1. A. S. Byatt: I am eternally grateful that despite all our research we really know nothing much about Shakespeare.
2. Does anyone know anything about how good Chartbeat‘s real time analytics are?
3. ‘Sand Wars‘
4. A prescient Umberto Eco in 1994 on the future of the Book
5. Established industries engage in rent-seeking behavior, St. Louis edition. (NB: here is the wiki on rent-seeking).
Our national school lunch program has a very dear place in my heart. I advocated increasing funding to the program as an affirmative case on a high school debate topic many, many moons ago. I was a novice debater and a poor advocate at the time and I am sure the only reason I won the few rounds that I did was that the arguments for these policies carry their own weight.
The argument is that hunger is perhaps the most meaningful barrier to learning in the classroom. This is because neither the mind nor the body can function at its best when it does not have enough nutrients. This prevents an immediate barrier to classroom instruction that the classroom cannot distance them from. You can provide the social, emotional, and physical distance from the problems in a child’s life in the space of a classroom, but you cannot separate a child from his or her hunger.
It seems worthwhile to me that schools should provide an adequate and nutritious breakfast or lunch option for children, particularly for children in poverty, but poverty alone is not the sole barrier to adequate nutrition. Even large numbers of children in well-off families routinely skip an adequate breakfast and having that option available at school is truly meaningful (Brown et al 2008) in whether or not your students are attentive and able to learn. There are real costs to medications and managing disruptive behavior and the entire system that enforces laws against absenteeism; I think the Brown 2008 study estimates one set of costs at $10 billion annually. Think of it this way: hunger increases misbehavior and hence the amount of non-productive, ‘guard’ labor in the form of security officers, social workers, etc that are necessary to deal with the consequences of misbehavior. Hence what appeared to be a simple problem of hungry children also represents an economy-wide misallocation of resources with many large and hidden costs.
There is a moral argument for providing sufficient diet options for schoolchildren as well. Children do not have a choice about whether or not they are educated; it is the law that they be educated (though parents have wide latitude in determining the direction of that education). In a sense mandating participation in education is a just form of involuntary servitude because children cannot opt out (and most children do want to be in school). It is our moral obligation to provide adequately for them given our constraint on their liberty. I would argue that if we cannot guarantee children the basic commitment to provide for their well being then mandating their participation in education is unjust. Consider the following: if we provide bad, inedible food to prisons, prisoners riot and lawmakers start writing bills. But there are no repercussions for us when we provide ‘spent hens‘ and bacteria-infested meat that doesn’t meet McDonald’s quality standards to children. If children misbehave we medicate them, providing employment for doctors who over-diagnose ADHD and other conditions and over-prescribe drugs like Ritalin that make billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies that make these kinds of mind-altering drugs.
These are reasons why I find shoddy and uninformed stances opposing investments in our children’s nutrition really disturbing. Here is Show-Me Institute intern Sarah Brodsky slamming what appears to be a notably successful effort in New Orleans (!) to improve access to nutrition:
I read further and saw that my guess was wrong. The “What We’ve Done” section of the website is all about school food. Of the 12 recommendations for change, two call for more local food in school lunches. One suggests that schools establish gardens on their premises because “Students need to grow fresh food and taste what they grow.”
Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools is lobbying for something peripheral to a great education. It doesn’t matter where school food was grown, as long as students get a nutritionally complete meal. And gardening, while it’s possibly educational and rewarding, is not a basic human need. If you think of school priorities, like creating a safe environment and teaching students to read, maintaining a garden would be pretty far down the list.
I hope Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools will reevaluate its goals and stay true to its original mission. A couple of questions to consider: Are the most pressing inequities already addressed, so that we can now devote our attention to gardens? Or do neighborhoods and parental income levels continue to keep a great education out of reach for many students, for reasons that have nothing to do with food?
The problems here are obvious! While it’s true that as adequate nutrition doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with where food came from, the status quo is so far from satisfactory that this FYI is meaningless. What is meaningful is that students now don’t have access to high-quality food. If it comes from local producers who don’t maximize yields, diluting nutrient content (as is the case with large agribusiness), the food is vastly better. If children aren’t eating meat that tests positive for salmonella four times more often than the meat McDonald’s accepts, or processed wheat products that have been stripped of their nutrient content and instead get access to food produced in less destructive ways, we are all better off!
Here’s the fundamental argument that Sarah’s blind opposition to local food ignores. Industrial food production and distribution happens on a national scale. Unfortunately, it is well documented that regulators don’t do their jobs well in regulating quality and safety. The compelling argument for local food is that being able to immediately hold specific people accountable and not depending on the bureaucracy of a federal regulatory body allows us to prevent children from eating contaminated meat and tortillas and things that would get a large fast food chain in a class-action lawsuit faster than you can say “where’s an attorney?”. Part of the basic economics of information holds that when information is specialized and decentralized it is harder to gather and interpret, meaning that consumers have less information, not more, about their choices.
There are three policy recommendations that I’d like to close with. The first is that we have more school gardens! Even if they’re not by themselves sufficient to feed an entire school the effort is still worthwhile. You get to start changing the outlook children have towards food and their environment and promote healthy living. And it’s a huge educational opportunity! A garden is a natural lab for chemistry and biology classes. It is a starting place for discussions about politics, fodder for historical and cultural education, and if you have a culinary arts program headed by someone like Brook Harlan at Rockbridge High (here is a good profile)here in Columbia, you’re really on to something.
The second is of course that this focus on local food is good. There are inefficient ways and bad thinking that can characterize the advocacy for local food and it is important to be unbiased and scientific; that being said, I think I have made a compelling argument that local food is good because you get what you pay for.
The third policy recommendation is that we encourage more school districts to end the monopoly on providing food services that they retain or contract out to large corporations. Allow multiple private vendors to provide food of certain quality and let competition drive at least part of the increase in quality. In economic language we can note more formally that expanding the market increases the amount of both consumer and producer surplus. It also protects our obligation to ensure basic services to our children. This is really the libertarian way out of the problem and it’s a good example of where interactions between public and private entities provide better services than the status quo, which is dominated by public schools granting monopolies to private lunch contractors.
I’ve recently come across a series of posts on food by Sarah Brodsky at the Show-Me Institute (a libertarian think tank here in Missouri) that I thought deserved a clearly articulated response. Sarah’s writing generally touches on the topics of local and sustainable agriculture in ways that I think don’t show much appreciation for the nuances of real-life markets and processes.
It is important to understand that I think of libertarian ideals in a different way most of the Show-Me Institute bloggers; my intellectual framework includes a rich appreciation of transaction costs and Coasian ideas along with the notion that comparative market analysis suffers if it does not account for the wide range of parameters that can characterize widely disparate markets. Other ideas I subscribe to in that vein are concepts from chaos theory that talk about self-organization and complexity and the idea that the interactions between public and private institutions are often far richer than the simple dichotomy between market and government that characterizes the public discourse.
So this series of posts will talk about food, a subject that I love. Today’s specific topic is the whole concept of local food, a concept that Brodsky seems curiously against. An excerpt:
Second, this is another instance of the government endorsing the idea that locally grown produce is superior to food from other sources. Anyone is free to hold this conviction; however, their belief has no place in policy until they come up with evidence for it. Supporters haven’t demonstrated a connection between local food and health. In fact, some dietitians even recommend frozen produce over fresh:
“[F]rozen produce actually can be healthier than the fresh variety. It is on the plant or tree longer than the fresh variety, so it’s packed with a higher nutrient value.”
If a public school near you is giving preference to food grown nearby, watch out. Your government might begin advocating local food as the correct choice for you, too.
Comments of that ilk are frequently distributed throughout Brodsky’s advocacy. While I’ll save the discussion of what role government should play in advocating policies designed to promote public health for later, today’s discussion will be about the unsupported claim that ‘supporters haven’t demonstrated a connection between local food and health’. First, let’s note that Brodsky conflates the notion of local food with the idea of non-frozen food, which doesn’t follow logically. One can grow vegetables and freeze them or prepare them for long term storage via canning or other preservation methods and this is not logically inconsistent with the idea that locally produced food is ceteris paribus better than the products of industrial agriculture.
But let’s talk about the list of reasons why locally produced food might be better than industrial agriculture. But it’s important to understand that I don’t disagree with the concept of industrial agriculture; some products are far more efficiently produced in quantities that allow us to take advantages of economies of scale in production and distribution. The reality of industrial agriculture is however far different, as markets tend to be dominated by large corporations that (horror!) use their resources to engage in rent-seeking behavior.
But some products do suffer when you increase yields without regard for other parameters. Winemakers have known for a long time, for instance, that it’s hard to make great wine without some regard for controlling grapevine yields. What’s true for grapes is also true across the board and it has a name: nutritional dilution. This topic is well addressed in the literature; here is an excerpt on the subject worth reading:
An explanation of exactly what happens in genetically engineered dilution effects may be helpful. Over many years of using yield potential as the dominant criterion in developing improved varieties, while average yields have risen, plant root systems have not been able to keep pace in drawing more needed micronutrients from the soil. When breeders selectively breed for one resource, using a selected trait like yield, fewer resources remain for other plant functions as the study explains.
“There may be trade-offs between the number of seeds and their size or between yield and growth rate and pest resistance. In tomatoes, there are trade-offs between yield which is the harvest weight and the dry weight, or between yield or fruit size and vitamin C, and between lycopene which gives tomatoes their the primary color and beta-carotene which is the precursor to vitamin A.”
This information on nutritional decline and selective breeding is nothing new to agricultural researchers and scientists. Science journals began publishing writings on nutritional decline over 20 years ago. A 1981 review in “Advances in Agronomy” discussed the widely cited “dilution effect,” in which yield-enhancing methods like fertilization and irrigation may decrease nutrient concentrations, an environmental dilution effect. Recently, evidence has emerged that genetically based increases in yield may have the same result, a genetic dilution effect. An explanation of exactly what happens in genetically engineered dilution effects may be helpful. Over many years of using yield potential as the dominant criterion in developing improved varieties, while average yields have risen, plant root systems have not been able to keep pace in drawing more needed micronutrients from the soil. When breeders selectively breed for one resource, using a selected trait like yield, fewer resources remain for other plant functions as the study explains.
Here is the link to the Davis 2004 study internally cited in the article above which was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. What this establishes that large-scale agricultural production yields crops with far less nutrient value than crops where yields are relatively lower, a situation that typifies many small, local producers. Brodsky’s argument I think assumes that none of this is true and it is clear that her stance is articulated without reference to any of the relevant literature.
In a broader sense, there are other costs and benefits that Brodsky just assumes away throughout her advocacy. Most specifically, we can talk about the negative externalities of industrial agriculture. How, for instance, would she account for the pesticides and herbicides that make large-scale agriculture mostly possible? Without passing a moral judgment of the use of chemical manipulation in agriculture, there do exist negative externalities from the large-scale use of pesticides (for example) that are not reflected through prices. Refined sugar, for instance, is a great example: the average American eats 150 pounds of sugar a year.
The sugar industry, which receives federal subsidies, has let massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide-polluted waters run off into the Everglades for decades. This has has horrendous environmental effects, the extent of which I won’t go into here, but a simple Google search will reveal plenty of literature on. Worse, subsidies allowed American sugar producers to undercut other sugar producers internationally. The market distortions that this policy create are large in scale and have far reaching consequences, including crushing domestic sugar production and agricultural economies in places where they are most needed (3rd World nations). Worse, the negative health effects of consuming large amounts of nutrient-deficient refined sugar have contributed in great part to America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics (Gross et al 2004, Jenkins et al 2004). Literally none of this is reflected in the market price of sugar.
And stories like these are not the exception. They are the norm. While I hazard that on the concepts underpinning libertarian thought I might have common ground with Brodsky, they form a very primitive lens for interpreting the detail-rich market and institutional structures that comprise reality. I, for one, would expect a master’s candidate in economics to present more thorough work, particularly when using a well-regarded think tank as a platform for one’s views.
My next few posts will address the school lunch/breakfast debate from this perspective and hopefully also the issue of government and its role in the public discourse (hint: it’s a lot more complex than you think!)
From N. Tilley’s “The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company“, pg 492-3:
Between 24 June and 5 August 1946, Kapp, Holland, and Jones worked out the basic produced for making sheets of reconstituted tobacco for use in cigarettes. It involved the extraction of tobacco flavoring derived from water, stems, and scrap. To form the sheet of tobacco fibrous materials, stems were pulped and used with fines (unusually small pieces of scrap). After it was pressed, dried, and tested, tobacco extract was sprayed on the sheet.
…
In view of the different burning qualities of stems and leaf, the conversion of stems, fragmented leaf, and tobacco dust into strips of even and excellent quality represented a significant accomplishment. On 13 July 1949, Reynolds management approved to construction of a plant to produce 10,000 pounds of reconstituted leaf per day.
I’m also reminded of the name they use for Velveeta-like cheeses, ‘processed cheeses‘.
Actually, I have a few thoughts. About Fight Club. And they aren’t about the book (which I have yet to read)
1. If you think that the lessons from Fight Club are in the vein of Marx and anti-capitalism, sure, there are some lessons there. But the really interesting connections are to the psychology of mass movements, a topic that invokes Eric Hoffer’s seminal work The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
2. Viewing Fight Club through a Dostoyevskian lens also yields many insights. Indeed, the main character’s psychological fragmentation is a core theme of the narrative through which the narrative itself is possible. Here is a brief summary of Dostoyevsky that those not familiar might find useful.
3. Heidegger’s insights on what he calls ‘techne‘ also have much to offer, though I find Heidegger only worth mentioning for his exposition on a few concepts and find other thinkers provide much more fruitful avenues for development.
Here is the wikipedia timeline for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Note particularly formation (Aug. 23rd), Florida landfall (Aug 25th), Louisiana landfall (Aug. 29th), Gov. Blanco orders evacuation of New Orleans (Aug. 30th). The Senate passed the relief bill, rumors of looting began to filter through the media, and Kanye called out President Bush on MTV on the 1st of September.
The following graph is trend data from Google’s Insights for Search tool for the search term ‘niggers’. Note the first real deviation from the trend as searches begin to really spike somewhere within Aug. 29-31. The peak is on September 3rd, and by the 11th of September searches have reverted to their normal rate.
Search Trend for 'Niggers' August 2005-September 2005
Here are the geographic distribution and the list of top searches during this period.
Geographic Distribution and Top Searches, Aug. 2005-Sept. 2005
The story here seems pretty simple; large-scale natural disaster in a prominent city with a majority black population (67.5%) seems to have provoked a pattern of racial animosity that is visibly concentrated in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Keep in mind that this picture is incomplete for at least two reasons. First, Google’s search data may not be fully aggregated and indexed or have been made searchable yet. Second, the search data is incomplete because people can block their information from being tagged with geographical parameters. And there may be other idiosyncratic reasons as to why the data is severely under-reported, but there is nothing I can see that mitigates the conclusion that a non-negligible group of Americans continues to harbor vicious racial animosity.
Here, by the way, is the link to the Google Insight for Search page that this data came from.
My friend Scott Clemens, a pianist, on Dr. Michael Budds on the trumpet: Dr. Budds loves arguing that the trumpet is the most egotistical and phallic of instruments*, and there is nothing quite like a trumpet to communicate the climax or high point of music (and you should know exactly what that represents).
*Particularly in light of Beethoven and Wagner.
I just saw master trumpeter Leonard Candelaria perform with accompaniment on piano from Natalia Bolkshakova at the Whitmore Recital Hall on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus. The recital to my understanding did not follow the program notes exactly here are my thoughts:
Abblasen (Gottfriend Reiche, 1667-1739): A short piece (1 min?) taken from notes in an inscription? or painting? The piece was played on the piccolo trumpet, an instrument that produced sharp, high brassy notes that were less dense and weighty that I expected. If I understood Candelaria correctly, this piece might be authored by Bach and not Reiche, but who knows.
Allegra Spiritoso (first movement), Concerto in D (Giuseppe Tartini, 1693-1770): Again with the piccolo trumpet and accompanied by the piano. There sometimes an awkwardness when you pair the piano, with its mellow fluidity, with wind instruments, which are brighter, brassier, and more punctuated. This piece seemed to work well thought.
Caprice (Joseph Turrin, b. 1947): I wasn’t able to take notes on the trumpet used in this piece, but it was a bright, jaunty piece of music that played deftly with mood and pace. Candelaria was able to use the diversity of the instrument well; overall, the piece had a coy, flighty mood that played with emotion and tone well.
La virgen de la Macarena (‘The Bull Fighter’s Song’, Benardo Monterde 1880-1959, arr. Rafael Mendez and Charles Koff): the story of Rafael Mendez was the most interesting part of Candelaria’s brief notes; Mendez was a musician who went to Detroit as a laborer in the automobile industry, was discovered through the local music scene, and made a career in California as a top performer.
Lisa Perotti-Brown, MW, solicited comments from sommeliers on how many wines one can reasonably taste and evaluate in a day. I found this answer to be particularly worth noting:
“I reckon the optimum amount of wines to taste blind is 60 in a day,” commented Andrew Caillard MW of Langton’s Auction House in Australia. “This is enough to taste, write a reasonable tasting note, review and memorize. Anything significantly over this is a struggle and requires short cutting. Anyone who says they can do more than this truly effectively is having him or herself on. The late Dr John Middleton of Mount Mary used to say it is 12 wines. Fatigue is a real issue and leads to inaccuracy. More alarming is the poor allocation of points and the lack of empathy for other cultural values that pervades among wine critics. Critics applaud individuality but assume that taste and received wisdom is homogenous across cultures.”
From the Irish Times, May 16, 2009:
POLICE IN Guatemala have arrested a Twitter user and confiscated his computer for inciting financial panic after he urged people to remove funds from a state-owned bank.
Jean Anleu Fernandez (37) was jailed for posting the 96-character message on the micro-blogging website earlier this week.
It is thought to be the first such case in central America.
Police raided the IT worker s home in Guatemala City on the orders of the public ministry division in charge of banks, according to local media.
The head of the banking system, Genaro Pacheco, said Mr Anleu admitted sending a message about Banrural, a rural development bank at the centre of a murder mystery which has engulfed the government in a political storm.
Mr Anleu sent the message on Tuesday of this week. It said: First concrete action should be remove cash from Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt.
Inciting financial panic is an offence in Guatemala, which like much of Latin America has a history of economic volatility.
Mr Anleu is due to be held in jail until payment of a EUR 4,800 fine, after which he will be placed under house arrest pending trial.
The detention prompted a backlash from the Twitter community.
Mr Anleu s message has been resent by other Twitters and funds are being collected to pay the fine.
A story from the Washington Post by DeYoung and Abramowitz (9/27/07), contains this tidbit that caught my eye:
Less than a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein signaled that he was willing to go into exile as long as he could take with him $1 billion and information on weapons of mass destruction, according to a report of a Feb. 22, 2003, meeting between President Bush and his Spanish counterpart published by a Spanish newspaper yesterday.
The meeting at Bush’s Texas ranch was a planning session for a final diplomatic push at the United Nations. The White House was preparing to introduce a tough new Security Council resolution to pressure Hussein, but most council members saw it as a ploy to gain their authorization for war.
Spain’s prime minister at the time, Jose Maria Aznar, expressed hope that war might be avoided — or at least supported by a U.N. majority — and Bush said that outcome would be “the best solution for us” and “would also save us $50 billion,” referring to the initial U.S. estimate of what the Iraq war would cost. But Bush made it clear in the meeting that he expected to “be in Baghdad at the end of March.”
I want to make an argument about how we should have gone about regime change in Iraq. I argue that we should have credibly offered Saddam Hussein to accept cash and exile in return for regime change (the rest of the story seems to indicate President Bush was never serious about the offer). Even a relatively expensive bribe ($1 billion-$10 billion) would have enabled a transfer of power far less bloody and expensive in human and fiscal terms than the war that President Bush initiated. Using cost-benefit analysis, that conclusion seems obvious to me; even a pure fiscal comparison between the current costs of the Iraq conflict (a little over $702 billion at present according to www.costofwar.com) would have indicated the relative merits of an exile deal.
This subject is an underexplored subject in the literature as far as I know. An SSRN search came up with two working papers that I thought were immediately relevant, both taking a stance on the option of offering exile to Saddam for regime change. The first paper, by Michael Scharf at Case Western in 2006, notes particularly that:
Admittedly, thousands of lives could have been spared if Hussein had accepted the deal. But at the risk of being accused of blindly embracing Kant’s prescription that “justice must be done even should the heavens fall,” this Article argues that it was inappropriate for the Bush Administration even to make the offer, and that if implemented the exile-for-peace deal would have seriously undermined the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention, which require prosecution of alleged offenders without exception.
The second article, by Leila Sadat of Washington University in 2006, agrees, noting:
Second, this Article challenges the conventional wisdom that “swapping justice for peace” is morally and practically acceptable. Instead, I argue that international negotiators offering exile are neither morally nor legally justified in doing so. Indeed, although it is beguiling to imagine that offering exile to Saddam Hussein would save thousands of lives, or that the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda would have laid down its weapons in return for automatic immunity, the evidence suggests the contrary: that warlords and political leaders capable of committing human rights atrocities are not deterred by the amnesties obtained, but emboldened. As will be discussed below, the cases of Sierra Leone, the Former Yugoslavia, and Haiti suggest that amnesties for top-level perpetrators imposed from above or negotiated at gunpoint do not lead to the establishment of peace – but at best create a temporary lull in the fighting. Indeed, amnesty deals typically foster a culture of impunity in which violence becomes the norm, rather than the exception.
I find both statements rather, well, wrong. I think it’s true Scharf and Sadat woefully underestimate the real costs of war; Scharf says “thousands of lives could have been spared” with Saddam in exile and Sadat says those who offered exile are neither “morally or legally justified in doing so”. I don’t think that either scholar evaluated the true impact of not exiling Saddam; Scharf notes the value of robustly enforcing international legal conventions like the Geneva conventions, ignoring the possibility that a pre-emptive war against Iraq would almost certainly involve greater circumventions of the Geneva conventions than exiling Saddam. Indeed, this turned out to be the case, as many well-documented cases of extra-legal rendition, torture, and violations of civil liberties turned out to be the modus operandi of the organization (President Bush’s administration) prosecuting the war. Sadat’s article talks about the morality of exiling criminals, but portrays this debate in a vacuum that does not include the costs of war and forced regime change.
I do have the sense that offering amnesty or exile to those in nations where institutions are extremely unstable ( particularly those in Africa) may not be a good idea for practical reasons and also that there is a very real difference between offering amnesty and offering exile. In any case I think there are clear differences between the offering of amnesty or exile to African warlords than to Middle Eastern dictators and that both Scharf and Sadat never really articulate clear reasons why clearly different scenarios are functionally the same (I understand that this is not a completely clear statement and that I haven’t come close to establishing the basis under which I think it is true but that’ll come soon as I progress in this direction).
But I digress. Let’s start from another angle. The difference between the cost of exiling Saddam and the nominal fiscal current cost of the war is staggering, about $701 billion. Even if you are very generous about estimating the cost of getting Saddam’s organization into exile and assume a tenfold increase ($10 billion) the answer is still obvious. Even with an absurdly expensive transition involving substantial amounts of US troops providing security while Iraqis were able to organize elections and start the process of governmental change, we can presume that war still looks like an unattractive option. If we expand our notion of the fiscal cost of war to account for the casualties of the war and the internal conflict that followed (roughly 5,000 coalition members and roughly 100,000 civilian casualties), the comparison is bleakly compelling.
What is the cost of a human life? If that question sounds like evidence that economics is a bleak, amoral science, rephrase the question. What is the value of preventing a human fatality? The US Department of Transportation uses the estimate $5.8 million as the basis for its cost analyses, and also runs the analyses for the higher estimate of $8.4 million. Using $5.8 million as the value for preventing the average human fatality, a rough estimate of the cost of the Iraq war is now
Fiscal Cost ($702 billion) + human cost ($5.8 million x 105,000=$609 billion) = $1.311 trillion
Using the higher value, $8.4 million, the cost of the Iraq war is $1.584 trillion.
Note, furthermore, that the cost estimates here don’t even begin to incorporate other large scale costs associated with the war, like foregone GDP growth, or the implicit costs of the damage done to the US’s status. At this point I really am beating a dead horse with a rather large club, so I’ll move on and save my energy for the seals.
What is the opportunity cost of the Iraq war? What alternative policy options could we come up with for equal to or less than $1.3-1.5 trillion dollars that would leave us better off? The sheer magnitude of the difference between the explicit initial costs of exile vs. the explicit initial costs of invasion would seem to be worth it; even if Iraq devolved rapidly post-Saddam and we still committed the same fiscal resources post-Saddam to the country we still save on the cost of the invasion and are likely to have far fewer civilian casualties.
There is the argument to morality that says we should punish the evil. What this analysis is designed to give is the sense that sometimes the costs of punishing the evil are too high. It is easy to see the evil that Saddam Hussein perpetrated throughout his career (some of it with US backing), but what is less easy to see are the thousands and millions of evils that perpetrate in the aftermath of a war. From the circumvention of international legal conventions on war and human rights, to the blatant corruption and crime that followed as the US gave contracts to private contractors operating as if they were their own law, to the warlords that sought to tear Iraq apart using their own militias, to the million small crimes against children and women and the weak that happen in the absence of law and order, the aggregate evils that flourish in the aftermath of war far outweigh the singular qualms that we have in sending an accomplished elderly dictator into comfortable exile.
Of course, exile for such a person would never truly be comfortable. Even on the most remote island, Saddam in exile would fear for his life; one does not rule a nation with an iron fist for decades and not make the kind of implacable enemies that would seek extra-legal justice at any cost.
Some make the argument that we don’t want to incentivize dictatorship by paying off current dictators. In a world where the steady-state path seems to be towards liberal democratic governments and we only buy off the dictators in nations where the institutional facilities exist to make a successful transition of power viable, nations transition ineluctably towards democracy and dictators become an endangered species. If we relax these constraints and try to buy off dictators in countries at the margin of institutional continuity and anarchy, this strategy still works if we are able to facilitate the rapid creation of those institutions by stimulating economic growth and increasing the education level of the population.
Note that though I describe the heft of this argument as libertarian (the outcome I describe is achievable solely through voluntary trade and all parties are better off) liberals and conservatives should find much to like about this argument. First, I think liberals would like the argument that wars of these kinds (superpowers vs. marginal third world countries) are outmoded and needlessly wasteful and allow precisely those kinds of government encroachment into rights and liberties that democracies are designed to ameliorate. I think conservatives would like the idea that America can buy peace and profit from it. I think those among us with common sense would like the idea that we can pursue an aggressive foreign policy that doesn’t treat Islam as an enemy and spreads the notions of economic liberty and freedom. The Western victory happens when we get people of different beliefs to understand the idea that differences in religion and belief don’t matter as much as the freedoms and liberties that allow us to pursue wealth and prosperity.
1. “The spiritually transformed firearms of Jesus Christ” or how to not alienate and piss off Muslims.
2. What the Snuggie can teach us about branding.
4. How to make deliveries to stations in the Earth’s orbit for $250 a pound.
5. A simple theory of political jobs: One implication is that paying politicians more, and giving them more privacy, would lead to less craven behavior.
President Obama is getting flack from the nutjob nativists for his decision to grant temporary amnesty to Haitians illegally in the United States. This seems like the charitable thing to do to me; economist Arnold Kling at Econlog also notes that it is the libertarian thing to do:
Finally, on another subject, a reader asked me to say more about Haiti. Jeff Sachs offers a predictable proposal for a massive infusion of aid. I have to admit that compared to other things our government does with our money, I see little reason to object. But the libertarian approach to Haiti instead would focus on opening our doors to refugees.
Look at the track record of refugees in America. It seems to me to have worked out remarkably well in most cases, both for the refugees and for America. Now, compare the track record of American military occupation and nation-building, or the track record of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries.
It is my feeling that one of the great failures of the Republican Party is that it cultivates this ethos that America’s greatness and glory is beyond reproach and that America’s status as the sole remaining global superpower gives it the moral right to war with nations and intervene militarily in places like Iraq for the purpose of liberating others. But this dodges the lessons from our history; generally, our attempts at Third World nation-building and geostrategic dominance have met with muddled success at best and spectacular failure at worst.
I can explain this in another fashion. An integral part of the conservative narrative is that A) market solutions work and are generally superior to government policy, B) that the best government is limited government and here you find particularly good defenses of federalism. Both of those ideas seem fundamentally sound to me. But the narrative becomes intellectually bankrupt where it becomes part of the other narrative of American power and dominance. That’s because the narrative of American power as an unequivocal force for good is also a narrative of superior American knowledge and expertise coupled with moral obligation. But this narrative does not wholly manifest itself as American exports of the ideas of economic liberty and freedom; it also manifests itself as geostrategic meddling, coupled with economic imperialism and schizophrenic focus on particular problems as they are relevant. Many of our problems in the Islamic world, for instance, are rooted in our defense of dictatorships against the Soviet threat, when we should have been directly supporting democracy and economic liberty.
It seems to me that Arnold’s argument is exactly right. The tragedy in Haiti deeply saddens me, but the deeper tragedy is also rooted in the inability of Haiti to sustain economic development and build the institutions that are key to rising GDP and human welfare. We shouldn’t forget that Haiti’s economy and government were critically damaged by a US occupation to preserve US economic interests in the nation, regardless of what the nation’s citizens actually wanted.
From a paper titled The Extended Mind by Clark and Chalmers:
Thus consider the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication (McClelland et al 1986, Clark 1989), the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble (Kirsh 1995), the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule (Hutchins 1995), and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture.
Ducks and Economics 