Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2349

The War On Drugs Versus Developing World Pain Relief

I've noted on a few occasions the tensions between the policy objectives of the "war on drugs" and people's legitimate desire to secure relief from intense pain. What I've written before about this has been about rich countries and regulatory/logistical hurdles to obtaining effective opioid pain relievers. But as Charli Carpenter writes, there's also a developing world version of the problem in which actual shortfalls of medicine are the issue:

However, a significant (and solvable) aspect of the problem is simply the relationship of supply to demand: the need for analgesics like morphine far outweighs the available supply. In part, this is due to the fact that such analgesics are produced from opium, the sap of the poppy. Since the same plant extract can also be used to produce heroin, a significant amount of political effort is now being expended worldwide to actually inhibit, rather than encourage, opioid production. This fuels shortages of analgesics.

Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Amir Attaran and Andrew Boozary suggest a seldom-mentioned way to increase supply: re-framing Afghanistan's poppy problem as "an opportunity for global public health." In short, the authors suggest pro-government forces abandon efforts to eradicate Afghan poppy cultivation and instead redirect them toward the production of licit opiods for analgesic pain medication.

For the vast majority of human history, there was really very little one could do about the problem of chronic pain. Consequently, most cultures have come to valorize stoical perseverance in the face of pain as a major virtue. The reality, however, is that few things are more misery-inducing than prolonged stretches of pain. Ameliorating severe pain where possible can provide giant gains in human welfare relative to more conventional goals like boosting incomes and measured GDP.

High Housing Costs And High Wages Often Go Together, But They Don't Cause Each Other

I completely agree with Elisabeth Ericson that it would be desirable to create additional tax brackets so that someone earning $250,000 and someone earning $2.5 million aren't facing the same marginal rate. But her subsidiary point about "grow[ing] up in cities where cost of living is high and salaries commensurately so" reflects a common but interesting error.

Earnings are higher in metro areas like San Francisco and Boston than in metro areas like Jacksonville and Phoenix. And housing costs are also higher in metro areas like San Francisco and Boston than in metro areas like Jacksonville and Phoenix. Consequently, the gap in real living standards between a guy who delivers pizzas in Boston and a guy who delivers pizza in Jacksonville is smaller than a naive look at wages would indicate. This sometimes leads people to conclude that the gap in wages is a kind of illusion almost as if Boston and Jacksonville have different currencies and we need to adjust for that fact when comparing income.

In reality, though, housing costs don't repeal the basic rules of economics. What you get paid for delivering pizzas is approximately equal to the productivity of your labor. So if the pizza guy gets paid more in Boston than in Jacksonville, that's because he's more productive. Sometimes that's because there are quality differences. If you're the best hairstylist on the planet, it doesn't make sense to live in Jacksonville—you should move someplace where there are lots of rich people. But sometimes it just reflects a difference in circumstances. The same pizza delivery guy with the same pizza delivery skill will be more productive (and thus earn a higher wage) in a richer city rather than a poorer one. People from Mexico can improve their productivity (and thus wages) by migrating to the richer United States and for all the same reasons people from Jacksonville can improve their productivity (and thus wages) by migrated to the richer San Francisco Bay Area.

So why doesn't everyone move to Boston? Well there are lots of reasons (weather, family, friends, obnoxious Red Sox fans, etc.) but this is where housing costs play a big role. The extra productivity is very real, as are the higher wages, but if you move you'd need to "give back" a lot of your wage gains in the form of higher housing costs or longer commutes. That works like a tax that discourages people from improving their productivity through migration. But unlike with a tax, the revenue doesn't fund public services. It merely accumulates as rents for people who bought real estate at the right time.

Ryan Avent gave a presentation about this at the Kauffman Foundation a few weeks ago, though I'm not certain he persuaded the audience that this is as important as I think it is.

Will House Democrats Hold Firm On The Debt Ceiling?

In a savvy piece of analysis, Brian Beutler notes that the posture of the usually irrelevant House minority could actually make a big difference in the debt ceiling fight:

Right now, House Democrats are coalescing around the view that the debt limit should be hiked without major concessions to the GOP attached to it. They want a "clean" increase in the debt ceiling. If House Democrats hold to that position, they'll force House Republicans to pass a debt limit hike with only Republican votes. What the conservative base of the party would demand under those circumstances is unclear, but there's a high likelihood it would reach way too far, and be a non-starter in the Senate and with the White House.

That's where Boehner would get stuck. He knows the debt limit needs to be lifted. He knows that to get a debt limit bill through the Senate, he needs Democratic buy in. And if Pelosi and her leadership team keep Democrats aligned, he knows that means ditching just about all the concessions Republicans want.

Boehner would thus be forced to lift the debt ceiling on Pelosi's terms, not his own. It would make the defections he suffered during the 2011 spending fight look like a minor rift. But he'd have no choice.

That said, it seems to me that it'll be difficult for Pelosi to hold House Democrats together unless the White House also takes a firm line on the issue. And to repeat myself on the subject, there's no reason for anyone to be offering concessions on this point. If the debt ceiling isn't raised, then that creates more and more problems over time. The solution to those problems is to raise the debt ceiling even though it's a bit politically embarrassing. So the offer should be "we're willing to raise the debt ceiling, thus solving the debt ceiling problem." Given that the leaders of both parties favor an increase, agreeing to an increase would be an excellent compromise!

Game of Thrones: Naked Ladies, Rape, Incest Subplots Not Necessarily Sexist

Hey there, folks, I'm very glad to say that Alyssa Rosenberg (formerly a guest blogger in these parts) is joining the ThinkProgress family and that while some technical aspects of her joining the crew are getting worked out she's going to be contributing some posts to this space (among other things). Her first such contribution is below:

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By Alyssa Rosenberg

Given how heavily HBO promoted Game of Thrones, the fantasy series it premiered last night, I'm not really surprised that there's been an outpouring of critical response to the show. What I didn't expect, though, was that so much of the morning-after analysis would consist of a discussion about whether the show is sexist.

I say this from the perspective of someone who has read all four of the George R.R. Martin books on which the show is based, and who's seen the first six episodes of HBO's adaptation. So I come to this with context about how sex and sexuality play into Martin's larger universe that first-time viewers aren't going to have. But even knowing what I know about how the characters and their storylines develop, I'm still taken aback by some of the criticism, and dismayed by the reminder that our culture's in a place where the default assumption is that any depiction of rape or sexual violence is gratuitous. Take this, from Melissa McEwan at Shakespeare's Sister:

I am, however, averse to gratuitous pornified images of naked women being inserted into entertainment in a way that treats their breasts like props. And I don't regard the line between the two as remotely fuzzy or difficult to navigate.

Leaving aside the exploitative nature of the storytelling, it's also just lazy and intellectually insulting. I am a grown-ass adult capable of understanding that Tyrion Lannister is a lech without actually hearing the slurping sounds while he gets a blowjob and seeing three naked prostitutes gifted to him by his brother. I have the faculties to discern that Viserys Targaryen is a horrible shit without actually having to watch him molest his teenage sister's breast. Etc. And if you can't communicate these characters' attributes without lingering close-ups on tits, then you are not a good filmmaker.

Or a question from one Entertainment Weekly colleague to another, "Do the women get to do anything more than be miserable or sex objects (willing, paid, or raped) for the men?" Or the deep and abiding weirdness of the New York Times Ginia Bellafante opining that "The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise," before going on to insist that no real women prefer fantasy to other kinds of literature and television.

It's true that networks like Showtime and Starz–and many, many other entertainment producers–are often in it just for the T&A. But if we always assume that's the case, we run the risk of condemning or missing out on shows and movies where there's a very specific point to both sexual nastiness and explicit consensual sex. If the point of a character like Viserys Targaryen is that his power obsession has ugly sexual overtones that are manifested directly in the physical evaluation of his sister as he's prepared to sell her off in an arranged marriage, then it's not true, as McEwan writes, "if you can't communicate these characters' attributes without lingering close-ups on tits, then you are not a good filmmaker."

The incestuous relationship between two of the main characters in Game of Thrones is meant to communicate their moral and spiritual rot, not simply to provide something naughty for us to get nervous and excited over. Their sex scene in the show's first episode isn't presented in romantic terms, but rather in somewhat desperate ones. And contra McEwan's complaints about a sex scene involving Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of the queen and her twin brother,the insistence that Lannister is as good a lover–or perhaps an even more sensitive, passionate one–than his full-sized counterparts is a blow against the frequent use of people with dwarfism in entertainment as proxies for children or comic relief rather than real human beings.

The sexual universe where Martin set his story, and where HBO is taking us now, is discomfiting both because of the specific characters Martin's created, and because it's a period piece. There's something far more honest in a scene where a young woman gets raped on her wedding night to a man she doesn't know and doesn't love, or where, as The Tudors does, an unwilling bride passes out during her first night with her husband in front of witnesses to their union, than in misty romance-novel retroactive rewrites of sex and marriage in eras past. Women may be constrained in Martin's universe, but that doesn't mean they're powerless.

What it does mean is that it's worth it for viewers to give the show a shot. If the series continues to hue as closely to the novels as it has so far, HBO will give viewers a richer, more progressive sexual universe than the show's critics expect. But that requires a willingness to expect that there's rhyme and reason to the sexual madness beyond the simple demands of a market for naked ladies.

More Women Needed For Peacekeeping Missions

United Nations peacekeeping efforts are one of the most underrated humanitarian undertakings. They lack the visceral thrill of a good coercive "humanitarian intervention" but in part for that reason they work better. The basic issue is that it's difficult for warring parties to make peace even if they both want to. After all, if you were fighting someone last week it's doubtful that you're going to trust him next week. Finding an enduring peace is much easier if there's some kind of third party enforcement, and the guys in blue helmets are well-suited to providing it. But of course nothing's perfect and Emily Musil Church makes the excellent point that peacekeeping could be greatly improved by including more women in the forces that are dispatched:

Women peacekeepers are seen as a potential solution to one of the most critical feminist issues in contemporary Africa: systematic sexual violence in areas of conflict. Rape is so common a weapon in the Democratic Republic of Congo's ongoing civil war that the country has earned the title of "the worst place in the world to be a woman." Making matters worse, the primarily male United Nations peacekeeping forces there have reportedly sexually assaulted Congolese women.

Female security forces offer hope on many fronts. Victims are more likely to report sexual violence to women in authority than men. Women peacekeepers are particularly vigilant about gender-based violence, even training local women in self-defense and community policing. And the symbolic presence of women in positions of authority can be empowering. For instance, after India deployed the first all-female UN police unit to Liberia, in 2007, sexual violence reporting increased and many more women joined the Liberian national police force. The unit set up health initiatives and skills training for women and girls, including child and maternal care.

There's a larger issue here about the changing missions of a modern day military. Most countries are more likely to send soldiers on a peacekeeping mission than to fight a war against a neighboring state. But relatively few militaries are really organized around that fact.

Chris Mooney on Motivated Reasoning

Chris Mooney has a great piece in Mother Jones on why people aren't persuaded by evidence:

In Kahan's research (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: "The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert." A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert "depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another." The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that "expert," in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

There are a lot of bad policy consequences associated with humanity's tendency to reason like this, and I don't really know how to solve them. But it's worth trying to fight confirmation bias in your own life by making sure to make an effort to seek out strong arguments against your own point of view. The world is full of bad arguments, and it's easy to become obsessed with how bad the arguments being made by "the other side" are. And at times this is an important fact about the world. But it's worth making sure you're up-to-date on what the strongest arguments for the other side are.

Prosperity Is The Ultimate National Security Issue

Andrew Exum notes that sharp cuts in "non-security" spending have security implications, using foreign language learning as an example:

Much like the International Affairs budget, which includes funding for the Dept. of State and USAID, funds that support the study of critical languages should be understood as part of our national security expenditures. I myself was the recipient of a 2007 fellowship that allowed me to spend a summer in Morocco in an advanced Arabic program that helped get my Arabic up to the level I needed to pore through newspaper archives in Beirut while researching a dissertation on Hizballah. And I would happily pay a little more in taxes to keep these programs going.

But hey, it's probably safe to cut funding for these languages. It's hard to see Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world causing issues in terms of U.S. national security interests anytime soon.

I would sort of put this differently. If you looked at the United States in 1935, our military was not particularly impressive compared to a more militarized country like Japan. But if you look at 1945, the United States beat Japan very badly in a war. And that's primarily because the United States of America was way better at building ships and airplanes than Japan. We were better at breaking codes than Japan. We were better at researching nuclear fission bombs than Japan. We grew more food and we had more people. The fundamentals, in other words, were strong. And that's the ultimate national security resource. The current level of defense spending has huge implications for a country's capacity to do something like speedily mount a military intervention in Libya—America can do a lot, the EU can't. But over the longer term, what matters most is the underlying fundamentals. The European Union has more people than the United States and a larger economic output, and could use those things to build a formidable national security apparatus if it wanted to.

Similarly, if you think about the national security landscape of 2035 what's going to be really important isn't the defense spending decisions of the United States. It'll be the fundamentals. How rich are we? How many skills do our people have? How many people live here? How much science can we do? Insofar as expending resources on today's security priorities prevents us from investing resources in building national capabilities for the future, we undermine our longer-term security.

Arthur Laffer And The Big Lie Of Tax Reform

Arthur Laffer is the predominant author of the old big lie of tax policy, that reductions in US income tax rates would increase revenue. And today (via Chait) we find him touting another big lie, this one about loopholes:

A tax reform to a simple flat-rate tax with no deductions would significantly reduce the current complexity inherent in our progressive tax system, which is full of loopholes, exemptions and special interest carve-outs. Based on the estimates from our new study, if a static, revenue-neutral flat-tax reform were to reduce the tax complexity in half, the long-term growth in our economy would increase by around one-half of 1% per year.

All the work here is being done by the proviso "with no deductions." It's quite true that a flat rate tax with no deductions would significantly reduce complexity. By the same token, a progressive tax with no deductions would reduce complexity. So would a calculus-based system with an infinite number of brackets and no deductions. That's because eliminating deductions reduces complexity and economic distortions. Moving to a straight proportional tax is just something rich people like because it means they'll pay less. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Productivity Only Causes Persistent Unemployment If Policymakers Fail To Provide Adequate Demand

Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr gave a speech on Friday that nobody noticed until Catharine Smith wrote it up for the Huffington Post on Sunday evening. The gist is that the iPad and related technologies are increasing productivity in the publishing industry and this is costing jobs:

"Why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes and Noble? Just buy an iPad and download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine," the Congressman said.

He also cited Chicago State University's initiative to replace textbooks with iPads for freshman students. Jackson stated that the goal of the University was to create a "textbookless campus within four years."

"What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs?" Jackson asked the House. "What becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not-too-distant future, such jobs simply won't exist."

People have been mocking this sort of argument since at least Bastiat's thing about the candlemaker's petition but Jackson is, of course, correct. My mother once possessed a lot of highly specialized human capital related to pre-digital page design; the kind of cutting and pasting that was done with very sharp knives and rubber cement. The rise of Quark XPress and Adobe PageMaker really did put people out of work, just as electrical lights put candlemakers out of work, and ebook publishing will decrease employment in book retailing. But the point is that when you take the long view it's not as if steadily increasing productivity leads to steadily declining employment—what it leads to is higher average output and rising living standards. But it only accomplishes that if the policymakers charged with macroeconomic stabilization use fiscal and monetary policy to ensure that there's a level of aggregate demand that's commensurate with our productive capacity. The fact that we have over 9 percent of the workforce unemployed indicates that they're failing. But this is the fault of the US Congress and the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (and the European Central Bank, and Angela Merkel, and the Bank of Japan, etc.) not Steve Jobs.

Philosophical Referee Signs

Via Alex Tabarrok:

As Ned Resnikoff observes the "that thinker does not argue what you think" foul very frequently has to be called on discussions of Friedrich Nietszche. My best advice would be that if you think you understand what Nietszche's saying, you're probably mistaken. Still, worth a read!