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

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

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

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

What happened to the author tags?

Dear Ms. Tuba Town,

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

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



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

Thank you

Voting: privilege or right?

Whaddya know? Got a theme goin' on here.

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

A couple of things that caught my eye:

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

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

Rights & Privileges

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

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

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

Diagno-thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best or worst side of American democracy?

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

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

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

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

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Want to get in trouble in politics?

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

Swine flu or Hogwash?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law is For Protection of the People

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

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

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

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