A Swift Blow to the Head: Alex Goodall's Blog

Well, that's another fine mess you've got me into...

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:59:00 +0000

What a shambles. The Brown government employs a scientific advisory council to provide them with supposedly objective information on the dangers of various illegal drugs, then refuses to listen to their advice. When the head of the council, David Nutt, points out that the government is ignoring their advice, they sack him. Other scientists resign in protest. The government’s attempt to present Nutt’s sacking as an issue of authority rather than scientific probity falls flat.

As much as I disagree with their decision on this, the Brown administration is not actually failing in this situation because they decided to pander to Daily Mail readers. Their failure lay in first stating that they would follow the scientific analysis, then ignoring the science when it didn't say what they wanted it to.

There’s no reason why social policies have to be solely driven by scientists. I thought it was ridiculous and absurd that when we decided as a society to ban smoking in public places, we did so almost entirely on the recommendations of health experts. Health experts have no absolute right to control my freedom because they operate within a scientific milieu, as much as they presume to. Nor is public health a value that takes precedence over all others. If it was, we’d ban driving tomorrow. Smoking is not just a health issue, and it is not logical to say that just because something is harmful it should be banned. Such decisions also speak to the kind of society we want to live in, and thus have strong social, civic and civil liberties components to them as well.

In the same way that we don’t only want policemen’s views when it comes to deciding how long we should incarcerate people without trial, we don’t just want to hear from scientists when it comes to the prohibition and legalisation of dangerous substances. Actually, I agree with the scientists on the particular questions of classification here. But even so I don’t see any reason why the government couldn’t simply have said in the first place that they would consult with scientists as well as the public generally, and a selection of civic and moral leaders about their views, and form a policy accordingly. The idiocy is in trying to pretend you’re being somehow objective when you’re clearly not.

Underpinning this is a bigger question about the role of expertise in modern society. Ever since Walter Lippmann wrote about it in the 1920s, the expert or specialist has come to take on an increasingly vital role in virtually every walk of life. We want clinical experts to make the best decisions about the right kinds of treatments we can afford; civic planners to understand how best to maintain our infrastructure; specialist economists to understand how our financial system should be regulated; and so on. We should listen to scientists if they say that the levies in New Orleans need repairing.

But the problem is that such classes of expert often tend to develop particular biases of their own that inevitably compromise their expertise and undermine their claims to objectivity. In particular, the need for self-perpetuation tends to create many distorting pressures.

In this particular case, it seems clear that medical experts have a significantly lower aversion threshold to medication than much of the rest of the population: hence the decision by GPs to hand out antidepressants like sweeties. Such aversions can’t be wholly dealt with based on formal assessments of harm, since it is a question of social values as much as medicinal effectiveness. And my gut feeling is that scientists have a tendency to overstate their degree of certainty when it comes to engaging in public debate, anyway.

Moreover, they're scientists nor PR experts, and tend to misunderstand how their messages will be interpreted by the media. Hence the classic phenomenon when scientists are asked to predict how many people might die from a particular epidemic. They go off and built a model that, due to the massive uncertainty in such efforts, says that between 35 and 35 million people will die. They give it to the press. The press headines the next day say "35 MILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM FLU OUTBREAK."

So the question is how to balance the need for expertise in the modern world, when the man on the street often simply isn’t qualified to provide a policy judgement, with the democratic need to hold policies accountable to the general will of the people and to reflect broader views about the kind of society we want than just a reductivist scientific assessment of a virtuous life. If we can’t say that whatever everybody wants is necessarily right; and neither can we say that the expert view is true; on what basis do we form our public policies?

University literacy standards

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Courtesy of HNN, I read this article by William O’Neill, which reports that the percentage of American graduates proficient in prose literacy has fallen by around 25%. “Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much,” O’Neill reports. “Further, the graduates tested in 1992 were themselves not particularly literate for the declining performance of college students probably dates from somewhere around 1980. Had there been an NAAL in 1970, at a guess, a solid majority of graduates would have been proficient in both prose and document literacy.”

Let us all be horrified with the awfulness of modern universities. “So we have the modern public university on the undergraduate level, where grade inflation is rampant, student skills diminish with every passing year, what passes as teaching is conducted by exploited adjuncts and faculty members who no longer care about standards—for students, that is, the drive for ever-more qualified professors continues unabated. It is a central irony of our situation that while mediocrity among undergraduates is tolerated and even encouraged, the professoriat demands excellence of its members, and of graduate students too as they are potential members.”

Ok, as a university lecturer I have a vested interest in rejecting this characterisation, even if I’m not directly implicated in the US case. But, whatever: let me raise the possibility that the problem might be not that graduates have a problem with literacy, but that Mr. O’Neill has a problem with numeracy.
In 1990, 20.3% of the US population’s 259 million people, or around 52.2 million people were graduates. In 2000, 24.4% of 291 million people – that is, 71 million – were graduates. (Sources: here and here) If the same proportion of the population were graduates in 2000 that had been in 1990, 20.3%, that would have meant that around 59 million were graduates rather than 71 million.

In short, the graduate population rose by about twenty million in the 1990s, fifty percent of which can be put down to the increased size of the population, and fifty percent due to an expanded graduate sector. Graduate numbers have therefore grown by substantially more than the graduate literacy rate has fallen. Right now there are around 14 million people undergoing higher education in the United States, a higher proportion than any other society in the world.

Fairly obviously, an increase in the intake will produce lower quality results. Partly this is because the standard of education will be poorer: clearly, you can teach ten people something more effectively than a hundred. But also it’s just a logical product of the supply of students: you’re naturally going to be accepting students of lower educational attainment if you want to raise the number of people attending. That’s why even the most ill-educated high school principal will focus on “value added” by teachers rather than overall attainment levels when it comes to assessing how well they’re doing. If these numbers are right – that the literacy rate among graduates has fallen at a notably lower rate than graduate numbers have risen – it suggests that the universities are having a net positive effect on literacy.

Examining only the cohort of university students is a classic fallacy. It implies that the cohort is identical in 1990 and 2000. What’s more meaningful is the overall literacy rate in the US. And if we go to the very data that Mr. O’Neill cited to highlight the falling standards of university education – the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) report - we see that the average literacy score for adults in the United States declined by at most a fraction of a percent in the 1990s. For Mr. O’Neill’s vision of falling standards to be accurate, that would mean that the drop in graduate standards would have had to be entirely made up by an equivalent rise in the literacy standards of non-graduates. Either he’s talking nonsense, or self-learners are doing a really fantastic job!

Grade inflation is real. Mass teaching is real. Underfunding is real. We’re no longer in a world where five percent of the population can be groomed for leadership and the rest ignored. But let’s not perpetuate the myth that faculty are failing to provide students a decent education as the modern university sector transforms. Most faculty I know work themselves raw to deliver exactly this kind of service. Most are doing a fantastic job teaching more and more people every year, and they should be praised for it.

Sitting atop politics

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:31:00 +0000

This morning began with another indictment of Obama on the breakfast table: condemned for compromising too much, for looking too hard for Republican support, for failing to understand the true nature of modern Republicanism. This time it came from David Bromwich, a professor of literature and political thought at Yale, in the London Review of Books. Obama is naive and afraid, Bromwich says:

“His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?”

If you think that all this effort is just about winning over Olympia Snowe, then it probably does seem a bit much. I am as disappointed with anyone over the compromises Obama has made on the vexed questions of the secret services, abuse and secrecy; and I think he could have been smarter in his dealings with Wall Street and been more willing to use the stick (why has anti-trust made no appearance in this debate, yet?).

Nevertheless, may I venture the suggestion that perhaps the clever man is not so stupid, that the accusation of delusion in politics usually equates to a failure by one individual to comprehend why another doesn’t think or act the same way as they do. Underlying this is a further failure: a failure to understand that Americans do not live in a dictatorship, that politics is not in the hands of any single individual – even the president – to direct according to his whim, and that we should probably be glad about it, since every Obama will, sooner or later, be followed by a Bush.

First, it is an astonishing and insulting statement coming from a comfortable academic (who I presume has neither been threatened with assassination nor had direct experience of Obama under fire) to conclude that the president's political decisions are being driven by fear of physical violence. I suspect that once you rise above a dozen ongoing assassination attempts on your person at any one time, then having two times, three times or four times more nutbags training their gun sights on you probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Without evidence to the contrary, I see no sign that the president is a coward, and think it’s a bit cheap to suggest so.

Second, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that Obama is seeking to conciliate the hard-right Birther Teabagging Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck shoot-yourself-in-the-forehead wing of the Republican party. Bromwich claims that Obama fails to understand that Republicans today are like John C. Calhoun. But it is beyond belief to conclude that a man who has to work near to (and often with) several hundred Republicans every day does not understand “what Republicans are like” as well as, if not better than, Professor Bromwich.

Conciliating the hard right was never the goal, nor is it now. It is an easy straw man to burn, to say that it was and is. The key battle was and is the centre ground. And against the image perpetuated by most of the world’s media, including the American media, most US citizens don’t actually resemble the loony-tunes on the far right. Most of them like the ideas of reasonableness and compromise, and are driven more by self-interest and a desire to protect their lifestyles and families than anything else. But they’re also nationalistic, and tend to buy into a fair amount of the fear-mongering put out by the right over the past half century. This is why President Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000, but could shift to a hard right line after September 11.

The message, then, is addressed at the centre of American politics, not so much in terms of the Democratic party structure and congressional membership (although there is some of this), but more importantly at moderate voters. These individuals not only share many concerns over the size of the state and the size of the deficit, but they also wish to see their politicians behave in a reasonable manner toward one another. And, like it or not, unlike the Democratic left, these voters have somewhere else to go.

I can’t remember a president that didn’t talk about governing for all the people; even Lincoln did as he was going to war against a section of them! Even though the truth was far more complicated, President Lincoln went to great lengths to paint himself as the compromise party so that the Confederates would appear as the aggressors. The South, of course, did exactly the opposite.

Moreover, the structure of the American two party system gives a prominence to ideologically-driven activists within the parties, and this can often disguise the inclinations of the far-less politically driven public at large or the size or importance of the “bulge” of normal voters in the centre. As I’ve said before and will no doubt say again, the divisions within the modern Democratic party are a product of its breadth of reach over left and centre of the political spectrum and thus a sign of strength, while the unity within modern Republicanism is a product of the party representing no more than a third of the country, and therefore a sign of weakness.

Failing to understand the real purpose of the compromise strategy ensures that Bromwich sees successes as failures. During Obama’s astonishing health care speech on 9 September, as we all know Joe Wilson gave his own, less carefully articulated two word response. “So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself,” Bromwich writes.

Obviously not. The speech was not intended to help with whatever personal or psychological difficulties that drive Mr. Wilson’s Tourette’s. It was designed to speak to the unconvinced third of the population who had been scared by the August protests, who already had health care coverage, and who were not convinced of the benefits of a trillion dollar spending bill in the midst of the worst financial crisis in living memory. Right or wrong, these people exist and Obama would be a fool to ignore them and focus only on speaking to the uninsured, who also tend to be the least likely to vote. Not only did Obama’s speech help to assuage those concerns, but Mr. Wilson’s outburst did so even more, further placing the Republicans outside the pale.

It’s also worth emphasizing that some of the values that liberals decry as hopeless compromises with the Republican right fit comfortably within Democratic party philosophy. Not all economic liberals are social liberals. Not all economic liberals understand the same thing by the term. Hostility toward outsiders is expressed more violently in the Republican party, and tends more often to be associated with images of armed minutemen patrolling the Mexican border. But many Democrats fear the effect of outsiders on jobs and wages and domestic industrial production. It is not so easy to say that the Republicans are the anti-immigrant party and the Democrats are all free marketeers and Latinos, as Bromwich implies. Or, as he states more clearly, that Obama’s softness on Israel is a product of pandering to the Republican right. Many Democrats are also strongly committed to a pro-Israel policy, even if the most anti-Israel attitudes do tend to cluster on the left.

Presidents sit atop a pyramid of politics. Very occasionally they can shape what they work with. But more often than not they are shaped by what they are given. Imposing a line from above without regard to the beliefs of different constituencies is almost destined to failure.

President Franklin Roosevelt, so regularly praised as the single most successful left-of-centre president in the twentieth century, so often used as a foil with which to beat Obama, was persistently criticized during his presidency for refusing to support an anti-lynching bill. But FDR believed that putting his weight behind such a bill would have immediately alienated the Democratic South and put to an end the rest of his reform programme. Similarly, with the Social Security Act, he was criticized for excluding many of the most vulnerable groups (such as domestic servants and agricultural workers). But he got the bill through, and in such a way that in seventy years its opponents have made not a dent on it. Roosevelt shifted to the left in the year or so before his 1936 re-election fight, and it is not impossible that we’ll see similar shifts under an Obama administration. But this was impelled by a militant labour movement capable of delivering him electoral victory, itself being pushed forward at breakneck pace not by radical leaders but the militancy of rank-and-file workers in industries across the country.

Today, with a weak labour movement and no meaningful alternative source of left-wing strength, the Democrats will continue to need middle class centrists to get into power, to pass reform laws, and to fulfil their agenda. Leftists who oppose this are at their most clear-sighted when they focus on building new institutions from the grassroots, as the right has been doing since the 1960s, not when they spend their time attacking the president. Attacking the president in a climate of structural, systemic weakness on the left, is little more than transference, blaming him problems that, in truth, we all own.

Problems viewing?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:39:00 +0000

One of my readers has been reporting continuing problems viewing this site, loading and adding comments. For the life of me, I've no idea why.

Can I ask, is this a more general problem people are experiencing? If so could you let me know - especially if you have any idea of how I might solve the problem. I wouldn't want to make my ramblings any more inaccessible than they already are...

Peaceniks and warniks

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:06:00 +0000

I was planning on avoiding comment on the whole Obama/Nobel thing, until this morning’s op-ed from Ross Douthat in the New York Times landed in my inbox, arguing that the president should have refused the prize. Not content to point out some of the damaging political consequences of Obama's acceptance, Douthat argued that his acceptance was a “travesty”.

Let’s be clear about this: the Nobel Prize has attained a certain universal status because of the broad aspirations it stands for and the many inspiring individuals who have received it. But it is a political tool operated by a small group of politically-driven individuals, not a genuinely universal institution. The Nobel Prize is not the equivalent to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Moreover, the underlying philosophy as laid out by Alfred Nobel reflects a particular view of the road to peace, and one that was to a degree influenced by the traditional Kellogg-Briand style peace efforts that so manifestly failed to avert generalised war twice in the twentieth century. There can be little doubt that the efforts of northern European states to promote reconciliation between warring parties in several regions of the world has been nothing short of amazing, and has at times even worked. But like it or not, what has worked most effectively in the past half century to limit the real danger, global warfare, has been the combination of genuinely multilateral institutions like the United Nations, providing a forum for the negotiation of the coagulated will of the world; and the deterrent effect of nuclear weaponry.

The prize, then, is a political object that reflects the political views of Alfred Nobel, refracted through a small group of well-meaning Nordic liberals. This doesn’t invalidate it, but it does politicize it. Moreover, as has been widely observed this week, the committee's intention to operate as a political mechanism means that the award – as in this case – is often given in the anticipation of events to be completed rather than for triumphs already achieved. Nobody would consider the idea of giving out the Nobel Prize for Literature to someone who’s just written a promising first novel, but this is defended for the Peace Prize. Why? Because it is not really a prize. It’s propaganda.

Propaganda for peace is a pretty good thing. The only problem is if it doesn't work. And if those five individuals who unanimously awarded the prize to Obama believed they were helping to further his political agenda, they were pretty naive. I remember an effort in The Guardian during the 2004 election to phone up Americans in swing states and to encourage them to vote for Kerry. Guess how that one went down. In truth, the prize didn't sway people who support the president or people who hate him; it simply confirmed their pre-existing beliefs.

If pushed, I might go so far as to say that the Nobel committee probably made a tactical mistake giving the award to Obama this year. The committee got itself Obama-ized.

That said, though, what is absolutely astonishing is that American right wingers should be saying that Obama should have refused the award once it was offered, or that his acceptance of it is somehow a blot on the president’s reputation. Ok, so you don’t happen to agree with the Norwegians who handed your president a prize. You don't think their vision of politics is correct. Don’t you think it’s quite nice anyway that people in other countries like and respect the person who runs your country? That they think he might help further the cause of world peace?

Do you only want presidents who are feared and hated by the rest of the world? Is that really what this is about?

Don’t agree with the politics? Fine. Ignore them. That’s the point about Norwegians (no offence intended). They’re hardly going to make your life a misery if you say “Thank you very much” and take no notice of them, which is presumably what Obama will do. In fact, they’ll probably be perfectly happy about it and head to do some cross country skiing or reconcile something else. So why all the hatred? What is wrong with people who can respond to good intentions with such fury?

In the 1930s, Henry Ford – largely in response to the vicious campaign of anti-Semitic propagandizing he launched across the forecourts of Ford Motor Company in the early 1920s – was given a medal of honour by Hitler. Dozens of groups demanded that he give the medal back, and when he refused this was widely seen as a stain upon his honour. Is this how far we’ve come in eighty years: that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, a group of people whose sole job is to try and reward individuals for promoting the cause of peace, has now taken the place of Nazi Germany in the rhetorical framework of the American right?

Health care, the story so far

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:40:00 +0000

Great summary of this summer's health care from Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books...

"It's apparent that Obama is still learning the differences between campaigning and governing. And sometimes his inexperience shows. His speeches on health care on Labor Day and before Congress a few days later drew on his old rhetorical skills and finally showed some passion, and the one before Congress was his most effective so far in combining both rhetoric and explanation. But it was of interest that Chuck Todd of NBC reported that before he gave those speeches Obama's staff had had to get him "fired up" to take on his critics. Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a "following," a "movement," would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.

...

"The White House and the Democratic leaders in Congress are counting on enough Democrats supporting a final health care bill because the alternative—losing another chance for universal health care—would be more devastating to their political futures, and to Obama's presidency, than any compromises they make along the way. And its consequences would be felt for a long time. For some time the odds have appeared to favor passage of a health care bill. But the road to getting there is still full of hazards. If Obama does get a bill that contains significant health insurance reforms and substantially expands coverage, he will have achieved more than any other president has, and under far more difficult circumstances. Then the assessment of him will—or should—be quite different than it was around Labor Day."

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Speechless

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:17:00 +0000

h/t: Below the Beltway

Victor Hugo and some cotton buds

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Kate Muir of The Times (h/t: normblog) writes about the Chavez book programme, whereby Chavistas are distributing literature to encourage broader reading among the masses of Venezuelans who, until recently, were functionally illiterate. Influenced by El Presidente's own shelves, Victor Hugo, Eduardo Galeano and Simon Bolivar are, unsurprisingly, pretty high up on the list, along with a pile of anticapitalist stuff ranging from intriguing to turgid to soul-sapping. Friedman and Hayek, surprisingly enough, don't get a mention!

An interesting reporter might have read some of the books on the list, examined how different they were, and perhaps discussed how the ideas within them might influence the way Venezuelans interpret the world. But this is a puff piece so I probably shouldn't expect too much. What we want is the solid, simple image and then a few coffee and croissant jokes at the end for a nice, self-satisfied morning read. Muir tries to make the book programme sound like a darkly menacing project of mass indoctrination, but I don't think even she can bring herself fully to believe it. The best she can do is note that groups are assigned "a group leader who structures discussions and at first encourages people to read aloud." A description that fits rather accurately my experience of primary school.

Muir generously admits that a government sponsored plan to distribute books is not the same as Nineteen Eighty Four, Fahrenheit 451, or "Nazi's Germany's attack on degenerate literature." But she neglects to explain, given this fact, why it was necessary to mention such comparisons in the first place. I'd like to point out that The Times is nothing at all like a smug and pompous broadsheet for little Englanders who believe that the whole world should be like Tunbridge Wells.

The truth doesn't make good reading. It's a damply unsatisfying conclusion for closed-minded readers to note that Chavez's efforts might be good and bad at the same time. And so, neglecting the fact that most of the people involved in the scheme will never have read books before, Muir concludes that the government distribution of books is "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers."

"Foreign titles used to make up 80 per cent of sales, but now because of recent currency and import restrictions on “non-essential goods” it is almost impossible to buy certain books, even pulp such as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. And while the officially listed books are free or the equivalent of £1.50, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was seen by a writer from PublishingPerspectives.com in one Caracas bookshop, priced at £80."

This leaves me in a quandary. I've been critical of Chavez's economic policies and have been watching the growth of personalism in Venezuela over the past decade with great concern. But Muir's brave new world of market freedom is almost enough to have me heading for the Big Red Door, having witnessed what the big book companies have done to our once great reading habits in the West. If I were being provocative, I'd be tempted to argue that the relentless focus on a smaller and smaller number of commercially appealing but intellectually empty titles, a product of the consolidation of publishers and distributors in the Anglo-American marketplace, amounts to an "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers." The result has been Dan Brown selling a hundred million books but not actually being able to string a sentence together. The first chapter of The Lost Symbol, by the way, is available for download from the very same page of the Times website, just to the right of Muir's article. The audio version, of course, since actually reading is probably a bit too much effort. Thanks Rupert!

Let's face it. Reading a Dan Brown is the educative equivalent of spooning a year's learning out of your head with a melon baller. And if I were given a choice between freely reading Harry Potter provided cheaply in the marketplace, or getting to read Les Miserables at the cost of an hour's wrangling from an ideologue at the end of the session, Monsieur Hugo and a pair of earplugs is frankly the only sensible choice. Looks like I'd better be buying my red shirt and beret and jumping on that plane...

What is Obama's direction in foreign policy?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:56:00 +0000

Perhaps it's unfair to say so, but Obama has to date come across as sharing some of his liberal predecessors’ problems when it comes to foreign policy, much of it relating to that old “vision thing”. The simple fact is that a blinkered, ideological and stupid foreign policy is easy to sell to the public, whereas complexity is, well, complex. Few people had much doubt about what the Bush administration wanted to do after 9/11, even if they hated it. By contrast, Obama is trying to juggle a number of balls at the same time: to undercut America’s imperialistic image in the rest of the world; strengthen ties with the great powers of the twenty first century, Russia, China and India; deliver demonstrable progress in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda and, secondarily, the Taliban; yet not get bogged down in another Vietnam in the process. Necessarily, all these juggling balls whirling around makes the strategy less clear in the selling.

But there is also some evidence to suggest that the strategy is simply less clear per se, that the administration is still trying to figure out exactly what it wants to do with many of these issues well into its first year in power, and which of the many foreign policy issues facing him are the priorities. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Clinton administration, which also focused primarily on domestic matters upon taking office, and took too long to figure out what it was actually trying to achieve in its relations with the rest of the world. And it’s not exactly reassuring.

Nevertheless, some general tendencies to seem to be emerging, and we will have to watch them over the coming months to see how they resolve themselves.

Firstly, the Obama administration has shown less interest in playing nice with the traditional allies – Britain, Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia – than his predecessor. (See, for instance, the hoo-ha in the UK about the apparent “snub” of Brown at the UN this week, here, here and here.) Less revealing than the substance – Obama’s a busy man, why should he waste his political capital bailing out a PM before his party conference when he's most likely going to be out of a job next year, anyway? – is the fear that this seems to have generated amongst a bored section of the British media. Diplomatic sensitivities should never be underestimated, especially if the best present you can think of for a head of state is a boxed set of DVDs. It may be that these relationship are being taken for granted at a time when others need cultivation; it may be a product of ideology; it may be a conscious attempt to assert the difference between the Obama approach and his predecessor’s. In truth, Obama’s probably right that he can afford to cool things a little, but the question remains: to what end?

The administration has certainly struggled to find alternative allies to take up the slack. The president has appealed to Europe for additional support in Afghanistan, for instance, but has made little progress with nations who see no vital interest in sending their troops to that region. There are tentative signs that Russia might be giving a little over Iran. But there has been little progress in Palestine so far, especially on the settlement issue. Speeches to the United Nations and the Muslim world, and overtures to Iran, have been generally welcome, but are more a question of changing the atmosphere than shifting the substance of US foreign policy. These may ultimately end up in a Nixonian triumph, whereby the exit strategy is built upon the reshaping of relations with wider regional power brokers. But this will not become clear for a good while, and it still takes two to tango. Moreover, this approach is sometimes difficult to mesh with a democracy-promotion strategy, especially given the complex and fractious politics in Iran, where efforts to seek rapprochement with Ahmedinejad and the revolutionary leadership will naturally strengthen them against the more pro-Western reformists.

Secondly, we have seen the administration, copied by the Brown government in the UK, trumpet nuclear arms reduction as part of a broader effort to get a new non-proliferation agreement on the table. Sounds good. But the problem is that nuclear decommissioning in the Anglo-American world is patently being driven by domestic budget concerns, and only secondarily by a desire to feed into arms control negotiations. This is best shown by the fact that Brown is making a big deal out of his offer to reduce the UK arsenal from four submarines to three, while simultaneously trying to neutralize nationalist opposition at home by pointing out that in practice this need not make any difference to the capacity of the Royal Navy to strike the enemy, or necessarily reduce the total number of warheads available for delivery. Obama has sought to square a similar circle, presenting the movement away from missile defence in Eastern Europe and toward a seaborne alternative as a way of defusing tensions with Russia, a way of saving money, and a more effective deterrent.

Right or wrong as a policy, this rhetoric doesn’t convince. Necessarily, the decision to reduce a nuclear deterrent is also a decision to increase a nation's vulnerability. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a meaningful deterrent in the first place. As such, genuine reduction in deterrence must be accompanied by an increased reliance on ties of trust and mutual assistance between nations, positive incentives for cooperation to replace the negative incentive of mutual fear.

More importantly, no-one will be fooled by the rhetoric. Everyone will know this is about the exigencies of deficit reduction. And because of that, we can presumably expect these offers to produce comparatively weaker responses from other powers. The same thing happened in the 1980s when the dire financial straits of the Soviet Union allowed Reagan to insist upon a deal for arms reduction (the “zero option”) that was far more aggressive than most professional nuclear negotiators had ever considered possible.

At the same time, there is a worrying lack of clarity about Afghanistan. In recent weeks we have seen internal disagreements in the administration bubble out into the public, as supporters of McChrystal have leaked their demands for a major surge in troop numbers, and the White House responding by playing up a Biden plan that involves a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and invokes memories of older, truly appalling suggestions by him to orchestrate a partition in Iraq. No-one can seriously believe that a Biden plan is on the table, but circulating the idea in the public domain is an attempt by the White House to assert ownership over the negotiations with the Joint Chiefs. It's the political equivalent of saying that the politicians, not the generals, will decide strategy in Afghanistan. It may do so, but it also points out that, in October 2009, there is still no clear strategy on the table.

To some extent, Obama is haunted by the ghost of Johnson, and has no wish to have his domestic agenda derailed by a war on the other side of the world. But he knows that a withdrawal which creates space for the Taliban to retake power would be even more disastrous for his chances of reelection. The most obvious third way is to try and shift the war onto Afghan shoulders, promoting local puppets, building up an army and leaving it to them to do the dying. This strategy has been applied in Iraq, not to mention dozens of places around the world during the Cold War. But the recent elections in Afghanistan have shown that US allies in Afghanistan are far from the perfect working partners one would like, making such a policy appear close to accepting that democracy is not a policy goal for the administration. Karzai’s need to knit together local warlords and power-brokers ultimately makes any kind of liberal regime virtually unimaginable under his rule. The pursuit of a Afghanization policy followed by a rapid withdrawal of US troops is most likely to produce a military dictatorship of some sort, as it has in most cases where this has been done in the past. Whether Obama can bear this kind of non-democratic solution may come to be the defining question of his foreign policy there.

Taken together, it is very hard to figure out exactly what the Obama administration is trying to achieve in its foreign policy, and in particular where the lines in the sand are. It seems to be driven as much by general instincts as specific calculations. Many of these big issues he’s plunging into will take time, and better that he is considered than foolhardy in his approach. We can't expect crises that have sometimes been decades in the making to all be sorted out in a matter of months. But sooner or later some tough choices are going to be inevitable. Until these arrive, many of us will be left scratching our heads.

Racism and logic

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:32:00 +0000

Ok, a quickie here as I had my racism argument quotient filled up with Henry Louis Gates earlier in the year. For the record, my view is that Republicans are perfectly able to get angry about Obama without it always being about race. Sometimes and for some people I imagine it is, sometimes it isn't. Life is complicated. The stuff about Obama's religion and birthplace seemed to offer fairly badly sublimated racial undertones. But we should remember that Republicans in the 1930s were quite happy to throw about accusations that President Roosevelt was a communist and a socialist and a dictator even though he was a patrician WASP. The state of South Carolina is a matter I'm not getting into here. But I found the confidence with which some people asserted that Joe Wilson's heckling was about race to be unsettling. I certainly can't believe Wilson would have been any more polite if a President Hillary Clinton had made the same speech. Presumably then it would have been sexism?

All that said, I've just seen a piece by Bruce Bartlett in the WSJ which frankly goes beyond my limited abilities to get to grips with. Bartlett criticizes Paul Krugman for arguing that "the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s." (Bartlett's paraphrase, but I've certainly seen Krugman, like many others, say such a thing.)

To challenge this argument, Bartlett provides 40 quotations from leading Democrats from Jefferson onwards, explicitly stating racist ideas. This, he argues, shows that the Democratic party "is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism" than the GOP. (This is taken from his book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past.)

Ok, let's begin.

1. History to one side for a moment and let's start with logic. Does it follow that because party A is racist, party B is not? Clearly not. So the argument is a false dichotomy from the start. For most of America's history, both major parties were run by people who believed in the natural superiority of whites over blacks.

2. How exactly is the Democratic Party's past "buried"? I can't imagine there are many Americans out there who have any sense of their own history and don't know that the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and abolition. Surely that's US History 101?

3. The argument Bartlett attributes to Krugman, which I think is probably accepted by 99.99% of scholars, so can hardly be seen as Krugman's contribution to public debate, is that beginning with Goldwater and taking fruition with Nixon's Southern Strategy, the Republican party built a new majority in part (note: not entirely, but in part) by winning the old "Solid South" from the Democrats.

Frankly, I really don't think this is in much doubt. Simple election returns show that the Southern states who voted Dem until the civil rights movement decisively shifted to the Republicans afterward, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that a large part of the reason they switched was because of the civil rights movement. The big clue lay in the fact that so many of them at the time SAID SO.

So, fairly obviously, the Republicans inherited that old South and its prejudices. It's not Democrat voters who carry Confederate flags around today, is it? So, also fairly obviously, an attempt to stress the racism of Southern Democrats in the past reinforces attention upon the Republicans of today. If Bartlett wanted to argue that the South wasn't always motivated by race, that in the past white citizens councils and pro-slavery advocates were genuinely concerned about civic order, this could be used to show that, by extension, the modern Republican South wasn't racist. It'd be pretty implausible, but at least it would make sense.

But to say we need to pay attention to the Democrats' racist past naturally suggests that one should pay attention to the Republicans' racist present. Surely only a professional partisan could see it any other way?

If one was to make some kind of massive racistometer machine, whereby attitudes about racial difference were added cumulatively into a big pot for each party, then I daresay the Democrats would be the losers (or winners, depending on how the machine works, I suppose). The party has a terrible legacy. But to use this observation to make the claim that the virtually lilywhite Southern Republican party of 2009 is not a place where racists find a home, well it just defies logic.

Not for the first time, I'm bewildered.

The Onion: New Live Poll Allows Pundits to Pander to Viewers in Real Time

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:39:00 +0000

New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Old right and new right

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:52:00 +0000

I've just read NYRB editor Sam Tanenhaus' new book, The Death of Conservatism. In many ways it's not very good; it's one of those tiny little overpriced hardbacks that (I assume) are fantastic moneyspinners for the author and publisher on a price to word ratio, written by individuals already able to trade on their name and reputation, but generally rushed together. The argument at times feels a little skewiffy, and the individual chapters still seem like the separate articles they were cobbled together from rather than parts of a whole.

But the essential point Tanenhaus is making is an important one: that even while it pays empty homage to the title, the brand of right wing politics governing the Republican party today has little to do with traditional conservatism. Tanenhaus provides a number of quotations that remind us just how far today's politicians and pundits have moved from their roots in the conservative resurgence in post-war America, and how far today's Republican values differ from those of their forefathers.

Whittaker Chambers: "A conservatism that will not accept [the rise of big government] ... is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy... Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms."

Irving Kristol: "the idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy ... In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind if they are to cope with many of their problems: old age, illness, unemployment, etc. They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it."

George Will: "Conservatives rightly defend the market as a marvelous mechanism for allocating resources. But when conservatives begin regarding the market less as an expedient than as an ultimate value, or the ultimate arbiter of all values, their conservatism degenerates into the least conservative political impulse, which is populism."

Why has this happened? It's because the old form of conservatism, which many look back on with nostalgia in comparison to today's politics of invective, represented a patrician sort of politics. It thrived in a society where the people making decisions about running the country could come together in a single building and talk amongst themselves, and where the intellectuals' job was to fill up a few minds deeply rather than many minds shallowly. In this climate, consensus and nuance was not only possible, it was an essential mode of working.

Like it or not, the modern form of right wing politics is a more democratic form than traditional conservatism, formed from the expansion of the Midwestern populist wing of the Republican party and the old Democratic South and the new Southwest, precisely at the expense of the older patrician elites. It is democratic, that is, in the sense of representing a popular movement, rather than in the sense of respecting the principle of majority rule (since they probably represent about a third of the country and yet are basically unwilling to compromise with the other two thirds.)

The new right has risen to power since the 1960s because it was able to capture the Republican party from the old elites and because it could deliver victories in elections. And that, I suspect, is why we've not seen the last of it, either; and why calls to return to an older style of conservatism are on a hiding to nothing.

Fussin' and fightin'. If the press has its way, that is...

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:34:00 +0000

The press loves nothing as much as a fight. And they care nothing about the consequences. Which has made me a little bit annoyed this morning.

Exhibit One, from the right. Alex Massie of The Telegraph, writing in The Daily Beast, calls Americans a bunch of wimps for reacting against Joe Wilson. The US needs to take a leaf out of the British book and start heckling each other, he argues. Except, of course, that it is expressly forbidden in the UK to accuse someone of being a liar in Parliament, so there's not actually any difference. Not to mention the fact that the spirit in the House of Commons is ugly and pointless, and a lot of Brits like me wish that they behaved less like children and focused on running the country. And, thirdly, do we really think that American politics needs more combativeness and less respect? Has Mr. Massie spent even a minute examining recent political events in the States? If politicians in America got any more adversarial we'd have had an assassination by now.

Exhibit Two, from the left. Charles M. Blow in The New York Times says that Obama can't get angry enough. "He’s an idealist in an age of cynicism, a conciliator at a time of cleaving. He strives to appeal to a dwindling body of better angels in an increasingly bifurcated country. It’s noble and inspirational, but will it be effective?" Sorry, Mr. Blow, but am I right here? You criticise Obama for being overly conciliatory and in doing so you liken his tactics to words from a speech given by Abraham Lincoln?! I'm not sure if you've read much of your own history, but at the point Lincoln gave his First Inaugural Address, seven states had just seceded from the union. But apparently today's world is more divided than that?

*Sigh*

To quote an old sci-fi movie, have IQs all dropped suddenly while I've been away?

We never need think again!

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:40:00 +0000

More amazement from TED.com:

Playing around with the budget

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:14:00 +0000

Amid all the jeremiads about death panels, funding for abortion, and health care for illegal immigrants, there is in my view one criticism of the Obama health insurance reform program coming from the right that is really worth listening to, and that is the question of financial impact. Even if you accept that the mess the United States is in is due primarily to the astonishing financial irresponsibility of Obama’s predecessor, this does not necessarily invalidate the issue.

Nevertheless, while the cost of health care coverage is inherently difficult to control, the fact remains that the president has (i) designed this bill from the outset to be a cost control as well as coverage measure; (ii) gone to great effort to provide ways of ensuring that these costs will be monitored and addressed if they continue to rise; and (iii) responded positively to suggestions from Blue Dogs and the two or three constructive Republicans in the debate that provide innovative ways of bringing down costs. To accuse the president of failing on this count smacks somewhat of partisanship, then.

That said, whether this bill passes or not (and I think it will), deficits will remain a number one issue for the United States going forward. Moreover, this problem will have to be dealt with in an extremely shaky economy, one where increasing the cost of doing business or adding extra burdens to middle class families may run the risk of plunging the nation back into recession. Balancing the budget in the best of times is hard enough – Bill Clinton needed the tech boom to do it. Doing it in the midst of severe financial contraction is nothing short of a nightmare.

So, let’s say that all politics goes out the window and I’m made dictator! Aside from health care reform, how might we begin to manage the deficit down over the next period while minimizing the negative impact of spending cuts and tax rises on the economic performance of the country?

First, a BTU tax is out the window. Or rather, I think it’s a great idea but it would have to be accompanied by matching reductions in taxes on incomes or it will put thousands of businesses and families into difficulty. It may be that raises in the tax threshold on gas consumption actually encourage people to be more efficient and therefore don’t have a major impact on business or personal incomes. It certainly seems to be the case that the extremely low gas prices in the United States correlate with extremely wasteful usage. But we can’t necessarily assume that this is true. So, the shift to a low carbon economy should change incentives rather than the overall tax burden and can’t be assumed necessarily to deal with deficit issues.

Second, foreign policy. First, let’s get this in proportion. According to the Congressional Research Service, since 2001 the operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and associated war on terror costs add up to $864 billion. Three quarters of this went on Iraq. So this adds up to roughly half this year’s deficit, and is more or less the same as the money spent on the bailout (though, of course, we hope to get the latter back.) A lot of money, but certainly not a solution on its own. (Side issue: a huge amount of this is about putting troops in the field. Obviously if you bring them home you need to find them jobs, etc. But this, in terms of relative cost, is nothing compared to having a soldier at war so we can assume that, whatever the geopolitical consequences might be, bringing troops home doesn’t have a major impact on the domestic economy.)

Predictions on the American wars for 2010-2019 range from $388 billion to $867 billion. Let’s say that you can keep to the low figure. That’s a saving of $500 billion over ten years, or $50bn a year. Moreover, there are all sorts of hidden costs to this which can’t be budgeted for but need to be paid: war fighting produces spending in other departments to cover veterans’ affairs, pensions, and the like; and we’re paying interest on debts accrued from past wars. But let’s take the $50bn figure to be conservative.

Second, mass amnesty for illegal immigrants. Wikipedia estimates there are 15-20 million illegal immigrants in the US. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument that there’s 15 million and 60 percent of them are productive workers and that these are all working for minimum wage (which I think are fairly conservative estimates.) Minimum wage is $7.25/hr, for – let’s say – 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. In truth it’s likely to be more since illegals generally work longer hours than legals. This gives an income of about $14,500 per person, which yields $1,757 for the government in income taxes. For nine million workers, that’s about $16bn annually of extra income.

Third, legalize all drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that Americans spent $66bn on illegal drugs in 1998. (I can’t find more recent figures from a quick search. This isn’t supposed to be a policy paper, you know.) Let’s add a sales tax of 8%. Meanwhile, federal, state and local governments spent about $30bn a year fighting the drug war. Finally there’s another $6bn a year spent on imprisoning people for drugs related offences. Together you get an extra income of about $5bn and cost savings of around $36bn. Let’s play it safe and add an extra few billion in costs to treat addicts and assume that the revenue from sales is proportionate to the health care costs. You’ve got yourself $36bn to play with.

Fourth, raise the mandatory retirement age and fix it in proportion to average life expectancy. Despite being healthier and wealthier, Americans today retire on average six years earlier than they did in 1940. This is crazy!

I’m struggling to find good numbers on this and not lose the whole of the day to this post, but Heritage estimates the social security shortfall will reach $90bn by 2015, and I’ve seen people quote GAO figures saying that raising the age of retirement would cover the shortfall. So let’s assume $90bn savings here. And let’s assume conservatively that the increased income from enlarging the workforce will be offset by the transition costs and growing number of people claiming disability benefit.

Together, these four proposals alone add up to $192bn annually in cost savings and revenue increases, or about 25% of the budget deficit.

These suggestions take no account of non-monetary effects of particular policies. Some of them might be hugely destructive socially or geopolitically. But since the argument is supposedly that balancing the budget should take precedence over all other things, that doesn’t matter, right?

My point is not that we should necessarily do these things, but to highlight the fact that the deficit question is inevitably tied up with priority. A genuinely tough decision is not like the ones that have been made in the past thirty years, when most presidents have chosen to shift between spending and borrowing, for instance. A genuinely tough decision is between two things when both are desirable. It’s these kind of tough decisions that the US will be facing over the next generation.

Partisan bipartisanship

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:01:00 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to read the press yet, they’re typically wrong about these things anyway, and it’ll be a while before we’re able to see with any clarity whether it has any meaningful impact on the course of the debate over health care. Things were never as off-kilter as the media presented them during the past month; the bubble of boredom misshaped a lot of the debate and made Obama’s position on the capitol seem more dangerous than it was. And nor was it accurate to say, as the media had also been claiming in the build up to the speech, that the president needed firmly to limit the content of the final bill and thus force lawmakers into a particular framework. Negotiations are still going on behind the scenes, and it would have been crazy to prejudice them with too explicit statements before an audience of millions.

Given all this, I’m going out on a limb. But I’m tempted to say that Barack Obama’s speech to congress yesterday night was one of his best. In terms of emotional range and sophistication of argument, I honestly can’t remember a speech like it.

The intensity of the moment was no doubt magnified by the fact that its messages were delivered directly to an audience of people intimately involved in the process of negotiation. You could pretty much identify who each sentence was being directed at; and the feed I watched on CNN helpfully made it even easier by generally cutting to the requisite individual at the appropriate moment. I’m probably biased in this, but it was great to watch John Boehner’s queasy face as the president talked about holding insurance companies accountable. And it was moving to see the Kennedy boys at the end. As Obama read out the letter from Ted it was hard not to see them as little kids sitting next to each other listening to someone speak about their Dad.

Obama took the same line he always did: stressing his credentials as a president rising above the fray. But this was the most partisan example of bipartisanship we’ve seen yet. His early comments were delivered with what seemed like uncharacteristic annoyance for a president who has so far seemed to be on a speed march to Nirvana. His decision to describe the “death panel” accusation as a lie was a step beyond the “untruth” claim he has previously made. It will almost certainly be the case that this reinforces hostility on the radical right. He certainly ran a risk taking this approach, and needs to be careful he doesn't go too far. But, as the heckling from the floor and almost immediate grovelling apology of Representative Joe Wilson showed, last night will probably play well with the centre. Americans tend to have strong feelings in different directions about their presidents, but they sanctify the office itself. The Republicans have pushed themselves into a corner where it is very hard for them to appear as anything other than obstructionists.

And while there wasn’t much in terms of policy, two things stood out. First, the Republicans have been somewhat triangulated by Obama on tort reform. This further establishes the President as the master of the centre ground. Second, and more importantly, we got a glimpse of what the "solution" to the public option debate is going to be, clearly the most fraught part of the bill.

This was where most people thought the president could come a cropper. Without Ted Kennedy's vote the Senate was unlikely to force cloture on a bill which had a strong public option in it if the healthcare lobby said so. But the House Democrats had said they wouldn’t support a bill without it. This meant that most people thought the president was going to have to come down on one side or the other, and risk alienating a powerful group.

In truth, though, neither was an option politically, and Obama recognized this yesterday. So what the president did instead was reinvent the meaning of public option as “the basic principle that if Americans can't find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice.” This creates room for a combination of private cooperative and kick-in clause after X years, which can then be presented as a public option, or at least an effective public option, to the House but not appear to be caving in to the Democratic left.

Clearly this is a fudge, and everyone will know it. But it provides a narrative to the end game, which is the White House’s number one priority. Obama is calculating that most people care more about the impact of the bill than its method. Moreover, he recognizes that, at the end of the day, left wing Democrats are more likely to cave in on this than Republicans, for the simple reason that intransigence leading to a defeated bill rewards Republicans in partisan terms, while it threatens to destroy the Democratic majority, when there are signs already that the House will be swinging toward the GOP in 2010. There are therefore more incentives for the Democrats to negotiate a solution than there are for Republicans. Given these pressures, I think the president will conclude he can persuade House Democrats that an alternative along compromise lines will achieve the core goals even while it concedes the mechanism.

Short of something incredibly dramatic happening, we will see an insurance reform bill by the end of the year. Short of something miraculous, this will include these kind of mechanisms but not a full fledged public option. If twenty or thirty million Americans get coverage through this, if preexisting condition selection is banned, and if it makes it easier for people to move around, then this will still be a massive step forward for America.

Barack Obama wants to eat your children

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:53:00 +0000

How many letters in the surname of the student Obama selected to introduce him, Tim Spicer? Six. How many words in the name of the place he was talking from, "Wakefield High School In Arlington Virginia." Six. How many letters in the word "school"? SIX!!

That’s right, I’m here to announce I’ve uncovered the secret message hidden within Barack Obama’s speech to school children yesterday. Underlying all the apparently smooth sounding words about personal responsibility and your duty to your country was lurking a subtext that, mark my words, will within a few years have produced a Sovietized army of Obama troops addicted to fluoridated water and ready to establish a dictatorial state in what will become known as the United States of Obama.

Just think about some of the things he said for a moment. “It’s understandable if you’re a little nervous.” A classic psychological technique to use personal anxieties to penetrate to the core of an individual’s identity before implanting the secret message. “You could have stayed in bed just a little bit longer this morning.” Suggesting that the message he is about to implant will activate while your children are asleep. “At 4:30 in the morning.” The exact time when the mechanism will kick in!

Now look at the following sentences. They appear separately, but through the careful use of subliminal noises generated by the president's epiglottis and the power of x-rays sent out by the autocue, they combine to make a single message. “I have something important to discuss with you... fulfil your responsibilities ... nothing less than the future of our country.” Readied, the students prepare to receive their instructions. “CANCER AND AIDS!” “CRIME AND DISCRIMINATION!” “A TURN FOR THE WORSE!!”

That’s right, the President is preparing to unleash a wave of criminal disorder by indoctrinating the minds of America’s young people so that they rise up in the middle of the night and head out to rape and pillage and steal. “Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe,” he suggests to the students. Maybe you should create one, more like! “Or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.” One big friend living on Pennsylvania Avenue, more like.

Do you need more evidence? Just look at the names of the exemplary students he mentioned. Jazmin – six letters. Andoni – six letters. Shantell – six letters. (In the ancient Sumerian script, you see, “SHA” is rendered as a single letter, making six.)

“(You can’t) LET YOUR FAILURES DEFINE YOU,” Obama ordered, slyly. “Find an adult that you trust.” And “(don’t) GIVE UP ON YOUR COUNTRY.”

Those parents were right. When the president extolls them to work hard, the only patriotic response is to resist. Fail! And fail as well as you can. Fight Washington's elites! When Obama speaks to students about the importance of attending class, the only option is to stay home. When he talks about how you need to do your homework, there’s only one option. Feed it to the dog.

Go on. Do it for your country.

Banking is too important to be left to bankers alone

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:46:00 +0000

I was travelling on the Docklands Light Railway last night. For those unfamiliar with the city, this passes through Canary Wharf, London’s central business district.

I picked up a free paper lying on one of the seats, which turned out to be not the tabloid celebrity rags that normally pass for free papers (though don’t get me started on the havoc these wretched things cause, not to mention the distributors who cause pedestrian jams blocking the streets until you take one off their hands). It was a copy of a city-only paper, CITY a.m., which – not spending much time in such places – I hadn't had the pleasure of reading before.

The experience of flicking through it was enlightening once again as to how far my daily experience differs from those operating in our financial sector.

The property pages opened with a country mansion retailing at a modest £15 million. It also showed the other way round, how far bankers’ experiences differed from the rest of the world's. The main feature on the front page was a rant, barely hiding within its pretensions to journalistic objectivity, against the current proposals circulating at the G-20 for controlling bankers’ bonuses. The piece neglected to consider views outside the city, quoting instead several business and financial sources explaining why Brown had signed up to a “dramatic u-turn”, caving in to the “fresh, much harsher line” proposed by the French and Germans.

Alastair Heath, general editor, expressed the hidden views more openly on the next page. “The entire endeavour was a bit of a distraction given that no serious economist really believes bonuses were the primary driver of the crisis.”

Mr. Heath, as just one of ABOUT TEN MILLION examples, can I refer you to a recent op-ed by a fairly well-known Nobel Prize winning economist on the New York Times staff, which begins as follows: “Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.” Once you’ve got your Nobel Prize I’ll be willing to defer to your definition of “serious economist.” Until then, shut up. Ok, I'll accept a Fields Medal, but I somehow suspect you don't have one of them either.

But aside from such patent absurdities, I was more struck by the whole tone of the paper than its individual contents. The BBC, for instance, represents the same bonus proposals as “an alternative to a formal cap on bonuses sought by some countries” - that is, a remarkably soft option given the shafting the financial sector has given us in the past two years.

It’s amazing to me, and I suspect the vast majority of people on the planet as well, that this crisis seems to have had essentially zero effect in challenging the complacent self-certainty of these enormously privileged individuals. These people have caused so much damage to society through their desire to amass ever greater wealth for themselves and yet still seem incapable of considering the idea that their self-serving assumptions might need a little modification.

Nevertheless, amongst more general unpleasantness, Heath does make some points worth bearing in mind. First, he argues that efforts to control bonuses may not have their intended effects. “Basic pay would jump; high performers would be given regular pay rises; poor performers would suffer pay cuts or be fired. Bonuses would reappear, albeit in hidden guise. Caps would severely damage efficiency and make banks even more likely to fail. Linking all bonuses to overall profit would make it impossible to reward star performers in loss-making organisations, a recipe for disaster. Even worse, the proposal would only apply to the largest banks, triggering an exodus of bankers to unregulated, smaller firms, hedge funds and start-ups.”

Obviously, the consequences of new regulations are hard to foresee, and need to be open for alteration if they fail to achieve their intended effects. In a sense, these arguments add up to not much more than "Don't bother trying to stop us, we will do what we like anyway." But even so, it's important not to dismiss them entirely, because we want to engineer a system that is more stable, not more byzantine.

Still, I don’t agree with Heath's characterization of the impact of incentives. Heath’s argument is that capping bonuses would damage the good functioning of banks in general. First, this assumes that salaried workers aren’t capable of discharging their responsibilities properly. This is fairly patent nonsense; the world is primarily run by salaried workers. Also, to accept the claim you have also to accept that bonuses have traditionally incentivized “high-performers” solely to add value to the corporation. I think that this is a fairly debatable proposition in the aftermath of the world’s biggest financial crisis since the 1929. The danger with enormous incentivization is that you might end up incentivizing people to do something other than what you wanted in the first place.

Heath goes on to complain that it’s unfair these rules are applied to banks which didn’t fail and didn’t take taxpayers money, calling this the “disgraceful concept of collective punishment.” Three things here. First, the city often acts as a collective when it suits them – putting enormous pressure on government to deregulate it as an industry, for instance. Second, if you don’t have collective punishment you need to have individual punishment. But the “too big to fail” problem means that the market hasn’t delivered the moral hazard necessary for this. Third, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Mr. Heath, but the rest of the world deals with industry wide regulations every day. If you’re a nuclear plant you’re expected to abide by safety regulations even if you complain that you weren't responsible for Three Mile Island. Suck it up, Mr. Heath, that's life.

Not only do I think that these G-20 proposals are a good thing, I think they’re essential if we want to reassert the simple primacy of citizenship over financial power, to establish the principle that voters collectively run the country, not financiers. The proposals are not hopelessly radical. In fact, they are astonishingly muted. I hope that they’re just the beginning. Banking is too important to our national well-being for it to be left to bankers alone.

Canary Wharf sits as a towering boil on the right cheek of London, located far from the commercial, residential and entertainment areas of the city. Not for the first time, as I sat reading this rag in bemusement, I was forced to conclude how appropriate this seems.

Silly season over?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:33:00 +0000

Al Franken - that's right, author of a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and, according to his pals at Fox a radical left wing firebrand - shows how to have a reasoned debate on health care reform (h/t Oliver Willis):

Isn't it nice when people aren't shouting at each other all the time?

Comparing the private and public sector on health

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:54:00 +0000

Ok, I’m sure no-one needs to have the absurdities of the anti-reform rhetoric to be pointed out any more times. (At least, no-one likely to be reading this.) How can a government programme be both so ruthlessly efficient that it will drive insurers into bankruptcy and yet at the same time utterly bloated and inefficient because the government can’t run anything properly?

Instead, let’s ask the question: how does health care coverage in the private and public sector really compare when we try and put simple ideological questions to one side...?

By definition, the private sector exists to make a profit. In certain contexts, usually in competitive marketplaces with low customer switching costs, profits require efficient delivery and therefore tend to encourage great quality and service. But not all contexts are competitive, and health insurance coverage isn’t one of them. The insecurities attached to coverage and its link to employment mean that the cost of switching is extremely high.

(Amongst other things, this leads me to conclude that if a meaty public option becomes watered down in the final bill, an appropriate executive branch response would be to brush off the old Sherman/Clayton book and start applying a bit of anti-trust law to these huge companies. If they want to present a fiction of themselves as lean, green, private-sector business machines, hold them to it. It also makes me think that elements in the bill that loosen the link between employment and coverage may turn out to be extremely important, even though all the attention at the moment is on the public option.)

As everyone knows, there’s two ways of increasing your profits: reducing your costs or increasing revenues.

When it comes to private health coverage the second element trumps the first. This is for the simple reason that death comes to us all sooner or later, but most of us would like to live forever. However much we spend on treatments that keep us alive, we’re still left wanting more. It’s not like you buy a chocolate bar, eat it, and aren’t hungry any more. Until someone invents an immortality pill, there’ll always be more drugs and treatments to spend our money on.

The nature of the market and product determines the business strategy. Selling cigarettes? Killing your client base? Focus on new customer acquisition. Selling health care? Keeping your clients alive longer? Get new products to market that offer a way to keep your customers going so that they can be around to buy more drugs from you in the future.

This is why the private sector has managed to be so amazingly innovative when it comes to developing new health techniques. But it also means that senior executives in hospitals and drug companies who concern themselves with strategy are going to tend to focus on new treatments rather than efficiency savings.

At the end of the day, the resources that can potentially be spent on health coverage are only limited by our ability to pay for them. Our demand for health is essentially infinite. This is what is driving the relentless growth in private sector costs. It’s only partly about the 30 percent that ends up as profit. We’ll always be in the market for new and ingenious ways to keep ourselves alive – and by extension ill much more of the time!

When the private sector does think about cost savings, moreover, it seems to prefer excluding applicants through rescission rather than delivering efficiency savings in health care services. It’s a simple fact that it’s much easier and more reliable method to sit with a pen and strike out badly filled-in coverage forms than it is to march up and down buildings devising innovative new ways to manage business processes.

Public spending, though, is not driven by the same imperatives. People always go on about how the private sector world is focused on the dollars, but in this case it's government that has a bottom line, absent in the private sector. The question of coverage will always be filtered through the question of “what can we afford to deliver?” rather than “What new things can we sell?” Even when this is not explicitly highlighted in the debate (for political reasons, usually), it forms a background presence as a tax-cutting or deficit-reducing movement.

While the private sector will tend to try to limit payouts, then, the public sector by contrast will try and restrict treatments. Insurance companies will tempt you in with a new wonder drug, then try and devise ingenious ways of kicking you out for not filling a form out correctly; the government will say that the new super-drug is too expensive and so can’t be deployed. Result: the private sector is heartless; the public sector rations.

The Onion: study finds young people remain apathetic about office politics

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:55:00 +0000

Something for a Friday:

Study Finds Young People Remain Apathetic About Office Politics

RIP

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Alex has too much time on his hands and gets carried away with charts

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:36:00 +0000

Ok, so, the conclusion from the last post was that we should be very worried about what the deficit and debt are going to do to the Obama reform agenda. Health care, the environment, job creation, investment in education will all be affected by the need to control the terrible situation the US has got itself into.

That said, the one thing that the debt should not do is convince Americans to support the Republican party, which is why I find the budget-terror rhetoric coming from the town hall Republican base rather ironic.

Despite their consistent harping on about the virtues of small government, the Republican record on controlling budgets since World War Two has been appalling, though as you'll see from the following chart Eisenhower and Nixon - essentially traditional Republicans - had a much stronger record than the New Right leaders, Reagan and Bush. Since 1980, every Republican term of office has seen a growth in the national debt as a percentage of the size of the economy. (The chart is of the average annual change in national debt as a percentage of GDP; so, the lower the percentage the better.)

Part of the reason for this is that the Democrats also have a stronger record on job creation. Why? Job creation helps increase trade and hence the total size of the economy, thus reducing debt proportionately. This chart shows the average annual change in the number of jobs during each administration. As you'll see, the red team's record - even under the old style Republican administrations - doesn't compare.

So, argue that the United States needs to acquire economic prudence as it pushes on with its reform ambitions, and that uncosted measures cannot be acceptable. Fine. I agree. Just don't claim in the same breath that the Republicans should have any right to talk about the economy.

(Source data: Wikipedia)

Some mid-season review budget facts; or, perhaps you don’t yet realize how much you’re in the stink

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:40:00 +0000

The OMB has just issued its mid-season report on the budget, based on more gloomy predictions about unemployment and growth. Here’s some highlights.

The national debt is expected to grow by $11 trillion over the next decade. This means that the national debt accrued between 2008 and 2019 is expected to be greater than the entire national debt acquired between 1776 and 2008
The OMB expects the deficit in 2019 to still be twice what it was in 2008
Interest payments on debts over the next ten years will alone be bigger than the money spent on Medicaid and TARP
To pay back just the debt that is expected to be acquired between 2008 and 2019 (i.e. to get back to the level of debt the US had in 2008), tax receipts will have to rise by roughly 30 percent.
And the real kicker: these assumptions already include expected savings from health care reform, tax reform, and a tax hike for high earners, an estimated $15bn annually in revenues from 2012 onwards for climate change technologies, and nearly $300 billion total from closing loopholes and other measures.

Enjoy your dinner tonight!