Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The liberal news network

So here at work today, in the interests of investigating this new media phenomenon, we've been listening to the new liberal radio network. The consensus so far: Al Franken isn't very good. Snore-o-rama, in fact (although his intro was pretty sharp). The chick who's on now, on the other hand, is pretty smokin'. She's also crazy. In fact, she makes Rush Limbaugh look moderate: she led into the last commercial break by accusing George Bush of using the children to whom he was reading on the morning of September 11th as "human shields". But who knows? Maybe there's a market for that sort of thing.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You can't keep a good yen down

With the yen trading near 1 cent (for readers unfamiliar with Japan's currency fluctuations, this is a very high value, historically), The Economist's Global Agenda is wondering if the finance ministry has given up intervening in the currency markets to try to preserve the yen's artificially low value. And it argues that maintaining Japan's trade surplus isn't the only reason they were intervening:

Inflation is often described as the result of too much money chasing too few goods. Japan’s deflationary dilemma is the converse of this: not enough money, chasing too many goods. The Bank of Japan is doing its best to fix the first part of this problem, flooding the banking system with reserves. But as Andrew Smithers, an independent financial analyst, points out, this policy is doomed to failure, because one never really knows how much money is enough. The right amount will vary as the economy grows, and as the demand for money fluctuates. This is precisely the reason why most central banks target the price of money, in the form of short-term interest rates, rather than its quantity.

Japan cannot do this, of course: its short-term interest rates, at zero, are already as low as they can go. But as an alternative, Mr Smithers points out, it can still target the exchange rate—the foreign price of money. The finance ministry sold ¥20 trillion last year trying to keep the exchange rate steady. But, Mr Smithers argues, this did not go far enough. In an ideal world, the ministry would go on selling until the currency was thoroughly debauched and the economy decisively reflated.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

New nuclear?

Amidst all this talk of OPECcutting production, a tiny beacon of sunshine on the energy horizon: companies are trying to win approval for a new nuclear plant, the first since 1973.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Best travel piece ever

From The Economist's Cities Guide:

Accommodation

If you are lucky you will be sleeping six or eight to a room at the Club, on thin mattresses. If you are unlucky, you will be sleeping in the corridor, or outside. Bring your own sleeping bag, preferably a very warm one in case you are in the garden. Other things to remember include a thin foam mattress, a mosquito net, a towel, soap, lavatory paper, water and water-purifying equipment, satellite telephone, several thousand dollars in small denomination bills and a flak jacket.

Booking ahead of time for the Club is impossible, but you may be able to send a message via the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe.

Eating and drinking

The menu at the Club does not vary: bread, tea and curds for breakfast; Plov (rice with meat), for lunch and dinner. You can buy supplementary food in the bazaar. The carrots are delicious, as are the raisins and dried apricots. The fiery local hot peppers may kill the local intestinal parasites before they start trying to kill you.

Sanitary arrangements

There is no running water in the hotel, or indeed anywhere in Faizabad. The standpipe water is piped from the mountain and has been tested for potability by Oxfam. It is probably better to stick to tea, or the two dozen bottles of water you have wisely brought with you.

Washing in the hotel can be done outside, from a cistern of fresh water, which the bodyguards find highly amusing, or in the washroom inside the hotel, which is less salubrious. You may be able to cadge a tin of warm water for shaving.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

We apologize for the inconvenience

But it's been a busy, busy week.

So, for your reading pleasure, I offer this selection from The Blank Slate, which I am reading this week, and which you should all read too, as it's fantastic.

Some debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one might despair that htey can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. Social psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intuitively certain that they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social conventin that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds, but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on teh other side don't immediately capitulate, it only proves that they are impervious to reason.

. . . People's opinions on politics, violence, gender, children and the arts help to define the kind of person hey think they are and the kind of person they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence, sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately, folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly staked to positions on empirical questions in biology psychology. When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analysis are most needed.

The landscape of the sicences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. . . Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. Each side must acknowlege that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common gound is my goal in the discussions to follow.

Now be honest . . . how many [liberals/conservatives] in the audience thought "See! Those [conservatives/liberals] really are irrational. It's been scientifically proven.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Updated Media Alert

CNBC has bumped me to next Friday afternoon. My grandparents will be awfully disappointed. Sigh.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The world's best chili

2 oz dried ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded (use gloves)
6 large garlic cloves, 3 of them finely chopped
1 tablespoon salt, or to taste
1 1/2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
4 lb well-marbled beef brisket or boneless chuck, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2- to 2-inch pieces
3 to 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
48 oz whole tomatoes in juice
1/4 cup canned chipotle chiles in adobo
1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
1 1/2 lb white onions, chopped (4 cups)
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 (12-oz) bottle beer (not dark)
2 cups water
2 1/2 cups cooked pinto beans, rinsed if canned

Soak ancho chiles in hot water to cover until softened, about 30 minutes. Drain well.

While chiles soak, mince 1 whole garlic clove and mash to a paste with 1/2 tablespoon salt, 1/2 tablespoon cumin, and 1/2 tablespoon chili powder. Pat beef dry and toss with spice mixture in a large bowl until coated.

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wide 6- to 7-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown beef in 3 or 4 batches, without crowding, turning occasionally, about 5 minutes per batch (lower heat as needed; spice mixture burns easily). Transfer beef as browned to another bowl. (Do not clean pot.)

Purée anchos in a blender along with tomatoes (including juice), chipotles in adobo, cilantro, remaining 2 whole garlic cloves, and remaining 1/2 tablespoon salt until smooth.

Add enough oil to fat in pot to total 3 tablespoons, then cook onions and chopped garlic over moderate heat, stirring and scraping up brown bits from beef, until softened, 8 to 10 minutes. Add oregano, remaining tablespoon cumin, and remaining tablespoon chili powder and cook, stirring, 2 minutes. Add chile purée and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes. Stir in beer, water, and beef along with any juices accumulated in bowl and gently simmer, partially covered, stirring occasionally and checking often to make sure chili is not scorching, 3-4 hours. (If chili becomes very thick before meat is tender, thin with water as needed.)

Coarsely shred meat (still in pot) with 2 forks and cool chili completely, uncovered, then chill, covered, at least 2 days to allow flavors to develop.

Reheat over low heat, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until hot, about 30 minutes. Add beans (if using) and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes.

Accompaniments: cubed avocado; chopped white onion; shredded Cheddar; chopped fresh cilantro; sour cream

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Media announcement

So it looks like I'll be on CNBC this Friday afternoon around 4:30 or 4:45 EST, on Maria Bartiromo's market roundup show. For anyone who wants my opinion on the week's big business stories.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Purge the PIRGs

A little while back, I had some rather harsh words for Ralph Nader, and especially the PIRG groups he spawned. More on the "science" and "research" those groups produce from Brooklyn College geology professor David Seidemann.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mushroom Strudel

2 medium onions, chopped fine
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1 1/2 pounds mushrooms, chopped fine
2 small red bell peppers, chopped fine
1/3 cup cream sherry (such as Harvey's Bristol Cream)
1/2 cup packed fresh parsley leaves, washed, spun dry, and minced
3 tablespoons fine dry bread crumbs
a 17 1/4-ounce package frozen puff pastry sheets (2 pastry sheets), thawed

In a 12-inch heavy skillet cook onions in butter over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until softened. Stir in mushrooms and bell peppers and cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until liquid mushrooms give off is evaporated and mixture begins to brown. This takes aproximately forever, although luckily, it is a low-intensity activity; I churned out a cheesecake and two kinds of canape-stuffing while this was going. Add sherry and cook, stirring, until liquid is evaporated.

In a bowl stir together mushroom mixture, parsley, bread crumbs, and salt and pepper to taste and cool, uncovered.

Preheat oven to 400°F. (NOTE: if you want to make these ahead, simply stick them on a cookie sheet after you've put them together, cover well with foil, and freeze. I froze the ones served at the party for a week, then pulled them out and popped them into the oven at 400°F the evening of the party. They came out fine--not a morsel survived, and several people asked for the recipe.)

On a lightly floured surface roll out 1 pastry sheet into a 14- by 10-inch rectangle. Halve rectangle lengthwise with a long sharp knife and spread about half of mushroom filling on 1 half, leaving a 1-inch border all around. Put remaining pastry half on top of filling. Crimp edges of dough together with fork tines and cut several slits in strudel with a small sharp knife. Carefully transfer with 2 spatulas to a large baking sheet, leaving room for second strudel. Make another one in same manner with remaining pastry sheet and filling.

Put in middle of oven and reduce temperature to 375°F. Bake until golden, about 35 minutes. Pastries may be made 1 day ahead, cooled completely on a rack, and chilled, wrapped in foil. Reheat, uncovered, on a baking sheet in a preheated 375°F. oven until hot, about 6 minutes. With a serrated knife cut into 3/4-inch slices.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Real conservatives support immigration

I just want to point out this fantastic editorial from the Wall Street Journal. In the interests of full disclosure, I wish to let my audience know that I have been in no way influenced by the fact that its author is having dinner at my house next week. But I have upgraded the wine I'll be serving.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are scientists stacking the deck against Intelligent Design?

I'm afraid I don't take much interest in the Intelligent Design debate. Even if the ID folks are right, and God did create the universe, only He did so in a way that makes His authorship not immediately obvious to materlistic inquiry, the discussion rather ends there, doesn't it? There's no real way to gather evidence as to whether or not God caused humans or other life forms to instantly materialise at some unknown point in the past, so you can't mount much of a dialogue.

(Such arguments are, of course, very useful for baiting militant atheists/Darwinists, by forcing them to admit that they can't actually prove it didn't happen. This is amusing cocktail party activity, but somewhat dangerous for its instigator.)

Nonetheless, there are other people having interesting arguments about intelligent design, of which this post by Stuart Buck is a very fine example. Color me unconvinced, but nonetheless, I think such discussions are great mental excercise for us secular humanists.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

No blow too low . . .

That a quote-hungry publisher won't use it to their own ends. Especially if that quote comes from the New York Times. I believe it was Dennis Miller who said that if the New York Times book review said "This is the worst book I've ever read. The person who wrote it should be executed in a gas chamber", the publisher would shorten it to "A gas--The New York Times" and stick it on the front cover.

Today's particularly egregious example comes from Stephen King's new book. Asymmetrical Information has learned that the publishers have selected the following as a pull quote:

When they call the roll of the great figures of modern American literature Bellow, Miller, Morrison, Updike, Roth they can now add a name: Stephen King.

Good quote, right? Well, here's the text of the story they pulled it from:

When they call the roll of the great figures of modern American literature Bellow, Miller, Morrison, Updike, Roth they can now add a name: Stephen King. Yes, the Stephen King who wrote "Carrie," "The Shining" and "Christine," not to mention "The Dark Tower" books.

The National Book Foundation, which hands out the prestigious National Book Awards, has decided to bestow its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters on the man who bestowed pig's blood and ax-wielding nurses on America's libraries.

You're probably tempted, as we were at first, to work up a sputtering head of indignation about this ... this ... indignity. But hang on a second. Ray Bradbury got the medal in 2000, and while he can now be painted as a man who gave a popular genre a literary flair, were they saying that when "The Martian Chronicles" made its debut in 1950?

And King will be feted by the same publishing world where Madonna is being touted as a children's book writer.

King has certainly contributed a lot. The foundation's Web site claims the 70 films, television movies and miniseries made from his work as a Guinness world record. He has created a subgenre that is said to have drawn in readers who may otherwise not have been inclined to pick up a book at all. He has also done something many other National Book Awardees have not done: made a pile of money. The publishing industry would very much like to figure out how he does it.

As would we all.

Now how can I, as a libertarian, chide the publisher for twisting the Times' words to its own ends? Well, it's not exactly truth in advertising, is it? And as a journalist, I'm repulsed, since doing this sort of thing is a major no-no in the biz. Although as such things go, it's surely a venal sin . . . I'd be shocked if many people pick up the next Stephen King novel on the basis of the Times' opinion. Still, it's healthy to keep in mind that with pull quotes, what you see is what you get.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Chocolate Pound Cake

This is the best chocolate cake I've ever had. The caveat is that I'm not a chocolate freak, and this isn't the super-fudgy, dark 'n oily concoction that chocolate freaks generally like. But the outside is crispy and the inside has a wonderful texture -- soft and delicate. The chocolate extract gives it a lovely, delicate flavour.

Cake:
2 1/4 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
3/4 cup unsweetened
Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour cream (8 1/2 ounces)
2 1/4 sticks (1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon chocolate extract (available at Williams Sonoma)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 large eggs

Do not preheat oven. Butter and flour a 12-cup bundt pan, knocking out any excess flour.

Into a small bowl sift together flour, unsweetened cocoa powder, and salt. In another small bowl stir together baking soda and sour cream.

In a large bowl with an electric mixer (preferably a standing electric mixer) beat together butter and sugars until light and fluffy, about 10 minutes. Beat in extracts and add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. With mixer at low speed, add flour mixture and sour cream mixture alternately in batches, beating until just combined.

Pour batter into bundt pan and put in middle of cold oven. Set oven to 350°F and bake cake 1 hour and 25 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on a rack 15 minutes and turn out onto rack to cool completely.

When cake is cool, wrap first in plastic wrap, and then in aluminum foil, and freeze for at least 24 hours. (Cake may be frozen up to 3 months). Let thaw in refrigerator for an additional 24 hours, and at room temperature for at least another two hours, before serving.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Artichoke Bruschetta

This was one of the big "finds" of the party -- even someone who likes neither cheese, nor mayo, nor "green things" said these were "really good." And it pretty much doesn't get easier than this; it also turns out to be delicious for dinner, with a nice salad.

1 6-ounce jar marinated artichoke hearts, drained, patted dry, chopped
1/2 cup grated Romano cheese
1/3 cup finely chopped red onion
1 tablespoon lemon juice
5 to 6 tablespoons Miracle Whip
16 1/3-inch-thick French bread baguette rounds

Place first 4 ingredients in bowl. Mix in enough mayonnaise to form thick spread.

Preheat broiler. Top bread rounds with spread. Arrange bruschetta on baking sheet. Broil until spread is heated through and begins to brown, about 2 minutes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More requests from the housewarming

Those who wanted my Amazon wishlist can find it here . . . there are indeed some houseware items on it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

New York (style) Eggnog Cheesecake

Those who were at my housewarming on Friday who asked for recipes were told that the entire collection was going up on the website this weekend. That was clearly a lie. But I'll be posting them throughout the week, so that anyone looking to replicate what they were served can.

The first recipe is for the cheesecake:

Ingredients:
1 cup gingersnap crumbs
3 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. butter or margarine, melted
5 pkg. (8 oz.) cream cheese, softened
1 cup sugar
3 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. vanilla
3 eggs
1 cup sour cream
3 Tbsp. rum
1/2 tsp nutmeg

Mix crumbs, 3 tablespoons sugar and butter; press onto bottom of 9-inch springform pan. Bake at 350°F for 10 minutes.

Beat cream cheese, 1 cup sugar, flour and vanilla with electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing on low speed just until blended. Blend in sour cream. Stir rum and nutmeg into batter. Pour over crust. Sprinkle with additional nutmeg if desired.

Bake at 350°F for 1 hour and 5 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes or until center is almost set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen cake; cool before removing rim of pan. Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Old News, New Excuses

I had a friend in high school famous for his B.S. On our final day of discussion of Crime and Punishment he weighed in, although several of us knew he had not finished the book:

"When Raskalnikov dies," he said, looking around the room and suddenly realizing that all eyebrows are raised, "...in a metaphorical sense, I mean..."

As I suspected (check the comments), the "World's Largest Snake" turned out to be less than half the fifty-feet length claimed. Its keepers, however, are making a bid for the B.S. hall of fame.

"I have no idea why the snake has shrunk," said one keeper when asked about the discrepancy, as the snake lounged on a tree branch inside its cage.

"Look, you must understand that a python's length is not constant," explains Darmanto, the owner and handler of Fragrant Flower. Fragrant Flower is the reticulated python found living in a tourism park in central Java which was last week touted as the longest and heaviest snake ever captured - 14.85m and 447kg. "Depending on the weather, on how recently he has eaten and when he last shed his skin, Fragrant can stretch and contract a great deal. A few days ago he stretched himself out halfway round the cage."

Unfortunately for Darmanto, his skills may become as obsolete as abacus dexterity.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Checking for Sources of "Unk-Unks"

Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for his famous "known unknowns" remark, then defended as Kantian and clear. Interestingly, I have seen no media coverage reveal he was simply quoting accepted project/process management theory going back to Chapman and Ward's 1997 textbook on Project Management and subsequent works.

Now I have just come across an article (also acknowledging a debt to Chapman and Ward) published a few months prior to the Defense Secretary's remarks that bears a very strong resemblance to the Secretary's phrasing.

Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation to Chaos, by Arnoud De Meyer, Christopher H. Loch and Michael T. Pich. MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002.

What Uncertainty Looks Like

Variation
Variation comes from many small influences and
yields a range of values on a particular activity..

Foreseen Uncertainty
Foreseen uncertainties are identifiable and
understood influences that the team cannot be sure will occur....

Unforeseen Uncertainty
As its name suggests, unforeseen uncertainty
can’t be identified during project planning. There is no
Plan B. The team either is unaware of the event’s possibility or
considers it unlikely and doesn’t bother creating contingencies.
“Unknown unknowns,” or “unk-unks,” as they are sometimes
called, make people uncomfortable because existing decision
tools do not address them. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always
caused by spectacular out-of-the-blue events, however. It also
can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events,
each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. Unforeseen
uncertainty occurs in any project that pushes a technology envelope
or enters a new or partially known market. Pfizer’s blockbuster
drug Viagra, for instance, began as a heart medication to
improve blood flow by relaxing the arteries.When clinical studies
found that it also increased sexual performance, the company
ended up developing that unexpected side effect into a blockbuster
drug, implementing new clinical development and a new
marketing approach midway through the original project.

Chaos
Whereas projects subject to unforeseen uncertainty start
out with reasonably stable assumptions and goals, projects subject
to chaos do not. Even the basic structure of the project plan
is uncertain, as is the case when technology is in upheaval or
when research, not development, is the main goal. Often the
project ends up with final results that are completely different
from the project’s original intent.

The hazards of entering this difficult terrain before the press are duly noted.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Things that make you go hmmmm . . .

Bet John Kerry wishes he hadn't made all that noise about how unnamed foreign leaders prefer him: Mahathir Muhammed, of "everything is the fault of the jews" fame, just endorsed him.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Calling all libertarians

Contributor A, of the brilliant Mistakes Were Made, has a question for you:

Nick Kristof says that a national ID, in the form of a beefed-up standard driver's license, would add security without sacrificing much or any real liberty. (He doesn't propose forcing people to carry it at all times, like some countries do.) Is he wrong on the second count, that the loss of liberty is essentially negligible?

Please don't answer

- Biometrics don't work. We're assuming for the sake of argument that the technology can be made to work.

- It won't add that much security. Since any security gain is good, I'm for anything that adds any security at all at an acceptable cost.

- It would be expensive - again, if there's a measurable, even if modest, security gain, we're assuming it's worth quite a lot in dollar terms.

- It will infringe your right to be invisible. You don't currently really have the right to be invisible. We're assuming you're a normal American who pays taxes, has a social-security number, answers the census, carries a driver's license and has a credit-rating. Those few who have none of these things can keep that right--they just may not marry, drive, fly, travel abroad, work for pay or draw any government benefit whatsoever.

- You don't like it in theory because government is bad. I want concrete examples of how a significant number of Americans could lose concrete rights.

- Ben Franklin once said "Those who would sacrifice liberty…" Yes, we know. I want an argument, not an aphorism.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Supermom: Hero or Myth?

Came across this post from Harry Brighouse today.

Great post by Laura about The Mommy Myth. The book is apparently about the sense of guilt mothers have about not spending 24/7 with their children. Laura says this:

What is the source of this more demanding style of parenting? The authors blame a vast right wing conspiracy, which they intelligently call the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda or CRAP. (Call me an academic snob, but I was really irritated by this. Also, trying to be cute, they call the former Soviet Union, those pesky Russkies. Finger nails on a blackboard.)

Laura disagrees, and instead blames the vast conspriacy of parenting experts

Unless the Sears are in league with CRAP, I think that the new style of parenting has other sources. Child development experts, safety experts, and parents themselves have brought about these changes.

Take this for what it's worth, from a woman with a fair number of issues with teh feminist movement--and who has no children--but the book (which I got for free) was so bad I couldn't finish it. It occasionally makes some interesting points, but the tone mimics the strident yet dorky pronouncements of everyone's stuck-in-the-sixties ninth grade social studies teacher, and the research quality matches it. For every data point, there seem to be seven or eight unfounded assumptions, and in several areas where I know there are well-known studies refuting or at least strongly calling into question the data they do cite, they don't even mention the possible disconfirming evidence, not even to dismiss it. Dreadful.

But I don't think you need to look to baby experts or the VRWC to find out why mothers today have so much higher expectations for their parenting. Social change seems a perfectly adequate culprint.

The women we're talking about have been raised, unlike their mothers, to be goal-oriented; even when they stay home, they treat child-rearing like a project that is supposed to be delivered with rigorous quality standards. The ones who do stay home also have a record low amount of housework to take care of, more disposable income than their mothers and grandmothers, and much greater mobility; this enables them to focus more energy on their children, setting a standard that's ever-harder for working mothers to achieve.

But I think this bit, from Laura's post, is crucial:

This is true. Raising children today is a much different enterprise than it was in the 1950s or 60s. My mom didn’t strap us kids into car seats, which meant that it was easier to go places and to share carpooling with neighbors. She put us to sleep on our stomachs, which is much easier than putting babies to sleep on their backs. She gave us solid food much earlier and filled our bellies with formula, which meant that we slept through the night quicker. She shoved us out the backdoor and we amused ourselves in the backyard with a stick and a hole. We had no dance classes, music classes, or playdates. We cried in our cribs until we went to sleep. If we didn’t like dinner, we went hungry. She read us stories, of course, and sang us songs, but she didn’t do it all day. She had the house to clean and dinner to make for my dad.

Our grandmothers didn't think that they were supposed to make their children the total center of all their daily activities. My grandmother never worked outside the home a day in her life, but she certainly didn't spend all that time "interacting" with her children. As soon as they could walk, my mother and aunts were shoved outside to play, in snowsuits in the winter. My grandmother had a house to take care of, clubs to attend, and so forth . . . if you'd told her she was supposed to spend all day, every day, doing little else but attempt to maximize her children's IQ, she would have thought you were crazy. And I think in large part that that's because my grandmother was utterly secure in her role as a wife and mother.

There's a tremendous amount of social pressure on women who are home these days. For most women, at least those in the college/graduate-educated class that I belong to, staying home just because you want to be a housewife is anathema. Even if we wanted to, we'd never admit it--our friends would be horrified. A house just isn't a full time responsibility any more, even if your husband needs a lot of business entertaining to support his career. What self respecting woman would be able to tell her husband, her friends, her family, or herself that she wants to stop working so she can play tennis and sit by the pool?

(And God! How dull I'd find it. I just wasn't raised to appreciate a life of leisure . . . )

No, the only acceptable reason to stay home is the kids. And if you're staying home for the kids, you'd better damn well be working on those kids, hadn't you? Stay-at-home mothers protest, rightly, the ridiculous vision that men have of the leisurely life led by housewives. (I had a conversation recently with a guy who wanted his wife to work so he could stay home with the kids and write. What did he think the kids were going to be doing while he wrote? I asked. Blank stare. Women, whether or not they have children, already know that the answer is "crawl all over you and ask you to get them a cookie/drink/toy". About the only thing you could write under those conditions is limericks.) But you know, the truth is, the most overwhelmed ones, the supermoms trying to squeeze every extra IQ point out of their kids, could ease up a little. Not every moment has to be crammed with Mommy and Me classes, precious painting moments, and Advanced Macrame for Toddlers. I consider myself blessed to have grown up in a home where my mother considered it her responsibility to make me healthy, secure, and well-mannered--not brilliant, athletic, and a concert musician.

Of course, this comes from someone without children. I imagine that all the parents out there are ruefully shaking their heads and saying "just you wait . . ." And humbly aware of my naivete, I am more than ready to be chided for my ignorance. But hey . . . before you chime in, why not put the kids in front of the television, pour yourself a drink, and relax for a minute?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Counter-routing around the damage

China is shutting down popular blog sites. They've met the enemy and he is opposing those who are oppose opposing them:

Some Chinese Internet users said the sites were shut because one or more personal Web pages carried opinions on a well known doctor's letter to China's senior leadership asking them to reassess the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.....

Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who blew the whistle on China's SARS (news - web sites) cover-up last year, asked the Communist Party's powerful Politburo to reverse the official verdict that the student-led movement was a "counter-revolutionary rebellion."

Unfortunately, this is nothing new:

This was not the first time Chinese authorities censored blogs, a popular medium for the country's 80 million Internet users. Last year, Web police blocked access to the U.S.-based "Blogspot" Web site, which then had more than one million users.

Besides shutting down domestic sites, China has jailed people for Web postings, created a special cyber police force and blocked access to foreign news sites

The Chinese government's self-described revolutionary struggle has always been sort of a joke, but shutting down blogs might qualify as at least an uphill battle. Morons.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Toad in the hole?

Various news sources are reporting that the Pakistanis think they have Ayman Al-Zawahiri cornered; Anticipatory Retaliation thinks that they've actually captured him. If it's true, it would certainly be glorious news.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Did the Spanish elections incentivize terror?

Over on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin is arguing that the altered outcome of the Spanish election will not increase the number of terror attacks in the West, although it may affect their placement or timing:

I thought this point by Donald Johnson responding to Chris’ post on the Spanish election (and disregarded in subsequent comments) was valuable enough to justify more prominence.

If al Qaeda has the capability to plant bombs and kill hundreds of people, they’re going to do it however they interpret the Spanish election. They might plant their bombs before elections if they think they can influence them, or they might plant their bombs where there are large crowds on some special date, or they might choose some big symbolic target again, like the Pentagon or the WTC. The point is to stop them, not to worry about how they might read election results except to the extent that understanding what they think might give clues on what their next target is going to be.

Exactly right. The idea, that by doing what al Qaeda (supposedly) wants¹ we are sending a message that will influence them to do more of the same directly contradicts the overwhelming evidence that al Qaeda is unconditionally committed to terroristic war against us, and cannot be dissuaded from it (evidence that has been stressed more on the right of the blogosphere than anywhere else). They cannot be influenced, only incapacitated.

Call me a doctrinaire neoclassicist, but something in me rebels at the notion that dramatically increasing the payoff of a given activity will not, at least on the margin, produce more of that activity.

Even assuming that the leadership of Al-Qaeda is so thoroughly evil that they wish to inflict maximum damage whether or not it has any effect whatsoever, their suppliers, of capital and labour, surely are at least somewhat responsive to effectiveness. Al Qaeda now has a wonderful new sales pitch for its financers: Give us money. We can alter the outcome of elections. It has an even better recruiting tool: your work may be dangerous, but look how much effect a few people can have!.

The conservative argument is generally applied to appeasement. I don't embrace it quite as fully as many of my warblogging companions--I think that there is probably some level of change that could convince Al Qaeda to stop targeting us, although I don't think that the minimum level (complete military and economic withdrawal from the Middle East) is either practical or desireable, and I am open to the argument that the change required might be totally unacceptable to a free society: stop making those dangerous cultural exports; stop outperforming the Middle East economically; stop being non-Muslim. But again, even if the leadership of Al Qaeda is so thoroughly evil that absolutely nothing we could ever do, short of signing up for their church and declaring Osama the Grand High Leader of Everything, would make a difference to their plans, it seems obvious to me that well short of that, the interest of Osama's financial backers and angry young men would begin to dry up. That doesn't mean that I think it is a good idea to attempt this sort of appeasement. I most emphatically do not think that, for I think that the cost would be far too high--and the act of appeasement would invite other extremists to try their hands at terror. But that doesn't mean I think it is technically impossible. It isn't; merely highly undesireable.

The question, then, is whether or not the Spanish vote lowers the risk of terror attack, by making the angry young men less angry; or raises it, by increasing the payoff to an attack. Judiciously, I'd say the latter. The number of troops Spain has in Iraq is trivial, and as many bloggers have pointed out, Al Qaeda's sad obsession with "the tragedy of Al-Andalus" will keep Spain on its target list for sometime to come. Meanwhile, the Spanish electorate has sent the message to all sorts of terror groups--not just Al-Qaeda--that a well timed bomb can get results.

This applies whether or not the Spanish people were attempting to appease Al-Qaeda in their vote. Bloggers on the right have been too quick to throw accusations of cowardice; it seems more likely that the PP shot themselves in the foot by trying to hang the attack on ETA. But bloggers on the left have spent far too much time trying to psychoanalyzing the Spanish voter, spinning delicate arguments about fine distinctions of intent. This is totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the Spanish voters were thinking when they threw the PP out, because Al-Qaeda is going to interpret the results in the way most favourable to itself, especially in the fundraising and recruiting drives that will be key to staging more results. Anyone who has worked at any medium-sized organization knows that when a big project comes off, precious few moments are devoted to debating whether it was the result of The Master Plan, or serendipity. Even less will the raw recruits who will be expected to carry out the bombings, or donors who will be expected to finance them, be encouraged to think about how effective they really were. Since most of those donors and recruits live in countries with tightly controlled media, they won't have much counterweight to Al-Qaeda's most compelling argument: terror works.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A cry for help

We are about to face an enormous increase in our bandwith charges. The first, emergency step is to strip down the site to get rid of bandwith-hoggers. Can my talented commenters suggest the best ways to do this without switching to some hideous all-text page?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Reasonable Doubts about Regulation

I submit to you that regulators of commerce in the United States are gradually:

1. Subsidizing discovery for both public and private litigants
   
2. Substituting subjective standards of fraud and misbehavior for specific guidelines
   

These trends will alter commercial and social activity in this country dramatically over the coming decades, although it is quite difficult to forecast the effects. I also believe that one's approach to these developments challenges the typical political boundaries of economic liberalism vs. 'progressive' statism or traditional conservatism vs. liberalism.

These pages have touched on many different developments relating to the tort bar and regulation, from my co-blogger's classic essays such as "Can We Sue Our Own Fat Asses Off?" and regulatory capture to my own comments on medical malpractice, financial institutions regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley and accounting disclosure. Unsurprisingly, my co-blogger and I have a similar aversion to many current regulatory developments, although we disagreed on the importance of expensing options.

In each case, there is a trade-off (or false dichotomy, some might say) between enforcement of behavioral standards through prescriptive guidelines/regulations or through the tort bar. Amidst our discussion of medical malpractice problems commenter Bernard Yomtov (if I remember correctly) asked why the growth in large medical settlements should bother privatization advocates like the Galt crew. The growing effectiveness of the tort bar in extracting large settlements, he avers, is merely privatizing regulation of medical care.

Bernard raised an interesting point - recent trends in financial regulation amount to giving up on the idea of strict prescriptive guidelines of behavior in favor of both subjective guidelines and creating a paper trail for litigators. Recent regulatory initiatives have focused on

• permanent retention and storage of internal and external email in non-alterable, third-party maintained media
  
• substantial, sworn disclosure of procedures and safeguards (via Sarbanes-Oxley, for instance)
  
• the identification of key individuals that should become the focus of any government or litigation action (via designation of key officers and departments, and the Sarbanes-Oxley mechanism of written representations)
  
• The adoption of subjective definitions of fraud and misrepresentation and disconnected remedies thereto.
  
• Continuous, subjective and coervice examination procedures
  
• The use of regulatory examinations to promote hiring practices and political correctness
  

I believe we can generalize from these developments that regulators, like the rest of us, are developing a post-modern cynicism about rule-writing. As with taxation and accounting guidelines, the more we attempt to make rules specific and comprehensive, the more opportunities for misbehavior and regulatory capture we seem to create.

Prosecution has recently focused on procedural matters or fraud in post-investigatory conduct than actual infractions. Martha Stewart was convicted for her conduct as the target of an investigation of insider trading, not insider trading itself. prosecutors elected not to bring charges on her trading after the investigation. Frank Quattrone was accused of destroying evidence and witness tampering. Quattrone faced no charges on the allegations of allocating hot stock offerings that made him an investigation target. But while the government was unable to successfully charge Quattrone or his employer, civil actions extracted a $100 million settlement from Quattrone's employer. Like the O.J. Simpson case, civil awards succeeded where criminal prosecution failed upon a higher standard of evidence.

Delegation to the tort bar, however, is neither entirely privatization nor problem-free. While tort lawyers themselves are not government employees, a trial verdict has the power of government behind it. It is not the market at work, it is a mechanism for enforcing explicit and implicit contracts. Regulators are forcing the private sector to modify its contracts and providing case preparation before the fact. This is truly a litigation subsidy. Some would suggest this merely levels the playing field between individual litigants and powerful institutional defendants. In some cases this is no doubt true, but not all. The class action lawsuit has certainly brought substantial means to the tort bar. In addition, the government can bring civil suit as well, and while the government may not dedicate as much money to trial, it certainly has other resources at its disposal. For instance, "regulatory blackmail" is common, where routine permits, licenses and filings unconnected to the complaints against a regulated entity are held up pending resolution of the matter (Infinity broadcasting complains that all its merger filings were delayed indefinitely while it was protesting an 'indecency' fine) It is far from clear that these legal subsidies aren't given to those with the deepest pockets or the greater power.

We understand the problems with civil suits, particularly jury trials. Juries tend to be sympathetic to anyone who suffers injury and generally weigh the specific costs of a jury award at the expense of its second-order effects. The insurance company can surely spare a few million for this unfortunate soul with breast cancer subsequent to a breast implant regardless of actual causative connections; one jury award can't possibly cause plant closings and slow innovation. Or so the reasoning seems to go.

I suspect we will trade one problem for another. If we increasingly rely on the pressures of potential civil litigation to alter behavior it may eventually rebound on the legal profession. I recently had a billing dispute with a securities lawyer. I referred to an email he had written some months before estimating charges for the assignment. He informed me that his firm's policy is to permanently destroy all email over three months old in order to protect the firm and its clients. Given the requirements for email retention in the financial industry (interpreting which his firm make's a pretty penny), I found this hysterically funny. Some time in the future, I suspect, objects of aggressive legal prosecution will prevail upon the authorities to invade privilege and subject the trial lawyers themselves to the same discovery subsidy that corporations suffer. So the keeper will become the kept. The only winners will be regulators looking for jobs.

No easy answers here (no unified Asymmetrical theory, if you will), but I can certainly speak anecdotally from recent experience that these new developments have a paralytic effect. It is incredibly difficult to recruit experienced outside board members and prohibitively expensive to buy them D&O insurance. Other experienced professionals are leaving their jobs rather than sign research reports, Sarbanes-Oxley filings on large entities or compliance certifications. Financial institutions and professional service E&O insurance prices are skyrocketing. The majority of technology budgets in the financial industry are focused on compliance with new regulation as opposed to innovation. The corporate sector is not far behind. It isn't just highly-ranked professionals or insurance and technology budgets. Simple open discourse is jeopardized. Institutions are beginning to govern intra-firm correspondence, or even investigative legal work product with an eye towards protecting themselves when this correspondence is made public. Critical expression must be oral and off-the-record, or it must be without substance. The ultimate effect is not just to disclose communication but to impede it. Without open, direct communication the firm stagnates. Writ large, these trends would seem to be a strong force for economic stagnation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh why, oh why can't we have a better press corps?

This Op-Ed by Paul Krugman is very silly.

I mean, it's not totally silly; it contains a pessimistic, but fairly good, assessment of the current jobs picture. Unemployment is not rebounding the way most people (including your humble correspondant) expected it to, despite the rapid recovery. One can speculate on the reasons for this -- I tend to think that a recent paper from the Fed, arguing that as manufacturing employment declines (due to extremely high productivity, not Evil Foreigners, before the tinfoil hat brigade begins their deadly march into the comments) have drastically increased the ratio of structural unemployment (sectors losing jobs) to cyclical unemployment (companies laying workers off until demand picks up again). But there are all sorts of arguments about why; no one can say they know for 100% sure -- though that hasn't stopped lots of people from trying, of course.

But the reason this column is silly is that Mr Krugman can't simply stop by saying, "hey, jobs are dismal" -- he has to pin it on (of course) the Bush administration.

The problem is, the president just doesn't have much to do with the economy. Bill Clinton didn't give us a good economy in the 1990's, and George W. Bush didn't give us a bad one now -- and when the economy improves, Bush won't have had much of anything to do with that, either. While one could argue back and forth about the impacts of Jimmy Carter's deregulatory drive (bet you conservatives didn't know he did something good, did you?) or Reagan's tax simplification and deregulation, ultimately the last president who had a major impact on the economy was Richard Nixon, and we don't remember that period very fondly.

Robert Samuelson pointed this out in an excellent column:

We are having a ferocious jobs debate, most of it fraudulent. If presidents could easily create jobs, the unemployment rate would rarely exceed 3.5 percent. But all they can usually do is influence the economy through taxes, spending and regulatory decisions -- and hope that job growth follows. In our market system, private employers play the pivotal role. They will add jobs only if: (a) demand justifies new workers; (b) labor costs aren't at unprofitable levels; and (c) they think healthy economic conditions will last. Electing a president based on job creation makes as much sense as selecting a doctor based on palm reading.

. . .

Admitting the truth is no fun: On jobs, presidents are mostly prisoners of the business cycle. The present cycle has been particularly confusing. On the one hand, the monthly unemployment rate peaked at 6.3 percent in June 2003, much lower than in the slump of the early 1990s (7.8 percent). On the other hand, job creation has lagged badly. By the government's payroll survey, nonfarm employment is about 2.35 million below its March 2001 peak and up 366,000 from its August low.

. . .

Facing a weak economy, a government can do three things: cut interest rates; run a budget deficit; and allow -- or cause -- its currency to depreciate. The first two promote borrowing and spending; the last makes a country's exports cheaper and its imports costlier. All these weapons have been deployed. Bush's policies are mostly standard economics; based on past patterns, these policies should have produced stronger job growth. But private employers have resisted hiring. "Economists are scratching their heads," says Randell Moore, editor of the monthly Blue Chip Economic Indicators, which surveys 50 economic forecasters.

. . .

We don't know [what to do]. But what we can know is that policies from a President Gore or Kerry or Edwards wouldn't have improved matters much. Of course, Democrats might have discarded some Bush policies: say, tax cuts for the rich. Still, the main forces shaping the job market would have remained well beyond presidential reach: the boom-bust cycle (President Bill Clinton didn't create the boom, and the bust was unfolding even before Bush's election); weak growth in Europe, Japan and Latin America, which account for almost 40 percent of U.S. exports; and business cautiousness. Protectionism is no panacea. It barely touches job creation; America's trade problem is weak exports as much as strong imports. Even if every offshored service job had somehow been saved, the job picture wouldn't have changed much.

No matter. During elections, politics overwhelms reason. Perhaps continuing economic growth and a weaker dollar will soon produce more jobs. On average, the economists surveyed by Moore expect 166,000 new jobs a month in 2004 -- or about 2 million for the year. Whatever occurs, someone will be blamed or credited. In war, truth is often said to be the first casualty. It's the same in campaigns.

Ah, you will say; you're just applauding the conservative and panning the liberal.

No. There is a valid argument that Bush's tax cuts weren't, theoretically speaking, ideally structured to provide maximum stimulus; Brad De Long made it in his post on the Samuelson column. But he doesn't contradict the central point of Samuelson's column, which is that no matter what the structure, the ultimate effect on jobs of that sort of fiscal stimulus is trivial. Bush might -- or might not -- have eked out some marginal extra job growth with a differnt program. But he would not have restored the 2.6 million jobs we've lost since the downturn began. And angry programmers looking for someone to blame for the fact that they no longer command high salaries will ultimately have to come to terms with the fact that the internet bubble just attracted too many people, at too high salaries, into a field that will not need that many people for many years to come, if ever again, and they are not going to replace the salaries they had in 1999. I was a technology worker before I went to business school, and I remember the late 1990's ever so fondly -- and I'm now making less than I was before I acquired a big fat load of graduate school debt. I feel your pain. But George Bush simply can't wave his magic Presidential wand and make all our economic woes go away.

And who does Paul Krugman think we need in the White House? Someone like FDR:

Franklin Roosevelt, in his efforts to combat economic woes, was famously willing to try anything until he found something that worked. George Bush, by contrast, seems determined to try the same thing, over and over again.

I feel compelled to point out that FDR's brilliant economic experiments included lunatic attempts to manipulate the prices of commodities by open market gold operations, and organising all the businesses and workers in the country into giant cartels for the purposes of fixing prices. Nor did he halt these "experiments "because they weren't working -- he ended his gold operations, IIRC, because other countries complained, and the supreme court put a stop to the NRA. (And only then because the congress stopped him from basically making the court an extension of the executive). Furthermore, comparing the two makes Bush look like the Employment Fairy; jobless numbers under FDR before the military buildup began in 1940 averaged 19.2%, running from a low of 14.3% to a high of almost 25%. (To be fair, the latter came during the first year in office--but also to be fair, the rate was 19% in 1938, so it isn't a clear case of the rate getting steadily better during his term.) And the "solution" FDR finally found to unemployment was World War II -- a solution that required a lot of co-operation from abroad, and moreover a strategy that Mr Krugman did not support when Mr Bush implemented it.

Now, FDR may well have alleviated a lot of suffering with many of his relief programmes, and that's very admirable. But that doesn't mean they repaired the economy, which wasn't, in any case, very well repaired. Similarly, while Mr Krugman's preferred solutions (extended unemployment benefits, temporary aid to state and local governments, and rebates for low- and middle-income workers) might be sterling ideas on moral grounds, and might even have provided some small boost to employment, they would not, as Mr Krugman strenuously implies, have taken care off all the angry programmers and so forth who are going to have to accept lower wages or retrain themselves for another field. Surely, as a professional economist, Mr Krugman has a responsibility to make clear the limits, as well as the benefits, of his proposals, hard though such cautions may be to fit in a 700 word column?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Breaking news on Madrid

The redoubtable Contributor A of Mistakes Were Made has just emailed me this article from ABC (the Spanish ABC, not our television network -- the article is in Spanish). For those without even my desultory command of the Spanish language, it says that the one bomb they recovered intact does not follow ETA's MO.

ETA usually uses Titadine (a sort of dynamite), which they steal in France, and two men linked to ETA were caught last week with a large truck filled with 1,000 pounds of it. The ABC article says, however, that the explosive is not Titadine but some other kind of Spanish manufacture, and the detonators are copper, rather than the aluminum that ETA generally uses. If true, this would be a deep blow to the argument that ETA, rather than an Al-Qaeda linked group, is responsible.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Explosion in Madrid

This is a horrifying day. For the spaniards, with a population around 40 million, this is an event on the order of September 11th. It's unutterably awful.

I'm afraid I don't have much to add beyond that. But a discussion has naturally arisen in our office about whether this is likely to be the work of ETA, the basque-separatist terror group. On the one hand, ETA is almost denying it. On the other hand, the Spanish interior minister has declared he has "no doubt" that ETA is behind these attacks. On the third hand, this is not ETA's general MO -- they usually notify the government right before the attacks, and claim credit for them afterwards, and while they often catch civilians in the crossfire, they generally restrict themselves to quasi-military or showy targets such as police stations. On the fourth hand, Spain caught a couple of ETA members trying to bomb a train station a few weeks ago. But then, it would be pretty stupid to try, try again in such a short time frame, wouldn't it? And European intelligence officials are saying that ETA lacks the resources to mount this sort of attack . . .

I'm singularly unqualified to opine on what this all means. But it does raise an important question that I'm hoping my readers can answer: why does it take so many resources to mount this sort of attack? From what I've read, the attack sounds like something I could have organized in my old protest days with little effort (provided someone else procured the explosives, of course): walk onto the train with a bomb in a knapsack, and then walk out another door, sans knapsack, before the train leaves the station. Even a time-synchronized group wouldn't have presented too many obstacles. But then, I don't quite understand why it took Al-Qaeda two years to organize 9/11, either.

Could those who have studied these matters offer their insights? What am I missing that makes these sorts of operations more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive than I'm imagining? And, if you know anything about ETA, what is your opinion on whether or not they could have staged this sort of attack?

UPDATE A group claiming to be afficionadoes of Al-Qaeda is apparently claiming credit.

FURTHER THOUGHTS If it was some group trying to take a play out of Al Qaeda's book, it seems highly likely that they did this to Spain because Spain supported America. It would behoove America to offer extravagent support for Spain now, diplomatically and monetarily--for our own benefit, as well as Spain's, because whatever your feeling on the war, one would hope that all Americans would like to improve our fracturing relationships with Europe, especially when all it takes to do so is to show some generosity to the victims of a catastrophe. The grouch bag is pretty low here at Stately Galt Manor, what with the move and all, but when the Red Cross sets up its fund for the bombing victims, I'm planning to scrape together a few nickels for it, and hope you'll think about making a donation to them, or another organisation doing similar work. If anyone has a good idea of charities that would be particularly helpful to the victims, please leave your suggestion in the comments.

EVEN FURTHER THOUGHTS Lets remember that the first reports to come out are often wrong -- remember the reports about Al Qaeda involvement in Oklahoma City? That's why donating to the Red Cross is the right response right now -- it's a good thing to do no matter who was behind this.

AND MORE IDEAS Instapundit is suggesting sending flowers to the embassy. The New York City consulate, as it happens, is right near my office, so we may walk over with some:

150 East 58th Street, 30 th & 31st Floors New York, NY 10155

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I am woman . . .

Frankly, I don't know what to think. Here I am featured in this Daily News article on successful women bloggers . . . and then the Columbia Journalism Review tells me I'm being discriminated against for my gender. I think the folks at Columbia are calling me unfeminine. That makes me so darn mad I'm going to sit right down here and sob hysterically into my gallon of Haagen-Dazs until they say they're sorry.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reader contest

Here in the office, we get a large supply of business book review copies. While review copies are generally popular, business books are something of a drug on the market, and it's not hard to see why with some of them. No possible paradigm has gone unmined, no matter how silly. I wanted to write a parody of a business book catalogue, with titles like "The Management Secrets of the Carmelite Nuns", but sadly, some desperate soul was there before me -- there are a plethora of actual books purporting to mine the financial wisdom of our nation's religious orders for the alleged benefit of their hapless readers.

So instead, I'm sponsoring a couple of little contests, for your amusement:

1) Submit the silliest business book, with its description, that you can find on Amazon.

2) Submit the silliest imaginary business book you can think of, with the description that might accompany it on Amazon.

Here's my submission:

Make a killing in the market
The amazing investment secrets of America's most famous serial killers

Before he became a household name for his murderous exploits, Ted Bundy was a successful law student and aspiring entrepreneur with an eye for a hot stock. Now, for the first time, you can have access to his investment advice, along with John Wayne Gacy's tips on real estate management, Jeffrey Dahmer's advice for the beginning commodities trader, and so much more! All told, the author has collected the financial wisdom of 35 of our nation's top homicidal talent. If you want to make it big in the market, you need to hone your killer instinct -- and there's no better place than this book.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A hell of a long post on conservatives in academia

Truly it is written "That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Now that I've been blogging for over two years, I find we are returning to arguments of yore, with few minds changed on either side.

And yet I, too, leap once more into the fray -- stormed at with snot and yell, into the valley of death, into the mouth of hell. Psychosis, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, pass the tinfoil and the plasticine, and let's get on with it.

The argument about the dearth of conservatives in academia can, I think, be broken down into three parts:

1. Are conservatives underrepresented in academia?

2. If they are, is this underrepresentation due to action on the part of the faculty, or is there some other reason that we can't (or shouldn't) correct?

3. If conservatives are underrepresented, and the cause of this underrepresentation is due, in whole or in part, to the actions of the faculty or administration, should we try to do anything about this?

Let's take those questions one at a time:

1. Are conservatives underrepresented at institutions of higher learning?

Let me narrow this question a bit to this: Are conservatives underrepresented at elite institutions of higher learning?

I do this for three reasons. First, this debate has become linked, for good or for bad, with the debate about affirmative action in academia; and affirmative action in academia is a meaningful issue at perhaps 10% of the institutions of higher learning in this country. (Remember, the vast majority of colleges in this country will admit anyone who applies, provided they can sign their name to a tuition check, and present some sort of high school diploma). And second, conservatives are primarily concerned with the dearth of their compatriots in academia because of the effect this absence has on policy and the culture of ideas, particularly as presented in the media. The elite academic institutions exert a tremendous influence over both, both through their pedagogic function, training the future policy analysts and journalists, and through their filtering function, deciding which ideas are valid and important. And third, the elite colleges are where most of the data is; no researchers have undertaken to visit each of our nation's tens of thousands of community colleges to find out what their faculties think. So let's concentrate on the narrower question.

Anecdotally, the answer is obvious to anyone on the right (or even, in my experience, in the center): hell, yes.

But I've never once seen politics come into the classroom! protest outraged liberals.

Umm-hmmm. And I never saw black women being followed around retail stores by clerks--until a friend of mine who is a black woman pointed it out. Unless it is very, very overt, few of us notice discrimination unless it is directed at us.

Now, for most of my time in college, I was a creature of the left. And during that time, the university felt like a warm, open place, a veritable hotbed of ideological diversity. It was only when I began to cross that ideological boundary that the pointed remarks and occasional open hostility became glaring. That I noticed that my university (Penn) seemed curiously uncommitted to protecting the communication of ideas, if those ideas concerned race or gender; the administration pretty much openly sanctioned the theft of any paper that offended a woman's group or minority organisation, and it denied due process to people accused of offensive speech towards women or minorities. That the generalised assumptions on which you were expected to operate in many classes were hostile to free markets in particular, and conservative ideas in general. No, hostile isn't the right word; hostile would imply argument or discussion. These things were never argued. The rightness of the moderately left-wing view of the world was simply taken as a given.

In other words, I noticed that every single one of my professors in every single one of my classes, with the exception of two economics professors, was either a Democrat, or too far to the left to be comfortable identifying themselves as a Democrat.

Now, of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, and given that I was an English major, I'm not necessarily representative; perhaps the history department was simply teeming with Republicans.

But that isn't the case, is it? As far as I can determine, every study that's ever been done, by asking the professors, or checking their voting registration, or their campaign contributions, or what have you, generates exactly the same result: with a handful of exceptions, no humanities department at any school of any significant academic reputation has more than two or three conservatives on staff, and many, many such departments have none.

So, let's take it as a given that there is indeed an extraordinary skew towards liberals in the humanities departments of academia. Actually, skew is far too weak a word; if we take the distribution between right and left among American citizens as the normal distribution, what we have in academia is a curve that pretty much chops off before it even hits the median line. That's not a skew; it's an intellectual monoculture.

Which brings us to question two:

2. Is the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia due to action on the part of the faculty or administration, or is there some other reason that we can't (or shouldn't) correct?

In examining the hypothesis that the political composition of the current faculty determines (causes) the political composition of the future faculty, we must examine three possibilities:

a. There is a causal link; the new hires are liberal because the current faculty are liberal.

b. The causal link is there, but runs the other way: the current faculty is liberal because the incoming faculty is liberal.

c. There is some other factor that makes both the faculty, and the hiring pool, left wing.

Many liberals discussing the issue like to take the strongest possible form of hypothesis a -- "Liberal faculty members, meeting in their secret dungeon, have signed a blood pact to refuse conservatives entrance to academia, and enforce this mission by ruthlessly interrogating prospective faculty about their political preferences, and then refusing to hire anyone insufficiently left wing" -- deny that it occurs, and then skip off with a blythe "Q.E.D." tossed over the shoulder to anyone who insists that there might be more to the story.

This is ludicrous. Not even the most ideological conservative, smugly convinced that we have live in a colorblind nirvana, would insist that discrimination is only present if a prospective employer leans across the desk and says "I'm afraid I can't hire you. You see, you're black." Nor would he limit it to a hiring committee sitting around a table and saying "well, it's a big stack of resumes here, but luckily we can get rid of 20% of them right off the top, because they're women." Even the most rock-ribbed, anti-affirmative action, land-of-opportunity-glorifying, whitebread midwestern meritocratic elitist would recognize that if everyone at the hiring meeting unanimously agrees that we need to toss out Candidates X, Y and Z because "they're not a good fit" -- and the reason everyone thinks that they're not a good fit is that their skin is the wrong color, or they don't have enough Y chromosomes, that this is discrimination, and it's wrong. They might not think it's possible to prove satisfactorily enough to warrant remedy; they might think the remedy would do more harm than good; they might think that the proposed remedies are unjust. But they don't deny that it is possible to discriminate without everyone sitting down and announcing they're doing it. In contrast to the south, I'd bet that very few admissions committees or HR departments in the north fifty years ago said "we don't want any negroes here" -- but just the same, they didn't get any negroes. And it's a rare person indeed who denies that this was because of racial discrimination. Certainly, it's very hard to imagine that any of the liberals advancing these arguments to "disprove" discrimination against conservatives in academia would do so.

(Does this mean, as Kieran Healy argued a while back, that I am being "forced to admit the existence of institutionalized inequality, something [conservatives] are usually loath to acknowledge"? Well, most conservatives I know, few of whom are the stolid lackwits that his post implies, acknowlege that institutionalized inequality exists. They don't think it is as widespread as those on the left who seem to see a racist behind every tree. They think that much of the institutionalized inequality comes from things that are politically difficult to fix, such as the failing schools, or politically impossible to equalize, such as failing families or the vastly better social networks possessed by the middle class--by what mechanism will we stop Dad from speaking to best friend Bill about that presigious summer internship? And they don't think that institutionalizing reverse racism is the right solution in most cases. That doesn't mean that conservatives are unaware that discrimination can happen without everyone sitting down and making a rule saying "No blacks". See above.)

In general, liberals favour hypothesis b, pointing out, correctly, that the population of graduate students from whom future professors are drawn is also very disproportionately liberal. They like to advance one of several theories to explain this:

i. Conservatives are stupid/narrowminded; professors are smart/openminded; therefore, conservatives can't be professors.

No data is ever offered in support of this rather extraordinary explanation. Indeed, I was able to find no data on the relative intelligence of conservatives and liberals (and of course, any such data would be provided by the very professors whose bias we are investigating.) Nor does the general quality of the accompanying rhetoric tend to support the notion that liberals are conservatives' intellectual superiors; rather the reverse, in fact. The vicious ad hominem, farcical caricature, and tendency to dehumanise the population they are describing lends itself to many a happy hour of replacing every instance of "conservatives are" with "blacks are" or "women are" and emailing the results back to the authors for comment.

ii. Conservatives are too interested in making money to go into academia

There is probably some truth to this. But it is not, by itself, adequate. Liberals do not significantly outnumber conservatives at medical school, and prospective doctors work longer hours, in more misery, for roughly as little pay (after taxes and living expenses are accounted for), for more years, than do graduate students. And while the financial payoff in most academic fields is lower, professors, unlike doctors, can't be fired and won't be sued, and they don't have to spend much of their days sticking their fingers into peoples' body cavities. Their cost of living is generally lower, they have excellent benefits, and they get the benefit of living in a culture that, though its hierarchy is probably more rigid than that of doctors, uses non-financial metrics to assess status, and indeed actively frowns on conspicuous consumption, which lowers their cost of living still further.

Moreover, there is no shortage of little wonks willing to work at conservative think tanks, even though these jobs are not well renumerated. So by itself, this lacks explanatory vigour.

iii. Conservatives aren't interested in academic inquiry/art/literature/etc.

Oh, snore. And your mother's a big fat idiot.

iv. Conservatives don't share academic values

Possibly so. But this begs the question: are liberal academics defining their values so as to exclude conservatives? In some cases this is valid; much as I value the free exchange of ideas, I don't really think it would be appropriate to offer tenure to a biology professor who doesn't believe in evolution. But does it matter whether your English professor does? And if so, how did they let in all the folks in my English department who embraced a blatantly political, anti-scientific "blank slate" view of human behavior despite all evidence to the contrary?

The problem in general with hypothesis b is that it doesn't really help us. In the private sector, if a fellow places an employment ad and it just so happens that all the applicants are white men, we don't say that he has discriminated by hiring only white men for the available positions. But this only works because for most positions, the employers do not control the hiring pool.

In academia, they do. From what I know (and there are fair number of academics running around the Galt family tree), getting a tenure-track job at a good institution is the culmination of a 5-7 year audition process during which you are looked over by the "club", sorted, ranked, and continually evaluated for potential weakness. So when professors claim that there couldn't possibly be any discrimination because they don't ask about political affiliation in interviews, this is more than a touch disingenuous. They don't have to ask, because the faculty at the applicant's institution, which can be assumed to share the same values, has already had ample time to figure out where the candidate stands.

Not, I must emphasise, that I believe that there is some vast, left-wing conspiracy to drive conservatives out of academia. To the extent that such things happen, I believe that they happen because many academics, in my experience, would prefer not to associate with conservatives, and a small but vocal percentage actually believe that being conservative is a moral wrong that should exclude you from consideration. Those biases, unconcious and conscious, serve to exclude conservatives by making it harder for them to get the recommendations and personal introductions that can make all the difference between landing a tenure track job and deciding you'd rather be a consultant after all. Which, in turn, allows hiring committees to assume that the overwhelming majority of candidates they see share their broad political outlook.

And the few that slip through . . . well, I've been on search committees when there were a lot of applicants and a few jobs. You're looking for any excuse to winnow the pile; I've thrown out resumes because I didn't like the font. So do I think that a notation that you were the chapter president of the College Republicans, or a graduate sponsor of the Campus Crusade for Christ, might well knock you out of the running? Consciously or unconsciously, yes. Certainly, my few conservative friends who were applying to graduate school thought it prudent to expunge anything that might betray a rightward tilt.

And what about hypothesis c? Is there some X factor about academia that makes both the hiring pool and the faculty liberal? To some extent, probably. Self interest, for example: academics will tend to do better under a progressive tax scheme than a flatter one, and more money spent on government probably means more money spent on government grants. In some cases, envy probably plays a role. Not a few academics are morally outraged at the money made in the private sector for work they consider to be substantially less valuable than the work they do; a little redistribution seems to them to be very much in order. Such people seldom consider that the high renumeration goes hand in hand with a lifetime of work that most people consider very unpleasant--which I point out because I jumped off the MBA track to a career in journalism, which is also badly paid, because it's a lot more fun than being an M&A associate. Let's consider, too, the experience most academics have of market forces. The primary goal of most academics is a tenure-track position, competition for which is unbelievably fierce. A group of people who have spent a considerable portion of their adult lives pursuing, as their primary goal, jobs insulated from market forces, in a job market characterised by severely binary outcomes in which a few lucky candidates landing cushy sinecures and the rest are forced to subsist at or near poverty or leave the field, is likely to have a significantly different outlook on economics and politics than, say, a group of accountants.

To sum up: do I think that faculty are engaged in some sort of grand conspiracy to keep conservatives out of academia? No. I think that the absence of conservatives in the immediate hiring pool is a combination of genuinely different interests and a hostile environment, plus occasional overt discrimination.

I do not believe that it is because Republicans are more money-grubbing, stupid, or narrow-minded than Democrats. (Of course, I wouldn't believe that, would I?) And I'll point out that the University of Chicago Business School, hotbed of free-market fundamentalism, which is often offered as an example of how different values might produce a similar skew in the other direction, does not, in fact skew noticeably Republican. Having been there during the election fiasco of 2000, I can testify that the student body splits roughly 50-50 Democrat/Republican, and faculty members averred that the faculty was similarly divided.

This also dramatically undercuts the common argument that the fact that the liberal skew in academia is much more dramatic than the liberal skew of the general population with postgraduate education is due to the professional schools. Lawyers probably trend Democratic, and the Republican tilt of MBA and Medical students, if it exists, is very mild.

Finally, let me point out that even if the potential qualified pool of academics is, say, 90% liberal and 10% conservative, the odds of getting the result we witness at Duke--6 Republicans out of a faculty numbering in the hundreds, IIRC--purely by chance is very low, certainly less than 5%. The odds of getting those same results, by chance, at every single academic institution of any repute in the country are astronomical. It's possible, of course, that it's just random bad luck. It's also possible that the reason there were no blacks in management positions at Fortune 500 companies in the 1950's was that they all simultaneously overslept on the day of the interview. But I wouldn't bet that way.

So if conservatives are underrepresented, and it is in part because the faculty at elite institutions create barriers to their entry into academia, that brings us to question 3:

3. What, if anything, should we do about conservative underrepresentation

If you're conservative, I certainly hope you didn't say "force universities to hire more conservatives!" You're not an ideological conservative; you're an opportunist willing to sacrifice any principle as soon as it's your own ox being gored.

I'm in favor of the sorts of programs I'd favour for any group: set up scholarships and chairs for those of your ideological stripe, or for subjects you want to see covered. Harangue your college. Expose institutional anti-conservatism. Embarass those who create the embarassing conditions that drive conservatives out. But quotas? Are you barking mad?

That doesn't mean I agree with liberals who make arguments like this:

I'm getting pretty tired of incessant snarky comments from conservatives about the lack of "intellectual diversity" on university campuses:

Here's more on the flap over Duke's diversity problem. "What’s clear is that the present administration has pledged a commitment to racial, gender, and intellectual diversity, but actual resources are only dedicated toward the first two components."

Duke — and other institutions — devote resources to the first two because America has a long and often ugly history of discrimination against ethnic minorities and women. America decidedly does not have a long and ugly history of discrimination against conservatives.

[Pedantic insert: it's not hard to understand. It's also illegal. I believe that the Supreme Court's Bakke decision, which I had the privilege of studying in my labour relations class, specifically ruled out quotas (or de facto quotas, such as the policy at most institutions of higher learning of altering the admissions criteria for minority students so as to produce a roughly equal number of minorities each year, which is higher than would be admitted without the alterations) based on rectifying past discrimination. Legally and logically, this makes sense to me, as it's somewhat repulsive to force some randomly selected white kids to take a bullet in order to rectify past discrimination for the rest of us. That left only "diversity" as the potential rationale for affirmative action. Having hung affirmative action on the educational benefits of diversity, it's hard to see how excluding half the political spectrum from the faculty fosters this desireable goal. But I digress.]

Our disagreement, I think, stems from one's conception of the university. Is it device for excercising power, or is it a place for education?

A little of both, I suppose. I've written before about education as a signalling mechanism, and I don't think there's any doubt that one's college degree functions as a proxy for a host of other items that have nothing to do with educational attainment, such as class, social polish, work ethic, and so forth. Given that, perhaps it's legitimate to try to distribute that signalling mechanism more evenly between races.

The problem is, I suspect it doesn't work that way; knowing that affirmative action is in place, a rational employer will discount for it, so in effect, rather than spreading the value of such degrees around, you've merely destroyed their value for those minorities who were not admitted under affirmative action. Though I might be persuaded on the morals, on the merits, I doubt that affirmative action is very effective. And it hurts two groups that really don't deserve it: high-achieving minority students who have their achievements discounted, and marginal white students, who will tend to be from less privileged backgrounds than the other white students at the school, and often than the minorities who displaced them, since minority students at elite colleges, like their white counterparts, are disproportionately drawn from the educated middle and upper middle class.

Leaving questions of social justice aside, the issue of whether or not we should care about liberal skew in academia comes down to this: do we care about what sorts of ideas our kids are exposed to? And do political ideas matter in the classroom?

Well, back when I was an english major, the surefire route to an A in perhaps 2/3 of my classes was to identify the political passions of the professor, and then cater to them. Women's studies? Queer theory? Racial and ethnic discrimination? Just write every single paper on that topic. The majority of my academic work in major thus covers such important topics as: homosexuality in Shakespeare's sonnets, power and gender relationships in Chaucer, racism in nineteenth century American literature, and so on. We didn't have to learn anything about any of these works, except that people who lived before 1975 were, by the standards of 1995, a bunch of racist, sexist and homophobic bastards, except for the ones who were probably gay.

Is that useful? To a point. But not to the extent that we generated papers on these topics. So Pope was sexist. So what? No matter how many classes you teach on his hopeless misogyny, he's not going to come back to catch a sensitivity seminar at the Wymyn's Studies Centre.

But I digress. The point is, our professors' politics did invade the classroom, even in a subject that's ostensibly apolitical. How much more would they matter in history, political science, economics?

Now, of course, many professors do try to play devil's advocate, presenting views not their own in order to round out the picture. And as a DA of long standing, I applaud them. But I also know that no matter how hard you try, you are never as forceful an advocate for the other side as you are for your own. You don't look as hard for disconfirming evidence. Studies that contradict your opponents do not set off the heart-racing, migraine-inducing, "I'll bet I can prove them wrong" reaction that makes for a vibrant marketplace of ideas.

It is simply not enough just to read the other sides' literature. It is too easy to throw something that disagrees with you aside with a quick snort of "that's obviously ridiculous!" For truly vigorous debate, which I'd argue is essential to the pursuit of truth, you need advocates from both sides right there, mixing it up face to face. (Politely, of course.) There is just no substitute for having someone who thoroughly disagrees with you pin you down and force you to defend each and every one of your assertions.

That sort of debate goes on all the time in academia--about subjects other than politics. Unlike some of the conservatives I've talked to, I recognize that there is a healthy tradition of vigorous debate in academic culture; I simply think that given the monoculture, it is unlikely that ideas with political implications get the same rough treatment as other academic questions. I think it would be healthier if the left had to expose its most cherished notions to academic debate on a regular basis--and if those notions are true, such exposure can only make them stronger. I also think that it's very important that college students, who are impressionable, prone to argue from emotion, and vulnerable to ideological hero worship, should have both conservative and liberal professors supplying their ideas.

But that's precisely why I'm against any suggestion of affirmative action for conservatives (and to be fair, I've seen no conservatives making such a ridiculous suggestion). Gaining a few quota'd positions, making conservative professors protected hothouse lilies, would destroy debate as surely as banning conservatives--perhaps more so, because the conservatives would have a cushy sinecure to protect. Besides, what criteria would you use to award the preference? Bah! The idea's too stupid to even waste more time thinking about.

So, like a good libertarian, I look to the market, and the distributed social networks of a strong society. Shop for institutions that are open to political diversity for your kids. And every time a professor opens his mouth to opine that the reason there aren't more conservatives in academia is that they're just not as good as we are, hold a mirror up to his prejudice until he writhes with shame.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm baaaaaack

And gloriously well rested. (Though not, alas, tan. I was, as it turns out, over-liberal with the SPF 45 -- especially since I tended to sleep well into the afternoon.)

I avoided the most common peril of Mexican travel by being very careful indeed about what I put into my mouth. Note to travellers: the most common slip-up is forgetting to brush your teeth with bottled water, followed by eating green leafy vegetables (which certainly weren't irrigated with purified water, and may have been fertilised with upsetting substances besides.)

I missed most of the excitement about Haiti. But all this truck with bottled water reminded me of a story I read about a woman living there (can't recall where) talking about the water situation. Some absurdly large percentage of children in Haiti, and many other third-world countries, die of diarrhea. It is absurd because the cure is so simple: five drops of clorox in a gallon of water, or a good boil on the stove. But this woman couldn't afford Clorox, or the fuel to boil her water. Think about that. With maybe a thousand bucks at Costco, you could probably prevent virtually all the diarrhea deaths in the country, personally. That is, of course, if you could ship the Clorox to Haiti without having it stolen by corrupt customs officers, greedy policemen, or menacing bands of "paramilitary" robbers. None of which is likely to change no matter who the government is; the cycle of corruption and poverty seems to be locked in. The tragedy of Haiti is that what we'd all be glad to do with money, we could probably only accomplish by invading.

Which brings up another thought -- why are all the places where the French have been such complete messes? Not that colonialism has a good track record in general. But having just finished editing several histories of former French colonies, it seems that the French have done a uniquely bad job. On the other hand, that could just be my small sample.

Other news of the week -- Martha, Martha, Martha. Should she have been convicted? Probably not. Is it a travesty of social justice? Considering the number of people who face harsher justice because they made the mistake of being poorer and/or darker skinned than their prosecutors, I can't get too worked up about the fact that Martha Stewart got the book thrown at her for, essentially, being famous enough to get her prosecutor's name in the paper. (Or so I assume; damned if I know what his name is). Being rich and famous has enough perks in this country that I won't weep too hard that it turns out to carry some drawbacks, too. Oh, I don't think such prosecutions are a good idea. But I'm a damned sight more worried about, say, the disparate treatment of powder and crack cocaine in our sentencing laws. Nor do I think, with apologies to my feminist sisters, that Martha got different treatment because she's a woman. I think she got different treatment because she's very, very famous and prosecuting the very, very famous -- especially for a currently unpopular crime such as insider information -- is a good way for prosecutors to gain a measure of that fame for themselves, and hopefully, eventually, the money and power with which such fame is often associated.

Finally, the LA Bloggers are a neat bunch, especially Rand Simberg, who was kind enough to give us a ride to the airport. Thanks, everyone.

More later, perhaps, on intellectual diversity on college campuses.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Close Encounters

UPDATE FROM MEXICO: Time has changed to 8:15PM.

My Co-Blogger emails to post the following: She will meet LA local bloggers at "Encounter, the LAX bar, at 9:00 on Friday." I assume she means 9:00 PM, or her journalism career has seriously aggravated her drinking.