance, especially if it's true that "motorized patrol... has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction." But wouldn’t people start complaining if the police weren't responding to all 911 calls as quickly as possible? This seems like a political issue. I wonder if there are cities out there that have tried this.

More: Peter Moskos responds in comments with some additional points that are very much worth reading.

Going Undercover

2008-02-03T17:53:00.000-05:00

The New York Times offers some pointers for anyone thinking about becoming an undercover police officer:

Being a good undercover officer takes a certain type of person. You must be an impeccable actor, a chameleon who can blend seamlessly into easily combustible situations, coolly stare your target in the eye and lie. You have to know the street lingo for drugs, like red top or blue top for different vials of cocaine.

You have to look the part, wear the right clothes, and have a good back story. If you say you are a mechanic, you’d better know cars, because chances are that the dealer will too. Many undercover narcotics officers use props. They might push shopping carts filled with soda cans in plastic bags, aping a homeless person, and twitch like an addict.

They might bring along a basketball, saying they are coming back from the courts and itching to score on the way home. If they are buying crack, they have to produce a crack pipe, or “stem,” and it has to look used.

If the dealer insists that they test the goods before they buy, that they take a hit off a crack pipe or a snort of cocaine, undercover officers are supposed to resist unless the situation is dire, unless they have a gun to their heads. And if they are they are forced to take the drugs, they must report it to their unit, and undergo a medical evaluation. And if they are forced to ingest more than once, they will almost certainly be taken off of the streets.

There's also—and this is the point of the piece—the temptation for corruption. Looking around for more info, I came across this website (which may look amateurish, but hey, it does cite scholarly sources...), which offers even more advice on getting started: "A typical pattern is to bring the undercover officer in as an acquaintance, business associate, or girlfriend/boyfriend of an informant, and then to distance themselves from that informant." All good advice, no doubt.

To nudge this all in a more serious direction, this follow-up Times story on the issues that arise when police rely too heavily on informants is great: "Petty crime is often tolerated in exchange for information. Detectives can be duped by an informant's agenda. While cases of corruption are rare, it is fairly common to have more 'give' in this delicate give-and-take." Ethan Brown runs down more problems here, noting that the rise of mandatory minimums and the power of judges to reduce sentences for "snitches" gives defendants overwhelming incentives to lie, especially in drug cases. It's hard to quantify how often such lying occurs, but one study found that 46 percent of wrongful death-penalty convictions involved informants saying untrue things.

Update: Actually, Alexandra Napatoff's Slate essay from 2005 is an even better overview of this topic: "The backlash against snitches embodies a growing national recognition that snitching is dangerous public policy—producing bad information, endangering innocent people, letting dangerous criminals off the hook, compromising the integrity of police work, and inciting violence and distrust in socially vulnerable neighborhoods." (Although I do think these issues should be separated from the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, which mostly seems to be about simple witness intimidation.) Of course, cops are never just going to do away with informants, but Napatoff argues that there's, at the least, ample room for more transparency.

Could Solar Power Do It All?

2008-02-03T16:28:00.000-05:00

You know, solar power sometimes gets a bad rap. By that, I mean: Few people believe it will ever play more than a bit part in the grand U.S. energy drama going forward. All the scientists are saying we've got to slash emissions in the United States 50 to 80 percent by mid-century, and most onlookers say, well, that means either we'll have to dream up some way to capture and sequester carbon from coal-burning plants, or do what John McCain says and go full speed ahead with nuclear power. But nuclear and "clean" coal are the only things that can provide most of the energy we need. Wind and solar? Pfft, too small. Too unreliable. And so on.

So, on that note, this Scientific American cover story on "A Solar Grand Plan" was fascinating. The authors (we'll call 'em Zweibel et. al.) argue, fairly convincingly, that the technology exists either right now or will in the near future to build a massive solar-power infrastructure that could supply 69 percent of America's electricity—and 35 percent of its energy—by 2050, which would cut CO2 emissions by 62 percent. (This assumes we electrify our transport with, say, plug-in hybrids.) Bear in mind, this is probably a conservative estimate—they're ruling out massive technological leaps, for one. But it's a grand vision all the same.

Yes, there are caveats and technological hurdles. The authors estimate that the efficiency of photovoltaic cells would have to rise to 14 percent—although current modules are at about 10 percent, so this isn't an insurmountable leap. Also, it would take about 30,000 square miles to install all those photovoltaic plants—and we're probably talking about the Southwest. That's a lot of wilderness to plop down on top of, but it's less space than the coal industry uses, when you include mining. Also, fewer mountains pillaged. And photovoltaic plants don't need much water, which is a bonus for the parched West. (Nuclear plants, by contrast, are water-guzzlers.)

The biggest question, though, is storage. The sun doesn't shine all the time. And batteries are still too expensive and inefficient (though who knows what advances are on the way). Zweibel et. al. suggest that compressed-air energy storage is the answer—in which the electricity from the solar plants compresses air into underground caverns, which then, during off-hours, is released to power turbines. One surprise: The authors estimate that there are enough such caverns around the country—many near metro areas—to do this. We'd also have to install a new system of high-voltage direct current lines to bring the power from the Southwest to the rest of the country.

All that won't be cheap. Between now and 2020, the government would have to spend at least $420 billion on subsidies, infrastructure, and so on. After that, if all goes well (and, hell, it probably won't), the solar industry would be on its way. On the other hand, the annual expense involved would be less than current farm subsidies, and the total spending would be about what was needed to build the country's high-speed telecommunications infrastructure over the past four decades. So it's not like this is totally outlandish or unprecedented—if Congress auctioned off all the pollution permits from the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, it could easily raise the money needed. Plus, after a while we'd be saving money—no more fuel costs.

Anyway, I'm not saying the United States should go out and do this tomorrow. But it's at least a way of thinking about how the U.S. could go carbon-free without giving massive subsidies to the coal industry or nuclear industry (both of which could well cost even more—especially when you count the waste disposal, security, etc. needed for McCain's proposed nuke-o-rama.) Personally I'd prefer a more distributed energy system, whereas Zweibel et. al. only see 10 percent of electricity coming from PV cells on rooftops, etc., by 2050, although, obviously, as the technology advances that would change. But like I said, a lot of this is about giving a sense of what's possible beyond the "clean" coal/nuclear drumbeat.

Plug-Ins On the Way?

2008-02-03T16:25:00.000-05:00

Over at Salon, Joseph Romm argues that affordable plug-in hybrid cars are only a few years away—even if we don't see a breakthrough in battery technology. That's a bold prediction, but it'd be a huge deal if it panned out. Right now, in terms of weaning the United States off oil—two-thirds of which goes toward transportation—plug-in hybrids are far more promising than liquefied coal (suicidal), corn ethanol (still too destructive), cellulosic ethanol (too far off), or hydrogen fuel-cell cars (way too far off).

The tantalizing bit here is that, according to one recent Energy Department analysis, we could, in theory, replace 84 percent of existing cars and light trucks—180 million vehicles—with plug-in hybrids without building a single new power plant. (That assumes the plug-ins would charge during off-peak hours and feed back into the grid during the day.) Even if that didn't happen, greenhouse emissions would still drop considerably in a plug-in world, even if the cars were being powered by dirty coal plants, although obviously the green ideal is to have the cars powered by carbon-free sources—nuclear or renewables. As a bonus, by providing distributed energy storage, plug-ins would actually make some intermittent energy sources like wind (which mostly blows at night) more viable.

Anyway, it's one of those grandiose visions that seems to be getting less far-fetched by the day. The city of Austin is already taking a hard look at the idea, as is Israel. The catch, of course, is that plug-ins would require a higher price on carbon and a fair bit of government support to become viable, though probably less support than biofuels need, and presumably less effort than it takes to police the oil supply in the Middle East.

(Note: I posted this a few weeks ago on The Plank, but I'm reposting here because, well, hell, why not? Plus it dovetails nicely with the post above.)

Some Optimism For a Change...

2008-02-03T15:29:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was wondering whether the scattered news reports I was reading about states rethinking their insane prison policies actually added up to a trend. Well, here's a report from the Sentencing Project that says it does. Last year, nine states set up oversight committees to look at sentencing, prison overcrowding, indigent defense, or reentry services. Seven states liberalized their parole policies. Four "eased policies that treated juveniles as adults." Three "relaxed sexual offense laws related to consensual acts conducted by teenagers."

That's a start, isn't it? As a bonus, "between 2004 and 2006, 22 states enacted sentencing reforms targeted at reforming prison populations. That said, last year Pew estimated that a countervailing wave of "get-tough" policies would lead to an increase of nearly 200,000 inmates in the next five years—bringing us up to 1.7 million people in state and federal prisons by 2011. That means prisons will grow faster than the population at large. So, for now, a few oversight committees are nice gestures, but they're not going to cut it.

(Oh hell, I guess I'll link to Glenn Loury's great Boston Review article—discussed here—in case anyone's wondering why on earth they should care about an overbloated prison system.)

Greening the World Bank

2008-02-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

David Wheeler argues that the World Bank should stop financing coal-fired plants in the developing world, start taking global warming seriously, and impose an internal carbon tax on all its development projects, with donors in the developed world making up the difference. That makes sense to me—just because Kyoto doesn't cover many developing countries doesn't mean nothing can be done to curb their emissions. Of course, you need donors to pony up, but didn't Bush say something about a clean-energy fund in the State of the Union?

In a related vein, Walden Bello argues here that the Global South isn't monolithically against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, although the evidence is sparse. Mostly, it's a nice history of some of the grassroots environmental movements that have bubbled up in the developing world over the years. This part is interesting:

The environmental movements in Southeast Asia played a vital role not only in scuttling projects like the Bataan nuclear plant but in ousting the dictatorships that reigned there in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, because authoritarian regimes did not perceive the environment as “political,” organizing around environmental and public health issues was not initially proscribed. Thus, environmental struggles became an issue around which the anti-dictatorship movement could organize and reach new people. Environmental destruction became one more graphic example of a regime’s irresponsibility.

In Indonesia, for example, the environmental organization WALHI went so far as to file a lawsuit for pollution and environmental destruction against six government bodies, including the ministry of the environment and population. By the time the dictatorships wised up to what was happening, it was often too late: environmentalism and anti-fascism fed on one another.

I had no idea. Christina Larson wrote a great Washington Monthly piece about an analogous situation in China: Beijing's worried about pollution (and even climate change), but it doesn't have the power to regulate the spewage from the provinces, so the government has given the green NGOs a little slack in hopes they can work their magic. But once you let the civil-society groups go it can be hard to pull the lasso tight again. Or something.

Who Needs V-2s?

2008-02-03T14:56:00.000-05:00

Why, in the waning days of World War II, did the Germans spend so much time and energy building V-2 rockets to rain down on London? The rockets were mildly deadly, true, but ineffective, and building one V-2 meant building fewer fighters jets—fighters that, while perhaps lacking in sexiness, were critical for bogging down Allied bombing raids. Why build one at the expense of the other? Freeman Dyson finds one possible answer in a new Wehrner von Braun biography:

How did it happen that Hitler gave his blessing to a crash program to produce the V-2 in quantity? Hitler was not a fool. As a foot soldier in World War I he had survived some heavy artillery bombardments. Von Braun demonstrated his plans for the V-2 to Hitler in person in August 1941, and Hitler reacted with sensible objections. He asked whether von Braun had worried about the timing of the explosion, since a normal artillery shell arriving at supersonic speed would bury itself in the ground before exploding and do little damage. This was a serious problem, and von Braun had to admit that he had not thought about it. Hitler then remarked that the V-2 was only an artillery shell with longer range than usual, and the army would need hundreds of thousands rather than thousands of such shells in order to use them effectively. Von Braun agreed that this was true.

After the session with von Braun, Hitler ordered the army to plan production of hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year, but not to begin production until the bird had successfully flown. This decision seemed harmless at the time, but it played into the hands of the army rocketeers. The army leaders knew that the notion of producing hundreds of thousands of V-2s per year was absurd, but they accepted the order. It gave them authority to spend as much as they wanted on the program, without any fixed timetable. In August 1941 the war was going well for Germany. The army had won huge victories in the first two months of the Russian campaign, France was knocked out of the war, and America was not yet in. Hitler did not imagine that within three years he would be fighting a defensive war for the survival of the Reich. He did not ask whether the V-2 might be a toy that the Reich could not afford.

In Germany as in other countries, the main factor driving acquisition of weapons was interservice rivalry. The army wanted the V-2 because of rivalry with the Luftwaffe. The German air force was leading the world in high-technology weapons, developing jet aircraft and rocket aircraft and a variety of guided rocket missiles. The army had to have a high-technology project too. The V-2 was a high-technology version of artillery. It gave the army the chance to say to the air force, our rockets are bigger than your rockets.

Although Hitler was nominally a dictator, he was no more successful than political leaders of democratic countries in keeping rivalries between different branches of the military under control. He could fire military leaders, and did so from time to time, but he could not make them do what he wanted. The army leaders, with the help of von Braun, launched a crash program to produce the V-2. They produced a few thousand V-2s altogether, enough to outshine the air force but not enough to be militarily useful. Hitler could not force them to produce as many as he thought necessary, and he could not force them to stop the program and transfer its resources to the air force. The army and the air force continued to operate as independent principalities until the day Hitler died.

It's still not exactly clear to me whether interservice rivalry is ever in any way efficient. Here's a 1957 Time story about the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force all jostling—much like in Dyson's story—to build their own missile programs. Much overlap ensues: "With the services competing hotly, the U.S. had upwards of 40 assorted missiles under development by 1950, when Defense Secretary George Catlett Marshall called in Chrysler Corp.'s gruff President K. T. Keller to bring order out of the chaos." Having all the services making basically the same damn thing jacked up costs enormously, outweighing whatever benefits competition might bring.

So, another (maybe dumb) question: Would the U.S. defense budget be much smaller and more streamlined if all three services were collapsed into one? That way, if, say, the military decided it needed to focus on counterinsurgency, you wouldn't have rival services demanding, and getting, nuclear subs and strike fighters at the expense of more soldiers. (As Fred Kaplan notes, the fractions of the Pentagon pie that go to each service hasn't budged since the 1980s.) Or are there actual benefits to having rival services? There was some discussion of this in this TAP roundtable on Rob Farley's proposal to abolish the Air Force, although the consensus was that "rational" budgeting will probably never happen.

Wildcats in China

2008-01-18T13:18:00.001-05:00

It seems like every week a news story will surface about how horrifying labor abuses in China are proceeding apace. After awhile, it all starts to blend together, since nothing ever changes. But this recent booklet from the Albert Shanker Institute, documenting the growing outburst of wildcat strikes and demonstrations around the country, is worth highlighting. The vignettes are compiled from interviews that labor activist Han Dongfang has done with Chinese workers over the past decade, through his radio show broadcast from Hong Kong. Han, whose personal story is riveting in its own right, gave a talk in D.C. this week where he estimated that strikes, many involving thousands workers, now happen daily in China. Is that a big deal? It might be.

None of these demonstrations involve China's "official" union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (which usually just orders the rabble to get back to work). In his talk, Han mentioned something I'd never heard: Although the ACFTU claims to represent 90 percent of Chinese workers, most of said "representation" consists of sending out a fax to newly formed companies, getting back a fax with some names scribbled on it, and putting the form in a filing cabinet. Indeed, the fact that many NGOs are now providing legal aid to workers and doing things the ACFTU should be doing means that state union is increasingly irrelevant.

Later, I asked Han to what extent the government tolerated these NGOs, and his reply was surprising: Labor violations have gotten so bad over the last two decades (in the Pearl River Delta manufacturing area, 40,000 fingers are broken or lost each year), that even many officials can no longer stomach it. "I don't believe people can be completely heartless," Han insisted. So the government is starting to sanction NGOs that assist workers, so long as they don't challenge the ruling party. Incidentally, Christina Larson of The Washington Monthly reported a similar dynamic vis-a-vis green activists in China—environmental degradation has gotten so severe, and Beijing so unable to rein in pollution in the provinces, that civil society groups have been given a freer hand.

Han was particularly eloquent about connecting the lack of bargaining power among Chinese workers with many of the country's other problems. Teachers, for example, have very few rights—especially in rural areas. So, not only are low pay and coerced contracts a recurring phenomenon, but, because teachers lack any sort of organized strength, the education budget, which is usually handled at the township level, frequently gets raided to pay for other priorities—a local industrial park, for instance. As a result, parents can't pay for their children's education, which in turn leads to child labor, and so on.

What was fascinating was how Han alternated between justified pessimism and sustained optimism. He was ambivalent about China's new labor contract law coming into effect this year—will it even be enforced?—and doubted that the Olympics would call attention to worker abuses. But he then observed that "labor rights violations have gone beyond anyone's wildest imagination" and that officials really are getting worried. Moreover, massive worker demonstrations simply weren't happening as little as a decade ago. One of the biggest questions, Han noted, is whether anyone can channel those wildcat strikes into "something systematic."

Power Mining

2008-01-14T22:55:00.000-05:00

Last month, James Verini had a great piece in Vanity Fair about Aristotle, Inc., one of the premier political data-mining firms in the country. (As Richard Viguerie tells it, "It's not just that their list [containing detailed information on 175 million voters] is good—they're considered to have the only list."):

"What we do is help a campaign run more and more like an effective business," [Aristotle CEO John Aristotle] Phillips says as he types on his laptop, bringing up on a large projection screen the profile of an actual voter in Atlanta, whom we'll call John Smith.

Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith's basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more.

Back in 1999, Dana Milbank wrote a TNR piece on the dawn of the "customized campaign," describing Aristotle as a tiny startup working with AOL to "create ads that appear only on the screens of those computer users the campaigns wish to reach." Since then, the firm's matured considerably: playing a starring role in Bush's '04 win (allowing the campaign, for instance, march into union neighborhoods in Ohio and locate voters upset about gay marriage); tilting the 2001 mayoral race in Los Angeles for James Hahn at the last minute (really); and helping Viktor Yuschenko uncover election fraud in Ukraine's 2004 election.

Sadly, we never learn which candidates in '08 have the best micro-targeting shops (most of Aristotle's clients are Republicans, though I believe that many top Dems now use Catalist). We do know, however, that techniques have advanced far beyond what happened in the last election: "Obama and other candidates now have the ability to custom-tailor cable-television ads down to the Zip Code in Iowa, or send a canvasser to a voter's doorstep armed with a computer-generated picture of that person's political personality." Freaky. Of course, those all-seeing databases do raise concerns about privacy and "political redlining"—campaigns are better able to ignore voters who either don't donate or vote in dependable blocs.

One interesting bit comes when Phillips explains why he's so secretive and rarely blabs to the press: "It doesn't benefit our clients for them to see a newspaper story about how great our technology is. Every campaign that we work with wants you to believe that it's shoe leather that wins the race, or great issues, or the love of the people, but the fact of the matter is a lot of it is the nitty-gritty organization."

How Green Is John McCain, Really?

2008-01-14T14:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, start with an easier question: Is McCain sincere about tackling global warming? As the story goes, he was first quizzed on the subject eight years ago in New Hampshire, and, after pleading ignorance on the matter, studied up and became a convert. He's reportedly close to Fred Krupp, the head of Environmental Defense, who has a history of reaching out to Republicans with green leanings (and, occasionally, trusting them long after they've ceased to deserve it—as with George W. Bush).

Plus, I'll admit, going into Michigan of all places and talking up fuel-efficiency, as McCain is now doing, takes some chutzpah, even if he is just doing it to woo independents. (Observe, however, that McCain has been notably silent on the fight over new coal plants in Michigan, which speaks poorly for his green bona fides.) He's also taking his lumps from Mitt Romney and National Review on the issue. So, yeah, I do think he's fairly sincere. One might even wonder if a McCain presidency, combined with a Democratic Congress, offers the best chance for a bipartisan-yet-still-half-wdecent emissions-reduction bill to get enacted and stay enacted. (Think Schwarzenegger and health care in California.) I'm skeptical, but it's not an outlandish argument.

That said, McCain's policy proposals are... far weaker than anything we've seen from the Democratic front-runners. Whereas the Dems all put out cap-and-trade plans with emission targets in line with what climate scientists are urging, McCain's website is vague on details. The cap-and-trade legislation he sponsored with Joe Lieberman in 2003 was a nice (if modest) gesture for its time, but, this year, McCain has opposed its successor, the watered-down Lieberman-Warner bill in the Senate, because it doesn't lavish enough money on the nuclear industry. We can debate the merits of nuclear handouts all day, but it's a lame reason to oppose the biggest cap-and-trade bill going, and is enough to make one question how "sincere" McCain will be when it actually matters. (Much like how, in 2005, he talked a big game on preserving habeas corpus but later folded like a lawn chair.)

So, substantively, there's less than meets the eye. One thing I do like about McCain, though, is the way he frames the issue—and here Dems could take lessons. Barack Obama, for instance, loves to emphasize the "sacrifice" required to avert global warming, which seems Carter-esque in its tone-deafness. By contrast, here's McCain's preferred delivery:

Suppose that climate change is not real, and all we do adopt green technologies, which our economy and our technology is perfectly capable of. Then all we've done is given our kids a cleaner world. But suppose they are wrong. Suppose they are wrong, and climate change is real, and we've done nothing. What kind of a planet are we going to pass on to the next generation of Americans? It's real. We've got to address it. We can do it with technology, with cap-and- trade, with capitalist and free enterprise motivation. And I'm confident that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren a cleaner, better world.

That sort of optimism would make Nordhaus and Shellenberger proud. Now, if McCain snags the nomination, he'd likely neutralize the Democrats' traditional advantage on the environment, as Bush did in 2000 by pretending he cared. But if there are still concrete differences between McCain and his opponent, then, as Dave Roberts points out, Al Gore could potentially step in by endorsing the Democratic nominee—unless, of course, McCain puts out an equally effective climate change proposal, etc. Gore's stature here is presumably big enough that he could unblur whatever differences exist.

New York Changing

2008-01-12T20:52:00.000-05:00

This is a few years old, but nifty as hell: Photographer Douglas Levere went around and re-shot many of Berenice Abbott's famous photos of New York from the 1930s. You can see some of the photos side by side here. Sometimes only a little's changed: a facade here, an elevated track there. Sometimes entire buildings have sprouted up. My favorite is the bakery on Bleecker Street that's still around today—even the way the bread's arranged in the window is the same as it was in 1937, but the buildings seen in the window reflection seem to have changed completely.

Ah, and there's a newer exhibit called Paris Changing, too. Different photographers, same concept. Now someone just has to do one for Washington, D.C.

Downward or Upward?

2008-01-12T20:33:00.000-05:00

Last December, in Gall v. United States, the Supreme Court gave lower courts a bit more discretion to depart from federal sentencing guidelines if the circumstances warrant it. The case itself involved a judge who let a convicted ecstasy dealer off lightly with probation, rather than the recommended 30 months in jail, because the deal had occurred a long time ago, and the man had cleaned up since then. SCOTUS backed the judge, and the whole thing sounded like a good, liberal outcome. At least if you think sentencing has gotten waaaaay out of hand.

Lately, though, Doug Berman's been piling up evidence that, in the post-Gall world, many judges may depart from the guidelines by handing out higher sentences. That doesn't seem too surprising: Academics may agree that federal sentencing guidelines are absurdly high, but a great number of judges don't think so (most federal judges, after all, are Republicans). Indeed, some reformers originally backed the 1980s guidelines in order to rein in excessively punitive judges (although the guidelines themselves turned out to be extremely harsh, too). Odds are, given more leeway, judges will be somewhat more lenient on crack defendants, who get an especially raw deal, but tougher on many others.

Basically, the only way we're ever going to get lower sentences (and fix our over-swollen prisons) is if Congress steps in. Speaking of which, here's an interesting story. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is one of those former "tough on crime" Republicans who's supposedly seen the light on America's prison crisis, and went so far as to co-sponsor the Second Chance Act, a modest but relatively liberal bill giving grants to states to fund prisoner re-entry programs. But now that the legislation's all ready for passage—heck, even Bush supports it—Sessions is putting a hold on it. What gives?

Sessions' stated reason—that he's worried about funding duplicate programs in a few cases—seems flimsy. One theory: he's worried about re-election this fall, and Alabama voters don't like this soft-on-crime business. A more, er, cynical theory: Republicans are planning to attack Obama for being a squishy liberal on crime should he get the nomination, and don't want to give him cover by passing this bill. Of course, maybe I'm just a paranoid nutter, and Sessions will lift his hold tomorrow. Also, as Jeralyn Merritt's round-up shows, Obama's not actually that squishy on criminal-justice issues, though he's probably about as liberal as one could hope any mainstream Democrat to be on this front.

Bright Lights, Rural Village

2008-01-11T19:08:00.000-05:00

There are about 1.6 billion people around the world who don't have electricity. Not only is that a catastrophe in its own right, but environmentalists worried about global warming might fairly wonder what'll happen if and when all those people do get power. An explosion in fossil-fuel consumption, over and beyond what we're already seeing? Well, maybe not. This new report from the World Bank suggests that, for many of those 1.6 billion, renewable energy may actually be the most cost-effective option for generating electricity. Really.

The logic goes like this: It's true, without a carbon tax, building a coal plant is often the "cheapest" option for large-scale power needs ("cheap," that is, if you ignore the pollution and climate-change costs). But that's not true for rural folks who live off the grid (about 500 million people) or in smaller, isolated villages (a good chunk of the rest). For these communities, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydro, and sometimes even solar are more economical, even before you start thinking about green concerns.

That makes sense. For a tiny village in the middle of nowhere that requires a 500kw load, building a monster coal plant—or installing hundreds of miles worth of transmission lines to the nearest urban area—won't necessarily be the easiest way to bring in electricity. There's also the added bonus that state-owned utilities in many developing nations can be unreliable, and micro-generation is a nice way to not have to rely (too heavily) on a corrupt central government.

Back in 2001, Nick Thompson and Ricardo Bayon wrote a wonderful Washington Monthly piece about how renewable energy often makes more sense for many developing countries than doing what the now-rich countries all did and burn loads of fossil fuels. (They used the example of solar power in rural villages in Ghana.) In some cases, it'd be easier for renewable companies to make inroads in the developing world, since it's not like there's a ton of pre-existing fossil-fuel infrastructure in place. But anyway, it's nice to see the World Bank putting forward a similar argument, only with more charts and graphs.

A Little Busting Goes a Long Way

2008-01-11T14:52:00.000-05:00

Back in December, Harold Meyerson wrote about how labor unions are increasingly going global and making alliances abroad. So the CWA will link arms with Germany's Ver.di to organize the German-owned T-Mobile here in the United States. But labor leaders aren't the only folks who can travel abroad: "U.S.-based transnationals [are trying] to bring their union-busting practices to their far-flung activities. At the moment... anti-union U.S. consultants are advising Chinese companies how to get around a mild Chinese labor-rights law that takes effect January 1."

Well, I was curious to learn more, and recently came across a paper by John Logan, a professor at the London School of Economics, on a related subject: As it turns out, not only are U.S. companies bringing anti-labor tactics overseas, but more and more foreign-based firms are calling the Americans for help in fending off their own organizing drives. Along with fighter jets and scrap metal, union-busting knowhow is becoming a major U.S. export—especially to the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

Take The Burke Group, a "union avoidance" firm that's been helping companies like GE, Coca Cola, MCI, and Kmart thwart organizing drives since the early 1980s (the firm claims a 96 percent success rate). In the past five years, TBG has been waging counter-organizing campaigns for clients in Britain, too: T-Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, Honeywell, FlyBe, Kettle Chips. During organizing drives, TBG will help convince workers that unionizing means wage cuts and job loss and, if necessary, will push employers to intimidate or fire organizers. Since British unions have had little experience with this sort of opposition, they've been getting crushed. Utterly crushed:

Following a five-year campaign to organize employees at General Electric Caledonian, Britain's largest private-sector union, Amicus, lost decisively a representation ballot in June 2002. Unaware that that Burke consultants were running the company's campaign, one bewildered union official remarked after the crushing defeat: "We have been blown out of the water… The result is a huge shock. We can’t explain why our arguments for union recognition have been rejected…It is quite obvious that those who said they would vote for us have changed their mind. God knows why."

The GE campaign is not an isolated case. The British union running the organizing drive at Amazon, the Graphical Print and Media Union, reported that the company mounted the most aggressive anti-union campaign it had ever encountered and accused management of sacking union activists and committing several other illegal practices. The union has temporarily abandoned its flagship organizing drive among distribution employees at Amazon.

It's an ugly scene. And notice, it took at least few decades for union-busting to become a billion-dollar industry and permanent fixture on the American labor landscape. Britain's getting there a lot quicker.

Climate Change and Innovation

2007-12-12T17:35:00.001-05:00

Nowadays, a growing number of conservatives are admitting that, yes, okay, global warming is real. But, they add, we shouldn't impose binding caps on CO2 because it's too costly, and anyway, the only thing that will save us is awesome new technology. For variations on the theme, see Newt Gingrich or Jim Manzi. Some of these folks seem to have great faith in Congress's ability to pick out the technologies that will save us, so they suggest that the government should just ramp up R&D spending on mitigation and adaptation and call it a day.

The liberal response is to say, yes, we need some technological advances to avert catastrophic global warming, but to get those, we mostly need to cap carbon emissions and let the market decide how best to adjust. That's the best way to spur innovation. Now, I'm a kneejerk lefty, so I've always thought this was basically correct, but here's a chart putting the argument in graphic form (via ED's excellent climate blog):

What are we looking at here? This is from a Carnegie Mellon research paper looking at patent filings for sulfur dioxide-control technologies for electric power plants. The government had been spending money on research for this stuff for a long time, but it was only in the late 1960s—after Congress passed the Clean Air Act, in all its regulatory glory—that the patents started flooding in. Regulation, it seems, and not R&D spending per se, helped drive innovation.

Prison Exodus

2007-12-12T17:15:00.001-05:00

The flipside of setting new incarceration records each year—at last count, the United States had locked up 1.5 million people in state or federal prison, and 775,000 in jail for minor crimes—is that, each year, you get fresh news reports heralding "the largest exodus of prisoners in American history." Those numbers, in turn, end up swamping state re-entry programs—which are often underfunded anyway—and that means high recidivism rates, which swell the prison population even further, and so the cycle continues. Onward and upward.

Anyway, U.S. News & World Report has a nice feature story on states that are trying to break that cycle. One major obstacle: "Holding a job remains the best predictor of success for ex-cons, and employer surveys have found about 80 percent of ex-cons to be diligent, trustworthy, and dependable. Yet employers are still reluctant to hire them. They risk having employees who can be at worst violent and at best antisocial and reap few benefits in return."

States can try to address that problem through tax credits and regulations, but even that's not a sure bet—on the tax credit front, "small businesses often find the paperwork more trouble than it's worth," and it's hard to bar employers from turning down ex-convicts (New York state tries, but I'm not sure how effective that is). Then there's the difficulty of coordinating job training, housing, and so forth. But Kansas, for one, has launched several re-entry programs that have cut recidivism rate in half. So it's not at all impossible.

Getting Revisionist With McGovern

2007-12-12T15:47:00.000-05:00

In the latest issue of Democracy, Rick Perlstein makes the case that most accounts of George McGovern's landslide loss in 1972 miss the mark:

McGovern lost because he was an isolationist? If you had said that in 1972, people might have looked at you funny. Whatever his preference for deep cuts in the defense budget, Republican surrogates who hauled out the isolationist charge were labeled "silly" by no less an honest broker than the New York Times' Scotty Reston. Over the following six years–according to my ProQuest search–the words "McGovern" and some variant of "isolation" were mentioned in the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune a mere six times.

And, of course, McGovern lost to a candidate who was also campaigning on a pledge to end the war. But what about the whole "acid, amnesty, and abortion" thing?

Well, like I said, his position on abortion was the same as Nixon's. His position on pot followed the President’s National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. And amnesty was enacted, in limited form, by Gerald Ford. And the person who cast the false aspersion, Novak has recently revealed in his memoirs, was ... Thomas Eagleton.

Perlstein argues that McGovern's substantive positions hurt him far less than his breathtakingly incompetent campaign: The disastrous flip-flop on whether to keep Eagleton on the ticket, for instance, or the 21-year-old novices crunching polling data. Plus, Nixon's dirty tricks were effective, and many prominent Democrats had a visceral loathing for McGovern. (Evidently, Hubert Humphrey—in an anecdote that's in dire need of follow-up—phoned Nixon on Election Night to congratulate the victor and intone, darkly, that "I did what I had to do" to keep McGovern from winning.)

Anyway, I'm not saying this is the final word on the matter, but since the specter of McGovern seems to get summoned anytime a less-than-maximally-hawkish Democrat opens his or her mouth, the counter-CW take is worth reading.

Update: For anyone interested, Rick Perlstein e-mails with a few more points that got left on Democracy's cutting-room floor:

1) In April of 1971... every viable Democratic presidential candidate, including Humphrey, went on TV in an extraordinary joint appearance and implored Nixon to set a date for withdrawal from Vietnam—including Scoop Jackson (who differed from the others only in that he said Nixon shouldn't publicly announce the date. So if people want to indict McGovern for his stance on Vietnam, they also have to indict his opponents in the Democrats' civil war—Humprey and, to a lesser extent, Jackson. It was just self-evidence to EVERY Democrat that we had to get out, and self-evident to Nixon that he had to appear to be getting out.

2) "Come home America" was a quote from Martin Luther King, and though of course it had isolationist resonances, in the context of both King and McGovern's speeches it was not literally geographic--it was a figurative call for America to "come home" to its founding ideals.

3) Democrats only started accusing each other of "McGovernism," equating that with "isolationism" starting in the early 1980s, in the context of debates about Central America--ie, if we ignored Communist encroachments there, Democrats would lose 49 states. It was an accusation Walter Mondale pioneered against Gary Hart (McGovern's campaign manager) for his announced reluctance to commit ground troops to protect oil in the Persian Gulf and (according to a Mondale spokesman) for continuing "the McGovern legacy of resistance to military spending and American involvement abroad." (Then, of course, Mondale lost 49 states...)

4) By 1986 you could be accused of "McGovernism" for basically paraphrasing things Nixon and Kissinger said in 1972. There was a columnist in the Post named Stephen S. Rosenfeld (I hadn't heard of him before) who excoriated a Hart foreign policy position paper for claiming "superpowers no longer dominate the world and 'the diffusion of power is the defining reality of our age.'" You can look it up (for example, Nixon's July 6, 1971 speech in Kansas CIty to a gathering of media executives, about which your colleague John Judis writes brilliantly in his 1992 book Grand Illusions: Critics and Champions of the American Century): that utterance was Nixon-Kissingerist to a T. And yet this Rosenfeld called it "one of those amorphous generalities that seem to come with the Democratic Party card."

Thus my ultimate point: "McGovernism" is a word not signifying an idea but a cudgel to short-circuit thought and honest historical reckoning.

Stick PIt

2007-12-06T23:49:00.000-05:00

Nothing about working in a slaughterhouse sounds pleasant. There's the meager pay: $21,000 a year, on average. There's the sheer danger of it all: The dizzying pace of the plant forces workers wielding sharp knives to work very rapidly, and workers face an absurdly high risk of death or disability. Safety standards are atrocious. There's also the... well, hell, just read the description:

Human hands… must make the same knife or scissors cut to slit open carcasses from anus to breast or the same twist of the hand to yank out viscera at a grueling pace, set by a relentless conveyor belt and reinforced by circulating foremen, while workers are standing in pools of water and grease in temperatures that range from freezing to ninety-five degrees and being pelted by flying fat globules or dripping blood.

Most of that's probably familiar to anyone who's read Fast Food Nation (or the Mother Jones piece that was the basis for that part of the book). But what's new to me is the angle Jennifer Dillard brings up in this recent paper: namely, the psychological toll of doing all that killing. Here's one interview with a slaughterhouse worker:

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, God, that really isn’t a bad-looking animal. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them—beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.

And another, even more gruesome passage:

Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around the pit. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe—two-inch diameter pipe—and I literally beat that hog to death. Couldn’t have been a two-inch piece of solid bone left in its head. . . . It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking, what in God’s sweet name did I do? ... People go into Morrell expecting respect and good working conditions. They come out with carpal tunnel, tendonitis, alcoholism, you name it, because they’re under incredible pressure and they’re expected to perform under intolerable conditions. Or they develop a sadistic sense of reality.

That's horrible, but not surprising. I certainly couldn't kill a pig. Most people couldn't—that's (partly) why we have slaughterhouses in the first place. And while I've never really believed that a person should only eat something he or she can kill with their bare hands, it is an incredibly gruesome task to outsource, perhaps even different in kind from other wretched tasks that low-wage workers end up doing. Maybe this can all be reworked into a moral case for vegetarianism at some point.

There's some evidence that slaughterhouse work is associated with increases in alcoholism and violent crime, but no one's done any rigorous studies. One big question is how to curb some of the worst, most trauma-inducing conditions. OSHA rarely addresses psychological hazards in the workplace, and, in any case, has never done a fantastic job of protecting slaughterhouse workers. Dillard suggests a few potential legal remedies, but what about labor unions? I'd be curious to know what the difference is between unionized and non-unionized slaughterhouses on this score. (Not that organizing a meatpacking plant is even remotely easy these days...)

Profiles of Clever People

2007-12-06T21:16:00.000-05:00

Via Greg Mankiw, The American—which is, I think, AEI's in-house rag—has a short but interesting profile of up-and-coming MIT economist Ivan Werning. Here's a summary of his work on inequality and inheritance:

Previous studies have shown that the most efficient economic system causes inequality to grow. Policies that reduce inequality are believed to have a trade-off: If you punish people too much for doing well—by reducing their incentives to pass on wealth to their children—these people will reduce their effort, to the detriment of the economy as a whole. But allowing inequality to increase concentrates the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Werning found that the models at the core of these judgments were incomplete. Allowing inequality to grow, unfettered, is economically optimal only if one looks at just the first generation. But if you take into account the children of first-generation parents, and their children’s children, then the most preferable system is not one that allows inequality to grow, but one that attempts to stabilize the distribution of wealth.

His paper shows that the transmission of wealth should be regulated to prevent an accumulation of luck—that children should essentially be insured against the family into which they are born.

Well, that jibes with everything I've always believed, so of course I'm going to find this interesting. Mankiw seems less convinced. Either way, here are the two papers where Werning lays out the case for a progressive estate tax (along with, in fact, subsidies for bequests by lower-income families). Here's a paper in which he rather cleverly rebuts the notion that the state needs to cut off unemployment benefits after six months in order to spur workers into finding jobs.

How's That for Disproportionate?

2007-12-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

One major point about drug laws is that they're very widely violated. In 2002, there were some 19.5 million drug users in the United States—about 8 percent of the population—but just 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people who went to jail for drug offenses. Now, that's a ton of people in prison—and most of them should not be there, period—but it's still only a tiny fraction of all drug users. Any law that's flouted that frequently is going to be enforced in a very, very selective manner.

But even though we often hear platitudes about how that's true—about how the War on Drugs disproportionately affects black people, and so on—the details here are truly remarkable. For instance, a 2002 NIDA survey found that African American teens use drugs at a slightly lower rate than their white counterparts, and that's true for a variety of specific drugs—even crack. But, that year, black youths were brought to court on drug charges at a rate of 8.2 per 1,000, compared with only 6.0 per 1,000 for whites.

Likewise, the 2002 SAMHSA National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that African Americans of all ages use illicit drugs at only a slightly higher rate than whites (9.7 percent vs. 8.5 percent). But blacks were sent to prison for drug offenses at a far, far higher rate. Okay, maybe that's because African Americans are more likely to be involved in selling drugs? But that's also doubtful: One DoJ study found that 13 percent of black youths had sold drugs, compared with 17 percent of white youth, yet, in 2003, black youths were arrested for drug crimes at twice the rate of whites.

Now, there are a slew of possible theories for why that's so. Disparate policing practices are one factor—police often focus on low-income and minority neighborhoods, and it's easier to spot and bust street deals than suburban sales. Unequal treatment in courts is another factor—white youths are twice as likely to retain private counsel as black youths, and one study found that, for instance, probation officers are more likely to see crimes by minorities as caused by personal failings, while seeing crimes by white youth as caused by circumstance. ("He's a good boy, just fell in with a bad crowd…") It's not hard to imagine that bias applies to judges and prosecutors, too.

Anyway, along those lines, the Justice Policy Institute just put out a fantastic new study adding its two cents on the issue. Their study looked at county-by-county data, and found some striking patterns. There's barely any correlation between drug use and the rate counties put people in prison for drug offenses. Rockingham County, NH, has a higher percentage of drug users than Jefferson Parish, LA, but Jefferson has a drug admission rate 36 times greater. And so on. JPI did find, though that counties with higher poverty rates, or larger percentages of minorities have higher drug incarceration rates—even after you control for crime rates.

The other noteworthy finding here is that counties that spend more on police budgets end up imprisoning people for drug offenses at a higher rate—even after you control for crime, region, poverty, unemployment, and so on. It's like you'd expect: When a county adds more police, those police spend more time going after drug offenders. And they're more likely to use their discretion to go primarily after black drug dealers—even if African Americans aren't selling drugs at higher rates, as has been the the case in Seattle, according to this in-depth study.

Yellow Tail For All

2007-12-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

Wine trivia pops up in the oddest places. Lying around the office was a copy of The Milken Institute Review, which appears to be the in-house publication of the Milken Institute—as in Michael Milken, of junk bond fame. Who knew? Inside, among other things, was a fun essay on the wine industry, by Philip Martin of UC Davis:

There have been three important changes in American wine drinkers over the past two decades. First, Americans upgraded their palates, moving from inexpensive jug wines with retail prices of less than $3 a bottle to popular-premium wines costing $3 to $7, super-premium wines at $7 to $14 a bottle and ultra-premiums, which cost more than $14.

Second, preferences are shifting toward reds, both because palates have become more sophisticated and because red wines may have health benefits that whites do not.

Third, Americans increasingly prefer the consistent taste of fruity (high-acid, high-sugar) wines produced in California, Argentina, Australia, Chile and New Zealand to the "mystery in every bottle" (typically drier) wines from Old World Europe. This trend has been accelerated (or, skeptics maintain, created) by the independent critic Robert Parker, who changed the global wine-rating business by setting a high ethical standard in his wine reviews that was missing before he vaulted to prominence in the 1980s.

That's interesting about Parker (as is his Wikipedia page, which notes that some chateau owners are so desperate to curry favor with the guy that they've done everything from send death threats to offer up their daughters). Meanwhile, I assume U.S. demand is going to keep growing rapidly—especially if we keep getting bombarded with 60 Minutes specials on how those accursed French oenophiles never get heart disease. And that could make things interesting.

After all, Americans seem to prefer the California/New Zealand/Australia style of winemaking, which strives for consistency across vintages, has an the alcohol level around 13-14 percent, and does away with some of the musty old European techniques like using wooden casks. So we''d expect European winemakers to adopt some of these methods in response, no? Surely someone's noticed that Yellow Tail is doing very, very well (by Martin's estimate, it now accounts for about a fifth of all U.S. wine imports, and Australia has surpassed Italy in U.S. sales). Then again, maybe it's just the cute 'critter' label, which can make any wine a hot seller here in the U.S.A.

Following the Bali Talks (But Not Too Closely...)

2007-12-04T16:02:00.000-05:00

There sure are a lot of news reports being filed from Bali—where delegates from some 190 nations are starting to discuss what sort of climate change treaty might follow Kyoto—but there's not much in the way of actual, er, news.

The one piece I'd recommend is Alan Zarembo's harsh—but perfectly fair—article in the Los Angeles Times detailing all the ways in which the Kyoto Protocol fell flat. The only reason participating countries could report a 12 percent drop in emissions was because industries in the former Soviet Union collapsed after 1990 and factories were shuttered across Eastern Europe. If you exclude the former Soviet bloc, total CO2 emissions from countries bound by Kyoto's caps actually rose about 8 percent since 1990.

Now, in many ways, Kyoto was less about achieving dramatic reductions and more about getting countries together to start acting like grown-ups and cooperating over climate change. (Although it was obviously a huge problem that the United States never ratified the treaty and that it exempted developing countries from pollution limits.) So it's probably fair, as one expert tells the Times, to say that Kyoto "was a diplomatic success, but environmentally it was a complete failure," though obviously that excuse won't fly this time around...

Okay, one more: This Der Spiegel dispatch, if true, is unbelievable. The Bush administration has long insisted that it won't accept mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions because, among other things, China and India haven't done so. But now U.S. officials are "discreetly" trying to convince China and India to publicly declare that they won't accept binding caps unless the United States does more—in effect, deadlocking the talks.

Another: George Monbiot complains that the UN goals for emissions cuts are inadequate, and that the only way we're going to avoid dangerous climate change is through "the complete decarbonization of the global economy." He actually thinks it can be done without too much calamity, although we'll probably have to give up flying... Yikes. Although maybe we can bring back the Zeppelin?

Aiding and Abetting

2007-12-04T11:28:00.000-05:00

Do I have this right? Florida courts have long rejected the argument that gun wholesalers are at all responsible for any murders committed with the weapons they sell. But, as The New York Times reports today, if a 20-year-old in Florida lends some friends his car one morning, and they end up killing someone, he can be convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole?

Race and the Death Penalty

2007-12-03T19:52:00.000-05:00

This paper, via The Monkey Cage, is striking. Two political scientists, Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz, polled a bunch of white people with this question:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Okay, that's about what you'd expect. But then they polled another random set of white people with a slight variant:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

No, that's not a typo. White respondents were more likely to strongly favor the death penalty after they were told that it's mostly African Americans being executed. (Not surprisingly, black respondents were far less eager to support the death penalty after learning about the racial disparity.)

Anyway, rather than chalk these results up to, say, genocidal tendencies among white folks, the researchers dove into a bunch of survey data and decided on this explanation: White survey subjects, they found, were more likely to emphasize personal failings as a primary cause of crime, rather than focusing on situational factors—poverty, inequality in the justice system, etc. So they're more likely to believe that, if black people are being disproportionately punished, it's because they "deserve" it, and hence, they reject any suggestion of unfairness so strongly—because it's inconsistent with their prior beliefs—that they run in the other direction.

I can't tell if that's the best explanation here, but either way, that's the result. Also, note that the death penalty debate has shifted terrain in the past decade. It used to be that opponents would argue over the morality of the death penalty, or appeal to the Constitution, but nowadays—especially after the rash of DNA exonerations that began in the early '90s—they tend to focus more on the risk of executing innocent people, as well as the disparate racial impact.

Those arguments actually seem to have worked somewhat—support for the death penalty nudged downward from 84 percent in 1994 to 66 percent in 2000—but Peffley and Hurwitz's work suggests that white enthusiasm for the death penalty isn't likely to change much in response to these new tactics. As noted, the racial disparity argument may, in some cases, even increase white support. What a world, eh?

Will the Amazon Survive?

2007-12-03T19:36:00.000-05:00

In another must-read New York Review of Books essay, John Terborgh argues that out-of-control fires may be the Amazon rainforest's undoing—and they may come sooner than we think:

Humid tropical forests simply don't burn, or at least that was the conventional wisdom. After all, millions of fires are set in tropical forest regions every year in conjunction with the slash-and-burn methods used to clear land for agriculture; yet the fires almost never escape into the surrounding forest. But in 1983, the large-scale fluctuation in climate called El Niño brought about a different reality. Southeast Asia became a tinderbox after unprecedented drought. Fires broke out and burned for months in the equatorial rainforests of Borneo, creating a pall of acrid smoke that shut down airports hundreds of miles away and caused respiratory distress in thousands.

Scientists investigating the causes and consequences of the Borneo fires discovered an important corollary. Forests that had been logged were the ones that burned; unlogged forests resisted fire. Logging synergizes fire in two ways. First, cutting down trees opens the forest canopy, admitting sunlight and drying out the leaf litter on the forest floor. Second, the debris of branches, chips, and stumps left behind by logging operations serves as fuel for any subsequent fire. For these two reasons, fire can propagate through logged forest under drought conditions but usually peters out in unlogged forests.

Ground fires burned huge tracts of Amazonian forest in conjunction with the El Niño of 1997 and 1998. The toll promises to be far more severe in the future. The first time a tropical forest burns, the damage can hardly be detected from above because the destruction is largely confined to saplings and small trees whose crowns lie below the canopy. But the subsequent presence of large numbers of dead trees greatly increases the fuel available to stoke the next fire. Consequently, second fires burn hotter and more destructively, killing large trees as well as practically all smaller ones.

And, of course, second fires generate even more fuel for the third fire. Colleagues of mine who study this subject, notably, Carlos Peres and Jos Barlow of the University of East Anglia (UK) and William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, assert that the third fire spells doom for the forest, since it kills all remaining trees. After that, the land once occupied by forest fills with coarse shrubs and grasses that become flammable every dry season. Fires then become a permanent feature of a transformed ecology and defeat the prospects for recovering the forest. Millions of acres of forest are now primed to burn a second time and millions more are primed for the first burn, thanks to the wave of rampant logging that has spread through the region.

Scary stuff. Terborgh's conclusion is harsh, but probably accurate: Brazil is going to keep hacking away at the Amazon—and, hence, increasing the risk of uncontrollable fire—until "an international community united by the specter of radical climate change" decides that it's worth paying Brazilians not to do so. The first version of the Kyoto Protocol didn't cover forests under its cap-and-trade system. Unless someone figures out how to account for them in a successor treaty, it may well be bye-bye Amazon rainforest—which would, in turn, further accelerate global warming.

P.S. Terborgh brings up the oft-overlooked point that about 40 percent of the Amazon basin actually lies not in Brazil, but in neighboring countries, and that in two of those countries—Peru and Venezuela—the vast majority of rainforest remains untouched, for various idiosyncratic reasons. But will that last forever? Maybe not. After all, a recent satellite analysis found that deforestation rates in Peru have surged over the past few years, as the logging industry expands... On the other hand, as Terborgh mentions in a follow-up exchange, support for conservation within Peru is remarkably strong, which can make all the difference in the world.

P.P.S. Also, note that this new report suggests that it would only take a very modest price on carbon to convince Brazilians not to hack down the rainforest. That's very good news.

The Consensus After the Consensus

2007-12-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

Now that it's fashionable to bad-mouth the "Washington Consensus" that prevailed throughout the '90s, there's the question of what's going to replace it. Walden Bello, who's pretty far left on these matters, argues that there's no longer any consensus in development circles on how to promote growth and reduce poverty in the Third World—instead there are roughly four distinct schools of thought. Those are:

1. Washington Consensus Plus. Basically, these are the same old market reforms that have been promoted by the IMF and World Bank all these years, only with an extra side helping of institutional and legal reforms. So, for example, the IMF now argues that countries need to develop "financial infrastructure" before they start liberalizing their capital inflows.

2. Neoconservative Neoliberalism. This is the murkiest category, but Bello calls this "essentially the development policy of the Bush administration." This approach mainly seems to involve bilateral debt relief and short-term grants that are conditional on certain free-market reforms. The Millennium Challenge Account is the most obvious example.

3. Neostructuralism. This appears to be the direction countries like Brazil and Chile are heading, in which economic growth and progressive policies are supposed to go hand in hand. So you have market reforms and liberalization, but also income transfers and spending on health, education, and housing to ease the pain—without going too far left, ala Hugo Chavez. "Neostructuralism," says Bello, "does not fundamentally reverse but simply mitigates the poverty and inequality-creating core neoliberal policies."

4. Global Social Democracy. This is the approach that people like Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz now seem to favor, which, Bello argues, often "places equity above growth." Advocates of this view are skeptical of trade liberalization and frequently "demand fundamental changes in the institutions and rules of global governance such as the IMF, WTO, and the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreements."

Now, I would've guessed that station #4 was the leftmost stop on this train, but, no, Bello argues, the problem with that view is that "global social democracy" is just plain incompatible with the "rapid integration of markets and production." Or at least it might be. He doesn't really offer any evidence on this score.

Then Bello really gets the neo-Marxist party started and suggests that "a functionally integrated global economy" is probably undesirable and, in any case, only came about as a "desperate and unsuccessful effort to overcome the crises of overaccumulation, overproduction, and stagnation that have overtaken the central capitalist economist since the mid-seventies." Well, no thanks, I'll stick with Door #4 (I think), although his broader taxonomy seemed useful enough.

Deep-Sea Diving

2007-12-03T18:03:00.001-05:00

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm terrified of fish. Horrified, mortified, petrified—the works. If it came down to a choice between lying in a coffin crawling with spiders or sitting in a bathtub with one little goldfish paddling about—I'd take the spiders. So there's precisely zero chance I'll ever find myself in a bathysphere 2,000 feet underwater, which means I'll just have to read about what goes on down there:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil [right]. It's a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish—seemingly all fangs and gape—with a "fishing rod" affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea—until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

That's from Tim Flannery's great review of two new books about deep-sea creatures. He also hazards a guess as to why most folks are more intrigued by the thought of going to Mars than exploring the depths of the ocean floor:

Is it the geography of Christian belief that has made us upright apes so dread the ocean deep, yet strive so mightily to explore the cold and (so far as we know) lifeless heavens? Not all human beings think as Beebe did. The Greenland Inuit, for example, believe that paradise lies at the bottom of the sea, for that is where their food comes from. It is the cloudy, frozen mountains and sky that they fear and shun. Whatever the cause, human beings know more about the surface of that dead rock we call the moon than the living depths of our own planet's seas.

Got a better theory? The last section of the essay is more depressing, about how all of the industrial waste and sewage humans have dumped into the ocean—scuttled ships, thousands of tons of chemical weapons, obsolete nuclear reactors—have wreaked no small amount of havoc on the sea floor. It's hard to care, until that gunk comes traveling back up the food chain. ("The liver-like glands of one species of shrimp... have levels of polonium-210 a million times that of seawater.") So there's reason to care beyond the (undeniable) fact that there's lots of awesomely wacky stuff down there...

P.S. This was traumatizing but cool.

Follow the Bouncing Trends

2007-12-03T17:11:00.000-05:00

I never know what to make of these trend pieces, but the AP has a hopeful article on how states are now "rethinking" the practice of charging kids as adults, while the Kansas City Star finds states "re-examining" residency restrictions for former sex offenders. Those changes would make a lot of sense (read the articles for a sense of the debate), but, then again, it seems like there are always stories in the news about states reconsidering this or that ineffective crime-control strategy, and not much ever seems to come of it...

On the other hand, our neighbors to the north are "pressing ahead with plans to create mandatory minimum prison terms for drug crimes in spite of two studies [prepared for the Canadian government] that say such laws don't work." Well, that's never stopped anyone on this side of the border.

Is the Drug War Inevitable?

2007-12-02T18:43:00.000-05:00

"All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs—with very little to show for it." That's the short version. The long version is Ben Wallace-Wells 15,000-word Rolling Stone cover story this month, where you can read all about how, thanks to the "War on Drugs," prison populations have ballooned, cocaine prices have plunged, and the U.S. military has inserted itself into a civil war in Colombia. Mostly, though, I was interested in examples of what alternative policies might look like:

In the summer of 2003, the police department in High Point, North Carolina, held its annual command-staff retreat. … One topic dominated the conversation: an increase in violent crime that was concentrated in three drug-dealing neighborhoods in the city. "The place we were at was that all the traditional enforcement was making no difference," says the department's deputy chief, Marty Sumner. "We agreed we weren't going to be able to eliminate drug use. We weren't even going to try to go after drug use. We wanted to change the marketing of the drug."

Sumner's department called in the Harvard criminologist David Kennedy. The High Point police had worked with Kennedy before, adopting the Boston Gun Project's policy of trying to break the link between drugs and crime. Now the criminologist told them that he had a new kind of project to propose, one that went beyond the Boston experiment. Kennedy's pitch was simple: The trick, he said, wasn't to focus on eliminating drugs but rather to shut down the most "overt" drug markets, the ones operating so openly that they attracted prostitution and violent crime. "Instead of looking at it as a drug problem, we decided to think of it as a drug-market problem," Sumner says. "What the public really couldn't stand was the violence associated with public drug markets." Dealers operating in the open are targets for stickup men and other would-be robbers, and the public swagger and turf consciousness of street slingers can cradle violent, simmering beefs.

High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city's three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn't. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they'd be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.

"We didn't think it would work," Sumner tells me, "but the drug markets have disappeared." …

In 2007, in the program's fourth year, [the number of drug-related murders] has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was." His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy's program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world's leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level.

The basic logic is to focus on drug-related murders and ignore those users and dealers who aren't causing violence. By all accounts, it works better than the usual old strategies. (But does it work better than, say, outright decriminalization or legalization would? No one's saying.) Local governments are paying attention. A few years ago, though, Mother Jones did a profile of David Kennedy and his approach to gang violence, noting that, despite Kennedy-inspired successes in Boston and elsewhere, the FBI and Congress have largely ignored his work.

Normally, this would be my cue to toss off a line about how Congress will never change, but the one encouraging aspect of Wallace-Wells's piece is that it gives some hope that the drug war isn't totally inevitable. Bill Clinton's first drug czar, Lee Brown, actually had non-crazy ideas about drug policy—even endorsing a RAND study showing that treatment was a better way to tackle drug use than throwing millions of black men in prison and gunning down traffickers overseas. But Brown was a poor spokesman, and soon Newt Gingrich came to power, at which point Clinton, worried about looking "soft," appointed Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who gave us pointless anti-marijuana ads and Plan Colombia. With a little luck, though, things might've turned out differently. Or is that naive?

P.S. Of course, the Lee Brown tale is also a reminder that, even though Barack Obama and John Edwards are hating on the "war on drugs" now, the pressures to stay the course once in office are considerable. But as for Hillary Clinton... well, as Marc Ambinder notes, she's come out against even applying the new guidelines on crack sentencing to current prisoners. It's a modest proposal—affecting maybe 20,000 crack offenders who were punished under the old, stricter guidelines—but totally sensible, and the fact that she's against even that is a good sign that she probably won't touch the drug-war status quo. (The same goes for all the Republicans, except for, maybe, Huckabee.)

P.P.S. Curiously enough, Wallace-Wells reports that Chris Dodd—who now has one of the more liberal drug-war stances around and supports marijuana decriminalization—might've been partly to blame for Plan Colombia. Rumor has it that Dodd originally pushed the plan so as to benefit a helicopter manufacturer in his home state. Rand Beers offers Rolling Stone only this cryptic comment: "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia. ... [pause] I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Mitigation Made Easy (Sort of)

2007-11-30T19:10:00.000-05:00

What's the deal with McKinsey & Co.? How much impact do its reports have? Do they get passed around corporate boardrooms? Ignored? I ask because I enjoyed this latest report, which argues that the United States could cut its greenhouse-gas emissions nearly one-third by 2030 at little cost, using mainly "tested approaches" and a few "high-potential emerging technologies." All we'd really need, it seems, is a modest carbon tax, some federal spending for infrastructure, a bunch of regulations, and, um, we're off. Yes, the Stern Review and the IPCC have said much the same thing, but maybe McKinsey can woo a broader audience.

Interestingly, about 40 percent of the mitigation measures that McKinsey studied—especially the ones that involve boosting efficiency—would actually save the country money in the medium run. The trick is to implement them sooner rather than later, since every year of delay means another round of inefficient cars and homes getting built. Conveniently enough, there's another new report out finding that California's strict efficiency rules haven't hurt the state's economy much at all. Instead, they've lowered energy costs for businesses and residents. I know, I know, who could've ever predicted that...

The McKinsey report was funded, in part, by PG&E and Shell. What this means, I can't say, though I will say that some of its conclusions sound odd. For instance, check out the graph that Dave Roberts highlights here. Is building a new nuke plant really cheaper than onshore wind and distributed PV solar? Even once all costs—waste disposal, insurance—are factored in? I'm also not sure how much hope we should hold out for carbon sequestration (though, note, that hardy perennial plays only a small role in McKinsey's vision). Also, even if mitigating climate change won't damage the U.S. economy much—and could even boost it—certain stakeholders will still get screwed during the transition. But, hell, that's never stopped people from supporting "free" trade, so...

More Alarmism, Please

2007-11-17T20:59:00.000-05:00

Another day, another UN climate change report, another trip to the thesaurus to look up synonyms for "dire." Grim? Daunting? I can't find a good one. The New York Times did a fine job, though, of summing up the ways in which the IPCC may well be underestimating the pace of global warming:

Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China. ...

The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.

Likewise, a recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees [Celsius] by 2030 [!?!?], a disastrous increase far higher than the panel’s estimates of one to four degrees by the end of the century.

As best I can tell, the IEA's "six degrees by 2030" prediction is a worst-case scenario—a look at what could happen if the world maintains its present energy course, and China and India keep on growing and burning coal at their current rates. Still, as worst-case scenarios go, it's a pretty fucking, um, dire one.

P.S. Ah. Thanks to commenter mitchell porter, it seems that should be "six degrees beyond 2030"—likely six degrees by the end of the century. Still (very) freak-out-worthy, but not the same as what the Times had.

Monkeys Everywhere

2007-11-14T11:24:00.000-05:00

It's not easy picking out the most surreal sentence from this Times piece about New Delhi being overrun by packs of wild monkeys. Is it the part where a gang of monkeys kills the deputy mayor? Maybe it's this:

Politicians with residences in the area have resorted to hiring private monkey catchers, men who use a larger, dark-faced monkey, the langur, to scare away the smaller wild ones.

And what happens when the bigger monkeys start ruling the city? An arms race, that's what.

Official Paranoia

2007-11-13T23:33:00.000-05:00

It's a random bit of quoting, I know, but I rather liked this passage from Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, on why the John Birch Society had such an ardent following in the 1950s and '60s:

Since McCarthy's day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the "repeal of industrialism," said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were industrialists).

The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had been telling them to be afraid—at least since 1947, when George F. Kennan argued in "The Sources of Soviet Conducts," the founding document of U.S. Cold War doctrine, excerpted in Reader's Digest, that "exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement."

Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakia, he said, "they controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled the country." Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a 1961 press conference, "Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever been." (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were supposedly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore fountains in order to infiltrate the United States.

You could no less avoid breathing in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in Charles Dickens's Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates claim that dangerous "fallout" from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the "discoveries" of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert Welch, that a KGB "Master Plan" allowed no Soviet to defect to the United States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel three-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets).

It shouldn't have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmosphere of fear and suspicion.

Sure, sure, that's not the only reason the group had tens of thousands of members (nor does it excuse their behavior, etc.), but... it's a fair point.

Corporations or People?

2007-11-13T20:17:00.000-05:00

Damned if I know what to think of Robert Reich's new book, Supercapitalism. You can read Robert Frank's Times review here; I'm too lazy to summarize it. The real fun comes in a few pages toward the end, when Reich (briefly) lists some ideas for dealing with modern-day corporations.

His bottom line: Corporations aren't people and shouldn't be treated like people. So they shouldn't be taxed (because the corporate income tax is inefficient and inequitable) or held criminally liable for wrongdoing (because it's unfair to make everyone in the company suffer for the crimes of a few—note that many low-level Arthur Andersen employees are still out of work). But, Reich says, companies should still be fined for wrongdoing—um, like people?—since shareholders shouldn't profit off illegal deeds. As I understand it, many experts also think civil liability is actually a more effective tool for dealing with—and deterring—corporate crime, although I can't really say.

The more radical part of Reich's analysis is that, because they're not people, corporations shouldn't be allowed to challenge laws and regulations in court—that should be left solely to investors, consumers, or employees. Now that's interesting, and would avoid bizarre situations like that in California, where global automakers sued to block the state's tailpipe-emissions law in 2005, even though a large number of the interested shareholders were foreigners. For that matter, Reich also argues that shareholders of a corporation shouldn't be forced subsidize political activities they oppose.

I don't know what the net effect of all these changes would be (large? small?), but it seems like they'd require constitutional amendments, at minimum. Reich is more persuasive when he talks about the limits of "corporate responsibility." After all, if companies aren't people, it's hard to expect them to do the "right" thing. That basic argument can be found in this essay, but Reich adds plenty of instances in which corporations say they'll do good (Nike and sweatshops) but the problem still persists (New Balance swaggers in with sweatshops of its own). Congress has a habit of holding hearings to berate corporations that misbehave, but then rarely follows up with laws or regulations that actually fix the problem.

P.S. More broadly, Reich offers a non-conspiratorial version of the "decline and fall" narrative that's central to all liberal books on domestic economic policy—namely, how the United States went from the mostly good ol' days of the 1960s (low inequality, strong unions, economic security for the middle class) to where we are today. He doesn't blame right-wing economic policies per se, but argues that they were an inevitable outgrowth of an economy being transformed by competitive pressures that benefited consumers and investors. Unlike Krugman's book, he barely discusses race at all.

There's some straw being torched here. Few liberals believe the economy would still look like it did in the 1960s—when cozy corporate oligopolies faced few competitive or investor pressures, and could afford to pay high wages and (mostly) play nice with unions—if not for Goldwater and Reagan. Yet Reich seems to spend a lot of pages rebutting that notion. But look, there's still the question of why the United States doesn't have a European-style welfare state and/or stronger unions to soften the edges of an increasingly investor- and consumer-centric global economy. Right-wing policies—and race—do play a role in that story. Still, the book's a very worthwhile read.

Drought and Out

2007-11-13T13:46:00.001-05:00

It's kind of talking-pointy, but Daniel Weiss and Zoe Brown have a nice analysis of the ongoing droughts in both the Southeast and Southwest. Beyond flogging the usual (sensible!) conservation measures, they also make the good point that energy use is a major culprit here:

Power plants are voracious water users. Nuclear plants use 830 gallons of water per megawatt hour, and coal plants are right behind at 750 gallons per megawatt hour. If current power generation and energy demand trends continue, power plants will use 7.3 billion gallons a day by 2030. The Department of Energy reports that this equals all U.S. water consumption a decade ago.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught on to this a few weeks ago, arguing that, seeing as how Atlanta's Lake Lanier is drying up, maybe it wasn't such a keen idea for the state to grant permits for a new coal plant that will consume "nearly 20 million gallons of water a day" from the Chattahoochee River, "putting an additional strain on metro Atlanta's major source of drinking water." (There's also that whole global warming thing, which is only going to dry out the region further.)

Conversely, wind and solar power use very little water. But many states in the Southeast have strongly opposed renewable energy mandates—claiming that they can't live without coal. Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue commissioned an energy task force last year that, in the end, recommended an aggressive push toward renewable power, but that proposal's gathering dust in a filing cabinet somewhere. I wonder, though—if the AJC's any indication—if the water crisis could finally prompt folks to rethink their energy stance. (Okay, more likely, they'll conjure up a way to cool power plants without using so much water, but one can always hope...)

The NRLB Gets Busy

2007-11-13T12:16:00.001-05:00

A math problem: The National Labor Relations Board has a one-vote GOP majority. The terms of two (2) Republicans and one (1) Democrat are set to expire at the end of the year. So just how many anti-labor rulings can the NRLB crank out before the deadline?

Let's see... carry the one... add the two... Ah. Answer: 61 and counting. Greg Tarpinian runs down some of the biggest decisions. There's a ruling that makes card-check elections more difficult, a ruling that makes it easier for workers to get rid of their union (employers will never abuse that one, scout's honor), and two rulings making it harder for illegally fired workers to get back pay. There's also a new rule that lets employers lay off union supporters during an organizing drive and then force them to sign release forms, preventing further legal challenges.

On the sunny side, the Senate can, in theory, refuse to confirm any new Bush appointees to the NRLB, which would give the board a one-vote Democratic majority until after the next election. Unless, of course, the president decides to make recess appointments...

Mmm... Jellyfish...

2007-11-11T23:31:00.000-05:00

Raffi Khatchadourian has an engrossing New Yorker profile of Paul Watson, a green activist who roams the ocean in a rusty North Sea ocean trawler, looking for whaling ships to harass and, if necessary, ram. There's a smart aside about how it wasn't until the mid-1990s that fisheries scientists fully grasped the scale of the damage over-fishing has done to the ocean. Plus this dystopian vision:

When Pauly and others took a longer view, they noticed another worrying trend. Humanity had been eating its way down the ocean’s food web; as large marine predators became scarce, people developed a taste for smaller and smaller fish. Animals that were once used for bait or that were considered worthless (hagfish, sea cucumber) were later taken in large quantities for human consumption.

"Bait thirty years ago was calamari," Pauly told me. "Now it is served in a restaurant. It is very nice. But it was bait before." Future generations, Pauly predicts, only half in jest, will grow up on jellyfish sandwiches.

Yum. Meanwhile, Japan, which scarfs down a quarter of the world's tuna catch, has agreed to reduce its fishing quotas for southern bluefin tuna and Atlantic bluefin—the fish used in sushi—because stocks are being depleted. It's not clear how strictly the fishing limits will be obeyed, though: Apparently, fisherman caught twice their legal quota of bluefin tuna in European waters this year. It's probably only a matter of time before bluefin goes extinct altogether, and we really do have to eat jellyfish sushi. The Times did a "light" piece a while back about the rise of deer-meat sushi, although the ravaging of the oceans is fairly unnerving.

P.S. I seem to recall reading somewhere that, waaaay back in the olden days, Japanese cooks didn't really use tuna in sushi—they preferred mackerel and snapper—and that tuna-mania was a twentieth-century invention, spurred during the U.S. occupation by soldiers who preferred fatty "red meat." But nowadays you read passages like this: "Without a sizeable slab of rich red flesh on prominent display, a sushi restaurant in [Japan] loses face—and customers."

P.P.S. In comments, Randy Paul points out that it's too late, our jelly fish future has already arrived.

Poor Defense

2007-11-11T16:53:00.000-05:00

Richard Posner, the U.S. circuit court judge, once pointed out that public defenders are overworked and under-funded—but then went on to say that he didn't necessarily consider this a bad thing:

I can confirm from my own experience as a judge that indigent defendants are generally rather poorly represented. ... If we are to be hardheaded we must recognize that this may not be entirely a bad thing.

The lawyers who represent indigent criminal defendants seem to be good enough to reduce the probability of convicting an innocent person to a very low level. If they were much better, either many guilty people would be acquitted or society would have to devote much greater resources to the prosecution of criminal cases. A barebones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendants may be optimal.

Now, I don't think the odds of convicting innocent people are "very low" in the U.S. justice system, though that might be a subjective judgment. But I'd always assumed that support for a "barebones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendants" was the prevailing view on the right. So it's nice to see that Radley Balko has a terrific, though not-online, Reason essay—discussing a new book on public defenders in Illinois—in which he argues against Posner and in favor of boosting state resources for poor defendants. (And how often do you expect libertarians to support greater spending for the poor?)

The disparities are striking. Prosecutors' budgets dwarf public defense budgets by about 2.5 to 1, and public defenders and court-appointed attorneys don't always have access to forensic experts or private investigators (nor do courts have to provide them). The fact that prosecutors usually have superior firepower, and can threaten mandatory minimum sentences if the case goes to trial, has given over-matched defense lawyers very high incentives to push for guilty pleas and "slough off burdensome caseloads." As Balko notes, a scant 1 percent of felony cases in Texas even make it to court, a level that's almost certainly too low.

I do wish, though, that there's been more discussion of the fact that public representation for the poor at the state level varies so widely from county to county. Some counties establish a state-run public defenders' office, some contract out the work to private law firms, and some pay individual lawyers by the hour to take court-appointed cases—as is the case in most of Massachusetts. My understanding is that the latter two set-ups create the starkest inequities, although I'd be curious to know more. (Public defenders' offices, after all, are hardly free of problems—see this investigation of Santa Clara county's justice system for a glaring example.)

David Feige wrote a great Slate piece in 2004 about how Massachusetts's hourly billing system created perverse incentives for court-appointed private lawyers to "load up on cases, plead out as many as possible as quickly as possible, submit a bill, and call it a day." Feige argued that dedicated public defender offices are a better alternative, and I think I agree. The obvious argument is that public defenders have more experience with criminal work, and are better able to lobby for more funding and lower caseloads (though not always successfully). Balko doesn't weigh in on this question, although his broader point about the need for more resources, regardless of the set-up, is well-taken.

P.S. Since I couldn't find Balko's review online, I'll compensate by linking to this great piece he did on the news that Schwarzenegger just vetoed a modest criminal-justice reform bill in California. That bill would've forced prosecutors to corroborate testimony from jailhouse "snitches," mandated the videotaping of police interrogations in certain cases, and established guidelines for eyewitness testimony. Suffice to say, none of these reforms should've been nixed.

Here Come the Weather-Makers

2007-11-11T06:55:00.000-05:00

Eli Kintisch has an eyebrow-raising scoop over at Science's website. This past week, a group of 50 top climate scientists met, behind closed doors, to discuss the possibility of geo-engineering as a way to stave off global warming. Mysteriously, only three publications were allowed to attend (Science, Nature, and The New York Times). And the results... weren't what anyone expected.

Most scientists have long dismissed geo-engineering schemes as crazy and dangerous—ideas like putting aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet, or modifying the ocean's albedo. The climate, after all, is very complex, trying to meddle with it further could really muck things up, and even talking about this stuff might divert attention away from the task of curbing CO2 emissions. But now, according to Kintisch, a growing number of climate scientists are so spooked by global warming, and the fact that most nations aren't doing enough to prevent it, that they've decided it would be crazy and dangerous not to look into geo-engineering.

The best overviews I've seen on this issue are this Boston Globe article and this Wilson Quarterly piece. But just to pile on: It's worth noting that no one has yet come up with an even halfway plausible geo-engineering plan. The most promising idea to date—injecting sulfuric dust into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight—suffered a blow after two University of Colorado scientists pointed out that it could wreak havoc on global rainfall patterns. More research would be fantastic, but it'd be insane for the world to sit around and wait for geo-engineering to save us, only to discover that, 20 years hence, none of these wacky plans have made it past the bong-cloud stage, and we're still on our present, carbon-belching energy path.

There's also the question of who would control the weather. Cloud-seeding in the United States has led to all sorts of lawsuits from farmers complaining about stolen rain. Chinese cities experimenting with this stuff have been warring over "cloud theft." The U.S. Air Force has drafted a report, "Weather as a Force Multiplier," discussing ways to use weather-modification as a weapon. If someone does come up with a way to cool the earth—say, giant space mirrors—there would be all sorts of tricky debates about who decides how it's used. It's hard to imagine that the international talks over that would be any less difficult than reaching an agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

Buckets of Cash

2007-11-07T20:00:00.000-05:00

Both the Center for Public Integrity and Spencer Ackerman point out that Musharraf's government in Pakistan has received some $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001, and no one really knows where it's going. Most of that money—around $6 billion to date—flows through a Defense Department program, the Coalition Support Funds (CSF), which was set up after September 11 to "reimburse" countries for various counterterrorism activities. Unlike most aid programs, this one gets little congressional oversight. According to CPI, Pakistan gets the vast, vast bulk of CSF funds. (Jordan gets a fair bit, too.)

"With the possible exception of Iraq reconstruction funds, I've never seen a larger blank check for any country than for the Pakistan CSF program," one veteran Senate staffer told CPI. All the Pakistani government has to do in exchange is tell the administration, behind closed doors, how it plans to spend the money. Wink, wink. At one point in 2003, the Pentagon forked over $195 million and simply told Congress, "This estimate is based on anticipated support that will be provided by Pakistan." That's all. Not much auditing. And the military, not "the people," seem to be getting most of the money. As Spencer notes, given that the Pakistani military is known for rampant corruption, that's a bit of a problem.

It's worth poking around CPI's broader investigation of post-9/11 U.S. military aid. Poor oversight seems to be fairly common, and not just with Pakistan. U.S. foreign-military training programs, for instance, are supposed to be monitored to make sure that we're not training and equipping folks who have committed "gross violations" of human rights. But a 2005 GAO report found that the vetting is often lax, discovering some 7,000 trainees who hadn't been vetted, including 32 from one notorious Indonesian special forces unit that had been specifically barred from receiving State Department funding because of it's human rights record. Pakistan, though, seems to be the biggest story here.

P.S. Can't say I know much about what's going on in Pakistan, but Stephen Cohen's short essay here was fairly informative, as was the polling data Hilzoy presented here, in addition to the stuff everyone else already linked to.

Once a Boondoggle...

2007-11-07T19:47:00.000-05:00

Seeing as how I'm too young to remember any of this, I'll just have to trust Jack Hitt's account of why Newt Gingrich decided to revive missile defense in the mid-1990s, after the program had been mocked to near-death in the 1980s:

[T]here was a time, not so long ago, when it was hard to come up with a good, intimidating national-security issue. Gingrich believed that the Democrats' skepticism of missile defense would serve as the key issue to flip the White House in 1996. Missile defense failed that test—but it didn't matter. The shield had been reborn as a hot-blooded, Republican-versus-Democrat wedge issue.

A wedge issue, mind you, whose annual bill comes to $11 billion—"a sum almost four times larger than the U.S. government's total spending on energy research." And, as Hitt documents in his piece, it's still very much a boondoggle. George W. Bush's chief contribution to said boondoggle, it turns out, was to order the Defense Department, back in 2002, to stop doing so many tests and just deploy the thing already. Suffice to say, that hasn't turned out well. In any case, plenty of scientists think the system will never work (and, even if it does, won't be worth the cost), but I thought this passage got at the darker heart of the matter:

Missile defense exists in a world of its own. It has a special budget process that exempts it from most congressional oversight, and it is pioneering a new acquisitions process that redefines the very nature of what constitutes a "threat." The system has a separate definition to denote what it means for a weapon to "work" and even what it means to "know" something to be true. The shield operates beyond the world of empirical testing, and outside the four service branches of the U.S. military. ...

It is America's Pyramid of Giza, our Colossus of Rhodes, our Great Wall—an infinitely advancing "system of systems" that, by the Pentagon's own description, can never be completed. It both works (in part or in theory) and does not work (as a whole or in practice). There is not, and never will be, a finished product. In time, the shield will shroud America and her allies, and a perpetual commitment to its everlasting need for further refinements and add-ons will be required to keep it functioning.

The italicized sentence seems spot-on. Back in 1995, the intelligence community declared that there wasn't any immediate need for missile defense, because no countries would be able to threaten the United States with ballistic missiles for at least 15 years. Wrong answer. So Republicans in Congress set up a commission, led by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, to draw up a new threat assessment, based not just on "likely" threats, but on "possible" threats. Maybe a country with Scud technology could convert that into ICBM capability. Maybe Venezuela will threaten us with missiles. And so on.

Obviously, once you start thinking this way, missile defense can expand forever. Hitt meets with missile-defense contractors who give presentations on how to adapt the program to defend against possible space aliens. Sure, why not? Aliens, Venezuela, it's a dangerous world out there. And if there aren't enough enemies, we can make new ones. Not to mention the fact that missile defense can spur other countries to expand and modernize their arsenals, since that's the easiest way to beat the system. Indeed, apart from enriching contractors, undermining arms-control treaties seems to be the only thing missile defense has actually accomplished.

Just think, for a quarter of the cost we could have doubled what the government spends on energy research. Ah, but that would be wasteful, Republicans might say. After all, the consequences of global warming are pretty uncertain.

Now That's Dirty

2007-11-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

In case anyone was wondering just how ugly the climate policy debate could get in the coming months and years, here's one hint. Last month, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment denied air-quality permits to two proposed coal-burning plants because of concerns about CO2 emissions. It was the first time permits had ever been denied for those reasons.

Well, the coal industry didn't like that one bit, and, this week, a group called Kansans for Affordable Energy—which is partly funded by Peabody Coal Company and by Sunflower Electric Power Corp. (i.e., the company whose permits were denied)—ran this ad in newspapers across Kansas:

Nasty and misleading. Nice. By the way, Peabody Coal—the world's biggest coal company—is playing an interesting role here. Unlike Exxon, which had an about-face on global warming last year and pledged to stop funding a few (though not all) denier groups, Peabody hasn't softened its stance on climate change one bit. Its CEO, Gregory Boyce, still dismisses all talk of global warming, and told BusinessWeek that the coal industry doesn't need to change or adapt to the inevitable crackdown on carbon emissions. Indeed, at this point, Peabody's main strategy appears to be a) persuading the Air Force (and Congress!) to massively subsidize liquid coal fuel technology—a disaster from a climate change perspective—and b) declaring that critics of coal are objectively pro-terror.

P.S. I've written about this before, but achieving "energy security" isn't necessarily the same thing, obviously, as dealing with climate change (since the former can, in theory, be met by using lots of coal, liquefied coal fuels, drilling in the Alberta tar sands, etc.) The Kansas ads are a rather nasty example of the former being used as a cudgel against the latter, which is something to watch closely.

Slow Trot for the Cure

2007-11-07T11:41:00.000-05:00

Will anyone ever develop an AIDS vaccine? On some level, it looks doubtful (not least because the virus mutates so quickly), and yet a sizeable chunk of the world's $10 billion in AIDS spending each year goes to finding a cure. Increasingly, though, scientists and doctors are saying we should put less hope in a technological fix and spend more of that money on proven, low-tech strategies like circumcision, sexual monogamy, and birth control. Also, the vaccine trials are becoming horrifying:

Among a group of nearly 700 subjects worldwide who received two doses of the vaccine, 19 became infected with HIV, compared with 11 for a similarly sized group that received placebos. The finding alarmed some scientists and underscored the tricky ethics of using human subjects to test potential remedies for incurable diseases.

South African researchers last week began warning hundreds of volunteer test subjects that the vaccine might actually have increased their risk of contracting HIV.

Two trials for microbicides—gels that women insert into their vaginas to prevent infections—also ended when more women using the experimental substance became infected with HIV than those using placebos. Scientists theorize that vaginal irritation caused by these products may have made it easier, not harder, for the virus to infect women. A study of whether diaphragms might inhibit HIV found that they were also ineffective.

"It's been an appalling year for the biologists," said Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society.

Then again, as William Easterly explained in his review of Helen Epstein's new book, The Invisible Cure, Western aid organizations haven't exactly done a bang-up job of promoting "proven, low-tech strategies," either. Uganda had great success with its ABC strategy—"Abstain, Be Faithful, and Use Condoms"—but religious groups loathed the condom part of that campaign, and NGOs were lukewarm about the "Be Faithful" aspect. (After all, family-planning groups are happy to flood African countries with condoms—an activity that attracts donors and aid money—but there's no large bureaucracy supporting a "Zero Grazing" campaign.)

Easterly jokes, bleakly, that most NGOs have their own ABC strategy—antiretroviral drugs, bureaucracy, and consultants. Most AIDS money gets spent on treatment rather than prevention (although the Bush administration has lavished tidy sums on useless abstinence campaigns). One U.S. ambassador to South Africa recently told groups receiving AIDS funding that they should cut back on prevention rather than treatment during budget crunches, noting: "Our priority must be delivery of treatment services." Only problem: ARVs are expensive, not nearly as cost-effective as prevention, and will never be able to reach everyone.

Now, I'm generally not as sour as Easterly about foreign aid, but he makes a solid case here. He's especially scathing toward Western consultants who swoop in to implement their own AIDS programs, but ignore homegrown efforts (as when a Christian group, Hope Worldwide, came into South Africa to do work with AIDS orphans but utterly neglected an already existing, and mildly successful, orphanage). That's Epstein's message, too: "[O]ur greatest mistake may have been to overlook the fact that, in spite of everything, African people often know best how to solve their own problems." It's a point worth heeding, especially since AIDS funding is exploding, and the potential to compound past mistakes seems very, very large.

P.S. By the way, Epstein's advice sounds sturdy, but it's also different from saying that all countries can take care of themselves. For instance, this recent paper by Evan Lieberman found that countries that are ethnically divided and fragmented (as many African countries are) are far, far less likely to pursue aggressive AIDS policies, for a variety of reasons—various ethnic groups are more likely to fear stigmatization; elites are more likely to blame only certain groups, or downplay the threat, and so on.

Clinton, Climate, Again

2007-11-05T17:16:00.000-05:00

Dave Roberts has more nits to pick with Hillary Clinton's energy policy here, but still gives her plan an "A" overall. That seems about right. There are lots of things I'd quibble with, too—the fact that Clinton's only proposing to spend $1 billion a year to bolster public transportation and pays scant attention to land-use issues—but Congress is going to fiddle with these secondary details anyway. It seems to me that the broader goals are what's important for a presidential campaign platform, and Clinton's laid down all the right markers.

The main thing that might distinguish Clinton from Obama and Edwards on this front is that she's a lot cozier with corporate lobbyists, which, I suppose, could make it more likely that she'll be less vigilant about pointless industry handouts and giveaways when it comes time to put together legislation. Maybe there's not a huge gulf between the candidates in that regard. Either way, that seems more important in the grand scheme of things than a side-by-side comparison of the little bells and whistles in each of the candidates' campaign planks.

Climate Plans Galore

2007-11-05T16:58:00.001-05:00

So... Hillary Clinton released her climate and energy plan, which can be read in full here. The broad outlines are just as audacious as what Edwards and Obama have proposed: She'd aim to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050—a goal urged by a growing number of scientists and green groups—through a cap-and-trade regime, with the pollution permits auctioned off rather than given away for free. That last bit is a key design point (see here for a handy explanation), and would help avoid some of the problems plaguing Europe's emissions-trading system. A good step all around.

You know, looking this thing over, it's hard to agree with folks like Ted Nordhaus and William Shellenberger that environmentalists have lost their way in recent years. After all, a few years back, an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases and 100 percent auction of pollution permits was considered a fringe position on energy policy. Now all of the leading Democratic presidential candidates are advocating just that. It's a seismic shift by any measure.

P.S.: Okay, one criticism: It'd be nice if this plan included stronger measures to ease the burden on low-income households (along the lines of what Obama has proposed). As Robert Greenstein recently told Congress, even a modest reduction in emissions could, potentially, raise energy bills for the bottom 20 percent of households by $750-$950 a year. The sort of home-efficiency and weatherization programs Clinton is proposing would help mitigate that, but those take time to implement. Alternatively, argues Greenstein, with just 15 percent of the revenue generated by auctioning off pollution permits, policymakers could offset the higher energy costs for low- and middle-income Americans through tax credits or rebates—and still have plenty of money left over to fund public transportation, R&D, and whatnot.

Japan's Aging Prisoners

2007-11-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

Social scientists frequently argue that people become less likely to commit crimes as they get older (though I wonder if white-collar crime is an exception). So it's strange to read, in The New York Times, that "Japan is confronting a sharp increase in the number of older criminals and prisoners." The U.S. prison population is aging, too, but mostly because of our long mandatory sentences. In Japan, the increase is being driven by an uptick in (mostly nonviolent) crime among the 65-and-up crowd:

A recent Justice Ministry report said that older people were increasingly turning to crime out of poverty and isolation, suggesting a breakdown in traditional family and community ties. With nowhere else to go, more of the older inmates serve out their full sentences, instead of being released on parole like younger prisoners. What is more, recidivism is higher among the older inmates.

There was an earlier Times piece documenting the stinginess of the Japanese welfare state, especially for the elderly, which explains a lot. As for recidivism, there's the fact that Japan tends to have an "unforgiving attitude" toward ex-convicts: "Relatives usually sever ties, so many inmates never receive visitors. In addition, welfare benefits are difficult to obtain; nursing homes are scarce and not a viable option for ex-convicts." They can't find work, can't afford rent, and frequently end up back in prison sooner or later. Come to think of it, the story isn't so different here in the United States.

The Gunbelt

2007-11-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

In the middle of an interview with Truthdig, former assistant secretary of defense Philip Coyle had a few words to say about how the military-industrial complex feeds and sustains itself:

Harris: What are you doing to either defeat this spending mentality or work within the system to change some of these things?

Coyle: Well, it’s very difficult, of course. Some defense programs, some defense procurements, spend money in every single state of the union. One of the displays that the U.S. Congress can get from the Pentagon is where exactly all the money is being spent on each particular program. And so sometimes this means jobs all across the country that makes it very difficult to attack.

Scheer: And the companies do that on purpose. I’ve talked to a lot of people on this whole subject and companies will make, as they say, the F-22 or the B-2 or one of those planes, wingtips, will be made in a state to guarantee jobs and to guarantee votes, right?

Coyle: Yes, they will, and of course once a factory or a plant is established in some city or town or state, the people there don’t want to lose it.

That isn't terribly jaw-dropping, but it's remarkable that a former top Pentagon official laid it all out like that. I guess I never realized that contractors themselves—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, the like—consciously tried to spread out projects in as many districts as possible to insure congressional support, but it makes all the sense in the world.

On an only slightly unrelated note, I've been skimming through The Rise of the Gunbelt, a 1991 book by Ann Markusen et. al., and it's pretty fascinating. The basic storyline here is that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, military production was, of course, concentrated in the old industrial heartland—the airline industry, for instance, grew up near the Great Lakes, around Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Dayton.

But after World War II, a brand new "gunbelt" arose along the continental rim of the United States. The big winners, sprouting up at different periods, were Seattle, the Los Angeles basin, Colorado springs, the greater D.C. area, and New England, along with the Sunbelt, Texas, Silicon Valley, and so forth. This change came gradually, as the cold war boosted Pentagon budgets and put a greater emphasis on air power, missiles, electronic warfare, SDI, and so on. There was also the fact that the Air Force adopted a contractor-based production system, as opposed to the Army's old in-house arsenal system.

The question is why certain areas became part of the "gunbelt" and not others. Aerospace entrepreneurs like William Boeing in Seattle, or the military boosterism of The Los Angeles Times were important, but so was the fact that some regions had lots of military retirees (Colorado Springs) or engineers (New England). The military tried to steer dollars away from areas where there was a competing civilian economy—which, it seems, is why the Midwest lost out—and to areas politically favorable to military activities. Surprisingly, the authors conclude that Congress had relatively little to do with where Pentagon money was steered. Watching John Murtha create a defense-contracting metropolis in his hometown of Johnstown, I doubt that's still true today.

Sadly, when it comes time to ask what secondary effects all this central planning had on the country—besides totally remapping industrial America—the book gets disappointingly brief. Income inequality, wasteful duplication of infrastructure, a boost in pro-military politics and militarism are the main negative consequences mentioned. I'd add that there's evidence that government spending could create more jobs if it went toward non-military purposes. Obviously there's some R&D spillover, but relatively little, given the sums involved. James Galbraith recently showed that the rise in inequality in the Bush years has been mainly concentrated in areas getting rich from military contracts. No doubt there's more.

Echo Chambers

2007-11-03T15:23:00.000-04:00

It's not exactly a rigorous statistical analysis or anything, but Cass Sunstein finds an intriguing pattern in the federal courts of appeals:

A few years ago, I asked a research assistant of mine who had nothing to do that week to look at some environmental cases to see how Republican appointees vote, depending on whether they are sitting with two Republican appointees or at least one Democratic appointee. If we construct something like Colorado Springs, Bush country, on the federal judiciary, just by looking at RRR panels, how do RRR panels look in environmental cases compared to how they look when it's mixed?

She collected about 40 or 50 votes. We didn't have enough to do statistical tests, but we did have enough to be startled, to find that Rs, Republican appointees, show very conservative voting patterns on the federal courts when they are sitting with two other Rs. In a case in which the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to get it to do more, Rs on our panels vote for them about 20 percent of the time. Rs are much more likely to vote for them—environmental groups—when there is at least one D present. The divergence is very dramatic.

This makes plenty of intuitive sense—putting just one Democratic appointee on a panel would likely make the other judges just a wee bit more liberal (or at least prevent a panel of all Republicans from becoming even more conservative in their views through the echo chamber effect), and vice versa. Except then this train goes off the rails: Sunstein later says this pattern doesn't hold for the Sixth Circuit court of appeals. His explanation: "[O]n the Sixth Circuit, the Democratic appointees and Republican appointees hate each other. They don't listen." But why on earth would that be the case?

Compare and Contrast

2007-11-02T16:22:00.000-04:00

From the department of curious graphs: Zubin Jelvah reports that economists have devised a new method for comparing economic inequality across different historical eras. The United States today turns out to be more unequal than the early Roman Empire, though the gulf isn't quite as wide as nineteenth-century England (yet):

There's plenty more in the post itself, including the point that modern nations aren't nearly as unequal as they could be, whereas pre-industrial nations tended to reach their maximum "potential" for inequality. Not sure how useful this all is, though: Surely 19th century China only looks relatively "equal" because it had hundreds of millions of peasants and an extremely tiny (in comparison) ruling class, right?

Victory, Reconciliation, All That...

2007-11-02T15:23:00.000-04:00

I don't follow this super-closely, but it seems like a growing number of conservatives have basically declared victory in Iraq. See, for instance, Andrew Bolt today: "Iraq not only remains a democracy, but shows no sign of collapse. I repeat: the battle for a free Iraq has been won." That would, obviously, be good news if true, but is it even true?

Well, let's see. The Los Angeles Times took a long look at the decline in casualties over the past few months. Some military commanders say it's proof General Petraeus's strategy is working. Other evidence suggests that violence is dropping because the sectarian cleansing of various Baghdad neighborhoods is largely complete. (Yesterday, GAO officials told Congress that this might indeed be the case.) An ABC News report partly attributes the decline in violence to a lockdown that can't last forever: "Across the city Sunnis and Shiites live in sectarian enclaves, many walled off." And there are still four million Iraqi refugees, who constitute a crisis in their own right.

So where does that leave us? Everyone and their mother knows by now that the whole point of the surge was to facilitate some sort of political reconciliation so that when the U.S. military is finally forced to draw down—for logistical reasons, the surge can't go on forever—violence doesn't flare up again. The latest GAO report on Iraq suggests that the United States lacks a clear strategy for making that happen—or any clear strategy at all for Iraq. Is the GAO wrong here? I suppose we'll see what happens when the military pulls back from Diyala Province next month.

A few more links: Ilan Goldenberg rounds up evidence that reconciliation isn't happening (and that it's still possible that the recent U.S. alliances with the Sunnis, Mahdi Army, etc. amount to arming various sides of a coming civil war). Spencer Ackerman highlighted some of the more hopeful signs of political progress (setting aside what's going on with Turkey and the Kurds). Marc Lynch wrote a post arguing that Iraq appears to be degenerating into a warlord state, and the United States doesn't have a long-term plan for altering this state of affairs—only short-term tactics for reducing violence here and there (which, of course, makes it very unclear why we should stay). If anyone has a better sense for where things are heading, by all means, chime in.

Update: See also this. Colonel Martin Stanton, the U.S. military official overseeing reconciliation efforts in Iraq, told reporters that a) there hasn't been a whole lot of progress on the reconciliation front, and b) b) if progress doesn't happen real soon, a great many Sunnis could decide to join the insurgency again...

The War on Fraud

2007-11-02T12:19:00.001-04:00

In a long American Lawyer investigation, Daphne Eviatar uncovers some curious facts about the Justice Department's Corporate Fraud Task Force, which was formed back in 2002, amid the Enron and WorldCom debacles. Get this: Between 2002 and 2005, federal prosecutors brought some 357 indictments in major corporate fraud cases. But, after Bush's re-election, that trickled to a scant 14 "significant" indictments in 2006 and then only 12 in 2007.

What gives? Justice Department officials say, well, we've licked corporate fraud once and for all: "We do believe that the success of the Corporate Fraud Task Force, in conjunction with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is making it more likely that fraud is being detected by corporations themselves." The alternative take is that the DOJ simply isn't trying as hard any more. In recent years, the Justice Department has established a bunch of other task forces—to go after, say, Hurricane Katrina-related fraud, or pornography—that may have sucked up resources. (See also a similar shift in focus at the FBI.)

No surprise, I'd probably bet on the second theory, but the American Lawyer piece never really settles the question. There are some other interesting tidbits, though: Apparently, the task force's main role, especially in the early days, was simply to badger local U.S. Attorney's Offices into prosecuting corporate fraud cases at a faster rate. "Go, go, go!" But the Justice Department didn't necessarily provide those attorneys any additional resources or manpower to investigate complex cases—the DOJ mostly just showed up at press conferences to mug for the cameras.

What's more, the rush to prosecute led to some shoddy cases and questionable tactics, leading to several reversals—as when a judge dismissed indictments against 13 KPMG executives last year, citing "intolerable" prosecutorial abuses. But the DOJ won't release acquittal or conviction rates, so it's hard to tell how widespread this sort of thing is. At this point, though, I lose the plot and can't figure out how effective the earlier crackdown was, or whether liberals should support hyper-aggressive prosecutorial tactics against corporations, or why convictions have slowed, or what. Obviously my instincts are to agree with this quick take at Daily Kos, but I honestly don't know for sure.

Street Crime or Terrorism?

2007-11-02T00:59:00.000-04:00

Random story of the day: Edgar Morales, the first gang member charged under New York state's counterterrorism law, was found guilty of manslaughter and a whole bunch of other crimes. The terrorism statute bumps up the penalties for each charge considerably. The Times has quotes from civil-liberties types who think it's awfully reckless to use terrorism statutes for ordinary street crime. Also reckless is the way the law was initially passed:

Adopted by the legislature six days after 9/11 with almost no debate, the law was initially viewed as a symbolic gesture because tougher federal terrorism laws already existed. In fact, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver commented at the time that he didn't think there would ever be a prosecution under the state law, saying he voted for it more as a show of legislative solidarity in a time of crisis.

That's nice of them. By the way, the Village Voice's earlier coverage made the whole case seem awfully fishy. Immediately after the original shooting of two bystanders, Morales was charged only with trespassing and tampering with evidence. Later on, one of the other gang members who was present at the shooting but had then fled the country, Enrique Sanchez, was arrested, pleaded guilty, and then agreed to cooperate with prosecutors by testifying against Morales. (Sanchez may have been ordered to come back and "take the fall" by the actual shooter, who threatened Sanchez's family in Mexico, although that's unclear.)

So, a year and a half later, the two guys who were originally suspected of doing the shooting still couldn't be found, and the prosecution then decided to use Sanchez's statements and go after Morales. That, I guess, is the backdrop for this weird passage at the end of today's Times piece: "Though jurors said they did not believe portions of Mr. Sanchez’s testimony, they blamed Mr. Morales for not leaving once he felt that a shooting would take place." Um, okay... And yeah, yeah, without knowing more, it's probably pointless to second-guess the jury, and yes, the stories about the gang itself are horrific, but, still, that's odd. What do I know, though.

Cleaning Up the Garbage Patch

2007-10-31T18:02:00.001-04:00

Not that anyone should remember, but a few months ago I wrote a little post on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a big swirling gyre of trash and debris in the Pacific Ocean that's at least twice the size of Texas. Well, now it seems the U.S. government wants to clean it up. True, that might not even be possible—we're talking 3 million tons of plastic, most of it in chunks too small to scoop out—but that won't stop them from trying.

Interestingly, the guy who discovered the Garbage Patch, Charles Moore, thinks that cleanup is too crazy an idea, and all that effort would be better spent trying to reduce plastic production in the first place. (Fun fact: The United States produced 60 billion pounds of plastic resin in 1987; that's doubled to 120 billion pounds in 2007.) I'd agree with that. Of course, the American Chemistry Council thinks curbing production is a horrible idea, and we should mostly focus on putting recycling bins on beaches and cracking down on litterbugs. But what would you expect them to say?

Mean-Spiritedness

2007-10-31T17:45:00.000-04:00

Let's see if I understand this story correctly: Katie Heath, a 27-year-old woman in Illinois, was convicted for selling meth and spent a year in state prison (much of that while pregnant). She came out, met the parole requirements, cleaned up her life, found a job, and enrolled in school. But then, a few months later, federal prosecutors came knocking and indicted her again for basically the same crime, a charge that carried 20 years in prison. So she cooperated with the prosecutors, something that would normally lead to a reduction in sentences, but got... no leniency in the end.

Not surprisingly, one federal judge was beyond appalled, delayed the sentencing (before, eventually, granting a motion to reconsider and recusing himself), and accused prosecutors of abusing the plea agreement process:

"For some prosecutors in the Southern District of Illinois, prosecutions are driven by statistics and a desire to prevent judges from exercising any control over the sentencing process without regard for the individual. Although not rising to the level of mean-spiritedness, the words arbitrary and capricious come to mind," Gilbert said Tuesday during a motion hearing on the case. ...

Gilbert accused the prosecution of making "illusory" promises in the agreements and said, "At least in this district, these so-called plea agreements are one-way streets and are unenforceable at sentencing by either the defendant or the Court."

He went on to say that in Heath's case, where she was already punished by the state for her conduct, "I strongly believe our government has failed here in that they have not been objective, abused their discretion and are not treating [Heath] with a concern for fairness or justice. In fact, sentencing [Heath] to prison for 20 years would be a miscarriage of justice."

That all sounds about right, although I'm curious to know why he doesn't think this "ris[es] to the level of mean-spiritedness."