Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2341

Mormonism: Treatment Effect Or Selection Effect

David Brooks has an insightful column on "The Book Of Mormon" making the point that stringent, arbitrary, rigorous religious doctrines that liberals find distasteful tend to be both more socially successful and also associated with individuals doing better. What I'm less certain about is the posited causal relationship here:

Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character. Changes in behavior change the mind, so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most.

But is Mormonism giving people self-control here, or are people with a lot of self-control becoming Mormons? Harry Reid is an incredible rags-to-senate-leadership success story and also a convert to Mormonism, but I'm inclined to believe that the same qualities that have made him successful drew him to the Mormon religion rather than the religion drawing him to those qualities. And then of course most Mormons are simply the children of other Mormons who are inhering all kinds of attributes from their parents.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Lydia DePillis writes:

At the moment, Stanton/Eastbanc's plans call for an office building on 7th and Pennsylvania that would rise to seven floors, or 88 feet. According to the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, that's "simply too tall and too large to blend gracefully with its Capitol Hill neighbors." The Eastern Market Metro Community Association agreed, insisting that the developers stick to a height limit of 60 feet, as endorsed by ANC 6B two years ago.

The staff of the Historic Preservation Office, however, wasn't so worried. "Given the breadth of the wide avenue, the relative hierarchical importance of this building in the totality of the project, and the site's frontage on a L'Enfant square and adjacency to a Metro station, additional height in this location is not inappropriate provided that the building is otherwise designed to 'enhance the character of the district and respect its context,'" reviewers wrote, recommending only mild setbacks on the top of the building.

Clearly what this debate needs is an anchor on the other side. An unreasonable extremist.

So here goes. As a resident of the District of Columbia, I would like to maximize the property tax revenues generated by the Hines site. Therefore, I think the building should be however tall the developer thinks it can be made profitably. As a resident of the District of Columbia, I would like to maximize the volume of employment in DC generated by the Hines site. Therefore, I think the building should be however tall the developer thinks it can be made. As a resident of the Planet Earth, I would like to maximize the quantity of economic activity located near heavy rail mass transit nodes. Therefore, I think the building should be however tall the developer thinks it can be made.

From an aesthetic point of view, I think the older historic buildings that surround the neighborhood would look really cool juxtaposed with a big-ass modern skyscraper. The idea that you maximize the beauty of a historic neighborhood by insisting on absolute uniformity is inane. Look at the Dancing House in Prague.

Pity For The Rich

You can tell something's happening in the economic policy debate when you start reading more things like AEI's Arthur Brooks explaining that it would simply be unfair to raise taxes on the rich. Harvard economics professor and former Council of Economics Advisor chairman Greg Mankiw has said the same thing. And of course Representative Paul Ryan is both a fan of Brooks and a fan of the works of Ayn Rand. Which is just to say that we used to have a debate in which the left said redistributive taxation might be a good idea nd then the right replied that it might sound good, but actually the consequences would be bad. Lower taxes on the rich would lead to more growth and faster increase in incomes.

Now that idea seems to be so unsupportable that the talking point is switched. It's not that higher taxes on our Galtian Overlords would backfire and make us worse off. It's just that it would be immoral of us to ask them to pay more taxes even if doing so would, in fact, improve overall human welfare.

If that sounds remotely plausible to you, you might have a lucrative career ahead of you working as an apologist for said Galtian Overlords. If not, then congratulations for possessing a modicum of common sense.

What Is It That An Explanation Of The Climate Bill's Failure Is Supposed To Explain

Matthew Nisbett's Climate Shift report critiquing the failures of the "green" movement to obtain a climate change bill is all the rage in enviornmentalist circles this week. Joe Romm and Chris Mooney both offer forceful critiques on specific points and I think Kate Sheppard and Brad Plumer have persuasive responses.

But most generally, I don't think it's always clear what it is that explanations of the climate bill's failure are supposed to explain. I think there are three important questions here that are largely distinct:

One: Why did the Democratic Party prioritize health care reform over energy policy reform in 2009?

Two: Why did conservative elites who favored energy policy reform in 2007-2008 change their minds in 2009-2010?

Three: Why were politicians more afraid to vote "yes" on a climate bill than to vote "no" on one?

It seems to me that most of the explanatory work has gone into answering question (3) which I think is a mistake. Messaging, organizing, etc. played a role in this. But at the same time, factors (1) and (2) played a huge rule in setting the stage for (3). In the 2008 campaign, John McCain's team was trying to persuade Grist readers that he had the better climate change policy. Had it continued to be the case that prominent conservatives were pushing for a climate change bill and the leaders of the Democratic Party made this their top priority, then the politics facing members in marginal states would have been totally different.

Health For The Old vs Health For The Poor

I posted this chart yesterday:

Adam Serwer , "I'm not sure there's any other explanation for the fact that Republicans are so much more likely to believe the government should provide health care for old people than the fact that old people tend to be Republican."

That's true, but also seems somewhat unfair. The gap is bigger for Republicans but it's big for Democrats and Independents as well. This probably has something to do with ethnocentric attitudes and something to do with the fact that middle class people all aspire to be old some day and also to never be poor. But from a technocratic point of view, the public's priorities are backwards here. Investing in the health of poor people is something that could very plausibly pay off down the road in terms of increased productivity and national growth. Investing in the health of a 80 year-old, by contrast, is bound to have pretty marginal benefits under any circumstance.

Endgame

Spinning like toys:

— The global recovery

Kenneth Arrow On The Difference Between The Health Care Industry And Public Health

(cc photo by SuperFantastic)

With Paul Krugman reviving Kenneth Arrow's 1963 classic on the special economics of health care (PDF) I was interested to read this bit of throat-clearing near the beginning of the piece that I'd overlooked the previous time I read Arrow's piece:

It should be noted that the subject is the medical-care industry, not health. The causal factors in health are many, and the provision of medical care is only one. Particularly at low levels of income, other commodities such as nutrition, shelter, clothing, and sanitation may be much more significant. It is the complex of services that center about the physician, private and group practice, hospitals, and public health, which I propose to discuss.

What's interesting about this is that in context Arrow is basically offering a hypothesis. Historically "other commodities such as nutrition, shelter, clothing, and sanitation may be much more significant" determinants of public health outcomes. But perhaps things will be different in the affluent society and health care considerations will start to dominate. But looking back 47 years later, we can see that's not really the case. To be sure, the balance has shifted somewhat from the days when basic sanitation could prevent cholera outbreaks. But fundamentally lifestyle factors are still dominant.

If we ate less sugar and smoked fewer cigarettes while eating more vegetables and exercising regularly, health outcomes would get way way better. In that sense, the biggest problem of the economics of public health has relatively little to do with the economics of the health care industry and a great deal to do with the economics of self-control or inter-temporal trade. If 26 year-old Matt could have offered 16 year-old Matt money in exchange for a credible commitment to not take up smoking, a massively health-improving positive sum exchange would have happened.

The Economics Of The Jetsons

Earlier today, Annie Lowrey drew our attention to the fact that George Jetson enjoyed a nine-hour workweek—thee hours a day, three days a week. Mike Konczal rightly connected this to JM Keynes' essay on "The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren" (PDF) highlighting the consequences of a super-abundance of material prosperity. It raises, I think, a number of interesting issues.

First, for the kids who don't know, The Jetsons are a middle class family living in the early 2060s and originally depicted in a television program from the early 1960s. George is married to Judy Jetson, a full-time homemaker who's assisted by a robot maid named Rosie. They have two kids and enjoy high material living standards. Essentially imagine a world in which productivity grows by an average of 2.5 percent per year for the next fifty years and Mr and Mrs Jetson have chosen to take the cumulative 418 percent increase in income by reducing hours worked to one quarter of present-day standards rather than vastly increased consumption.

That seems like a valid choice. But what happens to income inequality in this kind of world? Imagine another couple, the Hardworkers where both parents put in a 30-hour workweek and their combined household income winds up being 20 times that of the Jetsons. Do we need to redistribute income to George & Jane? Or is the fact that their absolute living standards are high the relevant issue?

And what about a rock star like Jet Screamer?:

You can imagine two different equilibria here. One is that maybe with so many people able to comfortable support themselves on nine-hour workweeks, that entertainment is done entirely on an amateur basis. Maybe Jet Screamer earns $0 from his music, and instead works three days a week at a nursing home to earn a living. He performs music because it's fun and because he enjoys the groupies.

But my suspicion is that people will still want to hear live performances of popular musicians. And in the world of the 2060s, the total income of potential concert-goers will be dramatically higher than is the case in 2011. That's not just because of the increased wealth at the frontier in the USA. You also need to imagine population growth, and substantial continued "catch-up" growth from the developing world. And yet it's still not going to be possible for Jet Screamer to perform live in multiple cities simultaneously and physical space that's proximate to Jet Screamer is inherently scarce. The result is that Jet Screamer is going to be become unimaginably wealthy relative to a middle class family like the Jetsons.

The Return of the Porn Wars

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Yesterday, Solicitor General Neal Katyal asked the Supreme Court to uphold two Federal Communications Commission decisions that had been overturned by the Second Circuit late last year on the grounds that the Commission's standards for what's indecent are so vague as to be unconstitutional. As annoying as it is to see the Obama administration doing something that brings joy to the hearts of the Parents Television Council, Katyal's decision to back up a federal agency was probably inevitable.

What's interesting about the request, though, is that it comes at a moment when there's a spike in anti-indecency anxiety. Earlier this month, more than 100 lawmakers signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him "to direct that the FBI and U.S. Attorneys work together to combat the growing scourge of obscenity in America." Obviously, there are legitimate issues connected to the production of pornography, among them child exploitation and sexual abuse and human trafficking. But there's more than a whiff of moral panic about the letter.

And on Tuesday, a federal grand jury handed down five felony charges against fetish filmmaker Ira Isaacs; he's already scheduled to go on trial on three pending obscenity charges in May. Isaacs makes content that I will not attempt to describe on a family blog, and that I devoutly hope to avoid encountering at any point in my life. But he's mounting a vigorous defense of his work, arguing that the federal government is wrong to say it has no artistic merit. The trial, I imagine, will be entertaining, considering what it's already revealed about the tastes of the judge originally assigned to preside over it.

Does all of this mean we're about to see more restrictive policies on obscenity and the regulation of indecency? I doubt it. There isn't a high-profile anti-indecency advocate like Tipper Gore to elevate the issue to national prominence. The letter to the AG feels more like an impending-election-checking-of-the-box for most of the folks who signed on.

If the Supreme Court does take the FCC's case, though, it'll be interesting to see what happens. As The Hollywood Reporter's Eriq Gardener wrote in 2009, the last time Supreme Court ruled on the agency's power to regulate indecency, the Justices that they'd revisit the issue soon.

I talked to Adam Thierer, a researcher at George Mason University's Mercatus Center who tracks tech policy, who says he isn't optimistic that the high court will change course, because when it comes to First Amendment rights, broadcasting is traditionally a "second-class citizen."

"Because the spectrum broadcasters use is still licensed by the FCC, the Court will probably say diminished First Amendment scrutiny is acceptable," he told me by email. "Of course, such a rationale is silly since many other professions are licensed (doctors, lawyers, etc.), but not censored by our government. But abandoning the old regulatory regime will still be hard for the Court and licensing provides the easiest hook to keep it around."

The ACLU's legal director, Steven Shapiro, held back from handicapping the case when I talked to him, but seemed more optimistic. "There's a lot of evidence that the agency has taken advantage of that vagueness to apply the standard in ways that are incompatible with our first amendment rules," he told me, and the Second Circuit's decision is a persuasive statement of that case. If this momentary kerfuffle over indecency produces more clarity for the FCC and prevents future ratings brouhahas in the future, maybe it'll all be worth it.

Africa Fact of The Day

From Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Though the human species got its start in Africa, human beings have thrived better in other parts of the world. Population densities had always been low throughout the continent until the arrival of modern agriculture and medicine; it was not until 1975 that Africa reached the population density that Europe enjoyed in the year 1500. Parts of Africa that are exceptions to this generalization, like the fertile Great Lakes region and the Great Rift Valley, have supported much higher population densities and indeed saw the early emergence of centralized states.

I predict that this is a book people will want to pretend to have read over the years, so if you plan on actually reading it (which I think you should) it's important to memorize some random factoids like this in order to be able to prove you went through the whole thing.