The Boys Weekend Journal

Man Robs Bank to Get Healthcare

2011-06-22T09:22:00.003-04:00

This story, from a local paper in North Carolina called the Gaston Gazette, really seems to capture the essence of the day. Well written, too. I definitely recommend that everyone take the time to read it.

How to Make Local Government Sexy

2010-08-28T22:30:00.002-04:00

This post on Andrew Sullivan's blog by Conor Friedersdorf is quite relevant to my Aug. 3 post on localism. Per its title, it is clearly an advocacy piece in favor of localism, but if anything its opening ("Does anyone pay regular attention to their City Council or County Board of Supervisors?") tends to support my point. It raises the question, to me at least, of whether this is inevitable. That even those people who are generally aware of (and potentially engaged with) national politics are often disengaged at the local level is really problematic for advocates of local government. But how would you go about promoting increased engagement? Would better online reporting and organizing make a difference? Do we need dedicated and effective bloggers in every community to bring these issues to life? And how would you promote/fund that? One could argue that people don't pay attention to it because there is a perception that local government doesn't have that much power and doesn't really matter. But I think Yglesias's arguments to that local government still has considerable impact on quality of life (through zoning and business regulations) are quite persuasive. Why is the public's perception so different? Certainly I don't have answers to these questions, and as such I am disinclined to offer much support to movements in favor of increased power for local government. I'd just like to see those who advocate that address these issues more squarely. I'm not convinced this is an intractable problem, and if concrete steps could be taken to address it, it would be to everyone's benefit. I think we just need some creative thinking on this topic.

Exploiting the National Security Fixation for Good

2010-08-28T22:11:00.002-04:00

Blogger Jeb Koogler, pivoting off a Foreign Policy article and a John Kerry speech here argues that efforts to direct aid to flooding victims in Pakistan is too focused on security issues:

Our aid policy in the wake of this crisis should largely be constructed and justified based on a notion of shared humanity -- not merely on a narrow assessment of American interests. That Pakistanis are suffering and desiring of international aid should be enough to warrant our attention, our dollars, and our support.

This is simple enough. Of course he's right. But Americans just don't care that much about foreign aid, particularly in a tough economy. However, there is no amount of funding that appears to raise any questions in support of national security. So anyone with half a clue who wants to support a foreign aid effort is wise to cast it in national security terms. And it's not as if this is dishonest. I tend to think that on a dollar-for-dollar cost efficiency basis, foreign aid will in many cases do more for national security than investing in the military and national security industrial complex. And if that angle works, why not exploit it?

"People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon."

2010-08-19T15:56:00.003-04:00

Here is a very though-provoking, and heart-wrenching, article in the New Yorker that I highly recommend. As with many New Yorker articles, it is lengthy but certainly worth the time. It tees up the very personal and philosophical issue of how we face death, but it also raises issues that get to the heart of the matter on health care policy.

(Don't) Be Evil

2010-08-15T13:34:00.004-04:00

To follow up my post from a week and a half back, it turns out the reports on the Google-Verizon deal were more or less accurate. Google and Verizon have thrown in together on a proposal for net neutrality legislation. Don't be fooled into thinking the result is a thoughtful compromise--it is a near total capitulation on the part of Google to Verizon's demands (see here for a good "that was then, this is now" comparison of Google's positions). The proposal has been hashed over quite a bit, and I don't want to repeat what has been said elsewhere (you can see here or here for decent commentary, here for a survey of coverage). At a high level, the critical issues are: a) it completely exempts wireless from any rules; b) it creates an incredibly broad exception for any sort of managed services (allowing the creation of tariffed fast lanes); c) the non-discrimination language is so vague that it's hard to tell whether Comcast's interference with BitTorrent (which the FCC previously ruled against) would even be covered; d) the FCC is prohibited from engaging in any prospective rulemaking; e) the FCC's enforcement power is capped at a $2m fine (a pittance for the big carriers); and, f) the FCC is required to grant considerable deference to industry organizations in interpreting the rules. It is, as I stated in my last post, a devastating defeat for net neutrality.

And the deal leaves the FCC in an awful situation. Already the FCC spent so long dithering on this topic that they allowed the carriers to wage a massive and surprisingly successful campaign to lobby Congress against net neutrality (see here for an example of just how much clout they have). It's not a big stretch to think that all of those congressmen will jump on board with the Google-Verizon plan. And given how well respected Google has been as a net neutrality champion, it would not be surprising to see a lot of other more net neutrality-friendly legislators hoodwinked into thinking this is a legitimate compromise that they can get behind. Come November the political situation will only get worse. If the FCC was too timid to act before, the chances of them taking bold action now is about nil. The only real hope is that Genachowski feels so backed into a corner that his only choice is to fight back hard (I'm not terribly optimistic on this).

While I noted before that Google has real conflicts of interest on the net neutrality question, on reflection it is still pretty stunning that they did this. Google is increasingly stepping into fraught policy questions, from net neutrality, to international trade and human rights, to antitrust, to copyright (also this), to privacy issues, and others. In all of these areas, Google has long benefited from its pro-technology, pro-openness, "Don't Be Evil" image. It's not that Google could do no wrong, so much as that techies would always give them the benefit of the doubt. That makes a big difference. But no longer. Google irrevocably shattered that image in a single blow (though the constant drip of all these other issues over the past several years surely didn't help). They will now be viewed as just another mercenary big company feeding its bottom line. The betrayal on net neutrality will cost them on many fronts, and unless there is some quid pro quo from Verizon that we don't yet know about, it doesn't seem like Google got much out of this deal. It's really difficult to fathom why they did what they just did.

Update (8/16): As if on cue to prove my point that things will only get worse, the Tea Partiers just launched a crusade against net neutrality.

Can't Win For Losing

2010-08-05T23:11:00.003-04:00

I hate to be all telecom all the time, but this is kind of big news. The FCC has dithered, vacillated, and backslid on net neutrality long enough that Google decided to take matters into their own hands and cut a deal with Verizon. Both parties now appear to be denying that anything happened. But it was extensively reported and it's hard to believe there is nothing to it. And the deal, if there was one, appears to have demolished the FCC's quixotic efforts to reach a solution on net neutrality that left everyone happy. It's not exactly clear what the deal was, but the basic outline of it seems to be that Verizon would have free rein to do whatever the hell they want with wireless service, would mostly be non-discriminatory with wireline service, but would have some sort of for-fee prioritization setup. In other words, it's a pretty devastating loss for the net neutrality supporters.

I think there is a lot of sentiment that we've been stabbed in the back by Google, but Google was never an ideal champion for this cause. They're in some sense the best we've got because they have money and prestige and that seems to be the only real currency in policy-making circles these days. They also have that nice motto about not doing evil. But they have pretty conflicted interests on this. Allowing the service providers to create fast lanes does allow them extort a cut of the revenue from online content and service providers like Google, and will almost certainly hurt Google's profit margins. But Google has a lot of revenue and a lot of money. And the other big impact of it would be to increase the barriers to entry for disruptive new entrants in the online service and content business. It would cost more to get started and increase the companies' cash burn rate, making it harder for businesses to start small and organically build their businesses as they refine their service offerings with the early adopters (which was the path followed by the likes of Napster, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention Google itself). Basically, having climbed to the top of the heap, Google can, by throwing in with the service providers, attempt to pull the ladder up behind themselves. Google will have significant leverage with service providers. New businesses won't.

So it's great that Google has been (and if its press release it to be believed, still is) a strong advocate for net neutrality, but it's worth noting that their interests don't align completely with the interests of other net neutrality advocates.

But I think the big story here is what a disaster the FCC approach to net neutrality has been. Harold Feld has a really phenomenal post on this, and I don't want to rehash everything he says. So go read it (and note that it was written before this Google mess). And I agree with basically all of that. And I agree with the commenter to that post who notes that this is symptomatic of the way the Obama Administration appears to work (which is more or less what I said back in this post). Virtually every worthwhile policy initiative has an entrenched interest that will oppose it, and the Administration is so cautious and conflict-averse they appear to be willing to let everything be derailed by endless deliberation. They just need to pick some fights, take action, let the incumbents howl, defend themselves to the public as best they can, and then let the chips fall where they may. What they're doing now is completely ineffective (if not counterproductive) and, as Feld notes, utterly demoralizing to anyone trying to serve the public interest. Hopefully this thing with Google, whatever the truth of it really is, will serve as the swift kick in the ass that the FCC needs.

Federalism/Localism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

2010-08-03T22:49:00.003-04:00

Matt Yglesias has a number of long-running themes on his blog. Two of them are fairly interrelated: Local government has far more impact on people's day-to-day lives (mostly through zoning and business and parking regulation) than most people recognize, and Americans tend to vote on far more issues, both in terms of direct ballot issues and electing people to office, than voters are willing to care about. Those themes collide in this post by Yglesias guest-blogger Jamelle Bouie. Bouie argues that state and local government officials are far more susceptible to corruption than elected federal officials. I disagree with his aside in the final sentence that Congress is less corrupt than we think it is (see the Lessig post from a few weeks ago on that), but generally, I think he has a good point.

There typically seem to be two motivating ideas behind pushing government authority towards state and local government: one size doesn't always fit all and vesting power locally will increase accountability. I think there's often a lot to be said for one size doesn't fit all. But I tend to agree with the Yglesias/Bouie position that localism does not increase accountability. It certainly increases the power of individual voters (you now represent 1 out of the 100,000 votes in your city instead of 1 out of 300,000,000 votes in the nation), but that increased influence has to compete with a huge gap in public attention. Not that many people truly pay to attention to national politics, but many people sort of pay attention to national politics, while almost no one pays any attention to local politics. And with the death of local newspapers (and the atrocious quality of local TV news), even if you wanted to invest in local politics, it's not easy to find good information. I think there are starting to be more blogs focused on the topic of local government (e.g., this excellent Arlington blog), but I'm not sure how widespread this sort of thing is.

So it would seem to make sense that power should typically be pushed towards the federal level unless it doesn't make sense from an administrative standpoint (e.g., zoning) or there is a compelling one-size-doesn't-fit-all justification for keeping it local. The counterpoint is to look at how absurdly dysfunctional the federal government is at present. But I see that as a separate and distinct problem in that, if we don't solve that problem we will all be seriously fucked regardless of how we distribute power across local, state, and federal government.

Yes Virginia, There Is A Político Loco

2010-08-03T09:37:00.007-04:00

Everyone is no doubt familiar with Arizona's Immigration Law (Arizona SB1070), portions of which were recently blocked from taking effect by a federal district court judge. Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Attorney General has decided that Virginia don't need no stinkin' law. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II recently released this official advisory opinion concluding that Virginia law enforcement officers (including conservation officers) may inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested," under current Virginia law. In his view,

it would be most surprising if state and local officers lacked the authority, where appropriate, to arrest individuals suspected of committing federal crimes such as bank robbery, kidnapping or terrorism. State and local officers are not required to stand idly by and allow such criminals to proceed with impunity. The same holds true with criminal violations of the immigration laws.

One slight problem with that analysis--unlawful presence in the United States is a civil, not criminal, offense. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1182(a)(6)(A)(i), 1227(a) (1)(B)-(C). (For additional support and a more detailed legal analysis, see this very helpful CRS Report from March 2009.) That distinction is critical to understanding the current legal battle involving SB1070. It has long been understood that state law enforcement officers may enforce federal criminal laws, but they may not enforce not federal civil laws unless there is an express delegation of authority.

There have been several efforts in Congress to criminalize unlawful presence (which are summarized in this CRS Report from 2006), but they have all failed. There has also been some effort to provide states with express authority to enforce civil violations of immigration law, but they too have been unsuccessful.

In the complaint the United States filed against SB1070, the government argued that Arizona's law effectively criminalizes the unlawful presence of aliens "despite an affirmative choice by Congress not to criminalize unlawful presence" (see paragraph 54). In its preliminary ruling blocking enforcement of aspects of that law, the district court agreed and held that SB1070 creates new criminal penalties that are in direct conflict with the pervasive scheme established by Congress. It therefore enjoined Arizona from enforcing certain provisions for now, until the court has had the opportunity to reach a final decision on the merits.

Virginia's AG Cuccinelli completely brushes aside the distinction between civil and criminal violations. Instead, in the opinion letter he attempts distinguish between the authority of a state law enforcement officer to arrest an individual who is unlawfully in the United States, and the authority to detain and interrogate someone who the officer reasonably suspects may have violated the law. That distinction is poppycock. The point is and has always been that civil enforcement of federal laws is left to the feds, unless the feds expressly authorize the states to get involved. Through this opinion letter, Cuccinelli usurps authority that clearly belongs to the federal government by effectively declaring that unlawful presence is criminally sanctionable in Virginia.

Word of the Day: Nutpicking

2010-08-02T10:40:00.003-04:00

I was reading through this piece about the discussion of race in traditional and online media on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com this morning (great blog, by the way) when I encountered the term "nutpicking." According to the link Silver provided, the term was coined "to describe the increasingly common practice on the right (and yes, on the left, too) of cherry-picking random comments or hate emails to smear your entire opposition as raving nuts." (I also like the description provided by one of the commenters: "I like to think of it as 'picking peanuts out of poo.'")

It looks like the credit goes to Kevin Drum for first identifying the practice in the wild and then promoting the name. Great term to describe an increasingly common phenomenon. I am certainly going to incorporate it into my vocabulary.

It's a Small World After All--Even on Facebook

2010-07-29T10:23:00.003-04:00

The Walt Disney Company announced Tuesday that it was paying $563 million to acquire "social gaming" company Playdom, the maker of Sorority Life and Mobsters--popular games on Facebook, MySpace, and mobile phones. Apparently social games are quite popular--according to this Business Week story, approximately 42 million people regularly play Playdom games each month. Another such game, Farmville, lists nearly 60 million active users on Facebook alone.

CNET notes that other major media companies are expected to jump on this social gaming bandwagon, too. Google has been considering whether to launch its own social networking site centered on such games. Dan Porter, CEO of an independent social gaming company called OMGPOP, is quoted in the story as stating: "Expect more deals as competing media companies like Viacom, Fox, IAC and others as well as large public game developers and Asian gaming giants roll through and answer back."

Hope and Public Financing

2010-07-26T11:09:00.002-04:00

I agree with Joe (see this post a few days ago) that Lessig's presentation is worth watching, and raises some fascinating issues. Lessig uses three areas of policymaking--broadband, cybersecurity, and copyright--to demonstrate how the legislative process is fundamentally broken. Lessig's fundamental point is that Congress is no longer run "for the people," but for special interests. Certainly not breaking news, but a point that cannot be highlighted enough.

But what to do about it? Joe notes that Lessig seems to be promoting a public campaign financing bill through the group Fix Congress First. I have not yet looked at the specific bill that they are proposing, but wanted to share my quick take on whether the concept of public financing is viable in light of the current Supreme Court composition. (I would love to provide a more detailed discussion down the road, if time ever permits.)

There have been two important Supreme Court rulings this term that bear upon this question. First, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court struck down previous limits on corporate independent expenditures. According to the Court, the concerns about corruption (or the appearance of corruption) are not sufficient to justify such a far-reaching ban on political speech. Furthermore, the Court held that First Amendment protections extend equally to corporations as to individuals. Importantly, the decision does not affect bans on direct contributions to candidates--although that may prove to be a distinction without a difference.

The second ruling, which has received much less attention, is an unsigned order the Court released late in the term involving Arizona's public financing program. The basic issue in that case is whether it is unconstitutional to provide additional matching funds to candidates who participate in the voluntary public financing system when opponents spend above a certain amount. The Ninth Circuit held that Arizona's system was constitutional, but the Supreme Court enjoined Arizona from providing any such matching funds until it has an opportunity to hear the case next term (note that the parties have not even asked the Court to hear the case yet, but the Court's order is a pretty clear indication that it will take the case.)

As I read the current jurisprudence, I don't think the Supreme Court is likely to declare public financing unconstitutional, but that approach would be completely ineffective without some restriction on private campaign financing or some other mechanism (such as Arizona's matching funds approach) to make the public financing scheme a meaningful option for those who choose to participate. In other words, public financing is a solution without any teeth if candidates can opt out of the program and do better through acceptance of individual and corporate funding--but the Supreme Court is likely to strike down any rules designed to encourage public financing over private campaign funding.

In my view, any solution has to be found in the masses. I agree with Joe that it seems like a very hard thing to do, but I am not sure there is any way around it. I like the way that Lessig frames the issue--we have to get at the root of the problem if we expect to make any significant policy changes in this country--but I think he does not dig deeply enough. I would trace the problems back to the poor understanding that most Americans have of the major policy debates going on in the country, which is due in part to the laziness of the people and also to the corporate media.

The Optimal Solution

2010-07-25T22:51:00.006-04:00

Here's another telecom post (I've got some non-telecom stuff lined up for the near future). As I noted in my post last Wednesday, while net neutrality is currently a necessity, it is a far from optimal solution. It is exceedingly difficult to scope and define. For one, it typically relies on a nebulous concept of "reasonable network management practices" which are considered to be acceptable forms of discrimination. Also, it is difficult to figure out how to make it address service providers segmenting their network connection to deliver managed services (primarily video and voice) over bandwidth kept separate from the Internet segment of the connection without becoming increasingly invasive and intrusive into service provider business practices.

Indeed, as I concluded that post, it would be far better to negate the need for net neutrality by forcing carriers to provider open access to the local loop to their competitors. This solution, however, has its own problems. The biggest one is a pricing problem. When you force open access, you also have to set rates. Set them too high, and you've accomplished nothing because the competitors will be unable to compete with the incumbent and no competition materializes. Set them too low and the incumbent gets choked for revenue and cannot profitably maintain its infrastructure. Accurate, objective pricing data will be difficult to come by, and both sides will have strong motives to skew the numbers in their favor. It will be a constant back-and-forth battle, rife with lobbying, and with regulators ultimately picking winners and losers (either intentionally or accidentally).

No, the optimal solution is this solution. One government-funded fiber network to rule them all. For a one-time investment of about $38b US dollars, Australia will provide an essentially permanent solution to the broadband needs of all of its citizens. The network will be open access, allowing multiple service providers to compete to provide Internet access. It eliminates the natural monopoly of the last mile by making it a publicly-owned utility asset. And by wiring every home with fiber, it eliminates the need to ever perform a major network upgrade again. From here on out it will just be a matter of maintaining existing plant, and occasionally upgrading the optics at each end of the pipe.

Obviously, this would cost a lot more in the US. Looking at just in terms of the population ratio you'd figure that it would cost something like $400-500 billion to do the same thing here. Given the current fiscal situation, that's pretty unlikely to happen. But any municipal or county government with access to some cash really should be doing this.

This Isn't What Social Democracy Looks Like

2010-07-24T22:20:00.001-04:00

Before I start generating new content, I am going to cheat one more time and post an email I wrote in January in response to this article by Jim Manzi proposing an alternative to what he perceived as a drive towards social democracy in the United States:

I have a couple key points of difference with Manzi. First, I think his conception of government intervention in markets is misguided and outdated. Second, I think his proposed solutions do little to address the social cohesion problems that he pretty aptly identified.

On the first point, Manzi's conception of government interference seems rooted in opposition to command and control regulation. To this extent his discussion of Reagan-era regulatory reform makes some sense. It was during this period that the government generally began to abandon command and control-styled regulation in favor of the market-oriented regulatory frameworks that prevail today. In some respects this means less regulation (which fits Manzi's conception), but often it just means different regulation. Consider telecommunications. For many decades the telecommunications market operated with relatively little regulation, governed essentially by a handshake agreement (and settlement of several antitrust cases) between the federal government and AT&T, whereby the government allowed AT&T to exploit a natural monopoly and ruthlessly crush its competition, and in exchange AT&T would provide near-universal service at geographically-equalized rates (subsidizing areas with high costs of service with profits from areas with low costs of service). This arrangement produced little regulation and an unproductive and stagnant, if stable, market. In natural monopoly markets like telecom, market-based regulation facilitates competition and drives innovation and productivity. Regulation of financial markets (including the sort recommended by Manzi) is typically intended to prevent fraud and improve the information available to investors, facilitating increased market competition. Carbon tax or cap and trade policies are designed to internalize external costs so that competition produces market-optimal production levels (including driving competition and innovation in clean tech). And so on.

Health care reform is a bit of an odd duck in that it merely codifies an existing broad social judgment that we as a society are morally and ethically unwilling to live with the consequences of a pure market for health care. You could say that this is a case of Manzi's tradeoff between market efficiency and social cohesion. But it's not as if health care reform is shifting society on that scale. That judgment was made a long time ago--we already treat anyone who walks into an emergency room in need of care. But we provide non-market-based care in a pointlessly inefficient manner. Moreover, various features of the current system inhibit worker mobility (most especially the combination of employer-based health insurance and pre-existing conditions), reducing the efficiency of the labor market. Ideally, smart regulation should be able to remedy these inefficiencies while carving out space for competition in the areas where it makes sense and does not directly contradict our general sense of social justice.

And Manzi's criticism of the Recovery Act and TARP fail to address the ultimate aims of those regulations--preventing complete economic meltdown. There is a broad (though certainly not universal) consensus among economists that these policies have worked, and that true disaster was averted. Sure, as Manzi points out, the Recovery Act (though not so much TARP) puts a big dent in the federal coffers, but the Great Depression cut federal tax revenues by 2/3s against the pre-depression levels--how would that have impacted the federal debt level (to say nothing of its human costs)? And while Manzi criticizes the takeovers of AIG and Citigroup and the government's intervention in the cases of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, there is again a considerable amount of consensus that the one event that pushed the financial system to the brink of utter collapse was the government's decision, in an effort to impose market discipline, to allow Lehman Bros. to go under. It's not as if the government had a lot of options in these cases. This is hardly, as Manzi would have it, the realization of some scheme to nationalize key market segments. The intervention in the auto industry is less defensible, but nonetheless represents essentially a judgment that the existing bankruptcy system does not provide an efficient mechanism to unwind a massive business concern without inflicting unnecessary collateral damage. I don't know if this is correct, but I am quite confident that the Obama administration has no real interest in running the auto industry. And I feel obligated to point out that Manzi's assertions about the Recovery Act are just plain wrong. He states that the Recovery Act is "dominated by outright social spending." In fact, the sort of social spending Manzi mentions (e.g., food stamps) is a) only about 10% of the cost of the Recovery Act, and b) one of the most effective means to actually stimulate the economy. By contrast, tax cuts represented about 35% of the Recovery Act (and sadly do a poor job of stimulating the economy).

In the end, there is no evidence of an actual shift towards a social democracy ... which is probably unfortunate, because, as Jonathan Chait points out in a response to Manzi, European-style social democracy seems to work really well. Manzi's whole foundational assumption that the U.S. economic system is superior to the European version has little evidentiary support. European social democracies are quite competitive.

Which gets to my second point: Manzi doesn't appear to have a solution to the problems he posits.

Manzi provides several suggestions to address the perceived threat of social democracy, but only two that could possibly address the issues Manzi identifies regarding social cohesion: increased school competition and immigration reform. His suggestions on both fronts seem sensible, but also modest, and not nearly up to the scale of the problems he identifies. Manzi's school proposals would, I think, be an incremental improvement, but I don't think they would nearly equalize the quality of education obtained by the high income and low income groups Manzi identifies. And I think just about everyone agrees that immigration reform would be a good idea, but I suspect that Manzi perceives immigration to be much bigger problem than I do. Together, these reforms would probably put a dent in the emerging levels of social inequality, but a small one. I appreciate that Manzi is thinking in productive directions about policy reforms aimed at social cohesion, something few of his contemporary conservative comrades are willing to do. However, if he rejects the sort of broad-reaching social safety net that European social democracies employ, particularly while resting on unfounded assumptions about the economic costs of this approach, I think it's incumbent on him to propose an alternative that can have a similarly broad-reaching impact on social cohesion. He doesn't come close.

Some Old News (Net Neutrality)

2010-07-21T00:00:00.003-04:00

In an effort to continue to add some new blog content, I'm going to cheat and recycle a blog-worthy (I hope) email I sent a few months ago in response to inquiries from a couple of folks about my opinion on a) this article by Tim B. Lee and b) the D.C. Circuit's opinion in Comcast v. FCC. My reply follows:

Tim B. Lee's (not to be confused with Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee) paper has a lot of good content. Where it falls apart is on its competition analysis. Lee's fundamental premise is that interfering with network openness decreases the value of the network, service providers have an interest in maximizing the value of the product they're selling, and, therefore, service providers will not want to interfere with the openness of the network. On p. 23, Lee says this will hold true even in the case of a monopoly. This analysis, I think, ignores a critical factor: the elasticity of the market. Lee's argument holds true only in an elastic market, where consumers will be highly responsive to changes in the value of the good. I would argue that broadband Internet access is a very inelastic market. If you look at usage statistics for people under the age of 65 (and even more dramatically for those under 50), virtually everyone uses the Internet. It plays an integral role in virtually every facet of people's lives--personal communication, social and family relationships, entertainment, education, work and employment-seeking, access to government services, etc. It is not something people will do without based on incremental changes in the value of the product. So if you are hypothesizing a monopoly market, consumers have very little leverage with which to discipline service providers. Service providers would have to do tremendous damage to the product value before they saw a significant change in consumer behavior. Consequently, service providers are free to consider ways in which to make the network more lucrative for themselves (charging content providers for access to exclusive fast lanes and the like), even if it moderately decreases the value of the product they are offering consumers.

To take that one step farther, if service providers can get away with decreasing the current value of the network, they have absolute freedom with respect to controlling the emergence of future services that might add value to consumers. They already have a captive market based on the present value of the offering, so they would have nothing to lose by steering future developments in ways that benefit their bottom line, even if in doing so they diminish the overall value of these developments to their consumers. This is the most concerning aspect. It would be bad to diminish the availability or value of existing Internet-based services, but it would be tragic to undermine the Internet as a source of creativity and innovation.

The crux of this dispute, at present, is video services. Based on the history of the Internet, I think we have to assume that there will continue to be unforeseen developments and emerging new services, and some of these will probably require very high bandwidth connections. But at present, the only applications that really require 30+ Mbps connections are video services (and even then this is mostly for high def, and, in the relatively near future, 3d video). Lee touches on the fact that cable and fiber-based service providers already have a walled-garden for video, but acts as if this stands separate from the net neutrality discussion. It doesn't. I have participated in discussions on net neutrality with the Assistant Secretary for NTIA (outside of the 5 FCC commissioners, probably the most influential government official on this matter), and these walled-off video services were very much a part of the discussion. And the service providers are hardly content to rest on the status of their present walled-gardens for video. Look at the pricing for FiOS or for the emerging DOCSIS 3.0 cable services. Low speed Internet connections (5-20 Mbps) are priced similarly to the prices from other Internet service providers, but the high speed connections (50+ Mbps), which could potentially threaten their video services, are always set at such a high price point that the Internet-only price exceeds the price of getting a lower-speed video connection bundled with video service. It's a pricing structure designed to protect the video services. Meanwhile, Time Warner and Comcast are openly attempting to lock down online distribution rights for cable TV content. They have stated that they will make online access to this content contingent on the user having a subscription to their video service. AT&T and Verizon have not publicly disclosed any parallel efforts, but I would be shocked if they were not working behind the scenes to lock down content of their own. And Comcast is now in the midst of a high profile effort to acquire NBC Universal, bringing in a huge library of content and programming to add their exclusive access system. Acquiring NBC will also give Comcast partial control over Hulu, which will be one of its primary online TV competitors.

All told, this is a broad and comprehensive effort to lock down a high-value, high-bandwidth data service. And the general unavailability of high speed connections combined with market uncertainty over licensing and content access issues has successfully prevented the development of any true innovative competitors in the IPTV space. Moreover, because one element of the service provider strategy is to price high speed connections out of the market, this has had the collateral effect of slowing or preventing the development of other potential high speed services and applications (this is why Google is now proposing to create a city-wide testbed for a 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home network). Letting Internet service providers into the online content and services market completely upends our expectations, per Lee, of how they should behave to improve the value of their Internet service product. Net neutrality advocates need not restrict themselves to worrying about hypothetical future harms, the real thing is happening right in front of our faces.

In discussing the potential threat of walled-gardens, Lee raises the example of AOL. AOL famously began as a walled-garden with exclusive content, then eventually, grudgingly, gave their users access to the Internet, and finally the exclusive content was dropped entirely. According to Lee, this illustrates that walled-gardens are not profitable. The key point that Lee omits is that AOL was not a monopoly (or even a duopoly). AOL's actions were driven by intense competition, mostly with mom-and-pop Internet service providers, at a time when all it took to be an ISP was to park a computer at the end of a copper phone line. The current service providers are generally monopolists or duopolists. The cost of entry to the market is prohibitively expensive (and economically inefficient). And the incumbents are so large that their collective actions can shape the development of content and services on the Internet in a way that AOL never could. The fact that walled-gardens failed in the 1990's tells us nothing about whether they could be economically viable for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and TWC today.

This brings us to the D.C. Circuit's decision last week. In 1996, Congress passed a Telecommunications Act that set up a regime for competitor access to the phone companies' last mile networks, allowing them to compete with the phone companies to provide phone and Internet service over their own infrastructure. At the time there were no commercial cable Internet service providers. As the cable companies became a larger and larger part of the broadband Internet service market, the disparity between phone companies (who were forced to share their plant with competitors) and cable companies (who weren't) became pronounced. Lawsuits by competitive Internet service providers attempting to gain access to the cable companies' plant forced the FCC to make a decision as to how to reestablish parity between the phone and cable companies. By this time (2002), Bush II was in office, and the default Republican position of helping the big guys prevailed. The FCC decided to designate Internet service as an "information service". The Communications Act gives the FCC a powerful tool box of regulatory controls over "telecommunications service" (generally referred to as Title II), but very little authority over "information services". The FCC had to shamefully torture the statutory definitions for telecommunications service and information service in order to make this determination, but that is neither here nor there. Several years later, after the case of a small phone company (Madison River Communications) blocking VoIP services that competed with its voice services, the Commission realized that they might want to regulate the behavior of Internet service providers in some cases. Having excluded Internet service from Title II, they didn't really have the statutory authority to do so, but decided to release a list 4 of non-binding network openness principles. A couple years after that, various members of the public were able to definitively prove that Comcast was interfering with BitTorrent traffic on its network, and they filed complaints with the FCC. After a long proceeding, in 2008, the Commission found the Comcast had violated the 4 principles, and required them to stop. Comcast challenged in the D.C. Circuit, asserting, among other things, that the FCC lacked statutory authority to enforce the 4 principles. They were right. Immediately following the FCC's Comcast decision, I did the first draft of a memo on the decision for a client. I predicted that Comcast would win the case in exactly the manner they did. So I can't say that I disagree with the D.C. Circuit's opinion.

At this point I think there is little question that the FCC will continue to enforce net neutrality principles. It was really the only big ticket item in Barack Obama's 2008 platform that related the FCC. Obama has reiterated his commitment to net neutrality on multiple occasions since taking office. It has to be at the top of the Democratic FCC commissioners' priority lists. So, to me, the question is not if, but how. Already there is a lot of talk on Capitol Hill about creating new legislation to give the FCC authority to enforce net neutrality. However, given the state of the senate, and the other major legislative efforts under way, it seems unlikely that anything like this could become law for a year or two, if at all. One quick way for the FCC to fix the problem by themselves would be to reclassify Internet service as a Title II telecommunications service. Two of the Democratic commissioners (Copps and Clyburn) appear to be inclined to doing this. The chairman, however, has indicated reluctance to do so. Reclassification would not only allow the Commission to enforce net neutrality, but would expose service providers (now including cable providers) to a whole suite of requirements under Title II. This would be a major change in regulatory approach, and the service providers will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next year or two to lobby against it. And even once the Commission acts, the service providers will then tie it up in lawsuits for years (as they did to the 1996 Act, from the time it was passed until the Bush-led Commission threw in the towel). It wouldn't be a pretty picture. But I nonetheless think it would be the right thing to do.

Moving Internet services back into Title II would allow the Commission to enforce net neutrality, but more importantly it would give them the tools to force the service providers to open their network to competitors. If done well, that could negate the need for net neutrality. Net neutrality is a regulatory framework designed for non-competitive markets. In a competitive market, consumers can respond to changes in the value of goods being offered, and Lee's thesis above would actually apply. Service providers that cripple their networks in the interest of building walled-gardens will see their subscribers go elsewhere, and the market will provide sufficient discipline to ensure good behavior. The only net neutrality regulation that would be required would be a network management disclosure requirement to ensure that consumers were making informed decisions. I think net neutrality is necessary given the current state of the market, but it is not an optimal solution. Competition would be far preferable. And, of course, for the service providers, competition is a far scarier prospect that net neutrality. Consequently, what we are likely to see is Chairman Genachowski publicly wavering on whether to join with his fellow Democratic commissions in favor of classifying Internet service as a Title II service until the service providers cry uncle and agree to some sort of non-Title II regulatory framework in which the FCC will be able to enforce net neutrality. Again, not my preferred solution, but it's what I view as the most politically feasible approach for Genachowski, and it has a distinctly Obama-esque feel to it.

Hope and Change and Broadband

2010-07-20T10:44:00.003-04:00

I am looking forward to viewing the presentation that Joe linked to in the previous post, and I am thrilled that the BWJ revival post involves the perennial favorite issue campaign financing. I hope to comment more on the state of Supreme Court jurisprudence in the coming days.

For now, however, I wanted to draw attention to a recent report from Nokia Siemens Networks entitled the Connectivity Scorecard (h/t Talking Points Memo). There is no question that America lags many other developed countries on infrastructure, as reflected in key measures such as broadband speed and penetration. But the report argues that the notion of connectivity should be expanded beyond basic infrastructure to encompass how the network is used (such as time spent online, take-rate of internet-based services, and usage of websites by businesses). And under this broader understanding of connectivity, the Connectivity Scorecard puts United States second behind only Sweden. (The U.S. was #1 in the previous two years that the report had been published. Fucking Swedes had to rain on our parade.)

I recognize there is a lot of subjectivity built into a report such as this. And it does not diminish the importance of continued investment in broadband infrastructure--nearly 20 million Americans live in areas that are not served by a single broadband provider, and only 35 percent of homes with annual incomes less than $50,000 subscribe to broadband. But perhaps we don't suck that bad. I bet Americans have more Facebook friends than other comparable countries. And probably more trolls per capita too. Seriously, though, my point is that Americans as a whole are pretty Internet-savvy, and that should count for something.

I'll Have Another Hit of Hope and Change, Please

2010-07-19T22:42:00.004-04:00

So it's been, hoo boy, over a year since I posted anything here. I'm once again going to try to get in the habit, and I figure I should start out with something strong. So here's an amazing presentation by Larry Lessig that provides a useful primer on the topics of broadband policy, cybersecurity, and copyright, then bends all three of these topics into a larger point about America's political process. It is very much worth the time to watch.

It's almost an hour long, but I think it stops 20 minutes too soon. He never answers the question of, well, what do we do now? I see that he's promoting a website for Fix Congress First. They appear to have a well-thought-out public campaign financing bill. But is that really the answer? Is there any real possibility this can get passed? (My guess: no.) Could it stand up to Supreme Court review? (Probably not, unless one or more of the conservative justices keels over while the Democrats still hold the White House.) If it did become law, would it solve the problem? That's hard to say, but at least it would be a huge improvement.

In any case, this seems like a hard thing to do as an insurgency. Lessig hits the crux of the problem when he notes that people commonly react that of course the powerful business interests run everything--it's always been like that! Certainly there has always been a certain amount of influence-trading in Washington D.C., but I have a hard time believing that it has always been like this. Nonetheless, I think the tendency among the public to believe that this is the way it always has been and always will be, until the end of time, amen, may present an insurmountable barrier for the popular uprising approach to political reform.

What I'm trying to say, in a long-winded way, is that my one source of crushing disappointment with the Obama administration has been its complete unwillingness to confront any powerful business interest. There were many things I admired about candidate Obama, but highest among them was his apparent dedication to changing Washington and improving the political process. I had hoped it would be the administration, rather than Lessig and his merry band of outlaws, spearheading the movement for political reform. I had hoped that he would confront entrenched interests and use his platform to show how badly they had served the public in the past and how directly their current interests conflicted with the public interest. None of this has happened.

Obama prevented a depression, passed landmark health care legislation and financial reform, and has done a lot of other good things. But he has done nothing in the realm of political process reform. Lessig is right that the FCC totally rolled over on the broadband plan. And Greenwald is right the administration only made it past the entrenched interests on health care reform by buying them out. And something not so different just played out on the banking regulations. It is honestly shocking to me how fearful this administration has been of entrenched business interests. Given the populist mood in the country, I should think the White House would relish a good fight with an unpopular industry (like the banks, or the health insurance companies, or Comcast). That, frankly, is the sort of press they need. But instead, when they get even a whiff of a fight like that coming, they turn tail and head for cover.

I don't know what to conclude. The Obama administration having been a letdown on this, I don't see any viable path towards political process reform in the near future. Between that and the new requirement for a super-majority to pass anything in the Senate (fodder for another blog post), the federal government has truly reached a new level of dysfunction. Despite Obama's legislative successes of the past couple years, I am deeply dismayed about the prospects of the federal government competently addressing any of the major challenges that will come its way over the next 10+ years. We are in a bad way to be sure.

Killing Grandma

2009-08-17T09:29:00.002-04:00

I definitely want to continue this discussion and plan to share a few more thoughts soon, but in the meantime I have to pass on this very interesting article from the Washington Post addressing the public fury expressed at some of the town hall meetings over the last few weeks. The title says it all: "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition."

Thoughts on Health Care Reform

2009-08-08T17:46:00.003-04:00

Let me first say that Veritas made an excellent commentary that addresses some very fundamental issues of health care reform and the ongoing debate. I agree that the current discussion is not being helped by fear mongering such as "socialized medicine" or "government-run health care" or "no one wants a bureaucrat between them and their doctor" (and the last would be different how from HMOs?). As Veritas points out, health care like so many other resources, is a limited resource and by definition is rationed in one form or another.

So how to do it? I heard an excellent segment recently on Fresh Air by Maggie Mahar. It's only 20 min long and well worth a listen. She highlights some of the reasons for skyrocketing costs of health care and offers some interesting solutions to at least part of the problem. A few of her points:

1) Like Veritas pointed out, going away from a fee-for-service approach vs. a lump sum payment might be one way to shift the focus to spending what is necessary and important for patient care rather than trying to make money. One perverse thought - might doctors/hospitals actually cut out certain tests or treatments in the interest of making more profit? Presumably this would be held in check by conscience as well as potential for lawsuits, but I wonder.
2) Making all insurance companies nonprofit. Another potential way to focus services on efficient, outcome based patient care rather than profit.
3) Increasing payments for primary care providers and reducing them for specialists. I certainly do see the inequity in salaries and reimbursements for procedures vs. primary care services. This may be one way to increase our supply and effectiveness of primary care providers.

I also wonder what happened to the discussion of malpractice lawsuit reform? I really like the idea of having a panel mediate such disputes and think this would go a long way towards bringing health care providers on board, even if it is a relatively small part of the cost of health care.

Speaking of the numbers, Henry Aaron has a very nice commentary in the New England Journal discussing the projected costs of the current health care bill as well as options to pay for it. This is well worth a read, and at some point Americans need to be better informed as to how we might pay for all this if we are going to do it. Adding to the deficit is really not an option at this point in my opinion. One option that has been put forth is making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid which Aaron shows to be one of the biggest areas of savings, though it remains unclear to me what these cuts would entail or mean.

On a more general note, I wonder if some (or much) of our increasing health care costs are due to lifestyle factors of Americans. Rates of obesity have skyrocketed along with its consequences of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Perhaps we should really be targeting our funds towards prevention such as weight loss counseling and treatment and exercise programs. Reducing this burden would have tremendous effects on the long term health of Americans and I predict would go a long way towards lowering costs in the long run.

I really look forward to more discussion on this and feel like I have so much more to learn. It's a complicated issue but a very important one. And as Veritas points out, what we are doing now is simply not sustainable.

"Rationing" Is Not "Socialism" But Is Essential for Cost Control

2009-07-30T15:58:00.053-04:00

I hope to provoke a good discussion on the health care debate by sharing a few thoughts. Rather than focusing on specific provisions that may be in the legislation (particularly because Congress itself hasn't figured them out yet), I want to explore some more fundamental questions. In what I hope will be merely the first installment on this topic, this entry argues that rationing is an essential mechanism for controlling the cost of health care. Without effective rationing, health care costs would likely be far higher than they are now and will almost certainly overwhelm us within a few decades.

Opponents of reform efforts have argued that President Obama "will ration your health care," as though rationing is part of the scary socialist nightmare that some see lurking around the corner. Much more recently, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa (whom some consider to be critical to any bipartisan deal) stated in an interview with NPR that we need to slow down the process because "we want to make sure that seniors don't get health care rationed." That is classic fear-mongering. The undeniable fact is that we have always had rationing of health care--we should be asking how to implement it in a fair and cost-effective way.

Peter Singer, a bioethics professor, recently wrote that "[h]ealth care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another." Traditionally, medical care was performed on a "fee-for-service" basis, and providers were rewarded for extending every feasible treatment under the circumstances, with little regard to cost--so long as the patient could pay. Even under a fee-for-service model, medical services are rationed: You get the level of care that you can afford. As Economics Professor Uwe Reinhard noted, "free markets are not an alternative to rationing. They are just one particular form of rationing." (In this article, John Butler discusses other forms of rationing besides price, including rationing by denial, rationing by delay, and rationing by dilution.)

Beginning in the late 1960s, the "managed-care revolution" injected a gatekeeper in between the doctor and the patient with the aim of keeping costs in check. All managed-care plans ration health care services through one mechanism or another. For example, many HMOs generally rely on "utilization management" (or "utilization review") to determine what treatments or services are covered under a patient's plan, using "medical necessity" as the touchstone. Whatever the method, managed-care organizations have to come up with some way to restrict health care services in order to bring down costs--otherwise, they are not "managing care" at all. As Justice Souter observed in Pegram v. Herdrich (a 2000 Supreme Court decision addressing the ability of a patient to sue her insurance company for allegedly breaching its fiduciary duty), "no HMO organization could survive without some incentive connecting physician reward with treatment rationing."

Even assuming that managed-care organizations have a beneficial role to play, it is obvious that they have not done enough. Health care spending in America is out of control. In a 2007 report, the Congressional Budge Office (CBO) found that per capita spending on health care has grown much faster than per capita GDP over the last four decades. In 1965, total health care spending was less than 6 percent of GDP. By 2007, it rose to 16 percent. Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (and formerly the Director of the CBO) testified that we spend nearly twice the amount spent per capita than France, Canada, and Germany--and nearly two-and-a-half times the amount spent in the U.K., Italy, and Japan.

And it is only going to get worse (and fast), unless we make some serious changes. The CBO projects that, absent dramatic legal reforms, we will spend 25 percent of GDP on health care costs by 2025 and 49 percent of GDP by 2082. For the visual learners among us, here is a graph reflecting the projecting spending on health care as a percentage of GDP:

In a 2008 report, the CBO found (and most analysts agree) that "the bulk of the long-term rise resulted from the health care system’s use of new medical services that were made possible by technological advances, or what some analysts term the 'increased capabilities of medicine.'" Other factors (such as aging of the population, the rising prevalence of obesity, administrative costs, and the practice of "defensive medicine") taken together "appear to explain less than half of long-term spending growth."

David Brown of the Washington Post recently wrote an article examining the changes in treatment for coronary heart disease. He observed that the chance of dying from a heart attack has dropped from 30-40 percent in the 1960s to about 6 percent today. But the price for that improvement has been hefty. Over that same period, "the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation)." Furthermore, according to that article only about half of the improvements in outcome can be attributed to increased spending on medical care; the other half "is the result of a more favorable 'risk profile' for Americans--less smoking, lower cholesterol, better blood pressure."

Rationing care (on some other basis besides price) is the only feasible way to control costs. It is also necessary in order for President Obama to accomplish his other stated objectives for health care reform--including "assuring affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans." As Dr. Arthur Kellermann observed in a recent interview with NPR, "in contrast to other wealthy countries, we don't ration medical care on the basis of need or anticipated benefit. In this country, we mainly ration on the ability to pay. And that is especially evident when you examine the plight of the uninsured in the United States."

I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Singer that "[t]he debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?" There are no easy answers, but we will certainly never escape the crushing burden of health care costs unless we begin to discuss the tough questions, like:

(1) What is the minimal level of care to which all individuals should be entitled?
(2) Assuming that "medical necessity" is not an effective standard in containing health care costs, what standard should we use?
(3) Should we consider how much longer a patient is likely to live, even if the treatment is successful?
(4) Who should decide in particular circumstances whether a specific course of treatment should be allowed?

Hopefully we can have a great exchange of ideas on these and other questions here. I encourage everyone who reads this to participate, either by posting entries, making comments, or sending emails. Together, we can save the world before bedtime!

The Outrage Game

2009-03-25T13:06:00.006-04:00

As a follow-up to last week's post, Joe Klein has a fine column on the AIG bonus outrage:

There is a real crisis out there. It has existed for a while. It has been spreading slowly as factory after factory has shut down, as the gap between rich and poor ballooned, as the rich found ways to get richer betting on exotic financial instruments with all the economic substance of a roulette wheel, as the middle class found it harder to pay for college, for health care, for gasoline.

But most of the anger we see and hear comes from people who are paid to be angry, on cue, on cable television--as opposed to people with actual grievances. Suddenly, the White House press corps goes barking mad over the AIG Bonuses. It is said that the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that the "public" can understand; in truth, the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that reporters can understand. Suddenly, the Obama Administration has a "crisis." The President has to go on television and act as if he's angry, even though he knows these bonuses are the tiniest outcropping of outrageousness.

A bunch of people on Wall Street engaged in high-stakes gambling with a lot of other people's money and the reputations and stability of financial institutions that had endured for many decades. They amassed personal fortunes that the rest of us could scarcely imagine while burning down their firms and taking the entire global economy down with them. That's outrageous. That is un-fucking-believably outrageous. That a CEO at AIG who had been installed by the federal government to clean up the mess (along with some folks in the Treasury Department) decided it wasn't worth fighting in court over $150m in bonuses that the company was contractually obligated to pay--that's not outrageous.

Financial Regulation

2009-03-23T13:37:00.002-04:00

I'm somewhat perplexed by this blog post by Richard Posner on financial regulations. Posner argues that there should be no new financial regulations until the current recession has bottomed out. There is a basic intuitive support for this argument in that additional regulations could limit risk-taking and drive up the cost of lending at a time when the federal government is desperately trying to encourage new lending. But Posner's position is focused primarily on uncertainty in the marketplace. He writes:

Any regulatory initiatives at this time will simply increase the already great uncertainty in which the financial industry is operating; and as Keynes pointed out, anything that increases uncertainty in a depression causes hoarding, which can in turn precipitate a deflation likely to deepen and protract an economic downturn.

His point is well taken, but I think he gets the matter of uncertainty backwards. The uncertainty Posner appears to be worried about is already priced into the market. The one thing that investors are not uncertain about at this point is that there will be new financial regulations. I don't think anyone doubts that at this point. The uncertainty is about what those regulations will be. The sooner the government can spell that out, the sooner this uncertainty will be diminished. The additional benefit is that the financial crisis has severely undermined public confidence in the banking system, and if the new regulations are well-crafted (or at least are broadly perceived to be), they can begin to restore some confidence. And in any case, when it comes to the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders, all of these concerns may be secondary to the fact that there is huge public support for financial regulations at present, leading to a desire to strike while the iron is hot.

You Are Outraged Because We Say You Are

2009-03-20T10:25:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Al Giordano for writing this column so that I don't have to.

Whenever executive salary and bonus caps have been discussed in the context of the various bailouts and rescue packages, I have supported any draconian measure that legislators have been willing to contemplate. I think it would be difficult to overstate the moral and ethical culpability of these executives and traders in this financial disaster. And if that means they quit their jobs, big deal. There are plenty of unemployed financial workers who would be happy to have them.

But this drama over the AIG bonuses leaves me cold. I just can't bring myself to give a shit about it. Given the context we talking about here, it is small potatoes and completely unsurprising. The mad rush of media personalities and politicians to trump one anothers' expressions of outrage, on the other hand, inspires a fairly visceral reaction in me (nausea). There are few things more pathetic than the panic of a politician who suspects that he or she may be missing a populist moment, and their willingness to dive head first off a cliff in hopes of landing on the bandwagon. And I can't help but suspect that if there were real populist outrage over this it would have taken longer to build and longer for the press to pick up on it. When the media goes into full-on shrieking populist outrage mode the moment it hears about the story, it rather seems like it's the media that's outraged more than the populace.

Further Developments in the War on IPTV

2009-03-10T16:20:00.007-04:00

A few weeks ago I noted that the networks shut down Boxee's efforts to deliver their content to viewers' TVs via Hulu's streaming web service. I speculated there as to why the networks would not want to play ball with Boxee. There is no question, on the other hand, why the cable companies are frightened of pure IPTV services, and it should come as no surprise that they are actively looking for ways to wall off content from them. Comcast and Time Warner are attempting to lock up cable TV content for online distribution (more details here). This content will be transmitted over the Internet in the same manner that a pure IPTV service would transmit it. The catch is that it will only be available to people who also subscribe to the cable companies' TV service.

Many cable TV programmers are likely to jump at this opportunity, as they've never been able to survive on a purely ad-supported basis and rely on cable carriage fees for about half their revenue. And, of course, even on that basis many cable channels could not survive if they were not tied together in cable tiers with other more popular channels (this is what much of the fight over a la carte cable revolves around). In fact, ESPN got out ahead of this game by trying (with considerable success) to strong arm ISPs into paying for its exclusive online content in a system analogous to a cable carriage agreement. What's next, regulatory battles over a la carte Internet? Oh, Kevin Martin, where have you gone?

On the other hand, for any really successful cable channels, my guess is they could do better by going it alone. This move will necessarily limit their online audience (as big as Comcast and Time Warner are, there are a lot of folks on the Internet who are not Comcast/Time Warner subscribers [though Harold Feld suggests that all MVPDs will be in on this game--anticompetitive conspiracy anyone?]). Moreover, they will be stuck in the position of subsidizing the crappy cable channels just as they have been through cable tiering all along. And if the good channels all flee, this may end up to be a pointless endeavor for the cable companies.

Obviously this move creates one more hurdle for IPTV providers to jump before going head-to-head with cable and telco video services. But it also creates potential net neutrality questions. This article suggests that Comcast will not treat this content any differently from other traffic for the purposes for traffic management or bandwidth caps. But if they or any other ISP were to in any respect preference this traffic, I'm calling it right now: instant FCC smack-down. This is exactly the sort of thing that net neutrality is intended to prevent.

In fact, I think the existence of monthly bandwidth caps at all will soon become highly suspect in the FCC's view. The Comcast Order hinted that monthly caps might be an acceptable network management technique. But anyone who routinely uses an Internet connection to view high def video will chew through these caps (I've seen estimates that HD video requires 4-12GB/hr (depending largely on the type of content), meaning a 250 Gb cap will last between 20-60 hours spread across all PCs and TVs in the household). In essence, monthly caps can be utilized to preference a non-IP-based video service over IP-based competitors.

ps. As you might note from my links here and in the previous post, I've been enjoying Silicon Valley Insider's Dan Frommer on this topic. He seems to be the go-to guy for this stuff.

Where Copyright Enforcement Collides With Network Management

2009-02-25T22:41:00.004-05:00

ArsTechnica brings us this story about the fascinating next step in the arms race between online filesharing and the content industries. A new P2P client, developed by the University of Washington, integrates BitTorrent into a social-networking-type framework that renders it impractical for any user to determine the ultimate origin of files he downloads.

The way this apparently works is that a user installs the client and links to his buddies (who have likewise linked to their buddies). When he runs a search it will poll the buddies to see if anyone has the desired file. If not, it will search the buddies' buddies, expanding outward until it finds the file. The file is then routed back to the original user through each intermediate buddy and, significantly, the source of the file is anonymized at each step so that each client is aware only of its immediate neighbors. Consequently an MPAA executive searching the network for infringing files would have no idea which users to sue. They would not have IP addresses or any other identifying information for anyone beyond their immediate circle of friends (supposing, for the sake of argument, that MPAA executives have friends).

It's a great system for people who want to avoid being sued for copyright infringement. The flip side, however, is that routing files through a bunch of intermediate steps rather than directly from the ultimate source to the downloader is hugely inefficient. You burn a lot of network resources to achieve anonymity. This is where the interests of the content industries knock heads with the interests of the ISPs. The ISPs have long had a love-hate relationship with filesharing as it is a network management challenge, but also a great value proposition for their customers. This is less true now, but in the early days filesharing was one of the primary drivers for consumer adoption of broadband. Not only would ISPs be better off with the straight BitTorrent model, but BitTorrent could be optimized to prefer nearby nodes, thereby increasing its efficiency and lowering the burden of filesharing on ISPs. This can be done to some extent by software alone, but could be further enhanced through the cooperation between the software developers and the ISPs. Moreover, the FCC's decision in the Comcast case makes clear that the ISPs are on dangerous ground when they attempt to interfere with filesharing software. Optimization of filesharing software, rather than an escalating battle, seems the sounder option for them.

How this conflict gets resolved is unclear. In the near term there is little that the ISPs can do about it. But at least they may start to become involved in the policy battles over copyrights and filesharing, and one could hope that the significant collateral damage inflicted by this fight, combined with its general futility, could lead to more intelligent policy. It is interesting to note that the adverse parties in this conflict (the big ISPs and major content providers) are the same parties that appear to be aligned on the same side of the Hulu-Boxee story I posted earlier. I don't see any interplay between the two issues at this point, but it's something to watch for.

As an aside, the article quotes the creators of the software as stating that its intent is, in part, to create a platform free from the prying eyes of an oppressive government. This is likely BS. While this software would make it considerably more difficult to track a file to its source, it is not impossible. With access to the PCs of the intermediate users (or, more likely, the logs of their ISPs) it is still possible to track a file back to its original source. While this is impractical in the context of a copyright claim, it is not something I would want to stake my life or liberty on where an oppressive regime is concerned.

ps. Public service announcement: This is unbelievably awesome.

How the Surge Became One of the Biggest Swindles in the History of American Foreign Policy

2009-02-24T21:12:00.007-05:00

In February 2006 Al Qaeda bombed the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq. The attack was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's crowning achievement, setting off the bloodiest and most grisly phase of the civil war in Iraq. The escalation of the war and the brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out by all sides helped to turn American public opinion decisively against the war and played no small role in the wins of the Democratic party in the November 2006 mid-term elections. While many inside and outside of Washington were finally ready to start looking for an exit, the Bush administration, its legacy already inescapably tied to the war in Iraq, decided to double down. President Bush announced the troop surge on January 10, 2007, and the additional troops began entering Iraq before the end of that month.

Midway through 2007 the levels of violence began to tail off, and by the end of the year attacks and casualties had fallen to their 2004-05 levels. In September 2007 General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reported to Congress that while virtually none of the political objectives of the surge had been met, the military objectives of the surge were being met. Over the course of 2008, it became conventional wisdom among political talking heads of all stripes that, notwithstanding the failure to achieve the political objectives, the surge had succeeded. John McCain prevailed in the 2008 Republican primaries largely on the basis of having been a champion for the surge. Mainstream newspapers called out Democratic candidate Barack Obama for failing to admit that he had been wrong about the surge. And Obama, for his part, seemed content to support this conventional wisdom on the basis that if the surge had worked, then it must be time to bring the troops home. This conventional wisdom has been augmented by the fact that the decline in casualties and violence has generally taken Iraq off the front pages. For the past year the conflict has been largely out of sight and out of mind, which itself serves as evidence of the apparent success of the surge and also diminishes public discussion that might lead to challenges of the conventional wisdom.

Lately, however, something odd has started to happen. Thoughtful and serious people, with whom I often agree, are employing the apparent success of the surge as justification for a much longer term commitment to keeping troops in Iraq (e.g. Thomas Ricks and Andrew Sullivan). Let me put aside for the moment the fact that I don't believe that the surge was the primary cause for the decrease in violence in Iraq (in fact, it probably wasn't even the secondary cause). Even if we assume that the surge was solely responsible for the decline in violence, the fact that we are today not one iota closer to solving the basic structural political challenges of Iraq than we were three years ago should reveal the surge to all as the utter failure that it is. In truth it stands as a testament to the hollowness and stupidity of the entire endeavor in Iraq from day 1. The question of how to resolve the ethnic/sectarian divisions of Iraq was at the top of every critic's list of objections before the war started in 2003. Here we sit in 2009 and still no one has the first fucking clue how to resolve this problem. And yet Ricks and Sullivan would have us keep tens or hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq for at least another 5 years in hopes that someone can pull a rabbit out of a hat and make everything better. I hate to be the one to break it to these fellas, it ain't gonna happen.

When I go back and look at what I wrote about Iraq two or three years ago, I see little that has occurred to change my evaluation. It's true that the decline in violence has bought us some time (although the levels of violence have been ticking up again, possibly in reaction to last month's elections). But time for what? There still appears to be little prospect for political reconciliation, meaning that whatever fallout will result from an American withdrawal will happen whether we withdraw this year or in 2015. And our presence in Iraq continues to cost us the lives of our servicemen and an immense amount of money, strain our military capacity and limit our effectiveness in Afghanistan, and hinder our efforts to repair relations with Arab and Muslim nations. The opportunity costs of remaining in Iraq are substantial, and the benefits of staying appear to be minimal. It's time to bring this misadventure to a close.

I remain of the opinion that we should be prepared to intervene again if things spiral too badly out of control, but I do not believe that we will see a serious effort towards political reconciliation until we force the issue by drawing down our forces. We have no better options than to try it and see what happens. The surge has not altered that equation. It has only delayed us, at significant cost, from asking the hard questions and making the hard decisions for the past two years. Now is the time to do what needs to be done.

Photo credit Zoriah

Understanding an Economic Apocalypse

2009-02-21T14:46:00.003-05:00

This is tremendously useful:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Darwin Posters

2009-02-21T14:42:00.002-05:00

I love this:

Source.

The New Battleground for IPTV

2009-02-21T11:42:00.009-05:00

The battle over net neutrality has always been, first and foremost, a battle about who gets to provide video services over the Internet. As such, I think that what just happened between Hulu and Boxee could have significant implications for the future of telecommunications in the US.

Spurred on by the massive success of YouTube, online video has made huge strides in recent years. We're now seeing multiple competing sources for online movies and TV. One of the last remaining hurdles for these providers to overcome is to make the move from consumers' computer monitors to their televisions. One potential route for this to happen is through gaming consoles. Another route is through dedicated hardware, basically a set-top box that connects to the Internet and serves videos. Boxee makes one such device. The key to commercial success for any such device is access to content, and Boxee had until recently been planning to get content from, among other sources, streaming video provider Hulu. Hulu carries content from numerous TV networks, including Fox, NBC, Comedy Central, PBS, and Sci Fi. One could imagine Boxee, with support for Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and various other sources posing a legitimate threat to traditional cable and fiber video services (e.g. Comcast or FiOS).

The emergence of such a free-standing IPTV service would be an important development that could break the video content market wide open and end the stranglehold that the big cable companies and telcos currently have over it. So it is disturbing to see that the powers that control Hulu (Fox and NBC) nixed Hulu's deal with Boxee. I assume that the scenario played out more or less as Marc Hedlund describes in the article. But it's not entirely clear what the motivation of the content providers is here. I think Hedlund is probably right that the advertising contracts probably work differently for online viewing that for traditional TV viewing, and the the networks have some profit incentive to protect their TV advertising. But this should be a temporary limitation--as new contracts are entered or old contracts are renewed there is no reason why fee structures shouldn't be adjusted to reflect the new reality that Internet video may be viewed on TVs as well as computer monitors. And to that extent, one might think that the networks would have some interest in seeing Boxee get off the ground and build some viewership so that the networks would be able to turn around and sell access to those viewers to potential advertisers. Instead they seem inclined to strangle Boxee in the cradle.

It's possible this is just a negotiating tactic and the networks want to squeeze a few dollars out of Boxee before they acquiesce in the Boxee-Hulu deal. But it's also possible that there are greater philosophical differences at work. It could be that the networks are cozy with cable operators and the telcos (or are frightened of them) and don't want to rock the boat. Or that the networks are concerned about their future in a world of IPTV. There's really no such thing as a "channel" on IPTV. And what, exactly, is a television network with no channels? Ultimately I do think there would be an important role for the networks in an IPTV environment, something more akin to what movie studios do: picking potential projects, then financing, producing, and marketing them. But it would be a big change, and if we've learned anything from the struggles of old content industries on the Internet so far it's that big incumbents are extremely resistant to embracing change. Additionally, even though the networks will still be important in an IPTV universe, they will certainly be subject to new competition. It would be far cheaper and easier for independently produced content to gain an audience via IPTV than it is in the traditional video market.

In any case, if the networks are inclined to fight IPTV, they are in position to set back its progress considerably. Without major network support, IPTV is likely doomed to being a supplementary service to traditional video rather than a direct competitor with it. This would be a bad result for consumers and a bad result for both the telecom market and the video content market, but sadly I'm not sure that it is irrational from the standpoint of the networks. I'm also not sure, at this point, that there is much that can be done from a regulatory standpoint to push the networks towards IPTV, but we should be on the lookout for opportunities to do so.

Brad DeLong Takes a Stand

2009-02-21T11:33:00.003-05:00

Brad DeLong, econ professor at Berkley (and respected blogger) has written a letter to the school's administration requesting that it terminate the employment of law professor John Yoo. I thank him for it, and hope others will join him. I've found it quite disturbing for several years now that Yoo has been treated as a respectable and important member of the legal academia. The man should count himself lucky that he is not in prison for war crimes and have the good sense to otherwise remain out of sight. DeLong's letter is well worth reading. The actions Yoo took for the Bush administration were blatantly unethical, and a lot of people suffered and died behind the bogus legal cover he provided the administration. He is an embarrassment to the school and the profession. And that's to say nothing of Jay Bybee sitting on the 9th Circuit.

Being a Bully Isn't the Best Bet

2009-02-21T11:16:00.003-05:00

First, I should note that I have been greatly enjoying Foreign Policy mag's expanded blogger lineup (Tom Ricks, Dan Drezner, Stephen Walt, and Marc Lynch). It's quite an impressive group of analysts, and part of my regular reading routine these days. Walt recently pointed out a great paper on international relations by Todd Sechser. Walt summarizes it as follows:

[G]reat powers often fail to get their way when they issue coercive threats (which is surprising at first glance), and that this problem may in fact get worse the more powerful they are. The basic logic here concerns reputation: weak states will worry about giving in to a great power’s demands (even when the demands are fairly minor), because they will fear that the great power will just demand more later. So they resist now, to enhance their reputation for being stubborn and to convince the great power to leave them alone in the future. The core of the problem is that a very powerful state can’t make a credible commitment of restraint; it can’t reassure the weak state that it really, truly, wants just a modest concession, one that the weak state might be willing to grant if it were confident that this would be the only demand. And the bigger and stronger the coercing state is, the harder it is for that state to reassure the weak power that its aims are actually limited.

It's not a shock that coercive threats against other states are generally unsuccessful (I think that's been a semi-regular theme of foreign policy discussions on this blog), but I think the point about being able to credibly commit to restraint is useful. This is one of the great values of international institutions. It has long been fashionable for conservatives (generally, but often liberals too) to scoff at the UN for hindering our ability to get things done. Ironically, the fact that working through institutions like the UN does to some extent tie our hands can make them more useful. A commitment to work through institutions in which our actions are restrained and other parties have meaningful voice makes our actions less threatening and more constructive.

Silver on Progressivism

2009-02-18T22:16:00.003-05:00

So I have to concede that after having been a serious Nate Silver junkie throughout the election season, I hardly looked at 538.com for a couple of months after the election was over. Increasingly, however, I've been drawn back as a regular reader. I think this post goes a long way to explaining why. I have from time to time expressed a certain amount of frustration with the liberal bloggers and netroots (as here or here). The online liberal community seems to have a heavy tilt towards economic populism and hyper-partisan demagoguery that I tend to find repellent. Some of the more prominent bloggers (e.g. Matt Yglesias) are lighter on the economic populism, but still tend to be heavy-handed partisan footsoldiers. Silver comes closer to mirroring my own views than any of the other bloggers I currently read. The discussion at 538.com linked above does a pretty good job of sorting out the differences. Like Silver, Obama clearly falls into the "rational progressive" category--in fact, he probably represents the prototypical ideal of rational progressivism. I expect we'll see plenty of argument over the next 4 or 8 years between the rational progressives and the radical progressives over the direction of the Obama administration. At least I hope so, because the conservatives are, frankly, too stupid to bother arguing with lately.

Good Quote

2008-12-10T18:32:00.003-05:00

I was just listening to some lectures on the Birth of the Modern Mind in the background while working on a take home exam from one of my Stats classes when I heard this quote.

Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit.

Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Anglican depends on the Quaker's word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: that man has his son's foreskin cut off, whilst a set of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled over his child. Others retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.
If there were only one religion in England, there would be despotism to fear; if there were but two, they would cut one another's throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily and in peace.

Voltaire, "Letters on the English" c. 1778

I thought it bore (indirectly admittedly) on the relation between commercialism and religious tolerance. I've been thinking a good bit on the idea that economic and commercial freedom and the prosperity that tends to accompany them have been the driving force behind the rise of political freedom and civil rights. So the quote just kind of struck me. Anyway, back to work.

Some More Rawls Discussion

2008-11-25T23:58:00.002-05:00

Speaking of meritorious blogging content, someone smart must have submitted this email to Andrew Sullivan. :) Having appeared on Fallows' blog some time ago, I wonder if this qualifies me as an Atlantic Monthly groupie.

The Brave New Media World

2008-11-25T21:29:00.003-05:00

Henry,

You raise a few interesting points. First, I would just note that your major premise is one that we've discussed a few times at Boys' events, although I can't recall whether you've been present for any of those discussions. It was the subject of a short but prescient book by Cass Sunstein titled Republic.com. He argued, precisely as you have, that proliferation in media sources will fuel self-selection of sources that confirm preexisting biases, undermining our cultural common ground and fragmenting our social beliefs. I think the threat is real, but can be overstated (as I'll discuss further below).

Second, I know exactly what you're talking about with regards to the comment sections on news sites. That stuff is purely toxic. It's even worse than you find on the purely partisan blogs and forums (e.g. DailyKos or RedState). News sites and YouTube comment threads and things of that nature appear to draw the absolute dregs for commenters. It's disturbing to read it, but ultimately I don't think that amounts to much. I suspect that it really is a very small percentage of the people who read the news stories or watch videos who post those comments (and probably with a high percentage of repeat players from one site to another). The numbers of people who participate in sites like DailyKos and RedState are more significant. Of course, those people also tend to suffer from groupthink and hyperbole and certainly represent a fragmentation in worldviews. But again, I'm not yet convinced that this is especially problematic. Their influence is ultimately fairly limited, as each party's Presidential primary this year demonstrated. In both cases the netroots favorites (Edwards for the Democrats, anybody-but-McCain (Ron Paul?) for the Republicans) failed to win.

Ultimately I think the democratization of public discourse via the Internet has been a tremendous win for the public. Contrary to your contention that we've seen a disappearance of sincere public discourse, I think we're seeing the emergence of new and important avenues for public discourse. There is a dialogue taking place on a community of blogs that surpasses in intelligence and candidness anything I can recall from the pre-Internet (or early Internet) days. To name just a few: Andrew Sullivan, Obsidian Wings, Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, Al Giordano, Dan Drezner, Greg Djerejian, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, John Cole, Cunning Realist, Josh Marshall. This short list covers a pretty broad spectrum of opinions (and certainly there are many others out there). These people are intelligent, generally well-educated, have diverse areas of expertise, and are interested in honest and sincere dialogue. Better yet, many of them read one another (and many other bloggers) and actually engage in back-and-forth discussion.

While the readership of the blogging community is still not at the same level as traditional media consumption, I think its influence is considerable. The bigger blogs (Sullivan, Marshall) draw in the neighborhood of a million page views a day, which is not insignificant. Moreover, that readership is disproportionately drawn from politicians (or at least political staffers), policymakers, and the media. This blogging community has the ability to affect campaign narratives. I think this is one of the reasons the McCain campaign flailed so wildly from one narrative to another over the Summer and Fall. The McCain strategists, all Karl Rove proteges, couldn't understand why their Obama narratives were not sticking the way the Al Gore - fibber and John Kerry - aloof liberal narratives stuck. The bloggers ripped their idiotic narratives to shreds and were quick to pounce if the traditional media went too far astray.

The emergence of this community presents a challenge to Sunstein's predictions. Certainly there is plenty of evidence on the Internet of Sunstinian self-selection and reinforcement of biases. But there is also a conscious acknowledgment among others that in order to be relevant as a thinker and a political writer one must be willing to inhabit the same world as other writers and one must be willing to engage differing views on more than a superficial level. Certainly this creates some tension between the self-reinforcing Freepers and Kossacks and the reality-based bloggers. On the conservative side this tension has spilled over into something like open warfare with the Freepers and Redstaters attempting to expel any conservatives who do not fully acquiesce in the Bush/Rove Republican orthodoxy. It's not clear how this is going to play out, although it seems inevitable that it will end badly for the Freepers, who are at this point quite remote from reality.

To conclude, I think, Henry, that you and Sunstein both had useful insights into the impact of hugely diverse media landscape, but I think the danger here is easily overstated. The broad expansion of the media landscape has occurred because the barriers to publication have dropped to almost nil (case in point: the Boys Weekend Journal), and the elimination of these barriers has also had tremendously positive effects. It does require people to be more savvy in their consumption of, and interaction with, the news, but the Internet has also made a great many people far more savvy about news media than the public has previously been. And the ease of entry into the market and the ease with which consumers can move from one product to another has allowed for something much closer to a true meritocracy than has ever existed in the traditional media. Nate Silver could never have gone from obscure bystander to political media powerhouse in less than a year in the old media market. I would go so far as to say we are entering a renaissance of political discourse. But the interplay between substantial number of people who have defied Sunstein's expectations with the still considerable masses who have conformed to his expectations does warrant continued observation. While relations between the two groups may frequently be strained, I think by virtue of pure merit alone the reality-based bloggers will always remain relevant and important.

Is a secular "church" a legal possibility?

2008-11-03T20:53:00.003-05:00

I've wondered about this for quite a while and I figured I'd put the question to you guys as legal experts.

The idea really became well formed in my mind when I was working on the printing press and would regularly read a Jewish newsletter for the Chicago area that we ran. It set me thinking about how valuable a resource a religious organization can be for it's members. They're really excellent models for how many non-market-based services can be provided outside of state action.

Prior to the major involvement of the state in things like charity (welfare), education, and health care, religious organizations were the major providers of these services. To some degree they still do provide these sorts of services and others which the state does not provide, such as social networking and adult education.

So, could you create a secular, tax-exempt, organization that has a set philosophy (humanistic, for instance) which provides adult education, social activities, private schools, scholarship funds, recreational facilities, counseling, etc., exclusively to members?

Election 2008 -- Viewing Guide

2008-11-03T10:32:00.018-05:00

I've collected a few sites to check on election night as the polls come in.

First, here's Nate Silver on what to watch for.

Here are the poll closing times:

Intrade's realtime electoral vote predictor:

CNN Election Center:

MSNBC results:

American Politics

2008-10-27T22:52:00.006-04:00

I was just watching a very good MIT panel on Media coverage of the presidential election when I heard a quote (1:56:50) I just had to transcribe and post here. John Carroll says:

I would like to think that actual reasoned conversation and argument might actually have some effect on people's perceptions and how they vote. I mean, that would be a giant step forward I think. But I'm not sure that's actually going to happen because the two sides have hardened so much. I think Tom [Rosenstiel] writes about this in his book, that there used to be a shared set of facts that people would argue from. They would agree on some basic facts and then, they would argue from there. I think people don't agree on basic facts anymore and I don't think that anybody allows for the possibility that someone who disagrees with them can have a reasonable point of view, a legitimate point of view. I think it's all about delegitimizing the opposition. I think that that makes a very hard dynamic for anything positive to happen.

This inspired me to make a post I've been meaning to add for some time. I've been feeling more and more in the past couple of months that the political climate in the US is becoming fatally ossified and polarized. Political discussion seems to be pretty much dead.

I don't own a TV, and I don't feel that either of the major parties comes comes close to representing me, so I haven't been following the election closely. I do however do some occasional reading at the Economist, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. What has gradually given me this creeping, skin crawling, feeling that political discourse has fallen into the abyss, is reading the comments which are ubiquitously attached to online articles. These pain me deeply.

I've been a long time user of the internet. Trolling and flaming on boards, forums, and news sites are nothing new to me. That is, I have a baseline. Yet, of late, I've found the comments on site like those I mentioned above to be particularly discouraging. A very high percentage of comments are incredibly hostile, loaded with vitriol and ad hominem attacks. It really doesn't depend on the article. Left or Right leaning articles tend to draw the predictable attacks from the opposing side (though it's disappointing that these are being phrased less and less in constructive and reasonable ways), but the really scary thing is that the articles that draw the most fire are those that take a neutral or centrist position. That is, the sides have become so polarized that any viewpoint that does not openly align with one camp or the other is fair game for vicious assaults from both.

The above panel helped me to think about why this is happening. The proliferation of the media, the creation of new cable channels and the new media, while adding depth and breadth to the discourse available to the average media consumer, has actually had a tendency to narrow their field of view. There are so many sources of information from any given perspective that a person can read many blogs and news sites, and watch several political TV shows while never actually exposing themselves any alternative viewpoints. While, a few decades ago, there may have only been a handful choices in terms of channels and papers, the very universality of these media sources required that they cater to both sides of the political divide. Today's media sources are so extensively diversified that we can each choose to steep in a carefully selected set of opinions that precisely support the very perspective that we have already chosen to adhere to.

My gut feeling is that this is leading us toward further calamity. I think that this trend toward polarization and the disappearance of sincere public discussion and debate has been underway for some time. I think our current circumstances (the Iraq war and the financial crises, the biggest political and economic disasters in recent memory) are the fruits of this trend. We are reaping disaster, and yet what we are sowing today is far more corrupted and virulent than the seeds that brought us our current sorrows.

I think this relates to what I have described in the past as the anthropomorphization of our problems. That is, we tend to blame the problems we see on the direct action and intention of other people. We implicitly believe that, if we can counteract the actions of these evil people, we can undo the problems of the world. Hence it makes sense to mobilize the base of our party at whatever cost. In our all out war we sacrifice the truth for political expediency. But if the problems are in fact much more complicated than we appreciate, the ends do not justify the means. In fact, the means do not lead us to our ends at all, but rather to folly and destruction.

Opens Source government.

2008-10-18T14:29:00.003-04:00

I just posted the following on a /. thread about the idea of an Open Source model of government.

In response to:

Open source is a much closer model for no government - or, in other words, anarchy. The last few years have been pretty clear to me that democracy doesn't produce government that works in the people's best interest. A linux model for government would allow people to choose how to organize themselves on a voluntary basis. Government, even the democratic version, rests on the application of force. So the two ideals really are mutually exclusive.

I replied:

Quite right.
Government, logically, is force. The government is that entity in a society which has a practical monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Insomuch as there are others able to ignore the dictates of the government or to use force to their own ends (think corruption/organized crime), the government is not sovereign.
In this sense the Open Source approach is not suited to government. The actions of government apply to everyone and are supported by the application of force (i.e if you disobey you will be arrested, if you resist arrest you will be shot) while an Open Source project is defined by voluntary action and a pluralistic, meritocratic, approach to system design. The two are inherently contradictory.
I think that to apply Open Source principles to government would require a Minimalist, Libertarian, style government. The Government Proper, the entity with the monopoly on force, would be restricted to ensuring that the various open development units don't attempt to use force against each other. Other than that policy would be left up to non-government units.
For instance, rather than having a monolithic federal welfare system, we could have a plurality of nonprofit organizations for the reduction and alleviation of poverty. If you have resources or skills and are concerned about poverty, you could join one of the existing organizations (the one which takes the approach that you find most appropriate) and contribute your time or money to helping them. Or, if you don't really identify with the approach of any of the existing organizations, you could get together with a group of like minded people and start an organization of your own.
Rather than taking a single ad hoc approach to solving civic problems we could have a diversity of parallel approaches being undertaken. Those that prove most effective will draw more and more contributors and donors, and, if they become too big and crufty, concerned members can fork off, or fledgling organizations can step in to break new paths and undercut the giants.
Under such a system, enlightened people would ask each other what organizations they work with, rather than what party they support. Instead of flaming each other in bars about which set of leaders should rule us, we could argue about which social projects take the best approach. Instead of sitting around reading the news and getting pissed, we could be designing new tactics and strategies for our favorite organizations. In other words, we could have real participatory "government" (as opposed to submitting a laughable, 0 = Democrat, 1 = Republican, every two years).
I think that this has been the major failing of the Libertarian movement. They've failed to paint a picture of a compassionate Libertarian world. Eliminating federal programs to assist the needy (poor, unhealthy, undereducated) does not mean that we'd all selfishly go around ignoring impoverished people begging on our doorsteps any more than legalizing drugs would mean that we'd all be out shooting heroin the next day. It just means that, instead of passing off our problems as a people to some faceless bureaucracy, we'd take responsibility for them ourselves.
Individualism isn't about greed. It's about standing on your own two feet and taking care of the world yourself, like an adult, rather than handing all of your problems over to our paternalistic government and then wallowing in childish self-pity when the world goes to shit.

I'd like to develop this sort of thing further. I definitely think that this sort of 'fleshing out the alternative' is a fruitful avenue for more writing. I think political discussion tends to be so frequently futile because we have such strong emotional associations around a lot of our ideas. If you associate your opponents ideas with images of bleakness, desolation, and misery and your own, with images of hope, enlightenment, and progress (and vise versa), then obviously there is virtually zero chance of either of you convincing the other of anything (because how could you possibly be convinced that bleakness is better than hope).

Unless we engage people at this deeper level of meaning, feeling, and association, (with images of how you feel the world could be) people will probably continue to talk past each other.

The Republican Strategy: Straight from Sesame Street

2008-09-07T13:26:00.003-04:00

For some time, I have been meaning to post a couple of thoughts I had after reading The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. At the time, I was worried that the book would launch a wave of attacks similar to those that hit Kerry in 2004. Thankfully, that didn't happen--largely due to prompt responses by the Obama campaign and supporters. The media has since moved on to other things (e.g., Palin-mania), but I wanted to get my points out there anyway.

The book epitomizes two of the things that trouble me deeply about politics today, particularly as it is played by the core of the Republican party (aka, the "religious right"). First is the abuse of science and academics to prop up completely bogus claims. "Dr. Corsi," and others in his camp, attempt to mimic the methods of scientists and academics but ignore the most critical aspects of those disciplines (such as refutability in science), in a blatant attempt to support their own views rather than to discover the truth. Second, there is a subtextual campaign to divide the world into "us" and "them," with McCain-Palin in the "us" camp and Obama belonging to "them." You remember the Sesame Street song that goes, "One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong ..."? That about sums up the theme of The Obama Nation, and for that matter the entire Republican strategy this election season. (Though in all fairness, I don't think that's the message that the Cookie Monster was promoting.)

Lessig on Technology Policy

2008-08-23T22:18:00.003-04:00

Here, in just over 15 minutes, Larry Lessig says basically everything I've ever tried to say about telecom policy on the blog (in the context of a critique of John McCain's tech platform). Take a look, it's well worth the time:

Also, for a number of weeks I've been meaning to post a link to this ars technica article on customer-owned fiber. Projects like this, or like Utah's UTOPIA seem to present the best way forward for the domestic telecom market.

A Gaffe That Draws Blood

2008-07-28T00:02:00.004-04:00

I have to concede, I am really quite pleased that John McCain started running his mouth about the Anbar Awakening. Before he did, the Conventional Wisdom on the Surge was so firmly established as to appear immovable. Everybody knows, the Surge worked. The fact that there is very little evidence to support that assertion really never came up. And if anyone tried to bring it up, they were scoffed at (as Obama was in the USA Today editorial above). Now that McCain has brought to the fore the fact that the Anbar Awakening, one of the most critical elements of our recent success in Iraq, was unrelated to the Surge, we can start to revisit the Conventional Wisdom.

What I think we'll find is that the real root cause for the turnaround in violence in Iraq had less to do with the additional 20,000 troops than with a change in tactics of which the Anbar Awakening was one element. The dramatic rise of David Petraeus marked the military's final grudging acceptance of the need to engage in actual counterinsurgency operations. After several disastrous years fighting the insurgency, it dawned on the Pentagon that their only real successes came where officers like Petraeus and H.R. McMaster eschewed the major operations that were up to that point the mainstay of the Iraq occupation and adopted classic counterinsurgency tactics. Hell, Petraeus wrote the book on the topic. Petraeus's ascension and this shift in tactics is what made the Anbar Awakening and the later success of the Surge possible.

This is a fairly important distinction, for a couple of reasons. First, is its obvious political impact. McCain has staked much on the fact that he supported the Surge when few others did, and the apparent success of the Surge is supposed to justify any number of prior errors of judgment with respect to Iraq (note how the USA Today article asks Obama to admit he was wrong about the surge, but it doesn't ask McCain to admit he was wrong about invading). If the Surge was not the answer, what does McCain have left to hang his hat on? Even if McCain did back counterinsurgency tactics, and it's not clear he did, that wouldn't be a terribly unique position. This humble blogger criticized the major ops approach to fighting the insurgency as far back as 2003, called for the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics in early 2004, and praised the military's movement in that direction in late 2005. Where was McCain all that time? I could have used his help back then.

Aside from the 2008 election, this debate has other long-term implications. Crediting the Surge for all that has gone right serves the right-wing's ever-popular Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy. According to the Green Lantern Theory ("GLT") any military failure is caused by a lack of willpower, and any military objective is achievable given a sufficient reserve of willpower. A corollary to the GLT is that any domestic criticism of either the decision to engage in a military conflict or the conduct of such conflict is a direct attack on the one resource necessary to win such a conflict (willpower) and thereby equivalent to treason. Proponents of the GLT have long scorned concepts such as nationbuilding, the exercise military restraint, respect for local culture, winning of hearts and minds, and, indeed, just about every other element of a traditional counterinsurgency operation. Not only are such things considered to be pointless, but they might weaken our resolve and are therefore deemed harmful to the cause.

Pinning all success in Iraq to the Surge is a perfect narrative fit for the GLT. Just when everyone else wanted to discuss withdrawal, George W. Bush rode the rescue with bulging reserves of willpower and not only refused to withdraw, he upped the ante as a tangible demonstration of his generous endowment of resolve. And lo, victory was achieved. If this is the narrative that comes out of the Iraq war, we will all live to regret it. The United States and Iraq alike paid a painful and bloody price to learn the lessons that the GLT proponents hope to obscure in a haze of Surge-o-philia.

In truth what we learned this time around are a lot of the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam. Indeed, Robert McNamara basically did learn those lessons. It is no coincidence that so did David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster. Petraeus wrote a doctoral thesis at Princeton titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam." McMaster also wrote a doctoral thesis on the mistakes of the American military in Vietnam. The lessons were there to be learned, but few among conservative policymakers and the Pentagon brass did, enamored of the GLT as they are. Will we walk away from Iraq with the public and policymakers learning all the same wrong lessons so that the next time around we will, at terrible cost, have to rediscover the right ones all over again? I surely hope not. And I hope that McCain's gaffe will open the door to a more robust public dialogue on this topic.

Too Big to Be Privatized

2008-07-13T23:48:00.004-04:00

There has been buzz for the past several days that the federal government would move to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now appears the rumors have proven correct. This follows not so long after the bailout of Bear Stearns. I don't know enough about the banking market to say whether the government has made the right moves with respect to these bailouts, but it strikes me as odd that any private entity should be considered "too big to fail". It seems there two potential routes around this: either ensure that no single firm in a given market obtains enough market share to make its collapse catastrophic, or simply put the critical functions under public control. The former option is problematic in that a) it would require a far more robust (and I mean FAR more) and aggressive type of antitrust regulation than we currently have, and b) it is easy to imagine that, even with a larger number of firms, intense competition might lead the firms to adopt similar approaches such that numerous firms would teeter on the edge of collapse at the same time, and a bailout would be required anyway. The latter option is problematic for the obvious reason that markets are generally more efficient than government management. But this system where private companies are free to reap really impressive profits (as the investment banks have), but the public ultimately bears the downside risk seems untenable.

This problem has always been at the foundation of my opposition to any sort of privatization of social security. In fact, it's worse for social security than for the banking system, because with social security you've got two levels risk to deal with--the institutional and individual. Because even if whatever private institutions we hand the system over to don't fail, if a significant number of individuals managed their risk poorly and get cleaned out, I find it inconceivable that the government wouldn't step in to rescue them. That is, after all, the entire point of the program. It's social security. And once that happens, of course we'd expect everyone else to try to shoot the moon with their investments, because what's the downside? This is the sort of risk we don't want to be distributed. It only works when the risk is pooled. Look for similar problems with some sort of hybridized public/private health insurance. Once we've made a social decision that some service is necessary, for whatever reason (economic stability, national security, moral obligation), handing it over to private entities will necessarily create serious problems with risk management and moral hazard.

I'm not necessarily arguing that, for example, our entire banking system or health care system should be government run. But I do think that in terms of structuring the mix of government and private management of such critical functions we need to try to identify key breaking points and either put them under direct government control or develop some clever system to ensure that private entities approach these functions with the right set of incentives.

Update (7/14): Sebastian Mallaby appears to have a similar take on the issue to mine.

Public Service Announcement

2008-07-12T10:38:00.003-04:00

It's been quite some time since I've done a public service announcement, but I just randomly happened upon this, and people ought to know. I haven't really heard anything about it, but I figure you can't go too far wrong with Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion. Here's the story. The first act is out on Tuesday.

Policy Outcomes

2008-07-12T09:49:00.004-04:00

It may not always be immediately obvious what the consequences of screwing up telecom policy will be, but here's an illustration. To be honest, I'm not sure that broadband penetration is a terribly meaningful statistic at this point. There are some outliers in difficult to reach locations who still have no access to broadband, but as a general matter, broadband in some form or another is available to those who want it, at least in those in the countries towards the top of these charts. The more meaningful statistic is the average throughput. Japan, Korea, and France have all passed the threshold where IPTV is practical. In fact, just based on those bandwidth numbers I ran a search for IPTV in France and came up with this. Broadband in the United States, by contrast, is five times slower than Korea or France, and ten times slower than Japan. The real kicker is that we pay more for that privilege than consumers in those other countries. We must be paying extra for our wonderful customer service... The other key point is that around the time of the dot.com boom, the United States was the clear global leader in Internet and broadband service. Japan and Korea, in particular, were late to the game and got to where they are now almost entirely as a result of aggressive regulatory policy. Our steady decline is similarly tied to our moronic telecom policies. Rambling on about the power of the free market (as an alternative to regulation) doesn't get you too far when you're dealing with non-competitive markets, and at some point that starts to show.

A Bear Market for Ideas

2008-06-22T15:19:00.007-04:00

Early in his primary campaign, Barack Obama indicated that if his Republican opponent opted into the public financing system for the general election, he would follow suit. In a highly publicized decision last week, Obama decided to forgo public financing. In a column for the Atlantic, Reihan Salam uses Obama's decision as point of entry to a general condemnation of campaign finance regulation. I've written on this topic before (here, as well as several other occasions), and don't want to rehash everything I've said previously, but I do think Salam's column merits a response. Salam cites examples like Stewart Mott contributing massive amounts of money to Eugene McCarthy as laudable examples of civic participation. I have a number of objections to this line of thinking. For one it strikes me as a terrible subversion of the one person, one vote principle. For another, it seems inconceivable that massive contributions would not alter the behavior of politicians (Salam's attempt to brush this off as a "theory" in the same sense that the Loch Ness Monster is a theory is cute, if not perhaps the mark of someone engaging in an honest discussion). But my previous posts on this topic cover those objections pretty well. Instead I'd like to consider a basic premise of Salam's column and of the campaign finance discussion in general: the money is somehow fundamental to (or even indistinguishable from) political speech.

The basic point of raising all of this money is to pay for television advertising. This is no secret, and Salam's absurd vision of candidates launching nationwide chains of day-care providers aside, this assertion is unlikely to elicit much objection. I think it is critically important to frame the debate in this manner. To refer to the money as being for political speech makes it sound considerably grander than it really is. It is really money to bankroll TV ads. To be sure, TV ads can be a form of political speech. But they make up a very narrow category, and one with some rather noteworthy characteristics. Think about the most important and memorable political TV ads. Like this one. Or this one. Or this. And this. And this. (As an aside, I would have included the Clinton 3 A.M. ad, but it has apparently, and remarkably, vanished from the internet now that Hillary has dropped out.) When we talk about campaign finance, we are not discussing political speech writ large, we're discussing a very narrow subcategory of political speech that consists almost entirely of non-substantive, emotionally manipulative, and often misleading, but objectively speaking highly-effective, advertising. This sort of political speech is representative of the "marketplace of ideas" only in the same sense that Stephen Colbert has decided that global warming is real because the success of Al Gore's movie indicates that the market has spoken.

Certainly the Obama model of fundraising, garning small contributions from a huge base of donors, is an improvement over the traditional big donor approach. Some of the concern over influence is abated when the contributor base is more diffuse. But the sums of money involved have only increased in this cycle (in fact, more money has already been raised than was spent in total in 2004), and that itself represents a loss for the civic dialogue. A debate conducted via TV advertising is an impoverished debate. Even Barack Obama's message is necessarily infantilized by translation to ad format. As Matt Yglesias noted of Obama's first general election ad, the message boils down to: "My mom is white! And I'm from America!" If this is our marketplace of ideas, it's pretty clearly a bear market.

I recognize that TV advertising is an important tool for candidates. It's one of the only ways for them to directly reach a mass audience to answer attacks and spread their message. The Obama ad, for example, is probably quite necessary given the breadth of the campaign of misinformation that has already been waged against him. It's a tricky problem, and I don't plan to offer any easy solutions here. But I do think we need to be clear about what we're discussing, and in the discussion of campaign finance regulation I think we can do without any grandstanding about the cherished role of political speech. The sort of political speech we cherish is not the sort that gets funded by this money.

Update (6/23): This amusing Slate video on cookie-cutter political ads seems rather appropriate to this discussion.

A Positive Story from the Blogosphere

2008-06-22T15:02:00.004-04:00

I don't have much of point to make with this post, I just think it is a really interesting story demonstrating the meritocratic impact of the internet and blogging. I'm referring to the meteoric rise of Nate Silver as a respected name in election-year journalism. Silver began as an unknown, posting on DailyKos under the name poblano. Before the voting began poblano penned diaries on a broad variety of primary-related topics. He gained a reputation on the site as a thoughtful and insightful Obama-backer. But it wasn't until late January, after several states were in the bag and super Tuesday loomed large that poblano's brilliance as a number-cruncher really emerged.

A pair of super Tuesday previews (initial diary, updated diary) drew huge amounts of attention, and deservedly so. poblano's previews included polling numbers, but greatly exceeded the depth of analysis offered anywhere in the commercial press, incorporating endorsements, fund-raising, and in-state campaign presence. While some of the delegate spreads were off, poblano correctly called the winner in every state (he considered AL, CT, and MO to be toss-ups). Super Tuesday itself provided a wealth of voting data to be mined, and poblano was soon off to the races, dissecting the results and turning them into projections for the general election. Again, the analysis found here was hands down better than anything I encountered in the commercial press.

Having gained considerable notoriety among political bloggers during January and February, in early March poblano moved off DailyKos to his own website, FiveThirtyEight. There he continued providing projections of the primaries and general election, and he also did something professional political writers never do: hold pollsters accountable. In May, poblano crushed the professional pollsters with his projections for Indiana and North Carolina, identified himself as baseball statistician Nate Silver, and finally began to garner attention outside the sphere of political blogs. Not only will Silver likely be a mainstay of election coverage for the rest of the year (and following election years), but I suspect that he has an awful lot of professional analysts reconsidering their methodologies and approaches to political projection. Oh, and, by the way, the projections for Obama at FiveThirtyEight are looking awfully nice these days.

Resistance is Futile

2008-06-12T22:37:00.003-04:00

Tim Wu on the state of the wireless market:

Who would have guessed that Apple—onetime victim of IBM and Microsoft—would today be an agent and symbol of industry consolidation? I don't know that it's fair to say this is Apple's fault. A telephone monopoly has been the norm for most of American telecommunication history, except for what may turn out to have been a brief experimental period from 1984 through 2012 or so. Like the short British experiment with republican government under Oliver Cromwell, it may be that telephone monopolies in America are a national tradition. In this larger story, the iPhone matters just as one of the last nails in the coffin of Bell's would-be competitors.

Brutal, but true. AT&T and Verizon cleaned house in the FCC's recent 700 MHz auction and appear to be scooping up spectrum and independent carriers faster than they can consume them. Sprint has been driven, in its desperation, into a last ditch joint effort with Clearwire, Comcast, Time Warner, Google, and Intel to offer an alternative data network -- a high stakes gamble that faces numerous business and technological obstacles. T-Mobile, the only other nationwide wireless carrier seems content to slowly sink into irrelevance. If the Sprint gambit fails, AT&T and Verizon will stand alone atop the wireless market. And even if it succeeds, the three viable national wireless networks will, by no coincidence, be under the control of the same four entities that have established total dominance over wireline voice, video, and data service in the United States: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. Either way, the mass extinction of competition in the American telecom marketplace is all but complete. To make matters worse, on the wireline side Comcast and Time Warner have few (if any) overlapping markets, and the same is true of AT&T and Verizon. To the extent that consumers prefer quadruple play offers (voice, video, data, and wireless), a proposition all the major carriers are betting heavily on, the vast majority of consumers will have only two options, if that. What has befallen the telecom market over the past 10 years is a disaster.

While we can only hope that help will be on the way once Democrats (hopefully) take over the White House and the FCC, it may be too little too late. To undo what has been done would require drastic measures. It would mean breaking up these big four, forcing some open access regime on them, or (best of all) forcing a separation of their physical network assets from their content and service delivery businesses. Any of these options would entail a major battle fought simultaneously on political, legal, and regulatory planes that, in all likelihood, would take the better part of a decade to play out. I doubt even an enlightened Democratic government would have the stomach for that. The only real alternative will be for the FCC to increasingly re-regulate these businesses. When the market cannot enforce discipline on providers of necessary services, regulators have to step in and assume the task. Net neutrality will only be the beginning...

Back from the Dead: Obama and Political Process

2008-06-11T21:57:00.010-04:00

As a first step to reviving this dormant blog, I'm going to cobble together various thoughts from discussions in email and elsewhere over the past half year or so. These thoughts are perhaps less novel and certainly less timely now with the primaries concluded than they were when they initially occurred to me, but I think they're still worth discussing.

Back when the Democratic primary was still hotly contested between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards (who, let's not forget, was the clear favorite among the netroots), Obama was not infrequently attacked as a "process" candidate. This charge was advanced derisively, with suggestions that such focus on process was a sign of vanity with little appeal beyond upper-middle class young white professionals who don't care about Real Issues. Typically it was accompanied with comparisons to other such vanity candidates like Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas, and Eugene McCarthy.

In response, I first must concede that I believe these critics are correct: Obama is a process candidate. While some conservatives have looked to Obama's liberal policy positions and scoffed at his supposed post-partisanness, Obama's post-partisan approach is a matter of process, not policy. Post-partisanship has to do with refocusing the process on substantive issues rather than the partisan circus we've seen the past 10-15 years, with having amicable disagreements, treating everyone with civility and decency instead of demonizing political opponents, with having a willingness to critically analyze issues without viewing them solely as an opportunity to score political points, with prioritizing competence over patronage and loyalty in government bureaucracy, with not letting elections be dominated by hot-button bullshit issues (e.g. Terry Schiavo) instead of the actual and quite serious issues facing our nation. This is really the defining attribute of Obama's campaign, particularly in comparison to his Democratic opponents with whom he had relatively few policy differences. So, yes, Obama is a process candidate.

I must strenuously disagree, however, with the position that Obama's process-focus is a matter of vanity, or is in any respect a political weakness. John Edwards thought that the Democrats needed to move left and take more populist positions in order to win. Hillary Clinton initially seemed to think we needed to move back towards her husband's centrist approach (i.e. the Democratic Leadership Council position). Later she seemed to adopt the Edwards populist angle, and later still she decided the Democrats needed be more ... white. The reality is that Democrats don't need to do any of that. What Democrats desperately need to do is fight back against the political circus and force people to look at real substantive issues. This is what Obama's post-partisanship is meant to achieve.

Along with criticism that he was too process-oriented, one of the chief netroots complaints about Obama was that he is insufficiently harsh on Republicans. He failed to call them out for being the repugnant, evil, spiteful people that, in the eyes of the netroots, they so obviously were. Obama failed to demonize the opposing party. What Obama understands that the netroots failed to grasp is that this road leads to tribal politics. That's the Republican way, the grand political circus. Everyone will retreat to their old familiar identity groups and fling flaming dog poop at each other and we'll rehash the same election we had in 2000 and 2004. In a year where the fundamentals so strongly favor Democrats, we might even win with that approach. But as a long-term strategy, it is a loser.

Bitterly divisive partisan politics is a game that Republican will always ultimately win. It's the game they've chosen and written the rules for, and they did so because it best fits the philosophy of their party and the memes they're trying to sell. It demeans politics, belittles the political process, and sows cynicism and distrust of politicians and government alike. For Democrats to fight back on the same terms concedes a decisive advantage to the Republicans right up front. For Democrats to succeed people need to believe in government, and for that to happen they need to first believe in the political process.

In order to break out of the long downward spiral of hyper-partisan politics it will be imperative to get some people to vote on issues rather identity. This is a difficult task, because it so easy for people to flee to the comfort of their identity groups. But the upside is we don't need a lot of them. All it would take would be to flip 10-15% of voters who've gone Republican in the last two election cycles to win a landslide victory. And here's the real key: these voters already agree with Democrats on all the major policy questions. A large majority of Americans favor universal health care (including a majority of Republicans!). A large majority of Americans believe the government needs to take serious action on climate change. A large majority of Americans want our troops out of Iraq within a year. A large majority of Americans agree that we should have diplomatic meetings with Iran without preconditions. Let me say this again: Democrats do not need to change their policy positions to go after independent and Republican voters. They already agree with us! The only key to victory is to figure out how to bust people loose from identity politics.

If Democrats can only break off a chunk of the Bush voters and get them to vote on issues instead of identity, they will win big. Hillary Clinton could never have succeeded in this task because she is a creature of hyper-partisan politics. Her political career was born of it, the hard feminist core of her support was built on it, and she personally revels in it. Her pitch to the primary voters was that we should support her because she could play this game better than anyone. And John Edwards, having failed with a more moderate, centrist approach in 2004, embraced identity politics himself this time around, pulling together an odd alliance of white working-class union voters and the most vociferous leftists of the netroots. But the fiery rhetoric and demonization of others required to win these groups was self-limiting, and Edwards consequently had no success extending his appeal beyond these identity groups. Neither of them could have avoided the trap of hyper-partisanship. Neither of them could have significantly altered the playing field. Either probably could have won, given the overall dynamics of this election, but neither would have been a game-changer.

But Obama did something different. Obama has built a campaign around rejecting the circus. His campaign is constructed from the ground up precisely to be a game-changer. He properly understood that concern over the political process is not a vanity issue; it is the difference between continued frustration for Democrats and clear political dominance. Obama treats all Americans with dignity and respect. He discounts no one and tries to engage everyone. He wants voters to believe that under his administration the government will take into account all of their views, positions, and beliefs and negotiate them in a reasonable and sensible manner. He recognizes that people don't always need to win every argument as long as they feel the system is fair and that their voice is heard. His campaign is built around these basic values.

It remains to be seen whether this will be enough to break the cycle. I think the approach is right, and Obama personally has demonstrated a level of wisdom, charisma, and leadership that leads me to believe he can really pull this off. But I don't underestimate the difficulty of the task. The Republicans wouldn't have invested so much in this approach if it didn't work so goddamned well. But if Obama prevails, this could be an incredibly meaningful victory, and a breath of fresh air that we all, at this point, desperately need.

Update (6/12): just for added emphasis, check out this Obama quote that they've put at the top of their anti-smear page: "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, or patriotism as a bludgeon -- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first."

The Battle for the Bottleneck

2007-10-25T22:29:00.001-04:00

Since Peter and Henry each independently forwarded this Wall Street Journal article on cell phones to me, I thought I should respond here. First off, it is a truly excellent article, and I agree completely with Walter Mossberg, the author. He does a fine job laying out the key issues in an easy-to-understand manner. With respect to the upcoming wireless spectrum auction there, the odds of open handset rule going through went up this week when Verizon bailed on its attempt to sue the Commission over it.

Since Mossberg did such a good job discussing the state of the market, I thought I might discuss why I think the market is like this. The short version is this: while the Internet revolution has created a profusion of telecommunications that a short time ago would have been unimaginable, at the same time it has threatened to make telecom providers more irrelevant than they have been since their inception and so they fight it tooth and nail. And now for the (really) long version:

The problem with the Internet viewed from the perspective of the telecoms is that it is an end-to-end network, meaning everything interesting happens at the endpoints and they're stuck in the middle. The stuff in the middle is designed to be transparent and fungible (particularly in the case that some of it is vaporized by a nuclear bomb). This is very different from what we had before the Internet. Previously any goods or services traveling down the phone line into someone's home or office were controlled by the phone company, be it phone service, long distance service, voice mail, video, advanced data services, etc. Even if you just wanted to communicate data between you two office sites, the phone company would set this up then charge you out the wazoo. It was a good business, and they made a profit for each additional application they could develop and provide to consumers over their lines.

But when the Internet comes along, even though the number of applications now skyrockets and the benefits people gain from their telecommunications links grow immeasurably, the telecom companies are no longer in control, and are therefore no longer profiting directly from the provision of services. Whatever the telecom companies were charging people an arm and a leg for can now be done on the Internet for peanuts. So to the extent that telecom providers did provide unique services, now anyone who can pipe in an Internet connection over any medium can eat their lunch. You don't have to rely on the phone company for voice communications or cable for video anymore. And many applications the phone companies hadn't implemented yet or hadn't even dreamed of are now out there being heavily used for free. It seems like it should be their shining hour, but it's really more of a let-down. Sure they are still selling and making money on the basic connectivity that underlies all of the Internet, and in record volume, but they'll be selling that in any case. It's the add-ons, the profits coming from provision of actual commercial services to end-users they want. So while openness is what has made the Internet great for us users, there has been a very consistent effort on the part of telecom companies to maintain control where they haven't yet lost it, or to regain control where it has been lost.

At the start of this thing the big telecom companies didn't even want to deal with home consumers; for them data services were things to be sold to corporate customers at outrageous prices that no home user would contemplate paying. So when PC ownership took off and it became apparent that there was a market for online services, other companies got involved. The initial generations of modems were built to work over the phone lines by converting their digital signals into analog beeping and squawking (converted back to a digital signal by the modem at the other end of the line) so that they only needed a normal voice line to operate. Phone company participation was not required. The initial big corporate providers of dial-up online services (Microsoft, America Online, Prodigy) ignored the Internet and each built their own walled garden, each providing their own proprietary services to customers. In this sense they adopted the same model as the telecoms. Everything that passed down that line was to be provided by them, and they'd get paid for it. Of course, the fact that dial-up modems require no significant physical infrastructure (all you need is an office with a bunch of voice lines and some computers) meant that the barrier to entry to the online services business was very low. So small shops opened all over the place. They, of course, didn't have the infrastructure to create a bunch of proprietary content and services the way the big guys did, but there was this Internet thing they could hook people up to for pretty low costs that had a lot of content on it. It didn't take consumers long to figure out that there was a whole hell of a lot more interesting stuff outside the walled gardens than inside them (in large part because the users went out and created it themselves). So the walled garden model was soundly defeated (although it took AOL the better part of a decade to admit it).

So we all got onto the Internet and the phone companies had lost control over content and services and so had the ISP's. Everything was free and open and we went crazy with entrepreneurship and had the dot-com bubble. But while that was happening, we were also developing technologically. The networks were trying to keep up with our demand for faster connections to get all the cool new stuff on the Internet (which is to say mostly online gaming, pirated MP3's, and porn). So we moved from dial-up to DSL and cable modems. This is an important transition, because, unlike dial-up modems, DSL and cable modems require physical infrastructure in the telecom networks. There needs to be actual equipment sitting in the local office of the phone or cable company for them to work. All of the sudden the phone companies had a way to take back control over everything. But wait, luckily for us Congress was out ahead of the game and had made arrangements for this in the 1996 Telecom Act. That sounds sarcastic, but isn't; Congress had achieved a remarkably balanced and well-designed compromise. The Act required, among other things, that the regional phone companies play nice with competitors and rent out the equipment needed to make a DSL network function, so that competitors could get at the same customers the regional phone companies served. Problem solved, competitive pressure will prevent the phone companies from reestablishing control over the Internet and abusing their market power.

Sadly it didn't work out that way. The phone companies didn't like this part of the '96 Act (big shock), so they launched an intense campaign of lobbying, foot-dragging, and lawsuits that lasted until a few years ago when Bush's FCC appointees decided to use the Telecom Act for toilet paper and the Supreme Court cheered them on. Internet access is no longer considered a common carrier service and is not subject to open access requirements. Now instead of thousands of ISP's in direct competition with each other, Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner basically own the consumer side of the Internet in the US. And, to varying degrees, they may be able to start rebuilding their walled gardens and capitalizing off of all the wonderful services people enjoy on the Internet, and turning our wonderful network into something a little less wonderful. This is what the fight over net neutrality is about.

One of the interesting battles in net neutrality is just how far it reaches into a provider's infrastructure. The case for net neutrality is most clear when it comes of an ISP's actual Internet service, where they're blocking a service or web site they don't want you to access. But there are other ways for an ISP to go about this. Consider cable. The cable companies set up their networks so that only a small part of their pipe is allocated for Internet service. The vast majority of it is carrying video. If they wanted they could scrap a few cable TV channels and expand the datastream to their cable modem subscribers. Now let's say that on-demand TV becomes a very popular service. Comcast has two ways to go about this. They could provide on-demand video pretty easily over the Internet, except they probably don't have enough bandwidth on their Internet service to handle it. So they would need to eliminate some video channels and expand their bandwidth first. But if they did that, anyone could sell on-demand video to their customers over the Internet, and Comcast would get nothing for it. They would have to compete for every customer, and the wouldn't have any real competitive advantage over other video providers. Alternatively, Comcast could keep their Internet service throttled down, and develop a proprietary on-Demand system that would occupy the same bandwidth but run independently of their Internet service. Now they have no competitors and get to tariff users for every use. Oh, happy day for Comcast.

All of this brings us, finally, to the mobile wireless market. There are three key points to notice. First, for technological reasons data services took quite some time to arrive in the mobile wireless market. So they got to sit by and watch all this other stuff happen. Second, like DSL and cable, wireless Internet service requires special equipment, meaning the wireless service provider is necessarily also the Internet service provider and has total control over the network. Third, the cast of the characters is fairly similar (AT&T and Verizon, again, plus a couple other big national companies). So what you have are companies that have learned that what they want, more than anything, is control and the ability to tariff users for every bloody thing they do on the network, and who technically have the capability in this market to make it happen. They have fought bitterly to maintain this control and will continue to. These are concentrated markets, so the threat of competition isn't that great, and clearly the fear of loss of control their users is much greater than their fear of competitive harm. And the big wireless companies are all moving in lock-step on this anyway, so there is no real competitive impetus to stop fucking with customers and actually give us what we want. This is the sort of thing that happens in concentrated markets…

On some level they know they'll eventually have to let their users onto the Internet for real (the iPhone is a concession to that reality, although AT&T saw to it that they get their pound of flesh from iPhone users anyway). But the longer they can keep customers off the Internet, or only let them on some borked up version of the Internet, the better. I mean if people can download ring-tones for free, who's going to pay their provider $3 a pop for them? If you can buy MP3's for your phone from iTunes for a buck, why would you pay Verizon twice as much for their proprietary music-to-phone system? Now they can sell you GPS-based mapping, sports scores, online games, SMS, emails with pictures from the camera phone, and every other damned thing you'd get for free on the Internet. If they provided good Internet service or allowed phones with WiFi capability onto the network, this would all come crashing down.

In the end, the simple reality is that the communications market is deeply dysfunctional. It's highly concentrated, has many components that are or were natural monopolies, and is littered with regulatory detritus from past battles with abusive monopolists (too many of which didn't come out the right way for the good guys). These are markets that desperately need oversight and consumer protections. Frankly, a lot of the physical infrastructure would probably be better off in the public sector. The Internet is an incredible economic engine and allows for so much innovation and competition, it's sad to let these crotchety bastards be the gatekeepers. The analogy to superhighways isn't that far off. It doesn't have to be like this. In other countries (generally where regulators have forced open access on the phone companies) people regularly pay about the same we do for Internet service that is ten times faster, they have mobile phones that can do WiFi and are interchangeable among providers, and they have no real issue over net neutrality because Internet providers don't have enough market power to abuse it. I'll be very curious to see what happens if the Democrats take over at the FCC in a couple years...

What if the government subsidized the employment of displaced workers?

2007-10-01T15:48:00.001-04:00

I was contemplating where I disagreed with the previous post when the following idea occurred to me. It could probably use a more rigorous development, but I think it’s at least interesting.

I'm kind of uncomfortable with the concept of government run retraining programs.

One major problem is figuring out what to train people to do. Do those being retrained get to choose what they are trained for?

If so, what will stop them from seeking training in a field for which they are unsuited, or one in which the demand for workers is little stronger than the field they just left?

If not, then it seems that the government would have to specify what fields show sufficient demand to bear an influx of newly trained workers, and then place workers in training programs that are best suited to their skills and abilities. I dislike this idea both because of its impact on the self determination of the workers, and because it would have a distortionary effect on the economy (as the training programs would act as subsidies for the selected industries by increasing labor supply and hence reducing labor costs).

Another issue is that an artificial training program might be a very ineffective way to train workers.

Even in many fields where formal education is routinely required, I suspect that the majority of learning tends to take place in the field, after placement. I think that this would be even truer of blue collar workers than others. So something along the lines of an internship/apprenticeship might be most efficient.

Yet having the government take industry partners and place workers in artificial internships, again, is not to my taste. It seems too likely to result in inefficient placements.

Instead, think briefly about the relationship between an industry with a growing demand for labor and an unemployed person. It’s likely that the unemployed person would gladly accept a position at a reduced wage in exchange for the opportunity to master the trade. Likewise, the firm would like to obtain another trained employee so long as they could make up the cost of training through the production of the worker. So both parties stand to benefit by working together on this. But there is a problem.

In a way the problem is akin that of intellectual property.

If I develop a new product or manufacturing technique I do so at some cost. If a competitor is allowed to use the fruits of my development and produce the same product or use the same technique they will be able to sell the output profitably at a price such as would require me, with my sunk cost, to take a loss. So, without a patent to protect my innovation, I have little incentive to develop it in the first place.

Similarly if I train an employee, I do so at some cost. If I am to retain that employee at a net benefit to my firm, I must therefore compensate the employee less than one which we had hired fully trained (i.e. with no training cost). But if the employee achieves the status of fully trained before I have recovered the full cost of her training, another firm will be able to entice her away by offering her compensation equal to her productivity, while I could not do so without suffering a loss. So unless I can monopolize her labor, I have little incentive to offer her training.

My desire to monopolize her labor is equivalent to an innovator’s desire to monopolize the use of their innovation through the use of a patent. But employees have rights that innovations do not. I cannot simply apply to the government to secure my right to exclusive use of this employee. Rather I must contract with her in order to ensure that she will stay with my firm. Of course, she would have little incentive to accept the contract after her training is complete, so we would have to agree to it before her training began. But here a couple of problems arise.

There is asymmetrical information.

The employer does not really know how productive the employee will be after training, so they will make an offer that would be appropriate for the average employee. But highly able workers will recognize that the contract would not benefit them as much as it should. So they would tend to refuse the offer. This would bring down the average productivity of the workers accepting the contract. So the employers would have to readjust the contract to account for the new, lower, average productivity. This would begin to push the next tier of most productive workers out of the contract, etc. And the spiral would continue until the market broke down.

Even without asymmetrical information there would still be a moral hazard problem. Provided with long-term contracts the workers would have less incentive to exert themselves in the service of their employers. Again this would lead the employers to make lower offers, in effect pushing the hardest working employees away from the contracts.

Between these two problems it seems unlikely that such arrangements would come about. In some industries, where an intensive amount of expert attention is required during the training process these problems may be fatal to in-job training. If the employer cannot break even over the duration of the training process, even if they provide zero compensation, then there is little to be done. But in some other cases there may be a solution. Now we return to my opening question.

What if the government subsidized the employment of displaced workers?

In the above scenario, it was not true that no training took place. Training could and would take place if the firm could extract sufficient benefit from the worker’s labor during the training process to break even prior to the worker becoming sufficiently trained to be attractive to other employers. By subsidizing the work of untrained workers (e.g. for some fixed period of time paying them some quantity per hour worked in addition to the compensation offered by the firm) and thereby reducing the compensation the firm must offer to retain the services of the employee, the government could increase the quantity of training that a firm could viably provide without loss, and thus give workers the opportunity to overcome larger experience barriers. Of course such a program would require monitoring to ensure that the employees were only being subsidized for skilled labor in which they were inexperienced and that the industry retained a sufficient proportion of the trainees to justify the subsidy. But I think that this monitoring would be much easier than hand picking industries and developing government implemented training programs. And I believe the outcomes would be much better.

The Role of Work

2007-09-20T20:30:00.001-04:00

Andrew Sullivan pointed out this fascinating article on the psychological impacts of employment (and unemployment). I take issue with many of the conclusions the author, Arthur C. Brooks, draws from the data he presents, but the data is worth taking a look at. In particular I'm drawn to the studies on the devastating impact of unemployment, as in the case of the Marienthal villagers or the University of Chicago survey that found that even a brief bout of unemployment drastically increased the tendency of respondents to feel hopeless or worthless.

Brooks concludes his survey of the data by stating that the only thing we need to do is "protect the free market so that people can find and choose the types of employment that suit each of us best." I find this conclusion difficult to reconcile with the data on unemployment. The implications of that data suggest to me that employers have a devastating non-economic advantage to wield over employees, and that normal market churn can have significant psychological externalities that aren't generally considered in economic models.

One need not be a bleeding-heart sympathizer with the poor or the unemployed to be concerned with such issues. Witness the current political dialogue on topics such as economic globalization, outsourcing, and immigration. I would suggest that the rising populist positions on all of these issues share two traits: they are motivated by fear of unemployment and all its consequent harms, and they are deleterious to the overall health of our economy. Note also that these issues tend to span across the usual political divides. You can find vehement opposition to immigration on the right, fierce opponents of globalization on the left, and distaste for outsourcing on every side. People have a tremendous fear of losing their jobs, a fear that viewed in purely economic terms may seem irrational, but taking into account the additional psychological effects perhaps it is not so irrational after all (although I guess you could conclude that the psychological impact is itself irrational).

Brooks points out that remedies such as welfare do little to address the psychological harm of unemployment. He also notes that making jobs more secure comes at a price. Brooks argues that more secure jobs tend to be less meaningful. I don't see the data for that, and I'm not sure it's right although I can see where he's coming from. In any case, certainly there is an economic price to be paid for making it more difficult for employers to adjust their workforce (European economies demonstrate this).

These considerations about welfare and job security seem to drive Brooks's conclusion that nothing should be done other than to support the market. And certainly, the market may provide enough of a remedy for some of the unemployed, particularly the highly skilled and well-educated. However, that does not address the whole of the topic. Particularly where globalization and outsourcing are concerned and where we see massive shifts in the market, people may find that skillsets in which they had invested a great deal of time, effort, and money are no longer needed, not just by their previous employer, but by any domestic employer. There is room here for the government to be involved in retraining and job placement for displaced workers. If we know that job churn is necessary and healthy for the economy, but that the impact on individuals of this churn can be severe, that seems the most sensible route to pursue. Not only can this have direct impacts on the social welfare of those affected, but the existence of such a safety net may also help reduce the fear that drives the dialogue on economic policy in the wrong direction. There is an obvious connection between this suggestion and our past discussions of Rawlsian fairness and political compromise (as seen here), but I'll leave that as an exercise for readers...

Islam Isn't the Problem

2007-09-12T22:54:00.001-04:00

Well, I haven't been posting as much as I'd like lately. I just haven't crossed that much that sparked my interest lately. But I think this is important (and it ties in to my previous post as well). This global Gallup poll of Muslims is significant, as its title says, in framing the war on terror. Gallup found that Muslims in the Middle East actually have a lower tolerance for attacks on civilian targets than do average (non-Muslim) Americans. The poll found only a weak link between religiosity and political extremism among Muslims. Gallup notes that while those who found the 9/11 attacks to be wrong often seated those beliefs in religious sentiment, those who thought the attacks justified relied on political rather than religious justifications. The summary of poll concludes that "the difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety."

These are important findings, not only in countering the rhetoric of the more jingoistic right wingers, but also in countering certain middle ground positions (i.e. Andrew Sullivan) that reject the more extreme policies that arise from such rhetoric while still embracing the framing of Islam as the root source of our problems. This conflict is and always has been about political differences. The pollsters find that the Muslims who sympathize with extremism tend to be those who believe that the West does not reciprocate their concerns and is unlikely to ever act on them, creating a siege mentality. This is not a new idea, at least on this blog, but solid data is always a welcome addition to the argument. We cannot hope to end this conflict without at the least understanding the motivations of our adversaries.

Understanding Al Qaeda

2007-08-12T21:56:00.001-04:00

One of the key battlegrounds in developing a strategy against Al Qaeda and its affiliates is the matter of defining who Al Qaeda is and what Al Qaeda seeks to achieve. From the early days after 9/11 the Bush administration sought to cast Al Qaeda as part of a epic struggle between cultures. And in order to build a properly ominous threat to justify military adventures and belligerent policies and cultural attitudes the administration's allies have sought to play up Al Qaeda's aspirations of conquest and the creation of a new Caliphate.

The reality, however, is that Al Qaeda has no such aspirations, and the only way Al Qaeda can be a player in an epic clash of civilizations is when we make them one through our own actions and rhetoric. This was one of the key points made by Larry Wright (author of the seminal work on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower) when he spoke at the Miller Center last year. According to Wright, Al Qaeda has virtually no policy platform or objectives. What drives young men to Al Qaeda is not a desire to accomplish any particular end, but a deeply seated sense of cultural humiliation by the West. This is the same factor that creates rioting and violence in response to perceived Western insults against Islam like the Mohammed comic, or the Koran in the toilet story. Al Qaeda holds out no promises of accomplishment or conquest, it promises recruits one thing: the opportunity to die as martyrs fighting the West.

A review on Slate last week of Raymond Ibrahim's Al Qaeda Reader confirms Wright's account. The reviewer, Reza Aslan writes:

While these writings provide readers with page after page of, for example, arcane legal debates over the moral permissibility of suicide bombing, they do not really get to the heart of what it is that al-Qaida wants, if it wants anything at all. Al-Qaida's nominal aspirations—the creation of a worldwide caliphate, the destruction of Israel, the banishing of foreigners from Islamic lands—are hardly mentioned in the book. It seems the president of the United States talks more about al-Qaida's goals than al-Qaida itself does. Rarely, if ever, do Bin Laden and Zawahiri discuss any specific social or political policy.

What al-Qaida does lay out, however, are grievances—many, many grievances. There is the usual litany of complaints about the suffering of Palestinians, the tyranny of Arab regimes, and the American occupation of Iraq. But again, legitimate as these complaints may be, there is in these writings an almost total lack of interest in providing any specific solution or policy to address them. Indeed, al-Qaida's many grievances against the West are so heterogeneous, so mind-bogglingly unfocused, that they must be recognized less as grievances per se, than as popular causes to rally around. There are protests about the United Nations' rejection of Zimbabwe's elections, the Bush administration's unwillingness to sign up to the International Criminal Court, and America's role in global warming. (To quote Bin Laden: "You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases, more than any other country. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.") Zawahiri's many complaints include the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, which he calls "a historical embarrassment to America and its values," as well as the United Kingdom's anti-terrorism laws, which "contradict the most basic principles of fair trial." There is even a screed against America's campaign-finance laws, which, according to Bin Laden, currently favor "the rich and wealthy, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts."

Most Americans would agree with many of these complaints. And that's precisely the point. These are not real grievances for al-Qaida (it does not bear mentioning that Bin Laden is probably not very concerned with campaign finance reform). They are a means of weaving local and global resentments into a single anti-American narrative, the overarching aim of which is to form a collective identity across borders and nationalities, and to convince the world that it is locked in a cosmic contest between the forces of Truth and Falsehood, Belief and Unbelief, Good and Evil, Us and Them.

In this regard, al-Qaida has been spectacularly successful, thanks in no small part to the assistance of the divisive "Clash of Civilizations" mentality of our own politicians. In fact, far from debunking al-Qaida's twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive "us vs. them" rhetoric.

Ultimately Aslan came to the same conclusion Wright did:

Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida's.

Keep this in mind next time some talking head tries to sell you on Al Qaeda's quest for a new Caliphate. Far from thwarting Al Qaeda, these pundits, through their rhetoric, are giving Al Qaeda exactly what it wants.

I'm Back (with some Comm'r Copps Content)

2007-08-06T08:37:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the lengthy absence. Certain other events were occupying my time... Posts here will probably continue to be infrequent for the foreseeable future, but there shouldn't be any more month-long gaps.

Anyway, having helped build his broadband policy arsenal last year, I'm always happy to point out when FCC Commissioner Michael Copps goes on the broadband policy warpath as he did this past week at the YearlyKos convention. Slashdot coverage here. Matthew Yglesias discusses it here (and the happy former Copps intern in the comments section isn't me). I have to disagree with Yglesias's comment that Copps is not a good speaker. He may not be the most captivating speaker, but he writes some very good speeches and delivers them effectively. I won't argue the point about his jokes, however. It is nice to see that media and telecom issues have a big following at YearlyKos. It's important stuff, although, as Yglesias notes, somewhat obscure. Let's hope that after the 2008 election Copps will have the power to do more than climb up on a soapbox about these issues.

As a random aside, I also wanted to link to an interesting column on Slate, co-written by UVA professor Jim Ryan, on Clarence Thomas's sincerity as an originalist. Both Scalia and Thomas have struck me as less principled and more political of late...

Another Round of Net Neutrality

2007-06-30T00:11:00.001-04:00

The Bush administration has fired its latest salvo on net neutrality, with an in-depth report by the FTC (actual report here). Their conclusion: let's wait and see. It's a 170 page report and covers a lot of ground. I can hardly respond to everything in it, but I would like to make a few comments.

First, the FTC does a solid job of covering the arguments in favor of net neutrality (pages 56-64). They didn't make any effort to soft-peddle the substantive arguments or build the strawman positions many net neutrality critics are so fond of. Most significantly they covered the concern that prioritization of ISP-provided content and other specially licensed preferred content would tend to recreate the walled gardens of the pre-Internet America Online and Prodigy days. They discussed the problem that lack of competition in the last mile makes the market an unreliable regulator of ISP behavior. Also they noted the argument that increasing bandwidth (say to 100 Mb/s) could make the issue of congestion largely disappear (and concerns over net neutrality with it).

The report also summarizes arguments against net neutraity (pages 64-69). Most of them are, I think, pretty weak. They raise the usual point about the necessity of non-neutrality to deal with small numbers of users sucking down large amounts of network resources for filesharing and the like. This really has little to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is about ISP's throttling the content end of the connection, not the user end. Even under most proposed neutrality regimes ISP's would be free to throttle users (within the terms of their service agreements) when users abuse the network. They also raise the point that different types of data (web pages versus VOIP versus streaming video) may need different service levels. This again, as I pointed out in my last net neutrality post, is not prohibited by net neutrality. It's ok to give VOIP traffic higher priority than web traffic, as long as no particular VOIP provider is preferenced over another.

The net neutrality opponents argue that net neutrality is necessary to allow service providers to capture enough revenue to fund the buildout of faster networks needed for advanced services. This seems facially plausible, but breaks down on further analysis. First, if what the ISP's want is a metering system, so that the users of advanced services bear more of the cost, there is nothing to stop them from simply offering those capabilities directly to end users for a price. Already some providers offer multiple tiers of internet service. Additionally, the net neutrality model doesn't appear to be one well suited to driving growth in network capacity. Non-neutrality revenue is built on bandwidth scarcity. If bandwidth isn't scarce, no content provider pays an ISP for preferred service. I find it hard to believe that if ISP's start to have significant new revenue streams coming in predicated on the scarcity of their network resources, they would turn around and invest that income in expanding their network resources and thereby undercut their new revenue model. In a non-neutral market it pays to under-supply bandwidth.

Finally, perhaps the most critical topic of discussion is the state of competition in broadband internet service (starts on page 98). If internet service was truly a competitive market, there would be no need for net neutrality regulation, as consumer demand could sufficiently regulate the market to prevent abuse by ISP's.

The report starts off by noting how much broadband prices have fallen and how much speed has increased in the last six or seven years. Certainly it's true that this has happened, but it needs to be put into perspective. This is, of course, a business built on technology that is improving at remarkable rates. Look at how much PC's have advanced in the past decade, how much faster the processors are, how much more RAM they have, how much more harddrive capacity, how much better video processing, and how much prices have fallen. By comparison, the rate of change in broadband internet service is glacial. Or you could compare cost and speed improvements in broadband service in the US with broadband services in Japan or Korea or France, where, on a price/performance basis, we've been left in the dust. Yes, the market is improving, but it would be an appalling failure if it didn't, and the rate at which it is improving does not bode well for the state of competition in the broadband market.

The other key point on competition is the matter of new entrants to cover the "last mile". Opponents of net neutrality argue that the cable/phone company duopoly is being challenge by other service providers using satellite, broadband over powerlines (BPL), or wireless systems. Each of these technologies, unfortunately, faces crucial barriers. Satellite is cursed with poor latency. As fast as the speed of light is, bouncing a signal off a satellite down to a receiving station, then back up to the satellite and back down to the user takes time, enough time to make satellite unusable for most interactive advanced services. BPL simply doesn't appear to be making the cut in terms of cost of deployment and performance level to entice many power companies to want to try rolling it out. It simply isn't going to have the cost/performance ratio to make it competitive with cable or DSL any time in the near future (if ever). For wireless the challenge is spectrum. Wireless will be highly competitive in the market for internet service at speeds of 10 Mb/s or less. But it does not appear that there is enough spectrum for widespread use at speeds much greater than that. As people become more accustomed to high speed cable/DSL/fiber service they will find wireless insufficient for standard residential use (and for most uses that implicate net neutrality concerns). Cable and DSL can provide speeds in the 30 Mb/s range (although no US providers offer this at present), and fiber will go up to 100 Mb/s. I'm afraid we are going to be stuck with a duopoly for some time. The market is not going to bail us out of this mess (although it could if federal regulators forced the cable and phone companies to open up their last mile networks to other competitors).

Liberalism, the State, and Free Markets

2007-06-24T12:06:00.001-04:00

I promised last week to eventually to get to the discussion of Rorty and Rawls. For various reasons, I've decided I'd rather not. But if anyone wants to read the discussion on their own, it goes something like this: Yglesias, Linker, Yglesias, Linker, Sullivan, Douthat.

Also, before getting to my main topic, and because it tangentially relates to that topic, I'd like to throw this in. Christopher Hayes has a column on the merits of bureaucracy and the fine people who inhabit our federal bureaucracy. If you look into the details of the DoJ scandal, it's hard to be as dismissive as Hayes about the lasting impact of the Bush administration on the bureaucracy, but he makes good points nonetheless. An excerpt:

It's slander with a long pedigree--Cicero called the bureaucrat "the most despicable" of men, "petty, dull, almost witless...a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog"--but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that "the government" is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It's far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves. Milton Friedman quipped that "hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned"; Ronald Reagan said in 1966 that "the best minds are not in government" because if any were, "business would hire them away"; and George Wallace expressed his desire to "take those bearded bureaucrats" in Washington who were in the process of desegregating the South, "and throw them in the Potomac."

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

...

But the moral of the Comey story specifically, and of the failures of the Bush Administration more broadly, is the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That's why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

So, anyway, on to the main course. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has a blog post excerpting from a lengthy article by Stephen Holmes in the American Prospect (from a few years back) on the views of classic liberals on the role of government. The basic gist of the excerpts is that the liberal ideals of individual rights and free markets are tied inextricably to the existence of a strong state to protect them. It very much reminds me of my previous discussion with Henry on libertarian paternalism and Rawls where I wrote:

This, in fact, has always been my biggest objection to libertarian theory. I simply cannot see how a libertarian state could ever remain so for any appreciable length of time. The initial structure of the government will not bind it in libertarian form, even if you had a constitution without amendment procedures. It was not a constitutional amendment that allowed the development of the administrative state in the US, but judicial interpretation. And it wasn't just uppity judges responsible for that (although I'm not sure it would be significant to my argument even if it were), but intense political pressure placed on them by political branches motivated by quite serious concerns about social stability and unrest (and rising socialist sentiment). Whether it's a Great Depression and populist outrage or rent-seeking businesses and other economically powerful interests, a state will always be subject to pressures (of varying intensities) to do non-libertarian things. The state will always have the power to do those things; it is inherent in being a state. That power cannot be ignored, and there is no structural way to make it go away. It just sits there begging to be used.

I have a strong suspicion that some of the policies necessary to keep those pressures at bay (to the greatest degree possible) are themselves non-libertarian (e.g. some level of redistributive tax policy and regulation of finances and political speech, etc.). In the end, I tend to believe that our rights (which may or may not be limited only to life, liberty, and property) are likely best protected by a state that overtly recognizes the threat of instability and subversion of state power and is structured to best address that threat, even if that structure is not a strictly libertarian one. The state may need to be more powerful and far reaching than a night watchman state in order to be a stable, free-standing system. What good is the night watchman if it ends up being overthrown by communists or turning into a plutocracy?

Tying in to the Hayes column: a robust state can be less prone to abuse and authoritarianism than a more easily captured minimal state.

One of the fundamental premises of Rawls's political liberalism is that the point of a liberal state is to create a platform for social cooperation that is the prerequisite for everyone to share in the benefits of, among other things, free markets. Libertarians suppose that you can rip away the institutions that result from this political compromise while still gaining the benefits they are meant to provide. This seems to miss something fundamental about human nature and social interaction.

Political compromise is necessary to create stable institutions, and stable institutions are necessary to enforce the rules of the market (e.g. to protect property rights, enforce contracts, settle disputes, and police fraud). Institutions that are not broadly considered legitimate will, as Rawls argues, be subject to instability, as each faction that even briefly manages to achieve power will attempt to tear down illegitimate institutions and replace them with institutions of their own preference.

So it becomes important to try to determine how people assess legitimacy. Rawls suggests fairness as a crucial benchmark. That seems to have a lot of merit. We've had Boys Weekend discussions on the topic before, noting psychological studies to the effect that people are willing to sacrifice their own benefit in order to enforce a system of fairness, even when there will be no opportunity for direct reciprocity. (I thought it interesting to see recently that humans are not alone in this behavior.) This suggests that even if a libertarian institution is quantitatively superior to some non-libertarian institution it might still be regarded as less legitimate if it produces outcomes that are perceived to be unfair.

Returning then to Dani Rodrik. Rodrik's main specialty is economic globalization. He argues that globalization promoters have been shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring populist complaints about trade unfairness, countering these arguments only with statements of the quantifiable benefits of more trade. Economists too often ignore procedural fairness in favor of simple economic gain. Regular people tend towards the opposite. Rodrik argues that domestic political perceptions of the globalization process are the key to further progress on trade. In other words, to create the social platform for cooperation necessary for global markets to expand we will require a more robust social safety net to remedy distributional unfairness and create perceived legitimacy for the whole endeavor. Otherwise the social compromise on which economic globalism is built collapses into a morass of protectionism. The market can only go as far as the state can carry it.

UPDATE (6/25): Rodrik posted again today with further evidence for his thesis on globalization. He cites a recent academic paper studying a survey of people from 18 countries that found an inverse relationship between the size of the state (measured by percentage of GDP) and preferences for protectionism. Rodrik quotes from the paper:

Our results provide microeconomic evidence consistent with the long-standing argument that the state and the market are in fact complementary. Openness and globalization can introduce uncertainty into peoples’ lives, and this additional risk can lead some people to oppose trade. Government expenditure can help to reduce this risk, and thus shore up support for open markets. It would seem that the ‘grand bargain’ that was embedded liberalism is politically effective.

Lessig Takes on the Political Process

2007-06-22T01:12:00.001-04:00

After spending the past decade redefining the academic landscape on intellectual property rights and driving forward the debate on law and technology, Larry Lessig has decided to move on to something new. His new project: to figure out why our political process doesn't work and try to fix it.

In Lessig's most reknowned case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, he argued to the Supreme Court that it made no sense for Congress to retroactively extend the duration of copyrights for works already in existence. You can't provide incentives, he argued, for someone to do something they've already done. He was, of course, absolutely right, but the Supreme Court decided it was Congress's call to make, not theirs. So now Lessig has turned his attention back to Congress, to figure out why it would create policy so obviously wrong. Lessig writes:

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

More recently Lessig has been one of the key advocates for net neutrality, where much the same forces are at work. He notes that "our government can't understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding." So Lessig has decided to dedicate his next decade to trying to crack this problem.

Obviously it's a big problem, and, as Lessig acknowledges, he's hardly the first person to take it on. But I'm excited to see him try. While Lessig has largely won the battle on copyrights and technology as far as the academic debate goes, his work there has had few tangible results in our legal framework. This seems the obvious next step. If he can accomplish half as much in his new endeavor as he did in law and technology, it will be a great win for us all. I wish him the best of luck.

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Wannabe Terrorists and the Bush Administration

2007-06-21T00:11:00.001-04:00

Security guru Bruce Schneier has an exceedingly well-sourced blog post (also a Wired article) on how the Bush administration has trumped up various post-9/11 terrorist plots in service of security programs that had nothing to do with the apprehension of the plotters. He argues, in effect, that the aspiring terrorists and the administration have a shared interest in terrifying Americans. In reality these terrorist threats were not so terribly terrifying, and all were thwarted through old-fashioned police work, the sort that the Bush administration has worked tirelessly to convince us is no longer adequate in the post-9/11 era. Schneier's no nonsense approach to security, as evidenced in this post, illustrates just how vulnerable Republicans should be on security in 2008, if the Democrats have the good sense to call them on it. Anyone who wants to formulate a sensible, reality-based security policy should spend some time on his site. It's full of gems like this one.

Another Bad Day for AG Gonzales (Or "The RNC Ate My Homework")

2007-06-19T06:59:00.002-04:00

I had been wondering what had happened to the congressional investigation into the RNC email accounts that had begun in the midst of the US. Attorney purge. Yesterday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released this interim report (pdf). Some of the highlights:

The Committee concluded that considerably more White House officials had received RNC email accounts than the White House had previously disclosed. White House spokesperson Dana Perino initially reported that there were only a "handful" of these accounts, and later clarified that there may have been as many as 50. The Oversight Committee found that there were at least 88.
Karl Rove made extensive use of his RNC account, sending or receiving 140,216 emails. He and others used these accounts for official purposes, in violation of White House policy--and, more importantly, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the President to "take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records." 44 U.S.C. § 2203(a).
Susan Ralston, former special assistant to the President, was deposed on May 10, 2007. She testified (pdf) that the White House Counsel's Office (at that time run by none other than Alberto Gonzales) received RNC emails as part of its investigations into the Energy Task Force in 2001 and the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. According to the Oversight Committee, "if her testimony is accurate, former White House Counsel Gonzales may have been aware in 2001 that Mr. Rove was using RNC e-mail accounts for official communications. Yet is was not until six years later that the White House" instructed the RNC to preserve the emails in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

Could this be the end for the Attorney General, or another miraculous display of his survival skills? Stay tuned ...

A Memorial

2007-06-17T13:30:00.000-04:00

For my Grandpa Martin.

From Kanakakee's The Daily Journal:

Grandpa's passing was the lead story in the Daily Journal last Monday. They also ran this obituary, and in today's paper the following column by senior editor Phil Angelo:

A life well lived

"Shakey" Martin had been in politics so long that most people in Kankakee County never learned how he got his nickname.

Back in 1939, Martin was a star guard on the Bradley High School basketball team that became the first team from any Kankakee County school to make it to state. He made the buzzer-beater shot, too, that won the sectionals.

Martin's class went 33-2 as juniors and 32-3 as seniors. Martin would dribble the ball up, weaving and bobbing like a penguin scrambling through a jagged ice field, it was said.

So teammates Lavern Hahs, Bob Martin, Harvey Hackley and Joe Dominick took to calling him "Shakey."

The name stuck.

"Shakey," 84, died last Sunday.

He was, by turns, a great athlete, a successful businessman, a community leader, and an elected Democrat who was never afraid to march against the grain -- if he thought he was right.

Shakey was an easy person to cover because he did a couple of things rare in Kankakee County politics. He would stand up and speak his mind. Piles of Journal clips, over and over, quote him on many issues. You never had much doubt where he stood.

And he would call over at The Daily Journal and say he was stopping in. Loaded with documents, he would make his point, communicating with the reporters, and through the reporters, with the public.

Some politicians, sad to say, show up only to complain. Not Shakey. He showed up with ideas.

He represented, too, a viewpoint not often seen in politics these days. He was a conservative Democrat, devoted to making sure that no county dollar was wasted. He always did his research before making up his mind. Once he decided what was fair, he stuck by it. Two decisions, from 1976, tell you a lot about his political philosophy.

In November of that year, he cast the only county board vote, Democrat or Republican, against giving a raise to the county board chairman. One month later, he was one of only four votes to give larger raises to county employees.

"Can you honestly say, without knowing what these people make, that we are paying them fairly?" Shakey said. Yet Shakey, too, would not spend dollars he though the government didn't have. He was on the BBCHS school board at a time when the teachers struck, seeking money Shakey thought the board couldn't afford to spend.

Winning a popularity contest always came second, in his mind, to doing what was right. In 1976, he took an unsuccessful stab at running for state representative. His positions, listed at the time in a Journal story: for gun control; against legalized gambling; for capital punishment; and against the ERA. Try finding a Democrat who would vote that way today.

Funneling tax dollars needlessly was never a Shakey priority. He once praised then coroner Wes Wiseman when Wiseman offered to cut his own pay (the measure failed) and called pay for top administrators in the county health department "ridiculous."

Yet it's a measure of his courage and integrity that when Kankakee County Democrats were in the rare majority for them from 1998 to 2000, Shakey was the county board chairman. In recent years, too, he led the fight on the county board against the giant landfills for Chicago trash.

All told, Martin spent 34 years on the Kankakee County Board. He spent four years as Bourbonnais Township assessor and three terms on the Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School Board.

For more than 40 years, he was the co-owner of Skelgas. He had returned from World War II as an Army veteran, taking up the family coal delivery business.

The lifetime Bradleyan was a joiner by nature. He helped found the Bradley Lions Club in 1949 and was the club's oldest charter member at a recent celebration. At age 80, he was still chairman of the Lions golf outing. He was the greeter at Bradley St. Joe's Catholic Church and president, at times, of both the St. Joe Holy Name and the St. Joe parish board.

He was a member of the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, the Moose, the American Legion and the VFW. He golfed, played bridge and would dance with his wife at the Moose Lodge. He was always ready with a handshake and a smile, completely unafraid to take his turn when it was time for him to volunteer.

He raised money for the Red Cross, the March of Dimes and the United Way. He was a great father, and excelled at what is a tougher role in today's world, being a great stepfather, too.

It's hard to imagine anyone who lived a fuller life, or anyone who was more tightly wound into the fabric of his community than Shakey was.

Professionally, he'll be missed.

Personally, he'll be missed, too.

It is fashionable these days to attack and degrade politicians, elected officials, and public servants, and more broadly the whole endeavor of politics, as corrupt, dirty, or meaningless. But Grandpa Martin and my dad will always stand as proud examples to me of how ennobling and fulfilling public service should be. America is what it is because all across this nation innumerable men and women of good will see it as worthwhile to do their part. I do not sit by quietly when I see their efforts and their sacrifices demeaned. Grandpa was a man I admired greatly, and I'd like to think that in some respect we're continuing to carry on his tradition here. It would be hard to find a better role model. I'll miss him.

Political Liberalism

2007-06-16T09:49:00.001-04:00

A week ago a philosopher named Richard Rorty passed away. I had never heard of Rorty, but his passing prompted a round of discussion between New Republic writer Damon Linker and Atlantic bloggers Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan. Certainly any discussion that involves 3 of the Atlantic's 5 bloggers is likely to catch my attention, but particularly one that involves John Rawls's concept of political liberalism as heavily as this one did. Hank and I had some discussion of Rawls here last winter, but we focused on his two principles of justice rather than the general concept of political liberalism. I thought this might be a good chance to discuss it a bit. I find it to be highly relevent in contemporary politics. Whether or not Sullivan would admit to being a Rawlsian (probably not), there is a strong strain of Rawlsian political liberalism in comments like this one:

Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That's why we mercifully don't have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices.

And when Barack Obama made his highly regarded speech on politics and religion last summer (video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) he went directly to Rawls's playbook for this:

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Rawls first gained notoriety from his book A Theory of Justice. In it Rawls attempted to develop a comprehensive political philosophy. He developed from first principles a full system of political justice and fairness resulting in a well-ordered society. But this required Rawls to make many philosophical commitments along the way. In defending A Theory of Justice from its critics (and there were many) over the next decade or so Rawls came to the conclusion that it was unrealistic to believe that any such comprehensive theory would capture the public imagination such that everyone would adopt it. This was particularly so when he considered that his theory was in competition with other comprehensive theories, namely religions, to which people tend to be quite attached. People had too many existing philosophical commitments.

So Rawls decided that a comprehensive approach to political philosophy wasn't particularly fruitful. What was needed was a way to reconcile the many existing and competing comprehensive theories already present in our society into a workable political theory. This motivated his second major book: Political Liberalism. The goal was no longer to try to establish his theory of justice as being true, but rather to make it a focal point of social agreement among a pluralistic mish-mash of comprehensive philosophies.

Rawls presents a long and fairly complicated theory in Political Liberalism and I won't attempt to sum it all up here. But there are two points I'd like to pull out:

First, Rawls sets a baseline for the participation of any comprehensive philosophy in a pluralistic democracy. Rawls requires that all must be reasonable. He defines reasonable to mean that they a) be willing to abide by rules of fair cooperation as long as others do the same, and b) that they accept Rawls's concept of "the burdens of judgment". The burdens of judgment reflect the fact that on deep philosophical questions (the focus of comprehensive doctrines) our evidence is complex and conflicting, weighting is difficult, many concepts are vague, there is much reliance on life experience and competing normative considerations. So we should expect different conclusions about what makes life good even from perfectly rational and reasonable people. Any comprehensive philosophy that cannot accept this uncertainty, that insists that only its conclusions can be true, is one that cannot peacefully exist in a pluralistic democracy. This is what Sullivan is talking about in the excerpt above (and in much of his book from what I gather). It's a simple concept, but one that went out of fashion with the rise of the religious political right, and is only now making a comeback.

The next point relates to part (a) above. As one of the rules of fair cooperation that Rawls suggests any comprehensive philosophy compatible with pluralistic democracy needs to accept, Rawls proposes public reason. Public reason is a way of talking about political issues in a language that everyone can understand. Obama's excerpt above pulls directly from Rawls's thoughts on public reason. Political actions must be taken for reasons that everyone (regardless of respective comprehensive beliefs) can see as legitimate, even if not everyone agrees on them. Actions motivated purely by artifacts of one comprehensive doctrine will not be seen as legitimate by supporters of other comprehensive doctrines. So, as Obama says, if you want to take such ideas into the public sphere they need to be reseated in principles more broadly accessible to everyone; simply citing chapter and verse of the Bible isn't good enough. Rawls argues that any argument that assumes that the listener shares the same comprehensive doctrine as the speaker (or should convert to the same doctrine) fails to respect the burdens of judgment and is an argument inappropriate for public politics in a pluralistic democracy.

Next time I hope to discuss the bloggers' discussion of Rawls and Rorty...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2007-06-13T15:41:00.001-04:00

Yeah, it's a lot like that. Courtesy of the Virginia Libel Show.

The 99.9 Percent

2007-06-10T10:25:00.001-04:00

Bill Clinton's brilliant Harvard commencement speech: Part I, Part II, Part III. He hasn't lost his touch...

Blocking Innovation

2007-06-09T14:07:00.001-04:00

As Vonage and Verizon having been battling in court since early this year over Verizon's claims of having patented some faily obvious elements of VoIP used by Vonage, software patents have again fallen under scrutiny. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has an OpEd in the New York Times arguing against software patents. He quotes Bill Gates writing in 1991 that if early computer pioneers had understood how to patent their works "the industry would be at a standstill today."

Software has always seemed poorly suited to patents for a number of reasons. Most of what software does is fairly obvious. The really innovative stuff tends to fall into either broad conceptual ideas (like the web) that would be inappropriate for patents or clever algorithms (like quicksort) that are basically mathematical discoveries, abstract intellectual concepts of the sort not traditionally patentable. The rest of it, however complex and difficult, tends to be fairly mundane implementation, requiring little originality (but often a huge effort in coordination).

Existing patent law, in theory, should prevent unoriginal things from being patented. But in reality it does not seem to do a good job of this, particularly in the initial granting of patents. And even if questionable patents can still be challenged and overturned in court, this is a remedy of limited value to small developers and open source projects. Going up against Microsoft or IBM's legal team is often an insurmountable barrier to entry. And both patent examiners and judges appear to struggle with the concepts of computer science in their efforts to determine what is or is not an obvious development. As the OpEd points out, two of Verizon's patents in this case cover the painfully obvious concept of converting between phone numbers and internet addresses.

From the economic analysis side as well, software development is ill-suited to patents. For one, there is, as the OpEd discusses, alternative protection available for software developers in the form of copyrights. Any direct copying already gives rise to a legal claim. And copyright is, as the article notes, considerably less cumbersome and expensive. Also crucial, copyright does not create liability for independent invention, while patent does. So if Verizon has valid patents on basic elements of VoIP they can bar anyone else from offering a VoIP service until those patents expire. With a copyright they could only prevent people from actually copying their system, but they would have no claim against a competitor who developed their own, even if it worked the same way.

It is important to recall the purpose of intellectual property protections: to allow inventors and developers to profit from their investments in new technologies and innovations, thereby promoting more such investments. The need for strong protection is much lower in the software space than for, say, pharmaceuticals. Development costs are relatively low and innovation occurs rapidly enough in software that there is a significant first-mover advantage even without patent protections. As long as competitors cannot rip off a new program wholesale (which copyright prevents) and have to independently develop their own version, the first innovator will be rewarded for her efforts. Look at how YouTube still dominates over other video-sharing systems. Some of its competitors are offering technically superior systems, but YouTube got there first. The software market, before these big companies realized they could patent everything under the sun, was wildly innovative and fiercely competitive. They didn't need patents to achieve that. Patents impose signicant transactional costs and barriers to entry without adding any meaningful beneficial incentives to the software business. This system is a mess, and I hope the Verizon case will help to spark reform.

Morning In America?

2007-06-06T01:56:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure exactly how to introduce this Newsweek column from Fareed Zakaria, but I know that it is a hugely important commentary. I can't emphasize that enough. I also can say that it very much underscores my support for Barack Obama. If you didn't read Obama's foreign policy speech when I linked it before, read it (or watch the video) after you read Zakaria's piece.

There is a strong tendency on the left right now, not without justification, to want to attack and tear down everything the Bush administration has done on foreign policy, even without necessarily having a vision of what will replace it. And there is an equally strong urge, I think, on both sides of the aisle to pull back from world affairs, having been so badly burned in recent years with our mission in Iraq in shambles, with Afghanistan beset with difficulties, with economic globalism causing domestic turmoil, with public opinion of the US heading south all around the globe. These are understandable instincts, but completely wrong.

The US needs continue to be bold and aggressive on the world stage, but in a very different way than it has been in the Bush era. We need the humility to recognize that the US cannot achieve its goals alone and that the US cannot force its will upon the global community, but we also need to recognize that the world cannot move forward on its major challenges without decisive American leadership. We need to restore the image of American idealism and optimism and hope. We've seen what comes of trying to lead through bullying and stubbornness. It should be apparent at this point that our global leadership will only be effective when people want to follow us. So we must present an image that inspires.

The politics of fear have wounded us badly. Fear debilitates and diminishes us. We need to realize how truly strong America is, and that as big as the challenges facing us are, as long as America holds true to its founding ideals there are no challenges that we cannot face and overcome. As Zakaria argues, this is the message the world needs to hear, but I think it is also the message Americans need to hear. We need to restore our own pride in who and what we are before we can expect anyone else to believe in us. We need to be unafraid to engage the world, to open ourselves and our ideas up to the world, to trust in our inherent strength to overcome criticism and meet challenges even though it may be a long and difficult road.

Too many liberals, seeing how Bush has weakened the Republicans, smell blood in the water and see this as the moment to finally crush the Republicans under their heels. Tempting as that may be, I think we cannot afford to press too far along partisan lines. This is the moment, while there is a pervasive feeling that Bush has taken us in the wrong direction, when we need to build concensus, to capitalize on that sentiment to forge a broad new agreement about who and what we are and what America should represent to the world. I think Barack Obama gets all this (although I hope I'm not just projecting my hopes onto him). I don't think any other candidate in the race does.

It's A Long Time Until the Primaries

2007-06-04T00:59:00.001-04:00

But I watched some of the Democratic debate tonight. A few thoughts:

This was not the best venue for Barak Obama. He was pretty good substantively (although he went a bit overboard in his focus on pursuing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan), but his answers, particularly early on, were not as smooth or strong as they should be. It is a bit surprising to me since the first time I saw Obama was in a televised debate for the Illinois senate primary. Obama was not one of the favored candidates in the race (and I had never even heard of him prior to tuning in), but he blew everyone else off the stage. He can do better than he did tonight, although it would be difficult to ever match the eloquence of his speeches in a debate format.

Hillary Clinton did a fine job. Most of what she had to say on Iraq and terrorism was moronic, but that was hardly unexpected. Her answers on everything else were strong, and she did a great job calling out Wolf Blitzer several times for asking unfair questions. Her performance has given me some confidence that she could win the general election, but I still worry about whether she would actually make a good president if she won.

There are moments when I really like John Edwards. At his best he can be the most honest and serious of all the Democratic candidates, but too often he panders directly to the DailyKos brand of hardline liberalism. And on a superficial level he doesn't carry the same level of gravitas that Clinton and Obama do. This is a significant problem in its own right, but especially so for someone whose degree of liberalism will leave him open to attacks on national security and terrorism. He can't afford to come off as a lightweight. But in any case, I was quite happy with what I saw from Obama, Clinton, and Edwards as a group. Any of them would make a much stronger general election candidate than Kerry was in 2004.

As for the rest, while none of them have a snowball's chance in hell, Joe Biden did a nice job and I'm happy to have him up there speaking his part. The others were mostly a waste of airtime. Richardson has gotten some press as being someone who could break into the top tier, but he might have been the weakest of the lot (which is saying something with Gravel and Kucinich out there). Hopefully the pack will start to thin out so that the main contenders can get more time at future events (although I expect Gravel and Kucinich will annoyingly hold out until the bitter end just to enjoy the free airtime).

Public Relations as Diplomacy

2007-05-31T19:27:00.001-04:00

Here's another data point to add to my alternate reality post from the weekend. Price Floyd, a long-time State Department employee has written a column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about why he recently resigned from his position as the State Department's director of media affairs. He argues that his job was made impossible by the insistence of the Bush administration that they could do whatever they wanted in international affairs as long as they got the PR right. The State Department's job was no longer to conduct diplomacy, but rather to sell the message. Reality didn't matter, symbolism was the only focus. The only result, Floyd says, was that people now view America's messages as meaningless propaganda. Slate's Fred Kaplan comments here. It reminds me, once again, how completely on the money the Defense Science Board's terrorism report was back in 2004 (blogged on BWJ here) when they wrote:

Policies, diplomacy, military operations, and strategic communication should not be managed separately. Good strategic communication cannot build support for policies viewed unfavorably by large populations. Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks credibility and underlying message authority.
...

Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource. Power flows to credible messengers. Asymmetrical credibility matters. What's around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Editors, filters, and cue givers are influential. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility.

Too bad no one listened to them...

Our First Line of Defense Against Terrorism

2007-05-31T13:26:00.001-04:00

An update to my post about James Fallows's Atlantic article, Declaring Victory, from late last summer. There Fallows argued, convincingly, that the primary threat of terrorism today is not international terrorist networks, but disaffected local Muslims like those that bombed London and rioted across Europe last year. Muslims in the US, as opposed to those in Europe, Fallows claimed, were highly assimilated and as such provided the US with a significant security buffer. Today the Christian Science Monitor editorialized on a Pew study of American Muslims that echoed Fallows's point, finding US Muslims to be "highly assimilated". CSM argued that the US must be careful to cultivate this identification of its Muslim population with the US and take care not to allow our public rhetoric to alienate young Muslims. I concur fully and hope that our politicians take note of this warning as the 2008 elections heat up. As it stands our Muslim residents are our greatest asset in the war on terrorism and a resource we cannot afford to squander.

Update: Speak of the devil, Fallows himself blogged a few comments on the Pew study today. And what's that at the bottom?? :)

Why The Atlantic Kicks Ass

2007-05-27T15:46:00.001-04:00

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made big news this week by publicizing prewar analysis from US intelligence agencies predicting the difficulties that we would have in Iraq. These reports were buried by the administration in their push for war. For many this was just one more stunning revelation of the recklessness and dishonesty of the Bush administration. For readers of The Atlantic Monthly, however, it was old news. James Fallows reported on this in January of 2004, and I blogged it here in July of that year. Nice to see that the Senate is catching up. I shouldn't be snarky; this is a good thing. Now that Democrats control the agenda in the Senate they can finally drag some of these things out into the light of day, and they should. But in any case, I think kudos are in order to Fallows and The Atlantic.

Update: Apparently Andrew Sullivan is not an Atlantic reader. He was shocked and outraged by this new report. Excerpt:

Just to anger up the blood some more, it's now clear, thanks to the latest Congressional report, that this president was warned starkly about the dangers of "a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" as a result of an invasion of Iraq. He was told that Iraq was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" for democracy. He was explicitly informed that there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so." And yet he still sent a pathetically insufficient occupation force in 2003 - and refused to increase it for three years of growing chaos and mayhem. Even if you excuse the original recklessness, the persistence in it - until our current point of no return - is and was criminal negligence - a callous disregard for your security and mine.

The gravity of the mistake this country made in 2004 by re-electing al Qaeda's best bet is only now sinking in as deep as it should. I fear, however, that we have yet to experience the full and terrifying consequences of that historic mistake.

We All Want Out of Iraq...

2007-05-27T00:40:00.001-04:00

...but we can't shirk our responsibilities.

I'm going to stick with Matthew Yglesias (who I've been reading quite a bit of since The Atlantic picked him up as one of their regular bloggers), although many people have expressed similar sentiments about the Iraq funding bill, particularly at the major liberal blog sites. Yglesias was disappointed that Democrats didn't fight on the funding bill to the bitter end. I dissent. I was hugely critical of the Democratic votes in favor of the original Iraq war authorization bill, and my bitterness on that front has not receded a bit these past five years. But I think that Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done with this funding bill. They fought a good fight in the public eye, passing a bill with benchmarks and defending it in the media although it was doomed to be vetoed from the start. They forced Republican congressmen to stand up and publicly support the president's policy in Iraq (a stand many of them will regret next year). They pushed the president to negotiate with them, and were rebuffed. He was not going to negotiate. And if we have learned anything about George Bush, we should know that he would not have backed down, regardless of what the Democrats did. They simply didn't have the votes to overcome a veto, and everyone knew it. That left them with but two options: capitulate or defund the Iraq war.

I want out of Iraq as much as anyone, but I would not have us abandon our responsibilities there. A precipitous and complete withdrawal is just not an option. Extricating ourselves from this mess will be a delicate operation. I believe we need to get our troops out soon, because as far as I can tell all they are accomplishing is to maintain a miserable status quo. Our presence is inhibiting any progress by the Iraqis and preventing the situation from evolving. But I have no confidence with respect to what happens when we leave. Things could move in any direction from there. Some of what might happen (and here I have visions of Rwanda) would be utterly intolerable. If we see things proceeding in that direction I feel that we will be obligated to bring the troops back in to put a lid on things and try again. Even if it costs us, even if we don't have a clear path to success. We have a responsibility, an obligation to the Iraqi people that I hope we do not forsake. We will need to be careful with our withdrawal and keep sufficient force in the region to react to events as needed. We will need to maneuver deftly to retain enough influence in Iraq to nudge things in the right direction without appearing to interfere. Defunding the Iraq war will not accomplish that. What we need is open heart surgery, and the only tool the Democratic Congress had was a sledgehammer.

This means, of course, that we will have to continue to live with Bush's management of the war for the time being. So be it. Elections have consequences, and the American people voted for the war in the 2002 midterm election and ratified that decision when they reelected George Bush in 2004. Last year's midterm doesn't erase all that. Now we're stuck with the president we have. Maybe over the next year enough Republican congressmen will defect to allow Congress to force a responsible withdrawal on Bush. If so, great. If not, then we just have to live with him until we can get a president who can deal with this conflict like an adult. The hardline "bring the troops home now" positions I see on so many liberal blogs these days are no more responsible than the policies Bush is pursuing in Iraq today. It's no cause for celebration, but Democrats in Congress did what needed to be done, and I respect them for it.

The Alternate Reality of the Right

2007-05-26T23:55:00.001-04:00

In considering the "fighting them there so they won't come here" argument, Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious conflict between symbolism (retreating from Iraq makes us look weak) and reality (staying in Iraq causes us to actually be weak). He seems perplexed by the Right's tendency to "view national security policy as something that takes place entirely at the level of symbolism". This is, I think, not so difficult to understand. American conservatives live in an alternate reality, unable to distinguish between symbolism and reality. To them, symbolism is reality. If you listened to enough conservative radio and watched enough Fox News you'd live in that alternate reality too. Never was this more clearly illustrated than in Ron Suskind's famous discussion with an undisclosed White House official (Andrew Card, perhaps?) about how the Bush administration was in a constant process of creating its own reality. This was never a matter of the Bush administration being able to fundamentally alter the state of the world directly through their pronouncements and news releases, but rather an expression of the belief that if they can control news cycles and assert a concept of reality strenuously enough, everyone else would have little choice but to accept it as real, and the world would adjust itself to the White House's vision. It was Wag the Dog transformed from satire into official state policy. They could reshape reality through symbolism by convincing people that what they thought was true actually wasn't.

Obviously this doesn't work. There are too many competing sources of news and reality does eventually trickle in to displace this fictional presentation. The reality-based community inevitably gets the last laugh, as Suskind pointed out. This is why the administration and their supporters were always so furious about the media reporting on bloodshed in Iraq and missing the "good stories"; the media was deconstructing the administration's carefully constructed alternate reality.

But it's not hard to see why conservatives got suckered into this belief, and why they still can't seem to let go of it. Most conservative news sources are mere propaganda outlets. Witness the old Pew study finding that the more people watched Fox News the more likely they were to believe that we had found WMD's in Iraq or that Saddam was behind 9/11. Or this more recent Pew study that shows that while liberals see Republican presidential candidates in exactly the same way conservatives themselves view them, conservatives, by contrast, see all of the Democratic candidates as raving left-wing lunatics. American conservatives have replaced their own reality with symbolism, so why wouldn't it be natural for them to think the same is true for everyone else? Their own echo-chamber media has relegated them to a world that only exists in their own minds.

Al Gore and TV Culture

2007-05-23T19:48:00.001-04:00

I was deeply impressed with this excerpt from Al Gore's new book The Assault On Reason from Time Magazine. It's heavily Amusing Ourselves to Death influenced. It makes a half-hearted diversion into being an advocacy paper for net neutrality in the closing paragraphs, but that may just be an artifact of reformatting the book into excerpt form, because prior to that turn the excerpt appeared to have a rather grander design. I'll be curious to see reviews of the whole book. I think Gore diagnosed the problem pretty well here, and I surely hope net neutrality is not the entirety of his answer. I have to concur with Andrew Sullivan, I much prefer the new public intellectual version of Al Gore to the old political candidate version. I hope he doesn't let himself be dragged into the 2008 race.

Opening Up Cellular Networks

2007-05-23T19:05:00.001-04:00

Some time back we had a discussion here on the insistence of US cellular providers that wifi features on new phones be disabled before the phones were marketed in the US. In a column for Forbes, Tim Wu argues that the FCC should use the upcoming auction of wireless spectrum gained from the digital TV transition to enforce a right to attach rule. He notes that the exact same question was broached with respect to landline phone service in 1968, where the FCC ruled that AT&T must allow the Carterphone to interoperate with its system (a ruling the paved the way for the creation of MCI and the ultimate demise of AT&T's monopoly). The rule would force carriers who purchased spectrum in the auction to allow any device that conforms to basic specs to operate on their network, knocking down an immense barrier to entry for wireless device manufacturers. This is a good example of a pro-market regulation, carving out space for innovation and competition in an anticompetitive marketplace.

More Barack

2007-05-14T01:07:00.001-04:00

A great in-depth profile from the New Yorker. Not too surprising to see some quotes from fellow Chicago Law prof (and BWJ favorite) Cass Sunstein, but there's also some stuff in there from Robert Putnam, from whom Obama took a seminar based on Bowling Alone. And Sunstein even throws out a Rawls reference. It's a regular BWJ-fest. Here's some of the meaty stuff:

Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes. “In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this,” Robert Putnam says. (For a couple of years, Obama participated in a seminar about rebuilding community, inspired by Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone.”) “I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.”

Sometimes, of course, there is no possibility of convergence—a question must be answered yes or no. In such a case, Obama may stand up for what he believes in, or he may not. “If there’s a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I’m not at all sure he shares that view, but he’s not an in-your-face type,” Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago, says. “To go in the face of people with religious convictions—that’s something he’d be very reluctant to do.” This is not, Sunstein believes, due only to pragmatism; it also stems from a sense that there is something worthy of respect in a strong and widespread moral feeling, even if it’s wrong. “Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.”

Lectures

2007-05-14T01:05:00.000-04:00

A pretty cool web site.

Won't Someone Think of the Troops!?

2007-05-09T12:02:00.001-04:00

I've been busy with exams lately, so I've been sitting on several things I hope to blog at some point, but I just couldn't let this one pass by. Last night Newshour had a feature on the Iraq war funding bill (you can watch it here). The story featured a moderated discussion between activists Jon Solz and Melanie Morgan. It pretty much encapsulates the entire war funding discussion in its complete absurdity (really, it's surreal, you have to watch it). It called to mind this astute post from a month ago by the Cunning Realist noting that:

Normally, U.S. troops support and serve as instruments of U.S. policy, not the other way around. Of course these aren't normal times. Now, national policy in Iraq and elsewhere is fixed around "supporting the troops" -- who are no longer the means to an end, but an end in themselves in our budding "troopocracy."

The degree to which "the troops" have become a political football is fairly sickening. There is a name for a government where the army runs the show and generals call the shots: dictatorship. Here in the US we have a republic where elected civilians give the army its marching orders. Political leadership does not end when war begins. There exists no act more fully and completely political than war. And there is no greater need for democratic political leadership than in a time of war. Did Abraham Lincoln listen to his generals and support the troops? No, he fired the generals one after another, because he was the head of state and they weren't doing the job he needed them to do to effect his political objectives. Why bother with elected officials if they are too busy worshiping the troops to make sound policy decisions? And to the extent that our elected government owes a responsibility to our military, I should think that the responsibility starts and ends with this: to make smartest and most rational possible decisions regarding the use of military force in the service of our national good. And you can't do that when the entire political debate revolves around who most loves the troops...

Losing the Independent Press and the Price We Pay

2007-04-27T00:47:00.001-04:00

Bill Moyers made waves this week with his special report on the role of the press in the run up to the war in Iraq. His story dovetails nicely with PBS Frontline's ongoing series of reports on the state of the press. Both are available online, and well worth watching. I would start with with Part III of the Frontline series, followed by Moyers's Buying the War.

Moyers has few true revelations and little new information, but it is well worth going back and seeing how badly the press got this war wrong, and revisiting some of the more egregious false claims of the pundits. Those pundits, as Moyers points out, are alive and well in American journalism. Many have been promoted. No one has been called to account.

The Frontline report helps to illustrate why American journalism is failing. No one does real reporting anymore, save a few national newspapers, and even they are cutting back. The newspapers are still highly profitable, but their readership and their revenue is in steady decline, and so sacrifices must be made for them to maintain their high margins and keep the corporate overlords happy. This was very much my concern while researching the media ownership rules last summer. Maintaining the prohibition on TV-newspaper crossownership has long been a central goal of the Democrats with respect to the media ownership rules. While I certainly see the value in that policy, for me the financial well-being of our newspapers has to be the top concern. I'm frankly not sure whether they would be helped or hindered by relaxing the cross-ownership rule. But I think we have to be willing to try anything that might preserve our last bastions of actual journalism.

Of course, the Moyers piece illustrates that even when newspapers have the resources to perform serious research they can fail to use them when caught up in the political conventional wisdom (as was the case of the New York Times and the Washington Post with Iraq). The conventional wisdom is created in part by the efforts of political actors (the White House in particular), but also by the media itself when it parrots the lines fed to them by those political actors. When real journalism is a small slice of the news media universe it seems that it is easily cowed by the overwhelming majority of the press for whom statements issued by the White House define reality. There needs to be a critical mass of independent press for news outlets to gain the courage of numbers to be willing to take risks.

Neither of these two pieces paints the whole picture on its own, the business of the news and the politics of the press, but together I think they give us a good look at what has gone wrong. The newspapers have a long way to go before they can recoup their lost hard-copy profits through their online presence. Given how much the internet has shaken up other industries, it's not clear they ever will. If they don't we can look forward to further setbacks to the quality of journalism in the US. We need to start to consider the degree to which quality reporting is a public good. In my opinion, in a democratically governed nation, journalism is the highest order of public good. The public cannot make informed choices if there is no one to inform them. If the market is unable to provide what we need, we will have to explore other avenues.

Government Without Conscience

2007-04-26T13:17:00.001-04:00

Recall my post on the head of the GSA holding a meeting for a Rove deputy to present Republican election strategies to GSA appointees, asking for their help in the upcoming elections? Well it wasn't just the GSA. 20 of these briefings were conducted with 15 federal agencies, including the EPA, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, HUD, Treasury, Education, Agriculture and Energy, NASA, the Small Business Administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and USAID. The GSA administrator, Lurita Doan, faced Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee yesterday. The Committee has testimony from a half dozen witnesses that Doan asked Rove aid Scott Jennings, at their meeing in late January of this year, how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates". As for Doan's appearance, it's clear she attended the Al Gonzales seminar on congressional hearings. She claimed to have no recollection of the Jennings presentation. Shown one of his powerpoint slides titled "2008 House Targets: Top 20", Doan claimed to have no idea what it meant. Upon the suggestion that it referred to representatives targetted in the 2008 election by the White House, Doan responded that such an interpretation was speculation. It must be fun the shamelessly lie on the stand.

What's sad is, were it not for the Democratic wins in the midterm elections, the administration might have gotten away with this stuff. I just hope we spend the next two years seeing this adminstration ripped apart and dismantled, brick by brick by brick. Hopefully it will be painful enough and leave enough of a lasting memory to deter other presidents from going down this road for a very long time.

One Scandal To Rule Them All

2007-04-25T17:13:00.002-04:00

Josh Marshall has an interesting post tying together Prosecutorgate and the Abramoff investigation into a single mega-super-scandal. It makes sense...

I've Waited Six Years for this Foreign Policy Address

2007-04-25T12:30:00.001-04:00

Barack Obama's foreign policy speech. He gets it all right. Not just on policy, but on tone and approach, which in foreign policy are at least as important as the X's and O's. This is where we should have been on September 12, 2001. A lot of people (primarily political junkies) already resent the Obama hype level (see Slate's Obama Messiah Watch), but the guy keeps hitting them out of the park. Andrew Sullivan's comments:

Obama's speech yesterday is his most detailed yet on foreign affairs. It is emphatically not isolationist; it is emphatically not against the use of military force when necessary; it is emphatically pro-military in its call for many more troops. On the critical issue of Iraq, Obama has taken a stand - a clear one for withdrawal, with the possibility of a strike-force over the horizon. This is a very difficult call, and the timing and execution of withdrawal will be dispositive. But one core strength of Obama's candidacy is that he got this war right when many of us got it wrong. He deserves more of a listening than many of us do. If his speech yesterday was any indication, there will be much to chew on. I'm sorry to see no commitment to a carbon tax; I'm unsure of whether diplomacy can or will work with Pyongyang and Tehran. We will all have to listen and watch Obama closely these next few months in weighing his candidacy against others'.

But this much we can already say: Obama brings something no one else does to this moment. By replacing one of the most globally despised and domestically divisive presidents in American history with a young leader half-Kansan and half-Kenyan, America would be saying something to the world: Bush-Cheney is not who we are. America is not what it has come to appear to be. This country is among the most culturally and racially and religiously diverse on the planet. America has long been a powerful and vital beacon for human rights - not, as recently, the avatar of torture, rendition and executive tyranny. The simple existence of Obama as a new president in a new century would in itself enhance America's soft power immeasurably, just as a clear decision to leave Iraq would provide much greater leverage for diplomacy and military force in a whole variety of new ways. Obama would mean the rebranding of America, after a disastrous eight years. His international heritage, his racial journey, his middle name: these are assets for this country, not liabilities.

This is the reason for his ascendancy. This is what the American people sense and the world awaits. This is what the Islamists fear. That last alone is reason to feel hope.

And the reaction over at DailyKos? Obama presents a "weak, mealy, and shockingly conservative platform. ... apparently Obama has joined the exalted ranks of the criminally misguided on foreign policy." This, of course, on one of the back pages, because the Kos front page has decided Obama doesn't exist unless they have something they can rag on him for (particularly if they can contrast him with their golden boy, John Edwards).

Sullivan likes it, the Kossacks hate it; I'm sold. I've commented before on the lack of a moderate liberal net presence as sites like DailyKos have drifted farther towards the fringe. So far I haven't found a liberal answer to thoughtful moderate conservatives like Sullivan, The Cunning Realist, Greg Djerejian, and Dan Drezner. I won't be surprised if we start to see some schisms in the liberal netroots over the next 6-8 months as the primary season heats up, and I'm hopeful something a little more reasonable will come out of it.

To close, an excerpt from Obama's address:

In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.

Whether it’s global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries.

The horrific attacks on that clear September day awakened us to this new reality. And after 9/11, millions around the world were ready to stand with us. They were willing to rally to our cause because it was their cause too – because they knew that if America led the world toward a new era of global cooperation, it would advance the security of people in our nation and all nations.

We now know how badly this Administration squandered that opportunity. In 2002, I stated my opposition to the war in Iraq, not only because it was an unnecessary diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, but also because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threats that 9/11 brought to light. I believed then, and believe now, that it was based on old ideologies and outdated strategies – a determination to fight a 21st century struggle with a 20th century mindset.

There is no doubt that the mistakes of the past six years have made our current task more difficult. World opinion has turned against us. And after all the lives lost and the billions of dollars spent, many Americans may find it tempting to turn inward, and cede our claim of leadership in world affairs.

I insist, however, that such an abandonment of our leadership is a mistake we must not make. America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, but the world cannot meet them without America. We must neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission – we must lead the world, by deed and example.

Too Awesome For Words

2007-04-21T13:01:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty sure this is the reason why people invented the internet.

Bush Concerned Over Heavy-handed Treatment of Protestors

2007-04-19T17:53:00.001-04:00

...in Moscow. Is Bush concerned about heavy-handed treament of protestors in Washington, D.C.? Not so much...

Gonzales: Nothing To See Here...

2007-04-15T12:55:00.001-04:00

AG Alberto Gonzales in today's Washington Post:

I know that I did not -- and would not -- ask for the resignation of any U.S. attorney for an improper reason. Furthermore, I have no basis to believe that anyone involved in this process sought the removal of a U.S. attorney for an improper reason.
[...]
All of these documents and public testimony indicate that the Justice Department did not seek the removal of any U.S. attorney to interfere with or improperly influence any case or investigation. Indeed, I am extremely proud of the department's strong record of vigorous prosecutions, particularly in the area of public corruption, where Republicans and Democrats alike have been held accountable for their crimes.

Recently retired career DOJ attorney Daniel Metcalfe, in a recent Legal Times interview:

Actually, I began earlier, in the first Nixon administration, as a college intern in 1971. But I was there again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General's Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft's Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice's highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG's personal staff.

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.
[...]
You have to remember that this is a Cabinet department that, for good reason, prides itself on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain. Even Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.

More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the "terrorist surveillance program." Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.

But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip -- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young "Bushies" in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's "policy concerns." That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone.

It's a great interview, the best discussion I've seen so far on this matter. And Metcalfe lays far more of it than I'd have imagined directly on Gonzales's head.

Big Lobbying Money + Complicated Subject + Stupid Tech Writer = Gigantic Mess

2007-04-13T11:58:00.001-04:00

Subtitle: Robert X Cringely is a bloody idiot.

The job of a tech writer is to explain the universe of high technology to laymen in terms they can understand. To clarify confusing topics, to illuminate, to inform. So why does PBS's Robert X Cringely insist on writing on topics about which he so obviously does not have even a wisp of understanding? This week he writes about net neutrality, a topic inspired, apparently, by his suspicion that his broadband provider may be messing with his faxes over his VOIP service. He goes on to discuss how ISP's already implement quality of service prioritization (QoS), which he refers to as tiered service, which means that we have, in fact, never had network neutrality. It also, he says, means the internet is not a "best efforts" network as all the pundits say it is. All of this is, of course, wrong. That's not unusual for Cringely. What irritates me is that this is an important issue, and the wrong characterization that Cringely just published is exactly the line of bullshit that the lobbyists for incumbent networks are trying to sell. This makes Joe unhappy. So I'm going to take time out of my day to do Cringely's job for him.

It's easiest first to define net neutrality by what it is not:

Net neutrality is not an effort to prohibit QoS prioritization or traffic shaping. If you want to (as Cringely says in the article) give top priority to VOIP, then routing tables, then commercial broadband service, then consumer broadband service, there is absolutely no problem with that. Knock yourself out. If you want to dial down bandwidth on popular filesharing ports because the bittorrent users are clogging your network, again no problem. This is not what net neutrality is about (with one caveat I'll get to below). (And in case anyone cares, traffic prioritization is not, as Cringely believes, mutually exclusive with being a "best efforts" network (which the internet by and large is).)

Net neutrality also does not prohibit tiered service offers. If you want to give you end users a choice between a $20/mo 2mb service, a $40/mo 10mb service, and an $80 100mb service, there's no problem with that.

And here is what net neutrality is:

Net neutrality prohibits discrimination based on source. All data of the same type gets the same treatment regardless of who it comes from. So you can discriminate as much as want between different types of data, as long all packets within each class get the same treatment. The point of this is that a service provider is not allowed to favor its own websites, email, VOIP system, streaming video service, etc. over a competitor's. If you want to give your VOIP system high priority service, then Vonage gets that service too. Similarly, service providers not allowed to preference third-party services who pay them a fee. So charging Vonage for special priority carriage then turfing other VOIP providers isn't allowed either. That's net neutrality.

Where this gets tricky is where a service provider doesn't offer VOIP or streaming video over the internet, but offers an analogous non-internet-based service over the same line (phone service for DSL, cable TV for cable modems). In that case, prioritization by type acts as a proxy for prioritization by source. If you throttle down all VOIP service equally, that still gives preference to your non-internet phone service. To that extent, and only to that extent, net neutrality may have something to say about type-based prioritization.

The cable and phone incumbents have spent boatloads of lobbying money to promote the misconceptions about net neutrality that Cringely put on display in his column. Traffic shaping based on packet type is highly useful, and generally accepted as a desirably practice. Likewise tiered service offers to end users serves an important purpose in the market. If the incumbents can get everyone to believe that these things would be trashed by net neutrality, it makes their job much easier in arguing against it. This lobbying effort has been quite effective, and I see these misconceptions all over the place. It always bothers me, but much more so when I see it from a perceived authority figure like Cringely. Tech writers have a duty to clarify this issue, not to muddy it further.

And, by the way, Cringely, the reason your fax doesn't work over VOIP has nothing to do with net neutrality. VOIP uses lossy compression tuned to work with human voices, not the blips, bleeps, and squawks of a fax modem. Your fax machine doesn't work over VOIP because the fax transmission is being garbled by that compression. Buy yourself a scanner and toss the fax machine, it's obsolete.

Talking Point Punctured

2007-04-12T19:46:00.001-04:00

Did Bill Clinton do something shady or unusual when he asked all of the US attorneys to tender resignations after he took office? Hardly. Ronald Reagan replaced 89 out of 93 US attorneys in his first two years after taking over from Carter. George H.W. Bush even replaced 88 of Reagan's US attorneys in his first two years. And George W. Bush, of course, replaced all of Clinton's US attorneys. The article doesn't say what the practice was prior to Reagan, but quotes one Carter appointee noting that turnover "is the tradition of the office. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and when a new administration comes in, everybody knows you will have a new U.S. attorney."

Total War on Iraq

2007-04-12T12:32:00.001-04:00

I was rather shocked today to find a column on CSM from a former managing editor arguing that the reason the US is struggling in Iraq (and didn't win in Korea and Vietnam) is our unwillingness to engage in total war. And what, exactly, does John Dillin mean by total war? The complete destruction of an enemy nation, including massive civilian casualties. As examples he cites the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sherman ravaging the American South. There's certainly a compelling argument that such tactics should never be acceptable (particularly compelling with respect to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for which there is compelling evidence to suggest the bombings were completely unnecessary to prompt Japanese surrender and had far more to do with the Cold War than WWII). But even accepting the premise that such attacks can sometimes be permissible, there's a pretty major difference between those situations and Iraq: in each of those conflicts the US faced an active state opponent, with troops in the field and territory under its control.

The idea of waging such a war in Iraq is not only absurd, but morally reprehensible in the extreme. We don't face state opposition. The Iraq government is our putative ally. We control the entirety of Iraq. For us to target Iraqi population centers for indiscriminate bombing wouldn't be waging war, but rather an exercise in genocide. At least in WWII there was always a means for our opponents to end the slaughter: unconditional surrender. What would signal a stopping point in Iraq? The Iraqi state has already conceded. It would simply be a gratuitous massacre lasting until our bloodlust had been sated.

But would it work? Perhaps if we slaughtered millions of Iraqis the insurgents would throw in the towel (although a couple million dead Vietnamese argue to the contrary). But even if they did, and even if we weren't troubled by the morality of it, where would this leave us internationally? Could anyone ever again regard us as a force for good in the world? Would our standing in the conflict with Al Qaeda and political extremism be improved? It would be an umitigated disaster.

Dillin's argument strikes me as another reflection of the general frustration that our military opponents have evolved and adapted in the days since WWII. The tactics we used there cannot work anymore, and that's no accident. It is precisely because the US military is amazingly proficient at total war that no enemy will ever allow us to bring that proficiency to bear. They know that for all our might in defeating armies and conquering territory, when it comes to holding territory over the long term, we are merely human. They can concede the field then engage us in a knife fight. And in doing so they gain the added benefit of transforming a military conflict into a political one, happily revealing our serious deficiencies in that arena. Our enemies have learned from the wars of the last century and moved on. Maybe it's time we did the same.

I Think We Took the Red Pill...

2007-04-09T20:28:00.001-04:00

...and now we're going to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. This DOJ thing is spiraling off in a dozen directions at once:

- US attorney in Wisconsin pushed into a voter fraud case that the appeals court referred to as "beyond thin" by the Rove Machine?

- Monica Goodling, the underqualified "party loyalist" DOJ attorney who resigned last week after pleading the 5th, appears to have been a key player in the US attorney hiring and firing process.

- Another DOJ party loyalist, former assistant to Deputy AG Paul McNulty (who admitted to having given false testimony to Congress), and Goodling co-conspirator, Rachel Paulose, was appointed as US attorney in Minnesota, where she recently drove several of the office's top staffers to resign.

- The DOJ's latest excuse for firing David Iglesias (he was an 'absentee landlord') could land them in further legal trouble: Iglesias was away serving in the Navy Reserve, and his position was protected by the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act.

- This has all gotten to be a bit much for Gonzales who apparently can't keep his own bullshit straight, to the point that his staff is pulling him out of planned TV appearances. Can't wait for the Senate date...

It has gotten to be a bit much for Slate too, as they has moved their Gonzo-resignation-meter up to 86% likely. Keep digging folks...

I'm at the Wrong School

2007-04-08T19:31:00.001-04:00

Here I had thought that the key to getting ahead was to go to a respectable top tier law school, had I but known that the pipeline to hot jobs ran through Regent University School of Law, I might have chosen differently. Who knew Pat Robertson was a legal genius? It's a school that leaves its students well prepared for the challenges of the federal hiring process, like this one:

In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.

"When one of the interviewers agreed and said that decision in Lawrence was 'maddening,' I knew I correctly answered the question," wrote the Regent graduate . The administration hired him for the Civil Rights Division's housing section -- the only employment offer he received after graduation, he said.

More here.

Corrupt to the Core

2007-04-07T15:02:00.001-04:00

In order to fully appreciate the depths of the prosecutor scandal, I think it's necessary to place it into the general context of how this administration views the federal government. In that respect the new scandal involving the GSA provides considerable insight. The General Services Administration is the agency tasked with providing material support to the federal bureaucracy. They provide buildings, transportation, equipment and supplies of all sorts to the various federal agencies. It is a massive organization with a $60 billion annual budget. In January top administrator of the GSA, Lurita Doan, hosted a meeting for GSA appointees at which one of Karl Rove's deputies, J. Scott Jennings, made a powerpoint presentation on the Republican strategy in the 2008 congressional elections, identifying the hot races and the party's prospects for success. Doan then asked Jennings, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?"

This appears, as the article notes, to be a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, but it's not so much the legalities that interest me in this issue. I can't help but view this administration's approach as embodying the long-standing hostility of certain parts of the Republican party (not least of which being the libertarian wing of it) towards government. While he certainly didn't invent this meme, Ronald Reagan probably popularized it more effectively than anyone else. Government, we came to understand, is the problem, not the solution. I'm certainly open to arguments that the government often does things poorly or takes on tasks that are not well suited to it, but when you go from specific criticisms to a generalized anti-government dogma, I can't help but think you eventually, inevitably, end up with the Bush administration.

If you spend all of your time out of government vilifying government, how can we expect you to have any respect for the institutional integrity of the government once you're in charge? If it's all bullshit anyway, why not appoint a horse and pony show administrator to head a critical government agency? Why not use the resources of government agencies to attack your political opponents? Why not use them to sell favors to fatten your campaign coffers?

Government, whether we like it or not, prefer it big or small, is a necessity. We'll never do away with it altogether. And for all our checks and balances there can be only so much democratic and institutional oversight. Plenty of constitutional governments have failed in the past (and we're witnessing one failing in real time in Iraq), not because their constitutional structure was faulty, but because that is only one part of the equation. Another part is a culture of respect for the traditions and integrity of the institutions of government. Much of what happens in our government comes down to the degree to which federal employees feel the weight of public trust on their shoulders, and the responsibility instilled by the tradition of the offices they hold. The Republican tactic of promoting a deep suspicion and overpowering cynicism about everything related to the government destroys that culture and is now destroying the institutional integrity of our government. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have ended up with the government they always thought we had (but in reality didn't).

I think this is a large part of why Barack Obama excites me and Hillary Clinton terrifies me. It's going to take someone like Obama to rebuild public trust in the integrity of the federal government. We're going to need a visionary and a statesman, and someone of substantial personal integrity. Clinton, perhaps more than any other candidate running on either side of the aisle, will serve only to deepen cynicism about government. She is just the sort of plasticky, blow-dried, political-consultant-run marionette that inspires distrust of the entire political system. The Bush administration has dealt our constitutional system a serious blow. To have it followed by another administration that only deepens the growing chasm of mistrust between the American people and their government could, I think, be disastrous.

The Housing Market Bailout

2007-04-05T11:21:00.001-04:00

I'm usually on here defending regulation from Henry and V, but this story just irks me. Ohio is raising $100m to bail out homeowners with ARMs facing foreclosure. Who the hell gets an ARM when interest rates are at their lowest levels in many decades? An ARM is a wager between you and your lender: if interest rates fall, you win, if they rise, they win. If you start from an historic low, who do you think is going to win that wager? This is a market populated by predatory lenders and foolish debtors. Dumping tax dollars in to keep it afloat may not be the brightest idea.

At This Point, I Should Just Admit...

2007-04-05T11:05:00.001-04:00

...I'm a fan of Francis Fukuyama. He defends himself against association with Bush administration neoconservatism in this Guardian column. I think his comments are right on the money. To wit:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along. But coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

Malaysian Cars Suck

2007-04-05T10:54:00.001-04:00

Apparently. This is pretty funny.

Update: Here's the video.

Who is the daddy now?

2007-04-02T19:53:00.001-04:00

Serenity beat Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie,
R2-D2 move over

Google Earth

2007-03-25T17:15:00.001-04:00

Maybe you guys have used google earth before. If you have'nt, go here and download it immediately. If you have, why didn't you tell me about it? This is frakking amazing.

I'll describe it as if you were unaware of its glory. It blends a 3-d globe with satellite images, and google place data to form a seemless explorable planet. Its like having one of those godlike CIA systems from the movies (except you can't keep enhancing any image indefinitely, unfortunately). I will never be lost again. Have you ever been baffled by obscure geographical refences in adventure novels? Not anymore. You'll know exactly what block they're on, and what the roof of the restaurant they're eating at looks like. Joe & Ceci, you live at 38° 2'51.29"N x 78°30'41.49"W and and an altitude of 564 ft (and your apartment is 0.5 arcseconds long from front to back). I could have just searched for your address, but I actually found you by hand, cruising around Charlottesville in my satellite (since I did'nt know your address off hand and this was way more fun anyhow). I'll let you guys explore it for yourselves. If you're not impressed you can go to hell.

The Commanding Heights

2007-03-25T02:07:00.001-04:00

I watched The Commanding Heights (TCH) earlier this week and I figured that, per Joe's request, I would post a comment. It was great. I was actually teary eyed more than once while watching it. I don't suspect that anyone would be too surprised by my evaluation. It did support many my preexisting beliefs. I found the perspective on post-communist Russia to be particularly interesting and informative.

I think we could use a lot more of this sort of media. Although TCH portrays a world in which the ideas of liberal economics have triumphed, I feel that that triumph is more practical than political. That is, I believe that many governments were forced into accepting more market oriented policies because command economies had been such a debacle. But I'm not so sure that liberal economics has gained any sort of ascendancy amongst the minds of the ordinary people of the world.

I fear that should the economic winds change, people are as ready as they have ever been to embrace socialistic policies. Not to put too fine a point on it, TCH paints a picture of a grand cycle going from the economically liberal beginning of the twentieth century, through an period of government dominance, and back to the modern era of world markets, and I suspect we might well repeat the same errors in the coming century that we did in the last. This would, of course, be tragic.

Really, as an American on the ground, do you see the weight of public opinion as being in favor of free market policies? In particular, amongst the free market sentiment that you do see, is it there for the right reasons? It seems to me that socialism is still far stronger than liberalism in terms of underlying public support. It is simply a far more intuitive system. Though I may sound like some sort of conservative crank, I think that we have to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of educators and educational institutions in the U.S. still guide students toward a preference for socialism and planning over markets and individual freedom. We must simply face the fact that organization and government intervention are the products of genuine popular movements, and that laissez faire economics has probably never had widespread support.

Just look at the labor and (largely equivalent) anti-globalization movements portrayed in TCH. Do we, at any time in history see any similar movements in favor of liberalism? No, not really. I guess the American Revolution is about as close as you get. Socialism just makes for way better slogans. People want to hear that their problems are caused by the greed and evil of the rich and powerful, not that scarcity is an inevitable phenomenon and that economic limitations hold with the force of natural law. I have argued before that the drive towards communism is likely maintained by the same forces that first inspired worship of the Gods. As human beings we have a built-in tendency to interpret events in terms of purposeful action. This facility is essential to our functioning as members of complex human societies. But it also causes us to anthropomorphize and personify natural forces. Because the natural forces of scarcity manifest themselves through the market, it makes perfect sense that we blame our problems on the human faces of corporate leaders and government officials. Though such scapegoating is satisfying, it is dangerously counterproductive. We have to recognize that when oil prices, for instance, become unpleasantly high, it is not because oil producers are greedy, it is because the relationship between supply and demand has changed. We can try to deny this fact by imposing government controls, but such a lie hurts no one more than ourselves.

All right, I'll stop jabbering about free markets. If you've watched TCH you probably already have a pretty clear idea of what I'm talking about. But I do still want to comment on instabilities in the modern financial system. This is a very significant aspect of the third part of TCH. These are a very challenging problem. The solution is not at all clear. My opinion is that what we need is, in fact, a greater degree of deregulation. This is totally opposed to what most economists would suggest. But I'll say it nonetheless.

I think that governments go way to far in guaranteeing stability in their banking systems, and that we need to make it much easier for banks to fail. You see, I believe that the operation of central banks brings about a system of risk pooling in which the possibility of failure is aggregated. There is no doubt that it is possible to do away with the risk of individual bank failures by creating a centralized guarantor, but to me it seems equally clear that such a system does not eliminate risk. It merely spreads it. But this spreading means that risk is externalized, so it is entered into far more often. It means that risk goes unrecognized, so it is underpriced. And it means that the realization of risk is quickly contained, so systemic purges of risk are much less frequent. Overall, the result is that the economy ends up containing way more risk than it could have ever supported prior to bank cartelization. In a way this is good. It allows much more lending to take place, and so we have lower interest rates, and hence more development and entrepreneurship. But it is bad in the sense that the economy builds up huge amounts of risk.

Just as the containment of moderately sized forest fires allows the buildup of large amounts of fuel mass, thus increasing the possibility of huge uncontrollable blazes, so the containment of moderately sized failures in the credit system makes much more dangerous failures more likely, if not inevitable. So what I'm saying is that we need to do away with the belief that we can control risk. We need to accept the fact that risk is an inherent result of our inability to foresee the outcomes of economic decisions. Given that recognition, the best solution is to break economies into smaller cells capable of failing individually and thus making failure more common, more recognizable, and more contained.

I think that today there is more unrecognized risk in the world economy than most people could possibly imagine, and that a systemic world economic collapse is more likely than most would like to think. It is in this risk that I see the possibility that the recent trend toward economic liberalization will be undone. If we do see a global economic catastrophe, few will choose to blame it on governments doing too much to safeguard economic stability, and many more will interpret it as a predictable failure of under-regulated markets.

I'm not sure that disaggregation is possible from where we now stand. Risks that have been taken cannot be undone, and disaggregation would almost certainly bring about immediate painful realization of this fact. And even if the central banks of the world were to cast risk back upon subunits of their economies, it would not undo the recent creation of a world derivatives market, which is essentially a privatization of the role of risk aggregation. This market may truly be a market failure: a making of poor decisions that could not be subjected to the strictures of market forces until it had become to big to stop without immeasurable harm being done. But it is too late to do anything about it.

In summary, TCH is very encouraging, and made me feel very warm and fuzzy. But I for one am afraid that the trend that it illustrates might be short lived. I may be wrong. I certainly hope that I am. But if I'm not, the tragedies of the twentieth century could well be revisited in the twenty-first.

Obama's Track Record

2007-03-20T21:35:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for digging up this slightly dated (October of last year) account of how Barack Obama kept himself busy during his two years in the Senate. Keep it in mind while you're being battered by the talking point about Obama having not done anything. The basic summary:

...I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn't wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

Also, a follow-up on prosecutorgate, Lincoln Caplan has an informative column on Slate on the proper role for politics in the justice system. He handily rebuts the oft-repeated canard about Clinton replacing the US attorneys when he took over by noting that in the past 25 years the number of US attorneys forced out mid-term for reasons other than misconduct is somewhere between two and five.

Mistakes Were (Not) Made

2007-03-15T13:37:00.001-04:00

I've been holding off posting on prosecutorgate so far mostly because I've been waiting with bated breath for it to explode. This is the big one. After a nearly endless series of blunders, scams, and scandals in the Bush administration, some big, some small, this is the one that I think will go down in the history books as the defining Bush administration scandal. And I've been too intently observing it unfold to say anything. I've finally been moved, however, to respond to the line of defense being offered by Gonzalez and the White House. That line: mistakes have been made. Namely, the DOJ was not fully honest about why the prosecutors were fired. End of story. They hope, by acknowledging and focusing on this particular aspect of the problem, to obscure what lies behind it. On the Newshour last night, the Republican operative (I don't recall who it was) was quite exercised about how awful it was that the DOJ misled the Senate on this count. He was also adamant that nothing else had been done wrong and that there was nothing actually improper about the firings themselves. Bush and Gonzalez have made similar remarks.

Not so fast. The bullshit about firing these prosecutors for performance issues is the least of the problem. Even the firings themselves are not the whole of the problem. This scandal is about the politicization of enforcement of justice in the US. So far Scott Horton at Balkinization has said it best:

What is at stake here? The issue is enormous. It is whether the criminal justice system will be turned into a partisan political tool. Bush's Administration is already widely called a "hackocracy" because of his tendency to fill slots with unqualified and incompetent partisan hacks. But the crisis at DOJ goes far beyond that. Even civil service positions - which have been protected from this sort of partisan corruption since the Hatch Act of 1939 - are being politicized. The Boston Globe, for instance, has closely documented the process of weeding out qualified career attorneys from the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and their replacement with political retainers - and the same process has continued throughout the Department. But at the heart of the DOJ scandal lies political intrusion into the exercise of prosecutorial discretion - one of the areas which a democratic society most needs to shield from partisan intrusion. There is now clear evidence that Gonzales and Bush directed political prosecutions and attempted to deflect prosecutions of Republicans for political purposes. A state that criminalizes political adversaries and that cloaks the criminal conduct of its retainers is by definition a tyranny.

A study by Donald Shields and John Cragan (not yet released) shows that under Bush seven times more Democratic officials have been investigated by the DOJ than Republican officials. Match that up with the Boston Globe findings. Combine it with all of the DOJ/White House emails released by the Senate showing the overtly political nature of the firing decisions, and how they tied into politicized prosecutions. There were no mistakes made. Nothing accidental occurred here. These people knew exactly what they were doing. They created one law for Democrats and another for Republicans. The Bush administration has made a concerted effort to reduce our nation to a banana republic. Gonzalez will have to go, but this scandal ought not end there. This administration and its DOJ is rotten to the core. For the sake of our nation and our system of government the Democratic Congress needs to climb onto this scandal and ride it as far as it can take them. This sort of misconduct needs to be punished to the fullest extent possible.

From the Wacky World of Legal Compensation

2007-03-12T17:27:00.001-04:00

Dahlia Lithwick on Supreme Court clerkship signing bonuses. Sure they're silly, what about big firm pay scales isn't?

Bushbabies, Yum!!

2007-02-24T15:06:00.001-05:00

I was also browsing the foreign policy blog, I find this more "politically" interesting. To see pictures of bushbabies, click here, now I am off cooking some dinner

Commanding Heights

2007-02-24T10:30:00.001-05:00

I wanted to point out a fantastic documentary we've been watching called Commanding Heights: the Battle for the World Economy. It's a 3-part, 6 hour show created by PBS in 2002 based on a book of the same title by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. You can actually watch the entire thing from that web page (although we netflixed it). It is tremendously educational about the economics of the second half of the 20th century (the entire first episode is devoted to the competition between the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek). It pulled together a lot of previously unconnected pieces for me. I recommend it highly, and I would be very curious to hear Henry's thoughts about it.

Also, unrelated, I believe this might be the greatest news report of all time (and it happened in Oconomowoc).