Asymmetrical Information

Question of the day

Talking on the phone today, I was reminded of this passage from The Age of Innocence, which I've always loved:

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.

Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being. . . .

Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "Hullo, father: this is something like, isn't it?" They stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the young man continued: "By the way, I've got a message for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past five."

He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave for Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's malice.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued. "Fanny made me swear to do three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from Buenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's. And she's our cousin, of course. So I rang her up this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her."

Archer continued to stare at him. "You told her I was here?"

"Of course--why not?" Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a confidential pressure.

"I say, father: what was she like?"

Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze. "Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren't you? Wasn't she most awfully lovely?"

"Lovely? I don't know. She was different."

"Ah--there you have it! That's what it always comes to, doesn't it? When she comes, SHE'S DIFFERENT--and one doesn't know why. It's exactly what I feel about Fanny."

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. "About Fanny? But, my dear fellow--I should hope so! Only I don't see--"

"Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric! Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. "What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out," he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

"My Fanny?"

"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't," continued his surprising son.

"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

"No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--"

"Your mother?"

"Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone--you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."

"No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other
anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? If you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got to rush out to Versailles afterward."

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied. . . . And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.

What's your favourite passage? Under one page, please.

Update

After reading this post, which asked "how much music is enough?" my friend Alistair pressed upon me this classical music box set the last time I was in New York. He himself described his gift, with his typical snobby flair, as "Surprisingly adequate, in a late-night television sort of way." A verdict I now heartily endorse. However, I am sorry to report that 1600 songs is also not enough.

How old are you really?

Scott Adams asks, what's your permanent age?

I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42-years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.

When I ask people about their permanent age, they usually beg it off by saying they don’t have one. But if you press, you always get an answer. And the age they pick won’t surprise you. Some people are kids all their lives. They will admit they are 12-years old. Other people have always had senior citizen interests and perspectives. If you’re 30-years old in nominal terms, but you love bingo and you think kids should stop wearing those big baggy pants and listening to hip-hop music, your permanent age might be 60.

I suspect mine is somewhere between 18 and 25. Does that surprise you? And what's your permanent age?

All politics is local

Gack. This terrible, terrible study on Justice department investigations is all over my favourite liberal blogs. Over at Free Exchange, we discuss why it's so awful:

But it seems to me that there is another, at least equally parsimonious explanation: local officials in cities are, as far as I know, overwhelmingly disproportionately Democrats. Cities are also much more likely to be targeted by corruption investigations, for two reasons: they offer more opportunities for corruption, because they provide more services, and officials are much more removed from the local population; and they offer opportunities for bigger thefts. Proportionately, stealing $7,000 from the Phelps, New York town beautification fund may be as big a blow as stealing $5 million from the New York City sewer system, but only the latter is likely to trigger a federal investigation. Also, small towns or counties have fewer officials, which means fewer people in on any corruption, which means fewer whistle-blowers to take down a conspiracy.

This thesis would also explain why there is no variation at the national and state levels; statewide offices offer sufficient scope for corruption in any state that any illicit activity is likely to bring Justice swooping down.

And indeed, when I look at the list of local investigations, they seem to be disproportionately concentrated in urban areas. To decide that this is a plot of some kind, I would have to compare the results from the Bush justice department to the Clinton justice department, an obvious check that the authors inexplicably decline to make. Instead, they calculate the chi-square as if Republican and Democratic politicians were randomly (i.e. basically evenly) distributed throughout the population. I'd declare this study not worth the paper it's written on, if only it weren't in electronic format.

At Matt Yglesias', commenter Brett Bellmore points out that it may even worse than that; according to him, the study didn't look at actual incidents, but only media accounts. Needless to say, the majority of media accounts of federal corruption investigations are going to come from major daily papers. And where do you find major daily papers? In big cities. And who dominates the political scene in big cities?

Is this really all you can expect from a communications professor? Someone needs to take their computers away until they promise to take Statistics 101 and actually listen this time, instead of just staring blankly at the pretty shapes on the board.

Update More here.

Little Brother is watching you

You would think that an organisation which calls itself the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and which says its mission is to "enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding", would try to do things that would make Americans like Islam more. Unfortunately, whatever public relations geniuses run the organisation have a positively uncanny knack for finding a case where muslims or Arabs have been wronged, sticking their oars in, and somehow screwing things up so badly that at the end of it all, net Arab/Muslim hatred in the country has increased 15%. Case in point: last November, some muslim clerics were removed from a flight and questioned after passengers reported them for "suspicious activity". This crazy, unwonted behaviour? The muslim clerics were . . . dressed like religious muslims. And praying to Mecca, as devout muslims are commanded to do five times a day. Needless to say, this is not exactly America's proudest hour. Hell, I've been known to cop a rosary in the terminal on stormy days, and I'm an agnotheist.

CAIR, of course, could not just milk this for the publicity; they helped the Imam hire a bright-boy lawyer who announced his intention to . . . sue the panicking passengers. That'll foster interfaith understanding.

Via Julian, I now see that Michelle Malkin is ratcheting up the whole sordid business one more hysterical notch with this delightful piece on our nation of citizen spies. I'm not quite sure why she felt the need to announce to all the Arabs and Muslims in America that they are being watched like hawks. It seems to me that after six of their religious leaders were detained by the government for, er, acting religious, they probably already know.

No need to be cruel

As people who know me in the real world can attest, I'm kind of a nut on the subject of animal cruelty. Not like a PETA nut--I nearly snarfed a milkshake all over the vegan friend who told me it was better for cows not to exist at all than to "live as a slave". You know, anthropomorphism is a form of speciesism.

But while I don't think it's necessarily immoral to kill animals for food, I do have serious moral problems with industrial farming. What happens to many animals in industrial farms may well actually be worse than death. Which would you prefer: a nice clean bullet, or spending the rest of your life confined in a cage only inches bigger than you are, with a barred floor so that your excrement can drop down onto the people below you . . . and guess what's coming from above? Don't forget having your nails and teeth removed so that you can't get into fights with others at the food bin.

This is an approximate description of what happens to industrially farmed chickens . . . lifted, mind you, from a business school case aimed at helping industrial farms be more efficient, by using rose coloured chicken contact lenses to cut down on the need for debeaking 'em*. Every rapacious MBA I've ever met who has been given a tour of an industrial farm by the owners, in the course of analysing the business for a bank or consultancy, has seriously considered going vegetarian. It's basically completely appalling.

So anyone who knows me who gets me on the topic is forced to sit through my impassioned plea to support certified humane meat, eggs and milk. Yes, they cost more. But we're a rich society, and morally, I think it's worth it to maybe eat vegetarian once a week so that the rest of the time, you can put meat on the table knowing that it didn't require years of torturing some poor animal to produce. The ASPCA and the Humane Society are doing a wonderful job with Certified Humane, which sets standards for cage-free products and inspects the farms to ensure that they're being met. If you make an effort to buy these products, you'll be helping change farming processes in America to alleviate animal suffering . . . and, if you're a conservative, making agribusiness a less efficient player in food markets, giving small farm communities a little breathing room.

This is not some nutty pinko philosophy. There are a decent number of libertarian vegetarians, as a post I recently pointed to documented. And a surprisingly large number of my acquaintances with impeccably classical liberal credentials, such as Clive Crook of the National Journal and The Atlantic, share my opinion that this is a major moral issue. Now it turns out that Andrew Sullivan is another such. Via his blog today I find that Burger King is switching to cage free products. If you care about animals, I heartily urge you to support their action by switching to BK for your fast food needs. Sure, the fries suck . . . but so do McDonalds', now that they're free of trans fats, tallow, beef flavor . . . and any detectable texture or taste. BK's burgers are better anyway. And if nothing else, you might save capitalism, by illustrating to environmentalists that markets can solve problems, as well as create them.

* No, seriously, I'm not making this up. Unfortunately, the contact lenses don't work very well, so they never made it in the marketplace.

Living in a state of fear

If you feel you just can't get enough of me on video, here's the webcast of my panel on Tuesday. The big 80's hair is courtesy of Clive, my hairdresser, who just can't stand the idea of wasting my luxuriant ringlets. The utterly wrong bio is courtesy of my magazine's publicity department.

I'm definitely the weakest link on the panel, in part because I was a last minute sub, and spent much of the preceding weekend packing instead of preparing my schtick; I rambled and looked at my hands a lot. But my co-panelists were excellent. And I improve on the Q&A!

Economics and music

We've got a ton of posts about the music industry up at Free Exchange right now. I urge you to head over and comment.

Soooo . . .

I'm definitely being evicted in NYC, as of April 30th. I've got a place to stay through the summer, but my mother needs a place for ten weeks while she's in pulmonary rehab at Mount Sinai. Anyone have a lead on a short-term sublet in New York City that's reasonably priced?

Serendipity

There's a new photo of me on Wikipedia. Believe it or not, I did not intend to dress like the wall; the effect was entirely unintentional.

Very strange moment of the day

The award goes to riding in an elevator with a late-forties businessman with the requisite subtly pinstriped navy suit, brightly shined shoes, white shirt, slightly florid face, and criminally boring tie. One hand on his wheely suitcase, the other fiddling with his blackberry. Fingers tapping impatiently as we slowly rose towards the top floor.

Why is this weird, I hear you cry. Well, because he absolutely reeked of marijuana. I mean, twelve year old boys doing bong hits in the powder room are more subtle than this. Who could he possibly have been? The director of ad sales from High Times?

But my Aunt in Dubuque hates it!

I have a new bloggingheads up with Jonathan Chait, during which I complained about the general tendency for health care books to engage in "argument through anecdote", where the data plays a distant second fiddle to the heartrending stories about x person who didn't get good treatment. So single-payer advocates drag out some American woman who didn't get a breast exam until it was too late, and opponents counter with the Canadian guy who died on the waiting list to see an oncologist.

These are stupid two ways. First, there's often little evidence that these people would have been saved by a different system. Even in Canada, there are people who don't bother to get an annual mammogram; even in America, there are people who die of cancer before they get any treatment. Jonathan Cohn's book, which I just finished, is a prime example of this. Of the people whose conscience-stabbing stories he uses to tie together his chapters, I'd estimate that fewer than half would even probably have had noticeably different outcomes under a nationalised system. (Although to be fair, I'd really have to go back and count up.) I would say that the probability approaches zero, for example, that the illegal immigrants would have been covered by any national system. Then there's the guy whose wife thinks his death was caused in part by the stress of arguing with the health insurer. When the examples are this weak, you kinda start wondering how big the problem can possibly be; couldn't he have found some people who would obviously have been better off in Canada?

The other problem is that in any system, there will be people who are failed by that system. There is no pareto improving health care plan, and the attempt to pretend there is by both sides of the debate drives me completely bonkers. I tried to say that in the discussion, but apparently failed; Matthew Yglesias takes me to task for saying something I certainly didn't mean:

Near the beginning of the health care section of her diavlog with Jon Chait, Megan McArdle correctly observes that no one health care system can serve every person as well as they might be served, and then says "What you're looking for is the average or the median." Jon gives this the old "right, right" hoping to move on to more debatable concerns, but I think it is worth saying that a health care system that this is less obviously true than one might think. Simply abolishing Medicaid would, after all, have no real impact on the typical middle-class, middle-aged American and would leave room for him to pay lower taxes. It would just be, you know, wrong.

What I was trying to say, as I posted in the comments, is that you have to look at the median or the mean, not the tails. You can always find someone in any system who has slipped through the cracks; this is not a particularly good guide to health care policy.

Okay, maybe I'm just an urban snob. But what's the big fuss about cars that parallel park themselves? Parallel parking is just not that hard. I mean, I'm not against it, but from the video, it seems like setting up the car to park is more of a pain in the ass than just parking it, plus the actual parking process takes longer than doing it yourself, and it doesn't do quite as good a job.

Plus the people doing the parking in the video pick a space big enough to front park in. It doesn't exactly make me long to go out and buy a car with this feature. Show me the Lexus shoehorning itself into a space big enough for a Corolla, and I'll get excited.

Update Sorry, I was unclear. Obviously, if you live in a rural area, you don't get much rpactice parallel parking, so you're not good at it . . . but you also don't need this car. I was trying to ask, who is the market for this thing?

As cooks go, I'm definitely an amateur. And I like to experiment with my own recipes; everything I made for my Bloggingheads.tv bout with Spencer Ackerman was an exclusive Jane creation. Nor am I averse to using processed foods; the best beef Stroganoff I've ever eaten is my mother's recipe, which involves chili sauce and ketchup.

But still . . . Velveeta fudge? I was going to say something witty, but I'm afraid I can't go on; I feel quite faint.

Mental note . . . time for a mammogram

The reports about Elizabeth Edwards are making me quite sad, perhaps because breast cancer rather runs in my family. The campaign is talking about this being treatable, but my sense is that this is rather a euphemism; once you have bone mets, you're talking about a few years at most. It's a terrible tragedy for him and their kids, who I seem to recall are quite young.

It makes a fellow proud to be a libertarian

I can't say I'm thrilled to find that there is a statistically significant minority of my ideological quasi-brethren lining up to tell me that it's a terrible idea to try and help poor kids with the school system. For one thing, my interlocutors say, the driving factor in the quality of a school is the quality (for which, read Socio-Economic Status) of its kids. And for another, it's immoral to take money from people to educate someone else's children.

The first point is echoed on the left (though they think this calls for massive income redistribution . . . as if giving someone another $15K a year in income will somehow magically make them care whether their child gets in fights or does their homework.) I don't deny that it is empirically true; people who are screwed up tend to be low SES, and unsurprisingly, they also tend to have screwed up kids. But it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off. Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task. In our system, however, any school that manages to do so achieves this feat only through heroic efforts to overcome the institutional barriers put in the way. For various reasons, this is not happening. I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn't it? I think it's the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.

Can the school system overcome all the handicaps that disadvantaged kids are born with? I doubt it. But it could certainly do better . . . and it could hardly do worse than many urban school districts.

Then there's the taxation is theft crowd. I'm sorry if my nom de blog fooled you, but I'm not that sort of libertarian. Children are a perennial problem for libertarians, but what it boils down to is this: children (and to my mind, the severely disabled), have positive rights. They have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else's dime. And if their parents abdicate this responsibility, then it passes onto the community, including the state, even if none of us asked said parent to reproduce. So arguing that educating poor children is immoral . . . well, I hardly know what to say, except remind me not to get into a lifeboat with you.

Grim Reader identifies me as a "veg-er-tarian": a libertarian vegetarian. Or in my case, a "vegetarian dabbler". Which describes me about right. Since I went to college, I've spent about equal amounts of time as vegetarian and carnivore; undoubtedly I'll go back to it at some point again. Even in my carnivorous period, I don't eat that much meat, not because I make a conscious effort, but because after spending years as a vegetarian, I no longer have that American sense that a meal without meat in it isn't really a meal. I actually prefer vegetables to meat. Seriously.

Which brings me to the actual point of this post. A friend of mine, who is not now and has never been a member of the Friendly Order of Non Carnivores, has decided to go vegetarian four to five days a week, mostly because they're getting pretty unhealthy. I tossed some of my easier recipes their way (no nut loaf or "delicious gluten stir fry!") The caveat is that they're looking for recipes without cheese, the eternal resort of the time pressed vegetarian; and they have a small baby.

What can my readers suggest? I'll offer up the absolute easiest thing I know how to make:

1 box lentil pilaf mix (I prefer Near East brand)
1/2 box pre-sliced mushrooms
1/2 yellow onion, chopped
dried sour cherries or cranberries (optional)
Black pepper grinder
Crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon butter

Make the mix according to directions. When the water is boiling, add all the ingredients, especially a ton of black pepper. Cook. Eat with a nice green salad. Tossing in a handful of toasted pecans never hurt either.

What's your easiest meatless, cheeseless dish?

Oh, no.

Public Appearance Alert

I'll be skulking around the New School tomorrow evening, appearing on a panel on risk. If you're in New York City, please come on down.

Please, permit me to 'splain

Kevin Drum says that my previous post on vouchers proves that I'm just in the business of union-busting. His commenters add to that my fierce committment to racial segregation, and of course, my desire to get taxpayers to subsidise my children in parochial schools.

As a childless agnotheist, I must protest that last. And the first two, as well. I have no particular interest in the teachers' unions, except insofar as I think they are an obstacle to reform. And if I could take all the disadvantaged minorities in the country and sprinkle them throughout the nation's lily-white high-performance school districts like so much cayenne pepper, I would, except that I'm pretty thoroughly revolted by the white paternalist liberalism implied by that sort of sentiment. At any rate, you'll have to accept on faith (or not) that I'm not trying to make Our Schools Whiter. Not that I'm sure how this could be accomplished, short of spraying the nation's affluent suburbs with a solution composed of two parts extra-strength Clorox to one part miracle whip.

Let's establish some of the basics which seem obvious to me:

1) The American educational system sucks.

2) It particularly sucks for poor and minority kids

3) It has sucked in approximately the same way for at least forty years.

4) The institutional barriers to not sucking are apparently insurmountable with the current interest groups in place.

5) It is extremely segregated by class, race, and income

6) It is extremely hard to recruit and keep good teachers

7) As a result, the schools with the most attractively upper middle class parents and children get almost all of the good teachers

8) The main reason that it is hard to get good teachers (outside of rural areas where it is hard to get good anyone to move there) is that their pay, unlike that of other union workers, is at the bottom of the distribution for their education level.

9) Given that the pay is at the bottom of the distribution for educated professionals, one of the primary attractions of the job is its short workyear and near-ironclad job security. Short of molesting the students or screaming racial epithets at them, it's awfully hard to get fired from a teaching position.

10) Jobs whose primary attraction is short hours and the difficulty of getting fired rarely attract the cream of the crop. The best teachers are either those few gifted passionate souls who want to teach, or women who are trying to match their schedule to that of their children. The latter group is shrinking; the former group has always been small.

11) Any meaningful reform of the school system that actually improves them will need to pay teachers much more.

12) Paying the current group of teachers much more will improve their standard of living immeasurably, but will do absolutely nothing for the students.

13) Therefore, coupled with higher teacher pay must come the ability to get rid of substandard teachers

14) This is not remotely feasible within the existing system

15) The programmes which have been shown to work best with disadvantaged kids are the ones that are heavily scripted, involve lots of repetition and rote learning, and otherwise make life no fun for the teacher.

16) These programmes are rarely implemented, implying that teaching disadvantaged kids to read and do math are somewhere well down the priority list of your average school district.

17) Monopolies are rarely responsive to their customers.

18) School board elections are not a particularly good way to gather feedback on school performance, but other than lawsuits, it is the single mechanism currently available to school districts. School board elections are a particularly bad way to gather feedback in very large, dysfunctional polities like cities.

19) A school where parents may pull their children at any moment is a school that worries about pleasing parents and children.

20) The government cannot hand out money without making sure schools meet basic requirements, like having a building, teachers, and some students. Any voucher programme will also have to periodically test kids to ensure that they are making progress.

21) This is not the same thing as imposing the same set of elaborate regulations on everything from teacher hours to eraser purchasing that currently hamstring public schools, and then complaining that voucher schools don't do any better.

22) Current teacher certification standards are lunatic protectionism promulgated by education schools collecting fat rents for slapping a laminate veneer of professionalism on educators. Any one I have ever met who has done a real degree, and then sat through education classes, has attested to their utter lack of useful content. We have math teachers who are very good at making posters about race, and very bad at math. The way to teach someone to teach is to give them some elementary child psychology, and then have them practice on actual children, who will illustrate the folly of listening to professors of child psychology. "Teacher standards" are the absolute last thing we should be imposing on voucher programmes. Principals are pretty good at figuring out if a teacher can teach.

23) Any voucher programme will have to offer bonuses for educating difficult kids: poor kids, kids with emotional problems, kids with learning disabilities, and so forth. Otherwise, those kids will end up stuck in a ghetto. On the other hand, if you get the pricing right, you don't need to worry about lotteries and so forth.

24) To hell with rich people: if you're in, say, the top 5-10% of the income distribution, you ought to get the same help educating your kids as my parents got, which is to say none.

25) Some people will be worse off under this system. There is no change ever that leaves every single person better off. This is not a reason to avoid change.

In short, I want to disempower all the groups currently agitating for Status Quo + More Government Cash, which includes, but certainly is not limited to, the teachers' unions. In exchange, I think I can give Democrats something I assume they want more than teachers' unions, which is a decent educational system.

But it's not because I want to gut the Democratic party. (I'm pretty sure that the Democratic party can survive without a big teachers' union bloc.) It's because incremental top down reform has so far mostly funneled more money into existing bad schools, with no better results. I want to change the system so that it works more like . . . something that works, like my local grocery store. I want to take the focus of the debate off the damn teachers, and put it back on the children. The teachers already had their shot. I want a voucher system not because I have it in for teachers, but because I want a school system that is more responsive, child focused, creative, outcome-oriented, and effective. I think that schools that have to meet basic standards and treat parents like customers are more likely to be this way than government monopolies where elections generally centre around one of two questions:

1) Who was the incumbent mean to at the last PTA meeting?

2) Shall we teach evolution and sex ed?

I'd just assumed that it was understood that I was willing to pay higher taxes if necessary to achieve better outcomes; that any voucher programme would have to test outcomes (which should obviate the need to control inputs); that difficult to educate children would need to come attached to some kind of bonus to help schools educate them; and so forth. But since that was apparently not obvious, yes, I am willing to double spending per student, to the tune of $500 billion a year if such a sum should be necessary, not because I enjoy seeing the AFT writhe in agony, but because I would very much enjoy seeing most of the kids in America get a decent education.

In the comments to an earlier post, LizardBreath says that her inner-city school is just fine:

Is it really conceivable that kids in inner city schools could get a worse education even from some awful fly-by-night unit where the books are written in Swahili, than they are currently enjoying right there at PS 82?

Yes, it is conceivable. I'm a well paid lawyer, and I send my kids to an inner city public school in the sense that the word is generally used in, rather than some elite high income program: the student body is probably better than 70% Latino, and around 50% first generation immigrant and low income. And I'm not sending them there out of some sort of deranged martydom -- they and their classmates are getting an excellent education.

There are certainly problems in American public education, but approaching it with the idea that there's nothing for students to lose from change, because nothing could possibly be worse for poor kids than the current status quo is wrong. Things could be worse, and things certainly could be more stratified.

This sent us off into a debate about whether Washington Heights is, or is not, in the inner city. Washington Heights is a lot like the neighbourhood I grew up in was (it has since gentrified); moderately violent, moderately poor, but with a pretty heavy leavening of paler, more affluent people supporting the school system. Our latest exchange:

My school was very moderately dangerous, and certainly not challenging for a bright kid, but in no way qualified as an inner city public school; the kids in the inner city schools ended up illiterate, and more than occasionally, dead.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 19, 2007 2:27 PM

Isn't your definition of 'inner city school' begging the question? All the inner city schools are nightmarishly disfunctional, and the racially and economically integrated school you attended in what is literally an 'inner city' doesn't qualify as an 'inner city school' because it wasn't a nightmare.

Sure, if that's the definition of 'inner city school', there's nothing good about any of them.

Posted by: LizardBreath on March 19, 2007 2:36 PM

Yes, we are using a different definition of "inner city". LizardBreath's definition is closer to that used by most of the people I went to business school with: if there is a significant number of poor, brown people in a neighbourhood, it must be the ghetto. Perhaps because I grew up in a neighbourhood with a large number of poor, brown people, this is not my definition.

My definition of "inner city" is "a neighbourhood with no middle class". East New York. Mott Haven. Morrisania. The old Bedford Stuyvesant. Camden, NJ. And so forth. Those are the neighbourhoods with the really astonishing social dysfunction, crime rates, and so forth. And those are the neighbourhoods where the schools are complete disasters. In part, it is that the parents aren't engaged; it's no use pretending that a major reason middle-class parents choose their childrens' schools is that they want to choose for their children a peer group which will encourage said children to behave in desireable ways. They also make the local school district toe the line.

But that is not the only reason. The other reason is that teachers in New York are paid and perked by seniority. There is no incentive to work in a failing school unless you're a martyr. The first thing almost any new teacher does as soon as they've accumulated enough points is transfer out of the crap school they started out in. Experienced teachers seek middle class parents every bit as much as those parents seek experienced teachers. The result is that LizardBreath's kids get the best of everything.

A voucher system is not a panacea. But it offers some poor, desperate parents a way to get out of their failing neighbourhood; it offers some good teachers a pay-based incentive to stay with difficult kids; it offers some reason for mediocre teachers to at least try to educate the little darlings; it offers some innovating educators a chance to make a difference. None of these things is true in the current system, and the current system is so captured by interlocking interest groups patting each other on the back that little short of dynamite will alter the fundamental dynamic.

LizardBreath is a great blogger and undoubtedly a fine mom. But she's also a well-paid lawyer. Her kids should not be getting more out of the public system than some kid growing up in a Bronx housing project. If vouchers do nothing but correct that small inequity, it might be worth it. Certainly, for LizardBreath to declare that the public schools must be better than the alternatives because they aren't failing her kids seems . . . well, just not right.

Quote of the day

Why should I fear death? Where death is, I am no longer. And where I am, death is not.

~Epicurus.

Okay, so I'm a little disappointed to find out that I'm not on the list of distinguished alumni in my high school's Wikipedia entry. (Two classmates--Danielle Levy, who runs Daily Candy, and actress Tracee Ross, are) But my dismay was entirely eclipsed by learning that Joss Whedon graduated from good old RCS a mere ten years before me. I feel so special.

Matt says I misunderstood him. Although actually, I was responding mostly to the commenters, except for the last paragraph. But let's parse the original post. As I see it, there are a few main points:

1) A voucher system which required lottery admission, gave out more money on the basis of disadvantage, and required schools to meet certain standards, would be preferable to the current system.

2) We can't, however, get there, because there are too many political obstacles.

a) It would be unconstitutional
b) It's not feasible politically
c) It's not feasible institutionally

3) Therefore maybe we can muck around with charters, but don't go crazy!

Point 1 we agree on; I think it's fair to say that a voucher should not be used at Tom's House of Arithmetic and Billiards. We undoubtedly will quibble about the details, but that's a negotiation for later.

Point 2a seems silly in the context of a national healthcare debate; if nationalising the healthcare system can be done under the commerce clause, I bet I can find room for education, too.

Points 2 (b&c) aren't well enough fleshed out to have misunderstood. Matt believes that there are substantial institutional and political obstacles to getting to a system like the one we both agree would be preferable to the current system. And I concur. Our difference is that I think Matt and other like-minded people are among the political obstacles, not because they are bad people, but because by fighting against vouchers, they give ideological cover to the teachers' unions and suburban homeowners who are fiercely protecting their turf. Come over to our side, outline a voucher plan you'd accept, and as long as it doesn't include "all schools must employ union teachers under centrally negotiated contracts that protect seniority and outlandish grievance procedures", I'll sign on. Central testing? Fine. You want to make sure they serve organic seaweed salad in the lunchroom? If that's what it takes to get you and other liberals into the voucher camp, I'll agree to that too. Double spending per student, for all I care. Libertarians and conservatives are standing here with the door open, ready to negotiate, and so far, no one's even wandered by.

Of course, I don't know that such a system would pass. But why not give it the old college try? Surely it's better than all of us just sitting around complaining about NCLB some more, though I acknowlege it's a poor substitute for appointing either Matt or me to the position of Education God.

This is the most fun I've had all week. Infer what you like about my week.

Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum respond to yesterday's question about single-payer education versus single-provider education.

I can build a pretty cogent argument in favour of single-provider education based on equity. We could conceivably say that we want every child in the country to receive a uniform educational product, in the interests of levelling the playing field as much as possible before we send them out to compete in Life's Great Rugby Scrum.

But I can only construct this argument if I completely ignore what American education actually looks like. Democrats complaining that a voucher system would lead to massive stratification by income leave me slightly flabbergasted. In what way could our educational system possibly become more stratified than it already is, short of just pulling poor kids out of school entirely and sending them to work in the coal mines at age six? Is it really conceivable that kids in inner city schools could get a worse education even from some awful fly-by-night unit where the books are written in Swahili, than they are currently enjoying right there at PS 82? I mean, at least they might learn a little Swahili.

But that is not what we want say opponents of school choice, and in many cases I believe them.¹ What we want is a system that funnels the most resources to the poorest and neediest kids. We want Denmark's public education system.

Believe it or not, that is what many voucher advocates want too.² We have noticed that the programmes introduced to help the poor and needy . . . the magnet schools, the special education, the smaller class sizes, and so forth . . . somehow always end up captured by middle-class parents who are motivated, and know how to game the system. In fact, it's almost an iron law: if you introduce a good programme into any school system, almost no one will benefit from it except middle class parents. All of these well-meaning schemes are, in fact, a bigger subsidy to middle class parents who don't need it than a voucher would be; at least they won't be getting any more public funds than low-income kids. Charter schools initially started in the hopes of helping needy kids, if they are good, end up with their lotteries flooded by every middle class parent who is willing to spend 45 minutes each way driving little junior to school.

Meanwhile, the teacher's unions are making sure that any teacher with experience gets to transfer out of low-income schools as soon as they have dried out behind the ears.

Given these political imperatives, how could a voucher system possibly be worse?

Matthew's argument is that politically, a different kind of system is not possible. Well, yes, it's not, as long as nice people like he and Kevin line up with the teachers' unions to oppose any substantive change to the current system that don't involve giving tmore teachers a whole lot more money without asking them to do anything much to earn it.

¹ In many cases I do not. In my opinion, the organised political resistance to school vouchers is about 60% kowtowing to the teacher's unions because they are a) unions, and unions are awesome! and b) the single biggest interest group in the Democratic party. The remaining 40% is mostly an emotional reaction by homeowners who have managed to snag homes in decent school districts, and are horrified by the thought that their massive investment will suddenly be rendered near-worthless. Maybe 2% is some sort of well-thought out logical reaction.

² Just as on the anti-voucher side, there are a number of less noble motives; a desire to break the power of the teachers' unions in the Democratic party, and a yearning on some peoples' part for the government to subsidize something that they are already doing.

So here it is a foul, disgusting Sunday morning in New York City. The streets are covered in slush, and the corners have accumulated deep puddles that look like something might be living in them. Like, the Loch Ness monster. I, wisely, am sitting inside, watching the political shows with my Dad on his shiny new HDTV while silently girding my loins for the coming battle with packing tape and bubble wrap. Did I mention I'm being evicted? But I digress.

The first thing you notice about HDTV is that some of the politicians look really awful. Studio makeup is not enough to cover up the sagging, cragging, and pitting of all those cruel years in Congress. Some of them look fine . . . John Kerry is positively handsome, if you like men who look kind of like a wrinkly old orange. (Can't his wife buy him a really convincing fake tan? Sigh. Yet another reason not to bother getting rich.) Others—and you know who you are, Senator Specter—not so much. Charles Schumer has a deep crease on the side of his forehead that looks like he slept on his glasses . . . on top of a lit stove. And Tim Russert seems to have a little rosacea problem.

There has been talk about this problem for a while among television personalities and . . . er . . . adult entertainers. Today, though, it suddenly occurred to me that this might have an impact on the 2008 election. Just as the introduction of television famously altered voter perceptions of the candidates in the 1960 election (those who listened to the debate thought that Nixon had won, but those who saw it on television overwhelmingly favoured the more telegenic Kennedy), HDTV could skew who we nominate and/or elect.

For example, though I've never met him, my understanding from those who have is that McCain's image of vitality is very carefully projected, and that when you actually meet him up close, he looks pretty frail. Will that come out on HDTV? How about Hilary? HDTV is least kind to older women; I'd bet it puts at least ten years on her. I suspect that Obama is the only candidate who will actually look good on HDTV; he's younger, and even light black skin ages better than caucasian. I'm tempted to side with Drezner against Cowen solely on the distribution of HDTVs in the country.

Tee-hee

McMegan? I've been thinking about buying a new nickname . . . maybe I'll use that one.

Good question

Why do men and women have such different handwriting styles?

More fun with Matt Yglesias' commenters

I actually found the previous post while looking for this comment thread on guns, because it's filled with so much thoroughly bizarre fun. I read it a week ago, and thought "I should blog that", but only now do I have time . . . because when I stop blogging, I have to start packing all my things in preparation for my eviction.

First prize goes to eloquent parodiest Enfant Terrible:

Second Amendment only gives you the right to serve in the military. The interpretation that it gives you the right to own weapons for private use is right-wing hogwash.

However, a follow up comment indicates that he may not be joking, and in fact believes that the second amendment was intended to protect our sacred right to join hte army:

ut I will shoot bad guys that break into my home and threaten my family. That's a basic responsibility.

How far would you pursue that responsibility? Would you shoot drivers who don't stop when you are trying to cross the street? They are more likely than burglars to kill you or your family members.

Then there is this prize:

The relative safety of guns in urban v. rural areas changes enormously. Unfortunately, you can't just ban guns in urban areas because they're still easy enough for criminals to obtain if they're legal in the next county. So you've got to ban them everywhere, which pisses of people like Gus who live in areas where guns are ordinary and not particularly dangerous.

So gun control advocates look to types of guns to limit. No cheap handguns or assault weapons. Fewer weapons designed for killing human beings. Most Americans can get behind these kinds of restrictions because they're very sensible and don't significantly put out ordinary gun owners.

But these types of reforms haven't happened because the gun lobby, led by the NRA, is the most effective lobbying group ithe past 20 years.

Posted by: Mavis Beacon on March 9, 2007 06:10 PM

Get it? Guns don't kill people. Black people kill people.

I was kind of shocked by Lindsay Bayerstein, who I'm pretty sure is not joking. I was originally under the impression that she must be living in some small town in South Dakota, based on her posts, but a friend tells me she is a resident of my own fair native city. Which is why things like this are a tad surprising:

If you're worried about burglary, just insure your stuff.

I can see someone wanting a gun for self-protection if they had a violent stalker who might be plotting to hunt them down. But buying a gun to protect yourself in the event of a burglary is no protection at all. Turning on the lights to find the gun will scare off the average burglar. If you're already getting burglarized, do you really want to add to your problems by confronting a desperate criminal with your loaded weapon? That's as dumb as trying to fight a mugger for your wallet. Just hand it over. It's not worth the risk.

Besides, you can get really good renter's insurance for a lot less than you'd spend on a handgun, a gun safe, ammo, and a gun club membership.

. . . . Buying a gun to defend yourself against burglary has minimal marginal utility compared to not threatening burglars. Threatening burglars is stupid. If you can scare the burglar off by turning on the lights or making noise, which is how most people do it (whether they mean to or not), that's great. Otherwise, why bother? That's what home owners insurance is for.

I presume Ms Bayerstein is not familiar with what happens after you file a claim with your insurance company, which is that your homeowner's insurance goes up quite a lot. In my case, that's after they announce that you're only covered for $5,000 worth of lost jewelry. If you get robbed multiple times, as has happened to Matts neighbours, they decide that you must not be locking your doors, and drop you. It's not some sort of magic talisman that makes everything all better. Also, much of the stuff they take, like your grandmother's engagement ring and all your graduation presents and the watch your grandfather gave you before he died, cannot be replaced with a check from the insurance company.

She follows up with this:

I'm just saying that if you interrupt a B&E in progress, chances are the burglar is not there to start shit with you. The burglary business model is stealth-based.

It's all about probabilities. Buying a gun as a strategy for dealing with burglars is a bad bet, especially if you have insurance and a working phone to dial 911. Like I said in my earlier comment, if you have some reason to believe that you're likely to be targeted for some other kind of violent home invasion, it might make sense to keep a gun around--especially if you live far away from the nearest source of help. But if you live in the city where the cops can be at your door in less time than it takes to open your gun locker, load your gun, and confront the burglar, it just seems silly to bother with all the risk and responsibility and hard work that you'd need to take on in order to use the gun effectively.

It's been a while, but I could open a gun locker and slide a magazine into a handgun in under a minute, which is about 1/5th the time that the cops could get into their cars and roar down from the nearest police station six blocks away, even if they were willing to put on the lights and sirens for "burglary in progress". Unless you actually live in a police station, this makes no sense.

There's also a little confusion of cause and effect. The reason that burglars in America are generally "not there to start shit" is that Americans have guns; in Britain, "home invasion" robberties, where the burglars beat up the homeowners to find out where the really good stuff is kept, are alarmingly common.

She later relates an anecdote about a black friend who nearly got in trouble with the cops for having a flare gun after Katrina. My feeling is that the problem there is not the gun, it's the cops. I hope we wouldn't suggest that said friend should make himself up in whiteface to appear less threatening.

The ultimate problem, of course, is this: how do you know if the nice young man who has just broken into your home is there to quietly burgle you, or to rape and dismember you?

Flexible funding

Matthew Yglesias has a very good post on No Child Left Behind

Setting your impoverished inner-city schools aside, there are two kinds of ways the other schools could be considered "basically fine." One would be that taking advantage of their more favorable financial situation and the fact that they're not actually drowning in children from bleak socioeconomic circumstances, they do a good job of educating all the students who come through their doors -- even those who do come from bleak socioeconomic circumstances. Call those, "Type A" good schools. The other kind of good school would be one that just has so few students coming from bleak socioeconomic circumstances that it's average performance level looks pretty good, even though some students are doing no better than the kids in the bad inner-city schools. Call those, "Type B" good schools.

One of the things NCLB does is require schools to report data based on fairly detailed socioeconomic subgroups. It lets you, in other words, distinguish between a Type A school and a Type B school. This drives a lot of the opposition.

. . . which triggered this exchange in the comments:

I think this would be a good time to wax rhapsodic about how wonderful single payer medicine would be.

Posted by: ostap on March 15, 2007 11:41 AM

ostap, are you confusing single payer with single provider? Posted by: terryg on March 15, 2007 12:23 PM

Which is, of course, amusing, because that's certainly what almost every Democrat has done with school funding. This is a common enough argument in debates over healthcare success--
I'm for single payer, not the NHS!--but it never occurred to me to wonder if those people felt the same way about school funding.

Question of the day: should one be required to stake out a consistent policy across school and healthcare funding? Or can some single-payer supporter explain to me why healthcare will work with what is basically a voucher system, but education won't?

Question of the day

Why does it seem to be physically impossible for anyone but Paul McCartney to sing Blackbird so that it sounds good? I've heard some very talented performers with great vocal range and control try it; they have all of them, every one, died.

Open comment thread

Since you can't talk back at Instapundit, this is a comment thread for those blog posts. Fire away.

Now with 50% more Jane!

Did I mention that I'm guest-blogging for Instapundit this week? That's where I'm putting all but the most personal of my posts this week. Except for when I write for Free Exchange. Or Democracy in America . . . in fact, there's a whole lot of Jane-blogging to be had, if you know where to look . . .

Question of the day

As longtime readers know, I'm slowly reconstituting the music collection that was lost when I moved west. Veeeeeeeeerrry slooooooooowly. Currently, I've got about 1100 songs, which is fine, but not enough for me to achieve that sense of security that comes from knowing that you'll have something you want to listen to every single time you fire up your iPod.

I posed the question to a friend over IM this morning: how many is enough? His answer: "all of them". That can't be right; it's very rare that I think to myself that there is one, and only one, album in the world I want to listen to right now. You have to be able to achieve a sort of musical statistical universe well short of every song that has ever been written.

But how many is enough? 1,100 is, as I can personally attest, well short of enough; every time I open iTunes there is something missing. So how far am I from achieving my goal of musical nirvana? 3,000? 5,000? More? I'm not asking when I'll stop needing new music; presumably, there will always be room in the inn. But when will I stop feeling that empty, yearning sensation every time I open a music player?

Why I heart Glen Whitman

He explains the comb over in terms of the Sorites paradox. Also, he ably addresses the central objection that I think a lot of people have to libertarian civil rights (near) absolutism in a post on that pinpoint search article everyone's been talking about:

Jeff Goldstein is unconcerned, because he agrees with David Brin that the possibility for micro-enforcement will create a groundswell of support for changing the laws in question . . . [t]his strikes me as hopelessly optimistic because it ignores the way state authorities actually work. Perhaps in the case of speeding, which virtually everyone does from time to time, the uproar might be sufficient to force a change in the law if the law is enforced uniformly (say, by automatic traffic cameras). But for most of the laws we’re talking about, there is ample reason to think the laws will be enforced selectively on targeted individuals and groups. In addition, the authorities use minor infractions like drug possession as leverage to justify arrests that could not otherwise be justified, to motivate testimony from unwilling witnesses, to extract plea bargains from suspects they cannot convict of worse offenses, and so forth. And everyone knows this. It’s standard operating procedure.

The proliferation and laws and regulations that make virtually everyone guilty of something gives state authorities the discretion to punish whomever they want, whenever they want. This is a problem already, and technology that eases the detection of every little infraction will only exacerbate it.

Debates about civil liberties often hinge on some sort of moral algebra. So people favouring increased power for the police say "Yes, there will be some more abuses, some innocent people may end up in jail, but we will also prevent X number of crimes". The object becomes altering the ratio of intrusions by the police to the number of violations by criminals until both sides of the equation balance.

But that kind of power changes the character of the government. It increases the number of detectable offenses until not all of them can be prosecuted, or even paid attention to. It puts me in mind of that novel . . . and damned if I can remember WHAT novel . . . when the man from the government laughs in surprise "Do you imagine we want you to obey the law?" Laws become an instrumental means not for maintaining public order, but for targeting persons.

It's just such an honour to be nominated . . .

I've made Atrios's wanker of the day. I'd like to thank my parents, my agent, the director, and all the little people . . . my friend Kate, Mickey Mouse . . . . oh, I should have prepared something, but I never thought I'd win. Thank you all. You hate me. You really hate me.

Some days, you get the bear

And some days, the bear gets you. As Dave says, it wasn't a great week. And as Dave says, these bastards aren't making it any better.

Supreme irony: when I read that headline, Young Ned of the Hill was playing on my iPod.

Not much war commentary has held up well

But this . . . this still stands as a work of genius:

Le president de France, Jacques Chirac, has appeared sur "les 60 Minutes" to expliquer au peuple de l'Amérique que France remains our cher ami et allié. Nous believe him. Encore, nous would like to expliquer l'Amérique in une langue that le Frenchman can comprendre.

Nous acceptons that le French détestent la guerre. Nous des Américains détestons la guerre aussi. Mais nous also detestons Saddam Hussein. Comme John Wayne put it in "Le Jour Plus Long"--l'excellent film au sujet de la libération de la Normandie--"You can't give the enemy a break. Send him to hell." Maybe quelque chose gets lost in la traduction, but certainement vous get le point.

After all, tout le monde can voir that les idéaux that ont inspiré la révolution française--liberté, egalité, oil contracts--are vivants et well. Mais, juste because nous believe that Saddam est une menace à la paix while le gouvernement français believes that Saddam est un bon associé commercial, il ne signifie pas that we Américains n'apprécient pas les contributions françaises à our own culture. Par exemple, où would l'Amérique be sans le "French fry"? And so, as nous regardons beaucoup McDonald's sur la terre française, we can say, "Lafayette, les Golden Arches sont ici."

Ce n'est pas tout, either. Like vous, nous share votre l'embarras at les actions anti-françaises ici on the home front. Dans notre Capitol, le Congrès Républicain a changé le nom "pain grillé français" to "freedom toast." Dans Maison Blanche, notre president apparemment préfére Tex-Mex cuisine de haute. Et nos collègues over at le New York Post have taken to pasting visages des weasels on top des photos des diplomates français chez les Nations Unies.

Mais toujours rememberez-vous: Nous Américains ne sommes pas comme cultivés as les Francais. Oui, nous did sauvé your bacon dans WWII, et we seem préparé--avec l'aide des Anglais et Tony Blair--to do so encore. But comme un peuple we Américains still préférons le cheeseburger Boeuf bourguignon, le Coors aux Chablis, et le Hummer au Renault. Et we will never, never comprendrons pourquoi vous awarded la légion d'honneur à Jerry Lewis.

Enfin, Monsieur Le President Chirac, nous will not allow une petite thing like une guerre to come entre our deux grandes nations. Vive la différence, oui. Mais it is bien for Paris to learn le same message that Saddam is learning maintenant à Baghdad: "Ne messez pas avec le Texas."

I think I handed in a couple essays . . . excuse me essais . . . like that.

So, about those March 2003 archives.  I went into the excercise expecting to be humiliated by my hawkish, sarcastic blather.  Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't make nearly as many predictions as I hoped. I didn't predict Iraq would fall painlessly, though I hoped.  My snark at Michael Moore was gentle.  I basically made three categories of error:  I didn't foresee the civil war.  I expected Iraqi oil to flow freely. And I was totally convinced that Saddam had WMD.

But see for yourself.  I divided my posts into two categories:  ones I made errors in, and ones I didn't.  THen there's a lot of flotsam I didn't mention, but I swear, none of the preening snark I feared and my antiwar interlocutors were undoubtedly hoping for.  There is one sappy Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I left out; if you must see it, check the archives at left for yourself.

Things I was wrong about:

• I engaged in some denial about the existance of really rabid supply siders, only to be offered real-world examples by Brad DeLong.  Them's still crazy.
  
• This post is right and wrong.  Right, because it's now clear that the French had some pretty strong foreign policy reasons that they weren't going to get behind us on Iraq no matter what.

I do want to post about something I've seen over and over and over -- on blogs, in comments, in news columns1. That is the Democrats who say, "Well, of course we should go to war but the only reason that France isn't going with us is that Bush is such a colossal screw up he offended them."

Talk about Ugly Americans! In the world of these folks, the entire rest of the world pretty much exists only in relationship to American actions. The French are foreign children, who will do what we want if we just pet and coax them a little. Likewise, the rest of the world, except for a few naughty rogues -- if teacher is good and kind and y'know, hip, the children will obey and the whole classroom will be like birds in their little nests agreeing. A postmodern classroom, where the teacher is learning as much from her students as the students learn from her.

France is a real, live country, with its very own foriegn policy aims that exist independently of the US. If you'd spent a little more time paying attention to foreign policy, you'd see that over the last five years, the French have been making a concerted effort to consolidate their dominance over the European Union and wield it as a club to counterweight the US. Not because the US is mean. Not because they're in a childish snit over Kyoto -- for one thing, the Europeans had no more intention of signing Kyoto than we did, and for another, what would you think of an American president who dropped out on a NATO ally because of Kyoto? Because France is concerned with increasing France's power in order to advance France's interest, which is what foriegn policy is supposed to do. Casting the entire things in terms of the US actions, as if the rest of the world were just bit characters in the drama of American Empire, is good for Bush-bashing, but bad for rational argument.

• I stand by the above, but not, obviously, this:

Similarly, Sadaam Hussein has held onto his WMD rather than disarming so that he could use them in a conflict he is bound to lose. He's been willing to starve his own people and isolate his nation rather than surrender them; now he's willing to take his nation to war rather than surrender power. These may be logical decisions -- but this is not a debate about the wording of a resolution or a couple of million in foreign aid that we can finesse with a little more wordplay. Arguing that diplomacy would have succeeded where 250,000 troops on the border have failed, as Tom Daschle is doing, is sheer lunacy.

• In the course of making fun of hte airline industry's ridiculous claim that they had to fire 3500 people because of Iraq, I proclaimed that "You don't lay off 3,500 employees because you're facing a seasonal downtrend; I'm pretty sure their peak season is summer, by which time the worst of the uncertainty and anxiety about Iraq will be resolved."  Hmmm.  To be fair, however, from the airlines' perspective, that was probably true.
• THis post about the cost of the war was mostly right; the war hasn't cost $2 trillion, and I'll go on record as saying it won't, either; certainly not in 2003 dollars. Maybe it should, but we'll pull out before then, I'd guess.  But there was this:

Thus, Eric Alterman is enabled to claim that the cost to the US taxpayer will be over $2t, even though most of the larger costs cited by Galbraith aren't going to be borne by Americans either directly or indirectly, but by Iraqi oil.⁶ That's the oil that will be able to flow freely for the first time in ten years because of this war -- and the revenue from which will flow to the Iraqi people for the first time in a decade.
The war will certainly cost more than the $60b and change that the President is asking for. But it is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.)

I don't know how much more, and neither does anyone else, although I'm sure the military has better guesses than I could make. It's important to think about the economic cost of the war -- the pro-war side has mostly dropped the ball on this, and it's an important calculation when we consider whether or not to go. But making up ridiculous numbers in order to support your predisposition isn't helpful -- and when the war doesn't cost us $2t, people are going to remember that the next time you talk about the costs of a program you don't like.

Things I got right: 

• Civil asset forfeiture still sucks
  
• CAFE standards are still stupid compared to carbon taxes
• College athletes shouldn't be used and dumped by universities without teaching them anything
• COLI plans sound much worse than they are
• I said that we were in a housing bubble.  Boy, how right I was.  Hope none of my readers have sub-prime mortgages
• I said we were going to war.  Honest, that's all i said:  Alea iacta est.  So far, this is less painful than I expected.  But I imagine it's about to get worse.
• I think I'd mostly still endorse what I said here.  Torture should be illegal . . . but if someone kidnapped my Mom, and was going to kill her, I would probably kick that someone around to find out where she was.  That doesn't mean that I want the government allowed to do it.  Instapundit said it:  if there really is a ticking nuclear bomb, agents will probably do it no matter what.  Legalising it just encourages its use in lesser scenarios.
• I'm still pretty sure that the Dixie Chicks don't have a civil right to a record contract.
• I don't know whether to put this in the win or lose column, but at least this Stuart Buck post I linked betrays more humility than I was retrospectively giving myself credit for:

I've read quite a few blogs, and quite a few op-eds, and I would guess that 98% of the people commenting on the war literally have no idea what they are talking about in any meaningful sense; the other 2% are limited to offering an educated guess on a few narrow issues like "how fast will we win."

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about blogs that link to this or that story on troop movements and such. I have in mind the writers/bloggers who predict that Iraq will become a model democratic nation that will shine like a beacon throughout the Middle East (although there aren't very many writers/bloggers who venture more than a hesitant hope on this point). I especially have in mind those writers/bloggers who, from what seems to be partisan dislike of Bush, predict that the Iraq war will only inflame anti-American tension throughout the world, provoke more terrorism, and in the end harm America's interests. If there's one thing that I'm sure of, it's that no one who comments on these issues has the faintest clue what will happen.

Does that sound too harsh? Perhaps. But consider these questions: Who, in 1929, could have plausibly and justifiably predicted the world-wide conflagration that would ensue shortly thereafter? Who, in 1945, could have predicted that within a comparably short period Germany and Japan would be America's allies? Hardly anyone, and certainly not the people who would have been blogging at the time, had the technology existed. Such broad questions about the state of world affairs are just too complicated, with too many variables, for anyone, no matter how well-informed or brilliant, to know what will happen.

• Dick Cheney's daughter did not go to Iraq to become a human shield.  Come to think of it, did anyone?
• I should say this still holds up pretty well:

I'm not blogging directly about the war, because I don't think anyone is interested in my sharing the encyclopedic understanding of tactical military operations I've gained from my extensive collection of W.E.B. Griffin novels. (I don't care what you say -- sometimes you just want to read a story filled with people whose lives contain nothing more complicated than shooting things and fantastic exploits with women of easy virtue).

But please, can everyone stop writing posts/articles on how the last ten minutes activity in the stock market proves their belief that the war is won/doomed? First of all, no one writing any of those "Stocks up on hopes of a quick resolution" headlines took a poll to find out what the millions of investors who set the stock prices by buying and selling individual shares of stock, was thinking. They're just guessing, mostly based on what they think would have caused them to buy and sell if they were people who had money, instead of journalists. Second of all, while the stock market is a useful indicator of the economy, it is not the economy, especially over time periods of several hours. The fact that the stock market dropped three hundred points yesterday does not mean that we are going all going to be out on the street next week, any more than the fact that it's up 100 points today means that we're moving to Easy Street. Third of all, investors overshoot and undershoot, just like you and me, because oops, that's who the investors are. Basing your estimate of where the economy/war is going on the opinions of the folks who brought you Yahoo at $214 a share is mildly lunatic. And fourth of all, stock prices, like other prices, are partly set by good old supply and demand. All the purchases that were delayed in the run up to the war started flooding back into the market when Saddaam didn't gas our soldiers day 1. Excess demand raised prices; some speculators rode the boomlet then sold off. Other things happened in the market. There's obviously some reaction to the war in there, but it's hard to separate how much, and it's not very useful because none of the investors setting the prices have any more idea than the rest of us how this thing will eventually wash out. So please, give the poor Dow a rest.

• The economy was not brought to its knees by the Do Not Call list. You heard it here first.
• So far, there is still no shadowy muslim cabal in the military.
• Senator Moynihan really is dead.  And also, was really a pretty good guy.
  

Over at Deltoid, there's an ongoing debate about what "seems reasonable" for how long the interviews should have taken for The Lancet. It's fascinating for many reasons, the most amusing being that the defenders of Les Robert et al clearly have no idea what actually happened during the interviews, which makes their "seems reasonable" kind of pointless.(As it does some, but not all, of the arguments from the other side.) And the reason they have no idea is that, AFAICT, Les Roberts doesn't have a very good grasp on what happened; he has contradicted his interviewers at least once, and is extraordinarily hazy on the actual mechanics of the whole thing.

But what I wanted to blog about is a somewhat related phenomenon, which is the systematic human tendency to understimate how long things take. This was driven home to me rather poignantly when I went up against Spencer Ackerman in Blogging Chefs, and tried to estimate just how much I could do in 90 minutes. Then I tested how long it actually took to, say, cook macaroni and cheese.

THere were a few things I overestimated a little: it only takes four minutes, not five, to slice two boxes of grape tomatoes. (Well . . . I extrapolated from half a box. But I wasn't getting noticeably faster at it.) But mostly I turned out to have underestimated various steps by a factor of about three. The reason is that I imagined only the highlights: operating the food processor, stirring the sauce, etc. I forgot about all the little things that slow you down: opening the wrapper, finding the spoon, having the cheese get caught in the blade, etc. Even though I'd given myself a generous fudge factor in estimates, I was still off by a factor of two or more.

The bias is well known by behavioural scientists; it's called "vividness". You tend to overweight things you can easily imagine, and underweight those you don't. The questions, being the same every time, are easy to picture. The time-consuming distractions, varying from house to house, are less easily imaginable, and so we give them short shrift in our calculations.

So I suspect that what is happening on the defending side, apart from the instinct clearly infecting both sides to exaggerate the ease/difficulty of the interviewers in order to gain points, is that everyone is imagining asking the questions, and getting answers. They're not imagining waiting at the door while the kid calls for Mamma, having their pen run out of ink and looking for another at the bottom of the bag, husband and wife arguing about when Mustapha moved to Baghdad, a milling herd at the door where everyone gets in everyone else's way and it takes five minutes to get inside, the death certificate being buried at the bottom of a chest, etc. All that stuff wastes a phenomenal amount of time.

I note, too, that Daniel Davies is starting to sound a little desperate when he

a) says that it's easy to find out household composition because after all, he asked the guy at the desk next to him in less than three minutes

b) snottily informs some commenter that Iraq is a WAR ZONE

. . . without wondering if b might affect the answer to a.

Beyond that, Arab extended families are pretty different from British nuclear ones. When people are poor and extended families, rather than the government, are the primary source of safety nets, people move around a lot; Grandma spends winter with you and spring with your sister's family; your cousin comes to visit for six months with the kids while she works stuff out with her husband. At least, that's the way it worked in my family, and the small sample of Arab and Arab American families I am familiar with.

To some extent, it still does operate here and in Britain; upper middle class households are much more stable than those lower down the income scale. Had Daniel Davies tried the same survey at the local burger joint, he probably would have found more household changes.

Need I point out that if Davies is right, and Burnham et. al. are right, then we should be seeing massive floods of refugees? So let's ask that Bayesian question that Davies is so fond of another way: given that Iraqi families are apparently so stable that few people move in and out of the household over a four year period, what are the odds that Iraq is actually having a violent breakdown of the magnitude described?

Bleg

Can anyone with a subscription to Nature email me the article from last week's edition on the Lancet study? I don't have a library card in DC yet.

It's official

I'm being evicted.

Update The apartment is being sold; I didn't, like, not pay my rent or start a business breeding cockroaches or anything. I'm on a month-to-month lease, and the apartment isn't stabilised, so I have no recourse; I'll just have to move. I'm not sure exactly when that will be . . . probably at the end of April or May . . . but it pretty much sucks, whenever it is.

Double update A commenter has this to say:

That's funny, really, in an ironic sort of way.

A dose of reality is good for you conservatives every once in a while. If you pay attention to it reality can make you a wiser person.

Let's be clear here: if I could pass a law to prevent my landlord from kicking me out, I wouldn't. This sucks in a big way--I'll never find a $1200 apartment in Manhattan again--but it sucks in a perfectly fair way, like getting the flu. I don't like it, but I'd like even less to live in a world where building or buying a rental building was a prison sentence . . . I don't think New York's more draconian housing laws have exactly contributed to the ease of finding an abode.

An office discussion of the term "punk-assed", which my British colleagues denigrate merely because it makes absolutely no sense, somehow brought us onto the topic of British football songs. It's an interesting phenomenon: these songs appear spontaneously, and seemingly instantly disseminate through large crowds of paralytically inebriated fans who may not be able to remember their own name right now, but always have mental room for a good song. A folk art that died out in America sometime in the mid-nineteenth century has somehow managed to stay alive, even robust, in Britain. More strangely still, the freelance balladeers largely come from the roughest elements of British society.

At least, I assume they do, because the songs are utterly filthy.

Update A Scottish correspondant writes:

In Scotland, of course, there's the additional wrinkle of
sectarianism to spice up proceedings. Officially one frowns upon all
this, unofficially there's a lot of fun to be had being part of a
crowd of seething, swaying, singing 90-minute bigots.

. . .

American sports would be much improved by importing this sort of
thing. Suggestions for anthems for Yankees-Sox games?

I've got nothing. So I turn in hope to my readers.

My cover is blown

Razib thinks I look like an elf. Interestingly, so did the medievalist I dated in college. When I protested that I was not short, he snottily informed me that real elves are very tall.

It's not as great as y'all think, though. Just because I'm an elf, doesn't mean I get to date Orlando Bloom.

Can I play?

Jim Henley offers up a new game: look back at your archives from March 2003 and see what you were wrong about, courtesy of Brian Flemming. Not surprisingly, mostly anti-war types are interested in playing. I am tempted to duck out, because (cringe!) I was wrong, and expect to find, with painful freshness, myself strutting like a power-mad peacock, preserved for eternity in Green and White.

And certainly Brian Flemming doesn't make it easy to resist that temptation; he just can't resist the opportunity to act like a flaming [expletive deleted], with a series of faux-sorrowful revelations that he was just too willing to believe that pro war people had a shred of humanity left in their cold, dead hearts. It's one of those rhetorical devices which unfortunately strikes the dull-witted and poorly read as exceedingly clever. I find painful enough to read in my own Freshman compositions, but unbearable in someone who is actually over the drinking age.

I mean, seriously, wince:

As I inspect the record, I do see that I made one serious miscalculation. I was right about the war, but I was mistaken about our odds of stopping it. I truly believed we could stop it, on the merits, because it was so clearly wrong. I'm a bit embarrassed that I earnestly engaged the pro-war side at Blogcritics (see the comments for an example), as if they actually cared whether the war was just. It was an incorrect presumption, and I should have realized the utter lack of good faith on the pro-war side somewhere around the 800th time I heard "Don't you remember 9-11?" as a response to an actual argument.

But I didn't see it then. Even after this harrowing experience, I still possessed hope, and could write something like this. Instead of blaming the American people, I blamed the media. I truly didn't appreciate the power of war to short-circuit reason. And I didn't realize that many of my ideological opponents weren't merely deluded, they actually didn't care if they were wrong. They wanted war, and they would have it.

So that's what I was wrong about in March 2003. But I learned from it. I'll never again underestimate man's hunger for war, or overestimate the collective intelligence of the American people.

Even before opening my archvies, I can assure you that there's at least one thing I'll learn from this experience. I'll never again hope for any sort of reasonable debate on this subject, or read Brian Flemming's blog.

Nonetheless, not only is fair, well, fair, this sort of thing is an excellent excercise in humility. So I will bring you, sometime before Sunday, an extended parade of my bad decisionmaking. Then I will stab my Brian Flemming voodoo doll through the eyes.

Seriously, though, my antiwar readers are encouraged to make sure that I actually follow through on this.

Ezra congratulates unions on giving workers political power:

Absent a healthy union movement, the competition between the interest groups that actually govern our nation becomes merely a vying of different business interests, with few powerful forces advocating specifically for the interests of the working class. There is, of course, a free rider issue in the way unions work, wherein the entire working class -- of which only 8% are unionized -- can benefit from the health care expansions and worker safety regulations and guaranteed maternity leave benefits and all the other worker-friendly legislation the labor movement convinces the Democrats to pass, even as the average American doesn't realize it's unions doing the bulk of the organizing behind these measures.

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. Another way of looking at it is that after getting the NLRB to force people to join, unions take the contributions of all their members, some 40% of whom seem to be Republicans, and give 100% of the money to Democrats, who then, at the behest of the unions, agitate for laws making it easier to force people to join the unions.

As a loyal reader of Dan Drezner, (as well as an avid consumer of Drezner Live! whenever the opportunity--alas, too infrequently--presents itself), I was bemused to read that he has been purveying soft porn. How about it, Dan? Where's the bodice ripper? How come I'm always the last to know?

All right, I feel a contest coming on. Place of honour to the reader who comes up with the best title and/or plot for a bodice ripper penned by Dan Drezner, and based on characters from the blogosphere. "Wild Fisking Flames", that sort of thing.

I got the Vaio

Yes, I know, I am a disgrace to true technical people everywhere. I shall turn in my badge. In my defense, it's not just pretty, but also has the best combination of size and weight for what I want to do. Which is drag it with me everywhere.

Question of the day

I am listening to Damien Rice's O in preparation for retrieving his new album from my friend's truck, where it has been languishing unlistened to for weeks. It's still really good. But I kind of feel like it's not quite as great as it was when I was going through an impressively gnarly breakup. Listening to it, it occurs to me that Damien Rice may be the single greatest portrayer of agony in the entire history of the music world--which is why his music's on, like, every Dawson's Creek ripoff on television. I mean, the raw tremor vibrates with such intensity that I find myself wishing that I could head over to his house with a