Archive for November, 2007

The important thing about the mainstream media isn't whether they lean one way or the other politically on a particular occasion. The important thing is that they are deeply stupid. Jamison Foster at Media Matters:

"No moderator [in the candidate debates so far] has asked a single question of a single candidate about whether the president should be able to order the indefinite detention of an American citizen, without charging the prisoner with any crime.

"But Tim Russert did ask Congressman Dennis Kucinich -- in what he felt compelled to insist was 'a serious question' -- whether he has seen a UFO.

"No moderator has asked a single question about whether the candidates agree with the Bush administration's rather skeptical view of congressional oversight.

"But Hillary Clinton was asked, 'Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?'"

Admit it. You've always wanted to know where Chicago's last wood-block pavement, tied houses, and black-on-yellow street signs are -- not to mention what became of Almond Street and DeKalb Avenue. Now you can, because the folks at Forgotten Chicago remember. (The "tied houses" are a parable of do-gooder regulation backfiring.) The site is Not Safe For Work...because if you are a true Chicago geek you may well forget to do any.

H/t to the Newberry Library.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Reviewing two recent books on the Great Depression and FDR's response to it, Benjamin Friedman in the New York Review of Books ($) adduces some numbers that call into question the right-wing revisionist historians' contention that FDR did nothing (or less than nothing) to end the nation's greatest economic catastrophe, and that only WWII saved us. From 1929 to March 1933, total economic production dropped steeply and repeatedly.

"March 1933 marked the bottom. Total production rose 11 percent in 1934, 9 percent in 1935, and then 13 percent in 1936 -- just enough to regain the level reached in 1929. But by then businesses in many industries had learned to make do with less labor, even if they now produced just as much." The one-year decline in 1937-38 was smaller and quickly ended.

World War II didn't start until 1939.

These numbers seem to be incompatible with the assertions that FDR's policies perpetuated the Depression and discouraged business innovation. Is there some good economic reason why they're wrong or irrelevant? 

From the website of the Chicago Reporter:

"Nearly half of Chicago police officers sued for fatally shooting civilians were previously sued for misconduct. Some say that should be a warning sign, but is anyone paying attention?"

For those who are, the Reporter and ColorLines magazine have developed a database of police shootings since 2000.

Lead reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein:

"The Chicago Reporter examined 85 fatal police shootings since 2000 and identified 17 wrongful death suits filed in federal court using the victims’ names. Though the Chicago Police Department does not disclose the names of officers who shoot civilians, the Reporter found the names of 20 officers who were identified in the lawsuits as a shooter. The Reporter’s investigation into the officers’ previous litigation history found that nine—or 45 percent—of them had been sued previously in either federal or circuit court."

Bear in mind that there are 13,000 Chicago cops. So this group is neither characteristic of the department nor too large to get the careful attention it deserves.

"These police officers’ actions, which have cost the city more than $7 million, resulted in lawsuits that were filed at the same time when most fatal police shootings appear to be declared justified."

I am not astonished at the existence of Dr. Vino's blog, but who knew there was an American Association of Wine Economists? (Thanks, Whet.)

Dr. Vino in a recent post waxes lengthy and eloquent on the carbon footprint of various wines, and reaches a conclusion I think somewhat similar to that of the omniscient Michael Pollan: local makes a lot of difference. A few tidbits:

"Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio.

"Shipping wine in bulk from the source and bottling closer to the point of consumption lowers carbon intensity.

"Light packaging material such as Tetra-Pak or bag-in-a-box has much less carbon intensity...

"There’s a 'green line' that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip." 

And on and on. If you like this sort of thing, you'll want to read the whole thing, or better yet, the full study titled "Red, White and 'Green': The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade," (pdf), which is AAWE Working Paper no. 9.

But nerdliness has its limits. Speaking as someone who can lose all focus when confronted with the wonderful maps that show how many days it will take to ship something from La Porte to Laramie, I say stop it! Environmentalist wine connoisseurs shouldn't spend their time on such things. They should lobby Congress to impose a hefty carbon tax ASAP, so that we all get the message loud and clear from the price stickers on Ripple and everything else.

Nothing less will help, because nobody has time to go around calculating the carbon footprint of every damn thing they do/eat/drink. That's what markets are for.

A lot of data from a credible source says being mildly overweight might be OK.

JAMA abstract (full text costs $): "Overweight was associated with significantly decreased mortality from noncancer, non-CVD causes...but not associated with cancer or CVD mortality."

David Usborne from The Independent UK, elaborating: "Those Americans who were merely overweight were up to about 40 per cent less likely than normal-weight people to die from a whole range of diseases and risks including emphysema, pneumonia, Alzheimer's, injuries and various infections." 

Robin O'Sullivan reviews American Wilderness: A New History at History News Network. Plenty of juice here, including editor Michael Lewis's swipe at "citizens who passionately oppose oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet brashly drive hundreds of miles in gas-chugging vehicles to hike in national parks," but I was especially struck by this passage in the review:

"Donald Worster's epilogue ties protection of wild nature to modern liberal, democratic ideals held by 'ordinary people.' He shows that defense of wilderness has been most successful in nations that support democratic principles, human rights, and freedom of speech -- e.g., Costa Rica, Panama, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Scotland. In these countries, wilderness is perceived as a place of freedom, worthy of respect. In more authoritarian nations, Worster contends, wilderness is a threat to dictatorial control. He optimistically believes that there is plenty of wild nature left for liberal democracies to protect."

Try substituting "the right to keep and bear arms" for "wilderness" in those last two sentences. Works pretty well, doesn't it?

Once again I am NOT arguing that either wilderness or gun ownership is good or bad. Save that debate for somewhere else. I am suggesting that there's a deeper parallelism. Conservatives tend to think of gun ownership as a kind of protection of freedom and order against lawlessness (from above or from below); perhaps liberals tend to think of "untrammeled" wilderness in the same way. But surely our protection isn't individual (holding a gun or retreating into the wild) but social: an educated, knowledgeable citizenry with a real stake in the social customs (like live-and-let-live) and political institutions (like the Constitution) that maintain order and freedom.

The indispensable Christopher Hayes, now Washington editor of the Nation, puts an old book and a new one in perspective at In These Times:

"Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants -- from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas) -- political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states. The second, the rise of democratic governance. With cunning aplomb, neoliberal writers and historians have packaged these two distinct phenomena together as one single story of progress and development. Look: Freedom’s on the march!

"[Naomi] Klein resurrects Hayek’s argument and inverts it, showing how time and again, the 'economic freedom' envisioned by Hayek and his ilk has been imposed at the expense of political freedom, often, Klein writes, 'midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion.' From Chile to Iraq, majorities empowered to choose their own government don’t start clamoring for flat taxes, privatized post offices and an end to controls on foreign capital. Instead, they often form unions or call for increased social spending. The Shock Doctrine is an encyclopedic catalog of the tactics that governments, corporations and economists have used to impose -- usually over popular opposition -- what Klein calls the 'policy trinity' of the Chicago-School program: 'the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending.'"

Read the whole thing, because Hayes doesn't stop thinking when he finds a good book he agrees with, and he doesn't hesitate to explain how Klein's book overreaches -- a quality too rare at all ends of the political spectrum. The comments are intelligent too.

Brad DeLong reviews an interesting exchange about a 1980 speech Ronald Reagan made that gave aid and comfort to southern racists. (If you want to extend that discussion, post your comments at his site, not here.) In the comments I came across an obvious point from "Dan'l" that I'd never read or thought of before:

"Funny how those who supported states' rights never supported civil rights as a matter of policy within their own state."

Amplified later by "Bernard Yomtov":

"This is a critical and generally overlooked point. It was certainly possible to argue both that segregation was immoral and that it was the duty of the states, not the federal government, to abolish it. So far as I know, no one who opposed federal civil rights legislation on states rights grounds took this position."

The floor is open. Did anybody do that? Unlike some of our regular commenters, I'm willing to listen to evidence that might contradict my long-held belief, in this case that "states' rights" was and is simply code for white racism.

Many of us, and most city planners, love the idea of walking to work. But where is it actually happening? Check out this site for data geeks, city-data.com (h/t Sam Smith). 

There are three towns in the US of over 5,000 people where more than half of the people walk to work: West Point NY (58%), Air Force Academy CO (56%), and Fort Gordon GA (53%).

The top three walking towns over 10,000 population: Storrs CT (45%), Amherst Center MA (42%), and Ithaca NY (41%).

In Illinois: North Chicago (27%).

Are college campuses and military bases the wave of the future -- or a signal of the difficulties of encouraging this lifestyle among the general population? I'm not sure they're everybody's cup of tea, but I can think of worse models. 

"The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting." So argues Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair, citing

"a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris -- or even the Yukon -- becomes a venture in high finance.

"And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands -- or so he says -- that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both."

Economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes a characteristically even-tempered argument the other way on some of the points in the first paragraph. He doesn't address the second paragraph.

I myself am puzzled why Stiglitz complains about high oil prices, when that is the surest way for us to get weaned from this fuel. The real problem is they're not high enough. We can't expect politicians to tell the truth about this, but economists should.

The business-based Civic Federation (PDF) on Illinois state legislators' ongoing carnival of errors:

"The state has provided short-term funding at the last minute to ward off 'doomsday' dates the CTA responsibly planned for.... The reprieves first borrowed from the agency's future state funding and then granted federal capital dollars to be used for operations."

Better than nothing, right? Wrong:

"Granting temporary funding at the eleventh hour is not only unfair to riders, who suffer uncertainty about getting to work and school, but also costs a good deal of money to the CTA. The agency has to reprogram its fleet and stations in preparation for new fare structures, reorganize its bus system, and place signage to warn riders. The CTA estimates that each 'doomsday' preparation costs $1.5 million."

BTW, "a new bus costs $250,000 and a new rail car costs $1.5 million."

(The Federation supports Julie Hamos's Senate Bill 572, which combines long-term funding and reforms.)

Peter Sacks in Teachers' College Record:

"As is often the case for lower-income families, Ashlea’s parents always wanted the best for her, but they were as information-poor as their daughter, even more so.

"I met Ashlea through my wife, Kathleen, who was her mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. We wanted to set up a modest college scholarship fund for Ashlea and asked her to maintain a certain GPA in school to earn it. When we broached the idea with her dad, Gary, we were shocked to learn that he didn’t know what a GPA was, let alone SATs, AP courses, or any number of details that families must master nowadays in order to prepare their children for higher education.

"Compared to other more educated and affluent parents and students I interviewed for my new book, Tearing Down the Gates (Sacks, 2007), Ashlea’s cultural deficits put her at a huge disadvantage in the education system. Our system relies heavily on the ability of families to provide the cultural capital needed for children to succeed. If parents of poor children aren’t providing them with sufficient information and resources to thrive in the American school system, then we’ve got to turn to schools to do the job."

From where I sit, this is a variation on a theme that E.D. Hirsch has been pounding away at for a few decades. 

Food for thought from former Bush adviser Michael Gerson in the Washington Post: 

"The two intellectually vital movements within the Republican Party today are libertarianism and Roman Catholic social thought ...

"Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules -- free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government -- asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread -- it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering. This obligation has never, in Jewish and Christian teaching, been purely private."

Ramesh Ponnuru offers some qualifications here, but doesn't challenge Gerson's basic point.

James F. McGrath, who teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and blogs at Exploring Our Matrix, takes exception to the usual usage of the word "faith" to mean "belief in the absence of evidence," and goes on from there:

"When people today read the Bible in a non-literal fashion, this is not a retreat from the advances of scientific knowledge. It is rather a return to the classic way of approaching these texts. The only people who are allowing the concerns of modern science to determine the way they read the text are, ironically, the fundamentalists, who seek absolute certain scientific explanations in a text that does not offer them.

"If you are looking for inerrancy in Scriptures and won't take no for an answer, I suspect that most Christians would be grateful if you would try Islam or some tradition that at least claims to offer such a text. But please, please stop trying to make Christianity live up to your strange modernistic expectations."

Read the whole thing -- it's not long. I personally would disagree that there is such a thing as "absolute certain scientific explanations," nor would I say the available evidence justifies McGrath's claim that "the reality of which we are a part is neither simply hostile nor ultimately meaningless." But those are side issues compared to the fundamentalists' failure to understand what it is they're reading.

Senior economist Terry Fitzgerald of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis tries to figure out why different measures of the same thing -- individual incomes of average Americans -- look so different:

"In brief, it seems that individual workers and households have experienced stagnation, while the national economy has grown robustly. How can it be that these two sources of data -- microeconomic data on individual wages and household income, and macroeconomic statistics covering the national economy -- lead to such different conclusions? Since a nation comprises a group of individuals, these statistics would seemingly be compatible."

In the first of three articles on this subject, Fitzgerald finds that it helps if he uses the same correction for inflation in both sets of data, and it helps some more if he counts benefits as well as cash wages. Both adjustments tend to show that middle-American incomes have not stagnated in recent years.

To this non-economist, this looks like an admirable piece of scientific work, trying to figure out why different measurements of supposedly the same thing don't match up, and how to make them more accurate. Whether the end result is what I might prefer politically is irrelevant.

The existence of the discrepancy in the first place isn't all that surprising, since these measures were designed originally for different purposes. The discrepancy doesn't prove that economics is a fraud, nor that the creators of either data set were conspirators or tools of a capitalist conspiracy to deceive people. This rather obvious point should give pause to intellectually honest conservatives who take it for granted that economics is good science, while making up reasons to disbelieve climatology because they don't care for its well-established findings about our civilization's uncontrolled effects on the earth's climate.

Propagandist Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek is quick to jump to his own politically preferred conclusion -- that we're all much wealthier now than 30 years ago -- without waiting for Fitzgerald's next two articles. I think Boudreaux is probably right, but only by accident. I look forward to his thinking more clearly about other sciences in the future.

Alex Gourevitch at n+1:

"While Democrats have become increasingly uncomfortable with the anti-democratic consequences of the hard power of the war on terror, they seem more comfortable with a 'soft power' politics of fear: environmentalism. Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right, and its influence only seems to grow as the war on terror’s influence declines. The New York Times’ bellwether of elite opinion, Thomas Friedman, recently swung around to the new framework...

"The global warming argument can be as morally coercive as the infamous ticking time-bomb torture scenario, even if the clock ticks slower. It’s not just that we should unite; we are, as Gore puts it, 'forced by circumstance' to act."

Trolls please note that Gourevitch is not making the discredited argument that global warming is nonexistent or harmless. He's talking about the way in which real problems -- terrorism and environmental deterioration alike -- tend to be discussed these days, as if the facts dictate one response and one only.

"In the face of real political opportunities, there is always an element of freedom. One chooses between two alternatives, picks a principle, and commits to it. Imagining ecological collapse as an overweening crisis demanding immediate action and collective sacrifice, with emergency decisions overriding citizens’ normal wants and wishes, is not really a politics at all, but the suspension of politics – there is no political choice, no constituencies to balance, nothing to deliberate. There is no free activity, just do or die. It seems we will have traded one state of emergency for another."

Conveniently for those of us with overfull bookshelves, many of the posts at History News Networks are on-the-fly book digests. Thus Marita Sturken of NYU riffs on her new Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Using some regrettable postmodern jargon, she asks how it is that we're constantly surprised when the United States does or suffers bad things:

"This is an innocence that proclaims that we don’t know (even in the face of evidence), that we are not responsible, an innocence that is constantly perceived to be 'lost' at various moments in American history. Thus, most national crises of recent history, from the Vietnam War to 9/11 to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, have been popularly described as moments of the loss of national innocence. And, we can safely predict that any future terrorist attacks within the United States will give rise to new assertions of a loss of innocence (one that must constantly be reasserted after the fact so that it can be 'lost' again). In this narrative, the United States never provokes, is never the cause of its crises, these are just events that, as was asserted about 9/11, came 'out of the blue.' ...

"National innocence must be actively, constantly maintenanced by narratives that reinscribe it [i.e., renewed by stories we tell ourselves] -- in order to be shocked when teenagers pick up guns that they have ready access to and kill their classmates, we must ascribe their acts to popular culture; in order to be shocked about the fact that our country sanctions and engages in torture, we must think it was the work of a few 'bad apples.' Innocence is a position from which such acts of aggression are easily screened out."

She's particularly unhappy with "a comfort culture that sells innocence -- in the production of kitsch.... a World Trade Center snow globe or an Oklahoma City National Memorial teddy bear, can rarely be an incitement to historical reflection or political engagement."

You think Seoul is small-time compared to Chicago? Looks like it might be the other way around. Check out this awesome site, comparing world subways or els at the same scale (h/t Coudal). Per comments at Treehugger, some are a bit out of date.

Here's one for just North American cities.

Hat tip to Kitry for pointing out this long, dispiriting article by Ben Elgin in Business Week:

"Hailed as an environmental pioneer, FedEx says on its Web site that it is 'committed to the use of innovations and technologies to minimize greenhouse gases.' [I didn't find these exact words there, but plenty like them.] With 70,000 ground vehicles and 670 planes burning fuel, the world's largest shipper is a huge producer of heat-trapping gases. Back in 2003, FedEx announced that it would soon begin deploying clean-burning hybrid trucks at a rate of 3,000 a year, eventually sparing the atmosphere 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually from diesel-engine vehicles. 'This program has the potential to replace the company's 30,000 medium-duty trucks over the next 10 years,' FedEx announced at the time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the effort a Clean Air Excellence prize in 2004.

"Four years later, FedEx has purchased fewer than 100 hybrid trucks, or less than one-third of one percent of its fleet. At $70,000 and up, the hybrids cost at least 75% more than conventional trucks, although fuel savings should pay for the difference over the 10-year lifespan of the vehicles. FedEx, which reported record profits of $2 billion for the fiscal year that ended May 31, decided that breaking even over a decade wasn't the best use of company capital. 'We do have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders,' says environmental director Mitch Jackson. 'We can't subsidize the development of this technology for our competitors.'"

If capitalism depends on short-term returns over long-term, we're in real trouble. Read the whole thing for a quick critique of Renewable Energy Credits as well.