Matt Yglesias

Endgame

Kids in the street drinking wine.

— High school bans evolution-themed t-shirt.

— Environmental implications of the Japanese election.

— Progressive Caucus swears they’re not bluffing on the public option.

— Lisa Jackson calls for a more urban environmentalism.

— Peter King says the New York Senate race is too boring for him to enter.

Song of the day is by Ladyhawke out of New Zealand: “Paris is Burning”. Sort of too bad she doesn’t sing with a kiwi accent.

Hoping the Truth Will Set Us Free

Kevin Drum offers up compelling polling evidence to suggest that winning the climate change fight will require people to have accurate information about climate change legislation:

Now, do you think the same people who were responsible for all those townhall shoutfests this month will have any trouble convincing people that $25 is the right number? Or $100? I didn’t think so.

Are we ready for that? I’m not sure. But we’d better be, because the second part of the opposition’s message will be the little picture. In healthcare that turned out to be death panels and abortion funding and illegal immigrants. For the climate bill it will be — who knows? But it’s a long bill and there’s plenty to choose from. Maybe it will be scare talk about Wall Street getting rich by trading emission permits. Maybe it will be scare talk about China taking over the world because they get to keep polluting as much as they want. Maybe it will be culture war talk about how Midwesterners are paying a bigger price to clean up the atmosphere than all those chi chi Californians.

Now I hope progressives can find effective counter-messaging tactics. But part of the reality of the situation, I think, is simply that it’s extremely difficult to imagine progressive policy happening without some measure of responsibility on the part of elites. Lately you’re seeing a lot of focus (most heavily from Mickey Kaus) on the idea that the Obama administration committed some kind of giant blundered by emphasizing cost control arguments on health care thus leaving themselves “exposed” to the right’s demagoguery. The crux of the matter, however, is that cost control would advance some substantive policy goals that conservatives claim to believe in and that are important for the future of American business. The goal of emphasizing such factors was the belief, perhaps naive, that some conservative legislators and business leaders would look at the proposals and say “hey, this is a pretty good idea.”

On climate, similarly, the idea behind the administration’s original rebate-heavy proposal was really just to hope that the merits of the case could persuade people. There’s not, after all, any logical reason why the Chamber of Commerce should be virulently opposed to the bill. Any firm with a below-average carbon intensity should benefit, and you would think that even rich businessmen would care about their children and grandkids growing up in a non-devastated world. This is really how legislating is supposed to work. You identify a situation people widely agree is problematic, and you advance a good remedy to the problem, and even though some narrow interests will still oppose you most elites ought to see that you have a reasonable solution and help you push it through.

But we’re not seeing anything like that behavior. So instead you enter this weird kind of semiotic space where we’re not debating whether or not it makes sense to raise taxes in order to expand Medicaid eligibility (an actual proposal) or to charge heavy carbon emitters and use the funds to help the poor and to finance clean energy investments (an actual proposal). Instead, we’re debating “death panels” and mythical $100 rate hikes. And I’m not really sure there’s any way to win a “debate” that’s completely ungrounded from reality.

Star Wars and the Limits of Counterinsurgency

I think this discussion of Star Wars and counterinsurgency at Andrew Exum’s Abu Muqawama blog is ultimately emblematic of the somewhat smug and insular nature of the COIN community. One ought to simply consider the possibility that Star Wars characters don’t employ insurgent/counterinsurgent tactics because Star Wars is telling us that COIN dogma is wrong. To say that the Rebel Alliance ” simply staged two conventional assualts on the Empire’s center of gravity: the Death Star” is, I think, to misconstrue the situation. What’s going on is that nobody on either side of the war seriously disputes the notion that “fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battlestation.”

Leia, in a very COINish moment, does say “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” But that’s before the full capabilities of the Death Star are apparent. Once it’s clear that the Empire can destroy planets wholesale, the rebels are in agreement with Tarkin and the Emperor that sufficient firepower, deployed without conscience, can, in fact, win the war. Thus, the rebels only hope for staving off defeat is a bold attack on the Death Star itself. As Exum’s correspondent notes, “they got lucky” in terms of destroying the Death Star so it made perfect sense for the Emperor to simply respond by trying to build a new one. Here, again, both sides agree that a fully operational Death Star can end the war, so again the rebels need to mount a somewhat desperate attack. And they win!

But the lesson here isn’t that the rebels are being irrationally conventional; the lesson is that there are limits to the logic of counterinsurgency doctrine. Overwhelming force and brutality really can be applied to good effect if you’re really willing to unleash it in an evil way.

Why Don’t Markets Clear in Urban Storefronts?

Vacant storefront on 1300 block of U Street; good place for a Wendy's? (cc photo by NCinDC)

One of the enduring mysteries of urban life is the prevalence of vacant storefronts. This is understandable in a truly depressed area where the whole local economy has broken down. But if you take someplace like U Street in Washington DC where there are tons of thriving businesses, it seems bizarre that there are also lots of vacant storefronts. Surely there’s something, at some rent, that could make a profit. And surely some rent would be better than no rent. But as Justin Fox writes, the markets seem not to clear even in super-prosperous areas like Broadway on the Upper West Side.

His theory, also endorsed by Felix Salmon is that the culprit is unduly long lease lengths:

If prevailing leases are low, or tenants hard to find, the developer will quite rationally choose to keep the property empty. Leasing at a low rate will lock in a loss, while keeping the property empty has significant option value: at some point in the future, rents might well rise, and the developer can at that point lock in a profit instead. This is why successful property developers generally need very deep pockets: anybody who needs immediate cashflow, in the form of rent today, is in an invidious bargaining position and is likely to lose out over the long term.

I buy this, but only to an extent. If you look at suburban strip malls, the same long lease dynamic applies, but widespread strip mall vacancies are normally a sign of specific economic distress. The current recession has less to a lot of them, but in normal economic times you tend not to see this. Instead, even depressed areas reach a low-rent equilibrium. Possibly this is because strip mall property is less speculative in nature than urban property. But I think the specifically urban nature of the problem probably has something to do with the level of regulatory uncertainty surrounding new retail endeavors in most American cities combined with the reluctance of many neighborhoods to play host to the sort of “uncool” national retail chains that could better manage the risks involved.

Hamas Embracing Holocaust Denial

The UN Relief and Works Agency, which oversees assistance to Palestinian refugees, was considering the idea of including a unit on the Holocaust in history lessons to Palestinian schoolchildren. It seems like a good idea to me that, among other things, might help the kids better understand the context for their current situation. Hamas leaders, however, are having none of it:

Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students. Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to “marketing a lie and spreading it,” al-Astal wrote in a statement. [...]

Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge Jewish suffering, fearing it might diminish their own. Attitudes toward the Holocaust range from outright denial to challenging its scope.

Israeli officials are using this argument as a pretext for why western governments shouldn’t reconsider their attitudes to dealings with Hamas. Meanwhile, the actual situation in Gaza is incredibly dire. As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Robert C. Adler wrote for CAP in July:

In the six months since unilateral ceasefires by Israel and Hamas were announced on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered from shortages, including basic medicines and services. In early March, the International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Economy for the Reconstruction of Gaza that was held in Egypt raised a total of $4.4 billion in pledges from the international community for the Palestinian Authority. But stringent import restrictions imposed by Israel and the continued divisions among Palestinian factions have impeded these funds from delivering much benefit to Palestinians.

A recent ICRC report emphasizes that the Israeli blockade has pushed unemployment to over 40 percent, while depriving the population of regular access to running water, to say nothing of proper medical. They warn that tens of thousands of children are going malnourished due to “deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.” The indifference of both the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership toward the practical aspects of this humanitarian crisis is truly appalling.

The Trouble With the Rule of Law

Another concern I have with the Cordesman piece is the offhand reference to the idea that “a significant number of such U.S. reinforcements will have to assist in providing a mix of capabilities in security, governance, rule of law and aid.”

I sometimes get the sense that people from a military background believe that the United States government, or perhaps some other government, has acquired some time-tested and proven methods of creating the rule of law in anarchic, multi-ethnic, impoverished states and that if only we put smart counterinsurgency generals in charge who realized the importance of unleashing the rule of law then we could lick that corruption problem. In fact, the problem with promoting the rule of law is that we have basically no idea how to do this. Thomas Carothers oversees the Carnegie Endowment’s “Democracy and the Rule of Law” program, so I always think it’s sobering to recall that he’s pretty skeptical about the prospects for promoting the rule of law. Check out his recent article, not particularly related to Afghanistan, called “Rule of Law Temptations”:

In this context of ever-increasing interest and often enthusiasm for rule-of-law development among Western policymakers and aid practitioners, a tendency exists toward uncritical and sometimes wishful thinking about the subject. Some of these lines of thought represent what can be described as temptations, to believe certain things about the rule of law and its place on the international stage that are misleading and sometimes unhelpful. At least four such temptations—concerning consensus, reductionism, sequencing, and ease—are identifiable and deserve attention.

In other words, buyer-beware about strategies that casually toss off the idea that we’re going to put the rule of law in place somewhere and that’s what’ll make our strategy work.

Blogger, Heal Thyself

A reader suggested over the weekend that instead of just complaining about the lack of explanatory journalism in the mainstream press, I ought to actually do some and help people understand what’s in the various different pieces of health care legislation. To which I say read this post by my colleague Igor Volsky that even comes with a helpful table.

For my part, let me just talk about the bill that’s pending in the House of Representatives, prepped for passage at any time the House leadership feels assured that the Senate is prepared to move forward with something. One thing the House bill does is help the poor out by expanding Medicaid eligibility to all those earning up to 133 percent of the poverty line. Even if the bill did literally nothing else, this would be an important progressive measure that improves the lives of many Americans.

In addition, it establishes a Health Insurance Exchange on which the currently uninsured can buy health insurance on the individual market. In the Exchange, insurers would be severely curtailed in their ability to engage in price discrimination against potentially bad health risks (”community rating”), wouldn’t be able to turn anyone down (”guaranteed issue”), and wouldn’t be allowed to retroactively deny claims (”rescission”). In order to make this work, we need to ensure that sick and healthy alike buy health insurance, so there are mandates on both individuals and employers. But to ensure that people can afford to fulfill the mandate, there will be sliding-scale subsidies for people earning between 133 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line. Last, the Exchange will feature a public option to ensure the existence of an alternative to for-profit health insurance.

The bill has other provisions related to financing and delivery system reform, but that’s the crux of the matter. Medicaid expansion and the creation of a workable individual market will ensure that everyone has health insurance and that the currently insured won’t need to worry about losing the coverage we already have.

Looking to the Midterms

Josh Kraushaar writes in Politico:

After an August recess marked by raucous town halls, troubling polling data and widespread anecdotal evidence of a volatile electorate, the small universe of political analysts who closely follow House races is predicting moderate to heavy Democratic losses in 2010.

Some of the most prominent and respected handicappers can now envision an election in which Democrats suffer double-digit losses in the House — not enough to provide the 40 seats necessary to return the GOP to power but enough to put them within striking distance.

I think it’s important to have the proper perspective on this stuff. The political system has a tendency in the direction of parity. Consequently, any party currently enjoying a large majority should expect losses in the next election. At the moment, virtually every left-of-center congressional district is already in the hands of a Democrat (the seats held by Reps Joseph Cao and Mike Castle are the main exceptions) while many right-of-center districts aren’t currently represented by Republicans. So the GOP will probably pick up seats. What’s more, the President’s party usually loses seats in midterms.

Nate Silver has a useful chart reminding us of this:

Even popular presidents usually lose seats. So Democrats will almost certainly lose seats. But that shouldn’t be taken as evidence that some kind of fiasco is looming—the loss of seats is something that can and should be taken in stride. The loss of the House majority, by contrast, would be a huge deal. But nobody seems to think that’s in the cards at this point.

Social Security and Suicide

Social Security Administration building, Washington, DC (cc photo by Ken Mayer)

Jacob Weisberg discusses various pro-death initiatives from the American right and brings this interesting factoid about Social Security and suicide rates:

Other GOP policies promote death for senior citizens with more modest incomes. Take the conservative push to privatize Social Security, which George W. Bush proposed and failed to get Congress to pass in 2005. Social Security has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, we would now be undoing income security for the elderly. Those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they’d presumably die younger and commit suicide more often.

Whenever you read, whether in the context of the United States or Japan or Europe, about the “problem” of population aging and demographic shifts it’s really worth reflecting on the fact that these are good problems to have. That old people live longer these days, with better medical care and radically less suicide, is a good thing. The fact that our wealthier societies allow people to spend more years in retirement after a few decades of productive work is a good thing. There are certain policy challenges associated with this, but it shouldn’t really be seen as a bleak scenario or an overall negative situation.

Defining “Victory” in Afghanistan

(DOD photo)

As Ezra Klein says “It would be nice if Anthony Cordesman definied the word ‘victory’ in this piece.” Or, again, it would have been nice if one of the editors of the Washington Post opinion section had made that observation before running the piece rather than waiting for one of their bloggers to notice it. But it really does make the specific claims he offers about what we ought to do in order to achieve victory hard to evaluate. His failure to do so is part of the annoying trend toward defining Afghanistan strategy debates in incredibly stark, binary terms. Either we need to commit maxim resources to a maximalist strategy, or else we’re going to admit “defeat” and cut and run. Realistically, though, there’s a broad middle ground of options between “eliminate all US support for Afghan government and let the Taliban run amok” and “engage in decades-long effort to remark all of Afghan politics and society.”

Another note I would offer on the Cordesman piece is that he defines the problems we need to confront in the region as including not only the Taliban, but also the government of Afghanistan (”Bush administration . . . did not react to the growing corruption of Hamid Karzai’s government”) and the government of Pakistan (”Bush administration . . . treated Pakistan as an ally when it was clear to U.S. experts on the scene that the Pakistani military and intelligence service . . . still try to manipulate Afghan Pashtuns to Pakistan’s advantage.”) This of course raises the question of on whose behalf this fighting is happening? The stability of Pakistan is often offered as the reason we need to be fighting the Taliban, but if it’s folly to be treating Pakistan as an ally then how much sense does this make? And if Karzai is part of the problem, too, then who’s side are we on?

Last but by no means least, it seems ridiculous to premise strategy on the idea that we need to somehow get Pakistan to stop trying to manipulate Afghan Pashtuns to Pakistan’s advantage. Are they supposed to manipulate them to Pakistan’s disadvantage? Is Pakistan supposed to become more indifferent to events in an adjacent country than the United States is? As long as Pakistan is stronger than Afghanistan—and it’s much, much stronger—then of course it will try to manipulate the situation there to its advantage.

Women’s Turnout Plunges in Afghan Election

Before the voting began in Afghanistan, people were concerned that women’s rights would likely be substantially infringed and it looks like those fears were warranted:

Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. In a few districts, female turnout was even higher than male turnout.

But on Aug. 20, when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, that heady season of political emancipation seemed long gone. This time, election monitors and women’s activists said, a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.

As I said before it’s not clear how many practical alternatives there really are or were to acquiescing in this situation. Mostly it illustrates the fact that no matter what resources we deploy in Afghanistan, our ability to create the kind of society we would like to see is pretty limited.

TARP Profits

I’ve been complaining for a while now about the tendency of commentators to treat the $700 billion TARP bailout as if it’s 100 percent losses when it’s always been clear that some large fraction of that money was going to be recouped. Indeed, as Zachary Couwe writes in The New York Times thus far the government is earning healthy profits:

The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually, according to calculations compiled for The New York Times.

Two things happen in a panic. One is that huge profit opportunities arise for anyone who has a giant pool of cash or the ability to raise it. The other is that thanks to the “flight to quality” it’s suddenly very easy for the government to raise cash. Hence, profit. Which isn’t to say that we’ll see a profit overall, lots of opportunities for losses still exist:

The government still faces potentially huge long-term losses from its bailouts of the insurance giant American International Group, the mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the automakers General Motors and Chrysler. The Treasury Department could also take a hit from its guarantees on billions of dollars of toxic mortgages.

This should be a real worry. That said, it’s worth noting that none of this is core TARP. AIG, Fannie, and Freddie are all separate initiatives. The Fannie & Freddie bailouts were inevitable and anyone would have done them. GM and Chrysler represented diversion of TARP funds away from their main purpose (banks) toward something progressives were more friendly to. It’s really only AIG on this whole list of bailouts were I think clearly condemnation-worthy recent policy mistakes were made. The underlying situation at Fannie & Freddie was a horrible policy blunder, but it evolved over the course of decades so it’s hard to point the finger at anyone in particular.

Executing the Innocent

The grim business of executing criminals has long been haunted by the specter of killing someone innocent. Common sense and the fact that a number of people on death row have been exonerated suggests that it’s happened, but no specific case has ever been widely acknowledged. Now it looks like David Grann, writing for The New Yorker, has our man Cameron Todd Willingham accused by Texas of setting a fire that led to the deaths of three children. The case, as Grann argues, is a mess. It’s founded on forensic evidence that’s not backed up by any real science, a mentally unstable semi-repentant jailhouse snitch, and some badly flawed eyewitness testimony.

You should read the story for yourself. The tragedy inherent in executing an innocent man is pretty clear. But it’s sobering to note that these death penalty cases are more heavily litigated than other kinds of charges that might lead to “only” ten or fifteen years behind bars. Given the staggeringly high number of people in prison in the United States, it stands to reason that we have thousands of innocent people behind bars. Part of the problem is simply that no system is foolproof. But part of the problem is a mentality among law enforcement and prosecutors that convicting the innocent is a workable second-best alternative to convicting the guilty. This leads to enormous and irrational resistance to ever rethinking “successful” prosecutions.

Disney Buys Marvel

Walt Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment. The crossover possibilities are endless:

I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do is awaken cursed slumbering princesses.

Why Horserace Journalism?

Paul Krugman speculates as to why political reporting is so dominated by horse race considerations and does such a poor job of trying to explain to people what the consequences of political debates might be for their lives. I think he neglects the extent to which this can be seen as a pretty pure lock-in phenomenon.

After all, the vast majority of people in this day and age don’t watch cable news channels and don’t read newspaper articles about American politics. The minority of the population that does do those things presumably consists of people who find coverage done the way it’s done to be pretty interesting. If you changed it all around to focus more on things like “what does this mean for average people?” or “what sorts of people would be impacted by this bill and how?” and less on things like “what tactics are Republicans using?” or “was it a mistake for Obama to emphasize cost control?” then you’re running a good chance of alienating the audience you have, and just kind of hoping that the people who are currently tuned out would tune in.

And you see this on the production side, too. I don’t, personally, find campaign tactics very interesting in the scheme of things. But the people who report on campaigns find this stuff fascinating. And those people set the tone for coverage. If you come along as a person who’s interested in policy debates but not so fascinated by campaign tactics, you just won’t succeed in a profession dominated by people who are fascinated by political strategy and want to write and edit stories about political strategy. It’s like how NFL draft coverage is never done by people who just say “it’s impossible to predict this stuff, so it’d be more interesting to talk about something else.” Only people who love draft speculation get gigs covering the draft, so draft covering is dominated by a weird approach that simply ignores how much of a crapshoot the whole thing is.

Geoengineering Done Calmly

As Brad Plumer points out it’s somewhat unfortunate that the term “geo-engineering” has emerged as a kind of catchall for “things that could mitigate climate change that don’t involve reducing carbon emissions” even though some of this stuff is well into mad scientist territory while some of it is totally sensible. He offers a taste of the sensible:

But geo-engineering doesn’t always have to be so drastic. Earlier this week, a new study from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in Britain laid out some smaller-scale measures to cool the Earth, and all looked a lot less problematic. We could, for instance, paint all our roofs white, reflecting more of the sun’s heat and cooling the Earth. That’s a form of geo-engineering, and one that’s less likely to have unforeseen side effects than pumping chemicals into the sky. (Though granted, white roofs don’t actually take carbon out of the air, so they do nothing to prevent, say, ongoing ocean acidification.)

The report also touts new artificial trees under development that could potentially remove carbon-dioxide from the air more efficiently than regular trees do. Planting 100,000 such trees on a 1,500-acre area, for instance, might in theory be able to absorb the carbon emissions from Britain’s entire non-power sector. Likewise, engineers could put tubes filled with algae on the side of buildings—the algae would absorb carbon-dioxide from the air and could then be collected, turned into charcoal, and buried underground, trapping the carbon for all eternity.

At some margin, these kind of measures are going to be cheaper and easier than further reductions in carbon emissions. At the same time, it really is worth emphasizing that there’s no reason to believe that that margin is the margin we’re actually at right now. It’s easy to talk about tubes filled with algae as an alternative to a hard cap on carbon emissions if what you want to do is ensure that American Climate and Energy Security bill dies in the U.S. Senate. More difficult is to actually pass the bill that raises taxes and spends the funds on constructing these algae tubes. And honestly it’s just common sense that as long as we’re installing new stuff on buildings everywhere it would be easier to install programmable thermostats and better insulation—proven technology that exists and is working happily on many places—and directly reduce emissions.

That said, trying to get people to paint roofs white seems like a total no-brainer and given how solid the science behind this is I don’t really understand why there isn’t more momentum behind it. Manufacturers of white paint need to hire some better lobbysist or something.

CIA Operatives Should Be Afraid to Break the Law

Not the most repugnant, but certainly the most bizarre, aspect of the most recent twists in the torture debate has been the willingness of the press to take seriously the argument that criminals who also happen to be CIA employees should not be held account for breaking the law because holding them to account might discourage them from breaking the law in the future. To wit:

Krongard, one of the few active or retired CIA officers with direct knowledge of the program willing to voice publicly what many officers are saying privately, said agency personnel now may back away from controversial programs that could place them in personal legal jeopardy should their work be exposed. “The old saying goes, ‘Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk.’”

“If you’re not in the intelligence business to be forward-leaning, you might as well not be in it,” Krongard said.

If one of the higher-ups at CAP asked me to do something that could place me in personal legal jeopardy, I would back away from doing it. That might be unfortunate for my would-be law-breaking boss, but from a social point of view this is the whole reason we have laws. If my bosses want me to commit a crime on their behalf, we as a society want me to say “sorry, I don’t want to go to jail.” But the view of the intelligence community seems to be that it would be a huge problem if this same principle applied to the CIA. Instead, they think people should feel that there will be no consequences for following illegal orders. That way, people will be more likely to follow illegal orders in the future!

It’s completely insane. But I think that direct quote from Krongard captures the essence of a mindset that seems dangerous prevalent in the intelligence world—the idea that breaking the law is their job, and that anyone who expects them to do otherwise is just being naive.

Majority Rule in the United States Senate

The New York Times editorializes in favor of Democrats taking a good hard look at doing what they can on health care through the budget reconciliation process. Sounds good to me. They characterize this as “Majority Rule on Health Care Reform” which would, in fact, be nice. But when it comes to the United States Senate it is always worth recalling that majority rule is a funny concept.

If you attribute to each Senator half the population of the state he or she represents, then the Democrats’ two Senators from California, two from New York, one from Florida, two from Illinois, two from Pennsylvania, one from Ohio, two from Michigan, one from North Carolina, two from New Jersey, two from Virginia, two from Washington, two from Massachusetts, one from Indiana, one from Missouri, and two from Maryland together represent 51.125 percent of the American people. That’s just 25 Senators. There are an additional 35 Democratic Party Senators. Legislation by “majority rule” would mean something less like “50 Senators get to make laws” than “the House of Representatives gets to make laws.” And keep in mind that for all the problems with Barack Obama’s strategy and all the perfidy of the right-wing and all the fecklessness of the media and all the ineffectualness of the Democratic Party leadership, if we operated on a majority rules system of government we’d be having a very different conversation. Absent the Senate, the American Climate and Energy Security Act would be law. And absent the Senate we would have a health care bill financed through taxes on the wealthy providing subsidies for families up to 400 percent of the poverty line, and creating a somewhat robust public option.

Now, obviously, that’s not the country we live in and everyone knew the Senate existed before we started down this road. But it’s absolutely crucial to understand that our political institutions are shaping these outcomes much more heavily than are individual tactical decisions.

Metrics for Afghanistan

Karen DeYoung reports that the administration is getting ready to reveal them:

The White House has assembled a list of about 50 measurements to gauge progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it tries to calm rising public and congressional anxiety about its war strategy.

Administration officials are conducting what one called a “test run” of the metrics, comparing current numbers in a range of categories — including newly trained Afghan army recruits, Pakistani counterinsurgency missions and on-time delivery of promised U.S. resources — with baselines set earlier in the year. The results will be used to fine-tune the list before it is presented to Congress by Sept. 24.

I think writing down metrics is a good exercise primarily because it requires you to get clearer about what you’re trying to do. “Winning” is great, but it’s important to attach some more specific content to that idea. That said, defining metrics naturally raises the question of what do you do if you’re not meeting them. Change your approach? Abandon the goals? For example, we want to see less corruption in the Karzai government. But maybe 18 months from now, it’ll be slightly more corrupt. What happens then? Do we say, “Well, you guys are corrupt and obstinate so we’re through with you?” Or do we start trying to poke around and bring different leaders to office?

At any rate, can’t have metrics-blogging without Metric videos. This is “Succexy”:

Good times.

Change Coming to Japan

Japan is kind of an odd duck among the world’s democracies in that they have most of the trappings of parliamentary democracy, but when all is said and done the same party always wins. Since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party has consistently held power except for one brief 11 month spell during which an opposition coalition controlled things. But today that’s changing as the opposition Democratic Party of Japan has swept to a clear win in parliamentary elections and already controls the upper house. Yukio Hatoyama will take over as Prime Minister.

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform. The thing that strikes outsiders about Japan is that they should probably let more immigrants in but no Japanese people seem to like that idea.

Costs, Benefits, and Distribiution

Whenever people say they’re “against” cost-benefit analysis as a method for evaluating policy initiatives or regulatory schemes, they appear to be talking in paradox. To say that you think something is a good idea more or less just means that you think the benefits of doing it would outweigh the costs of doing it. So pretty much any proposal for changing the way these things are evaluated amounts to a proposal to “mend but don’t end” the practice of cost-benefit analysis. That said, the current way of doing things has a number of very serious flaws. Mark Kleiman offers up three here but let me just site the most egregious one:

Formal benefit cost analysis counts everyone’s gains and losses equally. But common sense and the principle of diminishing marginal utility agree that a dollar’s worth of gain is more valuable to someone with few dollars than it is with someone with many. Obviously, taking $1 each from 900,000 poor people to give $1 million to a hedge-fund billionaire doesn’t reflect a social gain, but a formal benefit-cost analysis will show that it does: after all, the net benefit is $100,000. Thus gains and losses should be adjusted by (at least) dividing each gain or loss by the income or wealth of the person bearing it, so that a $20 gain to a family with an income of $20,000 weighs as a heavily as a $10,000 gain to a family with an income of $1 million.

This is a very common pathology of economic analysis. As Brad DeLong points out in this Socratic dialogue what passes for “value-neutral” positive economics in fact embeds some very strong and perverse ideas about value:

Agathon: “That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sick.”

Agathon: “And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sicker.”

Agathon: “But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system’s concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?”

And:

Glaukon: “We are value neutral economists! We don’t care about distribution! We care about efficiency!”

Agathon: “But claiming that you don’t care about distribution is implicitly saying that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.”

Glaukon: “You’re introducing politics into a value-neutral technocratic social science.”

Now as it happens it’s not 100 percent clear what alternative rule you should use. Which I think is one reason economists remain attracted to the “distribution doesn’t matter” point of view. It’s false to say that distribution doesn’t matter. But if you choose to believe that distribution doesn’t matter, that provides an unequivocal answer to how you ought to build distribution into your analysis. If you decide, accurately, that distribution does matter you’re left with the tough problem of specifying exactly how it matters. Much easier to just pretend it doesn’t matter, and then pretending that the fact that you’re pretending it doesn’t matter doesn’t matter either because it’s a “value-neutral” point-of-view. But it just isn’t/

Missing: Actual Explanation of the Health Care Issue

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander observes:

The Post publishes health-care reform stories almost every day as it tracks the twists and turns of the epic debate. So it’s surprising to hear from so many readers who ask: Why hasn’t The Post explained what this is all about? [...] In my examination of roughly 80 A-section stories on health-care reform since July 1, all but about a dozen focused on political maneuvering or protests. The Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism had a similar finding. Its recent month-long review of Post front pages found 72 percent of health-care stories were about politics, process or protests. [...]

It’s not for lack of interest. About 45 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press recently said they have been following the health-care story more closely than any other.

But nearly half of those surveyed this month in a nationwide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they are “confused” about reform plans.

This is, of course, the media’s characteristic flaw. The bulk of reporters and editors at major political media institutions have almost no understanding of substantive public policy issues. And they conjoin to their ignorance a kind of contempt for people who do understand them. Consequently, people who are interested in such matters tend to be driven out of the institutions in questions. Instead, you get a self-replicating cadre of self-congratulatory and shallow people who enjoy doing this kind of coverage while sneering at people who care about substance.

The bias toward process stories is not ideological in its intent, but it’s strongly ideological in its impact. Creating public confusion and ignorance while obscuring what’s really happening tends to favor elites versus people of modest means, it favors the status quo over change, it favors insiders over outsiders, and it favors narrow interests over the public interest.

The Trouble With Prescience

Via Paul Rosenberg, a very interesting pre-crash paper from Dean Baker called “The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is it Real or Is it Another Bubble?” His conclusion was bubble. He marshals a variety of evidence for this conclusion, but the key point is simply that the notional value of homes was increasing much more rapidly than the actually observed price of renting a place to live:

The only problem with the paper is that it was published way back in 2002. Baker not only makes the case for the existence of the bubble persuasively, but he highlights most of the various ways in which its collapse will create huge economic problems. But in 2003, the houses are more expensive than ever. And in 2004, things have gone up even more. Then they keep going up in 2005. And then for another year! And this is precisely what makes bubbles so problematic. Even when you’re pretty sure you’ve identified one, this gives you almost no insight into questions of timing. Consequently, it’s quite difficult to use your insight to go make tons of money. And that in turn makes the bubbles more severe, since the skeptics are basically out on the sidelines.

And in the reputational economy of analysts the consequences are even worse. If you go along with the herd and then predict a problem a month before it arises, then you strike everyone as prescient. But if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero. But Ben Bernanke who made very mainstream mistakes and then pivoted adroitly once the bill came due does.

The Commission Option

Fred Hiatt has a pretty reasonable column arguing that rather than ad hoc and limited investigations, we need to look into the torture question through a comprehensive independent commission. That said, I have doubts about this part:

Such a commission would investigate not just the Bush administration but the government, including Congress. It would give former vice president Dick Cheney a forum to make his case on the necessity of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It would examine the efficacy of such techniques, if any, and the question of whether, even if they work, waterboarding and other methods long considered torture ever can be justified. [...] But a fair-minded commission — co-chaired by, say, former Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — could help the nation come to grips with its past and show the world that America is serious about doing so. It could help Americans understand how this country came to engage in what many regard as vile and un-American practices. It might help the country respond better the next time it is frightened.

It’s hard for me to understand how we can outsource a decision about whether or not “torture ever can be justified” to an independent commission. That’s a policy decision that needs to be made by policymakers. And, in fact, it has been made by policymakers. That’s how torture came to be illegal in the United States. The crux of the matter is that we came to have a bunch of policymakers who no longer believed in that principle and thus they broke the law. This leaves us with a legal issue about what to do with them. But it also leaves the policy issue hanging out there. The main position of the conservative movement at this point is that torture is excellent, and something we ought to engage in. It’s important to resolve that argument, but I don’t see any alternative to resolving it through the political process. A commission can’t do it.

Change and its Discontents

This Kay Hymowitz article about how thanks to feminism nobody knows who should pay for dinner and so basically the world is doomed was published a while back, but I first saw it yesterday. I found it sort of grimly fascinating but couldn’t really find the words to express my feelings about it. But I bugged the twitterverse to get someone else to write about it and Will Wilkinson delivered:

I think I first saw this kind of argument clearly laid out in Tocqueville. If I remember correctly, he noted that there is a kind of soothing clarity in stratified societies with brightly marked class lines. When classes are stable over generations, and there is little mobility up or down, conventions that govern class relations become settled, making it easy to know how to behave toward those above and below one’s station. Moreover, when classes are fixed and mobility is limited, there is little anxiety about improving one’s position, since there’s so little prospect for doing so. American-style democratic equality creates a pattern of unceasingly stressful striving for relative rank, and all this mobility up and down produces a confusion in manners that can lead to dangerous social frictions and resentments. It becomes too hard to know what to expect of others, or what others expect from us.

This is, as far as I can tell, Hymowitz’s argument about gender relations in the post-feminist era. Women attaining something like social equality with men has created not so much liberation as a kind of toxic confusion. When women are free to be individuals, free to want different things than other women, men can’t be sure what any particular women might want from him. To open the door for her or not!? To pick up the check or not!? To be a nice guy like she says she wants or a bad boy like she really wants?! These unresolved and unresolvable questions has led inevitably to the contemporary condition in which men are either unlovable whining sad sacks or misogynist assholes who cite a cartoon version of Darwinism to justify treating a woman as little more than an upgrade from Jergens and a sock. If we don’t like it, we only have feminism to blame. Or something like that.

Exactly. As Will says, this phenomenon is real enough and it’s worth taking seriously the fact that it bothers people. But it’s really not worth taking seriously the idea that this cost outweighs the benefits, both the benefits in terms of justice and the benefits in terms of drastically enhancing the scope of opportunity available to both men and women. At any rate, Hymowitz by just really going on at length manages to lay out the underlying logic of a lot of contemporary social conservative anxiety in a way that you rarely see set out.