Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 416

An Unwelcome Christmas Gift

Unless Congress acts, 1.3 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits on December 28th. Rand Paul claims this is for their own good:

Matthew O’Brien counters:

This long-term unemployment trap has nothing to do with long-term benefits. Indeed, [Rand] Ghayad [a PhD candidate at Northeastern University] looked at the labor markets for unemployed people who are and aren’t eligible for benefits, and found they’ve been equally dysfunctional. No, this long-term unemployment trap has to do with our great recession, and not-so-great recovery. With a labor market that doesn’t work for people who made the mistake of losing their job at the wrong time. If anything, unemployment benefits have kept people from giving up; remember, you have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for them. The San Francisco Fed, for one, estimates that unemployment would have been 0.4 percentage points lower without extended benefits, mostly because more people would have stopped trying to find work.

Josh Green runs the numbers:

How much does growth stand to suffer?

Well, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the cost of extending federal benefits through 2014 would be about $25 billion. But the economic impact of cutting them off would be larger. That’s because the unemployed reliably spend the benefits they get, creating a “multiplier effect” in the economy. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics (MCO), estimates that every dollar of unemployment benefits generates about $1.55 in economic activity, meaning that the federal benefits set to end later this month will cost the economy about $39 billion in spending next year (which would, in turn, have supported 310,000 jobs, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute).

However, the effect on the economy will be worse than just the lost spending from those 1.3 million people. Throughout the year, state unemployment benefits will expire, with those who lose them having no emergency federal benefits to fall back on. Last week, a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Labor Department estimated that an additional 3.6 million people stand to lose access to benefits next year, so the drop in demand will be much larger than $39 billion.

Kilgore doubts unemployment benefits will get extended:

So it appears a budget “deal” that raises appropriations above sequester levels and avoids another government shutdown will involve sacrificing the Democratic priority of extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. It’s not clear why congressional Democrats are making it so clear so early that these folks are going to be the first to go over the side, but as Greg Sargent reports abundantly today, the signals are unmistakable.

Beutler looks at how the unemployment benefits fight intersects with the ongoing budget negotiations:

This is back-of-the-envelope. But if emergency unemployment benefits lapse, the $25 billion hit to the economy would largely, if not entirely, offset the fiscal easing Ryan and Murray are contemplating on the discretionary side of the budget. That’s not trivial

If a Ryan-Murray deal were the only viable budget vehicle, then digging in for extending emergency UI benefits as part of said deal would be such an obvious play politically, and on the economic merits, that it’s hard to see Democrats’ reluctance to pick the fight at this juncture as anything other than a testament to their belief that Republicans could act unilaterally and leave them on the hook for shutting down the government.

Given the weak-kneed performance House GOP moderates staged during the shutdown fight — the willingness they demonstrated to allow hard-liners to lead them by the nose — it’s hard to blame Democrats for assuming these guys might not be reliable allies of convenience. And if that assessment is correct, then the two in the bush are unattainable, and Democrats are making the right move.

Beer As Methadone

A charity group in Amsterdam is paying alcoholics to clean up public parks – and paying them in beer:

The former public nuisances start off the working day with two cans of beer each at 9 a.m. and walk out into the park and the adjoining streets with their garbage bags. They have another two beers at lunch and one more when they’re done at 3:30 p.m. Apart from the beer, the day’s wages amount to 10 euros ($13.69). In typical Dutch fashion, this is a highly practical arrangement: With a can of beer costing as little as 40 U.S. cents, the men earn less than $20 per six-hour day if you count the hot meal they are served. This is far below the national minimum wage, $11.60 per hour. Nobody complains. The beer is the alcoholics’ fuel, and some of them even say they are drinking less because, for the first time in years, they have some structure to their day.

Katelyn Fossett wrote last month about the problems she sees with the policy:

Paying alcoholics in beer doesn’t just turn a blind eye to the problem in the name of practicality but turns it into labor that benefits the city, even at the risk of worsening these alcoholics’ drinking problem. The plan highlights a problematic quality of so-called “Dutch pragmatism”:

If a government really does subscribe to the premise that social ills like alcoholism are inevitable, then can it be implicated in encouraging it, even if it’s part of a scheme that obviously profits the city? In other words, if cities are free from the burden of correcting social ills because they are inevitable, are they also free from the guilt of potentially worsening it?

Eric Crampton disagreed with Fossett, writing that instead of “enabling alcoholism [the initiative] looks a lot more like harm-minimisation to me”:

I don’t know, but would be willing to bet, that most of these workers were consuming rather more than the equivalent of five cans of beer per day before they started in. The delivery is paced throughout the day so there’s no chance any of them get drunk. By delivering the beer as beer rather than as the cash equivalent encourages pacing things rather than having the workers spend it all on lower cost per unit binge at the end of the day.

Sarah Hedgecock zooms out:

Although the first program of this kind was in Canada, it’s well-suited to the Netherlands’ famous disdain for zero-tolerance policies. It’s certainly an approach employed in many countries with regard to other vices: the idea takes the same approach as methadone clinics, which provide a less-strong drug to serious heroin addicts on the road to recovery. If some of Amsterdam’s alcoholics are working a full shift and drinking beer, it’s that many fewer lying unemployed in the city’s parks, polishing off bottles of hard liquor. In other words: it’s not a cure, but it’s a start.

Hersh vs Obama

Yesterday, the administration called Sy Hersh’s latest report – turned down by the Washington Post and the New Yorker – “simply false.” Money quote:

“The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack,” Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

Count me unsurprised that the US intelligence establishment refuses to accept that its findings might have been cherry-picked by those in the administration who had long wanted to go to war in Syria anyway. Count me also unpersuaded by the push-back.

Check out, for example, this blog on the circumstances surrounding the August 21 attack. It really does what the new media does best: it takes you through the evidence, with links, to a conclusion that the al Nusra front might very well have been the instigator. It convinced me, at the very least, that this remains an open question. Liberal internationalists are just as likely as neocons to see things they want to see and ignore those things they don’t. The need to meddle in other countries finds its justifications as it goes along. A reader adds:

If you look at the Russian presentation of facts and evidence, especially as put out by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, it was far more accurate and more candid than was the American presentation of facts and evidence.

In the end the Russians played a key positive role in defusing the situation. But what’s really remarkable, they were also consistently far more honest about what they were up to, and what was going on on the ground in Syria, than was the United States. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

I come away from this thinking very poorly of our intelligence establishment. They’re bloated, lazy, stupid and increasingly dangerous to the United States and the world. It’s a clear demonstration of the fact that throwing billions of dollars at it doesn’t get you better intelligence.

The GOP rails on about this moronic Benghazi “scandal.” But this is a real scandal. Watch official Washington just ignore it.

(Photo: An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube by the Local Committee of Arbeen on August 21, 2013 allegedly shows Syrians covering a mass grave containing bodies of victims that Syrian rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces in eastern Ghouta and Zamalka, on the outskirts of Damascus. The allegation of chemical weapons being used in the heavily-populated areas came on the second day of a mission to Syria by UN inspectors, but the claim, which could not be independently verified, was vehemently denied by the Syrian authorities, who said it was intended to hinder the mission of UN chemical weapons inspectors. By DSK/AFP/Getty Images.)

Coming Out Of The Year, Ctd

A reader writes:

My favorite from that list has to be Lucas Cruikshank. When that video first made the news, I’d never heard of him (I still haven’t, except for this, but I’m 41, not exactly Nickelodeon’s demographic, despite having grown up on “You Can’t Do That On Television”). But I love seeing this way-so-gay kid (OK he’s 20) so at home in his own skin, having a ball with his best friend (who prayed for years for a gay best friend – how old was she when she started praying and how great is that in its own little way?). This isn’t someone who has limped through high school and college coming up with excused for not having a girlfriend. And he stars on a children’s television network, where 30 years ago that would have at least gotten him blacklisted and probably resulted in national hysteria.

Forty-something celebrities coming out in the safety of established careers or personal fortunes, now that there are fewer consequences, doesn’t do much for me, but knowing that millions of gay kids have it better than I did growing up is still pretty nice.

Yes it is.

The Lives Vaccines Save

Ronald Bailey explains why libertarians should not support the right of vaccine refuseniks to put the rest of us at risk:

People who don’t wish to take responsibility for their contagious microbes will often try to justify their position by noting the fact that the mortality rates of many infectious diseases had declined significantly before vaccines came along. And it is certainly true that a lot of that decline in infectious disease mortality occurred as a result of improved sanitation and water chlorination. A 2004 study by the Harvard University economist David Cutler and the National Bureau of Economic Research economist Grant Miller estimated that the provision of clean water “was responsible for nearly half of the total mortality reduction in major cities, three-quarters of the infant mortality reduction, and nearly two-thirds of the child mortality reduction.” Improved nutrition also reduced mortality rates, enabling infants, children, and adults to fight off diseases that would have more likely killed their malnourished ancestors.

But vaccines have played a substantial role in reducing death rates too.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the annual average number of cases and resulting deaths of various diseases before the advent of vaccines to those occurring in 2006. Before an effective diphtheria vaccine was developed, for example, there were about 21,000 cases of the disease each year, 1,800 of them leading to death. No cases or deaths from the disease were recorded in 2006. Measles averaged 530,000 cases and 440 deaths per year before the vaccine. In 2006, there were 55 cases and no deaths. Whooping cough saw around 200,000 cases and 4,000 deaths annually. In 2006, there were nearly 16,000 cases and 27 deaths. Polio once averaged around 16,000 cases and 1,900 deaths. No cases were recorded in 2006. The number of Rubella cases dropped from 48,000 to 17, and the number of deaths dropped from 17 to zero.

His bottom line:

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins”… To borrow Holmes’ metaphor, people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to “swing” their microbes at other people.

Last week, Alexandra Sifferlin slammed Katie Couric for lending credence to vaccine fear-mongering after she hosted opponents of the HPV vaccine on her daytime talk show:

The two HPV vaccines currently available, Gardasil and Cervarix, are both proven safe through clinical trials, independent studies, and post licensure monitoring. The CDC and FDA also continue to track the vaccines’ safety. And yet Couric has framed the issue as if there were a debate to be had about whether the HPV vaccines are good for the public’s health.

“This kind of coverage is so incredibly irresponsible,” says Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy. “The danger of saying we are going to present both sides of an issue, when all of the facts line up on one side, is that as far as the audience is concerned, you are giving these sides equal weight. It presents a false impression that there is a legitimate debate here.”

A Snowflake Farmer

Meet Kenneth Libbrecht:

Libbrecht’s process, developed over the past few years, is done in a cold chamber and takes about 45 minutes in total. He starts with a completely clean piece of glass, and scatters many microscopic ice crystals onto it. With a microscope, he isolates a particular crystal, then blows slightly warmer humid air onto the glass. The water vapor condenses on the seed crystal, just like in a real cloud, eventually forming a visible snowflake.

Working with this process, Libbrecht has determined the temperature and humidity levels that lead to each particular kind of snowflake. “I call them ‘designer snowflakes,’ because you can change the conditions as you grow them and predict what they’ll will look like,” he says. Among other things, he’s found that a snowflake with a thin edge grows faster, causing the edge to sharpen even further, ultimately leading to a relatively large flake. Snowflakes that begin with blunter edges, however, grow more slowly and remain blunt, leading to blocky prisms, rather than elegant plates.

(Time-lapse film via Libbrecht’s website, snowcrystals.com)

Brittle China

Following several reports on the wealth of Chinese leaders, the Communist Party has threatened to expel two dozen foreign correspondents. Evan Osnos calls it “the Chinese government’s most dramatic attempt to insulate itself from scrutiny in the thirty-five years since China began opening to the world”:

China is gradually losing interest in soft power. The Party spent much of the past decade seeking to project a more attractive and welcoming image to the world; it placed billboards in Times Square, expanded the reach of its news outlets to broadcast more of its views to Africa and Latin America, and built hospitals, roads, and soccer stadiums in developing countries. Those efforts will continue, but the leadership is signalling that it has concluded being liked is less important than simply surviving. I spent some time with a senior Chinese diplomat recently, and when I asked what motivated the threat of expulsion, the diplomat said that the Times and Bloomberg were seeking nothing short of removing the Communist Party from power, and that they must not be allowed to continue. That argument surprised me: I had expected a bland procedural defense—this was a blunt expression of fear.

Previous Dish on press censorship in China here, here and here.

A Stone Cold War

One of the biggest victims of the Ukrainian protests has been Lenin:

Large protests continued in Kiev, Ukraine throughout the weekend in opposition to President Viktor Yanukovich and his government following the abandonment of a pact with the European Union. In the most visually impressive show of disdain for their leader, protesters tied electrical cable around a statue of Vladimir Lenin and toppled the statue, then broke it up into pieces with a sledgehammer (which had been blessed by an orthodox priest). The statue, first erected in 1946, was  by a flag of the EU as well as a sign that read “Yanukovich, you are next!”

Uri Friedman chronicles the “remarkable history” behind the statue and its ilk:

What’s most surprising is that the statue withstood the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and remained in Kiev’s Bessarabska Square until today (“Ukrainians are not very hotblooded people,” one man in the central city of Uman explained in 2004, when asked about the improbable staying power of Lenin statues in the country). You’d be forgiven if your first reaction to the news out of Ukraine was, ‘Wait, Kiev still had a Lenin statue?’

In recent years, however, the monument had become a fierce battleground between nationalists, who detest Lenin and Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs, and communists. In June 2009, a month after the pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko called for the country to “cleanse itself” of communist symbols, nationalists chopped off the statue’s nose and arm, sparking skirmishes and even an effort by Communist Party supporters to volunteer as guards and defend the sculpture around the clock. With the statue looking increasingly imperiled, one art historian made a plea to preserve the monument.

The fight over the Lenin sculpture in Kiev mirrors a larger battle in Ukraine over monuments to the country’s communist past—one primarily waged between the traditionally nationalist west and pro-Russian east. In August, RIA Novosti noted that at least 12 Lenin statues had been defaced in Ukraine since 2009 as part of a “statue war” between communists and nationalists. In perhaps the most bizarre manifestation of this conflict, a promotional video for the Euro 2012 soccer championships in Kharkiv edited out a Lenin statue from a shot of the city’s main square to avoid showing “images of a commercial and political nature.

Should Coding Be Part Of Kids’ Curriculum? Ctd

Many more readers fuel the thread:

“The obvious question is: Code what? And the fact that it apparently isn’t being asked suggests that those pushing this are massively ignorant of the IT field they are trying to prepare their kids for.” This reader’s argument is awfully reductive. When I think of introducing “coding” to public education, it’s not the process of learning a programming language; it’s the process of learning computational thinking. There are questions that can be answered through computation. How many homework assignments can I skip without sacrificing my A? How much money will my husband and I have to save before we are ready to have a child? Teaching the methods of computational thinking is certainly worthwhile.

Being concerned that programming languages are different and new ones are being created is akin to cautioning a child from learning the flute because there are so many different instruments. It’s not the fluting that’s important; it’s the music.

Another:

I suspect that you’re going to get a lot of feedback about the reader who stated this:

In addition, there are new computer languages appearing every year.  Some of them will catch on; others never will.  And any language that is currently in use is subject to massive obsolescence as new ones come along – quite possibly before the kids are even out of school.  So how do you decide which one to teach the kids?  Until someone can answer that question sensibly, any argument for teaching coding is built on sand.

My mouth gaped open when I read this, because this statement is just quite simply completely backwards.  I have a computer science degree and have been developing software for a dozen years and of course there are always new languages to learn, but the thing is, languages are tools.  What you are really learning when you learn how to code is the art of molding an inanimate machine to do what you want.  You have a computer that speaks only in 0s and 1s, and you need to get it to do extraordinarily complex tasks.  Put the language aside; doing this requires a very different way of thinking than what a lot of people are used to.

To learn this art, you first need a tool – a programming language.  Yes, you have to pick one, and I’m sure that there are better or worse choices for a first language, but in the scheme of things, which language you pick is far less important then getting going with the concepts that are involved in programming.  Once you learn one of those tools and you start learning how to think like a computer and how to compose a program to instruct the computer, learning another language is like learning another tool, a tool that is still used to accomplish the same task of instructing an inanimate machine.

That doesn’t mean that learning another programming language is trivial (some languages are more alike than others, so it really depends on which ones you know and which ones you are trying to learn), but knowing any one language and having some experience using it is a massive step towards learning other languages in the future.

Another reader:

I’m sure your mailbox is overflowing with experts on the topic of teaching kids to code; here’s one more.  Yes, kids should absolutely get some instruction in coding, but it should be around 8th grade, not college, and it will not lead to your kid coding for a living.

What you have to understand is that “coding” is a very vague term, like “math”.  The hard stuff (assembly code, drivers, OSes, low-level C++, etc) is incredibly difficult, and it really doesn’t matter if you teach it in high schools because about 99% of the population simply can’t do it well, no matter how much instruction they get.  However, that should not stop schools from teaching kids the easy stuff, like simple web design and scripting, which are no more difficult than algebra.  They won’t get your kid a sweet job at Google, but the odds that she will go through life without ever having a need to tweak some code in a web page or manipulate the data in a textfile is vanishingly small.

Today’s teens should learn basic coding for the same reason our grandparents learned to balance a checkbook – it’s a useful skill that will help them in almost any profession.  However, if your kid is destined to be a professional programmer, they’re very likely going to learn the skills they need in their bedroom at 2 AM, not from a high school teacher.

Another:

For teaching kids, I recommend just letting them have fun and try to imitate what they see on their computers and phones. Classes make learning boring. That’s how it was for me. I wanted to create those applications myself. There’s tons of environments for kids to play with, but if I was asked for one, I would recommend the Squeak language, which comes with an interactive programmable, graphical environment.

Another:

I’m teaching faculty in computer science at a state university. We do outreach to help K12 schools in the region that want to offer CS courses. One of the hurdles we encounter is that in our state, computer science doesn’t count as a science toward meeting state standards in the same way that chemistry or physics do. Likewise, while there’s mathematical reasoning involved, it’s not a math topic. There are teachers who want to teach it and students who want to learn it, but in the age of No Child Left Untested, it’s hard to add coursework that doesn’t directly meet the various mandates they’re under.  Yes, this is essentially a problem of politics and finding the will to make it happen, but deciding everyone should have some exposure to the subject is only the first step.

One more:

I happened to watch “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” on Netflix last night.  He’s is at once an endlessly fascinating man and a huge penis. But germane to the Dish, this quote:

[Writing computer programs] had nothing to do with using them for anything practical.  It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process. To actually learn how to think … I think everybody this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer but I think going to law school would actually be useful because it teaches you to think in a certain way, in the same way computer programming … teaches you to think.

(It should be noted I copied this text from the video using the voice recognition on my iPhone.  It should also be noted that the only error the VR program made was translating “I don’t think anybody should be a lawyer” as “I don’t think anybody should be white”.)

The Best Of The Dish Today

A new subscriber writes:

Thought you might be interested in my ‘new reader experience’. Sorry if you have heard it all before. Some questions: What is the policy on reader comments – is it really e-mail? How quaint! Where are the bylines (or whatever equates to bylines in blog terms)? What is ‘Ctd’?

Yes, it’s quaint old email – where we get to edit out trolls and stupidity and focus on the sharpest arguments. There are no by-lines for anyone, including readers. We like to keep the conversation as free from ego and as packed with ideas and experience as possible. Think of the Dish like an Economist-style magazine: all in one voice (largely derivative of mine but spiced up and honed by staffers over the years). ‘Ctd.’ is an English abbreviation for “Continued …” and usually means that the post is continuing a conversation from a previous one with the same title. As for our awards, check this out. For more information about those of us listed on the masthead, looky here. The Bookstore is here. Deep Dish is here.

And thanks. Our plea for free-riders to join the experiment gave us another huge surge of subscriptions this past week:

That last spike is you. We’re now closing in on 33,000 subscribers for the year. If you haven’t yet joined and want to spread some holiday cheer to all of us, subscribe!

As for today, I’d like to plug Rick Doblin’s Ask Anythings. You won’t find much serious discussion of psychedelics in the mainstream media, and by serious, I mean coverage that isn’t crammed with bad puns, giggles and lazy stereotypes. Rick’s discussion of what psychedelics actually do is one of the best short takes on the subject I’ve heard or read.

Four others: what Benjamin Disraeli had in common with David Simon; a history of sponsored content; another amazing new Emily Dickinson poem; and a real insight into the genius of Vermeer. Oh and the beard of the week – in the snow.

The most popular posts of the day were “What’s a Bisexual Anyway? Ctd” and David Simon on how capitalists seem bent on destroying capitalism.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: The Choristers rehearse for Advent services and concerts at St Paul’s Cathedral on December 9, 2013 in London, England. Each year nearly 20,000 people visit St Paul’s Cathedral for services and concerts in the run up to Christmas. By Bethany Clarke/Getty Images.)