The Yale Political Union

AHHHHHHHHHHT (Or, Why Modern Art is Important)

2010-07-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

The other day, I read a blog post over at BlagHag (by Jen McCreight -- lovely blog, and I recommend reading some of the other stuff too) regarding modern art. What the post says is more-or-less a repetition of a really old criticism of modern / contemporary art, and the more broad l'avantgardisme -- that it really doesn't mean anything, or that the artists / art critics / random people are writing obtuse descriptions of pieces of art that don't relate to anything at all, or that the artist didn't really mean that. It's a really tempting argument to make, and Science knows I wasn't very good about understanding art for a very long time, so I understand the impulse. Nevertheless it's not a friendly criticism, and it's a criticism that sort of misses the point of avant-garde.

The argument rests on an unstated, but pernicious, assumption: that avant-garde work either doesn't qualify as "good art", or even "art" at all, and therefore when people treat it as such, their interpretations are meaningless tripe trying to say something profound about something that isn't profound at all. This assumption is strong, but it might be well-founded -- well, if that assumption wasn't exactly what avant-garde argues against in the first place. Let's think about this with a particular piece, this one referenced in the above-linked blog post.

Untitled (1976), Robert Morris

The AIC describes this piece as "industrial felt", Jen used the word "oversized car mat" to describe it. My initial impressions were based somewhat on the car mat idea, but I think it holds nonetheless. In day-to-day existence, car mats are one of the least noticeable parts of a car, and are by function permanently underfoot (speaking from experience commuting on the 101 for my internship this summer, this is very true), and is therefore generally unconsidered as an object in an of itself, unless something goes wrong -- the material gives me allergies, or it gets stuck under the seat and gets a lump that bothers the position of my feet, or whatever (this conception I originally heard from my professor for Intro to Theory of Literature last semester, who made the same point, but with a bike -- you never notice the actual mechanics of the bike while you're riding it unless it starts to jam or breaks and you get thrown off).

What Untitled is doing is a general subversion of that principle. It takes the idea of the car mat , removes it from its permanently trampled place in contemporary society, and puts it up on a wall in the middle of a museum with a title and description and space all its own to consider for its own sake, to be celebrated and contemplated. The mere fact that we're able to contemplate it at all means that the work, as far as I interpret it, succeeds. What this piece and other pieces of found art ask is what exactly we mean when we use the word "art". Does it have to be something that's beautiful? Well, we don't agree on what's beautiful, and our conceptions of beauty have this nasty habit of reinforcing the views and opinions of those that are dominant or in power in our culture. So, how about things that have "artistic merit"? This runs into the same problem as "beauty" (to the point where women back in the 18th and 19th centuries, in a number of noticeable cases, either publishing anonymously or publishing under male pen names. Well, how about anything that's put in a museum -- we can trust the artistically-minded curators to be careful about making sure some non-dominant culture's "good art" gets in, right? Well, this would be where found art comes in. It's in a museum, it has its own space, you're not supposed to touch it. If this doesn't qualify as art, how exactly can you frame your views of what is "good" and "bad" art, or even "art" at all, as anything but your own subjective criteria? It's a brilliant deconstructive practice. We value art museums as centers of worthy artistic expression, excluding all that fails to meet the standard, but that label is something we attach to it, not something intrinsic to art museums. The only option we have left is to realize that absolutely everything can be treated as art.

My own intellectual development in this arena has a lot to to with Roland Barthes' Mythologies (Amazon link), especially "Myth Today", the last chapter. Over the course of the book, Barthes does literary analyses of a bunch of different phenomena, from pro wrestling to detergent marketing to car design, and then in the last chapter, he gives a theoretical framework for all of it -- that mythology exists as an influence that serves to normalize certain cultural practices, such to maintain both the preexisting hierarchy of society and in the case of France when he wrote the book, colonialism and imperialism. From Barthes:

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason. If I read the Negro-saluting as symbol pure and simple of imperiality, I must renounce the reality of the picture, it discredits itself in my eyes when it becomes an instrument. Conversely, if I decipher the Negro's salute as an alibi of coloniality, I shatter the myth even more surely by the obviousness of its motivation. But for the myth-reader, the outcome is quite different: everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified: the myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess.

The "good art" argument works pretty much the same way -- it's a historical contingency, that is, the artistic preferences of white Europeans, usually men, transmuting into a natural and immortal idea, here, beauty. So while the people who make the objection to modern art probably aren't doing this consciously, it's still reinforcing standards of artistic worth and beauty that are, in context, hegemonic. The way to fight this, again from Barthes, is to fight it with revolutionary, political language:

There is therefore one language which is not mythical, it is the language of man as a producer: wherever man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image, wherever he links his language to the making of things, metalanguage is referred to a language-object, and myth is impossible. This is why revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical. Revolution is defined as a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world; and its language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making. It is because it generates speech which is fully, that is to say initially and finally, political, and not, like myth, speech which is initially political and finally natural, that Revolution excludes myth. Just as bourgeois ex-nomination characterizes at once bourgeois ideology and myth itself, revolutionary denomination identifies revolution and the absence of myth. The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

Of course this was a few years in advance of Derrida, deconstruction, and the Tel Quels, but it's a similar sort of idea -- you fight convention through subversion, or in this case by subverting our conceptions of "good art" with carefully-placed car mats and Brillo boxes.

I haven't done this topic nearly as much justice as it deserves, but it's at least part of a start, I hope. We need to get to a point socially where we can consider literature and art with room for more of a work(wo)manlike understanding and not just worry about the aesthetics. We could learn a lot.

Economic Experts: Failures or Heroes?

2010-01-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

Since the financial crisis there has been a spate of critiques--some good and important, but most superficial and ill-informed--of the study of economics.

This editorial from the Daily Telegraph makes some good points but gets a lot wrong.

1. It is true that academic economics has become too obsessed with mathematical modeling. Granted, the mathematization of economics (effected by the late Paul Samuelson) began with the intent of transforming economics into a true science. This was a good goal, but framing all economic questions mathematically causes economists to ignore factors that can't be mathematically modeled. Ideally, we should continue to advance the mathematical rigor of economics while adding to that with other sources of knowledge. This is a critique of the way economics has been done recently, not the field as a whole.

But there are a few things this piece gets wrong. Keep in mind 3 things whenever you read another editorial excoriation of economists.

1. It's misleading to say that modern economists are responsible for the economic crisis. Imperfect economics played a role, of course, but so did bureuacratic stupidity, corrupt businessmen, and sheer bad luck. It is, in fact, one of the predictions of economics that the financial world is unpredictable precisely because available information is incorporated into prices so quickly. Since the unpredictability of financial markets is a tenet of modern economics, it's a fallacy to say that economists' failure to see it coming shows how wrong they are.

2. Economists do know a lot of things, especially about political economy. Economists do know that protectionism generally makes us all worse off. The amount of money economists save mankind each year by restraining politicians from taking over ever single industry, is, as Deirdre McCloskey points out, enough to pay the salary of every economist in the world a thousand times over.

3. Free-market economics has not been discredited. The fact that markets are imperfect and often lead to downturns does not mean that government is perfect. Many people believe that free-market economics was based on the idea that people are perfectly rational. This is false. Free-market economists are those who believe that individuals' localized knowledge generally allows them to make more rational decisions for themselves than any central governing body would. That's a modest claim. In real life we choose between the lesser of two evils--free-market economists are still right that, most of the time, markets are less irrational than government.

So, what's my talking point? 1) Academic economics needs to change its direction a bit, not by being less mathematical, but by being more of other things--taking more account of common sense, that which can be persuasive without being mathematically modeled. 2) Economists do know a lot, and do a lot of good for politics. 3) Financial markets are special cases, in general. As we rethink how we regulate financial markets we shouldn't undermine freedom and competition elsewhere. The economic downturn hasn't changed the fact that rent control hurts everybody or that high taxes drive jobs away.

I don't expect to say this often in 2010...

2010-01-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

But David Brooks got it exactly right. In today's column, Brooks writes:

...human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

Bang on the mark, Brooks. Even a true-blue technocrat like me will be the first to admit that government policies don't ideally make things perfect, they make them better. The bizarre expectations we have for government programs only set them up for (perceived) failure. Think of the way 'welfare queens' were used to dismiss all of welfare. The existence of fraud or waste in a system does not imply the system is not worth the costs.

In bureaucracies, fraud and waste are part of the standard sunk costs, just like more conventional operating costs for salaries and electricity. The question we have to ask is: are the benefits of the system greater than the drawbacks? In most social service cases, I'm inclined to say yes. I'm willing to put up with some level of fraud and abuse to ensure that poor children get medical care and food. In the case of national security, it is guaranteed that there will be flaws in the system that terrorists can exploit. Additional security is a bad idea at the point where additional security measures do not eliminate enough risk in proportion to the inconvenience and disruption they create.

Incidents of failure, even systemic failure may be acceptable as long as the cost of eliminating the flaws exceeds the harm done by the flaws. We can build helpful systems, but we shouldn't demand a response and an apology for every instance of imperfection. Particularly as the talking heads move from demanding changes to our security system to demanding strikes on Al-Qaeda in Yemen, it is essential to remember that, in foreign policy, not every action requires an equal and opposite reaction.

Here's hoping we start a new year by avoiding some old mistakes. I leave you with this quote from Patrick Cockburn on Alternet:

The real strength of al-Qa'ida is not that it can "train" a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa'ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries.

Teabagging Zinn, or, A Teabagger's History of the United States

2009-12-30T18:37:00.000-08:00

While I was off at Yale and TVless, my dad was good enough to DVR "The People Speak," the two hour long, frankly somewhat disappointing (besides getting to gaze adoringly at Matt Damon and Viggo Mortenson), summary/reenactment of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Unsurprisingly, "The People Speak" was filled with glorification of populist and grassroots movements from throughout our nation's history. I would expect no less; Mr. Zinn and I go way back- my wonderfully radically liberal history teacher introduced him to me in 8th grade, and even before that I was picketing Nike at the tender age of 8 with my socialist Jewish Sunday school with a chutzpah that he undoubtedly would have admired.

But I couldn't stop thinking, throughout the Woodie Guthrie songs sung by Bob Dylan and Emma Goldman speeches read by Sandra Oh, that the people marching on Washington and staging boycotts today are, in Zinn's view, from the completely wrong end of the political spectrum. What does Zinn have to say about the teabaggers? From an interview with Bill Moyers:

I think it's true that when people are — feel beleaguered and people feel that they are being overlooked, they will turn to whoever seems to represent them. Some of them will turn to [Sarah Palin]. And some of them will turn to the right-wingers, and you might say that's how fascism develops in countries, because they play upon the anger and the frustration of people. But on the other hand, that anger, that frustration can also lead to people's movements that are progressive. You can go the way traditionally of the Populists, of the labor movement of the '30s, of the Civil Rights movement, of the women's movement to bring about change in this country.

Let me say that I don't support the teabaggers. But it seems rather strained to me, and rather selective and elitist, to dismiss a good bit of grassroots organizing by the people just because you disagree with their politics. Are organizing and people's movements by definition progressive? It seems that Zinn's glorification of the working class doesn't always hold- reactionary movements have abounded from just that class, from the Know Nothings of the 1850s to the teabaggers of today. Are they worthy of the same recognition?

=?

Why link philosophy and politics?

2009-12-30T17:05:00.001-08:00

I just read this essay ("Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?") by Richard Rorty and I'm curious to know people's thoughts on it. I've always found it bizarre that we link politics and philosophy so closely, and I'd like some justifications. I think they have absolutely nothing to do with one another, nor should they. Some fun quotes from the Rorty to get the pro-philosophy factions' rage juices flowing:

I see no more reason to think that abandoning a belief in correspondence will make one a less honest scholar than to think that abandoning a belief in God will make one a less honest witness.

Given that it pays to talk about mountains, as it certainly does, one of the obvious truths about mountains is that they were here before we talked about them. If you do not believe that, you probably do not know how to play the usual language-games that employ the word "mountain." But the utility of those language games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as It Is In Itself, apart from the way it is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it.

Philosophy does not make much difference to our practices, and it should not be allowed to.

We can take each other very seriously indeed without taking the intrinsic nature of reality seriously at all.

Shaffer on Directed Studies at Yale

2009-12-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

At the risk of self-indulgence, I wrote a piece for Minding the Campus about Directed Studies at Yale.

My thesis? Because nobody doubts the value of the sciences or the utility of the social sciences, the duty should fall to the administration to make sure students give the humanities a try. College orientation sessions should have activities that talk about education, not just politics, too. That way, students can make informed decisions about what kind of education to pursue.

Psychiatry

2009-12-29T14:39:00.000-08:00

I was whining as usual today about our troubled, troubled world to my friend Carmen and how if only I was Dictator, all dissenters would be silenced and everywhere there'd be naught but rivers of milk and honey.

Me: Whenever kids whine about depression, i want them to stop. ugh. zoloft culture. need to man up. UGH.
Carmen: Whenever a crippled person whines about not being able to walk I want to slap him and tell him to get over it.

On that note, my stance on depression may very well be ridiculous so take me half-seriously. Please don't be offended by what follows below.

With that qualification in mind, I don't think that depression [especially teenage depression] ought to be treated with medication [a strong social support network is optimal but I guess that isn't often possible] and believe that much of psychiatry, especially medicalization of childhood conditions, is a money-making racket that preys on silly parents [e.g. ODD appears to be either "I spoiled my kids rotten and now I don't know what to do, fiddlesticks!" or "I have a brain tumor when it comes to understanding human nature. Let's bust out the drugs and therapy, that'll fix 5-year-old Tommy's temper tantrums."] The kids who getting pill'd today would have been known as 'problem children' once upon another time, before this all got overmedicalized. Just spank your children if they are hyper [ADHD] or defiant [ODD]. All hand-holding/"sensitive to a child's needs" culture creates is entitlement and spoiled kids. Spare the rod and spoil the child. As the Chinese proverb goes, da shi qing, ma shi ai. [= hitting is affection, scolding/nagging is love]. Children aren't spun out of sugar and glass; they have no moral compasses. This is what we fondly refer to as "mischievous". If an adult acted that way, the descriptor would be jerkface. Children have some license however because they are still 'unsivilized'. Still, no great need to worry so about their fragile psyches.

I am unconvinced that either of these two [ODD and ADHD] are not simply part of the human condition. Also, Stendhal syndrome?! ADHD sounds like "I hate school and sitting still" or "I'm disruptive". Sure, some children are just too hyper to function in the school system, which requires sitting for hours at a time. Either deal with the problem kid and force him to 'behave' in a school context [punish him...but what does timeout or 'talking to him' do, seriously, if you can't inspire fear properly?], or home-school him. Is Ritalin really the way to go? Giving unwitting children something similar in structure to amphetamine seems cruel if nothing else.

In addition, many parents exploit 'conditions' like ODD/ADHD to get their children ahead; extra time on standardized testing, tax benefits for parents of 'special/handicapped' kids. If one psychiatrist doesn't diagnose the child with the condition, another may. It's fairly easy to induce an ADHD state in a child - give them tons of sugar. Also, you can just teach your kid to act a certain way in the office. That is, tell them to be disruptive. If you think this doesn't happen, keep in mind that some people have no scruples. Most of the information the psychiatrist receives is from 1) the parents, who are talking about their child's behavior or 2) the child's behavior in the office.

I suppose depression is a different can of worms, though many who like to sit on pity pots will offhandedly say, "Yeah, I was depressed last year. It was so bad, man." The vast majority of my friends has reported 'depression' at one time or another; none of them were ever on Zoloft. The thing everybody has got is cyberchondria. Hell, even I self-diagnosed with SAD. Self-fulfilling prophecy when you whine. Cease whining, or get deported to Haiti, where 80% of the population is under the poverty line. If kids at Yale [for example] hate their lives, they need to get some perspective. There is never any excuse to hate the following: your life, either of your parents, yourself. Cease!

I always hear "depression only 'really counts' if it happens without a reason" [i.e. no divorce, no death in the family, nothing wrong with your life, etc. The logic goes that if a traumatic event happens, a subsequent bad mood is 'normal' and doesn't have to be treated medically.]. How can the psychologist know for certain that his client is depressed 'for no reason'? Self-reporting, which is ever unreliable. Any wuss is going to self-report as depressed for no reason, life without purpose, doesn't enjoy activities he once did. How does one know that adolescent depression isn't just growing pains or Angst? Apparently the subjective interpretation of the patient and his psychiatrist, who has a vested interest in finding problems. It's his job!

I worry about the habit-forming nature of many anti-depressants. Certain sources on the Internetz claim that Zoloft is in fact not habit-forming. However, "in discontinuing psychiatric medications, a taper dose is a rule." Hm, I wonder why! Due to withdrawal symptoms, and whyever would those occur? In addition, anything that makes you feel better or induces a state of pleasure [or at least 'fixes' your bad state] will build a dependence, even if it's not a very strong 'chemical dependence' like the 'observable' kind the smoker's brain creates for nicotine. Nobody claims that sugar is a drug, but the taste buds can be acclimatized very quickly to a certain amount of sweetness and thereafter during your meal, food that is just as sweet won't taste as good as the first bite. We even build 'tolerance' for a certain workout regimen, which is why weight loss plateaus and why running intervals or switching up the type of exercise is more effective than jogging 3 miles a day, every day. This is the whole, "the body adapts/builds dependency to almost everything" thing. e.g. Alcohol tolerance, 'tolerance' for a 'good' lifestyle that makes a worse lifestyle now seem unthinkable [=being spoiled], caffeine tolerance, sugar tolerance, leisure tolerance [Do you ever hear people who watch 2-3 hours of TV a day say, "But I never have any time to do anything I want to. I just can't imagine doing X. That takes an hour and I simply don't have time" ?] The pharm companies/psychiatrists can tell me that anti-depressants have 'zero risk of addiction', but that doesn't mean I have to believe them! Even if it's not a strict chemical dependence, there could be a psychological dependence. i.e. One begins to think they need the drug, just out of habit. If it's hard for somebody to cut out the one cup of coffee they "need" to stay awake in lecture every day, how difficult will cutting out a controlled substance like Zoloft be?

In short: Anti-depressants are over-prescribed, especially for adolescents, most of whom go through good ol' growing pains, insecurity, conflict with parents, bullying, self-image problems etc. and should just learn to deal instead of being coddled and given pills. Conflict and pain build character more than drugs do. Also, ODD/ADHD seem dubious at best to me, but ODD especially.

For additional reading:
Christina Hoff Sommers' One Nation Under Therapy: How the Help Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance.

Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature.

College Football: Guilty Pleasure?

2009-12-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

It’s bowl season, the culmination of the college football season in a series of bowl games, and a good time to think about college football. It’s certainly profitable, at least for the most famous and competitive programs. In 2006, Ohio State’s athletic department had over $100 million in revenue—Fortune did an interesting article on the Florida booster club a year after Florida won a national title (and a year before they won another). This money raises the question: Are profit-making football programs incompatible with the nonprofit missions of colleges?

The argument against college football is fairly simple: that coaches use players to increase their own salary and that alumni ignore the real mission of their college and instead focus on the record of their team. There are stories of athletes who cheat, or colleges that lower standards to allow football players to earn a meaningless passing grade, and coaches who push their players to the limit, and sometimes beyond.

Despite all this, I think college football is good for everyone involved. The argument that a football player gets a worse education than another student is questionable. First, players obtain an incredible amount of self-discipline through the work they put into the sport. Second, some football players would not have gone to college without football—either unable to afford it or unwilling to go for simply the education—and any college is better than no college. Thirdly, to say that football players cannot get a good education is untrue—Myron Rolle, a star safety at Florida State, won a Rhodes scholarship.

Furthermore, good football programs are not incompatible with good colleges. While Ivy League football is no longer nationally competitive, it once was. And other elite schools have competitive programs. Michigan (the 27^th best school in the US according to US New and World Report) had one of the best programs in the country a few years ago. And Stanford (the 4^th best school) was ranked as high as 14^th in the nation this year (in football). These are great schools with great football teams; the colleges with great football teams that are not elite colleges probably would not be elite colleges regardless of the football program.

So kick back and enjoy the rest of the college bowls; while college football may not improve colleges, it certainly does not hurt them.

The Art of Airport Security

2009-12-29T11:15:00.000-08:00

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win one hundred battles without a single loss.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The debate on this blog about airport security misses a very important point. Airport security does not need to be one-hundred percent foolproof to be effective. Think of it from the enemy's perspective. Every attack attempt they make is risky. Not because their agent could get arrested, because they typically don't care about the youth the send to blow himself up. However, if an attacker is arrested alive, the US government gains an intelligence bonanza about how the cell recruits and operates, and they do typically care about that. To work, airport security needs to raise the odds of arrest high enough for any terrorist that the cost-benefit calculation leads the group to conclude they would be better off attacking a less secure target. Securing airports this way increase the risk for everything else, but the only way to completely eliminate the threat from a terrorist group is to inflitrate and destroy it.

A Rebuttal, Briefly

2009-12-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

No security system is foolproof. However, America's airports could be made significantly more secure if we were willing to sacrifice passenger comfort to some extent. Currently, much of the security system is aimed more at deterrence and improving the confidence of fliers in the safety of air travel. To ensure that security is effective, every passenger would have to walk through bomb detectors (modern machines take ten seconds to blow air at you and analyze the results). Also, "random" passengers would have to be strip searched. It would be beneficial to have both a random system (to catch terrorists who don't fit the profile) and to search a large portion, perhaps half, of individuals meeting more than a handful of criteria that typically indicate an elevated risk of terrorist activity.

Unfortunately, the current system would catch only amateurs. Yes, terrorists can no longer hide dangerous devices in their shoes; they can still hide them in their underwear. Unless Americans decide that safety is worth more than comfort and "dignity," it is unlikely that our airport security will be truly effective at stopping well-planned attacks by determined, professional murderers.

If You Can Drink at The Game, You Can Blow Up a Plane

2009-12-28T20:53:00.000-08:00

[editor's note, there is a special prize for reading through the entire post]

In the post Underwear Bomber age, TSA officials have ordered airlines to keep passengers in their seats and take away their blankets, but, once again, these new security systems designed primarily to create the appearance of a reaction rather than make us safer. The logic I suppose is that passengers, curling into fetal positions for warmth and to suppress bladder function for the final hour of a flight will think: Well, they wouldn't make us do something this dumb if it weren't important and effective!

Enter the Beer Belly (tm). The Beer Belly is an unobtrusive, wearable pouch that holds 80 oz of your favorite volatile liquid, explosive or otherwise. In November 2008, as part of an experiment for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg successfully wore a full Beer Belly through an airport checkpoint. (The 8oz water bottle he had in his carryon was duly confiscated).

We can't make a security system that keeps smart people from getting dangerous things onto planes. Check out the entire Atlantic article for instructions on how to make your own steel knife in 15 min, board planes even if your name is on the no-fly list, and use (unscreened) airport employees to smuggle in guns.

Nothing will stop a smart person from doing a lot of damage if he wants to. We needn't look farther than Israel to see that no level of security will stop all terrorists. Let's expect less from the TSA. When something like the Underwear Bomber happens, Janet Napolitano should be able to say that, although the incident will be analyzed to see if there are any weakness to be addressed, no system can make mass transportation totally safe. And, as Nate Silver has pointed out, you are still much safer on a plane than in a car. If we lower our expectations for airline security, we won't be in appreciably more danger, and flying will be a much more pleasant experience.

---

Oh, and a brief outline of the way around the new guidelines: terrorists should use the buddy system. Book two seats next to each other, put a big guy in the aisle seat, have the window seat guy rig up his detonation system and go. Keep in mind that the passengers were only able to foil the underwear bomber because (a) they were moving around the cabin and (b) he SCREWED UP the detonation. The bomb was supposed to explode, not just catch fire. With a slightly better detonation system, the plane would have gone down.

[special prize: you are now on a terrorist watch list. Feel safer?]

Keeping up with the reality shows

2009-12-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know if anyone else watched a lot of reality shows--somtimes I feel like I must be the only person who was dumb enough to waste a large portioin of my senior year (after getting accepted to college, of course) watching these shows. Hopefully, no one else wasted their life like I did. But today I would like to write about these shows so that if you do decide to watch them, maybe you can derive some real enjoyment out of it.

Recently, whenever I flip open a non-serious, entertainment-based magazine, the women of the Kardashian family would appear on every single page. They are the stars of a reality show entitled "Keeping up with the Kardashians". A quick run down of the Kardashian family: Dad was OJ Simpson's lawyer during his murder trial, mom and the three daughers are famous "celebutantes". (yay, new words!) A typical scene in Keeping up with the Kardashians would be like this:

A Kardashian girl: get out of here!

Someone's boyfriend: yaaaa! you gonna get mad at me again? Why don't you hit me huh! *beep* *beep*

//loop starts

A Kardashian girl: shut up

the boy: you shut up

//loop ends

I know why shows like that are so hard to resist--look at the poster, all the cast members are beautiful and their life shiny and "interesting". In a way I think they are just like junk food--they are no good for you but if you get hooked, you keep wanting more.

In the food industry, there's this term called "priming". Priming occurs when an earlier stimlus influences response to a later one. For example, the priming of a potato chip happens when you first see the bag--the bright color draws you in. and then your brain reacts to the delicious memory of a chip that you've once eaten, the texture, the smell, etc. Once you tear open the bag, you are already way gone.

I guess in reality TV shows, priming works like this: attractive cast members (come on, look at the attached poster)-->unconscious thoughts to look at them for a longer period of time-->once you fix your eyes on the screen for more than 3 seconds, you are sure to be drawn in by the constant drama in it-->by the time you really start absorbing the information (just as when you really start eating the patoto chip) you are already way gone.

Some shows are smarter at marketting than this one is. The Hills and The City come to mind. MTV has so many of these! My super sweet 16, anyone? Well the thing with the Hills and the City is that they market themselves as the story of young girls who are "trying to make it out there". But on screen you never see them do any real work. If only the real world was this easy, if only we can all get paid by letting a film crew photo us as we eat paninis under the sun....life would be good.

However, there is one thing that I genuinely enjoy about reality shows--i like to keep up with their cast.

Spanning out from the Kardashian Dad--he married Kris Houghton, who later married former olympic gold medalist, Bruce Jenner. Jenner's son, Brody Jenner (aka step brother of the kardashian girls), appeared in the Hills (and in its spin off, the City) with his best friend Spencer Pratt. The two also stared in another reality TV shows, the Princes of Malibu; later, Brody won his own show, called "Bromance" . Spencer and his wife Heidi Montag (who is also a Hills co-star) later joined another reality show (surprise!) "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!".

That is 5 reality shows in 3 families. This is insane. We should invent a program that allows us to type in reality show casts and draws family trees for us, i bet it wouldn't span too far. The things that are on reality tv shows are garbage, but the pattern in who gets on it is still pretty interesting. I guess it is fair to infer that these shows only depict the "reality" of those families, which, in the end, is actually a good news for all the rest of us.

Hope First, Budget Second

2009-12-27T20:12:00.000-08:00

Warning the following post may include overly broad generalities.

I found Oriens' post about the militarization of space exploration rather thought-provoking. The following paragraph resonated with me. Something seems wrong about todays space program compared to that of the 60s and 70s.

It's kind of sad though. Back in the early days, space exploration was much more idealistic. Nations were competing, but for once they were competing to build rockets instead of competing to build missiles. In doing so, they were breaking barriers and expanding the frontiers of knowledge for all mankind.

After reading Non's sarcastic response and a freakonomics blog post, I think I can put my finger on what is wrong with today's space program. The problem isn't a militaristic focus, as space exploration has always been a strange combination of computer scientists, mathematicians, and fighter pilots. The problem is that the process of choosing goals and producing budgets has been reversed. In the 1960s Kennedy chose a goal and then figured out the price.

... I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

In fact in order to reach the goal, the funding for NASA was dramatically increased. The space agency's annual budget increased from $500 million in 1960 to a high of $5.2 billion in 1965. During 1965, the NASA's budget represented 5.5% of the federal budget. Today NASA's funding is roughly 0.55%. Now in days would a president ever propose a project stating that "no other project would be as difficult or expensive"?

I would assert that this change in NASA policy represents a larger problem with the US politics. For much American history, the nation has set a goal (ignoring the steep cost), spent whatever necessary to achieve the goal and then received huge returns. However, it seems that things have changed. Now, every decision has become a cost benefit analysis. "This is how much policy x will cost, this is how much policy will return. If y>x pursue policy." This cost benefit analysis leads to projects, such as the NASA projects mentioned by Oriens, that we know can be accomplished, with currently existing technology. Except for wars, Congress seems of afraid of any project without a solid cost estimate. The great projects that helped create America's image as the worlds leading innovator, such as the Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal, New Deal (TVA) infrastructure, and the Interstate Highway System, all involved setting a goal first, budgeting record setting amounts of money, and often running out of that money and budgeting even more. However, in the end the returns to society and government arguably greatly outweighed the cost. There is something wrong with the space program and there is something wrong with out government. With all the talk of hope in the last presidential election, the US needs a government funded project for which we don't currently have the necessary technology nor a past project or similar scale, a project that requires and inspires hope, ingenuity, and innovation.

Sometimes history happens when no one is looking

2009-12-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

It's almost 2010, and quasirandom Wikipedia reading resulted in me coming across two events that are going to happen in the upcoming year that almost no one is talking about. China is going to launch its first space station and the U.S. is going to start test flights of a new space plane, the X-37. There is a very good reason why very few people are talking about these events: they are both projects of the respective nation's military, and militaries aren't keen on releasing very many details.

Not that I know what I'm talking about, but I don't think there is scientifically that much significant here. Humanity has gone into space and built space stations before. The story is that militaries are taking an increasing role in space. Their presence can easily be justified to the politicians. The U.S. military is increasingly an organization in which orders are sent through communication satellites to attack targets located with recon satellites with weapons guided by GPS satellites. The Chinese military is getting there, launching recon and positioning satellites of its own. The space station and the X-37 aren't directly related, but how hard is it to get a politician to sign off on a multi-billion dollar defense project anyway?

It's kind of sad though. Back in the early days, space exploration was much more idealistic. Nations were competing, but for once they were competing to build rockets instead of competing to build missiles. In doing so, they were breaking barriers and expanding the frontiers of knowledge for all mankind. This was perhaps best captured in the picture at top, when the astronauts headed to the moon were the first people to see the entire earth as one, and brought back the pictures to show the world. Now days though, the only progress in space travel seems to be the work of either commercial or military entities. It shouldn't have been unexpected, as money and power have the chief motivators to progress through all of human existence, but it's worth noticing that one more idealistic dream seems to have quietly died away.

The Culture of the Filibuster

2009-12-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

Ezra Klein has a series of good posts and interviews up about the filibuster. I strongly agree with his overall thesis that it needs to go, largely for the reason that he writes here:

The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

That is undeniably the world we live in with the Senate we have. Unless you are of the wildly irresponsible starve-the-beast persuasion, it is also undeniably bad.

Out of all Klein's flurry of posts, though, this interview Klein did with Andy Stern, President of the SEUI, unsurprisingly, interested me most. Rather than focusing only on all the strictly institutional factors as did all the other interviewees, Stern also said this:

[Q:] On the night of the vote, you could see Sen. Dodd and Lieberman having a pleasant conversation behind the speaker. You're saying that in a Senate with clearer social pressures, Lieberman couldn't have walked back in and been greeted warmly after threatening to doom his party's top priority.

[Stern:] Democrats have failed to create a normative set of behaviors. They rely on rules when they should really act like a party. The fact that they have to change the rules because they cant act collectively is sad. Everyone gets to be the general when they feel their will or their issue or their point of view trumps everyone else's.

Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, everybody held up their vote for the purpose of gaining personal leverage. Now, appropriately, Harry Reid has to say this is the nature of legislation. But I never thought the nature was making compromises on rules rather than substance. This was 'I'll use the rule of 60 to gain substantive advantage.' The idea was not that democrats get 60 so everyone can be king or queen for a day. Everyone has been empowered. Why shouldn't Kent Conrad say that he won't raise the debt ceiling unless he gets his commission? It's the culture we've created. When we reward inappropriate behavior, we breed more inappropriate behavior. [...]
Do senators not appreciate how odd this looks to America? That with 60 votes, we can't have a debate? As obstructionist as the Republicans are, there is no such thing as a Republican filibuster. If there is a filibuster, it means Democrats are filibustering themselves.

I am of two minds on approaching the filibuster as a cultural phenomenon.

On the one hand, it undeniably is. Twenty years ago, the behavior we see discussed as routine would have been seen as traitorous; forty years ago, it wasn't even a consideration on anything but civil rights legislation. If we again lived in the world in which Senators saw it as completely warranted to be stigmatized, stripped of their committee privileges, earmarks, etc. if they filibustered their own party, it seems clear there would be fewer filibusters.

On the other, norms can't change just by taking a vote, especially when it isn't in people's interests to accept what's new (recall that the 60 vote threshold means that everyone together is less powerful but that each person is far more so). We have the culture of filibustering that we do today because the Senate boiled itself alive slowly over the past 20 years (with a fair amount of help with Gingrich, too, to be sure); meanwhile, no matter how much cojones Harry Reid might have in many of our ideal worlds, it seems dubious that a firm "this is how it's gonna be now, folks" would cut it.

As much as the cultural insight is accurate here, it thus also seems like a red herring. Merkley's idea to delay the change to 50 votes for 6 to 8 years seems like the most promising idea, though I am sure there are others, and it will certainly create some cultural changes in turn as time moves on. But given the culture we have today and the clear implications of who the most-effected Senators would be, trying to work on the level of norms or even procedures within the Democratic caucus seems doomed to fail -- though I hope I have the opportunity to be proved wrong.

David B. / David 3, Holder of a few positions with fancy-sounding titles in the past

Political Cartograms: Fun with Size Distortion

2009-12-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

I was surfing around the web looking for something to blog about, when I found an amazing website that I figured was worth sharing. The website has a large variety of cartograms, which according to wikipedia are maps in which "some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time or Gross National Product– is substituted for land area. The geometry or space of the map is distorted in order to convey the information of this alternate variable."

Here are a few that I found particularly interesting:

Obviously, comparing cartograms is an inexact method of comparing the relations between variables, but it is a neat way to develop theories. Does more women in government correlate to fewer executions?

And a final one that I felt connected to the on going debate on this blog about atheism and politics:

The map was actually less skewed toward the Northeast and West Coast than I personally expected.

Link to the website: http://show.mappingworlds.com/usa/

Malleus Maleficarum

2009-12-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

So I'll jump into this discussion we're having on the role of religious rhetoric. Largely and overall I agree with what Leah has to say, so the point of this will be a very narrow expansion and rebuttal to some comments courtesy Jess Belding on another post. I don't think Leah goes far enough in some places.

Specifically, I'd like to focus on this:

2. Politicians who use faith, rather than empirical facts, as a foundation for policy (cf Dubya many many times). Just one example:
I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa].

Both of these are hugely inappropriate, as they explicitly cut people out of the national conversation about politics. In the first case, unbelievers are dismissed as incapable of being a part of the political process, due to supposed ethical deficits. In the second, crucial justifications for policy choices are based on evidence that is not capable of being questioned, proved, or sensed by a large slice of the voting public.

The problem here is not just that the arguments are not capable of being "questioned, proved, or sensed" by a large (10-15%) slice of the public, it's that these arguments can't be questioned, proved or sensed by a slightly larger cut -- say, every member of the public, religious or not, minus the person making the argument. This isn't even a matter of all the different Christian denominations in the United States, or the people of different faiths (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, etc), but rather it's a matter of meta-communicability.

Let me explain. The way religious understanding and the idea of revelation work, as far as I can tell, is based on the idea that these experiences are very intense and, more importantly, very individual. In fact, so individual, that it's patently impossible for another person to understand exactly what's being experienced. It's very similar to the idea of qualia ("Redness", for example) -- it's a state that appears to have some meaning to me as I experience it, but I can't hope to communicate redness to someone else exactly as I experience it. I can describe about how it makes me feel, or describe the requisite wavelength or frequency of light that makes me see red, but as far as acting in such a way as to make someone else perceive red as I do, there's no way to do it (at least if and until we figure out exactly how consciousness works).

So, when George Bush says that God commands him to invade Iraq, no one, not I the atheist nor a Christian of any stripe nor anyone else can hope to understand his argument because we can't know if God talked to him in the first place or investigate the signficance of the statement. The only person who understands what George Bush means is George Bush, so in order to accept his justification, we have to trust him. Not just the standard, more scientific form of trust where we're able to accept the evidence, mind you, but complete faith that he had a fundamental truth revealed to him. Talk about cutting people out of the process! Now certainly it's not the case that every religious argument is of the same magnitude as the Bush one above, but it is a common trait that religious arguments, especially about policy, are logically incommunicable (I have some personal experience here; I can't remember how many times I'd discuss religion with someone and ram into impasses again and again because of this barrier). Religious appeals are useless in the public sphere because of this -- if my argument is legitimately based on religion, and doesn't just incorporate some lip-service talking about Jesus, then there's no hope anyone else can understand what, exactly or even to a reasonable degree of certainty, what I'm getting at because a conception of God that is largely vague to everyone else is a premise.

I have a few other thoughts about this topic, especially regarding the cultural marginalization of and discrimination against atheists, but those thoughts are better contained to comments of this and other posts.

Stephen

PoL

Another Country, Another Discourse

2009-12-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

or In Support of Leah

Early on in his term as president, Sarkozy got a lot of people angry for doing two things: he visited the Vatican, and he made statements to the effect that the state could never hope to replace the role played by the Church in teaching morality.

These, by American standards, would not be controversial statements. In France they drove us crazy. The president doesn't, shouldn't, talk about God. Whenever he does so, he opens a breach in the separation of church and state, and leaves us with the fear that religious morality will be in control of policy-making decisions. We take our separation of church and state very seriously, so that it may be said that you Americans don't really have the same concept of it we do. After all, while the headscarf ban in public schools is perhaps not entirely motivated by the desire to preserve our precious barrier, we nevertheless feel comfortable placing it under that label, as Americans never would.

The consequences of this, of course, are that all public discourse is forcibly atheistic (at least with the methodological atheism common to science), which has a tendency to make it easier to win office if you are an atheist, and to hide the effects of religion on our values. Still, for an atheist like myself it's a blessing. The assumption is that religion is a private affair, and there is an equation, as there should be, between the choice and making sense of religion and the choice and making sense of philosophy for an atheist. By excluding discussion of the foundations of morality, we facilitate a great deal of conversation about the results of our morality, i.e. policy decisions, since no matter what rationale we bring up for them all of us French folk have essentially the same values. So I kind of like laïcité.

I'm sure theists are as unhappy with this sort of a system as us atheists are with the American one.

Oh Holy Rhetoric

2009-12-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

In case you weren't aware, dear reader, some Yale Political Union members manage blogs of their own outside of this one. Last night, Leah Libresco wrote on her Huffington Post blog about religious rhetoric, replying in part to Matthew Shaffer's article "Obama the Theocrat" on this blog.

I agree with Matt that Obama's rhetoric inspires a less visceral reaction in secularists' minds simply because of his other policy positions, but Leah is right to distinguish between different kinds of religious rhetoric. Her formulation:

1. Politicians who deny atheists legitimacy as moral actors (cf. Mitt Romney in his 'forgive me for being a Morman' speech). He said,

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone" [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16969460].

2. Politicians who use faith, rather than empirical facts, as a foundation for policy (cf Dubya many many times). Just one example:

"I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa]."

Both of these are hugely inappropriate, since they explicitly cut people out of the national conversation about politics. In the first case, unbelievers are dismissed as incapable of being a part of the political process, due to supposed ethical deficits. In the second, crucial justifications for policy choices are based on evidence that is not capable of being questioned, proved, or sensed by a large slice of the voting public.

Leah is both right and wrong to explicitly connect it to policy. As secular values can come from rather arbitrary places and aesthetic concerns, there is no particular reason to raise them up as more legitimate than values informed by religious faith. However, it makes sense to keep discussions of efficacy and practice well within the realm of empirical evidence.

But that's not as bright a line as I'd like to think it is. Certain values may not explicitly pose policy prescriptions, but few people outside academia reason out "abortion is murder" into a pragmatic pro-choice stance. Oftentimes, liberal religious politicians say they don't wish to impose their religious views on anyone else. All well and good--but when they pass any legislation at all, they are imposing some set of values. When I say that I believe it is morally justifiable to take tax money from the wealthy to provide health care to those who can not afford coverage, I am making a value judgment and imposing my moral views--and for me, my religious views--on everyone else. (Whether this means is efficacious to my desired ends is a separate question entirely--which is why my pragmatism often tempers my leftist Catholic values.)

Still, I disagree with Leah, to the effect that she appears to believe the use of religious rhetoric at all will always lead to systematic discrimination against atheists in the public sphere.

Religious metaphors and stories are useful for politicians because they tap into narratives many people already feel emotionally connected to and cause voters to respond favorably. Indeed, in Drew Westen's handbook for aspiring demagogues, The Political Brain, he repeatedly emphasizes that religious references pay off for politicians.

The trouble is, these highly efficient strategies systematically disadvantage atheists. When Westen gave a lecture at Yale University a year ago, I asked him what he thought atheist politicians should do, given that so much of his advice presupposed an ability to tap into the religious feelings of voters. He said, essentially, that atheist candidates were out of luck and that this was a factor in his own decision not to seek office.

Westen's conclusion here should not go without challenge. In a reasonable world, someone like Drew Westen should not be cut out of the ability to engage in the public arena--but not because religious references should be put out of bounds. Rather, he should be free to challenge Christians to put their values into practice (on health care, the environment, what have you) even as he honestly states he does not share those values.

Traditional Marxists and some fundamentalist Muslims share concerns about interest and capital for very different reasons--there is no reason they should feel uncomfortable appealing to the values of the other group. In the Yale Political Union, I regularly attempt to persuade my atheist compatriots by appealing to their values and aesthetic concerns, even if the basis of my support for a particular policy is grounded in my own Biblical values. So long as I make clear how I came to my own position, there is no reason for such honest dialogue to be labeled sophistry.

Now, would many voters be prejudiced against Westen for his irreligious nature? Likely so. Many people do bind up concerns about character with the religion of a politician. But the problem here is the public's willingness to otherize atheists and not see them as consistent moral actors--not earnest appeals to religious values for the purposes of persuasion. As the original Politico article noted, in Barack Obama's visit to Cairo, he referenced not a biblical story but the Islamic story of Isra. Presumably, as a Christian, the President considers Isra (particularly the part where Muhammed consults with Jesus) to be heresy. But in his promotion of the value of interfaith dialogue, he appealed to the stories and values of Islam to make his point, and presumably the Muslims assembled were able to take this Christian seriously. I pray that my fellow Christians may themselves be able to take all appeals to their religious values in good faith--no matter who is doing the appealing.

Merry Christmas!
Chris
Chair, PoL

"Holiday music"---Microeconomics Rap

2009-12-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

With all the talks we hear about stimlulus, government, and recession, I think economics deserves a special post here.

Dan Hamermesh, a professor at University of Texas, wrote the following rap music for his Intro to Micro class. Apparently, he performs the rap song while "wearing a whoopee cap and riding around the lecture theater on a Razor scooter" every year. Here is the lyric:

It’s all about the Law of Supply and Demand,
Prices are set by the Invisible Hand.

A floor that’s put on your product’s price
Is something the consumer will find not nice.

If you raise your price when demand’s elastic,
Your revenue will drop and you’ll go ballistic.

Get the same extra utiles for each extra dollar,
The maximum utility is sure to follow.

Produce where price equals marginal cost
If you don’t you’ll find that your profits are lost.

Always think about cost, opportunity,
If not, you’ll find you’re hurting your community.

Think margin, think margin.

Monopolists set MR to marginal cost,
The result is that consumer surplus is lost.

Make sure your strategies are subgame perfect
Plan your strategic interactions without any defect.

Tax the inelastic, or you’ll be hurtin’
Because you’ve created a large excess burden.

With positive externalities it’s always wise,
To encourage more production — subsidize.

A tariff or a quota helps a few producers,
But consumers will always be the big losers.

Sometimes you gotta choose efficiency or fairness,
Ya need more than econs, ya need political awareness.

Think margin, think margin.

Too bad I couldn't find a video of him doing it. Bu according to Freakonomics blog, the University of Texas, where he teaches, just gave him a President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award. Way to go, Professor Hamermesh!

Aesthetics

2009-12-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

I was poking around the internet a little while ago and stumbled upon this strange little photo-gallery, of photos taken at an abandoned oil refinery in Italy:

http://www.pbase.com/jakobe/abandoned_refinery

It got me thinking a little bit about aesthetics. These photos are all of an industrial plant in a severe amount of decay -- certainly not a very beautiful thing in conception and usually not in result, but here it seems to work, and this isn't the only expression of a sort of intangible beauty in decay (see Dickens, or the Steampunk aesthetic). So, why is it that we find beauty in this sort of well-documented decay? Why do we appreciate form and construction over practicality and use?

Perhaps it's because things like form are more immediately appreciable and more intuitive, which appeals to a baser sense of aestheticism. We like elegant mathematical proofs more than we like enormous complicated beasts and we tend to more commonly accept the neoclassical economic models we learn in intro micro instead of the more correct, but more messy, modern models. There's an intense satisfaction to be gained by satisfying problem-solving urges that characterize our evolutionary development in a way that's very clean and ties up all of the loose ends instead of enormous solutions that are about as complicated as the problems.

So how does this fit into the aesthetics of urban blight? Perhaps it's a form of Neo-Romanticism. We don't understand the technological as intuitively as we do the natural because the things we've created weren't components of our evolutionary past and we don't have the genetic faculties to understand that intuition (this is the same problem that we have with quantum mechanics: we don't intuitively get it because we're not equipped to understand things that small. I forget who said it, but we're "medium-sized animals equipped to process medium-sized objects moving at medium-sized speeds"). The idea of nature eroding and destroying technology rectifies that problem. There's sort of a conception of nature balancing itself with intentionality present in the pictures, which is a simple, elegant solution of the type mentioned above.

Perhaps I'm trying to conceptualize this too much as a cognitive science or evolutionary question, so I'm curious to see what y'all think from other perspectives. The question is this: what is it that makes something aesthetically pleasing or beautiful? What's the function of that qualitative value? What does it mean? But even so, enjoy the photos, they're very well taken.

Stephen

PoL

So about this democracy thing,

2009-12-22T09:21:00.001-08:00

One of the items in the healthcare bill reminded me of our leave governments to the experts debate. As Karen Tumulty reports over at Swampland, the Senate health care bill creates a strong Independent Medicare Advisory Commission (IMAC), thrilling economists. The purpose of this commission would be to gather a panel of experts and have them come up with what Medicare should reimburse health care providers. Currently, these are set by Congress, as a result of much horse-trading and lobbying, with all the resulting inefficiencies. This is a major cause of the rise in Medicare spending, as no one ever lobbies congress to tell them to reimburse them less. Congress setting the rates also results in a series of seriously skewed incentives, such as various specialties of physicians getting paid not by how much they are needed or how much they have to train, but on how well they lobby Congress. Letting this process be done by a independent commission, with Congress only getting a final up or down vote on the entire package of recommendations, has been widely praised across the sane political spectrum. Everyone from Krugman to Brooks to Peter Orszag has supported the idea.

The thing is, these types of expert commissions seem to be getting more common. A textbook example would be the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) comission. It was generally agreed that we have some unnecessary military bases, but politicians like having military bases in their districts, and so there were plenty of accusations that our national security would be mortally wounded if we closed this base in the middle of Kansas. Hence BRAC, an expert commission that would look at the overall posture of the United States military, decide which bases we needed, and give its recommendations to Congress for a single up or down vote. It worked. There have been other independent expert bodies proposed. Candidate Obama supported the creation of an independent ethics office for Congress, since the House and Senate ethics committees did a terrible job. More recently, Senators Conrad and Judd Gregg, the Chairman and Ranking member of the Senate Budget committee, have proposed a commission to handle the federal budget deficit, since Congress has shown itself completely unwilling to take the necessary actions of cutting spending and raising taxes.

I think there are two ways to look at it. On one hand, even right now, Congressmen and women mainly provide the final yes or no as the details are worked out by think tanks, staffers, and lobbyists. Having a group of experts just (no offence to the many brilliant and patriotic think tankers, staffers, and lobbyists out there) streamlines and rationalizes the process. On the other hand, it seems like we have reached the point when good-governance types, the media, influential commentators, the President of the United States, and the people's own elected representatives seem to agree that if you want good governance, you should keep the people's own elected representatives as far away from the process as possible. Thoughts?

Does Climate Change Need a Trigger?

2009-12-21T21:02:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen has come and gone, and the results were underwhelming. The much touted twelve paragraph accord was a statement of intentionallity, and was not binding on any of the countries attending.

After the bloody battle on health care (and after seeing the gutted bill that emerged from the wreckage), it seems doubtful that Obama can push through meaningful climate change regulation, as long as the Republicans maintain their 40 vote stranglehold on the Senate. The situation will only get worse after 2010.

But, if the majority of scientist are right, we can't afford to keep kicking this can down the road, which is why I'm intrigued by a proposal that would let us postpone creating politically unpopular carbon taxes but would still be able to curb our dangerous behavior.

As described by John Tierney (a climate change skeptic) in the Science Times, a proposal by Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph would

call each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear. But if the climate modelers and theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct about the atmosphere heating up, then the penalties would quickly, and automatically, rise.

Except for logistical concerns about whether these penalties kick in quickly enough, this seems to be an idea that all reasonable people could assent to. Is there some sneaky subtlety I am missing here? Because this is the first climate change article by Tierney I've agreed with, and that does make me a little suspicious.

In the news

2009-12-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

Audio, Photos, and Video

2009-12-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Coming soon.

Contact Us

2009-12-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in writing for the Yale Political Union Blog,or if you have any comments or suggestions, please contact the current blog manager Sandy Zhu at sandy.zhu@yale.edu.

If you are another organization seeking possible collaboration with the Yale Political Union, please contact the Director of Campus Relations, Jaymin Patel at jaymin.patel@yale.edu.

We look forward to working with you!

About the Union

2009-12-10T12:37:00.001-08:00

"This Union can be of undoubted value to nation and to the University, provided it maintains independence and voices the true thoughts of those participating...Honest debates will help in the search for truthful answers." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933

The Yale Political Union is the largest undergraduate organization at Yale, and the only group of its kind in the country. Founded in 1934 by Professor A. Whitney Griswold (who would later become University President) to combat the insular and apathetic Yale political culture of the 1930s, The Union of today remains an engaging forum for political debate and activity.
Modeled after the Oxford and Cambridge Union Societies, the Yale Political Union exists to politically engage the University community. Each year America's great social and political leaders visit the Union to discuss current affairs and debate with the most engaging students on campus. Senators and governors, judges and journalists, activists and academics alike come to the Union to debate topics such as "Resolved: The United States Should Open Its Borders," "Resolved: The Left has Become the Enemy of Liberalism", "Resolved: Political Activity is Essential to Happiness," and "Resolved: Yale Should Discontinue Legacy Considerations."

The Union is a non-partisan organization, and guests come from across the political spectrum to address the members on a variety of topics that face the nation.

Recent guests of the Union have included Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean, controversial American baptist minister Al Sharpton, Key Founder of the modern Conservative movement William F. Buckley, Presidential candidates Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Bill Bradley, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, National Review Online Editor Jonah Goldberg, American Civil Liberties Union director Nadine Strossen, United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson, former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, and Central Intelligence Agency director George John Tenet.

The backbone of the Union is its strong party system, which breeds enduring friendships, encourages individual growth and provides the Union with a competitive and rigorous spirit. Each of the seven parties -- Liberal Party, Party of the Left, Progressive Party, Independent Party, Tory Party, Conservative Party, and Party of the Right -- has its own culture and style. Each hosts a variety of activities which complement the goals of the Union throughout the semester, ranging from weekly debates on more philosophical and social topics to the traditional toasting sessions at Mory's, from quiet community service to rousing political protests.

In addition to our guest meetings, the Union also sponsors various other activities for the politically inclined throughout the year. There are three prize debates every year -- the Freshman Prize Debate, the Gardner-White Memorial Debate, and the Party Prize Debate -- where students face off against each other in an effort to win cash awards or the highly coveted Union life membership.

Though the Union has an advisory board that has included Senators, Governors, famed scholars, and Presidents such as John Kerry, George Pataki, Gerald Ford, David Boren, Ahkil Reed Amar and William F. Buckley, Jr., the Union remains primarily a student run organization. All Union officers are undergraduates, as are most of the members of the parties' executive boards. Party and Union officers are elected during reading period each semester.

There is a place for everyone in the Union. Members vary from those who come only several times a semester to hear their favorite guests, to those who spend nearly every day immersed in some form of Union activity. All you need is an interest in politics.