March 20, 2004
Iraq, Syria, and Uncertainty
Today's New York Times reports that the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq has given heart to dissidents in Syria. That's exactly the sort of thing the architects of the Iraq invasion were hoping for. Like the end of the Iraqi tryranny, it has to be, on any reasonable accounting of the costs and benefits of going to war, an entry on teh credit side.
I wish that those who criticize the war were more willing than they seem to be to acknowledge its benefits, as I wish that those who still think it was a good idea were more willing to acknowledge both that the fear of a major Iraqi WMD program was central to the argument for war as it was actually made at the time and that it has proven in retrospect to have been seriously overestimated.
What the anti-war and pro-war sides have in common is an almost total unwillingness to acknowledge what seemed obvious to me: this was a hard problem, with no obivous right answer. No which side you were (or are) on, there are patriotic, humanitarian folks who know more than you do about the problem who disagree with you. If that were better understood, there might be a little less vitriol in the conversation.
Iraq, Syria, and Uncertainty
Today's New York Times reports that the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq has given heart to dissidents in Syria. That's exactly the sort of thing the architects of the Iraq invasion were hoping for. Like the end of the Iraqi tryranny, it has to be, on any reasonable accounting of the costs and benefits of going to war, an entry on teh credit side.
I wish that those who criticize the war were more willing than they seem to be to acknowledge its benefits, as I wish that those who still think it was a good idea were more willing to acknowledge both that the fear of a major Iraqi WMD program was central to the argument for war as it was actually made at the time and that it has proven in retrospect to have been seriously overestimated.
What the anti-war and pro-war sides have in common is an almost total unwillingness to acknowledge what seemed obvious to me: this was a hard problem, with no obivous right answer. No which side you were (or are) on, there are patriotic, humanitarian folks who know more than you do about the problem who disagree with you. If that were better understood, there might be a little less vitriol in the conversation.
Taking the bottle away from dangerous drunks
When someone gets caught drinking and driving, the first response is to take away his license: his driving license, that is. The "license" to drink -- legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities – is taken to be irrevocable.
But why?
Someone who drinks and drives may not be a bad driver (sober); but we know he's a bad citizen drunk. Probably, sober, he even knows that he shouldn't drink and drive. Once drunk, however, that knowledge leaves along with his fine motor control and capacity to handle divided-attention tasks.
So here's a modest proposal: If someone is convicted of driving drunk, or beating someone up drunk, or spraying swastikas on gravestones drunk, or is simply one of the relatively small number of badly behaved drinkers whom the police pick up time after time for drunk & disorderly (in any jurisidiction, something like a tenth of one percent of the population, consisting of chronic d&d; arrestees, accounts for something like fifteen percent of the arrests) – if, I say, someone show by his behavior that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when he gets a skinful – then why not revoke his drinking license? (No, the masculine pronoun here is not a mere artifact of grammar; like most crime, crime committed under the influence is overwhelmingly a male problem.)
How would it work? The "personal prohibition" imagined here couldn't plausibly by enforced by the state against the individual, so it, like the (far less well justified) ban on drinking under some arbitrary age, would have to be enforced by sellers of alcoholic beverages, required to do so by the terms of their licenses. To do so, sellers would have to verify that each buyer is in fact legally eligible to drink, just as they now have to verify that each buyer is of legal age to drink. And the same document now used to "card" young-looking drinkers could be used to enforce the ban on drinking by those who make their drinking a problem for the rest of us.
California, for the convenience of alcohol sellers, issues to those over 21 drivers' licenses with the bearer's photo in full-face, and issues to those under 21 drivers' licenses with the bearer's photo in profile. Similarly, someone who loses his drinking license for some period of time as a result of an alcohol-related conviction could have his existing driver's license taken away and receive a new license, with some marking showing that it is not also a drinker's license. (Most motor vehicle registries issue a "non-driver's license," also called a "personal identification card," for those who cannot or do not wish to have a license to drive but need a piece of plastic to show who they are and how old they are: not least for the purpose of being able to buy alcohol.)
Such a system would have good deterrent effects – loss of drinking privileges, and in particular the ability to drink in bars with one's friends, might be quite fearsome to some offenders and yet not at all hard for a judge to impose – and good incapacitative effects as well, insofar as reduced drinking by problem drinkers translates into reduced problems for everyone else.
Obvious problems:
1. The booze industry, and in particular the bar-and-restaurant trade, would hate it. Heavy drinking is their business, and while most heavy drinkers aren't problem drinkers, such a system would cost them some of their best customers.
2. Having to "card" everyone,rather than just those fortunate enough to look young would be something of an inconvenience for sellers and buyers of alcohol alike. (Though given the proportion of transactions involving credit cards, it's hard to see how the added inconvenience would be especially great.)
3. If there were enough disqualified persons, they might constitute a big enough market to support illegal production ("moonshining") or illegal sales outlets ("speakeasies"). I doubt this would be much of a problem, given the importance of brand names in the alcoholic-beverage trade and the difficulty of running a speakeasy in the absence of truly systemic police corruption. The key to controlling this problem would be to limit the number of persons disqualified from drinking to a few million at a time: a small proportion of the total market for alcohol, but (if properly selected) a substantial portion of the alcohol problem.
4. Some people legally allowed to buy alcohol would be willing to procure it for their disqualified friends, thus partially frustrating the intent of the law. That happens now with underage drinking. The problem might be smaller insofar as the idea that drunken drivers and drunken assailants ought not drink probably has wider and deeper social support than the idea that 20-year-old ought not drink.
5. Some people legally disqualified from drinking would secure false identification, just as underage drinkers now do. That would partly defeat the purpose of the law. It would also contribute to the market in fake IDs, which is not a trivial problem. If the proposed policy were combined with the abolition of the drinking age, this disadvantage would be more than offset.
license" to drink -- legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities – is taken to be irrevocable.
But why?
Someone who drinks and drives may not be a bad driver (sober); but we know he's a bad citizen drunk. Probably, sober, he even knows that he shouldn't drink and drive. Once drunk, however, that knowledge leaves along with his fine motor control and capacity to handle divided-attention tasks.
So here's a modest proposal: If someone is convicted of driving drunk, or beating someone up drunk, or spraying swastikas on gravestones drunk, or is simply one of the relatively small number of badly behaved drinkers whom the police pick up time after time for drunk & disorderly (in any jurisidiction, something like a tenth of one percent of the population, consisting of chronic d&d; arrestees, accounts for something like fifteen percent of the arrests) – if, I say, someone show by his behavior that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when he gets a skinful – then why not revoke his drinking license? (No, the masculine pronoun here is not a mere artifact of grammar; like most crime, crime committed under the influence is overwhelmingly a male problem.)
How would it work? The "personal prohibition" imagined here couldn't plausibly by enforced by the state against the individual, so it, like the (far less well justified) ban on drinking under some arbitrary age, would have to be enforced by sellers of alcoholic beverages, required to do so by the terms of their licenses. To do so, sellers would have to verify that each buyer is in fact legally eligible to drink, just as they now have to verify that each buyer is of legal age to drink. And the same document now used to "card" young-looking drinkers could be used to enforce the ban on drinking by those who make their drinking a problem for the rest of us.
California, for the convenience of alcohol sellers, issues to those over 21 drivers' licenses with the bearer's photo in full-face, and issues to those under 21 drivers' licenses with the bearer's photo in profile. Similarly, someone who loses his drinking license for some period of time as a result of an alcohol-related conviction could have his existing driver's license taken away and receive a new license, with some marking showing that it is not also a drinker's license. (Most motor vehicle registries issue a "non-driver's license," also called a "personal identification card," for those who cannot or do not wish to have a license to drive but need a piece of plastic to show who they are and how old they are: not least for the purpose of being able to buy alcohol.)
Such a system would have good deterrent effects – loss of drinking privileges, and in particular the ability to drink in bars with one's friends, might be quite fearsome to some offenders and yet not at all hard for a judge to impose – and good incapacitative effects as well, insofar as reduced drinking by problem drinkers translates into reduced problems for everyone else.
Obvious problems:
1. The booze industry, and in particular the bar-and-restaurant trade, would hate it. Heavy drinking is their business, and while most heavy drinkers aren't problem drinkers, such a system would cost them some of their best customers.
2. Having to "card" everyone,rather than just those fortunate enough to look young would be something of an inconvenience for sellers and buyers of alcohol alike. (Though given the proportion of transactions involving credit cards, it's hard to see how the added inconvenience would be especially great.)
3. If there were enough disqualified persons, they might constitute a big enough market to support illegal production ("moonshining") or illegal sales outlets ("speakeasies"). I doubt this would be much of a problem, given the importance of brand names in the alcoholic-beverage trade and the difficulty of running a speakeasy in the absence of truly systemic police corruption. The key to controlling this problem would be to limit the number of persons disqualified from drinking to a few million at a time: a small proportion of the total market for alcohol, but (if properly selected) a substantial portion of the alcohol pro 'blem.
4. Some people legally allowed to buy alcohol would be willing to procure it for their disqualified friends, thus partially frustrating the intent of the law. That happens now with underage drinking. The problem might be smaller insofar as the idea that drunken drivers and drunken assailants ought not drink probably has wider and deeper social support than the idea that 20-year-old ought not drink.
5. Some people legally disqualified from drinking would secure false identification, just as underage drinkers now do. That would partly defeat the purpose of the law. It would also contribute to the market in fake IDs, which is not a trivial problem. If the proposed policy were combined with the abolition of the drinking age, this disadvantage would be more than offset.
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Thread: Crime Control , Thread: Drug Policy , Thread: Policy briefs
March 18, 2004
McCain on Kerry
No, I do not believe that he is, quote, weak on defense.
More here.
I think McCain is enjoying himself. Payback is hell. And revenge is a dish which persons of taste prefer to consume cold.
Giving Congress the mushroom treatment
So it turns out that the Administration knew when the Congress passed what its officials were describing as a $400 billion Medicare bill that its own actuary had estimated that the cost would be more than $500 billion. (Current estimate: $534 billion.) And it's pretty clear that there wouldn't have been enough votes for the bill if an honest figure had been put forward. (Yes, the actual figure was floating around, but keeping it unofficial gave the swing voters deniability.)
Tommy Thompson is taking so much heat for this he now plans a formal investigation by the HHS Inspector General. Good. And the HHS IG is no longer Janet Rehnquist. Doubleplusgood.
March 17, 2004
A "special skills" draft?
Of course, we all know that the threat of resuming the draft is a mere figment of the fevered imaginations of anti-Bush lunatics. No one is seriously thinking of actually doing it.
Except, that is, for the officials of the Selective Service System, who have been at work since last fall on developing a "special skills" draft targeted at people who know computers and foreign languages. Of course, reimposing conscription would require Congressional action, but it's clear that the personnel folks at the Pentagon are taking this seriously enough to have encouraged Selective Service to get to work.
Can you say "perverse incentives"? I was sure you could.
March 16, 2004
Should Kerry name names?
It's too early in the campaign season to be handing out the award for the dumbest charge, but Team Bush has certainly staked an early claim with its attack on John Kerry's comment -- known to be the truth by anyone who pays any attention to such things -- that many leaders in friendly countries overseas are rooting for him to win, though diplomacy prevents them from saying so in public.
More on this in my latest post to The American Street.
George W. Bush as a failed war President
If John Kerry wants to win this election -- and there's some evidence that he really, really does -- then he really, really needs to get his speechwriters to read this analysis by Matt Yglesias of why George W. Bush has been such a terrible war President.
Kerry's trying: his speech to the Firefighters, which the White House managed to step on with its silly demand that Kerry unmask the foreign leaders who have told him privately they'd like to see him win, was largely about Bush's failures in the War on Terror. Or at least so the press coverage would suggest; the Kerry website doesn't seem to have the full text of his remarks.
I'm hoping the lines "big on bluster and short on action" and "I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror, I believe he's done too little" get to be part of the Kerry stump speech, and that one of the early Kerry ads will go hard at Bush on this issue. Now that Bush has an add suggesting that Kerry's vote against giving the President an $87 billion blank check to implement his non-plan in Iraq was a vote not to support the troops there, it's past time for the gloves to come off.
March 15, 2004
More thoughts on Spain
Several left bloggers, and most of Kevin Drum's commenters, seem to be missing the point about the Spanish elections. If the consequence of major terrorist actions is to induce voters to elect politicians who will pursue -- for whatever good reason -- policies the terrorists favor, that constitutes an incentive for more terrorist actions. So if the Spanish voters were saying to al-Qaeda, "Okay, we give up; we'll do what you want; just don't hurt us again," that would be bad for the world and dishonorable of the Spanish voters.
I'm a little bit disappointed that so many of the warbloggers seem eager to adopt this interpretation, and to trumpet their contempt for a country now grieving for its dead. It might be the right interpretation, and a certain amount of contempt would be justified if it were the right interpretation, but this really isn't the moment to by adding insult to injury.
Of course, the alternative interpretation -- or better say "another interpretation," since they aren't mutually exclusive -- is that the Spanish electorate was angry at having been bullshat by the Spanish government, which leaped to finger the wrong group for the bombings in order to use the bombings to its domestic political advantage. (Beautiful Horizons has some specifics: apparently the counter-terror investigators in Spain knew within hours that ETA hadn't done it, and some senior officials threatened to resign when Anzar continued to speak as if ETA had done it.) I can see how that possibility might send shivers down the spines of those hoping for a Bush re-election in November.
But I still have to ask the warbloggers one question: Why are you so eager to see bad news here? Why do you prefer to see the people of Spain as a bunch of cowardly appeasers, and the election result as a victory for al-Qaeda? Isn't the eagerness to see bad news in the War on Terror exactly what you love to accuse your opponents of?
Whatever mix of interpretations is true, it's certain that the Spanish voters just voted to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. One question people in Washington (and we, as their bosses) ought to be asking is why our government hadn't done more in the run-up to the election to make it clear to the Spanish people that acting in concert with the United States had direct benefits to Spain.
The Administration has been gleefully public in threatening and taking reprisals against those of our allies, including France, Germany, and Canada (but not, for some reason, Russia) that failed to follow our diplomatic and military lead. But the flip side of that -- benefits for those who have helped us -- hasn't been nearly as obvious. What victory suitable for domestic political consumption did the Bush Administration give Anzar and his Partido Popular. What victory has it given to Blair, or Berlusconi?
If there's a single idea that runs through the "Mirrors of Princes" literature from Xenophon to Machiavelli to Neustadt, it's that a ruler has to make it advantageous to others -- and especially to those who are not already his intimate friends -- to cooperate with him, and disadvantageous not to cooperate. Both domestically and internationally, the Bush administration seems to be fixated on only on the nasty half of that formula.
And whatever the reasons for what the Spanish electorate just did, the results make it clear that American unpopularity abroad has real consequences, and that it would be in our security interest to have an administration in power capable of attracting popular support in democratic countries for our fight against al-Qaeda and its friends.
Bill Clinton was and is a supporter not merely of anti-terrorist policy generically, but of the Iraq invasion as well. He spoke up at a crucial moment in the British debate on the war in support of the Bush-Blair position. Both domestically and internationally, Clinton has considerable prestige. Yet the Bush crowd has been so eager to have Clinton to use as a domstic political whipping-boy that they have never tried to engage that prestige on their side of the debate.
Many Democrats dislike George W. Bush in part because he was and is a war President. I see "war is not the Answer" bumper stickers on the same cars that have Dean and Kucinich bumper stickers on them.
But some of us dislike George W. Bush largely because he has proven to be such an inept war President. November Matthew Yglesias has details. We're hoping, this November, to elect a better one: a President capable of rallying the allies we need for this war, a President for whom homeland security is more than an excuse to do a little union-busting, a President who will not subordinate victory against terror to domestic political advantage, a President less in thrall to the House of Saud and therefore more willing to demand that Saudi support for al-Qaeda and for Wahhabist hate education cease.
Earlier thoughts on Spain here
Update Quite possibly neither of my proposed explanations (the Spanish electorate was waving a white flag or the Spanish electorate was punishing a government that lied to it) was correct. Turnout in this election was unexpectedly high, perhaps because some people who would otherwise have been non-voters were mobilized to make a gesture of civic solidarity. As in most countries, the potential electorate in Spain as a whole leans somewhat to the left of the sub-group that actually votes, in part because the non-voters tend to be young. So it may be that the terrorist attack didn't change anyone's mind about which party to vote for, but merely increased turnout in a way that happened to help the PSOE opposition.
Which just goes to show that lots of wierd stuff happens in politics, and lots of things mean less than they seem to mean.
I'm a little bit embarrassed at having missed what seems in retrospect like an obvious hypothesis. (Duhhh...if something changes in an election, it's either due to vote-switching or changes in turnout.) But the people who have spent the last two days insulting a nation in grief ought to be substantially more embarrassed.
Violence-minimizing drug sentencing
We currently have half a million people, more or less, behind bars for drug dealing, an increase of something like twentyfold over the past two decades. Over that period, prices of heroin and cocaine have fallen by more than 80%. So, on the evidence, the idea that we can push drug prices up by putting more dealers in prison -- an idea I once thought too obvious to need any argument -- seems shaky at best.
But we're still sending dealers to prison on the basis of, primarily, two factors: what they were selling, and how much. That makes sense only if the goal of drug enforcement is to shink the markets. If drug enforcement can't shrink the markets, then we ought to be asking what it can do, and asking it to do that.
My nominee: reducing violence. Target the long sentences, and the vigorous enforcement effort that accompanies them, at the dealers doing the shooting. Try to make a reputation for violence a competitive disadvantage rather thana competitive advantage in the illicit drug business.
Obvious problems:
1. More work for investigators. Weighing the powder is easy. Identifying a dealer as a shooter is feasible. Proving beyond reasonable doubt that a dealers is a shooter is hard.
2. Missing some truly bad guys. Some of the people now going away for long drug sentences are well-known shooters who couldn't be nailed for the people they shot (sometimes because the witnesses turned up dead). So some sentencing by conduct is already taking place informally. Making it a formal rule would mean that some really bad actors don't get hammered.
3. Fewer informants. Long sentences handed out by formula encourage "cooperation" (aka "ratting out your friends"). The ten-year mandatory is the contempory substitute for judicial torture: it can make people tell what they remember, and even what they don't remember. So getting rid of long mandatories for minor players will make all cases harder to make.
Still, reallocating cell space from big dealers to bad dealers makes sense, and the problem is how to make that happen, combining changes in laws with changes in policies. Not an easy problem, but one worth working on.
3.
March 14, 2004
The Spanish elections
At first blush, the election results from Spain aren't good news for the war against al-Qaeda. In something of a surprise compared to pre-bombing polls, the rightist Popular Party was booted out of office and replaced by the Socialists.
If this means that the Spanish electorate just voted to surrender to the terrorists, that's a disaster. If, on the other hand, the voters were punishing the PP for the outgoing Prime Minister's swift and incorrect attribution of the bombing to the Basque separatist movement ETA, which he then made into a partisan attack on the Socialists for being friendlier to Basque demands for autonomy than the PP has been, then I'd say the PP got about what it deserved. (Update: Apparently some voters believed that the government had withheld information pointing to al-Qaeda as the cuprit.)
Spain has troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Socialists had already threatened to pull out of Iraq unless the UN takes over after the June 30 handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis. If they also pull out of Afghanistan, one would have to say that the vote represented a big win for the bad guys, and a big defeat for U.S. diplomacy.
Both sides in the U.S. will probably find that this stengthens their already-held views. The hawks will think that they were right to give up on "old Europe," and the doves will reflect that the unpopularity of cowboy foreign policy isn't just among the elite, but extends to the voters in some of the countries most friendly to us.
And the anti-war hawks (such as Wesley Clark) -- folks who thought that the war on al-Qaeda should have been finished off before we took on Iraq -- will also find in this latest development support for their point of view. The Iraq invasion was massively unpopular in Spain even before the bombing; not so, as far as I can tell, Spain's participation in Afghanistan.
The problem for the US right now is how to make it seem to the Spanish Socialists that helping us will be more consistent with their own goals than hurting us. I hope that when the cursing and blustering is over, someone in Washington will be giving serious thought to that question, rather than organizing a boycott of bullfights and renaming the neighborhood around 110th and Lexington "Freedom Harlem."
Update An obvious point I didn't think of: The clear implication of this attack for the US that al-Qaeda is still capable of mounting something major, and it would be nice to know what the Administration has been doing to prevent the next blow from landing here, other than keeping the Department of Homeland Security non-union.
Second update More here
Making on-the-job training pay
It is well established that the best "job training" takes place on the job. But it is also well known that young, low-skilled workers are highly mobile from firm to firm, giving their current employers next to no incentive to contribute to those workers' non-firm-specific human capital (which is economese for teaching them anything that would increase their value to their next emploers).
Why not figure out a way to estimate the human capital of each worker entering the workforce or re-entering it after some moderately long period (say, six months) and then give the employer a financial stake in improving that stock by paying the first employer a share of the worker's payroll taxes over the next several years (maybe a declining share over time) no matter where that employee was then working? This would encourage hiring entering or re-entering workers, encourage giving them jobs in which they learn useful skills, and encourage employers to take the process of giving job references for current and former employees seriously.
Obvious problems:
1. It costs money. But given the public stake (thorough taxes and transfers) in increasing the human capital of low-skilled workers, and especially young ones, a well-designed program ought to be a net benefit even looking at the public fisc alone.
2. The market will take care of it; workers will accept lower wages for firms that invest in their non-firm-specific human capital, so there's no market failure to fix. That assumes more knowledge and foresight than many young workers may have, and assumes away all the rigidities in the labor market that prevent such bargains from being struck.
3. It will disadvantage existing labor-force participants and those with high measured human capital compared to new entrants and re-entrants with low measured human capital. True enough, though the size of the effect is open to question. This problem could be eased some by phasing out payments gradually rather than sharply as previous labor force participation and measured human capital rise.
4. (The flip side of #2): In the past, subsidy programs for hard-to-place workers have proven to do more harm than good because program eligibility became a stigmatizing factor. Less of a problem if the program applies to lots of workers.
5. Many employers may ignore the payments in making management decisions, thus wasting the entire subsidy paid to them.
6. Whatever the system to measure previous labor force participation and human capital, some companies will try to game the system by taking workers whose actual job prospects are better than they look.
7. Another form of gaming would involve maintaining heavy turnover while providing next to no training, in hopes of collecting the subsidy from those workers who, on their own, later did well in the job market. A minimum tenure requirement at the first employer in order to trigger the payments, and a formula that considered the performance of all eligible employees, with deductions for companies that produced large numbers of "duds," would help avoid that at the cost of increased complexity and perhaps some addition incentive to "cherry-pick."
8. By reducing the cost to the firm of employee turnover, the program would diminish firms' incentives to treat low-skilled new labor market entrants well once they were hired. Again, the subsidy formula might be jiggered to reduce that effect.
I don't assert that any given subsidy program would be the optimal one. This idea needs a significant investment in design and testing.
What almost can't be right is to continue to leave the incentive for firms to invest in the non-firm-specific human capital of low-capital new or returning labor force participants at zero.
