Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

All is now revealed, and a bleg

So the reason I am contemplating buying a car is that I am permanently relocating to Washington DC. That means that now both my mother and I are looking for apartments in the district.

She is looking for something with at least 900 square feet, at least 1B + den under $3,000, in one of the following neighbourhoods:

1) Dupont
2) Logan Circle
3) Georgetown
4) Adams Morgan
5) Columbia Heights
6) U Street
7) Mt Pleasant

I am looking for something a little more downscale, but with at least 700 square feet and hardwood floors, in one of the following neighbourhoods:

1) Dupont
2) Logan Circle
3) West End
4) U Street
5) Columbia Heights
6) Mt Pleasant
7) Shaw
8) Georgetown

Neither of us wants to live in Virginia or Maryland, no matter what the tax advantages, or Foggy Bottom. Both of us need an apartment that will at least grudgingly allow well-behaved pets. Both of us are good tenants: no breeding cockroaches or setting fire to the walls.

If anyone knows of anything, please let me know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sing it, sister

Becks is right. Everyone knows the unified queue is the best way to move checkout traffic. So how come every time customers in a crowded drugstore try to form a single queue, the cashiers force us to line up at the registers? Do they get some kind of psychic job from knowing in advance which customer they'll check out?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Shocker!

Women who don't get married until their thirties seek emotional intimacy from their families instead. The New York Times, of course, has the overwrought trend story.

For the record, I love my Mom (and my Dad). But four phone calls a day? "Mommy, I'm having tofu for lunch!" No thanks.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ditto

I'm with Steven Bainbridge: I'll vote for Mitt Romney when they pry the ballot out of my cold, dead fingers. Strapping your dog to the roof of the car, and then coldly out the cage when the frightened dog's sphincter cuts loose, and then continuing to drive with the dog on the roof of the car, is sociopath territory.

Yes, yes, dogs aren't people. But they aren't chickens, either. Anyone who could treat a beloved family pet that way, and teach his children to do so, has some pretty scary emotional issues.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Economist expands its blog hegemony

From sister publication Intelligent Life comes a dashing new arts blog, brilliantly edited by my erudite and witty colleague, Emily Bobrow.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Seriously?

Laura McKenna links to the Robert Putnam study thusly:

Robert Putnam is a big favorite of mine, though his latest study is very disturbing. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties. (Thanks, Amy P.)

This is hardly shocking enough to merit "very disturbing". It should not be news to anyone in Americ that if you juxtapose large ethnic groups, they have trouble getting along? This is the academic equivalent of "I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here".

Why, then, be in favour of immigration? Because over the long run, it builds a stronger, more interesting culture, and economy, which is why America kicks the rest of the world's ass on such a regular basis. But there are short term costs.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Best thing I've read all day week month year

Ezra on Thomas Friedman:

It's of course inevitable that Tom Friedman would fall solidly under the spell of a book entitled "How." The man is a human airport nonfiction table -- he can't help himself. Give him a single-word title with an overeager thesis and he's set.

He has captured the man's essence in a single, well crafted sentence. It's like how primitive islanders used to believe that a camera could steal your soul. Ezra Klein: soul stealer!

Okay, don't look at that metaphor too closely.

Here's me on Tom Friedman, a while back.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Time to drop the price

So as y'all know, my mother is moving to DC. One of my jobs as a good daughter is to scan the Craigslist ads for her. This apartment has been on the market for almost two months now. I have no idea what's wrong with it, but at this point, you would think the landlord would drop the price, or fix the problem, instead of posting the same listing every single day in the wan hope of finding a stupid sucker to rent it. He's already lost the equivalent of a $200 rent abatement by keeping it on the market this long.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Y is we so kulturali illiterit?

The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts issues this challenge:

I'd ask [ordinary Americans] how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Frankly, I'm too embarassed to post the paltry list I was able to come up with. I got one per category, at least--but some categories were a real struggle.

Of course, this list assumes that classical music, etc. is more worthy of knowing than what appears on American Idol. Perhaps I'm just getting all east coast and hegemonic here.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Wow

I've been deleted from Wikipedia for not being famous enough.

It's not a devastating blow or anything, but why does Wikipedia care how famous you are? Are they worried the volumes won't fit in people's basements?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I think Instapundit is right. Half my commenters aren't mad at immigrants; they're mad at me. Because they think I belong to some coastal elite that makes decisions for them without consulting them, or caring what they think.

To some extent, on immigration, they're right, in that I don't think that their needs are the only worthwhile consideration. I think that the relevant moral community extends outside America to the people who could be helped by immigration--just as I think the relevant moral community in the 19th century extended to the shores of my ancestral lands. That doesn't mean that I don't think their concerns are important; I just think that having benefitted from previous rounds of immigration by, you know, existing, in the richest country in the world, we kind of have an obligation to pay that forward.

I'm also kind of flabbergasted that my readers have taken the observation that groups of one people don't like being around groups of people who are different as an accusation of racism. I mean, there are crazies on the left who believe that this qualifies as racism, but the right is supposed to be immune to that sort of nonsense. You don't have to hate Mexicans, to disenjoy culture clash. Everyone's life is easier when we all agree. Against this, one has to weigh the many benefits of immigration. And not just to us wealthy, latte-sipping liberals. (Where was all this wealth when I was living on ramen in order to make my student loan payments?) Do you ever eat at a restaurant? Buy produce? Have a suit dry cleaned? Enter buildings to keep the rain off? Then you, my friend, are benefitting from illegal immigration. And if I really were the kind of wealthy elitist who already has mine, I wouldn't be the one to suffer from ending immigration. I'd fly in my produce from Guatamala. It's all the real Americans, the ones living form paycheck to paycheck, who get screwed. Remember what your supermarket looked like in the 1970's? Without immigrants in food production and processing, you can welcome those days back again; no one has yet built a machine that can cost-efficiently gut a chicken.

More broadly, the immigration debate seems dominated by people claiming that they're the only group worth talking about. The guy who tells me that I'm theorising while he's just reporting "facts on the ground" has decided that my facts on the ground don't matter. Which is especially odd because so many of my facts on the ground are the same as the ones he claims to report: a community choked with poor immigrants.

Everyone's facts on the ground matter: the low wage workers, and the people who employ housekeepers, and the farmers who need crop pickers, and so forth. Part of the problem with the immigration debate is that everyone is trying to exclude large groups of people as not morally salient.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jesus, the new commenters really are confused

Someone just called me a progressive.

Welcome, first time readers, but while some of my best friends are progressives, they would pretty much vomit if they heard me referred to as such. I'm a squishy libertarian.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Pardon me while I sip my latte

Yup, that's right. I went to an Ivy league school. I drink ersatz Cappuccino, (brewed at home, because I am a cheap elitist schmuck). I work in the elite media. I live in an east coast city. I am buying a Mini Cooper. I visited an IHOP for the first time on Saturday night*. I shop at Whole Foods. I am an effective vegetarian. Apparently, this means I am not a real American, and therefore don't get to talk about immigration. Only real Americans, who care about this country, get to vote.

Frankly, this red-state/blue-state nonsense made me tired when it was my ever-so-liberal neighbours complaining that "they" are a bunch of bible-thumping Jesus freaks, and it is every bit as fatiguing when it's coming from commenters who think that everyone who lives in Manhattan is basically living the life of a guest writer for Sex in the City.

Approximately half of the population of the United States are red staters. Approximately half of the population of the United States are blue staters. Look at each other. You are all real Americans. You all get to have opinions on how things should be run. Neither of you is the more authentic, moral, or freedom-loving group. All of you hold opinions for the same reason as those hating you across the aisle: a mixture of self-interest, conveniently cultivated ignorance, rational analysis, and high moral principle. Stop preening yourselves on what an altogether finer breed you are and start actually addressing your disagreements.

* For the record, it was delicious, and I ate far more than was good for me, and how come all Americans aren't fat with these places littering the landscape?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

For the record

I think the new immigration bill is dumb as a box of rocks. But mostly because I don't think there's a huge problem out there needing to be fixed. Also, it seems obvious to me that actually close the borders, as opposed to building a pretty fence, would cost more than any theoretical fiscal savings from doing so. I think having guest workers is a loathesome idea. My preferred immigration plan would be to massively increase the number of visas, set a very minimal bar to meet--not a terrorist, not a criminal, not carrying a hideous contagious disease--and then auction off various tranches of visas, classed not by type but by length of stay. Let the visas be transferrable. Then let immigrant communities do enforcement for you, as illegal immigrants suddenly threaten to erode the price of their valuable asset: the right to stay in-country.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of huh?

I've just been informed that Sicko includes moving footage where Michael Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for treatment the United States has denied its heroes.

Which is weird, because everyone who worked at Ground Zero has multiple medical programmes itching to cover any and every possibly site-related illness. Frankly, it's a little like being stalked--I find myself worrying that they're driving past my house at three am, craning out the window to see if I'm home. They somehow got my new work number when I moved to DC to call me to set up an appointment. Creepy.

Not that I exactly expected better from Michael Moore, but why did the workers go along with it?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A festival of bad design

So, it looks like I will need to buy a car, for reasons that will be revealed later. I have even selected the car I want, based on my very idiosyncratic needs. Now I want to select the year. (Don't tell my mother, but I am--gasp!--considering buying a new car.)

The last time I had to buy a car, way back in 1999, I went to Edmunds.com, found the book value and ratings for various models and years, and read about their reliability and comfort. They even, bless them, had information on the front leg room.

Now go and do the same thing on their current website. I dare you.

I'd be willing to kick in $15 or so to access the ratings, except that as far as I can tell, the problem isn't that previously free data is now behind the pay barrier; the problem seems to be that it isn't there at all. From their website, I can go to Autotrader to buy a used car, which is not very helpful since I already know how to type www.autotrader.com into my URL--in fact, I believe that's where I found the Green Hornet. I can find out what edmunds.com thinks women should drive. I can explore their incredibly slipshod reviews of new cars. But I can't find the damn book value of the car I want, which is the only thing I actually want to do.

This is what happens when the commercial team runs roughshod over editorial. The general rule about a website is that people have three or four things they might want to do when they go there. The rule of good design is to make those three or four things very prominent on an otherwise simple page, and let them go to it.

Commercial does not like that. Commercial wants to sell ads. And tie-ins. And sponsored links. They also tend to believe that if you don't throw every single possible link in front of the user all at once, the stupid readers won't view your pages. And if they have too much pull, you get a web page that drives readers away in disgust. The first rule of commercialising the web is, you can't sell stuff to people who just hit the "back" button.

Don't get me wrong: if commercial has too little pull, you get a web page that loses money and has to be shut down so they can afford to fire everyone. This is where a good UI guy is worth his weight in gold.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

But they're illegal

I find the argument that the problem with immigrants is illegal immigration pretty uncompelling. First of all, it's almost (not always) made by people who don't want to let those people (or equivalent numbers of their more law abiding compatriots) in legally, and react against any proposal to do so with exactly the vehemence that they complain about the illegal entry of illegal immigrants. The people making that argument may not be trying to be disingenuous, but ultimately, this is a pointless distraction: their real problem is that they don't want that many immigrants here, regardless of whether they entered legally or not.

And second of all, virtually no one who makes that argument is perfectly law abiding. Ever driven above the speed limit? Had a drink underage? Failed to declare the hundred bucks your friend gave you to tune up his engine? Jaywalked? Had sex with a sixteen year old when you were seventeen? Failed to separate your recyclables? Walked in the park after closing time? Smoked pot, or something stronger? Paid a worker to do something in your house or yard without giving them a 1099 or paying payroll taxes on their wages? Taken a pill that was prescribed to someone else? All of those are illegal; some of them are felonies. And I'll freely disclose that I've done a lot of them, although not which ones.

Breaking some laws--by, say, mugging an old lady for her social security check--is not only illegal but immoral. Other laws have neutral moral content. And breaking still other laws is morally required, as in when Nazi Germany ordered its citizens to turn Jews over to the concentration camp roundups (though I will not condemn those who failed, out of terror, to do so; who knows what I would have done at the mercy of Hitler's government.)

It is far from clear to me that being an illegal alien is a morally wrong, as opposed to legally wrong, act. It might even be a morally required act, if, say, your income is getting medical care and food for children back in Mexico who would otherwise died. But regardless of your opinion on the matter, you can't simply say "But they're illegal"; given that there is dispute about the moral status of our immigration laws, you first have to prove to your interlocutor's satisfaction that the law ought to exist. None of the people I've talked to who say that their problem is not the immigrants themselves, but their legal status, has even tried to prove that our immigration restrictions are just and right--which is strange, because those people generally want to make them even more draconian.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Am I dying?

I will now scuttle any chance at a lucrative legal settlement by announcing that, just like everyone else who worked at Ground Zero, I didn't wear a mask. I mean, I did, sometimes. But the respirators they gave us were cumbersome, hard to use, obstructed your vision, had a tendency to slip off, and gave me rashes where they touched my skin. I wore a mask only when I went onto The Pile, and not then once the rubble had been cleared. And frankly, I was unusual in wearing one on the site; I did so only because I'm asthmatic.

So it's very possible I'll die of asbestosis, especially since I was an intermittently heavy smoker from 1990-1999. It's not really worth thinking about, as I can't do anything about it. Nonetheless, I occasionally have uncomfortable visions of myself in forty years, playing the Supporting Old Person in someone's movie as I slowly waste away from mesothelioma.

I ought, therefore, to be sympathetic to complaints that The Gummit Lied to Us. And I would, if they weren't so hysterical. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are associated with years of exposure, most often along with heavy smoking. There is little known risk from transient exposure, like having some asbestos dust, along with 80 zillion other pieces of pulverised concrete, in your house for a few days. The government imposes stringent standards on asbestos removal because construction workers do it over and over, not because a single strand can kill you.

Similarly, I find the claims of elevated disease from people who were blocks and blocks from the site completely unbelievable. I'm an asthmatic who worked on the site for a year. They were exposed to dust for a couple of hours. I'm sure they coughed a lot in the days that followed. But I doubt they're now substantially impaired.

The difference is, I know my lung capacity readings, because the nice doctors do them every few years. I also have my weekly peak flow meter readings (yes, Dr. Raskin, I know I should be doing them every day). So I have scientific proof that after a year on the site, I'm--exactly as unhealthy as I was before.

I'm not surprised that among all the non-asthmatics who are suddenly being asked for subjective recollections of their previous lung health, and being shown respirometer readings showing that their upper lung function is only 93% of normal!, we're suddenly discovering a lot of new respiratory disease. Mild asthma is surprisingly unnoticeable. If I hadn't smoked like a fiend in college, I probably never would have been diagnosed.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Dang

I may have to subscribe to HBO.

Also, I have fallen desperately, hopelessly, eternally in love with Jemaine Clement.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public service announcment

Thievery Corporation is shockingly awesome in concert. I actually liked them better than the main act, Manu Chao. Though both were pretty great. Highly suggest you go see one of the few remaining shows if it's near you.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

Does anyone know what happened to Ephemera Now? First it took down its cool retro ad archive and switched to fruit packing labels; now it's gone entirely. I suspect a copyright issue, but Google has no answers. I loved that site . . . can someone update me?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A reader points me to this piece on immigration as a way of explaining why today is different. I've interspersed my comments between them.

Many claim that because the massive immigration that occured a century ago worked out OK, the current massive immigration will similarly work out OK.

This argument is an instance of the logical fallacy "Appeal to Tradition". The context has changed from a century ago. While there are certainly parallels, there are many differences and it's quite a leap to claim that the current situation will work out the same.

In fact, here are just nine of the differences between then and now:

1. Many of our current illegal aliens are from a neighboring country, meaning they don't have to make a clean break, they can go back and forth. There are families with members on both sides of the border.

2. Related to that, past immigrants came here on ships; current immigrants can walk over.

I might find this compelling if there were as many people here as there were in the 1880s. But as a percentage of population, the percentage of foriegn born residents peaked at 15% in 1890, 50% higher than today's ratio. And yes, that includes illegal aliens, although they are virtually certainly undercounted by the census bureau. Moreover, walking across the Mexican border is hardly obviously easier than travelling steerage. Furthermore, immigration foes wrongly imply that all illegal aliens come from Mexico. Mexico accounts for roughly half of illegal immigrants, with countries like Ireland and China contributing a substantial portion of the remainder. Most of the non-Mexicans who work illegally in the US could not walk across a border because it is very hard to hold your breath long enough to cross the ocean. When you get to legal immigrants, the numbers drop still further; Mexicans are only 25% of the total stock of foreign born in the US. To be fair, however, the second biggest group could also walk across the border to flood us with their unwanted poor. But I, for one, welcome our new Canadian overlords.

3. Italy, Poland, Germany, and Ireland never held territory in the U.S. On the other hand, the Southwest U.S. briefly was Mexican territory. And, in a poll conducted in Mexico, 58% said that the U.S. Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico.

It is not surprising that a poll conducted in Mexico finds that it should have its territory doubled by the addition of comparitively rich states. I am more interested in what a poll conducted in New Mexico finds. None of the Mexican Americans I know, though perhaps an unrepresentative sample, are eager to vote themselves into Mexico's political mess; if they wanted to live in Mexico, they would move back there, where their modest savings could provide a lavish lifestyle.

4. There wasn't a far-left, Gramscian "multiculturalism" movement a century ago. The related issue of political correctness makes it difficult for some to, for instance, use the correct names for things ("illegal aliens") rather than euphemisms ("undocumented workers").

Political polemicists who start with the notion that there is a "correct" word for thing, and that their word--which just happens to be the one that makes their opponents sound evil--is the correct one, set my teeth on edge. See, "Debates, Terminology, Abortion". It fools convinces no one except the ones who already agree with you.

But beyond inserting into our political discourse the entirely new, sneaky tactic (probably of Mexican origin!) of renaming things that sound bad to something that appears innocuous, I am hard pressed to see where the multiculturalists are winning all these monumental victories. Last time I looked, they were being pressed back at every turn. And I was rooting for their enemies. Bilingual education should be an accelerated English programme to get non-speakers up to speed; immigrants shouldn't be eligible for welfare, at least until they've paid some substantial taxes; and no one has a civil right to get anything out of the government in a language other than English, although personally, I don't care if the government decides to do so out of sheer niceness. In theory, it could be a problem, but in practice, the immigrants themselves are often the ones leading the charge for assimilation, by for example demanding that their children be taught in English.

5. There were ethnic newspapers, but nothing like today's ethnic media.

This is just ridiculous. Immigrants in 1900 could get all the entertainment that was then available in their own language; for example, by 1918, New York City boasted 20 Yiddish theaters. The idea that Latin American immigrants are somehow uniquely unable to assimilate because they can now watch soap operas and the Venezuelan version of Eurovision in their very own language seems to me self-evidently absurd; an immigrant at home watching television in Spanish is immersed in her own culture no more thoroughly than was the typical resident of an ethnic neighbourhood who shopped, worked, went to services, and partied entirely with their compatriots.

6. Immigrants who came through Ellis Island were checked for disease and suitability. And, they were pre-screened by the cruiseship companies, who were charged if someone was rejected. Nowadays, anyone can overstay their visa or just walk across.

This would seem like an argument for legalising immigration so that immigrants could go through a normal screening, rather than cutting down on the number of legal migrants. Beyond that, this was in an era when public health epidemics were common; we do screen for things like TB and HIV.

7. There's been a rapid increase in dual citizenship, leading to U.S. citizens with divided loyalties. 14% of U.S. citizens are eligible to be dual citizens, and Mexico encourages dual citizenship as a way of obtaining political power inside the U.S.

Surprisingly, I agree with this. I'm enough of a nativist to think that people should have citizenship in one, and only one country. We should require residents to give up other passports, as we used to.

8. The welfare state hardly existed a century ago.

Again, that's an argument for denying immigrants access to the welfare state, not keeping them out.

9. Obvious to anyone who's been to, say, Dallas or Los Angeles, there were many fewer people here a century ago than there are now.

Yes, but there are more citizens than there used to be. The high water mark of a single ethnic group's arrival was, as I pointed out previously, the immigration of nearly one million Irish to America in the 1850's, at a time when the entire population of the United States was about 23 million, of whom over 3 million were slaves. That is why one in five Americans now claims Irish descent. Unsurprisingly, this massive influx triggered the same hostility we see now, despite the lack of thins like a common border and a welfare state.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The end of an era

Fame-wise, Antioch has always punched out of its weight class. When my parents were in college, it was a centre of beatnik and hippie revolt. When I was in college, it achieved considerable fame as the author of an infamous sexual speech code, which required men to ask permission roughly every minute during a sexual encounter. And a shocking number of the professional organisers one met in those days were recent graduates of Antioch. In the back of my mind, where I store information I don't actually use for anything, it was filed under "Institutions, American, Venerable." So I was kind of shocked to hear that the school is shutting down because it has run out of money and, um, students:

Friday’s gathering, the first chance for trustees to tell alumni directly about their surprise decision to close the 155-year-old college, combined political grilling with encounter session for a caustic mix.

Trustees — holding back tears, their voices quavering — used questions as springboards to express their sadness and anguish over the closing. But impatient alumni demanded answers. “We came here from all across the United States at our own expense,” shouted one from the back rows. “We want answers!”

Another shouted: “Less talk! More questions!”

Trustees insisted they had no other choice, given the college’s falling enrollment and dire finances, than to shut it and perhaps reinvent it four years down the road. A new curriculum program, intended to save money and shrink the faculty by abolishing majors and developing areas of concentration instead, projected that 190 new students would enter Antioch last September; instead 63 showed up. This year the college had 125 acceptances for September, but it was still not enough. The school is to be shut in July 2008.

The alumni, perhaps predictibly given the school's culture, are in open revolt. But it doesn't sound like the trustees had much choice; there's no endowment left to speak of, and for whatever reason, students apparently don't want to enroll in Progressive Central. The alumni don't seem to be offering any mechanism for running a school with no money, and no one to teach; they're just angry at seeing their beloved alma mater shut down. As I'm sure I would be, if they decided to shutter Penn and sell off my dorms for condos.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Cheap shot

Was yesterday's post mean and unkind, a vicious ad hominem? I don't think so. But I do think a number of people who weren't meant to be included by it have taken it as an attack on them.

I am pro-immigration, but not pro-open bordes. I think there's a limit to how quickly America can assimilate immigrants. Luckily, I don't think we're anywhere near that limit. But I understand perfectly that there are realistic objections to immigration: the expense of social services, the difficulties of assimilation.

I was referring to a particular kind of objection to immigration: the "Oh my God, they speak Spanish!" objection, which goes hand in hand with the "they breed like cockroaches" and "they have a funny religion" objections (heard mostly in weirdo evangelical circles). Unless you are, like my mother's family, descended from the White Anglo Saxon Protestants who sailed for this country in 1621, or shortly thereafter, you are the descendant of people who had exactly the same charges leveled against them. The Germans. The Swedes. The Irish. The Italians. The Jews. The Serbs. The Poles. The Russians. The Portuguese. The Arabs. The Greeks. Frankly, I'm getting tired of typing.

The ancestry of every single one of my readers, those WASPs excepted, was the target of some native American group complaining that they were coming here with their funny language and their weird customs, keeping to themselves, taking jobs or land from good Americans. (The WASPs were also targets of complaints, but the indians tended to register their immigration fears a little more violently; possibly because those WASPs practiced exactly the kind of cultural separatism that they've been complaining about in other enthic groups for the last 200 years.)

Unless you're some kind of weird self-hating crank, you don't give any credence to this, even though it was just as true of your ancestors as it is of Mexicans today. They did lower wages for low-skilled workers, try to keep their children from assimilating, practice a strange religion, alter local mores (you can thank Jewish immigrants for the fact that children no longer recite prayers in school), and frankly, some of them, like the Irish and Italians, had a penchant for antisocial behaviour. They were also famous for living like, eighty to a room in extremely unsanitary conditions. And contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of them. One country, Ireland, sent about 1 million people to the United States during the ten-year famine period, at a time when the United States had a population of less than fifty million.

Your ancestors weren't welcomed; they were reviled. They didn't assimilate along the happy schedule outlined on saccharine television dramas; indeed, Mexican immigrants are much more open to assimilation than many groups, which is why early 20th century literature is so full of anguished dramas about immigrant parents trying to keep their children from losing their culture.*

Yet you may have noticed, you feel pretty American--so American that it may worry you to run into people who are visibly still participating in another culture, right here in your own back yard. Culture is phenomenally powerful, and the nearly iron rule is that, as long as the majority does not wall the minority off into a ghetto, the majority wins. That's true whether it's a company, a church, or a nation: the majority wins, no matter how hard the minority tries to hold out. Europe's problems with assimilations are not, in my humble opinion, very much to do at all with the ethnic characteristic of the immigrants; the problem is one ethnic characteristic of Europeans, which is that they are constitutionally unable to view immigrants, particularly immigrants who look different, as true citizens of their countries.

We are better placed now to assimilate immigrants than at any time in history. We have a longer history of assimilation, and fewer immigrants to work on. (And people who think that "hispanics" are a single, homogenous cultural block which represents some unique threat to assimilation are guilty of racism; my parents' Ecuadorian housekeeper had no more in common with the Mexicans at my local taqueria, or the Cubans in West New York, than you have with Scots or Jamaicans.) A special note to people who keep posting links to Aztlan nuttery: this is like Al Qaeda picking out NAMBLA as representative of American culture. Hispanic parents have been leading the charge against bilingual separatism in schools, and Mexicans feel about New Mexico about the way most Irish Americans feel about Armagh; sure, they oughta give it back, but it doesn't actually impact my life. Indeed, to their credit, the Mexicans aren't the ones giving money to terrorist groups who promise to reverse a centuries old land grab.

If you think that you deserve to be here, despite the many costs, psychic and otherwise, that your ancestors imposed on the pre-existing citizens, then you have a pretty high bar to explain why other groups are different and special and don't deserve the same chance. The charges leveled against Mexican immigrants are overwhelmingly anecdote and calumny. The actual data shows they seem to be assimilating just fine--at least if we define what your grandmother did as "just fine".

It looks pretty fine to me.

* The pretty-pretty "America is a great big melting pot" version of previous immigration waves is a creation of the World War II propaganda machine, which wanted to portray America as a harmonious fighting machine, not a collection of squabbling immigrant groups. It was then echoed in American textbooks in the 1950's, which is why so many people seem to believe it is actually true. It isn't. The history of America is the history of fierce resistance to immigrant groups as soon as they got too numerous . . . and equally fierce forgetting as soon as the immigrants' kids got jobs and learned English.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm with Ezra on this one. Expecting me to get all excited and worried about American immigration because of the tragedy of "Por espanol, oprima numero dos" in phone trees is like . . . expecting me to get all excited and worried because tonight, on a very special episode of Blossom, Randy considers having sex with her boyfriend!

There are a shocking number of purportedly educated people who think that Mexican immigration is a new, more dangerous phase of American history because, well, there are so many of them! And they don't speak English! You can travel for an hour through their neighbourhoods without hearing anything but Spanish! The pastiche version of American history represented by these worrywarts seems to have been scavenged largely from Little House on the Prairie and a few late night showings of I Remember Mama. In actuality, there were plenty of times and places in American history where foreigners flooded in in huge numbers, bringing their strange customs and yes, their language with them. Large swathes of New York were dedicated to Yiddish, Italian, Polish, Greek, Arabic (there was a large Syrian Christian population in Brooklyn), and, yes, Spanish. Yet today you can walk there without seeing a single sign for nashvarg, carne, φρέσκο ψωμί, خضروات, or even arroz con pollo. They left us the good stuff: bagels, pasta, pierogis, pasticchio, falafel, and empanadas, but the language, and most of the funny customs, vanished along with the generation that imported it. Cincinatti is no longer more German than English, the Portuguese fisherman of New England are now renowned mostly for their bread, and the Pennsylvania coal towns are denuded of Serbo-croatian. I can only think of one group that has managed to ruthlessly prevent assimilation, passing their strange religious customs, their language, and their clothes on generation after generation . . . a group that refuses to serve in the military, barely pays taxes, and frequently pulls its children out of school after eighth grade to keep them from getting Americanised. Not only that, but they have dominated their local area with their funny customs for years, pushing their unAmerican agenda on their neighbours.

That group is, of course, the Amish, and many of the same people complaining that Mexicans won't assimilate flock to Lancaster to take pictures of women in funny hats vending sticky-sweet food and overpriced handwork. Can someone explain this in terms that don't devolve into "But the Mexicans are brown"?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

All about me

Normblog has a profile up.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That's useful

I've actually used this a couple of times in the past week; it calculates the distance between dates. Very useful for journalists working on a story.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Critic fires off, scores own goal

I expect that the literary bloggers will be on this like white on rice:

In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn't. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn't offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

I don't do literary reviews because I am not good at talking about books, so I won't address that portion of it. But the part of the argument where he says that the proof of the inferiority of literary blogs is that they don't have the kind of audience that political blogs do leaves me frankly bewildered. Is Adam Kirsch living in some alternate universe where print literary writing has an audience to rival dead tree political journalism? This rather points up a weakness of print: book reviewers* are fooled into confusing their newspaper's circulation with the number of people who actually read their opinions on Proust.

* Full disclosure: I have been one of the New York Sun's book reviewers

From the desk of Jane Galt:

But people used to be thin

One of the criticisms of the set point theory is that people used to be thinner. And it is true, there weren't so many obese people around. But we are fooled by old movies into thinking that this means everyone used to be thin.

But look at this randomly selected ninth grade photo:

By my count, at least half the girls would be dieting today. I've noticed the same thing looking at my mother's high school yearbook; my mother strenuously denies that those girls thought about their weight. Our standards for "thin" and "normal" have changed dramatically, which is adding to our perception that Americans are getting fatter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm no philosopher, so I'm prepared to be wrong, but I'm a little puzzled by this Linda Hirshman essay endorsing the idea that the problem with the Bush administration is its lack of the Aristotelian virtues. Had we only had them in Congress and the White House, we'd never have gone to Iraq.

As I say, my reading of Aristotle is patchy at best. But he mostly seemed to be well soaked in ancient Greek culture, which was kind of martial. Their reaction to almost anything was to go and kick some serious ass whenever anything--like the lack of Greek control of the Middle East and Central Asia--was bothering them. Frankly, the Iraq war seems exactly like something they would have done, except with more soldiers and looting and rapine.

Did I just miss the part where Aristotle was all "Hey, guys, this war thing is a bad idea except in very extreme circumstances? True statesmen will strive to avoid it at all costs?"

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I just finished Gina Kolata's "Rethinking Thin", which is pretty scathing on the subject of weight loss. She heavily endorses the theory that people have a natural set point for weight, around which they vary by no more than 10-20 pounds. Try to go beyond that, and natural defense mechanisms kick in that push you back into your range; either you lose your appetite, or you become ravenously hungry and obsessed with food.

The idea seems to be that the natural tendency of most people is to be somewhat overweight--say, 10-30 pounds over what society sees as normal. Obese people, however, have something wrong with the mechanism their body uses to perceive how fat they are, so the chemical signals to eat keep coming. Basically, any time that they are losing weight, their body thinks they are starving.

Normal people think of obese people dieting down to something near normal as being essentially the same activity as it is for them to diet off those ten unwanted pounds, when in fact they are fundamentally different. Normal people are dieting down to the bottom of their set range, where it might be a little tempting to have more dessert. Obese people, on the other hand, are dieting down to a point where their body thinks they are starving, and floods them with chemical signals to EAT! Obese people who have lost a lot of weight act like normal people do when they are severely food deprived--tellingly illustrated by an anecdote from a World War II prisoner of war, who reports that the GI's in German prison camps sat around, not talking about tail, but swapping recipes. Imagine a force powerful enough to make 19 year old males stop thinking about sex, and start thinking about ways to bring out the parsley flavour in your cheese croquettes, and you have some inkling of what the obese go through. Gastric bypass surgery somehow short-circuits this hormonal surge, though no one quite understands why.

It makes sense to me. Like almost everyone who doesn't struggle with their weight, I have been guilty of thinking that fat people simply lacked willpower. But when I actually think about, say, the roommate with the binge eating problem, it's readily apparent that there must be something else going on. I once burst in on her as she spooned out the last of a half-gallon of ice cream that had not been in our freezer just hours before. "What a pig!" is the common upper middle class reaction. But that doesn't make much sense. I don't manfully restrain my many urges to eat a half-gallon of ice cream; the very idea revolts me. I'm not sure I could force myself to do so on a bet. So I can't really credit my behaviour to my superior exhibition of the bourgeois virtues of self restraint, since I am being restrained by lack of desire, not force of will. That she did want to eat that much ice cream seems to indicate that there is something very different about her that has nothing to do with virtue.

It isn't just eating, either; fat peoples metabolisms are notably slower when they lose weight than someone who finds it easy to keep their weight at the same level. (Note to dieters, however: it apparently isn't true that dieting results in a long-term fall in your metabolism, and losing weight, not being thin, is what cures hypertension, so yo yo dieting may not be as bad as its sometimes thought).

I'm not entirely satisfied with Kolata's thesis, because she doesn't address the two biggest holes in the "genetic determinance" theory: first, why are we getting fatter so rapidly? And second, why is weight so strongly correlated with income? Some of it may be reverse correlation (people are disgusted by fat people), but not all of it, because many people don't become fat until later in life, and the relationship holds more strongly for women, whose household income is likely to be more determined by what their husband earns than what they earn. Even if we were seeing fat wives left for thinner women, alimony should be supporting them in a higher quintile.

I am still wondering about one thing: why do we hate fat people so much? Upper middle class Americans look down on fat people as both physically and morally revolting. And contrary to a lot of the things you read in the fat acceptance movement, that is a longstanding prejudice; the upper class has been dieting since at least Lord Byron. It has been a long time since western society idealised women with abundant rolls of fat. Fat people have been reviled even when there weren't very many of them; even when it was (as it was, in the 19th century) a sign of wealth.

I have an evolutionary theory, which is that we are programmed to resent those people who we think of as taking more than their fair share from the collective food supply. Gluttony offends us because it taps some primal feeling that those who eat too much are bad, not for themselves, but for society. That's not quite satisfying, because then why do Africans prefer their women so plump? But so far, it's all I've got.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

My life as movie

Google Reader brought me to this, which brought me to this:

Here’s how it works:
1. open your library (iTunes, winamp, media player, iPod)
2. put it on shuffle
3. press play
4. for every question, type the song that’s playing
5. new question– press the next button
6. don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool

Results below the fold. My iTunes shuffle seems oddly stuck on a few albums: Billy Joel, Kanye West, Ray Charles, the Kingston Trio, so I have done two versions: one with the actual results, one if I bounce the second mention of an artist. Either way, it appears that I am going to have a very weird life.

Opening Credits

Mess around - Ray Charles

Waking Up

The Tijuana Jail - The Kingston Trio

First Day at School

Hard Times - Ray Charles

Falling in Love

The Gambler - Kenny Rogers¹

Breaking Up

Goodbye Blue Sky - Pink Floyd

Prom

Lucky - Hem

Life's Okay

Misty Mountain Hop - Led Zeppelin

Mental Breakdown

Pon de Replay - Rihanna

Driving

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel¹

Flashback

The Lion Sleeps Tonight - The Kingston Trio

Getting back together

My Way Home - Kanye West

Wedding

She's Always a Woman - Billy Joel

Birth of a child

Heart of Gold - Neil Young

Final Battle

Donal Agus Morag - Altan

Death Scene

High - James Blunt

Funeral Song

Raste Nun Hier, Gonne Dir Ruh! - Wagner²

End Credits

We major - Kanye West

or

Opening Credits

Mess around - Ray Charles

Waking Up

The Tijuana Jail - The Kingston Trio

First Day at School

The Gambler - Kenny Rogers¹

Falling in Love

Goodbye Blue Sky - Pink Floyd

Breaking Up

Lucky - Hem

Prom

Misty Mountain Hop - Led Zeppelin

Life's Okay

Pon de Replay - Rihanna

Mental Breakdown

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel¹

Driving

My Way Home - Kanye West

Flashback

Heart of Gold - Neil Young

Getting back together

Donal Agus Morag - Altan

Wedding

High - James Blunt

Birth of a child

Raste Nun Hier, Gonne Dir Ruh! - Wagner

Final Battle

Pam Berry - The Shins

Death Scene

A-Tisket, A-Tasket

Funeral Song

The Choice of Hercules - Handel

End Credits

Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkel

¹ If you only knew the effort it took me to type those words

² Apparently, birth and death take a very long time

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thanks to my friend Matt, who, knowing my love of totalitarian propaganda films, sent me this beautiful link to an old Soviet film of Stalin visiting Berlin. Stalin, upon viewing it, is said to have remarked that it was so lovely, he wished he had actually gone.

It's also, of course, great, because before I saw it, I didn't realise they spoke Russian in Germany.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jonah Goldberg toys with the idea of green roofs, which seems kind of unlikely to me. Frankly, I can't even water the African violet my landlady left me. I don't picture making time in my busy schedule to mulch out the roof.

But what happened to that whole "white roof" thing? Allegedly, just doing that (worldwide) could change the albedo of the earth enough to make a significant dent in global warming, and it doesn't seem that hard; white paint is cheap. I'm also told that, as a side effect, it makes the building cheaper to cool. So why haven't we already done this? As regulations go, it's one even this libertarianish chick could support--negative externalities, doncha know.

(via Matthew Yglesias, from whom I steal far too much these days)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

My colleague Roger McShane took this really cool photo of our intern. I think maybe we need to pay our interns more.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So you want to bloviate full time?

Best pundit major? I vote for English and Economics¹. English makes you write. A lot. A really lot. My average weekly word output as a college english major was higher than it is as a journalist and blogger. The lit major also familiarises you with the many ways to make a sentence sound good², as well, of course, as with the tragicomic human condition.

Economics, at least if you are in a decent program, forces you to attack data analytically, and develop at least a passing familiarity with statistics and math. There is almost no field of journalism, no, not even political journalism, which is not made a lot easier if you know how to deconstruct a statistic.

But the best part about majoring in economics is that it teaches you how to do an expected value calculation, and look up salary data, at which point you will make the very wise decision not to become a pundit. That is why the field is filled with philosophy majors.

¹ This of course has nothing to do with the fact that I majored in . . . English and Economics.

² This of course has not actually manifested itself in my writing. We're talking general principles here.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Catch as cat can

You never really know your cat until you walk a mile in his shoes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's enough to turn one into a raging leftist

To be sure, I do not know which of the many rumours about Paris Hilton's release is true. But it doesn't really matter, because I can't imagine that any of the ostensible reasons for her parole would have been sufficient to spring, say, the child of a janitor from the clink. Poor people would have been very sensibly told to sit in jail, scratching their rash and seeing if they could maintain a hunger strike for the full 45 days, which is what should have happened to the Hilton heir.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Counting the costs of Cuban communism

I'm not sure why everyone on the left is so sure that Cuba has a great health care system--or at least, as Ezra says, a great health care system given that the economy has been in a death spiral for the last fifteen years. People talk about the great clinical work that Cuban doctors do, the mortality statistics, and so forth, as if we have any idea what happens in Cuban hospitals. It's a communist country that acts like a communist country: rigidly controlling access to information, and preventing journalists and other Westerners from seeing things the government thinks are damaging.

We know, a la Michael Moore, that the hospitals Westerners are allowed into are quite nice. The reports about the other ones are less salutary. Cuba seems to be desperately short of things like antibiotics, and in the pre-antibiotic era, the only thing that kept hospitals from turning into death traps was Martha-Stewart-on-crystal-meth levels of committment to hygeine. The photographs of Cuban hospitals seem to indicate that at least in some places, this does not prevail; if that is true, research into 19th century health practices suggests that you'd be better off staying home, where at least there aren't a lot of other sick people to get fresh diseases from.

Why do we think we know how well the Cuban health system performs? Do we think that a government with thousands of political prisoners is above fudging its infant mortality statistics? Does it seem likely to anyone to the left of Noam Chomsky that serious researchers would be allowed to conduct serious research on outcomes in Cuban hospitals?

This doesn't seem like a relevant part of the single-payer debate to me; the fact that a communist state on a small tropical island can't provide good health care probably says next to nothing about various health systems either. I just think I'm surprised that so many people seem to take things like Cuban infant mortality statistics at face value, or believe that anything definitive can be said about Cuban health systems, other than that we really don't know what we don't know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This is cool . . . except I'm not really clear why it's better than regular contact lenses.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hmmm

The Atlantic's new politics blog is extremely good--good in a fun, bloggy way, as well as an "insightful political commentary" way. I just wish the EternaCampaign didn't give me hives.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Wow. Just -- wow.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The words, the lovely lovely words

This article on the new supercollider being built in Europe is really cool. It offers a heavy dose of potential schadenfreude for Americans, particularly American libertarians who find the notion of governments spending zillions of dollars to garner Nobel prizes for domestic scientists really stupid*.

So, if the rumor is true and the standard model Higgs has been found at the Tevatron, the LHC is in big trouble: Immediately, its "guaranteed" success—the final particle of the standard model, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prizes for European scientists—is gone.

But that is not the neat part. This is the neat part:

The irony is that things look just as bleak for the LHC if the rumor is false, and the Europeans end up finding the standard model Higgs themselves. Physicists have developed such a complete description of elementary particles that, once the final piece of the theory is in place, the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn't predict are almost negligible.

Particle theorists talk a big game. They get excited and tell reporters, not to mention government funding agencies, that the Higgs is just the beginning: The LHC, some say, may find examples of a class of particles indicative of a new fundamental property of nature, called supersymmetry. Others say there may be two or three particles, which together perform the job the standard model assigns to the Higgs. The truth is that these alternatives patch up the standard model, should something unexpected happen. If a Higgs-like particle is found, say, but it's too light to be the standard model boson. Or if it decays in a surprising way. In cases like these, the LHC could indeed produce dramatic new discoveries.

But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. With current technology, this would mean an accelerator the circumference of the Milky Way. Though some theorists—proponents, for instance, of string theory—speculate about what such an accelerator might find, few other physicists take them seriously.

In fact, finding the "just right" Higgs would be bad news all around. Surely the European Union wants more for its $8 billion than a single particle. But more importantly, it would provide the final proof of the standard model, which happens to be clunky, boring, and infuriatingly silent on the Big Questions that the final theory of physics was supposed to answer. Questions like: Why is there something, rather than nothing? And where does gravity fit in? If the standard model turns out to be a complete description of particle behavior, as the discovery of the Higgs would suggest, these questions may never be answered.

I don't know who this James Owen Weatherall is, (though his photograph suggests that he is cute) but he sure can write.

The problem, of course, is that I have no idea if any of this is true. My ability to assess the accuracy of his article, as opposed to the "Gee-whiz!" factor, is roughly the same as my ability to assess writing on the subject of 18th century Chinese porcelain. Unless they start claiming the Ming empire was in Peru, I'm pretty much gullible putty in their hands. And I have been taken in before; a physicist of my acquaintance confiscated my copies of The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-li Masters and wouldn't let me have them back even when I threatened to sue.

* Though less stupid than almost any other form of intergovernmental status competition

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jim Henley thinks America isn't ready for a trophy wife as first lady. Let me say that, despite his charms on Law & Order, I think Fred Thompson is a long shot for other reasons. (Which is why you should probably buy his contract right now on tradesports). But I'm not sure how much the younger wife thing hurts him. Grover Cleveland did something genuinely creepy: courted his dead partner's daughter, whom he had bought her first baby carriage, and of whose financial affairs he was guardian. This started when she was a freshman in college; he married her as soon as she graduated. Despite 27 years age difference, America ate it up.

Of course, things have changed a lot since then; but it's hard to argue that we've gotten more conservative about sex and marriage.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sigh

It was entirely predictible, but of course, I did not in fact so predict: I have been attacked by several of my leftier commenters and correspondents for not addressing the devastating argument that the Social Security Trustees median growth projections are lower than the growth rates that the American economy has historically provided. Why am I lying to America?

Let me 'splain. GDP is explained by a simple equation: [Labour force] x [Productivity]. Growth in the economy is therefore composed of growth in those two items. Unfortunately, growth in #1 is expected to slow sharply. The age cohort replacing the baby boomers is much smaller than the boomer generation, women have stopped moving into the labour force, the workforce keeps needing more education and therefore sacrifices useful labour years to school, and we continute looking for ways to get rid of all those annoying immigrants. Productivity may grow as fast, or faster than it is now, but it is not expected to keep pace; therefore, the rate of economic growth will fall.

In point of fact, the problem with social security is not that its unfunded structure somehow means that the future economy "can't afford" to support all those old people via Social Security. The economy doesn't care whether it supports old people through dividend payouts or social security checks. The problem with social security is that it is changing current behaviour.

• It encourages people to have fewer kids--a self-destroying Ponzi scheme. 
  
• It encourages them to retire earlier, because the payouts are set politically, rather than actuarily pegged to expected lifespan, as normal annuities are. 
  
• It encourages people to save too little, with two pernicious results 
  

• it becomes harder for our future, less well-staffed economy to support us all in the style to which we have become accustomed. 
• And it exposes current young people, who may not understand the future tax burdens required to support their future benefits, to substantial political risk that the future electorate will cut their benefits, leaving them worse off than they would have been had they simply been told to save for their own retirements.

It is true that many conservatives are wrong when they say that because Social Security is unfunded, the government will not be able to support retirees in the future. Doing so will require raising taxes by about 3% of GDP; the federal government could do this.

But doing so would be a big problem for that government, whichever party controls it; that's more than doubling the payroll tax. The fact that they could do this doesn't mean that they will; they may also need, politically if not financially, to cut benefits in some fashion. That will leave most people in whatever generation this happens to much worse off than they would have been had there been no social security; since then they would have saved adequately for their retirement. Just as conservatives are wrong to say that the government can't possibly afford Social Security, liberals are wrong to aver that the bonds in the trust fund somehow constitute a guarantee of future benefits.

Congress could legally slash benefits to zero right now without violating any obligations implied by those bonds, which are owned by the trust fund, not the retirees. The retirees have no legal right to a penny from those bonds, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled. If it did so, the accounting entries for interest and so forth would keep revolving through the federal government forever, with no legal repercussions for anyone except the unlucky bankrupts who were counting on a social security check.

Congress won't do this, because the political fallout would be nasty. But in the future, the political fallout from raising taxes might--almost certainly will, once Medicare is added into the mix--change that calculus. Social security payments wouldn't be done away with, but they will almost certainly be lowered substantially via means testing, taxation, and formula changes. And no, rosy economic growth assumptions won't save us. If they could, they already would have; until the last year, both the economy and tax revenues have been growing faster than expected for a long time, but the social security projections (with no change in method) have just gotten worse.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public service announcment

If you are going to read the TPMCafe Book Club on heterodox economics, I highly recommend that you do so while listening to Die Walkure. It gives the whole thing exactly the right atmosphere.