Author: Jonathan

Andrew Brown: The Queen of Fairies caught me

So, it’s Hallowe’en (and Samhain). Let’s give Andrew Brown the floor.

The Queen of Fairies caught me

Halloween was once a night of real fright, when the dead and the fairies walked close to us. How did that work?

And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I’m feard it be mysel.

But the night is Halloween, lady,
The morn is Hallowday,
Then win me, win me, an ye will,
For weel I wat ye may.

Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The fairy folk will ride,
And they that wad their true-love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide.”

This from the ballad of Tam Lin, which, if you don’t know, you should go and listen to now. Now while the song is running, there is no trouble believing the story, or at least in suspending disbelief. The defiance of Janet to her father is more vivid to me than almost anything any living woman has said. But at the same time I find that modern hallowe’en, the children’s festival with dressing up and sweets, not all of them poisoned, is wholly impossible to take seriously.

So why are witches and fairies real within the confines of the song, and absurd when children play at them? It seems to be an example of a more general question: why is the absurdity of other people’s beliefs immediately apparent to us and yet entirely invisible to them? (We ourselves, of course, hold no absurd beliefs, whoever we are. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dangerously deranged.)

The best answer that occurs to me is that the difference is made by participation – if you like, by playing along. Children believe in the particular game they happen to be playing. Of course, they understand, as we do, that the world could be otherwise, and the game might stop. Hence the delicious thrill of a game that breaks that rule, and becomes real. But the point that the world might be otherwise, and that the game might end, actually testifies to its reality while it lasts.

Giles Fraser once said to me, in an entirely different context, that all sorts of people who can’t bring themselves to say the creeds will sing them happily enough. He’s right. The two activities are profoundly different. The song is not the same as the lyrics read out loud, and this is true even if it has no accompaniment. Choral or just collective singing is different again – a point that’s obvious if we look at the completely secular activity of football chanting: on Saturdays the terraces of North London are full of otherwise respectable men singing things about opposing players that they would find literally unspeakable at work on Monday morning.

So the way to understand the spread of Halloween is not as a spread of beliefs, but of a set of games, or little dramas, if you will. To get hung up on the apparent content of the game is to make a kind of category mistake: year after year, a certain kind of evangelical will announce that Halloween is a festival of evil; year after year, they fail to understand that the child who plays at being a witch is much closer to becoming a Christian or to understanding any kind of religion than the one who never plays at anything at all.

But it’s not just evangelicals who get this kind of thing wrong. I do it myself all the time, most recently when mocking the Anglo-Catholics; for the answer to the question “How can they believe these ludicrous things?” is that they act them out. They feel their beliefs are true because they are embedded in a structure of ritual, both inside and outside church. Their words are given content by their actions. Without the actions, the words mean nothing. This sounds like a vaguely moral exhortation but it is just a plain fact. Without action, we couldn’t understand the meaning of any words at all.

When the Christian says they believe in order to understand, this sounds to the atheist like an abdication of responsibility. But in fact is is a recognition of necessity. There is a sense in which we can’t understand the beliefs we don’t act on. That’s why playing is so important. By pretending to act, we gain a sort of understanding — which is why I believe that Queen of Fairies will look at Tam Lin tonight and say “Had I known, Tam Lin, what this night I did see. I would have plucked out both your ey’en and put in two of tree” — at least I will believe it while the music plays.

(Tiend is tithe.)

More bogus numbers

John Schmitt, via Dean Baker. This seems of a piece with my previous Meg Whitman post.

Here we go:

Casey Mulligan Swings and Misses

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has a post today at the New York Times Economix blog where he seems to argue that the current push for statutory paid sick days in the United States is ignoring the role of economic incentives. According to Mulligan, workers in countries with generous paid sick day policies stay home because of “incentives, and not the flu”.

I don’t think Mulligan has been following the U.S. debate on paid sick days very closely. The U.S. debate is very serious about incentives. The current system — which does not require employers to provide paid sick days and leaves upwards of 50 million workers without paid sick days — gives strong incentives to workers to go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness.

Of course, offering paid sick days also gives workers incentives to take time off when they are not sick. But, there is nothing in Mulligan’s post that says where we should set the optimal level. He doesn’t even make a case that the most generous systems in Europe are too generous, just that they lead to more sickness absences in some cases. For all we know, after we factor in the cost of contagious diseases, the most generous European systems might still be too stingy.

To make his point about the effect of incentives, Mulligan features the following graph from a recent IMF paper:

MulliganSickDays.jpg

Mulligan, however, has made very selective use of the original IMF graph:

IMFsickdays.png

In the original, Denmark, Germany, and seven other countries with more generous statutory paid sick days policies all have lower sickness absence rates than the United States. A really interesting question is: how is it that these countries are able to provide both guaranteed paid sick days and lower sickness absence rates? (And why didn’t Mulligan include these countries in his graph?)

Meg Whitman: fun with numbers

George Skelton in the LA Times. I heard Whitman’s obviously bogus ad the other day and didn’t get around to doing the arithmetic. This is going to be a depressing campaign.

Meg Whitman’s radio whoppers

… Neither major party has a lock on truthfulness. I’ve written about false advertising by Republicans and Democrats alike for years.

Now, in the very first series of radio ads in the 2010 gubernatorial race, comes blatant baloney from billionaire political novice Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of EBay who is running for the Republican nomination.

“Did you know,” Whitman asks radio listeners, “that in the last 10 years, state spending has gone up 80%?”

Well, no, I did not know that. So I did some checking.

“They’re completely wrong when they say that,” replied state Finance Director Mike Genest, a conservative former budget consultant for Senate Republicans.

It doesn’t take much digging to learn that general fund spending “in the last 10 years” has risen just 27%, according to finance department data. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, spending actually has decreased by 16.6%. …

Saved from the death panels, by Medicare

From the NY Times review of Stanley Joel Reiser’s Technological Medicine. (I remember those shoe-sizing machines, so they must have been in use in the 1950s as well.)

The Tools of Doctors, and a Price for Patients

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Technology distances doctors from patients. It creates a compelling alternative reality composed of facts that may or may not be accurate (note all the false alarms created by spurious X-ray findings and aberrant blood tests). It incites considerable public backlash (shortly after X-rays were developed, stores in London were selling X-ray-proof underwear to preserve genital privacy). Then wild enthusiasm takes over (as exemplified by those X-ray shoe-sizing machines of the 1940s).

Medical professionals tend to be the opposite: first enthusiastic and then less so, as the limitations and drawbacks of the toys become clear. At a 1960 medical conference unveiling a new Teflon shunt for long-term kidney dialysis, the audience of doctors and scientists actually rose and cheered. But soon enough they were faced with the painful task of allocating what proved to be an extremely limited resource.

In Seattle, the job of deciding who would live on dialysis and who would die of kidney failure fell to a seven-member committee of laypeople dubbed, in a 1962 article in Life magazine, “the life-or-death committee.” Sound familiar? Only after the 1972 decision to extend Medicare to dialysis patients were these decisions no longer necessary.

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Cleanliness, Godliness and … Windex?

Two studies of the rationality of human behavior (ScienceDaily):

Clean Smells Promote Moral Behavior, Study Suggests

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.

The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

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And from an article a year ago:

Cleanliness Makes People Less Severe In Moral Judgments

New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments, showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning can influence our perception of what is right and wrong.

Lead researcher, Simone Schnall explains the relevance of the findings to everyday life; “When we exercise moral judgment, we believe we are making a conscious, rational decision, but this research shows that we are subconsciously influenced by how clean or ‘pure’ we feel.

“Take for example the situation of a jury member or voting in an election — if the jury member had washes their hands prior to delivering their verdict, they may judge the crime less harshly.

“Similarly, someone may find it easier to overlook a political misdemeanor had they performed an action that made them feel ‘clean’ prior to casting their vote.”

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Something there is that does not love a Higgs boson

Well, maybe…

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

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St Peter and the miserable worms

Andrew Brown.

St Peter and the miserable worms | Andrew Brown

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I think now McClatchey was right, and I was wrong to say that the Anglican Communion ended this week. The Anglican Communion actually ended at least 20 years ago, almost as soon as I started to write about it. There might be a federation of churches, more or less united by affection and common ancestry, but there would not be a single body with a common understanding of who was a priest, or a bishop, or what these titles meant. That is why the Pope has parked his tanks on the lawn that was once Runcie’s. But at the same time, I wonder if Runcie, too, was not right all along, and that one day, despite all the best efforts of Pope John Paul II, a woman will not walk through the doors of St Peter’s and be received as a priest. After all, gay people have been doing that for centuries.

Precognition

Precognition | Andrew Brown

Just sometimes, science fiction comes out right; in 1928 a philosophy lecturer saw the 21st century clearly.

My daughter picked up a book on Greek philosophy in a second hand bookshop and when we turned to the section on Epicurus one passage leaped out. The author, a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, is trying to explain the philosopher’s thought-world since “the words epicure and epicurean have a bad sound”.

But, he says, “The man after whom they are named lived … in an age when the falsity of the orthodox religion had become apparent to intelligent men and when with the coming of great kingdoms the independence of the Greek states was lost forever. It was for that age as it would be for us if Christianity had become a discredited myth and if Britain had become a subject state in an American Empire.”

That was published in 1928.

Health care reform: who’s your daddy?

This piece by Robert Reich lays out the worst problems with the current health care legislation. He’s right, of course, but it seems to me a safe assumption that the administration will cave on whatever they need to in order to pass a bill and claim victory. I could be wrong, of course—maybe Obama’s tough talk will turn out to be more than just talk. I doubt it.

Why Obama Has to do What Letterman Did: Refuse to Pay Hush Money

Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as they were paid off.

But now that it’s time to collect, the bill is larger than the White House expected, and it’s going to fall like an avalanche on middle class Americans in coming years. That means an ugly 2012 election (read Sarah Palin).

So the President has to do what Letterman did: Refuse to pay.

Big Pharma is on the road to getting its deal: not only 25 to 30 million more paying customers, but also a continued ban on Medicare using its bargaining clout to reduce drug prices, a bar on genetic drug manufacturers introducing similar biologic drugs until the originals have been on the market at least twelve years, and no public insurance option to negotiate low drug prices.

Big insurance is on the way to getting what it wants: 25 to 30 million more paying customers (many of them young and healthy), a requirement that almost all businesses “pay or play,” and no competition from a public option.

Doctors (that is, the American Medical Association) are on the way to getting what they want: Instead of a temporary patch on scheduled decreases in Medicare reimbursements to them, a permanent fix that would change the reimbursement formula altogether and reward them $240 billion over the next ten years.

But when they all get paid off, who will do the paying? Middle-class Americans who are already in a financial squeeze — whose wages are lower, adjusted for inflation, than they were thirty years ago, and whose jobs are disappearing. They’ll face still higher premiums, co-payments, and deductibles; and they’ll pay higher drug prices, Medicare premiums, and taxes to cover the rest.

That’s because these payoffs make it next to impossible to contain the wildly escalating costs of health care.

The only thing in the emerging bills that’s related to cost containment is a proposed excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans, costing over a certain threshold amount (the threshold is now up for grabs). But because the costs of health care are likely to rise faster than inflation, whatever threshold, the middle class will get socked again.

So Obama has to forcefully weigh in with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as the two try to cobble together passable bills for each chamber — demanding real cost containment.

The three big ones: (1) A true public option (better yet, one that allows anyone now holding private insurance to opt into). (2) Authority for Medicare to negotiate low drug prices. And (3) Lower Medicare reimbursement rates to doctors (in other words, no “doctor fix”).

In addition, the so-called “medical exchanges” in the emerging bills (as well as the public option, which hopefully will be included) should give preference to pre-paid heathcare plans, like Kaiser Permanente, whose doctors are on salary and have every incentive to keep people healthy rather than charge for more services and tests.

But if Obama doesn’t weigh in and say “no” to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America’s middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right-wingnut populist will wallop Obama, and then will wallop America.

The enduring Republican victory

David Kaiser. Please read the whole thing.

The enduring Republican victory

… Something even more striking is happening with regard to health care. Everyone seems to understand that we spend too much on it and can’t afford to go on at this rate. But Republicans and lobbyists seem very close to having killed the public option because it would be a cheaper form of health care. What we need, we cannot have. The broader problem is obvious. Cheaper health care means that many people will make less money out of health care—especially insurance companies and drug manufacturers. I have not heard even one participant in this debate suggest that there is something immoral about profiteering on medical care. Instead, the papers are filled with stories of the ways in which lobbyists are trying to make sure that a new bill will mean no less, and perhaps more, money for health care interests.

I am concerned by all this because I think that both the political future and that of the Obama Administration depend on facing these issues squarely. A health insurance “reform” that costs even more money will eventually have huge political costs for Democrats. Endless deficits with no end in sight will pose the same problem, and the collapse of yet another Wall Street bubble could easily return the Republicans to power. We cannot solve these problems without removing some of these taboos. The press, which consistently gives the most space to the shrillest voices on the right, has been no help either. The Administration has shown the courage to defy the conventional wisdom on several foreign policy issues, including missile defense and Iran, without apparently incurring political costs. Let us hope that it finds the courage to do the same on the far more critical domestic front.

Ockham’s broom

Mark Liberman. I have mixed feelings about the concept. Sometimes it’s the critical clue that ends up under the rug.

Ockham’s broom

Yesterday in the Journal of Biology, the editor introduced a new series (Miranda Robertson, “Ockham’s broom“):

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham’s broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

Robertson points out that sweeping things under the rug is often a necessary condition for scientific progress:

While Ockham’s razor clearly has an established important and honourable place in the philosophy and practice of science, there is, despite its somewhat pejorative connotations, an honourable place for the broom as well. Biology, as many have pointed out, is untidy and accidental, and it is arguably unlikely that all the facts can be accounted for early in the investigation of any given biological phenomenon. For example, if only Charles Darwin had swept under the carpet the variation he faithfully recorded in the ratios of inherited traits in his primulas, as Mendel did with his peas, we might be talking of Darwinian inheritance and not Mendelian (see [3]). Clearly, though, it takes some special sophistication, or intuition, to judge what to ignore.

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Freaking climate change

The tubes are abuzz with comment on Levitt & Dubner’s new book Superfreakonomics and its material on climate change. The consensus: at best, lazy and misleading; at worst, dishonest.

Start with Krugman:

Superfreakonomics on climate, part 1

OK, I’m working my way through the climate chapter — and the first five pages, by themselves, are enough to discredit the whole thing. Why? Because they grossly misrepresent other peoples’ research, in both climate science and economics.

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Climate Progress goes into considerably more detail.

Here’s Stoat at Science Blogs:

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling (and some other stuff)?

I liked Freakonomics, so I’m a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I’ll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the “global cooling” junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I’ll pay any attention to.

Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don’t understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not (mind you, plenty of more respectable folk do the same) (3) they pick an expert to talk to, but since they don’t have a clue about the subject they don’t know how to pick a good expert, or even understand what the expert says (4) there is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable.

The entire piece is riddled with errors. Reading it all would be tedious. So, before reading it in detail I decided to set myself a target of 10 major errors and then stop. …

And last, for now anyway, Brad Plumer.

Does “Superfreakonomics” Need A Do-Over?

I enjoyed the original Freakonomics quite a bit. It surveyed some fun-to-read economic research that Steve Levitt had done at the University of Chicago, and while a lot of that work was employed in the service of trifling questions (“Do sumo wrestlers cheat?” “Do game-show participants discriminate?”), it was clear Levitt was a clever economist who could gin up fascinating “natural experiments” to crack open everyday mysteries.

So now Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner have a sequel, Superfreakonomics, which includes a chapter on climate change. Do they deploy Levitt’s trademark economic techniques to shed new light on old questions? Because that might be useful! Alas, no, there’s nothing of the sort. Levitt and Dubner just parachute into the field of climate science and offer some lazy punditry on the subject dressed up as “contrarianism.” There’s no original research. There’s nothing bold or explosive. It’s just garden-variety ignorance. …

Should you care? Well, maybe not; Levitt & Dubner are hardly the go-to guys on climate science, nor the first to get it badly wrong. But the various critiques are at least entertaining, and educational to boot. And the subject itself is serious. Krugman concludes in a later post:

Levitt now says that the chapter wasn’t meant to lend credibility to global warming denial — but when you open your chapter by giving major play to the false claim that scientists used to predict global cooling, you have in effect taken the denier side. The only way I can reconcile what Levitt says now with that reality is that he and Dubner didn’t do their homework — not only that they didn’t check out the global cooling stuff, the stuff about solar panels, and all the other errors people have been pointing out, but that they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.

And that’s not acceptable. This is a serious issue. We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games.

Oh, what the hell, let’s add one more, with a link to yet another. Matthew Yglesias makes another useful meta-point, and points to the UCS in the bargain.

Steven Dubner Digs the Hole Deeper

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Caldeira aside, it would be one thing if Levitt and Dubner wanted to make the argument that they have reason to believe that most scientists are mistaken about the climate change situation. But instead they make the claim that most environmentalists are mistaken about the climate change situation and that it’s Levitt & Dubner who are channeling the views of the scientific community. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists “the fifth chapter of the book, ‘Global Cooling,’ repeats a large number of easily discredited arguments regarding climate science, energy production, and geoengineering.”

Of course it’s possible that the UCS is mistaken about some matters. And it’s possible that Ken Caldeira is mistaken about some things. But it’s not possible that Levitt and Dubner are correctly representing the views of Caldeira or climate scientists in general. Nor is it possible that Levitt and Dubner are correct when they assert that photovoltaic cells are black (they’re usually blue) nor is it correct to say that black PV cells lead to net increases in global temperature. These mistakes. A mixture of bad science and bad reportage on a crucial public policy issue, done by a writing duo who became famous for clever statistical analysis of trivial matters.

NOAA: El Niño to Help Steer U.S. Winter Weather

Well, so far so good… Click through to the NOAA article for a bigger version of the map.

winteroutlook_precip_300.jpgNOAA: El Niño to Help Steer U.S. Winter Weather

El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean is expected to be a dominant climate factor that will influence the December through February winter weather in the United States, according to the 2009 Winter Outlook released today by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. Such seasonal outlooks are part of NOAA’s suite of climate services.

“We expect El Niño to strengthen and persist through the winter months, providing clues as to what the weather will be like during the period,” says Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center – a division of the National Weather Service. “Warmer ocean water in the equatorial Pacific shifts the patterns of tropical rainfall that in turn change the strength and position of the jetstream and storms over the Pacific Ocean and the U.S.”

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Diagnosis: What Doctors Are Missing

A little weekend reading. Yves Smith points us to a piece by Jerome Groopman in the NYRB.

Diagnosis: What Doctors Are Missing

A fascinating and somewhat disturbing article at the New York Review of Books by Jerome Groopman looks at what counts for progress in medical diagnosis and finds it to be more of a mixed bag than most readers would assume. This won’t come as much of a surprise to those who know a bit about the field (one of my colleagues who worked at the National Institutes of Health called it “a medieval art”). But what is a tad disconcerting is that the efforts to make medicine more scientific may not in fact be a plus.

That may sound simply bizarre to readers. Isn’t evidence based medicine a good thing? Well, maybe not.

One of the reasons this piece struck a chord with me is that some of the efforts to make medicine more scientific parallel, in their negative aspects, the push to make economics more scientific. In medicine, this means developing more rules and tools for diagnosis; in economics, the course chosen was to impose more “rigor” which meant make greater use of mathematical exposition (proof-like theoretical papers) and to have “empirical” papers centered around statistical analysis of data sets.

Now while this all may sound well and good, in fact, both are methodological choices that limit investigation. For instance, evidence based medicine seeks to gather symptoms and then use that to determine what the ailment might be. Well, the problem is these protocols have been developed from people with only one thing wrong with them. Many people who show up in doctor’s offices have multiple pathologies. So a lot of effort is being expended to develop an approach that has limited value in the field, and worse, doctors are increasingly expected to conform to it.

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As if T-bills were no better than cash

This would be just another boring example of media ignorance, except that Sorkin is billed as “a financial columnist for The New York Times. Or maybe that’s not news after all.

Let’s See, Low Interest Rates Mean that Investors Have Trust

Somehow the world got turned upside in a Vanity Fair excerpt of a book on the financial crisis by NYT reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin, in outlining the dimensions of the financial breakdown following the collapse of Lehman, tells readers: “Treasury bills were trading for less than 1 percent interest, as if they were no better than cash, as if the full faith of the government had suddenly become meaningless.”

Actually, the full faith of the government suddenly was a really big deal. Interest rates of less than 1 percent meant that investors were willing to sacrifice interest payments precisely to take advantage of the full faith of the government. Investors were looking for security, not returns, and at that time, they considered government bonds to be very secure.

Thanks to Ken Broomfield for the tip.

—Dean Baker

Gerrymandering and incumbent reelection

This one’s a bit on the wonky side. Via John Sides we have a newish paper, The Rising Incumbent Reelection Rate: What’s Gerrymandering Got to Do With It?.

The answer in brief: less than nothing.

Some background. The reelection rate of Congressional incumbents has always been high, but over time it has gotten higher, as shown by this graph from the paper:

incumbents.jpg

Why is this? The authors aren’t willing to say for sure, but they are willing to say that it’s not because of increased or technically improved gerrymandering. Decennial census-based redistricting has actually decreased incumbents’ reelection rate, while other overriding factors (whatever they might be) have increased it.

A reasonable conclusion (and no real surprise to many of us) is that new independent-commission redistricting schemes such as California’s are not going to do much to change the incumbent advantage.

The New York Times Does Not Like the European Welfare State

Another Dean Baker classic.

The New York Times Does Not Like the European Welfare State

The New York Times is unhappy because it doesn’t seem likely that Europe’s governments will dismantle their welfare state. The problem is that people in Europe like the welfare state and democratically elected governments seem intent on putting the wishes of their electorate over the desire of the New York Times and the experts it chose to consult for this article.

The article begins by telling readers that: “two years ago, Europe was growing more rapidly than the United States, and the Old Continent finally seemed prepared to tackle longstanding economic challenges like rigid labor markets, runaway government spending and a rapidly aging population.”

In fact, these “longstanding challenges” do not really exist. Europe did not suffer from “runaway government spending,” most countries had relatively modest budget deficits prior to the economic crisis. Over the long-term, the United States is projected to face far worse budget problems than Europe because of its out of control health care spending.

Its “rigid labor markets” did not prevent Europe from experiencing labor productivity growth that was comparable to that of the United States. It also managed to run current account surpluses, instead of unsustainable deficits, like the United States.

Europe’s population is aging more rapidly than the United States, in part because its people enjoy longer life expectancies. It is not clear why the NYT views this as a problem.

The article is full of complaints that Europe’s governments are not following the NYT’s agenda. For example , without any substantiation the NYT tells readers that: “just when it is needed most, the political will to address Europe’s bigger economic problems seems absent, according to many experts across the region and around the world.” It’s not clear what “just when it is needed most” could possibly mean in this context.

The article later complains that: “In Germany, Angela Merkel, who was elected last month to a second term as chancellor, has also avoided taking on the country’s powerful unions and its regional banks. She has embraced the “social market economy” and has insisted there is no alternative to relying on exports rather than consumers to drive growth.”

It’s not clear what the problem is. Economists view exports as a form of investment. Rich countries, like Germany, are supposed to run trade surpluses, lending money to poor countries to finance their development. The NYT apparently wants Germany to siphon money away from poor countries, as the United States does, leaving them with fewer resources to finance their development.

It would have been useful if the article had included the views of someone associated with Europe’s labor unions or an economist more familiar with recent research on European labor markets.

—Dean Baker

In praise of idleness

Weekend reading from Bertrand Russell, 1932. Here’s his first paragraph; I hope you’re not so idle that you don’t read the whole thing.

russell.gifLike most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain. …

PR in Germany

I ran across two rather different takes on the proportionality of the results of Germany’s recent election.

First we have Matthew Søberg Shugart at Fruits and Votes:

The German result

Perusing the results of last Sunday’s German election (thank you, Adam Carr), one thing that jumps out at me is the high—by standards of Germany’s proportional system—disproportionality. …

While we have this from Pauline Lejeune at FairVote:

Germany’s federal parliament: fair and accurate representation

… The highly representative outcome of the German election is the product of its Mixed Member Proportional System…

There’s no real dispute here, but rather implicit comparisons of the German results to rather different standards. Lejeune:

Merkel’s Christian Democratic alliance and their partner, the FDP [secured] a clear majority in the Bundestag (53.37% of the seats) with 48.4% of the nationwide votes.

Historically, this is a rather high level of disproportionality a German election, and Shugart conjectures as to the reason behind it. But for the American voter, Lejeune’s point is the more interesting one:

Without the party list votes and seats, the CDU/CSU would have earned an overwhelming 73% of all seats and been able to govern on its own despite taking less than 40% of the district votes and barely a third of the party list votes.

So with PR and a little less than half the votes, the winning coalition won a little more than half the seats, while in a US-style majority-take-all system, it would have won nearly three quarters of the seats.

Quoting Ernest Naville,

In a democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.

…in Germany, anyway.

(If you’re not familiar with Germany’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, Lejeune’s article isn’t a bad place to start.)