Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2344

The Multitasking Conundrum

Kevin Drum asks: "After writing a couple of posts about multitasking, I'm curious about something: how good are you at multitasking? Which is to say, how good do you think you are at multitasking? And what kinds of things to you multitask at?"

As a member of the multitasking generation, a great lover of gadgets, and a professional in a multi-tasking oriented line of work I confront this all the time and I have to say it turns out that for me at least genuine multitasking is almost totally unworkable. I actually figured this out when I started listening to audiobooks rather than music while walking to work. Sometimes when walking I'll see something that gets me thinking and I realized that there's a kind of active thinking process ("huh, that building finally took the CVS sign down and put up a Living Social ad") that's incompatible with paying attention to the spoken text of the audiobook. With music, I don't have that problem. I can (and do!) listen to music while pondering, listen to music while writing, listen to music while reading, whatever. But I can really only carry out one linguistic function at a time—I'm reading, or I'm writing, or I'm thinking—and so I need to decide what's what.

I'll be 30 in a month and I hear that the kids these days think they can sit in the back of the lecture hall and listen to their professors while futzing around on Facebook. I can't pull that off, and I actually doubt that you can too if you really scrutinize it.

But I'm never totally sure what it is that people mean by "multitasking." Does switching between tasks rapidly count? I do that all the time. A little reading, write a post, respond to some emails, send some tweets, then do it all over again. That seems inherent to the life of the professional blogger. And I do think it's scrambled my brain a bit, insofar as I find it much harder now to read long books than it was when I was in high school. But I'd actually say the main casualty of the increasing diversity of amusements is that I watch a lot less random reruns on television than I used to. Long story short is that I think people ought to try to distinguish between switching between tasks (useful as more kinds of tasks are invented) and actually trying to do multiple things simultaneously, which seems to me to be a fool's errand.

Kant Was No Pietist

Ian Blecher writes:

I am writing a dissertation on Kant, so I was interested (and pleased) to see you mention him today. One thing you wrote was inaccurate, however. You describe Kant as a serious Pietist Christian who nevertheless devised an ostensibly secular ethical system…

In fact, Kant was no kind of Christian at all — let alone a fanatical Pietist. As Manfred Kuehn puts it like this in his biography of Kant (the provocatively titled Kant: A biography), "…Kant himself was not religious and was opposed to any form of external religious worship… [p. 250]"

Kuehn also observes that, according to Kant, "Only moral service will make us pleasing to a moral God. Prayer, liturgy, pilgrimages, and confessions are worthless. [p. 371.]"

It is true that God — the philosophical God, not the Christian God — has an important place in Kant's moral system. (It's also true that his parents were Pietists.) But if we think of Kant as a fanatic — like, say, Swedenborg — it's hard to understand why he would have insisted on the absolute rationality of moral action.

Fair enough, and I stand corrected.

Indeed, the truth probably illustrates the point better than the facts I thought I had. Western people (Kant included), whether or not they're Christians themselves, grow up in a background culture that's heavily influenced by Christianity. And the idea of a "realistic" moral law is a very straightforward consequence of the popular understanding of Christian hell. This may make the idea that ethical rules shouldn't be unduly demanding seem more commonsensical to people than it really ought to be.

Workplace Safety

CAP is just about to wrap up an event on the fortieth anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which seems like an excellent time to revisit March's post on the improved safety of the American workplace over the years:

Part of that, obviously, is a structural shift in the American economy. People like to get nostalgic about the blue collar factory work of yore, but one advantage of the service sector is that it's considerably less deadly. Then of course there's direct regulation of the workplace. But something that I think gets neglected is the important role the federal government plays in the sphere of information. In an ideal-type market place, the wage premium paid to workers willing to undergo health risks in an unregulated market would be perfectly efficient. Over time as average wage levels increase, employers would become increasingly unwilling to shell out wage premiums and would simply invest in safety instead.

But of course this ideal-type marketplace is supposed to feature "perfect information" whereas in a real marketplace there are asymmetries between workers and management about safety and managers themselves aren't omniscient with regard to the costs and benefits of safety measures. If you can establish credible public agencies that track and disseminate information about the incidence of workplace injuries, that trains people in best practices, and helps inform people about often obscure health risks then you're helping bring us closer to that kind of world.

The Option Value Of Not Drilling

NASA photo of Gulf oil slick, May 9

One of the quirks of capitalist economies is that depleting a finite stock of resources counts as adding to rather than subtracting from your nation's stock of wealth. This can lead to naive calculations that drastically overstate the merits of engaging in natural resource extraction—a dirty, dangerous businesses—at home, rather than paying someone else to do it. Another way of looking at it, suggested by a new paper (PDF) from the NYU Law School Center for Policy Integrity, is that not engaging in offshore drilling for oil and gas has a substantial option value. Right now, as Felix Salmon explains, "the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement does a very basic cost-benefit calculation when deciding whether or not to allow drilling in a certain spot: it looks at the costs, and then at the benefits, and then if the benefits outweigh the costs, it gives the go-ahead."

But perhaps this would be better:

Once the decision to drill has been made, it cannot easily be unmade. But that does not mean the only choices are either to drill now or never: waiting to decide is also an option. Because safer drilling techniques and more effective cleanup technologies continue to be developed, the costs associated with drilling should decline over time—perhaps in fits and starts, but following a generally downward trend. Meanwhile, future market prices for the extracted oil are uncertain, jumping one day and falling the next. Given this uncertainly, it only makes sense for the American public to wait to cash in the value of their finite oil reserves until the price is right: when the oil can be sold high, but environmental costs are low.

Unfortunately, the government's analysis has consistently failed to take into account the option value associated with waiting to drill, even though the methodology to do so has existed for decades. Because of this analytical failure, the government risks the possibility of selling the American public short to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if oil and gas companies were fully liable for the harms caused by drilling mishaps. But as we've learned, they're not. Liabilities are strictly capped at a preposterously low rate. And on this front as on every other the very same conservative politicians who oppose stringent ex ante prudential safety regulation also oppose stringent ex post legal liability.

Shots For Signatures

I sometimes wonder what the market value of a vote would be if you were allowed to buy and sell them on an open marketplace. Amanda Terkel's report on allegations of fraud in the effort to garner recall petitions against Democratic State Senators in Wisconsin gives us perhaps a window into the issue:

According to a draft of the Democratic complaint to the GAB, obtained by The Huffington Post from a Democratic source, a woman who was at John's Main Event, a tavern in Burlington, Wis., with her friends on Feb. 27, "heard that someone was providing 'shots' to people if they signed a petition to recall State Senator Robert Wirch," a Democrat.

The woman, who signed the complaint, said a bartender showed her the recall petition and told her that if she signed it, she and her friends would get free shots.

The source also passed along an audio recording of the encounter, in which the woman says, "So you're going to get us — one, two, three, four, five shots if we sign this?" A man responds, "That's right. … I'll buy them."

According to Yelp, John's is "Great for a casual beer-and-burger dinner" and features "a good variety of micro-brews" but no word on the ordinary retail price of a shot. According to a book I recently read about George Washington, bribing the electorate with free alcohol was considered par for the course in colonial Virginia.

Rep John Mica's Quest For Art Museum Funding Underscores The Case For Bills He Opposes

Representative John Mica of Florida has assembled a very orthodox conservative voting record sine the inauguration of Barack Obama. He voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he opposed the Obama administration's plan to increase infrastructure spending, and he voted yes on Paul Ryan's proposal for lower tax, Medicare privatization, and draconian spending cuts.

But in other respects, Representative Mica seems to understand the misguided nature of the conservative agenda. Consider one small thing, his desire to secure funding to relocate the Federal Trade Commission in order to allow for expansion of the National Gallery of Art:

Just as Republicans in Congress have been calling for an aggressive crackdown on federal spending, one powerful House leader has declared that his desire to expand the National Gallery of Art — at an estimated cost of $270 million — has become his singular, top priority on Capitol Hill.

Rep. John Mica, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, has spent years pushing legislation to evict the Federal Trade Commission from its stately historic building on Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of Washington, D.C., to make space for the art gallery expansion. Even after taking the helm of a committee that helps set the nation's policy on everything from air safety to mass transit to highway construction, Mica has maintained his laser focus on winning approval for this pet project.

"I have no other priority for the balance of my tenure in Congress," Mica said at a House subcommittee meeting in March.

It's worth noting that, hypocrisy issues aside, Mica's proposal on the merits makes a ton of sense. As it happens, last week I had to schedule a meeting with a few visiting Members of the European Parliament just before they went to a meeting at the FTC, which induced me to look up the FTC's location for the first time ever. Simply put, the corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue would be a great location for a museum (near the Mall and other tourist attractions where it'll be useful to visitors) while the FTC derives little practical benefit from the location. It's near a Metro station, which is excellent, but it would be easy enough to move the FTC to someplace else Metro accessible—near the New York Avenue or Navy Yard stations, or perhaps the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters building at 425 Eye Street.

What's true is that this will cost money. That's a downside. But the country's in the middle of a steep recession. Even in the relatively healthy DC metro area, we have sky-high unemployment among low-skill workers due to the decline of the construction industry. So from a real resources point of view, there's almost no cost to spending money on this kind of relocation at this point. And over the long-term, doing the project will benefit the country. If only Rep Mica could see that this exact same logic applies to useful projects all across the country and not just one idiosyncratic interest that we happen to share.

Deficit Reduction Is Unpopular

Diane Rogers says deficit hawks should take solace from the new ABC/WashPost poll despite the strong opposition to broad-based tax hikes and to entitlement cuts:

It's the response to the poll question below–which does start to get at the possibility of compromise for the common good–that deserves more of our attention:

Only slightly over 50 percent oppose this more balanced approach which combines ("small") cuts in the major entitlement programs with "raising taxes on all Americans." This is a glass that is (almost) half full. We haven't even begun to make the full sales pitch on this "shared sacrifice" plan with more specifics about how Medicare and Social Security can be trimmed while actually strengthening the safety-net parts of those programs (reassuring the liberals), or how revenues can be raised in a progressive manner by reducing "tax entitlements" rather than merely jacking up tax rates (reassuring the conservatives).

To my eye, the important thing about that result is the preference intensity. It's not just that people are against it by 45-53, but that the "strong" opposition has 40 percent of the population and the "strong" support has just 19. And this is as it should be! Nobody wants to pay more taxes or see grandma's living standards decline. I'm resigned to the fact that at some point something along these lines will have to be done to avoid high interest rates that would also be undesirable. But at the moment, interest rates aren't high. So raising taxes now would be pointless. And cutting grandma's living standards would be pointless. And simply promising to cut Future Grandma's standard of living would be something like double-pointless.

Waste is bad, so it's always a good day to try to reduce genuine waste in Medicare if you can. But there's neither a reason of policy substance nor a reason of politics to put "grand bargain" deficit reduction at the front of the political agenda in the 112th Congress.

GOP Field Will Keep Looking "Weak" Until Voters Know Who The Candidates Are

I've seen a lot of people remark on the alleged weakness of the Republican presidential field against incumbent Barack Obama, but today's New York Times poll offers both an explanation of the weakness and reason to doubt it will hold up—very few voters know who these people are.

Sarah Palin is a bona fide weak candidate who garners a disastrous 26-55 favorable-unfavorable split. Donald Trump is somewhat similar. But 42 percent of voters say they have no strong feelings about Mike Huckabee. 47 percent feel that way about Mitt Romney. Tim Pawlenty's favorable-unfavorable split is 12-8 suggesting, again, that normal people have no idea who he is.

Name recognition is an important characteristic in a race for state insurance commissioner, but anyone who wins a major party presidential nomination has no problem making the electorate aware of his existence. For now, though, name recognition gives Obama a formidable but fundamentally transient edge in head-to-head matchups. It won't last.

Libya and the First Casualty of War

The latest: "The French government spokesman, François Baroin, told reporters on Wednesday that the number of military liaison officers would be in single digits and that their mission would be to help 'organize the protection of the civilian population.' The British deployment could involve up to 20 advisers."

I'm not totally sure I know what it is about war that invariably seems to spark the impulse toward clumsy dishonesty, but there you have it. The bombing is to protect civilians. The military advisors are to protect civilians. Of course they are….

Endgame

Rolling down the street smoking endo:

— Girls don't start out more nervous than boys, but they end up that way.

— "Drink alcohol. Quite a bit. Mostly bourbon."

— Is it really true that lots of people work in offices where they make you use Internet Explorer? There ought to be a law.

— Tim Pawlenty isn't sure if homosexuality is a health risk.

— Everyone knows that heterosexuality is a leading risk factor for cooties.

— The quotidian militarization of American foreign policy.

— The only solution to our oil problem is to use less oil.

For 4/20, it's The Gourds' cover of "Gin and Juice".