Eugene Volokh's Blog, page 2725
August 22, 2011
An Inconvenient Truth: Christie Is Right on Climate
Until last week, many conservatives considered New Jersey Governor Chris Christie a hero. Some were even clamoring for him to enter the presidential race. Now, however, some of the same conservatives are branding him a heretic, even as he embraces policy decisions they support. What's going on?
Last week, Christie vetoed legislation that would have required New Jersey to remain in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions through a regional cap-and-trade program. The bill was an effort to overturn Christie's decision earlier this year to withdraw from the program. Given conservative opposition to greenhouse gas emission controls, the veto should have been something to cheer, right? Nope.
The problem, according to some conservatives, is that Christie accompanied his veto with a statement acknowledging that human activity is contributing to global climate change. Specifically, Christie explained that his original decision to withdraw from RGGI was not based upon any "quarrel" with the science.
While I acknowledge that the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing, that climate change is real, that human activity plays a role in these changes and that these changes are impacting our state, I simply disagree that RGGI is an effective mechanism for addressing global warming.
As Christie explained, RGGI is based upon faulty economic assumptions and "does nothing more than impose a tax on electricity" for no real environmental benefit. As he noted, "To be effective, greenhouse gas emissions must be addressed on a national and international scale."
Although Christie adopted the desired policy — withdrawing from RGGI — some conservatives are aghast that he would acknowledge a human contribution to global warming. According to one, this makes Christie "Part RINO. Part man. Only more RINO than man." ["RINO" as in "Republican in Name Only."]
Those attacking Christie are suggesting there is only one politically acceptable position on climate science — that one's ideological bona fides are to be determined by one's scientific beliefs, and not simply one's policy preferences. This is a problem on multiple levels. Among other things, it leads conservatives to embrace an anti-scientific know-nothingism whereby scientific claims are to be evaluated not by scientific evidence but their political implications. Thus climate science must be attacked because it provides a too ready justification for government regulation. This is the same reason some conservatives attack evolution — they fear it undermines religious belief — and it is just as wrong.
Writing at MichelleMalkin.com, Doug Powers warns that " if some politicians think they can swim in the waters of AGW without getting wet or soaking taxpayers, they should think again." In other words, once you accept that human activity may be contributing to global warming, embracing costly and ill-advised regulatory measures is inevitable. Yet it is actually Powers, not Christie, who is embracing a dangerous premise. As Christie's veto shows, he understands that the threat of climate change does not justify any and all proposed policy responses. One can believe the threat is real, and still think cap-and-trade is a bad idea. Christie's critics, on the other hand, seem to accept that once it can be shown that human activity may be having potentially negative environmental effects, this alone justifies government intervention. Yet the environmental effects of human behavior are ubiquitous. Human civilization necessarily entails remaking the world around it. So if recognizing negative environmental effects leads inevitably to governmental intervention, there is virtually no end to what government needs to do, global warming or no.
How inconvenient, then, that even the vast majority of warming "skeptics" within the scientific community would agree with Governor Christie's statement that "human activity plays a role" in rising greenhouse gas levels and resulting changes in the climate. The Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, for instance, has written several books acknowledging human contributions to global warming. In Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know (co-authored with Robert Balling, another "skeptic") for example, he explained that there is an observable warming trend and that human activity shares some of the blame. Michaels and Balling are labeled "skeptics" because they don't believe the warming is likely to be as severe or as disruptive as most other climate scientists, but they readily accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming. (See, e.g., p. 27.) Their rejection of a climate apocalypse — and not a denial of human contributions to climate change — is actually the view of most climate "skeptics," and nothing Christie said is incompatible with that view.
As I've written before, it would be convenient if human activity did not contribute to global warming or otherwise create problems that are difficult to reconcile with libertarian preferences. But that's not the world we live in, and politicians should not be criticized for recognizing that fact. Further, even if one accepts the "skeptic" perspective on climate change, there are still reasons to believe climate change is a problem, as I explain here. This does not require endorsing massive regulatory interventions or cap-and-trade schemes; there are alternatives. In the end, politicians should be evaluated on their policy proposals — and commended for the courage to acknowledge politically inconvenient truths.
August 21, 2011
The Price Point of Social Unrest?
Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain, this new article in MIT's Technology Review, The Cause of Riots and the Price of Food.
Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they've found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.
This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.
The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause. Both these sources are plotted on the same graph above.
This clearly seems to show that when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world. This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.
But what's interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," say Lagi and co. In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.
I am skeptical about this kind of analysis, particularly when it offers a specific date for when the threshold for social unrest is apparently going to be crossed — August 2013, if you were wondering. Am I right or wrong to be skeptical of the simplifications involved in this kind of analysis?
Tyler Cowen on Weaker Productivity, Anderson on Ice Floes, and Grace Slick on Sunrise
Tyler Cowen's column in the New York Times today takes up the disturbing problem of productivity that seems not just to be growing more slowly, but actually weakening:
The overlooked piece of news came this month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the second quarter this year, it reported, nonfarm business labor productivity fell by 0.3 percent, the second quarterly drop in a row. And it turns out that it rose only 0.8 percent from the second quarter of 2010. Over the last year, hourly wages have risen more quickly than productivity.
Why worry? Well, as the column points out, productivity gains are what produce long run increases in the standard of living. "Our society is wealthy," Cowen says, "precisely because it can churn out products like automobiles, flush toilets and Google search algorithms at relatively low cost. Productivity slowdowns mean erosion of living standards over the long haul, and they also can lead to short-term crises." The column then goes on to explore several of the considerable difficulties in measuring productivity, but concludes that if anything, taking account of those difficulties suggests that weaker productivity is understated in the American economy.
These themes are at the heart of Cowen's recent short book ($3.99 on Kindle), the splendidly robust and readable essay, The Great Stagnation. The essay argues that there has been a long-term historical slowdown in productivity and innovation gains since the first great strides of the Industrial Revolution. I've now read it twice. Each time, on finishing it, I've wondered what role an aging population in the United States means, for innovation, productivity, and economic recovery. Many of the discussions of economic recovery, trying to draw lessons from past downturns, seem to be premised implicitly on a static demography — or at least, even they accept the higher costs of care associated with a sharp upturn in the number of non-productive elderly, do not go to the further questions of what it means to have a society and, in an important sense, culture, that is dominated by the old and their concerns both material and spiritual? Is it impossible that cultural shifts occasioned by demography have an impact, for example, on Keynes' "animal spirits"? Risk-taking? Innovation?
One hears many economists comparing today to 1980, for example, whether to ask what is similar or what is different. But isn't one relevant difference simply that in the early 1980s, the recovery tapped into a Baby Boom generation just hitting its prime years in terms of energy, risk-taking, innovation, etc.? Today we Baby Boomers are spent as an intellectual, innovating force; it's not just that old people cost a lot to take care of, we also don't innovate and come up with new sources of wealth. Our risk taking days in pursuit of outsize gains through enterprise creation are mostly done; to the extent we aren't already tapped out, we can be rentier capitalists, I suppose, but that's not quite the same thing, and anyway current interest rates don't suggest much for that. We might easily use the handles of a gigantic generational demographic to seize social gains for ourselves, as we have done at every phase of our lives, from youth to death — but collectively we aren't likely to come up with a lot of new breakthroughs in science, technology, or anything other than new ways to push our memoirs of the sixties and seventies.
I sometimes wonder if this isn't the subtext beneath the two parties, and the upcoming presidential race. The Democrats basically think the American idea is over with the Baby Boomers — we Boomers spent everything else, why not the American Ideal, too? — and that the task is to simply see the boomers through to their cremations, and then, well, the future generations won't have anything to inherit besides unpayable debts to other people, if they haven't yet inflated them away. If that's the case, however, then the spending on the Baby Boomers' exit has already been exhausted, and most of us are not even there yet: there won't be enough ice floes to go around for us Very Old Ones.
The Republicans believe that a return to the policies of Ronald Reagan will bring about a new morning in America. But that optimism doesn't take into account that morning in America in the 1980s took place when I was in my twenties, energetic and hopeful and full of new ideas and innovation — not my fifties or sixties, sour and distempered. What makes the Obama administration special, on this view, is not that it contemplates the Baby Boom eating the next two generation's seed corn — but, rather, that it is already nearly finished chewing through it, even before boomers like me have reached retirement.
That's not very cheery and none of this Baby Boomer stuff is in Cowen's column; he would likely dissent from it, as overly pessimistic. His book is titled, "How we picked the low hanging fruit," after all, not "How we ate our seed corn." But Cowen's column adds a little fillip, which is to say — if America does not fill the innovation and productivity gap, don't expect that anyone else will, either, including China:
While the Chinese economy is wonderful for cutting costs and improving manufacturing methods, it will not soon be taking the lead in creating breakthrough products. For all the money spent on R.& D. in China, Chinese scientific papers are not cited much abroad and Chinese patents are filed at a low rate internationally, suggesting that they are less than revolutionary ... In other words, the next wave of major innovation will probably rely on the world's current scientific leaders, many of whom are based in the United States. Recently, though, Americans have not been getting the job done.
All this naturally made me think of that marvelous hymn to American Baby Boomer self-centeredness — still one of my favorite albums — Blows Against the Empire, and this track from Grace Slick.
The Education Bubble
The Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio highlights the enormous growth in student loan debt over the past twelve years.
Indiviglio comments:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it's correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.
The chart above is striking for another reason. See that blue line for all other debt but student loans? This wasn't just any average period in history for household debt. This period included the inflation of a housing bubble so gigantic that it caused the financial sector to collapse and led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. But that other debt growth? It's dwarfed by student loan growth
It should be apparent that this trend can't continue — and won't. The only question is what will cause it to change.
August 20, 2011
Insult-to-Religion Arrest in Egypt
Agence France Press reports (thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman at Religion Clause for the pointer):
Cairo police arrested a man who allegedly ... posted [statements on Facebook] 'that were insulting to the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed and Islam and Muslims.' ...
The youth was referred to the prosecution, which may charge him under a law that penalises 'insulting religion.'
I couldn't find more details on the story; please let me know if you know more.
Insult-to-Religion Prosecution Rejected in Poland
I blogged about the case when it was filed, but I'm pleased to report that a judge has thrown it out. From The Guardian (London):
[Judge Krzysztof Wieckowski] has found [death metal singer Adam Darski, of the band Behemoth,] not guilty of offending religious feeling ... [by] ripping up a Bible during a show [in Poland] ....
He had been cleared by a court last year but prosecutors appealed that verdict.... According to the Polish news agency PAP, [Darksi] also called the Bible "a deceitful book" and the church a "criminal sect" ....
[The judge's ruling] said it considered Darski's actions "a form of art" consistent with the style of his band [and] that the court had no intention of limiting freedom of expression or the right to criticise religion.
Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.
David Hudson, Guest-Blogging
I'm delighted to report that David Hudson, of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt, will be guest-blogging this coming week about his new book, Let the Students Speak!: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools. The title is largely self-explanatory — the book talks both about the leading Supreme Court cases on the subject, but also about other controversies, including the most recent ones (such as the debate about "cyberbullying"). I'm much looking forward to David's posts.
Out-of-State Admissions to State Universities
Glenn Reynolds points us to an article by Steve Cohen in the Daily Beast on increasing numbers of out-of-state students accepted at state universities. The reason for this is collecting full-fare out-of-state tuition dollars by cash strapped public universities. (In every place I'm aware of, and as a parent of a DC child just starting as a freshman at Rice University, I am very aware, the old strategy of attend somewhere for a year and then get resident tuition doesn't work anymore — whatever the residency rules for other things, generally a student will be an out-of-stater for the full four years.)
Cohen particularly focuses on UCLA and UC Berkeley as examples of the new trend in college admissions:
Even colleges that shunned out-of-state students for years are showing a marked receptivity. The University of California's top campuses—Berkeley and UCLA—have doubled and even tripled their rosters of out-of-state kids. At UCLA, the total percentage of out-of-state kids is still relatively low: only about 7 percent of last year's entering class. But at Berkeley, it was a whopping 19 percent and will grow to 20 percent this year, according to Janet Gilmore, a university spokesperson. Five years ago, the percentage of out-of-state students at Berkeley was a mere 5 percent.
At most of these world-class universities, admission is still very selective. The acceptance rate for out-of-state students at UCLA was only 30 percent last year. But that was still better than what California residents experienced, which was a 21 percent acceptance rate. And it even got a tad easier for out-of-staters compared with previous years. Five years ago, out-of-staters applying to UCLA were admitted only 21 percent of the time, compared with their California counterparts, who saw a 23 percent admit rate.
My daughter was a beneficiary of this; she was accepted to both. I would not have thought she was competitive for either place as a pure out-of-stater even a few years ago. (It probably helps that very few private school kids in DC seem to apply to either UCLA or Cal; my daughter's friends at Sidwell Friends, National Cathedral School, and St. Albans, where my wife teaches, went en masse to Michigan, but very few of them apply to the University of California.) When we visited the two UC schools, the admissions people were explicit in saying they were looking for out-of-state and international admissions, partly to keep their reputations up but mostly for the money.
As an out-of-state parent, of course, I like this. And DC is something of a special case, being both tiny in population and having no public university (I'm not counting the University of District Columbia, which is something closer to a community college) of its own. Looking at it from the perspective of the state's own residents, I think it's a terrible deal, and if I were a state legislature, I would set strict limits on the percentages of out-of-state and international students that could be admitted, and the larger the pool of highly qualified applicants — California or Texas are pretty easy cases — the less reason to admit non-residents.
The problem is a classic public choice problem. (Side-note: This problem is quite apart from a different problem, something quite crazy from a policy standpoint. At the moment when parents find it hardest to fund their children's education at private universities, in the midst of a serious downturn, the loss of tax revenues pushes down funding to public universities and lowers their quality and ability even to put on classes. Yet this is ideally the moment when public universities should be able to act counter-cyclically and sweep up the best students at state-university rates, both improving their reputations — and building the state's economy into the future. But no. Leave that aside.)
The public university faces a serious crunch in state funding. It seeks to respond by bringing in more out-of-state and international students who will pay its full tuition cost; each of those students is much more valuable than an in-state student, no matter how well-qualified. Anyway, if you have all of China to choose from, you can always find someone who will fit the bill, both intellectually and financially. But the out-of-state tuition does not really cover the subsidized fully internalized cost of the public university to that state's public. That's so in a direct sense, in terms of direct subsidies, and if one counts the capitalized costs of past subsidies, often over a century or more. And the even more indirect, but still important, costs of community, alumni, and other goodwill (including the very expectation and promise of long term state funding — the effect of which is to give others the confidence to contribute, donate, and help build the institution over the long term), then the fully internalized cost would be far higher still.
The university has little incentive to charge that cost; all that matters to it is something over the current in-state tuition cost that the out-of-state traffic will bear. In the face of demand from in-state students, however, this is a bad policy for the state and its residents — its community, which was, after all, the reason why the state subsidized the damn thing in the first place — even as it is good policy for the university.
To which one can say, well, the problem here is to raise the tuition price to fully capture to cost, and then let the university choose. But that's a good policy only if one assumes that a public university, founded by a state for the benefit of its society and economy, should be indifferent as to the members of that political community. Which is to say, those that live there and lived there in the expectation of having some shot at attending the institution, and having a priority in that institution, as opposed to anywhere else. I realize that many at public universities (particularly the most elite that regard themselves as islands of cosmopolitan universalism in a sea of narrow and parochial people who regard being a resident — residing — living in a place for the long term) see such expectations related to actual place and actual community as precisely the problem. But I don't see that state legislatures, who presumably — even in California — are supposed to have some connection to place and resident community, should see it that way.
Price alone won't do it, so long as the number of physical places is limited at the most elite schools. That being the case, were I a state legislator in California, I would support very strictly limiting the ability of public universities to make decisions that are good for the university and bad for the state and its residents. But in that case, be prepared for the loud and sententious backlash; the first rule of university relations with the wider world is that there is no policy in the financial self-interest of a university that will not be declared to be in accordance with Universal Virtue and the Greater Public Interest. The University wants more money from a wider and higher paying pool; poof: it announces that its mission is to offer its services to the Global Community and to Men & Women Everywhere. At whatever the global traffic will bear.
(My goodness, higher education is such a racket. And such a self-regarding and self-righteous one!)
Update: Thanks for some very good and thoughtful comments. I want to bring my response to a couple of them up into the post:
A couple of quick thoughts on the quality and money issue ...
First, the university has a serious conflict of interest on each of the questions of more money and more talent. The post addresses mostly the question of money — the university will ordinarily have reasons to raise direct revenues for itself even if it comes along with an indirect subsidy. In the case of talent, in the market for university reputation, out of state is fine with the university as it has no stake as such in the fortunes of the state itself.
With respect to either of those, there's no reason to believe that the university has the best interests of the state at heart, and good reason to think that its interests conflict with those of the state and its residents. Moreover, the questions here ultimately run to the net, long term welfare of the state as a political and social community, and there is little reason to believe that the university is able to make those judgments; those kinds of decisions, through budgetary processes and state mandates, are exactly the kinds of large scale social tradeoffs that legislatures exist to mediate.
There are important factual and value judgments that have to be made about various aspects of this. One is how much to trade off the hope that out of state talent will remain in state — this is frankcross's point — if given a valuable place at the university. Another is the quality — not just reputation, but quality — of a complex and interlinked research university across many fields — and how much that is connected with undergraduate admissions from in-state and out of state and internationally. Another is the value to be assigned to having some amount of the student body from someplace else.
Those are all complicated tradeoffs and assessments; they do not seem to me to be specially within the governance of a university that depends for so much upon the larger state budget and its taxpayers, now and in the past, and particularly given the conflicts for the university's interests. I think there is no simple answer to any of this. The enormous value to the wealth of California as a state owed over a hundred and more years to the investments in its three tier university system are staggering, and that is so despite the current difficulties in the state. But it seems to me equally that the interests of its higher education system have been diverging from the interests of the state's residents and society more broadly in many, many ways. And will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The LawProf Behind "Inside the Law School Scam"
In the latest post at Inside the Law School Scam, titled "An apology," the LawProf reveals himself to be the author of this essay.
UPDATE: Paul Caron rounds up coverage and background here.
Identifying Experts' Political Affiliations and Funding Sources in the Media
Liberal Pittsburgh political blogger "Davyoe" complains that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review misleadingly portrayed me as a "politically neutral" expert when they interviewed me about the recent individual mandate decision a few days ago. The type of issue he raises is commonly brought up these days:
While his description above seems politically neutral (he's just described as "an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law") parts of Somin's bio was conveniently omitted by the Scaife-employed [reporter] Craig Smith.
Somin is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Scaife-funded Cato Institute — and from that page we also learn that Somin blogs at the conservative/libertarian Volokh Conspiracy.
However brilliant Professor Somin may be, politically neutral he isn't. Smith should have pointed out Somin's connections to the political right.
Also omitted, of course, are the millions of dollars Smith's boss Richard Mellon Scaife has shuffled of to Cato, where Somin's a scholar.
The implication is that the media must disclose any connections, however indirect, that an expert has with politically motivated funders of any kind. Being an adjunct scholar at Cato is an unpaid position that doesn't give Cato any control over my research (or me over theirs) — much less giving any such control to individual Cato donors. If that is going to be the standard for what reporters must mention, it should be applied consistently across the board.
For example, most major universities get funding from liberal foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, and often also from individual liberal donors such as George Soros. Many of the liberal legal scholars who are quoted in the media in support of the individual mandate are affiliated with the American Constitution Society, which also gets some of its funding from Soros (full disclosure: I've spoken at several ACS events myself). Some of them also blog at liberal legal blogs, such as Balkinization.
Even more significantly, virtually every university (including mine) gets large amounts of money from the federal government, which is the defendant in the individual mandate cases and has a huge stake in the outcome. By Davyoe's standards, that would have to be mentioned any time an academic expert is quoted in support of the individual mandate or any other expansion of federal power. I suppose it would also have to be mentioned that many academics are employed by state universities controlled by one of the twenty-eight states that have filed suits against the mandate, including George Mason University, which is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The state and federal governments have a lot more leverage over me (and other academics) than Richard Mellon Scaife does. Even most private universities are heavily dependent on federal funds — much more than on any private donor.
There are, however, some good reasons for not mentioning these things every time an expert is quoted. First, virtually any article that quoted any academic expert on anything would then be cluttered with a long list of donors and affiliations. The net result is that reporters will usually shy away from quoting experts because doing so would require too much space. Second, in most cases the experts in question are not advocating their positions because of those affiliations, but rather the reverse. I'm not a libertarian because I'm affiliated with Cato and say what they pay me to say. Rather, I'm affiliated with Cato because I'm a libertarian and had been one for many years before I ever did any projects for them. If I was a liberal constitutional law scholar, I could easily avail myself of the much greater research funding available on the left. Similar reasoning applies to liberal legal scholars affiliated with ACS and other left of center organizations.
The situation may be different when an expert is directly employed by an organization with a stake in the outcome of a legal or policy dispute and is hired for the purpose of advocating that organization's viewpoint (e.g. — a spokesman for the Department of Justice who comments on the individual mandate case, or one who speaks for the plaintiffs). In that case, there is stronger reason for supposing that what he says is dictated by his affiliation with his employer. Presumably, he or she would be fired for expressing a contrary opinion.
In fairness, the Tribune-Review didn't mention a connection I have to the individual mandate cases that is much more important than those Davyoe focused on: I have written amicus briefs in several of the mandate cases on behalf of the Washington Legal Foundation and others. It's arguable that this should have been noted. At the same time, many liberal legal scholars have written amicus briefs on the other side, yet this is rarely if ever mentioned when they are quoted on the mandate cases in the media. Perhaps the point I made above with respect to my Cato affiliation also applies here. The amicus briefs were pro bono projects that I accepted because I already believed that the mandate is unconstitutional. I didn't come to that conclusion because I was asked to write those briefs. The reverse was true. Presumably, the same applies to the many liberal legal scholars who wrote amicus briefs on the other side. Still, it's reasonable to argue that when the media quotes legal scholars about a case, it's relevant to disclose any amicus briefs they may have written or signed in it.
On the other hand, it's much more tenuous to claim that the media should disclose any indirect affiliations with any donors whose political views place them on one side of the dispute in question. By that standard, there are no experts who qualify as "politically neutral." Virtually every expert employed by a research institute, think tank, or university has indirect connections to government or private donors with a political agenda.
Obviously, there is another sense in which most experts are not neutral. With rare exceptions, they tend to have strongly held views on the subjects they study, views that are often influenced by their general ideological outlook. These factors can sometimes blind the expert to the merits of opposing arguments. That's a real problem. But it's very different from the assumption that experts' views are dictated by various indirect affiliations to donors.
UPDATE: Davyoe responds to this post here. Interestingly, he admits that his view really does requires the media to mention all experts' connections to politically motivated, funders, however indirect. For the reasons I describe in the post, I think this is both unrealistic and unnecessary. Any story that quoted an expert would then be weighed down with long lists of all the donors (including government agencies) who have ever given money to any organization he has ever been affiliated with. The practical result would be to either make the stories unreadable or (more likely) to deter reporters from quoting experts in the first place.
Davyoe also tries to catch me in a supposed contradiction for disclosing that I have spoken at ACS events myself. But I didn't disclose that because I thought it was essential to identifying my supposed biases. I did so in order to make clear that I'm not trying to suggest that liberal scholars' affiliation with ACS somehow puts them beyond the pale or renders them unworthy of citation as experts. If a reporter quotes one of these scholars without mentioning their ACS ties, I don't think the reporter will have done anything wrong.
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