Month: July 2009

Why Not Legalize Kidney Selling?

by Patrick Appel

Mark Kleiman responds to Postrel’s excellent article on kidney donation:

Postrel argues – convincingly to me – for a repeal of the law against cash payments to organ donors. Since transplant is actually cheaper than dialysis, and since dialysis is a federal entitlement, there’s no need to make the recipient pay, and therefore no issue about rich people crowding to the head of the line. But that’s the next step. The first step is to expand the utilization of the Kidney Registry; a little bit of money spent on publicity might go a long way. Surely Postrel is right that the issue suffers from an unjustifiable lack of urgency. Ten peoplea a day are dying unnecessarily. For some reason, people who get outraged about the ethical problems surrounding paid donation don’t seem to regard those needless deaths as an ethical issue calling for urgent action.

As American as Paperwork

by Conor Friedersdorf

What must a federal bureaucrat do to abolish an unnecessary form?

Standard Form 152 is not a famous federal form like the Internal Revenue Service’s 1040. But for more than four decades, it has been assigned the job of standing sentry over other federal forms.

Agencies that want to create, kill or amend federal forms often have

to fill out an SF152, also known as a “Request for Clearance or Cancellation of a Standard or Optional Form,” or file another form just like it. In other words, the SF152 is a federal form that begets other federal forms — a dispenser from which red tape first flows.

So begins a piece by Alison Leigh Cowan that capably documents the absurd paperwork situation in the federal government. How bad is it? "Last year, Americans spent nearly 10 billion hours filling out more than 8,000 different government forms and other official requests for information tracked by the federal budget office," she writes. "That compares with roughly one billion hours spent on similar paperwork in 1981…" An alarming increase!

Nor is government paperwork (and the digital equivalent) the only problem. Consumers are similarly bombarded. Ever tried to read a whole cell phone contract or credit card agreement or warranty? What percentage of words you've signed your name below have you actually read?

It is similarly laughable to imagine that any normal citizen could read all the laws passed by Congress in a given year. In fact, many Americans would have a difficult time getting through the ordinances passed by their municipalities — reason enough to consider the proposition that "perhaps what America needs is an authority whose sole job is to get rid of outdated, ill-conceived, or just plain bad laws."

More broadly, American society needs to better understand the costs of proliferating paperwork so that it can be weighed against the benefits of creating ever more forms to be filed. That consciousness must precede any effectual effort at reform, or so it seems from the many ineffectual bygone attempts. I wonder if Dish readers have any non-obvious anecdotes that illustrate the costs of paperwork (or else heretofore untried reform ideas).

How Should We Judge Obama’s Stimulus?

by Conor Clarke

Columnist-in-Chief Barack Obama took to the pages of yesterday's Washington Post to defend his stimulus spending:

It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall. We must let it work the way it's supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.

Keith Hennessey, director of the National Economic Council in the Bush White House (the position now occupied by Larry Summers), has an almost almost syllable-by-syllable response here. But while I enjoy Hennessey's blog and admire the freakish exhaustiveness, this paragraph really rubbed me the wrong way:

This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008. […] Instead the President handed the money and program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy. The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending interest-based binge.

That's not quite how I remember it. What I remember is that before any congressional bill was on the table, the administration released a metrics report (PDF) on what the stimulus should contain. The report argued that any recovery bill should "spend out at least 75% of its total commitment within the first 18 months after passage" — ie, in the remainder of the next two fiscal years. When the Congressional Budget Office scored the final version of the bill, it reported that 74.2251% of the money would be spent in this two-year period.

Now I suppose Hennessey might say a couple of things about this. He might argue that 75% was never fast enough. (Did he say so at the time?) Or, Hennessey might argue that 75% is fast enough but not happening. (I find that possible but presumptuous, since it's been just five months since the bill become law, and by some standards the spending is ahead of schedule.) Or, he might say that the 0.7749% difference between the president's promise and the CBO's score constitutes the administration's "primary macroeconomic policy mistake." Or, he might not.

What I suspect is happening is an attempt to shift the stimulus goalposts. The administration does this too, of course. Or at least it's being a bit slipperly with it's claim that the stimulus will "create or save" 3.5 million jobs — a laughable standard that is totally untestable without a time machine and a large appetite for fiddling with historical counterfactuals. But whether 75% of the bill is spent in the next two years is something that's easy to measure. We may as well do it honestly.

Profiting Off The Protesters

by Chris Bodenner

Fintan Dunne sounded the alarm this weekend over a spam-related "cyberattack" in the Iranian twitterverse. Mike Dunn reacts:

Twitter users may remember a scandal last month when UK home furnishing store Habitat hijacked Twitter’s trending topics (the most popular words and tags currently being used by twitterers) to promote their own products. […] I differ from Dunne in that I don’t see this as a cyberattack so much as a Habitat-style hijacking of an popular topic. Lots of people use Twitter, lots of them are interested in #iranelection, and for spammers that equals lots of potential victims customers.

But Dunne is right to raise the importance of this issue. Already some legitimate Twitter users are moving away from the #iranelection tag, using #iran or #iranrevolution instead. As #iranelection is overwhelmed, the conversation on Twitter risks becoming diluted as users drift towards different hashtags. Dunne has set up an anti-spam Twitter account which tells followers which terms to remove from their searches in order to find relevant information on Iran, and this could prove an extremely useful tool.

Still, Twitter, having recognised its important role in post-election Iran, now needs to act against the spam. If it does nothing, the spammers might succeed where the Iranian authorities have failed, and silence online opposition.

In other Twitter-related news, FP's Evgeny Morozov has an ominous post about Iranian authorities using social networking sites to gather intel.

The Virgin Thighs of Straight Men

by Conor Friedersdorf

Bloggers have been having a lot of fun with David Brooks' unusual admission in a cable news interview:

You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

But Hilzoy isn't amused.

News flash: This has been happening to people forever, at least if you count women as people. Back when George Washington was writing out his "Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation", which Brooks cites as an example of the Dignity Code, Thomas Jefferson was hitting on Sally Hemings. A professor whose class I was enrolled in once grabbed my breasts at a party. Every woman I know has stories like this. Maybe being groped in a public setting is a novel experience for straight guys; not being a straight guy, I wouldn't know. But if it is, that isn't because no one ever groped anyone in a public setting before.

It's a fair enough point — one that demonstrates the value of a blogosphere composed of both male and female writers. As a straight man, I can assure Hilzoy that we rarely if ever have that kind of experience (though we're vaguely aware that women fare worse, despite the fact that many aren't fond of talking about the matter in mixed company). That's why I think she's being entirely too hard on Mr. Brooks in her next paragraphs:

Honestly: this is like complaining about the recent breakdown of our longstanding social strictures against violence, and citing as evidence the fact that some white person somewhere got lynched last year. 

So I'm left to wonder: why did David Brooks write this column? Is it (a) because none of his female friends and relations ever told him about the existence of sexual harassment? Or (b) because he doesn't think that public groping violates the Dignity Code when you do it to women, because for some reason women just don't count?

Inquiring minds want to know.

In fact, Mr. Brooks made the remark that offended Hilzoy as a throwaway laugh line in an off-the-cuff television interview — the kind of setting where it's easy to make characterizations based on your life experiences without being perfectly attuned to the fact that other people experience some aspect of the what you're describing differently. Upon reflection, I imagine David Brooks would grasp that women are touched in the way he describes, and perhaps he wouldn't cast that particular act as an example of contemporary societal decline.

But really. Is it even plausible that David Brooks would countenance the public groping of women? Isn't it perfectly obvious, if we afford him even the slightest benefit of the doubt, that he is against the public groping of women, and would characterize a man who publicly groped a women as undignified?

I think so.

The gender experiences of men and women are so fundamentally different that it is really unhelpful to jump on what is at worst a bit of lazy thinking as though it reveals odious sexism — especially if you want straight men to engage gender matters in public discourse, rather than leaving every fraught discussion to female writers at magazines geared toward women. This stuff is difficult enough without assuming bad faith. I am sure that Hilzoy sometimes discusses some matter from a female perspective without being perfectly attune to the way that a man might experience it differently. Should that happen in the future, she ought to be given the benefit of the doubt that she is neither stupid nor sexist, as should we all.