Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2305

Age Discrimination In Officeholding

This is the kind of thing that one tends to forget as one gets older, but American law is full of difficult to justify age discrimination provisions. Are any of us really troubled by the thought of a 20 year-old having a beer? Particularly odd, as Jonathan Bernstein notes, are the variety of federal offices for which one is not allowed to run if one is under 35 years old.

For example, while it seems like it would be difficult in practice for a twentysomething to win a senate election, it's very hard to see what the problem would be with letting such a person serve if he managed to win. I'd rather have Jamelle Bouie or Ezra Klein in the Senate than any number of folks currently there. I've been reading recently about the debates at the Constitutional Convention and it's interesting that there doesn't seem to have been much explicit discussion of these age limits or what their purpose is. The escalation with the restrictions on who can be in the House laxer than those for the Senate which are laxer than for the White House seems to mostly be part of a symbolic scheme where they wanted to kinda sorta replicate the Commons/Lords/Crown structure of the British constitution. But as best as I can tell there wasn't some specific concern here about a crop of 27 year-old senators wrecking the Republic.

The New TV Season: Do-Gooder Ghosts

By Alyssa Rosenberg

You know, the world would be a better place if more ghosts showed up and told doctors to go out and improve the management of health clinics serving underserved communities:

I am a total Jennifer Ehle stan, and as her Twitter feed suggested, she was nervous about this getting picked up—other than one appearance in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, she's never done American network television before—so I'm happy for her that CBS decided to pick up A Gifted Man. If you're not familiar with her work other than the brief glimpses you might have gotten in The Adjustment Bureau and The Kings Speech, a brief primer on her work is here.

Especially because of the affection I bear her, I hope that the show is good, not merely on the air. It would be a bit frustrating if this was yet another story where a scientific type is brought closer to god and embraces the error of his cynicism by a loving miracle, if only because those shows are super-cliche (also, science always loses, which is a bummer). I'd be interested to see something more along the lines of Mark Salzman's wonderful Lying Awake, about a nun who has to reconcile herself to the scientific source of her intense spiritual visions. It would be much more interesting for Patrick Wilson's character to have to make actual choices, instead of simply being beatifically haunted.

The Failure of Prison Privatization

Privatizing prisons hasn't been the boon that was promised:

The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates.

The state's experience has particular relevance now, as many politicians have promised to ease budget problems by trimming state agencies. Florida and Ohio are planning major shifts toward private prisons, and Arizona is expected to sign deals doubling its private-inmate population.

There are important general lessons here. The genius of the real private economy is that firms that are really poorly run go out of business. It's not that some magic private sector fairy dust makes the firms all be runs soundly. Lots of bad businesses are out there. But they tend to lose money and close. Meanwhile, well-run firms tend to earn profits and expand. The public sector doesn't have this feature. Just because a public agency is inept is no guarantee that it will go out of business. Resources are allocating according to political clout rather than any criteria of merit. It's a problem. But it's not a problem that "privatizing" public services actually solves. There's no magic private sector fairy dust.

That's not to say government services should never be contracted out. As an extreme example, public agencies don't manufacture their own printer toner. DC contracts out its Circulator buses to First Transit and it's very successful. There are some very good charter schools. But there's no fairy dust. Not in prisons and not elsewhere.

The President As Pundit

The presuppositions of American global hegemony create some odd policy dilemmas. For example, will Barack Obama say that Bashar Assad must go? Should he?

Now if you ask me about it, I would say that ruling a country as a dictator is morally wrong. That's true in Syria, it's true in Bahrain, and it's even true in friendly well-managed dictatorships like Qatar. Killing protestors is even more morally wrong. People shouldn't do it! If your only way to hold an office you don't deserve is to shoot protestors, then you're deep in the weeds of some morally wrong conduct. That's obvious and it would seem bizarre for Obama or Hillary Clinton or anyone else to voice any other kind of opinion on the matter. Certainly I'd be quite alarmed if I learned that Obama or Robert Gates or other senior officials in the US national security apparatus believe that killing unarmed demonstrators in a bid to hold on to political office is an ethically acceptable mode of conduct.

But that's easy for me to say. Nobody expects me to follow it up by parachuting into Damascus, punching Asad in the face, and establishing a new regime to lead Syria in to the future. And nobody expects the Prime Minister of Portugal to do that either. He can just sort of offer a view, same as you or me or Joe Lieberman. But if the President of the United States says things, he's expected to back them up with action. Which is fine. But action often isn't warranted!

Endgame

And now it's even sooner:

— Neat interactive education tool.

— And another one.

— Teachers' compensation shouldn't be so backloaded.

— Vince Gay's vision of change involves an awful lot of firing city commissioners only to promote their deputies.

— Amazed by the number of articles that don't seem to realize that "serial philandering" and (alleged!) sexual assault are different things.

— At least Americans may now learn what the IMF is.

The only birthday song that matters. They Might Be Giants, "Older".

Apparent Distance On Schematic Diagrams Matters More For Travel Decisions Than Actual Distance

Mass transit systems generally use schematic diagrams rather than geographically accurate maps. This normally has two purposes. One is to make the lines straighter and the other is to make the stations look more evenly spaced. That, in turn, is all for the sake of readability. For example, check out this geographically accurate but impossible to read map of Boston's T:

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Compare that with the diagram:

This all makes sense as practice, but Zhan Guo has a new paper out looking at London which concludes that apparent distance on these schematics makes a big difference to how people plan their trips. A bigger difference, in fact, that the actual travel times. This is something planners need to think about when designing system maps.

Senate GOP Moving To Immunize Oil Companies From Lawsuits After They Screw Up

Lefty green stalinist types think we need more regulation of oil companies to prevent them from destroying the Gulf of Mexico with their drilling. But that's nuts. Everyone knows America's the most lawsuit happy country in the world. Any oil company is going to invest plenty of money in safety procedures to avoid the massive damages they're sure to be hit with in the event of a big spill. Right? Right? Well, Kate Sheppard reports that Senate Republicans are working to eliminate that safeguard. Welcome to the "Offshore Production and Safety Act of 2011″:

The measure would deem the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, located in New Orleans, the "exclusive venue" for all civil suits dealing with energy projects in the Gulf. That's a problem because the court is stocked with judges who have financial holdings or other ties to the oil and gas industry. That means lawsuits would be relegated to a particularly sympathetic court, no matter what jurisdiction the company is based in or where the incident that prompted the suit occurred.

I feel protected and safe already.

Taking Pop Culture Alcoholics One at a Time

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Due both to the news that The Thin Man is headed for a remake, the failed remake of Arthur, and the fact that Netflix Instant is letting me make up for lost time and a childhood mostly without a television by giving me access to all of Cheers, I've been thinking a lot about alcohol and popular culture. Obviously, both Arthur and the Thin Man movies were built around fairly constant levels of alcohol consumption and a fairly unrepentant attitude towards that, which poses a real challenge to remaking them given how much attitudes about alcohol use and abuse have shifted since the originals were made. By contrast, Sam's alcoholism is a constant if mostly unobtrusive undercurrent in the early seasons of Cheers.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a contemporary pop culture phenomenon that presents addiction in such a matter-of-fact way, as part of someone's larger life, rather than the defining feature in it. We've got a lot of movies about the process of recovery, which makes sense, given the way we've made a cultural fetish of rehabilitation. And we have a lot of culture about the tragedy of addiction, whether it's Nic Cage drinking himself to death in Vegas (life lesson: if that's the only movie you have available to you at a slumber party, go with the board games), or the baroqueness of addiction, like in Bad Santa. But we don't have a lot of shows or movies about the normalcy of addiction—I'd be curious as to how the Anonymous bit of A.A. plays into that—and the maintenance work of recovery, which is what most people who don't fly off to lux treatment centers need to do. It's an extraordinarily individual response to a condition with considerable societal costs. The universe, or rather, Funny or Die, appears to have answered my plea in the form of a short movie, Successful Alcoholics:

Successful Alcoholics from TJ Miller, Lizzy Caplan & Jordan Vogt-Roberts from Lizzy Caplan

The final scene in particular is a great explication of the challenges of staying sober—or for that matter, walking away from the highs of manic depression in favor of a blander equilibrium. And it's further proof that Lizzy Caplan is a marvelous actress. I'd love to see a feature-length version of this, with her starring in it.

Edit: It's come to my attention that I didn't do a great job of defining exactly what I'm looking for. As I said in comments, I'd like to see something that a) is in a contemporary setting, that b) isn't specifically about addiction/the drug trade/in some other way an "issue" show or movie, where c) the character's addiction is a day-to-day factor the way it is in Cheers, rather than relapse thrusting the issue to the fore only to have it not be talked about much otherwise. And I'd be curious to see this happen on a huge hit. Captain Cragen on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a good example of this. But on a show like Bones, for example, where almost every episode ends in a bar, it would be interesting to see a character who goes along but doesn't drink because he or she can't. It's always annoyed me how Booth's gambling equation is generally only brought out for Very Special Episodes.

Facebook Gets Patent On Phototagging

Via John Gruber, the US Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Facebook a patent for photo tagging.

I think it's difficult to maintain that absent said patent there would be insufficient economic incentive for programmers to want to create "the next Facebook" or for venture capitalists to invest in it. What this kind of promiscuous patent-granting does is stifle competition and massively complicate any new innovative firms. A big existing company can easily hire lawyers to deal with intellectual property issues, but as you'll recall Facebook was founded by a couple of college students in their dorm. That's how businesses get started, and that means you have to be able to do it without an army of lawyers.

Trade In The Nontradables

Prettier than Phoenix!

A very interesting article by Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo on "The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge" divides the US economy into two sectors. One is the tradable (manufacturing, financial services, pharmaceuticals, etc.) and the other is the non-tradable (health care, education, construction, food service, etc.). Spence and Hlatshwayo show that employment in the US has shifted out of the tradable sector and into the non-tradable sector, and that this has left behind an increasingly high-wage tradable residual and a low wage non-tradable economy.

Daniel Gross has a good summary of the implications they draw:

Looking back on the period from 1990 to 2008, the co-authors found that 97 percent of the 27.3 million U.S. jobs created were in the non-tradable sector. (The five largest non-tradable sectors, mentioned above, contributed 65 percent of the 1990-2008 jobs growth.) "The employment creation occurred mostly in non-tradable sectors — where we don't have international competition," Spence said.

On the one hand, that's good news. It means the overwhelming majority of the new jobs created can't be offshored easily. But the report notes that powerful forces may inhibit further growth in these areas. The two leading employment sectors, after all, are government and health care, which accounted for 40 percent of the incremental jobs created between 1990 and 2008. Due to high deficits and rising pressure on health care spending, those areas aren't likely to be huge sources of job growth going forward. What's more, construction and retailing, two other large sources of nontradable jobs, are sectors that relied on debt-fueled consumption. In an age of tight credit and continual deleveraging, those areas aren't likely to be big jobs generators. Finally, these jobs tend to add less value and pay lower salaries than jobs in the tradable sector.

This analysis seems kind of limited to me in a number of ways. For one thing, it's true that we're not "likely" to engage in massive public sector job creation in part because of "high deficits" but that's a policy choice. I don't see any data in the article to indicate that it would be a bad idea to increase taxation of the high-wage financial services sector and use the money to hire the people we would need to hire to get safer, cleaner streets, a new generation of transportation infrastructure, etc. If the alternative to hiring people to do that work is for them to do exciting and rewarding things in the private sector, then a sparse public sector makes sense. But if the alternative to hiring people to do that work is for them to be depressed, broke, and unemployed then we should pay them to do something.

The other thing that's interesting to me is that it's not just "international" competition that doesn't exist in the non-tradable sector. A hairstylist in Marin County doesn't really compete with a hairstylist in Miami anymore than she competes with one in Mexico. Of course people can move. And they do move from Mexico to the United States because the United States is a richer country so they have more economic opportunities there. And immigration controversies aside, we generally all acknowledge that this is beneficial to the people doing the moving. But what's curious is that more people are moving to the Miami area than to the Bay Area, even though the Bay Area is richer and presumably economic opportunities there would be better. This is the "Moving Toward Stagnation" issue and it's much more significant than people realize.