Month: April 2007

[Ross] Niall Ferguson suggests that John McCain is the only candidate "battle-hardened" enough to understand the importance of sea power. Isaac Chotiner points out that Ferguson isn’t exactly a neutral observer – like James Carville with Hillary and Samantha Power with Obama, he’s both a pundit and part of the kitchen cabinet of the candidate he’s boosting. (See also Matt Yglesias on this topic.)

[Megan] (Enters, stage centre-right, looks around)  Wow, it sure is big in here, isn’t it?

In my normal life, I’m an economics blogger.  And since it seems to be obligatory to post on the tragedy at Virginia Tech, I thought I’d start by talking about the decision errors I see in the commentary.  Daniel Drezner, one of my favourite bloggers, has been blogging on the coverage a bit:

According to the Washington Post, there were some warning signs from Cho Seung Hui before he killed more than 30 people at Virginia Tech: "Cho was an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school’s counseling service, the Associated Press reported."

This fact prompted an e-mail from a colleague that raises a disturbing question: 

In 8 years, I’ve taught hundreds of students. 2 of them so alarmed me by their behavior, I contacted the Dean of Students office to see what could be done. The answer: nothing. The best I got was a half-baked assurance that voluntary counseling would be suggested to one of them (he was an undergraduate who had insisted on taking my graduate seminar, showed up and refused to leave on the first day of class, and then sent me increasingly enraged emails filled with expletives and threats to bring charges against me to the Dean of Students). I ended up having to have a staff member escort me to class in case the student showed up again. He didn’t, fortunately. But I didn’t follow up and I bet nobody else did, either.

When a faculty or staff member reports disturbing student activity, what is the appropriate response? Can any actions be mandatory? What feedback loops should be regularly instituted? I don’t have any answers, but I do have an acute sense of vulnerability — universities, esp. public ones, are wide open.

All professors have encountered or will encounter this problem in their careers — the student who seems way too intense for their own good.

That said, I’m also concerned about overreaction. What happened at Blacksburg is a rare event, and red-flagging students just for being intense and weird can create problems as well.

This strikes me as a classic example of hindsight bias.  The teacher flagged two students; one of them happened to turn out to be a mass murderer.  But how many other college students have written things so creepy their teachers were worried about their sanity?  Say it’s two per sizeable college in the United States; that’s thousands of students who wrote really disturbing stuff, and didn’t shoot anyone.  I recall my college creative writing classes, in which my most notable short story prompted several students and a very well-meaning teacher to approach me with offers of sympathy and help for my tortured issues about class, my father, and the Catholic Church.  I was almost unable to bring myself to tell all those lovely, helpful people, that I had no such issues; in the grand traditions of fiction writers everywhere, I had made it all up. 

All right, I confess; I did allow one particularly cute specimen to console me with a few drinks at the New Deck Tavern.  But that’s a story for another day, and probably, another blog.

The point is that even if all mass-murderers did write scary prose, or make sweeping apocalyptic statements, or otherwise give some signal of their impending meltdown, the signal wouldn’t do us any good, because mass murderers are really, really rare.  You’ll have a thousand false positives for one false negative.  In hindsight, we can always pick out some clue to what was about to happen.  That doesn’t mean that we can, or should, see those things beforehand.

Related is the criticism of administrators for sending students to class after the first murder, or of police for not locking the campus down immediately.  This is a classic problem with recriminations:  we tend to assume that the fact we had a bad outcome means we made a bad decision.  But in an uncertain world, this is ludicrous.  Good decision making concentrates on the most likely events, not the wild outliers.

The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus (or anywhere else) are not a prelude to a mass killing.  Should we really act as if they were, because it might prevent the 0.001% that are?  Shutting down campus is not free; if nothing else, it absorbs a huge number of police resources that could otherwise be used to track down the killer in the vast majority of cases where the killer is still at loose, armed, dangerous, and not planning to kill himself.  In this particular case, shutting down campus would have been the right answer.  But in 99.999% of cases, it would have been the wrong answer, and would have placed the public at greater risk, as well as producing mass hysteria on campus.  Castigating the administrators for getting it wrong, or rushing to enact legislation that ensures administrators do the wrong thing in most cases, is bad decision-making.  Not that this will prevent us from doing just that.

[Ross] Two articles in The American Conservative wonder if it might be Chuck Hagel. As a card-carrying Hagel-skeptic, I’m inclined to agree with Jim Pinkerton, who writes that "what remains to be seen is what Hagel would truly do about Iraq that’s different from what has been done and is being done. Even as he was non-announcing, Hagel seemed at pains to reassure his audience that he was not going to offer any starkly divergent choice to Americans—not then, not ever."

As Pinkerton notes, there’s plenty of room for a Republican politician (particularly from the Midwest) to champion what’s become a forgotten tradition in American politics – a sober-minded foreign-policy realism that’s oriented around offshore-balancing rather than the pursuit of hegemony. Becoming the tribune of such a worldview wouldn’t get Hagel the 2008 GOP nomination by any stretch of the imagination, but it would make him a voice worth listening to. Everything I’ve seen, though, suggests that he’s more interested in basking in the media attention that comes with being a Bush-basher than articulating a serious alternative to the interventionist consensus that got us into the Iraq War in the first place.

[Andrew] A palpable shift in the past four months in the polls.

[Ross] His suicide note, and his plays.

[Ross] If you read Jane Kramer on the French elections (and then Christopher Hitchens on what she left out), you won’t just have a good sense of the state of political play in la belle France, you’ll also have a pointed reminder of the gulf between French and American attitudes toward sex and marriage, particularly where public figures are concerned. America isn’t nearly as puritanical as people like to claim: Rudy Giuliani is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate in spite of being twice-divorced and having publicly cheated on the second Mrs. Giuliani, Bill Clinton was President in spite of frequently cheating on his wife, and even social conservatives have been known to fall in love with divorcees and flagrant philanderers from time to time. And while we expect our politicians to actually be married, rather than raising their kids in a pacte civil de solidarité, the weird political-personal relationship between Ségolène Royal and François Hollande isn’t that different from the Bill-and-Hillary union, as Kramer notes.

But then there’s this:

[Sarkozy] has been known to threaten the press over articles he didn’t like (Libération) or to exact revenge when he has been embarrassed. When his wife, Cécilia, had a serious fling in New York last year, and the paparazzi caught up with her and her boyfriend, he called his friend Arnaud Lagardère, the owner of Paris Match, and Lagardère obligingly fired the editor-in-chief who had signed off on publishing the pictures. (Both men deny there was any pressure.) Cécilia came back, after which Sarkozy added a notably un-French confession to his campaign autobiography, saying that whatever problems they’d had were all his fault—that he loved her and she loved him, but that his passion for France had made him inattentive. He promised her the stars and the moon forever, and since then she has played a strong role in his campaign. When I saw Sarkozy last month at the ministry and asked about the two men who would be sitting in on our interview, I was told, “One comes from Cécilia, the other from Nicolas.”

Pause for a moment and try to imagine what would happen to, say, the Presidential campaign of John McCain if his wife were carrying on a public affair.

[Ross] Robert Frank versus Greg Mankiw versus Robert Frank, debating "trickle-down" economics.

[Andrew] "Common conception of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice and above all a love of personal freedom … these are the common conceptions upon both sides of the ocean among English-speaking peoples," – Winston Churchill, 1943, quoted by John O’Sullivan in a recent review in National Review.

Is there a single principle on that list that Bush and Cheney and Rove have not undermined?

[Ross] Eugene Volokh wonders how soon is too soon to start the inevitable post-Virginia Tech dialogue about gun control, and Joshua Claybourn chimes in. Obviously, this kind of meta-debate is somewhat academic, since nobody – from the New York Times editorial page to Michelle Malkin – seems interested in waiting even a day before trotting out their hobby-horses. I’m extremely skeptical, though, that there’s actually anything significant to learn about gun policy from yesterday’s violence: Extreme, unpredictable events like this one seem like precisely the kind of thing that shouldn’t dictate lawmaking decisions (though of course they inevitably do). If there’s a case for gun control, it’s in the daily run of shooting deaths that don’t make the front page; if there’s a case against gun control, it’s in the daily run of crimes deterred by an armed citizenry (and in more abstract questions of personal liberty), not in the faint chance that a kid with a conceal-and-carry permit might have taken the Virginia killer down.

Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:

Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society. And they are saying this by way of exculpating their actions . . .  Murder is murder is murder. I realize that events unfolded rapidly, and that two hours is a very, very short time in the life of a police investigation, and that the police may just be casting around for a post-hoc defense against the castigation that is sure to come, but the idea that you don’t warn people that a killer is on the loose just because you think he killed his girlfriend seems like 1950s thinking.

Well, maybe. But "intimate killings" of one sort or another are very common: Roughly half of all murders in the United States are committed by someone known to the victim, and roughly one-third of all women murdered in the U.S. are killed by a lover, at least according to this study of crimes of passion across the 1980s and 1990s. The same study finds that 97 percent of the latter subset were "one-victim, one-perpetrator incidents." I don’t know what fraction of the remaining 3 percent involved the wanton murder of strangers (rather than, say, killing a romantic rival as well, or another relative, or someone who happened to get in the way), but I bet it was vanishingly small. So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.