Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I don't think this is right. Current progressive support for aborting babies with congenital birth defects has very little in common with the philosophic basis for eugenics; the progressives aren't trying to clean up the gene pool. Rather, they're expressing support for a certain sort of personal autonomy--the right not to have a child that would be a massive burden. It's an autonomy of which I believe Ross also disapproves, but it seems fundamentally different from the arguments about eliminating those people for the good of society, which is what the old progressives were advocating.

His opponents go too far--the eugenicists were not just interested in cleaning up the gene pool for future generations; in many places, particularly in Europe, they also started knocking off the defectives. They were bothered, not just by the fact that these people might reproduce, but also the burden they placed on resources that they thought could be better employed--and also, one suspects, by the common human revulsion against people who, because of a facial deformity or a severe cognitive deficit, don't quite match our mental image of the word "human". It's not totally crazy to point out that aborting a down's foetus is somewhat facially similar to euthanising a down's infant back before you could tell in advance.

But philosophically, the two positions seem to me to be worlds apart, and I don't think you can trace any consistent lineage between the two. Nor is it right to say that the ends are the same. One group wants to enhance personal autonomy; the other was trying to build some sort of hyper-sanitized, technocratic collective in which everyone was a happy cog--and the retarded didn't make good cogs. It is the means that are similar.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

No more blogging today, and probably tomorrow, and quite possibly Thursday as well. Friday's also not looking so good, and the weekend's shot . . .

I'm moving into my new apartment tomorrow. Then I'm off to New York for, like, an hour, then back to DC, and then off on Friday to Toronto to spa with a friend or two. So while I will try to check in, I wouldn't count on it.

Not that I imagine you were.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've always thought Jim Cramer a little unhinged, but Felix Salmon catches him going over the edge. Time to adjust the meds, Jim. Normal people do not default on their mortgages because the value of their house has dropped, unless they are in dire financial circumstances. The reason they do not do this is that a 200 point drop in your FICO score is a little painful. Especially if you, er, want to keep the credit cards.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lileks is cruising.

I've been on exactly one cruise, on this ship, and it was actually pretty great. It was a family cruise, and I was the only person in my demographic (it leans heavily to the under eighteen and over fifty), but that actually turned out to be a plus; I wore my rattiest bathing suits and ugliest comfy shoes all week. Heaven. Really, it's pretty hard to go wrong sailing between the Greek Isles.

Most of my fellow passengers were experienced cruisers, and they displayed an obsession with food that was frankly astonishing. The food, to be honest, wasn't that good, except for the fresh fruit, upon which I gorged myself about six times a day. I also had a couple of good lobster tails. The rest of it ranged from uninspired to dreary. The only vegetables were wan, and drowned in mayonnaise or vinegar.

But there sure was a lot of it! If you wanted, you could have a six course meal every night. And everyone except me, my mother and my sister did. They seat you at a table with different people every night, so I got a decent cross section. And without exception, they* ordered everything they were entitled to. Not only that, they were shocked, and in a few cases indignant, when I didn't do the same. I was the lightest eater at our table--it was very hot in Greece--and without exception, they focused on me. "You're not going to have dessert?" they'd say in amazement. "I hope you're not on a diet."

No, I'd explain, just not particularly interested in another Teutonic construction of bland custard and soggy pastry.

"But it's free!" They'd say, as if there were some moral imperative to eat food one didn't want as long as one doesn't have to pay for it. One woman from Virginia told her husband "I think maybe she's anorexic" when she thought I couldn't hear her. I don't know why she would have thought that; I was sitting six inches from her. And if you've ever met me, you know that I'm about forty pounds and a healthy appetite off anorexic. In New York, I'm considered quite tubby.

But I did not laugh. I was raised to laugh at people behind their backs. It's called "manners".

I'm still at a loss to explain this behaviour. Tickets on the ship cost thousands of dollars; almost all the passengers were quite financially secure. I find it hard to imagine that any of them ever had to deny themselves food for financial reasons. So why did they suddenly go bonkers and start gorging themselves just because a cruise ship offered them an unlimited supply of mediocre meals?

* (the English speakers, at least; my mother doesn't speak another language, so that's who we sat with)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Item One I was not, not, NOT trying to imply that modern-day progressives are in some way linked to the more repulsive ideas of the original Progressive movement. The reverse, in fact. Given that the overwhelming majority of progressives are not racist WASPs with a heavy social-darwinist streak, why pick that name out of the dustbin of history for your rebranding? Conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, etc. have all been associated with some unlovely ideas in the past . . . but those who currently bear that label have the excuse that they have always worn it. Today's left is picking a new name, so why not one that doesn't have some ugly past associations? That is not the same thing as saying that progressives accept, or secretly endorse, Progressive errors; I think most of them aren't really familiar with the less nice parts of Progressivism. They tend to think of it as anti-trust and child labour laws, not forced sterilisation and anti-immigration laws.

This after Ezra's post, which assumes that I meant the same kind of silly ad hominem that one hears from many sides--conservatives were against birth control, the Democratic party favoured slavery, yada yada. I think that sort of thing is ridiculous. I was just pointing out that I think the rebranding might be better done, if it must be done, with a name that has fewer unsavoury overtones. Of course, it may only have those overtones for me, descended as I am from Irish Catholic political types, the kind that the Progressives thought needed to be Cleansed from The System.

Says Ezra:

[The progressives'] good goverment reforms (combined with the legal culture changes in the 1970s), are the reason that it takes about seventy years to get anything done at any level of government. My father likes to point out that had George Bush come into office saying "Shoring up the levees in New Orleans is my #1 priority" and proceeded to act on that, by the time Katrina hit the Army Corps of Engineers would probably have just about finished the Environmental Impact Analysis on the preliminary bids.

If there had been no lawsuits, that is.

There are always lawsuits.

Does anyone actually believe this? Does Megan? Or does it just sound sort of cutting and droll?

And incidentally, her post, which is another in the genre of "the historical progressives had pretty wide streaks of racism and eugenetics running through their movement" strikes me as very, very weak. Conservatives -- and not just "historical" conservatives, but still living conservatives, like Bill Buckley -- fought to preserve segregation as the law of the land. Fought viciously for it. And then spent 45 years determinedly taking advantage of the passage of the Civil Rights Act to gain lots of votes among quiet racists.

But tell me again how the progressives had "streaks of racism." And tell me again how much conservatives suffer from not only those linguistic associations with their forebears, but their more contemporary attempts to eke a political advantage out of their party's legacy of racism.

A couple of things to untangle here. I'm not sure what that last is supposed to imply: assuming, arguendo, that it is in fact true that the Republicans made mileage off of racism in the 1990's, would that be a good strategy for the Democrats to replicate? If the word "Progressive" made people like the left more because they associated it with eugenics and keeping blacks out of unions, should the left embrace that?

I've responded to the "conservative" point above, but here again: any movement that is around long enough will end up with a legacy of things it used to support, but no longer does. It's silly to bring those up as if they represented current day policy; and you will never hear me, I hope, talk about how today's progressives are the same folks who egged on Margaret Sanger's less salutory instincts. However, it's not, I think, unreasonable or rude to point out that the name has unsalutory associations, when the topic is picking a name.

As for the meat of the question: does anyone really believe this? Damn straight, and not libertarians. That's an argument from the left, not the right; its main author is Phillip Howard, author of, among other things, The Death of Common Sense, which I commend to you all. I thought that it was obvious that I was bringing up a procedural, not a substantive, critique, but apparently not.

Mr Howard's argument is that the progressive transformation of the administrative culture, followed by the innovations in legal review that started in the 1950's but really blossomed in the 1960's and 1970's, has resulted in a sort of sclerosis that has drastically curtailed the scope of government. We have substituted rules and rights for bureaucratic discretion and legislative accountability, which sounds awesome in theory, but in practice means that it is tremendously hard to get anything done, and frequently that absurd results come out of the civil servant's inability to weigh competing public interests against each other.

Government contracting has gotten slower and more expensive with each passing year, as the bidding process and review become ever-more rulebound and complex. There is no particular reason that government projects should be slow (inefficient is another question for another time), but they now are, legendarily so. In emergencies, they can sometimes get it together, which is why Ground Zero was cleaned up so fast, and sometimes not, which is why New Orleans wasn't (and people who want to blame the latter solely on the Bush administration should note that AFAIK, Bush's FEMA handled both jobs: the best and the worst conducted disaster recovery in the nation's history.) But prospective projects are a whole other issue.

Look at the Second Avenue Subway. It has been in the works since the mid-1990s. The final EIS was approved in spring of 2004, IIRC. The bond offering shot through the political system like a greased pig, being approved by voters a mere eighteen months later. Just eighteen months after that, in spring of 2007, ground was broken, though there were then delays because of arguments about contracts and financing. But if all goes well, it should still finish on schedule. Phase 1 will be complete by 2014, and by 2020 the whole thing should be done. Just about 25 years, start to finish.

In the first 30 years of the last century, New York built pretty much all of its 722 miles of subway. The original IRT line, which, if I'm doing my math right, was longer than this line, was completed in under four years. And yes, before you ask, it was constructed through inhabited neighbourhoods where streets had to be inconveniently opened, or tunnels expensively dug.

I'm not aware of any reasonable person who even questions the notion that the length of time it takes to complete government projects has steadily lengthened ever since the Progressives kicked out politicians like Jimmy Walker and replaced them with a well-protected, rule-bound civil service. Until now, I wasn't aware that other people were unaware that there is a serious literature wondering how good a deal all that was.

Do I buy that literature? In part. Accountability is good, but we're supposed to get that from the electoral system. One of the tenets of public choice theory is that politicians attempt to lock in their preferences by making it hard to change the system later on. My sense is that this happened twice in the twentieth century: by the Progressive civil service reforms in the 1920's-1940's; and by the legal reforms of the 1960's, which conferred legal rights where there had previously been administrative discretion. Both groups thought they were doing God's work, so they made it very difficult to undo; now that the costs are apparent, the system is nearly impossible to reform. Yes, libertarians like things slowed down, but progressives don't, so I'd think they'd want to at least consider the notion that this wasn't such a terrific idea.

On the other hand, corruption and abuse of power are real problems; in the developing world, they're crippling problems. It may well be true that the direct cost of battling the corruption of the machine politicians exceeds the direct amount they cost the cities; especially since much of the money that went through those machines was used for coalition building that now has to be bought with more legal forms of bribery, like boondoggle construction projects in their neighbourhoods. But the indirect cost of a cultural loss of trust, and barriers to innovation and business creation, should not be underestimated.

At any rate, do I believe that it takes longer to do things now because Progressives thought that there was no project that couldn't be improved by a really awesome committee full of smart, well meaning people thinking Big Thoughts about The Future? Yup, I do. I really do. And I invite anyone who does not think this to go sit through a public hearing on some trivial change to a valve in the sewer system, and then tell me with a straight face that I am wrong.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hmmmm

Driving home tonight, I heard the BBC talking about Michael Vick. Now, I haven't followed the case, because it makes me upset. But the announcer said something I hadn't realised:

"Vick's dogfighting ring allegedly executed dogs that lost by electrocution, hanging and drowning."

Okay, what is the point of executing dogs that lost in painful and protracted ways? Did he really think it would encourager les autres?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So far, the best name we have come up with for fake trailer recuts is "twailers", short for "twisted trailers". And the best nomination so far is:

Please keep them coming. Each fresh one makes my whole week.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Bemused

Can someone please tell me exactly what Roy Edroso objects to in my post on "progressive" v. "liberal"? Aside from the fact that it's "glibertarian", I mean?

Update A reader opines that he thinks I'm trying to slander progressives by associating them with the original Progressives' less salutory tendencies. Which is exactly the opposite of what I meant. What I was trying to say is, given that contemporary whatever-you-they-want-to-call-themselves are not racists, eugenicists, etc., I'm not sure it's a great idea to take the name of a bunch of people who were.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Okay, this is pretty good:

But not, I think, as good as the spoof that spawned it:

Incidentally, is there a name for movie trailers cut to advertise a movie completely different from teh underlying film? There should be, because I love them passionately.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Boycotts and Ostracism

Roger L. Simon writes of MoveOn and DailyKos:

Whoa! Let’s put it simply: attacking sponsorship is at base a sneaky way of suppressing free speech and essentially anti-democratic and reactionary. Brave New Films? Brave New World is more like it. Gilliam’s company’s name echoing Huxley’s dystopia seems like some kind of unconscious admission of a creepy truth.

In my book they have a right to make their views known to sponsors in any legal way they wish (as long as they remain privately funded). But it is hysterically funny to see organizations of this ilk adopt the techniques of Jerry Falwell or the American Decency Association.
It's fair to say these techniques typically rebound on the boycotters.

One of the commenters makes a good point as well, although the phenomenon is hardly as restricted in practice as he suggests:

This relates to one of my hobby horses regarding the left side of the blogosphere: their overuse of ostracism as a politcal (sic) & social tool.

Trying to cast a person (or company) out of polite society is a radical tactic, but it's not always wrong. The way the left uses this tactic, though, is troubling. They regularly use it, or threaten to use it, against people who disagree on purely political matters.

But if you try to cast out someone who disagrees on something like social security reform, for example, what social sanction is left for those who truly should be shunned by society, like neo-Nazi's and NAMBLA members? The left turns to ostracism so much that the tactic could loose its power. That would be a bad thing.

At the school parent gatherings Tigerhawk and I attend, his "W" bumper sticker has provoked screaming and name-calling from otherwise sedate suburbanites, and one of my neighbors became suddenly unfriendly when we enrolled our kids in the Charter School.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The throwdown over the terms "liberal" and "progressive" in the left blogosphere has been mildly interesting to me, because I've always been dubious about the switch. I mean, I'm happy to call people whatever they want, and the corpus of moderate-and-beyond left-wingers seems to have decided that they'd rather be known as "progressives" than "liberals", so that's what I try to call them. When I remember, at least.

But I'm not sure that it's actually a good idea. For one thing, the historical progressives had pretty wide streaks of racism and eugenetics running through their movement; many of the "good government" reforms they sought had a lot to do with draining the power of the city political machines which were objected to not merely because they were corrupt, but because they catered to the unwashed masses that the progressives found distasteful.

Incidentally, those good goverment reforms (combined with the legal culture changes in the 1970s), are the reason that it takes about seventy years to get anything done at any level of government. My father likes to point out that had George Bush come into office saying "Shoring up the levees in New Orleans is my #1 priority" and proceeded to act on that, by the time Katrina hit the Army Corps of Engineers would probably have just about finished the Environmental Impact Analysis on the preliminary bids.

If there had been no lawsuits, that is.

There are always lawsuits.

So I'm not sure why you would want to inherit their mantle. For another, progressives seem to want the switch because they think that "liberal" has somehow been poisoned by right-wing propaganda. I'm not sure that's true, and even if it is, it wasn't the name they objected to. Slapping a new label on old ideas is unlikely to work.

But I digress. I meant to tell you that Noah Millman has written something very good on the subject:

Here are, in my view, the two key temperamental distinctions:

- Progressives orient themselves temporally, towards the future. Liberals do not fundamentally orient themselves temporally because their principles are timeless.

- Liberals love to argue about ends and means and whether one can justify the other; an argument between Kant on the one hand and Mill on the other is a quintessential liberal argument. Progressives are inclined to believe that arguments about means are really arguments about ends in disguise.

That last is why I have to spend so much time explaining that when I come out against card check, or the Griswold-Roe-Lawrence emanations and penumbras, it is not because I have some secret anti-union/woman/gay agenda, but because I think they're extremely deleterious to a liberal order. I have many friends who seem unable to comprehend, or at least believe, the idea that anyone might genuinely care enough about process to sanction a good process that produces bad outcomes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

No big deal?

Okay, one more post about Scott Beauchamp.

John Quiggin doesn't like these sort of attacks because they don't matter to the larger policy question of whether Iraq was a good idea or not. And I agree that they don't matter in that way. Anyone who thought we were going to send 160,000 people, most of them fairly young men, to Iraq, and put guns in their hand, and give them power, and not have any of them abuse that power, needs to have their head examined. Nor do I think that the story (whether true or not) gave aid and comfort to the enemy. The Arab/Muslim world already thinks pretty poorly of us. The thing that generates outrage there is accounts of us hurting civilians, not stories about chasing dogs with Bradleys or making fun of contractors. The skull story might hurt, a bit, if anyone hears it, but forgive me if I am sceptical that Osama et. al. have taken subscriptions to TNR.

But though I disapprove of the way that both sides have turned this into a battle in some larger culture war over whether soldiers/Republicans or journalists/Democrats are the bigger jerks, it still matters a great deal whether the story was right. Just as it mattered whether Jayson Blair's stories were right, or Stephen Glass's, not because their stories would resolve momentous questions of public policy, but because it matters a great deal whether the information that media conveys is correct. Editors should live in fear that something they have published is wrong; that's healthy. Whatever the motives of the critics--and I hate to point this out, but almost certainly anyone who gets caught writing a fake story, will be caught by someone who doesn't like them very much, and has ulterior motives for desiring to disprove what they wrote--the mechanism is sound. It is the journalistic equivalent of peer review.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

From Opinionjournal's Political Diary Rudy

From Opinionjournal's Political Diary

Rudy Giuliani rests much of his presidential claim on his experience handling Sept. 11, even though many of his fans found his efforts to curb lawlessness in New York City more impressive. But his habit of invoking 9/11 may be in danger of turning into self-parody if a recent Iowa campaign appearance is any indication.

The question from a voter concerned federal support for HIV medications. Mr. Giuliani elicited applause with his initial response: "I don't want to promise you the federal government will take over the role." But according to the online Iowa Independent, which covered the event, Mr. Giuliani continued: "My general experience has been that the federal government works best when it helps and assists and encourages and sets guidelines... on a state-by-state, locality-by-locality basis. It's no different from the way I look at homeland security. Maybe having been mayor of the city, I know that your first defense against terrorist attack is that local police station, or that local firehouse."

Huh? It might be prudent for Mr. Giuliani to leave such points for a more salient moment, such as when somebody actually asks about 9/11. The 2008 presidential campaign has many months to run and Mr. Giuliani might yet turn mystique into mockery if he earns too many headlines like the Iowa Independent's snarky "Rudy Giuliani: Asked About HIV, He Answers With 9/11."

Will Taranto now say Rudy Giuliani, the "tough former mayor who, by the way, showed leadership on 9/11"? I'm pretty sure he won't say "lovely and talented".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Actually . . .

One more post on Scott Thomas. Or rather, links to other posts on it.

Graeme Woods comes closest to my own thinking on the thing; it's the best piece I've read so far.

And Ezra, in the course of upbraiding me, says:

If you want to question a story's veracity, you can. But you actually need to possess some relevant information throwing its facts into doubt. Or you need some motive for why a soldier, in a war zone, would invent disturbing, but not actually barbaric or illegal, actions on behalf of the troops. What we've got is absolutely nothing.

What interests me is that you don't need a motive. I'm actually fascinated by this. The past five years have brought tales of fabulists in a number of fields: Michael Bellesisles, Jayson Blair, the guy who faked nobel prizewinning reserach at Bell Labs, even though there was a virtually mathematical certainty that he would be caught. Why did they, or Jack Kelley, or Stephen Glass, do what they did? Tyler Cowen's theory is that their impulse control circuits failed at some point; another friend votes for the common explanation that they wanted success beyond what their talents would allow. Whatever it was, it seems obvious that in profesisons where it is possible to cheat, some people will try to cheat. And unfortunately, ours is one of those professions.

Which brings me to the people asking "Where were the fact checkers?" Might I suggest that you try to fact-check a 2500 word article before you demand to know how these things might get through?

It is simply not possible to fact check every single thing written. If a writer says that he was standing on a corner at a given hour of the day, you don't demand video; you have to take it on faith. It seems that some people with more military knowlege than the TNR editors think they have discovered erroneous details that could be easily checked. But of course, experts in a topic can always spot the crucial details--would you, tank driver, like to fact check one of my articles on bankruptcy and try to pick out what the key details are? The problem is, those experts are experts because they are off doing whatever it is they are experts on, not being journalists. Obviously, journalism should ever strive to improve. But the standards being expected here are not realistic, particularly not at the current price which y'all are willing to pay for your media.

Special bonus point: the editors at TNR presumably did not call the commanding officer of the base to ask whether there was such a contractor there, because it was a small base, and they didn't want to blow their source. *Now* that phone call can be made, but it seems perfectly obvious why it wasn't, then.

Now I'm done, I promise.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I should note that I don't feel like I have any horse in the TNR race, as it were. The least convincing rebuttal of Private Beauchamp's allegations is that "American soldiers are good people!". But on the other hand, the least convincing defense is "atrocities happen in war!" Both can be true, and irrelevant to the question of whether Private Scott Beauchamp is an incredible jerk, with enough other incredible jers around him that he managed to get away with some incredibly awful things. It seems ludicrous that the main subject of argument seems to be whether Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt, or Franklin Foer and his editors, are deluded losers keeping themselves willfully ignorant of wartime conditions in order to advance their ideological agenda.

So let's get it out of the way. The Iraq war was a bad idea. Undoubtedly, American soldiers are doing things that are either immoral, or disgusting, or both, because that's what happens when you give people guns and tanks and power, and the UCMJ can only reel that sort of thing in so far. American soldiers in World War II used to boil Japanese skulls and send them to their girlfiends, and yes, we were still the good guys in that one. War is hell, she said with unabashed clicheness.

I'm interested--and frankly not that interested; it was a throwaway post--only in the question of whether TNR got taken, not in exploring what this says about some larger culture war. As far as I'm concerned, if they got taken, they got taken for the obvious reason that there is a limit on one's ability to fact check; that there is an even greater limit on the ability to fact-check anonymous sources; and that the editors of TNR are very far from Iraq and don't know what it's like there. Whether they got taken, which is my bet, or whether it turns out that I am wrong and there is no reason to doubt the stories, that will not actually change anything about Iraq. The vituperative focus of both sides on the imagined nastiness of the other, is both beside the point, and says more about the culture war here than anything in the actual stories, or the decision to run them.

And that still won't make Iraq be successful.

But TNR's defenders seem to think that it is a defense to say, "Well, everyone who's talking about this is evil; and also, bad things happen in war." Both could be true, and wouldn't tell us whether *these* bad things happen. Some bad things mostly don't happen in war (at least, not recreationally): squads don't all start, say, cutting each other's genitals off in the rec hall. So the question is, are these particular things likely things to have happened? There are decent arguments, technical, psychological, and practical, that they weren't: Bradleys are too slow to chase dogs with, helmets are too tight to fit extraneous item's like a child's skull, soldiers rarely make fun of their own wounded, much less one who might turn out to be the woman who could put you on latrine duty for the rest of your tour, and soldiers that badly wounded are usually discharged so why would he have been uncertain about her identity? Those aren't idle questions; they need an answer better than "I friggin' loathe Michelle Malkin."

More generally, I think a moderate tone is a good idea in these things. Otherwise, you run a high risk of looking like a jerk when you have to admit you're wrong; or a real jerk when you pretend the whole thing never happened. Posts on what embarassing morons your opponents will be bitterly regretted if, say, it turns out that there is no such contractor at Beauchamp's base; as will fulminations about left-wing lies if Beauchamp's stories are corroborated at his court martial. Safer to say that your best judgement lies one way or another, and leave it at that.

But as I say, my passing interest in the entire thing, which is animated almost entirely by the fact that I have spied some of the editors involved at cocktail parties, is not very great; somewhere below the neighbour's termite infestation, but above my urgent need for curtain rods and bookshelves. This will almost certainly be my last post on the subject.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm totally confused by this:

Not all gambling leads as easily to corruption. For instance, if betting were allowed only on which team would win a game or a series, then corrupt gamblers would find it much more difficult to get referees or players to cooperate with them. The Black Sox players are famous precisely because they are rare.

If David Stern wants to reduce gambling-related corruption in the N.B.A., he should try to find a way to encourage the types of bets that do not promote corruption. When faced with a betting scandal, a sports league usually hardens its anti-gambling stance. But that doesn’t work. A smarter approach would be to become more tolerant of some kinds of gambling in an effort to crowd out the bets that create incentives for scoreboard manipulation.

That’s right: Legalizing wagering on which team wins or loses a particular game, while banning all bets on immaterial outcomes like point spreads, would destroy the market for illegal bookmakers and make sporting events less corruptible by gamblers.

The reason for point-spread betting is not that betting on outcomes is illegal; it's that it's necessary to make a market on many games. Top teams frequently play teams that have no realistic hope of defeating them. In many of those games you would have lots of people willing to bet on the good team winning, but no one willing to take the other end of the bet. There are limits to the use of odds to even out those sorts of betting market problems--for some reason, it's less than thrilling to make a bet that pays off one cent for every dollar you lay on the favourite. Odds work in horseracing precisely because there's almost always some horse in the race that could plausibly beat the top contender.

How creating a legal market that almost no one wants to bet in, will discourage point-shaving, is not quite clear to me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Brian Beutler is encouraged by the debate between Hillary and Barack about foriegn policy, but disgusted by the media reaction:

Certainly what you're hearing from Clinton and Obama is a healthier debate than what you're hearing from journalists. Clinton's basic position is that Obama has, by announcing his intent to engage enemy leaders, proven that he's too naive to set the country's foreign policy. Obama, on the other hand, contends that Clinton's foreign policy ideas are too similar to George Bush's for comfort. As far as I'm concerned, I think Obama's argument is basically correct and Hillary's argument is totally nuts, but in any case both arguments are pretty close facsimiles to what the two candidates actually believe about foreign policy.

The press, on the other hand, is doing exactly what you'd expect. Conservatives are saying exactly what you'd expect--that Hillary's correct, and that diplomacy is bad and that nobody will ever support Obama's idea. David Brooks wrote, "He continues to attract huge crowds and huge money, but he also continues to make rookie mistakes, like saying he’d talk with Hugo Chávez." Charles Krauthammer wrote,

For Barack Obama, it was strike two. And this one was a right-down-the-middle question from a YouTuber in Monday night's South Carolina debate:

"Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during
the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else,
with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?"

"I would," responded Obama.

Liberals, of course, responded as they always do--by neglecting to evaluate the merits of the two positions and offering instead a maddeningly typical meta-analysis of the argument--one that defaults with 100 percent regularity to the idea that only hawkish ideas seem serious.

Matthew Yglesias concurs:

There are a lot of ways in which the progressive punditocracy is more admirable than the conservative one, but this really and truly isn't one. The candidates, as Brian says, are for the first time having an exchange that at least seems to reveal something about their approach to foreign policy and ideas about how the United States of America should relate to other countries. This would be a good time for progressive journalists to try to provide their audience with arguments about who's right, arguments that, if persuasive, could shift the direction of public policy. The amateur-hour political analysis is silly -- as is always the case, Obscure Political Controversy X will prove politically damaging to Candidate A if and only if the press gives Candidate A negative press coverage as a result of OPC-X.

It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks, of course, since it leads to a lot of flailing when you finally get your hands on the reins. And it's maddening if you're the kind of journalist who cares more about policy than the political horse-race. But if you don't get the power, you'll be left with a shiny set of policy prescriptions gathering dust on your mantle.

In other words, you could end up as a libertarian.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Say it ain't so

Chilling words from a morning-show segment on the Simpsons movie:

The show has been on for almost two decades.

I am not old!

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Bureaucratic Imperative

Instapundit says:

I was doing some math on Yale, trying to figure out if they could abolish tuition entirely based on their endowment earnings. I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, which makes me less interested in donating when they call.

I had that exact conversation with the current headmaster of the boarding school I attended, which has an endowment of nearly $1 million per student and a loyal donating alumni base. I did some back-of-the-envelope figures and suggested that they could go entirely tuition free if they cut the enrollment about 10%. He looked at me like I was from Mars and said:

But then people who could afford it wouldn't pay!

Why is that idea O.K. in graduate schools, but not earlier? The first institution to try this will get a lot of meritocracy points.

UPDATE: commenter Alkali links to this essay:

Suppose you got a brochure from United Airlines listing the fare from Boston to San Francisco as $1 million. However, the brochure stated that "because of our commitment at United Airlines to ensuring that every American gets the transportation that is his birthright, we offer financial aid." The brochure comes with forms in which you list every scrap of money that you have. You are instructed to send this into United Airlines along with a certified copy of your tax returns so that they can evaluate your need. A few days later, United Airlines writes back: "Great news. We have evaluated your financial situation and have determined that if we take more than $1,000 out of you, you'll be reduced to the homeless shelter. So we're awarding you $999,000 in financial aid and you only have to give us $1,000 to fly from Boston to San Francisco.

Nerds. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995. Does this make you applaud the philanthropy of United Airlines? Or do you just say "those bastards colluded with the other airlines to set an outrageous fare. Then they are behaving like a classical profit-maximizing monopoly by engaging in price discrimination, i.e., charging each customer the maximum amount that he can afford to pay."

[If United were following all of the university traditions, then they would have "overlap meetings" with the other airlines to make sure that Delta did not mistakenly offer you $999,500 in financial aid and cloud your decision about which airline to fly because of monetary considerations. The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division and a federal judge's ruling put an end to this tradition in 1992, however. In theory.

btw, I was aware of Cooper Union, if only because my sister went there. That is an undergraduate degree, although perhaps more of a professional school. And it was a positive example I used with the headmaster, to no particular result. Don't they own the land under the Empire State Building?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

There's now't wrong with gala luncheons!

Speaking of reading, remember the novels of DH Lawrence, et al?

Remember them . . . then watch this:

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I haven't been following the story too closely, but it seems to me that the rhetoric on the Scott Thomas story could use a stepdown on both sides.

On the one hand, it's pretty ludicrous to accuse the New Republic of trying to underhandedly besmirch the war effort and the army. They've been wholehearted supporters of both for a long time.

On the other hand, it simply isn't true, as a number of bloggers on the left have claimed, that there's no evidence that Scott Thomas Beauchamp is lying. Or rather, there isn't evidence (yet), but the more lurid stories look pretty unlikely. For starters, as some of my more critical commenters will be happy to affirm, Americans are really, really attached to dogs. As Radley Balko was telling me yesterday, libertarian media types apparently found it much easier to gin up outrage about Waco and Ruby Ridge by pointing out that the government agents had shot dogs, than by pointing to the dead human bodies, even children's bodies. I find it thoroughly conceivable that one or two psychos might go after dogs this way. I find it numerically extremely unlikely that everyone in a Bradley would have gone along with this; the military is disproportionately drawn from the dog-loving rural classes. Not to mention the fact that swerving back and forth in an IED-laden war zone seems exceedingly likely to get your unit killed.

Similarly with the story about making fun of an IED-disfigured contractor. In a mess hall full of soldiers, many of whom would have known people disfigured or killed by IEDs, no one stood up? The thing might happen in a small, sick group. It beggars belief that 100 or more people silently watched some pottymouthed privates taunting a cripple who had acquired her injuries in the line of duty. I'm moderately well-versed in the stories about battle-hardened veterans committing atrocities in World War II. I've never come across a single story about making fun of your own side's wounded.

Atrocities, and just plain barbaric behaviour, do happen, even on the good guys' side. But the fact that they happen doesn't mean that anything can happen. AFAIK, the taboo behaviours soldiers engage in tend to fall into fairly well-defined patterns: rape, pillage, looting, revenge exacted on innocent but handy targets, graveyard jokes, taking trophies from the enemy dead. There's a kind of primitive logic to them that may sicken you, but still ultimate makes some sort of emotional sense. Beauchamp's stories defy that logic, which makes me distrust them. In addition, at least one of them can (and is) being definitively checked; and people who allegedly ate in that very small mess have already come forward to say that there was no female contractor or soldier of that description there.

At this point, I would be willing to put a little bit of money down right now on the proposition that Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp recants the entire thing as soon as the army opens up a court martial investigation for the many violations of the UCMJ chronicled in his diary. It seems to me fairly likely that the editors at the New Republic got taken in by a fabulist who was thousands of miles away in a place they'd never been. That's unfortunate, and it may be a career-ender for Franklin Foer. And perhaps they should have known better. But this wasn't some sort of elite conspiracy, and it's silly to imply that it was.

At worst, it was an editorial mistake; which is not exactly something it's impossible to imagine many of the more vocal critics making. Whether or not the editors at TNR were too gullible, I have no doubt that they bought the piece in good faith, and fact-checked it as well as any place does these days. And now they are doing exactly the right thing; not stonewalling, like CBS, but opening up a thorough investigation. It's too much to expect their ideological rivals not to enjoy the schadenfreude, but the implications of bad faith should cease.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

One, two . . . hit!

So I was chatting with blogger and music geek Julian Sanchez (in true blogger fashion, we both had laptops open at the time) about a radio station that used to be on one of the online radio services: one hit wonders. It was terrific. It consisted, as you might have guessed, entirely of hits from bands who never had another successful single. And it quickly became one of my favourite radio stations, until they took it down.

Julian quickly pointed out that it might be even more interesting to have a station of two hit wonders. Except the only example we could come up with--well, him, really--was Don McLean. I'm hoping my readers can do better. Who else belongs on our new radio station?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Loser..er...Labor Pays

Glenn Hubbardon corporate taxes ($)

Who bears the corporate tax burden? Some may be tempted with a quick answer, "corporations." But that is clearly wrong. The Econ 101 admonition that people pay taxes -- in this case, suppliers of capital through lower returns, workers through lower wages, and/or consumers through higher prices -- remains true even when the tax is aimed at capital. And the category "owners of corporate capital" (that is, stockholders) is also too narrow. In his celebrated analysis of the corporate tax almost 50 years ago, Arnold Harberger showed, for a closed economy, that a separate tax on corporate capital would reduce returns to all owners of capital, making it a tax on saving (and, in a framework more general than Mr. Harberger's, on investment).

Recent research has cast an eye in a somewhat different direction, showing that the tax may be borne not entirely (or even principally) by owners of capital, but by workers. Globalization plays a role. In an open economy, with mobile capital, a source-based tax like the corporate tax will lead to a capital outflow, reducing investment and productivity and wages. Indeed, Mr. Harberger's updated research on the incidence of the corporate tax concluded that labor bears not just the brunt of the tax, but a burden that may be larger than the tax itself.

In other research assuming that the world-wide capital stock is fixed, William Randolph of the Congressional Budget Office finds that labor bears about 70% of the corporate tax. More generally, the burden on labor is higher to the extent that saving is responsive to after-tax returns and the country has a small effect on world prices of goods.

Most of this research has relied on theoretical models, albeit sometimes with parameters calibrated from actual experience. But direct empirical tests of the effects of openness, corporate taxes and their combination on workers' wages tell a similar story.

A recent paper by Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute analyzes data across countries and over time, concluding that for countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 1% increase in corporate tax rates results in a 0.8% decrease in manufacturing wage rates. (Economic intuition suggests significant negative effects of the corporate tax on manufacturing wages because of the complementarity of capital and labor for skilled workers.)

Wage effects of this size suggest labor bears much of the burden of the corporate tax. In fact, workers collectively would be better off if they voted for higher taxes on labor with corresponding cuts in the corporate tax.

More fuel for the Dreck tax compromise. If we are going to tax income from corporations, we should tax it closer to consumption -after it is paid to shareholders.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Good Point

Radley Balko makes a good point:

Spitzer denies any knowledge of what his closes aide was doing, which seems improbable.

But hang on. Even he didn't know, isn't this the same guy who wants corporate executives held criminally liable for the mistakes of their underlings, even if they had no knowledge of those mistakes? Isn't this the guy who wanted to make not knowing about those mistakes a crime in and of itself?

Hmm, perhaps we should make elected officials sign a certification or disclosure form under threat of large financial penalties, and stating that they know what all their underlings are up to.

Nah, too draconian.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Another take on the estate tax

Speak No Evil, Ask No Evil outlines a few un-pc questions for the candidates:

4. Will you, as president, allow the discriminatory estate tax to return in 2011 even though it will harm gays and lesbians?

Few gays can admit that George Bush has done anything for the community. However, when Bush eliminated the estate tax, he also took away one of the federal benefits of marriage. With no estate tax gay and lesbian couples do not face the discrimination in the tax code they did before Bush was elected President.

All of the major Democratic candidates talk about repealing George Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy but in doing so, they’d be reinstating taxes on gay and lesbian couples. How can that be fair?

True, as I've said before, that marriage carries special subsidies, and subsidies are inherently discriminatory.

Update: This compromise proposal would eliminate many of the gripes expressed about the estate tax (some voiced in the comments below):

Mitchell and Shays’ bill would set the exemption, indexed for inflation, at $3.75 million beginning in 2010. It raises the exemption to $5 million by 2015 and then indexes it for inflation after that. Also, it would eliminate the flat 55 percent tax rate and create segmented estate tax rate brackets: zero taxes for estates valued up to $5 million, 15 percent for estates valued $5 million to $25 million, and 30 percent for estates valued above that.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at 6:19 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The unread

Alex Massie has a terrific post on books one hasn't read. Alex became one of my favourite persons after this dialogue (dramatic recreation):

Me: I've never read Camus in English.
Alex: That's brilliant! I'm going to use that.
Me: "I've never read Camus in English?"
Alex: No, like this: "I've never read Camus in English" . . . That way I don't have to tell them I've never read Camus in French, either.

He asks

That being said, dear, gentle reader, what books, what authors even, remain terra incognita to you? To start this confessional I'll admit that, among too many others, I've never read either Proust or George Elliot.

I'm having trouble answering this because of the giant, gaping holes in my literary knowlege. (I leave out non-fiction, since I've read barely anything written before 1950 in that category.)

Marlowe. Jonson. Sterne. Baudelaire. Flaubert. Balzac. Hugo. Dreiser. Eliot. That's just off the top of my head; it's hard to look at your bookshelf and see what isn't there. The bigger problem is that I've read and forgotten one book by a lot of canonical people like Goethe, about whom I could tell you nothing except that he seems sorta sad.

What about you? What haven't you read, that you should have?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Young Matt Zeitlin says:

The goblins in the Harry Potterverse have one purpose - running the Gringotts bank, where all wizards, good and evil, store their treasures. The goblins, especially as depicted in the movies, are universally hooked nosed, short, unattractive and green. Furthermore, they are considered by the wizard world to be miserly, stingy, greedy and two-faced. Professor Binns soporific History of Magic lectures tell tales of centuries of goblin oppression, segregation, mistrust, bad relations, exclusion and revolts. Sound like any European ethnic minority you know? That’s right, Rowlings’ depiction of goblins reflects the type of stereotypes that are more fitting for Russia in the late 19th century or a second rate Gazan newspaper.

Green? Okay, so I'm about as goyishe as they come, but I did grow up in the most Jewish city outside of Israel proper, and my high school had such a large majority of Jewish students that I was more than once dubbed "the affirmative action shiksa". And none of my friends, or their relatives, or any of the thousands of Jewish people living in my neighbourhood, looked even remotely green. I mean, except the time my friends and I got into the leftover Manischewitz from the Klein family Passover. Nor have I ever heard this stereotype from the occasional vile racist who assumes that my white skin and clearly Anglo-Irish heritage means that I share, and wish to discuss, their repulsive opinions. Did I miss a memo?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Winterspeak notes that fewer iPhones were sold than expected, and says:

It may be still to early to say, but perhaps, for all its wizardry, the iPhone is still not good enough as a phone to convince people to switch. I've always contended that cell phones need to be cell phones first, which means focusing on 1) reception and 2) voice quality. I did not see much in the iPhone's marketing material about 2), and AT&T is not known for 1).

If the iPhone does dissappoint, I'm sure that tech pundits will say it's because it's a closed platform, without any third party applications. I think the real reason will be that it's missing some core phone basics, and because it's too expensive for something as fragile and losable as a cell phone.

My diagnosis dovetails with his: it costs $600, with no special for signing a contract, and forces you to switch to AT&T's inferior network*.

Churn is very, very expensive for phone companies, so they generally pay consumers not to switch, by offering them a new phone every time they sign a new contract. In effect Apple thought its phone was good enough to capture those rents for itself: instead of paying you to sign a lengthy contract (by giving you a discounted iPhone), Cingular instead tried to pay Apple to make you come on board. If the early sales figures are right (and don't suddenly pick up), that will be evidence that the features of the phone are not enough to force large numbers of consumers onto its network.

The iPhone is really, really cool. It would be a category killer if it were sold like a normal phone. But at the current price (including the network switch) it's not worth it to a lot of consumers. Even many of my super-gadget-geeky friends have declined the honour. As will I unless they start selling it more like a normal phone.

* Yes, I know that this depends on what city you're in, but in many areas where the iPhone's target audience lives, it bites weasels. Being awesome in Chicago and Atlanta is not enough to overcome this. And no, Apple didn't go to AT&T because it's GSM and they wanted to make their phone work worldwide. They approached Verizon (CDMA) first, but since Verizon has the biggest network and the largest customer base, they weren't willing to make the concessions Apple wanted to do the deal.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I do not think he meant it that way

At least, I sure hope not:

I know you lizardbrains don't think Andrea Bruce is that hot, but she looks so sweet and smart. Totally the first one I'd ask out (after Catherine, who is like a sister to me).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Where the wait?

Tyler Cowen blogs about Matthew Yglesias blogging about waiting times for doctor appointments. Specifically, about a three-month wait to see a doctor.

Not that I in any way disbelieve them, but I am flabbergasted by the number of progressives who have to wait months to see a doctor. Thanks to job hopping, and employers with itchy insurance trigger fingers, I have been, over the last ten years, covered by most of the major New York State insurance providers: Guardian, Physicians, Oxford, Blue-Cross, Aetna, and IIRC, US Healthcare. I've had, if I'm counting correctly, seven primary care physicians, not counting the nice Indian lady at the Medicare mill who gave me discounted cash treatment when I was uninsured. I once waited three weeks for an appointment during the end-of-the-summer vacation doldrums, and I remember being surprised by it.

And I'm kind of a sick person. I have asthma, one or two autoimmune diseases, have flirted with back problems, and have made sporadic attempts to fix my hips through physical therapy. In the past few years, I have visited a neurologist, a gastroenterologist, an immunologist, an endocrinologist, a pulmonologist, a dermatologist, a gynecologist, and a sports medicine specialist, plus whatever kind of doctor it is who knocks you out and sticks a tube down your throat to see if you have an ulcer. (I didn't). Yet I have never, in all these doctor's visits, had to wait even a month. To see each of those specialists, I waited less than a week.

My theory: general practice physicians have four categories of patients.

1) New patients needing a routine physical.
2) Old patients needing a routine physical.
3) Old patients who need to be seen relatively urgently ("I'm having dizzy spells")
4) Old patients who need to be seen right away ("I have a 103 degree fever and I'm coughing blood)

They manage their schedules so as to give the least priority to group number one. Specialists, on the other hand, have three groups of people:

1) People needing a diagnosis
2) People needing treatment
3) People who might be undergoing an acute crisis

Number three gets priority, but is fairly rare; numbers one and two are roughly on par with each other, and depending on the specialty, 1 might even have the edge.

I have no idea whether this is true; it's just how I would organize it.

This also tracks with the observation that America has a lot more specialists than other countries, and a relative shortage of GPs.

My theory predicts that almost all of the "three month" wait stories come from two groups of people: brand new patients going to their PCP for the first time physical; and people who wanted to see "the best man" for their complaint in an urban area, (or the only man in a rural area). Thoughts?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Yet Another Modest Proposal

(revised)

I wonder if it is possible to cover tax developments without simply stating the obvious.  Case in point:  Politics May Thwart Effort To Close Tax Gap. In other news, drivers are angered by traffic and children may lie to get what they want.

In the realistic spirit of my proposal to get rid of the governmental institution of marriage, I'd like to offer a reform proposal that solves for most complaints:

1) The core of my proposal is to make cash dividends tax-deductible to the paying entity in exchange for eliminating the preferred treatment of dividends and capital gains to individuals. All dividend and capital gains income would be taxed at the current marginal rate. However,

2)In order to continue investment incentives of the current structure, lower the corporate tax rate to 15%, but dramatically simplify the corporate tax code by eliminating special timing differences. Capital expenditures should be 100% deductible.

3) Make all forms of compensation and benefits other than ERISA plans taxable to the recipient.

Seems to me this makes Hank Paulson happy with internationally competitive tax rates, gets rid of the disparities that are driving class warriors crazy (not a worthy end in and of itself, but we are all tired of hearing about it), and eliminates some of the perverse incentives around executive compensation and leverage by making them relatively more expensive to shareholders. Furthermore, it is one step towards transparency in who pays corporate taxes. It also dramatically shrinks the difference between LLCs and regular corporations.

All in all, closer to the Jane Galt tax plan. Thanks to entrenched interests, it will never happen.

UPDATE: I suppose this deals with the question of percentage, but not necessarily with some of the techniques that allow hedge funds and equity funds to defer the taxation of carried interest. Well, let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. I'd also be in favor of allowing individuals to invest much more money and not be taxed until the money is used or withdrawn, such as a universal savings account of up to, say, $2 million, that would only be taxed on withdrawal.

My responses to comments are noted within the comments. I'm experimenting with in-comment responses. Bear with me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm afraid that when it comes to writing about art, I'm about as talented as I am at . . . all right, I'll say it, "dancing about architecture". Possibly, this is because I know nothing about art history or theory; I am prone to form violent aesthetic attachments to things for reasons I couldn't even begin to explain. And I have gathered the impression from my more knowlegeable friends that my taste is distinctly pedestrian, though of course they would never actually come out and quite say that. Nonetheless, I suspect that I am a permanent denizen of the upper middlebrow.

So I won't try to explain why I loved the Serra exhibit at the MoMA, except that his titanic forms engendered in me the most powerful aesthetic experience I've had since I first stumbled across Peter Doig's Concrete Cabin in the Saatchi gallery two years ago. You walk around them, and the constant unfolding of that looming metal tugs your consciousness upward and outward in surprising ways. Then you walk inside them, and the space seizes you with shocking power. You wouldn't think that a series of spaces which are all, essentially, ovals surrounded by metal walls, could each be so different from the others, and provoke such different reactions in you. It was just stunning.

The only downside was all the people. I found it impossible to enjoy the sculptures while they contained a steady supply of tourists nodding politely as they sped through--got to catch the Picasso before we head over to the Phantom matinee!--and only barely bearable to enjoy them in the presence of other people who were, like me, ambling slowly around and through the space in order to take it in from every angle. That sounds snobbish, I suppose, but it isn't meant to be; there's no reason that anyone else should share my aesthetics, and usually they don't. But it was hard to enjoy the sculptures while they were filled with people who obviously didn't particularly care for them.

All of this is by way of saying that if you like modern art at all (and even if you don't hate it), and you can get yourself to New York City, and you haven't already decided that I have execrable taste in art, you should get yourself down to the exhibit before it closes in September.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Harry Potter: No Spoilers

My father waited at the 82nd street Barnes and Noble to get each of us a copy. Harry Potter is not the first time that books have created such a stir--when Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, crowds used to meet every boat from London crying "Does little Nell die?" But this is the first time in living memory. The line stretched literally around the block, and then further. There's something nice, really, about a whole country participating in a cultural phenomenon.

But God, does Rowling need an editor. Two hundred pages in, the sheer amount of extraneous chitcat, lavishly highlighted minor characters, and painfully cliche description, is already wearing on me. The action of those pages should have been compressed into seventy-five, max.

More than that, I will not say.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh my God

I just got the first comment in six years of blogging that made me actually want to vomit. I've deleted it, but you know who you are, and more importantly, so will I if you try a stunt like that again.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've a piece up at the Guardian on the economics of magic in Harry Potter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Of women and business school, Felix Salmon writes:

Elissa Ellis-Sangster is one of those women who use phrases like "move the needle" – someone who talks about "putting value and importance on diverse leadership" when she could just say "promoting women". And so I wasn't sure what she was talking about when she was quoted in today's WSJ on the subject of female enrollment in MBA programmes:

When schools raised the work experience level to five years or more, it became a big issue for women who wanted to go back for their M.B.A. soon after college, before they started thinking about having a family.

Thankfully, Dana Cimilluca was there to translate:

One of the big challenges to increasing female enrollment in M.B.A. programs is pregnancy. The five years or so of experience that many business schools want their students to have before enrolling is a tall order for a woman planning a family.

Which is slightly clearer, even if it still doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Do they mean that women often have babies within the first five years of entering the workforce, and that therefore it takes them longer to get five years' experience? Or is it that women with small children are less likely to want to take an MBA, because at that point they have a child to support? In that case, women would be less likely to enroll in MBA programmes requiring five years' experience just because they're more likely to be mothers at that point. Or is it just that women don't want to be pregnant during their MBA, and that six years after joining the workforce is a time when they often are pregnant?

If it's the first, I think it's no big deal: it really doesn't matter if the women in an MBA programme are slighly older than the men. But if it's one of the latter two, then the problem isn't the five-years-experience rule, so much as it is the hesitance on the part of pregnant women and mothers to go to business school. Ellis-Sangster thinks the solution to the problem is for business schools to require less experience of their MBA students. Maybe it would be easier and more effective to simply make more of an effort to accommodate mothers, as well as the childless.

The problem isn't the schools; it's the employers. Business school is essentially prep-school for certain jobs. My high school was a very structured programme designed to propel you into an ivy league school at the end of it; business school was a similarly structured system for getting you into a top-tier investment banking, consulting, or marketing job.

Everything happens on a well set schedule, and you spend about the first year and a half, out of two years, recruiting. No one in their right mind wants to be job-hunting while pregnant, and frankly, no employer in their right mind would engage anyone to learn a new job while simultaneously mastering the care of a squalling infant. Thus, you can realistically expect not to be able to get pregnant while in business school, and it wouldn't be a great idea to have a baby until you're a few years out of school either. If you want to spawn much before 32, you oughtn't to get an MBA, and there's nothing the schools can really do about that.

But the proposed system, admitting 23-year olds, is also terrible. Business school is much improved by being free of smart but aimless kids looking for a way to stay in the academic cocoon a little longer. And people like me, with my fetching 2.93 undergraduate GPA, could never, ever have gotten into a top-ten school if those intervening years hadn't given us a chance to grow up. Nor would the people from Eastern Illinois State and the University of Takoma, mostly people from lower-middle class backgrounds who went where they could afford to go, and needed the five years of work to demonstrate that they were rising stars.

If you admit younger applicants, you'll miss all of those people; the nation's top business schools will be filled with a bunch of extremely affluent kids from top-ranked universities who majored in economics--and almost no one else. That would make the programme substantially worse in all sorts of ways, not least because the skills needed to make a good college student are not necessarily the same skills that make you a great banker, consultant, or entrepreneur, or even a good MBA candidate.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of extremely suspicious headlines

Matthew Yglesias titles a post: "Sardines: Tastier Than You Think". Which is like "Cancer: More Fun Than You Might Imagine". I think sardines are among the worst things ever invented. If I tasted them, I might upgrade that opinion to merely "Barftastic", but that doesn't mean you should actually eat the creatures. Yech.

Full disclosure I hate any and all forms of cooked fish, except the milder-tasting crustaceans.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm sold

All right, I've just turned into one of those pretentious journalists who fanny about with Moleskins and fountain pens. I've always been a leetle bit obsessed with writing with the right pen, but I have held off on the absurdly expensive Moleskine notebooks. However, I bought one in Heathrow in May, because it was the only notebook on offer. Now it has combined with the celebretory gift of a fountain pen. Writing on that lovely, creamy paper with a fine gold nib is very close to a religious experience for this writer. I'm physically restraining myself from heading to a coffee shop right now with a pack of Dunhills and an idea for an experimental novel . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Scott Adams has an interesting post on success:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. . . . Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.

At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too.

It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.

What are your three?

Obviously, I'm not an economist. And I don't think that Jonathan Franzen, or even Malcolm Gladwell, are looking over their shoulders, worrying that my deft prose styling might knock them off their perch. As far as I can tell, this is a complete list of all my talents:

1) I read fast
2) I write better than perhaps 90% of my countrymen.
3) I understand a modicum of economics
4) I have lovely handwriting, and know how to write a good thank-you note
5) I can produce dinner for eight with two hour's lead time
6) I can imitate Neil Young and Christian Slater

Yet I have parlayed these limited talents into a blogging/journalistic career lucrative enough to keep the wolf away from the door. Like Scott Adams and the script producer he talks about at the beginning of the post, I did so randomly, by stumbling upon something that very few people were doing at all, much less well, and tricking media companies into paying me for it. If the management consulting firm for which I was supposed to have worked hadn't blown up rather spectacularly in 2001, there would be no blog, or journalism career. Funny how things work out.

Update Sorry, bad taste alert. "Blown up" is the fairly common term for companies that undergo severe financial crises. No lives were lost in the process.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

IT's started

I'm on a video news fast until I've read Harry Potter. Someone's gonna say *something* soon.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

After a headline proclaiming that Mad Men "could have been The Sopranos of advertising, but isn't", Adam Hanft launches into all the details that Mad Men gets wrong, before moving onto a broader critique.

This made me wonder. Lawyers love to complain about the ridiculous elements on Law and Order. Doctors love to skewer ER. Do you think actual gangsters sit around at dinner parties and regale each other with all the ridiculous technical errors on The Sopranos?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A number of readers have emailed to ask why I am such a liberal hypocrite. In particular, why I condemned MItt Romney for strapping his dog to the top of his car, but not Michael Vick for dogfighting.

Just in case you were wondering, yes, I am against dog-fighting. And cock-fighting. Roach races are okay. Any time you see a dog fighting story on the news, you can pretty much say to yourself, "Yup, she's against it."

However, I (blush), don't know who this Michael Vick fellow is. In fact, I've never managed to learn the rules of football. Hence my failure to post on the subject.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

IT seems I've missed my window to be nominated for "Hottest Media Type in DC." Because I know that y'all would have voted for me, right?

Update: It seems I may not have missed the window after all. And . . . well, all I'm saying is that if you don't nominate me, I'll cry, that's all. And maybe take a handful of ambien and who really cares because it's just another dead, ugly, Washington-DC based journalist, right?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Harry Potter and the Half-Wits

* SPOILERS (sort of) *

I find Harry Potter snobbery exceedingly tiresome. I'm sure it would be very nice if everyone read proust instead, but it would also be nice if they confined themselves to a high fiber diet, took up jogging, and never had a drink . . . and I'll fight any nanny who tries to make me do it.

And yet . . . the last two books have done a lot to kill my buzz. That hasn't stopped me from (like everyone else in the known universe) pre-ordering my copy of the Harry Potter book. I figure I have about a twelve hour window in which I can avoid knowing how it all turns out; during that time, I mean to plow through all eight squintillion pages of wizardry and adolescent angst. But I am not as excited about it as many of the people around me, or indeed as excited as I thought I would be, after I finished the first few books. The problem is not that the books aren't Anna Karenina; it's that they're not nearly as good as they could be, or ought to be.

Recently, kicking through some internet archives, I found that Kieran Healy had put his finger on the source of my lingering disappointment with Hogwarts and company. “Harry”, he wrote, after finishing the Order of the Phoenix, “has been licking the lead paint at Privet Drive.”

Harry acts like an idiot, and not the normal sort of teenage idiot who thinks they are the immortal centre of the universe. Harry’s idiocy is sui generis. Who but Harry Potter, having been given a wrapped gift by his beloved godfather with the words “use it if you need me”, would leave it unopened at the bottom of his suitcase and instead break into the evil head teacher’s office when he wanted a quiet chat? What sort of a nit can’t figure out that when a wild giant keeps saying the word “Haggy”, he wants his half-brother Hagrid? Or guess, for tiresome centuries of pages, that “Tom Marvolo Riddle” might be an anagram for “Lord Voldemort”, when the seven-year old sitting next to me in the bookstore picked up on the resemblance a few scant minutes after opening The Half-Blood Prince?

I mean, not that that's some great feat. "Marvolo" is a name so ridiculous that it could only have been invented to absorb extra letters. The real magical mystery of the Half Blood Prince is how little Tom Marvolo managed to escape being beaten to death on the schoolyard long enough to make it to Hogwarts.

However, one shouldn’t be too hard on Harry, since his mental fog seems to be infectious. Adults in children’s books are often stupid and capricious. But at least their pointless behaviours are usually animated by some comprehensible motive, such as malice. The adults in Harry Potter seem to perform acts of outrageous idiocy on a purely recreational basis.

For example, I cannot be the only person who found myself unconvinced, to the point of queasy embarrassment, by this passage at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

“But did you not wonder why it was not I who explained this to you? Why I did not teach you occlumency? Why I had not so much as looked at you for months?”

Harry looked up. He could see now that Dumbledore looked sad and tired.

“Yeah,” Harry mumbled. “Yeah, I wondered.”

“You see,” Dumbledore continued, “I believed it could not be long before Voldemort attempted to force his way into your mind, to manipulate and misdirect your thoughts, and I was not eager to give him more incentives to do so. I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was - or had ever been - closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me.”

This could have redeemed only if Dumbledore had continued:

“You realize, Harry, that this makes no sense. For one thing, I have been coddling you for years, despite having known all this, until I—suddenly and for no apparent reason—decided to drop you this year like a hot rock. Too, you might ask why, if I was so worried, I had allowed you to learn many so things that it would be incredibly useful for Voldemort not to know, such as the fact that a cadre of wizards is plotting against him. Why, in fact, the one secret I kept from you is that Voldemort can read your mind, when presumably this is, by definition, the one thing that Voldemort certainly already knows.

But had I displayed the sense God gave a mussel in this situation, you would probably have acted more like a normal teenager, and less like a severely brain damaged refugee from The Dirty Dozen. And then there would have been no book. So I am sorry that you were upset, and Sirius had to die, but publishers get very shirty when you slip your dates.”

I confess, I am afraid to find out how Harry Potter ends. It seems all too likely that Harry, and th rest of his band of merry madmen, expire--not through the evil agency of Lord Voldemort, but through forgetting to do something basic, such as breathe.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Quote of the night

As I was lamenting the disappearance of my copy of Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" to my dinner companion, I discovered that said companion was the source of the disappearance; I had loaned it to him, and he had never returned it.

Could I have it back?

Uncomfortable shrug. "I still haven't finished it," quoth he. "I've started it like, six times."

Wondering why this is funny? Buy the book . . . you'll see.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of huh?

Are these posts jokes?

Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley-and-Madison hat for a moment?

A: I'd find nothing easier. (You left out the dirty hippyprogressive Montessori school where they taught me Pirandello and Diderot.)

Q: Very good. (It didn't fit the rhythm, and anyway they get the picture.) How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable?

A: With suspicion and unease, naturally.

Q: It's strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race.

A: Worse and worse.

Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it's also correlated with diet.

A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation? Such things cannot be.

Q: What if I told you the trait was accent?

A: I'm sorry?

Q (in a transparently fake California accent): When you, like, say words differently than other people? who speak, like, the same language? because that's how you, you know, learned to say them from people around you?

A: Do you have a point to make, or are you just yanking my chain?

Q: Would you agree that accent has all the characteristics I just described?

A: Higher cognitive functions — heritable — class and race — not plastic after adolesence — correlation with diet, hah! — I guess I must.

Q: But would you say that there is any genetic or even congenital component to accent?

A: Not really. Obviously, some congenital conditions, like deafness or defects of the vocal chords, make it hard to impossible to acquire any accent. And I can imagine, though I don't know of anything, that there might be very specific mutations which make it hard to hear a distinction between a given pair of sounds, or easier to learn a specific distinction. But, in general, no, there is no non-trivial genetic component to accent.

Interpreted by LizardBreath:

So, there's this quality that's intimately connected with the higher brain functions, very highly heritable, and very strongly correlated both with race and with ethnicity on a finer-grained scale than race. It's somewhat plastic in childhood, but unlikely to change significantly after adolescence. A standard liberal reaction to that claim might be "(A) I don't believe you that those are the facts, because (B) if that were true, it'd be clearly an innate, genetic quality, and I don't believe you that there are such genetic differences with intellectual implications between ethnic groups."

The quality, for those who haven't clicked through yet, is accent, which clearly has no genetic component whatsoever. The Sloth goes on to argue by analogy for the plasticity of things like IQ, and you should read the post. But I wanted to use it as a general defense for total skepticism on common-sense arguments about innate qualities of human nature.

I'm pretty uncomfortable with IQ determinism. But this is bizarrely beside the point. The serious IQ guys don't point to correlations between the IQ of children and their parents, which could obviously be either nature or nurture; they mostly rely on adoption studies, which (like studies of height and weight) seem mostly to show that adopted children more closely resemble their biological parents than their adoptive parents. No one is denying that there are plastic heritable characteristics; they're just denying that IQ is among them.

The gender evidence is harder; no matter who adopts you, you're still a girl. But there should be cross cultural variation, and there doesn't seem to be much, which is worth thinking about.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Point, thou art missed

The new favourite activity of progressive bloggers seems to be pointing out that in America, you sometimes have to wait to see a doctor!

No system, free market or government-run, can guarantee that you can get into see a particular doctor immediately, any more than they can guarantee a table at your favourite restaurant. Neither system is going to require that doctors refuse to book appointments so that they will always have time to see you whenever a spot of healthcare strikes your fancy.

The difference is, in a free market system, you can go see a different doctor. In Canada or Britain, you just have to wait it out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm no lawyer, but . . .

I think Jonathan Zasloff is off-base here:

Corrie's family is now suing Caterpillar, which made the bulldozer, for damages, on the grounds that Caterpillar knew or should have known that the sale would enable the IDF to commit human-rights violations. For Ron Coleman, guest-blogging at Overlawyered (and sub silentio backed by Bainbridge), this is absurd:

Yes, a law professor is making this argument. Okay, a law professor who blogs at Huffington Post, but still? No, he's not a new face; but he certainly remains a brazen one. For in our bizarro world, right is a very special kind of wrong -- the promotion of violence (by the likes of Rachel Corrie) is peace;the sale of construction equipment (by Caterpillar) is murder; and fallacious legal argumentation is the product of one of the “the top 20 legal thinkers in America."

To my mind, this confuses the legal basis of the suit with the facts of this case. It seems to me perfectly reasonable as a general matter to argue that if a corporation knows that its product will be used by a government purchaser to commit human rights violations, then that corporation can be sued using an aiding-and-abetting theory. If the company doesn't know but should have known, then that is a closer case, of course, but certainly not implausible.

One relevant precedent here is the case of Doe v. Unocal, in which the Ninth Circuit held quite appropriately that if Unocal had paid the Myanmar government to provide it with "security" for its oil pipeline, knowing that the Myanmar Army's concept of "security" is the widespread massacre of any villagers who dare resist and the forced labor of hundreds of others, then Unocal can be held liable.

The problem, then, isn't the principle: it's the fact that it is being used by people like Corrie (or rather, her family), who may have been not a victim of human rights abuses, but rather a facilitator of them because of her support for Hamas. And it is being used against Israel, whose human rights record, for all its faults, many people consider to be quite good and certainly a far cry from egregious violators such as, say Myanmar.

Thus, if there is a criticism of Chemerinsky here. it is that he has exercised poor judgment in accepting this client. He might respond that even were this to be so, he needs to be involved in the case to protect the principle. Many of the most important civil rights cases were litigated on behalf of truly despicable clients. Hard cases make bad law.

Conservatives like Bainbridge should think about it this way: say a corporation sells sophisticated intelligence-gathering equipment to Fidel Castro's internal security forces. They, of course, use it to find a pro-democracy activist and then brutally torture her. Is it so unreasonable that the vendor should be held liable?

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict--I'm afraid I'm suffering from an extended bout of vertigo and just don't have the strength to be screamed at today--it seems to me that Zasloff is begging the question. Is it unreasonable to think that a vendor should be held liable if it sells Castro's government equipment to spy on human rights activists? I kinda think it is. Mr Zasloff wants to hold companies accountable for enforcing a collective judgement about Castro's regime that we aren't even willing to enforce collectively--by, say, banning sales of such stuff to Cuba*, or getting rid of the offending government.

He also skips over what seems to me to be the main objection to the lawsuit, which is that there is no way that Caterpillar could have reasonably known what the IDF was going to do with that bulldozer, and hence, no grounds for a suit.

Even in cases where we all agree that governments are human rights abusers, and where we agree that companies are legally and morally responsible for preventing those human rights abuses by denying governments their tools of oppression, there is a spectrum of corporate guilt. If you supply Zyklon B to the Nazis**, you are clearly moral filth whose bankruptcy and disgrace I will not mourn one little bit. On the other hand, if some colo