Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

My goodness. More ironclad dating rules of which I have been up to now, blissfully ignorant:

. . . there is currently only one broadly accepted rule of courtship: The Third Date is The Date (unless, of course, you're a glued-together-at-the-knees Rules girl.) If either party declines sex on the Third Date, it's a clear sign that the relationship is going nowhere. And if the Third Date culminates in sex, they're officially a couple--or at least, the guy's a real loser if he doesn't ask the girl out again afterwards. (Sex before the Third Date is a signal that a) you believe in love at first sight; b) you're a promiscuous floozy; or c) you think a, he thinks b.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Krugmanomics

This Salon article on what we could have bought with the proposed tax cut uses the same technique recently popularized by Paul Krugman: it compares the multi-year cost of a tax cut with the one year cost of something else. Or a lot of something elses, in this case. My critiques of their numbers, based on fairly strong personal knowlege, are in red.

Tax-cut total: $330 billion

Amount needed to provide health insurance for all 9.2 million currently uninsured children for one year: $13 billion

This implies that she can insure children for $100 a month. Where do I sign up for this deal?

Amount needed to provide health insurance for all 41.2 million uninsured Americans, including children, for one year: $98 billion

This implies that she can insure everyone for under $200 a month, including expensive chronic conditions. I repeat -- where do I sign up for this deal?

Amount needed to close state budget gaps across the country: $78 billion

Amount needed to hire an additional 100,000 teachers to reduce class size, provide grants to repair 6,000 schools and assist with new-school construction, and provide additional math and reading help for over 9 million eligible low-income students: $300 billion

Which would be delightful if anyone had shown that class size or infrastructure has any effect on outcomes

Amount needed to end homelessness for chronically homeless people within 10 years: $1.3 billion per year to create and sustain 150,000 units of permanent supportive housing

No serious homelessness researcher believes that the chronically homeless, otherwise known as the "streeted" homeless, are suffering from a lack of affordable abodes, rather than their mental illness, drug and alchohol habits, or profoundly anti-social tendencies, which is what is keeping them out of our current supply of supportive housing.

Amount needed by the Environmental Protection Agency to complete cleanups at high-priority toxic waste sites through the Superfund program: $92 million

Last time I looked, Superfund is funded by the companies, not the government.

Cost of Head Start for all 1.8 million children, up to 5 years old, who currently need but don't receive it: $25 billion

Yet another wonderful sounding program that produces no measurable lasting results

Cost of continuing to provide grants to potentially jeopardized regional poison control centers and maintain a toll-free poison information phone number between 2005 and 2009: $142 million

This is quasi reasonable, but since it's something like .0005% of the federal budget, I hardly think we need tax cut repeal to fund it.

Cost of USDA testing of 12,500 cattle samples for mad cow disease, in addition to homeland security measures such as physical security upgrades at lab facilities and background investigation of workers: $21.7 million

I'm trying to wrap my brain around this even more trivial item. We need physical security to prevent terrorists from sneaking in to spike the samples we're testing for mad cow disease, a disease not currently found on US soil? Am I getting this right?

Budgeted cost of continuing to enable states to meet energy emergencies due to extremes in temperature, either during severe cold weather in the winter or sustained heat waves in the summer: $1.7 billion

Cost of measures to improve food safety in 2003, including hiring additional FDA inspectors, and developing new ways for federal inspectors to detect food-borne illnesses in meat and poultry and determine the source of contamination: $101 million

Estimated homeland security costs for full support of state and local emergency personnel in their efforts to prevent and respond to acts of terrorism for three years: $12 billion

Cost of providing housing assistance nationwide for victims of domestic violence from 2004 through 2008: $100 million

Cost of hiring 100 new public-school teachers: $3.125 million

This number seems to give a figure of $31K for each new teacher. One suspects that they might have forgotten some important components, like the benefits that equal 50-60% of teacher salaries in my area.

Cost of hiring 100 state child-care workers: $2.08 million

I'm not sure why we only want 100 of 'em, but if it were my kid, I'd want them paid a little more than $20K with no benefits.

Cost of fully immunizing 100 children against preventable diseases: $64,433

I am under the impression -- correct me if I am wrong -- that with the requirement to immunize all children before they start school, the current vaccination problems come from parents refusing to get their kids vaccinated, rather than lack of access to vaccines. Unless we're talking about vaccines for trenchmouth and Dengue fever, in which case, it is probably true that we don't vaccinate for them, for which we may humblly thank God every day.

Price of 250,000 new fire trucks: $56.2 billion

At least in New York City, the current problem is oversupply of firemen and related equipment.

Identified funding needs for community-based services in the care and treatment of HIV/AIDS in 2002: $2 billion

Identified funding needs for HIV prevention and surveillance prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $1 billion

Identified funding needs for HIV/AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health: $2.9 billion

It's nice that we've identified these funding needs, but before we spend $6b on them, I'd like to know what they are and what good they're going to do.

Estimated cost of funding Older Americans Act programs for seniors -- such as transportation, delivered meals and elder abuse prevention -- for 10 years: $39 billion.

Because I've always said this country doesn't devote enough of it's budget to seniors. Plus, seniors are disproportionately benefitted by this tax cut, so maybe we should ask them whether they want the cash, or the Older Americans Act.

Cost of providing needed assistive technology and durable medical equipment for 1 million individuals with disabilities for 10 years: $39 billion

This is already being done by the states, according to my aunts, who both work with disabled kids.

Cost of compensating federal employees called to active duty in the uniformed services or National Guard for the difference between their civilian and military pay: $89 million over the 2004-2008 period

And they're going to give back all the pay and benefits we gave them when they didn't have to go anywhere? I'm grateful to our reservists, but it's not as if they signed up without knowing they might have to go to a war. A lot of them signed up for the nice boost military service gives their civilian pay. And how come we're only compensating federal employees, if this is such a hot idea?

Yearly cost of direct treatment for mental illness in both the private and public sectors in the U.S.: $92 billion

This already seems to be being funded. Why is it necessary to repeal the tax cut, again?

Estimated cost of spending for countermeasures against smallpox, anthrax, botulinum toxin, plague and Ebola under Project BioShield: $5.6 billion between 2004 and 2013.

Again, already seems to be funded.

Cost of 60 million doses of an improved smallpox vaccine: $900 million

Again, already seems to be funded. One suspects they started to run out of reasonable-sounding programs and reached for the filler.

Annual cost of providing services to foster children, including educational assistance, job placement, health services and room and board: $200 million

Amount needed to establish a National Housing Trust to provide communities with funds to build, rehabilitate and preserve 1.5 million units of affordable housing over the next 10 years: $5 billion

I believe we have an organization that does this called HUD, which is funded rather lavishly.

Cost, per recipient, of Job Corps, an education and training program benefiting disadvantaged youth and young adults: $17,000

Benefit is a strong word without any serious study of outcomes. The government record on job training programs, however, is generally horrendous.

Federal funding requested in 2004 to maintain the National Domestic Violence Hotline: $3 million

Federal funding requested in 2004 for the national Abandoned Infants Assistance program: $45 million

Cost of assisting states in covering the excess costs of providing special education services to children with disabilities: $8.9 billion

Annual cost of providing funding to public libraries through state formula grants so that libraries can promote wider access to learning and information: $1.6 billion between 2004 and 2009

I'm pretty sure libraries are already promoting wider access to learning and information -- how, exactly, would this be different?

Cost of providing grants for treatment, counseling and referral for runaway and homeless youth subjected to sexual abuse in 2003: $15 million

Annual cost of funding the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: $20 million

I could go on about the . . . ahem. . . non-traditional statistical techniques practiced by the laundry list of left-wing advocacy groups from which the authors drew this list. But that would be like beating your six-year old cousin at pool and demanding a rematch. The things that are useful seem to be trivial, or already funded; the things that are non-trivial seem to be showboats with no measurable benefit. Anyway, consider them roundly damned.

The real question is, are the authors really intending to advocate that we should repeal the tax cut, fund all these programs for a year, and then end them? That would be stupid. Yet that's what they appear to be advocating when they title the article "What we could buy with the tax cut".

Well, no we couldn't, because even if we repealed it, we'd only get part of the revenue in one year. But let's say we capitalized the entire repeal at an attractive rate (this cannot be done in real life, but they're living in fantasyland, so why shouldn't we?) We pay for everything this year. Then next year the entire $300b+ bill comes due again -- around 1/6 of the entire federal budget. Actually, it will have grown, as government spending is wont to do, but we'll leave that aside as well. Where do we get the money? Raise taxes, I'm sure. By 13%. (By which I mean that your tax bill goes up by 13% of itself, not that we ad 13 percentage points to your current rate, for anyone who might be thinking of creating a new conservative factoid.) That's a big hit for this wish list of programs, few-to-none of which have been shown to have lasting benefits to anyone other than their program administrators and advocacy groups.

Why did the authors do this? Why, to make their case sound better, of course. Look at all we could be doing, this screams, if it weren't for old mean Bush and his tax cuts for The Rich! Admitting the we could only have a small fraction of this list wouldn't make the tax cut sound nearly so bad -- and admitting that the programs that actually provide measurable benefit are all already funded, or would cost trivial sums . . . what are you, some kind of right-wing fascist?

Pointless articles like this are not helpful. The only extent to which they work is the extent to whcih the readers don't notice the number flummery. If you can only make your point by deceiving your readers. . . well, maybe it's time to look for another point.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Reptile picture post apparently lacking substance

I have absolutely nothing to say about collective insanity, tendency toward nastiness or ideological blindness of the Right/Left/Dems/Republicans. I've been accused of being all of the above yet simultaneously committing apostasy in every context.

Patiopundit, speaking on some other subject, claims to be of two minds about all of this. Well, how would he feel about this? And I don't even know where to begin (or end) when confronted with this.

Perhaps that last picture is a metaphor for...something.

UPDATE: A colleague emails me the following:

The image of a snake eating its own tail is called an "ourobourus", and it has extremely important hermetic/cabalistic meaning. The symbol is generally taken to refer to continual re-birth or re-generation of the universe (or, in some theories, the demand for senseless IT spending).

Special agent Scully on the X-files had an ourobourus tatto on her shoulder. Don't ask how I know that.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Back from the break

Sorry I've been away -- between getting ready to go away for Memorial Day weekend, going away for Memorial Day weekend, and recovering from going away for Memorial Day weekend, I've been a mite preoccupied.

Later: income inequality. Now: dating advice!

Not from me, silly. From Salon. I was intrigued by this part of one of their personals letters:

There is an unwritten rule that the guy should not be the very first one to say "I love you" in a relationship, and I think for good reason. Is it worth the risk to break this piece of cultural wisdom?

I've always assumed that men basically knew the unwritten rules most women still operate under: we wait for you to call us, we make no move to pay on first dates, we give long descriptions of your hidden physical attributes and lovemaking techniques to our friends for comparison purposes. Yet here is one I was unaware of. Nonetheless, the author of the advice column (male), seems to tacitly endorse the existence of this rule as something as natural, universal, and ironclad as "Don't order broccoli on a first date". So there is a strong possibility that I have been sheltered. Have others heard of this rule?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Anyone who's interested can hear me on Behind the Headlines tonight around 8:30, discussing the spending binge our states have been on.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And people ask me why I think the Democrats have gotten insane on teh subject of the Administration.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

When you want something you've been thinking said better than you could ever hope to say it yourself, the first place to turn is, of course, Lileks:

So why did anyone believe the BBC story? Why did Robert Scheer take the bait and write an entire column based on an uncritical acceptance of the Beeb’s mad blather? The Prof was on Hewitt tonight (and contrary to what he said, he came off just fine) and he noted that it’s one of those stories that confirms the suspicions of those who wake every day believing the worst. Sure, they say the sun rises in the east, but that’s just to keep you from looking west where the real action is. Each side is guilty of this - in the 90s a substantial contingent of the right was convinced that Gov. Bill Clinton ran coke out of Mena. It’s almost as if you have two options:

1. I disagree with my opponent's position on taxation, and therefore I shall oppose it.

2. I disagree with my opponent's position on taxation, and therefore I believe he has sex with goats.

Which brings me to a political theory I have been developing for a while now:

Jane's Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

I used to think it was just the Republicans -- well, some Republicans -- who were insane. I mean, I am the only person I've ever met who actually thinks we got about the right result in the impeachment. We impeached the guy, to say "No, you can't just commit perjury", but we didn't remove him from office over a minor civil suit. (Although Democrats who are planning on deluging me with elegant arguments about how he shouldn't have had to answer those questions -- I agree with you, except for one little thing, which is that he signed, with great fanfare, the law that made it so he had to answer those questions. As far as I'm concerned, therefore, he's the only guy in America who should have had to answer such questions under oath.)

But I could see how you wanted him impeached, and I could also see the argument for not impeaching him. It was a judgement call.

Except that a substantial portion of the Republican Party seemed, long before, to have lost all judgement. They were insane on the subject of Clinton. It wasn't enough that they disagreed with him politically; nothing would do but that he be the AntiChrist. They flooded the airwaves and newsprint with vituperative rants about the veriest trivialities of his administration. They raged impotently at the people in America -- THE FOOLS! -- who couldn't see that Clinton was the AntiChrist, even though it was as plain as the nose on your face. Every tiny shred of news about Clinton, no matter how innocuous, was waved about as evidence of his perfidy. I recall listening to some radio commenter go on and on about some Rose Garden ceremony for some law that was, as laws go, blandly heartwarming though ultimately useless, rather than, say, totally antithetical to basic concepts of liberty. The radio host used this law, which was so boring that I can't remember its topic except that it had something to do with kids and learning, as proof of Clinton's inherent evilness. How dare he cavort with children in the Rose Garden when, as we have already seen, he's EEEEVVVVVIIIIILLLL.

Republicans, I thought, seem to be insane. (This opinion was quickly vindicated when they nominated the charming, yet thoroughly unelectable, Bob Dole.) I wonder what makes them that way?

Now I know. The loss of the presidency clearly unhinges people's minds.

Democratic websites now offer the same vast well of spleen, the same conviction that every single news item with the word "Bush" in it somehow vindicates their thesis that Bush is not merely a center-right president with tax policies they dislike, but a proto-Fascist intent on establishing a dictatorship and herding his political opponents into camps. I'm not saying that all Democrats believe this, any more than all Republicans were crazy Clinton bashers. But just as the Republicans did, they tolerate an astonishing array of nutty opinion. And a very large percentage of the commentariat, from the blogerati upwards, are totally obsessed with proving that Bush is, like, the worst president ever.

I confess myself surprised. I would have thought that they would have learned the lessons of the Clinton presidency, such as that obsessing with the commander-in-chief reflects worse on you than on him. But no, there's something about a political opponent in the Oval Office that seems to act as a red flag to a bull.

And of course, conspiracy theories have made it mainstream with the large number of thoroughly disproven tropes about Florida, from "A concerted effort was made by the Republicans to disenfranchise black people" to "Gore won" (that paper recount, the one you spent six months claiming would vindicate you, shows he lost. Deal with it.)

Republicans, of course, have turned into the Democrats of the nineties -- smugly convinced that they have merely assumed their rightful place at the top of the world, and that because of the essential goodness of their cause, they need exert little effort to stay there.

Of course, the way the Democrats are behaving now, they're right about that last part.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good News

Jane Galt is finally employed in a highly desireable job! Details to follow as they become available. The important thing right now is that Our Long National Nightmare is ended.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tax and Spend

I have a piece up on Tech Central Station today about the disastrous budget plans of my beloved state and local governments.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Don't forget!!!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jacob Levy calls the Senate tax cut proposal the worst tax cut ever. I'm not sure that's fair. It's certainly a dreadful one, but let's not forget all Clinton's "targeted tax cuts" that cost a bunch of money, subsidized things that people were mostly doing anyway, and introduced high levels of structural complexity and rigidity into the tax code.

Can anyone else think of other equally bad tax cuts?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Really good piece on health care by Robert Shapiro.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

New York City Metro Issues

Now that it's all metro, all the time, a correspondant writes to ask if it's true that the MTA lied about it's finances, or whether that's just rhetorical handwaving. The answer is, sorta.

The MTA wasn't totally clear about its finances. But in its defense, it wasn't legally obligated to be.

The Straphangers campaign is basing its lawsuit on the fact that Alan Hevesi has charged that the MTA has $500m more in surpluses than it revealed to the public. It got one of New York's famously liberal judges to go along with this, and rule that the MTA has to roll back the fare increases because the public hearing wasn't fair. Never mind that this may not be technologically feasible and will cost $2m, in addition to the $1.2m in revenue the MTA expects to lose per day.

But a quick glance at the numbers readily available from the indispensible Independant Budget Office reveals that the straphangers are telling less than the full story.

The MTA is projected to lose $250m this year, and $750m next year. That's more than twice the surplus that's supposed to save us, just for two years. And unlike a regular business, the MTA can't exactly cut costs elsewhere. It's largest expenses by far are its union labor force, infrastructure operation, and debt service, none of which are fungible without deep service cuts. And with employment down and the economy projected to remain in the doldrums for the foreseeable future, it's no good betting that rising ridership will save the system.

So while it's possible that we didn't need to raise fares right this instant, it's a pretty good bet that we'd have to do it pretty soon -- and before you've spent down the cash reserves isn't a bad time. And it's thoroughly foolhardy to roll the changes back, with all the attendant chaos, merely to reimplement them in another six months, even if such a thing could be accomplished.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Finally!

We get our first email offering statistical evidence of decreased quality of care!

We tried to hire a Chicago Economics PhD named Joseph Doyle last year. (He went to the Sloan School at MIT). He wrote a quite convincing paper that there was a reasonably sizeable effect of your insurance status on the probability of death from motor vehicle accidents. The paper is called ""Does Health Insurance Affect Treatment Decisions & Patient Outcomes? Using Automobile Accidents as Unexpected Health Shocks" (I can't find it on the web, but it's referenced in this paper)
It's really a very clever paper, and Doyle has all the proper levels of "scientific" modesty (to mention another interest of your) in describing it. The problem, of course, is that the uninsured aren't like other folks, so it's really difficult to figure out whether worse outcomes in the health care system are due to their lack of insurance or from other stuff. Doyle's ingenious idea was to look only at motor vehicle accidents where the guy is brought in unconscious. The uninsured die more often. There are obviously hosts of objections one could make to my description of this (and believe me, we brought them all up when Doyle came to talk to us) but he carried out a number of tests to try and ferret out what caused the result. We are a group of economists who were highly skeptical of his conclusion, but this was a case where the care of analysis won most of us over.

That said, the effect wasn't huge, it dealt only with mortality, not morbidity, and it really focused on trauma care versus, say cancer treatment, where Doyle admits he can't even imagine how one would study such a thing in an unbiased way. But I just wanted to let you know that there is at least one non-anecdotal rigorous study (earned him a PhD from Chicago) which does suggest that the uninsured get somewhat worse care. Keep up the good work.

That's the kind of evidence we like to see! Of course, we'd want to see more studies, and to find out how he controlled for prior health and severity of injury, but we presume that those are exactly the sort of thing the economists asked about.

See, guys, there is disconfirming evidence out there! Now let's broaden the scope, since the original question of "Who hasn't treated their children for lack of funds" seems to be too narrow. Anyone have stories about people who couldn't get cancer treatments because they lacked health insurance?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question Answered

Yes, race did have something to do with Jayson Blair being allowed to continue writing for the Times despite multiple screw ups. I imagine that the bloggers who were screaming about what racist bastards people were for suspecting it will now post apologies.

Before opening the session to questions, Mr. Raines made a pre-emptive attempt to address whether Mr. Blair's race — he is black — had played a role in his being added last fall to the team covering the hunt for the snipers in the Washington area.

Only six months earlier, Mr. Blair, 27, had been found to be making so many serious errors as a reporter on the metropolitan staff that he had been informed that his job was in jeopardy.

"Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter," Mr. Raines said. "I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities."

"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Calling all Dr. Weevil fans. . .

He needs your help!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Profanity is too weak

In the midst of a gargantuan fiscal crisis, the New York City Council found the funds to transport people to Albany to demonstrate in favor of rent control.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lunch hour questions

One more post before I go back to work.

I'm reading the excellent Left Hooks, Right Crosses, a collection of political writing from left and right edited by the inimitable Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Caldwell. There are a number of essays on The Bell Curve, which I have read. I am the only person I know who has done so, and also, the only person I know without an opinion on its veracity. I keep meaning to re-read it, and see if I form an opinion, but I haven't the time.

What struck me is this: the arguments against the Bell Curve seem, overall, to be very poor. I recall reading Stephen Jay Gould's piece on it in the New Yorker, which literally flabbergasted me; it seemed such an obvious fabrication of selective quotation, half-truths, and statistical mumbo-jumbo that any reader who had read the Bell Curve would indignantly reject it. But of course, no one did reject it. No one read the book. They took Stephen Jay Gould's word for it, because he was Stephen Jay Gould. (I want to state here that this was a long time ago, and without access to Lexis-Nexis, I'm going on memory; it's possible that the piece is better than I remember it. But while it's possible I got the statistics wrong, I recall several instances of really egregious selective quotation that couldn't have been accidental. If SJG needed to resort to such tactics to refute the work, how right could he really have been?)

The strongest item I've seen is questioning the separated-twin studies from which Herrenstein and Murray draw their conclusions; several pieces argued that twins who were allegedly raised in different environments were in fact being kept by close family members. This is very important, and would be even stronger if the writers had mentioned how many children out of the study were being kept near each other.

All the pieces against them were marred by gratuitous name calling and vitriolic denunciations of anyone who would even consider the possibility that such a thing were true. I don't recall enough detail about the book to have an opinion one way or another. But as Charles Murtaugh often says, the world is not here to please you. It is possible that there are vast, heritable differences in IQ. It's also possible that there aren't. The problem that no one seems to have addressed is what we're supposed to do if, as Murray argues, IQ is important, even if none of it is hereditary.

The problem with environment is that, from what I know, it seems to be most important in the years before seven, in terms of actually shaping aptitude. And the overwhelmingly important environment is home.

Let's look at a child of low-IQ parents. Say that IQ is mostly heritable. That child is starting off with an overwhelming handicap that we can't fix unless we're willing to consider unspeakable eugenics programs. Sure, with a good environment, we might improve things a little. But unless we're willing to deny kids with a better heredity those same resources, their genes are going to set a ceiling that will keep them from rising as high as their high-IQ counterparts.

Now say that heredity plays no role. Do things get better? Not really. That child is going to grow up in a home with massive intellectual deficits. Very low IQ parents are unable to provide the rich stimulation that children of high-IQ parents get. Those children end up with massive deficits in the number and quality of words they've heard, on the order of sixty percent; the quality and quantity of new experiences; the number and kind of games played; the level of attention. How do you make that up? I think everyone envisions a head-start style program, but the reason parenting is so important in the first place is that it provides intensive, one-on-one attention. This is why friends in social work tell me that even a moderately bad foster home is better than a good institution. Institutional children don't thrive; they are duller, emotionally and intellectually, than peers raised in homes. (This has very interesting implications for the British upper class, incidentally. But I digress.)

Even if we wanted to pay for that kind of program, where are we going to find the millions and millions of high-IQ adults to become surrogate parents to low-IQ children for several hours a day? Sticking a kid in a room with twenty other kids to be read stories and play number games is not going to equalize the differences.

So while people who attacked the idea that IQ is strongly heritable seem to think that this makes the problem less intractable, I'd say it makes it rather more. We're going to have genetic engineering to overcome the former within the next hundred years, I'd bet. But I think we'd all be frightened of the kind of social engineering that would overcome the latter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I thought this was amusing, but I also thought it was obvious that it was a joke. Well, Jacob Levy clearly thinks that people might think it wasn't a joke. If you thought it wasn't a joke, you need to put the stereotype detector up a little higher.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More reader mail

Another piece on the perils of our dog-eat-dog medical system:

I can give you a very specific story about Canadian and US Healthcare.

My daughter goes to college at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. I like to tell people that when she graduated, I wasn't satisfied with kicking her out of the house so I kicked her out of the country.

At college, she developed an allergy to the dust in the dorm. This was in September of 2002. Since she was in Canada, the socialist healthcare went into full swing. She saw the school nurse on the same day she asked to be seen. The nurse determined it was an allergy (not sure how it was that she was qualified to make that determination) and contacted the dorm manager and had her mattress and pillows replaced and the carpets cleaned. She slept on the common room couch for two nights while they did this. The allergies didn't go away. She went back to the nurse who said she should see the doctor. The next available appointment was in six days. The doctor said it was allergies and wanted the dorm to clean her room. She told him they already did that. He said it didn't matter, his first treatment protocol was to ensure her environment was cleansed. So, the dorm manager cleaned the carpets and threw in the drapes too. Still no relief, so she went back to see the doctor. You can't see the doctor without a referral, so she got to see the nurse again. The nurse ordered yet another cleaning of her room and scheduled her to see the doctor in five days. The doctor didn't know what to do at this point. He needed tests for allergies, but he isn't an allergist and couldn't order those tests. He also couldn't prescribe allergy medicine without the tests, so he consulted her to an allergist. (She said she had to ask the doctor about fifty questions to figure out why he couldn't just write a script to begin with.) The first available appointment was in six weeks. That appointment was subsequently pushed back another four weeks due to the doctor getting ill and having to catch up with his backlog. There wasn't any other allergist available to fill in while he was sick. By this time, the semester was over and she came home for Christmas break. (I notice that my timing is a little off, but there were breaks between the cleanings and her determining that the "therapy" wasn't
working.)

When I saw her in the airport, I didn't recognize her. Her face was swollen and her eyes were horrible. She looked like she was forty years old from all the swelling and wrinkles and redness.

As soon as I got home, we called the military health system (my wife is retired, so we get health care through them). The military isn't known for it's incredible efficiency, but they gave us an appointment for the next morning. The doctor wrote her a prescription for an anti-allergy medication, gave her six months worth of re-fills and sent her on her way. He was also very annoyed that the Canadian doctor hadn't done more. He let us know that the next time she had this type of problem, she could call the clinic directly, speak to a primary care physician and probably get treatment over the phone due to her situation...as long as it wasn't too serious, in which case we plan to fly her home to be seen. She was feeling better by the evening and looked normal two days later.

She still hasn't seen the Canadian allergist. He was unable to catch up on the backlog of patients with Canadian Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and a few other holidays mixed in. She has also gotten two refills from the military's mail order pharmacy, without a problem.

If I had been completely without insurance, I would have taken her to the local ER. This costs $129. I know this because the military doesn't always pay for ER treatment and I had to foot the bill when I dislocated my knee. The medication would have cost $30. While this may set back someone with a $40,000 income, it wouldn't kill them. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that in less time than a socialist system would take, that same earner could save up enough to go to a real doctor and be treated.

I know that my readership is biased rightwards -- but surely someone can come up with stories about how they were denied access to critical care because of cost. Come on, my pinkish pals! Flood me with horror stories. I promise I'll post them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Testimonial

Wow. I just got this amazing response to my post on Dean's health care rhetoric:

Dear Megan,

You recent post asking for hard evidence of children going without treatment prompted me to write, although with a story completely counter to the one Dean is claiming:

In August of last year my 23 year old brother, Adam, was struck by a car while riding his bicycle in downtown St. Louis. He was knocked from his bike, rolled up the hood of the car, then was carried by his own momentum across the hood and fell to the street striking his helmet-less head. This last blow resulted in a severe brain injury, which ultimately resulted in his death.

At the time of the accident, Adam had been without health insurance for approximately 6 months. He had only recently graduated college and been removed from our parent's insurance. For a reason we'll never know (simple negligence most likely), he had declined to sign on to his employer's health plan - I note this fact only for the sake of honesty; Adam was not without access to health insurance, he had simply declined it. The first night in the hospital, my parents (wisely) declined to sign the financial responsibility statement requested by the hospital. It took two days for us to determine definitively that Adam was not covered. The driver of the car that hit him had been released by the police on the scene - and had returned to her home state of Mississippi (even now, we expect to never see or hear from her again). It took us another 2 days to discover that her car insurance was forged. In short - Adam was in a coma, critically injured, and had no financial or insurance assets which might have covered the cost of his treatment.

Adam was taken to the nearest hospital, which coincidentally has a reputation for supporting the best neurosurgery unit in the region. Over the course of following 13 days he received the following treatments:

-2 separate cranial operations, each of which required two neurosurgeons and lasted approximately 10 hours a piece.

-2 cranial shunt insertions, requiring approximately 90 minutes of time for one neurosurgeon

-13 days of 24/7 intensive care, with a minimum of 1 IC nurse dedicated exclusively to monitoring his condition

-5 days constant monitoring with a portable EKG

-A number of different drugs which filled about 2.5 pages on the hospital's final bill

-20 MRI exams

-At least a thousand other things I can't recall

Total cost - roughly $230,000.

Total cost to my family - $0.

There is no doubt in my mind that Adam received the best possible treatment someone in his condition could have, despite the fact that the hospital knew it had no guarantee of recovering its costs.

There is also no doubt in my mind that Adam's death would have come much sooner, and that his treatment would have been far less aggressive and inferior in quality, if this same scenario had played out in a country with a Hillarycare-esque System.

To illustrate, I refer you to the 20 MRI's Adam received in his last 13 days. I once read that there are as many MRI instruments in the Washington D.C. area as there are in all of Canada. This may well be a canard, but there is certainly no shortage of anecdotes detailing just how difficult it is for Canadian patients to receive even the most basic of diagnostic tests. The average wait for an MRI is something like 3 months - Adam needed 20 of them in 13 days. Advocates of single payer health care appear to believe that the system which produces the former result is superior to the one that produces the latter.

Anyone who thinks that our healthcare system should be effectively ruined by a healthy dose of socialism has either never had a loved one in desperate need of advanced medical care or has absolutely no concept of just how poorly these systems function.

And this does not even consider the fact that none of these systems produce new treatments or techniques at a rate remotely comparable to the US health care system. Techniques that might one day, perhaps, save someone else's brother in a similar situation. That statement may be a cliché', but it's also very, very true.

I don't know if anything I've written above might be of use to you in your coming "pungent words". I have to admit, writing this was at least 20% therapy for me (I've wanted to say these things for some time now - your post just opened the door). But I have a very compelling reason for opposing anything resembling HillaryCare.

I've been through the worst case scenario most HillaryCare advocates like to use as a rhetorical bludgeoning tool - and it convinced me just how wrong they are.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So -- Jayson Blair. Indictment of affirmative action, or no?

First of all, though I'm not a fan of AA, I think that Jayson Blair could easily be an indictment of affirmative action as it was practiced at the Times, without being an indictment of the practice in general.

Second of all, I really don't buy the idea that because they used racial preferences in hiring, which they pretty clearly did, the Times somehow let themselves in for this. Anyone who's ever done hiring knows that a stellar resume and a good interview are no guarantee of competency; conversely, one of the best guys I ever worked with had been a porter before he went into technology. There are no perfect metrics. And even if they'd hired someone with ludicrously substandard qualifications, it does not therefore follow, as night to day, that the guy was going to be a plagiarising, expense-account abusing liar. Any more than a glossy set of credentials would ensure that he wasn't any of those things.

Third of all, it seems clear to me that there was more than one pathology here. Jayson Blair was the Boss's Favorite. He smoked with the Managing Editor. Anyone who's worked at a corporation run by someone of Howell Raines' apparently dubious managerial talents knows that you don't have to throw race into the mix in order to get some ugly results.

Fourth of all, it's not really all that usual to check things like graduation as (again) anyone who's ever had hiring power can attest. I've come across more than one resume of someone who clearly hadn't been at the institution they claimed (one of them claimed to have been at school with me, but didn't remember a single major incident from the four years, and couldn't tell me where Smokey Joe's was.) Hell, I went to college with a guy who hadn't graduated from high school -- he'd been expelled second semester of his senior year, but his school hadn't informed Penn. It is more than most of us can manage to telephone ten or twenty educational institutions, and a hundred former employers, to verify that our final applicants were there.

Nonetheless, it seems possible, even likely, that race was a factor. From what I can tell, every editor he worked with thought he was incompetent, yet he was repeatedly promoted, which is definitely unusual in the corporations I've worked for -- usually, they wait for you to improve before they give you more responsibility. I mean, I've worked in plenty of places where people whose co-workers thought they were incompetent got promoted, but usually if your manager was urging that you be fired, your future with the firm was fairly limited. Moreover, reading between the employees of the Times seem to pretty much be saying that, yes, Jayson was off-limits because he was black. That seems to me to be a corruption of the ideals of affirmative action: blacks aren't being given an opportunity to excel; they're ornamental conscience-salvers pretending to do real work just like white folks, but just like the kids who show up on Take Our Daughters to Work Day, we donn't expect them to actually do a good job. But frowning on that sort of affirmative action is not an automatic condemnation of hiring preferences.

Defenders of the Times aren't really doing the paper any favors when they claim that it wasn't affirmative action. If it was affirmative action, it was a misguided implementation of possibly misplaced ideals, with limited overall effect. If it wasn't, their repeated refusal to even investigate gross abuses betrays a lack of interest in truth or accuracy that calls into question our ability to believe anything written in the paper. How many other untouchables are still writing for them?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Things like this strike me as weird: EJ Dionne makes an unverifiable statement that Bush is being given a pass on things that Gore would have been pilloried for.

The unverifiable statement itself doesn't strike me as weird; I am forever being inundated by people from both ends of the political spectrum shouting "you can't tell me that if Gore were president, he wouldn't have been treated differently!" Whatever, chum. The Psychic Friends Network just cut me off for nonpayment.

What strikes me as weird is the example Dionne chooses: the New York Times.

I mean, what is the mechanism of this Bush favoritism supposed to be? He can hardly claim, as conservatives do, that reporters and editors are slanting stories because of bias; they're Gore guys, through and through. Nor can he claim that it's because they're pandering to their readership, which is nearly as liberal as the paper itself. Advertisers? Maybe. But its advertisers are New York people and companies, which are still very liberal. The risk of alienating them by sucking up to Bush has got to be at least as great as the risk of alienating them by slamming him.

Why then? Because the folks at the Times are just stupid, or mean?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Monetary Policy

You know it's bad when the central bank can't afford to print money.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Egregious Idiocy

It looks like New York is exploring alternative avenues to raising revenue: fining small business owners for having awnings with too many words on them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Democrats in New York are complaining that George Pataki didn't mention the obscene bedget deficit in the run-up to the election. Which is true. The only problem is, the Democrats didn't mention it either. Everyone saw this coming, and no one wanted to say anything, because the first guy to talk was going to be the guy who got to promise tax increases and spending cuts. I agree wholeheartedly that this should have been an issue in the election, but the blame for its absence can be spread evenly around.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

HillaryCare, Part II

So with the unveiling of Dean's new health care plan, I think that we can presume the Democrats are going to make some sort of national health care the centerpiece of their 2004 agenda, unless of course they nominate John Kerry, in which case they'll have no agenda whatsoever. But I digress.

As you can imagine, I'll have some very pungent words for nationalized health care just as soon as I clear up this backlog of work. But for now, here's a question. This is the money quote from Dean's announcement:

``Here, in the richest, most advanced country in the world in the 21st century, it's simply wrong for a sick child to go without seeing a doctor because her parents can't afford it,'' he said, noting the United States was the last of the major industrialized countries to provide universal health care.

But here's the thing: I'm unaware of any situation in which sick children go without seeing a doctor simply because their parents can't afford it. Poor people have Medicare. Less poor, uninsured people have free clinics, out-of-pocket payments, or the emergency room. The only situation in which I can see this occurring -- that a child goes without a doctor simply for lack of health insurance, rather than because of other parental dysfunction -- is one in which a lower-middle-class family cares more about their credit rating than their child. In other words, it seems vanishingly unlikely.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Can anyone produce evidence -- not anecdotal, "my cousin says. . . ", but real data consisting either of peer-reviewed studies not funded by single-payer advocates, or of personal experience in which you, or a member of your immediate family, did not take a sick child in need of medical attention to the doctor because of the expense? Children with the flu, or other non-fatal maladies for which the only treatment is rest and liquids, do not count. Perhaps in some theoretical medical textbook world, they should see a doctor to ensure that it's nothing serious -- but my mother didn't take us to the doctor for those things, and we had perfectly good health insurance. The pain-in-the-ass factor is too difficult to separate from the expense factor in mild illnesses, so please -- only serious cases.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Special Sauce for the Old Grey Goose

I haven't had much to say on all Blair all the time, just because I can see just how this could happen to The New York Times, it being a great big honkin' bureaucracy and all. The following, however, jumped out at me during my morning read as too funny after all the moralizing we businessmen-Times readers have had to endure on the Grey Lady's editorial pages.

Arthur Sulzberger announced today a new and lower standard for "public trusts" (via the Wall Street Journal no less, so the link requires subscription)

In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger said there is little that anyone could have done to prevent Mr. Blair, who had worked at the Times nearly four years, from putting false information into the paper. "Do we have a system designed to uncover venality? No, we don't, and you know something, I guess I am not unhappy with that," Mr. Sulzberger said. "I don't want us to become a police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company."

Mr. Sulzberger would, for instance, "be unhappy" with measures such as:

• Independent private and regulatory audits;
  
• Records of interactions with the public and all internal email retained for seven years on specified searchable media;
  
• Mandatory continuous use of vacation time to uncover fraud;
  
• Pointless and annoying exams on record-keeping, how to interact with the public and how to trip up your own people;
  
• all correspondence reviewed prior to receipt or posting;
  
• a centralized public record of complaints related to employees;
  

After all, no business should "have a system designed to uncover venality." That would be like becoming a "police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company." Unless, of course, you are a financial services firm, in which case we can safely assume you are out to rip off someone.

I look forward to The Times applying Mr. Sulzberger's standard to its editorial evaluation of the next accounting or rogue-trading scandal.

P.S. What is it with "venal" these days? It seems to have become the mot du jour for the politically correct. Since money does not seem to have been at the core of Jayson Blair's motivation, Sulzberger's choice of words is rather odd.

To paraphrase Anthony Blanche "I wanted to spring into a cab and cry 'take me to Jayson's venal articles'".

UPDATE: Patrick Sullivan points to the following in the comments (this editorial also quoted in the New York Sun's editorial yesterday):

"[T]he move to hold top managers personally liable for any
misrepresentations made to investors - which the new corporate oversight
legislation also does - is a watershed worth celebrating.C.E.O's will no
longer be able to feign ignorance about the details of the companies'
accounting, as Jeffrey Skilling haughtily did early this year at a
Congressional hearing on Enron's implosion."

--The New York Times, editorial, "Downsizing the Imperial C.E.O.," August 9,
2002

"But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to
examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no
newsroom search for scapegoats. 'The person who did this is Jayson Blair,'
he said. 'Let's not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk
editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.'"

--The New York Times, news article, "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long
Trail of Deception," May 11, 2003

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You should really go read this post on the judicial filibuster by Lawrence Solum right now.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Bloggers can do better than that

Check out Norman Mailer's response to Dennis Miller's fairly amusing WSJ piece on the Norman Mailer diatribe I trashed here.

Dear Dennis,

Just because the two big guys who flanked you on Monday Night Football took away your balls and left you with a giggle in replacement doesn't mean you have to suck up to The Wall Street Journal.

But thanks for appreciating my fine use of "keen."

Keen up, then, to my piece and read it again without panic. You're too good to become squalid and kiss-ass for so little.

Cheers, blessings,

Norman Mailer

Why is it that every time I see a debater descending into the genitalia wars, it's always one from the allegedly enlightened left?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Laffer Curve Goes Local

Great piece on the disastrous, insane tax plan that our legislature has just given us here in scenic New York. The city council and the state legislature together said "No! No! No!" to cutting spending -- in fact, with a record deficit, they gave us $2b in new spending. At the same time, they raised our already enormous taxes to record levels.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, read the editorial. And apply some common sense: over the long run, tax increases are going to cost the city more than they gain in revenue.

Long-term, the damage to the city's economy could be profound. Over the last four decades, New York City has become the most heavily taxed city in America. And as a result, Gotham has not added a single net new private-sector job over that period of time, while local government jobs have grown by more than 20% -- 90,000 positions.

The private sector in New York has stagnated because high taxes have driven both businesses and individuals out of town. The city perpetually has a net outflow of residents -- more people leave the city to live elsewhere in the U.S. than come here from somewhere else in America. The outflow is especially intense among families earning more than $100,000 a year. Yet the city is again increasing the tax rates on these individuals, arguing that they are most able to bear the added costs of higher taxes.

But Jane, I hear you cry, you've told us time and time again that cutting the Federal income tax won't increase tax revenue! How can you say something different in this case, when the state and city tax rates aren't even close to the Federal level?

Because federal tax rates are an entirely different animal from local taxes. It's a lot easier to relocate your house or your business across state lines than it is to move to the Turks and Caicos, which most people can't even spell. It's especially easy here in Manhattan, where New Jersey, Connecticut, and even Pennsylvania are eager to welcome new tax dollars at extremely attractive marginal rates. Consider that, when all the proposed tax increases are enacted, someone making $100k a year will face a combined state and local tax burden of 12% of their income, plus a sales tax of 9%. That may sound like a lot to you -- but it's hard to get by in the City of the $1800 Studio Apartment on $100k, particularly when the tax man is taking (after Uncle Sam has his bite) more than half of your income. New Jersey offers convenient transportation, a lower cost of living -- and a tax rate less than half of that in New York City. And I haven't even added in things like the property tax yet.

Bloomberg took a lot of heat for that property tax -- but to his credit, he proposed it as an alternative to an income tax hike, which he correctly predicted would scare the bejeesus out of the bondholders. The bondholders, you see, are very much aware that if the tax base moves away, the city's going to be in trouble. It's a pity the legislators aren't smart enough to realize that if they don't pay some attention to the Laffer Curve, they'll find they haven't any base left to tax and spend.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's always delightful to stumble across someone who thinks that a presidential election campaign should be run like sixth grade popularity contest. It would be even more delightful for the Republicans if the Democrats took this advice. That supermajority may be coming quicker than you think!

Update James Joyner does it better, and at greater length.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Juan Non-Volokh has a great post on why the proposed lawsuit to end Democratic filibusters is such a bad idea.

Personally, I'm not opposed to the idea that you need a supermajority to confirm judges -- in some sense, I think it's not a bad idea to require that 60% of the Senate be comfortable with the judges on the bench.

However, I am extremely troubled by the ideological underpinnings of the filibuster. I think that fair-minded people can agree that the reason for the filibuster is a Democratic desire to keep the court from moving rightward in order to protect controversial rulings from being overturned. (And the purpose of the Republican procedural games was, in turn, a desire to prevent the court from moving leftward, thus preventing new controversial rulings from being put in place.) The effect is to impose a de-facto litmus test on appointees: we may not have judges who will not support Roe, Bakke, and their ideological brethren.

Why is this a problem, ask belligerent Democratic friends. Why shouldn't we be allowed to protect those important rulings?

Well, for starters, if they're such a great idea, how come you can't get a majority to protect them?

But that's just quibbling. It's deeper than that. This is not the first time in our history that the courts have been used to end a heated debate by imposing a fiat rule. Sometimes it works; Brown v. the Board of Education did sound the death knell for segregation. But often it doesn't, and if the divide is deep, and growing deeper, the power of the court is the worst way to resolve the dispute. The south won a temporary victory with Dred Scott -- but the appeal was lost at Gettysburg. And if we hadn't had the court settling deep disputes by fiat in the first case, we might not have needed the second.

The logic behind this Democratic filibuster is not really about left and right. It is essentially an attempt to legislate specific court decisions on specific issues: abortion, affirmative action, and so on; the Democrats are effectively saying that no matter who has the majority, no one may nominate judges that are not pro-choice. That's not merely an extremely disturbing abrogation of the court's power to the legislature; it's an attempt to do an end run around the legislative process. The separation of powers has, by and large, stood us in good stead for two hundred years. No one law, or even any three, are worth the damage this effort is doing to our system.

If you're gettin ready to defend the filibuster to me, let me first ask you this: how do you feel about the Republicans imposing the same litmus tests in reverse? That is to say, no one may be approved if we find evidence that they are in favor of Roe, Bakke, and their judicial cousins. Still think it's fair? I've no doubt you can come up with some interesting sounding reasons that that's entirely different, but you and I know that that's just posturing. If you don't think turnabout is fair play, you need to rethink your position. Because "to hell with fairness, I'm right!" is going to be a mighty uncomfortable line to be selling if y'all lose seats in the next round of elections.

Which is ultimately why the Republican lawsuit is such a dreadful idea. It's an attempt to do the same thing they're protesting in the Democrats: using the courts to end a political dispute. And this dispute isn't worth that kind of precedent. Besides, there's a strong possibility that if they hold off, the voters will resolve the dispute for them. And not to the liking of the Democrats.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Interesting. Bill Hobbs says that one of the favorite liberal factoids -- that George W. Bush went AWOL during Viet Nam -- just ain't so.

Bush volunteered to serve in a unit at the very moment it was seeing combat in Vietnam, and only a restructuring of the unit's mission before he completed his flight training made it unlikely he would fly in combat. And he was never AWOL - he completed his required service and even served beyond the minimum.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I want to write more about New York's disastrous new budget when I have time, but here's a start: it's risking our credit rating.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Dispatches from the Fat Wars

It's hard to get fat kids to shed pounds if their mothers don't realize they're overweight.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've been meaning to link to this piece for a while, an excellent post by Fritz Schrank who thought they were going to eat their tobacco companies and have them too.

States have been spending the bejeesus out of the tobacco settlements, capitalizing the future payments to cover current spending, allocating the monies six ways from Sunday, promising activist groups and public sector unions a juicy cut of future payments in return for their support at the poll. They've also been raising the hell out of tobacco taxes in order to close budget shortfalls.

They thought that they could get away with this because cigarettes are a classic example of a price inelastic good: a good for which even large changes in price produce very small changes in demand. But it seems that cigarettes aren't quite as price inelastic as the states thought; when cigarette prices go up to $7.00 a pack, people do curtail their consumption. This hurts the revenue stream from which the states are supposed to take their payments. It may be an overall benefit to society, but that isn't going to help George Pataki placate the health care workers who thought they were getting raises financed by the tobacco money.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that settlements haven't stopped the class actions, and the payments on other class actions may force the tobacco companies into bankruptcy. If that happens, I'm told the states will have to stand in line like everyone else for pennies on the dollar.

It's especially interesting to me because there seems to be a significant manifestation of the tragedy of the commons. Each state has an incentive to maximize their personal revenue at the expense of the other states; hence the hike in tobacco taxes on top of the stealth tax hike represented by the settlements. But if they all raise their taxes, they push the companies into bankruptcy, and everyone is worse off than if they kept milking the revenue streams of a going concern. Yet because the incentive to defect is high, everyone rushes to raise their own taxes so they can get theirs while the getting is good.

Far down the road, we can also look forward to rising medical and pension costs, since smokers very conveniently die after their peak earning years, but before they require expensive long-term care. On the other hand, we get more years sitting at Granny's knee, and who can put a price on that?

Other than a lot of very angry public sector union workers, I mean.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Poetry Wednesday

Most of the poetry we now know from World War I, with the exception of In Flanders Fields, is a blistering indictment of the horrors of war. But there were also poems in the heroic tradition, like this one from Rupert Brooke:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The cynic in us says that this is not true: memories fade, the earthworms carry those last molecules of England away. But another part of me says that it is true; that the heroic choice to place your own body between your beloved home and war's desolation cannot be erased, even if it is forgotten. Brooke himself died of blood poisoning en route to the Dardanelles, and he is buried in a grave on Skyros that will be forever England as long as anyone is reading English poetry.

Of course, I have the furtive fondness for maudlin poetry characteristic of the upper-middlebrow. Don't worry; next week we'll have excerpts from Howl.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm not an enormous fan of reality television, but nonetheless, I'm currently watching American Idol. Every once in a while I like to see what the proles are doing with their time.

What I don't understand is why they have to drag out the agony by separating out the bottom two and making them, and the audience sit through two commercial breaks while wondering which one's going to get the axe. It's horrible.

Competition I understand. There is no true excellence without the possibility of failure. But is there really big market demand for slow ritual humiliation?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I think the New York Times circulation drop has been somewhat overblown -- their circulation is down onlly off the massive post-9/11 spike, and that after a 33% price increase. While it's true that the Post's circulation was up, the New York Post probably wasn't the paper that most out of town people turned to to find out what was happening here in the days after 9/11.

Nonetheless, I think the fact that the NYT's circulation is dropping as the Post's rises probably does indicate a swing towards conservatism in these insecure days. And this argument, which I've heard in multiple places, is wrong:

They raised prices 33-1/3% and circulation dropped 5.1%. What is everybody? Stupid? They made money on the drop. (100 copies at $.75 equals $75 dollars; 94 copies at a dollar equals, er, um around $94) Their strategy is to simply lop off the less well heeled and build an advertising base of big hitters who can buy show tickets at $125 per seat, Knicks and Ranger tickets at $500 each, trips to Europe at $10,000 per person, and so on. They don't want Joe and Jane Lunchbucket to be SEEN reading the snooty New York Times. Howell Raines is a hero to the suits upstairs.

That would be true if newspapers made their money off of subscriptions. But subscriptions are only a fraction of their revenue. If you check their financial statements for 2002, you will see that subscriptions are barely more than 1/4 of revenue. The lion's share of revenue is advertising, and advertising revenue is predicated on the number of eyeballs that see the ad. So while hiking the cover price may increase subscription revenue, it may well do so to the overall financial detriment of the paper. Indeed, if you check the revenue figures (See Consolidated Statements of Income on Page 54), you'll see that while subscription revenues are up slightly, advertising revenues are flat despite a slight recovery in the advertising environment from 2001's lows.

There are some caveats. There's the aforementioned advertising slump making it hard to raise ad rates; the subscription hike was no doubt a response to this. There's also the fact that companies do occasionally have to raise their prices to keep up with inflation. This is because subscriptions serve as a sort of signalling mechanism to advertisers, telling them how committed readers are to read the paper. If your paper is too cheap, advertisers will assume that your readers have a very low committment. They'll also assume your readers are -- well, in an unattractive income demographic. If it's expensive, on the other hand, they figure that you're damn well going to read the thing, eyeballing their ad as you do. This is why free papers apparently make the vast majority of their revenue on personal ads and rooms for rent. Nonetheless, it's clear that the New York Times didn't significantly improve their overall revenue picture this year, despite a major price hike.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Interesting blog of the week

Hasidic rebel offers the inside look on a community that doesn't get a lot of airtime in the blogosphere.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Schadenfreude is an ugly emotion, but it can be a lot of fun, especiallly when applied to currency regimes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of egregious redundancy

Great Robert Samuelson article.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Terrific post from Kevin Drum on things to keep in mind when you're reading survey data.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Radley Balko has a nice piece on ACORN, the living wage activists who were using the exemption laws for managers to pay their leg employees $18k a year for 54 hours of work per week, and pulling out every illegal stop in the book to keep them from unionizing. Interestingly, I was having a conversation yesterday with someone who used to work for ACORN, and he said that he could see why they did it, because having a union for low wage employees would severely hamper his effectiveness. Which is probably true. The problem with that statement is that the managers of nursing homes and food service firms undoubtedly feel exactly the same way.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Pensions delayed are pensions denied . . .

The Wall Street Journal reports that airlines are seeking a five year "delay" in augmenting their pension funds, which are now underfunded due to the collapse in stock prices. It's hard to blame them; they're hemorrhaging cash at the same time that they have to top up a whacking great pension underhang. But it appears they're not the only industry making such requests:

At the same time, however, the airlines' attempt to seek pension-funding relief is part of a broader push toward such legislation in the U.S., with many companies seeking changes to mortality rates and requests to contribute more of their company stock, rather than cash, to their pension plans

These are dreadful, horrible ideas.

The general way to change your mortality statistics to reduce your reported pension liability is to assume that everyone is going to die younger than you've been estimating, thus drawing pensions for fewer years. Mortality is going down, not up, in this country. It would be egregious malfeasance to change your mortality statistics in order to make your pension estimates more favorable, unless you find that your vested employees are disproportionately composed of alchoholic skydivers who smoke 3 packs a day.

Contributing your company stock is even worse. This is effectively what happened at Enron -- employees were betting not only their current incomes, but their retirement, on the success of one company. No matter how well run the company is, that's a recipe for disaster.

We'll be watching as this develops. But it wouldn't hurt to call your congressman to nip this one in the bud.

Update: A former actuary comments, saying that it's perfectly legit to change your assumptions, but that they shouldn't anyway because it's a temptation to malfeasance. I'd argue that the standard for determining whether someone has a "blue collar" life expectancy is pretty inexact: whether they're represented by a union. Pilots and flight attendants are covered by a union, and their only risk to mortality is risky bar behavior between flights. More broadly, not all unions are alike. Construction workers have a highly elevated risk of mortality, both because they're disproportionately poor immigrants from countries with inferior health care, and because what they do is risky. They also smoke like chimneys. I doubt health care workers, telephone linesmen, or auto painters have the same kind of increased mortality risk, but this bill lumps them all in together. If they want to do a mortality study, they should study the mortality rates in the professions whose estimates they want to alter, and they should be forced to top up any that live longer than their assumptions, so that if they go belly up later on, the taxpayer doesn't have to bail them out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And here's why surveys and polling are such a black art.

One of the biggest ones isn't even covered: it's getting harder and harder to get people on the phone. I participated in a health survey the city of New York was doing; it took me fifteen minutes and I figured, what the hell, here's some civic duty. But I talked to any number of other people who'd hung up on the survey takers. This is getting more and more common with polls and surveys, and it's a huge problem, because the people who hang up aren't simply randomly distributed, so you end up getting samples hugely weighted with the old and unemployed, and underweighted with those who have better things to do than answer questions about public policy.

The article does, however, have some troubling ideas about our poll-driven democracy:

Economists have gone even further in explaining/excusing public sloth in regard to political beliefs and actions. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan recently has posited the appropriateness of rational irrationality, whereby we choose an optimal amount of absurd and counterfactual things to believe based on what it costs us to hold these unrealistic beliefs.

Caplan’s concept would have helped clarify Weissberg’s findings, which show that people seem to credulously accept the endless possibilities of government goodies, believing they will all deliver exactly the benefits they promise. Weissberg argues that most polls are systematically biased toward manufacturing a vox populi that clamors for an ever-growing welfare state.

To test this thesis, he designed and executed a pair of surveys that he thinks provide a more sophisticated and accurate way of gauging an intelligent, informed decision -- not just an ignorant wish. He used these polls to retest public support for a couple of Clinton-era government expansions: shrinking public school class size by hiring tens of thousands of new teachers, and increasing government-supported day care.

Weissberg found exactly what he was looking for (and one wonders how often that happens in social science research -- there’s a poll whose results I’d like to see). If you give longer, more detailed polls that demand citizens balance costs within a necessarily limited total budget, and inform them of both the possibilities of failure and the real dimensions of the problem allegedly being solved, previous apparent support for government action and spending quickly fades. For example, if respondents were told that the new teacher program could lead to cutbacks in other school programs, 71 percent of the support evaporated; when informed that an expenditure of $1.2 billion would lower average class size only from 17.8 to 17, 43 percent of supporters changed their minds.

Underlying Weissberg’s argument is the dire hint that, to the extent that politicians speak and act in reaction to polls, we are in effect living in a plebiscitory democracy. His larger point is that the people are far too stupid to be heeded by politicians.

Which goes back to an argument I had about funding in the comments of another post: the commenter argued that it was perfectly okay to have a large majority voting themselves things to be paid for by only a small minority. But when that happens, you get the majority of voters looking only at one side of the equation: the benefits. Several liberal emailers and commenters have suggested that it was some sort of wacky, fascist notion that one should evaluate the benefits of a program only in connection with the costs. If I blow my head off to cure my headache, the headache's gone, but so's the head. And if I decide to spend 10% of GDP on social programs I don't really care about because what the hell, I'm not paying for it -- it's that rich guy I don't like! -- the 10% of GDP is nonetheless gone, and not being spent on cell phones or televisions or trade paperback versions of Das Capital.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of awful statistics

I happen to agree that John Edwards is the only Democrat with a realistic chance of carrying the election in 2004, unless things turn badly south for Bush. But I hate statistics like this:

The last Democratic candidate to win the presidency from north of the Mason-Dixon line was John F. Kennedy in 1960. Edwards was the only southerner in the race until Sen. Bob Graham of Florida joined the crowded field. Edwards isn’t shying away from touting his southern roots and its importance to Democratic competitiveness in 2004.

There have been ten presidential elections since 1960. Three featured Southern Democratic incumbents. Two featured Republican incumbents with good economic conditions. In other words, half those elections faced loaded dice against any Northern Democrats. The other five are hardly adequate to make generalizations absent some other reason to think that non-Southern Democrats have trouble winning national elections. I mean, I think they probably do, because non-Southern democrats tend to have a record of very liberal positions that don't play well in the red zone. But the quote above is not sufficient evidence for the proposition.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

In marketing, the brand is sacred. It is fetishized, coddled, propitiated like the mysterious god it is. A great brand, like Coke spits money out of the mouth of the golden idol. On the other hand, when a brand goes bad -- well, just think of the poor schmucks in the diet industry whose best-selling product in the mid-eighties was called "AIDS".

Unfortunately, the care and feeding of a brand is an art, not a science. Some of them just keep chugging along, like Coke. Others get tired and stale and take on bad associations that are hard to shake, like Cadillac. When that happens, companies will often take radical steps to revitalize the brand. Which is what's happening right now with the venerable K-Y jelly, where they're currently seeking a way to bring their brand into the 21st century. This article's a fascinating look at how marketing executives think about those sorts of decisions. This quote encapsulates a lot of the magic of brands:

Could a name change be all K-Y needs to prevent chafing? Possibly. "I hate K-Y Jelly and it's all there in the name. Why a K? Why a Y? It sounds so Jiffy Lube. No one wants to have that slimy jelly feeling reinforced by, say, the very tube you're staring at during a moment of passion," says a Manhattan financial writer. "I use Silk. Every time I pick it up I think, 'Aaah, silk. This feels silky! And whether it does or not, that's the beauty of branding. Brands make you believe."

Or for those who don't care about brand management, it's a good opportunity to snigger every time someone says "market penetration".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Nick Gillespie is panning Hillary's memoirs in advance. I'm inclined to agree, but that's not really all that big a bet, since I can't think of a political memoir since Churchill that hasn't sucked.

Having done a very brief stint in publishing post-college, I'm flabbergasted by the initial hardcover print run, which is set at 1 million copies. One million people are supposed to plunk down $30 to read Hillary's musings on the Clinton First Ladyship. It can only mean one of two things: Hillary comes clean about what it's like to have your husband's adultery become the main topic of conversation for several billion people, or the good folks at Simon and Schuster are letting the liberal air of the Upper West Side cloud their minds -- "Everyone I've talked to says they'll buy a copy!" My guess is the latter, and I'll no doubt get email telling me that this is just evidence of my bias, because the people at Simon and Schuster are smart types who know their business better than I do. Too true, and that's why I don't have a book contract. But even smart types who know their business make major, costly mistakes on a regular basis, and will continue to do so as long as we live in this imperfect world. Simon and Schuster could be brilliant, or they could be betting the farm on the literary equivalent of Pepsi Clear.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So having re-read my post on science, I stand by what I said, but I think I stated my case more strongly than I meant to. It apparently came across as -- I think Daniel Drezner described it as "a broadside against every social science except economics", which it wasn't meant to be, because I like sociology and political science, and I think that economics isn't all that much farther down the pike. I do think it is, a little, and no one's offered to change that opinion; most of what I've gotten is email saying "It is too science! We use statistics." (Memo to academics: when you have academics in your family, 101-level sarcasm is not a compelling tool for changing your mind. Although maybe that wasn't the point.) I come from a family wedded to political science and government, and I think that what they do is interesting, important, and valuable. But it seems to present few natural experiments in which one variable is dominant enough to be observed the way that, say, New York's housing market can show you a textbook case of price ceilings.

Sociology I think is interesting, but 99% of what I've read in the field relies on either qualitative observations or surveys, which I don't regard as rigorous data. People lie, they have poor memories, or they don't care, and their responses are far too variable. One of my favorite business stories is the story of New Coke, in which Coke spent several hundred million dollars, far more than had ever been spent on market research for anything, producing survey after survey showing that New Coke was going to be the biggest thing since fire. You may recall the product lasted four months, of which something like 3.5 were retooling the plants again to produce Coke Classic. By some accounts, it nearly destroyed the company.

Okay, those people cared about getting it right. Which is not to say that sociology professors don't, but sociology professors rarely work with the knowlege that the truth or falsity of their hypothesis is going to be dramatically proven in front of 5 billion people, nor with the kind of budget that the market researchers at Coke had. No publish or perish there -- take all the time you need! And the survey respondants were right there, had three questions to answer on a topic that they had no incentive to lie about, and had the subject of the questions right there in front of them where they could check. They still flubbed it.

You can run all the statistics you like, but if you're working with surveys, you have enormous hurdles to overcome. Especially when you're trying to study topics of actual interest, which is to say topics people have an incentive to lie about. Garbage in, garbage out.

That's why my friends in market research say they always prefer response testing -- what do people buy, how and where do they buy it, and where did they get the idea? -- to surveys. People will apparently say anything to get five bucks. I've done rudimentary survey design, and while there are ways to make them better, it always came back to the fact that no one filling out the survey really gave a hang. And those were my friends. You know this yourself, if you think back to the last time you filled out a survey. I'm told that odds are even you deliberately lied at least once. Though of course, I have no idea how they'd figure that out. ;-)

What I think makes economics more scientific than sociology or political science, to the extent I think it is, which is not to the same order of magnitude that I think, say, Chemistry is more scientific -- is that you can look at what people do, instead of asking them about it. Which is not to denigrate the fields in which you have no choice but to ask. Experimental psychology seems to be more scientific than any of these fields; the sort of psychology that produces therapists, less so.

But I could be wrong about sociology and political science. I'd argue that if I am, the professors who have castigated me really have some 'splaining to do, because I've taken multiple courses in all of their disciplines, and if it's so damn rigorous, how did I get through four semesters of coursework at what's supposed to be a pretty good school without anyone's having mentioned it? But then it's my fault too, for assuming that what I was taught in college was a good introduction to the discipline. Which is really part of the problem, isn't it? My sociology classes were a not-very difficult excercise in writing up my opinion on various groups of people, bolstered by large chunks of text citing other people who'd written up their opinion on various groups of people, on whom the only hard data was either medical or economic, which is to say not gathered by the sociologists. I presume that the more rigorous approach was not taught to me because it's easier on everyone if we spoon-feed the students mildly interesting pabulum so we can get back to our research. Which is pretty much the way literature is taught, not to anyone's credit.

Anyway, the remarks about social sciences got tied up with remarks about some Middle Eastern Studies students which I think implied that I thought that this was how the social sciences operate, which it isn't. I don't know that that's how Middle Eastern Studies operates, though the attitude certainly isn't rare in the humanities. I confounded the problem by referring to them collectively as the humanities, which was really sloppy.

There's also the fact that I have something in my head when I say science, which is maybe not what you have in your head, and maybe not what I would have had if I'd had six semesters in the history of science, but there you are -- I only have the one lifetime. I'm a blogger, not an academic, not an economist, not God, which are among the titles I have apparently erroneously claimed. If anyone's under the misimpression that this is anything but a chick typing into a box while she waits for her dinner companion, let me correct that now. And if I somehow gave the misimpression that I thought that I was anything more than that, I apologize. And if everyone will stop waving their degrees around and proclaiming what an idiot I am, and cease the contemptuous surprise at the many, many books that I haven't read because, as mentioned above, I am neither omniscient, nor omnipresent, nor omnicapable, I am more than happy to be enlightened as to why I am wrong.

But after I have dinner. Cheers.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Heretical Ideas does some much needed deconstruction of claims that one party's president makes the economy grow better than the other.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Daniel Drezner links a report saying we're winning the war on terror. Perhaps, although as Kevin Drum notes, we mostly seem to be winning in South America. One could hope that that's because we're ratcheting down the war on drugs, but I'm sure there's no such luck. But I'm suspicious for another reason.

As any management theorist will tell you, if you make something the criteria for success, you will get more of it.

I suspect, given my knowlege of government bureaucracies, that prior to 9/11, our terrorism-fighters, domestically and abroad, had incentive to report as many incidents as possible. This made their jobs seem more necessary and important, and thus increased their prestige, power, and budgets.

I also suspect that after 9/11, there was a strong incentive to minimize the reporting of terrorist events, so as not to be seen as the guy who couldn't get a grip on this very important problem, and should thus be replaced with someone who can.

A cursory glance at the numbers seems to confirm my thesis: the decline seems to be in the marginal events, not the major ones, and it's mostly in Latin America, where there's a fair amount of room to reclassify drug war dustups as terrorist activity.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are humanities useless?

So now I've spent a few days being mean to humanities types -- what are English majors good for?

Anecdote being king, I'll offer a few of my own. In business school, the engineers were the bane of economics and strategy classes. They liked the math and matrix bits, but if you heard someone in Macro insistently saying "But that's not the real world!" it was sure to be an engineer. I had a lot of conversations with study partners that went like this:

"Show me where that happened."

"It's a model."

"So it's stupid. It doesn't happen like that."

"It's a model."

"But it's pointless."

"It's a way of thinking about things. It's useful to have the model so you can test it against the real world."

"But why bother?"

"BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE TIME TO WRITE AN EQUATION WITH 280 MILLION VARIABLES."

Though of course the mechanistic view of economics -- that it's no good unless you can plug a value in at one end and get an exact result at the other -- is by no means limited to engineers. How many times have you heard someone say that the economics they learned in undergrad was useless because they were never asked to sit down and work out the production numbers by finding where marginal cost equals marginal revenue?

The interesting thing about the technology field is that while it's mostly engineers and computer science majors, there's a large minority of people who were drawn in from other fields. And what's really interesting is that the most brilliant people I worked with during my time as a network engineer were humanities majors, something I've also heard other people say. Brilliant technically, I mean, though I carved out quite a happy niche for myself as the liason between the technology and business units.

Why should that be? I don't know. To the extent that it is true other than anecdotally, I suspect that part of it is that someone who can get a master's in English lit from Columbia and become a really good programmer is just someone who's really, really smart. But they also tended to be people who came up with the solutions other people hadn't thought of -- the outside-the-box people.

What makes the humanities (separate from the arts) important is that they take the areas where we have insufficient data (or too much) and try to abstract useful principles from it.

I got a lot of angry political scientists and sociologists on my tail for saying that they aren't sciences. But they aren't. That's not an insult; studying English literature and creative writing isn't a science either, but I thought it was sufficiently worthwhile to spend four years doing it. Following a drug dealer around for years may produce brilliant insights into the human condition, but they aren't scientific insights: the experiment is not reproducible, relies on a single data point, and there's an insurmountable problem of how the observer introduces change into the system they're trying to observe. Now, admittedly that example was connected to a snotty anecdote about sociology I told in the comment section of another blog, but I tell snotty anecdotes about English Lit all the time, and I still think it's an important contribution to human thought. It seems to me that the sociologists are so sensitive because they desperately want to be taken for scientists, when I just don't think the discipline's there yet. The more you tell me about your surveys and first-person qualitative studies and how rigorous were the statistics you used to describe them, the less I am inclined to embrace sociology as a rigorous science.

But it doesn't have to be in order to be valuable. The universe does not offer us always and everywhere the opportunity to hypothesize, test, and peer review. Most of the time we have to make binding decisions on incomplete information. By searching for information in the spaces where hard data is not available, the humanities give us the tools to address those decisions.

Now, I'm often hard on English literature and other humanities fields because, let's face it, most of the students are not there to learn anything; they're there to expend as little effort as possible in return for their $100k. Maybe it's different in the harder Ivy League schools, but at Penn most of my friends were there to have fun and get a job. Class was an occasionally interesting distraction that was relevant only insofar as it affected your GPA, and thus your relationships with your parents, and your prospective employers. That's true of engineering to some degree, but at least the engineers have to work for it.

But that doesn't mean that it can't be immensely challenging and rewarding, nor that it can't provide us with valuable insights into the human condition. I am disturbed that the majority of the country doesn't grasp basic principles of scientific thought, but I'm equally disturbed that the majority haven't any idea or interest about their own history or how their government works, much less in picking up Shakespeare or even Dickens. And why not? Because it's hard, that's why. Just like any other discipline, understanding history or reading great works of literature from past centuries requires you to put in a lot of legwork building up your vocabulary of cultural and linguistic information before you can really get into the works. It's boring. You stuff your brain with facts; you read Guilliver's Travels for the second time hating every word. Then one day you have a eureka moment: two facts connect themselves in your mind in some way you've never thought of before. The internal logic of the eighteenth century penetrates your brain, and you laugh out loud at something Swift has said. Those things are important. They are the only way that we can enlarge our knowlege of human action beyond the limited scope of our own lifetimes -- and as any scientist will tell you, the larger the data set, the better. They also tell us about ourselves in an intimate way that physics won't. A life without art strikes me as, in some way, deeply unexamined.

So if the engineers who haven't picked up a book since you read "The Godfather" in high school thought you were getting off easy, think again. The reason you haven't is that you're just as lazy as the English majors you make fun of.

The problem with our education is deeper than a lack of science. It's a lack of breadth. We allow our students to wander off into little corners and only talk to others who share a fairly narrow range of interests. And we do so because doing otherwise is too hard. Hard on the professors, who have to force learning into the brains of students who aren't used to it and don't like it; hard on the parents, who will see a lot more variance in their childrens' grades than they like; and hard, of course, on the students, who often seem to bitterly resent any effort to actually make them learn anything. In which number I was probably included in my younger days. But we should try anyway, if only so that we'll have more areas of potential dinner conversation than the latest episode of Survivor.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Jackleg Calculations

Mark Kleiman has a question:

Max Sawicky notes an interesting "fun fact" from an article by Adam Carasso and Gene Steuerle in the subscription-only Tax Notes: restoring the $3000 personal exemption on the income tax to its 1948 purchasing power would exempt a family of four from any income tax liability unless its income was more than $50,000 per year.

But why treat this as just a "fun fact"? Why isn't it the perfect Democratic counterweight to the Bush tax cuts? Restore the inheritance tax above the $5 million level, and undo the cuts in the top brackets, to pay for a big increase in the personal exemption. (Max suggests refundable credits instead, which has huge substantive value but almost certainly less political pizzazz.
If Carasso and Stuerele cost out this proposal, Max doesn't give us the answer, but costing it out shouldn't be hard.)

Sounds like something for one of our Presidential candidates to pick up and run with.

Well, because they already aren't. As I recall, the average federal tax liability of a family in the sub $50k range is in the 5% range.

What they have, of course, is FICA -- Social Security and Medicare. But since those are paid on the first dollar, that's irrelevant to a discussion of the standard deduction.

This is bad from another perspective. Households over $50k are only 40% of the population. Progressive taxation is one thing, but having a majority of the population face no marginal cost to new spending initiatives is unlikely to have a salutary effect on policy priorities. Your children may deserve the best, but having them set the family budget is unlikely to turn out well. The Jane Galt Tax Plan could preserve progressivity while still forcing us to only spend money on things that we as a nation really value -- although of course I understand that for some, that may be a bug, not a feature.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally, I can receive, but not send email. If you're wondering why I seem to have chopped off an interesting correspondance mid-mark, that's why.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Corrections

A while back, I stated, a propos of a discussion of the difference between the worldviews of the classic liberal and the adherent of an authoritarian faith, that one does not have to believe in God to be an Orthodox Jew. Dr. Manhattan corrects the misimpression (picked up from a professor of religious studies!) and gives a nice overview of Jewish thought on the matter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Has anyone else seen this conspiracy theory about Bechtel and ties to Bin Laden from the New Yorker?

When the contract was awarded, two weeks ago, the Administration did not mention that the bin Laden family has an ongoing relationship with Bechtel. The bin Ladens have a ten-million-dollar stake in the Fremont Group, a San Francisco-based company formerly called Bechtel Investments, which was until 1986 a subsidiary of Bechtel. The Fremont Group’s Web site, which makes no mention of the bin Ladens, notes that “though now independent, Fremont enjoys a close relationship with Bechtel.” A spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Fremont’s “majority ownership is the Bechtel family.” And a list of the corporate board of directors shows substantial overlap. Five of Fremont’s eight directors are also directors of Bechtel. One Fremont director, Riley Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive officer of the Bechtel Group, and is a member of the Bush Administration: he was appointed this year to serve on the President’s Export Council. In addition, George Shultz, the Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, serves as a director both of Fremont and of the Bechtel Group, where he once was president and still is listed as senior counsellor.

No doubt any Bush family members in the Boston area rode on public transportation at some point with the Bin Laden family members attending Harvard.

Later in the piece the author notes that the Fremont Group has $11b in assets, meaning that the "ties" consist of holding less than 1,000th of a minor Bechtel-affiliated organization. I have those sorts of shadowy ties all over the place -- to my Korean grocer (possibly connected to Kim Jong Il?), my Columbian garage owner, and of course, to the power brokers over at Vanguard, where I stash my loot in a 401(k). I'm a regular one-woman international terror conspiracy, I am.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Okay, one more post:

I came across this blog, which I've read from time to time. It's written by an anarchist in Canada. Pretty pictures. But what struck me about it today is that it's all about us. Nothing about Canada, other than local event-stuff; it's All-American-Imperialism-All-the-Time. And not just imperialism. This guy is going on about American wilderness policy, voting machines, and military contracting procedures.

I'm trying, and failing, to picture an American blog talking about almost nothing but Canadian foriegn and domestic policy. Is this a sign of some ominous imperialist phenomenon, or just that the Canadian left needs to get out more? Or has Canada simply reached such governmental perfection that they are now, with typical Canadian altruism, heading over to help the neighbors?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The problem with economics

More thoughts from the science conference before I get down to work:

One of the worst problems economics has as a policy tool is that it is a policy tool.

Economists have social beliefs about any manner of things that are not, strictly speaking, economic. They may place a very high personal value on various sorts of liberty. They may place a very high value on reducing income inequality, or they may believe that it is morally repugnant to state that a citizen somehow owes his fellow man the labor-hours represented by his tax dollars. They may think that people should, or shouldn't, be allowed to carry guns, a judgement that is often more about the people carrying the guns than the societal effects of their carrying them.

In other words, some economists vote Republican, and some vote Democratic.

Well, if you're a physicist, this really has almost nothing to do with your work. Whether or not the quarks are defrabulating will have very little impact on either your vote, or public policy.

But if you're an economist, people listen to what you say. They make policy choices based upon it. And that's where it gets sticky. Because if you favor a certain political party, or a certain policy, as a matter of personal belief, you have a power that the physicist doesn't: by shading the truth a little bit, you have the potential to make your beliefs into law.

The temptation has got to be overwhelming. And that's why so many policy pronouncements on things like government spending and taxation are crap. People want high or low levels of taxation because they have certain ideas about justice, and they proceed to dress up those ideas with economic-mumbo jumbo that sounds plausible to the layman in order to help out The Team. They write articles in which they not-quite-say something that they know to be untrue, or at best utterly unproven, in such a way that they can deny having said any such thing to their colleagues, while knowing that the layman will construe the facts they laid out next to each other as being connected. Or they omit crucial data, or they forget to mention that half the profession disagrees with them -- a good example of this is the famous Card and Krueger study on the minimum wage, which is hotly disputed, and which even if it was true, would only tell us that very small changes in the minimum wage produce no measurable change over short time periods. It does not tell us, as many advocates have argued, that we could raise the minimum wage to $10 with salutary effect on poverty. They compare numbers that aren't relevent or engage in silly semantic arguments about terms. In effect, they state that they are positively sure about something that no one can know with such confidence.

The effect is twofold. It convinces some people who then vote for something that they wouldn't vote for if you were honest and said "I think we should cut taxes because I don't think anyone should have to pay 50% of their income in taxes." It convinces other people that economics is all crap, and that therefore they shouldn't listen to anything you have to say about the things you are sure about, like, say, free trade. That's a huge cost. The latter effect is exacerbated by the "two talking heads" format of magazine articles, in which the wing-nut who thinks that we can make ourselves rich by erecting huge tariffs is given the same space and gravitas as the guy voicing the opinion of 99% of the profession.

Paul Krugman complains in one of his articles that people will say "economists disagree about everything" and dismiss the large body of things that economists are really pretty sure about. This would be more compelling, of course, if Krugman hadn't become one of the leading practicioners of the "I didn't actually say that, I just strenuously implied it" school of advonomics. Because Krugman likes the highly progressive payoff structure of social security, we now have the readers of the NYT op-ed page thinking that we don't have a pensions crisis. Thanks, Paul. We needed that.

It's impossible to avoid entirely, of course. We all like our arguments to put their best foot forward, and the temptation to polish them up just a bit by tucking in those inconvenient facts where no one will see them is among the most common human follies. But all of us bloggers should remember to watch ourselves for those tendencies as closely as we watch everyone else.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Really nice post on the history of judicial confirmations from the Volokh Conspiracy. Especially recommended for anyone who has been seen in the comments section arguing that it's all the fault of whichever political party they don't belong to.

A thought occurred to me as I was reading this, which I'm sure is hardly original, but which I will nonetheless pass on: this is the legacy of what I would argue was a very, very bad impulse in the Warren court to use the courts for social engineering. Court rulings are the worst way to make society-wide decisions, because the court is unlikely to represent the body of thought at large in society, and because court rulings are the most rigid sort of lawmaking we have -- they aren't subject to recall, change, or petition except over decades.

In some cases, as in Brown v. Board of Ed, these things are necessary, but Brown v. Board of Ed also had a fairly settled constitutional precedent. The Warren court became the judicial equivalent of those young men who think that if one splash of cologne is delightful, eight would be even better. If the court could remove the legal impediments to education provided by the state, why couldn't it also read, in penumbras and emanations, any number of other rights and privileges that they thought it would be nice for people to have?

What is all of this about, after all? It's ultimately about protecting the exceedingly tenuous rulings of that court: Roe, Bakke, etc. Liberals are willing to fight to the death over this because they could never get privileges as sweeping as those granted by the court through a legislature responsible to the majority. But really, regardless of the particular outcome, we shouldn't have rulings that sweeping, and that tenuously anchored to constitutional law, emanating from the high court, any more than we should have it ruling that a fetus has a constitutionally protected right to life or that states may not pass the local equivalent of the Violence Against Women Act. And when you consider that with a slight change in the composition of the court, one might produce just such outcomes, perhaps the advocates desperate to protect a legacy of judicial activism will rethink the righteousness of their position.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've gotten some interesting mail and comments on yesterday's post. A lot of them had to do with predictions.

Many of them made the very true point that economics doesn't make rigorous predictions like physics. Which is true, but then physics doesn't either in the way that they're implying. When you throw a baseball, a physicist could theoretically predict where it will go, provided he could take accurate measurements of all the variables -- knew exactly what the wind was going to do, could trace all the micro-movements you will perform with your arm as you hurl it, could get an instant measurement of the force with which you threw, and otherwise could get an instant handle on all the variables affecting the path of the ball. In a dynamic system, he can't, so the best he can do is give you an approximate heading. The fact that he can't instantly tell you exactly what is going to happen in every physical instance doesn't mean that the insights of physics and chemistry can't give us general principles that enable us to build a pretty good bridge. Similarly, no economist can tell you exactly what the economy is going to look like in six months (although if you average their predictions, they apprently do a better job than you'd think at setting a rough range of performance). That doesn't mean that nothing they say is of any possible interest, to be used only when you need window dressing for your pet political causes. There are a lot of areas where economics can, and does, give us guidelines for building prosperous systems.

Then there were the people from the other side, the humanities. I'm afraid I've spent far too much time already in my life arguing about whether knowlege is socially constructed or not, and I don't want to start up that debate again, so I'll just say this. Science is the attempt to understand a phenomenal world that I'm going to posit actually exists, and actually has immutable properties. If you don't think this is so, I invite you to step out the nearest fourth floor window and then send me a report on the social construction of gravity.

Others made more interesting points. There were a surprising number of political scientists arguing that they didn't want predictive models; the important thing is a good explanatory model. Said one "I'd rather have a really good explanatory model than a mediocre predictive model." There are a few problems with this. The first is that predictions are how we test whether we have a good explanatory model. I can construct an explanatory model for any set of facts, given enough time. Starting out knowing exactly what I have to explain, I can build a beautiful story for why it is so. But the only way I can know if this model actually works -- if my explanation of the War of 1812 is valid for anything besides19th century former British colonies -- is to make predictions about the next war and see if they hold up.

Think of Greek Astronomy. It worked pretty well as an explanatory model for several thousand years. All the planets revolved around the earth on a series of interlocking rotating cycles. The whole thing was beautiful, fit all the known facts, and was easy to understand to boot. The only problem is, it was wrong. And how did they know it was wrong? Because over time, it failed to accurately predict the movement of the stars. Now, I could say "I have a great explanatory model for star movements between 1200 and 300 B.C.", which is true, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.

Which brings me to my second point: what is the use of a science that can only tell us what's already happened? That's not science, but art. Which I love. I don't want my novels to provide me a mechanistic model of human behavior; I want them to make me feel what it would be like to be someone else. But while art can describe and illuminate the human condition, it does a very poor job of helping us change it, which is why political novels are so uniformly dreadful.

We already have a humanities discipline that tells us what happened: history. Building models of why it happened doesn't seem to me to be particularly useful, or even different from what history already does, unless I can hope that someday, it's also going to tell me how to avoid the bad parts, and replicate the good parts, before it happens again. I don't think political science has to be at this point right now, for after all, the history of all the sciences is mucking around with a lot of things that don't work before you find some that do. But I find it disturbing that I received a number of emails arguing that political scientists shouldn't try to build predictive models -- that the only really important thing was talking to each other about what had already occurred. Or at least that's what they seemed to be arguing. If that's really what you want to do, you ought to strip the word "science" out of the discipline's name.

There was one reader who emailed me something about the scientific method that I think is important, which is that if hypotheses have to be falsifiable, results have to be reproducible. Which is to say, in other words, that your model has to be broadly predictive. If the only person who can get the results you get is you, that weakens your theory to useless in the eyes of other people. I had an interesting conversation last night comparing this with the humanities. In some disciplines, when the only person who can produce your results is you, this enhances rather than destroys your reputation. More often, you see incidents like the Bellesiles case, where no one even tried to reproduce his results for an extraordinary period of time. In the sciences, if you produce extraordinary results, you see a rush by other teams to try to reproduce it in the hopes either of getting to be the guy who takes down Icarus, or of getting a little reflected glory for yourself. (And of course, the hopes of finding out whether or not some extraordinary result is true.) Bellesiles, who said something that flatly contravened the common understanding of a fairly major thread in American history, should have been mobbed by people trying to reproduce his results -- and their fellow historians should have been cheering them on. In reality, anyone who challenged this finding was dismissed as a gun-nut driven by vainglory and vendetta.