Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Matt Yglesias has been talking a lot about regulations on barbers and hair stylists lately.  Matt’s basic point is that the field seems to be over-regulated.  Should we care if a person who plans to style women’s hair also knows how to do a shave with a straight razor?  What if a person just wants to do basic haircuts but no chemical treatments?  Matt’s commenters freaked out.  I realize that there are real health and safety issues here, and I’ll defer to the opinions of the internet commentariat (a population known for its grooming prowess) to sort out what sorts of rules are necessary to have a healthy and safe good hair day.  However, in many states it appears that rules go way beyond the basics of “how not to spread disease” to “You can’t braid hair unless you also know how to do chemical treatments, straight razor shaves, etc.”

I think barbering is a useful place to examine principles because it is a trade that requires some skill but not the years of training for, say, a heart surgeon or a chemical plant design engineer.  It is a field where  there are some established big corporations in the field but individuals can still open shops and get clients on the side.  (My wife spent a fortune on a private hair and makeup person for the wedding.)  There are real health and safety issues, but there’s also room regulatory overkill to stifle competition.  And states have regulations of varying stringency.  I don’t claim to be an expert on it, but it seems like a place where the case for far less regulation is strong, but a few significant factors leave room for reasonable arguments  in favor of at least some regulation.

Two other points:

1)  Because this is the internet, Matt was of course called on white male privilege by people who pointed to the hazards from chemicals used in certain hair treatments for women of color.  Well, I’ll see your chemical hazards in minority communities card and raise you an African-American hair braiding case taken by the Institute for Justice.  If somebody’s only planning on braiding, maybe there are a few health and safety issues to be careful about, but should we care if she can do other hair care procedures?  Seems like a rule that makes it harder for women in disadvantaged communities to make money practicing a time-honored craft.

2)  I’ll follow Matt and further raise you a Barack Obama sticking up for ex-cons trying to make it in society card.  Seriously, why shouldn’t an ex-con be able to get a cosmetology license?  Once you decide that a person’s prison sentence will be shorter than life, you’d better decide to make it reasonably feasible for him to earn a living in some sort of lawful trade.  Now, maybe convicted scam artists shouldn’t get jobs in accounting (although there’s also an argument that if he knows accounting really well and wants to go legit, sticking with something he knows may be the fastest route to a respectable living), and maybe oxycontin dealers shouldn’t work in pharmacies, but other than that why stack the deck against ex-cons any more than it’s already stacked?  Barbering is a skilled blue-collar trade.  A man can earn a reasonable living, perhaps even run a small business.  Why deny that option to somebody who’s trying to go clean?  If you  do, then his only options are either really low wages, or crime.  Do you want an ex-con facing that choice?

Anyway, I think Matt is raising some important issues.

John Quiggin’s musing on why nobody has recently really tried to build Libertopia for real reminds me of a professional libertarian friend’s jibe that, “The problem with a libertarian society is that it would be full of libertarians.” He was having fun with the common perception of the libertarian personality as being . . . differently socialized. But the quip encapsulates one of two concerns that motivated the ideological “conversion” that some people wish I would talk more about.

The “progressive” case for libertarianism always held that private charity and voluntary mutuality could and should replace (what passes for) the Welfare State in succoring the needy, halt and lame. And the State as an institution is an engine of such evil that one (me) wants that to work out. Still! But the road from Here (the actual existing American mixed economy) to There (minarchism, say) seems to run through very resentful country.

Boiled down, I know and have known a lot of committed libertarians, and a lot of them belie the stereotype of the Randroid “I’ve got mine, Jack” egoist. They’re wonderful, generous, compassionate people. But over time I lost faith that they (we) made a movement that could build a society expressing those best impulses. I grew to worry that the habits of mind required to thrive in a society “without a net” would militate against the voluntarism that “progressive” libertarianism prefers to “coercive” support structures for the weak. More particularly, actually motivating the destruction of such safety-net as America currently has seems to involve stirring up the sort of resentment against “moochers” and “parasites” that has put Atlas Shrugged on the Tea Party syllabus. Who is going to voluntarily donate a significant portion of their time and income to help moochers and parasites?

Again, the State is a very bad thing. It fosters murder on a staggering scale, one no smaller group of predators can match. But some states manage to kill a lot fewer people than this one does. And it doesn’t follow that the first step to replacing it with something better is getting rid of Medicaid.

By Thoreau

1)  Here’s a professor who’s decided to actually do something about PhD over-production.

2)  I just learned that my alma mater, a top-ranked school in physics, recently gave tenure to a person who devotes tremendous effort to classroom teaching and prefers to publish one really good paper nailing down every aspect of a project rather than a flurry of smaller papers.  Consequently, this person publishes very few papers (but they’re all excellent).  It is rare to see a research university reward that sort of thing, and I will have to keep that in mind the next time the alumni office calls asking for money.

By Thoreau

Fred Clark is funny.  And while I usually hate internet invocations of “privilege”, this one gets it about right.

By Thoreau

Lest this become an all-Burlington-Coat-Factory-recreation-center-all-the-time blog, let me take up another important topic:  Air travel.  Recall that the airlines recently instituted fees for checked luggage, reasoning that in the middle of an economic downturn you can get more customers by charging them more.  This had the utterly predictable result of causing more people to carry their luggage on and store it in the overhead bins.  That, in turn, had the utterly predictable result of clogging the overhead bins.

The airlines are now charging for early boarding, so you can get first crack at the overhead bins. I would like to suggest a few additions to the pricing scheme:

1)  All of those people who don’t board early, and have to hunt around for the remaining overhead space, are really slowing things down and causing hassle.  Disincentivize this by charging extra for boarding after the early boarding.

2)  Have you ever been on a plane where the captain says that the weight is unbalanced and some people will have to move to different seats?  An even weight distribution is important, and people who don’t bring any luggage at all may be upsetting the balance.  I therefore propose a fee for people who don’t bring luggage.

3)  Look at all the unused space in the aisle!  If you have an aisle seat, and you don’t want somebody standing next to you holding onto a handlebar like subway riders, you should pay a fee for sitting next to an uncluttered aisle.

4)  Pressurizing the cabin?  Srsly?  God put a certain amount of air up there, and that should be good enough for you.  If you are one of those namby-pamby libruls who needs extra air, you should have to pay for your own oxygen tank.  The good people in Real America breathe the air that God put there.  And even in Fake America, places like Los Angeles, we’re fine with breathing sub-optimal air!  What’s your problem?

5)  Those restrooms get cleaned every once in a while, and somebody has to be paid to do it.  What kind of free-loader are you, using the airplane restroom for free?  You should pay for that.

6)  Seat belts are part of a liberal crusade by Ralph Nader.  I say get rid of them, and those who need seat belts as reassurance can pay extra.  Or they can also buy a teddy bear and pacifier.  Whatever makes them feel better.

7)  I’m fine with allowing cell phones on planes, but you should have to pay extra for that.  In fact, you should have to pay extra to talk to ANYBODY.  Even the people you’re traveling with.  Silence may be golden, but so is talk.

8)  If you pay taxes, you’re just paying for the subsidies that keep the airlines so inefficient.  You should be penalized for that.  I say taxes on taxes, payable to the airlines.

9)  If your flight lands safely without being hijacked, you should pay an extra fee for the safe service provided.

10)  If your flight is hijacked and crashed into a building, you should pay a fine because you failed to fight back and stop the hijackers.  Inaction has a price, you know.

Together, we can build a stronger airline industry.  Enjoy your flight!

By Thoreau

This article makes an interesting point:  The Southern Strategy drove African-American voters away from the GOP.  Immigration politics will ensure that the GOP gets very little support from Hispanics.  And the mosque issue may be the final nail in the coffin for the GOP with Muslim voters.  Now, certainly there are Democrats who have done plenty of crappy things to piss off all of these groups (and I’m not just talking about pre-realignment Dixiecrats) but the GOP has managed to hurt itself even more with these groups.

Kulturkampf that alienates the minority in favor of an ethnic/religious majority isn’t automatically a losing electoral strategy.  It’s evil as all hell, but that’s politics, alas.  After all, the majority is the majority, and to win district-by-district or state-by-state elections you don’t need a national majority, just a majority of those voting in a majority of districts.  Still, if the ethnic/religious majority is itself divided, alienating minorities means that you have to win by big margins among the majority group.  Have they thought this through?  I think they’ve drunk too much of their own kool-aid on the “Real America” stuff.

By Thoreau

It occurs to me that while the vast majority of “just a theory” disclaimers are intellectually dishonest, there is one issue that reasonable laymen find disconcerting about evolutionary biology:  It’s a historical science in large part (although there is a large component of the field devoted to contemporary phenomena such as antibiotic and pesticide resistance).  You can’t do a controlled experiment on the past.  A reasonable person might wonder if we can really be as confident in evolutionary biology as we are in experiments that can be repeated under controlled conditions.

Also, one might wonder if all of the indirect reasoning involved is really valid.  For instance, we use radioactive decay under the assumption that decay rates and abundances are constant.  What if there’s a mechanism (e.g. cosmic radiation) that causes some isotopes to be produced continually, or in spurts?  What if some isotopes are preferentially taken up in certain chemical or biological processes?  It turns out, of course, that these factors do matter and are studied and accounted for, and actual radioactive dating is more complicated than the 8th grade science class version.  But people don’t always know this.  Even if they did, they might wonder if the chain of indirect reasoning and indirect observations involved lead to shaky conclusions.

What people don’t know is that most of the other things in science and technology involve indirect measurement.  I had an ultrasound done on my heart recently, to see if I have the same condition that my brother has.  (Fortunately, the answer is no.)  That nice image on the screen, however, is the result of a lot of data processing.  The actual, direct measurements would look nothing like a picture.  A lot of analysis is needed to produce that image on the screen.  Even the image on the screen only tells so much to the casual observer.  It has to be interpreted in light of lots of other information.  I looked at it and I had no idea if that spot on the image was noise, a natural feature, or an aneurysm.  The doctor had to make that determination.

Likewise, the evolution chapter of the textbook isn’t the only one based on a chain of indirect reasoning.  That nice picture of the cell, and all those diagrams of what the pieces do and how the reactions  proceed?  It’s rare that it all comes out so clean.  Usually there’s  a long chain of inference.  Those reaction pathways weren’t worked out by just watching a bunch of things in one test tube as they changed from molecule A to molecule B and so forth.  Lots and lots of experiments using lots and lots of different techniques had to be done on each stage.  Come to a biophysics conference, and you’ll see indirect measurement and inference everywhere.

Now, at some point you do need to learn what was synthesized from numerous experiments so that you can take advantage of the cumulative knowledge of the ages, rather than learning about each detail of each step of the line of reasoning that got us here.  You can’t teach the process behind everything, as nice as it would be.  But you could teach the process behind a few representative things.  You could start breaking down the resistance by teaching the process behind some diagnostic technique.  MRI, ultrasound, CT, whatever.  Something nice and concrete and practical.  Then teach the process behind some important phenomenon in microbiology, or cell biology, or physiology, or whatever.  Then, after they see the power of indirect measurement and inference, you could teach the process behind, say, the age of the earth.  Or the rise of some species.  Or the evolution of the eye, to the extent it’s known.  Or something else.

I don’t claim that it will persuade everyone.  Some people are unreachable.  But showing the process of inference and indirect measurement might have a lot of other educational benefits besides winning over a few people who wonder about the rigor of a historical science.

By Thoreau

It is often suggested by liberals of various sorts that right-wing kulturkampf is a way to distract the conservative base from economic issues where they would be more natural allies of the left if only they opened their eyes.  Here, Gene Healy offers a mirror-image critique by suggesting that right-wing kulturkampf is a way of distracting Teabaggers from the GOP’s disinterest in libertarianism, and if they would only open their eyes they’d be natural allies of libertarianism:

All this posturing is getting tiresome. The “mosque” controversy isn’t about property rights or religious freedom. It’s a bogus issue seized by the GOP establishment to distract the rank-and-file from the party’s reluctance to shrink government.

By Thoreau

It occurs to me that Obama could just invite the Imam of the “Ground Zero Mosque” and Sarah Palin to come to the White House and have a beer together and sort this out.  Of course, the Imam would probably refudiate alcohol, but I know recovering alcoholics who drink “near beer”.

By Thoreau

Because I cannot look away from the stupity world championship that is the Ground Zero lower Manhattan former Burlington Coat Factory Mosque multi-purpose community center, I am compelled to note that Hamas has just decided to weigh in on the matter*.  Sadly, they support the construction project.  Gee, thanks guys.  You shouldn’t have.  No, really, you shouldn’t have.  Seriously.  They must know what they’re doing.  Having won elections, they must have at least some understanding of how people will sometimes reflexively take a side based on who’s on the other side.

You know, if I were an evil, violent religious fundamentalist, and I wanted to torpedo a project, I’d come out in favor of it.

*Yeah, yeah, New York Post, but the point is that even if this story should turn out to be inaccurate, it’s the story that’s being told and that’s what matters in these parades of stupid.