Thanksgiving reading

Hope you're all stuffed with Turkey and whatnot. I had a lovely weekend with friends, family and all. Then I sat down to read an article (via Yglesias, of course) about Israel. There are so many things to say about "Why Israelis Don't Care About Peace with Palestinians" by Karl Vick, but this part in particular was deeply troubling, and familiar:

"There was a time when people felt guilty about the Tel Aviv bubble," says Shavit. "Then it turned out the bubble was pretty strong. The bubble was resilient." Indeed, there are times when you can think most of the nation is within it. Polls are clear on the point. In a 2007 survey, 95% of Israeli Jews described themselves as happy, and a third said they were "very happy." The rich are happier than the poor, and the religious are happiest of all. But the broad thrust, so incongruous to people who know Israel only from headlines, suits a country whose quality of life is high and getting better.

But wait. Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask), don't Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity? Well, not exactly. Asked in a March poll to name the "most urgent problem" facing Israel, just 8% of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty. Israeli Arabs placed peace first, but among Jews here, the issue that President Obama calls "critical for the world" just doesn't seem — critical.

Frankly, I don't see a lot of room for Canadians to scold the Israelis on their "bubble". The Middle East peace process, at least, is unlikely to lead to (for example) a global food shortage and massive famines.

Canada's bubble--and the lack of urgency towards global climate change and shutting down the tar sands--is far more damning, frankly.

Wherein I side with the glibertarians

Okay, based on my entirely-scientific and not at all shoddy survey of each and every one of the Internets, I am the only one who read this story and thought the homeowner was a fucking goof:

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

Ahem. $75 a year amounts to $6.25 a month. If you're super-curious, it's about 21 cents a day. It is, if you're a homeowner, an entirely reasonable sum of money--one could almost say trivial.

Except it's not trivial, this is about your house not burning down you moron. By the quotes elsewhere in the story, it's clear Gene Cranick knew the rules--pay the subscription and be served, or don't pay and don't. He gambled, and lost.

There are a ton of interesting arguments to be made about whether a service like this should be fee-based to begin with--and I side with Chet in thinking that mass privatization of public services is basically a case of political amnesia.

But that doesn't seem to be what's actually going on here. Thanks to Kevin Drum, I suspect the only real lesson to draw from this story is something far more banal--the Cranicks were trying to enjoy a low-tax lifestyle with the security of a high-service city nearby, and it bit them right in the ass.

This is an ongoing problem in Obion County, Tennessee, and the people who live in the rural areas around South Fulton know very well what they're doing. From a PDF that Drum links to, the important points of this scenario are:

1) There is no county-wide fire service in Obion County.

2) There are city fire departments throughout Obion that, while funded by city taxpayers, will respond to calls for help outside the city lines.

3) All of these services charge a fee. There is no legal way for the fire services to force you to pay. So more than half of the fine, upstanding rural citizens of Obion County--after having their homes and loved ones saved by urban tax dollars incarnated as a firefighter and a hose--cheat. Or, if you prefer, steal a vital public service.

4) In response, the majority of city fire services charge rural homeowners an ongoing subscription fee to be served. This nicely avoids a number of problems having to do with handing individuals wads of cash or blank cheques in an emergency situation.

5) Some stupid motherfuckers still refuse to pay, believing--contrary to the explicit policies of the cities they rely on--that they'll get away with it.

So I'm sorry, on any number of levels I just can't be sympathetic to this guy. Obion County should have a public, county-wide fire service--but it doesn't now, and if you live in Obion County, you know this. You know this because the city of South Fulton calls rural residents at the end of July to make sure they know they're in arrears, something the city did in this case and this family ignored. Rural homeowners who don't pay the service are tax cheats, pure and simple, trying to get the benefit of living close to a city without paying the taxes for it.

Now, a bit of Googling that I'm not going to retread here (investigation vs. privacy--where's the line?) reveals that Gene Cranick is the owner of a not particularly prosperous farm, though substantially more prosperous than the surrounding county. Maybe the Cranicks just fell on hard times--not uncommon in the US these days--and they couldn't pay the bill, though my bet is that's not what we're looking at here.

Sadly for Gene Cranick, his son Tim went and cold-cocked the South Fulton Fire Chief and is now in prison awaiting a plea hearing. Now the family is not only out of their home and life posessions, but they're looking at how to pay the legal bills on a felony assault charge.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. We can also say, apparently, that paying your taxes upfront is a lot cheaper than the alternative.

UPDATE: Yup, I'm on the same side as the brain trust at the National Review.

Every country has its own version of the Bush Administration

...and some days I want to expand that and say every jurisdiction does. But lets talk China for a moment. Apparently, the Americans are suddenly concerned that China, having gone hot and cold in regional politics, is going cold again:

Hu and Obama met Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, amid increasing regional angst at what the Obama administration and several East Asian countries see as China's increasingly aggressive and arrogant foreign policy.

Of course, it's just possible the Chinese have actual reasons for what they're doing:

There are currently two factions shaping the internal Chinese debate. One could be described as a “status quo” faction that does not seek major changes in the relationship with the United States. It sees the U.S. as a benign power supporting an international system that is conducive to continued Chinese economic, scientific, and cultural development – despite longstanding contentious, but manageable, disagreements on Taiwan, trade, and human rights.

The other faction, which is less cohesive but more bellicose, believes the United States feels threatened by China’s rapid development and that the U.S. is seeking to contain and constrain it in a variety of ways, including aggravating disputes between China and its neighbors and limiting Chinese access to resources, markets, and technology. These diffuse but potentially volatile anxieties are being employed by a variety of anti-status quo political personalities in the broader internal struggle over China’s future - and the future of the Chinese Communist Party - that is animating the upcoming transition to a new Chinese administration.

The split between these factions within the Committee has led to deadlock. Until the Committee comes to a decision, Chinese officials do not have a policy to guide engagement with the United States. So they are in a holding pattern that is reflected in their interactions with their U.S. counterparts.

U.S. officials should not be surprised by the feelings of distrust toward the United States. Over the past several decades the United States pursued policies that some members of the Chinese leadership found threatening.

What's really rich is hearing US policy makers describe China's foreign policy as "aggressive and arrogant". Until China invades an oil-rich state on the pretense of finding weapons of mass destruction, kills more than a million people in the process, and then never finds a single shred of evidence to justify its crimes, I think the US should really STFU about China's foreign policy.

A few lessons

As long as Axelrod was helping Obama capture the White House, it was easy to assume both men subscribed to the same worldview...

The development shattered the tentative understanding between Axelrod and the wonks. Geithner believed that you cease to be an advanced economy once the government starts dissolving contracts. Axelrod and other senior political aides, like Gibbs, felt the administration had to respond to the country’s legitimate outrage. They began to worry that Geithner’s principled caution, while noble, could bring the administration down. The president was exasperated but ultimately sided with Geithner on the letter of the law.

Politically, it didn’t work. “If you were going to pick a moment when the whole thing turned on Obama,” says a longtime Democratic consultant, “it was the moment the administration saved the AIG bonuses.”

There's so much that could be said about that quote, from Noam Scheiber's TNR article on David Axelrod. But two points that I'd really like to focus on:

1) Note what you can and can't do in an "advanced" economy: the UAW saw their contracts and pension agreements torn up like confetti to save GM and Chrysler, but banker contracts are sacrosanct. This, fundamentally, is Obama's worldview. (The GM-AIG comparison is entirely fair, because both companies were on government life support at the time.) The difference between how workers of different collars, and colours, were treated is a pretty good indication of the ruling ideology in the west these days.

2) There's been an argument since, oh, before he was even inaugurated about people being disillusioned with Obama. I've chimed in on this more than once, but re-read that first line I quoted again. David Axelrod is probably closer to Barack Obama than all but one or two men not directly related to the President. They spoke several times daily during the campaign, Axelrod knows Obama's politics better than almost anyone alive.

And even he has faced the same problems of reconciling his expectation of candidate Obama with the reality of President Obama.

That seems worth noting, to me.

Yowch

Jesus, two weeks without a single post. That's a new level of suck for me, I think.

Apologies. Real life has intervened in a most obtrusive way. Meanwhile, I laughed quite heartily at this. If you've been to any university in the last 20 years or so, I'd wager the dialogue between Abbas and Fyvush sounds awfully familiar.

Also funny: A capella Inception trailer:



I challenge you to not be walking around all weekend and not occasionally let loose with a loud BRAAAAAWM.

Peak oil getting taken seriously?

Here's some news from the UK, from a while back:

But documents obtained under the FoI Act seen by the Observer show that a "peak oil workshop" brought together staff from the DECC, the Bank of England and Ministry of Defence among others to discuss the issue.

A ministry note of that summit warned that "[Government] public lines on peak oil are 'not quite right'. They need to take account of climate change and put more emphasis on reducing demand and also the fact that peak oil may increase volatility in the market."

And here's something more recent from Germany:

The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.

The study, whose authenticity was confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE by sources in government circles, was not meant for publication. The document is said to be in draft stage and to consist solely of scientific opinion, which has not yet been edited by the Defense Ministry and other government bodies.

Ah yes, something that consists "solely" of scientific opinion, without being filtered through the Ministry first. How terrible. The actual conclusions of the report aren't terribly surprising, and indeed are the kind of thing we've been expecting for years. For example:

Politics in place of the market: The Bundeswehr Transformation Center expects that a supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market. "The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts," the study states. In the long run, the study goes on, the global oil market, will only be able to follow the laws of the free market in a restricted way. "Bilateral, conditioned supply agreements and privileged partnerships, such as those seen prior to the oil crises of the 1970s, will once again come to the fore."

Market failures: The authors paint a bleak picture of the consequences resulting from a shortage of petroleum. As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes. "Shortages in the supply of vital goods could arise" as a result, for example in food supplies. Oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 95 percent of all industrial goods. Price shocks could therefore be seen in almost any industry and throughout all stages of the industrial supply chain. "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse."

Relapse into planned economy: Since virtually all economic sectors rely heavily on oil, peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets," says the study. "A conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis."

The return to pre-eminence of politics, as opposed to the domination of market mechanisms, is something I've written about before.

Of course, this presumes that you think of oil as a "market" good to start with, which is questionable given that America's fought at least two wars to keep the flow of oil uninterrupted.

Interesting that both stories give the impression that governments are discussing this all quite seriously, but don't want to go public with it because it would freak the norms.

While we're discussing it, what if peak coal arrives synchronous with peak oil? Are totally effed?

Boy, if that turns out to be true a whole lot of Ontario Progressive Conservatives are going to owe Dalton McGuinty an apology over the caterwauling that put us through when he started migrating away from coal.

Purdy

This is a very impressive movie:



Note especially the change starting in the very late 1990s. It's like somebody suddenly turned on a light somewhere between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter (Jove is the outermost planet on the margins.)

Turns out Bjorn Lomborg is Danish for "Richard Cohen"

Ugh. Watch as another entirely discredited voice gets free press for belatedly coming to grips with the facts that were in front of his face the entire time.

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

So Lomborg is only about twelve years late to the party. This makes him twelve years less credible than, say, Jim Hansen or Joe Romm. He is also a direct analog to the voices who came out against the Iraq War, circa 2006-2007.

Interesting side note: In Canadian English, "Bjorn Lomborg" is properly pronounced "Michael Ignatieff".

10 Years ago

10 years ago today, me and a girl went out on a date. Everything else in my life has followed from that day in my life as surely as night follows day.

When Vicki and I started dating, I was what polite company would call "between opportunities" and what impolite company called a high school dropout. One year later, I had finally completed high school. One year after that, I was entering university with a substantial scholarship. Four years after that, I had graduated with highest honours and was moving in with Vicki. Two years after that, she agreed to marry me, despite the fact that I was in the middle of finishing a second degree. One year after that we bought a house. And three months ago yesterday we were made man and wife by the powers vested in our officiant by the Province of Ontario and the Castle Grayskull.

Yes, we had the officiant say that. If you've got a problem, get your own wedding. Were there Imperial Storm Troopers at our wedding? Why yes, yes there were.

Not too bad for a relationship that started with dinner at a restaurant that no longer exists and a viewing of The Cell.

I could go on, of course. I could talk about the good times, the bad times, how happy we make each other, and how every once in a while we want to kill each other with whatever blunt object is handy. But frankly, none of that is as startling to me as the massive changes in my life since we met.

The thing I remember about the days before Vicki was how angry I was. I still get angry, and maybe too often, but back then I was angry the way I'm a mammal--angry at my failures in school, angry at my parents (hey, I was 19) angry about nearly everything. I look back and simply cannot understand why. Since meeting Vicki, it just seemed so much easier to be happy.

I always assumed that boys learned to be men from the men around them, and that's true--we can learn the how and whats of manhood from out fathers, uncles, and friends. What I didn't learn until I met Vicki was the why. Without her, I probably would have muddled through my life in one way or another--I like to think I have some innate abilities--but there's no doubt in my mind my life would be poorer and I wouldn't have accomplished what I have without her. Her love for me gave me clarity and focus, and to this day when I'm confused, lost, or unable to choose a path forward, I know that she's there to help me make the right choice or love me if I make the wrong one.

Vicki, I love you more than spaghetti and more than Babylon 5. I hope you're okay with the last 10 years, because I'm a non-smoker and probably have another four or five decades ahead of me. If you'll have them, they're all yours.

Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity

Yglesias:

I fear that historical evidence of poor economic performance in the wake of asset price bubbles bursting is creating a mood of dangerous complacency. You can read that as evidence that we’re destined to experience an extended period of poor growth, but you can also read it as evidence that what normally happens after a bust is that policymakers implement an ineffective response. And as Posen argues, accepting the view that slow growth is inevitable is a major cause of ineffective policy and becomes self-fulfilling. Japan started growing once it got some policymakers who believed it was possible for Japan to grow, and thus that they would try pro-growth things and try them on a large scale.

Meanwhile, in Greece:

This dire prognosis comes even despite Athens' massive efforts to sort out the country's finances. The government's draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country's budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country's economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country's gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.

And back in the US, the one signature Obama program on easing the economic crisis was a deliberately cruel hoax:

Was HAMP a bait-and-switch? Did Treasury know all along that it was likely to fail in its stated aim, but go ahead with it anyway because of its second-order effects? That seems to be the message they’re sending — that HAMP was a way of encouraging owners to apply for loan modifications, not because they were likely to get those modifications, but just because the sheer fact of applying for the modifications would help out homeowners generally, by reducing the rate of foreclosures, and banks too.

When Jared Diamond's book Collapse came out, a lot of people focused on the first part of the argument (hey, collapse happens!) and ignored the second part of it: namely, that governments are frequently unwilling or unable to make the social changes needed to stave off calamity. Indeed, they often make the exact wrong choices that make conditions worse.

I'd say the last two years have given a lot more evidence to that argument.

In Memoriam

Matthew Simmons died last week, and it's a loss to the peak oil advocacy network. It was only after his death that I started to peek around his website -- the Ocean Energy Institute -- where I noticed that he too shared a belief [PDF] that ammonia played a major role in the future of any carbon-free economy. Basically, Simmons advocated for massive construction of offshore wind on both coasts of the US and in the Great Lakes, as well as onshore wind in the midwest, all tied together with a major grid and with plug-in hybrids, and later ammonia fuel, as storage.

I first wrote about Ammonia about two years ago, and haven't seen anything to really change my mind since: if we need a liquid fuel that can be produced on a large scale and power both existing infrastructure (with modifications) and future projects, ammonia is definitely a winner. If anything, I've become more convinced of NH3's merits because the "reserve" of the key element--nitrogen--is enormous and omnipresent, while doing anything with carbon at this point other than burying it seems like madness.

Welcome to the last ditch

That's the last line of one of Gwynne Dyer's latest columns:

Before the current recession, global emissions of greenhouse gases were growing at almost 3 percent per year, and they will certainly return to that level when the recession ends. To come in under +2 degrees C of warming, we need to be reducing global emissions by at least 2 percent by 2012: a total cut of around 5 percent each year, assuming that economies grow at the same rate as before.

That would be hard to do, but not impossible. However, as the years pass and the emissions continue to grow, it gets harder and harder to turn the juggernaut around in time. On the most optimistic timetable, there might be US climate legislation in 2013, and a global climate deal in 2014, and we really start reducing emissions by 2015.

By then, we would need to be cutting emissions by 5 or 6 percent a year, instead of growing them at 3 percent a year, if we still want to come in under +2 degrees C. That’s impossible. No economy can change the sources of its energy at the rate of 8 or 9 percent a year. So we are going to blow right through the point of no return.

He also points out that what we're seeing in Russia at the moment--an economically and politically weakened state casting about trying to deal with an unprecedented natural disaster--is something we ought to get used to. You could add Pakistan to the list.

Fun fact: In 2007 a new law took effect which basically gutted Russia's national forest fire corps as a gift to logging companies.

Dyer believes that geoengineering is the next step--out of necessity, not efficacy. I don't think we'll even get that much.

I have been doing this too long

So I have, fitfully, found semi-regular employment where I get to write online in an informal fashion. I would normally call it blogging, except that other people keep calling it different things. Anyway, I had to explain to one of my editors what it meant when I used the phrase "shorter [other writer]", and realized that joke dates back to the early years of the blogosphere when we were all busy arguing over the impending war in Iraq.

And now I feel very, very old.

All you need to know

NY Times writer Ross Douthat on the proposed City Hall mosque:

By global standards, Rauf may be the model of a “moderate Muslim.” But global standards and American standards are different.

Of course they are. I do love how the proponents of universal moral constants suddenly discover exceptions when brown-skinned people offend them.

Somedays, "war looming in the Middle East" isn't even news

So Jeff Goldberg has a new article out in the Atlantic about how Israel is going to attack Iran next spring.

Except, no, that's not really what it's about. It's actually about saying Israel will attack Iran--if the US doesn't attack first. But the Israelis would clearly like the US to attack, and not them.

And some Israeli generals, like their American colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack. “Our time would be better spent lobbying Barack Obama to do this, rather than trying this ourselves,” one general told me. “We are very good at this kind of operation, but it is a big stretch for us. The Americans can do this with a minimum of difficulty, by comparison. This is too big for us.”

Part of the point here is that Israel would only get one shot at an attack on Iran, whereas the US could sustain days, or even weeks, of bombing without serious concern. The other point is that, of course, small countries like to get big countries to do the heavy lifting here for them.

Why, exactly, western readers are supposed to view Israel as a plucky country just sticking up for itself when it won't, um, stick up for itself is a mystery left to the reader.

What really annoys me about the Atlantic piece is the sheer craven dishonesty of the author. In 2002, Goldberg believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and he warned specifically that the failure of Israel's raid on the Osirak reactor should be a warning to liberals who thought Iraq had been effectively disarmed. In 2010, Goldberg instead writes:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

In a way, accusations of dishonesty are beside the point: at no point does it occur to a propagandist that the two contradictory things they've put to print can't both be true. Both are true as necessary. In 2003, Osirak was a failure because Iraq simply redoubled its efforts to get a nuclear bomb. In 2010, Osirak is a success and shows the invincibilty of air power to get the job done.

So the story we've got so far is that a) certain American writers play fast and loose with the truth, and b) Israel is nervous enough about launching a raid on Iran that they're using prominent American periodicals to ask Uncle Sam to do it instead.

Meanwhile, the article does actually capture the list of potential downsides for an Israeli or US raid on Iran: basically, lighting the Middle East on fire (again) for at best a temporary reprieve. Indeed, the Osirak raid is instructive here because many Iraqis have come forward to say that the Israeli attack actually convinced the Iraqi leadership to massively accelerate their nuclear program, which they did and was only interrupted by the Iraqi defeat during the Gulf War.

So you've got an Israeli leadership that is convinced, utterly convinced that for next to zero benefit (indeed, probably making their strategic situation worse) they'll launch a raid that will have the secondary effect of almost certainly setting off a wave of terrorist attacks, at the very least. It would also dramatically strengthen the role of countries like China and Russia in Iran, and weaken America's ability to give any kind of security guarantee to Israel.

It would, in short, be a clusterfuck pursued only by the insane or the insipid. But Israelis and Americans of all stripes are convinced that Iran is run by madmen.

21st century liberals

There's a common thread that runs through politicians as varied as Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, Dalton McGuinty, and yes Barack Obama. Maybe as far as liberalism is concerned, we should start the clock of the 21st century a bit early--the way historians talk about a "long 19th century" that started in 1789 and ends in 1914. That way we could integrate Bill Clinton, by far the most important liberal leader of the 21st century--both because he was the American President, and because he set the path that we seem to be following.

The common thread that runs from Clinton to Chretien to McGuinty to Obama, is basically an inverse Leninism: if the early Soviets believed that the state needed to control the "commanding heights" of the economy, your modern liberals seem to believe the commanding heights of the economy need to control the state. One implication from this is that they basically reject the idea of a serious political argument, in the original sense of the word: the idea that there are serious disputes between parties of different levels of power and autonomy is basically dismissed. Instead, there are just problems that need to be managed. The capital-c Correct solution is one in which the needs of everyone can be satisfied.

Except that, of course, no solution actually satisfies everyone, so you get some really bizarre redefinitions of "satisfaction". You end up with emergency actions to rescue bankers but a sense of resignation, and even apathy, at tens of millions of people unnecessarily out of work.

Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.

Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

Of course, you've got to love how Alter tries to reassure us that the extraordinarily wealthy people in the Obama administration mobilized truly massive amounts of capital to rescue their extraordinarily wealthy comrades--but not because of ideology, you understand.

There's a similar thing happening in Ontario right now, as the McGuinty government introduces any number of changes -- tax shifts from business to individuals, changes to post-secondary education funding, and now changes to labour law: if your boss has screwed you out of wages you're owed, you now have to prove to the government you've confronted your boss before they'll intervene on your behalf.

Leave aside the question of fairness--lord knows if I steal from my employer, the law doesn't require them to confront me before they call the police--is the law of the Province of Ontario going to say, in effect, that unless a taxpayer has tried to resolve a problem themselves, they don't want to hear about it? That the government doesn't consider it a crime to leave your workers unpaid, so long as you get around to it eventually?

It's worth noting that the Liberals in Ontario have managed to be so incompetent and malicious lately that even the Toronto Star editorial board has managed to timidly, gently tip toe towards actually criticizing the Liberals on this. But the larger problems is that basically the leftmost span of the political spectrum--leftmost acceptable span, of course--is basically still lemon socialism.

Christ almight, Paul bleedin' Krugman--a neoliberal deity, or at least a major saint--is considered the outer fringe of acceptable American leftism. Not that I don't think he's great, especially lately, but there's got to be more than this, right?

No positive social changes allowed

via Dave Roberts at Grist, there's a debate that I think encapsulates a lot of our current problems. Basically, a number of conservatives at The American Scene were arguing over carbon taxes. Jim Manzi, a conservative who basically gets way too much credit from polite liberals, responded with a number of arguments against a carbon tax.

1. Europe is a huge, advanced market that has had these taxes for decades while internal combustion has remained a very stable technology, and people have continued to make choices from among broadly pre-existing technologies such as mass transit, bicycles, walking and so forth.

2. Even if other conditions mean that we can now create qualitatively different technical innovation in the near future, Europe provides a big enough market to induce this, and there is no obvious reason why the incremental market that would be provided by the U.S. would make much difference.

Argument 1 is true, but irrelevant as for all but the last six years really, fuel taxes have been in the context of a market where oil was still, by a very very far margin, the cheapest source of energy around. (With the obvious exception of the oil shocks which preceded Europe's regime of fuel taxes.)

Argument 2 is kind of funny for a conservative, because it basically casts the US as a free rider on European innovation--or, to put it another way, America is an environmental welfare bum, and Manzi doesn't mind.

Now, people responded by saying that despite Manzi, Europe has responded to higher fuel taxes in a variety of ways, largely summed up by "doing things in less fuel-intense ways". (Smaller vehicles, more transit and bike use, etc.)

Manzi's response really has to be seen to be believed:

This strikes me as, at best, a word game. I understand that innovation is not identical to invention. But this is like saying that in response to an increase in the price of peanut butter, I “innovated” by making smaller sandwiches and eating ham-and-cheese more often (while noting that I designed these new sandwiches very well, and am probably healthier anyway with less peanut butter in my diet). If by “innovation” in response to higher gas prices, we mean switching to smaller cars and taking the bus and riding bicycles more often, then I agree entirely that higher gas prices in the U.S. will induce innovation.

First of all, I think Manzi's grasp of basic nutrition is about as bad as his grasp of climate change: he thinks switching to a meat-and-cheese diet from peanut butter would be better for him?

That aside, Manzi--who, sadly, is one of the few US conservatives who doesn't dismiss climate change outright--is basically saying here that the easiest, cheapest, most reliable way of reducing carbon pollution (doing the same or more with less carbon) doesn't count as far as he's concerned. These are forms of innovation, but for a US conservative, if it doesn't involve nuclear-powered fuel cell Hummers, it's just hippie socialism.

This isn't just a doctrinaire conservative viewpoint, either. I always think of this as the "Wired fallacy"--after their truly horrible article on nuclear power a few years back. It's basically the bog standard popular US view on science and technology: don't bother changing behaviours--technology will do it for us.

Of course, we change our behaviours all the time in response to new technologies, so why we shouldn't anticipate that has always boggled me.

A discussion on the Middle Class

A friend emailed me this a few days ago. It's basically a psychiatrist giving his own explanation for why the "American dream" is out of reach--he blames an infantilizing culture in parenting and academia, and I particularly liked this bit:

They're not better educated, they just have more degrees. Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it? No, but every parent of a high school kid I've talked to about this says the same thing: "I know, I know, but I just want her to get that piece of paper." So work this out in your head: either this parent is a solitary genius who is the sole possessor of the knowledge that the college degree is merely a brand and not a mark of knowledge; or every employer in the world already knows this. So if we all agree the degree doesn't mean anything close to what we are pretending it means, then what's the point of piling on? Isn't this technically a Ponzi scheme?

I've used the phrase "paperwork arms race" before to discuss exactly this phenomenon, but calling it a Ponzi scheme is pithier. In my field, I've taken a master's degree to get exactly where my father was with 2 bachelors degrees, and where someone in his father's generation could have been with a high school diploma. In the industry I'm discussing, one more generation back would take you to the point where high school dropouts were doing the work.

Yes, some tasks have gotten more complicated because of new technology--but the people who have problems with new technology are definitely not the young people entering the workforce, ergo much of this academic training is deadweight.

That said, I'm always wary of "cultural" explanations for things that can be explained more directly. For example, from the Financial Times:

Unsurprisingly, a growing majority of Americans have been telling pollsters that they expect their children to be worse off than they are. During the three postwar decades, which many now look back on as the golden era of the ­American middle class, the rising tide really did lift most boats – as John F. Kennedy put it. Incomes grew in real terms by almost 2 per cent a year – almost doubling each generation.

And although the golden years were driven by the rise of mass higher education, you did not need to have graduated from high school to make ends meet. Like her husband, Connie Freeman was raised in a “working-class” home in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. Her father, who left school aged 14 following the Great Depression of the 1930s, worked in the iron mines all his life. Towards the end of his working life he was earning $15 an hour – more than $40 in today’s prices.


Thirty years later, Connie, who is far better qualified than her father, having graduated from high school and done one year of further education, makes $17 an hour. The pace of life has also changed: “We used to sit around the dinner table every evening when I was growing up,” says Connie, who speaks with prolonged vowels of the Midwest. “Nowadays that’s sooooo rare.”

The Last Psychiatrist spent much of his post spanking a relatively privileged kids who was offered a starting salary of $40k a year, and said no because he thought he deserved something better, recession notwithstanding. So yeah, we can all laugh at him (anyone want to pay me 40K? I'll take it!) but we could laugh at the stupidity of the privileged, melanin-deficient classes till the cows come home--it wouldn't change the fact that for the much larger number of people, the middle-class dream is actually, objectively out of reach.

Asking everyone to take 3 years of school after high school before they can even expect to start making a liveable wage--much less a comfortable one--is actually an imposition, especially when there's so little evidence it's necessary. Yes, the wage premium for a post-secondary education has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, but for what? So the middle class can work at 1/3 of the wages their lesser-educated parents did?

What we've seen in North America is not an expansion of middle-wage jobs that one can secure with, say, a 3-year post-secondary program. Instead, we've seen a vast expansion of low-wage jobs and a smaller expansion of high-skill, high-wage jobs--the middle class dream is disappearing because there are less middle-class jobs. Talking about "culture" and "infantilized adults" can illuminate some thing--indeed, I do think I am probably less "adult" than my father (and I'm sure he didn't think he was ready at all for 3 kids by 31! But that's only two years away for me.) But I think the objective facts of the economy are far more powerful.

Indeed, when there are fewer middle-class jobs that one can get with a realistic skill set coming out of high school, you would expect people to take longer to "grow up", if we define growing up as job, marriage, house, etc. Nothing matures you like actually having to do something.

Sometimes, humans do stupid things: FILM AT 11

Matthew Yglesias notes that driving a car is very likely to kill your child. Yes, you--you in the back, dangling your remote starter, waiting for the lecture to be over. This is actually a really important point: owning a car is basically the leading cause of death for children.

Don't believe me? Here's the Center for Disease Control's statistics for causes of death in 2007 (I assume 2007 is the latest year for which complete data is available.)



So, "unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death, ahead of homicide by a country mile. Note for a moment that "only" 2,285 children died of homicides that year. What, exactly, makes up "unintentional injury"?



More than twice as many children are killed in traffic accidents as are murdered. The reasons for this are pretty simple: children don't die of heart disease or cancers (mostly) because they're not smokers or sedentary overeaters. (Yet.) So motor vehicle fatalities are the biggest remaining cause. And yet, people regularly choose to drive their children to school for fear of some trauma befalling their children on the way there. Because people don't regularly research childhood death statistics (and really, who would want to?) people don't realize that by unnecessarily putting their kids in a car, they're putting them in more danger, not less.

What's your most hated legacy policy?

Scott Adams offers an interesting idea:

One of the biggest problems with the world is that we're bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it's hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It's problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The tax system is a mess. Banking is a hodgepodge of regulations and products glued together. I could go on. The point is that anything that has been around for awhile is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be.

My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country.

Okay, so what legacy systems would we reform/kill?

Um, criminal justice in a big way. Between the number of offenses that make no sense in law, or the conditions in which we jail people, I really wonder if redeploying all of our efforts at incarceration towards simply putting more police on the streets to prevent crime would be more worthwhile, even if you assume that everyone who wasn't deterred got away with it. And that doesn't even get into issues of discrimination...

Telecommunications. AM, FM, Television, telephones, cell phones, all are increasingly irrelevant, or would be in a world where incumbent powers didn't own the best parts of the radio spectrum and the wired grid.

Here's one: end of life care in medicine. The inability to have a mature discussion about the end of our lives--between patients, doctors, and families--is absolutely a holdover from a different age (when medicine was usually powerless before a rapid death) and has serious real-world consequences for the survivors. Families are left heartbroken as their last months are spent with pale shadows of their former loved ones, and -- there's no way to put this that doesn't sound grisly -- their fellow citizens bear the costs, either directly or indirectly, of massively expensive treatments that all too frequently don't work, or add days to a person's life at the expense of weeks of painful treatments. See this Atul Gawande article for a truly depressing exploration.

Intellectual property: boy is this not working at all. A 20-year copyright would allow even the most avariciously successful artists to extract 99% of the value of the current system: only the longest of the long-tail successes would be hurt, but even then not by much. Paul Simon would no longer be getting cheques for his LPs with Art Garfunkel, but he would have continued to get beer money from Graceland until 2006. U2 would still be getting money for Achtung Baby until next year. A 50-year copyright would be almost indefensible in my view, but I'd still take it in a hot second as an alternative to what we have now, provided that we chiselled that bastard in stone.

And yes, then it too would become a hated legacy policy someone would be out to destroy.

Anyway, Adams' thought experiment has a lot in common with the philosophy behind the Seasteading Institute, who want to start ocean-borne colonies with the explicit purpose of escaping the legal and political restrictions on land. Though they're basically a bunch of glibertarian Galtists, there's part of the vision that really interests me.

Also, I'd sign up with the North Pacific Kibbutz and wait for the Galtists to collapse under their own ego. At which point we'd kindly offer to help them out, provided they learn the lyrics to the Internationale.