The first debate of the 2012 general election

I'll be live-blogging it here tonight.

As always, any quotes I write down will be done without a transcript or pause/rewind button. So they might not be verbatim, but I'll try to be accurate.

For more live-blogging, check out Althouse (my mom), TalkingPointsMemo, and Democracy in America.

[Added later: Here's the transcript, and here's video of the whole debate:]



9:06 - President Obama criticizes the "top-down policies that got us into this mess." Is Obama trying to pitch himself as the candidate of bottom-up policies? That's hard to believe.

9:07 - Mitt Romney brushes off Obama's charges that he's going to take a top-down approach or "cut taxes for the rich."

9:08 - Romney says that Obama believes in something that doesn't work: "trickle-down government."

9:09 - Moderator Jim Lehrer asks Obama to expand on the idea of trickle-down government, and Obama responds by explaining his education policy of "race to the top." The debate has been very vertical so far.

9:10 - Obama makes the unpopular admission that the government needs to both reduce spending and increase revenues in order to control the deficit.

9:11 - Romney to Obama: "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine."

9:12 - Romney describes the economic slump as an "economy tax" on the middle class.

9:14 - Romney makes the implausible promise to make "no tax cut that adds to the deficit."

9:16 - Obama says that even if you cut all deductions that benefit the wealthy, it wouldn't make up for the shortfall in revenue that would result from Romney's tax cuts for them. Is Obama assuming that all these enormous changes in the tax code would have no effect on behavior?

9:22 - Romney's explanation for how his math adds up is that he would cut taxes for small businesses, which would create jobs.

9:23 - Obama says that Romney is making "the same sales pitch [on taxes] that was made in 2001 and 2003." Obama equates his own approach with Bill Clinton's. So, "we've got some data on which approach is likely to create jobs for middle-class Americans."

9:24 - Romney goes on at unnecessary length about the debating rules: "He got the first answer, so I have the last word on this topic," etc.

9:26 - Romney: "The amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion dollars a year, is simply not moral."

9:27 - Romney promises that he'd go through all government programs, figure out which ones don't work, and stop funding them. This sounds uncannily similar to a promise Obama made in one of the 2008 general-election debates. (See my live-blog from October 7, 2008 — coincidentally, it's in the update from the exact same time, 9:27.)

9:31 - Obama attacks Romney for raising his hand in a primary debate when the Republican candidates were asked if they'd turn down an offer of a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts and tax increases.

(I stopped live-blogging here for about 20 minutes because the ABC News and YouTube feeds were too choppy. The C-SPAN feed works much better.)

9:52 - Romney says that Dodd-Frank is "the biggest kiss given to New York banks I've ever seen." He criticizes the "unintended consequences" of financial regulation, but says that some financial regulation is essential.

9:53 - Obama seems at a loss for words for an uncomfortably long time before he goes into his explanation of the causes of the financial crash.

9:54 - Obama: If you think the problem is that we had too much regulation of Wall Street, then Romney is your candidate. Romney rejects this: "It's not that Dodd-Frank was always wrong with too much regulation. Sometimes it doesn't give clear regulation."

9:56 - Romney is asked why he wants to repeal Obama's health-care law. He cites the Congressional Budget Office saying that Obamacare will make health insurance cost $2,500 more per person. Also, "it puts in place an unelected board that will tell people, ultimately, what kinds of treatments they can have." He wants you to think "death panels" without him having to say it.

9:59 - Obama says that Obamacare will definitely let you keep your health insurance. (This calls for a fact-check!) It will just mean that health-insurance companies "can't jerk you around." He admits that "Governor Romney did a good thing" by enacting Romneycare.

10:02 - Romney says that Romneycare is different from Obamacare because the latter will cause people to lose their health insurance. He also reels off a dizzying array of other distinctions, which I doubt many viewers will be following.

10:03 - Obama mocks Romney's references to the "unelected board." Obama characterizes this as making "smart choices" and using "best practices"; the alternative is "to let businesses decide how long they can afford to keep paying premiums until they just give up."

10:05 - Obama says Romney is right that health-care premiums have been going up for the past 2 years — but they've been going up more slowly than in the past 50 years.

10:06 - What would Romney enact in place of Obamacare? He won't describe the whole thing, because the description would be too long. But his plan would include a rule against barring people with pre-existing conditions. And he'd let young people stay on their parents' plans, though he adds that this could happen purely through the free market.

10:10 - Obama says that Romney "says he's going to replace Obamacare" (yes, he did call it "Obamacare"), but he won't say what he's going to replace it with. "Is the reason he's keeping his policies secret, because they're too good?"

10:11 - Romney responds that he's holding back from giving more specifics because he's doing what Ronald Reagan did: laying out "principles" such as creating incentives for economic growth, broadening the tax base, and cutting taxes. Oddly, he adds a compliment to Obama for sharing some of Reagan's economic principles.

10:14 - Obama: "The genius of America is free enterprise." However, there are "things we do better together." He then segues back to his education policy: "Government can help. It can't do it all."

10:16 - Romney responds to Obama: "I reject the idea that I don't believe in great teachers or more teachers. Every state can make that decision on its own."

10:16 - Romney quotes various phrases from the Declaration of Independence, including "the pursuit of happiness." He seems to say that this means that the government has a responsibility to provide for those who are unable to provide for themselves.

10:18 - Romney says that federal funding should "follow the child" — that is, let the child and their parents decide where to go to school.

10:20 - Obama says that Romney hasn't been clear about his education proposals, but he would cut the education budget by 20%.

10:22 - Romney to Obama: "As president, you're entitled to your own house and your own airplane, but not your own facts. I'm not going to cut education funding."

10:24 - Lehrer says they're short on time for the remaining issues, but he's not going to claim he's done a good job of moderating. Obama: "Jim, you've done a great job!" Lehrer: "Oh, well, no . . ."

10:26 - Romney lists various things he's going to do on "day 1" as president. Obama points out that Romney is going to have "a busy first day," since he's also promised to repeal Obamacare on day 1.

10:30 - Obama: "Four years ago, I said I wasn't a perfect man and I wouldn't be a perfect president, and that's a promise Governor Romney probably thinks I've kept."

That's all. Check in here again for the vice-presidential debate next week.

UPDATE: About an hour into the debate, Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo, who of course is favorable to Obama, said:

My read so far is that if you go by energy and tossing out lots of data points, then Romney is running circles around the president. Obama has only on a few occasions really pressed a point hard. Whether that means he’s ‘winning’ I don’t know. But energy level, Romney all the way. But I think there are a lot of traps that Obama’s put out there for Romney. Romney really pressed his insistence that he just isn’t going to do what he says his plan is going to do. I think those statements – and the statement about vouchers – might be unpacked badly for him over the next few days.

The 7 bloggers at the Economist's blog Democracy in America seem to be unanimous in saying that Romney won. "W.W." (Will Wilkinson) says:

Romney won decisively. Obama clearly approached the debate with a mainly defensive strategy, hoping to come away without having done anything to rock his very comfortable boat. But the boat did rock. Obama was flummoxed by Romney's superior preparation, intensity, and execution, and tonight's truly dismal performance from the president has put the sustainability of his lead in question, if not actually in peril.

Another blogger at the Economist, "T.N.," says:

Obama seemed to sleepwalk through much of the debate - and the fact that so many potential attack lines were not exploited suggests that . . . this might be a deliberate tactic - to bore his way to victory over the next month.

Andrew Sullivan says:

Look: you know how much I love the guy, and you know how much of a high information viewer I am, and I can see the logic of some of Obama's meandering, weak, professorial arguments. But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look.

Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn't there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment.

The person with authority on that stage was Romney - offered it by one of the lamest moderators ever, and seized with relish. This was Romney the salesman. And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It's beyond depressing. But it's true.

There are two more debates left. I have experienced many times the feeling that Obama just isn't in it, that he's on the ropes and not fighting back, and then he pulls it out. He got a little better over time tonight. But he pulled every punch. Maybe the next two will undo some of the damage. But I have to say I think it was extensive.

What is President Obama's drone war in Pakistan doing?

Here's an important new study on our drone war based on 130 interviews, including with Pakistani victims and witnesses of drone attacks. (PDF of the complete report.) The study says:

In public statements, the US states that there have been “no” or “single digit” civilian casualties.” It is difficult to obtain data on strike casualties because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability, compounded by the obstacles to independent investigation of strikes in North Waziristan. The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind.

But the problem goes far beyond "civilian casualties":

Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves. . . .

The report points out that the government considers any Pakistani man who's killed in a drone strike to be a "militant," and the media seems to blindly go along with this:

Journalists and media outlets should cease the common practice of referring simply to “militant” deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government accounts of “militant” deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as “militants,” absent exonerating evidence. Media accounts relying on anonymous government sources should also highlight the fact of their single-source information and of the past record of false government reports. . . .

What's President Obama's role in all this?

When President Bush left office in January 2009, the US had carried out at least 45 drone strikes according to the New America Foundation, or 52 according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), inside Pakistan. Since then, President Obama has reportedly carried out more than five times that number: 292 strikes in just over three and a half years. This dramatic escalation in the US use of drones to carry out targeted killings has brought with it escalating tensions between the US and Pakistan, as well as continued questions about the efficacy and accuracy of such strikes.

A key feature of the Obama administration’s use of drones has been a reported expansion in the use of “signature” strikes. Between 2002 and 2007, the Bush administration reportedly focused targeted killings on “personality” strikes targeting named, allegedly high-value leaders of armed, non-state groups like Salim Sinan al Harethi and Nek Mohammad. Under Obama, the program expanded to include far more “profile” or so-called “signature” strikes based on a “pattern of life” analysis. According to US authorities, these strikes target “groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.” Just what those “defining characteristics” are has never been made public. In 2012, the New York Times paraphrased a view shared by several officials that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” The Times also reported that some in the Obama administration joke that when the CIA sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” they think it is a terrorist training camp. . . .

[T]he President acts as the final decision maker, at least with respect to the decision to carry out “personality strikes” targeting named individuals. . . .

The administration claims to have a thorough vetting process by which names are chosen. It is unclear what, if any, process is in place for [these] decisions.

"Government-funded film critics do grotesque damage to freedom of speech."

Mark Steyn at National Review observes:

The more that U.S.-government officials talk about the so-called film Innocence of Muslims (which is actually merely a YouTube trailer) the more they confirm the mob’s belief that works of “art” are the proper responsibility of government. Obama and Clinton are currently starring as the Siskel & Ebert of Pakistani TV, giving two thumbs down to Innocence of Muslims in hopes that it will dissuade local moviegoers from giving two heads off to consular officials. “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” says Hillary Clinton. “We absolutely reject its content, and message.” “We reject the efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” adds Barack Obama. . . .

What other entertainments have senior U.S. officials reviewed lately? Last year Hillary Clinton went to see the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”? The Book of Mormon’s big showstopper is “Hasa Diga Eebowai” which apparently translates as “F*** you, God.” The U.S. secretary of state stood and cheered.

Why does Secretary Clinton regard “F*** you, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the family but “F*** you, Allah” as “disgusting and reprehensible”? The obvious answer is that, if you sing the latter, you’ll find a far more motivated crowd waiting for you at the stage door."

Why did Rick Perry fail?

It might have been sleep apnea.

Is Romney wrong about economic mobility in the United States?

In a Washington Post editorial, Ruth Marcus writes that Mitt Romney is presenting a "Fantasyland version of the American Dream." According to Marcus, Romney claims that

all it takes to succeed in this country is determination and hard work. Government merely needs to get out of the way, roust the Entitlement Society slackers and let the Opportunity Society strivers go for it.

“Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America,” Romney told donors at the now-famous Florida fundraiser. “I’ll tell you ... 95 percent of life is set up for you if you’re born in this country.”

Describing his own path, Romney noted that he gave away the money his father left him. “I have inherited nothing,” he said. “Everything I earned I earned the old-fashioned way.”

There’s only one thing wrong with this cozy, self-satisfied worldview: It omits the enormous advantages accruing to those born on third base. It ignores the grim reality that those born to less-privileged families are far less likely than the Bushes or Romneys of the world to secure their place in the middle class or above.

It imagines an America where economic mobility is far more fluid than it is in reality. Being born in America is an advantage, to be sure, but some spoons are a lot more sterling than others.

A new study from the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families underscores Romney’s misperception. “The reality is that economic success in America is not purely meritocratic,” write authors Isabel V. Sawhill, Scott Winship and Kerry Searle Grannis. Rather, they say, “It helps if you have the right parents. Those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults.”

This seems to be flawed reasoning. The statement in that last paragraph assumes that merit is randomly distributed throughout the population. But that's not the only plausible theory. How about this alternate theory? Parents earn their money through their actions. They took those actions because of some combination of their genes and their environment (including how they were raised by their parents). The parents obviously pass on their genes to their children, and they can also pass on some of their upbringing by raising their kids to share their values and so on. The children will tend to act in similar ways to their parents. In short, parents can pass on their "merit" to their children. If that's correct, then in a meritocracy, you'd expect a person's level of economic success to be fairly similar — although far from identical — to their parents.

And that's what the study shows:

People do move up and down the ladder, both over their careers and between generations, but it helps if you have the right parents. Children born into middle-income families have a roughly equal chance of moving up or down once they become adults, but those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults. The chance that a child born into a family in the top income quintile will end up in one of the top three quintiles by the time they are in their forties is 82 percent, while the chance for a child born into a family in the bottom quintile is only 30 percent. In short, a rich child in the U.S. is more than twice as likely as a poor child to end up in the middle class or above.

As Tyler Cowen wrote in a blog post called "Why Economic Mobility Measures are Overrated" (which I've blogged twice before):

How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I do not know how much of current American (or other) immobility is due to this factor, but I find it discomforting that complaints about mobility are so infrequently accompanied by an analysis of this topic.

"No One Murdered Because Of This Image"

Jonah Goldberg analyzes the profound significance of an Onion article.

People and percentages

Paul Krugman points out the fallacy of characterizing a group of people as a 47% bloc: people don't stay in the same situation for their whole lives. So a statistical percentage isn't equivalent to a group of actual human beings.

The exact same fallacy is committed by those who divide the country into "the 1%" and "the 99%."

The New York Times on the Romney campaign

"[A] flustered adviser, describing the mood, said that the campaign was turning into a vulgar, unprintable phrase."

Brunch conversation

Me: Do you want some of my watermelon?

My girlfriend: You're only asking me that because I'm black.

(At the highly recommended Americana Vineyards in Interlaken, New York, near Ithaca.)

David Brooks analyzes Mitt Romney's hidden-camera comments

Brooks writes an insightful column on Romney's infamous comments:

Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers. Forty-seven percent of the country, he said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor. . . .

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

I agree with most of that. But Brooks's line of reasoning about parents and children, though clever, is also potentially dangerous. Adults aren't children. And the government isn't — or, shouldn't be — our parents.

By the way, who are the 47% of people Romney referred to as not paying income taxes? Here are a few charts with the answer. As you can see from that link, Romney is about right if you're looking at federal income taxes paid in 2011: 46.4% of households didn't pay them. But most of those households (28.3%) paid payroll taxes instead. Among the remaining 18.1%, most of them (10.3% of the total) were elderly, and almost all of the younger ones (6.9%) made less than $20,000 a year. It's fine for Romney and others to make the case that more of them should pay higher taxes. But let's be clear about who we're talking about.

Do tax increases discourage the wealthy from working hard?

Judge Richard Posner (who's considered "conservative") has this to say on the subject:

Increasing income taxes can . . . reduce the amount of work. But when the issue is increasing marginal income tax rates, the likelihood of a significant effect on work depends critically not only on the amount of the increase but also on where the margin is set. The Obama Administration proposes by allowing some of the Bush tax cuts to expire on schedule to increase the marginal income tax rate of persons whose taxable income exceeds $250,000 a year from 35 to 39.6 percent. . . . The effect on most of these taxpayers would be small. Suppose a person earning $300,000 in taxable income pays $75,000 in taxes currently. If his marginal rate (the rate for taxable income above $250,000) rises from 35 to 39.6 percent (for simplicity I’ll round this up to 40 percent), then his total income tax bill will rise from $75,000 to $77,500 (because on the last $50,000 of his income he will pay an extra 5 percent in tax). Will this increase in his total federal income tax bill, of 3.3 percent, cause him to work less? I would like to see evidence that it would.

Because of tax avoidance opportunities, it seems that very few people pay more than about a quarter of their income in federal income tax. Suppose someone has an income of $10 million on which he currently pays $2.5 million in income tax. The Administration’s tax increase would raise his income tax by $487,500 ([$10 million - $250,000] x .05), or slightly less than 20 percent. Would that affect how hard he works? I’m skeptical.

Income tax on earned income . . . does increase the cost of work relative to leisure, which is the basis for concern that increasing income tax rates, especially marginal rates, will cause a shift from work to leisure (and . . . to nonpecuniary work such as household production). But there is another effect: by lowering disposable income, an increase in income tax may cause a person to work harder in order to maintain his previous standard of living. The net effect on income of a higher tax is therefore uncertain. . . .

Americans are accustomed to working hard and to achieving and maintaining a high level of expenditure on consumer goods. In addition, people who earn high incomes tend to be highly competitive and to rate themselves by their income relative to the income of peers. Because of the absence of an aristocracy and the presence of a generally philistine attitude toward culture, money is the key index to prestige and social standing in the United States and, for many Americans, to a feeling of self-worth. These features of American society lead to me to be skeptical in general about the effect on work and therefore income of increasing marginal income tax rates to the levels contempated by the Administration.

A Berkeley economics professor, Owen Zidar, has studied the macroeconomic effects of tax changes on different income groups by looking at decades of data on U.S. federal and state taxes (respectively, from 1945-2010 and 1980-2011). (Here's the abstract with a link to download the whole paper.) He concludes:

Do tax cuts that go to high income taxpayers generate more output and employment growth than similarly sized tax cuts for low and moderate income taxpayers? . . .

If tax cuts for high-income earners generate substantial economic activity and job creation, then we should expect to see three things in the data. First, employment growth should tend to be higher in the years following exogenous tax cuts for the rich. Second, places with a higher share of rich people should grow faster following national tax cuts for the rich (since these areas receive more tax cuts for rich people in dollar per capita terms). Similarly, growth should be lower following tax increases on the rich, especially in places where many rich people live. None of these predictions are born out out in the data.

I find that the relationship between upper income tax changes and growth is negligible in magnitude and substantially weaker than equivalently sized tax changes for the bottom 90%. The point estimates suggest that almost all of the stimulative effect of exogenous tax cuts is due to tax cuts for the bottom 90%. Differential consumption responses help explain why a dollar of tax cuts for the top 10% produces less growth than those for the bottom 90%. Investment responses are also stronger following tax cuts for the bottom 90%, suggesting that the effects of additional economic growth tend to exceed the effects from income changes among those who are more likely to save. Overall, tax cuts for the bottom 90% tend to result in more output, employment, consumption and investment growth than equivalently sized tax cuts for the top 10%.

(You might object that this kind of study is skewed by the fact that taxes are sometimes raised or cut in response to specific economic conditions. But Professor Zidar tried to exclude those kinds of tax changes from his study.)

Does Obamacare let everyone keep their health insurance plan?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Got a long letter from my health insurance saying the Affordable Care Act is causing my health benefits to be significantly reduced and my premiums to increase. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Dear Obama, that's fine, but don't call it the Affordable Care Act.

Here's Politifact on President Obama's claim that "[i]f you're one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance. This law will only make it more secure and more affordable." Politifact says:

[A] March 2012 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress, projected that 3 million to 5 million fewer non-elderly people would obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed. Including those with individually purchased policies enlarges that decline by an additional 1 million to 3 million Americans.

CBO’s estimate is broadly in line with a number of other independent estimates. . . .

In reality, Americans are not simply able to keep their insurance through thick and thin. Even before the law has taken effect, the rate of forced plan-switching among policyholders every year is substantial, and the CBO figures suggest that the law could increase that rate, at least modestly, even if Americans on balance benefit from the law’s provisions.

Politifact concludes: "We rate Obama’s claim Half True." That seems pretty generous.

Nietzsche on Obama?

1. "Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, then, this hope will be arrogance, an overestimation."

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), #443

2. "[S]ome individuals . . . are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork."

— Nietzsche, id., #627

3. "There are men so presumptuous that they can only praise a greatness which they publicly admire by representing it as steps and bridges that lead to themselves.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880), #210

Is there more entitlement spending under Democratic or Republican presidents?

Republicans, according to this editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time: Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

"Bill Gates is better than Batman"

A well-designed argument.

The Republican Convention in a nutshell

"Convention speakers: 'OK, guys, my turn to get an applause line with 'You didn't build that!"'"

(From Alex Knepper on Facebook.)

Should Romney have a "Sister Souljah" moment by linking Bush to Obama?

Jonah Goldberg thinks so:

Romney must challenge Obama’s theories of both the past and the future. The notion that Bush was a government-shrinking market fanatic is bizarre. Under Bush, the federal government spent more than 3 percent of GDP on anti-poverty programs for the first time. Education spending rose 58 percent faster than inflation. Bush gave us Medicare Part D, the biggest expansion in entitlements since the Great Society — until Obamacare. He signed Sarbanes-Oxley, created a whole new Cabinet agency (the Department of Homeland Security), and was the originator of the bailouts, TARP, and the first stimulus program.

Obama took many of these policies and approaches and expanded them. Historians will look back on the Bush-Obama years as a time of largely uninterrupted growth in government and debt.

I don’t believe the Republican party would punish Romney for a policy-heavy “Sister Souljah moment.” I’ve made this argument in front of numerous conservative audiences (and recently in the pages of National Review) with little to no objection. My hunch is that Bush himself would be happy to serve as a punching bag if it would help.

Thomas Sowell on the need to end Medicare as we know it

Sowell writes:

There are people who take seriously such statements as those by President Barack Obama that Republicans want to "end Medicare as we know it."

Let's stop and think, if only for the novelty of it. If you make any change in anything, you are ending it "as we know it." Does that mean that everything in the status quo should be considered to be set in concrete forever?

If there were not a single Republican, or none who got elected to any office, arithmetic would still end "Medicare as we know it," for the simple reason that the money in the till is not enough to keep paying for it. The same is true of Social Security. . . .

We are not yet Greece, but we are not exempt from the same rules of arithmetic that eventually caught up with Greece. We just have a little more time. The only question is whether we will use that time to make politically difficult changes or whether we will just kick the can down the road, and keep pretending that "Medicare as we know it" would continue on indefinitely, if it were not for people who just want to be mean to the elderly.

In both Europe and America, there are many people who get angry at those who tell them the truth that the money is just not there to sustain huge welfare state programs indefinitely. But that anger might be better directed at those who lied to them by promising them benefits that were inherently unsustainable.

Some Like It Hot

My girlfriend and I saw Some Like It Hot, the great (great, great) comedy from 1959, at BAM over the weekend.

Best line, in a New York theater in 2012:

But you're not a girl, you're a guy, and why would a guy want to marry a guy?!

Abortion and rape

A piece in Reason magazine points out:

[A]lthough Romney was "always personally opposed to abortion," he was "effectively pro-choice" when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, promising he would not seek to restrict abortion rights. Later he had a "change of heart," but even today he believes, consistent with his Mormon faith, that "abortion should be permitted in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is threatened."

While that last exception can be justified on grounds of self-defense (albeit against a nonculpable "aggressor"), the other two cannot, and Romney has never clarified why rape or incest justifies taking an innocent life. Likewise the Mormon church, which cites the biblical injunction against murder in condemning abortion but nevertheless does not take as hard a line as the Roman Catholic Church.

"For many people," Romney said in a 2007 presidential debate, abortion "is considered an act of murder." Evidently he is not one of those people.

I agree that it doesn't seem to make sense for those who are opposed to abortion rights to support a rape exception. If abortion is infanticide, why does that fact no longer matter when there has been a rape? After all, no one supports infanticide of a baby (who has been born) when the conception resulted from rape!

The apparent discrepancy would seem to be resolved if you assume that what really motivates pro-lifers is disapproval of promiscuity and hedonism.

I question whether anyone is genuinely, whole-heartedly in favor of criminalizing abortion in the sense that they would like to see vigorous prosecutions of anyone who performs or receives an abortion, or aids someone else in doing so (e.g., paying for someone else to get an abortion). The consequences would be wildly unacceptable.

Stating one's opposition to a legal right to abortion can be a way of saying there's something about modern culture that one finds objectionable; it isn't a realistic policy solution. The fact that abortion remains generally legal actually works to the opponents' political benefit. As Nietzsche said (in Human, All Too Human, #531), "Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive."

President Obama and Paul Ryan are almost the same on Medicare.

Explains Matthew Yglesias:

Medicare is . . . an open-ended promise to pay the bills for most of the health care services consumed by the elderly. It’s almost as if the government had a program that just gave senior citizens free shoes in unlimited quantities. The main difference is that undergoing medical treatment is generally unpleasant and it has no real resale value, so in practice people only want to consume so much of it. . . .

Both Ryan and Obama want to put an end to this and give Medicare a finite growth target. And, indeed, they’ve both converged on the same target. Ryan put out two budget plans based on very stingy Medicare proposals: The most recent version of his idea caps Medicare growth at the underlying GDP growth rate plus 0.5 percentage points. Obama, in his remarkably little noticed Fiscal Year 2013 budget proposal, offers the very same target on Page 33. Both campaigns, in other words, propose putting Medicare on a fixed diet and they agree on the precise diet.

Where they disagree is on how to implement the cuts. Ryan’s proposal is to turn Medicare into a voucher program where seniors would get a subsidy with which to buy an insurance package, with the value of the subsidy limited by the overall growth target. Obama’s proposal is to hit the growth target the way foreign single-payer systems limit their costs, with more aggressive bureaucratic management of what Medicare is willing to pay for and how much it’s willing to pay.

The difference between outsourcing (Ryan) and centralized rationing (Obama) is an important one, but from a patient’s point of view they might end up looking pretty similar. Under Ryan’s approach, the poor will be left with bare-bones plans and more affluent seniors will either pay higher premiums to get more deluxe plans or else pay out-of-pocket for noncovered services. Under Obama’s approach, the poor will be left with bare-bones Medicare and more affluent seniors will either buy separate supplemental insurance plans or else pay out-of-pocket for noncovered services. The workability of Obama’s idea, in my view, is well-validated by international experience while the Romney/Ryan alternative amounts to taking a leap of faith in the magic of the private sector. But ironically it’s essentially the same leap of faith Obama is taking in his signature health care program for nonseniors—the view that an adequately regulated, subsidized system of private insurance plans can provide reasonable coverage at reasonable cost.

Medicare and reality

An article in Reason magazine defends Paul Ryan's Medicare plan:

At the rate we're going, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest payments will consume the entire federal budget by 2025—leaving nothing for defense, law enforcement, national parks, highways, food stamps and all the other responsibilities the government is supposed to handle. Either drastic spending cuts or staggering tax increases would be needed.

To insist that Medicare can and should remain just as it is today is either delusional or dishonest . . . .

It's easy to improve health care if cost is no object. It's easy to reduce costs if you can tolerate worse health outcomes. The trick is to balance the two needs. The Ryan plan is a credible attempt. . . .

Democrats have a point in saying what Ryan offers is not as good as the current version of Medicare. It's also not as good as the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the valley of Shangri-La.

His option does, however, have the virtue of a connection to the real world. It's a place his critics can't avoid forever.

Yes, President Obama did cut Medicare ...

. . . not just for health-care providers, but for senior citizens too.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias agrees:

Reducing Medicare's generosity to health care providers is an idea I'm happy to get behind, but there's a reason Medicaid is not considered a particularly high-quality health insurance program and its low reimbursement rates are a key part of it—lots of doctors refuse to accept Medicaid patients. Already Medicare is stingier than private plans, and in large high-income metro areas the most-in-demand doctors often decline to see Medicare payments. Any change at the margin to make it less lucrative for doctors will increase the number of providers who try to shun Medicare payments.

All things considered, I'm fine with that. . . . But if your top priority in life is to make senior citizens' health care as excellent as possible at any price, then Obama's savings are in fact contrary to that goal.

How an abortion would have been better for a mother and daughter

Lynn Beisner writes this in the Guardian (via):

I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. . . .

An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. . . . She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.

Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured. . . .

[My mother] abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organisations. . . .

The world would not be a darker or poorer place without me. Actually, in terms of contributions to the world, I am a net loss. Everything that I have done – including parenting, teaching, researching, and being a loving partner – could have been done as well, if not better by other people. Any positive contributions that I have made are completely offset by what it has cost society to help me overcome the disadvantages and injuries of my childhood to become a functional and contributing member of society.

A commenter named Afroblanco makes an important point on Metafilter (where I also posted this link):

One of the most disingenuous arguments of the anti-choice movement is "my mother would have aborted me, but I'm glad that I'm alive." A lot of women have abortions because they'd like to have children someday, but they're not ready yet. And since most American families have 3 kids or fewer, it's safe to say that once a woman reaches her "limit", she's not going to have more. So, if your mother only wanted 2 children and had an abortion before you or your sibling were born, then shouldn't you be glad she had that abortion? I'd imagine a lot of people . . . would be in this boat.

In praise of Paul Ryan

The left-leaning columnist William Saletan writes:

Ryan refutes the Democratic Party’s bogus arguments. He knows that our domestic spending trajectory is unsustainable and that liberals who fail to get it under control are leading their constituents over a cliff, just like in Europe. Eventually, you can’t borrow enough money to make good on your promises, and everyone’s screwed. Ryan understands that the longer we ignore the debt crisis and postpone serious budget cuts—the liberal equivalent of denying global warming—the more painful the reckoning will be. There’s nothing compassionate about that kind of irresponsibility.

Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend.

Ryan refutes the GOP’s bogus arguments, too. He proves that you don’t need private-sector experience to be a good lawmaker. He proves that a genuine conservative, as opposed to a Tea-Party ideologue, votes for bailouts when economic sanity requires them. Ryan also shows that a real conservative doesn’t worship any part of the budget, including defense. His expenditure caps can’t be squared with Romney’s nutty pledge to keep military spending above four percent of GDP. And Ryan destroys Romney’s ability to continue making the dishonest, anti-conservative argument that Obamacare is evil because it cuts Medicare. Now Romney will have to defend the honest conservative argument, which is that Medicare spending should be controlled. . . .

It speaks enormously well for Romney that he made this choice. It tells me he’d run the country the same way he ran Massachusetts: as a prudent, numbers-oriented businessman. . . .

The party of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the party of spite and bloviating and recklessness and extremism, isn’t for me. I’m voting for Obama. But four years from now? In a stronger economy, with a runaway debt? And Ryan at the top of the ticket? That’s awfully tempting.

That last paragraph is a bit strange: does Saletan really believe that bloviation is a more serious problem than the deficit?

Predictions

Barack Obama wins a second term.

Paul Ryan is the next President of the United States.

Thomas Sowell on wishful thinking

"Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case, it is usually at the expense of others. In other words, it is the opposite of idealism."

How to make America more like Scandinavia . . .

. . . without killing economic growth.

Also, how to fund a nonfiction book.

Both involve from-the-bottom-up processes.

Nietzsche on life stages

"Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

People as bad poets. Just as bad poets, in the second half of a line, look for a thought to fit their rhyme, so people in the second half of their lives, having become more anxious, look for the actions, attitudes, relationships that suit those of their earlier life, so that everything will harmonize outwardly. But then they no longer have any powerful thought to rule their life and determine it anew; rather, in its stead, comes the intention of finding a rhyme."

From Human, All Too Human, Part I, # 609-10.

Why do Americans have less income mobility than Europeans?

I linked to Tyler Cowen's post with 7 points about income mobility yesterday, and I mentioned that he speculates about that question. Here's what Cowen has to say (#4); I think this is a profound insight that doesn't get nearly enough attention:

Why do many European nations have higher mobility? Putting ethnic and demographic issues aside, here is one mechanism. Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on. That approach makes more sense in a lot of Europe than here. Some of the children of those families have comparable smarts but higher ambition and so they rise quite a bit in income relative to their peers. (The opposite may occur as well, with the children choosing more leisure.) That is a less likely scenario for the United States, where smart people realize this is a country geared toward higher earners and so fewer smart parents play the “tend the garden” strategy. . . . “High intergenerational mobility” is sometimes a synonym for “lots of parental underachievers.”

Another thing (Cowen's point #7):

I would like all measurements [of income mobility] to take into account the pre-migration incomes of incoming entrants. Denmark, which doesn’t let many people in, is a much less upwardly mobile society once you take this into account. Sweden deserves more praise, and in general this factor will make the Anglo countries look much, much more supportive of mobility.

Tyler Cowen on Paul Krugman

"Paul Krugman is a great economist. But of all the people in my RSS feed, in terms of his quality and skill as a reader, he is not in the top 90 percent."

That's how Tyler Cowen concludes a reply to Krugman in their debate on income mobility.

(Here's Cowen's original post with 7 interesting points on income mobility, including speculation about why it's higher in Europe than in the US, and here's Krugman's response suggesting that Cowen's post is "anti-American.")

One of Cowen's co-bloggers, Alex Tabarrok, also defends Cowen. He gives three elegant hypotheticals which lead him to conclude that "economic mobility measures are overrated. What we should care about is growth." Whether or not you're not predisposed to agree with that view, I recommend clicking the link and considering Tabarrok's hypos.

Relatedly, here's a column by Thomas Sowell on income mobility. Excerpt:

All sorts of statements are made in politics and in the media as if that top 1 percent is an enduring class of people, rather than an ever-changing collection of individuals who have a spike in their income in a particular year for one reason or another. Turnover in other income brackets is also substantial.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Most people start out at the bottom, in entry-level jobs, and their incomes rise over time as they acquire more skills and experience.

Politicians and media talking heads love to refer to people who are in the bottom 20 percent in income in a given year as “the poor.” But, following the same individuals for 10 or 15 years usually shows the great majority of those individuals moving into higher income brackets.

The number who reach the top 20 percent greatly exceeds the number still stuck in the bottom 20 percent over the years. But such mundane facts cannot compete for attention with the moral melodramas conjured up by politicians and the media when they discuss “the rich” and “the poor.”

There are people who are genuinely rich and genuinely poor, in the sense of having very high or very low incomes for most, if not all, of their lives. But “the rich” and “the poor” in this sense are unlikely to add up to even 10 percent of the population.

For more of this, I recommend the chapter on income in Sowell's book Economic Facts and Fallacies.

3 responses to Obama's "You didn't build that"

Charles Krauthammer:

The ultimate Obama fallacy . . . is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.

. . . Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure.

Will Wilkinson:

Mr Obama's observation that it takes a village to make a fortune is in one respect irrelevant and in another offensive. It is irrelevant because the class of people Mr Obama wants to "give back" has already paid most of the tab, and continues to pay most of the tab, for the tax-financed public goods upon which they, and the rest of us, so crucially depend. At the federal level, the top 10% percent of the distribution paid over 70% of income taxes in 2009 . . . . Mr Obama's in-it-together point is mildly offensive in context because it is used to imply that top-earners who resist paying an even larger portion of America's tab do so only because they are in the grip of an absurd myth of self-reliance.

Together with a bit of simple democratic mathematics, the facts about the portion of tax revenue contributed by the rich plausibly suggest that they pay more than their fair share for the infrastructure of capitalism. The rich have money, which can buy political influence. But the middle class have votes, which in a democracy is influence. So it's not surprising that the public goods upon which the middle class equally depends are financed disproportionately by the wealthy. Of course, no one ever got elected by identifying middle-income voters as the free-riding class. Asking the minority who already finances rather more than most government expenditure to "give something back", as if it were currently skating by unfairly on the more open-handed spirit of the less privileged, is plain, old-fashioned demagoguery. . . .

Anyway, it's not the infrastructure of American capitalism that's busting the budget, is it? Our fiscal strain is largely a matter of buying health-care for old people. The health and longevity of America's elderly is an admirable and humane goal, but it's not part of the vital infrastructure of business.

None of this is to say that the top tax rate should not rise. There may be other, better, reasons to stick it to the rich. . . . But Mr Obama's notion that the rich get more out of our common institutions than they put in is questionable, to say the least. And his suggestion that opposition to higher top income-tax rates could only be based on by-the-bootstraps social atomism is a silly bit of bad faith.

(I made a similar point in response to Elizabeth Warren.)

Ann Althouse (my mom):

You could say if you listen sympathetically to Obama saying the quote, you could understand the quote in a way that's not ridiculous and disturbingly left-wing. And if you get that far, then Romney's use of it could be understood as "a false attack." . . . But why would Romney not use that quote for all it's worth? Since when does decency/integrity/honesty require that a politician interpret his opponent's words in a sympathetic light and give him the benefit of the doubt? The quote is a gift to Romney and he's accepted it.

It's like Romney saying "Corporations are people." That's a gift to Obama's people and they are using it. They don't feel any ethical compulsion to stop and say we understand what he really meant. I mean, I love the way the new Obama ad — trying to get us to understand — includes this additional part of the context: "We succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

When I heard that the first time, I said: Yeah, corporations are people. We do things together. Sometimes when people succeed doing things together, they form a corporation as a way of working together. But you'll never hear Obama say that. He will use the "Corporations are people" line for full mockery effect, never admitting that he knows why it makes sense and why it really isn't anything we disagree about.

The Aurora shooting

It's unfortunate that so many people's instinctive reaction to a horrific tragedy is to proclaim that it supports their political views.

"Should All Young Americans Be Fiscal Conservatives?"

Good question:

If young Americans knew what was good for them, would they all support aggressive deficit-cutting plans that slash government spending across the board? . . .

The federal government spends more than seven times as much on someone 65 or older as it does on a child. Even after you include state and local spending on public schools, total spending per person on children is less than half that for the elderly. Over the past decade, the number of children in poverty has soared, and over the rest of this decade, spending on children will shrink by a fifth (as a percentage of total federal spending), while spending on the elderly will swell even more. On the current path, in 25 years Social Security, health-care and interest on accumulated debt would consume all Federal government revenue, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office projections. . . .

Current policies will continue to shift resources from the young to the old. Moreover, these policies are ultimately unsustainable, so that when today’s young people retire, they will not be able to count on full benefits. Without a change in policy, in 40 years Social Security will only be able to pay three-quarters of the payouts that have been promised. The gap cannot be closed by tax increases alone without sizable spending cuts.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jason (the commenter) suggests an explanation:

Money the government is spending on old people means young people are free not to take care of them.

200 photos from the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison

To see the artist, title, and year, click on the slideshow. This will open a Flickr webpage with the information.

All the artworks are from the 20th and 21st centuries. The artists include Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Warhol, and Rothko. (Link to the museum.)

A question about Obamacare

Won't the health-care law encourage people not to have health insurance? You pay a tax that's less than what health insurance would have cost. Wait till you're seriously ill to buy it, and you'll be entitled to get it. In the past, people were more incentivized to get health insurance even if they were healthy, so they wouldn't run into the pre-existing condition problem.

Who's the loser after today's health-care ruling?

I don't know if today's decision upholding President Obama's health-care law was better for Obama or Mitt Romney. But there is a clear loser: almost every pundit in America.

Everyone who said the law should, or would, be held constitutional under the Commerce Clause was wrong. Everyone who said the law should, or would, be held unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause was also wrong. Almost no one got it right.

Ann Althouse (my mom) lists 3 ways that Obama is the real loser:

Romney has at least 3 big arguments:

1. Obama imposed a huge new tax on working people.

2. Obama deceived the American people by saying it was not a tax, when it was.

3. The law made it look like money would go to insurance companies — in the form of new premiums — that would keep premiums low as the companies were required to take on people with pre-existing conditions, but now we find out that the money is really going to go to the federal government.

Democrats for Gary Johnson

Terry Michael, who once served as a press secretary for the Democratic National Committee and has been a vocal supporter of the two-party system, explains why he's voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee for president:

I don’t intend to change my registration. I’m still a Democrat. But I’m a small “l” libertarian Democrat, who wants to teach fellow Democrats that 21st century libertarians are not a bunch of selfish, Ayn Rand-style, greedy capitalists. Among the three issue frames of politics—economy, social, and foreign—most rank-and-file Democrats share much in common with modern libertarians. Most libertarians want to keep government out of our bedrooms, away from our bodies, and out of the backyards of the rest of the world. On the economy, while we are for limited spending, taxes, and regulation, we favor free markets—not oligarchic capitalism that uses government to re-distribute tax revenue to the military-industrial-congressional-media complex, the behemoth pharmaceutical companies, or other lobbyists along Washington’s K Street who seek benefits from government and regulations that put competitors at disadvantage. . . .

Gov. Gary Johnson balanced New Mexico’s budget all 8 years he served; he pledges to end the insanity in Afghanistan immediately; he is committed to legalizing drugs, to ending the government-induced black market that drives up profits and causes Mexican cartels to murder thousands, like the Al Capone murder and mayhem created by alcohol Prohibition. And he wants to end handouts to corporations that see the U.S. Treasury as a giant ATM, stocked with cash by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

I have been a slave to political pragmatism during my four decades in these 10 square miles surrounded by reality known as Washington, D.C. But this year, I encourage my Jeffersonian, classical liberal friends, in each party and neither, to send a simple message to both my party and the Republicans, in the form of votes for Gary Johnson.

Treadmill videos

1. Cats

2. Box




3. Slinky

Happy 70th birthday to Paul McCartney and Roger Ebert!

The linguistic quirks of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

John McWhorter notices that Romney often says "gosh" and "gee":

“This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late ’70s,” he reminisced to a radio host about a steak house. Or, Romney surmised how his Mormonism would play out during his campaign with, “Oh, I think initially, some people would say, ‘Gosh, I don’t know much about your faith, tell me about it,’ ” as if his G-word fetish were the way just anyone talks these days. Or: Chris Wallace asked whether said faith might be a disadvantage in voter perceptions of him, and Romney exclaimed, “Gee, I hope not!” Then, Romney on carried interest—one is to “say, gosh, is this a true capital investment with a risk of loss?”

McWhorter, a linguist, gives this analysis:

Gee, gosh, and golly are all tokens of dissimulation. They are used in moments of excitement or dismay as burgherly substitutions, either for God and Jesus—words many religious people believe should not be “taken in vain”—or for words considered even less appropriate. . . . The medieval and even colonial Anglophones’ versions of profanity were to express dismay or vent pain by swearing—“making an oath”—to God or related figures considered ill-addressed in such a disrespectful way. The proper person at least muted the impact with a coy distortion, à la today’s shoot and fudge. . . . To increasing numbers of modern Americans, the G-words are unusable outside of quotation marks . . . .

The proscription against swearing “to God” has ever less force. I recall being taught it as a child in the ’70s but being quietly perplexed as to why and wondering what “in vain” meant. Since then, “ohmigod” has become an ordinary remark among even a great many churchgoers. The evasive essence of the G-words, redolent of the Beaver Cleaver 1950s Romney grew up in, has long been rejected as phony, out of line with the let-it-all-hangout essence of the culture. Indicatively, a Web search turns them up endlessly in ironic writing about Romney’s assorted evasions and half-truths during his campaign. The modern American, even if he or she has one of Romney’s Harvard degrees, often uses today’s version of profanity in the slots where Romney slides his G-words. A more, shall we say, vibrant translation of “Gee, I hope not” would be “Shit, I hope not,” and in “This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late ’70s,” “hell” would be substituted for the “oh gosh,” especially after a beer or two. Or, even in more buttoned-up moments, our versions of those sentences might include “Man, I hope not,” and especially for those under about 40, “Dude, I don’t know much about your faith.” Man and dude both reach out to the interlocutor seeking agreement. Man and dude are, at heart, solicitations—“You know what I mean, man/dude?”

This warmer, more personal way of speaking fits with a trend in American English during Romney’s lifetime, in which casual speech styles have occupied ever more of the space that used to be reserved for the more formal. Casual speech always has more room for the folksy reach-out than formal speech does: Witness the use of yo today among younger black people. “Them pants was tight, yo!” I once caught on the subway. The yo isn't the grand old call from a distance—Yo!—the guy’s friend was standing right there. This new yo appended to the ends of sentences has a particular function,reinforcing that you and your conversational partner are on the same page in terms of perspectives and attitudes.

Gee, I don't find the "G" words that odd. I would be much more taken aback if I heard a presidential candidate using "man" or "dude" that way. And surely McWhorter wouldn't seriously advise Romney to start using "yo," at any point in any sentence. By the way, although the headline and the body of the article mention the word "golly" — the squarest of the "G" words — McWhorter doesn't give any example of Romney using that word.

A commenter on the New Republic's website has a good catch:

This article misses the single most antiquated bit of English in Mitt's arsenal: the use of "why" as an interjection. As in, "Why, that's just about the best piece of pie I've ever had!" I think Ward Cleaver was literally the last person in America to use "why" this way. In 2012 it's at best naive-sounding and at worst creepy.

I agree that when Romney uses "Why . . ." at the beginning of an exclamation (instead of a question), he sounds like he's from a bygone era. We all know Romney isn't cool the way President Obama is.

However, though we'll never get tired of poking fun at the quirks of presidential candidates, I wonder whether it would be so bad to have a president whose speaking style is a bit out of touch. If that matters at all, it would mean he'd be slightly less adept at persuading people — either firing up his base, or winning people over to his point of view. If that's one of his main weaknesses, that might not be so bad. Our leaders shouldn't be too persuasive. Obama is so good at connecting — making you feel like he's talking directly to you — that it can be dangerous. After all, he has more power at his fingertips, including military and police forces, than anyone else in the world.

People like Obama, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Tony Blair can talk you into anything. I sort of prefer the square, stilted politicians like Romney, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore. To me, they seem more "real," because most normal people would not be very adept at convincing a nation of hundreds of millions that "I'm basically like you; we want the same things." Most ordinary citizens who tried to run for president would probably come off as wooden and unhip. The candidate who can connect with most people is actually unlike most people.

Back to McWhorter's article: he says that Obama has "more modern" verbal tics:

This is true not only in the dusting of black inflection he often uses for rhetorical purposes, but in a certain interjectional tic: a particular penchant for you know even in weighty contexts. You know steps outside of the formal, propositional box of a statement to solicit agreement from the listener, rather like a raising of the eyebrows or hands spread outward with palms upward. A dedicated Obama mimic could go a long way in sprinkling develop thoughtful statements with ample you know-age.

"You know" isn't really so modern:

In 1998, I asked a 95-year-old linguist whether he remembered people using like in the hedging way they do now when he was a child, and he said that back then, you know was used in the same way. (I have since been told this by two other nonagenarians.) The difference is that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t given to saying you know in discussing the League of Nations.

I've been struck by how many of the people who appear on Bloggingheads, for instance, will constantly pepper their speech with "you know," which seems to be the erudite version of "like." (A similarly refined substitute for "like" is "sort of.") They've learned that "you know" makes you sound thoughtful and academic, while "like" makes you sound like a teenager. We're supposed to look down on people who constantly use "like," while admiring the nuance of those who use "you know," but neither is more or less meaningful than the other.

Pet videos

1. Beagle vs. hog




2. Cat going down stairs

Cafe conversation

From the table next to me at The Grey Dog in Manhattan:

— Is she young-ish?

— No, she's not that young. She's 24.

— But she's young-ish.

The definition of insanity

Rent control in France.

(If you don't understand why this is a terrible plan, please read the first chapter of Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, or the pages in the index entry for "rent control" in his Basic Economics.)

War — what is it good for?

Being absolutely adorable.

How likely is it that the winner of the 2012 presidential election will lose the popular vote?

About 5%, according to Nate Silver at the New York Times:

One hypothesis might be that Mr. Obama enjoys some sort of intrinsic edge in the Electoral College — and that, like Mr. Bush in 2000, he could win the Electoral College while losing the nationwide popular vote.

Our analysis suggests, however, that this is not necessarily the case. The model’s simulations estimate that there is only about a 2 percent chance that Mr. Obama will win Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Meanwhile, there is only about a 3 percent chance that Mr. Romney will do so.

Silver forecasts that Obama has a 62% chance of winning re-election — much lower than the 80% chance that Obama would win if the election were held today.

Is Google making us stupid or smart?

Neither.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Ray Bradbury has died at age 91.

Here's an interview with him (undated, but uploaded in 2008).

A thing that begins when you're 3 and 6 and 10 and 12 winds up in your fictions when you're in your 30s. . . .

The reason why my books are popular: because they know I'm a lover. . . .

Love what you do, and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. . . .

I'm going to have a t-shirt made — it says: "Stand at the top of the cliff, and jump off, and build your wings on the way down."

We are all the sons and the daughters of time. So I thank the universe for making life on earth and allowing me to come alive here.

The War on Everything

The European and North American bubble

Mark Steyn writes:

[T]he unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence" that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

When should you stay at your job?

Why reductionism about the self and other philosophical subjects is so common and so wrong

There's a new book called The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood. In an interview by Sam Harris, Hood explains his premise that the belief that you have a "self" is an illusion:

For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion – it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That’s not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity.

Now, here's Will Wilkinson explaining his problem with that (he uses the word "eliminativism" where I use "reductionism"):

Right off, I get red flags. Eliminativism of all sorts -- about morality, consciousness, free will, the self -- is frequently motivated by what I like to call the “fallacy of disappointed expectations.” The heart of the fallacy is to accept at the outset that the nature of the self, for example, is precisely what an extravagantly metaphysical, often religious, account says that it is. Then one observes that there exists little or no evidence in support of that account. One then concludes, having already simply assumed that the self (or free will or consciousness or moral reasons) could not be something less grand, that there is no self (or free will or consciousness or morality). If the self isn’t a hard gem-like flame literally flickering somewhere east of the pancreas, then there is no self! Usually arguments from disappointed expectations are advanced in a spirit of excited, self-congratulation, as if reasoning poorly were the same thing as staring bravely into the abyss.

I strongly agree with Wilkinson — about the self and all his other examples (free will, consciousness, morality). He's articulating something I've noticed before, but I hadn't thought to put it in terms of "disappointed expectations."

When I was in college, I had a philosophy professor who seemed frustrated by the fact that many students wouldn't give the obviously correct answers to the most basic moral hypotheticals (e.g. whether it's morally better to care for a sick person or to eat babies). He said something to the whole class that was startingly rude but hard to deny: "The intelligence level tends to get turned down in philosophy classes."

"Any job creation was accidental."

So says this New York Times op-ed, which strongly suggests that Mitt Romney shouldn't get credit for creating jobs through his work at Bain Capital. The article is by Steve Rattner, who used to work for the Treasury in the Obama administration.

Thomas Sowell, in the book A Conflict of Visions, includes a chart with two columns and two rows. The columns are labeled "beneficial" and "harmful." The rows are labeled "intentional" and "unintentional." Sowell points out that intelligent people seem to disagree on whether there is anything of significance in the "beneficial" + "unintentional" quadrant. Rattner, the op-ed writer, apparently believes either that there's nothing significant in that quadrant, or that no one who creates things in that quadrant deserves credit for it.

The latter would be an odd view. As Sowell points out, we have a word for things in the "unintentional" + "harmful" quadrant: "negligence." We generally blame people for acting negligently. So, why shouldn't we praise people for doing the opposite — causing unintended benefits?

Great moments in verbosity

"Would all jurors with last names beginning with the letters A through Z please turn in your forms?"

"I don't think they understand the complex foundation upon which their own prosperity rests."

That's a very important point made by economist Glenn Loury. Loury and my mom, Ann Althouse, bemoan the fact that most voters' knowledge of economics is so shallow that not only is Mitt Romney attacked for being successful in business, but Romney doesn't even seem able to defend himself:



On this topic, a must-read is Reihan Salam's "Let Us Now Praise Private Equity."

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

The New York Times obituary describes Fischer-Dieskau's experience as a German in World War II:

[I]n 1943, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to care for army horses on the Russian front. He kept a diary there, calling it his “attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings.” . . .

“Lots of cold, lots of slush, and even more storms,” read [one entry]. “Every day horses die for lack of food.”

It was in Russia that he heard that his mother had been forced to send his brother to an institution outside Berlin. “Soon,” he wrote later, “the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: they starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

And then his mother’s apartment in Lichterfelde was bombed. Granted home leave to help her, he found that all that remained of their possessions could be moved to a friend’s apartment in a handcart. But as early as his second day home, he and his mother began seeking out “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.”

Instead of returning to the disastrous campaign in Russia, he was diverted to Italy along with thousands of other German soldiers. There, on May 5, 1945, just three days before the Allies accepted the German surrender, he was captured and imprisoned. It turned out to be musical opportunity: soon the Americans were sending him around to entertain other P.O.W.’s from the back of a truck. The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated.

Here's Fischer-Dieskau singing "Gute Nacht," from Schubert's Winterreise (with Murray Perahia on piano):



Many of the comments on that YouTube video were posted today, echoing the song title:

Gute Nacht, meine freund ;(

(The third movement from A German Requiem by Brahms.)

Animal minds and meat

Recent studies have found that people are more likely to deny or minimize animal minds when they think of the animals as food, or when they expect to eat meat soon:

[M]eat eaters were asked to think about cows and sheep. Some of them thought about these animals living an idyllic life on a farm. Others thought specifically about these animals growing up on a farm and then being killed for food. Later, they also rated the mental abilities of the animals. When people thought about the animals as food, their ratings of the mental abilities of the animals were lower than when they thought about the animals living on a farm.

It isn't just thinking about animals being used for food, though. In one final study, all of the participants had to write about the process of raising and butchering animals for food. All of the participants thought they were going to do a food sampling task after writing the essay. Half of the participants were told they would be eating fruit during the food sampling, while others were told they would be eating beef and lamb. Finally, participants rated the mental abilities of cows and sheep. The group that was about to eat meat gave much lower ratings of the mental abilities of cows and sheep than the group that was about to eat fruit.

This abstract of the studies theorizes that we deny animal minds in order to reduce our own cognitive dissonance. The dissonance can result from simultaneously wanting to eat meat, yet not wanting to harm beings that have minds.

Europe, 1000-2005 in 3 and a half minutes

[UPDATE: The video has been taken down. I'm leaving this post up to preserve the comments.]

West Virginia uses federal stimulus money to buy $22,000 internet routers

I'm shocked, shocked to see wasteful spending by state officials with very little accountability or expertise, who have been showered with money under the theory that massive government spending is exactly what America needs right now.

Obama decides to make his support of same-sex marriage public.

My reaction to President Obama's decision to "go ahead and affirm" that he supports same-sex marriage (adapted from a comment by me on Metafilter):

It's nice that Obama has made this announcement, albeit after noticing that other high-level politicians like Joe Biden, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney don't seem to have suffered much political blowback from doing the same thing. (It's interesting that our 3 most recent vice presidents are all supporters of same-sex marriage.) Obama's switch from supporting it in 1996 to opposing it in time to run for president to supporting it again (now that the polls are turning in its favor) seems analogous to Mitt Romney's calculated flip-flop on abortion. Again, I'm glad about Obama's announcement, but I don't find his "evolution" particularly inspiring.

I don't think many of those who previously criticized Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage thought he was bigoted in the slightest. I assume his personal views, then and now, are not anti-gay, and I can't believe he was being honest in the past about being genuinely opposed to same-sex marriage. I find it hard to imagine that he ever had a private conversation with someone in which he passionately defended his view that two women or two men shouldn't be able to get legally married. I assume, though it's of course impossible to know, that he's been in favor of same-sex marriage all along and has decided to be honest about it now. Good.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of children's books including Where the Wild Things Are (which will be 50 years old next year), has died at 83.

From the New York Times obituary:

As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.” . . .

Mr. Sendak could also be warm and forthright, if not quite gregarious. He was a man of ardent enthusiasms — for music, art, literature, argument and the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them.

In an interview last year, Sendak said:

"I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

"Who's in charge — you or your brain?"

That question is debated in this Guardian piece. It's a flawed question, since your brain is part of you.

It reminds me of this excellent article: "'Is it evolutionary, or is it . . .?'" The point of the article is that that's probably not a good way to start a question, since you can agree with an evolutionary explanation of human behavior while also agreeing with other explanations of the same behavior. (Previously.)

The "brain" article ends with this passage by neuroscientist David Eagleman, which I strongly agree with:

It is not contradictory to recognise that we are sealed off from most of reality, and that we can discover more of it by a process of careful experimentation. That is the endeavour of science. For example, you cannot see, hear or touch radio waves, but you can build machines to translate the waves into the biologically delimited language in which you can understand them. You can build such machines only because science reaches beyond what we know to discover new realms.

Neuroscience is uncovering a bracing view of what's happening below the radar of our conscious awareness, but that makes your life no more "helpless, ignorant, and zombie-like" than whatever your life is now. If you were to read a cardiology book to learn how your heart pumps, would you feel less alive and more despondently mechanical? I wouldn't. Understanding the details of our own biological processes does not diminish the awe, it enhances it. Like flowers, brains are more beautiful when you can glimpse the vast, intricate, exotic mechanisms behind them.

One problem is that reductionism is very tempting. Reductionism means feeling unsatisfied with making an observation based on evidence — "Hey look, here's something" — and feeling the need to rule out the possibility of other types of observations by adding: "And it's the only thing." Reductionism can make people feel contrarian and scientific, without actually being scientific. There can be multiple layers of explanation that are all accurate and not mutually exclusive; different kinds of description can peacefully coexist.

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died at 47.

The Beastie Boys' website has posted an obituary:

It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam "MCA" Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Yauch taught himself to play bass in high school, forming a band for his 17th birthday party that would later become known the world over as Beastie Boys.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Yauch’s mother said he died at 9 a.m. on Friday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan with his parents, his in-laws, his wife, Dechen Wangdu, and his 13-year-old daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch, at his bedside. He had been admitted to the hospital on April 14 after a three-year battle with cancer of the salivary gland. He was conscious until the end.

“He was a very courageous person,” his mother, Frances Yauch, said. “He fought a long battle with cancer. He was hopeful to the very end.”

Mrs. Yauch said had been undergoing chemotherapy this spring, but his health deteriorated rapidly over the last two weeks. “It all just seemed to happen overnight,” she said.

MCA is on the right in this video from 2009, announcing his diagnosis.



Pitchfork says:

The Beastie Boys are one of the most important and influential hip-hop groups of all time. They were instrumental in making hip-hop a global, mainstream force. Formed in 1981 as a hardcore band, they combined punk and rap into a singular sound that grew increasingly broad over the years, encompassing a vast array of genres. Yauch, Michael Diamond (Mike D), and Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock) released several classic albums, including their debut album Licensed to Ill in 1986, 1989's Paul's Boutique, and 1994's Ill Communication.

I'm not generally a big fan of rap, but the Beastie Boys were an incredibly energetic band that brought joy to a lot of people. This is a real loss to music.

Federal government traps 24-year-old man in a room for 4 days

The Daily Caller reports:

Daniel Chong, a 24-year-old University of California, San Diego engineering student [was] detained and then forgotten about by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Chong was detained on April 21 when agents raided the home of a drug dealer. The agency confiscated 18,000 ecstasy pills, along with other drugs and guns.

The New York Times adds:

Mr. Chong was left alone in the 5-by-10-foot holding cell, with no food, no sink and no toilet — only a blanket. He said he could hear footsteps as agents walked by, other cell doors opening and toilets flushing. He kicked the door, screaming for water. But no one came.

After the first two days, Mr. Chong said, he began to hallucinate, imagining “little Japanese cartoon characters telling me what to do.” He clawed at the walls, convinced that they contained messages about where to find water.

Three times he drank his own urine. The only sustenance he had, he said, was a packet of white powder that he found wrapped in the blanket, which turned out to be methamphetamine.

On the fourth day, he said, the lights in the cell went out. Eventually, his hands still cuffed behind his back, he broke his eyeglasses with his teeth, as he contemplated killing himself. On his arm, he tried to carve a message: “Sorry Mom.” He also swallowed a piece of the glass, which cut his esophagus.

The DEA has admitted that they trapped him in the cell. A DEA spokesperson says:

"[H]e was at the house, by his own admission, to get high with his friends."

By his own admission!

This would have been unacceptable treatment even if he had been a serial killer.

Mitt Romney on what President Obama isn't allowed to say about foreign policy

"Shorter Romney: Obama has to stop apologizing for America and stop taking credit for defending America" — Bill Scher (on Twitter)