Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Libertarians and liability

An anarchocapitalist friend of mine is fond of arguing that strict liability--i.e., getting rid of limited liability for shareholders of corporations and so forth--is the solution to many ills.

This strikes me as thoroughly lunatic; our free and prosperous society owes much of its freedom and prosperity to the high level of capital formation permitted by the invention of the limited liability structure. Or so I mote. A mite tough to build a railroad using just the contents of one's savings account. I have told him this, of course, but we have not, so far, had a meeting of the minds. Of course, I am only libertarian-ish, with a hefty dose of utilitarianism thrown in along with liberal lashings of quasi-Christian morality.

But Tyler Cowen offers another, more interesting argument:

It's liability per se that isn't justified by libertarian standards. Under Lockean property rights theory, you own physical things, not the values of those things. It is for this reason that if you set up shop next to a competitor, you are not infringing his property rights, even if his business ends up being worth less. So let's say I steal your painting. Yes, you do deserve your painting back. It is yours. But say I steal your painting and lose it or wreck it. That should be the end of the story. You never owned the "value of that painting." You simply owned the physical painting. You are not due compensation. If you take my money as compensation for your loss, that is simply another theft. All this talk about the "doctrine of rights forfeiture" is handwaving. The forfeiture doctrine is a convenient utilitarian fiction (which I will partially endorse), not libertarian theory. Rights aggressors do not, in fact, lose their own rights in turn. Why should they? Evreyone in prison is there unjustly and yes that includes murderers. I will, of course, accept many of these injustices for utilitarian reasons; I am a good pluralist.

I'm still waiting for a good counterargument. Perhaps my readers can provide one.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Serious question

A number of my more pinkish friends are fuming that the only reason that Plan B is not going to be available OTC is politics--Bible-thumping Bush appointees who want to punish women for having sex.

What follows is a serious question for people with some medical knowlege of the substances involved, not an invitation to vent your opinions of the Bush administration's religiosity, the feminist movement, or the appropriateness of allowing young girls access to birth control.

1) Why should I be allowed to get emergency contraception, which is basically just a whacking great dose of birth control hormones, and not a pack of birth control pills, OTC?

2) Why should I be allowed to get a whacking great dose of hormones, but not a harmless little albuterol inhaler?

3) Why should I be allowed to get things that can kill me, like Tylenol, but not a harmless little albuterol inhaler that is infinitely more difficult to overdose on?

Extra credit: for pro-prohibition drug policy wonks only (Mark Kleiman, I'm looking at you)--why do I have to show a photo ID to get a 12-pack of Sudafed? Is it really likely that I will be able to use 12 Sudafed tablets to start my own home Meth lab?

Just askin', is all.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

We're getting a new Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs. Actually, despite my flippant headline, Mr Paulson is a big Wall Street heavyweight with oodles of financial experience. Unfortunately, he enters the office at a rather inauspicious time. The White House has neither the time nor the political capital for major economic policymaking; if Mr Paulson is to move centre-stage, it will most likely be as a troubleshooter for some financial crisis. RIght now, however, the economic scene is unusually calm, which will leave him little scope (though many think this is just the calm before the storm--which they suspect is the reason the White House is appointing a Wall Street big shot instead of a corporate CEO a la O'Neill and Snow.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sorry for the hiatus . . .

I was travelling last week, and had neither the time nor the internet access for blogging. But i'm back, with my pet project of the day. After reading this New York Times piece on high school dropouts, I was intrigued by this quote:

Ms. Pointer, at Rockland for a year, said she had been reluctant to take the G.E.D., the exam that could have earned her an equivalency degree, because she had heard that it was difficult.

"And if you don't pass it, you don't have anything," she said. "I guess it was really a big fear of failure."

Going to college, she said, was far better. "This way, I am going to class, learning from it, studying for it," she said, "and when I pass and I have enough credits, I automatically get my equivalency diploma."

That seems weird to me. I mean, really, really weird: how could you be less afraid of taking college classes than the GED? But then, I come from a family with freakishly good test-taking abilities; if achievement were determined solely by standardised test, Clan Galt would rule the world.

At that moment, my fevred brain hatched a plan: I, who have already taken college classes, would assess the relative difficulty of taking the GED by . . . taking the GED. And writing/blogging about it. Any interest, readers? More importantly, are there any interested editors out there? Can a girl 15 years out of high school pass the GED with no preparation? How long does high school stick with us? Who are the people who take the GED? And does it still require a #2 pencil? Inquiring minds want to know. . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How can house prices be going up when population is going down?

Co-blogger Winterspeak asks an interesting question on his own blog:

The front page of the Globe today says there is a record glut of houses in the Boston area. The forecast prices will fall. As you read through the article, it mentions that MA lost 19K residence between 2003-2005 as people moved to (cheaper) New Hampshire and Vermont, or moved to other parts of the country (Florida, North Carolina). In addition, New England has an old population, and as they age people are trying to move to smaller homes or they head south and west for retirement.

I don't know how a shrinking population can support the doubling of housing prices Boston saw between 2000-2005, unless stock has been taken out of the market by tearing houses down, which I do not think has happened.

Possible answers:

1. Household size is shrinking, spreading that smaller number of people over more housing. This has been a trend in America for a long time, and I would expect it to be particularly trendy in wealthy Massachussetts, where fewer people live with Mom.

2. Incomes are increasing

3. Low interest rates are increasing the ratio of buyers to renters, pushing up demand for a limited stock of available homes for purchase, while decreasing demand for rental housing.

4. People calculate what they will pay for a house based on the monthly payment they can afford, not the total price. This causes house prices, like bond prices, to vary inversely with interest rates.

5. Years of falling interest rates, increasing housing demand, Boston's economic boom among young professionals, and the nearly unlimited human capacity for self delusion have convinced the financially naive that housing is a sure thing, leading to the development of a speculative bubble that is about to pop.

I'd bet on four and five for sure, and suspect that one, two and three also contributed.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

The Harvard Paradox

Greg Mankiw notes that Harvard scores lowest in student satisfaction *and* enjoys the highest yield (% of students admitted who attend) of any leading American university. How can the same institution be so desirable and so disliked at the same time?

Ideas:
1) Students go in with insanely high expectations that are then crushed. So, everyone admitted accepts, but they expect so much that the experience can only go down hill.

2) Parents pressure students to go to Harvard, so they go there *but* attending the school is a miserable experience.

3) In the eternal question -- do prestigious schools produce high-achieving students, or do high-achieving students select prestigious schools to signal their ability with the school doing little to nothing to actually help them develop -- Harvard comes out high in the "rubber stamp" end of the spectrum. If you believe that prestigious schools both 1) educate students and 2) signal intelligence, then the most prestigious school (Harvard) is likely to be heavy on the 2 and can therefore slack off on the 1. Certainly Larry Summer's goal was to improve the quality of the undergraduate education, which suggests 1 has some room for improvement.

4) Harvard students are just a miserable, ungrateful lot, who would moan and whine no matter where they went.

5) You need to be cutthroat competitive to get into Harvard, and then you find youself surrounded by other cutthroat competitive people, and you all make each other's lives a living hell.

6) To get into Harvard you need to focus on studying, not partying. Once you're in there, you find yourself surrounded by other people who don't know how to party. So you all study, and that's no fun.

Whatever the reason(s), I'm confident that If student dissatisfaction at Harvard becomes widely known, it will have zero impact on its yield. Given how inelastic demand is, any rational supplier would cut investment in the product, and shift it to things that make them happy, like ivory backscratchers.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are those burning trousers I smell?

Last week, the blue half of the blogosphere got all excited because Jason Leopold said he had sure and certain knowledge that Karl Rove was going to be indicted post haste.

I've been meaning to blog about this, because as a journalist my immediate reaction was: are y'all on crack? We're talking about a story from Jason Leopold, the fellow who was jettisoned by Salon for plagiarizing and making explosive allegations about Secretary of the Army Thomas White that subseuently could not be authenticated, either by the source or Leopold's cell phone records. According to the New York Times, Dow Jones, his former employer, was similarly disenchanted with his work habits:

Until April, Mr. Leopold was a Los Angeles correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires. He said he resigned from Dow Jones to write a book about the energy crisis.

His resignation came about a week before Dow Jones published the second of two extensive corrections of a March 18 article by Mr. Leopold and another reporter. The corrections there and in The Wall Street Journal, which also published the article, invalidated virtually all of the major points of the article, which accused Enron of compensating several executives excessively.

Mr. Leopold said he believed he was being singled out because of his aggressive reporting.

''I don't think there's any reporter out there who has skirted the edge like I have and really tried to obtain information about Enron,'' he said.

Taking a story on Mr Leopold's word is like trying to get rich by taking the advice of those late night television hucksters. Nonetheless, many were convinced--or at least made hopeful--by Leopold's blustering threats to out his sources if the story turned out to be false.

So that's what I was going to write. Then I got lazy . . . and then I was OTBE: Overtaken By Events. Truthout, the website that published the story, has recanted. With charming naivete, Mark Kleiman awaits the outing of sources, even though the wording of the recantation is more than a little desperate:

On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story's title. The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story. While we paid very careful attention to the sourcing on this story, we erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle. In moving as quickly as we did, we caused more confusion than clarity. And that was a disservice to our readership and we regret it.

As such, we will be taking the wait-and-see approach for the time being. We will keep you posted.

Papers publish stuff from anonymous sources who get it wrong all the time. They don't apologize for it unless there is something very, very wrong with the story--like Judy Miller's repetitive gullibility and excessive source-greasing. Otherwise, they just write a new story saying that for whatever reason, it didn't happen. While even the most inveterate liar tells the truth sometime, it strikes me as unlikely that there are any sources for the story outside of Jason Leopold's extremely fertile imagination. Unless shown very convincing evidence, I will regard anyone he "outs" as an unwitting victim of Leopold's mendacity, and the left-wing's credulity.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stagflation?

Econbrowser has a good question:

We all understand that the Fed's next move depends on incoming data. But what if the incoming data raise concerns of both higher inflation and slower output growth?

Answer: nothing good. There is a school of thought that says the stagflation of the 1970's stemmed from the productivity shock of a sharply decreased supply of oil. If that's true, as oil inches towards its 1980 record, we should see similar (though reduced, thanks our lower dependence on oil) effects.

Of course, it may not get to that record--oil supply may be about to catch up with demand. But the Fed has to act now, not knowing whether those forecasts will turn out to be correct--or Al Qaeda will manage to land a big one in Saudi Arabia's oil fields, and the economy will really be in the tank.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

Honest Accounting

State governments have been made to honestly account for their healthcare liabilities by putting the cost of those future liabilities on the books today. No changes are being made to the promises, or to taxes, or to any part of the system -- everything remains exactly as it was except an implicit cost is being made explicit.

People are freaking out.

"It's no exaggeration to say that elected officials are shocked, absolutely shocked, by the size of these liabilities," says Donald Rueckert Jr., senior vice president and actuary at Aon Consulting, an insurance broker.

I like this step because it does not change any part of the entitlement process, which is politically problematic, it's simply more honest and upfront about costs. I'd like to see the same thing happen to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I don't think those systems can be reformed without first making their costs explicit.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

The Virtues of Nagging

Arnold Kling has an essay up on TCS where he argues that paternalistic states reduce the importance of families.

Single moms and the welfare state go together. Strong families and free markets go together. Morse argues that a combination of weak families and free markets is much less likely to persist.
...
Most Western nations have created a cycle of dependency with respect to single motherhood. Government programs, such as welfare payments or taxpayer-funded child care, are developed to "support" single mothers. This in turn encourages more single motherhood. This enlarges the constituency for such support programs, leading politicians to broaden such programs.
...
The original idea of "compassionate conservatism" was for government to achieve goals using as partners faith-based organizations and other nongovernmental associations. If that idea ever takes off, I believe it will be a disaster. My line is that "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and private-public partnerships absolutely corrupt the private sector."
...
There is nothing compassionate about government subcontracting out to private entities. The only real compassionate conservatism is conservatism that shrinks the role of government. Compassion should start with families and expand through voluntary associations. Government programs, everywhere and always, undermine families and weaken voluntary associations.

Arnold's essential argument is that since welfare subsidizes bad behavior (single motherhood, unemployment etc.) the state encourages that behavior and you get more of it than you would otherwise, even though everyone agrees that that behavior is bad and creating more of it was not anyone's intention.

He then disses "compassionate conservatism" and the notion that partnering with NGOs and churches to deliver welfare services is a disastrous idea because such flows of money will corrupt the entities it travels through.

You get corruption whenever other people's money is coercively redistributed and I don't know why Arnold thinks churches and NGOs will do worse than the agencies currently involved with such distribution, or worse than those organizations do currently. The central economic insight is that subsidizing bad behavior produces more of it, so if you want to dole out money to those who have made bad decisions, it stands to reason that some non-monetary force would also be useful -- namely nagging.

A Mormon buddy of mine told me about how the Church takes care of those who lose their jobs, giving them monetary assistance etc., but how it also expects them to look for a new job seriously. If the community feels that the person is not working hard enough, they let him know, and may give him odd jobs that he has to do to keep getting his allowance. Essentially, social expectations and nagging work against the bad behavior encouraged by the monetary subsidy.

If the welfare state is here to stay, which it looks like it is, then perhaps one way to reduce its pernicious effects is to channel the money through nagging, paternalistic Church groups and NGOs.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

John Kenneth Galbraith RIP

Surprisingly enough, it was John Kenneth Galbraith who initially got me interested in economics. While prowling through my parents' bookshelves one day, I happened upon a copy of The Great Crash, (which I still recommend as one of the most engaging treatments of the 1929 stockmarket collapse). Even before I went to business school, I had recognized the signs of a speculative bubble in the stock market, thanks to the good professor, and declined to join my peers in the technology industry in betting on what they sincerely believed was a sure thing--or my fellow students who took out $100K in student loans so that they could hold onto their Webvan stock.

It was natural enough, then, that when my introductory macro professor was outlining the various schools of economic thought, I should ask into which school JKG fell. My professor furrowed his brow, thought for a moment, and finally said "his ideas are less of a school than a conspiracy theory." Over time, I came to appreciate him as one of the most brilliants writer ever to turn their pen to the subject of economics, but not a great economist. But he did have a gift for skewering the more elaborate pretensions of laissez-faire economists: possibly my favourite line of his is "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself." This, incidentally, was written in the fifties, for those who think that there was some kinder, gentler era of corporate governance in the distant past.

Clive Crook, another great economics writer who provides a brutal assessment of the Galbraith legacy in this week's National Journal.

Galbraith's special gifts were not intellectual penetration or access to deeper wisdom, but gravitas, worldly sophistication, armor-plated apprehension of his own intellectual superiority -- and wit (never underestimate that). Friedman does in fact rival Keynes as the greatest economic thinker of the 20th century. His devotion to meticulous scholarship did not preclude him from thinking big: Capitalism and Freedom is up there with Keynes's General Theory and Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Galbraith's The Affluent Society is up there with The Tipping Point and The World Is Flat -- except that Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are not usually so wrong in their judgments.

During the Second World War, Galbraith worked at the Office of Price Administration, fixing prices as part of that era's semiplanned economy. Unlike every other former central planner I have ever come across, in person or in print -- whether it be from India's old Planning Commission (which Galbraith once advised), the Soviet Union's pre-perestroika Gosplan and its East European equivalents, Africa's agricultural marketing boards, Britain's assorted pre-1979 prices and incomes boards, you name it -- Galbraith brought from that experience the view that there was much to be said for having bureaucrats fix prices. The experience seemed to dismay everybody else and to convert them to the view that markets do the job better. Galbraith thought, no, he had done pretty well.

He appeared to believe that the sensible thing would be to find more brilliant men like himself, difficult though this would be, and to put them in charge. This approach to managing the economy would become more desirable over time, not less, because economic growth would otherwise mean the increasing accrual of power to corporate interests. The countervailing power of the state would need to grow in response -- just the opposite of what modern economic orthodoxy (based on all that specious math) called for.

The book he sometimes said was his best (of the 30-odd he produced) was The New Industrial State, published in 1967. Its thesis was that big companies were growing so powerful that consumers no longer had any say. The basic mechanism of supply and demand was broken. Consumers just did as they were told. All power resided with mighty corporations -- such as General Motors. Long before Galbraith died, and probably even at the time he wrote the book, the falsity of this idea was plain. (What would General Motors have had to say these past 20 years about the impotence of consumers?) Galbraith never saw the need to adjust his worldview.

The basic problem with Galbraith is the same issue I have with most of the urbane prophets of the nanny state: they confuse their preferences about things like lawns, large automobiles, and television programmes with moral imperatives. Then they are confused when the power they have handed the state to impose their preferences on everyone else instead gets used to provide gas tax rebates and NASCAR stadiums. (Stadia?)

Still, reading his less technocratic works is a great pleasure, and one can learn something from every writer--if only to never, ever get on Clive Crook's bad side.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Send in the clowns

Pretty funny piece about the attitude of blue-staters like myself towards orthodox Christians:

To be fair to these perplexed and terrified people, Christians are not easy to understand. To begin with, there are roughly 2,000 years of history to grasp, and certainly more denominations and subdivisions than that to take on board. For people who were raised secular, I imagine it's like trying to understand an opera after coming in halfway before the end: the stage is crowded with people, two of them seem to be dead, a woman is wearing a hat with horns, and everyone is making a terrible racket.

Seriously, read the whole thing. Via the incomparable Eve Tushnet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can one oppose polygamy without opposing gay marriage?

In a way, that's a silly headline: obviously you can oppose polygamy while supporting gay marriage, just as you can be a libertarian blogger who makes fun of lobbyists despite the fact that your father's salary as the head of a trade association put you through college. But can you find a solid public policy wall that will keep the polygamists from hijacking your arguments to advance their cause?

This is an argument that matters particularly to feminists, because while in theory polygamy could take non-sexist forms, such as polyandry or group marriage, in practice it usually takes the form of polygyny--possibly for the Darwinian reason that a woman can't significantly raise her childbearing (or rearing) capacity by taking on extra husbands, but a man can significantly increase his progeny by having multiple wives. And polygyny has some pretty heavily sexist cultural baggage attached to it. I'd argue (and have) that polygamy only works if the plural spouse gender is pretty radically oppressed, since otherwise the competition for resources between spouses, for themselves and their children, will destroy the family*. I'd say that there's some good empirical evidence for this, in that the societies we know that currently practice polygamy, including Mormon fundamentalists here in the US, are also societies in which women are distinctly second class citizen, useful as breeders and housekeepers but not much else.

Amptoons links to a post that attempts to bell the cat, though not to my mind a very convincing one:

The trouble with the slippery-slope argument from gay marriage to polygamy is that it’s a nice sound-bite argument that doesn’t lend itself to a nice sound-bite response. “Show us why polygamy is wrong,” our opponents insist, as if that’s easy to do in 20 words or less. (Try it sometime.)

But here’s a little secret: they can’t do it either, because their favorite arguments against same-sex marriage are useless against polygamy. “It changes the very definition of marriage!” (No: marriage historically has been polygamous more often than monogamous.) “The Bible condemns it!” (Really? Ever heard of King Solomon?) “It’s not open to procreation!” (Watch “Big Love” and get back to me.)

If there’s a good argument against polygamy, it’s likely to be a fairly complex public-policy argument having to do with marriage patterns, sexism, economics, and the like. Such arguments are as available to gay-marriage advocates as to gay-marriage opponents. So when gay-rights opponents ask me to explain why polygamy is wrong, I say to them, “You first.”

But such arguments against polygamy are likely to stand and fall on the same weaknesses as arguments against gay marriage. That "fairly complex public-policy argument" is simply impossible to make in a convincing way. Prove to me that polygamy will advance female oppression, be bad for child welfare, harm the economy, etc. Prove to me that legalising polygamy really means legalising polygyny. Prove to me that polygamous marriages are less stable and emotionally rewarding than monogamous marriages. You can't, because you have no sample to work with. And it's possible that by the time you do have a sample to work with, it will be because we allowed a change in the marriage laws that screwed everything up.

To me, the only even moderately convincing argument in the anti-gay-marriage arsenal is that we don't understand what we're messing with. Their specific arguments about what gay marriage will, or will not, do are no more or less convincing than the equally speculative arguments from the other side on how gay marriage will unleash an epidemic of bourgeois normalcy among American homosexuals. In the absence of data, both sides are rather like medieval theologians arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. To me, the only argument against gay marriage worth taking seriously is simply this: we have an institution which is vital enough to appear in almost all known human societies, and while the forms can differ greatly, it seems to always and everywhere take the form of a contract between a man and a woman. Assuming that social structures go through some pretty hefty darwinian selection, that's important data. We could be in the position of a mad scientist who thinks that if two arms are good, eight would be better . . . only to find that his top-heavy creature cannot stand on its own feet.

At the grassroots level, where most politics really happens, the argument that those opposed to gay marriage are using is a more gut level version of this: we shouldn't have gay marriage now, because we haven't had it in the past. That is also the practical argument against polygamy. And if you succeed in ripping down the first barrier, I think you'll find that practically, you've also eroded the resistance to polygamy--at least among male voters.

Now, I don't think the slippery slope argument is a very good reason not to have gay marriage; if marriage in America is indeed sturdy enough to withstand gay marriage, I presume it's also sturdy enough to withstand polygamy. If it's not--well, then, who cares about polygamy, because gay marriage will already have gutted the thing. But if feminists do want to block polygamy while encouraging gay marriage, then I think they need to get a better means of differentiating the American public's opposition.

*This argument does not apply to group marriages--but Robert Heinlein's elegant arguments notwithstanding, I don't see group marriages working all that well. Human jealousy is a very, very powerful thing, and having been a member of one of those roving adolescent packs where romantic alliances are constantly forming and dissolving between members, I found it highly unstable.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Am I a liberal?

Like Daniel Drezner, I have become disenchanted with the Bush administration--though frankly, I was never that enchanted in the first place, as anyone who read my long agonizing piece on whom to vote for knows.

Now Mr Drezner invites me to take Atrios' 15-part test and find out whether I've become--gasp!--a left libertarian. To the libertarians who heard me spend the weekend defending (or at least arguing in favour of accomodating) large swathes of the environmental movement, the answer is probably "Duh!" But let's take the test and see, shall we? I've taken the liberty of copying in Mr Drezner's answers, so you can compare them with mine.

. . . the hardworking staff here at danieldrezner.com has begun to ask me whether, given my lack of faith in either the Republican administration or the Republican Congress, I'm really a Republican. Now I'm a libertarian, so I've never fit perfectly within much of the Republican canon. But has my opposition to Bush caused me to unconsciously morph into left-libertarianism?

Fortunately, the Atrios Litmus Test for Liberals (usefully edited by Kevin Drum) has recently made available for one and all to dissect. Let me take it and see how I do!!

The liberal party planks that I'm supposed to support are below. My answers are underlined [my answers bolded-JG]:

1) Repeal the estate tax repeal: Hmmm... I confess to being pretty agnostic about this one on philosophical terms, but in the spirit of fiscal rectitude I'll back it.

As long-time readers know, I think the estate tax is a woefully inefficient way to collect revenue; I'd much prefer eliminating the basis step-up as a more efficient means of collecting roughly the same revenue. And given that the Bush tax cut was estimated to cost about $30 billion a year, this seems unlikely to do much to close the budget deficit--for comparison purposes, the unexpected increase in income tax revenues this year was well over $100 billion. It's fairly trivial to be sure . . . but still, no.

2) Increase the minimum wage and index it to the CPI. This proposal does make me nostalgic for the good old days of wage-price spirals. No.

Roger that. The minimum wage is a terrible way to help the poor. Change that to an increase in the EITC, and I'll come on board.

3) Universal health care (obviously the devil is in the details on this one). Do free ponies come with this one? Hacker and Pierson tell me that details matter a lot when one party is in power, so no, I'll pass.

No, no, a thousand times no. If you're really worried about healthcare for the poor, take a look at the Jane Galt healthcare plan.

4) Increase CAFE standards. Some other environment-related regulation. Whenever someone says anything akin to "some other... regulation," I get hives. No. [But what about gas prices?--ed. Sorry, not worked up yet -- besides, high gas prices should have a much greater effect on fuel economy than CAFE standards.]

That's a trifle over-broad, isn't it? If "some other environmental regulation" you mean a big fat carbon tax and market-based initiatives to get the Federal Government out of hte business of promoting the tragedy of the commons in the West, then yes, and I'll even take a CAFE increase as the price of cooperation. Otherwise, count me out.

5) Pro-reproductive rights, getting rid of abstinence-only education, improving education about and access to contraception including the morning after pill, and supporting choice. On the last one there's probably some disagreement around the edges (parental notification, for example), but otherwise. This is a bit fuzzy to me. I certainly oppose government restrictions on access to contraception, etc., but the language makes it sound like the government should be funding these choices. I'll be charitable and say yes, though.

Though I'm against Roe, I'm for legislative protection of reproductive rights, and certainly don't want to see the morning-after pill outlawed, so I'll say yes here.

6) Simplify and increase the progressivity of the tax code. Completely agreed on the simplification -- which is why I vehemently oppose the increased progressivity.

Actually, I support on both counts--that's the Jane Galt tax plan. Yes, provided we increase the progressivity with a negative income tax.

7) Kill faith-based funding. Certainly kill federal funding of anything that engages in religious discrimination. Opposed to the first part, OK with the second.

I'm in favour of killin gall sorts of federal funding--but picking on the Salvation Army doesn't seem like good policy to me.

8) Reduce corporate giveaways. Phrased that way, sure. Just curious, though -- would universal health insurance be considered a corporate giveaway?

Sign me up too.

9) Have Medicare run the Medicare drug plan. Hell, no. Just kill the motherf#$er.

Amen.

10) Force companies to stop underfunding their pensions. Change corporate bankruptcy law to put workers and retirees at the head of the line with respect to their pensions. Wow, that would do wonders for private investment in general and the stock market in particular. No.

Mr Black should know better. Most of the pension shortfalls were in fact caused by ERISA (America's pension regulations), which forced companies to disburse "excess" gains in the name of preventing companies from accumulating slush funds. Mr Black may not be aware that unions are in the same boat--and that if he pushed his desired regulations through, it would gut many of the unions who have gigantic holes in their pension plans, makign their labour even more unaffordable.

Nor would putting the pension plans first in line do much--secured assets aren't available to the pensions, and in most of the bankruptcies we're really worried about, the non-secured assets aren't worth much, because the whole industry's in big trouble.

11) Leave the states alone on issues like medical marijuana. Generally move towards "more decriminalization" of drugs, though the details complicated there too. Sounds good -- yes.

Hallelujah, amen.

12) Paper ballots. Oh, please. With the obvious caveat about protections against fraud, this one falls under "leave the states alone" for me.

FIne, whatever, if it means we can shut up about Diebold.

13) Improve access to daycare and other pro-family policies. Obiously details matter. Again, only with the free ponies!! Details make me itchy. No.

Nyet.

14) Raise the cap on wages covered by FICA taxes. If it would fund the transition funds to an actual private pension system, yes. But I suspect that this is not what Atrios is thinking, so no.

I'll go you one better--get rid of FICA and roll it into the general revenue system.

15) Marriage rights for all, which includes "gay marriage" and quicker transition to citizenship for the foreign spouses of citizens. Yes on the first point, but part of the problem with current immigration policy is that the legal system is already stacks the deck in favor of spouses and other relatives, so no on the second.

So, that adds up to five and a half points of agreement, which equals only 36.6% agreement. So no, I'm not a liberal.

Definitely no on the second part--three years strikes me as quite an easy waiting period, particularly since you get your greencard right away. On the first--as long as it's done in the legislature, not the courts, then yes.

That makes me 43% liberal according to my count. Nonetheless, I doubt that Mr Black and I will vote for many of the same candidates. I suspect our agreement has more to do with the triviality of many of Mr Black's proposals than some harmonic convergence.

Update Oops! Missed one: "undo the bankruptcy bill". I'm for it, though not for the reasons Mr Black undoubtedly is; I think most people who end up in bankruptcy are not unfortunate victims, but people who behaved irresponsibly, and moreover, even after the reforms America still has--by far!!!--the most lax bankruptcy code in the world. But I think that bankruptcy enhances entrepreneurship, and innovation is good.

That makes my score 7.5 out of 16--a whopping 46.9% liberal. Mr Black and I are closing fast . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Crossed signals

I very much dislike David Foster Wallace. His writing has always struck me as the literary equivalent of that guy who damaged his liver trying to hold his breath for nine minutes--a difficult feat, to be sure, but one where the results are vastly less impressive than the cost. I am never so irritated as when reading some reviewer gushing about his amazing vocabulary. Not that what he writes is good, interesting, or pleasing to the ear. No, his singular achievement is using lots and lots of words that his readers don't know.

From all the awestruck fawning, you would think that he wrote his books under SAT conditions. Has no one ever thought to take these gullible and insecure people aside and explain, gently and with love, that David Foster Wallace has the dictionary right there, where he can look up his unusual words--that his signature feat could be repeated by a high school sophomore with a little time on his hands. And if memory serves, it has been. Frankly, if I'm going to pay to see a stunt, I want at least a 10% chance that the performer will be maimed or killed in the process.

Bryan Caplan offers the scientific explanation for my annoyance:

The motivating paragraph of "Too Cool for School" still blows me away:

Contrary to this standard implication, high types sometimes avoid the signals that should separate them from lower types, while intermediate types often appear the most anxious to send the “right” signals. The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays... Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response.

Today another example struck me: The best writers - like George Orwell - usually stick to short and simple words. In fact, in his legendary "Politics and the English Language", the second rule of good writing is "Never use a long word where a short one will do." The third-stringers, in contrast, hide behind their thesauruses. (Lit crit, anyone?)

Why doesn't everyone follow Orwell's rule? Harbaugh has a clean answer: If you're a writer of moderate ability, you can't make yourself look good using ordinary words. So you hide behind pompous language, demonstrating at least that you know more words than the average slob. In contrast, a great writer can sound brilliant in monosyllables - and those who can, do.

As it happens, I'm reading Volume I of the collected Orwell, and the comparison between his prose and mine is the occasion for much pained wincing. But at least when I use a long word, it's not because I think I'm getting paid by the syllable (in acclamation). No, actually, this is the way I talk. Disturbing, I know. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live with a character from a slightly stilted Edwardian novel--well, just ask any of my roommates. Except I can't do all those complicated hairstyles or twirl a parasol.

But I digress. To my mind, the very best prose is the kind where you can't quite put your finger on why it is so damn good . . . where the whole thing is so polished, precise, and true that you can't pick out a single, clever sentence to put in your quote diary. Sadly, I'll never have the pleasure of producing such . . . but I can admire it in others.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Genocide? Who cares?

Matthew Yglesias argues that Darfur is not genocide, in the common sense of the word: a government trying to wipe out a minority ethnicity. Jeffrey Alan concurs:

His point is that the killings in Darfur arose as a tactic in a war, not simply as a desire to exterminate a particular group. And this matters because once we recognize that a war is taking place, we need to address a number of hard questions before considering any intervention. Reasonable people might still advocate intervention. But they should have good answers for all the questions that Iglesias poses in order to make their case.

Here are the hard questions envisioned by Mr Yglesias:

Faced with counter-guerilla mass slaughter, you can't just stop the killing, any intervention necessarily entails taking a side on the basic question of the war. Advocates of intervening have a duty to explain what it is they intend to do -- create an independent Darfur? Controlled by whom? They also have a duty to answer, rather than simply dismiss, questions about the big picture of American foreign policy. How would attacking another Arab country affect America's larger security concerns? Would circumventing the UN merely provoke protests from China and like-minded human rights averse dictators, or will developing world democracies like India, South Africa, and Brazil see it as imperialism run amok? Is war with Sudan an efficient humanitarian measure when we could be curing measles without great controversy?

I'm afraid I really don't understand. Maybe I'm some sort of moral lackwit, but I don't care about the Holocaust because it slaughtered six million Jews. I care because the Germans systematically butchered eleven million people. Were the deaths of Slavs, homosexuals, criminals, disabled people, and political dissidents less worrisome? Not to the Slavs, homosexuals, criminals, disabled people, political dissidents, and the family and friends that lost them. Would it have been okay if the Germans had declared war on the Jews first?

All of these things that opponents of intervention in Darfur are begging us to consider are things that we would have to consider anyway. If Darfur were a genocide, rather than a "tactic in a war", how would that make a difference to strategic planning? Yglesias, (and Miron) seem to be implying that while guerilla warfare is complicated, genocide is simple: we'll just send some troops in, flip the genocide switch off, and no need to worry about, say, leaving Darfur in the hands of the government that was trying to murder its people a few weeks ago, or the geopolitical fallout from attacking an Arab nation (although not one that the Arabs themselves feel much ethnic affinity for--Sudanese "Arabs" speak Arabic, but look African.)

If the argument is that genocide is so special that it somehow overrides any need for planning or tradeoffs, I question why. There are indiginous people all around the world who are right now having their cultures eradicated by forced government action, just as Australia and Canada once made strenuous efforts to de-culturize the natives the whites displaced. Even without government action, languages are dying, cultural practices are giving way to modern conveniences and the broader culture, folkways are being forgotten. But we do not try to invade other countries to prevent forced assimilation, and no one even remotely suggests that we should. What, then, makes genocide so special? Are we trying to preserve their chromosomes? As the "race is a cultural fiction" people keep assuring us, the human race has not been around long enough to have accumulated any really interesting biodiversity.

Or is it just that "they're Jewish" is a really, really crappy reason to kill someone? While I agree, "they're farming on land where I want to graze my sheep", or "their land has all the oil on it", or "I have a lot of surplus young men who would like a taste of power and a chance to rape a lot of women" don't strike me as enough of a moral improvement to justify different standards for intervention.

Don't get me wrong: genocide=bad. But I can't see saying that genocide is somehow so much worse than normal killing that we should invade England to prevent the killings of 5,000 cornish people, while ignoring the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur because it's just some boring internal conflict. For me, the only compelling reason to stay out of Darfur is the (plausible) argument that intervention won't work, or that it will cost the American public more than we can pay.

Update: What do we even mean by genocide? According to Mr. Yglesias:

"What comes to mind when non-lawyers hear the word 'genocide,' however, is something akin to the events of the Holocaust, where a regime pursues the destruction of an ethnic group as an end in and of itself. Without denying that monstrous things are being done in Darfur, I don't think that genocide -- in this sense -- is what's happening."

But I'd argue that what comes to mind is less connected to an ethnic group as with the size and composition of the targets: genocide means killing very large numbers of civilians, not as collateral damage in a war, but as a primary aim. The ethnic part is decidedly secondary; we do not apply genocide to small tribal groups, nor to terrorist attacks against Israel (no matter how much the terrorists may *want* to push Israel back into the sea, they lack the wherewithal), nor to Hiroshima. Or rather, people do apply these labels, as a way of expressing moral outrage about these events, but most people recognize that the labels don't fit.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You say "Progressive", I say "Regressive"

Greg Mankiw makes a very good point:

The basic problem is that there is no single way to gauge changes in progressivity. As a result, people can take the same set of numbers, look at them from different angles, and reach very different conclusions.

Consider a simple example (which I used in a fall ec 10 lecture). There are two people. A rich guy earns $200,000. A poor guy earns $20,000. At first, the rich guy pays $50,000 in taxes, and the poor guy pays $1,000. Then a new President takes office and cuts the rich guy's taxes to $48,000 and the poor guy's taxes to $800.

Who is getting the better deal?

• You could say the rich guy gets the better deal: The rich guy gets an extra $2000 in take-home pay, while the poor guy gets only $200. After the tax cut, the difference in take-home pay between the two guys is larger.
• You could say the deal is evenly balanced: Everyone gets to keep an extra 1 percent of his income.
• You could say the poor guy gets the better deal: The poor guy gets a 20 percent tax cut, while the rich guy gets only a 4 percent tax cut. After the tax cut, the rich guy pays a larger share of the total tax burden.

It is impossible to say on purely economic grounds which of these perspectives is better. All of these statements are mathematically correct, even if they leave the reader with a very different impression. If you are a politician or a journalist trying to argue that this tax cut is good for the rich, good for the poor, or somewhere in between, you can do it!

Update Brad DeLong doesn't like it. One objection is worth taking seriously: he says the op-ed Mankiw is citing implies that the tax cuts are progressive no matter what the definition you use. That doesn't, of course, obviate the more interesting point that Mankiw is making, which is that "progressive" is not some hard-and-fast rule, and I suspect that the distinction Mr DeLong is offering is rather fine for anyone but an economist.

But I don't think his second objection holds water:

Let me try an analogy. I, full professor Brad DeLong, am having lunch with lecturer Dariush Zahedi today. After lunch, I presume Dariush will say we should split the bill--$10 each. Suppose I say: "That isn't fair. Berkeley pays you less (a lot less: what we do to our lecturers is shameful) than it pays me. I should lay out more cash for this lunch. How about this: I put down $5 cash, you put down $0, and we put the balance on your credit card. That would be fairer, wouldn't it?"

Dariush would then be an unhappy camper. He would think--correctly--that I was mocking him.

Back in 2000 the U.S. government was running a surplus of some $200 billion a year--a broadly appropriate fiscal policy, given the state of the business cycle and the looming health care costs dilemma. Today we're running a deficit of $300-$400 billion a year. Relative to what would be a sane, reality-based, and appropriate fiscal policy, the Bushies are putting $500-$600 billion this year on our collective national credit card. That bill will come due: somebody has to pay it. To pretend that it won't--to pretend that you can talk about the progressivity of the burden of paying for the federal government without talking about the long-run incidence of the national debt--well, that would be the equivalent of me telling Dariush that only cash matters: that when we talk about who paid for lunch, we should count only cash put down now, and we shouldn't count the fact that his credit card bill will show an extra $15 due next month.

But this metaphor only works if the long term burden of US debt falls on relatively poor people. And I think that unlikely.

There are four ways that I can think of for the US to deal with its debt burden:

1) Raise taxes to pay it off. This will be a burden on America's relatively poorer members only to the extent that the tax burden falls on them. But while overall withholdings are only very mildly progressive in America (thanks to Social Security payments), income tax is extremely progressive; the effective federal tax burden on someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger is roughly 30%, while a median-income family of four pays less than 8% of its income to the federal tax, according to the decidedly liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If the tax system stays the way it is now, the deal is more like Dariush paying $5 and Mr DeLong putting the rest of it on his credit card--which sounds like a good deal to this overworked and underpaid junior journalist.

Is the tax system likely to change? Colour me sceptical. "Raise taxes on the poor" just doesn't have much of a ring to it, and while the AARP might come around to lobbying for another increase in payroll taxes . . . excuse me, contributions . . . it will be a tough, tough, tough sell. I find it much more likely that we will see another Clinton style increase on the top earners, while keeping Bush innovations like the 10% tax bracket, meaning that the rich will be doing the bulk of any debt repayment. (Of course, they will also get a lot of the payments, since they hold a lot of t-bills . . . but so does the Chinese Central Bank.)

2) Inflate/devalue the currency, so that the debt gets repaid in cheaper dollars. This largely hurts investors, aka the rich, whose assets become worth less, while helping debtors, aka regular joes.

3) Default. This is very bad for the economy, and everyone in it, but especially the wealthy. The wealthy, who, as mentioned above, hold t-bills, lose their whole investment. They also tend to see their incomes permanently hurt from big financial crises, at least according to this paper.

4) Roll it over. This presumes growth in GDP/tax revenues large enough to do so at attractive rates. The interest is financed by tax revenues, which, as noted above, tend to come from the rich--and will ever more so after 2010, as social security revenues are diverted to--crazily enough!--pay for social security.
!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Journalistic ethics: moral obligation or oxymoron?

There's quite a lot of misinformation in academia about what constitutes journalistic practice. A while back, I had a long back-and-forth email exchange with Tim Lambert over his mistaken belief that TCS's practice of publishing op-eds without fact-checking them was somehow egregious hackery, rather than standard practice among even the most august journalistic institutions--including, I believe, the New York TImes. (My employer fact checks everything--and I mean everything we run, but we're a weekly, and also, slightly obsessive.) Now Juan Cole thinks Christopher Hitchens owes him an apology for publishing comments made to an apparently private listserv.

Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology.

I belong to a private email discussion group called Gulf2000. It has academics, journalists and policy makers on it. It has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list. It is run, edited and moderated by former National Security Council staffer for Carter and Reagan, Gary Sick, now a political scientist at Columbia University. The "no-forwarding" rule is his, and is intended to allow the participants to converse about controversial matters without worrying about being in trouble. Also, in an informal email discussion, ideas evolve, you make mistakes and they get corrected, etc. It is a rough, rough draft.

Hitchens somehow hacked into the site, or joined and lurked, or had a crony pass him things. And he has now made my private email messages the subject of an attack on me in Slate. (I am not linking to the article because it is highly unethical and Slate does not deserve any direct traffic from my site for it.) Moreover, he did not even have the decency to quote the final outcome of the discussions.

Hitchens, apparently, got the messages from someone who forwarded them to him.

But Mr Cole is mistaken to call this unethical. It may have been unethical for the listserv member to forward the postings, but it is perfectly ethical--indeed standard--for a journalist to publish them once received (provided he himself is not a member of the listserv.) As a journalist, I have no obligation to protect a confidential relationship between third parties. If your mother, or wife, or lawyer comes to me and reports the contents of a private conversation, I will publish it. The other party may be divorced, disbarred, or disowned, but my conscience will be perfectly clear; depending on the beat, many journalists get a large portion of their information from people violating trusts. If it is a matter of national security, or endangering someone's life or health, or facilitating criminal activity, then I have an obligation not to publish it--but I don't see that any of those exceptions apply to Mr Cole.

Mr Hitchens should have contacted Mr Cole for a reply. But that's not a matter of ethics; simply a matter of good journalism. If Mr Hitchens owes anyone an apology, it's his editor,not Mr Cole, who has no right to be heard. He certainly had no obligation to ask Mr Cole if he could "publish his private email". You may be sure that neither Jason Leopold nor Paul Krugman asked Thomas White if they could pretty please publish the (apparently false) emails alleging he had a role in Enron's collapse.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

I'm reading THe Atlantic's piece on the world post-Roe, and it says that 62% of Americans support abortion in cases where the mother's mental health is endangered.

Having never been pregnant, mentally ill, or in charge of people with those conditions, I'm curious: what mental conditions are exacerbated by pregnancy? Presumably any woman who doesn't want to be pregnant will be made unhappy by it, so can health care providers englighten me as to what would constitute a genuine risk to mom's "mental health"?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why is oil policy so wrongheaded?

Michael O'Hare has a great post on that topic:

As a piece of social policy, one has to wonder about the wisdom of slapping a big tax on the only people who are providing any of this oil we want so badly. One doesn't even have to wonder about the whole concept of all the schemes to make oil less expensive; did the demand curve for petroleum suddenly tilt the other way while we weren't looking? One more time, what's the logic of subsidizing domestic production and exploration: is there some prize for being the first country to use up its petroleum?

When I did wind tunnel research on how tall buildings affect the street-level winds around them, the architects always asked whether some sort of canopy over the door would help, and we had to explain that the wind is very big, and so is the building, so anything that would change the way the wind blows also has to be very big. The oil system is very big, and poking at it with tiny instruments like deposits to the strategic oil reserve, or rushing to slurp out the two years' worth of oil imports in ANWR, are not going to make any important difference. Actually, no bullet is silver, even though we desperately want to think wind power, or biofuels, or nuclear, or turning off the lights more carefully, will "solve" the energy crisis. Lots of these will be incrementally helpful, but none of them is as big as the oil flow we've become habituated to, and every one has a really sobering social price of one kind or another.

Petroleum is not like solar energy. Fossil fuels are a stock, not a flow, of sunlight that was stored up over millions of years when no-one needed to drive kids to the soccer game. We've had a nice century drawing down that bank account, and it's over. Maybe, as Rick says, not right away, but soon. "Soon" in policy earthquake terms is a few decades. There's lots of coal, but if we start really playing that game with current technology (that is, burning it into CO2 that goes into the air), a lot if it will be used up (for example) keeping Europeans warm in a subarctic climate when the Gulf Stream stops. Of course the beach will much easier to drive to as it moves inland.

What will make a difference is to use a lot less, and using less oil means real behavioral change on a broad, retail level. It absolutely doesn't mean making gasoline cheaper! We're talking about things like living in smaller houses, close enough together to get people out on their feet and bicycles, and into trains and trams.

. . .

e're not talking about those things, though; we're talking (praying, actually) about making it not so, please. Our politics have a long, toxic tradition of candidates' and voters' mutual infantilization. The politicians treat an election, or an office, as the worst thing one can lose, and promise to fix everything with a trick that won't require any actual work by us; we vote for people who tell us fairy tales that would excuse us from any heavy lifting if they were true, and excuse us from confronting downers and grownup responsibilities if we pretend to believe. This game is being played at a really frenzied level around gas prices, and the mix of ignorance and plain mendacity both parties are wallowing in is--this is really amazing--neck and neck with the immigration performance in the theater next door.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Markets in measurement

There are many sources of bad statistics in the world, but few as fertile as the rolling green (but well-fortified) hills of the abortion debate. Remember how Bush made abortions go up? Or the thinly researched (though intuitively appealing) proposition that sex ed reduces abortion rates? Perhaps my personal favorite is the "legalizing abortion doesn't make it any more frequent" argument, beloved of feminists (including ones I respect greatly), but hard to swallow--its proponents are essentially arguing that every single woman in America knew where to get an illegal abortion, and was willing to break the law to do so, prior to 1973. Steven Levitt--a very smart economist, a super-amazing writer, and a guy who's spent a lot of time looking at figures on conceptions and births, also disputes it, with what seem to be some very compelling figures:

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.

Note that this is simply a prelude to establishing his thesis that legalizing abortion caused the crime rate to fall--an assertion that the feminists of my acquaintance have been rather happy with. Of course, it's only true if legalizing abortion caused the abortion rate to rise--which his data indicate they did. One of the problems with Amp's data is that it's not cohort-adjusted--we get the birthrate, but not the number of women of childbearing age in the population. And even his data show a sharpish drop in 1971 (the year after large states like NYC and California made abortion legal) and another sizeable one in 1973 (in January of which year, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.)

My own investigation indicates that the "abortions didn't increase" assertion traces back to a paper that estimated the rate of illegal abortions at somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million per annum. (Note that if Levitt is right, this latter figure is certainly too high, as the number of abortions post-Roe was only 750K.) Some enterprising researcher took the upper bound, compared it to today's abortion rate, and concluded that abortions hadn't increased--a ludicrous assertion for many reasons. First, obviously, because the correct statement is "abortions have increased somewhere between slightly and 7-fold". And second, because today's abortion figure is not the same as the abortion figure around the time of Roe, as Levitt's figures show--nor would we expect them to be, if only because of population growth.

Not that feminists are the only source of lousy abortion statistics--far from it. Recently I've been looking at estimates of how often the Pill (or emergency contraception) prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful stuff. The correct answer is: "beats me". But that's not the answer pro-life groups give. They're certain it's a big, bad number--even though they admittedly have very little handle on the smaller numbers that go into it.

How often do low dose pills (the most common ones) permit breakthrough ovulation? Oh, somewhere between 2-20%.

How often does the effect of progestin on cervical mucus prevent the egg from being fertilised? Well, I don't know for sure--but it's definitely between usually and never. (in that link's defense, they did use some real, actual scientific evidence showing that a whole lot of sperm make it through the thickened cervical mucus in rabbits, which does give pause.)

How many users of the pill are sexually active? Couldn't tell ya.

How many of them are fertile, and having sex with fertile partners? No idea.

With this paltry evidence, pro-life groups don't say "best not risk it"--they treat dispensing birth control as the equivalent of a war crime.

To be fair, you also get a huge number of pro-choicers adamantly denying that the pill or EC ever work by preventing implantation, an assertion for which they have exactly as little data as their opponents.

Now, data on this sort of thing is hard to get. But it's not impossible to get; how come we don't have any?

Well, nobody wants to provide it, that's why. Pharmaceutical companies manufacturing birth control sure don't want a study indicating that taking the pill causes fertilized embryos to slip the womb, since that would limit the market for their products. They don't have to do such studies--so why do it?

Now, a number of my liberal readers are no doubt rubbing their hands right now, saying "See! We can't leave research in the hands of private companies! The profit motive distorts it."

Um . . . yeah. So where are all the government studies on the numbers of abortions, the reasons women have them, the biochemical effects of hormonal contraception?

Why, we don't have them, do we? Because the government sure as hell doesn't want to put out a study that will make millions of women at least think twice about their so-easy, so-convenient, so-effective birth control. Why, they'd be storming Capitol Hill with pitchforks!

Lesson: when information markets fail, those failures are often hard to correct through government action, because the consumers who don't want certain data are also the voters who would rather not hear it. I don't know how we do correct those failures, but a good start is acknowleging that we have met the enemy, and he is us.