Do I really wanna know?
— Huge iPad security breach.
— Felix Salmon makes the case for interchange fee regulation.
— Closing the IT gap.
— Law firm conducts purge of female associates with kids.
— Bad DC bus drivers back behind the wheel.
Hellacopters, “Carry Me Home”
Via Ryan Avent’s Twitter feed, here’s how the Fed saw things in June 2008:
Things were worse than that!
As a thought experiment, imagine what answer Ben Bernanke or Barack Obama or Larry Summers or John Boehner or Mitch McConnell would have given in June 2008 to the question of “if unemployment goes up to ten percent, how will you respond?”
David Leonhardt has an excellent analysis of the substance and politics behind the too-small stimulus:
But when they are not speaking for quotation, some White House and Congressional officials acknowledge that they could have done more to stimulate the economy, and sooner. In part, they have been busy with other things: legislation on health care, finance and education that could shape the economy for decades to come. The bigger reason, though, is politics.
In the face of near-united Republican opposition, top Democrats have decided that the political costs of aggressively pushing for more stimulus are too high. Any new bill will help only on the margins, and it will give Republicans another chance to blame Mr. Obama for the deficit, even though the current deficit is more of their own party’s making. The Democrats may be right, too. We will never know, because we will never be able to re-run the 2010 election under a different set of circumstances.
Leonhardt goes in one direction with this, but another place you can take it is the nature of America’s political institutions. If Barack Obama were Prime Minister of a Westminster-style system then he’d really be in a position to go implement whatever he thought was best. Certain actions would come with a high political price, of course, but in exchange for paying the price he’d get his policy preferences. And if his preferences were vindicated by events, then the price would turn out to be pretty low. The US political system isn’t like that. The President bears the bulk of the responsibility for the performance of the economy, but he has limited tools of discipline over his copartisans in congress and the opposition party—whose incentives point in favor of generating poor economic performance—gets a large say in the matter.
This is the system you would set up if you wanted to make it as difficult as possible for the federal government to engage in macroeconomic stabilization policy. If we want to do better in the future, we need some combination of (a) changing how the system works, (b) developing better automatic fiscal stabilizers, or (c) getting the Federal Reserve to do a better job of performing a stabilizing role when short-term interest rates are close to zero. The system as currently designed, can’t produce the sort of policies that Leonhardt and I favor.
As you probably know, poor children get subsidized school lunched because in America those of us who don’t work for the Cato Institute have this crazy idea that malnourished children is a bad thing. And as you probably know, kids don’t go to school during the summertime. And yet as Melissa Boteach points out, children actually eat food during all seasons. Fortunately, the government does have a couple of programs that attempt to get summer meals to poor children, but unfortunately these programs are pretty limited in scope:
These programs have proven effectiveness, yet we fail to connect many eligible children with summer feeding programs and the food and enrichment activities they provide. Fortunately, Congress has the opportunity to make significant improvements to summer feeding in the upcoming reauthorization of the child nutrition programs, including strategies to better connect children to the programs.
One of the biggest limitations of the SFSP under the current model is the shortage of program sites. There are just 34 summer food sites for every 100 school lunch programs. Congress should ensure that more areas are eligible to serve summer meals in order to address this disparity.
These days in Washington it’s fashionable to invoke the next generation as a rationale for cutting spending, but the next generation will be much better off if we borrow more money at attractive interest rates to avoid malnutrition than it will be with less debt and more hunger.
It’s also worth noting the broader background here. One of the reasons kids from high-SES families do better in school than kids from low-SES families is that high-SES families provide more educational value outside the classroom. Consequently, when you shut schools down for months at a time you open gaps in learning achievement that get wider and wider after time. Summer vacation is as American as apple pie, but it’s also a really effective weapon of class warfare against poor kids. Well-designed expanded learning time is a very good idea.
Not that he’ll get any credit for it from the haters, but it seems to me that the UN Security Council’s vote to impose sanctions on Iran counts as a vindication of Barack Obama’s view that taking a more conciliatory approach to the world will help get more cooperation from other world powers on American priorities.
Spencer Ackerman explains what comes next:
This will not be the last effort at sanctioning Iran. U.S. and European officials have talked for months about pivoting off a successful Security Council vote to cobble together a coalition of major Iranian trading partners to tighten the economic screws on the Iranian leadership. Those include the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Japan, the European Union, China and Russia. But expect conservative voices to continue a push for a total oil embargo on Iran, as a congressional measure to impose additional gas sanctions was deferred for the vote.
Something that I think is worth noting here is that sanctioning Iran isn’t just about Iran and Iran’s nuclear program. It’s about every other country on earth, and all those countries’ hypothetical nuclear programs. The precedent of North Korea makes clear that if you really want a nuclear weapon, the international community probably can’t stop you. But how many world leaders cast a glance at Kim Jong-Il and say “I wish I were that guy”? If Iran continues to refuse to verifiably disarm, we want to make sure that other leaders of mid-sized powers still feel that a price is being paid that’s high enough to induce them to make other choices.
(cc photo by Jeff Kubina)
Following in the footsteps of Brad DeLong and in the spirit of generosity, it’s perhaps worth trying to reconstruct the best argument against stimulus and in favor of fiscal retrenchment that I can make. The story I would tell is that we’re seeing a bit of an ironic switcheroo in which the liberals who normally tell me markets aren’t perfect are now telling me not to worry about the US (or German or Japanese) fiscal deficit because interest rates are so low.
In theory, this is because these securities are “safe.” Investors are confident that these securities will be repaid, and that they’ll be repaid via a mechanism that doesn’t involve massive inflation. But what mechanism? Is it actually true that the United States has a credible plan to close its long-term fiscal deficit? Well, no it’s not. Nor is it true that the U.S. political system seems to be highly functional and capable of making the tough choices need to formulate such a plan. So why are rates really so low? It’s a bubble. Investors view US government debt as “safe” because they’re confident other investors will view it as safe. The social practices of financial markets require something to be the “safe” asset and by convention that asset is US government debt. Investors know that other investors know that yet other investors will view it as safe. Ergo it’s safe, in much the way that house prices always go up. Which is to say that it’s safe until the bubble pops and the animal spirits become seized with panic and everything goes to shit.
In other words, we need to ignore the price signals and the markets and substitute instead the judgment of expert economic planners that there’s too much debt out there.
I think William Galston comes closest to outlining this view and I think there’s something to it. But even if it’s right, the upshot isn’t that we need to act now to cut the deficit now. It’s that we can’t afford to wait until later to cut the long-term deficit. It’s an argument for acting right away on a bill that schedules for the future higher taxes on the rich, higher taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, less spending on defense, and progressive cost-sharing for Medicare.
One thing that’s been frustrating progressive lawyers for a few years now, but increasingly so over time, is the belief of the public and the press that the federal judiciary is primarily a venue for tackling “hot button” issues like abortion and the death penalty. In reality, the bulk of federal litigation has to do with businesses suing each other, workers or consumers suing businesses, or businesses trying to fight off regulators.
The Constitutional Accountability Center has a new study out (PDF) that takes a look at this issue through the lens of the US Chamber of Commerce, the premiere group that can be found arguing that corporate executives should be able to get away with doing whatever they want. Here’s how often different justices sided with the Chamber’s position on cases the Chamber weighed in on:
We can see that this is a substantial divider between the court’s five conservatives and its four non-conservatives. The gap between Kennedy and Souter is much larger than the Kennedy-Alito gap or the Souter-Ginsburg gap.
And a look at the close cases decided by 5-4 votes is even more telling:
Of the 17 cases decided by a five‐Justice majority, 12 (71%) resulted in victories for the Chamber. In these cases, the conservative bloc voted for the Chamber 84% of the time, compared to only 15% for the moderate/liberal bloc. Strikingly, in these close cases, Justice Alito never cast a vote against the Chamber of Commerce’s position.
Now maybe you think that business interests have a hard time getting a fair shake in the Congress and at the White House. Certainly I would say that one problem with the political process is that it’s difficult for members of geographically dispersed minority groups to get a fair hearing there, so one positive thing the courts can do is help groups like that out. Maybe you think business interests are the same way. It’s just hard for a CEO to get his calls returned, or to get anyone to take his campaign contributions or look at the research documents his lobbyists called up. So maybe that’s why it’s so important for the judiciary to give them an extra helping hand. Maybe.
Reading Tim Fernholz’s excellent article on the successful Build America Bonds program and the fuzzy thinking that’s imperiling it made me want to write once again on the topic of bailout-rhetoric, which I think has become really dangerous and counterproductive to understanding. I last thought of this reading an email discussion about Joe Gagnon’s monetary policy ideas that objected to his proposal as a “backdoor bailout.”
And of course in other quarters we can’t appropriate funds to prevent teacher layoffs because that’s a “bailout.” Or we shouldn’t let the IMF prevent a fiscal meltdown in Europe because that’s a “bailout.” But, heck, economic growth is corporate bailout! Growth is a bailout for feckless state and local politicians! Everything is either a bailout or else it’s collapse.
Obviously, there’s frustration about the difference between the solicitude the political system shows to problems in financial asset markets and the solicitude shown to problems in the labor market. But people should just say that! It’s not that policymakers have some proclivity for “bailouts” but refuse to do worthy virgin-pure “jobs” bills. It’s that policymakers have been willing to do just enough to halt asset price crashes and prevent unemployment from really whacking the college educated set. This is bad. It’s very bad. More can and should be done. But obsession with the evils of “bailouts” is only muddying people’s thinking.
Jon Chait recommends Gadi Taub’s trenchant critique of the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Barak administration’s approach:
Israelis are stunned by the fact that the world has grown to think of Hamas as the righteous victim and of Israel as the evil aggressor. This perception of Israel is false and malicious, but it does not mean that Israel bears no responsibility for it. Yes, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the world. Yes, there are unfair biases against the Jewish state. But Israel has been feeding them. So long as Israel’s government continues to settle in the West Bank, no one—not even Israel’s American friends—will believe that Netanyahu seeks peace. So long as Israel seems to be bent on making its occupation permanent, on holding a whole population under military rule without basic political rights indefinitely, it will be increasingly ostracized by the international community.
Today, Israel is not the belligerent party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is Israel that has offered partition, and the Palestinians who have consistently refused it. Netanyahu inherited a winning hand. He could have put a peace plan on the table, leaving the Palestinians to refuse it. He could have declared that Israel wanted to withdraw from the West Bank and would do so if its security was guaranteed by an agreement with the Palestinians or a third party. He could have offered state housing help for those who would leave the settlements even before an agreement. Instead, he mumbled something half-heartedly about two states, and then moved on to fight for enlarging settlements.
As far as it goes, this is great stuff. But I think Chait’s enthusiasm for the analysis reflects the main pathology of mainstream American Jewish thinking on the subject—a bizarre willingness to believe that Israeli politicians are bafflingly stupid. I mean, yes of course nobody will believe that Netanyahu seeks peace as long as his top priority is to expand settlements. Yes of course if Israel wants the world to believe that Israel holds the moral high ground it should unambiguously offer to renounce occupation. Yes of course if it’s really true that the Palestinians are hell-bent on refusing reasonable peace offers Israel should expose this fact. But that’s just to say that the current Israeli government isn’t seeking peace—it’s seeking settlements.
These aren’t tactical blunders, they’re substantive commitments. And they’re appalling ones. We just had a nice nationwide Two Minute Hate over Helen Thomas’ desire to purge Israel/Palestine of its Jewish population, but her vision and Netanyahu’s are nearly mirror images.
For domestic consumption in Israel, it’s fine to see Taub-style narratives. Progress is made by letting people align “doing the right thing” with their own nationalistic mythologies, and his piece works in that regard. But in terms of America’s policy in the region, it’s necessary for policymakers to be clear-eyed about what’s happening and not have the White House and State Department hamstrung by congress and external pressure groups demanding that Netanyahu be treated with kid gloves or that we all participate in a myth about a sincere search for peace. If Israel’s leaders would rather have the West Bank than have peace, then there’s only so much we can do about that. But it would be foolish of us not to readjust our relationship accordingly.
Stanford’s Jon Krosnick explains that Americans believe climate change is real, believe it’s caused by human activity, and want to see it stopped—but they diverge from experts in how it should be done:
Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power. And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
A frustrated Kevin Drum glosses this as “the American public doesn’t want to do anything — carbon taxes or cap-and-trade — that might actually work.”
But that’s not quite right. In principle you could seriously reduce overall emissions through these kind of regulatory measures. But it would be much, much, much more economically costly than alternative approaches. Offering giant tax subsidies to manufacturers of fuel efficient automobiles and offsetting the lost revenue with higher income taxes and reduced public services will, over time, cut fuel consumption. But you could cut fuel consumption by an equivalent amount with a modest increase in the gasoline tax, which would produce revenue that could be used to reduce income taxes and increase public services. The difference between the two policies is that on the “free” option everyone loses except automobile manufacturers, whereas on the “expensive” option everyone who consumes a below-average amount of gasoline comes out ahead.
But the public’s understanding of these kind of issues—and not just in an environmental context—is extremely poor. And I think conservative politicians, conservative pundits, and conservative political institutions deserve a great deal of the blame for this situation. The view that it’s better to achieve policy aims through taxes and fees than through piecemeal subsidies and regulations is a standard consequence of the neoclassical economic model that these people are the strongest proponents of. And in general, taxing undesired externalities is by far the most “free market” way to handle these kind of situations. But the American right offers, in practice, no support for these kinds of market-oriented policies. Instead it’s spent thirty years deeply investing in rabid anti-tax politics that have completely conquered the Republican Party and largely conquered the Democratic Party as well. Now it’s nearly unthinkable to suggest that anyone should ever pay more taxes for any reason. And yet demonizing taxes doesn’t eliminate public demand for policy solutions to broad problems, it simply channels it into less efficient channels.
Part of the perversity of stringent immigrant clampdowns is that not only do they have few-to-negative benefits, but the costs of implementing and enforcing these rules can be quite high. Jurisdictions that are looking to purge themselves of undocumented immigrants are expending resources on hurting their local economy that could be put to constructive ends.
Which is how you wind up with Arizona’s State Treasurer calling for the construction of outdoor prison camps in order to make the budget work while maintaining the immigrant-bashing cred he needs to run for governor as a Republican:
Arizona state Treasurer Dean Martin, a Republican candidate for governor, called on Tuesday for the creation of statewide tent cities to house the expected increase in the number of illegal immigrants expected to be arrested under the state’s controversial new immigration law. [...]
His proposal is in response to growing concerns in Arizona that the cash-strapped state cannot afford to enforce the new immigration law that goes into effect next month.
Shades of Andersonville. Meanwhile, though high levels of immigration are beneficial to the immigrants and to most native-born workers, it is true that a minority of native-born Americans—primarily those who lack a high school degree—suffer economically because of mass immigration. But rather than expending scarce resources on outdoor prison camps, it would make much more sense for politicians concerned about these impacts to expend the resources on programs that help people.
It’s always dangerous to try to sum up a bunch of disparate events into a single trend, but I suppose yesterday’s primary results on the Democratic side show that we’re still in a world that’s less interesting and less dynamic than journalists and activists alike want it to be. Winograd’s challenge to Jane Harman turned out to be totally unimpressive, Mickey Kaus’ vanity primary bid turned out to be a total joke, and even though Bill Halter’s challenge to Blanche Lincoln gave her a real scare (and seems to have had a real impact on the course of the financial regulation bill) in the end it was turned aside pretty comfortably since Arkansas Democrats are a pretty conservative bunch.
I’m less clear on the all the GOP results. If anything, what we’ve learned over the past 3-4 years is that whether or not the crazier candidate prevails in these contested races, whoever prevails ends up needing to adopt full-spectrum craziness.
Price Fishback’s recent argument that social spending in the United States is actually higher than what you see in Sweden and Denmark attracted a lot of attention around the blogosphere. Lane Kenworthy, an excellent scholar of such questions, examines the issue and reveals that in most relevant ways it’s not true (although it is true in some other ways). Probably the most telling one is this:
Fishback tries to account for this, but as Kenworthy explains he gets it wrong:
In his paper, Fishback cites similar numbers from the OECD. He cautions, though, that “One advantage the poor Americans would have had in spending their disposable income is that they face consumption tax rates in the 4 to 7 percent range, while consumption taxes in the Nordic countries are above 20 percent.” Actually, consumption tax rates are incorporated in the purchasing power parities (PPPs) used to convert incomes to a common currency, so these income figures already adjust for differences in consumption taxes.
Two important things to further note about this. One is that as Fishback himself notes “[p]ublic services not counted in disposable income, like health care and education, likely are better for the very poor in the Nordic countries than in the United States.” The other is simply that Denmark and especially Sweden have per capita GDPs that are lower than America’s in PPP terms (Denmark I think is close at market exchange rate, and Sweden is lower either way). So for better or for worse, the Nordics are clearly putting a lot more effort into helping the poor. Conversely, America is doing much more than Denmark (and I think a bit more than Sweden) to help poor people born in foreign countries by letting them come live and work here, though again the Nordics have more foreign aid.
Yesterday afternoon, Lindsay Graham confirmed that he’s bailing from efforts to pass a climate change bill. The odds weren’t looking good for this legislation, but now they’re hard to distinguish from zero. And the news gets worse after the midterms. Simply put, given the difficult nature of the problem and the regional considerations in play, you just can’t tackle climate change unless a substantial number of Republicans want to tackle climate change. In theory, this shouldn’t be impossible. There are three Republicans from liberal states in New England. And there are a bunch of Republicans from southwestern states with low carbon emissions and huge potential to generate low carbon energy. On top of that, you have Republicans from Gulf Coast states whose population should be intimately familiar by now with the ecological consequences of climate disruption and fossile fuel use.
But there’s no sign of any movement. And as Kate Sheppard observes, Graham himself can barely speak coherently on the subject:
I’m in the wing of the Republican Party that has no problem with trying to find ways to clean up our air. We can have a debate about global warming, and I’m not in the camp that believes man-made emissions are contributing overwhelmingly to global climate change, but I do believe the planet is heating up. But I am in the camp of believing that clean air is a noble purpose for every Republican to pursue. The key is to make it business friendly.
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Paradoxically, the 111th Congress is going to go down in history as one of the most productive and consequential of all time, but also one that abjectly failed to confront the most important issue it faced. And by “Congress” I mean “Senate.”
You split my heart in two:
— Lindsey Graham abandons climate bill, planet doomed.
— Poland implementing chemical castration law.
— SCOTUS right-wing takes further steps to enhance the political clout of rich people and big business.
— One man’s excessive health spending is another company’s profits.
— How Orly Taitz might win in California.
— China boosting internet access while remaining committed to large-scale censorship.
The climate situation may be totally hopeless, but at least there’s still Swedish pop. To wit: Robyn, “Fembots”.
Felix Salmon and Kevin Drum ponder the American middle class’ implacable opposition to taxing the rich as a means of closing the budget deficit. Their comments are interesting, but I’m seeking evidence that any such opposition exists. On March 29, Quinnipiac University asked “Do you think – raising income taxes on households making more than $250,000 should or should not be a main part of any government approach to the deficit?” The answer? People think it should:
When they asked about raising income taxes on households making more than 1 million dollars, support was overwhelming, 72 of respondents including a majority of self-identified Republicans said it was a good idea.
More from PollingReport:
CBS News/New York Times Poll. April 5-12, 2010. N=1,580 adults nationwide:
“Do you regard the income tax which you will have to pay this year as fair, or not?”
Fair, 68 / Not fair, 30 / Unsure 8Bloomberg Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. Dec. 3-7, 2009. N=1,000 adults nationwide:
“I’m going to mention some specific government programs that add significantly to the federal deficit. For each, please tell me if the spending is justified and should be continued, was justified but should be cut dramatically, or is not justified at all. . . .”
“Tax cuts for the very wealthy”
Justified, continue, 27 / Justify, cut, 12 / Not Justified, 60 / Unsure 1Gallup Poll. April 6-9, 2009. N=1,027 adults nationwide:
“As I read off some different groups, please tell me if you think they are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much, or paying too little. How about [see below]?”
“Upper-income”
Fair share, 23 / Too much, 13 / Too little, 60 / Unsure 3
Higher taxes on the rich is basically the only deficit-reducing policy measure the public supports.
Via Paul Waldman, an interesting Pew Center report on trends in multi-racial marriage. They’re on the rise:
And unions between whites and Hispanics or Asians constitute the bulk:
As I’ve said before, I think the upshot of this is that the country will be “whiter” in 2050 than naive demographic projections suggest and that will largely be because a very substantial portion of the descendants of today’s Hispanics and Asians will be considered white.
To follow up on two themes from yesterday, Eric Voeten has a very interesting post about the looming election in the Netherlands. One point is that in their system the election results underdetermine political outcomes because coalition-formation is hard to predict. They have polls that tell you how many seats different parties are likely to get, but prediction markets have no idea what the resulting government will look like:
Voeten observes:
Some voters are trying to anticipate how their choice will affect the coalition formation process: about one-fifth of all voters says that they will vote strategically. This will mean different things to different people. For example, some may allocate their vote in a way that they think will maximize the probability of keeping the PVV and Geert Wilders out of office whereas others are motivated by keeping the PvdA out. If all of this illustrates one general point, it may well be that Andrew Gelman is right that “elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved”.
That in turn serves as a reminder that contrary to what I sometimes here people say, proportional systems don’t necessarily eliminate strategic voting. Instead, they change the nature of the strategic calculus.
To the best of my knowledge there are precisely two people in the United States of America interested in the “Bologna Process” of higher education integration currently occurring in the European Union. Luckily for you, I am one of those people. To make a long story short, the higher education systems of the different EU member states have traditionally been structured differently, and the powers that be decided they needed to create some kind of system of comparability so that a Finnish degree could be compared to an Italian or Belgian one. This is dull on its own terms, but it has the pretty radical implication that colleges and universities are going to have to submit to some kind of measurement of actual teaching and learning rather than just saying “yep, so-and-so definitely took a class!”
The other person interested in this is Kevin Carey, who reports that similar metrics-based reforms are coming to Utah, the rare conservative state that also has a good government innovative streak:
With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the “tuning” methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe. Led by William Evenson, a former professor of physics at Brigham Young University, faculty members developed a comprehensive account of what physics students need to know and be able to do at the associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degree levels. “The B.S./B.A. student should demonstrate the ability to use statistical mechanics to define the entropy from the density of states and connect this form to the 2nd law when expressed as ds = dQ/dT >= 0,” for example. Other requirements include extensive laboratory, research, and communications skills.
[...]
“The process builds in accountability,” Evenson told me. “Once you’ve defined the outcomes, you can ask, ‘Are the programs really doing that?’ If a student finishes and can’t do what’s advertised, they’ll say, ‘I’ve been shortchanged.’ Transparency makes it easier for students, parents, and policy makers to make the right choices.” Tuning works only if it’s faculty-driven, Evenson stressed, rather than imposed from the outside. And tuning doesn’t mean that different colleges and professors will all start teaching exactly the same way—only that they will teach with shared, public goals in mind.
These are process reforms, but they’re essential to substantive reforms in the way higher education is done. Modern information technology clearly makes it possible to attempt any number of new approaches (whether DIY U-ish or otherwise) but it’s difficult to apply innovative teaching/learning experiences to a marketplace dominated by credentials and vaguely defined branding. A new university is almost by definition not a prestigious one, even it’s really good at teaching students. Developing real criteria for what you’re supposed to be learning gives innovators a chance to actually reap rewards from doing a good job.
I’m an admirer of Caitlin Flanagan’s skills as a writer of prose, and I like that she likes to take on topics that others shy away from. But it’s always bothered me that the Atlantic lets her write articles that, under guise of book reviewing or some such, make sweeping statements of social trends without any kind of empirical backing or even recognition of the possibility that assertions can be verified or not through data. Fortunately, for the first time ever this blog has an intern, Ryan McNeely, currently pursuing an MA at Princeton and conversant with research methods and facts in a way that Flanagan isn’t. I asked him to poke around at her latest article which posits that very young teen girls are spearheading a cultural counterrevolution against a burgeoning hookup revolution. Not surprisingly, there seem to be some problems.
Flanagan posits, for example, that the reactions of liberal mothers of women born circa 1961 “to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.” Of course hypothetical reactions are hard to predict, but here’s CDC data (PDF) on teen sexual health outcomes since the mid-seventies:
And a couple of quotes on trends during the period when today’s teen girls have been growing up:
— “During 1991–2007, the prevalence of sexual experience decreased 12% overall, from 54.1% to 47.8%. Logistic regression analyses indicated a significant linear decrease overall and among female, male, 9th-grade, 10th-grade, 11th-grade, 12th-grade, black, and white students.”
— “During 1991–2007, the prevalence of multiple sex partners decreased 20%, from 18.7% to 14.9%.”
Flanagan also asserts that attitudes have shifted against virginity very recently:
Two divergent cultural tracks regarding girls and sexuality have developed in this country. At one extreme, in not-insignificant numbers, you have evangelical Christians who have decided to demand that their children—and in particular their daughters—remain virgins until marriage. Until very recently, this would not have even needed to be put into words; it was the shared assumption of most Americans, and everything in the culture—from mainstream entertainment to religious doctrine to the most casual remarks passed from mother to daughter—supported it.
According to David Harding and Christopher Jencks “Changing Attitudes Toward Premarital Sex” this change in fact occurred in the 1970s:
In 1969, more than 75 percent of American adults with an opinion on premarital sex said it was wrong. By the 1980s only 33-37 percent of Americans said that premarital sex was either “always” or “almost always” wrong.
Attitudes aside, the CDC’s document “Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing, National Survey of Family Growth 2006-2008″ would have provided a wealth of information to Flanagan about actual trends in actual teen conduct, had she been interested in looking it up. For example, during this period of burgeoning hookup culture fewer teens are having sex:
72 percent of teen girls report that they were “going steady” with the first person they had sex with. An additional three percent say they were cohabiting, engaged, or married.
Faced with an imaginary trend toward promiscuity, Flanagan asks rhetorically “Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity?”
In the real world, however, the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports that boys are more likely to binge drink than girls, and although this gap is narrowing, “overall past month consumption among 12- to 17-year old males and females has been declining.” So we have a made-up trend toward hookups explained by a made-up trend toward binge drinking!
Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion.
To say something else about Helen Thomas, one thing I’ve seen raised in a number of quarters is the selectivity or hypocrisy involved in condemnations of her. I think that’s right, but I also think people have to be careful with the deployment of pure hypocrisy arguments, which are always the tool of people trying to defend weak positions. North Korea’s egregious human rights abuses don’t mitigate Israel’s human rights abuses. Mike Huckabee’s support for cleansing the entire area west of the Jordan River of its Arab population is disgusting but doesn’t somehow make Thomas’ view that Israeli Jews should be deported to Poland okay.
Which is to say that with hypocrisy we should be trying to level up—to hold everyone to higher and better standards of conduct—rather than to level down by using observations of hypocrisy to minimize bad behavior. In my opinion, it’s a huge problem that people who openly or implicitly support massive displacement or perpetual disenfranchisement of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians are considered respectable figures in American and Israeli politics. But you tackle this problem by tackling it and by tackling the religious fanaticism and bigoted nationalism that give it welcome.
Andrew Gelman elaborates on the conditions that make U.S. presidential elections pretty predictable, but that don’t let us say the same thing about other kinds of elections:
(a) A long history: we can predict this year’s election, to some extent, from last year’s. The U.S. isn’t a country like Guatemala where they’ve only been having competitive elections for a few years.
(b) Clear separation between the parties. Talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum aside, the Democrats and Republicans are, according to Huber and Stanig, further apart on economic issues than are left and right groupings in just about every other industrialized country.
(c) Only two major candidates. Anderson in 1980, Perot in 1992 and 1996: they cane close but they didn’t quite make it a real three-candidate race. It basically worked to focus on the Democrat and the Republican.
(d) Equal resources. Not quite: Nixon reputedly massively outspent McGovern in 1992, Bush had the edge over Gore in 2000, and Obama had a few hundred million to spare in 2008. Still, compared to referenda and elections for congress and governor, presidential races are on a pretty level playing field.
(e) A clear schedule: Voters have many months to sort out the information and make up their minds.
This is worth keeping in mind when you hear the intuitively wrong-sounding empirical results on the lack of campaign effects. What the political science is telling you isn’t that presidential election campaigns couldn’t make a difference to election outcomes, it’s telling you that they don’t seem to make a difference in practice. But if one candidate just refused to fundraise, or did fundraise but did something wildly eccentric with the money, then for all we know that might make a big difference. You could imagine a candidate deliberately trying to tank the race, or just acting plain-out weird. What if John McCain delivered lengthy speeches denouncing his own policy agenda? But in practice we always see two well-funded, well-known candidates run pretty conventional campaigns and within that context the ups-and-downs of the campaign trail don’t seem to make a difference.
Leikha Kihara’s Reuters profile of new Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda indicates that he shares the current global fad for fiscal austerity whether or not it makes sense. More encouragingly, though, it also reveals that he’s not afraid of picking a public fight or two with the Bank of Japan over the monetary authority’s need for looser policy. There’s a strong case for central bank independence—namely that lack of independence will lead to unduly loose policy—but that’s a contingent, empirical case. The experience of Japan has been of independence leading to unduly tight policy and far too little growth. Recently the European Central Bank has been trending in that direction as well and even though the American Federal Reserve looks good in comparison we’re also erring on the side of doing too little.
The overall dynamic is poisonous, and elected officials need to start challenging it. Japan is as good a place as any to start.
Via Ezra Klein, Andrew Ross Sorkin explains how BP might be forced into bankruptcy. Worst case scenario is unlimited liability
Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, BP’s liability for economic devastation — above the cost of the cleanup — is capped at $75 million, a number Mr. Hayward has already said he plans to blow through. But if BP is found to have violated safety regulations, which seems likely, that cap becomes irrelevant.
This would seem to be Scott Sumner’s case number one in which additional regulation is unnecessary because “The financial losses to BP are the same order of magnitude as the damage to the environment” so we “need to simply accept the fact that ’stuff happens.’ And hope this will be a wake-up call for the offshore oil drilling industry to be more careful.”
That seems to me to be a very naive view of how the incentives are structured. I assume you’re not going to find a line like “BP regularly violates safety regulations, which is no problem most of the time but could expose us unexpectedly to unlimited liability in case of a giant spill, and by the way we’re not insured against this scenario because we can’t publicly admit to safety violations” in a BP annual report. And even if BP CEO Tony Hayward winds up getting fired over this, he and other top BP managers will still have earned much, much, much more money in their careers than most people do. Of course in principle BP shareholders could make direct inquiries into this sort of thing, but of course in practice nobody does. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I myself am indirectly invested in BP via some broad indexes and over the course of my lifetime as an owner of BP stock I have remained blissfully and rationally ignorant of the details of BP deepwater mining operations. Corporate governance is just nowhere near good enough for market mechanisms to prevent these kind of rare catastrophes.
Obviously in practice neither is regulatory governance, which is why these situations arise. But on both fronts it makes sense to try to do better. I’m sure some other liberal pundits have ideas in terms of how drilling should be regulated, and on the corporate governance front I take this as another reason to think we should probably allow insider trading.
I think this speaks for itself:
Another key swing voter, retiring Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., is concerned that “the bill only raises taxes and includes no spending restraint, which isn’t his idea of fiscal responsibility,” a spokesman said. Bayh is also upset that negotiators removed a low-income housing tax break for Midwest disaster areas, which his spokesman said would create 1,700 jobs in Indiana.
Bayh has been among the most vocal senators opposed to a little-understood byproduct of the tax increase on “carried interest,” which would treat the sale of a fund manager’s stake in his or her business as ordinary income rather than capital gains, sources said.
It’ll be interesting to see what Bayh’s next job is.
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