Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 368

Better Late Than Never?

A record-breaking 87 prisoners were exonerated in the US last year:

Today’s report from the National Registry of Exonerations counts more than 1,300 exonerations in the past 25 years. Among the long term trends they discuss:

* Twenty-seven (27) of the 87 known exonerations that occurred in 2013 — almost one-third of the total number for the year — were in cases in which no crime in fact occurred, a record number.

* Fifteen (15) known exonerations in 2013 — 17 percent — occurred in cases in which the defendants were convicted after pleading guilty, also a record number. The rate of exonerations after a guilty plea has doubled since 2008 and the number continues to grow. …

Last year, 40 people convicted of murder were exonerated, including one person who’d been sentenced to death. Murder and sexual assault convictions make up the majority of exonerations. The report points out that that may be largely because the meager resources available to review old cases tend to focus on the crimes with the most severe penalties. That would indicate that there may be a whole universe of innocent prisoners convicted of lesser crimes who simply don’t have anyone to fight for them.

Balko has a more upbeat view:

The fact that we just had a record year for exonerations – and more than a decade after the introduction of modern DNA testing – is a good sign. If nothing else, that we’re exonerating more people means there are more resources being devoted to looking for these cases. It means that courts are more open to reconsidering old cases. It’s also a testament to the fact that, in some parts of the country, police and prosecutors are actively participating in task forces charged with seeking out the wrongly convicted.

Andrew Cohen thinks there are “two relevant facts worth noting that are not synthesized into the exoneration report’s analysis”:

The first is that not all states are equal when it comes to prioritizing exonerations. Some simply care less about justice for the wrongfully convicted than others. Some are spending money on programs designed to ferret out inaccurate trial results while others are not. The registry that has given us this report may be national, in other words, but the remedies in place surely are not. Congress could help rectify that. So could the Supreme Court. So could the executive branch. Maybe this year.

The second point that needs to be made in the shadow of the report is that some states today are moving against the flow. Lawmakers in at least two states, Alabama and Tennessee, are seriously considering measures that would tighten appellate deadlines in capital cases, making exonerations harder to achieve.

(Graph via The National Registry of Exonerations’ “Exonerations in 2013”)

Quote For The Day

“It is fair to wonder if Hillary Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks. It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime. Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains.

Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say,” – Josh Green, Atlantic, 2006.

Mental Health Break

What Insurer Bailout? Ctd

The CBO predicted that Obamacare’s risk corridors will save money. Barro takes that estimate with a grain of salt:

CBO’s report does not say it considered the one piece of information that really would make them smarter than the insurers: up-to-date demographic information on the health status of the insurance enrollees. CBO can’t have this information because it’s not collected through the signup process; it will only be known as people start filing claims.

I don’t mean to insult the economists at CBO, who are smart people doing careful work. But the value of their projections is driven by the quality of information available to formulate those projections, and that quality is lower here than when, say, CBO estimates how much income tax the federal government will collect last year.

So it’s too early to say the risk corridor will save taxpayers money. We don’t know. Which, again, is why the program exists to begin with.

Suderman adds:

CBO’s score of the risk corridors relied heavily on Medicare Part D’s history because the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with risk corridors in the health insurance market. Given the budget office’s cautious nature, it’s an understandable choice. But it may not actually tell us all that much about the practical reality of the provision and its probable costs.

America And The Protestant Work Ethic

It’s struck me that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic – unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique of Obamacare – as opposed to the mendacious “two millions jobs lost” line. A reader writes about his own experience:

My job for the past 20 years was recently eliminated. I am 63 and originally planned to work until at least 65 for one reason: Health Insurance.

If I had to enter the old insurance market at my age, with pre-existing conditions, it would be unaffordable and I would have had to look for work that offered insurance. With the ACA, I can afford health insurance until I am 65, and for that reason I have decided to retire rather than look for work. That provides an opening for someone younger to get a job I might have taken. And I get to enjoy an earlier retirement, spend some of my money on things other than insurance, and be one less person competing for a good paying job. A win-win for the country in my eyes.

Hard to argue with that – but it does mean a relaxation in the work imperative – and that’s worth debating. Or I think of myself – a small business owner with serious pre-existing conditions (HIV, chronic asthma, mild depression). Until Obamacare, it was unthinkable for me to be unemployed at any point, because of the health insurance issue. I was always terrified of losing access and being bankrupted by treating a disease I could not get insurance for. Now (if I were not neck-deep in Dishness) it’s conceivable. I feel empowered by the ACA not to work if I choose to and have the savings to take a break. There are a zillion different scenarios in which the guarantee of health insurance removes the absolute necessity of working if you have some savings to fall back on.

Or think of our debate about social mobility and inequality. With wages stagnant for most Americans since the mid 1970s, and hard, often back-breaking work failing to provide real gains in income, doesn’t the logic of the work ethic get attenuated? Isn’t it also affected by your knowledge that many people at the very top of the pyramid rake in unimaginable dough for working far less hard than your average teacher or healthcare worker? And isn’t the vast accumulation of wealth among so few itself a contributor to the decline in the work ethic, since it provides so many dependents with such easy, unearned cash? It’s not just the left that has created these disincentives. Global capitalism has done its part as well.

Or take the issue of marijuana legalization. One strong thread in the opposition is the fear that we’ll all stay on the couch, binge-watch Netflix and sleep in late, while the Chinese eat our lunch. And it’s strongest among those who experienced the American dream – the over-60s – than among those for whom it seems like a distant memory – the under-30s. And then there is immigration reform. Isn’t there an obvious, if unstated, cultural fear here that Latino culture is less work-obsessed than white Protestant culture (despite the staggering work ethic of so many Latino immigrants)? Beneath the legitimate concerns about border enforcement and security – which Obama has beefed up beyond measure, by the way – there is an anxiety that the core identity of America might change. We might actually begin to live more like Europeans do. Heaven forfend.

At the core of this is a real debate about what we value in life, and what makes life meaningful.

And that’s a real debate we need to have more often and more publicly. Work is an ennobling, mobilizing endeavor. It is our last truly common denominator as Americans. But what if its pre-eminence is unavoidably weakened by unchangeable economic forces? What if the accumulation of wealth through work is beginning to seem like a mug’s game to more and more, trapped in a stalled social mobility escalator? Why wouldn’t people adjust their values to fit the times?

I have to say I feel conflicted about this. I’m a pathologically hard worker, and for me, the American dream remains not only intact, but still inspiring. I believe in work. I don’t want the welfare state to be a cushion rather than a safety net. At the same time, it seems to me that as a culture, we have a work ethic that can be, and often is, its own false idol. The Protestant work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving, self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy. And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something will give.

And would it be such a terrible thing if exhausted American workers were able to take real vacations of more than two weeks a year; or if white-collar professionals could afford to take a breather in mid-career without worrying about their health insurance; or if 63-year-olds like our reader could actually enjoy two more years of leisure at the end of their careers? Would it be so awful if more Americans smoked pot and were able to garner a few more moments of chill and relaxation rather than stress or worry? How damaging would it be if a little Catholic, Latin culture mitigated the unforgiving treadmill so many of us are on?

As I say, I’m conflicted on this. I struggle every day with a saner balance between work and life, and work has consistently won. But the older I get the more I treasure not the money but the time I spend on this earth. I weigh the benefits of incessant work against the new friends I never make, the books I never read, the vacations I find hard to take, the empty afternoons that make life worth living. And, as in any individual life, the life-work balance needs adjusting over time in a society as a whole.

At what point, in other words, is the pursuit of material wealth eclipsing the pursuit of happiness this country was founded to uphold? Is the correction against the Protestant work ethic a destruction of the American values – or actually a sign of their revival after a period of intense and often fruitless striving? I suspect the latter.

(Photo: Max Weber, 1917)

The Science Guy vs The Creationist

Jerry Coyne scores the debate between Bill Nye and young-earth creationist Ken Ham:

Nye did a pretty good job defending evolution, and calling out Ham for crazy stuff like the Ark story and the supposed inconstancy of natural laws. But he could have done better. In response to Ham’s claim that there’s no way to test whether radiometric dating is accurate, or that different minerals in the same rock give different dates, Nye could have mentioned that we do indeed have ways to judge whether radiometric dating is reliable, in particular the isochron method. Nye used the term “higher” and “lower” animals, which even Darwin realized is not valid terminology under the theory of evolution (every species is equally “evolved” in terms of how long its ancestors have been around: we’re all about 2.5 billion years old. I realize that this is the quibbling of an evolutionary biologist, but stuff like the accuracy of fossil dating represented a missed opportunity for Nye.

Mark Joseph Stern holds that it wasn’t really a debate, as only one side was bound by reality:

For all his witless rejection of data, Ham displays a certain brilliance in rankling non-creationists with his insistent irrationality. The maddening aspect of his creationism is not just that it’s ridiculous, but that he insists it’s a perfectly logical, empirically verifiable scientific explanation of the universe. It doesn’t matter how meticulously or forcefully Nye rebuffs the illogic of Ham’s views; Ham is always ready with a red herring rejoinder, a straw man riposte, an indignant counter-argument based on nothing but his own opportunistic exegesis. Nye has the burden of being tethered to facts; Ham has the luxury to create his own fiction.

Saletan considers the finer points of Ham’s theories:

The most intriguing part of the debate was Ham’s discussion of “kinds.” This is a creationist way of explaining visible evolution. According to Ham, finches and dogs have evolved, but finches have always been finches, and dogs have always been dogs. This boundary—evolution within kinds, but not evolution from one kind to another—is supposed to protect the myths of creation and the ark. But the boundary turns out to be flexible. To reduce the animals on the ark to a manageable cargo, Ham’s associates at Answers in Genesis have rationalized the number of “kinds” down to fewer than 1,000. This revision means that God did less of the work of diversification than originally supposed, so post-flood evolution had to do more. In effect, it’s creeping Darwinism.

Kevin Vallier makes the theological argument against young-earth creationists:

Ham, [Kent] Hovind and others act as if their interpretation of the Bible is the only “literal” one, when many church fathers have read Genesis 1-2 allegorically since Origen (184/5-253/4) (see Biologos’s discussion). Augustine is perhaps the most famous one of these. In the debate Ham says that you can believe in evolution and be a Christian, but he immediately adds that they have a severe theological conundrum in doing so (making sense of how death entered the world). Well, Mr. Ham, Augustine was pretty smart and he didn’t see the conundrum, so why should we?

Dan Vergano explores why our beliefs on this subject are so sticky:

[Yale professor Dan] Kahan’s research suggests that’s because people aren’t really answering whether they literally believe in Genesis when they answer questions about creationism and evolution. Rather, Kahan says, they are telling the pollsters what they think their friends and neighbors believe. If you’re a car dealer in a conservative Christian town, for example, you don’t want your customers to think you aren’t one of them or else you aren’t going to sell a lot of pickup trucks. Likewise, a coffee-shop owner in much more secular Boston isn’t going to make customers comfortable selling Bible stories alongside the soy lattes.

Can The Closet Be Critical In Some Cases?

Vanessa Vitiello pays homage to the closeted public figures who used their positions to advance gay rights from within the halls of power:

This is not meant to suggest that traditional activism was unimportant to the struggle for gay and lesbian equality. Quite the contrary: Before the Stonewall riots begat the modern gay rights movement, it seemed unlikely that the status quo of hiding—and of meekly submitting to occasional acts of harassment and violence by law enforcement—would ever change. An activist front in the battle for acceptance was a necessary precondition for subsequent developments. But activists on the outside looking in could never have brought about change so quickly on their own; they needed closet cases embedded in the existing power structure to serve as catalysts.

In 2014, even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has gay friends. But without the closet it’s hard to imagine how that could have come to pass. In order to get from there to here, we needed people like Vaughn Walker. You may remember Walker as the federal judge who ruled California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional. He was first nominated to the federal judiciary by no less a conservative than Ronald Regan, was then blocked by Democrats (due, in part, to his perceived anti-gay stances), only to be re-nominated by George H. W. Bush and eventually confirmed. Walker didn’t come out of the closet until 2011, after he’d retired from the judiciary.

Just What The Economy Ordered?

Rep. Chris Van Hollen claims that Obamacare will lower unemployment:

How Douthat thinks about the labor market effects:

The bigger the effect, the more likely that the people dropping out aren’t just, say, parents cutting hours to spend more time at home while the other spouse works full time, but people we should want to be attached to the workforce, for their own long-term good and the good of the economy as well.

Which is why it’s appropriate that the new C.B.O. projection of 2 million to 2.5 million job-equivalents disappearing has inspired more disquiet and debate than the old projection of 500,000-900,000 … because it’s a sign, however provisional, that the costs of Obamacare’s workforce effects might exceed the benefits. I don’t see liberals reckoning seriously with that possibility, and I think they really should.

Kliff talks to economists about the ACA’s impact on employment:

“On the one hand, when you expand a program where eligibility is based on income, that means if people increase their income, they could lose eligibility. That may create a disincentive to find a job,” says [Harvard University health economist Kate] Baicker, who was a member of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 2007. “But if health insurance makes people healthier, it might give them extra resources that could increase their ability to hold or search for a job. People have made arguments in both directions.”

Ryan Avent chimes in:

The argument that the ACA will be good for the economy centres on the view—not at all absurd—that insured workers will be healthier and therefore more productive over a longer working life, that insurance related job-lock will become less of a problem and productivity will rise as a result of better job matches, that reduced dependency on employer-provided coverage will encourage entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, and that constraining health-care cost growth will either raise real wages or make it more attractive to hire or a bit of both.

Now you can argue that on reasonable guesses about how these effects play out, effective labour supply still declines, relative to the pre-ACA trend, as a result of Obamacare. What you can’t say, first, is that they are irrelevant and, second, that they are included in the CBO analysis. In fact, what you should say is that they are relevant and are not included in the analysis.

John Cassidy qualifies the CBO’s projections:

In exploring some of these effects, the C.B.O. was making a valuable contribution to the public debate. But its actual figures are merely informed guesses about what might happen in the next few years, and they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Obamacare is so big and so new that we can’t be sure what impact it will have. In coming up with the estimates that two million jobs will be eliminated by 2017 and 2.5 million will be eliminated by 2024 (or the equivalent in hours worked), the C.B.O. relied on academic studies of previous policy changes, such as changes in tax rates and alterations to the eligibility requirements for Medicaid. These studies may provide a reliable guide to how Obamacare will play out—or they may not. If we’re not comparing apples to oranges, exactly, we’re certainly comparing Granny Smiths to McIntoshes. And, in any case, the conclusions of the studies differ.

Memories Of Molestation, Ctd

Another reader shares his story:

I just wanted to offer my two cents on one particular aspect of the Woody Allen case. Many of his defenders point to the allegations that Mia Farrow “coached” Dylan before she spoke to the police. The edits in Dylan’s video testimony certainly suggest that Mia was at least talking to her and shaping her testimony, which could lend credence to the claim that the molestation was “invented” by Mia. But my experience as a victim of sexual abuse could suggest a different motivation.

My old sister and I were sexually abused by my father when we were very young. Our parents separated when I was two weeks old, and on weekend visits with my father, he would do many inappropriate things, similar to the actions that Allen has been accused of.

Inappropriate touching, yes. Penetration, no. The custody battle went on for years, and, of course, these allegations of abuse were a major factor in it. And yes, my mother coached me and my sister. She discussed what wording I would use when testifying before a judge. But she didn’t do this because the allegations were her invention. She coached me because she had already run into many sexist judges who were liable to take my father’s side in the matter. She coached us for the same reason every lawyer coaches their client before taking the stand: to make sure they communicate what they want to and to ensure that their words are not misinterpreted.

I’m not convinced of Woody Allen’s guilt, and I also understand the institutional hatred that a mother can instill in her children towards her ex-husband. And I’m sure that “invented abuse” and “implanted memories” are real things. But the coaching of a nervous, vulnerable child before they testify in a case that they really don’t understand is not evidence of either.

Previous readers on molestation here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Five standouts: baked Alaska; Hillary Clinton’s close to non-existent record in twenty years of public life; cannabis’s non-proven relationship with schizophrenia; the promise of an anti-war Republican nominee; and the hideous abuse and violence against gay people in Putin’s near-fascist Russia. Oh, and Putin’s Olympic Potemkin Village.

The most popular post of the day remained Debating Woody Allen on Superbowl Sunday; followed by Where The Non-Believers Are.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: People watch as waves crash against the seafront and the railway line that has been closed due to storm damage at Dawlish on February 5, 2014 in Devon, England. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.)