Will the real Partisans please stand up?

This Yglesias post got me thinking about which politicians are the most partisan. Here's Yglesias explaining who is not partisan:

Say what you will about this stuff, but none of it is partisan. Bolton was, after all, perfectly correct to say that the deal Nick Burns struck with North Korea and that Bush agreed to contradicts the basic premises of the Bush foreign policy. The partisan thing for Bolton to have done would have been to keep his qualms quiet and let the Great Leader bask in praise. Similarly, for Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama isn't partisanship. What's partisanship is when people refrain from criticizing their party's leading figures.

Partisanship is when you refrain from attacking people in your own party for ideological differences or when attack people in the other party for views which you actually agree with. Too often nowadays writers and Op-Ed columnists equate honest political debate with partisanship simply because they can't imagine that people would actually disagree with them on the merits so they simply assume the opposing side is motivated by partisanship.

If you want to find the real partisans, look for politicians who have have taken strong public positions on important topics but failed to follow up that rhetoric by actually voting against the party line. If you want people who are clearly not partisan at all, see politicians willing to put their own party's senate seat at risk simply because they think that perusing the best foreign policy is more important than party orthodoxy.

Take Arlen Specter, Republican senator from Pennsylvania. He strongly suspects that Alberto Gonzales purposefully lied to congress (and him) while under oath, questioning him harshly. But when it came to actually calling for a special council to investigate suddenly Specter wasn't all that interested calling a special council "a great fundraising device for the Democratic Party."

It's interesting that he should frame his opposition to the special council in such starkly partisan terms. Specter does not oppose a special council because he thinks Gonzales is innocent. He doesn't oppose the special council because he thinks he'll be able to resolve the matter with Bush (perhaps by convincing him to dismiss Gonzales). He opposes the special council because - as much as he dislikes seeing a presidential appointee commit perjury - he hates the idea of helping the Democrats even more.

If that isn't rank partisanship I don't know what is.

Feeling Enviromental

(This is cross posted on my personal site)

A couple of times on my blog I’ve taken the position that all environmentalism can be defended on selfish grounds. Basically, screwing up the environment is bad for the long-term economic health of the world. Top-soil is good for the American economy and so is a corn belt that’s located here and not in 5 square acres of Canada. Similarly, every extinction is like a million year lab experiment thrown away before we’ve had a chance to learn from the results.

It’s pretty obvious that this argument works for short-term stuff like that affects people’s health right now and in direct ways but I’ve come to realize more and more that it’s not really a useful way of arguing for environmentalism generally. People just don’t get invested in environmentalism for selfish reasons; maybe their selfishness just doesn’t operate on long enough timescales. Instead, I’ve found that most people who favor environmentalism do so for non-selfish "emotional" reasons: a love of the unspoiled outdoors and empathy for the creatures who are killed by environmental neglect and so on. I don’t think I ever appreciated those reasons till I went hiking out by the house I grew up in with my girlfriend Lisa.

Here’s our hike.

When I was a kid I remember the trail feeling wild. This time it just looked abused. There was trash everywhere and the view from the top that used to be inspiring just looked like a view of a lot of sprawl. Developments replaced chaparral, the horse ranch is now a shopping mall, and the clearing where I saw a group of wary roadrunners in my youth now has a driveway in the middle of it. I took Lisa there a couple times but I’ve never been able to show them to her probably because they just don’t go there anymore.

Obviously my family’s complicit in all this. The house we moved into was once a new development which no doubt replaced wild country. But I’m an adult and can recognize the difference between capitulating to the realities of a housing market which doesn’t value lost wilderness and not valuing wilderness in the first place. And I can also recognize that the “realities of the housing market” don’t just appear out of nowhere: they’re the result of government policies (or lack thereof) that we can change.

See, I’m getting emotional.

Independence Day!

(cross-posted at my own site)

I'm generally not disposed to just sit around appreciating how great our country is in general. Rather, like liberals everywhere, I like to spend my time complaining about what we're getting wrong and how we can fix it.

There are some pretty obvious problem with the United States that pretty much everyone recognizes. Most obviously it is fundamentally unfair that 34 million Californians have to share two senators while the 14 people who live in Wyoming have the same number. This is just a fundamental injustice which was made even worse in light of the fact that Wyoming gave us Dick Cheney.

Our government is also built with too many veto points. If you prefer being oppressed by corporations and rich rather than by the government this is great. If on the other hand you like to have a responsive government that works it's not so great. If you wonder why the federal government can't pass any bills without slathering on the pork look directly to the founding father's insistence no bill could pass unless approved by the house, the senate, the president, the supreme court, one unblemished virgin, and an augur who must affirm that the bones approve.

The many veto points also serve to confound basic responsibility for politicians. I mean, I've often been told that Ronald Reagan would have passed balanced budgets if not for those damn tax-and-spend Democrats in congress. Not true of course but our system doesn't make that obvious. Similarly, Clinton didn't approve of Kyoto but was able to blame it on a Republican senate that wouldn't pass it.

Really we should drop the whole multiple veto point thing and take a look at a parliamentary form of government. Have one big house which is elected with proportional choice, instant run-off elections (like the ASUC only with voters that actually care). This will allow for more than two parties (depending on the cut-off) and the coalition that gets the majority of votes gets to pick the prime minister. This will make parties more accountable and make it easier to pass bills and repeal old ones that suck. And if some prime minister is so unpopular as to be ineffective we'll just hold another election right then and there. Don't you wish we could do that right about now?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on this fine day of independence. We shouldn't look too harshly on the founding fathers for the shortcomings in the constitution. Democracy was still a new idea then. They were like the first guys on the block to get a satellite dish who ended up keeping the 6 foot giant in the backyard even as their neighbors bought the newer mini roof-mounted ones.

Libby walks

Bush:

Worst president ever?

Or worst living organism ever?

Thoughts on the singularity

In his 1993 essay"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" Vernor Vinge predicted that once humans invented intelligent machines (or other super-intelligences) superior to humans we'd enter a post-human era where the key players where not man but machine. Part of his argument is that even if we wanted to prevent super-intelligences from taking over the economic incentives to creating one would be so great that sooner or later some one would build a machine capable of taking over everything.

I think the main flaw in this is the idea is that it's not necessarily the case that anything smart enough to take over man's fate would desire to do so. Presumably the super-intelligences would only desire to do what we programmed them to desire. And it's not clear that the desire to propagate and spread is something you'd accidentally end up instilling in your creation.

Though the stray death-cult might create a machine willing to multiply itself endlessly across the universe, you'd assume that most organizations would confine themselves to creating machines that focused on, you know, figuring stuff out for us. The only real danger is that a poorly configured machine would accidentally desire to propagate itself. Presumably it would be contained by all the other super intelligent computers that would probably be instilled with a desire to avoid having computers take over the universe.

Get a broom!

I hate leaf blowers as if they were little gas-powered Hitlers.

That is all.

Scientific tactics

Inspired by Paul's post below I started listening to the other Beyond Belief lectures which are actually quite good so long as you ignore the crazy quantum-consciousness people who always seem to be able to trick their way into these kinds of events.

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk in the first webisode where he articulates a common argument that in the debate between science and religion which faults scientists for being too "hoity-toity". His argument is basically that accusing people of being dumb is no way to convince them of your position.

On one level this is an intuitive argument. However, I think it's useful for scientists to observe the tactics being used by the other side. Put simply, the other side has no problem with accusing people of being dumb. Nothing is more condescending than being told that you will burn in hell for all eternity because you don't agree with me. And more specifically the argument that ties religiosity to morality is very common.

I suppose the fact that the religious side of the debate doesn't really address the question of whether they are effective, but it is instructive. More broadly, I think scientists have to take a wider view of why people take on religious beliefs (focusing specifically on how people come to believe things which impede science) and try to emulate the best parts. There's a whole lot of social programs used to sell religion that could just as easily be used to sell science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

On these long weekends I get to sit around and take the time to work through a lot of books, movies, or TV programs I don't otherwise have the time to dedicate to. Today I've been watching sessions from last November's Beyond Belief symposium. The best speaker I've seen so far is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is much better here than he is on PBS, since he's got the room to improvise and riff on his preferred variations on the theme of the relationship between science and religion. It's more history than science or religion, and he's really very watchable.


If you don't have the patience or time for the full 40 minutes, at least watch his 5 minute tirade about "Stupid Design":



Update: Also cool - though I'll stop embedding - is Stuart Hammeroff's discussion of why he thinks we can be conscious of events as they happen even though it would seem that our brain works too slowly to process the information at the necessary speeds. Apparently quantum information can go backward in time, and if consciousness is an emergent property of quantum phenomena, it would be no trouble to be conscious of things while they happen. I'm ignorant enough that that all sounds plausible to me (it's apparently quite controversial), but I don't get why he thinks that means that Thomas Huxley was wrong to describe us as "conscious automata, helpless spectators"; it's not like we can make some claim to control the quantum phenomena. Whether the illusion of control is constructed as things happen or after the fact, it's still an illusion.

How Parents Choose Schools

Andrew Coulson thinks that this study out of Georgetown "finds that families (overwhelmingly low-income and African-American) participating in D.C.’s school voucher program are making rational, informed choices and are becoming more astute consumers the longer they participate in the program."

In reality, the results are somewhat underwhelming. Certainly, there is a high level of parent satisfaction with the program, and the program's retention rate is at 90%. But education isn't about parental satisfaction, it's about helping children. Coulson, like many libertarian and school choice types, assumes blithely that families are making well-informed decisions, an assumption for which the evidence is rather thin.

For example, in DC, what criteria are parents using to make their school placement decisions? There's a table in the report I'll summarize:

Criterion	Prevalence
Class Size	All families
International/Global Focus	Small number
Location	Small number
Rigorous Academics	Most families
Religious/Moral Curriculum	Small number
Safety	All families
School Directory/Brochure	All families
School Visits	All families
Student Input	Small number
Test Results	A very small number
Word Of Mouth	A very small number

That's not terribly encouraging. The criteria that are probably most important - the ones that best indicate the added educational value of attending the school - are given relatively little weight. The closest parents come to looking for specific educational outcomes is with the "rigorous academics" thing, but as long as that's divorced from test results, it's not clear what the content of that requirement really is. (I think the other under-weighted criterion is word of mouth.)

At the same time, families are giving far too much consideration to things like the school brochure - essentially a commercial for the school. And then there's class size, which was important to all of the participating families. A few years ago, Coulson's Cato-buddy Dominick Armentano explained that class size isn't actually important:

Most of the public policy world is ruled by warm and fuzzy myths. Take the important issue of class size and student achievement. Florida is in the process of mandating smaller class size on the assumption, presumably, that students will learn more in smaller classes with more teacher attention. Sounds good, but is it generally true?

There have been close to 300 separate studies nation-wide on the relationship between class size and student achievement. Professor Eric Hanushek, an economist at the University of Rochester, reviewed these studies and discovered that only 15% of them suggest that reducing class size improves student learning as measured by standardized tests. Indeed, in 72% of the studies reviewed, there was no statistically significant effect on measurable student achievement associated with smaller classes. Even more surprisingly, in 13% of the studies reviewed, student test scores actually declined as class size was reduced. In sum, a full 85% of all of the studies on class size and student achievement found that reducing class size did not improve student performance.

This really points at the crux of the school choice issue for libertarians. When the government makes poor decisions about educational policy, this is viewed as a shortcoming of the system. For private schools, the libertarian standard is different: the very same poor decisions, when made by private actors, are features of the system to be applauded, rather than regrettable bugs.

It could very well be that the DC voucher program will promote improved student achievement. The folks at Cato, though, clearly do not care about student achievement in any fundamental way. What matters to them is choice as such. Unfortunately, they go so far as to conflate customer satisfaction with quality of outcome. That's a pity, because I think choice is an important element in school reform. I just try not to mistake it for an end in itself.

The big lesson that we should take away from the Georgetown report is that families are very clearly invested in finding quality educational settings for their children, and that investment should be leveraged. But families also apparently make these decisions on the basis of the information that is most readily available to them - paid advertisements, class size statistics, etc. The problem is that the most easily-observable features of a school often do not correlate strongly with school quality (measured in terms of educational outcomes.) The trick is defining standards by which schools can be measured and presenting those measurements in a way that is useful for parents as they make choices for their students.

The Logic Of Welfare

Over at Free Exchange, they're speculating as to why societies that are so generous with their welfare states can also be so selfish with their immigration laws.

I diagnose the issue as a a cultural disconnect between the ostensible justification for the welfare state, and the actual operation.

The conscious justification is "We need to take care of the needy". But of course, if this were the actual logic, no Western government would spend any money on domestic poverty programmes; they would ship all the money abroad to countries where poverty is really dire, and let the people at home, who at least have things like clean water to drink, shift for themselves.

The actual pattern of thought is "We need to take care of our needy compatriots", with a much weaker "We'd like to take care of other needy people, money and time permitting".

I think this is right, but incomplete. Even if we cared about the needy without regard to their nationality or status as "compatriots", we still wouldn't "ship all money abroad" because, realistically, that wouldn't be a very effective way of helping people. Whether or not our compatriots deserve more aid, they're easier to help.

Making foreign aid effective is notoriously tricky business. Actually, the folks at the Economist themselves put it thusly:

Poor governments tend to be corrupt and inefficient; the countries do not have the complementary assets to make use of vast inflows of aid. There are some convincing papers showing that aid is negatively correlated with outcomes, even after controlling for the fact that screwed up countries tend to attract sympathetic donors. Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago who was, until recently, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has a relatively new paper with Arvind Subramaniam indicating that foriegn aid makes poor economies less competitive by raising real exchange rates, a developing-world version of dutch disease. Recent evidence also indicates that aid may undermine good governance, by giving the government a source of revenue that, unlike taxation, does not depend on the goodwill of their constituents.

That was four months ago, though, so maybe their editorial position has changed.

Part Of The Civil War In Four Minutes

Leo Casey thinks that this video is a good visual summary of the Civil War because, as he puts it,

Histories of the Civil War, especially for the high school student, tend to lose the forest of the war in the trees of particular campaigns and battles; this little video provides a context for all of those details. One can see how the first years of the war were largely a bloody stalemate, look at how the war in the West and Gettysburg broke that stalemate, understand how Sherman’s March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and grasp the strategic logic of campaigns designed to split the South and the North.

Yes and no.

Yes, because it's basically true that many of the details of the Civil War - or any war, for that matter - that students are forced to learn in their history classes are essentially unimportant. There's no need to spend student time and brain power memorizing any but a few of the 10,000 or so instances of hostilities between the North and the South. What's important about the military history of the American Civil War, in a high school education, is the general phenomena that gave each side its relative advantages and the way in which those advantages were used (or underutilized) so as to lead to the result that actually occurred. Except as an indicator that he or she has spent a great deal of time studying, knowledge of the Battle of Brentwood is of no significant importance to a high school student. They call it "trivia" for a reason.

At the same time, though, the military history of the Civil War is not, in fact, "the forest of the war" at all; the military trends themselves require context. Watching this video, one has no sense as to why there was any fighting in the first place. On some level, of course, the level of violence in question is completely senseless, because in a sensible world, the war never would have happened. On another level, though, the outcome of the military conflict was going to have tremendous consequences for basically the entire world, and this video, as cool as it is, just doesn't capture that in any way.

Talk about a free ride.

Our society is full of financial and intellectual free loaders. Libertarians get to visit National Parks and send their kids to public schools. Creationists get to benefit from evolution-based medical advancements. Atheists, apparently, get to live free and happy in a country moderated by Christian values.

But America's biggest free loaders are the hordes who want to kick every undocumented worker out of the states. Can you imagine what Pat Buchanan would have to pay for a pint of strawberries if he got his way? Could Fox News still afford their fleet of custodians if Bill O'Reilly sent all those Mexicans back where they came from? Would a Minute Man be able to pay for a construction crew to pour his foundation if the prevalence of migrant labor didn't pull prices down?

Sometimes I secretly wish that these people did wake up one morning to find all the undocumented workers mysteriously vanished. All those god-fearing, Mexican-hating, Republican-voting poor folk across the country would have a rude awakening when they tried to buy food, find a babysitter, hire a construction worker, get their car repaired, or any number of other necessities.

Tonight on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Robert Rechtor of the Heritage Foundation repeatedly harped on cost illegal immigrants exact on taxpaying Americans. Specifically, he claimed that each undocumented resident takes in $20,000 more in services than she pays. For starters, how comparable is this number for other poor Americans who are also citizens? Don't tell me that someone pulling in $23,000 a year (half the household median income in the U.S.) pays more in taxes than he and his kids receive in public services. Secondly, if that $20,000 figure includes the cost of educating non-citizens' citizen children, this statistic neglects the economic return the country enjoys from investing the cost of that education into a future American worker.

But, more importantly, how much less do American citizens have to pay for their essentials in order to accommodate those undocumented workers?

Immigration, migrant labor, and path-to-citizenship policy are messy and complicated, and oddly enough I don't support unfettered illegal immigration. I can't summarize my thoughts on these issues in a single blog post. But I will posit that our current arrangement only marginally benefits illegal immigrants compared to how much consumers, employers, and the state gain.

Where The Checks Have No Name

Via Mark Kleiman, it looks like some banks will deposit checks for you whether or not they're signed. Nice.

As it happens, my experience is that banks will also accept checks for deposit regardless of who they're made out to. I encourage the people I supervise to get their paychecks deposited into their bank accounts electronically. Still, several have not signed up for direct deposit. About a year and a half ago, two of those individuals - who also happen to share a first name - ended up with each others' checks. One of them noticed the mix-up before taking the check to the bank, but the other one had already deposited the wrong check.

Banks. Do. Not. Care.

We Were This Close To Disappearing

Mark Krikorian at The Corner helpfully suggests that opponents of the new immigration compromise look to NumbersUSA to help organize the fight against foreigners who want to live here. NumbersUSA, in turn, offers this (apparently Christmas-themed) chart:


There is also this helpful explanation:

The green section of the graphic is the future that millions of Americans began to create in the early 1970s when they decided -- on average -- to have families at replacement size (about two children per family).

But the red shows the extra population Congress added through above-replacement-level immigration.

You can see that if Congress had allowed immigration at replacement-level numbers since 1970 to match the American people's replacement-level fertility, we would be living much less congested lives today...

But the green on this graphic is a future that has been forever destroyed by Congress through its decisions to dramatically increase immigration numbers to force mass U.S. population growth at an unprecedented level.

Let's just assume those numbers are all very accurate. And let's ignore the fact that it's pretty weird to suppose that people decide how many children to have on the basis of how big they want the U.S. population to be. (Do they all get together and decide as a group? Is one couple supposed to hold off of having kids if the neighbors have 4?)

What stands out for me is the apparent fact that the folks at NumbersUSA regret that the country's population is not on track to decline. It's not that population declines are necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think that the pro-decline view adequately appreciates the extent to which the America of today is funded by the Americans of tomorrow. It's all well and good to say that per-capita wealth goes up as population goes down, but government liabilities have to get divvied up on a per-person basis, too.

And since when did conservatives start longing for a world with fewer Americans in it?

It's National Bike (and Get Hit by a Car on Your Way) to Work Day!

Beware of old ladies in brown Cadillacs who don't signal or check their mirrors. Didn't she know that it's Bike to Work Day?

Don't worry; I escaped the collision with only some bruising and scratches on my arm, for which I feel very fortunate. I was too shaken up to write down her license plate number or chew her out, but hopefully she'll be more careful in the future.

Please, folks, be aware of bicyclists when you drive. We have a legal right to share the roads with drivers, and most of us are pretty great about following the rules.

8 Weeks Vacation A Year!

Matthew Yglesias thinks that Finland "may have taken things too far" in legislating a whopping 39 days of mandatory vacation time per year for its workers. I say, by what standard? Finland's GDP grew by 5.5% last year, compared to our own modest 3.4%. They seem to be doing just fine.

The 40 Year-Old Economics Pundit

Until Beat the Press got a face lift, I didn't realize that Dean Baker was actually Steve Carell.

Like Survivor, But With More Awkward Contestants

The Democratic debate schedule is out, with 6 scheduled through the end of the calendar year. Fox is conspicuously absent as a host. I will say that I thought the moderators of the last Republican debate - the one on Fox News - did a very good job, but I somehow doubt they'd offer a fair platform for the Democratic candidates.

I see YouTube is a sponsor of the July debate; is that some kind of first?

Genetics In Everything

Apropos (sort of) of the John Rawls/Mark Kleiman/Brad DeLong discussion of reciprocity and free trade below, a few days ago R. Ford Denison discussed the evolution of babysitting behaviors, and commented:

Major transitions in evolution have often involved loss of independence, as discussed last week. Most female bees work to increase their mother’s reproduction, rather than laying eggs themselves. Less extreme examples of helping others reproduce are known in some animals. “Kin selection” favors helping relatives, if the cost of helping is less than the benefit to the one helped, times their relatedness to the helper. This is known as Hamilton’s Rule. As Haldane put it, “I would jump into a river to save two brothers or eight cousins.” “Cost” and “benefit” are measured in number of offspring and “relatedness” is relative to one’s usual competitors.

That is all.

History Is Argument Without End

At the risk of sounding like I'm making an appeal to authority, I wanted to direct people to a really good interview with presidential historian Robert Dallek on Charlie Rose's show. You can watch the video here. Dallek's got a new book out on Nixon and Kissinger, and he's a really good story teller in no small part because he just radiates enthusiasm.

Of topical interest might be some of the bits about Iraq and contemporary presidents. To some extent, Dallek's an informed guy what he has to say is worth hearing just on the strength of his knowledge of history. It's also interesting because to some extent listening to Dallek can give us a glimpse of how history will evaluate and judge the agents and events of today.

On parallels between Iraq and Vietnam:

In four years, some 23,000 additional American troops lose their lives...I think what they needed was a fig leaf, was to say, "We've been there all these years, we've invested so much blood and treasure. The Vietnamese, we've trained them. Now it's time for them to stand up."...This idea of Iraqization impresses me as being as futile as Vietnamization was...We've been there for four years now, over four years, longer than World War II, in Iraq, and if they can't get their act together at this point, when is it going to happen? Four more years? Ten more years?...That's what we had in Vietnam. Bush, this president, should have learned the lesson of Vietnam. I'm afraid he hasn't.

On the likely verdits of history on recent presidents:

Does someone have to be a great mind to be president? After all, Reagan I would hardly describe as a great mind, but in many ways he was an effective president. I doubt that he'll be seen as great. Too early to tell...This current man? Very poor. I think he's been a very poor president, and I think history will judge him very harshly. His father was somewhat better, but was not a great politician. He had a keener sense of what to do in international relations than what his son has done...I know [this is very conventional wisdom]. We'll see in thirty or fourty years...Bill Clinton is an interesting figure. I think he will be seen as certainly not a great president, but an above average president, and certainly quite intelligent, but a flawed human being...He would point to Theodore Roosevelt, who said, "I can't be a truly great president because I've never had a war to fight." And there's possibly some truth to that...But on the other hand...I think TR is the equal measure of a Woodrow Wilson. Wars don't always get you to greatness. You stumble. Harry Truman, with the Korean war, did a great deal of harm to his presidential reputation in the end.

There's a great deal more.