Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is there a market for growth risk?

Robert Schiller thinks that developing countries should be able to borrow with interest rates linked to their GDP growth. He's right that this would have made things a lot easier for Argentina recently . . . which is precisely why investors won't like it. They won't borrow in pesos now, because they don't want to take on the currency risk (i.e. the well-founded fear that Argentina's government will try to print its way out of insolvency, at the expense of its creditors)--how on earth will you convince them to take a risk that Argentina's government will not find yet another creative way to run its economy into the ground? I mean, far be it from me to pit my puny intellectual talents against those of Robert Schiller, but as he himself concedes, the only real market for this debt is in countries that don't need it -- industrial countries with stable currencies. Even if Argentina found people to buy these sorts of bonds, it seems likely that the investors would require a discount so deep that the government would rather borrow in dollars than curtail their spending.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Could the dominos really be falling?

The Lebanese government has agreed to step down after massive protests this weekend. Of course, it could be a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" unless Syria backs down, but this might be the start of something big . . .

I've had my doubts about the war (post-invasion; I supported it pretty much unequivocally going in). But I haven't been willing to pull the trigger and say "I was wrong" simply because I don't think enough time has elapsed to tell. I was wrong about the WMD, indisputably; but was the invasion necessarily a bad idea? I don't think we know yet. I think most people are trying, in good faith, to figure out whether things are hopelessly $@#! up, but I think everyone's affected by the natural human tendency to overweight things happening right now! In technicolor! over the future and the past. Certainly, the history of economic journalism is the history of hysterical panic about some unsustainable trend, right up to the point where the trend abruptly stops trending, leaving a dazed herd of journalists milling ledelessly on the vast media savannah.

Along those lines conservative pundits have been too quick, I'd argue, to embrace recent developments in the Middle East as proof that the Iraq War was right all along. The Arab world is a looooong way from having its first stable democratic government. The triumphalism is just a tad overwrought when we're trying to use the fact that Hosni Mubarrak is allowing multiparty rigged elections to justify the Iraq war.

That said, these are very, very encouraging signs. Here's hoping for hundreds more such.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on Chait

Canned Platypus offers a rebuttal to Will Wilkinson's piece on Chait. I'm not generally a fan of the "fisking" format, but the rebuttal isn't wrong in one easy-to-categorise way; it's wrong in lot's of small ways. For example, Mr Darcy, the blog's author, quotes Mr Wilkinson:

Liberalism is not a list. It’s just not. And it is not a list that has incoherence as a natural byproduct of being a list that rejects ideological certainty. Green, Hobhouse, Dewey, Rawls, et al did not see themselves as championing incoherent lists of things people might happen to want. They championed a particular conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state based on what they took to be compelling general normative principles.

. . . and responds thusly:

…which naturally lead to lists of more concrete policies and actions which would shape the real world according to those principles. As soon as we try to apply any principle, instead of just leaving it on the shelf to admire, we end up with a list. Conservatives, libertarians, and so on have their lists too, which anybody can look up in a manifesto or party platform. Rawls et al might not have championed the list itself, but they did not preclude its existence either. In fact, their works are full of examples which could be items on such a list. The fact that people express their interpretation of a principle as a list of consequences is not a failing; it’s a sign that people have actually made the connection between principle and reality. By and large, it’s a good thing.

This is true in some trivial sense, but irrelevant in the context of the argument. Yes, of course conservatives and liberals all have principles that result in lists of practical things. This is exactly what Mr Wilkinson is saying--that neither conservatives nor liberals are simply in the business of trying to figure out the positive "best" mechanisms by which to maximise some normative priorities we all agree on. Both groups have a different set of normative principles, which generate different "lists", so to claim that liberals somehow have a lock on empiricism because they are solely interested in figuring out the best way to maximise their list is to make the enormous unempirical blunder of failing to observe what's actually going on in political debates.

It is a mistake that liberal bloggers and columnists are fond of making (and undoubtedly conservatives are prone to the same sorts of errors); one often sees them proclaim that the things they want, like more spending on health care, poll well, and that therefore America is with them. But lot's of things poll well, including many things that are incompatible, like higher spending and lower taxes. The fact that people agree that it would be nice if everyone had more health care does not mean that they agree that it would be nice if the government took 5% more of their income to provide it, and instituted rationing to control costs. These value judgements are the heart of the political debate today--how has Mr Chait not noticed?

Mr Darcy presents the idea that conservatives have lists as somehow refuting Mr Wilkinson's argument. But that was the whole point of the argument, which is: conservatives have different lists, rather than some sort of ideological blinkers that prevent them from understanding the best way to get the items on the liberals' lists. His point would only be relevant to the question of whether liberals were more empirical than conservatives if he were somehow arguing that conservatives, while having lists, are empirically challenged as to how to execute them. But I've seen no evidence that social conservatives are, say, unusually untalented at promoting policy goals like more praying, or that libertarians are promoting policies that actually reduce economic freedom because they don't study the empirical evidence. What Chait really seems to be saying is that conservatives aren't interested in following the inevitable logical conclusion from the observation that national health care systems make sure everyone has access to some minimal level of health care, when of course conservatives have a whole different set of normative goals, like innovation and choice, that aren't met very well by national health care systems. Calling the former "empirical" and the latter "ideological" begs the question.

The next exchange is really . . . odd. Mr Wilkinson says

If God came down and told conservatives that free-markets and smaller government aren’t the best way to get the things on the list kept in the offices of the New Republic ("And I know,” God said, “for it is I who made Nature’s Laws") and the conservatives said, “Oh, that’s OK God, we’ve got a different list in the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, but then you knew that,” that’s not a failure of empiricism.

Prompting this:

Actually it is, and there’s something a bit slippery about Wilkinson’s criticism. When we mention God we think of faith, so we interpret belief in what God says as a matter of faith. Wilinson is trying to make us think that those who disagree with God are the champions of empiricism. However, this God in Chait’s example is a God whose existence has presumably been validated as empirical fact, not a matter of faith. If this God tells us something different than what we already believe, it sets two sets of empirical observations against one another, not empiricism against faith. The correct thing to do when such a contradiction occurs is to attempt a resolution, all within an empirical framework. Accepting either conclusion without making such an attempt would indeed be a failure of empiricism (or, more correctly, of the scientific method) as Chait claims.

Tarzan confused. It seems very clear to me that Wilkinson is not talking about empiricism v. faith; his use of God mirror's Mr Chait's. All he is saying is that even if one had final, absolute, unquestionable confirmation that the free market was not the best way to achieve Mr Chait's goals, this would tell you nothing about whether or not we should achieve them. The free market may not, for example, be the best way to go about executing all children under three, but even if God came down from on high and confirmed that infant executions are always most efficiently performed by a government agency, this wouldn't make me more interested in setting up a Department of Reckless Slaughter.

Then there's this from Mr Wilkinson:

is Michael Kinsley Jonathan Chait’s main source of economic theorizing? I swear that just two weeks ago I heard the 2004 Nobel winner say that a system of social security personal accounts would have a monumental effect on the supply of labor, and thus on growth, and national wealth. So what’s an empiricist to do? Throw in one’s lot with Michael Kinsley or Edward Prescott?

To which Mr Darcy responds:

This is an ad hominem attack with a red herring. How messy. Kinsley’s beliefs on social security are not relevant to this discussion, and bringing them up is a low attempt to paint Chait as inconsistent (when in fact he might be able to explain the apparent contradiction if given the chance) and thus discredit him instead of the argument he’s making.

First of all, Michael Kinsley's beliefs are directly relevant, since Jonathan Chait presents Mr Kinsley's beliefs that social security privatisation won't work as proof about how much more empirical liberals are then those dogmatic ideologues on the conservative side. There is more than a whiff of argument from authority to this, which is about as un-empirical as you can get. Furthermore, Mr Wilkinson is not attacking Mr Kinsley; he's simply pointing out that other, even more august authorities disagree with him.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who knew?

There's apparently more than one kind of dating disaster.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

SUV safety

Anti-SUV people, of whom there are a lot in my neck of the woulds, like to point out that many SUV's are less safe than sedans. The reason that SUV's are less safe is not, of course, that there is something inherently wrong with the vehicles; it's that people who buy SUV's often drive them like morons. They don't account for the higher center of gravity, trying to take turns as if they were in a sports car, which makes the vehicle roll. They are lulled by the enhanced acceleration that four wheel drive offers in bad conditions, driving as if their stopping ability were also enhanced. (All cars have four-wheel braking, and your average SUV actually stops slower than a normal car, because it's heavier--momentum = mass X velocity.) The truck frame is stiffer than a car frame, so morons lower the tire pressure in order to make the ride feel cushier, which can cause all sorts of exciting accidents.

It seems to me that if you're really interested in reducing accidents, the thing to do is to tell as many people as possible not to drive like morons, rather than taking a grim pleasure in the sight of so many SUV owners going to an early doom. Far be it from me to credit the government for much of anything, but it seems that the attorney general is trying to do just that, with a really adorable graphic that is now my official favourite advertising mascot of the decade. If you ever drive an SUV, you should check it out pronto.

Update My personal view on SUVs is that they have significant negative externalities which might well warrant government regulation. They impede the view of other drivers, forcing them to get an SUV themselves, or sacrifice road visibility. And they guzzle gas, which causes greenhouse warming and land wars in the Middle East. I would like to see a hefty carbon tax, and wouldn't be all that averse to a tax on vehicle height either, and I know that my libertarian readers are going to try to flay me with a dull cheese grater for saying so, but there you are.

I'm even open to arguments that we should do something about the fact that they are more deadly to other drivers in accidents, while keeping their own occupants safer. Not too open, mind you, because I don't want every college student in a Geo to start arguing for taxing everything larger than a tin can, plus the really dangerous vehicles on the road are big trucks, and I'm too familiar with the economics of transportation to want to ride them off the roads. But I could be persuaded, with the right regulatory proposal.

[What about the argument that their bumpers, being higher, tend to kill occupants of other cars? As far as I can tell, there's no actual, y'know, evidence of this; just the fanciful musings of some people who really, really hate SUVs).

So I'm no lover of SUVs. What I don't like is the moralistic way that people go after SUVs. They tell us it's all about the external characteristics of the vehicle: the tendency to kill other drivers, the visibility, the fuel efficiency. Yet, other vehicles that have similar characteristics, like minivans, inspire none of this ire. Now, this isn't an argument that one can't invade Iraq unless one also goes after every tinpot dictator in the world; clearly activists have to choose their battles. But if someone says that they only care about these bad, objective criteria, and not something else, like the demographics of SUV drivers, and then ignore other vehicles that meet those same, objective criteria, I have to question it. If SUVs as a class were somehow easier to go after than minivans, I could see it, but it's rather the reverse; SUV's are basically well-upholstered light trucks, very hard to regulatorily distinguish from the light trucks people need to do business. Minivans are, if I recall correctly, cars, which we give different mileage criteria from trucks for good reason. (Assuming, for the nonce, that we are going to have a regulatory mileage regime in the first place).

Anti-SUV people are full of impractical plans for somehow banning all SUV's without touching light trucks being used for their intended purpose. But how much easier would it be to address the negative externalities, with carbon or height taxes? And why write long, screedy works on how market research shows that SUV owners are (scientifically proven!) nastier human beings than everyone else?

Update II Here's someone who really doesn't like SUVs.

What's so bad about SUVs? First and foremost, they are far larger and more massive than the use to which they are put requires. This means two things: They are terrible "road hogs" and they are horribly wasteful. Hauling around a ton of unnecessary steel requires power, and that means a big V-8. Now don't get me wrong -- I love big American V-8s. But when they are put to the use of hauling a ton of unnecessary steel with the aerodynamics of a shipping container, they get gas mileage in the low teens in around-town driving (the use to which most SUVs are put). Can you say slavery to Arab oil? The next time you hear a red-blooded American patriot complaining about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and then drive off in her giant Chevy Subdivision, think about it. Now, take a look around the next time you're on the road. How many SUVs do you see? How many people do you see in each one? It would be more efficient if SUV drivers drove real cars and just mailed checks to Al Qaida. Oh, and this same person is probably one who "doesn't like American cars." Huh?

What else do I hate about SUVs? Most people who drive them probably don't realize this, but "real" SUVs are trucks. Suburbans, Expeditions and their slightly smaller siblings are ladder-frame trucks with solid rear axles. Now if you're in the business of hauling literally tons of cargo, ladder frames and solid rear axles are a good thing. But if, like almost all SUV drivers, you simply need to take yourself, (occasionally) one or more human passengers and a little bit of inanimate stuff from point "A" to point "B" on paved roads, this automobile design became outdated 20 years ago at the latest. Now I'll confess that Detroit has done some amazing things to civilize the handling of the truck since Americans decided that they wanted the least sophisticated design possible for their cars about ten years ago. But an SUV is still a truck and it handles like a truck.

And what does Detroit think about all this? They love it. Why? Because when they sell an SUV, they're selling their lowest-tech vehicle that has the least R&D expense and costs the least to produce, since its basically the same product they've been selling -- as a truck -- for the last 50 years. Come on, people! Challenge Detroit! Ask for a product they have to break a sweat to design and build! "No thank you," says Mr. and Mrs. America, "even though we spent the 1980s and 1990s putting down American cars as being technologically inferior to European and Japanese products, we've changed our minds now and want to buy cars that American manufacturers were good at making -- in 1950."

Update III: On reflective thought, the potshot about taking a grim pleasure in the deaths of SUV owners is not quite fair. While I have no doubt that there are anti-SUV people who are not saddened by the fiery deaths of Humvee owners, I have no way of knowing what percentage of anti-SUV people that is. I therefore withdraw the overblown rhetoric.

However, the rhetorical point stands, and I want to make it forcefully: while I understand that trying to ban SUVs satisfies a bundle of goals, among which safety is only one, if you try to argue out of ostensible concern for the safety of SUV owners, while writing (or citing!) pieces that argue that SUV owners are "insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed [people], who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills"--well, let's say I'm underwhelmed by your tender regard. And if you really do care about their safety, then you might suggest, just in the way of a stopgap, things short of a total ban. Because if you do care about their safety, and you recognise that in this imperfect world a total ban on SUV's just might not come to pass (or at the very least, take time during which more people are dying), it behooves you to do whatever you can to prevent needless deaths.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That's gotta sting

I tried to read Jonathan Chait's piece on how liberals are all pragmatic empiricists just looking out for the common good, while conservatives are self-deluding ideologues clinging to their illusions with inhuman strength even as the gale-force winds of reality pluck at their clothes and do really astonishing things to their hair.

I just couldn't. These orgies of self-congratulation to which the media (and the blogosphere) are prone make me cringe. Watching a fellow journalist dig himself deeper into the hole of self-refutation should be fun, but somehow it's just painful. Perhaps it's that trembling voice whispering "there but for the grace of God . . . " into my unwilling ear.

Luckily for me, the sickeningly brilliant Will Wilkinson has waded into the fray, eviscerating Mr Chait's article with a few lightening flicks of the wrist:

Chait's claim is that liberals by and large are empiricists, willing to go where the evidence takes them, while conservatives (loosely and irresponsibly identified with free-market types) are dogmatists who will unaccountably but doggedly cling to principle even after being brought low by data. The claim is almost self-refuting. It should be impossible for an intelligent and observant person, such as Chait imagines himself to be, to fail to see the ravages of dogmatic narrowness on all sides. To claim the mantle of empiricism exclusively for liberalism (or any -ism) in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that that empiricism is water in ideology's oil is a signal failure of empiricism.

. . . [you'll have to go over there and read all the meaty parts yourself]. . .

Let's just grant that if Chait is correct, and liberalism is by nature incoherent, then his article successfully embodies liberal ideals to a spectacularly high degree.

[Mindles adds: This Chait, right? Uh-huh.]

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally, having read Larry Summers' remarks now, I think it's pretty embarassing for academia that this scandal got as far as it did. A commenter at Matthew Yglesias' nailed it:

. . . if the university maintains that tenure is intended to foster a climate of free debate of a wide range of unpopular hypothesis, then it seems hypocritical for the tenured faculty to demand multiply apologies from Summers and threaten his job because he offered a hypothesis that certainly should be open to scientific verification.

To the outside observer it makes Harvards faculty look like a bunch of immature people unwilling to entertain ideas that conflict with their narrow view of the world.

Larry Summers made some suggestions about the causes of female underrepresentation in the "hard" sciences. They were based on research, more than adequately caveated, and eloquently put. The hysterical reaction to his remarks by women at the conference, followed by the indignant bluster of Mr Summers' colleagues, make Harvard, and academia, look more than a little bit silly.

Mindles adds: ..and if they read this, they'll feel even sillier.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on the tenure track

Brad De Long has a great post on this:

The process of climbing to the top of the professoriate is structured as a tournament, in which the big prizes go to those willing to work the hardest and the smartest from their mid-twenties to their late thirties. Given our society (and our biology), a man can enter this tournament this without foreclosing many life possibilities: they can marry someone who will bear the burden of being for a decade a "happily married single parent," or they can decompress in their late thirties, look around, marry someone five years younger, have their family, and then live the leisured life of the theory class--or not. But given our society (and our biology), a woman cannot enter this particular academic tournament without running substantial risks of foreclosing many life possibilities if she decides to postpone her family, and a woman cannot enter this particular academic tournament without feeling--and being--at a severe work intensity-related handicap if she does not postpone her family.

In order to make progress, you have to either alter society (and perhaps biology) substantially, or back away from the work-intensity tournament model of choosing people for the high-prestige prize academic slots. But everyone in the debate wants to hold onto the tournament model--either because it justifies their current high-prestige position or because they fear that calling for change will get them a reputation as not being intellectually serious. Few want to call for root-and-branch reorganizations of society for fear of being dismissed as utopian dreamers. And so there are few voices saying that the problem of the disparate impact of the tournament system is a dire and severe one. It's better not to talk about it. What good could come from rocking the boat, and making the senior faculty face the possibility that fixing things might actually disturb their lives somewhat? Instead, pretend that things can be fixed with a little more affirmative action at the assistant professor level, and perhaps some extra committee meetings.

What gets me, really, is that it's all so unnecessary. I mean, say we keep the structure just as it is, but let parents drop out for a while and come back to pick up where they left off. Or start their PhDs when they're in their thirties. What have we lost?

Nothing, I'd argue. Oh, I'm sure law firms and academic institutions would say that they have a shorter work life ahead of them, costing their law firm or university valuable years of their work. But is this really true? It seems to me that the increasing problem at universities is that older professors are there too long already, choking the system that is supposed to bring new blood in; having more tenured professors for shorter stays should increase the flow of new blood at not-that-high a cost. Plus (for law firms) you delay the clock on their salary accrual, giving them a cheaper lifetime cost, and particularly lowering their renumeration at the end of their career, when they are most likely to be overpaid.

Perhaps it's that younger people are perceived as having more stamina. This seems like a valid complaint, but on the other hand, by the time a woman leaves a law firm or academic institution to have kids, you've got a lot invested in her. You have to count the cost of losing your investment in young female lawyers against the cost of not being able to beat quite so much work out of older female associates.

More broadly, half of law school classes, and a lot of economics and other graduate programs, are women. If universities, law firms, investment banks, and so on, continue the tournament model, they are going to miss out on a great deal of talent.

(Why won't the market respond, a la Gary Becker, with firms and universities that hire these underutilised female resources? Well, the markets for high-end law firms, investment banking services, and top-ten universities look a lot like cartels, which means they can continue behaviour that is good for the senior partners, but bad for customers and economic efficiency.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why can't mothers find part time work?

I know you didn't think I was going to say "Vast-Right Wing Conspiracy". Unfortunately--and, my liberal interlocutors, I really do regret this, because it sucks--I think the answer to the question "Why can't we find part-time work that allows us to combine work and childcare" is "For good reasons."

A top-flight career generally has little room for part-time work, because top-flight careers are about knowlege. Most companies need their knowlege around five days a week, because it is very inconvenient if a problem pops up and the person who knows the answer has only a 50% chance of being in the office that day.

Larry Summers put it neatly:

I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.

The model that I think a lot of feminists have in mind is one where you basically take high-powered jobs and split them in half during the childbearing years. Each partner does half the family work--child-rearing and housework--and then devotes the other half of their time to their career.

This is a fantasy, and to be fair, I think a lot of feminists recognise that it's a fantasy. But I'm not sure they recognise exactly why.

In the case of low-wage workers, it's because there are high fixed costs to adding another worker. There is training, health insurance and ancillary benefits, payroll taxes, and so forth. Training is surprisingly expensive. Domino's pizza says that every new worker costs them $2,500--this for someone who needs to learn how to pick up a pizza and carry it to the correct address. And when a friend in a VC firm is estimating the cost of hiring a new employee, they generally tack on 40% of the employee's salary for benefits and so on. So there are substantial fixed costs, and an employer who has to double those fixed costs by hiring two workers is going to recoup them certainly by cutting the wage they pay, and in many cases also by cutting benefits. Given the cost of day care, this means part-time work often brings very little actual cash into the family coffers.

But the fact is that it is not our nations waitresses, janitors, factory workers, call-center operators, secretaries, vetrinary assistants and nurses who have trouble getting part time work. They may be worried about accepting less pay or benefits, but they do not have trouble finding the work. The people who have trouble finding part time work are well-off women like me, in desireable careers, who want to keep their hand in while devoting themselves to raising their children.

But there are real reasons why the sorts of jobs we have are not available part time. (Note: I do not really consider working four days a week, instead of five, "part time", whatever the government says. If your kid spends more days in day care than with you, you are not working part time.) The main one is simply co-ordination. If you've ever worked for a European company, you know that it is much more difficult to get things done, because some person you need to talk to always seems to be on holiday; during the summer, things pretty much ground to a halt at the financial firms I've worked with. If you have a large number of people who are only in the office 3 or fewer days a week, the co-ordination problems become monstrous. The information you have locked up in your head is valuable to your company; the company can't afford to have it locked away from them for long periods of time.

Now, there are fields that use part-timers pretty well, but it's often limiting. Journalism offers the opportunity to freelance and keep your hand in while staying home, but a newspaper can't really use a reporter who might, or might not, be available when the story breaks. Part-time lawyers are growing rapidly, but AFAICT mostly limited to routine work such as simple wills or real-estate deals, which is not what most top-ten law graduates want to do with themselves. In general, part-time professional work is much less rewarding, both financially and psychologically, than its full-time equivalent. And I don't think that, in high-end jobs, that will change. A high-end job simply requires too much committment to take meaningful responsibility for childcare.

Taking time off is actually more feasible in those fields, and the very real discrimination against women who have done so is largely irrational. There's no reason that a woman (or a man!) shouldn't be able to hop off the tenure track in most of academia and then hop back on after the kids go off to nursery school--except that academics have a picture of themselves as dedicated to the life of the mind, and people who want to drop out and grind baby peas as insufficiently serious. Of course, the field changes and moves on while you're away . . . but after all, these people entered graduate school knowing much less than they do now, but no one said that they shouldn't be allowed to teach classes, did they? Admitted back into academia, those who have been away will get themselves back up to speed. Likewise investment banking, corporate law, and all the other glamor jobs that we're currently asking women to give up or immolate themselves on the altar of working motherhood.

So the deck does seem to be stacked unnecessarily against women. But I don't think that's some sort of cosmic injustice. Employers want you to work full time, or stay the hell home, because it's easier for them. You want them to provide a career-track part-time job because it's easier for you. What makes you think you're the one occupying the high moral ground, here?

What's the answer, though? We've got a generation of smart, educated, extremely able women. It seems a crying shame to keep them from raising their children as they want to -- or punish them, if they do, by ever after sequestering them from jobs that could use their talents.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm certainly worried about how I'll manage, if and when my time comes. But I'm not that worried about "Society". Society is still coping with a gigantic change in the role of women, groping towards a stable balance between work and children. The fact that it may not come out exactly right for me doesn't mean that my daughters are in trouble . . . any more than the invention of the spinning-jenny meant that the descendants of the English cottage weavers were forever doomed to penury.

I think that the path to a better future will be reached by working with our companies and families to find arrangements that work better than either the fifties stay-at-home, or the eighties Power Mom. I think we could use more suggestions on how each of us can make those kinds of adjustments, and fewer calls for Uncle Sam to fix it all for us helpless little ladies.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Focus on the family

I've hesitated to blog about this article because I, after all, am not a mother.

What know I about 3 am feedings, Spongebob Squarepants, day care pickups or those special moments when one finds oneself on one's knees, covered in vomit, as one's darling child wails uncontrollably? I mean, it all sounds horrible, but I expect that it would be even worse to live it, fighting tears of exhaustion and a post-partum pouch.

[Incidentally, current parents should note that y'all are not doing a good job of selling this child-bearing thing to those of us who are as yet non-reproductive. You know, if you actually succeed in communicating all of the dreadfulness of your parental lives to us, as so many articles currently seem intent upon doing, your social security benefits are going to look pretty darn sad in thirty years or so. But I digress.]

Nonetheless, I felt compelled to leap into the fray, because the article seems sloppy even by the standards of the modern book excerpt.

For one thing, it's all anecdotal . . . and light even on anecdote. Most of the article is an extended rant about the author's personal feelings, thin stuff for a cover story. Consider the following passage, which is relatively heavy on "data":

It all reminded me a lot of Betty Friedan's 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique. The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia, and the push to be perfect. The way so many women constantly looked over their shoulders to make sure that no one was outdoing them in the performance of good Mommyhood. And the tendency—every bit as pronounced among my peers as it had been for the women Friedan interviewed—to blame themselves for their problems. There was something new, too: the tendency many women had to feel threatened by other women and to judge them harshly—nowhere more evident than on Urbanbaby and other, similarly "supportive" web sites. Can I take my 17-month-old to the Winnie the Pooh movie?, one mom queried recently. "WAY tooooo young," came one response.

I read that 70 percent of American moms say they find motherhood today "incredibly stressful." Thirty percent of mothers of young children reportedly suffer from depression. Nine hundred and nine women in Texas recently told researchers they find taking care of their kids about as much fun as cleaning their house, slightly less pleasurable than cooking, and a whole lot less enjoyable than watching TV.

I mean, if the harshest, most judgemental moment the author can find is someone pointing out that a 17-month old doesn't really belong in a movie theater, well, cry me a rivulet. As for the unsourced statistics, I find it disturbing, but not necessarily surprising, that so many mothers of young children report depression . . . but how "young" are we talking? The younger you set the bar, the more likely you are to catch post-partum depression, which has, AFAIK, little to do with society, and everything to do with hormones.

But as for the rest . . . was the author really that shocked to find out that it isn't as much fun to do toddler activities as it is to watch Friends? If adults found building blocks and tinker toys as fascinating as toddlers do, they'd sell them in Sharper Image. Stressful? Yes, having someone totally dependant upon you is stressful. I can barely get myself up, showered, dressed, and fed, and when the going gets tough, I sometimes forget that last item. A whole other person to do that for? One that screams when it's needs aren't met? That must be, dare I say it, incredibly stressful, even if that other human being weren't trying to drink the Mop 'N Glo or set the dog on fire.

Not that I am insensitive to Ms. Warner's plight. Far from it. Motherhood is terribly, terribly hard, and professional women today have to make really hard choices that can really be unfair. If they work, they bear more of the responsibility for childcare than their husbands, which makes it harder to have a successful career. They are plagued with guilt in a way that their husbands are not over whether they should have stayed home. But if they stay home, they will, in all likelihood, not be able to re-enter the workforce at the same high level they left, sacrificing earning power and opportunity for exciting work. If their husbands leave them later in life, the courts will not recognise their sacrifice by awarding them alimony. Part-time work is concentrated in duller, less glamorous, and less financially rewarding areas.

But the article is shot through with the implication that somebody done us wrong, rather than the recognition that life hands us hard choices. Don't get me wrong: I think the system is broken for professional women, whom I presume society wants to reproduce, and I think we are only now fumbling towards possible solutions. But there is something that sets my teeth on edge about the complaint that it's all because society isn't giving us what we (so richly!) deserve.

When women claim that "men do less of the housework", I yawn. Your house isn't shared by "men"; it's shared by a husband. It is your job to first, pick a husband who isn't a selfish jerk, and then second, explain to him that he needs to do more of the housework. His unwillingness to wash dishes or mop the floor isn't because he's getting secret orders from the patriarchy; it's because these things are unpleasant, and we all like to avoid unpleasant activities, and your husband doesn't care about clean floors as much as you do. The art of setting priorities and evenly dividing unpleasant tasks between family members cannot be outsourced to society.

Instead of blaming society, moms today tend to blame themselves. They say they've chosen poorly. And so they take on the Herculean task of being absolutely everything to their children, simply because no one else is doing anything at all to help them. Because if they don't perform magical acts of perfect Mommy ministrations, their kids might fall through the cracks and end up as losers in our hard-driving winner-take-all society.

This has to change.

We now have a situation where well-off women can choose how to live their lives—either outsourcing child care at a sufficiently high level of quality to permit them to work with relative peace of mind or staying at home. But no one else, really, has anything. Many, many women would like to stay home with their children and can't afford to do so. Many, many others would like to be able to work part-time but can't afford or find the way to do so. Many others would like to be able to maintain their full-time careers without either being devoured by their jobs or losing ground, and they can't do that. And there is no hope at all for any of these women on the horizon.

No one else is doing anything to help them? Fathers are doing more today than ever before, even if they aren't doing enough. Schools have more resources than ever before, even if the various unions and bureaucrats are claiming too much value for themselves, rather than their students. From public education to public health care, Society is doing more than it ever has before to help us take care of children. What society isn't doing particularly well is taking care of us.

But in part that's because we didn't like being taken care of, remember? When we were home, supported by our husbands, with plenty of relaxing time to take care of our kids, we were going out of our skulls with boredom.

But that "well off" at the beginning of the second para is the key. Let's cut to the chase, here. The problem is not that women are oppressed by the cancer-like spread of Mommy & Me classes. The problem is that motherhood does not easily combine with a top-flight career.

Perhaps naturally, Ms Warner blames the government for this turn of events. Unsurprisingly, the way the government should fix it is a whole lot of government spending and regulation:

* We need incentives like tax subsidies to encourage corporations to adopt family-friendly policies.

* We need government-mandated child care standards and quality controls that can remove the fear and dread many working mothers feel when they leave their children with others.

* We need flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own. This shouldn't, these days, be such a pipe dream. After all, in his State of the Union message, President Bush reaffirmed his support of (which, one assumes, includes support of funding for) "faith-based and community groups." I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)

* We need new initiatives to make it possible for mothers to work part-time (something most mothers say they want to do) by creating vouchers or bigger tax credits to make child care more affordable, by making health insurance available and affordable for part-time workers and by generally making life less expensive and stressful for middle-class families so that mothers (and fathers) could work less without risking their children's financial future. Or even, if they felt the need, could stay home with their children for a while.

* In general, we need to alleviate the economic pressures that currently make so many families' lives so high-pressured, through progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class. So that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality—and quantity—time with their children. And so that motherhood could stop being the awful burden it is for so many women today and instead become something more like a joy.

There are issues with day care -- so many that I'll leave them for another post. But let me point out that having all this high-quality day care doesn't seem to be making motherhood more attractive in Europe -- at least not if we look at birth rates.

Tax subsidies for "family friendly policies" (whatever they are) and part-time work are all very well, but I find it hard to believe that their effect would be more than marginal. Tax subsidies are excellent at creating more low-wage jobs, but those jobs, as I argued earlier, are already abundantly available on a part-time basis. Cravath is not going to hire a two-day-a-week mergers associate because there's a $3,000 a year tax subsidy attached.

The economic pressure affecting middle class families seem to me to come largely from seeking scarce resources for their children: housing in good, safe school districts, and a good college education. You can redistribute all you want, but unless you make it so everyone earns exactly the same thing as everyone else, those scarce resources are still going to go to the people who are willing to spend the most money on them, which, by and large, will be the people who make the most money to begin with.

But what's really bothersome about the article is that she finishes up with all these policy prescriptions, when half the problems she cites have nothing to do with economic pressure.

Economic pressure is not making anyone stay up all night hand-painting paper plates for her child's birthday party, as she cites on page #1.

Lack of affordable day care is not the cause of "whole towns turning out for a spot in the right ballet class. . . the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers", the madness which is the main subject of Page #2.

A dearth of "family friendly" corporate policies is not responsible for the fact that "the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally", as she describes on Page #3.

Failure of our economy to provide part-time work is not the reason that "in many districts the public schools are so bad that you can't, if you want your child to be reasonably well-educated, sit back and simply let the teachers do their jobs, and must instead supplement the school day with a panoply of expensive and inconvenient "activities" so that your kid will have some exposure to music, art and sports.", as she laments on page #4.

Government action will not get rid of the meritocracy that produced me and Judith Warner -- at least, not in any way that either of us would approve of. Nor will it change the fundamental fact that parenting is not a part-time job--and neither is being an M&A associate.

Udate There are three other issues I want to address: affordable day care, lack of part-time work, and why parents need two incomes to raise a family these days. But they're long enough to warrant a post of their own, particularly since this one is already so incredibly long. So no need to email, and if you want to comment on those two issues, save it for the later posts, which (I promise!) are coming.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Should people who believe in God have higher accident rates?

Will Wilkinson says yes, since they should be eager to get to paradise. The ever-insightful Tyler Cowen says no, since they believe they have a part in God's plan. I say no, since there is no additional payoff to dying quickly!

What, after all, is the goal of theists? To spend eternity with their Maker. Eternity, as we all know, is infinitely long. So they cannot add to the time that they spend with Our Heavenly Father, since "infinity + 30 years" = "infinity".

(Work with me on this. I was an English major. Those number thingies confuse me sometimes.)

On the other hand, assuming that they have some utility to life on this side of The Great Divide, they can add to their net "mortal" utility, by having more human years, without subtracting from their total "Hosannas on Highest" years. It's a winning strategy for the rational theistic value-maximiser.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of the paranormal

Huh?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

News flash-Eason Jordan has been fired!

I got to converse with Jay Rosen last night on the topic of Eason Jordan, and what seems to me to be the mainstream media's rather bizarre reaction to his firing.

I haven't blogged about this story, because, to be frank, I just don't care that much. Eason Jordan said something that's pretty reprehensible, if he meant it the way it was taken, which subsequent evidence, including his own behaviour, seems to indicate that he did. On the other hand, it's not really a journalistic sin, but a personal one.

But then he was fired, and the media, to my mind, went off the deep end with a fifty-pound weight around its neck. A fellow from CJR called bloggers "the drooling morons of the lynch mob". A New York Times pieces made it sound as if Eason Jordan had been terribly victimised by callous thugs with a political axe to grind. Even the Wall Street Journal lamented that it had come down to firing him. The dominant tones were shock, surprise, and rage that bloggers had managed to magnify a slip of the tongue into a firing offense. The blogosphere had clearly Gone Too Far.

Excuse me? Exactly who do we think we are, Miss Thing? If Eason Jordan had been a division head at General Motors, and he had been reported as having said some stupid and indefensible at a private conference, like that women workers were out to sue for sexual harassment in order to enrich themselves, would the New York Times have thought that this was an outrage? Would the Columbia Journalism Review think that editorial columnists calling for the GM VP to explain his remarks were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of line?

Don't be ridiculous. When prominent people working for high-profile companies make stupid remarks in public, and the public finds out about it, the general result is that they are quickly shown the door by their employers. Why should Eason Jordan's Fortune 100 company be any different?

Oh, because it's journalism? Huh? What Eason Jordan was doing wasn't journalism; it was speaking off the cuff, making extremely serious allegations with none of the evidence that a journalist would require before daring to put forth such accusations. Why should he be any more protected from the results of his idiocy than a Johnson & Johnson executive?

Why, because journalists have been protecting each other from the results of such stupid, off-the-cuff speculation for decades, and suddenly they feel a little naked. This is understandable. AT&T execs can at least spout silliness to each other. Most journalists, on the other hand, are mostly friends with other journalists. To whom should we float our wild conspiracy theories and misanthropic fulminations on people we disagree with, if anything we say to journalists is suddenly on the record?

But on the other hand, Mr Jordan wasn't speaking to other journalists; he was speaking to a large number of strangers, many of whom were almost guaranteed to leave the room and tell sympathetic audiences that yes, it really is true that the US military is deliberately shooting unfriendly journalists; I heard the head of CNN's news division say so. CJR and the Times are curiously uninterested in these violations of the Chatham House Rules.

Perhaps it's not fair that journalists should alone be denied the benefits of protecting each other. Doctors manifestly do it, as do police, firefighters, teachers . . . it's hard to think of a profession, in fact, whose members do not to some extent band together to protect their own against outsiders, even when "we" are wrong. It is, I suppose, a touch unjust that journalists alone should be denied professional courtesy.

On the other hand, it may not be good for us, but it's undoubtedly good for society.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Finally, clear talk about Global Warming

Absolutely terrific article on global warming from The New Scientist. It's level-headed and carefully explains what the actual disagreements between scientists are about global warming, carefully explaining what sorts of scientific evidence and tests they use, rather than falling back on the tired journalistic "The majority of scientists agree . . . "

Here's a sample:

First, the basic physics. It is beyond doubt that certain gases in the atmosphere, most importantly water vapour and carbon dioxide, trap infrared radiation emitted by the Earth's surface and so have a greenhouse effect. This in itself is no bad thing. Indeed, without them the planet would freeze. There is also no doubt that human activity is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and that this has caused a sustained year-on-year rise in CO2 concentrations. For almost 60 years, measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have charted this rise, and it is largely uncontested that today's concentrations are about 35 per cent above pre-industrial levels (see Graph).

The effect this has on the planet is also measurable. In 2000, researchers based at Imperial College London examined satellite data covering almost three decades to plot changes in the amount of infrared radiation escaping from the atmosphere into space - an indirect measure of how much heat is being trapped. In the part of the infrared spectrum trapped by CO2 - wavelengths between 13 and 19 micrometres - they found that between 1970 and 1997 less and less radiation was escaping. They concluded that the increasing quantity of atmospheric CO2 was trapping energy that used to escape, and storing it in the atmosphere as heat. The results for the other greenhouse gases were similar.

These uncontested facts are enough to establish that "anthropogenic" greenhouse gas emissions are tending to make the atmosphere warmer. What's more, there is little doubt that the climate is changing right now. Temperature records from around the world going back 150 years suggest that 19 of the 20 warmest years - measured in terms of average global temperature, which takes account of all available thermometer data - have occurred since 1980, and that four of these occurred in the past seven years (see Graph).

The only serious question mark over this record is the possibility that measurements have been biased by the growth of cities near the sites where temperatures are measured, as cities retain more heat than rural areas. But some new research suggests there is no such bias. David Parker of the UK's Met Office divided the historical temperature data into two sets: one taken in calm weather and the other in windy weather. He reasoned that any effect due to nearby cities would be more pronounced in calm conditions, when the wind could not disperse the heat. There was no difference.

. . . In the face of such evidence, the vast majority of scientists, even sceptical ones, now agree that our activities are making the planet warmer, and that we can expect more warming as we release more CO2 into the atmosphere. This leaves two critical questions. How much warming can we expect? And how much should we care about it? Here the uncertainties begin in earnest.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere now stands at around 375 parts per million. A doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, which could happen as early as 2050, will add only about 1 °C to average global temperatures, other things being equal. But if there's one thing we can count on, it is that other things will not be equal; some important things will change.

All experts agree that the planet is likely to respond in a variety of ways, some of which will dampen down the warming (negative feedback) while others will amplify it (positive feedback). Assessing the impacts of these feedbacks has been a central task of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a co-operative agency set up 17 years ago that has harnessed the work of thousands of scientists. Having spent countless hours of supercomputer time creating and refining models to simulate the planet's climate system, the IPCC concludes that the feedbacks will be overwhelmingly positive. The only question, it says, is just how big this positive feedback will be.

The latest IPCC assessment is that doubling CO2 levels will warm the world by anything from 1.4 to 5.8 °C. In other words, this predicts a rise in global temperature from pre-industrial levels of around 14.8 °C to between 16.2 and 20.6 °C. Even at the low end, this is probably the biggest fluctuation in temperature that has occurred in the history of human civilisation. But uncertainties within the IPCC models remain, and the sceptics charge that they are so great that this conclusion is not worth the paper it is written on. So what are the positive feedbacks and how much uncertainty surrounds them?

Melting of polar ice is almost certainly one. Where the ice melts, the new, darker surface absorbs more heat from the sun, and so warms the planet. This is already happening. The second major source of positive feedback is water vapour. As this is responsible for a bigger slice of today's greenhouse effect than any other gas, including CO2, any change in the amount of moisture in the atmosphere is critical. A warmer world will evaporate more water from the oceans, giving an extra push to warming. But there is a complication. Some of the water vapour will turn to cloud, and the net effect of cloudier skies on heat coming in and going out is far from clear. Clouds reflect energy from the sun back into space, but they also trap heat radiated from the surface, especially at night. Whether warming or cooling predominates depends on the type and height of clouds. The IPCC calculates that the combined effect of extra water vapour and clouds will increase warming, but accepts that clouds are the biggest source of uncertainty in the models.

. . . But even if you accept this sceptical view of how science is done, it doesn't mean the orthodoxy is always wrong. We know for sure that human activity is influencing the global environment, even if we don't know by how much. We might still get away with it: the sceptics could be right, and the majority of the world's climate scientists wrong. It would be a lucky break. But how lucky do you feel?

My take: we're playing with fire when we make huge changes to a complex system that we don't understand, as we seem to be doing with the various substances we're pumping into our atmosphere. I'm not quite sure what to do with this, however, since India and China will overtake us as world's biggest emitters in the not-so-distant future, and like the rest of the developing world, have shown no interest in leaning into the strike zone and taking one for the team. Also, environmentalists, to my disgust, continue to block the nuclear power plants that seem to me to be the only realistic hope for conversion to a hydrogen economy. And the general green fascination with downgrading our lifestyle, rather than, say, converting to a nice clean energy source like nuclear, has always seemed to me to show a remarkable lack of basic understanding of how an economy works. So there's a lot of blame to go around on what I'd say should be a slam dunk.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Help!

We're under trackback attack. Can anyone tell me how to turn off trackback globally?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A plea for help

I'm looking for a London sublet for part of March, running through at least April and possibly May. Being a journalist, I'm on a budget . . . no corporate apartments or hotels for me. This seems to be considerably harder to find in London than it is in New York, at least so far. Can any of my readers point me in the right direction?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Double-plus ungood

Doctors have discovered a new strain of AIDS that is resistant to three out of four of the major anti-AIDS drugs, and progresses to full blown AIDS in possibly as little as three months.

People I was close to died of AIDS before (and in one case, right after) the cocktails became available. The cocktails changed the lives of so many . . . it's a saddening reminder that many of our medical miracles may be ephemeral.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

I'm getting a prescription for

I'm getting a prescription for this, it sounds like just the thing. I have a bottle of damitall, but it isn't strong enough.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Broken Windows Redux

Every time there's a big disaster, some idiot trots out our old friend The Broken Window Fallacy. The Broken Window Fallacy is the distressingly common belief that some destructive act, such as, say, breaking windows, is good for the economy, because look at all the work we just created for the glassmaker! This ignores, of course, the things we could have spent the money on, if we weren't busy repairing all those broken windows.

Different River takes on the inevitable application of this idiotic theory to the Tsunami. Here's what I wrote about the equally moronic notion that the 2003 blackout was good for the economy.

Update I think part, although by all means not all, of the confusion stems from the common journalistic belief that if something increases GDP, it is necessarily "good for the economy". While I'd argue that this is generally true, GDP is of course an imperfect measure.

The problem with natural disasters is that since GDP measures only flows, rather than stocks, it picks up, say, the uptick in economic activity that comes with rebuilding after a bad hurricane, but does not measure all the wealth that was destroyed when the hurricane roared through. So even though, on balance, the hurricane was a negative thing, our main economic statistic, GDP, will portray it as a positive.

This would not be a problem, of course, if most journalists had more than a cursory knowlege of economics.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Annals of journalism

Kudoes to the New York Times for making possibly the most egregious use of the unsourced third party quote in history:

But in today's statement, Pyongyang zeroed in on Dr. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, where she lumped North Korea with five other dictatorships, calling them "outposts of tyranny."

"The true intention of the second-term Bush administration is not only to further its policy to isolate and stifle the D.P.R.K. pursued by the first-term office, but to escalate it," the statement said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Outside critics and defectors say that North Korea is neither democratic nor popular, since it has been ruled for the last 60 years by the Kim family, an avaricious clan that does not permit multiparty elections or the slightest whisper of dissent. Today Pyongyang told the Bush administration to talk to the kinds of North Koreans it likes.

Wouldn't want to go out on a limb there by just saying outright that North Korea is a brutal dictatorship led by a man who is neck-in-neck with Michael Jackson for the title of "weirdest human being on the planet". Better dredge up some "critics" to make the point so you won't have to defend such an outlandish accusation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

A co-worker asks whether a blogger has ever been sued for libel--and I find I don't actually know the answer to that. I know there's been all sorts of legal fooforaw, but not being a lawyer, I haven't paid attention to any of the details. But I'm sure that my readers know the answer to that question, so if you do, could you weigh in? Many thanks.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hmmmm . . .

Why is David Talbot, the founder of Salon, stepping down just as the company declares it's first ever profit?

[Salon declared a profit?--ed. Yes, I too could have been rendered prone by the proverbial plume.]

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You can't force a cow to give milk . . .

Wal-Mart has fought bitterly against unionisation of its stores. Consequently, it is Target #1 for union organisers, who would count it the high point of their lives to see Gulliver firmly tied down by the Lilliputian locals. So far, Wal-Mart has managed to stay union-free, but now the unions are shopping jurisdictions, hoping to unionise the giant abroad, and then use those friendly sister unions to pressure the behemoth into unionising here. It would be a breathtaking victory for labor if it works.

Hope was on the horizon . . . two stores have unionised under Canada's more labor-friendly laws. Now, however, Wal-Mart has struck back: it's closing one of the stores, saying it can't make a contract.

I know nothing about Canadian labour law, but under American law, management cannot threaten to fire workers for organising. On the other hand, they're under no obligation to provide them jobs, either, if they decide they can't profitably run the company any more (and I suspect that Wal-Mart might well be willing to give up the whole Canadian market rather than set a risky precedent). It's actually quite interesting, in a game theory way. If I remember Labor Relations 101 correctly, management cannot threaten to, say, close the plant if the worker's unionise. On the other hand, Wal-Mart doesn't have to. It's so big that it can close a few stores that do unionise, which effectively tells employees what happens to a unionised Wal-Mart far more effectively than mere threats could.

And though I expect labor forces to cry foul, I suspect that Wal-Mart is probably well within its rights to close the store if it can't reach an agreeable contract with the new unions. This is probably a crushing blow to any hopes of unionising The Blue Menace in the near future.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Truly outrageous!

I see that I am supposed to be outraged by Brit Hume's allegedly egregious misquotation of FDR, to claim FDR's mantle for George Bush's privatisation plan.

But then I actually, y'know, click the link, and find out that FDR's plan looks a lot like Bush's, except that it wasn't nearly so generous.

FDR's plan involved three steps:

1) a temporary benefit paid to workers who hadn't had time to accrue pensions, phased out years ago.

2) A mandatory annuity

3) A voluntary, add-on annuity

By the time the mandatory annuities were paid out, they'd actually been made more generous than what FDR had proposed, as you'll read in the above link. How generous? The average benefit for a male worker was $22.71, which translates into a whopping $287.64 in 2003 dollars. The actual average benefit in 2003? $895.00. Even with a sizeable clawback, Bush's plan will be far more generous on the mandatory side than FDR's, plus the voluntary annuity that FDR wanted, but never got (though the details of the financing of the annuities differ, the result seems substantially the same: Americans have the choice of putting aside savings with which to buy annuities when they retire).

So Brit Hume's implication that FDR supported a plan like Bush's seems to me to be pretty accurate. I've got better things to waste my outrage on.

Update Let me make it clear: I'm not a fan of selective quotation, which Mr Hume's arguably was, if he was saying that FDR would have supported full, rather than partial, privatisation of the system (the quote seems to me to be marshalling support for the Bush plan, not some hypothetical fully private plan, but I don't have a transcript.) I also think that the current practice of trying to marshal historical figures in support of very modern policy arguments is idiotic. The fact that Mark Twain wrote a damn fine novel does not mean that we should listen to his opinion on the Spanish-American war, the fact that JFK cut taxes does not mean that we should do so now, and Ike's budget policies are not necessarily a good guide to our current fiscal policy.

But Al Franken seems to me to be implying that FDR would unequivocally not have supported the current privatisation plan, which seems to me to be unequivocally false, since FDR proposed something very like it, except that the mandatory portion wasn't nearly as lavish.

(Would FDR support Bush's plan if he was somehow magically reincarnated today, or would he side with the Democrats? I don't know, and you don't either, and frankly, we have enough politicians mucking things up as it is without going mucking around in graves for more.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Carly, we hardly knew ye

The first woman to head a major technology company has been forced out. The highlight of Ms Fiorina's tenure was, of course, the disastrous merger with Compaq, in which Ms Fiorina demonstrated that women are every bit as good as men at senseless, megalomaniacal empire-building.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Speaking of healthcare costs

Quel surprise! The administration's estimates of the 10-year cost of the Medicare prescription drug plan just shot from $400 billion to $720 billion. Who would have thought that a government health care programme would end up costing vastly more than the politicians claimed when they passed it?

Part of the change comes from earlier flim-flammery on the part of the Administration & congress, which projected costs from 2004-2013, even though the benefit didn't start until 2006. The new projections start in 2006. But that move alone can't possibly be enough to account for the projected costs nearly doubling. Hang onto your hat, Hilda; we're in for a bumpy ride.

Update Democrats are outraged-outraged! But I don't understand why, since the plan they wanted would have cost even more, and presumably, its costs would be forced upwards by the same pressures that beset the Bush plan, which would make it cost even more than the gazillions the Bush administration is planning to spend. I mean, I understand that they didn't like the structure of the programme, but the basic cost pressures are the same. As far as I know, the reason prescription drug costs are rising so fast isn't that prices are rising faster than inflation, but that people are consuming more drugs. I would thus expect the primary driver of the programme's costs to be expanded consumption (which the Democrat's plan featured more of), limiting any gains to be had from their plan to get the pharmaceutical companies over a barrel and beat them with a big stick until all the drugs fall out of their pockets.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Anecdotes cut both ways

Dr Tony on TennCare, the generous state Medicaid programme that's being cut because it was bankrupting Tennessee:

Whenever there is an article, like this, about TennCare, they always describe some poor soul that nobody could justify removing from the roles. However, I never see any articles listing all the healthy 20-somethings I see in the ER who are on TennCare. These are potentially insurable people who simply elect not to buy insurance and get on TennCare during an acute illness, usually requiring hospitalization, and then just stay on the roles. Then they ask for a prescription for Tylenol because they have no money. Then they spill their beeper and cigarettes out of their purse as they reach for that cell phone that's ringing.

This is actually a serious problem with journalism. Whenever we have a programme cut, we go out looking for the heartrending story of someone who will lose their benefit.

But living, as we do, in an imperfect world, we have to accept that there are tradeoffs to social policy. Until Jesus comes back to sort out the deserving from the needy, we are stuck with legislators and civil servants to do the job. Since they, unlike Jesus, are not omniscient, they will get it wrong some of the time.

This means that we have to choose whether to bias towards false negatives (setting up a system that will deny benefits to some who deserve them) or false positives (setting up a system that will give benefits to some who don't). This is not a binary choice; at any given level of benefit, I guarantee you that someone, somewhere, should be getting it and isn't; while someone else shouldn't, but is. The question is how many of each you've got; society has to decide how much of each it wants to risk, even while knowing that, due to the very nature of the problem (imperfect information) it will not have a very exact idea of whether they are denying benefit to too many, or too few.

Put like that, of course, the answer seems obvious to all but the hard-core libertarian: deny benefits to as few people as possible! But of course, widening the benefit basket has costs. The most obvious are the monetary costs, which in the case of Medicaid, are considerable, but there are also all sorts of second-order economic and sociological costs. It's pretty obvious, for example, that the dramatic increase in transfer payments in the 1960's had the primary effect of lessening material want, but the secondary effect of creating an inner-city underclass. These are difficult questions.

But when journalists attack these stories, they are prone to elide the difficulties. Right-wingers will say "liberal bias" and I don't deny that that's a problem, but there are other issues. Heart-rending stories make for good journalism, the kind that gets you noticed. Plus, it's easy to find someone who's going to get their benefits cut; just call your favourite advocacy group, and they'll supply several from their stable. On the other hand, how do you go about finding someone who's basically scamming the system? They don't want to be found.

"Hard cases make bad law", and sad stories make bad policy. What journalists should be telling us is the complex web of problems that surrounds a big policy debate like this one, but too often they settle for the easy way out, reporting numbers and a few "he-said, she-said" matches between the policymakers and their interest-group opponents, which they tie together with a story about some benefit recipient guaranteed to rend the heartstrings. But anecdotes are not data.

Not that journalists shouldn't tell us these stories: I firmly believe that we should see the human face of the policy decisions we make. But we should see all the faces (or at least a representative sample), not just the ones that are easy to find, and reaffirm the average journalist's committment to spending other people's money.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's about time someone did it

West Hollywood is considering banning "cosmetic surgery" for dogs:

The mayor of West Hollywood -- a liberal, pet-embracing city adjacent to Los Angeles that two years ago brought America a ban on the declawing of cats -- has proposed a new ordinance making "tail-docking" and "ear-cropping" illegal.

The new law, which was scheduled for debate before the West Hollywood City Council on Monday, would also ban other nontherapeutic or cosmetic surgeries on animals.

"By docking the tails of dogs or cropping their ears, animals are subjected to painful and unnecessary procedures and somebody has to stand up to this cruelty," West Hollywood Mayor John Duran said in a written statement.

It is no accident that I own a breed which doesn't have its tail or ears cut by the breeder. I know that people who breed dogs do so because they love them, which makes it particularly hard for me to fathom why they would cut off parts of the dogs they breed in order to make them conform to some human-authored breed standard.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public Service Announcement

For anyone looking for a new iron, Amazon is having a one-day sale on the Rowenta Perfect Iron. I just bought one with my Amazon gift certificate.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Random question of the day

Every so often, anyone who supported the war has to contend with the cries of "Chickenhawk!" It doesn't really wound me all that deeply, since usually I'm too entranced by the sight of libertarians/left-liberals who seem to be calling for a militaristic state along the lines of Sparta or Starship Troopers. Also, I'd be 4F.

Or at least, I think I'd be 4F. I have asthma, and I'm blind as a bat. But am I blind and asthmatic enough? What is the cut off for "too puny to draft?"

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can Medicaid trim down?

We have seen the future of nationalised medicine, and it is . . . mind-bogglingly expensive:

Forty years ago, Congress, as an afterthought to the Medicare program for the elderly, created Medicaid to help pay for the medical needs of about four million low-income people. Today, the program covers 53 million people -- nearly one in every six Americans -- and costs $300 billion a year in federal and state funds, recently surpassing spending on the federal Medicare program. In some states, Medicaid accounts for one-third of the budget.

The benefits offered by Medicaid have steadily expanded over the decades. The program now pays for 60% of the nation's nursing-home bill. It covers eight million disabled people and 25 million children. At many hospitals that cater to indigent people, Medicaid accounts for more than 40% of the revenue. "It has become a program that takes care of the worst situations," says John Holahan, director of the Urban Institute's Health Policy Center.

Bush is trying to cut $60 billion out of the Medicaid budget over the next decade, allegedly by cracking down on the gimmicks states use to collect extra payments from the Feds. Does this include New York State's scheme of forcing the local government to match the state's spending, thereby doubling the take from the Feds? Enquiring minds want to know!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is Osama channeling Sartre?

Kieran Healy calls the thesis that terrorists picked up some of their ideology from leftist academics "an ugly hypothesis slain by an unbeautiful fact".

Still, even now, AL is trying to insinuate that anti-Western Nihilist academics in European universities somehow turned Arab students into terrorists, without providing either facts or testable arguments to support his case. Which is probably a good thing for him, as the facts indicate that he’s completely wrong. Marc Sageman, who has actually done some real research on this topic, has the goods. In his network analysis of 400 terrorist biographies, he found that:

Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if exposure to leftists in the humanities and social sciences caused people to become terrorists. Unless AL wants to make the case that those notorious humanist Nihilists at engineering schools, computer science departments and urban planning institutes have been indoctrinating their students with Romantic anti-Western ideas, he’s plumb out of luck.

Now, I have no idea whether Al-Qaeda picked up some of its ideology from leftish academics, and, to be blunt, very little interest in exploring the matter. But, as it happens, I have a personal connection to some people who've been through Egypt's education system, which is apparently a lot like other (non-Saudi) educational systems, and I suspect that Mr Healy is confusing Irish or American engineering students with the Arab kind.

The Egyptian educational system, like the Irish one, is based on taking a nationwide high stakes test for university admission. Your score on the test determines where you get to go to school. My understanding of Arab education is that just about everyone who scores highly on the tests becomes either (you guessed it!) a doctor, a scientist, or an engineer, which is somewhat true in Ireland, but nowhere near to the same degree, as I presume Mr Healy himself proves.

That doesn't mean that they go to university and buckle down to the company of their fellow nerds, while the humanities students read Derrida and protest the lack of vegan alternatives in the cafeteria. Arab engineers and doctors are just as immersed in the university's cultural activities, and just as explosed to the various intellectually fashionable political theories, as their comrades in the humanities. They didn't become engineers or scientists because of their personal interests. They became engineers or scientists because that is what you do if you are a smart person in an Arab country. The person whose educational career I know most about, an Egyptian engineer, spent his college career cutting class and hanging out at poetry houses, talking art and politics with other radicals.

So I don't think that one can conclude that simply because they were engineers, they hadn't been exposed to all sorts of left-wing academic ideas. Hell, I don't think you could conclude that about American engineers, but it would certainly be more right than talking that way about Arab professionals.

This does not mean, however, that I believe that Al Qaeda picked up its ideology from Foucault. Nor am I interested in the question. To the extent that Al Qaeda has bad ideas, that are also bad ideas embraced by the academic left, I am all for vehemently opposing those bad ideas. But to try to somehow taint the left-wing academic excercise by connecting it to Al Qaeda is silly, and worse, dangerous. The job of academics is to have idea. Some of those ideas will be bad. I, naturally, think that left-wing academics have more bad ideas than right-wing ones. But I want them to keep having ideas, because the world doesn't have enough, and odds are, if they keep trying, eventually they'll have some good ones. Trying to shame or punish them because they had some bad ideas, and someone else got a hold of those bad ideas and did some awful things with them, is a fundamentally illiberal activity.

As I said, I don't know whether Al Qaeda actually did get some of its bad ideas from the academic left. But I don't think trying to establish some causation is really very useful, even if it exists. Much better to spend our time pointing out how bad the ideas are.

Update Oops! The post was by Henry Farrell, not Kieran Healy, Ogged tells me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those wily French

Check what they're up to now.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thoughts on the labour movement

What does the left want from labour these days?

I ask because this Matt Bai article from the New York times seems to have touched off a minor resurgance of the leftish dream of a unionised America in which everyone makes $25 an hour, rolling up the sleeves of their denim workshirts as they lift their dirt-smudged chins to the sun, their eyes fixed on the horizon where they can just see the dawn of a bright future, in which the sinewy forearms of the workers will craft a new society, untainted by human suffering . . .

Sorry. Every so often, I channel Lillian Hellman. But I've never hurt anyone.

Yet.

Anyway, I'm just thinking about what exactly the left hopes will be the result of a resurgent labour movement. Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU, is pressing the AFL-CIO to reorganize, in order to more effectively force whole local industries to unionise, rather than going after companies piecemeal. This makes the unions more effective at actually wringing concessions out of companies, since it effectively removes the competitive pressures on them.

But does that really mean a bright, high-wage future for all? This piece by someone named Zwichenzug makes the point that this only works in non-tradeables; ie, unionisation is only effective at raising its workers salaries in the absence of competition. Andy Stern's strategy is, effectively, to create an oligopoly with which his union can negotiate.

The problem with this, as a strategy for raising living standards, is of course that when you create this sort of oligopoly, the money doesn't come out of shareholder's pockets, as I presume the left wants it to. When you raise wages across the board, I would think you would also see an increase in prices across the board, since all the employers know that their competitors' cost structures have also changed and it's safe to raise prices. And since the demographic that works at WalMart is, by and large, the demographic that shops there, this can't be a very good strategy for increasing their standard of living. Certainly, it is the poor who benefit the most from Wal-Mart's low cost, since to them seven cents off a can of peas really means something.

But even in non-budget industries, it is the lower income quintiles who are most hurt by the kinds of oligopolies needed to sustain strong union bargaining power. The airlines are an excellent example of what I've said above. The twilight struggle of the major airlines with bankruptcy has made it clear that the lavish union jobs they provide, which seem to pay at least double the market rate, were really only economically viable when regulation protected their oligopoly, and allowed (hell, forced) everyone to price at cost-plus. Without such regulatory protection, it seems likely that eventually every one of the major airlines will either shed their high-cost unions (unlikely) or follow Pan-Am and Eastern Airlines to the grave.

And who has benefitted from deregulation? Companies? Nope; until recently, at least, they paid through the nose for their last-minute, flexible tickets. First class? Honey, if you're flying first class, you aren't worried about the cost of your travel. No, the beneficiaries are the 85% of Americans who had never been on a plane as of 1970. In my mother's youth they used to dress up to go pick people up at the airport; it was the province of luxury. Now people who saw far flung relatives only rarely, when they could get away for long enough to justify a couple day's driving, can, usually for less than a day's wages, get to Mom in a matter of hours. The cost of those high-priced union jobs was that most Americans had fewer, and less varied vacations, and less time with family--and the working class and the poor were hurt the most. That hardly seems like a liberal dream.

Unions are a good vehicle for redistributing income from one class of workers to another; they don't seem to me to be a very good vehicle for redistributing income from one economic class to another. The progressive tax code works much better, though I'd argue, still not very well, and at a cost. So the rhetoric of "Living wages" and "good jobs for all" doesn't seem to me to match the reality of agressive union promotion.

Unions are very good at some things, of course; for one, they're good at diverting union dues to Democratic politicians. They're a core Democratic constituency, and the very heart of its organizing and get-out-the-vote campaigns. They're brilliantly effective at forging strategic alliances with manufacturers to block, or even roll back, free trade. But raising living standards? Outside of government unions (and I'd question even those), I pretty much doubt it.

On the other hand, I'm no labor economist. I could easily be missing something. Or I could be missing some third, real reason that everyone's so excited about unionisation. If so, please 'splain me. I'm curious.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good article from Newsweek on how the Ba'athists took over the insurgency. Short answer: they have the money, perhaps hundreds of millions stashed in Iraq and Syria by Sadaam prior to the invasion.

Question of the day is: what is the burn rate of the insurgency? In other words, how much money do they go through a month, supporting fighters, building bombs, and so forth? How long can they keep this up?

From a labour standpoint, the answer may be "not that much longer". An election day suicide attack recent used a boy with Down's syndrome as the bomber. And the Iraqis have captured an erstwhile bomber who says he was tricked into committing suicide--his handlers told him to drive the truck somewhere and leave it, then blew it before he could get out. (Unfortunately for them, the explosion didn't kill him, but blew him through the windshield instead of killing him) It suggests--though of course it is far too soon to tell whether or not these are mere blips--that the flood of foriegn young men willing to blow themselves up for God and nation may be slowing.

Any qualified opinions? How much, in men, materiel and money, does it take to run an insurgency? How quickly are the leaders spending down their capital?