Nomad Homebody

what I did on my summer vacation

2009-08-30T00:39:00.003-04:00

Murdo, Badlands, Circle Park 1, Circle Park 2, grimy resort, Sunlight Basin, Yellowstone 1, Yellowstone 2, Idaho Falls, Additional Redfish 1, Additional Redfish 2, Bench Lakes, Redfish Inlet, Sunny Gulch, Morgan 1, Morgan 2, Boulder 1-2-3-4-5-6, Zion, Grand Canyon 1-2-3, Quaking Aspen, Laura's wedding 1-2-3, Two Guns, Flagstaff, Needles, Amelia.

Casualties: one multi-tool, one iPod, one iPod radio converter, two water bottles, one 1989 Volvo station wagon named Flash.

That's right, I sold my car for $30 and a ride to the airport to pick up a rental car.

Highlights: the farmers' markets in Des Moines, Idaho Falls (blackberries, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, pancake mix that starts with grinding your own flour), Shoshone (best sungold cherry tomatoes I've ever had), Salt Lake City (potato-green bean salad with purple basil, Asian sandwich with grass-fed beef), Boulder Utah (can I please give you some money for the cucumbers? please? and the apples - I really don't mind paying for my food), Albuquerque (chiles!), Bakersfield (fruit of all kinds, and technically a farmstand). Everything about Sunlight Basin. The wildlife in Yellowstone: baby bald eagle, baby bison, baby grizzly bear, grown-up grizzly bear, black bear, more bison, antelope, elk, wolf. Redfish Lake. Everything about Boulder. Escalante. The Navajo and Hopi nations. Meeting a ton of interesting people, including some of the Gardener's friends. The fact that the car made it to California - barely - before it died.

Now I'm moving into an apartment, starting grad school, fixing up a cabinet, seeing friends, eating ice cream, and trying to spend more time up in the hills. I'll write more eventually, I think. But not tonight.

other priorities

2009-07-02T23:27:00.002-04:00

I have to let you know that this blog is just not at the top of my list right now. I've been thinking of a post on Shop Class as Soulcraft, another one about the community center in my neighborhood that used to be a church, plus a couple others I started writing a while ago. But in the rest of my life, I just packed up everything I own in the city I've lived in for 6 years (plus the preceding 4 in the metro area for college). We sold our furniture, cleaned the apartment, put the belongings that won't be useful for camping in storage, and drove out of town.

I'm on the first leg of a 5000 mile, six week road trip in the company of the Gardener, an elderly Volvo station wagon with a busted odometer, and a small mountain of our joint possessions. (The car's possessions include fuses, baling wire, motor oil, and retired climbing rope.) Right now I'm at my grandmother's. This weekend might see some writing - after I leave my parents' house, though, I have no idea when I'll have internet. Just so you're all forewarned out there.

The upside, which I must admit is better for me than for you, is that I think this trip is going to be AWESOME.

another article about Iran

2009-06-22T07:24:00.003-04:00

A professor at the protests. Definitely worth reading. Two particularly intense moments in the annals of humans in bad situations:

There is a woman who is being beaten. She’s horrified and hysterical but not as much as the anti-riot police officer facing her. She shrieks, ‘Where can I go? You tell me go down the street and you beat me. Then you come up from the other side and beat me again. Where can I go?’ In sheer desperation, the officer hits his helmet several times hard with his baton. ‘Damn me! Damn me! What the hell do I know!

and later,

At Gisha, there’s a similar scene. Again the people have the whole crossing in their control and you can hear the uproar and horns. Motorcycles are burning in smoke. But I’m suddenly stunned. I see a red object, which later proves to be a man, about 50, his head covered with blood, crouching, people passing him by as if he was a garbage can. Then comes a guy with a long stick who wants to beat up the already beaten Basiji. People gather and stop him. He’s furious, ‘Why should I not? They beat tiny girls! They beat everyone! Bastard!’

via hilzoy.

read about Iran

2009-06-21T14:19:00.002-04:00

One, by Roger Cohen from Tehran, is both opinion and reportage, and the writing is excellent.

The second is by someone I'm going to grad school with this fall, about her cousins in Iran and how she sees the current situation.

more important

2009-06-20T16:21:00.003-04:00

You wouldn't know it from the blog, since I don't have much to say about it, but I've mostly been thinking about Iran.

Andrew Sullivan is the best Iran news aggregator I've found. The
liveblog of today's protests is full of raw information and links to unfolding stories and things pulled out of the #IranElection twitter feed. Also video of the deaths of protesters, which I did not watch.

not that hard

2009-06-19T18:13:00.004-04:00

The DOJ is going to sit down with queer law organizations and try to strategize about the best way to deal with all the DOMA cases. This is the kind of thing they could have done beforehand to avoid the kind of fall-out the DOJ brief had last week. Not complicated. If you care about a policy issue, you make a strategy for dealing with it. Glad to see they're willing to do it now.

In some ways, I think it's better to have had this reason for people to get all riled up. It's being riled up that makes people organize, and leads to the kind of pressure that gets meaningful progress.

(via Dan Savage)

selective walkback

2009-06-18T16:24:00.003-04:00

So, it seems pretty clear now, despite the NYT's assertion to the contrary, that the DOJ did have to defend DOMA. And John Aravosis at Americablog has been absurdly misleading and hysterical. But I still think this highlights Obama's lack of strategy on queer issues, and the importance of pressing the issue and not being patient. The hysteria may have been unwarranted, but it's the bad press that got Obama to act on federal partner benefits. Basically, Obama's been claiming he'll do something about this eventually, be patient, etc, but because he's a politician and not a hero, he'll respond to political incentives (especially if those political incentives get to work on Congress, as well.)

I disagree with Tammy Baldwin that he's gone as far as he can, though. Harry Reid, the embarrassingly incompetent Senate Majority Leader, says there are no Senate co-sponsors to repeal don't ask don't tell. Obama's famous congressional machine can't find a couple senators who want to sponsor a bill that 69% of Americans support? Puh leez.

bad cases make bad law, cont.

2009-06-18T14:59:00.002-04:00

You have a defendant who won't claim he's innocent, but still wants DNA testing on the off-chance it might exonerate him? You get Supreme Court FAIL, and the worst effects are on other people who might have had stronger cases.

Choose your test cases wisely.

can't look away

2009-06-17T22:12:00.000-04:00

Wow. No wonder this is a New York Times article. Fat panic? Check. The trivial concerns of the super rich? Check. Major league cat fights? Check.

What sets her off is the junk food served on special occasions: the cupcakes that come out for every birthday, the doughnuts her children were once given in gym, the sugary “Fun-Dip” packets that some parent provided the whole class on Valentine’s Day.
...
“Is there or is there not an obesity and diabetes epidemic in this country?”

When offered any food at school other than the school lunch, Ms. Roth’s children — who shall go nameless since it seems they have enough on, or off, their plates — are instructed to deposit the item into a piece of Tupperware their mother calls a “junk food collector.”

The reaction from other parents? "Please, consider moving." Her poor kids.

word

2009-06-17T19:48:00.002-04:00

This is right on. Much as the DOJ shouldn't be defending DOMA with badly written briefs that insult queer people, and much as I think Obama failing to do anything on queer issues is bullshit, the people filing the DOMA lawsuits should stop. Now. The most likely outcome of a DOMA lawsuit right now is a lot of bad precedent, and that's probably why Lambda Legal won't touch them.

(and yes I know the man has a lot on his plate, but don't ask don't tell? I mean come on. Unless this is a clever strategy to get the queers all riled up so we put enough pressure out there that Congress will actually pass things. In which case, awesome, but I gotta say I doubt it.)

smallest possible treat

2009-06-17T08:48:00.002-04:00

During the same conversation with the Gardener and Stupendous Fish that brought us the piece about self-control, Stupendous Fish recommended Don't Shoot the Dog, which is about obedience training. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so. In any case. The book apparently describes some of the results of operant conditioning studies on rats. It turns out that, while you can train a rat to press a lever for a treat, the rat eventually gets bored if it gets a treat every time. I would to. If you want the rat to keep pushing the lever, the trick is to give it a treat at random intervals, the longer the better. You want to give it a small treat - the smallest possible treat that still feels like a treat - because you don't want the rat to get full or feel satisfied: if it feels satisfied, it might stop pushing the lever. So: smallest possible treat, longest possible interval.¹ If you time this right, the lever-pushing habit gets nearly impossible to break. It works for humans, too, and is one of the reasons it's so hard to get kids to break bad habits. Stupendous Fish described a pre-schooler who's whining a lot; attention itself is a reward, so if you even look at her for a second when you hear her start whining, you're reinforcing the behavior. But not very much. Smallest possible treat. Keeps her coming back for more forever.

But this post isn't just about operant conditioning! No, no, it's actually about gay politics. Because I can't leave it alone. Obama's reaction to the indignation over the DOMA brief isn't to explain that it was a mistake, it isn't to introduce legislation to repeal don't ask don't tell (which, did I mention, would be a popular thing to do? large majorities of conservatives support repealing don't ask don't tell), it isn't to do anything substantive: instead, Obama plans to sign a presidential memorandum (which expires when he leaves office; not even an executive order) giving partner benefits to same-sex couples employed by the federal government. Some partner benefits. Not health insurance.

Oh, and the administration flat-out admits that they only did it because there's been so much fuss, and because there's a GLBT fundraiser for the DNC coming up next week.

I think Obama's thought process in this was, give them the smallest possible treat so they'll shut up and go to the fundraiser. But I think he miscalculated. He's not reinforcing support for his presidency among queers. He's reinforcing making a fuss. Because this treat exists - so we know it's worth pushing that lever - but it's nothing. It barely whets the appetite. It's not even health insurance for the .06% of Americans who are gay partners of federal employees. Perpetual fuss, here we come.

I think, by the way, that there was a time for putting queer issues off to the side, and not worrying about them temporarily. But I think that time is over. Policy is actually lagging public opinion in some places. Time to expect better, and then demand it.

1. As an aside, this is creepily similar to slot machines; they probably both invoke what Temple Grandin calls the SEEKING system.

annals of cookery

2009-06-17T07:24:00.000-04:00

"Spear the garlic with a fork, and use it to beat the eggs, egg yolks, cream, and goat cheese together."

OK, Deborah Madison. If you say so.

build a better protest

2009-06-16T21:09:00.002-04:00

I love this idea.

"Here's the idea: one gay or lesbian couple—a couple currently denied their rights under DOMA—shows up at the entrance to the White House grounds. A different couple every day. They ask to speak to the president about DOMA. They're refused. They sit down. They refuse to leave. They're arrested, carried away by the police. Couples would be recruited from all over the country, demonstrating that gay marriage isn't just an issue in liberal California or godless New England, and the media in each couple's home city and state would be notified in advance of their arrest. The occasional famous couple—Rosie and Kelli? Ellen and Portia?—would participate to pull in celeb media. But most of the couples who come to D.C. to get arrested would be average folks. The couples would need support, legal and logistical, and we would need someone to organize media outreach and maintain a website. The website would include a photo and profile of each couple that comes to D.C. to get arrested, collect all the press, and be used to recruit couples willing to travel to D.C. and get arrested.

"The action would be small scale—it would be human scale—and it would go on and on and on. It would demonstrate better than another gay march just how seriously we take this issue: we take it seriously that we're willing to travel to D.C. and get arrested. It wouldn't be a one-day event that the White House could ignore or bluff its way through with some lame statement about its "commitment" to ending DOMA. The couples would keep coming. Every day an arrest. Drip, drip, drip. Members of the White House press corps would see couples getting arrested every day on their way to work. Gibbs would be forced to address DOMA on a near-daily basis. The president would be asked about the issue again and again."

If this turns into a reasonably well-organized process, with legal support and everything, look for the Gardener and me to get arrested. Dan Savage, whose idea it is, says that his publicity-shy boyfriend will do the same. I'm tired of being patient.

cowardice

2009-06-16T16:56:00.005-04:00

I actually was planning to write about Obama and queer issues a few weeks ago, when Rachel Maddow was inviting Daniel Choi - gay soldier fluent in Arabic - on her show. Choi came out on the air, and is now getting kicked out of the Army. Obama could do something about this, by ordering the military to stop issuing determinations that soldiers are gay or invoking his powers while stop-loss is in use, but he won't. And hasn't. He won't even say anything about it himself. Dan Savage has been calling this "the fierce urgency of whenever."

Now something else has happened: one of the many DOMA challenge cases currently working their way through federal court has gotten to the point where the Justice Department files a brief. DOJ normally supports federal law - it's their job - but in unusual cases may decide not to support the law ~~when an important policy issue is at stake. I'm not a lawyer, and have a slightly hazy grasp on these details, but this much is vouched for by other people who know this better than I do.~~ If DOJ does choose to defend the law even though the administration opposes it on policy grounds, they can tailor the defense so it is as narrow as possible, and thus not imperil future efforts to exercise those rights. In this case, DOJ decided to file the brief; they also assigned the task of writing it to a Mormon Bush hold-over.

Bet you can guess how that worked out. It's an extremely broad defense of DOMA - "scattershot" has been mentioned; "kitchen sink" as well - which compares same-sex marriage to incest and child rape, claims that same-sex marriage is too expensive given scarce government resources, and anyway, gay people can just have straight marriages. Seriously. I'm not joking. It's a fucking disaster, and there is no way in a million years that any fierce advocate of gay rights would write something like that.

Like Andrew Sullivan, I doubt that Obama personally wants to screw over gay people. But it's not like no one knew there were DOMA suits being filed, or like no one had ever heard him mention that he's opposed to DOMA. I suspect that Obama supports gay marriage, himself. He said he did in the 90s, when he was running for something smaller and more local. He can't come out in favor of it right now, because it's too politically expensive, and honestly, that's fine with me.

What's not fine is this: Obama ran partly on a claim that he got it, and that queer people would not be second-class citizens in his administration. He hasn't delivered. Not at all. He hasn't mentioned the Iowa court decision except in a joke, he hasn't done thing one about don't ask don't tell, and he hasn't bothered to get someone to coordinate his administration's response to a major set of civil rights litigation. That's bullshit. I know the man is busy: I don't expect him to personally sit around writing the DOMA brief for the DOJ. But nothing? Nothing at all? And then this bullshit? If I were running HRC and this were an election year, I'd be looking for another candidate. Not saying I wouldn't vote for him myself, just that if you're a single issue gay rights group, this isn't your man. (And they have pulled out of the LGBT DNC fundraiser. As well they should.)

I think this amounts to cowardice. Obama's not willing to stake even a tiny amount of prestige - even the tiny amount required to get rid of don't ask don't tell, which a majority of conservatives want to get rid of - on queers. Ta-Nehisi Coates points to Jelani's comparison of Obama and JFK, one fo the few that makes neither of them look good. And I can't tell you how disappointed and sad I am to agree.

EPIC FAIL

2009-06-13T00:53:00.002-04:00

I'm really mad at Barack Obama.

I'll have more about this, and what Dan Savage is calling the fierce urgency of whenever, tomorrow, when I haven't been out drinking with a bunch of queers. Just fyi, that means the post has to show before 3 pm if it's going to.

After that, I'll be drinking with a bunch of people who can't marry their partners. At a march. Because what's a march in Philadelphia without beer?

a field guide to health insurance

2009-06-11T11:32:00.004-04:00

We're moving, so the Gardener is leaving her job, which means she needs health insurance. Grad school doesn't cover partner benefits (for anyone, not just for queer partners), so it's the private market. Have I ever mentioned how godawful it is to buy private health insurance? Even though we're both young and healthy - and thus privately insurable - it's a damn mess. There's no standard format for the policy description, so it's practically impossible to directly compare plans: ehealthinsurance is the closest I've found to something that will do that, but it's sometimes hard to interpret. For example: the Kaiser plan lists out of network services as "not covered." What that actually means, according to the Kaiser representative I called, is that only emergency and urgent care are covered out of network. Which is good, because insurance that doesn't cover you in an accident when you're out of town doesn't hedge your risk very effectively.

So this is a half-genius idea. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) wants to create some kind of guide to health insurance via a non-profit trust. The plan is to give letter grades in categories like adequacy of coverage, affordability, transparency, blah blah blah. Great idea. I'd love to have some real reputational data on the insurers I've been looking into. But even more than that, what I need is a standard format for the underlying coverage data. I need to be able to know exactly what I'm comparing to what. Kind of like a nutrition label, but with money.

I've spent a lot of time on the phone researching this, so let me tell you how to pick your health insurance (on the off-chance that it's useful to one of this blog's 2 readers):

1. Look at the premium, then stop looking at the premium. This is the least useful piece of information available, except insofar as it rules out the plans that are far too expensive for you. More expensive plans are not always better.

2. The deductible. That's how much you have to pay, right off, if you get hospitalized/seriously ill/whatever. It should be an amount that will not destroy you financially, because in fact that's a major reason for having health insurance. But plan that if you get hit by a truck, you will be out this money right away. In fact, if you're the sort of person who keeps money around for emergencies, it would totally make sense to keep that money in your emergency cash account. If you have solid savings and usually use minimal medical care, it might make sense to have a high deductible plan; but you're making a bet that you won't need to pay the deductible.

3. But that's not all! What services have the deductible waived? Many plans waive the deductible for primary care or specialist visits, so if you have a suspicious mole and need to go to the dermatologist, you don't have to pay the full office fee yourself.

Some plans waive the deductible for only a certain number of visits: Anthem Blue Cross has a plan that's directly aimed at young healthy people and covers only 4 doctor visits/year. Basically, you can get a pap smear and go to the doctor to get your strep throat checked out, but anything chronic or weird or hard to diagnose is going to cost you the deductible. So if you take a plan like this, you're essentially betting that you're not going to develop a chronic or complicated health problem: it's good for catastrophic situations and preventive care, but not for things that are in between.

4. Still not all! What you really need to keep your eye on is the Out of Pocket Maximum. Even after you've paid the deductible, you're still responsible for co-insurance. Frankly, I don't really worry about the co-insurance percentage: you end up having to pay between 20% and 50% of your costs other than office visits once you've hit the deductible, but once you're in the hospital or getting surgery everything is so damn expensive that I figure I'll end up hitting the Out of Pocket Max if something like that happens. So. That's what I worry about. And here, you need to be careful. Sometimes the OOPM is listed as an additional amount after the deductible; sometimes it includes the deductible. I looked at an Aetna plan that listed the OOPM as $8000 in network or $12,500 out of network when you figure the deductible in. I figured that would mean the total OOPM - the amount I'd be liable for in a real health problem - would be $12,500, but I called to check and boy was I wrong. The in network and out of network costs rack up separately, so the real OOPM was $20,500.

The OOPM should also be an amount that will not destroy you financially, that you could come up with via credit cards or loans from family or a payment plan from the hospital, and that would not force you to declare bankruptcy. We looked for plans with an OOPM between $3000 and $5000. It would suck to come up with that, but I bet we could. $20,500? Not so much.

5. Lifetime maximum benefit does matter. If something really bad happens (cancer, etc), you can run through a low lifetime max in a couple of years. I would prefer to have a plan with no lifetime maximum benefit, and am actually a little worried about the fact that my grad school health insurance has a $400,000 lifetime max. If I had to choose a plan with a lifetime max, I'd rather have it be over $5 million.

6. How much do you hate referrals? If you really hate them - if they keep you from going to specialists because you hate them so much - get a PPO instead of an HMO. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry that much about the distinction (unless you have a particular doctor/specialist you really need to see).

7. Here's my theory on mental health coverage: if you need it, because you have a mental health condition that requires ongoing management, worry about mental health coverage, but worry about prescription coverage more. I basically think bad therapy is useless, and that it's hard enough to find a good therapist that even if your insurance covers therapy, there's a good chance you'll end up paying out of pocket anyway. If you're the kind of person who sometimes likes to see a therapist to talk about your family, get advice about transitions, etc, don't bother worrying about mental health coverage. (All of this, of course, is for people who have a fairly clear handle on their own mental states: sometimes these change, and you suddenly need more treatment than you used to. And if you have kids, it probably really is worth worrying about mental health coverage, because you never know how they're going to turn out.)

8. Speaking of prescriptions, I found several plans that cover only generic drugs. This doesn't really make sense to me, because it leaves you exposed to substantial risk of very expensive medical bills.

9. Try calling the insurer to ask questions. If the person you reach isn't helpful, they're not going to get any more helpful once you've bought the insurance.

10. Insurance is more expensive for women. I don't really have anything to say about this, other than that it sucks and is dumb.

fish in a barrel

2009-06-09T18:39:00.001-04:00

I am so tired of hating on New York Times columnists. Sort of. It's also kinda fun. They've managed to replace Bill Kristol, who was spectacularly wrong on matters of political strategy, with Ross Douthat, who's spectacularly wrong on gender issues, which he writes about with some frequency.

Why does he inflict his ideas about gender on us? I don't know, because he likes showing off both his ignorance and his poor reasoning skills? Because he thinks dudes with penises have an obligation to us poor bereft ladies to show us the way and the light? Per latest example: Douthat thinks (or perhaps merely claims) abortion is nearly unregulated in the second and third trimester. Why he thinks this, I cannot say; why his editors allow him to claim this, I cannot imagine.

He also recognizes the moral complexity and particularity of each individual decision to abort or continue a pregnancy, but then claims that this is an appropriate subject for public debate. Because when 300 million people try to come up with a set of rules for when people should stay pregnant, they're likely to be able to make very subtle distinctions that don't push people into miserable positions. Not! Just kidding! Douthat never claims that the decisions 300 million of us will come to in our clumsy attempt at Jeffersonian deliberative democracy will be good ones; he just thinks there'll be more restrictions on women's rights to abortion, and that this will somehow satisfy pro-lifers and they'll pack up their bloody fetus signs and go home, never to murder another doctor.

To which I have 3 responses:

1. Bitch, Ph.D. has nailed my view on this over and over again in saying that abortion is a highly personal moral decision, and that the best decisions are the ones made by a woman who has good medical advice and care, and good social support. You have to trust women. Yes, sometimes people will make bad decisions. But that's true about all kinds of things, and the fact that people will sometimes make bad decisions is not a reason to deny women - and only women - the right to full sovereignty over their bodies, to the decision of whether to allow their uteruses and the rest of their bodies to bring another person into the world. And you have to trust them to make those decisions in the moment, because bright-line rules almost always end up putting someone in an untenable situation. That's why Douthat is wrong, and this isn't an appropriate subject for public debate. We shouldn't argue about fetal abnormality rules, or whether the exemptions should count mental health (and, if they didn't, what we would do with suicidal pregnant women), whether it's just innocent virgins who were raped who can have abortions or whether the rest of us sluts get health care too, how severe the health threat has to be, or whatever else Douthat thinks he should get some say in. No. We should help women make good decisions, and LEAVE IT. And Ross Douthat, who's never going to be pregnant, isn't a parent, and has shown a truly remarkable lack of empathy for women in his previous writings, should well and truly leave it.

2. Moderate restrictions on late-term abortion will not satisfy the pro-life movement. They claim to believe that abortion is murder and we're living through a modern-day mass slaughter. Most members of the pro-life movement are also ineradicably opposed to birth control and are deeply committed to enacting controls over women's sexuality via legal or cultural means. There's no way they would be satisfied with mostly banning second and third trimester abortion, because guess what? If they could be satisfied that way, they'd already have called off the protests.

This doesn't mean there are no pro-life or 'with reservations about abortion' people who couldn't live with that solution; just that for any measure that allowed elective abortions the pro-life movement would keep right on working, and the debate would stay just as highly charged and contentious, and people like Tiller's murderer would have everything they need to become radicalized. And if they ever won, we'd be right back to the days of septic abortion wards in hospitals and a lot of dead women who didn't want to be pregnant. Douthat's claims that we can compromise our way out of the abortion debate are patently disingenuous. He brings up other countries with legal restrictions, as if to say his strategy worked there; but in most of those countries abortion is actually easier to get because it's paid for by the universal health care system, and the real issue is that they just don't have organized fundamentalist political groups. If Douthat can get rid of our organized fundamentalist political groups, maybe then we can talk. Absolute best case scenario, if most pro-life activists and politicians weren't also anti-tax movement conservatives, it might be possible to find some common ground on social services; but slim fucking odds on that too.

3. Where is my NYT column? I could clearly do a hell of a lot better than their current line-up. I'm even willing to frequently mention Aristotle and virtue, too, if it makes me seem conservative and thus acceptable.

Update: Also, of course, see hilzoy. Who not only dismantles Douthat's argument (which, let's be honest, is a little beneath her formidable skills), but also makes a fantastic statement of my first point. Only more clearly, and in one sentence: "When it's not easy to tell the exceptions from the rest, whether or not it's OK to have a rule depends on how bad it is to miss those exceptions, and how bad it is not to have a rule." (And I think the consequences of missing the exceptions are, in the case of abortion, really bad.)

how it's done

2009-06-09T14:41:00.002-04:00

This interview with Barney Frank has got to be one of the best examples of how to respond to leading questions I've ever seen. The man is a bulldog: every time the interviewer tries to get him to broaden his claim that Scalia is a homophobe to a claim that people who oppose same-sex marriage are homophobes, he returns to his original point and explains why it's not the one the interviewer is attributing to him.

It's old news, obviously - I wrote something about it ages ago, and was reminded of it when I saw GQ's interview with Frank. He does the same thing: the reporter asks why bonuses and pay on Wall St are back up, Frank explains that although he'd prefer they stayed low that's not how the system works, and the reporter pushes him, saying it's a crappy way for the system to work. Frank says,

"I have to have one rule: If you want me to explain something, and if you’re gonna assume that when I explain it I support it, then I can’t explain it to you."

The other thing he does is that when he decides what he's saying, he sticks to it. If the reporter kept pushing him that way, I have no doubt that Frank would have said, hey, I'm not talking about this any more. He has near-perfect control over whatever message he's putting out. It's a hard skill to master.

the perils of data

2009-06-08T04:30:00.000-04:00

When this article ran in the NYT magazine, several months ago, I had a whole post planned out about one particular thread. Joe Nocera describes the evolution of Value at Risk - VaR - which was a system JPMorgan developed for measuring risk. It became the financial industry standard for measuring risk for a number of reasons: it gave a single number for the primary riskiness, JPMorgan developed it and then gave it away, and it gave bank regulators a simple thing to look at to figure out if banks were taking on too much risk.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that there's a whole set of events out beyond the 99% of normal variation that VaR covered which, over time, became very significant; there were also several critiques of Nocera's article which pointed out that VaR assumed that prices essentially varied randomly, and couldn't account for real-world events that affected risk. I've lost the links to those articles, or I'd link to them - they were by actual economists who actually know things.

But here's what's more interesting to me than the near-collapse of the financial system: it's a problem that Nocera does cover, by summarizing what Till Guldimann, a former JPMorgan banker involved in creating VaR, told him:

"The big problem was that it turned out that VaR could be gamed. That is what happened when banks began reporting their VaRs. To motivate managers, the banks began to compensate them not just for making big profits but also for making profits with low risks. That sounds good in principle, but managers began to manipulate the VaR by loading up on what Guldimann calls 'asymmetric risk positions.' These are products or contracts that, in general, generate small gains and very rarely have losses. But when they do have losses, they are huge. These positions made a manager’s VaR look good because VaR ignored the slim likelihood of giant losses, which could only come about in the event of a true catastrophe."

In other words, the people who created the policy environment built incentive structures around a particular data point. So the people operating in the policy environment privileged that data point over all others. Turns out that credit default swaps look very good in a VaR model; turns out they also create huge systemic risks by entangling many financial actors into any particular problem.

Can anyone think of any other time this has happened? Like maybe in higher education, with a set of rankings? Or how about in K-12 education? Oh that's right, it's called "accountability." It's what NCLB would be doing, if it had more teeth.

We live in an age where people are very interested in data, and in a lot of ways that's great. We should try to figure out how to measure things: the same NYT article mentions a situation in which a recurring data point tripped some managers' attention at Goldman Sachs, and as a result they met, discussed the mortgage market, and decided to take on less risk. That's a good use of data. But blindly privileging any particular data point will leave any system vulnerable to being gamed. I guarantee you that there are schools out there that are figuring out how to game - not cheat, but game - the testing system. Some of those schools are also doing a good job on other things; others are focusing on specific tests, at a real cost to their students. My school tried to game the test by setting up a special academy for students they thought might make 'proficient,' and having higher behavior and academic standards for that academy. It may or may not have helped those students; it certainly didn't help anyone else.

The same thing is happening with Clemson University in the Inside Higher Ed article: some of the reforms they're making are good for their students, others are attempts to game the system, but none of them proceed from an honest evaluation of what would make Clemson a better university. It's schmality instead of quality, and I wish the data evangelists would be honest about the way a laser-like focus on data makes the pursuit of schmality worse.

Christianity and war

2009-06-05T12:02:00.002-04:00

I know there are at least two people who read this blog who actually know stuff about Christianity, and I'm wondering if you (or other people! people I don't know!) could help me with something I find confusing. I've read the New Testament, and I know a little about the early history of the Christian church, but I know more or less nothing about more recent theology. Jesus is very clear in the New Testament, mostly. "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also." (from Luke, and also from Matthew.) He hangs out with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors, and I don't remember a single instance in which he does anything violent (though I'm ready to be corrected on this). There's some talk of how God will judge people, but really nothing about how anyone should carry out that judgment now, and in fact various injunctions against judging, more or less on the concept that it's God's job to do that and we're not God. At least that's how I remember it, from my New Testament class seven years ago.

So obviously Tiller's murder raises some questions for me, but so do the Crusades and pretty much every war that any Christian organization has blessed or waged. What's up with that? How do Christian theologians justify war and retribution? There's plenty of bloodthirsty behavior in the Old Testament, so I can see where Jews are getting it. I know basically nothing about Muslim theology, but it does seem like there's not the same crazy pacifism in Muslim tradition. I mean, it seems like it's mostly a situation of "people will be people, no matter what the scriptures actually say," but I do wonder how the people who claim to buy into that scripture then square it with their own desires for violence and retribution. Especially if there are people who grapple with it in a serious and honest way.

what I've been reading (abortion edition)

2009-06-04T10:05:00.000-04:00

One more thing about late-term abortions: people tend to sneer at mental health reasons for abortion. They think that means "I'd rather not have a baby." I tend to think that these people have never met anyone suffering from mental health difficulties - or at least have never known what it meant. Being suicidal is a direct threat to a person's life. Depression is not the same as being kind of unhappy, and I can't imagine anyone who has known someone suffering from depression who would then think it wasn't a big deal to inflict that on someone else. And adoption is not a simple solution. The outcomes for women who relinquish children for adoption are BAD. Lots of suicidal ideation, lots of depression, feelings of grief which are often more intense and persistent than the grief of women whose children have died. A teen-ager who is suicidal about her pregnancy is someone with a life-threatening mental health condition which can be resolved by abortion. I would hope that even people who don't believe she should get that care would understand and accept the seriousness of what they're asking.

I've been reading a lot the last few days. Some of it:

Dr. Tiller was a remarkable person

Violence and rhetoric:
One anti-choice activist from Kansas, and another who's given it up. Plus one more ex-anti-choice activist. Ellen Goodman and m. leblanc. Sara Robinson ties the murder - appropriately, I think - to other far-right organizations.

More about late-term abortion
Helping teenagers navigate the system. Two stories from Andrew Sullivan.

Hilzoy posts stories about Tiller's work and a description of how Operation Rescue harassed Tiller's staff. She proposes legal changes that would make us all safer, and argues with Megan McArdle about whether this sort of thing is justifiable, if you are sufficiently opposed to abortion (and there's a second part, also very much worth reading). Also: the logical consequences of suspending civil rights.

Anne Lamott talks about her abortion.

George Tiller

2009-06-01T17:33:00.007-04:00

I'm a lot angrier about George Tiller's death than I would have expected, and I think it has to do with the way my thinking about abortion has changed over the last few years.

I don't think abortion should be legally restricted. Pretty much at all, with the exception of the same kinds of ordinary, minor restrictions we have on all medical procedures. I don't really understand how people can argue that a woman should be legally compelled to donate her uterus to another human being when they wouldn't argue that she should be legally compelled to donate her kidney once that child is born. I mostly have minimal respect for the arguments for criminalization, or rather for the people who make those arguments, because they're so tremendously unwilling to support measures that actually reduce the number of abortions, like contraceptive access and a social welfare net. I heard a woman on Radio Times recently describing her experience bearing a disabled child while she was a member of a very active evangelical church - she and her husband felt completely abandoned by her church, which in her view had a commitment to children which ended at birth. She was furious that the same politicians who vote to restrict abortion also vote to gut funding for health and education of already born children. That's par for the course with anti-choice politicians. (I'm especially disgusted by anyone who thinks it's relevant how someone got pregnant. Pregnancy and childbirth are the ways another human being is created, and human beings shouldn't be turned into punishments or consequences for having sex. It'd be a terrible way to treat a child. See m. leblanc's comments in this thread for more.)

But what I really don't understand is the particular discomfort with third-trimester abortions. No one wants to have a third-trimester abortion. There are about 100 third-trimester abortions a year in the US, and I would be astonished if any of them are elective. The second trimester is different. Women end up getting pushed into the second trimester because they're having trouble coming up with the money for an abortion, or because they're trying to work out a way to raise the child that falls through, or because they don't realize they're pregnant. But very few women don't realize they're pregnant for 6 months (those who do are often children - 9, 10, 11 - who had been raped, had never menstruated, and learned they had ovulated for the first time when they suddenly realize they are very pregnant). Third trimester abortions are so difficult and expensive to arrange that it takes something pretty serious for a woman to make that particular decision. Something like finding out that her child is developing with no face, and will die shortly after birth regardless. That she is carrying conjoined twins, one of whom might be saved for a short life of surgery and organ transplants. Something like learning that her pregnancy has a good chance of killing both her and the baby, or that giving birth to a doomed child would jeopardize her ability to ever have another child. There are problems that develop or show for the first time late in pregnancy, and George Tiller's willingness to perform late-term abortions at a risk to his safety and his life helped these women in desperate situations. Not only that, but it sounds like he did so with tremendous care and kindness to each woman helped: one person says, "I remember he spent over six hours in one-on-one care with my wife when there was concern she had an infection. We're talking about a physician here. Six hours." (That link, by the way, is really worth following if you want a sense of what kind of doctor he was.)

There are a few people - mostly the sort of "consistent ethic of life" Catholics who also work very hard against the death penalty, war, and poverty, and routinely get themselves arrested protesting on military bases - who oppose intervening in such cases because they believe it devalues human life, and that in such cases a woman's moral responsibility is still to do her best to allow that life to continue. It's not my own moral view, but I can respect it, especially since the people I've known who espouse it vigorously tend to have turned over their own lives to fighting injustice and violence. But I bet that most people who read the stories of Tiller's late-term abortion patients will think that these are people who did the best they could in terrible situations; that Tiller really, truly, helped them; and that should they ever find themselves in a similar situation, they would want to have that option. I would hope that even people who oppose abortion - even "consistent ethic of life" Catholics - could have sympathy for the women who have late-term abortions, and see that actually these are the absolute last situations we should try to make more difficult. Protesting Tiller's clinic, harassing his staff, and murdering him look to me like pretty low-yield ways to end exactly the kinds of abortions that, when you really know the stories in question, seem like some of the hardest to really be angry about.

This is without even mentioning the fact that if all obstetricians knew how to perform late-term abortions, women whose fetuses die in utero would not have to spend days risking hemorrhage while they carry around a dead fetus because no one within a distance they can travel knows how to safely remove the fetus.

I think my anger about Tiller's death, like my increasing anger that women constantly find their own reproductive decisions (from contraception to pregnancy to childbirth) interfered with and denied, has to do with my increasing realization that this is the kind of thing that could affect me. I know that six women I know - in my and my parents' generation - have had abortions; I'm sure there are many more. I'm not likely these days to get pregnant accidentally, but if I do want to have kids I don't want to find that, thanks to a bunch of white men desperate to hold on to their own power, I can't get health care in an emergency.

If you're in Philadelphia, come to the Love Park rally even though it's raining.

p.s. go read everything at Bitch, Ph.D., and Obsidian Wings about Tiller and abortion. I'll put together some abortion-related links soon, too.

do your job

2009-05-27T22:04:00.003-04:00

Remember being a pain-in-the-ass teen-ager? Remember thinking something was unfair at your high school, and making a fuss about it? Remember the minor thrill of rebelling for what you thought was a good cause, and pissing off your parents and teachers in the name of progress?

Feeling good about being confrontational like that is one of the great rewards of being a teen-ager. These kids in Georgia, with their segregated prom that they all go to, won't have it. Especially the white kids. It's their job. They could decide, en masse, at the provocation of one popular but socially conscious kid, that they won't go to the white prom. The hell with the prom dress, or the limo, or whatever else it is your parents pay for that makes prom night so special. This is the chance to poke a stick in the eye of your whole town, and do it for a really good reason, and maybe even get some national media attention. I got no respect for the white kids who just go along with the segregated prom. It'd only take one year to get rid of it forever, and it'd be a little nerve-wracking, but it'd be really fun, and you'd be the kids who got rid of the segregated prom.

That's your job, teen-agers. Get out there and do it.

(with acknowledgments to the Gardener, who brought up this point, and who went to her high school prom with a girl before she was gay.)

what are you going to do with that self-control?

2009-05-14T10:23:00.004-04:00

I like this New Yorker article about self-control and meta-cognition, both of which are things I think about a lot (why am I able to delay just about anything, but sometimes totally unable to start things, like the report I should be working on right now?). They're also both trendy education research topics - see the typically ill-informed David Brooks piece on the Harlem Children's Zone, which provides a simple, elegant summary of why people worry about this: "The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values." The article in the New Yorker is about how self-control works (via the directed use of attention), how it affects the rest of your life (by making it easier to study, save for retirement, etc), and how people can learn it (by practicing the directed use of attention).

Which actually mostly reminds me of a conversation I had with Stupendous Fish and the Gardener two weeks ago over a lovely steak dinner. We were talking about cause and effect, and how there's actually a fairly narrow window in early childhood when you learn, easily, how cause and effect works. It's the period described in the Baby Scientists episode on This American Life. If you don't learn it then, you have to painstakingly assemble an understanding of it later in life. A lot of the students I worked with in wilderness therapy lacked this understanding, and as a result kept making the same decisions (just a little cocaine, run away from home, sleep with someone when you don't want to, skip school today) despite their dislike for the consequences of those decisions. Someone who understands cause and effect at an intuitive level is eventually going to realize that the way to avoid those negative consequences - fights with parents, arrests, drug addiction - is to stop choosing the things that create those consequences, and the kids who made that basic connection tended to do much better much faster. They'd gotten trapped in a pattern they didn't like, but as soon as they got some distance they could identify the pattern and start making different decisions.

One of the most common reasons that kids miss out on developing that understanding is that they're being abused in some way. One key feature of abuse is that it's illogical - that you are praised or punished or criticized or loved not because of anything you did or didn't do, but because your parent (or whoever) is in a good or bad mood at that particular moment. I once had a boss like that, who would respond to the same exact piece of work totally differently depending on how he felt, and it made me crazy. I hated him, and I quit as soon as I could afford to; there was another person working there who had the opposite reaction, constantly trying to please him and feeling terrible about herself because she couldn't. It was a miserable workplace. Anyway: that kind of abuse doesn't usually wreck an adult's view of the world, but when you're 3 it totally prevents you from learning that your actions can affect what happens to you; that meta-cognition is actually worth doing.

And this is, in my view, one of the weak spots in the New Yorker article about self-control - and from what I can tell, in the underlying research. In order to control yourself, you have to think it's worth doing. Part of that comes from the home environment, of course. But my guess is that economic instability can also affect how you see delayed gratification. The researcher in the story, Walter Mischel, describes testing delayed gratification with kids in Trinidad by offering them a small chocolate bar now, or a much larger bar in a few days; later, he tested kids in Palo Alto by offering them one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows when he came back. It struck me that kids raised in an unstable economic situation might rationally believe that the much larger chocolate bar - or even the second marshmallow - would never materialize. And with a several day lag, they might be right. Maybe Walter Mischel would have a family emergency and have to return to the US; maybe the kid would for some reason not be able to come to school (or wherever the testing location was) that day. No chocolate for you! Inner-city schools are, honestly, often so disorganized that promised rewards and punishments never materialize; part of what the KIPP schools are doing is not just encouraging students to delay gratification, but establishing an environment in which it is rational to delay gratification because you will actually get the reward later on.

The same thing is true for high school students who can see cause and effect - they're not damaged that way - but don't rationally believe that they'll get the rewards of knuckling down and doing the schoolwork. And why should they? They are surrounded by people who have not been economically successful, and the people they know who are successful are not usually that way because of their academic success. Part of reconnecting that logic has to be making sure that it observably, demonstrably makes sense for a kid to delay gratification, to play by the rules, to work hard in order to get somewhere. The somewhere has to be there. That it's not, for some students, is the hard legacy of institutional racism, and the reason that teaching kids self-control - helpful as it is in a sane, well-organized school - isn't enough to create equality of opportunity.

pedantry and pet peeves

2009-05-02T12:08:00.003-04:00

You cannot tow a line. Where would you tow it to? Rather, you must TOE the line.

You may give someone his or her due, but not his or her do. Unless you are a hairdresser.

Please commiserate with me, and consider posting the usages that make you crazy. Unless you're one of those damn kids who plays the rock music too loud. In that case, get off my lawn.

dear internet

2009-04-24T14:55:00.002-04:00

Today has been great so far. I have biked downtown, done small amounts of paid work, eaten soft pretzels and gelato, drunk espresso, done more paid work, biked to the south side of town, drunk two blood-orange margaritas outside, eaten some nachos, and biked to my girlfriend's office to wait for her to be done with work. Then we will bike home together.

IT'S SPRING!!! Could I be any more excited?

something short about education

2009-04-22T18:04:00.004-04:00

The Economix blog at the NYT recently posted, describing the comparative inefficiency of the US educational system. Which, if you look at the graph, is true. But it's more complicated than that. (I posted a chunk of this as a comment on that blog.)

Two major issues: spending per student in the US is in fact very split between wealthy and poor districts. Philadelphia spends $11,000 per student per year, almost $10,000 less than nearby Lower Merion, and is constantly short of funds. Not that there isn’t waste in Philly’s system, but money certainly isn’t easy to come by for teachers.

Second, the other countries which do well tend to have strong, generous social support networks. My guess (as a former teacher) is that schools there don’t have to provide health care, counseling, food, etc to students who have trouble getting them at home. One huge difference between my experience going to school and my experience teaching was that, by and large, the kids I went to school with got glasses when they needed them, and if they fell way behind in reading or math, their parents noticed (were equipped to notice by their own educational success) and got them tutoring or other assistance (because they had either time or money with which to provide those things).

There are still huge problems within our educational system that are matters of educational policy rather than social policy more broadly defined: we lack a unified set of national standards, the standards we do have (especially in math, though this may also be true in other subjects where I know the debates less well) are less rigorous and more connected to rote memorization than the standards in other countries, and teachers have far less prep and development time than teachers in, for example, Japan.

I’m routinely astonished, though, by the number of non-educators (and sometimes educators) who think that failing students is somehow the key. This always, always comes up in comments on articles about education, and usually some version of this will also come up in a professional development workshop. Yes, students need accountability, and yes, it makes your job a lot harder when students don't know the earlier material. But making them repeat the same material in the same context without additional supports doesn’t help - it just leads to a bored, frustrated kid who thinks he or she has already learned this (and has, in the sense of having sat in a classroom while it was being taught). The evidence also just doesn't support a claim that making students repeat a grade improves their achievement - mostly it makes them more likely to drop out, and lowers over-all achievement. You can’t just keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

I still like the Iowa Supreme Court

2009-04-13T08:56:00.002-04:00

In Iowa, as in California but not Massachusetts, Supreme Court justices face retention elections periodically - every 8 years in Iowa, every 12 years in California. This means that a justice who supported Varnum v. Brien, the same-sex marriage decision, is taking some actual risk that there will be an organized campaign to boot him or her. Per Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, support for same-sex marriage is increasing about 2 points a year. Nate's model claims that Iowans will vote for same-sex marriage in 2013. (Electoral outcomes would presumably be more positive for "a justice who supports same-sex marriage among other qualities" than "same-sex marriage," but if you know something about public opinion that contradicts this, you should feel free to jump in.) You might thus predict that the further away a justice's retention election, the easier it would be for that justice to support Varnum v. Brien. In fact, of the seven justices who unanimously voted for the decision, three have retention elections in 2010, including one who was only appointed in 2008. That suggests they were willing to risk their own positions on the court for same-sex marriage, which I just find very endearing. And brave.

Iowa rules, your state drools

2009-04-03T11:29:00.005-04:00

Unless your state is Massachusetts or Connecticut.

"In a unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court today held that the Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution."

The decision itself (PDF) is lovely. From the background facts:

"This lawsuit is a civil rights action by twelve individuals who reside in six communities across Iowa. Like most Iowans, they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals. They maintain important jobs, or are retired, and are contributing, benevolent members of their communities. They include a nurse, business manager, insurance analyst, bank agent, stay-at-home parent, church organist and piano teacher, museum director, federal employee, social worker, teacher, and two retired teachers. Like many Iowans, some have children and others hope to have children. Some are foster parents. Like all Iowans, they prize their liberties and live within the borders of this state with the expectation that their rights will be maintained and protected—a belief embraced by our state motto. Despite the commonality shared with other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs are different from most in one way. They are sexually and romantically attracted to members of their own sex. The twelve plaintiffs comprise six same-sex couples who live in committed relationships. Each maintains a hope of getting married one day, an aspiration shared by many throughout Iowa.

"Unlike opposite-sex couples in Iowa, same-sex couples are not permitted to marry in Iowa. The Iowa legislature amended the marriage statute in 1998 to define marriage as a union between only a man and a woman. Despite this law, the six same-sex couples in this litigation asked the Polk County recorder to issue marriage licenses to them. The recorder, following the law, refused to issue the licenses, and the six couples have been unable to be married in this state. Except for the statutory restriction that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, the twelve plaintiffs met the legal requirements to marry in Iowa.

"As other Iowans have done in the past when faced with the enforcement of a law that prohibits them from engaging in an activity or achieving a status enjoyed by other Iowans, the twelve plaintiffs turned to the courts to challenge the statute. They seek to declare the marriage statute unconstitutional so they can obtain the array of benefits of marriage enjoyed by heterosexual couples, protect themselves and their children, and demonstrate to one another and to society their mutual commitment."

I love the rhetorical trick of describing plaintiffs in terms of their similarities to other (hypothetical and semi-mythologized) Iowans, a trick which of course tells you where the decision is going. And in fact, there it goes, after pausing to take stock of the evidence related to child-raising in same-sex households, the diversity of religious views on same-sex marriage, and the claim that gay and lesbian people can get married (to someone they're not interested in marrying): "The language in Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman must be stricken from the statute, and the remaining statutory language must be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage."

Nice work, Iowa Supreme Court.

p.s. I totally had a new media moment this morning: I knew the decision was due out at 8:30 and there was nothing on the Des Moines Register homepage, but there was a hash tag (#iagaymarriage) to search twitter with. So I sat around refreshing the twitter search until someone at the courthouse found out what the decision said, and twittered it. Nice work, new media.

identity politics

2009-03-31T09:30:00.002-04:00

Ezra Klein just wrote a piece arguing that we should ensure that food prices reflect the various externalities (health, environmental, etc) so that consumers can make good choices. It's a policy concept I definitely favor, but I still hated the piece. Why? Because the thrust of his argument is that "[a]t the end of the day, the best information a consumer has is always the price of a good." That, in fact, we are consumers first, and that it makes little sense to ask people to think about food in any way other than as a commodity. This is a philosophy of human identity that I hate, that feeds into the sense that our lives are and should be primarily oriented around a marketplace rather than around relationships or ideas or values. It's capitalism as identity. One lovely aspect of the food movement - and especially about local food from farmers we can meet - is that it gets people to think about the whole web of interactions that happen when you buy a half-gallon of milk or a chicken sausage or a basket of potatoes, and to see those as not simply a matter of exchanging cash for commodities. I find it pretty condescending for Ezra to claim that people (presumably people other than him and other foodies) just can't understand those connections and thus have to be told what to buy via price, and that there's no hope for moving in a different direction. And yes. Yes I realize that the anti-commodity food movement is often very elitist, but it doesn't have to be; and I think living in Philadelphia, where local food is much more practical and accessible has helped me realize that.

Changing price signals is great policy, but it's crap philosophy.

the cost of self-righteousness

2009-03-25T20:00:00.004-04:00

Read this post of Ta-Nehisi's about the costs of being tough on crime.

"This is more than theory for me. Ten years ago, my college friend Prince Jones was followed by a cop from Prince George's county Maryland, into the District, and out into the suburbs of Virginia, where he was going to see his young daughter and girlfriend. The police officer was allegedly looking for a drug dealer--a short man with long dreads. Prince was about 6'3 and wore a low caesar. The officer and Prince ended up in a confrontation, merely yards away from the home of Prince's girlfriend. He produced no badge, just a gun and a claim that he was a cop. Prince didn't believe him (and without a badge, I wouldn't have either) and rammed the guy's car. The cop shot Prince eight times, killing him.

...

"Despite a botched operation, that spanned three jurisdictions, and resulted in the death of an innocent man, and orphaned a girl who will have no memories of her father, the officer was neither prosecuted, nor bounced off the force."

1 in 100 adult Americans in jail. 1 in 31 adults under correctional control. 1 in 11 black adults. Those are not trivial costs, and they speak only to those directly legally sanctioned. Those legal sanctions have a corrosive effect on the willingness of African-Americans (and anyone disproportionately affected by them) to trust the criminal justice system, but Ta-Nehisi's friend was the child of a radiologist, a college student, someone who might have been expected to escape those costs. Because of his color, he did not. When people talk about the "success" of the war on drugs, those costs - and who pays them - deserve to be remembered.

with minimal comment

2009-03-20T23:07:00.006-04:00

Hilzoy is right. As usual.

A couple of years ago, it would have been hyperbole to suggest that we would all be better off if the senior executives at all our major financial firms were people picked entirely at random out of the phone book. Now, it's arguably true. People picked at random would, admittedly, be likely not to have been to business school. They might not know a lot about futures or derivatives or put options. But so what? At least they might have been more likely to know that they were clueless, and a few of them might have had the common sense to ask questions like: will housing prices really go up indefinitely?

In any case, what's the worst they could have done? Bankrupted their companies with ludicrously risky gambles that fell apart once markets went south? Destroyed trillions of dollars in value? Brought the world financial system to the brink of collapse? Left taxpayers across the globe on the hook for trillions of dollars? Bankrupted entire countries?

Oh, right.

"Getting it" means understanding that the entire story that some people on Wall Street have told themselves about why they got such obscene levels of compensation is false. As a group, they were not uniquely talented. They did not make a lot more money for their company than they earned, at least not in the long run. Their salaries were not fair compensation for the value they produced. It would not have been worse if they had been replaced by people chosen at random.

And really? We would probably still be better off, because at least people picked at random out of a phone book wouldn't have highly negotiated contracts allowing them to loot their companies - which are not in bankruptcy today only because we, the people who pay taxes, gave them billions of dollars - via bonuses, insider trades, etc. I read something a while ago, maybe the article I linked to about how hard it is to live on half a million in Manhattan, in which a banker argued that if he creates $30 million in value for a company, he should get a chunk of that. Which I'm all for, as long as he shares the risk when things go badly. If you are responsible for the good times, you've got to take responsibility for the bad times; and no one arguing on Wall Street's side in the media has given the slightest indication that they realize that. (This is also why I find James Kwak's argument that we should blame Greenspan so compelling.)

economic crisis perspective

2009-03-19T12:48:00.001-04:00

Yikes.

Discuss.

symbolic regulation

2009-03-14T21:28:00.004-04:00

Let's talk about raw milk and regulation. I drink raw milk. I buy it at one of two retail outlets; there are three brands available in Philadelphia, one from each of three very small farms that raise three different heritage breeds of dairy cattle. It's totally delicious. I stopped having cereal with milk years ago because I felt like the milk had a weird aftertaste; raw milk doesn't have it. The Gardener also finds it much easier to digest than pasteurized milk. I also feel pretty good about the food safety of raw milk. In Pennsylvania, raw milk is licensed, inspected, and regularly tested for contamination; more importantly, the farmers treat their reputation like gold. One of them recently recalled its weeks' production because they found bacteria (listeria or campylobacter, I don't remember which) somewhere in the bottling facility. Not in the milk, and no one got sick, but they recalled it immediately. Their relationship with their retail outlets and customers is direct and traceable, and unlike the Peanut Corporation of America, if there is so much as a breath that one of those farms isn't careful, they'll lose customers. The retail outlets will stop ordering, and the customers will stop buying. They are certainly far more careful than basically any large-scale dairy, and the testing they do is more comprehensive.

All of which makes me really annoyed with most parties in the article linked above, which talks about an E. coli outbreak in Connecticut linked to raw milk, and the new regulations the state is planning: namely, raw milk will be restricted to on farm and farmers' market sales. Now. That's the law in most states, actually. And it's certainly sad that several children got quite sick, and may have long-term kidney damage. (Although, ok, one of those kids got E. coli from another kid, which means she was interacting with that other kid's poop, so it's hard for me to see raw milk as the primary health issue; and the other parent was all, "I didn't know raw milk could have any health problems ever," which made me a little irritated with how she totally missed the part in middle school science where everyone talks about Louis Pasteur and the germ theory of disease.) But requiring that sales be made directly by the farmer will do nothing whatsoever for public health, unless you believe that raw milk is intrinsically a health threat and reducing its consumption is in and of itself good for public health. It's symbolic: hey, it's sad that kids got sick! Let's do something! When a better option would be to think about whether Connecticut does have adequate testing and inspection. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that since PA makes you test twice a month, and CT doesn't seem to make you test even once a month, there's some room for actually useful changes in there.

(Apparently the state did consider such a bill, but since it required farmers to pay more, it got nowhere. Which makes me wonder: isn't there a compromise? Don't Connecticut's raw dairy farmers want to have evidence that their dairies are safe? Testing and permitting, done right, are really good for the credibility and safety of raw milk. They're apparently trying to raise funding for monthly testing via a non-profit, but having it be state-mandated really does improve credibility, because it helps prevent situations like this one in which a single farm's problem becomes an issue for every raw dairy in the state.)

so classic! and so wrong!

2009-03-13T11:47:00.005-04:00

Most important, it would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

There's so much wrong with this as a statement of policy that I don't even know where to start. You know who wrote it, right? David Brooks. Who seems to believe that emotional bonds with students are both the real measure of success in teaching, and that they can easily be measured using standardized tests. Honestly, there are a lot of people who believe both of these things. They're all wrong.

Meaningful, personal relationships with students are great. They were and are the lifeblood of any success I ever had as a teacher, in no small part because they were by far the most rewarding part of teaching and I would never have lasted without them. I still run into my students occasionally - on the trolley, on Facebook, and outside the deli by my house - and the ones I see, for some reason, are students I had a real relationship with. Every so often I get a phone call or an email. I love knowing how my students are, and sometimes they tell me that my role meant something. But - and I know this is true - this is only one of the many ways to be a good teacher, and it is not enough. I knew plenty of teachers who had real relationships with their students, who did not treat them like cattle to be processed, and who nevertheless did not expect their students to do well academically and were unable to get them to do so. In fact, there were plenty of my students - the students of someone who unambiguously cared about her students, and tried to have meaningful relationships with them - who for various reasons, didn't learn that much in my class. For some of those kids, I know why: untreated mental illness, chaotic life situations, illiteracy, a rational calculation that summer school would be less work. For others, I don't. There were kids with whom I had real connections who didn't learn much.

While I didn't have kids who couldn't connect, but nevertheless learned, those kids - and those teachers - exist. It's a different teaching style, and while it's unlikely to help a kid supersede crazy obstacles outside of school, that impersonal quality can be its own powerful center for a classroom culture. I had plenty of teachers like that in high school, and some of them were excellent: they devoted tremendous attention to planning their lessons, communicating material, and offering academic feedback, with minimal interest in your personal affairs. In some situations, this is a great teaching method, though I'm not surprised that David Brooks, decades from any personal experience as a teacher or student, can't remember the value of these teachers. I will agree that many students need to have a few teachers who develop a personal connection and use that to motivate that individual student, and that students from unstable home situations can especially benefit from that kind of mentoring, but it is nevertheless not the only valuable teaching method.

Brooks's worst mistake is to claim that merit pay will reward caring teachers over impersonal ones. The obstacles to implementing merit pay are enormous: most systems give good teachers even more incentive to find a well-run, high-performing school serving students with stable home resources, and even less incentive to work with the most difficult students. At any given school, the obsessive focus on standardized test scores takes time: teachers who are interested in how their students will do on standardized tests, and thus what their merit pay will look like, need to teach lessons focused on standardized tests, research the standards, grade practice tests, etc. None of those things involve real connection with students. And real connection with students will continue to go unrewarded, because it is remarkably difficult to measure, and in and of itself not sufficient.

It's no surprise that David Brooks is incoherent, and the rest of the article (where he tries to talk about policy) is worse. But this tiny example - one sentence in one column - seems extraordinarily apt to me as a representation of just how poorly thought out his views on education are.

(I should probably leave this alone, but I just can't:

Democrats in Congress just killed an experiment that gives 1,700 poor Washington kids school vouchers. They even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the program, so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends. The idea was to cause maximum suffering, and 58 Senators voted for it.

There is practically no evidence that vouchers work. They do not provide adequate funding for most students to attend wealthy, fancy private schools, and they disproportionately benefit students with well-organized, stable family situations who are in the best position to take advantage of it. Plus, vouchers are expensive. I'm not deeply opposed to grandfathering in students who already have vouchers, but it's fucking irresponsible for David Brooks to talk about it this way. Education is complicated, and there's a lot of real information out there. He needs to shut up til he understands it.)

shockingly similar to us!

2009-03-09T10:05:00.002-04:00

So apparently, if you want medical care in Romania, you need to pay bribes - to the doctor, the medical orderly, the nurse, etc. And the New York Times runs an article about this SHOCKING practice, and how the low salaries Romanian doctors make contribute to its prevalence, and includes the usual array of horror stories about people being denied care.

Because that would never happen in the US. Not to that kid who died of sepsis because no one would fix his abscessed tooth, not to someone with kidney failure whose sister is a health policy advocate, not to THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of uninsured and underinsured people IN THE UNITED STATES who can't afford the preventive care they need and therefore get worse or die. Not to African Americans in Mississippi, who have an infant mortality rate about the same as that in Sri Lanka, Albania, and Colombia.

Seriously, what are they smoking? Yeah, there are some differences between not getting care unless you can bribe medical providers and not getting care unless you can pay medical providers (some gain in transparency, and some ability to subsidize care for people who can't afford ~~bribes~~ payments), but to get all high and mighty about this terrible terrible problem when it's not that different from what's happening ALL AROUND THEM?

(Sorry for all the caps. They, ah, express my sentiments toward the health care system.)

clusterfuck

2009-03-04T10:27:00.002-05:00

Well, I guess we're not moving to Iceland. Contra the previous plan.

Actually, that story mostly tells me that I don't want to invest money in stocks or corporations. Don't worry, Iceland. We're still cool.

lazy writing for the digital age

2009-02-25T12:08:00.004-05:00

Memo to writers: Beginning any piece of writing with, "Webster's Dictionary defines [my subject] as ...." has long been recognized as poor form. It is just as lazy to begin with, "Typing [my subject] into Google returns [large number of] hits." Especially if your subject can be expressed in a few rather common words.

Memo to users of statistics: Any "online poll" is utterly meaningless, unless it is simply a normal poll that has happened to use a web interface.

Memo to editors: These problems? It's your job to keep them out of print.

ocd

2009-02-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

I don't know where I'll be going to grad school, but now that I know I'll be going I've started focusing on the insignificant details that I actually have some control over. So when we move, we're going to box everything up, stick it in a storage space, go on a road trip for two months, and then I'll come back (by plane if necessary) and either load it on Amtrak (for a cross-country move) or a U-Haul (for an East Coast move).

I swear I have actually called Amtrak to get shipping rates to both places I might end up going. I still don't know when I'm going to choose or how I'll begin to decide between someplace pretty where I'll be happier and have more friends and someplace cold with crazy-awesome professional options, but I know how I'm going to get there.

This is what happens when you have to have control over something. You find the little tiny thing four months out that you can control, and obsess over it instead of the huge giant thing you need to figure out in the next six weeks.

Also? Boy does moving suck.

ethical dilemma

2009-02-07T09:31:00.003-05:00

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that there's someone who is a public advocate on a particular subject, and is relatively well known for his or her advocacy. You happen to know that this writer/speaker/agency director/political candidate's behavior in his or her private life is dramatically at odds with his or her advocacy positions. We're not talking, "Leaves the lights on in the other room while writing about environmentalism," we're talking, "Owns four Hummers and has trophy heads from endangered species on his or her wall." Or, writes movingly about the importance of preventing child abuse, but has broken his or her own child's arm several times. You have this information, and you are also pretty sure you could contact someone who is integrally involved in facilitating this person's further advocacy, whom you reasonably believe would find this person's private behavior appalling, and whom you also reasonably believe might take steps to alter this person's public role given new information. What is your responsibility? Do you have an obligation to offer that information? To keep your mouth shut and not damage someone else's life? Does it vary depending on the severity of the infraction and the importance of the person's position?

I haven't been able to get a handle on this at all. So any thoughts you have, I'd like to hear.

anti-feminist round-up

2009-01-29T12:03:00.005-05:00

1. Dick Armey explains: the only reason to listen to a woman is so she'll have sex with you.

(via Bitch, Ph.D.)

2. Also: gross. And not that free from the scrutiny of feminists. You're on the internet, for crying out loud.

3. Question of the day: if ultra-right-wing Christian teen-agers think saddlebacking doesn't ruin their purity, what about fisting? Or dildos?

I mean

2009-01-27T09:30:00.002-05:00

yes, Beyonce's "Single Ladies" "celebrates the oppressive power dynamic that exists between men and women, while simultaneously trying to imply that women can utilize the subordinate position in a heterosexual romantic relationship to empower themselves." That is undeniably true.

Also true: the video is based on Bob Fosse choreography, which is kind of amazing. And it's a great fucking dance song, especially if you happen to encounter it at a queer dance party. Nothing quite like dancing to oppressive heteronormativity in a bubble tea restaurant/bar crammed with dykes. Actually, there's another opportunity to do that this weekend, for those who live around here.

still cooking

2009-01-18T18:39:00.004-05:00

Still not writing. Instead, experimenting with desserts. It's "would you still love me?" week at my house for baking. What if I add too much of something? Or don't have a particular ingredient at all? Will I still be a worthwhile person and will the recipe work out and how is this related to me getting into grad school? So far all the desserts have turned out fine, and no one has disowned me for fucking them up. Maybe I'll get into grad school after all.

Two weeks ago I made the Cook's Illustrated coconut cream pie with bananas and caramel on the bottom. The recipe has a lot of moving parts, which kept hitting me over the head like the workshop tools in the Pirates of the Caribbean fight scene. I bought the crust, because last time I made a graham cracker crust it was more like graham cracker crumbs weakly coating the outside of some custard. The store-bought one held together much better. But no sooner had I heated the milk, the coconut milk, and the unsweetened coconut than I realized I didn't have enough eggs. To the co-op! Which was out of eggs! Fortunately a friend was working there: he offered me as many eggs as I needed from his own refrigerator if I'd go to his house and bring his dog back over. Great. I got to pretend I have a dog for 15 minutes while I picked up my two eggs. When I got home, I realized that I actually needed three eggs. I had to wait til the next day to make the custard, but ultimately triumphed.

The pie was awesome. The custard is good enough to be a stand-alone recipe. To convert it to banana-caramel, per the suggestion of the original recipe, I just made caramel sauce (half of the recipe lower down in this post), poured the caramel into the crust, sprinkled in some toasted coconut, sliced up a banana and arranged it on the caramel, and then added the custard. I did not top the custard with a full layer of whipped cream, because I've done that before and it dilutes the coconut flavor. Instead, just a dab of whipped cream on top. If I'd had it, I would have added black rum to the whipped cream, though vanilla is also very good with coconut.

Last night: Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread, from Smitten Kitchen, which I discovered earlier this week and love. Also delicious. I added an extra half tablespoon of ginger, a little more of the other spices, and an extra teaspoon of baking powder. That last entirely by accident. The cake completely collapsed in the middle, but its deliciousness remained, especially eaten with caramel sauce and maple-bourbon whipped cream. Use plenty of bourbon.

Speaking of caramel sauce, I don't understand why people don't make it more often. It's easy, and forgiving. This time I accidentally put the cream in before the butter, and for a while I thought I was going to end up with a floating layer of butter on top of my caramel. Fortunately, it mixed in eventually.

Caramel Sauce
1 c. sugar
5 Tbsp water
1/4 c. butter
1 c. whipping cream
salt to taste
Combine the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir. Heat gently until bubbling slightly, then turn the heat up to medium high. Let boil without stirring (original recipe says to use a wet pastry brush to get crystals off the sides - do this if you want, but all that happens if you don't is that it burns a little on the side and you need to give it more soaking and scrubbing.)

Eventually the sugar starts to caramelize. Swirl and stir it - the edges will be darker, and you want to see the combined color. When it's the color you want (I like burny dark caramel, but you can experiment) turn the heat off. Whisk in the butter, then the cream. The caramel will bubble up furiously and maybe crack a little, and the sugar will tend to form a sticky tangle. Stir over low heat until everything is smooth. Add salt and taste. You can also add vanilla or other flavorings here, though I've been wondering what would happen if I mixed the sugar with Earl Grey instead of water.

Just made chocolate-chip coconut meringues, because we had left-over egg whites, and tried science to discover the relative merits of greased-and-floured versus plain baking surfaces when you don't have parchment paper. Or cookie sheets, but all our alternatives are Pyrex. No science there. Surprise! If you grease and flour the pan, the meringues stick less.

The recipe is for Almond Rochers. We didn't have almonds, but there was a penciled note suggesting coconut and chocolate chips instead. We didn't have enough chocolate chips, so I just added some extra coconut (left over from the cream pie). They turned out beautifully: the recipe (which I'm not posting right now; maybe tomorrow) has you warm the egg whites and sugar before you beat them, and the residual heat melts the chocolate just a little, so that it's streaky instead of chunky. They make interesting stripey organic forms, kind of like less regular, flat-bottomed pollen particles. Yummy yummy allergens.

promises, promises

2009-01-16T11:21:00.006-05:00

I'm supposed to be writing about why David Brooks is wrong about education, and how Value at Risk relates to No Child Left Behind.

But I just started a new (yet remarkably non-stressful) job, and I've been traveling, and it's winter, and the Gardener is sick, so what I actually want to write about is food.

I found out last week that the awesome, famous, surprisingly unpretentious¹ beer bar in my city - which I knew to buy local when possible and to buy wind power offsets - also serves at least some meat that I'm happy to eat. I found this out by calling and asking in the middle of the afternoon, and the reaction of the person I talked to was, "Are you writing an article or something?" No, no, I just want to know for myself. What about the steak frites? The burgers? What about chicken dishes? "Is this for an article or what?" Oy. No, I am just that interested.

Also, are you sick? Is someone in your household sick? Do you need something tasty and nourishing to eat that doesn't take long to make? Consider miso-tofu-rice-greens Feel Better Soup.

Feel Better Soup for 2

1 cup rice (white, brown, short-grain, long-grain, whatever)
a little tamari
a chunk of wakame/nori/other dried seaweed (optional)
hot pepper flakes
2 cups leafy greens (chard, kale, spinach, etc), washed and cut into wide ribbons with most of the stalks removed
half a block of tofu, cut into small cubes
miso paste - I get fancy South River three-year aged barley miso, which it will not surprise you to learn I like better than Miso Master; but Miso Master (or whatever) would be fine
2-3 scallions, washed and thinly sliced
toasted sesame oil

Cook the rice like you normally cook rice.

Bring 2.5 - 3 cups of water to a boil. Drop it to a simmer and add a slug of tamari and some hot pepper flakes for flavor. Add the greens and the tofu, and simmer until the greens are cooked but not soggy, 3-5 minutes. Turn the heat off and stir in miso to taste - miso doesn't do well being boiled. Serve it up.

To serve: put a big scoop of rice in the bottom of your bowl. Ladle the soup on top. Garnish with scallions, and add a generous slug of toasted sesame oil in the middle, where it will look cool. Eat.

Note that you still have half a block of tofu left, and probably some scallions as well, so you can make this the next night too.

1. It's pre-foodie-revolution in a way that makes it feel like the staff are stoked that you're interested, rather than judging you for not knowing enough already.

yes!

2009-01-06T06:58:00.004-05:00

Just go read the Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson op-ed in the NY Times. It's Wendell Berry! Also they talk about pasturing, which is really awesome, and about perennialization of grain crops - definitely awesome.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

Correct!

every possible kind of incompetence

2009-01-02T22:49:00.004-05:00

The Bush administration: refusing to regulate workplace safety in order to more aggressively regulate allowable species of service animals.

I almost want to leave it at that, but there are a few things in the articles that are too good to pass up. From the OSHA article, which you should read only if you still have the capacity to be shocked by Bush administration venality:¹

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake.

Foulke's ~~explanation~~ excuse? "He was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed." I am an expert on this particular tactic. It is entirely a deception.

The guide animal article profiles a seeing-eye pony, a parrot that accidentally got trained to shout, "Calm down, Jim!" when its owner is about to start a psychotic fit (incidentally, this works very well), and a monkey that staves off panic attacks. I didn't know about the psychiatric care animals, which seem very practical, although I used to work with 'therapy' dogs at a wilderness program. The range of species, and the specific considerations involved, are fascinating; Rebecca Skloot, who wrote the article, also has video and more photographs of the animals in question at her personal blog. Most interesting single tidbit: guide horses can have working lives up to 30 years.

1. I continue to be surprised, once in a while. I think it's less that I don't believe they would, than a sort of astonishment that somehow this administration has managed to think of everything. It's like the Eddie Izzard bit about killing extraordinary numbers of people: you screwed that up too? Really? It's impressively thorough.

I wish I owned a TV so I could watch Rachel Maddow

2008-12-31T16:54:00.001-05:00

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

path dependence, unions, and health care

2008-12-30T14:51:00.004-05:00

Jonathan Cohn’s piece about auto workers in the New Republic talks about both the major gains that unions won, and the way that right-to-work laws closed off opportunities for further union organizing. Union efforts developed the modern American welfare state: because union wage and benefit gains altered the market for labor, other companies had to offer better wages and benefits, and Americans became accustomed to the idea that they would receive health and retirement benefits through their employers. But globalization (which allowed manufacturing to take place in other countries) and the decline of unions changed that situation.

As Ezra Klein points out, weakening unions leads to a collective action problem:

a dilemma in which the rational actions of individual actors make everyone worse off. What's smart for the one proves to be dumb for the many. Imagine, for instance, that you are a new business entering a field where the major players are decades old. Over time, they've bargained with their workers, raised their pay, offered good health benefits and retirement packages. The rational thing for you to do is undercut their labor costs. Then you can sell the good more cheaply and take away their market share.

Klein and Cohn both point out that countries which provide their welfare state benefits directly through the government don’t face this collective action problem. Every firm both receives benefits and pays taxes to support them, so there’s no empty market space in which a firm can evade costs that others bear. This is changing to some extent as manufacturing and services both go global, but since countries are sovereign entities that have substantial control over their borders (especially over legitimate cross-border transactions), they have far more options for mitigating the collective action problem than any individual firm.

What Klein and Cohn both ignore is how things got to be this way. Why does the US, unlike every other wealthy country, rely largely on private employers for its welfare state services? The answer is complicated, but one part of it is union co-optation. In most countries, unions pushed for national health insurance; in the US, unions made what looked like a temporary, tactical decision to push for an employer mandate to provide health insurance, and to negotiate individual agreements with employers that offered union workers health insurance. The Taft-Hartley act, which Cohn notes allowed right-to-work laws and made union organizing much more difficult, combined with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to give unions substantial control over multi-state health and welfare funds. It didn't just limit organizing - indirectly, it limited activism.¹

Just as union ability to organize was declining, and as the percentage of workers who were unionized dropped, unions were handed control over health and welfare funds, which they viewed (correctly) as a major potential source of continued influence and as a potential recruiting tool. National health insurance, which would make the Taft-Hartley funds obsolete, would deprive unions of one of the best reasons for employees to join a union. In other countries, unions focused on winning guaranteed health benefits, vacation time, and retirement security through the political process, rather than through bargaining with a single employer at a time. In the US, partly because of the arrangement of institutional incentives but also for other reasons (which I think I used to know more about), unions negotiated an expansion of the private welfare state. It doesn’t look like such a good bargain now: we’re losing those benefits one employer at a time, and we never did get maternity leave. I have some hopes that the slow-motion collapse of private benefits will generate the political will for an expansion of public, guaranteed benefits, as seems to be happening with health care. We still need to remember, while we do it, that today’s temporary, tactical decision can radically change tomorrow’s incentives and possibilities.²

1. I know about this stuff from reading Marie Gottschalk (in college, and again today): "It's the Health-Care Costs, Stupid!" and The Shadow Welfare State.
2. Shout-out to Paul Pierson!

a manoeuvre!

2008-12-26T21:23:00.005-05:00

My first reaction to Rick Warren being selected as speaker was something like this:

Listen, it's my right to marry that Rick Warren wants to take away. I hate the man, for his sexist opposition to women in positions of authority, his stand for forced pregnancy, his homophobia.

But I find it pretty persuasive when a Balloon Juice commenter points out that anointing Warren as the next evangelical leader puts Dobson out in the cold and means that we'll have some evangelical leaders who aren't dead set against all progressive politics. We'll peel some evangelical votes off by emphasizing poverty and the environment, and we'll get more Democrats in Congress and more progressive programs on those issues. We'll get better policy out of it, so I'll swallow that symbol.

Ezra is right about the use Warren will make of that power, but that's only a concern insofar as Warren giving the invocation will give him a larger audience. I'm betting not. I'm betting he already has the audience and congregation he's going to get - that the major effect of tying Warren to Obama will be to make the Democrats more acceptable to evangelicals rather than the evangelicals more acceptable to the Democrats. So ok. I'll trust Obama to make that decision right now. If we start getting bad policy out of the deal, that'll be the time to get mad.

I've changed my mind, partly. I believe Amelia that there are other, real progressives out there on the evangelical scene - people for whom poverty isn't an afterthought, but same-sex marriage is. And I also find Amelia's argument compelling: that Obama is supposedly someone for whom scripture has some real meaning, and that choosing Warren suggests either that he cares rather less about theology than he has claimed, or that Warren is in line with his theology. So I don't think this was such a great decision anymore: this wasn't his only option, or even his best option, and it suggests that he is not serious about things which he claimed to be serious about. Like gay rights, women's rights, and science.

(I'm not saying, by the way, that Obama should never talk to Warren. Just that delivering the invocation is a much larger public honor than inviting him to dinner at the White House. Though the day when Warren's views are considered as socially unacceptable as David Duke's cannot come too soon.)

I also, in thinking that this was a clever piece of triangulation, had argued against being angry about the pick. I was wrong. We should be furious. One, having all these straight people online being angry about queer issues cheers me up. I love knowing that queer issues are not peripheral for my straight friends, but something that actually is close to their hearts - and I'll say that I was surprised and warmed by the reaction to Prop 8, even among people I'm close to. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight mentioned the increasing engagement on queer issues earlier this week as well, and points out that we're seeing a rapid transformation in public opinion. Eight years ago, neither candidate for president favored civil unions; this year they both did.

Second, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the person who really has it right on this. My job isn't to make Barack Obama's job easier. And--as I'm sure he knows--his job isn't to his marching orders from the bloggers who have no political capital to lose. Jelani talks about Adalai Stevenson putting segregationist John Sparkman on the ticket. I think about Lincoln promising to unite the country, blacks be damned. And now Biden defending the Warren pick. I want to be clear--in the context of who they are, national politicians, these people are not "wrong." I think Biden, like Stevenson, and like Lincoln make a solid, political case.
But that doesn't make Frederick Douglass wrong either. That doesn't make black leadership wrong for denouncing Stevenson. And it doesn't make those of us who believe that a man who bans gays from his church should not be giving the invocation, wrong. Obama and co. have the job of building national consensus. We have the job of expanding the boundaries of that consensus. We are in conflict, and this is as it should be. Seriously, what is one without the other?
And not just that, true as it is. Obama just pissed off a lot of queer people, and a lot of our already pissed off straight allies. He owes us. And he just burned up all his queer-friendly cred: not just because he chose Warren, but because people - some of them straight - made a gigantic fuss about it. Because we expected something better. So now Obama owes those of us who care about queer rights. We have the chance to get better policy precisely because people got mad about Warren. There's more about gay issues on the Change.gov site than there was on the campaign website. Baby steps. But now he's got something to prove. I have to say, I don't mind that as an outcome.

choice schmoice

2008-12-12T11:58:00.003-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, about the whole gay marriage thing, "What if it is a lifestyle?" The argument (as often publicly made) for letting us queers do our thing rest on the idea that we didn't choose to be gay, and thus can't choose to be straight, so it's just mean to try to force us into a role that won't work. Ta-Nehisi says,

"Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?"

This has bothered me for a long time - last night, I watched Jon Stewart going after Bill O'Reilly about gay marriage, and Jon Stewart's framing, as it was to Mike Huckabee, is that he didn't choose to be straight, people don't choose to be gay, and you shouldn't be harassed for something that's not your fault. There's a sense that if you could help it, you should - that being gay is bad, but you're forgiven because you can't help it.

I don't think my relationship is bad. I don't wish I were dating a man. And - here's the tricky part - I could help it.

The science, for whatever it's worth, is mostly done on men. And I think that many gay people do experience their sexuality as something fairly immutable that has been the case for a very long time. But I don't. Gender doesn't seem to be a particularly important constraint for me. Not that I'm not picky, just that I'm not at all picky about that. I'm particular about politics, and I like my gender presentation a little outside the mainstream, and I like people who have a critique of capitalism. No investment bankers, thanks. But the thing is, I've dated guys, and it's not like I'm never attracted to them. I could, in a different world, probably choose to be straight. But I chose to be in a specific relationship with a specific woman - I chose a same-sex relationship. And I'm really, really happy about that choice. But it does mean that the idea that queers are alright because we didn't choose it is a bad fit for me. I did choose it. Am I still alright with Jon Stewart?

It's also hard on young queer people, because it suggests that being gay is so awful that you'd never choose it if you had an alternative. I used to think that, actually. A gay friend thought, when she was in middle school, that if she were gay she would never ever tell anyone. (Fortunately for us all, she changed her mind.) Similarly, I was looking through a diversity curriculum for activities, and there was one in which the participants were asked to imagine a gay person's life and go through all the moments where that person is rejected, harassed, and hurt for being gay. The idea was to convince straight participants not to be mean to queer people, but put one queer kid in the mix, and that poor kid gets to spend the activity thinking of how bleak the future is, and struggling to choose not to be gay. And that's what's really crazy-making about the "it's ok because you can't help it" rhetoric: how do you know if you can help it or not unless you try? It suggests that every decision about being attracted to or involved with someone of the same sex ought to be run through a screen of "do I have to?" It almost needs the oppression there, because without the oppression, maybe people would just choose to be queer and you wouldn't know who can't help it.

It reminds me a little of the way women are encouraged to ask ourselves, "do I need that?" about food and, well, really about most of our desires that are for ourselves. It's kind of a crap way to approach your life, and I worry that the language of the current 'tolerance' fight for queer people perpetuates that kind of approach instead of accepting that queer relationships don't need more justification than straight ones.

(I know I promised some thoughts on education policy. I'm working on it!)

this post brought to you by the New Jersey Transit news stand

2008-12-07T00:04:00.003-05:00

Dear Vanity Fair,

Perhaps you commissioned Maureen Dowd to write about Tina Fey knowing only that she was a New York Times columnist, and never having read any of her columns. I’ve actually read those columns, though, and the profile she turned out was exactly what I would expect. You did a disservice to Tina Fey, and to your readers. We learn little about Tina Fey’s childhood, nothing about her philosophy of writing, nothing about her transition to acting – nothing about the substantive development of her personality and career. Instead, we hear endlessly about her German father and German work ethic, her Greek mother, her weight gain, weight loss, frumpy dresses, mousy appearance, thrift store sweaters, worries about her body. The weight and body image angles are particularly upsetting, since Dowd uncritically accepts the idea that thin equals beautiful, and thus that thin equals successful. But the cumulative effect really says it all: after reading that article, I was bored, offended, and self-conscious about my ass. Tina Fey’s talent deserves better. So does my reading time.

Better luck next time,

North

education reform and junk analysis

2008-12-05T13:19:00.003-05:00

Shorter David Brooks: "I know nothing about the subject I'm writing on, and would like to display my ignorance for the world to see."

I don't have time to write a full analysis right now. I'll do it on Sunday or Monday. But I just want to say. People who don't know shit about shit should stop talking about schools and education reform. Of course, if that were the standard, David Brooks wouldn't get a column at all.

nerd!

2008-12-04T13:22:00.003-05:00

You know you're a sustainable farming nerd when you get all engrossed reading the Organic Valley farmer profiles. This one made me happy: the farmers switched to grazing from row crops, and from Holsteins to Jerseys, and went to seasonal dairying, and they're happier and have a better family life and the cows are happier too. If you, too, are a sucker for little stories about the world getting better, you can get a few minutes of enjoyment here.

I'm in love

2008-12-02T21:59:00.003-05:00

If you haven't seen the dancing walrus video, you owe it to yourself to spend the next 49 seconds watching it. Especially if you're too busy. Then, if you have a couple minutes, you should read the Natalie Angier article about walruses. Sample: "Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts." Attention walruses: you are amazing. Please come visit.

just in time for the holidays!

2008-11-24T15:56:00.002-05:00

I hope none of the three children in my generation ever has occasion to send a letter like this to another sibling.

The Gingriches are going to have a fun Thanksgiving.

traveling; home

2008-11-19T15:46:00.002-05:00

I've been in Chicago for the last two days. It's cold and windy, and my grandmother is crazy; otherwise great. At the coffee shop this morning, the cashier asked where I'm from.¹ I don't know if I look out of place - in Hyde Park? it's full of dressed-up pseudo-hipsters! - or if my voice, which is ridiculously scratchy, makes me sound like I have an accent.

I claimed Philadelphia, because I'm not there. In Philadelphia I would have claimed Des Moines. In Des Moines? I guess I would have said, "I grew up here," which is not quite the same as, "I'm from here." I always claim the last place I was, which means I can never be home. Next year I'll probably be from Philadelphia full time.

Anyway. When I told him I was from Philadelphia, he said congratulations. The Phillies win, which seemed like such a big deal at the time, is such ancient history that he had to remind me why Philly got congratulations. After the Phillies won, there were riotous celebrations; for days afterward, Philadelphia was full of irritable, slightly hungover fans who wandered around shrieking "Go Phillies!!!!1!" every time they saw anything red. They were kind of like grumpy, overtired bulls.

Election day was totally different. I wouldn't have been anywhere else. After they called the election - at 11:01 pm - people poured out into the streets and danced, banged pot lids, chanted, sang, shouted, hugged each other, drummed. The church on the corner near my house has a tiny school, and on Wednesday morning all the kids, ages 4 to 13, were out there waving home-made "Honk 4 Obama" signs and screaming and dancing. People smiled at each other on the street.

I know Obama's bound to disappoint us. I know it. And I'm ready to leave Philadelphia, because if I don't do it soon I never will. But that day, I wouldn't have been anywhere else.

1. He and the woman barista, who had an amazing voice, both seemed to be flirting with me. Do they flirt with all their customers? Do I just look that queer?

words we'll be done with after Tuesday

2008-11-03T09:44:00.000-05:00

It's like this election has its own vocabulary: double down, vetting, surge, in the tank, rogue, close the deal.

Conspicuous by its absence is the most useful phrase to describe the last several months: jump the shark.

(See This. Fucking. Election for a last-minute replay of this. fucking. election.)

on the phone with Barack

2008-11-01T21:44:00.005-04:00

Because I'm really, really cool, I was getting some coffee ice cream and Nutella (with bonus roasted almonds on top!) together to eat while I watched the Daily Show. And the phone rang. And it appears that Jon Carson, Obama's voter contact guy, decided, why don't we just call everyone? And put them on a conference call with Obama?

I feel slightly suspicious of my telephone, and absolutely validated in feeling that this election is just like a sports game. What is going to happen next?

[I am not a hard-core volunteer - I volunteered once and signed up for 3 days of GOTV - so I'm curious who else got that call.]

election lost on a technicality

2008-10-30T17:05:00.007-04:00

Godwin's Law

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

John McCain, on the LA Times's refusal to release (per its promise to its source) a tape of Obama at a fellow professor's going away party from Chicago:

"I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?"

According to internet tradition the first person to make such a comparison loses.

Can this election please just be over already?

"They spent 6 times my yearly income on her wardrobe"

2008-10-23T09:12:00.006-04:00

Look, I want to be sympathetic to Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on new clothes. I buy that she needed new clothes, even though she wasn't "a beet farmer last week" (if you want to see how she dressed before, there's a set of photos on the Seattle PI website; a lot of what she wore in Alaska would have been savagely mocked if she wore it in front of a national audience). The demands of the national stage are intense, and much more so for women: no female political figure (and I include Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain) could follow the Obama strategy of wearing a rotating set of identical dark two-button suits, white shirts, and variably colored ties. I also buy that those clothes have to be not only varied, but high quality, expensive, and fashionable, and that people will notice and mock her if they are not. And she needs a lot of them, because she can't wear the same thing every day, or even twice in the same week - and even then she needs far more clothes than seems normal, because she doesn't stay in one place long enough to get everything cleaned and sent back to her before she leaves, so they probably have to get shipped by her post-event team.

But $150,000! That's a different $2000 outfit every day of a 2.5 month campaign. It's just, just.. it is just not reasonable. I have been to fancy department stores! There are very nice outfits available for much, much less than $2000, and her standard outfit of femme skirt with jacket is completely amenable to mixing and matching. (I'm not the only one who can't figure out where the money would go: the editor of Glamour magazine basically agrees.) If it had been some smaller, seemingly unreasonable amount of money, like $50,000 or $75,000, I could have seen defending Palin. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.

(post title from the Political Schmientist)

crazy pills

2008-10-22T10:53:00.002-04:00

The whole scrap about Ayers and ACORN in the debate the other night (if you missed it, the short version is that McCain said he didn't care about some washed-up old terrorist and then talked about him ad nauseam, and Obama said this is ridiculous) reminded me of some of the more totally insane things about this election: namely, that people are willing to believe all kinds of terrible things about Obama and vote for him anyway. Ben Smith at Politico has the best examples: a canvasser in Fishtown, a Philadelphia neighborhood, finds people who are outright racist, but "they would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

And then, well, this kind of speaks for itself, although you should click over and read the whole thing: after watching a no-holds-barred ad for a focus group, the kind that throws Wright and Ayers and everything at Obama, this happens.

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

She thinks he was a member of a terrorist group. She's voting for him anyway. Like other members of the focus group, she was willing to accept these racially motivated slurs, but she didn't think acting on them was in her own best interest.

The guy who organized the focus group said, "I felt like I was taking crazy pills."

This has a little to do with why I think having Obama as president would be amazing for race issues in this country. I mean yeah, the far-right crazies - the Patriot movement, the white supremacists, the kind of people David Neiwert at Orcinus keeps an eye on - will go nuts. Obama will need incredibly intense security. But most people will see a black man (biracial, yes, but in a lot of the country he just reads as black) being president, doing a pretty good job of it, and most importantly seeming like a smart decent guy, and it'll change their gut feelings about race the same way it happened for this guy:

"I’ve always been against the blacks," said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

It's not like anyone wakes up and suddenly things are fine, but it changes people's ideas of what's possible and what's normal.

McCain Watch '08: out of touch

2008-10-08T00:12:00.004-04:00

Last night at the debate, McCain talked about his health care plan, explaining to the audience that it would let them shop around! Choose whatever insurance plan they wanted! He sounded like he thought people would appreciate the offer and be happy not to be locked into whatever plan their employer offers.

Which, frankly, is a nutty thing to think.

Buying individual health insurance is a painstaking, unpleasant process in which you are constantly trying to figure out exactly how screwed a particular plan will make you if you have a major health problem - this involves reading legalese in 4-point font - and exactly how restrictive the particular insurance company will be about the doctors you can see and conditions they'll cover. Not to mention that it's absurdly expensive - McCain's $5000 credit does essentially nothing for anyone with a major pre-existing condition. But even if it were free, getting health insurance for yourself sucks. I did it this year, and if it should be easy for anyone, that person is me: I am young, reasonably healthy, don't smoke, and have neither pre-existing conditions nor a family to worry about; I'm also over-educated and good with numbers. It still sucked. I was sure I was getting screwed, and I took a crappier plan than I would ideally like because at least I can afford the premiums.

Anyone who's ever had to deal with their own health insurance knows it sucks, and you're better off getting it through your employer, who by virtue of scale will be able to negotiate a better and less expensive plan (same argument holds for single-payer, not that I'm holding my breath). So when McCain talks about how great it's going to be to be able to find the best health care plan for yourself, all he's saying is he has no damn clue what getting health insurance is like. And he doesn't. He was in the Navy until April 1, 1981, and was elected to Congress in 1982, where he's been ever since. With the exception of one year of his life, he has had government health care immediately available; during that year, he worked for his father-in-law, a hundred-millionaire. Any guesses as to whether he was offered health insurance with that job? His insurance has always been taken care of. So he's trying to encourage the rest of the country to take on a complicated, onerous, confusing responsibility for managing their own health insurance - something he's never done himself, or showed any interest in doing, because it sucks. But he's fine with it sucking for the rest of us.

"But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

2008-10-06T16:02:00.003-04:00

I read Rolling Stone's profile of McCain out loud to the Gardener (yes, the whole thing; procrastination > gravity). My first reaction was something like, that poor guy. He sounded like a miserable, obstinately angry, misogynistic child, desperate to live up to a standard he could never meet, always trying to make up for being a screw-off by getting his way. We hear that McCain tried to pick up girls as a high school sophomore; when they laughed at him, "he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge." In the story, McCain erupts in anger, crashes two planes, almost gets kicked out of school twice, acquires the nickname McNasty, and, constantly on the verge of failure, relentlessly returns to his family connections to bail him out. The man needs help.

By the time the article reached McCain's political career, all my sympathy had evaporated. He's a habitual liar, a corrupt, dishonest, dishonorable, deceitful politician. He needs help, but keep that man away from the presidency. "Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself."

Gross.

the vp debate

2008-10-03T08:15:00.005-04:00

I don't understand the reaction to the VP debate. Biden had a lot of great moments: reclaiming the 'ordinary guy' mantle by talking about raising kids alone after his wife died, saying that McCain was no maverick on the things that count, saying on climate change that "if you don't understand what the cause is, it's impossible to come up with a solution." Palin kept it to no more than about three total melt-downs into incoherence, each of which came when she neither answered the question asked nor shifted entirely to a different topic, but rather talked around the question. Her attempt at telling us her Achilles heel was a notable example of this. Gwen Ifill was unbelievably tame, not pushing either candidate to give a straight answer to any question - though Biden actually did answer every question, at least briefly, so she could only have pushed Palin much.

So far so good, and nothing the blogs and newspapers aren't talking about. But for my money, Biden's best moment was his closing statement, which I'm putting below. It starts at about 1:38, and it hits all the right notes - a story about his dad in Scranton, an appeal to America to 'get up together', and 'may God protect our troops,' which coming from an observant Catholic with a son in the military sounds utterly sincere.

The most extraordinary moment in the debate, though, goes not to any of the absurd things Palin said about Obama's record (for a partial list of things she lied about, check here) or Biden dismantling McCain or even Palin saying how wonderful it is that "We both love Israel!", but to the same-sex marriage question. Here's Biden's response, in print, to whether benefits should be extended to same-sex couples:

"Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

"The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted -- same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.

"It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do."

Palin's response?

"Well, not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that's sometimes where those steps lead.

"But I also want to clarify, if there's any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves, you know, I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue.

"But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.

"But I will tell Americans straight up that I don't support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.

"But I'm being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non- support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage."

Despite Biden's slip - saying "same-sex marriage" when he meant to say unions or something like that - both candidates are basically arguing for same-sex couples to get approximately the benefits of marriage. Which, ok, why don't you just give everyone civil unions and get the government out of the business of marriage altogether? But the fact remains that five years ago, sodomy statutes could be enforced; now, both sides of the ticket support civil unions for gay couples, and it's essentially uncontroversial (at that level - obviously it remains tremendously controversial at the level of, say, referenda). That ain't peanuts.

speech!

2008-10-01T13:16:00.002-04:00

The Secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, a man in a position to do so, talks race and Obama. Got me all choked up. Ignore the video, basically - it's jerky and low-fi - but the audio is worth 7 minutes of your life.

skewer

2008-09-30T10:19:00.003-04:00

Republicans are claiming that a 'partisan' speech by Nancy Pelosi (puh-leeze - read the speech yourself here and tell me what you think) made them not vote for the bail-out bill. Barney Frank counter-offers: "Give me the names of those 12 people and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they'll think about the country."

tangible reasons the credit crisis matters

2008-09-29T23:01:00.003-04:00

Farmers generally harvest on credit - no credit means they can't pay their employees or run their machines and, the year after record food prices, the harvest is at some non-negligible risk from the financial markets.

Which, by the way, is a time-sensitive issue. Warren Buffet also sounds worried, which always makes me nervous. I've also been thinking about what Obama should have said about how a potential bail-out package would affect spending priorities (**cough**Keynes**cough**) - Lawrence Summers mentions the case for Keynesian stimulus about two-thirds of the way through this article.

sentences you're not expecting

2008-09-29T14:11:00.001-04:00

"Mainland China’s stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen are closed this week as part of a national holiday marking the establishment of China as a Communist country in 1949."
(Article here.)

problems with pricing schemes

2008-09-26T12:09:00.003-04:00

I've always wanted to be able to subscribe to cable stations individually, because dude, $50 a month for a giant package including Lifetime? Not worth it. There's also the small problem of me not having a TV. However. That means I can't watch the Daily Show, and that's a problem. Because I almost did not see him say, in response to McCain's decision to 'suspend' his campaign, "John McCain: the only one who can impulsively overreact to something ten days old."

Later in the show he makes the moderator of the third, hypothetical debate laugh so hard he can't talk.

disconnected thoughts on campaigns and bailouts

2008-09-25T14:07:00.005-04:00

McCain suspending his campaign seems kind of desperate to me: "I campaign and campaign, but people don't want to vote for me! If I stop campaigning, maybe they'll like me better?" Also kind of pathetic. Not to mention dishonest, since he's claiming he doesn't have time for the debate but he does have time to tape an interview with Katie Couric.

$700 billion is about $2,293 per resident of the United States. In case you were wondering what the bailout plan had to do with you. Zephyr Teachout (whoa 2004 flashback) has some more examples of what $700 billion actually means. I'm pretty appalled by the idea of giving any member of the Bush executive branch a blank check for that much cash.

It doesn't look like I'll have much time to volunteer for the Obama campaign, and I feel like I'm shirking my civic duty.

real != fake

2008-09-17T18:39:00.004-04:00

After all those articles about how eating unprocessed, nutritious foods and being active are more important for your health than losing weight, the New York Times prints an article about how more people are eating unprocessed, nutritious foods that includes the following sentence:

"The real question, is whether better eating can translate into weight loss."

ISN'T THAT THE FAKE QUESTION?

The article also positions what it calls 'positive eating,' in which you choose to eat things that are good for you and taste good (usually organic, unprocessed, natural - real - food) as a diet fad, which, if you were really reductionist, it might be. But it's not. Why? Because unlike other diet fads, real food is sustainable: it feels good, it's reasonably affordable if you cook for yourself, it provides both pleasure and health, it does not rest on some bizarrely contorted idea of how to eat.

This is part of my view about how you change the world. It has to be sustainable, which means that whatever method of changing the world you choose, you have to be able to keep doing it. Virtue and pleasure need to be connected, which is my fundamental problem with all the non-profits that expect you to work for them all the time for practically no money because you're doing what my grandmother calls good works. That model is how people end up quitting their non-profit gigs at 28 to get a corporate job. The positive eating (positive working?) model is how people keep on doing good.

(Somebody call Aristotle! This is all shamelessly ripped from the pages of the Nichomachean Ethics.)

three unrelated sections

2008-09-11T03:04:00.005-04:00

Oy, I seem to have dropped off the face of the planet. I don't have much to say about Sarah Palin, other than what a nasty sleazy dishonest politician she is, the kind of person I wouldn't call a bitch because what an insult to bitches. And McCain, with all that stuff about honor? And a campaign based on flat-out lies? I'd feel sorry for him, seeing his reputation destroyed like this, except he's doing it to himself. Voluntarily, too.

On the more funny end of things, here's a picture of something true:

Via Wronging Rights, which is the sort of gallows humor best appreciated by students of wartime atrocities. Political Schmientist, I'm looking at you.

Now I'll go back to thinking about how I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars and all year applying to grad school, and I won't get in because I have bad grades my first two years. In an utterly bizarre twist, the fact that I read a lot of old books as a kid seems to be my best hope for acceptance letters.

puppies and teddybears with big scary claws

2008-08-17T16:13:00.006-04:00

Got this from Daily Kos, which I seem to be reading while I'm lounging around being sick. It's awesome footage of a grizzly mama and two cubs getting a little harassed by a wolf, which seems to want to play with the cubs. Two things I noticed: first, that wolf is big! Grizzlies are enormous, and the wolf looks not too much smaller than the mama: I guess they must have really different builds, because a large wolf is 150 pounds and a small grizzly sow starts at something like 250 or 300 pounds. Second, you can really tell that at one point the wolf wants to play - it looks just like a dog doing what's called a play bow with its shoulders and head low, hindquarters high, and tail wagging (right after minute four). The grizzly cubs are almost impossible for me to read - mama seems mostly interested in chasing the wolf away, but I can't tell what the cubs want at all. I think this speaks to the long human acquaintance (including, for many of us, personal acquaintance) with wolf relatives. We're pretty good at reading canine behavior; ursine stays kind of mysterious. Third thing, even though I said there'd be two: this is such a cool thing to do! The USGS is putting solar-powered motion-activated cameras in the Northern Rockies to videotape wildlife doing their wildlife thing. It's mostly to understand how effective their DNA collection efforts are, and whether there's sampling bias with respect to age and sex, but you can see a wide range of other applications for that kind of camera information.

Here's the video, and here's the link to the USGS site.

McCain Watch #4: oops, you guys care about that?

2008-08-17T07:58:00.003-04:00

I haven't been doing much McCain watching, what with being out of the country and everything, but no sooner do I get back than the man does another foolish thing. It's not a dumb policy idea, necessarily, but it's a politically expensive thing to say. McCain said he wanted to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact of 1922.

You're now looking at me like I'm speaking a different language, unless you follow western water policy. The compact is an agreement - based, stupidly, on best-case water level predictions - about how much water the various Colorado River states get each year. It gets split evenly between the Upper Basin states (Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) and the Lower Basin states (Arizona, New Mexico, and California). You might spot one problem right away, which is that the Lower Basin states have about 44.8 million people, compared to 10.6 million in the Upper Basin states. The other huge problem is that the compact is based on water levels measured during a particularly wet period, and thus promises what it can't deliver. A new version the compact wouldn't be a terrible idea, though in my personal view some of the most foolishly-situated cities in the world are the ones that would want more water in order to grow (Phoenix, baby, I'm looking at you); thus, renegotiation is unlikely to get us a more ecologically sensible agreement.

So. Anyway. This piece of water policy, which allocates a seriously disproportionate amount of water to some sparsely-populated states, is probably more sacred than the Constitution in Colorado, and I'm including the Second Amendment here. Everyone in Colorado is pretty sure that renegotiation would reduce the amount of water they get, and giving up water is not something you want to do in the West. It's like the caucuses in Iowa, where no candidate will come down too hard on farm subsidies. Except McCain just said he was all for renegotiating the compact. ColoradoPols (which I found via Daily Kos) puts their headline up as "McCain just lost Colorado," and the Colorado politicians quoted say variations on "over my dead body." Variations like, "over my cold, dead political carcass" that aren't too different at all. Who know what this will mean come November - I'm not going to start crowing just yet - but it can't be that great for McCain.

What really gets me about this is that McCain is an Arizona politician, so he ought to know how people feel about water policy.

full up on ruins

2008-08-01T14:32:00.002-04:00

Every other building in Israel is some kind of excavated restored ruin with 4-foot thick stone walls and arched windows.

How we long for a bungalow.

the plan is planned

2008-07-31T09:36:00.002-04:00

I missed my bus from Cairo this morning, so I'm going to fly to Tel Aviv. At 4 am, which means getting to the airport in the middle of the night (maybe 1 am) for security screening. Especially considering I have a last-minute one-way ticket on El Al. Think anyone might be jumpy about that? The good thing is that the flight takes an hour twenty, where a bus would be 14 hours at a conservative estimate.

Then: two days in Jerusalem (and maybe Bethlehem), and I go see my cousins in some little town between Tel Aviv and Haifa.

It's a good plan, I think, but either way it's the plan I've got.

egypt #2: interesting things about Cairo

2008-07-30T11:25:00.003-04:00

A man weaving his bicycle in and out of Cairo traffic (worst I've ever seen) with a 12-foot tray of pita balanced on his head.

...

Every few blocks there's a juice place where, for 40-60 cents, you can get a glass of fresh pomegranate, guava, mango, or orange juice. I get one and then, ten minutes later, find myself thinking, "Is it too soon for another?"

...

Women wearing gloves (and black robes and face veils) for modesty in the Cairo heat.

...

I don't mind wearing long pants - or the heat itself - as much as I thought I would. To be honest I mind it less than wearing modest clothes for Shabbat at Orthodox homes.

...

Crossing the street is absolutely terrifying.

...

Cairo is the dirtiest place I've ever been. The city redefines air pollution, and it sticks to your body and makes you dirty whether you touch anything or not.

...

Bargaining for taxis is entertaining. You flag down a taxi by - well, really, if you're a foreign woman, by existing, and then state your destination and ask, "Bi-kam?" How much? Often the driver will shrug and say, "No problem, no problem," but in that case I won't get into the car, because I want an agreement before we get there. Other times the request is several times the going rate - it's worth trying, after all, and the fares are really cheap anyway - and then there's the counter-offer and sometimes a little "That's too much, you know it's too much" and then the agreement, or you wave the taxi on and wait for the next one. Which arrives in 2.8 seconds, or sometimes is already waiting.

...

Is it too soon for another pomegranate juice?

school of no: pyramids campus

2008-07-30T07:48:00.003-04:00

The tourist hassle at the Pyramids is intense.

"Excuse me madame! Hello madame! Excuse me! Hey!"

Don't look don't look don't look.

"Would you like to buy a postcard/headdress/miniature pyramid/scarf/sphinx/camel ride/horse ride?"

La' shukran (no thank you).

"Maybe next time?"

La' shukran.

Direct methods have failed. Next tactic: pretend to be friends.

"Where are you from?"

America.

"I love America!"

Mmm.

"You look Egyptian."

Raised eyebrow.

Eventually I just started saying, "Soy de España." Luckily none of them spoke Spanish.

I almost didn't go to the Pyramids, because it seemed like a hassle (which it wasn't, really). But then I realized they're the Pyramids. So I went. And dude. They're pretty damn cool. Also, the boat museum there is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Seriously. Out of control. And it's just one boat.

egypt #1

2008-07-28T11:34:00.004-04:00

Some photos I would have taken, but couldn't:

At Wadi Rum, a man in a white robe and a red keffiyah leads 8 camels, all saddled, on a string of leads through red sand desert in the slanting evening sunlight.

(click)

At Petra, a Bedouin family packs up for the evening. An old woman and a young woman are putting away the trinkets they've been selling; a young man and two little boys have brought up the donkeys they rent to tourists; a toddler sits beside the path.

(click)

The minibus from Taba - loosely packed with me, an 18-year-old Austrian, one world-weary 20-something each from Moldova and Ukraine, two quiet Jordanian men, and a security guard in a purple tie and mirrored sunglasses - careens down the middle, the actual center, of the Sinai desert road.

(click)

The Austrian, the Moldovan, and the Ukrainian haggle the poor bus driver into accepting shekels, dollars, and euros rather than the previously agreed on 100 Egyptian pounds. People! There is an ATM in the Egyptian arrivals hall, and the charmingly named Israeli 'Change Place' will change your money as well. Use these services!

(click)

One of the quiet Jordanians makes sure the minibus stops where I can get a taxi to where I'm staying and offers to let me use his phone to call the person I'm staying with.

(click)

A houseboat on the Nile at dusk, ashtray upon ashtray on the table. A guitar. Radiohead on the speakers. Just like you'd think it would be.

(click)

Sunlight through the high windows at the Egyptian Museum. Most of the display cards look like they were made on a typewriter in the card catalog era by someone who spoke good English but was only a fair typist. A few of the cases have cards written on lined notebook paper in ballpoint pen - these are only in Arabic.

(slideshow over)

I haven't spoken to anyone all day, except for some stilted efforts at telling a taxi driver where to go. Traveling alone is weird. Also, as a solo woman in a place with a lot of harassment, I'm not willing to talk to men at all unless I start the interaction (i.e. I hail a taxi). Mostly, this has been very very easy to enforce. It also means I'm not willing to sit and have tea when it's offered, even though that kind of hospitality is something for which the Arab world is (justly, as far as I can tell) famous.

I'm glad to be adventuring, but I still kind of want to go home.

where can you see lions?

2008-07-27T03:56:00.002-04:00

Only in Cairo! and that's where I'm going today. I predict awesomeness and exhaustion. Thanks to everyone who gave me thoughts and advice.

good and bad

2008-07-23T15:33:00.002-04:00

Petra is incredible.

I don't like my travel partner. He's a fine person, but we're not compatible. He's much more price sensitive than I am (and would probably sleep out in the desert if he were alone) and kind of hard to communicate with.

Petra is amazingly beautiful. Remind me to write about the Bedouin later. I think I'm going to go to Egypt alone.

grumble grumble grumble bah

2008-07-20T09:59:00.003-04:00

My traveling partners have both bailed on me, so if I go to Egypt I have to go by myself (which I don't want to do). I can't reach the person I'm trying to call in the United States and it's too early to call anyone further west. No one has answered my beg for information. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tomorrow and all my clothes are dirty. I might want to come home earlier and it might cost $250 to change my ticket.

Harrumph.

israel #2 + bonus request

2008-07-18T09:20:00.004-04:00

Now I'm in this crazy Orthodox mystical artists' community called Tsfat. A couple three quick observations before I let the 15 people behind me get on the computer, and then a plea for you to find information for me.

1. It is actually damned impressive that the Jews are still around. Not so many peoples with thousands of years of more or less recorded history who still have not only their genetic material here, but their culture. And that didn't happen because of secular humanist people like me. The Kabbalah artist who talked to us said, basically accurately, that until a couple generations ago the (or some of the) physical ancestors of the people in the room prayed daily that they or their descendants could someday return to Israel, and here we are, and that's crazy. To him it's the fulfillment of prophecy and prayer. To the Arab inhabitants of this land, it's the Nakba, the catastrophe. To me?

2. Whoa I'm so exhausted. There's much more to digest than I can possibly do before I leave. I'm looking forward (already, less than halfway through my trip) to getting back home where I can drink a cold beer in a hot shower and then sit down for a few hours and write and think.

3. Group dynamics with 40 people for 2 weeks - even when all those people are pretty chill - are still kind of intense.

4. Quick bleg: There's a new warning out for Israelis to not travel to the Sinai and to come back if they're there for fear of kidnappings, and there are tons of rumors going around about Iran. Does anyone know anything about the political situation in the Middle East over the last two weeks and want to send me some articles or a quick digest of what's going on (in comments or by email)? Also, does anyone know if the warnings are confined to Sinai or include Egypt proper? And finally, does anyone know how the status of American tourists with Israeli stamps on their passports fits in to these warnings? And finally finally, how should this affect my chosen mode of transportation (air/bus/service taxi) to Cairo?

israel #1

2008-07-10T11:26:00.003-04:00

Two days ago: flew to Israel. Rode a bus with 40 other people to Jerusalem and got talked at about Abraham and this being the Jewish homeland. Walked through the Old City to a place where we could see the Dome of the Rock; more talking about the First Temple, the Second Temple, Nebuchadnezzar, the diaspora, and this being the Jewish homeland.

Yesterday: got up at 4:45 to take a bus with 40 people to walk up a mountain to a fortress in the hot desert (breezes feel like they just drifted out from a furnace) and get talked at about Herod and this being the Jewish homeland. Floated in the Dead Sea: it's bouncy! and warm! Weird! An attempt at discussion with 40 people.

Today: got up at 3:30 to walk up a different mountain in the slightly less hot (because earlier) and get talked at about David and this being the Jewish homeland. Then one of the most unearthly lovely places ever: an oasis. Trees moss water waterfalls caves swimming! Swimming! In the desert! You have no idea how good it feels (unless you do). Then took a bus to Jerusalem with 40 people to a hotel that connects to the intertubes. Tonight we will get talked at about Shabbat and this being the Jewish homeland.

Is anyone starting to see patterns here? Also I am having a lovely time and will write much more when I get home.

gone

2008-07-06T22:21:00.001-04:00

I'm traveling in the Middle East for the next month. Wish me luck and give me suggestions, unless you're one of the fifty people I've already hit up for luck and suggestions.

stupid

2008-07-02T11:13:00.004-04:00

Three guys showed up in the alley by my house today with a ladder, banging around and knocking over the trash cans, so I stuck my head out the back door to see what was up. They're taking down this big tree in the back of the house, which is covered with poison ivy. Covered. All the way up. These guys are not arborists: all they've got is some work gloves, a rattle-trap ladder, a chainsaw, and a rented moving truck. No protective gear of any kind. So I tell them about the poison ivy, and one guy starts freaking out, but another, who seems to be in charge, says naw, it's just regular ivy. Off they go. I told the guy who was worried about it to scrub himself in the harshest soap he can find when he's done, but they're still going to be absolutely covered with it. But what kind of person hires three dudes who don't know how to identify poison ivy - or much else about trees, from the looks of their work - to take out a big tree covered in a vine?

At least they're not going to burn the slash. Poison ivy in the lungs is nothing to mess with.

conditional ocd

2008-07-02T07:28:00.004-04:00

If you know me, the idea that I could be obsessively organized about anything is kind of laughable. My room's a mess, my 'files' are stacks of paper in cardboard boxes or on the floor, and my strategy for keeping people from breaking into my car is to have so much random, essentially valueless crap in there that it's not worth breaking the window to see if there's something valuable under there.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty damn organized for any backcountry trip. It's not a conscious decision, but I'll take it - as far as places to get a little OCD, backpacking's a good one. Turns out that a month of travel in the Middle East gets me feeling the same way. I leave for Israel on July 7, and I won't be back until August 7. I'm making lists and trying to remember absolutely everything I could possibly need. It's spilling into grad school planning: I just made an excel spreadsheet to track my applications.

Maybe someday I'll fold my laundry.

driving up to New Hampshire

2008-06-24T21:58:00.002-04:00

Some people like driving alone. It's a thrill. Good for thinking, with the red line of taillights like a guide to your thoughts, and the whole country linked up through the Eisenhower interstate system, and you're alone with your rattly engine and some meditative work. Not me. I want someone there to change the tape and read the directions and pass me a water bottle. But I can do it, and I take a certain grim pleasure in the doing - mostly in my ability to do it. The apex of that particular masochism came in 2006: 2500 miles over 5 days, one of them the 14-hour haul from Des Moines to Vail. That spring I put over ten thousand miles on my car, including 1500 in one particular weekend, almost all of them driven alone. It's exhausting work, strangely, to sit in one place and stare, carefully, ahead and behind and to the side while making small adjustments to a wheel and some levers.

Sunday night I left home at 5 pm and drove more or less north until 1:38 in the morning. Up through New Jersey and over the George Washington Bridge and across the Bronx. I stopped at a little gas station in northwestern Connecticut, did jumping jacks while I pumped gas, and laughed at some teen-ager who told me he liked my car. Got sweaty and exhausted and that feeling - does anyone else get this? - that my eyes are something like the robot's in Wall-E: set way back in the middle of my head and taking up half of it, maybe more.

It's so awful but it feels good.

worst. columnist. ever.

2008-06-21T23:52:00.005-04:00

The David Brooks approach to social commentary:

1. Identify two opposing stereotypes.

2. Use them to describe a situation which is manifestly irreducible to stereotype.

3. Claim that using these stereotypes gives you special insight into the situation in question.

4. Ignore any inconvenient facts, which is to say most of them.

Tim Burke is correct that this is calculatedly dishonest. See Sasha Issenberg for further details.

last day

2008-06-20T14:04:00.003-04:00

Two years ago, I was getting drunk with the entire Teach for America South Dakota corps in Valentine, Nebraska, after the last day of school.

Last night, I was playing ultra-competitive flip cup with a good chunk of the TFA Philadelphia corps after the last day of school. Earlier in the evening, people had been drinking and smoking cigars on someone's back patio when one of the people there called the principal and got her to come. She stayed for one drink and tried to get some of the teachers there to come work for her.

It was totally fun. I got home at 1:30. Now I have to go to school to be professionally developed. I'm not sure I'm going to make it.

expertise

2008-06-19T06:04:00.001-04:00

There's an entertaining anecdote in one of the American political science books - I think it's John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies in which a transportation researcher arrives at a conference on public transit by bus. All the other transportation experts gather around him and pepper him with questions about the bus. They are experts on buses who have no experience of buses.

It's the kind of thing that actually happens all the time - happened to me last weekend, at a party where I met an education researcher who wanted to ask me questions about teaching - but it reached perhaps its lowest state in the absurd situation of Chris Matthews claiming that Obama didn't understand diners. It's old news, over two months old, in fact, and too stupid to be worth resurrecting, except that goddammit it makes me mad.

The situation: Obama is at a diner in Indiana; he's offered coffee; he says he'll take orange juice. According to Chris Matthews, this is something that is not done in diners, and based on this fact alone I will guaran-goddamn-tee to you that I spend more time in diners than Chris Matthews does. Obama asked for orange juice for crying out loud, not pomegranate white tea or whiskey or something else you shouldn't expect a diner to have, and not for chicken-fried steak or something else you shouldn't substitute for , and he did not launch into a tirade about how coffee is bad for you. He asked for another drink which is usually available at diners, which is a completely normal response to being offered a cup of coffee.

Chris Matthews blathers about this violation of diner etiquette at length. He appoints himself as an expert on diners, and in doing so makes it blindingly obvious that he doesn't know what he's talking about. No experience whatsoever.

And then, icing on the cake, Matthews tells his correspondent, "You could do this. Shake hands at a diner. What a regular guy."

Recap: Chris Matthews - TV personality, estimated income over $5 million/year, married to an executive at J.W. Marriott, graduate work in economics - is telling us who counts as a regular guy.

Not him.

end of an era

2008-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

It's the end of the year - end of 2 years, end of my time as a high school teacher - so I'm going to write a little about my students. It'll probably be cheesy. I'm writing it for myself, so don't read if you don't want to.

failure
Selene said, when I talked to her about her disruptive shouting and insistence that she wanted to go to the principal, that she hated failing my class, and particularly hated that she felt unable to stop failing. "Sometimes I want to fail myself, so I know I did it and it's not just you failing me."

So human. Also such an incredible thing to be able to articulate.

happiness
There was a little awards assembly and I gave two girls - the only ones there who had earned anything particular in my class - achievement awards. They hugged me: I was the only teacher to get a hug (I was also the youngest by about 30 years). Later, one of them came to talk to me in my class. She was practically glowing. She wanted to tell me something but didn't have the words, so I told her to say it in French. "I want to say - sorry, pour tout mal que j'ai fait."¹ It was probably the loveliest most heartfelt apology I've ever received.

being cool
I played spoons for about an hour with 8 of my favorite students this morning. I dealt and they were all impressed by my shuffling skills and fought madly over the spoons whenever the scuffle started.

A girl who is, as my mother would say, the glass of fashion saw me a few weeks ago with my glasses and said, "What is this?! It's not cute!" Monday and Tuesday she wore her glasses to school.

I am all over the yearbook, including one absolutely characteristic photo of me standing in front of a full class of students with my finger on my lips.

but not that cool
Speed Scrabble was a poor choice of game for people who don't speak English fluently.

statistical self-congratulation
84% of the students in my senior class are going to college or community college. The rate schoolwide is 30%.

Graduation is tomorrow.

McCain Watch: Taxes

2008-06-17T09:08:00.001-04:00

McCain's tax plan is, ahem, bad.

Here's a handy graph (stolen from The Reality-Based Community showing the benefits to each income quintile of the McCain and Obama tax plans.

The benefits from Obama's plan are in blue, the benefits from McCain's are in red, and if it costs a quintile something that appears as a downward bar. It's clear that Obama's plan benefits lower- and middle- income taxpayers while costing the top 1% and top 0.1% quite a bit (all this is measured relative to 'current policy' - i.e. extending the Bush tax cuts - rather than 'current law,' which includes a sunset for the Bush tax cuts.) McCain's plan give everyone a little bit, but gives the top 20% more (and the top 1% and top 0.1% do even better); Obama actually costs the top quintile something, but is superior for everyone else. In addition, Obama's plan increases revenue (again, relative to current policy rather than current law) by 2%, while McCain loses 2% (not to mention his non-tax policy of maintaining troops in Iraq indefinitely, which will be very expensive and contribute to large deficits). The Tax Policy Center, which is a center-left, definitely academic, generally reliable entity (partnership of Brookings and the Urban Institute, gives this analysis of economic effects:

McCain's reduced individual and corporate rates would improve economic efficiency and increase domestic investment, but the larger deficits he would incur to do so would reduce and could completely offset any positive effect. In contrast, Senator Obama's proposed new tax credits could encourage desirable behavior, particularly if the childless EITC and payroll tax rebate encourage additional labor supply among childless low-income individuals. However, he would also direct new subsidies at an already favored group - seniors - and an already favored activity - borrowing for housing-which could probably be better directed elsewhere.

I think it's worth pointing out that it is not pro-business to cut taxes and increase deficits, which McCain is essentially inevitably proposing.

Obama does not get a pass here from me. Subsidizing home equity borrowing has been way overdone, and, like the Tax Policy Center, I think there are better ways to use that money. However, his proposals are far more fiscally responsible than McCain's 'cut taxes on the rich in war-time' plan.

The bottom line is that McCain isn't even good for business interests, just for (maybe) the top 1% who benefit so dramatically from his tax plans that it offsets the damage to the overall economy. And in fact his plan is so skewed that Obama's plan is prima facie better for the bottom 80% of the income distribution. If, as economists like to believe, we are all constantly making economically rational choices, I expect to see an 80 - 20 vote split this November.

negritude

2008-06-16T22:00:00.003-04:00

There's a very interesting article about African immigrants in France, something I'm particularly interested in because I have several Malian students who grew up in Paris. The article describes both Obama's rock star status and his effect as a catalyst for conversations about race in traditionally race-blind France, as well as the growing movement among black immigrants to France to address race.

Personal note: My students have said, very clearly, that it is better to be African in Paris than in Philadelphia. My mother's response to that was: the deepest racism in France is against Arabs.

The article is worth reading not only for its fascinating look at race somewhere else - where race officially does not exist, but where far-right xenophobes were second in the 2002 presidential election - but also because it contains some excellent snippets.

For example, a summary of the trouble with ignoring race:

"The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal," he said. "But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal."

France does not have particular trouble with educational inequity, but economic inequality persists:
The percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

And for sheer color:
Youssoupha ... [a Sorbonne-educated Congolese French rapper] was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside.

That's right, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant just outside Paris. Beat that! (No seriously - what does beat that?)

dead past

2008-06-12T09:07:00.000-04:00

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been writing about trying to survive in Europe around 1000 AD with a secondary question about other time periods, still in Europe. Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East have obviously come up - people have suggested, wisely in my view, that someone whose primary skills are academic might do better in the Middle East or East Asia around that time.

I find this particular question totally fascinating, but the discussion makes me scratch my head. First of all, there's a blind assumption that the traveler in question is male and white. Much discussion of how much taller and stronger than everyone you'd be (I doubt I'd be taller than most of the men), little discussion of the relative rape risk, assumption that the obstacles will be those faced by an ill-informed foreigner, not by a woman who may legally be property. Similar for race: if you look dramatically different from anyone the people there have met (not just taller/stronger/healthier/better teeth, but completely different skin color) you might have some interesting reactions.

Second, most of the advice is about how to take over the world. I find this kind of laughable, especially when people assume that some small piece of knowledge would be immediately influential, or that you'd be able to somehow leverage your vastly! superior! knowledge of marketing! or your basic understanding of something very technical like telescope lenses in order to revolutionize the society. My favorite might be the person who suggests posing as a wizard (which in and of itself might get you killed) by using 'a magnet, some wire, and a water wheel' to produce electricity (where will you get a magnet and some wire? also, educated people may already know about electricity: the Greeks did) or by using a lighter (basically a fancy flint and steel, which is a very old technology). Also foolish is the idea that a modern person with no fighting expertise or reputation would be able to convince the nobility that your military strategy would be better than theirs. Still, there are some pretty good ideas in this category: selling boiled water, working on camp sanitation for your local ruler's military (reduce disease casualties in wartime? very useful), bookkeeping, a few simple technologies.

All of them ignore the most important thing. I think most of us would find that we have a lot of potentially usable information, but it's not going to do you a damn bit of good if you get killed (as a witch, as a heretic, just by pissing someone off). Since the original question was about what to do to prepare, here's my advice. Start by learning wilderness survival stuff: shelter-building, basic navigation and time-telling, how to build simple snares, gutting small game, edible plants, fire-building (flint and steel is your best bet here - bowdrill is a royal pain). Most people of the time will probably be much better at it than you, but it'd be nice not to look like a total fool; also, I think people are likely to be the most dangerous condition you face, so being able to ditch people for a while would be pretty useful. Second, learn as much self-defense as possible. In both situations, don't concentrate on our stereotypical ideas about what knights and other nobility do (swords? not your friends): instead, learn knife and hand fighting for self-defense, focus on small game in hunting, etc.

Remember that people don't have the scientific method as an integral part of their culture yet, so even if you start doing something that improves health outcomes or whatever, they may not be able to fully notice or understand those improvements. That's a real liability if you're trying to develop a sanitation infrastructure or do medical work: it's not going to be 100% effective, and the first failure may call your entire work into question, depending on the explanatory model people are using. These kinds of cultural differences probably cannot be overstated, though of course human commonalities remain.

Personally, my only real skill is medicine. And not just boiling water or basic anatomy, where the benefits are not immediately obvious: because I have some wilderness medicine training, I'm pretty decent at treating sprains, breaks, cuts, and other day-to-day emergencies where the pay-off is fairly immediate and not just epidemiological. Depending on where I landed, that's probably the type of work I'd try for; if I were in Christian Europe, I might also head for a convent.

I do not think it means what you think it means

2008-06-11T15:58:00.003-04:00

Stephen Dubner, on the Freakonomics blog argues in favor of specialization and against eating local. The argument makes some sense: transportation costs, according to some recent work, don't account for that much of the carbon emissions created for food. Here's where my understanding breaks down. Dubner describes making orange sherbet, which was expensive and produced crappy orange sherbet: unsurprising. He concludes from this that growing one's own food is likely to be resource-intensive in money, labor, and waste, and that therefore specialization is a better deal. Which, fine, but it's based on some fundamental misunderstandings of the local food movement.

1. Eating local doesn't necessarily mean growing your own. I certainly grow fairly little of my own food (the Gardener of course has a garden, with lettuce and greens and tomatoes and herbs), but I eat mostly local, including items like eggs and milk that are totally impractical for me to raise myself.

2. Specialization can mean different things. The farmers I buy from have a specialized job as farmers, but they maintain the ecological health of their farms by growing a variety of crops which they rotate, and by incorporating animals into their farms. So their job is specialized, but they are generalists within that specialty: being a true specialist as a farmer means planting a monocrop, which then exposes your crops to greater disease risk and reduces your ability to let the ecology do the work of keeping the land healthy. Dubner conflates specialization of labor with specialization of crop, and they're very different.

3. Bizarrely, Dubner argues that growing your own will rarely be cheaper. This is just untrue overall, although there will always be exceptions. Herbs are a great example: a window box with marjoram, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, etc will run you something like the cost of 2-3 bundles of each herb. There are certain things where that's not true, obviously (eggs and milk are easy examples, but corn is expensive and takes a lot of land), but Dubner doesn't really investigate the costs: he just assumes that it's similar to his orange sherbet. What's particularly funny is that the NYT food section has a current article about how people are gardening to reduce their food costs, which does include some actual information.

4. Growing your own means using excess capacity. Walk around any city: there's tons of space to grow food, including patios, vacant lots, roofs, windowboxes. Because this increases the net food growing capacity of the planet, growing your own, especially for city dwellers using it as a supplement, is a pretty clear benefit for overall efficiency. Similarly, Dubner claims that people are bad at growing their own food, but this isn't a fixed point: the best way to get better at gardening is to do it for a few years.

As an aside, if I were trying to do what Dubner did with the orange sherbet, but in an efficient way, the first thing I would do is abandon the idea that it needs to be orange sherbet, and instead make something with some excess: this week, that'd be strawberry-buttermilk ice cream with jam strawberries that you can sometimes get at the Farmstand and the buttermilk that's left in our fridge from making butter out of cream that was going to go bad. Part of the point of eating local and being ecologically efficient is turning waste into food. Compost, buttermilk, yogurt, jam, dried tomatoes: take what you have too much of and make it useful.

small success

2008-06-11T12:45:00.004-04:00

Weeks ago, one of my students, an extraordinarily dedicated girl from Sierra Leone, was in class when the rest of the students on a field trip and said, "You have to help me with my spelling homework. I don't understand it and my mother doesn't know how to read." I told my dad this story and he said that lots of Americans don't know how to read, but as far as this girl knows her home language doesn't have a written form. Not just, has trouble understanding Dickens. This is, has trouble with using symbols to represent sounds in order to communicate.

Last week, she got a B on her math final.

you know it's hot

2008-06-10T07:24:00.003-04:00

1. I bought an air conditioner after 4 summers in Philadelphia.

2. I've been wearing skirts for the last 4 days. In fact, I bought a dress last night because the idea of wearing pants to school today made me want to vomit.

3. They let school out at noon yesterday and today.

McCain Watch #4: Less jobs, more wars

2008-06-09T14:54:00.007-04:00

1. McCain called his wife a trollop and a cunt. Sixteen years ago, but yowzah. In front of reporters and everything, because she teased him about his thinning hair. Actual quote: "At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you cunt." Hello, impulse control. You can read about it, apparently, in The Real McCain.

2. Speaking of the same pun, please watch the video below, from The REAL John McCain: Less Jobs, More Wars. This is what I meant when I said the anti-McCain ads practically write themselves.

Then you can watch the second one:

My favorite part is at the end, right before he starts falling over his own feet talking about the tax cuts, where he says he thinks the US is better off than we were 8 years ago and then says we aren't. Please watch them both. It's worth 6 minutes and 4 seconds of your life.

half right

2008-06-07T10:26:00.002-04:00

California is denying water permits to development projects that don't have an adequate water supply, which turns out to be quite a few of them. While this NYT article, as usual, omits some important information (where are most of the permits being denied?) and is a short newspaper article so you don't get much background (have I told you to read Cadillac Desert? I'll tell you again), it's still pretty interesting. Adequate water supply in this case means meeting a 2001 rule that you need a 20-year water supply: California already relies heavily on water imported from the Colorado basin, so it's not clear where any new water is going to come from, especially since climate-change predictions have the Colorado basin and California both getting dryer.

The problem, as the article does mention, is that agriculture - mostly though not entirely heavily subsidized, environmentally devastating, corporate agriculture - uses much more water than residential and office uses. So the water boards are absolutely right to prevent developments - especially developments with golf courses! which should never exist west of the 100th meridian! - that lack an adequate water supply, but at some point agriculture will have to pay too. It's a sign of the lunacy of our agricultural system that we have dammed rivers and exterminated salmon in order to grow and heavily subsidize crops that destroy the topsoil, pump chemicals into the Pacific, and end up with land whose inadequate drainage concentrates selenium and other heavy metals and chemicals in swamps that then kill migratory birds and are essentially permanently unusable. And then we have to refrigerator-truck those crops across the country, exacerbating global climate change and further reducing the available water for California.

Smart.