Mark A. R. Kleiman

YOU-CAN'T-CHEAT-AN-HONEST-MAN DEPARTMENT

Max Sawicky has been getting the same "My-father-was-the-oil-minister-of-Nigeria-before-they-shot-him-and-I-need-your help-to-regain-what-he-stole" spam emails I get every day. (You may remember Teresa Nielsen Hayden's categorization of this as a variant of the "Spanish Prisoner" in a fascinating taxonomy of basic frauds.) But Max has run into an especially tricky example, one that has fooled tens of millions of people.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:22 PM | |

KARL ROVE IS LYING AGAIN.
Yawn.

Another Brad DeLong special, this time linking to Timothy Noah of Slate, about a spinmeister who has made an accurate judgment of the reporters he deals with. DeLong has my favorite epigram of the month, which I'm nonetheless going to take the liberty of editing: "If God had not wanted the press corps to be fleeced, he wouldn't have made them sheep."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:36 PM | |

THE PONY IN THE PILE OF HORSE MANURE

The current system of taxing capital income, and especially corporate earnings paid out as dividends, is badly distortionary because some income is taxed twice, once to the corporation and again to the shareholder who receives the dividend check. The Bush Administration has proposed to change that, in a way that will lead to considerable income being taxed not at all, which will also have a distortionary effect and will also enrich tax lawyers, tax-shelter operators, and people who already have plenty of money, while making the budget deficit even worse, thus limiting our options for funding necessary public programs and putting upward pressure on interest rates. The main defender of the current proposal is CEA chair Glenn Hubbard.

Brad DeLong links to an essay by Len Berman of the Tax Policy Center showing that there's a better way to eliminate the current distortion, one that would be less distorting and would also pay for itself. The author of the better proposal the Bush Administration rejected in favor of shoveling out more goodies to its donors: Glenn Hubbard.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:31 PM | |

MORE MONKEY BUSINESS

Some responses to my mailbag, and to the comments section of Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite:

1. I shouldn't have said "fool." Other than one action which I took (take) to be foolish, I have no knowledge of Prof. Dini; even if I'm right about the folly that's no reason to think that he's a fool generally. A bad inference, and bad manners.

I wrote in anger because I think making peace between the scientific and religious cultures is enormously important. The gap between mass and elite on this matter (producing what Peter Berger called "a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes") is social dynamite. "Science" is revered, but the actual scientific belief-system -- as opposed to awe of scientists as magic-workers and greed for the things they and their technologist allies can produce -- remains a minority creed. Having grown up Jewish in the Jewish part of Baltimore, I can recall my shock (at about age 9) when I figured out that Jews were a minority. Many of my fellow-believers in the science-creed have yet to make that discovery, or at least haven't yet dealt with it emotionally. Calling people stupid because they disagree with you is rude. Doing so in a democracy, when they outnumber you, is dumb.

In the evolution controversy, the creationists have been, by and large, the aggressors. That's what Prof. Dini seems to be reacting against, and his anger is understandable. Note that, even setting aside the frank miracles, there are lots of other things in the Bible grossly inconsistent with scientific knowledge, starting with the "waters above the firmament." But it's only evolution that the hard-shell Christians have chosen to make a test of faith. They don't object to the schools' teaching that the earth moves around the sun, though the Book of Joshua clearly implies otherwise. So it's not quite fair to ask whether Prof. Dini is going to make his students deny the Burning Bush, the Virgin Birth, and the transformation of water into wine at Cana; on none of those points do the fundamentalists insist that scientific teaching in the schools adapt to their reading of scripture.

2. Yes, evolution is more than paleontology. It pervades biology, and is making strides in the human sciences as well. But the inquisition to which Prof. Dini subjects his students is a paleontological one, asking about the origin of humanity rather than what happens currently in an antibiotic-laden petri dish or tuberculosis victim. One correspondent, someone I know well both personally and as a brilliant research worker in one of the mathematical social sciences, reports the following as his belief: that Darwinian natural selection is the primary mechanism for species change, but that the origin of humankind depended on a Divine intervention outside the ordinary operation of evolution. Presumably Prof. Dini would find that answer unacceptable, because it rejects a purely scientific view about human origins. Yet my correspondent has all the personal characteristics that would have made a great physician, had he chosen to pursue that career: a quick, powerful mind, razor-sharp judgment, humility, real concern for others, readiness to acknowledge error, the capacity to keep multiple hypotheses in mind while actively pursuing one of them, commitment to getting the right answer and doing the right thing, concentration, and energy.

3. No, medicine is not a science. Biology is a science. Socially, medicine is a profession. Practically, it is a craft, what Plato calls a techne: a knowledge-how based on understanding, as opposed to a mere knack. Training in medicine involves learning biology, among other things, but physicians are expected to heal, not to contribute to the growth of knowledge unless they happen to be research workers as well. So I continue to believe that excluding someone from medical education because he has non-standard views on evolution is unjustified, just as excluding someone from law school because he believed in Marxism or Objectivism would be unjustified.

4. Some anti-evolutionists claim to be doing science rather than making religious claims. Their scientific work has been judged worthless by the scientific community competent to judge. Adherence to "creation science" or "intelligent design theory" is much more at variance with serious scientific practice than mere refusal to let biology trump religious faith in answering the question, "How did humanity come to exist?" A student who insists on writing creation-science answers on biology exams can justly be flunked; the teacher is entitled to determine the range of legitimate opinion in the classroom, in keeping with the practice of the scientific community involved. But writing "I don't believe a word of this" after a completely correct answer doesn't make the answer any less correct.

5. The argument that no one can possibly understand biology without accepting evolution as true seems to be contradicted by the fact that the student in question received an "A" in one of Prof. Dini's courses. Correction: This statement turns out wrong. The student who is complaining dropped the course on becoming aware of the rule about letters of recommendation. What I should have said is that the rule only applies to students who received A grades, because an A is one of the requirements for even asking for a letter. So any student denied a letter for not making the appropriate confession of faith must have somehow earned an A.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:01 PM | |

MONKEY BUSINESS AT TEXAS TECH

Some fool who teaches biology at Texas Tech has announced that he won't write recommendation letters for undergraduates applying to graduate school in biology, or to medical school, unless they tell him they believe in the theory of evolution. Predictably, this gives the right-wing Bible-thumpers another chance to act as if they were an oppressed minority. Yech.

If the rule applied only applicants for graduate work in biology, it wouldn't be utterly baseless. After all, you probably wouldn't recommend someone for graduate work in physics who insisted that Newtonian mechanics was "just a theory" and held out for the Aristotelian theory of motion. But there is plenty of scientific work to do in biology that never touches Darwin: lots of biochemistry and molecular biology, for example, or biostatistics.

And applying the rule to medical school is just pointlessly nasty; of course there are insights to be gained from Darwinian medicine, but since most physicians don't know about them and most med schools don't teach about them, a creationist med student wouldn't be at any practical disadvantage whatever. My oncologist's views on paleontology aren't of much more importance to me than my auto mechanic's.

Eugene Volokh has several posts on this issue, asking a number of good questions both legal and moral. This one raises difficult questions about why religious beliefs that seem absurd to those not members of the religion in question aren't held to "count against" their holders in the same way as comparably far-fetched beliefs of other sorts.

Here's my two cents' worth on that point:

One reason religious beliefs get downplayed as evidence of either rationality or character is that many of them are held as "Sunday truths," either not really believed or believed in a special psychological compartment not allowed to touch real life. There are physicists who are also Biblical literalists; what do they really believe about the day Joshua made the Sun stand still in the sky? (Stopping the rotation of the Earth might be a miracle; stopping the rotation of the Earth, and then restarting it, without any effects of angular acceleration, is a contradiction in terms.)

Another reason is that many of those beliefs are held as metaphors; C.S. Lewis has a wonderful riff where he invites the scoffers who make fun of crowns and harps in heaven to stop reading literary texts that are too grown-up for them. If "man made in the image of God" and "God blowing the breath of life into Adam's nostrils" are read poetically rather than prosaically, then they're really not on all fours with the idea that the earth is flat or that the moon is made of green cheese.

It seems to me that many people who say they "don't believe in evolution" don't actually have any fixed opinion about the origin of species; rather, they're denying an apparent implication of that belief: that, in reality, human beings are merely animals. Those people are holding out for the idea that humans have something of the divine nature. That view can be taken as a metaphysical proposition about human beings, but it can also be the expression of a moral stance: that it's wrong to treat human beings the way animals are treated. Neither the metaphysical proposition nor the moral stance is obviously false. (And if we take the the "divine nature" statement as an image rather than a proposition, then a simple evaluation of truth or falsity isn't even appropriate.)

Linking the belief that humans are special to a particular view about paleontology seems to me a mistake, but, given the intellectual history of the matter, not a silly mistake. Poorly understood Darwinian views can be, and have been, given very wicked practical applications. So if someone wants to make a principle of refusing to say that humans descended from animals by natural selection, nothing compels me to think the worse of him for doing so.

The best reason to refrain from judging people negatively on the basis of their expressed religious beliefs and their religious affiliations is that such self-restraint is part of our liberal tradition. People care deeply about their religious commitments, and we should be very reluctant, not only as voters but as individuals, to do anything that puts pressure on them to disavow those commitments. Whether Prof. Dini has a legal right to his stated policy, and whether his university can compel him to change it, oughtn't to be the central issues. This is a matter of ordinary human decency. Handicapping someone in applying to medical school because he won't say something he thinks is false is mean and stupid, just as kicking a kid out of Scouting because he won't pretend to a belief in a Higher Power is mean and stupid. [The fact that the "Christian conservatives" making a fuss about the Dini affair defended the right of the Boy Scouts to discriminate on religious grounds is a good debating point, but two wrongs -- unlike three lefts -- don't make a right.]

I've written at length on the problem of bigotry against some forms of religious belief that exists in some portions of academia, which I find just as revolting, and less easy to explain, than the bigotry against atheists that persists elsewhere in the social system. I wish Professor Dini hadn't decided to illustrate my point again.

UPDATE

According to Prof. Dini's webpage, virtually all of his education was in Catholic schools, and he spent fourteen years as a member of the Christian Brothers order. He says nothing about his current religious affiliation or practice, but he does mention a strong interest in how high-school biology is taught, and in the evolution v. creation controversy. I must say I'm delighted that the teacher in question wasn't an atheist named Rabinowitz.

SECOND UPDATE

Kevin Drum, the CalPundit, thinks everyone is missing the point here. The point, he says, is that recommendations to grad school in biology ought to be based on how well the student knows biology, that evolutionary theory is central to biology, and that anyone who believes in Creationism doesn't understand evolutionary theory.

Kevin and I usually agree, but I have to dissent here, on two points. First, as noted above, the policy extends to med school, not just bio grad school. They're not the same thing. Second, it's perfectly possible to understand a theory without accepting it. I can give fairly competent accounts of the labor theory of value, humoral medicine, Lysenkoism, and the doctrine of the Real Presence, without believing any of them. If the professor wants to say that he won't recommend a student who can't explain the theory of evolution by natural selection, with appropriate reference to the evidence supporting it, that's fine with me. It's the required confession of faith that sticks in my craw:

If you set up an appointment to discuss the writing of a letter of recommendation, I will ask you: "How do you think the human species originated?" If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences.

Does Kevin want to assert that truth is self-evident, so that no one can understand a true theory without accepting its truth? Otherwise, his equation of disbelief in evolutionary theory with ignorance of biology doesn't seem to be valid. [For a critique of that optimistic epistemology, and an argument that its political consequences are noxious, see Popper's "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance."]

Kevin wants to know whether the Liberty Institute (the lawyers for the student) would complain if a divinity professor refused to recommend a student who didn't believe in God. To that I would respond "Recommend for what?" If the student is applying to a Christian seminary, the refusal would be a reasonable one. But it if she's applying to law school, or wants to do graduate work in history, I think it would be an act of bigotry. If she aced a divinity course, (Prof. Dini's policy is to recommend only students who earned an A in one of his courses) presumably that's evidence of her capacity to absorb, and work with, a body of complicated material, which is what the law school or history graduate department is interested in. Creed is irrelevant to the study of law or history, and I would say it's equally irrelevant to the study of medicine.

My job as a teacher is to supply my students with the facts, the skills, and the ideas required for them to be able to form serious opinions on whatever it is I'm trying to teach them about. It's not my job to make their opinions coincide with mine. That's the difference between a university and a fundamentalist seminary. And I happily write enthusiastic recommendations for students whose political beliefs differ radically from mine. (I just sent one off for someone who might wind up on a Republican national ticket some day.)

In the case Kevin cites, quite possibly the Liberty Institute would be in favor of intolerance. That would confirm Kevin's guess (and mine) that they're a bunch of religious bigots. But that's the difference between us and them. We're not bigots. We believe in tolerance.

Don't we?

[Follow-up post here. ]

[Further follow-up here: the Justice Department has opened a formal inquiry with a demand for documents. I thought Dini's policy was wrong -- it's since been modified and, in my view, is now largely unexceptionable -- but I think this intervention into university affairs is intolerable.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:23 PM | |

GRECIAN FORMULA UPDATE

[Previous item here]

Jane Galt recalls that Bush looked pretty gray for the State of the Union, and finds some more recent photos showing him gray rather than brown. She suggests that the photo in question, where he's clearly brown, must be the effect of lighting.

That could be right, though to my non-professional eye the rest of the tones in the photo don't suggest it; it's actually rather over-lit, which should tend to accentuate gray hair rather than hiding it, and it certainly isn't at all sepia-toned.

One possibility is that Bush is inconsistent about dyeing his hair. Jane points out that the very gray pictures she found are on the first page of this Yahoo search under "State of the Union." Those happen to be photos from the speech itself, on the 28th, and the most recent photos, from the 30th. Scroll down a little to photos from the 29th and you see him much browner.

Another possibility is that Chris, Atrios, and I simply overinterpreted the photographic evidence. That can happen.

Jane adds, sensibly, that it's pretty silly to be arguing about whether the President dyes his hair. No disagreement here. But how does that differ from making fun of the (nonexistent) plan to dress Al Gore in "earth tones?" Politically, that stuff works, and that Republicans now have, and Democrats now lack, the capacity to make that sort of point against an opponent is a big structural advantage for the GOP.

As soon as Bush apologizes to Gore for the remark about hair-dye and the thousand other petty personal insults he and his minions spun into a "character issue," and has Karl Rove tell his tame media attack dogs to cool it on John Kerry's haircut, I'll be happy to say no more about Bush's petty vanity.

But Bush's whole political shtick is to be the Personally Decent Man, by contrast to Clinton. There are two things wrong with that claim: its irrelevance, and its falsity. If the other side will admit to the irrelevance, I'll be happy to shut up about the falsity. I'd much rather talk about how he cooks his budget numbers.

A year ago in his State of the Union he promised that deficits would be "small and temporary." Now we're headed for $300 billion worth of red ink next year, and, according to Bush's own OMB Director, deficits stretching into the next decade. Yet Bush never condescended to explain to us why last year's promise is now inoperative. That's the kind of dishonesty we ought to be talking about. The personal stuff is merely metaphor.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:14 PM | |

KRUGMAN/KURTZ/RAINES/KAUS UPDATE

I take it back. Kurtz didn't leaven his nastiness with reporting, but merely with borrowing. Nicholas Confessore had the tidbit about Raines forbidding Krugman to say "lying" in this Washington Monthly piece.

That same piece turns out to contain the following gem from Mickey himself: "The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's good or bad for the country." Now Kaus has a point: a policy that is defended dishonestly can still be good policy on balance. Even so, it's a bad idea for our leaders to lie to us, and a shame to us that we allow ourselves to be lied to and ruled by liars. Therefore, it's a good thing to have journalists like Krugman prepared to call them on their lies, especially if they're lying about our future rather than about their own pasts.

If Krugman's critics started out by saying, "Yes, he is right to call Bush a liar, and it was a public service to do so, and Bush should start telling the truth and the rest of the press should start doing its job, but now that we all have the message, can't Krugman tone it down a little?" I'd say they had a point. But if they were saying that and the rest of the media was doing its job, I bet Krugman would tone it down a little.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:35 PM | |

PUZZLE SOLVED

During the campaign, Mr. Bush made a reference to the current inhabitants of Greece as "the Grecians," and was duly made fun of for doing so, since everyone else calls them "Greeks." Eugene Volokh points out that "Grecian" is a completely legitimate, though archaic, English word. (In fact, it still has some currency as an adjective.) As I understand it, though, its reference has always been to classical, rather than contemporary, Greece, as for example Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or Dryden's translation of Plutarch's "Lives of the Eminent Grecians and Romans."

If so, Eugene's defense of Bush as using a term merely archaic rather than incorrect cannot, I think, stand. Bush used a term for the ancient Hellenes in referring to the contemporary Hellenes, which was a misake.

But that left a puzzle: Where did Bush find the word? It didn't seem likely that he'd been reading Keats or old translations of Plutarch. But now (see post immediately below) we know where he saw it:

The label of his bottle of Grecian Formula.

[Update here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:55 AM | |

**************** IRONY ALERT! IRONY ALERT! **************

As has been noted before in this space, irony (as a literary device, not as a lifestyle) is a tricky business to handle. Its point is to induce the reader to agree with, or at least see, the point you're really trying to make by forcing his reason to revolt against the point you seem to be making. If you make the absurdity of the position you're pretending to adopt too obvious, the irony falls flat, like a badly-timed joke. If you make it too subtle, the reader will understand you as actually holding your "gambit" position.

Since different readers read with different critical intensities and different senses of what might possibly be true, or what you as a writer might possibly mean in earnest, any ironic expression will probably be too coarse for some readers and too subtle for others.

I thought my ironic pseudo-attack on Chris of Interesting Times and Atrios over the Bush hair-dyeing story was safetly on the broad side of the spectrum, but a letter from a reader disabuses me of that notion; she defends Atrios against my ironic charge of passing along doctored photos.

Just in case, then, let me unpack the irony.

1. Chris published, and Atrios linked to, photos showing that Bush was dyeing the gray out of his hair.

2. Chris pointed out that Bush had made fun of Gore for dyeing his hair, saying that it proved Gore "doesn't know who he is."

3. Therefore, if Bush dyes his hair, he's guilty not only of a pardonable petty vanity but also of crass hypocrisy.

4. If so, contrary to the established belief, he's just as capable of dishonesty in his private life as he is in his statements on public issues.

5. But the conventional wisdom as expressed through the mainstream media continues to paint Bush as personally sane and decent, by contrast with Clinton. We keep hearing that "He knows who he is" and "He's comfortable in his own skin."

6. So if Bush dyes his hair, and if the mainstream media outlets and pundits bury the story and continue to repeat those lines, we have one more piece of evidence that "liberal media bias" is a figment of the right-wing imagination.

7. But Chris and Atrios are known to be reliable, and Chris gives sources for his photos.

8. Ergo, BUSH DYES HIS HAIR.

9. Ergo, Bush is a lying hypocrite in private as well as in public.

10. Ergo, the media account of him as fundamentally sane and honest is eyewash, and you should remember that the next time you hear or read something good about him you can't see with your own eyes.

[Previous post here.
Update here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:18 AM | |

HOW QUICKLY THEY FORGET

Brad DeLong links to Paul Krugman, who -- unlike any other columnist, reporter, or blogger I've noticed -- actually bothered to read last year's State of the Union Address. What happened to those "small and short-lived" deficits, Mr. President?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:46 PM | |

BULLSH*T! THEY'RE MAKING THIS UP!

Chris at Interesting Times ought to be ashamed of himself for publishing obviously doctored photos, and Atrios for linking to them.

They're not really expecting us to believe that President Bush, well known for Being Comfortable In His Own Skin and Knowing Who He Is -- the very same President Bush who made fun of Al Gore for dying his hair because it showed that "he doesn't know who he is" --dyes his hair, are they? Get serious!

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:15 PM | |

My paean to the good life on the Westside drew not only Jane Galt's good-humoredly envious reaction but what seem to be quite sincere snarls of hatred from two of her visitors.

"Kate," having duly complained about the cold in New York, hastily adds:

"On the other hand, I would still rather be in good ol' NYC than in the armpit of the world known as LA."

"Eric," aiming lower than "Kate" both anatomically and rhetorically, adds the following quote from H.L. Mencken:

"If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in."

As a transplant, I don't take any of this very personally. One of my colleagues, however, a native Angeleno who spent some years in Bostonian exile, quickly wearied of the assumption that anyone born where he was born must be an airhead. (That view, he reports, was often voiced by people who considered themselves cosmopolitan but had never been west of Pennsylvania.)

The rules of the regional-abuse game are quite complex: saying nasty things about New York picks you out as a rube and a bigot, while dumping on Los Angeles establishes your sophistication. (I will need to have someone explain to me slowly why Mencken's opinions about L.A., based presumably on his observations in the Raymond Chandler era, have any relevance to the city as it now is. In any case, as a Baltimore boy myself, it seems to me that the Baltimore-based Mencken might have done well to reflect on stones and glass houses before criticizing anyplace else.)

The convention seems to be that the horrid weather on the East Coast builds character, while the excellent weather here leads to moral and intellectual degeneration. The connection of harsh climate with human flourishing is an idea at least as old as Machiavelli (see Discourses, I, 1). I'm told that Montesquieu said similar things, though Hume dissented. William McNeill in Plagues and Peoples attributes the prejudice to the fact that, in era before sewers, vaccinations, and antibiotics, people in warm climates were at greater risk of infectious disease.

My colleague attributes part of it to sheer Nietzchean ressentiment and sour grapes: if you have to live with miserable weather, it helps if you convince yourself that miserable weather is a benefit rather than a cost. No doubt cognitive dissonance also plays a role: people who have decided to live outside of Paradise need to justify their choice to themselves. And the nice-weather-makes-you-dumb idea is fully consistent with the basic Puritan notion that anything good for you must feel bad, and vice versa.

Now I'm no Angeleno triumphalist: the complete absence of civic pride, as expressed by the architecture and condition of our public buildings and the scandalous shabbiness of major cultural institutions such as the L.A. County Museum of Second-Rate Art, really gets me down sometimes. I miss deciduous trees and second-hand bookstores. The state of the Los Angeles Mummified School District is a source of constant outrage.

But the notion that no real work gets done here because everyone's at the beach, and that everyone in L.A. is concerned mostly with his muscle tone and his sign of the Zodiac, is really fairly silly. As a stereotype it lacks even the modicum of truth required for a good joke.

I remember being told, before I left Boston, "Every year you live in L.A. takes a point off your I.Q." Pehaps that's true. But then those of us clever enough to move here presumably had some points to spare, compared to those dull enough to continue to suffer Northeastern summers and winters, and Northeastern manners.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:30 PM | |

OUCH!

William Saletan in Slate on the State of the Union Address:

"What Bush said of Saddam's disarmament record could equally be said of Bush's domestic record. He has given no evidence of progress. He must have much to hide."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:27 PM | |

HOWZZAT AGAIN?

Help me out here, folks. I'm obviously missing something.

Mickey Kaus has been singing lead, with Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan doing harmony and various Volokh Conspirators providing vocal riffs, in a bloggic chorus the burden of which is that Howell Raines is destroying the New York Times by pushing a left-wing agenda, and in the service of that agenda "spiking" columns, twisting news stories, burying leads, and committing other heinous offenses against journalistic integrity. Paul Krugman's columns are offered as a case in point.

This week the Washington Post ran a profile of Krugman by Howard Kurtz. The profile is by no means a friendly one. Lawrence Kudlow -- a conservative economist of no professional reputation who has never held an academic appointment -- is allowed to say of Krugman, a Clark Medal winner who has had tenure at three of the leading five economics departments and might one day win the Nobel Prize for his work on trade theory, "His economic credentials have kind of evaporated," and no real economist is heard giving that remark the raspberry it so richly deserves. Andrew Sullivan, who must have been looking in the mirror as he spoke, is quoted on Krugman's "extreme partisanship, self-righteousness and moral condescension toward his opponents, who are obviously evil to him."

Kurtz pauses in his hatchet work for a single item of actual news: During the 2000 campaign, Krugman was forbidden to use the word "lying" to describe George W. Bush's behavior in his column. The author of this ukase: Howell Raines.

Now this account hardly seems consistent with the picture of Raines as a left-wing fanatic madly rigging everything in his paper against Republicans. Instead, it suggests that he does what editors get paid to do: decide the tone of what goes into the newspaper, whether it's about George W. Bush or Augusta National.

I was thinking of blogging the item and needling Mickey about it, but the moment passed. I was pretty sure that, of what seemed like his only options -- a decorous silence, or an admission that here was at least one datum inconsistent with his thesis -- Kaus would prefer decorum to contrition.

As part of what seems to be a divine master plan to cure my of my delusions of omniscience, Mickey found a third thing to do: cite the article as evidence for his thesis that Raines edits with a heavy hand, as if the argument all along had been about journalistic independence from editorial blue-pencilling rather than about political bias. Item here, as the P.P.S. under January 23.

Okay, I'm stumped. I disagree with Mickey about 98% of the time (the other 2% he stumbles onto the truth), but he's no one's fool, and he doesn't take his readers for fools either. So what he says must make some twisted sort of sense. But I'm damned if it can work it out.

Remember when I went off on Chris Suellentrop for ragging on Harry Potter, only to discover that I'd totally missed his satiric point? This must be another one of those, and I'm going to look and feel like a doofus when someone tells me just what it is I'm missing.

Tell you what: straighten me out on this in a private email and then keep quiet about it so I can pretend to have figured it out for myself, and I'll send your favorite charity fifty bucks. That's fair, isn't it?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:33 PM | |

THE WEALTH GAP AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT:
THE BAD NEWS IS THAT THE GOOD NEWS IS PROBABLY WRONG

Ted Barlow has a highly encouraging (for those of use who are easily encouraged) post about the relationship between the wealth of black families and the educational attainment of their kids. He cites work by Dalton Conley showing that the famous gap between blacks and whites, which persists even controlling for income (black kids from families in the highest income quintile -- not the highest income quintile among blacks, but the highest income quintile overall -- have reading scores equal to those of white kids in the next-to-lowest quintile) disappears once you control for family wealth, rather than family income.

The wealth gap by race is much more marked than the income gap. Closing it would require vigorous intervention. But if the wealth deficiency is what accounts for the difference in test scores, at least that locates the problem in a place where public policy might have some actual reach. To that extent, then, it's good news.

Alas, it isn't really so. First, the size of the wealth gap, even controlling for income, suggests black families as wealthy as white families with similar incomes are extreme outliers. That means you have to worry that wealth is proxying for other unmeasured characteristics, rather than acting directly to improve performance. If so, doing things to make black people wealthier shouldn't be expected to bring their kids' performance into line with those black families who are wealthy now.

What's worse, the outcome measure Conley used seems to have been "educational attainment" (i.e., how far someone gets in school) rather than any measure of performance, such as reading or math scores. According to my colleague Meredith Phillips, who literally wrote the book on the black-white test score gap (along with Christopher Jencks), the attainment gap, controlling for income and other demographic variables, is already fairly small, and it's not surprising that adding wealth to the equation closes it all the way.

But the link between wealth and test scores is much weaker than the link between wealth and highest grade completed, as Phillips writes:

After controlling for income, wealth can explain some additional percentage of the gap in math scores (an additional 15% of the gap if I recall correctly) but barely any of the gap in reading/vocabulary scores (at least among young children). Estimates I've run based on 5-6 year olds' vocab scores show that wealth explains no additional chunk of the gap above and beyond causally prior variables. I doubt that wealth is the full causal culprit here.

That's not to say that the wealth gap isn't worth working on in its own right: it is. But it doesn't appear that wealth redistribution, even if we could accomplish it, would solve the problem of blacks graduating from high school with skills resembling those of the average white middle-school student.

UPDATE

Ampersand posts the actual wealth tables, including a set disaggregated by income class. Ugh! And Ted Barlow graciously follows up on the above.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:31 PM | |

UN-RETRACTION IN THE JOHN LOTT AFFAIR:
ALONG COMES MARY

If you've been following the John Lott fracas, most of what follows will be old hat. The rest of you, gather round and listen closely. It's a complicated story, and it's also a character test. If you find it sad, you have a fine tragic sense and a good heart. If you find it funny, you should be ashamed of yourself, and I want you on my side in a political knife-fight.

Background: Lott, who made the famous (and vigorously disputed) finding that states that liberalize the rules for issuing permits to carry concealed weapons experience reductions in crime as a result, has been accused of fabricating a survey about "defensive gun uses." Lott claimed to have found that 98% of incidents where people used a gun to defend themselves involved brandishing only, rather than firing or actually wounding. Other surveys found much higher rates of firing, and the sample size Lott asserted was much too small to support the precision implied by the 98% claim. Lott also claims to have lost all his data, kept no financial records, and forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped with the purported survey.

Based on what I had read, I opined that some time ago that (1) Lott was probably making it up and (2) if so, that ought to count as a very serious -- career-ending -- instance of scientific misconduct. [Previous post and links here. Tim Lambert keeps a running box score.]

Imagine my dismay, then, when someone came forward who recalled having been one of the interview subjects for the survey in question. Lott's original accuser, James Lindgren (the same scholar who delighted the gun-rights folks by demonstrating the fraudulence of much of Michael Bellesiles's Arming America), interviewed the person and found him convincing. Lott's defenders were relieved, and announced that the controversy was over.

What a revoltin' development! If the survey had actually taken place, I had done Lott a serious injury by asserting that the balance of probabilities was against it and drawing personal conclusions about him (albeit tentatively) on that basis. It still seemed to me, as it does to others, that the 98% claim was unjustified and that Lott must surely have known that, but publishing a dubious interpretation is a long way from making up data.

It was put to me in an email that I owed Lott a retraction, and I procrastinated, trying to decide whether to eat my crow with salt & pepper only or try to dress it up with a sauce bordelaise about confidence intervals and Lott's curiously variable account of where the 98% number came from in the first place.

Then Atrios (oh, come on, you didn't really think you were going to get through a story like this without encountering Atrios, did you?) dropped the bombshell. Not only was the supposed interviewee a gun-rights activist (which Lindgren knew when finding him credible) and former NRA board member, he was the practitioner of an especially sleazy trick by which a gun-rights group appropriated the name of a gun-control group that had neglected file its annual report on time, thereby (unbeknownst to its organizers) losing its charter and leaving its name free for anyone to grab.

That fact, combined with the fact that no other survey respondent, and none of the workers, had come forward, suggested to me that the survey question was open again. Someone willing to cheat -- and it seems to me that the maneuver described, which everyone seems to agree actually happened that way, amounts to cheating, despite its legality -- might well be willing to lie (which, after all, is also perfectly legal, as long as you're not under oath and not selling anything).

Then came the part that's either very sad or hilarious, depending on your enlightenment level. Julian Sanchez, who like many others had more or less concluded that the survey was real, noticed a coincidence of IP addresses between Lott himself and a woman named Mary Rosh. Rosh had vigorously defended Lott, and sharply attacked his critics, in a variety of Internet forums (Lott having told various people that he personally never engaged in on-line controversy of that sort), had offered warm praise of his teaching performance, and had written an extremely enthusiastic review of Lott's book on Amazon.com. ("SAVE YOUR LIFE,READ THIS BOOK--GREAT BUY!")

After a little back-and-forth between the pro-Lott and anti-Lott sides about what could and couldn't be inferred from IP addresses, Lott acknowledged that "Mary Rosh" was his pseudonym, and that he had been making the posts himself. [Tim Lambert offers a selection of "Mary Rosh" comments, with links.]

Some of Lott's defenders have tried to make the issue here Lott's use of an internet pseudonym. By itself, that is certainly inoffensive, though a really scrupulous honesty might insist on the use of an obvious pseudonym or anonym: Publius, Atrios, Concerned Citizen, or simply "John Smith," with the quotation marks. But Mary Rosh went way beyond pseudonymity: "she" made statements that her non-existence except in Lott's imagination made contrary to fact, such as that she had taken Lott's course and found him fair-minded. I find reading "her" stuff, knowing that she is just Lott's persona, rather creepy. This isn't academic dishonesty, since it doesn't involve data or results, but it's plain old ordinary dishonesty of a fairly garish hue.

And the Amazon.com review in particular is very near the line that separates ordinary lying from legally actionable, and perhaps even criminal, fraud. The claim that the book might "save someone's life" is obviously silly, since it's about the statistical effects of legislation, not the mechanics of self-defense. But by posting it in a false name, Lott conveyed to readers (it's the lead review on Amazon.com, by the way) the impression that some real person had read his book and found it highly valuable, when that was not the case. That the review heading ends "GREAT BUY" makes the commercial context clear. Of course, no prosecutor would be bothered with such a petty fraud, but it's really infra dig. for someone who's supposed to be in the truth-telling business.

Moreover, "Mary Rosh" makes it easier to believe that Lott would not only invent a non-existent survey, but also coach a witness to confirm its existence. And even if, contrary to what now seems most likely, the survey turns out to be a reality and not a fantasy, we're still left with Lott as the inventor of "Mary Rosh" and the publisher -- not once, but many times -- of that unjustifiable 98% claim.

As I've noted before, you don't have to believe the extreme Lott claim that liberal concealed-carry laws actually reduce crime to support such laws. The strongest case against such laws is that they will tend to increase crime in a noticeable way, and that doesn't seem to be true, either. If liberalizing concealed-carry laws has any effect on crime, either way, that effect is too small to be obvious statistically. [See John Donohue's chapter in the forthcoming Brookings gun-policy book.] And after several years of several hundred thousand Texans being allowed to carry concealed, the Violence Policy Center, trying its hardest, can't come up with much in the way of actual gun violence committed by that group of people. [Note to VPC: you don't need a gun, or a license to carry one concealed, to drive drunk, so counting drunk-driving incidents by concealed-carry-permit holders doesn't really tell us anything interesting about the laws in question.]

So here's my plea to my gun-rights friends in academia. If you admit that John Lott lacks the basic honesty required for citizenship in the Republic of Science, that doesn't mean you have to give up your guns and join the Brady Campaign. You're perfectly free to believe in an individual-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment and oppose gun registration. So you ought to be willing to call this one on its merits.

The inclination to circle the wagons against a co-partisan under attack is a strong one. But Lott is now beyond reasonable defense. Those who were most vigorous in pursuing Bellesiles, and most contemptuous of those who kept defending Bellesiles as the evidence of his duplicity mounted, ought to be the first to say "Enough is enough, already."

Cut your losses, fellas.

UPDATE: The story keeps getting weirder, and sadder; now Lott is blaming the book review on his thirteen-year-old son.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:48 PM | |
Thread: John Lott

"IF THE PILGRIMS HAD LANDED AT LA JOLLA, NEW ENGLAND WOULD BE A NATIONAL PARK" DEPARTMENT

My hymn to the good life on the Westside of L.A. got a rise out of poor Jane Galt, who's suffering through a truly nasty East Coast winter. Result: my first 1500-hit day, about half referred from Asymmetric Information.

Jane, have I mentioned that I went hiking again yesterday, on a trail a little lower down? Very nice view, and absolutely quiet, but even at sunset it was just a little too warm for comfort.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:50 PM | |

JAMES CLIFFORD ON THE HERITAGE REVIVAL AMONG ALASKAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

When I walk in late to a lecture and the first thing I hear is "colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial," I expect to be bored and annoyed. In fact, I was fascinated and largely convinced instead, by James Clifford of UCSC talking about the politics and aesthetics of indigenous culture in Alaska. The high points for me were:

--The images of contemporary masks, which completely blew me away. My taste in sculpture runs to the archaic Cyclades, classical Greece and Etruria, and modern West Africa, not to the New World or the Pacific, but I found some of the Yup'ik (new vocabulary word for me) masks just astonishing. (There's a slideshow here if you click on "View the Masks," but the slides there are only a faint echo of the slides from the talk, though they're drawn from the same book.

--An account of the modern heritage movements that acknowledged their incomplete connection with the past they celebrate without being dismissive of them for that reason. Clifford compared them to the Renaissance, which also involved the appropriation, modification, and to some extent fabrication of an old, largely dead, culture, under the guise of rediscovery.

--A story about religion among the Alutiiq (another new vocabulary item) people who live on Kodiak Island. They are largely Russian Orthodox. One the one hand, the church has embraced various aspects of Alutiiq culture, including the traditional masks and shamanic dancing. On the other hand, at Christmastime, they sing thirteenth-century carols in Old Church Slavonic: songs no longer extant in Russia or Ukraine.

--The reported dialogue between a young woman building a traditional skin boat as part of a "heritage camp" and her parents:

"We're building a boat."

"You don't know how to build a boat. It will sink."

"But they're going to put the boat in a museum."

"Good. In a museum, it won't sink."

I won't try to do justice to Clifford's argument. He has a related paper here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:33 PM | |

WELL, THERE'S GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS.
WHICH DO YOU WANT FIRST?

Brad DeLong looks backward from 2023:

Next, came the shift in world incomes. We had such change before but not at this scale. Iron-hulled steamships of the late 19th century were indirectly responsible for the extraordinary rise in purchasing power of immigrants in the New World, who bought cheap European-made goods. That income shift coincided with a swing to political right on the Continent, where elites saw that free trade and industrial growth weren't necessarily in their best interests.

The consequent boom in developing countries has seen them converge toward the developed-world norm at twice the pace seen in the late 20th century. International trade in white-color jobs is growing as competitive as trade in blue-collar jobs. That fact was underscored when Chicago Business School fired its faculty a decade ago and thereafter taught its courses via teleconference by professors from the Jakarta School of Economics. The resulting wage shifts in the U.S. gives it a relative income distribution of late 20th-century Brazil.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:04 PM | |

ANTI-CLERICALISM AND RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE

Glenn Reynolds makes a rhetorical move which is often made but seems to me to embody a logical mistake: conflating hostility toward a religious movement or an institutional religious body with hostility to its members as individuals. It seems to me that only the latter, or the former where it implies the latter, ought to be called, and condemned as, "religious prejudice."

It's perfectly possible, though sometimes tricky in practice, to hate and fear a religious organization without hating or fearing its members, or wishing them ill in any way.

One case where the distinction becomes clear is the Church of Scientology. There's good reason to believe that the Church itself is a fundamentally a criminal enterprise, of which individual Scientologists (and others) are the victims. Prosecuting the leadership of Scientology doesn't strike me as an exercise of religious prejudice. However, various attempts in Germany to keep Scientologists out of public jobs strike me as much more problematic.

Similarly, one of the ways the institutional Catholic Church in America has deflected criticism regarding both its politics and the participation of much of its hierarchy in a massive cover-up of child sexual abuse is to claim that any attack on the church is a throwback to the anti-Catholic prejudice that used to be so strong in this country and in Britain. (The Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights has been the main practitioner of that trick.) But there's no reason not to regard both the possible prosecution of Cardinal Law and the ascension to Ivy League university presedencies of practicing Catholics as twin indicators of progress toward a more just society, and I am aware of no evidence of the Church's current travails translating into prejudice against individual Catholics.

In the instance Glenn cites, Atrios refers to the Washington Times, which is owned by the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, as the "Moonie Times."

On the one hand, I'm no fan of that locution, because "Moonie" is certainly an offensive epithet aimed at the Rev. Mr. Moon's followers. (If Catholic Church owned a Washington newspaper it would be obviously offensive to refer to it as the "Papist News.") On the other, it's certainly fair to remind people that the semi-official newspaper of Republican Washington is owned by a foreigner who holds lunatic religious opinions, has apocalyptic political plans and ties of unknown strength to a foreign intelligence agency, and who is also a convicted felon.

But though the word itself is a slur, Atrios has said nothing, to my knowledge, against Unification Church members, as opposed to the church's leaders. So it seems rather rough for Glenn to be comparing Atrios's hostility to the Washington Times to hostility (such as the hostility Glenn himself has often expressed) toward the people he calls "radical Muslims."

Sometimes it is actually the case that the followers of some relgious movement do in fact repressent threats to others, as witness the terms "Assassin" and "Thug." There are certainly mosques in which hatred of the kaffirs is preached, and out of which people organize to put that hatred into practice.

But the attribution of bad character to individuals because of their religous commitments largely deserves the bad name it got during the Wars of Religion, and I think the caution about making that attribution, so often dismissed as "political correctness," is a socially useful caution. Both fundamentalist Protestants and atheists face a certain amount of social and employment discrimination because others consider those beliefs to be signs of moral deficiency; that seems to me regrettable. The existence of such invidually-damaging religious prejudice makes it more important not to apply that lavel to attacks on religious institutions or leaders.

[Glenn's specific point that Atrios misstated his own connection to the Washington Times is a stronger one, and I think he's entitled to a retraction. But I take it that Atrios's point was that someone could march in an A.N.S.W.E.R.-organized rally without identifying with its goals, just as one could write a column for a Moon-owned newspaper without identifying with Mr. Moon's projects.

[Perhaps one could distinguish in the following way: the writer of an op-ed gets to express his own opinions, subject to editing; a participant in a march winds up, more or less, endorsing the views put out by the march organizers, and providing an audience for the speakes chosen by those organizers. If, as has been reported of A.N.S.W.E.R.-organized rallies, the microphones are open to Israel-bashing but not to the defense of Israel, then everyone attending the march winds up giving, will he nill he, an endorsement to the anti-Israeli view.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:45 PM | |

A FEW QUESTIONS, ASKED IN MY BEST TONE OF CALM REASONABLENESS

Is the Bush Administration actually talking about using tactical nuclear weapons to dig out buried Iraqi arsenals?

Are we really ready to set, or even talk about setting, a precedent for the unprovoked first use of nukes? (Notice that even the talking isn't free. Now if the Russians decide to use nukes against the Chechens, or the Pakistanis against the Indians, they can point to our expressed willingness to do so as evidence that their doing so didn't break any strong taboo. It's very much in our national interest to keep the use of nuclear weapons in the "unthinkable" category.)

Has anyone done the calculation about the fallout from ground bursts, which tend to be exceptionally "dirty" in radiological terms? ["Bunker busters" cannot be "enhanced radiation" ("neutron") weapons. They have to move the dirt, and there's no way of moving dirt without getting it "hot" and scattering it into the air.]

And isn't it time for some ^$*#& adult supervision at 1600 Pennsylvania?

As someone on the fence, but leaning pro-war, I'd like to hear about this from my favorite warbloggers. Does their enthusiasm for war with Iraq extend to the situation where it would involve us in making a first use of nuclear weapons? Mine doesn't. And the fact that we would be going to war under what seems to me such criminally reckless leadership is the biggest single factor keepiong my support for a war tentative.

UPDATE: A reader notes that the above fails to distinguish between ground bursts, which inevitably generate lots of fallout, and underground explosions, which generate a lot of radioactivity but don't vent it to the atmosphere. Fair point.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:30 PM | |

A SURE GUIDE TO THE EVALUATION OF CHIEF EXECUTIVES
AND UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTS

First-rate people
hire first-rate people;
second-rate people
hire third-rate people.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:37 PM | |

"IT'S A TOUGH LIFE, BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO LEAD IT" DEPARTMENT

It's 72 degrees, sunny, and the air is clear enough so that I have a beautiful view of downtown Los Angeles from the window of my office. I'm going to knock off for the day and go hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, about a ten minute drive from work and a five minute drive from home.

Today is unseasonably warm, but unless it's actually raining I can count on being able to hike comfortably any day of the year. Even on a hot summer day it's so dry that outdoor exercise is comfortable.

Once I get past the first hill, there's no traffic noise unless the wind is from the north, and I can see the ocean, Catalina Island, the whole sweep of the city, Mandeville Canyon right below me, the Santa Susanna Mountains rolling away on the other side of the San Fernando Valley, and three or four ridges beyond them to the north and west. If I go hiking in the evening after a hot day, the heat rising from the valley floor makes the city lights twinkle like stars. Usually the sunsets aren't much -- not enough clouds -- but once in a while some cirrus happen to be right over the mountain peaks behind which the sun sets, and then the show is spectacular, with the clouds lit intensely against the darkening sky. It looks as if the mountains were covered with burning snow. Less showy, but equally impressive in its way, is watching the fog from the ocean roll in like a river. Being on a hilltop completely surrounded by fog and looking up at the stars is something you don't soon forget.

Please don't tell any of the Bostonians who felt sorry for me when I moved from Harvard to UCLA. Why shatter their illusions?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:57 PM | |

EASY COME, EASY GO

Well, so much for the Thacker nomination. (See "Oh, Goody!" immediately below.) They pulled the plug.

A Christian activist chosen by the White House for a presidential AIDS advisory panel is withdrawing his name under pressure after characterizing the disease as the ``gay plague,'' along with other anti-homosexual statements.

Seems Bush appointed Thacker without having any idea of what he believed in. But it turns out the rest of the commission is nothing to write home about, either. Thanks to Atrios for the lead; he also links to a MWO take-down of Andrew Sullivan's air of outrage at finding gay-bashing in the Bush Administration.

I see that Sullivan has won the coveted Claude Raines Memorial Gambling Awareness Award for this one. That hardly seems fair to Bush, whose protestation of surprise that someone who used to work for Bob Jones University turns out to be a wee bit homophobic is at least as hard to believe as Sullivan's shock that Bush would appoint someone like that. Had I been on the selection committee, I would have proposed a split award. [UPDATE: The committee agrees.]

Note that the AP story that ran in the New York Times identifies Thacker as a "Christian activist." That's the sort of thing that makes me feel really, really good about being Jewish. But if I were a Christian, I'd be pretty upset about mass-media acquiescence in the attempt by a small group of political extremists to hijack the term "Christian" for their brand of quasi-religious lunacy.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:40 PM | |

OH, GOODY!

Just so blacks don't feel singled out, Bush has decided to appoint some people whose bigotry is against gays, instead. (Or maybe "as well"; it's hard to keep track.) One of them will be serving on the AIDS Commission.

How could anyone say that GWB lacks a heart? Or a sense of humor?

Thanks (and welcome) to the Disgusted Liberals, who have taken as their mission "helping liberals help themselves."

(Well, someone has to.)

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:10 PM | |

PRISON BUDGET BLUES

Today's Los Angeles Times reports on the inevitable: people are starting to discuss reducing California's bloated prison population (now about 160,000) as a way of dealing with the state's budget crisis.

Some quick notes:

1. We have too many people in prison.

2. Most of the people in prison would not, if they were outside the walls, commit enough crimes in the course of a year to make it worthwhile to keep them inside at a cost of $25,000 each.

3. A few of the people in prison would, if they were outside the walls, commit so many (and so serious) crimes in the course of a year that it would be worth keeping them in at many times that cost.

4. It's not easy to tell which is which just by looking at criminal histories and other easily available data, or by interviewing offenders. [Reporter to Robert McNamara: "Mr. Secretary, isn't it true that half the Pentagon budget is completely wasted?" McNamara "Absolutely. My problem is, I don't know which half."]

5. Given the presence of that minority of really bad actors, on average imprisonment has direct crime-control benefits via incapacitation well in excess of its financial costs. (It also has indirect crime-control benefits via deterrence, and indirect crime-control costs via creating ex-prisoners, whose limited legitimate economic opportunities are likely to increase their future criminal activity. How those balance out is anyone's guess.)

6. The financial costs of prison aren't the most important costs. The reason to have fewer people in prison is that prisoners, and their intimates, suffer terribly. If someone has to suffer terribly, I'd rather have it be criminals than victims. But that doesn't mean that the suffering of prisoners is something we don't have to worry about.

7. The cost of keeping someone in prison for a day is about $70. The cost of a day's parole supervision is about $3. The cost of a day's probation supervision is $1. If we could design an intensive, high-cost form of community supervision (using drug testing, electronic position monitoring, etc., and with a very tight trigger on re-imprisonment for not obeying the rules) that reduced the criminal activity of someone subjected to it by 50% compared to no supervision at all, but only cost 20% of what a prison cell costs, that would be a more cost-effective approach to crime control than incarceration; we could have a smaller corrections budget and less crime. Oh, and we could have fewer human beings kept in cages.

8. Someone subject to that program would commit a rape-murder, and the political career of whoever developed the program would be all over.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:29 PM | |

UPDATES: From my mailbag

I'm grateful (in theory, at least) to those readers who write in to keep me honest. Some recent instances (I'm suppressing the names because I don't know who does, and does not, want to be mentioned):

-- With respect to "non-economic" damages, a reader points out that loss of eyesight wasn't the ideal example, because it has financial as well as non-financial aspects. A person who becomes blind may suffer reduced income and increased need to hire people to do things for him he can no longer do for himself; those losses are straightforwardly evaluable in dollars. But of course being made financially whole in that way won't restore the person to the pre-loss level of well-being. That additional, non-financial, loss was my topic. So perhaps a better example would be a libel victim who is retired and therefore suffers no financial loss from being publicly branded a child molester. The issue of financial v. non-financial losses shouldn't be crossed with the issue of compensatory v. punitive damages: there's no relationship between the degree of negligence or malice displayed by the tortfeasor and the losses incurred by the victim.

Actually, there is one reason one might want to distinguish financial from non-financial losses. A tort system is both a regulatory mechanism and an insurance program. From a regulatory viewpoint, financial and non-financial losses ought to be treated alike; we want decision-makers to fully internalize the risks they impose on others, whatever the nature of the potential losses. But thinking about the problem from the viewpoint of potential victims, and assuming that the expected value of liability costs are going to be built into product prices, we ought to ask how much "insurance" those potential victims want to buy. In that analysis, non-financial losses may look different from financial ones because they may not be the sort of losses that increase one's marginal utility for money. If my house burns down, I've suffered a big financial loss, and the amount a dollar adds to my well-being is higher than it was before my house burned down. That's the logic of buying fire insurance.

But if I were in chronic pain, most of the things that can be done about it are relatively cheap, so the non-financial loss is fairly small, and the result of being in chronic pain would be to reduce the overall importance in my life of ordinary-sized financial gains and losses because the things that money can buy can't do much about the basic problem. Similarly with the death of a child: it's a horrible thing, but not something it makes sense to insure against, because it decreases, rather than increasing, your uses for money.

Not all non-financial losses are non-insurable in that sense, but some are, and that creates at least a smidgen of logic behind treating the two categories differently for the purposes of tort law. But an arbitrary damage cap doesn't seem like the right solution to that problem. In fact, I can't imagine the problem for which an arbitrary damage cap would be the right solution. Can you?

-- With respect to Plato, I didn't intend to imply that Popper and Russell were leading Plato scholars, or alternatively that view I attributed to them was restricted to marginal participants in the discourse about Plato; it is in fact more or less the received view. All I meant is that most of us absorbed our initial views about Plato such sources. (A passage from Russell's assault on Plato was one of the readings on my SAT verbal exam.) Nor do I mean to diss either of them; reading Russell as a teenager was an enormously liberating experience, and I remember the thrill of reading Popper's "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance" in my freshman philosophy of science class. (I still find Popper exciting and convincing both on epistemology and on the Presocratics: to a greater extent than would be professionally respectable were I a professional philosopher.)

Also on Plato: I agree with the reader who wrote to say that the philosophical focus of the Republic is the psyche, not the polis. The topic is justice as a virtue, and Socrates proposes that it will be easier to discern justice in its larger vessel rather than its smaller one. But that architectural plan didn't keep Plato from inserting some quite acute comments on political life, and (if I'm right) some hilarious satire on the "advanced" opinions of his time, into the dialogue.

Further on Plato: My use of the word "conservative" to describe Glaucon, and Socrates's other interlocutors, was ill-considered. As a reader pointed out, they are only too willing to embrace various wild-eyed schemes of reform, including the abolition of the family. "Right-wing" would have been a better term to express their aristocratic and pro-Spartan political leanings.

-- On racial preferences: A reader asserts that the system of racial preferences at the University of Michigan was in fact quota-like, because the weights in the point-score system were manipulated to guarantee a minimum level of minority enrollment. Since my reader had clearly read the documents, I'll take his word for it unless and until I'm corrected again. I still don't know what an "imprecise quota" is supposed to be.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:03 PM | |

NON-ECONOMIC DAMAGES

The use of the term "non-economic damages" in the "tort reform" movement is thoroughly disingenuous. It's hard to even imagine what such a loss would be. To an economist, anything that someone values -- in the sense of being willing to forgo something else to have it -- has "economic value." If X will pay Y to have Z, or refuse an offer of Y to give up Z, then Z is worth (at least) Y to X, by the only standard that ought to matter.

What's at stake is the status of non-financial losses. The notion that financial losses are real, while non-financial losses are somehow fictitious, must -- unless it is merely special pleading -- reflect an astonishingly false sense of values. Under what conceivable theory should the loss of a million-dollar house be fully compensible but the loss of one's eyesight, for example, be treated as worth only $250,000? Would you give up your eyesight for that sum? Neither would I.

UPDATE here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:10 PM | |

GLORY AND PENITENCE

Eugene Volokh reflects on the character of the Martin Luther King holiday:

Most American holidays (and, I suspect, most holidays in other nations) are either relatively nonideological cultural or religious affairs (e.g., Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, Christmas, Easter), or are unalloyed celebrations or glorifications of the nation or its people (July 4, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Veterans' Day). Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- and possibly to a lesser extent Labor Day, when it was first created, though I can't be sure about that -- is different: It celebrates a great man and a great success in American life, but the greatness of both comes from their fight against a great American failing. The message of July 4 is "What a great country!" The message of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday is at least in large part "What great crimes our country has committed, but what a great thing it is that we have largely overcome them."

I think that it's not bad for the nation to have at least few holidays that are occasion for self-criticism or even self-doubt, mixed with confidence in a better future. Self-congratulations are important, too, but they should be mixed with some official and repeated acknowledgements of past wrongs. But it's important to recognize that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday is a different sort of holiday, which is supposed to create a different mood and contribute something different to the national psyche than other holidays do.

I had never thought of the matter in those terms, but it seems to me that Eugene has captured an important aspect of the truth. One historical quibble: Memorial Day is originally Decoration Day, on which the graves of the Union dead were strewn with flowers, so it shares with the King holiday the combination of celebration and penitence. [Decorating Jefferson Davis's grave with flowers is a different sort of action, conveying a different message.]

But I would give primary stress in each case to the celebratory aspect. From the viewpoint of African-Americans, the King holiday is purely a celebratory one, I would think, with a message more or less like that of Passover for the Jews.

But speaking as a white American, I can reflect with more than a little pride that not once but twice in our history a substantial number of white Americans made it their business to end the oppression carried out by other white Americans against black Americans. In each case, only a minority felt strongly enough to make it a crusade, but at crucial moments they were able to command majority support for first ending slavery and then ending Jim Crow.

Chattel slavery was not a uniquely bad institution in world history -- though it ranks high up on the list -- but the struggle against it was, I believe, absolutely without precedent. Has any other country experienced a civil war fought within a dominant ethnic group over the welfare of a subordinated ethnic group? I can't think of one.

So Memorial Day and the King holiday, and the events they commemorate, don't fundamentally strike me as occasions for national self-criticism or self-doubt. Instead they make my heart swell with patriotic pride.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:51 PM | |

DUNDERHEADS 1, IRONY 0

Atrios cites Jonah Goldberg's utter misunderstanding of a Mark Twain letter on censorship as evidence for the proposition that conservatives as a class are so without a sense of humor as to make themselves ridiculous.

Atrios certainly has Goldberg's number; Goldberg, in making an argument about censorship of materials intended to be viewed by children, cites the following letter written by Mark Twain to a librarian who appealed for his help against a proposal to deny children access to Huckleberry Finn:

Nov. 21, '05.

If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that questionable companionship?

Goldberg's astonishing commentary on this:

...Mark Twain himself wanted his book banned from some libraries ... Now, I'm not in favor of pulling Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from libraries, but let's at least give a small nod to the fact that some material actually can be banned from libraries without the sky falling.

Of course, the irony here is so broad that none of my usual readers needs it explicated, but just in case Jonah Goldberg or one of his readers might be reading this perhaps I should unpack the argument for him. Twain is pointing out that the arguments made in favor of censorship in the name of traditional values would result in banning the Holy Bible, which many regard as the very root of those values. Ergo, censorship is a bad idea.

[UPDATE Goldberg concedes that "It's entirely possible that Twain was being sarcastic." And it's also, I suppose, at least within the realm of possibility that the Pope says mass. Incredible!]

"Ha ha," I hear you say. "Typical. Dumb dittoheads. No sense of humor at all."

Not so fast. No doubt you, dear reader, are aware that Plato was an advocate of censorship, believing that his young "guardians" should be brought up hearing only martial music and bombastic patriotic poetry. So we were taught by Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

But now take a look, if you will, at Republic II, 376c-385. Plato's Socrates, talking to a group of young intellectual conservatives, has no problem convincing them that censorship of reading material for the young is a good thing. He then immediately introduces as examples Homer and Hesiod, the closest thing to canonical sacred texts known to Athenian society, and they're so thick they just keep saying "Yes, Socrates."

It's the very same joke Mark Twain made, and for two millennia now people a lot smarter than Jonah Goldberg have been reading Plato's irony as if it were sober prescription. What makes this misreading even more astonishing is that Plato, later in the same text, makes a famous claim that the ideal polity would ban dramatic poetry altogether, and does so in a dialogue, a species of dramatic poetry.

As I was taught this material by Paul Desjardins, the ironies go much deeper, starting with the fact that the polity constructed in the dialogue is not in fact the city that embodies justice, but instead a luxurious city to meet the luxurious taste of Glaucon and his rich, idle friends. (372c-375). The "guardians" -- not, in the text, rulers, but warriors -- are necessary only because the city-in-speech being built is unlimited in its desire for wealth, and therefore will fall into conflict with its similarly intemperate neighbors.

Personally, I can't imagine writing or speaking without the use of irony in its various degrees, starting with the sarcastic "r-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght!" and moving up the scale of subtety. But the warning is there. Even a supreme literary artist -- which Plato undoubtedly was -- proved unable to overcome the natural thick-headedness of his readers, and wound up being identified with the very position he was satirizing. "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

UPDATE here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:49 PM | |

JOURNALISM AS SHE IS PRACTICED:
CONDI RICE, KARL ROVE, AND RACIAL PREFERENCE

Those who observe the news process have much to learn from the pair of stories in the Washington Post Friday and Saturday. The stories concern the role of Condoleeza Rice in the Bush Administration’s decision to come down against the University of Michigan’s policy of racial preferences in undergraduate and graduate admissions. [See the two posts immediately below on the language and substance of the issue; this one is about journalism and politics.]

As Sisyphus Shrugged points out in a long, hilarious essay, Post reporters Mike Allen and Charles Lane performed a remarkable feat of journalistic contortionism: writing an entire story whose very point, from the perspective of those who planted it, was the race of its subject, while mentioning virtually every fact about that person but her race.

The story was designed to establish that Bush’s decision was approved, and indeed suggested, by an Actual Black Person, so what’s that you were saying about racism, you miserable Guilty Southern White Boy? It’s a remarkable effort at spin control: not so much that its author (presumably Karl Rove) had the effrontery to try it, but that the Post was supine enough to let him get away with it.

Of course, the story said nothing about the prime irony involved: by fronting Rice as an Actual Black Person, the administration demonstrated the occasional value of having an ABP around, and thus of efforts to promote diversity, such as the very efforts on the part of the University of Michigan the Administration had just asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional.

It appears that Colin Powell wasn’t prepared to play: he has been, and remains, on record in favor of preference programs, which he has acknowledged gave his own career a useful boost or two. (What's that you said, Mr. Belafonte?)

But it also appears that Rice wasn’t willing to be used quite to the extent that Rove, or whoever it was, tried to use her. Saturday’s Post had a follow-up story by Allen in which Rice “clarifies” her position: it seems she thinks that the use of race as a factor in admissions can be appropriate, though she thinks that facially “race-neutral” means to increase diversity should be tried first. (The brief filed by the administration in the law school case acknowledges that “diversity” can be sought as a goal, but seems to argue that adequate race-neutral means to boosting it are always available, so that in practice it could never be used. The brief is also notable for its invention of the spectacularly self-contradictory concept of an “imprecise quota.” [p. 38])

The follow-up story (by, remember, the lead author of the original story) contains the following paragraph, to be chewed and savored by connoisseurs of the art of not admitting error:

Rice's statement came after an article in The Washington Post yesterday in which several White House aides said she had played a crucial role in Bush's deliberations and helped persuade him to publicly oppose Michigan's program. Officials who described her role to The Post noted that it was unusual for her to become such a major factor in an issue that did not involve foreign policy. Their comments had the effect of associating a respected African American adviser to Bush with a decision that has been criticized by many black leaders. Rice reportedly was angry about the article in part because she believed it had been written only because she is black.

So (1) the Washington Post published a story attributing views and actions to a senior official without ever interviewing that official, (2) the story got that person's views and actions substantially wrong, but (3) no apology is called for. Nor does the reporter reveal the name of the person who (one must assume) deliberately misled him, and led him to mislead the country. It is well understood as a matter of journalistic ethics that the identity of a source speaking on background can be revealed if it turns out that the source was using anonymity in the service of an effort to deceive. It is also understood as a matter of practical politics that any reporter who burns Karl Rove in that fashion is toast.

This event will not, of course, damage the position of the Post as one of the “liberal media” in the world of right-bloggic demonology. That it put the President's National Security Advisor in a thoroughly false position is evidently of no concern to Rove & Co.; after all, it's not as if we were at war or anything.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:32 AM | |

THE LANGUAGE OF THE RACIAL-PREFERENCE DEBATE

The University of Michigan has a program under which membership in various statistically underrepresented groups has value under a point system used to control admission decisions. What should we call it? The term used above, “racial preference,” seems to me neutral and descriptive, though few proponents of such programs will agree with me.

Their preferred term is “affirmative action.” The program described certainly fits that label, but the label doesn't describe it very well: literally, “affirmative action” means any action designed deliberately to increase the participation of statistically under-represented groups, including sending recruiters to schools with large African-American enrollments. Targeted marketing programs aren't very controversial; it’s the use of race or analogous factors in choosing among applicants that raises hackles, so calling a controversial program by a name that includes lots of uncontroversial programs seems to me a trifle sneaky. Under the program, some people will, at the margin, get in because they’re black, and others will not get in because they’re white. It seems to me that “racial preference” is the right description.

Certainly “quota” is the wrong desciption for the Michigan program, though its opponents, including the Administration, keep saying they’re against it because it’s a quota. That description is false at two distinct levels. Historically, a quota is a ceiling, not a floor; it was brilliant, but rather dishonest, of the neocons to apply the term used to describe the programs that used to keep minority enrollment down, and hated for that reason, to programs designed to push black enrollment up. Setting aside, say, 10% of the slots for African-Americans would indeed create a “quota” of 90% non-African-Americans, but that’s hardly analogous to saying “No more than four Jews per class.”

["Quota" is also used to describe enforcement programs for anti-discrimination laws that rely on achieved outcome levels rather than process measures. It ought to be, but isn't, considered strange that the folks who support enforceable numerical targets as a way to monitor and manage educational quality oppose enforceable numerical targets as a way to monitor and manage integration efforts, and vice versa. But let that pass for now.]

Even if we grant the use of “quota” to mean merely “enforceable numerical target,” and even if we regard “quotas” so defined as bad, the Michigan program doesn’t seem to fit. The point system may be designed to achieve a target level of African-American enrollment, but nothing guarantees that it will do so in any given year. That's the reason the Administration had to invent the concept of "imprecise quota" to explain why a system that established no enforceable numerical target was still a quota. The disinclination to tell the truth if there's any feasible alternative is one of the distinctive characteristics of the Rove Administration.

UPDATE here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:18 AM | |

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE RACIAL-PREFERENCE DEBATE

So what do I think about what should be done about the "affirmative action" problem? I’m sorry you asked that question, but I suppose I ought to answer it.

I think that in some cases diversity serves legitimate organizational interests, but I doubt that “diversity” is a good shorthand for the goals to be served by racial preference programs. Racial preferences and other forms of affirmative action ought to be evaluated, in my view, as means to the end of shrinking the inter-ethnic gaps (and most of all the gap between African-Americans and the rest of the society) on various measures of income, wealth, well-being, and social influence, toward the goal of creating a society in which being black is no more important in determining one’s social position and opportunities than being, say, of Irish descent is now. [Which, let’s not forget, is substantially less important that was the case one or two or three or four generations ago: being Irish in 1870 was probably as important as being black today.]

I would say the same thing about social class: Children whose parents never attended college ought to get some sort of leg up in the elite college admissions process, both because I think the yuppie puppies would benefit from meeting as equals some people who chose their ancestors less wisely and because the children of the poor have had, on average, less than an even break, and increasing the rate of intergenerational social mobility is consistent with American ideals.

Given that as a goal – which I acknowledge not everyone shares – then the question is how best to accomplish it. Here’s how I would define the problem formally:

Assume we have Y applicants for X slots at, let’s say, an elite university, and that we can rate those applicants according to some scoring system in which group membership is not a factor. Call that “quality.” (Calling it “merit” suggests that persons of the highest “quality” deserve preference over those of lower quality, which may or may not be the case.) If “quality” is the only thing that matters, then the optimal choice rule is to pick the applicants in descending order of measured quality until all the slots are filled.

We might also care about the composition of the group: needing a critical mass of some characteristics (enough musicians to fill the college orchestra), at least a sampling of others (Sinhalese? Montanans? Conservatives?) for the sake of diversity in its literal meaning, and not too many of still others (pre-med or pre-law students, perhaps). Or we might not want a college class consisting entirely of tall girls and short boys, on the theory that such an arrangement would interfere with social life. Such considerations would complicate the choice algorithm.

Now assume that there is some group G that is “under-represented” in the class resulting from the choice algorithm we select, in the sense that we’d like to have more, rather than fewer, members of G in the final mix, other things being equal. Assuming that the “quality” measure is valid, we’d also like to have more quality, rather than less, again other things equal. Those two objectives will trade off. Once we’ve taken all the G-member applicants who rank as highly on quality as the lowest-ranked non-G-member applicant accepted, then every additional G-member we take will reduce overall quality as we measure it.

Pretending that the quality of applicants is some ineffable characteristic not subject to measurement, or that the complexity of needing enough oboe players and not too many nerds makes the whole process irreducibly arbitrary, is simply obscurantism in the service of refusing to face the hard problem. I understand why many people would prefer to avoid saying that there are proportionately many fewer blacks than whites among high-school graduates with the very best academic preparation, but if it weren’t true then we would have to re-estimate the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Undeserved suffering may be, as Dr. King liked to say, redemptive (though I rather doubt it) but we can’t just wish away the results of generations of poverty and discrimination.

Given the existence of the tradeoff, what we want is a process that will give us as much overall quality as possible for any achieved level of G-membership, and as much G-membership as possible for any given sacrifice of overall quality. The approach that accomplishes that is to rank-order G-members and non-G-members separately, and take from the top of each list. (This is mathematically equivalent to the approach called “race-norming” when applied to standardized testing programs.) We can set a quality cutoff, take all G-members down to that cutoff, and then fill the balance of the class the best non-G-members; we can set a G-membership floor (“quota”), take that many G-members, and fill the balance with the best non-G-members, or we can decide where to make the cut once we have the applications in hand, based on how well we’re doing on each objective and on the terms of the tradeoff as we face it.

That might mean setting an upper limit to how big the gap we’re prepared to allow between the lowest-quality G-member accepted and the highest-quality non-G-member rejected. That gap measures both the quality cost of “diversity” and the likely visibility of the “quality” difference between the two groups of students, or graduates, which is certainly one negative feature of aggressive preference programs.

(Oddly enough, I have never heard the beneficiaries of legacy admissions policies, including the one that got our current President into Yale, or of geographic diversity programs, such as the one that got our former President his Rhodes Scholarship, complaining about the resulting stigma.) [UPDATE: A reader who attended Yale College and Harvard Law School reports that the stigma was nonetheless real: "I was actually quite shocked at the level of disdain for students who got in through legacy admissions (and everyone knew who they were)." So may I now assume that the same folks who oppose racial preferences out of concern about stigma will oppose legacy admissions for the same reason? After all, it isn't fair to the legacies who actually could have gotten in on their own to devalue their credentials by association with people who are just relatives of buildings.])

Attempts to avoid facing the terms of the quality/diversity tradeoff through “race-neutral measures” must increase the quality sacrifice required to achieve any given level of diversity, because in general they will lead to taking some lower-quality non-G-members in preference to higher-quality non-G-members merely because they share some characteristics (e.g., attendance at certain high schools) with G-members. That is, “race-neutral measures” require you to foul up your entire selection process, including the part that applies to sorting applicants from the non-target group, in order to get the “diversity” you want. (Some police departments have abandoned the use of IQ testing for candidate cops in order to avoid screening out too many African-American applicants.)

In return, race-neutral measures allow you to avoid facing either the fact that some non-G-members are being excluded because of their non-G-membership or the precise terms of the quality tradeoff. Too high a price, in my view.

UPDATE

A note from a reader convinced me that the above is obscurely written. Perhaps an example will help:

Imagine you run a police department that recruits cops based in part on an IQ test, which turns out to be a pretty good predictor of job performance; higher IQs correlate, among other things, with lower rates of infliction of severe injury or death on suspects. [No, I don't want to have the IQ argument now; pick your own predictor if you're IQ-phobic.] But the department is also concerned about having a good representation of group G among cops, and it turns out that G-members tend to underperform non-G-members on IQ tests.

You could fix that by keeping the IQ test and picking both G-members and non-G-members based on their IQ scores, but using a lower cutoff for G members. That would be a non-race-neutral "quota" system. It ensures that you get the "best" (by this partial measure) G-member and non-G-member recruits, minimizing the sacrifice of average IQ score for any given target representation level for group G.

Alternatively, you could eliminate the IQ test, or keep it but simply set a very low cutoff score for "adequate" IQ and make everyone above that level eligible to be hired. If the distribution of IQ scores is lower among G-members, then lowering the cutoff score will tend to increase the representation of group G among those selected. That's a "race-neutral" measure. Because you're now selecting neither G-members nor non-G-members based on your quality measure, the overall measured quality of the group you hire will be lower under this system than under the forbidden "quota." Both the G-members and the non-G-members hired will, on average, have lower IQs than would have been the case using an explicitly race-conscious selection mechanism, and you wind up with a dumber and more brutal police force because you didn't want to be explicit about your need to hire G-members and the costs in quality terms of doing so.

More here; Glenn Loury supplies some numbers.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:05 AM | |

STOP THE PRESSES!
THE OMB DIRECTOR TELLS THE TRUTH!

Mitch Daniels says "deficits may continue into the next decade." Mickey Kaus seems to be surprised, and not at all pleased. (He holds out some hope that the Washington Times got it wrong, but here's the same story, with more detail, from the New York Times.

Most of my fellow left-bloggers seem to froth at the mouth at the mention of Kaus's name, and I'm sure his sudden discovery that the Bush Adminstration is terminally fiscally irresponsible will lead various of my friends to nominate him for the covted Claude Raines Award given out by Sisyphus Shrugged. [See the Daily Kos, for example.] After all, Paul Krugman, whom Kaus never tires of vilifying, and Brad DeLong, whom he has treated only somewhat less shabbily, have been telling us for a long time exactly what Daniels just said: the numbers never added up, and if the last round of tax cuts becomes permanent (forget about the next round) so will the red ink.

The goal of the Bush tax cuts was, and is, to bankrupt the federal government, in order to make domestic initiatives impossible and to force a butchering of Medicare and Social Security when the boomers retire. It's exactly the Reagan plan, as revealed in David Stockman's book.

But the fact that you and I wasn't surprised doesn't mean that Mickey's surprise and dismay aren't real. Indeed, I'm convinced that they are completely genuine. Having developed a thorough loathing for some of the current and recent leaders and power groups within the Democratic party (way out of proportion, in my view, but not by any means incomprehensible), he had a desperate desire to believe that Bush wouldn't be, and wasn't being, a complete and utter disaster. I recall being able to convince myself in 1976 that Jimmy Carter wouldn't be a complete and utter disaster, so I know how he feels.

If the latest revelation, and a few more like it, eventually convince him otherwise, I for one will welcome him back to the ranks of the neoliberals. I sometimes think that James Carville and I are the only two Democrats left with the inborn viciousness that serves Republicans so well, and I'd love to bring that number up to three by getting Mickey's marvellously poisonous pen working for our side.

[And when Glenn Reynolds discovers that Bush is attacking Iraq instead of taking on Saudi Arabia, as opposed to attacking Iraq as preparation for taking on Saudi Arabia, and figures out that, while most Democrats take anti-libertarian positions with some discomfort, and largely out of perceived political necessity, the current Republican crew is deeply and abidingly anti-libertarian in the personal sphere and not really opposed to corporatism in the economic sphere, I'll be happy to welcome him as well. The political equivalent of "First do no harm" is "Throw the rascals out," and anyone who notices that the current crew is a bunch of rascals is welcome to join the tossing bee.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:56 PM | |

DAMON RUNYON EDITS ECCLESIASTES

While it may be true
that the race is not to the swift
nor the battle to the strong,
that's the way to bet.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:16 PM | |

CONCERNING PROVERBS

I love proverbs, and always have. I collect them, remember them, use them, modify them. Occasionally, I even try to invent one. By "proverb" here I mean a short phrase or sentence embodying an idea that applies to many situations and that is so familiar it is routinely used without attribution. Even in formal writing, I will say:

The race is not to the swift.

not:

As the Preacher saith, "The race is not to the swift."

or:

"The race is not to the swift," [Eccl 9:11].

That is, proverbs are treated as common intellectual property. Correspondingly, proverbs can be modified at discretion, without reference to the original maker: Churchill promised the English people nothing but "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," but they remembered it as "blood, sweat, and tears," and so it is.

It seems to me -- speaking here under the correction of those who have scientific knowledge -- that our spoken and written language has become less proverbial (as well as more cliched) over time. That creates a problem for those who are heavy proverb-users: we are sometimes taken to be inventing material we mean to be merely repeating or referring to.

Just now, for example, I was on the phone with a reporter writing a story about Colombia's decision to include the value of peasant coca-farming in its national income accounts. The reporter, quite reasonably, asked whether such information could be gathered accurately. I said, roughly, "Of course it can't, but a reasonable guess is better than treating the value as zero. You do what you can, where you are, with what you have." The reporter then asked me to repeat the last phrase, evidently intending to quote it and attribute it to me; I had to explain that I was quoting rather than inventing. (A quick Google finds an attribution to TR, and the canonical version ends "what you've got," which seems to me less elegant; I'm sticking with my version.)

Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a measure of how weird I am?

[Some years ago David Hsia and I assembled a commonplace-book we called "Out of Context." I've uploaded it, and the link is below. Contributions welcome.]

Out of Context

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:29 PM | |

REWARD OFFERED

Now that the New York Times has published its highly flattering portrait of Glenn Reynolds, I'm offering a $5 to the first person who spots anything resembling an apology or retraction from any of the right-bloggers who published warnings about the coming Times "hit job" on Reynolds.

Perhaps the reason the New York Times doesn't bill itself as "a crusading liberal newspaper" is that it isn't a crusading liberal newspaper, but a document published by a bunch of human beings trying, not always successfully, to run a real, balanced newspaper. Just try to imagine a truly crusading paper -- the Washington Times, for example -- running a piece that nice about someone on the other side of the partisan divide.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:57 AM | |

QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION

David Hsia has an editorial in the latest JAMA on the federally-mandated quality-improvement initiative in hospital-based health care.

The Institute of Medicine asserts that medical errors kill more people in the United States each year than motor vehicle crashes. For complex reasons, existing systems of quality assessment, review, and improvement function suboptimally.

Unfortunately, the CQI initiative has not yet attained full acceptance by the general public. The name-blame-shame model produces readily understandable headlines, but it does not methodically eliminate errors to improve statistical outcomes. Yet even if every worker in a health care system could do his or her job perfectly, most events that are considered to be errors would still occur. Although organizations like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement have led the effort to extend the CQI initiative into health care, the recent survey by Blendon et al makes it clear that neither members of the public nor physicians appreciate that poor systems cause most errors.

Contrast that reasoned tone with the adversarial debates over quality improvment in education. Part of the difference is that the health care industry, and the cluster of professions around it, have enough political muscle to be allowed, more or less, to manage their own affairs. Another part is that doctors admit that there are measurable outcomes in medicine, and that in principle physicians should be held accountable for what happens to their patients.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:07 PM | |

PUBLIC OPINION ON THE WAR WITH IRAQ .

War with Iraq still seems to be scheduled for about this time next month. Various attempts to dissect the public mind with survey questions suggest that the average voter (quite sensibly) doesn't really know what to think. The latest Gallup Poll seems to have asked the question in a new format:

"As you may know, the Bush Administration says it has evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or programs to develop them. On January 27th, United Nations weapons inspectors will report their findings so far to the UN. If the inspectors have not found any evidence, what should the United States do: invade Iraq with ground troops based on the evidence the Bush Administration says it has, invade Iraq with ground troops only after the UN inspectors find evidence of weapons, or not invade Iraq with ground troops regardless of what the UN inspectors find?"

Invade based on Bush Administration evidence 23 %
Invade only after UN inspectors find evidence of weapons 52 %
Not invade regardless of what UN inspectors find 19 %
No opinion 6 %

[Results posted on Polling Report.]

Since no one really expects the inspectors to find a smoking gun, Bush will be going into Iraq with a somewhat queasy public behind him. That won't matter if victory is quick and easy and the post-invasion clean-up is cheap and effective. But the first half of that "if" statement is only plausible, and the second half something less than that.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:34 AM | |

THAT WAS A JOKE, DAMMIT!

Paul Krugman responds to a mildly scary experience -- someone forwarded to him an email from someone signing himself "drstrangelove" offering cash for dirt about Krugman -- with a good-naturedly humorous post in which he lays out all the details himself, and concludes by asking for the promised check. One of the questions had to do with Krugman's consulting arrangments; Krugman describes them, and adds, "I've done missions for the UN, consulting for the World Bank and IMF, etc., but those things aren't lucrative. I'm also a "Centenary Professor" at the London School of Economics - it doesn't pay me anything, but might be a helpful connection when I'm forced to flee the country."

The post overall isn't funny enough to keep Garrison Keillor up nights, but it's an astonishingly temperate response to something that would have left me pretty angry. In context, the "flee the country" remark is obviously tongue-in-cheek. (Krugman's suggestion that the Bush Administration has probably already checked him out to see if he has any personal vulnerabilities appears to be serious, but it's also quite plausible: Krugman is certainly a considerable thorn in their side, and you can ask John McCain whether Karl Rove is willing to play hardball at times.)

Daniel Drezner -- who acknowledges that the snooping expedition was something worth getting angry about -- describes this as "border[ing] on megalomaniacal paranoia." Would it be rude to suggest that Mr. Drezner borders on terminal humorlessness?

[Not, however -- unlike some of Krugman's critics -- from terminal Bush-worship and wilful blindness about basic economics. Drezner isn't happy with the new round of tax cuts at all, at all.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:53 PM | |

CAN YOU SAY "OFF THE RESERVATION"?

See? Only partisan Democrats like Krugman and DeLong think Bush's stimulus plan won't stimulate much.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:27 PM | |

LATEST TEA LEAVES

The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll doesn't seem to be good news for Mr. Bush:

"If George W. Bush runs for reelection in 2004, would you say you will definitely vote for him, might vote for or against him, or will you definitely vote against him?"

Definitely For Bush 36
Might Vote For or Against 31
Definitely Against Bush 32
No Opinion 1

Jan. 10-12, 2003. N=1,002 adults nationwide. (Results are among registered voters.)

The same poll shows his job approval down to 58% and his job disapproval up to 37%, his worst showing since before 9-11 (he was 51/39 right before the disaster). [Gallup attributes the drop to the Korean situation; Bush's foreign-affairs rating is now 53/42.] Ipsos-Ried shows 58/38 on the job performance question. The political observers who said that his aggressive campaigning this fall would make him a more divisive figure seem to have been right. The figures through December suggested to me that Bush had levelled off after the long decline from the post-9-11 peak, but now I'm not so sure.

However, compare the Gallup re-elect figure with other results available on Polling Report, such as this one from Zogby:

"Do you think President Bush deserves to be reelected or do you think it is time for someone new?"

Deserves Reelection 51
Someone New 36
Not Sure 13

Latest: Jan. 4-6, 2003. N=1,001 likely voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.2.

That suggests to me that about a third of the electorate is set against Bush, somewhat more than a third but less than two-fifths solidly for him, with the folks in the middle somewhat leaning in his direction if pushed. What I don't see is the sort of solid popularity that would make it dangerous to attack him. If the Democrats can direct more of their fire at him than at each other for the next twenty-two months, he could be taken.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:45 PM | |

DIM BULB DEPARTMENT

Q: Mr. President, how many North Korean nuclear devices does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Saddam Hussein.

More on Ted Barlow.

Speaking of illumination, now's probably as good a line as any to quote my friend David Kennedy:

"It is better to light a candle than to investigate the root causes of darkness."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:34 PM | |

"NO VALUE, REALLY"

To those of you who served in Vietnam, Don Rumsfeld offers a one-finger salute. Patrick Nielsen-Hayden responds.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:25 PM | |

MANNERS-AND-CUSTOMS-OF-THE-QUAINT-NATIVES DEPARTMENT

Kieran Healy illustrates how anthropology can help make sense of weird behavior in Malawi, Greenland, and the United States. And don't miss the hilarious follow-up post, with its tour of the "new Canada":

In this land of the musk-ox, the beaver and the moose, there is no musk-ox or beaver or moose meat to be had. The man behind the counter at the meat store is little more than a butcher. The remains of cows and sheep and pigs are all he has to sell...

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:17 PM | |

EDSALL ON MORALITY POLITICS

Tom Edsall has some thoughts in the latest Atlantic on the politics of morality. Usually lugubrious about Democratic prospects, Edsall points to declining religiosity as measured by self-reported church attendance (between 1972 and 2000, the proportion reporting never going to church tripled to 33%) as good news for the Democrats, and thinks that Republicans put themselves at risk if they make themselves "the party of sexual repression."

From his word processor to God's in-box.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:12 PM | |

TAKE THAT, MR. NEWCOMB!

The latest item in Brad DeLong's "Mathematical Calculations" series is a version of what the philosophers call "Newcomb's problem," or "Newcomb's paradox," though the relative contributions of Newcomb and Nozick to its formulation are, I gather, unclear. Here's the problem as DeLong states it:

An all-knowing alien who has a perfect computer model of your mind lands on earth. Xhsbr (that's a pronoun, not a proper name) shows you a box with two compartments, one compartment of which is clear and the other compartment of which is opaque. Each side has a door. You can see $10 in the clear part of the box. The alien says that xhsbr has analyzed your psychology, and if you are the kind of human who would not take the $10 xhsbr has put $1,000,000 in the other, opaque compartment, which will be yours. But if you are the kind of human who would take the $10, xhsbr has put nothing in the other, opaque compartment. The alien says that you must first open the door to the clear compartment (and take the $10 or not) before the door to the opaque compartment will open. The alien says that the door to the clear compartment will only open once.

What do you do?

One reader notes that this is a problem in philosophy rather than mathematics, which is fair enough comment. Another notes that the claim about "infallibility" is hard to reconcile with intuitions about free will (or, I would add, the availability of true randomization devices: what if you set up a mechanical array that makes the action of taking the $10 or leaving it depend on some quantum-level event?) and that the problem is more usually formulated in terms of your observation of the results of choices made by others: they always, or almost always, correspond to the rule that the greedy are punished and the abstemious rewarded.

The point of the puzzle is to challenge the idea of "dominance" as used in decision analysis and game theory. A dominant choice is one that makes you better off whatever the other player does, or however some uncertainty is resolved. In this case, taking the $10 leaves you either with $10 instead of nothing or with $1,000,010 rather than $1,000,000, since by hypothesis the decision about whether your get the $1 million or not is already made. Thus it is a dominant choice, and you should take it. But it is paradoxical that those who make the "right" move do so much worse than those who make the "wrong" move.

Here's my proposed solution to the paradox:

Consider the problem in advance. Clearly, in the circumstances as described, those who are so constituted as to leave the $10 are better off than those so constituted as to take it.

I therefore now made a public promise to to always leave the $10 if given that choice. Violating such a commitment is not something I would do for $10, so when the time comes I will leave the $10 because of the commitment. That is, by making the commitment, I make leaving the money, rather than taking it, the dominant choice. I'd rather have nothing but my integrity than have $10, and I'd rather have my integrity and $1,000,000 than not have my integrity and $1,000,010.

If the circumstance is actually as stated, I will then collect $1 million, and offer words of thanks and praise to Newcomb and Nozick for causing me to think the problem through.

Moreover, I hereby resolve to deal analogously with any analogous problem that I may encounter.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:32 PM | |

AN OBLIQUE THOUGHT ON THE TRENT LOTT AFFAIR

Glenn Loury makes an observation on the Trent Lott affair I haven't heard anyone else make. While Lott was thrashing about madly in an attempt to keep his head above water, he more or less offered to make concessions on various race-related policy issues in return for support from African-Americans and those who identify with their aspirations. That offer was not merely rejected, it was mocked. That seems to Glenn to have been an unwise move, in purely interest-group terms.

That conservatives should have opposed any such deal is obvious. Lott's stepping down was no great loss to them, and they certainly wouldn't have wanted to see those concessions made. But why should Lott's overtures have been rejected with such contempt by most of the black political leadership and its white allies? Was it really so much more important to punish Lott than to secure practical advantage from his misstep?

Even if his proclaimed rebirth as an anti-racist was insincere, he might still have kept whatever deal he made. Now the Republicans have cast all their racist sins onto this scapegoat, and neither he nor his party is left owing African-Americans anything.

UPDATE: A note from a reader:

One prominent black leader did take Trent seriously: Rep. John Lewis.

Lewis, whose civil rights credentials are second to none in terms of heroism, leadership, and moral integrity, accepted Lott's apologies as sincere, and is apparently going to accompany Lott on a tour of important southern civil rights locales, supposedly in the spring.

SECOND UPDATE:

Jacob Levy thinks that making a deal for Lott's survival would have involved a sacrifice of the moral high ground and thus been inadvisable even on practical grounds. I can see both arguments clearly, and don't have a strong intuition about which ought to be the more convincing.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:50 AM | |
Thread: John Lott

AN ITEM FROM MY COMMONPLACE-BOOK

Desire and wrath
are good servants,
bad masters,
and no man's friends.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:26 AM | |

THE JOHN LOTT AFFAIR

The toughest thing to deal with in any sort of argument is apparent misconduct by people on your side. It's no surprise that the gun-control folks have been giving John Lott a hard time about his apparent fabrication, not just of survey results, but of an entire survey, in an attempt to cover up a mis-citation of someone else's work in his book Less Guns, More Crime. But those on the pro-gun side of the question must have been tempted to keep quiet, to deny the evidence, or to make excuses for Lott.

It is very much to the credit of Glenn Reynolds that he addresses the issue head-on, and doesn't cut Lott much slack. The Lindgren post he links to is really devastating. Tim Lambert has a summary of the blogospheric action, which also leaves Lott looking quite bad. Lambert asserts that Lindgren was an early critic of Bellisles, the historian who faked data in an attempt to show that privately-owned guns were rare in Colonial America.

It's not quite inconceivable that Lott actually conducted the survey in question, but his explanation really requires a lot of believing. (Did Lott's dog eat his homework a lot when he was in school?) In particular, one has to believe not only that Lott can't remember the names of any of the students who did the survey for him in 1997 but also that not a single one of those students, hearing about the controversy, would have come forward to identify himself and his (or her) co-workers. (Recall that the University of Chicago isn't the University of Ohio; it has only hundreds of students per graduating class, so if Lott really wanted to he could just get a class list from the alumni office and run his finger down it until he spotted some of the names.)

A second survey, also done by Lott, purportedly replicates the results of the first. Unlike the first survey, the second has a still-extant questionnaire and data tabulation available for inspection. One scholar on the pro-gun side of things has argued that the correspondence of results is evidence, not merely for the truth of the underlying claim about defensive gun uses, but also for the proposition that the first survey had actually been conducted (else how could Lott have guessed the result so accurately)? But that reasoning doesn't seem sound to me. As Lindgren points out, the reported results are inconsistent with many prior studies. And survey results aren't at all hard to fake, especially considering that the people making the phone calls for the second survey were very likely aware of the desired results and of the high stakes involved.

How much does any of this matter? That really breaks into two questions:

--How should Lott's findings now be treated?
--How should Lott himself now be treated?

The answer to the first of those questions turns out, I think, to depend on the answer to the second.

Glenn makes the point that the claim in question -- that only 2% of self-reported "defensive gun uses" actually involve firing the weapon, as opposed to merely brandishing it -- is quite peripheral to the claim for which Lott is most famous: that laws permitting anyone allowed to own a gun to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon reduce the incidence of crime.

Fair enough. But what basis is there for believing that more important claim? Why, Lott's own reports of the results of his econometric analysis, based on a data set he assembled. Both assembling a data set and doing econometrics involve making a very large number of choices, leaving plenty of room for legitimate differences of opinion -- and plenty of room for outright cheating.

Other scholars have re-analyzed the "More guns, less crime" claim and found it wanting. That's not surprising, and the result would, in the ordinary case, be simply a research dispute, which might either be resolved by further investigation or left an open question. But that assumes that we have researchers of professional standing on both sides of the question.

With respect to Lott's standing in the research community, if he faked results it doesn't matter whether he faked them on something serious or something minor. A single case of unmitigated scientific fraud should, and usually does, end an academic career. No one will hire that person, give him research grants, or publish his findings. And it has to be that way. Scientists don't have auditors. They have to trust one another. Faking is hard to detect. Once someone has faked results, there's simply no reason to believe that any other results he comes up with aren't faked.

If Lott found that liberalizing concealed-carry laws caused reductions in crime, and other researchers using similar methods and data found otherwise, and if Lott can be shown to have practiced scientific fraud, then unless and until someone else does the same work from scratch and gets Lott-like results, the default option is to believe the other researchers.

Nothing we discover about Lott can take away the fact that years of experience with liberalized concealed carry have provided little or no evidence of increased firearms-using crime as a result. The Violence Policy Center's report License to Kill, which details every single recorded crime committed by anyone who obtained a concealed-carry permit in Texas from 1996 to 2001 in an attempt to show that the policy had bad results, in fact demonstrates the contrary. (Someone ought to tell the VPC that it's not necessary to have a concealed weapon, or even a permit for a concealed weapon, in order to drive drunk, so that the finding that some permit holders were arrested for DUI tells you precisely nothing about the merits of the policy.)

That finding seems to me to be a very strong argument for "shall-issue" laws: they give some people a right they value, at very little apparent cost to anyone else. Not everyone will be convinced by that argument; for example, it's at least conceivable that concealed-carry laws increase the level of fear without increasing the actual rate of armed assault. If I were writing a law about concealed carry, I'd like to tighten up a little on who gets to have a gun, and I'd like a law against possessing a loaded firearm (concealed or not) while under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants. Still, the case seems like a strong one even without the Lott claim to back it up.

But the claim itself -- that liberalizing concealed-carry laws can significantly reduce crime -- should now, I think, be regarded as probably false, unless and until Lott is vindicated in the survey affair or someone not tainted by a history of scientific misconduct comes up with new evidence in its support.

And even if Lott's thesis is revived, Lott himself should -- again, unless he can demonstrate that he did in fact carry out the 1997 survey as he has described it -- be excluded from the research community. Fool me once, shame on you ...

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:50 PM | |
Thread: John Lott

CONCERNING LIEUTENANT BUSH

The Democratic Veteran has some thoughts about GWB's "honorable" record in the Texas Air National Guard. It seems that the DD-214 (that's what feather merchangs like you and me call "discharge papers") used to contain a set of numbers called "separation codes" that told quite a lot about the holder's actual military service. The media, the McCain campaign, and the Gore campaign all having failed to do their plain duty two years ago, this is largely an exercise in shutting the barn door after the horse is stolen, but there would still be some value in helping to expose Bush's asssertions about his service as the tissue of lies they almost certainly are. If you think this stuff is pretty irrelavant to debates over serious public policies, you're right. If you think it's not effective, ask who controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress: the party that perfected the politics of personal destruction.

Everyone should check out the story; experts in freedom-of-information law should get in touch with the Democratic Veteran directly.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:50 PM | |

IS TEMPTING CHILDREN MORALLY INNOCUOUS?

Glenn Reynolds links, with seeming approval, to this essay, whose theme seems to be that, since fat people are ridiculous, corporations that entice children into eating patterns that lead to obesity are blameless. I have already expressed my doubts about the soundness of that logic. Perhaps someone who finds it convincing could explain it to me slowly.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:41 PM | |

ANOTHER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DISASTER

If you insist on apponting people to jobs based on their ancestry rather than their qualifications, you're going to get stuck with incompetence, if not malfeasance. Roger Ailes illustrates.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:51 PM | |

THE HOUSE OF SAUD AND THE HOUSE OF BUSH: AN ISSUE FOR 2004?

MyDD has a great picture of Bush and Prince Bandar, and makes the argument that the Bush-Saudi relationship is a huge potential vulnerability for GWB. Bob Graham isn't the perfect candidate for 2004, but if he's the only one prepared to make that point long and loud he may be the only one who can win. (The George Will column MyDD links to is worth pondering: it would be unimaginable tha Will would write in those terms about any other Democratic candidate.)

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:36 PM | |

ANOTHER GREAT SOUND BITE

Since the professional politicians associated with the Democratic Party and the campaign consultants who run them seem to have lost the art of the pithy phrase, and since the one competent liberal journalist writing a major column is an economist in real life, Blogspace must step in to fill the pith gap: calling in the new medium to redress the balance of the old, one might say.

I've already mentioned "We're looking at deficits forever." Now the Democratic Veteran comes up with the perfect label for the fiscal fecklessness of our current rulers: "Credit-card conservatives."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:12 AM | |

COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS DEPARTMENT

This is rude.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:12 PM | |

DO WE ALSO PLAN TO RAPE THE WOMEN AND SELL THE MEN INTO SLAVERY?

From Newsday:

Plan: Tap Iraq’s Oil
U.S. considers seizing revenues to pay for occupation, source says

"There are people in the White House who take the position that it's all the spoils of war,” said the source, who asked not to be further identified. "We [the United States] take all the oil money until there is a new democratic government [in Iraq].”

"Spoils of war"? Isn't that sort of ... unfashionable? I thought it went out of style along with cavalry charges. What century are these people from?

As to "seizing revenues to pay for occupation": the technical term, I believe, is "looting."

Thanks to Jeanne d'Arc for the pointer.

[Kevin Drum also saw this before I did, and has some comments. The Agonist is also on the case.]

One of Sean-Paul's readers finds it strange that some people who regard war, and the casulaties resulting therefrom, as legitimate, regard looting as illegitimate. The seeming contradiction isn't hard to explain: it's simply the difference between killing someone who is threatening to kill you, and stealing his wallet afterwards. The killing might be justified, if the threat is imminent. The theft is never justified, because the wallet isn't yours and even a justified killing doesn't make it yours. Moreover, if you steal the wallet onlookers will have reason to doubt whether you were really defending yourself rather than committing a robbery-murder.

It may be significant that Kevin and Sean-Paul, both liberal supporters of war with Iraq, and I, a liberal supporter of war with Iraq about half the time, have all picked this up, while -- to my knowledge -- no conservative or liberatarian warblogger has noticed the story.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:45 AM | |

SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT TO ME

Americans who accuse their fellow citizens of sympathizing with the enemy merely for dissenting from the nation's war aims are objectively anti-democratic.

--From the worthy new blog Orcinus.

[Thanks to the Democratic Veteran for the pointer.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:49 AM | |

"WE'RE LOOKING AT DEFICITS FOREVER"

That's the way the chief economist at Standard and Poor's, David Wyss, summed up the impact of the proposed Bush "stimulus" plan. He's given the Democrats their mantra. "We're looking at deficits forever."

No Democratic speech from now through next year should be without that line. It even has a nice rhythm:

We're LOOK-ing at DEF-i-cits for EV-er.

Okay, people, get chanting!

(Thanks to Soto at Daily Kos for the pointer. He has some pointed comments of his own.)

[UPDATE: Kevin Drum, the CalPundit, has a label for the plan, to replace the obviously false "stimulus program":

The George Bush Tax Complification Act of 2003

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:24 PM | |

SOME GOOD NEWS ON THE THIMEROSAL BILL?

Glenn Reynolds notes that the thimerosal provision and some of the other garbage that got Christmas-treed onto the Homeland Security bill will apparently be undone. He's prepared to give credit to what he calls "the lefty part of the blogosphere," which is surely generous but might or might not be accurate; the families seem to be fairly well organized, which surely matters more than anything bloggic. Maybe the teensy bit of publicity some of us were able to give the Frist/Lilly book deal helped increase the prospective political cost of leaving the provision in place. [Atrios had the story first among bloggers.]

Glenn quotes a reader as congratulating Senator Frist for making a move with which Frist actually disagrees substantively. Is it really so surprising when a Republican leader lives up to a negotiated agreement?

In fact, I am surprised (or will be if it actually happens). I was on record predicting a flim-flam. But it's hard to see simply delivering on a promise as something to boast about.

[For those just coming into this serial, a review of the bidding, with links, is here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:43 PM | |

ENFORCING PUBLIC INTOXICATION LAWS IN BARS

Good! Clayton Cramer explains to Glenn Reynolds why it's not obviously silly for police to enforce public intoxication laws in bars. He thus saves me the trouble of a long post.

Bottom line: while only a small proportion of those who become intoxicated do stupid or criminal things, a large proportion of all stupid and criminal acts are committed by people who are intoxicated, and bars are indeed public places.

One point that Clayton doesn't make, in response to Glenn's assertion that the obvious next step is giving people sobriety tests at home for fear they should then go out: Very few people actually sleep in bars. Sobering up occurs at the rate of about one drink per hour. Bars have parking lots because many patrons drive to them. A drunken bar patron has a very high likelihood of becoming a drunken driver when he leaves. Someone getting drunk at home has a better chance of sleeping it off safely.

I hope someone has noticed the terrific research opportunity the crackdown creates to discover whether such enforcement actually cuts down on the rates of drunken driving and drunken assault. Whatever the legal justification for the policy in question, it still ought to be abandoned if it doesn't produce results.

Perhaps I should mention here my personal alcohol-policy hobbyhorse: a law to forbid the purchase of alcohol by those previously convicted of alcohol-related crimes.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:26 PM | |

SUBSCRIBING

If you would like to get each post to this list as an email message, please send an email from the appropriate address to:

kleiman-subscribe@topica.com

This might be useful if you were in China, for example.
You will get each post as first published, rather than as it appears after I've finished editing and updating.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:21 PM | |

WHICH CONCEPT WAS THAT, EXACTLY?

I'm normally reluctant to disagree with Brad DeLong, because he usually writes about stuff that he understands and I don't. But I find myself puzzled by his post about capital punishment.

It seems that the death-penalty debate has been the subject of dueling attempts to turn professors' prejudices into ersatz expertise (anti here and pro here). [Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy wonders why anyone should care about what political opinions a bunch of professors hold, as opposed to caring about what their research finds.]

One of the anti-capital-punishment points is the risk of wrongful execution. Some of the pro-death-penalty folks claim that the risks of that are exaggerated by those who assume that every overturned conviction represents a case of actual innocence, and assert that of the 100 cases of wrongful capital sentencing in over the past 30 years, only 30 involved demonstrable innocence.

DeLong headlines his post "Unclear on the Concept Department" and comments:

Here we have a bunch of people who seem unclear on what they are arguing for. For them to say that the system they favor was not on its way to frying 100 innocent people, but only on its way to frying 30 innocent people is not a powerful argument in their favor.

Well, compared to what? If we think of capital punishment as part of an attempt to reduce the incidence of homicide, then we might want to use the size of the problem as a benchmark. In the 30 years since executions were resumed, there have been roughly 500,000 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in the United States. There have been somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 capital sentences handed down, and something under 800 actual executions.

Against that background, 30 wrongful sentences -- not wrongful executions, let's note -- doesn't seem like a very large number. Is one too many? Sure. But so is one homicide. If capital punishment were able to reduce the incidence of homicide by a tenth of one percent, that would be about 18 avoided killings per year. How does that stack up against one wrongful death sentence per year?

Or perhaps we should compare the injustice of wrongful capital sentencing against the injustice of wrongful imprisonment. Thirty bad sentences out of (let's say) 6,000 would be a rate of one in 200, or half a percent. The rate for non-capital offenses is unknown, but almost certainly higher: I'd guess that about 2% of the 400,000 people who go to prison each year are actually innocent of the crime charged. That's 8,000 wrongful imprisonments per year. And unlike someone on death row, an ordinary prisoner has only a negligible chance of having his conviction reversed.

So one wrongful capital sentence per year would be a very small number compared either to the homicide problem or to the miscarriage-of-justice problem, and obviously it would be a smaller number than three per year. That leaves me unclear on what concept the pro-death-penalty professors are accused of being unclear about.

[As faithful readers will know, I really have no dog in the death-penalty fight. I'm queasily for it in principle, but in practice I assume that any politician who makes an issue of being for it is a scoundrel and unserious about the real issues of crime control. Further thoughts on the death penalty here and here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:47 PM | |

TAXING CONGESTION

Brad DeLong wonders why you have to be a Trotskyist to apply simple microeconomic principles to the problem of urban automotive congestion. I wonder along with him. Go Red Ken!

It would be foolish to hope that the current fiscal crisis of the states might make some non-Trot governors on this side of the pond pay attention to congestion fees as a potential revenue souce.

Yes, Mr. Davis? Was there something you wanted to say?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:52 PM | |

HEALTH PRIORITIES

Ross at the Bloviator links to, and comments on, a new Institute of Medicine report on priority areas for improving health care. Tobacco and obesity made the list, but not alcohol or other drugs. Hard to believe that alcohol abuse/ dependency, with an estimated prevalence of about 8% of the household population, doesn't belong there someplace.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:40 PM | |

CHINA CLAMPS DOWN ON BLOGGER.COM SITES

Richard at Hong Kong Journal Redux reports that the Chinese government is now blocking access to "virtually all" blogger.com sites. (Oddly, he seems to regard his inability to subject himself to my ranting as some sort of disadvantage. Takes all kinds, I suppose. De gustibus sure ain't what she ustibus.)

As an expat recently relocated from Hong Kong to Beijing, Richard is in general less sanguine than the mainstream media both about the Chinese economic miracle and Chinese political liberalization. Apparently the Chinese government has decided to exert censorship over the internet, and (with the help of various Western contractors, competing as always to sell the rope) is doing a pretty good job of it.

I must say I'm impressed at their capacity to understand the threat that I, in particular, pose to them. Most of my American readers have completely failed to notice that my ceaseless assaults on "George W. Bush" are really directed at Hu Jintao. But I suppose reading between the lines is a more highly developed art in China than it is here.

One thing I don't know is whether the Chinese thought police are prudes. Because some Blogger.com bloggers are fluent in one-syllable Anglo-Saxon, many of the nanny programs -- including many of the programs used, as now required by law, in public libraries to protect children -- reportedly filter out the entire domain. Could that be the problem in China?

Some of my readers who work for various federal agencies have also reported that they can't access this weblog from work, which I assume also to be a Blogger.com problem based on naughty language. It would be too self-flattering to think that the Bushies had found it essential to their continuation in power that federal civil servants be unable to read my screeds during working hours.

Just for the record, I have nothing but contempt for any writer who can't express disdain and indignation within the bounds of what used to be called Christian English. This is, after all, the exalted Blogosphere, not the wall of a bathroom stall in a bus depot. On the other hand, I think indiscriminate domain-level filtering is a stinking crock of sh*t, and the [expletive deleted]s who dreamed it up can go %#$% themselves.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:46 AM | |

CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR

Let's get the tort lawyers out of the way, reduce regulatory interference, and bring excessive union power under control. Then we'd have a world that looks like this.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:52 PM | |

ACTUALLY ...

Remember the North Korean cheating on its nuclear program that the amateurs in the Clinton Administration never tumbled to but the experts around our truly Churchillian new Commander-in-Chief cleverly discovered? Turns out (per Josh Marshall) that the Clintonistas told the Bushies about it during the transition. The Bush team then promptly ... forgot about it for more than a year. I suppose they were too busy chasing those missing W keys.

I keep saying that this sort of cynical dishonesty is eventually going to catch up with its perpetrators. Why won't anybody believe me?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:47 PM | |

WE'RE AGAINST IT!

So what should the Democrats say about the Bush "stimulus" program? Should they complain about the distributional impact, asking for something less skewed toward the half-million-dollar-a-year crowd, or about the size, asking for something smaller? Neither of those seems to me to be on target.

Let's back up and ask what we want. We want substantial stimulus now. We want fiscal relief now for the state governments and immediate aid for the long-term unemployed. We want a big one-time infusion of cash into the public health infrastructure. We want fiscal responsibility for the long term. And we won't sacrifice any of those to make the half-a-million-dollar-a-year crowd any richer than it already is. The issue isn't rich vs. poor. It's doing the right thing for the economy now, and the right thing for the economy for the long run, versus rewarding campaign contributors.

Substantively, the Pelosi plan looks pretty good. (More stimulus now, and lower long-term costs, than the Bush plan.) But rhetorically, trying to outbid Bush for middle-class interest groups is a loser.

Cutting taxes on dividends makes absolutely no sense. The stimulative effect would be trivial, the efficiency gain negligible, the distributional consequences awful, and the damage to the capacity of the federal government to pay its bills catastrophic. It would also put another big hole in state and local finance by driving up municipal bond interest rates (since common stocks will now provide a competing source of tax-free income).

That has to be the basic Democratic line: "This is a stinking crock of sh*t, and we're not having any." Not "How about something for us, too?"

RHETORICAL UPDATE

This morning's papers are full of "Bush Proposes Plan to Stimulate Economy; Democrats Say it Favors the Rich," instead of "Bush Proposes Another Round of Tax Cuts; Democrats Say Plan Would Wreck Economy." Just what I was afraid of.

SUBSTANTIVE UPDATE

Brad DeLong passes along Barry Boskin's defense of the Bush plan. There's more justification for it than I would have thought. In particular, the fact that dividend payouts come out of post-tax corporate income but interest on bonds comes out of pre-tax corporate income generates a bias toward debt rather than equity finance, which a tax break on dividends received would to some extent counteract.

More here from D-Squared Digest

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:25 PM | |

A TALMUDIC WARNING TO BLOGGERS

Beware of lashon harah.

Note that truth is not a defense. Were those rabbis tough, or what?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:26 PM | |

COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF

(a) many millions of nonblack Americans seriously dislike black people
(b) well-nigh every one of those people votes Republican, and
(c) without those votes no Republican would ever win any election above the county level

So, dear reader, who did say it, and where? (No fair peeking, now.)

a) Michael Kinsley in The New Republic
b) Kweisi Mfume in The Crisis
c) John Derbyshire in The National Review
d) Atrios on Eschaton

Oh.....You guessed it.
How clever of you!

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:07 PM | |

GEE, I NEVER KNEW "MODERATE" MEANT "DIM-WITTED"

Using grain (grown with petroleum-derived fertilizer) as a source of motor vehicle fuel may not be the stupidest idea anyone will ever invent -- surely someone, someday will propose dealing with California's water shortage by growing more orange trees in the desert and then distilling the water out of the orange juice -- but it has to be close. That current version of that scam is called "ethanol." The updated version is called "soy biodiesel."

Here's the bad news: According to the Washington Times, Norm Coleman is planning to demonstrate that he's a moderate by pushing this nonsense.

He opposes Republican efforts to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, preferring, instead, to focus on alternative and renewable fuel sources, such as soy biodiesel made from soybeans, that "represent important economic growth opportunities" in agricultural states such as his.

UPDATE

Two readers point out that, as opposed to the stupid biodiesel proposal described above, there's a perfectly sensible biodiesel idea: recycling the vegetable oil used in deep-frying. (I've always susupected that fast-food joints did their deep-frying in recycled crankcase oil, but that's a different issue.) Apparently there are big environmental gains at the point of use as well as in production. I have no idea what the economics is like.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:57 PM | |

TWO POSTS WORTH READING ON P.L.A

Dwight Meredith has a terrifying and uplifting account of the first Freedom Ride here. He has some excellent questions there.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:41 PM | |

ON FOOLING ENOUGH OF THE PEOPLE, ENOUGH OF THE TIME

Jonathan Chait in the New Republic provides a truly chilling account of Bush administration mendacity on the budget situation. We've gone from "deficits aren't going to happen, even if the economy softens" to "projections of deficits are guesswork" to "any deficits will be small and temporary" to "deficits don't matter."

The horrible thing is that no one cares. Everyone who cared to know knew that the Bush budget plan was a pack of lies from its inception. This reminds me of my favorite mistranslation from Machiavelli (The Prince, Chapter 18):

"Men are so simple, and so dominated by their present needs, that whoever wishes to deceive will always find another who wishes to be deceived."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:13 PM | |

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW

Brad DeLong wonders why Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Glenn Hubbard disagrees so vehemently with Professor Glenn Hubbard. The Chairman calls the concern that higher deficits will impede economic growth "nonsense." The Professor published a textbook last year giving the formula for precisely quantifying the impediment.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:47 PM | |

CORRECTION

Due to an editing error -- committed, no doubt, by Howell Raines -- it was earlier suggested in this space that George W. Bush was Draco Malfoy. That was incorrect.

George W. Bush is actually Sauron; Total Information Awareness is the Lidless Eye.

We regret the mistake.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:24 PM | |

VERDICT FIRST, THEN THE EVIDENCE

Don't worry; MIT's investigation of whether a key missle-defense test was faked isn't going to be allowed to slow down procurement.

Don Rumsfeld doesn't even bother to pretend that the thing is actually ready for prime time:

At the Pentagon, Defense Department officials acknowledged that much work remains to be done before the systems will be perfected, but they cited a need to act against "unpredictable" threats and said they hope to improve the system by trial and error.

"I like the feeling, the idea, of putting something in the ground and in the sea and getting comfortable with it," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing. "Every program doesn't arrive fully developed. It will evolve over time."

A cynic might even suspect that the point of the program was to award contracts rather than to shoot down missiles.

Bad cynic! Naugty, naughty, naughty! Shame on you!

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:20 PM | |

HMMMM.....

Michael Crowley in the New Republic profiles Bob Graham as a potential Presidential candidate. If it's really true that his greatest weakness is being a compulsive diary-keeper, he might go far.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:30 PM | |

CONCERNING GEESE AND GANDERS

Eugene Volokh reports that the anti-flag-burning amendment is about to rear its ugly head again, and asks an interesting question: if we're going to amend the Constitution to allow the Congress to ban the burning of the American flag, why not allow it also to ban the flying of the Confederate flag?

Eugene's argument that the two acts are importantly analogous seems convincing to me, though, as the preacher said, I could teach it round or flat. The act of burning seems more immediately violent, expressing a kind of hatred that is only implicit in flying the Stars and Bars. (Someone might fly the Confederate flag because he cherishes the memory of his great-great-grandfather who fell heroically at Chancellorsville, without bearing any animus to anyone; it's harder to tell the same sort of story about burning the Stars and Stripes.)

Of course, Eugene's intention is to discredit the whole idea of a Constitutional amendment. I have to admit to having more sympathy for the anti-flag-burning cause than even a former ACLU member ought to have, and I would have been reasonably content if the courts had found a way to uphold the constitutionality of the flag-burning statutes. My revulsion against the proposal for an amendment stems mostly from the inconsequence of the issue involved. The Constitution is too sacred a text to have trivia scribbled in its margins; an anti-flag-burning amendment would be a sort of -- well, desecration.

But Eugene's thought-experiment might be put to a different use: as a proposed amendment to the resolution proposing the Constitutional amendment. I know it could be offered in committee; I don't know what the rules are for floor action. But it would be lovely to make everyone in Congress take a stand on whether it ought to be OK to sport a symbol of the greatest act of treason in the history of the Republic. Now all we need is someone in each house rude enough to propose it.

UPDATE

A reader questions my use of the term "treason."

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
-- Art. 3, Sec. 3

The Confederate flag was invented for the purpose of "levying war" against the United States. Q.E.D.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:53 PM | |

NO SH*T, SHERLOCK!

From an AP story.

The freelance journalist who said he would oversee DNA testing to prove whether the first human clone has been produced said Monday he was suspending his efforts for now.

"The team of scientists has had no access to the alleged family and, therefore, cannot verify firsthand the claim that a human baby has been cloned," Guillen said. "In other words, it's still entirely possible Clonaid's announcement is part of an elaborate hoax intended to bring publicity to the Raelian movement."

Duhhhh....reeeeeeeeeeeely? A hoax?????? Whooda thunkit?

The performance of the mainstream media in covering this non-story has been a disgrace. Note that even the latest account is by the AP science reporter, whose next assignment will no doubt be the likely impact on the Bush Presidency of Mars rising with Saturn in the ascendant.

I only wish that the standards of political journalism were higher. But Ari Fleischer makes a living proving that they aren't.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:13 PM | |

A PRINCIPLE OF GENERAL APPLICATION

Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

-- A. Lincoln, Speech to the 140th Indiana Regiment, March 17, 1865

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:33 AM | |

PAGING DR. KAFKA

Coerced treatment is always a tricky proposition. But it's worse when people are forced to be treated for diseases they don't actually have, and not considered "cured" until they admit to having them.

That's Maia Szalavitz's rather grim take on the burgeoning teen-drug-treatment industry. She knows what she's talking about.

Dealing with kids who have real drug problems is hard work. But the field has also attracted more than its share of sleazy operators and child abusers. I wonder whether Andrea Barthwell, the widely-admired deputy drug czar for treatment, will be allowed to speak out about this? And can we expect to hear from the American Society for Addiction Medicine?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:29 AM | |

RANGEL'S MODEST PROPOSAL

Now that everyone's finished shredding Charlie Rangel's proposal to restore the draft for its obvious impracticality, do you think Rangel will break his deadpan and give them all the horselaugh they deserve for not noticing that he never meant it in the first place? He was just poking fun at the chickenhawks.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:12 AM | |

I WANNA GO BACK TO DIXIE...

I wonder if any of the folks who were so joyous about Trent Lott's departure as Senate Majority Leader, and bragged about how it showed the Republicans have begun to furl their Confederate flags, will have anything to say about his suddenly becoming the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, with lots of perks to hand out? He wasn't entitled to the job by seniority, but Rick Santorum decided to give way.

And speaking of Confederate flags, the Vice-Chair of the California Republican Party also seems a little unclear on the "Party of Lincoln" concept. The ever-morally-clear White House says "Not our department."

Thanks to Sisyphus Shrugged for the links.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:24 PM | |

ON BUSH'S POPULARITY

Interesting Times has an interesting post comparing Bush's job performance ratings with Clinton's. It's overoptimistic (from a Democratic standpoint) because it's about job performance, not personal favorable/unfavorable impressions. But Chris has one thing right: Clinton has been under unremitting personal attack from the day he declared for the Presidency until today. Bush has had more or less a free ride, not just from the press, but from the elected Democrats, who are afraid to criticize him because he's popular and then wonder why he's still popular.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:04 PM | |

WASN'T CARDINAL LAW AVAILABLE?

Atrios has doubts about John Lehman's qualifications to serve on the 9-11 commission. Seems there's a little matter of covering up a pedophilia scandal when he was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. (I recall someone calling him, back then, "The fool of ships.")

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:41 PM | |

PARANORMAL STUPIDITY

Turns out I'm not nearly as sharp-witted as Kevin Drum, and not NEARLY as sharp-witted as Brad DeLong's nine-year-old. At least, this puzzle took me about five minutes and a very large number of tries. Once you see it, you will find it hard to believe that it fooled you even once.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:13 PM | |

TIME TO BRING BACK THE AMATEURS?

Here's one interpretation of what's going on in Korea.

* Without thinking about it much, Bush backed Kim Jong Il into a corner. He declared Korea part of the "axis of evil." He claimed for the US the right to invade any country we think might be a threat to us: a right much less attractive to exercise if the potential invadee has nuclear weapons. He made it clear that no possible course of action would lead to a resumption of economic aid. He got so committed to a war with Iraq that Korea became invasion-proof for the next several months. So Kim saw that he had nothing to lose, and much to gain, by joining the nuclear club in a hurry.

* We had previously announced, under both Bush the Elder and Clinton, that North Korean acquisition of a nuclear weapon was something we would regard as a causus belli. Now we've had our bluff called, and we're doing something called "tailored containment" instead, which isn't going to help our cred with the Koreans or anyone else. [Krugman's summary: "What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash and carry a small stick?"] Meanwhile, we seem to have both the South Korean government and the South Korean public hostile to us.

* This is one more example of Bush's faith-based policies: dealing with problems by praying that they won't get too bad, or that if they do the spin machine can convince the public to blame it on Bill Clinton. In fact, as those despised "amateurs" around Clinton figured out, we're playing a very weak hand vis-a-vis North Korea. The only political tactic the Mayberry Machiavellis never consider is levelling with the American people.

As I say, that's one interpretation of what's going on. Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings, Sean-Paul (the Agonist), Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum (the CalPundit), Paul Krugman, and Brad DeLong all seem to share it, more or less.

I'm open to other interpretations, if anyone can supply them. But the eagerness of Bush's cheering section to talk about absolutely anything but Korea isn't encouraging.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:46 PM | |

OPPORTUNITY-COST ANALYSIS AND MASS PREEMPTIVE SMALLPOX VACCINATION

Ross at the Bloviator links to and comments on a New York Times story about the damage being done to other public health initiatives by the costs of defensive moves against bioterrorism, including the Phase I smallpox vaccination campaign.

As noted before in this space, I can't see either the financial cost or the side-effects burden as an adequate reason not to proceed with mass vaccination at once. [By "at once" I mean, ideally, before mid-February, when the war against Iraq is scheduled to start: just think about what happens when you hit a skunk with your car. (Yes, I understand it's already to late to get that done.)] A few hundred lives and a few billion dollars simply aren't large stakes compared to the damage that would be done by big smallpox outbreak.

But the "opportunity cost" argument is much more potent. If the result of going all-out to prevent smallpox is to leave ourselves more vulnerable than we would otherwise be to anthrax, or alternatively to increase the incidence of tuberculosis and syphilis, those costs could easily outstrip the direct financial costs and side-effects burdens of vaccination itself. That is, mass smallpox vaccination might be cost-justified but not cost-effective compared to other uses of the same public-health dollars.

However, that analysis implicitly assumes that the public health budget is more or less fixed. Now that I'm paying a little bit of attention to this issue, it seems clear to me that the weakness in our public-health machinery constitutes a significant national vulnerability. If we're at war, then we ought to be shoring up all of our defenses. The money could come from other defense expenditures (missle defense, for example), from other "homeland security" measures (airport security?), from non-defense expenditures (pick your own), from taxation (a spending increase is at least as good as a tax cut if the goal is short-term economic stimulus), or from borrowing (i.e., increasing the deficit).

As a born-again deficit hawk, the last listed would be my last choice, but a few billion bucks in a ten-trillion-dollar economy simply isn't a sum worth worrying about in this context. No one really thinks that the $60 billion or $100 billion or $200 billion it's going to cost to conquer and occupy Iraq is a serious argument against doing it. So why does a much smaller sum for domestic preparedness suddenly look like a budget-buster?

There's a different version of the opportunity-cost argument, but it's subject to the same response. Right now, we have limited amounts of vaccine, and limited amounts of vaccinia immunoglobulin (VIG) to treat vaccination side-effects. Mass vaccination now would exhaust the vaccine supply, leaving none for post-attack vaccination of those exposed to infected individuals, and more than exhaust the available supply of VIG. That's a problem. But how big a problem depends on how much it would cost to rapidly increase the supplies of vaccine and VIG, where "rapidly" means wartime-rapidly, not medical-research-and-development-rapidly.

Let me repeat: Mass smallpox vaccination now may not be the right thing to do. But the arguments I've heard against it so far seem either altogether invalid or arguments for doing something else as well to relax some constraint in the problem: increasing the total public health budget, rushing production of vaccine and VIG.

And to repeat again: odds are, this is all about a precaution that will turn out to be unnecessary. Most precautions do. That doesn't make it prudent to forgo them.

[SMALLPOX THREAD starts here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:04 PM | |

FRAMING EFFECTS IN THE SMALLPOX-VACCINATION DECISION

One of the paradoxes of real-life decision-making discovered by Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky is that, while normative economic rationality seems to imply risk-aversion, people confronted with real decisions, though risk-averse when it comes to gains, act as if they are risk-seeking when it comes to losses. That is, they sometimes refuse to accept a smaller, certain loss if the alternative is a larger loss that arrives only with some probability, even when the small, certain loss has a smaller expected value than the gamble.

The famous case here [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 1981, 211, 453-458] involves asking groups of experts to decide how to treat a hypothetical epidemic in an isolated population of a disease that is inevitably fatal. In groups given the choice between a treatment approach certain to save one-third of the population and a treatment approach with one chance in three of saving everyone, most experts prefer to be sure of saving one-third. But in other groups given the choice between a policy that will kill two-thirds of the population for sure and one that has a two-thirds chance of killing everyone, they take the risk approach. Of course, the two choices are identical except for the phrasing (what Kahneman and Tversky called "framing.")

[IRRELEVANT FOOTNOTE: I'm convinced that, in the (implausible) hypothetical given, the right thing to do is to gamble, however you frame it, because if two-thirds of the population dies the other third will be wracked with survivor guilt. Thus given the choice between a one-third chance of being alive after a horrible epidemic and a one-third chance of being alive with no such epidemic, I'd choose the latter, and that's the choice that the decision-maker has to make on behalf of the population. But that's beside the point of the K-T experiment, which could equally well involve a scattered rather than a concentrated group of potential victims.]

What makes me think of this is a conversation I had today with a very smart fellow: a hard-science Ph.D. with high-level government experience, now running a well-known, certified Good Guy research-and-advocacy group. He knew about as much about the smallpox question as I do, which is to say more than the average newspaper reader but not very much. His immediate take was that it was a hard question, because, as he put it, "You're weighing real lives that would be lost to vaccination against hypothetical lives that would be saved in case of an attack."

That seems to me like the wrong way to think about the problem: it's about like saying that your fire-insurance premium is "real money" but the loss you would suffer if your house burned down uninsured is merely hypothetical. But it also seems as if it might be a very common way to think about it, and something likely to bias decision-makers against mass vaccination.

Now let me repeat that my conviction that we ought to go ahead with mass vaccination, while strong, is self-consciously ill-informed, and wouldn't be very hard to change with some additional evidence or analysis. I just had a long email from a real expert, who tells me flatly that I'm wrong and that mass vaccination now would be a bad idea. (I will post it if the author gives permission: the key concepts are the opportunity cost of smallpox vaccination in a world of limited public health capacity and multiple threats [e.g., anthrax]; the fragility of public trust in public health recommendations, and thus the need for a lengthy process of public education before children start dying; the opportunity cost of shooting our whole vaccine supply and having none available to deal with actual outbreaks, here or elsewhere, if they happen; the promise of a lower-side-effect-profile vaccine within a couple of years; and some strategic and diplomatic considerations.)

What worries me is that, in the wake of the Swine Flu fiasco and in light of some of the Kantianism-on-steroids that passes for bioethics, we may be suffering from a massive failure of collective nerve that would make it impossible to sacrifice 500 lives (or 50 if the re-vaccination strategy is actually sufficient) to protect the other 280 million even when the situation clearly called for it. Accept for the purposes of argument that we shouldn't go ahead with mass smallpox vaccination now; still, we will face similar choices in the future, if, as seems only too likely, we have entered into an era of asymmetric conflict with biological weapons among the potential threats. That is not a world in which a bias toward inaction in the public-health arena will serve us well.

[MORE here.]
[SMALLPOX THREAD starts here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:48 PM | |

HIT 'EM AGAIN, AGAIN, AGAIN!
HARDER, HARDER!

Eugene Volokh has a difference of opinion with Paul Craig Roberts. Conoisseurs of intellectual carpet-bombing will want to replay it often in slo-mo.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:18 PM | |

10A second lecture notes revised1.doc

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:14 PM | |

TODAY BLOGLAND, TOMORROW THE SENATE

Hesiod links to today's New York Times story on media strategies for Democrats.

The Times story speculates on why Democratic-leaning talk shows have done so badly, focusing on the problem of excessive concern with detail among liberals and the viciousness deficit that makes liberal shows less entertaining. That may be right, though it raises the question why no organism has emerged to fill the open niche. An alternative view would be that there's no niche open, because liberals have less appetite than conservatives for spending time listening to affirmations of what they already believe. We're the non-church-going group, remember?

Hesiod thinks that blogging ought to be at the center of the campaign to take back the noosphere from the VRWC. Seems to be as good a notion as any right now. The problem is how to turn that notion into a plan, and the plan into a program. That means thinking hard about how to build a true mass audience. (My uninformed guess is that building an email/weblog version of a telephone chain, encouraging lots of only semi-politically-active folks to start personal weblogs that would occasionally link to key items on sites such as Eschaton, TPM, and Counterspin, is the best bet.)

It also means thinking about how whatever readership we do build can be converted into a money flow to campaigns and other causes we care about, recognizing that not all of us care about the same campaigns and causes. But the fundamental goal must be to wean the Democrats from their reliance on corporate money, which means building a mass base of individual donors. (Think half a million people at $1000/yr. each plus a couple of million at $100/yr. each.) The fact that the Democrats now split the over-$100,000-income vote about evenly means that there's plently of Democratic money around, if it can be mobilized. Partly it's the classic Mancur Olsen collective-action problem; it's not as if my $1000 is going to make the difference, so why not let someone else contribute? But partly it's that lots of potential donors don't trust the DNC to use their money well and don't know who will.

One thing to note: All of us make routine financial decisions that most of us don't much care about. (Which long-distance carrier to subscribe to, which credit cards to use for everyday purchases.) There are also bigger-ticket decisions, such as the choice of a brokerage firm or mutual fund, that also get made rather casually. Many of us would be happy to delegate that decision-making to someone we trusted to have looked into all the options and made a reasonable choice, especially if that delegation could be turned into a flow of funds to causes we care about. If -- and it's still a huge "if" -- we can build a mass readership for progressive weblogs, the next step would be to try to convert some of those routine decisions into a financial base for progressive politics.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:13 PM | |