Obsidian Wings

Which Came First: The Regulation Or The Egg?

by Gary Farber

"One big 20-year experiment" has been conducted on what happens when you leave egg safety to lax federal regulation, spotty state regulation, and the market, and the results aren't pretty.

On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with salmonella.

“It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

If someone murdered nine people, and wounded five hundred, with a gun, we Americans would have paid as much attention to this as we did the Columbine high school massacre, or Nidal Malik Hassan, or Charles Whitman.

The Real Servant Problem

by Jacob Davies

Just a quick note on servants, which we were discussing in the comments to a previous thread.

The big problem I have with servants who work directly for one person or family - and especially full-time servants - is not about productivity, and it's not based on aesthetic dislike for the idea. The big problem is that the widespread expectation that a middle-class lifestyle includes a significant amount of labor performed on your behalf by other people creates a wide constituency for class warfare of the middle and upper classes against the lower.

If you expect that you need servants to live a reasonable lifestyle, you will directly benefit from having a broad, deep pool of people who are desperate for work, and as such you will have an interest in opposing policies that would increase the cost of such labor by reducing unemployment, reforming immigration policy, or reducing the size of the group living in or near poverty. That doesn't necessarily mean you will oppose them. But you will have an interest in doing so and in aggregate that interest will result in more perverse and less egalitarian policy.

I often think this is the real reason that immigration reform never happens: when it comes down to real change, the people who shape public opinion look at their own situation, which tends to rely on personal labor to a much greater extent than ordinary people, and they realize that real change would substantially increase wages for domestic workers. So, well, maybe it's best if the issue just falls off the agenda again for a while... It's not direct opposition so much as a willingness to let it slide.

Without personal servants, the middle class tends to have interests that obviously coincide with the working class and underclass, which is to say primarily in reducing the allocation of resources to the ultra-rich, in increasing the pool of potential purchasers for consumer products by elevating working class people to middle class status, and in providing support for the poor in case you wind up being one of them. There is no direct interest for them in reducing wages and in fact a solidarity interest in increasing the cost of labor to capital.

So under those circumstances the dynamic tends to be everyone against the upper class - which I think is a healthy one given the immense political power that money gives to the wealthy. The other dynamic, which I think has been much too prevalent in the past couple of decades, is the middle & upper classes allied against everyone else. And that's really a recipe for disaster in the end.

I have similar feelings about widespread small-scale stock ownership that encourages people to think that they have a strong personal interest in the profits of business - witness the recitation of the Dow during even short news broadcasts even though to most people it has almost no relevance. But because you can gain or lose large amounts rapidly in the stock market it can feel more important than how much salary you are paid, even though the latter really makes a much bigger difference in standard of living to most people.

It's not that I think this kind of stuff should be banned. I'm not really into banning things. And some domestic labor reflects effective specialization. But it's a societal bad smell to see a lot of personal servitude; an indication that something is going wrong somewhere. In software engineering they call these kind of indicators "code smells"; things that are technically okay, but if seen in quantity tend to mean that something is really screwed up under the surface.

To Put the World to Rights

by Eric Martin

Bernard Finel, riffing on the wrongheaded suggestion from the otherwise intelligent David Axe that the US involve itself militarily in the Congo (because, hey, our military is getting lazy just sitting around doing nothing, and our budget surpluses need to be spent somewhere, and winning other nations' civil wars is something of a specialty for us, etc):

The fundamental problem for the United States is that primacy has become its own justification.  Because we are everywhere, threats anywhere engage our interests requiring us… to be everywhere.  Foreign interventions — whether military, political, diplomatic, or economic — require no further justification in terms of national interest.  They are assumed to be justified by virtue of our global presence.  It is the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone.

Because we perceive ourselves as already committed, we then engage in a process of rationalization of our interventionist impulse.  Unfortunately this is an easy task. Since the world is messy, it is pretty easy to construct a geopolitical, economic, humanitarian, or reputational justication for acting everywhere and anywhere.  Something bad (or potentially bad) is happening everywhere, and something bad happening anywhere is assumed to implicate American interests sufficiently to justify intervention.

As a result, we don’t use our power only where such interventions are required, but we use it instead everywhere except when a compelling argument against intervention exists.  American foreign policy begins with the presumption of intervention, and those of us arguing for restraint are required to make an affirmative case for it.  And not only must restraint make an affirmative case, it must make a case that is compelling beyond the shadow of a doubt.  Successfully advocating restraint often requires, in short, proving a negative — that nothing bad will happens if we fail to act.  In Afghanistan, for instance, even the possibility that a terrorist attack might be planned there in the future is justification for an annual expenditure of $100 billion.

As Finel and others point out, advocating for war, any war, is good for your reputation as a foreign policy analyst.  It's a career move. [UPDATE: I want to stress that I am not accusing David Axe of pushing this argument for career purposes, just noting the disturbing conventional wisdom that pervades the foreign policy community] Meanwhile, opposition to any such endeavor gets you labeled an "isolationist" - as if an unwillingness to deploy the US military in dubious, murky local conflicts in every distant locale, from Burma and Darfur to Somalia and the Congo, is the equivalent of advocating a complete disengagement from the rest of the world.

If we can't bomb them, let's have nothing to do with them.

On the other hand, maybe those motivated by humanitarian impulses could instead pursue the myriad ways in which we can save and improve lives without, you know, bombing the people we're saving in the process.

Social/Justice

by Doctor Science

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo asked Should We Fight For ‘Social Justice’?

If someone tells me they need ‘social justice’ to mark some crucial distinction, I’m happy to entertain the possibility. Analytically, my complaint is that the term is vaguely redundant; redundancy never killed anyone dead. But why burden yourself with redundancy that seems mostly to provide Glenn Beck and co. with fodder for dismissals that are lazy even by their standards?

Much of the ensuing discussion got into details about Hayek, Rawls, etc. that are above (or something) my head.

But I was reminded of something I wrote in the comments of a discussion at ObiWi in June 2006:

My gut reaction to discussion of the "patterned view" of justice versus the "process view" is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, "Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!"

Segregation Nation

by Jacob Davies

Some maps of the racial make-up of American cities by a guy called Eric Fisher.

Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.

New York City:

Detroit:

The SF Bay Area:

Click on any of them for bigger images and many more maps of other cities.

I don't have an editorial comment, I just think they're really striking maps. I live on the island of Alameda, which is the mostly-red-with-a-little-bit-of-green blob right in the center of the last map there. Well, okay, one comment, which is that the title is a bit unfair; I don't think there are any other countries with much better integration than the US. Race is a really easy in-/out-group marker...

How To Be Rich And Miserable In The Wealthiest Nation That Has Ever Existed

by Jacob Davies

1. Accumulate really a very large amount of debt.
2. Decide to care deeply about what people who are a lot richer than you think of you.
3. Spend all of your money and then some trying to keep up with them.

There's a little pile-on going on with an unfortunate U of C law professor complained about the terrible consequences of the return to pre-Bush tax rates over $250k and got mocked for it by Michael O'Hare and then thoroughly dismantled by Brad DeLong - although I think it's worth noting that the income amounts given are speculative. Still, his whining isn't a matter of speculation.

I think they did a thorough job, so I don't need to add too much. But I do find it interesting just how often the pattern of unhappy high-income people follows the checklist I started with. Massive debt loads can make you poor whatever your income, and once they're run up, you don't get any enjoyment from them. Judging yourself by the standards of wealthy people is a good way to make yourself very unhappy (as is hanging out with wealthy people, often, as many of them didn't get wealthy by being nice). And you cannot possibly keep up if you try.

I feel bad for the professor for much the same reason I feel bad for anyone who has made a series of bad decisions - that they may have found impossible to avoid making at the time - that have put them in a situation where they are both unhappy and unable to escape the consequences of their actions. I don't know what advice to offer. But I don't think avoiding a 4% hike in marginal rates is going to solve his problems.

(Edited to remove an uncharitable comparison.)

Little House On The Playa

by Jacob Davies

My idea of a restful, refreshing vacation is to drive hundreds of miles to the middle of a high-altitude desert to a spot where there is nothing but dead salt pan for miles in every direction, no water, no flora or fauna, spend several days working like a dog in the hot sun to build a little camp, spend a couple more days hanging out in it with my friends and whatever lunatics wander in off the street while enjoying day-and-night pounding techno music and explosions, with only the primitive comforts we build for ourselves in a little kitchen and a sun shower, then tear the whole thing down and pack it all away again for next year.

This isn't a post about What Burning Man Means. I have no idea what it means to most people. For me it's a chance to spend some intensive time with some good friends, experience some really weird stuff, watch some big fires and explosions, and enjoy a pretty solid attempt at a total rejection of mainstream culture.

Making Perfection the Enemy of the Good

by Eric Martin

Gulliver, reacting to reports that the US is mulling over a $1.2 billion arms/training package to Yemen as part of a burgeoning whack-a-mole counterterrorism effort in that country, sums it up quite concisely:

A dude tried to get on an airplane in the U.S. with a bomb in his pants, and this is causing confusion about whether to give a country on the other side of the planet ONE POINT TWO BILLION DOLLARS in helos, patrol boats, and small arms.

Let's just reflect for a second on the stupidity of this.

It's not only a case of employing an elephant gun to swat a fly - there are real concerns that the Yemeni government has little interest in using the arms, aid and training to pursue al-Qaeda elements in the region, but would instead turn its up-armed attention to restive domestic groups.  Thus, the United States would find itself smack dab in the middle of yet another local conflict, coming down on the side of a proxy with a dubious human rights track record, and whose interests only tangentially coincide with our own (Somalia/Ethiopia, I'm lookin at you!).

That is not only inefficient counterterrorism, it's outright counterproductive.  Also, following Gulliver's lead, I recommend this piece by Paul Pillar on the subject:  

The aid package is a manifestation of the American tendencies to militarize counterterrorism, to think of a metaphorical "war on terror" as primarily a literal shooting war, and to respond to an international terrorist threat that knows no territorial boundaries by capturing, bombing, or stabilizing particular pieces of territory.  The impetus behind the package also tacitly acknowledges what most proponents of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan do not: that Afghanistan has no special claim as a piece of territory that will make a significant difference in whether al-Qaeda does or does not pose a serious threat to U.S. interests.  The issue of aid to Yemen also manifests some of the trade-offs that abound in counterterrorism, particularly the one between the short-term kinetic impact of using force against bad guys and longer term consequences that may not only run against other U.S. values and interests but also may be counterproductive as far as the counterterrorist objective itself is concerned (such as by stoking anti-Americanism through collateral casualties or close U.S. association with the repressive apparatus of a local regime). [...]

One reason for the oversimplifying, military-heavy approach toward Yemeni terrorism is that Americans in general like to view their enemies in oversimplified terms and to favor simple, direct, forceful ways of dealing with them.  Another reason is specific right now to Yemen and is related to an observation that my friend Steve Simon made in a panel discussion (in which I also participated) on Wednesday at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.  The attempted attack of an airliner last December by the underwear bomber coming from Yemen, had the attack been successful, would have been a catastrophic political blow to the Obama administration.  This effect would have reflected the way Americans expect perfection in counterterrorism, along with the partisanship that causes political opponents to pounce enthusiastically on any failure, regardless of its causes or how much it was or was not avoidable.  So there is a strong impetus not only to do whatever possible to avoid another Yemen-originated attack, but also to be perceived to be doing that.  This may be an example of a demonstrable pursuit of perfection in securing Americans from terrorism working against well-considered adoption of policies that, while perfection is impossible to achieve, are apt to be more successful than the more demonstrable alternatives.

In my more charitable moods, I chalk up some of Obama's failings on civil liberties/national security issues to just these political calculations (closing Gitmo comes to mind).  Not that they're particular to him, or even the Democratic Party alone. No, this is a bi-partisan malady, with plenty of voter-provided pathogen. 

David Foster Wallace asks a good question.

Her worth is far above rubies

by Doctor Science

It turns out that Marty Peretz is pretty much a bigot

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

A lot of people are upset about it, but as far as I'm concerned it's news like "Water, Continued Wet."

Meanwhile, science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon thinks

Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had ...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving.

This is, frankly, considerably more surprising and upsetting than Marty Peretz being a jerk (water, wet), for me and for a bunch of other people.

I hope that David Moles is right, and that Moon -- who I would have described as a writer of great insight and sensitivity -- is

only repeating what the media’s been telling her — what our climate of bigotry and willful ignorance has been telling her.

I had been planning to make a pre-Yom Kippur post about the Book of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon services, but I've changed my mind. A major part of the several services throughout the more-than-24-hours of Yom Kippur is spent listing and regretting sins, especially those that are collective (everything is in the plural, what *we* have done) and that are sins of speech: lies, gossip, deadly silence. To atone, we have to speak rightly; I will do some small part now.

Yeah, I Traded Laughs, in for Charts and Graphs

by Eric Martin

[UPDATE: I see that Gary already posted this here diagram below.  Apologies for the oversight on my part.]

The magic of venn diagrams:

As created by Mark Shea. The accompanying post is worth a read too.

(via Steve Hynd on Twitter)