Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 45
July 16, 2013
Yglesias String, cont.
Matt Yglesias weighs in on the efficacy of public defenders without ever having read . . . oh, you know where this is going:
Matthew Yglesias speculates about what would have happened if George Zimmerman had been represented by a public defender. As somebody who knows quite a few public defenders (and — full disclosure — is married to one), I was surprised to see Yglesias describe most public defenders as having “little emotional … investment in winning the case.” It’s been my general observation that many public defenders are extremely passionate, whether about helping their clients, defeating overreaching prosecutors, or both. It’s not a bearable job if you don’t have an emotional investment in it.
That assertion aside, Yglesias’s broader point is to worry that those who are represented by public defenders may have worse outcomes than those with represented counsel because public defenders lack adequate incentives and resources. But some of the research on this is actually quite interesting. Morris Hoffman, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd wrote a paper arguing that while public defenders’ clients do tend to fare worse than those with private counsel, that may be caused by a selection effect . . .
Knowing stuff is for suckers.
Bonus: He thinks British Imperials never wore shorts.
July 12, 2013
Speaking of Misreading
The following passage appears in a post by Clare Halpine over at NRO:
Much of our culture today is predicated upon our belief that overpopulation is the root cause of the world’s ills. Consider these statements, which have recently graced the pages of learned tomes, the first from a New York Times commentary:
“Our failure to regulate the human population ensures a future of environmental toxicity including genotoxicity, disease, famine, warfare, and massive social upheaval . . .”
And from Jonathan Last’s book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting:
“Children are actually an impediment to economic and social success . . .”
The theory of overpopulation informs our view of life so fundamentally that although no one really knows what genotoxicity is, and children are not typically birthed for reasons of social climbing, we live schizophrenically: rejoicing in birth notifications and baby shower e-vites from our friends, while feeling guilty for being accessory to what we have been told is the selfish act of reproduction.
Really? I’m not sure if this is a misreading or a mischaracterization of WTE. Or inelegant writing.
Btw, I’m not sure where that quote she ascribes to me is from. It’s not in the book and it’s not in the interview she links to. Entirely possible I’ve said it somewhere, but what the book says (and the formulation I try to use, not always successful) is that we have “a system where economic and social success are largely dependent on not having children.” Which is a very different connotation.
(I used a similar formulation in a 2006 piece: “We have reached a point where children are actually an impediment to economic and social success.”
Or maybe she’s just the first person to come away from What to Expect thinking that I’m selling the dangers of overpopulation.
Ruy Teixeira on Sean Trende
It’s nice to see that I’m not the only person Ruy Teixeira attacks without reading carefully: Sean Trende’s response to Teixeira’s criticism of his work is low-key and kind of damning.
July 10, 2013
Gay Marriage Recriminations: “Ender’s Game” Edition
Galley Friend J.S. sends along this Slashfilm post on Orson Scott Card and Ender’s Game, which walks past outright hostility and up to the line of calling for a boycott of the film. Because Card views gay marriage the way Barrack Obama did the day before yesterday. When Obama was a hateful bigot. Obvs.
But that’s just par. What makes the post worth noting are two things.
(1) It’s another data point on the question of how magnanimous the same-sex marriage movement will be in victory. Here we have Card waving the white flag and abjectly asking that his views on traditional marriage be allowed to be privately held. And even that seems unacceptable.
(2) More importantly, this is a fine example of the victors writing history. In the course of his surrender, Card writes, “Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.”
Slashfilm answers with the following:
First of all, just because marriage wasn’t being debated in the Supreme Court in 1984 doesn’t mean the gay rights movement didn’t exist back then.
Of course, it isn’t the case that gay marriage “wasn’t being debated in the Supreme Court in 1984.” Gay marriage wasn’t being debated anywhere. It wasn’t even being debated in the gay rights movement. The idea of same-sex marriage existing as a legal construct–let alone being a constitutionally-guaranteed right–didn’t emerge until sometime in the late-’80s/early ’90s and only appeared on the very fringes of anyone’s notice in 1993, when a Hawaiian court looked at the issue.
Most Americans didn’t really notice the gay marriage movement until 1996, when DOMA was signed into law by another notorious bigot, Bill Clinton.
It’s not just that the Right People (Clinton, Obama) get a pass on being hatemongers, while Orson Scott Card is History’s Greatest Monster. It’s instructive how we’re now re-writing history to suggest that the gay marriage movement has been with us forever as part of the eternal struggle for truth and justice.
Incidentally, this back-dating is helpful in further vilifying the Wrong People because it allows us to show that they aren’t just morally culpable for having the wrong opinions now, but are inferior for having had the wrong opinions then, too.
For the Yglesias Clip File
Pinko-squish that I am, I’m the last guy in the world to spring to the defense of CEOs, because I think you can make a pretty good argument that CEO compensation is distorted by so many externalities that it represents “true market value” in about the same way that the price of gas in any given locality represents the price of crude. Matt Yglesias isn’t helping though. Here’s a take-down of his recent post on CEO compensation in America vs. Europe. Spoiler alert: There’s a whole body of research on exactly this subject which Yglesias seems to know nothing about:
The entire notion that American chief executives earn a lot more than their foreign counterparts is largely misplaced. A study that looked at this question last year found that what appeared to be the great variance in CEO pay between the U.S. and Europe is largely illusory.
After controlling for firm size, ownership, and board structure, all characteristics that often differ between U.S. and international companies, the gap is reduced, with U.S. executives earning only a 26 percent premium. And when the analysis adjusts for the greater use of stock options and share awards in the U.S., the pay premium is reduced to an economically modest 14 percent. Maybe that would be a nice raise for a European CEO, but it’s not likely enough to induce him to cross the Atlantic and emigrate to the U.S.
The fact is that U.S. companies are more likely to be owned by institutional owners and to have independent boards. These features of the American corporate ownership are closely linked to a larger fraction of compensation being paid in stock, for the very good reason that diversified institutional shareholders are interested in a rising stock market and want to provide incentives for stocks across the board to rise. Concentrated ownership—by families, by the government, by banks—is far more common outside the U.S. and apparently has an effect on how CEOs are paid.
Pedro Matos, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, was one of the authors of that study.
“In other words, the world is flat for CEOs, or nearly so,” Matos wrote in Forbes earlier this year.
Knowing stuff is boring.
Bonus nugget for the Juicebox clip file: Don’t forget this passage from CJR’s profile of Ezra Klein:
“If you wanted to tell the story of my coming up, Matt Yglesias is the key figure,” Klein says. “Matt’s blog was a major inspiration for me, because he was a college student and he did this kind of data-driven, very careful work that appealed to me.”
July 8, 2013
Freestyle Bane
Kind of reminds me of Cypress Hill.
June 28, 2013
The Physics of Traffic
This piece of genius does a good job of distilling a lot of the math behind traffic, which is something of a minor obsession of mine.
What’s new to me is the concept of anti-traffic spacing, which, now that you think about it for five minutes, makes sense.
But more intriguingly, it makes a sensational argument for driverless cars. Because computer-driven cars could be programmed to behave in an optimal, coordinated manner so as to mitigate traffic in a way human drivers simply can’t.
The Gay Marriage Movement in Victory
Ross Douthat mused the other day that the future of religious liberty in America will depend mostly on how magnanimous the gay marriage movement deigns to be toward the knuckle-draggers who bitterly cling to the antiquated views of marriage once espoused by Barack Obama in April of 2012. He may be right, though there are other, less-condign possible futures. But let’s leave that alone for now and do a quick temperature check on the magnanimity of the gay marriage movement.
Here’s John Aravosis going after an evil, right-wing Republican hate group (the Family Research Council) for “the most anti-gay logo” in the history of politics. You’ll want to pay attention to two aspects of this post.
(1) Aravosis thinks the logo in question is hateful because it features “a man performing oral sex.” Tobias Funke responds, “No, but funny how your mind would go there boy-Michael.”
The stick-figure in question is pretty obviously a person kneeling in prayer. I suppose you could call this a Rorschach test of some sort if you really wanted to stretch things. But the point here is that Aravosis doesn’t even raise the possibility that FRC was indicating prayer. He jumps straight to the hate histrionics.
(2) Aravosis opens his post with the following line:
In one of the most unfortunate moves in American politics since Republicans kept referring to the Tea Party “teabagging” . . .
I had to read that three times to make sure I understood what he’s saying. In Aravosis’ reading of history, the Tea Party/teabagging stuff was a slur perpetrated by the Tea Party rather than against the Tea Party. That’s a pretty tortured depiction of reality. Parts of the Tea Party originally called for sending tea bags to Congress as a message–we do all remember where “Tea Party” comes from, correct?–and then the left quickly adopted “tea bagger” as a slur against Tea Party members.
Aravosis is just one data point in a wider gay marriage movement that consists of roughly 80 percent 65 percent 51 percent of the country, so I don’t want to make too much of it. But as a quick temperature read on their inclination towards the tiny rump minority which believes traditional marriage is important, it’s worth marking down.
The conventional view is that, whatever else happens in the realm of civil society, the religious liberty line will at least hold at the door of the church. I’m not particularly convinced and whatever the case, I’ll be surprised if that line isn’t repeatedly assaulted in the next decade.
June 27, 2013
Wimbledon 2013 Notes
Yesterday was, by far, the weirdest day of grand slam tennis I’ve ever seen. Injuries, walk-throughs, Federer out in the 2nd round. Maybe the craziest stat of the day: Seven players who have held the #1 ranking–seven of them!–lost in one day. That’s nuts.
Looking at the draws the rest of the way in, Djokovic and Serena are obviously the favorites. But one quick thought about Serena:
Win or lose, she’s top three women ever, right? Court, Graf, and no one else is close. One of the remarkable aspects of her career is that she was dominant both early and late.
But I wonder about this late-stage dominance. A lot of it is Serena, of course. She rebuilt her body and decided to take tennis seriously again. Yet at least part of this story is the total implosion of the generation of tennis players behind her.
Serena was born in 1981 and didn’t become a dominant singles player She succeeded a generation of top women including Lindsay Davenport (1976), Mary Pierce (1975), Jennifer Capriati (1976). All of them won majors. Serena’s own generation includes her sister Venus, Kim Clijsters (1983), Justine Henin (1982), and Martina Hingis (1980). This is probably the Greatest Generation of women’s tennis because it features four players who were legitimate, long-time #1s with multiple majors. It’s an unbelievably loaded cohort. And interestingly enough, Serena didn’t fully dominate them until most of them had cleared the field.
Look at the list of women’s major champions and you see generational waves coming in every seven years or so. But that never really happened for the group of players that came after Serena’s generation. You have Maria Sharapova (1987) and Victoria Azarenka (1989) as multiple major winners. But that’s it. Ana Ivanovic (1987) won one French. Petra Kvitova (1990) picked up one Wimbledon. (Most of the freak, one-off winners, they’ve come from Serena’s generation with wins from journeyman such as Fancesca Schiavone, Li Na, or Samantha Stosur.) No other women born after 1987 have won majors. No woman born after 1990 has won one. Heck, only one woman in today’s top 25 was born after 1990.
That’s amazing.
The crop of women tennis players born after 1983 has been an incredible bust (with the sole exception of Sharapova). The failure of the generation of players including Wozniacki, Radwanska, Kirilenko, Cibulkova, Radwanska, etc. is, to my mind one of the great untold stories of tennis. And you can’t really talk about Serena’s late-career success without taking account of it.
