Exit Port A

Respones and further discussion..

2011-03-01T23:29:00.008+01:00

This post is a response to issues raised by Mr. Klein to my last post on equipping revolutionaries with satellite modems.

Mr. Klein's response:

Interesting idea, but there are a lot of problems with it:

1) Non-Interference/Reciprocity: A whack load of international law is based on the idea of non-interference, i.e. that countries don't mess with events inside other countries' borders. That would be a pretty clear violation of that principle (although under R2P, you could probably justify it if the UNSC approved the action and the leader of the target country were attacking his own people). If you did it anyway, what's to stop other countries from messing with your internal affairs? I mean, Congress even prevented DP World from buying Long Beach's port. How could you complain if Iran started handing out bomb-making manuals in Penn Station?

2) Recipients' risk: People who start/join a revolution are betting on its success to prevent reprisals. Even if you could hand them out secretly, and only to the right people, the recipients would be putting themselves at risk of treason *before* a revolution had even started, so they'd be holding evidence against them without even having a revolution to bet on. It's like depositing your life savings with a bookie before you even know when the race is gonna be or which horses are gonna be in it. You gonna take that bet?

3) Legitimacy: Although I get that it would just be facilitating what people would want to do anyway, that kind of support would make it very easy to portray a revolutionary movement as a foreign puppet show. That never goes down well.

4) Micro-Blowback: Let's drop the assumption that you hand them out only to the 'right' people and those people are able to keep them and stay on the 'right' side. Wouldn't the Taliban in Afghanistan just love to have a (bigger and cheaper) satellite comms network? Even if you hadn't given it to them directly, they could just go house by house and nab the devices from those who did have them, as they already do with cds.

5) International blowback: While distributing the devices would certainly sell better at home than arming them, it's not like the oil rich BFFs and panicky Israel would just stand there impotently cursing your resourcefulness a la Mentos commercial. They're gonna be effin pissed.

From the perspective of the powerful, it's pretty much never a good policy to arm the Helots. It's not always easy to identify what counts as a weapon and who counts as a helot. Discretion is the better part of valor.

Mr. Klein,

While your Mentos reference put a smile on my face (and made me go watch the foo fighters video again), I think I can (relatively easily) sidestep most of your concerns.

First of all, if undertaken by a government, such an operation would obviously have to be covert and risky by nature; points 1, 3 and 5 are totally valid if a government is stupid enough to get caught doing something like this. Perhaps it would be better (as I suggested) to let multinational media conglomerates try something like this. I think that would, at least to a certain extent, eliminate 1, 3, and 5 as issues: it’s not the British government, but rather a BBC reporter handing the things out to protest leaders. While this may influence point 3 the least, Israel and the Saudis would certainly understand they were dealing with a different beast.

This brings up a topic of particular interest to me: How does International Relations Theory deal with the "fourth estate" role of mass media? One thing that has been interesting for me to see is the zeal with which journalists have been charging into these places trying to get a story or an interview (often at great danger to themselves). While these people may just be acting out of careerist self interest (nothing like warzone reporting to boost your stature as a journalist), many seem to feel a responsibility to get images out and help people gain their right of expression. I could totally see a reporter doing something like I proposed spontaneously themselves...or an ambitious news editor coming up with the idea...

I have a few counterarguments for individual points of contention as well:

1) In addition to what I said above, I'm not sure I agree with the non-interference/reciprocity argument at all as it applies to what we might call rouge regimes (outlaw states?). Doing something like this in China would be dangerous for sure, but in almost any other country I can think that we could want to do this in, I don’t really care that they might get pissed off...in fact, those governments have already proven to oppress their people and have often shown official and direct contempt towards democratic values. If the US government gets caught handing out these kinds of devices in Iran, that’s bad, but they're developing nuclear weapons and funding our enemies anyway, so I don’t see how that changes things much. In an already deteriorating place like Libya I'm even less worried about territorial borders (apparently neither are the British or the Germans, as they landed a few warplanes in the desert a few days ago to airlift people out).

Also, I don't much care about an Iranian passing out bomb making material in New York...that kind of information is available online and in thousands of other places, even if it might be harder to get at since 2001 (glad I printed out my copy of the Jolly Roger Cookbook). And its not like the guys in militias are going to have a problem getting guns or explosives in the US. This might be made part of a larger point of democracies that have freedom of expression need to worry less about fringe views than those that heavily restrict access to information.

2) I guess I was more envisioning this as a tool to be given to revolutionaries in actio. The risk in trying to establish sleeper cells of these things is high. In fact, I think the most difficult logistical issue here is to identify who to give the things to: if you give it to an established protester (who might be able to use it most effectively) he's also the one that's going to get arrested first. If you give it to just any old guy, you might not get any quality images.

In cases like Libya or Bahrain(and Iran as well), however, people have already shown that they are willing to risk their lives even without these things; you have an already established revolutionary movement who is going to be hanged anyway. This strategyis designed to make it easier for the condemned to get their message out, not be the reason they get hanged.

3) I'm not sure how powerful arguments from leaders who have already been de-legitimized by their people claiming outside influence have on popular opinion within the country. While I grant you the point, I don’t think I can give it much weight, especially if we modify my proposal as in point 2 above. And again, while the argument of outside influence can still be made if a media organization is handing these things out, such a situation gives western governments at least a sheen of plausible deniability and complicates the sales job of an embattled regime significantly.

4) Two points here. One, I don’t think there is an application for this in places like Afghanistan in the sense that I'm saying. I'm not trying to get poor people internet to help them build a new life, I'm trying to get the pictures of revolution out. And though the Taliban is leading a revolution, it’s not a democratic one: the images or video they would be posting to the net would appeal to a much smaller audience and not affect international public opinion in their direction. Video of decapitating prisoners and cutting off women’s noses isn't exactly going to win them any friends in the world community.

More specifically, I would be surprised if Taliban and Al Qaida leaders (in particular) don’t already have satellite phones, if not versions of exactly these devices.

5) I think I covered this point mostly at the beginning of this post. Again, if a government got caught doing this it would certainly be bad for them...the idea is to not get caught...

How to get the pictures out

2011-03-01T01:10:00.006+01:00

So, it seems this whole democratic revolution thing is getting out of hand. First we had Tunisia. Then there was Egypt, which I wrote about here. Now Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Iraq and other countries are having what we might call civil unrest, ranging from protests to days of rage.

Oh yea, and lets not forget about China and Iran.

It seems that one of the great equalizers between autocratic power and democratic reformer has been the power of the internet to somewhat level the PR and organizational playing field. The point has been made so many times already I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but sites like Facebook and Twitter have made organizing and publicizing events much easier, even in the face of censorship, disruptions of service (as in Egypt), and journalist brutality. The images (and raw video) that world citizens are now shown on a daily basis have put significant pressure on democratically elected leaders to DO SOMETHING. Individual people are being shown brutal images (and video) of police crackdowns on peaceful demonstrators on their evening news. During dinner. With their kids watching.

The pressure on elected officials to make strong statements, both in condemnation of dictators and in support of revolutionary/resistance movements has been heavy. John McCain and Joe Liebermann (reporting from Cairo) called on Obama to institute a no-fly zone and to provide the resistance "with the arms to defend themselves" in Libya this last weekend. This has obviously put western leaders in a bit of a bind, seeing as how they've been dealing with (or tolerating) these same autocratic regimes for a while now...and that they are still heavily dependent on and working with others (Saudi Arabia in particular). If Obama really were to arm the resistance of Libya, what about the protesters (rebels) in Oman, Bahrain (where the 5th Fleet is stationed), Iraq (really? arm rebels in IRAQ?!), or Saudi Arabia (our oil rich BFFs?).

Being able to post a picture or image online, get it out in circulation without censorship, has not only caused stronger responses by elected leaders and helped protesters organize, it has spawned the copycat phenomenon we see now. Without the spread of pictures of a burning man in a square, and of millions assembling in Tahrir Square just weeks later, the anger and hope of other oppressed peoples (not a big fan of that category, but we'll go with it here) have been awakened. One of the reasons the situation in Libya is so vague is that we are getting few real images or news at all (although we are getting more and more as rebellion forces establish control). One of the first things that Egypt did was shut off the net, and china has been proactively censoring the internet and proactively arresting people posting to blogs trying to organize protests.

Publishing images also strengthens the resolve of protesters as people begin to sense that the world is behind them, that their fight is just and approved of, and that others are paying attention. Protesters in Bahrain, for instance, are worried that the unrest in Libya will "steal their thunder", so to speak. Revolutions are now competing for air time (this puts a grim new spin on the old television journalism addage "if it bleeds, it leads").

This poses the question: How do we get the pictures (and video) out of the country in the face of governmental control of communication networks and the internet?

Answer: Why not pass out some of these? This could be a fun exercise for our intelligence communities: find journalists (or maybe just random people) and give them these things, teach them to use them. Tell them, that when the internet and cell phones (and maybe even landlines) go down, to bust the thing out and start sending pics. Maybe this isn’t a job for the government; maybe news corporations should do it instead. Imagine BBC or CNN or Al Jazeera handing these things out to activists they come across; the company could pay for the transmission and device, but gets the content provided to them by citizen journalists. The things only cost $2,700 a piece, and I'll bet we could get a bulk discount. Obviously the quality of journalism isn’t the issue here: it’s the images we want!

The images of everyday people risking their lives to stand up to authoritarian systems they find unjust in the name of democratic freedom. In your (and everyone's) living room, at dinner time, in front of your kids.

Egypt, Revolution, International Democracy and American Interests

2011-02-11T00:44:00.011+01:00

While reading this article I returned to a thought that has been reccuring recently in regard to the current unrest/revolution/democratic freedom movement that has taken place in Egypt over the last 3 weeks. The article gives a brief biography of the new vice-president of Egypt, Omar Suleiman, and how he seems to not only be Mubarak's guy, he's also the CIA's, the state department's, Europe's, the Saudi's AND the Israeli's guy. He's also not very popular with the protesters, seeing as how he has run the intelligence and spy agency since 1993 has has been accused by multiple international organizations of torturing prisoners (including on behalf of the US).

So it seems to me that this isnt really the guy that those who are "pro-democracy" should want. If you are for representative democracy that heeds the will of the people, the last few weeks are about as clear a demonstration that this country wants its leader(s) sacked (I think the images of people fighting with stones, kitchen knives, and pieces of re-bar ripped out of the street are powerful enough).

Unfortunately (or interestingly, from a more objective perspective), Mubarak and Sulieman have entrenched themselves heavily in regional politics and have been major recipients of US and European aid. The Israeli peace process has been based on heavy assistance from Egypt (and thus from Mubarak and his government), and the government there is dependent on Egypt if their blockade of Gaza (and Hamas) is to continue. The Israeli government is heavily invested in the political outcome in Egypt. Let's be clear: the Israeli blockade of Gaza is ridiculous and their government has been acting very badly over the last couple of years. All the more reason for them to prefer the dictator and understudy-to-the-dictator that they know (and can hide behind) to the angry, democratic, and generally anti-isreali mob they don't.

And now we come to the heart of the matter. The fact is, that if the Egyptian people really get a representative democracy, the government of one of the biggest economies, cultural centers, and strongest western allies will become significantly more anti-Isreal and anti-US. One of the main complaints of the protesters is the complicity of Mubarak in the Israeli occupation and the American funding of an oppressive government. And they have every right to be upset! We have been funding an opressive dictator for 30 years! Isreal has been horribly oppressing Palestinians with the help of their government! The situation is reminiscint of the Iranian Revolution (where we had backed the Shah) or a series of Central and South American regimes (where we had also propped up dictators).

So. Morally (ideally), I want to say that the protesters are right, Mubarak and his whole regime need to go, and a real representative democracy should be instated in Egypt. If such a government could become stable we could no longer say that there is only one democracy in the middle east. Given the fact that the military has taken almost a neutral role and kept the security situation reltively stable, and given the relatively strong Egyptian economy, a new regime might get back on its feet sooner than we expect.

Will it be hostile towards Isreal (thus challenging the notion that democracies never go to war) or will it become a second pillar of peaceful secular democracy in the middle east (does Turkey count?) How close will such a government deal with governments like Syria's "president-with emergency powers" and Jordan and Saudi Arabia's "Autocratic Monarchies"? What if we begin to see such revolutions in other countries around the region? How will modern political and philosophical models hold up (of particluar interest to me: John Rawl's non-ideal theory)?

How close will the new Egyptian government want to openly associate itself with the US and Europe? How will the emergence of a representative democracy in one of the most culturally influential countries in the arab speaking world change US foriegn policy? Will congress authorize aid money to a government that is openly or believed to be hostile to Israel and US interests? How stable IS the Egyptian state without the billions of dollars we give them each year?

What about the 2012 presidential elections? I can't wait for someone to accuse Obama of being anti-American for supporting a democratic revolution in Egypt that has endangered the Israeli peace process and embarrassed the Israeli regime.

Still, are the major political and economic powers with interest in the area going to allow a government to form that dramatically changes any of these dynamics? I truly believe that a democratic Egypt will be beneficial in the long run, but I can imagine a very rocky road there. What if a democratic government fails miserably and the security situation in Egypt becomes significantly worse? Again, given the self control and professionalism of the military shown in the last few weeks, I doubt such a situation would happen. But what if the conservative Israeli Government refuses to lift the blockade from their side? Gazan refugees pouring over the Suez? Egyptian tanks in Gaza?

I'm not saying I think this is going to happen, and again I am firmly of the belief that in the case of expanding democracy, short term pain (or chaos) is worth it for long term gain (and stability). But it's certainly an interesting situation that raises a lot of questions, both realpolitikal and philosophical. I guess all we can do is watch and wait.

One thing I do know: if Egypt returns to (relative) stability after elections in september, its going to be a great place to visit by spring next year!

Observations from the Homefront

2009-10-14T00:46:00.002+02:00

I noticed that this space was kind of bare over the last few weeks. Let's see if i can entertain you with some new observations from the US of A:

1) American Football is god. It was always on, and it was a constant topic of conversation in Portland, Las Vegas, Boston and New York. Went to an Oregon game in Eugene, bet on college ball in vegas, and watched NFL with Valerie's dad in Boston.

2) Americans have more fun. I don't really know about our canadian friends to the north (help?) but US Americans like to have fun. I don't just mean drinking (lord knows there's enough of that in Germany), but being spontaneous and open to new things and (maybe) weird situations. This creates an atmosphere that on any given night, anything is possible.

3) Going along with the spontaneity thing and anything goes atmosphere is a general lawlessness about the place. I'm not saying that there is a lot of obvious lawbreaking, but things ranging from drinking and driving, doing drugs, hunting, to the way of life, buisness strategy, mental state, and international political actions (especially under G.W.) seem to be governed by a mentality that
a) If there are no rules about something, or they are vague, then you should push the envelope as far as possible.
and,
b) Even if there are specific rules against something, as long as the probability of getting caught is aligned properly with the penalty when caught, you do it anyway (cost-benefit analysis of lawbreaking).

This behavior shocked certain Germans upon arrival in the US...

4) Living in New York is a highwire tightrope act. There is so much going on, and there is this combination of everything happening so fast, being so expensive, and so extreme in every sense of the word, that falling off and getting sucked up is easy. But as long as you can ride the surface of the chaos (or i guess, balance on the tightrope, to use my original metaphor) its a really exhilarating and experience.

5) Man, lotta Hassidic Jews at Coney Island

6) Spanish is becoming more accepted as legitimate second language. More signs, menus in english and spanish. More TV stations, newspapers and radio stations in spanish.

7) One night, standing on a corner in Brooklyn, I had difficulty choosing from eight different types of food for dinner (Mexican, Chineese, Spanish, Southern fried chicken, Pizza, Hotwings and Burgers, Japaneese/sushi, and a deli/sub sandwich place). No Joke. Three nights later, I was in Tuebingen, wracking my brain trying to decide which of two available options i least wanted to eat: Pizza or Doener. I think I would be ok with this tradeoff (since i can get *bad* chineese and burgers at most times as well) if i could just get a decent jewish deli here.

I mean, look at this Sandwich! Thats Turkey, Ham and Roast Beef with Swiss cheese melted over it and ranch dressing, lettuce, tomatoes and onions. Served warm. Called the All-American. Can I get an Amen?

Funny Will Ferrell and Healthcare

2009-09-23T07:18:00.003+02:00

"Unfortunately", this video was forwarded to me by Move On, which produced the video. On the other hand, its done by Will Ferrell and is pretty funny..

Yglesias in Germany

2009-09-20T09:01:00.002+02:00

Matthew Yglesias is traveling through Germany right now and is writing interesting things about population density, walkable cities, and world war two appeasement politics.

perhaps more interesting for a certein writer for this blog, hes got an interesting post on connections between macro and micro-economic theories and complex systems.

Canary in the Mineshaft?

2009-09-01T12:42:00.001+02:00

I’m not a socialist, but I can have a civilized conversation with most socialists. I’m not religious, but I can have a civilized conversation with many religious people. In Canada, I (almost) never attended a demonstration, because I think most issues I care about deserve a more thoughtful response than a fist in the air and a catchy slogan, and the normal process worked pretty well to redress grievances anyway.

I attend demonstrations regularly in Germany, though, because here fascism is not dead. I cannot have an civilized conversation with fascists; a fist in the air is as appropriate a response as any. The point is to make their minority status obvious and seem hopeless and silly. Unfortunately, they’re not very silly or innocuous, and I’m wondering when they’ll cease to be tolerated generally.

People often dismiss my concerns about fascism as exaggerated, as if it’s my personal soap box issue. It might be, but it’s also a significant phenomenon in the real world. There are three nationalist-fascist parties in Germany: the NPD*, the DVU, and the Republikaner (in order of slightly decreasing detestability). There are also Kamaradschaften and Burschenschaften, which are the lower and upper-class versions of radical right-wing fraternities (though a handful are nearly tolerable). Many Germans and other Europeans claim that they’re offensive, sure, but they’re not dangerous. Well, there were nearly 20 000 right-wing crimes last year in Germany alone, of which over 1 000 were violent. The NPD has recently been harassing and threatening other parties’ non-white candidates. Last week, a 22 year-old member of the NPD’s youth wing was caught building a bomb (sorry I couldn’t find an English article about it, but you see the picture of the bomb?). They’re not just dangerous, they have ambitions to be more dangerous. What’s worse is that they just won 5.6% of the vote in Saxony, again beating the threshold to participate in the government, and they only missed the threshold in Thuringia by 7300 votes. These psychopaths are in state governments!

Okay, so they DO exist and they ARE dangerous, so why haven’t they been banned? Well, banning would require judicial proceedings, and in order to initiate these proceedings, the German state would legally have to withdraw all of its moles they have in place to observe the groups secretly. So what’s it gonna take? Here’s a thought experiment: Hizbollah officially sets up shop in a central European country, and one of their youth leaders is caught building bombs. Their members are also convicted of a thousand racially-motivated violent crimes a year. How fast would they be banned? What the hell is the difference? Why are hateful terrorists allowed to continue their work!? When will we realize that this problem is already big enough to be tricky, and it is only getting bigger? Why are these vile f*ckers tolerated!?

*Isn’t it a lovely coincidence that NPD also stands for “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”?

You can lead a horse to water and watch him contently die of thirst.

2009-09-01T11:41:00.001+02:00

AF1 makes several good points in his letter about why health care reform is more of a political necessity in the States than just one party’s hobby topic. He’s said before that the Obama administration and the democrats generally need to work harder to sell their ideas on a personal level.

I’m afraid he’s underestimated just how much abuse Americans ~~will demand~~ can tolerate. In response to a woman asking how her brain-damaged husband will get proper care and treatment without health care reform, Sen./Dr. Coburn tells her to ask her neighbours. His reply garnered him applause. Got a brain tumour? Maybe Aunt Bea at the corner store can spot you some aspirin. Paraplegic? Why not ask the scout leader across the street if you can use his son’s soap box racer to get around when he grows out of it?

In Canada, a representative saying anything of the sort would have been chased down, tied up, and given a very stern talking to. In Germany, he probably would have had to announce his resignation before being allowed to leave the hall. But there are segments of the American public clamouring for these values presented with such callous and glib haughtiness. There’s some graffiti near my office that reads “It is not a sign of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I think it’s a little strong for southern Germany, but it’s a shoe that might fit better elsewhere.

The Letter (Repost)

2009-08-31T17:28:00.002+02:00

This is a re-post of my previous entry with the font issues corrected...

As my wonderful long time readers know, I have a certain member of my family that I occasionally get into arguments with about politics. The arguments usually consist of him forwarding me severe right wing junk mail, with headings like "What will Obama do next?" or "Health Care reform will take your medicare away!" and me sending him e-mails back asking him to please stop sending me things like that.

I've been meaning to write a post about this topic for a while, with a good example, but i had to wait a while till he sent me another. Last night he did. For the sake of brevity, I can't go into the whole details of the exchange we've had over the past 24 hours, but I'll give you a run down: It was late (or early if you prefer) when I got home last night, and upon reading the e-mail (example to follow) i sent him a pretty mean response asking why he sends me this stuff, what HIS opinions were, and pretty much what the hell his problem is (note to self: 3 beer e-mail limit) I went to bed and woke up to find he had already responded, with a sincere e-mail about his veiws of health care reform. His arguments were basically that reform should come in the form of waste reduction and lower taxes, so that more people can get a job and get health care. He asked me (again) if I had read the whole House bill, and that there were provisions in there that would be horrible. He also threw in a good "you don't want illegals getting health care do you?" for shits and giggles.

My mental wits about me again after a shower and some food, I sat down and wrote a response. And thus, i publish here an open letter [with edits for anonymity] to opponents of health care reform as currently being proposed in the US Congress..

First, the e-mail he forwarded:

Statement by the President
________________________________________
I read in Snopes that this is partially true. As a Vet with service connected disability I find this very distastful. By the way, I did not volunteer for the army, I was drafted. Those who did volunteer did not volunteer to go to war, they were ordered by the President of the USA, their commander in chief to go to war.
[Relative]
it's unpardonable. He has the freedom to talk this way because of the soldiers who fought and died for the rights of all Americans!
Statement by the President ??
UNBELIEVABLE
THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PUBLIC OFFICIAL LET ALONE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. AND THIS GUY IS OUR "COMMANDER IN CHIEF". HE IS A DISGRACE.
UNBELIEVABLE PRESIDENT???
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES.
WHAT AN EMPTY HEADED PERSON HE MUST BE....
Bad press, including major mockery of the plan by comedian Jon Stewart, led to President Obama abandoning his proposal to require veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost to the federal government of treatment for injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.

The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal.

"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.." "I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Please pass this on to every one including every vet and their families whom you know.
How in the world did a person with this mindset become our leader? I didn't vote for him!!!
REMEMBER THIS STATEMENT... "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice?
If this PERSON thinks he will ever get another vote from an Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard service member or veteran of a military service he ought to think it over. If you or a family member is or has served their country please pass this to them. Please pass this to everyone.
I'm guessing that other than the 20-25 percent hardcore liberals in the US will agree that this is just another example why this is the worst president in American history. Remind everyone over and over how this man thinks, while he bows to the Saudi Arabian king.

WHEW! I think certain cultures would call this treason, especially since there is only one shred of truth to this e-mail...the fact that John Stewart made fun of Obama...
Now, my response:

Dear [Relative],

Thank you for responding to my e-mail so quickly and with your feelings. I want to apologize for the tone of my last email..i was really upset by the junk mail you sent me, and reacted.

Please allow me to respond rationally.

You mention that if the economy was better, then more people would be able to get jobs and therefore health insurance. I think this is exactly the problem with our current system, that our health care is employer based. This creates situations where people hold on to jobs they hate, or work under conditions that they normally wouldn't, just to get health care for their family. You also get situations like now, when during a recession people loose not only their jobs, but also the basic health care services (dental, vaccinations) for their family through no fault of their own. I believe health care should be portable, and completely independent of employer, so that situations like this do not arise, and people feel more free to determine where to work and what to do with their lives. This does not mean that their health care needs to be government run or paid (two different systems mind you). Private insurance that is portable and affordable is fine by me.

This brings me to another point you made. You said that anyone who is sick can go to the emergency room and get care. This is quite true, and a testament to the goodwill of doctors and hospitals. The probelm is, that when (if) that person recovers, they are going to have a bill for multiple tens of thousands of dollars to pay. The price of health care in the US is astronomical, and has no relation to actual costs or work. The reason that those who don't have health care haven't gotten it isn't because they don't want it, but rather it is too expensive for them, or the insurance companies deny them coverage based on pre-existing conditions. If there is one thing that NEEDS to be reformed, its insurace practices of price gouging, denial of service, and revoking coverage when emergencies do happen. The current legislation is designed to do all of these things, regardless of whether we have public or private insurance. I do believe that a strong publicly run insurance agency would do much to help combat abuses by competing with large health insurance companies that often have set up regional monopolies. I also think having the government regulate what hospitals and doctors can charge for service is a good idea: the fact that a person has to pay $170 out of pocket to get his teeth cleaned even when he has insurance (like I did a few years ago) while the dentist is driving a maserati is not only ridiculous, but is at some level immoral (in my eyes). Another way of combating monopolistic behavior by insurance companies would be to induce diversification in the market (similar to what happened to AT&T) and make the health care market much more competitive. To do this, we would STILL need significant government regulation of the health care markets, even if no public plan was offered.

As for the legislation itself, i haven't read the house bill because it makes no sense to read a bill that will be changed (minimum) twice before becoming a law. The various bills being talked about in the Senate are all different than the House bill, and once they get together in committee the final product is going to look completely different than the one you've read. While i think it is important for our legislators to know what they are voting on, I think it is weak to use "Have you read the bill?" as an argument when "the bill" doesn't really exist.

This brings me to my final point, and the one that made (makes) me so upset when you send me these anonymous forwards. I find the general tone of debate in America right now deplorable, and it makes me really sad to see what is happening at the town halls around the country. There is no debate, only screaming, and the people doing the screaming are either misinformed, or afraid and reacting. The organizers of many of the groups have publicly stated that their goal is to disrupt meetings, not to contribute to debate. When someone stands up and begins to scream about the constitution and gun rights (watch this video) during a town hall on health care it gets us nowhere. When people bring firearms and stand outside of meeting places to "demonstrate their rights" it smacks of fascism and intimidation tactics. And when people accuse the president, or members of congress, of being Nazis, i see a sad lack of historical perspective and no chance at a rational conversation about the real issues with health care in America today.

The e-mail you sent me (and the others you have sent me) falls right into this category of fear-mongering and, well, shouting through the ether. First of all, it's an anonymous bulk mail, which claims to quote the president. You said that from Snopes it's partially true, but don't mention WHICH part (is it the part about how John Stewart made fun of the president? 'cause that's his job). I would agree with you and others that if the president said something like this:

"I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst
financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to
do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I
underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow
Americans."
That that would be atrocious. But c'mon, do you really believe that Obama said this? He's not stupid, and even if he THOUGHT these kinds of things (which I do not believe) he would never say something like that on record. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money..." c'mon. These kinds of charges are bogus (see here) and serve to perpetuate lies. There is a similar problem with accusations of "death panels". You were in the insurance buisness for a long time, and certainly know a few things about actuaries. Instead of having private insurance companies make cost effectiveness assessments, the House bill wanted to create a government body that would also serve this function (and would also allow private insurance companies to do their own risk assessments as well) and report of the efficiency of certain health services. Unfortunately, a bunch of screaming about "death panels" got people all riled up and afraid, and now legislators have caved and removed this provision from consideration. This is the tyranny of irrational fear over rational discussion. You mentioned that money could be saved by making the health care system more efficient: its hard to get more efficient if you don't have anyone looking for inefficiencies. Now that this provision has been removed, it will be that much harder to find and isolate effective and cost effective procedures being done across the country.

So, in summary, I believe that the health care system in America is broken and has been for years. I believe that most of the reform needed is in insurance regulation and in making health insurance more portable, affordable, and reliable. Those millions of people that do not have health insurance should have the option to get it at an affordable price, be it private or public insurance. I believe the costs of health care itself, from dental visits to emergency room traumas are obscenely high, and this is due to rampant price gouging and exploitation by hospitals and heath care providers. It's hard to fault them for these profiteering ways, since the system allowed them to get rich this way, but that's why i think the system needs to be changed. There need to be strong controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. And there need to be protections in the system so that people are not dependent on their employer for family health care.

All of these provisions are in the legislation that is being debated in both houses (see here) and I hope to see some form of these reforms passed...with or without an expansion in government funded (medicare) or run (veterans health care) programs.

Thank you for your thoughts,

Love,

A Fortunate One

Update: sorry about the font issues guys, Blogger is frustrating me...

He makes a good point..

2009-08-31T00:44:00.001+02:00

Yglesias again, with a nice point about the way US government works

The Letter

2009-08-30T18:39:00.005+02:00

As my wonderful long time readers know, I have a certain member of my family that I occasionally get into arguments with about politics. The arguments usually consist of him forwarding me severe right wing junk mail, with headings like "What will Obama do next?" or "Health Care reform will take your medicare away!" and me sending him e-mails back asking him to please stop sending me things like that.

I've been meaning to write a post about this topic for a while, with a good example, but i had to wait a while till he sent me another. Last night he did. For the sake of brevity, I can't go into the whole details of the exchange we've had over the past 24 hours, but I'll give you a run down: It was late (or early if you prefer) when I got home last night, and upon reading the e-mail (example to follow) i sent him a pretty mean response asking why he sends me this stuff, what HIS opinions were, and pretty much what the hell his problem is (note to self: 3 beer e-mail limit) I went to bed and woke up to find he had already responded, with a sincere e-mail about his veiws of health care reform. His arguments were basically that reform should come in the form of waste reduction and lower taxes, so that more people can get a job and get health care. He asked me (again) if I had read the whole House bill, and that there were provisions in there that would be horrible. He also threw in a good "you don't want illegals getting health care do you?" for shits and giggles.

My mental wits about me again after a shower and some food, I sat down and wrote a response. And thus, i publish here an open letter [with edits for anonymity] to opponents of health care reform as currently being proposed in the US Congress..

First, the e-mail he forwarded:

Statement by the President

I read in Snopes that this is partially true. As a Vet with service connected disability I find this very distastful. By the way, I did not volunteer for the army, I was drafted. Those who did volunteer did not volunteer to go to war, they were ordered by the President of the USA, their commander in chief to go to war.

[Relative]

it's unpardonable. He has the freedom to talk this way because of the soldiers who fought and died for the rights of all Americans!

Statement by the President ??

UNBELIEVABLE
THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PUBLIC OFFICIAL LET ALONE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. AND THIS GUY IS OUR "COMMANDER IN CHIEF". HE IS A DISGRACE.
UNBELIEVABLE PRESIDENT???
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES.
WHAT AN EMPTY HEADED PERSON HE MUST BE....

Bad press, including major mockery of the plan by comedian Jon Stewart, led to President Obama abandoning his proposal to require veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost to the federal government of treatment for injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.

The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal.

"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.." "I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Please pass this on to every one including every vet and their families whom you know.
How in the world did a person with this mindset become our leader? I didn't vote for him!!!
REMEMBER THIS STATEMENT... "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice?
If this PERSON thinks he will ever get another vote from an Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard service member or veteran of a military service he ought to think it over. If you or a family member is or has served their country please pass this to them. Please pass this to everyone.
I'm guessing that other than the 20-25 percent hardcore liberals in the US will agree that this is just another example why this is the worst president in American history. Remind everyone over and over how this man thinks, while he bows to the Saudi Arabian king.

WHEW! I think certain cultures would call this treason, especially since there is only one shred of truth to this e-mail...the fact that John Stewart made fun of Obama...

Now, my response:

Dear [Relative],

Thank you for responding to my e-mail so quickly and with your feelings. I want to apologize for the tone of my last email..i was really upset by the junk mail you sent me, and reacted.

Please allow me to respond rationally.

You mention that if the economy was better, then more people would be able to get jobs and therefore health insurance. I think this is exactly the problem with our current system, that our health care is employer based. This creates situations where people hold on to jobs they hate, or work under conditions that they normally wouldn't, just to get health care for their family. You also get situations like now, when during a recession people loose not only their jobs, but also the basic health care services (dental, vaccinations) for their family through no fault of their own. I believe health care should be portable, and completely independent of employer, so that situations like this do not arise, and people feel more free to determine where to work and what to do with their lives. This does not mean that their health care needs to be government run or paid (two different systems mind you). Private insurance that is portable and affordable is fine by me.

This brings me to another point you made. You said that anyone who is sick can go to the emergency room and get care. This is quite true, and a testament to the goodwill of doctors and hospitals. The probelm is, that when (if) that person recovers, they are going to have a bill for multiple tens of thousands of dollars to pay. The price of health care in the US is astronomical, and has no relation to actual costs or work. The reason that those who don't have health care haven't gotten it isn't because they don't want it, but rather it is too expensive for them, or the insurance companies deny them coverage based on pre-existing conditions. If there is one thing that NEEDS to be reformed, its insurace practices of price gouging, denial of service, and revoking coverage when emergencies do happen. The current legislation is designed to do all of these things, regardless of whether we have public or private insurance. I do believe that a strong publicly run insurance agency would do much to help combat abuses by competing with large health insurance companies that often have set up regional monopolies. I also think having the government regulate what hospitals and doctors can charge for service is a good idea: the fact that a person has to pay $170 out of pocket to get his teeth cleaned even when he has insurance (like I did a few years ago) while the dentist is driving a maserati is not only ridiculous, but is at some level immoral (in my eyes). Another way of combating monopolistic behavior by insurance companies would be to induce diversification in the market (similar to what happened to AT&T) and make the health care market much more competitive. To do this, we would STILL need significant government regulation of the health care markets, even if no public plan was offered.

As for the legislation itself, i haven't read the house bill because it makes no sense to read a bill that will be changed (minimum) twice before becoming a law. The various bills being talked about in the Senate are all different than the House bill, and once they get together in committee the final product is going to look completely different than the one you've read. While i think it is important for our legislators to know what they are voting on, I think it is weak to use "Have you read the bill?" as an argument when "the bill" doesn't really exist.

This brings me to my final point, and the one that made (makes) me so upset when you send me these anonymous forwards. I find the general tone of debate in America right now deplorable, and it makes me really sad to see what is happening at the town halls around the country. There is no debate, only screaming, and the people doing the screaming are either misinformed, or afraid and reacting. The organizers of many of the groups have publicly stated that their goal is to disrupt meetings, not to contribute to debate. When someone stands up and begins to scream about the constitution and gun rights (watch this video) during a town hall on health care it gets us nowhere. When people bring firearms and stand outside of meeting places to "demonstrate their rights" it smacks of fascism and intimidation tactics. And when people accuse the president, or members of congress, of being Nazis, i see a sad lack of historical perspective and no chance at a rational conversation about the real issues with health care in America today.

The e-mail you sent me (and the others you have sent me) falls right into this category of fear-mongering and, well, shouting through the ether. First of all, it's an anonymous bulk mail, which claims to quote the president. You said that from Snopes it's partially true, but don't mention WHICH part (is it the part about how John Stewart made fun of the president? 'cause that's his job). I would agree with you and others that if the president said something like this:

"I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst
financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to
do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I
underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow
Americans."

That that would be atrocious. But c'mon, do you really believe that Obama said this? He's not stupid, and even if he THOUGHT these kinds of things (which I do not believe) he would never say something like that on record. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money..." c'mon. These kinds of charges are bogus (see here) and serve to perpetuate lies. There is a similar problem with accusations of "death panels". You were in the insurance buisness for a long time, and certainly know a few things about actuaries. Instead of having private insurance companies make cost effectiveness assessments, the House bill wanted to create a government body that would also serve this function (and would also allow private insurance companies to do their own risk assessments as well) and report of the efficiency of certain health services. Unfortunately, a bunch of screaming about "death panels" got people all riled up and afraid, and now legislators have caved and removed this provision from consideration. This is the tyranny of irrational fear over rational discussion. You mentioned that money could be saved by making the health care system more efficient: its hard to get more efficient if you don't have anyone looking for inefficiencies. Now that this provision has been removed, it will be that much harder to find and isolate effective and cost effective procedures being done across the country.

So, in summary, I believe that the health care system in America is broken and has been for years. I believe that most of the reform needed is in insurance regulation and in making health insurance more portable, affordable, and reliable. Those millions of people that do not have health insurance should have the option to get it at an affordable price, be it private or public insurance. I believe the costs of health care itself, from dental visits to emergency room traumas are obscenely high, and this is due to rampant price gouging and exploitation by hospitals and heath care providers. It's hard to fault them for these profiteering ways, since the system allowed them to get rich this way, but that's why i think the system needs to be changed. There need to be strong controls on what doctors and hospitals can charge. And there need to be protections in the system so that people are not dependent on their employer for family health care.

All of these provisions are in the legislation that is being debated in both houses (see here) and I hope to see some form of these reforms passed...with or without an expansion in government funded (medicare) or run (veterans health care) programs.

Thank you for your thoughts,

Love,

A Fortunate One

Update: sorry about the font issues guys, Blogger is frustrating me...

Sci- fi review

2009-08-28T11:06:00.001+02:00

I watched “The Day the Earth Stood Still” yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised. Sci-fi generally is really cool for IR geeks because it often takes some of our favourite topics (destructive weapons, first encounters, environmental catastrophe, weird political systems, etc) and pushes them beyond our conventional limits. The first of Asimov’s Foundation series is perhaps the best example of this. I don’t really want to bitch about Keanu Reeves (is he always trying to be stoic, or does he not understand the script?), who just does his normal Keanu thing, nor do I want to pick out everything the film got wrong (if you want that, go here). The point of most movies, and probably all science fiction movies, is to show possibility rather than actuality. Still, this movie got some things right and left me with a couple of questions. I’m not going to bother flagging what might spoil the movie for you, so if you haven’t watched it and want to, stop now.

1. The first thing that grabbed me is the alien technology. We tend to build things in a nice linear fashion, like good little engineers. We know exactly how the wheels will turn because of how we affixed them to the axle, which is affixed to the drive shaft, which is affixed to the transmission, which is… It’s all “knee-bone connected to the shin-bone”: sequential, predictable, but difficult to scale beyond a certain level of complexity. The aliens in the movie, however, use technology based on cellular automata: it’s based on very small pieces that reproduce themselves and combine unpredictably to produce the desired results. The alien’s space suit is a biological mass grown over his body. The giant robot-centurion-thing can fragment into little nano-bots that will reproduce themselves and attack (mostly inorganic) stuff. Building working technology that operates on complexity rather than linear, one-thing-after-another principles, can be tricky to control but easy enough to design, and it would offer a lot of other benefits, like being able to respond to unanticipated events. Some would say that we’re just getting started with this kind of technology, pointing to the difference between, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica (composed linearly) to Wikipedia (more like swarm intelligence). I’d say that we’ve been using it for a long time inadvertently with market mechanisms determining the allocation of resources among us, but I do think that super-intelligent aliens would be more likely to use complexity than linearity for many purposes. Kudos screenwriters.

2. The aliens seem to have a kind of Gaia-hypothesis, but they seem to apply it to the universe as a whole. This is evident when the alien says he wants to save the Earth (independent of the humans on it), that life-supporting planets are rare and need to be preserved, and especially when he says (cornily) at the kid’s grave that “nothing in the universe ever dies… it is only transformed” (though he did say the other alien who had been here longer would die). In any event, this idea can be expressed intelligently, and I’m going to assume that the aliens’ understanding wasn’t one of the atavistic ideas that the only way to be ecologically aware is to live according to the principles of some esoteric, apocryphal ‘Earth Mother’ or some such nonsense. If they have such an ontology, though, it would be hard to justify destroying humanity. Kind of like with the complex, non-linear technology, you don’t know what will become of us because humanity doesn’t move in straight lines, much to the dismay of historical materialists. By analogy, if you wanted to reclaim some farmland and make it wild again, it wouldn’t do to just plant a few saplings, wait a few days, and then uproot the saplings and give up because the process wasn’t going in the desired direction. The aliens seem to understand the benefits of creative destruction, but they seem oddly confident about their abilities to induce and direct it.

3. Okay, so the aliens wanted to destroy humanity because we’re ruining the planet, they start the process, kill a whackload of us, but Jennifer Connelly and son of the Fresh Prince manage to convince them to change their minds just before it’s too late. How are we as a society supposed to deal with that? After other genocidal rampages, truth and reconciliation commissions are set up, we have trials, or the victors make the vanquished pay. We don’t have the power to compel the aliens to agree to any of this, and I’m not sure what measures would redress our legitimate grievances (‘You made a mistake? You kill a third of humanity, and you think that ‘my bad’ or ‘oops’ makes it all go away?’). But we would have to come to some agreement, because we would still depend on the aliens not to destroy us while we figure out how to go carbon-neutral. How do you bury that hatchet?

Fun flick. Didn’t change my life, but it was a pleasant distraction for 90 minutes. (Kudos too for making a 90 minute movie. They seem to have been out of style for a while and were sadly missed.)

State of constant revolution

2009-08-28T09:33:00.001+02:00

Lexington, the editorial section about the US in the Economist, wrote an article last week about the paranoia in American politics (@ AF1: maybe something for grandpa?). They do a decent job of describing the ~~problem~~ phenomena, but they make no attempt to analyze its causes. Let me synthesize what I’ve heard.

When I was a grad student in London (the English one), one of my professors said that America has never really gotten over its revolutionary mentality. Revolutionary governments often (justifiably) fear incursion by foreigners who preferred the ancien regime, and this often makes them paranoid and likely to lash out. Think revolutionary France (pick one, actually), early Bolshevik Russia, Cuba, and in some places, like Iran and North Korea, this revolutionary defensiveness against foreign incursion is practically official ideology.

I never really bought this in America’s case because a) it’s been quite a while since they faced a credible threat of foreign invasion, b) I don’t think many Americans honestly think very much about foreign invasion and c) America has had long periods of relative isolationism. It does make certain amount of sense, though, applied to the States from the inside. Many people do seem terrified that their government has been hijacked somehow by people hell-bent on ruining their ‘more perfect union’ (sic). This isn’t new, either. It seems to be a recurring theme.

So far, this is just reframing the Economist’s description without providing any of my own explanation. My hare-brained theory, though, has to do with a naive image of god and imposing this image where it doesn’t belong. Think about it. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’ as if the guys were immaculately conceived. Watch some videos of health care town halls and people ranting about the constitution to get a sense of what I mean. Given that 45% of Americans are young Earth creationists, they must have a very paternalistic and personal view of god. He’s like Geppetto, tinkering away in a workshop for our benefit. They don’t seem to think any less of their founding fathers, ignoring that they were also men of flesh and blood, fallible, political, and vain. Since the first Canadian prime minister once puked in parliament because he was too drunk, we might have a more realistic view of our all too human beginnings as a state.

So I think there might be a swath of Americans worried that their current leaders, whose humanity is obvious by their drinking (GWB), philandering (WJC), smoking (BHO), and admitted drug use (all three) think that the former state of grace and perfection (Eden) has been overtaken by a bunch of frat boys.

I’d love to hear alternative explantions.

This is just gold

2009-08-27T21:35:00.001+02:00

Why, oh why, can't we make candy without teaching our children about sex?

Just another reason that the germans are more tolerant that us anglo-saxon puritans..

Whose head belongs on the pike?

2009-08-26T17:31:00.001+02:00

The American Justice Dept. has advised reinvestigating some instances of torture, and Slate published an iconoclastic article claiming that restricting the investigation to those who overstepped what the Bush administration deemed legal is almost worse than no investigation at all. I beg to differ.

First, my usual list of caveats: I grant that Obama’s choice not to pursue those who justified and tried to legalize torture by fiat is a move meant to preserve a thinning patina of bipartisanship and his thinning political capital. Clearly, it’s perverse that a leader would have to weigh healthcare reform and torture policy, as if there was a real connection between the two. A world without torture would also be preferable, and we’re not going to get there by protecting those who pushed for it. Protecting the directors of heinous activity also doesn’t set a very good example when trying to cajole Iranian, Burmese, Sudanese, North Korean or other regimes into being more decent to their own citizens and others. Instead, it sends a message of “our country right or wrong”, which is truly a vile form of patriotism that vile people elsewhere are only too eager to copy.

Still, I think that investigating and trying those who overstepped the Bush administration’s own guidelines (and not those who wrote or followed those guidelines) has merit for two reasons and a half reasons.

1. The Bush administration allowed some pretty nasty stuff, including “walling”, “the facial hold”, “wall standing”, sleep deprivation and waterboarding to name a few. Like the techniques used in the medieval inquisitions, many of these techniques are meant to induce whackloads of pain and discomfort without drawing blood or leaving lasting evidence. As I understand it, Holder wants to go after those who exceeded what the White House thought was appropriate, which means these people were doing things I don’t even want to consider. By prosecuting them, you’re at least likely to get the worst of the bunch.

2. The good ol’ Nuremburg defence gets its name because many Nazi war criminals claimed to be “just following orders” at the post-war Nuremburg trials to absolve themselves of guilt. The fourth Nuremburg principle states that this defence won’t fly (#2 could have really interesting implications for this case). Even if you are ordered in a chain of command to commit a crime, it is incumbent on you to refuse and do the right thing. Now, if my superior officer were a conscripted Nazi officer, I’ll grant that he is liable to make mistakes about what is right and wrong. But if the guidelines of right and wrong are coming from the duly appointed Attorney General, Vice President, or the President himself, and if I know that several legislators are aware of these guidelines, can I not assume that they’ve passed a test of legitimacy appropriate to the situation? Investigating and trying those who set the limits also implies that the rules are invalid, and even those who followed the rules are potentially guilty. This totally screws up the distribution of responsibility in a democracy. The intelligence agency isn’t there to make policy, they’re there to execute it. If they can’t trust the guidance coming from their legitimate superiors, where the he!! are they supposed to turn? What then is the proper indicator of acceptable conduct? What responsibility do their duly officiated superiors bear?

2.5 This is only half a reason because it’s instrumental rather than principled. The American armed forces get seemingly immaculate support. Aside from screw ups like My Lai, atrocities get very little press, and the army can do no wrong. “Support the troops” is a very powerful American mantra that can determine whether one is American or (horror!) “unAmerican” (like me, I suppose). The intelligence services, on the other hand, are like the plumbing in your house or the electric system in your car: they work best when you don’t hear about them. Lately, the CIA has taken serious heat for not foreseeing or forestalling terror attacks, for fabricating evidence to support dastardly purposes, and now for using cabinet-sanctioned interrogation techniques. They get beat on for screwing up, but you don’t hear about their successes. Although I disagree with many of the practices and powers of the CIA and their associated institutions, we would have to invest something like it if it didn’t exist. It serves a valuable function that many of us enjoy for next to nothing. Maybe they’d be less keen on throwing strangers into walls and scaring the hell out of people if they got more credit for what they do right.

Leave the garden variety of moral decrepitude alone for now and go after the out and out heinous. There’ll be time for the small-fry later, if there’s still adequate bloodlust to punish them.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Unprecedented Accuracy

2009-08-25T15:27:00.001+02:00

The Economist uncharacteristically published a piece about epistemology and method, though they didn’t come out and say so. They review the pros and cons of using ‘instrumental variables’ in statistics. They give the example of years of schooling being able to replace “innate scholastic ability” as a variable to predict potential earnings, which is arguably necessary because it’s very difficult to measure something like innate scholastic ability. If I’m driving home at night, and the guy ahead of me is swerving, I will infer that he’s probably drunk, though I have no way to test that directly: his swerving is my ‘instrumental variable’. The article does indicate several criticisms of using them, but they miss several other bigger points.

First, in political science these are usually called ‘proxy variables’ because they substitute for something we can’t measure. That is, they’re indirect to start with. They make you start your analysis somewhere you didn’t want to be.

Second, the Economist talks about the ability of instrumental variables to increase the control on the relationship of interest; you can add them to your model to make sure that you’ve accounted for everything. Can you? Jim Ray, a political scientist, has argued for years that just cramming control variables into a model actually distorts it. There’s an often repeated “rule of three” saying that a model including more than three independent/control variables is worthless. A far better way, according to Ray (see the first paper on his site), is to run several tests with few variables and compare them: if you have variables A,B,C, and D, and you run 3 tests that indicate their effects on your dependent variables as follows: ABCD, ABDC, ADBC. You would know that A is the most important (because it’s always first), and B is more important than C (because it’s always before C). There are more sophisticated statistical techniques to do this, but this is the logic behind it. Economists don’t like to do this because it’s hard, time consuming, canned software doesn’t do it or not very well, and nobody else is doing it, so there’s fear of nonconformity. (Did you ask yourself why the magic number is three? Me too. The reason seems to be that two is too few and four is too many. Brilliant, huh?)

I think a deeper problem with statistics in economics and the social sciences more generally is that many have illusions about what they can do and how to use them. Statistics can’t show causality. They can only show if the mutual occurrence of values is something that we would expect to see randomly or if it would be odd to see that mutual occurrence. That is, if we say that tall people make a lot of money, what counts as “a lot”? Statistics can tell us that people over 6’6” (2m) should earn X $/year if they were like everybody else, but they earn X+15 000$ a year, and there’s a 1 in Y chance that what we’re seeing is purely accidental. They couldn’t tell us why tall people earn more. With regards to the proper use of statistics, we often cook the books to find what we were looking for from the beginning. Scale a variable here and make an index there until it all fits. That is, we’re hunting after the correlation. The idea should be the opposite. If you find a correlation, try to destroy it. Try to make it disappear. If it stands despite your best efforts to make it go away, it might be worth asking the question why it won’t go away, and that’s going to require a totally different kind of research. But negative results don’t get published, and it’s hard to figure out what counts as a ‘significant’ negative result, so we ignore them and keep hunting for the correlation. Whatever you do, though, statistics will never be able to indicate causality! If you want to get all huffy and talk about statistical tricks to indicate causality better, like ‘Granger causality’ spare me. Adding lags can show a progression through time, but it still does not count as a mechanism!

To moderate my rant against statistics, I’d also like to point out another one of their uses, possibly the best one: counting. We can’t count the fish in the sea (easily), we can’t count the stars in the sky (at all), and we’ll have a hard time counting everybody in the world, but we don’t have to. Just like statistics can answer questions like “what’s big?” or “how many is a lot?” very well, it can also answer the simpler question of “what’s there at all?” if you input a surprisingly small amount of data. Those super-early exit polls are often close to the money, and it is possible to infer a population’s values from those of a small sample using statistics. But those polls will never be able to tell you why any respondent voted or answered as s/he did.

Schadenfreude & Chuckles

2009-08-24T17:06:00.001+02:00

The German Bundesliga is three games into the season, and the FC Bayern Munich has 2 of a possible 9 points. It’s their worst season kickoff since 1966! To give you a sense of how I feel about Bayern, there’s a great old joke to describe it: What’s the difference between a clean, white dress shirt and a Bayern fan? – You can be seen anywhere with a white dress shirt. (Sorry Martin.)

In other news, Slate has produced the latest entry in Obama’s Facebook feed. It’s predictably brilliant.

Misery for Misery’s Sake?

2009-08-21T17:20:00.001+02:00

The Scottish Justice Secretary has decided to release the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and many people are predictably unhappy about it. Before I explain why releasing him was the right decision, let me get a few things straight. First, the decision to release him has nothing to do with the hero’s welcome he received on arriving in Libya. Treating him as a hero sets a poor example, it is terribly insensitive to the families of the victims, and I don’t see what honourable purpose it could possibly serve. Second, terrorism is abhorrent, and terrorists ought to be duly pursued and prosecuted. It was right and just that the bomber, al-Meghrahi, was in jail, if jail is the legitimate thing to do with criminals. Caveats aside, why was it a good idea to release him? I can think of four purposes for incarcerating criminals of any kind, and making him spend the last few months of his life in jail would have served none of them. Here they are in the order in which I think they would be most defensible.

Rehabilitation: Sending people to jail for rehabilitation assumes that nobody is incorrigible. With the right intervention, you can turn the lowliest knave into a functioning member of society. Al-Meghrahi was made responsible for the deaths of 270 people, although it would be a mistake to think he acted alone. That’s pretty bad, but let’s assume that he could be rehabilitated given the right treatment. If that were true, could he be rehabilitated within the three months or so he has to live? And even if that’s possible, is that the best way to spend scarce rehabilitative resources, or is that a case of throwing your money into the proverbial pit? If he ain’t got there yet, he ain’t gonna, and we got better things to do anyway.
Prevention: This is compatible with rehabilitation, and it’s the idea that we need to keep dangerous people out of circulation in order to deny them the opportunity to do more damage. From the pictures I’ve seen of Al-Meghrahi boarding the plane in Scotland and disembarking in Libya, the guy can barely stand. Besides, you can bet that he will be persona non grata or watched like a hawk for his few remaining weeks. I’d be less surprised if the pope turned to terrorism than if this guy used his last weeks to do more damage.
Deterrence: This is the idea that being in jail is miserable, and the example of punishing criminals with misery will make others too scared to commit crime. To the extent that this purpose works at all, I’d say it’s already been served. He was caught, he was put somewhere he didn’t want to be and from which he couldn’t escape. Anyone wanting to follow in his footsteps would have to conclude that they’d have a decent chance of going to jail, and that the best way out would be to contract a terminal case of prostate cancer. Okay guys, form an orderly line, you can’t all be terrorists at once.
Retribution: This is the notion of victim’s justice, an eye for an eye, and whatnot. I don’t really see the point of this in general (it rights no wrong, and any evil it prevents can be prevented better otherwise), but let’s run with it for a sec. If you wanted this guy to suffer, why let him sit in a Scottish prison where he gets decent food (as decent as any British food gets, I suppose), proper medical treatment, and relative comfort? Why not torture him? I once saw a documentary about a medieval Uzbekh prince who would wrap male traitors up in an old carpet with a decaying, maggoty sheep’s carcass. Why settle for a decent cell when you can inflict real misery? I’m not saying the retribution idea makes any sense, but if it did, there would be much better ways of going about it.

There are reasons to be upset about Lockerbie: that it happened at all, that it all got hung on just one patsy, that Qaddafi will protect anybody else involved until he dies, when his son(s) will likely take over and continue the tradition. Letting a frail and dying man go home costs nobody anything.

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy…

2009-08-20T11:50:00.001+02:00

…is its inefficiency. That’s a quote from Eugene McCarthy, and I always interpreted it as a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek phrase, like Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst form of government (aside from all the others). I just found a reason to take it literally and be thankful for it.

The CIA has apparently been hiring contract killers on the free market. They had an agreement with Blackwater, everybody’s favourite soldiers of fortune, to locate, capture and kill suspected terrorists since 2001. The saving grace is this line from the article: “Several million dollars were spent on the programme but no militants were caught or captured”. Thank heavens! There are a lot of very big problems with this (beyond the fact that they couldn’t even do it efficiently). Some of the obvious ones:

It’s questionable whether any government has the authority to kill anyone, so how could they have the authority to contract it out? I mean, a government is either the guys with a monopoly on the use of violence, or a collective fiction (sorry, ‘social construct’) we endow with the authority to regulate public goods, turn some private goods (taxes) into public ones (roads, defence, etc.), and manage some resource flows in society. The USA is fortunately (hopefully) in the second category, so how could a collective fiction be entitled to kill? I’m not a never-say-die pacifist (sorry), and I think that killing people can be justified in cases of self-defence, even if that defence is an effort to protect ideas. You wanna curtail my freedoms, I’ll ask you nicely to refrain once, but otherwise it’s gonna get ugly. I even think this can be aggregated up to a collective state level, but then there must be some substantial hurdle, like a fair trial or parliamentary/congressional approval. A government mustn’t, or at least ought not dare, claim the authority to kill people at will. If the government is only barely able, how in tarnation could mercenaries ever pretend to be able.

There’s a less principled and more instrumental reason too. There’s an election in Afghanistan going on as I write this (go guys!). If Afghanistan is to avoid falling back into the barbaric and cruel state of civil war that existed before the US/NATO invasion, we in the West need to sell our system to them. We need to convince them that there are ways to redress grievances and resolve social problems without relying on coercion alone. Part of that is the belief that if someone wrongs you, you can seek redress in an impartial court under the rule of law. If you are accused of wrong, you will be able to defend yourself with exactly the same legal rights as your accuser. This is a great system, despite the lawyers it necessitates (sorry Chris, Chris and Ron). The Afghans have experience with the system of might makes right and summary justice. They’ve practiced it quite a bit. We couldn’t teach them anything about how to make it work, and I sincerely hope that we can say with conviction that our system is the best alternative, it can work, and they should accept no substitutes. Neither should we.

The same applies to Iraq and anywhere else we break, but Afghanistan is just really salient right now.

(Irresistible irony: American republicans are still going apesh!t because of unfounded claims that the democrats’ health care bill(s) will include death panels/death squads to decide who will get treatment and who will die – already ripped apart, you’re welcome. That the CIA had been hiring hitmen since 2001 to kill people without trial could, without much hyperbole, be construed as a republican policy of employing death squads/panels. Hey kettle! Why you gotta be so black?!)

Why I want to live in germany..

2009-08-20T03:29:00.001+02:00

I had a long evening, but one of the more interesting conversations was about how "all americans are free" and "americans are so tolerant of different opinions and open to all ideas". This was from a German mind you.

Then I read something like this.
If you don't keep up with the NBA very much, suffice to say that Stephon Marbury is a (former) professional basketball player, who has gotten into the wonders of the web a little too much ..
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And I think, "who's tolerant, where?"

I think I'll stay here thank you...

One man’s pandering is another woman’s good press.

2009-08-18T16:35:00.001+02:00

Charli Carpenter over at the Duck apparently disagrees with my disappointment about the NYT article on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. She considers it good for him, and good for political science generally.

It might be good for people who talk about politics, but please be careful invoking the term “political science” in your praise!

The Scientist?

2009-08-18T12:56:00.001+02:00

A brilliant polyglot-historian-political-scientist friend of mine (who is, incidentally, as stateless in fact as I am in spirit) brought an article to my attention that requires comment. The New York Times is pitching Bruce Bueno de Mesquita as the Svengali of political prognostication. He doesn’t really need their help, though, ‘cause he’ll do it himself if you give him a stage and mic.

The article briefly describes his agent-based model of political coalition-building (without using scary terms like ‘agent-based’) and sings the praises of his many and illustrious successes in predicting outcomes for various firms and government agencies. Allow me to debunk, if I may.

They say in the article that 40% of the papers in the American Political Science Review use ‘modelling’. I’ll buy that, but very little of it is comparable to what Bueno de Mesquita does. His is agent-based, so it doesn’t begin by trying to come up with an equation that will tie all the relevant variables together in a nice curve on a graph. Instead, models like his start with little agents in a computer simulation, and somebody inputs rules for their interaction and their qualities. You let them figure out how to interact on that basis, and you can play with the parameters to simulate different scenarios. I would buy that 40% of APSR’s papers use either statistical/econometric modelling (cramming variables onto a curve) or two-player game analogies, like the prisoner’s dilemma. If you want to see how different agent-based modelling in international politics can be from either of these approaches, check out Lars-Erik Cederman’s earlier work or Armando Geller’s recent work.
He’s presented in the article as if he’s some kind of alchemist who’s stumbled across the philosopher’s stone and has privileged access to underlying political truths of the universe. Ever wanted to be an alchemist? Download Netlogo (for free!), spend a day or so doing the tutorial and getting familiar with the software, and you’ll be able to construct models just like his. I’ll grant that the trick was more impressive back in the ‘70s, when you’d probably have had to use punch-cards, but the mechanics of the process are the same. Alchemy for everybody!
There’s been loads of criticism directed at the models used by financial firms, economists and regulators lately for ignoring the shaky ground on which they stood. I’ve touched on this tangentially before. The NYT article, though it presents scepticism about Bueno de Mesquita’s approach in the title of the article, spends almost no space engaging with the model’s limits. Sure, the financial and economic models are more analytic (making inferences based on real data), while Bueno de Mesquita’s are more synthetic (trying to simulate something real based on principles), but is there any reason to believe one is more inherently accurate than the other? I don’t see why there would be.
If Bueno de Mesquita can model the next big decision in, it would seem, any given context, why does he stop there? I mean, that would give him the input to model the decision after that, which lets him model the next decision, and the next, and so on. Given enough computing power, he would have a crystal ball able to see arbitrarily far into the future. The article doesn’t even mention why this is a problem. (Even assuming his assumptions make sense and we’re all rational actors, if I know that you are using a model like his to make your decisions, I will use a model that includes your use of a model as a parameter. You will then build my model into your model, which I will then build into my model, etc. Eventually, we have expectations of each other’s behaviour of an arbitrarily high order (read the first couple of chapters of that link) and put each other out of the modelling business in the process, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.)
One of his customers said his model has “intellectual rigor”. In model-guy-code, this means “I don’t understand it, but I take that to be a sign of its refinement and sophistication! (Just please don’t say I have blind faith).”

When faced with such nonsense back in the ‘90s, oh that hallowed decade, we used to say “Dont believe everything that you breathe
You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve”

"Buy all the opium in Afghanistan, you say?!"..."Brilliant!"

2009-08-16T22:35:00.002+02:00

I once sat on a bus coming back from Strasbourg with a good buddy of mine and we got into a difficult conversation with another American there about the war in Afghanistan. He began his argument with the idea that the US just needed to buy the opium from the farmers in Afghanistan to limit the flow of illicit drug money to the Taliban. So far, so good. It got difficult when he began arguing that the US would then just need to decriminalize opium, could sell it and tax it, thus creating a market for Afghan farmers and funding redevelopment efforts.

An elegant plan, I must say, but one that my friend and I pointed out had a few political hurdles (legalizing opium for one..) and that maybe a more practical plan could be thought of. He was having nothing of it, and insisted that if the US government were to just buy, legalize, and distribute opium, then the war in Afghanistan could be won.

I hadn't thought about this incident for a few months when i came across this article. Seems like there are a few thoughts along the lines of buying the opium from the farmers, and even a pretty good suggestion of what to do with it (hint: not pimping it to Americans). Theres a much more detailed argument here, which also lays out some of the UN hurdles that would have to be jumped if such a plan were to work.

I will say though, that i question the government's ability to control the flow of money between the farmers and the Taliban. Even if we buy the crop the, the Taliban is going to see a percentage of the money we give them as a part of bribery, extortion, and some good old fashioned bullying. Until we can offer the afghan farmers physical protection, i think its going to be hard for them to do business with us legitimately. That being said, it may well be in our interested to buy the opium, accept the inefficiencies and the fact that we're giving the Taliban money, and find a legitimate world market for Afghanistan's major crop.

Conservative opposition to healthcare officially jumps the shark

2009-08-15T11:50:00.001+02:00

First it was death commissions (or even death squads). Then it was the administration trying to create a vast blacklist from the e-mail addresses of those who receive government healthcare. Now the Republicans have gone full circle and are opposing policies that THEY suggested.

When will the madness stop?

Ideological Crisis?

2009-08-14T16:41:00.001+02:00

Okay, so I’m fairly unabashedly a classical/market liberal ideologically. At least it’s a label I identify with most of the time. Though some of my ideas, like the notion that universal healthcare and education are indispensable in a well-functioning society, would make the folks over at the CATO Institute, who put themselves in the same category, cringe and chase me with pitchforks.

I’m not a big fan of discussions of intellectual purity. Leninists arguing over who suffers from the worst case of false consciousness are missing the point. I do, however, tend to think that it’s prohibitively difficult, if not principally impossible, to engineer society for an optimal result. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that there is such a thing as an ‘optimal result’ for everyone. There are some principles that ought to be upheld or that are worth striving for, like equality of opportunity, peaceful discourse, efficiency and personal freedom, but I think people need to figure it out their own paths to happiness, the good life, or whatever fulfils them.

To hold these kinds of ideas, you need to believe that leaving people to their own devices will also produce tolerably good results. The alternative gives us Hobbes: if people, when left to structure their own lives, make each other miserable or dead, it would be better to give someone the power to make and enforce rules. The tradeoff between security and liberty is an old one, but I usually come down on the side of liberty – strongly. Now, this belief/hope that free interaction will not lead us into perdition has some corollaries, i.e. that there are self-organizing processes in society, these provide us with enough order to get by, and they’re preferable to dictates from above. Markets are a classic example of these self-organizing institutions, and the belief that free markets are the best way to manage production and exchange. This idea has been taking some heavy criticism in the financially dour atmosphere of late.

I’ve argued elsewhere that people expect too much from economics and that this leads them to bet foolishly and misdirect their rage. A red-blooded market liberal would also say that the current crisis is not a crisis of regulation; rather, less regulation would also be fine so long as those who gamble poorly can also lose. This isn’t stupid. I think it’s defensible, but there’s perhaps a deeper problem that I’ve recently noticed, and markets might not be able to solve it efficiently (and I apologize if I’m very late in noticing it). If you think about society cybernetically, as a self-regulating system of inputs, memory, manipulation, and output, you see the potential for lots of equilibrium. It should be possible to balance interests against each other such that society produces tolerable results even if each individual is a selfish SOB. The ability to constrain devils justly is the great attraction of invisible-hand mechanisms and constitutional checks and balances.

I recently found a case where the cybernetic view paints a potentially dark view of the market. I saw a report yesterday in which a lobbyist for some GMO producing agrifirm was being interviewed about why GMO food is a good thing and research should continue. I am ambivalent about GMO: it has strong arguments for and against. Still, the guy’s argument was along the lines of “Look, we’re making what people would want if they understood the issue. If people didn’t want it, we would be banned, so leave us alone.” Tobacco companies and arms manufacturers could easily make the same argument – I know.

The lobbyist gave this interview on a documentary about lobbying. The guy was saying that his firm needed to counterbalance people’s irrational fears about GMO by buying political influence, and this is justified because the people are irrational. He’s admitting to buying market power with the argument that democracy doesn’t work otherwise because people have poor judgement. Market power isn’t always a bad thing. The reason that I can use any given machine in an internet cafe, or drive a rental car I’ve never seen before, is that a few big market players together established how an operating system, or a car’s controls, will look and work. Market power can be a boon. When the lobbyist, however, doesn’t follow demand, but circumvents the market to obtain regulatory benefits, he’s ruining the system. From a cybernetic perspective, demand is the constraint that limits the supply and vice versa; feedback from the one dials down or cranks up the other. Breaking that loop and going through government rather than price tips the system in favour of supply, maybe a cybernetic equivalent of a lag on demand or a gain on supply, causing the system to overshoot its equilibrium.

So I was wrong, the efficient market hypothesis is wrong, and market liberalism wobbles, right? Well, it’s tricky. A big company that has invested in plant, inventory and employees is going to need some predictability in the market in order to do business. One mustn’t forget that “No taxation without representation” implies a responsibility and an entitlement. If I give money to an interest group or political party, I’m also trying to stack the deck in my favour. Lobbying takes many forms, and I don’t know if any are inherently illegitimate, or if they can all be contingently illegitimate if practiced by d0uche bag5.

Nonetheless, the fact that investors can act as influence syndicates and outflank citizen-consumers is troubling. (And there’s a cybernetic side here too: the investors give themselves a competitive advantage, giving them a greater ability to extract rents, and the rents allow them to secure ever larger competitive advantages.) And the democratic problem is clear: there is no higher authority to tell me what I rightfully want. Many people who are entitled to vote scare me to death. I might talk as if they’re nuts (and who’s ruling that out?), but I am absolutely in favour of everyone who understands what voting is to have the vote. If the state has a right to determine aspects of your life, you should bloody well have a say in the state! I’ve been called ‘an intellectual Mongol’ before, and I’d call that a back-handed compliment, but a compliment nonetheless. But just because I think you’re wrong doesn’t imply that I think I deserve extra votes, which is exactly what agriman was arguing.

What happens to liberty if free markets are incompatible, even to a significant degree, with democratic governance? What’s a liberal to do?

What a load of Bull!*

2009-08-14T09:57:00.001+02:00

The chairman of the German policemen’s union is begging for 2000 ‘Cybercops’ and has said that “The internet is the biggest crime scene in the world.” Hold the phone! (or the router, as the case may be)

This just can’t be allowed to fly. Saying that the internet is the biggest crime scene in the world is like saying that public land is the biggest crime scene in the world. I’ll grant that many crimes are easier on the internet, like perhaps fraud, and there are others that seem to exist pretty much exclusively by virtue of the internet, like hacking into government computers. Many crimes, some very serious, are very difficult, if not impossible, to perpetrate online. I’m thinking of heinous stuff like murder, rape, assault, human trafficking – sorry, I mean slavery - and the like. Hell, if $1000 is going to be robbed either by a guy with a shotgun and a balaclava in a liquor store or by some faceless organized crime syndicate online, I’d still prefer it to happen online because nobody gets near a shotgun. True, there is almost, kind of such a thing as a cybermurder, but I would still argue that such cases are exceptions that prove the rule (I know of only the one so far).

How the police want to monitor internet communication is unclear, but I don’t see why this issue should be treated any differently than postal communication, whose inviolability is a constitutional right in Germany. The internet is another public space, and it has a (huge) red light district, casinos, pickpocketting rings, and drug labs in addition to all of the stored and shared knowledge and discourse. You can’t have the rose without the thorns, and of course where there are thorns, there are also pricks.

*The German pejorative euphemism for a police officer is “Bulle” (bull), equivalent to the English “pig”, but, you know, more flattering for the cop.

Cynical, Moronic or just Bat-sh!t crazy?

2009-08-13T14:19:00.001+02:00

I had lunch with A Fortunate One yesterday, and he described a debate he’s having with a family member about whether a single-payer healthcare bill is desirable practically and morally. (He’s covered this topic already.)

We talked about the ‘death panel’ idea, being spread mostly by American republicans that there will be some group of people convened by the healthcare reform that will decide whether certain treatments will be covered. Although I don’t think it was news to AF1, I pointed out that such things already exist, often in the form of insurance actuaries, and they’ve even been portrayed in pop culture (sorry, I just broke the first two rules). If this seems controversial to you, Slate gives a bit of an explanation.

Sarah Palin has used her facebook status to play up the death panel idea, and this raises a question in my mind. Is she cynical, stupid, or plain ol’ bat-sh!t crazy?

The cynicism hypothesis is that Palin knows how insurance and legal compensation work, but she invokes terms like ‘death panel’ either to get herself in the headlines or because somebody has paid her. It would make sense because, though she isn’t necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, she has quite a bit of experience. I mean, I wouldn’t call her educated, but she has done stuff. She was mayor of Wasilla, governor of Alaska and VP candidate. I mean, she was even on the evening news for a while. How did she get through her (sadly) illustrious life without picking up a solid thought or two about risk and valuation?
If she is genuinely stupid, there would probably have to be somebody egging her on. I mean, if she’s not smart enough to understand and accept that everybody’s life has, at least in practical terms, a monetary value, somebody must have explained some corollaries of single-payer healthcare to her and put her up to it. She’s had her moments in the past (see above), so it’s plausible that she was just a cog in some heinous individual’s machine.
You think it’s impossible for her to have achieved such stature and be a few cans short of a Joe-Six-Pack, read her resignation speech again. She knows what she needs to deflect and what kinds of things she mustn’t say (e.g. “I’m in over my depth”, “Who are we kidding?”, “I shall rule all!”), but her means of misdirection are, well, unconventionally composed.

So what is it? Cynical, moronic, or bat-sh!t crazy?

Oh, and while we’re talking about the ‘intellectually disabled’, I posted recently about hand-wringing in Canada to refer respectfully to descendants-of-people-who-live-in-what-we-now-call-‘Canada’-before-Europeans-arrived and American neglect or ignorance of a problem. It seems that Americans are worried about other problems of nomenclature when it comes to ‘klatschies’, as my special-ed-teaching bro-in-law would call them.

You heard (well, read) it here first.

2009-08-12T10:16:00.001+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to bring some perspective into the Economist's critique of macroeconomics. Well, it turns out that Robert Lucas, the economist who has rebutted their article, broadly agrees with me.

Canada is not Great Britain (But their Flags are similar!

2009-08-12T00:01:00.002+02:00

Nice comparison of healthcare systems by Mr. Silver. I'm going to send this one to gramps..

Finally, some talking points: Updated

2009-08-11T19:36:00.005+02:00

Yglesias has been my blogger of choice for the past few days and has another post worth linking to today about the "Eightfold Path of Consumer Protection" that the White House is touting. The summary is that there are eight solid goals of Healthcare Reform that don't involve creating any kind of public insurance program but rather how current private insurance companies are regulated. The eight goals are both ambitious and sweeping:

"
1. No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions
Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

2. No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pay
Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

3. No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care
Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

4. No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill
Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

5. No Gender Discrimination
Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

6. No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage
Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

7. Extended Coverage for Young Adults
Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

8. Guaranteed Insurance Renewal
Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won’t be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick."

Yglesias makes the point that we should use these goals as benchmarks for any legislation that passes Congress, regardless of whether there is a strong public option or not.

I tend to agree with that statement, although I am fully behind a strong government program and find the whole co-op idea being flown by the Senate Finance Committee to be a misguided enterprise at best. More importantly, this list gives Democrats across the country some solid talking points on some very noticeable problems with our system. Elected Democrats and everyday people should be able to use these kinds of points to argue for Obama's reform efforts and counter the distractions being created by the right. While the White House needs to do everything it can to get these talking points out there, it's also critical for the reform effort that everyday voters hear this kind of stuff. Nobody wants to be denied healtchare, people hate having deductables rise and having to pay for stuff out of pocket, and the insurance companies make a good bad guy (on a related note, why isn't anyone making the connection between the insurance companies and the failing economy (think AIG)). Each individual talking point can be usefully geard towards a specific audience as well, so that if I'm talking to my rabid right-wing grandfather I can emphasize Points 2, 4 and 6. If I'm talking to some guy closer to my age I can underline points 1,3, and 7.

This is the kind of message direction that has been lacking from the Obama Administration up until now. These are concrete goals which would improve the healthcare of the vast majority of Americans and not just the 15% who don't have insurance (and who don't tend to vote). Its pretty hard to argue against accomplishing these things with reform. Now it's just a matter of the amplitude at which the message is blasted through the media at those on the recieving end of the box..and how far the massage gets carried by word of mouth contact.

UPDATE I:

The DNC is getting on board with a national ad-buy

Origins and Names

2009-08-11T14:34:00.002+02:00

After a discussion with the brilliant Mrs. Klein, my fervent anti-spiritualism might be toning down somewhat. Still, I ran across this article that gives a brief status report on the idea that religion is the result of biological evolution, like teeth and male nipples. The sides presented are more or less that it is either literally a genetically-conditioned form of social organization evolved to provide competitive advantages on its carriers (like haplodiploidy), or that it is generally helpful, could have spread memetically (like fashion trends), but is really more cultural than genetic. The author tries to give a solomonic solution by calling cultural evolution 'an exaggerated metaphor", and granting that there's more to humanity than our genetic hard- and software.

Have both sides forgotten their Popper? Is a little falsificationism too much to ask? This is a debate about which there is an objective fact of the matter. It's more like asking whether more people have black hair or blond hair than it's like asking why Beethoven is better than Mozart (or vice versa). The way the debate is pitched, both sides are arguing for their own just-so-story. Religion as a biological trait to increase cohesion within the group sounds plausible enough, but if that's so, find the gene(s)! Just because it sounds plausible, doesn't mean it's true.

I have the feeling that scientists trying to make the God-is-a-product-of-biology argument would expect vindication if they could find that gene, as if that would be the final nail in the theist/deist coffin. The natural (I mean 'theological') reply to the question of how that gene got there, would of course be something like "Magic man dunnit". I recently remarked that I couldn't understand how an intelligent person could hold religious faith, and while that might still be true, the faithful as a group are capable of some first rate sophistry. Still, how religion is related to evolution is an empirical question, and I accept no substitutes.

I also saw this kind of travel diary by an 'Indian' who visits 'Indian' casinos. I remember when I was a kid growing up in western Canada, 'Indian' could be used to describe the pre-16th century inhabitants of the Americas and their descendants without denegration. That didn't last long before the term 'native' became more politically correct. (I had a problem with this even in grade-school, because both of my parents are first-generation immigrants to Canada (from different countries), and I was born there, so how were they any more native than I? If the plan was to ship all the colonists home, where was I to go?) Then 'aboriginal' was en vogue. (It's an etymologically interesting term with similarly disturbing connotations for me. 'More original than original', which would leave me, where?, just original?) Now, I think First Nations is the PC nomenclature, which can lead to some pretty awkward sentences ("This First Nations' gentleman has lost his hat! Has anyone seen the First Nations' gentleman's hat?"). My point is that Canada has really torn itself up over relations with First Nations (although we still call the responsible governmental department "The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs"), as one can clearly see from the terminological gymnastics of the last 30 years, but the Americans seem comfortable with good ol' 'Indian'. I wonder why.

My guess is that it has to do with Canada's multiculturalism. In Canada, I think we're pretty happy to call people whatever they please, but more importantly, the social ideal is cultural diversity, and some might need extra measures to stand out in the cacophony of different titles and tongues. We have many wheels, but only the squeaky ones get greased. In the States, there seems to be more of a integrationist, melting pot ideal in which all comers are meant to assimilate. Standing out might be a bad thing, so only the biggest minorities can withstand the resistance that hopping on the euphemism treadmill attracts. If there are costs to standing out, only those strong enough to assert themselves will even try. Hmm?

Small Goverment, No Government

2009-08-11T11:09:00.002+02:00

I just read this article on the Beeb about the possibility that protests against the democrats' health care plans might be phoney, staged events put on by "birthers" and bitter republicans. I confess, I don't really care. What did bother me is this line:

...'small government good, big government bad' is the Republican motto.

Are you sure? Lazily, I'm going to take some figures from the Wikipedia to show that this is profoundly misleading. Let's have a look at deficits as a percentage of GDP. Negative numbers indicate surpluses and positive ones indicate new debt. Generally speaking, a number under 3% (the EU's allowable limit) is pretty respectable. Let's eliminate the figures for Roosevelt/Truman because winding down WWII was bound to save a lot of money, and that trend continues through Eisenhower, so let's start with Kennedy/Johnson. The average deficit as percentage of GDP for democratic presidential terms since Kennedy is -5.7, for republicans in the same period, it's 7.0. In recent history, republican presidents lose slightly more money than democrat ones save. If we look at just the most recent two-termers for the most recent trend, we get -4.4 for Bubba and 9.3 for Dubya. You can give Clinton a handicap because he inherited a big deficit from Bush senior that he was able to turn around, whereas GWB inherited a handsome surplus from Clinton that he managed to run into the ground.

The so-called Blue Dogs have been getting a lot of press lately, and their message of fiscal conservatism is music to my liberal ears (though I do support universal health care for fiscal and normative reasons). I would like to submit, though, that even the reddest (as in "most commie") democrat would have a hard time beating a republican in terms of fiscal profligacy. There is an old idea in American foreign policy analysis that republicans can be more dovish because other countries expect them to be the toughest hawks, and democrats have to be more hawkish than they would like, because nobody will take them seriously otherwise, assuming they're a bunch of softies. The same seems to be the case in fiscal policy: people assume republicans will save, so they have the freedom to spend and bloat government. It's perverse. Don't buy it.

Other news that caught my eye (for the anarchically and totalitarian-inclined):
Living human rights advocates in Chechnya are becoming about as common as Aung San Suu Kyi's days at the beach.

There also seems to be a growing movement to have children-free zones in public places in Germany. Thank goodness! There was a smoking law in my hometown for a while that allowed restaurants and bars to admit minors or smokers. Being a childless smoker at the time, I was very satisfied. Even after having quit, I'd still prefer second-hand smoke to first-hand brattiness!

Quick Link

2009-08-10T21:18:00.002+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

Interesting book link I got from Matthew Yglesias on Plato's dialogues (with comics!).

The whole book is available for free online, and if you register (for free) you can download it and many others as a .pdf!

Tacit Powers and Missing the Point

2009-08-09T10:29:00.002+02:00

The supreme court succession now seems to be signed and sealed, but I've got a couple of questions that are unresolved. First, why did Jusitice Souter resign? The standard answer seems to be that he hated D.C., he wanted to go back to New Hampshire (click your heels three times), and the desire to be replaced by someone with a liberal slant (mission accomplished), which was likely while Obama is in office. This leads me to the second question: is there any precedent for strategic resignations in the supreme court? As far as I can tell, Art. 3 of the American constitution does not include influencing the future composition or decisions of the court as one of its powers. On the contrary, it seems to expect justices to serve until they are no longer able or invalidate themselves with bad behaviour. That they would manage their tenure strategically seems to be a blindspot.

Strategic resignation is not a new phenomenon in general. There are plenty of examples of national leaders resigning with the ground laid for particular heirs, as in Uzbekistan, Egypt, or N. Korea. This happens all the time, and it was probably even more common when royal dynasties were still going concerns, but those decisions tend to be (at least de facto) extra-constitutional. Is this a regular occurrence for the US supreme court, and does it have any legal/constitutional backing?

The second burr in my saddle is the resolution of Ulla Schmidt's vacation plans. The German health minister got in trouble recently for flying to Spain, having her chauffeur drive her official, armoured Mercedes to meet her in Spain, and then looking foolish when the car got stolen. She has been cleared of wrongdoing, because it is legal for ministers to use their official cars for private purposes, as long as they pay tax on the private use. Her party's leader has now reinstated her place in the "competence team" (read, shadow cabinet) for the barely noticeable election campaign.

I'm still outraged and want blood! Don't get me wrong, I think it's reasonable for ministers to use their cars for private purposes. If I had one provided, I wouldn't be able to justify having a private car too, and I would just use the one. I also think that the rules are fine: the minister is responsible for compensating the taxpayer for private use. Fair enough. The source of my outrage is the environmental impact of flying and having a car and driver meet you there. According to this calculator, I reckon her flying to Spain (assuming she flew alone and on a normal commercial carrier) generated 400 kg of CO2 emissions. Fine. It's too far to bike, and I probably would have flown myself.

Her car, though, is an armoured S-class Mercedes. According to this site, a late model S-class will get 12.7 L/100km (18.5 mpg). This, however, doesn't account for the extra weight of the armour, which is about 20%, so let's call it an even 15 l/100km, which is probably generous. Let's say the drive was 5200 km, which is the distance from Berlin to Alicante (return); that gives us a return trip gas consumption of 862 litres (not including the weight of the chauffeur, his kid, and the luggage). Just driving there and back cost 1996 kg of CO2. So, even though Ms. Schmidt's choice to use her car was legal, it unnecessarily released 2 tons of carbon dioxide. And Germany is supposed to be able to brow beat emerging countries and the Yanks into cutting their emissions at Copenhagen later this year? With what credibility? What ever happened to leading by example?

She may not have acted illegally, but she immorally polluted the environment, which belongs to all of us. I'm f*ck!ng fuming, but not as much as Ms. Schmidt's car, which I helped pay for in the first place.

Hooray! I mean, Good. I mean, Oh Crap.

2009-08-05T17:08:00.001+02:00

I saw an article today talking about the falling tendency for political collectivities to go to war against each other. I had heard the same argument before from Steven Pinker (who is actually referenced toward the end) and on a slightly more academic level from John Mueller (whose new stuff is poorly referenced). And I thought to myself, "Sweet! Everybody is jumpin' on board. Pretty soon this will be a big, unstoppable idea! Violence is over! Hooray!" This elation was predictably short-lived.

Of course war is becoming less common. An old reason for war, conquest, doesn't fly anymore. Ch. 1, Art. 2 of the UN Charter is pretty clear on this: political settlements are the only legitimate means to gain territory. There are some tricky questions remaining about national self-determination in different corners of the world, such as northern Sri Lanka, Tibet, S.E. Turkey, and Quebec, but the geopolitical map of the world is fairly stable as far as conquest is concerned. Ideology is also slowly harmonizing, which was another big cause of war, and international and colonial wars are just generally out of fashion. I'll leave it to you to decide whether going into a failed state without a proper government counts, as was the case with Ethiopia's incursion into Somalia and NATO's invasion of Afghanistan. Still, it seems that international wars are becoming less common, and fewer are dying in the wars that do happen.

So why am I not rejoicing. Well, I ran into this article that snapped me back into reality. There's still a lot of violence going on inside borders. Granted, the male rapes in Congo they mention happen in Kivu, and that's not exactly the pinnacle of civilization. It's been a miserable corner of the world at least since its neighbour, Rwanda, tore itself apart in 1994, and it has experienced other rough periods too. The recent domestic violence in Iran, Pakistan, Xinjiang and Nigeria mustn't be forgotten either. There is still plenty of room in the world for violence at a national level.

Well, I thought further, at least modern democracies should be free of the scourge of violence. I mean, sure there is going to be some level of hockey fights, crime and accidents in any society, but we can at least get close. Their views would also be especially important because they (who'm I kidding - we) tend to be rich and make most of the rules for the rest. Before I jumped on this hopeful new train of thought, I reckoned it might be a good idea to find an indicator of attitudes toward violence in these modern democracies. Just as I was giving up hope, not having access to the means to launch a big international survey and evaluate the results, a proxy landed in my lap. The Economist printed this graph that shows attitudes toward torture in several countries, many of which are modern democracies. I figured that the practices I was worried about were fairly similar to torture - at least at the level of attitudes. I mean, by granting that "some degree of torture should be allowed", you're essentially saying "other things being equal, it's okay sometimes for some person I've never met to do nasty violence on some other person I've never met for some unspecified purpose." If that's a fair extrapolation, it just might be the indicator I was looking for!

So what does the graph tell us? It's hard to say, which also means it's hard to be optimistic. The western Europeans are predictably anti-torture (peaceful). They're modern democracies, so points for optimism. On the other hand, the figures for the US are close enough to be poll results from a post-convention presidential race, and Turkey and India, which are also modern democracies (seven times out of ten in months with an "r") actually favour using some torture.

As a pleasant surprise, China's figure is lower than expected, as is Russia's. Even Egypt's is lower than I would have expected. My enthusiasm in these cases is muted because these countries have particularly unresponsive governments that take the attitude of "like it, or we'll beat you up!" If you can't get your preferences into a judicial system and make them stick, they lose normative potency.

I suppose the take home message is that you can sleep soundly that you are less likely to die or be harmed in an international war than your grandparents, but watch out for your neighbours and officials if you live outside the EU (and maybe Canada). And it started out so wonderful.

The Plight of the Big Minority

2009-08-04T10:25:00.002+02:00

Having grown up in Canada (eh?) and being an IR geek, I don't have much experience watching coalition governments, especially during campaigns. Elections are something we often like to assume away in IR, and Canada hasn't had to many coalition governments in my time, especially not in Alberta. It's been really interesting watching the (seemingly endless) American campaigns and the German super election year.
One very stark contrast is the brevity of German campaigns. Canadian elections are often called at relatively unexpected times, but the Germans follow a pretty regular schedule, as do the Americans. Still, the Germans manage to keep campaigns pretty short - a few months at most.
Another contrast is the difficulty of running as the minority party in a grand coalition, as the German SPD (social democrat party) is trying to do now. It seems that incumbent parties basically use the canned story about their record and their plans for a glorious future, and opposition parties have theirs about the governing party's mistakes and disrepute. The junior grand coalition party is stuck, though: they can't criticize the incumbents because they are incumbents, and they can't easily rest on their record because credit mostly goes to the larger partner.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the SPD candidate for Chancellor and German Foreign Minister, recently promised to create 4 million jobs in the green energy and health sectors. The other parties and many observers promptly laughed him out of town. Obama has made a very similar claim generally gets praised for it. I'm wondering what the smart move for the SPD would be. What's the winning narrative? (not that I'm pulling for the SPD, just out of curiosity). It's funny how heavily campaigns seem to depend on being able to tell a good story rather than any more sensible, consequential criteria.

Speaking of large minorities, there's a controversy bubbling in Gelsenkirchen about the local Bundesliga team, FC Schalke 04 (soccer season is starting, so expect more soccer posts). Schalke is to the Bundesliga what the Boston Bruins are to the NHL: rarely on top but been around long enough to be a pillar of tradition in the league. Their fans have a stadium chant that includes the lines:

Mohammed was a prophet who didn't know about soccer, but from all the beautiful colours, he figured out the blue-white [Schalke's colours] - my translation.

Now domestic Muslim fanatics are threatening Schalke's fans. I have to ask, why the insecurity? Considering that soccer as we know it today didn't exist until 1863, Mohammed died 1231 years too early to have known about it. He couldn't have known any more about soccer than he could have known about Teflon or Baywatch. I wouldn't even call this criticizing Mohammed; it's just a stupid fact in a stupid fan song. His name could just as easily be replaced by Abraham or Gautama.
I suppose that one should be used to this sort of nonsense after the Danish cartoon outcry of a few years back, but it's nothing I care to get used to. There's a tendency to wall religion off as a Realm of Infinite Tolerance (i.e. everyone must tolerate it), but incidents like the one in Gelsenkirchen might lend some credence to Sam Harris' argument that liberal tolerance of religions provides cover for extremists less worthy of that tolerance.
It also raises questions about what one can legitimately say about religion with the expectation of peaceful (if not polite) discourse. Although Muslims seem to be especially touchy, but Hindus and Christians also have their angry mob moments, and the religious seem less able to sort out arguments (in many cases probably a precondition of faith). For example, if I were to say that Jesus existed as a person but was devoid of any kind of divinity, this is not a criticism of Jesus. If he were a divine figure, I'd agree that he's a relatively friendly and benign one - I don't criticize him, I just don't believe he's all he's cracked up to be. Try explaining that difference to these folks or these.
And even if I were criticizing somebody's holy cow (so to speak), so what? A divine being can surely take it. I think Canada is just peachy, but I laughed heartily when I heard "Blame Canada" and when it was nominated for the Best Song Oscar in 1999. Grow up and have some faith in your, erm, faith.

Shorthand Blasphemy and some updates.

2009-08-03T13:48:00.001+02:00

I was going to write a diatribe about how religious faith requires a historicist perspective, and I still might, but not today. Kindly enough, the Catholic church bailed me out. It turns out one of the Catholic church's banking arms has been busted by the German news weekly, der Spiegel, for investing in British American Tobacco, European defence giant BAE Systems, and get this, Wyeth, a world leader in contraceptives. An English account is available on the Beeb. I'm wondering what their reaction would be to a lay believer investing in the same firms. They can be mighty harsh: a 9 year-old who was impregnated by her stepfather in Brazil was excommunicated, along with her whole family and doctors, after aborting. Is the church even capable of excommunicating itself? I mean, the 9 year-old in question was going to have twins, so let's call that 2 lives for argument's sake. Have a look at BAE Systems' product list, and ask yourself whether a "120 mm Armoured Mortar System II" or an "F-35 Lightning" might not do greater damage. It was calculated that smoking killed 5 000 000 people (i.e. they killed the equivalent of all Chicago, twice) in the year 2000 alone.

I don't want to argue that weapons are inherently bad, that smoking doesn't have a beauty of its own, or that contraception is a panacea. I do think this is a further indication that religion persists at least in part as an existential protection racket, among other things. This need not be a conspiracy, it could just be a case of dispersed greed and vested interests. Some guy once said something about it being harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Who was that again?

While I'm being all self-righteous, I'd also like to point out that I'm not the only one who a single-payer model would be at least worth consideration for American health care reform.

I also ranted a while ago about the near universal overreaction to swine flu. Well, if you're really looking for a reason to panic, providence provides. I'd rather my next door neighbours had swine flu (sorry guys) than for a single Chinese to have pneumonic plague. Not that anybody asked.

Stand by Your Macro

2009-07-30T10:15:00.001+02:00

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

2009-07-29T18:00:00.003+02:00

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?

2009-07-29T14:25:00.001+02:00

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

2009-07-29T11:21:00.006+02:00

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..

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

2009-07-28T21:52:00.004+02:00

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?

2009-07-28T19:15:00.001+02:00

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?

2009-07-28T18:11:00.002+02:00

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:

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?
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

2009-07-28T14:08:00.000+02:00

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.

2009-07-27T13:24:00.001+02:00

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!

2009-07-27T11:28:00.001+02:00

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.

"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.
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.
done
"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.
"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?
"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.
"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.
"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?
"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.
"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?

2009-07-27T09:51:00.005+02:00

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?

2009-07-26T22:08:00.008+02:00

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?

Want to get in trouble in politics?

2009-07-24T21:59:00.003+02:00

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?

2009-07-24T18:06:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-24T14:14:00.001+02:00

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

2009-07-24T10:10:00.006+02:00

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?

2009-07-24T09:57:00.004+02:00

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

2009-07-23T19:33:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-23T14:44:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-23T14:25:00.002+02:00

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.

2009-07-23T09:12:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-22T19:00:00.002+02:00

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:

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."
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...

2009-07-22T13:00:00.002+02:00

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!!!

2009-07-21T11:00:00.005+02:00

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?

2009-07-21T08:41:00.004+02:00

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

2009-07-20T22:49:00.008+02:00

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!

2009-07-20T20:14:00.004+02:00

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?

2009-07-20T12:33:00.003+02:00

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

2009-07-16T18:44:00.003+02:00

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?

2009-07-16T09:31:00.005+02:00

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.

First Question

2009-07-16T00:25:00.000+02:00

Since Ben and I have talked about Mathew Yglesias a bit and referenced him in the e-mail chain that led to this blog, I thought I should link something of him to get a bit of discussion going:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/ben-nelson-attributes-his-zeal-for-defending-the-interests-of-rich-people-to-the-public-at-large.php

He discuses one of the problems of our government and more practically as one of the major obstacles of getting Obama's reforms passed: the lazyness and general inertia of senators in particular to get off their asses. Yglesias picks on conservative demoracts in particular, but I think the same thing could be said for all moderates, even the republicans. Surely there are some republicans that would support health care reform in some way, but the all at like the probelm is so damn hard and huge so they never begin anything.

Anyway, i guess the question is, how can we change this aspect of the US political system? I would venture to sy that this sort of inertia (for lack of a better word) is intrinsic in many governments, but I'll leave that kind of statement to the political scientists. Are there practical measures to be taken to minimize this sort of behaviour? Is it even undesirable for the government to be like this sometimes
(hopefully not all the time, right?)?

out..

Oh yea, Oh yea

2009-07-15T15:45:00.002+02:00

I'm on a boat motherfucker!

Its amazing how quickly a vague idea can take shape when you get a few like minded folks together who have an interest in projecting their brain farts into the ether.

I'm glad to be here, glad you guys are here, and love the name...

-A