To My Parents, Ayn Rand, and God

Things that people in my social circle like that I don't get, #138

2012-02-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

.... this op-ed. As many Constant Readers know, I have participated in several Koch-funded programs and really benefited personally and professionally from them. Naturally, I've therefore been disappointed by many of the sleazier and less fair allegations levied at them. See generally the "libertarianism" tag. At the same time, this particular column doesn't do a particularly good job detailing specifically problematic things that President Obama personally has done against the Kochs. Indeed, the only specific transgression by a politician mentioned comes at the end of the 2nd paragraph, where it's mentioned that Democrats in Congress want to drag Koch before Congress to respond to questions about the Keystone XL pipeline project. I agree that such would be stupid and vindictive, but it's hardly clear from this piece that this particular bad idea originated with Obama. I imagine that he and members of Congress don't always see eye to eye; just ask Nancy Pelosi sometime if you're inclined to disagree. The rest of this rhetoric about Nixon's Enemies List and so forth therefore hardly seems all that helpful or illuminating.

Indeed, it's not surprising that Obama should speak out vehemently against the Kochs from time to time. Obama and the Kochs disagree on important principles. A lot is at stake. That's bound to lead to some heated rhetoric and incivility. But unless it's clear that Obama is actually misusing executive office to go after the Kochs, all of this writing about bills of attainder and so forth seems more inflammatory than useful.

In which I agree with Ann Althouse

2012-01-31T10:07:00.001-08:00

... re: values.

On "how to build a dog"

2012-01-30T12:41:00.001-08:00

Interesting reflections on how my Willow came to be.

Oh, clementine

2012-01-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

And giant boxes of said fruit are filling up the markets this time of year! Here's how I got through my box.

1. I think I've blogged this clementine cake before, but it is worth noting again just how marvelous it is. Note that because of the almond flour, it's gluten-free; good if you are entertaining people who adhere to this particular popular diet.

2. This clementine vanilla quick bread is yummy and easy enough, but the process of scraping out the vanilla bean freaked Willow out. Yes, that's right; our golden retriever erupted in one of her once-monthly fits of barking. "Don't worry, Willow," I had to explain. "See, vanilla beans cost $10.99 for two at Whole Foods, which alas means we don't have them all that frequently. Markets can be more effective at deterring certain kinds of conduct than using force via barking." I'm not sure she quite got the love-the-price-system sermon, but she's learning.

3. Chicken paillards with clementine salsa were also yummy and fresh-tasting. Only con is the giant amount of salsa. It probably serves more like six people rather than four. Also, ambivalent reaction of golden retriever to pounding chicken breasts thin with sherry bottle was noted.

4. Halibut with clementine gremolata was okay, although I wouldn't serve it with spinach again. The bitter with the sweet didn't quite work.

On gay equality and capitalism

2012-01-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan is famous (infamous?) for moving all over the map politically; when I first started reading his blog, he was a Burkean conservative. Then he became a passionate defender of Obama whose Burkeanism became increasingly more theoretical and abstract and whose positions on contemporary meat-and-potatoes issues appeared fairly mainstream Democratic. Recently, he endorsed Ron Paul, and the compass needle seems to have hit "libertarian." In this vein, he's put up two good posts on how the private sector appears more receptive to the movement for gay equality, and why this means that advocates for this cause should focus on changing civil society rather than enacting more laws. For all of his bumping around the political compass, good for Sullivan for realizing this important point.

Interesting paper on racial and other admissions preferences at Duke

2012-01-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if anyone actually reads or appreciates my occasional posts on this topic, but in case people do, this is an interesting new empirical paper on preferences at Duke. Alex Tabarrok also has a nice summary of it up at Marginal Revolution. For earlier coverage of the science and engineering issue, see here.

Why didn't I think of doing this?

2012-01-17T20:51:00.000-08:00

" In civil marriage, prenuptial agreements are permitted, so the man hardly shares all his worldly goods, and plenty of people marry with reservations, and without violating the law when they do so. People write their own vows too. Sometimes they say them in Vulcan! "

-- Conor Friedersdorf, commenting on Rick Santorum's opposition to gay marriage. It's a good piece, although not one that has much that's unfamiliar to libertarians or liberals who have tried to make the case for gay marriage to social conservatives.

Petite blondes of the world unite

2012-01-16T10:05:00.000-08:00

Stranger outside of Whole Foods, to Pnin and Willow: She's such a nice dog. Calm, sweet, obedient. I was thinking of getting a golden retriever, but they're too big. I want a dog like her, though -- like a golden retriever, but smaller.

Pnin: Actually, she is a golden retriever.

Stranger: Oh.

Pnin: She's a puppy, so she's still growing. And she's maybe a little small for her age. There are some females who are 60 pounds at six months. Willow was only in the high 30s or low 40s. So maybe she'll be only 55 or 60 pounds when she's full grown.

It's all too common for people to get my beloved's breed wrong. It's not too weird that people sometimes mistake her for a Labrador. Little goldens don't have the big fluffy coat that bigger ones do, and they do look more like Labs. But when Willow was a lot littler, someone asked me if she was a cocker spaniel. Lest I worry about her being small for her age too much, though, I've also been asked if she was part Great Dane. Uh, no. As a small human myself, though, I guess the two of us will just have to stick together.

Rights gone wrong gone not quite right

2012-01-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

I wanted to like Rights Gone Wrong by Richard Thompson Ford a lot more than I actually did. The sum of the parts is somehow greater than the whole. That is, Ford's pretty good at describing, chapter by chapter, problems with particular civil rights laws currently on the books. I particularly appreciated his account of the flaws of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act -- he notes that older workers are more likely to face discrimination and irrational stereotypes before they're hired and employers have a chance to learn about their true abilities. But it's actually quite hard to figure out whether one has been discriminted against at the hiring stage, because it's hard to figure out if one wasn't hired due to the employer's leaning on irrational stereotypes or because there were simply better-qualified applicants whom one has never seen in the pool. Thus, the act winds up being in effect a rather large wealth transfer to older, already-comfortable workers. Similarly, Ford does a good job discussing how laws requiring accommodations for disabled students have given families an incentive to seek out attention deficit disorder diagnoses for their children. Because the line between clinical attention deficit disorder and garden-variety inability to focus on things that are hard or boring is inherently fuzzy, it's all too tempting for doctors to diagnose children ADHD who may not be really so that they can get the very rich benefit of extra time on tests.

I found the book far less satisfying when Ford attempts to tie these narratives about the very real problems with these disparate laws together into a common story of "rights gone wrong." One, the book is in some ways surprisingly fuzzy on what a right is. In some places, Ford appears to be equating "right" with "entitlement to some special benefit." I have never felt entirely comfortable within the philosophical natural rights tradition, but as I read this book, I found myself wondering if I'm more of a natural rights person than I used to think I was. That is, in my view, the list of "civil rights" is pretty much the same as what was enumerated in Corfield v. Coryell. I prefer to think of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil rights legislations as attempt to remedy violations of those rights -- though one can certainly debate whether some of these remedies are over-broad, still necessary today, etc. -- rather than creating new civil rights, as Ford in some places indicates it does. In other places, Ford laments "excess individualism" in our culture and the like for these reasons, which just raises my ex-Objectivist hackles further.

Ford's preferred remedies for these problems entails more "pragmatism" and "nuance" in lieu of "absolute" rights. This would appear to entail giving judges more discretion. While this might avoid some of the more ridiculous extremes avoided with literal interpretation of a law to a situation to which it doesn't seem to fit, discretion can also be bad because it permits judges to skew the literal text of civil rights statutes to fit with their political or ideological views. Ford also seems to prefer administrative-based approaches to enforcing civil rights laws, an approach that would have the virtue of saving parties' litigation costs. On the other hand, there are real public choice problems with giving bureaucracies additional power to enforce civil rights laws. These issues are not really addressed in the book.

In summary: this book is better on diagnoses than it is on cures.

On my inner life

2012-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Should I be alarmed that I dreamed last night that I'd somehow been transported back to 1994, and that Rick Santorum was teaching my middle school math class? Instead of having us do math, though, he has us doing painful and difficult abs exercises on the floor underneath a special tent-like blanket. Never have I been so relieved to find myself waking up at 7 a.m. and scrambling to get off to a 9:30 meeting. Relatedly, I'm about ready to give up on rapid eye movement sleep.

On brushing up on one's medieval British history

2012-01-12T20:32:00.000-08:00

Pnin, Willow and I recently finished listening to a Teaching Company course, The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest. It's been one of my favorite Teaching Company courses so far. The lectures are easy to follow and well-organized, and Paxton has a crisp, clear voice that works well for the medium. I'm a fan of Teaching Company courses primarily as gap fillers -- to pick up knowledge that I should've gotten somewhere along the way during the course of a decent liberal arts education, but didn't. So I've loaded up on classical music, for example, and on periods of history that I happened never to study. It's thus entirely possible that there are significant omissions or distortions that a real scholar of this stuff would notice that I'm not. But as far as I can tell, that's not been a problem for my purposes.

Relatedly, Pnin recently recommended Sharon Kay Penman's historical novels, which cover the same perid and place. I've made my way through the Henry II/Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy and am now delving into the recently released Lionheart. I'd recommend them readily to George R.R. Martin fans. Penman's novels obviously lack the magical elements of the Song of Ice and Fire series, but they do feature similarly sprawling casts of characters faced with complicated, morally ambiguous situations. Penman's technique of shifting rapidly between the points of view of different characters is also somewhat similar, though her cast isn't nearly so large nor separated in time and space as Martin's. Overall, very enjoyable thus far.

Thoughts on athletic preferences

2012-01-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Dartblog has two posts up regarding an editorial questioning Dartmouth's athletic recruitment policies. The post at the second link, by way of defending the existing policy, reproduces in full an editorial from government professor Allan Stam describing his experiences as a student-athlete at Cornell. The post at the first link by recent grad Isaiah Berg defends reforming athletic policy by noting that, lyrical and well-written as Stam's op-ed is, it is hardly clear from it that large admissions preferences (as opposed to no preferences at all or very modest preferences) can give student-athletes the benefits that Stam identifies. I agree with most of Berg's analysis, but I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.

First, Berg doesn't cite any numbers in his post about the magnitude of the differences between recipients of athletic preferences at selective schools and those students who don't. Some such numbers are out there; this piece by Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade indicates that recruited athlete status is worth about 200 points on the SAT (on the 1600 scale.) To put that number into additional context, the same study found that being His panic is worth about 185 points and being African-American is worth about 230. There is a growing body of research showing that African-American and Hispanic students who receive racial preferences in admissions may actually learn less than their counterparts attending schools at which they are better matched on the basis of academic credentials; this amicus brief sums up the state of play in this field. Notably, due to the ill effects of mismatch, beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action appear less likely to receive degrees in science, technology, and engineering than their counterparts attending schools at which they are good matches or to pursue the Ph.Ds that would permit them to enter Stam's own profession (university teaching.) Given that the credentials deficits Espenshade identifies between average recruited athletes and affirmative action beneficiaries are similar, it's entirely plausibe that the same mismatch effects apply, and university officials would be wise to be concerned about them.

Second, Stam conclucdes his piece by noting, "I often wonder if the loathsome dismissiveness with which America's intellectuals view athletes, soldiers, business people, and politicians lies in their own insecurities rather than in any better sense of judgment they might have rather than the rest of us." I don't think that intellectuals generally have a better sense of judgment than most people, except perhaps in the limited domains that they have studied more closely than most people. Nor has it been my experience that most intellectuals are loathsomely dismissive of professional athletes, as opposed to benignly indifferent, and I find it hard to believe that any intellectual alive can be adequately loathsomely dismissive of most politicians for my taste (Richard Epstein perhaps excepted.)

That said, I do share Stam's concern that too many intellectuals are too dismissive of soldiers and of business people. It is perhaps possible that immersion in intense athletic experience might make more such people less reflexively sympathetic to anti-military or anti-free market ideas. But one should not confuse sympathy to a political or economic idea with exposure to or engagement with a set of political ideas. It's been my experience that the children of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, for example, are pre-disposed to be more receptive to libertarian ideas than kids whose parents are from other racial and ethnic groups; it's easy to understand why. But having tea with Ukrainian grandparents once a week as a nine-year-old as an introduction to libertarianism is a poor substitute for real exposure to the great libertarian thinkers (Hayek, Mises, etc.) and sustained discussion and debate about their ideas. The situation with left-wing anti-military and anti-capitalist ideas at elite universities, I suspect, is similar. The goal ought not to be to provide students with life experiences that will make them more receptive to these ideas, but to ensure that these ideas are actually taught and engaged with in the classroom.

Finally, most of us, in this day and age, want an intellectual class that includes both men and women. There are perhaps a few exceptions in the most conservative sliver of the population, but even many of them have gone to rallies for female politicians like Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin. I doubt that the military would've really welcomed 18-year-old five-foot-one-inch, ninety-two-pound Isabel Archer as an enlistee. Perhaps they would have put her at a desk somewhere to analyze aerial photographs or maybe shipped her off to language school. And indeed, though there are a few women who will be strong enough to fight in combat and face the kind of physical rigors that Stam writes about, there are likely fewer women physically capable of doing so than there are men. While it's true that participating in varsity college athletics is less physically demanding than military work, Stam's entire vision of achieving personal excellence and leadership qualities through militaristic or quasi-militaristic physical discipline is one that seems more readily accessible to men than to women. How are those of us not capable of fighting in combat to achieve self-mastery and excellence?

Whither the state of Asian America?

2012-01-10T18:51:00.000-08:00

Charles Murray has an essay in The New Criterion titled "Belmont and Fishtown: On Diverging Classes in the United States." I believe it is an excerpt from his forthcoming book titled "The State of White America." In it, he posits the rise of an increasingly stratified society that is bifurcated into a new upper class and a new lower class -- people who reside in the fictional neighborhoods that he calls Belmont and Fishtown, respectively. Arnold Kling has the reasonable response that if this were a problem in the way that Murray claims, one would expect to see a more bimodal distribution of I.Q. scores emerging among the children of these new classes. He doesn't cite any such I.Q. data one way or the other, but I am inclined to suspect that if such data existed confirming Murray's hypothesis, someone would've brought it to his attention.

I have a different point than Kling to raise, though (and, to be fair, perhaps Murray addresses it in his book or in writings other than this short essay -- I've no way of knowing.) I've spent much of my adult life in and around Murray's Belmont-ish circles, and what's striking to me is how easily Murray glides over how over-represented recent Asian-American immigrants and their children are in these circles. When I took honors math and science classes in high school, my parents and friends used to joke that I brought diversity to the group because I was one of the few white women in the room. Most of my competitors were Asian guys. My dad used to tease me about the strange-sounding names of the guys who would call -- "Hey, Rabindranath wanted to check his answers for physics with you, and Srikanath wanted to know if you'd been able to get number 23" -- looking for help or commiseration with the homework from those classes. More recently, I see the same dynamic with the students I interview for the selective college that I attended. I've interviewed five women this year and last. Three were born outside the United States.

Some such of my friends and interviewees have come from wealthy families; some have come from poorer ones that were unusually obsessed with education and hard work. But I'd venture to guess that even the wealthiest such immigrant and child-of-immigrant kids are more attuned to the norms of social classes other than their own than is typical for children of native-born wealthy families. They seem to spend more time, on average, going to family, ethnic community or religious functions, where one meets people from a variety of different backgrounds. Their parents were less likely to express exquisite sensitivities along the lines of "I don't watch any TV except for Mad Men and The Wire," or disdain for people who like the Olive Garden. It's also quite common for my immigrant friends to travel back to their home countries and to spend substantial amounts of time visiting relatives who are far worse off than Murray's Fishtown dwellers.

So... while it might well be true that there are not a lot of students at Ivy League schools who are attuned to the feelings of truck drivers from Iowa, it is also true that there are many more students there who are exquisitely attuned to the problems of working-class Pakistani restaurant owners from suburban New Jersey. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that such students are actually discriminated against in the admissions process at such schools. It is not entirely clear to me why having one type of sensitivity is more important than the other. Assuming that there is not some reason for this that I have missed, then there would seem to be a few easy remedies for the situation that Murray describes. One would be to stop discriminating against Asian-Americans in elite admissions, a reform that might also be desirable for many other reasons.

Two, more broadly, Murray's concerns about insularity of elites argues for more liberal immigration policies. Let the most cognitively able students from countries around the world churn up into the Belmont class and shake up complacent attitudes there. As the winds of economic and political opportunity shift around the world, let America see fluxes of talented immigrants from different groups that leave their marks on the new upper class. While I've focused on Asian-Americans in this post, I understand that Eastern European Jews went through a similar process of becoming over-represented in the upper class and leaving a mark on new upper class behavior a generation before. I've no idea what the next group or groups to do so will be -- that depends in large part on how the winds of political and economic opportunity abroad change -- but I've little doubt that there will be some.

i

GOP's Working Class Muddle, etc.

2012-01-09T17:58:00.000-08:00

So apologies for the lack of blogging, but I've been coming out from under a bad cold. Through trial and error, I've learned recently that the CVS pills with pseudophedrine in them are just about the only things that help my congested nose. But under current federal law, you now have to display a state ID to get them from behind the counter and sign a statement that says that you are not making any material misstatements in connection with buying them, lest you be subject to a $25,000 fine. I am reminded of the periodic cries from some that voter ID laws are tantamount to Jim Crow because black voters disproportionately lack state IDs ; where is the NAACP to point out that ridiculous regulations on the sale of pseudophredine based drugs have a similar disparate impact? Heck, if they demanded hearings on this on Capitol Hill, I'd be strongly tempted to support them.

In the meantime, however, while I'm dipping my toes back into blogging's waters, please go read this column by Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ on "The GOP's Working Class Muddle." It's excellent, and I wish I could say I'd written it myself.

I really need to incorporate the phrase "caucus virgin" into my everyday vocabulary.

2012-01-04T09:14:00.001-08:00

So I am back to D.C. and environs after a nice Massachusetts trip, and little Willow appears to be recovering from her misadventures in sock theft. Perhaps a full post and pictures will follow, but I fear overwhelming you all with too much cuteness. Also, while I am sure that everyone has figured out by now that I am a totally unserious person, I might as well at least try to maintain some pretense of non-frivolousness by writing about subjects other than my darling golden retriever.

As some of you may have noticed, there was an Iowa caucus last night. And Rick Santorum narrowly lost to Mitt Romney, generating plenty of buzz. Like many other libertarians, I am no Santorum fan, for reasons ably laid out by David Boaz in a recent Cato at Liberty post and Jonathan Rauch in a 2006 essay for Reason. Reading most of his conservative defenders has been depressing; Jennifer Rubin's stating that the blemishes on Santorum's record as a fiscal conservative are merely a vote for No Child Left Behind and some earmarks rather glosses past the long list of non-fiscally conservative statements he made in his book and elsewhere as documented by Boaz and Rauch. David Brooks's column praising Santorum had its share of equally cringeworthy moments, though I suppose Brooks's big government conservative streak is well-documented enough that nobody should be surprised. But memo concerning the last line; as a UChicago grad, when you write that "The country doesn't want an election that is Harvard Law vs. Harvard Law," the point you ought to be making is that Harvardians are unserious jocks, not that they are scary intellectual elitists, which was presumably what you meant based on context.

I suppose I can take some comfort in knowing that his particular brand of populist big government conservatism is unlikely to play as well outside of Iowa than it did within it and that his popularity is likely to fade once some of his more extreme remarks come under closer public scrutiny. Also, while I have decidedly mixed feelings about Ron Paul, it's nice to see that at least some polling data indicate that it is the small government elements of his message, and not the creepy paleo-libertarian ones, that resonate most with Iowa's younger voters. (I am also indebted to said blog for coming up with the charming "caucus virgin" locution that appears in the post title). Thus, onto N.H. as it is!

Ailing Willow

2011-12-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

Alas, poor Willow. She'd made a safe trip with my husband up to see his family in Massachusetts for a few days. I'd come back to D.C. to hopefully get some work done (and avoid burning up scarce vacation days in anticipation of a trip to ancestral homelands of Ukraine and Russia this summer) and then join the Pnins over the weekend. She did well on her first day, even getting along better than expected with the Pnin family cocker spaniel (see above.) I was even hoping that she'd connect with some of the local academics regarding her recent paper, "Coase on Toast?: An Empirical Investigation into Asymmetric Bargaining at the Breakfast Table," possibly putting herself on tenure track in the econ department at MIT. But this has not transpired so far. She swallowed a sock around 11:30 this morning and had to be whisked off to the local animal hospital. The vet was able to get her to throw up Sock #1, but discovered a Sock #2 lurking in her gut. Now she has to stay overnight in the hopes that she'll pass Sock #2. If she doesn't, surgery awaits. Theists, please summon up thy superpowers on Miss Willow's behalf. Meanwhile, I'll just stare at the floor and remind myself over and over to try to be confident in modern medicine.

UPDATE: Young Willow has passed Sock #2 and returned home without needing surgery. She has more or less gotten back to her frisky and energetic ways. But all socks will now be under lock and key -- perhaps even the lockbox that Al Gore mentioned in his 2000 presidential campaign, as Pnin puts it...

Shinto Willow

2011-12-27T19:14:00.000-08:00

Each December, any blended family must inevitably confront the question, "In what religious tradition will we raise our golden retriever?" So first, we exposed Willow to her Jewish side by letting her watch us light the tiny $10 menorah from Target. She seemed intrigued enough that she avoided jumping up on the kitchen table to like it. This was followed by the eating of the Hanukkah gelt, which we'd actually purchased for the presidential candidate themed holiday party to serve as the Ron Paul appetizer (y'know, because of his love of the gold standard.) Associating paleo-ish Ron Paul with Jewish tradition perhaps felt not quite right, but Willow seemed more miffed that we couldn't share any of our chocolate with her.

Then she traveled north to visit her Archer grand-owners for a celebration of Christmas. This was all somehow so exciting -- tree! pine needles from tree to put into her mouth! terrifying plastic Santa Clau on neighbors' lawn to bark at! stacks of presents around it which can double as a homemade golden retriever agility course! -- that she managed to inflict diarrhea on herself. But she does approve of the numerous special dog cookies that she received from friends and relatives and the new Kong Wobble that she got as a present. If she were, like the heroine of a popular young adult novel, forced to try to pick one religion for herself, I don't know which one she would settle on.

Fortunately, however, Willow is nothing if not an outside-the-box thinker. (Though she hastens to add that she does sometimes like to stick her head into empty J. Crew boxes and sniff around in them. In fact, if you have some, feel free to send them her way.) And so she has apparently settled on... Shinto ancestor worship... which slights neither of us! Yes, she has discovered a pillow on my parents' couch with a picture of one of her distant ancestors, Am. Can. Bda. Ch. Cummings' Gold-Rush Charlie. She is quite content to stare at it for hours on end while she's relaxing on the sofa. And thus our clever girl splits the difference between her two divergent religious backgrounds and offends neither of her humans!

My Christmas gift to you is a link to the Wikipedia entry for "revealed preference."

2011-12-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, I'm convinced that news articles recommending giving gifts that the recipient doesn't actually want are not actually about providing recommendations that are supposed to be useful, but instead a literary device that enables the author to mount her soapbox on behalf of a familiar cause without her plea sounding tired and shopworn. Ignoring the gimmick aspect of the genre would be akin to my husband's refusing pick up Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation because he is Jewish and it is rude to read letters addressed to other people. Or encouraging my sort-of boss to stop writing "Questions for the President" blog posts because the President never seems to answer his questions, without realizing that the "question" device is a clever way of framing his commentary on Obama's policies.

Take, for example, the most extreme and outrageous entrant into the genre that I have yet discovered -- ""As a Christmas Gift, Tell Your Friends and Relatives That They Are Overweight." No sane person can possibly think that this is intended to be real gift-giving advice. Please, please, as my husband points out in a somewhat different context, while we can perhaps easily judge the health risks associated with a friend's being overweight, it's much harder for us to figure out how much pleasure the other person gets from indulging in her bad habits. This would counsel for leaving our friends to their own devices and not sticking our nose into others' private business. Fortunately, most of us do this already.

That said, the genre's feeling pretty tired to me already. I'm starting to prefer my "here's why you should support my pet cause" sermons straight up, rather than watered down with "here's how this is relevant to the Christmas season" gambit. I'm in luck then that it's December 23. But I hope that this particular form of gimmickry gets retired next year, seeing how not-fresh and not-original it feels.

Notes on fashion

2011-12-22T20:37:00.001-08:00

How to explain the periodic appearance of long-sleeved sheer T-shirts in the world? Yes, they look fine when one buys a "layering piece" to put underneath it, e.g. a basic white tank top. But basic white tank tops are also useful when paired with articles of clothing other than the aforementioned sheer T-shirt. So, inevitably, there will be days when one is tempted to wear the sheer T-shirt by its lonesome but realizes that there are no suitable clean layering pieces in the drawer. Long-sleeved T-shirts of fabric of normal thickness notably don't have this drawback. Given that, why does anyone persist in buying the sheer kind? It's doubly annoying to number among the unsuspecting who think "Ah ha! Cute shirt on sale!" and then realize, no, that its sheerness makes it vastly limited for wear and un-buyable. Gah.

Also: how am I to understand the tall boots worn over jeans or leggings trend? It seems aesthetically appealing enough. It conjures up nice images of people in equestrian dress. I can support that. But where should I be looking for boots that are suitable for this purpose? The good ones all run expensive, and I don't want to sink a lot of money into some I'm unlikely to wear regularly. And I fear cheap ones would just be uncomfortable in all the wrong ways.

Yes and no to Alex Tabarrok's Atlantic essay on immigration

2011-12-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

Alex Tabarrok has an interesting short essay up at The Atlantic in which he argues for increasing the number of high-skilled immigrants who get to stay. He calls it the "no brainer" of the year. He puts it the following way:

Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open?

In 2010, the United States more often chose Door #2, setting aside about 40,000 visas for people of extraordinary ability and 55,000 for people randomly chosen by lottery.

To which I say: yes and no. Yes to increasing legal immigration for high-skilled immigrants, for all of the reasons that Tabarrok sets forth in the piece. But I'm less confident that the dichotomy set up in the first paragraph is the best way to frame the issue generally. It's not obvious to me that the national economy's best served by creating an immigration policy that focuses on getting the most intellectually talented people possible, for the reasons that Tabarrok's GMU colleague and fellow econ blogger sketches out rather colorfully in in part of a blog post that is on the whole about quite a different topic:

Suppose we have an isolated society in which everyone is a genius. Let's call them the Brains. Who takes out the garbage? A Brain, obviously. Who does the farming? Again, Brains.

Now what happens if the geniuses come into contact with a society where everyone is of average intelligence at best? Let's call them the Brawns. If the Brains allow the Brawns to join their society, the average genetic quality of the Brains' society plummets. But everyone is better off as a result! Now the Brains can specialize in jobs that require high intelligence, and the Brawns can take over the menial labor. Total production goes up.

This is an example of what economists call the Law of Comparative Advantage. Trade between two people or groups increases total production even if one person or group is worse at everything. Suppose, for example, that Brains can make 5 Computer Programs or 10 Bushels of Wheat per day, and Brawns can make .1 Computer Programs or 5 Bushels of Wheat per day.

Computer Programs Bushets of Wheat
Brains 5 10
Brawns .1 5
Brains and Brawns can still trade to mutual benefit: Just have one Brain switch from farming to programming (+5 Programs, -10 Bushels of Wheat), and three Brawns switch from programming to farming (-.3 Programs, +15 Bushels of Wheat), and total production rises by 4.7 Programs and 5 Bushels of Wheat.

So I'm not convinced that the United States wouldn't be made better off by letting in additional people who are more like Bryan's imaginary Brawns than his imaginary Brains. Nor am I sure that any government central planner could come up with the right formula to figure out the optimal number of Brains and Brawns to whom to grant visas. It's probably much better to just let as many Brainws and Brawns who think that they can find work to come (so long as neither Brawns nor Brains are terrorists, spies, or have other such problematic skeletons in their closets that would make them obviously poor candidates for eventual citizenship.)

Perhaps Tabarrok thinks that increasing the number of high-skilled immigrants is a more politically feasible reform to current immigration policy than one that would increase legal immigration more generally. If so, fine. But his first two paragraph are still a less than helpful way of framing the issue.

Test

2011-12-20T09:12:00.000-08:00

I had a misadventure last night whereby a spammer got into the Gmail account I have under my maiden name (i.e. the non-pseudonym equvialent of isabel.archer@gmail, rather than the non-pseudonym equivalent of isabel.pnin@gmail, which is what I've been using for the better part of the last year anyway). It seemed that the spammer had also deleted To My Parents, Ayn Rand, and God (or perhaps Google did based on the spammer's Terms of Service violation.) But, miraculously, my three years' worth of rambling about baking, meritocracy, and libertarianism seems to live: o, atheist libertarian holiday miracle! Assuming this test works, expect more substantive blogging to resume shortly.

Cards welcome

2011-12-18T14:44:00.001-08:00

So I am looming on the verge of old age. Perhaps oddly, having read John Derbyshire's infamous musings on women ceasing to be attractive at the age of 20 and the PUA guys' oeuvre makes these last few days of my 20s seem less worth clinging to. Somewhere, there will be always be haters, as the kids say. Yet if I ever did wish to succumb to age-based self-loathing, I guess I can be drawn back from the brink based based on misadventures in being carded, which still occur frequently despite the whole tottering on the brink of third decade of life thing. Yes, I'm used to occasionally awkwardly rooting around in my purse before entering crowded bars in Adams-Morgan or having to produce ID on demand when buying wine at grocery stores. The Wegmans near my parents in Pennsylvania did once card 67-year-old Papa Archer, whom no reasonable person would mistake for a 20-year-old. But on the other hand, there are the places that don't routinely card that nonetheless ask me to fork over ID. Are there really lots of underage types ordering sangria at Jaleo,or Pinot Grigio with their organic pizza at Coppi's? Did they really need to ask me for ID?

But the upside of old age is that it presents a wonderful opportunity to throw a combined birthday/holiday party for oneself. This year, Pnin and I had a 2011-year-in-review theme, with dishes paying tribute to each of the major presidential candidates. More pictures and recipes will follow, but in the meantime, here is a recipe for Hermain Cain 9-9-9 cookies, courtesy of Cooks Illustrated:

INGREDIENTS

Butter Cookie Dough

2 1/2cups unbleached all-purpose flour (12 1/2 ounces)
3/4cup superfine sugar (5 1/2 ounces) (see note)
1/4teaspoon table salt
16tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), cut into sixteen 1/2-inch pieces, at cool room temperature (about 65 degrees)
2teaspoons vanilla extract
2tablespoons cream cheese , at room temperature

Glaze

1tablespoon cream cheese , at room temperature
3tablespoons milk
1 1/2cups confectioners' sugar (6 ounces)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. FOR THE COOKIES: In bowl of standing mixer fitted with flat beater, mix flour, sugar, and salt on low speed until combined, about 5 seconds. With mixer running on low, add butter 1 piece at a time; continue to mix until mixture looks crumbly and slightly wet, about 1 minute longer. Add vanilla and cream cheese and mix on low until dough just begins to form large clumps, about 30 seconds.

2. Remove bowl from mixer; knead dough by hand in bowl for 2 to 3 turns to form large cohesive mass. Turn out dough onto countertop; divide in half, pat into two 4-inch disks, wrap each in plastic, and refrigerate until they begin to firm up, 20 to 30 minutes. (Can be refrigerated up to 3 days or frozen up to 2 weeks; defrost in refrigerator before using.)

3. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 375 degrees. Roll out 1 dough disk to even 1/8-inch thickness between 2 large sheets parchment paper; slide rolled dough on parchment onto baking sheet and chill until firm, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, repeat with second disk.

4. Working with first portion of rolled dough, cut into desired shapes using cookie cutter(s) and place shapes on parchment-lined baking sheet, spacing them about 1 1/2 inches apart. Bake until light golden brown, about 10 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking time. Repeat with second portion of rolled dough. (Dough scraps can be patted together, chilled, and re-rolled once.) Cool cookies on wire rack to room temperature.

5. FOR THE GLAZE: Whisk cream cheese and 2 tablespoons milk in medium bowl until combined and no lumps remain. Whisk in confectioners' sugar until smooth, adding remaining milk as needed until glaze is thin enough to spread easily. Drizzle or spread scant teaspoon glaze with back of spoon onto each cooled cookie, as desired.

Eating and drinking in and about Washington, D.C.

2011-12-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

1. No link because I don't think they have an actual website, but the empanadas* cart at the Downtown Holiday Fair thing at 9th and G is very meh. They're not awful, per se, but they're not good either. The dough is like weirdly too thick or something. Although I am admittedly spoiled by visits to Chile and Argentina, the empanadas I made based on a Cooks Illustrated recipe were better, and that without masa harina. So, hrumph.

2. On a better note: although apparently this was already amply written about elsewhere, Meatballs is actually pretty good. Or, at least, the polenta is nice and creamy, and the meatballs with marinara sauce are warm and lovely and filling on a cold day. It is apparently supposed to be a sort of Italian-influenced version of Chipotle, and both share the vice of serving only giant portions that are hopelessly more than a 5'0 woman should ever try to consume in one sitting. Also, don't naively ask for a bottle of water without thinking about it. That is, they offer only expensive Italian bottled water that can only be opened with a bottle opener. Luckily, there is a bottle opener in my office's kitchen, but I found it only after some annoying rummaging.

3. There is a newish libertarian non-profit in town called Keep Food Legal that had a fun fundraiser on Saturday night. The El Chilango tacos served are yummy; recommended.

4. This is an interesting and thoughtful post about culture, and I agree with the general point about the subtle ways in which cultures work. But I'm a little bit surprised by the meal example. That is, I think I've routinely observed plenty of upper-middle-class types eagerly downing everything on their plates at dinner. My biggest eater friend is a lawyer's son grown up to be a Jesuit priest. He's been running marathons regularly since he and I first met in college, and he apparently needs the thousands of extra calories to keep himself powered up. I've noticed other people who love upper-middle-class-ish sports eat with the same voracity, although perhaps not quite on the same scale.

There's also the phenomenon of the "Om om om, must devour as much free food at cocktail reception as possible!" instinct, which I confess I haven't fully grown out of myself. But in my view, that's an age and lifestyle thing -- a relic of being a young person from a relatively comfortable background growing up and with plenty of cultural capital, but temporarily in a stage of their lives where cash for groceries and dining out is relatively tight. Many of my friends who went through a similar law/grad student/intern stage of life seem to have the same instinct.

So, blog friends, is there a class signal here that I should be noticing? If I'm trying to impress bigwigs, should I be making a point of politely and delicately not finishing dinners?

* No tilde because I can't figure out how to do this on this computer; sorry, hispanophone friends!

amen, brother

2011-12-13T09:07:00.000-08:00

Clearly the point of the infamous Romney bet was that this wasn't supposed to be a trivial amount of money; c.f. the kids on the playground at the nearby elementary school who like to say things like "I'll bet you a million dollars that...." None of them have one million dollars; many of their parents probably don't even have a million dollars. (It's Arlington, so the number of their parents that do is probably non-trivial.) Still, the point is that they are so sure they're right that they're happy to frame the bet as one that cannot possibly be lost. Robin Hanson, however, harrumphs further (and convincingly) about what is really going on here:

The idea that a president candidate couldn't afford a $10,000 bet is crazy, as is the idea that ordinary folks don’t know this fact. They pay for TV commercials, which cost lots more than $10,000. They fly all around the nation in planes, which gets expensive.

So clearly we have moved high up into belief meta-levels here. “Yes, most people know Romney can afford $10,000, but some aren’t sure that most others know this, and so this shows that Romney doesn’t know about such folks.” Or “It is rude to point out that you are rich, even when everyone knows you are rich. Yes wearing nice suits shows he’s rich, but not wearing suits is socially unacceptable. Offering smaller bets is acceptable, however, so offering a big bet could be interpreted as bragging about wealth. Not that I’d interpret it that way, but someone might, and this shows Romney doesn’t realize that.”

Geez it must be a pain to be a presidential candidate. This all shows how much we care about social savvy and signaling in such folks. We don’t much care if they understand supply and demand, but they damn well better know who might try hard to be offended by what.

Yep, that's pretty much it.

Septime Webre production of The Nutcracker

2011-12-12T16:46:00.000-08:00

So I admit that there is part of me that shuddered when, after a Gilt City offer for cheap Nutcracker tickets landed in my inbox, I read that said production was very American. I am more than happy to claim the mantle of "libertarian, not conservative" when it comes to regulation of sex and speech. But when it comes to grammar and art, suddenly I start waxing traditionalist. There isn't really a right-wing tribe for aesthetes who happen to be hard-core free marketers, but if there were, I might prefer to fly their banner in lieu of "libertarian."

Anywho. All this is long prelude to way of saying that, despite the annoying advertisements about re-interpretation, the Septime Webre production of The Nutcracker is actually pretty likeable. First of all, at least the production has the good graces to stay in the right century; the children's costumes at the initial Christmas party scene are suitably Victorian. Mercifully, most of the rest of the Americanizing touches -- such as the rats cast as American soldiers rising up against King George, or the cherry blossoms scene -- manage not to feel too contrived.

Pnin said to me afterwards that it felt less lavish than a version of the Nutcracker that he'd seen growing up. And, indeed, this is a ballet that's meant to be produced on a grand scale; trying to stage it on a shoestring feels deeply wrong. Perhaps it's because I'm used to much cheaper theater, but I didn't notice it. Ultimately, recommended.