The QOTD, on biased authority:
“Medical journals are rarely accused of ideological bias, they are accused of financial bias. The press are rarely accused of financial bias, they are accused of ideological bias. If you studiously spend one month looking for the opposite bias in both, what will happen is that you will become an alcoholic.”
Regardless of what one thinks of the gay rights/defense of marriage debate, this much should be unassailable:
“If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union and thus to procreation will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.
A veneer of sentiment may prevent these norms from collapsing but only temporarily. The marriage culture, already wounded by widespread divorce, nonmarital cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing will fare no better than it has in those European societies that were in the vanguard of sexual ‘enlightenment…’
Candid and clear-thinking advocates of redefining marriage recognize that doing so entails abandoning norms such as monogamy. In a 2006 statement entitled Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, over 300 lesbian, gay, and allied activists, educators, lawyers, and community organizersincluding Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and prominent Yale, Columbia and Georgetown professorscall for legally recognizing multiple sex partner (polyamorous) relationships. Their logic is unassailable once the historic definition of marriage is overthrown.”
– Robert P. George, Gay Marriage, Democracy and the Courts, Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2009.
When Professor George says that “norms such as monogamy” will be abandoned, I take him to be referring to the historically prevailing cultural attitude that sex is only permissible within a married relationship. I do not think, though perhaps I am wrong, that he means to say that non-traditional (e.g., polyamorous, temporary, or otherwise non-monogamous) relationships will replace monogamous relationships as the “norm.” Although non-traditional relationships will doubtless increase, they will increase only insofar as there is demand for them, and something in the human makeup seems to drive the great bulk of us towards a desire for monogamy. Instead, I take Professor George to mean that non-traditional relationships will become “normalized” in the sense that they will be accepted and the stigma against them removed or reduced.
Viewed in this light, the comments quoted above seem unassailable. The question is not whether this will happen, but simply whether it has already happened (as a consequence of the divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock child bearing he mentions) and, if so, whether it can or should be reversed.
(As always, I do need to add the caveat, per Stanley Fish, that there is not and never has been a “principled basis” for upholding marriage norms, if by “principled” one means a basis which is distinct from the substantive values one holds and wishes to impose on the world.)
Over that the National Review, Ed Whelan has publicly “outed” anonymous blogger publius of Obsidian Wings. This is in retaliation for some blog posts that were critical of Whelan.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of their respective political positions (and regular readers will know that I am far more likely to favor the National Review’s take on any given political subject than Obsidian Wings’), what Whelan has done here is shameful. If Whelan cannot endure public criticism, then he shouldn’t be in politics. I am embarrassed to share a political party with such a petty man. The NRO should be too.
Update: Ed Whelan has apologized. Good for him. It is hard to do a heel face turn when one has made a public mistake. This speaks highly of his character.
I’m frankly still in shock at the Chrysler debacle:
“Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right?
Until Chrysler…
The Obama administration’s behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors — entitled to first priority payment under the “absolute priority rule” — have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.
The absolute priority rule is a linchpin of bankruptcy law. By preserving the substantive property and contract rights of creditors, it ensures that bankruptcy is used primarily as a procedural mechanism for the efficient resolution of financial distress. Chapter 11 promotes economic efficiency by reorganizing viable but financially distressed firms, i.e., firms that are worth more alive than dead.
Violating absolute priority undermines this commitment by introducing questions of redistribution into the process. It enables the rights of senior creditors to be plundered in order to benefit the rights of junior creditors.
The U.S. government also wants to rush through what amounts to a sham sale of all of Chrysler’s assets to Fiat. While speedy bankruptcy sales are not unheard of, they are usually reserved for situations involving a wasting or perishable asset (think of a truck of oranges) where delay might be fatal to the asset’s, or in this case the company’s, value. That’s hardly the case with Chrysler. But in a Chapter 11 reorganization, creditors have the right to vote to approve or reject the plan. The Obama administration’s asset-sale plan implements a de facto reorganization but denies to creditors the opportunity to vote on it.
By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing businesses. That is, businesses that might have received financing before but that now will not, since lenders face the potential of future government confiscation. In other words, Mr. Obama may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election. But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?”
– Todd Zywicki, Chrysler and the Rule of Law, Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2009, via .
Commenting on a related facet of this mess, Megan McArdle provided the best summary:
This move has shown potential partners that government funds are dangerous, and potential lenders that union firms are risky bets; both have probably cost American citizens more than they saved. So why did the government risk so much for so little gain?
You know the answer, don’t you? Because they’re planning to do it again.
The QOTD:
“There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.
Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country… [T]he tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an “ethical populism.” The protesters are homeowners who didn’t walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don’t want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don’t need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right — and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.”
- Arthur C. Brooks, The Real Culture War is Over Capitalism, Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009.
Via Bruce Schneier:
The single greatest killer of Americans is the so-called “lifestyle disease”. Somewhere between half a million and a million of us get a short ride in a long hearse every year because of smoking, lousy diets, parking our bodies in front of the TV instead of operating them, and downing yet another six pack and / or tequila popper.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.
After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we’re ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience “cessation of life” due to medical errors – botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and “nosocomial infections”. (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)
The next most dangerous encounter the average American is likely to have is with a co-worker with an infection. Or a doorknob, stair railing or restaurant utensil touched by someone with the crud. “Microbial Agents” (read bugs like flu and pneumonia) will send 75,000 of us to meet the Reaper this year.
If we live through those social encounters, the next greatest danger is “Toxic Agents” – asbestos in our ceiling, lead in our pipes, the stuff we spray on our lawns or pour down our clogged drains. Annual body count from these handy consumer products is around 55,000.
After that, the most dangerous person in our lives is the one behind the wheel. About 42,000 of us will cash our chips in our rides this year. More than half will do so because we didn’t wear a seat belt. (Lest it wrinkle our suit.)
Some 31,000 of us will commit suicide by intention this year. (As opposed to not fastening our seat belts or smoking, by which we didn’t really mean to kill ourselves.)
About 30,000 of us will die due to our sexual behaviors, through which we’ll contract AIDS or Hepatitis C. Another 20,000 of us will pop off due to illicit drug use.
The next scariest person in our lives is someone we know who’s having a really bad day. Over 16,000 Americans will be murdered this year, most often by a relative or friend.
After that, it’s an overdose on “non-steroidal anti-inflammatories”, acetaminophen or aspirin. About 7,600 hundred a year, perhaps due to the aftermath of those tequila poppers.
Next most dangerous thing is going to work. About 5,500 of us will buy the farm due to “occupational trauma”.
If that’s scary enough to skip work, we might want to skip lunch, too. Next most dangerous thing is the food we eat. About 5,200 of us will hurl our lives away due to “foodborne agents”.
Another 4,000 of us will drown. A significant percentage will be fishermen found floating with a high blood alcohol content and an unzipped fly.
As the data clearly shows, the things that genuinely threaten us are the ones we are most likely to ignore or simply accept. (We’re statistically far more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than by an action of Al Qaeda, for example.) The ones that we’re scared witless of – and spend trillions of increasingly scarce dollars to avert in our boundless paranoia – are less likely to harm us than a bag of peanuts. (Deaths in America due to peanut allergies average 50 – 100 per year.)
…The things we fear most may be least likely to occur, which means the time, trauma and treasure we invest in them is a complete waste.
Security itself is an illusion. It is a perception that exists only between our ears. No army, insurance policy, hazmat team, video surveillance or explosive sniffer can protect us from our own immune system, a well-intentioned but clumsy surgeon, failing to look before crossing the street, an asteroid randomly hurtling through space or someone willing to die in order to do others harm.
In this sense, the only things that can truly make us more “secure” are not things. They are the courage to face whatever comes with dignity and intention, and the strong relationships that assure we will face the future together, and find comfort and meaning in doing so.
Imagine, then, what might happen if we simply quit listening to the scaremongers and those who profit from our paranoia. Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.
Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.
– John Goekler, The Most Dangerous Person in the World?, Counterpunch, 3/24/2009
Hedge fund manager Andrew Ladhe is getting out while the getting’s good:
“I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.”
And on that note, The Leveraged Sell-Out asks us to remember the Titans.
(First link via Dealbreaker).
Now this was a revelation. L’Hote explains where the myth of the stereotypically male “locker room conversations” might come from:
In his nonfiction book Travels, Michael Crichton pointed out that the reason women think that men are always having “locker room conversations” about intimate sexual details is that women themselves tend to take part in those conversations all the time. I have never had a “locker room conversation” in my life, and I think I would find frank conversation about sexual details with my friends deeply off-putting. But it seems that, for an average women, whatever information she has about you sexually has been shared with all of her friends.
That’s been precisely my experience. I’ve never heard a man engage in “locker room talk,” and to my knowledge I don’t know any man who would feel comfortable having such a conversation with his friends. But I understand, from second-hand reports, that this sort of conversation is extremely common among women (or at least the women that I know). Maybe he’s on to something here.
It’s been a very busy week, and a lot of people deserve high praise for their excellent summary of our economic problems. Two writers in particular stand out from the pack, however.
First, one of the best rebuttals to the “they’re all crooks” mentality comes from Equity Private at Dealbreaker, who is commenting on Ann Woolner’s disastrous Bloomberg piece from this afternoon (which I won’t link because it doesn’t deserve the traffic):
“The degree to which this mirrors the American version of “return entitlement” boggles the mind. .. No one is to blame for your poorly invested and badly diversified retirement losses other than you. If you didn’t know that you were getting 8%+ returns in the market because there was some risk of catastrophic loss involved, then you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. ‘…a relative few money lenders and Wall Street wizards…’ did not ruin the economy. All of the market participants did with their blind belief that housing prices could only go up. That oil would remain cheap forever. That sovereigns might never lose their taste for subsidizing conspicuous consumption.
I think that the Woolner’s and Cox’s of the world have it backwards. We shouldn’t be restricting short sellers. We should give profits from short sales and puts preferential tax treatment.
The idiot who decided that owning a home was the American Dream actualized to such an extent, and the desire for which was honed to such a keen edge, that we were going to allow people to put down a mere 3% if they joined a government home ownership program is the nimrod that Woolner should be jumping on. (Three guesses who scuttled risk based pricing here).
The corrupt, nepotistic emperor who turned Freddie and Fannie into a cushy slot to drop big campaign contributors and political operatives into as a reward for a job well done should attract Woolner’s ire.
You are not entitled to an affordable MacMansion, cheap insurance on a hurricane scarred floodplain, 9% annual returns on your index fund for 40 years in a row or equities that go up but never come down, and as a Bloomberg contributor you really should know this.
Grow up.”
On the calmer side, here’s Paul Kedrosky again, describing the inevitable end of the current economic situation:
“This moment too shall pass. Eventually volatility will fall, banks will deleverage or merge or fail, and we will see the requisite studies showing that short-selling wasn’t the problem, plus that market quality deteriorated in stocks in which short-selling was banned. It’s as predictable as the politicians piling on. Too bad no-one cares in the rush to be seen having found someone to blame.”
That’s precisely right.
Paul Kedrosky offers sanity in these troubled economic times:
“Repeat after me: The trouble is not with short-sellers. The trouble is not with short-sellers. The trouble is with an over-levered financial system built on a house of cards comprised of under-collateralized toxic paper that was applauded all the way up by “housing is the American dream” nutters who couldn’t see that vast expansions in thinly-traded credit are a path to economic ruin. Focusing on the short-sellers will lead to completely wrong and counter-productive non-solutions to the current crisis.”
If you need a layman’s primer on the current economic disasters, Freakonomics offers a concise summary aimed at the general reader which is extremely helpful.
Like almost everyone who doesn’t struggle with their weight, I have been guilty of thinking that fat people simply lacked willpower. But when I actually think about, say, the roommate with the binge eating problem, it’s readily apparent that there must be something else going on. I once burst in on her as she spooned out the last of a half-gallon of ice cream that had not been in our freezer just hours before. “What a pig!” is the common upper middle class reaction. But that doesn’t make much sense. I don’t manfully restrain my many urges to eat a half-gallon of ice cream; the very idea revolts me. I’m not sure I could force myself to do so on a bet. So I can’t really credit my behaviour to my superior exhibition of the bourgeois virtues of self restraint, since I am being restrained by lack of desire, not force of will. That she did want to eat that much ice cream seems to indicate that there is something very different about her that has nothing to do with virtue. It isn’t just eating, either; fat peoples metabolisms are notably slower when they lose weight than someone who finds it easy to keep their weight at the same level.
I just ran across a feature on MSN Money which summarizes the average total cost of raising a child. I’ve always wondered how to do a cost/benefit analysis on the decision to have children. This is at least a preliminary step towards having some hard numbers to evaluate.
All in, but excluding non-monetary investments (such as time and sleep deprivation), each child in a dual-parent family with two children costs between $124,800 and $249,180, depending on the family’s average income. This estimate is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey by the U.S. Department of Labor, conducted from 1990-92, updated to 2001 dollars using the Consumer Price Index. As a caveat, the USDA ends its cost survey when a child legally becomes an adult at age 18 and does not include any estimates for sending children to college.
If you have only one child, the USDA assumes you’ll spend slightly more on that child and suggests multiplying the total expense by 1.24.
If you assume a two-parent family that makes between $40,000 and $65,000, you’ll have to invest about $210,000 per child plus college tuition (if you’re going to pay for that). If you assume a two-parent family that makes more than $65,000, you’ll have to invest about $250,000 per child plus college tuition. And, of course, if you really want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, you’ll need to factor in the opportunity cost by calculating the interest (or investment return) you could have earned on that money over an 18 year period.
How to use Google to find mp3’s.
Florida’s huricane “insurance” plan is one of dumbest things I’ve heard in weeks. (Mississippi’s response runs a close second, however.)
In the Agora notes that stupid speed limits cost lives:
Many traffic laws are inacted because of a misconception by state and federal legislators. They believe that reducing the speed limit will slow the speed of traffic, while raising the speed limit will cause an increase in the speed of traffic, and thereby increase accidents. Their belief is misguided. Colorado’s Department of Transportation already seems to understand (pdf) and notes that “Before and After” speed studies show that there are no significant changes in vehicle speeds or accidents after speed limits are changed…
The Cato Institute’s Stephen Moore reinforces this view in a 23 page paper titled “Speed Doesn’t Kill” (pdf), as does the British Columbia Automobile Association. Moore notes that 33 state raised their speed limits after the federal government’s repeal of the 55 mph law in 1995. Because of this, traffic death rates dropped to a record low level in 1997. In addition to saved lives, these more sensible laws offered an economic benefit estimated between $2 and $3 billion per year.
And finally, here is Stephen Colbert on US-China relations (via peer-see). For the record, Cobert is a comedian: I obviously don’t endorse his actual position.
Christmas is frequently criticized for encouraging mindless consumerism and crass materialism. And that’s fair. But the damage done to our world by this ill-considered gift giving tradition actually runs much deeper: the deadweight loss of Christmas renders everyone just a little bit poorer, rob families of a degree of financial security, and consumes vast amounts of our precious time and psychic energy. And it’s not even altruistic: imagine what we could accomplish, as a society, if we decided to collectively donate $4 billion annually to help the poor? If we’d stop giving each other uninteresting gifts, we could do that without sacrificing any money at all.
So yeah: when you’re opening presents on Christmas morning, remember that you’re implicitly choosing to leave Tiny Tim out starving in the cold.
Happy Holidays!
(Trivia: Before today, the internet contained approximately zero pages which included the phrase “Christmas: Threat or Menace?“)
Here are some links, in no particular order, that I’ve been meaning to mention for a while:
First, some new happiness research: “Boosting the frequency of sex in a marriage from once a month to once a week brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 a year.” This conclusion comes from a paper written by David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth who also serves on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick. The same paper also concludes that “the happiness maximizing number of previous sexual partners in a year is 1.”
Next: Greg Mankiw links to a new CBO paper reminding us that domestic labor bears about 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax, while domestic owners of capital bear slightly more than 30 percent of the burden. Remember that the next time you hear someone rave enthusiastically about the value of increasing taxes on large corporations: the corporate tax is mostly a hidden tax on labor.
In other news, I was glad to hear that Francis Beckwith was recently granted tenure at Baylor University. Beckwith is an Associate Professor of Church-State Studies and the Associate Director of the Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor. He’s also a conservative Christian thinker who promotes accommodation on church/state issues, opposes abortion, and believes that teaching intelligent design in the public schools is constitutional. As a result of these beliefs, he was originally denied tenure at Baylor, despite his excellent CV. As Ed Brayton argues:
There are plenty of legal scholars that I disagree with completely that I cannot imagine being denied tenure at any university (Robert Bork, Robert George, etc). It’s not enough to say “I think they’re wrong, therefore they don’t deserve tenure”; by that standard, no one would ever get tenure. Like those men, Beckwith is a prominent advocate for his position and regardless of whether I agree with that position, by the standards of legal scholarship, they would generally be granted tenure on the basis of their scholarship. And I fear for academic freedom if we’re going to make disagreement the standard for deciding who can and can’t be fired. So on the whole, I think it’s probably the right decision to make.
Next up, Stuart Buck quotes an article by Michael Pollan reminding us that government regulation may make the recent E. coli/spinach problem worse:
Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place.
And finally, several months ago, the Southern Baptist Convention elected Frank Page as its new President. Over at In the Agora, Seth Zirkle noted that:
Page’s election comes just moments after the SBC promulgated its new position on alcohol, namely that he who toucheth the chalice drinks to his death. Page, in addressing the alcohol question, appeals to an “overall” witness of Scripture that gives a negative appraisal of strong drink. Overall, since there is no single passage in Scripture that explicitly condemns the consumption of alcohol, just drunkenness (1 Cor 6:10).
I can only assume that Page found the scriptural prohibition on alcohol in the penumbra of the text. Heh.
Michael Dukakis and Daniel Mitchell, both prominent progressives, argue that the minimum wage should be raised. Why? Because raising the minimum wage will force poor immigrant workers out of a job and out of the country. (Alex Tabarrok points out that this was originally the explicit purpose of the minimum wage.)
Eric Crampton explains why donating to a “charity run” is foolish.
MIT Economist Amy Finkelstein argues that “the spread of health insurance between 1950 and 1990 may be able to explain about half of the six-fold rise in real per capita health spending. ” (via Marginal Revolution)
David Bernstein correctly notes that, by forcing law schools to encourage racial diversity, the American Bar Association may have cost affirmative action advocates their victory in Grutter.
Jonathan Adler notes that “one of the perverse effects of the Endangered Species Act is that it encourages private landowners to make their land inhospitable to potentially endangered species.”
There is a theme here.
