This is just gold

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?

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

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

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?

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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…

…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..

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.

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?

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.

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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.
4. 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.)
5. 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!"

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

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?

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!*

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?

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.

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!

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

Finally, some talking points: Updated

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Framing the Debate postscript

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

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

Sitting Ducks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Media and Politics: Danger ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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