The Reality-Based Community

Jacob Levy opines that Lawrence v. Texas will turn out to be good for gay rights (because the weight of national opinion is on the Court's side) and not bad for Republicans, who now don't have to defend the indefensible and who get to argue about gay marriage instead, which is much more favorable ground for them politically than the sodomy laws.

That seems reasonable, but Levy doesn't answer Phil Carter's question: Where does the decision leave the prohibition of sodomy under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the "don't ask, don't tell" policy?

It's pretty hard to defend the UCMJ provision in light of Lawrence, but it can't be argued that Lawrence squarely resolves it. So the Administration has to make a decision, and it looks to me as if it loses either way.

Unlike merely acquiescing in a Supreme Court decision which it can say (at least out of one side of its mouth) it disagrees with, moving to repeal the UCMJ provision, or to let it become a dead letter through non-prosecution, or refusing to defend it against a Constitutional challenge, would outrage an important part of its base. So also on the question of letting open gays serve. Those are questions on which the Christian Right has kept the Republicans squarely on what Levy calls (I think correctly) "the wrong side of history." So it doesn't look to me as if Bush has a good move. I predict he'll try to duck the question, but I'm not sure he'll be able to do so for a full fifteen months.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:39 PM | |

Quantitative reasoning ... doesn't come naturally to any of us. It seems to be our fate to enter this world with lousy quantitative instincts, as if Adam had miscounted the fruit on the tree of knowledge and forced all of us to suffer for his arithmetic sin. Or, to put the same thought in more secular terms, the remote ancestors whose struggle for survival shaped our genetic makeup faced an environment where quantitative skills were not especially important in solving the problem of finding a meal without becoming a meal.

--Derrick Niederman and David Boyum, What the Numbers Say

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:22 PM | |

The geese in flight
do not intend
to cast any shadow
on the surface of the lake.

The water has no mind
to reflect the image of the geese.

The sentiment feels Taoist, the poetry sounds Japanese. Can anyone place the quotation?

Answer here

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:20 PM | |

It is said that, as Benjamin Franklin left the last meeting of the Constitutional Convention -- which had kept its deliberations secret, so that the citizens didn't even know what form was proposed for the new government -- a woman came up to him on the street and asked, "Well, Dr. Franklin, what is it to be? A monarchy, or a republic?" Franklin is said to have replied, "A republic, madam -- if you can keep it."

If a republic is to maintain itself as a republic, rather than degenerating into an oligarchy or party dictatorship, it must be the case that the party in power can't reliably maintain itself in power. Imagine, just as a hypothetical, a republic whose campaign finance system gave a big natural advantage to whichever party was most favorable to big personal wealth and corporate interests. Imagine further that the party favorable to those interests managed to get control of both the executive and the legislative branches. Now imagine further that the leadership of that party had no scruples about exploiting to the fullest its powers to help friends and punish enemies, in the interest of making its dominance permanent.

Now read this. And this. And this.

Are you afraid yet? Are you very afraid?

What have you done today toward keeping the republic?

[Thanks to Jeanne d'Arc for the links.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:46 PM | |

UPDATE: The post below is obviously inartfully written, since I just got a furious email from a friend who thought that it constituted "praise for the Supreme Court for acting lawlessly and Clinton for acting recklessly." To clarify: I like the outcome as a policy result, but not as a legal conclusion. Had I been on the Court, I think I would have had to hold my nose and vote with Scalia. As to Clinton and gays in the military, I don't think that good intentions outweigh shabby execution; I think he made a rookie mistake, and he and country paid for it. I think that the Supreme Court is now the only reasonable hope for straightening out policy on gays in the military, but I also think that in doing so it would be overstepping its proper bounds.

The Supreme Court says that state laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy are unconstitutional. (Read all about it here.)

Phil Carter thinks that means the ban on gays in the military will fall as well.

Substantively, I'm delighted with the Court's decision, and I'll be even more delighted if Phil turns out to be right. But as a Constitutional matter -- speaking here not as a Constitutional scholar, which I am not, but merely as someone with a citizen's level of interest in Constitutional law -- yesterday's decision strikes me as something of a far fetch. That's because the proposition that private adult consensual sexual conduct has only private consequences and is therefore not an appropriate subject for legislation seems to me so implausible. (Longer version of that argument here.) The extension of that principle to requiring that openly gay people should be allowed to serve in the military strikes me as an even farther fetch.

To repeat: considered purely as an outcome, I think yesterday's decision is something to celebrate, and the hypothetical extension to the military would be an excellent policy choice, both in terms of justice and in terms of military efficiency.

Unlike the state criminal sodomy statutes, which are mostly dead letters, the ban on gays in the military is very much alive, and it continues to damage not only homosexual servicepeople but the whole relationship between the military and the broader society.

Anti-homosexual prejudice, though it remains widespread, is now thoroughly disreputable, especially in the academic world. That matters, because the universities, no matter how much they are hated by the right-wing culture warriors, continue to be the producers of the society's leadership cadre, including most of the officer corps. (The service academies are tiny compared to ROTC.) As long as the military discriminates against gays, there is a sense in which assisting the military -- for example, allowing ROTC units or military recruiting on campus -- means collaborating with that discrimination.

It is not to be expected that the military and the academy should be friendly with each other, but it's extremely unhealthy for the services and the universities alike to let their natural differences grow into serious antipathy. The ban on gays is by no means the only thing that has been acting over the past generation to foster such an antipathy, but it's an important problem, and I would be delighted to get it out of the way.

Since what Justice Scalia calls the "anti-anti-homosexual culture" is associated with the left side of the political spectrum and with the Democratic Party, putting the military firmly on what I suppose ought to be called the pro-anti-homosexual side of the issue contributes to the process by which the military becomes associated with the right and the Republicans. That's good for the right and the Republicans, bad for the left, the Democrats, and -- it's important to note -- the military, which benefits enormously from its perceived status as an institution removed from political or ideological partisanship.

The history of Bill Clinton's attempt to end the military discrimination against gays, and of the campaign to frustrate that attempt, has yet to be written. When it is, it will furnish one of the sadder chapters of our national political history.

Clinton's promise to end the ban "with a stroke of my pen" on his first day in office, made apparently off the cuff at a Kennedy School appearance in the run-up to the primary season, was fine as campaign rhetoric, and the fact that he got away with it suggested that public hostility to homosexuals might be receding. But that he should have imagined that a President can in fact do something of that magnitude with a stroke of his pen suggests that he hadn't yet figured out the difference between the Presidency and a governorship. And regarding the line about "the first day" as a promise to be kept literally meant that there was no time to do the necessary spadework in the Pentagon, on the Hill, or with the voters.

That no one around Clinton told him he couldn't get away with it -- Gore, for one, must have known, both as his father's son and as Neustadt's student -- is harder to fathom, but perhaps no one in that White House wanted to seem either backwards morally or deficient in political courage.

In any case, the fateful executive order was signed, apparently without any consultation either with the Joint Chiefs or with the Capitol Hill barons. In particular, Sam Nunn, whom Clinton had just mortally offended by passing him over for Secretary of Defense in favor of Les Aspin, apparently hadn't been consulted. I don't think that's any excuse for Colin Powell's egregious insubordination or for Nunn's backing him up, but it makes them easier to understand. Yes, Richard Russell never would have helped the brass defy a President (someone should have told Nunn, who regarded himself as Russell's disciple, that the old man would have been ashamed of him) but on the other hand none of the Presidents Russell worked with would have imagined doing anything that profound without at least asking first. Novice President or not, Clinton of all people should have been able to figure out that you have to kiss them before you screw them.

Imagine that Clinton had met with Powell and Nunn sometime before his inauguration, and said to them, "Gentlemen, we've got a problem. I've made a promise, and the President's word has to be good. But it has to be done in a way that the services, the Congress, and the country can accept. Let's not worry about that "first day, stroke of the pen" nonsense: that was just a campaign speech. But I promised that homosexuals would be able to serve, and that promise has to be kept. I'm asking you to help me figure out a way to get this done." Now maybe they would have just told him to get stuffed. (For all I know, such a meeting did happen, and they did tell him to get stuffed.) But I rather doubt it. I think we would have wound up with something much closer to a full repeal of the ban than to "don't ask, don't tell."

Be that as it may, in fact Powell and Nunn decided to teach the new kid a lesson, and of course the Republicans were only too happy to help cripple the Clinton Administration. Hopelessly slanted hearings were held, a RAND report exploding the "combat morale" rational for the ban was suppressed until the deed was done, and Clinton was forced to order "don't ask, don't tell" under the threat of having something worse passed over his veto.

With public attitudes, and especially elite attitudes, having changed rapidly over the intervening decade, it's quite possible that the military leadership's opposition to softening anti-gay policies, which was obviously heartfelt in the early 1990s, might be much less strong if the issue were raised for the first time today. But the nasty tone of that debate, and the lies that had to be told to win it, would make it very hard for the military as an institution to back off now. The same applies to the Republican Party; even George W. Bush, the object of what sometimes seems like worship among the right wing, would face intra-party revolt if he tried to do what Clinton tried to do, not least because Clinton tried to do it and it was Bush's friends who stopped him.

So this may well be a case where the military, and what used to be called (before Bush v. Gore) the "political branches" of the Federal Government generally, would (like the chaste, lovely maiden of Siam in the limerick) be secretly grateful if the Supreme Court forced them to adopt more civilized policies. But lots of things that are permitted to civilians -- lots of things that are regarded as fundamental freedoms for civilians -- are routinely forbidden to servicemembers, starting with the right to criticize public officials and the right to quit one's job.

In order to decide that the ban ought to be removed, you have to think -- as I do -- that the ban is in fact not conducive to the process of getting ready to fight, and of actually fighting. But that strikes mea as precisely the sort of policy inquiry in which the courts have a comparative disadvantage compared with the executive and the legislature.

My earlier post on the case just decided said that I thought the law was Constitutional and hoped that the Court would strike it down. That led Glenn Whitman to ask whether I really thought that the Court should act lawlessly. No, I don't. But I feel rather a way a football player must feel when his out-of-bounds catch is ruled in-bounds, or the way a lawyer must feel when she wins a case she thought she deserved to lose on the facts and the law. When the bank makes an error in my favor, I'm not disposed to argue.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:29 PM | |

1. The venality of professors who take kickbacks for "adopting" (i.e., requiring students to buy) books

or

2. The stupidity of professors who confirm having done so on the record

Thanks to the Invisible Adjunct for the link to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i42/42a00801.htm

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:17 PM | |

Speaking of David Boyum (see below) he and I have an article on drugs and crime in the latest Public Interest. Here's the topic sentence:

No drug policy can deliver a drug-free society. But smarter policies can give us a safer one.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:00 PM | |

We take a respite from our darkness-cursing for a bit of candle-lighting.

Suppose you were convinced that the susceptibility of the voting public to statistical b.s. (as for example the claim that "faith-based" prison programs have been shown to reduce recidivism) constituted a major threat to the viability of republican government in an increasingly complex and data-drenched world. And suppose further that you wanted to do something about it. What might that be?

Here's a suggestion: buy two copies of What the Numbers Say, one for you and one to give away.

The book is a joy, written in a breezy style and with a wealth of examples. It's build around two simple ideas: quantitative reasoning is essential, and it doesn't have much to do with "math" either in the axiom-theorem-proof sense or the memorize-this-formula sense. What Niederman and Boyum call "quantitative reasoning" is just applying common sense to situations where quantity -- "more" or "less" -- matters.

Full disclosure: David Boyum is a long-time friend and sometime collaborator.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:49 PM | |

You play it like this.

John Edwards, alone among Democrats, seems to grasp the plain fact that, deep down, this is still a Puritan country, and people prefer their political arguments dressed up as sermonettes. I still think 2004 is a year for a candidate who can outflank Bush on national security, which means Graham or Clark. But whoever runs needs to be able to sound the note Edwards sounds.

Thanks to Tapped for the pointer.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:59 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Here's a sure-fire method for producing a "successful" program: measure your successes, and ignore your failures. Works every time. What's astonishing is how easy it is to get some academic to write it up, how willing the newspapers are to report the resulting "study" as if it contained actual information, and the many politicians will then cite your "success" as scientifically documented fact.

The latest incarnation of this particular confidence trick is from Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, which, thanks to the generosity of then-Governor George W. Bush, runs its own prison (for born-again Christians only) in Texas, and now has similar programs in Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas. A report from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society found that graduates of the program (called InnerChange) were only half as likely as matched controls to return to prison. Or so we are told in a press release from the Prison Fellowship. The White House gave Colson a nice photo-op with Bush, and Ari Fleischer said "This is an initiative that the President believes very deeply in to help reduce recidivism in our federal prisons and prisons everywhere." Religion News Service picked up the report, and of course the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is also enthusiastic, taking its obligatory swipe at "liberals" who want to keep God from rescuing sinners.

Here's the way the study worked. The researchers took a group of 171 prisoners who entered the InnerChange program, and found then selected the records of a group of other inmates that met the selection criteria but didn't enter. The comparison group was selected to match the program entrants on race, age, offense type, and something called the "salient factor score," (SFS), a standard measure of recidivism risk. Then the post-release criminal behavior the graduates of the InnerChange program was compared to that of the matched controls.

Veeeeeeerrrrrrrrryyyyyyy zzzzzzzientifick, nicht war?

But completely bogus. Not only were the entrants to the program a self-selected group, which means that in some important ways (such as a desire to change their lives) they weren't actually matched to the comparison group, but it was only the graduates -- 75 of the 177 entrants -- who showed better behavior than the pseudo-control group. Comparing all of the entrants (including those who dropped out, were kicked out, or got early parole) to all of the comparison group, the difference in recidivism reverses: the InnerChange group was slightly more likely to be rearrested (36.2% versus 35%) and noticeably more likely to actually go back to prison (24.3% versus 20.3%).

In other words, those who succeed, succeed, while those who fail are likely to fail. Whodathunkit?

Don't get the impression that the Prison Fellowship is unusual in hyping its numbers this way. Most of the drug treatment literature (the stuff the people wearing the "Treatment Works" buttons keep shoving at you) works the same way, as a National Academy study of a couple of years ago rather rudely pointed out.

The self-selection problem is a really hard one for social scientists go get around: as an ethical matter, you can't randomly assign people to receive different treatments without getting their informed consent in advance. Anyway, it's quite plausible that even a good program will only work for the people who want it, so there's no point in randomly assigning people who just aren't interested.

If there are more volunteers for a given treatment than there are program slots, then you can invite people to volunteer and tell them up front that there will be a lottery to get in. But sometimes that won't work, and you just have to match on the observables, hope the resulting distortion isn't too great, and tell your readers to be cautious in interpreting your resuls.

But there's no excuse for cherry-picking by comparing those who make it througha program with a group matched to all of those entering the program. That's just cheating. The only legitimate way to analyze the data is to keep everyone selected for the program in the study, regardless of how long they stay in the program. (This approach is called "intention-to-treat" analysis, a carry-over from its roots in medical-outcomes research.)

Nor is there any excuse for reporters regurgitating this pap without checking with the people who know better. (Finding someone who hates the program on ideological grounds to describe the findings as "junk science," as the religion News Service did, doesn't count.)

"So how," I hear you ask, "does anyone get away with this shell game?" The answer is the same as for any sort of bamboozlement: it only works on people who, at some level, want what you're trying to convince them of to be true. As Machiavelli didn't quite say (but one of his translators said in his name), "men are so simple, and so driven by their needs, that whoever wishes to deceive will find another who wishes to be deceived." The Prince, Chapter XVIII

Manuel, the Cabellian anti-hero, put it more succinctly, in the Latin proverb he borrowed as the motto of his house: Mundus vult decipi.

Update Just for a change, I have a constructive suggestion for something you can do about it.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:50 AM | |
Thread: Crime Control

1. They brought it out on the solstice. Nice touch.

2. Eight million for a first US print run? Amazing! Assuming an average retail price of $25, that's $200 million, which sounds like a movie number rather than a book number. That's something more than 1% of the total retail value of books sold in the country in a year.

3. I guessed right about the meaning of the title.

4. From the first hundred pages (out of 850), it's looking good.

5. I couldn't quite figure out what Borders was trying to accomplish by organizing the midnight sale the way they did. Whatever it was, I don't think they accomplished it.

a. Borders allowed advance reservations (unpaid, I think), which were guaranteed to be good anytime this weekend. That seems like a sensible way to reduce the crowd pressure the first night.

b. But by Friday evening, reservations were no longer being made, suggesting that they expected to sell out. Right. You don't want to promise books you don't have.

c. Given the prospects of selling out, though, why discount the book 30% off its $30 cover price? The other books in the series, which aren't in short supply, weren't being discounted, and I was told that the 30% discount was only good for the first week.

d. Instead of making people line up hours in advance, Borders handed out numbered tickets. (I don't know when the tickets started being distributed, but I got there about 9 p.m., wandering in from a restaurant across the street to see if they had a copy of Amis's The Green Man -- they didn't -- and wound up with ticket # 157, which made me a Ravenclaw.) That was a big convenience for the customers, and potentially a way of encouraging them to buy more books, by letting them wander around the store until their numbers were called (perhaps in groups of twenty). But in fact the customers were told to line up, in numerical order, no later than 11:50. It took me almost an hour to get to the registers, and couldn't have been further than a third of the way back, so some folks probably had more than a two-hour wait, which seems a lot longer if you're standing in line than it does if you're browsing around a big bookstore.

e. Okay, maybe they didn't want to sell a lot of other books right then, because that would slow down the line compared to simply handing out the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (no more than three to a customer) and collecting the money. As it was, the line moved pretty slowly; with five registers operating, it took me 45 minutes to get to the head of the line, suggesting less than one transaction per register per minute. My actual purchase of three copies took no more than twenty seconds, even using a credit card.

f. But if the goal was to make the line move, why did the tickets offer a 10% discount on any regular-priced book? And if Borders didn't want to encourage loading up on other merchandise, then why the deep discount?

g. If the goal was to get the midnight business done as quickly as possible, why not announce that a line ticket would serve as a reservation if presented anytime this weekend, encouraging sensible people to go home and get some sleep? Of course, some of the customers wanted to get the book tonight. But others, like me, just wanted to make sure of getting a copy and would happily have come back in the morning.

h. With several hundred people in line to buy a particular book, Borders did exactly nothing to try to cross-sell them other books of more or less the same sort. There was no display table with fantasies, or books about magic, or English school stories for that matter. When I looked for Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea to show the lady behind me in line, who was talking about how her teenager loved the Potter books, I was able to find exactly one (and neither of the other two books in that set).

6. Now a question for the publisher: Since book collectors love anything special, why not have a sticker or stamp identifying the books as having been purchased on the first day of issue? First editions aren't going to be rare, with an initial US print run of 8 million, but the "first-day cover" might have some value.

7. Despite the hour, the crowd was very patient and well-behaved. But what seemed to me like an obvious form of cooperative behavior failed to emerge. Each customer was allowed to purchase up to three books, but if the sample of people around me was at all representative while many of the people there only wanted one. So why not, once at the head of the line, buy three and sell the other two to those who were waiting? That's what I did, and my two customers seemed very grateful. Did the rest of the crowd just not think of it, or did they think of it and decide it was somehow against the rules? Buying three copies took no longer than selling one, and there were enough to supply everyone in the store, so the other people waiting in line weren't disadvantaged at all. Neither was Borders. And the employees of Borders got to go home a few seconds earlier than would otherwise have been the case. So it looked to me like a clear opportunity to spend one of my minutes to save three of other people's hours, a benefit-to-cost ratio rarely available in altruistic endeavor.

The price of the book, including tax, was just about $20, and that's what I took from the two people I sold to. One of them, after I had already given him the book and told him the price, offered me $25 instead of $20, which I interpreted as a gesture of gratitude. I didn't take him up on it. But I wonder what the auction price of a copy would have been at that moment? I preferred doing a very-low-cost good deed to making a small profit in cash, but under the circumstances I wouldn't have disapproved of someone else who decided to take advantage of the opportunity for arbitrage. What did bother me is what seemed like the sheer thoughtlessness of the people who only bought one book, rather than noticing, and seizing, the opportunity to help someone else out.

8. Of course that raises a question for me: instead of just making my own cheap contribution, why didn't I try to suggest it to others as well? Answer: I probably would have when I was younger, but I'm more self-conscious about my congenital officiousness than I used to be. There's no doubt that some people would have been offended by the suggestion: not so much by its content as by having a stranger trying to tell them what to do.

9. I'm delighted that Harry Potter is such a phenomenon. Anything much more truly "fantastic" in mood, or much more demanding as literature, probably couldn't have made the same inroads into mass consciousness. But it wouldn't be unreasonable to hope for some "gateway" effect from Rowland to the larger world of fantasy. Is there any evidence of that? I don't know.

10. Almost all of James Branch Cabell is out of print, and largely unobtainable. What's keeping the Library of America? In their format, the whole Biography of the Life of Manuel series would fit into four volumes, I would think, for a subscription price of about $100: about what the five Harry Potters so far would cost in hardback. The Library of America has issued complete sets of Chandler and Hammet (for which I'm grateful). Given the rank Cabell once held in American letters, and given his real literary merit, doesn't he rate comparable treatment? Perhaps this is a question of economics rather than one of literary judgment; I don't know how many copies the Library of America has to sell to break even, or how many it can count on selling to public and university libraries. Maybe, among the eight million people who are going to buy Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this week, there really aren't two thousand, or five thousand, or ten thousand, or whatever the break-even number would be, who could be interested in Cabell. But it does seem a shame.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:02 PM | |

Annual U.S. expenditure on books: $17 billion
Annual U.S. expenditure on alcohol: $105 billion

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:43 PM | |

Here's a good "Jackson-Vanik" to use on Saudi Arabia: its practice of allowing its citizens to kidnap their American-born children in custody disputes already resolved by American courts, and of keeping American women married to Saudi men virtual prisoners in the country. Even the Wall Street Journal seems to be appalled, though naturally it takes a completely irrelevant swipe at American feminists for not making more of a fuss, omitting any criticism of the Saudi liegeman now sitting in the White House. (See Grant Rabenn's post for the link to the WSJ editorial and to some background material.)

I remain completely befuddled by the silence of the Democrats on the issue of the Saudi tyranny and the Bushies' connections to it. I'd hate to think that Saudi penetration of the K Street lawyer-lobbyist corridor is so complete that no one dares to say the right thing. Dick Gephardt, not otherwise my favorite candidate, did take whack at the Saudis in the course of criticizing the administration's energy policies, but that seems a little bit too oblique an approach if this is going to be developed into the winning issue I think it could be.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:46 PM | |

...the San Francisco Chronicle, for its caption for Rob MacCoun's op-ed on Canada's proposed marijuana decriminalization and the drug czar's predictable overreaction:

O CANNABIS

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:19 PM | |

Gray Davis, our dull, secretive, shifty, fiscally irresponsible, coin-operated, lock-'em-up-forever governor, faces a recall petition engineered by one of our loony-toon right-wing Congressgeeks, Darrell Issa.

The LA Times seems to think that it would be "undemocratic" for the citizenry to reconsider the results of the 2002 election, but I can't quite follow the editors' reasoning: if there's a criticism to be made of the initiative and recall provisions of state's Progressive-era constitution, it's that they're excessively democratic, leaving too much power in the hands of the voters rather than their elected representatives.

But why shouldn't the voters, with the benefit of more information, be able to vote again? Making recall petitions a normal part of the political process would certainly have some costs, but there's no reason to think that such a development is likely; if this petition succeeds in forcing a vote, it will be the first time for a California governor.

Admittedly, the recall provision does seem to have been drafted in a fit of silliness. Here's how it works: If 12% of the number of voters who voted for an office sign a recall petition, a new election is held, in bifurcated fashion. On the same day, voters vote on two questions: whether the incumbent is to be displaced, and who is to replace him. If a majority votes to boot the incumbent, then the person getting a plurality of the votes in the "beauty contest" part of the ballot. (The incumbent can't run in the "beauty contest.")

Not only does this guarantee an impossibly complicated campaign, it creates the possibility that, in a splintered field, some loser with good name recognition or a fanatic following might be elected governor with, say, a quarter of the votes. And it's truly frightening to imagine how much of our future the Gray Ghost would sell out for campaign contributions in a recall, given how shameless he is in ordinary times.

Still, getting rid of Gray Davis seems like a worthy cause. (I was prepared to vote for Simple Simon, and would have if he'd had the good sense to remain silent and be thought a fool rather than, as he did, opening his mouth and removing all doubt.) The good news is that Phil Angelides, the state Treasurer, and Bill Lockyer, the Attorney General, who have been jockeying for position in a 2006 race, both announced that they wouldn't be candidates in a recall election. (The Lieutenant Governor, Cruz Bustamente, is still keeping his counsel.) What I'm hoping for is that Issa and Ahhhhnold and maybe a couple of other GOPhers get into the race, and that a single Democrat (an actual Democrat this time) could pull it out. The papers are talking about DiFi, but she probably won't do it, and there's no particular reason to think that she'd be a good governor.

Leon Panetta, anyone?

Update My friend Steve Teles suggests that the above analysis is too shallow, treating as a single-play game what is in fact a multiple-play game:

Political entrepreneurs considering recalls in the past were faced with the fact
that experience would suggest the impossibility of the task. A successful
recall would reduce the "uncertainty cost" of a recall, as well as
suggesting organizational mechanisms by which this could be achieved. Each
time it was successfully done would reduce both of these costs--this
suggests that there is a path dependent mechanism at play in recalls once
the original threshold is passed. Which would further suggest that if you
thought the recall as a recurrent phenomenon was undesirable that you would
want to stop it at this point. The evidence for this can be found with
referenda and initiatives--the first few were hard but they increase
dramatically over time as the uncertainty cost gets eliminated and the
collective action problems start to get solved.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:52 AM | |

There is much less enthusiasm about formal logic among ordinary educated people today than there was a few short centuries ago, in the period roughly from Peter Abelard to Leibniz, when logic seemed as if it might be developed into a machine for producing unlimited numbers of true and valuable propositions. But the less glorious role to which Bertrand Russell consigned it -- helping us avoid false inferences -- is still a useful one. By stripping away the particulars from an argument, particulars which may have such emotional force as to blind us to otherwise evident fallacies, the reduction of an argument to its purely logical form can act as a form of error-checking.

Take, for example, my blog-buddy Jo, the Democratic Veteran. Asked if

>Some X does not have quality Y.
>Therefore, no X has quality Y.

represented a valid inference, Jo would presumably say, "Heck, no! Perhaps some, but not all, X has quality Y."

But commenting on my tentative support for the RAVE Act (as expressed here, Jo writes as follows:

Mark argues that the law might have a chance of measurably reducing Ecstasy/MDMA use, but I disagree. If just passing a law worked, we would be a nation of tea-totalers, the death rows in this country would be empty and no one would ever drink and drive. Neither would I ever have had to stand with any of my troops who had flunked a urinalysis for some drug or another at Captains Mast.

which, if I read it correctly, makes the argument that since some people aren't deterred, no one is deterred.

I doubt that Aristotle or William of Ockham would have approved of the logical structure of that argument. What either of them would have thought of the RAVE Act is a different matter, as is the question, which I regard as still open, whether the RAVE Act is on balance good legislation.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:52 PM | |

Predictably, the US and Great Britain, now formally recognized as the occupying powers in Iraq, are starting to be confronted with a nasty question. We believe in both liberalism (i.e., individual freedoms) and democracy. But it's not obvious how to reconcile the two in Iraq. At least a substantial minority, and (now that the Baath is history) probably the best-organized part of the population, is profoundly hostile to individual liberty, especially when the individuals involved are women. The reports from the ground, aren't pretty, if the BBC and Newsday are at all representative: in some areas, it's becoming unsafe for unveiled women to walk around in public, and institutions that accept security help from the mullahs wind up having to accept their prejudices too.

I know which side I'm on, and I know which side American voters would be on if the question were put squarely, but it's actually not a simple question either in principle or in the world of practical politics.

If Iraqis, in free elections, vote to subject themselves to Saudi-style or Iranian-style theocracy, should they be allowed to do so? I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that sovereignty, even democratic sovereignty, shouldn't be absolute: that international human rights norms ought to be enforceable even against the popular will. As long as sharia includes legal penalties for apostasy, any regime that makes sharia enforceable in the law courts ought to be considered illegitimate on its face. But note what a radical stance that is: surely one the current administration, to say nothing of the UN, would be very reluctant to embrace.

Mostly, the US government can duck that question. But being an occupying power makes ducking hard. Now that we're both officially and effectively in control, either we have to admit that we're willing to let the mullahs and their followers force Iraqi women to move back a generation, or we have to do something to stop it. So far, the silence from Washington has been rather deafening. That's partly, I think, because we hope to get help from the mullahs both in enforcing order on the ground and in suppressing the Baathist remnant.

Tell me: Are we having fun yet?

Update Salam Pax sums it up from the viewpoint of an Iraqi who isn't pleased about being occupied but prefers being ruled by conquerors to being ruled by his countrymen:

So the “interim Iraqi government” got screwed. Quelle surprise!!

Not too hot about any of them anyway and this way we get to blame the Americans for the screwing up of our future. They have been involved in creating the mess we are in now, they should take responsibility in helping us clear it up. Ummm, let’s put it this way so no one gets pissed off: Pretty please with sugar on top, don’t leave now and let the loony mullahs stick me on a pole and leave me in the sun to think about my “Sins”.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:07 PM | |

Noah Shachtman suggests four areas where the Democrats can make the national security issue against Bush in 2004: he calls them "nation-building;" "9-11" (roughly, "Where's Osama?"); homeland defense, and multilateralism (which sounds like a loser at the polls until you read Shachtman's slogan for it: "a posse, not a cowboy").

All reasonable stuff, but it misses what seems to me Bush's central vulnerability: his unwillingness to confront the Saudi monarchy, which was up to its neck in supporting and financing al-Qaeda and still defends its practice of paying bounties to the families of terrorists who manage to blow themselves up while murdering Israelis.

A challenge for people who know more detail than I do: what would the structure of something that did for the Saudi issue what Jackson-Vanik did for the issue of dealing with (what proved to be) the dying Soviet regime? We need something that, without mentioning Saudi Arabia, in fact picks it out, and does something nasty to it until it stops doing some of the nasty things it does.

Of course it needs a provision allowing the President to waive it in the national interest. Go ahead, Shrub. Make my day.

Update If the Bush Administration allows the imposition of sharia in Iraq (see next post) that would also be a great issue. The time to start talking is now.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:26 AM | |

Has the Iranian counter-revolution finally begun? When the government starts criticizing, and even arresting, the vigilantes who have been doing its dirty work, something serious has to be happening. But Slate finds no mention of it on the front page of any of the US papers it scans, despite the overall slowness of the news day.

A little bit of bad news mixed with the good: it seems that the US-based broadcasters who have been trying to pump up the protests are monarchist in tone, but the folks on the ground don't want to bring back the Shah and are eager not to be perceived as pro-American.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:29 PM | |

A couple of readers have emailed me asking what I'm doing way out on the left fringe in this blogspace map. Does anyone understand the methodology employed?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:07 PM | |

It's nice to know that some questions have answers. David Boyum handles my "why-can't-you-get-a-real-bagel-outside-New York" question deftly, offering a mix of supply-side and demand-side answers:

From a baking perspective, three things distinguish a dense, chewy, and flavorful bagel from soft and bland impostors.

1. Authentic bagels are made with the stiffest of bread doughs. The wate-to-flour ratio is normally 50 - 55%, about 10 percentage points less than for ordinary bread dough. Also, the bagels are formed after a minimum of proofing. By contrast, faux bagels are made with ordinary dough after a significant rise.

2. True bagels are retarded overnight before cooking. The long, slow, cold fermentation dramatically heightens and improves flavor. Legendary baker Peter Reinhart says that making a bagel without overnight retarding is like drinking a fine wine before it has aged.

3. Real bagels are boiled before baking. Counterfeit bagels are simply baked in a steam-injection oven. Boiling kills the yeast and cooks the dough on a bagel's exterior, which prevents the dough from plumping up during subsequent baking.

Now why is it so hard to find a proper bagel outside of New York? I assume it's the joint influence of mass production and lowbrow tastes.

Bagels are, in a sense, a victim of their own success. Efforts to mass produce bagels undermined the costly traditions of hand forming, overnight retarding, and kettle boiling. Bagel forming machines, the elimination of retarding, and the introduction of steam-injection ovens greatly reduced production costs. Moreover, Reinhart suggests, authentic bagels are something of an acquired taste, and most people who didn't grow up on the real thing prefer softer, easier-to-chew bagels.

Julia (of Sisyphus Shrugged) suggests that the main demand-side reason is that many Americans are averse to chewing their food, but adds another I hadn't thought of: real bagels go stale almost at once, and a stale real bagel is completely inedible.

Knowing why I can't get a real bagel isn't an adequate substitute for being able to get a real bagel (nor is Jacob Levy's report that getting a real bagel is increasingly hard even in New York), but it's at least a consolation.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:20 AM | |

Tom Runnacles has some acute reflections on the political economy of the workweek, followed by a very convincing little essay on the Europhile/Europhobe split in Britain (Runnacles is a Phile, but he thinks most of his countrymen are Phobes, and thinks it's a wrong of the elite to push a political agenda, albeit one with which he sympathizes, using economics as a cover), followed by a stirring essay on the music and showmanship of Wynton Marsalis, after which ... well, you get the idea.

Damned if I know how Runnacles has avoided being added the blogroll until now, but the oversight is hereby rectified.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:52 AM | |

Does anyone know why bagels are largely unprocurable outside New York?

It's not that I have any strong objection to the fluffy toroidal rolls available under that name in bakeries and supermarkets, but they aren't actually dense, chewy bagels. Are real bagels somehow more expensive to make than the imitations?

Or is that that many more people like the thought of eating bagels than actually like bagels? Presumably that's also why pastel-colored, delicate-flavored "nova" has displaced real red, fishy-tasting, salty belly lox.

It's not that I'm in any ethical position to complain; no doubt the "Thai" and "Cambodian" and "Hunan" food I love would come as a considerable shock to actual Thais, Cambodians, and Hunanese, and I'd probably find the real version of any of them too far-out, and too spicy, for my taste. It's just that it's been a long time since I had a real bagel with cream cheese, red onion, and real lox.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:36 PM | |

Requiring restaurants in Los Angeles to post their cleanliness scores reduced hospital admissions for food-related illnesses by 20%, according to a study forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. (Those with access to the Wall Street Journal can see David Wessel's May 29 account here.) The Health Department inspections themselves were well-established; the only thing that was new was the requirement that the grades be posted. Not only did patrons shift from less-clean to more-clean restaurants, the resulting market pressure led restaurants as a group to (literally) clean up their act.

Question for the libertarians in the audience: on the facts as given, is the regulation requiring disclosure justified?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:05 PM | |

With the scrupulous sense of balance for which this site is so well known, the blogroll today adds two new sites (new absolutely, not just to the blogroll): in the right corner, wearing the red, white, and blue trunks, Opaun, by Owen Paun, who, although highly intelligent (he aced my toughest course), remains convinced that George Bush is a good President, and, in the left corner, carrying the skeptical torch, Civic Dialogues, by "Erasmus," who seems considerably less committed to Christianity than the original Erasmus.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:20 AM | |

I wish I could agree with Glenn Reynolds when he says that "Burma is more likely to be freed at gunpoint than via diplomacy." Certainly, guns would be more effective, if someone were willing to use them. But no one is, least of all the Bush Administration, which has just gone to court to try to quash a human-rights lawsuit directed at Unocal's collaboration with the Burmese dictatorship.

Saddam Hussein's tyranny was perhaps a good reason to invade Iraq, but it wasn't the reason Iraq was invaded. As long as the SLORC, or whatever it's calling itself this week, confines itself to making the Burmese miserable, it has nothing to fear from Team Bush.

Note that this can't be attributed to cynicism on the part of Bush or his advisers; it's a matter of principle. Bush made it clear during the campaign that he opposed any use of US military might for any purpose other than protecting American interests, defined in a way that clearly didn't include the abolition of forced labor in Burma.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:53 PM | |

Glenn Reynolds relays an account of what seems to be a real outrage. A DEA agent apparently used the newly-passed RAVE Act (now formally the Illicit Drug Antiproliferation Act) to intimidate an Eagles’ lodge in Montana to cancel an anti-drug-war fundraiser planned for its premises. Glenn cites this incident as vindication for his belief that the RAVE Act was a bad idea from the beginning. (And the silence of the press -- a Google News search comes up absolutely dry -- is really astonishing.)

Maybe Glenn is right: perhaps the new law was a bad idea. Certainly, it gives lots of discretionary power to a Justice Department whose current leadership has consistently abused the powers entrusted to it, as when it tried to use the DEA’s power to revoke the licenses that physicians need to prescribe controlled substances to nullify Oregon’s assisted-suicide law. If the DEA really did what it has been accused of doing in this case – which seems plausible, though at the moment the only available accounts are from sources hostile to the DEA – that can’t really be called surprising.

But the target of the law – the growing use of MDMA (“ecstasy”) – is a genuine, and potentially large, problem, and the law has, in my view, a better chance of doing something about that problem than most drug-policy initiatives have of reaching their targets. Here’s why I think so:

Starting in the mid-1990s, MDMA emerged rather suddenly from the alphabet soup of recreational chemicals to become what is now probably the second-most-widely used purely illicit drug, behind cannabis, with a market in the several-to-ten-billion-dollar range, way behind cocaine (at around $25 billion) but on a par with cannabis and heroin. If we look at initiations – people trying a drug for the first time in a given year – MDMA, at 1.9 million, is second only to cannabis (2.4 million) and way ahead of everything else, including even the non-medical use of prescription drugs. The current MDMA initiation rate is higher than the cocaine initiation rate ever was: cocaine peaked at about 1.5 million new users per year.

Even more troubling, what used to be a distinctively “European” MDMA use pattern – multiple doses, every night, every weekend – has become much more common here, and that more dangerous pattern is closely associated with “raves”: all-night dance parties with a mostly youthful clientele and a set of musical styles conducive to trance-dancing.

MDMA is a highly reinforcing drug; it induces in many users a strongly positive emotional state that lasts for several hours. But it has one very peculiar characteristic: its capacity to produce that state typically wears off with repeated use. Virtually any drug will create a tolerance: that is, over time higher doses will be needed to generate the same biological effects. But the diminished effects of MDMA cannot be recovered by using more of the drug: that’s the peculiar characteristic.

That peculiarity led Jerome Beck, Deborah Harlow, and their colleagues, who studied MDMA use in the late 1980s, to predict that its use would be self-limiting. And it’s still quite possible that the dominant use pattern for MDMA will turn out to be low-dose (a single pill of about 100 milligrams per session) and low-frequency (no more than a handful of times per year). There’s reason to hope, though nothing like a guarantee, that such occasional low-dose use will prove to have only limited risks, or that it could be made fairly safe with a few simple precautions.

But while MDMA’s special emotional charge wears off, its purely stimulant effects do not, though they are subject to normal tolerance formation. Therefore, someone who wants to dance all night may find that the drug continues to be rewarding long after someone using it under other circumstances would have gotten bored with it. That’s what explains the association of frequent high-dose use with rave activity. Using three or five or eight E pills per night, three nights per weekend, almost every weekend, is likely to be bad news, though right now no one can say for sure just how bad the news will turn out to be. (That high-dose, high-frequency users are subject to a midweek depression is fairly well established; the extent, duration, and clinical significance, if any, of the associated cellular-level changes in the brain remains a matter of heated scientific controversy.)

That being so, neither the fact that the RAVE Act will tend to discourage some socially responsible actions by rave operators (such as providing “chill-out” rooms, encouraging the distribution of information about the risks of MDMA use and how to limit them, and allowing on-site pill-testing) nor the risk that the law will be abused, as it seems to have been in the Montana case, suffices to convince me that it will do more harm than good.

I can imagine a radically different approach to MDMA policy, based on harm reduction via dose and frequency limitation, that might have better overall results, but I can’t imagine getting such a policy adopted in the current political climate. If the practical alternative to the RAVE Act was drug policy as usual -- a little more law enforcement, longer sentences for dealers, and inventing fancier lies to tell the children -- at least the RAVE Act stands out from its background as having some chance of not being a complete waste of effort.

The language of the law isn’t a masterpiece of legislative draftsmanship, and the process by which it was passed was less than edifying. But it has, I would argue, some measurable chance of reducing the size of what otherwise seems likely to be a serious problem. I’d like to hear what its critics propose as an alternative, or at least a serious argument that the Act as passed is worse than nothing. The bare assertion by Glenn’s friends at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism that “The RAVE Act has no valid law enforcement purpose” fails to convince.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:26 PM | |

Niall Ferguson has a very curious essay in today's New York Times. He asserts two things that are clearly true -- that Americans typically take their religion far more seriously than Europeans do, and that Americans are also more committed to paid work, with longer workweeks and longer worklives -- and claims that the two observations prove that Max Weber was right about the Protestant ethic.

The main point of the essay is political rather than religious: Ferguson fears that the European Union will impose what he calls its "secularized sloth" on the Eastern European countries who are lining up to join it. Ferguson seems a little confused in his treatment of Catholicism, and I doubt that Weber would think that the article adequately restates his thesis, but let those details pass.

To me, the striking thing about the article is Ferguson's strongly-expressed but apparently unexamined preference for overwork as a way of life and his apparent unawareness of the irony involved in claiming a Christian religious sanction for a commitment to relentless getting and spending.

By ordinary economic logic, the richer we get the more we ought to be willing, at the margin, to trade off material goods for the leisure in which to enjoy them. That Americans have actually been lengthening their work years over the past couple of decades is doubtless true, but it ought to be regarded as puzzling rather than praiseworthy. We ought to be examining our social system to figure out why it doesn't offer more opportunities to earn a little less and have a little more time off, and why so many people in the richest country in the world feel so stretched financially that they neglect their health (for example by undersleeping and underexcercising), their friendships, and their families to pile up the dough. It isn't just that the workweek has extended; commuting times, too, have grown.

Why? Why aren't Americans taking more of their increased wealth as leisure rather than consumer goods? Robert Frank has some thoughts on these topics that seem to me convincing, both in Luxury Fever and in the book on "Winner-take-all" economics he wrote with Phil Cook, but I'm insisting here on the questions rather than on any particular answers.

Put aside for the moment about the problems of children whose parents aren't (still) married. Just how pleased are we supposed to be that an upper-middle-class child of today in an intact family gets substantially fewer parental hours devoted to his or her upbringing than would have been true a generation ago? The entry of women into the professional workplace was, in my view, a great social accomplishment, but wouldn't we be better off as a country if both the earners in two-earner families with kids felt able to work fewer hours and spend more hours doing the job of parent?

Ferguson can barely control his rage at the thought that the horrid, horrid "Old European" European Union is threatening to deprive the innocent (though now, Ferguson reports, Godless) Czechs of the glorious opportunity to put in 2000 hours a year at the office. That will, he explains, mean that the US will continue to have a higher GDP per capita than Europe, despite the fact that Western European productivity is as high as, or higher than, ours. He seems to think this is self-evidently A Bad Thing, though he doesn't bother to explain why.

Nor does Ferguson ever reflect on what a certain rabbi from Nazareth might think about all of this. But it's not really very hard to figure out; the Sermon on the Mount is memorably eloquent: "Lay not up treasure here on earth ... you cannot serve God and Mammon ... Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them...And why take ye thought for raiment? Behold the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these ..."

Jesus, as quoted in the Gospels, is sometimes obscure, but his position on the Protestant Ethic couldn't be clearer. He was against it.

Now I'm not very religious, and the religion I mostly don't practice isn't Christianity. So I'm not committed to the idea that what Jesus said is the way people ought to behave. And of course there are lots of things about institutional Christianity that are hard to square with the Gospels; there's no contradiction between the textual claim that the Sermon on the Mount is hostile to accumulation and Weber's sociological claim that some aspects of Protestantism were favorable to economic growth.

But isn't it rather strange to claim as an argument in favor of Christian religiosity that it encourages people to sacrifice their children to Mammon?

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:31 PM | |

There's been lots of criticism of the Bush Administration for having turned Afghanistan back to rule by warlords and apparently planning to let Iraq fall under the domination of the mullahs. This strikes me as unfair.

During the campaign, Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for engaging in "nation-building" and promised, if elected, not to waste American tax dollars on any such futility. Accordingly, he has made no real effort to build a workable nation in Afghanistan, and seemingly will extend the same practice of salutary neglect to the even graver nation-building task in Iraq.

Surely it can't be right to criticize a politician for keeping his promises.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:44 PM | |