Month: July 2008

Steven Levitt remarks on a Minnesota teen who tried to sell his vote eBay and was charged with a felony:

The minimum bid was set at $10. Nobody bid on his item. The failure to attract bidders is consistent with the arguments that Dubner and I have made about the puzzle of why people vote. Any individual’s vote is almost certain not to determine a presidential election (especially if that vote is cast in a state like Minnesota). Thus, the market price for that vote should be essentially zero. Certainly well below ten dollars. Of course, the fact that bidding on the item would have gotten you charged with a felony might also have discouraged bidding.

A dissent:

Anti-hippie meme is powerful?  To whom exactly?   Ex-anti-hippies? McCain’s already winning the 60+ vote, but he’s still losing overall.

If there’s one thing so many of us have noticed about the ad is how disconnected it feels from today’s world.  The battles of the 60s, the summer-of-love, etc. means almost nothing to many of us today.  If anything, it only reinforces McCain’s age and out-of-touchness, not the opposite.

Agreed. I don’t like the subtle culture war beginning – but it retains effectiveness with some demographics. That’s all I was saying.

Wilkinson daydreams:

I have a dream that President Barack Obama will decide to privatize Social Security, because it’s the sensible and moral thing to do. Democrats will be extremely confused for a couple months, but then will decide that this is in fact the greatest idea ever. Roles will reverse and Republicans will enlist the AARP and Jonathan Chait to kill it in a repeat of 2005, but their hearts aren’t in it, and they lose. Obama’s successful Jason Furman-lead transformation of the Social Security system is incredibly popular with the younger voters who put him into office and and sets him in such a strong centrist position that he completely crushes Romney in 2012. Are you listening Barack?

Believe it:

There are two ways to wear a bow-tie or a tweed jacket: as if it is the most natural thing in the world, or as a deliberate and self-conscious bit of drag. The problem is that there are very few people today for whom bow-ties and tweed jackets do come naturally. For everyone else, it’s drag — it has to be drag — and drag isn’t serious.

Drag isn’t serious? I wouldn’t say that around here if I were you. As for tweed, Atlantic editors still pull it off effortlessly. Every once in a while.

New York, New York, 9.30 am.

Maybe WALL-E isn’t so outlandish:

The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

A reader notes:

Awesome, isn’t it?  Greenwald, Kos, petitions to Obama…the liberals have taken over the mantle the GOP abandoned…the conservative position of "wait a minute, do we need a new law at all, don’t we already have one that covers this issue and that would work just fine if people actually observed it?"

McCain’s new TV ad. Much better, I’d say. The initial anti-hippie meme is powerful and the stylistic message – we’re gritter and realler than this dreamy upstart – clearly the McCain brand regained. Maybe this campaign isn’t dead in the water after all:

A reader writes:

You wrote:

In the period after 9/11 in question, I do not find these cardinal sins. Venial maybe.

Had they eavesdropped without warrants for a few weeks or a few months after 9/11, you would be right — I wouldn’t have had a problem with it and I doubt anyone else would either. Then it would be only a venial sin. But the warrantless, illegal spying went on FOR YEARS — into 2007.

The telecoms were making huge amounts of money from their contracts with the Gov’t and the Bush administration wanted to spy on whomever it wanted regardless of what Congress or the courts said (to implement their theories of presidential omnipotence).

So the lawbreaking wasn’t just "in the period after 9/11 in question." It went on for years. The exigency of 9/11 was long gone. They could have gotten warrants, re-written the law, done any number of things to bring the spying within a legal framework.  But they chose to break the laws instead because they think they have the right to.

That’s what is at stake here – whether the Government and corporations are free to disregard the laws enacted by the American people through their Congress — not just in emergency situations, but well beyond that.

   

I take the point. I’d say in response that the line between emergency and non-emergency is a little blurry. And fixing it retroactively stirs up a nest.

Right-wing nutter Spengler defends the idea that Obama hates America. It is Obama’s appreciation of the customs and culture of Indonesia that set him off:

… For an American presidential candidate to refer to traditional society as the model for the solution to American problems has no precedent. It is one thing to denounce American errors while upholding American principles. Never before has America considered electing a president who prefers the alternative, and that might just be the most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since its Civil War.

Now here’s the passage in Dreams Form My Father that Spengler objected to:

The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms …

I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.

What strikes me about this passage is its cultural conservatism – its awareness of how human societies can mysteriously work even in conditions of poverty and that building meaningful community in wealthy, modern, atomised democracies can be difficult. The social breakdown of the urban ghetto in America is a cultural and social failure compared with some more traditional societies – and how to "fix the broken society" is as much a conservative challenge as a liberal one. I don’t see how this is anti-American. It seeks to keep our wealth and freedom while mitigating its problems. The notion that a sense of this is "just be the most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since its Civil War" is deranged.