Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reihan Salam says it all

. . . so much (sigh) better than I could, as usual.

On the debate between Barbara Ehrenreich and Jason Furman over Wal-Mart:

Honestly, this is a textbook look at why you're better off skipping some conversations. Does it make sense to have a "thoughtful" conversation with someone waving around a rusty blade, or who believes that your "numbers" and "math" are yet another malevolent manifestation of corporate voodoo?

I read "Nickeled and Dimed", and was impressed by its detailed description of life at the bottom . . . and completely unimpressed by its economic illiteracy, paternalistic snobbery about the people she worked with, disdain for her customers, bizarre fantasies about the motives of middle-class consumers, and her complete and total lack of even a vestigial sense of humour. Her dialogue with Jason Furman has not improved any of these opinions.

Sometimes, as Steven Colbert says, reality has a liberal bias. And often it doesn't. In those cases, neither wishing hard as hard can be, nor plugging your ears and screaming "I can't hear you! I can1 hear you!" will change these facts.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Other funny journalistic moment of the day

This may be the only amusing thing ever written about the WTO:

Time Running Out for Jargon-Riddled WTO . . .

The WTO is surely one of the most cliche-riddled bodies in the world as diplomats compete in a game of words to describe sometimes impenetrably complex trade issues. Even if the metaphors only sometimes add substance, catchy phrases usually mean more to people outside the rarified air of global commerce.

The WTO has been saying for months that "time is running out."

The organization's former director-general Supachai Panitchpakdi cried crisis over a year ago, warning his finger was hovering over "the panic button," even if he had yet to press it.

Since then, the Geneva-based body has approached "the point of no return," reached "the edge of the cliff," "crossed the Rubicon" and faced its share of "do-or-die" deadlines.

The WTO's current chief Pascal Lamy has alternately described himself as the organization's shepherd, nurse, midwife and conductor. He is also fond of referring to the round as a marathon or a jet plane, and the organization as a football team. Does that suggest that he is the pacesetter, pilot or coach?

Lamy's biggest test in metaphor mechanics came after the WTO's trade summit last year in Hong Kong, more noteworthy in the end for its large protests and political finger-pointing than any market-opening deals.

Citing the gathering's minor achievements, he declared the round back on track, even though the tough decisions were pushed back until this summer.

"We now have enough fuel in the tank to cruise at the right negotiating altitude now," he said.

With the year's first deadline in April fast approaching, top trading officials jumped on the bandwagon, adding new turns of phrase if little substance.

ndia's Trade and Industry Minister Kamal Nath _ who was the first to downplay hopes ahead of Hong Kong, or "recalibrate the level of ambition" _ warned of the EU and U.S. creating a "suicide round."

Former U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman called April 30 the "drop dead date" for negotiations and six top trading powers met in London in March to break the logjam. After apparently little progress was made, all were eager to cite progress.

"We made progress on narrowing the concepts of numbers," Portman told reporters afterward. He didn't explain further.

Not to be outdone, Nath esoterically added that the meeting was useful for defining "elasticities;" Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim cited the lack of "a click" necessary to reach a deal.

After Lamy cancelled the "drop dead" session, he called this week's gathering _ dubbed in WTO jargon the "full modalities meeting" _ in its place.

In recent weeks, Lamy has sounded the warning anew.

The marathon runner has warned of "hitting the wall," a runner's term for the point of near exhaustion toward the end of the race.

In May he switched to security alert levels, saying that "we are now in the red zone" due to a lack of movement.

However, he suggested there was still room to recover because countries had yet to reach "the red part of this red zone."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Funny journalistic moment of the day

The White House's title on the document providing Bush's remarks at last week's Vienna summit between US and EU leaders? "President Bush Participates in Press Availability at 2006 U.S.-EU Summit".

I'm thinking of going back to school to learn another language: Flack. I need to learn how to describe showing up for work in the morning as "Journalist participates in Boss availability opportunity at the New York office." That should get me the big raise.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Funny journalistic moment of the day

I'm working up a story on the Federal Reserve, and came across this bit from some web outlet called "All Headline News":

According to CBS, the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's interest-rate setting body, raised its key short-term interest rate for the sixteenth time in a row to 5 percent at its May 10 meeting.

Now, of course, it is standard to attribute facts to the journalistic outlet that uncovered them, particularly if they can't be checked independantly. But this was not exactly an amazing journalistic coup by CBS; the Federal Reserve publishes its rate-setting decisions as soon as the meeting is over. Which All Headline News could have found out by visiting the website, and clicking the link titled "monetary policy". That's where they store the May statement.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Food for thought

Interesting discussion of "vaccinations" against drug addiction at Mark Kleiman's place.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ve have vays of making you talk

As my coblogger pointed out before I could get to it (my excuse is that I was ill), Austan Goolsbee, one of my favourite professors, had a great article in the New York Times last week arguing that if immigrants don't learn English, it's not because they're ungrateful wretches; it's because it's damn hard to learn a new language after sometime around puberty. Making laws ordering them to learn English is thus only slightly more effective than making laws demanding that they become taller. The net result is to discourage people from integrating into society.

Of course, for the sponsors of such legislation, that may, as the programmers say, be a feature rather than a bug. Like many economists, Mr Goolsbee is too polite to point out such sordid motives, but I, a lowly journalist, have no shame. I will not claim that I know for a fact that many of the people demanding that immigrants "learn English, dammit!" are doing so precisely because they themselves have never managed to tack on a second language. But I suspect it is so--and rather unattractive, too, I might add. Of course, it is common courtesy when in another country, whether travelling or emigrating, to tack on enough of the local language to interact with the natives. But our immigrant population is certainly no less guilty than the Americans I see bumbling around Mexico, speaking increasingly louder and more slowly to the uncomprehending natives, as if treating them like retarded children could somehow break down the language barrier. They would not, I fancy, be flattered if the Mexicans reacted by smiling brightly and saying "Le Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-je yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa que NOOOOOOOOOOO HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-blo IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIn-GLES".

I have been told by several people that this is all right because we, unlike them, are going to their country and spending money. But I can't say that I discern any remarkable generosity of spirit in allowing Mexicans to live twelve in a house while they mow our lawns and wash our cars.

Perhaps the best take on all this--certainly, the funniest--was provided by Nick Gillespie in July's Reason. It is not yet available online, so I'll offer the juiciest bits:

It's embarrassing enough--humiliating really--that the United States doesn't have a state religion, which would facilitate community, enforce national identity, and ruin non-believers' weekends. We can at least have an official language, and it's a damn good thing everyone agrees it ought to be English, since most of us speak it already, and it's probably pretty close to what "American" would sound like if we hadn't been British colonies originally.

Thank you, Rep Tom Tancredo from suspiciously Spanish-named state of Colorado for having courage to introduce a constitutional amendment that would declare English "the official language of the United States." (And for being the most forceful advocate of building a wall between Mexico and US, though I hope he'll be more careful checking out the government contractors than he was with the ones who worked on his house in the Centennial State a few years ago. Seems they employed illegal immigrants.)

Come on, already: if I moved to Australia, you can be damned sure I'd learn to speak Australian. Indeed, when I think of need for English literacy tests for immigrants, I remember my maternal grandfather, Nicola Guida, who showed up at Ellis Island (what a polyglot sum that was!) in 1913 and then proceeded to waste most of his time working manual labor jobs like quarrying rock and digging basements by hand and raising four children, rather than taking time to learn English, the ingrate. It's one of the great pities of my life that, because I speak no Italian (other than what I picked up via the Godfather movies), I was never able to communicate effectively to him just how un-American he was.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good point.

From Greg Mankiw:

Compare the numbers from two articles in today's NY Times:

Warren E. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and one of the world's wealthiest men, plans to donate the bulk of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four other philanthropies starting in July.

According to the study [by the International Food Policy Research Institute], a deal similar to what is now on the table — modest cuts in real tariffs, limited cuts in domestic support payments, full elimination of export subsidies and 97 percent duty- and quota-free access for exports from the poorest countries — would create global gains of $54 billion per year.

In other words, success in the Doha round of international trade talks would give the world more every year than what Buffett can give once after a lifetime of being the world's most successful investor.

At the end of this week, there will be a WTO conference in Geneva. In all likelihood, this will finalise the collapse of the Doha round of negotiations, putting together a face saving package with little real progress on either agricultural subsidies or lowering tariffs in developing countries, the two major issues that have derailed Doha. If ministers do not reach a substantial agreement on those issues this week, there will not be time to finalise the deal and put it before congress before George Bush's fast track trade authority runs out next July.

Mr Mankiw's post tells you just how big a tragedy that is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on partisan hackery

I'm afraid I haven't time to take on the complete response of Henry Farrell, except to note that in most places he's simply repeating himself, and where he isn't repeating himself, he has now narrowed his claim of partisan hackery on the part of my employer somewhat, to not printing that there had been a legal finding that Smithfield Foods threatened to report its immigrant workers to la Migra if they unionised. All I can do is respectfully disagree that this is the smoking gun Mr Farrell seems to think it is. Again, not because it doesn't belong in the story, but because it doesn't actually deny the objective question of whether immigrants are, or are not, making it country. Slaughterhouses are horrible places to work (which is not necessarily a union/anti-union problem: there are limits to how pleasant the task of cutting up animals can be made, as anyone who has ever been hunting will attest.) Their bosses may (or may) engage in all sorts of nefarious anti-union activity, but that still wouldn't tell us whether immigrants are, or are not, steadily improving their lot. The relevant questions are, how do the immigrants feel about it; not "how do the union organisers at Smithfield feel about it?"

There is one other claim that I must contest: that The Economist is somehow rare and different in its news gathering and reporting from reputable news outlets. Let us compare a piece from The Economist's website on the minimum wage, to one from the Christian Science Monitor, and ask ourselves, which of these is the partisan hack job?

(extended entry for those who feel like reading my opinions on media bias)

First, The Economist:

[Cut section on the political mechanics of the minimum wage, which Democrats are proposing to raise to $7.25 an hour]

At $5.15 an hour, a full-time worker earns less than $10,300 a year, barely above the poverty line for a single person and well under it if the wage-earner supports a child. The real value of the wage is down to its lowest level since 1955. In the late 1960s, the wage was more than half of average hourly earnings for a (low level) production worker. Now it is less than a third.

However, the number of people earning the minimum wage has also declined. In 1980, over 15% of workers received it (or even a lower wage—there are broad exemptions for various classes of workers). That figure is now just 2.5%. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank, estimates that lifting the wage to $7.25 would affect only 4.4% of workers, giving them an average increase of $0.79 an hour.

This would yield an extra $1,580 a year for full-time workers, enough to get a mother and child within shouting distance of the poverty line. But most such workers aren’t in a full-time job. Of the roughly 1.6m low-wage workers who do regular hours, nearly 1m are part-timers, most of them doing fewer than 25 hours a week. This is ammunition for opponents of an increase, who also point out that few such workers support families, or even themselves. They are mostly young (more than half of them are under 25), and according to testimony before Congress from the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2004, only 15% of workers making less than $6.65 an hour live in poverty. Many of them have family incomes well above the poverty line.

Given all this, a minimum wage increase seems like a blunt instrument for attacking poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which already gives a annual bonus to the working poor, targets poverty more directly and effectively. Nor will fiddling with the minimum wage do much to placate the anxious middle class. Raising the wage, say critics, may even hurt the people who are supposed to be helped. Businesses say that higher wages could force them to reduce staff (though economic studies appear to show that is unlikely). More worrying is that unskilled workers may be kept out of the labour market if they are unable to claim jobs with higher minimum wages.

But for Mr Kennedy and his fellow, all this may be beside the point. Minimum wage workers are sympathetic figures, working boring jobs for paltry pay. Most Americans say they support an increase. While that may not get the wage up, it could help put Republicans on the defensive.

Now, the Christian Science Monitor:

Keisha Walker, for one, is happy that Congress is at least debating whether to raise the minimum wage. For her, boosting it to $7.25 would mean earning an extra $1 an hour - enough to pay for eight months of groceries or perhaps a few nights out.

An office assistant for a low-income apartment complex in Atlanta, earning $6.25 an hour, Ms. Walker is one of 139,000 Georgians who would benefit directly from a minimum-wage hike. A technical school dropout and mom in her late 20s, she scratches together a living, relying on her fiancé to pay major bills.

"They need to raise it if only to help people pay for [rising] rent," she says, returning by bus from taking her two sons and a nephew to football practice. "It's getting so you can't survive in this country."

[cut political mechanics and transitional filler]

"The typical minimum-wage worker is not a teenager earning side money," says Isaac Shapiro, an associate director at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington. "Most minimum-wage workers, those most affected by the wage increase and those just above the minimum wage, their earnings can really be vital to their household economics."

ome 48 percent, or 3.5 million, are between 25 and 64 years old who, on average, contribute more than half of the income in their households, experts say.^[1]

Lanky, with a wide smile and a tight-knit straw hat on his head, Thomas, a Liberian immigrant who prefers not to give his last name, worked for five years as a gas-station attendant, never making more than $5.15 an hour. It was so little money he had to quit. He went freelance, selling mattresses on the street from the back of his beat-up Chevrolet truck. He rents a room with a friend in a flop house. He sends his extra money back home to Liberia - or gives it to needy people in his neighborhood.

"There's no way you can depend on one job anymore," says Thomas. "You have to get out there and hustle, have two or three different things going, to make it work. Everyone is suffering. They all tell you the same story."

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, nearly a third of the workers who start at minimum wage are still working at that rate three years later. A quarter, also like Thomas, stop working - or at least leave official payrolls. Thirty-nine percent move up to better wages.

In Atlanta, working full time at minimum wage amounts to a third of the $32,000 a year it takes for a no-frills life, says the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Only six percent of Georgia residents hold low-wage jobs, while states like Montana, West Virginia, and Alabama have the highest rates, around 10 percent. Twenty-one states have set higher-than-national minimum wage rates.

One reason even some Republicans are mulling the wage hike is that the number of single mothers making minimum wage has nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Of Americans making less than $7.25 an hour, half are over 24 years old, and about half are primary household earners. Sixty-two percent are white, 16 percent are black, and 17 percent are Hispanic. Nearly twice as many are women than men.

"The relative value of the minimum wage has fallen by nearly 20 percent," says Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Resarch. "These families are already living at the bottom, and you're talking about families who didn't have a lot of frills to begin with."

For Ms. Walker, the Atlanta office assistant, rising child-care costs mean that her weekly paycheck is not enough to stay employed, at least when school is out, so she took the summer off to care for her two boys, Derick and Rico. That means she has learned how to cook and takes the bus. Her boys' football program is subsidized. Movie nights are out. Cookouts in the park are in.

"I'm lucky to have someone who can help out," she says. "A lot of people don't."

One of them is Mary Davidson, a single, 50-something dry-cleaning clerk in Charlotte, N.C.. Rising gas prices forced her to look for work closer to home. She found a job at $6.50 an hour, and she took it.

Going out to eat is out of the question. But she finds solace in her church choir, but feels guilty even there. Her income, especially working only 20 hours a week, doesn't allow her the 10 percent tithe that is expected.

"I'm making $6.50 - that's no money!" she says. "People should understand, especially people at the White House behind a desk - put yourself in my shoes. Pay my money for your bills. See if you can make it!"

But some economists say the minimum wage does more damage than good, and see its diminishing value as a sign of its waning importance. After all, they say, the number of people who would be affected by the wage increase has decreased from 10 million in 1996 to some 8 million today, while average wages have risen from $12 to $16 an hour since the last hike.

In fact, they say, upping wages will only create incentives for businesses to hire fewer low-skilled workers - which is what happened when at least 146,000 restaurant workers lost their jobs after the last minimum-wage hike, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Which of these is more partisan? In my opinion, the Christian Science Monitor piece is at least as opinionated as The Economist's piece -- I certainly finished with no doubt about what I was supposed to believe by the time I finished reading. They quoted left-wing think tanks extensively without identifying them as such, slathered on the hard-luck stories . . . and then used as their sole source for the proposition that the minimum wage might not be such a great idea, the National Restaurant Association. The author might as well have come out and said "You could believe these objective think-tank professionals, or you can take the word of these self-serving corporate types. We report, you decide!" That, of course, is if the reader got that far; the writer carefully tucked every bit of disconfirming evidence in the last two paragraphs, which a substantial number of readers will never get to. The Economist piece states its opinions, rather than steering the reader towards them--but the disconfirming evidence is run throughout the piece, the sources are mostly either government statistics or from think tanks that support the minimum wage, the partisan leanings of cited sources are clearly identified, and (she said modestly), the piece leans on economic arguments, rather than anecdotes.

This is not to say that the Christian Science Monitor piece is illegitimate. But I don't think you can make a reasonable argument that it is somehow more objective than The Economist's piece. Nor do I think you can say that the CSM's piece is somehow atypical of the way that issues like the minimum wage are treated in the pages of our nation's newspapers--the ones that Mr Farrell says separate their opinions from the news page in a way so fundamentally different from the operations of The Economist that my attempt to distinguish between an Economist news piece and a New York Times op-ed is disingenuous trickery.

In fact, I'm against "slant" journalism--I think it's dishonest, and our nation's newspapers would be in much better condition if journalists would just come out and state the opinion they have formed from the various facts that they present, rather than putting on a false face of objectivity. But I don't think it's illegitimate . . . just unnecessary.

Yet I believe that the liberals accusing The Economist of unwonted bias compared to other media outlets genuinely believe their claims. If you already agree with the conclusions, the typical American media style of slanting stories, rather than stating your opinon openly, feels more objective; it is only when you disagree that it grates. And in general, of course, we tend to believe things that we agree with . . . which means that we don't search those pieces for the missing facts that might prove them wrong.

A long time ago I wrote about academic bias:

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

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

That sort of debate goes on all the time in academia--about subjects other than politics.

To sum up: we'd all be a lot better off if before they started flinging accusations of bias, incompetence and trickery at the media, bloggers tried to make an honest assessment of whether it's the bias that bothers them . . . or the fact that it's disagreeing with cherished opinions. Because if your accusations of bias are biased . . . well, it would be nice if we could at least try to get our political opinions off of some sort of infinite recursive loop of accusation and self-congratulation.

¹This is rather distorted . . . as mentioned in The Economist piece, according to the Bureau of Labuor Statistics over half of minimum wage earners are under 24, and the overwhelming majority of them work part time, which tends to give credence to the idea that the typical minimum-wage worker is, indeed, a teenager (or other young adult) earning side money.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

End of an era

Aaron Spelling has died. Surprisingly, not by being blown up by an insane neighbour, or shot by a jealous lover.

Incidentally, I'm home sick for the first Saturday evening I've spent in front of the tube in a long while. As far as I can tell, the opinion of the television producers is that if you're home on a Saturday night, you'll watch any damn thing.

Unfortunately, they're right.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally . . .

I'm sick with some mysterious not-quite-flulike ailment, and have an enormous workload, and have to spend the weekend driving my dog upstate before I take off for Europe for several weeks. So if I don't respond to your email or blog post, it is not because I hate you, or am rude, or am, as one letter writer suggested, "Afraid to take me on!" I'm just overwhelmed.

Memo to readers: if you have some sort of mysterious, not-quite-flulike ailment, the one thing you should not, under any circumstances, watch on television? Infomercial for corndogs. You may not even know that there are such things, but it is all too possible to come across one when your resistance is down. And that is Really. Not. Good.

I'm just saying . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Comment of the day

From Rob Lyman, whose blog is greatly missed, in a conversation about whether learning programming languages is the same as learning the spoken kind:

I'm a poor programmer whose solution to execution failures is type louder and more slowly.

As always, the winner of the coveted aware receives absolutely nothing except the gratitude of millions of adoring fans.

From the desk of Winterspeak:

Legislating English

One of Jane's and my favorite U Chicago professors, Austin Goolsbee, has a nice piece in the NYTimes about legislating English. Austin's point is that since people living in the US already have huge incentives to learn English -- higher wages, better job, more advancement -- anyone who cannot speak English must be incapable of doing so. He goes on to cite some research on how people are more capable of picking up new languages when they are younger, but lose this ability after the age of 11 or 12.

I do not know what impact early age bi-lingual education has on a child's ability to learn English (if English is not their first language), but if it's negative, given the above, then bi-lingual education is a bad idea. Moreover, if ability to speak a language is fixed, the perhaps European moves to require a mastery of the local tongue is less about actually getting immigrants to integrate and more about removing immigrants who cannot.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Talent as a monopoly

Karl Smith picks up on yesterday's post and offers an interesting insight on the relative problems of taxing capital and labour:

The straight facts of the matter are that high and progressive taxes on investment in ACME Inc. are likely to be destructive to the economy, while high and progressive taxes on the ACME CEO's compensation package are not.

People have monopoly power over their talents. People with lots of talent have lots of monopoly power. Taxing away monopoly profits is generally not destructive to the economy.

Side note: what's true at the national level is not necessarily true at the state level. It's a lot easier to change state residency than it is to change national citizenship and it's a lot harder for the state government to increase investment than it is for the federal.

This, incidentally, is why highly progressive countries like Sweden have low capital taxation, and very high income taxes: capital is mobile, but labour is much less so, particularly after people get settled with children and spouses and houses and so forth. Also, because capital formation involves deferring consumption, high levels of capital taxation can encourage people to shift funds from investment to current consumption, making society as a whole (most economists would argue) much worse off.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tarzan confused

So the original post that sparked this minimum wage pissing match is Ezra Klein's assertion that there is an inverse correlation between high minimum wages & employment. Will Wilkinson pointed out that the correlation could be running the wrong way: states with good employment are more likely to raise the minimum wage.

But the correlation doesn't even look to me like it's there. Try as I might, I don't understand how Mr Klein got that conclusion from these data; it seems to me that the states with minimum wages above the federal minimum are vastly more likely to have unemployment above the federal average. The correlation is not perfect, of course; this is the real world we're talking about. But of the nineteen states with a minimum wage above the Federal average, twelve are in the bottom half of the unemployment distribution, which is to say they have higher unemployment rates:

Michigan #2
Alaska #3
Oregon #6
DC #8
Rhode Island: #10
New Jersey: #12
Illinois: #13
New York: #15
Massachussets: #16
California: #18
Wisconsin: #19
Washington: #21

Whereas there are only 7 in the happy end of the unemployment scale:

Minnesota: #31
Connecticut: #33
Delaware: #34
Maryland: #39
Vermont: #45
Florida: #49
Hawaii: #50

Of those, only three are in the ten best employment states, versus 5 in the worst employment states; and all three of the best employment places are states that are heavily dependant on the tourism industry. I just don't see how this is a justification for high minimum wages. But I'm sure I must be reading it wrong. Mr Klein? Mr Wilkinson? Someone?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Follow up to the post below

A commenter on Farrell's site, like me, noted that The Economist did, in fact, note HRW's report Smithfield's abuses.

No, no, no!!! Said Farrell; that's not enough!

The Economist never itself endorses HRW's claim that slaughterhouses are bad places to work, that immigrants are open to abuse etc, and indeed uses Queiroz's story to cast doubt on these claims. But we're not talking about matters of opinion here--we're talking of matters of legally established fact. The Economist never adverts to the fact that the Smithfields Foods management has been found by the NLRB to have threatened that it would report undocumented immigrants to the authorities if they voted for a union. I’ll repeat yet again--if you want to use the Smithfield Foods experience as your poster-boy for the experience of poor undocumented immigrants, then the ways in which management in your case-study have demonstrably abused illegal immigrants is surely germane. Nor for that matter, does the Economist ever mention that the Smithfields Foods plant in question was specifically singled out in the HRW report; instead it suggests that the HRW report was about slaughterhouses in general.

For that matter, I’d be quite interested to know how the Economist found Queiroz as a potential interviewee in the first place.

Cue the sinister music. Undoubtedly, they had him fabricated at the Evil Right Wing Straw Men factory. Alberto Queiroz is made of people! He's people!!!!!!

But seriously, folks . . . it's not enough that The Economist quotes HRW; it must not only reprint its accusations at great length, but also endorse it, or it's partisan hackery. In Farrell's telling, asking a worker about his experiences is bad reporting, akin to making up a source. Good reporting is what Herbert does: telling only one side of the story, without any suggestion that there might even be another side.

Mr Orwell, I'm ready for my closeup.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

My facts are better than your facts

I slapped back at Henry Farrell's condemnation of an article in The Economist the other day; turnabout being fair play, he has rejoindered:

. . . This is an argument from authority, a kind of argument with which Ms. McArdle has a rather unhappy history. More to the point--it's a bogus argument from authority. McArdle's claim is that newspaper reporters are more authoritative than op-ed writers, because they don't leave out "all the inconvenient facts," and because they're "at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion." Now this is a claim that I'm prepared to buy, up to a point, with newspapers that maintain a clear separation between editorial content and reportage. The Wall Street Journal, for example, does some first rate economic reporting, even if its editorial pages are a cesspit. But as a defence of The Economist, it isn't even laughable; it's pitiable. The Economist has never sought to disguise the fact that it's a magazine with a strong pro-free market agenda, which pervades not only its editorial content, but its reporting. It doesn't try to present both sides of the question and never has; its reportage is shot through with opinionated assertions and undefended value judgments about the need for "reform" of lamentably social-democratic West European countries, to marketize the education system &c&c&c. Nor does it tend to report developments which might call its preferred policy stances into question with any great degree of enthusiasm. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in principle--I'm obviously in favour of strongly opinionated political writing, or I wouldn't do it myself. But it certainly doesn't put Economist reporters in a very good place to criticize op-ed writers and political magazine journalists, or more generally to assume a lofty position from which they may criticize the pell-mell of ideologically driven debate beneath. The activities that op-ed writers and Economist reporters are engaged in aren't nearly as far removed from each other as Ms. McArdle might wish to suggest.

Which brings us to the more particular matter under discussion. Herbert's piece rested on a set of factual claims--if she wants to take issue with the article, she should, one would think, concentrate on whether these claims are in fact correct, rather than appealing to general arguments about the inferiority of op-ed writers. My original post suggested precisely that "inconvenient facts have been left out so they won't annoy the reader." As I claimed, if you want to take an undocumented immigrant worker's experience in Smithfield Foods' meatprocessing plant as a proxy for the Mexican-American dream, it's hardly irrelevant that Smithfield Foods has an established track record of abusing aforementioned undocumented immigrant workers' rights, and threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they should dare to organize themselves. If this isn't an "inconvenient fact" for the Economist's preferred narrative, I'm not sure what would be.

For starters, Mr Farrell seems to have confused an argument from authority with an argument from methodology. If I argue with a creationist about the age of the earth, he could say that I--not having done the scientific research myself--am just making an "argument from authority", and that there's no reason to privilege the authority of the scientists over the authority of The Divine Architect. But while I think far too many people do believe in evolution for pretty much the same reason that fundamentalists believe in creationism--because their neighbours and parents and other authority figures told them it's so--that is not why I am accepting evolution over creationism. I am placing my bets on evolution because the scientific method seems to me to be a better way to find out the truth than searching for answers in a book written by some enterprising middle-eastern shepherds ca. 800 BCE.

I've written opinion columns and I have, as Mr Farrell points out, written reported pieces for The Economist. I would seem, therefore, rather more facts at my disposal than Mr Farrell, who has, AFAIK, done neither. No matter how much it pleases Mr Farrell to think so, the procedures for the latter are very different from, and to my mind, superior to, the procedures for the former, even at such an august institution as the New York Times. (Perhaps especially at such an august institution; it took Paul Krugman's accusing the Secretary of the Army of being a major player in the Enron scandal to end the NYT's previous policy of leaving corrections up to the columnist.)

At least in the minds of all the editors I've ever dealt with at The Economist, the purpose of an Economist article is not to sell the gospel of free markets; it is to find out the truth, and print it. That means that if you turn in an article full of right wing talking points (not that I've ever tried such a trick), you can expect to find an irritated editor grilling you about the other side of the story, and demanding that you revise it to be more balanced. If you get facts wrong, you are in for an embarassing session with the fact checker. When you write an op-ed or a column, by contrast, everyone knows that you are putting in only the facts which put your case in the best light, and I've never heard of an opinion piece anywhere being fact-checked.

That doesn't mean that Mr Herbert is wrong. Just as it is possible that Yahweh created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, Mr Herbert may have the right of it. But if I have to choose between believing an opinion column, and believing a reported piece from any paper, including The Economist . . . including even most of the political papers that are donor supported . . . I'll go with the reported piece every time.

I suspect that Mr Farrell would be happy to endorse my methods if I were using them (as I do, when writing), to decide that a paper on health care delivery from a tenured academic has more credibility than one from the Heritage Foundation. I interrogate the facts when I can, which is how that I decided that the AEI's first estimates of the cost of John Kerry's health care plan were likely to be more reliable than either their second, higher estimate, or the ludicrously low second estimate from teh Kerry campaign's pet health care economist (whose first estimate was within shouting distance of the AEI's first estimate). But if I don't have time--and journalists on deadline unfortunately often don't--I tend to assume that a tenured academic's work is more likely to be correct than a paper from a think tank where the donors determine within what limits a paper's answer may fall. Perhaps this is just another in my long and disreputable history of arguments from authority¹?

That is not to say that The Economist is not a classical liberal paper with a bias towards free markets and free trade; obviously it is. But just as at papers with a left-wing bias (almost all of them), that bias takes the form of which arguments the editors and reporters find more convincing, NOT a conscious decision to selectively report the truth. I might have a harder time selling an Economist editor a story that said that free trade was bad than I would selling such a story to, say, the Boston Globe. But then I might have an easier time selling them a story on how the minimum wage transfers money from poor people to middle-class teenagers, a view endorsed by that well known source of right-wing propaganda, the Clinton-era HHS.

Neither is an indictment of the news orgnaisation; it's the natural human tendency to find things more believable when they agree with what you already believe. Mr Farrell, I'd suggest, simply doesn't notice it in other papers because, well, they agree with him more, and hence he finds them more believable. The Economist is no less methodologically rigorous than any other paper anyone I know has written for; indeed, it is rather more rigorous than most about things like fact-checking. The difference is that The Economist states its opinions, rather than maintaining a facade of neutrality while slanting the article so that the readers come to the same conclusion that the reporter did. This, of course, is more irritating if you happen to disagree with the analysis, but it is not measurably more "objective". Indeed, Mr Farrell's criteria for "objective" seems to be "left wing", that being the ideological tenor of all the papers he cites, including those which, like the Wall Street Journal, are quite opinionated².

I am not particularly interested in interrogating Mr Herbert's facts, and I certainly don't have the time--any more than Mr Farrell could be bothered to call up the subject of The Economist's story and ask him whether he liked his job, rather than taking Bob Herbert's word that he couldn't possibly. I have no doubt that most or all of the things that Mr Herbert printed are factually true . . . which is irrelevant, as Mr Farrell's very point is that one can tell a materially false story even when everything in it is factually true, simply by leaving out inconvenient facts. For example, the NLRB may have thrown out the previous two union elections at Smithfield, and the majority of workers at Smithfield may not want to unionise--except that for a large swathe of the left-wing commentariat, that is a logical impossibility, like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Such unstated assumptions are how we know that The Economist is lying and Bob Herbert is telling the truth.

Now, as to the question of what facts are selected, I think Mr Farrell is simply wrong here: Mr Herbert's allegations about Smithfield's union practices were, at best, tangential to the story. I have no doubt that Mr Farrell sincerely believes that they belong there, just as I would sincerely like to see every story about the retail industry include a section on the manifold benefits of interstate trucking deregulation. But now that I've spent some time as a journalist, I recognize that in a world of limited resources (not the least of which is reader attention), most of the time other journalists are going to have to use their precious space to write about whatever they were writing about, rather than flogging my pet political projects. This recognition is not shared by most bloggers, left and write, engaging in freelance media criticism.

This is the opening of the story in question:

A HUNDRED years ago, a sensational novel attacking the meatpacking industry prompted Congress to draft the first federal food-safety laws. The author of “The Jungle”, Upton Sinclair, was disappointed. He had hoped to persuade Americans to embrace socialism. For him, the important point was not that the slaughterhouses of Chicago were unsanitary, but that they were “the spirit of capitalism made flesh”—a system in which “a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.” The book's central character, a Lithuanian named Jurgis Rudkus, had come to America believing that through hard work he could grasp the American Dream. But he found that “the whole country...was nothing but one gigantic lie.”

Rarely has a great novelist been so wrong about so much. No one now worries about the poverty of Lithuanian-Americans. But many still worry about the health of the American Dream. Can immigrants still work their way up from the bottom? Can they become American?

It's not a story about slaughterhouses or labour relations; it's a story about whether or not immigrants are getting a toehold on the ladder of prosperity. It isn't that you couldn't include Smithfield's unionization woes in a story about the economic fortunes of immigrants; it's just that it's not obvious to me that, as Mr Farrell asserts, you have to. I am only guessing, but I'd imagine that Mr Farrell believes that unionisation is a--even the--major factor in creating worker prosperity; to him, therefore, it would be natural to talk about Smithfield's labour practices. But not everyone believes this; many people think of unions as a way to redistribute benefits not to workers, but between them, and as with minimum wage laws, argue that unions are net destroyers of social value. To those people, more interesting issues would include labour mobility, economic networks, and human capital acquisition--the very topics that The Economist's article covers.

But here is the truly weird thing, which I forgot to mention the first time around: The Economist does mention the labour problems: it's there in the first sentence, even before talking to a worker:

But is a slaughterhouse a nice place to work? Smithfield does not let journalists in, for reasons of “biosecurity”. Human Rights Watch, a watchdog from New York, issued a report in 2004 entitled “Blood, Sweat and Fear”, which accused American meat and poultry firms of “systematic human-rights violations”. Slaughterhouses are harsh and dangerous places to work, said the report, and illegal immigrants, who form a large chunk of the workforce, find it hard to defy abusive employers.

That report, as you'll find if you follow through the link, is probably the source of many of the allegations that Mr Herbert made. That The Economist did not choose to make it the focus of the piece, nor to elaborate on the anti-union activities, rather than general allegations of abuse, is a sign of right-wing bias only if you first accept the unstated assumption that unions are a means to transfer value to workers, rather than between them; that unions are net creators of value for poor workers; that unions unambigiously make their workers better off--all of which are, to say the least, hotly contested.

Instead of focusing on unions, The Economist, having established that a widely respected human rights group thinks Smithfield is abusive, decides in a fit of right-wing madness, to ask a worker who had made it out of the slaughterhouse what he thought about the experience. Mr Farrell appears to think that asking people about their experiences, and then writing down what they say, is bad reportage. This must be some special, super-scientific academic method that those of us who do not have PhDs in Political Science are too dumb to understand.

Mr Queiroz takes a more benign view. Yes, the work is hard. The line goes fast and you have to keep cutting till your hands are exhausted. And yes, it is sometimes dangerous. He says he once saw a co-worker lose a leg when he ducked under the disassembly line instead of walking round it. But many occupations are risky. Taxi-drivers are 34 times more likely to die on the job than meatpackers.

Mr Queiroz does not think Smithfield was a bad employer. Wages of more than $10 an hour enabled him to buy a house back in Mexico. Cutting up pigs was easier than picking blueberries, he says, because he did not have to toil under the sun all day. And when he had had enough, he quit and set up a taco stand with his brother. That was five years ago. Now he owns a Mexican restaurant. America, he says, is “the land of opportunity”.

Mr Queiroz is already somewhat tangential to the story, an example, not a data point; Smithfield is doubly so. I agree that if you were writing a story about how Smithfield is making immigrants' lives better, you would have to mention its union troubles more extensively (though I am virtually 100% sure that if you did, good reporting would find the story much less black-and-white than the one Mr Herbert tells). But demanding that a journalist go off on a tangent to a tangent of a tangent because you are very interested in unionisation in this country is rather presumptuous--particularly if you've never had to write under a strict word limit.

This is emblematic of much of what passes for media criticism in the blogosphere. My economic paper is solid fact; yours is a partisan hack job. My issue is vital; yours is irrelevant. My facts are important; your facts are silly. Reporters have to wade through all of this and find some way to capture the essence of a story in 1,000 words or less. Academics who get to turn in papers of 30 pages plus-or-minus 3,000 words, and bloggers who have no word limits at all other than those on the muscles of their typing fingers, should try compressing their thoughts into 600 words a week before slinging around accusations of hackery and bias.

¹ Weirdly, the example that Mr Farrell links has absolutely nothing to do with argument from authority; its an argument that economists relying on revealed preference are more likely to produce correct answers than social scientists forced to rely on survey data. For which I was roundly blasted by all the sociologists, political scientists and so forth in the blogosphere. Was I correct? That's another blog post. But this reinforces my conclusion that Mr Farrell has a rather idiosyncratic--not to mention somewhat silly--definition of "argument from authority".

²The Wall Street Journal? Left wing? I hear you cry. The news section leans almost as far left as the editorial board leans right. Unlike many other bloggers, I see nothing wrong with this; they run an excellent news team.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I heart Will Wilkinson

Why? You ask. Because he writes pieces like this: the piece that I would have written, if I were as smart and talented as Mr Wilkinson is . . .

The law of demand is a bitter pill for defenders of labor market price controls. Noted economic theorist Matt Yglesias has grown weary of appeals to “Economics 101″ in the minimum wage debate. “After all,” Yglesias writes, “there’s a reason they offer more economics classes and you don’t get your degree after taking just one.” His American Prospect colleague Ezra Klein says of the law of demand that “It’s a good guideline, but it’s got no end of exceptions.” The minimum wage, of course, is one those exceptions.

They’re both right in general, if not about the minimum wage in particular. There are more economics classes, and they do teach exceptions. However, let’s not imagine that there is some advanced economic class in which you learn that the law of demand is false. (Well, no doubt there is somewhere. There is contradiction-friendly “paraconsistent logic,” after all.)

To use Yglesias’s misapplied example, Econ 101 principles do not stand to higher-level economics in the way that Newtonian physics stands to relativity and quantum machanics: as a useful, but literally false, simplification of reality. Economic laws are not strict laws of nature, codifying ineluctable relationships of necessity, and they do not pretend to be. So counterexamples are not ipso facto falsifying, and the law of demand is never replaced with a better, more empirically adequate, law. The law of demand is very, very empirically adequate as it is: It captures a ubiquitous regularity of human behavior that is abundantly comfirmed every moment of every day, and without which there would be no science of economics.

But it is just a regularity, like people flinching involuntarily when they hear a sudden, loud sound. It doesn’t have to happen, but it’s pretty surprising when it doesn’t. (”Is he deaf? Paralyzed?”) And when it doesn’t, there’s need for some special explanation.

Economic laws, like the principles of all the “special sciences,” are ceteris paribus generalizations: generalizations that are true other things being equal. Econ 101 lays out the basic laws and explains what follows from them ceteris paribus. Later, students learn about cases when other things are not equal — when there are exceptions to the generalization. So, it is always possible to argue that the law of demand does not apply in this or that kind of circumstance. A certain necessary auxiliary condition, which is almost always present, may be absent in a certain kind of case, causing the regularity to break down. But then, in order to predict an exception to the regular pattern, you need to cite the absence of the relevant auxiliary condition (e.g., “He can’t hear; that’s why he didn’t flinch”). I hope Yglesias is not also tired of Philosophy of Science 101.

Now, let’s note two things. First, you will be utterly hopeless in reliably identifying exceptions to a ceteris paribus law when you never grasped its logic in the first place. Exhortations to mind your Econ 101 generally aren’t exhortations to stop being so darn advanced. They are exhortations to actually comprehend the principles upon which advancement depends. And, second, the fact that a law is ceteris paribus does not mean you can deny its applicability whenever you want to. Political convenience tends not to be an appropriate auxiliary condition. You can’t wave your hands and just hope that a good argument is in some upper-level textbook you haven’t read.

I can understand why liberals get frustrated with conservatives citing "basic economics". In fact, things that make intuitive sense sometimes aren't true, because your intuition is wrong, or (more commonly), because there are other basic factors, which also make complete intuitive sense, that you have overlooked. A long time ago, on a website far, far away, I tried to explain this in relation to the conservative economic intuition that if you cut people's taxes, they will work harder:

. . . there are tradeoffs involved in decisions to save or work: every dollar saved is a dollar you can't consume now. And every hour worked is an hour of leisure lost.

When people are making tradeoffs between two goods, economists commonly analyze it from the point of view of two effects: the income effect, which is the effect on your demand for a good of a change in your income, and the substitution effect, which is the effect on your demand for a good in the change of the relative prices of the good and it's substitutes.

Breathe deeply. The bleeding from the ears stops after a little while.

Seriously, it's not that hard to understand. Think of a good -- say Ramen Noodles. The income effect on this good is negative: as your income goes up, your demand for Ramen goes down.

The substitution effect is also easy to understand: if McD's is having a 99 cent Big Mac special, you shelf the cup o' noodles and head out for some mystery meat.

Got it? Great. So let's look at . . . a cut in marginal rates.

. . . the cut in marginal rates effectively increases your income. The income effect on demand for leisure v. work is unambiguous: as they feel richer, people want to work less and play more.

The substitution effect is also easy to comprehend. The tax cut just effectively raised your hourly rate. Leisure is therefore more expensive. Say you were taking home $10 an hour, but now you're getting $12. Every extra hour you decide to play instead of work is costing you more money. The marginal hours, the ones you spent watching shows you don't really like on Saturday afternoon, or arguing with your boyfriend about whose turn it was to get the car washed, might have been worth $10 but just aren't worth $12. So you work more.

. . . arguments about the effect of marginal tax cuts on the economy thus hinge on a debate over whether the income effect or the substitution effect is larger. That debate is still raging, and it's a post for another day. Suffice it to say that Bush's economists think that the substitution effect outweighs the income effect, so that cutting marginal rates will grow the economy.

Conservatives who argue the unambiguous case that people work harder when they're taxed less are overlooking a big, easily intuitive factor: when people have more money, they can afford to take more time off. (They're often overlooking another factor: most people don't have that much discretion about how much they work. This is the factor most often cited by liberals opposing tax cuts, but they too get it wrong, by forgetting that there are lots of marginal cases who do decide how much they work. A new rule or regulation doesn't have to effect every single person in the country--or the relevant market--to have an effect.)

That's very irritating, particularly since it's often exponentially harder to explain situations using multiple intuitions, even if the intuitions themselves are simple, than it is to explain them using only one. Witness the above explanation of income and substitution effects, which I think I've boiled down pretty concisely, versus: "if people get to keep more of their paychecks, they'll work harder." Truth be told, the tendency of conservatives to proclaim that their various deeply beliefs about things like property rights and hard work are not value judgements, but "Scientifically Proven! Using Economics!" sets my teeth on edge too.

But, then, liberals engage in the same sort of irritating single-intuition mongering: "Capital gains tax cuts primarily benefit the rich" . . . because, you know, taxing capital has absolutely no effect on the rest of us. We don't consume goods or services that are produced using capital, do we? After all, capital is icky--I certainly don't want any of that nasty capital in my double-frazzleberry mocha latte. I buy certified capital-free goods!

The economists who signed petitions in 2004 endorsing Kerry were, by and large, liberals who wanted a liberal president because, well, they're liberals. This is very understandable. But then they had to go and dress it up as some sort of super-scientific judgement that they'd made, not because they're liberals, but because they had Special Economic Insight that allowed them to divine a deep, universal truth which pointed to John Kerry as the superior presidential candidate. This was no more impressive than conservatives arguing that the wisdom of George Bush's tax cuts had been handed down from the divine Economist-in-Chief to Art Laffer on a pair of golden tablets. It seems to me that conservatives are more prone to this sort of economic philosphizing than liberals, but it is by no means a unipartisan vice.

More telling, though, is Will Wilkinson's point: just because economics often tells a more complicated story than political sound-bytes would suggest, doesn't mean that simple stories are always wrong. Lots and lots of simple stories are right. Rent control not only destroys the housing stock, but also eventually redistributes available housing from the poor to connected middle-class insiders, often government/non-profit employees, or to wealthy people who can afford "key fees" and the like. Confiscatory taxation produces black markets. High inflation produces high interest rates. When interest rates go up, the prices of bonds and housing go down.

Price ceilings and floors are among the most well documented economic phenomenon out there. The results are intuitively obvious: if you set the price of something below market level, there will soon be none of that thing left, and if you set its price above the market level, you will end up with a glut. These things are utterly predictible. When such regulations are proposed, they are, in fact, predicted. And with depressing regularity, the predictions come true.

In the case of the minimum wage, there is a decent argument that within the relatively small margins at which our nation's various levels of government tinker with it, the effect on employment is too small to be picked out of noisy economic data in which hundreds of variables are constantly changing. There is also the kind of complicated argument that Mr Yglesias is fond of, which is ably outlined by Mr Wilkinson:

The most popular principled explanation for the failure of minimum wage increases to create unemployment is a story about monopsony conditions for low-wage labor, i.e., imperfectly competitive labor market conditions in which there is a single buyer of low-wage labor (or a colluding band of buyers), that is able to set wages that workers have little choice but to accept. A simple model (Econ 101, even!) shows that under such conditions, an increase in the minimum wage, within a certain range, could even increase employment and raise efficiency.

It is not, to be sure, a very good argument: it is very hard to see how thousands of minimum-wage paying establishments, most of them engaged in cutthroat competition with the other mwp establishments, and all of them plagued by high turnover costs, could be engaging in the sort of collusion implied by monopsony. Proponents of this theory, such as Card and Krueger (the authors of the most famous study arguing that the minimum wage doesn't decrease employment), offer a lovely, complicated story about search costs and so forth, but this is patently unconvincing. Unless you are in a very, very economically depressed area, it's hard to see how the search costs in the minimum-wage market could fall more heavily on the workers than on the employers, who have to not only find workers, but also train them. The workers, meanwhile, can easily find out who's hiring just by driving down the main highway, or taking a stroll through the local mall. And they get paid during the difficult training period. A much more parsimonious explanation is that Card & Krueger screwed up . . . and indeed, when you look at payroll records, rather than a telephone survey, you get the result predicted by our simplistic Econ 101 model: employment went down.

That's not to say that there aren't any economists who think that the minimum wage is a good thing; there are. But as Mr Wilkinson points out, that's not the consensus view. And if you're a liberal who likes to defer to the consensus on things like supply side tax cuts, you cannot then turn around and declare that your other pet policies are okay because some economist, somewhere believes that it's a good idea. I mean, if you've ever been to the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, you'll know that there is nothing so nutty that some economist, somewhere, can't be found to endorse it.

Nor, when you propose to violate the consensus, can you escape your obligation to explain why you think this will work by grandly proclaiming that "Economics is complicated". I mean, physics is complicated--so complicated that I nevere actually took any--but as a general rule v = v₀ + at just the same.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can I join? Can I join?

Greg Mankiw has a new club for lovers of Pigovian taxes. I looooove carbon taxes. I think I've even said so in print, somewhere. It's just that I have a memory like a . . . like a . . . like one of those things, you know, with the holes in it that you use to drain pasta? I have a memory like a whaddayacallit.

Pleeeeeeeeeease let me join your club, Mr Mankiw! I'll just sit quietly at the back and not bother anyone, I promise . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That slow slide . . .

Henry Farrell takes The Economist to task:

The Economist really should have gone elsewhere for this week’s Horatio Alger story about undocumented immigrants making good in the American economy.

Consider Alberto Queiroz, who crept across the border 12 years ago. . . picked blueberries for $5 a box. . . this job lasted only two months . . . So he sought more stable employment, which he eventually found at America’s largest hog slaughterhouse. Smithfield Foods’ plant at Tar Heel, North Carolina, turns some 32,000 pigs a day into hams and loins. Thanks to selective breeding and efficient, hygienic processing, American meat has grown steadily leaner, cheaper and safer, says Joe Luter, Smithfield's chairman. . . . Human Rights Watch, a watchdog from New York, issued a report in 2004 . . . Slaughterhouses are harsh and dangerous places to work, said the report, and illegal immigrants, who form a large chunk of the workforce, find it hard to defy abusive employers. Mr Queiroz takes a more benign view. Yes, the work is hard. The line goes fast and you have to keep cutting till your hands are exhausted. And yes, it is sometimes dangerous. He says he once saw a co-worker lose a leg when he ducked under the disassembly line instead of walking round it. But many occupations are risky. Taxi-drivers are 34 times more likely to die on the job than meatpackers. Mr Queiroz does not think Smithfield was a bad employer. Wages of more than $10 an hour enabled him to buy a house back in Mexico.

Bob Herbert, spirited across the Times Select paywall by Jordan Barab, has a rather different tale to tell about the same plant. . . .

None of this gets any mention at all in the Economist, natch. Feelgood stories about illegal immigrants coming through blood (quite literally in this case), sweat and tears to eventual success, don't generate quite the same glow about the American can-do economy when you know that their employer threatened to get 'em thrown out of the country if they voted to unionize. Note also the sly way in which the Economist minimizes meatpacking firms’ responsibility for workplace safety by peddling an anecdote which lays the blame for a serious accident on a careless worker rather than Smithfield Foods. The Economist is continuing (and perhaps even accelerating) its downward trend.

Note that The Economist, whose reporters extensively research and fact check their claims, is automatically full of [expletive deleted]. A New York TImes columnist who turns in 700 words twice a week consisting, in this case, apparently largely of reprinting the press releases of the Smithfield plant union organisers, is an unimpeachable source. Opinion columnists: reliable fonts of disimpassioned analysis. Reporters who spend weeks working on a story: partisan hacks.

This is not to slam opinion columnists, who I often enjoy. But having written reported stories, and opinion columns, I know that the standards for the latter are a tad more loose. No one ever challenges an opinion columnist to be balanced, fair, or even defend his facts, unless they're of the "The Holocaust never happened!" variety. Reported pieces, on the other hand, get checked down to the spelling of the names, and then gleefully interrogated by editors and other reporters who disagree with you. When I see an opinion piece, I know that all the inconvenient facts have been left out so they won't annoy the reader. When I read a reported piece, for all the complaining about the MSM in the blogosphere, I know that the editors and the writer are at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion--at least provided that they work at a mainstream paper, and not one of the money-losing political mags where the editors have to keep the donors happy.

Not that Mr Farrell's readers seem particularly interested in facts or truth. Much of the comments section consists of readers rather hilariously assuring each other that one of the statistics from The Economist's story is right-wing horse puckey that cab drivers are 34 times more likely to be killed on the job than meat packers. I don't know where that particular stat comes from, if they'd spent a little less time working themselves up into a fine lather of pompous indignation, and a little more time actually, y'know, trying to find out the truth, they would have discovered that the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists taxi driver as one of its most dangerous occupations in its Census of Occupational Fatalities, and that the most recent data shows that our nation's 500K+ meatpackers experienced roughly 20 deaths per year on the job, while the roughly 60K cab drivers had an average of 60 occupational deaths per year, putting the disputed figure in the right ball-park.

Reality-based community. Tee-hee!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thought for the day

On selling sovereignty:

Angola is the kind of situation that made me think very differently about sovereignty, and about the kinds of politics, both conservative and leftist, that mark the achievement of sovereignty as the initial and necessary condition of achieving prosperity and freedom. Sovereignty is the material resource that the Angolan elite controls and sells, not oil. They are rentiers who extract wealth from selling permission for extraction. But they’re no different than a car thief who hotwires a car parked outside a suburban home, drives it fifty miles, and then sells the car on eBay. The difference is not in what they do, but in the legal and governmental mechanisms that permit what they do. The car thief is going to run into trouble establishing a title that can be transferred legitimately. The Angolan elite has no such difficulty.

All the international institutions which exist recognize them as possessing title to sovereignty. They’re the ones who send representatives to the United Nations. They’re the ones who fill embassies around the world. They’re the ones that the World Bank or NGOs speak to and reach agreements with. That’s not a conservative or liberal thing, not a failure of the United Nations or of the Bush Administration. It’s an indictment of the entire interstate system built up over the course of the 20th Century, in all its parts and particulars. That system gives titles and ownership to thieves, and allows thieves to sell their goods to supposedly legitimate businesses.

I’m profoundly skeptical about the kind of quasi-governmental aspirations embedded in a lot of international development efforts, about the desire to govern local communities in quite profound ways in accordance with visions and plans sketched out a thousand miles away from the places where they will be implemented. But why not ask that the interstate system of the 21st Century, including non-governmental organizations, serve a few of the most minimal functions of government with regard to property and commerce? I can’t buy a hot car and expect the government to sanction my ownership. If I pass cash under the table to get the car, the car stays hot, and I can expect it to be taken from me at any time to be returned to its rightful owner. All the petroleum that comes out of Angola today is equally stolen. The people who peddle Angola’s sovereignty have no right to sell it, and those who buy it know that perfectly well. We need some kind of global system that refuses that transfer of title.

Emotionally, I agree with Mr Burke. In practice, I think it will be hard to establish a system for determining what constitutes valid sovereignty without making the international development community even more offensively paternalistic than it already is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Snarky journalistic tid-bit of the day

From The Economist:

BRITISH representatives in Brussels spent the evening before the European-Union summit (held on Thursday June 15th and on Friday) rigging up a television room so Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, could watch England take on Trinidad and Tobago in the World Cup. That interested him more than talk about the constitution, which the rest of the summiteers were scheduled to discuss at the same time. Mr Blair was well advised. European heads of government were gathering on Thursday for a summit that was likely to prove boring and pointless, even by the EU's own demandingly high standards of tedium.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Blast from the past

According to the LA Times:

With inflation heating up amid the prospect of another interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve, some economists said Wednesday they were beginning to worry about a ghost from the past: stagflation.

Their concern over the dreaded affliction of rising prices in a languishing economy--last seen in the 1970s--follows a second day of bad inflation news.

Lisa Girion, Times Staff Writer, appears to have been suffering through a bad breakup, or something else that has caused her to spend the last year holed up in her apartment, eating Ben and Jerry's and paying no attention whatsoever to the economics news.

Not that this is an excuse. I suffered through a rotten breakup last fall. Ben and Jerry and I are no strangers, and I have watched the Science channel special on comets destroying the earth no less than thrice. (Memo to the lovelorn: it will not happen soon enough to end your misery). Nonetheless, the entire time I was very much aware that economists were increasingly worried that high oil prices would simultaneously put inflationary pressure on the broader price index, while depressing the rate of economic growth, bringing the bad old days of the 1970's once more upon us*. I'm not saying that I bought bell bottoms and a pet rock. But I did start pricing platform shoes.

To Lisa Girion, Times Staff Writer, however, this all apparently came as a horrible shock when she finally learned of it this Wednesday, after moderately bad inflation numbers were released. Don't anyone tell her that Brad and Jennifer are through. Too much bad news at once might overwhelm her delicate constitution.

*Actually, not quite. Our economy is more fuel efficient than it used to be, and the central bankers of the 1970s reacted to the oil crises by providing too much liquidity, which brought on the double-digit inflation our parents remember so vividly. Today's central bankers are much more firmly--one might even say suicidally--committed to price stability. Hence they will tamp down on any inflation caused by oil shocks, which will give us more "stag", but less "flate" than the 1970's enjoyed.

Bottom line: don't load up on credit card debt in the expectation that inflation will take care of it for you. Uncle Ben is likely to disappoint you. And bankrupcty isn't as easy as it used to be.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Comment of the week

Thanks, Anony-mouse!

I wonder what the more pithy expression for "pole-vaulting the shark while slathered in bloody chum, and on fire" is.

The lucky winner of this prestigious award gets . . . the tender satisfaction of a job well done.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

If wishes were horses then beggars could ride

It is common, and silly, for people worrying about America's current account deficit to make statements like this:

If the US were a developing nation, it would have been IMFed by now.

And if I were Anna Nicole Smith, I would have absolutely ENORMOUS . . . vacation homes. This is not very relevant to my current summer plans.

Developing nations have to pay extra money to borrow because lenders think that there is a better-than-average chance that they will not pay the money back. Developing economies are more prone to sudden shocks than rich world ones; their tax collecting systems are primitive; their governments tend to have a less-than-sterling committment to international fiscal rectitude; and they are often prone to coups by people who start off their new reign by repudiating all former debts. Moreover, their central bankers tend to be political cronies who will inflate the currency whenever it is politically convenient for those in power, which is why such countries are often required to borrow in a more stable currency, to remove the temptation for heads of state to inflate their way out of inconvenient debts.

Investors are pretty confident that the United States is not going to suddenly shed 25% of its GDP because of a boll weevil infestation, or get a president who nationalises all the farmland, expels half the skilled workers in the country and kills the rest, and runs the Treasury's printing presses day and night as a way to temporarily cover up the ensuing problems. They are reasonably sure that our economy will grow at a steady, if unspectacular pace, and that we will be able to meet their debts (as they should be; both our national debt and our fiscal imbalances are relatively modest by international standards, and look especially good if you compare our long term fiscal position--where the primary driver of imbalances is social security and Medicare--to those of Europe and Japan.) Thus, they lend to us in dollars, and they lend to us at very attractive rates.

One of the reasons that the panickers neglect to mention that all these foreigners are lending us dollars is that in their judgement, the United States is the most likely economy in the world to deliver an attractive combination of growth and low risk.

That is not to say that our fiscal imbalances are not a problem: they are. Getting our fiscal house in order, on both the government and the household level, is not going to be pleasant. But it is ludicrous to talk as if we were the next Argentina.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tee hee

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Minimum wage redux

Greg Mankiw writes about Republicans and the minimum wage. Here's what I wrote not-so-long ago; that's still my opinion.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Regarding Leopold

Would it be wrong to say I told you so? Because I did, you know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Technical question

I am considering dipping a toe into the turbulent waters of videoblogging. Can any of my readers tell me what I would need to do this, and what is the cheapest way to go about it?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Friend Paul sends along this picture, which he noticed while doing some research for a film.

The caption reads as follows:

Many members of the battleship USS New Jersey watch a Japanese prisoner of war bathe himself before he is issued GI clothing on board the ship in the South Pacific in December 1944.

Above and beyond the inevitable comparisons to current practice, I don't understand why this photo was staged this way, unless the POW was pulled out of the ocean in the middle of some sort of 'all hands' exercise.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is America longing for Universal Health Care?

Steve Benen seems to think so:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) agreed in 2003 to create a congressionally-backed panel to work outside DC to find out what Americans actually want from the health care system. Apparently, people said they want universal coverage, guaranteed by the federal government.

To which I respond: of course they do. The existing system costs too much and offers too little to too few people. Since the Clinton plan fell apart in 1994, the country has seen no practical changes, except services cost more and there are more uninsured Americans. A single-payer, universal system -- services are provided by a private healthcare system, but financed by the government -- has to be more appealing than the status quo.

Do they want it? Or do they just say they want it? This may seem like a silly question, but as any market researcher will tell you, it's crucial. Americans told Coca-Cola that they loooooved New Coke. They told Congress that they loved Cat Care. People say all sorts of stuff in surveys that turn out not to be true when they are asked to put their money, or their votes, where their mouth is. A blind taste test where you take two sips of a cola and tell the nice lady who gave it to you that you'd buy it is not the same thing as actually putting a 24-pack into your cart and wheeling it up to the register.

In theory, theory is the same as practice. In practice, it isn't. Voters, and consumers, often like things in abstract that they hate in particular. ClintonCare was very popular right up to the point when people started hearing about the details. And while its proponents attribute its political failure to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and its insidious mind control ads, I find Richard Epstein's argument more convincing: the majority of Americans are quite happy with their health care, and they are only willing to endorse health care programmes that do not require any change in their own health plan. This pretty much precludes any sort of comprehensive reform of the sort Mr Benen clearly hopes for.

In an extensive ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll, Americans by a 2-1 margin, 62-32 percent, prefer a universal health insurance program over the current employer-based system. That support, however, is conditional: It falls to fewer than four in 10 if it means a limited choice of doctors, or waiting lists for non-emergency treatments.

Support for change is based largely on unease with the current system's costs. Seventy-eight percent are dissatisfied with the cost of the nation's health care system, including 54 percent "very" dissatisfied.

Indeed, most Americans, or 54 percent, are now dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States — the first majority in three polls since 1993, and up 10 points since 2000.

Yet apprehension about the system is counterbalanced by broad satisfaction among insured Americans with their own current quality of care, coverage and costs — a situation that tends to encourage a cautious approach to change. While the system is seen to have gaps, flaws and an uncertain future, it's also seen to work for most people.

Among insured Americans, 82 percent rate their health coverage positively. Among insured people who've experienced a serious or chronic illness or injury in their family in the last year, an enormous 91 percent are satisfied with their care, and 86 percent are satisfied with their coverage.

When push comes to shove, insured Americans will take the devil they know over government promises.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

IT's Magic

As you may or may not recall, the cost of Kerry's health care plan was brought under $700 billion in new spending (which it needed to be, because $700 billion was the amount his new taxes were projected to bring in) by the simple expedient of slashing 30% off the bill through "administrative and IT savings". This rather stonkered me. Turning something over to the government is not a known way to produce enormous efficiency improvements in management, even with something as inefficient as the health insurance market. And forecasting cutting edge IT from the government . . . well, the State Department was long known in Washington as the "Prisoners of Wang", because they'd made a hefty investment in Wang computers, only to see the company blow up in 1992.

They didn't get to replace them, I'm told, until well into Colin Powell's stint as secretary. Many offices still don't have internet access.

Having, in a previous life, designed and built computer networks, and also been the child of a trade association executive whose members work on government spec, it seems to me that the American government is the enemy of good IT. This is not because government qua government is somehow necessarily unable to design a good computer system, or because their technical people are morons. Rather, the procurement process that big government projects must go through in America practically guarantees that whatever system is purchased will be, by the time it is installed, bloated, inefficient, and sadly outdated.

By the time you've had a nice long open bidding period, let every congressman on seven or eight committees earmark the legislation to ensure that at least some part of the system is manufactured or maintained in his home district, held public hearings and offered a lengthy public comment time to let everyone in the country have their say about our new computers, had a crack team of civil servants laboriously sift and respond to every comment, including "I think the computers should be a nice, patriotic red, white and blue", had the EPA go through the mandatory Environmental Impact Statement, and wrapped up all the loose ends in conference committee, your shiny new system is so outdated that you might as well give everyone an abacus and a pad of paper. And upgrade it? Are you crazy? Any big upgrade has to go through the whole damn process again. Shut up and go telex Washington to send us more leeches for the cancer ward.

Or at least, that's how I understand it.

Paul Krugman has been pushing the VA as a model of technological medical management. Perhaps they are. But the New Economist offers another vision of what our government could do with a nice big medical IT project, and it comports much better with what little I know about government IT.

The project was given the go ahead in 2002. It was supposed to cost £5 billion and last less than three years. But anyone familiar with the track record of major UK government IT projects will know what happened next. The project is now due to cost £20 billion and last at least a decade. Beezy Marsh reports in today's Sunday Telegraph that 'Computer says no' to Mr Blair's botched £20bn NHS upgrade

The Prime Minister's dream of a 'paperless NHS', using 21st century, state of the art information technology, is in danger of crashing under a mountain of problems. Four years later, the joke is on Mr Blair, and the taxpayer. The "Connecting for Health" project is two years behind schedule and more than three times over its initial £6.2 billion budget.

Lord Warner, the health minister, revealed this week that the real cost of the programme would approach £20 billion by 2010, its revised delivery date. A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) is expected to be damning, suggesting that corners were cut so that political deadlines could be met.

More than £11.75 million of taxpayers' money has been lavished on consultants, including Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse Coopers, PA Consulting, Cap Gemini and IBM. Yet the glitzy, "joined-up" NHS remains a low-tech hotch-potch. Doctors are largely unimpressed. Dr Richard Vautrey, a GP in Leeds and spokesman for the British Medical Association on IT, has struggled for months, for example, to get "choose and book" working. It should enable GPs to offer patients a choice of four hospitals but has been beset by technical difficulties. "It does work in some places, but we haven't been able to get it to," says Dr Vautrey.

The technological challenge appears to have outwitted leading network and software providers, including Accenture and iSoft, and the prognosis is not healthy. Prof Martyn Thomas, visiting professor at Oxford University Computing Laboratory, says: "This programme shows many signs that it is at risk of failing. We are hearing concerns about computer products being used in a way that manufacturers have advised against. These concerns are coming from people who fear their jobs are at risk if they speak out. Problems with computer systems cannot be bullied into submission."

Prof Thomas was among 23 leading computer specialists who recently wrote an open letter to the health select committee, calling for an independent audit. The project was given the go-ahead even though small-scale local trials had not been carried out. Later, it became clear that solving myriad problems would be more expensive than anticipated.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated . . .

America's estate tax should be popular, especially with legislators, since outside of select precincts, the dead cannot vote. Nonetheless, this week Senate Republicans have been pushing to abolish, or at least substantially ease, what they like to style the "death tax". It is currently slated to decline gradually to zero in 2010--and then leap back from the grave in 2011 to slap estates over $1 million with marginal tax rates that can hit 60% for a moderately large estate. This convoluted design was meant to keep the projected cost of the tax down when it was passed in 2001, with the intention of making it permanent later. It began to seem as if later had arrived: the House has already passed a bill, and the Senate moved today to advance the bill. The motion lost by a narrow margin, but Frist is already saying that they'll be voting on it again this year. "Getting rid of the death tax is just too important an issue to give up so easily", quoth he.

Unsurprisingly, vehement opposition has surfaced. Proponents of death duty argue that it is the fairest tax America has, hitting only the unearned inheritances of America's very richest citizens at a time when inequality is on the rise. It also encourages charitable giving, and helps close America's gaping budget deficits. According to data from the Tax Policy Centre, abolition would cost the treasury almost $300 billion between 2011 and 2016; the compromise plans currently on offer from Senators Baucus and Kyl, which would raise the exemptions and lower the tax rate, would cost nearly as much.

Nonsense, retort critics: the tax raises relatively little revenue, and penalizes those who save, rather than squandering their wealth. Taxes on capital, they also point out, slow economic growth more than income taxes. Plus, while the tax is progressive, that progressivity is highly imperfect--according to these figures from the Tax Policy Centre, estates worth $3.5-5 million will face a higher effective tax rate in 2011 than those grossing over $20 million. Why, they ask, support a tax that hits farmers and entrepreneurs harder than the Hiltons?

Who is right? Sob stories about farmers and entrepreneurs seem overblown; though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that estates of farmers and small businessmen are more likely to have trouble paying the taxman, only a small fraction of such estates have difficulties, and there are generous provisions to ease the burden. More generally, it's hard to see how a levy that collects a few tens of billions annually could do serious damage to an economy that produces $13 trillion a year in goods and services.

Opponents of repeal are also on shaky ground, however. The CBO finds surprisingly limited effects on charitable giving, and the revenue raised is indeed small. Even if the current tough provisions­which even many proponents see as too stringent--go into effect as scheduled the $300 billion estimated take is a mere 1.4% of the total tax revenue forecast by the CBO during that period, and not even 12% of the budget deficit.

Every little bit helps, of course. But the levy also has hidden costs, starting with probably billions spent annually on estate planning to avoid it. Assets structured to get around it are often also sheltered from other taxes; high death duties thus may raise less than some estimates suggest. Capital gains revenue is particularly affected thanks to generous exemptions for inherited assets, which are scheduled to go away, at least for big estates, when the estate tax does. Furthermore, to the extent that they slow capital formation and GDP growth, they will further lower future tax revenues.

The fact that the tax collects a small amount of revenue from a few, very well off people, may be beside the point. The battle is as much emotional as economic, pitting property rights and family feeling against a desire to do something about growing inequality.

But America's widening income distribution cannot be blamed on bequests. According to Piketty and Saez, while in 1929 the wealthiest Americans derived more than 70% of their income from invested capital, and only 30% from wages or entrepreneurship, by 1998 the very rich got only 20% of their income from investments. Wealth may be more worrisome, but it's hardly a growing problem right now--though there's a decent argument that it might be, without the estate tax. Currently, however, it seems the problem is shrinking, not growing. In 1985, over half of the Forbes 400 had inherited at least some of their wealth, but only 145 of the people on the 2005 list said the same, even though estate tax collections have been at historically low levels in the interim. These days, the most important things affluent Americans bequeath to their children seem to be expensive educations, soaring ambition, and the right connections--all difficult to tot up for the taxman.

This may be why, despite the superficial allure of sending Paris Hilton to the poorhouse for a dose of reality sans television, Americans don't seem very keen on the estate tax. That explains why the Republican congress is focused on abolishing this rather insignificant tax, rather than serious tax reform—even among registered Democrats, polls show support for lowering or abolishing it. Abolition looks politically unlikely. But even with a tough midterm election looming in November, the odds Republicans will secure some sort of reform look almost as certain as, well, death and taxes.

(see also Tyler Cowen, Brad de Long, Professor Bainbridge, and Greg Mankiw)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Superhomo economicus

Tyler Cowen is soliciting suggestions for superheroic feats to save the economy:

Let's say we had an altruistic and incorruptible Superman, how should he allocate his efforts to improve the macroeconomy? He is really strong, he can fly very fast, leap tall buildings at a single bound, has incredible vision, and somehow he is immune from Einstein's theory of relativity and time dilation at near-light speeds (his most impressive achievement, if you ask me).

Yes he should save the world from evil madmen, but fighting ordinary crime hardly appears worth his trouble. Criminals seek pure transfers, and Superman's policing doesn't lower our (inefficient) investments in locks enough to make a difference in the growth rate. It's about as silly as having Superman sub in for FedEx when the skies get crowded over Memphis.

And should his alter ego, Clark Kent, really be a photographer for a daily newspaper? At least that guy is contributing to a reproducible output; he must have read Sherwin Rosen's paper.

Hmmm . . . some possibilities:

1) Go after political rent seeking--with garden shears if necessary. Coastal city zoning boards might be a good first target.

2) Use his x-ray vision and superhearing to remedy the problem of asymmetrical information. I mean the phenomenon, not the blog. Though if superman does order me to close down the blog, he probably won't have to ask twice. Considering what he does to women he likes.

3) Fighting the enemies of free trade. Jacques Chirac, I'm looking at you.

4) Anti-corruption enforcer in Africa. With x-ray vision and superhearing this shouldn't be difficult--and how many African kleptocrats can afford kryptonite?

Any more suggestions?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of missing data

A ways back, I meditated on the awfulness of the data available on the mechanism by which the morning-after pill (and by extension, the ordinary birth-control pill), prevents pregnancy.

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!

I had a chance to air this theory at a dinner party this weekend with some science-y types, where a throwaway remark about the birth control pill preventing ovulation led to an intense discussion over whether or not this was true. A British woman who had in a previous life done a graduate degree in biochemistry was stonkered by my casual assertion that the pill prevent