June 12, 2005
The TGIF problem
Raising the retirement age to help balance out the finances of the Social Security system is a popular idea among people who discuss policy professionally and recreationally, but a thoroughly unpopular idea in the country at large. Geoff Garin and Kevin Drum are undoubtely right: a major reason is that we policy wonks and chatterers mostly have jobs we like doing, and wouldn't mind doing a few more years, while most folks have jobs they'd really rather not do.
That's a problem for the Republican right's Social Security wrecking crew, of course, which doesn't make me unhappy at all. What does make me unhappy is that, in what is by some measures the richest nation in the history of the planet, most people don't really enjoy the activity that occupies about a third of their waking hours.
One of my favorite Citigroup Zen billboard slogans is "Make sure your life work isn't work." Looks to me as if we're doing rather badly on that score. Let's call that the "TGIF problem."
If things changed so that, on average, people made somewhat less money at work they enjoyed somewhat more, our measured GDP would go down, but our national well-being might well go up.
Solving the TGIF problem would, of course, leave unsolved another problem: according to the hedonics studies, a large proportion of people also don't much enjoy their leisure, and spend it watching television programs they don't much enjoy. But one problem at a time.
Footnote: In universities, finding office space for the emeriti -- retired professors -- is a problem administrators worry about. The assumption, frequently valid, is that professors like professing, and that even if they've decided to stop getting paid for it they still want to write and, sometimes, teach. My friend Jack Hirshleifer, who went emeritus before I got to UCLA and is choughty-cough years old, just told me happily that he'd just gotten the manuscript of a new paper on sexual selection as a signalling process out to a journal and the proofs of the next edition of Price Theory and Applications off to the publisher. I'm sure there are folks at UCLA and Harvard counting the years until retirement, but they don't talk about it out loud.
Part of the difference, no doubt, is that a professor can stop having assigned responsibilities and a schedule while remaining a productive worker. Most jobs aren't structured that way. But the larger difference is that, other than grading and committee meetings, the day-to-day work of professoring is pretty intrinsically rewarding. As Bob Dole said about being a Congressman, "Indoor work, and no heavy lifting."
No, we can't make all jobs like that; someone has to do the heavy lifting or the heavy things won't get lifted. But I doubt that most jobs need to be as unpleasant as the retirement statistics suggest they are.
June 09, 2005
A missed opportunity
Too bad that selfish Sheldon Silver blocked Mayor Bloomberg's plan to give a billion-dollar gift of public money to the New York Jets to build a football stadium that might have been used for the Olympics.
After all, playing host to the Olympics would really have put New York on the map.
Now it's doomed to be nothing but the financial and cultural capital of the world.
And all that land will have to be used for housing or open space or commercial development or something else much less vital than a stadium to be used eight times a year.
What a shame!
June 08, 2005
Self-organizing complexity and intelligent design
The Intelligent Design argument holds that that the universe, and in particular living organisms within it, are too complicated to have arise spontaneously, and therefore must have been created. (Forget for the moment Hume's obvious question about who created the creator.) That's all based on the idea that something that works must have been designed to work.
But of course if that were true, then individuals interacting in their own self-interest couldn't create the spontaneous order of a market. If we wanted to make sure that everyone had bread, we'd need to have a Ministry of Bread to plan the bread supply.
Adam Smith pointed out the advantages of relying for bread on the self-interest of bakers, and Frederich Hayek (among others) worked out some of the logic of sponanteously self-organizing human systems.
And yet the wingnut Intelligent Designers are also mostly wingnut free-marketeers. (Via John Cole, I notice that the Eagle Forum is pushing to have ID taught in the Utah public schools.)
Has anyone pointed out to them that the logic of Intelligent Design is the logic of socialism?
This feels like such an obvious comment that someone must have made it before, but I can't recall seeing it. (I'd be grateful -- well, let's be honest and just say that I'd try to control my narcissistic rage -- if someone could point me to an earlier source.)
Footnote
Quoting Hayek in liberal circles leads to raised eyebrows, just as quoting Keynes does in right-wing circles. The mechanisms are similar; in each case, the political opinions and affiliations of a thinker are taken to taint his intellectual contribution.
Of course Keynes's actual political opinions weren't what the wingnuts take them to have been (he's hated largely as a proxy for Roosevelt) while Hayek did indeed write the absurd Road to Serfdom -- which predicted that the Labour Party would entrench itself in power through dictatorial means -- as well as the brilliant Constitution of Liberty.
But the main point is that a thinker's actual or perceived political affiliations have very little to do with the merits of his abstract thought, and it's absurd to be reluctant to quote the "wrong" sort of thinker. The value of Plato doesn't rest on the virtues of Dionysus II as a ruler.
Update As a reader points out, Jim Lindgren beat me to this idea.
Another reader thinks (though neither of us has the text handy) that Hayek's point in The Road to Serfdom was that dictatorship would be necessary to accomplish the Labour Party's stated aims and that "democratic socialism" was therefore an internally incoherent idea, not that the Labour Party would in fact be willing to impose dictatorship. My memory (from high school days) is that the book was more apocalyptic than that, but I'd be happy to discover I was wrong. If so, the Hayek/Keynes comparison would be that much stronger.
Unblock medical marijuana research
Sally Satel, who tends to be a drug-war hawk, is outraged by the obstructionism of the Federal government when it comes to allowing the research that might make marijuana available as a medicine. She's entirely right.
I doubt that whole cannabis, even if its cannabinoid rations could be standardized through breeding and bledning and the lung insult of smoking largely eliminated by using vaporization instead, will ever be an important medicine. Dutch physicians don't seem especially eager to have their patients use it. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be made a legal medicine if there are patients who would benefit from it, as there undoubtedly are. And it certainly doesn't justify the joint efforts of NIDA and the DEA to keep us from finding out whether cannabis is medically useful, and if so to whom.
Censoring science is a nasty habit, whether the bureaucrats doing the censoring work for the Federal government or a univerity Institutional Review Board.
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June 07, 2005
Racism in the Linden incident
The case of the four white men in Linden, Texas, who beat up a retarded black man and dumped him on a fire-ant hill, but received only minor punishment as a result, generated an exchange between Orin Kerr and Arvin Tseng about the role of race in the handling of the case. I thought Arvin, aguing for the significance of class, had a good point, though not one that really undermined Orin's well-expressed outrage.
Now comes Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune with a detailed account of the case, including a quotation from the recently retired mayor of Linden:
I don't think there was anything racial about it. These guys were drinking, and this guy [Johnson] liked to dance. I'm not surprised when they get to drinking and use the n-word. The black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out there.
(Emphasis added.) Note that the "boy" is 42 years old.
Witt also reports on what seem to be two relatively fresh lynchings, neither leading to prosecution:
There was the case in 1994 when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found dead from a gunshot to the groin. And another in 2001, when a black man who had been dating a white woman was found hanging from a tree. Local officials ruled the first case a hunting accident and
the second a suicide, despite the persistent doubts of family members and civil rights officials.
Case closed, I'd say.
(Any bets on which Presidential candidate carried the white vote in Linden last year?)
Aside from Witt's truly excellent account, the MSM still isn't paying much attention to what Orin correclty called a "sickening" story. Neither is the Blogosphere.
Full text of the Chicago Tribune piece in an update to this earlier post.
Consistency
The four liberals on the Supreme Court -- Breyer, Ginsburg, Stevens, and Souter -- all believe in an expansive version of Federal power. Presumably, all four also think that if sick people want to smoke pot and their doctorts agree, the Federal government should as a matter of policy, butt out. All four dutifully voted to uphold the Constitutionality of the Controlled Substances Act as applied to private noncommercial intrastate medical cannabis cultivation and possession.
The Court's three hard-line conservatives -- Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas -- share a Constitutional doctrine placing greater restraint on the Federal government. But as social conservatives, all three presumably disapprove of smoking pot, even in a good cause. Nonetheless, two of them dutifully voted to strike down a law of which they, presumably, personally approved. (Having recently criticized Justice Thomas for voting his prejudices rather than his principles, I note with admiration his consistency in this instance.) Justice O'Connor, one of the swing Justices, writing in dissent, made the tension between her policy preferences and her Constitutional doctines explicit.
That leaves, of course, Justice Scalia, who gleefully struck down Federal power when it was used to protect women or keep guns away from schools, but voted to uphold it when it came to keeping medicine away from sick people. Is there any possible line of legal reasoning that could justify those three votes, taken together?
Footnotes Lyle Denniston argues that Justice Kennedy also put War-on-Drugs ideology ahead of his announced Federalism.
Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr has lots of interesting doctrinal discussion about Raich, as does SCOTUSblog (start here and scroll down and down and down).
Prescription diversion and drug abuse
Eugene Volokh questions an argument of Justice Thomas, dissenting in Ashcroft v. Raich, that allowing patients to grow their own pot would not lead to substantial leakage into the illicit market. Justice Thomas cites amphatamines and morphine as examples; Eugene says "I had thought that prescription narcotics often do make their way into the illegal markets... the availability of prescriptions has undermined the broad prohibitory goals of the Act."
The answer is: It depends, both on the rigor of controls on prescription drugs and on the availability of non-pharmaceutical supplies of the drug in question or substitutes for it.
Dexamphtamine used to leak massively from the prescription market into the illicit market; in 1970, three times as much amphetamine was legally produced and sold by pharmaceutical companies as was prescribed that year by physicians. Moving amphetamine to Schedule II, and the imposition of triplicate prescriptions and other measures to control retail-level diversion by some states, largely dried up that market. (Those controls also, of course, led to the development of a huge market for illicitly-produced methamphetamine; it's quite possible, though not certain, that the net result of tightening controls on the diversion of prescription amphetamine was to create a larger drug abuse problem than would otherwise have existed.)
Morphine doesn't leak much because there's not much illicit demand for it, but hydromophone (dilaudid) and miperidine (Demerol) are much sought-after as heroin substitutes.
The semi-synthetic opioids hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (Percodan, Oxycontin)have thriving diversion markets. The diverted opioids have created opiate-abuse problems in places the strictly illicit heroin markets don't reach, so it's certainly fair to say that diversion in that case has been the source of a significant amount of drug abuse that otherwise wouldn't be happening. The same is true of the benzodiazepine "minor tranquilizers" (anxiolyitics) such as Valium and Xanax.
The harder a drug is to make in an illicit lab, the greater the possible contribution to drug abuse of making it licitly available. Methamphetamine is easy to cook from easily-available precursors; heroin is moderately easy to make, but only if you have a supply of opium; oxycodone simply isn't a backyard chemical.
Where diversion is a significant problem, there's a real tradeoff (as Eugene notes) between making life easy for physicians and patients and reducing drug abuse.
In the cannabis case, insofar as the "buyers' clubs" function as convenient retail outlets, they may do a little bit to increase the availability of pot for non-medical use, though of course the places most receptive to the presence of such clubs tend to be the places where strictly illicit cannabis is easiest to obtain. But the ubiquity of the illicit cannabis supply, in both geographic and social space, greatly reduces the impact of making it medically available.
In the fact situation of Ashcroft v. Raich -- production by a patient for personal use -- that impact must surely be entirely trivial. Yes, if such activity were allowed, some patients would grow more than they need and sell the surplus. But it's inconceivable that their contribution, either to production or to retail availability, would be noticeable, let alone significant.
So Eugene is right that Justice Thomas's claim is too sweeping, but Justice Thomas is right that, on the facts of this case, there's no real tradeoff between medical availability and substance abuse.
Footnote
Eugene's reference to "the prohibitory goals of the Act" is an interesting tribute to the extent to which the War on Drugs has distorted the original intent of the Controlled Substances Act.
In its terms, the CSA is a regulatory statute, not a prohibitory one. The goal of making medicine available to patients is every bit as central to the statutory scheme as the goal of keeping drugs of abuse away from potential addicts. But of course that's not the way the enforcement agencies, or the politicians, now see the problem.
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June 06, 2005
Homicide drop in Chicago
The preliminary FBI Uniform Crime Reports for 2004 are out, and homicides in cities of over a million population are down 7.1% from 2003 to 2004. New York is no longer the driver: Chicago is down 25%, from 600 to 450.
Anyone know why?
Update: Thanks to a reader, here's the Chicago Tribune's take on the question, stressing the implementation of CompStat-like police management policies and problem-solving tactics.
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