Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

An unhappy accident

Earlier, I accidentally accepted a blogad for a website I will not link, which proclaims that it is "In memory of Avraham Stern and Dr. Baruch Goldstein who resurrected the concept of reciprocal violence".

Needless to say, I did not and do not endorse this repulsive message. Indeed, I find myself unable to express the depths of my disgust that it was associated with my web page for even a few hours. I don't hold this blog particularly sacred, but it does represent me in some fashion. And though I normally don't censor my blogads, I have no interesting in providing a forum, however small, for such sentiments.

What Baruch Goldstein did terrorism. It was the vengeful butchery of a self-appointed executioner who believed himself entitled to slaughter civilians because his cause was more important than basic principles of human justice. It is not made right because there were provocations, anymore than the Palestinian terrorist who straps a bomb on their back and climbs aboard a bus is justified by the many blows he has been dealt by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The indiscriminate murder of civilians cannot be justified by anything; it is the wrongest thing there is. And if I were prepared to even tacitly endorse such actions, I would first grant them to the Palestinians, who at least have the excuse that they have no other military recourse.

I don't know how I could have missed what that ad was selling . . . though it didn't reference Mr Goldstein directly, it did mention that it had been banned in numerous places, which ought, if nothing else, have tipped me off that this was something I should check out. I have no excuse except that I wasn't paying attention, which is of course no excuse at all. I'm sorry if any of my readers picked up the misimpression that I endorsed, or was neutral, about the message of that site. It's sadistic, repulsive, and amoral, and if this weren't a family blog I'd use some more pungent words that might have some hope of really expressing how I feel. I'm trying to figure out how to refund the money, and in the future, I'll read my ads more carefully.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

Racist or Rational?

"Project Implicit", at Harvard University, tries to measure unconscious attitudes by timing how long it takes people to associate certain pictures with certain words. The most interesting tests concern race.

You're asked to pair, as quickly as you can, different sets of words and faces flashing across the computer screen. The results--approximately 4 million people have taken a Web version of the test--are often not what the test-taker expected, uncovering automatic (implicit) unconscious associations that are contrary to the tester's stated, conscious (explicit) beliefs. Banaji herself owns up to feeling "humbled" by her test results, which showed she unconsciously favored white over black, young over old, and associated females with home rather than work.

A common result is that non-blacks associate whites with good words ("joy", "good", "peace") and blacks with bad words ("sadness", "bad", "anxiety"). Take the test yourself here implicit.harvard.edu/implici.

The researcher conclude that people have implicit attitudes, and that those attitudes are racist.

In Economics, in work done by Gary Becker (Nobel Prize, Chicago) racism is defined as a preference for one race over the other. If an employer picks a stupid white candidate over a smart black candidate he is making a racist decision -- the stupid white candidate will be less productive than the smart black candidate and therefore the employer has picked less productivity (and money) over more. He is compensated for this because he prefers white people over black people.

However, an employer that picks a smart white person over a stupid black person is not racist. He's simply picking the most productive employee.

If you do not have detailed information on an individual, it is rational to evaluate them on group averages. If you are walking down a dark street at night, and a small, elderly female approaches from the other side, you would feel safe because small elderly females are statistically non-criminal. On the other hand, if a large, young man approaches, you might be more worried. If the man is black, given higher crime rates among blacks, you may be more concerned still.

Judging people on group averages when you have no additional information is called "statistical discrimination", although given how loaded a term "discrimination" is a better phrase may be "statistical differentiation". Statistical differentiation is not racist in that it is not a preference for one race or another, it is simply a decision based on group averages when individual information is not available.

The Implicit Project implicitly assumes that any differentiation between blacks and whites is racist, and does not consider that case of statistical differentiation. This means they do not consider that an individual may make decisions based on factors other than race, of which race is merely a statistical marker.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Response to Peter Northup, and why I continue to believe that contraceptive availability is not a major factor in teen pregnancy

Am I a prisoner of UChicago price theory? Perhaps, though I never "drank the Kool-Aid" as thoroughly as some of my compatriots at the business school.

But price theory can be a useful, if simplistic framework, with which to look at human behaviour.

Let me posit that if women, or men, had some button they could push by their bed that would instantly render them temporarily infertile, the rate of abortions would fall dramatically. It would not be totally eliminated: we would still see terminating pregnancies because they have found out that their babies are potentially disabled, or the wrong gender--and those pregnancies (anecdotally considerable in some areas) that occurred because young girls erroneously believed that having a baby would revive their boyfriend's flagging interest. But it would be reduced by an order of magnitude.

But of course, contraception is not instant and costless. It has monetary costs: about 75¢ per condom, and about $25 a month for birth control pills, plus the cost of a doctor's visit. My argument, which I stand by, is that these costs are trivial relative to the non-monetary costs.

My evidence for this proposition? Well, for one thing, we know that a very substantial fraction of the women in the country are getting their birth control from subsidized public sources: "Of U.S. women who use a reversible method of contraception, 24% each year obtain family planning services from a publicly funded clinic or a private doctor reimbursed by Medicaid." I'd say that one-quarter of women of childbearing age is probably a generous estimate of how many of them would have difficulty affording birth control (even among women aged 18-24, the poorest age group, the poverty rate is only 19%).

For another, we know that free contraception programs produce only very modest results where they are tested. Consider these highlights from Planned Parenthood:

* The most successful adolescent pregnancy prevention programs in the U.S., which combine sexuality education with direct access to or information about contraceptive services, have increased contraceptive use among participants by up to 22 percent (Frost & Forrest, 1995). [emphasis mine]

* More boys who participated in a high school condom availability program in Los Angeles reported using condoms every time they engaged in vaginal intercourse during the past year (50 percent) than the year before (37 percent), and more boys reported condom use for recently initiated first vaginal intercourse (80 percent) than the year before (65 percent) (Schuster et al., 1998).

* Condom use among students in New York City public high schools that have condom availability programs is five percentage points higher than in Chicago, where no such programs exist (Guttmacher et al., 1997).

In other words, if we give birth control to students for free, and tell them how to use it, and urge them to do so, we might increase the number of students using birth control regularly by 22% [memo to study neophytes: that 22% figure does not mean that out of 100 students, 22 more of them are now using contracpetion; it means that whatever smaller group were previously using contracption is now larger by 22% of itself--so if 50% were previously using contraception, 11 more students are now using birth control than were before.]. That's pretty damn underwhelming. And that's the best study Planned Parenthood can come up with, the one that is probably the outlier on the normally distributed bell curve of such study outcomes. I've no doubt that the abstinence folks have grabbed whatever study lies at the other end of the bell curve, and are using it to claim that contraception-based sex ed actually increases the number of pregnancies by teaching students that it's okay to have sex.

I do believe that educating people about sex and giving them contraception for free increases contraception usage somewhat, and lowers unwanted pregnancy. But how much it reduced unwanted pregnancies depends on how many of today's unwanted pregnancies result from ignorance or lack of access to contraception; if these are not the primary cause of unwanted pregnancy, then the effect of such laudable programmes will be modest. And based on the studies so far done, that effect seems to be pretty trivial--too small to make more than a small dent in the number of unwanted pregnancies.

This leads me to conclude that the monetary cost of contraception is, at best, a small contributing factor to unwanted pregnancy in this country. (These studies were, after all, conducted in school districts with some of the worst concentrations of poverty in the country.)

I must apologize to Mr Northup on one count; when I saw him linking AGI data on regional variations in abortion rates, I assumed that he was linking the same chart I had been looking at, which shows state-by-state variation in rates of abortion and pregnancy both for teens, and the population of childbearing women as a whole. I assumed that he was looking at the same thing.

Bad Jane! When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me both! He was not looking at the underlying data; he was looking at a puff-piece summary sheet supporting AGI's position of "more birth control, less restriction". Not that there is anything wrong with this position, but that page is a position paper, not data.

Remember that scene in Crocodile Dundee where the frightened heroine tells ol' Croc to give his money to a mugger because "he's got a knife"? Mr Dundee looks bemused and says, "That's not a knife." Pulling a sort of 3/4 length machete out of a holster, he says "This is a knife," and the muggers run in the other direction.

Well, that's not data. This is data. And Mr Northup, I'm sorry you were mugged.

Those data simply do not, in my admittedly cursory reading, support the contention that education and contraception access will substantially reduce abortion. The places with the best contraception access, the most liberal sexual mores, and the most liberal sex ed, are also the places with the most abortions. These are the states with more than 23 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age, which is the national mean.

California
Connecticut
District of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Maryland
Massachussetts
Nevada
New Jersey
New York
Rhode Island

All have outstanding liberal governments, dense populations, and high levels of spending on public health, as well as lots of Planned Parenthood clinics.

I think Mr Northup has made a common, and understandable, error, conflating preventing pregnancies with preventing abortions. The best candidates for the kind of outreach he advocates--changing social mores, making birth control more known about and easily obtained, are poor rural areas in the bible belt, where the sex ed is least contraceptive focused, and the nearest Planned Parenthood may be a long drive away. Even allowing that one could march in down there with one's hip northeastern values and overcome parental resistance to giving their children free condoms, one might have a salutory effect on unwanted pregnancy (though I'm still unconvinced). But because so few women there have abortions, this would do very little to lower the number of abortions in this country.

Given the urban concentration of abortions in the United States, I simply cannot endorse the idea that the main problem is contraceptive access, or contraceptive education.

Mr Northup, in response to my posts, has clarified his position as follows:

So, to be clear, Ms. Galt's post annoyed me not because I disagreed with the claim about education, but because I disagreed quite strongly with the implicit claim that, having disposed of the education question, Saletan's *general* argument about targeting contraception falls apart. I was annoyed, not by what she put in, but by what she left out: all the other causal mechanisms that influence the relative costs and benefits of protected versus unprotected sex (which she rightly enough acknowledges in her replies to me).

Ms. Galt and I both seem to agree that, overall, there are two interrelated choice functions in place, both of which are sensitive to costs and benefits: the choice to have protected v. unprotected v. no sex, and the choice to terminate v. keep an unintended pregnancy. Moreover, we can't look at these two separately: the relative cost of abortion will feed into the relative costs of protected and unprotected sex. And of course the number of people who are faced with the second choice, and so the number of abortions overall, is determined by the choices made at the first stage.

But the cost of abortion is hardly the only factor that constitutes the cost of protected v. unprotected v. no sex. And what I really objected to was the implication that protected sex is already basically as cheap as it can be, so the only way to shift costs is by manipulating the costs of unsafe sex through sanctions on abortion. Again, whether or not this is a fair reaction to her piece is up to the reader. I can only note that she seemed to dismiss such concerns pretty flatly with her claim that "there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore." Even in her followup, she seems to stick with this: she has an extended paragraph about how Trinessa is only $25/month, condoms are often free, and Planned Parenthood allows for doctors' visits at "trivial" cost.

I don't think these claims serve to undermine my argument. $300 a year is not trivial, not for everyone, and again, we should not ignore the non-monetary costs of time and effort.

Ignore them? My primary argument, based on that tired old UChicago price theory, is that the reason that we will not significantly reduce abortions is that the non-monetary costs of birth control--acquiring and remembering to use it, and the unpleasant side effects, medical or otherwise (insert "raincoat in the shower" jokes here), so far outweigh the monetary costs that even giving people birth control for free has only a limited impact on their usage. In this, I have the advantage of having actually looked at some of the data. In this age of AIDS, if you can only achieve a modest increase in condom usage by giving them away for free in school, where everyone under the age f sixteen must at least occasionally drop in, then it seems to me that you have simply taken government action as far as it can go.

Mr Northup sticks by his thesis that social stigma and class are still big issues here. And to some extent they are. But in the context of reducing abortions, it's only useful to discuss them insofar as we believe that we can remedy these ills. I am very much aware of the fact that Mr Northup and I are members of a privileged class, and that this has conferred all manner of non-monetary benefits on my life. But while I would like to distribute the benefits of my privileged upbringing to everyone, not just insofar as access to health care goes, but in terms of having a great job and a stimulating life. But so far, I have no idea how to go about doing so. Nor, as far as I can tell, does Mr Northup; he states the goal of changing destructive norms as if it were a policy prescription, rather than merely a (laudable) desire.

And, of course, money and effort don't exhaust the "costs" of safe sex; social stigma is very real. This matters both directly, as worries about shame and reputation influence decision-making, and indirectly, as social norms about who is responsible for birth control (and whether birth control is something that, obviously, one should use, or is instead a signal of moral failure) factor into the monetary and non-monetary costs (do parents pay, or must a teenager pay secretly? Will her boyfriend chip in? Will she have to drive an hour away to fill her prescription so that no one knows she's on the pill? Etc.) Obviously these vary enormously across individuals and communities; for many people, they may indeed be trivial. But for many, they are not, and I believe that they could be lower than they are now--but not necessarily through government action, let alone reeducation!

As we've seen from the above, given the urban concentration of abortion, this is simply not credible. No teenager in Chicago, DC, New York, Boston, LA, New Haven has to drive an hour to get birth control from a completely anonymous source, and even if there were only one pharmacy in the city, it's unlikely that her community outside of her immediate failure will even tut-tut as she proudly steps up to the counter with her box of condoms. Payment, as we've seen, is pretty much irrelevant, since there is excellent free birth control provision for young women. If you want to go ahead and start another clinic to give kids the Pill, be my guest. Add a shuttle service, education classes, and for all I care a pedicure station. I'll applaud your efforts, and throw in a little of my own hard-earned cash to boot, since I think it's a worthy cause. But I will be surprised indeed if we see a meaningful drop in abortions as a result. I'm not denigrating providing contraceptive access as a project; I think it is a fine, fine idea. I just don't think it's going to do very much about the abortion rate, which was after all Mr Saletan's point.

I didn't intend the cross-national data to be anything but suggestive, but I do feel the data ought to make us realize that these costs, especially the social ones, are not set in stone or written into the deep structure of the universe. Cultures can and do change, although I would certainly hope that state coercion would be absolutely the last tool people reach for (sadly, it rarely is). Which, again, is why I was so very annoyed by Ms. Galt's first post: she critiques Saletan's statist prescriptions only to implicitly go along with his presumption that the only thing on the table is State Policy. She seems to have backed away from this in her replies, which is great, but I stand by my reading of the original post.

To me, the question of state vs. non-state policy simply isn't very relevant here--and to the extent that it is relevant, it undercuts Mr Northup's case. Giving out free stuff is something that the state is actually very good at, as state activities go; I don't expect substantial disparities in the success rate between free condom programmes from the New York City School District, or Planned Parenthood. Education might be a different story--but a widespread non-state sex ed programme simply is not within the constellation of available policy options, as far as I can see; there's no way to get the teenagers to you.

And broad social change, the third pillar of Mr Northup's argument, is simply too broad to be useful as a policy alternative. I certainly agree with Mr Northup that if there were different attitudes towards sex and contraception among the groups that currently rely heavily on abortions as birth control, then we could see a dramatic drop in abortions. But as an insight, that's trivial: if people were different, they'd be different. How do we persuade them to behave differently? Public education campaigns designed by non-profit groups have roughly the same dismal success rate as ones designed by public health departments.

The challenge posed by Mr Saletan (or so it seems to me), is "What can we do to make abortion rarer" But if "we" is Mr Saletan, and Mr Northup, and me, the answer is "very little". "We" are not members of the communities where abortion is prevalent, and have very little hope of effecting the grassroots change that might alter abortion rates. And the options available to "us", changing the relative cost of contraception, doesn't seem to work very well. That leaves an option that we know works: changing the relative cost of abortion. I don't find that an acceptable option. But it is the only policy open to those of us in the commentariat that we actually know works.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sometimes I really, really like this man

Bush suggests Ford and GM make "a product that's relevant" instead of contemplating a bailout.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What is the Internationale?

A reader wants to know. Sigh. Oh, my little chickadees . . . don't you care about the worker's struggle? Don't you feel their pain?

The Internationale, for those who don't know, is the theme song of the Socialist/Communist/Anarchist movement. It is, as Wikipedia puts it, "sung with the right hand raised in a clenched-fist salute". You can hear the English version here, as recorded by Billy Bragg in 1991. (He was a bit slow on the uptake.) It goes something like this:

Arise, the damned of the earth,
Arise, prisoners of hunger,
For reason thunders in its crater,
It is the last eruption!
Let us discard the past,
Army of slaves, arise, arise!
The world is changing at the base,
We who have been nothing, let's be everything!
|: It is the final struggle
Let us gather, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be mankind! :|

There was a time when any self respecting student activist knew it by heart. Sigh. Backwards, turn backwards, oh time in thy flight . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why children are a special libertarian case

There are a number of people arguing in my comments that abortion is fine even if the fetus is a person, because no one has a right to use another person's body for their support.

Well, in the classic libertarian formulation, no one has a right to my income either. But it would take a pretty hard core libertarian indeed to say that the state should allow parents to kick their children out on the streets if they tire of them.

Formulations that make sense, are even admirable, when applied to two adults, simply won't wash when they are applied to children. And even if you can find some like-minded clique of ultra-libertarians to share your opinions with, you have no possibility at all of ever convincing any but a tiny fraction of one percent of the rest of America that your ideas should be put into practice.

You certainly won't persuade me. I not only think that the state should intervene if parents are abusive, should garnish the paychecks of reluctant parents, and should ensure that parents attend to the health of their children, but also believe that the state should provide high-quality education and health care for children under the age of eighteen (plus pregnant women who can't afford prenatal care). Now, many would argue that in so believing, I have forfeited any right to call myself a libertarian. But if this be treason, make the most of it.

You cannot morally treat children, or fetuses, as if they have the same rights and obligations as human adults; they have fewer freedoms, but more entitlements. Children are not only uniquely vulnerable, but also uniquely innocent; that fetus did not ask to be in your body, and has no means at his disposal to get out and stop bothering you. Trying to reason his fate from principles designed for consenting adults is neither practical nor morally just. Moreover, any society that did try to treat children and fetuses as adults, in the way that my commenters are advocating, would not be long for this earth. Evolution does not take cognizance of how beautifully consistently you have reasoned from first principles when it decides what behaviours will survive.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thank you thank you thank you!

Thanks to all my amazing readers who ordered through my Amazon associates account, today I was able to load up on the following goodies on Amazon. I not only got much-needed kitchen equipment, but a head start on rebuilding the album collection I lost when I moved to Chicago. And I still have some left over for books. Thanks, everyone, for making my Christmas very merry indeed.

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking

Tracy Chapman

Led Zeppelin

Harvest

After The Gold Rush

Pleased to Meet Me

Taylor Digital Oven Thermometer/Timer

"The Who: The Ultimate Collection

Soehnle Attache Digital Food Scale

Red Roses for Me

Rum Sodomy & the Lash

Peace and Love

The Complete Bertie and Jeeves Megaset

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Things I am not . . .

I am not a "theist"
I am not a "statist"
I am not a misogynist who just wants to control women
I am not a puritan who wants to punish women for having sex
I am not an "abortion monger"
I am not a "would-be baby killer"

Staking out the middle ground on abortion is so much fun, isn't it?

If you want to know what I think about abortion, read this. I want abortion to be legal, but I am in favour of stigmatising it. I am also in favour of more and better birth control, which I devoutly hope the pharmaceutical companies will provide as fast as they can. I would love to see the Pill be otc. I think that abortion is not a question of people who want to kill their babies versus people who don't understand that I have a right to control my body; I think it is a complicated question of conflicting rights, and that as the cost of pregnancy, in terms of heatlh, money, and social stigma has gone down, we are rightly worrying less about the rights of the woman to control what happens in her body, and more about the also-compelling right of the fetus to get born. I think Roe is bad law and poisonous policy for the health of our Republic, and I think that abortion should remain legal, at least in the first trimester, with limited restrictions--a state of affairs that would bring our abortion law in line with most of the rest of the civilized world. Feel free to disagree with me. But I am not a beknighted fool who does not understand the issues involved--after all, I'm not the one reflexively repeating slogans, at an ever-more-hysterical pitch, rather than actually engaging with my opponents.

And when you vituperate and foam, when you call me names instead of engaging in civilized debate, when you argue with my social class, or my moral values, or my putatively limited intellectual gifts, rather than my points . . . well, it may make you feel good. It may impress your fellow travelers. And it undoubtedly protects you from ever having to consider that your position might be the slightest little bit wrong. But it does not persuade me, or any of the other mushy moderates that you need on your side if you want to actually make policy. Pro-choice folks: you're losing the Court. Pro-life folks: you've already lost the public. But you might have a chance of getting something done if you stopped shouting at us and talked to us instead.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Safe legal and rare?

Peter Northup of Crescat Sententia makes another attempt to prove his overwhelming intellectual superiority, and instead scores an own-goal:

One last point about Jane Galt's bizarre abortion post. Her line that '"safe, legal and rare" is like "good, fast, and cheap" -- you have to pick two, because it's not possible to have all three at one time' is a great example of a catchy zinger that turns out to be completely absurd upon examination. I already suggested in my last post various reasons for thinking that abortion could be made a lot more rare than now while staying safe and legal, but let's dig deeper into this "pick two" claim. So we can have safe and rare, but illegal, abortion? How interesting. Like safe and rare, but illegal, drug use, I imagine. Or how about legal and rare, but unsafe? Again, that's an interesting claim. How would that work? What would produce such a world? Now, claiming that legality and safety both increase abortion rates, *ceteris paribus*, might actually have the virtue of being true, but it would have the awful downside of being trivial--direction of effect is interesting, but tell me magnitude, and let's please unpack that "all else equal". And, of course, it would have the fatal flaw of not sounding clever.

To start with, Mr Northrup didn't suggest anything in his last post that suggested that education--the topic of my post--could make abortion substantially rarer. I have no doubt that there are lots of things we could do to make abortion rarer. We could shoot doctors who performed abortions. We could make sonograms mandatory for all pregnant women. We could put teenage girls under lock and key. We could improve the career opportunities for young poor women, making pregnancy a much less attractive risk (I understand from the social workers that I used to work with that, at least in the mid-1990s, a major driver of the abortion rate in New York's inner city was young women who mistakenly thought that getting pregnant was a good way to rekindle their boyfriend's flagging interest.) We could put men or boys who impregnate women into forced work programmes to pay for junior's diapers, unless they already have a paycheck to garnish. We could establish a DNA database for the purposes of identifying each and every child's father. We could imprison women who get abortions. We could force all teenage girls to go on depo-provera, or similar, until they graduate high school. We could, if we had some sort of magic social medicine that allowed us to change culture at will, stop teenagers from believing that promiscuous premarital sex is acceptable, that birth control is the woman's responsibility, and that teenage boys with seven kids aren't deadbeats, but studs.

Few of these options appeal to me. But I have no doubt that all of them would work. The question I was asking was not "is there some policy that will reduce abortions?" to which the answer is obviously, yes. The question was "will some Federally mandated sex education programme reduce abortions", to which the answer, as far as I can tell, is "not much". To the extent that Mr Northrup's reasons really are reasons, and not sarcastic invective hurled my way in the mistaken belief that I will be impressed, they are either wrong, or irrelevant to my point. They're also rather silly--does he really have some viable way to change all those embedded cultural values he claims result in women not getting birth control? I mean, for one thing, the idea of the government coming in and deciding to re-educate us out of our values is, frankly, more than a little creepy. And for another, when was the last time you saw such education work? Chinese concentration camps don't count.

As to the question of "safe, legal and rare", Mr Northrup seems not to understand the idea of "context". What are they teaching in schools these days? Obviously, there are many things that are safe, legal and rare; polite argument, for example. Likewise, "good, fast and cheap--pick two", which is a rather old saw regarding the quality of fast food; I apologize if it went over Mr Northrup's head. There are lots of things that are good, fast, and cheap, but Wendy's is not among them¹. Good cooking takes time.

Safe, legal and rare abortion seems to me to be unlikely given the constellation of policy choices from which we can choose. The American electorate will let us teach their children about depo-provera; they will not let us inject their daughters with it against their will. And so forth.

But where's the data? Why, I'm so glad you asked. The magnitude, as it turns out, is very, very large, as you will find if you read these three pages from Freakonomics²:

In the first year after Roe v. Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the United States (representing one abortion for every four live births). By 1980, the number of abortions had reached 1.6 million (one for every 2.25 live births), where it levelled off. . .

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in America had myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun marriages, as well as the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in adoptions of foreign babies). Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policy.

Making the less-than-heroic assumption that legalizing abortion did not make it suddenly less prevalent, the most conservative analysis of the impact of Roe would suggest that it increased the pregnancy rate by 30%, the abortion rate by more than 50%. In other words, the effect of Roe dwarfs any other effect we have seen on either out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or abortions.

Since 1991 we have seen a long, slow secular decline in unwanted pregnancies, for reasons that are not clear; probably, some combination of social factors, better birth control, and (one might posit) Roe's breaking the chain of unwed motherhood that passed from hapless mother to unwanted daughter. But no scientist that I am aware of has made an even half-hearted stab at attributing much of this to better sex-ed.

But if Mr Northup thinks he has a policy programme short of prohibition which could cut the number of abortions in half, I would be eager to hear it.

Oh, and Mr Northup, if you want to know how abortion can be legal, rare, and unsafe . . . just give antibiotic resistance a few more years. Contrary to popular belief, it was penicillin, not Roe, which ended the high death rate from backdoor abortions.

¹Yes, I like a Wendy's frosty and a biggie fries as much as the next gal. But they don't have any particular flavour; they're just sweet and fatty. I wouldn't choose them over, say, Boulud.

²If those links don't work--and they may not--go to Amazon, and search Freakonomics on the word "births". Those passages come from page 138 and 139.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those happy Golden Years . . . .

Lord, do I miss being a student. And not just because I loved "Ramen-and-cheez-doodle surprise" night in the drafty old Victorian house I shared with seven roommates, not to mention waiting in line for seven hours at Student Health to get my asthma meds. I mean, it sounds terrible, but we had a sort of proletarian solidarity in those days that you young whippersnappers will never know. Why, many's the time when I led the other students in singing the Internationale before we . . . but I digress. The point is, I don't just miss being a student because it was such a delightful combination of adult freedom without adult responsibility. No, I miss being a student because I was just so damn smart.

I mean, a lot of you may think that I'm smart now. But when I was in school, I was a supergenius. Any old idiot can get to be a genius merely by dint of having a 150 IQ, but my intellect was of finer stuff altogether, faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful then the people who get to decide whether or not you make it onto American Idol. Even better, I knew everything*. My intellectual superiority to the rubes who did not attend my august institution--and many of those who did--was a tangible, glorious thing, which animated my days and warmed those dark nights when the boiler broke and I had to sleep in my entire wardrobe.

Best of all, I thought that I had invented snotty. Waxing sarcastic about the opinions of others was just so wickedly fun, especially when those other people were right there where I could watch the backs of their necks turn red. It honed my verbal skills to a sharp edge. It impressed the hell out of my fellow students, proving to everyone that I was exactly the supergenius I thought I was. The fact that other, older people, were not snotty confirmed my opinion that I must be some sort of genetic breakthrough, far outstripping the mental powers of my doddering elders.

Those days have passed, for me. But others are clearly still enjoying them¹. I wanted to comment directly on the post, but I can't, since there are no comments. Then I thought about writing Mr Northup an email gently pointing out the error of his ways. But that's so, you know, square. So I thought, "Hey, one good turn deserves another!" And don't I deserve, really, to be a little snotty? I've kept it in check for so long.

Besdies, while Mr Northup, like almost every PhD candidate I know, seems to think that he has discovered this literary art form, he is sadly mistaken. Friends, I not only perfected the medium; I hold the patent.

Mr Northup thinks I am an idiot. And not some garden-variety idiot; a "hard-nosed quasi-libertarian" idiot:

If I were going to write a parody of hard-nosed quasilibertarian policy analysis--an attempt to gently mock the tendency of some of my fellow travelers to only make the tough calls when it's someone else's ox being gored, and play into the stereotype of a libertarian as a person whose policies correspond astonishly well with his or her privileged status--and I decided to write about abortion, it might go something like this:

I'd sadly note the impossibility of a free lunch and the power of incentives to affect behavior in even the most private of realms. I'd talk about how naive it is to expect problems to be solved by well-meaning programs of governmental education--in this day and age, does anyone really not know that sex can result in pregnancy? That contraception makes it less likely? I'd shake my virtual head mournfully at the fantasies of my benighted friends on the left, pro-choice like me, but lacking the wisdom imparted by UChicago price theory.

No, the simple truth is that women--not me or my friends, you know, but other women--have unprotected sex and then have abortions because, well, it's not very costly; that's what Roe v. Wade means! "Safe, legal, and rare"--only in Shangri-La, I'm afraid; you only get to pick two. I'd write that, much as I hated to admit it (pro-choice as I am, you know), the deep, dark secret of all clear-eyed pro-choicers is that keeping abortion legal is, in fact, *the* secret cause of (other!) women's risky sexual behavior. Pro-choicers might talk a good game about safe sex, I'd sigh, but until we're willing to break out the coathangers, it's clear where our priorities really lie.

Now, to make this parody just right, I'd have to ignore what, on the face of it, would be the most obvious response to risky sex being too "cheap" relative to safe sex: target the "price" of safe sex *directly*, instead of getting at it only through the indirect (and, to the lustful mind, far less salient) route of penalizing those who actually end up pregnant. You know, the sort of line of thinking that might take into account the non-trivial costs of reliable birth control, especially for the uninsured (better not bring up how the state makes you see a doctor!). And I'd sure as hell better sweep under the rug all the unpleasant little truths about sexist social norms, about who pays for the pill, about the very real stigma that in many communities clings to any young woman who dares imply by what she purchases from her pharmacist or what she demands of her doctor that she is, in fact, sexually active.

After all, if I brought any of that stuff up, my readers might start wondering why the cross-national variance in teenage pregnancy and abortion rates is considerably greater than the variance in teenage sexual activity; they might think these considerations suggestive of a deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex. They might start thinking that this is one of those social ills that *does* hold out the prospect of unambiguous improvement; perhaps we needn't break out the coathangers, after all, if we want teenage pregnancy and abortion rates as low as those in Sweden!

Of course, the kind of change that would be required wouldn't be easy; it would involve shifts in both norms and policy, and a lot of down-and-dirty activism. It would mean confronting deeply embedded belief systems, ideologies that are quite hostile to female sexual autonomy. It would mean recognizing that the state is not the only cause of oppression in society, particularly for certain groups.

I know, I know--it's not polite to excerpt the entire thing. But I think it's safe to say that Mr Northrup's post has already brought us outside the dainty bounds of etiquette.

Interestingly enough, I was preparing a post on cross-national variation in pregnancy and abortion rates! Using that very chart! Unfortunately, unlike Mr Northrup, I have a job². However, I am hard-pressed to see how he draws his conclusions from the AGI's excellent data. For one thing, it seems to indicate that there is some sort of terrible "deeply undesirable set of policies and social norms that punish only optional public markers of sexual activity, like contraceptive use, while doing little to deter the private aspects, like actual sex" in the liberal Northeast, where women who get pregnant choose to abort, while the tolerant, loving Bible Belt is clearly comfortable enough with a woman's sexuality that should she get pregnant, she feels free to carry the baby to term.

Had he spent a little more time with the data, he might have noticed something curious: how many teens get pregnant does not seem to be very well correlated with the kind of sex ed they receive, at least if we assume that having voted for Al Gore is a pretty good proxy for a state's general attitude towards sex ed, and toss in Nevada on the (possibly erroneous) assumption that a state that has legalized prostitution probably doesn't have hard-nosed "abstinence only" education. Indeed, the very worst rates of teen pregnancy (and abortion) are in the District of Columbia, which I am assured by acquaintances who have taught there, has the very liberalist sex ed there is, and extremely good access to all sorts of family planning clinics.

Rather, a brief scan of the data reveals that abortion seems to be correlated with three things: being in the Deep South, having a large population of hispanic immigrants, and being highly urbanized. I assume that item number one is highly correlated with having abstinence-only education, but if that's so, why aren't Kansas, Missouri, and so forth similarly afflicted? And why do California, DC, and so forth dwarf Mississippi and Alabama in rates of pregnancy?

Furthermore, assuming that the number of abortions is at least a rough proxy for whether or not the pregnancies are wanted, it seems likely that we are picking up some noise from early teen marriages/cohabitation in the South and among hispanics. Over 50% of the pregnancies in the District of Columbia are aborted, while less than 20% of the pregnancies in Alabama are. I presume that some large part of that is due to differences in personal beliefs among the two populations, but the magnitude of the disparity--almost three times as many pregnancies carried to term in the deep south--suggests to me that more of the pregnancies in Alabama are probably intended, or at least welcome.

Regardless, the data simply doesn't support his core argument: that the problem is social norms and government policies are responsible for low rates of contraceptive use, leading to teen pregnancies. Indeed, the high rate of teen-pregnancy/abortion in states like New York, Maryland, and DC is driven in great part by the urban African-American population, where an illegitimacy rate above 80% makes the statement that extramarital sex is stigmatized ludicrous.

It is mildly fascinating to find myself--who has been an uninsured woman of extremely limited means forced to rely on Planned Parenthood for her women's health needs--the target of such a very pompous lecture on the subject by a white male graduate student who most assuredly has not "been there", or indeed in the neighbourhood of "there". Despite the impressively forceful self-confidence with which Mr Northup advances his view, I am afraid I will have to disagree, for which I have only the dull excuse that when I was actually in that situation, it was nothing like what Mr Northrup describes. It is not expensive to acquire birth control when you are poor; Planned Parenthood provides both doctors visits and birth control pills on a sliding scale, making the cost trivial to even the poorest of women. Even if they didn't provide it, a prescription for Trinessa (the generic form of Ortho-Tri-Cyclen Lo) is about $25 a month--or less than five hours of work at minimum wage; an annual exam is a couple days of extra work. That is not insignificant, but it's not impossible, either, especially for teenagers who have enough time on their hands to be having sex. Moreover, even in counties without Planned Parenthood, there are free healthcare clinics. And where there are not free healthcare clinics, there are condoms, and if memory serves, the girls don't usually pay for those. At $8 for a box of twelve, they are for most teenagers even more affordable on a per-act basis than the Pill, and while they certainly aren't perfect, I'd imagine they could put a hefty dent in those over 50% of aborted pregnancies that resulted from not using anything at all.

I'm not satisfied with this response, because it's so disorganized and muddy. But then it occurs to me that the reason that this is so is that the source shows exactly those characteristics--disappointing both from Crescat Setentia, and a graduate student at NYU. He never really attempts to refute my core thesis, which is that for teenagers, sex ed has high threshold effects: once you are aware that sex causes pregnancy, and birth control prevents it, there's not that much that sex ed can add. A perusal of the data on sex-ed programs would seem to back me up; effects are extremely modest. Abstinence-based education pretty clearly doesn't work, but contraceptive-based education, surprisingly, doesn't do much better.

Education works by countering ignorance. That's why initial anti-smoking education worked well. But after people knew that smoking caused cancer, telling them so again didn't much deter them. Likewise, once people know how to get pregnant, and how to prevent it, telling them so more elaborately doesn't get you much bang for your buck.

Now, there might be another threshold--there might be some form of sexual education so fabulous that it pushes us across the line. But I doubt it. For one thing, most sex ed is pretty useless--my head is still crammed with useless information about the relative effectiveness of vasectomies, IUDs and tubal ligations that I will certainly not need until I've had a few children, and can get from a doctor if I want it then. And for another, public health education campaigns have a pretty dismal success rate. Obesity, smoking, and drugs are only a few of the things that we have tried, and failed, to eradicate by telling people not to do them.

But why bother to deal with the data, when heavy sarcasm is so much more expedient, and is just as impressive to your audience--as long as they don't know anything either. Besides, that result doesn't feel right. A public education campaign about contraception should be overwhelmingly more effective than one about not smoking--after all, you're telling people who don't want to get pregnant, something cheap and easy they can do to not get pregnant! Yet, it doesn't work all that well. I find that outcome as surprising as Mr Northrup.

I don't pretend to know why we have so many unwanted pregnancies in this country, though these folks have some ideas. But at the heart of it, it seems to me to be a fairly typical case of people making a bad decision now to ignore the potential bad consequences later. That's very common behaviour--it's why I didn't floss yesterday--and it's very, very hard to eradicate with education.

Why is our pregnancy rate lower than Sweden's? Mr Northup would like to know, and so would many of my would-be interlocutors, and so would I. I'd also like to know why their rape rate is so high compared to the rest of Europe's, and Austria's rape rate is so low compared to ours. But I'm pretty sure that it's not because people in Sweden don't know that rape is bad, or how it can be prevented³.

*In a job interview a while back, I was being quizzed by an economics professor about how I had liked graduate school, and the intervening period. "When I graduated from grad school," I said ruefully, "I thought I knew everything important there was to know. Four years later, I've been humbled."

"Everyone thinks they know everything when they get out of grad school," he said solemnly. "Count yourself lucky that you got over it--a lot of my colleagues never do."

¹You made fun of him for being a young whelp! I hear you cry. Don't you know that that's just going to make him madder?

Indeed, I do. I remember very well the towering, not to say incoherent, rage to which I could be reduced in my student years by the mere suggestion that someone, particularly someone who was not one of my professors, or a radical guerilla living in exile, knew more than I did simply because they are older. But frankly, he earned it. And besides, one of the rare pleasures of getting older is the joy of pointing out to someone that they are not only being a jerk, but exactly the same, stunningly unoriginal kind of jerk, that you used to be before you knew better.

²Cheap shot! you cry. Is there some other kind in snotty-land?

³But what if sex ed is different? you ask. Undoubtedly it is. Maybe Sweden has found some unbelievably fabulous sex ed programme that we should import by the tonne. Sell it in Ikea!

But cross-country comparisons, as Mr Northrup should know, are fraught. They can be sabotaged by differences in reporting--does Sweden count an RU-486 abortion as an abortion, or something else? More importantly, with something that is as multi-factorial as abortion is, effects like having a relatively young, or relatively old population, poverty rates, cultural attitudes about childbirth and sex, and so forth often--even usually--swamp the things we are trying to measure, like effective sex education. It is interesting that Sweden has a low abortion, but if the reason their abortion rate is low is that that Sweden is full of Swedes, instead of the ethno-religious mutts that inhabit our fair nation, then that doesn't give us many useful policy options--other than moving to Sweden.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Holy industry consolidation, Batman!

CBS and Warner brothers are merging UPN and the WB. Does this mean that the Gilmore Girls and Girlfriends will all be in one show?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Random observation

I'm watching Fox News, thinking that they, if anyone, will be broadcasting the conservative victory in Canada, which I'm writing about. No such luck; they're broadcasting the Alito confirmation process. Lindsay Graham is being interviewed right now about the way Alito's been treated. And wow! Either the Fox News legal reporter is a giant, or Lindsay Graham is really, really short.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

HSA in 2006?

Kevin Drum is upset about Healthcare Savings Accounts:

The debate over HSAs is going to get mighty wonky over the next few months, but always keep this explanation in mind as you're trying to make sense of the charges and countercharges. The fundamental idea behind HSAs is not to provide better healthcare, it's to provide less healthcare. Conservatives want you to think twice before spending a hundred bucks for your regular pap smear.

I'm probably going to write enough about HSAs over the next few months to make everyone scream for mercy, especially since I assume the White House will decline to publish an actual plan, leaving us instead to speculate wildly about what they really have in mind. So I'm going to wrap up this post right here. Just remember: if you think more risk, more complexity, and less healthcare are the answer, HSAs are for you. The rest of us will keep pushing for something that actually makes sense.

The idea behind HSAs is indeed to make people spend less on their healthcare. Every health care policy analyst out there claims that their plan will cause people to spend less on their health care; single-payer advocates think that they can shake all that extra money out of the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and insurance administrators, while those of a more libertarian stripe are hoping to get it out of consumers. I won't rehash that argument here (say, "Thank you, Jane").

But I really don't understand the opposition to HSAs among single-payer advocates. It certainly won't hurt anyone, will it? If you get a high-deductible policy, and save the deductible in a tax-free account, how are you worse off? HSAs are, after all, primarily targeted at those who find it difficult and expensive to get insurance, such as the self-employed. Or are those people not entitled to have their health care problems solved the way old, sick people are? You might think the programme is underwhelming as a way to address health care costs, but why the vituperation?

"Conservatives want you to think twice before spending a hundred bucks for your regular pap smear" actually might not be a bad idea--there's some evidence that annual pap smears don't do any better for most women than a pap smear every two or three years, but hey, why risk it? The insurance company's paying! More importantly, there's a fair amount of health care that isn't necessary: "I have a cold! Write me a prescription for antibiotics!" Such visits are a waste of doctor time; a waste of insurance dollars; and they contribute to antibiotic resistance. Eliminating them would be a medical bonanza.

Will that keep health care costs under control? Seems unlikely. The primary driver of health care costs is heroic end-of-life interventions These interventions are not within the budget of all but the very wealthiest of citizens, and given that our society is unlikely to let people die for lack of $300K for ventilator support, they are not going to stop. Given that Medicare has also done almost nothing to restrain these costs, I find it implausible that neither market nor government action will prove capable of restraining the growth of health care costs.

Nor does the fact that our health care costs are high, and growing, really bother me. We're basically the richest nation in the world. All of our citizens have enough food, clothes, and a roof over their head. Do we have something better to spend our money on than being healthy?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Want to cut down on abortions? Make them illegal

Now is the time of year when William Saletan tells us that we should stop arguing about abortion and just keep women from getting pregnant in the first place.

Well, thank you, Dr. Insight. Hey guys--let's stop arguing about the death penalty, and make it so no one ever commits heinous murders!

The insistence that the abortion problem can be remedied with better education would seem to me willfully obtuse, if it weren't obvious that the more ardently pro-choice members of our society need, in a deep down way, to believe that abortion is a necessary response to an unforeseeable misfortune, rather than a form of birth control for the lazy and imprudent.

Which sounds more perjorative than I mean it to. I mean, I'm lazy and imprudent in all sorts of ways--just ask my student loan officer. But even a cursory thought about abortion leads one to the conclusion that inadequate sex education is simply not likely to be a major contributor to the number of abortions in this country.

People who get abortions can be divided into three categories: those who were using birth control perfectly, but had an unforeseeable accident; those who were using birth control imperfectly ("imperfect" use apparently, in many of the statistics collected, includes "oops, we're out of condoms!"), and those who weren't using birth control. The largest group is apparently group number three.

Now, to a certain sort of social analyst, this seems to indicate that these people desperately need education and cheaper birth control. But it seems to me that, outside of a few religious communities where abortion is not likely to be a common practice, there are very, very few people in America, even young ones, who do not know that having unprotected sex gets you pregnant. Whether they have hip, now, "Do what ever you want, but do it safely" sex ed, or mean, puritannical "Good girls don't have sex" abstinence-based education, they are being told exactly what sort of thing can get you pregnant--and in abstinence-based programmes, having the bejeesus scared out of them with scenarios that are possible, but wildly unlikely. If there is a teenager in America who doesn't know that doing that can result in a baby nine months later, then they are being home-schooled by incredibly uptight religious parents, and any resulting pregnancies are Mom's responsibility, not ours.

Even in the depths of the bible belt, teenage boys know what condoms are, and teenage girls have heard of the pill--if not on television, then in the girl's bathroom. Now, one might argue that without good sex ed, teenagers will not be adequately informed about the relative benefits of condoms or the pill. But roughly half the people getting abortions were not using birth control at all. What is better sex ed going to tell them that they don't already know?

Nor do I think that sex ed is likely to remedy what is (I assume) the other major source of unwanted-and-terminated pregnancies: people using their birth control incorrectly. I had (she said modestly) pretty much the finest sex education money can buy. It started in fifth grade and went every year until I was a junior in high school. Yet apparently none of my classmates could remember things like "no, you are not protected for a few months after you stop taking the pill". My classmates avoided pregnancy (to the extent they did) not because they had fabulous sex education, but because they were anxious enough about their futures to use protection each and every time. As far as I have been able to tell from a cursory examination of the literature, abstinence-based education is almost completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancies, a failure mitigated only by the fact that birth-control based education is also almost completely ineffective at reducing teen pregnancies. Sex education simply is not telling teenagers very many crucial facts that they don't already know.

Better education might prevent some condom failures, if the same kids who forgot the dates of the Civil war three days into summer vacation actually recalled their sex-ed lectures at the moment of truth. But the other common failure--failure to take the pill every day, at the same time--is amply warned against by one's gynecologist. Over and over and over again. Especially if you get your pills at Planned Parenthood, as so many of our uneducated teens do. Still one of the most common ways to get knocked up.

As for the people who get pregnant despite having taken every reasonable precaution--that tiny minority so beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters--education isn't going to help them at all, is it?

Mr Saletan seems to be ignoring a very basic question, implied by his own statement that half of all terminated pregnancies occur in women who weren't using any protection: why are so many people engaging in behaviour that they have been repeatedly told will lead to an unwanted pregnancy? Especially when there are cheap and effective prophylactics at the nearest drugstore? Answer: because it's not very costly to do so.

Abortions are relatively cheap, and relatively painless (or at least, they sound that way if you haven't had one--I don't actually know if they're painful or not), and America's youth, like youth everywhere, are not very good at correctly estimating the future disutility of current actions. This is why smoking continues to be popular. And the back seat of a car is a terrible place to by trying to do an expected value calculation in your head.

Not that I'm advocating making abortion illegal; I'm not. As I've said before, I'm reluctantly pro-choice. But "safe, legal and rare" is like "good, fast, and cheap" -- you have to pick two, because it's not possible to have all three at one time. At least not until we get that perfect birth control that doesn't have to be remembered, doesn't have to be prescribed, doesn't have to be applied, and never lets its user down. And by then we won't have to worry about getting pregnant anyway, because the Trump will have sounded and we'll all be on our way to meet Jesus at the pearly gates.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Stupidest rationalization ever

I know smoking isn't good for my health, but neither is walking in the polluted streets of Madrid or Barcelona, nor is living in a world where the United States refuses to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.

Javier Maras in today's Times.

I should say I'm generally sympathetic to beleaguered smokers. The following is certainly true, but I find it extraordinary that a smoking ban was the event that provoked the revelation:

A totalitarian state is one that sticks its nose where it doesn't belong and attempts to intervene in every aspect of its citizens' private lives, and many governments today, whether left, right or center, have developed this practice of behaving like busybodies. The old notion that only dictatorships can be totalitarian seems terribly naive nowadays. And that is the worst thing about this antismoking law and others of the same ilk: they unfortunately prove that totalitarianism is no longer incompatible with the democratic systems that once guaranteed our freedoms.

I believe that such proof was available long before anti-smoking laws, simply in arenas of less vital interest to Mr. Maras than his own post-prandial intoxication.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Honne and Tatemae

David Sanger in today's NYT:

Similar fears [of the aftermath of a pre-emptive strike], he said, gave President Bill Clinton pause about launching a strike on North Korea in 1994. Later that year he reached an accord for a freeze on the North's nuclear production facilities. But in 2003 everything unfroze, and now the North, by C.I.A. estimates, has enough fuel for at least half a dozen bombs.

"Everything unfroze" in 2003? Because they supposedly stopped their Plutonium program but secretly began enriching Uranium instead? And this in an article entitled "Why Not a Strike on Iran?".

Times logic proceeds from the idea that the world all of a sudden became a dangerous place when the current administration took office-or at least picked up from where it was during Bush I. The Clinton years were apparently some sort of Caribbean vacation.

(if the title is inscrutable, click here)

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The unspeakable pursues the incredible

Is 'religious hate-speech' an oxymoron, or a tautology? If the argument described below is actually a legal defense, it certainly highlights the recursive logic of hate speech laws:

COPIES of the Koran were handed to the jurors in the Abu Hamza trial yesterday as his defence argued that some of the cleric's "offensive" statements were drawn directly from Islam's holy book....

Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza's interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was "simplistic in the extreme".

..He added: "It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself."

Mr Fitzgerald cited two verses of the book that Abu Hamza would rely on, among many others, as theological justification for the words that had led to him being charged. They were Chapter 2, verse 216 and Chapter 9, verse 111. He said that all the great monotheistic religions had scriptures that contained "the language of blood and retribution"

via LGF who calls it the 'absurd dead end of multiculturalism'.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Good idea, Gene, but not enough Bush-bashing

Too reasonable' seems to be Noam Scheiber's criticism of Gene Sperling's book.  He describes Sperling's ideas as 'unfailingly sound'...

More than anything else, "The Pro-Growth Progressive" embodies the neoliberal idea that all problems are solvable if we just set aside ideology and focus on what works. 

.....but spends the bulk of the article complaining that the time for sound policy ideas is somehow passed.

Gene Sperling is thoughtful, hard working, well intentioned and wickedly smart. Reading his book gives me pangs of nostalgia for the days when he and his colleagues ran the country. But the same approach that works when you're in power doesn't necessarily work when you're completely shut out of it. Is this really the time for statesmanship? Sadly, Democrats may be better off embracing bare-knuckle politics.

Sperling charts ideas that could help recapture the center and Scheiber rejects them for, well, for precisely that reason. 'Bush Derangement Syndrome' is probably over-diagnosed, but this strikes me as the saddest sort of textbook example: In Scheiber's view, Sperling's policies are somehow brilliant in every practical way yet fall short because they don't sufficiently confront the current administration. 

This remark is also unintentionally hysterical following Scheiber's long digression about the Bush Administration (oh- right, it's a book review!):

To be fair, Sperling does criticize the excesses of the Bush era.

Well! Sperling must be so relieved that he didn't totally fail in that regard.

Apparently, power and partisanship are more important than policy. Has he thought through where this leads?  Is the proper strategy when out of power to a) oppose everything or, b) propose only far-fetched, confrontational policies? Perhaps I'm presenting a false dichotomy, but what is Scheiber suggesting?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Color me surprised

The folks in the Justice department really need to subpoena Google's records to find out that there's a lot of porn on the internet*? Don't they have computers over there at Justice?

*This link is fairly work-safe as long as you are using headphones, and have a boss who doesn't mind you watching videos of monsters.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Alito fatigue

Dahlia Lithwick writes that while Alito may be credibly willing to defer to precedent on Roe, he (or whoever is put in that seat) is gonna have to make it up as he goes along on national security, because there's just not that much good precedent out there. She gives this as a reason to vote against Alito.

But we don't care about that, do we? Because no matter what anyone may say, we all know that the only important thing in these hearings, the only reason the Dems are badgering him, is determining whether he will, or will not, vote to overturn Roe.

And Lord, I hope he does, just so that we can all shut the hell up about abortion for a while.

Are we debating the scope of executive power? The limits to congressional fiat? The rights of people to be free from searches? The wild extension of local power represented by the Kelo decision? The detention of prisoners in the War on Terror? The rights of people who, while nominally citizens, have de facto declared war on the United States? No, we can't, because apparently the only important legal issue in the entire country is whether or not a woman must, or must not be forced to, notify her parents and/or husband when she decides to terminate her pregnancy. This, my little chickadees, is what has become of the majesty of American law: nine justices quibbling about whether an abortion law needs an exemption for medical emergencies in order to qualify for the magical penumbras of constitutional protection.

Because, you know, the single biggest threat to the health of the Republic is the possibility that, somewhere, a doctor might perform an abortion on a woman whose life is threatened when there is no time to notify her husband, and some nutjob prosecutor will decide to actually press charges. If you can find me one jury in the darkest heart of the Bible Belt who would vote to convict a doctor for performing emergency surgery to save the life or fertility or health of a mother when there is genuinely no time to notify the husband, well then I will personally cook you a ten-course meal with all the trimmings.

This is what we are reduced to. We are fixated by the elaborate Kabuki performance in which Republican judges lie about what they think of Roe in answer to questions from Democratic senators lying about the fact that any hint of opposition to Roe will earn their automatic veto. Are we looking for jurisprudence, or entertainment?

I'm really disgusted. Repeal Roe, please, so that we just might possibly be able to actually have a substantive debate about the legal future of this country, which seems to be facing some rather important issues right now that do no involve anyone's womb. I will be happy to help found an organisation which takes all the lobbying dollars now spent on keeping Roe legal and funnel them into a lovely spa-like facility somewhere in Massachussetts, where women who live in the handful of states that might outlaw abortion can come to terminate their pregnancies. I will fundraise vociferously for a scholarship fund, to give poor women plane fare, spa accomodations, and makeup of any lost pay. I will do anything to ensure that we, as a nation, do not have to spend one more day debating whether women have a constitutional right to scrape a fetus out of their womb.

Just had to get that off my chest. I feel much better now.

Update When I say we'll all "shut the hell up about abortion", do I mean that we'll stop arguing about it? Of course not. It's an important topic. When I hear pro-choicers say things like "If you're against abortion, don't get one! I feel like saying "So if you're against lynching, don't string your neighbours up!" Not that I think that abortion is the moral equivalent of lynching. But for people who do believe that the fetus is a full person, being told to shut up about the 1.5 million infanticides being carried out each year is insulting, and worse, makes the speaker sound like a parochial moron.

What I want us to shut up about is this "abortion is a constitutional right!" mantra with which many pro-choicers have sought to gloss over the fundamental argument about whether abortion is right or wrong. Once we've stopped peering into the emanations and penumbras, trying to catch a glimpse of the fetus that so many activists swear is there, we can get back to the important question, which is "Should we allow this? And if so, how much of it?"

The pro-choice side is opposed to this, not merely because they've already got everything they want, but because the American public is egregiously misinformed as to the legality of abortion in this country, the number of them that are performed this year, and the reasons for which they are performed. It is only my opinion, of course, but I'd be willing to bet a hefty sum that public opinion would swing even farther from the pro-choice side if a healthy, open debate on the topic were ever held.

So why am I, pro-choice woman that I am, in favour of rolling back Roe? Several reasons. First, I don't think that a right to abortion can be reasonably inferred from the constitution. I'm no legal scholar, but the little legal scholarship which I have sampled on the topic seems mostly to consist of scholars arguing that such a right should be in the constitution, not that it is; they get the rest of the way by positing that we have a living constitution, which can basically say anything you want, except if you want it to say you have a right to own guns. I know, this is a naive point of view; actual lawyers feel free to chastise me. But as far as possible, I believe in originalism, and yes, that means that I'd be willing to overturn Lawrence as well, even though I'm very happy with the outcome on a personal level. If you want to change what the constitution means, I think you should have to amend it.

Second, Roe has motivated a whole bunch of people who I don't particularly want to see stir out of their barcaloungers. Leave it up to the states, and almost everyone will be willing to let it go--neither pro-choicers nor pro-lifers generally have the energy for cross-country treks to protest. Also, letting people feel like they have some recourse defuses a lot of the anger on both sides. I mean, except from the people who are currently getting to jam their opinions down the throats of their opponents while allowing them no legal recourse.

Third, Roe and its progeny are mulitplying ridiculously, delving into ever finer nuances of technical details. Correct me if I'm wrong, but constitutional law is supposed to be about the big picture, not about whether 48 hours v. 24 hours waiting period constitutes and undue burden.

Fourth, Roe has made abortion law, to me, unacceptably permissive. Few areas in the country, even ardently pro-choice ones, would allow late-term abortion at all if legislators had to debate it, and justify it to their constituents.

Fifth, to me the ultimate point is to reduce abortions without turning women into breeding farms. The best way to figure out how to do that is, to my Hayekian mind, to let 50 states experiment with 50 different sets of abortion laws, and see which works.

And sixth, the debate over abortion is overshadowing debates which I think are more important. I'd like to get this off the national stage, and back to the states where it belongs.

That doesn't mean I think that we won't talk about it. But I think a debate along the lines of "Is abortion okay before it implants? How about after? What about afer brain-waves appear? . . . " is likely to be a lot more fruitful than

"Baby killer!"
"Neanderthal!"

From the desk of Winterspeak:

The Zone of Competition

Carriers (Verizon, Comcast etc.) are petitioning the government to allow "level of service" agreements for internet traffic. Currently, the government actively regulates media in general, through decency standards on public television, funding public radio, and enforcing a variety of community and public interest standards across media in general. The unregulated internet is an anomaly in the media world and it's not surprising that carriers want that to change.

Information travels across the internet in packets and it does not matter what that packet contains. An emailed joke is as important in the Internet's eyes as a million dollar contract. Carriers want to change this and tier the internet, so some packets will get priority over others. This would be a dramatic change from the neutral end-to-end principle that governs the Internet now.

Carriers argue that they need tiered pricing to better ration bandwidth. If bandwidth becomes scarce, and networks become jammed up, then pricing the traffic "hogs" is the best way to relieve that congestion.

Arnold Kling, though, questions the very notion of bandwidth being scarce. I'm with Arnold, I don't think bandwidth is scarce.

And Tyler Cowen argues that the beauty of the status quo is that all the surplus is captured by consumers (websites try to offer good experiences and get customers, customers go to them or a competitor).

I believe that carriers are agitating for this because they don't want to be dumb pipes competing in a commodity business. Tiered service means they can offer different things to different customers at different prices. This will allow them to differentiate themselves from each other, and maybe even specialize (with all the benefits that flow from that).

Part of me feels that tiered pricing online is reasonable, but I'm also leery of changing a system that works as well as the Internet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How bad is America, really?

There is, among some people of my acquaintance, a belief that America's recent forays into counterterrorist experiments of highly dubious legality, is some sort of brutal departure from the honorable norms that prevail in the rest of the developed world. I find this particularly shocking given that some of the people who profess this belief are actually from other parts of the developed world, and have apparently somehow never noticed that their legal systems are far less interested in protecting the innocent, much less the guilty, from the intrusive hand of the state. If the British haven't noticed that the surveillance cameras everywhere take rather more of the liberty out of "civil liberties" than an American would put up with, surely they have heard of the . . . er . . . creative ways that their government found to detain IRA members when the government could not mount adequate evidence to convict them in a court of law? And the Code Napoleon-based systems found on the continent are even less respectful of the niceties than the Brits are, as Daniel Drezner notes:

It turns out the Bush administration wishes the U.S. system was more like the French:

In the French system, an investigating judge is the equivalent of an empowered U.S. prosecutor. The judge is in charge of a secret probe, through which he or she can file charges, order wiretaps, and issue warrants and subpoenas. The conclusions of the judge are then transmitted to the prosecutor’s office, which decides whether to send the case to trial. The antiterrorist magistrates have even broader powers than their peers. For instance, they can request the assistance of the police and intelligence services, order the preventive detention of suspects for six days without charge, and justify keeping someone behind bars for several years pending an investigation. In addition, they have an international mandate when a French national is involved in a terrorist act, be it as a perpetrator or as a victim. As a result, France today has a pool of specialized judges and investigators adept at dismantling and prosecuting terrorist networks.

By contrast, in the U.S. judicial system, the evidence gathered by prosecutors is laid out during the trial, in what in effect amounts to a make-or-break gamble. A single court, the “secret” panel of 11 judges, established by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than two decades ago, is charged with reviewing wiretap requests by U.S. authorities. If suspects are spied on without permission in the interest of urgency, the authorities have 72 hours to file for retroactive authorization. The Bush administration’s recourse to extrajudicial means—military trials, enemy combatants—partly stems from an assessment that the judicial system is unfit to prosecute the shadowy world of terrorism. The disclosures that the Bush administration skirted the rules to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects at home is apparently the latest instance of the government’s deciding that rules protecting civil liberties are hampering the war on terror. French police and intelligence services, in contrast, operate in a permissive wiretapping system. In addition to judicially ordered taps, there are also “administrative wiretaps” decided by security agencies under the control of the government. Although the French have had their own cases of abuse—evidence has exposed illegal spying by the François Mitterrand government in the 1980s—the intrusive police powers are for the most part well known by the public and thus largely accepted, especially when it comes to national security....

Bush administration officials argue that the FISA law in its current form does not effectively counter the terrorist challenge. Yet, the administration has not made serious efforts to amend the law or push for broader reform of domestic counterterrorism. Doing so would no doubt be difficult politically and may require regular tweaking, as the French experience shows. But such an effort could pay dividends, for both law enforcement and the American people’s trust in their government.

In recent years, French authorities claim they have thwarted a number of terrorist plots by using their forward-leaning arsenal, from a series of alleged chemical attacks planned by Chechen operatives against Russian interests in Paris to a recently reported ploy by French Muslims linked to a radical Islamist group in Algeria to target one of the capital’s airports. “The French have a very aggressive system but one that fits into their traditions,” says Jeremy Shapiro, the director of research at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They seem to be doing the best job in Europe.”

Now, for all the "pack, not a herd" memes floating around the libertarian areas of the blogosphere, I am more than willing to posit that the French system may do a vastly superior job of breaking up terrorist networks. But who cares? Vesting that sort of intrusive power in one person would do far more damage to America than any terrorists are likely to inflict (barring the--IMHO extraordinarily unlikely--possibility of a nuclear attack.)

Forbidding everyone to drive would do a dandy job of eliminating car accidents, but the cure is worse than the disease. Likewise, building up the apparatus of a police state in order to catch a few crazies would kill the very thing that makes America (if I may say so) the best damn country in history.

Conservatives who want to berate me for not appreciating the threat of terrorism, let me take a little, er, pre-emptive action here. Unless you have lost the ten or so people that I bid farewell when the towers collapsed, including my first boyfriend, have watched the smoke rising off the ruins from the roof of your childhood home, have tried frantically to find out if your current boyfriend had been taking training down at the WTC that day, and have numbly tried to convince yourself that the buildings you knew so well were really and truly and forever gone as you turned up for another weary day of work at Ground Zero . . . unless you have done all those things, then please do not lecture me on terrorism. I get it.

As bad as terrorism is, there are worse things in the world, and governments that spy on their citizens, and torture them, and imprison them without trial, are among those things. Undoubtedly, if I ended up dying in a terrorist attack, I would wish we had done more. But hey, if I was killed in a car accident, I'd undoubtedly wish that the guy who hit me had had his license pulled. This would not be an argument for shuttering the interstates and making everyone get around on Shank's ponies.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Cross purposes

Whole Foods is switching to wind power--not, the CEO emphasizes, because he is some sort of airy-fairy hippie using his shareholders' money to further his ideals, but because it makes good business sense:

"It's a sales driver rather than a cost," he said. "All of those things we do related to our core values: help drive sales, help convince a customer to drive past three or four other supermarkets on the way to Whole Foods."

Wouldn't all those extra miles driven negate any environmental value of using wind power? Just askin', is all.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

The end of defined benefits

I like this Calculated Risk post on the passing of corporate pensions at least in the defined benefit sense. Defined contribution plans (401(k)s) will continue and grow. But....

This will put the burden on the employee and from my experience, the employees that will probably need the benefits the most, will contribute the least (as a percentage of income), and invest poorly.

When I was a trustee for a 401(k) plan, I saw the following behavior repeated many times: Less sophisticated investors would tend to be overly conservative putting most of their money in money market funds. Then they would occasionally invest in whatever went up in the most recent quarters. If they had a losing quarter, they would scurry back to the money market fund. Their overall results were poor.

Keeping your money in cash, putting it into a stock that had recently gone up, and selling as soon as it goes down, is a terrible investment strategy. But I agree with the broad point -- individuals are terrible investors and giving them money and 401(k)s will result in retirement savings that do not grow and will be whittled away by higher administrative costs.

I cannot think of a better area for behavioral economics to make a real impact on improving people's lives and adding much needed sanity and efficiency to the 401(k)/defined contribution retirement era we all now live in. "Save More Tomorrow" is a scheme put together by U Chicago's Dick Thaler and UCLA's Shlomo Benartzi that takes people's natural inefficient inclinations into account and puts together a better retirement plan for us all. The libertarians amongst us (and you know who you are) can calm down -- the program is entirely opt-out so if anyone wants to manage their savings in a different way they are free to do that as well. Save More Tomorrow sets better defaults, it does not constrain choice.

Key features:
- The plan automatically takes money out of raises, so you always see paychecks go up, they just go up by less than they would otherwise.
- The money goes into low-cost, diversified index funds
- All details of the plan are opt-out. Including enrollment.

The results?

The first implementation of the SMT plan yielded dramatic results. The average saving rates for SMT plan participants more than tripled, from 3.5 percent to 11.6 percent, over the course of 28 months.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Anybody with a brain knows...

TigerHawk relieves himself of all sorts of non-rightwing thoughts (proving he leans "compassionate libertarian" like the authors of AI).  I agree with him in most cases, but I take heated exception to one:

I think that golf is our most destructive sport. My reasons are legion. If you don't agree, it is because you haven't thought about it enough.

Here I think he's just relieving himself of some lefty 'progressive' logic (e.g. "if you aren't outraged you haven't been paying attention"; "golf courses are to open space what ketchup is to vegetables"). So I'll counter with my own - if he doesn't find the good in golf, he just hasn't tried.

Enough of this George Carlin B.S.  Over to you, Fritz Schrank and Jeff Jarvis.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Funding cataclysm?

I like drinking with economists, because they're funny. When I go drinking with, say, physicists, I usually end up mired in rants about string theory, which is tough on me because it makes my already limited pool of brains start rattling around in my otherwise empty skull. When I go drinking with economists, on the other hand, they start ranting about how the rest of the world treats them. The most common version of the complaint was summed up by one economist of my acquaintance who said: "You know, I never offer opinions on gall bladder surgery, chemical synthesis, or drawing up a will, but doctors, chemists, and lawyers--and everyone else--all think they know how to do my job better than I do."

Case in point: Paul Ewald, biologist, who thinks that finding an infectious basis for diseases like heart disease and cancer would destroy the health care industry as we know it:

One array of dangers arises because ideas that challenge the status quo threaten the livelihood of many. When the many are embedded in powerful places the threat can be stifling, especially when a lot of money and status are at stake. So it is within the arena of medical research and practice. Imagine what would happen if the big diseases — cancers, arteriosclerosis, stroke, diabetes — were largely prevented.

Big pharmas would become small because the demand for prescription drugs would drop. The prestige of physicians would drop because they would no longer be relied upon to prolong life. The burgeoning industry of biomedical research would shrink because governmental and private funding for this research would diminish. Also threatened would be scientists whose sense of self-worth is built upon the grant dollars they bring in for discovering miniscule parts of big puzzles. Scientists have been beneficiaries of the lack of progress in recent decades, which has caused leaders such as the past head of NIH, Harold Varmus, to declare that what is needed is more basic research. But basic research has not generated many great advancements in the prevention or cure of disease in recent decades.

The major exception is in the realm of infectious disease where many important advancements were generated from tiny slices of funding. The discovery that peptic ulcers are caused by infections that can be cured with antibiotics is one example. Another is the discovery that liver cancer can often be prevented by a vaccine against the hepatitis B virus or by screening blood for hepatitis B and C viruses.

The track record of the past few decades shows that these examples are not quirks. They are part of a trend that goes back over a century to the beginning of the germ theory itself. And the accumulating evidence supporting infectious causation of big bad diseases of modern society is following the same pattern that occurred for diseases that have been recently accepted as caused by infection.

The process of acceptance typically occurs over one or more decades and accords with Schopenhauer's generalization about the establishment of truth: it is first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and finally accepted as being self-evident. Just a few groups of pathogens seem to be big players: streptococci, Chlamydia, some bacteria of the oral cavity, hepatitis viruses, and herpes viruses. If the correlations between these pathogens and the big diseases of wealthy countries does in fact reflect infectious causation, effective vaccines against these pathogens could contribute in a big way to a new golden age of medicine that could rival the first half of the 20th century.

The transition to this golden age, however, requires two things: a shift in research effort to identifying the pathogens that cause the major diseases and development of effective interventions against them. The first would be easy to bring about by restructuring the priorities of NIH — where money goes, so go the researchers. The second requires mechanisms for putting in place programs that cannot be trusted to the free market for the same kinds of reasons that Adam Smith gave for national defense. The goals of the interventions do not mesh nicely with the profit motive of the free market. Vaccines, for example, are not very profitable.

Pharmas cannot make as much money by selling one vaccine per person to prevent a disease as they can selling a patented drug like Vioxx which will be administered day after day, year after year to treat symptoms of an illness that is never cured. And though liability issues are important for such symptomatic treatment, the pharmas can argue forcefully that drugs with nasty side effects provide some benefit even to those who suffer most from the side effects because the drugs are given not to prevent an illness but rather to people who already have an illness. This sort of defense is less convincing when the victim is a child who developed permanent brain damage from a rare complication of a vaccine that was given to protect them against a chronic illness that they might have acquired decades later.

Mr Ewald combines deep knowlege of biology with gross ignorance of economics to produce an answer that is as silly as what you probably get when economic journalists start theorizing about evolutionary biology. (blush)

How many things are wrong with this argument? First, it assumes that the price of a vaccine is the same as the price for a dose of medicine. But how much would you be willing to pay for an AIDS pill that you have to take oer and over, versus a vaccine that has fewer side effects, plus you don't have AIDS? If you're one of those church ladies who makes pimento cheese sandwiches in between visiting the poor, maybe not so much. But if you're a sexually active young adult in an urban area, I'd venture that you'd probably be willing to pay at least as much for your AIDS shot as you would for your breast implants or nose job. The pharmaceutical company could collect all that money up front, and as we know if we stayed awake in Econ 101, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

Second of all, it ignores marginal cost: pharmaceutical companies get to get all the money you'd pay for a vaccine, with only the cost of producing one dose. To stick you for AIDS drugs, they need a bigger manufacturing plant, more workers, and of course whatever raw materials go into the manufacturing. That's presuming that people only ever need one dose of a vaccine, which isn't right; most vaccines I'm familiar with require boosters every few years to keep immunity up.

Third of all, it assumes a lump of consumer demand for health care. Say we vanquish heart disease, cancer, and so forth (though given evolutionary biology, won't we need ever-expanding teams devoted to finding new anti-infectious agents? Couldn't we shift some of our statin and chemotherapy scientists over there?) If we're all living longer, we'll need new joints, a lot more plastic surgery, better pain killers, and some sort of drug to keep us awake after Sunday dinner.

Fourth, it ignores competition. Sure, if I'm a company with a blockbuster AIDS drug, I might not want to cannibalise my own sales. But the company across the street whose market-leading antacid just went off-patent would probably love to introduce a lucrative new vaccine.

The health care market can cope with change just fine. That is, if the regulatory system lets it. The problem with vaccines isn't that you can't charge enough money for them; it's that vaccines are very useful things, which tempts governments to break the patent. It is thus perhaps wiser for pharmas to invest in a good baldness cure than something that people actually need. But this is not a market failure; it is a government failure.

There are major incentive problems with vaccines, and to be fair he touches on one of them: because vaccines protect you against something you haven't got yet, patients are more likely to sue if something goes wrong. And as they become more widespread, people are tempted to free ride on the vaccinations of others. It is only because almost everyone is vaccinated that phobic parents are willing to let their children go un-immunized; if measles and polio were widespread, they'd be a lot more worried about possible blindness and paralysis than about the extremely rare side effects of vaccines. This is a public health problem in areas like boulder, where bobo parents refusing to vaccinate their children have caused a resurgence in diseases like Whooping Cough and measles--unfortunately, affecting not just their children, but adults whose immunity has waned over time.

But those are easily fixed with regulatory changes, such as requiring vaccination to attend school; they're not fundamental to the market. With a few tweaks, I predict that the health care industry will survive, and even grow, even if we vanquish heart attacks and conquer cancer.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Road to Hell . . .

In the comments to my previous post, a commenter lambastes me for this:

So why did Public Citizen get Cylert banned, rather than Tylenol?

Because if they tried to get Tylenol banned people would say, "What, are you nuts? I use that stuff!" while Cylert is used by a vanishingly small percentage of the population.

But if they weren't pushing to get anything banned at all, people would say, "Why are you guys still in business? Why are you still asking for donations?"

This is extraordinary logic. I mean, since my dentist has no financial interest to remind me to brush and floss (and show me how to do them correctly), and, in fact, as great financial interest for me to have awful teeth, I should believe that she's being disingenuous whenever she tells me to take care of my teeth? (My dentist does have personal and professional integrity, as do those who work for Public Citizen, but, reading the post & comments, that's easily dismissed.)

The assumption is that I believe Public Citizen is acting maliciously. I do not. People have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what is in their self interest is also Good for America. I've no doubt that farmers, steelworkers, and the owners of tAmerican textile factories all believe that the preservation of their industries is essential to prevent the further fraying of the fabric of American life.

Public Citizen is full of people looking for something to do. If no very good opportunities present themselves, they will seize on less-good opportunities. If you've ever been in a group of eager activists, or marketing executives, you'll know that it doesn't take long for the members of the group to talk themselves into believing that their new cause is very important indeed.

Like the most successful salesmen, the high-achieving activist believes his own BS. I speak here from experience: while I was canvassing for a Nader group, I was firmly convinced that the fate of the Western World was riding on the reauthorisation of the Clean Water act. It would have been unthinkable for me to conclude that the donations on which my weekly paycheck depended were almost worse than wasted. There are consciousless people who can sell things they know are worthless*, but most people need to believe in what they are saying. Fortunately for them, it doesn't take humans very much effort to develop a sort of false consciouness, in which any evidence that our product is inferior is shunted to the back of our mind, not allowed to connect with any other facts that might force us to consider finding another job.

Consider, for example, investment banking research. When I spent a summer at [cough] famous investment bank [/cough], one of the major selling points we included in our pitches was our fantastic research and our huge distribution network of brokers. Now, executives taking a company public generally already have their own stockbroker, and they can get access to investment banking research for considerably less than 7% of the total revenue from their IPO; a 10K account at each bank would do it.

What were we really selling, then? Well, this was a lightly coded promise to promiscuously abuse the trust of the investing public. What they were really saying was: "if you let us do your IPO, we'll say nice things about your company in our research, whether or not your financials deserve it, and our brokers will help keep the price high by jamming your stock into the portfolios of our unsuspecting clients." With brokerage profits declining due to competition from Ameritech and co., brokerage accounts and research departments had become a liability unless they could be used to secure lucrative IPO business.

Now, my colleagues and business school classmates knew this. We knew, too, that companies were massaging their earnings; indeed, we devoted a significant portion of our accounting classes to learning how to undo the deceptive accounting. It should have occurred to us that if companies were doing these things, there was probably a reason--and that that reason was that they wanted to take advantage of the naivete of average schmoes who didn't know how to properly account for stock options or recognize "big bath" tactics. Yet, somehow, we never thought of that stupid schmuck, out there in flyover country, letting his broker stick him into some dog so that the investment banking guys could bring in a little more business. It wasn't malicious; business school students are not the rapacious predators of stereotype. (Indeed, at least the half of my classmates who are Democrats consider me a heartless capitalist imperialist pig.) We just . . . never asked ourself why all this seemingly silly activity was happening.

Similarly, my idealistic colleagues at PennPIRG never troubled themselves to compare the mathematics of the canvassing organisation, which I'd estimate sucked up at least 75% of all the donations just putting the canvasser at your door to ask for money, with the spiel and the literature we delivered. These emphasized first and foremost our research, which it seems to me could not have absorbed much more than a couple percentage points worth of PIRG's total budget, and our legislative efforts. It was not because we were bad people; a solid majority of the people I worked with were idealists who really cared about the environment. It was just much more comfortable to concentrate on the mechanics of getting money out of people than to think about where that money was actually going.

Which brings me back to Public Citizen. I don't think that they are acting maliciously--as any dentist who told you not to brush your teeth would be. I just think that, like the rest of us, they find it surprisingly easy not to compa