Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2486

What Is Hidden and What Is Revealed

Something I've long heard (privately) from representatives of European governments and the Obama administration and the Israeli government is that (privately) the leaders of the Gulf Arab states are very worried about Iran and would be (privately) pleased by harsh anti-Iranian measures from the international community or even Israel. Something I've always wondered back—privately, of course—is what probative value these kind of private communications are supposed to have. One thing I learned from WikiLeaks, however, is that the private worries from Arab states that I've been privately assured Western governments have received have, in fact, been received.

But this still leaves the question of what informational value these private conveyances of concern really have. There's often a conceit in both the world of intelligence and the world of journalism that "secret" truths are somehow better than ordinary ones. That the truth is necessarily hidden, and that hidden facts therefore are especially important to know.

But what do we really know about the leaders of the Gulf states? I mean, suppose you were an envoy from Qatar Ministry of Defense and you're in a meeting with someone from the Defense Department and your private view is that Israel should be pushed into the sea and the United States is the "great satan." Well, you're certainly not going to say that in a meeting! So what will you say? You'll tell your interlocutors something you think they want to hear, and you'll try to get then to give you advanced military equipment. So there you are, "privately" very concerned about Iran.

Which isn't to say Gulf officials are in fact lying when they privately say they're very worried about Iran. If you look at the objective situation, it's reasonable for the Gulf states to be worried about Iran. So it's reasonable for us to assume that the Gulf states are in fact worried about Iran. But this is a surmise we can reach based entirely on publicly available information. Their private statements are just private statements. They could be true or they could be lies. Our best guide to their accuracy is what we know about the objective situation. The private "knowledge" drops out of the analysis entirely except as something for people to boast about to show off their savvy. But the best analysis, in this situation as in most other situations, actually comes from facts that are available in a fairly robust way. Which is to say public facts, not spy vs spy stuff. Even the WikiLeaks documents about Iran could be part of an elaborate CIA disinformation campaign for all I know.

France, China, Israel, and Iran

I thought this WikiLeaked account of a meeting between Assistant Secretary for Europe Philip Gordon and several French officials was kind of fascinating. Here's a window into what I think is the under-discussed question of the economic consequences of a war with Iran:

Levitte said that he informed the Chinese FM that if they delay [sanctioning Iran] until a possible Israeli raid, then the world will have to deal with a catastrophic energy crisis as well. At the same time, the debate over stopping the flow of gasoline into Iran will be very sensitive and would have to take into account which countries would be only too willing to step in and replace European companies. Levitte informed us that they would like President Sarkozy to talk to President Obama by telephone in the coming days to discuss the G20 and Iran. The French are proposing two possible windows to schedule the call.

Now the other issue here is what about this besides its deployment as a talking point to get China to get tougher on Iran? Does the government of France genuinely think that an Israeli attack on Iran will in fact lead to catastrophic energy crisis? Does the American government think that? Does the Israeli government think that? For all the words that have been written on the Iranian nuclear issue, I think this question remains very poorly understood.

Housing Would Be Cheaper If There Were More Supply

I rag on density issues all the time, because this under-discussed subject leads to real human suffering: "One in five renters and one in seven homeowners in the Washington area spend more than half their income on housing, according to census figures, a proportion that housing experts consider a severe burden."

There are a lot of things you can try to do to ameliorate a shortage of affordable housing, but particularly when you look at the metropolitan scale nothing will really work unless you build more housing units and in an already large metro area like Washington that means allowing more density. I talk a lot about the need to allow more density in the city proper, but an even bigger impact would be seen if we allowed more density in the geographically larger inner suburbs. That's not to say people need to be "forced" to live in high-density structures, it's to say that we need to curtail the current practice of restricting people's ability to choose higher density lifestyles if that's the pay way to achieve the balance between commute time, neighborhood amenities, housing costs, and living space that they prefer.

Robotic Warriors

An interesting John Markoff piece in the NYT about the growing use of automatic or remote-controlled systems in the military:

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

"Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs" as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

These issues are worth thinking about, but as I wrote reviewing Peter Singer's excellent book on military robots, the biggest worry should probably be elsewhere:

Singer's calm exposition, however, does not conceal the alarming substance of his book. Perhaps the most disturbing truth is that a book about military applications of robotics is largely coextensive with a book about robotics in the United States. Singer alludes to the fact that the world leader in robotics is Japan, where technological prowess is used to do productive work on behalf of a skilled but aging population. There robots are "used for everything from farming and construction to nursing and elder care" in a country that contains "about a third of all the world's industrial robots." In the U.S., by contrast, civilian applications of robots remain relatively primitive. The field is dominated by defense-oriented research funding and competition for large defense-related government contracts. Perhaps the most notable American civilian robot is the Roomba, a sort of semi-intelligent vacuum cleaner. But even this is made by a firm, iRobot, that has extensive defense contracts for its PackBot and other military robots.

Shunting such a large proportion of our talented engineers into dreaming up more clever ways to engage in misguided military adventures seems to me to be a policy that's going to end up leaving a lot of useful ideas on the table. If you took the funds currently appropriated for specialized high-tech defense procurement and put some of them into basic research funding and gave some of them back to the private sector, we'd be on the road to higher productivity.

Hispanic/Anglo Voting Gap

I think this is a pretty confused discussion of Hispanic voting patterns from Lamar Smith:

Exit polls reported by CNN and updated this week reveal that a historically robust 38 percent of Hispanic voters cast ballots for House Republican candidates in 2010 – more than in 2006 (30 percent) and 2008 (29 percent). In fact, since 1984, Republican House candidates have only won a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote in one election: 2004. This level of Hispanic support for Republican candidates came despite widespread pre-election claims by advocates for illegal immigration that the Arizona law and a pro-rule-of-law stand would undercut Hispanic support for Republicans.

All we're seeing here is that Latino support for the GOP moves up and down, just as white support does. 2010 was a better year for Republicans among all demographic sub-groups, and Hispanics are no exception. But it's possible to look at the evolution of the white/Latino voting gap over time. In 2004, when I don't think there was a clear partisan difference on immigration, Republican House candidates did 13 percentage points better with white voters than with Latino voters. By 2006, it was a 21 point gap. In 2008 that expanded to a 24 point gap. And in 2010 it was a 22 point gap. The hypothesis that the creation of this gap was driven by the opening up of a partisan difference on immigration strikes me as plausible and at any rate isn't debunked by merely citing the fact that the overall level of Latino support for the GOP fluctuates with general political conditions.

The March of Progress

I saw a very interesting exhibit on kitchens yesterday at MOMA that included this poster from a 1930 show in Basel of then-state of the art kitchen technology.

Among other things, it really had a way of putting the current era of technological progress in perspective. There was a time, in the not so distant past, when even in the richest countries on earth cooking food required the splitting of wood and the setting of fires. Between that and hand-washing clothes, the banal aspects of domestic life all entailed incredible quantities of manual labor that here in the developed world we've completely left behind. Something like the iPhone is a mighty cool gadget, but I think the digital technology that's advancing rapidly these days just pales in comparison to some of the changes of a century ago in terms of really transforming people's lives.

Stimulus and Reconciliation

Brad DeLong's talk on the failure of macroeconomic stabilization policy in the current crisis is excellent. One point I would make that he misses in his catalog of errors is that it should have been possible in 2009 to write a budget that included reconciliation instructions for possible additions to or subtractions from ARRA according to economic developments. This would have made it possible to enact more stimulus with 50 votes once it became clear that the unemployment rate was going to go higher than had been initially realized.

The Karzai Factor

Kevin Drum comments on Hamid Karzai's evident loss of faith in the NATO mission in Afghanistan:

From the U.S. point of view, of course, they key thing isn't whether Karzai is tired or delusional or getting bad advice. What really matters is that over the past year he's apparently come to the firm conclusion that a continued U.S. presence is unhelpful. This pretty plainly makes our military efforts in Afghanistan pointless. As Gen. Petraeus and his counterinsurgency gurus continually tell us, political support is crucial to eventual success. If we don't have it — and it's now about as clear as it can be that we don't — then all the Lisbon conferences in the world won't produce a plan for victory. It's about time for Barack Obama to start leveling with the American public about this.

Well . . . that'd be nice, but when last we saw General Petraeus was moving US military tactics away from that kind of counterinsurgency model in favor of more use of firepower. And on some level I think the way this works is that "counterinsurgency" means whatever Petraeus and his proteges say it means. What's more, if the US government decides Karzai's attitude makes continuing the war impossible they might just as easily decide to get rid of Karzai as decide to end the war. I certainly hope it doesn't come to that, but all the signs from the administration are that they're absolutely determined to give this thing a few more years worth of time and all their other decisions seem to flow from that.

The Robustness of the Nation-State

Nassim Taleb forecasts the future and says that within 15 years: "The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians' misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence."

Maybe so. And yet it seems to me that people have been predicting the nation-state's demise for a long time and it seems like a very robust structure. If anything the trend I see toward greater adherence to a strict interpretation of what a nation-state is supposed to be. Belgium splitting in into two properly "national" states seems much more plausible than Los Angeles emerging as a quasi-sovereign entity.

Goodbye Reptiles

I went to the American Museum of Natural History yesterday to see see dinosaurs learn about science, and I was a bit distressed to learn that my favorite childhood museum wants to abolish the concept of "reptile" from our discourse. Apparently their fancy cladistics-based approach to species classification tells them that crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards & snakes and that even the lizard & snake suite of creatures is closer to birds than they are to the turtles & tortoises. So reptiles aren't a real natural kind. Amphibians are getting the same treatment.

One of the entrance halls to the museum is also bedecked with quotations from Theodore Roosevelt, a man who turns out to be full of excellent quips that express bad ideas. "If I must choose between righteousness and peace I choose righteousness," the wall proclaims. Turns out he was talking about World War One where I guess he got neither.