Public Servants Quarters

Deception and Mistake (Fiction Version)

2010-08-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a book in my off hours. Actually I'm working on several books in my off-hours but that's not the point. Anyway, in the book I'm working on, one of the major plot points is that the whole back story for the book is a series of lies designed to manipulate the main characters.

Story takes place in the mid 16th century as the last of the Italian Wars is winding down. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and Francis, King of France meet with Pope Paul III in Trent and concoct a plan to obliterate the major Protestant armies on the continent so that they can lead the Counter-Reformation. They'll deal with England some other time.

Strictly speaking, they should be worried about the Danes, who historically were worried about the Swedes, who really and truly given how things worked out in the 17th century is who everyone should have worried about -but that's historical rabbit holing and I won't worry about it.

Anyway, since the Protestant factions (Schmalkaldic League in the Empire and Huguenot Party in France) are unlikely to just disband themselves, Emperor and King came up with a plan. They each launch an attack into Italy (war to this point having mostly been fought in Holland, despite the object of the war being Milan...), and subtly suggest that they need truly loyal men to lead it. The Protestants in both places trying to -for a variety of reasons -get on the good side of the court, volunteer. As a result, the largest portion of both Protestant faction's armies go off to kill each other, leaving the Catholics to clean up the remainder back home. Which they do in the Schmalkaldic War (April, 1547) and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre -which I'm moving up a decade for dramatic purposes.

So there's a pretty massive deception in the backstory which the main characters can't figure out too soon because if they do, they'd turn around and head home. I also want to decieve the reader at least for a while for dramatic purposes. The problem comes in revealing the deception without just having someone say "hey, he lied!"

In fact, I've got one character who says "he's lying!" from the start, no one believes him for the altogether good reason that he's been saying it for a while before the evidence even starts to accumulate. If the reader figures it out too fast, they spend however many pages of the book until the characters figure it out going "morons..." or at the least they're waiting for the book to catch up to where they were 40 pages ago.

Likewise, the character's have to be believably wrong, without being so believable that the reader doesn't believe they're wrong.

I worry about this because of previous debacles. I ran a game once where the villain pretended to be the player's contact for something like three sessions. At the end of the three sessions, the players got themselves captured and their real contact rescued them. What followed was a whole bunch of confused looks as this person they'd never met before said "I'm here to help you," and they all said "but we know you, and you're not you..."

What brings it to mind today, other than working on the novel, is that I was reminiscing about the writing for Knights of the Old Republic II, which has the same problem. There are some interesting bits in the game which I missed repeatedly until they were pointed out to me -explicitly because so many characters are lying that, despite having been told these points a few times, I'd disregarded them.

In particular, the penultimate villain is a creature who feeds on the Force, sucking the Living Force out of Living Creatures leaving... Dead Creatures. The hero is a Jedi who, in the back story, cut herself off from the Force as a defense mechanism against the mother of all "disturbances" in the Force. The game's metaphor is being deafened by a loud noise. Anyway, throughout the game the hero is regaining her ability to use the Force -which seems to suggest the character is healing. Actually, the character is using the Force of other people, but unlike the villain, is doing it with something like consent. It's like jumpstarting a car, except that you can never unhook the vehicles.

This leads up to the climactic penultimate villain duel where the hero can tell the villain to drain her of her massive amount of Force rather than the planet below -defeating the enemy because what happens when the insatiable thirst meets the unfillable void...

It's all very dramatic. I missed it at least 4 times before it was pointed out to me because so many people in the game lied, I simply assumed the character was healing and the Jedi were just dumb (it's not like the game provided a lot of counter-evidence... to either point).

The ending also became totally incomprehensible because, if you don't realize that your character is not using personal Force Power but rather is absorbing external Force power, then the villains plan to poison you with the Death of the Force and send it through the universe killing the Force... sounds like a crazy plan.

Excellent game, wrecked in part by too-good lying on the part of the writers/characters. I worry about the same thing, though "excellent book" may be stretching it a bit.

David Harsanyi on Ending State Sponsored Marriage

2010-08-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

David Harsanyi, in the Denver Post has an editorial saying that the State should get out of the marriage business because the state doesn't care about marriage and it's just causing problems. He dates the origins of our problems to a "pestering theologian" in Geneva in the 1500s. I'm wondering if he's obliquely meaning Calvin, but I'm not looking it up because it's not important.

He says this is the start of state meddling in marriage. I'd say that's true, but misses the point. It's also the start of states.

The 16th century is an interesting time period. It's the end of the dominance of the Catholic Church, the end of the dominance of clan and fief, the end of the dominance of Kings and Feudal Aristocracy, and the end of the small world. It's the beginning of travel, the beginning of office-holding (OK, Athens had it in 1700 years earlier, but there was a heck of a hiatus), the beginning of the Reformation, and the start of professional states and bureaucracies.

The reasons for this are debated. My view is that Social Contract theory is basically wrong on the particulars and the states were created by the particular needs of the aristocracy given changing technology -particularly the ability to travel long distances. Basically, modern states are a tax-collecting system for a society where wealth is mobile. A feudal society works wonderfully if people can't move their wealth, much less well when they can. But I'm idiosyncratic.

This is important to marriage, though, because it relates to why states got involved in the first place, and it was one of the first things they did. My understanding of pre-modern marriage (this is intro-anthro, for what it's worth) is that marriages were arranged, held, and enforced privately. The Church, or whatever religious institution is present elsewhere than in Europe, is really only important for providing justification, witnesses, someone who can read for record-keeping, and then whatever religious meanings are required.

The marriages themselves are held together by social pressure, family contact, economic necessity, and so on. Again, state's not really involved. The accoutrements of marriage are also easy to take care of in a premodern society. Households? just count the number of married men in the village. Patrimony? everyone knows who's in whose bed. Inheritance? time honored tradition covers that.

These are very important goals, but not things the newly burgeoning states really cared about.

These are also things you don't need a state to enforce -but that only works so long as you aren't in a mobile, urban, cash-based, capital infused society. Once you are, households and villas and fiefdoms become complicated arrangements. Patrimony is easier to fake. Inheritances become subject to fraud. Would explain why the Romans had a fairly well established family law, but the Europeans didn't (except for the vestiges held onto by the Catholic Church).

Well, come the 16th century, suddenly families have need of the new states, and the states have new need of the families. The states, being tax-raising systems, tax households (left-over from feudal times). Military service, which the new states need, is also done by household. Financial security and maintenance -a major concern of the tax-collector state -depend on secure transmission of property from one person to another, secure estates, and non-fraudulent inheritances. The states and families make a trade. The states will secure families against dissolution, cuckoldry, fraud, and loss. In return, the state will keep records for military and tax purposes, which the households will provide.

So far as I can tell, subsidy for family formation -i.e. children -comes later, though it might be implicit in conscription requirements.

What's this got to do with David Harsanyi? Well, the situation is "worse" now than it was 500 years ago. The situations requiring state involvement in marriage are basically unchanged, or stronger now. Taxes are assessed on households, inheritance depends on strong legal systems, the financial system -in case you needed reminding -is a major government sector. The "problem" is that for 50-100 years, the states have not been keeping up their end of the bargain (admitting that maybe they hadn't been doing a particularly good job before that). States now treat marriages as a revenue source, or possibly as something to subsidize, forgetting that they didn't create it, they were given access to it to solve specific problems. Problems they've made worse, I'm thinking specifically of no-fault divorce and a sizable chunk of family law governing inheritance, custody, and asset distribution.

If we jettison the state from marriage altogether (assuming it could be done -the tax-collector state might stupidly kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but it's unlikely to let it go) we're back to the situation of 1500 which invited states to intervene in the first place. The question is whether those problems are preferable to the current ones.

For what its worth, I'm nearly convinced, held in place only by innate lawful goodness, over-interpretation of Matthew 22:21 and Romans 13:1-13, and lack of an alternative.

Now, consider if I'm doubting the wisdom of state-sponsored marriage (and note that my reasons for supporting it still have nothing to do with anything a state does or can do), think what is going on with everyone to the left of me in the Bell Curve (I'm presuming I'm unusual in my support for it, and hence in the right tail). And now you know why monkeying with this institution was a bad idea.

And for the benefit of my parents, et cetera, I'm not doubting the wisdom of marriage, I'm doubting the wisdom of getting the state involved -i.e. the benefit of the marriage license, not the marriage itself. I'm borderline "state can bite me, and I'll file separately."

And Tuesday Cyrano Died

2010-08-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

Today has come and gone without incident or event.

I went for ice cream and put away some books.

Ate pizza for dinner.

I'll sleep soon.

New week begins tomorrow.

Revenge of the Nice Guys

2010-08-05T13:32:00.000-07:00

Shorter Below Post:

No, I do not have a better use of my time, thank you for asking.

Having had a week to mull the subject, I come to the following thoughts.

1.) I believe that real manliness is unvalued by all but a very small subset of the relevant population. Translated: women between 18 and 34 living in the Western World with conscious Western World outlooks. Now, that population being around 1 billion, a very small subset is still a lot of people.

2.) Manliness being unvalued, it is not surprising that men stopped acting like men. McArdle is right, the PUAs are acting girlie. She's ignoring the reason for this: women started looking for girlie men.

3.) The girliness of the PUAs, however, doesn't stem from mimicing "manly men." In fact, the men they mimic are borderline cases of manly men. Men do the "risky business" dance in full camp irony. PUAs do it in all seriousness.

4.) Men enter into a situation and they think "what does a man do here?" In the movie 300, King Leonidas makes this question explicit: "how shall a man save his kingdom?" The goal is to act properly, damn the consequences. You shoot Liberty Valence, you slap Jimmy Stewart and tell him to get out there with a clear conscience and be a man already. And you come back and tell the world the truth, even if they don't want to hear it.

5.) The PUA enters into a situation and thinks "how can I get ahead here?" I don't know that this is womanly behavior -Medea notwithstanding -so much as just bad behavior.

6.) In the past, the aspiring PUA could be sublimated into being a man because manliness was rewarded, so the answer to the questions "what should a man do?" and "how can I get ahead" was the same. Most of the time. Much drama has always been gotten from when these aspirations diverged. See Achilles and Odysseus for possibly the earliest examples. (Specifically, both new that going to war would end badly for them, both tried to avoid it, but when confronted with their obligations, they ultimately went. Much pathos ensued.) A better literary mind than mine could probably make a case for Gilgamesh. It is the central question of the Y chromosome.

7.) Between the success of the PUAs anyway, and the woman's response to the Nice Guy (however ill-trained he was), and other things which aren't my beat, we have pretty good evidence that "being a man" is not a way forward, and much like John Wayne, "being a man" is a fast way to drunk and alone.

8.) The odd thing is, while John Wayne is a rough and tough exterior, much of his personality is hidden because its required. The true manly moment for the character, though, is the moments of pure honesty when the barriers are let down. When Wayne confronts Stewart after torching his ranch. When Odysseus regains his mind and escapes Calypso for Penelope, and when Achilles is moved to rage by the death of Patroclus (and to a lesser extent his relationship with the priestess of Apollo, Briseis). The Romantic novels mentioned in the link from McArdle talk about similar things as the height of manly love.

9.) I'd like to say that the problem of the Pick-up Artist is that his disenguity traps him (or her) in a mutual lie that this is how the world works and humans must just adapt. The mutual lie (girls are in on it too) prevents the PUA from enjoying this height of manliness. Problem is, that's true but irrelevent. Modern society doesn't value the height of manly romantic love, any attempt to pursue it is ultimately going to have, at best, no effect, and at worst backfire horrendously. Is there any wonder he uses mutual lies to pretend to drop barriers while still leaving the real ones in place? Its the closest thing humanly possible.

10.) Which brings us back to the original conclusion. The modern world is built to destroy real love, or at least not to support it. If you want it, you'll have to find it and preserve it on your own, God willing. Good luck with that.

11.) We're doomed. But we've been doomed before. We're never so doomed as when things are about to turn around.

12.) We're still doomed.

Nice Guys Finish Last

2010-07-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

**Warning: Lengthy Rambling Post That I Publish Against My Better Judgement Because I Really Need to Talk It Out and It's Early in the Morning**

For reasons that surpass my own understanding -I mean this seriously, it isn't morbid fascination and the interest predates the recent obvious reasons -I have a long standing interest in the idea of the pick up artist, or as it is lingo-ish-ly called "game".

Really, I don't know why. My best guess is that it is because I am simultaneously offended by the entire concept -I don't mean in the PC feminist way, I mean in the same way I am offended by crooked cops and rogue administrators -and yet cannot explain why the game is wrong. Let me restate: I know why the game is wrong; I don't know why it is incorrect.

I suppose I'd best start at the beginning for those without my peculiar purient interests. As explained by Charlotte Allen, but confirmed by several self-proclaimed PUAs or simply accolytes thereof, game is a method for allowing beta-males to develop the skills to act alpha for the purposes of getting girls to go home with them. Beta and Alpha are not particularly well described here except maybe by number of notches and gauchity of notch location, but whatever. The central insight is that women are looking for a certain type of man, but also that women are liars. Therefore, what women say should be discarded in favor empirically observing the types of men they choose. After much experimentation, the PUAs have determined that women go for jerks (since they claim otherwise, this is also proof of the lying). Specifically, women like men who strategically put them down ("neg" them), isolate them from their peers, and have a general, cold aloofness about them.

Post evidence gathering, the theory developed was that women want a man who gives them value, but in order for a man to do that, the man first has to demonstrate that the woman is not important to him. After establishing that, through aloofness et cetera, then his compliments have meaning. If this all sounds vaguely manipulative, it is. The PUAs practice this -mimicing James Dean, Tom Cruise, Marlon Brando.

This strikes Megan McArdle (recently married) as girly, and one of her commentors elaborates:
"Women are, in my finite perception, attracted to confidence, intelligence, resources and experience. The purpose of The Game strategies is to substitute a relatively standardized routine for wit, apathy for confidence, and then bugger off before the woman realizes your greatest accomplishment in life is a level 60 orc shaman."

Now the problem arises. The purpose of the Pick-Up-Artists are clearly base and vulgar. But even the greatest artist is using the same technique and technology as the worst pornographer. As if to demonstrate the point, several to my knowledge happily married men claim Game is essential to the maintenance of their Long-Term-Relationships (link not actually an example, but blogger is).

Incidentally, at that point I roll my eyes and say: "shucks, such romantics..."

Now, the real problem is that McArdel's critique is just wrong. Or, possibly, I'm a girly-man, I shouldn't discount that possibility. But I don't feel particularly girly admitting that I spend a great deal of my life mimicing behavior. My choice, aside from specific friends and family, is John Wayne rather than James Dean (and maybe this explains a lot...). What Would Jesus Do is a lovely saying, but often not very helpful in the moment. Neither, incidentally, are reason and logic -and romantic emotionalism is right out. No, the moment where a "manly response" is required, I do what Aristotle taught, and think "what would the manly man do in this situation."

I suppose its a bad sign that the John Wayne character I most identify with is the Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. For those who don't know, he dies drunk and alone with another man getting credit for his one good deed, not to mention the girl.

OK, so having dispensed with the notion that practice and mimicry are somehow unmanly, let's dispense with this "women are attracted to confidence, intelligence..." blah blah blah. If this is the case, we should all pack up and go home now. Resources and Experience are basically exogenous. Accidents of birth, gifts from God, something men can't control. Likewise intelligence, not that any of these have helped me. That leaves confidence, and as someone who suffers tremendous stage-fright even when well practiced and rehearsed, I will tell you the only cure I know is faking it. I direct you to the musical explanation. And in this particular case, where for various social, psychological, and economic reasons, men are basically powerless, anyone who exudes real confidence is either a fool or a felon.*

So we're left with the statement: Game is vulgar. But not yet shown to be wrong. And at this point it must be noted, apparently it works. Unmanly or not, manipulative or not, women seem to respond to it.

Now, at this point, my inner John Wayne erupts into a fury that, in a different time and place, would destroy a saloon. If the insights of game are correct, the perpetrators are the worst kind of bent teacher. Using knowledge and insight to despoil and destroy, to subsume the world for selfish gain. John Wayne shot Liberty Valence because it was the right thing to do, knowing full well it would destroy his way of life, make a world with no place for him, elevate his rival to a place of power and authority, and ruin him completely. Didn't matter. Not shooting Liberty Valence would have allowed Valence to get away with murder, caused a good man's death, and destroyed a whole society. Even if John Wayne would be a prince in that society, the price was too high.

And then I read this and I understand why John Wayne burned his house down afterwards.

Of all the things I've linked, I strongly say to read that, and then consider the other side of it. I haven't done all those things, but I've done enough of them to think I qualify for "the nice guy."

Insincere? Hardly, the nice guy is the most sincere man in the world. He'd shout his feelings from the rooftops if he thought it appropriate. He's a hopeless romantic, filling the role shown him in a thousand movies, and a thousand more stories. He doesn't know what he's doing, but he doesn't care. He's in love, and every action is love story, ready to be embelished. Is he acting unmanly? I don't know. I have these same impulses. The only reason I don't act on them is an overdeveloped sense of propriety. John Wayne doesn't do flowers (I rather hoped YouTube would have contrary evidence, if only for the irony, but alas...). I envy this man's sincerity. What he lacks is experience or knowledge. He lacks a certain cynicism. "Does he love you for who you are, or has he glommed onto you out of desperation because you actually paid some kind of attention to him?" Why are these exclusive? Consider the person who is actually so desperate: what is the character trait he most loves? Acceptance. Once provided that he knows all he needs to know.

He is, for what its worth, wrong. And looking in the wrong place. And, more than that, acting unmanly. But it is not his sincerity that is lacking. He has been ill-taught in virtue, and so demonstrated a vice, but he has done so honestly. He's to be corrected, not scorned.

He is also the other side of the PUA's act. Isolated? Done for you. Negged? A thousand times over. Given value by a single statement? Well, that's the problem ain't it.

Gee, being a playa ain't so bad when it's you.

Moving on. Clingy, Self-Abacing, and Insecure. I suppose it depends on where the line is between loyal and clingy, humble and self-abacing. But if a man has difficulty knowing that line, consider where he learned it, and consider the number of times you let it pass as "cute," and then contemplate the definition of the phrase "leading on." As for insecure, probably true, but it's my firm belief that all men are insecure. Part of being a man is learning how to hide it, bury it, and replace it. The great trial of intimacy is that you want a person with whom you can reveal your insecurity, but in doing so you become less of a man, so always you must hide insecurity, prefering to be thought insincere, than weak. John Wayne covers Marion Morrison. I'll be his wife called him Marion.

Are these men desperate that they put aside their own needs? Maybe, but then consider their examples. We are taught to be sacrificial, and not just for a woman. Stories of men killed in battle, men who went to great lengths for a cause or a person. Like the monastics who realized, now that they could no longer be martyred for the faith, the Nice Guy looks for another way to demonstrate his manlyness. But he suffers another problem. He is now taught that he is to be sacrificial, but also that women don't need him. I won't speak for every other nice guy, but I held my peace on numerous occassions not out of fear that conflict would end the relationship, but out of the belief that it would be unmanly to object to such a small thing. Incidentally, this is also the reason the Nice Guy gives in. It comes in two shades, first that the abuse of the veto would be wrong, and second that -knowing that the veto is basically meaningless, anyway -is afraid to exercise it lest it be ignored, diminishing him. These are not exclusive.

And yes, to have their manlyness questioned because they refuse to abuse it is irritating.

As for the rest of the essay, I'll say that the nice guy in the throws of love and heartbreak honestly believes all of that. The man who doesn't isn't a man but a robot. He'll get over it. Takes me about 2 weeks, maybe 18 days.

Now let us consider the PUA, his insincerity is a given, in fact assumed. Is he desperate? Perhaps in a metaphorical sense. Certainly he's glomming onto the person who returns his attentions and has no interest in the person behind the mask. Is he insecure? Well, again, perhaps metaphorically, and even morally. Certainly, he's not a secure man -he's following a formula and picking up girls. As for the tension between sacrifice and independence, the PUA has resolved the tension by being only for himself. He's never vulnerable, never weak, never intimate. But unlike Marion Morrison, he's not subsuming himeself into a Man, he's subsuming himself into a psychology textbook on how to manipulate others to his own gain.

I return to Aristotle. Seek the middle path. The Nice Guy aspires to being a man, and in doing so honestly, reveals that he's imperfect at it. The PUA dispenses with being a man and is rewarded for doing so. And the Nice Guy is damned for his troubles.

I don't know how to reach the middle path. I do know that the Nice Guy actually desires to be there, and reaps scorn for it. I believe, but do not know, that this is because we are corrupt -this is not new -but also that our teaching is corrupt, when it rewards those who dispense with the facade and curses those who try to live up to the standards they are shown.

And this is the crux of it. John Wayne was a romantic. A man wants to be romantic, even if he doesn't know how. Even if he isn't particularly good at it. But it is a manly romance, a proper one. One that lives up to the right virtues and ideals.

Game, and the womanly equivalent discussed above, replaces ordered, manly romance with a conterfeit. That it spends as well as real romance is irrelevent -in fact insulting. It isn't real. The counterfeiters, male and female, are traitors and scoundrels to the truth. Some worse than others. At this point, the training is too thorough, the counterfeits too plentiful. Romance has suffered a coup, leaving no place for those who want to learn to do it right.

Maybe we get lucky. Maybe things change in a few years.

The counterfeiters offer a tempting alternative: it spends like real money. You could be a prince.

Dr. Helen has a clinical response. Ann Althouse perhaps has the correct one.

I don't know what John Wayne would say.

I know I find that price too high.

_____
*I expect this might require some explanation. Under current law and practice, women can extricate themselves from any relationship up to and including marriage at nearly no cost. Men, on the other hand, risk a lot to so much as ask a woman out. Rejecting a man is costless to a woman, but to the man it is an enormous blow to psyche and reputation. This is stupid, but this is also reality. At the other end, family and divorce law as currently written and applied (and mostly as applied since it is woefully under-written) allows any person to dissolve the marriage at any point for any reason or no reason, but then generally favors women (this is Dr. Helen's usual beat). As a result, the most recent numbers I looked at showed half of all divorces being instigated by women -far higher than historic trends. I believe the people who say, for men, that under current law marriage is a fool's bargain are correct. I will marry for God's reasons, not the United States', and will trust God, but not the law or society. I'm aware of what I'm doing, which is all the more depressing.

For what its worth, I thought I had gotten lucky. More the fool me.

Science could use a good war

2010-07-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Jonathon Adler comments on how the "war on science" continues into the Obama Administration.

I wish. Adler is correct that what is being reported is less a war on science than standard, run of the mill, management of workers who happen to be scientists. Every worker complains that his or her boss is medling and these workers aren't special. Even the broader war on science has less to do with science and more to do with policy, and particularly in the case of environmental law -well, the law.

Brief history lesson: the most prominent use of science in the law is in environmental law. Much of, if not most of, environmental law, and most notable in the big ones -Clean Air Act, parts of the Clean Water Act, TOSCA (a toxic chemical control law) -set legal limits on environmental damage that are triggered by a scientific finding of any damage. Which is to say, if the environment is to be affected by a policy, or a program, the law prevents the policy from going forward without a waiver -and sometimes even then. Even at the time this was known to be a bad idea, so the EPA and other agencies found a work around. Redefine science and damage to make the law less restrictive. This practice continues to today with the EPA using the Clean Air Act to claim jurisdiction over the emissions of Carbon Dioxide (not actually among the listed pollutants in the law), and then realizing that the law was going to require to regulate every plant, human, and campfire, redefined the meaning of the law's terms to allow them to focus only on the biggest emmitters.

A couple of laws since the big ones in the 1970s have recognized that saying "if science shows an impact, you can't do it" is a bad idea, and so the ones in the late 80s and early 90s include provisions for benefit-cost analysis. Environmentalists and scientists dislike these laws for obvious reasons, and have enough influence that they have prevented other laws from picking up BCA requirements -though Clinton and Bush both made requirements for BCA to be done unofficially for in-house use before promolgating regulations. So far as I know, Obama has continued the practice.

In other words, in environmental law, a lot of the "war on science" has to do with badly written law that makes policy and regulation turn on what "science" says (I put science in quotations because in each particular case it is actually what a select group of scientists say) rather than what Congress, the President, or other duly elected or appointed officials say. As a result, those officials have a great deal of pressure to make "science" say what the officials want it to say.

It isn't an option to say "we're fine with accepting the oil-spill risk, and we're fine with accepting the toxin risk from usind chemical dispersents in the case of a spill" because the law doesn't allow for that. Instead, the officials have to say "the risk of oil spill or toxic damage to the water is scientifically minimal."

Less legally, but the same basic dynamic is present in things like abortion policy (which also has a large legal component), stem cell research, and a lot of other science and policy issues (that's our word for the subfield). Where the law does not require doing what the scientists say, public opinion and public support for science as an enterprise does. The result is the same, though. Rather than arguing what's actually controversial about evolution (whether it requires a lack of God to function, whether it can explain any more than intra-species variation, whether evolutionary explanations are actually interesting*, and a more meta debate about information/matter dualism) we instead debate whether the critique of evolution and ID are "science." Instead of debating whether Anthropologic Global Warming is happening as predicted, whether that's a problem, and what options we could use to deal with it, we are instead debating the best way in which to keep temperatures where they are now**.

This is a cousin to my usual stalking horse of experts claiming the authority to make policy and officials letting them, though in this particular case the officials are the People at large. For all the usual reasons, I think this is bad. But the side effects of this decision are not a war on science, they are the inevitable result of trying to make judgement a technical decision -the result of some flow chart. We could use a real war on science to get the people who are supposed to exercise judgment back in the driver's seat, and get the science back where it belongs...

OK, that metaphor just went off a cliff. Scientists are navigators? Back seat drivers? Whiny kids in the back going "are we there yet? I'm hungry! I want several million dollars in research money to explore the best hamburger to get at lunch!"

*Interesting here in the technical sense. The big complain with Evolutionary Psychology as used in Political Science and Public Policy is that it is tautological. It isn't obvious at first because the circle goes through so many iterations. However, most arguments from Evolutionary Psychology come down to finding a reason why a particular institution, community, or whatever was selected for. Stripped to its essence, the answer to every question is "Natural Selection did it," which is just a secular version of "God did it." And, it doesn't actually answer any questions. I've seen the same critique extended to biology, where the argument is clearer, but it isn't my field.

The clearest example is the polar bear example. Polar Bears are white, because white bears have a better chance of getting food in the arctic. Polar Bears share habitat with Grisly Bears. Grisly bears are brown. Why don't grisly bears turn white? Because they have other traits that make turning white less important. OK, but a white grisly bear should have an advantage still, so why don't grisly bears turn white? Because the selection pressure isn't there. Why is it there for polar bears, but not for grisly bears?

The whole point is that the answer may be correct, but doesn't tell us much. Hence, it isn't "interesting." Rational Choice Theory gets the same flak -though RC has the benefit of being testable in a lab on a short time frame. The complaint with EP is that it always back calculates to something immutable. We take the existing institution and think about what environmental factors would give rise to it. And we're always right because we know what the environmental factors were many times, so we just say well, one leads to the other. But since we can't alter the environment enough, we can't really test it. RC does the same thing, but RC comes back to a rational calculation, which we can alter by removing or adding information. We do this in the lab quite a bit, which is why RC survives even though it is everybody's favorite whipping boy.

**There are many economists who think, regardless of the reason, a little warming is a good thing, and the damage that would be caused by warming can be mitigated or prevented from the surplus from longer growing seasons and less use of heating oil. In general, the economic impact of global warming is problematic because over its time scale it is not robust. Which is to say, small changes in your assumptions can give you wide swings in your outcome. We have no a priori reason to favor, say, a 1% interest rate over a 3% interest rate, but that small difference is the difference between no problems and catastrophe. As described in the literature, that choice has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the researcher's opinion of how valuable your great-great grand children are relative to people living today.

Ars Technological: Part 2

2010-07-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

All of Part 1 was basically prepatory to this one.

Realizing that games are an art form -albeit one in which a lot of the product is just folk art -I wonder which games will be in the expanded canon.

Consider, in the ancient world there were many pieces of art. Of which, The Odyssey, Greek Pottery, Roman Engineering, Egyptian Architecture, and a touch of Persian Music survives in the modern canon. Oh, among the very educated, you'll get The Illiad and maybe The Epic of Gilgamesh, among the truly interested you'll pick up regional epics like Cattle Raid of Cooley and the Osiris epic. Anything else is known only to those hapless geeks who are paid to care about it (not that there's anything wrong with that).

From the Middle Ages we get Cathedrals, Canterbarry Tales, Song of Roland, and that's about it. From the early modern era we get the selected works of Shakespeare -which by now are basically reduced to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. From the classic era we get Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. And so on up to the plethora of art available today.

But it isn't like there was a shortage of art in the past. Its just that the things which have survived to today are the things which parents loved enough to share with their children, or things which enough people thought were important enough that they should be taught in schools, if never actually read (unfortunately, I was discussing the other day about how The Bible falls into the latter category...).

Games are no different. From the hundreds available, which are the ones that will be shared with a new generation of children? Which ones of those will make it the next generation?

There is the problem with games that, as a technology based medium they are dependent on being transfered as technology changes -just like old movies, some if not many of which have been lost to age and decay now that the materials for projecting them no longer exist.

I don't really know. The only game on my shelf which I would insist my children learn is KOTOR I. There's a good case to be made for the Dark Forces series at least from DF2: Jedi Knight through Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. Mass Effect is a good game, and a thrilling piece of art, but I think its status as a "must share" will depend on the quality of the whole trilogy.

In fact, I think a lot of games require a certain amount of understanding in order to understand the game itself. Deus Ex is a fine game, but at this point is basically quaint. If you don't remember the days when every game was linear and character development was predetermined, the extent of Deus Ex's non-linear gameplay and exploration options is a whole lot less impressive. Every game that's come since has basically been improving on that breakthrough. Even the awesomeness of KOTOR II requires an understanding of the standard RPG mechanics and standard player behavior in order to understand. KOTOR itself is pretty stand alone.

There's probably a strong case for Final Fantasy VII, but I'm unable to make it as I lost interest after 20 hours (the end of the first of five discs).

Of the older generation of games, King's Quest and Police Quest are probably pretty viable. For adventure games, I'd probably go with LucasArts Monkey Island and Full Throttle -and one day I'll have to find a copy of Psychonauts because everyone seems to think that one is awesome.

Man, predicting the canon is harder than it sounds...

Ars Technological: Part 1

2010-07-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Art of the Videogame

Via Althouse I see that Roger Ebert is again going on a crusade against video games as an artistic medium. I'd link direct, except the Sun Times website is glitchy beyond reason, so if you're really interested you can get the gist, or spend the time trying to load the original article, from Ann Althouse.

Frankly, I'm just going to ignore and dismiss Ebert in general (I've not been a fan for some time as it is). His argument is, at best question begging, and at worse simply ignorant. Not in the "you just don't get it" sort of way but in the "the entire discussion centers on whether video games are more like chess or more like movies, so it isn't really an argument to say that video games are games like chess, chess isn't art, and therefore video games are not art, and if you don't know that, why are you commenting in the first place?" Being somewhat familiar with the games he uses as his evidence, it's also abundantly clear that Ebert knows nothing about the games. Example: the great accomplishment of Braid (which I'll admit to being less impressed than many others by, but whatever) is the way it incorporates the gameplay mechanic of reversing time into the puzzles, and then uses that incorporation to explicate the theme of... whatever the theme of the game is, frankly it's pretty confusing which is why I'm not that impressed by it. But there are some sequences of the game, particularly the very last (which is actually the very first -see, it's confusing) which demonstrates how context and order change the meaning of scene better than a thousand Rashomans. The time mechanic is emphatically not just about reversing your mistakes, thus invalidating the challenge of the game or puzzle. That was Prince of Persia, and even the Prince series managed to incorporate that game mechanic into the larger thematic story -and even manages real tragedy with the mechanic.

All of this thinking got me wondering. I've heard people say that the art of photography is the dark room. The art of film making is the editing room. The art of painting and sculpture, poetry and prose are their own forms. And so on, each art form has its own form of excellence. So I got to wondering, what the excellence of the video game is.

It is, incidentally, an important question in art. Poetry, according to Aristotle, is artistic in its cathartic ability. Oedipus Rex is a good tragedy because the audience identifies with Oedipus, thinks highly of him, and then feels the pain, frustration, agony, and crushing depression of Oedipus's fall, and leaves the play -like Oedipus -feeling purged of the negative emotion.

Tolstoy thought art was determined by its communicative ability. Folk art is good because it is a universal translation medium for explaining the farmer in the valley to the banker in the city.

Kant argued that art was a tool which allowed the mind to engage in judgement and reason without practical context (what he called mental free play).

The Beauty Theorists (a representative of which is eluding me) claimed that art was determined by its aesthetic characteristics -i.e. beauty -and when that became obviously untenable (this is, incidentally, the source of my love for Goya) they switched to the argument that it was determined by the opinion of experts.

And then there's Danto who writes that art is made by its transformation, in which a mundane collection of materials is artificed into something which is more than the mundane parts (hence his title: Transfiguration of the Common Place).

Video games can be any of these things.

Catharsis: Play Knights of the Old Republic I and II on the Good path and feel the tragedy of the characters as their central reason to exist is stripped away and revealed to be an illusion sourcing from their inner corruption, and then play on the Evil path to realize that even giving into base nature and desire is ultimately banal and unsatisfying. And then see the heroic overcoming of the base nature, or the tragedy of slavery to the Dark Side, and be released of your own anxiety.

Communication: 14 Final Fantasies (10 had a sequel, and I'm not counting the spin-offs) 7 Tales and dozens of other Japanese games break down the cultural barriers between the US and Japan, and in many ways do a better job of it than film or literature did.

Mental Free Play: I give you any Western RPG -Neverwinter Nights, Planescape: Torment, Balder's Gate, Kotor I & II, and Mass Effect. Emersive games which give you many opportunities to reflect, think, and consider the themes of the games. Many of the classic "Westwood" Real Time Strategies -the Command and Conquer series, Dune series, and the Blizzard Studios Warcraft and Starcraft which offer opportunity to explore and reflect while playing the levels, but also give you the alternate campaigns to allow you to see the game from the "villain's" perspective (though, really, it isn't until the later games that the villains become sympathetic).

Beauty: People play Shadow of the Colossus just to look at the imagery. I once parked a landspeeder atop a Tatooine mountain in Star Wars: Galaxy just to watch a herd of banthas cross the Dune Sea. Mass Effect provides visuals that make Star Wars look like a student film. Outlaws gave music that would make Sergio Leoni blush. Stylized games like Braid offer aesthetic experiences equivalent to anything Hollywood can produce.

Transfiguration: Perhaps the strongest argument for video games is that they have transformative powers far beyond what many other art mediums can, because they include the player in making the transformations. In how many movies has the hero had to order a sidekick onto a suicide mission? How traumatic is the death of Obi Wan in Star Wars as he buys time for Luke to escape? This takes the simple imagery of the event, the reality of actors portraying events with the help of clever editing and special effects and provides a new meaning and new emotional response. Now, I give you Mass Effect, which gains the same emotional response, but now you don't watch helplessly as Luke can't save him, you are, by the mechanics of the game, impotent to help. Further, you decide who gets the suicide mission. I remember playing a number of games -Hidden and Dangerous 2 most recently -where you become quite attached to the men in your command, and the senseless death of one of them -particularly when you didn't do anything wrong, it's just the way war is -is a real shot in the guts that Hollywood can only achieve through excessive use of acting and mood music. H&D2 accomplishes it with a gunshot, a yell, and a crumpled body.

But I offer another possibility. Videogames are a new medium. Perhaps they need a new criteria which sets them apart from painting, or sculpture, or film, or music, or literature. Videogames largely started as games -Pong, for example. Over time, the game developers realized the artistic possibilities, and so began to attach stories to the game. Sometimes this worked very well, sometimes not. The history of FMVs (Full Motion Video Games) is one of a movie interspersed with random gameplay -and with notable exceptions (ORIGIN's Wing Commander Series, mainly) -is not well remembered. However, for at least a decade, game designers have begun the process of integrating the game into the story and vice versa. Sometimes this works really well, such as in many FPS games, like HALO or Deus Ex or Half-Life where its like a story told from the first person perspective. Other times it works less well.

The best games, however, are the ones that manage to blend the game mechanics into the art of the game. God of War is a game about a psychotic killer trying to get revenge on the gods who cursed him, and whom he blames for his problems, and is in many ways (so say the people who play it) a tragedy of a man who will not face his own responsibility for his station in life. The game mechanic is an action button sequence. They're simple combinations of buttons that flash on the screen, rather than combinations of moves you have to learn that give you a cool effect. What this means is that, in God of War, you have to be complicit in all the psychotic killing, and its easy. At the end of three games you find yourself in the same place as the protagonist. "I've spent hours casually murdering people, but really, it's not my fault. It's Zeus', or the Game Designer's..." This is basically the reason why I played the first three levels and then put the game away never to play again.

This is also the reason why Dante's Inferno seems to have been so bad. The designers copied God of War, but they missed the connection between the gameplay mechanic and the game.

Bioshock goes a step further and demonstrates how a character in a game, even a wide open sandbox, really has no free will except the choice not to play. And at the end of the game gives the player explicitly this option: murder the villain or turn the game off. How do you like choice now? And it does all of this with the basic genre conventions of the FPS.

And with this as our working definition, there are in fact a lot of games which really aren't much art. Sandbox games like Pirates! Live the Life, while fun, are basically on the level of folk art. They don't communicate anything directly, but rather indirectly. Many strategy games, RTS or TBS, or even the new 4X (that is, Real Time, Turn Based, and Expand/Explore/Exterminate/Exploit) are basically chess with fancier graphics, and again are basically folk art. Some of them aspire to more, there's quite a bit of writing in the TBS Alpha Centauri and its spiritual cousins, Civilization, but at the end it's still basically an ornate chess set. Many flight sims, war games, and shooters are basically serviceable simulators, and again, just really nice sail boats or whatever. Art, but of a decidedly low type.

But then again, so is a lot of everything else. This is hardly unique to games.

Pop Music Popularity

2010-05-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

The Nostalgia Chick's most recent video review is about the recent trend (where recent is defined as since 1998 -gosh culture moves fast these days...) in Blonde Bombshell Pop-rockers. I don't actually recommend this video unless you're really interested in reliving and thinking about why Brittney Spears, Christina Aguillera, Jessica Simpson (she had straight hair once?!), Lady Gaga, and Kesha (and I'm not justifying her existence with a $ on the s, regardless of what her passport says) were popular to the degrees that they were.

But there was one line in the review that struck me. Back when Lady Gaga was Stefani Germanotta -she was a very talented musician. Lady Gaga... is not. -A brief aside, I must be totally tone deaf because, style aside, I can't tell why Lady Gaga's singing is worse than Stefani Germanotta's- And this is why she's successfull. The Nostaliga Chick chalks this up to "image" when dealing with teenagers.

Now, I rather enjoy a little pop music. I'm not a huge fan, but I have been known to walk the halls of the University humming "Poker Face" (I think if I sang the words they'd fire me...) and I once recited the lyrics to "Pour Some Sugar On Me" in class by way of referencing the T-Mobil Commercial to make a totally unrelated point. Also as a college student I enjoyed "Hey Ya" probably far more than was healthy. Once I liked the Black Eyed Peas for reasons I'd like to not remember. And the Black Eyed Peas aside, I've never felt particularly embarrassed by enjoying this music. Maybe it was because I also had loaded up in my car several CDs of classical music. I'll kill hours driving across Missouri listening to Beethoven's symphonies (5, 4th movement in particular gets a lot of play). Granted, I wouldn't try to analyze pop music very hard -a rule I'm about to break.

When I catch myself singing in the shower, dancing around the apartment, and generally having a happy-go-lucky time acting like a moron -and this includes the times I danced from the Computer Lab to my Office in full view of the entire department while humming "Weapon of Choice" and "Never Gonna Give You Up" I was not looking for music with any particular aesthetic quality. The music was fun, easy to sing, and you could dance to it.

I hum the 5th Symphony from time to time, also "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and "Fugue in G-Minor." When seasonally appropriate I'll hum or sing Chanticleer's arrangement of Franz Beible's "Ave Maria" or any of a number of great pieces of music. I do all of them badly -I don't have the range for "Ave Maria," the mouths for "Fugue" or the tongue of "Nachtumusic." In any case, these are hardly "fun" pieces of music. Beautiful, yes -like the kind of thing you see in a museum. But pop music strikes me more as the paintings you adorn your bedroom with if you aren't insanely rich.

Pop music is a more participatory genre. Great music is something written for skilled musicians to perform in an appropriate venue for an audience. The audience claps at the end of Bach's Concertos, they clap with "Hey Ya."

And to cap my point: can you imagine this happening

With classical music?

On the Virtue of not Jumping to Conclusions

2010-05-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

Back in February, the Columbia Police Department raided the house of a suspected drug dealer at 8:30pm. Upon entering, the police encountered two dogs, which were shot -killing one and wounding the other. The police didn't find the suspected drugs, but instead found paraphernalia and small amounts of marijuana. The trial now concluded (by pea bargain), the video has been released to YouTube.

And some people are apoplectic.

Now, there are some general policy things to maybe worry about. For example, it's usually considered a bad idea to serve a warrant at night because of the risk of an innocent suspect thinking he's being burglarized. I recall reading that many places determine "night" as 9:00pm, and perhaps we'd like to revisit that. I express no opinion the matter as I can see that we might want to raid in the evening shortly before bed because that's when a suspect is most vulnerable.

We might like to revisit our warrant policy about drug raids. The police say they acted quickly on an informant, but apparently not quickly enough -or the information was bad. The 9:00pm rule might not have mattered in this case because of the time constraint. Again, I express no opinion on the matter. As the police say, there's a trade-off. The more time you spend confirming the evidence, the more time there is for the drugs to move onto the street.

But that's not what commenters are howling about. No, they're incensed that a dog got shot while a child was in the house. Here's the thing -we don't know anything about the events except that they happened. The video enters the house after the first shot and never leaves the living room, so while we hear barking and whining and shooting and then the reactions of the residents, we don't actually know anything about the shooting.

"Oh, how could they shoot that boy's pets!?" Well, according to the report, they shot a pit bull and a corgi. Which is to say, cuteness aside, they shot an attack dog and watch dog. I'm sure the drug dealers and their children love their working animals, but this was not necessarilly a harmless lapdog. The news reports are not specific, the YouTube description -which I take with a shaker of salt -is that the pit bull was caged, but since we don't see anything, we don't actually know.

It might not have been a good shooting. IA report is expected in a couple of weeks and will probably answer a lot of questions. What was the warrant for, was it justified, should they have gone when they did, does CPD procedure need to be revised, were the dogs accurately percieved as a threat or should the officer have known they were no danger, should the gun have been fired inside an occupied house? We don't know any of that, and it's kinda important to answer these questions before we pass judgment.

But please, don't let that stop us from preaching and preening about the pigs.

Oh, and in response to Megan McArdle's smart-alec commenter: when they knock six times and announce "Police, Search Warrant!" twice, and then pour into your living room wearing blue uniforms and vests marked "Police," yes you assume they're cops.

A Poetic Observation

2010-05-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

I was reading about Dark Matter today (I was also avoiding work and thinking about a novel) and the reason it is hypothesized to exist. In the short and layman's terms with which it was described to me, if our theories about the Big Bang, certain gravitational constants, conservation of motion, et cetera are correct -and we've got good evidence that they are -then the energy in the universe should be causing the observable galaxies, star systems, and so on to fly apart. Because this doesn't happen, we hypothesize there must be matter and energy in the system to counter this effect, and we just can't detect it.

Now, it's possible, perhaps likely, that this is really the effect of a vast empty space and not enough light and energy meaning that non-emitting matter can only be detected if it's close enough to a star to reflect the light or other energy -though I'm not sure from my reading if this is actually the scientific thought on the matter given that Wikipedia is throwing around words like nonbaryonic and matter without atoms -I don't actually care enough to get this aspect of the science right in any book I write unless I first decide to publish it and then an editor insists.

But as I was in a literary mood I recalled a metaphor for God -which a quick search of my concordance reveals is non-Biblical -that in his capacity as personal God of the Universe sets and holds the heavens in their courses.

And I thought, gee -wouldn't it be cool if that's what Dark Matter was. God's hands holding the stars in the sky and carrying them through their courses.

Heritability in Political Science

2010-05-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

So a law student at that bastion of free thought, Harvard Law School, made the mistake of speaking her mind to jerk after a dinner party, and made the double mistake of committing it to paper. In this way we are far wiser than the luminaries who saved western civilization after the fall of Rome, those hopeless bigots were stupid enough to leave a record of their thinking.

Eugene Volokh hits most of the important parts:
1.) No one is ever going to trust the science on genetics and IQ if everyone rightly believes that only one answer is actually acceptable to science.
2.) Convening the Cambridge Inquisition over an empirical question is wrong.

Really, all four parts are worth considering if you have an interest.

I'm obligated by history and principal to say that there's a special circle in Hell reserved for corrupt cops, and teachers who savage their students at the behest grievance mongers -and the offense is made worse if the teacher is either ignorant or has botched his or her responsibilities previously. They're worse than Judas, Cassius, and Brutus -and even Satan. Those traitors at least had the decency of a cause.

But this is basically expected, and in the same way I avoid places where I expect to find crooked cops, I avoid places where I expect to find crooked academics. Hence why I don't address racial issues much, and when I have to, do so as perfunctorally as thoroughness will allow.

Frankly, this is old hat. But at the risk of contradicting my last post, what bothers me most about this is the constant shifting of what is and is not allowed to be genetic. First, an important caveat is that it isn't the same scholars making these points, so my irritation is probably with the discipline rather than the academics. I leave it to others whether this is an improvement.

The big thing in Poli Sci at the moment is genetic explanations. Alford, Funk, and Hibbings kinda opened the door with their argument that ideology is genetic, and an army of political behaviorists marched through it. I've since read arguments that voting behavior, ideology, authoritarianism, and a bunch of other behaviors are genetically inheritable -and I find these arguments basically tendentious. AFH's article uses an extraordinarilly lax definition of Conservative, the voting behavior argument was actually that some people have a genetic predisposition to be stressed, and such people vote less (becaus I needed biology to explain to me that people who don't like to make decisions tend to make less of them), and so on.

However, we're not allowed to think that, given that the best predictor of academic performance is the mother's academic performance, that achievement gaps are basically resistant to every intervention we try and persist between races for decades, that maybe academic ability (usually measured in IQ or derivatives) might be genetically heritable.

The Authoritarianism argument I read was worse: the author stacked the deck in order to avoid drawing the obvious racist conclusion by only analyzing whites because, as he admitted, the strongest Authoritarians (I hate this concept...) in the US are... African-Americans. This, of course, didn't stop him from then continuing to argue that Conservative White Republicans were a unique bastion of racial hatred and illiberal sentiment -but by that point I'd stopped caring. I think the SOB got an award for that article too...

In other words, my read of the poli sci literature to this point (which is admittedly cursory, but it isn't my field) is that genetic heritability is only allowed for white people. Gee, love that apolitical, self-correcting nature of SCIENCE!(tm) following the evidence wherever it leads.

And, as you might've picked up, I'm rather dismissive of the entire enterprise as either tendentious or vacuous, for reasons which I'll happilly explain some other time. So, take this for what it is: an aspect of my discipline that I don't like, think is probably rotten from birth, and should be pruned from the discipline. But I won't get my way so this stupidity will certainly continue.

Fallacious Fallacies

2010-04-29T20:46:00.000-07:00

For reasons totally unrelated to anything (but not quite to the level of goofing off), I was trolling Wikipedia's entries on logic -I presume they must be written by debators -and was reminded once again why I hate people who point out logical fallacies.

OK, hate is probably to strong a word -but I really dislike this debating move.

First, and I'm aware of the multiple levels of irony here, it is itself a logical fallacy as typically used. Excepting a formal logical proof, pointing out that someone's argument contains an error doesn't actually demonstrate that the argument is wrong. I'd rope this under ad hominim, but apparently it's a special form of the argument from ignorance (you can't prove your argument, therefore I'm right). But an incorrect argument doesn't change reality, so it is far more important to point out what the error is and why its inclusion actually gets us to the wrong answer (or might get us to the wrong answer). I have many examples in mind, but the one I'll use is from a conversation with Peter Lawler years ago at a Philosophy conference. He was presenting on language and communication -a topic I'm interested in -and if I recall correctly, argued that there really is no such thing as language, but rather that everyone has their own language and conversation is an exercise in mutual code-breaking. Actually, as I reflect more on it I think he probably had a point, but at the time I didn't buy it, and said that it was an important characteristic of language that it was a group identifier (I still think I have a point). An important part of Spanish is that it's spoken by Spaniards, and an important part of being a Spaniard is speaking Spanish. Dr. Lawler pointed out this was circular, which was true, but really beside the point which was that language and group identity are tightly related.

Incidentally, this comes up still in my research on groups -Social Identification theory says that social identification with a group is a two step process: 1.) Members claim identification, 2.) Group acknowledges that claim. Dr. Jennings likes to remind me that "groups" do no such thing, they're abstract concepts. This is slightly more on point than pointing out it's circular.

But back to the main point, the real reason it bugs me is that often, the person claiming a fallacy is simply wrong, often by applying a much stricter logical rule set than required, or because (and this is why I used the Lawler example) they have misunderstood the other person's point (and this is why I begin to think Dr. Lawler was more correct that I gave him credit at the time).

And this brings us to Wikipedia's example for Referent Switching.

The concept is straight forward: use one meaning of a word, and then subtly switch the meaning of the word -otherwise known as a bait and switch -in order to get to a desired conclusion. The example they use is from the Evolution-ID argument, that Evolution is a Theory.

The claim is that this is a fallacy because, in the first line, Evolution is called a Theory -meaning a scientific one, and in the second Theory is called speculative -using the colloquial meaning of Theory. Sort of like the joke about how my job can't be important because it is, as we all know, Academic.

My objection to this example (not least of which is that this is just a bad place to insert it), is that I can say with just about certainty that IDers aren't referent switching. They mean Theory in the speculative sense both times. The realization that there is a linguistic difference between how IDers mean Theory (and specifically, I mean non-experts) and how Scientists mean Theory is the reason you will now see the argument phrased "Evolution is not well tested, and therefore should be taught as a hypothesis."

But to conclude, there is a deeper reason this bugs me, and the reason I made my crack about debators at the top. This is point scoring. If you're keeping score, you're interest is not in getting to the truth, but in showing off your superior debating skills. This is arrogance, presumption, and when used to browbeat people into doing what you, as an academic, want them to do, is the type of petty treason that so enrages me.

You want to score points, run for office. We'll tally in November.

Group Dynamics and the African American Vote

2010-04-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Couple of posts by Pete Spiliakos at Ashbrook's No Left Turns Blog on conservatives attracting the African American Vote.

In the first he says that any conservative attempt to attract African-American votes is going to be filled with medals of dishonor because Liberals and Leaders in the Black Community are going to heap scorn on the conservatives trying to attract them, and cast out as Uncle Toms anyone who actually breaks from the Community to vote for or run as a Republican. That will last right up until the moment enough African Americans vote for Republicans that it is clear the scorn didn't work, and then we'll all pretend it didn't happen.

In the second he says that conservative starts on gaining African American votes have sucked. For emphasis he links William Voegeli's essay at Claremont about Movement Conservatism's lack of interest in Civil Rights.

All very interesting and worth a read.

On the broader point, I think Spiliakos maybe has a point. If Republicans want to attract the Black Interest Groups, they're going to have to treat them like any other interest group. Simple cosmetic "look, we hire African Americans" wouldn't cut it with with the Warhawks or the Wallstreeters or the Pentecostals, we wouldn't expect it to work for African-Americans. If conservatives are going to attract African-Americans they are going to have to find policies which attract African-Americans and don't repel the existing coalition, and not simply dress up the existing policies in the duly insulting black face.

Nonetheless, I'm underwhelmed by Spiliakos's two posts, particularly the second (I think he's closer to the truth with his first). The argument Spiliakos requires us to believe is that African-Americans know that their political future is with Conservatives -particularly Evangelicals and Pentecostals, since the foundation here is the shared Social Conservatism -but choose to vote against their interests out of spite for a miscalculation by a bunch of Catholics and Jews (Buckley, Podhoretz, and Kristol) 40 years ago. This is an idiotic reason to vote for Democrats. It's only made slightly better in the first post -which suggests that African Americans are being systematically lead astray by Liberals and the African American Leadership -if you consider being elevated from stupid to gullible a promotion. Worse, they'd be stupidly, hypocritically gullible, because it isn't like African Americans didn't spend a lot of time voting with people who hated them in the past -I refer you to the New Deal Coalition. So in this telling, voting with actual segregationists who currently actively hated African Americans was prefered to voting for the descendents of the people who misjudged the level of evil of segregation and thought that the massive coming racial welfare state (which not a decade later Daniel Patrick Moynihan would point out did more harm than good to African Americans) was the worse evil, then realized their error, and spent 30 years trying to make up for it with crime reform, welfare reform, and a bunch of other stuff.

What is this, the Stockholm Syndrom/Battered Wife approach to voting?

Rather, I suspect Voegeli has a better handle and Spiliakos missed it. The overlap between Conservative and African-American policy preferences is not as broad or as deep as it needs to be to maintain a coalition. African-Americans get a better deal from Democrats than Republicans. It's not just nostalgia for Johnson motivating the African-American vote. As early as Martin Luther King, Jr. the African American community was advocating for a more redistributive and socialistic Federal Government. In Voegeli's telling, we honor MLK on the Calendar, but we honor Malcom X in our policy. That's a policy Republicans simply can't deliver.

Further, this is a perfectly rational policy goal for African Americans. They are an extraordinarilly well organized social and political group, they deliver lots of votes in a reliable block, they have effective leaders, and their demands are not onerous to the majority of the population. It's a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.

Republicans are offering a dispersed benefit with a dispersed cost in exchange for African Americans giving up their current concentrated benefit. A history of distrust is not required to explain why African Americans don't sign on the line immediately. The only concentrated benefit Republicans can offer is to sign African Americans up in the pro-life league -which doesn't actually require becoming a Republican, and my admittedly cursory reading of the literature is that African Americans are not that exercised by abortion relative to their white coreligionists. In group dynamic terms, while they share a group affiliation, they do not share a salient affiliation.

There's a further aspect of African American Organizational Interests. Moreso than in other groups, there is a very strong social identification for African Americans (OK, the research on this was actually done in South Africa, but I'm going to guess its transferable based on some similar American results). One aspect of social identification is that it provides a strong set of norms that you have to obey to maintain that identification. Now, recalling the McArdle blog from a week or so ago, there isn't a strong "White" identification because that culture is so dominant identification of it is the social equivalent of asking a fish if water is wet. There's some network research that reaches the same basic conclusion -people identify based on small and unique markers -and small is an important, if relative term. A large body of African Americans and Whites will subdivide by race and sex, and if there are a bunch of people still in each group they'll subdivide again by something else. A smaller body may not feel the need to split.

So, unique in being part of the non-white population of the US is that you can have social identification based on color, but it isn't enough to identify yourself with a group. The group has to counter-recognize you, and that's where the norms come in. Now, in any group, these norms probably work to get everyone working towards the group's goals. But not everyone who wants to be "part of the group" shares those goals. Classic example: not everyone in the AARP supports the AARP's lobbying agenda, but because of the other benefits, they put up with it unless the AARP really ticks them off. Now take that logic and multiply from "gee, I get nice discounts" to "this is a defining characteristic of my life" and then contemplate how difficult it must be for African Americans to vote for Republicans when their leaders and communities tell them to vote for Democrats, they and their ethnic brothers get concrete benefits from voting for Democrats and in return Republicans are offering... the promise that eventually the well will run dry.

And we think this voting behavior is hard to explain, why?

And it gets worse before it gets better. These types of organizations are intended to be self sustaining. The benefits gotten from the first group action is used to fund the next one. The resources and benefits tie people closer and closer to the group identification, so it almost never weakens so long as the group is effective.

But it does eventually get better. The ecology of groups is fluid. Yes, for a long time African Americans as an organized interest have managed to dominate their field. But demography is changing. Whites are becoming closer and closer to African Americans in terms of organization as their hegemony on the culture erodes. Other racial groups are beginning to compete with African Americans in the Democratic Party. As this continues, the hold African Americans hold over individual (even lots of) African Americans will weaken. Fewer benefits can be used to hold membership, and even the importance of "being black" will pale in comparison to "getting anything, even if I have to work with white people to do it."

So, to sum up: African Americans get a good deal from Democrats. Republicans have nothing to offer them that will not alienate some portion of the existing coalition. Nonetheless, African Americans cannot forever stay in the Democratic Party because their position is premised on demographics that no longer hold. Once those demographics destabilize the African American position, they will reassess their political strategy -they might decide that the GOP is a better home for them based on things like shared social conservatism.

Other alternatives: the GOP jettisons some portion of the coalition to attract African Americans (probably the Wallstreeters, possibly the Libertarians). The country goes bankrupt and the Democratic Party is no longer able to fulfill its promises to constituent groups, like African Americans. African American preferences shift dramatically to the point they no longer consider the benefits they get from the government worth the paper they're written on. Or, the institutional voices of African America (ie the people who say "vote Democratic") do something really, really, really, and I mean Biblical Proportion, calling down lightning from Heaven, seven trumpets and a skywriter, really stupid so that individual African Americans consider membership in the "black" group to be nearly as insulting as being Republicans.

And a final note on Voegeli's essay: he makes a statement in there about how Fringe conservatives missed the "Civil Rights is OK" memo. I think he might be a little harsh on Buckley there. My recollection is that The Movement makes a point that the Conservatives aren't going to add a Racial State to their platform, so if Southerners want to join the coalition, that's great, but they're going to have to baptised to wash away the stench of segregation after their Come-To-Jesus moment. Its Southern rejection of this idea that leads to the Wallace run, and the failure of the Wallace run that leads the South to switch to the GOP on the Movement's terms. Sorta like what I'm predicting for African Americans.

Closing Minds

2010-04-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

I still think the "which party is more narrow minded" argument is a stultifying waste of time (because its obvious that it must be the other guy's party -everyone thinks this...). But I would like to agree that on first couple reads this by Ross Douthat strikes me as basically correct.

The research I do on interest groups leads confirms that interests tend to be narrow because they don't want to get into expensive fights with other groups. Intra-party fighting is very expensive, so the constituent groups tend to not get in each other's way. This is true of all politics. I was talking to a student who was saying how he couldn't understand the pro-life movement's desire to have babies born, and then let them starve because they wouldn't fund the welfare state. I explained to him that, to the extent the pro-life movement has a policy on the welfare state, they are the promoters of a "more family friendly" one. Sam Brownback was big on this. But there isn't a political coalition in this country for a Family Friendly natal-welfare policy. There is a coalition for pro-life and a coalition for small welfare state, and the pro-lifers have (correctly) assessed that it is better to be part of the winning the pro-life coalition than to get into a fight with the welfare reformers.

My addition to this is that I am becoming accutely aware of how important the "leadership" resource is. Briefly, ecoplogical interest group theory says that groups seek out areas where they don't have to compete and where they monopolize one or more resources -money, members, political power, leadership or some such. Manipulating policy is about getting a coalition of interests who monopolize the correct sequence of resources.

Douthat notes that there's a great deal of intellectual diversity on the right. The narrow-mindedness comes from the rote-repetition by politicians and the narrow interests of the constituent groups in the movement. This, I think, has always been, is true for the other party, and always shall be. This is the nature of coalition politics. Everyone pursues their own goal, they avoid confrontations they don't need, and they form coalitions around mutually congruent goals and mutually required resources. These intellectual ideas are a resource, but not one that seems to be needed at the moment (Party of No and all that) and not one that any group has monopolized.

What's needed is a group with leadership (or an entrepreneur) who will take those ideas and try to form a coalition around them. The more complicated and unified the ideas, the harder this will be to do -but without leadership, it won't happen at all. However, until a group monopolizes the resource and marries it to leadership, promoting these ideas will be an invitation to intergroup conflict, which, remember, they try to avoid.

In other words, the problem on the right as of this momement is a lack of leadership and an excess of potentially good ideas. This results in too many ingredients and too few chefs to make the stew of political coalition.

I'll end by way of example. I begin to realize how important Bush was to the right. Not everyone liked compassionate conservatism, but because Bush monopolized the leadership resource and monopolized the compassionate conservative resource, for coalition structure he was the only game in town. Competing against Bush and Compassionate Conservatism was going to be an expensive game and it was better for the allied groups to simply accept it as a given and adjust to the new environment. With Bush gone and Compassionate Conservatism dispersed across the movement, there's not a game at all because the necessary players/resources are not on the field. We're waiting for a leader who has a monopoly on a plausibly good idea to provide the core of the new coalition. Put another way, we're waiting for the next Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, or W. Bush and hoping we don't instead get Nixon, Ford, or HW Bush.

On Modern Warfare's Plot

2010-04-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Games.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading about video game design and I learned about the Call of Duty Series and its emersive storytelling. I knew the series existed, but I always assumed it was a traditional war shooter -the plot exists to justify shooting stuff, it doesn't really connect anything together. Really, this is a fine thing for war games as, from the perspective of the infantry involved, their job really is just a series of unconnected "go there, shoot them," orders.

So I was really excited. A war game shooter with storytelling, plot, drama, characters... this was great! I was making plans to buy an X-box just for these games (and a few others).

I was so excited I went to YouTube and found a couple of Let's Plays so that I could see what I'd missed. I was actually sorely disappointed.

To begin with, the games look awesome. They are easily as realistic as Black Hawk Down with perhaps a bit less blood. Actually, the realism of the rest of the game makes the basic unrealism of the genre stand out, that's how realistic it is. It's also very pretty. The set pieces are breathtaking and the levels are so emersive you lose yourself in them. Then there's a lot of scripted awesome, like an M1A1 blowing up a T-90 by picking it up on the infrared scope and shooting it through a building.

But the hooking point for me was the story, which at the end of two games I realized... made no sense. Specifically, the character of General Shepherd, who was a big attraction, was a let down.

*****

The Story in Brief:

Sometime in the 1980s history diverges from ours. The Soviet Union crumbles, but the Russian Federation never becomes strong, and the former Soviets never become even as independent as they are today -as evidenced by the presense of a bunch of Russian Soldiers in Pripyet, Ukraine in 1995. The Democratic Russian government (Loyalists) is fighting a fairly constant shooting civil war with Russian Ultranationalists lead by the distinctly not-Russian Imram Zakhaev.

Zakhaev is actually a former Soviet strongman from one of the Soviets who apparently longs for the good old days when he was in charge of whateveristan so long as he bribed the Russian KGB lackey every month, and now that those days are gone he seems to think a strong Russian Empire will help him. Well, maybe he's envisioning himself as another Stalin. Before becoming a Russian Politician he made his fortune selling arms to the Rebels. He was deemed enough of a threat that the British tried to kill him in 1995 in Ukraine. They missed.

As the game begins, British SAS is prepping for a mission in the Bearing Strait, which they then launch. They storm a freighter, kill everyone aboard, and locate a stray Russian nuclear warhead, which they learn from the manifest is heading for an unnamed country on the Arabian Penninsula. They tell the Americans, who happen to know the guy in charge of this country, Al-Faradh. They find this out just in time for Al-Faradh to be the victim of a coup. This is, incidentally, a great level and credits sequence which shows so much of the mess going on in this country in the coup aftermath. Lots of shooting, executions -basically every reason why we're glad they don't happen here. Anyway, the level ends with Al-Faradh being executed on national TV by the new dictator, Al-Saud. The Americans being concerned about Al-Saud and Russian Loose Nukes prep the nearest Marine Expeditionary Unit, SEAL Team 6, and a NEST team to remove Al-Saud and secure any nuclear devices he has.

SAS gets a message from a loyalist spy who tipped them about the freighter in the Strait that he needs to talk to the... and then he gets cut captured. Why SAS is running ops in Russia rather than loyalist Spetznaz I've know idea -well, Spetznaz has a bad habbit of killing the people they're trying to rescue, but we'll presume they don't always kill the hostages... Anyway, SAS is inserted with a Russian Spetznaz/Airborn unit to storm the village where the Rebels are holding the spy. They get the spy, who tells them to call off the attack, Al-Saud is laying a trap.

Unfortunately, before they can report this, they get shot down in Russia and spend just enough time running for cover that they can't call in until its far too late.

The Marines land and battle their way across the country, securing everything except the capitol. They prep for their final assault when the SAS reports, and SEAL Team 6 and NEST confirm, that the nukes are in the capital, armed, and set to detonate. The Americans start to withdraw, but the nuke explodes, vaporizing the 30,000 marines. You get to walk around the rubble for about a minute before succumbing to your injuries and dieing.

The Russians report that Al-Saud didn't commit suicide, but is instead hiding out with the Rebels in Azerbaijan. SAS is inserted, they capture, interogate, and kill him after confirming that he was working for Zakhaev, and that it was Zakhaev who set him up the bomb.

SAS and Marine Force Recon, with the Russians, track Zakhaev to a remote missile silo in one of the former Republics, managing to secure the silo before he can detonate missiles on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. They then get chased out into traffic (why there's an interstate next to a missile complex I've no idea) where they are finally trapped on a bridge. At the last moment, they are saved by the Loyalists who swoop in, and in a dramatic moment the leader of SAS, Captain Price, slips his pistol to the new guy, "Soap" McTavish, who plugs Zakhaev.

The survivors of the raid are taken to a Russian hospital, where only McTavish makes it home to Britain. In the intervening 5 years, things go to hell in the Russian Federation. It's never clear how bad, but the Rebels get substantial control of the country. Enough to control the army, the navy, the air force, and the prisons. Zakhaev becomes the symbol of Russian Ressurgance, and the Allies are blamed for martyring him -somehow overlooking the fact that he tried to nuke the US, did nuke the MEU in the Gulf, and the Allies responded by shooting him rather than paving the entire Russian Empire in glass to a depth of 6 feet. Things are apparently bad enough that McTavish runs the necessary ops to jump from Sergeant to Captain, and the Allies put together Task Force 141, a dedicated anti-Russian unit. As a consolation, they give it to Major General Shepherd, who was the commander of the MEU which was nuked. Why an Army Major General is in charge of a Marine Expeditionary Unit is never explained. Maybe it was a joint thing.

Anyway, 5 years later (2015 give or take) the US Army is still in Afghanistan taking cities back from the Rebels and making the world safe for democracy (good grief I hope we're not still taking cities back in 2015...). Shepherd recruits Joseph Allen, a Ranger, for TF141, and promptly gives him to CIA to slip into the inner circle of Vladamir Makharov, Imram Zakhaev's former Right Hand Man turned hired gun.

McTavish, now heading up an element of TF141, and "Roach," the newest British recruit break into a Russian base to steal back the ACS module from a downed plane before the Russians can crack the codes. Roughly the same day, Joseph Allen (wondering if he's got a relation to Ivan...), masquerading as one of Makharov's men, participates (or not, Player's choice) in a terrorist assault on a bunch of unarmed civilians in Moscow's Zakhaev International Airport. Just why, exactly, CIA is going along with this is never explained rather than shooting Makharov and handing the crumpled body over to the remaining loyalists I've no idea. Anyway, turns out Makharov knows Allen is a spy, shoots him, and leaves Allen -who for some reason must have CIA PLANT tattooed across his chest -dieing on the runway. The Russians find him, draw the obvious conclusion that CIA just launched a terrorist attack on them.

TF141, knowing that Makharov did the attack, but unable to prove it, go to Brazil to find the arms dealer who supplied Makharov with American weaponry. They find the dealer's contact as he's about to get shot by a different gang, and after a running gun battle, they strap him to a chair and go to work with a car battery -as a side note, even CIA doesn't do this, and I'd imagine SAS would be rightly offended at the suggestion that they'd do it either, no matter how justified. They find the buyer, who reveals that Makharov needed to frame the US for the attack in order to get the Russian government, now largely controlled by the Rebels, to green-light a punitive raid on Washington, DC.

Before they can phone it in (we're litterally days since the raids on the Russian base and the Russian airport), the Russians invade both coasts of the US, slipping past the American radar and sonar by using the data from the cracked ACS module. The Rangers, rotated back to Virginia, come out of their homes to find their base under attack. They quickly assemble to repel the Russian Paratroopers from the base and then push out into Suburban, Virginia. Once the Americans get their act together, they stomp the Russians all the way back into D.C. over the next two days.

Meanwhile, TF141 plans a raid on a Russian gulag to liberate a prisoner who knows something about Makharov, but to do that they have to capture a Russian Oil Rig that has been set up as a AAA platform. The Navy doesn't just obliterate it because the Russians are holding the rig crew hostage. This makes no sense, but I'm just going to presume that normally the rig would be held by the Loyalists and the Rebels captured it, so the Allies aren't blowing it apart as a favor to the Loyalists. You know, the guys who are so helpful that they couldn't even tell us there was a fricking invasion force prepped so that it could launch and land within a day of the greenlight.

Anyway, the Gulag only holds one prisoner, and is awesome if you thought The Rock was a cool movie (several shoutouts to this, incidentally). Turns out the prisoner is Captain Price, who somehow the Rebels diverted here from the hospital, out from under the nose of those helpful loyalists who someone explain to me why we haven't nuked them already?

Apprised of the situation, Price decides the best thing to do, in contravention of Shepherd's orders, is to steal a Russian nuclear submarine, and launch a missile at Washington, DC, setting it off in space to create an EMP to disable the Russian heavy equipment... and I guess he figures the Americans can get their own heavy equipment from Missouri to DC in less than the day it will take the Russians to get theirs to DC from Arkangel given what's already been shown of their logistical capability. Now, this does have the nice effect of saving the Ranger's hide, as their staring down the shaft of a Russian attack helicopter when the EMP goes off, and the helos promptly fall out of the sky (this is actually pretty funny in a sick sort of way).

The infantry gather on the lawn of the White House, which is controlled by the Russians, and launch an assault to retake the White House and the other shielded Federal Buildings so that they can get into contact with Headquarters. HQ informs them that they are sending the B-52s, and they need to pop green smoke (another The Rock reference) to mark their positions. After fighting through the White House, the Rangers get up on the roof and pop green smoke to signal all clear, at the same time green smoke pops on the Capitol and DoJ and other major buildings and landmarks. Really, this scene of "the City is ours, take that, Sow" would work fine without the air strike, but whatever.

Shepherd, who it turns out has been telling anyone who'll listen for 5 years that the Russians were planning something like this, is given over-all command of the response. He relocates to his base in Afghanistan, but decides first they need to string up Makharov. He splits the surviving members of TF141 into two teams to hit the last two known places Makharov was sighted. They hit the sites simultaneously, secure the arms caches and the intelligence on Makharov's plans, and return to the extraction point to report to Shepherd and his new "Shadow Company."

Shepherd takes the intel and shoots Roach. And for some reason, the American special forces who make up Shadow Company toss the bodies in a shallow grave and light them on fire rather than arrest Shepherd for Murder. At the same time, Shadow Company is attacking the rest of TF141. We skip to that...

Captains McTavish and Price and the last survivors of TF141 manage to evade both the Russians and the Shadow Company, which are shooting at each other as well as at SAS. They get ahold of the Russian Loyalists to call for a pickup, and have a terse conversation with Makharov who tells SAS that Shepherd's base is in Afghanistan. In a running gun battle on the runway, SAS manages to make it out with the Loyalists, but only the two Captains are still alive. The Russians inform them they they are now wanted fugitives, accused of international terrorism. The Captains go to Afghanistan.

After a lengthy chase through a mountain and cave complex (very Iron Man), they chase Shepherd in a boat to a waterfall, where he boards a chopper. Price (established previously a crack shot with a rifle) shoots the pilot of the chopper, causing it to crash. The boat then goes over the falls.

In a tense fight with Shepherd, McTavish gets stabbed in the chest. Shepherd reveals that, after this invasion, he'll have no shortage of patriots and volunteers to fill the ranks of the army. It'll be a better world. And I shall be invicibl... That's where Price attacks him. McTavish pulls the knife out and throws it through Shepherd's head. The Loyalists make the pick-up and we're now waiting for CoD7, Modern Warfare 3.

*****
So, I flagged a few. The numerous plot holes of MW2 have been pointed out by others. I'd like to hit a few others that relate to the first game as well.

First, what in the name of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch did Imram Zakhaev think was going to happen when he lured a MEU onto a nuclear warhead? I mean, good grief. What on earth did he think he was going to accomplish by vaporizing 1 MEU? It's not like we don't have six more where that came from (probably more given the setting).

Further, it having been established that the rebels of the Russian Federation slipped at least 2 nukes to Al-Saud so that he could lure an American Army onto a nuclear timebomb -when the Rebels took control of Russia, why, exactly, did we not nuke them? It's not like they'd demonstrated they could be deterred. The opposite, in fact.

Also, I buy that we can get the 2,200 Marines of an MEU anywhere in the world in a day. I want to know where the other 27,800 soldiers who got vaporized came from. But at least logistics are consistently easy in this universe. The Russian invasion is rediculously easy and fast. They slipped through our Radar using a stolen ACS module so that they could airdrop a punitive raid. I wasn't aware you could airdrop BMPs. And for that matter, where'd they get the artillery, air support, and helicopters? Those things have got to have naval support and I can't imagine that the entirety of Europe, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, England, and the United States missed it. And once they get there, where's the Atlantic Fleet? One hundred and eighty six ships, parked less than 200 miles from the invasion and they're nowhere to be seen. I'd blame Obama's defense cut-backs, but no one should be tarred by this lousy storytelling.

Alright, alright, we let it pass for the rule of cool. And they were trying to make a "war is hell, and how would you like it if someone invaded your country?" story. And as several have pointed out there's a distinct anti-war-on-terror undercurrent. I'd roll my eyes, except that they screwed it up, and that's just irritating. First off, if the attack on Zakhaev International Airport is 9/11, then makers of Modern Warfare 2 are Truthers of the worst sort. The ZIA attack is orchestrated by the rebels who run the government of Russia as an excuse to attack the USA. Second, the attack on ZIA precipates a punative raid on the USA -which is stupid, incidentally, you don't punitively raid people who can make you glow in the dark. For better or for worse, the US attack on Afghanistan and Iraq wasn't punitive. There's a lot of people who wish it had been, but we weren't there to kill people in revenge, we were there to topple oppressive regimes that encouraged terrorism in the hope that by doing so we'd be able to forego the punitive raids in the future. Good idea or not, these invasions were launched with the hopes of gaining permanent peace. So the developers are Truthers who missed the point of both invasions (I suppose I should be happy that the Russians aren't running around demanding our Coal Reserves to power their tanks...).

But then they missed several golden storytelling opportunities as well. At the beginning of the game, the Rangers force a bridge crossing, call in an airstrike to destroy a building housing rebels, and then drive through the town in their humvees, until they get rocketted from a school, which they then clear. During the invasion of DC, then, the Americans should have defended a river crossing from a building which got bombed by MiGs, from which they had to move to another building and launch an ambush on a convoy of Russian Armored Cars. I mean, if you're going to set up the parallelism, do it right!

And on a minor nagging point, the battle in Suburban, VA, a place I gather has very high gun ownership based on the voting patterns, should have had a whole slew of civilians in their homes shooting it out with their AR-15s. Not only would this fit the culture during the initial part of the invasion, and fit the level naming (Wolverines! a Red Dawn reference), it would also compelete the parallelism of the anti-war-on-terror point by showing that the people you shot in level 2 were just like the Americans in level whatever defending their homes. This point would have been stupid (the American civilians aren't going to go about murdering their neighbors and planning to bomb Russia with state support after the Russians leave), but at least it would have been well made. As it is, the point is completely lost because the Americans respond in uniform in accordance with the rules of war.

But finally, and the real reason for this lengthy post, and the reason I gave a plot synopsis: General Shepherd. Why is he the villain?

For starters, let me point out that he's right in all particulars. The speed and organization of the Russian invasion means they've been planning this for a while. They shot down an aircraft and cracked the ACS before the ZIA shootout. They were just waiting for an excuse to invade. They needed the Americans to move first. In fact, I think they've been trying to invade for 5 years. The reason Zakhaev lured an MEU onto a nuclear bomb was to provoke an American response that he could use to get the Russians to launch an invasion. And the reason he slipped the bomb to a no-name Middle-east dictator is because, if the Russians bombed an American target, the world would rightly blame Russia. But if Al-Saud bombs the Americans and the Americans bomb Russia, well now its our fault.

So, when Shepherd says that the Americans have been blind and stupid for 5 years, he's right. When he says the Russians are planning to attack the US, he's right.

Now, it's implied, though never stated, that he's been working with Makharov (why? silly writer, plot holes don't matter in this game...) and slipped the Russians both the ACS module and Joseph Allen in order to precipate the invasion... that was already coming. Geez, CIA, NRO, and NSA must be incompetent in this universe. And he's doing it for comedically bad super-villain reasons that are completely unnecessary given that he's right.

In fact, the whole thing reads like "we'd like to save Makharov for the last installment of the trilogy. Who's available for the dramatic ending villain in this game?" Or maybe a bad parody of "the complainer is always right," where the complainer is only right because he's also a traitor, except that the Russian's planning predates any of his known treachery.

And its all the more annoying because Shepherd has a perfectly good reason to break the rules to start a war. Five years ago his command was obliterated by the Russians, and when he wanted to go get revenge, Washington wouldn't let him. His consolation prize was TF141, which let him whack the Russians on occassion, but it wasn't the equivalent revenge he wanted. But to get his revenge all he has to do is unveil the Russian invasion plans, doing which might require some rule breaking along the way. Doesn't require working with Makharov, doesn't require shooting up ZIA. He just needs to do something Patton-esque to bait the Russians into shooting first.

Further, if we follow the story as is and ignore the insinuation that Shepherd was in bed with Makharov, his actions at the end of the story make perfect sense. He's trying to nail Makharov for the obvious reasons, but he also needs to clean up TF141 who, you'll recall, violated orders and nuked Washington, DC. Price and McTavish are terrorists now. Slightly understandable ones, but terrorists nontheless. And Roach helped them do it. The only questionable thing Shepherd did was not arrest and court martial the lot of them as soon as they reported back from the Submarine Raid, and that might be explained by expedience -I need people to do these raids and TF141 is available. The only thing he has to answer for then is why he tried to kill the terrorists of TF141 instead of arrest them -to which I can only suppose he figured that the ACLU or somesuch would make locking these dangerous terrorists up more difficult that its worth and so its better to shoot them and be done with it.

Sorta like Obama is doing with Predator drones.

In fact, the only thing I can think of that would make these games make any sense, is if Makharov and Zakhaev actually are patriots of their Republics, and have been running an elaborate false flag operation for 25 years to provoke the US into attacking the Russians to bleed out the Russian army so that the indigenous armies of the Republics can drive out the Russians and gain true independence. In other words, we're going to fight WWIII in the Modern Warfare Series because in 1946 the US sold Eastern Europe and Central Asia to the Communists -in the great irony of an anti-war game, in an attempt to... head off a war.

I should totally write that book.

On the Paying of Taxes

2010-04-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Another tax day has come and gone, leaving us to argue once again about whether taxes are too high or too low, too progressive or too regressive, and so forth.

I confess to having no real preferences on the matter of taxation in itself. But a few notes:

There's been back and forth, with this latest from The Weekly Standard a good synopsis, on whether enough Americans pay taxes.

For my own part, with annual income of just under $20,000 a year, I pay about 5% in payroll and income taxes for all levels of government. I am in the 30th percentile of the income distribution at this time. Figure another 6% tax on consumption, and remembering how much I save, I figure my total tax bill, including sales, is in the vicinity of 10%. That strikes me as about right for where I am. If there are people out there close to me paying less, I'd be really irritated at them.

Second, we have a pretty good idea that there is, surprise, an inverse relation between tax price and government services. That's the fancy way of saying when you don't pay much for government services you tend to want more of them. Much the same way that when ice-cream is half-off I buy twice as much. As a result, an easy way to get people to shrink the size of government is to raise their taxes until the price is equal to the cost of providing.

But we don't do that for the entirely good reason that its a really bad idea to pay up front for services you'll be using for a really long time. It's like paying cash for a new car when they're offering 5-years, 0% APR. As a result, our fiscal system encourages us to keep taxes down and spread the cost of most government services across many years. The technical word for this is income smoothing. We will be a lot happier in the future if we pay cash now, but we'll also be a lot less happy now. So by paying some in the future and some now, we maintain constant happiness.

If I've understood correctly (not guaranteed on this issue), we've rather overdone it, for some reason. Many culprits suggested -I have no opinion. So now, we're facing down the possibility that we're going to be really unhappy in the future because we've sanded down our happiness so much in the future that its actually less than the present. This means we should be paying more now than later.

The problem is, every attempt to this point to get us to pay more now coincides with us spending more now too. This was Greg Mankiw's basic complaint with the ACA Healthcare reform -even if it was a good idea, it was burning up all the easy ways to pay more now in order to spend more now. His analogy was a bankrupt person taking a vacation to the Carribean because, after it was over, he wouldn't be any further in the red than when he left.

For this reason, I'm not positive raising taxes is a good idea. We could easily eat up our excess capacity, not rebalance the income books, and thus end up being worse off than we are.

To this end, I begin to think the only real option is to metaphorically cut up the credit cards, accept that we're overpaying in the present as the price of not shearing the future too close again.

But the problem here is that we can't actually pay off the credit cards, which means we'll need to use some form of financing just to get back to solvency, and so long as that's an option, then the politics will allow us to increase spending as we increase taxes, putting us in a worse way.

There's also a lot of stuff -roads, tanks, aircraft carriers -that really should be financed because we use them multiple years. The reason, as has been explained to me, that we don't simply create a Federal Capital Budget, however, is that if we did so, we'd have so many budgets to reconcile, we'd never pass them all (last count: 13 House budgets, 13 Senate budgets, a budget resolution, and reconciliation and a whole bunch else -adding the Capital Budget would double those numbers).

So, our problem is that, because we underpaid in the past, we demanded too much government. The too much government has put us in a position where if we raise taxes, we raise spending. It has also required us to use debt financing just to get back on top of things, but we can't do that safely because government is too big and too complicated to restrict properly.

I think in the end, someone is going to have to take a bullet (maybe a bipartisan commission). We're going to have to cut services and raise taxes. But you'll understand if, in the current environment, I wait for the service cuts first.

Liberals in the Culture, and a Stream of my Consciousness

2010-04-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm very tempted just to link a story, say "interesting" and move on, but given the most recent post I feel compelled to be a little more verbose. You've been warned -long and sprawling examination of my mind ahead.

Some weeks -gosh, maybe months -ago, David Frum ended his relationship with American Enterprise Institute over what was most likely a pay dispute (Frum wanted to paid and AEI wanted him to occasionally work for them rather than work on his own projects and mention AEI at the bottom of the page).

David Frum was a speechwriter in the GW Bush White House, as an AEI fellow he did good work on conservative causes, was responsible for the "Axis of" part of "Axis of Evil," and was an interesting guy to read on political history and politics.

Somewhere along after the Iraq War went belly-up the first time, my read was that he basically made his peace with the coming Conservative Crack-up and went to deciding how best to cushion the crash landing. I'd estimate that was about 6 years ago, maybe a little less. At that time, I thought he became much less interesting as he stopped talking about new ideas and started talking about how to salvage what we could on our way to becoming Canada. More critically to the reason I stopped reading him was that he became very snippy at anyone who said "you know, we could still win this..."

So, Frum's separation from AEI strikes me as basically the culmination of this story. AEI wanted to stop digging in and launch a new offensive, Frum wanted flag the "unimportant" buildings for the enemy to bomb, if you'll pardon the over-wrought political metaphor. Example: AEI went full-throat on why the Healthcare Bill was a bad idea, Frum went nuts on pro-lifers for derailing it for a year (description approximate, I got some of this third hand).

Against that backdrop, Julian Sanchez -who, I confess for reasons so shrouded in the fog of time I don't remember them, is filed in my mind under "arrogant, foolish, and wrong" -penned an article on the conservative quest for epistemic closure and how it accounted for conservatives' belief that Frum must have sold out for the cocktail circuit. (Incidentally, telling rank and file activists that their members hang out with the other side in Washington, DC does not actually engender confidence that the members won't sell out for prestige -it just astonishes us that it happens as rarely as it does.)

Now normally I wouldn't give this much thought, what with Julian Sanchez filed in my mind under "arrogant, foolish, and wrong" for reasons I can't remember, which might be making his point, but there's only 24 hours in the day and its a big web -that's my defense and I'm sticking to it...

Anyway, normally I'd read it, shrug, and go on with my life. For what its worth, I have no idea why Frum jumped ship. My irritation with him stems from the moderately strongly felt sensation that he jumped ship just when it was getting tough, and then mocked those of us who toughed it out. It's not that he's joined the other side, it's that when it looked like things were going the wrong way, he tucked his tail and fled. And that's irritating, but forgivable. Now he comes back and wants to be in charge, leapfrogging everyone who stood there and took fire while insulting them for sticking around long enough to actually win. This, incidentally, feels like the reason I don't like Julian Sanchez -the same feeling -also present with Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey, with whom I associate Julian Sanchez and the so-called liberaltarian project.

OK, so that long kinda-meta jog down memory lane and my own psychology leads to the article I wanted to link as "interesting."

Megan McArdle at The Atlantic writes a long and more-streaming essay than this, actually 3 of them so far -on structural biases as a human condition, rather than a simply Conservative or Liberal condition. If I can summarize, dominant culture groups don't notice that they are a dominant culture -it just is. So when minority groups look at the dominant group and say "I don't fit in," they form their own groups to have a social life. The dominant group sees this and goes "why do you have to be difficult? Can't you see how you're acting all wrong?" This perception keeps the "weird ones" from getting jobs, seeking out academic positions, et cetera. Since we're all weird somewhere, we should empathize, but we are egocentric and perceive our weirdness as normal, which results in the familiar shouting matches. And this is ultimately bad.

Jonah Goldberg has a particularly interesting rejoinder, I recommend it alone if you only have time for one, at AEI (the circle is complete...) He makes many of the same basic points: "epistemic closure" is a human problem, not an ideological one; and adds that the overt hostility for conservatives by all liberals 40 years ago is the reason we have these parallel institutions, and its really not convincing, now that Conservatives have been affecting politics for 15 years, to claim that its only because Conservatives live in an echo-room. The crack on Paul Krugman is particularly amusing to me, but I like the word "Defenestrate." He also adds that it isn't like conservatives are lacking ideas -in many ways they have too many, which each appeals to a different part of the movement.

*****

Well, that was a lot just to say "read this." I'd like to make a handful of side remarks:
1.) Is it weird that I don't find the existence of Bob Jones University's old no interracial dating rule, or Trinity United Church of Christ's anger at white Americans particularly troublesome? Chicago and wherever BJU is located are strange places. The world doesn't end because someone somewhere is behaving in a way I don't like -now if we institutionalized either nationally -then I'd have a problem. But as tumors go, I find these fairly benign.
2.) I do find Obama's membership at Trinity UCC troubling -sort of. I have other reasons for thinking his policy will be bad and muddled without invoking his church. But I'm not comfortable with a person who chooses a church for political reasons, and I'm not sure why I'm supposed to think well of a person who sat in a pew for 20 years and never heard the pastor talk, and then abandoned the church at the first hardship. In other words, I don't think his history at Trinity reflects well on his character. He was either a pharisee or an apostate.
3.) On the other hand, I don't find campaigning at Trinity or Bob Jones particularly troubling. I figure if the 9th Circle of Hell had electoral votes, politicians would campaign there and actively seek Satan's endorsement.
4.) Following up on my most recent posts, I'm happy to consider the existence of a dominant culture making it hard for minorities to enter. I remain unconvinced that the Central Government is anything other than a giant hammer for pounding octagonal-multi-color pegs into gray-flannel-square holes.
5.) Which is why I remain generally in favor of decentralizing this stuff -even at the University. A bias against conservatives (or anyone) can't work effectively so long as they have a friendly place (like George Mason) to go. This makes the potential for bias at the Journals (as revealed by the CRU e-mails) so troublesome. They are centralized.
6.) On the general point of political echo chambers -based on the research I'm familiar with -which is a grand total of one book, but a recent one and a highly awarded one -the evidence is that they don't exist in the aggregate. People who consume political news are voracious readers of the news. They read everything -they may have political biases in how they interpret, but they don't ignore sources which don't conform to their views. The place where it might happen is the low-information voter, who is generally not politically active in the first place.
7.) On the other hand, people who become more politically active tend to actively cease debating and go straight to cheering on the team. Politically active debaters tend to be well informed, but not very active. How those findings interact, I've no idea.
8.) Apropos of nothing, McArdle is the second person in as many days to use the locution "as there are parts of the right I like..." and that really toasts my buns. You're writing this massive missive supposedly for my benefit and then you finish off with "but there's all this stuff you care about that I hope burns for eternity." Gee, thanks. Remind me to make you guardian of my children, your concern for our welfare is so grand. Look, I'm fine with a liberal who says "I think you have a point here, but no where else." I'm fine with a conservative who says "I'm a conservative, but I think we've got a problem here." But -bringing it full-full circle to David Frum -this whole "I'm one of them, but not one of them" routine is really annoying and not how you run for King.

On Liberals in the Academy and Research

2010-04-05T20:04:00.001-07:00

A recurring debate in higher ed is why are liberals so dominant. The dominance of liberals is not questioned, and in fact has been used as a recruiting method in more conservative schools. George Mason law and University of Chicago, for example, famously scooped up conservative and libertarian professors who were languishing in other schools, gave them a platform to teach and publish, and reaped the rewards of excellent teachers at a low price.

The question is why. Inside Higher Ed reports new evidence on an old theory. Short form: the main theories are hiring bias, self-selection, social-economic status dissonance (that is, professors are a high status, low paying job), and colleague socialization. The evidence here is that liberal professors start their lives as liberals, and so the likely causes are self-selection or hiring bias, and they refer to other research to argue that it's self-selection.

There are interesting counter-arguments: if the normal life path is from liberal to conservative, then job characteristics like the status dissonance and liberal colleagues could prevent that slide, or that the self selection is driven by hiring bias at the undergrad level -conservative undergraduate's first experience with academia is that it is a place intolerant of their views, they take the message and do something else. In any case, it seems that the proper solution is as suggested by the researchers: institutions and academics need to foster conservative scholarship at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

For my own case, I've had, to my recollection, only two professors who irritatingly paraded their politics, I've had several more who did not make a secret of it. Nonetheless, I don't parade my relative conservatism around much. I think people would be more likely to recognize that I'm an Evangelical before they hit upon conservative -but I don't make a secret of it either. It just seems unprofessional. My teaching and scholarship should be based on evidence, I should strive -to the extent of bending over backwards -to give the strongest case I can for liberal and conservative policy views and leave it to the student or policymaker to decide which policy to adopt. I do think, as a general rule, that I need to stress conservatism a little more or the critiques of liberalism a little more, but that's because my perception is that students are aware of the benefits of progressive policy, and aware of the drawbacks of conservative policy. Though, as I learned this year, I seriously underestimated the amount of anti-union fervor among my students (of 50 I think only 3 were actually in favor of a Union closed-shop law).

Now, it happens that the research agenda I'm following is relatively amenable to a conservative view (it might be amenable to a progressive view as well, certainly it has commonality with the environmental Home Rule movement). If asked I would say that I think the implications of my research are that we should shrink the size of national governments and delegate more power to smaller sub governments, such as counties or cities, and not be enamored of big metropolitan governments. In any case, I would argue further, whether we consolidate the government or not we do not actually solve the problem, we simply move it to a new government, so let us make everyone's life easier and not consolidate, but I specify that these are my policy preferences, not my research. My research is that interest group politics are constant, regardless of the aggregation of the government (which may be wrong, this is why we do empirical research in addition to theoretical research).

I ponder, though: it is widely known that journal publications are an important part of academic advancement, it is also known that publication is largely dependent on review by other academics, and the first cut is "does this interest the editor." I've heard several PhDs express annoyance that some journal's editor is enamored with some concept, and so nothing else gets published until that editor leaves. This suggests it is not enough to look at college faculties to answer the bias charge, but we would also have to look at the journals. The idea of a subverted journal process is not outrageous (see: East Anglia Climate Research Unit e-mails). My feel for the policy journals is that they aren't particularly biased -possibly the result of more conservative leaning economists sharing the space with more liberal leaning political scientists. Whether the same is true for, say, sociology, I don't know. It is simply something to add to the research agenda, and maybe one day when I don't have a thousand more pressing things, I'll get some data and take a look.

Porn and Public Policy

2010-04-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Double-check that the "L" didn't fall out of public...

A strange confluence of stories in the last week. National Review ran an anonymous (for reasons I can't actually imagine, given the content) article on the effects of pornography on men and marriages. Short form: it's bad. This provoked a number of responses and counter responses from a bunch of people.

Second, Stanford Magazine, an alumni publication, ran a biography Dr. Clelia Mosher, a Stanford MD who did the first known sex surveys of women -Victorian women -some 20 years or more before Kinsey's famous surveys. Fascinating biography and description of research: she found, for example, than women did in fact breath the same as men -from the diaphram -but that doctors had not found this, finding instead that they breathed from the chest, because women wore corsetts. The confluence however is not about biology, but psychology. Victorian women were not prudes in married life.

Third, Massachusetts passed a law redefining for tax and wage purposes an "Independent Contractor," trying to crack down on construction companies, and instead got nude dancers. Who are now moving to Connecticut in an irony that Hooker and Winthrop probably don't appreciate. (Also, fascinating details about the economics and psychology of the business from a nude dancer.)
______________________________

A few things:
1.) some of the responses to the NRO article are overwrought in their claims that the original article is overwrought. The author mentions her own experience as a hook, and then moves on, and her claim is not that porn increases rape but rather that it changes the perception of it (that it is more common and also less troublesome), and these aren't assertions but the reports of research -the provenance of which I can't vouch for.

2.) The response that there are other problems facing marriage today is very irritating. The people who make it demonstrate tremendous lack of empathy and excessive arrogance and ignorance. Yes, believe it or not, the anti-porn crusaders are aware of trashy romance novels, boddice rippers, Priscilla's, high divorce rates, low marriage rates, and that women now instigate a high level of all of it (see Victorian's weren't prudes either). They've fought some rather high profile battles over all of these, and girly magazines, contraception, and abortion. Some of them are still fighting these battles 40 years after they were lost. The retort is ignorant, and also non-responsive. First, they do have policy prescriptions on all those other issues, and second, that's not what they're talking about right now. On behalf of the crusaders, to everyone who says "do you want to ban woman's porn and romance novels," I'll say "yes, now can we get back to the topic at hand?"

3.) As the Stanford bio notes, historic research on sexual behavior is very bad, possibly due to poor understanding of the primary sources, possibly due to bad theory (Kinsey is a bad lense through which to understand Victorian Era sex, as 10 minutes reading Civil War era diaries and letters would make clear -after 2 year separations to fight there were some kinky corporals coming home). But it does seem reasonable that porn, prostitution, and other sex industries are more prevalent now than a hundred years ago simply because modern technology makes the barriers to private entry much lower. Anyone can call a 900 number or find a call girl service or porn site on the internet, this is no longer limited only to the very rich who can be discreet and the very poor who no one watches.

4.) Despite having a pretty good feeling that the sex industry should be reguated or stamped out, we have no idea how to do it given the tools available to us. The pure hypocracy involved complicates the matter. I was reading a book chapter on local regulation of the sex industry -meaning prostitution, porn, and novelty shops -which mentioned in passing that the reason these things locate in residential areas is because married men and women are major consumers -something which the Massachusetts story mentions as well.

_________________________

As a policy matter, sexual morals are difficult to legislate or regulate. This doesn't mean it can't be done (you can't legislate morality is another cliche I wish would die, or else the recent health care reform, to take just one example, never would have gotten out of committee), it just means it is very hard.

The hypocracy of local residents is notable, but not a problem. First, they may be different residents. Second, even if they were the same residents, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with binding yourself against some temptation. I may get angry and want to strike another person -the knowledge that I have agreed ahead of time that this is bad, and that the police may arrest me if I do it is an additional pressure that I keep my hands down. Sex shops work the same way. There is also the possibility, as raised by police and other city officials I've talked to, that the sex shop itself is not the problem, it is the prostitution, drug dealing, pimping, and other forms of vice that follow in their wake. Sure, vice cops can crack down on everything else, leaving the store alone, but it is easier and cheaper just to relocate the store to a part of town with fewer (rich) people.

No, the policy problem -familiar to many other things -is that technology and demand have passed our ability to regulate without draconian measures. It doesn't help that a sizable portion of the libertarians in the US think that even a single store putting a shield over the cover of Cosmo constitutes draconian regulation. Regulating the internet is difficult. Regulating cable is difficult in the current legal environment. Even regulating shops is difficult now. Remove the first ammendment protections and the shops simply move to more permissive places and sell remotely (gambling already does this).

Given the law and the technology, our tools basically consist of massive taxation -unpopular because it legitimizes the industry and gives the state a reason to desire its continued existence -and blanket bans -unpopular because they catch a lot of stuff we don't want to ban outright. Local governments don't have the necessary jurisdiction, and research indicates this isn't something that cities cooperate a lot on (they cooperate a little, but just enough to make sure it lands in someone else's back yard).

That leaves societal controls, such as the ones the Victorians used. But as we now know, the Victorian societal controls depended on a legal regime and the difficulty of gaining access to material -both long since dismantled. I don't know how or if we can repair some of the social damage, or even how much "damage" we want to repair -for example, the problem with no-fault divorce wasn't that it allowed women who needed a divorce to get one without paying large sums of money to their husbands, it was that it also allowed women who just wanted a new stag to do the same thing. Local controls are inadequate, state and national controls are too powerful.

Yeah... we're doomed.

Assorted Asides

2010-03-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

Healthcare
The vote is supposed to be Sunday. I see a bunch of people doing counts, which all basically come up "its close, but looking like a failure." My hunch is that if the vote comes it fails, because this feels more like Congress is indecisive about what to do, than which way to do it. For comparison, the Medicare Part D vote was basically about the way in which to extend coverage to perscription drugs, and so arm twisting could get people to take "half a loaf" as they say. This feels more like the Clinton reforms, where a lot of people didn't want any of it, so half a loaf just meant you got your poison pill in sliced bread. So there's definitely an upper limit to what arm twisting can get the Democrats, and they have the additional problem of being up against a wall with regards to the Senate.

Irritation
I've been playing Sims 2 for several years now. Back at the beginning of the semester I splurged and got the Double Deluxe expansion, which included the "Store" edition, which gave me a whole bunch of new wall colors, floors, and so on. I didn't know it was included, but I really liked the bold solid colors (yes, I'm an interior decorator's worst nightmare). Unfortunately, it causes a number of problems with the rest of the game, including, I found out today (note, some 3 months after I got it) that the coffee shop coffee maker no longer appeared in the game. This angered, irritated, and insulted me no end. The solution was to uninstall the Store Edition, at least temporarilly. Which angered, irritated, and insulted me again. Just so we're all clear, I'm irritated that something I didn't know I bought 3 months ago is messing up something I never used for years until yesterday. Yes, I'm over it. (In my defense, I did spend good money on this software and I don't think its outrageous to expect it to work.)

Lawful Good verses Lawful Evil
I've had this conversation a few times in the last week. When I was in grade school and middle school I suspect I set off many of the "troubled kid" alarms. I was moody, didn't have many friends, wanted to get out of class, mostly kept to myself. Of course, the reason for this is that I was a 3rd Culture Kid trying to adopt to a 4th culture (American Civilians, as opposed to Allied Military). Things exploded in 8th grade with the first of my 2 fights in school, and ended with the second fight in 9th grade. The first fight was handled badly by the principal and three teachers, who also handled me poorly for some time before and after. The second fight was handled better. The principal's behavior made me very antagonistic to zero-tolerance and second-strike rules. For some time I thought that the Law couldn't be good because all my experience with it was that the guilt went free, the innocent were punished for defending themselves, and the Majesty of the Law dictated that the only right response was to stand there and take it. The Law was easily manipulated by the proactively evil, who knew that the Law was blind not only to the outcome, but to the evidence as well, and had the sense to strike from the shadows when no one was looking. The way to get ahead was not to follow the rules, but simply to be strategic about when I broke them.

The reason I did not feel that way for very long was because of several teachers and principals who, to some extent or another, told the Law to shove it and did what was right -but still mostly within the rules. I took the lesson that even in this life, good people in positions of authority are the rule, not the exception. And for this, I am still Lawful Good, and still in school. So, thank you to:
Charles Brooks (English)
Janet Racee (Math)
Michael Moon (History)
Susan Beal (Science)
Mrs. Stoner (Head Principal)
Mrs. Stephens (Asst. Principal, 9th Grade)
and Honorable Mention to Andy Robichaud: it I ever end up in another principal's office, I hope its for as good a reason.

Music and Lyrics

2010-03-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

So I saw this morning (hastily retracted) that the Canadians were planning to change the lyrics to "Oh, Canada" to be more gender neutral -reverting to the original lyrics:

Oh, Canada
Our home and native land
True Patriot Love, in all thy sons command

to end with "thou dost in us command"

or using a newer version: "in all of us command."

Once you get past the obvious jokes, and really, the "oh sibling..." was good, there's really not anything objectionable about the idea -except maybe that Canada's government has more pressing things to handle. It doesn't change any particular meaning of the song, and maternal goddesses not withstanding, motherlands have daughters too -they just got shafted because even with the flourish on "sons" it's one sylable too long to fit.

No, the objection is that its a bad change, musically. Excepting "Patriot" which I think Canadians must pronounce with two sylables, except at the end of a sentence ("eh?") the line has a very strict rhythm and progression of emphases, in which the explosive "s" in "son" is actually important. Mother goddess aside, I suspect his is the real reason for the original line change. I'd suggest instead switching to "in all our hearts" or "in every soul" to maintain the pattern.

The other objection is "you just came off the Olympic Games! And now you're going to change the anthem! Dudes, your entire country just learned how not to mumble Oh Canada... Oh Canada... Oh Canada... Oh Canada..."

On a related note, this is also a great excuse to post a youtube from The West Wing where the President of the United States enters a hall and the orchestra plays "Oh, Canada" (it's funny in context) but seriously, this is the clip they don't have.

Also, this same objection is basically why I don't like the rewrite of "Jesus Loves the Little Children." The relevant line is "red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight" which, sure, I can understand the unfortunate implications -ignoring the fact that no child would and this is a.) a good thing, and b.) something only adults worry about. But most of the proposed changes are just bad.

"red and yellow polka dots, Jesus loves us lots and lots" has the unfortunate implications that Asians with the Pox have a special place in heaven -which I'm sure Lottie Moon would agree while noting it misses the point of the song -or worse that God prefers aliens -or if you want to get semantic "red and yellow polka dots" is the strangest oath I've ever heard.

If we're gonna update the lyrics, can we at least do it well?

Notes on Teaching Seriousness

2010-02-26T16:58:00.000-08:00

I held a seminar in my class this week on the policy process. The idea was, after 2 simulations on setting policy the people in the class would have something to say about how policy was made. I don't have the knack for seminars yet. I'm hoping for more success in the second half when we do Policy, because I imagine several of them will have strong opinions on policy and so they'll have something to argue about.

In the course of the discussion, there were a couple moments where the class kinda cracked up over a couple of names. I broke the class into 5 groups, each representing a city, and allowed them to choose names for their groups. Two of the groups chose pop-culture references. Nothing wrong with this, that's how Lexington got its name, after all. The first reference is "We Make It Rain" which is a lyric from a rap song -to the best of my reading comprehension a mysoginistic song (not surprising), but not obscene. The second is Wolfpack -referencing the movie The Hangover which several of my friends thought was hilarious and certainly fine for this group.

Apparently its hillarious to listen to a professor recite rap lyrics. I responded, to moderate laughter, that if they were good I'd recite "Pour Some Sugar on Me."

This occassioned enough "would you?" and chuckling that I had to say "alright, joke's over."

Now, I'd say at least 75% of the class enjoyed the moment of levity (not that it helped -I think I could've murdered someone on stage and not gotten a reaction).

The other 25% looked like I'd just killed their pet rabbit and stewed it.

On other occassions I've made jokes or satiric comments in my lectures. References on the slides (I go all out, I've referenced Gilbert and Sullivan, the Simpsons, Ghostbusters, and Lady Gaga) to provide a mnuemonic. They dutifully write them down with nary a chuckle.

And then there's the serious ones, who probably think the entire schtick is horribly inappropriate for a college instructor.

And the earnest ones, who really believe in politics and are just a little to eager to understand too much -"Don't understand me just yet, its just a small gig -no gold or treasure."

The earnest ones contribute, which is good. Sometimes the serious ones do to.

Was I ever this serious? This is really the reason for this reflection. Did I sit in a classroom so stone faced that the instructor thought I was angry? I'm the one who once demonstrated the secret of making over-written Arthurian Legend fun to read was to pretend it was really a trashy romance novel (And then Yvonne was laid upon his shield by three princesses... Good Night Everybody!) I can't imagine what is so darn serious about this subject. For that matter, I can't understand such seriousness about grades either -but then I have that luxury. But even when studying calculus -my worst subject -my study group wasn't so serious. We wrote a viral e-mail -which didn't get anywhere -about how studying Calculus was a bit like studying to become a priest -complete with crosses and stars.

This is supposed to be fun.

And also an excuse to post this:

Which is just awesome.

Apathy, all my ideals fall away from me...

2010-02-20T11:37:00.001-08:00

...I'm not half the man I was/
Because, of Apathy...

In the class I teach I've mentioned a few times that I am/was a Republican, worked for Republican office holders and campaigned for Republican candidates and generally know that side of the aisle better (I forgot who the DNC chairman was, for example). Had a student who I think leans Democratic ask me what kind of Republican I was.

I responded that I'm an apathetic one.

His response that it was nice to see an intellectual Republican is probably fodder for another day. I simply joked that there a lot of us, and we even staff some good academic departments.

I follow politics still, but I really have a hard time getting excited about it. I think the Democratic Health Care Initiative is a horrible bad idea. If it passes, I'll live. I'll probably be worse off but I'll have other more pressing problems like getting over writer's block and intrinsic laziness (have I mentioned what I'm not doing in order to write a blog post...) and getting a dissertation written followed by 3-5 publications before I get tenure if I can get a job, oh and there's the wedding and...

So, yes, politics is a bit of a diversion from my life.

I think this makes me a far better conservative than I thought...

Things not to say when doing something dumb.

2010-02-16T14:46:00.000-08:00

Via JammieWearingFool, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer flogs the TSA for rank dumbness.

Short form: Cop going on vacation with a disabled son is instructed to take his son's leg braces off, and then the son is instructed to walk through the metal detector alone. This ranks just slightly above the stupidity of asking a man with a prosthetic to do the same. Frankly, only Jesus (or Paul) get the privelege of saying "Shake off your braces and walk through the metal detector." The TSA may think it's God, but that's just because they work for the Government.

Fortunately the TSA director for the airport says this was not proper procedure, and in fact they should have done a separate, private screening. For a four year old disabled kid this remains overdone, but at least it isn't mind-numblingly obviously pointless. The best line, though, comes in paragraph 18. After the police officer going on vacation summons the TSA supervisor to complain, the supervisor responds: "You know why we're doing this." I would have paid to see every passenger in the terminal come over and make a suggestion. It would have been epic, I'm sure:

I feel the burning desire to strike a (Green) police officer

2010-02-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

Or maybe an Audi advertising executive.

I'm planning a Commercial Review for later in the week, but in the interim: memo to German Car Companies: Your fascist joke privileges were revoked in 1939 and haven't been returned yet.

Trial By Ordeal

2010-02-01T14:23:00.001-08:00

No, this is not a post about my dissertation.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, Peter Leeson writes in The Boston Globe about how trial by ordeal might have worked in the middle ages.

The comments at VC are mostly useless (I recall now the reason I seldom read them) but I do see one person noting that this article is based on research indicating that most people who went through the ordeal were, in fact, acquitted. Suggesting that either God does intervene in justice, or that God's servants intervene in justice.

The short form of the argument is that the ordeal worked because everyone was convinced it would work. Those who submitted to the ordeal were presumed innocent, and if someone went through with the ordeal in the face of overwhelming evidence, the priests or nobility would make sure he failed it.

At least one law professor I heard speak, years ago at a National Youth Leadership Forum explained that Trial By Ordeal was frequently a ritualized jury trial. One example he gave was this: the crowd gave you a poison, and then clapped 30 times. At the end of 30 claps, they gave you the antidote. If you were a real jerk, 30 claps could take all day. Nice guys got the antidote in a couple seconds. You could imagine the same thing happening in a trial by water:

"He sunk."
"He might come back up."
"Good point, better give him another minute..."

Sudden death jury deliberations.

Several VC commenters ask how it is that everyone believed in the ordeals, but not the priests. I should think this obvious, but then I like medieval history. Nobles and Priests faced different ordeals. Talking about "Europe" of course is grossly misleading. England, Scotland, France, Spain, the Empire, the Papal States, Denmark, and the Other Empire all had very different legal methods and ordeals.

But I don't think its too far off to say that, generally, Nobles and Priests could simply swear an oath, Nobles additionally could fight a challenge. It was the peasants who got dunked. I rather recall this is the point of benefit of clergy was to not only get the lighter punishments but also the easier trials. Its why it was abused, leading to much conflict in England (and other places, I'm sure). And also leading to my favorite story.

Same law professor as above, read about Trial By Bread, a Benefit of Clergy trial. A clergyman would swear on a Bible that he was innocent, and that if he was lying, may he choke to death on the Host. He was then administered communion. Turned out that the professor could find only one confirmed case where someone failed it. A nobleman claimed that, as he vested Bishops and was given his place by clergy, he was a kind of clergy. He choked to death on a wafer.

God works in mysterious ways. Or maybe the Bishop was just not pleased. Either explanation works.

Boom and Bust

2010-01-26T16:04:00.001-08:00

So some fellows at the Mercatus Center tried to get jiggy with their bad selves -always a bad idea, we're academics, we're supposed to be boring -and decided to rap out the Theories of the Business Cycle.

Here's their effort:

Unfortunately, I highly doubt anyone who didn't already know the basics understood most of that, so the Servant is here to explain.

First off, the Business Cycle they're trying to explain is the boom-bust economy. Economies grow over time, but they grow by getting big first, and then crashing down -but they don't fall back to the beginning.

Keynes's Case
Keynes was trying to explain why, in contravention of conventional wisdom at the time, you could have stable economies with high unemployment. What he came up with was the idea of Animal Spirits. This is the desire to take risk and enjoy reward. When animal spirits are high, people take risks on investments and buy expensive items. This puts money into the economy which creates jobs. When the animal spirits are low, people don't spend their money and as a result the number of jobs decreases.

C I G all together get's to Y is the reason reduced animal spirits lead to unemployment. Consumption, Investment, and Government Spending are all types of Income (that's Y because I is already used and also is used to mean interest rate). When the animal spirits drop, C and I drop, leading to a drop in Income. Without income, C and I drop further, and the cycle repeats. One solution to this problem is to revalue everything, but contracts won't let you revalue your payroll (that's sticky wages). As a result, businesses dry up and you have a stable economy, with depressed animal spirits, and high unemployment.

Stimulus is intended to awaken the animal spirits. By increasing G, Income is kept constant so there isn't the downward spiral of Y into depression, that's maintaining Aggregate Demand, keeping Y constant.

All of this is part of the argument of circular flow. Circular Flow argues that ever spending is someone else's income. When spending drops because aggregate demand dropped, someone loses income -ie, their job. Pulling your money out of the bank and hiding it under your bed takes money out of the economy and so reduces someone's income. Banks that are scared to lend have the same effect (that's the liquidity trap). The paradox of thrift is that if everyone saves (but doesn't invest), then income is reduced, making saving harder. However, if people invest, their money provides income to many more people, that's the multiplier (simplified). But in a depression, people don't invest because they're afraid the bank will fail. Only the government is stupid enough (er, can be convinced) to spend money in this situation (and they can get a good deal on labor and materials, so there's that.)

Hayek's Case
While in the aggregate, C+I+G=Y, that ignores the fact that there is a process that goes into allocating Y to each category, and that's price, interest rate, and taxes. Individuals respond to the difference between the three prices (I'm going to stick with that word now) in determining whether they should consume, invest, or allocate. If the time price goes up (that means the interest rate goes down) they'll consume more or allocate more to the government.

Ignoring that allocation process makes economic policy not about the efficient allocation of resources, but about maintaining the status quo, even if that means expanding G (because usually government is the easiest way to do it) well beyond its effective bounds.

If you want to have I, you need to have Savings (the corresponding expenditure type). Substituting G or C for Savings confuses the allocation process. The substitution spoofs investors into thinking there is savings, when there's not, so they make expenditures well above what they would have made otherwise. This increases Y, which increases C, G, and I, but the information is still wrong, and so you get a bubble. But people don't realize its a bubble, they think it's real money (those sticky wages again confuse them). Pretty soon, everyone starts acting as if they are richer, but really it's all an illusion.

For a while you can get away with this, but eventually you run out of slack resources, and suddenly prices start spiking. When that happens, people realize they aren't rich, but by then they've made agreements based on high incomes. To follow the metaphor from the video: Keynes's animal spirits were the result of being drunk on cheap money. The system crashing down is the necessary correction to balance the books and let everyone know what their true wealth is.

Of course, this still doesn't explain why you could have a stable economy with high unemployment. That's another argument.

Avatar: The Review

2010-01-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday Myre and I went to go see James Cameron's new movie, Avatar. Lest everyone be put off by the following massive bit of negative criticism let me say that I enjoyed watching it and I'll have nice stuff to say at the end.

Now that the movie's been out for a bit, there's not so much of a problem with spoilers, so they're below. There are also spoilers in Gregg Easterbrook's review (you'll have to scroll down) and David Johnson's review

My huge complaint with the movie is that it's a mess behind the camera. There are a bunch of plots and stories that are implicated but completely ignored, there are plot-holes and idiot-balls galore scattered through the entire film, and the movie doesn't feel the need to explain anything which makes the strange stuff you see all the more incomprehensible.

For the benefit of people who haven't seen the movie, in the future a company has colonized a moon of a gas-giant around Alpha Centauri to mine a mineral called unobtanium. The planet is awesome and cool, so of course the humans are strip mining it. It's also very dangerous, and so the humans have brought in an army of mercenaries to protect the mining operation. There's an indigenous population which doesn't get along with the humans so they create the Avatar program to put human's into the body's of Na'vi so that they can communicate with the natives and negotiate a settlement. This requires that the avatar and human have identical neural systems, so the avatars are cloned with the human subject's DNA grafted into the relevant part of the genome to create the identical neurons. When one of the scientists in the program is murdered by a mugger, the company asks his identical twin brother (Jake Sully) to step in.

The brother is a Marine who lost the use of his legs and can't afford the neural treatments to get them back, so he joins the team in order to get the money for the surgery. His first day out in the world, he gets separated and falls in with the local population. He spends the next three months learning to be a Na'vi, ostensibly so that he can serve as a trusted go-between. Instead, the company uses the information he brought back to plan an assault on the Na'vi, destroying their tree (basically a city), and provoking Jake Sully to defect, lead an uprising or the Na'vi, and beat the humans off the planet, afterwhich through the particularl awesomeness of the planet (everything is nueralogically wired together), he gets his mind transfered permanently from his body into his avatar and lives happily ever after on the planet.

There's a plot (a sequence of events tied together by theme or character), but there isn't much of a story the way its handled. Jake Sully has a straight-forward motivation going into the movie: he wants his legs back. It's mentioned once or twice near the beginning. Never mentioned again. He got the chance because of his brother, murdered during the previews, burried in the opening scene, mentioned once afterwards. The humans are on Pandora because they want unobtanium (I hit my head every time I hear that, why don't you just insult us totally and call it mcguffinite) it's mentioned once and then never again. The largest deposits are under the home trees, mentioned a few times but nothing is ever done with it.

By the end of the movie, Sully seems to have ignored his legs and is going into the avatar because he likes being a Na'vi, is in love with the princess, and wants to kill the humans, though we never see the transition. The humans are fighting the Na'vi because they're really ticked at the Na'vi and Sully and the unobtanium is hardly mentioned again (I think aptly symbolized by the villain switching from being the executive to the head of security).

There's no shortage of good stories to work with here. Sully begins with no legs, but is working to get them restored and works them out to keep them in shape for that day. By the middle of the movie he's let his legs atrophy from lack of use. The Colonel asks the question which is a great story by itself "How's it feel to betray your own race?" We don't even need a war to have this story. Bring in Sully to actually serve as a diplomat, and then find him going native, losing the trust of his superiors, letting his legs go -I'm envisioning an awesome scene (written by Aaron Sorkin or Martin Scorcese maybe) where the doctor grabs Sully and tells him that he is a human, not a Na'vi and he's going to have to start taking care of his human body or he won't be able to do either, and that when this diplomatic mission is over they will probably send him back, and then he'll need to have his legs still healthy for the surgery to work. Or, there's a phenomenal changling story to tell here. Real life as a human is humdrum, life as a Na'vi is awesome wish-fulfillment. You could easily put Sully in a "man with no home" position, force him to realize that being a Na'vi isn't all fun and games, and force him to decide human or Na'vi for reasons other than getting to run around like a character in a video game.

What we get: he's made chief, gets the girl, and leads the rebellion. Gee, haven't seen this movie before.

There are also many parts of the story that run on idiocy. The company acts like the worst run colony in history. Even the Spaniards didn't kill everyone. The executive violates hostile colonization rule #1: divide and conquor. He then spends an enormous amount of money to destroy the home tree to get the unobtanium (smack) which he's then unable to mine because there's a giant freaking burning tree on top of it. So he goes and fights an expensive war, which he loses. How did these guys survive the first month on planet? The East India Company could have done better with their original equipment.

Sully is supposed to spend three months learning the Na'vi culture so they can negotiate with them. Instead, he creates an incident when he mates with the chief's daughter, who is only supposed to mate with the next chief (it's not established if this is a matrimonial arrangement). Not that it matters because the executive bulldozes the tree before they even attempt to negotiate.

They handwave this with Sully saying that the human's have nothing the Na'vi want. First, I don't believe this. Even if you need to go Cortez or Pizzaro on the current chief to find someone who'll negotiate, there's always room for negotiation in something like this (seriously, the Na'vi aren't doing anything with the unobtanium -their negotiation stance could be "if you can do it without destroying the tree, have at," and the humans counter with "cool, we'll just switch to lateral shaft mining," you know, that thing we've been using on earth for 300 years). Second, even if I believed Sully, we're seriously going to take the word of the guy who's diplomatic skills were so great he spent 3 months not negotiating and just created a major incident? And third, why in the entire company do they not have a competent negotiator or diplomat! I know for a fact (well, from a Joel Garreau book on land use) that the two universal traits sought in a real estate agent are 1.) Retired Fighter Jock, 2.) Retired Sports Jock. Get one, put him in an avatar, let him do the whole "and now you are a man" sequence, and then make a real estate deal. Seriously, this ain't complicated.

Then there's all the stuff the movie doesn't explain that's sorta important. David Johnson found that there's a brief mention at the end that earth is dieing, which suggests that they really needed that macguffinite (smack) that the Na'vi weren't using. Thanks nobel savages, we'll all just go and die now because you were too selfish to bother negotiating. There's the floating mountains, which you can sorta figure out must be filled with the stuff I'm not gonna say again, which they aren't mining for some strange reason (out of the movie Cameron apparently says "there was an accident and they decided it was too expensive" to which I rejoin "than a war?"). The precise sentience of Pandora is never explained -is it a collective conscience or is it actually personalized? And why precisely is something this awesome being destroyed rather than mined for pharmecuticals? Big company or not, there's a government involved somewhere, particularly once its revealed that there's a sentient species on planet.

It's almost as bad as Ferngully, where everything is explained by magic. Now, if the Colonel had been played by a singing Tim Curry...

And this makes worse the telegraphing of every single plot point in the movie. Seriously, you knew it wasn't done because there were obviously telegraphed plot points that hadn't been resolved yet. And in a couple cases, they were so obvious they didn't feel the need to show us the resolution, just tell us it happened.

I could probably go longer, but that would necessitate seeing the movie again, which I won't do just to nitpick.

No, I'll see it again (maybe) because it was awesome. Some of this stuff I noticed in the movie. Most of it I realized after I started thinking about it. The movie is a marvel of sucking you in. There was only one place where I rolled my eyes and fell out of the movie, and it was the last part of the fight with the Colonel, something like 5 minutes before the end. It's visually stunning in a way I don't think will transfer to the small screen (certainly not without 3D). The music was phenomenol, the world was amazing. Frankly drop the humans, I'd watch a fake documentary about the Na'vi and Pandora in 3D.

This movie was for me what I think Titanic was for everyone back then. Light on the plot, not subject to rigorouse thinking or criticism, and visually stunning. That no one really talks about watching Titanic the way people talk about watching, say, It's a Wonderful Life I think indicates that it won't be recalled with any particular force a generation from now, and the same with Avatar, but as spectacle it's the top of the list.

In fact as I've mentioned above, I think that technical awesomeness is probably a long-term liabilty for the story as it won't translate to the small screen. But in the end, this is probably not a problem for Cameron. He made a movie spectacle to show on the big screen with 3D glasses. His plot is simple and inobtrusive enough not to ruin the shot of the sunset. That's probably what he was aiming for.

The next film maker will manage to give us the sunset and a decent story. So for that we can thank Avatar.

Random thought: I wonder how close a scene-for-scene comparison would be, let's see, there's sex in the strangely located automoblie, then there's sex in the strangely located tree, they both end with hour-long set-pieces...

Napier Wept

2009-12-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

From the nation that gave us "You may follow your custom. And we shall follow ours."

The Newest Innovation. "We have appointed an FGM co-ordinator to drive forward a co-ordinated government response to this appalling crime and make recommendations for future work."

We are so doomed.

Hobgoblins

2009-12-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

"A Foolish Consisency is he Hobgoblin of little minds,adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines." -Emerson, Self Reliance

I've been trained in statistics and probability. I may not have always understood he minute points of every class and model, but I've gotten A's, and my methods are considered quite adequate for research.

One of the rules of probability is encoded in the "gambler's fallacy", which says that no event is ever "due" just because there has been a long run of counter events. This is the "even if you've flipped a coin and gotten heads 85 times, it does not mean that you will get tails on the 86th, you still have a 50-50 chance on the flip, or a bad coin" axiom.

I can show you the logic, I can work you through the math, and I can say with absolute conviction tha I don't really believe a word of it.

85 heads in a row; I expect to see a tails on flip 86.

I can give reasons for this, of course, which simply rule out probability. A coin is likely to land on the opposite side of what it started with for the same reason toast is likely to land jelly-side-down. Dice are more likely to show cerain faces because of wear and tear or because the throw didn't really randomize the dice, but rather just chucked them to slide across the table.

But really and truly, I am not thinking of these things when I throw my dice. No, I'm thinking that this is my lucky die, and that shaking it 30 times will make it more likely to come up with the face I need, and that whispering threats and blowing on the dice so they know who their master is will make them cooperative.

Every gamer knows these rules. Every gamer has a superstition. Threaten your dice daily, if you don't know what they did, they do. Store your dice with bad numbers up so that they will be tired and more likely to show good numbers. Store your dice with the good numbers up so that they will be used to showing those numbers. Store your dice in whiskey so they'll always be happy. And any of a thousand other rituals.

We throw hundreds of dice a year, we know better.

I have probability lessons drilled into me. I know the rules. I just don't believe them.

Oddly, I do belive the rules in other areas. I have no doubt about the way lottery works, that no number sequence is more likely than another. I generally believe that streaks are more indicative of lopsided odds than that they should be broken soon (i.e. a streak of baskets in basketball is indicative of a good shooter, not that he's "on fire").

But with my dice, if I haven't rolled well for a while, I switch dice. I have lucky dice. I figure my luck has to change eventually.

No idea why. I suspect that part of it is that I roll dice in narrative games. Narratives are subject to the rules of irony and literature, so of course a streak of bad luck is remembered as worse than it was because the narrative frames it. The roll which breaks the streak is also a major narrative event (think of the moment in the movie where the hero is about to be thrown off the bridge but then he fights back and wins -that's the streak break). And of course, because God has a twisted sense of humor, and so do most GMs, when you need a 20, you will roll a 19. And of course the literary analysis overrules the probability analysis.

But the important thing is, with all the training and understanding to the contrary.

I believe the gambler's fallacy.

It's a small (corner of) the 'net after all.

2009-12-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

I won't run you through the details of the blog war because it's sufficiently eye-rolling to the me (who followed it) that I'm seriously considering writing off that whole corner of the net for the next few months.

But, there's a blog war going on involving the corner of the Internet where RS McCain, Patterico, and a handful of other Conservative bloggers hang out. They are all very serious. Comments about the "conservative blogosphere" having an all out war are rampant within their posts. Their links to all the other participants fill their posts and blogrolls.

And two steps outside their little network no one is paying any attention.

Seriously, the "conservative blogosphere" at HotAir, Ace, Instapundit, NRO, RedState, and some of the other major institutions -haven't said a word. And it's not like they don't know the participants. They all link each other all the time -well, NRO is more likely to link Patterico than RSM, but otherwise its fairly even linking.

I suspect there's an important network point to be taken here. Not sure what it is.

One possibility is it reinforces the power of powerful linkers (sometimes called gatekeepers, and other terms in the literature that I'm blinking on). Even though this corner where the war is happening looks as if it's tied into the center of the right-o-sphere, it's actually far less central than it's ties indicate. Many central actors link them. They are still fringe characters because the major central actors are linked by many, many more people. If NRO, Ace, et cetera don't deign to enlarge the war-space, it will remain contained for the duration.

Another possibility is that even central actors can have their own cliques. If this were a policy debate we might imagine a fight flaring up in a sub-sector of the policy with many important actors, and yet the other important actors would more or less ignore it because they have other things to do.

A last possibility is that this indicates its harder to tell who is central and who is not based exclusively on link information or size.

I conclude by noting that recently Andrew Sullivan and Little Green Footballs made their announcements of officially switching to the left-o-sphere. What I find interesting (and why I connect it here) is that, while I became politically active when I turned 18 (for various reasons, though interested, I stayed out of it mostly in High School), there has never been a time when I took either website seriously as an important voice on the Right. Yet it took 7 years or more for them to migrate from the Center of the Right to wherever they are on the left now. (LGF is an unusual case in that it only came to political prominence because of 9/11.) Yet, in the Right-o-Sphere both names are relatively well known and linked, and an outgoing link was once a very important thing. So it seems that there might be some interesting network inertia in play as well when determining who the "important" and "central" people in the network are.

Boys Don't Cry

2009-12-07T17:33:00.001-08:00

The UK Daily Mail has a piece on why women make bad bosses (really it seems more like why Amanda Platell thought she was a bad boss and generalizing to explain the shortage of high-ranking career women).

I'll note a few things: this vaunted ability of men not to take criticism personally. I'm usually a pretty high nature-nurture must be understood together fellow, but in this case I think nurture may be the driving factor. My ability to not take criticism personally comes from large doses of a.) boys don't cry, b.) nor do they take criticism personally, and c.) if I were to either cry or take the criticism personally that would mean my critic wins. And d.) I never want to lose. Really, the stuborn desire not to lose is the main driver.

Then again, this could be a male nature driver too. After all, how many men have done stupid things on a dare? There's also the factor that I don't believe I was ever taught this, so it may be nature being channeled through nurture after all.

Second, I suspect on a very small sample size that the lack of good women bosses can likely be attributed to children, family, and other priorities. When I was part of the job search for a position in Paducah we interviewed several women (it happened that all the final applicants were women) and several were very good and would have been great additions to the city management team. Of the top three, one of them -and one with great experience as a leader and boss in several sectors -withdrew because she didn't want to put in the 80 hours a week being a high ranking, on-call city official required. She wanted to spend more time with her son while he was still in the house, if I recall correctly. The previous job holder got married and moved away.

The great bane of my professor's existence is that their best and brightest women scholars get married and take less prestigious jobs, either to be close to their husbands or to raise families. Of course, their normal students probably do the same, but it's less a bane when a student goes to a state school because its a good fit than because it's in the same city as their husband. Also, this is almost universally women following men.

Though, there's the strange counter case where one of my office-mates' husband followed her here, so there's that.

As I said, small sample size. But I know there is some more general research looking at wages which show that women do leave their careers to take care of children -and further that they are very happy about it. I can imagine that the same women who would be the best bosses are also the women who can tell that they can either be super boss or super mom. If being super mom makes them more happy. As a result, compared to the crop of men who might be made bosses, there will be more bad bosses among the women because there is a higher concentration of good bosses among the moms relative to the bad bosses.

Nationalism

2009-12-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

I'm fishing for comments and responding blog-posts from my knowledgeable friends here, just fyi.

At Thanksgiving Jonah Goldberg wrote a paean to Thanksgiving in which he says that it is his favorite holiday because:

It's not commercialized
It's our only nationalist holiday
It's about family,
And left-over turkey sandwiches are great

The joking aside -and I have bad news for Mr. Goldberg, Helzberg Diamonds sent me a Thanksgiving-day sale mailer -I think his love for the holiday boils down to: it's a holiday that honors the relationships which aren't to the state. Independence Day honors the relationship to the the Federal Government, Memorial Day and Veterans Day to the Military, even Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a celebration less of him than of the Civil Rights Act. Thanksgiving honors all the other intermediaries and other loyalties we have.

And by virtue of being on Thursday probably shows that those relationships are different from the loyalties we owe the State. And in any case, as a somewhat hardcore Burkian, I like the idea of a holiday for the Little Platoons (and no, I hadn't thought of it this way prior to his essay).

Anyway, his post included the line "A little mystic nationalism is a good thing, because it provides the emotional sinew that helps us hold onto our patriotism." Which set off the firestorm, so to speak.

Will Wilkinsn responded with "here's your good and healthy" (I'll spare you the click, it's a picture of caskets draped in flags -1, that is precisely what is good and healthy about it, everyone of those bodies is a volunteer, rather than drafted cannon fodder 2, that Wilkinson can't see this is one of the myriad reasons I don't want him near anything important ever).

Pascal-Emmanuel Goby, who I don't read reliably but generally have good sentiments towards, responds with a jab of his own and a lengthy defense of patriotism and nationalism which I think can be summarized as: nationalism and patriotism -love of both your people and your country -is a prerequisite to living in a democratic society. He doesn't say it, but I take him to be channeling G.K. Chesterton's aphorism that you wouldn't follow the advice of someone who says "I'm sorry, but we're all doomed," but is not actually sorry. Nationalism and Patriotism are the assurance that the speaker is actually sorry.

Ilya Somin, who I do read reliably and have slightly less good sentiments towards but still good ones, joins Willkinson's side of the debate in two posts which I summarize as: Nationalism is not good because it is irrational, causes mass-murder, and other stupid things which outweigh any moral or morale benefits it provides. He concludes that playing with Nationalism is like playing with fire.

Lawrence Auster about whom I know nothing responds to Somin that the United States most certainly did start as a nationalistic enterprise and that Libertarians generally have too little respect for social organization more complex than the individual, alienated, rights-bearing person.

Goldberg responds, again at length, in the same vein. First, the benefits of nationalism are in low dosages. It's a prophilactic and a vaccine against many dangers, but like any drug can have bad side effects, or even be lethal, if over-indulged -like most things (like, say, over-emphasizing alienated rights-bearing individuals and throwing them against the Leviathan). He emphasizes that nationalism and patriotism are a kind of love, which are necessary to get through rough patches -he doesn't say it, but I take his offense at responses involving the word contract to be that even a contract is not binding absent an underlying love of something else (even if it's just not going into exile). Then there's the It's a Wonderful Life argument that love makes the world better even as it may make a single person, in theory, worse off (but even George Bailey realized his life wasn't so bad at the end). And concludes that both Patriotism and Nationalism are required to counter-weight each other. That love of the People must be judged against love of the Country, and vice versa. These competing obligations keep us from being led astray. He makes explicit what I think Auster meant, that libertarians very much hate the idea that man has obligations from birth.

Finally, Somin responds that calibrating the dosage of nationalism is hard to do and even though love is good, nationalistic love has more down side than up.

___________

So that's the set-up and outline. Intuitively I side with Goldberg and Goby (incidentally, this is going to force me to moderate further my francophobe jocularity). Partly this is that I trust them more than I trust Somin and Wilkinson. Partly I don't think I buy Somin's historical exegesis. If every country in the history of the world (many score, possibly many hundreds) has had nationalistic fervers to one extent or another, I'll need more evidence than a few dozen mass-murdering nationalists to think that _nationalism_, rather than some other taint, is the source of the problem. This likewise makes me skeptical that the dosage is difficult to pick -obviously most of the world and most of history have managed it pretty well. Further I think the dislike of nationalism is flowing from what Goldberg identified as the dislike that we are born with obligations.

That these obligations are a bulwark against tyrany I think is obvious. The need of Totalitarians and Absolutists to sever all other loyalties -to God, Family, and Community -is strong evidence that these loyalties make the Tyrant's task harder. I think the history is on the side of the proposition as well. Without nationalist sentiment, Italy remains dominated by France, England is over-run by a succession of domestic and continental dictators, France never arises from the dark ages.

But I think mostly I'm uncomfortable with the idea that obligations are to be judged based on their utility. I was reading an economist saying that it made no sense that so few Americans were defaulting on their home loans. The credit hit isn't bad enough to struggle through and they'd be much better if they just went bankrupt or returned the collateral. Surely this is some kind of sunk-costs fallacy... That economics can't see that the debt obligation is binding regardless of the balance sheet strikes me as a fault in economics. That economists can't see that this "irrational" honor underpins their entire system strikes me as ludacris (and that last is hyperbolic, though I'm underwhelmed by the reputational and game theoretic literature on the point).

I think my best summation is that Somin compares nationalism to playing with fire. OK, sure, playing with fire can get you burned. However the proper approach to fire is respect and care, not freezing to death.

But Somin's argument won't just disperse for me. I'm not sure which part is not-unconvincing. Is it some aspect of the history: maybe nationalist unrest is bigger than my immediate frame of reference? Perhaps it's the "other stupid things," like protectionism, or maybe nationalist repression, or refusal to consider foreign ideas (is that really that widespread? I mean, European Socialism I understand is more often rejected in the US because of what it did to Europe, not because it comes from Europe.)

So I put it to my knowledgeable friends, particularly Sean since German Nationalism is his baliwick, but all of you: Matt, Jonny, Uncle John, Ross, and anyone else. Is nationalism good, is it possible to be a nationalist libertarian, and is there something intrinsic about nationalism or is it just to be judged more utilitarianly?

Amusing Line of the Day

2009-12-03T17:32:00.000-08:00

"Congress can conclude that the moon is made of green cheese and then pass any damn thing it wants, but EPA is not so free"

James Delong on the EPA's inability to provide the source data for listing CO2 as a criteria pollutant because East Anglia lost it.

The Propriety of Proprietary Data

2009-11-27T13:33:00.000-08:00

Among other vats of boiling water the CRU scientists find themselves in, one is their refusal to share their data with other scientists. My reading of some of the material is that their refusal is likely driven by the desire to be secretive, and the evidence from the data manipulation source codes indicates that part of the reason for secrecy is that they couldn't replicate their own work, and so were uncertain that anyone else could replicate it either. This would, obviously, look bad.

However, there are differing opinions in my area on sharing data.

On the first extreme is the "data wants to be free, yo" position of share all datasets.
On the other extreme is the "I spent years building this dataset" position of sharing no datasets.

In between there are a bunch of possible positions.

The primary argument in favor of the first position is that it makes science better. Sharing datasets allows people to replicate work of other researchers and builds a collection of ready-made datasets for people to quickly test theories (and us grad students love that).

The downside of this arrangement is that sharing every dataset means that, after the first article, it is a race against time to complete your research agenda before someone else steals your thunder. The only solution is to create new datasets for each article, which slows research to a crawl.

The primary argument for the second position is that it makes research better, because researchers have an incentive to collect good datasets that they can do a lot with, and encourages them to put a lot of effort into the collection because the dataset will be there's.

It's the data equivalent of "nobody ever washes a rental car."

I don't know which position has more adherents. It likely depends on the discipline. I know that ecological organizational researchers are known to spend years building their datasets and they won't let anyone else look at them -but they also do very detailed research. Network theory researchers have a share-it-all ethic, which has resulted in a lot of network articles and the rise of network ideas across disciplines. On the other hand, economists frequently use public databases (many created just for them by governments) which have known data limitations, but everybody uses them and knows them, so economists dominate over all. And the sociologists complain that the research is facile.

The common view I've heard from my professors is that public databases can always be recreated from the original source material if the researcher will publish his method and manipulations, and datasets created from scratch should be considered proprietary until the creator researcher is done -sorta like copyright for data makers.

This doesn't help the CRU, though, which held onto its data, including public sources, and wouldn't reveal what its manipulations were (either because they didn't themselves know or because they thought they might be indefensible).

Climate Change Science and Some Insight into Academics

2009-11-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

I've long said that PhDs are given way too much deference and that experts in general should be kept away from the levers of power in their capacity as experts.

It seems the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been demonstrating my point for the last decade.

The story is that some hackers cracked the CRU's computers, stole a few hundred megabytes (the file is 62mb but I understand it's compressed) of e-mails, documents, and data, and published it on the Internet. And there's some stuff in there which is pretty damning. Like, falsifying your data damning. Then there are more e-mails about deleting e-mails which may have been open to Sunshine Laws (which having been in a position to have such e-mails, is a big no-no -like potential go to prison no-no), and some rather mercenary statements about research funding.

Really, it all looks bad. It probably is bad. Seriously, the insights I'm about to give don't include conversations about defrauding governments or avoiding sunshine laws -that I'm aware of.

I would hate to be judged by some of the frank conversations I've had. I think my e-mails are generally pretty clean and nuanced but I'd hate to be judged by those either. When I'm talking to my colleagues and my professors we talk in something that is almost jargon, but more like friend-code.

Remember in college how someone would quote Monty Python and everyone would laugh as if you'd just retold a brilliant joke (seriously, Python is not that funny)? Among my own friends and family we can reference obscure events -I mean I don't think we'll ever talk about burning popcorn quite the same way again -and have entire conversations so thoroughly filled with special knowledge that we can lock out entire rooms. I'm failing on examples at the moment, but I think most people know what I'm referring too. Even though it's just normal English, there are stories and events that attach to words and phrases that carry far more meaning than the words.

OK, now imagine the same kind of relationships, plus you all had detailed and intimate knowledge of the same 2,000 pages of detailed expert knowledge, and 4,000 pages on related if-not-quite-identical subject matter, plus an enormous ego requiring that you demonstrate your grasp of esoteric concepts, and time constraints that would make ice sweat.

Believe me. You could stand right next to me and I could communicate your clothing size to one of my officemates and you'd have no idea what I was saying (OK, I exagerate to make the point. If I tried to communicate your clothing size you'd at least realize I wasn't talking actually talking about public finance). We can have conversations that lock out entire rooms.

I'll give an example: we talk about politicians buying votes a lot. Now you might think we're talking about corruption. Actually, we're talking about a theory which says: Politicians are lazy people who are coerced to work for money just like everyone else and so they work only hard enough to get 50%+1 votes and any money paid above that requirement is pocketed as an economic rent. And even that short sentence is probably not completely clear to you because "lazy" and "rent" actually have special meanings here.

We shorthand that whole concept into district vote buying.

We also talk about housing policy, wages, voting, and pollution in some pretty harsh racial and social terms. We talk pretty loosely about bigotry, but we also talk pretty loosely African American pathology. A lot of this is shorthand. We talk about white flight from failing cities with black urban cores. We're actually refering to a fairly complicated feedback process of social disolution, service decline, tax-base destruction, mismanagement, and finally flight -a situation in which neither race is exactly guiltless of the damage. We also talk about the dysfunction of the poor and African Americans, but actually this is, again, a complicated story of failed policy, rotten economics, bad decisions, poor societal and civic support within the communities, and racism.

We know all of this, but at least amongst ourselves we don't pepper every statement with four lines of caveats.

Incidentally, this extends to our discussion of data as well. We talk about data mining and data manipulation -somewhat facetiously. And I have e-mails where I detail some pretty extensive alterations, omissions, and recodes of datasets that I would hate to have judged outside of the context in which I wrote them. I just recently finished altering a dataset by dropping a few percent of the data, arbitraly recoding thousands of outliers, and replacing cases with other cases. I would like those decisions judged in light of: 1.) The dropped data was missing information on marriage and family status without which I couldn't even properly weight the cases, much less compute their tax returns, 2.) The tax software we were using couldn't interpret families larger than 15 or households with more than 2 adults living there so many 3+ adult families had members arbitrarilly removed from the calculations, and that while negative income makes sense on a Census form, it doesn't make sense on a tax form so many thousands of income variables got recoded to zero, and 3.) I had to aggregate personal information to household level, and things like "number of people living in this house" didn't come out well in the means and medians so I assumed that the largest number was the most generous to our assumptions and simply replaced every family's size with the largest value in that family. I wrote an e-mail detailing all those changes. I'd hate for it to be read apart from the project.

It's a source of wry humor in my school that, as economists, we know that the Commonwealth of Kentucky spends too much on higher education, yet every year we send faculty and students to Frankfurt to beg for more money. We say this periodically, particularly in Public Economics around the time we talk about the marginal value of public goods. Partly the hypocracy is amusing. But we do it because we figure that if we don't argue for as much money as we can get we'll get less than we actually should have because budget decisions are based on weighing between everyone's strongest cases for funding. It's sort of like the reason we want defense attorneys to go all out to defend guilty clients. Again, though, like a defense attorney would hate to be heard talking about which guilty clients he got out, we'd hate to be heard talking about how maybe we're over-funded.

Finally, while everything I've said above is true, as I've been around a while, I don't think every professor and student is doing this entirely for honest and understandable reasons. I think there is a strong desire to broadcast cynicism, show how you've "seen it all," be transgressive, and demonstrate your superiority over the hoi poloi. Some of that rubs off as new students try to mimic their older peers, who mimiced their's, all the way back to the first professor who ever set himself up as what Edmund Burke called the Sophists, Economists, and Calculators (no the irony is not lost on me).

Some lock out is necessary. We simply can't communicate efficiently with each other if we always talk as if we're explaining this stuff to the completely uninitiated. Further, unless there's an uninitiated standing right there, there's no need to. Further still, even if a novice is standing there, unless they need to be part of the conversation, the only reason to turn the difficulty down is politeness, and even then only if the novice actually wants to be part of it.

But I think some scholars really get off on locking out the public. They like having secret knowledge. If modern academia is the Medieval Church, these people are the Gnostics. I've been quite blessed that I've had only three gnostic professors and one half-gnostic (maybe he was an Aryan -ok, I'm stretching this metaphor too far...) that I know of (being an initiate now it's a little hard to tell how my professors deal with normal people based on their dealings with me). Further, they like the power the secret knowledge gives them. They want to be handed the reins of government because their smart, and the evidence of their brilliance is that no one can comprehend them.

This is the reason for my admonition: if you don't understand what an expert wants you to do, make him explain it until you do. If he gets huffy and demands you do it because he said so, refuse. These, I think, are the hallmarks of a Gnostic. A true professor should have no problem with trying to communicate the reasons in a way a layman can understand. They may not be able to, at which point they may have to say "look, I don't think I can make this any simpler. I know you're a little locked out. But please trust me on this." And then you make the decision based on how much do you trust this expert. But never make a decision because the expert is so much smarter than you he can't explain what he wants.

I am very glad to say I learned that admonition, or something similar, from many of my teachers. I want to emphasize that I have had excellent teachers who don't have this problem. It may even be a very visible minority that has this particular vice.

Sometime later I'll talk a little about grants and funding.

I'll close with an illustration. Last year I think we hosted Kurt Zorn form University of Indiana, Bloomington. He had a conversation with the PhD students. I remember only one thing from that conversation. He called UI and Bloomington an "oasis in a sea of" and I forget what word he used, but it wasn't complimentary of the farmers who's taxes paid his rent. Some of what I've described is done with exactly that kind of attitude, and it goes completely unnoticed. Since that conversation I have tried to be much less academic in my speach. I would hate for my hosts to hear me say something so insulting to them, and I feel dirty that Dr. Zorn thought I should take the comparison to Lexington as a compliment.

If I ever say something like that about my civic hosts, may God or Myriam smite me. And if I say it in public, shoot me before I finish the sentence.

What's the 99th Congressional District?

2009-11-16T14:51:00.000-08:00

You'll get no complaint out of me that the "Jobs Created or Saved" numbers for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AKA: The STIMULUS, AKA: The Democratic Reelection Act, AKA: The act with that creepy quasi-Soviet logo that splattered all over everything it funds...) are bad, bogus, and generally should be ignored.

So you might expect me to chuckle along with the revelation by ABC that there are many jobs being created in Congressional Districts which don't exist. Money being spent in the 99th Congressional District of the US Virgin Islands, oh what stupidity, Obama...

Oh, I'm laughing, but not at the Administration.

Federal Awards, of which the Stimulus counts, are recorded in a ledger system called the Federal Assistance Awards Data System. It is a ticker. That's it. It has a standardized form, the data comes in and is just pasted to the bottom of the page. It is a famously difficult data system to navigate. Massive missing data, difficulties pinning down where money was spent rather than where it was deposited, double counting, and a host of other problems plague this system. It's only benefit is that it's automatic and exhaustive in a way that the Federal government could not be, accurately, without exhorbitant expense.

So it's possible, probably likely, that some of this is bad data entry. All that would be required is for someone to put too many or too few letters in a report and suddenly Arizona's 04 Congressional District becomes the 42 district.

But many of the ones ABC complains about actually have meaning.

The 99th district? Means no representative.
The 98th district? Means non-voting representation.
The 90th district? Means that the funds were spent in multiple congressional districts.
The 00th district? Means statewide.

And others may be a clerk's attempt to be helpful: "Oh, well we spent money in the 4th and 2nd districts..."

And I looked up those basics in 5 seconds on google with faads congressional district codes.

Of course I knew to look for this from painful experience. Never, ever, using that raw datasystem without an army of GAs (though the county aggregations are pretty good).

But in the entire army of ABC reporters did no one think to read the manual before they tried to read the datastream?

**Update**

OK, now I'm laughing at the administration, which apparently can't be bothered to rtm either.

n00bs.

Sparkman Death Update

2009-11-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

Interesting development.

That is all.

Liveblogging the premiere of V on ABC

2009-11-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Being as I've been waiting for this for, oh, maybe a decade, certainly since I was in undergrad (8 years or so), I thought I'd get my reviews and reactions.

The original V was a fabulous piece of network TV storytelling, a fascinating bit of Sci Fi, and a pretty good adaptation of It Can't Happen Here. Pme pf my touchstones of cinematic excelence.

OK, it's 8:00. It's starting...

8:15: OK, first commercial break. Shows the signs of being rushed compared to the 4 hour original miniseries. The 1983 version took better part of an hour to establish who everyone was and their relationships. This one has it pretty well laid out already. That said, while the information comes at you rapid fire, it's not hard to follow. The better special effects really help, because they can show a lot of what they had to tell in the original movie.

8:30: Good cast of actors. They got the set-up out of the way quickly. I wonder if they did that mainly because they figure most everyone knows it. They just came out and said "we're here for the water." Now we're into a completely different mystery from the original. There are still similarities, of course. I'm a little disappointed that the priest's homily was a straight political/pragmatic warning "we should make sure the bandwagon is sturdy and going where we want to go." And he makes the good points that we should be wary of gratitude turning to worship and devotion. But he's a priest, and there's no shortage of scripture on the point. Idolotry, testing prophets, even warnings against the anti-christ. I'm pleased to see that there is an identifiable theme here. The original V was about power in the Orwellian sense. This is about power, possibly even religious power, in the Huxlian sense.

8:36: I'll let the short distance go, because it broke at a good spot. They skipped the formation of the resistance, and instead they skipped to the people being recruited. The FBI is tracking down the resistance -at the moment they think it's a terror cell trying to attack the US while it's otherwise distracted. Someone just handed off the evidence to the priest to give to the resistance. Really, the central story -the one about the Visitors coming to kill us, take the fluids, and use us to fight their wars -is just background, and really the story here is about how us mere mortals respond to the event. The FBI does its thing. The priest is worried about people turning too much to the Visitors. The disaffected kid with raging hormones is turning to the Visitor Chick. The businessman with a shady past is trying to stay out of trouble. And the reporter trying to do his job just got put in the "do I do my job, or suck up..." quandry.

8:47: The reporter failed. Shocking. Hoo-boy. The Visitors were here all along causing disruption, creating a world ready for a savior, and now it's endgame. And why didn't the priest make the anti-Christ connection? But the reveal was great. First the scene intercut the Visitors spinning the reporter with the Resistance explaining the real plot. And the FBI agent realized that she was tracking the wrong terrorism cell while the Visitors take over healthcare, and eventually all other aspects of human civilization. And now the response to the V's connects to the larger story.

9:00: ...

...

OMGTHATWASAWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sorry. Wo... So, saw some of the last 10 minutes coming. I had Alan Tudyk (the FBI agent's partner) pegged as a visitor basically as soon as she went in the door. Didn't have Ryan, who I thought was going to be a combination of Elias (the gang member) and his brother (there's irony in that locution...) but instead he was Barbara -the 5th Column. No laser blasts. Must have spent their budget on the spaceships.

So, obviously I liked it, and I'll be watching the whole season. It's not gonna be quite fair to compare it to the miniseries. I can see that they've put a lot of effort into telling the story in tv series format. Kenneth Johnson (the original creator) said that when they planned it, they planned a series of TV Movies, like Perry Mason, and they were never able to get it right as a series. I think they managed it.

Very good story telling. Pacing was great. Music wasn't notable, but I was engrossed, so I take that to mean a good score -not as memorable as the miniseries's, but still good. Acting was phenomenal. They managed the set-up, the introductions, and got the story rolling very well. I will continue to whine a little that if you're going to have a character who is a priest, someone somewhere needs to do the legwork so that he, at some point, acts like a priest instead of a random do-gooder with a strange looking collar.

4.89 stars.

Franz Biebl: Ave Maria

2009-10-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

There's a court case in Washington State involving this piece, a school wind ensemble, and the First Ammendment.

I have many witty insults for the superintendent -I've been working on them all day.

But I forego them to simply say: this is what the school banned, and it is the most beautiful piece I have ever listened to.

The Acrosstic is an Underappreciated Art Form

2009-10-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

Heh.

That is all.

Smart Growth and the Poor

2009-10-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

Saw a website which is new to me today. Newgeography, which has a story on the progressive meccas' of mid-sized cities little race problem. Specifically, they only have one.

A commentor points out that we lack a standard for calling these cities progressive ideals, which is a fine point, but I'll imagine we can come up with such a standard without changing the list much. My own experience has been with New Urbanism (sometimes called Smart Growth), for which the poster children are San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Austin, Alexandria, Princeton, and Charleston, with a watchful eye on the work of places like Chatanooga and other recent converts. Particular ire is aimed at places like Celebration, Florida, which look on the map like a New Urban city, but is in fact a planned community run as a non-profit corporation by Disney (I'm not kidding).

New Urbanism includes a lot of things: architecture, design, street layout, planning, culture, government, and is, by my read, a fairly progressive school. Certainly it's defended in largely progressive language about fairness and democracy and health and community. In two lines, it's defense is: 1.) This is what the people really want if they look deep inside themselves and think about what's best for them and the community, and 2.) This is a system of design which is best for the poorest and oldest of us who we have to take care of.

Translated into English: 1.) These properties sell like mad and for exhorbitantly high sale prices. 2.) ~~And the poor don't need a car to come mow your non-existant lawn~~. And they're a great place for poor people to live.

Run a little bit further down history's plane, and we get the phenomenon noted by New Geography. Really progressive places, with New Urbanism and generous local welfare policies are rich and white. Actually, this isn't a new observation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan cracked in 1992 that school performance (a proxy for most types of social wellbeing, as used by the Human Development Index) was better improved by moving students closer to Canada. Among policy people the retort to a Swede's insistance of his nation's superiority is "how wonderful, in America our Swedes do that too." New Geography sees the evidence, if not the playful history, in observing that a Scandinavian Welfare state is much easier when your population is Scandinavian. Homogeneity is important for a lot of social wellbeing, as Robert Putnam pointed our a few years ago in his study of Los Angeles. (In honor of her recent Nobel, I'll also point out that Elinor Ostrom long ago pointed out that altruism is more likely to be abused in non-homogenous groups, and that new people are expected by the old-timers to break the unofficial rules and ruin everything for everybody.)

There's more to be said on the topic, but I'll stop here today.

Stacy McCain: Gonzo in Eastern Kentucky

2009-09-29T08:43:00.001-07:00

Stacy McCain, boosted by a couple of blog-donating readers, decided to drive to Kentucky to report on the Bill Sparkman murder. He's in Manchester, 30 miles from London, 30 miles from Berea, 30 miles from Lexington, give or take 30 miles.

His first report for The American Spectator covers a lot of the same ground I mentioned the other day. The backwoods area has a lot of low level crime and that's what most assume he ran into, with his Census Credentials mistaken for a badge. I did not know about the political corruption in the area, that is more than the usual endemic corruption for Kentucky. I kind of zone out about it now, but when I first moved here I recall hearing a story on the news about some politician getting in trouble for self-dealing about every day.

Also, football is important in Kentucky. The mayor of Winchester and the Judge of Clark County told me that, should they attempt a merger and the vote fail, they suspect the line of yes and no votes will match perfectly with the line for the high school football teams that were consolidated decades ago.

Eastern Kentucky Murder

2009-09-26T18:50:00.001-07:00

Nothing of particular excitement striking me this week, but there was that murder down the road...

There was a census worker murdered in Eastern Kentucky. Caterwauling to the contrary, he almost certainly ran into some type of criminal activity and was killed before he could report it. Eastern Kentucky is basically the ghetto, but white, three times as isolated, and spread out over a much larger area. The economy there consists of subsistence farmers, resource extraction (mostly coal), and drugs. If that reminds you of, say, Columbia or Afghanistan, yes. That's the point. The reason you won't normally hear about it is because the population is so spread out -a few hundred in this valley, a few hundred in the next, that they rarely run into each other unless they intend to. We recently had a paper presented that was studying Newfoundland, which basically has the same economic profile (don't know about the drugs).

The take home point was that government subsistence subsidies made Newfoundland, and by extension similar places, worse because the subsistence provided just enough cash to interact with the modern world, while the residents themselves already functioned with a barter and black-market economy. The residents of these areas are not going to starve. If they get hungry, they go hunting or tend their gardens. If the economy suddenly went south, they wouldn't notice. Federal subsidies are intended to move people from poverty to work, but in this area (and possibly generally, but that's another post) it only pays for leisure since all the necessities of life were previously taken care of.

As a policy, the conclusions I'm hearing now are that these areas should basically be depopulated. Move the populations closer to cities, bus in the workers to mine coal. I understand that China is already doing this. At the very least, we should stop subsidizing these areas unless we are actually intending to subsidize hunter-subsistence farmer lifestyles. Notably, if we are OK with that, then subsidize away, just be aware that these subsidies aren't actually moving people to "work."

Turns out, life is doing this already. Forever, so far as we can tell, the eldest couple of children in each family would leave, sending money back to take care of the family. Now, birthrates are so low (possibly on account of the subsidies, depending on how seriously you take Gary Becker), that the eldest couple of children are also all of the children. So in the next century, Eastern Kentucky and Newfoundland will both largely depopulate naturally. If trends continue.

Unfortunately, that leaves the black-marketeers. And they become a denser part of the population (and here I leave current scholarship and speculate). I suspect one of the next great management issues for the Appalachian mountains will be law enforcement in an area shifting from company towns to the wild west and managing the decline into ghost towns.

__________________

Afterthought Update:

I'll not be surprised if the case is not solved. In addition to Eastern Kentucky being poor, soaked in criminal enterprise (albeit of a "low" type), and sparsely populated, there will be dense networks of family and community attachments that will have few external ties, which incidentally is the same way that most types of organized crime are organized, as well as tight families and old neighborhoods, including inner city ghettos. What that means is that tracking from one witness to the next will not get police into another part of the holler, and even if the police were investigating the right area, there's no guarentee that the witnesses will say anything. They have to live there even after the police leave. Based on what I've learned about rural sociology, the FBI should have the County Sheriff involved early and often to facilitate the local population talking to them. That the murder victim is a local resident, or at least a nearby neighbor, and that it's located within a decent drive of Lexington, Berea, and London increases the possibility that there are connections out of the community which might be connected to someone who knew the murdered worker and would therefore be willing to tell the police something. Still, while I hope they find the guys, I won't bet on it.

Good Light and Old Technology

2009-09-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

This semester I am taking two classes which emphasize environmental policy -largely because they are policy analysis classes and environmental policy is comparatively easy to analyze as we've been doing it for 30 years or more.

As part of the second of these classes, we have been discussing the science going into Global Warming/Global Climate Change policy. The important point is that we are fairly certain the planet is warming. We have good reasons to think a primary aspect of warming is the increase in greenhouse gasses (gasses which absorb heat rather than letting it radiate out into space), of which one of the most important is water vapor and one we study a lot is carbon dioxide. For this reason, a lot of global warming policy revolves around reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and because controling water vapor is nigh impossible, that largely means controlling CO2.

What came out in reading around the policy, though, is that there are many climate "forcers" (things which change average temperatures, and by extension climate). Of which, we understand greenhouse gasses.

That's it.

The least understood forcer is the Sun. Slightly better understood, but still not well modeled, is ocean temperature variation (and the drivers of that). Better understood than that, but again not much, is aerosol and cloud cover. And if any of these have feedback loops (for example, we have reason to think that temperature increase and ocean currents combine to affect polar ice levels, which affect ocean temperatures which in turn affect atmospheric temperature and ocean currents) we understand those even less.

So there's a lot we don't know. But we do understand greenhouse gasses and the basic technology required to control them, at least a little. I learned that hydrogenation technology is nearly a hundred years old (hydrogenation is where a fossil fuel, usually coal, is bombed with hydrogen to make it bond with hydrogen, creating a liquid or gas with more hydrogen bonds per carbon, meaning more energy for less CO2 -it's the same principal as hydrogenating vegetable oil to get the right cooking properties). Coal cleaning, gasification, and liquefaction were understood and actually had widespread use in Europe (particularly Germany) during the 1930s and 1940s as an oil substitute. We bombed several coal liquefaction lubricant factories. Little did we know the environmental calamity our pulverizing of the Third Reich was unleashing on the world.

In discussion, it was mentioned that most of what we talk about for climate policy is rehashing of proposals and technologies that are at least 50 years old. This is what we're good at. And yet there's a whole lot of stuff we don't know and technology we've yet to find. One rather fanciful idea is an orbital umbrella with varying opacity which can be used to modulate the amount of sun and starlight that reaches the surface. Of course, we have no idea what else it would impact. One of my departmental colleagues in the class is friends with an atmospheric climatologist who's assessment of our knowledge of lower-atmosphere interactions is "we don't know anything about them."

We do this a lot actually. Makes me wonder the validity of the claim "problem definition defines the solution." We mean that how we describe the problem will limit the solutions. If we define climate change as a problem of greenhouse gas emissions, then we're probably looking at some sort of emissions regulation and reduction solution. If we describe it as a temperature problem, we have a bunch more solutions available.

But at the moment, all we understand is greenhouse gasses, which makes it quite impossible to describe the problem as, for example, a "too few clouds" or a "too hot sun" or a "too violent ocean" problem.

Rather than the problem definition determining the solution, our level of knowledge determines both the problem and the solution. I'd think this would make for a far more oportunistic policy process. Which would also explain why everything we're discussing is 30-50 years old.

Buckley v The Bir(ch/th)ers

2009-09-06T15:30:00.000-07:00

Many interesting events in the last week that could be blogged about. Many bits of dirt that I could talk about.

There was the birth of, possibly, a new form of blogging retort: the Visual Fisking.

I learned that Chester A. Arthur was accused of being Canadian.

The President is doing something either unprecedented, or not, by addressing school children, except he won't be (pesky local school districts picking their own start dates, where did he think we were, France?*)

And John Henke wants to excommunicate WorldNetDaily.

I'll blog about that one, since it involves something near to my heart.

Short Form: John Henke is a "neo-libertarian" (no, I don't know what that means. -maybe he's a neo-liberal with less tact) political advisor for the Republican Party or Conservatives in general. WorldNetDaily is an Internet news source I think I can accurately describe as a political tabloid. WND ran a series of articles by Jerome Corsi that may or may not have implied that the US Government was preparing to create concentration camps in the event of an emergency.**

The people clamoring over whether Obama is a "Natural Born Citizen," which so far as I know is a different type of conspiracy come in for some criticism too. And Patrick Ruffini bucks up his co-blogger with an even more direct reference to the expulsion of the Birchers and the Randians from Conservatism back in the 60s and 70s.

The comparison is probably inapt. For one thing, as Rick Brookhiser argues in his recent book, the Birchers and the Randians had to go not because they were embarrassing, but because they took up all the proverbial air in the room in which they were the giant pink elephants. So long as those fellows were around, Conservatives had to argue about whether Eisenhower was or was not a Communist, rather than arguing over whether or not Johnson was taking an appropriately hard line with the Soviet Union. Second, Buckley's own recounting of the shelling of the Birchers indicates that the Birchers were very wide spread, as opposed to the Birthers and Jerome Corsi, and also that he did not attack the Birchers directly, but rather slowly sucked the support of the Birchers away from Robert Welch. It was Russell Kirk, who planned to retire to his farm and wait for the Praetorians to come for him anyway, who wanted to just declare that the Birchers were fools and be done with it.

Goldwater and Buckley informed Kirk that this was not a good idea.

Ruffini and Henke cast themselves as Buckley, but they're actually filling the Kirk role. Who Buckley is in this story, I have no idea. That it may be Ace of Spades is, in itself, a little bizarre.

What's the Buckley Role? This is the part that's near and dear to me -sorta. Buckley is the bridge. In network talk he's referred to as the Tertius (third person). Buckley, and for that matter Whitaker Chambers, were able to walk in all circles of the Right, and Buckley could walk in several circles of the left. When Buckley said "We think the Birchers are good people, but Robert Welch is a loon," the entirety of the Right listened to him -which is distinct from followed him. The point is, everyone trusted Buckley. Chambers had the same cache. Being a former Communist who had changed sides, publicly burning his bridges with testimony against Alger Hiss, every anti-Communist in America listened to Chambers. When Chambers said that, for all their anti-Communism, the Randians were equally dangerous (his specific write-off was that every one of her words read "To the Gas Chambers, go!"), the anti-Communists listened.

Buckley's important role, by my read, was that he was a Tertius Jungens (Third Who Brings Together). Through his Yale education, he had a connection with an intellectual patrician class. Through God and Man at Yale and his other writings, he had a connection with a middle-brow conservatism. Through National Review he maintained these relations, and brought together such disparate people as Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers, Barry Goldwater, Irving Kristol, Pat Buchanan, Frank Meyer, and Ronald Reagan. Understand: without Buckley, the Right never forms a movement. The Libertarians make a general nuisance of themselves, but never sign onto Fusionism. The paleocons wax nostolgic for an isolationist past that never was, the neocons slave away their lives trying to get the Liberal Establishment to recognize the disaster of the New Deal and Great Society. The Religious Right retreats into its compounds and waits for the impending Armageddon.

It was this ability to bring together that earned Buckley the trust necessary to say "no Birchers, no Randians, at least not in the leadership."

John Henke, a neo-libertarian, does not have that kind of trust. A whole swathe of the Conservative Intelligentsia which voted for Obama and now wonders what happened to the moderate they loved, does not have that kind of trust. Whole sections of the three legs of Conservatism mutually distrust each other and each other's leaders. Patrick Ruffini is closer to having the needed trust, but even he misidentifies Buckley as "the Intellectual," the role that Kirk filled and that Ruffini and Henke have forgotten.

Why is this near and dear to my heart? I'm interested in how policy is made, and I think the interactions of policy coalitions are an important part of it. Moreso, I think a necessary component of political coordination is that there be go-betweens who are trusted in all segments of the coalition. They don't have to be leaders, but they do have to bring the groups together. It's not enough to have ambassadors, the ambassadors have to be believed. Buckley was an awesome example of this. I suspect it's actually wide spread in successful political coalitions at all levels of government. I'm looking for a way to test it, but I have no ideas at the moment.

_________
* I can't find an Internet quote for it, but one of my textbooks, in its section on centralized verses decentralized government uses France's schools as the eidos of centralization. At some point, the Education Minister in Paris could literally look at his watch and tell you what every student in France was doing in his or her classroom.

**I'm not tracking this down too hard. Looking at the actual linked article, Corsi seems to be saying that some amorphous people are afraid these centers could be abused, and Corsi probably shares the belief. So the specific complaint is not: Congress is creating concentration camps, it's: Congress is creating a camp infrastructure that could be abused in the case of a declared national emergency in combination with other national security laws to turn disaster relief stations into concentration camps. Which is not necessarily any less crazy, though it has the appropriate ring of stupidity to be something Congress would accidentally pass, if not something any self-respecting, patriotic, American President would actually consider using. For what it's worth, if the Feds want to shell out on this, I won't stamp my feet too hard, but direct disaster relief is a State Function, for good or ill. See, Blanco, Kathleen; Governor of LA.

Health Costing 2

2009-08-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

I tried to illuminate the problem with costing in a previous post, and while it's intelligible to me, it's hardly reading on the "explaining to people who haven't devoted their life to finances" meter, and maybe even to on the "people who have" meter.

So, having splattered the terms across the screen previously, I'm going to give it another shot.

Imagine an ideal world:

There's a factory producing widgets. The widgets require several inputs, including raw materials and workers to produce them. Each hour of labor, each gram of widget-ite has a price attached to it. We know what that price is, because we bought the labor and widget-ite at the market. Likewise, we know the price/kw/hr to power the factory. We can combine the price of the labor, materials, and energy used to create one widget, and get the marginal cost of creating that widget.

Now, that's not the whole cost of creating the widget, because back at the beginning we built a factory, and that cost like a bajillion dollars. That's the fixed cost, and what we are supposed to mean when we say "overhead." (Yeah, yeah, I know, we normally actually mean the cost of turning the lights on, but that should properly be in the marginal cost.)

So, if we only create one widget, in order to break even, we have to sell it for the marginal cost, plus the fixed cost. And that's really expensive. Sometimes you hear this in the discussion of new medications. "The second pill cost 2 cents. The first pill cost $20 million!" So, really, both pills should be sold for $10 million and 2 cents.

Now, the fixed cost is spent and basically irretrievable (we could think about scrapping the factory, but won't). So, it turns out, as long as you can sell the product for more than the marginal cost, you should, because if you can do that long enough, you can eventually pay off the fixed costs and come out ahead.

OK, now we enter the real world. We don't know what the marginal cost of a lot of things are. Ideally, we would know how much it costs to provide one more audit for the company, but in fact we don't. We have on our tables how much the auditing office costs us. However many audits we ask for, it costs us the same, even if some audits are more complicated than others. The best we can do is get an average cost (cost of the office/number of audits).

We have the same difficulty with things like power for the lights. Ideally, we would know how much light was needed for each widget, but in practice we just turn the lights on and divide the electric bill by the number of widgets. This is the reason things like the accounting office and the electric bill get roped into "overhead."

The problem comes when what the accountants call overhead has picked up so much of what is actually marginal cost, that what's on the sheet as "marginal cost" is actually a lot less than the true marginal cost of one more widget. If the widget is not selling at a high enough price to clear the average cost of each widget (overhead + marginal cost), but is selling above what the balance sheet says is the marginal cost, the company will keep selling it. If it is above the balance sheet marginal cost, but not above the actual marginal cost, the company will keep selling, unknowing that it is selling at a loss.

The company goes out of business.

Companies know this, so they try to correct for the problem. That's where costing comes in. The problem for costing techniques is that none of them is perfectly accurate, and the more of the production of the good is hidden in "overhead" the less accurate the cost accounting methods are. In large companies, that error can be so huge as to swamp the whole balance sheet.

So, let us think about a hospital room. Based on our accounting techniques, a hospital room is essentially overhead. So are the nurses and doctors monitoring that room. About the only things that aren't overhead are drugs and bandages.

Ideally, we would know the marginal cost of the time the nurses and doctors spend in that room, and we would know the cost of keeping the lights and TV on, and the costs of new sheets, and so on, and we could add all that up and tell the patient what the cost was from the start.

Since we don't know that, what we have to do is give the patient the average cost and hope it's close. If it isn't, the hospital will be overcharging (and therefore losing patients) or undercharging (in which case losing money).

Now, we might think that hotels have the same problem, but they don't. Hotel rooms are all the same, so competition among hotels does a fairly good job of revealing the price of a hotel room, and those that can provide it without losing money have found their costs. Hospital rooms are not all the same. Even the same hospital room differs between patients.

So, why does all this accounting rigamorole matter?

Marginal Costs can be cut. Fixed costs can't.

If a hospital finds itself running short of money, it can't shut down some rooms (or at least the accountants don't think it can shut down rooms) the way a factory can reduce it's hours or shut down an assembly line. Where do hospitals cut costs? Doctors, nurses are fixed costs for a room, but not for the whole hospital, so they reduce staff and stretch them further. They try to maintain profitable patients. They skimp on hardware improvements. Doctors forget to wash their hands as they try to move through their rounds.

This distorts service delivery for reasons I won't go into. The argument of some of the reformers I take to be that part of the reason hospital rooms are taken to be such massive overhead is because of the third-payer health insurance system (presumably because insurers want set rates for rooms), but also because the tax, medicare, and medicaid systems are built around costs rather than prices, so hospitals have a reason to shift marginal costs into overhead and then spread it out across hospital rooms. The accounting trick then distorts the service delivery.

The health economists I've talked to say that one solution is to break up the overhead by specializing. If all a clinic does is heart surgery, all it's rooms will be very similar, and it can compete with hospitals and other heart surgerys to set it's prices. To the extent procedures can be broken out this way, that is the trend, with heart and eye surgeons leading the pack.

So, I hope that is maybe a little more illuminating than the first attempt.

Health Costing

2009-08-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

James DeLong at the American Enterprise Institute Blog has a short comment on health care costs and billing. Short form: hospital billing is distorted by an emphasis on costs rather than on prices, which is the result of the odd nature of medical care and third-party billing.

This both reminded me of, and finally explained, some things I read last year about so-called "cost accounting."

Cost accounting, costing, or MCA (for Management Cost Accounting) was developed as a way of setting budgets for departments in business that did not produce anything, but could not be contracted out or eliminated. The classic example is the records office, without which a business couldn't even make payroll, but which neither produces nor sells anything. From the perspective of the balance sheet, the records office is pure cost. In a bit of irony, on the balance sheet, the finance office is also a pure cost.

A further irony: PhD students are also pure cost.

What makes them pure cost is the problem of indivisibility. It's a guy in a room full of file cabinets and computers, who's salary we have to pay, who's office we need to heat, and who's equipment we need to maintain. Some days, he works very hard because there are lots of requests for information going to him, and those requests back up, and cost the whole department money in delays. Other days, he sits in his office and surfs the internet.

And then there are the people in records and finance!

Basically, a department like this is all fixed costs. An assembly line can be sped up or slowed down, but the records office is like the office supplies or the light bulbs. Either you have it or you don't.

This leads to two problems. The first is how to allocate the budget to the office. Again, an assembly line can be adjusted, so we can tailor the budget for the assembly line to maximize profits, but this office has no variation. We have a very efficient assembly line, let's put more money into it, expand it, and make more money! We have a very efficient records office. Let's put more money into it and... nothing will happen. The result is that these offices are usually inefficient, cost too much, and still manage to be underfunded. The second problem is, even if proper amount of the budget could be allocated, the revenue that feeds into the budget cannot be divided amongst the outputs of the office. We have a very efficient assembly line, and we sell the final product for $5, and after paying for parts and labor, we have 50 cents left, so we add up parts and labor and find that producing this gizmo costs $4.50. Now, we need to summon a record in order to produce that gizmo. We send a memo to the records office, they respond, we produce the gizmo, and it cost $4.50, plus the $100,000 we spend to maintain the records office. OK, how much of that $100,000 was used to produce our gizmo, so we know how to increase the price? Is it the same in every other department? What about every other gizmo?

This is the cost accounting problem. There is a massive overhead which cannot be simply divided by the number of outputs to determine a cost. And we can't build the budget of the office just by dedicating a revenue stream to it, because the office sells nothing. So, we guess.

What's this got to do with health care? Hospitals and the doctors within them are a major fixed cost. The equipment, the salaries, the works. Very expensive, and there is no obvious way to expand or cut a hospital's functions to improve efficiency. As a result, it is very hard to adequately cost a patient, and therefore hard to bill them. The massive overhead leads to bad business decisions, as the business side of the hospital believes it is losing money on overhead, when it is not, and so inflates prices everywhere to make up a non-existent shortfall, which then creates a real shortfall when demand for medical care drops.

Solutions: well, if we had solutions for the problem we wouldn't study it as much. There are whole literatures out there on new methods of solving the problem. Most of them don't work, and don't even necessarilly improve on the old ones. The only true solution is to get off costing by finding some way to create a market that will prodcuce prices. That involves finding a way to break up the overhead that is a hospital medical staff.

Probably, that means a shift away from hospitals and towards specialty clinics, which is what the health economists tell me is the current trend.

Ted Kennedy is Dead

2009-08-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

He died on the 25th, some two days ago.

I've always had a somewhat conflicted feeling about the man. The list of his flagrante delectos is as long as my leg. Carl Cannon reviews the big one, and why it still grates after 40 years. Basically, the joke that a Kennedy can get away with murder in this country stopped being funny on July 18, 1969.

The man was the poster child for how the rich and the liberal could do whatever they wanted with no consequences, from cheating on tests, to cheating on wives, to pulling strings for senate seats... Somehow, being denied the Presidency doesn't seem like much of a slap on the wrist. Then there was the Robert Bork's America speech, about which the less said the better.

Yeah, most of the plebs would be forgiven thinking this patrician deserved to have his head mounted in the forum with sewing needle driven through his tongue and his hands manacled to the pillar.

And, if that was all I knew about him: cheater, cheater, draft-dodger, silver-spooner, murderer, liar, mediocrity... I'd probably think this was a good time for a little proscription myself.

But I know more about him. I never met the man, but when I worked in the Capitol, other staffers spoke in awe of him, even Republicans. Carl Cannon cites Pete Wilson -hardly a political squish in his day -as liking Kennedy. I have in my hands the autobiography of Orrin Hatch, not exactly Ronald Reagan, but recall that Conservatives wanted to overturn their own term-limit and succession rules to keep Hatch in charge of the Senate Judiciary committee rather than hand it over to Arlen Specter. Hatch was friends with Kennedy, and records that, when Hatch's father died during a mostly partisan ethics investigation against Hatch, it was Kennedy, and Kennedy alone, who came to his office to commiserate. I recall, but without sources, that John Ashcroft, a Lion of the Right on his own, was friends with Kennedy, or at least friendly.

So maybe this has something to do with the nature of the Senatorial Class. I would not be shocked by the discovery that the Senate is the worlds most exclusive Guild as well as Men's Club. But Wilson and Hatch are men I ostensibly trust (OK, not really, but people I trust, trust them, so...) and they spoke highly of him. Even after the Borking, all that Hatch will say is that Kennedy went too far.

Maybe he was a suave monster. Affably evil. Or maybe he was a nice guy who's ambition drove him to atrocious action. Maybe he was a showman, and his sincere confessions will never be known to us because we knew PT Barnum, rather than EM Kennedy. Or, maybe he was simply a complex, conflicted, broken, fallen man, much like the rest of us, who's fall from grace was all the larger because of the columns his family started on.

I didn't know him. I will neither miss him, nor grieve his passing, the same way I neither miss nor grieve the passing of everyone else who died on Tuesday. None the less, Kennedy is now in the presence of the Maker he professed to know, and we hope a rebuilt man, burned of his shortcomings and refined into the perfection he was intended for, rather than cast aside.

I've always felt that Hatch, Wilson, and Ashcroft, and probably me, would all find Kennedy to be a wonderful friend in another time and place. He's to then.

Rest in Peace, Senator Kennedy.

Committee Chairs and Policy Programs

2009-08-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Jay Cost, a political watcher I've followed for a while, has a post up at the horserace blog about Obama's screwing up and mishandling of the health care bill, which I'd encourage anyone with an interest in how legislation is moved politically to read over.

The short form is that the health care bill is in trouble because Republicans won't vote for it, and the needs of conservative democrats are diametrically opposed to the needs of liberal democrats. Ramesh Ponnuru has phrased the problem as needing to expand care to the currently uninsured, while reducing costs, and not cutting any services. And that's just to get the Democratic Party to vote for it.

Cost is confused as to why the President didn't see this coming, and has a pretty map to show why it should have been blindingly obvious that no acceptable bill was going to come out if it was written by the committee heads.

It probably should have been blindingly obvious, but I'll put out one reason why it might not be obvious to an academic. The most cited attempts to find ideological spread between the "median congressman" and the committee chairs find that the spread is not that much.

Why Would We Expect a Gap?
Committee Chairs are chosen from the senior members of the Majority Party. While those members might be perenial wheeler-dealers from moderate districts who have managed to weather every political challenge known politicians, more likely the senior members come from "safe" districts. No Republican of any note will ever come from Nancy Pelosi's San Fransisco district without a major scandal or a wave that demolishes the modern Democratic Party. As a result, a very liberal member from a very liberal district can expect to be in Congress until they want to retire. Likewise in conservative districts.

The Median member, though, is probably a freshman Congressman from a moderate district, so the Chairman and Moderate are not likely to see eye-to-eye.

Encouraging ideological separation further is that Congressmen state their preferences for committees, and senior members can expect more deference. So, the Committee Chairs are not only more ideological than their median members in general, but also more ideological in the subject of the committee's jurisdiction.

So, from this we'd expect that the Committee chairman, and through his lead, the Committee would be more extreme than the Congress.

Yet we rarely see it (not that I researched this topic extensively, but I never saw it. I saw a bunch of papers looking for it and failing).

Why Might There Not Be A Gap?
One theory is that while Committee Chairmen may be more ideological, so will their ranking minority members, and the need to keep the minority from grinding the committee to a halt might force the Chairman to moderate to control their committees. Further, while party Committees on Committees take requests, they don't listen to most of them, so the ideological homogeneity, even of a single party, in a committee is likely to be less. Chairmen might not want to push their luck either. Forcing too extreme a bill (where extreme here just means that the Median Member doesn't like it) results in a lot of work for not a lot of effect.

The main theory is that committee power comes from the conference. After all ammendments are made in Congress, the Conference Committee has to put together something that will pass both houses. Committees of Jurisdiction get a second crack at the bill, so they can insert what they really want. However, they have to do it with the understanding the other House has to agree, so Committee Power and Chair Power have been overstated by assuming they were centered on one person, rather than two.

The splitting of committee jurisdictions has also weakened the power of committees further. More committees looking at the bill means that more members have to sign off on it before it reaches the floor. Now it's not just a House and Senate sign off, but multiple House and Senate sign offs.

Why might there be a gap now?
Well, we should never overlook the possibility of incompetence, which is what Cost ultimately thinks. I'd add that the problem of Party/Chairman distance is greater for Democrats than for Republicans because Republicans have chairman term limits, so you don't have to be from a 40-year safe district to chair a committee. Further, the largest sub-caucus in the House of Representatives is the Republican Study Committee, which has a homogenizing effect by expressing where a majority of the majority of the Party stands on a given issue (basically laying out the realm of the possible ahead of time).

Another possibility is that Obama misread how much influence he has with Democratic Members, and so thought he could persuade them to vote for the bill after it was made. Relatedly, Obama's deference to the Chairmen in the first place might have been the crucial mistake if previous chairmen had been kept in line by either the Speaker or the President.

This could also be the result of the original plan failing. Recall this bill was already supposed to be passed by now, which might justify leaving the majority of the party out of the loop. But at this point, a lot of little issues which some aspect of the party might have let by on the grounds of speed are now moot. There's plenty of time to revisit the bills.

I'm also gathering that there is a rather unprecedented amoung of bill splitting going on right now. Normally a bill will be split amongst 2 or 3 committees tops. I'm hearing 6 or 8 being batted around, which if true (I'm not hunting to find out) would seem like legislative madness. Even 3 on a bill this big would seem very hard to do.

Finally, this is just a really big and likely consequential bill. Rank and file members may be willing to go along with something a little more extreme than they like most of the time because it's small and minor. This is neither, so the problems of applying the averages found in research to the reality of this particular bill bit the leadership in the back.

End Result
I don't think this bill was ever likely to pass. There's a reason why Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security are called the Third Rail, and Obama and the Democratic Party whacked it with a big iron rod attached to a hornet's nest. You could call it incompetence. My guess is that the Democratic Leadership had a plan that they thought would work with their majorities, but it was premised on this being a normal sized bill. When it scaled up, though, it left the realm of average and became really weird, and they had no plan for dealing with it. Whether they should have is a question for someone else. I think it probably nailed this bill in the coffin until at earliest next session.

Teaching

2009-08-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

In the spring semester it appears I will be teaching the State and Local Government class for Political Science. I'm very happy about that, as they couldn't devise a better a course for me. At the same time, I'm a little worried because I've never taught a full class before and don't have an under-graduate level local government class to mark my own lessons to. I hope to make up in stories from the various cities I've worked in or followed what I lack in teaching experience.

To get us over the first hump of teaching, we spent the last two days doing TA orientation, which included a micro-teach section where we learn to create a short (6 minutes) lesson and deliver it.

This is mine. What are county and municiple governments:

The Practical and Moral Headache of BCA

2009-08-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

CEO of a company calls in a Physicist, an Engineer, and an Economist and asks them "what will be the net outcome of this project?" The physicist closes the blinds, dims the lights, and shows a slideshow of the science of the project and says "scientifically, it'll be a success." The engineer closes the blinds, dims the lights, pulls out his classified blueprints and says "technically, it's a boondoggles." The economist closes the blinds, dims the lights, pulls out his notepad and says "What do you want the answer to be?"
____________________________

Benefit Cost Analysis. The ruler of policy debate, the measuring tape in our policy toolbox, the meter of our quantitative language -one massive giant brain-splitting headache.

Practical Headaches

Oh, it's very useful, provided you can agree on the inputs. In theory, the idea is very simple. Add up the benefits of a policy, subtract the costs of implementation, pick the one with the highest positive value. But the pain is in calculating benefits and costs.

Some of the usual ones we're familiar with:

1.) Things that don't have price tags

Human Life is, for analystical purposes, valued at around 7 million dollars by the federal government (plus or minus, given the program and department). This number is devised by computing how much people are willing to pay to avoid a premature death, amortized over time. It's actually a surprisingly consistent number (the lowest one I've seen was half a million, but most of the estimates I've seen were in the 2 to 5 million range, so for purposes, OMB is actually using a pretty high number).

Health: The current measure of health is the QALY: Quality Adjusted Life Years. Essentially, we calculate how much a person would spend to not be crippled, i.e by using the money spent on a risky surgery to prevent debilitation, use that to determine how much a person's life has been reduced by poor health, and then spread that out over a lifetime. This is a measure I've seen commonly (where my experience should not be taken to be exhaustive, health not being my thing).

2.) Things that have uncertain price tags

The environment: we're fairly certain that polution is bad. Monetizing that badness is hard to do. It's easy to calculate clean-up costs. The cost of losing a statue in central park to acid rain -that's a little harder. We try to monetize things like lost happiness to campers at a lake ruined by runnoff, but most of the time, we simply don't know how valuable these things are. We usually end up with a base-line value, and then fight over the amount above that base-line.

The Future: quite distinct from long time horizons, we simply don't know what the future holds, so if we don't know the exact and total effects of a policy, we can't put that into a B-C Analysis on either side. No one has ever taken the Polio Vaccine, will this be a huge benefit to mankind, or a blip on the radar screen of happiness? We've never mandated 10 years of education in schools, will this lead to brilliant scientists or a race of couch potatoes? We've never put enormous controls on pollution or health care, what will be all the repercussions? There's almost always something left out of a B-C A simply because we don't know about it until afterwards. We just hope it wasn't important.

3.) Uncertainty

Asteroid Impacts and other Really Bad Things: We're pretty certain that an asteroid impact of Rocks-Fall-Everybody-Dies Total-Party-Kill size would be bad. We're less certain how likely it is to happen. Small chance of total disaster, large chance of nothing. Even before the time horizon, Global Warming has the same problem since our models aren't great and we haven't nailed down all the causes, much less how bad the damage would be.

Time Horizon: We're less excited about preventing disasters that are far off than ones that are close, or paying for benefits that will show up in the future. That's the basic reason why you insist on an interest payment when you put money in a savings account. Choosing the time horizon can affect the result due to the magic of compounding. A long time horizon can make a catastrophic outcome to expensive to head off now, or a cheap solution better than a good one. Choose a different interest rate to get different magic times where the result is what the analyst desires.

4.) Who Pays, Who Benefits, Who Counts?

Where does the cost fall, and who comes out ahead verses who comes out behind? Does it matter if a lot of people come out a little behind if a few people come out way ahead (the logic of affirmative action) so long as the end result is better than doing nothing?

Who and What counts? The most environmentally friendly automobile out there isn't the Prius (all that mining for lithium and cadmium takes a tole), but rather a 1950s or 1960s era steel-framed car. All the production environmental damage is done, so it's just the marginal damage of poor gas mileage to worry about. But wait, there are so few 1950s or 1960s cars out there, we have to create new cars, and the Prius comes out better on that metric. Except there's a shortage of Priuses, so instead we have to look to good-mileage non-hybrids like the Carolla. No... You get the idea. It's a bit of an inside-game among the people who were in my BCA class: take an existing analysis, find something that hadn't been counted which would flip the result. Repeat until someone is stumped.
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The Moral Headache

We have a lot of experience doing medical BCA. Drugs are the easiest thing to do willingness-to-pay studies on because there are so many treatments for a lot of common diseases. (Recycling, fyi, is a close second.) Having gotten a willingness to pay, we know, roughly, what the public considers the benefit of the drug.

Now, consider a screen for cancer. We have two screenings. One is $100, but will catch 90% of cancers. There's another that costs $1000, but will catch 100% of all cancers. Cancer strikes 1% of the population, so in order to save 1 life with the $1000 screen, that we wouldn't catch with the $100 screen, we have to screen 1000 people, spending $1,000,000. Is that a trade you would make (we can ask this question, and do). To be totally correct, we'd have to subtract the $100,000 we'd have otherwise spent, but just bare with me.

Same scenario, except now the cancer screen costs $5,000. So saving one additional life costs 5 million. Still willing to do it? Now it's a $10,000 screen. $10 million. Still willing to do it? Now, even if you are willing to spend $10,000 on your own cancer, how willing are you to have a majority vote decide on whether that screen will be implemented or even developed? How willing are you to let elected officials decide? Or OMB with their $7 million figure?

Public Records

2009-07-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

I rather thought questions on Obama's birth certificate had petered out, but I'm informed that it makes for great TV.

For those not following this, the non-loony version:

1.) Barack Obama was born in Kenya
2.) As an under-age mother, his mother did not confer automatic citizenship on Obama (incidentally, if this law is still on the books, I'd be perfectly fine with repealing it).
3.) Desiring American Citizenship for her (or their) son, the Obamas send an affadavit to the Hawaii Department of Health swearing that Obama was born in Hawaii, at home.
4.) The Hawaii Department of Health dutifully creates the birth certificate, sends the birth announcements, and maintains the record which spits out the so-called "short-form" certification of live birth we've all seen.

5.) Therefore, we should look at the original record which will show whether Obama was born in a hospital or born at home.

Obvious, to me anyway, problem with even the non-loony theory: if the original record says "born at home," and since every family member who would have been involved in the fraud is dead, how precisely would you show that he wasn't born at home?

Further, what on earth would convince Obama's mother to travel to Kenya anytime after the 6th month of pregnancy in 1961?

Anyway, the underlying issue here is the integrity of public records, and this gives me an excuse to talk a little about them.

Government's don't throw anything away. In fact, even accidentally throwing away a public record is a felony. Actually, moving the record from its proper location is also a crime. Removing the record from the record's vault without authorization is a crime. Even transfering records from one vault to another requires records and authorizations.

City Hall can burn down. The mayor's office can be a box under a bridge. But public records must be preserved.

How seriously do we take it? My first day on the job in Paducah: "Hi, welcome to Paducah, here's your computer, here's your internet, here's your e-mail. All your e-mails are public records, don't delete them."

Caused a bit of a kerfluffle when I ran out of space in the inbox.

Public records are created automatically. Now, we do a lot of it electronically, but in the old days there would be an army of clerks who did nothing but recieve data, format it, notarize it, copy it in triplicate, and archive it. Even today, every day the computer spits out all the formallized records, the clerks have to review each one for errors, sign it, and file it.

Records are filed by type, with the major types being Government Actions, Platts, Financial Records (there may be others, but those are the ones I know).

Government actions are anything the government does. City enters a Memo of Understanding with a firm to provide a new police cruiser, a copy goes into the records. City ordinances, go into the records. Mayor's correspondence, goes into the records. Clerk's summary of the biweekly commission meeting, goes into the records. The napkin the city manager sketched out the budget on at lunch with the finance director: usually goes in the trash, but it should go into the records.

If a record is made, it should go into the records. This is problematic for when governments do things in secret -particularly for non-feds, since we can't classify documents. The normal solution is to short-circuit the record keeping so no record is made. When the commission meets behind closed doors, the clerk leaves her pens and notepads in the Chambers. No records can be made, so nothing can go into the vault.

Another trick: if the Mayor and two commission members are in a room, there's a quorum, and the commission is in session. If they are not in executive session (which requires a specific set of circumstances) any actions are public records and must be recorded. Solution: the Mayor is never in the room with more than one commissioner at a time. In fact, the mayor would go to his office and call each commissioner separately to talk about whatever business was at hand. Once an agreement was hammered out, then they'd meet all together on the record.

These records are kept by the clerk, and in Kentucky are kept in a fire-proof vault which is kept closed at all times unless someone is in the vault. Should there be a fire, we have to secure the vault before we evacuate. In Paducah we had records of city purchases and sales of property (mostly cemetary plots) dating back to the 1880's -the originals, not copies. Actually, this causes a connundrum, those records belong in a museum, not a vault. They're falling apart. City Solution: all the originals are being scanned in high resolution (bought a copier for the purpose) so that the records can be moved to a better location.

Platts are real estate and improvement records. They are always maps or blueprints or plans. These are stored in either plattbooks or rolled up like a map and stored in bundles. Each book or bundle is a specific geographic area, so you might pull a book that says "800-900 W. Jefferson Street" which would be the 800 block of West Jefferson Street. Platts sometimes include previous records (I don't know if it's general, or just for the ones I was looking at since there were the platts were for new houses -we had the current platts out, plus the plans for the houses) allowing you to follow how improvements are made. If the property has an inspections file, there will be a corresponding file (manilla folder) cross-referenced by address or geographic coordinates with the inspections reports, photographs, evidence, et cetera.

The platts also have a corresponding records book which records ownership, assessed value, and other property information. Those files are generated by the Clerk's Office, so this is the home of the second copy. This information, though, is entered in a ledger, rather than via record, so while you can get information from a platt book, if you want the history and signatures, you'll have to compare to the Clerk's records.

These records were scattered all over Paducah. Platts relating to parks were kept at Public Works until recently, when they were transfered to engineering (causing a major paperwork headache to the clerks doing the transfers and possibly an inadvertent felony when a book was diverted to the wrong office). The engineers had all the road platts already. Everything else was kept in the inspections department, mostly in giant wall-shelves that had shelves which swung out so you could read the books without picking them up (they're heavy).

The flood protection division of Engineering had the floodwall platts, original Army Corps of Engineers work from the 1940s.

Financial records are the ones I have the least experience with. So far as I can tell, these were the only records which were kept entirely in the computers. They could be printed out as a ledger called a greenbar (because the paper has green bars alternating on each line). One accound could run five or six pages (2 or 3 feet of ledger) for all it's yearly activity. Presumably, since finance records have always been a ledger system, the conversion to computer ledgers was easy -though the software they use is ancient, and the database so large that converting even to Access files is considered prohibitive. Joke: the only way the finance records system will be updated is by hand. After the server explodes.

Finance has numerous records, and again, they share with the platts and the clerks. Each property and business has a license or tax value on record, as well as whether the taxes were paid on time, what type of fees are owed, penalties and interest et cetera. All of the revenue streams are then combined into the Revenue Database in the computer where they are disbursed to the revenue accounts. From those accounts, money is drawn by the budget into expenditure categories.

This is more complicated than it sounds. At any given time the finance records are going over 3 years or more of budget and revenue forecasting. They are building next year's budget, they are monitoring this year's budget, and auditing last year's budget. I think it could fairly be compared to nailing jello to a wall while herding cats into an airplane being assembled in flight.

Which is probably the reason why they don't have vaults of records.

Now here's a fun thing. At least in Kentucky (and maybe elsewhere) there's a big movement across most of the state to convert all their records into a Geographic Information System. Paducah, Lexington, Louisville all do it, and I've seen several other smaller cities and counties making a go at it too. GIS is all computerized. The map of the city, divided into plots, streets, et cetera is what you interact with. You click on a plot: you bring up the ledger of deeds and the plattbook (digitized). You can get all the clerk's records, and the finance files. Only things which wouldn't be included on the map are government acts which don't impact property and finance expenditures. It's very cool.

OK, enough records blathering. On with the day.

Of Cops and "Assholes"

2009-07-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

I was planning to blather about judicial research (shortest form: it's hard) but then I saw this which is a.) more interesting, and b.) something that I have a little more first-hand experience with, and c.) something that doesn't require me to hedge everything with "it's not my field and I really don't like the research..."

There are many places to link, but I'll just go with Cop in the Hood because it lets me link the John Van Maanen piece which will just shock my professors no end (I don't know why I seem like a quantitative purist to everyone).

The spur for this is the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. a Harvard Proffessor and apparent race-theorist-grand-poobah that who's name I've heard but I always confuse with the guy who teaches the kid to fly F-16's to "Gimme some Lovin'" in Iron Eagle, so I'm hardly the fellow to comment much on him.

But I have had the chance to watch and interact with a number of police officers and departments (though the largest one doesn't come close to the size of Baltimore, I'm sure). I've been pulled over three times -though one of those was actually the car behind me getting pulled over for a broken headlight, it was dark and I wondered why the cop didn't know his headlight was out -been on two ride-alongs, talked to numerous police from officer to chief in four departments, and one day hope to do Lexington's Citizen Police Academy. Going by Van Maanen's definition, I think I've managed to keep my time typified as "asshole" to one encounter, and hope I may yet develop honorary police membership.

OK, for those of you who don't want to read 30 pages of social science, I'll summarize. Police divide all non-police into three non-exclusive categories: Know-nothings (that's the public), Suspicious Persons (i.e. arrest subjects), and Assholes (people who don't need to be arrested, but do need a thorough beating). The classes are not mutually exclusive, so a know-nothing might shoot off an alarm and become a suspicious person, a suspicious person might trigger a confrontation and become an asshole, et cetera.

The basic characteristic of the asshole is that he needlessly and knowingly antagonizes the police. This antagonism reflects a disrespect of the law and authority represented by the patrol officer who takes it as both a professional and personal insult. Van Maanen goes back and forth on whether the response (in the 1970s a beating, now a vindictive arrest) is a way for the police officer to restore the moral order of the universe, a way to demonstrate his dominance of the situation, or a way for an officer to turn a small incident into "real police work" and then feel like he's done his job.

Various updatings on the theory include that the police officer wants to maintain control of the situation for safety reasons (I've seen military trainers give essentially the same explanation -in a violent confrontation you want to maintain the initiative and control, it's safer for you, and in the case of police, for everyone else too). I've talked to police officers who say this reason is why they 1.) want to see your hands 2.) want you not to have a gun, and 3.) if you have a gun and get into a criminal encounter (i.e. are mugged) they want you to leave the gun alone and call the police. By drawing a weapon you escalate the situation, but without training you cannot control the situation. The end result is someone getting killed, where the police would be able to defuse the situation.

I've also talked to police officers whose approach to controlling a violent situation was to put the other person in a bloodhold (that's where you stop the flow of blood to the brain, rather than a stranglehold where you stop the person from breathing) until they passed out and then cuff them. So opinions vary. The second officer's trainers were putting a lot of effort into breaking that habit, by the way, as both dangerous and counter-productive.

So I went on patrol with the cops. I observed the "suspicious person" category many times. It was Friday night so we were mainly on drunk-and-dissorderly suppression. That meant frequent bar cruising to show the flag and scare the drug dealers. While the big goal was suppression -they wanted to scare the dealers out of the bar, not arrest them -I don't recall any cops treating them as Van Maanen or Moskos describe. The closest thing to the dehumanizing attendant to the "asshole" categorization was the mock surprise of an officer on getting a call to respond to an underage girl picking up a drug dealer: "Drug dealers? Under-age drinkers? Prostitution? At Froggies? Never!" Got the serious impression that if the cops had their way they park a black-and-white in front of that bar and never leave. We were there about every 20 minutes from 10:00 (when the shift started) to 2:00 (when I was so tired I had to go home or I wouldn't be safe to drive back on my own).

The suspicious category was people who had broken a law (mainly non-moving violations, two broken tail-lights) or were driving weird. I don't know what the officer I was with saw. We made two stops to administer Feild Sobriety Tests. Both times, when we ran the plates we got DUI priors, and in both cases, while the officer could smell alchohol (I stayed in the car) the driver was able to walk the line and their eyes didn't bounce, so we made no arrests. He said they were swerving and tagging the lines, I couldn't see it, but then this was my first time trying to pick the drunks out from the bad drivers.

We also spotted a van driving too slow through the residential areas off from the downtown -which is a hotbed of crime the Paducah PD had been (with much success) trying to clean up. That set off alarms because when we got closer we saw he had McCracken Plates, but he looked lost. We trailed him for four blocks, long enough to run his plates in the computer, got nothing, and so went back to looking for drunks and walking-through bars.

We also spotted a Cadillac parked under a streetlamp with two women leaning on the hood, which was either a prostitution drop-off or a drug deal, but by the time we got around to check the car's plates, they were driving off, so again we went off our own way.

So, suspicious characters I saw a plenty. Didn't see the cops categorizing too many people otherwise. Later, when I checked with the chief and watched the exams for promotion to Sergeant and Captain I learned that they actually spend a lot of time trying to train that out of the cops. And they also spend a lot of time trying to get the cops to not only know the beats, but know the people on the beats so that the "know-nothings" get to know what the cops are doing. The big success story the PD was bragging about while I was there was driving the crime rate in a certain neighborhood through the floor with two cops who just lived there and brought their cruisers home at night.

There was one exception to this and it drove the chief crazy: dealing with the local black population. Sending one cop, even a black cop, always resulted in a confrontation and a complaint from the local black leaders. The PD's solution: cordon off the area and if the complaints got bad enough to warrant a response -which in the rest of the city would be a walkthrough, the PD sent all five patroling officers to descend on the bar or party, and the duty officers (normally a sergeant) and possible the Captain as well. This stripped protection from the rest of the city for at least half an hour, but it prevented blow-ups.

I think that's enough stories for now. More another time.

Violent Video Games

2009-07-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Fascinating website I came across today while I was avoiding reading about the Miami Metro Government's formation. Bruce on Games has insight into the development and marketing of video games, and links to other game marketers as well.

Being as I can be fascinated by anything other than what I'm supposed to be reading at this moment, I foresee many wasted hours...

I gather that Bruce Everiss is a British marketter (though in the modern economy, a marketter's nationality may be merely nominal), so he focusses on British politics and its influence on the gaming industry, and its lack of understanding of, as he calls it, gaming as simply a new communications medium which is non-linear, interactive, and connective.

Brief amusing aside: I can't place Everiss's politics, but he does dislike the current Labour government, and he has nice things to say about the Tory Shadow-Minister for Arts and Culture because he "understands games." I think the world might implode if the Tory's were swept into office again on the power of a million frustrated videogamers. It also might be followed by the greatest case of buyer's remorse since, oh, probably the previous election.

Anyway, Everiss comments frequently on the foolishness of politicians regarding the impact of violence in videogames on children. He makes the valid point that the violence in videogames as a whole is much less than the violence present in books or movies, even when limited to childrens' books, or his favorite comparison: The Bible. He then tees off from that to the claim that videogames act as a catharsis and actually reduce violence.

Well, on that point he is neither wrong nor right. Once again, this is not my field, but I'm fairly well read on the topic, and Dr. Butler likes to talk about it, and I like to listen. As I have understood it, the connection between violent observation and violent behavior is much better theorized about than empirically studied. This isn't for lack of trying, it's just really hard to study.

The basic theory is that viewing violent acts desensitizes us to violence. Not appreciating the magnitude of violent acts, violent behavior is downgraded in severity within our minds. Violent behavior having been downgraded in our minds, we are, on the margins, more likely to respond with violence when provoked than had we not viewed violent acts.

That theory does not imply watching violent acts increases crime. It increases violent acts, but those violent acts could be perpetrated in a simulated world, which is what Everiss suggests (hence, the Catharsis theory). This is analogous to the argument that while viewing pornography has an addictive component that increases the viewer's sex drive, it is more likely to direct the viewer to additional pornography (even violent pornagraphy) rather than to rape.

Testing this theory to determine the impact on crime and delinquency is a pain to do, as is most everything involving people, much less children. For one thing, we can't measure how many violent scenes children see. So we tried using tv availability on the theory that, all else equal, children who have more channels available will have access to more violent scenes, and so will see more violence. That didn't work, so we tried the cost of cable, on the theory that if cable costs less, parents will buy it, children will have more channels, and so on. We're apparently still using that one, but it's fallen out of enough favor that papers are now being written that use the number of days it rained to measure how many violent scenes children watch on the theory that when it rains, children don't go outside, when they don't go outside they watch TV, so if it rains a lot they'll watch a lot of TV, and see a lot of violence, particularly if cable is cheap and they have a lot of channels available to them.

I chuckle because, of course, we're getting awefully close to ice cream causes rape and drowning territory (all are caused by summer heat, so it looks like they are related, but they aren't). However, this is not unusual in social sciences. Even if we could measure directly what we thought was important, it is not clear that it would tell us anything. If we established that violent children watched more violent TV it wouldn't give us causality. Violent TV could have no effect on children at all, but if violent children were slightly more likely to watch violent TV (as the Catharsis theory states) then it would look like violence and tv-watching are related.

Incidentally, Everiss makes a big deal of cross-national studies which show that the introduction of gaming is associated with a decrease in the crime rate. Cross-national studies can be useful, but in this case I'm unconvinced. First, the introduction of games is going to be related to the progress of time and economic development. Crime rates are also related to the progress of time and economic development (largely, they have been going down everywhere for a while). Therefore, without looking at any data, I can be fairly certain that the introduction of games will be related to dips in the crime rate. You would not believe the number of researchers (in my experience: almost all of them) who forget that basic problem of dealing with temporal data. The other problem is the arbitrary selection of end-points. Yes, it's true crime has been going down since 1993. There was a major piece of crime legislation in 1992 and a major welfare reform in 1994, and the Crack Wars ended in 1993. I suspect one or more of those events might be important and, if included in the model, dwarf the impact of videogames. Allow me to chose aberations for my end points and I can make anything look good. (And, incidentally, the use of 1993 probably reflects where the data starts, on account of that 1992 crime bill, the researchers aren't being duplicitous, they either don't know or didn't think to mention that 1993 might be a problematic start year.)

At best, we have evidence that points one direction. In most cases, we have evidence that points in six directions and the one that brings the researcher the most fame, the university the most money, and makes everyone feel best is chosen (I say cynically). Honest researchers, of which I'm sure there are many, will tell you what they found, tell you what assumptions are required for that finding to point where they think it does, and tell you what else it could mean. This is, incidentally, why you should never defer decisionmaking to an expert. He already believes his assumptions, that's why he assumed them. The question is, do you believe his assumptions.

We are not sure of the relation between violent games or TV and real-world violence. We have theory that states the two are connected, and we have evidence that desensitisation is real. Army basic training is essentially predicated on desensitzation and indoctrination in order to get soldiers to kill on command and only on command. Some of the early work on the point made complained that games like Doom removed killing from a moral context (which is, incidentally, the Ironclad Defense of most great literature) while maintaining the desensitizing. The result was children who could kill, but not who followed the orders on when to kill. This may or may not have happened. We'll never know. Developers more or less took the point, and with notable exceptions, began including the moral context and the characteristics of police shoot/no shoot simulators, meaning that most video game violence now resembles actual military and police training about what you can and can't shoot and when. It also made for much better games, if I may say so myself.

End of the line? We don't know. My opinion: context matters. The content of games should be judged on context of the actions, and not the actions themselves. I think many, possibly most, games measure up well under that criteria.

Pendulum Swings

2009-07-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

Rasmussen has a new survey out, summarized by The Weekly Standard with some comparisons to a year ago.

Short form of the short form: a year ago Democrats lead in 7 of 10 policy fields when voters were asked which party they trusted more. Now, Republicans lead in 8 of the 10 fields.

This poll question is venerable and veritable, and we've been asking it, or some variation on it, since the 50's, and there's been a lot of research into what causes these types of massive swings.

Generally, I don't like the research. It is far too tied up in "which party has the smarter or better informed voters," it doesn't even bother to ask what the ideologies and thought processes underlying these switches are, nor does it ask people if they've changed their mind, and if so why. (That last could be a critique of Rasmussen and the other pollsters, but since the Political Scientists aren't asking for the data, I prefer to blame them). Many of the people doing the research have obvious axes to grind, and they want to demonstrate that when the voters side with the "right" people it's because they are well informed and understand the issues, and six months later when they change their minds it is because they've become stupid or been duped. Obvious measurement reasons for the swings are not even considered, for example: we compare how people feel about the administration now to what the administration is doing now, and are say "well, they must be switching positions because of the economy" when actually the people being surveyed are responding to the cap and trade vote from last week. One particularly egregious (in my opinion) paper compared people's knowledge of welfare policy to their opinions on welfare policy a year after Welfare Reform, used a particularly narrow definition of Welfare Policy, and then complained when the respondent's answers described welfare policy from the previous year (or the current year if a more expansive definition of welfare was used).

So, for all of these reasons, I don't particularly trust the research that has been done on public opinion swings. This is also the reason it isn't my field, I work on things who's literature I do not lightly toss aside -nor hurl with great force.

Nonetheless, the folks who do the research have a couple of theories for why we see these swings.

1.) The public is ill informed, lacks ideological preferences, and works off of indicators, either from elected officials or from public sources. Opinion of political parties reflects satisfaction with the current arrangement, or desire for change. When the indicators reflect no problems, the incumbent party is trusted. When the indicators start flashing red, even if the incumbent party didn't do anything wrong, the public switches to the other party as a corrective. In this case, the steadily rising unemployment rate, the narrow passage of Waxman-Markey in the House, and a few other things are setting off alarm bells and so the public is switching horses.

2.) The public has defined ideological preferences, but the parties are unable to create coherent platforms which satisfy a majority of the electorate. The parties then look for a coalition that will provide a temporary majority, but as soon as that majority is satisfied, the coalition falls apart. In this case, the Democrats were elected to pass a stimulus. Now that the stimulus has been passed, everything else the Democrats want to do irritates everybody one way or another, and so Republicans gain as the "not-Democrats" alternative.

3.) The public generally prefers no change. The Democrats want to change a lot, therefore they are losing public trust. This is functionally like option 2, except that in option 2, the public supports some change, but once that change is made, the public then prefers all change stop.

4.) The public has defined preferences, but has difficulty monitoring government, so again has to use indicators. Because preferences exist, it's not a simple "things are going well" vs. "things are going poorly" but rather a scale of "are we moving away from my preferences or towards my preferences?" This most clearly reflects a pendulum motion as the public will support a party until it starts moving past the "bliss point" and then it will slowly start to switch over to the other party in order to bring it back towards the bliss point.
4.a) My own variation on this which I may one day do something with, is that this analysis presumes a single axis with a single bliss point that simply changing parties gets policy closer to the best outcomes. As I explained before, I think this is overly simplistic. Instead, I think there are numerous axes, each with it's own faction supporting it. A coalition of factions will pull policy one direction, but one faction may get more than the others. As a result, the factions getting less influence may still be involved in policy making when the public breaks off from the coalition. The pendulum motion then resembles more of a circular or oblique motion. For example, we could imagine a coalition of people supporting liberty and socialism/statism where the socializers were the dominant partner. Very quickly, the public sours on the socializing but not on the liberty. The public switches to a new preference for liberty and localism, where liberty is the dominant partner. The public then sours on liberty as local differences are over-run by national institutions pushing non-interference by local government, so the public switches... you get the idea.

5.) The public is informed, and does have ideological preferences, but has to balance information gathering with little things like eating and sleeping, so they rely on a cadre of political leaders to watch carefully and sound the alarm when something goes wrong. The public then watches those elite members to see if they match up to the ideological preferences of the voters. Switches from one part to another reflect the realization that the party apparatus is not as conservative/liberal/moderate/practical/ideological/this/that/the-other-thing as previously thought, and so the public is choosing a new party.

Those are the major theories of pendulum swinging I'm aware of. Any one of them would make sense, but I have difficulty picking which one is "right" in a given set of circumstances for the above given reasons that I don't trust the majority of researchers trying to prove on or the other.

What's Happening in Honduras

2009-06-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

My Spanish is a little rusty, and the reports are conflicting.

And it doesn't help that American journalists seem to think the Honduran Constitution looks like ours and misanalyze appropriately.

Faustablog has the basic timeline.

There are three main issues going on down there, and a fourth underlying concern. The three main ones: the succession rules, the amendment rules, and election rules. The fourth concern is that we've seen a lot of dictators crop up in Latin America, who are then removed by the army, which sets up either a junta or another dictatorship, and we really don't want to see it again.

Honduran Constitution prevents presidents from succeeding themselves (I am not clear in my translation about whether they are forbidden from second non-consecutive terms, but sitting presidents are forbidden to run for President. Also serving military officers, Secretaries of the State, or as near as I can tell any government official with a title higher than dog catcher who was in office within one year of the election). President Zelaya wanted to, in grand Latin American despot tradition, amend the Constitution to allow himself to run for a second consecutive term.

Understanding that this is grand Latin American despot tradition is important so that you will understand why the Honduran Constitution prohibits the amendment of the Constitution to change the length of term of the President, or the number of terms he may serve. In fact, it is notable that, other than the rules for the amendment process which everyone is focusing on (in ordinary session, the amendment must carry with 2/3 vote, and be confirmed by 2/3 vote in the subsequent ordinary session -that is, special sessions don't count), this is the only thing in the entire document that covers everything from health care and agricultural reform to how the budget has to be drawn up that is un-changeable.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the Hondurans in 1982 really wanted to avoid the return of the Caudillo (loosely: knight in shining armor) Dictator that plagues South American history.

So stop focusing on end-running the amendment. The amendment was illegal, full stop. The legislature just confirmed that, and so did the Honduran Supreme Court.

Alternately, and I'm not sure about the legal status of this, I'm hearing Zelaya was wanting to convene a Constitutional Convention, which if I read this right, requires a plebiscite.

Zelaya decided to hold a referendum, which is illegal also, because referenda have to be proposed by the legislature and plebiscites can only be called to add to the Constitution those things which have not been previously addressed in another article.

The Armed Forces of Honduras oversee the elections, so Zelaya ordered them to distribute the ballots. The head of the Armed Forces refused, Zelaya fired him, the Supreme Court stepped in and told the President that he could not fire the Head of the Armed Forces.

Why can't the president fire the head of the Armed Forces? In Honduras the military is not exactly under the President. They independently oversee elections, and they also "guarantee the alternation of the Office of the Presidency." Translation (I think): When the President's Term is up, the Military meets him at the door, escorts him to his car, and makes sure he never comes back.

Now, when if became clear Zelaya wasn't going to obey the law, the Congress of Deputies convened and impeached him and his Vice President, which made the Speaker of the House the Acting President.

Here, the succession might have gotten a little confused. I keep reading that the Supreme Court ordered the army to remove the President -and they might have under the authority of the army to guarantee the alternation of the President, but as Acting President, the Speaker of the House would have the power to order the Military to remove the President as well which would make more sense.

Anyway, this is hardly my area of expertise. I studied Peru and Columbia, and that was 5 years ago. I'm horribly out of date. I'm working off news reports and the Honduran Constitution, and a Spanish English dictionary to help with the words I don't know.

Where I sit, it sounds like the Honduran State worked exactly as intended to nip a potential dictator in the bud. The Courts kept the army independent, the Legislature removed the dictator and replaced him with an elected President who will have to step down after the next election, and the Army enforced the alternation of the office.

Win one for the good guys.

Why Cap and Trade Regimes Don't Work Well

2009-06-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

So the House passed a Cap and Trade bill on Friday. Politically, it didn't make a whole lot of sense because the Senate has no interest in the bill and it nearly lost -seems like a lot of risk for a Friday headline. Economically, cap and trade laws aren't new. The basic idea was explained in a paper by Ronald Coase in the 1950s, though the practice dates back to English Common law (which Coase cited in his paper). In the 1990s, the Clean Air Act was amended to include a cap-and-trade provision for pollutants -mainly sulfur. There have also been a number of attempts to apply caps and trades to deep-sea fishing. The concept is not dissimilar to hunting licenses that specify "2 does, 1 buck" or some such. The jury is out on the Clean Air Act Amendments -the last analysis I read was inconclusive, but everyone likes to claim that it worked wonderfully or sucked totally. The general trend, though, is that despite the wonderful theory, cap and trade doesn't seem to work.

First, Coase. Prior to Coase, the economic view of public goods was that markets could not allocate them. Since no one can own a public good exclusively there is no way to prevent someone from consuming the good. This may be a feature for national defense or a fireworks display. Everyone wants a good Fourth of July display. On the other hand, the person with severe eye and ear problems living down by where they launch the rockets may wish that they could avoid the display. You can see how this relates to pollution. When soot is shot up into the atmosphere, it effects everyone whether they want it or not.

The previous known solutions were regulation and pigouvian taxes. Regulation is straight forward: a law mandating how much soot can be emitted. Pigouvian taxes are a per-unit tax on emissions which raise the price of the public good. Both of these are like taking an axe to a toothpick. They are very hard to fine tune. Coase showed that the market failure of a public good was not intrinsic to the good, but rather to the confusion of property rights.

If the atmosphere is allocated to the polluter, he has a right to pollute to his heart's desire. If the atmosphere is allocated to everyone else, they can prevent all pollution. So far this sounds like regulation. Except, once property rights are established, the polluter and the public can negotiate a compensation for pollution.

Notwithstanding some practical complications to "allocating property rights," William Fischel has argued (and shown, but only in Pennsylvania and New Jersey) that local governments are actually quite good at extracting compensation from local polluters. States and nations are less good -I would guess because of the coordination problem and the preference aggregation problem. (i.e. Local governments have a good idea of exactly how much the factory is worth and how much damage the pollution does, by the standards of their citizens. States and nations have a harder time figuring that out.)

OK, Cap and Trade. Cap and trade is a regulatory approach that is intended to mix regulation with property rights to get efficient pollution controls (or other types of controls). The regulation is the creation of Caps. As the name suggests, caps are a maximum amount of pollution that can be emitted. These caps are then divided up to emissions permits which the holders can trade. So, polluters can negotiate over the amount of pollution emitted by trading their permits.

In theory, a polluter could come up with a more efficient way to produce his good, say fish, sell his permits, and make a higher profit.

In practice it has not worked out that way, and the primary weakness seems to be the cap regulation. If the cap is arbitrary, it tends to distort markets horribly causing all kinds of economic damage, this seems to be what has happened in fisheries. The caps were too low for the businesses, so the fisheries either closed entirely or became monopolies/cartels. Worse, if the cap is arbitrary, it will be set by either regulators or elected officials, who are susceptible to political considerations. If the price of energy goes up, the cap will be lessened in order to relax the price -defeating the point. If the industries complain, the caps go up. This seems to be what happened in Europe when they tried to implement Kyoto.

So arbitrary caps seem to be problematic. The known solution to arbitrary caps is to not make them arbitrary. The cap is set at something like 80% of each factory's output as of some arbitrary date in the past. The problem is that this makes inefficient old plants a goldmine for emissions permits. Companies that were planning to modernize halt modernization so they can milk their old plants for permits. This is the primary complaint I am aware of against the Clean Air Act Amendments and the increasing average age of power plants seems to back this complaint, but is not definitive. This is also what seems to have motivated Russia's backing of Kyoto in Europe, and their maintenance of decades-old-factories is the alternate explanation for why European cap-and-trade is something of a joke.

So, what's the underlying problem? Well, I think it's a variation on the underlying problem with Coase. Getting a bunch of people to agree on the optimal amount of pollution and production without a market is nearly impossible. If we could do it, we could set the level through regulation and pigouvian taxes. Assigning property values doesn't get us anywhere if we can't agree on the value of the property among the owners. If we knew the ideal cap, we'd just set it. Without knowing the ideal cap, the trading is just a fertile ground for gaming and corruption. Even with the ideal cap, the trading system is hard to keep honest.

Do we have a better solution? Not really. The option set hasn't changed much in 50 years. Regulation, Taxation, Cap and Trade. There's a fourth option I alluded to earlier: local control. Normally it is argued that local pollution controls aren't an option because pollution is too widely spread, but Fischel's research (on another topic) indicates that, in fact, local governments are very good at controlling pollution, and possibly even better than states and nations. That, or taxation, if we must do a major regulation, would be my preferred solutions.

But I'm odd that way.

Novel Writing

2009-06-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

Most everyone knows I like to write long stories. Or at least, I like to think about writing them. Or perhaps I like to think I like to write long stories.

John Scalzi, who I read on occasion, but must confess I know nothing about, explains why most new writers are in their thirties. Short form: learning to write a novel is a time consuming business when you can devote your entire time to it. Most people have lives, so learning takes a while. Once you learn, writing a novel itself is a time consuming task (most novelists are happy to write one draft per year, and that's with the structural forms in your auto-text file). Then, publishing takes even longer.

I currently have four novel ideas floating in my head and with notes and plans scattered across my hard drive.

1.) A Space Fantasy that may or may not involve one or more of: a giant battleship with an integrated control center that coordinates a fleet and the desk jockeys who run it (since 1998), a bunch of middle-aged retired officers brought back into service by FTL drives (since 2000), an outpost forced to use children and old men in its defense because reinforcements are 40 years away (since 2005).

2.) Dune in the arctic without spice, worms, or lasers. In fact, the only thing it has in common with Dune is a fractured feudal system and an emperor who stabs the main character's father in the back (2002). And at this point, the villain is looking more and more to be a bureaucrat who fancies himself a Philosopher King dispatching the actual ruling class so that he can be Dictator himself. And the nobility are strangely OK with escaping alive and never coming back. Which is to say, not much like Dune at all (2006).

3.) A group of 4 heroes in a fantasy story know they are heroes in a fantasy story and angst about the fact that, knowing they are heroes, they cannot be truly courageous, and therefore cannot be heroic. The villain, knowing that he's a villain, tries to change the genre of the story so that he can win -solving the heroes' problem so they can courageously and heroically defeat the villain (2005). Or, the author of said book get sucked into the story and has to find his way to the end of the book without getting killed -hilarity ensues (2007). Or, the story is actually bed-time fairytales told to his daughters, who are sucked into the story with him to be used by the villain as a bargaining tool to change the genre of the story (2009).

4.) A family moves to a small town in the Midwest and has to adjust to the closed culture of rural America (2004). And deal with anxiety over the loss of the closed culture that the family's entrance into the town represents (2006). And the father is the new city manager, brought in after a reorganization to modernize the city's government, which is now located on a major river (2007). Yes, my experience in Paducah largely informed that last change.

OK, so there's been a lot of change over nearly a decade on those four stories. Only one of them has ever made it to a full draft. That was the second variant of the first story, which I finished along about in 2004 or 2005. I showed it to Keith, who was editing a literary magazine at the time and generally had good editorial skills. His review was, and I quote:

"It sounds too much like you."

It was 2007 before I understood what he meant and really took the criticism to heart. That may only partly be because Keith gave it. I'm not afraid to proclaim my ignorance when I was 20-ish. The realization was when Paducah started informing the last story idea that I would want to write with more understanding and empathy, and have my characters speak with more conviction, and in fewer sermons, that I understood "and that's not the way I always sound."

Lightbulb.

So. There's a learning curve. And I'm still on it. And if I'm very lucky, maybe I'll match Scalzi for debuting a novel before I'm 40.

Does Good Government Require Class?

2009-06-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of last semester, late April I think, we hosted Dennis Epple, a noted and notable economist from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He presented a paper on mobility and efficient government provision.

The central finding of the paper was that, in Pittsburg and a few other test cities, government provision of services, particularly education, were out of sync with the efficient levels demanded by the districts of the city. After the analysis, the deduced reason was that the combination of poor chasing the rich to get better services at less cost, the inability to use either direct head taxes or use fees, and the connection of housing prices to tax rates made efficient service provision possible.

Shortly: services are paid for by property taxes, and the benefits from the tax in turn show up in the value of the house. If the service is worth more than the tax, the value of the house goes up. Poor people chase the rich, trying to buy the absolute smallest house that will still get them in the district of the rich houses. This results in the poor buying more house than they really want, and drives up the values of the houses (higher demand) pricing out later poor people. The rich have to pay higher taxes to make up the shortfall from these additional below-average houses but don't gain any more services.

The result is that everyone overpays for their services. The rich in higher taxes, the poor in bigger houses.

There were three solutions: a head tax, privatization of services, or class division. Head taxes and privatization work on essentially the same idea. The headtax divides the cost of services by the number of people, and sends everyone a bill, rather than using a portion of the property value. The attempt to coast on the rich doesn't work because everyone in the district pays the same. Privatization also makes everyone pay the same, but now the users don't even have to move into the district to use the service if they will commute.

Class division, however, was the easiest solution. Headtaxes are unequal, privatization isn't possible for truly public goods. Class divisions, though, are always possible. Simply preventing the poor from moving into a district with the rich (a simple income or wealth requirement is all it would take) reached a nearly optimal distribution. Unable to coast off the wealthy, the poor would move to districts with higher tax rates, but the amount they paid was actually the same, the services rendered was the same, and they didn't have to buy a giant house they couldn't afford.

Such restrictions are practically hard to enforce, and so the paper actually suggests the inequality of the headtax and privatization to the greatest extent possible were the prefered solution.

But I've been thinking since then -which is not to say come up with an answer -about whether government requires class divisions to function. The history of attempts to eradicate class divisions is not pretty, and the results are not usually considered markers of good government. In the Epple study, attempting to eradicated the class distinction actually made everyone worse off, but especially the poorest.

Anyway, don't have an answer, and after 3 months of mulling doubt I'm going to develop an insight.

Left, Right, and Center

2009-06-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, linked by Donald Douglas at American Power, discusses ideology and the foolishness of talking about the Holocaust Museum Shooter as a "right wing" or "left wing" extremist when the very fanatic nature of the shooter means that he is not on any recognizable graph of political ideology. He links to three graps from Conservative Resources which are similar to dozens of graphs you've seen in any of a hundred introductory political science textbooks.

I've reproduced them below.

Allow me to understate: I hate these charts with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

I particularly hate the last one. The only substance dense enough to bend communism and fascism around into Theocracy is an academic's skull. And only an ideologic ignoramous can place anarchism next to any Marxist ideology, much less classical socialism. Such foolishness requires willful misunderstanding of "whither the state." I suppose I should credit them with getting the "nice" ideologies in the center so we can all feel good about ourselves -we're all moderates, YAY! -and that they manage to get libertarianism "opposite" socialism, though it's an open question to me how different the ideologies are for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

OK, understatement over.

First, for those who don't know, the Left-Right continuum comes to us from the French Revolution. The French General Assembly, which kicked off the revolution, sat ordered from left to right from the perspective of the Speaker, according to their support for the Ancient Regime -i.e. the monarchy. So, from the perspective of the Assembly, those on the far left were most opposed to the current government. And somewhat further left were the Jacobins. Those on the far right were Monarchists.

Now, in the same way that anti-communism more or less defined American Politics for 60 years, Monarchism defined European Politics during the Revolution. So in this historic example, speaking of a left-right continuum makes a certain amount of sense. In the US, the more Anti-Communist you were, the more Right-Wing you were. In France, the more Monarchist you were, the more Right-Wing you were. That there were strange people on both sides didn't much matter because regardless of your prefered government, your position on the King (or Communism) defined which side you voted with.

That's fine, makes sense. Afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, academics tried to make ideological sense of the divisions in France -which was already a bad idea because, as Napoleon and Talleyrand might have indicated, philosophical consistency was not a hallmark of the French Revolution -and then they tried to generalize this already stupid idea which makes it quite possibly the dumbest piece of historical and political analysis ever committed to textbooks.

And today we live with it because we've been using it for 150-200 years and we just accept uncritically that there is some single criteria with which we can describe all political philosophy.

Not to put too fine a point on it: this is Platonist horse-hockey dressed up in historical bells and ribbons and passed off as penetrating analysis. It is the belief that there is some eidetic form of perfect government and that we can measure the quality of government by comparing it to this immaculate pattern. Ideologies move along this scale of perfection getting warmer or closer to the perfect form, which of course is some type of "moderation." Aristotle and Daedalus would vomit to hear "the middle course" so horribly mis-defined from "appropriate and wise" to "lukewarm and uncontentious."

Whatever criteria you think is the single measure of politics, it's wrong. If you try to create a continuum using a single measure of politics, it's wrong. If you try to do it with 2, as those famous "political axis/economic axis" graphs do, it's wrong.

Political ideology is not that simple.

Within English Liberalism alone, Isaiah Berlin identified three competing virtues: Liberty, Freedom, and Order. These three virtues are noted as being exclusive, and one must dominate. Locke chose Liberty as the lodestar, Burke chose Order, and Mill chose Freedom. Each gave us a different type of Liberalism. French Liberalism centered on Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality (with disasterous results, I note in passing).

Those are just the Western Liberal traditions. Monarchists and Anarchists have an entirely different set of criteria. German Liberalism only shares emphasis on Order with England or France. Then there are the variations on Catholic Socialism, or Catholic Monarchism, and the various sub-types of Protestant government.

A Generalized Left-Right continuum is an impossibility.

In some circumstances, a specific Left-Right continuum may be possible. Incidentally, the US today isn't one them, and hasn't been since Clinton.

Now, I left Fascism, Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and Libertarianism off the earlier discussion for a reason. It is because, to some extent or another, all of them deny that there are tensions among government virtues. They all believe that government is ultimately unnecessary if you can create a man who internalizes the organizational needs of his society, and as a result there will never be conflict of virtues. They are, in some sense, all descended from The Frenchman Reausseau and believe that society is corrupting, and the influence of society can be undone without the loss of civilization. Fascism and Communism create that man through the period of dictatorship. Marxism predicted the creation of such men through historical pressures. Socialism in most forms augments the historical pressures of Marx with state, church, or other civil pressures (call it controlled Hegelianism). And Libertarianism believes that the removal of government and the invocation of the market will solve the allocation problem. So in this case it isn't so much the denial that virtues conflict as it is the denial that the conflict cannot be solved with sufficient market trade.

I'll note that not all Libertarians fall that close to anarchism, but enough do to distinguish them from the Mill or Locke style of Liberal/Libertarian (Reason, I'm looking at you -and Objectivism, don't think you aren't on the list). Certainly of the bunch, Libertarians are the most benign, which is not to say safe.

OK, this rant has gone horribly, horribly too long. I hope I've prodded enough people to get a comment or two out of it. I'll conclude with this.

The belief of a constant left-right political continuum is pernicious because it forces us to spend our time trying to shoe-horn ideologies into a continuum which, by their own standards, they don't fit. The ideologies simply to not value the same things, and so to speak of them as having more or less affinity for some eidos is to talk about how oranges are like orangutans. This means we do not understand the ideologies at all. Further, we limit our ability to understand truly foreign ideologies like, for example, Islamic Fundamentalist Political Thought or the various strains of fascism and communism.

But most pernicious is that it sends scholars on wild goose chases for things like "the right-wing gene" which don't exist, but nobody calls them on because, after all, we all know that there's a such thing as a right winger.

The Biggest Gun

2009-06-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sean is embarrassing me into writing more (not intentionally, I'm sure, it's just having that effect).

Maura Flynn has a straight forward -she calls it conservative, but I don't think it's incorrect to call it libertarian -case for gay marriage.

It's short, the really short form of it is: Government is a really big gun. Do you really want the government to be used to enforce moral values?

Leaving aside the snarky responses (it's good to know murder is morally nuetral, it's just the removal of a taxpayer that offends the government -explains why gang violence is never solved...), or the blunt ones (yes). That ship sailed eleven centuries and more ago, and went right off the edge of the earth between 60 and 200 years ago (it depends on what event you want to date by). It ain't coming back.

Given that, the options being presented to "traditionalists" -really the options being presented to everyone -is hold the gun, or have someone else hold the gun. For the traditionalists, they can choose to be shot by the Libertarians or the Liberals, or they can try to hold the gun themselves (it is enough for them, perhaps uniquely though I wouldn't swear to it, simply to prevent anyone from actually getting a shot off).

Federalism would largely solve the issue by greatly reducing the size of the gun and meaning that any group could protect itself if they just moved to one place. Hannah Arendt drives me up a wall, but her argument for the existence of Israel is good and valid in that context and in this. No people can guarentee it's safety or it's perpetuation without a government that must always protect them. In the US, there is only one government, and to some extent or another each faction wants to use it against the others. Given these circumstances, becoming "the party of freedom" is to unilaterally disarm and allow the slow extermination.

And people wonder why I'm a localist.

Anonymous Blogging

2009-06-08T09:08:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend, Ed Whelan at NRO had enough of an anonymous blogging sniping at him from the bushes. So he flushed him. Blew away the bushes. Outed him. Choose your metaphor.

What has followed at NRO is a rather interesting exchange on the virtues (or lack there) of anonymous journalism and blogging.

Short form: is anonymous blogging cowardly and sinister? Do bloggers have an obligation to protect the identities of anonymous bloggers? What obligations do anonymous bloggers have to maintain their anonymity (and pseudonymity)?

I can relate a little to the anonymous blogger who doesn't want to get in trouble in real life for his opinions on the web. I can also understand the person who wants to quarentine his real life, friends, and family from the worst excesses of the web. My own solution has simply been to keep a low profile (I kid about my abysmal readership, but if this blog started shooting hundreds of hits per day, I'd shut it down). I also try to maintain what TigerHawk called the "Osama or your mama" rule. Of course, my Mom does read this blog, so, yeah...

And if Osama is reading this, Dude, get out more.

Now, in large part my take on anonymity is that it should be avoided unless there is a very, very good reason. Milbloggers concerned about operational security, very good reason. For my own part, if the views expressed on this blog were sufficient to get another person insulted, fired, or hanged (in that order) I'd be ashamed to speak behind a mask. I admire John Adam's description as the "first in line to be hanged," and identify with Grachus (from Spartacus) that I'd rather be proscribed than exiled. If there is ever going to be a proscription list in this country, I'm either going to write it or be on it -even if it is only third from the bottom.

But we're not talking about that level of security -and people may differ on the moral requirement to suffer with your colleagues. Mainly we're talking about the embarrasment a blogger wanted to avoid by writing stupidly and ad hominemly from behind a psuedonym.

I recall a statement along the lines that there is no defense to an ad hominem. If the audience doesn't catch that the argument is vacuous, the victim looses. Ed Whelan says that he was inclined to ignore the blogger until he started getting e-mails about it.

This leads to the follow up: the only defense against an ad hominem is a left hook. Or, if you must be polite, another ad hominem. However, with an anonymous or psuedonymous blogger, that isn't really an option.

Unless you reveal them. That seems to be Whelan's defense: he put the "hominem in the ad hominem." Anonymous bloggers who want to be insult jocks without argument leave their targets few weapons except "outing."

Notes on the Tiller Murder

2009-06-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a week and things have calmed a bit.

Something that's been bugging me about the murder: very few people are talking about the context of the shooting, and yet to hear the shooter talk, that was the most important thing.

GetReligion has a decent roundup, and the main stories from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (the source material for GR) do a decent job between them.

Megan McArdle at The Atlantic did an interesting series of posts on the point that discussed whether pro-life forces really have access to the political system, but seems to be unaware of the larger context in Kansas.

Patrick Frey, out in California comments a few times.

All are interesting in their own ways.

What I think they are all missing is that George Tiller wasn't a random abortion doctor. Pro-life groups in Kansas forced through numerous restrictions on abortions -particular the late-term ones Tiller specialized in. They didn't matter. Tiller continued on his merry way. He was almost certainly breaking the law, but with his connections (he was a major political donor and helper to Governor Sebelius, as made national news -Kansans already knew it -when she was nominated to head HHS). Dennis Boyles, among other Kansas watchers has been pointing out for years that Tiller's influence extends all through the Kansas government, right down to the judges who sit on his prosecutions.

The last prosecution was stymied multiple times by State judges; Federal judges had to intervene to keep the prosecution alive. Tiller himself bankrolled a candidate to knock off the Attorney General (Phil Kiline) who was backing the case. When this came to light during the Sebelius confirmation... it amounted to nothing.

We have people who knew the killer saying that he was notably upset (even for his normal upset self) about the results of the trial and hearings. He was already paranoid about how the government was against him. So might someone do the digging to find out about those things?

It looks to me like Tiller was unique in this respect. He corrupted every law and institution meant to bind him. In every important way, he was untouchable by force of law. Kansans had access to the policy process. Didn't matter for George Tiller.

In other words, Scott Roeder was a vigilante, enforcing a law that the state could or would not.

Doesn't change the final analysis. Vigilante justice is neither justified nor right in this case. I read a statement from the Southern Baptist Convention from some time ago that called vigilanteism regarding abortion law "revolution and rebellion." That's correct. When things are bad enough to warrant revolution and rebellion, when vigilanteism is called for, George Tiller won't be the first one to kill. Maybe in time Roeder will look like John Brown -though I've never found John Brown to be particularly sympathetic myself. But we rightly hanged John Brown, and we'll rightly hang Scott Roeder.

Then we hope the historical analogy stops.

Why Don't We Use Hard Money?

2009-05-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

100th post. Seems I'll finally get around to answering the question I've gotten, oh... twice. Why don't modern economies use "hard money."

"Hard money" in our context usually means Gold Standard, but there's nothing that stops it from being any other non-fiat script. We could base our money on Yugos and the money could be described as hard.

The world financial markets since the late 70s have used a free-floating, fiat script system for currency. Free-floating means that the value of a dollar is not pegged to a set value for every other currency, nor is it pegged to a set amount of another commodity (i.e. gold). Fiat script means that the currency is not backed by another commodity (i.e, gold) but only by the promise of the issuing state to accept the script at face value in return for its debt and bonds. Gold standards have every currency in the world pegged to a set quantity of -or other commodity.

With money based on the gold standard, you cannot exchange one currency for another currency (the script is useless in the other country). Instead, you exchange your currency for gold at home in the US, take gold on vacation in the UK, and exchange the gold for the new currency.

Since the gold is the only real money, everything else is script, you have reduced the amount of money in the US and increased it in the UK. So, in the first country, there's the less money chasing the same amount of goods, you get deflation (each dollar can buy more goods). In the second country, the money supply has increased, so there's more money chasing the same number of goods, you get inflation (each pound is now worth less).

This causes an imbalance in the real exchange rates of the two countries. A chair that previously cost the same now costs less in the US and more in England. So, people in England start buying American chairs. This moves money from England to the US, reversing the effect of your vacation, and we're back in equilibrium.

Now, moving gold is a pain. It's heavy, and hard to insure. So, instead what would happen is that you would take dollars from the US, exchange them for pounds, and the the British would exchange the dollars en-mass for gold from the US Treasury.

But that's a real pain in the neck, still. So instead, they use the dollars to buy American goods.

And since we're just buying and selling currencies without going through the gold intermediary, we can set prices for Dollars in Pounds, and vice versa. Since we aren't exchanging with the treasuries, we can set the price at whatever clears the market (regardless of what the face value is). And we can list those prices, and call them "exchange rates."

So what's the gold for?
___________________________________

OK, I can hear the goldbugs screaming already. I know of three arguments that the Gold Standard is superior to the current floating exchange rate.

1.) Gold has intrinsic value and provides stability to the monetary system that fiat money does not.
2.) The need to back script with gold restricts the ability of government to monkey with the monetary system.
3.) The gold standard forces discipline on banks.

The first is simply wrong if we actually believe in exchange value. Nothing has intrinsic economic value. It has only the value that you can exchange it for. Gold's value as a currency is exclusively that everyone will take it. For the time being, that is also true of fiat money. Gold may have other uses than as an exchange -which would be a plus except that the use of gold would be a constant drain on the monetary system, causing permanent deflation. So we'd have to isolate the money gold. Then we'd have to use notes to indicate the money. Except, we do that now. So what's the gold for?

Well, the gold limits the amount of money in the system: it can't be more than the amount of gold. Except that isn't true. Banks only keep a fraction of their deposits, lending out the rest. So we modulate the amount of gold in the system by setting the fractional reserve limit (how much the bank has to keep in its vaults). We can do that with paper, we don't need gold. And, in fact, being limited to the gold can be very bad. Without a steadily increasing monetary supply, an expanding economy will cause deflation -which causes prices to drop, but doesn't effect long term contract prices or the terms of debt. All of those agricultural panics and bankruptcies caused by falling food prices you read about in High School History: caused by the Gold Standard. And if those recessions turn into depressions, there's no fiscal mechanism for countering the sudden upswing in deflation -leaving only debt and prayer.

And in any case, the historical record is that governments largely ignore the gold limit. Run up against the gold standard? Revalue your currency: boom! Start the presses! Or, get lucky, and find gold in Klondike or California. Or start coining Silver. We still do this every time we raise the debt cap.

Further, the fixed exchange rate system may provide stability in one country, but it raises havoc with everyone else's prices. This was the reason the Allies wanted off the Bretton Woods train. They're economies were much better than they had been immediately post war, but the high value of the dollar was making it hard for them to trade. Americans bought British goods, drove British prices up, leading to an increase in British wages to make up for it, driving up the price of the Dollar. No one could ever catch a break -and every time we mucked with the value of the Dollar (like say, with price controls under Nixon) it sent shockwaves through everyone else. America sneezes and the rest of the world catches a cold, and all that. This, incidentally, wasn't necessarilly all great for the US: we rightly complain now about Chinese currency manipulation through fixed exchange rates.

The real complaint it seems to me is with fractional reserve banking and government monetary discipline. The thing is, the gold isn't what kept governments disciplined. Circumventing gold was very easy to do. It was the climate and culture of the government that kept the monetary system in check. For a while, we thought that the mavens at the Federal Reserve were doing that job. Turns out we were wrong. The gold standard is, if you will, a highly elaborate rube goldberg machine for making us think we have institutions of government restraint. It hid that instead we had a wellspring of traditions of government restraint.

You won't get those back with the Gold Standard.

Supply and Demand Works in the Pubic Sector Too

2009-05-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

I am constantly amazed that people, politicians, and consultants are surprised that polls show a preference for lower taxes and higher services.

This is sufficiently uncontroversial that we actually teach this in our public-finance and public-econ classes. As tax-price (that is, not the rate, but the actual number of dollars you pay in taxes) per "unit" of public services goes up, demand for those services goes down. This is just like private sector demand and supply curves. Price goes up, demand goes down. Also, this demonstrates that government is a "normal" good. That means "more is always prefered." As your income goes up, you buy more of it.

I'll spare you the math.

The budgetary problem, at least for the Federal Government, is that price and service are totally divorced from each other. This results in the Federal Budget being presented as: "These are the service packages, yea or nay?" followed by "These are the tax packages, yea or nay?".

Of course, the not surprising result is that the highest service package is chosen and the lowest price tax package is chosen, and the difference is made up with debt.

Most budget reform bills expressly try to link spending to services, with varying levels of not working: perhaps most famously the FICA tax which is linked to Social Security and Medicare, but has been raided for decades by the General Fund, thus defeating the purpose of linking taxes to services.
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MAJOR CAVEAT

There is actually a lot of research and thought that goes into setting optimal tax rates and service levels. Practically, local governments live on their ability to provide ideal services for optimal tax prices. So this should not be taken as a criticism of people who are trying find the right systems, nor should it be remembered in the future if I go on at length about how complicated setting tax rates can be and how, despite the simple theory, there are good political reasons not to use efficient tax structures and not to link taxes to services.

"If you're going to do it..."

2009-05-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

"... Do it right."

"Understand? For Victory."

Darth Obama

2009-05-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Jake Tapper:

Story breaking slowly over the last week about Obama threatening Chrysler secured bond holders with public shaming if they didn't cave into his administration's demand.

To begin with, this was a stupid idea as Megan McArdle points out at The Atlantic. Secured bond holders have a strong legal position in bankruptcy, and they aren't open to the public. They serve a select clientelle, which is probably quite happy with their performance. Seriously, who would you rather have manage your money? The guy who threw it all away when the Secretary of the Treasury insisted, or the guy who got roughed up by White House Greek Chorus... I mean, Press Corps.

But most stupidly was to refer to the "full force of the White House Press Corps" which has just a touch too much similarity to "Armed and Fully Operational Battle Station" (which, yes, was the Emperor, but no one is going to confuse Obama with Ian McDiarmid in Sith makeup). And given the context of multiple bail-outs, multiple contracts, and the rather unprecedented intervention -such heavy-handed threats, followed by denials of them just bring up the obvious comparison.

Lando: "That was never a part of our agreement, nor was giving Chrysler to the UAW!"
Darth Obama: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

Scorched Earth

2009-05-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm expanding my horizons. More from Pajamas Media.

First, John Hawkins on why the Right should fight dirtier against the Left.

Second, Adam Graham on why the Right shouldn't fight dirtier against the Left.

To summarize: Hawkins says that the Left has slimed any conservative who publicly defied them, from George Bush to Joe the Plumber to Miss California and the former Miss Alaska. These folks are adults, they can take it, but the not so subtle hint to the rest of the country is "shut up and do what we tell you." So long as it works, so long as Conservatives won't hit back, the Left will continue to do it. Therefore, hit back and eventually the Left will stop.

Graham responds that this isn't really the tactic for the Right. First, they're loathe to do it (as evidenced by the fact they haven't spontaneously started over the last decade) so even if you could get a segment of the Right to start sliming back, the majority of the right would turn away from them (i.e. the number of Republicans who agree with Ann Coulter but won't say so in public and are a little irritated with her most of the time). Second, even if you could get the Right to do it, it wouldn't work. The thing about fighting people who have no shame is that you can't embarass them with slime. But since Conservatives have a reputation for respecting authority and generally not going digging, the public wouldn't respond well to them starting now. Further, even if you could get the Right to throw mud, and not lose the public's respect for stooping to a low normally associated with MoveOn and ANSWER, no one would ever hear about it. Even FOX News wouldn't touch it, much less the White House Press Corps which has it's lips permanently glued to the President's posterior (Jake Tapper generally excepted, it seems).

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Short form: as a rule for policy change, Hawkins is probably right. Coalitional politics are rightly described with war metaphors rather than sports metaphors (though how many sports also include war metaphors -looking at you Football). Wars end when everyone who wants to die for the cause has been obliged. If you refuse to make the other side hurt, you guarentee you're eventual defeat.

There are really only two exceptions to the "last man standing on the policy field wins" rule. The first is a shock that so rearranges the priorities of everyone that the policy either ceases to be a battleground, or is settled on a totally different metric. The famous example here is the California Marine Life Protection Areas. Environmental and Academic interests had ground the commercial fishing industry so much to dust that even the Chamber of Commerce and the recreational fishing groups were jumping sides to support limiting off-shore fishing. But then there was a budget crisis and the tax revenue from the fishers was too important, and the cost of implementing the enforcement zones around the MPLA's was too high, and the Commercial Fishers won after all (at least for the foreseable future).

The second is the hurting compromise. That's where neither side can win, but they can make fighting so painful for the other that they come to an agreement just to make the hurt stop. This is a theoretical outcome, but no examples exist in the literature I've seen (doesn't mean they don't exist, just that I don't know them).

I tend to agree with Hawkins. Being the last man may not be an option, but putting sufficient hurt on other side to force them to the negotiating table is about the only option currently available.

On the other hand, I think Graham is right politically. Putting pain on the other side is hard and exhausting work, even for people enjoy twisting the screws. It's also dangerous, because it can backfire horribly -if you lose a chunk of your coalition going at the anvil you end up that much closer to the last man who wants to die for the cause.

Which is to say, for the Right, they're probably waiting for option 2. An outside intervention.

Fortunately, it looks like the Democrats are willing to provide one.

The Death of Federalism

2009-05-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

On some level, I actually like the idea of inter-governmental grants. It allows all the benefits of local decisionmaking and the benefits of resource pooling to produce better government for all.

But this is almost certainly a bad thing.

"David, David!"

2009-05-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

I see Rick Moran, who I don't normally read, caterwauling at Pajamas Media, which I also don't normally read, about the purging of moderates from the Republican Party. Since I don't normally read either of these places, I'll admit I followed the link from Patterico sub-blogger Karl.

Comment 27 brought to mind two stories that may illuminate some of the Party's base (or perhaps at least the SocCon's) irritation with some of the moderates in the party. The first story is the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. Oliver Hazard Perry, aboard the brig Lawrence engaged the Royal Navy broadside, and expected to be covered by the brig Niagara. Captain Jesse Elliott, however, never brought the Niagara into the battle. When Lawrence was disarmed, Perry transfered his flag to Niagara and had some very choice words for Elliott about being left for dead -he then threw Elliott off the ship, ordering him to bring up the gunboats.

The second story is a Sherlock Holmes case "The Crooked Man," where Holmes and Watson are called to a regimental headquarters to investigate the death of the commanding officer after a heated argument with his wife -where she constantly yells the name "David" though the husband's name is James. Only after solving the case does Holmes realize that "David" was not a name, but a reproach.

I suppose it's an historic irony that the two most prominant conservative reformers or moderates are David Brooks and David Frum.

The conservatives who marched into the November Meat Grinder might be forgiven shouting out to their leaders, sitting in New York drinking tea "David! David!"