Blogs Are Better

With the constantly evolving nature of the news media landscape, self-conscious journalists working for traditional newspapers occasionally decry the growing influence of bloggers. This always seems silly to me, not only because some of the best young journalists are bloggers (see my blog roll for specifics), but because I think the blog format is actually objectively better than an ink-stained broad sheet. Bloggers have the ability, unlike New York Times writers, to conduct interviews and print the full transcripts. They can engage in a substantive back-and-forth over policy specifics. They can come back to stories and update them with renewed consideration as the facts develop.

But the single feature that I always thought made blogs a paper-killer for people who care about substantive reporting was the fact that they link to external sources. This is huge. Talking about a new report? You click to read it. Interesting analysis from someone on the other side of an issue? Click. The ability to readily follow a story around the internet, to other perspectives and original sources, is simply a vastly superior way to become informed. I knew that a physical newspaper’s inability to function this way would put them at a competitive disadvantage, but it never occurred to me that it would actually encourage a culture of unaccountability. Ben Goldacre has a great little piece explaining the nature of the problem:

Lastly, on Wednesday, the Daily Mail ran with the scare headline “Swimming too often in chlorinated water ‘could increase risk of developing bladder cancer’, say scientists”. There’s little point in documenting the shortcomings of Daily Mail health stories any more, but suffice to say, while the story purported to describe a study in the journal Environmental Health, anyone who read the original paper, or even the press release, would see immediately that bladder cancer wasn’t measured, and the Mail’s story was a simple distortion.

Of course, this is a problem that generalises well beyond science. Over and again, you read comment pieces that purport to be responding to an earlier piece, but distort the earlier arguments, or miss out the most important ones: they count on it being inconvenient for you to check. It’s also an interesting difference between different forms of media: most bloggers have no institutional credibility, and so they must build it, by linking transparently, and allowing you to easily double check their work.

No. 68 Project

A few weeks ago I read in the Washington Post about this pop-up dinner series that brings amazing chefs and top mixologists together to assemble amazing tasting menus for a short run of small dinner parties. The No. 68 Project began in London and recently moved to DC. I was very intrigued, but a little ambivalent about the highly curated application process. Fortunately, my friend Manpriya does their PR and extended me an invite.

I enjoyed a lavish 7-course menu prepared by Chef Frederik de Pue, paired with delicious and intoxicating cocktails crafted by Owen Thomson, of Minibar fame. I wanted to blog about the dinner, but I’m not a food writer and didn’t think that I could properly express how I felt about the food, drink, and atmosphere. Fortunatly, one of the guests was a writer for the New York Times who wrote about the evening in last weekend’s Style Section. So I’ll defer to him.

As we finished over fromage blanc ice cream and a gingery speculoos flan served with a chartreuse-laden hot chocolate, a little fatter and much tipsier, the meal and the topic came together. “How do I keep you out of my browser history?” Scott Reitz, a writer, blurted at Ogas. I didn’t hear anyone cop to Ogas’s findings outright, but from a chorus of chuckles and a few blushing faces, No. 68 had done its job. The evening was delicious, potent and maybe a bit embarrassing.

The Straight Dope on the New Republican Budget

So I really don’t want this to become a budget blog, but with a government shut-down growing nearer, fiscal policy does happen to be the hot topic in Washington these days, in addition to it being the focus of my day job. That being said, Paul Ryan yesterday released the official Republican alternative budget vision and boy is it a stinker. The media has already taken to calling it “bold” and “courageous” which seems to be establishing a pretty low bar as I’ve never considered it particularly brave to tax rich people less while cutting services to poor people. I’m not going to go through all of things that are wrong with the GOP budget, instead I simply want to make a couple of points about what it actually does, as opposed to what Republicans and Fox News will say that it does.

The budget does, in fact, dramatically cut government spending and reduce the long-term debt burden. It does this by cutting funding to social programs and shifting a huge percentage of the future cost of healthcare onto individuals. And these cuts are much larger than they need to be because Ryan also includes a massive tax cut for the wealthy. The non-partisan CBO analysis explained the cuts inherent in their plan to privatize Medicare:

Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system. For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, CBO estimated the beneficiary’s spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark:…By 2030, the beneficiary’s spending would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal, 25 percent under the extended-baseline scenario.

So seniors will see their out-of-pocket healthcare costs increase over 40%. Anyone who says this doesn’t happen is lying. It’s important to note that the Republican plan makes no attempt to limit the increasing costs of healthcare, they simply shift more and more of those costs onto individuals. The same goes for Medicaid, which is primarily a program for the low-income disabled and elderly. CBO reports:

Federal payments for Medicaid under the proposal would be substantially smaller than currently projected amounts…Even with additional flexibility, however, the large projected reduction in payments would probably require states to decrease payments to Medicaid providers, reduce eligibility for Medicaid, provide less extensive coverage to beneficiaries, or pay more themselves than would be the case under current law.

I want to point out that much of the savings the GOP plan purports to generate is very long-term, while the social program cuts and upper income tax breaks occur now. This is a trick that politicians use, knowing full well that long-term cuts never materialize. It’s the classic “my diet starts tomorrow” problem. So in the short and medium term, the GOP budget actually adds to the debt. That’s right, it’s less fiscally responsible within the actual 10-year budget window. The CBO analysis is below:

I’ve highlighted the debt levels with the red arrows, but I’ve also used the blue box to show the levels of spending in the GOP plan as a percentage of GDP. You may recall that every Republican senator recently voted to amend the constitution, forbidding Congress from spending more than 18% of GDP. You’ll notice that by that standard, the GOP budget is actually unconstitutional for at least the next 30 years.

The last thing I want to note about the budget is that a lot of the numbers and predictions fall somewhere between extremely optimistic and complete fantasy land. I won’t go through them all, but as an example, they cite a Heritage Foundation analysis predicting that this plan will unleash the market’s animal spirits and spur massive economic growth. Specifically, the Heritage report predicts that it will bring unemployment down to 2.8 percent. That’s so outrageously impossible that it should give you insight into the veracity of the analysis they’re using. Below is a graph of unemployment, for a bit of context. The last time it was at 2.8 percent was August of 1953.

Will Someone Please Get the GOP a Calculator and a Briefing Book?

One crank Republican Senator recently decided that the way to solve our budget challenges was to sponsor a Constitutional Amendment that would bar Congress from spending more than 18% of the previous year’s GDP, erect barriers to raising revenue (thus making it harder to balance the budget), and require short-term cuts that look like this:

By 2017, the requisite cut to noninterest spending would exceed the entire discretionary budget (including emergency supplemental appropriations for overseas contingency operations). Entire cabinet agencies, such as the departments of Education and Energy, and all of their programs, would have to be abolished.

Bruce Bartlett does a pretty decent job summing up the whole project. “In short, this is quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin. Every senator cosponsoring this POS should be ashamed of themselves.”

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say one crank Republican? My mistake. It was actually co-sponsored by EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN SENATOR. Every last one. So you may be thinking, gee, 18% of GDP…sounds reasonable enough. I’m sure they have a budget proposal that spends less than 18% of GDP. Well no. Of course they don’t. The only budget proposal any Republican has put forward is Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” and while the Ryan plan does, in fact, make a number of ill-advised and regressive cuts, it still wouldn’t pass muster. EPI explains:

According to CBO, primary spending under the Ryan Roadmap would total 19.3% in 2040, with total spending at 23.5%…Again ignoring the regressive, budget-breaking tax policies in the Ryan Roadmap, total spending would equal 19.5% of GDP by 2060—a full 1.5 percentage points above an 18% global spending cap and roughly three percentage points above the effective cap, assuming similar rates of trend GDP growth.

Well if all the Republican Senators want to make it unconstitutional to enact the only GOP budget plan with actual numbers, they must have an ace up their sleeves. Their eye on the long view of history. Back to the good ol’ fiscally responsible days of Reagan.

I’ve gone ahead and highlighted spending as a percentage of GDP during Reagan’s time in office. Oh wait! The GOP’s brilliant plan would make every single year of Reagan’s presidency unconstitutional? That socialist dystopia of the 1980s?

There are lots and lots of ways to tackle the medium and long-term deficit issues facing this country, but the Republican party has simply left the field. Saying that they don’t have a real budget plan is far too generous. They have gone so far outside the realm of economic sanity that they literally want to enshrine in the Constitution that Reagan’s economic agenda was too disastrously liberal. The only conclusion is that anyone defending current GOP fiscal policy is either ignorant, insane, or a complete shill.

Iron Man Suits > Collateralized Debt Obligations

The video below is a perfect example of why TED talks are so amazing. When done well, they bring to light innovative work being done that is truly awe-inspiring and heartening. I had no idea that Berkeley Bionics had developed a 1.0 version of an Iron Man suit that allows people to not only carry hundreds of pounds with ease, but enables a paralyzed woman to stroll across the stage on two feet.

But after I watched this video I read about a new report from the Kauffman Foundation that describes how the growth of the American financial sector is cannibalizing entrepreneurialism.

These new products require such sophisticated engineering that the industry now focuses its recruiting on new master’s- and doctoral-level graduates of science, engineering, math and physics, and pays them starting wages that are five times or more what they would have earned had they remained in their own fields.

Because these new hires are often the very individuals who otherwise would have comprised the most robust pool of prospective founders of high-growth companies, the financial services industry’s steady rise has had a cannibalizing effect on entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy,

There exists a real trade-off here that isn’t discussed often enough. We have a relatively finite number of brilliant engineers in this country and there’s a real loss of productivity every time one of them leaves MIT to go work at Goldman Sachs instead of Berkeley Bionics. I don’t really blame the engineers and physicists. It’s hard to turn down a million dollar salary. But as we allow the financial sector to continue to grow larger, more complex, and more profitable, it’s worth asking how much value they’re actually adding and at what cost.

All The Wrong Questions About Libyan Intervention

As the Obama Administration and our European allies dip their toes in the water of one more Middle Eastern war, I can’t help but be baffled by the lack of serious scrutiny given to this intervention. What little debate exists centers around the questions of whether the cost of intervention would be worth the strategic benefits or whether operating within the limited mandate of the Security Council resolution will be sufficient to aid the rebels in a decisive victory. But I have a much more fundamental set of questions that no one seems to be addressing. Who are the rebels, what would an opposition-controlled Libya look like, and is that something that the US wants to support?

I understand the euphoria surrounding popular uprisings that seek to liberate a people from autocratic regimes. But not all opposition coalitions are created equal and few 20th century revolutions resulted in western-style democracies. A quick look at the modern history of Iran, for instance, is instructive here. Given what little information we have about Libya and its opposition, the most prudent view seems to be that espoused by Sen. Jim Webb:

I asked Secretary Clinton yesterday when she was testifying before the Foreign Relations Committee if we had any idea really who these people would be if we were to take that step. And she basically said we don’t know these people. So we’re in a situation where we’ve got a long history in this region of making mistakes in supporting opposition movements or in tilting one way or the other when the results come out in a way we really wouldn’t like to see them. So who would we be giving arms to in Libya? There are so many different factions that are in this opposition movement. And since we don’t know them, what we need to do is work very hard with other countries and other actors who do know them so we can get a better picture of what’s going on there.

One of the few people trying to figure out “who these people are” is Christopher Boucek at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We do know that the largest number of foreign insurgents in Iraq came from the rebel stronghold of eastern Libya. In fact, Libya has had a robust jihadist movement doing battle with the Gaddafi regime since the early 1990s. The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was long-allied with al-Qaeda until their jailed leadership struck a deal the Gaddafi in 2009* that literally swung the prison doors open and flooded the streets with supposedly reformed radical jihadist foot soldiers. How much of the highly-sectarian rebel movement is made of people sympathetic to LIFG ideology? I don’t know. But what worries me is that the US government doesn’t seem to know either. Same goes for what a post-Ghadaffi Libya would look like. Boucek points out the dangerous and unpredictable vacuum that is likely to develop if the rebels succeed in ousting the Colonel:

There are no independent state institutions, political parties, trade unions, free press, or civil society organizations in Libya, and if Qaddafi leaves there is nothing or no one to fill the void. Qaddafi’s Libya is devoid of organized national governance, as the country is governed through “direct democracy,” peoples’ committees, and informal power brokers. Not even the military is a cohesive, national institution. Instead, the military is riven by regional and tribal fractures that are purposefully kept weak and chronically under-resourced.

A future Libyan government is very likely to include Islamist activists.

Many of the domestic proponents of swift intervention in Libya are members of the second generation Libyan diaspora. Young and engaged professionals whose parents fought in the resistance during the 1980s. Their tireless work over the last month to try to extract information from inside the country and disseminate it is truly inspiring. Their genuine desire to retake control of their country is indeed moving. But unfortunately, we have no idea if these people representative of the rebel movement on the ground. Virtually none of them have ever actually been to Libya.

So before we launch into a debate on tactics and goals we should really be having a much more robust discussion of whether we really want to be using US military might to tip the scales in Libya. Supporting the rebel movement may well be the right thing to do, both morally and geo-strategically. But I’d really like someone in our government to take that analysis seriously and make that case instead of merely taking it on faith while they hop in their fighter jets.

*The original version of this post incorrectly stated the date as 1999 instead of 2009.

An Urban, Liberal Tea Party? We Can Share the Road.

As predominately liberal urban areas become increasingly ideologically distinct from conservative rural areas, we should expect to see more silly proxy wars over cultural issues. The traditional battle lines are drawn on issues such as our irrational agriculture subsidy regime, which Secretary Vilsack admits is really just a (politically entrenched) subsidy for rural living. We’ve also seen this phenomenon recently surrounding the seemingly innocuous decision by the Obama administration to make high-speed rail and intercity connectively a national priority. Despite the fact that there are very strong economic arguments for both rationalizing our agriculture program and making it easier for people to travel between urban centers, the debate often gets confused by framing it in confrontational terms. Rural Folks vs. Urban Elites. American car culture vs. euro-influenced rail commuters. George Will recently took to the pages of Newsweek to elevate this unnecessary antagonism to the level of absurdity:

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables.

Efficient transit policy as liberal mind control. Does that sound like a rational framework in which to discuss transportation policy? I think that the best thing about rail, bikes, and walkable environments is, in fact, that fewer people are not in cars, but it’s not as sinister as Will envisions. More good options for personal transport is a good thing and fewer drivers are also great for the people who do choose to drive. The worst thing for a car-based commuter is more cars.

The fact is that many of these issues that are being appropriated by political partisans don’t actually fall very neatly into one of two ideological camps. There’s simply no inherent reason why a conservative who believes in low marginal tax rates and minimal government activity should support the mortgage interest tax deduction, which serves as a huge subsidy for suburban sprawl with the majority of financial benefit going to the very rich. Similarly, I assume there are conservatives who live in rural Nevada who would benefit from having the option of taking a high-speed train to visit relatives in Utah. The closer you look, the more you see that not only do these issues not fall conveniently into ideological camps, but there’s actually a lot of room for bipartisan agreement. Ed Glaeser highlights some of the aspects of Tea Party libertarianism that would mesh quite easily with the interests of liberal urban dwellers:

Residents of dense downtowns should urge Tea Partiers to take up the fight against socially engineered suburbia through federal homeownership subsidies and sprawl-inducing federal highway spending.

A strong Tea Party push for choice and charter schools could help city children. Even keeping marginal tax rates low is – in effect, if not in intent – pro-urban, because metropolitan workers typically earn more.

Part of the point of all of this is that as our political culture becomes more polarized, we should be resistant to the efforts of partisans to recast some of the few remaining issues where ideologies can converge as, instead, proxy wars in their larger political battle. Just as cars share the roads with bikers and walkers, so too can urban liberals coexist with rural conservatives on some policies. But we’ll all have to focus more on policies then on political identity.