The Only Winning Move

Alright, I’ve just finished watching the Big Speech on YouTube, and I’m unsurprisingly not too impressed. The New Republic is caling this speech “risky” and “gritty.” Well.

What I saw was a pretty pedestrian acceptance speech. Let’s see - first we thanked a bunch of people. Then we gave an insincere shoutout to Hillary. Then there was the obligatory introduction of Joe Biden as “the next Vice President of the United States.” Oh, and of course he mentioned his wife and kids. From there, it was a long string of the usual sophomoric politics jabs, bad puns, straw man comparisons and name brand association logic:

The jabs:

I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine.

Because it’s never happened that a celebrity grew up poor and only became elitist later?

The bad puns:

For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you’re on your own.

Get it? Because, like, “ownership” starts with “own,” and “you’re on your own” also has this word in it, and since a regular grammar rule can thake the “own” in “you’re on your own” and make the noun “ownership” out of it, then that MUST have been what the Republicans meant when they said “ownership.”

The straw man comparisons:

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.

Because apparently, Fortune 500 profits have nothing to do with whether a startup will be successful or how much people tip. Equally apparently, it’s unusual for a company to enter the Fortune 500 as a result of “work.”

The name brand association logic:

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans - have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

Because clearly, what presidents from your party did 50 years ago are the only predictors we need of how a member of the same party will behave today. Isn’t this politics stuff easy?

No doubt McCain will engage in all these same tactics in a week. The point is just that there’s absolutely nothing special or new about this speech, so the press can go ahead and cool it with all the “historic” talk.

The New Republic says that

…the agenda Obama laid out tonight is bolder than anything Democrats have seriously proposed since the 1960s.

Huh? As near as I can tell, it is exactly the same agenda that the Democrats have been laying out since the 60s. Let’s see - everyone’s gonna have a job, easy healthcare for all, no outsourcing, click the ruby slippers and there’s boundless clean energy here at home, education is a really damn good thing so we’ll keep throwing more money at our stellar public school system, investing in technology, um, welfare but only for people who deserve it. I mean - all this stuff is the same line we’ve been hearing since the Great Society. As goals, they’re identical to the list of Republican talking points, actually - the differences are on which ones are how much of a priority and, more importantly, on how they’re to be achieved. Nothing in Obama’s speech suggests he has any new ideas on that score.

Now, the New Republic tells us that Obama actually “laid out, in necessarily pedantic detail, how that translated into a governing agenda.” But if he did, I really missed it. The only two specific policy proposals I heard were these:

And I’ll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy - wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.

That’s a policy proposal, yes, but is it a good idea? There’s no point in “investing” in things that aren’t going to be profitable. And while these 5million jobs might be “new” in the sense that they are offered today and weren’t yesterday, if they’re not paying for themselves by generating profits then the money to pay all these salaries has to come from somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is almost certainly by taxing - which means taking money from people who would have invested it in new companies - thus also “creating jobs” - and letting the government take it and “create” jobs that are less economically efficient than those other jobs would have been. So we get 5million jobs we would have had anyway, only we make sure that these 5million people aren’t actually doing anything useful. Brilliant.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

Hmmm… Admittedly, it’s another specific policy proposal, it’s just that I’m really not clear on how we implement it. How do we know now which companies will end up creating high-wage jobs in the future? Better still, what incentives do they have to grow and provide high-paying jobs if the more successful they appear on paper the bigger the government’s cut as a percentage of their budget gets?

If we’re being generous, we might count this as a policy proposal:

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

It’s certainly not “laid out in necessarily pedantic detail,” but I ’spose that’s OK since it’s just a goal. But an unachievable goal is sort of like an “investment” that you know isn’t going to work out. Why bother with it at all? It’s sort of like my goal to be billionaire in five years. I try not to beat myself up too much over that one at those times when it doesn’t seem to be happening for me.

Again, none of this is to really blame Obama for not being something he’s not. I have no doubt whatever that next week we’ll be hearing McCain’s own personal version of jabs, bad puns, straw mans, and unrealistic goals passed off as “policy proposals.”

The difference is that after McCain’s speech, no one is going to embarrass themselves by calling it “risky” and “gritty.”

Given Hillary Clinton’s speech last night, I think it’s only fair to say that I was wrong about her using her podium to sabotage Obama’s campaign chances. The real test, of course, comes when her husband speaks tonight (unlike her, he isn’t being watched like a hawk for signs of sour grapes, which gives him more elbow room). But for Hillary’s part, the New Republic has it right when it characterizes her support for Obama as “reluctant — and persuasive.” The tactic was basically this: “If you voted for me for my ideals rather than my pretty face, then you’ll do better with Obama than McCain.” It wasn’t the most ringing endorsement in history - but it was unmistakeable. As many have pointed out, she didn’t say much that was nice about Obama personally. She took the time to call both Joe Biden and John McCain honorable men - no such gold star for Obama. But honestly, if she had gushed about Obama it would’ve seemed insincere. THAT would’ve been sabotage. Instead, she gave the only argument that her die-hard supporters are likely to respond to at this point: that sure, maybe Obama isn’t the best choice, but he’s a Democrat, and after 8 years of Bush it’s important that we elect one. It was as much, and no more, than he deserved - as much, and no more, than was required of her. And honestly, no one was paying her to do better. In the end, she did exactly what Obama needed: gave an unambiguous but underwhelming endorsement - thereby coming across as sincere without drawing undue attention to herself. This was no Ted Kennedy replay.

Slate points out that there was a glaring omission in her speech: she never reassured everyone that Obama would be a good commander in chief - ready to “take that 3am phone call.”

That was her strongest argument against Obama during the primary¿so strong the McCain campaign is recycling her ad about the president answering the phone at 3 a.m. Maybe Joe Biden is planning to address that issue for Obama, and Clinton needed to stay focused on convincing her supporters. Still, it felt like a hole.

Yes, I suppose it did - but what was the alternative? The only thing worse than her not mentioning it would be mentioning it - which would come across as either hypocritical, a bald-faced lie, or equal parts both. And honesty, does anyone think that Obama would make a better Commander-in-Chief than McCain? Probably not even Obama does. Candidates have their strengths and weaknesses, and whatever Obama’s strengths, standout military experience simply isn’t one of them. The Obama campaign does much better without THAT ISSUE being brought up at the convention by the woman who has done more than anyone else to date to use it against him.

So it seems Hillary Clinton isn’t throwing Obama under the bus. Damn.

Nathan took the time to watch Timecop over the weekend. Pause for a moment to marvel at the time management priorities of someone who has the spare minutes to sit through something like Timecop but has never even once in his life seen Red Dawn. Very well, let us never speak of it.

It seems that in Timecop my favorite ignorant Yankee bugbear rears its ugly head. Yes, folks, I’m talking about the WHOLLY IMAGINARY “royal ya’ll.”

The idea is this. People who are not from the South and ard in no way native speakers of our beautiful dialect(s) sometimes imagine that we use ya’ll in the singular.

So, in situations where someone says “How’re ya’ll doin’?” - and only addresses one person - certain wishful thinkers imagine that there is a singular form. To be clear on this: there might be in some dialects. For example - in one of Eric Hyman’s papers on the subject he includes a citation to the effect that fully one-third of Oklahoma respondants claim that they can use ya’ll in the singular. Bully for them: but they’re not Southern and so I won’t make claims about how they speak. The “controversy” is over whether this ever happens in the South, and the answer is “rarely, if ever, and if it does it is an idiolectal phenomenon and not a feature of any Southern dialect.”

Ya’ll is, quite simply, never ever singular for Southerners. However, it does have a use that can admittedly be confusing to people who are not native speakers of the dialect. As an example, let’s take the sentence that Eric Hyman thinks of as his trump card:

I put a box of gloves for y’all [spellt this way in original] on the table if you need it [dentist to assistant, Fayetteville, NC, May 23, 2005]

He puts this at the head of his Fall 2006 article in American Speech and evidently thinks thereby to have ended the debate. This cannot be the so-called “institutional” ya’ll (where, say, in addressing a clerk in a store as ya’ll the speaker refers to the store), nor can it be the “associative” ya’ll (a form that includes people associated with the addressee but not necessarily present - like family members). Ergo, it must be singular - i.e. the assistant only in the example given.

Harumph. It is not. Not only am I Southern, but I also happen to be from North Carolina, and the dentist simply can’t have meant only the assistant by that statement. Maybe he is from Oklahoma, or Southern Indiana, or any of the other places that claim to have this singular form, but I find it really difficult to believe that he can be from North Carolina and mean by this statement what Hyman thinks he means. Were I to overhear this, I would parse it as a plural referring implicitly to the dentist’s entire staff of hygentists. Now - I’m also from Charlotte and not Fayetteville, so I suppose it’s just possible that people in the eastern half of the state have this form - but I seriously doubt it. Ya’ll, as I and everyone else I know uses it, is only ever plural. The dentist means “you staff.”

Now, Hyman also includes a cute swipe at intropection as a method of data collection in his article.

A linguist [=all linguists] needs to employ both empirical data and Chomskyan introspection.*

True enough. But it’s worth spelling out all the same why Chomskyan introspection works so well. It works so well because members of the community under study have internalized, though exposure to countless examples (=data), the rules of communication peculiar to that speech community. While it often happens that someone from far away uses seemingly familiar forms in unexpected ways, people close to home who do this usually get recognized for speaking a particular idiolect. For example, Alexis knows someone who has spent her entire life in Arizona, but neverhteless has isolated Northern Cities Shift pronounciations - like “melk” for “milk.” The point here is that however she came by this, people around her notice it and think it odd. Another example: one of Noah’s friends has a strange way of pronouncing “innovative” - with heavy stress (and a short vowel) on the second syllable: innAHvative. The reason it’s “fucked up” isn’t because no one but him does it (I hear certain breeds of Canadians do it on TV all the time), but rather because no one he grew up with does it. Where he picked it up is anyone’s guess, the point being that the mere fact that he does it doesn’t make it generally permissible in, much less characteristic of, his speech community. It’s what we Linguists call “marked,” which is a euphemistic way of saying [+weird] in this case.

Here’s Hyman:

The relative rarity or frequency of ya’ll is not at issue here: if even some native speakers of Southern American English do use it, then it can be so used.

Bollocks, mate.

Dialects are not the union of the set of all sentences permissible to anyone who happens to have been born in a given region. Such a definition would obviously be completely useless. If we paid attention to every old git who claimed to be able to get a reading we wanted for a string of phonemes that we wanted to have it, then we’d might as well hang up our labcoats and be done with it. A language is as much defined by what’s unacceptable as by what’s acceptable. To cite an example - a certain student in our very own department here at IU who is (allegedly) from Pittsburgh claims that nominative is the default case there. For those of you not schooled in syntax, this is actually probably not true of any dialect of English - which is why when someone asks you “Who wants candy?,” and you do, your response is either “Me” or “I do,” but never just “I” by itself. That’s because objective case is probably default in English, and you only get nominative when there’s a tensed verb (which is why putting “do” after “I” makes it mysteriously OK). Now - when pressed on this this student claims that in Pittsburgh people say “I” in response to “Who wants candy?” But I simply don’t believe her, and I doubt that anyone in Pittsburgh does either. Sometimes people are just plain “wrong.” Of course she’s not “wrong” for her own idiolect. There are any number of reasons that she herself might actually speak this way (given the individual, I suspect it’s a vain attempt to appear intelligent - classic hypercorrection). It’s the claim that this is permissible in the Pittsburgh dialect that’s silly. Just because we have one example of a native speaker of that dialect who finds it permissible does NOT make it grammatical for the community.

So sorry, Dr. Hyman, but you’ll have to do better than coming up with a handful of people who misparse ya’ll to make your case. I have no doubt that you can hand a couple of guys at a gas station $20 and stage a conversation. I just wonder whether you can call it “science.”

*This is included as an example sentence, making it an example of the Linguist’s favorite dodge.

I haven’t been reading as much politics lately, so I missed the recent open letter by 100 college and university presidents calling for lowering the national drinking age to 18. I only came across it by accident, in a column by one of the more ridiculous members of the religious right who actually supported the move. Since then I’ve read a number of columns taking the opposite stance - and trotting out the old statistics that states that lowered their ages to 18 in the 1970s had higher traffic fatalities in the relevant age groups, fatalities which declined again in 1988 when, thanks to wholly unconstitutional pressure from the federal government, the drinking age went back up to 21.

What I didn’t expect to see was a column making this case in Reason.

But I probably should have. Reason, as I have pointed out before, is often Libertarian-in-name-only. And while granting the drinking age isn’t really a partisan issue — there is no Libertarian principle that opposes regulation of substances for minors, and where to fix the age of majority is largely arbitrary — there are reasons to expect that most sincere Libertarians would favor this particular move.

They are:

(1) Consistency - One of the easiest potshots to take at the current statute is to point out that men can take up arms and die for their country at 18, but they can’t pop in a bar after work and have a drink. Here’s how Steve Chapman’s column waves its hand on this issue:

There are other arguments for lowering the age. Maybe the most popular is that if you’re old enough to join the Army and die for your country, you’re old enough to buy a beer. But there is a good reason to avoid such blind consistency. Among the qualities that make 18-year-olds such good soldiers are their fearlessness and sense of immortality - traits that do not mix well with alcohol.

Yes, and traits that also do not go well with entrusting these people with the decision to join the Army, now that you point it out. More to the point: traits that do not magically vanish at 21. If the reasons 18-year-olds make “such good soldiers” include that they’re fearless and immortal, why aren’t 16-year-olds allowed to join up? The answer is simple: we let 18 year olds make this decision not because we believe they magically become mature enough at 18, but because we’ve all agreed on an arbitrary age at which to consider them adults. Some of them are adults long before this point, some of them won’t be until well into their 30s. And yet they all get the right to vote and enlist - no proof of emotional maturity required.

Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders.

No - but that’s because it is impossible to prove an “abuse” of the franchise “to the peril of innocent bystanders.” What would that honestly even mean? Notwithstanding, maintaining that an average 18-year-old is not mature enough to drink and that he makes a better soldier because of the same immaturity makes it more than a bit disingenuous to then turn around and let him vote on the technicality that there is no direct evidence that he is abusing the franchise. Sorry, but if you’re committed to defining “minor” for the purposes of drinking as 21, you really ought to be committed to defining it that way for voting and enlistment as well.

(2) States’ Rights - Arguably more important to Libertarians should be the nontrivial states’ rights and constitutional issues. It isn’t the federal government’s role to regulate things like the drinking age, and if they’re going to do it anyway they need to balls up and make a law about it, rather than sneaking it in under federal highway funding eligibility stipulations. The same voters that send the highway funds to the feds as tax dollars are all state voters too, after all. To claim that they know what they want in terms of a drinking age when they vote nationally but haven’t a clue when voting locally is more than a little silly. Especially when we’re taking a line of argument like the one Mr. Chapman takes in this column - i.e. that the drinking age is an arbitrary fixation that should be determined by empirical experience rather than principled consistency. In explaining why 18 year olds are mysteriously mature enough to fight and die in war but not to drink, there’s surely plenty of room for differences in the situation across state borders?

Besides, we don’t have a single age threshold for adulthood. We give driver’s licenses to 16-year-olds, but a 20-year-old Marine returning from Iraq will find he may not buy a handgun or gamble in a casino.

That’s because these are state-level discrepancies. Some states never allow gambling at all, for example - and the legal driving age has been 21 in places like Colorado in the past. One sticking point in all our craws growing up in Charlotte, for example, was that kids in South Carolina - a 40min. drive away - could drive at 15. We had to wait that extra year. Marriage laws, laws on statutory rape - the list goes on and on of differing age limits. And the one thing all these capricious limits have in common - with the one glaring exception of the drinking age - is that they are state-level determinations. What, one wonders, makes alcohol so special that states can’t be trusted to govern their own citizens on this account as well?

Indeed, I should think any self-styled Libertarian would be especially concerned about letting the federal government make arbitrary regulations where drugs are concerned, given the cavalier manner in which the Attorney General’s office tramples over state perrogatives in fighting the War on Drugs.

Now, to be fair, the numbers are on Mr. Chapman’s side. There’s plenty of reliable evidence that lowered drinking ages are indeed accompanied by increases in highway fatalities - especially in the age groups in question. But these numbers are not the beginning and end of the issue. Anyone serious about a national drinking age of 21 needs to think seriously about raising the national service and voting ages as well. And anyone who thinks the federal government has the authority to regulate the drinking age nationwide really owes us an explanation for where it got this authority, why the states don’t have it instead, and why we shouldn’t be too concerned about abuse. What I think it is improper to do in political circles - especially purportedly “libertarian” political circles - is assert that the success of a particular program in getting the stats to come out the way you want is the whole of the argument. Principles like states’ rights, the proper role of the federal government, and even application of the law cannot be brushed aside for the sake of pushing the drunk driving numbers one way or the other - certainly not without any discussion whatever of possible alternative ways to achieve the same goal. So I’m sorry Mr. Chapman, but you’ll have to do better than this.

Earlier I said that I would detail some of the reasons I’m so confident in my predication that Obama is going to lose the presidential race. This is one of the main ones.

The link goes to an AP article about the apparently-shocking fact that the Clintons and Obama just might maybe not have gotten around to healing their rift yet. Ya think?

The peevishness on both sides and the volume of behind-the-scenes catcalls are noteworthy because both the Clinton and Obama teams had resolved in pre-convention talks that it was overwhelmingly in the interests of both sides to get along.

Well, it’s not like we didn’t know the media was stupid. C’mon - there is nothing “noteworthy” about this - and that’s because it’s patently not in the interests of both sides to get along. More accurately, it’s in Obama’s rational interests, but his ego gets in the way. It’s not even in the Clintons’ rational interest.

I doubt there’s anyone alive who honestly thinks Hillary Clinton has given up hopes for being president. Here’s the thing: that goal gets a lot more distant if Obama manages to win this year. Because if Obama wins, he’s gonna wanna run for a second term, and that’s 8 years that Clinton will have to wait to try again. I mean, unless he just really, really flubs his tenure Jimmy Carter style - which isn’t even unlikely. But even so, the record of challengers to sitting presidents isn’t too great. Generally they come off looking petty and deluded, and all they really accomplish is the own goal of keeping their party from otherwise-certain victory in November. Ted Kennedy’s 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter and Eugene McCarthy’s (later Bobby Kennedy’s) challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 come to mind. So pinning hope on an insurgent challenge in 2012 doesn’t seem likely to be Hillary’s first choice among options, really.

Now, she could wait until 2016 and hope to ride on the coattails of a successful Democratic resurgence. But Obama’s unlikely to be a good president, and I think the Clintons are smart enough to see that. Even if he were, this plan involves waiting 8 years and allowing Obama-camp machinations to have a say in the successor (hint: it won’t be a Clinton), all while the Clintons’ party prominence declines. Plus, she’d have to run on someone’s coattails - not really her cup of tea. If anything, politely waiting her turn in 2016 seems even less likely than mounting an insurgent challenge in 2012.

Surely her best option is that Obama loses the election this year and she gets a second crack at it in 2012. And you’d have to be pretty blinkered to think she won’t do what it takes to make it happen.

No, it’s just media idiocy to think that it’s “overwhelmingly in the interests of both sides to get along.” It’s in Obama’s interests only up to the point he wins the election, after which he’ll want to do whatever he can, really, to get their cronies out of the party and reduce their influence as much as possible. And it isn’t even in the Clintons’ interests at all.

Now, if Obama were really the smart political animal everyone seems to be tripping over their shoelaces to say he is these days, he would recognize that and cut some deals with them. Cabinet positions for their lackeys, or something. But get a whiff of this:

A prominent Obama backer said some of Clinton’s lieutentants negotiating with the Obama team are “bitter enders” who presume that, rather than the Clintons reconciling themselves to Obama’s victory, it is up to Obama to accommodate them.

That’s because it is up to Obama to accomodate them, you moron! That’s not “fair,” and it’s not “right,” and it’s certainly not the way Democrats like to imagine their party functioning, but it does happen to be reality. Obama can either suck on it, or he can sit there in stunned silence while the Clintons sabotage his convention. It’s up to him, really. And, to be fair, maybe some accomodation is going on behind the scenes. But you certainly wouldn’t know it the way his camp has been talking.

One senior Obama supporter said the Clinton associates negotiating on her behalf act like “Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific still fighting after the war is over.”

Charming analogy. The reason it doesn’t work is because the Clintons, unlike isolated pockets of Japanese soldiers, still do have some bargaining chips. Obama’s (apparent) failure to recognize that doesn’t speak well of his political perceptiveness.

Obama’s in a difficult position - let’s not deny it. There are two ways he could deal with it - neither of which is very palatable, admittedly, but also neither of which he seems to have embraced. He could cold-shoulder the Clintons, sideline them at the convention, and make it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party has entered a new post-Clinton era. This is more feasible than it might at first seem. Al Gore, after all, did roughly that in 2000, and we all know how close that election came. But the Clintons each headline their own day at the convention (though - and I admit this is clever - Bill’s position is more prominent than Hillary’s), so snubbing isn’t what’s going on. The other option is to fully embrace them - which means cutting all kinds of deals with them, possibly even putting Hillary a heartbeat away from the presidency (though a Chicago tough like Obama might be more unwilling than most to take that particular risk) in the VP slot. And obviously that hasn’t happened either.

What seems, on the surface, to be happening, is that Obama is being fair, giving the Clintons their due, and trusting them to behave themselves. Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.

Obama’s only real hope would be that Bill, for personal reasons, doesn’t wanna see his little wife be prez ever. And just maybe that’s why he acted like such an ass during her campaign. But even if true, I think Bill has ego issues of his own on the line here. He’s being maneuvered out of the party, he knows it, and I don’t think he’s gonna let it happen.

One flashpoint is the assigned speech topic for former president Bill Clinton, who is scheduled to speak Wednesday night, when the convention theme is “Securing America’s Future.” The night’s speakers will argue that Obama would be a more effective commander in chief than his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). The former president is disappointed, associates said, because he is eager to speak about the economy and more broadly about Democratic ideas - emphasizing the contrast between the Bush years and his own record in the 1990s.

As well he should be. Foreign policy isn’t seen as one of Clinton’s strong points, to put it mildly. I mean, better than Jimmy Carter, maybe, but that’s not saying much. I think the point here is that if this is Obama’s idea of being “clever” and playing a “sly political game” to keep the Clintons satisfied but marginalized, he’s really out of his league. Savvy would’ve been to recognize that Bill is primarily worried about his legacy at this point and play to that.

I guess we’ll know after tomorrow. But here’s my honest guess. The Clintons are going to be subtle about it, but they’ll find ways to sabotage the campaign. They’ll “misspeak,” or speak off topic, or go over their time allowance. In general, they’ll signal to their supporters that they wouldn’t mind too much if Obama lost.

And lose he will.

The irony of the whole thing is that Obama had a sure shot at the presidency in 2016 by cutting a deal with Clinton and getting himself on her VP ticket - or else runnning again in 2012 when she lost. He’s overplayed his hand.

It bears repeating: this isn’t exactly his fault. He doesn’t seem to be handling it as well as he could, but the situation would be unfortunate for his chances no matter how he played it. My aim here isn’t to blame Obama for losing so much as to explain why he will.

One of my favorite public policy tricks is “controlling” for effects that are actually relevant. Like, for example, when people are puzzled that we’re facing inflation risks in the wake of the ethanol subsidy that they can’t measure because inflation indices “control for” volatile things like food prices. The following isn’t exactly a public policy example, but that doesn’t keep it from being amusing.

New Scientist reports on evidence that polygamy is the key to long life for males. Want to live longer? Apparently the answer is to marry several women. This increases your lifespan by about 12% - nontrivial, really.

It makes intuitive sense. Men are biologically programmed to mate rather than nurture, so a system of marriage that sanctions this kind of behavior is probably less stressful on them. Not to mention, over time polygamous societies will tend to select for long-lived men anyway (since these will have more opportunities to mate). Further, the existence of lots of dependants may cause such men to take more care of themselves. And finally (and most convincingly), in such societies where the social status of the wives depends on the husband, wives have a greater incentive to care for him in old age, and there are more wives around to do the caring more efficiently besides.

So why is it that I can’t think of any first-world countries that are polygamous?

Which is, of course, the punchline. In their own words:

Using data from the World Health Organization, Lummaa and Russell scored 189 countries on a monogamy scale of one to four - totally monogamous to mostly polygamous. They also took into account a country’s gross domestic product and average income to minimise the effect of better nutrition and healthcare in monogamous Western nations.

In other words, controlling for economic factors that cause longevity, polygamy seems to be the way to go. No one seems to have considered that monogamy (rejection of polygamy, if you prefer) might itself be implicated in the economic success of a country (thus indirectly causing an increase in longevity for both males and females). I have to confess I’m not sure what the mechanism would be, but it’s pretty clear to me that we can’t just ignore the fact that every first-world nation out there is pretty exclusively monogamous. It’s striking, when you consider it: I can’t think of a single (properly) industrialized nation where polygamy is the norm.

This isn’t, of course, to come down against conrtolling for variables in statistics to isolate the effects of the variable we’re interested in. It’s more to caution against relying overly much on statistical methods in your interpretation. This polygamy effect was a useful fact until popular press journals like New Scientist got hold of it, probably. And I mean that in the following sense. Yes, probably these researchers have proven that polygamy is more advantageous for men all other things being equal. But of course, all other things are virtually never equal out there in the real world - so if you are giving practical advice to men in general on how to live longer, your advice would be “promote a monogamous society!” It will cause the longevity gap between men and women to widen - that is, women will live even longer relative to you than they already do naturally - but you yourself will also live longer than you would have, so you both gain.

It rather reminds me of the tradeoff between progress and equality. One of the things that annoys me most about left-wing politics is the undue focus on equality. They talk about equality as though it were the primary goal of the political process, when it isn’t at all obvious to me that it should be. Paul Krugman, for example, likes to write columns lamenting the fact that “income inequality” is increasing. That is, middle class wealth is growing steadily, but upper class wealth is growing rapidly. What he almost never mentions is that this trend starts around the end of the 70s, when the nation was facing a serious economic crisis due in no small part to policies designed to keep income inequality low. Since then, since getting rid of a lot of those policies, the nation has been growing fast - meaning that everyone is much richer than they were in the 1970s. Some people have had runaway success, but we’ve all benefited. The relevant question to me - the one Mr. Krugman and his ilk never answer - is “what was the alternative?” Would middle class people be absolutely better off today than they are now if we had continued throwing up constraints on economic growth in order to keep people more equal? It’s pretty clear that they would not be - and that, as a middle class person myself, is all I need to know to sign up for the current approach and ditch the socialism of the 70s. I would rather be better off in real terms than relative terms, thank you very much.

So, I suspect, it is with monogamy. Men would be relatively better off in polygamous societies, but I’m not sure they would be absolutely better off. And for anyone with common sense, it’s the absolute terms that matter. If the relative lifespan of women and men in a polygamous but underdeveloped society is 45 and 40 respectively, but it’s 90 and 75 in a monogamous and developed society, then obviously everyone is better off in the monogamous society, even if the longevity gap between men and women is greater. Given a choice of which society to grow up male in, obviously it’s smarter to choose the one where you get to live to 75, even if that means giving the girls a bit more of an age advantage over you.

Now, to be fair, New Scientist isn’t quite as blinkered as I’m painting them.

Rather than a call to polygamy, the research might solve a long-standing puzzle in human biology: Why do men live so long?

This question only makes sense after asking the same for women, who - unlike nearly all other animals - live long past the menopause.

So they’re kind enough to admit that the researchers aren’t advocating polygamy - rather, the motivation for the research is to solve a puzzle in biology. Biologically speaking, organisms shouldn’t really live much past their ability to mate. This makes humans an odd sort of creature - because male humans, who are fertile well into old age, don’t live as long as female humans, who aren’t. The grandmother hypothesis seems to be doing a good job explaining the female half of the equation, but no one has come up with a good explanation for the boys. This research reports on groundwork for future attempts to solve this puzzle.

Now - a couple of disclaimers. First, I haven’t done any number crunching of my own in this area and therefore have no idea whether economic development and monogamy really are correlated in any meaningful way. I suspect they are, but I really don’t have the data to prove it. Further, if they are indeed correlated in a meaningful way, this says little to nothing about the direction of causation. It may be that economic development causes monogamy, rather than the other way around. It may even be that neither causes the other, but that they are both correlated with some unseen factor. And certainly if monogamy does turn out have some causal effect on economic development, I haven’t really got a clue what the mechanism would be. Finally, it should be added that even if monogamy has a causal effect on economic development, that is no reason to assume that effect applies at all stages of development. It may be that it is a spur to development that can be productively discarded once a certain level of wealth is achieved - at which point other arrangements may be even more advantageous.

I think the most interesting way to shed some light on this would be to investigate the reproductive fitness of serial monogamists. Many anthropolgists have observed that monogamy seems unnatural and probably survives only as an illusion, really. 60-70% of all couples cheat at some point, which is probably a result of instinct rebelling against convention. The hitch is that convention often does prevent reproduction, even if it can’t do much against reproductive behavior. Hence serial monogamy - the practice of staying faithful to your partner, but not “forever.” So I would just like to express the hope that these researchers (who have done a lot of interesting work in this and related areas) will test the age effect for men who are married multiple times in life. My guess is these men live longer relative to those with fewer lifetime reproductive partners, and that there is no similar effect for females.

If there’s a case more emblematic of just how whiny our legal culture has become than this one, I’m not sure I want to know about it. The link takes you to a legal breif filed in Georgia on behalf of Macia Warden by the Alliance Defense Fund.

The facts are these. Marcia Warden was employed as a counsellor by an agency under contract to the CDC to provide counselling services to its employees. Ms. Warden happens to be a devout Christian, so one day when a lesbian CDC worker walked into her office asking for help sorting out relationship problems with her partner, Ms. Warden dutifully informed her that as a Christian she wouldn’t be able to advise her in good faith and so referred her to a colleague. The CDC employee went to the colleague and received counselling she describes as “exemplary,” but the encouter with Ms. Warden had angered her all the same and she filed a complaint that eventually resulted in Ms. Warden’s termination. Ms. Warden is now suing her former employer and the CDC for discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 as well as filing a constitutional complaint that her First and Fifth Amendment Rights were violated.

This is one of those coses where nobody is right and everyone is. Let’s start with what’s wrong with Ms. Warden. First of all, the constitutional claims are ridiculous. It’s true that the First Amendment protects Ms. Warden’s right to practice her religion and equally true that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which prohibits the government from putting a “substantial burden” on a person’s ability to practice their religion - the so-called “Sherbert Test,” designed to, among other things, exempt American Indians from drug prohibition laws that would threaten their ability to carry out religious ceremonies, etc.) gives her broad protection from government interference in that practice. However, nothing about either of those protections gives her an inalienable right to employment at a particular private counselling service. If the counselling service she works for considers her religion incompatible with its mission, I see no problem with it asking her to go practice her constitutional religious freedoms elsewhere. Yes, yes, I get that her service was under contract to the CDC - a government organization - at the time. But nothing in the complaint alleges that the CDC demanded her termination. That was the decision of her (private) employer. The Fifth Amendment claim is equally absurd - for the same reason. Ms. Warden has not been deprived of “life, liberty or property” at all as far as I can tell - but even if she has it’s not as a result of caprice on the part of the governing authority. She does not own her job, and in any case it isn’t “the government” depriving her of it. All that’s happened is that she’s been inconvenienced, and though this is no doubt shocking to a great many people, there is no Constitutional Right to comfort.

As for the lesbian who complained, what gives? Was it really necessary to file a complaint here? After all, I don’t see anything particularly unprofessional in Ms. Warden’s behavior. I get that it angers lesbians that there are people out their whose religion disapproves of their lifesyles, but welcome to humanity. That same religion disapproves of me and my lifestyle too. And for any given lifestyle on the planet, it’s pretty much a given that there’s a major religion somewhere that doesn’t like it. So what? Given the circumstances, Ms. Warden did no more or less than could’ve been expected of her: she sent the woman to a colleague better able to help her. Granted that she unnecessarily agitated the lesbian by bringing up her religion. She could’ve simply said “for various reasons I think my colleague is better suited to handle this case” and left it at that. But honestly, the woman got the counselling she needed, and that should be enough for any adult. There’s no need to make a political issue out of it.

What’s interesting about the case is that Ms. Warden definitely does have a legitimate complaint under the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and so I’m eager to see what the courts do with this. Her constitutional claims are absurd, but the Civil Rights Act was designed to cover cases just like this, and it does have a clause prohibiting employment discrimination against people on the basis of their religious beliefs. So this lesbian employee may have inadvertantly opened a can of worms gays would rather have left shut. If the courts uphold the law, they will have little choice but to find in favor of Ms. Warden.

I would just like to say that I think that’s a shame. NOT because I’m sympathetic to childish lesbians who aren’t satisfied with receiving “exemplary” counselling if they know there’s someone somewhere in the building who disapproves of their lifestyle. It’s because I defend the right of a private company to fire any employee who obviously can’t do the job she was hired to do to the company’s satisfaction. I’m sure they didn’t get around, in their job interview, to asking Ms. Warden specifically whether she had any religious objection to doing relationship counselling for same-sex couples. But if that’s nevertheless a service they offer and Ms. Warden can’t perform it, well, then I don’t really see the problem with letting her go. The reductio ad absurdum pretty much writes itself. We wouldn’t think twice about a supermarket that fired a teetotaling cashier for refusing to sell alcohol on religious grounds, or fired a vegetarian cashier who refused to sell meat. It wouldn’t matter that another cashier the next lane over was willing to sell the alcohol or meat - everyone would agree the supermarket was within its rights. It wouldn’t make a difference that the cashiers in question had religious objections to alcohol or meat - everyone would agree that they were free to practice that religion in another line of work or with another supermarket chain. And that’s all that’s going on here. Ms. Warden’s religion gets in the way of efficiently performing her duties. Granted that there is another counsellor the next room over who can handle the patient, Ms. Warden’s religion is still introducing inefficiencies into the organization that the employer has an absolute right to correct by replacing her with someone more versatile. That is, of course, a matter of principle for me. Employers own their organizations and may use broad discretion to hire and fire whom they choose. Any basic belief in property rights commits one to this conclusion. Even so, as a practical matter it just so happens that there are plenty of alternate jobs for Ms. Warden to consider. Any manner of Christian Family counselling organization would no doubt be happy to hire her - so this really is just a temporary inconvenience for her.

Everyone’s guessed the punchline by now. Modern people can be really whiny. There is no right to comfort, nor is there a right not to be offended, and the sooner people realize that the better off we’ll all be. The lesbian who filed the complaint can go ahead and grow up any time. “Tolerance” does NOT mean the same thing as “approval” - all that is required for “tolerance” is the willingness to live and let live. As far as I can tell, Ms. Warden is willing to live and let live, so she qualifies. Leave her alone. But asked of the two who is worse, I’m gonna have to go with Ms. Warden. While I find the CDC employee’s complaint unnecessary and unfortunate, at least it stayed at the level of a customer service matter. Ms. Warden, by contrast, is placing demands on judicial resources complaining about nonexistent violations of her rights. It bears repeating: there is no constitutional right to comfort, nor to a pleasant workplace experience. Someone calling to complain about your beliefs is NOT a violation of your rights to free speech or religion, and if your beliefs get in the way of your ability to do your job, then perhaps you should really be big enough to find another line of work on your own without crying to the courts that things didn’t go your way. I guess I don’t have to remind anyone that people’s constitutional rights are violated for real every day. The courts are already busy enough enforcing the real constitution without having to worry about Ms. Warden’s imagination as well. Here’s hoping the case gets summary dismissal. I know it won’t, though - and that’s because Ms. Warden isn’t imagining the Civil Rights Act. Would that she were…

It’s conclusive: science fiction made me the man I am today.

Emphasis on the MAN there. Because according to this clever site, which estimates the probability of you being male or female based on your browsing history, it is 97% likely that I am male.

The methodology is presented clearly. It’s a (very) simple likelihood function based on which of the Quantcast Top 10,000 sites you visit. And, helpfully, it then shows you exactly which sites in your history were contributing how much to your results.

It seems my stand-out MALE site is i09.com - a general-interest science fiction fansite, which is visited by 2.33 times as many blokes as birds. Runners-up are Slashdot, National Review, and Townhall, each at 1.74, followed by Valleywag and Lifehacker, at 1.7 and 1.64 each. In other words - science fiction, conservative politics, and an interest in programming and technology make you male. Beam me up, bitches!

This study - summarized at Cognitive Daily - seems tailor-made for the gun control crowd.

It goes like this. Participants were told that they were taking part in a taste sensitivity study. This enabled researchers to take a pre-experiment saliva sample (to get the participant’s “resting” testosterone level). Participants were then divided into two groups. Members of one group were given a game of “Mousetrap” and asked to write instructions on how to assemble it; members of the other group were instead asked to write instructions on how to assemble a pellet gun that happens to be a pretty realistic model of an actual model of for-self-defense-and-insurrection handgun.

Any old boob can see where this is going.

Next phase: after completing the instructions, participants gave another saliva sample, and were given a drink of water mixed with hotsauce and asked some dummy questions about how it tastes, or some such. Then they were invited to make a mixture for the next guy.

Here are the shocking results. The people who wrote the assembly instructions for the (model) weapon had MUCH HIGHER TESTOSTERONE LEVELS in their second saliva sample than the other dudes. NOT ONLY THAT - but they put over THREE TIMES AS MUCH hotsauce in the mixture “for the next guy” as the dudes who wrote the Mousetrap instructions.

So it’s an open-and-shut case folks. Handling gunz - even fake onez - turns men into aggressive killing machines.

Where to begin? Um - I think first and foremost we should point out what’s scientifically lacking here. Pellet guns are not real guns, but unfortunately no control seems to have been done for experience handling firearms. Presumably, people who know what’s what won’t get much of a testosterone rush from building a fake gun. In fact, there’s reason to expect that people who handle real guns all the time won’t get much rush from building even a real gun. That is, I’m willing to bet that the real operative variable here is “weapon-of-any-kind + novelty” rather than “gun + boy.” And indeed, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone in the comments section at Cognitive Daily that the only people asked to participate were men. The study seems to want to conclude that this is an effect “in men,” but of course we don’t know that at all without including women. More to the point, there are any number of other testosterone-inducing situations that could’ve been tested for here. For example, I guess that playing football, watching UFC, or looking at Playboy would’ve done just as nicely as building a model gun. For that matter, they could’ve put the different groups into driving simulators - one of which is smooth sailing, one of which is full of simulated jackasses who cut you off, slam on the brakes just in time to keep you from making the light, go way below the speed limit - in general drive like Hoosiers. But of course, no one is testing for that. They decided that they wanted to focus on putting gunz together, and just pulled Mousetrap (of all things!) right out of their asses as a barely-plausible comparison. They haven’t even gone to the trouble of having a third group build a model tank or set up a battlefield of miniatures to make sure they’re really onto something.

It’s not that I don’t think this kind of social psychology research is useful, it’s more that I disapprove of experiments that are designed, out-of-the-bag, to stoke people’s political prejudices. I don’t think anyone will consider it a leap if I say we can expect to see this one show up in the Brady Campaign’s talking points by the end of the month.

Of all the objections I raised above, what people in particular need to test before citing this as evidence that the mere presence of a gun in their hands turns men into slobbering cavemen is whether people who have real experience with guns exhibit the same reaction. I have little experience with guns, for example, and so they scare me to death, and that’s why I enjoy shooting them so much: because it’s the same kind of thrill you get from a roller coaster. But to someone who shoots regularly as a kind of hobby, it’s hard to imagine that the same sort of reaction will obtain. These people get comfortable with guns and focus more on the target-shooting aspect than the “make loud noise go BOOM!” part. If in fact experience with guns mitigates the testosterone effect, then obviously the policy consequences will be quite different. It would be a good argument for, to cite one example, a program that I support: required “gun education” classes in public high school.

The main thing that I take away from this, though, is that it’s a nice example of the well-documented bias against guns. Though it seems plausible that handling any kind of weapon would increase a participant’s testosterone levels, there doesn’t seem to be much motivation to design analogous experiements involving, say, handling swords, knives, or even darts. Beating a punching bag with a face on it might have more of an effect than beating a plain punching bag, or a bag of salt. Playing whack-a-mole with illustrated poles more than plain-colored poles.  ET CETERA. Point being, it’s pretty sketchy to pick on guns exclusively. I don’t think I go too far in speculating that the person who designed this experiment is interested neither in what associations trigger aggressive behavior nor in public safety per se. He’s just a Michael Moore fan finding a way to work his hobby into his job.

There’s apparently some minor controversy in the UK over the opening of the Metropolitan (London) Police’s Crime Map Website. It’s still in beto at the moment, but you can go there for a functioning preview. It does about what you would expect: projects a map of the city with areas color-coded by whether they have above- or below-average crime. Clicking on an area causes a bubble to pop up with the overall crime rate for burglery, robbery and vehicle crime for the last two reported months and an arrow showing whether the trend is up or down.

OK, so it’s rather minimal at the moment, but idea of interactive crime maps is a good one. Off the top of my head: you would want a map that you could customize for particular kinds of crimes, we’d want longer-term trends than just the last two months, probably more information about how current stats compare with historical trends, the magnitude of the crimes reported, report vs. conviction rates for this area, etc. The crudity of the current service is no doubt some combination of its novelty (features will improve with user feedback over time) and the fact that it’s run by an entity with little stake in customer satisfaction (the government). Since this sort of thing has a real private-sector value (especially as regards real estate purchases), I suspect it’s only a matter of time before private companies start mining Met crime stats for sites of their own - provided there’s no law against it in the UK, I mean.

People who are opposed to it are privacy groups and real estate agencies. No surprises there. Although, honestly, I don’t see what the privacy advocates have to complain about. These are rough crime statistics that the Metropolitan Police already know. I don’t see how making them public knowledge infringes on anyone’s privacy. It sounds to me more like a gain in the government transparency area. As for real estate agents, the fact that they’re upset about it means it’s a good thing. It’s removed one avenue of deception is all. If real estate is about location, location, location, then obviously the relative safety of the neighborhood is a relevant pricing factor. People buying in higher-risk areas should be able to demand lower prices. This is a gain for everyone. And of course if safety is indeed at a premium, then agents should be able raise prices in safer areas to offset losses in more dangerous places. For that matter, property speculators now have a stake in the safety of the neighborhoods they invest in. There could be real profit in buying up a bunch of properties in an area, taking steps to make the area itself safer, and then reselling the properties at a premium on that basis a few years later. A possibility, mind you - the reality may be a bit less dramatic. But at the very least, it gives absentee property owners a stake in neighborhood safety.

Information is generally a good thing, and I don’t see the harm in it here.