He really wrote these sentences:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.
No word yet on whether Newt favors shutting down Manhattan’s Indian restaurants until the Indian legislature allows the consumption of hamburgers.
For discussion, see here, here, and here. I want to highlight one important point that Brian Leiter makes in the last of those three links, namely that tenure is a form of non-monetary compensation, and that academic salaries would likely skyrocket in its absence.
At least the first half of this claim is, I think, obviously right. The average tenure-track academic has spent nearly a decade in graduate school during which he or she did full-time work for a salary barely above the poverty line, then endured a brutal job market resulting in a stressful and often thankless job, likely with a salary that’s about half that of his or her friends who bailed out of academia and spent a measly three years in law school. I’m not complaining, of course! – but let me just say that this arrangement is made significantly more attractive by fact that those who make it through the crucible don’t have to face the usual worries about getting fired when times get tough or the management shifts around. Would many academics be doing this anyway, if the pay were still poor but the job less secure? Speaking for myself, probably yes, which is part of why I’m not quite sold on Leiter’s claim that the abolition of tenure would have “astronomic” impacts on the costs of hiring faculty. (It might just as well make it so that the overall quality of the professoriate was not as good.) But the prospect of tenure does do quite a lot to offset the various things that might otherwise steer people away from careers in academic, and it’s important not to overlook that influence.
… without so much as addressing the fact that the videos Breitbart posted were edited in a way that took the controversial remarks entirely out of context. Here’s the entirety of Riehl’s summary of what Sherrod had to say to the NAACP:
At approximately 17 minutes into the now-released full video of the event, Sherrod can be heard relaying a tale from her past in which she initially failed to help a white farmer with the full effort she would reserve for a black farmer.
The assembled crowd of card-carrying members of the NAACP took great pleasure in that, their laughter was not nervous at all. That is a contemporaneous expression of racism by today’s politically correct standards, not racism from some 40 years ago.
Sherrod later says, “It’s not so much about white…” then catches herself and says, “It IS about white and black.” Perhaps Sherrod should explain why, even today, color is so centrally important in her work, be it at the Agriculture Department or elsewhere.
In other news, I am in possession of a Human Events column in which Dan Riehl, conservative blogger, lays out in stark detail, that he consistently views the world through the prism of race and class distinctions. Here are some key remarks:
“It IS about white and black.”
… no one is allowed to object to a significant Obama-supported policy change impacting the healthcare of all Americans without being labeled a racist.
… everything is all and only about race.
Evil capitalists are at the top, exploiting racist divisions to maintain control. … whites were deliberately propped up to make them feel superior to blacks … Blacks then bring up the rear, seemingly oppressed by all. … what is needed is the type of government-dictated economy more like a Marxist state, than the America we know and live in today.
But really, all of this is less about the racism of Dan Riehl than that of those who read him.
I’m quite disinclined to insert myself into the middle of the Douthat-Larison discussion (see here, here, here, here, here, and also – whew! – here) of Hollywood’s depiction of U.S. foreign policy, but I do want to make one small point that deserves some emphasis: namely, that narrating the push for war in a way characterized by the right sorts* of sympathy for the motives and actions of those behind it has the capacity to serve a powerfully anti-war function, too, by reminding us that not all unjust wars are the product of greedy business executives and lies and backroom dealings among warmongering neocons in the DoD. This is not to say that the drive to war in Iraq wasn’t characterized by well more than its share of that sort of thing, but we do well to remember that even the best of intentions – which I can say with great confidence were had by a significant body of war supporters – don’t make an action right, and so that we can’t immediately discern the unjust wars from the just ones simply by scrutinizing the honesty or inner purity of those who would lead us into it. It’s for this reason, I think, that the “Bush lied, people died” account of the Iraq war can be so unhelpful: not because it’s false, and not just because it’s polarizing or lacking in tragedy or ambiguity, but because it gives the impression that the lying – which is not that uncommon, mind you – was the primary place where things went wrong, whereas in reality the war in question would have been unjust and disastrously executed even if everyone had been perfectly forthright about why we were getting into it.
To those of you who have written to ask or have been wondering in silence the answer is, yes, the combination of finishing a dissertation while planning for a cross-country move and a new job and also welcoming another son into my family (born in the living room, no less) has ground to a halt what little was left of my bloggy momentum. There is, though, a piece of mine in the latest New Atlantis in which I offer a Burkean’s lament over the death of conventional wisdom, focusing on – what else? – the science and pseudo-science of food, as well as a review in the November TAC of Susan Brewer’s Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, which I liked quite a lot. I was, however, quite frustrated by Brewer’s unwillingness to face down the consequences of her research for the traditional hagiography of one Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
Least satisfying of all is Brewer’s claim—made in both the introduction and the conclusion, and in each case entirely without argument—that even deceitful state propaganda can be tolerable if the cause is sufficiently noble. Brewer notes at the start that she believes World War II—“a legitimate war,” she calls it—fits this billing. She supplements this diagnosis with her attempt to distinguish the “censorship, exaggeration, and lies” relied on by the likes of the Bush administration from the “strategy of truth” adopted by FDR. But the facts make it hard to sustain such an interpretation: from Brewer’s own account, Roosevelt lied to the public about his intended policies as he ran for a third term in 1940, censored news reports that were deemed insufficiently optimistic, and of course sent 180,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps. (“Pioneer communities” was the official term.) Even the truth-telling strategy Brewer champions was itself an advertising move, based on the recognition that “too much salesmanship” on the part of the Office of War might turn people off, while more “straightforward and practical” instructions on what to do and believe would “regain public confidence in official propaganda.” If the cartoonish film and poster campaigns of the Wilson administration are the point of comparison, then the Iraq War’s salesmen come off rather well, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that in each case the public was being dishonestly sold a war by men who would barely have to sacrifice, much less fight and die, to implement their preferred policies.
All of which raises some natural questions: Are there circumstances in which state officials are permitted to lie, suppress non-strategic facts, or otherwise distort the truth in the service of an official agenda can be licit? If so, what circumstances are those? And more generally, what sorts of threats might be posed to a democracy by its government’s ability to exploit its inherent authority by functioning as a sort of advertising agency for itself?
Consumer-driven health (CDH) products [i.e., high-deductible health plans relying on HSAs or Health Reimbursement Arrangements to reimburse for qualified expenses] have been marketed in various forms since the early 2000s. While emerging data is [sic] not entirely conclusive, general directional conclusions can be drawn from the studies published to date. […]
With regard to first-year cost savings, all studies showed a favorable effect on cost in the first year of a CDH plan. CDH plan trends ranged from -4 percent to -15 percent. Coupled with a control population on traditional plans that experienced trends of +8 percent to +9 percent, the total savings generated could be as much as 12 percent to 20 percent in the first year. All studies used some variation of normalization or control groups to account for selection bias.
For savings after the first year, at least two of the studies indicate trend rates lower than traditional PPO plans by approximately 3 percent to 5 percent. If these lower trends can be further validated, it will represent a substantial cost-reduction strategy for employers and employees.
Generally, all of the studies indicated that cost savings did not result from avoidance of appropriate care and that necessary care was received in equal or greater degrees relative to traditional plans. All of the studies reviewed reported a significant increase in preventive services for CDH participants. Three of the studies found that CDH plan participants received recommended care for chronic conditions at the same or higher level than traditional (non-CDH) plan participants. Two studies reported a higher incidence of physicians following evidence-based care protocols.
The authors add that “no data-based study has emerged” to contradict the indication that CDH plans “can produce significant (even substantial) savings without adversely affecting member health status”. H/T to Alex Tabarrok, who adds that the effects of such plans would likely be much more significant if they were adopted more widely.
(Cross-posted.)
Conor makes a bunch of worthwhile points in his case for incrementalism in health care reform, but while he may be right on the merits I suspect that the strategy he suggests is unlikely to be a political winner. As I’ve suggested before, if conservatives want to take the health care issue away from the Left they’re going to need to find a way to frame and argue in favor of their positions using morally weighty language: taking “smaller, discrete steps” may be all fine and good, but those steps have simply got to be bound up in a narrative according to which conservatives are genuinely in favor of reform, so that voters who are justifiably unhappy with the status quo don’t feel that voting Democrat is their only real alternative.
Proponents of school choice provide a helpful example of how such strategies can be implemented effectively. There is a strong empirical case to be made that school choice improves educational outcomes across the board, but its advocates tend to be most persuasive when they frame the issue as a straightforward matter of social justice, forcing politicians to confront voters over the question of why they’d rather bow to the demands of teachers’ unions than help poorer families to afford the same sorts of schools that their own children attend. It may be that school choice is also a less dangerously ambitious step toward reform than, say, a wholesale overhaul of educational standards, but the latter is the sort of rationale that only a wonk could be moved by – and by a similar token, few people outside the Republican base are likely to be all that alarmed when opponents of the public option in health care reform start raving about competitiveness and the role of the market in encouraging medical innovation.
For a more radical proposal along these lines, see Arnold Kling (via Reihan, who has more here on a similar topic):
The Republicans are not beating up on Obama for reinforcing the status quo. On the contrary, their tactic is to portray the Obama plan as something that is radical and threatening. Maybe that message helps them politically. But it undermines any possibility of a real debate about which direction to take in health care policy.
I would like to see a debate between reforms that free up health care market and policies that entrench the status quo. The fact that the Republicans are not engaging in that debate is just one more reason for believers in markets to view Republicans as unreliable allies.
If Conor is right, it could be that going all-out with pledges to abolish the status quo would not be a politically effective approach, either; but I think the more important point is that simply appealing to the virtues of “free markets” isn’t going to do enough to frame conservative reform proposals as intrinsically desirable. The message ought to be: Here’s what health care reform of our sort can do for you; what the other side is offering is just a costly giveaway to special interests that will do little more than tinker around the edges. Mere demagoguery may be sufficient to win the policy battles here and there, but conservatives need to do more than that if they ever want this issue to play in their favor in the long run. The pessimist in me is pretty confident about which sort of strategy the GOP will adopt.
So while we’re making lists, how about one of the most overrated children’s books? Not really the “worst” ones, I guess – much better to put together something along the lines of Noah’s list, with the targets limited to books that are regularly described as “classics,” as “beloved,” etc. After a bit of thought about the matter, I’ve got two from my son’s bookshelf that deserve a calling-out:
- The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. I guess that this is a pretty common target in these kinds of discussions, but damn is it ever deserved. Tree loves boy. Boy loves tree. Boy grows up. Boy exploits tree. Tree takes it all silently, growing less happy with each lonely year. Boy gets old, tree is a stump, boy sits on tree, no apologies. I mean, I get the point: the tree loves the boy. But heck, even Jesus was able to rise triumphant when all was said and done; couldn’t Silverstein have made the love at least a little more, you know, mutual? (Other questions: Why didn’t the tree’s apples grow back? And how did the boy build himself and his family a house out of branches?)
- The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg. Yes, the illustrations are beautiful; yes, the story is generally enjoyable; and yes, it is indeed “beloved.” But a children’s book about a trip to the North Pole that concludes by informing its readers that people usually stop believing in Santa Claus when they grow up? We bought this one last Christmas and it’s been fine reading for a two-year-old, but at some point it may have to disappear. Being made into a creepy-looking CGI film starring the voice of Tom Hanks as the glassy-eyed conductor seems an appropriate fate.
Anyway, that’s my attempt to start things off; anyone want to add to the list? I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with scores to settle.
So everyone is blogging about this chart, which was pulled together by AEI’s Andrew Biggs:
The potential significance of these data for any number of common understandings of the factors behind rising medical costs is immediate, but – and speaking as a statistical ignoramus, so pillar of salt and all that – the way that they’re being presented here is doing some pretty significant work, isn’t it? Crucially, it seems clear to me that the numbers should at least be calculated in terms of per capita expenditures, since as it stands we aren’t shown how much of the total growth in each case is due to simple increases in human and non-human animal populations. And based on what I could glean from a quick search, the U.S. pet population increased by about 17% from 2001 to 2007 alone, which would give an annual growth rate of almost 3% in contrast to a U.S. population growth rate of about a third of that. Biggs’s graph (I couldn’t figure out how to dig his original data out from the Consumer Expenditure Survey) does suggest an increase in veterinary expenditures more on the order of 30% or so during that same stretch, so it’s clearly not as if there hasn’t been a notable increase in veterinary expenditures per pet, but not accounting for this sort of complicating factor seems a significant omission, no?
I’m sure a better number-cruncher than I could use this as an inspiration to put a more revealing chart together – get to work, Conor Clarke! – but in any case the data were interesting enough that I thought it worth pressing on them a bit.
Noah asks a good question, and I wish I could answer it more adequately than I will.
One distinction that immediately leaps to mind is that between keeping a pet in and around the house just as a loosely attached being whose role in the life of the family is viewed by its members as ordered simply toward the provision of meat, and having a pet that is viewed – perhaps absurdly, as some might insist, though obviously these things come in degrees – as a part of the family, as “one of us”. The latter model is of course the one that predominates in American households, and I can imagine that e.g. Rod might have had a good deal more trouble serving up the dumplings with that hen who turned out to be a rooster if he’d given it a name and allowed it to curl up with him on the couch; by contrast, I recall a friend from Kansas describing a family who’d bought a calf and straightaway named it “Meatball”, just so the kids wouldn’t get any illusions. (Perhaps the person who really ought to be taking on this question is Caleb Stegall.) Hence the relevant question would be: When e.g. a South Korean family has a dog around the house that they plan to put into a stew, do they view and treat it in the same sorts of ways that most Americans treat their pets? The bonds of attachment and affection that such treatment naturally engenders would, it seems to me, make it a great deal more difficult to go in for the kill.
But on the more general question of the relative merits and demerits of knowing where your food comes from versus, well, knowing your food, it strikes me as perfectly reasonable for the ethically-concerned meat eater to think that the second alternative is the superior one, at least in the abstract. Part of the reason why I prefer, say, buying beef by the whole or half steer instead of a cut at a time is that it enables the focusing of one’s attention on the distinctive sort of sacrifice that meat-eating requires; the family members can direct their gratitude toward the life of the particular animal whose death made their sustenance possible. And such an attitude is likely to be further strengthened when the animal was one with which the family had some real contact, not to mention the memory of a time during which they sustained it in much the same way that it is now sustaining them.
None of this is to deny that a close and personal relationship to the sources of one’s steaks is the sort of thing that would make the average meat eater, myself very much included, unpleasantly troubled by what that luxury requires. Then again, a bit more such discomfort might not be a bad thing at all. Raising, slaughtering, and consuming our fellow animals are activities fraught with mystery and a good deal of darkness, and it’s at our peril that we drive those qualities too thoroughly from our conscious minds.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get the sense that Andrew Sullivan didn’t even bother to read Ross’s latest column before he came out spluttering at it? I mean, how is it possible for someone to write a “rehash of the Nixonian class resentments and Rovian cynicism” when he criticizes the “Mrs. Spiro Agnew” role that Palin played in the McCain campaign, or simply blame “her elitist enemies” for her downfall when he admits that the American democratic ideal was “tarnished by Palin herself, obviously”? Like the game lately played by Governor Palin herself, it appears that this is a contest that the Palin-sympathizing commentator simply can’t win.
Similarly, here is the inimitable Freddie deBoer, taking issue with Ross’s take on Palin’s by-her-bootstraps rise to prominence:
Ross– Sarah Palin’s family makes better than five times the national median household income. Five times! The Palins own a huge mansion, four other properties, two boats and a plane! I will never be as rich as the Palins, in all likelihood. Hell, the odds are pretty good that any three readers of this blog combined made less than half what the Palins made last year. There is no earthly sense in which “lower class” can retain any meaning and include Sarah Palin.
Uhh, Freddie? What Ross said was that Palin grew up to be a great success story, which is not at all incompatible with her having, and retaining the very evident marks of, her small-town, middle- (note that Ross did not say “lower-”) class, humbly-educated background. Criticizing Palin’s startling lack of policy knowledge and almost total inability to communicate positions effectively is one thing, but calling her “slutty” and mocking her “white trash concupiscence” is quite another, and naturally opens the way for columns like this one: for no unbiased observer can seriously deny that Palin’s class and gender were consistently seized on in the attempts to discredit her, and no one who takes the democratic ideal seriously should look back at that saga without some real concern for the role that class plays in American politics.
In any case, when it all shakes out I pretty much agree 100% with Radley Balko:
It is possible that Sarah Palin was both unfairly mistreated and personally attacked by the media and many on the left, and that her family was rather ruthlessly and mercilessly run through the ringer . . . and that she’s a not particularly bright, not particularly curious, once libertarian-leaning governor who sadly devolved into a predictable, buzzword spouting culture warrior when she was prematurely picked for national office by John McCain.
This is, I think, pretty much the same thing that Ross was saying, albeit with more emphasis on the first conjunct than the second. That someone who devoted thousands of words to speculating about whether Sarah Palin faked a pregnancy can read Ross’s column and come away complaining about Rovian cynicism is a pretty hilarious example of false consciousness.
(Cross-posted at Upturned Earth.)
So thanks to this half-assed attempt at humor, I seem to have joined my colleague Mr. “Friedersdork” on the list of guys with websites whom Mark Levin most loves to hate. So far as I can tell, though, the process that led to this decision involved little more than Levin – or an assistant, perhaps – doing a Google search for recent mentions of the Unmockable One, coming up with clever ways to make fun of my name and affiliation (Schmuckler! Perversative! OMGROTFLMFAO!), and then adding me to the roster straightaway. (Apparently the best way to combat the deranged is to drum up some free traffic for them.) To which I can only ask, really? I mean, we’re supposed to be putting together a list of The World’s Most Deranged Bloggers, and this is all that’s involved in the vetting process? Shouldn’t there be, like, a considered ruling by some sort of panel of experts on blogospheric derangement, or at least a more careful review of the potential candidates’ bodies of work?
I used to think inclusion on this list really meant something, but this kind of thing makes me wonder whether Rod is actually such a “Crunchy Conman” after all.
At Hit & Run, Katherine Mangu-Ward mocks San Francisco’s mandatory composting program, which requires – horrors! – residents to put organic waste products out to the curb in a separate trash bin. I confess that I’m not in on the joke. I mean, trash pickup is a public service, right? So what’s wrong with requiring the people who make use of it to sort their trash in a way that minimizes the buildup of landfills? If San Franciscans were being made to compost in their own backyards, then I suppose I’d find these complaints more understandable – but so long as the city is providing (at taxpayer expense, of course) a service that much of the world’s population can still only dream of, why not use some of that waste to fertilize area farms and vineyards?
Indeed, to my admittedly inexpert eye such policies are a plausible example of government efficiency: here in Berkeley, our (non-mandatory) public composting program (which just involves putting food scraps in the yard waste bin) yields a product that is then sold to gardeners and farmers, whereas the stuff that goes in the black bins has to be buried or sent off to sit on a barge somewhere at the city’s expense. Perhaps I’m wrong about the finances, and in any case I know that making fun of “green” initiatives is pretty much the H&R raison d‘être (“it’s even grosser than rinsing out your tuna cans”, Mangu-Ward says of the San Francisco program), but so far as government-sponsored attempts to reduce waste and harmful emissions go this one seems pretty unobjectionable, right?
This is Berkeley, after all, so the tattoo-covered arms couldn’t themselves have been much of a clue. But I can’t help wishing that I’d had a bit more of a sense of whom I was speaking to, so that when the guy I met over coffee and donuts after mass in the church basement told me that he played bass for, as he put it, “a band called Rancid”, I’d been able to blurt out something other than Wow, I TOTALLY listened to you guys when I was a kid.
But anyway. That was then, this is now, and Matt’s younger kid’s baptism was unquestionably the most tattoo-populated sacrament I’ve yet had the pleasure to attend. All of which is just a roundabout way of prefacing the observation that you really ought to watch Matt Freeman and Rancid play on Conan O’Brien tonight! I haven’t yet listened to the new album, but it promises to be quite good, and by all accounts the group that I just saw termed “the quintessential popular punk band of 2009” still puts a good show, the occasional gray hair notwithstanding.
Bonus footage of the band’s new single – with even bonusier footage of classic East Bay haunts and shots of Matt (he’s the one who neither plays drums nor has bicolored hair or a tattooed cranium) looking rather bemused by the whole affair – below the fold:
Via Eve Tushnet, this piece at Cracked.com is, though foul throughout, just terrific.
Conor is right about the importance of the depletion of global fisheries, and doubly so about this being an issue where thoughtful conservatives can show that they really do care about, well, conserving things. In fact I wrote a Culture11 column on the subject back in October, discussing research on how a privatizing strategy centered on granting tradable “catch shares” to fishermen could play a key role in stemming the tide of fishery decline; I’m not sure that I’d stand by everything I wrote (or the way I wrote it) in the original piece, but given the emphasis that Johann Hari puts on fishery quotas in the piece Conor linked, it seems relevant. Unfortunately, the published version seems to have vanished into the ether, but that’s what hard drives are for – I’ll paste whole thing below the fold:
“From where I sit”, reports Hannah Rosin in this diavlog, “everyone thinks you should breastfeed.” Can this possibly be right? And if so, doesn’t it say more about her seat than the societal trends she’s discussing? Here in ultra-progressive Berkeley and among our self-selecting group of friends, we’ve naturally experienced – and sometimes gone in for – a good deal of the no-holds-barred breastfeeding advocacy that’s got Rosin so riled up. But even so, we got formula pushed on us by a nurse at the hospital, know many other parents whose doctors or nurses did the same, and have friends and family members who for various reasons have breastfed only a little, if at all. And while one can do pretty well out here breastfeeding in public without getting disapproving looks from passersby, we’ve been in plenty of perfectly “enlightened” parts of the country where this simply isn’t so, and where the social stigma attached to nursing a child at church or in a museum or restaurant is hard to bear even for an hour, let alone a year or two or more. These, meanwhile, are just the easy cases; attitudes toward breastfeeding differ wildly across the country, and there’s every reason to think that Rosin’s experience, like ours, is very much the exception rather than the rule.
It is, I think, really this lack of sensitivity to the broader cultural situation that left my wife, like so many other nursing moms and breastfeeding advocates (“fascists”, Rosin calls them), so upset with Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic essay. Rosin’s right, I think, to object to the unrealistic or overbearing attitudes that many breastfeeding advocates take to the subject: there’s no excuse for overstating or misrepresenting the science, and mothers who find nursing to be a burden should absolutely not feel guilt-ridden if they slip off to the store for formula or rice cereal. But the idea that the experience of having friends and physicians pressure a woman into breastfeeding and then make her feel tremendously guilty about the thought of stopping or cutting back is anywhere near the cultural norm even among Atlantic readers or the rest of the American overclasses seems quite unrealistic to me. It’s true that we need to find an appropriate middle ground, and that accomplishing that is going to require honesty about the benefits and burdens of whatever decisions mothers, fathers, and children choose to make. And no one should deny that perspectives like Rosin’s can play important roles in helping us to do these things. She’d be able to do that much more effectively, though, if she didn’t minimize the very different sets of challenges faced by mothers and children in circumstances different from her own.
It’s “not the vacuum”, Rosin writes, that’s “keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound”. No doubt this is true in a select handful of cases, but it gets things pretty badly backwards in a large range of others.
(Cross-posted at the new and improved Upturned Earth.)
Seeing as it appears to be Say Controversial Things About Public Education Week, I want to make a couple of remarks about state-sponsored preschool programs, by way of a column I wrote for Culture11 late last year.
That column grew out of what was, and still remains, a deep frustration with the ways that advocates for “universal” preschool have drawn on the work of Chicago economist James Heckman, whose research on the social and economic benefits of preschool programs is frequently put forward in support of the claim that federal and state governments need to make publicly-funded preschooling available to all. That Heckman’s work would be used to this end isn’t initially very surprising: he’s a Nobel laureate, after all, and his research into the economic benefits of preschool has turned up some tremendously encouraging results. But as I wrote in my column, Heckman’s case for preschool simply isn’t a case for universal preschool, and using his work to such an end requires ignoring a number of his own convictions:
[Heckman] is much more careful than many of those who appeal to his work to distinguish between the sorts of targeted preschool programs that have actually been found to work and huge, multibillion-dollar boondoggles like the Obama-Biden “Zero to Five” plan. While Heckman does speak and write passionately about the value of intensive early intervention in the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enlisting him as an advocate for a federally-sponsored universal preschool program requires severe distortions of his actual views: for example, a 2006 essay that Heckman wrote for the Wall Street Journal closes with the observation that there is “little basis for providing universal programs at zero cost,” and “no reason for [early childhood] interventions to be conducted in public centers.”
“Vouchers,” Heckman continues, “that can be used in privately run programs would promote competition and efficiency in the provision of early enrichment programs. They would allow parents to choose the venues and values offered in the programs that enrich their child’s earliest years.” Appropriately targeted, means-tested, and choice-driven ventures are one thing; but to spend public dollars in such a way as to “try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing,” as he put it in a 2005 interview, is “foolish.”
So what gives? What I wrote at the time, and still think is basically right, was that Heckman has been able to be enlisted on the side of universal preschool largely because opponents of such policies have failed to claim the moral high ground in anything like the way that they’ve – arguably, anyway – claimed it so successfully in the “school choice” approach to primary and secondary education. And again, there’s a reason for this: the kind of programs that Heckman’s research has found to work haven’t been ones like Head Start; they’re far more expensive than a universal program ever could be, and involve quite a lot more time and effort than preschool usually does. When Heckman cautions against universality as in the quotes above, or concludes a paper (gated, I guess) that discusses the famed Perry Preschool Program by saying that “[i]nvesting in disadvantaged (my emphasis – JS) young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large”, he means exactly what he says: every dollar spent on taxpayer-funded daycare for rich and middle-class kids is a dollar not spent on having teachers come, as they did in the Perry Program, to visit the homes of kids who are worse off. But as it is, there’s no real constituency for spending tens of thousands of dollars a head only on the lower-class kids who’d really stand – and need – to benefit.
All of which is just to say that politics is a drag, isn’t it? On one team you’ve got a group that supports the educational lobby and so favors universality; on the other you’ve got the group that screams “Socialism!” and “Statism!” at the faintest whiffs of redistribution or government intervention; and over on the sidelines you’ve got a rag-tag group, clinging tightly to the data showing that they’ve got an idea that just might work, watching the ongoing battle with horror and occasionally spitting into the wind. I think I need a beer.
At my personal blog, I’ve got a post up putting forward seven propositions that pretty much define my present thinking about torture and the prosecution thereof. Some may find it strange that nowhere in that list does a professed (if not yet professional) philosopher have anything at all to say about “ticking time-bomb” scenarios and the other kinds of hypotheticals that Conor, for instance, ably takes up here. But this is actually because, perhaps contrary to what Conor says in his follow-up post, I think that such abstract considerations pretty much are little more than a distraction from the really crucial issues.
The reason for this is simple: the fact that a given sort of behavior can reasonably be counted as legal or moral in one circumstance says nothing at all about whether it can be so counted in another. There are countless behaviors that share this characteristic: sexual intercourse, for instance, is obviously one, as are cursing and slapping and swearing and humiliating and waking people up in the middle of the night or even trying to scare them with dogs. And we all can see, I think, when it is that such behaviors are appropriate, and when it is that they are not; being able to make such distinctions is just what it is to be appropriately responsive to moral demands.
Given this recognition, the important discussion about torture – which is to say: the discussion about torture that we need to be having, as opposed to the one we’d be in a position to have if not for all the things that happened on our government’s watch – is a discussion about whether, given the circumstances that actually obtained, the things that agents of our government did to prisoners and detainees were warranted. Whether there are some other possible circumstances in which some of those behaviors might have been warranted or even morally required is an entirely separate question, and while it’s of some philosophical interest it clearly ought to be far less important to us than the question of whether what we did constituted torture; and as such, it’s generally quite hard to see the insistence on posing wild counterfactuals rather than dealing with real-life cases as anything but a ruse.
Again, that’s not to say that counterfactuals are never relevant to moral deliberation. (For a helpful account of why they sometimes are, see Bryan Caplan’s post here – though for a note on why they sometimes aren’t, see his post here, too.) But the problem is that when you’re faced with an actual situation that call for a moral evaluation, thinking instead about some alternative possible world is at best a luxury you can’t afford; in practice, it’s often like discussing the trolley problem when faced with a charge of vehicular manslaughter. The key is to get the actual circumstances right, and understand what they demanded, not to dream up some imaginary alternative in which the behaviors in question would arguably have been okay.
One more point: even when we are entitled to go in for thought-experiments, there’s every reason not to make too much of their conclusions. In the first place, our intuitions about what to do in far-away circumstances are often pretty corrupted; moreover, there’s a tendency in designing thought-experiments to idealize the imagined circumstances to a far greater degree than worldly situations can ever achieve. (The standard “ticking time-bomb” scenarios are cases in point.) Perhaps most crucially, an excessive focus on what to do in idealized situations can easily corrupt our judgments about what to do in ordinary ones, and there’s every reason to have our laws written in a way that doesn’t permit even the handful of exceptions that abstract reflection might suggest are appropriate. The decision to harm, shock, or terrify a person, like that to go to war, can never be a “slam dunk”; in the real world, it always needs to be made with deep trepidation and concern for the seriousness of what’s involved. If such a mindset had been in place in the wake of 9/11, no doubt many of the subsequent evils would likely have been avoided.
Why is counterfeiting wrong?
Or more precisely, why is the belief that counterfeiting legal tender and then using to to buy stuff is wrong compatible with anything other than a spooky theory according to which certain pieces of paper (or metal) are magically able to exude monetary value? I don’t mean to be snide, but it strikes me that such questions are reasonably analogous to those at the basis of Jim’s challenge to non-pacifist opponents of torture.
Counterfeiting is wrong, of course, not because of the intrinsic properties of the pieces of paper involved, but because the practice of using as legal tender only those pieces of paper (or metal) that have the right sort of causal history is the very basis of modern economies. And in the same way, torture is wrong not because pacifism is true but because the practice of drawing bright lines to distinguish wanton cruelty from necessary evils is what makes human society the remarkable thing that it is.
Why doesn’t that answer seem sufficient?
As Jim suggests, I suppose it has something to do with the desire for a reason why the lines are drawn in one place rather than another; the decision not to torture is, after all, supposed to be different from the restriction of automobiles to the right side of the street. But then the natural response is that we have absolute prohibitions against torture and inhumane treatment because wanton cruelty is wrong, and that conduct on the battlefield isn’t governed by similarly strict laws not because it’s “OK to inflict (the most extreme imaginable) violence when the guy is totally helpless in combat”, but because laws regulating conduct on the battlefield are extraordinarily difficult to formulate and enforce.
Jim asks why “suddenly upon [an opposing combatant’s] saying the words ‘I surrender’, any serious violence beyond confinement becomes wrong”; the obvious answer, though, is that such violence is wrong because he’s surrendered, and that what sets off humans from other animal species is our recognition that, except perhaps when it is a matter of punishing someone pursuant to a conviction in an impartial court of law, killing people who have surrendered themselves is an immoral thing to do. That combatants sometimes resemble people who have surrendered, and that certain things that can legally be done to combatants look an awful lot like other things that can’t legally be done to prisoners, are much better arguments for restraint on the battlefield than for mass execution of prisoners of war.
