Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More casualties of the war on terror

John Poindexter is going to resign.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Fun facts of the week

* Only 63% of the French population between the ages of 15-64 is in the labor force.

* On Saturday, Tony Blair will become Britain's longest continuously serving Labour prime minister

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Silvio in the Dock

This week's edition of The Economist has a rather damning series on Silvio Berlusconi, starting with a blistering editorial (for The Economist, anyway) and an open letter from the editor, and moving on to detailed examinations of corruption allegations surrounding state-owned company SME (and various spontaneous declarations and claims made by Mister Berlusconi in the matter), the smearing of Romano Prodi, a handy guide to Mr Berlusconi's other trials, and one to his early business career.

Why is this important? The open letter explains:

I am writing to you to pose questions that I believe the public has a right to hear the answers to. As this can no longer occur through the Italian courts, such questions should be posed and answered in public.

On June 18th, the Italian parliament approved a bill to grant immunity from criminal trials to the holders of the five highest offices of state, including the president and prime minister. It is now a law. The law applies even if a trial started before the office-holder was elected. The new law’s most immediate effect is that the one remaining criminal trial in which you are involved —the SME case, in which you are accused of bribing judges—has been suspended until you are no longer prime minister. Even then, the trial will start again only if you were not elected to one of the other offices that benefits from the immunity. But the law is being challenged in the constitutional court.

One suspects that there is a lot of consternation in Italy right now.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Saddam seems to have released a new tape acknowleging the deaths of his sons and calling them martyrs.

If it's real, he must have been in an interesting bind. Their deaths, I imagine, substantially hurt the resistance. But if he didn't acknowlege it, people would question whether he was still alive and free. A difficult tradeoff, as it effectively ends the question of a Saddam dynasty.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A market in terror

Stephen Green has kindly mentioned us in his post about the pentagon's proposal to create a futures market in terrorist attacks.

How can you create a market based on catastrophic loss of life, some are screaming. To them I say: ask MetLife.

On the larger question of whether or not this is a good idea, I am of mixed feelings.

In general, these things seem to work really well. The reason is that collectively, we are smarter than individually. Which is to say that if you survey a large group of people on a large number of factual questions, and take the answer that is chosen by the most people for each question, the group is generally right more often than any of its members, even the best performing ones.

This holds true for verifiable matters of opinion, as well -- by which I mean that if you ask a group of people to guess the outcome of a number of elections, sporting events, or what have you, they are likely to be right, as a group, more often than the best performing member. Unless you've got Dick Morris in there.

And if you ask them to bet their own, hard-earned cash on the outcomes, the results get even better. Especially if you let them vary their bet, which provides a measure of how certain they are of the outcome.

This is one of the insights behind efficient markets theory, of which, as a good University of Chicago gal, I am something of a proponent. And if it has the Jane Galt seal of approval on it, you know it has to be good!

So I think this thing could be a very effective tool for deciding when, where, and how to expect new terrorist attacks. The politicians criticising it do not acquit themselves well, denouncing the program for, as my junior senator put it, "Creating a futures market in death", a purely semantic judgement on a program which could help prevent hundreds or thousands of real live people from being killed. The idea seems to be that it's much better for those people to die than for us to have a program that sounds bad.

But there is a problem, which is that it creates some rather perverse incentives. For one thing, the purpose of the system is presumably to prevent attacks. But traders won't want to prevent attacks, because they don't get paid unless the attacks happen. How do you keep traders in who know that they may be providing you information that will keep them from making money?

But the bigger problem is that, while all markets are vulnerable to people who seek insider information to create an artificial advantage, insider information in this market is likely to be especially nasty, because it will generally come from being one of the folks planning the attack. Which gives rise to the distinct possibility that people will plan attacks for the purpose of enriching themselves on the market. This is what makes life insurance such a dispiriting business to be in. If you fix a horse race, well, it's mean, and people lose money, but if you fix a truck bombing. . .

Because players in this market could very easily set up the events on which they are betting -- the idea of terrorism, after all, is that it is a do-it-yourself operation -- you would need to be very careful not to create incentives for mayhem. If it were me, I would set it up so that no one can collect more than the economic cost of executing the attack, which would build some distorting incentives into the system (people would tend to bet more on large, costly events, in excess of their actual probability, because of the higher payoff), but thereby keep from building distorting incentives into our civil order.

Update In the comments, Jonathan Falk of NERA points out that the market was supposed to be limited to professionals, which I hadn't realized, and am not entirely sure I approve, especially as Tyler Cowen of Volokh has pointed out that any terrorist worth his salt could make the same bet on the stock market, if they're at all clever.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Neat trick of the week

The BBC generates a 650-word profile on North Korea without once making reference to the fact that it is communist.

Nor does it mention any variant on the word: socialist, collectivist, Stalinist, what have you.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The glory of capitalism

Britain has its first Islamic stockbrokerage.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Remember how the 9-11 report was going to show that the administration knew there was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Oops.

Prior to the report's publication, a person who had read it told UPI that it showed U.S. intelligence agencies had no evidence linking Iraq to the 9-11 attacks or to al-Qaida. In fact, the issue is not addressed in the declassified sections of the report.

Kevin Drum asks the sensible question:

. . . who the heck was UPI's source? What kind of source makes an error like that about a document that's going to become public the next day?

My guess is a source who was suspected of leaking to the press and has now confirmed that s/he is the culprit. While embarassing the hell out of whoever they were leaking to. Methinks there's some bitter chortling going on in the administration these days.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

They've captured some of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards.

The interesting part of the story: there were informants telling us where they were, and Saddam seems to have caught and executed them. He and his sons were running around under the noses of the troops.

Saddam is also definitely (ahem) a few cards short of a full deck:

The bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in Baghdad in the genuine belief that they could hold the city. Only later, when they believed they had been betrayed by their commanders, did they consider an alternative. “The resistance was not factored in before the war,” he said. “There was a closed meeting five or six days after the war, and that is when they began to discuss the resistance.”

If he still thinks the reason we won is that he was betrayed by his commanders, rather than, say, the several-orders-of-magnitude greater firepower, he's nuttier than we thought.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Fun facts of the week

* You're whining about the current recession? By the end of this year, Venezuela's economy will be almost 20% smaller than it was at the end of 2001.

* In 2001, public debt made up about 20% of bank assets in Argentina. Now it's nearly 80%.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Meanwhile

Bush has ordered US troops to a station off the coast of Liberia to assist peacekeeping forces. I don't know what I think of this expansion into quasi-colonial peacekeeping, but we do seem to be doing a better job of it than the Europeans did, at least. Or, for that matter, than our own history of sucking up to foul dictators as long as they promised not to put the hammer and sickle on their flag.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And now for the good news

Here's some nice news out of Iraq from the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

Despite chaos and casualties, confidential documents detail plans to "permanently reduce or zero-out tariffs" and prepare for talks next year to get Iraq into the World Trade Organization. U.S. administrators want to begin small-scale privatization by October and to build an "investor-friendly tax system" by January.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

California recall

I think most regular readers know that Gray Davis is not my favorite politician. However, I think the recall's a bad idea. Davis may not be particularly competent, but he's also faced a number of huge crises not entirely of his making. And if you start recalling every politician in a crisis, you'll make the state ungovernable -- especially when it most need strong leadership. Ultimately, that will cost the state more than it costs Davis.

In fact, it looks like it's already started to -- citing the budget crisis and the recall, S&P just lowered California's debt rating.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Big brother is watching you. So what?

I'm afraid that sometimes I just don't understand what the privacy people are on about. Such as the woman in this Salon article on the radio frequency tags increasingly being used to track inventory and prvent theft:

Albrecht is tenacious, and her work has caused some embarrassment for the Auto-ID Center. She recently discovered an article in Smart Labels Analyst magazine, a subscription-only trade publication, that described an alarming RFID setup at a Tesco store in Cambridge, England. According to the Smart Labels Analyst article (which Albrecht read to Salon over the phone), a surveillance camera trained on Gillette razors was activated each time a customer removed a package of tagged razors from an RFID "smart shelf"; the system was apparently taking pictures of each razor-blade buyer (or browser) to prevent theft of the Gillette Mach 3 blades, the world's most-stolen retail product. Albrecht first alerted the (London) Guardian to the camera-enabled-shelf story; the newspaper reported the news on July 19, and within a few hours the story made its way to many blogs and discussion sites like Slashdot, where hundreds of readers railed against RFID.

I mean, I just can't see why I would care, unless I were a professional razor blade thief, in which case I would probably dislike the intrusion on my income. But I can't see myself, even then, getting enough moral indignation together to found a whole group dedicated to getting rid of the things. So Wal-Mart knows I bought razor blades, or tampax, or hemhorroid medicine. Who cares? So does my credit card company. I'm not trying to front the repulsive idea that anything corporations or the state do in pursuit of criminals is fine, but really, I can't see any palpable damage to anyone at all from these things.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is the Do Not Call list really best for society?

Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Tyler Cowen is leading a lively discussion on whether the benefits of the Do Not Call list really outweigh the costs. After all, people do buy things from telemarketers; in fact, the "yield" that direct marketers get from people who have asked not to be contacted doesn't seem to be any lower than the yield from those who haven't opted-out. The economists presumption is that the people who buy things must place at least some utility on what they bought; hence, it is not obvious that the economic damage from the telemarketers exceeds the benefit.

Speaking as

a) a libertarian who
b) put herself on the Do Not Call list and
c) has purchased things from telemarketers, and moreover
d) would conceivably do so again

I'd still argue it does.

First, the story of how I bought something from a telemarketer. As so many things in this weary world are apt to, it all comes back to my teeth.

And my fear of needles. Let me explain.

I hate needles with a passion seldom found in one so young. Thus when I needed my wisdom teeth out, I did so with only a local anaesthetic, because I couldn't bear to have them stick a needle in my arm to sedate me.

This was when I was seventeen. The noise and racking of having the first one out was so traumatic that I inadvertently neglected to make an appointment to have the other three removed for the next ten years.

Until I got a monstrous case of strep throat, which somehow caused my remaining wisdom teeth to become infected. I have never been so sick and miserable in my life. I saw the periodontist. Out they must come! he proclaimed, gave me a prescription for delightful painkillers, and made an appointment to remove them the next day.

(The next day was when I discovered that I am allergic to Vicodan and related narcotics. I discovered this by becoming spectacularly sick all over the periodontist's reception area. But that is another story.)

The painkillers killed the pain, induced a marvelous, floaty sort of feeling, and lifted my spirits to the point where I was filled with a sort of miasmatic love for every other man, woman, and small furry animal on the planet. I got into a long, languid discussion of my past school days with a stranger who phoned with some vague connection to Penn's alumni office. I was just wrapping up with them when my mother walked in, bearing supplies for my convalescence.

"Hello, mother darling," I said, hurling myself into her rather surprised arms.

"Who was that on the phone?" she asked.

"Someone from the Penn alumni office," I said, pillowing my head on her shoulder. "I love you."

"Why were you giving them your social security number and mother's maiden name?" she asked. I had no answer.

Needless to say, after I'd gone off the painkillers, I found this very worrying. I was checking my credit report like one of those psychotic rats in lab experiments, waiting for someone to open up a credit card or car loan in my name. Then, about a week after the teeth came out, my new University of Pennsylvania insignia credit card arrived in the mail.

Did I need a credit card? No. Would I have ordered it in my right mind? No. Would a telemarketer have sold it to me if they saw me in person? Not unless they wanted a lawsuit; I was fairly obviously heavily medicated.

On the other hand, it hasn't been an undue burden to me, either. Not, by itself, worth passing a law.

But it's not the things I buy that I'm worried about, even though I am probably one of those people with low sales resistance who should avoid telemarketers like the plague. If I'm too idiotic to keep from saying "no" to a salesman, I don't think it's the government's job to keep me from being an idiot. No, it's the 2,000 people who telephone me with things I won't buy that put me in the regulatory mood.

I suspect most people feel the same way: it isn't that they fear sharpers using advanced mind control techniques to force them to put aluminum siding on their house; it's legions whose services they will never use that make them angry enough to demand legislation. They understand that there are potential benefits to the consumer: for everyone who bought something they wouldn't have that they don't need, we might well be able to stack up a case of someone who bought something they needed but weren't planning to purchase, such as fire insurance or a burglary alarm that prevented financial losses. But that still leaves the rest of us who had to pay for those services with all the precious, irreplaceable time we spent hopping up to answer a phone call we didn't want; with money spent on telezappers and unlisted numbers and caller ID that still didn't keep them out of our livingrooms at dinner; with all the call-screening and other defensive maneuvers that annoy us and eat up our time just so we won't have to talk to another jerk trying to pressure us into buying something we don't want and can't use.

Consider that most of us value our leisure time at more than our average hourly wage, since otherwise we would forfeit some of that leisure to work more. The average hourly wage in this country is considerably more than what a telemarketer makes per hour, especially among the demographic that telemarketers target.

Now, according to this piece in The Economist on telemarketing, telemarketers contrive to spend fifty minutes of every hour on the phone with a live human being. They do this by mass-dialing and then hanging up on lines without a live human -- and sometimes lines with a live human, if there's no telemarketer available to ply them with lawn furniture.

So unless their yield is very high indeed, the telemarketers are externalizing a cost onto their non-customers that is as great, or greater than, the benefit they and their customers gain from the indiscriminate dialing. That's a major strike against it in my libertarian book.

Telemarketing is also the sales tactic most likely to sell to people who are for some reason befuddled and in no condition to make any sort of decision about major purchases. While as I said above, that is not by itself enough for me to condone regulation unless it predominantly sells to that group, it still counts against it.

And what groups does it benefit? I can't think of one. The homebound are perfectly well served in their shopping needs by the internet and the television shopping networks, which don't bother anyone else. No one wants to be contacted by a telemarketer; the sales are almost exclusively of things people weren't planning to purchase. While that could have good as well as bad effects, I should think that in the best case the society-wide effects would balance each other out.

It benefits the telemarketer, of course. But it would also benefit him if he were allowed to enter my home and take the silver; I see no reason why I should suffer undesired annoyance for his sole benefit.

Comparisons to television advertising won't wash. Watching the television is still a voluntary activity; having a telephone, and answering it, is not. At least for the 99% of Americans in mainstream society, it isn't. Moreover, while I might not like the advertising, I do like the programming it pays for. Telemarketers are not the natural price of having a telephone. The telemarketer isn't paying for my phone. If he were, as Cowen suggests he might, I'd be more inclined to take his calls.

It's a hard argument for a libertarian to formulate, however, because libertarianism tends to be a philosophy of absolutes, and this, to me, is a problem of scale. (Is it possible I'm a closet utilitarian?) If the problem were one or two calls a month, I'd probably argue against such a law, because the harm of imposing another regulation, and the cost to the telemarketer and his potential consumers, would seem to outweigh the trivial cost imposed by answering the phone once every couple of weeks.

But modern technology has allowed telemarketers to externalize ever more of their costs onto the people they call, by increasing ten, twenty, a hundredfold the number of calls, and hanging up on the folks who were unlucky enough to haul themselves out of the shower when there wasn't anyone available to tell them about the wonders of Terminix. I think there is a tipping point, beyond which all those external costs outweigh the benefits accrued by telemarketers and the people who buy from them. And when people with a couple of precious hours of leisure every night have to listen to a sales pitch every twenty minutes, I think we've passed that point.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Nice to fly on a private jet

Yes, as my co-blogger points out, my neighborhood was more or less shut down on it's Northern border today for a while, with subway stops and several streets closed.

Victim and assailant entered the building together, both of them allowed to go around the metal detector. Mayor Bloomberg has now decided to make the pols go through the metal detectors with everyone else. Announcing this change, I heard him say (I heard this in the car, so I may not have the wording right:

Just like in airports, where pilots and stewards don't have to go through security, we allowed councilmen to avoid going through the magnometer.

Nice try. I stood with a pilot in O'Hare a few weeks ago as we were both wanded and our shoes put through X-Ray. He claimed the flight crews were disproportionately singled out for special security checks.

Pols excuse only themselves from the inconveniences of hoi polloi.* How would Bloomberg know anyway? Most of his flying is in his private jet to his weekend home in Bermuda.

*hoi = "the".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Breaking news

A man pulled a gun and started shooting in New York's City Hall. At least one man, Councilman Davis, is injured.

City Hall is usually locked down pretty tight, as I recall; I can't imagine how he got in with a gun. Regardless, they've closed the Brooklyn Bridge and are blocking nearby streets to traffic.

For those who aren't familiar with New York City geography, City Hall is just a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Cool site of the week

A correspondant sends this excellent link: if you liked Horlicks, you'll love all 7,000 old ads on this site.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Truth in advertising

Those libertarians who don't want to study war no more can ponder the necessity for government advertising and labeling regulations while reading this delightful ad for some sort of powdered nutritional product, which features one of the many diseases companies used to make up in order to claim their product cured them: the dreaded night-starvation.

But please read the entire thing; one should also ponder just how far the copywriting art has come, as exemplified in the decidedly ambiguous description of the product: "Horlick's has a fascinating flavour, and it is economical too."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More breaking news

The Eiffel Tower is on fire. Predictibly, American news outlets eschew reporting this in favor of pictures of people sitting in lawn chairs along the roads in Jessica Lynch's hometown.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Breaking news

CNN is reporting that the Army may have killed Saddaam's sons.

Update It seems to be confirmed. That's an enormous blow to the remaining Saddaam loyalists; it's not likely he can found another dynasty at his age. Plus one imagines they feel the noose closing in. . . perhaps it's time to explore those attractive time-share options in Baja?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Maunderings on Iraq, etc.

Why am I not posting on Iraq, Niger, or associated topics? Mostly because I think it's too soon to tell.

In early June, Bill Emmott, the editor of The Economist, had a debate with Katrina Vandenheuvel (sp?), the editor of the Nation, on the topic of globalization. One of the most interesting points that he made was that the Marshall Plan wasn't even proposed until 1947.

The narrative of WWII in most American minds seems to go something like this: we won, the nations formerly ground under the Nazi heel rose up joyfully to greet us, the Germans realized the error of their ways, we slapped the Marshall plan together a couple of weeks later, and soon Europe and America were joining hands across the Atlantic to form NATO, singing "It's a Small World After All" as everyone gazed soulfully into the bright quasi-socialist future. . .

In short, the years 1945-1955 seem to have been edited out of the popular imagination.

There were, for starters, quite a lot of collaborators in all the countries we liberated, and they didn't immediately realize the Germans had lost. They apparently ran around the hedgerows with guns making trouble for Our Boys for quite some time.

Nor were the Germans very happy to see us. Or, rather, they were, but only in comparison to the Russians. That didn't stop them from shooting at us, though.

All those jokes about cleaning your plate because the poor, starving children in Europe would be glad to get your food had a source: millions of poor, starving children in Europe. People were eating grass, leaves, and other inedibles in a desperate attempt to fill their stomachs. Audrey Hepburn looked like a famine victim because she was one.

The Marshall Plan was nice and all, but while it was big in relation to our budget, it was trivial in relation to the actual economies that had existed before the war, which is why anyone who lived in Europe in the fifties can tell you that large swathes of it were rubble long after the war ended.

The point being that even a "good war" is not enjoyed by either those fighting it, or those in the places where it is being fought.

Are we doing a good job in Iraq? Damned if I know. (Which is probably why no one's asking me to administer a demilitarized zone.) I'm sure that mistakes are being made, but I'm spectacularly unqualified to tell which are the mistakes and which are the sound policies that will only bear fruit after ten years.

To be sure, I'm extremely disturbed that the Bush administration seems to have had absolutely no plan for what to do with Iraq after we got it. Given the exigencies of war, I would consider it par for the course if they'd developed an unworkable plan that had to be chucked and replaced -- but it looks to me as if no one in the administration gave any thought whatsoever to any scenario except the Iraqis joyfully rising up to greet us, installing a representative democracy, and sending representatives to Washington to join hands with the cabinet for a chorus of "It's a Small World After All". . . I find this extremely disturbing.

But that doesn't mean we're DOOMED! DOOMED! DOOMED! We may be, of course. But I'm withholding comment until the matter's a little clearer.

The troops hate being in Iraq. They also hated being in North Africa, Normandy, Sicily, Guam, Okinawa, and pretty much any other place we've ever fought a war. If you read any first person history of popular wars like the Civil War or WWII you will find that while you may have imagined them passing the time by delivering stirring speeches to each other on human rights, the primary occupation of soldiers in any war, no matter how well justified or pre-approved by the UN, is complaining. War is tiring, time consuming, often painful, and worst of all, usually excruciatingly boring. Imagine your own workplace, except that your stupid boss is around 24-7, and also, his mistakes could get you killed. Complaining fills the time between getting shot at and choking down awful food. The only place soldiers like occupying is Paris, and try getting that one through the Security Council.

As for Niger, everyone's too busy yapping about how Bush is AN EVIL, LYING BASTARD, or, alternatively, his critics are MENDACIOUS HYPOCRITICAL HELLSPAWN, for me to figure out what actually did, or should have, happened, and how seriously to take it. I'll wait until the furor has died down before formulating an opinion.

But I did have one thought this week. If you've been following what is, to my mind, the much more interesting story of the efforts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and economy, you know that Saddaam was robbing the oil trust to buy. . . whatever, which left the infrastructure in very bad shape. At the start of the war there was only about enough electricity, water, etc. to meet between 1/2 and 2/3 of current demand. Saddaam withheld supplies from the provinces in order to feed Baghdad and Tikrit, where all his supporters were. So even after we get the infrastructure back to where it was, which should be within six weeks, Baghdad will have the quality of its services degraded, because it was getting more than its fair share before we ousted Saddaam. Indeed, some provinces are even now getting more electricity than they did before the war.

So question of the day: is it possible that the picture we're getting of Iraq might be affected by the fact the most of the reporters are centered in Baghdad, where the hotels are, where most of Saddaam's supporters are, and where things seem to the residents to have gotten dramatically worse because they're no longer being funneled a disproportionate share of the resources?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Political humor

Okay, whether or not you're a fan, this Dennis Miller bit on John Kerry is even funnier than "Shrub":

I knew Kerry was going to have to run for president because his features are so chiseled, his actual skull could be on Mt. Rushmore. The guy looks like an Easter Island statue in a power tie.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The next S&L crisis?

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Of late, a wicked double whammy has hit defined-benefit plans. On the asset side, which is typically 50% invested in equities, values evaporated along with the sinking stock market. On the liabilities side, retirement promises, which are discounted based on 30-year Treasurys, ballooned as interest rates fell. Result: a gap that must be closed. Trouble is, taxpayer money may have to close it.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a quasi-government agency, insures benefits for 44 million people covered under defined-benefit programs. Over the past year, bankruptcies in the steel, airline and retail sectors have not only vaporized the PBGC's $7.7 billion surplus, but pushed it into a $5.4 billion deficit. Though the agency still has a positive cash flow, the current pace of plan assumptions cannot be sustained. At some point, the PBGC would have to ask Congress for a bailout.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Factoid of the week

Can any engineering types out there confirm or deny this rather breathtaking set of claims from favorite Factoidist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, found in a Salon article on attempts by the states to build My Own Private Kyoto?

"Once we get cheap electricity from wind, then we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen," said Brown. "And hydrogen is the fuel of the future."

That future may be closer than we think. "Everyone always talks about hydrogen in relation to fuel-cell cars, but the reality is that if we wanted to move rapidly away from oil, we don't have to go that route. We could simply convert our internal combustion engines from gasoline to hydrogen, burning the hydrogen directly," revealed Brown. "It's fairly simple, requiring minor engine changes probably costing not more than about $200 per car. For that amount, a mechanic at a service station could convert an internal combustion engine to a gas engine that would run on natural gas or hydrogen. In fact, BMW now has a prototype model where, while driving down the road, you can switch from gasoline to hydrogen and back again. From an engineering point of view, it is entirely within range." It hasn't been attempted before because hydrogen hasn't been cheap, but an abundance of wind power would change that.

Brown dismisses another often mentioned impediment to the wind-hydrogen transition: the lack of a distribution system. The infrastructure is already in place, he said. "I do all my cooking in a Washington, D.C., apartment with natural gas piped in from Texas. Hydrogen can be delivered the same way, using the same pipes."

Meanwhile, I'll be looking at this one:

Retrofitting natural gas pipelines probably won't come cheap. Because hydrogen atoms are very small, thousands of miles of pipeline would have to be better sealed to prevent leakage. But that cost pales against the $1 trillion in climate change-related disasters over the past 15 years. In 1998 alone, the hottest year on record, a Southern U.S. drought did $6 billion in damage; a freakish New England ice storm did $2.5 billion; Hurricane Mitch, the deadliest Atlantic storm in 200 years, caused $5 billion in destruction; while a Yangtze River flood in China did $30 billion in harm. Unless action is taken, the cost of global warming-caused disasters is likely to double every decade, according to a U.N. Environment Program Finance Initiative report.

This is misleading in the extreme. Not even the most committed GW-believing scientist would dream of attributing that $1 trillion to GW. Warming, if it is occurring, is still well within the limits of natural variation, and it's not possible to attribute any given event to the greenhouse effect. And the article doesn't -- quite. But I'll bet quite a bit of money that a large number of readers came away from this paragraph believing that the cost of global warming is $1 trillion and set to double every decade. Whereas the current cost of global warming is more likely to be zero than $1t -- in which case it is, of course, mathematically certain that the cost of global warming at the end of each decade will indeed be at least double the cost of the decade before it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What I'm reading this week

A paper from the AEI by Messrs. Gokhale and Smetters on the unfunded liabilities of the US government. (It's been circulating in draft for quite some time, but the final version is newly out this month).

The differences between future benefit payments and future tax collections are not part of either the government’s debt or budget measures.

It is not only the current size of Social Security and Medicare that makes the accounting omission a serious one. Although the financial commitments involved will be paid far into the future, they affect the savings behavior of younger people today— both programs are deeply embedded in the political expectations and immediate economic choices of all Americans. And the rapidly approaching “demographic transition” to a society with a much higher ratio of older to younger people will make the current expedient of pay-as-you-go financing unsustainable before long. Accurate accounting has a practical purpose: to reveal the consequences of current practices and to clarify the nature of the choices we face. In the absence of accurate accounting, political debate over some of the most momentous issues of the age is proceeding in an empirical vacuum, and has become much more confused and desultory than it needs to be. American citizens are being misinformed, to their serious detriment, in both their political and private choices.

Gokhale and Smetters propose a new set of accounting measures
to supplement the conventional ones. “Fiscal Imbalance” adds to the federal government’s current public debt the present value of the difference between all projected federal non-interest spending and all projected federal revenue. “Generational Imbalance” indicates how much of the Fiscal Imbalance arises from older generations shifting tax burdens to younger (including yet-unborn) generations.

I've just started reading it, but I think that last measure is rather important, more morally than economically.

Short term borrowing, over say the next ten years, does not to a significant extent give benefits to current citizens at the expense of those not yet arrived. But long term deficit spending is deeply immoral: those alive get all the fun, while those unborn get all the bills. And the way that it's stacked now, with an active over-sixty generation demanding exorbitant taxes to fund their retirement and medical care, and those slightly behind them handing the bill to their grandchildren rather than have an unpleasant confrontation, is just dreadful.

More thoughts later. . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Awful Statistics

This one's from Volokh.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Some of the sweetest words in the English language

New Heinlein novel.

(Via PeoriaPundit)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Personal announcement

To any friends who have recently sent me email at my GCA address -- I, in a fit of exhausted stupidity, blew away my mailbox last night. Just shuffle over to janegalt -at- janegalt.net with any new mail you might have, if you don't mind.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally, I'm not sure whether you non-subscribers can see this, but it's pretty damn funny.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And now for some happy news

Space wedding!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Grist for the conspiracy mill

The fellow who may have been the source for BBC accusations that Tony Blair's cabinet "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq has been found dead after going missing for several days.

Update Here's a very detailed rundown of his questioning by parliament last week about the BBC report.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Great Expectations

The Wall Street Journal today has a really, really good piece on the NBER and the end of the recession, which it is officially calling for the fourth quarter of 2001. The NBER looks at a combination of unemployment and GDP growth, which has been lacklustre but steady since the end of 2001.

The National Bureau of Economic Research said the U.S. economic recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later, not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Most economists concluded more than a year ago that the recession ended in late 2001. But Thursday's declaration by the NBER -- a private, nonprofit economic research group that is considered the official arbiter of recession timing -- came after a lengthy internal debate over whether there can be an economic recovery if the labor market continues to contract. The bureau's answer: a decisive yes.

When calling the end to a recession, the NBER focuses on several economic indicators, but two have been especially important: changes in employment and gross domestic product, which is the value of the nation's output of goods and services. Since the fourth quarter of 2001, GDP has expanded slowly but consistently -- rising 4% through March of 2003.

Employers, however, have eliminated 938,000 payroll jobs since November 2001. In addition, 150,000 people have dropped out of the labor force because they are discouraged about their job prospects, according to the government.

. . .

"It has been an inadequate recovery," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, who served on the NBER committee that determines recession dates until he joined the Bush administration earlier this year. He said the White House is expecting growth to accelerate to a rate of slightly less than 4% in the months ahead, which should begin to bring down unemployment.

The group's long-running debate on the timing of the recession sheds light on broader structural shifts that have made this business cycle much different from previous cycles and on how the economy responded to the shocks of Sept. 11.

In typical recoveries since the end of World War II, economic output has bounced back sharply as businesses rushed to rebuild inventories and invest in new equipment. With demand for their products and services growing more quickly than their ability to produce, managers soon started hiring additional workers.

This time, economic growth has been unusually slow -- a product of intense competition from abroad, the hangover from the technology and stock-market collapse, terrorism concerns and other factors. At the same time, the productivity of workers has been unusually strong, meaning that business can meet sluggish demand for products while still eliminating jobs. The result has been a recovery in the eyes of economists that doesn't feel like one to many workers.

"This is meaningless from the point of view of people worried about their jobs, but meaningful for economic researchers," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.

. . .

"In terms of the decline in output, it ranks as a relatively mild recession," said Robert Hall, a Stanford University economics professor who is chairman of the NBER committee. "The labor market side is quite different."

. . .

Despite Thursday's announcement, many executives -- still stung by the profit collapse of 2001 and the stock-price decline that came with it -- are only now becoming more confident about the economy. And even they say they are hedging their bets.

. . .

The downturn itself was very shallow, in terms of lost economic output. Mr. Resler estimates that economic output contracted by just 0.6% during the 2001 downturn, the second-smallest output loss on record. It also was among the shorter contractions.

There are various reasons for this. Monetary policy has become more effective at counteracting downturns. Meanwhile, labor markets and pricing have become more flexible, thanks to more than two decades of deregulation. That allows companies to adjust to signs of waning demand. Increased use of technology has added to this flexibility.

But short, shallow recessions are giving way to long, arduous recoveries that do little to improve the job market. In the six quarters since the end of the recession, GDP has expanded on average at a 2.6% annual rate, compared with a 5.3% average expansion during the previous eight recoveries. Meanwhile, the job market's performance during this recovery has been the worst on record.

So why doesn't it feel like the recession is over?

One of the major factors, as the article points out, is that unemployment is a lagging indicator, which is to say that it continues to rise even after the recession is over. (Stock prices, by contrast, are a leading indicator: they start to fall ahead of the recession). And it's lagged more in recent recessions -- the jobs are a lot slower to come back, which is what killed George Bush's father in '92. The recession had been over for a year, but the unemployment numbers were still bad. Remember "the jobless recovery"? We're having another one. We've lost nearly a million payroll jobs since 2000, and it still hurts.

In general, recessions have been getting steadily shallower since WWII. The problem is that recovery takes longer, which is psychologically very hard. Fewer people are out of work -- fer gosh sakes, the unemployment rate is below what some economists used to think was the lowest possible rate of sustainable unemployment. It's well below what continental Europeans enjoy during their booms. But while fewer people may have actually lost jobs, more people fear losing their jobs, for longer. ("Is this recession worst than 1981?" I asked my mother recently. "Every recession is the worst recession when you're in it" was her sage reply.)

For another thing, even if GDP increases at quite a clip, a lot of us aren't going to be able to increase our consumption along with it, because we spent a nice chunk of the nineties increasing our consumption above sustainable levels based on unrealistic expectations. If we were technology workers, for example, we assumed that the demand for our services would be always and forever strong, while the sky-high wages we were able to demand would not attract any new entrants into the job market to compete for our jobs and thus drive wages down. If we had money in the stock market, we figured that it was okay to use our credit cards to buy a 72-inch HDTV system because, after all, our portfolio was going to double every six months, which would leave plenty of money to pay the bill and the accrued interest. If we were homeowners, we took out extra loans on the rising equity in our home on the assumption that it would be easy to sell the house for a comfy profit if we needed to. If we were practically anyone, we assumed that a loan at 7-8% was a good deal because inflation would chew up a lot of that over the life of the loan.

Now inflation is practically nonexistant, the technology job market is glutted, the housing market is stalling out, and we're choked with debt that no measly 3-4% increase in GDP is going to get us out of. A lot of us will be putting any future income increases into paying down debt, not improving our lifestyle, for quite a long time. (And I am included in that number: my decision to attend business school was predicated on drawing a salary a lot higher than a journalist's when I got out.) Even if things get better, they aren't going to get as much better as they were getting just five short years ago. Of course, they were only getting better because we were borrowing part of now's "better" to pay for it. But that doesn't make it easier to face that cabinet full of Top Ramen when you get home from a hard day's work.

So even though the economy is getting better, it feels worse. Though I'm no Austrian, you might call this The Great National Hangover. It won't kill us.

But sometimes, we might wish it would.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Economic History

Tee-hee! Noam Scheiber points out that Howard Dean seems to be running on Herbert Hoover's economic platform.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Still more required reading

This Economist article on the budget should give readers left and right something to chew on.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More treaty talk

When they're finished reading the Russia piece below, everyone should go read this brilliant op-ed in the New York Times by Robert Lane Greene.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Everyone should read this piece by Colby Cosh on Russia and the Kyoto Treaty. Just in case you didn't, y'know, see it at Instapundit or something. Okay, Mom, go read it, then.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Dangers of Data Mining

I want to have a little chat about an economic fallacy that one sees all over the place, from commentators both left and right: the idea that because some number was particularly good under the presidency of one's chosen political party, that this therefore means that their policies are correct. Specifically, they use this kind of data to claim that some thing of which they are in favor is good for the economy -- without reference to what that piece of data would have looked like absent their favored item.

This fallacy is extremely widespread. I will use one example apiece from left and right.

For a while, leftish bloggers were quite caught up in the notion that the correlation of good economic performance with Democratic presidencies had to be causal. Clinton was thus "good" for the economy.

But when you want to argue that a president is good for the economy, you cannot just point to the fact that the economy was good while he was president, QED.

Even the most policy wonkish can concede, surely, that there are some influences on the economy larger than that of the president. If green men from Mars had invaded during Clinton's presidency and razed the capital infrastructure to the ground, forcing us to return to subsistence farming with the attendant loss of life -- surely we would not blame Clinton for the entirety of the resulting 97% contraction of GDP, would we? We might argue that he should have prevented the invasion, or at least valiantly climbed into a fighter plane like Bill Pullman and at least try to chase them off, but we would not argue that better fiscal, monetary, or social policy would have averted the, er, recession.

Indeed, if you begin totalling up the outside influences, you quickly realize that they are much greater than the influences of fiscal and monetary policy, at least within the rather staid limits set by the American voting public. (Our staggering new budget deficit is a dainty 4% of GDP. The Argentinian government would have laughed such miserly sums off the playground during its heyday.)

If you want to claim Bill Clinton was good for the economy, you must first establish what the economy would have looked like without the benevolent policies you give him credit for. If we were due for a nice long internet bubble, Clinton's policies may have helped, hindered, or done little either way. But simply pointing out that GDP and tax revenues grew doesn't give us any clue as to which of the three is true.

Now, conservatives may be chortling. But you have your own wing-nuts to contend with, my frosty friends. Like the fellow I saw the other day trying to refute the standard macroeconomic belief that if you raise budget deficits, you decrease national savings, and thus investment, and thus future productivity gains. His argument? In the 1980's the budget deficit increased but interest rates went down.

Well, yes, they did. But that might have had a little something to do with the fact that the government abruptly halted its massive inflation of the money supply. In fact, if you see how neatly falling interest rates dovetailed with Volcker's aggressive monetary targeting, it becomes obvious that by far the largest influence was the Fed's war on inflation.

It is thus insufficient to point out that interest rates were dropping. This tells us nothing about the effect of the budget deficit on interest rates, which is generally, IMHO, relatively trivial. We can only figure out that effect by first determining how much interest rates would have fallen in a neutral environment, and then analyzing whether the budget deficits measurably added to it.

But how do I do that, I hear you cry. Why, it is difficult, my little chickadees; that is why people have to get PhD's and things. It is so difficult, in fact, that when you see a blogger who has claimed to prove some grand theory, such as the superior economic performance of their political party, or the ability of budget surpluses to generate astonishing rates of growth, using only numbers they can find on the internet in fifteen minutes or less, you should be very, very suspicious.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

All abortion, all the time

I'm sorry. But I just found another good article on the subject, this one on why Americans, unlike Europeans, can't seem to move beyond the debate.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Follow the Yellowcake Road?

I've decided that the Niger uranium scandal isn't going anywhere. Yesterday, I wasn't so sure. But today, I read this Michael Kinsley piece:

Bushies fanned out to the weekend talk shows to note, as if with one voice, that what Bush said was technically accurate. But it was not accurate, even technically. The words in question were: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush didn't say it was true, you see -- he just said the Brits said it. This is a contemptible argument in any event. But to descend to the administration's level of nitpickery, the argument simply doesn't work. Bush didn't say that the Brits "said" this Africa business -- he said they "learned" it. The difference between "said" and "learned" is that "learned" clearly means there is some pre-existing basis for believing whatever it is, apart from the fact that someone said it. Is it theoretically possible to "learn" something that is not true? I'm not sure (as Donald Rumsfeld would say). However, it certainly is not possible to say that someone has "learned" a piece of information without clearly intending to imply that you, the speaker, wish the listener to accept it as true. Bush expressed no skepticism or doubt, even though the Brits qualification was only added as protection because doubts had been expressed internally.

When the president's critics are reduced to quibbling over grammar, the battle is lost. This scandal may hurt the president, as the clever arguments about the meaning of the word "is" hurt Clinton. But I think it has far greater potential to damage the opposition, who, by engaging in such arguments, make themselves look like pettyfogging quibblers out to injure the president by any means necessary.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A propos of last week's abortion post, a very good article on the fraught ethics of harvesting stem cells from fetuses conceived in order to cure a fatally ill sibling.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

Acting-wise, who would be the modern-day equivalents of Ronald Reagan? This is not an invitation to share your opinions on his religious or political views; rather, what actors make the same sort of films, and enjoy the same level of name recognition, as The Gipper did during his movie career?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Media alert

My Canadian fans can hear me on the radio on CBC at 4:30 EST this afternoon discussing the fast food lawsuits.

Update You can hear it here, if you're so inclined.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Idiot savants

My co-blogger has already shredded the "brights" far more ably than I, so I'll only add this: one wonders how bright these people can be if they think that they are going to build a successful political movement based on telling America that their religious beliefs make them smarter than the rest of their fellow citizens.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Let your Bright so shine before men

I'm intrigued by the "bright" movement. I suppose it is difficult, in some circles, to espouse a worldview devoid of religious underpinnings. The definition sounds reasonable.

The noun, Bright, refers to a person whose worldview is naturalistic--free of supernatural and mystical elements. A Bright's ethics and actions are based on a naturalistic worldview.

• worldview -- You can find an extensive discussion and example definitions on www.teachingaboutreligion.org
  On the whole, the notion refers to an individual's belief system related to concepts such as the meaning and purpose of life, existence after death, the presence of deities, nature and origins, morality and human nature, rituals, and other major life stance considerations.
  
• A naturalistic worldview is absent any presumption of forces or entities beyond what can be observed/measured.

As an aside, it does seem that at the core, any worldview has to rest on some core philosophical belief or assumption. Even objectivists start with "existence exists", right?

I'm appalled, however, at this idea that we must recognize "brights" as some bitterly oppressed minority ready to form a group identity with a "swelling chorus" of righteously victimized voices clamoring for their group "rights":

But there's no reason all Americans can't support bright rights. I am neither gay nor African-American, but nobody can use a slur against blacks or homosexuals in my hearing and get away with it. Whatever your theology, you can firmly object when you hear family or friends sneer at atheists or agnostics or other godless folk.

And you can ask your political candidates these questions: Would you vote for an otherwise qualified candidate for public office who was a bright? Would you support a nominee for the Supreme Court who was a bright? Do you think brights should be allowed to be high school teachers? Or chiefs of police?

Let's get America's candidates thinking about how to respond to a swelling chorus of brights. With any luck, we'll soon hear some squirming politician trying to get off the hot seat with the feeble comment that "some of my best friends are brights."

Please. Give me a break.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has a fairly predictable reaction:

One problem they clearly don't have is an excess of humility.

'heh'.

SECOND UPDATE: Lots of blog chatter on this article.

THIRD UPDATE: Pejman absolutely crushes it. "ROFL", as they say:

First of all, the very notion of reviving secular humanism and then trying to pass it off as a new and novel sociopolitical movement and theory is rather . . . um . . . remarkable. I had no idea that one could simply reach back into the past, take an intellectual movement, dress it up in modern garb, and then claim a new philosophical invention. Can we do this for any kind of theory? Because if we can, I would love to share Yousefzadeh's General Theory of Relativity with all y'all--surely the Nobel Prize in Physics now awaits me. I would be delighted to propound an economic theory that I am proud to rename the Yousefzadeh Theorem--which means that now I've made myself eligible for a Nobel in Economics (the University of Chicago will be so proud to have me continue their little tradition). I'm working on a series of poetic quatrains in Persian that I plan on calling The Rubaiyat of Pejman Yousefzadeh--I think you'll like them. And hey, how about . . . well, you get the point....

....I'm glad to treat anyone and everyone who denounces and renounces this article as a literary abortion procedure gone horribly wrong with all the respect in the world. Dennett's writing is so terrifyingly bad that it may very well be a sign that the Apocalypse is upon us (and how funny would it be, by the way, to have Daniel Dennett's atrocious forensic skills serve as a harbinger for the events of the Book of Revelation? Talk about delicious irony!).

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Why bloggers go into isolation

["On Screen"] At the height of its popularity, the insipid "Liberals/Leftists/Democrats do this, Conservatives/Right Wing/Republicans do that" genre produced an analysis suggesting political orientation had something to do with the tendency to allow comments on one's site. I don't remember where I read it, I only remember rolling my eyes. This is just an illogical method of suggesting that relentless revelation of 'the truth' by the 'good guys' in the comments is wearing the rightish/leftish blogger down.

Obviously, I don't think allowing comments has anything to do with political persuasion. It's more analogous to the tragedy of the commons. This author suggests as much in an analysis of Usenet:

A list is "push" technology: once you subscribe, all the messages arrive automatically; you do not do anything more to select or request them. The inevitable death of an open mailing list is dictated by the fact that you are purchasing a package of things-- messages--which arrive together. Since anyone is free to include a poison message in the lot, at some point the content of the entire list will lose interest, the good content outweighed by the bad.

But whatever tragedy is experienced in the death of a mailing list bears no relationship to speech delivered via "pull" technology--in a bookstore or on the World Wide Web. As long as the speech I want is available and I am free not to select the speech I don't, there can be no tragedy of the commons. The existence of a disfavored sheep somewhere is not a tragedy of the commons unless its consequences are the wrongful death of my sheep. In a world where speech is delivered via "pull", my sheep and yours can co-exist.

The best form of blog feedback seems to be when someone else blogs on it on their own site. As this author suggests, the problem is that the comments (good and bad) are bundled together with an individual post , and email is pushed upon you. A link, however, is yours to follow, and the author's to "wear" on his own site.

The natural Usenet laws that apply to email and comment forums are less operative when people write on their own site. I believe this is because they have to place it in the context of their own writings and online identity-- there's less bluster, more proofreading and no attempt to simply achieve some kind of verbal graffiti. Finally, an entry on someone else's site doesn't seem to sit there demanding a response (because it is 'bundled' with your post) as it does when it's in your inbox or a post on your blog. Trackback is terrific, but doesn't seem to have critical network effect yet. That's one of the reasons I added a link to the Technorati link cosmos for each post here (by the way, thanks for the tech help with that, I'd be happy to share the two lines of php/MT tags that make it work).

Don't get me wrong, I'm really fond of many of our commenters, even (sometimes) those few whose mission in life is to point out the errors of our ways. Many have brought additional links or information to our attention that truly inform thinking about our posts. That's the real benefit of a comment section, the "more on this here" or "here's an added detail" sort of entry for those of us who might want to pursue a topic further.

The tendency to disallow comments, I believe, has everything to do with the above mechanisms, and rises with age of blog, traffic, attraction of a "Watch" crowd* and experience in public forums prior to blogging (i.e. Volokh and Reynolds). Some time ago, Steven Den Beste wrote a typically thoughtful post on why he shut down his forum:

What I've found is that for the last couple of months, Clueless Comments hasn't been a place that I myself felt like visiting. If it had been installed on someone else's server, I probably would have just stopped going to it entirely. But since it was mine and I had assumed the responsibility of keeping it working, I forced myself to visit it once a day. But instead of looking forward to that, I found it had become a chore, something I did out of obligation and wished I didn't have to. In fact, I don't remember the last time I actually felt like visiting it, or was glad I had afterwards.

Today I wandered over to Clueless and found Steven having second thoughts about receiving email, even a flood of positive email. Thankfully, I don't receive this volume of non-spam email (at home, anyway), but I can imagine it beginning to weigh on you.

Clueless was one of my first big-time perma-links when I had my own site. I won't write to Steven, but this is obviously a supportive blog entry. Thank Qualcomm stock for reaching a multiple of 233X earnings in 1999, and thank Steven for Clueless. Feel better Cap'n.

* Let's give credit where credit is due to the founders of Warbloggerwatch. First among......

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Just say no to steel tariffs

The WTO just ruled against American steel tariffs. Quite properly so, since they were a blatant piece of political protectionism. Now the EU is threatening several billion dollars worth of retaliatory tariffs, as they're entitled.

Now, this could be a good thing for us or a bad thing. If they slap tariffs on products that use steel, tariffs that will go straight to the bottom line of the steelworkers union (for all the talk of how the Bush administration is hostage to Big Business, it's the unions, not the companies, for whom the tariffs were enacted) -- well, then Bush can lift the tariffs, blaming those meanies in the EU, and still maintain enough juice with the AFL-CIO to get some trade deals passed.

On the other hand, if they slap the tariffs on agricultural products as a sop to their farmers, then we have two pissed-off entrenched constituencies instead of one, and Bush loses some latitude.

Expecting the latter, but hoping for the former, I sign off for now.

Stay tuned. . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ever closer union

The Italians seem to be gearing up for a feud with the Germans. On top of last week's Berlusconi escapade in Brussels, this week an Italian minister has called Germans "hyper-nationalistic blondes", prompting Schroeder to cancel his holiday there.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Good News

A man in Arkansas has awakened from a coma after 19 years. Can you imagine going to sleep in a Madonna world and waking up to Brittany?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What you see isn't always what you get.

This Rungu blog has a chart showing that Democratic presidents seem to preside over a lot more job creation than Republican presidents:

Roosevelt 5.2 D

Johnson 3.8 D

Carter 3.1 D

Truman 2.5 D

Clinton 2.4 D

Kennedy 2.3 D

Nixon 2.2 R

Reagan 2.1 R

Ford 1.1 R

Eisenhower 0.9 R

Bush I 0.6 R

Bush II -0.7 R

Looking at that, one would think that Roosevelt was the paradigm of job creating wizardry, while George Bush was a job-hating moron.

But unemployment is hovering in the 6.4% range, while unemployment in 1939, arguably the last non-war year of Roosevelt's presidency was 17%. Yes, you heard me right.

Now, would you rather be looking for work with Roosevelt at the helm, or Bush?

Which is not to say that either of them has any particular insight into employment policy. In this century, Democratic power coincided with the long post-war economic boom (and please don't bore me with the "Democratic policies caused it" theory of the boom, since even uber-partisan Democratic economist Paul Krugman will tell you the boom was the result of rising productivity.) It also coincided with highly expansionary Keynsian monetary and fiscal policy that pushed down unemployment at the expense of creating inflation. Reagan was the unlucky bastard whose Fed chief had to shut down the party by raising short term interest rates to 20% to get the inflation under control, which sadly hurt his employment numbers. Eisenhower too had to induce a recession to tamp down inflation. GBI got the S&L crisis and GBII got a collapsing asset price bubble. None of these things had anything to do with Republican policy; they were just the poor fellows who got stuck with the mess. Note that the most Keynsian Republican president, Nixon, got the most job creation. He also got 6% inflation and an economy in the tank. The sort of old-style Keynsian pump priming that FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon tried works -- for a while. The long term effects are the 1970's, by which time they were out of office. And while the job-seekers might have accepted even high inflation as a trade-off, it's pretty hard on people with investments, such as retirees. Over the long run, a society does not improve itself by discouraging saving.

Just to point out that when you see a little statistic like this, there's usually a bigger picture you're missing. And especially with presidents, where the meaningful data set is far too small to separate out the effects of chance from the effects of policy, it's very hard to draw meaningful conclusions.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A propos of last week's abortion posts, James Joyner poses a thorny moral question: how do the militantly pro-choice pose a coherent objection to aborting a fetus because it's gay? (This presumes a test for fetal homosexuality, which I've heard argued convincingly may not be that far off.)

One could, after all, make arguments for aborting gay fetuses that mirror many of the ones made for aborting disabled fetuses. It is difficult to be gay in our society. Gay teenagers are often terribly unhappy, as indeed are gay adults. Gay children will miss one of life's most joyful experiences, that of conceiving a child with the person you love. One can argue that there is nothing wrong with being gay, as I would, but surely there's nothing "wrong" with having Spina Bifida, either -- it's just very, very inconvenient. And if a mother is entitled to choose not to have children because they're handicapped in some way, or for that matter because it's an inconvenient time in her career, why is she then not entitled to choose to have only heterosexual children who won't require awkward explanations to bigoted neighbors or coworkers, and who are much more likely to provide her with the genetic grandchildren she probably craves? Such abortions may be a craven response to a bigoted society, but no more so than abortions obtained because middle-class professional types don't want to endure the stigma of having friends, colleagues, and/or family know they gave a child up for adoption.

Understand that I'm certainly not endorsing aborting gay fetuses, both for reasons of personal belief, and because several of my nearest and dearest are homosexual. But I'm having a hard time formulating a coherent pro-choice argument against them.

This is not really a new question. Feminist groups have been struggling for years with the routine practice of sex-selection abortions, trying to formulate an argument that allows them to ban abortions for the purpose of choosing the sex of your child, but not abortions for the purpose of not telling your grandmother you're pregnant. They've largely given this up and instead have settled for advocating bans on amniocentesis in the countries where such abortions are common, an approach that not only denied women access to a test that can detect serious problems with a pregnancy, but also didn't work, as the invention of sonograms, which don't require a doctor to administer, made the ban irrelevent.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Keeping things in the right perspective

Do you remember "I'm crushing your head" from the Kids in the Hall?

Here's a website dedicated to a more materialistic version of the same perspective. Despite it's being a complete waste of time, I find the humour increases with each click. I also notice some recent postings here by a part-time blogger.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Who is Harry Potter?

UPDATE: A good round-up of like interpretations of Harry Potter is available at the Modulator. Perhaps these books function similarly to the Mirror of Erised?

_____

Natalie Solent thinks there are libertarian themes in the Harry Potter stories. I didn't really think much about it until finishing the Order of the Phoenix. This is, without a doubt, the Atlas Shrugged of the Potter series.

The face of evil in the Order of the Phoenix is the bureaucratic and over-reaching Ministry of Magic. The Ministry refuses to accept Dumbledore's admonitions about Voldemort, not only because they have been infiltrated, but also because to do so would be an admission of some fault on the Ministry's part. Instead, they attempt to expel Harry from Hogwart's, then plant a ministry official, Professor Umbridge, within the school to spy on and eventually take over Hogwart's. Umbridge, who teaches defense against the dark arts without ever asking the students to practice...a defense against the dark arts, is everything you could want in a feckless, incompetent bureaucrat. She issues one decree after another deploring the eccentricities of the Hogwart's faculty and Dumbledore's iconoclastic ways until, invoking the power of the Ministry, she decides to remove and arrest Dumbledore.

Dumbledore leaves of his own accord, and the school promptly becomes completely ungovernable under Umbridge's supervision. Furthermore, Dumbledore and others with whom he is working to fight the Dark Lord, cannot be located by the all-seeing Ministry.

Say what you will, but Dumbledore is essentially Hank Rearden in Harry Potter V.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Having it all - and then some

I went to school with a fellow who truly had it all: He was from a prominent wealthy family, honed his immense musical talent early on, and girls swooned everywhere he went*. Showing no interest in sports, he was still fast and adept on the field. It seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do. You just knew that someday you would open the New York Times Magazine and find an article all about him.

It's worth noting that Adam was a genuinely nice guy (is, I assume, but I haven't seen him in 15 years). A little aloof, but not in an egotistical way. In fact, given all he had going for him as a teenager I thought he was pretty down-to-earth. This article, however, is a bit much. Oh what a burden to come from a famous, wealthy family and have great expectations, etc!

It's extraordinary how many people with all the advantages end up wrecking part of their lives with drug addiction. As Adam says in the article, he lost 'ten years of composition'. With Adam's talent, it could have been ten years of almost anything.

*My wife, for crying out loud, cites him as the best looking man she's ever seen (and then she adds the required but meaningless "present company excluded of course").

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Hey, Who Put Pundit in My Potter?

Frankly, he's just become a pest now. A boggart in our blog.

Here's the rest of the collection.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Risk-adjusted: $6.7 Trillion to $3 Trillion

Going back, for a moment, to Boskin's study ('found:$12 Trillion'), Allan Sloan likens it to fictitious pension accounting in the Perpetual-Motion Money Machine.

Sloan's argument goes exclusively to Boskin's present value estimation, not the assertion of a substantial deferred tax asset for the government. Boskin's calculation of present value assumes a high return stream on the dollars in deferred-tax plans now, then discounts it back at a lower rate than the return stream. Sloan feels this is financial legerdemaine.

Boskin assumes one rate (7.5 percent a year) for the return that IRAs, 401(k)s and such will earn on their assets, and a different rate (5.3 percent) to establish today’s value of taxes to be paid on account withdrawals. Get out your spreadsheet program or compounding calculator, and let’s crunch numbers.

I'll do Sloan one better: here's a little on-line model to input your own figures.

Unfortunately, the present value calculation incorporates without making explicit a discount for risk. What Boskin is doing here is discounting a risky return stream (that expected from the stock and bond markets) at an essentially risk free (Treasury) rate. It's not that Boskin is strictly wrong, it's that he hasn't pointed out that the return might be well above or below his assumption and therefore his number and the actual product of the tax-rate times the dollars in deferred plans now can't be compared on an apples-to-apples basis.

Added return from increased risk (the perpetual money-machine premium) is the sole source of external new money possible for social security, which is otherwise zero-sum. Sloan points out that the numbers involved are so large they would actually affect potential returns in the capital markets. However, Boskin's deferred tax asset is already largely invested in the private sector, while the Social Security 'surplus' is entirely in special Treasury deposits.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A Tour of the Word Museum

For Father's day, I received a book called The Word Museum. I've been dipping into it ever since, finding words I want to work into my prose:

• Quodlibetarian - One who talks or disputes on any subject; [from] quodlibet, a nice point, a subtilty [Johnson] SEE sea-lawyer.
  
• Sea lawyer - an idle litigious 'long-shorer," more given to question orders than to obey them...
  

We could probably fit 'SEE blogger' into that first definition, no?

• Prinkle - The flesh is said to prinkle when there is a tingling sensation, consequent upon a temporary suspension of the circulation [Mackay]
  
• Potvaliant - heated with courage from a strong drink.
  

Like this guy?

• Pogonophobia - A fear of Beards [T. Wright]
  

..reminds me of Bertie Wooster's shock at on catching sight of "Bingo in the fungus".

• Insufflation - The act of blowing a gas or vapour into a cavity of the body, as when tobacco smoke is injected into the rectum [Hoblyn]
  

WHAT? You mean 'blowing smoke up my ass' is more than just an expression?

• gardyloo, jordeloo A cry which servants in the higher stories of Edinburgh give, after ten o'clock at night, when they throw their dirty water, &c. from the windows; hence, also used to denote the contents of the vessell. From French, gardez l'eau, save yourselves from the water. [Jamieson]
  
• fribbler A trifler; a fribbler is one who professes rapture for a woman, and dreads her consent [Johnson]
  

You get the idea. I occasionally toy with changing my pseudonym, as it's been 18 months since I was dared to post a comment calling me "MINDLES(sic) HEDONIST DRECK". I know that it isn't the most pleasant sounding or easy pseudonym. Surely I can find something good in here - maybe 'quodlibertarian'? On the other hand, what a pain to recode and for all y'all to redo your links.

By the way, if you are wondering about the abundance of daylight posting, I took the day off today. I've had a run and I'm enjoying my lunch and a little time to myself during daylight hours. What a feeling! I love having three kids and a demanding job, but it does get on top of you....

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Belief and Constitution, continued...

Time to react to the comments in this post about Constitutional "privacy", sodomy laws, abortion, etc.:

My point was that discussing these issues can be extremely unpleasant, because the distinction between one's personal beliefs and one's interpretation of the Constitution are often confused (see the bullet points in the linked post). My personal beliefs embrace a far broader definition of freedom than has generally been read from the Constitution, yet I tend to be excoriated for my reading as if it reflected my personal beliefs. In general, I would say the comments show that the "ought to be protected" and "is protected" (..by the Constitution) problem is operative. For instance:

1. Brad DeLong appears to disapprove of "the likes of me", whatever that means, even though we are philosophically in a similar place and only disagree about the actual content/intent of the Constitution. (more on Brad's comment later)
   
2. "fub" attacks comments made by someone else (unnamed) who may or may not be a constructionist and is therefore, apparently, similar to me.
   
3. "Chuck" suggest I am "picking and choosing" government's intrusions into one's life, even though I reject most all of them on a philosophical basis. My point, as stated before, is that our current working interpretation of the Constitution does "pick and choose".
   
4. "Anonymous" says the post was pointless because he/she's never met anyone who supported sodomy laws. This, of course, seems to skirt the issue that such people not only clearly exist but are visible in the comments as well as one click away from this blog. And, of course, Scalia is what started all this. (Incidentally, if one can stop putting off hostile vibes on this subject, the believers come out of the woodwork, even here on the East Coast.)
   
5. FDL asks "what are the limits on legislative power". My answer would differ if he specified whether he meant limits under the Constitution or as I think it "ought" to be.
   
6. Phil points out that "rights to" exist in the Constitution, but appears to be disputing my personal opinion about "rights to" vs. "freedom from".
   

"Jimbo" wants to know whether I think heterosexual marriage is a lifestyle choice or a matter of vital social interest. I'm not sure the idea that society would fail without marriage is proven, but I don't think that's relevant. It would have to be an overwhelming social interest (like national defense) in order to justify interference in personal freedom. In my point of view, that is.

Brad, and several others, have much to say about the Ninth Amendment and the idea that rights aren't "granted", rather we "have" them. I agree that substantial freedoms are a vital component of basic human dignity.

The problem here is who gets to define non-enumerated rights? We would not agree on what those rights are. I might argue that I have the "natural" right to my property and that the government taxation of income or wealth is a violation of my natural freedom to use my own property as I see fit (I might indeed!). Does the Ninth amendment defend my position, or is it silent? You might argue that the Ninth gives the power to accept or deny this 'natural right' to the courts (some do and some vehemently object to that idea in the comment thread) but I'm saying I'm not entirely comfortable with the courts doing the enumerating, regardless of the constitutional merits.

The Constitution is an extraordinary document, but is it perfect? Adam suggest that it should be studied and interpreted like the Bible. Is it complete if we do enough "Bible study"? I think not. For argument, I submit two biblical issues that are subjects of heated debate but where the interpretations differ widely.

1. Look at the various interpretations and translations of ""whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter into it". If our rights are subject to this sort of interpretation, won't they appear and disappear at the court's whim? Is that what should happen to "natural rights"?
   
2. Consider the 'Fifth Gospel' of Thomas, apparently excluded by religious authorities in the 4th century. What is the relevance of external documents that did not make it into the present document?
   

I welcome instruction on the ConLaw concepts, I am not as well-versed as I should be. What I would really welcome is some assurance that if we accept the court's powers to enumerate the un-enumerated, that the freedoms I expect from a philosophical basis will not be compromised. I don't really have that.

Finally, at the risk of being excommunicated by my more conservative readers, I don't think the state should have any say in consensual relationships. Thus, the State should restrain itself from subsidizing such relationships and therefore have no say in poly