Matt Yglesias

Mar 1st, 2011 at 6:14 pm

Endgame

The problem is you:

— Nancy Pelosi’s against styrofoam cups, so conservatives decide to love them.

— Scott Walker’s plummeting poll numbers.

— The voters want small class sizes.

— Fetus scheduled to testify at Ohio legislative hearing.

“Indians and Chinese, by contrast, have drunk their own Kool Aid.”.

— We need market pricing of helium (bigger deal than it sounds).

For Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, Liz Phair “Divorce Song”.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 5:28 pm

The Social Conservatism Of The Damned

This is apropos of not much more than reader mail, but when examining social conservative hostility to gay and lesbian equality I think it’s critical to highlight how lazy it is. Social conservatism places a number of stringent demands on people’s sexual behavior. It tells them to avoid premarital sex, it tells them to avoid infidelity to their spouse, it tells them to avoid divorce. This is hard stuff. Some people live up to it. But most don’t. It’s a rigorous moral code by whose light many people are failing, and the vast majority of non-failures will nonetheless struggle mightily with it.

By contrast, “don’t make out with another dude” is really easy for most dudes. It’s very hard for some, of course, but most people aren’t gay and thus have absolutely no difficulty adhering to moral injunctions against gayness. A political movement that ran around talking about the sanctity of marriage and how divorce should be illegal and divorced people should be disgraced and run out of public life would have trouble catching fire. But almost everyone can stand up for “traditional morality” on the cheap by heaping scorn on a relatively small minority.

Filed under: Ethics, Gender



Mar 1st, 2011 at 4:29 pm

Chris Dodd Cashing In With The Movies

There was pretty overwhelming sentiment that Chris Dodd would find his post-Senatorial career as some kind of lobbyist for the insurance or finance industries, so I’m pretty surprised to learn that he’ll be heading up the Motion Picture Association of America instead. Apparently “the job will require Mr. Dodd to push a Hollywood agenda in Washington that includes a more aggressive governmental stance against piracy and prodding China to lift limits on the distribution of Western movies.”

China should, in fact, lift limits on the distribution of Western movies and the US government ought to press them to do it.

As for “piracy,” I think the recent murder of Americans by actual Somali pirates should drive home how absurd it is to analogize unauthorized copying of a non-rival good to violent kidnapping and robbery. Nobody dies when you download a copy of Little Fockers. So it’s always worth asking what pressing social problem stepped up anti-infringement measures are intended to solve. Is America a country with an unusually low violent crime rate, such that it makes sense to divert more law enforcement resources away from such matters? Do Americans have too much disposable income, so we’re looking to raise the cost of entertainment? It’s actually quite true that real wages for movie stars have been declining in recent years, so maybe this is the issue Dodd wants to address.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 3:30 pm

The Kochs and the Commons

Charles Koch claims to be very upset about “crony capitalism” (albeit willing to benefit from it personally), but the real triumph of the Koch Brothers and their ilk is in branding the line of work they’re in as any kind of capitalism at all.

Suppose I had a business where what I do is find people who live in flood prone areas and threaten to wreck their houses unless they pay me money. That would be called an extortion racket, not capitalism. I don’t own those people’s houses. Real capitalism requires the government to restrain me from knocking the houses down. Similarly, I can’t just stand in the middle of a busy intersection, cause a traffic jam, and then shout “free market” when the cops try to take me away. After all, I don’t own the intersection any more than I own your house. So what about Koch Industries and its substantial fossil fuel interests. Do they own the air? Do they own the homes of people in flood-prone areas? To the best of my knowledge, that’s not the case. Charles Koch no more owns the air than I own his house or the interstate highway system. So why is “Koch Industries is allowed to spew whatever it wants into the air” considered a free market position? In part, it’s a misunderstanding. But to a much larger extent it’s a branding triumph. The basic point about pollution and regulation was understood by classical economists and political theorists, was understood by Hayek, is understood by right-of-center politicians in Europe, etc. But in America, things are different, and that’s in large part a triumph of some very self-interested philanthropy.

Someone who took the ideas of private property and free markets seriously would be jumping up and down with his head on fire about coal and oil companies wrecking an atmosphere they don’t own and refuse to pay for.

Filed under: Environment, Ideology



Mar 1st, 2011 at 2:46 pm

An Army Marches On Its Stomach

Kristen Hinman on the US military’s unhealthy meal plans:

Take the Army. Its food program mandates that soldiers have access to eggs-made-to-order, three types of bread, three types of meat, six kinds of cereal, no fewer than one potato dish, and at least one pastry at breakfast alone. At least two hot entrees, with one sauce or gravy, must be offered at lunch and dinner, along with a deli bar featuring three types of meat; a short-order grill with four items; “two additional hot short-order entrees (pizza, fried chicken, and so forth)”; French fries; onion rings; assorted chips and pretzels, and at least four desserts. These are minimum standards. The Marine Corps is much the same. Chocolate milk is mandated at every Marine meal, and four types of soda must flow at lunch and dinner. Marine bases with funds available for takeout containers are encouraged to serve hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and French fries from the griddle at lunch, dinner and breakfast.

This all-you-can-eat style of chow-hall is a relatively new model. For most of the 20th century, the menus were more Spartan, with one or two options for meat, starch, and vegetables. But after the draft was rescinded, military brass began to think of service members more like customers; a certain quality of life was considered necessary to keeping a fast-food nation enlisted, and the food-court model took over. At the same time, a parallel food universe evolved alongside the government-funded mess halls. Franchises like Taco Bell and KFC moved onto bases; vending machines stocked with candy and energy drinks were installed in barracks. After the Iraq war began in 2003, fast food became available in combat zones.

I feel like there’s something oddly unserious about an imperial project that involves the construction of a TGI Friday’s in Kandahar.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 1:30 pm

Supermajority Rules: Use ‘Em When You Got ‘Em

(cc photo by kevindooley)

SR writes: “Does your disdain of the US Senate filibuster spillover to Wisconsin Senate Democrats abuse of the quorum rule?”

This kind of stuff is just dumb. Given that the filibuster should be abolished, do I think members of the Senate should filibuster bad bills? Of course they should. Your job as a legislator is to try to pass good bills and block bad ones. The real question highlighted by the Wisconsin standoff is for filibuster fans. If routine supermajorities are great for the US Senate, then the Wisconsin State Senate provide for them? How about Nebraska? What’s so different about the US Congress that routine supermajorities are good idea there but not for state legislatures and city councils all around the country?

At any rate, if I were writing a state constitution I would try to minimize the possibility of quorum hijinks. But the good news about quorum hijinks is that you can’t pull this kind of stunt on a routine basis, it seems require the holdouts to bear substantial personal costs in a manner that deters its constant application. But it’s possible that things will change and state legislators will start pulling this stuff all the time, which would be bad.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 12:30 pm

“All Of Us”

Pretty much everything about a NIMBY group complaining that a five-story building is a “mammoth” structure that will “block light and air” is ridiculous. But the most ridiculous part is this rhetorical slippage at the end:

The land of the Hine School site belongs to all of us, the citizens and taxpayers of the District of Columbia. The developers were awarded the right to propose how to develop that public land, but we believe that the current concept design is not congruent with, does not harmonize with, and potentially threatens the historic character of Capitol Hill. The massive, block-sized building plan evokes corporate standardization, anonymity and conformity, and, per the changes outlined at the beginning of this letter, we call upon the developers to create an alternative concept more responsive to the neighborhood in which it will sit for decades to come.

There’s an enormous contrast here. The Hine School site belongs to all of us not just to a subset of wealthy homeowners on Capitol Hill. I’m trying to write less about this kind of land use issue because I’m hoping to get together a book project on these issues, but I wanted to call attention to the general shape of this controversy. Should planning over the site be dominated by the interests of the city at large (larger tax base, more housing stock, etc.) or by the interests of rich nearby landowners? And is enhancing the ability of rich nearby landowners to maximize the value of their estates really a progressive stand? I’m not immune to the impulse toward greed. I own property. I kinda sorta hope that all real estate decisions in my neighborhood are governed by the principle “what’s best for Matt Yglesias’ investment.” But ultimately I think people in all neighborhoods would benefit from an effort to take a less narrow view of the interests at stake.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 11:51 am

Credit Where Due

Ohio’s going all-in against public employees rather than pulling a Wisconsin-style “only unions that never back Republicans get the hammer”:

“This is going to get passed and people will sit back and say, ‘What happened?’” said Mark Horton, a retired firefighter who is treasurer of the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters. “Once it’s done, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.”

Unlike similar legislation in Wisconsin, which exempts police officers and firefighters, the Ohio bill includes them — and is controversial for that reason.

Firefighting policy doesn’t seem to be something you hear much about in the political arena.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 11:28 am

The Last Doughboy

Frank Buckles, the last American to serve in World War One, died yesterday:

President Obama said in a statement that Mr. Buckles lived “a remarkable life that reminds us of the true meaning of patriotism and our obligations to each other as Americans.”

Frail, stooped and hard of hearing but sharp of mind, Mr. Buckles was named grand marshal of the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington in 2007. He was a guest at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day 2007 for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He was honored by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at the Pentagon and met with President George W. Bush at the White House in March 2008.

Should someone maybe mention that the war in question was a giant mistake? That’s no reflection on Buckles as a person, but I feel like it really deserves to be highlighted in any talk of the first world war.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 10:27 am

Military Aid and Terrorism

Eric Neumayer (LSE) and Thomas Plümper (University of Essex) write in The Journal of Peace Research:

Americans are a major target of international terrorism. Yet, terrorists from some countries are much more likely to attack American citizens than terrorists from other countries. Similarly, anti-American terrorism from a specific foreign country is much more prevalent during certain periods than others. This article develops a rational theory of international terrorism, which argues that attacking foreign nationals is of strategic value to terrorists even if they ultimately aim at gaining political influence in their home country. Attacking foreigners is the more attractive to domestic terrorists the more the terrorists’ home government depends on military support from the foreign country. Applied to the US case, our theory predicts that more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that receive more US military aid and arms transfers and in which more American military personnel are stationed, all relative to the country’s own military capacity. Estimations from a directed country dyad sample over the period 1978 to 2005 support the predictions of our theory for both terrorist incidents involving Americans and terrorist killings of Americans as dependent variables. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design.

The goal of much of America’s terrorgenic policies is to secure our economic interests in the face of oil price shocks, but this holds up to very little cost-benefit scrutiny.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 9:29 am

People Like Public Employees

It’s always been my understanding that public sector unions’ true source of power in political conflicts was not so much their unions as the fact that teachers, cops, firefighters, etc. are held in much higher esteem by the public than politicians or journalists. Given the GOP’s newfound enthusiasm for tackling the interests of service providers head on, I thought maybe something had changed about this dynamic, but if it has it doesn’t show up in the polling:

Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.

Those surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits, breaking down along similar party lines. A majority of respondents who have no union members living in their households opposed both cuts in pay or benefits and taking away the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Smells like overreach.




Mar 1st, 2011 at 8:31 am

Jobs, Oil, and the Trade Balance

Atrios writes:

I’m someone who is more sanguine than most that high oil prices won’t be economic Armageddon. Obviously now would be a particular bad time for oil prices to shoot up, as the economy already sucks, but longer run I don’t see it as an economy killer. It will be a negative hit, and production and transportation patterns would change, but I don’t think it will fundamentally alter existence.

I sort of disagree. Here’s how I see it. The best way for anyone to change their oil consumption is to move. Either to a place where you need to drive less, or else to a place where you don’t need oil to heat your home. But in the short term, it’s very difficult for households to cut oil consumption by relocating. Consequently, in the short term the demand for oil isn’t very elastic. That means that if you brought oil up to $200 a barrel by raising taxes you’d generate a bunch of revenue that could be offset with lower income taxes or what have you. But if oil goes up to $200 a barrel because of supply constraints, then that entails a rise in America’s net imports and therefore a drag on GDP. In the long run, I’m sure we can adjust to high oil prices the same as we’d adjust to anything else. But in the short run, the issue with oil isn’t just inconvenience to households, it’s the impact on the trade balance.

In general, I feel like there’s huge denial around the role of petroleum in America’s trade deficit. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, US firms had a dominant position in the automobile industry and the USA was a major oil exporter. And we’ve never switched away from industrial policy oriented around suburbanization, auto dependency, and high per capita levels of oil consumption even though nowadays it’s an industrial policy only Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Norway could love.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Endgame

The house where we used to stay:

After the Sauds.

— Obama backs increased state flexibility in ACA implementation.

Looking Glass Economics.

— “Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing on the Labor Market” (PDF).

— The trouble with inflation targeting.

Arcade Fire, “Sprawl I (Flatland)”.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Life in the United Kingdom

Abortion advice:

The draft guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is for all doctors, nurses and counsellors advising women contemplating terminations.

Its first recommendation on “what women need to know” instructs health professionals: “Women should be advised that abortion is generally safer than continuing a pregnancy to term.”

Meanwhile, on adoption and gay rights:

A British court has ruled that a Christian couple cannot care for foster children because they disapprove of homosexuality. Judges at London’s Royal Courts of Justice ruled that laws protecting gays from discrimination take precedence over the couple’s religious beliefs. Eunice and Owen Johns, aged 62 and 65-years old, had previously fostered children in the 1990s, but what one social worker described as their “strong views” on homosexuality raised red flags with authorities in the English city of Derby when they were interviewed in 2007.

The latter story seems to me like it may be overreach, but on the former story there’s no question that the new advice is accurate. And yet never in a million years will we be moving to hand it out.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 4:30 pm

American Colonies

I’ve quoted Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America a couple of times already, and now that I’ve finished it I just wanted to recommend it in the strongest possible terms. This is a book that really takes colonial America out of the dusty world of potted elementary school fables and brings it to life. Taylor’s technique is to reject the ahistorical process of “knowing” that the United States of America would be the political descendant of the Anglophone colonies in New England and the Chesapeake Bay. Instead, he situations those colonies inside a larger British imperial project that also existed in the West Indies, Nova Scotia, and Hudson’s Bay as well as Spanish (New Mexico, Florida, California), French (Louisiana, Ohio River Valley, etc), Dutch (New York), and even Russian (Alaska, Pacific Northwest) colonial projects.

The key theme, however, concerns a process that was distinctive to the Anglophone settlements. This is the supercession of a dynamic of class (placing European nobility above commoners, whether native, European, or African in origin) with one of racial solidarity:

In 1676, Virginia erupted in rebellion when the frustrated servants and freedmen blamed their plight on an insensitive, exploitative, and unqualified class of ruling planters. Led by Nathaniel Bacon, the ill-fated rebellion invited increased crown intervention in Virginia’s government. To stem that encroachment and defend their power, the leading Virginians created a more popular mode of politics, which required an alliance between common and great planters. At the same time, the passage of time and increased fortunes permitted the planter elite to perfect a genteel style that commanded greater respect from the common planters. Their alliance became both easier and more essential at the turn of the century, when the great planters switched their labor force from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans. Class differences seemed less threatening as both the common and great planters became obsessed with preserving their newly shared sense of racial superiority over the African slaves. As the historian Edmund S. Morgan has aptly argued, the colonial Virginians developed the American interdependence of elite rule, popular politics, and white racial supremacy. That distinctive combination increasingly set the colonies apart from both their English origins and the colonies of other empires.

An interesting subplot in the book is the tradeoff faced by 17th and 18th Century Englishmen between health and wealth. Due to the greater availability of land, non-deceased New Englander were richer than people in the mother country, and the American South was richer than New England. But the “death by tropical disease” gradient ran in the opposite direction, such that immigration to Virginia was an extremely risky proposition.

Filed under: Books, History



Feb 28th, 2011 at 3:29 pm

Unions, Norms, and Inequality

Read a working paper from Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld recently that argues that the decline in union density has been a bigger deal for wage inequality than most economists realize, largely because there’s been significant action through the channel of norms. The authors claim the effect can be empirically estimated:

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to less than 10 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent among women. Inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent in this same period. We study the effect of deunionization on rising inequality with a variance decomposition that assesses the contribution of the shrinking weight of the union wage distribution to overall wage inequality. We also argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for the effect of unions on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education.

The impact is much larger for men than for women. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a publicly available copy of the paper yet. In general, I think the impact of norms and conventions on social outcomes is often underrated.

Filed under: History, Inequality



Feb 28th, 2011 at 2:30 pm

Medicaid Costs

Via Jamelle Bouie, a reminder that retirees aside healthcare is near the heart of many state budget issues thanks to Medicaid:

Almost everything in American politics circles back to health care costs. The government has committed to pay for health care for certain classes of people—the elderly, its own workforce, the poor—and health care costs are growing more rapidly than the economy as a whole. Meanwhile, on the private sector side the insurance market as we know it exists largely because of tax subsidies that, in turn, are becoming more expensive to provide. The fact that these are manifest themselves as separate issues called “Medicare,” “Medicaid,” “public sector compensation,” “insurance premiums,” etc. reflects the fact that we have an unusually patchworky health care system.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 1:29 pm

Health Care Costs Are Driving State Budget Woes, Like All Other Kinds Of Woes Everywhere

Paul Krugman and Kevin Drum write up a new Dean Baker paper (PDF) arguing that state pension shortfalls are actually pretty small, and mostly driven by the recent stock market crash.

But that doesn’t mean that all’s well when it comes to public employee retirement. Instead as Ryan McNeely argues, we’ve basically got a version of the Social Security / Medicare thing. The arm of federal retirement security programs dedicated to giving people money has a modest, manageable problem. The arm of state worker retirement programs dedicated to giving people money has a modest, manageable problem. But commitments to cover people’s health care costs are a huge problem in a world where health care costs are growing as a share of GDP.

Of course the exact same thing is playing out in the private sector. Over the past twenty years, corporate compensation costs have been rising much faster than wages. That’s because employers are paying more for health benefits. The private sector, in effect, has been Social Security to keep Medicare affordable. Or cutting pensions to keep retiree health care costs affordable. The fact that we keep defaulting in that direction reflects the political and social clout of the health care sector but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that providing health care services is not a cost-effective way of promoting health. Most people would be better off with more money and less health care coverage.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 12:27 pm

The Case For Bureaucrats

Reducing federal spending by reducing federal personnel costs is an appealing proposal because it lets politicians be for “less spending” without being for less programmatic activity. But as John Gravois argues in a new Washington Monthly article this is actually a huge problem. When congress mandates reduced staffing levels but doesn’t otherwise change what the federal government is supposed to do, there’s no way to get the job done but to rely more on contractors. And though contracting is sometimes the right way to go, to be properly executed you still need people supervising the contracts:

In other words, if Congress and the White House agree to substantial cuts in the federal workforce but don’t also agree to eliminate programs and reduce services, the end result could be more spending and deficits, not less. Strange as it may sound, to get a grip on costs, we should in many cases be hiring many more bureaucrats—and paying more to get better ones—not cutting their numbers and freezing their pay. Because in many parts of government, the bureaucracy has already crossed that dangerous threshold beyond which further cuts can only mean greater risk of a breakdown. Indeed, much of the runaway spending we’ve seen over the past decade is the result of our having crossed that line years ago—the last time there was a Democrat in the White House, a divided government, and calls for slashing the federal workforce in the air.

He runs down examples of how understaffing has wound up leading to runaway contract costs and huge overruns. But he also runs down examples of a more insidious phenomenon—understaffed regulatory agencies being unable to properly enforce existing environmental and financial regulations. I think this latter piece is really the nub of the issue. “Let businesses pollute all over the place” doesn’t sound so good as a political message. It’s much more viable to simply starve the regulatory agencies of the funds needed to do the job effectively. That kind of stealth deregulation is incredibly pernicious, but it’s also not amendable to this kind of “you think you’re going to save money, but really you won’t” type of argument that works for the contracting side.




Feb 28th, 2011 at 11:28 am

Regional Inequality in China

When I was in China, all anyone could talk about was how much poorer other parts of China were than the parts I was seeing. The Economist’s new set of interactive charts on China’s provinces illustrates the point. Here’s each province’s PPP-adjusted GDP per capita:

I was in Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang, and Liaoning the poorest of which is still about twice as rich as a province like Sichuan. One of the oddities of China is that it’s biggest cities are actually a bit on the small side. Shanghai is only the tenth largest metropolitan area in the world (Hong Kong is 12th and Beijing is 19th) even though China is the largest population country in the world and these metropolitan areas are the richest parts of the country. There’s no good economic logic to Shanghai being smaller than New York and Beijing being smaller than Los Angeles, but internal migration has traditionally been tightly controlled in China. That’s changing, and increased migration to the highest-productivity areas of the country should be a continued source of growth for a while now.




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