Stand by Your Macro

The financial crisis has certainly unleashed fits of apoplectic wrath and disappointment. The bankers seem to get most of the wrath for botching the system, and the economists seem to reap most of the disappointment for 1) promoting a system that made a crash inevitable, 2) failing to see the crash coming, 3) failing to prevent the crash, 4) failing to interrupt the crash, or 5) all of the above. A recent piece in the Economist does a fairly good job at sifting through the diversity of opinion among economists, but it makes the same mistake as everybody else has so far in analyzing the crash and economists' role in it. Specifically, it overestimates the state of social science.

An old international law prof. of mine once told me, "A good lawyer doesn't tell you what you can and can't do. A good lawyer tells you how to do what you want to do legally." This phrase picks out two of three good reasons why economics couldn't have foreseen nor prevented the crash: a lack of empirical knowledge and a lack of theoretical knowledge, to which I would also add the inability to determine social goals autonomously.

By empirical knowledge, I mean brute facts about the world, like how many cars were sold, how much money is in circulation, how many people are working where and for how much money, etc. Although statistics (as a branch of math) helps a lot to count accurately, there are many things the economists can hardly know in principle. If a German economist wants to know how much money German consumers have in readily accessible accounts, they can ask the banks to provide them aggregate figures. They won't, however, be able to see the nest egg I have squirrelled away in the Motherland, and which I can draw upon if my finances here get tight. A trifling example to be sure, but aggregate these blindspots in an economy the size of Germany's, and you could well have an economy the size of Ecuador's hiding under the mattress. More significantly, the fancy financial vehicles that have made the headlines recently all have the purpose of yielding better rates of interest than what boring mortgages or operating lines of credit can offer. If you have some solid debts, slice them up, mix them with some riskier stuff, sell the package at a higher rate than either alone would have brought or borrow against their putative value. Either way, this gives private financial institutions the means to create a multiplier effect on the amount of cash floating around. If you think money is printed by the central bank, you're right in the sense that the Bow River is filling the oceans. Economists in one country can hardly tell how much money their own compatriots have, let alone how much is being pumped out of a globalized financial system. An educated guess is better than nothing, but counting units of value that can be created out of thin air (well, out of bytes, Mbits, and contracts - close enough) is not an exact science.

The second problem is that, even if economists knew all about what is out there, they don't know how it all fits together, which is what I mean by theoretical knowledge. The subcordial debates among economists are evidence of this as are divergent prognoses. In general, economists would do well to remember Darwin's quip that "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" or Bertrand Russell's that "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." They should be honest about what they can and can't reasonably say, what they do and don't know. Instead, they are often concerned with producing as many forecasts as possible to make the news, get politicians' ears, and divert funding in their own direction. This is a perfectly human strategy, and they've brought much of the opprobrium on themselves through hubris, but they couldn't make these claims credibly if they wanted to. Also a part of theoretical knowledge, I would say a big part, is to know what makes people tick. The received wisdom is that, if you just assume people will act rationally, that assumption will approximate aggregate behaviour "well enough" and "most of the time". The alternative is Keynes' (pretty empty) concept of "animal spirits". Both of these sound to me like fudge factor assumptions about human nature and how people make decisions. My bet is that behavioural economics and neuro-cognitive science will be able to give us a better idea of how people actually make decisions, and then it will be for economists to rebuild their models with facts instead of hunches or fudges. I'm just putting that out there for now, but it might deserve a long post of its own one of these days.

Empirical knowledge is about what's out there, and theoretical knowledge is about how it all fits together, but shortages of both aren't the source of the disappointment with economics. I think the biggest problem is that economists can't determine our social goals on their own, but we tend to blame them for it anyway. Before the proverbial lawyer can tell you how to do what you want, you have to know what you want. Most people seem not to want stagflation, but they get confused about what they want when the choice is between high employment and high inflation (good for income, bad for wealth) or low employment and low inflation (bad for income, good for wealth). There's no good economic way out of that decision, though, and most people seem to expect economists to be able to tell us what would make us all happier, collectively and as individuals, and then to make it happen, dammit! You can't tell the economist that he should figure out a way for you to have your cake and eat it too, because he can't, and most of the time, they don't even have that (pitiful) degree of guidance.

I guess that this raises a bigger question of what the social sciences can do for society, and what society can reasonably expect from social scientists. We can't fix Darfur (certainly not on the cheap), we can't sprinke pixie dust on the economy, and we can't necessarily help you with your addiction to Cool Ranch Doritos. Does that imply malpractice or irrelevance? As for malpractice, it doesn't as long as we act in good faith, as long as we don't sell snake oil and profit off others' gullibility. Irrelevance? Well, if it were irrelevant, you wouldn't be wringing your hands over Darfur or job losses in the first place, now would you?

Framing the Debate postscript

Not much from me here, but a great article from Nate Silver on the polling data that supports my position that the Administration is botching the framing of the healthcare debate. I am particularly proud of the fact that he comes to pretty much the same conclusions that I did: That Obama and the democrats have failed so far in selling this to the public, that they need to emphasize what it's going to do for Americans in general, and that Obama can probably only do so much at this point without over exposing himself.

Silver is a better writer than me though, and he's got data. So it's worth a read :-)

Sitting Ducks?

One of my favourite blogs for IR geeks recently ran a post about a report from the Brookings Institution (pdf) about assassination as a means of foreign policy. I haven't read the entire 44 pages from the folks at the BI, so I'm going to consider this strictly in terms of what the Duck has to say about it. Be it resolved that a liberal state can legitimately assassinate individuals without due process?

Of course, assassination isn't a practice one generally associates with liberalism. Even the most vehement market liberals need some kind of harm principle to make inalienable rights like private property stick, and murder is usually considered harm with good reason. On the other hand, consider this little thought experiment: John Stuart Mill is driving down the street and sees little old Pol Pot jaywalking up ahead. Does/should Mill stop? Heck no! I think liberals can justify assassination/murder on the grounds of the categorical imperative, but they must be very careful in deploying it. The categorical imperative (at least the better half, if you ask me), for those who Kant remember, states "act only on that maxim that you would will to become a universal law." In other words, unless you would accept everyone behaving the way you are, what you're doing is wrong.

The tricky part is in formulating the maxim. In the example above, if Mill were following the maxim of "run over all old Asian men", he'd have to pull a u-turn and make roadkill out of the Dali Llama. If the maxim were "run over evil people", it would just beg the question of what's evil, and even it's "only run over those whose decisions caused thousands of deaths", there would be precious few two-term presidents in the States in addition to a doozy of an epistemological problem. So, the maxim of "runover anybody whose role in implementing genocide is indisputable, and don't cause any collateral damage while doing it" will at least serve as a first approximation.

A second, more technical problem is to make sure that everybody else knows what the maxim is. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and others are likely to claim a similar right. Not only must you make sure that your maxim is one that fits the situation at hand, you have to make sure it's one you'll be able to live with in the future - even when it might be applied to you.

A third problem is that you might let the cat out of the bag and give everybody license to start killing people with their own maxims, with which you might disagree. The world has seen people who wanted to kill all the rich, and if we can choose our maxims, what's to stop them from choosing theirs (besides our threatening them, which gets us nowhere)?

So I s'pose my answer is a very thin yes, that state-sanctioned assassination can be legitimate, but I disagree with the Duck's justification that "...someone has to have the job of playing cop in the international system." It's more complicated than that, as it should be.

New Media and Politics: Danger ahead

I followed a link from Ben Smith this morning to a peice about a potential Senate candidate posting information about his candidacy on facebook. It got me thinking about the effects of new online media and perception of status in our politicians.

As we've seen over the last few months, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are slowly (or maybe quickly) evolving into media and message delivery devices. I need only mention the twittering of Iran's protests to demosntrate the power that these new forms of communication have to disseminate information to interested readers. An interesting aspect brought up by Bill Simmons at ESPN recently has been the use of Twitter and Facebook by NBA players to break news of trades and firings before journalists even find out. Senators and Congresspeople have been taking Twitter by storm recently. And now we have the case of a potential Senatorial candidate correcting a false news report (which was apparently posted on a Blog based on a text message he sent to them while driving) on his facebook page! Then, his facebook entry is picked up by a few OTHER blogs and it becomes news as well.

Let's set aside the issue of the dangers of texting while driving (which was the topic Ben Smith focused on) and talk about the ways that new media are morphing traditional journalism and reporting. If this kind of trend keeps up, a large part of future journalists jobs will have to be searching through these social networks looking for news straight from the source. Not a lot of investigatvie journalism there, and the fact that any reader who is interested can just log on to Facebook or Twitter or whatever and get the news "straight from the horse's mouth" doesn't really speak volumes about the nessescity of print media and traditional newspapers. How can the New York Times or The Oregonian (for that matter) hope to keep up? Thier only out seems to be to invest heavily in online media themselves (which the NYT has certainly done).

Another point here connects to Mr. Shackleford's comments about responisbility for what your write online. The more news is created by the original source, the more responsibility that source bears. After reading this short Blog entry and Mr. Dumezich's Facebook profile update, we know that he's a dangerous driver, has some freinds that are pumped about him running for senate, and that he gave some misleading (or poorly worded) information to a Blog about his future electoral plans. Is this what i need to know about my candidates for Senate? Being a dangerous driver might not be too bad as far as crimes go, but i could see it coming up in oppo research for Evan Bayh should the election get to that point. One of his friends even asks him his opinion of another potential candidate: "What do you think of Martin Stutzman, who has already announced?"... if he's not careful, Mr. Dumezich is going to be talking campaign strategy right out in the open...and the rest of us (and bloggers) can read right along.

A third aspect that interests me here is the level of professionality that we expect of our elected officials, and whether things like Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and the like are compatible with this. I at least still have an image of sentators as aloof, professional, and relatively responisble parties. Although I know this isn't the case by a long shot (I mean, c'mon, we now have a senator Al Franken) I wonder if this is the kind of behaviour that the public will see as somehow amatuer. If Mr. Dumezich were to be interveiwed by a traditional newspaper or TV station about his plans to run for senate, it would seem legitimate and even professional. By him texting something to a blog, and then correcting it with an entry on his facebook page, some part of his authority as a speaker (as a german rhetoritican would say, his "ethos") seems to be lost. To me he seems to be just another guy writing on his Facebook page. While this might be good for a more populist candidate, it just doesn't seem all that senatorial. So while I might still vote for the guy if he were running for the house of represenatatives, I think this while exchange might have lost him my vote (if I were from Ohio and a republican) for Senate..

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What you write can (and should?) be held against you.

So here's a question that's been on my mind:  How much of what you say on a blog should reasonably be held against you?  An Alaska blogger recently lost her job for running an extremely nasty blog on the tiny Alaska town where she was news director at an NPR station.  The locals eventually found the blog and they were not happy.  Now I really can't find much pity here.  People are always doing this sort of thing; especially transplants in rural areas on the assumption that country folk are too dumb to use the internet or not nosey enough to google the names of people they know (The first is just insulting and kind of stupid.  The second is amazingly stupid since one stereotype about small towns that is definitely true is that the citizens are nosey as heck) and it they're always surprised when it blows up in their faces. Posting a blog like chillyhell about the town you live in is like playing with gasoline and matches.  Fun sure, (and yes it is fun we all know fire is fun let's not deny it) keep it up long enough though and it's likely to burn you.  Any sensible person should know this.

But behind that there's a more interesting question:  Is it ever morally justifiable to fire someone for what they post on a blog?  To me it seems to depend on who they are and what they post.  Suppose you're a campaign worker and post long rants about how the folks in congressional district X are mouth breathing morons who ought to be put in a zoo.  Once you're found out keeping you on the payroll is not going to do anything to get your candidate elected; just the opposite in fact.  And since that's why they pay your salary, well they'd be fools not to let you go.  Not only that but blogs aren't like bitching to your coworkers over drinks, mom and dad on the phone, or friends via email.  Everyone can read them.  So once certain lines are crossed in what someone says it seems reasonable that various employers might justifiably have grounds to can you for what you say on a blog.  After all, it can hurt the organizations' images and play heck with morale and employees ability to work with one another.  I know that if I took it into my head to trash a prof in my department I happened not to like online and at length I wouldn't be surprised if I got called into the chair's office and got read the riot act (in fact I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's all that happened to me).

But yeah, "once certain lines are crossed" just where do we draw those lines?  Well anything personal about someone who isn't a public figure seems to me to be in danger of crossing those lines.  Hillary Clinton, Mitch McConnell, Kent Conrad, etc.  all chose to put themselves in the limelight.  If you just need to make fun of someone; at least make fun of someone who has in some way asked for it.  What's more we have a compelling interest in making being able to discuss these people even in the roughest possible terms.  But can anyone really tell me that anyone besides the blogger and his or her friends has a compelling interest in trashing a few poor yokels no one's ever heard of before or that these people somehow deserve it?  Seems bad enough to be trapped in rural Alaska.  Anyway to some extent it seems common sense.  Within limits we think hating an otherwise decent person for his political opinions is unjustifiable, but hating someone for saying snarky, hurtful things about people we know and like, well that's a different thing entirely.

What happened to the author tags?

Dear Ms. Tuba Town,

Please bring back a few elements of our little corner of the world! There were a few things here that will be sorely missed:

Seeing who posed what
The link in the top corner of the Blog that linked to the settings page
A line or break separating one post from the next



The gods will smile upon you and yours if you could bring these things back to me Ms. Tuba Town.

Thank you

Voting: privilege or right?

Whaddya know? Got a theme goin' on here.

A brilliant, conscientious legal student friend o' mine over at the U of T sent me this video of a town hall with Congressman Mike Castle of Delaware, which was interrupted by a woman ranting about her birth certificate and her father's service in WWII. She eventually gets the whole assembly to rise and recite the pledge of allegiance.

A couple of things that caught my eye:

1. She actually gets them all to rise. She is moving people, having an effect. They are listening. This is not the kind of person I would find compelling, and I'm looking for the trick. Where are the mirrors?
   
2. She has quite a few supporters in the audience. Enough that their idiocy carries the day, and they're politically active. If there are an equal number of considerate, coherent citizens in that area, they're apparently the ones staying home!

Sometimes when my conversation gets real good and lubricated, I've been known to float the idea of competence tests for voters. Like a driving license, voters would have to answer some basic questions to determine that they care a little and have some information about what they're doing. I was once asked what kind of questions should go on such a test, and the best answer I have, not having done any serious research, would be the same questions the country would pose to immigrants. It would be something of a democracy-sophocracy hybrid. To be honest, I'm not sure if the video is an argument for or against it.

Rights & Privileges

Christopher Hitchens, former communist and trenchant (if grating) atheist, has recently argued that Henry Gates should have used his 4th amendment rights to keep a nosey constable at bay than to claim the officer was acting in prejudice. Though I would agree with the conclusion, Hitchens provides little more than personal anecdotes of how he himself has been harassed by the police without any justification for the position, so I'll do it for him.

It's pretty obvious that those on top of the North American social hierarchy have missed few opportunities to abuse those below. Cortez whooped the Aztecs, Pizarro did a number on the Inca, economienda and slave-driven agriculture gave privilege to the privileged. This practice has fortunately been losing legitimacy and its legal underpinnings. That the pendulum is swinging back is to be welcomed, but could it swing too far?
Now, I don't want to argue that some amount of institutionalized preference in favour of the historically downtrodden is illegitimate. How are those in a society that rewards education and privilege supposed to pull equal if they are starting from a position of ignorance and destitution? I've raved before about how important I think it is for everyone to have a fair shot and how tricky things get when fairness seems unattainable. There was no racial caveat before, and there never should be. I think, though, that legal interference to redress fair but unwanted outcomes has several negative side-effects. First, it could create a system of reverse discrimination (by the way, when does reverse discrimination mature and become just regular discrimination?). Second, it could lead those receiving the preferential treatment to become dependent on it. The man who gets a fish delivered to his door every day is going to be a lousy fisherman. Third, and maybe most seriously, it reifies the prevailing categories. There is a whole branch of arithmetic devoted to determining what fraction of First Nation blood one must have in order to qualify for benefits under the Canadian Indian Act. If we want a society that is colour blind, or at least colour tolerant such that it becomes a category devoid of normative content, then how are we supposed to get there if we're always thinking of rules and metrics to make distinctions on colour/race/sexual orientation/long list of etc?
I really respected that Barack Obama didn't play the race card during his campaign. He had his folksy moments, but they were as affected as his competitor's. And y'know, I think it worked. He got elected! So how do we maintain the post-racial momentum and capitalize on post-racial gains? I propose that, in cases of potential discrimination where a general right that applies to everyone would achieve the same outcome as a particular one that reproduces the categories that nobody wants anyway, argue generally. Use the 4th amendment. It would be wonderful if the general argument became recognized as the stronger one.

In other news, I've recently run across not one, not two, but three (!) articles expressing sympathy for the "hardships" faced by millionaires (and billionaires) in these tight times. I have little sympathy for a bus driver or telemarketer who overleveraged him/herself to speculate on the value of his/her house, but I have absolutely none for those who did essentially the same thing on a larger scale and will have much softer landings. A rich man might well get into heaven, but he ain't gettin' any sympathy for having to drink domestic beer.

Diagno-thanks.

I posted recently about the indomitable march of medicine and how the medical establishment, if not people in general, is terrified by the thought that death is natural and even quite proper.

Now it seems the same problem is happening in the field of mental health. It's getting ever harder to be in a bad mood without having a diagnosis attached to it.

Just because I like bashing commandments, or Walt al Arrabiata!

Harvard professor, Stephen Walt, has just produced a list he's calling "The Ten Commandments for Ambitious Foreign Policy Wonks." I don't know if I qualify, but I'll give my two cents anyway.

1. "Thou Shalt Not Question US Membership in NATO." Walt just provides the reasoning that 'it isn't done' without questioning why not. NATO often gets unfairly panned. Sure, it probably produces more hot air and useless military jargon, but it's also kind of nice to have an alliance of stable-ish, liberal-esque democracies. Although everybody has a veto, it's sometimes able to do things other fora can't seem to manage, like bombing Serbia.
2. and 3. "Thou Shalt Oppose the Spread of Nuclear Weapons" and "Thou Shalt Not Question the Need for a Nuclear Deterrent." Walt says that you must hold both opinions simultaneously to be consistent, but that confuses horizontal proliferation (who can have nukes?) with vertical proliferation (for those who have nukes already, how many can they have?). There has always been an injustice in the weapons-for-watts bargain contained in the NPT. Those who were supposed to get help developing nuclear power for peaceful uses often get snubbed, the 5 legitimate nuclear powers don't always behave responsibly with their weapons, and there's a troubling amount of tolerance for countries like India, Pakistan, and Israel that disregard the nuclear taboo. There's also the compelling argument that, if horizontal proliferation is going to happen anyway with the nuclear states just watching, then it might be better to have more weapons than fewer. If India and Pakistan each have 5 nukes, they might calculate that they can afford the probable losses, but they are probably not even going to think about it if they each have 500.
3. done
4. "Thou Shalt Not Question the Desirability of American Primacy" I have often compared Canada's position in the world as being the nice, smart, reserved guy with the violently drunk, steroid-popping neighbour. As Julius Nyerere put it, "It makes no difference whether the elephants are fighting or making love, they still trample the grass." We could do worse, but don't expect thanks either. Hopefully there's more lattitude when it comes to non- or half-American wannabe wonks.
   
5. "Thou Shalt Not Call for an Accommodation with Cuba" He extends this commandment to Iran and N. Korea, where it makes a little more sense. They at least have ambitions and means. In Cuba's case, though, it just looks petty. Sure, nobody wants to condone the ugly Cuban regime, but why should the cow grudge the fly on its back? Arguably, making such a stink over such a small problem damages American interests. Who would respect China for beating on Bhutan?
6. "Thou Shalt Not Criticize the CFR ... or other major foreign policy institutions" This is pure instrumental rationality (a fancy word for opportunism). Sure, these institutions exist to debate questions relevant to the home country's foreign policy, but they tend to conduct long discussions only to reach their foregone conclusions. That said, the people arguing for their foregone conclusions are generally smart, which explains how they got where they are. But I hope that a characteristic of the smart is respect for people who try to poke holes in their ideas conscientiously.
7. "Thou Shalt not Take the Armed Forces' Name in Vain" I'm waiting anxiously for the day when hero-worship will be regarded as backward. While soldiers deserve some credit for being willing and competent, where applicable, they would often do well to consider what they're willing to kill and die for. "My country right or wrong" is a reprehensible sentiment found all too often parading around in uniform. If they were really clever, they might stop and think about why there are different sides in the first place. As with number 6, this commandment is directed at those who think of constituencies rather than of people. For them it's wise enough, but it's foolish as a general principle.
8. "Thou Shalt Acknowledge the Importance of Human Rights, Democracy, and Other American 'Values'". Boy, I'm glad the Americans invented or discovered these values for the rest of us and have raised their implementation to perfection. I'm glad that, in the world's most powerful democracy, no president could get elected without winning the popular vote. I'm thrilled that Americans have identified human rights and have banned practices like torture and the death penalty. Why didn't Walt mention the requirement that aspiring foreign policy wonks be schizophrenic?
9. "Thou Shalt not Question the Right of the United States to Intervene in Other Countries" Allende, Arbenz, Mossadeq, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan. It's hard to argue with success.
10. "Thou Shalt not Favour Negotiating with 'Terrorists'". As Walt implies, a lot of the art involved is about determining who and when is a terrorist. It was encouraging to see the Economist differentiate between terrorists (those who seem to recognize no rules on the use of force) and jihadists (those who fight like armies to achieve the Great Caliphate). The question about whether terrorism is a development problem certainly is debatable (and should be debated), but it is often interpreted as sympathy for the devil.

Walt mentions that he's not advocating either side on any of these debates, but his reasons for including are so bland that they called for a spicier response. Walt al arrabiata!

How would you like it if somebody did that to you?

So a Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a former navy press spokesman, has filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Miami Herald about some comments he alleges were made by one of their reporters, Carol Rosenberg. There's a story about it in the post here and you can see the original letter here.  Now I have doubts about whether he's telling the truth.  Gordon was a press spokesman for the navy whose main job was spinning Guantanamo to the press, and Rosenberg filed a number of negative stories about the place.  So it's pretty easy to imagine that Gordon wants to get even with her and undermine her credibility.

Assuming he's telling the truth though, the comments that seem to have upset the commander most were the one's where Rosenberg implied that he is gay.  Now as another reporter pointed out it's hard to imagine that a sailor isn't used to well sailor talk; I'd add that it's hard to imagine that no one's ever implied he's gay before.  I suppose it's possible he doesn't know much about Churchill and his wit and wisdom but it's harder to imagine that he missed out on this little disco gem or has never encountered a member of the army or marines (variations on the "all navy men are gay" is a favorite subject of fun in both those branches I'm told). 

Anyway apparently the utter hypocrisy of his complaint has never dawned on Cmdr. Gordon. Remember that a big part of the fun and games that went on at Guantanamo and elsewhere under the name of "enhanced interrogation techniques" was routine sexual humiliation of the detainees.  When we were kids I'd wager most of us were told after doing some nasty thing or other, "How would you like it if somebody did that to you?"  Well Gordon got just a little taste of what the detainees have went through and he does not seem to like it very much at all.  I suppose that one would not expect a flack like Gordon to have much of a sense for hypocrisy-- it's pretty much a disqualification for the job after all-- but I hope it doesn't escape the rest of us.

(He does whine that "He's been abused worse than any detainee," though I don't see any references to Rosenberg setting on him with dogs, waterboarding him, or actually sodomizing  him in the complaint.)

The best or worst side of American democracy?

An article today by Nate Silver discusses Arlen Specter's voting patterns and the question of self interest in the actions of senators related to the danger of possible primary challengers. The article isn't long, so go ahead and read it.

The basic question (or comment i guess) that Silver poses is whether Arlen Specter's party switching and predicatable voting patterns (siding with Republicans when he has a republican challenger and with Democrats when hes up against a democrat) are necessarily a bad thing. The money quote is, "Arlen Specter is either just about the best reflection or the worst reflection on the state of our Democracy -- it's just hard to say which one."

I guess I'll leave the obvious comment aside that one would hope that senators act in the interests of voters as opposed to following the political winds, but i do wonder if there is a problem here at a deeper level of democracy. If the point is to give the voters what they want as a representative, Specter has seemed to do a pretty good job of it; he's been in office for a long time and sits on fairly important committees. He keeps getting reelected as well, and the way he's done it seems to be to protect his right and left flanks with votes for a short period of time (we'll see if his new found liberalism sticks around after his primary challenger is wiped from the field). This voting on both sides of the issue, however, makes Specter a fairly moderate voice in the Senate, something that has gotten rarer over the past few years (especially when he was still in the republican party). Some might say that there are already too many moderate democrats in the senate, but I tend to prefer moderation to the extremes on both ends. He's also seemed to have chosen the right side of a lot of issues over the years for his constituents, regardless of his party affiliation. He doesn't seem to pander to either side too much (unless we count his voting pattern itself as pandering). He's not wedded to a specific ideology, except maybe getting Arlen Specter reelected.

So I guess the question stands: is Arlen Specter a good or bad example?

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Want to get in trouble in politics?

So why do politicians lie so often? Is it a shortcut to better ends, a cold utilitarian calculation they all make? Is it because fundamentally dishonest people are disproportionately drawn to politics? Or is it maybe because the single best way to get in real trouble in politics-- even more sure fire than say visiting your Argentine mistress on the state's dime or propositioning the House pages-- is by actually stating a glaringly obvious truth? Well I suppose it could be a combination of two options or all three, but the third definitely has to be part of the explanation.
Remember the huge trouble Hillary Clinton suggesting that while no one would deny his importance or heroism it was just possible that other people besides Martin Luther King Jr. may have played a role in ending segregation. You know like LB J who not only signed both the civil rights and voting rights bills into law, but used every ounce of his political skill and a good bit of his political capital to get those bills through congress. Or the scandal that erupted when Howard Dean dared to state the screamingly obvious fact that capturing Hussein, who had no links to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group that had ever actually attacked us and who wasn't even in power, would do absolutely nothing to make us safer from terror? Or perhaps when the Kossacks drove that Stranahan fellow from their little village for saying that maybe there was something to those rumors that John Edwards was cheating on his wife?
Well Obama seems to have had just such an experience. Apparently he's felt enough heat from the controversy that he saw the need to call up Sgt. Crowley for having the utter temerity to state the obvious fact that the Crowley acted stupidly in arresting a man in his own home. And whatever you think about Gates getting arrested can you really deny, given all the trouble he's put himself through, that Crowley acted stupidly?
(Though I suppose in fairness to both Obama and Crowley maybe he thinks that the call is simply the best way to make this nonsense go away for all of them. Truth be told Crowley's probably done a fair penance for his stupidity and whenever Gates gets around to writing the inevitable book about all this he'll be laughing all the way to the bank. I do like Crowley's suggestion about having a beer to smooth it over. Note that I never said the man was stupid, just that he acted stupidly).

Swine flu or Hogwash?

Whatever the characteristics of the illness, swine flu makes for virulent and highly resistant discourse. I hear a lot about how many people are infected and how many people are dying, but I haven't heard anything that indicates a different magnitude from what I would expect from garden variety winter influenza. So I checked the numbers:

Using numbers from globalsecurity.org, I come up with a mortality rate for seasonal influenza (normal flu) of about 0.13%. Of every 10 000 people who are infected with the flu, we can expect 13 to die.

Using numbers from a microbiologist and professor of clinical medicine at ANU, of 10 000 who get H1N1 swine flu, about 10 will die.

Since these sources didn't report their sample sizes, and I haven't seen any raw data, I can't calculate whether this difference is statistically significant. And I'm frankly not worried or keen enough to start writing emails to the CDC. However, it's a fair bet that swine flu is about as lethal as regular flu, if not a little gentler.

There are some worrying reports about much higher rates in Mexico and elsewhere. But really, when was the last time you heard about the mortality rate in Mexico during a normal bout of the flu? It doesn't really get reported, and I suspect there's a good reason why I'd rather be in a hospital north of the border, so the difference is likely just due to environmental differences like hygiene and healthcare provision. Again, it's a low-data conclusion, but it's reasonable.

I hope that the attention devoted to it is just a factor of a slow news season and light fearmongering by interested parties. I hope it's just that banal. Still, let's keep some perspective.

Boy, I guess I'm really getting my rant on.

To be or not to be ain't always a question

Having almost always lived in countries with impeccable healthcare, I have a hard time understanding American resistance to the universal success of well-managed universal systems and have a hard time caring about the pettiness of congressional pageantry. But there is a question hidden in the debate that does interest me.
At the risk of sounding older and curmudgeonlier than I already am, I remember that people still died of old age when I was a kid. My great-great-grandmother, Hilda, died at 106 or so (there's a picture of five generations in one shot - can't happen too often). I was young at the time, but I don't remember anyone mentioning a 'cause of death'. It seemed quite natural that a >100 year-old body was just done. Even when Hilda's daughter, Gladys, died at around 88, nobody felt compelled to demand an autopsy. She was old.
Then I read today that "According to virtually any commonly cited value of a year of life, the increased spending (on healthcare costs/year of life since the 1970s) has, on average, been worth it." The same article also said "...it costs far more to prolong the lives of the elderly ($145 000 per year gained) than the young ($31 600), and the rate of spending on the oldest Americans has grown the fastest". * This is mindbogglingly bad economics. This tells us that the marginal value of years of life decreases after a point with age (i.e. as you become older and more decrepit, you value each extra year less - at some point you're begging for the end, as some of us might have witnessed before), but the marginal cost increases (paying for each extra year becomes more expensive as time goes on). When did we acquire this principle that life should be extended at all costs, and where does it come from?
I have a few theories, none of them well-researched, but they're hopefully at least plausible.
Theory #1: Despite arguments to the contrary, I reckon the world is a much more secular place than it was a century, even a generation, ago. Religions tend to offer some hope for continued personality (can't really call it existence or consciousness) in some form after death. This might be a consolation prize people would generally be willing to accept in lieu of heroics for the preservation of life, but those without faith don't even have access to it. As a substitute for eternity, people are willing to fight for every last second of a limited period.
Theory #2: Olson's old fashioned collective action problem: in a world of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, concentration wins. Every doctor gets a lot of benefit (her entire salary) from a healthcare system, whether public or private, and there are far fewer doctors than people paying for them. As a result, the doctors are willing to fight harder for their interests than patients will for their own, which means that the flow of resources is skewed in the doctors' favour. Doctors get a lot of resources for treating the elderly, so they make a strong case for doing so.
Theory #3: Diffuse reciprocity: since each generation depends on the subsequent one for care when we get old, whether in terms of pensions or medical care, we want to set the example for how our offspring are to take care of us, and hedge our bets by overproviding care for our predecessors. On the notion that it's better to have too much than too little, we end up doing the current elderly injustice so that no expense will be spared when it's our turn (though we have little comprehension of how miserable we might be when we get there).
Theory #4: Senseless overconsumption: there seems to be a common idea that we could conceivably want anything anybody else could sell. Echoing Mallory's sentiment about why anybody would want to climb Everest, about the best explanation I can find for anybody wanting to buy a number of consumer goods, like anything with a celebrity signature on it or useless stuff like Tamagotchis, tis "because it's for sale". I had considered the idea that it might be some sense of entitlement, but I don't think it's that deep. Do old people and their relatives even frequently question whether treatment is a good idea at all, let alone whether any particular treatment is?
I could probably come up with more, but I think the point's been made. You wanna really save money on healthcare? Have the wisdom to know when it's your time (hint: if you're over 80, you're due) and the gravitas to bow out without herculean measures and croesian costs.

*If we really believed this, wouldn't we compensate all of the sacrificed innocents in war on the same scale? If an extra year of an old woman's life in the US is worth $145 000, why do the families of killed civilians in Afghanistan get as little as $210?

Law is For Protection of the People

I couldn't resist the Kristofferson refererence; it's a funny song if you've never heard itAnyway, the flap over the Gates arrest continues. Today the police are hitting back. The most remarkable thing in the article is this quote from David Holloway the President of the International Brotherhood of police officers, "What we don't need is public safety officials across the country second-guessing themselves." I imagine this sounded good to Holloway when he said it but it's one of the stupidest things I've ever read from someone who's the president of anything. Do we really not want men with guns giving a second thought to the matter before they decide to light us up? I would say that precisely what we do want and need is for "public safety officials" to at least think things through before acting.
This whole case has gotten extremely muddled. It seems that most people think it stands and falls on whether Sgt. James Crowley is a racist, and beyond that the whole question of whether the Cambridge Police Department is guilty of racial profiling hangs on this case. We ought to put both aside. I don't think Crowley is a racist, and I don't know enough about Cambridge to make any judgment about racial profiling there. Step back from that and just consider this: A man was arrested in his own home, and his offense was basically mouthing off to the officer in question. It's not like he was hanging off the hood of the cop car or even physically threatening the cop. Even if we believe every word Crowley says and nothing Gates says, Gates "crime" was basically being a jerk. And this is the best interpretation you can put on Crowley's actions. To arrest someone for being a jerk to you is simply outrageous. It's nothing more than a power trip on the part of the officer.
If policemen really are professionals they need to show some restraint. If someone were to show up to my office hours waving around a graded paper he or she wasn't happy with and accusing me of some kind of bias in grading, the last thing I would do would be to flip out. If I did, I'd be in deep trouble and I'd deserve it. Being a professional, heck being a grown up, means that sometimes people say nasty things to you and you have to sit there and take it. Most of us have to as part of our jobs and we know it. Most of us have to as part of our private lives unless we want to step outside. But of course we all know that if we annoy the police we can get arrested (What does disorderly conduct even mean? The translation is basically what Prez said in "The Wire" after cold cocking a kid: "He was pissing me off.") Calling Crowley a rogue cop is pure histrionics; we're not talking about the Bad Lieutenant here, and calling him a racist is unwarranted too. But that doesn't let him off the hook. He abused his power to get back at someone who was annoying him. Shouldn't we be outraged by that?
The funny thing is that I have a harder time seeing this happening in Germany than I do in the supposedly freedom loving U.S. I'm tired of this line that the police are somehow above criticism because they have dangerous jobs. Yes they are professionals and yes they do have important jobs, but that's exactly why they need to think things through and why we should hold them to a high standard. The cops really do work for us, and there's two sides to that. If they do a good job we should be grateful, but they also have a responsibility to us. We do pay their salaries after all. Whether as a matter of fact it is or not, the law should be for the protection of the people.

Did you hear the one about the mayors and the rabbis?

No long post today - yet, but I did run across this news that seems to confirm a widely held stereotype.

As former Secretary of Labo(u)r, Raymond Donovan, once put it, "“If you're in the contracting business in this country, you're suspect. If you're in the contracting business in New Jersey, you're indictable. If you're in the contracting business in New Jersey and are Italian, you're convicted.”

Update to Framing the Debate

Update (this got long, so i created a new post):

Having read Mr. Kleins's comments and getting back to the homestead, I'm going to post my you tube video and then respond a bit to said commentry

First, a funny video about the concept of personal healthcare plans that aren't dependent on your employer:



This is a great video, and not just because it visalizes some great work fantasies (i particularly like the guy sitting on the copier) but because the text is right on as far as selling the idea of healthcare being portable. After a quick review of the bills in the house and senate right now, it seems that this provision is receiveing a bit of a head nod in the House "No reason to ever make a job or life decision again based on health care coverage" and looked over in the senate. I hope that Wyden (who sits on the finance committee) will insist that this kind of coverage be included and empahsized.

I say emphasized because these kinds of programs could be used to really sell this rform to the general public. One could make a pretty good argument that Obama already did that during the election but, as Mr. Klein says, Obama seems to have punted again, only to hope for a quick fumble recovery before time is up... (if were looking for an american footbal analogy, perhaps it would be better to call this an onside kick). His speech last night (which i havent yet listened to but have read a bit of) seemed to me to be a start. What really needs to happen is that people get energized about getting something done. I don't mean apealing to joe six pack, but i mean making it clear to the american people that massive reform will do EVERYONE a lot of good, the seniors and the insured as well. Charts like this might help.

Whats happening instead is that the american people are distracted by a lot of other things, they dont really like congress that much, and the republicans are doing their best to verbally lash Obama when they can. The fact that the mainstream media is going along for the show is unsurprising. Although Obama is starting to try and get things moving on the social movement front (which would hopefully put more pressure on the senators and congressmen that are dragging their nuckles), his administration and political arms have been pretty rough recently, even running ads against moderate democrats recently. I think it might be too late for the President to really be able to move this, and the most effective thing he could to is to tell Ried and Pelosi to just stand up, take responsibility for this thing publicly, and ram it through. As far as selling the people, the White House (and Congressional democrats!) should be touting the benefits of this program for everyone.

Iran's Veepstakes

It would seem that in all the sound and fury about health care reform and just how many votes Sotomayor will get in the Senate we've forgotten about Iran. This is too bad because something both interesting and possibly quite scary is going on there right now. A fight has broken out between Ahmadinejad and Khameini over Ahmadinejad's choice for veep. Khameini nixed his choice, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, but Ahmadinejad is sticking to his guns so far.
Now at first glance it wouldn't seem scary at all; just the opposite in fact. The clerics dislike Mashai because he's said that Iran is friends with everyone "even Israelis," he attended a ceremony in Turkey where women danced, and another in Iran where women played tambourines and read from the Koran. So at first glance it appears that Mashai is being punished for showing both a minimal level of sanity and decency. (Before concluding that this shows that maybe Ahmadinejad isn't as bad as we think it's worth pointing out that Mashai is his son-in-law).
What's scary about this is that Ahmadinejad feels confident enough to stand up to Khameini. The common opinion is that Ahmadinejad is the clerics' stooge, but figuring just who's really in charge in Tehran is like reading tea leaves. Another theory is that Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards have all but seized power and that the clerics are now more or less their puppets. This latest development gives a bit more credence to that theory, and at the very least shows that Ahmadinejad is no puppet. That's scary because in dealing with Iran we thought we could count on the fundamental venality of the Iranian regime. The Ayatollahs may talk a good Allah and Mahdi game, but when it comes down to it most of them want to continue fleecing their own people and enjoying their own privileges more than doing what they take to be Almighty's will on Earth. They're scumbags, but rational scumbags. And as long as they're rational nuclear deterrence would probably work (the scumbag element helps too, at least the purely self-interested are easy to predict). They may expect a nice time of it in heaven, but they've a good thing down here so no need to rush things. Ahmadinejad on the other hand has all the signs of a true believer. If the Ayatollahs are in charge a nuclear Iran is bad, but not terrifying (or at least not much more terrifying than anyone having nukes is). On the other hand if Ahmadinejad really is in charge or has a good bit of room to make his own plays, a nuclear armed Iran may be actually be as awful as the neo-con types make out.

Framing the Debate

As i surf the internet on this rainy afternoon I keep noticing a trend in the reporting on Healthcare legislation in the US. Most of the journalists (particularly thos from the Washington Post) seem to be taking the position that Obama it fighting for his Presidency right now. Naturally republicans are taking this to heart and have begun making wild statements about "bringing him down" and making the healthcare debate "his waterloo". Of course the news media has jumped on this story an run with it, with even (fairly) liberal blogger Ben Smith penning a peice where he says, "Finally, we're starting to see him sweat"

Now nobody expected healthcare reform to go smoothly, but i think many are surprised that its going so roughly. It is begining to look like there won't be a finished bill by the august recess despite the White house's full on media offensive (and Obama's nationally televised news conference). This will, in turn, spur the media to spin stories about how Obama has lost power, how his agenda is in danger, and whatever can he do to get things back on track?

The fact of the matter is that this entire episode is somewhat self imposed by Obama, and I'm kind of at a loss of words to see why he has forced himeslf into this position. By emphasising the august deadline its almost as if he's trying to test out his legislative influence..and as we're seeing, its not just the republicans that are pushing back. Instead of waiting for september (which is when procedural rules will kick in making healthcare legislation much easier by forcing an end to debate and denying the right to filibuster) he's pushing the envelope here. Maybe he's got something else up his sleeve, but it seems to me that he could have just waited this one out for another month. As it is, he's going to take a pounding throughout august as the pundit class faults HIM for the senate's inaction (Pelosi has already scheduled a vote for the end of july on the house version of the bill and has repeatedly said they will vote).

Another aspect of this is the lack of personalization that the issue of healthcare has gotten so far in the media and debate about reform. We've heard a lot about numbers: the number of uninsured, the costs associated with reform. But we've heard less of the impact on normal americans in a more personal sense. An article by Matthew Yglesias got me thinking about this last night. The basic gist is that many of the people that would (or could) be up in arms about reform aren't, because they don't really see how thier lives would change with it. One statistic that stood out is that 90 percent of voters have healthcare (vs around 80% of the population as a whole) and thus aren't that worried about it.

What they don't realize (because the debate hasn't been framed that way yet) is that most of them only have insurance because of their job. Those that are losing their jobs come to realize very quickly that health care reform is needed (perhaps a silver lining to the 9.5% and rising unemployment rate?), but those that aren't don't nessescarily see the hidden costs of our system, because a lot of the costs are payed by the employer. Thus, they aren't really mobilized or upset about the current configuration and are content to let their congressmen wrestle with the issue.

We can beging to see a bit of an improvement in the framing of the debate in last nights speech by Obama. The theme was "What's in it for me?" and I think that is exactly the right tone to take. The american people really need to see that there is a way to have healthcare without being dependent on your employer, and that the healthcare that they probably do have is way too expensive and cumbersome. I'm not talking about publishing more horror stories about how Johnny lost his leg because he didn't have insurance, but more stories about how Frank has worked for 30 years at a job he hates because he needs health insurance for him and his family. I'm talking about addressing the issue of medicare head on, and letting the old folk know that although THEY may have government run healthcare, thier children and grandchildren don't.

I wonder why it has taken so long for the white house to come around to this tactic, and I hope that it's not too late in the game (again, time frame self imposed by Obama) for congress to be cajoled into action.

p.s. I wanted to post a you tube video here, but the server at my company doesn't allow the you tube website to load. So I'll post it later..

When the going gets tough, hop on a flight to Switzerland.

One story has repeatedly popped up in the news over the last few months that just won't seem to die, so to speak. Every time I run across it, I fall into a paralysis of moral uncertainty. So I says to myself, I says, "Blog it."

Daniel James was a well-educated and well-heeled English rugby player who, in a rugby accident, became paralysed from the neck down. Anyone who's played rugby knows that injuries, even fairly serious ones, are par for the course. Where the story gets tricky is when James decided that a broken body wasn't worth living in, travelled to Switzerland, and received assistance in ending his own life.

I'll happily grant that there is no good argument against permitting euthanasia for the terminally ill. I'd even say that it is a right, meaning the onus of argument is on those who would rather ban it, because each is entitled to it a priori. My confusion starts when considering the question in cases short of terminal illness, leaving aside the observation that life is always a terminal condition.

One bulwark of market liberalism, The Economist, recently weighed in on the topic, declaring that euthanasia is fine in cases of terminal illness but inadmissible in other cases. Their reasoning is that the risk of the elderly being pressured into early graves by greedy associates (for insurance money or inheritance, if it isn't obvious) is too great. It's true that every individual is and ought to be the final arbiter on matters of his/her own existence, but the social consequences might require some qualifications on that position. For example, I once heard suicide described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem (must've been an after-school special). This doesn't apply in cases like Mr. James's, but it does in many other conceivable ones. Consider the depressed debtor who reckons that ending her life would be preferable to rebuilding her credit, which isn't so far fetched, or the politician whose scandals get to be too much, or the single parent who doesn't want to face another day of too much responsibility. In such cases, the perpavictim (victitrator?) basically bails himself out of responsibility. Piss on them slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I'm cashin' in my chips. This choice leaves the rest of us holding the bag for somebody else's responsibilities, which isn't cool.

As to Mr. James, whose condition was permanent, I have a really hard time empathizing with his response to paralysis, but any outside perspective is arguably irrelevant anyway. I've known productive and contented people who happened to be wheelchair-bound. It would be foolish to claim that paralysed life bears some special and valuable properties - it sucks, it's a rough deal, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Still, there are pursuits one can enjoy with just a brain and some sensory apparatus: music, books, movies, social contacts, etc. But some people seem not to care for them, and who has the right to force them. Some of my favourite last words come from George Eastman (of Eastman-Kodak fame), who wrote on his suicide note, "My work is done. Why wait?" I would find those words coming from Daniel James less credible, being such a young man, but the sentiment might still apply, and the big difference was that James lacked the ability to do it himself when nobody would be around to prevent him.

I don't have an easy answer for it, but I did want to get the question out there. Maybe now it will stop dogging me.

Don't buy insurance from your butcher

IR theorists often get the idea that they have some special expertise to comment about all sorts of topics, and pop culture is a regular fetish. One IR scholar published a book about the IR take on Harry Potter, with the peculiar twist that he himself looks like Harry Potter.

The latest attempt involves an analysis of a rapper battle between Jay Z, the reigning champ, as it were, and a young challenger, The Game. Although I admittedly don't know much about rap, I know a thing or two about IR, I take it as my duty to set the record straight. I doubt anybody will take the piece too seriously, but it might lead them to discounting IR too.

The author, Marc Lynch, is trying to make the argument that Jay Z is a classic great power faced with the problem of maintaining his status, and he seems to be trying to put a strong realist spin on it, but he misses the mark widely. His first peculiar observation is that neocons would tell Jay Z to use his power to bend others his way, and liberals and defensive realists would tell him to restrain his power. The intelligent thing to do is to realize that if you're in power, you're not the one with the problems, but you may not have that luxury forever. Randall Schweller would tell you that you should use your power, but you should do it investing in institutions that will provide you with a soft landing when power wanes. Other states will see you making rules that bind yourself too, and they might think you're more benevolent, or something.

Lynch also kept talking about Jay Z's constraints and how he wouldn't dare to do this or that. What the heck counts as power in this case and what does it cost? He's constrained only if he has a limited amount of resources, but what are these resources. Many real realists at least give good proxy measures for power like tanks, warm bodies, capital reserves, production capacity, etc. I can imagine how the tanks run out, but Jay Z seems to fight mostly by talking, and he seems to be able to do that forever.

There's also the account of how, after Jay Z reconciled with the preceding King of NY, "In a world of unipolarity, both win through co-optation, reconciliation through enemies, and the demonstration that the gains of cooperation outweigh the gains of resistance." Even when two parties to agree on the same course of action as the best for everyone, there is still often a debate about how to split the benefits. France and the UK both want cleaner water with more fish in the English Channel. No argument there. If they could achieve it, though, they might not agree on how to split the fish. There is rarely just one Pareto equilibrium, and they rarely split conveniently. (Thanks, Stephen Krasner.)

Two bizarre quotes:

1. on the rivalry of The Game vs. 50 Cent: "In that war between a rising power and an upper-echelon middle power, both ultimately benefited."
2. on Jay Z's options: "If Jay Z hits back hard in public, the Game will gain in publicity even if he loses ... the classic problem of a great power confronted by a small and annoying challenger."

Okay, so WTF? What historical analogs does Lynch have in mind? When was it ever the case that two middling powers benefited from a war among themselves? They're much more likely to be swallowed up. Divide et impera. And if the problem of a weaker challenger gaining publicity is a classic one for a great power, when has it ever happened that way? Iraq gained a lot of publicity once by invading Kuwait, and it was not a very big problem for the US (to get Iraq out of Kuwait - not the rest). The publicity certainly doesn't help a middling power trying to amass resources and prepare an attack. He's just making this up as if everyone in IR would buy it. Bullsh!t.

Finally, there's Lynch's own council to Jay Z: "His best hope is probably to sit back and let the Game self-destruct..." This is appeasement! Appeasement is only contingently bad. It's a fine thing when the bad guys appease the good guys, but it doesn't always work that way. Ask Poland.

It doesn't matter whether you win or lose...

The American senate has voted not to purchase further F22 fighters. This is a fine thing because nobody America is fighting right now can shoot down anything they've already got, and they have no plans to fight anybody who can. It was rather an albatross.

So all is fine and good. What disturbed me was the analysis in Fred Kaplan's piece expressing wonderment that the better argument could win and that national interests could prevail over the parochial interests of individual senators, despite the best efforts of the 'military-industrial-congressional complex' to rig the process otherwise. That billions of dollars and perverse amounts of destructive power could depend on the interest of a handful of factory workers in Connecticut is disgusting in itself. That an attentive observer would be surprised that democracy and good sense managed to trump these particular interests is worse. That someone could be so surprised and not mention any need for reform is positively vile.

I'll close with a shout out to my homie, Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Danger! 1533!!!

I just read a scary article about how Amazon can remotely delete content on customers' e-readers.
Aye caramba! Of course, the author says this could lead to real consequences resembling Orwell's "1984", but any real sci-fi geek would know that Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a much better analogy.

Anyway, I gotta go polish my pocket protectors and anagram some Asimov.

Duden, where's my vocab?

First, I'd like to thank Ms. in Tuba Town for the HTML makeover. I'm so glad the job wasn't entrusted to me, and it's awful snazzy. Woohoo!

Second, I wrote yesterday about the pros and cons of choosing a single language for Europe, and I said that languages were "the original spontaneous social order". I take this truth to be self-evident, but the news this morning reminded me that many would beg to differ. It seems a new Duden has been published, and the German conjugating classes are all atwitter because they can now officially use words like "Twitter", "Bad Bank" and "Flatrateparty" without making a mockery of themselves. Other words, like "Jahrweiser" (archaic word for "calendar") and "Cochonnerie" have been cut from the starting lineup of German vocabulary.

The interesting thing is that most Germans would most emphatically disagree that language is a self-organizing phenomenon, and I think it has to do with the German love of rules. When Germans talk about human rights or international law, it's as if they're talking about the laws of thermodynamics - naturally instituted, utterly clear and beyond dispute. It was a real pain in the @$$ back in my days as an English teacher, because Germans would often ask why Americans use "have" and the English use "have got", why there are multiple spellings for sceptical/skeptical or honour/honor, and who allows the regulator to be so careless. They could hardly conceive of the careless casuistry in the idea that the English language is simply what English speakers say and write.

Germans prefer a different system. There is an "Institute for German Language", which was actually tasked with devising a unified German spelling system. The result is pretty much universally despised, but most Germans, even the loudest critics, tend to complain more about the IGL's final product than questioning their legitimacy even to try. Most Germans will similarly tell you, if asked about the source of their words, that the Duden might not invent them, but it is the supreme criterion of acceptability. Again, they talk about these institutions and processes as if they are necessary and perfectly natural, ordained elements of Creation. Many of them would have an absolute hissy fit if they stopped and considered the fact that they have ceded final say of their vocabulary to a privately owned publishing house. Not only is that haphazard and undemocratic, it could lead to profit! Horror!

What the Germans, and most others too for that matter, might not realize is the extent to which all languages and vocabularies are sub-contracted to marketing types and ad-men. I had a discussion with Mrs. Klein this morning about whether or not the adjective "knackig" (crispy like a ripe apple) had any meaning when used as a modifier on interest rates. What the he11 is a crispy interest rate? She maintained that it is just a synonym for "good", but that implies that it can mean high or low with reference to interest rates, and I have a hard time with any adjective whose meaning is that flexible. Is any instrument that blunt worth having? The point, though, is that this was inspired by an ad, and some seem to accept immediately that crispy can apply to interest rates if it's been thusly printed somewhere. Let's not forget that "Twitter" is a brand name, and "tweeting" is a word invented by a company to describe interaction among its customers. The name of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing, was explicitly devised to encourage people to use it as a verb, just like "googling" (itself another verb née brand name).

To take things full circle, does any of this help with yesterday's quandary of whether it would be more liberal to harmonize European languages or to maintain memetic diversity. Absolutely! I reckon there are two ways to solve the problem liberally. First, we can let nature take its course and see which languages prevail. In a process of creative destruction, new terms, dialects and languages emerge where others fade. This is kind of Burkian conservative liberalism, because it allows for novelty by preserving the traditional process, which creates without being pushed. Second, we could all vote on what counts as a word and whether or not any given word ought to be welcomed into our common lexical repertoire. Letting everyone vote on new words and usages might sound like a hugely bureaucratic idea requiring all kinds of new standards about who's competent to vote, what the criteria would be and who's going to pay for it all. That's true, but only as long as you, like the Germans, want the process to be centralized. If, however, you're willing to let the process occur at a more grassroots, distributed level, well then, isn't that what we do already?

Haustiere! Update II

Fish!

I wanna be the yellow one!

Update:

I found a much better pet. We can edit all of the colors and background image and everything. Right now a fly is released every minute, but if you click in his box, a fly appears and he eats it :-)

@Claire: If you want to change the settings you have to reembed the applet. click on the link in the frog cage and you'll get to the website..


OK, I'm obviously just playing around now and im going to stop. Just added a little translation bar to the website: click the language and google translates our blog. Its kind of funny (and occasionally surprisingly accurate) to read what google translates. It seems to leave out a lot of verbs....

Anyway, feel free to vote on whether to keep this stuff, or just remove it outright..

Later

Google Rocks!

I'm trying to game the system on the Google search engine with our title..

We now come up number 5 on the search for "Exit port A" on google...

Unfortunately, if you don't use the quotes you get all kinds of other websites (appropriately mostly from the US and other immigration sites about entering and leaving the country). :-)

Keep linking the site places, like Facebook, StudiVZ, twitter and all that. Maybe we can get to 4th place!

United We Stand, Divided We Fall?

Today I was going to use Sarah Palin as a vehicle to bash the current state of the Republican party, but I quickly had the unpleasant feeling of beating a dead horse. Luckily, something else caught my eye.


As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.


The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.


The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?


And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.

Response

I'm posting my response to Ben's post here, because the interface is so much nicer that the little comment box...I wonder if that can be changed somewhere..

Anyway, I guess my first response to Ben's post is that the problem only arises if you accept the liberalist position that everyone does (or should) start from an equal position. Rawls does this in his theory of Justice and its exactly what bothers me about it: the assumption that to get an ideal system of justice everyone has to start at the same point. Not only does this render his theory practically usless (until he bends it to fit the real world later in Law of Peoples), the same problem lies at the base of all those philosophers' theories. If you start from an obviously idealized position its pretty hard to get back to reality.

Having said that, I don't think that a concept of political liberalism hinges on that concept. I would emphasize it as the goal of liberalism to acheive parity of opprotunity for everyone, and the acceptance of a paternalist state that limits our freedoms to try and acheive that goal. I think you can still retain a good chunk of liberalist theory if we could just accept that they start in the wrong place, but end up with the "right" (in my liberal relativist nihilist opinion) kinds of ideas about how government should work in relation to people and personal liberties.

The Elephant in the Liberal Salon, or All Who Were Created How?

The best definition of liberalism I can think of says that it's the disposition to assume that humans need and deserve as much freedom in their personal affairs as possible, and to ask what kinds of constraints are necessary to preserve that freedom. A sheep in a pen full of wolves isn't "free" in any meaningful sense, so some measures, like free education, free healthcare, a justice system and defence establishment are necessary to make sure that everyone has a fair shot at structuring their own lives as they see fit. This is list is illustrative, not necessarily comprehensive.

A big assumption here is that everybody starts off with equal means. To the extent that individuals' success or failure rests on their own decisions, the system is fair. You bet on a long shot and lose, it's your own fault; you play it safe and eke by, good for you; you strike it rich (whatever "rich" might mean contextually), well done! This system works really well so long as we can work with abstract assumptions about "human nature" in the style of the greats, like Kant, Smith, Hume, Mill, &c. For lack of knowledge how people are, we make an educated guess and extrapolate. The liberal idea would encounter serious trouble, though, if we had reason to believe that we don't all start on a level playing field, that the deck is systematically stacked in favour of some, that some of us are sheep and the rest are wolves.

There is trouble on the horizon. There was a piece in Slate a while back talking about genetic differences on IQ test results, and Steven Pinker has made a similar and more informed argument on similar lines. Some of arguments out there paint race as a big factor, but depending on your definition of race (and there are several ), I'm mixed race, so I don't have a stake in how that game, nor do I really want one. But it doesn't necessarily have to be about race at all. We've all interacted with people who just didn't seem to be able to keep up or who seemed to do effortlessly what we could only do with considerable toil. Our understanding of liberalism will work so long as the inherently disadvantaged or privileged are just marginal quantities. Most developed countries can deal fairly well with their own mentally handicapped. It would also be fine if everyone had a valuable skill. Modern service economies, which is the direction everybody seems to be moving, value only certain types of skills, and it seems that these might not be randomly distributed nor that there is a huge hump of mediocrity with a few high fliers and knuckle-draggers on either end. Rather, it seems that people are spread out in terms of intellectual ability, the distribution might depend on certain predictable factors, and intellectual ability seems to count extra relative to other abilities, at least in any country I'd want to live in.

Given that this could be the case, liberals have a lot of soul searching to do. The first big question is: does this represent a threat to the liberal way of doing things? If no, how can society be considered fair (without too much sophistry)? If yes, can liberalism or the system be reconfigured to deal with it? I mean, genetic engineering should make this a technical problem, provided everyone has equal access to improvements (note: these improvements would probably have to be chosen prenatally, so you'd be stuck with your parents' choice, like your name - is that any more liberal?). If everyone were engineered to have similar qualities, what could we still consider meritorious? Did you really earn it if you were designed from (before) birth to achieve it? If the status quo remains, the question of merit remains too, and it circles back to affirmative action-type arguments. Is a runner-up actually more deserving than the winner because the winner had inherently better odds of winning?

Without wanting to anticipate any easy answers, I'd like to get the debate rolling.