Author: Jonah Shepp

Charity Can’t Cut It

by Jonah Shepp

Mike Konczal tears down the right-wing trope that private charity can be an adequate substitute for government social insurance, looking at the historical role of the state in building and maintaining America’s safety net:

One problem with the conservative vision of charity is that it assumes the government hasn’t been playing a role in the management of risk and social insurance from the beginning. It imagines that there is some golden period to return to, free from any and all government interference. As Senator Lee has said, “From our very Founding, we not only fought a war on poverty—we were winning.” How did we do it? According to Lee, it was with our “voluntary civil society.” We started losing only when the government got involved.

This was never the case, and a significant amount of research has been done over the past several decades to overturn the myth of a stateless nineteenth century and to rediscover the lost role of the state in the pre-New Deal world.

The government’s footprint has always grown alongside the rest of society. The public post office helped unite the national civil society Alexis de Tocqueville found and celebrated in his travels throughout the United States. From tariff walls to the continental railroad system to the educated workforce coming out of land-grant schools, the budding industrial power of the United States was always joined with the growth of the government. The government played a major role throughout the nineteenth century in providing disaster relief in the aftermath of fires, floods, storms, droughts, famine, and more.

James Kwak backs him up:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. There are basic economic reasons why public social insurance is superior to voluntary charity. The goal here is to protect people against risk: of unemployment, of health emergency, of outliving one’s savings, and so on. For a risk-mitigation scheme to work, there are a few things that are necessary. One is that people actually be covered. This is something you can never have with a private system (unless it’s regulated to the point of being essentially public), since charities get to pick and choose whom they want to help. …

Another thing you want is the assurance that the system has the financial capacity to actually protect you in the event of a crisis. That’s why you don’t depend on your neighbors to rebuild your house if it burns down. Besides the fact that they may not like you, they probably don’t have enough money—especially if you lose your house in a fire that burns down the entire neighborhood. As I’ve said many times before, there is no other entity in the country—and not really one in the world—with the financial capacity of the federal government. Even state governments scramble to cut benefits when push comes to shove, which is one reason why some states provide Medicaid coverage to almost no one.

Your Cell Phone Knows Everything About You

by Jonah Shepp

Mystic aside, the NSA claims that collecting your phone metadata doesn’t violate your privacy because it doesn’t tell them much about you. Well, researchers at Stanford have been studying that claim since November, and even they were surprised at how staggeringly false it turned out to be:

We did not anticipate finding much evidence one way or the other, however, since the MetaPhone participant population is small and participants only provide a few months of phone activity on average. We were wrong. … The degree of sensitivity among contacts took us aback. Participants had calls with Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more. This was not a hypothetical parade of horribles. These were simple inferences, about real phone users, that could trivially be made on a large scale.

The study’s implications are pretty major:

“This is striking,” Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told Ars by e-mail. “It highlights three key points.

First, that the key part of the NSA’s argument—we weren’t collecting sensitive information so what is the bother?—is factually wrong. Second, that the NSA and the FISA Court failed to think this through; after all, it only takes a little common sense to realize that sweeping up all numbers called will inevitably reveal sensitive information. Of course the record of every call made and received is going to implicate privacy. And third, it lays bare the fallacy of the Supreme Court’s mind-numbingly broad wording of the third-party doctrine in an age of big data: just because I reveal data for one purpose—to make a phone call—does not mean that I have no legitimate interest in that information, especially when combined with other data points about me.”

Derek Mead adds:

Remember, these inferences are solely based on phone metadata, which includes phone numbers and call time. Phone metadata is an extremely powerful tool—the NSA wouldn’t be so dedicated to collecting it if it wasn’t—and it’s absolutely, unequivocally isn’t anonymous. As the researchers write, it’s “unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window.” I asked [Stanford’s Jonathan] Mayer if there was anything he’s seen that people could do to limit the usability of their metadata. The answer was pretty simple: Unless you stop making calls, there’s nothing you can do.

Odious Debt

by Jonah Shepp

Jamila Trindle and Keith Johnson note an economic silver lining of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine:

It may be cold comfort when enemy tanks are still on its border, but some observers suggest that Kiev should be able to write off at least $5 billion of its debt to Russia because Moscow has effectively stolen Ukrainian territory and energy resources, as well as military hardware and bases. “An obvious focal point for the Ukrainian government now that Russia has intervened across its border, and actually seized land/assets is debts owed to Russia,” said Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank Group. “No doubt the lawyers are sharpening their pencils as we speak.”

There are already a few ways in which Russian takeover could end up alleviating Ukraine’s debt, the most pressing of which is probably the $1.8 billion (and counting) that Kiev owes Gazprom for natural-gas shipments over the last year.

But Felix Salmon explains that some debt, like the $3 billion Russia lent to Ukraine in December, may prove harder to shake:

[T]he loan was not, technically, a bilateral loan from Russia to Ukraine. Instead, it was structured as a private-sector eurobond. … This is a notorious vulture-fund move: a hedge fund buys bilateral debt from a sovereign, and then sues not as a sovereign but rather as a private-sector creditor. I can think of a few hedge funds which would be interested in Russia’s debt, if they could buy it at a discount to where the rest of Ukraine’s debt is trading. After all, to use a term you might have seen on this blog in the past, this loan is, legally, pari passu with all the rest of Ukraine’s bonded debt.

(In fact, this bond is arguably senior to the rest of Ukraine’s bonds, thanks to a very unusual provision which allows Russia to accelerate the debt if Ukraine’s GDP falls. But since there now seems to be no chance that Ukraine will pay the coupon on this bond, it’s going to be in default very soon anyhow.)

It’s OK To Bareback … On The Toilet

by Jonah Shepp

Mona Chalabi presents the evidence against toilet seat covers:

Public health professionals are continually emphasizing that it is virtually impossible to catch an STI from a toilet seat.

It would require the perfect storm of bacteria (i.e. you would have to sit down on the exact place where the virus was deposited, immediately after it was deposited, and it would have to be a super virus that could survive outside the body).

That improbability is highlighted by a blog post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, which suggests that “if someone has an open, draining wound (MRSA [Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] positive) and sits on the toilet seat and does not wipe it, someone else can sit on the toilet seat and if they have an open wound contract MRSA, also.” The number of people with open wounds on the part of their bums that hits the seat is likely to be low. And of those people, the number with MRSA-positive wounds will be even lower.

Despite that, demand is high. One U.S. company that sells automatically dispensing toilet seat covers has 2,000 accounts in the Americas and takes in $5 million a year.

Why Is Putin Doing This?

by Jonah Shepp

A 2007 interview with Adi Ignatius offers a clue:

Putin argued then, as now, that the United States was on dangerous ground in its approach toward Ukraine. “The United States somehow decided that part of the political elite in Ukraine is pro-American and part is pro-Russian, and they decided to support the ones they considered pro-American,” he said. “We believe this is a mistake.”

He gave voice to the motivation that drives him now in Ukraine (beyond, of course, the possibility of extending Russian influence and perhaps territory). The breakup of the Soviet Union, in his view, was hasty and ill-conceived, and it cut off many ethnic Russians from mother Russia. He seemed to be testing an argument for the irredentist push Russia is now pursuing in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. “What did the collapse of the Soviet Union mean?” he asked. “Twenty-five million Soviet citizens who were ethnic Russians found themselves beyond the borders of new Russia. Nobody gave a thought to them. Is it not a tragedy?”

But Lucian Kim believes Putin’s true concerns are his own grip on power and his paranoid attitude toward the West:

Convinced that the new authorities in Kiev will finally pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, Putin is hacking off as much of the country as he thinks he can get away with. He doesn’t want to re-create the Soviet Union as much as form a ring of buffer territories to ward off Western influence from the Russian heartland. For Putin, it’s the beginning of the endgame for his regime’s survival.

As Michael Totten sees it, the Ukraine debacle is all about checking the expansion of NATO:

What he most fears is that Ukraine might join NATO, removing yet another buffer state between himself and the West and kiboshing his plans for the Eurasian Union, a euphemism for a 21st century Russian empire. (Does anyone seriously believe Kazakhstan will be an equal partner with Moscow?)

Keeping his former Ukrainian vassal out of NATO will be easy now even if a militant anti-Russian firebrand comes to power in Kiev. The Crimean referendum—whether it was free and fair or rigged is no matter—creates a disputed territory conflict that will never be resolved in Ukraine’s favor. It will freeze and fester indefinitely. There isn’t a chance that NATO would accept a member that has a disputed territory conflict with Russia. No chance at all. Ukraine is as isolated as it could possibly be from the West without getting re-absorbed into Russia entirely.

Putin did the same thing to Georgia in 2008 when he lopped off the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and he did it for the same reason.

Joshua Tucker offers another explanation:

Numerous commentators have stressed the potential short-term and long-term economic and political costs to Russia of annexing Crimea and/or an extended military conflict with Ukraine (see in particular this commentary by Sergei Guriev and this one by Samuel Greene). So perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that whatever the economic costs, the Russian leadership has become convinced that doing nothing after ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine represented a security threat that could not be ignored. This could have been due to a very specific calculation, such as the belief that there was a credible threat to the future of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea, or it could have been due to a more general concern that allowing Russia’s ally — Yanukovych — to fall without a response would signify weakness moving forward. Either way, the key distinction of this explanation is that Russia’s moves were essentially reactive in nature to a perceived security threat.

Liberal Arts Intervention

by Jonah Shepp

To support democracy abroad, Charles Kenny advocates inviting more foreign students to study at American universities:

Student experiences can have a huge impact on attitudes toward democracy and governance, and those with foreign education are an incredibly influential group in their home countries regardless of where they live. In national security terms, that points to a high return on efforts to increase the number of foreign students studying in U.S. universities—and suggests that recent policy has been going in completely the wrong direction. The share of foreign students studying in the U.S. dropped from 23 percent to 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, a decrease attributed not least to toughened immigration procedures.

We want those future leaders coming to the U.S. Along with easing the burden of visa application, the U.S. should offer more financial support for scholarship programs and consider it a highly effective form of foreign aid. The Fulbright program alone has supported the education of 29 heads of state or government. For U.S. government funding of $243 million, supplemented by $80 million in overseas and private contributions, there are around 3,000 students in the U.S. as well as over 4,000 U.S. citizens abroad. That makes the program considerably cheaper than other U.S. efforts to make friends overseas—it’s about $20,000 less per enrollee than the Peace Corps, for example. On an annual basis, the price tag is about 0.2 percent of the annual cost of the military effort to promote security and democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011.

The preponderance of autocrats and apparatchiks in developing countries with American or European diplomas might dampen enthusiasm for this idea, but only by a bit. Kenny focuses on how an American education can produce more democrats, but there’s another side to the coin: it stands to reason that many of those who seek an American education do so because they are already attracted to liberal ideas, but can’t engage those ideas freely in their own societies. Reaching out to these people is of a piece with the notion, advanced by Masha Gessen among others, that sometimes the best (or only) thing we can do for oppressed people in illiberal societies is to get them the hell out of Dodge. That includes those who would like a Western education but can’t get one.

Perhaps there’s a way to target Kenny’s proposal toward those proto-democrats rather than the children of privileged classes seeking only to purchase prestige diplomas.

The Mysterious Fate of Flight 370, Ctd

By Jonah Shepp

Chris Goodfellow doesn’t think MH370 was hijacked:

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations. …

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.

Jeff Wise shoots down that theory:

Goodfellow’s account is emotionally compelling, and it is based on some of the most important facts that have been established so far. And it is simple—to a fault. Take other major findings of the investigation into account, and Goodfellow’s theory falls apart.

For one thing, while it’s true that MH370 did turn toward Langkawi and wound up overflying it, whoever was at the controls continued to maneuver after that point as well, turning sharply right at VAMPI waypoint, then left again at GIVAL. Such vigorous navigating would have been impossible for unconscious men.

Goodfellow’s theory fails further when one remembers the electronic ping detected by the Inmarsat satellite at 8:11 on the morning of March 8. According to analysis provided by the Malaysian and United States governments, the pings narrowed the location of MH370 at that moment to one of two arcs, one in Central Asia and the other in the southern Indian Ocean. As MH370 flew from its original course toward Langkawi, it was headed toward neither. Without human intervention—which would go against Goodfellow’s theory—it simply could not have reached the position we know it attained at 8:11 a.m.

Meanwhile, Jessica Trisko Darden considers how the search reflects on national security and politics in Asia:

While the countries of the region lack the ability to effectively monitor their airspace and maritime borders, they clearly have the capacity to blame one another. Political haranguing has been an evident part of the Malaysian-led search process. Both China and Vietnam repeatedly expressed frustration with Malaysia for providing contradictory details that hampered their ability to search for wreckage. Vietnam temporarily downgraded its search in the absence of credible information before ending it following word that Malaysia had suspended its search in the same area. Relations between Malaysia and China have been strained by an inability to locate the 153 Chinese citizens on board the flight and Malaysia Airlines’ handling of the passengers’ families.

David Wertime zeroes in on China’s mounting frustration with Malaysia:

Malaysian authorities have certainly given China ample room for angst. The New York Times reported on March 16 that a series of errors, delays, and obfuscations by the Malaysian government and military has hampered the search process. Chinese social media, which provides the best available public indicator of citizen sentiment, has not shown a proclivity to forgive. An online short comic series shared over 50,000 times on Weibo depicts a haggard boss (China) defenestrating a lazy employee (Malaysia) after he gives lackadaisical answers at a meeting about MH370 also attended by well-prepped Vietnamese and U.S. avatars. (In an introduction, the artist calls the Malaysians a “pig troupe.”) A phrase combining the character for Malaysia with a popular Internet curse word became a Weibo hashtag and been used more than 400,000 times.

Follow all the Dish’s coverage of the missing plane here.